Mr Toppit (39 page)

Clearly, Wade was not much of a housekeeper at the best of times, but Travis was shocked by the state of the place compared to when he had last been there. It seemed to have been ransacked. They didn’t, of course, know what they were looking for, but thought they might find something like the phone number of a friend, some way of contacting Wade. Maybe they thought they would come across his Christmas card list. They didn’t. There was nothing. But Rachel had been there. Travis recognized her sunglasses lying broken on the floor.

As they were leaving, Travis had an uncharacteristically bright idea. He saw the light of the answering machine flashing and pressed “play.” It turned out that half the messages were from him, sounding increasingly desperate, but there were others as well. Several were hang-ups: thirty seconds of static,
background noise and a bit of breathing before the click. One was a voice shouting, over music, “Wade—you better get your ass down here right now,” one was from a woman complaining that Wade hadn’t been there when she turned up for her chakra lesson, and one was from Rachel. Graham said it sounded as if she was calling from another planet, not just far away in terms of distance but far away from any kind of Rachel he’d thought he knew. “I’m in a phone box,” she said. “Do they call them that here? Oh, Wade—are you there? Wade? Where are you? I thought you were going to be here at eleven. I’m in the parking lot by the bar on the corner. That’s where you said, isn’t it? I want to come home.” Graham said she was crying now. “Please. Please. Please come. They’re not here yet, but you’ve got to come. I’m trying to do what you said. I’m trying to focus on the base of my spine. What’s the energy called? I can’t remember. Is it the
prana
thing? I haven’t got any more coins. I need—” The message cut off.

Graham said that he and Travis drove back to Laurie’s house in silence. He told me he had had almost a physical fight with Erica when they got there as he tried to get to the phone to call the police and she blocked him. He was now really worried about Rachel, but Erica was adamant. I could just imagine.

“She is an extraordinarily foolish girl, Graham. She’s how old? Twenty-four? Twenty-five? Are you saying she’s been kidnapped by this person? No, you’re not. Is she being held by force? No. Is she mentally retarded? No. She is simply thoughtless and stupid. She and her brother before her, not to speak of the clueless Travis and Merry, who started this whole thing. I will not have any of them jeopardize Laurie. She is the only blameless one in this grotesque situation. There must be no more lies in the newspaper about her. Those kids—kids!—have
abused her generosity and hospitality. They have used her unmercifully and I will not, I repeat
not
, have Laurie suffer because of it. Rachel left this house of her own free will. She got herself into this and she must get herself out of it. Whatever it is.”

Just then Laurie arrived back from the studio and promptly burst into tears at the sight of Graham and Erica shouting at each other. She had to be taken off and comforted by Erica. After they had calmed down, Graham sat with Laurie and went through how they were going to do the
Hayseed
show the next day.

Even if Graham had called the police, I don’t suppose it would have made much difference. Rachel was missing, but she wasn’t exactly what you would call, in police terms, “a missing person.” Anyway, how would they possibly locate her and Wade in the whole of Los Angeles? Nobody even knew his last name. In the event, the day after Laurie and Graham did the show, Rachel and Wade were found.

That day was the first time I knew any of this, and the person I heard it from, surprisingly, was Martha. She called to tell me that Rachel had been involved in a car accident. The police had found her bag, with her driving license and address, and telephoned Martha. She had possibly broken her leg but she was all right and in a hospital. Martha sounded completely unruffled by the news, in fact seemed rather irritated by the inconvenience. Would I call Laurie to get the details? Martha was always good at getting other people to do things for her.

You read about people breaking into a cold sweat but until then I hadn’t known it actually happened or what it felt like. Martha, always oblivious to irony, appeared to have missed something obvious to me. It was Arthur all over again: the phone call, the broken leg, the hospital. Rachel was going to die, if she wasn’t dead already.

Erica picked up the phone, and before I had the chance to say anything more than “It’s Luke,” she said, quite calmly, “Oh, Luke—I’ll hand you straight over to Graham.” I hadn’t even known he was there.

