The Juliet (12 page)

“But you got plenty of action behind the scenes.”

Rigg nodded sagely. “You see ‘Cowgirl Style’?”

“Sure.”

“Producer of that one ran out of cash and tried to pay me in pussy.”

“Cool.”

“Not cool. I had a mortgage payment to make. So I took a Leroy Neiman original instead.” Rigg had liked that picture. Horses at a racetrack, lots of reds and greens and yellows. A man’s kind of painting. Too bad the faux-redhead gun nut ended up with the painting after a coked-out skirmish ended their romance. Rigg helped himself to another beer, and he grumbled, “Shoulda took the ‘tang.”

They finished the joint, and Carter rolled another. The movie was half over when he cooked up a frozen pizza for them to share. Rigg was making a huge dent in the beer, but Carter didn’t mind. He seemed very happy. Rigg was a little worried about the protocol should the boy become aroused in his uninhibited state, but that never happened. Carter was sort of like an old man that way, as if he were watching a sporting event. He asked a lot of technical questions, but the only urges he succumbed to were hunger and thirst.

At one point during the gang-bang finale, Carter offered Rigg the last piece of pizza, and that was moving. Rigg had made a lot of new friends lately, and now here he was, getting high and watching bad porn in the twilight of the day and his life. Rigg was on the verge of sentiment and philosophy. He said, “You know son, I’m glad I met you.”

“Yeah, I sorta wish we’d gotten together earlier, when you were giving away houses, man,” Carter said. “You wanna bunk here tonight, seeing as you’re homeless and all?”

“Nah, I’ll be all right,” Rigg said. Then he leaned back on the truck bench to rest his eyes for a minute or ten.

* * *

There are always stars in the desert night sky, but they don’t do enough, and in between them the dark spots are darker than anywhere else on earth. A bit after midnight Rigg’s headlights were bouncing down the mountain at 80 miles per hour. He nearly sideswiped a pickup coming in the other direction, before the Jeep’s speed decreased, and it rolled all the way down to a kiddie-car crawl. Eventually it veered off the road into the flower-filled basin, bouncing a path through the field before coming to a lazy, bumpy stop. The headlights lit up two long shafts of pink blooms that seemed to quiver under the illumination.

Rigg woke up behind the wheel. It was not his first blackout. It was not even his first while driving. This kind of event used to scare him straight for a week or two, but these days he was more sanguine about his biochemical adventures. Jammed into the deep inner pocket of his jacket was a white paper sack full of goodies courtesy of his new pal, Carter. Rigg had to admit he did not know where he was in the world.

He twisted in his seat to look over his shoulder. With a few feet of the wrecked path discernible in the backup lights, it seemed possible to trace the way back to wherever he came from. Night blind and about blind drunk, it wasn’t going to be easy. A skinny coyote trotted across his exit, out of the weeds and back into them like a ghost, and Rigg was startled enough to consider how this was one of those times where he was truly
in the moment
.

When he got back to the road he just drove, and soon he realized he was on his way back to The Mystery House. He’d driven the route so many times over the past four months his memories had melted into pure knowledge, as if he’d lived in the Valley all his life. He sang to himself:

Ride your mystery horse to The Mystery House

There’s a wild woman there loves only you…

The song named the house, and the stories of ghosts, murders, and treasure came after. A lot of history was like that, all twisted and made to fit. No one seemed satisfied with the way things really started or ended.

As Rigg pulled into what used to be his driveway, he saw the blank shape of a vehicle parked in front of the house and the faint glow of light within. Willie Judy had wasted no time in taking possession of her new property. Well, that was a good sign, wasn’t it?

Except it wasn’t. He pulled up alongside the parked vehicle and realized it was the old blue Subaru from the morning. The prospecting couple had returned and made themselves at home, apparently.

“Not cool,” Rigg said for the second time that day, and possibly for the second time in his entire life. He had a handgun in the Jeep, a Walther P99 his agent bought him as a retirement present, but over the years he had never experienced a situation that was improved by a gun. He preferred not to bring one into this situation if he could avoid it.

Rigg pushed the front door open but remained on the other side of the threshold as he listened to the couple going through his things. They weren’t speaking, but the rhythmic scuff of paper and boxes was unmistakable. The only light inside was indirect, and then he saw the sweep of a flashlight beam bounce off the doorframe. They had made their way through to the back of the house.

A stack of map pieces lay on the floor.

