Listener Dooley was sitting straight up now, or as straight as his paunch would let him, taking it all in.
"Skippy," I said, "you're going a little fast for me. Is there someplace we can talk?"
Listener Dooley looked vaguely affronted and then remembered that he wasn't supposed to be Listening.
Skippy cast a guileless glance around the room. "There's nobody here," he said.
"Think again. How about the parking lot?"
He gazed through the windows. "It's dark out there."
"Darkness is an illusion. If you could see through it, it'd be light."
"Simeon," he said, his face falling, "you mean the only reason you're here is to see me?"
"Well, I didn't fly four hundred miles to be told it's dark outside."
"Aw, hell," he said. "I thought…"
"Maybe later. I've been invited to the Revealing."
He lit up again. "You're going to go, aren't you?"
I took his arm. "We'll see," I said, steering him through the door. "Let's talk first."
In the parking lot, Skippy shivered as if he somehow lacked the fat man's natural insulation. "You really should come to the Revealing," he said a trifle sulkily. "It'd be good for you."
"Skippy, the plane home doesn't leave until ten. Tell me what I want to know and I'll sit through a Maria Montez movie."
"You'll love it. Honestly, you've never seen anything like it. This little girl, except it's not her really, of course, but whoever it is, it's something."
"I'm sure it is."
"So you'll stay?"
"First things first. Do you know anyone who calls himself Ambrose Harker?"
"I think I might have known a Harker a long time ago. I don't think I've ever met anyone named Ambrose."
"Who was the Harker, then?"
"Her name was Alice. Jesus, this is when I was in high school. A little pale girl with terrible skin. A physics brain, remember physics brains? I sat behind her in math so I could cheat off her tests."
"What about her brothers?" I knew I was getting nowhere, but the only way you learn the answer to a question is by asking it.
"Alice Harker? If she'd had brothers they wouldn't have admitted it."
"So who have you talked to me about?"
He rubbed his chin and then transferred his attention lower down, tugging at his loose shirt where the fat bulged through. "Nobody," he said at last. "Why?"
"Nobody came to you and asked for a recommendation?"
"Simeon," he said, "I haven't told anybody about what you did for me." He finished with his shirt. "How could I, you know?"
"Sensitive."
"Dynamite. Especially for a fat middle-aged actor who's earning a decent paycheck for the first time since he stopped selling real estate."
"So not a soul?"
He opened his mouth and then closed it again. "Nobody at all."
"Okay. Do you know a guy in his late thirties, bony and unpleasant, with a flat-top? Got a tailor who should be a vivisectionist, makes a lot of spit noises when he talks?"
"I certainly hope not."
"Big Adam's apple? Blue eyes?"
"Uh-uh."
"Insists on perfect understanding all the time?"
Something flickered in Skippy's eyes. "Like how?" he said.
"Like asking 'Do you understand?' after every declarative sentence. Like grilling waiters on whether they've got his order straight."
"No," Skippy said shortly. He looked nervous. "Why?"
"Somebody's jerking me around. Somebody who said you sent him."
"Simeon, I didn't send anybody."
"Somebody who maybe set somebody up to get killed."
Skippy's eyes widened. Then a peal of bells rang out, a secular angelus floating through the mists of Big Sur.
"That's it," he said. "Come with me?"
"You don't know anything about it."
"Zip," he said, "nothing. I'm sorry. Come on, I want a decent seat."
"For what?"
"The Revealing."
Chapter 6
"It's the best thing that's happened to me since my second divorce," Skippy said earnestly as he steered us between buildings toward a large lighted structure. He was making an obvious effort to keep his fervor in check, but his hammy hand clutched my arm as if he were afraid I'd try to make a break for it.
The paths were full of people, young, old, and in between, mostly white, mostly prosperous-looking, clearly eager to answer the summons of the bell. Ever the gentleman, Skippy stopped to allow an old lady in a walker to make a wobbly right from a tributary path onto the main drag. Listener Simpson was helping her, to the old lady's obvious irritation, and she flashed us a harried smile. Once they'd set off in front of us, Skippy hit his pedestrian's overdrive and dragged me past them.
"So why is it so great? Are your arteries any better? Is your blood pressure down?"
"No and yes, in order. Even with all this blubber, my blood pressure is lower than it's ever been. And without medication, too," he added triumphantly.
This was a revelation. Back when I'd known him, Skippy's medicine cabinet had been bigger than my living room. "Your druggist must be furious," I said.
We were slowing now as the faithful converged into a couple of well-behaved lines in order to pass through the single open door. The light flooding through the door was brilliant. We'd walked a quarter of a mile, and despite the coolness of the night, Skippy's face was filmed with an enthusiast's sweat.
"Calm down," I said. "Bliss can kill. Orgasms claim many lives each year."
"That's another thing," he said, heedless of all the ears around us. "I feel much less compelled to womanize." One of Skippy's problems was that he didn't have a subconscious. Like a character in a Dostoyevsky novel, he said everything, and usually to the wrong person.
We were toddling slowly along in the line now. Skippy's eyes shone and he licked his lips hungrily. I felt as if I were boarding an airplane for Akron or Duluth, someplace I'd never been and didn't want to go.
"It's changed my life," he said. "The Church has changed my life. And at my age, too."
He was so eager for me to ask him about it that I almost didn't have the heart not to. But I managed.
"Look at me, Simeon," he finally said. "Do I look like a success?"
"Do you want me to say no? You're doing okay. Take away most successes' Piaget watches and they look like shoe salesmen. Dress a bum in Armani and spritz him with cologne, and he looks like the CEO of Gulf and Western."
"Yeah, yeah, turn it into a joke. But do I look like a Hollywood success?"
"Somebody has to play people who look like you."
"That's what I did for years. Walked by in the background wearing a plaid shirt and carrying a bottle in a bag. Bumped into featured players in elevators. I had a three-year stretch where my longest line was 'Oops.' Now I'm a star. So what's the difference?"
"I give." I hate guessing.
"The Church."
"The Church made you a star?"
"Sure it did. Of course it did. I'm only a TV star, I know that, but, Jesus, Simeon, do you know how much money I made last year?"
"Skippy," I said, disappointing the people nearest to us, "there are a few secrets a man should keep."
He clapped a hand guiltily over his mouth. "You're right," he said from behind it.
"But it's the Church that made the difference," I said by way of a prompt.
"Didn't I say so?"
"Can we be specific, or is that against the rules?"
"There aren't really any rules. It just gave me access to what I already had. I had the skills, I had the experience, the voice, I had all the resources it took to be successful. But I didn't know how to get to them. It was like I was living in a diamond mine but I didn't know what a diamond looked like."
"At the risk of prolonging the metaphor, diamonds look like gray pebbles until they're cut."