Last Call: Expiration Date Part 2

CHAPTER 4.

It was all very well to say "Drink me," but the wise little Alice was not going to do that in a hurry. "No, I'll look first," she said, "and see whether it's marked 'poison' or not" ...

-Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland LUMPY AND DARYL HAD not found Kootie's bag of quarters in the knapsack's side pocket, and in an all-night drugstore farther up Fairfax he had bought a cheap pair of sungla.s.ses to conceal his swelling discolored eye. That left a little more than six dollars.

Kootie was sitting on a bus bench now, just because he had been too tired to walk one more block. Maybe it didn't matter-maybe all the bus benches in the whole city looked like this one; or, worse, appeared normal to normal people but would all look like this to him.

The bench was black, with a big white skull and crossbones painted on it, along with the words DON'T SMOKE DEATH CIGARETTES.

And he had seen packs of these Death cigarettes at the drugstore. The packs were black, with the same skull and crossbones for a logo. Could that actually be a brand name? What could possibly be in the packs? Little white lengths of finger bones, he thought, stained with dried blood at one end to show you where the filter is.

He was s.h.i.+vering in his heavy flannel s.h.i.+rt. The sunlight was warm enough when it was s.h.i.+ning on him, but in the shade like this the air was still nighttime air-chilly, and thin enough to get in between the teeth of a zipper. Maybe when the sun got up over the tops of the storefront buildings this strange night would finally be all the way gone, and the bus bench would be stenciled with some normal colorful ad.

Maybe he could go home, and his mom and dad would be there.

(in their wedding clothes, those two had to have been his real mom and dad, not the bodies duct-taped into the chairs in the atrium, the bodies with their eyes-) He was shaking now, and he leaned back, gripping his elbows tightly, and forced the shuddering breaths into his lungs and back out. Perhaps he was having a heart attack. That would probably be the best thing that could happen. He wished his feet could reach the ground so that he could brace them on the pavement.

Back up on Sunset, hours ago when the sky had still been middle-of-the-night dark, he had tried several times to call the police. Maybe in the daytime he'd be able to find a telephone that worked right. Maybe maybe maybe.

The s.h.i.+vering had stopped, and he cautiously took a deep breath as if probing to see if a fit of hiccups had finally gone away. When he exhaled, he relaxed, and he discovered that his toes could reach the pavement.

He brushed back his black curly hair and stood up; and when he had walked several yards to be able to stand in a patch of sunlight, he discovered that he was hungry. He could afford breakfast, but probably not much after that.

"You waiting for the 217 bus, kid?"

Kootie glanced up at the old man who had spoken to him. "No," he said quickly. "No, I'm ... walking to school today." He shoved his hands in his pockets and hurried on south down the Fairfax sidewalk, forcing himself not to glance fearfully back over his shoulder.

That guy looked normal, Kootie told himself. He might have been just a man on his way to work, curious about this kid out by himself at dawn here.

But Kootie remembered some of the people he'd met during this long, alarming night. An old woman pus.h.i.+ng a shopping cart across a bright-lit supermarket parking lot had shouted to him, calling him Al, and when he had hurried away from her she had started crying; her echoing sobs had been much louder than her shouting, and he'd still been able to hear her when he was a block away. Later, ducking away from an old man that had seemed to be following him, he had interrupted a young b.u.m, his pants down around his ankles, defecating behind some trash cans ... and Kootie shook his head now to drive away the memory of seeing rocks and bottlecaps coming out of the embarra.s.sed guy's b.u.t.t and clattering on the asphalt. And one woman had pulled up to the curb in a gleaming XKE Jaguar and rolled down the pa.s.senger-side window and called out to him, "You're too young to smoke! I'll give you a hundred dollars for your cigar!" That time he'd started crying, because even though he couldn't understand what she'd meant, he had wanted to run to the nice car and beg the pretty lady for help, but her eyes and lips and teeth had been so glitteringly bright that he could only hurry away, down an alley too clogged with trash cans and stacks of wooden pallets for her car to follow.

