Kitabı oku: «Coldheart Canyon», sayfa 9

Chapter 4

Burrows had brought both painkillers and tranquillizers that Todd supplemented with a large order from Jerome Bunny, a ratty little Englishman who’d been his supplier of illicit pharmaceuticals for the last four years. Under their influence, Todd spent the next twenty-four hours in a semi-somnambulant state.

The rain was unrelenting. He sat in front of Maxine’s immense television screen and watched a succession of images of other people’s pain–houses gone, families divided – dreamily wondering if any of them would exchange their misery for his. Every now and then a memory of the visage he’d seen in the mirror–vaguely resembling somebody he’d known, but horribly wounded, filled with pus and blood – would swim up before him, and he’d take another pill, or two or three, and wash it down with a shot of single malt, and wait for the opiates to drive the horror off a little distance.

The new dressings Burrows had put on, though as promised they indeed left his eyes uncovered, were still oppressive, and more than once Todd’s hands went up to his face unbidden, and would have ripped the bandages off had he not governed himself in time. He felt grotesque, like something from a late-night horror movie, his face – which had been his glory – become some horrible secret, festering away beneath the bandages. He asked Maxine what movie it was – some Rock Hudson weepie – in which a man was covered up this way. She didn’t know.

‘And stop thinking about yourself for a while,’ she said. ‘Think about something else.’

Easily said; the trouble was thinking about himself came naturally to him. In fact, it had become second-nature to him over the years to put all other considerations out of sight: to care only about Todd Pickett, and (on occasion) Dempsey. Not to have done so would have meant a diminution of his power in the world. After all, he’d been playing a game which only the truly self-obsessed had a chance of victory. All others were bound to fall by the wayside. Now, when it would have been healthier to direct his attention elsewhere, he’d simply lost the knack. And he had no dog by his side to love him for being the boss, whatever the hell he looked like.

Late in the day Maxine came back from her visit to the Hideaway, as she had now dubbed it, with some good news. The house in the hills was just as Jerry Brahms had advertised.

‘It’s the only house in the Canyon,’ she said.

‘Which Canyon?’

‘I don’t even think it’s got a name.’

‘They’ve all got names, for God’s sake.’

‘All I can tell you is that it’s somewhere between Cold-water and Laurel. To be perfectly honest I got a little lost following Jerry up there. He drives like the Devil. And you know my sense of geography.’

‘What is the house like?’

‘Right now it’s practically empty. There’s some old stuff in there – looks like it goes back to the fifties, maybe earlier – but nothing you’d want to use. I’ll have Marco choose some furniture from the Bel Air house and move it over. Get you comfortable. But really it’s ideal for what we need right now. By the way, Ms Bosch has been calling my office. She got quite pushy with Sawyer. She’s absolutely certain you’re in Hawaii screwing some starlet.’

‘If that’s what she wants to think.’

‘You don’t care?’

‘Not right now.’

‘You’re certain you don’t want to see her?’

‘Christ. See her? No, Maxine. I do not want to see her.’

‘She was pretty upset.’

‘That’s because she wanted a part in Warrior, and she thought I’d get it for her.’

‘Okay. End of discussion. If she calls again –?’

‘Tell her she’s right. I’m in Hawaii fucking the ass off anyone you care to name. Manipulative little bitch.’

‘So here,’ Maxine said. She proffered an envelope.

‘What’s this?’

‘They’re the pictures I took of the Hideaway.’

He took the envelope. ‘It’ll be fine,’ he said before he’d even looked at the photographs.

‘You might be there for a few weeks. I want you to be comfortable.’

Todd pulled out the photographs.

‘They’re not the best, I’m afraid,’ Maxine said. ‘It’s one of those throwaway cameras. And it was raining. But you get the idea.’

‘It looks big.’

‘According to Jerry they used to call them dream palaces. All the rich stars had them. It’s hokey, but it’s got a lot of atmosphere. There’s a huge master-bedroom with a view straight down the Canyon. You can see Century City; probably the ocean on a clear day. And the living room’s as big as a ballroom. Whoever built it put a lot of love into it. All the mouldings, the door-handles, everything is top of the line. Of course it gets campy. There’s a fresco on the ceiling of the turret. All these faces leaning over looking down at you. Famous movie stars, Jerry said. I didn’t recognize any of ’em but I guess they were from silent movies.’ She paused, waiting for judgment. Todd just kept looking at the pictures. ‘Well?’ Maxine finally said. ‘Too Old Hollywood for you?’

‘No. It’s fine. Anyway, isn’t that what I am now?’

