Afterlife (25 page)

“So how about dinner tomorrow?”

“And now that they've screwed
me
, you know what I'd like to do? Pour blood all over their office, just like that terrorist out there. I'd like to see Lou Ciotta prancing around on his show, him so cute in his underwear, and he opens a beer and takes a swig and spits it out. 'Cause it's blood.”

“I'll pick you up at eight, we'll go have Chinese.” Big of Steven, whose heart still burned from the tangerine beef, but he couldn't answer rage for rage. He was only trying to give it room, like Margaret's exhaustion.

“Look, I'm better off by myself right now,” said Mark, milder now and almost apologetic. “It's nothing to do with you. I get in these black moods—even before AIDS. I just have to sit with it.” Steven nodded gravely, not wanting to say the wrong thing. He thought they'd pretty much wound it up when Mark threw a final curve. “So how was Andy Lakin?”

“Oh … nothing,” Steven blurted, suddenly feeling cornered. “I mean, he's very earnest. I told him I wasn't available.”

“Why not? He's got a great ass.”

“Yeah, well, there's this small problem about my dick.” Which was a lie now, of course. The instrument in question had been quivering like a tuning fork these days. Yet he seemed to want to hide it, as if the recovery of his carnal edge might somehow threaten Mark.

“Steven, you think too much.”

They let it go at that. Still Steven would have pressed it again on Wednesday, maybe even done the unthinkable—driven over to Skyway Lane and dropped in with takeout. His life was a constant round of takeout now, and what was one more stop? But then, Wednesday turned out to be a nightmare start to finish, so he didn't have time to think. Ray Lee had an appointment with the eye doctor, and Margaret's car wouldn't start, so Steven had to pick them up and run them over to Cedars.

They sat all three in the front seat, Ray Lee regaling Steven with the plot of a stinko B, Ida Lupino and Robert Stack, convict on the lam holing up on a widow's farm. “Lotsa chickens, lotsa heartache,” Ray Lee concluded, lilting the air with a delicate fine-boned hand—the hand that still worked. In the eye clinic waiting room he vamped about whether he might need glasses, promising himself a pair of tortoiseshells from L.A. Eyeworks. “Please, I rather be fashion victim than AIDS victim.”

None of them said a word about the deeper issue—that if he was having neurological problems, overnight the horror might seep into the bright jet of his eyes. There were blind men all over West Hollywood now, some who saw shadows, some who saw Christmas lights, and four or five of them were sitting right there in the clinic, staring at nothing.

While Ray Lee was in with the doctor, Margaret told Steven he had to go by the office and pay the bills—by the fifteenth or the phone would be turned off. Steven felt a spurt of irrational rage, to think he had to take care of his own affairs, and as if it was all Margaret's fault. Which made him plummet with guilt, so that when Ray Lee came out of the eye exam with his sight intact, dancing in his wheelchair, Steven invited them both for Thanksgiving.

“
You're
going to do Thanksgiving?” Margaret asked, incredulous.

“Well, sure, why not? We've always done it.”

“Victor, you mean,” she observed skeptically.

Touché. Last year Steven had spent the whole of Thursday under the covers, sobbing over the Macy's parade. But he'd been planning it ever since his last encounter with Dr. Buckey, even if he hadn't quite got his invitations out. Things being lately blurred with Mark, the moment never seemed right for making party plans. He'd been keeping his options open as to the guest list all along, with a vague idea of springing it on them the day before, so they wouldn't have time to dread it.

Ray Lee gave out with a shriek of delight, drowning Margaret's irony, and promised to make creamed onions and mince pie. “With a lattice crust,” he enthused breathlessly, flashing his crooked smile at Steven, right side grinning, left side down, a Noh mask of the tragicomic.

An hour later, Shaw Travel was as still as Pharaoh's tomb. Inside the door where the letter slot dumped was a daunting pile of mail. Steven stepped over it as if it were a body and went around to Margaret's desk. He flipped the phone machine to playback, turned the volume up, then waded back into the mail. As the messages began to spill out, he pawed through the endless brochures and come-ons, trying to sort out the bills.

