Mirror, p.17
Mirror, page 17
‘At least he’s at peace now, in the Kingdom of Heaven,’ said Sister Michael.
‘What?’ asked Ramone. Then, ‘Sure – oh, yes.’ He glanced at Martin and made a face. Martin had already told him about Theo’s description of the world beyond, with its talking turtles and its people with stretched-out heads.
Sister Michael laid a cool pale hand on Martin’s shoulder. ‘If there’s anything else that I can do, please don’t hesitate to call me. When somebody passes on, we do recognize the need to comfort those who are left behind.’
‘Yes, thank you,’ said Martin.
Ramone sat down on one of the gray fabric couches and tightly crossed his arms. Up above his head, a painting of a gentle-faced Madonna smiled down at him, with an expression that forgave all human weakness. ‘What do we do now?’ Ramone wanted to know. ‘If Homer Theobald couldn’t help us – if he wound up getting wasted – then what hope do the rest of us have?’ He leaned forward and asked, ‘You really think it was the mirror that wasted him? All that way away?’
Martin shrugged. ‘He seemed to think so. I showed him that key and he went white. I mean he was gibbering. I wish to God I hadn’t now. He might still be alive.’
Ramone took out a cheroot, but the nun at the nurses’ station silently pointed to the sign which said No fumadores.
‘How did she know I speak Spanish?’ Ramone whispered, replacing the cheroot in its carton.
‘She must’ve guessed. Or maybe she read ¡Viva Las Patillas! on the back of your T-shirt.’
Ramone said, ‘Let’s take a look at that key.’
Martin handed it to him. While he had been waiting to hear if Theo would survive, he had taken it to the hospital washroom and carefully rinsed Theo’s blood off it. Ramone turned it over and over and then handed it back. ‘It’s just a plain ordinary key.’
‘Well, maybe it is and maybe it isn’t. I think we should go to the Hollywood Divine and find out, don’t you? There’s nothing to keep us here.’
‘I don’t even know if the Hollywood Divine is still standing,’ said Ramone. ‘They demolished most of that block last year.’
‘All we can do is take a look.’
Sister Michael intercepted them again as they walked toward the elevators. ‘Mr Williams! Mr Perez! Did you want to view Mr Theobald before you left?’
Martin looked at Ramone, and Ramone bulged his eyes in an expression which unequivocally meant ‘no way’.
‘Thanks,’ said Martin. ‘But I think I’d just like to remember him the way he was.’
‘How was that?’ asked Ramone as they went down in the elevator to the hospital lobby.
‘Alive,’ Martin replied.
The Hollywood Divine Hotel had been erected in 1927 by Daniel T Rolls, the wealthy second son of the Rolls hotel family of Pasadena. It stood two blocks north of the celebrated intersection of Hollywood and Vine, a fanciful creation in the neoclassical picture-palace style that had been popularized by Eve Leo.
In its heyday, the Hollywood Divine had been celebrated for its eccentric and arty clientele – the West Coast equivalent of the Algonquin in New York. But with the squalid death of its founder in 1938 (cocaine, bourbon, inhalation of vomit), it had quickly lost its cachet. Now it stood shabby and seedy and ready for demolition, its pale pink stone corroded by vehicle fumes, its marquee half collapsed, its marble steps stained with urine and measled with chewing gum.
‘I could have sworn they knocked this place down already,’ Ramone remarked as they parked outside in Martin’s Mustang.
They were immediately approached by a thin-faced kid with a crimson punk hairstyle. ‘Hey, friend, take care of your car?’
Martin reached into his shirt pocket and gave the kid two dollars. ‘There’s another three where that came from if the stereo stays where it is.’
‘You got it,’ the kid told him.
Three young hookers were standing outside the hotel, two black and one white, in skintight satin miniskirts and halter tops. They were all pretty: one of them was almost beautiful. She winked at Martin as he went up the steps and he couldn’t help smiling back.
‘Made yourself a friend?’ asked Ramone.
They pushed their way through the bronze and glass doors of the Hollywood Divine and into the gloomy lobby. The carpet was rancid; so filthy and stained that it was impossible to tell what color it had originally been. There was a suffocating smell of marijuana and body odor and disinfectant. Six or seven scarecrows were sitting on the ripped-open leopard-skin seats where John Barrymore and Bette Davis had once sat, sharing bottles of muscatel from brown paper bags and sniffing in chorus.
