Rubicon Beach (9 page)

On the island I slept. I dreamed I buried my face and my heart in the sand, the first wrapped around the second.

I didn’t lie there very long. The cold woke me; I was wet through and through, and there on the edge of the sea was a hard wind, though an hour before the night had been still. The hotel hovered before me, a monstrous dark yawn, and I got up and headed for it. I was walking around it ten minutes before I found the entrance. There were no doors, just a gouge where glass had been. There was no light. I was cold and inside the building it wasn’t much warmer. A corridor turned south and shot off in the distance, each side of it lined with little cubicles: empty ticket agencies and barbershops and clothes boutiques and post offices and rental centers filled with busted mirrors and dilapidated shelves and counters, maps across walls and racks with old postcards and magazine stands and ledges filled with small cracked bottles and things I couldn’t make out. At the end of the corridor were some stairs. I stumbled up in the dark and could see the main lobby of the hotel open up before me, a black expanse, rows of motionless elevators and a dining hall and beyond that a lounge. I thought I heard some sort of music overhead and caught a glittering of something framed within the gash of the ceiling. I found myself staring up into a huge tunnel that ran through five or six floors of rooms to the sky; the glitter was stars in the distance.

A light was coming from the lounge. I held myself, shuddering. I’m damn cold, I said out loud. I got to the doorway of the lounge and it was immediately warmer. A bulb was burning at one end of the room dirty orange electricity. I said to myself, What, they have someone come around and change the bulbs? The lounge was gritty and lined with webs; a bar was at the back shadowed and still, with liquor bottles on the shelves behind it and glasses sitting upside down on what was once a white cotton towel. All of it was dimly visible to me in the light of the hearth at the other end of the room, where a fire was burning. The hearth was set in large flat stones and surrounded by large worn chairs. I went over Io the fire and was standing there several moments before I realized someone was sitting in one of the chairs. “Lee?” he said, blinking at me in the dark.

I looked at him in stupefaction. He stood up and came over to me. Ile was tall, probably as tall as Jon Wade but nowhere near the mountainous build; he moved like an aristocrat. As far as I could tell from the flames of the fire he was in his mid-fifties. He was stylishly dressed and groomed but his face had a certain thickness to it, as though he drank a lot. At this moment, in fact, he was holding an amber glass with ice clinking in it and seemed just the slightest bit tipsy.

“My God, Lee,” he said, touching my shirt, “you’re drenched. What the hell happened to you?” He pulled me by the elbow to one of the other chairs and I sat down in it. “Look here,” he said, “can I get you something from the bar?” He was watching me with utter concern. I stared at him and then over at the bar in the dark with all the dusty glasses upside down on the dirty white towel. I looked at the glass in his hand and back up at him, and water ran from my hair into my eyes.

“No thanks,” I said.

“Here,” he said, “pull the chair closer to the fire.” He started to pull me out of the chair so he could move it closer to the fire.

“It’s all right,” I said, resistant. “I’m fine here.” I looked around me.

“What happened to you anyway?” he said. “I’ve been waiting damn near forever. The damn phone doesn’t work or I would have called.” He squinted at me in the dark.

I shook my head. “I’m not Lee.”

He kept squinting at me. He sighed heavily. “No, I can see that now.” He took a gulp from his amber glass and turned to the fire, anxious. He turned back to me. “Well I hope you’re all right,” he said a little absently. He sat in his chair and held the drink on one of its arms, thinking. Presently his attention came back to me. “Someone turn a hose on you or something?” he said, regarding me from head to foot.

“I took a swim,” I explained.

“A swim?”

“Out in the water.” He stared at me. “The lagoon,” I said. “It was the only way I could get here.”

“The lagoon?” he said in complete bafflement. But he waved it away. Ile sighed heavily again and looked toward the door, muttering. “Where is he anyway?” I heard him say under his breath.

I turned toward the door too. “Waiting for someone?” I asked.

“If we don’t come up with this script, it’s over for both of us,” he said. He was clearly agitated. “I can’t afford to lose this opportunity. I’m . . . I’m forty-five years old and I need a vehicle.” He was older than forty-five. I knew that not by the way he looked but by the way he said it. “I’ve been patient with Lee a long time, and I’ve been waiting a long time for the right vehicle.”

