Long Shot (36 page)

“Greg—he's dead.”

And now it was he who couldn't speak. The shock was sharper here, perhaps, than what he had felt two weeks ago, though the loss was nothing to him. It had to do with hearing it person to person. The phone brought him in at the level of things that needed attending to. He thought:
Tell her you'll be right there
. Not that he wanted to, not at all, but he had no choice. In a way, it was all his fault that she was in this deep.

“I got home about eight,” she said. His eyes glanced right. It was 9:36 by the digital clock on the dressing table. “I didn't expect there'd be anyone here. The servants are gone by six. But it got so quiet, I couldn't sit still. I went through the whole house, room by room. Like I had to turn on every light and check the doors and windows. Greg, I never do that. I'm not the type.”

“Where is he?”

“Well, that's the funny thing,” she said. “I was satisfied. Everything looked the same as ever. I started back to my room, and then—I don't know why—I decided to come up here.”

When she paused again, he realized what it was: She was trying to fill up the empty space before the cops took over.

“You mean Jasper's room?”

“That's it!” she replied excitedly, as if he'd guessed a riddle. “Shot himself in the head. The gun's right here in front of me.”

“Look—why don't you wait downstairs?”

“Oh, it's all right—there's no blood. He fell in the water and floated out. He's right on the edge of the falls, like he's just about to go over.”

“You want me to come?”

“No, no,” she said. “If I'm all alone, they'll go to a lot of trouble to make it easy. It's one of the perks, you know.”

In the silence now, he saw her staring down the stream to where the rag-doll figure of the dead man poised at the lip of the stream. Beyond it, the dark bowl of the canyon. Somehow, this was the plainest talk they'd ever had.

“What about Artie? You want me to break it to him?”

“I guess so,” she said vaguely—as if, in half a minute, she'd forgotten it was Artie she had just been trying to reach. That Greg was only an accident, coming in on the line this way. “Be good about it, will you, Greg? He hated Carl like crazy, but they go back a long way.”

He ended it with promises to be there later on. She protested gamely, but he overrode her. With one last bit of advice: “Hey, Viv, don't let them take a thing except the body. As far as you know, he died of grief.”

It was only when he hung up that he realized she and Artie might just want to be alone. After all, they were two out of four and counting down. As he drained his second J & B and rolled an ice cube round his mouth, he realized something harder still—he was glad it was over and glad she'd won. He was sick of thinking in overdrive.

There was no need to let this business out. Who could it possibly profit to have the tale told straight? The storm of Jasper's headlines had only just died down, till a reader had to flip through fifteen pages to get to the day's terse update. Justice—or some more rabid force—had already done its damnedest over Carl. The wider proclamation of the charges laid against him had no appeal to Greg, though here he could be overruled by Vivien and Artie. They had the prior claim.

But how would it make things better to say that Carl was the culprit? Jasper would never again be restored to his former larky prominence as macho man-about-town.

What about Harry Dawes? Wasn't he reason enough to trumpet the facts abroad? If only to clear his name in Turner's Falls, Wisconsin—where in one fell swoop they'd lost their Eagle Scout, as well as their very own Candide. Greg had a moment of pure and unspecific sentiment, in which he waffled back and forth. As it happened, he also had a mirror not two feet off, in which he watched a veil of sorrow gauze across his eyes.

As if from an aerial view, he saw the whole Midwest as a string of towns where men had names their whole lives long and sought to keep them clean. It was nothing but a fantasy, of course. What did a boy from the Near North reaches of Chicago know of the real Midwest? Yet he wondered now if there wasn't something deep in the land that explained the furies that blew up here. They had all come such a long, long way. By the thousands, they couldn't go home. They would not say who they used to be, and time wasn't on their side.

He was struck so sad, he gasped. The crack inside him widened. He was only moments short of sobs—when the door flew open and the star sailed in.

“You peeked—I saw you,” Artie swore, flinging a white silk scarf at him. It swirled and streamed and fell in a pool on the makeup table. Greg was lightning quick. He had his mask in place in half a second. He smiled in a sleepy way, like he'd had too much to drink.

