I'll Let You Go (15 page)

“I'll get you archive photos,” said the consultant, shuffling through lobby debris. “Everything's from the thirties,” he said. “It was all marble—before the scavengers got to it … make a great loft building.” He pointed to the ceiling. “All this was copper conduit. Brass doorknobs everywhere, engraved with HB. Clarence Darrow used to rent a whole floor.”

“Hello?”

“Clarence Darrow used to have offices—”

“Hi, Mom.”

“I'm not disturbing you, Doddy?”

“Not at all,” he said, continuing his walkabout. Realizing that Mr. Trotter was taking a call, the consultant moved away to give him privacy. Dodd pushed the earbud further in as he spoke into thin air. “Just looking at property.”

“What else is new?” said Bluey, sardonically.

“How are you feeling?”

He knew she was calling to discuss the day's obits.

“Well, Winter told me a marvelous joke.”

“Is Winter doing stand-up now?”

“Don't you be silly,” she laughed. “Would you like to hear, Doddy?”

“I would. Yes, I would, Mother, very much.”

The consultant cautioned him to take care as Dodd poked around at the base of the stairs. A solitary pigeon watched their lazy progress.

“We were going over my album and Winter suddenly says, ‘God was sobbing on a cloud.' Well, her delivery was so natural, Doddy, that I had
no
idea what she was saying. I said, ‘Winter, what on
earth
are you talking about?' ‘God was sobbing on a cloud,' she said, cool as can be, ‘when an angel floated up and said, “What's the matter? Why are you crying?” And God says, “I'm in love with an atheist—but she doesn't even know I exist!” ' Isn't that marvelous, Doddy?”

“Wonderful.”

“I thought it a delightful thing. And Winter—well, I never
knew
her to tell a joke. And she doesn't know where she heard it, but it
must
be Thurber or Wilde. It does
sound
like Wilde, doesn't it, Doddy?”

“It's very witty.”

“Oh, Doddy, did you read about the poor little girl killed in Brentwood?”

A fifteen-year-old who went to school in the Palisades had been struck by a car in a Montana Avenue crosswalk; Lucy had already told him, but he didn't let on.

“Tell me what happened.”

“The father saw her get hit—how awful! How could you ever get over seeing something like that? An old man, who shouldn't have been driving. Ninety-four years old! They showed the shrine on the news. That's what they do now, the friends and neighbors tape letters and flowers to telephone poles until they rot away. Do you remember the Deutschmans?”

“Howard and Lillian.”

“Well, Howard just dropped dead—at a hundred and three! At St. John's. Born in St. Petersburg. Did you know he played bridge? The article says he was an expert, even wrote a couple books. Now that, to me, is marvelous … the things you find out, Doddy,
after
they're gone! Howard was a great friend of Sybil Brand—
there's
a jail you could probably have for a song! It's closed now, did you know? Where do they put all the prisoners, that's what
I
wonder about. What do they
do
with them? You know, your father and I used to see the Deutschmans all the time at the Hilton, for the benefits. In the grand ballroom—oh, that was long before Merv moved in.
Long
before. Howard had a degenerative hip. And you'd better believe Lillian's still cutting a rug, at ninety-one! Who did the Deutschmans know? The Bloomingdales, the Darts, the Jorgensens—now, there's another one! Earle
just
died, at a hundred and one. Didn't I read you that? Do you know what the paper said, Doddy? That he was working out with a personal trainer three times a week and playing tennis before he died. At a hundred and one! It said that Earle Jorgensen spent three days on a schooner watching San Francisco burn after the earthquake—in 1906! Now,
that's
old. Did you know Marion—Earle's wife—did you know that Marion's son is Donald Bren? He's got almost as much money as
you
do, Doddy. Land in Orange County: the Irvine Ranch. And of course Howard and Lillian knew the Annenbergs—
everyone
knew the Annenbergs. The Deutschmans were
very
much a part of the Sunnylands Christmas crowd. Walter always called Sunny ‘Mother'—ugh! Don't you ever call Joyce that, Doddy, don't you ever!”

