Coldheart Canyon (75 page)

And then—perhaps sooner than they’d wanted or planned—her body gave out.

Her shrieks ceased. Her death-dance ceased.

She hung in their arms like something that had once made sense but would never make sense again.

Just to be sure there was no more fun to be had with her, Virginia Maple, who’d been the second victim of the scourge of stars that had begun with the death of Rudolph Valentino, drove her hand into the dead woman’s mouth, and with the strength death and hatred had lent her, clawed out a fistful of the woman’s brains, which she threw at the tiles.

There they spattered, holding for a moment before sliding to the ground. Meanwhile someone else had gone in through her womb and pulled out her innards, like a magician’s colored handkerchiefs coming one after the other (yellow, purple, red, brown), the coils of her guts, her stomach, and all the rest attached with loose strings of tissue and fat.

Tammy saw it all.

It was a good deal more than she wanted to see; but no less than her CC[348-676] 9/10/01 2:29 PM Page 566

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eyes could take in. Not once did she look away, though every second that it continued she told herself she should do so, because this was just a common atrocity now. It was nothing to look at, and nothing to be proud of looking at.

But when it was over, and the ghosts dragged Katya’s disemboweled remains away into the fog, to put to whatever grotesque purpose their anger still demanded, she at least knew that the bitch was finally dead. She voiced that opinion, and of course Jerry—never one to sweeten things unnecessarily—replied: “Things are never the way you think they’ll be in Coldheart Canyon. We’ll see how dead she really is.”

When they went upstairs, Maxine was in the kitchen, squatting in the corner with a blank expression on her face. She looked extremely weary, as though the toll of recent events had taken fifteen years off her life. She wouldn’t get up, so Jerry went down on his haunches and started to quietly talk to her.

Finally she spoke. She’d had every intention of coming downstairs to help them, she told him, tears streaming down her face, but then the noises started, those
terrible
noises, and she could no longer bring herself to do it. She went on in the same fashion for a while, circling on herself.

“Why don’t you try to get her to stand up?” Tammy suggested to Jerry.

Then she went to pay her respects to Todd.

The Golden Boy was lying where he’d fallen, more or less; looking peaceful, more or less. Eyes closed, mouth open; blood shining on the ground around his head.

During the early years of her infatuation, Tammy had had dreams in which she would touch him. There’d been nothing sexual in these touches; or at least nothing explicitly so. Just his being there in an ordinary room, and saying to her, it’s okay, you can come over here, you can touch me. That had been the sum of it.

She’d always woken from those dreams with such a profound
yearning
in her heart: a yearning to confirm his existence in her waking world, simply by one day getting the chance to really touch him. Just to know that he CC[348-676] 9/10/01 2:29 PM Page 567

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wasn’t simply a game played with light, but a real thing, of flesh and blood.

Now here she was, and here
he
was, and she could touch him all she liked, but nothing on earth could have persuaded her to do so.

What she’d been looking for in that touch was no longer there to be found. He’d gone, and what remained, as she’d just seen in the room below (yellow, purple, red), was not worth her attention.

She turned from his corpse, fighting the instinct to say good-bye to it, and finally—unable to resist the force of instinct—saying it anyway. Then she returned to the kitchen, where she found that Jerry had succeeded in coaxing Maxine to her feet, and was now rummaging in the fridge for something cold for her to drink.

“I’m afraid there’s only beer,” he said. “Oh no, wait. There’s some milk here too. You want some milk?”

“Milk,” she said, her eyes suddenly brightening, like a child’s eyes. “Yes.

A glass of milk.”

Jerry carefully poured a brimming glass for her, and she drank it down, staring out of the window between gulps. “As soon as you’re ready,” Jerry prompted her, “we should go. Yes?” She nodded as she drank.

There were new dins from below, suggesting that the ghosts were up to fresh mischief. Nobody wanted to be around when they finally tired of their labors downstairs, and decided to ascend.

“Eppstadt?” Maxine said, her mind apparently sharpened by the milk.

“What happened to Eppstadt?”

