Earthquake Weather (39 page)

But this morning he had nevertheless helplessly found himself consulting the NADA sign and the ashtray once again, and a few minutes ago, at lonely random, he had got around to asking about her disgraced grand-uncle Georges Leon.

The answering string of letters that he had just copied down was easily translatable as, “He was the western king, and then his son Scott was the western king.”

And he now remembered Pete Sullivan dialing out Scott Crane’s full name on the old rotary telephone in the laundry room in Solville, six days ago—Cochran had noticed at the time that one of the two last names had been Leon.

It could hardly be a coincidence—apparently the dead king in the back of Mavranos’s truck was some remote cousin of Cochran’s dead wife.

Abruptly there was a hard knock at the motel-room door, and Cochran jumped so wildly that both ashtrays sprang off the bed; then he had dived to the closet and fumbled up the .357 with hands so shaky that he almost fired a bullet through the ceiling.

“Who is it?” he demanded shrilly. He hoped it was Plumtree at last, or even Mavranos—and not the police, or Armentrout with a couple of burly psych-techs and a hypodermic needle, or whoever it had been that had shot at Mavranos by the Sutro ruins last week.

“Is that you, Sid?” came a woman’s hoarse voice from outside.

Carrying the gun, Cochran hurried to the door and peeked out through the little inset lens. It was Plumtree’s flushed face staring at him—in fact, in spite of the apparent sunburn and the tangled blond hair across her face, he could recognize her as being specifically Cody. And even through the peep-hole he could see dried blood on scratches below her jaw and at one corner of her mouth.

He pulled the chain free of the slot and swung the door open. “Cody, I’m damn glad to—” he began, but guilt about his recent schemes stopped his voice.

She limped in past him and sat down heavily on the bed. She was wearing clothes he hadn’t seen before, khaki shorts and a man’s plaid flannel shirt, but she smelled of old sweat, and her bare legs were scratched and spattered with mud and burned a deep maroon. As he closed the door and reattached the chain, Cochran remembered dully that the Bay Area sky had been solidly overcast this whole past week.

Plumtree was shaking her head, swinging her matted hair back and forth, and she was mumbling, perhaps to herself, “How do I
hang on,
how do I
keep him down
? I feel like I’ve been stretched on the
rack
! Even Valorie can only pin him down
sometimes.
” She looked at the gun in Cochran’s hand, and then her bloodshot eyes fixed on his. “Shooting me might be the best plan, that Mavranos guy’s no idiot. But right now you better tell me you’ve got something to drink in here.” She sniffed and curled her grimy lip. “Jeez, it stinks! Talk to the school nurse about
hygiene,
would you?”

“I—”
Cochran stopped himself, and just tossed the gun down on the bed and fetched the current pint bottle of Wild Turkey from the windowsill. After he had handed it to her he hesitantly picked the gun up again and tucked it into his belt.

Plumtree tipped the bottle up and took several messy swallows, wincing as the whiskey touched the cut at the corner of her mouth; but she nodded at him over the neck of the bottle as she drank, and when she had lowered it and gingerly wiped her mouth, she wheezed, “Don’t be shy about it,” breathing bourbon fumes at him. “Put one through my thigh if you’ve got the leisure and elbow room, but—if I turn into my dad?—you
stop
me.” The bottle had been half full when he’d handed it to her, but there was only an inch or so left when she gave it back to him. “How long have I been gone?” she asked. “Not too long, I guess, if you’re still here. I was afraid you wouldn’t be—that, like, everything happened a year ago, and the king was dead past recall.”

“Today is Monday the sixteenth,” he said, “of January, still. You’ve been gone … two full days.” He thought of wiping the neck of the bottle, then just tilted it up for a sip. The whiskey will kill any germs, he thought. “Where
were
you?” he asked after he had swallowed a mouthful of the vapory, smoldering liquor.

“You’re a gentleman, Sid. Where
was
I? I—” She inhaled sharply, and then she was sobbing. She looked up at him and her eyes widened. “
Scant!
You found me!” She clawed the bedspread as if the room might begin tossing like a boat; then she grabbed his arm and pulled him down beside her, and buried her face in his shirt. “God, I hurt all over—my teeth feel like somebody tried to pull them all out—and I’m a mess,” she said, sniffling. “Hold on to me anyway. Don’t let me run away again! You might have to handcuff me to the plumbing in the bathroom or something.” He had both his arms around her now, and felt her shaking. “But don’t—Jesus, don’t
hurt
him, if he comes out.”

