Self-Defense (38 page)

“Staying out of their lives so his genius
wouldn’t overshadow them. Giving them money—who do you think paid for the
coward’s dope after he ran through his trust fund? Then he tries to pocket
those ampules, the little puke.”

“Why’s Buck so interested in seeing Lucy?”

“Because he’s her
father.
A girl
should meet her father. If she doesn’t, it’s her loss. He’s one of a kind.
There’s beauty in that, alone. Don’t you see?”

“One of a kind,” I said.

“Look,” she said, fighting to keep her
voice low, “you get off on helping people, but that doesn’t mean you know
everything. If you were hiking in some strange place and you came across a
snake that had never been seen before—maybe it was poisonous, you had no
idea—would you run from it? Or would you try to capture it and learn about it?”

“Depends on the danger.”

Her nostrils widened and pulsed. She
opened and shut her hands several times. “Okay, I tried. You’ve got your
script.” A few more steps, then: “He’s the
only
thing in her miserable
little ground-chuck existence that can make her prime
meat.
But go on,
let her continue in the same old way.”

Sound came from the radio. Low and
anguished, then louder. Wordless moans. Then filthy words, a chain of them.

“Baby’s up,” she said.

Just past the stairs, she said, “You can
wait here.”

Alone with the stuffed heads, I walked
around the giant room, listening to loud voices from the back of the house.

When she finally pushed his chair out, he
was in a dark blue silk robe over white pajamas and his hair was disheveled.

“The Jew!” he said, slapping the wheels
with his hands. Trying to go faster but Nova was in control and she steered him
right at me.
“Der Yid!”
Spittle flecked his lips and his eyes were
crusted. He rubbed one, picked something out, and flung it away.

“And don’t tell me your cock hasn’t been
peeled and your mother goes to Mass. You’re a dime-store Freud and that makes
you a
Jew.
Thinking you’re better than everyone and have a right to nose
into everyone’s business. Every analyst I knew felt that way; that’s why all
analysts are kikes.”

I stared at a stuffed owl.

He said, “Where’s the girl?”

Nova said, “Be nice to him, Buck,” in an
overly sweet tone. “He came all the way here to tell you something important.”

I stared at her. She shrugged and walked
over to a window.

I said, “Did I?”

She said, “Didn’t you? You’re the expert.”

Then she left.

Lowell watched her. “Those cheeks,” he
said. “Like sugar-coated sponge rubber. To be between them... What’s on your
mind, Dimestore? The girl still working on her bruised-virgin courage,
dispatching you on another reconnaissance mission?”

“It’s Puck,” I said. “He’s dead. Drug
overdose.”

He nodded. Stopped. Clamped both hands
down on his wheels and turned his back on me.

“All right,” he said, very quietly. “All
right, you’ve delivered the message. Now fuck you to hell. If I see you again,
I’ll kill you.”

He showed up two days later at the
funeral, arriving late, wheeled across the rolling lawn of the cemetery by
Nova. Conspicuous in a white suit and shirt and a wide-brimmed straw hat. He
stayed well back from Lucy and Ken as a minister on call to the mortuary
recited a dispirited prayer. Once, Nova’s eyes met mine and tried to hook me
into a staring contest. One of her hands touched a breast. I turned my
attention back to the service.

The cemetery was one of those hundred-acre
things yearning to be a theme park: offices in a colonial mansion, bulldozed
hillocks of golf turf, replicas of Michelangelo’s statuary cropping up in odd
places. Instead of gravestones, brass plaques were set flush with the ground.
Ken had bought Peter’s strip of perpetuity yesterday, after Milo’d helped speed
release of the body.

I’d spent a good part of the past
forty-eight hours at the house on Rockingham. Ken and Lucy had been nearly
inert, eating little, resting a lot, barely capable of speech.

I’d experienced some inertia myself, not
following up on Curtis App or doing anything else about Karen Best. Sherrell
Best had phoned once, and I’d had my service call him back to say I’d get to
him in a couple of days. The grief of the moment loomed so huge, it seemed to
have blotted out the dream. I wasn’t sure when—or if—Lucy would ever return to
it. Still, as I stood there among all that barbered green, it chewed at me.

A few feet behind me, two laborers waited
under a tree.

The minister said something about the
puzzles of life and God’s will. Then he shot a glance at the laborers and they
came over. One of them activated a motor attached to thick cloth straps that
supported the gray lacquered coffin. The straps loosened very slowly and
descended. As it hit bottom, it made a resonant, almost musical sound, and Lucy
let out a high, agonized wail. Ken held her and rocked her as she cried into
her hands.

Behind them, Buck said something to Nova.

The laborers began shoveling dirt on the
coffin.

Each clump made Lucy cry out. Ken’s face
looked ready to crumple.

Buck shook his head, and Nova wheeled him
away.

The chair bumped its way over the grass,
catching a couple of times and forcing Nova to free its wheels. Finally, she
got it to the curb of the swooping drive where the hearse sat and worked a long
time getting Lowell out of the chair and into the Jeep. Folding the chair and
stowing it in back, she sped off.

I dropped Milo off at the West L.A.
station and drove back to Malibu. Shooting the Curl was still closed.

Had I flushed the prey too well?

I stopped off at the Malibu civic center
and killed an hour locating a business license for the surf shop.

