“No. I read it over and over. He’s been around the industry in some connection, and I think he tried to sound as if he knew me, but he calls me Lysa instead of Lee. That could be a cover-up, of course. And it has a phoney kind of limey slant to it, calling me ducks.”
“What size were the negatives?”
“Little. Like so.” She indicated a 35mm frame size.
“You checked them against the prints each time?”
“Sure did. But in a lot of cases the prints were just an enlargement of part of the negative, even less than half sometimes.”
“So you were all paid up well over a year ago. And you thought it was over. When was the next contact?”
“Two months ago. Less than that. Early in January. An old friend, trying to make a comeback, was opening at The Sands in Vegas, and a bunch of us were rallying around to give him a good sendoff. It was in the papers that we were all going to be there. Dana was with me. We had a suite at the Desert Inn. Somebody left this envelope for me at the desk at The Sands. I guess they thought I was staying there. They sent it over. Dana got it. I was just waking up from a nap. She came in with the damnedest expression on her face and handed it to me. She had opened it. It was another set of the pictures. There wasn’t any return address. The desk had no idea who had left it off. Dana wanted to quit right then and there. She is a strange gal. I had to explain the whole thing the way I explained it to you, Trav. She knew right away that it was the same thing that had cost me all the money. She still wanted to quit. I had to beg her to stay. Our relationship hasn’t been the same since she saw the pictures. I don’t blame her. I’d still hate to lose her. This is the envelope. You can see how it was addressed. Somebody just cut my name off the front of a fan magazine, something like that. Here is the note that was with it.”
It was quite different. Individual words and letters had been cut from newsprint and newspaper stock and pasted to cheap yellow copy paper. It said:
Shameless whore of Babylon you will be cut down by the sord of decency and money will not save your dirty life this time but you better have money ready you whore of evil I will come to you and you will no the truth and I will set you free.
She hugged herself. “That one just scares the hell out of me, Trav. It’s kind of sick and crazy and terrible. It just isn’t the same person. It can’t be.”
“So you went and saw Walter?”
“No. I just got more and more jittery the more I thought of it. I’m still shook. I was at a big party at the Springs and I got a little stoned and made a scene and dear Walt was there and he took me for a walk. I hung onto him and cried like a baby and told him my troubles. He said maybe you would help. I guess you can say something was stolen from me. My privacy or something. And somebody wants to steal my career or maybe my life. I don’t know. I’ve been carrying cash around with me. In thousand-dollar bills. Fifty of them. I don’t expect you to get back what I paid. But if you could, you could keep half. And if you can get that nut off me, you can have the money I’m carrying around.”
“Are the pictures in that envelope?”
“Yes. But do you have to see them?”
“Yes.”
“I was afraid of that. I am not going to let you see them until you say you’ll try to help me. Every time I think of that note I feel like a scared kid.”
“It’s a very cold trail, Lee.”
“Walter said you are clever and tough and lucky, and he said being lucky is the most important.” She gave me an odd look. “I have this feeling that my luck is running out, darling.”
“How many people know about this?”
“The four of us, dear. You and Dana and me and Walter. But you know more than the other two. Not another soul. I swear.”
“Wouldn’t it be logical for you to tell Carl Abelle?”
“Sweetie, when one of those things is over, it is over all the way. Enough is enough forever.”
“Could he have set you up for it?”
“Carl? Definitely no. He’s a very sunny type. Very simple needs and very simple habits. Totally transparent, really”
“Usually I gamble expenses, then take them off the top before the fifty-fifty split. But this is a little too chancy for that.”
“Expenses guaranteed up to five thousand,” she said without hesitation, “and when that’s gone we’ll talk some more.”
“Walt must have said I could be trusted.”
“What other choice do I have? That’s one thing about this. There hasn’t been any trouble making decisions. There’s been just one way to go. Will you try? Please? Pretty please?”
“Until it looks hopeless.”
She scaled the envelope into my lap. “God knows I’m not the shy type, sweetie, but I don’t think I could watch anybody look those over. I’ll take a walk. Take your time.”
She went to the heavy door and let herself out quietly.
Three
AFTER A little time I put the twelve photographs back into the envelope. I took a slow turn around the room. I am too big a boy to be churned up by the explicits of other people’s kicks.
Nor did I feel any compulsion to make moral judgment. These were modern animals caught in black and white at their silly play. Such sport was not for me, and very probably not for anyone whose friendship I claimed. There seemed to be some kind of severe selection involved. An acceptance of that presupposed an inability to accept or believe in a lot of other things. Personal dignity for one.
But something still bothered me, something I could not quite define. So I took them out and shuffled through them again. The clue was there. It was the terrible loneliness on their faces. Each one of them, in all that lazy confusion of intimacies, in that lexicon of clinical descriptions, looked utterly, desperately alone.
And they were beautiful people. Lysa Dean was the featured player in every shot, and her body was as superb as its promise.
I felt as if I had glimpsed the edge of some great paradox. The grotesque ultimate of togetherness is the final loneliness of the human spirit. And once you had been that far out on that barren limb, there was no chance of ever coming all the way back.
I shrugged and looked at them again to see if they told me anything about time lapse. I put them away again.
From the varying lengths of shadow in the pictures, from the changing positions on the sunny terrace, I could tell that they had been taken over a matter of hours, perhaps on separate days.
Soon she returned, coming in with a look half challenge, half calculated demureness. “Well?” she said.
“It doesn’t look as if it was a hell of a lot of fun.
That response startled her. She stared at me. “Oh, you are so right! You know, it seems to me as if it was all a thousand years ago. I guess I’ve been trying to fade it out of my mind. Oh Christ, there’s kind of a sickly excitement about it, I guess. But what I remember now is being constantly cross and irritable and impatient. And sleepy. Just terribly sleepy and never being allowed to sleep long enough, and having the feeling that all the rest of them were just one… one thing somehow. Not like the pictures.”
“Are these exactly like the other pictures you got?”
“They are the twelve exact same shots, but not exactly like the others. These are fuzzier and grayer, sort of. Not as sharp. But I didn’t save any of the others to compare, of course.”
“We have to look through these together so you can give me the names to go with the faces, Lee, and tell me what you know about each one.”
“I suppose it has to be done.”
“Like a trip to the dentist. I think there’s at least one fair picture of every other person in the group.”
She made a face. “Those pictures are such a big boost to my pride, Travis. It does something for a girl to look like a fifty-peso floozy in a back-room circus in Juarez.”
I turned a light on and we sat at the desk in the sunken part of the room. I found a pencil and paper. I pointed to the pictures and asked the questions. She answered in a thin small breathy voice, her face half turned away. I took the following notes.