Behind him now he heard the familiar puff of air brakes and the roar of a bus engine, and a moment later the big black-and-white RTD bus had gone grinding and sighing past on his left. Kootie distantly hoped that the old man had got aboard, and was going to some job that he liked, and that to him this city was still the malls-and-movie-billboards place Kootie remembered living in.

He watched the bus move ponderously through the lanes of morning traffic-what was down in that direction? The Farmer's Market, Kootie recalled, and that Jewish delicatessen where a big friendly man behind the fish counter had once given him samples of smoked whitefish and salmon-and Kootie saw a police car turn north from Beverly.

There was a pair of pay telephones in front of a minimart ahead of him, and he slanted his pace to the right, toward them, walking just fast enough so that he could be standing there holding a receiver to his ear when the police car would be driving past at his back. When he got to the phone he even went so far as to drop one of his precious quarters into the slot. I need time to think, he told himself.

He was imagining waving down the police car, or the next one that came by. He would let himself just hang on to the door handle and cry, and tell the officers everything, and they would all go back to Kootie's house on Loma Vista Drive. He would wait in the car with one of the cops while the man's partner checked out the house. Or else they'd radio for another car to go to the house, and they'd take Kootie "downtown."

And then what? Several times during his long night's trek he had paused to close his eyes and try to believe that his parents weren't dead, that he had just hallucinated all that terrible stuff about them being dressed up for a wedding in the living room and at the same time sitting murdered in the atrium, and about the one-armed hobo rus.h.i.+ng up the hall and trying to grab him; and he had tried to believe too that the gla.s.s brick in his s.h.i.+rt pocket had nothing to do with the people he was encountering; and he hadn't once been able to believe either thing.

Could he believe them now, now that the sun had cleared the rooftops of the shop buildings across the street and all these distracted, ordinary strangers were busily going to work?

He could do an easy test. With a trembling finger he punched the 9 b.u.t.ton once and the 1 b.u.t.ton twice. I can still change my mind, he told himself nervously. I can still just run away from this phone-jeez, walk, even.

There was a click in the earpiece, and then a man's blurry voice: "... and I told him to just go f.u.c.k himself. What do you think of that? I don' gotta ..." The voice faded, and Kootie was listening to the background murmur-laughter, mumbling, gla.s.ses clinking, someone singing. He could just barely hear a child's voice reciting, over and over again, "In most gardens they make the beds too soft-so that the flowers are always asleep."

Kootie's chest was empty and cold. "h.e.l.lo," he said, in a voice that might have been too loud because he had to talk over the sudden ringing in his ears, "h.e.l.lo, I was trying to get the emergency police number-" It could still be all right, he thought tensely, all the L.A.-area phones could be crossed-up in this way-but even just in his head, just unspoken, the thought had a shrilly frightened tone. "Who have I reached, please?"

For a moment there was just the distant clatter and slurred speech, and then a woman's voice, choking and thick, wailed, "Al? Al, thank G.o.d, where are you gonna meet me tonight? That supermarket parking lot again? Al, my legs've swelled up like sausages, and I need-"

Kootie hung up the phone without dropping it, and he was able a moment later to walk easily away down the Fairfax sidewalk; but he was surprised that the air wasn't coagulating into the invisible mola.s.ses that, in nightmares, kept him from being able to drag one foot ahead of the other.

It was all real. The sun was up, and he was wide awake, and that voice on the phone had been the voice of the old crazy woman he'd run away from in the parking lot, hours ago. His parents really were dead, obviously killed because he had broken the Dante and taken away the gla.s.s brick.

Kootie had killed them.

And even though the police wouldn't ever believe that, they would make Kootie do things-like what? Identify the bodies? No, they wouldn't force a kid to do that, would they? But he'd still have to make probably a million statements, which would either be true and sound crazy, or be lies and sound like a kid's lies; and eventually he'd be put into a foster home somewhere. And how would the telephones behave there! What sort of person would be in charge of the place, or soon come visiting? And if by then they'd decided he was crazy, they might have him in restraints, strapped down on his bed.

