THEY NEVER STOPPED, THE MEMORIES never stopped: Goldie would be with him forever, her face at once beautiful, taunting, seductive, remote, laughing, snarling, and distorted and frozen in terror. The dreams were always the same in the end, regardless of how they began: the sunlight fading to salt-smelling evening, the booze or the dope in the air, Goldie yelling to a pickup to come out and meet her husband. This time there had been somebody moving on the deck, a sound, heavy breathing and running, faces with frightened eyes. Then he woke up in a hot, sticky sweat, cold air coming in at an unfamiliar screen window. The sound of the rain was gone, and as his head and eyes cleared, he saw clouds of fog billowing beyond the gray rectangle of tattered screening. Slowly it all came back to him, and he got out of bed. Out the window, he stared at the motel’s courtyard with its gravel and scrub grass and shuffleboard courts.
The night before, he had checked the drunken man’s body to make sure he wasn’t dead, then had wormed his way back out through the Colony’s gates. He’d driven around the rain-slick streets until well past midnight, until the shaking in his hands and legs had quieted and his heartbeat was back to normal. He had tracked down a hamburger and a cup of coffee at Ship’s on Wilshire in Westwood, had sat in the window watching the rain until he caught himself, head down, mostly asleep. From there he’d headed down to Little Santa Monica and driven along beside the high muddy inclines shoring up the railroad tracks until he saw the Easy Rest Motel’s blotchy neon sign through the rain. It was a dripping white frame affair, an exhausted palm tree, twenty units in a sad courtyard built on the wrong side of 1940. An old geezer with a round pink face, smooth as a beach ball, and one eye gone milky with cataract was sitting behind the counter. He was reading a tattered paperback copy of Anthony Adverse while a pop psychiatrist on an all-night talk show babbled about premature ejaculation from inside an old cathedral-style Philco. My kind of place, Challis thought, registering with Eddie’s name.
Now it was almost ten o’clock, and there was another crazy day to face. Twenty-four hours before, he’d been lying on the floor in the back of Morgan Dyer’s Mercedes. It had been a very long twenty-four hours, and he wished he knew how much he’d learned. He took a shower and thought about it. Ollie Kreisler and Pete Schaeffer had separately offered him ways out of town, and the rest of what he’d learned kept pointing him at Jack Donovan.
Dressed, he sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the list of items he’d copied from Goldie’s datebook. Those clearly relating to Jack Donovan obviously reflected her impatience, the cause of which was utterly mysterious. Whose side are you on? put Donovan in the middle of something, between Goldie and someone else, a maneuver she frequently employed in her personal relationships and which made her less than universally loved.
But the rest of the notations had the look of an unbreakable code. M re K? Max. TV=V.L. Why V.L.? LV=VL? None of it meant anything to him. Nothing at all.
He paid his bill and drove east on Little Santa Monica, edging his way carefully through the thickness of the fog, turned right on the Avenue of the Stars, and parked in the huge lot wedged in behind the Century Plaza Hotel and Twentieth Century-Fox. In only a couple of years the studio had gone from being an ulcer ranch to the top of the industry with The Omen, Silent Movie, Silver Streak, and Star Wars. It was a miracle, of course, and that was what the business was all about. The miracles, few and far between, helped to make up for all the unbelievably tacky shit infesting the fabric of everyday life. He had breakfast in the Century Plaza coffee shop, smack between a pair of miracles, Twentieth and ABC-TV. And people still asked where they’d hidden the American Dream.
He opened the Los Angeles Times to page three and lost his appetite. The bearded face stared back at its disguised owner and the headline said: “CHALLIS STILL MISSING.” In smaller type: “Mountain Search Intensifies.” And in the story itself mention was made of the possibility that he had somehow eluded the search teams and gotten off the mountain, storms or not. He forced himself to turn back to the front page, which was devoted almost entirely to the effects of the continuing rains. He chewed a forkful of scrambled eggs and glanced around the large room, which lay in a rather somnolent valley between breakfast and lunch. There were maybe twenty customers working their way through sweet rolls and bagels and lox and coffee, and every damn one of them was reading the Los Angeles Times. He touched the side of his face, just to make sure his beard hadn’t suddenly reappeared.
Outside on the promenade that tunnels beneath the Avenue of the Stars like something from the twenty-first century, a landscape of concrete with the Shubert Theater and Beatlemania on the left and Star Wars still holding at the Plitt on the other, he nearly bumped into an ABC-TV executive he knew and a PR guy from Twentieth he’d always known had coveted Goldie’s round, tight little ass. He watched them from the corners of his eyes as they ricocheted off in different directions looking worried about their fading suntans. They hadn’t even noticed his existence, let alone his identity, but it didn’t make any difference. He felt terribly obvious and exposed and jittery.