He patted her dirty hair and kissed the top of her head. I’ve got to just throw away that cassette from the phone-answering machine, he thought. Even if it
would
serve as a potent lure, how could I possibly have thought of—pushing this woman out of her own head, in order to get Nina back?—or even just compounding Janis’s problems by adding one more ghost to her sad menagerie? And Nina is
dead,
she’d only be what Kootie called a ROM disk, like Valorie. I swear I will
not
settle for that!

The bottle was in his right hand, behind her, and he wished he could get it up to his mouth.

“Where have you been, Janis?” he asked softly.

“Where—?” She shuddered, and then shoved him away. “Right back to me, hey?” she said. “Janis can’t face this flop? Or did you have Tiffany here, is that why you’re on the bed? How much time’s gone by
now
?”

Cochran stood up. “It was Janis,” he said wearily, “and just for a few seconds. Cody, I wish you—never mind. So
where were
you all?”

“
I was
—well, I was out in the hills.
I’ve
got to remember this, huh? Out in the woods with people wearing hoods, killing goats.” Tears spilled down her cheeks, and smeared the grime when she cuffed them away, but when she went on her voice was animated, a parody of vivacity: “One of the goat heads wound up on a, a
pole,
and I was on for just a couple of heartbeats when it was in the middle of
speaking
to us, in what I think was Greek. The goat head was speaking, in a human language. Goats have horizontal pupils because they look from side to side, mostly, and cats have vertical pupils because they’re always looking up and down. My pupils are … staying after school for detention. I don’t know who the hooded people were.” She nudged the NADA sign with her hip. “Whaddaya got, a Ouija board? Ask
it
who they were.” She smiled at him. Her nose had begun bleeding. “The hooded people.”

Cochran glanced at the clock radio on the bedside table. He still had an hour and a half before he was to meet Mavranos. In the last couple of days he had got into the habit of walking up Russian Hill on Lombard to Van Ness and catching the cable car down to California Street and then taking another one west to Chinatown, but today he could drive the old Granada, and hope to find a parking place. He might even get Cody to drop him off at a corner near Grant and Washington. No, she’d be way too drunk—maybe Janis could drive him.

“Okay,” he said. He stepped into the bathroom and hooked a face-cloth off the towel rack, then tossed it to her as he bent down beside the bed to retrieve the clean ashtray. “Your nose is bleeding, Cody,” he said, placing the ashtray on the metal sign. “Put pressure on it.” He sat down on the bed and laid his fingertips on the round piece of clear glass. “Who has … Miss Plumtree been with, during these last few days?” he asked.

As soon as he spoke, it occurred to him that Cody should be touching the ashtray too, and that he should have cleared the ghost of Nina off the line; but the ashtray was already moving.

“Write down the letters as they come,” he told Plumtree nervously.

“I can remember ’em,” she said, her voice muffled by the towel.

“Will you please—here we go.” The ashtray had paused over the L, and now moved sideways to the E.

“Letterman,” mumbled Plumtree. “I knew it. I was with David Letterman.”

When the ashtray planchette had spelled out L-E-V-R, Plumtree inhaled sharply and stumbled back to the Wild Turkey bottle and took a gulp from it, wincing again. “Fucking Lever Blank,” she gasped as blood spilled down her chin, “that’s what I was afraid of. Goddamn old monster, he can’t leave that pagan hippie cult alone, even though they threw him off that building in Soma.”

“It’s not ‘lever,’ dammit,” interrupted Cochran loudly without looking up from the metal sign. “Will you please write this stuff down? It’s L-E-V-R, with no second E. And now an I, and an E … get the goddamn pencil, will you?” He glanced quickly at her. “And you’re bleeding all over the place.”

“Okay, okay, sorry. Just, my hands feel like I’ve got arthritis.” The alcohol was visibly hitting her already—she was weaving as she walked back to the bed, as if she were on a ship in choppy water. She fumbled at the paper and pencil. “What …?”

“L-E-V-R-I-E-R-B,” he spelled out. “And another L—and an A.”

She was goggling blearily at the board now. “And N … and C …” she noted, painstakingly writing the letters.

