As soon as the televised scene was replaced by a view of some new car leaning fast around rural roads, he drained the beer and took the other one with him as he got up—the food could wait—and walked back through the crowded tables to the hallway where the telephones and the rest rooms were.
He dropped a handful of change on the wood floor, retrieved most of it and thumbed a quarter into the pay-phone slot, then punched in the remembered number.
Above belt-level wainscoting the wallpaper was furry red velvet—and it fleetingly occurred to him that in spite of the beamed ceiling and the etched glass partitions around the booths, this place was probably too new for deLarava to find it worthwhile snuffling a straw in these corners.
The phone at the other end was ringing, and then it was picked up. “That you, Pete?” came a gasping voice.
“Sure is. Steve? I’m—”
“Where are you calling from, man?” Away from the phone he snapped, “I’m fine dammit!” to someone.
“Well, I’m in a bar—in Westwood, I think, on Wilshire. A ‘sports bar,’ with TV sets hung all over the place, every one on a different channel. Loud. I can’t wait to get to your place. And I don’t think I’ll be spending the night after all. I gotta get back to Arizona—”
“Okay, listen, I just this second dumped a whole panful of Beans Jaime dip all over myself, and it’s damn hot. I’ve got to get back in the shower. Stay there for another half hour or so, okay?”
“No problem, I’ve got some snacks—”
“Cool. That’s good then. Shit, this stuff is like napalm! How's—I meant to ask, how’s Sukie?”
Sullivan was glad that he had thought to bring a beer with him. After chugging a series of gulps, he gasped, “Fine. No, she’s—well, I think she’s dead.”
“Jesus. You think?” After a pause, Steve said, “I always liked her. Well! Do something sentimental for me? Have a Kahlua and milk for me, in her memory, will you do that? Promise?”
It had been Sukie’s favored breakfast drink. Sullivan nodded dutifully, imagining dumping Kahlua and milk into his stomach on top of the Guinness. He realized that Steve couldn’t hear a nod, and said, “Okay, Steve. So what’s your address? I don’t need directions, I’ve got a Thomas Brothers guide.”
Steve gave him an address on La Grange Avenue, and Sullivan hung up and returned to his table.
The fried mozzarella had cooled off, but the Buffalo wings were still hot, and he dipped them in the marinara sauce as often as in the blue-cheese dressing. When the waitress came by again he ordered two more beers…and a Kahlua and milk, though he resolved to let the drink stand as a gesture rather than drink it.
He got hungrier as he diminished the fresh beers and ate the snacks, and after gnawing at the chicken bones he began chewing up the rehardened mozzarella. Just as he was considering ordering something else, maybe the Nachos Grande, the waitress walked up and told him he had a call at the bar.
He blinked up at her. “I doubt it,” he said. “Who did they ask for?”
“A guy drinking a Kahlua and milk. You haven’t touched it, but I figure you’re who they want.”
That has to be Steve, somehow, Sullivan thought uneasily as he pushed back his chair and weaved his way between the tables to the bar, on which a white telephone sat with the receiver lying next to it. He was reminded of the call he’d got at O’Hara’s, back in Roosevelt, the call from Sukie that had started this pointless—no, this cathartic—odyssey, and after he had nervously picked up the receiver and said “Hello?” he was relieved to find that the voice on the other end was not Sukie’s again. Then he realized that he hadn’t listened to what this woman had said.
“What?”
“I said, is this Pete Sullivan,” she said angrily.
“Yes. Are you somebody at Steve’s house? I—”
“This is Steve’s wife, and I’m at a pay phone. He scalded himself dumping that dip on his leg! And in his hair! Intentionally! To have an excuse to give me a shopping list and get out of the house so I could call you from somewhere where those men wouldn’t hear! Here’s his note for you, his ‘shopping list’; Pete—Call me back and say you cannot make it over to my house, please, Pete. And don’t say on the line where you’re going, and get out of there. Whatever it is, they want you alive. I’ve got a wife and kids. Good luck, hut don’t call me again ever after this next call. That’s his note, okay? This is the third damn sports bar on Wilshire that I’ve called, and now I’ve got to go to some store and buy some more frijoles and Jack cheese and stuff, even though I know we’re not going to be making more Beans Jaime, thank God, just so this shopping trip will look genuine to those men! They’ll leave when you call and tell them you can’t come over, so call. And then just leave us alone!”
“Okay,” he said softly, though she had hung up. The waitress was standing nearby, watching him, so he smiled at her and said, “Can I make a local call?” When she shrugged and nodded, he went on, “And could I have another Coors Light.”
Again he punched in Steve’s number; and again Steve answered it quickly. “Steve,” Sullivan said, “this is Pete. I’m calling from a different bar, I’m up on Hollywood Boulevard now. Listen, man, I just won’t be able to make it by tonight. And, ah, I’m gonna be leaving town—I’ll catch you next trip, okay? Next year some time, probably.”
As he carried his fresh beer back toward his table he wondered, without being able to care very much, if Steve’s regrets had sounded any more sincere to “those men” than they had to Pete.
He was looking down and carefully watching each of his shoes in turn catch his forward-moving weight, for his spine was as tense as if he were walking along the top of a high wall.
He sat down heavily in his chair at last, and, just in case, hid the glass of Kahlua and milk under his tented napkin.
Those would be deLarava’s men, he thought dully.
And I can drink all night long, or run to the van and drive to Alaska, and it won’t change the obvious fact that she is planning, again, to—
He inhaled, drained the beer, and then dizzily exhaled.
—She is again planning to consume my father’s ghost. For some reason she can’t just let him rest in peace.
She went to Venice today because of the fish business, sure, but the fishes must have been acting up because my father’s ghost is coming back out of the sea; right there in Venice, where he drowned thirty-three years ago. Right back where it started from, he sang in his head.
DeLarava would like to have me—alive—as a lure. Not as part of a mask, the way Sukie and I used to work, but, for this one, as a lure.
With a shudder of revulsion, Sullivan remembered how fat and youthful and happy deLarava always was after sucking in some ghost through one of her sparking clove cigarettes.
Presumably one ghost was as good as another…so why was she again going after his father’s? On that Christmas Eve in 1986, Pete and Sukie had both been uneasy with the fact of being physically present in Venice Beach, especially with deLarava, for it had been in the Venice surf that their father had drowned in 1959, when the twins had been seven—but it wasn’t until well after noon, in the instant when Sukie had spilled the contents of the shoebox deLarava had brought along, that he and Sukie had known what ghost was indeed that day’s particular quarry. DeLarava had probably been hoping to consummate the inhalation without the twins even suspecting, but the exposed wallet and key ring had been, horribly and unmistakably, their father’s.