I nodded. “Who’s Lee?” I said after a while.

“Lee’s not fucking here, that’s who Lee is,” he said, his voice rising. He finished his drink. He was still a moment.

“Name’s Richard,” he said, extending his hand.

I took it. “Cale.”

“Are you an actor?” he said.

“No.”

“Do you work in pictures at all?”

I kept looking around me, at the bulb burning at the opposite end of the room. I was finally becoming warm from the tire. I didn’t know what he was talking about. “No,” I said.

“Good for you. Bloody good for you. I mean it. It’s a fucked business and a fucked place. I admire anyone who can avoid it aItogether. What is it you do?”

“Can you tell me,” I said slowly, “where the kitchen is?”

“What kitchen?”

“The kitchen of the hotel.”

“I think it’s downstairs behind the ballroom,” he said. “Or maybe that’s the dining room.” He added, “The dining room’s closed.”

“I have to find the kitchen,” I said.

“Are you a chef?” he asked, distracted. He was getting agitated again. He stood up from the chair. “The hell with this. I’ve been patient with Lee a long time. I’ve been waiting a long time for the right vehicle.” He looked around. “Maybe I should catch a cab into Beverly Hills, phone from there.”

I stared at him. This man thought he was going to take a cab somewhere. “Lee?” he called. He was calling into the dark beyond the doorway behind me. I turned and then he said, “There’s someone there. Is that you, Lee?” he called. “I’ve been waiting.”

I saw a form move in the dark; there was someone there. I stepped toward the door and the form backed away, and when I got there I could hear the light steps of someone running across the lobby. The guy behind me called again but now I took off after the footsteps and reached the stairs that went back down the way I had come.

‘There was music above me and the shine of stars, and I looked up into the sky six floors away. The tall silhouette of the actor was small in the far door.

I turned back to gaze into the mouth of the stairs, and I saw her. It was absolutely black but I saw her anyway; she held the knife in her hand. It already had blood on it. “It . . . is you?” I heard her say, in awkward English.

It’s me, I said. I stepped toward her, down the stairs. She ran.

At the bottom of the stairs I heard her steps fade away down a long corridor. At the end of the corridor was another light and in the light I could see a small glowing object on the floor. As I came closer I could see it was the knife, glistening red. I half expected that, when I reached it, it would vanish. I half expected that, as I bent to pick it up, it would dissolve in my hand. It did not. When I held it, it feIt ordinary, nothing epiphanic at all. It took me ten minutes to find the kitchen. It had a burning bulb too, like the lounge and the corridor from where I’d just come. The kitchen was strewn with utensils and appliances and pots, and the large white doors of the freezer were wide open. It looked as if it had been abandoned only a moment before, and there was the barely lingering smell of rotted food. Next to one of the freezer doors lay the headless body of a man, still bleeding. I reeled for a moment, not looking at him; I wasn’t used to that yet. I didn’t see the rest of him and I wasn’t inclined to search for it. I went over to a place some ten or twelve feet from him and took off my clothes and lay on the ground with the knife in my hand.

Maybe I slept, maybe I passed out. I say maybe because later, when I learned how much time had gone by, sleeping or passing out seemed the only explanation; I feIt as though I’d been lying there only a few minutes. Occasionally I would raise my head to see if the body was still there. But then I must have fallen asleep, because a voice woke me. Cale, the voice said, what are you doing?

I opened my eyes. A very big shadow was standing over me.

“Wade?”

“What are you doing?” he said again.

I held my hand up in front of my face. I still had the knife. “I’m guarding the body of Ben Jarry,” I said. When Wade didn’t answer, I said, “Don’t tell me. Don’t tell me there’s no body over there.” When he still didn’t answer, I raised my head from the floor and looked over in the direction of the body. There were a bunch of cops and there was something on the ground with a sheet over it. I nodded. “Finally. Finally got a body. There’s no eluding me forever.”

“No,” came Wade’s voice out of the big shadow, “there’s no eluding me forever.”

“I knew you’d get him sooner or later,” I explained, “I always had confidence in you. No matter how tough the assignment, you were bound to snare him. Millions of murdered men, true, but not having a head is a distinguishing characteristic. No way you can escape notice very long if you don’t have a head. You guys are aces. You guys are crackerjacks.”

