Tough Luck L.A., page 20
“You’re a very nice young man.” She paused, then added, “Maybe a little confused,” as an afterthought.
“Is Alex here?”
“No. We sent Alex and his friend home. We had to convince them first that you were going to be all right.” She smiled broadly.
“I’m not trying to do the wounded soldier routine to win back my sweetheart,” I told her.
“I know, darling. Don’t you worry. Ellen doesn’t even know about this.”
That was a little too assuring, but anyway, I still said, “Good. I just didn’t know where else to go and I was afraid because I—”
“Try to hush, Benjamin. You’ll feel better.”
“I just want you to understand.”
Mrs. Brockhurst said she understood. We didn’t say anything for a few minutes, then, almost to herself, she said that she hoped that Ellen and I would be able to work things out for ourselves. We were “such a nice couple.”
I kept trying to say something, but each time I started to open my mouth she told me I should lie still and not talk. She went on to tell me that, although he hadn’t said much, the doctor had appreciated my apology. I had made a big start toward breaking the ice between us. I guess I’d been delirious because I had absolutely no recollection of what I’d said. But, from piecing together Mrs. Brockhurst’s remarks, I gathered that my oath of contrition had covered two main areas. Number one, that I deeply regretted the rift between the doctor and myself as evidenced a few days back in the Hall of Justice and fervently wished that I had stayed to explain myself and dispel the misunderstanding that existed between us. Number two referred to the Brockhursts’ twenty-fifth anniversary party at which I had imbibed to excess and made a spectacle out of myself by climbing the highest palm tree on their grounds and getting stuck up in the fronds until a handful of firemen had lugged a ladder out to get me down. This little scene had been over a year and a half ago, but my contention had been that this was when my rapport with the doctor had first started turning sour. The fact that this faux pas still bothered me had touched the Missus and the doctor. I had apologized at the time, but I suppose they thought I had been prodded by Ellen or had just felt compelled to be polite.
I looked up at Mrs. B and felt glad for what I’d said. It relieved me that my abiding guilt had made the doctor a little more convinced I was capable of sincerity.
I fell asleep again. When I woke up, I cleared my throat. The house sounded completely dead. Then I heard footsteps from the kitchen. The maid put her head in the door.
“You like soup?”
“Where’s Mrs. Brockhurst?”
“No one here.”
“Yes, I’d like some soup.”
The girl brought me a bowl of beef broth. It tasted better than everything on the menu at Scandia, and after I finished a few bowls I felt like I was ready to climb Mount Everest. So I stood up and walked to the bathroom. After that, I came back and lay down again to celebrate my adventure. I started worrying about whether the doctor had called the cops and reported anything. It probably was his duty. You couldn’t just go around yanking bullets out of people without telling somebody about it.
I knew that this was really the right time to vamoose before anybody came home to stop me. So I got up and put on my pants. They were caked with dried blood and ripped in one of the knees. My shirt was nowhere to be seen. I sat back down on the bed and listened to the maid as she moved around the house. After about ten minutes, I couldn’t hear her anymore and concluded that she’d stepped outside for a minute. I hobbled upstairs as fast as I could and went into the doctor’s drawers, picked out underwear, then opened the closet and chose what looked like one of his old suits. The lapels were narrow and one sleeve looked like it was on the verge of fraying. The pants fit surprisingly well and, wearing boots, I could get away with them being a little short. I went into the bathroom, shaved with the electric razor, washed everywhere that wasn’t covered by the bandage over my shoulder, then spent about fifteen minutes trying to put on one of the doctor’s freshly laundered shirts. When I was all finished, I called a cab. Then I draped the coat over my shoulders Italian style and walked outside and leaned against the mail box on the curb. The cabbie defied reality and got there in about ten minutes. As we pulled away, I heard a car approaching behind us and looked up into the rearview mirror. It was Mrs. Brockhurst in her Coupe de Ville. I waved goodbye, but she didn’t see me—which was just as well.