The offices of The Coast magazine took up a lot of high-priced territory in the ABC Entertainment Center, a sea of chamois-colored carpet on which floated a fleet of Corbusier chairs, tables with glass tops an inch thick, Boston ferns and elegant, swaying little date palms, and something Challis thought might just possibly be hibiscus. Working himself up to a frontal assault, calling on the shades of Raymond Chandler and Marlowe and all the other private eyes who had trekked across all the carpets toward all the snotty receptionists in pursuit of all the villains, Challis plunged toward the gimlet-eyed blond. She had frizzed hair like a Boston fern that was not yet big enough to develop a beautiful droop; her fingernails were as long as piano keys, painted dark brown, and on the middle finger of her right hand someone had implanted a gold star in the nail. She looked up with the kind of blank, arrogant face perfected by girls of twenty-five.
“I’d like to see Mr. Donovan.”
“The line forms on the right,” she said.
“Tell him it’s—”
“I’m sorry,” she said, trying to show she wasn’t, “but Mr. Donovan is in a meeting and he really cannot possibly be disturbed. I’ll have to wait until he’s free. Take a seat, please, Mr. …”
“Claude Smith, Maximus Productions.” He smiled at her. “I won’t take up much of his time.” He headed for one of the leather-and-chrome chairs, sat down.
“He is all booked up for the rest of the day, you know.”
“I’ll take my chances.”
Now that he was in the office, he began to wonder what the hell he thought he was doing, what he expected to pry out of Donovan. To begin with, he would have to tell Donovan who he was, and once he was revealed, what was Donovan likely to do in response? What if he called the cops? What if he had a gun in his desk? Challis squirmed in the chair. But everything in Goldie’s datebook seemed to point to her relationship with Donovan: she must have confided in him … he must have some clue to what she was doing, what she wanted to tell Toby. So, what was there to do but risk it? He looked at his watch.
The magazine was only a few years old, and he’d heard that the beginnings had been hangnail and threadbare. Donovan had come west with a background in publishing, or so the story went, but he hadn’t acted as if he had heavy money behind him. In a way it was his second tour of duty on the coast, but also, in a way, he’d never really left after making his first stop as an ad salesman for a local TV station, then as a columnist’s leg man and small-time publicity agent, then as an agent at one of the big shops that eventually merged and became bigger yet. Back in Jersey and New York City he’d worked the business end of several magazines and newspapers, made a reputation for propping up incipient DOA’s. And then it had been back to Los Angeles, blowing his own horn for all it was worth. The Coast would be the magazine for the entertainment industry, for politics, for social investigation, the magazine that would tell Californians what their state—Donovan had taken to calling it “the lead-edge state, the place where everything happens first, the place the world makes a habit of watching”—really amounted to. It all sounded wonderful, but The Coast had been a sickly baby the few times Challis had read it—and then his life had blown up in his face and he didn’t see much of The Coast. Now, sickly infant or not, prosperity had come to Jack Donovan.
On the wall facing him, spread from floor to ceiling, was a color blow-up of The Coast’s first cover, an aerial shot of the entire Los Angeles area all the way to the sea, which was a masterpiece of matching and joining dozens of individual photographs. Challis sat quietly staring at the various landmarks of his adult life, wondering what enabled the magazine to project such an image. Perhaps it was just the Los Angeles syndrome, the belief that a false front was as good as the real thing.
Half an hour later the door opened and a bizarre-looking elderly woman dressed in a voluminous black caftan swept toward the receptionist trailing an overwhelming aroma of verbena. She clanked beneath lots of gypsy jewelry, bracelets and rings and several necklaces dangling a variety of amulets. Her nails were bright orange, not quite matching her henna-rinsed hair, which looked like the fuzzy halo of a dead dandelion. She clutched an ancient, cracked black leather satchel overflowing with papers and folders, the whole package bound together with a colossal rubber band. She shuffled back and forth in front of the receptionist.
“I must insist, young lady, I must.” She sounded like Eleanor Roosevelt. “This is of the greatest possible importance to Mr. Donovan. I was up all night working it out, it’s terribly, terribly important.” Her voice dropped dramatically and the jewelry set up a cry as she drew a conjurer’s line in the air, the orange nails almost leaving a trail behind them. “Danger,” she crooned, “danger all around him … he’s off center, you know that … terrible danger. … It was all there last night, plain as day.” She turned to Challis. “You there, young man, can’t you feel it? Even here in this very room?” Her round eyes had a pinhead of light at their dark centers, pierced him, a flickering bird’s eyes, blinking like two camera shutters. “Honestly, don’t you feel it, sir? Ominous … oppressive forces working against our dear Mr. Donovan.” Challis began to stammer a non sequitur, but she rescued him by turning back to the girl. “He’ll want to know, this I assure you, Marguerite.”
“My name isn’t Marguerite,” the girl said, surprised.