When I told him about Martha’s phone call he sounded stunned, and I could hear his voice trembling. I gave him the number the police had left and made him swear he would ring me as soon as he had spoken to them. In fifteen minutes he was back. He told me he had talked to the police and the hospital and that, apparently, she wasn’t in any danger. He was going straight there. I thought I’d go mad waiting and by the time he called me, a couple of hours later from the hospital, I had already found out about flights to LA. “There’s absolutely nothing to worry about,” he said. “She’s fine. Just in a bit of pain.” I think that defines “understatement.” I was gabbling about going straight to the airport and getting onto a plane, but Graham said, “Honestly, Luke, there’s no need for that. I’m going to stay until she’s out of hospital, until she’s absolutely fine, I promise you. And then she can be at Laurie’s, recuperate, sit in the sun. Anyway, Erica can look after her—she’s a nurse.” That was the most terrifying scenario of all. What he seemed most insistent on was that Martha must not come. I didn’t tell him there was no need to worry about that: it was the least likely thing to happen.

Afterwards, Rachel never talked about it so nobody knows exactly what happened, but at some point in the night, after Wade had picked her up, his car had come off the road halfway up Mulholland Drive. It might have been what the police called “a chase situation”—something to do with the tire tracks and the speed of the car. Another driver, not at the time but at dawn, saw the car turned over and had called them. Rachel, like
the well-brought-up girl she was, was wearing a seat belt. Wade wasn’t. He had been killed instantly. As the car turned over, the bonnet had caved in and had crushed Rachel’s left leg. She was “stable” but unconscious, although that might have had more to do with the alcohol and drug levels in her body than the injury itself. In the boot there were several crack pipes, a bag of cocaine, and a large amount of crystal meth, wholesale amounts, not personal use.

The fixers moved into action. Laurie’s lawyer and the press people from the show convened at the house to work out a plan, not so much for Rachel but to distance Laurie from any potential fallout. Graham was the one on Rachel’s side, although I don’t suppose he was immune from self-interest either—none of this, if it got out, would be great publicity for the books or the BBC series that was due to air at Christmas.

You can do anything with money and there was no shortage of that, either from Laurie or from the inflated coffers of the Carter Press. The first thing was to sort out medical care. Graham called his office and had Rachel put on the company insurance policy that would routinely cover employees on business trips. Then, on the lawyer’s advice, she was moved out of Glendale, the hospital in the valley that she and Wade had been taken to, and transported to Cedars-Sinai in Beverly Hills. The imperative was to distance her, as best they could, from Wade and the drugs. Anyway, Cedars-Sinai was much closer to Laurie’s house.

It all seemed to be about distance, to make sure Rachel was as weightless as a balloon, floating above the earth with no connections, no cord attaching her to anything. In the forms that needed to be filled in by the hospital and insurance company, there had to be an address she was staying at in Los Angeles. On
the lawyer’s orders, it could not be Laurie’s house so they put her down as care of Wallace Carter at his house in Brentwood. More than that, nobody even connected to Laurie was to telephone the hospital or to visit Rachel. No flowers, letters or gifts were to be sent. Her stuff was packed up, put into her suitcase and delivered to the hospital, the luggage label, with Laurie’s address on it, removed and substituted with another that bore Wally’s. Only Travis ignored the directives and spent most of the days after the accident hanging around the waiting area of Cedars-Sinai in case he could see her.

She was in hospital for ten days and had two operations on her leg. She would always walk with a limp. When she was released from hospital, she was installed in Wally and Ryoko’s guesthouse, with a nurse to look after her. The final hurdle of distance to be vaulted was the inquest into the accident. Laurie’s lawyer pulled every trick out of the bag. Because of Rachel’s “extensive and life-threatening injuries alleged to have been caused by the deceased,” she was allowed not to testify in person but to give a written deposition. Her statement, prepared by Laurie’s lawyer, stated that she was a publishing executive on business in Los Angeles, she had met Wade for the first time at a party that evening and he had offered her a lift. Because of her jet-lag, she had fallen asleep in his car and had no recollection or knowledge of the accident. She also had no knowledge that he was “alleged to be a habitual and known drug user,” or that the boot of the car contained any illegal substances.

