Читать книгу Sunset People - Herbert Kastle - Страница 14

Arthur called Diana at one-thirty. She wasn’t overly fond of the Grecian Massage’s owner-manager because of his AC/DC action and his numerous attempts to drag her into it. But yesterday had been the worst day of her life, and now she was into the black morning hours, and there was no one to turn to. Certainly not Mom and Pop.

Arthur said, “I’ve been in La Jolla since Friday afternoon, y’know?”

“I know.”

“I just got back about an hour ago and Lori’s filling your shift and she tells me what happened and I can’t believe it, right?”

“Right,” she whispered.

“You need anything?”

“I can’t sleep.”

“Quaalude’ll relax you. I’ll bring a few. And a friend so we can talk.”

“No friend, Art.”

“A lady, hon. A doll.”

“Please. I’m a sick girl tonight.”

He was silent. She knew she’d spoiled his plan to dope her and comfort her with hetero and lesbian sex. To Arthur Dumont, sex was the answer to all pain, all loss and anguish, his main, perhaps his only reason for living. And he wasn’t alone. The Strip was loaded with what street people called “come freaks.”

When he still said nothing, she said, “I’d be glad to pick up the pills at your place if you don’t want to bother coming here. I really need something to knock out the thinking mechanism, the memory banks.”

“What about your books?” he mocked, having resented her withdrawal into reading as so many of the parlor people did.

She answered straight. “Can’t read, Art. Can’t concentrate. Can’t do anything but remember.” Which disarmed him.

“Yeah, well, a tragedy like that—” He sighed. “You don’t know how to live, Diana. I’ll bring ’em over.” He hung up.

It would be at least half an hour, probably longer. Arthur was in Hollywood; Diana lived in a condominium in upper Malibu, inland side of the Pacific Coast Highway but with a good view of the ocean. One of a row of attached two-level apartments called town-houses in L.A.—two bedrooms and bath upstairs; living room, kitchen, dining area, and shower-bath downstairs—it had cost more than she’d felt she should spend. But she’d needed a place away from the action, a place with some sense of the natural world, with the peace that the ocean provided, and she’d sunk just about every dime into buying and furnishing it. That was three years ago, and the townhouse had turned out to be the best investment she could have made, more than doubling in value. A neighbor had recently sold a similar apartment for two hundred thousand.

Another reason she’d bought the townhouse was so that her beach-loving sister would spend weekends with her. Her friend. Her lifelong playmate . . .

She was crying again, and there was no sense in that. Better Arthur’s way, with drugs and repeated orgasms. Better any way than to remember Carla, remember childhood.

St. Louis. Mom and Pop and Carla and Diana. And, for fifteen years, their brother, youngest of the brood, Jackie. Like Carla, doomed. Like Carla, struck down by violence. But unlike Carla, it was violence of his own making. He’d wanted a car. He’d stolen two before taking the Corvette from the dealer’s lot, and being chased, and dumping the car, and running.

And being shot when he ignored the officer’s repeated commands to stop.

“I swear I thought I would hit him in the legs,” the officer had said at the inquest, looking at her parents. “But he tripped . . .”

So he’d been struck in the back, the bullet passing through his heart. So he’d been buried near Grandma’s, in St. Anne’s township, where he’d been happiest.

Not that they hadn’t been happy enough as kids. Poor, yes, but no one mistreated them too badly. An occasional slap in the face from Pop, who saved his real anger for Mom. Her he beat up. And that, along with Jackie’s death, had sent Diana out of the house, out of her sophomore year at Washington University and plans to teach English, to Los Angeles and a brief attempt to break into the movies.

Being pretty, being involved in amateur theatrics, had led to a good deal of attention from men in St. Louis, and to a certain amount of sexual experience. Which increased during her year of acting classes and auditions in Hollywood. Also, her own appetites had been strong and steady.

Still were, though her cynicism had matured and altered the way she looked at men. A stiff penis was one thing; it could be enjoyed on the very simplest of terms without involving your mind, your future, your freedom. Love, long-term affairs, and marriage were other things entirely, being weighted, it seemed to her, so heavily in the male’s favor that fewer and fewer intelligent women were willing to involve themselves. Careers were the answer for these women. And Diana felt her career was to earn as much money as quickly as possible with as little involvement as possible.

Which the massage parlors had offered, with the big plus of satisfying her sexual appetites. She got ten percent of the money Arthur received from her basic twenty-dollar fees, plus everything else she could make. Other parlors had paid less, but she hadn’t stayed long where she wasn’t getting her just share. Now she was content.

Or had been.

