“Okay, sure,” Mitch said, smiling at him. “As in a Hang-town Fry-bacon, eggs and oysters, am I right?”
“So you know your eats, too,” he said approvingly.
“You don’t get a shape like mine by nibbling on rice cakes and parsley.”
“I sure do love that movie.” The old geezer was still talking about Abbott and Costello. “Love dungeons and secret passageways of all kinds.”
“If that’s the case, then you ought to check out an old Charlie Chan picture called Castle in the Desert.”
“Is that the one where Douglass Dumbrille wears that mask over one side of his face to cover his scars?”
Mitch raised his eyebrows, impressed. It wasn’t often that the name Douglass Dumbrille came up in conversation anymore. Not even in the critic’s section on the flight back from Sundance.
Hangtown flicked his cigarette away and went back to pawing through the trash bin. “You mm-rr-might enjoy my house. It’s rigged with all sorts of secret passageways and chambers. They used to hide slaves there back in the days of the Underground Railroad. Emma Teasman owned it then.”
“The poet?”
“That’s the one. My great-grandmother. Mind you, I’ve made a number of modifications and I’ve put in… Aha!!!” he exclaimed suddenly. He’d found himself a bent-up old rooftop television aerial. It must have been eight feet high when it was intact. It was still plenty large. “A monument if ever I saw one!” he proclaimed, hoisting the ruined aerial up in Mitch’s general direction.
“A monument to what?” Mitch grabbed it by the other end and yanked it up onto the ground.
“To when the one-eyed monster was king,” Hangtown replied, starting his way slowly up the ladder out of the Dumpster. “It’s not anymore. That damned Internet’s the big boss now. Point and click. Point and click. Now the nincompoops are buying crap they don’t need without even getting up off the sofa. Hate those damned computers. Only good thing about ’em is they killed television-except for Celebrity Deathmatch on MTV, of course. Ever watch it?”
“You bet. Martha Stewart removed Sandra Bernhardt’s inner organs with an ice cream scoop last time I saw it.”
“So you have cable at your house?” the old man inquired slyly.
“Why, yes. Don’t you?”
“Nope. Still aren’t wired out by us.” Hangtown reached the top of the ladder and climbed out, wheezing. He was a big, lumbering old man, at least six feet three, and he had a lot of trouble moving. “I’d love to get me a satellite dish. But then I’d never do a thing except sit and watch old movies all day. Hey, what are you looking for down here anyway, Big Mitch?”
“A bucket to hold my kindling.”
“Hell, got some old copper apple-butter tubs in my barn. Fix you right up.”
“That’s awfully generous of you, Hangtown.”
“The hell it is. You’ll pay me for it.”
“Why, sure,” Mitch said hastily. “How much did you have in mind?”
“I need you to take this aerial home for me. Won’t fit in my sidecar.”
“You’ve got yourself a deal,” Mitch said, glancing admiringly at Wendell Frye’s antique ride. “That’s quite some old bike.”
“It’s a 1936 Chief,” Hangtown said, as the two of them deposited the aerial on the tarp in the back of Mitch’s truck. “Manufactured right up the mm-rr-road in Springfield by the Indian Motorcycle Company. Found her in a barn in Higganum a few years back. Cylinders still had the original nickel plating.” He climbed slowly on and donned his leather helmet and goggles, cackling at him. “Spiral Staircase was another good one. Remember that eye in the peephole? Man, that’s the good stuff! Who was the villain in that?”
“George Brent.”
“George Brent! Whatever happened to him?”
“He died.”
Hangtown shook his huge white head at Mitch. “Wish people would stop doing that. Makes me wonder if it might happen to me someday.”
“You think it won’t?” Mitch found himself asking.
“I don’t think at all, Big Mitch,” the great artist roared, kick-starting the bike’s engine. It caught right away, spewing clouds of thick exhaust in the morning air. “Thinking is what kills you. Christ, didn’t you know that?”
CHAPTER 2
Ohh… Ohhh… Ohhhh…
They were at it again up on the third floor. Those damned Sealy Posturepedic gymnasts in the room right above hers. They’d been humping away up there nonstop every night for the past week, that bed of theirs shaking like a washing machine in its final spin cycle.
Ohh… Ohhh… Ohhhh…
Whoever she was, she was not quiet. Her love cry was plaintive, the cry of a sad young girl. As for him, Des hadn’t heard the man make one single sound yet. Assuming that it even was a man up there. Because if there was one thing Des Mitry had learned so far in life, it was this: Never assume.
Ohh… Ohhh… Ohhhh…
Thoroughly wide-awake now, she flicked on her bedside lamp and fumbled for her heavy horn-rimmed glasses, the ones that were forever sliding down her nose. It was 4 A.M., according to the clock on the nightstand, and more than anything in the whole wide world she wished she were in her own bed in her own home. But that was not possible-the renovations on her new place still hadn’t been completed. In fact, every single aspect of the job was taking twice as long as the contractor had said it would. She knew this was normal. But knowing it didn’t make it any less aggravating. Besides, it was just plain impossible to get comfortable in a new job in a new town when everything she owned was in storage and she was sleeping-make that trying to sleep-in a strange bed. Even if it was a damned canopied bed.
Ohh… Ohhh… Ohhhh…
The inn was fine, really. Except for those damned X-games upstairs, of course. But they weren’t the real reason why she was awake. After four years at West Point, Des could sleep through a carpet bombing. No, it was the wondering. Wondering if she’d made the right decision when she gave up a job she was good at to chase after something she really loved, but-let’s face it-might be no good at at all. Wondering about this new, highly unlikely relationship she was in with a pigment-challenged man who sometimes made her feel as giddy as a schoolgirl and other times just plain scared to death.
It was entirely possible, Des realized, that this was the happiest she’d ever been in her life. It was also entirely possible that she had completely lost her mind.
Ohh… Ohhh… Ohhhh…
She got up and put on her sweatpants and started in on her homework exercises. A succession of hand and wrist studies by Durer to be copied out of Robert Beverly Hale’s Anatomy Lessons of the Great Masters. Des was studying figure drawing two evenings a week at the world-renowned Dorset Academy of Fine Arts, one of the only institutions in America that still taught art the same painstaking way the Renaissance masters had learned it-line by line, stroke by stroke, with serious attention to craft and a refreshing absence of baloney. One night a week they worked with a model, the other they studied perspective and anatomy. Paul Weiss, her professor, was so serious about anatomy that he had taken them to the morgue at Yale-New Haven Hospital to watch medical students dissect cadavers. Not that Des had needed to tag along. She knew what was underneath the skin only too well-violent death was what had driven her to the drawing pad in the first place. In fact, when Paul got a look at her portfolio of murder victims he became so disturbed that he fled the studio and vomited. When he returned, looking exceedingly pale, he’d asked her if he could show her portfolio to some other faculty members. She let him, naturally. Now they all stared at her, wide-eyed, when she strode the corridors with her drawing pad and tackle box filled with charcoals.
They did not know what to make of her. She was not like the others.
Ohh… Ohhh… Ohhhh…
Seated on the edge of the bed, she went to work diligently replicating Durer’s intricate hatchings and cross-hatchings. She worked in pencil, focusing her considerable attention on the flexor tendons of the palmaris longus, transfixed by how, somehow, each line articulated tendon and sinew and bone, how the human wrist slowly came to three-dimensional life on the drawing pad in her lap. It was sheer magic.