They'd been closed for only sixteen days, but it seemed like years. Call after call swept over him, people wanting holiday reservations, sometimes leaving three or four messages before they gave up. Old customers were especially persistent, leaving word for Margaret or Steven himself, cuddly with familiarity: “Fran and I want to go someplace special for Christmas. Some inn in the middle of nowhere—big fireplace, no phones. You know what we like.”

Steven found the phone bill, water and power, American Express. As he padded around to retrieve the checkbook from Margaret's desk, the calls grew increasingly desperate. A party of forty-eight teachers bound for a convention in Vegas gave up on the third try. Various gay professionals, used to princess treatment, sounded more and more wounded with every call. “I'm missing all the discounts,” they whined, then pettishly rang off. The husband of Fran left a little mini-lecture, the text of which was I-scratch-your-ass-you-scratch-mine, and therefore Margaret shouldn't expect a discount anymore at Fran's killer boutique on Beverly Drive.

Frankly, by the time Steven had written the three checks, he wondered if they had any business left at all. He looked around at the silent office, no more eager to dive back in than ever. Ray Lee was out of there for good, and Margaret had made not a peep when they passed the two-week limit on the office closure. There was nobody left. But while the thought of closing down made Steven wince with emptiness, even that finality couldn't make him throw himself back in. He couldn't do this and tick at the same time. Could only keep himself from not waiting to die by staying adrift of time. And Shaw Travel was time-obsessed—every departure down to the minute, every checkout, every three-day cruise to nowhere.

Then, after a call from a frantic woman on Maui who'd missed her connecting flight, came a soft and tentative voice. “Hi, it's Heather. I don't know who's picking up messages, but I owe you all an apology. I feel just terrible. It's because I was scared, but that's no excuse. I want to see Ray, and I want to come back to work if you'll have me. You're the most fun people I ever met. Tell Ray I make a meatloaf that's to die.”

Well now, wasn't that fortuitous? Shaw Travel would snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, all because Heather had faced her fear of death. Good for her! Steven felt positively lumpy with sentiment as he flipped the phone machine back to answer. He would make her Assistant Office Manager and send her on the next free gig from Princess Cruises. He'd call her tonight, and the agency would reopen again by morning.

He closed the door behind him with relief, still without a clue what the cash flow was these days, how close to the brink. What he was really thinking driving home was: if she made a dynamite meatloaf, she could probably pull together a passable sausage dressing for the turkey.

When he got to the house, he called Mark, not to push for tonight but to rope him in for the Norman Rockwell feast. Nobody home, and he didn't want to leave it on the machine, so he hung up. He stood in the dining-room doorway and studied his table. Nine: Ray Lee and Margaret and Richard and Mark and Sonny and Heather and him—

The doorbell. For some reason, as he moved to the foyer, he was certain it was Mark, as if he'd pulled him here by telepathic means. He threw open the door laughing. But no: a lean and pony-tailed Latina in jeans and a Mickey Mouse T-shirt. Immediately she looked away shyly from Steven's laugh. She was frightened, almost trembling, like a deer caught out of cover. Steven composed a meek and helpful smile, assumed she wanted to sell him something, or collect for some desperate cause. At last she sought his eyes again, miserable but trying not to plead.

“I'm sorry—I'm Linda Espinoza.”

He didn't connect it right away, offering his own name in return, trying not to sound patronizing. She nodded as if she knew it already, presumably working from a canvasing list. She looked sad enough to be a Democrat. Then, because she could see he was still in the dark, she added with a certain stubborn dignity, “Dell's my brother.”

Steven beamed. “Well, of course he is,” he said eagerly, bustling her into the house. And she didn't get a word in edgeways for the next two minutes. He put a light on under the kettle, chattering all the while about Thanksgiving dinner. How he had meant to invite them all along, and there he'd been working out the seating when she rang.

To her he seemed slightly delirious, which maybe he was, with so many balls in the air. But something about him had seized on the holiday, something to do with pulling a family together around Ray Lee, who might not last till Christmas. Something to counter the awful gathering of blood clans everywhere, hiding their distances one from another, smothering them in gravy.

“Don't feel you have to cook or anything,” Steven hastened to assure her, “but if there's something special you're good at and you have the time—”

He turned to hand her a mug of tea and saw the patience in her eyes. He held his breath to hear, and she spoke: “Dell's in trouble. He's the one trashed that church.”

