Medusa's Web (17 page)

Louise laughed breathlessly, though she was frowning. “You're thinking about the batteries? Twenty-three years?” She laughed again. “Those would be some miracle batteries.”

“See if you can touch the flashlight.”

Louise crouched and reached into the box with her free hand, and her unsteady fingertips struck the cardboard bottom, for the flashlight had disappeared.

And then she had spun away and stumbled across the driveway and was leaning against the white trunk of one of the eucalyptus trees. Her short blond hair fluttered in the wind.

Scott sighed and stood up, and he stepped out into the sunlight and walked over to stand beside her. She seemed to be calm, though she was panting.

“That was good,” she said. “That threw me. What is it, hypnosis?”

“That flashlight—” Scott paused for several seconds, his mouth open, then he went on doggedly, “That flashlight was never here. No, that's not quite right—that flashlight was never here
today
. It was here in 1992, when my cousin Claimayne was stowing my parents' stuff, a month or so after they left.” He spread his hands apologetically. “Time is kind of screwy around this house. Who was Taylor?”

“Oh no you don't.
The flashlight was never here, time is screwy
? That's like something I'd expect Madeline to say. Honestly now, Scott, are you kidding or have you gone crazy?”

His headache had not gone away. “There's things Madeline understands better than you do. Who was Taylor?”

“Taylor Taylor Taylor! You don't know who he was, but you went to where he lived?—and died?”

To his surprise, Scott found that he had become very angry. “I know a woman shot him in the back to steal a reel of film from him. I'd
like
to know more than that.”

“Ooh, you're in this, all right. I have to tell you, I'm going to tell them what you just said.” After looking in his face, she went on hastily, “He was William Desmond Taylor, a movie director in the silent-movie days, he was in love with the actress Mabel Normand, and yes, he was shot in the back, killed, in 1922. But nobody—except you?—knows who shot him.”

Scott had heard faint music playing behind Louise's words, and now that she paused he recognized it as the old Kansas song, “Dust in the Wind.” He glanced around at the car and the garages, but the music became louder when Louise pulled a cell phone out of her jeans pocket.

She glanced at the phone. “It's them. Be quiet.”

“What do they want with the big spider?”

“I get the idea . . . that they imagine they can evade death, with it, somehow. Though you die if you look at it. Go figure. The other
group, I think, just wants to destroy it.” She swiped a finger across the screen and raised the phone to her ear. “Hello?”

Scott leaned forward. “Talk to me direct,” he said loudly. “Don't send ex-girlfriends around.”

Louise's lips were a tight line; after a few seconds, she said, “Yes, okay,” and handed the phone to him. “It's for you now, asshole.”

Scott took the phone. His headache was strongly reasserting itself behind his left eye.

“Mister Madden!” came a man's voice from the little speaker. “We'd like to hire you to help us find something.”

“What do you want it for?”

“We want to ascertain its benefits, sir, and use those. We'd be happy to have you participate. And we'd protect you and your family from others who want it. What led you to visit the parking lot at Alvarado and Maryland yesterday?”

Scott held the phone away and touched the red square that ended the call. He handed it to her and limped back to the open garage.

Louise came hurrying after him. “Good work,” she said. “I don't know that I'm any use to them now.”

Scott sat down and picked up a handful of the papers and cards in the opened box, shaking coffee grounds and ancient eggshell fragments off them. “You said you were going to tell me all about it,” he said over his shoulder, “but first you told them that I went to Alvarado and Maryland.”

“Damn it, I didn't know what it meant, then, when I told them! They told me after, about Taylor living there.” She sat down on the other side of the box. “That guy in the Blazer knew about it, though—he was on his cell, all excited. I wondered why.”

But Scott could hardly hear her over a sudden ringing in his ears. “This,” he said carefully, holding up a blue plastic rectangle, “is my dad's Visa card.” He took a deep, shuddering breath. “It expired in 1993, a year after it was put in this box.” He dropped it and looked at another card. “And this is his driver's license.
Expired in 1996. Oh—here's my mom's. Here's their checkbook.”

“Why would they—what are you thinking?”

He wiped his hand across his mouth, careless of the coffee grounds that clung to his fingers. “They didn't go away.”

He stood up and yanked open a drawer of the white desk; and then another, and a few seconds later he had discovered that all of them were empty. He went to the bar and opened the drawer that had once held corkscrews and jiggers and strainers, and the cabinet door below it where bottles had stood, but everything was gone.

