ON HALLOWEEN of 1967 the Queen Mary had made her last departure from England; and for these past twenty-five years the world’s grandest ocean liner had been moored at the Port of Los Angeles in Long Beach, a hotel and tourist attraction now. The Cunard line had sold her to the city for 3.2 million dollars, and had insisted that the boilers be removed so that the ship could never again sail under her own power.
Under another name Loretta deLarava had sailed aboard her in 1958, and had once danced with Robert Mitchum in the exclusive Verandah Grill at the stern, where you never ordered from the menu; the head waiter, Colin Kitching, would find you at lunch and ask what you’d like for dinner, and you could order anything you could think of, and they’d have it ready by eight.
The Verandah Grill now served hamburgers and Cokes and beer, and anybody on earth could get in. The tables and benches now were contoured sheets of vinyl-covered particleboard, and the floor was hard black rubber, with a herringbone pattern of bumps on it so people wouldn’t slip on the french fries.
HER LEXUS had not been stolen; and unfortunately the car telephone beeped at her while she was still on the Long Beach Freeway, within sight of the usual litter of old pickup trucks parked in the dirt by the river to her right and the usual half-dozen men on the banks with their fishing poles. DeLarava sometimes fished off the stern of the Queen Mary, late at night, and ate raw the big opal-eye perch and sea bass she occasionally hauled all the way up the side of the ship, but it never seemed to help. And these weary old men fishing in the poisoned Los Angeles River just seemed to mock her efforts.
She was soon crying as she held the telephone receiver to her ear, though her face as she stared through the windshield at the cars ahead of her was effortfully expressionless. More wrinkles she didn’t need. She could only speak haltingly as she steered with her left hand.
“Are you still there?” buzzed the voice from the phone.
“I’m here, Neal.” Why did the best vegetarian restaurant in Los Angeles have to have that name?
“So they’re going to meet us for lunch at Nowhere at one,” he went on. “Table for Obstadt, okay? They like the Queen Mary ghost show; be ready to defend this reunion-show concept, though, the ‘Ghost of a Chance’ thing, I don’t think they view it as feasible yet.” There was a click on the line. “You’ve got another call, Loretta—that’s all I had. See you at Nowhere, at one.”
“Right.” The line clicked on Obstadt’s end. DeLarava sniffed hard and blinked, then pushed a button on the back of the phone. “Hello?”
Over the background static of a portable telephone, she heard a steady echoing splashing. Whoever was calling her was doing so while urinating!
“Hi,” came a voice, “is this Loretta deLarava?”
“Who is this?”
“Ms. deLarava? This is Ayres out in Venice Beach, and I don’t know if this one is worth your time, but—”
“Are you pissing as you speak to me, Mr. Ayres?”
The noise abruptly stuttered to a stop. “No,” Ayres said breathlessly. “No, of course not. Of course not.”
“Good. What did you want to speak to me about?”
“Um. Oh, yeah—this may not be the kind of thing you told me to watch for, but a big goddamn fish just washed up on the beach this morning. It’s about twenty feet long, apparently dead, and nobody can figure out what the hell kind of fish it is. And a bunch of lobsters and crabs crawled up out of the ocean at about the same time—they’re still running around, some of ‘em have got into the shops and the tennis courts. People are freaked.”
DeLarava’s heart was pounding, and all thought of Ayres’s discourtesy was forgotten. That would have to be him, causing that, she thought. Coming back out of the ocean these…thirty-three years later. Of course this new damned smoke would finally be the beacon that would lead him ashore. And if Pete Sullivan is in town, that would also have helped draw him out.
“Thanks, Bernie,” she croaked. She hung up the phone and began signaling for a lane change. She hadn’t needed to ask where at Venice Beach.
She would have to call the studio and have them send a news crew to Venice, and then scoot south on the 405 to pick up Joey Webb at his creepy Signal Hill apartment. Good thing he never went anywhere.
She wasn’t ready for this. Here was the old man coming out of the sea already—and Halloween was only three days off. It would definitely have to be this year, this Halloween. Would Joey do, would he be mask enough, all by himself? He’d probably be okay today, when she’d just be trying to see where the old man went, but what might happen on Saturday? Damn Sukie Sullivan anyway. Paranoid lush.
DeLarava’s scalp was itching again, under the rubber band that encircled it under her brushed-over hair, and when she scratched, the rubber band slipped upward and jumped to the top of her head, where it sat slackly holding her hair up in an effect that she knew from past experience looked like a miniature thatched hut. She couldn’t pull the rubber band back down into place before she got off the freeway—it took two hands, and she would want to fix her hair too.
She had started wearing a rubber band around her scalp when she turned forty (in 1966!), as a measure to keep her facial skin pulled taut. It had perhaps never worked very well for that purpose, but she had noticed that the cerebral constriction of it seemed to keep her thoughts aligned, keep her personality from fragmenting into half a dozen frightened little girls. And when old triumphs began (irrationally!) to shake up silty clouds of guilt and shame in her thoughts, a rubber band or two around her skull helped to slow the involuntary tears.
But fresh tears were leaking out of her eyes now. At least I’ve got an excuse to miss the Nowhere lunch, she thought: Alert businesswoman, consummate professional; had to go cover the story of the crabs terrorizing Venice. And maybe my stateroom will be robbed today.
In ‘46, when she’d had her other name and had still been waiting tables in Fort Worth, her little rented house had been broken into. The burglars had emptied her jewelry box onto the bed, and had flung her best clothes onto the floor, and had even left a greasy handprint on her not-yet-paid-off radio—but they had not taken anything at all. Obviously she had had nothing, perhaps had been nothing, worth their attention.
The unconsidered life is not worth living. She had got consideration a number of times since then; she’d been robbed of diamonds, Krugerrands, fine cars—and she had gone to bed with a number of men, especially during her brief period of fame, and had even briefly been …
She shied away from memories of her marriage, and of a starkly sunny summer afternoon at Venice Beach.
But none of it had ever been enough to confirm her.
She knew it was Houdini’s fault.
The southbound 405 was crowded, and she had to slow down to a full stop in the right lane. She sat there expressionlessly leaking tears for a full minute before the cars ahead of her began to move, and only then, too late to fix it, did she remember her disordered hair. She glanced at the driver of a Volkswagen trundling along in the lane to her left, and wondered if he was puzzled by her unusual coif, but he was oblivious of her. That didn’t help at all.