Coldheart Canyon (86 page)

She tried to catch his eye one last time—to have one last piece of him, even now. But he was already looking away; looking at where he was really headed.

She heard him speak one last time, and there was such happiness in his voice, she began to cry like a baby.

“Dempsey?” he said. “Here, boy! Here!”

She turned her head toward the light, thinking she might glimpse him even now, but as she did so, she heard—or thought she heard—the angel utter a word of its own; a seamless word, like a ribbon wrapped around everything she’d ever dreamed of knowing or being. It wasn’t loud, but it erased the sound of the sirens, for which she was grateful; then it moved off up into the darkness of the Canyon.

Knowing she was safe in the hands of those who would take care of her, and one, Maxine, who loved her, she followed the ribbon of the word up the flanks of Coldheart Canyon, skimming the darkened earth.

And as the woman and the word passed over the ground together, the creatures of the Canyon forgot their fear. They began to make music again; cicadas in the grass, night-birds in the trees; and on the ridge, the coyotes, yapping fit to burst. Not because they had a kill, but because they had life.

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And So, Love

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Although every medical expert who paraded by Tammy’s bed in the next many weeks—bone-specialists and skull-specialists, gastroenterologists and just good old-fashioned nurses—invariably pronounced the opinion that she was a “very lucky woman to be alive” there were many painful days and nights in that time of slow, slow recovery when she did not feel remotely lucky.

Quite the reverse. There were times, especially at night, when she thought she was as far from unmended as she’d been when Todd had first pulled her out of the car. Why else did she hurt so much? They gave her painkillers of course, in mind-befuddling amounts, but even when she’d just taken the pills or been given the injection, and the first rush of immunity from pain was upon her, she could still feel the agony pacing up and down just beyond the perimeter of her nerves’ inured state, waiting for a crack to appear in the wall so that it could get back in and hurt her again.

She was in the Intensive Care Unit at Cedars-Sinai for the first seventy-two hours, but as soon as she was deemed fit to be removed from the ICU, her insurance company demanded she be taken to the LA County Hospital, where she could be looked after at fifty percent of the price. She was in no state to defend herself, of course, and would undoubtedly have been transferred had Maxine not stepped in and made her presence felt.

Maxine was close friends with several of the Hospital Board, and made it clear that she would unleash all manner of legal demons if anyone even
thought
of moving Mrs. Lauper when she was in such a delicate state. The hospital authorities responded quickly. Tammy kept her bed, complete CC[348-676] 9/10/01 2:29 PM Page 656

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with a private room, at Cedars-Sinai. Maxine made it her business to be sure that the room was filled with fresh orchids every day, and that fresh three-layer chocolate cake from Lady Jane’s on Melrose was brought in at three every afternoon.

“I want you well,” she instructed Tammy during one of her first visits after Tammy had been released from the ICU. “I have a list of dinner parties lined up for the two of us that will take every weekend for the next year, at least. Shirley MacLaine called me; claimed she’d had a vision of Todd passing over, wearing a powder-blue suit. I didn’t like to spoil the poor old biddy’s illusions so I told her that was
exactly
what he was wearing. Just as a matter of interest, what
was
he wearing?”

“Jeans and a hard-on,” Tammy replied. “He’d torn up his T-shirt for bandages.” Her voice was still weak, but some of its old music was starting to come back, day by day.

“Well, I’ll leave you to tell her that. And then there’s all these friends of Todd’s who want to meet you—”

“Why?”

“Because I told them about what an extraordinary woman you are,”

Maxine said. “So you’d better start to get seriously well. As soon as you’re ready to be moved I want you to come down and stay with me in Malibu.”

“That’d be too much trouble for you.”

“That’s exactly what I need right now,” Maxine replied, without irony.

“Too much trouble. The moment I stop to think . . . that’s when things get out of hand.”

Luckily, Tammy didn’t have that problem. In addition to the heavy doses of painkillers she was still being given, she was getting some mild tranquilizers. Her thoughts were dreamy, most of the time; nothing seemed quite real.

