‘What?’ asked Martin, baffled.
‘Used to go there … when I was a boy … Father took me … cocktail lounge … Here! take the key! The Hollywood Divine! Leopard-skin banquettes … gold-tinted mirrors … Here! Martin! The key!’
Theo waved the key; and impatiently, one of the paramedics passed it back to Martin. ‘Guy’s out of his tree,’ the paramedic remarked, covering Theo’s face with the oxygen mask.
Martin waited while the paramedics sent back Theo’s vital signs to the hospital. Then he asked, ‘Where are you going to take him?’
‘Sisters of Mercy, that’s the nearest.’
‘All right,’ said Martin, ‘I’ll follow you.’
‘No tailgating, that’s all,’ the paramedic told him as he rolled Theo’s bloody body onto a stretcher.
‘In a Rabbit?’ said Martin bitterly.
Six
THEO DIED AT 3:46
that afternoon. Martin was sitting in the reception area when Sister Michael came rustling up in her white habit and white wimple to tell him that all their efforts to save him had been to no avail.
‘Was he a close friend of yours, Mr Williams?’ Sister Michael asked him, with a face like the Angel of Solicitude carved in wax.
Martin said, ‘No, I met him for the first time today.’
‘We did everything possible. But his lungs collapsed. You can talk to the doctors later, if you wish.’
Ramone appeared, wearing a black T-shirt and black jeans and looking unhappy. ‘I called his house. Some boy answered. His boyfriend, I guess. Said he thought there was a sister in Indiana, anyway he’s going to check through his address book and call her.’
‘At least he’s at peace now, in the Kingdom of Heaven,’ said Sister Michael.
‘What?’ asked Ramone. Then, ‘Sure – oh, yes.’ He glanced at Martin and made a face. Martin had already told him about Theo’s description of the world beyond, with its talking turtles and its people with stretched-out heads.
Sister Michael laid a cool pale hand on Martin’s shoulder. ‘If there’s anything else that I can do, please don’t hesitate to call me. When somebody passes on, we do recognize the need to comfort those who are left behind.’
‘Yes, thank you,’ said Martin.
Ramone sat down on one of the gray fabric couches and tightly crossed his arms. Up above his head, a painting of a gentle-faced Madonna smiled down at him, with an expression that forgave all human weakness. ‘What do we do now?’ Ramone wanted to know. ‘If Homer Theobald couldn’t help us – if
he
wound up getting wasted – then what hope do the rest of us have?’ He leaned forward and asked, ‘You really think it was the
mirror
that wasted him? All that way away?’
Martin shrugged. ‘He seemed to think so. I showed him that key and he went white. I mean he was
gibbering
. I wish to God I hadn’t now. He might still be alive.’
Ramone took out a cheroot, but the nun at the nurses’ station silently pointed to the sign which said
No fumadores
.
‘How did she know I speak Spanish?’ Ramone whispered, replacing the cheroot in its carton.
‘She must’ve guessed. Or maybe she read
¡Viva Las Patillas
! on the back of your T-shirt.’
Ramone said, ‘Let’s take a look at that key.’
Martin handed it to him. While he had been waiting to hear if Theo would survive, he had taken it to the hospital washroom and carefully rinsed Theo’s blood off it. Ramone turned it over and over and then handed it back. ‘It’s just a plain ordinary key.’
‘Well, maybe it is and maybe it isn’t. I think we should go to the Hollywood Divine and find out, don’t you? There’s nothing to keep us here.’
‘I don’t even know if the Hollywood Divine is still standing,’ said Ramone. ‘They demolished most of that block last year.’
‘All we can do is take a look.’
Sister Michael intercepted them again as they walked toward the elevators. ‘Mr Williams! Mr Perez! Did you want to
view
Mr Theobald before you left?’
Martin looked at Ramone, and Ramone bulged his eyes in an expression which unequivocally meant ‘no way’.
‘Thanks,’ said Martin. ‘But I think I’d just like to remember him the way he was.’
‘How was that?’ asked Ramone as they went down in the elevator to the hospital lobby.
‘Alive,’ Martin replied.