He recoiled away from a memory of duct tape.

If he just got rid of the gla.s.s brick, would all this stuff stop happening? But who would eventually find it, and why had his parents kept it hidden?

He remembered a Robert Louis Stevenson story about a devil in a bottle-it could get you anything you wanted, but if you died owning it you'd go to h.e.l.l-and if you wanted to get rid of it you had to sell it for less than you'd paid for it, or it would come back to you even if you threw it into the ocean.

Was this thing worth money, could he sell it? Was it a "cigar"? If so, he could have got a hundred dollars for it from the Jaguar woman last night. It seemed to him that a hundred dollars was a good deal less than what he had paid for it.

There was a low, white-painted cinder-block wall around the little parking lot of a strip shopping center ahead of him, and he crossed to it and hiked himself up to sit on the coping. He glanced around at the wide, busy intersection and the sidewalks to make sure no one was paying any particular attention to him, and then he unb.u.t.toned the pocket of his heavy flannel s.h.i.+rt and lifted out the gla.s.s brick. It seemed to click, very faintly deep inside, when he turned it in his hand.

This was the first time he'd looked at it in sunlight. It was rectangular, but b.u.mpy and wavy on its surfaces, and even when he held it up to the sun he couldn't see anything in its cloudy depths. He ran a finger around its narrow side-and felt a seam. He peered at the side surfaces and saw that a tiny straight crack went all the way around, dividing the brick into two equal halves.

The two guys that had robbed him so long ago last night had taken his Swiss army knife, so he worked a fingernail into the groove and twisted, and only managed to tear off a strip of his nail. By holding the gla.s.s thing between his palms, though, with his fingers gripped tightly over the edges, he was able to pry hard enough to feel the two gla.s.s sections move against each other, and to be sure that the thing could be opened.

He pressed it firmly together again and took off his backpack to tuck the brick safely down among his tumbled clothes. He pulled the flap down over it all and then, since the plastic buckles had been broken last night, carefully tied the straps tight before putting the backpack on again. Maybe people wouldn't be able to sense the gla.s.s thing so easily now.

Like a gun, he thought dully, or a grenade or blasting caps or something. It's like they had a gun in the house and never told their kid even what a gun is. It's their own fault I somehow accidentally got them killed by playing with it.

If I open it-what? A devil might come out. A devil might actually come out. It wouldn't matter whether or not I believe in devils, or that my friends and the teachers in school don't. People in 1900 didn't think that radium could hurt you, just carrying a chip of it in your pocket like a lucky rock, and then one day their legs fell off and they died of cancer. Not believing something is no help if you turn out to be wrong.

He heard the short byoop of a motorcycle cop's siren and looked up nervously-but the cop was stopping way out in the intersection, and, as Kootie watched, he climbed off the blue-flas.h.i.+ng bike and put down the kickstand and began directing traffic with broad slow gestures. The traffic signals had gone completely out sometime during the last few minutes, weren't even flas.h.i.+ng red; and then even when the policeman waved for the southbound lanes to move forward, the cars and trucks and buses stayed backed up for another several minutes because nearly every driver had stalled and had to start up again.

As Kootie crossed Beverly, the sound of grinding starter motors was echoing among the lanes behind him like power saws.

CHAPTER 5.

"Then you keep moving around, I suppose?" said Alice.

"Exactly so," said the Hatter, "as the things get used up."

"But what happens when you come to the beginning again?" Alice ventured to ask.

"Suppose we change the subject," the March Hare interrupted ...

-Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland ONE OF THEM HAD finally been for real.

