The Song Is You (13 page)

Hop stepped closer. She had finally fished the entire thing from

the pinched hole, her eyes gleaming.

She rose to her feet, unfurling it as she did.

It was a blanket, yes.

But the pattern on it was no pattern. For a moment, he thought it was a drop cloth for painting. How else to explain the red—no, that was the streaming light from the alley; it was more of a ruddy brown —splotches all over, wild rings of various sizes and one deep blot about the size of a dinner plate?

“What is that? What are you showing me?” he demanded, voice strangely constricted.

“Come get a look,” she said, although Hop couldn’t have been more than five feet from her.

He stepped toward her, conscious, with the swollen ceiling, of his height, of the way he towered over her, his shadow swallowing her like a monster in some old movie.

But she wasn’t frightened at all. He could even see the shine of her teeth. She was smiling.

It was when he stood within a foot of it that he had to admit it. Admit what it was.

“They wrapped her in it,” she whispered, tongue clicking along her teeth as she spoke.

“How do you know that?” Hop extended an arm to his side intending to lean his hand against the wall beside him. Trying to look casual. His hand on the wood, a piney knot, a plush tread of moss or sea slime. Standing there. Looking at this little devil.

“They left it in the room,” she said, nodding slyly. “I snuck in and got it before Frenchie and Big Arthur could get there.”

Hop looked more closely at it. At the striations and stippling. He could picture it once red and moving, wrapped around itself, now gone to rust. Jean Spangler, all tight-bodied, sure-faced, ready for anything, but, as the broadsheets would say, not this.

“Why don’t you give me that?” he blurted, without even thinking. What was his idea? Something in the back of his head—something about getting it from her and tossing it into the water. The last bloody strand of the story slipping into the dark murk of the harbor.

“Mister, what do I look like?” She dropped her arms. The blanket swam around her reedy legs.

“What good’s it going to do you? It could be anything.” He tried to keep his face cool and logical. Like it was all a put-on in which he was barely interested.

“It’s my lucky charm. Can put it to use when I need it.”

“What? To put the squeeze on? It doesn’t prove anything.”

“Then what you want it for, big man?”

“I’ll give you ten dollars for it. And that’s more than it’s worth,” Hop said, finding it hard to look at the thing. Its encrusted folds calling to mind past rivulets. Like some horrible shroud. All this and he was bargaining with her, trying to make a deal. He fought a raw taste in his mouth.

She looked at him. “What are you going to do with it?”

“That’s my business, honey,” he said, voice turning, losing its precision. He only called girls “honey” when something was slipping

away from him fast. Mostly, they called him honey.

“Sorry,” she said, shaking her head. “Sorry. I just don’t trust you.”

Hop raised his eyebrows in genuine surprise. “Really?” He wasn’t

used to this. “You look like more trouble than I got luck for.”

“Maybe I’ll just take it,” Hop said, voice harder than he meant. Something was clanging in his head. Why didn’t she trust him?

“Then I call Big Arthur.”

Hop surprised himself by saying, “Would he hear you down here?”

There was a glint of recognition in her eyes that made Hop’s face burn. She nodded, then, chin out, said, “He’d hear me, mister. He’s closer than you think. He’d be here in a minute.”

Hop tried to look away from the blanket, forced his eyes away. Tried to regain focus, and a sense of himself, of who he was, and wasn’t.

“Hey, I don’t want it. I don’t need it,” he said, talking mostly to himself. He took a breath, rubbed his forehead. What did she think he was going to do? Did she really think he was someone who would steal her imagined ticket out of whore town? Who would rough her up? Who would—

“I’m not that guy,” he said, backing away, backing up the cellar stairs. “I’m not that guy.”

“Whatever you say, mister.” The oldest eyes in the world.

Go home, he kept telling himself. But he couldn’t. Not after that.

It was clearer now than ever. There’s things for Frannie Adair to find, if she’s good enough at looking.

No matter how far ahead of her you are, if you stop, she could still catch up.

But he wasn’t sure where to go. And so he decided to go to the only place left.

The snaky devil at the center of this sordid tale: Gene Merrel. That fast-footed, puckish American boy on-screen was a bouncing shadow concealing a lathering brute.

He couldn’t very well call Tony Lamont and ask for Merrell’s

address. So how?

