The bartender was a woman too, and as Cochran watched she drew a draft beer for one of the men who had been playing bar dice. The man pulled a little cloth bag from his coat pocket and shook from it a pile of yellow-brown powder onto the bar. The bartender scooped the powder up with a miniature dustpan and disposed of it behind the bar.
Gold dust? wondered Cochran with the incurious detachment of being half-drunk. Heroin or cocaine, cut with semolina flour? Either way, it seemed like an awful lot to pay for one beer.
A black dwarf on crutches was laboriously poling his way out of the bar now, and when he had braced the door open to swing his crutches outside, Cochran caught a strong scent of the sea on the gusty cold draft that made the lamps flicker in the moment before the door banged shut behind the little man. And under the resumed knock and rattle of the dice he now heard a deep, slow rolling, as if a millwheel were turning in some adjoining stone building.
He became aware that his food was gone, along with the bourbon and a lot of the beer, and that Plumtree had a cigarette in her mouth and was striking a match. Cochran’s cigarettes were still back at the madhouse.
When she threw the match into the ashtray it flared up in a momentary flame; an instant later there was just a wisp of smoke curling over the ashtray, and a whiff of something like bacon.
“Brandy in the ashtrays?” said Cochran, in a light tone to cover for having jumped in surprise. “What’s the writing on it say? ‘No smoking near this ashtray’?”
Plumtree was startled herself, and she reached out gingerly to tilt the ashtray toward her. “It says—I think it’s Latin—Roma, tibi subito motibus ibit amor. What does that mean?”
“Lemme see.” Cochran tipped the warm ashtray toward himself. “Uh … ‘How romantic, to be … submitting … in a motor bus, having … a bit! … of love.’ ”
“You liar!” She actually seemed frightened by his nonsense. “It doesn’t say that, does it? In a motor bus? You’re such a liar.”
Cochran laughed and touched her arm reassuringly. “No, I don’t know what it says.” He took a sip from one of the beer glasses, and to change the subject he asked, “Why did you say Coors is like screwing in a canoe?”
“Because it’s fuckin’ near water. Ho ho. Let’s get out of here. Strubie the Clown ought to be home by now. I’ll go copy down the address listed for him and call us a cab.” She had got out of the booth and was striding away toward the telephone before he could protest.
“Strubie the goddamn Clown …?” he muttered to himself. “It won’t be the right guy, not this lawyer you want. Tonight?”
He at least managed to finish the bourbon and the beers before she got back and pulled him up onto his feet; but when she had marched him to the door and pulled it open—there was no sea scent on the breeze now—she hurried back inside so that she could speak to the blond woman who had been shouting, and who by this time was very drunk and crying quietly.
When Plumtree rejoined him and pushed him out across the Rosecrans sidewalk, she immediately began looking anxiously up and down the street. “I hope the cab gets here quick,” she muttered.
“Oh hell. Me too,” said Cochran, for he saw that she was now holding a purse.
Strubie the Clown’s house was a little one-story 1920s bungalow off Del Amo and Avalon in the Carson area of south Los Angeles, and after the taxi dropped them off Cochran and Plumtree hurried out of the curbside streetlight’s glare, up the old two-strip concrete driveway to the dark porch.
No lights seemed to be on inside the house, but Plumtree knocked on the door. Several seconds went by without any sound from inside, and Cochran blinked around at the porch.
A wooden swing hung on chains from a beam in the porch roof, and Cochran wobbled across the Astroturf carpeting and slumped into it—and instantly one of the hooks tore free of the overhead beam, and the swing’s street-side corner hit the porch deck with an echoing bang.
“Christ!” hissed Plumtree; she reeled back and bumped a ceramic pot on the porch rail, and it tipped off and broke with a hollow thump and rattle on the grass below. Cochran had rolled off the pivoting and now-diagonal swing, but his arm was tangled in the slack chain, and it took him several seconds to thrash free of it. The fall had jolted him. His face was suddenly cold and damp, and his mouth was full of salty saliva; beside the front door sat a wide plastic tray heaped with sand and cat turds, and he crawled over and began vomiting into it, desperately trying to do so quietly.