The Hollywood Divine Hotel had been erected in 1927 by Daniel T Rolls, the wealthy second son of the Rolls hotel family of Pasadena. It stood two blocks north of the celebrated intersection of Hollywood and Vine, a fanciful creation in the neoclassical picture-palace style that had been popularized by Eve Leo.
In its heyday, the Hollywood Divine had been celebrated for its eccentric and arty clientele – the West Coast equivalent of the Algonquin in New York. But with the squalid death of its founder in 1938 (cocaine, bourbon, inhalation of vomit), it had quickly lost its cachet. Now it stood shabby and seedy and ready for demolition, its pale pink stone corroded by vehicle fumes, its marquee half collapsed, its marble steps stained with urine and measled with chewing gum.
‘I could have sworn they knocked this place down already,’ Ramone remarked as they parked outside in Martin’s Mustang.
They were immediately approached by a thin-faced kid with a crimson punk hairstyle. ‘Hey, friend, take care of your car?’
Martin reached into his shirt pocket and gave the kid two dollars. ‘There’s another three where that came from if the stereo stays where it is.’
‘You got it,’ the kid told him.
Three young hookers were standing outside the hotel, two black and one white, in skintight satin miniskirts and halter tops. They were all pretty: one of them was almost beautiful. She winked at Martin as he went up the steps and he couldn’t help smiling back.
‘Made yourself a friend?’ asked Ramone.
They pushed their way through the bronze and glass doors of the Hollywood Divine and into the gloomy lobby. The carpet was rancid; so filthy and stained that it was impossible to tell what color it had originally been. There was a suffocating smell of marijuana and body odor and disinfectant. Six or seven scarecrows were sitting on the ripped-open leopard-skin seats where John Barrymore and Bette Davis had once sat, sharing bottles of muscatel from brown paper bags and sniffing in chorus.
The great chandelier hung from the lobby ceiling like the desiccated corpse of a giant spider, still dangling in its web.
Martin and Ramone approached the desk. The desk clerk was surprisingly young and clean: a young man in a shocking-pink shirt with blond crew-cut hair. It was only when he laid his thin arms on the marble counter that Martin saw the needle tracks.
‘You people checking in?’ he asked them. His eyes were as pale and as expressionless as two stones you find on the beach.
Martin shook his head. ‘I was wondering if you still had safe-deposit boxes here.’
‘Safe-deposit boxes?’ The young man blinked.
‘Yes, you know. Somewhere your guests can keep their valuables.’
‘What, are you kidding? If any of our guests happen to have any valuables, they keep them on their persons. Besides, they don’t usually stay for longer than a half hour.’
‘But are the original boxes still here – the boxes that were put in when the hotel was built?’
‘I don’t think so,’ the young man told him. ‘Pretty much everything has gone. Somebody walked out with a goddamned bathtub last week. Can you imagine that? Nobody knows how he got it through the door.’
Martin gave a tight grimace and looked around him. One of the scarecrows was waving his arms and singing. ‘
Sur
…
wannee song! Suwannee song! You c’n blow your flute ’n’ you c’n bang y’r drum ’n’ you c’n
–’
‘Will you shut up?’ one of his companions screeched at him. ‘Will you shut up?’
Martin stared at the old scarecrow for a while. Then he turned back to the desk clerk and said, ‘Who’s that?’
‘Who’s what?’ The young man may have looked quite presentable, but his brain was somewhere in another galaxy.
‘That old bum singing. The one singing “Suwannee Song”.’
The young man focused his eyes across the lobby. ‘Oh, that’s Fido. Well, everybody calls him Fido. He’s been hanging out for just about a hundred years. I think he used to work here or something. He’s always telling stories about how he walked in on Bill Haines, and Bill Haines was wearing nothing but a brassiere and a garter belt and a picture hat.’
Martin left the desk and walked across to the group of scarecrows. Fido was sitting right in the middle of them, on one of the leopard-skin banquettes. His face was puffy and flowered with gin blossoms. He wore a fifties-style suit with wide flappy lapels. It had once been fawn, but now it was greasy gray. Martin couldn’t approach too close. The collective stench of these down-and-outs was overwhelming.