Of course, he'd known it all along. She was fighting back tears. He led her into the dining room and sat her down exactly where he planned to have her next week. Brokenly she told him about the police arriving with a subpoena. Dell had left a trail that was ridiculously easy to follow. Several of Mother Evangeline's parishioners had seen the pickup truck from which the ghoul emerged. Once it was ascertained that the blood was turkey, it was simple to track down the farmer in Riverside. Even a rookie could have followed the trail to the thirty-five-dollar deposit at Western Costume.

It all converged this morning at Dell's apartment, the banging of the police rousing Linda across the court. When they got no answer, they broke down Dell Espinoza's door. The mistake they made was coming at seven, when the gardener was always out by six. They found the tapes in the kitchen cabinet. They told Linda her brother was wanted for desecrating a church, for tampering with the mails, for attempted murder.

“He tried to
kill
somebody?”

“Because of the reservoir. They say he try to give people AIDS.”

Finally she let out some of the tears, not squalls of them like Margaret did, but a few small sobs with her shoulders hunched. Steven laid a hand gently on her arm and murmured like a lullaby. He was juggling so many cases at the moment, he wasn't sure how much he had left to offer. Besides, his first instinct was fury at Dell for putting his sister through this, so if Steven did rush in to help, it would be for Linda's sake. And if Dell Espinoza thought he was going to ruin Thanksgiving, he was sorely mistaken.

“Where is he now?”

“He's at my friend Emilia's, but he can't stay. She's afraid her kids'll get hurt. He's waiting for me to call him.”

“And tell him what? That he can stay here?”

He didn't say it so roughly, but her silence told him he was right. She took a deep breath. Steven looked forlornly past her into the living room, where the big leather sofa hadn't seen someone sleep over since they had nurses around the clock. He pictured what the terrified Emilia must be imagining: a shootout by the L.A. police, Sheriff Noonan announcing to the Minicam crews that they'd bring him out dead or alive. Even if she survived, they'd send Emilia back to Mexico on a slow boat. Ruefully Steven conceded that his house would work much better for a Shootout—no minors involved, nobody to deport.

“All right, but just for a few days,” he said, and even as she clasped his hand in gratitude, he recalled saying something of the same sort to Sonny, and that was almost a month ago.

Only after Steven had agreed to give her brother sanctuary did Linda begin to pour out all her terror. How she had seen him withdraw deeper and deeper for months now, willfully almost—the opposite of putting the passion of his grief behind him, letting it fade to a dull ache the way it had with her. Dell Espinoza's passion only seemed to grow more violent and secret. In the month that followed the anniversary, she thought he was going to kill himself, and could even feel that the one thing holding him back was Linda herself—the last protective urge he felt as head of the family.

That was the word she kept using: passion. Rather formal and only half-translated, as if it meant something far more intricate in Spanish. Steven had never thought of grief quite that way before, like some kind of sexual hunger. Carnal and driven, obsessive, consuming. But he also understood what Linda meant, for the white-hot passion in Steven himself had dwindled at last to a quiet throb, like a broken bone that ached in the rain.

“He'll listen to you,” said Linda. “You lost what he lost. Maybe you'll help him get rid of the anger, so it won't eat him up anymore.”

Steven made all the right noises, promising to be a sounding board for her wayward brother, but in fact he didn't expect to make the slightest dent in the gardener's rage. He wasn't even sure he wanted to, startled instead to find himself feeling a surge of pride. He liked the idea of having his very own anarchist. Besides, he knew Dell well enough from fifty widowers' Saturdays to know he couldn't be budged. So all he would get from Steven was the leather sofa to crash on, seven nights max, assuming he behaved himself and made no crazy calls.

Linda phoned Emilia from the kitchen, speaking in rapid Spanish and making no mention of Dell by name. As they waited for the terrorist to be delivered, Linda explained that the pickup truck had been impounded. Though she didn't drive herself, she was trying to get it sprung so Dell's men could keep up with the gardens. Only now did Steven understand she had walked the half-mile uphill to his house, having taken the bus from Silverlake.