“You shithead!” Plumtree gasped. “We’re wrecking his place!”
Cochran was aware of the sound of a car’s engine idling fast out at the curb as if it was shifted out of gear, and then the noise stopped and he heard a car door creak open and a moment later clunk shut.
“He’s home,” whispered Plumtree urgently. “Stop it! And get up!”
Cochran was just spitting now, and he got his feet under himself and straightened up, bracing himself on the wall planks. “ ’Scuse me,” he said resentfully with his face against the painted wood. “ ’Scuse the fuck out o’ me.” He pulled his shirt free of his pants and wiped his mouth on it, then turned around to lean his back against the wall.
“Who’s there?” came a man’s frightened voice from the front yard.
“Oh,” muttered Plumtree, “I got no time for this flop.” A moment later she turned toward the front steps. “Mr. Strube?” she said cheerily. “My friend and I need your help.”
“Who are you?”
Cochran pushed the damp hair back from his face and peered out into the yard. The figure silhouetted against the streetlight glare wore baggy pants and a tiny, tight jacket, and great tufts of hair stood out from the sides of the head. The shoes at the ends of the short legs were as big as basketballs.
“We’re people in trouble, Mr. Strube,” Plumtree said. “We need to find a boy whose name sounds like … well, like Boogie-Woogie Bananas. He’ll be able to help us.”
“I … don’t know anybody whose name sounds … even remotely like that.” The clown walked hesitantly up to the porch steps, and his gaze went from Plumtree to Cochran to the broken swing. “Is he a clown? I know all the local clowns, I think—”
“No,” said Plumtree. “He’s … a king, or a contender for some kind of throne … it’s supernatural, a supernatural thing, actually. …”
Strubie’s bulbous rubber nose wobbled as he sniffed. “Did you two get sick here? Are you drunk? What have you done here? I’m going to have to ask you to leave. I’m in the entertainment business, and my schedule …”
Cochran jumped then, for suddenly a man’s voice came grinding out of Plumtree’s mouth, gravelly and hoarsely baritone: “Frank, you got a show-biz friend in the bar here!” the voice drawled amiably. “Nicky Bradshaw, his name is. Shall I tell him where you live?”
Cochran gaped at Plumtree, totally disoriented. There had been a TV star called Nicky Bradshaw—he had starred in some situation comedy in the fifties. Was this voice Flibbertigibbet talking? Cochran was pretty sure that Nicky Bradshaw had died years ago. What bar was Flibbertigibbet talking about?
“Bradshaw doesn’t … blame me,” said the clown quietly, “for his death.”
Again the man’s voice boomed out of Plumtree’s throat: “Then you don’t mind if I tell him where you live, right?”
The clown sighed shakily. “Don’t do anything.” He clumped up the steps to the porch, digging a set of keys out of the pocket of his baggy trousers, and he unlocked the front door. “Come inside, if you’ve got to talk about these things.”
Plumtree followed the clown into the dark house, and after a light came on inside Cochran stepped in too, pulling the door closed behind him.
The green-carpeted living room was bare except for some white plastic chairs and a long mahogany credenza against the far wall; impressionistic sailboat prints and unskilled oil paintings of clowns hung in a cluster over it, as if Strubie had once, briefly and with limited resources, tried to brighten the empty expanses of mottled
plaster walls.
Plumtree sat down in one of the plastic chairs and crossed her legs. Her jeans were tight, and it made Cochran dizzy to look at her legs and at the same time remember the voice she had just now been speaking with.
In the glare from the lamp on the credenza, the clown was hideous; the white face-paint was cracked with his anxious frown, and the orange tufts of hair glued onto the bald wig above his ears emphasized the exhausted redness of his eyes.
He didn’t sit down. “Who are you?” he asked, shakily pulling off his white gloves.
“That’s not important,” said the man’s voice from Plumtree’s throat. A sardonic grin made her cheekbones and the line of her jaw seem broader, and Cochran had to remind himself that it was a woman’s face.
Strubie cleared his throat. “Who’s your friend, then?” he asked, nodding toward Cochran, who, daunted by this attention, let himself fold into one of the chairs.