“You’re a very resilient woman,” her doctor, an intense, prematurely-bald young fellow called Martin Zondel, observed one morning, while scanning Tammy’s chart. “It usually takes people twice as long as it’s taking you to bounce back from these kinds of injuries.”

“Am I bouncing? I don’t feel like I’m bouncing.”

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“Well perhaps
bouncing
is too strong a word, but you’re doing just fine!”

It was a period of firsts. The first trip out of bed, as far as the window.

The first trip out of bed, as far as the door. The first trip out of bed as far as the en suite bathroom. The first trip outside, even if it was just to look at the construction workers on the adjacent lot, putting up the new research block for the hospital. Maxine and Tammy ogled the men for a while.

“I should have married a blue-collar worker,” Maxine said when they got back inside. “Hamburgers, beer and a good fuck on a Saturday night.

I always overcomplicated things.”

“Arnie’s blue-collar. And he was a terrible lover.”

“Oh yes, Arnie. It’s time we talked about Arnie.”

“What about him?”

“Well for one thing, he’s a louse.”

“Tell me something I don’t know. What’s he been up to?”

“Are you ready for this? He’s been selling your life-story.”

“Who to?”

“
Everyone
. You’re hot news, right now. In fact I had a call from someone over at Fox wondering if I could sell you on the idea of having your life turned into a Movie of the Week.”

“I hope you said no.”

“No. I just said I’d talk to you about it. Honestly, Tammy, there’s a little window of opportunity in here when you could make some serious money.”

“Selling my life-story? I don’t think so. I don’t have one to sell!”

“That’s not what these dodos think. Look at these.”

Maxine went into her bag, brought out a sheaf of magazines and laid them on the bed. The usual suspects:
The National Enquirer
and
The Star
plus a couple of more up-market magazines,
People
and
Us
. Tammy was still too stiff to lean forward and pick them up, so Maxine went through them for her, flicking to the relevant articles. Some carried photographs of Todd at the height of his fame; the photographs often emblazoned with melodramatic questions:
Was Fame Too Much for the World’s Greatest
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Heart-throb?
on one; and on another:
His Secret Hideaway Became a Canyon
of Death
. But these lines were positively restrained in contrast with some of the stuff in the pages of
The Globe
, which had dedicated an entire “
Pull-out Special your family will treasure for generations
” to the subject of
Haunted
Hollywood
; or, in their hyperbolic language: “
The Spooks, the Ghosts, the
Satan-worshippers and the Fiends Who Have Made Tinseltown the Devil’s
Fanciest Piece of Real Estate!
”

There were pictures accompanying all the articles, of course: mostly of Todd, occasionally of Maxine and Gary Eppstadt, and even—in the case of
The Enquirer
and
The Globe
—pictures of Tammy herself. In fact she was the subject of one of the articles, which was led off by a very unflattering picture of her; the article claiming that “
According to her husband, Arnold,
obsessive fan Tammy Jayne Lauper probably knows more about the last hours of
superstar Todd Pickett’s life than anybody else alive—but she isn’t telling! Why?

Because Lauper (36) is the leader of a black magic cult, which involves thousands
of the dead star’s fans worldwide, who were attempting to psychically control
their star, when their experiment went disastrously and tragically wrong
.”

“I was of two minds whether to show you all this,” Maxine said. “At least yet. I realize it probably makes your blood boil.”

“How can they write such things? They’re just making it up . . .”

“There were worse, believe me. Not about you. But there’s a piece about me I’ve got my lawyers onto, and two pieces about Burrows—”

“Oh, really?”

“One of them was a very long list of his . . . how shall I put this? His

‘less than successful’ clients.”

“So Todd wasn’t the first?”

“Apparently not. Burrows was just very good at buying people’s silence. I guess nobody really wants to talk about their unsuccessful ass-lifts, now do they?”

Maxine gathered all the magazines up and put them into the drawer of the bedside table. “That’s actually put some color back into your cheeks.”