It had been two hours since the Greyhound bus had pulled out of the dawn-streaked yard of the Albuquerque station, subsequently finding the I-40 highway and cranking its way up through the dry rock Zuni Mountains, downs.h.i.+fting to follow the twisting highway among the ancient lava beds, and booming down the western slope to roar right through Gallup without stopping; but when the bus finally swung off the I-40 at the little town of Houck, just over the border into Arizona, Angelica Anthem Elizalde simply kept her seat while most of the other pa.s.sengers shuffled past her down the aisle to catch some fresh morning air and maybe a quick cup of coffee during the fifteen-minute stop.

She looked out her window. Though it was now eight-thirty, the bus was still casting a yards-long shadow, and the shadow pointed west. She s.h.i.+vered, but tucked her ladies' magazine into the pocket of the seat in front of her.

She had hoped to distract herself with its colorful pages, but had run aground on an almost hysterically cheerful article about how to cook squash, with a sidebar that addressed "Twelve Important Squash Questions"; and then she had been forced out of the pages again by a multiple-choice "Creativity Test," which gave high marks to the hypothetical housewife who, confronted with two mismatched socks after all the laundry had been put away, elected to (C) make hand puppets of them rather than (A) throw them away or (B) use them for dusting.

None of the listed answers had been anything like "burn them," "eat them," "bury them in the backyard," or "save them in case one night you answer the door to a stranger with bare, mismatched feet."

Elizalde managed a tight smile. She flexed her hands and wondered what work she would find to do in Los Angeles. Typist, again? Waitress, again? Panhandler, bag lady, prost.i.tute, a patient in one of the county mental hospitals in which she'd done her residency- -a felon locked up in the Sybil Brand Inst.i.tute for Women- She quickly fetched up the magazine out of the seat pocket and stared hard at a photograph of some happy family having fun around a swing set (-probably all of them models, really, who had never seen each other before lining up there for the picture-) and she thought again about turning back. Get off the bus at Flagstaff, she told herself, and catch the 474 bus, take it all the way back to Oklahoma City, be there by eight-thirty tonight. Go back to the big truck stop under the Petro water tower, tell the manager at the Iron Skillet that you were too sick to call in sick when you failed to show up for the waitress s.h.i.+ft last night.

Get back on that old heartland merry-go-round.

For nearly two years she had been traveling, far from Los Angeles, working in restaurants and bars and small offices, along the Erie Ca.n.a.l from the Appalachians to Buffalo, and up and down the Ohio River from Pittsburgh to Cairo, and, most recently, along the Canadian River in Oklahoma. She'd celebrated her thirty-fourth birthday with half a dozen of the Iron Skillet waitresses in the bar at O'Connell's in Norman, twenty minutes south of Oklahoma City.

At least L.A. would be fairly warm, even now, in October, four days before Halloween. The Mexican street vendors in the Boyle Heights area might already be selling El Da de los Muertos candy, the white stylized skulls and skeletons- (-Shut up!-) Again she forced herself to stare at the family in the magazine photo, and she tried to believe that it really was a family, that they were genuinely enjoying some- (-long-lost-) (-Shut up!-) weekend in the backyard, oblivious of this photographer- ... It didn't work. The adults and kids in the photograph just looked like models, strangers to each other.

Elizalde remembered driving the L.A. freeways at night, s.n.a.t.c.hing an occasional glance to the side at some yellow-lit kitchen window in a pa.s.sing apartment building, and always for one moment desperately envying the lives of whatever people lived there. She had always imagined hammered-copper roosters on the kitchen wall, a TV in the next room with "Cheers" getting innocent laughs, children sitting cross-legged on the carpet- (-Shut up.) That had never really worked, either. Maybe those apartments had all been vacant, with the lights left on. She folded the magazine and put it back.

A few moments later she jumped, and looked toward the front of the bus just before the first returning pa.s.senger stepped aboard, rocking the bus on the shocks. Elizalde sighed. No, she couldn't go back to Oklahoma.

