The Juliet (38 page)

“Easy peasy,” Scottie said. “The rock’s only been missing since…when did the documentary say they lost track of her? The ‘50s?”

“Right. Then I’ll tell the Sheriff his retirement party will be held on Atlantis.”

There hadn’t been any traffic since Willie pulled in, but in the distance the soft glow of headlights reflected off the desert. The vehicle was about a mile away.

Scottie was suddenly somber. “Tony said Dexon wanted to change you. Did he?”

The lights grew stronger. “You want me to tell you my secrets,” Willie said. “Okay, how’s this? I wish I had found The Juliet, but I’d be just as happy living in The Mystery House, being a person with a life. I guess that’s a change.”

Together they watched the police cruiser pull into the parking lot. It rolled by the green truck and paused. When the officer saw Willie in the lot, he pulsed his light and siren once.
Stay put.

“Oh, Rhys,” she said. “What have you done?”

“I didn’t think you were coming back.” His voice cracked. “I was angry about Dawn, about how we may have screwed up her life trying to protect you. So I reported the truck stolen.”

Willie nodded. The cruiser’s interior light was on, and the officer was on his radio. “Well, the inevitable has arrived a little sooner than I expected.”

“You’re pissed at me,” Scottie said.

“I’m really not,” Willie said, and she could see he was disappointed by that.

“Come here, quick,” Willie said. She grabbed Scottie’s neck and pulled him towards her, pressing her mouth on his forehead to kiss him hard, no pucker. Her lips were flat across the wrinkles of his brow.

When she released him, Scottie staggered a half-step back, clutching his cane. He gave out a dry, half-chuckle. “I just figured you out.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah.” He touched where she’d kissed him. “You’re that crazy Auntie with the jewelry who scares the cousins at Christmas. Except you’re young and you don’t smell like basil leaves yet.”

“What kind of jewelry?”

“Copper bracelets with turquoise. All the way up both skinny arms.”

“I’ll take it,” she said. “It’s nice to know I may amount to something someday.”

Together, Scottie and Willie watched the officer step out of the cruiser. It was hard to believe he was coming for her.

* * *

March 26, 2005: Death Valley, CA

Plan A was for Nene and Baron Glatter to go public as the lucky tourists who discovered The Juliet, offering her to the highest bidder. Plan A was off the table. Plan A didn’t anticipate murder. Plan A didn’t anticipate the continued existence of Stiegs out there either. Apparently there was a diaspora of trashy boors trading on the name, as Baron had discovered during a session on the Alkali’s sole computer. The Stiegs of the twenty-first century would pounce on their lost treasure like starving coyotes.

Plan B was more discreet and involved finding an ethically impaired broker.

Plan B, version 2 required the addition of a skilled and furtive lapidarist to the team, one who could carve away a quarter to a third of the egg that could be passed off as the second section. That any one person possessed both halves of The Juliet was a scenario so outrageous that almost no one would believe it. But surely someone would, ideally someone with deep pockets and an imagination that beggared common sense.

The stress made it almost impossible to sleep, and Nene kept squirming and fidgeting on the foam mattress she shared with Baron. They were due to check out of camp in the morning, and morning couldn’t come fast enough.

When she did sleep, she dreamed of the past, of that day when she was strolling through the beach party, insolent as hell, unaware that she was stepping into oblivion.

Nene dreamed that walk through the party over and over again.

By morning she was alone in the bunk. Baron was already up, cooking coffee and going through the checklist of things necessary to prepare the RV for travel again. There was a lot of noise outside. It was the turnover day for the resort, with many travelers on their way out.

Missy thumped her tail against the bunk, and Nene reached out to scratch her ears.

“You picked a bad morning to sleep in,” said Baron. His nerves were fried. He hadn’t slept well either. “I’ve been up for hours.”

Nene didn’t apologize. She took her coffee and watched the hubbub through the slatted window next to the bunk. “To a new beginning,” she said.

Baron gripped the edge of the sink. He wasn’t in the mood for good mornings. There was too much to do.

