Wake Up and Dream (31 page)

Barbara was standing beside him now. The only other thing on the desk apart from the flies was a solitary buff gray folder. He lifted it open. Instantly the flies began to crawl over old cuttings—curled and yellowed images of Clark’s face from the middle pages of single column articles in
Variety
back in the days when he was just about famous—and a bigger glossy that he remembered having done at Mina’s considerable expense and never feeling happy with. Abe had also gotten hold of one of Clark’s business cards, and he looked, from the emphatic way he’d crossed out the disconnected number and the tiny breasts which decorated its edges, to have tried calling it. He’d then written another number on the back of the card which Clark recognized as belonging to a service office he’d briefly used to take messages until he decided the whole thing was a rip-off. Finally, in a fresher, crisper hand, was the number for the phone in the hall of the Doge’s Apartments, and then the words
Glory Guzman?!!!
deeply scored with a kind of frustration Clark could understand.

“Looks like he did try to speak to you,” Barbara muttered. “Is Glory always like she was this morning?”

“No. We got her on a good day.”

“So he chose you, and the message about the whole business didn’t get through, and then he… Do you think this is really a suicide?”

“No.” Abe swung gently in the fresher breeze from the open window. Quite a lot him had already leaked onto the floor, and was forming a black, slow-spreading pool around the chair which the flies seemed especially to love. They’d have to hurry up here, or he’d need to find somewhere to vomit. “But that’s what it’s supposed to look like.”

“You don’t say.”

No sign of a suicide note, fake or otherwise, but would this kind of guy really need an explanation as to why he’d killed himself? Clark doubted it. The cops, when someone finally got around to noticing the smell, would be happy to file a
Death By Own Hand
report and leave it at that. Wouldn’t ever get as far as being looked at by homicide, any more than had the death of April Lamotte.

Picking out a fly which had crawled into the edge of his mouth, Clark closed the folder. Was it so surprising that Abe had chosen him when he was asked about finding a guy who was prepared to play at being someone else’s husband for a few hours? He supposed not. After all, who else was Abe likely to think of when he was looking for a tall guy with big ears, not too many scruples, a background in matrimonial affairs, and some experience of proper acting? He checked the diary again. There was nothing else beyond that previous Friday. After that, he reckoned, Abe Penn was probably dead. Otherwise, and for all this frustrations at trying to speak to Glory, he’d have tried to get in touch again.

Clark riffled through the desk drawers. Nothing much more, beyond some copies of a business card for Nero Investigations. There was some dried-up orange peel in the bin, and a sandwich with a bite mark which the flies, with so much of Abe to go at, had chosen to ignore. Also a copy of the
LA Times
for that same last Friday as the diary. Abe had made a less than successful stab at the crossword.

A crackling flash detonated in the room. Every fly on what was left of Abe’s body instantly took off, momentarily revealing an anatomy squirming with millions of fresh white maggots.

Barbara thumbed on the Graflex’s winder. She paused, and looked over at Clark.

“What?”

They was no one about as they left the place. Outside, the combined city reek of horse dung, gasoline fumes, hot tar and tamarisk had rarely smelled so good. Clark stood out front of the block for a moment, looking up. Abe’s office was on this side. You could see where the window had been left half open—and the lazy circle of a few flies as they went in and out. He walked over to the spot directly beneath. No proper paving here, just gravel and dog dirt. He pushed around at the gravel with his shoe, vaguely remembering how people said the sidewalks in this town were supposed to glitter in the sun like gold. Then he saw something flash. He stooped down and picked up the broken remains of a needle-tipped glass tube.

“W
E GO TO THE POLICE?”

“’Course we don’t.”

“Another suicide—but there’s no Abraham Penn on here.” They were sitting back in the Delahaye, and Barbara had unfolded that faded guestlist for the premiere of
Broken Looking Glass
once again.

“I think Abe was just…” He shook his head. “What would the military call it? A civilian casualty.”

“The wrong person in the wrong place?”

“Exactly.”

