IF THERE WAS ONE THING which he’d learned in his job, it was when to make an exit. He could swig back the rest of this drink, make some stupid non-apology, climb out of this couch. Keep the fifty, of course.
And go.
“I’m sorry, Mrs Lamotte. I could take your suggestion one of several ways—and I don’t say that some of those ways don’t leave me flattered—but not one of them is the kind of work I do. If you’re looking for a chaperone, I guess I have a few friends who do that sort of thing when they’re between acting jobs. And if you’re looking for… Well, if you’re looking for more than a chaperone, there are some guys I know who—” “I’m not looking for any of those things, Mr Gable. Or anything else you might imagine.”
“Well…” He gazed up at her, wondering why the hell he was still sitting here. “That’s okay too. I’m really not here to judge. But I’m not here to waste your time either.”
“You’re going to tell me next you’re a busy man, I suppose.”
The tone, the swagger, was new. April Lamotte was some piece, no doubt about it. She was unlike pretty much every other client he’d ever encountered. And he was almost certain by now that she was wearing nothing underneath her silky green trouser suit.
“I’m asking you not to leave, Mr Gable. More than asking. If you do, there will be consequences. Your State license, for example. That document you always say you have in the car, or at the office, or in the pocket of your other suit. As if you had another suit.” She gave a nasty chuckle. “Or a proper office. Or pay road tax on that rusty old car. Believe it or not Mr Gable, I’ve had you looked into—discreetly, I might add—and I do need the help of someone like you. You fit the bill in most ways, even if you’re not perhaps as good a match as I’d been hoping for…”
April Lamotte strode over to a dresser. She came back with a framed photograph. “Here.”
The frame was heavy and gilt-edged. He had to squint and tilt it before he could get a proper look at the photograph inside, which was of a guy standing before a low wall in that kind of hunch that tall men often affect. He was thickly bearded and wore heavy tortoiseshell glasses, along with suede loafers, pleated slacks and a white button-up tee shirt. His dark hair was messily slicked back so it stuck out around his noticeably protuberant ears. He wasn’t smiling and he had his hands stuffed in his pockets. He didn’t really look the sort of person who liked having their photograph taken.
“You can’t tell from the photo, but Dan’s got buck teeth much like yours. Never would have them fixed. Says they’re part of what he is. And he’s pretty much your exact height and build—and he’s got those jug ears as well.” She gave another of those sharp laughs. “So maybe I shouldn’t have been quite so disappointed when I first saw you. I mean, how close can two men get? There’s Dan’s beard of course. False ones always look false. But all you need to do is say that you’ve shaved it off. You know how different men look after they’ve done that. Then you can add in the way you’ll look with something like Dan’s glasses on as well.”
She was getting way ahead of him. “So…” The photo made a dull clang as he laid it on the glass-top table. “… what is it that you want me to do?”
“As I say, I want you to become my husband. But only for a few hours. The risks are so small that they’re barely worth mentioning. And the rewards—well, what would you say to a thousand dollars?”
“I’d say that nobody gets paid that sort of money unless they’ve earned it. Or the person who’s paying is desperate.”
“Desperate.” She considered him and the word, her head tilted. “I wouldn’t say that exactly. But I do need your help. And I can make it extremely difficult for you if you walk out.”
“Where’s your husband now?”
“I’ll come to that.”
“And you want me to—”
“I’ll come to that as well. But first, let me tell you something about me and Dan…I won’t bore you with my life story, Mr Gable, but you should know that I grew up in mid-state nowhere and was always ambitious. I knew I wasn’t bad-looking, but I realized young that getting runner-up place in the local beauty pageant wouldn’t wash for much. My sister and I used to talk about it—make plans nights as we lay in bed. I decided to train as a nurse. I reckoned that that was the best chance I had of getting rich, and that LA was the best place to try. You know—changing the sheets and wiping the ass of some rich old guy in a big mansion who doesn’t see his family from one year to the next. A whirlwind romance, maybe a few blissful months of marriage, and then…”
“That’s a neat plan.”
“Is, isn’t it? Only trouble was, I wasn’t the first. You wouldn’t believe it, Mr Gable, but even the nursing agencies in the city of Los Angeles have a casting couch.”
