I’d continued researching the Marshalls, a clan that required toning down to make them believable as fiction. Jay’s dad remained a rake at 78, golfing with ex-Presidents and shagging socialites half his age. He’d been such a good spook that no records of his CIA service had ever emerged from the vaults at Langley.
Two interesting items were documented: Jay’s dad paid Bill Casey a hospital visit the day before the CIA director died during the Iran-Contra scandal, and Regis Marshall had been in Dallas “visiting friends” on November 22, 1963.
Before her recent death, Jay’s mom had turned a blind eye to her husband’s philandering by turning to drink, charity, and Catholic mysticism. Jay’s siblings headed foundations and edited literary magazines, prayed with Billy Graham and partied in Monte Carlo, opined on cable news shows and got away with murder in Tijuana whorehouses.
Only Jay had lived off-screen, largely invisible, leaving me to invent him by draping his shroud around my muse. My Camera Guy was a Quixote in khaki shorts, roughed up by life, but still expecting truth to triumph.
The rapid-fire plot worked fine, but crafting a good thriller wasn’t enough; I had to seamlessly weave Jay’s personal odyssey into the larger tale. So get your ass back to work, Tim.
No sooner had I settled at my desk when the phone rang. The phone I’d unplugged days ago... My heart skipped, but then I remembered that Wednesday night, well into my cups, I’d decided to plug the phone back in. That I only vaguely recalled doing so was a testament to how hard I’d been boozing.
“This is Tim.”
“Your mother died last night,” said a soft female voice, then hung up.
Dropping the receiver, I stared numbly out the living-room window. Mom was only seventy, losing her marbles, sure, but healthy as an ox. I was planning to bring her to Cali soon, get her around-the-clock care...
Cold cig pasted between my lips, I grabbed the phone and dialed my big sister Ellen, back in Ohio.
“...number has been disconnected.”
Impossible. Ellen was the responsible one. She’d lived in the same house for twenty years and paid her bills two months in advance. Three more dials got the same result, so I tried Aunt Sophie.
“...disconnected.”
Working through my phone book, I grew frantic as every call failed to ring through.
“Tim Stokley no longer exists,” a voice whispered in my ear. “Maybe when you erased him, your family was erased as well.”
“Shut up!” I barked, recognizing the voice as Jay’s. “And I talked to Ellen at Christmas, so she definitely does exist, unlike you. You’re dead, remember?”
“I was. You resurrected me.”
Our imaginary exchange was interrupted by music erupting from downstairs. The new neighbor again, blaring thrash-metal at ear-bleeding volume.
“Okay, that’s enough!” Storming out of the apartment and down the stairs, I was ready to tear Noisy Neighbor a new one, but as I barged through the door into the first-floor’s common kitchen, the music stopped.
“Play your tunes that loud again,” I shouted, marching back to the last studio unit, “and I call the landlord, understand?”
Silence.
“You hear me?”
Nothing. I rapped on the door, which hadn’t been shut completely and now snicked open. “Listen,” I called through the crack, “other people live here.”
Still nothing, so I nudged the door open. The apartment was empty. I went in and looked around. Nail holes in the walls had been patched, but not repainted. Turning the faucet in the tiny bathroom produced only a belch of air. The room was vacant, but damn it, the noise had come from here, directly below my bedroom.
“Forget it, Tim,” Camera Guy said. “They’re just screwing with you.”
Wrong. I’d been screwing with myself, dancing out on a tightrope because the script demanded it. But unlike Jay, I had a grip on reality and could return to solid earth whenever I chose.
Camera Guy’s ghost had yielded its secrets. Time for Jay to get along to his final reward, and for me to get up the I-5 to Hollywood and reclaim my career.
This notion calmed me, but when I turned to leave I saw a poster tacked to the inside of the door. WANTED FOR TREASON shouted a six-inch headline, but the figure in the poster below had been cut out. I gawked at it for a moment, then raced through the kitchen and out the door.
A flash of yellow caught my eye, dangling from the hedge. I walked over to where Jay had stood a week ago today and saw that it was a strip of police tape. It was a sunny afternoon, but suddenly I was shivering, pulse hammering like a meth freak’s.
“You can flirt with madness,” I reminded myself in a whisper, “as long as you keep sight of the difference between truth and fiction. And the truth is that Mom isn’t dead and nobody’s after me.”
I’d wound myself up like a spring. It was time to split for L.A., but not just yet.
Crouching down, I poked around the roots of the hedge until my fingers brushed cool plastic. Three film canisters that Jay had stashed there before I shooed him into the arms of the law.
As I gingerly extracted the film cans, leery of their toxic truth, a car alarm began blaring up at the motel. Jumping to my feet, I sensed a target on my back, but there were no black sedans in sight.
Not yet.
I stashed the film in the Mustang’s trunk, then raced upstairs to the apartment. Shut down the computer, grabbed a suitcase and threw in clothes, smokes, toiletries. The script and all my notes went into a leather shoulder bag, then this first load was deposited in the Mustang’s backseat.
The car alarm was still screaming as I returned for the computer and a final look around. I stalked from room to room, fretting over forgetting something important, then the idea hit me.
Dino, my beat-poetry-loving drinking buddy, was the assistant manager at a Fast-Foto in Mission Valley. A finger-walk through the Yellow Pages and — thankfully — this call rang through.
Dino promised to have the film developed in fifty-nine minutes or less, per the Fast-Foto pledge. I made him swear not to wander out to toke up, then dropped the phone and split.
The freeway was less than a hundred yards from my door. I’d be at Fast-Foto within minutes, drop the film, then call Sal and let him know I was on the way.
Damn it! The on-ramp was blocked off for the goddamned San Diego marathon. No choice but to continue on toward Sea World, away from my destination. The next ramp was also closed and, caught in weekend tourist traffic, it took fifteen minutes just to reverse course and head back toward Sports Arena. Frantic now, like a rat in a maze, I needed to get off the road, get a grip, and plot an alternate route to Mission Valley.
One of my watering holes was dead ahead. Wheeling into Hoby’s Hideaway, I grabbed my bag and darted inside. Ordered and downed a whiskey, then took out the script, flipped toward the end, and read:
EXT: A freight train speeding across the plains beneath an inky, ominous sky.
INT: Jay huddled in a boxcar, arms around the sleeping Sophia.
The train carries us east, toward a safe-deposit box in Boston, the key to which hangs around my neck on a knotted shoelace, eighteen inches of cotton that I used to strangle a man last night. A man I thought was my friend...
“ ’Nother shot?”
“No,” I told the barkeep, tucking the script away. No time to ride the rails with Jay when I needed to get moving myself. Fishing for cash, I heard a voice say, “Scotch. The oldest you’ve got.”
It was Crewcut, the guy who’d shadowed me at Ocean Beach the other night. My stomach clenched with fear, and I knew how Jay must have felt when the cops squealed up beside him.