Of course the real reason he didn’t go collect his gun out of the Jeep was that he tried real hard not to think about the gun at all. A man alone with a firearm starts to hear it talking to him, same as the drink does, except you can’t blow your brains out with a tumbler of Laphroaig. Not in one second, anyway.

Rigg weighed his options. Shout hello or retrieve his gun and say it more quietly. From within he heard a thud and a whispered, “Goddammit.” Someone banged a shin. It was nice when the cosmos humanized the enemy.

“Hello in there.”

All shuffling ceased. Rigg imagined the couple seized in freeze tag pose. He spoke to the air, “Ah, I said hello. Don’t be rude, now.”

Not a peep.

As Rigg recalled, the man was portly and the woman was a sack of bones. He hoped they weren’t preparing some kind of embarrassing ambush. He felt pretty sure they weren’t career criminals. The best approach was probably a direct one.

“Hey y’all. Don’t jump me. I know what you’re after, and it ain’t here.”

The bedroom light flicked on.

“Where’s your dog, then?”

The man’s face appeared in the shadowed hallway, floating like a moon until the rest of his body attached itself. He was dressed in an American flag t-shirt and track pants. His ankles were pink, and his feet were jammed into cheap brown loafers. Who ransacks a house in loafers? Rigg expected to see the woman bringing up the rear, but instead he heard the creak of the bedsprings. What the hell were they up to back there?

“Missy’s back in the trailer,” the man said. “We’re staying at the Alkali RV park.” He held his elbows in his hands as if to hide his belly. “Why aren’t you angry?”

Rigg stepped in and flicked on the wall light. “Honestly? I’m bombed.”

Both he and the man winced at their mutual exposure. Rigg scanned the room and saw several tidy piles of map pieces, ready to be boxed up and spirited away.

The man said, “You lied to us. This
is
The Mystery House.”

Rigg nodded. He crossed over into the kitchen area where he put the goody bag on the counter and pulled a bottle of water from the fridge, turning his back on the man before he said, “That give you a right to trespass?” He nearly drained the bottle in one go. He could feel a familiar stale ache commence behind his eyes, knowing soon it would spread out into a cap of pure white pain. He needed hydration, a lake full of water to wash away the hangover coming on.

“They said you abandoned the place. We didn’t know you were coming back.”

The bedsprings creaked again. This time the woman emerged with palms blackened and the knees of her jeans dark with dirt. She did all the crawling for this team. She wore an identical American flag t-shirt, but somehow it looked almost fashionable on her angular frame. Now that Rigg could get a better look at her, he saw that she was a good deal older than her husband. Rigg’s age, in fact. The woman’s face was pinched into a scowl, and she was the sort who could blend elements of embarrassment and anger into a whole new emotion.

“Who said that?” Rigg kept an eye on her but talked to the man. “I didn’t abandon shit.”

“We had lunch at the Alkali. They were all talking about it.”

“Well, you misunderstood. So you two just get along now, and we’ll say nothing more about it.”

The man and the woman exchanged confused looks. That was it?

Rigg shoved the bag a little further under a cupboard, hoping for the camouflage of shadow. There were piles of reasons Rigg was disinclined to call the cops, but these folks didn’t need to know any of them. He pointed towards the map pieces. “And leave those right there.”

The woman shrugged. “You have a couple of rare ones. You could get something for them on eBay. I could help you with that.” She behaved as if she hadn’t just been caught in the act of scavenging a stranger’s house. In fact, she acted as if she were owed more for her trouble. She looked at the map pieces and then at Rigg. “And how long have you been looking for her?”

“Long enough,” Rigg said. “The Juliet ain’t here.”

“But you thought she was.”

Rigg did not respond.

The woman persisted. “And you believed the map segments were real.”

“Look, get out of here already, or I’ll call—”

The woman leaned forward. “Do you think you have them all?”

Rigg said, “There is no all.”

The man chimed in, “Of course there is.”

If Rigg’s anger hadn’t ignited, he would have felt sorry for the pudgy dude. “Do you even know who I am?”

“We do now.”

“Good. Then you know I know what I’m talking about.” He grabbed up one of the piles of green map segments and shook it at the man. “I’ve studied these for years.” The paper rattled and the sound sent hangover sparkles across his vision. “Some of these match up to real places. Some are just diagrams of, I don’t know what, middle fucking earth or something.”

The woman nodded. “And if anyone ever found The Juliet, there’d be no reason to buy Nuggetz, would there? Stuff was awful.”