50
“How many times are you gonna take my picture?”
“How many do you want me to?”
“None would be fine.”
“I gotta have something to remember you by, don’t I?”
“Listen, I don’t know where you’re comin’ from, but you been here every day—seems for a week. All you do is walk around the plaza, take a cable, then come back and walk around the plaza some more.”
“I happen to like it here. Is there anything wrong with that?”
“What’s your trip, man?”
“I don’t know. What’s yours?”
“My trip is sittin’ here in the flower stand all day.”
“Well, my trip is walkin’ around the flower stand all day.”
“I get paid for it. What do you get?”
“Enjoyment.”
“You are really weird.”
I walked back up toward the top part of the plaza by the bank. Yes, it was certainly nice to be in San Francisco. There was nothing typical about this girl and, at heart, I knew she didn’t represent the hospitality of the city, but still, nonetheless, for three days running, she had been the only person I’d spoken to outside of the night shift clerk in my quaint hotel.
I looked like shit. I felt like shit. My thoughts were like shit. It was no wonder the girl wasn’t exactly crazy about me. I looked back over toward the flower stand on the corner and saw her. She was standing outside the glass enclosure, staring after me with equal parts of incredulity and disgust crinkling up her button nose and pulling up the corners of her mouth into a smiling sort of wince.
I kept walking away and sat on a short brick side wall facing out toward Montgomery street. I tried to step outside of myself and see the part of the picture she was looking at. Here was a guy who was standing there somewhere around the corner of Montgomery and California Street every morning by the time she got to work. He was wearing a pair of unpressed wool slacks over scuffed-up pointed boots; a baggy T-shirt with captioned illustrations of Fisherman’s Wharf, Coit Tower, Golden Gate Bridge, Harbor Tours, Chinatown, and Cable Cars in bleary color across the front; the T-shirt bulged over the chest because his left arm was hanging from a sling which could be seen tied behind his neck; and it was all topped off by an unshaven face and a pair of aviator shades with the right lens shattered (I had sat on them on the plane). This guy was standing there on her turf every single day as she arrived. It was obvious he didn’t belong here. He wasn’t an executive in the 52-story tower or the bank next door. He wasn’t maintenance apparently. He didn’t seem to be a wino either. With those possibilities eliminated, what else could he be? A lame, pathetic vagrant with a crummy little instamatic who walked around all day taking pictures. At five o’clock when she was ready to leave, the guy was still there. Just when you thought he was gone for good, there he was again with his crummy little camera, hopping off the cable car and walking briskly across the street. As if he were going somewhere. But where did he go? Up the plaza steps around the tower, then back again to those same steps and down. Then he walked around the block, came back to the same place, and started all over again.
Crazy, some kind of rare nut. That’s what she was thinking. Suddenly, it became important to me to prove myself otherwise. I walked back to the flower stand and told the girl that I wasn’t really as strange as I seemed. She was actually quite pretty. Dark, long, frizzy hair held down the sides of her face with a colorful Indian headband. It was amusing to me, in some ways almost consoling. People still lived like they were in the 60’s up here. I felt sure that most of them didn’t even know what a Nielsen rating was or how the stock at Fox and Paramount was climbing like all get out.
She told me to get away from her or she’d call for the police. I told her that I had just given up a career in the Coast Guard. I was wandering around because I hadn’t been able to decide what I wanted to do. She didn’t go for it. She looked over my head at nothing, then returned to the Robert Heinlein novel she was reading.
