ABSOLUTE QUIET. Not a breath of movement. That curving staircase which seemed to hang on nothing but shadows. A gloss on the floors so deep that walking over them felt like crossing a lake. He reached down into his suit coat pocket and felt the Colt’s ribbed wooden grip. All the doors along the corridor which had previously been open to the garden were shut. With so much glass, and on a day this warm, the air was overpoweringly hot. There was a sour and musty smell, too; the big flower arrangements which had seemed so impressive before were wilting now as the water in their vases evaporated to sludge.
The wraith wasn’t running this time, either. Just an empty plinth, with wires running out the back and a switch he hadn’t noticed before on the side, although he certainly had no inclination to try to turn the thing on. The big room where April Lamotte had seen him, with its trophy tapestries and decorations, smelled as stale as the corridor, although it wasn’t quite so hot. He’d been expecting—he didn’t know what. But something. Instead, every which way he turned, all he saw was reflections, illusions, shadows.
The place felt almost overpoweringly empty. Yet everything was neat. Everything was just-so. The sort of neat and just-so, it occurred to him, that comes when someone tries hard to scrub away at their life until all that’s left is surface brilliance.
He checked the other downstairs rooms, and down in the kitchens and the quarters for the maids, which were empty as well: the mattresses bare, the wardrobes clear of anything but a few coathangers. He peered inside big refrigerators and freezers; barely anything in them, either. He sniffed at the drains, and at the few drinks left in the drinks cabinet. He looked behind picture frames and inside toilet cisterns. Nothing, zilch, nada …
Then there was a study, a small room far too tidy to be somewhere in which a guy like Daniel Lamotte would ever work. The desk was bare apart from a new black cradle-set bakelite phone, a letter-opener and some geometrically arranged pens. The desk drawers contained nothing but more stationery. He pulled them all the way out and felt around and underneath just to be sure, but found nothing more. The wood double file cabinet beside the desk was unlocked. The two big drawers held too many bills and receipts for him to do more than flick though, although he didn’t doubt that any incriminating stuff would have been incinerated in that bonfire. But what stuff? And where exactly was April Lamotte?
He paid more attention to the bank statements, all of which were recent, and stacked with the kind of figures he wasn’t used to seeing in his own communications from the Cali Fed and Gen. There’d been some big payments in, and then out again, recently. Tens of thousands of dollars since the spring. More evidence of someone getting ready to head off somewhere? He riffled back into the lower cabinet where he thought he’d noticed some legal-looking documents, and found secured loans, mortgages, terms of indenture. He remembered April Lamotte standing in the strange gloom of that room down the corridor. I won’t beat about the bush, Mr Gable. Dan and I need the money … That wasn’t quite the picture he was getting here, but it was certainly the case that she’d used Erewhon’s considerable value to get hold of a lot of fresh capital, and then done something with it all which looked to involve transferring large amounts of cash.
Blackmail? Was that it? Or maybe she was shunting everything to one side before she tried to declare for bankruptcy? Leaving papers like this which told any kind of story might have seemed odd, but Clark reckoned that everything here was either easy for someone else to check up on or was already on public record, and would have raised even more suspicions by its absence. What was missing here was the rest of the story. Whatever that story actually was.
He slid the two drawers back without taking any of the papers. After all, he had a key, and he was getting a feeling by now that April Lamotte wouldn’t be coming back to Erewhon any time soon. Then, on second thoughts, he crouched down and reopened the file cabinets and felt around the inside backs and corners. His fingertips brushed something. He leaned harder and winced at the soreness of his bruised elbow. Then he had it. He lifted it out.
A torn out scrap of newspaper. On one side there was nothing but a bit of newsprint sky. The other showed an advert.
Nero Investigations
Fully State-Licensed
Discreet and Professional
“We Provide Answers Without Any Questions”
Huntingdon 1799
She’d been coy enough about many things, but she’d admitted using some kind of private dick to find him, and Nero Investigations fitted the bill. Thing was, he knew who ran the set-up. Abe Penn might be a few steps up from him in the PI foodchain—with a valid license and an office with a working phone and maybe even a service secretary—but Clark couldn’t believe that Abe would set him up with someone like April Lamotte without warning him. There might be little honor left in his particular trade. But there was some.
He picked up the phone and dialed Abe’s number, picturing those relays down in that little exchange as he heard the clicks and buzzes. The line rang. It rang again. On the tenth ring, he put the handset back down in its cradle.
He looked more closely at the one picture on the wall. It was a glossy image in the full garish color of a realtor’s brochure of a pine cabin surrounded by trees and the glimpsed peaks of mountains. The gold lettering said, Larch Lodge, Bark Rise, Sierra Madre. Not the sort of place which any backwoodsman would ever inhabit, but he remembered how April Lamotte had said something about a place they owned up in the mountains that Dan had gone to in one of his failed attempts to reconnect. He lifted the picture down, worked the photo out from its frame and stuffed it, along with the Nero Securities advert, in an inside pocket.
Upstairs, everything was just as empty, and just as swish. Along with a pool room which looked to have never been used to play pool in and several pristine guest suites, he found a dedicated feelie viewing room. It also functioned as a kind of library, with leather, brass and wooden fittings, although there wasn’t a single book. The tall, dustless shelves along the side walls were stacked instead with boxed reels of filmstock and feelie wire. After all, why would a modern writer actually need to read? He studied the long rows with their title labels stuck beneath them for a few minutes, but they meant little to him—with his interest in the feelies, it was hardly likely they would. But yeah, now here was something just a touch out of place. There were odd gaps. Missing titles that were somehow suddenly as obvious, and as recent, as punched-out teeth. One of the labeled gaps he even recognized. It was The Virgin Queen.
