“Recently?”
“Uh-huh. Hey Lena! Gimme that J. an’ J.” Scrawny passed her the baby oil. Rising, Honey shrugged off the open uniform and sat down again, negligently bare.
“Funny thing: I don’t sweat hardly, even in the lights.” Shaking a puddle of oil into a palm, she started massaging her thigh. “But sex suppose to make you sweat, you dig? So I got to fake it.” She coated her left thigh, then started on the right. “I mean, can’t have a sexy gal don’t sweat, you know?”
It seemed about time to acknowledge this performance: “An’ Miz Scarlett, you know you cain’ show yo’ bosom ‘fo’ three a clock.”
Long pause while she trained bland eyes on me, then Honey smiled with a sudden, lovely sweetness, and when she replied, the chitlins were dialed way down. “Anyway, it helps my skin. What do you want with Lee?”
By now, my cover story had a lapidary shine: “Lee’s got some money coming from her stepmother. The mother paid me to look for Lee, so she could get the money. I’ve never met Lee, but everyone I’ve talked to seems to think she’s an unusual person.”
Another bland stare, then Honey handed me the bottle. “Do my back, will you?” She leaned forward in the chair. I spattered oil between her shoulder blades, then rubbed her skin as clinically as possible. She remained silent, her face invisible.
“There you go.”
She sat up. “Thanks; give me the bottle.” She dappled herself with oil while I kept my eyes on her face and wondered where to wipe my hands.
Her smile grew mildly taunting. “Keep talking.”
“That’s all, really.”
“Hm.” She spread the oil, watching my face with that bland look. “Am I bothering you?”
“A bit, yes.”
“Why?”
This was growing tiresome. “Partly because you’re shining me on, and I didn’t do anything to justify that.”
“Jus-tee-fy that!” The chitlins returned for one phrase, then she resumed her normal speech. “What’s the other partly?”
“I’m strongly tempted to like it.”
She began oiling her arms, but absently, as if she were taking a solo sunbath. “What are you really doing here?”
I looked at her. No longer teasing, she lounged as unselfconsciously as if her shiny flesh were shrouded in a tent. Like her hands, her face was oddly slender, with grave, knowing eyes. She regarded me patiently, like a schoolteacher waiting for an answer from a slow child.
Something about her encouraged candor. “There’s another film - like this one,” waving vaguely toward the set, “and Lee’s in it.”
Honey nodded.
“Only she’s not really in it. Her closeups were cut in to match a different girl.” Honey’s eyelids drooped at that one. “I know why the film was faked: to extort money from Lee’s stepmother. But it couldn’t have been done without Lee’s cooperation.”
“You think the girl’s holding up her mother?”
“It might seem that way.”
“But you don’t believe it. How come?”
“Doesn’t fit. I meant it about Lee being a special person: almost otherworldly.”
“And girls like that don’t associate with dirty movies.” There was no edge in Honey’s soft, encouraging voice.
“That’s not it; but girls like Lee don’t blackmail their families.”
Honey studied me thoughtfully, methodically kneading her cheeks and throat. Then she nodded. “What if Lee doesn’t want to get found?”
“That’s possible, but I’d like to make sure she’s all right.”
“And that she’s as nice a girl as you think.”
“That too, I guess.”
Sighing, Honey dropped her hands in her lap. “You’re better off not messing with it. I don’t know anything myself, but I get a bad feeling about this place.” She looked around her. Another sigh. “Well, I’ll tell you where she’s hiding: with some old gay guy up in the hills.”
“Candy Wishbourne?”
“Don’t gimme names, and don’t you say I told you, hear?” Her drawl was creeping back in, as she retreated to her original distance. She stood up, stretching. “Look like Dolores is done fluffin’ ol’ Chuck, so I gotta clock back in.”
Honey stood over me, knee to knee. From my seated position, she resembled the Venus of Willendorf. “You keep on keepin’ on; but be sure you lookin’ for the right thing in the right place.”
The director said, “We’re ready, Honey.”
“Comin’.” She looked at me for another beat, smiled gently again, then swung back toward the set.
The cast was busily re-entangling as I quietly let myself out.