‘Fido?’ he asked.
Fido looked up at him blearily. ‘That’s me, your honor.’
‘They tell me you used to work here,’ said Martin.
There was a chorus of groans and raspberries from Fido’s companions. ‘Don’t ask him!’ one of them begged in a voice reedy with phlegm. ‘Do us a favor, will you, friend? Don’t ask him!’
‘Was the gemmun addressing
you
?’ Fido demanded with all the indignation of an Oliver Hardy.
‘He worked here, he worked here, now go!’ the other scarecrow appealed.
Martin said to Fido. ‘Maybe we can talk in private? I wouldn’t like to antagonize your friends.’
‘Friends? Call this riffraff friends? These just happen to be items of flotsam who have eddied their way into the same backwater.’
‘Oh, can it, Fido,’ groaned another scarecrow. ‘You make my ears want to scream.’
Fido teetered his way out of the assembly of winos around the banquette and accompanied Martin and Ramone to the far side of the lobby, beside the gilded fountain that had long ago dried up, and whose shell-shaped bowl was now crammed with cigarette butts and empty bottles and used needles.
Ramone wrinkled up his nose as Fido lurched a little too close to him. ‘You won’t get arrested for taking a shower, did you know that?’
Martin said, ‘Ssh,’ and waved Ramone to keep quiet. He didn’t want to upset Fido before he’d had the chance to talk to him.
‘Is it true you worked here?’ he asked.
‘What’s it worth?’ Fido wanted to know.
Martin held up a ten-dollar bill. Fido sniffed, and took it, and snapped it between his fingers to make sure that it was genuine. ‘All right, then,’ he said. ‘I worked here.’
‘Were you here in 1939?’
Fido nodded, his white prickly chin making a crackling sound against the collar of his grubby shirt. ‘Sure, 1939. I was promoted to bell captain that year. March 1939.’
‘Did you ever see Boofuls here?’
‘Boofuls?’ asked Fido suspiciously. ‘Why’d you ask that?’
‘I’m just interested, that’s all. I’m writing a book about his life.’
‘Well,’ sniffed Fido, ‘he didn’t have too much of a life, did he? But he sure had a memorable death.’
‘Did you see him?’
‘Of course I saw him. He was here all the time, him and that Redd woman. Every month; and all kinds of others, too. Famous actors, you’d know them all. Famous directors, too.’
Martin frowned. ‘You mean Boofuls used to meet a whole lot of other actors and directors here, every month?’
‘That’s right. It was a joke. Nobody was supposed to know. Big secret, don’t tell the press, that kind of thing. And to tell you the truth, I don’t think the press ever did find out. But we knew, all of the staff. You couldn’t help recognizing somebody like Clark Gable, now, could you? And there was George Cukor and Lionel Atwill and dozens of others. All the big names from 1939, they came here. Maybe not every month, but pretty well.’
Ramone warned, ‘You’d better not be putting us on, Mr Fido.’
‘Why should I put you on?’ Fido challenged him. ‘It’s true, it happened. Every month, here at the Hollywood Divine, in the Leicester Suite.’
‘And Boofuls was
always
here?’ Martin asked him.
Fido nodded. ‘They wouldn’t start without Boofuls.’
‘Wouldn’t start what?’ said Ramone.
Fido puffed out his blotchy cheeks. ‘Don’t ask me, how should I know? It was all supposed to be secret, right? We laid them on a spread before they started – chicken, lobster, stuff like that – and then we had to lock the doors and leave them to it – whatever it was they were doing. But believe me, they were all famous. You’d have known them all. Errol Flynn, he used to come. Joan Crawford. Wilfred Buckland, the art director. Fifty or sixty of them, every month, sometimes more.’
Martin said, ‘You’re
sure
about this?’
‘Sure I’m sure. I was the bell captain.’
‘Well, how long did these get-togethers go on for?’
‘Two, three in the morning, sometimes longer.’
‘And Boofuls stayed there all that time?’
‘I used to see him leaving, four o’clock in the morning sometimes. That Redd woman used to cover him up with a cloak and a hood, but you couldn‘t mistake him.’