“I’ll tell you the truth, I don’t know.” Plumtree’s face turned toward Cochran, and the wide-pupilled eyes squinted at him. “I gotta say I don’t much like the look of him. However, he may kiss my hand, if he likes.”
Cochran shook his head and licked beads of sweat off his upper lip.
Strubie took a deep breath, and then hugely startled Cochran by reaching both hands behind his ears and peeling the white scalp, with the tufts of orange hair still attached to it, forward and right off of his head. “Who is this bananas person,” the clown asked wearily, “and how can he help you out of whatever trouble it is that you’re in?” He tossed the white bald wig onto the wooden floor. His thinning hair was gray and tangled, and the inch of unpainted forehead below his hairline was the color of oatmeal.
The light dimmed out, then brightened.
And when Plumtree spoke, it was in a woman’s voice: “Don’t tell him,” she said. “You didn’t tell him yet, did you?” Cochran glanced at her quickly, but was unable to guess which personality was up at the moment.
“Tell who,” said the clown, “what?”
“The … the man who was speaking through me,” she said. “Valorie has blocked him, for now. Did you tell him how to find the boy?”
“No,” said Strubie.
“Good. I’ll go away, and you’ll never hear from … that man, again. Or me.” Cochran thought it was Cody speaking. “Tell me how to find the boy, and no harm will come to him, I promise.”
Strubie laughed softly, exposing yellow teeth in the white-painted face. “I used to be a divorce lawyer,” he said. “I’ve hurt enough children. Today I try to … give them some moments of joy, if only in a frail, half-assed way. It’s what I can do. How do I know you’re not going to go hurt this boy, or kill him? Other people have wanted to, in the past.”
Plumtree spread her hands. “I need to find him because he can restore a dead king to life. I killed … or at least, the man you were just listening to, I helped him kill … a king, and I need to make it right.”
“A king,” echoed Strubie. “And if I tell you nothing …?”
“Then I’ll hang around. I’ll be back tomorrow. The bad man will get it out of you one way or another, and incidentally you’ll have a terrible time. Everybody will.”
“God help everybody,” said Strubie softly.
Strubie reached under the lapel of his midget’s jacket and slid out of an inner pocket a flat half-pint bottle of Four Roses whiskey; he unscrewed the cap and took a deep swig of the brown liquor; his long exhalation afterward was almost a whistle.
“The boy’s name is Koot Hoomie Parganas,” he said hoarsely. “His parents were murdered just before Halloween in ’92, because they were in the way. The Parganas boy had another person inside his head with him—you should be able to empathize!—and a lot of ruthless people wanted that person, wanted to consume it into themselves. For them to do that, incidentally, would have involved killing the boy.”
He sat down on the credenza and lowered his face into his hands. “The last I heard of him,” came his muffled voice, “he was living in an apartment building in Long Beach. I don’t remember the address, but it’s a big old rambling three-story place on the northwest corner of Ocean and Twenty-first Place, run-down, with a dozen mailboxes out front, and he was living there with a man named Peter Sullivan and a woman named Angelica Elizalde.” He raised his head and pried off his bulbous red nose; his real nose was textured and scored with red capillaries. “The building used to belong to Nicholas Bradshaw, the man who played the Spooky character in the old ‘Ghost of a Chance’ TV show—he owned the building under the alias Solomon Shadroe—but it was quit-claimed to his common-law wife, who had some Mexican last name.”
“Valorie’s got all that,” said Plumtree. “Do you owe this Koot Hoomie any money?”
“Owe him—?” said Strubie, frowning. “I don’t think so. No. In fact, I got gypped out of a reward, when I led the bad people there; they were offering a reward to whoever could find Bradshaw, find the Spooky character, and I used to work for Bradshaw when he was a lawyer, after he quit being an actor, so I was able to track him down there. I never got—”
“It sounds like you made Koot Hoomie’s life harder, doing that,” said Plumtree. “Would you like me to take any money to him, from you, as a token of restitution?”
The clown put down his bottle and stared at her out of his red, watery eyes. “I couldn’t,” he said finally, stiffly, “give you more than a hundred dollars. I swear, that’s the absolute—”
“I think that’ll do,” said Plumtree.