For about twelve hours now she had been doing this, reacting to noises and jolts just before they happened. She'd been in bed when it started, and she'd awakened in her darkened apartment just before the clock radio had blared on. At first she had thought some mental clock had been keeping track of the time while she'd slept-she'd found herself remembering her grandmother's saying, Es como los brujos, duerme con los ojos abiertos: He is like the witches, and sleeps with his eyes open-but the effect had continued as she'd proceeded to get ready for work, so that she'd flinched before water had come out of the shower head, and dropped her hair dryer because it had seemed to quiver animatedly in her hand just as she was about to push the On b.u.t.ton.

Then she had begun blinking her eyes even before the tears welled up in them. She'd sat down on her bathroom floor and just sobbed with fright, for in the same way that she'd seemed to be antic.i.p.ating physical events, she had now been afraid that an idea was about to surface in her mind, an idea that she had been strenuously avoiding for two years. Before she'd been able to distract herself, the idea had hit her: maybe she had not, after all, had a psychotic schizophrenic episode in her Los Angeles clinic in 1990.

And, bleakly, she had known that she would have to go back there and find out. Find out if One of them had finally been for real.

Everybody was getting back on the bus now, and the driver had the engine idling. Elizalde let her head sink back against the high, padded seat, and she thought she might at last be able to get some sleep, during the twelve hours it would take the bus to plow on through Flagstaff and Kingman and Barstow to, finally, Los Angeles.

After all, it seemed that nothing could sneak up on her.

Soy como las brujas, duermo con mis ojos abiertos.

Pete Sullivan clanked the gears.h.i.+ft into neutral and gunned the engine to keep it from stalling. He was stopped in what was supposed to be the fast lane of the 101, a mile or so short of the tunnel where the northbound Santa Ana Freeway would merge in. G.o.d only knew when he would get to Hollywood.

Though it was a non-holiday Friday morning, even on the westbound 60 the traffic had been jammed up-fully stopped much of the time, and occasionally speeding up and opening out in front of him for just enough moments to let him imagine that the congestion was behind him, before the red brake lights would all start glaring again ahead of him.

In the driver's seat of his van he was above most of the other drivers, and during the course of an hour, while his foot had moved back and forth from the brake to the gas pedal, he had watched the towers of Los Angeles rise ahead of him in the bra.s.sy light. The towers had been scrimmed to dim silhouettes by the smog, as if they were faded shapes in a photograph that's been left out too long in the sun-or, he had thought, as if the city has had its picture taken so many times that the c.u.mulative loss of images had begun to visibly diminish it.

Like deLarava's ghosts, he had thought. Maybe the whole city has died, but is too distracted to have realized it yet.

The towers were clearer now, and it was disorienting to see big buildings that he didn't recognize-one of the new ones was a tall tan-stone cylinder, like a stylized sculpture of a rocket s.h.i.+p, and he wondered uneasily if he would still be able to find his way around the city's streets.

His window was open to the diesel-reeking air, and he looked down over his elbow at the center divider, which in the old days had generally just been a featureless blur rus.h.i.+ng past. Flowering weeds, and even a couple of midget palm trees, were pus.h.i.+ng up out of cracks in the concrete, and curled around them and the many Budweiser cans was an apparently constant web of brown tape from broken stereo ca.s.settes; there were even a lot of peaches for some reason, bruised but unbitten, as if some citizen of this no-man's-land had left them there like Hansel and Gretel's bread crumbs.

Sullivan wondered what ca.s.settes these were that drivers had so prodigally pitched out their windows, and he grinned nervously at the temptation to open the door and salvage some of the tape. It would be a cinch to clean it and wind it onto a fresh ca.s.sette-half. Would it all be the same kind of music, perhaps even all copies of the same tape? It occurred to him that the center divider looked like a miles-long shrine to primitive-but-urban G.o.ds; and he s.h.i.+vered and turned his attention back to the pickup truck in front of him, in the bed of which two Mexican girls were listlessly brus.h.i.+ng their long black hair.