‘What?’

‘Old Hollywood.’

Chapter 5

Jerry Brahms had been a child-actor in the late thirties, but his career hadn’t lasted into puberty. He’d been at his ‘most picturesque’, as he liked to put it, at the age of nine or ten, after which it had all been downhill. Todd had always thought of Brahms as being slightly ridiculous: with his overly-coiffed silver hair, his mock-English diction, and his unforgiving bitchiness about the profession to which he’d once aspired.

But Jerry knew his Hollywood, there was no doubt of that. He lived and breathed the place: its scandals, its triumphs. He was most informed about the Golden Age of Tinseltown, which coincided, naturally enough, with the years of his employment. In matters relating to this period his knowledge was encyclopaedic, as he’d proved three years before, when Todd had been looking for a new house. Jerry had volunteered his services as a location scout, and after a week or two had taken Todd and Maxine on a grand tour of properties he thought might be suitable. Todd had not wanted to go; he found Jerry’s chatter grating. But Maxine had insisted. ‘He’ll be heartbroken if you don’t go,’ she’d said. ‘You know how he idolizes you. Besides, he might have found something you like.’

So Todd had gone along; and it had turned out to be quite a trip. Jerry had organized the tour as though he was entertaining royalty (which perhaps, as far as he was concerned, he was). He’d hired a stretch, supplied a champagne-and-caviar hamper from Greenblatt’s in case they wanted to picnic along the way, and a map of the city, on which he’d meticulously marked their route. They went down to the Colony in Malibu, they wound their way through Bel Air and Beverly Hills; they looked at Hancock Park and Brentwood, their route plotted by Jerry so that he could show off his knowledge of where the luminaries of Hollywood had lived and died. They passed by Falcon Lair on Bella Drive, which Valentino had built at the height of his fame. They went to the Benedict Canyon Drive home where Harold Lloyd had spent much of his life, and past Jayne Mansfield’s Pink Palace, which was as gaudy as ever, and the house where Marilyn and DiMaggio had briefly lived in wedded bliss. They visited homes occupied, at one time or another, by John Barrymore (‘It still smells of liquor,’ Jerry had remarked), Ronald Colman, Hearst’s widow, Marion Davies, Clara Bow, Lucille Ball and Mae West. Not all the houses were for sale, nor open for inspection; in some cases Jerry’s research had simply turned up a property close by, or one that resembled the house in which some luminary had lived. Other properties were located in areas that had become shadows of their glamorous selves, but Jerry didn’t seem to care, or perhaps even notice. The fact that stars whose faces had become legendary – whose names evoked lives of elegance and luxury – had lived in these homes blinded him to the fact that there was often decay around them. They were like sacred sites, and he a pilgrim. Todd had found the tenderness with which he talked about these places, and about the people who’d once occupied them, curiously touching.

Four or five times during the trip Jerry had directed the driver to a certain spot, invited Maxine and Todd to get out of the limo in order to show them a certain view, then presented them with a photograph taken on precisely the same spot sixty or seventy years before, when many of the places they visited had been little more than an expanse of cactus and sand. It had been an education for Todd. He hadn’t realized until then how recent Los Angeles was, nor how tenuous its existence was. The greenery was as artificial as the stucco walls and the colonial facades. The city was one enormous back-lot, fake and fragile. If the water ever ceased to pump then this verdant world, with its palaces and its swooning falls of bougainvillaea, would pass away.

As it turned out, Todd hadn’t ended up buying any of the properties Jerry had shown them that day, which was probably for the best. He finally decided to stay in his house in Bel Air, but substantially remodel it. It didn’t matter, Jerry had said, apparently reserving his opinion on whether Todd would join the pantheon of guests, nobody legendary had ever lived there.

Once Todd had said yes to the house in the hills, it took a day to get the move to the Hideaway properly organized; a day which left Todd spent sitting at the window of the Malibu house, staring at the pale reflection of his bandaged face in the rain-spattered glass. Technically, the painkillers Burrows had given him should have left him without any discomfort whatsoever, but for some reason, even when supplemented by some of Bunny’s specials – not a minute of that day passed without his being acutely aware of the pressure of the gauze and the bandages on his face. He morbidly wondered if perhaps he wouldn’t be left with this residue of feeling for the rest of his life; he’d heard of people who’d had certain operations who were made much worse by the surgeon’s knife, and indeed were never the same again. The thought terrified him: that he’d done something completely irreversible. But there was no use in regretting it. All he could do now was hope to God that this unavoidable complication, as Burrows insisted it was, would be quickly cured, and he’d have his face back intact. He wasn’t even hoping for improvement at this point. Just the old, familiar Todd Pickett face would do fine; creases, laugh-lines and all.

