They Thirst (9 page)

She turned on the hot water tap and for the moment closed the mental cupboard on the age-old art of dream-reading.

Jack Kidd's black Chevrolet van, a darkroom on wheels airbrushed with sword-wielding barbarians and half-naked damsels
a la
Frank Frazetta, stopped at the gates of Hollywood Memorial Cemetery. The gates were wide open, and Jack could see a light burning in the watchman's station, though it was now almost eight-thirty and the sun was glaringly bright across the rolling, green cemetery lawn. Jack, a Canon hanging around his neck, hit the horn a couple of times, but no watchman came out to greet them. On the seat beside him Gayle yawned and said, "No one's home. Let's drive on through."

"I need to talk to this guy first." He pounded the horn again. "Maybe he's curled up somewhere, sleeping off whatever makes him see old Clifton roaming around out here, huh?" He gave her a quick smile and opened his door, stepping out onto the pavement. "Back in a minute," he said and walked across to the little white concrete watchman's station with the red-tiled roof. He could look through the window that faced the cemetery gates and see the whole interior at a glance. A lamp was burning on a blotter-topped desk, the chair pulled back slightly as if someone had just stood up. Atop the desk there was an open
Sports Illustrated,
a half-full coffee cup, and an ashtray littered with cigarette butts.

Jack tried the door. It opened easily. He stepped inside, checked a small bathroom, and found it empty, then walked back out to his van. "He's not there," he said, climbing up to his seat and starting the engine. "That's a hell of a note! The guy knew I was coming out this morning. How am I supposed to find old Clifton's grave?"

"Listen, can you wrap this up in a hurry and get me over to Parker Center?" She tapped the crystal of her wristwatch impatiently.

"Okay, but first I'm going to drive through and try to find the guy. It'll just take a few minutes. Three shots of a headstone, that's all I need." He drove into the cemetery, passing beneath towering Washingtonia palms. Marble gravestones, mausoleums, and angelic statues were scattered on each side of the winding main road, all surrounded by huge oak trees, palms, and decorative clumps of palmetto; the bright green grass sparkled with early morning dew, and a thin sheen of haze clung low to the ground. Gayle could see the stout white buildings of Paramount Studios over on the far side of the cemetery, so close that any strung-out, bleary-eyed, hopeless kid who'd just flunked a screen test could just stumble on over and fall into a grave. It was odd, she thought, that most of the major studios in Hollywood overlooked a cemetery.

Which reminded her of a rumor she'd heard around the
Tattler
offices a few days before. "You know what some people believe about Walt Disney?" she said, glancing over at Jack. "This his ashes aren't really in Forest Lawn, that his body's being preserved in liquid nitrogen so he might be revived someday. Trace wants to do a story on it."

"That figures."

"It is a little strange, though. Disney's plaque is the only marker in the whole cemetery that doesn't have any dates on it."

"What have you been doing—your cemetery history homework?"

"No, but that story beats this bullshit about Clifton Webb, doesn't it?" She looked over at Jack in time to see his eyes widen. "Christ!" he said and hit the brakes so hard the van's tires burned rubber. "What is
that?"
He stared directly ahead.

Gayle looked and drew in her breath with a shudder.

Lying in the road was a skeleton wearing a long, pastel green dress. Clumps of brownish hair still clung to the shattered skull; both legs and an arm were broken off like thin white pieces of gnarled driftwood. The remaining hand clawed toward the sky. On both sides of the road, scattered across neatly trimmed grass and decorative clumps of sharp-tipped palmetto, were the fragments of more skeletons. Skulls and arms and legs, spines and hipbones littered the cemetery.
A boneyard,
Gayle thought suddenly, a pulse pounding at her temples. She could not tear her gaze away from the obscene and casual lay of those skeletons. There were whole skeletons dressed in grave suits and dresses, lying atop each other as if they'd been dancing at the stroke of midnight and had collapsed with the brutal coming of dawn. There were also worse things—new corpses that weren't quite all bone yet, covered with black flies. Gayle could see that dozens of headstones had been thrown over and the graves dug up, mounds of dirt standing over ragged, empty holes.

