“Rachel Gershon: 1229 Sea Vista, Ventura.”
“Phone?”
Pepe smiled with sour pleasure: “No listing.” Tossing the folder at the file drawer, he swept across to his office door and opened it with ostentatious meaning.
“I may want to ask some questions later, Pepe.”
“I will attempt to fit you in.” He shut the door behind me.
The girl’s desk was still vacant when I crossed the outer office, except for a two-year-old calendar. One of those long lunches.
Back down the creaking stairs and into the sound stage, just in time for a take. The assistant camera man extended the slate one-handed, two fingers holding the clap stick open.
“Speed.”
“Mark it.”
The sound man muttered into the mike beside his Nagra recorder, “Sixteen baker take three.” Clack! The assistant scuttled back to the Eclair camera, ready to pull focus.
“And action.”
Grandpa struck a hortatory pose, intoning, “And when Jehu was come to Jezreel, Jezebel heard of it; and she painted her face, and tired her head, and looked out at a window.” The delivery was somewhere between old Finlay Currie and John Huston at his most oracular: “And he said, ‘Throw her down.’ So they threw her down: and some of her blood was sprinkled on the wall, and on the horses: and he trode her underfoot.”
Trode?
The key grip twisted a dolly knob and the camera crept silently downward. “Go, see now this cursed woman, and bury her: for she is a king’s daughter.” The key grip eased the crab dolly back from the actor while the assistant pulled focus. “And they went to bury her: but they found no more of her than the skull, and the feet, and the palms of her hands.” The script girl followed the text with a pencil, mouthing each word. “And the carcass of Jezebel shall be as dung upon the face of the field in the portion of... What? What’s that word?”
“Holy Jesus, cut!”
Grandpa’s voice lost thirty years and twenty DB of bass: “The fucking dolly blocked my cue card.”
“Take four right away.”
But the assistant caroled, “Reload!”
“Jee-zus Christ!”
I gathered the Rev. Hammond was not on the set today.
I latched the massive sound stage door and turned back into the corridor to confront a girl clacking toward me in high-heeled boots. She made a stirring long shot but did not quite survive the closeup: chestnut pageboy wig, lashes like tufts of blacking brush, deltas of umber makeup faking cheekbones. Sleeveless undershirt under a Kit Carson fringed jacket and jeans so tight they squeezed her flesh into small parentheses bracketing her hips. She carried a Lucite tray like a cigarette girl in a gangster picture.
She looked at the door. “They making one?”
“Red light’s off. They’re reloading.” The little tray compartments were packed with pills, tablets, lozenges, capsules - tan, brown, white, and olive - in every size from pinheads to stream pebbles.
She saw me looking. “Vitamins.”
“All of them?”
“Yeh really; and minerals and protein concentrate - stuff like that. Oh hell.” She pursed sticky lips at the now-revolving light beside the door. “They’re shooting again.” She clopped into a room opposite the sound stage door and dropped the tray on a table.
I followed. “What are they for?”
Under the android makeup, her smile was sweetly natural. “I’m a consultant like. See, I find out about your health and eating habits and stuff and then I prescribe vitamins.”
“Quite a variety.”
“Well sure. Natural health is real hard, cause we’re so corrupt.” I blinked. “I mean our eating and health and stuff. How’s your sex life? Oh it’s okay; I’m like a doctor, right? Nothing personal.”
“Why do you ask?”
She picked out a translucent pill full of yellow goop. “Know what this is?”
“Vitamin E?”
“Mainly, but this is different; exclusive. See those grains? Pot. Female essence. Dynamite stuff.”
“A personal testimonial?”
She frowned, struggling with the idea, then grinned. Like her smile, her teeth were engagingly natural and slightly crooked. “You got a great vocabulary. I respect that. Hey, is Pepe on the floor?”
“He was upstairs in his office. Is Pepe a client?”
“Yeh, I’m working on his wind - like he cuts the cheese a lot, you know? Embarrassing. I’m trying vitamin C.”
I considered this therapy gravely, then: “Do you have a business card?”
“Naw. I’m Peeper Martin.”
“Stoney Winston.”