He had to smile. “I believe I can.“
“I still had a plan, I still had hopes, but this was the start of the Great Depression and the only work I could get with my diploma was at the Metropolitan State Hospital—you know, the Met?”
He nodded. Of course he knew about the city lunatic asylum out in
Norwalk. Kids on the streets taunted each other with its name.
“So there I was. Pretty much penniless and emptying bedpans and tightening the straps on straightjackets on sixteen hour shifts so I could afford to eat. I don’t know if you can imagine what working at the Met’s like.”
“To be honest Mrs Lamotte, I’m not terribly keen on those kinds of places.”
She paused to give him a look. “Who on this earth would be? Some of the patients—and a fair few of the people who work there—are enough to make you wonder what it means to be human. I’d come off shift and take the train back into the city so tired I was past sleeping, and I’d stop by late evenings at this rundown diner up on Bunker Hill called Edna’s Eats. It was there that I first saw Dan. He was just this quiet guy sitting nursing a coffee. But there was something about him. We ending up talking, and he admitted eventually that he was a writer. He wasn’t that proud of anything he’d written, but I was curious…”
She walked over to a cabinet on the room’s far side. Its doors revealed a bookshelf of shabby yellowish spines. She took some out. “You see.”
Dime novels. He turned them over. They had that rough yellow paper feel and smell of cheap glue. Vixens in the Dark. It Came From Beyond. Midnight Lust. War on the Alien Horror. Beautiful Corpse. The covers were deliciously lurid. Knives and guns. Taut bosoms and slack lipstick mouths. Futuristic cities and strange pulsating machines.
“He’d already written all of those,” she said as he studied the authors’ names. Sid Tulla. Frank F. Freeman. He particularly liked Luella Stand. “His real name was Daniel Hogg, and he said they were trash, but I bought a few and I read them on the train back from the Met. Those books, of their kind, were stunningly good, and I told Dan so, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone more pleased.”
“So you decided this guy was your ticket to the high life?”
“We fell in love, Mr Gable. I know this probably sounds ridiculous to you—and it certainly hadn’t been part of what I’d planned on getting out of this city—but there you are. We fell in love and we moved in together in this rathole apartment, and I soon realized that Daniel Hogg was wasting his talent.”
“His name wasn’t Lamotte?”
“Can you imagine anyone ever making it in this town with a name like Hogg? So, that was one of the first things we decided to change. I liked the Daniel bit, and my name, Lamotte, was just about the only thing about my past life I was proud of. So he became Daniel Lamotte even before we married and I got him to start writing screenplays which, even back then before the feelies, was obviously where the real money was. That, and I also got him to fire his agent.”
“Sounds like you were already doing that particular job for him, Mrs Lamotte.”
Those eyes, which he decided really were green, flashed. “I haven’t brought you here to justify myself. You can take this story any way you like…”
A story, he thought, which would have made a decent enough script itself. In fact, it probably was one, circulating somewhere from studio to studio in twentieth draft. Nurse (you’d probably need to make her an aspiring actress as well; no one would ever believe a good-looking broad in this city wanting to be anything else) meets pulp writer at some midnight diner. Maybe he’s scribbling on a notepad. Maybe she’s read one of his books. Or maybe she just spills coffee in his lap…
“I know this sounds over-fancy, but Dan lived to write. He’d never written any kind of script before, but the stuff just flowed out of him, and it was good. Between us, with him doing the writing and me quitting nursing and doing whatever was necessary—and I do mean whatever—to get his scripts noticed, we finally started to get some work. He was especially good at twists and endings—events which seem inevitable once you’ve seen them, but which you’d never have been able to predict before. Have you seen Freedom City? That was one of Dan’s very earliest. And then along came the feelies—”
“I don’t go much for the feelies, Mrs Lamotte.”
“But I guess you’ve heard of The Virgin Queen?”
He nodded. Not that he’d actually seen that one, but even he’d heard of it. A ruffs and codpieces epic, it had come out in around 1933 or 4 and, as much as anything, had been responsible for convincing the world that the Bechmeir field was the future of the entertainment industry.
