“That was Pete Sullivan? This guy didn’t look anything like your pictures of him.” Webb frowned in thought. “Not at first, anyway. He did get taller.” “Damn it, it was him, trust me. What was he doing?”
“Oh. Oh, chatting up a bird. A-sparkin and a-spoonin’, I’m assumin’. Mex gal. She got taller too, after a while. She was trying to reason with a guy who was in love with her, a sulking man hiding in a drainage pipe. But when Neat Pete showed up with his joke dinner jacket and fine white hands, she decided to chat with him instead. They stood in a parking lot that was in a traffic whirlpool, so I couldn’t intuit what they said. Dig this—there was a Venice Farmer’s Market in that very parking lot this morning! I bought various vegetable items. I will cook a ratatouille.”
“Shut up, Joey, I’m trying to think.” Who on earth, she wondered, could this “Mex gal” be? Not just someone he met by chance, if the two of them took the precaution of talking in an eye of traffic. And the mask seems to have covered her too, giving her the appearance of some other person, which undoubtedly would have been Houdini’s wife, Bess! (What a mask!) (May thieving Sukie Sullivan’s ghost be snorted up by a shit-eating rat!) Was Pete in Venice looking for his father’s ghost? Did he find Apie’s ghost? What—
“Ratatouille,” said Webb, “is an eggplant-based vegetable medley. I tried to write MISTER ELEGANT once on a T-shirt, and it was days before I realized that I’d got it wrong, and I’d been walking around labeled MISTER EGGPLANT.”
“Shut up, Joey.” The Parganas kid, she thought, and Pete, and the “Mex gal” will be running scared now, keeping low; but maybe I can still get a line on Nicky Bradshaw. I’ll have to check my answering machine, see if there have been any Find Spooky calls.
And and and—Obstadt’s coming to the shoot on the Queen Mary tomorrow. He wants to know about some “problem that can arise with this ghost-eating business.” (How vulgar of him to speak plainly about it!) I’ll have to watch for a weakness in him, and be ready to assert myself. There’ll be high voltage, and steep companionways—and the whole damned ocean, right over any rail.
“You don’t seem to be getting ahold of anybody, do you?” Webb said, smiling and shaking his head.
“Joey, shut the fuck up and get out of my stinking face, will you?” She levered her bulk off of the bed and swung herself toward the door of the motel room. “Keep looking for Arthur Patrick Sullivan. He’s got to be here, or be coming ashore in the next twelve hours—you haven’t left this area, and you’d have sensed him if he was awake anywhere within several blocks of here, wouldn’t you?”
“Like American Bandstand.” Webb hopped down from atop the TV set, agile as an old monkey. “He can’t have got past the walls of my awareness,” he said, nodding mechanically. “Unless someone opened the gate to a Trojan horse. A Trojan sea horse, that would be, locally.”
“A Trojan…sea horse.” Her face was suddenly cold, and a moment later the marrow in her ribs tingled.
“Oh my God that fish, that goddamn fish!” she whispered. “Could Apie have been hiding inside that fish?” I am in control of nothing at all, she thought dazedly.
Webb gave her a look that momentarily seemed lucid. “If so, he’s gone.”
“If so,” she said, pressing her temples again, “he’s in L.A. somewhere.” She was panting, clutching at straws. “He’ll probably try to find Pete.”
“Oh well then, said Webb with a shrug and a grin. “Find one and you’ve found them both, right? It’s that simple!”
“That simple,” echoed deLarava, still panting. Tears were spilling down her shaking cheeks again, and she blundered out the door.
CHAPTER THIRTY EIGHT
“What else had you to learn?”
“Well, there was Mystery,” the Mock Turtle replied, counting off the subjects on his flappers,—”Mystery, ancient and modern, with Seaography…”
—Lewis Carroll,
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
SULLIVAN had parked the van in the shade under one of the shaggy carob trees at the back of the Solville parking lot, and then he had got out and looked the old vehicle over.
The back end was a wreck. The right rear corner of the body, from the smashed taillights down, was crumpled sharply inward and streaked and flecked with blue paint. Apparently it had been a blue car that had hit them when he had reversed out onto Lucas. The doors were still folded-looking and flecked with white from having hit Buddy Schenk’s Honda in the Miceli’s lot yesterday, and the bumper, diagonal now, looked like a huge spoon that had been mauled in a garbage disposal.
In addition to all this, he could see four little-finger-sized holes in and around the back doors, ringed with bright metal where the paint had been blown off.
Forcing open the left-side back door, he had found that the little propane refrigerator had stopped two 9-millimeter slugs, and he had disconnected the appliance and laid the beer and Cokes and sandwich supplies out on the grass to carry in to the apartment; the sink cabinet had a hole punched through it and the sink itself was dented; and a solid ricochet off of the chassis of the field frequency modulator he’d just bought had ripped open one of his pillows, the deformed slug ending up shallowly embedded in the low headboard. One of the back-door windows was holed, and the slug had apparently passed through the interior of the van and exited through the windshield; and one perfectly round, deep dent in the back fender might have been put there by a bullet. And of course the driver’s-side mirror was now a half-dozen fragments dangling from some kind of rubber gasket.
These were the extent of the damage, and he shivered with queasy gratitude when he thought of the boy having been crouched on the van floor in the middle of the fusillade and of Elizalde’s head nearly having been in the way of the one that had punched through the windshield. They had been lucky.
Sullivan had made several trips to the apartment to stack his electronic gear in a corner with Elizalde’s bag of witch fetishes beside it, and put the drinks and the sandwich things into the refrigerator. Finally he had locked the van up and covered the whole vehicle with an unfolded old rust-stained parachute, trying to drape it as neatly as he could in anticipation of Mr. Shadroe’s probable disapproval.
Now he was sitting on a yellow fire hydrant out by the curb across Twenty-first Place, holding one of Houdini’s plaster hands and watching the corner of Ocean Boulevard. There was a bus stop at Cherry, just around the corner. Clouds like chunks of broken concrete were shifting across the sky, and the tone of his thoughts changed with the alternating light and shade.
In shadow: They’ve been caught, Houdini’s thumb can’t deflect the attention the boy was drawing; they’re being tortured, disloyal Angelica is leading bad guys here, I should be farther away from the building so I can hide when I see the terrible Lincolns turn onto Twenty-first Place.
In sunlight: Buses take forever, what with transfers and all, and Angelica is a godsend, how nice to have such challenging and intelligent company if you’ve got to be in a mess like this, even if this séance attempt doesn’t work; and even the kid, Shake Booty or whatever his name is, is probably going to turn out to be interesting.