Dot.

Of course. Dot Hendry.

A good-time girl who never missed a rising star. And with a black

book to make Winchell himself jealous. “Dot? It’s Gil Hopkins.” From a night-chilled phone booth on

Western Avenue.

“Hop, even you should be in bed by now.” All Tennessee drawl.

“Without you to warm my toes?” he asked, trying for endearing,

inviting her to recall the last time they saw each other, Dot unrolling her stockings behind a set at the studio Christmas party.

“Aw, I had too much Tom ‘n’ Jerry that night, Hop. You know I don’t go for publicity men. Only talent.”

“Ouch.” Hop laughed. “Listen, doll…”

The house was in posh Holmby Hills. Merrel wasn’t the type to bring girls like Dot to the family homestead, but she was a resourceful girl and had collected the address from a receipt tucked in a corner of the box holding the fur-lined gloves Merrel had given her as a come-on.

“But that was a few years ago,” she’d told Hop. “I hear he’s hitting the pipe too much. The girls I know won’t go near him.”

He pulled up in front of the creamy-walled Moorish house.

Now what, jackass, Hop thought to himself.

Every time he shut his eyes he saw the stained blanket.

He could be home asleep.

He could be anywhere.

What do I think I’m going to see, Hop wondered. What could I

possibly see?

And then he was trudging up the sprinkler-beaded lawn.

And then he was chest-high in shrubs, searching for a window

without the blinds pulled shut.

Fuck.

It was close to three a.m. And Hop could see very little of the house’s interior other than the shine of marble floors, the hushed glow from a single light throwing a dusty glitter through a set of curtains in the upstairs windows.

Hop smoked a cigarette while contemplating the odds he could survive an effort to scale the gutters, gripping turret edges to make his way to a second-floor balcony.

Slim, boy. Real slim.

He wasn’t sure how long he’d been standing there when he heard the sound of rustling mock-orange shrubs. He turned slowly, too dumbstruck by the night’s endless surprises to be startled.

There stood a sharp-jawed man with a dark felt cap and all the

loose-backed calm of a veteran groundskeeper.

“Hunting rabbits?” the man said, hands in pockets.

Hop managed a wan grin and not much else.

“Ah, don’t bother. Listen, if you’re with one of those Hollywood

rags—’cause I’m guessing by the suit, even if it is pretty wrinkled, that you’re no cop—you’re out of luck.”

“Yeah?” Hop said.

“The king of the castle, he ain’t here.” The man looked at the ground, his cap momentarily shielding his face. He sure as hell wants to say something, Hop thought. Stroke him a little.

“That’s okay. I’m patient. And open to suggestions,” Hop said, wondering if the man was looking for some bucks, or just a comrade.

“That I don’t have,” the man said. “Suggestions, that is. Patience I got in spades.”

“So where’d milord go?” Hop said, working the comrade angle.

The man gave a cold smirk. “He’s gone to … let me get this right: Palacio Sano.”

A bell rang in Hop’s head. “Ah,” he said. “The Lourdes of the smart set”

“You been there yourself, my man?”

“Thankfully, no. But I’ve been in this town enough years to know what going to Palacio Sano means.” On Hop’s second week at the studio, rumor was a star’s wife had been paid off to keep her from going to the press about her husband’s trip to Palacio Sano. It didn’t stop the star from drinking a fifth of Mexican tequila and smashing his car into the side of his house rather than think about it any longer.

“If only Merrel had seen all those movies they showed us in the army. The ones with the sexy French actresses all the way from Dubuque,” Hop said. He wondered if Merrel had been infected before or after the night with Jean Spangler. “Too far along for the penicillin?”

“Hell, I’m no MD, blue eyes, but he sure thinks he’s on his last dance card.”

Hop wondered how the studio would garnish this heartwarming tale. “Beloved Musical Hero Struck Down by Aneurysm”?

“Lost to Heart Condition—His Family’s Curse”? Would he himself write the press release?

“The duo will do no more,” the man sighed liltingly. “No more fighter pilots prancing through aircraft hangars, singing about love in the clouds. No more pirates dueting on top of skull-and-crossbone masts for the pleasure of fair lasses. All that crap those fellas been hustling for ten years.”

“Sutton’ll grab a new pair of pipes to frolic with in no time,” Hop said.

