I’m sure you are, I thought, again fantasizing about whacking him across the jaw. My daydream was interrupted by another young person, a girl with Lucy-red hair, who leaned back in her chair two monitors over and said, “Did you try the old notebooks, Shawn?”
I raised my left eyebrow at him and said, “Did you try that, Shawn?”
Shawn groaned.
The girl rose from her chair and walked over to one of the remaining shelves, sagging from the weight of its contents. I followed her over and she selected a particularly thick white one, flipped to the back and ran her finger down the columns until she found what she was looking for. What I was looking for.
“Parson, John. This lists him on the board for a company called Monumental Pictures in Culver City. Think it could be the same person?”
Monumental was the name of the production company behind Angel of the Abyss. It went under before my parents were born, but it certainly wasn’t unheard of to resurrect old names for new uses. Then again, I had no idea how long Parson had been dead, or if this second iteration of Monumental was still a going concern.
I said, “That’s John, all right.”
“I’m afraid all this has is that and the web address. MonumentalPictures.net. This is a pretty old book, though — at least eight years, I think. I’d say visit the site and hopefully it will have all the info you need.”
She gave me a caring look, her eyes unable to stay away from my bandages for too long.
“Thank you so much for your help,” I said to her. To the other little shit, I said nothing at all.
I left and found a pharmacy where I bought some gauze and other items to redress my head. I also bought a cotton beanie to cover most of it up. From there I took my bounty to the nearest copy center, which in the post-Internet café age were just about the only places other than libraries where you could find a computer for public use. I paid for an hour but I only needed five minutes.
The website was so old it had frames and clip art, but there was an address and a phone number. I copied them down and rushed back to my motel room, where I dialed the number before the door slammed shut behind me. Out of order.
But I still had an address.
The next half hour I spent carefully unwrapping my mummified head to redress before I went back out again. It was the first time I’d seen the wound, and it was horrific. My right eye was still swollen shut and the entry point was black and crusted. There was some kind of cotton or cloth stint lodged in the tiny hole, but I didn’t go prodding at it to find out more. I developed a fear of exposing it too long and, after wiping my half-shaved head down with some antiseptic wipes, wrapped it quickly and cinched it with metal teeth. Then the beanie went on and I looked less like a horror creature and more like a derelict who lost a battle with a baseball bat in some back alley.
I couldn’t decide which was worse.
West of the 405 and not too far from the Mar Vista projects there stood on South Slauson a large gray obelisk of a warehouse. There was no signage to identify its purpose, no windows on the street-facing side. The place could have been used for anything, or nothing at all. Either seemed equally dangerous to me. There was no telling who was in a place like that and what they were doing there. Possibly something perfectly innocuous and above-board, but given the way my little working vacation to L.A. had turned out so far, I wasn’t interested in putting any money on that.
Not that I had much in the way of money — once again I’d charged my taxi ride out there, forty bucks. It was a miracle my credit card company hadn’t cut me off yet, decided the damn thing was stolen. As things stood, I was going to be looking at one hell of a bill, assuming I lived long enough to be shocked by it.
I stood on the sidewalk as the cab drove off, listening to the city and the dull roar of the 405, and tried to imagine whether the junior Parson did anything remotely related to moviemaking in this place, once upon a time. I had my doubts. Monumental Pictures folded in the year between the disastrous premiere of Angel of the Abyss and Grace Baron’s official “death.” I didn’t know exactly when John Parson decided to resurrect the name, nor why, but it seemed a good bet to me whatever it was, it was something his widow was willing to kill just about anybody to conceal.
At the front door I found a small button, presumably a doorbell. I didn’t touch it, but I tried the handle. Locked. From there I walked around the side, past a rickety-looking ladder leading up to the roof, and around to the back. There was an empty parking lot back there, the macadam cracked to hell and the cracks filled with tall weeds and crabgrass. The back of the warehouse sported two steel doors just like the one in front and a loading dock situated atop a broad concrete slab. I tried both back doors with the same result.
I was just about to start weighing the pros and cons of trying that ladder when the left side door crunched open and a hairy face poked out. I jumped a little, startled.
The face, almost all beard, said, “Jinx, that you?”
The temptation to run popped into my head, but then I remembered that running was off the menu for me for the foreseeable future. Instead, I said, “No, sorry.”
“You need to sleep here, man? It’s cool. It’s safe.”
The door opened the rest of the way and a thin, pale man stepped out. His long hair was brown and gray, matted like his beard. He didn’t seem particularly dirty, but he was clearly homeless. He looked at me with watery blue eyes that said he could tell I was in dire straits, that he knew a lot about that.
I said, “I kinda…just wanted to look around, actually.”
“No trouble?” He seemed skeptical. I couldn’t blame him.
“No trouble,” I agreed.
He bit his thumbnail and traded glances with me and whatever was behind the door. While he thought it over, I decided to introduce myself.
“My name’s Graham. I’ve been looking for somebody, and I think maybe she’s been here. Maybe not for a while.” I didn’t know if I meant Helen or Cora Parson. Or both. It didn’t really seem to make a difference.
“I been squatting here off and on about a year,” the man told me. “A couple guys a little longer. I guess the place shut down ‘round 2000. S’what I hear, anyway.”
“What was it before that?”
“I dunno. Marky would know. You should ask him.”
“Is he here?”
“Marky’s always here.”
The guy pressed the door all the way to the wall and stepped aside to let me by. As I passed him, he squinted one eye and reminded me: “No trouble, man.”
I showed him my palms and smiled, and I walked into the dark, musty space.
There were no fires burning in barrels as I might have expected, and in fact most of the open area was completely dark and vacant, apart from rows of empty metal shelves and cardboard boxes here and there. The residents — the squatters — were concentrated in a smaller space walled off with particleboard and strung with multicolored Christmas lights. The man, my friend, went toward it and motioned for me to follow. The guy seemed a lot more the hippie type than the murderer type, so I followed and tried not to think about the Manson family.
Seated on a surprisingly decent-looking love seat were a man and woman, both in their thirties or early forties. She was black and he was Hispanic. Both were smoking cigarettes, or what I assumed to be cigarettes. When my guide approached, the man sat up straight.
“Who’s that, Duff — Jinx?”
“Nah, it ain’t Jinx. This guy’s called Graham.”
Now both of them perked up as I emerged from the shadows behind Duff. The man, who I gathered was Marky, stood up to assess me. I smiled stupidly at him.