“THIS IS SOME PLACE.”
There were no obvious signs of forced entry at Erewhon, or of LAPD scene of crime notices or further violence or blood. Automatic lights flared on when they entered the hall.
“Just stand over there by the staircase. I want the reader to get a real sense of this place’s scale. And put those glasses back on.” Barbara Eshel screwed a new flashbulb into the Graflex camera which had taken up most of her handbag.
Pop. Flash.
“If you like, we can just say it’s an old picture of Daniel Lamotte before everything went wrong. Depends how the story works out, but we’ll certainly need something, a visual angle—especially if I can get a feature in one of the better magazines.”
“I thought you said you were doing this for a piece in LA Truth?”
She lowered the Graflex to twist the winder around. “Yeah, but the more I think about this, and the more we find out—this story’s got breakthrough written right through it like a stick of Long Island rock.”
Flashbulbs hissed and flickered. She wandered off, cursing in surprise at the size and splendor of the rooms.
The same fine furniture, pale carpets and dark curtains swam into view beneath the recessed lights when they went upstairs to find clothes. The phone still sat on the glasstop table beside the bed in the room April and Daniel Lamotte had shared. So did the ashtray, still filled with all those ground-out pastel-colored butts. He could even see the dent on the bed where she’d sat and waited two nights ago for the call saying her husband was dead.
“You know,” Barbara was saying, “this woman’s not so very far from my clothes size. Might even be the same. But who the hell needs all of this stuff? Such a waste of money…” Nevertheless, she was lifting lots of it out; whole shifting, rustling piles of dresses and suits and skirts. “And by the way, Clark—do you really think they’d be able to afford this lifestyle on a feelie writer’s money alone? Okay, he wrote some successful screenplays, but this? Thought you said you knew this industry?”
The guest suite he went to get changed in wasn’t much of a come-down. Even though the boiler was off and the water was cold, the shower felt sweeter than anything he was used to. And not a cockroach in sight.
I could get used to this, part of him was saying as he sat on the edge of the bed and toweled himself. The walnut furnishings. The carpets. The mirrors. That car outside. The cost of a working man’s monthly wages for a bottle of cologne. And that young woman in the room along the corridor—who was probably naked in the shower right now—I could get used to her, as well.
But nothing would settle. Not this weird new life he was living, nor the old one he seemed to have lost. Even now, it took an effort of will to look at himself in the long dressing table mirror, and the face he saw bought no particular relief.
He shook his head. Inspected the fine assortment of another man’s clothes he’d gathered. Shirt collar pinned by solid gold. A suit of that deeper shade of black you never saw in any regular clothes shop, and only rarely in night skies. Shoes snug as a ballerina’s pumps. A silk paisley necktie so beautifully painted it was a work of art. He already knew the look and fit all of it would be perfect.
He went downstairs after he’d gotten dressed and waited for a while in the hall for Barbara Eshel to come down. He smoked a Lucky Strike. He stared at the phone in the alcove. He wandered the long corridor after he’d finished his cigarette. The wraith was still turned off. He stopped and studied it. Then he felt around until he found a toggle switch around the back of the plinth.
Nothing at first but a soft swishing, like silk over flesh. He guessed that that was the looped recording wire passing and re-passing over the recording heads. Then came a humming, and a faintly cattish smell of warm valves and shellac as the amplifiers started to do their work. There was something floating now between the charged plates like a stream of sunlit dust, and the air seemed to have chilled as if a door somewhere had been opened. The plasm shimmer of the Bechmeir field was unmistakable now, a dance of light, and beautiful to behold.
The wraith floated before him, and it seemed that his mind was playing tricks, although he knew that what he was experiencing was, by definition, a trick of the mind. What had April Lamotte said about this feelie recording—that Daniel Lamotte had got some studio to mix in the auras of all his favorite actors, then put it on a loop? He could see what she meant. For wasn’t that Peg Entwistle’s queenly aura he was now feeling, and wasn’t this one that guy with the ragged gait for whom things always went wrong? It really was like the distillation of some endless night at the feelies, and he could understand why Daniel Lamotte had got the thing made, and also why it had come to taunt him. But there was something else as well. An undertow that dragged oddly at the spirit—something bleak and powerful and strange…
He turned the thing off with a shudder, and watched it fade and drain away. Hearing something further down the corridor, he turned and saw that lights were on in the room where he’d talked with April Lamotte. A changed Barbara Eshel was standing beside the long couch.
“What kept you so long, Clark?” she asked.
Every time he thought he’d got some sort of handle on this woman, she went and did something like this. How, for example, could she have got herself dressed and downstairs so much more quickly than he had? And then, manage to look like she did?
“You don’t brush up too bad,” she said as she studied him. “For a failed actor, that is.”
“Neither do you. For a twobit newshound.”
“This…” she gestured—she’d chosen a long, dark dress which shimmered with turquoise blues—“… was about the only thing in April Lamotte’s entire wardrobe that anyone move around in like a normal human being.” It was loose and long from the hips down, low and tight at the bust. She hadn’t done much to her hair, but whatever she’d done had transformed her. Or maybe it was the earrings or the silver choker. “I mean, what is the point of having some glossy fabric wrapped so tight around your thighs and ass that you can barely walk?”
“I think I can explain that.”
“Don’t bother! I already feel like some ridiculous society whore. And I’m someone who used to stand outside Liberty League rallies waving banners until the LAPD started beating us up.”