Manifesto for the Dead (3 page)

She'd been beaten badly, and strangled about the neck.

Behind her, in the back of the car's huge trunk, there'd been a brand new shovel. Someone had meant to bury her, maybe. The girl had not been dead long. There was still color in her cheeks, and her body had not yet begun to stink.

Thompson stood with his palms flat against the trunk. The time to go was now, but he didn't. The street was empty. The nearby porches, the gray windows and overhanging balconies—they were all flooded with white light. He raised his hand to brush away the heat, then he heard a car rushing down Hillcrest Avenue from the hills above the Hollywood Bowl. He could have behaved differently—he could have flagged the car down, maybe, called the police—but standing there, the key in his hand, he was overcome with an inexplicable guilt, as if he were the one responsible for the girl's death. It was the guilt one feels in a dream, moving down corridors to escape punishment for some half-remembered crime. The car was closer now, approaching the corner, and he did not have time to make it into the building without being seen. So he climbed into the Cadillac. (It was the alcohol, he would think later, or the sun in his eyes, the old jumpiness, a perpetual flaw, that made him leap the way he did.) He sat behind the wheel and turned his face as the car went by.

Go to the cops, he told himself. But that would mean explaining everything. Not just the Okie, but how he himself had taken the man's keys, popped the trunk.

My fingerprints are all over the car, he thought. The cops will hold me on suspicion.

They could detain him forty-eight hours without cause, he knew—and without liquor. The thought made him twitch. He had been through withdrawal before. The idea of going through the terrors while under interrogation, in a cell, in a dark room …

His mind searched around for an alternative … what could be done … with the girl … the car …

He took the flask from his pocket, felt the whiskey burn in his gut. A feeling of strength, the old rush, the sidewalk shimmering. Then the tremor came again, a hard shiver—a sanitarium shiver almost, as if the fabric of the world were tearing apart, the light disintegrating into dark—and he had to take another drink. Then he heard another car rolling down Hillcrest, and the panic moved him to action. He had to get out of here. He turned the key. The ignition fired.

He pulled onto Franklin, then urged the Cadillac slowly across Highland Avenue, not far from the Ardmore.

What now
?

He was implicating himself, he knew, worse with every action. He had to get rid of the Cadillac. Out in the desert, far away. But then how would he get back? And how would he explain where he'd been?

He braked at a stop sign. A car came up from behind. He took a hard left, away from the car, into the Hollywood Hills, and he realized suddenly what he was going to do.

He drove past the old Iago Hotel, climbing up a short, steep grade to the east side of Whitely Terrace, following it until the houses ran out and the asphalt became gravel. Then he killed the engine, easing the Caddy up close to a cyclone fence that ran along the ridge.

The Hollywood Freeway was at the bottom of that ridge, rushing through the canyon below. This spot was not exactly isolated, but it was out of sight, a patch of stone and dirt hidden from the plate glass windows above and the freeway below by a stand of eucalyptus grown out of control. It might be a few days before anyone noticed the car. Then he reached into the back and grabbed a red sweater that lay on the seat. A fine, soft material. Cashmere, he guessed, property of the deceased.

The sweater carried the smell of perfume and the odor of sweat, musky and faint, and that odor seemed to fill the car as he clutched the fabric between his hands. He used the sweater as a rag, wiping his prints from anything he had touched. He worked hurriedly, nervously, and when he finished, he left the keys in the ignition. Maybe someone would steal the goddamn car, he thought, and take the whole nightmare off my hands.

He bundled the sweater into a paper bag and headed down the hill. His prints might be on the fabric, and he needed to get rid of it someplace else, away from the scene.

Not far ahead, there was a break in the cyclone fence. A ragged little path ran into the brush nearby. Further down he could see a dirt road of some sort, on the slope above the freeway. The city had been doing some trench work there, but the job seemed to have been abandoned. It was the way things were these days, half finished jobs everywhere. The murderer had intended to bury the girl, but it wasn't going to happen now. Not unless I do it myself, and his heart fluttered horribly. I could finish the job tonight, roll her into the trench, be done with it. He reached for his flask and pushed the thought away. He'd gotten himself too involved with this already. Besides, he was an old man and didn't have the strength for wrestling with a dead woman in the Hollywood Hills.