“What are you doing, Cale?”

“In the archives of the library are the legends of murdered men, Inspector. Maybe some are real and maybe some aren’t. I’m familiar with most of them at this point. I’ve been smuggling their legends into my tower, I’ve been poring over them in my sleep. My favorite is the one of the man murdered in this kitchen. This very one. Like Ben over there, except this murdered man would be a little harder for you to track down, since he had a head. He was shot with a gun. Do you know about this man?”

“No.”

“In this very kitchen. Shot with a gun. By an Arab of some sort. Late one spring night and many people saw it. He bled on the floor and did not die immediately. He aspired to lead his people and at the moment he was shot he was in the throes of triumph, his people had acclaimed him on this very night just outside this very kitchen. Before him, his own brother had led the people, and his brother was another murdered man, and the brother that came before them was a murdered man as well. A whole family of murdered men. They were born in America.”

“America One,” came Wade’s voice from the big shadow, “or America Two?”

I got up off the floor. I stood toe to toe with him and held the knife hard. I held the knife as hard as his eyes held me. “Not America One or America Two,” I said, seething. “Just America. They were born in America.”

Wade licked his lips. “I have to arrest you.”

“Because we have a body here and we have you holding what by all appearances seems to be a murder weapon.”

“You don’t understand,” I said. “That’s Ben Jarry over there. You can’t arrest me for murdering Ben Jarry. You’ve already set me free for helping
you
murder Ben Jarry, remember?”

Wade slowly blinked. “Put your clothes on.” He looked down at my side where I held the knife hard, and he put his hand out, palm open and draped with a white handkerchief. We stared at each other a good half minute before I put the handle of the knife on the white handkerchief. He wrapped the knife and called over Mallory and gave it to him. I put my clothes on. We walked from the hotel kitchen up the stairs into the lobby. I could still see the light of the lounge where the bar was. “There was somebody else here earlier tonight,” I said to Wade, nodding at the light. “Some sort of actor, your height, fiftyish. I talked to him.” Wade lumbered over to the lounge, looked in and came back. “No one I can see but check it out,” he said to Mallory. Check it out, Mallory said to the cop next to him. Wade walked on ahead, and Mallory and another cop led me out into the night, where we followed Wade to a boat down by the beach, where there were still more cops.

They had spotted me taking off with the boatman that evening. They hadn’t picked me up at the time because they wanted to see where I was going and why. They’d lost us in the fog and only when they got the boatman coming back could they make him show them exactly where in Hancock Park he’d dropped me off. You must have made great friends with the little blond hooker, Wade said to my surprise, she wouldn’t tell us shit. They’d been stymied again until they got a report from a schooner that docked in the south harbor with a small boat tied to its tail.

Back in town they took me to the station. It was now nearly dawn. A few cops were standing outside smoking and in the front room a couple of women who did not look as though they worked the lagoon but over by the East Canal were sitting on a bench that ran along the wall. Next to them on the bench a guy was slumped over. Wade talked to the cop behind the desk and then after a few minutes we went through the door down a green hall to a small windowless room. Everyone was exhausted. I should have been exhausted too. Instead everything in me was fired, I couldn’t remember when I had feIt this tired. Perhaps I had never feIt like this, even before prison. I had this ridiculous sense of being in control of everything, I had this feeling of calling all the shots. It was ridiculous because I wasn’t calling any shots at all, it was ridiculous because everyone thought I was out of control. We sat in the small windowless room at a single table with two chairs. I was in one of them and Wade was in the other. Mallory stood by the door and another cop stood in the corner. I sat looking wild and fired; Wade looked exhausted. “Have you settled down now?” he said to me.

“What do you mean?” I looked at the other cops.

“Are you clear in your own head?” he said.

“Everything in me is fired,” I explained. With perfect timing someone knocked on the door, and Mallory opened it. It was the police doctor. He said he wanted to take some blood and a urine sample. Wade said, Fuck that, this man isn’t drugged. “Everything in me is fired,” I explained to the doctor. The doctor had me open my shirt; he took my pulse and put his hand on my head. He turned to Wade and said I was burning up, and I said, What did I tell you.