"JeeeeSUS!"
Jack said, catching a bit of the breeze that carried with it the green smell of rot. "Somebody's torn the hell out of this place!" He popped the lens cap off his Canon and climbed down from the van.

"Jack!" Gayle called after him. She felt cold and clammy, like an old wet rag. There was something lying in the shadow of a tree, perhaps ten feet to her right, that she couldn't bear to look at. She thought she heard the high buzzing of interested flies. "Where the hell are you going?"

Jack was already snapping pictures. "Trace is going to want some shots of this!" he said; his voice sounded electric with excitement, but his face had gone as pale as paste and his finger was trembling on the shutter. "How many graves would you say are open? Twenty? Thirty?" She didn't answer. The shutter clicked, clicked, clicked. Since he'd signed on with the
Tattler,
a little more than two years ago, he'd taken pictures of freeway wrecks, suicides, gunshot victims, once even a whole family of Chicanos who'd been fried to black crisps in a gas-leak explosion. Trace had printed the pictures because he was true to the
Tattler's
motto: We print it as we see it. Jack had gotten used to those things because he was a professional and he needed the money for his documentary film work. The
Tattler
was one of the last of the "bucket of blood" tabloids, and sometimes what Jack was required to photograph was pretty damned grisly indeed, but he'd learned to grit his teeth and shoot on muscle reflex. "If it's part of the human condition," Trace always said, "there's a place for it in the
Tattler." But this was different,
Jack thought as he took a couple of pictures of the green-clad skeleton lady,
what had been done here was just pure, plain old evil. No, check that. It was
Evil,
about as damned black as you could get.
A shiver went through him.
Welcome to the Twilight Zone.

When Gayle came up beside him and touched his arm, he jumped so violently that he took a picture of clouds. "What happened?" she said. "What. . . did this?"

"Vandals. Maybe bikers or a devil cult or something. Tore the hell out of the place, whoever they were. I've seen cemetery vandalism before—you know, headstones kicked over and that sort of shit—but never anything like this! Christ, look at that!" He made a wide detour around a couple of broken skeletons and reached a massive, ornately carved stone vault. Its entire top had been torn off. He peered in and saw nothing but a little dust and some scraps of dark cloth down there at the bottom. A mossy odor, as if from an empty well, came floating up to him.
Whose vault was this?
he wondered. Tyrone Power's? Cecil B. DeMille's? Whoever it had been was just a handful of gray dust now. He stepped back to take a picture, almost tripping over a grinning skeleton in a dark suit at his feet.

A few yards away, Gayle stood staring down into an open grave. In ornate script the headstone read, MARY CONKLIN. Scattered in the dirt at the grave's bottom were yellow bones held together by cobwebs of wispy lace. "Jack," Gayle said quietly, "I don't think this is just vandalism."

"Huh? What did you say?"

She looked over at him, only vaguely aware of birds singing in the high treetops around her, oblivious to mortal concerns. "The coffins," she said. "Where are they?"

Jack paused, lowering his camera. He stared at the heavy concrete plate that had been shifted—
how many hundreds of pounds did that thing weigh?
—
from the vault where; Old Dusty lay. No coffin in there either. "Coffins?" he said, a trickle of sweat like ice water running down his side.

"There aren't any. I think . . . these remains were dumped out, the coffins stolen."

"That's crazy," he replied softly.

"Then look in these empty graves, damn it!" Gayle was almost shouting now, nausea roiling in her stomach. "Find me a coffin in any one of them! Go on, look!"

Jack didn't have to. He gazed across the green, sun-dappled landscape; the place looked like an ancient battlefield, all the soldiers left to rot where they'd fallen, left for the vultures and the scavenger dogs. No coffins? He let the Canon dangle down around his neck; it felt heavy with the evidence of some hideous, awful Evil. No coffins? "I think . . . we'd better call the cops," he heard himself say and, backing away from that violated tomb, he stepped on a disembodied skull that cracked with a noise like a tortured shriek.