SIX

Back on the Boulevard, Thompson went into Musso's and had himself the pork chop special and a pair of drinks. He waited for Billy Miracle. All the while, the sweater sat inside the bag on the seat beside him. It gave off a sweet, womanly smell. He'd been unable to get rid of it, out there in the broad daylight.

Thompson finished his set-up, then ordered another.

Finally, Miracle showed. The producer didn't come directly to Thompson, though. He leaned his head into a booth, talking to a woman there.

If Thompson were not still shaking from what had happened on the hill, he might have recognized the woman a beat sooner. Then he knew. It was the movie star, Michele Haze, Lombard's old flame. An arresting woman in her early forties, Haze was a platinum blonde with pale features and dark eyes. At the moment, she sat in a sultry, slump-shouldered way, enshrouded in blue smoke.

Miracle held a hand on her shoulder, then he let loose and came toward Thompson, carrying with him the opening pages Thompson had sent by courier.

“Meetings, meetings. I been in meetings all day.”

“Any luck?”

“Luck? The world wasn't created by luck, Jimbo. By some lucky fuck waving his hands. There were plenty of meetings first. There were things to talk over, you bet. Hierarchies to set straight. Camera angles. Production budgets.”

Miracle laughed, and Thompson saw a glint in the man's eyes, a tiny crack of light shimmering in the snowy depths.

“No, it was a long process. A lot of details. Adam and Eve, and that goddamn snake. That's what it took to create the world. Not a concept, but a plan. Divine inspiration.” The light in Miracle's eyes opened wider and Thompson remembered the story about the gangster to whom Billy owed money, and how that gangster was not going to wait forever. He felt Miracle's nervousness and smelled his sweat. “Michele and I, we have someone coming down to talk to us. A money man.”

“Here?”

“Yeah. So I can't talk as long as I might like.” Miracle set Thompson's pages on the bar. “How much you need to finish this?”

Thompson stammered. He hadn't expected Miracle to jump into the money end so quick. “Eight,” he said at last. “Half up front, half on close.”

Miracle let out a whistle. “This is coming out of my pocket, you know.”

“I can do it for six.” Thompson's voice broke.

“Two. That's the best I can offer. I would do better if I could, but my financials are pretty fragile. Also, you need to guarantee me a publisher.”

“How do I do that?”

“Tell 'em you got everything all lined up. Tell 'em its going to be blockbuster movie. I'll pay one-half up front, okay. Maybe the publisher will kick in more.”

“If I'm going to do this right, I need to see your screenplay. I need to know the story.”

Miracle waved him off. “Don't worry about all that. I've got everything you need, right here.”

He took out a newspaper clipping and slid it to Thompson. It wasn't long, just a few inches of blotter copy about a man wanted in Texas for double murder. The fugitive had tied a man and woman back-to-back, cinching the knots so the ropes tightened as the couple struggled to get free. In the end, the couple had strangled in their chairs.

Thompson was puzzled. Then he realized: Miracle wanted him to use the newsclip as the basis for the story.

“There's your killer. He kills this couple in Texas, then he hightails it to Los Angeles.”

“Why here?”

“He needs money, and there's this old man from his past, you see, an ex-con, a kind of father figure, who lives out this way. This old con, he sets our boy up with a murder contract in Hollywood.”

Billy Miracle made a sweeping motion with his hands, slapping them together. “Kabam. That's it. How the stories come together. The killer. The love triangle. Behind the contract is a jealous woman. She wants her rival dead. And our boy from Texas—he's the instrument of her passion.”

Miracle made it sound like a neat bit of business, but Thompson wasn't so sure.

“That's the truth about killers,” said Miracle. “We act like they come out of the blue. Out of the deep dark nowhere. Fact is, we create them. All of us. That's what the
Manifesto's
about. That's what I want the audience to understand.”

“All right,” Thompson said. “One thing, though—money. I'm a little short.”