“What shall it be tonight?” asked the man in the salmon jersey, sweeping back and forth. “‘Mad About the Boy'? ‘Satin Doll'?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“My
encore
, dummy!”

Greg could hear the clamor from the bar as it rose another notch. They clearly wanted more.

“How would
I
know?”

“It's settled, then—we'll do ‘April in Paris.' Order me up some oysters, won't you, darling? I'm feeling a little mad tonight.”

He pulled the door wide and vanished.

Greg, who was still not finished processing Vivien's call, realized he was half a step behind, the whole way through the scene. He'd become convinced that he had in hand the missing piece of the bigger picture. He was just about to set it in place, when Artie came and went like a false alarm. It was something to do with the pairing-up at Carbon Mountain long ago. He'd lost it now. He would have called Vivien back to ask, except he was pretty sure it was nothing she said.

He wondered if this new death would cancel Friday night. Could they get a body in the ground that fast? Would the mourning up at Steepside be sufficiently low-key to let the screening go on as planned? There was something here that would not fit—not till they'd connected up with Jasper once again. If they could only get to him, just to see the way he moved in the days before he died, the rest would surely fall in place.

Okay, so it was over. The last gun had been fired. Greg wasn't out to beat a dead horse, just because he'd been one-upped in the pinning down of the killer. But really, he thought, this story had no passion. So what if Carl had been cracking at the seams, from living out his life in Jasper's shadow? What had all of that to do with Jasper? For two weeks now, Greg had been digging for a concrete act that could trigger a murder ten years down the line. He figured it must be something completely specific, to leave a welt so deep on somebody else's heart.

Perhaps he fell wide of the mark because he never had a good look at Jasper Cokes. He'd avoided all his cruddy movies automatically. Never liked his look, somehow. It was just such a hard and antic manner, sleek with lust and effortless charm, that proved to Greg he was less a man himself, way back in the jungle of high school. Jasper's pitch—the sneering kiss and the one-way rush, the locker-room swagger of a tennis jock—was more than a delicate sort could bear. Greg wouldn't play ball with the enemy. He'd stick to
Laverne and Shirley
before he'd pay four-fifty to have his cock teased.

Now all of that had changed. In part, it was knowing that Jasper was gay, so the whole of his macho stance washed off like so much makeup. Among the clones and anorexics of the new breed here in Hollywood, Jasper Cokes was suddenly more than just another cipher in the toxic sky above L.A. Still, Greg had no clear picture of him. Everyone kept insisting Jasper wasn't quite himself. He was drugged, they said, till he floated two feet off the ground. He coasted from one anonymous fuck to the next. He wasn't
there
.

But if that was so, then what was the self that he left behind to
get
that way? What did he used to be like before? Nobody ever said. Though all Greg had were the old haphazard snaps from Carbon Mountain, he thought perhaps he had a better idea than they. As with any dream too much told and retold, everyone else had ceased to see Jasper at all. They just saw what they made him into.

He picked up the phone and peered at the dial, trying to figure how to ring the bar. Before he had time to guess, there was a click. The barman came on the line.

“Yeah, what?”

“Send in a dozen oysters, will you?” he asked. His stomach followed up with a sudden roll, as if to beg for the lunch he'd missed and the dinner he'd spurned in the heat of pursuit. “On second thought, make it two.”

“Listen—all we got back here is Fritos.”

Greg could hear the dusky, plaintive lyric of
April in Paris
riding behind the barman's voice. What now? He was not a man given to giving orders. He avoided clerks in stores with a second sight, just when they longed to help him most. He'd never used room service ever, not once in his life. He preferred to starve.

“I don't care where you get 'em—just
get
'em,” he said. “Send someone out to a restaurant. Say you got somebody sick.”

“With what?”

“The vapors.”

He could hear the barman serving beers, the bottle caps bulleting off when he brought up his church key. The ricochet made it sound as if Artie were singing in a bunker somewhere, in the midst of a pitched battle.

