Along the way, I got to philosophizing. It occurred to me that, though I agreed with Barbara about the film’s importance, there was something to Shea’s incredulity, too. Just how important was an old silent movie, anyway? Everyone involved in its production, from the star down to the kid who delivered sandwiches to the set, was long dead by now. More than that, even the most essential contributions to our culture didn’t seem that important in the long run, at least not while I leaned against the hotel’s façade with a cigarette dangling from my mouth and my eyes on the weirdos and tourists shambling up Hollywood Boulevard like zombies. The whole damn world was going to come to an end someday and when that happened, who would be left to give a damn about Shakespeare, or Dostoyevsky, or Van Gogh? Never mind Angel of the Abyss. I doubted more than a thousand people alive even knew it ever existed. Only cinema geeks like me and the late Leslie Wheeler could possibly be bothered. Us, and whoever found it necessary to murder her to get their hands on one-eleventh of the film. There were more pointless reasons to die, but I couldn’t think of many.
Dark thoughts like this consumed me and I started to lose focus on the whole nasty situation that enveloped me. I decided I needed a drink, so I stamped out my smoke and went back in to find the hotel bar. Despite the years I’d had to get used to it, I still hated the idea of a bar I couldn’t smoke in, but I swallowed it down and ordered a Dewar’s on ice. Almost as soon as the bartender set to getting it for me, I felt a hand on my shoulder.
“There you are,” Jake said. “I’ve been looking for you, pal.”
For Christ’s sake, I thought. I said, “Man of your word.”
“Mama taught me not to lie,” he said, pulling up a stool beside me. The bartender came back round and set my drink in front of me. Jake said, “One of those for me, too.”
With a sharp nod, the bartender got to it. Jake slapped his hand on the bar, startling me a little, and grinned ear to ear.
“Back in Cali, man!” he boomed. I winced. I absolutely hated it when people said Cali. The only thing worse was La-La Land.
“Probably not for long,” I said. He cocked his head to the side as I sipped my scotch.
“Job fall through?”
“You could say that.”
“Well, dish. What’s the story, Graham?”
“Went to meet with the lady who hired me this morning,” I began.
“Yeah?”
“Only she was dead when I got there.”
“Jesus,” Jake said. “Are you serious?”
“Serious as an Eisenstein picture, bud.”
“What, she was old or something? Heart attack, something like that?”
“Not so old. Cops think she was murdered.” They think. It was pretty damned cut and dry, actually.
I killed my drink and signaled for another.
“Holy shit. That’s terrible, Graham. That must have been a hell of a shock.”
I chuckled morosely. “You’ve got that right. My old man dropped dead in the living room when I was in high school, but I never saw the body. Fact is, this is my first, and it wasn’t at a funeral or anything nice like that. She was just crumpled up in a chair, dead as disco. Place was trashed, too.”
I didn’t know why I was being so candid with Jake of all people, but my mouth just ran away with me. Probably I just needed somebody to talk to after everything that happened and he was handy. Nonetheless, I was starting to feel a bit queasy thinking about it and decided to change the subject.
“What about you? You flew out here?”
“Borrowed some cash, got a decent deal on the ticket.”
Figured.
“How’d you find me here?” I asked.
“Made sense you’d stay in Hollywood, so I started calling around. Got this dump on the fourth try.”
“Regular Hardy boy.”
“Sure,” he said. “Maybe I’ll open my own agency. Take pictures of cheating husbands and shit.”
That would probably be the most work he would have ever done in his life, but I kept that to myself.
“Where are you staying?” I asked him.
“Not far. Little motel with questionable morals. I don’t have a sugar mama funding my vacation.” The words had barely passed his thin lips before his face pinched and he dropped his eyes to his lap. “Ah, crap. Sorry, Graham.”
I waved it off. The waving hand was a little uncoordinated. The scotch was doing its job.
“Forget it. Listen, maybe I’ll stay on another day or two. I’ll ask how far ahead my room is covered and cash the check I got. Tomorrow we’ll do something, you know, Los Angelesy. Make the best of it.”
“Hey, that’s the spirit,” Jake beamed.
“Damn,” I drawled, simultaneously tapping the rim of my glass at the barman. “Why let a little murder ruin a perfectly good trip? We’ll go to Disneyland. Get a goddamn star map. Maybe we’ll run into Brad Pitt and get a fucking autograph.”
Jake pursed his mouth and absently stirred his scotch with the little black straw the barman put in it. I laughed and grabbed his shoulder as the guy brought me number three, which I grabbed and clinked against Jake’s glass. After a deep slug from my hooch, I sighed with gratification and said, “Forget it, Jake — it’s Chinatown.”
An old joke we’d once shared, the line from the Polanski film, and enough to break the ice I’d formed by being a morbid ass. Jake grinned, and I slapped him on the back before excusing myself for a smoke outside. It was damned curious how much more I liked the guy when I was in my cups.
Outside the city was brighter in the night than it was in the daytime, lit blindingly with street lamps and glaring neon signs. Traffic had picked up, transporting sightseers and partygoers, though all the characters in cartoon costumes seemed to have gone home for the night. They had been replaced by the same transvestite street walkers I remembered from my time there in the nineties. It was great knowing how things didn’t change.
I fired up a cigarette, dragged deeply on it, and suddenly remembered what the cop had said about getting in contact with Helen. The thought sent me crashing to half-sobriety and I started to worry that I’d end up in a room with her in some grimy police station, my past never quite willing to give me up to the future.
Such were my unhappy thoughts as I worked my way down a smoldering Pall Mall and the brick wall burst in a cloud of dust about six inches from my ear. Without giving it much thought, I dropped to a crouch and another shot cracked the night, this time hitting the wall where my head had been seconds earlier. Pathetically, I was still clutching my cigarette between two fingers.
A set of tires squealed, peeling out, and I looked up in time to see a late-model Saab speeding down Hollywood in a cloud of exhaust and burned rubber. I couldn’t see who was in the car, but I knew damn well that whoever it was, they’d just tried to shoot me dead. I collapsed on my ass and sat there on the sidewalk, half-drunk and dumbfounded, trying to convince myself it was just another one of L.A.’s notorious, mythic, random drive-bys.
But as I finished my cigarette and people came bursting out of the hotel lobby and from both sides of the street, I knew perfectly well that wasn’t the case.
Angel of the Abyss was catching up to me.