He crouched and ripped open the four remaining cardboard boxes, one after another, and the first three contained nothing but more paperbacks, the bar tools that had not been in the bar drawer, and an electric fan that Scott remembered roaring in the window of his parents' room on hot summer evenings; and the only thing in the fourth box was the beige telephone that had sat on his mother's desk. He looked at the clear-plastic dial and wondered whose finger had last spun it. There was of course no sound at all in the earpiece when he picked up the receiver, but he lifted the telephone out of the box and tucked it in the crook of his arm.

There was nothing else in the garage. If his parents had discovered something that might somehow be used against his now dead but intrusive aunt, it wasn't here. He glanced again at the box that contained the licenses and credit cards, then looked away, dizzy and breathing hard.

Louise was leafing through the paperbacks, but Scott stepped out onto the sunlit asphalt and reached up to take hold of the rope that dangled from the bottom edge of the garage door.

“We're through here,” he said.

“But I need to—” she began; then, seeing him tug at the rope, she got to her feet and hurried outside.

The door crashed down in a shower of dust and splinters, and Scott crouched to slip the padlock through the hasp and click it closed. He stood up, still carrying the telephone.

“There's no spiders in there,” he said breathlessly. “Claimayne put all that stuff in there, and he'd have looked through it all and taken any.”

He straightened up, coughing. “Don't waste your time following me anymore. I'll be watching.”

WHEN SCOTT PUSHED OPEN
the kitchen door and stepped inside, he was disconcerted to find Ariel and Madeline sitting stiffly at opposite sides of the kitchen table; Madeline, in sweatpants and a Gumby-and-Pokey T-shirt that served as pajamas, had her eyes tightly closed and her fists clenched on the table edge, and Ariel had pulled up the hood of a pink terrycloth bathrobe and was peering out from behind her bull's-eye glasses. Her eyes appeared to be clusters of concentric rings, and her right hand was groping among a dozen shortbread cookies on a plate that sat on the table between them.

“Is that Scott?” said Madeline. “Scott, look at the ceiling!”

He did, and saw nothing remarkable in the expanse of yellowed plaster; and he was already dizzy. He was about to look back at his sister, but she added, “Keep looking at it till I tell you to look down! There's cracks in the plate these cookies are on.”

“Cracks,” he said impatiently. Then, “Like spider cracks?”

“Right,” said Madeline, “like the windows! Ariel's trying to break it up without spilling all the cookies on the floor.”

“I can't see worth a damn through these stupid glasses,” Ariel said tightly.

“For God's sake. How long have you two been sitting here like this?”

“It
just happened,
Scott,” said Ariel in an irritated tone. “We're not
idiots
.”

Scott lowered his head enough to see the plate in his peripheral vision, and then with his free hand he just reached down and swept it off the table. Cookies and plate fragments spun across the floor. He was breathing fast.

“You pig,” said Ariel, snatching off the glasses to glare at him.

“Madeline,” he said, “you and I need to go out and get breakfast somewhere.”

His sister stood up, eyeing him cautiously. “Okay. But you have to pay the check.” She hurried out through the door to the dining room.

“And first you'll clean up these cookies!” added Ariel. “And you have to buy more!”

Scott started after Madeline, then swore and pulled open the broom closet. He set the telephone on the table, yanked out a broom, unclipped the plastic dustpan from it and hastily swept up the debris. He dumped it into the Trader Joe's bag standing beside the outside door and clipped the dustpan to the broom again, tossed it back into the closet and retrieved the telephone, then hurried through the dining room and up the wooden stairs.

FORTY MINUTES LATER HE
and Madeline had found a parking space for her old Datsun in the lot behind the 101 Coffee Shop on Franklin at the bottom of Vista Del Mar, and now they were sitting in a vinyl-padded booth at the back, between the window and a wall with rocks cemented all over it. Madeline had a glass of iced tea on the Formica table, and Scott, his hair still damp and spiky from a hasty shower, was unenthusiastically sipping a cup of coffee.

“Where did you find the phone?” asked Madeline as she picked
up the menu. “I'm glad I'm not a vegetarian,” she added as she scanned its columns.

The place smelled wonderfully of bacon and onions, but Scott wasn't sure anything more than coffee would be a good idea yet.

“It was in one of the uphill garages,” he said, and he added, “I saw Louise this morning.” When Madeline raised her eyebrows, he went on. “She was there, trying to break into the garages. She's working now for people who want . . . Medusa, Usabo. They think I can find it for them.” He told her about the conversation he'd had with Louise, and with one of her employers—and, finally, about finding their parents' driver's licenses and credit cards.

