Wake Up and Dream (23 page)

“’Cos he
is
. Hey, listen. The guy’s…”

But Clark was already walking up the street.

“… it’s just.” Roger said as he tagged along beside him. “Well, something falls right into your hands, you take it, right… ?”

The mailbox was affixed to a lamppost beside a dusty willow tree. It was old, its drab paint peeling,
U.S. MAIL
embossed down the side. But this was probably the box which Daniel Lamotte had used to mail the blue draft of
Wake Up and Dream
—the one that Timmy Townsend said had never reached him. He crouched to look at it more closely as Roger continued to mouth excuses about whatever it was he and his friends had done. The only part of the mailbox that didn't look old was the lock, where a gleam of freshly drilled-out metal was showing. When he gave the front panel a push, it simply creaked open.

F
RYING SMOKE AND A SMELL
of over-cooked eggplant hung inside Blixden Apartments as Clark climbed the stairs. Radios were playing. A fat lady in not much more than a towel pushed past him on her way to the bathroom. The door to room 4A was ajar.

“The wanderer returns.” Barbara Eshel was sitting cross-legged in the middle of the floor, surrounded by papers. “Like the outfit, by the way. Did that really get you inside the Met?”

“You’ve seen the kid from the street?”

“The one called Roger? The one with all that guff about dark cars and guys in uniform?”

He put down the toilet wastecan he’d brought with him from Larch Lodge and sat on the chair beside the typewriter. He pushed at the letter T so that it was half-raised, then let it fall. He took off his glasses and pinched his nose. The room looked, smelled—
felt
—different. The papers were stacked now. Barbara Eshel had even thought to get rid of many of the old soup cans and bourbon bottles which he’d only looked at disgustedly. She’d even straightened the grayed sheets over the mattress.

“But
I
was okay.” She picked up the Colt. Gave it an Annie Oakley spin. “Any baddies come to my hacienda, they get this. You okay Clark? What did you find… ?”

He told her about the waitress at Edna’s Eats who’d seen Daniel and April Lamotte there last Friday morning, and how he’d left the place apparently drunk, but more likely drugged. About driving into the mountains, and how April Lamotte supposedly killing herself only made sense when you put some guy dressed as a cop and some misleading signing also up there. Then there was what he’d found at Larch Lodge…

“April Lamotte even talked to me about starting a new life,” he said. “It’s the only thing that adds up. Something about the script that Dan was writing suddenly spooked her. Or maybe not so suddenly… Or maybe there was some kind of warning or somebody told her something. But whatever way it happened, she reckoned that if she used me to fake Dan’s death, they could both run for it and start afresh with new identities. Somewhere they’d never be found. I mean, I may not look
that
much like the guy, but I’m close enough if all you have to go on is an ID, a diver’s license, and a general description. And who else but April would the police have called on to identify the body?”

“And when morning came—after she’d left you for dead on Mulholland Drive—and she didn’t get the phone call she was expecting from the police, she panicked and drove up to Larch Lodge?”

“Yeah.”

“What I don’t understand, Clark, is what she was going to do if her plan had worked. Okay, she’s got her husband seemingly dead and the money sorted, but what about herself?”

He remembered again that new roadmap, and the gritty feel of sand he’d first got from it. And the notepad the police had shown him. The reason the phrases she’d written looked like tryouts, it suddenly occurred to him, was because that was what they
were
… “I think she was planning to stage her own death as well. Maybe not produce a body this time, and it’s not what actually happened, but drive out over the mountains and leave her car parked somewhere in the high desert. Might not be found for months, and by then they’d hardly be looking for a body. Not with the note she was planning on leaving, and the vultures and coyotes. Makes perfect sense. Her husband’s dead, after all. So why bother to live? Why not just drive off and walk into nowhere? Who wouldn’t believe that?”

“But she didn’t make it up to Larch Lodge yesterday morning, did she?”

“No.”

“You think someone else got to her, made it look like the suicide she tried to fake for her husband, and then got to Dan after that and possibly doped him with a syringeful of something?”

“Yeah.”