When the original papers had been filed,
the Sheas had been living on the land side, up Rambla Pacifica. Three years
later, they’d moved to the 20000 block of Pacific Coast Highway.

I drove back south and found the place: a
one-story Cape Cod, white board and green shutters, squeezed between two bigger
stucco edifices. Probably one of the original beach structures of the twenties
and thirties, reminiscent of a quieter, simpler Malibu. Sometimes big storms
washed the old places out to sea.

I rang the bell. No answer. The knocker
was a bronze sea lion patinaed with salt. I used it to drum the green wooden
door a couple of times. Still nothing. Neither Gwen’s customized van nor Tom’s
BMW was in sight. But no mail in the box, not even throwaways.

I went home and called the Producers Guild
and learned that Curtis App was president of New Times Productions in Century
City.

A call to New Times got me a voice mail
system that required an engineering degree to understand. I pushed 6 to speak
with Mr. App and got cut off.

It was just after noon.

I drove into the city, heading straight
for the university library.

The computer held a dozen references to
App, the most recent being five-year-old reviews of a movie he’d produced called
Camp Hatchet II.

Bomb review. Maybe that was his spiritual
link with Lowell. The next seven citations were more of the same. Then I found
a thirteen-year-old article in
American Film
entitled
APP
ON THE DEFENSE: TEEN PIX PRODUCER SAYS HE KEEPS KIDS OUT OF TROUBLE.

The magazine hadn’t been microfilmed, but
it was in the stacks. The article was an interview in which App acknowledged
the dreadful critical notices he’d received on each of the nine soft-sex
blood-and-gore flicks he’d produced and admitted that “my pictures aren’t
Dostoyevsky, they’re popcorn for the head. But no pubic hair or nipples. Kids
watch them, space out, and have a good time in the drive-in. When they’re
there, they’re off the streets, so think of it as public service programming.
As a parent, I’d rather have my kid watch
Janey
Makes the Squad
or
Red Moon Over Camp Hatchet
than a lot of the garbage that’s on
network TV.”

The accompanying color photo showed App
sitting in the driver’s seat of a long-snouted red Ferrari convertible, a
satisfied smile on his face, a perfect sky and palm trees in the background.

From the narrowness of his shoulders, a
small man. Thin face with ratlike features and an extremely pointed chin.

Gray hair, Caesar cut, white tennis shirt,
red sweater that matched the Ferrari. Great tan.

No mention of his ever optioning Lowell’s
book, so either I’d guessed wrong about that or it was something he wanted to
forget.

Scrolling back, I came across nothing on
him for the next nine years, then a piece in
The Wall Street Journal
entitled
RETAIL FOOD A GROWTH MARKET.

It turned out to be one of those center-of-the-front-page
lightweight articles the
Journal
runs in order to amuse nervous
businessmen. The full title read
Retail Food a Growth Market If Consumers’
Special Needs Are Met: Curtis App Likes Sprouts and Jicama.

Back in those days—three years before the
Sanctum party—App had been a financial analyst for an investors’ group
specializing in supermarket chains, vending machines, coin-op laundries, and
fast-food outlets. In the article he predicted that retailers were going to
have to cater to ethnic and special needs to be successful in an increasingly
competitive market.

A photoengraving showed the same pointy
face with full dark Beatle-length hair.

From groceries to slasher flicks? An
association with Lowell must have seemed the next step toward High Art.

I left the library and stopped at an
instant-print place in Westwood. No other customers in the store, and it took
exactly twenty-three minutes to obtain fifty business cards.

Good paper, ecru shade, classy embossed
script.

Below that, a phony post office box in
Beverly Hills and a phone number I’d used ten years ago while in private
practice. Putting three cards in my wallet and the rest in the trunk of the
Seville, I headed for Century City.

New Times Productions was located in a
twenty-story black tower on Avenue of the Stars. A hit movie a few years ago
had featured a building just like it, under siege by terrorists. In the film, a
rogue cop had vanquished the bad guys using guile and machismo. Most of the
actual occupants of the real-life building were attorneys and film outfits. In
real life, the terrorists would have been offered a deal.

The production company took up almost all
of the top floor, the exception one office belonging to an outfit named Advent
Ventures.

The New Times entry was two huge glass
doors. I pushed one of them, and it opened silently on a skylit waiting room.
The floor was black granite, the furniture Lucite, white leather, and iron,
powder-coated deep blue.
Variety
and
The Hollywood Reporter
were piled up on tables. Big frameless
black-and-white paintings hung on gray wool walls.

A girl who looked about eighteen, in a
white T-shirt and second-skin jeans tucked into spurred black-and-white cowskin
boots, sat behind a deskette. Her long straight hair was buttercup streaked
with ebony. A diamond was set into one nostril. Despite bad skin, she had a
great face. I stood there awhile before she looked up from her cuticles.

“Uh-huh?”

“I’m here for Mr. App.”

“Name.”

“Sandy Del Ware.”

“Are you the chiropractor? I thought you
were tomorrow.”

I handed her a card.

She wasn’t impressed. The place was
silent; no one else seemed to be around.

“Do you—uh—have an appointment?”

“I think Mr. App would like to see me.
It’s about Sanctum.”

Her lips rotated a couple of times, as if
spreading lipstick. If there’d been a pencil on her desk, she might have chewed
it.