“A cowboy name - only you don’t look like one.” She shook my hand with cheerful vigor.
“Peeper, I’m doing some work for Denise Tolman. She owns this lot. I’m looking for her daughter, Lee.”
“Official?” The candor washed out of her face. “Hey listen: she’s got a right to live her life.”
“You bet she does. I just need to find her to give her money.” Peeper relaxed slightly. “Denise, uh, had an offer to sell the studio and of course Lee would be involved.”
I was pleased with this improvisation, but it only revived Peeper’s wariness. “She gonna sell the lot?”
“Just an offer. Maybe nothing to it.”
“Yeh, well I gotta see Pepe - I mean about his vitamins.” She stepped out into the hall.
“Where can I find Lee?”
Peeper stood quite still, looking at me from under her sticky eyelashes. Then she walked slowly back into the room. “You know, you send funny waves.” Like Denise earlier, she stared into my eyes, one at a time. “Kinda smartass - but positive.”
I looked at her, intrigued by this nice chipper person disguised as a tart, like a happy child in a Halloween suit.
As if still reading those waves of mine, she snapped her gawky grin. “Try the fag.”
“Not an exclusive label in these parts.”
“Um, Wishbourne. Candy Wishbourne. Are you ready for that name?”
“I know Candy; the art director.”
“Right; well, she talked about him sometimes.” Peeper grabbed her tray of nostrums.
“Thanks. Say, do those things earn you a living?”
She cocked the tray on her hip and posed. “Naw, I’m a movie star.” Then she clattered off up the hall, obviously hot to tell Pepe that Denise was selling the lot.
* * * *
Lying on the water bed in Sally’s twilit bedroom, playing stethoscope: my right ear pillowed on her warm sternum, cycling slowly up and down like an anchored boat. I was listening to her romantic heartbeat and the more prosaic burbles of her supper, processing. My right eye was blinded by flesh, leaving my left one to interpret Sally’s contours without benefit of depth perception. From my worm’s eye angle, I traced a vast Saharan landscape of dunes undulating toward a tiny, golden cloud so distant it might have been a mirage, hovering at the base of foothill thighs.
Rocked by Sally’s gentle breath and lulled by muffled peristalsis, I was slipping into a light doze.
“Am I putting you to sleep?”
“Wha? Oh! No, I’m tracking every word. You said he was worried about peripherals.” Sally was rehearsing the incomprehensible details of her day at work, selling computers.
“You did hear me. But when I told him what you could do with an RS232 port, I really turned him around. I know I’m going to land that order.” Sally’s one of the best salesmen in her region.
She scratched my back and the tan landscape danced a gentle hula. “That’ll put my year-to-date way over last year’s. Hey! Then we could take a vacation.” Excited, she wrapped her arm about me so I was pillowed fore and aft.
“Stoney, are you listening?”
“Got my earmuffs on.” Sally smelled of sunshine and apples.
“About a vacation?”
“Let’s get married instead.”
“No.”
“Why not, Sally?”
/>
“Same reason as last night.”
The sting of it turned me defensive: “No vacation until I can pay half.”
My resilient cave tensed around me. “Shove off!”
She swung out of bed and thudded into the kitchen, a thoroughbred Clydesdale mare. The fridge door slammed and bottles clanked as she worked off her annoyance through excess percussion.
Laurel Canyon insects droned mantras in the dusk.
To be honest, there’s no good reason why she should commit to me. When I work, I’m away on location half the time. And when I don’t, I’m down at Unemployment. Which is partly why she earns four times what I do.
She can rent my head and body for a kind word and a plate of pasta, so why should she pay upkeep and depreciation on me?
Winston is not cost-effective.
Sally returned with fresh bottles of Dos Equis beer and stretched out at right angles across the head of the bed.
Dank silence while we sucked our beers.
“I’m sorry, Sally, but you can’t have it both ways. You can’t be independent if I’m dependent.”
“Your ego can’t stand living off a mere woman.”
I rose on one elbow to scan the length of her. “I’d call you anything but ‘mere.’ “
“You mean fat.”
Oversensitive. In fact, Sally has just enough substance to look properly female: a cheerful, ripe convexity. I lay back, pillowed on her middle.
