Expiration Date (8 page)

No indeed, thought Sullivan now. DeLarava paid us damn well. And if she hadn’t tried to get us

car-bo-lic faithless, poi-so-nously pregnant

to do that muscle beach feature in Venice, on

bone-dry king of angels

Christmas Eve in 1986,

won’t go until we got one, so dredge him out now

we’d probably be working for her still, to this day.

He frowned intently at the check, tossed thirteen dollars onto the Formica table and walked quickly out of the restaurant into the chilly October breeze.

I
T HAD
been
early
in 1986 when they had hidden the mask in the ruins up on Laurel Canyon Boulevard. Just a dried thumb and two plaster hands, but Sukie always referred to the set as “the mask.”

Sullivan steered the van back onto Hollywood Boulevard, heading west again; there was still only the one more turn ahead. On the south side of the street stood a new McDonald’s restaurant that looked like an incongruously space-age Grecian temple, but at least the Chinese Theater was still there in all its battered black and red byzantine splendor at Highland.

The boulevard narrowed after that, as it flowed west between big old apartment buildings and broad lawns, and around Fairfax the pavement of the eastbound lane was entirely ripped up for repairs, but the sun hung still a little short of noon in the empty blue sky when Sullivan reached Laurel Canyon Boulevard and turned right, up the hill.

The curling road had only one lane each way, and no shoulder at all between the pavement and the greenery hanging over bowed chain-link fencing, and he had to drive a good quarter of a mile past the place before he found a wider spot where the van could plausibly be parked without getting clipped by a passing car. And then the walk back down the hill was a series of lateral hops from the asphalt into the tall curbside grass every time a car came looming at him from around a corner ahead. Already he was sweating.

Even after six years he recognized the section of chainlink fence he was looking for, and when he stopped and hooked his fingers through it and peered up the wooded slope beyond, he saw that the ruins had not been cleared away. Nearly hidden under shaggy palm trees and oaks, the broad stone stairway swept up to the terrace at the top of the hill, and even from out here on the street he could see many of the broken pillars and sagging brick walls.

He was breathing deeply, and wondering almost resentfully why no one
had
planed this off and put up condos or something. The real estate must be worth a fortune. At last he unhooked his fingers and stepped back.

Several
NO TRESPASSING
signs were hung on the fence, but it was widely split at one point, and among the tall weeds beyond he could see empty twelve-pack beer cartons and a couple of blankets and even a sort of little tent made from an upended shopping cart. Sullivan glanced up and down the road, and at a moment when no cars were in sight he ducked through the gap and sprinted to the shade of the nearest palm tree. He picked his way through a dense hedge of blue-flowered vinca, and after a few seconds noticed that he wasn’t walking on dirt anymore—the soles of his black leather shoes were brushing dust and drifts of leaves off of paving stones that had been laid in the 1920s.

The stairs were broad between the low corniced walls, but were thickly littered with bricks and chunks of masonry and the brown palm fronds that had been falling untended for five decades; and sycamore branches hung so low in places that he practically had to crawl from step to step. When he had scrambled up to the second landing he paused to catch his breath. The air was still and silent and fragrant with eucalyptus, as if Laurel Canyon Boulevard and all of Hollywood were very far away. He couldn’t even hear any birds or insects.

A row of once-white marble pillars supporting nothing anymore ran along the top of a wall across the stairs from him, and below the wall a dead stone fountain poked up from a bank of dried leaves; the ruined architecture all looked Greek, or at least Mediterranean, and it occurred to him that time didn’t seem to pass here—or, rather, seemed already to have passed and left this place behind. Probably that’s why they don’t tear it all down, he thought. It’s too late.

H
E WAS
now three-quarters of the way up the dusty, overgrown slope. To his right was a little stone bridge over a dry streambed, and though both of the wide cement railings still arched over the gully, the middle six feet of the bridge’s floor had long ago fallen away. A weathered two-by-six beam spanned the gap, and he remembered that in 1986, at least, the beam had been sturdy enough to bear his weight.

He discovered that it still was, though it was springy and he had to stretch his arms out to the sides to keep his balance. On the far side he paused to wipe the dusty sweat off his face; he thought about lighting a cigarette, but looked around at all the dry brush and glumly decided he’d better not.

Then he froze—someone was moving around below him, clumsily, through the litter on one of the clogged side terraces. Sullivan couldn’t hope to see the person through the shaggy greenery below, but in the weighty silence he could hear someone mumbling and scuffling around.

One of the bums that live here, he thought. It doesn’t sound like a cop or a caretaker; still, the bum might draw the attention of such people, and I don’t want to get kicked out of here myself before I retrieve the mask. They might fix the fence, or even
post guards, before I could get back. This place is a historical landmark, after all, though nobody seems to pay any attention to it.