“So now Daniel Lamotte’s been taken, without any obvious struggle, by person or persons unknown, but most likely driving a black Mercury sedan and wearing some kind of official-seeming uniform? And perhaps he’s alive and perhaps he’s dead? And all of this is because of something he’s written in
Wake Up and Dream
?”

“You tell me why else. I don’t think it’s in the blue draft. Not in the script Dan first sent to Senserama, the one April Lamotte let me see, but the one he wrote after that, and she destroyed in a bonfire. But something
happened
to him. Like he’d found out something new and vital and big. Like he was gripped by a fever. And that discovery was what really scared April Lamotte.”

She scooted over on her knees to the metal wastecan. Pulled a face. “And there’s more of the screenplay in
here
? A pink draft?” She prodded it open. “Ow…”

“Watch the syringe.”

“Jesus, Clark.” She waved her finger. “Could have told me it was still in there. This is such a
mess
…” As she pulled out long, ragged bunches of toilet sheet he was reminded of the presence which had stirred itself out of the detritus in the City Hall mens’ room. “Are you
sure
he hasn’t… ?”

“I’d be careful. Like they say on the signs, you should always wash your hands.”

“Have you been able to
read
any of this… ?”

“Enough to tell me that Dan had somehow decided that the real start of the story went back to him meeting April when he was still plain old Daniel Hogg and she worked at the Met—which, by the way, she really did. That, and that Howard Hughes was somehow at least as big a part of the story as anything to do with Lars Bechmeir.”

“
Or
Dan was hearing voices, seeing ghosts—had gone plain mad… But did you actually get to see Howard Hughes? In that cleaner’s uniform?”

“Yeah. I got there… The Met’s a strange place. Even you or I would soon be acting pretty odd if we were patients. Howard Hughes works at keeping the furnaces and the generators going. Everyone calls him Howie, and I guess he seems happy enough. Almost sane, as well, until you start prodding him. He’s had all sorts of operations done to his head. I tried asking him about what happened in the early days of the Bechmeir field, the way I suppose the real Daniel Lamotte had planned on doing, but, the way he answered the questions, it was like nothing was there.”

“You mean he’s forgotten?”

He shook his head. “It wasn’t even that. He just talked like it had happened to someone else. And he said something about Lars Bechmeir being hard to get to beneath all the publicity. And this in a place where they actually
use
Bechmeir fields to keep the patients subdued. None of it seemed real… But I did get this…” He pulled the staff records from his pocket.

“Neat work.” She smiled as she studied them. “You almost impress me, Clark. Might even make a half decent journalist if you weren’t wasting your life sniffing other people’s bedsheets. So she really did work at the Met, and for some reason Dan suddenly decides the place has got something vital to do with the script he’s working on. All of which brings us right back to April Lamotte… And whatever caught up with her.”

“And here’s why that new script didn’t get to Senserama—that mailbox down the street has had its lock drilled out. Dunno when, but the kids down there have been looking though the mail for money or whatever since early last week. Not that they ever saw anyone, and the postie’s only just noticed, but it looks like it was done using the same kind of tool which did the padlock of the exchange up at Woodsville. April Lamotte was being watched, tracked, her phone listened in on. Dan was too—his mail was being intercepted and read. It all fits.”

“And what about us, Clark?” She’d drawn knees up, her arms wrapped around them, and was looking at him with a sideways tilt to her head and an expression which was somehow both knowing and wary. “Where do we fit in with all of this?”

She boiled them up some coffee in her own room. It was the same kind of space Daniel Lamotte had occupied, but what struck Clark was its neatness and cleanliness. Proper drapes at the window, a patterned rug on the floor. Thrift shop stuff, maybe, but chosen by someone who cared about how she lived.

There were books everywhere—and papers—but they were all neatly stacked. Her typewriter had pencils laid tidily beside it like soldiers. This was nothing like the boarding house rooms of most women he’d encountered. No forests of slips and stays and stockings put out to dry. No dresser scattered with over-spilling ashtrays encrusted with residues of powder and lipstick.