“Oh,” said Madeline. “Oh.”

“I didn't want to tell you about it back at Caveat, with Ariel and Claimayne banging around.”

The waitress arrived then, and Madeline distractedly ordered catfish and scrambled eggs, while Scott just pointed at his coffee and handed his menu back.

“They didn't go to the Riviera,” Madeline said. “I guess their blackmail project didn't work out.” She looked up at him with tears in her eyes. “Do you think they're dead?”

“I don't—well, yeah, Maddie. And I've been
hating
them all these years—for nothing.” He sipped his coffee. “If they are dead.”

“If they're not, you'll keep hating them?” She blotted her eyes with a napkin. “I never hated them. I figured they knew what was best.”

“You did not. Did you? They
abandoned
us!—in that madhouse! What might have become of us—?”

“Besides what did?” She balled up her napkin. “But if they died in '91, they
didn't
abandon us.”

“Oh, yeah.” Scott nodded reluctantly.

Neither of them spoke, then, and Scott wished restaurants still permitted smoking; and he told himself that he had not started drinking again. One slip didn't mean a relapse. Madeline slowly turned her fork around and around on the table with her finger.

“I wonder how they cook the catfish,” she said finally.

Scott thought about it, then shrugged.

Madeline went on, “So Mom and Dad were blackmailing her. I can't believe she'd kill them over that.”

“We don't know what
that
is. It must have been Claimayne or Aunt Amity who packed that box, and not long after Mom and Dad disappeared.”

“But why would they
save
the stuff, if Aunt Amity killed our parents?”

Scott opened his mouth, then closed it. “Well,” he said finally, “that's a good point. If she killed our parents and wanted to make it look as if they'd left town, she'd hardly save all the stuff they would naturally have taken with them.” He stared out the window at the sunlit traffic on Franklin, disoriented at having used the phrase
killed our parents
. Madeline was still turning the fork in circles on the table.

“I stayed up late last night,” she said, “reading the Valentino book. And this morning I looked him up on Wikipedia—Natacha Rambova doesn't sound like a nice person, though she and I got along.” She looked down at her left thumb and flexed it.

Scott considered telling his sister about his conversation with Rudolph Valentino last night, but decided it could wait. For one thing, he didn't feel ready yet to describe his own near-naked awakening in the dark garden.

The waitress returned and set a plate in front of Madeline, and the browned catfish smelled so good that Scott almost wished he had ordered something to eat. She made a sort of sandwich, with scrambled egg and pieces of catfish between slices of toast, and took a big bite of it.

“Do you still have Aunt Amity's phone book in your purse?” Scott asked. “And your phone?”

Her mouth full, Madeline nodded.

“I'm going to try to talk to that Ostriker character, if he's still
alive. Mom wrote that they might offer a finder's fee to him, for whatever the blackmail information was, and she wrote that if he squawked, they'd tell him he should be grateful they're not exposing
him
. I'd really like to know what fact they were blackmailing her
with
—what it was that she wouldn't want known, and to whom.”

Madeline swallowed. “Call him right now?” When Scott nodded, she opened her purse and began digging through it. “What are you going to say?”

Scott's headache had not receded much, and he considered ordering a beer; but it would upset Madeline.

“I don't know,” he said. She had laid the phone book and her pink cell phone on the table, and he opened the book at the O tab and found Adrian Ostriker. He picked up the phone and tapped in the number.

The line buzzed five times, and then he got a recorded message in a gruff male voice: “You've reached who you've reached. Speak.”

“Mr. Ostriker,” Scott said, “I'm Scott Madden, nephew of Amity Speas, or Madden. You may have heard that she passed away last week. She left me a message to give to you—”

The phone clicked, and a man's voice, more clearly now, said, “She's the one that wrote those detective books. I read she died. A
message
?”

Scott was sweating. Forge on, he thought. “That's right.”

“So what's the message?”

“She made me promise to deliver it in person.”

“How did you get this number?”

“She gave it to me, sir.” Across the table, Madeline rolled her eyes, and Scott shrugged irritably.

“Why should I bother meeting you?”

“Oh—curiosity, I guess. If you don't want to hear it, that's fine; I've done my best to keep my promise.”

“I can whup your ass.”

It occurred to Scott to wonder if the man was drunk. It was only a little past eleven in the morning, but Scott could understand it.

Before Scott could think of a reply, the man went on, “You got a pencil?”