“You bet your life.”

Hop looked across the dark expanse of the lawn. What more did he need to do, anyway? As much as he knew, there didn’t seem to be any danger of anything coming to light. The groundskeeper, he didn’t seem the type to pull out the megaphone—he hadn’t yet—and even if he did, a movie star spreading a social disease, even a bad one, was hardly proof that he’d killed someone. And Lemon Drop— she’d likely bide her time with that blanket, and by the time she found a use for it, no one would even remember why they cared. All that was left unstitched was the tiny hole he’d opened for Frannie Adair. And how many days could she really spend on this, an unassigned story based on the ramblings of a drunken press agent probably talking big talk just to get under her garter?

“So, does everyone in the house know? About the big S?” Hop’s mind clicked back on track. On some kind of track. He offered the man a cigarette, which he took. No. Just me. Ask me how.”

“How, my man?” Hop held out his match to him. As the man’s crisp-eyed face moved closer to light his cigarette, Hop could see something twisting in his eyes.

“Ask my girl.”

‘Why don’t you tell me instead.”

“I am telling you,” the man said, scowling up at the house. “I brought her here one day to try to get her a job. A kind of secretary for the old lady. Before I knew it, he’d cornered her into the laundry room.”

“Did he—did he hurt her?” Hop asked, even as he knew.

The man didn’t answer. Then he shrugged and said, “I guess she had Stardust in her eyes.” He stroked tobacco off his tongue, his face a cold grimace. “But he was done with her an hour after meeting her. Only he stuck, boy. On her, he stuck.”

Hop remembered Sutton’s carefree attitude when Hop had lied about the waitress with the clap. He bet Sutton didn’t know about Merrel. That would be some career-staggering surprise.

And then the groundskeeper, like so many others, endless others, told Hop everything. Hop had always had that gift, that look of open-faced guilessness. A supreme gift and one Hop blamed for giving him his guile to begin with.

The man told Hop that, after it was over, Merrel confessed. Told her all about his condition, even said he was sorry, in a way. But in another way, he wasn’t. And then he cried like a baby and told her she was polluted now, too. He said he’d had it long enough that he was sure he’d lost his mind. And she would now go like he did, go to places inside his head, and find that all rules, all laws, all reason would slip off her, too, like a coat falling to the carpet. Nothing seemed real anymore, he said, and there was no longer any difference between his waking life and his dream life. It was all the same and you had to realize it as the true state of grace, because that’s what it was. And he wondered if she would feel as free as he did to taste everything, run his polluted tongue over the blackest ridges and furrows in the worst places. He saw pictures in his head, of dark, rutted lesions, of cancers, ringed holes that were just under his skin—and he had to make the pictures real. He drew pictures of these things—rows of red circles—on cocktail napkins, newspapers, menus. The laundry girls would find them in his pockets. The maids would pick them up off the desks and bureaus. He told her he couldn’t stop thinking of them, of red-ringed sockets and red-ringed necks and cervices, and then everything started to look like how the disease looked in his head. And if it didn’t, he’d make it so. The darkness he felt all around, he said he’d had to decide a long time ago to swallow it whole.

Hop felt his mouth go dry. He felt his cigarette slip from his fingers. The green dark of the lawn, it seemed suddenly filled with the red circles, the circles from the blanket the girl had shown him not an hour before

“The funny thing is she passed the Wasserman. Her doc said he’d probably had it for years and was no longer infectious. But he never seemed sick to me.”

“Why don’t you go to the police? The papers?”

He looked at Hop, an ember of his cigarette crackling. “She

wouldn’t like it.”

“Oh,” Hop said.

“He told her that he got it from some mongrel cunt on a trip to

Panama,” the man said. “That’s what he said. To my girl.”

Hop nodded.

“I met her at the church picnic in Lomita. She was about to take a

job as a carhop at the Hot ‘n’ Tot when I talked her into coming here.”

Hop nodded again. He didn’t know what else to do.

As he drove, he tried not to think of the look on the man’s face. Tried not to think of the waitress at the Eight Ball. Tried, most of all, not to think about the red-ringed blanket that had hung before his eyes. (Was it his imagination or had it smelled so strongly of blood that he might have been in a butcher’s back room? It couldn’t still smell, could it?)