“They definitely
were
married, by the way.” He was sat down with his coffee on a threadbare easy chair. She was flicking through some of the stuff she’d moved here from next door. “
I’ve
been checking things, too. Down at County Records, for a start. Happened May 6, nineteen thirty three. Nothing fancy. Although, just like you said, April Lamotte kept her maiden name and Daniel must have already changed his from plain old Hogg. Now,
that’s
something I can admire about this woman, whatever else she’s done.”

He nodded and sipped his coffee. He guessed she’d probably also checked on an unlicensed private investigator and once near-famous actor called Clark Gable. It was what he’d have done.

“That last sighting of Daniel Lamotte you were told about by the waitress down at Edna’s Eats fits in with what I can remember. Now I’ve thought about it, I’m sure his typewriter was still clacking away earlier last week—say Monday and Tuesday. In fact, it was going so hard and fast that I remember sitting here next door and staring at my own machine and feeling envious. And then it went quiet. Maybe not Thursday, though. I’d say earlier than that. Wednesday at the latest. But it
does
figure—
if
last Friday he went down to that diner to speak to his wife about whatever he’d discovered.” She sighed. “I wish I had a more exact memory.”

“How about asking some of the other people who live here about what they’ve seen?”

“You think I haven’t? One of the few joys of living in a place like this is that no one takes much notice of anyone else. Still, I’m pretty sure someone’s been in there and sorted through his stuff. Not ’cos anything obvious is torn out or missing, but there’s nothing
new
. There’s nothing loose, or unfinished. It’s all far too neat. But this I
did
think was odd.” She handed him a pale blue sheet of typed paper.

Nuclear Power?

Space Travel?

Gold from the sea?

Mind Control?

Teleportation?

Jet power?

Television?

“He wrote
that
?”

“Unless you did.”

“Maybe he was just riffing around for ideas for another project? Some futuristic kind of thing?”

“Who knows—but every other piece of paper and book and notebook next door is tediously and exclusively and repetitiously similar. I could carry on looking, I guess,” she said, “but there’s a limit to how many versions of the same sentence, written out with or without a comma, anyone can read and stay sane. We really need to find out where the guy is, and if he’s still alive.”

She then unrolled a list on a long sheet of paper. It was written in a neat hand which he now recognized as hers. “These are the names and sometimes the addresses of at least some of the private and generally unlisted clinics in and around Los Angeles.”

Clark whistled. “That many?”

“It’s far from complete. This is LA, don’t forget. Seemed this morning like it might have been useful. All wasted effort now, by the look…” She sighed and pushed her fingers through her fringe. He got the impression from the gesture that not all her efforts had gone to waste. “But I
did
take the Redcar down to Willowbrook after I’d finished at County Records. You know, to visit the old theater were Lars Bechmeir worked on his invention that’s now a museum. I asked the ladies at the souvenir desk if they remembered seeing a guy matching your—I mean Daniel Lamotte’s—description. And they did. Could even show me his name in the visitor’s book. He went there to look at the archives a couple of times about three months back, then once again three weeks ago. Although that isn’t why they remembered him.”

“Those earlier visits would have—”

“Hear me out, Clark. They said they remembered him from that last time because he’d been talking with the Director of the Charitable Board. A woman by the name of Doctor Penny Losovic. She works out of there. Didn’t sound like he’d made an appointment to see her, more like they struck up a conversation in the reading room.”

“Didn’t you try to talk to this woman?”

“I couldn’t—she isn’t there. They haven’t seen Doctor Losovic at her office in the museum since early last week. Normally, she comes and goes. It’s not her job to run the place, or count all the money that the rights to the Bechmeir Field generate—what she does is oversee the donations that the Board gives out—so there’s no one she really answers to. But they haven’t seen hide nor hair. And they’re just starting to think it’s odd.”

“Wasn’t it her name on that letter that Daniel Lamotte got back from the Trust about the feelie, the one that said to speak to their lawyers?”

“Yeah, but it was p.p.—it wasn’t signed by her. She’d already vanished on the day that letter went out.”

“You mean, this woman had a conversation with Daniel Lamotte, and no one’s seen her since?”

“Pretty much.”

“Has anyone reported this?”