She went on like that while he made his way to the sidewalk. The consultant followed and they climbed into the Arnage.

His mother was on to another obituary, and he let her talk all the way to Beverly Hills. It was comforting to hear her chattily cogent, because of late there had been some reason to worry. A few days after the release from Cedars, Winter had found her standing in the hall in frozen repose. Startled, Bluey pretended she was trying to recall where she misplaced a book, but it was clear to Winter that the old woman was literally lost. Dodd phoned their dear friend Dr. Kindman, who suggested she be evaluated for Aricept; the billionaire had seen the Alzheimer's drug promoted in
National Geographic
, next to an ad for a pill that was supposed to help your dog remember better when he began having trouble responding to his name. He thought that odd.

He eased his mother off the phone as they neared Beverly Vista, the grade school he had attended as a boy.

Back in the sixties, the Trotters lived on Bellagio Road (they always seemed to live on a road), just outside the eligibility zone of the Beverly Hills school system. Louis could have sent his kids to Buckley or Oakwood or Westlake—could have sent them anywhere—but wanted them in public school instead. So he bought a house on Roxbury, south of Wilshire, and Winter stayed there with the children during the week. Dodd and Trinnie could walk to grade school; that way, when they graduated, they could walk to high school too, even closer but in the other direction. His father liked the unpretentious small-town feel of that. Hadn't Beverly High's “trapdoor” swimming pool been famously filmed in
It's a Wonderful Life
?

His alma mater had turned to him for help. BV had been badly damaged in the Northridge quake; since then, the lovely orange-brick California Romanesque revivalist-style buildings were entirely fenced-in, with students housed in “temporary” school-yard bungalows. The district wanted to demolish the school and build state-of-the-art facilities, but there was opposition, both nostalgic and fiscal.

The Board of Education came up with an Environmental Impact Report that provided four suggestions. The first was to do nothing—they called it the No Project Alternative, meaning the bungalows would remain. The second was the Auditorium Rehabilitation with New Construction Alternative; the third, a Partial Historic Rehabilitation with New Construction Alternative; and last, a Historic Rehabilitation Alternative—restoration of the school as in its heyday. The fight was
between the PTA, who wanted to tear the thing down, and the preservationists, who reminded that all schools in the precious Beverly Hills system were official historic landmarks. The feud had lasted years.

Marcie Millard, former treasurer of their eighth-grade class and now honorary president of the PTA, had charmingly approached Dodd at a scleroderma fund-raiser. She looked the same as he had always pictured her, hair upswept and old-fashioned, as it had been in the school production of
The Music Man
. She made sure to refer to such shared touchstones—long-ago plays, outings, cultural ephemera—when they spoke, yet Dodd had the perverse sense she didn't really remember him, and had found out by chance (or the Internet) that he was an alumnus. Sometimes her words and manner seemed too scripted and eager, but maybe that was just her way. Marcie's kids were now at BV and she expressed her disgust and contempt for “the scandal of district politics” that had caused the near seven-year delay in renovations. The children, she said, were the ones who suffered. She wanted to know if Dodd would be interested in funding a new campus, ballsily suggesting the school might even bear his name as a result of his largesse.

So there he was again, walking through another shell, this time retracing smaller steps taken more than thirty years before. The group—Marcie and her carefully selected PTA brethren: architect, dentist, restaurateur—wore hardhats and missionary smiles, as if the mere presence of Dodd Trotter,
their
Dodd Trotter, class of '71, completed—
sanctified
—the dream team. Their billion-dollar angel.