“I told you,” Tammy reminded her.

“Oh yes. He’s dead, isn’t he?”

“Yes, he’s dead.”

“And the waiter?”

“Joe?”

“Yes, Joe.”

“He’s dead too.”

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that were littered around the house. Todd in the hallway, Sawyer somewhere in the garden, Joe the Waiter and Eppstadt in the bowels of the house; and Katya? Many places, by now.

“We should be thankful,” Jerry said.

“For what?” Maxine wanted to know.

“For getting out of here alive.”

“Let’s be thankful when we see Sunset Boulevard,” she said, a little of the old Maxine showing, “not before.”

The noise in the house was still escalating as they left, and when Tammy looked back she saw that there was a crack over the front door, two inches wide, which zigzagged all the way up to the eaves, like a bolt of black lightning.

They got into Tammy’s car, and drove down the hill. Maxine’s spurt of fortitude gave out halfway down, and she began to cry pitifully, but Tammy was having none of it.

“Shush,” she said, half gently, half not. “We’re not having any of that, you hear? It’s over, Maxine. It’s over.”

Of course that wasn’t strictly true. Her mind turned to the creatures she’d encountered in the Canyon during the night; the children. What would happen to them? And what other perverse miracles had the Devil’s Country worked upon the anatomies of those who’d ventured there? She vaguely wondered if perhaps she or Jerry, both of whom had spent some considerable time in that godless place, would have something to show for their presence there. She would have to watch herself closely, at least for a while.

By now they were almost at the bottom of the hill.

“We have to go and report all this to the police,” Tammy said. “Together.”

“Now?” Maxine said. “I couldn’t possibly.”

“We have to, Maxine. There are bodies up there. We don’t want to be accused of murder.”

“They’re going to think we’re all crazy,” Maxine commented.

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“Well, that’s easily solved,” Jerry said. “We’ll bring them up here, and they can see it all for themselves. That’ll change their minds.”

“Suppose they
do
think we’re responsible?” Maxine said. “People like to point fingers in this damn town.”

“Well they won’t be pointing any fingers at us,” Tammy said. “We’ll explain.”

“Explain?” Maxine said. “How the hell will we ever
explain
?”

“We’ll start at the beginning and go on until we’re done. We’ve got nothing to hide.”

“There’ll be no end to it,” Maxine said. “Now Todd’s dead, the press is going to be all over us. They’re going to be digging up every sordid little story about him, whether it’s true or not. They’ll print any piece of garbage that floats down the sewer. It’s going to go on for months. And you think in the middle of all this the truth is going to be heard? Forget it.

It’s going to be a circus.”

“You don’t have to be a part of the circus,” Jerry said. “None of us do.

We can just say no, and walk away. Let them write whatever they want to write. They’re going to do it anyway.”

“True enough,” Maxine sighed. “I just wanted to try to guard his reputation.”

“Maybe if you’d guarded him a little better when he was still around we wouldn’t be in this mess,” Tammy said. She caught Maxine’s reflection in the mirror; the corners of her mouth turned down in misery. “I’m sorry,” Tammy said. “Maybe that was a bit sharp.”

“No,” Maxine replied. “I let him down. He needed me and I walked in the opposite direction.
Mea culpa
.”

“What does that mean?”

“I’m responsible?” Maxine said. “And I am. Don’t think I don’t know it.”

Her reply brought an end to the exchange. They drove on in silence until they reached Langley Road, which in turn brought them on to Doheny Drive, and finally down onto Sunset Boulevard.

It was a busy intersection, the lights slow. They had to wait through three changes, creeping closer to the main tide of traffic; but there was a CC[348-676] 9/10/01 2:29 PM Page 570

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simple contentment for all three in sitting in the car and watching the buses and the messenger bikes and the Beverly Hills Rolls-Royces drive on past. Life going on, in other words, in its usual way. People going east, people going west, all oblivious to the fact that just a short drive from this loud, bright place was a cleft in the rock of the City of Angels which was deep enough to conceal miracles.