The great chandelier hung from the lobby ceiling like the desiccated corpse of a giant spider, still dangling in its web.
Martin and Ramone approached the desk. The desk clerk was surprisingly young and clean: a young man in a shocking-pink shirt with blond crew-cut hair. It was only when he laid his thin arms on the marble counter that Martin saw the needle tracks.
‘You people checking in?’ he asked them. His eyes were as pale and as expressionless as two stones you find on the beach.
Martin shook his head. ‘I was wondering if you still had safe-deposit boxes here.’
‘Safe-deposit boxes?’ The young man blinked.
‘Yes, you know. Somewhere your guests can keep their valuables.’
‘What, are you kidding? If any of our guests happen to have any valuables, they keep them on their persons. Besides, they don’t usually stay for longer than a half hour.’
‘But are the original boxes still here – the boxes that were put in when the hotel was built?’
‘I don’t think so,’ the young man told him. ‘Pretty much everything has gone. Somebody walked out with a goddamned bathtub last week. Can you imagine that? Nobody knows how he got it through the door.’
Martin gave a tight grimace and looked around him. One of the scarecrows was waving his arms and singing. ‘Sur … wannee song! Suwannee song! You c’n blow your flute ’n’ you c’n bang y’r drum ’n’ you c’n –’
‘Will you shut up?’ one of his companions screeched at him. ‘Will you shut up?’
Martin stared at the old scarecrow for a while. Then he turned back to the desk clerk and said, ‘Who’s that?’
‘Who’s what?’ The young man may have looked quite presentable, but his brain was somewhere in another galaxy.
‘That old bum singing. The one singing “Suwannee Song”.’
The young man focused his eyes across the lobby. ‘Oh, that’s Fido. Well, everybody calls him Fido. He’s been hanging out for just about a hundred years. I think he used to work here or something. He’s always telling stories about how he walked in on Bill Haines, and Bill Haines was wearing nothing but a brassiere and a garter belt and a picture hat.’
Martin left the desk and walked across to the group of scarecrows. Fido was sitting right in the middle of them, on one of the leopard-skin banquettes. His face was puffy and flowered with gin blossoms. He wore a fifties-style suit with wide flappy lapels. It had once been fawn, but now it was greasy gray. Martin couldn’t approach too close. The collective stench of these down-and-outs was overwhelming.
‘Fido?’ he asked.
Fido looked up at him blearily. ‘That’s me, your honor.’
‘They tell me you used to work here,’ said Martin.
There was a chorus of groans and raspberries from Fido’s companions. ‘Don’t ask him!’ one of them begged in a voice reedy with phlegm. ‘Do us a favor, will you, friend? Don’t ask him!’
‘Was the gemmun addressing you?’ Fido demanded with all the indignation of an Oliver Hardy.
‘He worked here, he worked here, now go!’ the other scarecrow appealed.
Martin said to Fido. ‘Maybe we can talk in private? I wouldn’t like to antagonize your friends.’
‘Friends? Call this riffraff friends? These just happen to be items of flotsam who have eddied their way into the same backwater.’
‘Oh, can it, Fido,’ groaned another scarecrow. ‘You make my ears want to scream.’
Fido teetered his way out of the assembly of winos around the banquette and accompanied Martin and Ramone to the far side of the lobby, beside the gilded fountain that had long ago dried up, and whose shell-shaped bowl was now crammed with cigarette butts and empty bottles and used needles.
Ramone wrinkled up his nose as Fido lurched a little too close to him. ‘You won’t get arrested for taking a shower, did you know that?’
Martin said, ‘Ssh,’ and waved Ramone to keep quiet. He didn’t want to upset Fido before he’d had the chance to talk to him.
‘Is it true you worked here?’ he asked.
‘What’s it worth?’ Fido wanted to know.
Martin held up a ten-dollar bill. Fido sniffed, and took it, and snapped it between his fingers to make sure that it was genuine. ‘All right, then,’ he said. ‘I worked here.’
‘Were you here in 1939?’
