(“Jesus,” someone muttered. “Did they all die?”
(The question brought deLarava back from the spicy pleasures of the memory.) “Hm? Oh no, they didn’t…die. But for a while they definitely had nothing to think about except when Nurse…Nurse Loretta might find the time to attend to their sickbeds! I can assure you!” Her British accent had been broadening out to sound more Texan, and was practically a drawl when she added, “That time they really were pooped-out puppies.”
At that moment Bradshaw realized who she was. Her appearance had changed drastically in the intervening three years, but when she forgot the hoarseness and the affected accent he knew the voice even an instant before the pooped-out puppies phrase—which he had heard her say a number of times—confirmed it. Then she looked up and saw him, and her eyes widened and then narrowed momentarily as she visibly became aware that she had been recognized.
It’s Kelley Keith, he thought in that first moment of surprise; it’s my godfather’s widow…fat and disfigured now…
Only then did he consider what she had just said. The most important appointment of his life. And he remembered that the autopsy of Arthur Patrick Sullivan had mentioned spoiled potato salad in his stomach as the cause of the cramp that had caused him to drown, out past the surf line on that summer day in Venice in 1959.
BRADSHAW HAD backed away without changing his sleepy expression…but he’d known that she wasn’t fooled. She was aware that he—alone!—had recognized her, and that he alone had understood her oblique and inadvertent admission of murder.
AFTER HAUNTED House Party was in the can, he had finally stopped trying to chase his earlier success in show business. He had enrolled in the UCLA law school, and two years later passed the California bar and moved to Seal Beach to practice real-estate law.
Sometimes during the ensuing decade he had wondered if the advent of Loretta deLarava had scared him away from the movies…and then he had always recalled the artistic merits of Haunted House Party, and had wryly dismissed the suspicion.
He had stayed away from Hollywood, though, and had gradually stopped seeing his friends in the industry; and even so, he was careful to keep his home address and phone number a secret, and to vary the route he took to his office, and to come and go there on no set schedule. He kept a gun in his office and car and bedside table. Superstitiously, he never ate potato salad.
And in fact it wasn’t potato salad that she finally got him with, in 1975. It was a spinach salad with hot bacon dressing, and lots of exotic mushrooms.
When Johanna returned to her magazine, Shadroe, who hadn’t called himself Nicholas Bradshaw since his “death” in ’75, took one more look at the static television screen and then stumped into the little room where the tub was, and by the glare of the bare overhead lightbulb he stared with distaste down at the dozens of ice cubes floating in the gray water—like broken glass in a tub of mercury.
The sooner he took his bath and got out, the sooner he could be in his car and driving west on Ocean Boulevard to the marina, where he would climb aboard his boat and spend the long hours of darkness sitting and staring at another TV set switched to CBS with the brightness control turned down just far enough to black out the picture, watching the white line that would certainly be on that screen too, and listening for the burping croaks of his pigs.
Like every other night.
CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR
“That’s the effect of living backwards,” the Queen said kindly: “it always makes one a little giddy at first—”
“Living backwards!” Alice repeated in great astonishment. “I never heard of such a thing!”
“—but there’s one great advantage in it, that one’s memory works both ways.”
—Lewis Carroll,
Through the Looking-Glass
AT the northwest corner of MacArthur Park, crouched under a pyrocantha bush in the shadow of the statue of General MacArthur, Kootie watched as his fingers opened his bag of purchases from ninety-nine-cent store on Sixth Street. The box of insecticide proved to be MIRACULOUS INSECTICIDE CHALK—MADE IN CHINA, and inside it were two sticks of white chalk with Chinese writing stamped into them. An instruction sheet on flimsy paper was all written in Chinese figures, and Kootie leaned out of the shadow of the statue’s base as his hands held the paper up close to his eyes in the leaf-filtered radiance of a streetlight.
“‘Directions for use…’” he heard his own voice say thoughtfully. Kootie started to interrupt, “You read Chinese—?” but Edison took over again and finished, “…On door, use enclosed chalk to write “Bugs, kill yourselves forthwith.”’”
Then Edison was laughing an old man’s laugh with Kootie’s boy’s voice, and he flipped the paper over. “Kidding,” Edison said. On this side the directions were in English. “The chalk is more effective to use at night,’” Edison read, and Kootie could see that he was reading it correctly this time. “Well, that’s handy, eh? ‘Draw several parallel lines each two to three centimeters apart across the track which the insect used to take…’ I like ‘used to,’ as if the job’s already done. Well,” he said, folding up the instructions, “this will do some good, though it’s a child’s version of a device I set up in the Western Union office in ‘64 in Cincinnati, and later in Boston—a series of plates hooked up to a battery. That was for night work, too—I told everybody it was for rats or roaches or whatever they’d believe, but it was to get some rest from the damn ghosts.”
Kootie caught a brief glimpse of memory: a big dark room in what had once been a downtown Cincinnati restaurant, copper wire connections arcing and popping all night, the harsh smell of the leaky batteries, and morose, transparent ectoplasmic figures huddled in the corners far away from the stinging metal plates.
Kootie’s hands waved. “Get us back out to the sidewalk, will you boy?”
Kootie tucked the bag back into his shirt and then obediently straightened up and walked across the grass and stepped up to the sidewalk. He started to brush dirt off his pants, but found that he was crouching to draw a circle all the way around himself on the concrete with the stick of chalk. His lips twitched, and then Edison used them to say, “I’d better let you do it; spit in the circle. If I try it you’ll do something else at the same moment and we’ll wind up with spit all down our chin.”
Our chin? thought Kootie—but he did spit on the sidewalk before straightening up.
“Very well, your chin,” said Edison. “Now crouch again and let me draw some lines.”
Kootie squatted down, and then watched as his hand drew a maze of lines around the circle: parallel lines, spirals, radii from the circle’s edge—until this section of sidewalk looked, Kootie thought, like the site of some hopscotch Olympics. Cars hissed past in front of him in the street beyond the curb, but the only close sounds were the click-and-scratch of the chalk and his own eager breath.