I felt like shit. I was going buggers. I crossed the street and walked down a block or so until I found the first bar. One, two, three doubles of dark fire water and the flames were still rising up my back. The only thing I felt was more sober. It smelled and looked stale in there. An Olympia waterfall (“It’s The Water”) in perpetual motion over a well-seasoned cash register and a black, Naugahyde-cushioned bar with matching high seats down the line. The seat at the far end was turned over on its side. The bartender looked like he belonged here. Like a piece of furniture, he was just there, didn’t give a damn about what he had to look at or listen to. It didn’t matter. I watched him washing the glasses. His eyes looked interested. Like an alchemist polishing his stone, he took a certain pride in things inanimate. Fuck the rest of it and why worry. It’ll give ya trouble. Right. I put my head down over my free arm along the cushioned edge. The bartender told me there was no sleeping allowed. My nose was down in the crook of my arm and I smelled myself under the armpits. It was a rotten smell, a stink of inactivity, shiftlessness, not the healthy stink you give off after you’ve been working out, letting off some good steam. I lifted up my head and took another whiff around the watering hole. Smelled just like me. We were twinsies.
I got back on the street. It was 4:45 and I didn’t give one holy shit about the fact that the buildings would start emptying out in about fifteen minutes. I passed a drugstore and saw a pair of aviator shades in the window and thought about buying them with the half-hearted notion of improving my image. Then I reached down into my pocket. I had twenty-eight dollars. I knew I wouldn’t be able to fly back to L.A. I had confronted that little inconvenience from the start. So, at eight bucks a night, I had three more nights in the Stanford Arms, which was fine with me. Even though the black and white TV in the lobby and all the young and old derelicts and flies that came with them were compliments of the house, a man still got that hankering feeling for his very own slum.
At the rate things had been going, with three days down the tubes and another three to go, I was thinking that I’d better get back over to the plaza and put in some more time, regardless of how it all looked in the flower girl’s eyes. I passed up the sunglasses and walked back over there.
The girl didn’t look up, although I knew she saw me. I walked around the bottom of the tower and mulled everything over again just for the pure entertainment of it. I wanted to stop the last leg of a murderous scam, a monetary affair that had taken the life of someone close to me, the lives of others not so close, and almost—but not quite—mine. I had a sore arm and shoulder to prove it. I had put my money on the hope that the Frenchman believed that he’d killed me. He’d therefore be coming to Frisco at some time soon to make the final arrangements for transferring the full trust estate into his control. My hunch was that this young foreigner had to be the last remaining survivor. Therefore, the tontine would be terminated. Frenchie would inherit the original principal sum and the interest that had accrued. It was his dough and I believed that there was enough of it—and probably enough papers to sign and be notarized—so that he’d have to be right there in the flesh.
All of this made sense. What didn’t was the strong possibility that I’d been framed for a tontine member myself. This frame could have been honest, unintentional. But important things just don’t happen that way. There was somebody else involved. Somebody else had been coaching Frenchie, giving him pointers, telling him where it was he had to go. The bank obviously had a list of all the official players. But what was going on here was lost and buried far beneath the paper work. Identities can be borrowed, traded, or created at the drop of a hat. The Bank of America wouldn’t be the one to know. The only thing I had in my head was that I had to follow Frenchie to the truth. He’d lead me to somebody or something that would wrap it up completely.
51
I was so wrong.
I was coming down the short stairs by the tower, angling in toward the corner of the plaza so I could pass in front of the flower booth just for spite before I headed back over to the other entrance on Kearney Street. A sharp cold gust, and a billowy dress filled up like a sail and caught the corner of my eye. A flash of leg, long and thin, dark, perfect, fluting upward into a narrow thigh, slight like the tip of an arrow. Hands came up, then down over the pleated navy front. Long hands. Red, red glycerin lips that struck the late sunlight and shattered it. Dark, glossy hair brushed back off a fair face. Like a highdiver making her approach on the board, her head was thrown back, and her shoulders jutted back further with every step. She knew where she was. She knew where she was going. Her hands stayed along the sides of her pleated skirt, holding it down against the wind. The closer she got, the better she looked—the kind of woman who, although good in clothes, is always better without them. I felt pretty sure about that. In fact, I was certain. Because it was Denise.