After several tense seconds, Cochran lifted his fingers from the ashtray. “That’s it. What, Levrierble …?”

“Levrierblanc.” She held out the blood-spattered sheet of paper and gave him a scared, defiant glare. “That’s still Lever Blank, if you ask me. The French version.” She pressed the towel to her nose again.

“My wife is French,” he said, nodding, realizing even as he spoke that it was an inadequate explanation. “Was.”

“I know. Sorry to hear she died, dirty shame.” She snapped a dirty fingernail against the paper, spiking the blood drops on it. “It’s two words. Blanc’s the second word, like Mel Blanc.”

Cochran nodded. Obviously she was right—and he suspected that if Nina hadn’t been their …
operator
here, it would have come out in plain English as
LEVERBLANK.

“A goat head,” he said, “speaking Greek.” In his mind he heard Long John Beach’s crazy lyrics again: …
and frolicked in the Attic mists in a land called Icaree.
“I think you’d better write down everything you can remember about this Lever Blank crowd.” He glanced again at the clock radio. “Not right now. I’ve got to meet Mavranos in a little over an hour. Let’s get Janis to drop me near the place, she—” isn’t falling-down drunk, he thought; “—isn’t having a nose-bleed, and then you can come back here and—”

“Janis drive? Fuck that. I can drive, and I’m meeting Marvos—dammit—
Mavranos
with you, too. We’ll get this
done.
I don’t want to have that little kid’s dad’s blood on my hands one hour more than I have to.” Her own blood was running down her wrist. “He just wants, my father, he wants to become king, like he failed to do when he was in a body of his own. A
male
body, he needs. If we can get Crane solidly raised from the dead, I think my father will have no reason to hang around, he’ll just go back into hibernation, like a case of herpes in remission. You don’t have herpes, do you?”

Cochran blinked at her. “No.”

“Tiffany does. You should know. I won’t even drink out of a glass she’s used. How far away is it, where you’re meeting Marvy-Arvy?”

“Oh—no more than twenty minutes, if we drive. Of course if we’ve got to find a place to
park the car,
I don’t know how long that might take. No, I really think it’s too dangerous for you to be there, Cody—if Mavranos gets hold of you, he’s liable to do something like—”

“Nothing I’ll object to. Nothing I won’t deserve. I got his friend killed.” She struggled up from the bed, still pressing the bloody face-cloth to her nose. “You got coffee? Good. Make me a cup, and pour the rest of that bourbon into it. I’m gonna,” she said with a sigh, as if facing a painful ordeal, “take a shower.”

“Could I talk to Janis about all this?”

“No. And what do you mean, ‘she doesn’t have a nosebleed’? It’s her nose too, isn’t it?”

Cochran opened his mouth to point out some inconsistencies in the things she’d said, but found that he was laughing too hard to speak; tears were leaking from the corners of his eyes, and his chest hurt. “I’ll,” he managed to choke, “have the coffee ready when you … get out of the shower.”

Her mouth twitched. “Laugh it up, funny boy,” she said mockingly, then lurched into the bathroom and closed the door with a slam. From the other side of the door he heard her call, “And don’t be peeking in here to see if Tiffany’s on!”

Cochran was still sniffling when he pulled open the bedside table drawer, and he lifted out the cassette and stared at it.

Two full seconds over a lit match would destroy the thing.

But,
It’s her nose too, isn’t it?
—and, if it comes to that,
his,
too. Her terrible father’s. A lot of jumping around, re-shuffling and discarding, might happen before we all get out of San Francisco.

He tucked the cassette carefully into his shirt pocket.

Besides that all secret men are men soon terrified, here were surely cards enough of one black suit, to justify the holder in growing rather livid as he turned them over.

—Charles Dickens,

A Tale of Two Cities

D
R. ARMENTROUT KNEW HE
was lucky to have got out of the smoky apartment building and back down to the street, and his car, and to Long John Beach, before encountering this …
very shifty
woman.

The day had started propitiously, but this last half hour had been a rout.

Late last Thursday his teal-blue BMW had finally limped off the 280 at Junipero Serra Boulevard and sputtered up Seventh to Parnassus to the UCSF Medical Center, where he had got a couple of colleagues to make some telephone calls for him; the upshot was that he had been allowed to take over house-sitting duties at the nearby Twin Peaks villa of a neurologist who was on sabbatical in Europe.