Expiration Date (7 page)

Sullivan wondered uneasily what she might have scheduled for this upcoming Saturday.

DeLarava had been interested in only two of the suicides that had taken place at the Shelton. The first was a woman called Jenny Dolly—around the turn of the century Jenny Dolly and her twin sister Rosie were a celebrated dance team, renowned for their beauty; but Jenny’s face had been horribly scarred in a car crash in 1933, and she had hanged herself in her apartment here in 1941. The other suicide had been the actress Clara Blandick, who, one day in 1962, had got her hair fixed up and had carefully done her makeup and put on a formal gown and then pulled a plastic bag over her head and smothered herself. She was chiefly remembered for having played Auntie Em in the 1939 version of
The Wizard of Oz.

Auntie Em, Auntie Em
, thought Sullivan now as he puffed on his cigarette echoing in his head the mocking voice of the Wicked Witch of the West in the movie.

And, he thought as he squinted through the smoke, a twin sister who killed herself. How’re you doing, Sukie?

The shoot had been what gaffers called a bad-hang day. The lights had been plagued with “ghosting,” the lamps glowing dimly even when the big old dimmer boxes indicated no power being transmitted, which called for a lot of laborious checks of the light board and all the cable connections; and then when the cameras were finally running, the shoot had repeatedly been interrupted by power surges and blackouts.

Apparently a lot of people had died at the Shelton, he thought now.

Live and learn.

DeLarava had kept looking at her watch, though the clock on the lobby wall was accurate. Twice Pete had peered at her watch as she glanced at it, and both times it
had been wrong—
differently
wrong: once it would read, say, 6:30, and a few minutes later it would be indicating something like 12:35. At one point he had called Sukie over to one of the malfunctioning lights and in a low voice had told her about their boss’s erratic watch.

Sukie had followed deLarava around the carpeted lobby for a few minutes after that, ostensibly to ask about the placing of the props and the fill lights, and then she had come back to where Pete was still crouched over the flickering lamp; and she had told him in a whisper that no matter which way deLarava was facing, the hour hand of her watch always wobbled around to point up Wilcox—north. It was a compass.

Shortly after that the music had started up. DeLarava had liked to have taped music playing before the cameras started running, even
during
takes for which the soundtrack would be entirely dubbed in later—she said it helped establish the mood—and the music was always something contemporary with the period the film was dealing with. Today it was Glenn Miller’s “Tuxedo Junction,” and she had decided to start it up early.

As the audiotape reels started rotating and the first notes came razoring out of the speaker grilles, deLarava had turned away from the twins and fumbled something out of her purse. She was clearly trying to conceal it, but both of the twins saw that she was holding a drinking straw—one of the striped ones marketed for children, with a flexible neck and some kind of flavor capsule inside it to make plain milk taste like chocolate or strawberry.

S
ULLIVAN PITCHED
his cigarette out the window and started up the van’s engine. Stopped ahead of him was a battered old blue-painted school bus with the back doors open, and inside it, on wooden shelves and on the floor, were crates of bananas and tortillas and garlic and long, dried red chili peppers. A mobile third-world grocery store, he thought, a hundred feet from the Hollywood Boulevard sidewalk.

It reminded him of lunch, and he wondered if Musso and Frank’s was still in business, a block or two west. He steered the van around the stopped bus and drove up Wilcox to make a U-turn back to the boulevard. Over the tops of the old apartment buildings in front of him he could see the Capitol Records building, designed long ago to look like a stack of vinyl records with a needle touching the top disk.

Vinyl records, he thought. The clocks and maps are definitely broken.

—Lewis Carroll,
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

M
USSO
and Frank’s Grill, Hollywood’s oldest restaurant, was still in business on the north side of the boulevard at Cherokee, and Sullivan parked around the corner and walked in through the double wood-and-glass doors and crossed to one of the booths under the eternal autumn-scene mural and the high ceiling. The Tuesday special was corned beef and cabbage, but he sentimentally ordered a sardine sandwich and a Coors.

This had been his and Sukie’s secret hideout; their friends and coworkers had hung out in trendier places like the City Cafe and the Cafe Figaro on Melrose, or the Ivy down on Robertson.

In fact, he and Sukie had driven here in 1984 for dinner right after the Christmas Eve shoot at the Shelton, and during the drive Sukie had been loudly singing gibberish Christmas carols—
O car-bo-lic faith-less, poi-son-ously pregnant…O rum key, O ru-um key to O-bliv-i-on…Com-mander Hold-’Em, bone-dry king of a-angels…
—and of course the old schoolyard song they’d got in trouble for singing in some foster home when they’d been seven,
We three kings of Orient are, trying to smoke a rubber cigar; it was loaded, it exploded…

As soon as they’d got to the restaurant and been seated, Sukie had ordered a double Jack Daniel’s, and Pete, though he had wanted a beer, had wound up with a Coke, because when the waiter had walked up to their booth Pete had been leaning forward and saying, “Coke?”

After the waiter had left, Sukie had grinned and said, “Coke what?”

Pete had waved vaguely. “What she was doing. Loretta, our dignified boss, snorting a straw along the old hotel wallpaper! Old cocaine mixed up in the dust, do you think?”