Poor old Abe Penn. Not that he’d known him well—not that he reckoned anyone had. Just another sleazy guy in a too-tight suit, and not particularly fragrant even when he was alive. He remembered him mostly from a case where they’d been hired by opposite sides in a divorce, which had been no problem at all. They’d gone and got drunk on the fees after the case was finished, which was when Clark had probably given him his card. Since then, he’d heard that Abe had been mostly doing freelance employee reference and insurance investigations. Basic trudgework. Abe might have had a license, but he couldn’t do a
Don’t you remember me from the talkies?
turn to persuade the lady clients to hire him for messy matrimonials the way Clark could.

Now the guy had gone and got sucked into this business and killed, probably for no better reason than that April Lamotte had seen one of his adverts in the cheaper rags promising secrecy and discretion. Not that Clark reckoned that Abe had ever got as far as going up to see April Lamotte. That had been someone else—whoever had listened in on her calls on a link from the automatic exchange, then staged Abe’s suicide using whatever was in those syringes, and had driven up to Erewhon themselves pretending to be Abe, and then probably delivered that unpostmarked letter to the communal postbox at the Doge’s Apartments, most likely driving a Mercury sedan.

Once again, Clark had that itchy feeling of being followed, hunted. What puzzled him most by now was how he and Barbara had managed to get this far along Dan and April Lamotte’s tracks without being killed. That, and how all the others who’d been touched by this strange affair had also made it. Kisberg. That doctor woman—if she
was
still living. Lars Bechmeir, even. And, yes, Peg Entwistle. He remembered again the gaps he’d noticed in Erewhon’s viewing library. Those missing feelie reels.
The Virgin Queen
amongst them.

“Barbara, what else have you got in that bag of yours.”

“I told you, Clark. I’m just collecting stuff that’s relevant. It isn’t as if you’ve—”

“No. That isn’t what I mean. Have you got that receipt—the big-bucks one for the feelie studio dated earlier this year?

T
HE PREMISES OF FEEL-O-REEL INC.
lay only a few blocks off and along Pacific Boulevard from Abe Penn’s. But they belonged to a different world.

With its wide lots and dazzling aluminum and steel buildings, the Nueva Vision Business Park looked as if it should house the sort of technologies which Daniel Lamotte had once written about in those pulp “Scientifiction” novels. In a way, it did. If not death rays, rocket fins, instant cures for cancer and meals that came in a tablet, it did at least play host to the manufacturers of the Precious Poochie range of canine clothing, the T C Coolo automatic ice crusher (
You’ll Never Choke on Another Cube
) and the SeaSlooosh! pool wave-machine. In this elevated company, the activities of the Feel-o-Reel Post Production studio seemed everyday.

Inside the rollback doors, men in white suits were pushing trolleys and tending machines that looked like hi-tech spinning wheels. One of the guys saw Clark and Barbara, and signaled emphatically, without removing his cotton mask, that they should wait right where they where. Another guy then emerged from a glass-walled office.

“Sorry, but we have to be very careful about contamination. Get the slightest bit of grit in the drawing or charging processes, and a whole reels gone to waste. Don’t think I caught your names… ?”

Pete Peters—his parents must have had some imaginations—was wearing an open-neck suit, expensively tailored to look casual in an oh-this-thing-I’ve-just-thrown-on sort of way. He had a relaxed manner and a dry, quick handshake.

“This is Barbara Eshel, and I’m, ah…” They’d agreed on a spiel outside, but Clark still had to think for a stupid moment before coming up with his own name. “… Clark Gable. We’re working for someone called Lamotte. Reason we’re here is, we’re private investigators, and—”

“Of course, of course! My only surprise is it’s taken you so long to get here. Are you working for their insurance company as well, or just for Mr Lamotte in a private capacity?” Peters beckoned them back toward his glass cubical. “Might as well come in…”

His office smelled of clean machine oil like the rest of the place. It was cramped, but expensively furnished in the modern way. Even though there was no outer window, the polished glare off everything made you want to put on sunglasses.

“Know much about what we do here?” Peters asked once he’d got them seated in hard little chairs.

“Well, er…” Barbara began.

“Thing is,” Peters leaned forward across the glasstop desk, “the big feelie companies all have their own stock production facilities, but a lot of the kit they have is at least five years old. And the staff…” He chuckled. “They’re a whole lot older. So what we offer is a faster turnaround and a better, more consistent finished product. A sharper field. A bigger kick for your feelie buck. Then we get used a lot by the independents. I can get our secretary to give you a leaflet. Then, of course, we do one-offs. But you know about that.”