“Though I do wish the bloody Industry would let me earn a living.”
My head bounced with Sally’s chuckle. “Bloody. You don’t often use British words.”
“I’m not British - haven’t been for half my life.”
“But you’re not quite American either.” She sat upright. “What are you?”
A long pause while the crickets went on vamping in the trees beyond the deck outside. What was I? Small-bore thinker, would-be artist, poser, floater, detached from my own culture and shipped off to be the purest kind of Californian: an immigrant to a nation-state.
“Let’s say I’m prone to self-dramatizing.”
Sally ignored that. “Why did you leave England?”
“Not my choice; I was just a kid. When my mother got fed up with being an army wife, she took me as far away as possible. I guess Los Angeles was the best she could think of, this side of Kuala Lumpur.”
And my old dad got emergency leave to fly to L.A. where he pleaded with her to come back and then wept alone in my dark bedroom before flying back and disappearing from my life.
As if she sensed my feelings, Sally wrapped her arms around her knees, trapping my head completely.
“You’re flattening my ears.”
She released me and I rolled over to lie on my back beside her.
“Sorry I overreacted to your vacation offer.”
“Okay.” She got up on her knees, planted a palm on either side of me, and started a slow reverse push-up. “Cootchy-coo, Stoney.” She swung back and forth, back and forth, upside-down bells tolling gently.
“And I promise to lighten up.”
“Shut up, Stoney.”
Sally descended like summer twilight.
Chapter 3
Tracing screechy turns through the Hollywood hills on this bright new morning, which was indistinguishable from yesterday’s because L.A. dispenses weather in job lots, often weeks at a time. I needed to check out Candy Wishbourne, who lived up here in the hills near the end of this semi-rural road, in a neighborhood so rife with sodomites they call it “Lavender Hill.”
I struggled past Candy’s driveway, missing the ceramic tile house number blushing pink below matching hibiscus. Half a mile to a turnaround, then slowly back. Down a patched concrete driveway to a sixty year old house built in Conquistador Cute: red tile roof, tan stucco troweled in rustic sweeps, picture window shaped like a MacDonald’s arch, oak door with outsized iron hinges, and a spy hole, which opened to my knock on a yellow eye.
“Candy in?”
A beat, then the eye tracked indolently down the six feet-two of me from straggling hair to sneakers, inspecting my thinnish, beaky nose, assertive chin, and frame which Sally insists is not, in fact, skinny. The eye paused appreciatively at my scrimshaw belt buckle but dismissed my no-brand jeans with a flicker.
The spy hole closed; the door opened. “Yes?”
“I’m Stoney Winston, a director. Candy knows me.”
Jeeves was five feet-four, with a black, quarter-inch crew cut and a gold stud in one earlobe. A sparrow body in red tank top and faded cutoffs. Feet bare. His thin face had stopped evolving during adolescence, but his eyes belonged to a hotel doorman or an aging cop.
“I’ll get him.” His voice was incongruous: an actor’s basso. He left me in the tiny foyer, surveying the gilt mirror and the floor of black and white parquet so overscale that two and a half squares spanned the hall.
“Hel-lo sailor!” Candy gives the Straights a show of gay clichés until they pass some private test of his.
“Hey, Candy. Saw your beer commercial last week. Nice job.”
“The driveller who lit my set made it look two feet deep.” But Candy seemed pleased that I’d noticed. Recognizing me, he dropped the Oscar Wilde impression. “Come in, dear boy; always a treat to chat with an adult.”
I followed him through an archway to the Spanish colonial living room. Once he accepts you, Candy is a pleasure to work with: easy-going, considerate, and completely professional - with a bottomless fund of movie lore and a wit as dry as silica gel. In his habitual twill jumpsuit, he looks like a fat repairman, come to fix the fridge. As if to complete this image, he rolled a vacuum cleaner away from the white sofa, to let me sit down.
“Housekeeping’s a cross I bear. Like nature, Herbie abhors a vacuum.” Turning to the Sparrow: “Don’t you?”
Herbie stared, impassive.
“And what brings you up to Wuthering Heights?”
“Candy, do you know Denise Tolman?”
