Sometimes Misty stopped by the gallery and sat on the stool beside the window like a living display as he sprayed the glass and wiped it down, the sun warm on his skin as the missing girls watched him.
Saturdays he took breakfast with Saint and her grandmother at Lacey’s Diner. Saint watching Norma with tender concern, despite the barbs she lobbed at her grandmother when she asked the waitress to Irish up her coffee. Norma asked Patch if he had seen the riots in Los Angeles, the looting and shooting, told him that civil disturbance implied civility to begin with.
“She’s getting preachy in old age,” Saint said, to a scowl.
The Palace 7 had closed its doors in the fall of 1986 and remained empty while Sammy, the new owner, wrestled with the cunts at the town council over a change of use. It had the high ceilings and broad windows he craved. For years the battle had raged. And then Walt Murray, the projectionist at the Palace 7 for over thirty years, neared his ninetieth birthday. Walt’s wife, a hard-faced dame named Mitzie, approached Sammy about opening the old doors for one night only as a surprise for her husband. Caught in a Remy Martin haze, Sammy readily agreed, only to clean forget the next morning. A week later, when a poster appeared on the window of the 7, so horrified was he by his act of munificence, Sammy headed over to the law offices of Jasper and Coates and threatened all manner of legal action.
“The old bitch blindsided me. Everyone in this goddamn town knows I celebrate the death of Jackson Pollock on August eleventh. Fucking drip technique.”
Patch hauled him back from across the street, the two standing outside the empty movie theater as Sammy steamed away.
“They might look on it favorably. You’re giving back to the town,” Patch tried.
“I do nothing but give. People can walk by my window and transport themselves away from this bastard place with a single glance.”
“Everyone misses the 7.”
“The place ran at a loss.”
“People would love you if you reopened it. Good karma, Sammy.”
“The day I give a fuck what people think about me is the day I see hard proof that karma is real. That good things do happen to the good.”
“Just for one night then. You can’t back out now, Sammy. You just can’t.”
Sammy shook his head in despair. “What are they showing? It better be something with Catherine Deneuve.”
Patch looked at the window, and then he saw the poster. “Oh, Jesus.”