“Find a publisher, and I'll have my people draw you a contract. Meantime, I've got to get back to Michele. Like I told you, we've got money on the line. Mr. Big, he's on his way.”

Miracle went back to Michele Haze. She sat smoldering under the blue light. In the movies, she had played dozens of roles—a country girl, a city sophisticate, a tramp—but it was always the same part. A woman yearning for the good life, tormented by some inner darkness.

She and Jack Lombard had had a very public affair, off and on, never marrying, but it had gone on for years. Then recently things had begun to sour, not just with Lombard but on the screen too. Lines had begun to show on her face, and it took too much gel to hide them from the camera. Lombard had put her aside for The Young Lovely. So now she sat with Billy Miracle, lighting a cigarette, glancing toward her reflection in the darkening mirror.

Thompson finished his drink, grabbed up his bag with the cashmere sweater inside. He felt the liquor burning in his stomach, and a light-headedness upstairs.

The barroom door opened again. The light came tumbling in and a shadow emerged from that light. When the door closed, the shadow took the shape of a man. Jack Lombard.

Lombard was in his early fifties. He was a tall man, and stood with a boyish slouch. From a distance he struck you as nothing special. Just another someone, a guy with a casual manner, ordinary, but it was this ordinariness people found attractive. In his way, he was a good-looking man. Blondish hair, just turning gray, and eyes that were disarmingly blue.

Thompson remembered his own business with Lombard. He'd been hired to write the script of an adventure movie. Meanwhile Lombard maneuvered behind the scenes, the way producers do. A string of directors. Peckinpah and Hill and back to Peckinpah again. The project had ended on the cutting room floor in Mexico, with Peckinpah whipping out his dick, pissing on the roughcut. So Lombard had brought in another writer, and Thompson had lost his shot at the big money.

Now he watched Lombard shake Miracle's hand. He had a touch of hatred for the man, a touch of venom. He watched him kiss Michele Haze. Thompson didn't understand at first, then it occurred to him. Lombard was the money man Miracle had been waiting for. It didn't quite make sense. Lombard and Haze had split up, and he couldn't see Lombard dealing with the likes of Miracle. Yet Miracle had gotten past The Young Lovely and here they were, the three of them, Lombard and Haze and Miracle, all at the same table.

Thompson paid his bill and left. Outside, he stood blinking under the desert sun, clutching the red sweater inside its bag and wondering what to do next.

I should toss the sweater, he thought. It's the only link between myself and the dead girl. I could stuff it in the dumpster behind Musso's, or in the bushes around the corner. It was still daylight, though; he might be seen. Inside the bar, the girl's death had seemed remote, but now he wondered about her, and who she might have been. He felt again tainted with guilt. The sun was like a white light inside his head; he felt pain deep inside his stomach. He did not want to go back down to his room on the Strip, not now. A man emerged on the street ahead of him. He was tall and thin and moved with quick steps, angling through the street hustlers, coming at him through the rising fumes. The Okie, Thompson thought. The man wanted his keys back, his car, his corpse. But the man was not the Okie at all; he looked emptily at Thompson, crossed the street, kept on going.

Thompson felt the foreboding again, a trap about to spring. Planets misaligning, stars falling out of the sky.

He tried to shake the feeling. He staggered up the hill to the penthouse, where Alberta would be waiting, like she always waited, he told himself, scrubbed clean, in her dress with her string of pearls, and her hair done perfect, and while he thought about her, he caught again the fragrance of the sweater, and felt an erection growing against all odds, sadly, morosely, emerging from the nowhere like a tombstone from the grass.

SEVEN

He found Alberta in the living room. The light outside had begun to shift, and she looked pretty on the couch, in her loose cotton dress. He sensed the leanness of her body, and its softness too. Her face had aged, but unlike him, her muscles hadn't yet gone to hell. She didn't drink, and her eyes were still clear, though that clearness could be a sharpness sometimes, and her eyes seemed to strike everything she saw.

She smiled to herself, knowing he watched her. There was something alluring in that smile, something bitter.

“Honey?”

“Yes?”

“I've got good news.” He sat down beside her and put his hand on her leg.