“No, but I’ve been on her lot many times.”
“How about her stepdaughter, Lee?”
“Redheaded child? Mm-hm. Like some tea?”
“No thanks.”
“Well I will, since hooch is now forbidden. Herbie, be a sweetheart.” The Sparrow glared at the tone of command, but padded obediently into the kitchen. “I’m due for a spot of surgery and my picky doctor just insists on marginal liver function.”
Come to think of it, Candy looked more grey and flaccid than ever, and his flaky hair was almost gone.
“What’s this about Lee Tolman?”
“Denise is worried about her.”
“Ah, the wicked stepmother.”
“Why do you say that?”
“It’s expected; though I must say Denise doesn’t do a very good Witch of the West.”
“I thought you didn’t know her.”
Candy waggled Groucho eyebrows: “I have my sources.”
The Sparrow returned with tea in a flowery cup, the kind you assemble in sets, no two alike. Candy sipped, then puckered: “What is this bilge? I know: you put in saccharin. Ugh. He’s trying to give me cancer.”
“Redundant,” Herbie muttered, retiring to the white piano stool.
“Candy, Denise is making some financial arrangements involving Lee.” His skeptical eyebrows urged me forward. “Lee may have some money coming.”
“She could use it. She hasn’t a dime, as far as I know.”
“Then you’ve seen her recently?”
“Here and there.”
Unaccountably, I felt a billowing relief. “Is she all right?”
“Shouldn’t she be? Dear boy, what is all this?”
“Lee moved out of Denise’s home eight months ago and hasn’t contacted her since. I’ve only seen - well, some pictures of her, but she seems very unworldly - vulnerable. She worries me.”
Candy placed his cup and saucer on the marble coffee table between us and stirred his tea in small, majestic circles. I sat tig
ht.
Finally, he looked up: “She stayed here for a while, with us.”
“Here?”
“She was safe enough.” His flat tone signaled my gaffe.
“I only meant, I didn’t realize you knew her that well.”
“Oh yes, she practically lived at the studio for a while. It was after her father died. She confided in me.”
Herbie rumbled resentfully, “Her Dutch Aunt.”
Candy ignored him. “Then she went to work for that Bible thumper in Burbank, for about six months - until the good Christians fired her.”
“Isaiah Hammond’s church?”
“The Universal Christian Church of Burbank, California. Nice cadence to it.”
“Why’d they let her go?”
“Wouldn’t tithe or something; who knows? Well, she’d no place to go and no money and she wouldn’t go back to Pasadena - I mean, who would? So she came to Herbie and me.”
“Is she still here?”
“Oh no. She left about two weeks ago, for fields and pastures new.”
“She didn’t say where?”
Candy shook his head, eyeing me as if trying to decide something. Then: “Lee’s an extraordinary personality. Very quiet. Almost...”
“...Mousey.” Another footnote from Herbie.
“But she has a mesmerizing quality. Very hard to describe. I despise the term, but vibrations comes to mind.”
“I feel them myself.”
“Then I would be doubly careful.” With this cryptic remark, he set down his cup and leaned back.
Plainly, Candy was through volunteering, so I decided to take a small risk: “Did Lee have anything to do with porno films?”
He didn’t blink: “Not the kind I watch.” Zero for trying.
“I’m going to find her, Candy. Any suggestions?” He shook his head and rose. “Then do me one favor: give her my number if she comes back.”
He took my business card. “If she... gets in touch, I’ll tell her about your interest.”
His line reading was peculiar, but I couldn’t tell why. “Fair enough.” I retreated to the black and white foyer, shadowed by Herbie. “Thanks, Candy. Hope your surgery goes well.”
He semaphored a fat arm. “Not to worry: I know my liver redeemeth!”
* * * *
Standing on the sullen Malibu beach, amazed as always that Los Angeles offers three weathers at once: crisp autumn on Candy Wishbourne’s mountain, smoggy summer in the flats below, and now grey winter at the water’s edge.
Hummel’s crew ignored the dismal gloom. They were used to filming on location at great expense, then canceling the rented natural environment by erecting a studio around it. Just now, they were overpowering a small section of dismal afternoon with a golden summer sunset.