Chapter 12
Wheezing up into the twilit Hollywood hills toward Candy Wishbourne’s, I wanted a third eye to monitor my rear-view mirror. But no vans behind so far, no traffic at all on these semi-rural lanes. Streetlights were straggling on erratically as their photocells decided independently when it was indeed dark, while ten thousand insects set out tiny sheet music and rosined their hind legs.
Candy’s driveway was lined with cars tonight: Mercedes, Beetle, MG-TC, mini-pickup - and a flawless 1947 Packard resting on fat whitewalls by the front door.
Wrought-iron porch lamps splashed amber light on a large red cross decorating the door. Party music floated out the windows. I rang and waited.
The door was opened by a nurse out of a music hall sketch: tiny cap riding a bouffant wig, double nose cone bosom straining a uniform dress short enough to expose the garters holding up white stockings. Spike-heeled pumps no nurse could ever stand in.
“Well look who’s here!” in a ringing basso. The nurse was Herbie.
“Oh! Herbie; right. I’m Stoney Winston, remember? I came to see Candy, but I guess I should have called first. Having a party?”
Herbie focused, more or less, on a spot six inches in front of me. “Having. A. Party. A rhetorical question, yes? Or do you think I always dress this way?”
“Well no...”
“I’ll bet you do. I’ll bet you secretly do. Think, I mean, not dress. Well why not?”
“Am I intruding?”
“I love intrusions. And extrusions. And protrusions. Come on in; show us your protrusion.” Swinging the door wide, Herbie teetered toward the living room on his spike heels. I followed, doubtfully.
The dim living room continued the hospital motif. A bar was set out on a rolling gurney, complete with lab beakers for glasses. The ice bucket was a bedpan and other bedpans offered hors d’oeuvres. The all-male guests were costumed in lab coats, green surgical suits with paper shoe covers, or like Herbie, nurses’ outfits. One reveler affected a patient gown which exposed his back and butt. People talked in couples or small groups, or sat alone, immobilized in chemical pursuits. There was pot too, from the smell.
Though bizarre, the effect was subdued or even dull, as if all the energy had been drained in carrying out the party theme, leaving none for the festivities themselves. I walked through suspended conversations and guarded looks, smiling politely, toward the chromium hospital bed against the opposite wall, on which Candy Wishbourne reclined, a fat odalisque in silk pajamas.
“Hey Candy.”
“Ohmygod, look at you. Doctor Winston, I presume? Are you with someone? Why didn’t you tell me? I never guessed.”
“I’m alone.”
“Where’s your costume? You must have a costume or Herbie will throw you out on your tushie. No, just kidding - though he’d like to.”
“What’s the occasion?”
“I am, or more properly, my insides are. Yes, my Galens have consented to carve me up at last. Hospital tomorrow, surgery Monday, and out by the end of the week, right as a fiddle, fit as rain, big as a dollar. That’s why they call doctors Hippocrits. Wait: a moment to consult my jug.” Candy sucked on a length of surgical tubing attached to a hanging IV bottle, modified with glass lab equipment to make a water pipe. His eyes bulged and watered as he held the smoke down, then he w
hooshed marijuana fumes at me, coughing.
“Should you be smoking that?”
“Touching concern, dear man, but not to worry. Only booze is banned, you see; the issue being my liver. Or would that be tissue?”
“I’m sure things will turn out for the best.”
“Now I get it: you came as Doctor Pangloss. Cute.” Candy inhaled another lungful.
“Candy, I really came to see Lee Tolman. Where is she?”
“Where are the snows of yesteryear?”
“I know she’s here; her friend Honey told me.”
“You mean, ‘her friend told me, Honey.’ You’re sweet too.”
“Please, Candy. It’s quite important.”
“My attention has turned inward. I’m visualizing the shape of my pancreas.” He siphoned out another toke of pot.
“Well, as long as I’m here, mind if I have a drink?”
Candy raised two plump arms to indicate the house was mine.
I mixed a weak, warm scotch, declining ice cubes from the bedpan, then settled my face in a blank, pleasant expression and wandered toward the kitchen. Herbie was bent over the oven, removing a cookie sheet of broiled cheese and crackers.