Passing through the condemned halls spooked him. He went to the rest room, and Marcie called after, “Not sure the equipment's working too well in there!” He stood on the spidery-fissured diamond-patterned tiles and peered through the wire-cage windows. The architect came in, trying a faucet, which erupted in a rusty geyser. When the water cleared, he washed his hands and reminisced about a field trip they'd taken to Paradise Cove. Dodd said he'd never been to Paradise Cove and the architect had to admit he'd confused him with Tim Gaspard, a brainy boy who played the harp.

Before he left, Marcie made a final plea. She hoped, she said, they could create an environment as creative and technologically sophisticated as the campus at Four Winds, where Dodd's children were enrolled.
Oh, she's good
, he thought.

The consultant waited in the car while Dodd took a slow walk around the school's circumference, ringed by stucco'd condominiums and duplexes in the French Normandy or Spanish Colonial style, their attractive leaded-glass bay windows presiding over tiny lawns like great dark open mouths. His attention turned to the playground. The prefab bungalows were hideous; how bizarre that parents had tolerated them all these years. A bell rang and children poured out. He was startled how a generation had changed the complexion of the student body from garden-variety Jew to Benetton: Korean, Latino and Persian.

They all looked happy enough.

E
arlier, had Mr. Trotter looked back through the Bentley's smoky rear window as it pulled away from the historic Higgins Building—had he had
cause
to look back—he might have seen a fiftyish detective in a serge suit rounding the corner. The gentleman had a homeless man in tow, or rather was towed by the homeless man; they'd just come from the St. George, where only yesterday the badly decomposed body of a woman had been found in bed, strangled by her own sheets.

The wily Sherpa was none other than Someone-Help-Me, who, rebuffed the night before, had discarded the spoiled custom-made sign that had provided his name. It was Will'm's misfortune the beggar had chosen that very night to camp in an alcove across from the venerably decrepit Higgins “plant.” Awakened by a caroming warble of sirens from black-and-whites, he had poked his head from the cardboard; it was then that he saw an alley child in the light of the street lamp, and heard an unmistakable shout calling her back to darkness. A large, charcoaly figure appeared and lifted the girl to his back, covering her with a greatcoat before galloping off.

The vagrant and the detective walked from alley to sidewalk, scrutinizing the crime scene.

“Did the girl seem to be in any distress?”

“That time of night … little girl that age.
I'd
be distressed. Not in bed with her toys all safe.
I
would be—”

He rasped his words, interposing repulsively guttural clicks, grunts and snickers.

“Was she fighting? Did he
force
her—”

“—wouldn't be playing no kinda game
that
time of night.”

“But he
shouted
at her,” said the detective, mildly exasperated.

“A
command
—and you better listen. ‘Come 'ere, girlie!' All ‘Englified,' too, like he Michael Caine! Shit, that one's a
bear
.”

“You saw her face.”

“Not too well. But I'd know her. Yep, I'd know her!”

“And the man?”

“I didn't so much
seen
him but
heard
him.”

“Then how could you identify?”

“That one hard to miss! Big as a house—I
know
that one. Chased after him awhile, too. Couldn't keep up, me with my leg … Never thought he go
that
way, not with
kids
. Them who fuck kids is pure shit.”

“Which way did he run?”

“Down Broadway.
I
didn't go no further. He was
movin'
and
groovin'—
the girl on 'im like a papoose!”

“Now, you know this man?”

“Name Will'm but some call 'im Topsy.”

“And you know where to find him?”

“Give me
heehaw
and I'll know, know what ahm sayin'?”

One-legged Fitz passed by and Half Dead nipped the informer's ankle, drawing blood.

“Mother
fuck
you, spunion! Old crackhead
bitch
!” He lowered a fist down on the dog's spine and the thing trundled off. “I'll
kill
that mutated peesuhshit!” He pounded the air with a gnarly fist. “Kill
you too
, Half
Man
!”

Fitz skedaddled as the dog dodged a bike messenger, who threw them an oath.

Someone-Help-Me rubbed his bitten ankle as he cane-lurched after the laughing detective on the short walk back to the St. George.