Armentrout sighed. “Thank you, Officer Hamilton. I think that will be all.”
“Okay, Doc. Say, how’s your crazy girl working out? Was her name Figleaf? I hope she was worth the money”
Armentrout thought of telling Hamilton that the woman had escaped, then discarded the idea. I don’t really want the cops in on this now, he thought. “Miss Figleaf has been a valuable addition to our team,” he said vaguely.
“Softball league, sounds like. Well, if you use electric scoreboards, nobody’ll know when you lose—right?—with her playing for you.”
Armentrout agreed absently and hung up the phone. “And if the referee’s got a pacemaker, he’d better not declare her out,” he said softly, to no one but the Siamese-twin mannikins leaning against the couch.
Well, she really did kill the king, he thought, our Miss Plumtree, our Miss Figleaf…who certainly held tight to her fig leaf while she was here. And a new king is apparently in readiness. Those people expecting Elvis sense it—the undying King is coming here!—and the gangs of teenagers are clearly, some kind of spontaneous embodiment of the Maruts who are mentioned in the Rig-Veda: noisy, armed youths from a culture so primitive that dance served the purpose of devout prayer, who—helpfully in this instance, while the king is temporarily out of the picture—aggressively embody fertility; and they’re assuming too the role of the Cretan Kouretes, who hid the vulnerable infant Zeus from his murderous father Kronos by performing their Sword Dance around the baby, and masked his crying with the noise of their clashing weapons.
It’s in Leucadia that I’ll get a line on the new king, Armentrout thought, whoever it turns out to be. I wonder if dawn is close enough yet for Venus to be shining like a star in the eastern sky.
The telephone rang again. Armentrout assumed Hamilton had forgotten some detail, and he picked up the receiver. “Hello?”
And then his lungs seemed to freeze—because over the phone he was hearing once again, for the first time in eleven days, the familiar phantom bar sounds, laughter and clinking glass and moronic jabbering. Then a well-remembered voice came on the line—loud, as the very fresh ones always were: “Doctor?” whined the teenaged bipolar girl who had killed herself last week. “I walk all crooked now—where’s the rest of me?”
He hung up the phone without saying anything. There was no use talking to ghosts anyway, and he didn’t want to give the thing the confirmation of having found him.
But she had found him, and no doubt would again. Hers was the first local death for which he’d been responsible since the mysterious and apparently one-shot amnesty that had been granted at dawn on New Year’s Day. How long could it possibly, reasonably be before he would need to send more people—or even just idiot mumbling fragments of people, which would clump together—to that incorporeal bar?
As he stood up and crossed to the file cabinet to fetch out the two purple velvet boxes and the unrefrigerated blood sample from Plumtree, he was mentally rehearsing his imminent departure from the clinic. I can avoid some carrying-hassle by strapping the two-figure appliance right onto Long John Beach, he thought; he’s already established as crazy.
I’ll write him a pass, say we’re going on a field trip…to early-morning mass at some Catholic church. I’ll tell the guards that the old man thinks he’s the Three Wise Men, overdue at Bethlehem.
CHAPTER TWELVE
My father hath a power; inquire of him,
And learn to make a body of a limb.
—William Shakespeare,
RICHARD II
WATCH for a Mobil station,” said Plumtree, leaning back in the driver’s seat and squinting through cigarette smoke at the onrushing dark pavement of Highway 101.
Cochran nodded and peered through a wiped-clean patch of the steamy windshield, though there was nothing at the moment to see but the endless ellipsis of reflective orange lane-marker dots and the perilously close night-time fog hanging on the road shoulder. They were north of Oxnard, out of L.A. County, and had just driven past the exit for something called Lost Hills Road. Why would anyone take that exit? Plumtree had wondered aloud. If hills get lost out there, they’d certainly lose you.
“The Jenkins woman’s not gonna be cancelling her credit cards till ten,” Plumtree went on now, “at the earliest. Hell the way she was knocking back the margaritas, she probably won’t get up before noon.”
Jenkins had proven to be the name of the woman whose purse Plumtree had stolen at the Mount Sabu bar. After searching the Belmont Shore area for an older-model car, and then finding and quickly hot-wiring a ’69 Ford Torino that had been parked off Redondo Avenue, Plumtree had used the Jenkins woman’s Visa card in an all-night Ralph’s market to buy a carton of cigarettes and a dozen cans of soup and a can opener and a fistful of Slim Jim packages and two twelve-packs of Coors and two bottles of Listerine and three 750-milliliter bottles of Popov vodka. A vodka bottle was opened now, wedged between her thighs and occasionally rattled by the bumps on the steering wheel when she changed lanes.
One of the lane changes was a sharp enough swerve to press Cochran against the passenger-side door and make him drop his cigarette, and Plumtree only remembered to click on the turn signal after she was in the left lane and yanking the car back straight. The vodka bottle had rattled like a mariachi band’s percussion gourd. “You want me to drive?” Cochran asked, fumbling on the floor for his cigarette.
“You’re drunk,” said Plumtree. “And don’t… point out to me…that I’m drinking. Alcohol makes me a better driver, keeps me alert. We need an alert driver, for this fog.”
Cochran sat back in the passenger seat and hoped she was right. Certainly he wasn’t sober…and at least they both had their seat belts on. He didn’t want to have to stop and get out of the car, anyway—the car had a heater, and Plumtree had blessedly turned it up to full blast.
Past her silhouetted head he could faintly see the line of the surf glowing gray as it silently rose and fell out past the State Beach, under stars haloed by the incoming fog so that they looked like the stars in Van Gogh’s Starry Night.
“I wonder if the dead king’s crowd has even got started yet,” he said.
“All the dead king’s horses and all the dead king’s men…” Plumtree said softly.
Couldn’t put Scott Crane together again, Cochran mentally finished the rhyme.
“I think—” Plumtree began; then she went on quickly, “this car runs pretty smooth, doesn’t it? I’d like to have done a compression check before we took off on an eight-hour drive, but I don’t hear any bad lifters or rocker arms.”
Cochran bent over to reach into the bag between his feet, and he tore open the top of one of the beer cartons and lifted a can out. “What do you think?” he asked casually as he popped the top and took a leisurely sip.
“You may as well start working on those,” said Plumtree with a nod, “they’ll only warm up, sitting down there by the heater vent.” She hiked up the vodka bottle and took a hearty gulp. “I think I turned those moths into wasps.”