“Never heard of it,” said the barman after a pause.

“Disease of the heart. You get so dizzy you can't keep anything down but oysters and good champagne. You'll do it?”

“It'll cost you an arm and a leg. A buck apiece, I bet.”

“Money's no object,” Greg assured him, squinting into the mirror to see how pale the East had left him.

“Yeah, I'll do it. But only because it's for Artie, see?”

Greg thought that was the end of it. He'd have hung up first, but stayed to hear as much of the song as he could. Distorted and strangely hollow-eyed, it crackled through the line, faint as an Edison cylinder full of the voice of Caruso. The bottles went on being opened, and Greg assumed the barman was momentarily stuck, without a free hand to hang up. He didn't suppose they had anything more to say. Then:

“Listen—if you're so loaded, do me a favor. Slip him a little cash, why don't you? He doesn't have nothing. You want champagne with that?”

“Of course,” said Greg, dazzled at how elaborate Artie's lies turned out to be.

“We don't got French,” said the barman, “but I guarantee it's good and cold.”

He made it sound like ginger ale.

The connection broke abruptly, and Greg was left to ponder the notion of having come off as stinking rich. The big tycoon who appeared by chance in the leading lady's dressing room, lighting his fat cigars with twenty-dollar bills. The irony was compounded by the fact that Artie had six million socked away. As for being taken for a long-lost love come back for old times' sake, Greg didn't mind in the least. It was his kind of story, after all.

He rose from the chair and stood back to see what they saw in him. He was just beside the rack of gowns, and he picked up the end of a tawny boa and draped it across his shoulders. It made him feel vaguely threatened. He shrugged it off, not a moment too soon. The door swung in, as if someone meant to catch him in the act. In fact, it was only Artie, back as big as life.

He dragged the wig from his head and plopped it on the table. His short and sandy hair, all plastered with sweat against his scalp, looked more than ever like a football player's. The jersey dress was soaked at the pits and belly—though not at the tits, where the falsies absorbed the heat. He made no further move to cross back over now, neither stripping out of the dress nor diving for the cold cream. The hair, it seemed, was quite enough concession to the real.

“You were saying?” Artie asked, without benefit of backtrack.

“What?”

“No—
why
. You were going to tell me why.”

“Look, I know you didn't do it,” Greg began.

“Then why did you say I did? For kicks?”

“Because”—he had no notion what he meant to say till it tumbled out—“I don't know how you stood it, frankly.”

If what he was after was a moment's pause, he suddenly got it in spades. Artie stood still and waited to see what further twist was coming. From the neck up, he was just another man, with a thin veneer of makeup on—like a kid at Halloween. Neck down, the illusion held, especially as he stood with his hands on his hips, a shimmer of bangles at either wrist. The moment grew. The two faced off so nakedly they even seemed to blink as one. Greg began to understand that Artie might prefer to come across half and half like this—like a man at a woman's window. As if one could have things butch and pretty both at once.

“Say on, Macduff,” said Artie dryly.

Greg took a deep breath, ready as he'd ever be: “Well,” he said, “you must have felt real fucked over, right? Like somebody stole your life right out from under you.”

“What life would you be referring to?”

“Why, the theater, of course.”

“Oh,” he exclaimed, like the light had dawned, “you mean
them!
” And he pointed across the room at the Lunts.

“Well, yes.”

“This is all before my time,” said Artie, walking across to stand in front of
The Barretts of Wimpole Street
. He smiled as if it were the play itself spread out in front of him—third-act curtain just gone up. “I used to hear all these stories,” he said, “about how it was in the thirties. The streets were paved with gold. The lilacs bloomed all over Times Square. And everything good was a hit.”

“Didn't you want a piece of that?”

“Of course,” he said. “Who doesn't?”

He spoke without trace of sarcasm. Turning away from the poster, he smiled a smile that seemed to mean it didn't matter. It was all the same to him how fate was broken down. He stepped up to Greg, put a hand on his arm, and leaned over as if to tell a secret. He said: “Things haven't turned out so bad—believe me.”