About an hour ago he had stopped peering ahead to see what wreck or freeway construction would be causing the traffic jam-apparently the freeways just snarled up without any definable cause these days, like the turbulence that would sometimes inexplicably shake a sump pipe at a power station even when all the air had been bled out of it.

In Los Angeles s.p.a.ce is time, he thought-you don't say I'm thirty miles from downtown, you say I'm half an hour from it. If unpredictable turbulence has become a real, constant factor in traffic, then all the maps and clocks are broken (like the Mad Hatter's b.u.t.ter-clogged watch!) and you can only make a hazy guess about how far it might be from one point to another.

I'm a hundred years from Venice Beach, he thought, and a thousand miles from Christmas Eve of 1986. Better draw up a chart.

He pushed the thought away and concentrated on the traffic.

The Brew 102 brewery proved to be gone. 102 had been the only beer Sullivan had ever encountered that had sediment in it, but he found that he missed the old black-and-yellow sign, and he was further disoriented to see half a dozen helicopters parked on the wide roof of a building on the other side of the freeway. With the glittering rocket still ahead of him, the whole place was looking like a poster for some 1930s science-fiction movie.

When he eventually gunned the van up the off-ramp at Hollywood Boulevard, though, there were beat-up old couches under the palm trees in the freeway border area, and a dispirited-looking group of ragged black men, their hair in ropy dreadlocks, were slouching there in the shade. He half expected to see chickens running around their skinny ankles, and a fire in a split oil drum behind them.

The clocks and maps are smashed and ripped to bits, he thought. Even though it was the best b.u.t.ter.

He drove west on Hollywood Boulevard, cautiously pleased to see that though the names of many businesses had changed-there was no Howard Johnson's restaurant at Hollywood and Vine anymore-most of the actual buildings he remembered had survived.

It seemed to him that it had always been like this, in the area from Franklin south to Melrose and beyond. Every building looked as if it had originally been used for something else. Even here on Hollywood Boulevard, the odd top corners of the storefronts were frequently broken or bent, showing old brick underneath, and between buildings he could see brick alcoves, way up and far back, dating from G.o.d knew when. Tiny ironwork balconies still stuck out on second and third floors, with probably nothing behind them anymore but empty offices.

Now that he was nearly there-only one turn remaining, a right onto Laurel Canyon once he'd got out past this tourist area of the boulevard-he was in no hurry to get to the ruins he and his sister had explored on that spring day in '86. At Wilc.o.x he impulsively decided to turn north-and when he'd made the turn he saw that the Shelton Apartments had been torn down, replaced by some sprawling new pink apartment building.

He pulled the van over to the curb and switched off the engine for the first time since stopping for eggs and bacon in Blythe, four hours ago. Then for several minutes, while he lit a cigarette and stared across the street at the new four-story building, he tried to remember the old Shelton.

Like the Lido and the Mayfair, both of which were still standing a block farther up the street, the Shelton had had one of those big signs on the roof, separate ornate letters in line, supported by a lattice of steel beams, and had had a lot of the decorative cornices and balconies that architects never seemed to bother with anymore. The only eccentricities of this new place, the HOLLYWOOD STUDIO CLUB APARTMENTS, were inset windows and an apparent blanket policy of having all corners be rounded. A banner across the top announced $777 MOVES YOU IN! Probably not a bad price around here, he thought absently, these days. It had been while filming a doc.u.mentary in the lobby of the old Shelton in the winter of '84 that he and his sister had finally got a strong clue about what Loretta deLarava really did.

deLarava had hired the twins right out of college ten years earlier, and they'd been working for her ever since as "gaffers"-lighting technicians. deLarava produced short-subject films-in-house instruction pieces for businesses, nontimely human-interest bits for news programs, the occasional commercial-and for twelve years the twins had spent their days driving to what seemed like every corner of Los Angeles, to lay cables and set up Genie lifts and hang lights over some beach or office floor or sidewalk.