Later, Marco came to pick Todd up, having spent the morning moving some essentials over to the new house. Todd went with him in the sedan, Maxine followed on.

‘I got lost twice this morning,’ Marco said, ‘going back and forth from the old house to the new one. I don’t know why the hell it happened, but twice I got all turned round and found myself back onto Sunset again.’

‘Weird,’ Todd said.

‘There are no street signs up there.’

‘No?’

‘There aren’t many houses, either, which is what I like. No neighbours. No tour buses. No fans climbing over the walls.’

‘Dempsey used to get them!’

‘Oh yes, old Dempsey was great. Remember that German? Huge guy? Climbs over the wall, gets Dempsey’s teeth clamped in his ass and then –’

‘Tries to sue me.’

‘– tries to sue you.’

They chuckled at the incident for a moment, then rode in silence for a while.

Chapter 6

‘So what exactly did Jerry tell you about this place?’ Todd asked Maxine as they stood outside the Hideaway.

‘Not much. I told you he’d played here as a kid? Yes, I did. Well, he said he had wonderful memories of the house. That was about all.’

Maxine hadn’t taken any pictures of the exterior, it had been raining so hard that day. Now, seen clearly for the first time, the house appeared much larger than Todd had anticipated; perfectly deserving of the term ‘dream palace’. He couldn’t get a complete grasp of its size because the vegetation around it had been left to run wild. A large grove of bamboo to the right of the front door had grown fully thirty feet, its tallest stalks standing higher than the chimney-stacks. Bougainvillaea grew everywhere in lunatic abundance, purple, red, pink and white; and even the humble ferns, planted in the shade of the perimeter wall, had flourished there, and grown antediluvian. There was room beneath the fronds to stand with your hands raised and still not touch the nubby spores on their underbellies.

The house itself was palatial Spanish in style, with more than a hint of Hollywood fantasy in its genes. The stucco was a washed-out pink, the roof a washed-out red. There was a great deal of elaborate tilework at the front steps, and around the windows, the tiles themselves still bright blue and turquoise and white, the complex interplay of their patterns lending a touch of Moorish beauty to the façade. The front door looked as though it had been purloined from the set of a medieval epic; the kind of door Douglas Fairbanks Senior might have slammed and bolted shut to keep out an army of evil-doers. It would have sufficed too, in its enormity. Maxine had to push hard to open it; and when it finally swung wide it did so not with a gothic creak but with a deep rumble, as a system of counterweights hidden in the wall aided her labour.

‘Very dramatic,’ Todd remarked, playing it off. In truth, he was impressed by the scale of the place; by its scale and theatricality. But guileless enthusiasm he’d had shamed out of him long ago. It wasn’t cool to like anything too much, except yourself.

Maxine led the way through the turret, with its grandiose spiral staircase and its trompe l’oeil ceiling, into the house. The photographs she’d taken had come nowhere near doing the place justice. Even stripped of most of its furniture, as it was, and in need of repair, it was still nothing short of magnificent. There was everywhere evidence of master craftsmen at work: from the pegged wood floors to the elegantly carved ceiling panels; from the exquisite symmetry of the marble mantels to the filigree of the wrought iron handrails, only the best had been good enough for the man or woman who’d owned this place.

Marco had artlessly arranged a few items of Todd’s furniture in the living room, a little island of brittle modernity in the midst of something older and more mysterious. Todd made a mental note to give every thing he owned away, and start again. In future, he was going to buy antiques.

They went through to the kitchen. It was built on the same heroic scale as everything else: ten cooks could have happily worked in it and not got in one another’s way.

‘I know it’s all ridiculously old-fashioned,’ Maxine said. ‘But it’ll do for a little while, won’t it?’

‘It’ll do just fine,’ Todd said, still surprised at how much the place pleased him. ‘What’s out back?’

‘Oh the usual. A pool. Tennis courts. And a huge koi pond. Probably a polo field for all I know.’

‘Any fish in the pond?’

‘No. You want fish?’

‘It’s no big deal.’

‘I can get koi for you if you want them. Just say the word.’

‘I know. But it’s not worth it. I’ll be here a month and gone.’

‘So take them with you.’

‘And where would I put them?’

‘Okay,’ Maxine shrugged. ‘No fish.’ She went to the kitchen window and continued her description of the real estate. ‘The whole Canyon belongs to the house, as far as I can see, but the gardens spread down the hill an acre and a half and all the way up to the top of the hill behind us. There’s a guest-house up there. Perhaps two. I didn’t go look: I figured you wouldn’t be having any visitors.’