She’d had her condominium and her reading and an occasional play or movie. Had a weekend or two each month with Carla when they cooked for each other or ate out at a good restaurant. And watched TV. And talked, talked, always talked about home and Jackie and their parents and their old friends. And this link to the past had kept them both—but especially Diana—sane and stable.

It was Diana who had suffered most at Jackie’s death. With Mom so hard on him, saying he was “just like his father,” Diana had become surrogate mother. It was she who had known how bad he was turning, how dangerous his life was becoming. It was she who had planned to get him away from St. Louis as soon as possible. And it was she who had sat up with his body all night in St. Anne before allowing the morticians to have it.

A strange night, that one. A night of healing as well as grieving. A night during which she had grown in a way that few people her age grew.

She’d known her own mortality that night. She’d lost her true virginity that night. She’d understood life in a certain way, and while Carla had continued to look for love, for marriage, it had somehow ended for Diana.

And now what? Now her sister was dead and she hadn’t been able to make herself call her parents. Her embittered parents who kept asking when she and Carla, who had followed her to L.A. within eight months, were going to “come home.” Her mother who explained the continued beatings by saying, “It’s your fault. Yours and Carla’s. Your father takes his grief, his loss, out on me.”

Which was bullshit! Her father took his failure at work, at being a man, out on her. Her father, who talked of having been scouted by the major leagues when he was a high-school baseball star. Who said her mother had “planned to get pregnant with you,” looking at Diana, “so she could trap me into marriage and make me quit school and lose my chance to pitch for the Cardinals. Oh, Christ, what I could’ve been if it weren’t for you and your mother!”

He would have been just what he was now. He’d worked hard enough at the Anheuser Busch Breweries. He was about to retire.

But he was nothing in his own eyes, so he was nothing.

And he’d never been able to enjoy his wife, his children, make them part of the fabric of his life. So they were nothing . . . when they were with him.

She and Carla had escaped. Her mother was trapped by habit, history, an inability to conceive of making it on her own.

She was standing near the phone. She simply had to inform her parents!

But her mother would shriek and both would blame her for—as her mother had once put it—“influencing your younger sister to follow you in a life of sin.” And that was without having any idea about the massage parlor.

What if the story hit the St. Louis Post Dispatch which her father read faithfully for crime and sports? What if they had already found out? What if the phone rang . . .

It did ring! It sent her stumbling backward, trembling. It kept ringing until she had to pick it up to stop the awful clangor.

“Diana?”

“Who is it?”

“Lieutenant Admer.” He paused. “Call me Larry.”

She was silent.

“I’m sorry for the way I informed you of your sister’s death.”

He didn’t sound sorry to her. He sounded glib.

“Has anything come up about the case?”

“Not yet. But I promise I’ll do a job.”

“Like the job you did releasing my occupation to the news media so that everyone thinks my sister was a streetwalker?”

“That I had no control over. The reporters get all the infomation we get, with the exception of a few facts about the modus operandi, the killer’s technique . . .” He interrupted himself. “Anyway, we can’t hold anything back from newsmen these days.”

“Newspersons. Or haven’t you ever met a woman reporter?”

He chuckled. “Push women’s rights, do you? Chop down the macho?”

She thought of giving him an answer, but she was sick of him and said, “Unless you get to the point of this call, I’m hanging up. And don’t ever bring that other officer, Marv, near me again.”

“Take it easy. I only want to apologize for the way I broke the news. I’ve never been good at things like that.” He was more convincing this time. But then he said, “As for Sergeant Rodin, he’s an experienced detective and he’ll work as hard to solve this thing as I will.”

“Don’t let him come near me.”

“C’mon now, Diana. I’ve warned him not to repeat . . .”

“Or else I’ll file a complaint.”

His voice hardened. “I wouldn’t recommend that, lady. You know what you’re worth in front of a judge, the D.A.?”

She hung up.

In half a minute, the phone rang again.

“I lost my temper,” Admer said. “I’d like to come over and talk about your sister, her habits, the people she worked for, her dates . . .”

“I gave you everything yesterday.”

“Why can’t we be friends?”

“At two in the morning?”

“So what? You deal with men all night, don’t you?”

“For a fee,” she said, despising him.

“Okay. What is it? Twenty? Twenty-five? I’m curious enough to pay. Once.”

“I only do business at the parlor.”

The man’s temper blew. “You’re a real bitch, you know that? If I wanted to apply a little pressure, you’d never work again!”

She continued as if he hadn’t spoken. “Of course, I’m not allowed to deal with a cop. Fm required to ask the question, ‘Are you a police officer?’ of each prospective customer, to avoid entrapment. I’ve never had a yes, but should the answer be yes, I’d ask that customer to leave. With you, I already know the answer.”

It was he who hung up this time.