“Clever party, Herbie. Your idea?”
“Well, the concept. I mean, I couldn’t really surprise him, could I? Besides, I didn’t know where to rent all this shit.” He waved the cookie sheet and one cracker skated off the edge to land on the stove.
I picked it up and ate it. “Good.”
“I was going to serve nothing but liver: paté, braunschweiger, rumaki - you know; but it seemed a bit much. Oh well.”
“I understand. Say, where’s the bathroom, Herbie?”
“Getting to you already? Down the hall.”
I left him to lay out his crackers in a fresh bedpan.
I headed down the plastered, oak-beamed hall, pretending to search for the bathroom, cracking open doors set in deep recesses. Workroom filled with drafting table, blueprint cases, swing-arm lamp. Nope. Tiny den with a huge projection TV at one end and a loveseat at the other, now occupied by a male couple giggling dreamily at a commercial. Master bedroom furnished in Early American: empty. Then the bathroom, which I didn’t actually want to find, at least until I’d tried that last door down at the end of the hall.
It was locked. Knocking; waiting; waiting; knocking. No response. I knocked again.
“Go away.” The voice was female.
“Lee?”
“Who is it?”
“Lee? I’m Stoney Winston. Can we talk?”
“No.”
“Listen, I’m not - not a party guest.” Silence. “I came to talk to you. Honey told me you were here.”
“Honey?”
“At the studio. A black lady.”
“Yes.”
“She said you’d be here. Please, Lee; it’s important for you.”
“Why?”
“The film. It’s gotten out of hand. I’m worried about you, Lee. Someone’s dead.”
Long pause, then, “Who’s dead?” The door opened a crack. I couldn’t see who was behind it. “Who’s dead?”
“I don’t know - a woman. Can we talk?”
“Who are you?”
“Stoney Winston; I told you.”
“I mean, where do you come in?”
“I was looking for you when I found the dead woman. I thought she was you.”
The idea seemed to reach her. “Why would anyone want to kill me?”
“That’s what I have to find out. Please, Lee.”
Another long pause and then the door swung open. Lee Tolman scrutinized my face as if taking inventory, then dropped her eyes and stood back from the door.
No mistaking her: carrot hair, pale skin, oversized green eyes with almost invisible lashes, and a strange air of abstraction, as if much of her were simply elsewhere.
That weird, incorporeal beauty: the improbable spectral glow pulsing somehow, somewhere, inside. The face in the film was Lee’s - no doubt about it.
But not the body. Standing there in cutoff shorts and pink T-shirt, her actual body was fuller-fleshed and bigger-boned, with strong, square feet and peasant ankles.
I felt obscurely betrayed by that thick form. The face that had floated so compellingly above the slender movie body was now brought down to earth by a heavy load of sullen, stolid flesh. My Lee had been illusion - an editor’s sleight-of-hand. This Lee was over-weight and clunky.
She sat on the bed, still absorbed in her own thoughts, and I watched the shiny flesh tighten over fat as she flexed her knees. Her shoulders were plump as well, and her breasts were large and round - not the sloping cones I remembered from the film.
Memory stirred: something about breasts; then it slipped away. “Lee, I found a pornographic film. I thought you were in it. But I’m a film editor, and when I studied the work print, I saw that your closeups were cut in later to match another... actress, to make it look as if you’d made the film. The fact is, you didn’t.”
She nodded, still staring at the rug.
“No one had seen you for two weeks, so I went looking. I found out about the Universal Church.”
Lee’s mouth wrinkled at the name.
“I thought you might be staying on a boat down at the marina, so I went looking for you there. I boarded the boat and searched it. There was a dead woman on the boat. I thought she was you.”
Lee looked at me, puzzled.
“I couldn’t see her face, but I recognized her body from your film.” One slack breast spilling out of her bikini top. Breasts again, but what...? “I didn’t know then that the film had been faked. You see why I thought it was you?”
Memory coming closer: pink foothills behind a scrim. Oh, no!
Lee got it simultaneously: “Peeper!”
“Yes. I just figured it out.”
“Peeper’s dead?” Her mouth dropped open and she swung her head in tiny, denying arcs. “No.”