"Do you mind?" Palatazin asked the young blond girl with the glittery eyeshadow who sat on the other side of his desk. He held up what had once been a perfectly white meerschaum pipe, now a scarred lump of coal.

"Huh? Oh no, man, that's okay." Her accent was reedy Midwestern.

He nodded, struck a match, and touched the bowl with the flame. The pipe had been a gift from Jo on their first wedding anniversary, almost ten years ago. It was carved in the likeness of a Magyar prince, one of the wild horsemen-warriors who'd swept bloodily down into Hungary in the ninth century. Most of the nose and one eyebrow were chipped away, and now the face more closely resembled a Nigerian prizefighter. He made sure he blew the smoke away from the girl. "All right, Miss Hulsett," he said and glanced quickly down at the notepad before him; he'd had to clear away an armload of newspaper clippings and yellow folders to make room for it. "This friend of yours was walking to work Tuesday evening on Hollywood Boulevard, and a car pulled to the curb. Then what?"

"There was a guy in the car. A strange-looking dude," she said. The girl smiled nervously at him, fidgeting with a small purple suede purse that she'd positioned in her lap. Her fingernails were chewed down to the quick. Across the office in a chair near the door, Detective Sullivan Reece, as chunky as a fireplug and dark as the ebony Magyar pipe, sat with his arms crossed and watched the girl, occasionally glancing over at Palatazin.

"How old did this man appear to be, Miss Hulsett?"

She shrugged. "I don't know. Not as old as you. She said she couldn't really tell because, you know, the lights are so bright and weird on the boulevard at night. You can't tell anything about people until they're right up in your face."

He nodded. "Black, white, Chicano?"

"White. He was wearing real thick glasses, and they made his eyes look huge and funny. He was . . . my friend Sheila said . . . a chunky guy, not real tall or anything, but just . . . thick-looking. He had black or dark brown hair, cut almost to a stubble. He looked like he needed a shave, too."

"What was he wearing?" Reece asked, his voice powerful and gravelly. When he was a kid at Duke Ellington High School, he'd carried the bass line in the choir and made the auditorium floor vibrate.

"Uh . . . a blue windbreaker. Light-colored pants."

"Any mongrams on the windbreaker? Company emblem?"

"No, I don't think so." She looked back at Palatazin and shivered inwardly. Being so close to cops unnerved her; Lynn and Patty had told her she was a fool to go walking into Parker Center, to offer information to the cops because, after all, what had they ever done for her except bust her twice on soliciting charges? But she thought that maybe, if they ever busted her again, this sad-looking cop in charge might remember her and make things easy. The muffled noise of ringing telephones and clattering typewriters outside the office was beginning to grate on her nerves because she'd had to force herself to stay straight—no coke, no hash, no pills—when she came to see the heat. Now she was so nervous she could hardly stand it.

"All right, Amy," Palatazin said softly, sensing her uneasiness. She was beginning to look like a deer who'd caught a whiff of gunmetal. "What about the car? What kind was it?"

"A Volkswagen Bug. Gray or greenish gray, I think."

He wrote both colors on his pad. "What happened next to . .. uh . . . your friend?"

"This guy opened the door and leaned out and said 'Are you selling?' " She shrugged nervously. "You know."

"He was trying to proposition your friend?"

"Yeah. And he flashed a fifty, too. Then he said something that sounded like Wally's got something for you

"Wally?" Reece leaned forward slightly in his chair, his high-cheekboned face glowing like burnished mahogany in the sunlight that streamed through the open blinds behind Palatazin. "You're sure that was the name?"

"No, not sure. Listen, all this happened to my friend Sheila. How am I supposed to know anything for sure, man?"

Palatazin wrote WALLY? And below that, WALTER? "And then?" he said.

"He said, 'You won't have to do much. Just get in and we'll talk.' " She paused, staring at the buildings of L.A. through the window behind him. "She almost went. A fifty is a fifty, right?"

"Right," Palatazin said. He looked into her troubled eyes and thought,
Child, how do you survive out there?
If she was over sixteen years old, he'd dance the
csardas
for the entire homicide squad. "Go on, please."