“Not really. What I hear, he was pretty much the complete asshole.”
“You heard right.” This from B-side by the door.
“So there’s nothing you can tell us? Now, when it could make a difference? Before this all goes any further?”
I shook my head.
He set the razor carefully on edge on the nightstand, stood and ambled towards B-side, who shifted the radio between hands to open the door.
“We’ll be in touch.”
“Be careful out there, Detective.”
“Thank you for your concern. So few care.”
His smile put me in mind of a throat cut ear to ear.
Chapter Twenty-five
Chickens may not have a lot on the ball, but once they start, they do go on. Velma’s boy looked like what gets tossed off a butcher’s block when everything remotely useful’s been hacked away.
“Two violent deaths since you showed up here,” Lonnie Bates said. “This sort of thing follow you around?”
“Could look that way, I guess.” Did to me sometimes.
We stood over the cadaver with Doc Oldham. I was thinking how the words cave and cad were in there. I was thinking how frail our lives are, how thin the thread tethering us to this world. Go out for the Sunday paper and on the way back, half a block from home, you get hit by a delivery truck. Random viruses claim squatter’s rights in our bodies and won’t be evicted. Amazing any of us manage to stay alive.
“Lonnie, goddamn it, I got people to take care of. Live people. Not much I can do for this poor son-of-a-bitch, is there?”
“County pays you, Doc.”
“Every village’s gotta have an idiot.” He wore good-quality clothes, Brooks Brothers tan suit, blue oxford-cloth shirt, carefully cinched tie-all so stained and body-sprung that Salvation Army sorters would have thrown them out. Half a mug of coffee disappeared at a single swallow. The mug had a nude woman on it. When you poured in hot liquid, her flesh disappeared and a skeleton emerged. As the contents cooled, flesh came back. Right now, she was about half formed. “Dozen more bodies, I might even be able to make my car payment this month, who knows?”
“What can you tell me?” Bates asked.
“Chickens ate him.”
“Thank God we have you. All those years of study, all that expertise. Without that, where would we be?”
Doc Oldham shrugged. “If I wasn’t here, why the hell would I care in the first place? Hell, I don’t care now. Velma okay?”
“Don Lee’s with her. Niece on the way up from Clarksdale. Only family she has.”
“Igor!”
An elderly black man looking like a 1950s railroad porter appeared to claim stretcher and remains of body and wheel them away. Doc Oldham followed. Much-abused stainless steel doors swung to behind.
We walked out into stiffling heat, early-morning rain dripping from trees and eaves and steaming off the sidewalk.
“What’s your day look like?” Bates asked.
“Assuming you don’t have other plans for me, it looks like a drive into the city.”
I’d spoken to Val and got the name of a guy who wrote about movies and taught film studies at the university. His books sported titles like Biker Chicks and Fifty-Foot Women, Short on Clothes, Skateboard Cowboys. He’d written an entire book, Val said, on the three versions of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Kind of books Carl Hazelwood might have had out in the garage, from the sound of things. Guy’s a little weird, Val added. What a surprise.
Just over two hours later I found myself on a block-long street a mile or so off campus where restaurants, cafes, coffee shops and bars still tilted their hats towards students. St. Martin’s Lane didn’t exist on any map; I’d had to stop and ask directions three times. Then, when I found the address, there was no house on the lot. Five-fourteen gave way directly to 518, with a spot between like a missing tooth. A structure stood back by the alley fence, though, a guest house or converted garage. I pulled into the ruins of a driveway and headed for that.
What at first glance I took to be a small, hunched man answered my knock. On closer notice I realized he wasn’t small at all, only drawn into himself, so that he gave the appearance of such. He’d been wearing headphones that pulled away when, oblivious, he came to the door and, as it were, the end of his rope. He glanced back at them lying inert on the floor a yard or so behind. Two days’ growth of beard, hair chronically unruly, scuffed loafers, baggy chinos with frayed cuffs, a black T-shirt. Over this, a many-pocketed hunter’s vest.
Two rooms from what I could make out, possibly another beyond? Shutters and curtains drawn. The whole of it seemed to be lit with a single 40-watt bulb.
“You’re Turner? Come on in.”
He showed me his back as he scuttled into, yes, a third room, and came back with a platter from which he peeled off a plastic covering. Carrot sticks curled up like the toenails of old men, cheese cubes awash with sweat. I had the impression my host didn’t entertain often and was into recycling.
Having delivered the goods, he bent to retrieve the headphones and put them on a table beside a rickety recliner.
“I was just having a beer,” he told me, and picked up a can of Ballantine Ale. Tilting it back only to find it was empty, he looked puzzled, as with the headphones. “Maybe that was earlier, come to think of it. Have one with me?”
“Sure.”
Again, back to me like a beetle, he exited. A hairless cat materialized at my feet, throwing itself to the floor in elaborate shoulder rolls. On a TV in one corner a black-and-white movie showed soundlessly. Long, back-projection shots of highway-patrol cars coursing down highways. Arizona? New Mexico?
My unaccustomed host stood in the doorway, beer in each hand. His name was Mel Goldman. He survived off novelizations of B-grade movies and TV series. Half a dozen paperbacks he’d written around a show concerning L.A. teenagers’ crises (things are hell out there in the promised land!) did okay in the States but went gold in Germany. Publishers brought him over, major national magazines interviewed him. I almost shit my pants, he’d said of the experience upon return. Those people had to know I’m a Jew, right?
“Aliens have landed,” Goldman told me. “The sheriff’s kid saw them, but no one believes him. He’s a dreamy sort. First reel’s amazing-just kind of floats. Creates this whole town, this atmosphere of suspicion and dread. Then it all gets thrown away and the whole thing turns into one long, stupid chase. Kind of thing a man would eat his socks not to have to watch.”
I tried hard not to look down at his feet.
He handed me a beer and asked what he could do for me. We sat watching a ’52 Dodge with a green plastic screen like the brim of a card dealer’s hat above the windshield careen off the road as a tall man, strangely stooped, stepped out before it.
“Something about a murder, you said on the phone. I don’t see how I could possibly help you with something like that.”
I gave him the abstract: my case and Carl Hazelwood’s death in fifty words, dry as a science paper. Like notes you make about clients for your files. “I don’t know what I’m looking for,” I said. “But I read Carl’s journal. Lot of it had to do with old films.”
“Science fiction, gangster, prison stories-that sort of thing?”
“How’d you know?’
“What else would it be?” He watched as the tall, stooped man entered a cave hidden among trees.” ’Home. I have no home. Hunted, despised, living like an animal.’”
“Okay”
“Bride of the Monster.”
Onscreen, inside the cave, the tall, stooped man stood over a body laid out on a steel table.