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O N E

News, like a life-form, is divided into orders and classes and kinds. Thus, what was deemed worthy of note on the front page of
Variety
(the grosses of Todd Pickett’s last four pictures, the fact that his agent, Maxine Frizelle, had been present at the death-scene, some sketchy details about the history of the house in the Canyon) was not thought appropriate for the front page of the
LA Times
(the fact that there were multiple bodies at the scene, suggesting some vague connection with the horrors of the Manson Murders; a brief synopsis of Todd’s career; elsewhere, an obituary, and elsewhere again a sincere, if hastily edited, appreciation of Pickett’s contribution to cinema); none of which was again deemed appropriate for
The National Enquirer
, which put together a special edition centered on the deaths of Todd, Gary Eppstadt and—as they put it—“
the unfortunate,
unnamed victims who were pulled down into the same spiral of decadence and
death that claimed the Hollywood power-players
,” but padded the issue out with the Old Faithfuls: Haunted Hollywood, The Tragic Deaths of the Young and the Beautiful—Marilyn; James Dean; Jayne Mansfield—

“
Doomed Souls Who Paid the Ultimate Price for Fame!
”; and all this gutter journalism of a high order by comparison with the real bottom-feeders, the journalists of
The Globe
, who printed, among countless lurid absurdities which they had clearly invented at their editorial meetings, a number of facts that were paradoxically closer to the truth of the events than anything in any other newspaper or magazine. Given their notoriously low standards of veracity, however (
The Globe
’s editors considered crudely-doctored pictures of Pyramids hovering over the Pentagon hard news), CC[348-676] 9/10/01 2:29 PM Page 574

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the publication of these reports made the truest parts of the story unprintable in any other journal. The facts became tainted by association; poisoned, in fact. If it appeared in
The Globe
, how could it be true?

The only items of the story that appeared in every location were those that were related to the hard facts of death in Tinseltown.

Todd Pickett, everyone agreed, had been on some kind of downward spiral. The cause might be disputed, but the fact that he was no longer the Most Beautiful Man in the World (
People
Cover, Jan. 1993) or the Most Successful Male Star of the Year (ShoWest, five years running) was not. In the eternal game of snakes-and-ladders that was Hollywood, Todd Pickett had done all the climbing he was ever going to do. If he’d survived, it would all have been downhill from here.

There was in fact a widely-held opinion which stated that in dying young—even dying violently—Todd had made the best career move of his life. He’d gone while the going was relatively good; and in a fashion that would assure his name was never forgotten.

“
For Todd Pickett fans the world over,
”
Variety
opined, “
today’s tragic news
brings the curtain down on a stellar career filled with glorious moments of pure
cinematic magic. But there must be many of those admirers who are relieved that
their hero will never disappoint them again. His run of spectacular successes (all
of which were produced by Keever Smotherman, who died less than a year ago at
the age of forty-one) was plainly drawing to an end. All that remained was the
sad, and regrettably all-too-common spectacle of a great star eclipsed.
”

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T W O

Tammy saw that word everywhere now:
eclipsed
. It sat hidden in otherwise innocent sentences, waiting to mess with her mind. The instant she saw it she was back in the Devil’s Country, staring up at the shape of that black moon obscuring the face of the sun. She could feel the contrary winds against her face. She could hear the sound of horses’ hooves, or worse, the wailing of Qwaftzefoni.

When that happened, she would have to put down whatever it was she was reading that had concealed the treacherous word and direct her attention back to the real world: the room in which she was sitting, the view through the window, the weight of the flesh on her bones.

Of course, the word wasn’t the only trap. Though she’d come back to the house on Elverta Road and valiantly tried to pick up the rhythm of her briefly forsaken life, she knew it would be a long time until the bad times passed away. She’d simply seen too much; and the threads of what she’d seen were intimately woven into the world she’d returned to. Though she’d put all the objects around the house that were connected to Todd (and there were a lot of them) away in the big front bedroom with the rest of her memorabilia, out of sight was not out of mind. She knew she was going to have to deal with all that stuff in a more thorough way before too long; and the prospect weighed heavily upon her.