Probably not smart to antagonize a police lieutenant. But the uncaring nerve of the man, trying a make, with her sister still on ice at the morgue!

She decided to speak to Arthur about transferring to another of his four parlors. Or to check on the Taj Mahal in Santa Monica . . . though that was a little too close to home. She’d always kept her professional life and home life far apart.

But what home life could she have now? Carla’s visits had been family. Without family, what did she have?

No man in her life besides her clients.

No real girlfriends, though she occasionally saw one of the less freaky parlor girls.

No one at all, really.

Quite suddenly, grief was overshadowed by panic.

Dear God, she was alone in all this world!

And there wasn’t even any dear God for her.

The doorbell rang. Gratefully, she ran downstairs to answer it.

Arthur was a small, dark-haired man with sharp, ferret-like features and a pair of the purest, widest, bluest eyes she’d ever seen. Looking into them, you would never think he pushed dope, women, men, children, pornography. Even an occasional murder-for-hire, she’d heard.

He came inside and looked around. “Nice.” He pressed a small plastic jar into her hand.

“How much?” she asked, turning to her purse on the coffee table.

“You owe me.” He sat down on the couch. “Why do you live way the hell out here?”

“I’m an ocean freak.”

He nodded, accepting that. To Arthur, everyone was some sort of freak.

She went to the kitchen and took one of the large tablets. She came back and sat down beside him and raised his hand and kissed it. “Thank you,” she whispered, and knew she was falling apart.

He stared at her. “Hey, nothing.” He was about thirty-five, whipcord-lean, dressed in tight brown pants and loose maroon velour shirt. He wore a small gold spoon on a gold chain around his neck, decorative and also quite functional for snorting coke.

She held tight to his hand. It was all she had this black, black night

He kept staring. Then he said, “You want a straight scene? Like a missionary fuck or something?”

She laughed, tears pushing at her eyes, and shook her head. “If you’d just sleep with me.”

He pulled his hand away and stood up. “Can’t see it If I sack you, I’ll fuck you. At the least.”

Again she laughed, and this time the tears rolled down her cheeks. No help from Arthur of the purest blue eyes.

“Listen, you’re falling out of it, you know?”

“I know,” she whispered thickly.

“You need something.” He thought a moment. “Remember Chrissie, the redhead? She was turning hard junkie. Scientology was her out. You oughta try Scientology. Or maybe Hari Krishna. Or the Jesus freaks. Something to latch onto, Diana, because fun isn’t your bag.” He walked out the door.

She sat there alone, and nodded. Fun wasn’t her bag. But neither was religion.

Still, he was right about her needing something.

A smart man, Arthur Dumont. A man with friends high up in city government. Which was why he’d retained four of his six massage parlors when most other such entrepreneurs had folded completely. A rich man too, and she respected the self-made rich. They generally knew what they were talking about.

Not like the wailers, the complainers, the failures: her father.

Not like the make-out cops: Lieutenant Lawrence (call me Larry) Admer. Who was in charge of finding the animal who had blown her sister’s life out the top of her head. Who couldn’t care less because he obviously classified Carla, along with Diana, as a hooker, a non-person. Carla, who hadn’t been robbed, hadn’t been sexually assaulted, hadn’t been touched at all . . . simply murdered.

She got up, fists clenched . . . and staggered. She’d never taken Quaalude before, or any of the mind-altering drugs that people popped like candy, but it was obviously beginning to work.

The super-relaxant was taking her out of it, at last.

She went upstairs and undressed, dropping her clothes where she stood, and got into the king-sized bed. Where she and Carla had spent so many nights giggling together like kids, talking far into the morning.

And Quaalude or not, she again clenched her fists, again saw her sister’s waxy face and matted hair—matted with blood and bits of brain. Again wept. Again despaired of life. Again panicked. Again knew Arthur was right and she had to find something to live for; her “out.”

Had to find it soon.

She had wanted, for an insane week, to kill the cop who had shot her brother. It was her out at the time. But he’d been transferred and no one would say where and she’d known it was impossible. And also known it wouldn’t have satisfied her even if it had been possible.

Now she wanted to kill the animal who had taken Carla from her.

And this too seemed impossible.

But if it were possible, it would satisfy her.

Her eyes closed. Her fists unclenched. The drug took stronger hold.

And still, she knew she had to have a course of action, a raison d’etre, something to hinge her life on.

An out.

She forced open lips and eyes, which seemed glued shut now, and said, “I swear, baby,” speaking to Carla, “I’ll find whoever did it. I swear I’ll punish him.”

The next time that cop phoned her, he’d get a surprise—a cordial reception. Because whatever it took, she had to learn how to find the murderer, had to know everything the police knew.

With this, she could finally surrender consciousness.