Rigg rubbed his face and tried to recover his cool. “They went out of business anyway.”

“What do you think happened to The Juliet, then?”

These two were too calm. It didn’t seem right. Either they were accustomed to getting caught like this or they had been conjured up by Rigg’s drink and drug addled subconscious mind. “Everybody asks me that. I’m tired of coming up with hypotheticals.”

“So, you think they never hid it.”

“Hell no.” The bottom of Rigg’s stomach went chilly, as if the hatch had been left open in his soul’s root cellar. “Hell no,” he said again, just to make it stick this time. “It’s all just a bunch of stupid stories.”

“Well it sure looks like you believed in those stories. At least for a while.” The woman looked around. “I’d go a step even further, Mr. Dexon. I don’t think Nuggetz
was in possession of The Juliet in the first place. The picture on the box is a bit of a giveaway—that round blob in gold starburst setting? The Juliet never looked so common.”

She was right on that point. The strange woman seemed hungry to test out her theories on a fellow searcher, but couldn’t she see that Rigg wasn’t searching anymore? The cowboy actor wanted nothing more than to dive face first into Carter’s bag of pills and thrills as soon as these hyenas let him be, but this conversation had gone on too long for a quick kick in the ass goodbye. “Where’d you get your tip about The House?”

The woman shrugged. “Research. Logic.”

Bullshit. Snap-snap-snap. That was the sound of Lady Hangover walking across Rigg’s bottle glass skull, and she was wearing heels. These fools were trifling with him.

“Excuse me.” Rigg pulled himself to his full height and strode out of the house, leaving the door yawning open into the night.

The man and the woman waited inside, confused. They heard the Jeep door slam.

When Rigg came back, he had the gun with him. “So let’s try this again. How’d you come to connect The Juliet to The Mystery House?”

If he thought the man was pale before, he was almost transparent now. His wife stepped up, and they both stared at the Walther in Rigg’s hand. It was a terrible way to hold a gun, as if he couldn’t bear the sensation of it, but it was still a gun in hand. Everyone in the room respected that.

“Mr. Dexon, please.” Now the woman was beginning to get a sense of perspective.

“You familiar with the Castle Doctrine?”

“Is that gun loaded? It makes a difference, you know.”

The man said, “I can’t take this anymore.” He stomped around to the sofa and sat down. It was pitiful. Even the woman seemed to think so.

Rigg said, “Sir, had this been a real situation, you’d be smoking like bacon right now.”

The man turned childish. This was not what he was promised, apparently. He said, “Feels real to me.”

“Okay, okay.” To keep the guy from crying, Rigg put the gun down on the counter, still within easy reach.

“Thank you.”

Rigg asked the woman, “You gonna answer me? Just out of human decency, no gun threat. I think you have to admit I’ve been very understanding and all.”

The woman nodded. “Well, there’s the song of course.”

“You set a lot of store by some 70s AM radio schlock?”

She looked pained but recovered quickly. She wouldn’t meet Rigg’s gaze. “Whether you enjoy the song or not doesn’t affect the quality of the information.”

“But what makes you think the information is good?”

She took too long to answer. Rigg could tell she was trying to make up a lie. And it was the creative expression on her face that struck Rigg as familiar. “Well shit.”

The woman blinked. She held herself still as a deer.

Rigg said, “You’re Kimber Logue.” He looked his guest up and down. “You’re looking good, girl. For a dead ‘un.”

“I’m Nene Glatter these days.” Logue closed her eyes. “Not everyone ages as well as you have.”

It wasn’t a compliment and Rigg didn’t mistake it for one. They had met before.

* * *

1974: Big Sur, CA

Kimber Logue was as much phantasm as she was a woman, and that was the sum that came from a lust for fame minus the genius required to make any difference in the world. At least that was Paul Lattanzi’s impression as Logue strolled through the beach house party in a lavender-tinted snakeskin suit, complete with blazer, vest, and boot-cut trousers, and a lavender snakeskin cowboy hat tilted over her eyes and long, dark hair. Flashbulbs went off, and Logue threw her arms around every groupie and musician she encountered. She knew how to throw shapes and cast shadows; a strong silhouette was more important than a strong soul. The mannish girlfriend to many famous guitarists, Logue was well known, but no one could remember why. Identified by the press as a musician and a model, no one knew any of Logue’s songs, and the only photographer who could make something of her strong, equine face was Helmut Newton.