In reply Sukie had resumed singing some badly remembered lines from “We Wish You a Merry Christmas”—
“We wont go until we got some, we won’t go until we got some, we won’t go until we got some, so trot ’em out now.”

“What the hell, Suke,” Pete had said, bewildered by her manic cheer.

“I figure that’s what the Sodomites and—what would you call ‘em, Gomorrites?—were singing outside of Lot’s house, you know? In the Bible, when all of Lot’s neighbors wanted to bugger the angels that were visiting him. Loretta wouldn’t go today until she got some, and she did get some—she sucked ’em up through that straw.” The drinks had arrived then, and Sukie had drained hers in one long swallow and mutely signaled for another.

“Got some what?” Pete had said after a halfhearted sip of his Coke. “Angels? Angel dust? What?”

“Ghosts”
, Sukie had said impatiently. “What did you think? She snorted up a whole pile of ghosts today—did you see how much younger she looked when she finally got into her car and split? She looked thirty years old tonight, a
youthful
thirty, and she looked a goddamn
hundred
this morning. We somehow made it possible for her to draw a whole lot of ghosts out of the walls of that place and then snort ’em up her nose.”

Pete hadn’t wanted to start discussing ghosts with his sister. “She’s a, something like a necrophiliac voyeur,” he said. “There’s probably a single word for it. She likes to go shoot films at cemeteries and places where people have died, and kind of rub her fingers in the dirt, we’ve noticed that in her before. Hell, I suppose there’s somebody somewhere who watches the tape of Jack Ruby shooting Oswald, over and over again. Getting off on…what, the thought that somebody really did die here. Creepy, but probably harmless right? But I’m afraid she’s going flat-out
crazy
now. Where does that leave our jobs? I mean, there she was, crouched over and snuffling along with a
straw
, as if some dead lady’s perfume might still be in the wallpaper!”

“Pete,” said Sukie, “I don’t mean perfume, and I don’t mean
metaphorical
ghosts. I mean there were real essences of dead people in that place, and she
consumed
them in some literal way, like a whale eating plankton.”

Pete stared at her. “Are you saying,” he asked carefully after a moment, “that you think she actually
believes
that?”

“God, you’re an idiot sometimes. I’m saying that’s what happened. She’s
right
to believe it, she
did
eat a bunch of ghosts. Didn’t she change, visibly, between eight this morning and nine tonight?”

Pete tried to smile derisively, but gave it up and let his face relax into a frown. “She did get something out of it,” he admitted. “But come on,
ghosts?
”

The word hadn’t sounded ludicrous in this dark wooden booth at Musso and Frank’s.

“And,” he found himself going on, “she is often…prettier and cheerier, after a shoot. Still damn fat.” He laughed uncertainly. “Do you suppose that’s what she’s been doing, all along? She never used a
straw
before. That we ever noticed, anyway.”

“I’m sure she’d have liked it better if we hadn’t seen her do that—but she obviously needed it too bad to be subtle this time. I bet she usually sucks ’em in through those damned cigarettes of hers—maybe ghosts are drawn to that clove smell, like kids to hot cookies. It was a flavored straw, you noticed.”

Sukie’s fresh drink arrived. Pete drained it himself, and Sukie glanced at her watch and then at the clock on the wall, and she asked for two more.

For a full minute neither of them spoke.

Pete was feeling the bourbon hit his fragile alertness like static muddying up an AM radio signal. “And of course it would have something to do with bar-time,” he said finally. “Ghosts are…if there
are
ghosts, they’re certainly a very derailed crowd, in terms of time.”

“Of course. And the electrical problems. We always have electrical problems, and she still not only doesn’t fire us, but pays us way too much.”

“We don’t
always
have electrical problems,” Pete said irritably. Then he made himself think about what Sukie had said. “Now you’re saying it has to be
us?
Specifically Pete and Sukie?”

“She acts like it, doesn’t she? Has she ever once hired anyone else? Those props, those watches and things, those were lures; but for some reason she needs us to make her able to hook ’em. Did you keep on looking at her watch?”

“Not after the first business,” he said glumly. Of course Sukie would have, once he’d told her about it.

“When we finally got started filming, the hour hand was pointing straight to the section of wall she took her straw to, every time, and it wasn’t north anymore.”

Pete grinned weakly. “Compass needles point to ghosts?

“Evidence of the old glazzies, droogie,” she said, quoting the movie
A Clockwork Orange. Glazzies
, he recalled, meant eyes. “Let’s get some menus,” she went on. “I may as well eat while I drink, and she’ll want her precious twins all peppy and full of vitamins tomorrow.”

H
ER PRECIOUS
twins, Pete thought now as he finished his sardine sandwich and drank off the last of the Coors, alone in the booth on this sunny but cold morning eight years later.

The twins had continued working for deLarava, for precisely another two years, after that Christmas Eve; and Pete had eventually come to believe that Sukie was right about what deLarava had been doing at their shooting locations.

Neither of them, though, had seriously considered quitting.
What the hell
, Sukie had remarked more than once when she’d been drunk;
it’s just exorcism, right? I mean, she inhales the ghosts and then they’re gone—obviously, since she never goes back and does a shoot at the same place twice. We’re exorcists, like that priest in that movie. And we didn’t take no vows of poverty.