We were ten feet apart and she hadn’t seen me. I crawled to the side of the flower girl’s glass booth, looked over toward the curb. Her car was still there. It was a four-door Volvo with an elderly driver in livery, double-parked, drumming his fingers over the steering wheel. I looked back toward the tower. She was going in the entrance.
I was feeling something, but I wasn’t sure what. Shock, alarm, confusion, depression? No, none of these. Peace, calm, tranquility, surcease of pain and sorrow. That was more like it. Also, not surprised. It was so simple, so obvious, and the simple reason for not having overtly suspected was because it had been that way. I thought that I must have known without knowing all along and that was why I had this sense of equanimity. It was almost religious, the feeling. I looked up at the sky. The wind was blowing the clouds, keeping the air clear and blue. The bank and the 52-story tower, the scene on the street, all of it looked beautiful because life once again made sense. The particular timing and the claimed shared experience were what had held me back from confronting it, from transposing feelings into thoughts. My reluctance, my doubt—I traced back all of my more subtle inklings to the obvious knowledge that we had had a history of not liking each other. And that had been so logical, too. If I had gotten to know her better while Vicky was living, then, well, of course, I would have wanted to know more about her. Not big things necessarily, but little things that could be pieced together artfully into all kinds of tales once Vicky was gone. And even if for some irrational reason they just hadn’t seemed right, who could have proved them otherwise? Who would have denied that Denise and Vicky had been neighbors and high school chums? It had taken her and whomever she was working with a minimum of a year to set the stage. That was a lot of time and work. It had to be because this was all worth something, something in dollar signs that would probably be more than the wildest calculations I’d had in mind.
The flower girl was closing up, pulling in her pots of white and yellow chrysanthemums. She was either pretending that I wasn’t there or she’d forgotten about me. Fine. I was standing in the middle of the plaza trying to keep an eye on everybody coming out. The Volvo was waiting, so she’d most likely be coming out the same door again. I wanted to shield myself from view but still keep a good angle on her when she came out of the building, so I walked up California toward the bank building and leaned up against a parked car. My arm and shoulder hurt again and it felt good to lean back. I took another look up at the sky and then I started daydreaming about her nipples, how long and taut they were. I could see myself bent over them, taking the two of them together, kneading the little breasts to bring the points together so I could suck on them both at the same time. I could see myself fucking her. Almost, but not quite, I could hear her moaning at me, “Put it in and fuck me;” then, “Harder!” I laughed aloud remembering all the naughtiness. Down below I was as hard as steel. I still felt like fucking her. Which amazed me. At that moment I felt I’d rather fuck Denise than anybody else alive. I wanted to slap her face and paddle her little butt. I could hear her shrieking in my ear and all it made me want to do was slap and spank her harder. What I really wanted to do was kill her. I realized that, and I could feel the excitement so bodily it made me shiver.
I glanced back toward the Volvo, then ambled over and took in the license. The driver didn’t even see me. As I was walking back over toward my waiting place, she came out. She had her arm around somebody a head taller than she was. Smug-looking, gray wings around his temples, a ruddy, bony face with a square, pronounced chin. Looked and dressed just like a magazine model. Their hips rolled in stride; they were fused together like incestuous Siamese twins. He leaned over her lips and she came up on him hard and swift. I watched him open the back door of the car, let her in, then follow after her.
They drove away and I just stood there. The flower girl’s glass cage was all shut up. She’d left without my noticing. The excitement had drained out of me. I felt spent. I was thinking about my shack in Laurel Canyon and the place seemed like a palace to me. I wanted to take a nap, but I couldn’t face walking back through that lobby full of sour-looking strangers in the clean light of day.
I walked down to Bush Street, went on up and plopped myself down in a small booth in a large Chinese-style coffee shop a little off the main drag on Grant. It was fairly busy, so I ordered up some won ton soup, a steak sandwich with fries, chocolate milkshake, tea, and coffee, wolfed it all down, bided my time; and, when the moment arrived, I put the check in my pocket and cruised out the door. I felt guilty but promised myself I’d send them something at some later date.