The clown stared at her for another few seconds, then wearily got to his feet and shuffled out of the room in his blimp shoes. Cochran could hear him bumping down an uncarpeted hall, and then a door squeaked and clicked shut.
Cochran exhaled through clenched teeth. “This is very damned wrong, Cody,” he whispered. “This poor man can’t afford your … extortion, or protection, or whatever it is. Hell, I’m sure that lady in the bar couldn’t afford to lose her purse! I’m going to—first chance I get, I’m going to pay these people back—”
“Talk the virtuous talk, by all means,” Plumtree interrupted. “Janis can give you tips on it. I’ll make my own restitutions, like always. In the meantime, I don’t need to hear your estimates of how much cash is enough to finance the resurrection of a dead king.” Her lip curled in a smile. “No offense, pansy.”
Cochran shook his head. “Janis is right about you. Did you know she escaped to save your life?”
“Well sure. She needs me a whole lot more than I need her.”
The door down the hall creaked open again, and the clown soon reappeared with a sheaf of crumpled bills in his hand.
“I’m paying not to see you people again,” he said.
“We’ll see you get your money’s worth,” Plumtree told him, standing up and taking the bills. She even counted them—Cochran could see that it wasn’t all twenties, that there were at least a couple of fives in the handful.
Strubie crouched with an effortful grunt, and picked the latex bald wig up off the green carpet; and when he had straightened up again he tugged it back over his hair, and retrieved the rubber nose from where he had set it down on the credenza and planted it firmly on his face again. “You’ve stirred old ghosts tonight,” he said hoarsely. “I’ll sleep in my full mask.”
“Let’s for Christ’s sake go,” said Cochran, struggling back up onto his feet.
Plumtree pushed the bills into the newly acquired purse and strode to the door.
When she and Cochran had stepped out onto the devastated dark porch, and then made their unsteady way down the driveway to the halo of streetlight radiance at the curb, Cochran squinted back at the house: and in spite of everything that had gone before he jumped in surprise to see five—or was it six?—thin little girls in tattered white dresses perched like sickly cockatoos on the street edge of the roof, their skinny arms clasped around their raised knees. They seemed to be staring toward Plumtree and him, but they didn’t nod or wave.
“Look at me!” said Plumtree in an urgent whisper. When Cochran had jerked his head around toward her, she went on, “Don’t look them in the eyes, you idiot. You want to be bringing a bunch of dead kids along with us? And you’re not even masked! You’d just flop down dead, right here. Those are Strubie’s concerns, whoever they might once have been, not ours.”
Cochran’s head was ringing in incredulous protest, but he didn’t look back at the girls on the roof.
Plumtree had started scuffling along the street in the direction of the gas-station and liquor-store lights of Bellflower Boulevard, and he followed, shivering and pushing his hands into the pockets of his corduroy pants.
Cochran forced himself to forget about the ragged little girls and to focus on Plumtree and himself. “We’ve got plenty enough money for a motel,” he said. “To sleep in,” he added.
“Maybe it’s a motel we’ll wind up at tonight,” Plumtree allowed, “but it’ll be in Long Beach, I think. We need to find another cab.”
Cochran sighed, but broadened his stride to keep up with her. Perhaps because of Long John Beach’s upsettingly wrong lyrics to “Puff the Magic Dragon,” misunderstood rock lyrics were now spinning through Cochran’s head, and it was all he could do not to sing out loud,
Had a gold haddock,
Seemed the thing to do,
Let that be a lesson,
Get a cockatoo,
Wooly bully …
Plumtree called for a taxi from a pay phone at an all-night Texaco station on Atlantic, and when the yellow sedan rocked and squeaked into the shadowed area of the lot where the phone was, out by the air and water hoses, Cochran and Plumtree shuffled across the asphalt and climbed into the back seat. The driver had shifted into neutral when he had stopped, but even so the car’s engine was laboring, and it stalled as Plumtree was pulling the door closed; the driver switched off the lights, cranked at the starter until the engine roared into tortured life again, and then snapped the lights back on and clanked it into gear and pulled out onto the boulevard before either of his passengers had even spoken.