Authors: Ian R. MacLeod
He pecked and peered at the loose gravel. Saw evidence of many recent cigarette butts, screwed-up Chesterfield packs, gritty lumps of discarded gum, half-eaten sandwiches, a few fluttering sheets of yesterday’s
Van Nuys News
. Cops were such slobs. Amid the recent swirl of car treads, there were also the wider tracks of what he took to be the ambulance and tow truck. He peered more carefully over the flimsily-guarded drop where rocks gnashed and tumbled through scrub larch toward the flashing creek. Something long and black had been tossed that way and was lying curled, nasty as a snake, about thirty feet beneath. His heart hammered. The wind rushed in his ears. The length of hose which had ended April Lamotte’s life had probably been thrown that way by the walkers who’d found her, or the guys from the tow truck. Evidence or not, no-one was going to risk climbing down there to get it. Neither was he.
He wandered about some more. Found a small rill and splashed his face and drank. Water had rarely tasted so good. Then he went to edge of the trees which raked up toward the mountains to take a piss. Just as he was finishing, he noticed a glassy glint amid the pine needles down by his feet. He picked it up. It was a glass and steel hypodermic. The plunger was fully depressed.
Driving on and up the road toward Bark Rise, he passed a small settlement of prefab bungalow houses and a gas station-cum-general store. He pulled in. A rangy, mangy dog was growling and yapping at the end of its chain. The old man who came hunching out from the dark of his hut was white-eye blind in the same eye as the dog, and had similarly bad teeth.
“Nice ride,” the old man muttered as the meter clanked and he filled the Delahaye up with gas. “Shame about that busted window. City kids do that?”
“Yeah. You hear much about what happened down the road there yesterday? That woman who killed herself?”
“Not much. Other than that the cops came up this way an’ bought me clean outa Chesterfields.”
“Many people use that overlook to end it all?”
“Not soas I’d know of. Nice enough spot. More likely to make you want to start afresh than dump it all down the can.”
“That was what I thought.” He remembered those bleak little scraps April Lamotte had written. What had the last one been about? Something about being in
a dead and empty place
…
“You ain’t some ree-porter, are you?”
“No. Just happened to know the woman.”
The meter stopped clanking. “That’ll be three fifty on the nose.” The old man gave the nozzle a shake.
“Say, you didn’t happen to see a guy around here who looks a tad like me? Tallish. Same pale suits. A beard, but these teeth and ears.”
“What? You related?”
“You could say.”
The old man shook his head, took the money, and hooked the nozzle back into the pump. “You
sure
you ain’t some kinda press?”
“Yeah. I’m just—”
“Heard the broad was some looker, as well. Car almost as fancy as this here. Done dead like that, real waste. More as like, someone might take that bend wrong and go down the ravine. Them barriers ain’t gonna stop nothin’. ’Bout time they got it sorted, just like I was telling that cop yesterday.”
“The ones who came up after the suicide?”
“Nah. The cop who was here earlier. Saw him when I was coming thataway. Puttin’ up some kinda roadblock on the same spot. Said it was for a survey.”
“When was this?”
The old man gave him a wall-eyed version of the you-must-be-stupid look Clark was getting used to receiving. “Like I say, early yesterday.”
“What time?”
“’Bout nine thirty, maybe ten. Mist hangs there sometimes ’til almost midday.”
“What was this cop like?”
The old guy rubbed his stubble. “Tall, I’d say. Almost as tall as you. ’Bout middle age the same. But thinner. Had one of them longish faces that looks sad even when it ain’t. Wore them newfangled glasses people put on against the sun. Didn’t take his cap off either.”
“Any kind of accent?”
“Cop had what I’d call a churchy kinda voice.”
“You mean, sing-song?”
“Nothin’ like that. Just mean ed-u-cated like he’s come from no particular place at all and ain’t we all supposed to be impressed by it.”
“Happen to notice his car?”
“Like a zebra got stripes, it was a po-lice car, drawn right across the road with a stop sign put up beside it. Just one of them regular black jobs. Said through it was for some kinda safety survey before he left me.”
“Any idea of the car’s make?”
“The sort you don’t notice. Like I say—”
“Just a regular black sedan, maybe a Mercury, with a badge stuck on the door and a light on the top?”