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“It’s indignation,” Tammy said. “It’s fine to read all that nonsense in the supermarket line. But when it’s about you, it’s different.”

“So shall I not bring any more of them in?”

“No, you can bring ’em in. I want to see what people are saying about me. Where are the magazines getting my photographs from? That one of me looking like a three-hundred-pound beet—”

Maxine laughed out loud. “You’re being a
little
harsh on yourself. But, you’re right, it’s not flattering. I guess the photographer himself gave them the picture. And you know who that was?”

“Yes. It was Arnie. It was taken last summer.”

“He’s probably gone through all your family photographs. But look, don’t get stirred up. He’s no better or worse than a thousand others.

Believe me, I’ve seen this happen over and over. When there’s a little money to be made—a few hundred bucks even—people come up with all these excuses to justify what they’re doing with other people’s privacy.

America deserves to be told the truth
, and all that bullshit.”

“That’s not what Arnie thought,” Tammy said. “He just said to himself:
I deserve to make some money for putting up with that fat bitch of a wife all
these years.
”

There was no laughter now; just bitterness, deep and bleak.

“I’m sorry,” Maxine said. “I really shouldn’t have brought them in.”

“Yes, you should. And please, don’t apologize. I’m not really all that surprised. What are they saying about you . . . if you don’t mind me asking?”

Maxine exhaled a ragged sigh: “She was exploitative, manipulative, never did anything for Todd except for her own profit. That kind of stuff.”

“Do
you
care?”

“It’s funny. It used not to hurt. In fact, I used to positively wallow in being people’s worst nightmare. But that was when Todd was still alive . . .”

She let the thought go unfinished. “What’s the use?” she said at last, getting up from beside the bed. “We can’t control any of this stuff. They’ll write whatever they want to write, and people will believe what they want to CC[348-676] 9/10/01 2:29 PM Page 660

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believe.” She leaned in and kissed Tammy on the cheek. “You take care of yourself. Doctor Zondel—is that it, Zondel?”

“I think so.”

“Sounds like a cheap white wine. Well, anyway, he thinks you’re remarkable. And I said to him: ‘
this we knew
.’ ”

Tammy caught hold of her hand. “Thank you for everything.”

“Nothing to thank me for,” Maxine said. “We survivors have got to stick together. I’ll see you tomorrow. And by the way, now that you’re
compos mentis
—I warn you—there’s a chance you’re going to have nursing staff coming in to ask you questions. Then selling your answers. So say nothing. However nice people are to you, assume they’re fakes.”

Maxine came every day, often with more magazines to show. But on Wednesday—three weeks and a day after Tammy had returned to consciousness—she had something weightier to place on her bed.

“Remember our own Norman Mailer?”

“Detective Rooney?”

“Ex-Detective Martin Ray Rooney. The same. Behold, he did labor mightily and his gutter publishers saw that it was publishable and they did a mighty thing, and put it in print in less than three weeks.”

“No!”

“Here it is. In all its shoddy glory.”

It wasn’t a big book—a mere two hundred and ninety-six pages—but what it lacked in length it made up for in sheer bravura. The copy described it as a story too horrific for Hollywood to tell. On the cover was a photograph of the house in Coldheart Canyon, with the image of a glowering demon superimposed on the clouds overhead.

“He says you, I and a woman called Katya Lupescu were in it together.

Like the three witches in
Macbeth
.”

“You mean you actually read it?”

“Well, I skimmed. It’s not the worst thing I’ve read. He spells all our names right, most of the time, but the rest? Oh God in Heaven! I don’t know where to begin. It’s a big sticky mess of Hollywood myths and CC[348-676] 9/10/01 2:29 PM Page 661

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Manson references and completely asinine pieces of detective work.

Basically, he’s convinced everyone is in on this massive conspiracy—”

“To do what?”

“Well . . . that’s the thing. He’s not really sure. He claims Todd found out about it, so he was murdered. Same with Joe. Same with Gary Eppstadt, though of course
everybody
in Hollywood had a reason to murder Gary Eppstadt.”