“Funny, isn’t it? One of the most famous of all the feelies, yet no one remembers the name of the guy who wrote it. Even those idiots at the Academy passed it over. But it brought us the kind of life I’d dreamed about when I came to this city. Dan’s work sold, and it did well, and for a few years we were happy. We both were…”
He let his gaze travel slowly in the shafts of sunlight which were playing in narrower and brighter patches across the parquet as the light outside strengthened towards noon, and then he looked back to Mrs Lamotte. Even with her strange request, and although Daniel Lamotte was supposed to be the sort of writer who was above such things, he was still expecting some standard plot-twist to emerge at the end of this story. The new blonde secretary with legs up to here. That bitch in the house opposite who always sunbathes in the nude. The pool boy. He was used to most kinds of tale as to why lives and marriages went wrong.
He risked raising a questioning eyebrow. “Everyone gets happy for a while, Mrs Lamotte. It’s an unwritten law of the universe. And then they get less so. That’s another law. And that’s normally where I come in.”
“I suppose you’re right.” April Lamotte sighed. She did such a good job of the sigh that he wondered if she really hadn’t put in time as an actress as well as a nurse. Then she and her barefoot reflection resumed pacing the shining floor. “And after the success of The Virgin Queen, Dan could write the scripts he wanted and know they’d sell. But maybe that was part of the problem. He’d always written under pressure. But now he had time, opportunity, freedom. We’d bought Erewhon and had a pine lodge up above Sierra Madre. We were doing well and there were some real successes—Sometime Never, Prospector, Friday Means Tonight … but each new idea was harder than the last. By about 1938, Dan hadn’t produced a script in a whole year.”
“He’d stopped writing?”
A new cigarette. A fresh plume of smoke. “You disappoint me, Mr Gable. If I didn’t know you’d lived in this city all these years, I’d wonder where you’d been. You’re like me—you came here to find riches and fame. Almost got there as well, didn’t you? Toured as an actor, got a contract with one of the old talkie studios. You were well on the way to somewhere, even if that somewhere ended up as where you now are.”
“Well—thanks.”
“So you of all people should know enough to understand that writers never stop writing, or at least trying to write. He tried everything. Doing without sleep or not getting out of bed for days. Holing up in our pine lodge. Then he started going off on these jags. I found him once out by the Third Street tunnel under Bunker Hill. He was huddled up and howling like a baby.”
She shook her head. “It slowly tore him apart. I mean, he was always shy and nervy—he always left dealing with the outside world to me. But now it was something else. He just froze. Wouldn’t speak, would barely move, for hours, days. Lying in bed or the same chair. Sometimes, he’d just stand in one place like time had stopped inside him. It was scary. Or he went manic. It was like this terrible fear. Something at the back of everything that was always haunting him. But I guess part of me had always known that this side of Dan was there. Even when we were first staying in the top floor of a cheap rowhouse, I sometimes had to… Well…” She flicked ash. “I had to nurse him. Calm him down, or get him up and back to coping with things. Of course, I knew where to get the necessary stuff. But now, Dan was boozing as well. I’ve used private clinics to dry him out, had witch-doctor psychiatrists try to work out what the problem is. All to no avail. And then he bought that wraith, that fucking ghost in the hallway that he said—can you believe this?—was a birthday present for me. Got some twobit studio to mix the auras of all his favorite performers into this one recording, and then put it on a loop. Cost us a fortune which by then we couldn’t afford. And he’d just stand there gazing at that thing as if it really was his muse, even though we both knew it was taunting him. God knows why I turned it on today. Maybe I’m taunting myself as well. But with Dan it was still all about writing. And I still did everything I could to help him. Believe me. I did everything. I wanted him back. I wanted my Dan, my Daniel. And I knew that the only way to get him was to have him writing feelie scripts again. “This spring, though, things started to improve. He was off the booze and I’d cut down on the tablets and he was watching lots of feelies in our viewing room and talking about writing something in a way I hadn’t heard in ages. Not like it was some demon that was haunting him, but just a simple task that needed doing again. But he said Erewhon gave him the jeebies and he needed to get back to what he called the best of times, by which he meant when we didn’t have a dime to rub together.
