At last he had got back into the van and driven down Magnolia all the way to the empty south end of Queen’s Highway and stopped in the left lane, by the chain-link fence; he had slapped his shirt pocket to be sure he still had the dried thumb in the Bull Durham sack, and then he’d got out and stood on the cooling asphalt and stared through the fence, across the nearly empty parking lot, at the Queen Mary.
Her three canted stacks, vividly red in the floodlights, had stood up behind and above the trees and the fake-Tudor spires of the “Londontowne” shopping area, and he had wondered if Loretta deLarava was at home in her castle tonight.
The breeze had been cold out in the dark by the far fence, but he had been glad of his distance and anonymity—even if deLarava had been standing out on the high port docking wing and looking out this way, she couldn’t have sensed him, not with the thumb in his pocket and the plaster hands in the van right behind him. Houdini’s mask was only in effect draped around him right now; he wasn’t really wearing it, wasn’t a decoy-Houdini as the wearer of the mask was intended to be; but even so the mask would blur his psychic silhouette, fragment it like an image in a shattered mirror.
You’ve hurt my family enough, he had thought at her. Fully, fully enough. Let us rest in peace.
The beer had made him sleepy, and, after eventually getting back in the van, he had driven only a little distance west, across the Cerritos Channel and up Henry Ford Avenue to Alameda, which was called B Street down here in lower Wilmington, before pulling over to a curb and turning the engine off and locking up.
THE RATTLING roar of a low helicopter swept past overhead now, and for an instant he glimpsed the vertical white beam of a searchlight sweeping across the yards and rooftops and alleys. Somewhere nearby a rooster crowed hoarsely, and was echoed by another one farther away.
Sullivan wondered if Los Angeles had ever been really synchronized with the time and space and scale of the real world. Even finding a men’s room, he remembered now as he sipped this first cup of coffee, had often been an adventure. Once in a Chinese restaurant he had trudged down a straight and very long flight of stairs to get to one, and then discovered that a number of doors led out of the tiny, white-tiled subterranean room—he had made sure to remember which doorway he had come in through, so that he wouldn’t leave by the wrong one and wind up in some unknown restaurant or bakery or laundry, blocks from where he had started; and one time in a crowded little low-ceilinged Mexican restaurant on Sixth he had pushed his way through the REST ROOMS door to find himself in a cavernous dark warehouse or something, as big as an airplane hangar, empty except for a collection of old earthmoving tractors in the middle distance—looking behind him he had seen that the restaurant was just a plywood box, attached to the street-side wall, inside the inexplicably enormous room. His Spanish had not been good enough to frame a question about it, and Sukie had been irritably drunk, and when he’d gone back a month or so later the place had been closed.
He lit a cigarette now and wondered if Sukie really had, actually, killed herself.
Remotely he remembered how close the two of them had become—after their father died when they were seven years old—during the years they’d spent in several foster homes. They had never had a “psychic link” or anything like that, but the world was so coldly divided between us two and all of them that the twins could read each other’s moods instantly, even over the phone, and either one of them could unthinkingly and correctly order for the other at any restaurant, and the random letters on passing license plates would always suggest identical words to each of them.
Now Sukie was probably dead, and still his first response to the thought was Good riddance. He was surprised and uncomfortable with the vehemence of the thought.
The twins had begun to differ when they were going to Hollywood High School, and it had become clear that the money their father had left them would be used up before they would finish college in about 1974. Sukie had never been interested in boyfriends, and she resented Pete spending money and time on things like dances. And the girls Pete went out with always dumped him before long, so the whole effort of trying to pursue romances really had seemed like a costly waste.
EEVENTUALLY HE had got a clue to why the girls had always dumped him.
HE AND Sukie had supported themselves through their last years in City College with jobs at pizza parlors and miniature golf courses and pet stores, but even after they’d graduated and got hired by Loretta deLarava for substantial salaries, they had continued to be roommates. Sukie continued to have no interest in the sex that was opposite to her, and Pete had continued to have meager success in pursuing the sex that was opposite to him.
And then in the summer of ’86, Pete had got engaged.
Judy Nording was a film editor who had done postproduction work for deLarava since the late seventies, and Pete had got into the habit of drifting past the editing rooms when she would be working. Somehow he had known that he’d be wise to do this visiting when Sukie was off on some solo errand.
Judy had been two years younger than Pete, but she had made him feel naive and stodgy and incurious—she not only knew everything about editing and mixing, but also knew nearly as much as he did about lights and colored gels and generator trucks and on-site electrical problems. And she was tall and slim, and when he strolled into her office she had a casual way of shoving her chair back and throwing one long blue-jeaned leg over the editing bench, with her ankle between the rewind posts, and the tight denim that sheathed her calf glowing in the glare from the light well. Her long blond hair was generally tied back in a braid.
He had been fascinated when she’d shown him things like the xenon-gas projection bulbs that worked under eight atmospheres of pressure, and that burned so hot that they reconfigured ordinary air into ozone which had to be piped up through the ceiling by exhaust fans; and she had taken him down to the wide Foley stage in front of the screen in the projection room, and shown him the dozen floor-sections that could be lifted away to expose yards-wide movable wooden trays, so that the actors who were dubbing English dialogue onto foreign movies could audibly plod through sand while they spoke their lines onto the new soundtrack, or walk clickingly over marble, or even, if the last partition was lifted away, slosh noisily through a pool of water.
She had lived with half-a-dozen other young people in an old three-story Victorian house off Melrose, near the studio; even in ’86 the house and yard had been fenced in with chain-link and barbed wire. Eventually Judy had given Pete a key to the front gate.
Sukie had been furious when he first spent the night there—but as it became clear that her brother and Judy Nording were actually likely to get married, Sukie had apparently changed her mind about the woman, taking her out for “girl-lunches” and shopping expeditions.
Pete had been naively pleased that the two women were getting along, and he was seeing Judy every night.
Then one evening at Miceli’s, an Italian restaurant off Hollywood Boulevard, Judy had been inexplicably cold and abrupt with him; he had not been able to demand or plead or wheedle the reason from her, and after he had sulkily driven her home and gone back to his and Sukie’s apartment, he had shut himself into his room with a bottle of Sukie’s Wild Turkey bourbon and had laboriously and painstakingly written a maudlin sonnet to his suddenly hostile fiancée. At about two in the morning he had opened the door, thrown all the drafts of the sonnet into the kitchen wastebasket, and lurched off to bed.