‘Does Jerry know anything about the history of the place?’

‘I’m sure he does, but to be honest I didn’t ask.’

‘What did you tell him about me?’

‘I told him you had a stalker, and she was getting dangerous. You needed to get out of the Bel Air house for a while until the police had caught her. Frankly, I’m not sure he bought it. He’s got to have heard the rumours. I think we’d be best letting him in on what’s been happening –’

‘We’ve had this conversation once –’

‘Hear me out, will you? If we make him feel like he’s part of the conspiracy, he’ll stay quiet, just because he wants to please you. He’ll only get chatty if he thinks we kept him out because we didn’t trust him.’

‘Why the hell would he want to please me?’

‘You know why, Todd. He’s in love with you.’

Todd shook his bandaged head, which was a mistake. The room around him swam for a moment, and he had to grab hold of the table.

‘You okay?’ Maxine said.

He raised his hands, palms out, in mock surrender. ‘I’m fine. I just need a pill and a drink. I sent Marco out to get some supplies.’

‘But Todd … it’s barely gone noon.’

‘So? If I stay here and get shit-faced every day for the next month who’s going to care? Find me something to drink, will you?’

‘What about Jerry? We didn’t finish –’

‘We’ll talk about Jerry some other time.’

‘Am I telling him or not?’

‘I said I don’t want to talk about it any more.’

‘All right. But if he starts to gossip, don’t say I didn’t warn you.’

‘If he tells the fucking National Enquirer it’s my fault. Happy?’

Todd didn’t wait for a reply. Leaving Maxine to search for the liquor, he wandered out to the back of the house. The lawn – which lay at the bottom of a long flight of steps from the house, their railings entirely overtaken by vines – was the size of a small field, but it had been invaded on every side by the offspring of the plants, shrubs and trees which surrounded it, many of them in premature flower. Bird of Paradise trees twenty feet tall, sycamore and eucalyptus, rose bushes and fox-gloves, early California poppies shining like satin in the grass; meadowfoam and corn lily, hairy honeysuckle and wild grape, golden yarrow, blue blossom and red huckleberry. And everywhere, of course, the ubiquitous pampas grass; soft, fleecy plumes swaying in the sun. It was uncommon, even uncanny, verdancy.

Todd strode across the lawn, which was still wet from the rain, down to the pool. Dragonflies flitted everywhere; bees wove their nectar trails through the balmy air. The pool was a baroque affair, descending from the relatively restrained style of the main house into pure Hollywood kitsch. The model, perhaps, was B de Mille Roman. A large mock-classical bronze fountain was set at the back of the pool, the intertwined limbs of its figures – a sea-god and his female attendants – rendered more baroque still by the tracery of living vines which had crept up over it. A sizeable conch in the sea-god’s hands had once been a source of rejuvenating waters for the pool, but those waters had ceased to flow a long time ago. Todd was mildly disappointed. He would have liked to have seen sparkling blue water in the pool instead of the few inches of bottle green rain-water that were there at the bottom.

He turned and looked back towards the house. It was still more impressive from this side than it had been from the front, its four floors rising like the tiers of a wedding cake, its walls lush with ivy in places, and in others naked. Beyond it, further up the hill, Todd could just see a glimpse of one of the guest-houses that Maxine had mentioned. Altogether, it really was an impressive parcel of land, with or without the buildings. Had Jerry shown it to him as part of the grand tour Todd might well have been tempted to invest. The fact that Jerry hadn’t done so probably meant that it had not belonged to anyone of significance, though that seemed odd. This wasn’t just any Hollywood show-place: it was the crème de la crème, a glorious confection of a residence designed to show off all the wealth, power and taste of a great star.

By the time he’d made his way back inside, Marco had turned up from Greenblatt’s with a car-load of supplies. He welcomed his boss with his usual crooked smile and a generous glass of bourbon.

‘So what do you think of the Old Dark House?’ ‘You know … in a weird way I like it here.’ ‘Really?’ said Maxine. ‘It’s nothing like your taste.’ She was plainly still mildly irritated by their earlier exchange, though for Todd it was past history, soothed away by his wanderings in the wilderness.

‘I never really felt comfortable in Bel Air,’ he said. ‘That house has always been more like a hotel to me than a home.’

‘I wouldn’t say this place was exactly cosy,’ Maxine remarked.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Todd said. He sipped on his bourbon, smiling into his glass. ‘Dempsey would have liked it,’ he said.