“You mean,” Clark asked, “like the commission from Daniel Lamotte?”

“We do all kinds of stuff. It’s still not that usual for us to do work for a private individual, but a lot of companies are getting more and more interested in feelie technology. All sorts of people you’d never even think.”

“R H Macys? Howard Johnson’s? The Liberty League? The Nazis?”

“Exactly!” Peters nodded as eagerly as Timmy Townsend had.

“Although precisely who we do business for is commercially confidential…” He trailed off, and looked a trifle disappointed when Clark and Barbara didn’t press him. “You really
aren’t
the police, are you, by the way? I need to be entirely clear on that. Otherwise, my lawyer’ll kill me.”

“No.” Clark said. “We’re not.”

“Absolutely,” Barbara agreed.

“Okay. Because, well, some of the stuff we’re asked to do gets at bit
edgy
, if you know what I mean…”

This Peters guy was interviewing himself, the way people sometimes did when they were confronted by a private dick. Again, they both nodded. Clark knew all about the sort of bad taste that went into modern stag feelies, and certainly didn’t want to hear about anything that got more “edgy” than that.

“So I guess,” Peters asked, “you want to know the details of the break in?”

Break in?
“That sure would be helpful,” Clark agreed, wishing he’d brought along a notepad to help things along, then seeing Barbara fish inside her handbag and produce one.

“Just in your own words, Mr Peterson,” she said brightly, waving a pencil. “Might as well start at the very beginning.”

“Not that much to say really. Your client Mr Lamotte came in, oh… It was in the spring. March, I think…” He reached to flick through a big Rolodex. “Here it is, the 26th. He brought in the recordings he wanted cut and mixed and transcribed with him. Said it was a surprise birthday present for his wife.”

“Got a record of what the recordings were?” Barbara asked.

“We have to. Don’t you know that everything to do with using feelie technology is licensed?”

“Of course. Silly me. So… ?”

“Well here is it.” He unclipped a card from the Rolodex and handed it to her. “Although I guess your client could confirm as well…”

Clark and Barbara studied it. The neatly handwritten list on the card which contained an order number and Daniel Lamotte’s contact details corresponded pretty much with the missing reels Clark remembered in Erewhon’s viewing library. Basically, it was a list of all the feelies for which Daniel Lamotte had written the script.
The Magic of the Past
was there. So were
Sometime Never, Prospector, Sunday Means Tonight, Freedom City
and
This Point Backwards
as well. So, of course, was
The Virgin Queen
.

“It was quite an interesting challenge. Thing is, Mr Lamotte wanted us to edit and cut these feelies so that we could extract the aura of each of his favorite stars, then re-edit them into one single track.” He shook his head. “Not sure if that sounds weird or not. But who am I to judge? I just do the work.”

“What about this one at the bottom?” Barbara tapped the card with her pencil. “Where you’ve just put a number?”

“Yeah, that was an older reel. Mr Lamotte said it was from his private collection, or his wife’s, or something like that. Rusty old thing. No label or anything. Hasn’t
he
explained this to you? Jesus, it must have gone
wayback
, had to clean it up and run it at double speed, although it wasn’t so bad once we’d worked out what it was supposed to represent.”

“And that was?”

“Well, it was just this series of recordings of these different anonymous auras. Must have been some early demo or something, I guess. There were twenty separate sequences in all. It just ended in this glob of fused metal like it had been burnt out. That can happen sometimes—like if filmstock gets trapped in the shutter. Although you need to push the magnetic heads real hard to trigger a melt.”

“Any idea where he got this recording?”

Peters shrugged. “Like I say, it was an ancient thing. Didn’t have any of the usual identifiers. That was why we had to give it a fresh catalogue number. Otherwise, we’d have the Bechmeir Trust on our tail. Doing what we do, we don’t want that. Like I say, everything we produce has to be licensed.”

“How does that work?”

He shrugged. “Simple enough. Pat in our main office has to send off a chit for each recording we make and the Bechmeir Trust log it and send us back a bill.”