After two weeks at Wally’s house, when she could walk unassisted, she was taken to a drug-rehab center in Arizona, where she stayed for a month, the reason for her sojourn there stated as “depression.” The twenty-five-thousand-dollar fee was paid by the Carter Press and deducted from the
Hayseed
royalty
account. Travis quietly packed his guitar, amp, and surfboard, left Laurie’s house without saying good-bye to anyone, drove to Tucson, where the place was, and booked into a motel for the duration.

The one detail of her “extensive and life-threatening injuries” that I didn’t know until years later was this: the accident had caused her to lose the baby she was carrying, the one she had told me about, the one she was going to get rid of.

Laurie had had a dream and she knew where it came from. A few days before, when she was being driven back from the studio after a crisis meeting about the
LA Times
story, she had seen a strange sight several streets away from home: a whole house wrapped in an enormous blue plastic sheet. There had been an infestation of termites, and it meant the owners had to move themselves and their possessions out while the place was tented and toxic gas pumped in to kill the bugs.

In her dream, she had seen the termites fleeing the building before it was too late and heading towards her place in battle formation. Only—being a dream—they were sometimes termites and sometimes people, but whatever disguise they wore she wasn’t going to let them come to her house: she was going to make sure of that, even if she had to nuke them off the sidewalk. Except something had clearly gone wrong: in the next part of the dream, they were already inside her house having a cocktail party in which the canapes were chunks of brick and wood from the house that were being passed around by termite maids in uniform.

In the midst of the light hum of conversation and the clink of glasses and the clacking of mandibles, she saw some familiar faces. There was Erica in the corner demonstrating her backhand with one of her many arms to Marge who had obviously just been to the hair salon. Alma was sitting in a chair gazing malevolently out at the guests and probably about to complain
that there were too many Jew termites. She shooed away a little boy who was running by screaming at the top of lungs. Laurie hadn’t seen him for a long time but she knew it was Paully Schiller. Merry was there, too, looking fresh as a spring day in her light blue dress, scuttling across the floor offering people refills. In the kitchen, Rick and Jerrilee were duetting on “I Wonder What the King Is Doing Tonight” from
Camelot
, their antennae waving time to the music like metronomes, and earning quite a round of applause when they finished.

The house was light and airy. The walls had already been attacked and there were large holes that were letting a breeze flow through to provide some welcome cool on this hot afternoon. There were some guests out in the garden, attracted less by the sun than by the new timber decking that had recently been laid, which seemed as luscious as caviar to those partaking of it. A little distance away from the other guests outside, standing under one of the palm trees, Laurie could see Luke and Rachel Hayman being snooty and English and not joining in the party. How typical, Laurie thought.

Then she saw something else that made her heart almost stop. Out of the shade behind the tree, a figure crawled forward and came to rest behind Luke and Rachel. She had only seen him once a long time ago in what already seemed a different lifetime, but she would have known him anywhere: it was Arthur Hayman. His children turned and looked up at him with adoration, and out of the sleeves of his jacket came a variety of spindly limbs that he placed on their shoulders

Then she woke up. It was three in the morning now and she couldn’t remember the last time she had had anything resembling a full night’s sleep. She felt lost and alone. In fact, she was alone—Erica was at the hospital with Alma. On top of
everything, Alma had chosen this moment to have a stroke and could go at any time according to the doctors. The only sounds she could hear came from BJ and Marty: a scratching on her bedroom door which she had purposely shut to stop them coming in and a horrid, needy wailing noise. She’d never liked them anyway. She’d only let Erica have them to keep her happy. They were as bad as the termites.

She tried to think clearly, but all the problems seemed piled on top of each other, connected and interconnected so that dealing with just one of them—pulling a single card from the house of cards—might bring the whole edifice down. She thought she had been so clever to bring Rachel over to do the
Hayseed
show. She had been under no illusions that it would have been better to use the boy, but she hadn’t been prepared to let him hold her to ransom. She had given him everything and he had flung it back in her face. It had all gone wrong after that. She couldn’t exactly blame Rachel for the timing of the newspaper stories, but she was obviously one of those people who carried disaster in her hand luggage. Laurie wasn’t about to forgive her for what she had put them all through.