The old guy nodded.
“But you haven’t seen him since?”
The old guy shook his head. “Not much you see the po-lice round here. Don’t have no call for crime. Do get some am-bu-lances, though. People come up here from down there in winter, stay up in them cabins like they think they’re Rebels. Do that thing on the snow.” He worked his lips and gestured his scrawny arms.
“Skiing?”
“That’s the one. Then they come back down again with their legs broke. Must be some way of passing the time.”
“You visit LA much?”
“Just the once. Heard things have changed a lot since. Heard the picture houses these days got gadgets that’ll pry up the inside of your head neat as a melon. Heard them ce-lebrities dance around in there like hobgoblins. Change the way a man thinks. Sure don’t sound like the work of the good Lord to me.”
“You’re right,” Clark agreed. “It isn’t.”
H
E FOLLOWED THE DIRECTIONS
which the old man at the gas station had given him. Bark Rise was more an area than a single road, and everything along its forest drives was landscaped, screened, tucked away. This was moneyed LA transported up from the coastal bowl into the foothills of the San Bernardino Mountains without a single drop of its precious elixir being shed. A woman cycled by him from the other direction. She was blonde, tan, long-legged, extraordinarily beautiful. Everything up here looked like an advertisement.
There were polished oak signs, and he found his way to the turn which led to Larch Lodge easily enough. He parked the Delahaye under the trees just back from the junction, wondering why he hadn’t brought the Colt, and how far he’d have to walk to reach the place. But it wasn’t too far; just enough to foster the illusion that this log and shingle construction was the only habitation within fifty miles. The power cables buried. Nothing to hear but the sway of the pines. Larch Lodge was squat, trying hard to be pretty, and looked like it belonged in a clumsy fairy tale. There was a four car garage shaped like a barn around back, and a smaller lodge for servants or extra guests.
He checked the smaller place first, peering in at the windows. They were barred on the outside, and the place didn’t look as if it had ever seen much habitation. He glanced at the wavering trees. Someone could be out there in the forest. Anywhere. Watching. Waiting. But it seemed more likely that the kind of creatures you got in cartoon feelies—chorusing bluebirds, sexily-voiced deer and dancing rabbits radiating playful bonhomie—would emerge into this rustic wonderland.
There were no windows in the garage, but he found a side door with a latch but no bolt. A car sat gleaming dully on the clean concrete. A mud-green Plymouth P9 Roadking coupe—nothing upscale like the Caddy or the Delahaye. He checked inside, sniffed the exhaust, touched the tires, felt the bonnet. It had rarely been used. A runaround for getting down to Pasadena for liquor? The garage was otherwise empty. There weren’t even any tools.
He walked across to the main lodge. The windows here were barred as well. He saw unwashed bowls through in the kitchen. In the bedroom was a mussed-up double bed. He leaned back from the window against the logs, trying to get his brain into gear. Signs of recent habitation, but once again this place felt dead. He rooted in his pocket for Daniel Lamotte’s keychain, flipped through it, and found the only key he hadn’t yet used.
The nail-studded front door gave silently to the closed-in air. All the furniture seemed to have come with the house—heavy, raw wooden stuff trying to look like it had been knocked together by a backwoodsman instead of kids in a Mexico sweatshop. There was a moose head on the wall above the iron stove in the main sitting area. He checked inside the stove to see if anything had been burned, but it was factory clean. The kitchen was a mess. Despite the polished surfaces and gingham curtains, it had the same smell of booze and Campbell’s tomato soup as 4A Blixden Apartments.
The bedroom was even more redolent of the real Daniel Lamotte. A cream suit coat much like the one Clark was wearing was still draped over the back of the dressing table chair. That gingery scent he’d noticed when he first opened the cardboard suitcase back in Venice was here. He rubbed the bedsheets between his thumb and finger the way an expert bookseller might touch a first edition. If April Lamotte had still been his client, he’d have told her that her husband had slept here recently. Not last night. But maybe the night before, and several nights before that.