He tiptoed through the fieldstone arch ahead of him and picked his way up a side stairway, which, being narrower, was relatively clear of debris. His fast breathing sounded loud in the still air.

There was another arch at the top, and he paused under it, for he was at the broad main terrace of the hill now, and he’d be visible crossing the cement pavement that stretched between the jungle below and the odd house in front of him.

The pavement was clear up here, and he let himself light a cigarette. Sukie, he recalled, had brought a flask, on that…March?…day in ‘86. That’s right, March—it had been Good Friday afternoon, which had seemed like a good day for burials.

At first the two of them had thought that
this
house—this narrow two-story building, brick below and stuccoed above, with castle-like crenellations along the roof as if the owner were ready to hire archers to repel attack from below—must be Houdini’s mansion, and they’d been surprised that the famed magician would live in such a little place. Later they’d learned that this was just the servants’ quarters. Houdini’s mansion had stood a hundred yards off to the south, and had burned down in the thirties. But this was nevertheless a part of the old Houdini estate. It would do fine as a place to hide the mask. “Hide a thumb in a place where there’s already a lot of its thumbprints,” Sukie had said.

S
ULLIVAN NOW
stared uneasily at the house. The doors and windows were all covered with weathered sheets of plywood, but on the tiny upstairs balcony sat a flowerpot with a green plant growing in it. Had there been rain in L.A. recently? The palm fronds he’d climbed over below had been dry as mummies. Was some homeless person living in this place?

He decided to hide here for a little while and see if the noises on the slope had been heard and might draw someone out onto the balcony.

Sullivan recalled that he and Sukie had nearly killed themselves struggling up the slope six years ago, for they’d been “on bar-time big time,” as Sukie had said—they’d been feeling the roughness of a step underfoot before the shoe actually touched it, and the bark of a tree limb a second before the hand grasped it. But Sukie had been full of hectic cheer, chatting graciously with imaginary guests and singing misunderstood snatches from Handel’s
Messiah
. Sullivan had been constantly whispering at her to shut up.

No one seemed to be home in the little castle. Sullivan relaxed and sucked on his cigarette, and he looked up at the brushy slope beyond the house. The upper slope had advanced visibly since his previous visit—broken dirt was piled up right to the stones of the arch at the south end of the house now, and a section of ornate
marble railing stuck up crookedly above and behind the arch like a bleached rib cage exposed by a cemetery landslide.

He jumped suddenly, and as his cigarette hit the pavement he heard a voice from the stairway he’d just climbed: “By the hair of my chinny-chin-chin—”

Sullivan crouched behind the house side of the arch as the voice went on, “I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll eat you, billy-goat-gruff.”

It’s that bum, he thought nervously. He’s following me, and of course my gun is locked up back in the van.

Then he grinned at his momentary panic. Just a bum, he told himself. Forget him and go get the mask from the garage, which luckily is still standing. Sullivan stretched out his leg and stepped on the smoldering cigarette, but he was trembling, for the
billy-goat-gruff
remark had reminded him of the troll that had lived under a bridge in that old children’s story. Maybe, he thought as he made himself maintain his grin, I shouldn’t have walked across that board over the broken bridge back there.

He straightened up and stepped out into the sunlight and began walking across the old cement, careful not to kick any stray rocks.

The open-arched garage was a strange structure too, entirely fronted with tiny inset stones and with two broad castle-like merlons on the roof; the inside walls were all stonework as well, and the back wall was concave, as though to provide good acoustics.

After only a few steps he whipped his head back around to the left and saw a skinny old woman come shuffling around the corner of the house. Her white dress looked as if it had been elegant before someone had spent years sleeping, and apparently doing engine work, in it, but all she was wearing on her stained feet was a broken pair of plastic zoris. The soles flapped on the cement as she hunched toward him.

“I suppose you don’t want to lose your name?” she was calling anxiously.

Then Sullivan heard the bum scuffling quickly to the top of the stairs behind him. “Blow your house down!” he was cawing.

Sullivan broke into a run for the garage; he stomped and skidded inside and in an instant was crouched in the shadows against the back wall, digging in the loose dry dirt with his hands. It seemed to him that the dirt was colder than it had any right to be.

“Where the
fuck
,” he was keening to himself, just as he felt the plywood board he and Sukie had laid over Houdini’s mask. He paused, even though he could hear the bum wheezing his way across the driveway toward the garage. It’s not Houdini buried here, Sullivan reminded himself, it’s not even his ghost. He took a deep breath and lifted the board away in a shower of powdery dirt.

And he saw that the life-size plaster hands and the little cloth Bull Durham sack were still in the hole. If the bum was just a bum, Sullivan could probably chase him away by waving the plaster hands like clubs.

Even in his panic he grimaced with distaste as he tucked the sack into his shirt pocket, and then he made himself snatch up the plaster hands, and he turned toward the light of the entrance.