“Yes, Lee. The body belonged to the woman in the film.”
“Peeper made that film with Jokie Driscoll.”
“Then that was Peeper on Isaiah Hammond’s boat. Do you see why I thought you might be in trouble?”
“Why me?”
“I met your mother.”
“She’s not my mother.”
“I mean your real mother, Ritchie Gershon. She told me about you and Hammond.”
“That I slept with him? That’s not ‘in trouble.’ “
“True, but Peeper was, and she was connected with Hammond, just like you.”
“I don’t think she slept with him.”
“But she was killed on his boat. And because I found her, Hammond tried to have me killed too.”
Lee stared at me, frowning, as if chasing down a fugitive thought. Then, “Yes, what about you? You never said where you fit in.”
I sat down beside her, struggling to round up my own straying thoughts. There was no place to go without bringing up the extortion threat and Denise. Well, so be it.
She waited me out with eerie patience, until I’d assembled something to reply. “Denise Tolman hired me to find you because she wanted to suppress that film. The film bothered me, Lee, even before I realized it was faked. It didn’t seem right. Your face was too... spiritual.”
This corny word changed her. Lee looked at me in mild surprise and life flowed into her face. “Spiritual?”
“That’s right: a beautiful, inward-looking quality. I couldn’t square it with a dirty movie.”
She actually looked animated.
“No one with such an inner light could have made that film.”
Lee was nodding now in unison with my little hymn, and even as I mouthed this empty pap, I felt her uncanny power to transform it into truth. She had the gift of saints and demagogues: the ability to confer belief.
“Then I visited your mother in Ventura and she told me all about you. I think she loves you very much, Lee, but she’s cut off.” She looked pained at this. “Everyt
hing she said confirmed your... essential truth, your spiritual ambience.” Though lacking all talent for these pieties, I sounded strangely sincere. I was starting to scare myself.
And Lee was still nodding. “I hoped Mama saw the truth. I tried to tell her.”
“I know you feel a threat too. That’s why you’re hiding here.”
“Not from Isaiah.”
“Who, then?”
“Not who.’ Her face closed slightly. “I thought you understood.”
“I sometimes feel the truth before I understand it.” She nodded again, as if this were logical. “Help me understand it.”
Lee’s personality disappeared, as if adjourning to an inner room. Then, after a lengthy introspection, she raised her two hands and inspected them, as if for cleanliness. “I don’t know. I’ll think about you.”
“How do you mean?”
“I’ll think. I trust my thoughts. But not tonight.”
“Tomorrow, then?”
“I don’t know.”
“Let me come back tomorrow, please?” She stared at me calmly. “Please, Lee? It’s important.”
Finally: “Yes, it feels important. Yes.”
“And stay here where it’s safe.”
“Yes.”
“I’ll come back tomorrow morning.”
“Tomorrow.” For the first time, Lee smiled.
Back down the hall toward the front of Candy’s house. The living room orgy, if such it ever was, seemed more listless now than ever, with people standing or sitting dully. Candy an inert silk pile on his chrome bed. Herbie on the white piano stool, turning the nurse’s wig in his hands as if puzzling over a small, hairy beast he’d trapped. In the provocative dress, with his own quarter-inch-long hair revealed, he resembled a caught collaborator, humiliated by the French Resistance.
Chapter 13
Puffing clouds of smoke through the Sunday morning sunshine bouncing through my front windows from the patio, as I surrendered to an occasional craving: a cheap cigar. I pretended this ten-cent cheroot was a sweet Havana corona and the puffer was my mentor, Sigmund Freud.
His small, neat feet paced out a tidy pattern as he talked. “Regarding Fraulein Tolman, the picture you present is inconsistent.”
“That shouldn’t surprise you, Doctor.”
“Nothing surprises me.” Unhitching circular spectacles, he scrubbed them with a dazzling hankie. “But you are, as an observer, an amateur at best.” Freud peered into a corner, as if surveying a full lecture hall.
“Consider...”
“I’m over here.”
“Ach.” He reinstalled his spectacles; revolved: “Ah! Why have you this need to be elusive?”