“Oh, Bradshaw,” she said, her quick anger deflating. “My…manhunts are doing just fine, thank you. I’ve got one snatch working right now that’s going to be costing me twenty grand.”
“Good for you, kid, the big time at last.” Obstadt glanced at the taped-shut Marlboro carton on the seat beside him. Twenty grand for a washed-up old prehistoric fish? he thought. Or did you give up on the fish? I’m spending forty grand to finance a snatch, buy the access to somebody else’s snatch—but forty grand for a thousand primo smokes is the bargain of a lifetime. Jeez, though, cash!—in a cigarette carton that I’ve got to hand to some guy from the phone exchange, just for rerouting their reward listing of that missing Sockit Hoomie boy! The exchange people are reliable, but who, really, is this Sherman Oaks person? His ass’ll be smoke, if he hoses me on this. “So who is it that slipped through your fingers tonight?” Obstadt said into the phone.
“If everybody minded their own business,” sniffed deLarava, “the world would go round a deal faster than it does.”
Obstadt suspected that her line was a quote from one of the Alice-in-Wonderland books. Loretta liked old smokes that had hung around hotel lobbies for decades; Obstadt preferred them fresh. It was the old ones that quoted Alice all the time. Among the solid old bum-smokes on the street, the Alice stuff seemed almost to be scripture.
He was driving between the broad dark lawns of the Veterans Administration grounds now, with the Federal Building to his left and the cemetery to his right.
“Is it that fish?” he asked, taking another bite of the cookie. “Did you get outbid by the fish-market man at Canter’s?” So much for your bid to be the Fisher Queen, he thought—in spite of all your vegetarianism, and your “youth treatments,” and your Velcro instead of buttons and topologically compromising buttonholes.
“What are you eating?” deLarava demanded. “Don’t speak while you’re chewing, you’re getting crumbs in my ear.”
“Through the phone? I doubt it, Loretta.” Obstadt was laughing, and in fact spraying crumbs onto his lap. “It’s probably dead fleas. Don’t you wear a flea collar under your hair?”
“Jesus, it’s sand! Grains of sand! Has he been whispering to me while I napped? But I’ll eat him—”
The line clicked. She had hung up.
He replaced the phone in the console cradle, and his smile unkinked as he drove under the freeway overpass, the cemetery behind him now. You spend all day at the beach, Loretta, he thought, you shouldn’t be surprised to find sand in your ear.
Loretta was crazy, beyond any doubt. But—
Something big had happened two nights ago, at around sundown; he had had to excuse himself from dinner at Rusty’s Hacienda in Glendale and go stand on the sidewalk and just breathe deeply and stare at the pavement, for all the ghosts he’d snorted up over the years were clamoring so riotously in his mind that he couldn’t hear anything else; the Santa Ana wind had strewn the lanes of Western Avenue with palm fronds, and Obstadt had squinted almost fearfully southwest, over the dark hills of Griffith Park, wondering who it was that had so abruptly arrived on the west coast psychscape.
The intensity had faded—but now the street-smokes were all jabbering and eating dirt, and some kind of dinosaur had washed up in Venice, and deLarava couldn’t stop crying.
Loretta’s a down, he had said this morning. She wins chips in this low-level game, hut never cashes ’em in to move up to a bigger table; still, some big chips do sometimes slide across her table; and she’s all excited about one now.
He stomped the gas pedal furiously to the floor, and bared his teeth at the sudden roar of the engine as acceleration weighted him back against the seat.
The fish? he thought; some Jonah inside the fish? The guy that maybe left the state? Nicky Bradshaw?
Who?
CHAPTER TWENTY TWO
The snoring got more distinct every minute, and sounded more like a tune: at last she could even make out words …
—Lewis Carroll,
Through the Looking-Glass
AND way out east at the other end of Wilshire, out where multicolored plastic pennants fluttered along nylon lines strung above used-car lots, where old brownstone apartment buildings still stood on the small grassy hills, their lower walls blazing even in the failing daylight with bright Mexican murals, where neglected laundry flapped on clotheslines in the grassless courtyards of faded apartment complexes built in the 1960s, Kootie stepped up a curb, limped across the sidewalk away from the red glow of a Miller Beer sign in a corner bar window; and rocked to a halt against the bar’s gritty stucco wall.
He was still intermittently talking to himself, and during the walking of these last several blocks he had even begun moving his lips and whispering the dialogue.
“I cant walk anymore,”‘ he panted. “I think I’ve ruined my foot—they’re probably gonna have to just cut it off and put a wooden one on,”
“Duh,” he said thickly then, speaking for the absent ghost of Thomas Alva Edison, which he was certain he had left behind in a mess on the stairs at the Music Center, “well, I got wooden teeth. No, that was George Washington—well, I got a wooden head.”
“I saw your head,” Kootie whispered, his voice shaky even now as he remembered that shocking period of dislocation. “It was made out of old strips of beef fat.” He mouthed the last two words with, it fleetingly occurred to him, as much revulsion as his vegetarian parents would have done. He jumped hastily to the next thought: “I’m gonna go in this bar—no, not to get a cocktail, you stupid old fart!—I’m gonna get somebody to call the cops for me.”
Kootie was still holding the quarter that the pay telephone had given back to him two hours ago. He had been gripping it between his first two fingers and tapping it against the palm of his hand as he had walked. The rhythm of the tapping had been unconsidered and irregular, but now, probably because he had a purpose for the coin again, the tapping was forcefully repetitive.
“I don’ wanna go in the bar,” he said in his dopy-old-Edison voice, and in fact Kootie didn’t want to step in there. The memory was still too fresh of the lunatic phone call with—with what, exactly? The ghosts of his parents? It had been that, or it had been a hallucination. And his parents had seemed to be in a bar.
But if somebody else made the telephone call…
(He found himself picturing carbon; black grains in a tiny cell at first, with a soft iron diaphragm that would alternately compress and release the carbon grains, thus changing their conductivity; but the grains tended to pack, so that after a while the conductivity was stuck at one level…)
If somebody else made the call it might go through, and not just be routed again to that bar from hell.
That call an hour ago had started to get through—Kootie was sure now that the first voice he had heard had really been the 911 operator, for after he had walked away from the pay phone he had seen a police car drive past slowly in the right-hand eastbound lane of what had proved to be Sixth Street. Kootie had wanted to go flag him down, but had found himself hurrying away across the parking lot instead, and pushing open the glass door of a ninety-nine-cent store, where he had then gone to the back aisle and crouched behind a shelf of candles in tall glasses with decals of saints stuck on the outsides.