“So he got this rental, a cheap place Downtown. Called it reconnecting. He went there, and he took his typewriter with him. That, and a few reams of paper and some old clothes. And I let him go, Mr Gable. I let him go not because I’d given up on hope, or had given up loving him. I let him go because I hoped. Because I loved…” She gave a soft, sad smile, and he was way beyond telling whether to be moved or impressed. “I wasn’t abandoning him. We’d meet up sometimes at the same diner where we’d first met. It was almost like old times. And he seemed happy.
’Course, he wouldn’t say much about what he was writing. When things are going well, writers never will. Just said he was really on to something. Said the whole thing was alive around him in this city. And then, finally, when he did show me, I knew he was right. I wept the first time I read the treatment for Wake Up and Dream through, Mr Gable. I really did.”
He nodded. He could imagine that April Lamotte was capable of many things, but weeping over a feelie treatment somehow didn’t seem like one of them.
“But Dan was already fading. I knew the signs. He was starting to worry the way writers always worry, and he was getting back into the pills and the booze in ways that were beyond my control. From being the greatest thing since the Bible, the whole project became a heap of mule shit. Perhaps you can imagine. Perhaps you can’t. Basically, and once again, Dan just started to crack up…”
“So he’s back again now in some clinic?”
“About a week ago. A place up in the hills. I had no choice.”
“And you’ve got a feelie script you want to peddle, and a husband who isn’t up to doing a pitch?”
“That’s almost the size of it.” She ground out her latest cigarette. “But not quite. Dan’s a respected writer. The Virgin Queen was a huge hit, and the studios still scent money when they hear Dan’s name. He sent the script off on spec without even checking with me, but I was able to broker a deal—Senserama Studios, no less. We’re almost there, Mr Gable. The contract’s approved and written, and it’s waiting at their lawyers to be signed and witnessed. But Dan has to sign it.”
“Couldn’t you stall? You’re obviously acting as his agent, can’t you sign on his behalf?”
“The studio won’t hear any of that. They know Dan’s a recluse, but there are limits. It’s got to be Dan. And you know what producers are like. If we let this go, it could be gone forever.”
He nodded. He knew that the attention span of an average studio executive was shorter than a toddler stacking wooden blocks.
“And—and I won’t beat about the bush, Mr Gable—Dan and I need the money. This whole lifestyle—this house, the cars you saw outside, the gardens, not to mention the clinics… All of this,” she gestured, “doesn’t come cheap.”
“How about you simply dust your husband down and spruce him up for a few hours? After all, you said he just needs to sign something.”
“Dan’s in a bad way, Mr Gable. He’s been to some very dark places. He’s under restraint even now. And I can’t disguise what the Senserama contract’s worth—you’ll be seeing it anyway if you agree to help me get it signed. It’s five thousand dollars upfront on twenty five when the final script’s approved, and I’m offering you a straight one thousand. I can make the appointment for tomorrow and you can have the check cashed by the next day.”
“You really think I’m that much like him? I mean, for all the charming things you said about my looks…”
“That’s not important. Dan’s publicity shy, and the lawyers will never have met him before. The beard’s easy. You’ve just shaved it off, and you know how different a man looks without one. Dan wears his hair differently, but it’s nothing that some Brylcreem won’t fix. I’ve got some theatrical glasses—you know, the sort with plain lenses—which are pretty much exactly like Dan’s pair, and they’ll make a big difference as well. Who’s going to argue if you look like Dan, and you’re wearing Dan’s clothes, and you’re with me?”
“I’d need to practice his signature—know something about his voice and manner.”
“That’s obvious. And I’m guessing that this won’t be the first signature you’ve ever forged.”
“I’ll need to take a look at that feelie script, if I’m really supposed to have written it…”
But he was treading water. Truth was, now the whole thing was laid out before him, he felt oddly relieved. After the dark threats and her strange tale and Erewhon’s peculiar atmosphere, the idea of impersonating a scriptwriter for a few hours, even if it did involve forgery, fraud, criminal misrepresentation, embezzlement and maybe even theft, felt like no big deal. Then there was the money, and the challenge of doing something that briefly took him back toward his lost career. And, last but by no means least, there was April Lamotte.