“I remember,” said Mavranos quietly.
“Well, he’s gonna need them again, now, isn’t he?—to pay for passage across the Styx, and for the drink of surrender from the Lethe River, over on the far side of India.” In spite of being blind, the old man shuffled forward, reached out and accurately laid one of the coins on each of the dead man’s closed eyelids.
Mavranos’s face was stiff. “We okay now? Right, everybody out.”
They all began shuffling and elbowing their way through the doorway back into the office, while Mavranos hung back with the revolver; a couple of Spider Joe’s antennae hooked one of Angelica’s bean pans off the counter and flung it clattering to the floor, spilling dirt and withered bean sprouts across the linoleum.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Mark, silent king, the moral of this sport:
How soon my sorrow hath destroyed my face.
—William Shakespeare,
Richard II
KOOTIE was back up on the desk beside the inert television, sitting cross-legged and finishing his fish stew. When everybody had resumed their places, he refilled his wine cup and said, “Who was this person who gave you my name and address?”
“And when did he give ’em to you?” added Mavranos.
“Dr. Richard Paul Armentrout, at Rosecrans Medical Center in Bellflower,” said Plumtree, who was sitting on the floor beside Cochran in front of the couch now. “This afternoon.” Apparently she too was respecting Strubie the Clown’s hundred-dollar bid to be left out of this picture.
Mavranos frowned, his high cheekbones and narrowed eyes and drooping mustache making him look like some old Tartar chieftain. “He sent you here?”
“No,” Plumtree said. “Sid and I broke out of the hospital, when the earthquake hit, a couple of hours ago. Armentrout didn’t even believe there was a king, much less that I had…helped to kill him, until he talked to me this afternoon. Then he said, ‘Oh, you must have had help, from somebody who was practically a king himself, like this kid from a couple of years ago.’” She looked up past Cochran at Kootie. “Which was you.”
Kootie put the bowl aside and took a sip of the wine. “Why did you escape?”
“Armentrout wants to find out what happened on New Year’s Day,” Plumtree told him, “and he wasn’t going to let us go until he was totally satisfied that he’d found out everything, using every kind of strip-mining therapy that his operating room and pharmacy have available; and even then I don’t think he’d have wanted us to be able to talk, after. He wouldn’t have killed us, necessarily, but he’d have no problem fucking up our minds so bad that between us we couldn’t string together one coherent sentence. This afternoon, just as a warm-up, he tried to break off and…consume a couple of my personalities.”
“Your personalities,” said Angelica.
“I’ve got MPD—that’s multiple—”
“I know what it is,” Angelica interrupted. “I don’t think the condition exists, I think it’s just a romanticizing of post-traumatic stress disorder, best addressed with intensive exploratory psychotherapy, but I do know what it is.”
“My wife was a psychiatrist,” remarked Pete, ‘“before she became a bruja.”
Plumtree gave Angelica a challenging smile. “Would you advise Edison Medicine for the condition?”
“ECT? Hell no,” snapped Angelica, “I’ve never condoned shock therapy for any condition; and I can’t imagine anyone prescribing it for PTSD, or a hypothetical MPD.”
“Edison Medicine,” came Kootie’s wryly amused voice from above Cochran. “It knocked me right out of my own head—and killed my dog.”
One of Spider Joe’s antennae popped up from the carpet with a musical twang, making Plumtree jump against Cochran’s shoulder. He put his arm around her, and in the moment before she shrugged it off he noticed that she was trembling. Well, he was too.
“Whatever,” said Pete, who had sat down on the couch. To Plumtree he went on, “You say he tried to eat some of your personalities. Was he masked, when he did this?” He absently tapped a Marlboro out of a pack and flipped the cigarette into the air; it disappeared, and then he reached behind his ear and pulled out what might have been the same cigarette, lit now, and began puffing smoke from it. “Like, did he have a…a pair of twins present, or a schizophrenic?”
“He had a crazy guy on the extension phone, listening in,” spoke up Cochran. To Plumtree he said, “The old one-armed guy, Long John Beach.”
For a moment no one spoke, and the only sound was the chaotic drumming of water splashing into the pots on the floor. Then, “A one-armed guy,” said Kootie steadily, looking hard at Pete Sullivan, “named after a local city.”
“I—I thought he died,” said Angelica, who was standing beside the desk. “You mean the one who called himself Sherman Oaks, who wanted to kill you so he could eat the Edison ghost out of your head?”
“Right, the smoke-fancier.” Kootie glanced at Plumtree. “Ghosts are known as ‘smokes’ to the addicts who eat them, and he used to eat a lot of them.”
“Shit, he still does,” put in Cochran. “Though he’s down to Marlboros these days.”
“I thought he was dead,” insisted Angelica. “I thought he blew up along with Nicky Bradshaw, when they both fell off the Queen Mary, two years ago.”
“With ‘a local man called Neal Obstadt,’ right?” said Plumtree. “Who was looking for Scott Crane in 1990? Armentrout mentioned this. The explosion killed the Obstadt person, according to him, but just collapsed a lung of this Long John Beach, or Sherman Oaks.” She grinned, breathing rapidly between her teeth. “I wonder what other names he’s used. Wes Covina. Perry Mount.”
Cochran was embarrassed by her incongruous merriment, and nudged her. She nudged him back, hard, in the ribs.
“Or in drag, as Beverly Hills,” Pete agreed absently. Then he stood up abruptly and looked around the room. “Well, he’s been here before—he knows the way here, too. We’d better get ready for him, and for this psychiatrist.”
Angelica visibly shivered, and she touched the gun under her blouse. “We should just run, right now.”
“We need to know where to run, first,” Pete told her. He stepped to the television set and clanked the channel switch a couple of notches clockwise. “Could you plug this thing in again, Oliver? We need some readings, Angie. Pennies, I’d think, for a fine-grain closeup-type picture. What year was Crane born in?”
“Nineteen forty-three,” said Diana.
The tanned teenager hopped up off the couch and plugged the TV set’s cord into the wall while Angelica pulled open a desk drawer and bumped glass jars around in it. “Pennies,” she muttered. “Nineteen…forty…three, there we are.” She lifted one of the little jars out and sat down on the couch. The set’s screen had brightened, and a woman in a commercial was talking about some new Ford car. Cochran and Plumtree hiked themselves forward on the carpet to be able to see the screen.
Angelica shook the jar, and the half-dozen old gray pennies in it rattled and clinked—and the TV picture shifted to a newscaster reading the day’s winning lottery numbers. She shook the jar again, and now they were watching the portly, bearded figure of Orson Welles sitting at a restaurant table, waving a glass of wine and quoting the Paul Masson slogan about selling no wine before its time.