He headed back along the thickly carpeted landing to a final set of double doors which, it turned out, led to the main bedroom suite. Midnight blue velvet curtains hung half-open before the shut doors of a Juliet balcony. White sheepskin rugs and low white divans floated amid their reflections like puffy summer clouds. There was a frieze behind the bed: a marquetry of polished woods suggestive of flames or the wings of birds. At least here, though, there was evidence of recent activity. The ash tray on the glass bedside table next to the phone was an over-brimming heap of pastel stubs, and there were several small indentations on the side of the mattress as if someone had repeatedly sat down and got up again from it, although the bed didn’t look slept in. Still, he peeled back the blankets and carefully inspected the sheets. Freshly laundered. He detected none of the usual stains or scents.
The bath in the en-suite bathroom looked big enough to swim in. So, almost, did the toilet bowl. There was a steel and enamel cabinet hung on the wall. Bottles, syringes and pipettes filled its shelves. As he checked their labels he got a waft of that medicine cabinet smell. He wasn’t much up on medical Latin, but he knew what Luminal was. 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 …
He went back out into the bedroom and checked the walk-in closets. Dan’s clothes took up a lot less space than his wife’s—but he’d never been inside any marital home where that wasn’t the way. He tried to picture April Lamotte in this room. Tried to picture her here last night, sitting on that bed and staring at that phone and getting up again and pacing this room and smoking all those cigarettes as she waited for the call from the police to tell her that her husband had been found dead in his car up on a Mulholland overlook. Tried to picture her here on other nights. Tried to picture her here with Daniel Lamotte.
He slid open bedside drawers. No rubbers, French postcards, German handcuffs or Swiss lubes. Hadn’t she said that there wasn’t much going on between them sexually, or was that just another ruse? He pocketed the half packet of Lucky Strikes he found on Dan’s side. On April’s, there was nothing more than you’d have expected a woman to keep where she slept. Odd bits of jewelry. Sanitary stuff. A few loose aspirin. He had another feel around the back of the drawer to check he wasn’t missing anything and felt the slide of something papery and took out a small brown rectangular business envelope. There was no stamp but April Lamotte’s name and address was neatly typed on the front. It had already been torn open, and looked to be empty. No. Not quite empty. The envelope slid and hissed when he moved it. He widened the top into a vee and tipped it toward his cupped palm. A thin stream of sand whispered and glittered. He wiped his hand, thought about putting the envelope back, then changed his mind and slid that into his pocket. Not that it made any sense. Not that anything here made much sense.
Erewhon was a plateglass brick wall. Best thing he could do would be to drive back to Blixden Avenue, grab as much other evidence as he could, then head off someplace and lie low for a while just to see what happened. Maybe he’d never know what April Lamotte had been up to, or whether her husband was dead or alive. Would that really be so bad?
He studied the long dressing table. Expensive perfumes and creams were lined like a miniature city in glass. He lifted one up, took off the cap, and sniffed. Chanel Cuir de Russie. A blunted lipstick in her shade of burgundy lay nearby. He rolled the thing in and out. Then, he heard the sound of tires on gravel.
Drawing out the gun, he stepped quickly back to the side of the halfdrawn drapes and parted their edge to look out. A car—a Bentley tourer in British racing green—was heading up Erewhon’s drive. It stopped out front. A largish guy got out. Hands on hips, he looked the house up and down. He was wearing what you’d probably term a business suit in this city, although you’d have put it at the gaudy end of weekend wear anywhere else. The plaid was bold but, for all of the colors which had gone into its weave, the bright mustard necktie managed to clash with every one.
The guy walked up to Erewhon’s door. Electric gongs shimmered. A pause. The gongs shimmered again. Then he stepped back into sight. Once more, he looked up and around. He was young, and tall, and well-built in the way fit, affluent young men often are before they turn to fat.
“Hi? Is anyone about?” He scanned the lawns.
“Mrs Lamotte? Anyone? Mr Lamotte… ?” In puzzlement, the guy shook his head. Wings of light brown hair shone like some glossy new man-made fiber as he tucked them back into place.
Clark dropped the edge of the curtains and re-pocketed the gun. He could let this character leave. But hadn’t he just spent this morning trying to work out what was going on? He decided to risk it, and with the decision came a strange, pleasurable rush. Pushing the tortoiseshell glasses back up to the bridge of his nose, he turned the key in the balcony doors and stepped out.
The guy beneath looked up at the sound of the doors opening, shading his eyes against the sun.
“Can I help you?” Clark asked in a lighter, quicker voice.
“Yeah, well. I was… .” The guy was still squinting, staring. “Are you really Daniel Lamotte?”
“Guess I must be.”
“Hey. Well, this is brilliant. I’ve been trying to call. Gee…” He flipped back his glossy hair once more. “I can’t believe it. You’re really Daniel Lamotte! This is just so, so… I’m your biggest fan. The absolute biggest. I bored your wife with just how much I admire your work when we spoke. Sorry. Sorry. You probably don’t even know who I am…” He spread his arms. “I’m Timmy Townsend, senior production executive at Senserama. It’s my job to get Wake Up and Dream up on the screen. And what a job that is, eh?” He did a little spin and turn on the gravel, his arms still spread. “What a fucking job!”