Fido nodded, his white prickly chin making a crackling sound against the collar of his grubby shirt. ‘Sure, 1939. I was promoted to bell captain that year. March 1939.’
‘Did you ever see Boofuls here?’
‘Boofuls?’ asked Fido suspiciously. ‘Why’d you ask that?’
‘I’m just interested, that’s all. I’m writing a book about his life.’
‘Well,’ sniffed Fido, ‘he didn’t have too much of a life, did he? But he sure had a memorable death.’
‘Did you see him?’
‘Of course I saw him. He was here all the time, him and that Redd woman. Every month; and all kinds of others, too. Famous actors, you’d know them all. Famous directors, too.’
Martin frowned. ‘You mean Boofuls used to meet a whole lot of other actors and directors here, every month?’
‘That’s right. It was a joke. Nobody was supposed to know. Big secret, don’t tell the press, that kind of thing. And to tell you the truth, I don’t think the press ever did find out. But we knew, all of the staff. You couldn’t help recognizing somebody like Clark Gable, now, could you? And there was George Cukor and Lionel Atwill and dozens of others. All the big names from 1939, they came here. Maybe not every month, but pretty well.’
Ramone warned, ‘You’d better not be putting us on, Mr Fido.’
‘Why should I put you on?’ Fido challenged him. ‘It’s true, it happened. Every month, here at the Hollywood Divine, in the Leicester Suite.’
‘And Boofuls was always here?’ Martin asked him.
Fido nodded. ‘They wouldn’t start without Boofuls.’
‘Wouldn’t start what?’ said Ramone.
Fido puffed out his blotchy cheeks. ‘Don’t ask me, how should I know? It was all supposed to be secret, right? We laid them on a spread before they started – chicken, lobster, stuff like that – and then we had to lock the doors and leave them to it – whatever it was they were doing. But believe me, they were all famous. You’d have known them all. Errol Flynn, he used to come. Joan Crawford. Wilfred Buckland, the art director. Fifty or sixty of them, every month, sometimes more.’
Martin said, ‘You’re sure about this?’
‘Sure I’m sure. I was the bell captain.’
‘Well, how long did these get-togethers go on for?’
‘Two, three in the morning, sometimes longer.’
‘And Boofuls stayed there all that time?’
‘I used to see him leaving, four o’clock in the morning sometimes. That Redd woman used to cover him up with a cloak and a hood, but you couldn‘t mistake him.’
Martin said, ‘He was only eight years old, what was he doing staying up all night?’
Fido coughed and then noisily cleared his throat. ‘I don’t know what the hell he was doing, staying up all night. We used to listen at the door sometimes, but we could never hear nothing. Sometimes music. But they used to have girls in as well. Not exactly hookers but what you might call starlets.’
Martin looked at Ramone, but all Ramone could do was shake his head. ‘Don’t ask me, man, I never heard of anything like this. Either this guy’s shooting us a line, or else his brain’s gone, or else we just came across the biggest Hollywood mystery that ever was.’
‘Listen,’ Martin told Fido, ‘when you were working here, where did they keep the safe-deposit boxes? Can you remember that?’
‘Certainly I can remember,’ said Fido. ‘What’s it worth?’
Reluctantly, Martin handed Fido another ten-dollar bill. He snapped it, the same way he had snapped the first one. Then he sniffed and said, ‘They used to keep the safe-deposit boxes in back of the manager’s office, through the archway behind the desk. But if you’re looking for them, I can save you some trouble, because they ain’t there now. Round about 1951, when the Hollywood Divine really started losing money, there was some kind of plan to refurbish it, you know, and they shifted a whole lot of stuff down to the basement. The only trouble was, the plan fell through, lack of money, zoning problems, something like that, and everything that was shifted down to the basement just stayed there.’
‘So that’s where the safe-deposit boxes are now?’
‘You’ve got it, your honor. Not to mention two thousand square feet of moldy carpet, and enough velvet drapes to make Little Lord Fauntleroy pants for every down-and-out in Greater LA.’
Ramone gave a sharp, unamused laugh. Fido shrugged and gave a goofy grin, baring abscessed gums and brown, tartar-clogged teeth.
‘One more thing …’ put in Martin. ‘Who’s this Redd woman you keep talking about? I thought that Boofuls was looked after by his grandmother.’