“You seem to me to be a Marguerite. I knew a Marguerite once …” She interrupted herself: “Well, what does it matter? What does it signify? I must see Mr. Donovan, poor Mr. Donovan.” She marched, jangling, to a chair on the other side of the glass-and-chrome table next to Challis. Once her eyes clicked up at him, as if she were recording his presence, putting his picture in her files. “You have a weak face, young man. Prey to temptation, a wounded character—what’s your sign? I can help you—”
“With all due respect,” Challis said, “I sincerely doubt that—”
She had raised one clawlike, beringed hand, bracelets banging down toward her elbow, was about to say something, then stopped with her eyes refocusing above his head.
A tall man wearing a dark blue pinstripe suit had moved quietly around the corner, presumably coming from the important meeting. His face was deeply tanned, fans of squint lines at the corners of his eyes; his nose was long and Hamitic, curved like an inward-pointing scimitar, and his small ears were tight to his skull and the tops were hidden by a fringe of gray hair cut short to look long. He looked like a Borgia prince waiting for the poison to work on his dinner companion. He was followed by a fat young man with skin the color of typing bond and a mustache that resembled a scruffy mouse at rest. The fat man stopped at the desk.
“Mr. Laggiardi has a meeting in the valley,” he said. He checked his digital watch. He set his briefcase on her desk, since the watch required a free hand to depress a button. In his dark brown gabardine suit he resembled a large mound of earth slowly drying on a sunny day. “Please alert our driver.” He lowered his voice, whispered moistly, “Mr. Laggiardi does not wait on curbs for limos.” The girl nodded at the sheer enormity of such a prospect. “Your Mr. Donovan will be joining us later. After we’ve had lunch … and if Mr. Roth should call, tell him we ran over a bit here and are on our way.” He picked up his briefcase and sighed heavily. There was an angry-looking boil on the back of his broad white neck where his collar rubbed at it. “Oh, yes, if New York should call us at this number, tell them to reach us at Maximus this afternoon—now, that should do it.”
Then, without a word to each other, the two men left the office, the fat man holding the door for Laggiardi. Challis had the impression that he was witnessing the comings and goings of a group of actors. He reflected that Laggiardi bore all the trademarks of a New York clout-meister venturing inside the enemy camp, probably with an eye toward carrying out some mischief along the lines of looting, sacking, and plundering.
A few minutes later a man roughly the size of a telephone booth appeared from the recessed corridor. He stood about six-feet-four, and Challis would have guessed his weight at 240. He was balding, with what hair he had graying and combed straight back from his massive sunlamp-pink forehead. He wore a Brooks Brothers gray herringbone suit with a blue Oxford-cloth button-down shirt and a striped regimental silk tie, black wingtip shoes, as if he had made this most recent trip west with a firmly held refusal to give up his New York uniform. He wore his round-faced gold watch on the underside of his wrist, secured by a blue-and-red wristband. He consulted the watch as the receptionist said, “Mr. Donovan, there are some people …” He looked across the room, his broad pink Irish face smiling, his small blue eyes twinkling like stars that had burned out millennia ago. “Aha,” he cried as he spotted the lady with the orange hair and the caftan, “my dear madame!” He enclosed her shoulders in the arc of his immense right arm, hugged her, and began walking her back toward the receptionist. “A thousand pardons, madame.” He grinned. “May the sun and the wind always be at your back, may you be in heaven half an hour before the devil knows you’re dead, so forth and so forth, my dear lady, but I shall have to see you on the morrow. … Dear girl,” he said to the receptionist, “will you promise to fit madame into the schedule tomorrow? There’s a good girl!”
The old lady began fumbling with the cracked satchel, catching papers in the rubber band, half-spilling them. “But you are in danger,” she dithered, “dire, terrible danger.”
“You’re telling me, dear lady, you’re telling me!” He took her by the shoulders, met her round bird’s eyes with his cold twinkling blue ones. “At the moment, I am late for a couple of very important dates and then a party … but tomorrow we shall share a biscuit and a dram and you will tell me the worst.” He caught sight of Challis, nodded abruptly with a quick, phony, fading grin as if he had just noticed one of Laggiardi’s gunned-up hopsels left behind to enforce some odd, brutal demand. Donovan’s gaze passed quickly on, back to the receptionist, and the bantering, bullshit tone was replaced by coldness. “And, Jill, Buller has an hour to clean out his desk. Sixty minutes and not a minute more. … Ah, Hal”—he turned to see yet another body appearing from the corridor—“I was just telling Jill to start the timer on you, old fellow. You’ve got an hour to become a part of my past—is that crystal clear?”
Hal Buller was middle-aged, portly, and sweating. His face was flabby and looked newly pale. He held a balled-up white handkerchief in his hand and his eyes were red. He said hoarsely, “Fuck the sixty minutes, Jack. You can have the crap in my desk. And may the wind always blow in your red face, you stupid mick bastard!” Buller pushed past. When he slammed the door, the room reverberated with the ensuing silence. Donovan beamed from face to face.