She said, “If you want to go back to Centenary and buy that picture, it’s okay with me.” This was her way of apologizing for whatever had Baron on edge. “You’ll have to go on your own, though. I think that fat man believes he knows me from somewhere. I shouldn’t risk crossing paths with him again.”

Baron nodded in agreement. “We have been a little reckless.”

Nene sipped the coffee. There were grounds in it. “Take the car. Take Missy.”

Baron looked at her for the first time that morning. She slept in the nude, and even at her age her breasts were better than most, small and high. Rock and roll tits.

“Yeah, I want the picture.” He placed the keys to the RV on top of the checklist. “I’m going to take The Juliet as well.”

Neither of them breathed for a moment. Then he said, “You’re strong.”

That’s when she knew she’d never see Baron again. That was bad news. Not only did Nene love him, in her narcissistic way, she was counting on him to care for her in her declining years.

Plan B, part 2 had broken him. The more partners they talked about taking on, the more dispirited he became. So this was his solution, to go it alone. Maybe he’d been thinking about leaving her for some time.

Nene said, “May I ask you something?”

“Don’t.”

“Thanks for the coffee.” She hoped she sounded more tender than bitter.

Baron took his bag and the dog. The Juliet was probably stashed inside his dirty laundry, jammed in a grocery sack in the corner of his suitcase. The RV shook as he left, and Nene held her cup steady. Then came the sound of the Subaru’s engine turning over.

As Baron pulled away, Nene had a funny thought. Too bad Dexon didn’t survive, they could have kept each other company out here in the middle of hell. Nene tapped out a cigarette from a fresh pack on the table. New matches too, with
Alkali Springs Resort
stamped in green on the white cover. Another homey touch from Baron. He was sentimental.

She lit up, and watched the camp activity through the tiny screened window. Everyone was awake, active, outside. Kids running and screaming because somehow the air was making them do it. Grown-ups gossiping in their pajamas, carrying coffee cups like they were academy award statuettes. Nene let her ashes fall where they would. She was past caring, except that she would miss the dog.

She’d give Baron the better part of an hour to change his mind, but then it would be checkout time and after that, no mercy. Baron was gambling on her silence, on her desire to remain hidden from the world, but he hadn’t factored in the most important detail of her life: being Nene Glatter was boring as hell.

* * *

April 30, 2005: Los Angeles, CA

When Nene staggered into a crowded medical center in south Los Angeles, she learned that the Spanish word for zombie was
zombi.
She briefly locked eyes on the five-year-old who had screamed the word, and her gaze sent the child hurtling into the protective embrace of his mother.

Everyone else in the lobby stopped chattering, clicking, moving—med techs and patients alike. As they should.

The shock of cold air tightened Nene’s skin; it had been quite a while since she’d walked into a room naked, but that was what muscle memory was for. When one of the technicians rushed to intercept her, she collapsed onto him.

The first order of business had been to get rid of the RV. She’d driven it to Sonora and traded it for bus fare to Los Angeles. In L.A. she checked into a transient motel with an empty pool where it only took a month on a diet of gin and vending machine crackers to transform her lean frame into an emaciated horror. After a skillful application of filth, she was skinny and ragged enough to look as if she’d just stepped off the cover of a bootleg Rolling Stones’ album.

She didn’t bother cutting or burning herself to enhance the effect. Ever since she was young, her body terrified all on its own. Age hadn’t softened it, either. Age merely added details here and there.

The nurses and doctors had IVs and questions, but Nene made a show of struggling to think or speak clearly. She was still undecided as to how far to go, what kind of story she wanted to tell them about Baron. There were so many ways to hurt him, to haunt him, to make it impossible for him to come out of hiding.

And she might not have to say much at all. People were good at filling in the gaps.

The only thing she had to do right now was tell the truth:

“I think…I think I’m Kimber Logue.”

* * *

1990: Trona, CA

The desert was monotonous until it wasn’t. The drive from Beatty to Ridgecrest was scenic but repetitive until you passed through Trona where five hundred limestone spires jutted up from the dry basin of Searles Lake. Some of them reached well over one hundred feet tall, and they were called the Trona Pinnacles. The Pinnacles offered up a shocking landscape, as unearthly as the earth could get—the go-to location for a producer in need of a striking backdrop for dinosaurs or aliens. Sometimes both.