“Just a sec.” Scott made writing motions with his hand, and Madeline quickly pulled a pen and a wrinkled Taco Bell receipt out of her purse.

Scott took them and flattened out the receipt. “Yes.”

“What was her favorite movie?”

“
Salomé,
” said Scott. “Alla Nazimova.”

“Okay. You're in L.A.?” When Scott confirmed it, the man gave him an address.“It's up Laurel Canyon from Hollywood Boulevard. Go left, uphill, at Jorgensen Road.” He described a few more turns, and added, “Come alone.”

“Right,” said Scott, but the line had already gone dead.

He sat back and laid Madeline's phone on the table. Madeline spread her hands.

“He wants me to go over there,” Scott said, “to his house, it sounds like.”

“Right now?” When Scott nodded, she pushed her plate away and said, “Let's go.”

“I have to go alone. He specified it. You could drop me off back at Caveat and I could—”

“I don't care what he specified. I
am
coming with you.”

“Maddy, he sounds crazy. He said ‘I could whup your ass.' I couldn't let you—”

“Oh,
big brother
. They were my parents too. What, he's going to think I'm threatening?” She quickly slid the phone and the phone book back into her purse. “If you don't let me come along, I'm going to call him back. His number's right on my phone, I just have to touch it.”

Scott smiled sourly. “What are you going to say?”

“I'll say . . . your real purpose is to sell him a solar water heater. Anyway, he must be pretty old by now, right? I don't think he could
really
whup your ass.”

Scott stood up from the booth and dug out a couple of twenty-dollar bills from his pocket. “Okay. You're probably safer at his place with me than at Caveat anyway.”

MADELINE DROVE WEST ON
Franklin to avoid the traffic on Hollywood Boulevard two blocks south, and at Wilcox Scott told her to pull into the parking lot of a dry cleaner's so that he could look at the cars that had been behind them; he didn't see Louise's white Saturn, or a white Chevy Blazer, but he told his sister to wait until half a dozen cars had gone by before resuming their route. She fluttered the gas pedal to keep the engine from stalling while they waited.

As she steered the car back into the lanes, Madeline was frowning and hesitantly turning her head back and forth as if her neck was stiff, but when Scott asked her if anything was wrong, she lifted one hand from the wheel and waved dismissively.

Apparently to change the subject, she said, “You've got cigarettes? Go ahead and smoke if you want. And don't forget you've got to buy cookies somewhere. They were Pecan Sandies.”

“. . . Okay.”

Past Wilcox, Franklin narrowed to one lane each way, and all the buildings beyond the curbside trees seemed to be apartments; after another half a mile the street was interrupted by the broad, curling lanes of Highland Avenue, but Madeline managed to get into the southbound right lane and catch Franklin when it resumed its westward course around the white Gothic bell tower of the United Baptist Church. Then it was apartment buildings again, of more modern architecture, that swept past on either side.

“You'll want to take La Brea down to Hollywood,” said Scott. He had lit a cigarette and rolled down the window, and the grass-scented morning breeze ruffled his hair.

“There'll be another street after La Brea,” Madeline said.

“Why bother—” began Scott, but she had already pressed the gas
pedal, and the old Datsun roared ahead and rocked right across the La Brea intersection.

“Okay,” said Scott, “what's wrong with La Brea?”

“This isn't out of our way,” said his sister stubbornly. “Just a little farther—it can't be more than a block or two ahead . . .”

“What can't be?”

She didn't answer, but a few seconds later hit the brakes suddenly enough to make Scott grab the dashboard and drop his cigarette.

“There!” she said, pointing to her left.

Scott bumped his head retrieving his cigarette and peered irritably past her at a very new-looking brown-and-tan four-story apartment building with well-trimmed palm trees standing taller than the sidewalk ficus trees.

“There what?”

A car behind them honked, and Madeline let the car roll slowly forward, still looking at the building.

“Eyes front,” said Scott. “What about that place?”

Madeline finally looked away from it to the lanes ahead and sped up. “That's where the house was, where Kosloff shot me! Shot Natacha. It must have been La Brea where the taxi driver turned right, on the way to that hospital.” She gave him a brief, wide-eyed glance. “It makes it seem more real, to see the actual place where it happened!”

“Well—”

“It's still the actual place, Scott, even if the house is gone.”

She finally turned left at Camino Palmiero and drove between still more apartment buildings, these separated from the street by wide lawns and ranks of stately palm trees, and drove down to Hollywood Boulevard, where she turned right.