deLarava had been a disconcerting boss. One of the first jobs the twins worked on with her had been a short film about the vandalizing of Houdini's grave in Brooklyn in 1975-and deLarava had been the first to cover the event because it hadn't even occurred before she arrived. It had been deLarava herself who shattered the stone bust of Houdini in the Machpelah Cemetery and took a mummified thumb out of a hollow inside it, and who had dug two plaster hands out of the soil in front of the grave. The twins had of course not even been tempted to turn their new boss in to the authorities-but, apparently on a drunken whim, Sukie had stolen the thumb and the hands from deLarava's luggage on the drive back to the airport.

deLarava had cried when she'd discovered the loss, and ransacked the car, and had even had to make new airline reservations because she insisted on driving back to the cemetery to look for the items, but Sukie had not ever admitted to the theft.

From the beginning Sukie had taken a perverse pleasure in tormenting their boss, and certainly deLarava was an easy target. The fat old woman always wore a rubber band around her scalp, with her hair brushed down over it to keep it from showing, and after Sukie had discovered the habit she made a point of finding opportunities to b.u.mp the woman's head, dislodging the rubber band so that it sprang to the top of her head, making a wreck of her hair. And deLarava's clothes always had Velcro closures instead of b.u.t.tons or zippers, and Sukie frequently managed to get the old woman's shoes or jackets attached to upholstered chairs or textured wallpaper, so that deLarava had to pull herself loose with an embarra.s.sing tearing sound. And once, after a minute or so of silence during a drive, Sukie had glanced brightly at the old woman and said, "Yeah? Go on-? You were saying something about a picnic?"-acting as if their boss had just begun a sentence and then forgotten it-but deLarava had reacted with such fright to the disorienting gambit that Sukie had never tried that particular trick again.

At the Shelton they'd been filming in the lobby and in an upstairs hallway, and of course Pete and Sukie had arrived three hours before the rest of the crew to locate a 220-volt power source in the old building and set up the hydraulic lifts and hang the key lights. Sullivan remembered now that for an outdoor shot of the hotel they'd rented battery-powered lights made by a company called Frizzolini, and that Sukie had kept saying that deLarava had better be careful of getting her hair all frizzied. Possibly Sukie had been drunk already.

deLarava herself had arrived early for that shoot. She would have been in her mid-fifties then, and for once she had been looking her age. She had always smoked some kind of clove-flavored Indonesian cigarettes that made a room smell as though someone were baking a glazed ham nearby, and on this morning her chubby hands had been shaking as she'd lit each one off the b.u.t.t of the last, sparks dropping unnoticed onto the carpet, and her pendulous cheeks had quivered when she inhaled. She had brought with her a whole hatbox full of props to distribute around the shooting area; Sullivan remembered pocket watches, a couple of diamond rings, even a feather boa, in addition to the usual antique, still-sealed bottles of liquor.

The project had been a short morbid piece on the suicides that had taken place in the old building; perhaps the film had been done on spec, for Sullivan couldn't now recall any particular client for the job, and he couldn't remember it having gone through the post-production or screening steps. Incongruously, they had been filming it on Christmas Eve. The old woman had never let a Christmas Eve or a Halloween go by without filming something, somewhere.

Sullivan wondered uneasily what she might have scheduled for this upcoming Sat.u.r.day.

deLarava had been interested in only two of the suicides that had taken place at the Shelton. The first was a woman called Jenny Dolly-around the turn of the century Jenny Dolly and her twin sister Rosie were a celebrated dance team, renowned for their beauty; but Jenny's face had been horribly scarred in a car crash in 1933, and she had hanged herself in her apartment here in 1941. The other suicide had been the actress Clara Bland.i.c.k, who, one day in 1962, had got her hair fixed up and had carefully done her makeup and put on a formal gown and then pulled a plastic bag over her head and smothered herself. She was chiefly remembered for having played Auntie Em in the 1939 version of The Wizard of Oz.