Rigg thought the Pinnacles looked like an army of turd soldiers, ready for battle.

Two actresses in bikini tops and jeans shorts were taking snapshots of each other, climbing up the rocks to strike unlikely seductive poses. A man in a rubber suit that looked like a sunburnt intestine had pulled open the zipper to breathe and read a new page of dialogue just handed to him. The monster had more lines than the girls. The girls were there to scream and lose their tops on cue.

Rigg was the outlier in a crew that was otherwise an even mix of whelps and old-timers. The young’uns were the
talent
—acting, writing, directing—while the old folks were doing the real work of hauling equipment and using it. The girls tried to get Mr. Intestine’s attention, but he was busy studying. Rigg had been given new pages too, but it didn’t matter. There were only so many variations of “Hold it right there!” Once he hit his mark on a jagged piece of rock that looked as if it were floating in the blue sky, anything he might say would be gold just as long he was fatally heroic, shooting his futile bullets into the creature.

Rigg spotted a friend on the crew. Bill Jimenez was in his sixties, a tall, burly fellow incapable of smiling. He was hauling apple boxes out to a miniature cliff that would look like the edge of the world when framed properly.

“Let me help you with that,” Rigg said.

Jimenez shook his head and said, “Union rules.”

They both laughed, and Rigg took on two of the boxes.

“You Lead Man on this piece of shit?”

Jimenez growled. He always growled. “Lead man, gang boss, key grip, and all around catamite. They got a girl in to do makeup. I think she’s the director’s sister.”

“Making Golan-Globus look classy.”

“You got it, Hamlet.” When they reached set, Jimenez dropped the apple boxes to the side. So did Rigg. Jimenez looked out into the vast and bizarre landscape. “Been out here a dozen or so times now.”

Rigg nodded. “Feels like home.” He figured he’d filmed five or six features out at the Pinnacles over the course of his career. “Thank God for space operas.”

“Food on the table,” his old friend agreed.

It didn’t matter how futuristic or bizarre these made-for-TV flicks were, they still needed the anchoring presence of a cheap cowboy with a Q rating. And cowboys didn’t come cheaper than Rigg. The seventies and early eighties had been pretty good to him, but his feature days were over. In the span of the past five or six years he’d slid far and low, from commercials to pornos and now to this—
cable
.

Jimenez inspected the equipment, looking for what was missing. “You ever work with old Budge Lange?”

“Met him once on
Miracle Mountain,
but we were never on set together.”

Jimenez said, “Yeah he was about ten years before you came up. Played bikers and hoodlums before he caught a few westerns. When the work dried up he disappeared. Poof, you know?”

“Meaning what?”

“He went into
seclusion.
Like he was a real star or something. He moved to Death Valley. Hell of a thing.”

“You trying to tell me something?”

Jimenez was momentarily confused by Rigg’s response. Then he realized. “Oh right. Actors. No, I’m not talking about you. I’m saying you might want to visit him while you’re out here. Especially since us old-timers are a vanishing breed.”

“You said he disappeared.”

Bill Jimenez rubbed his own shoulder. “That’s the
story.
But he kept in touch with a few of us. I bring him goodies and the news when I can. Mostly magazines and pills.”

“I see,” said Rigg. “He’s a good guy then?”

“Not really. He was always looking out for himself and nobody else. But now he’s in a bad way.” Bill left his hand on his shoulder. Rigg could tell he was sore and getting sorer. This was no job for a man of his years.

“Dying?” Rigg asked.

“Dying, yeah,” Jimenez said. “Nothing lasts forever.”

Together the men stared out at the vast range of pinnacles.

“Except this shit.”

* * *

“The owl and the pussycat went to sea, in a beautiful pea green boat,” Budge said, with the surprising rhythm of a pro. Rigg had heard about this phenomenon, and he’d thought it was just an urban legend, that old actors in extreme decline will sometimes toss off lines from old scripts with uncanny grace. The great ones—Garrick, Bernhardt, and Barrymore—were said to have performed their greatest speeches, quite mindlessly, just before death, as if their lives were the words, and the words were leaving their broken hosts behind.