The ashtray on the dressing table was heaped with Lucky Strike butts. Picking through them, he found four pastel stubs marked with burgundy lipstick. He looked again at the bed, but it was obvious to him that only one person had slept there, and restlessly. A glass tumbler sat on the table. As well as a toffeeish residue of what looked and smelled like dried bourbon, there was a chalky tidemark at the bottom. He checked the steel cabinet beside the shower in the bathroom. Next to the shampoos and toothpaste were almost as many boxes and bottles of downers as he’d found at Erewhon.
It felt like he was starting to get the picture. Of Daniel Lamotte being taken here by his wife—drugged, from Edna’s Eats—last Friday. Her locking him up inside this quiet, solid place with its heavy door and barred windows. Maybe visiting him once or twice in the days since whilst she worked up her plans to fake his suicide. Telling him each time that it would be alright, she’d soon make the bad dreams go away, and meanwhile would he take another drink and down a few more tablets, just like always?
He tried many other drawers. Found nothing but a few broken pencils, worn right down to the nub, a dry pot of ink and a pen with a ruined nib. Most of the other storage spaces were empty; he got the impression the Lamottes had bought Larch Lodge a few years back and then not known what to do with it. Oh, for the troubles of the rich…
Only the drawer of a rustic-painted chest in the main sitting area resisted opening; it was a thin plywood thing put there to fill an otherwise empty space along the wall beneath two Remington prints. He went back to the kitchen, grabbed a knife, and pried the cheap lock open. He wasn’t expecting much—if you’d wanted to hide anything, you’d surely have made a better effort—but inside was a checkbook, and a key. The key was straightforward; it was for a Plymouth, and would almost certainly fit the P7 in the garage. So, in an odd kind of way, was the checkbook. It was completely unused, and drawn on a Great Western Bank account in the name of a Mr Richard and a Mrs Elizabeth Tudor.
Elizabeth Tudor—wife of the writer of
The Virgin Queen
… And hadn’t Richard been one of the queen’s beaus? People could never resist doing something clever with their names when they tried to change identity. Not even the smart ones like April Lamotte. She’d even talked of heading off and starting afresh, how Argentina was a place where life could be made new again. For all the current Governor’s efforts, Clark knew from his own work with quickie divorces that the Mexican border was porous as a sponge on the minor roads, and that the borders got even leakier the further south down the continent you went. Visas, passports, driving and marriage licenses simply didn’t come into it. Not if you had the money, which she’d obviously been salting away in this new account under a false name. So what else would you need to start a new life with your supposedly dead husband, apart from a reliable but unobtrusive automobile and a book of checks?
Simple, really. Just left a few questions unanswered. Like what she’d been fleeing, and how and why she’d died, and what the hell had happened to her husband.
The guy had still have been writing up here in this lodge; that much was clear. He wandered some more. A built-in bookcase covered one wall of the living area. It was lined with yearbooks and directories which looked to have been chosen for no better reason than the nice leather spines they possessed. He shoved a few out from each row in case there was something tucked behind them, but no luck.
It might have puzzled some people that a writer should choose to live without proper books—either here at Larch Lodge, at Erewhon, or in apartment 4A—but Clark wasn’t surprised. He’d met a few writers in his time. In most ways, they weren’t a recognizable type, but if there was one thing they did have in common, it was that they didn’t like other writers; not their physical presence, nor news of failures or successes, and especially not their work.
He was down to the last shelf, simply tossing aside the books by now—gold embossed yearly Almanacs for the
Los Angeles Examiner
from 1911 through 1938—and still nothing. But one fluttered oddly. He picked it back up and saw that many of the pages had had bits torn out of them. He checked the other almanacs more carefully—it was mainly the years 1928 through 1933 which had gotten this treatment—then sat down on a rustic chair with the volumes stacked beside him. Thing was, Daniel Lamotte could have torn out entire articles, or pages, but he’d mainly gone for just the pictures, and it was possible to make a pretty accurate guess at what was missing.
Not a single picture of Lars Bechmeir was left in any of the books. Howard Hughes was also missing—including all the many photos about his aviation adventures. Herbert Kisberg, too. Just an ingénue in those days; the kid from back east who was challenging the established giants with a twobit studio called Senserama. He supposed that fitted as well. But ripping out everything about the Metropolitan Mental Hospital? Escapees, inspections, changes on the board? Going through the rest of the almanacs, he found nothing. Or nothing his reeling mind could work out.