Fido said, ‘I never knew too much about her. But she was the one who booked the suite, that’s how we got to know her name. R-E-D-D, Redd, that was it, but it could have been a what’s-its-name, you know, pursue-dough-name.’
‘Do you have any idea what her relationship to Boofuls was?’
Fido shook his head. ‘No idea. She just rushed him in before it began and rushed him out again when it was over.’
‘Did you get to see her face? What she looked like?’
‘Well … briefly. It’s a long time ago now. But she was pale, you know what I mean, the sort of pale that looks like somebody’s been ill, or shut up for a long time without going out in the sunshine. Pretty, in a way, but kind of sharp pretty. Sharp nose, sharp chin, sharp eyes. Classy, too. Definitely classy. But sharp.’
‘What did she used to wear?’
‘Always the same, black evening cloak, red dress underneath. Never saw what style it was. She was in and out of here so darned quick.’
Martin was mystified by all this. He had never heard of any other woman escorting Boofuls besides his grandmother; and he had certainly never heard of monthly get-togethers of movie stars at the Hollywood Divine Hotel, with Boofuls apparently presiding.
‘I hope for your sake this is on the level,’ he told Fido.
Fido saluted with a hand that was gray with grease. ‘You never came across a servant so true, your honor.’
For twenty more dollars, the vacant-eyed desk clerk took Martin and Ramone up to what had once been the Leicester Suite. They climbed the wide marble stairs to the mezzanine floor and crossed an echoing landing that smelled of Sterno. The desk clerk led them up to two wide carved doors – some of their panels broken now and nailed up with sheets of ply – and unlocked them with keys from a huge jangling ring.
‘We have to keep this place locked, every junkie in town was using it as a shooting gallery. We used to drag out two or three stiffs every single morning, OD’d on crack.’
Inside, by the light of half a dozen bare bulbs, they cautiously explored a hotel suite that must once have been magnificent. Because it was on the mezzanine floor, its rooms were half as high again as any other rooms in the hotel. Its walls gleamed with gold and silver wallpaper, and there were gilded Renaissance moldings on its murky ceilings and around the doors.
The desk clerk led them through an inner lobby, and then through more double doors to a cavernous room that must have been the lounge. There was a grand gilded fireplace and a gilded chandelier, but all the furniture and the carpets had been taken out. The floor was littered with old yellowed newspapers and rat droppings; and in the far corner there stood, unaccountably, a green and white garden swing-seat.
Their footsteps scuffed and echoed. Ramone, with his hands in his pockets, said, ‘You can’t believe that Clark Gable was ever here, can you?’
‘What was he doing here, that’s what I want to know,’ said Martin. ‘What was Boofuls doing here?’
‘Orgies, maybe?’ suggested Ramone. He walked around the swing-seat and then pushed it. It creaked backward and forward, backward and forward, squueaakkk–squikkkk, squeeeaakk–squikkkk.
Martin said, ‘A small boy holding orgies? It doesn’t make sense.’
‘Well, don’t ask me, man,’ said Ramone. He sniffed. ‘This place gives me the heebie-jeebies.’
The desk clerk asked, ‘You done now? There’s nothing else to see.’
‘Yes,’ said Martin, ‘I guess we’re done. Can you take us down to the cellars?’
They left the Leicester Suite and the double doors were locked behind them. The desk clerk took them downstairs to the lobby and then along a narrow corridor to the kitchens and the service areas. The kitchens were filthy: strewn with rubbish and deserted. The grease-encrusted oven doors hung open. It was difficult for Martin to believe that the Hollywood Divine’s celebrated homard orientale had once been prepared here, as well as the famous fiery pudding of red cherries and Grand Marnier created especially for Gloria Swanson.
The desk clerk unlocked the cellar doors. ‘There’s a light switch down on the left. You can look all you want; I have to get back to the desk. Just tell me when you’re through.’
Together, Martin and Ramone groped their way down the first flight of wide concrete steps. Martin found the light switch and flicked it; a row of fluorescent tubes illuminated a wide vaulted cellar stacked to the ceiling with chairs, tables, folding beds, mattresses, chalkboards, lampshades, statuettes, signs saying Exit and No Smoking, boxes, crates, and rolled-up carpets.
