King Maybe (22 page)

“Or Suley's driver's license.”

“Suley.” She closed her eyes. “The topic at last. She called herself Suley, but her shrew of a mother called her Susan Lynn. Susan Lynn Platz, who thought of herself as Suley, and Jeremy Granger made Suley her legal name, at least on the driver's license and birth certificate I created, and then he named her again, as Tasha Dawn, of all the stupid, stagey things, and then he made her Tasha Granger, and with every new name things got worse.”

“Suley's the main reason I'm here,” I said. I looked at Garlin Romaine, crippled at twenty-four, and made a bet that she'd be on the side of a girl whose childhood had been stolen from her. “Granger's sort of forcing me to . . . well, cheat her, and I don't want to do it.”

“Honey,” Garlin Romaine said, “there's nothing left to take. It got worse and worse. The past year or so, what I saw was an animal that had been caged and beaten until it had lost the belief it could escape. Just waited for whatever was going to come next.”

“Why would he do that to her?”

“It's his nature. She told me once a couple of years ago that the only thing that really interested him was seeing how far he could push his power. Taking people's lives and tying them in knots, getting people with talent to whore themselves out doing things that were beneath them, just rubbing their noses in it. She said to me she didn't think he'd be happy until somebody killed him.”

“Eventually,” I said, “I'm sure somebody will.” I went over to the platform, where I'd seen a canvas-backed director's chair, toted it over, and sat. “So she kept seeing you.”

“I think I was the last person she liked in her whole life. After me it was all Jeremy and the wolves he threw her to.”

“How did you get involved in the first place?”

At first I didn't think she'd answer. Instead she took a deep drag off the butt, hit the acrid stench of the filter, and glared at it as though it had betrayed her. “You're a burglar, right?”

It sounded so bald, put that way. “Right.”

“Well, you're going to have to pardon a bit of skepticism. You
swear
to me you're on Suley's side?”

“I do. And I will. On whatever you choose.”

She dropped the butt, which was almost all filter, into one of the glasses of water on the table. It emitted a short, affronted hiss, and she looked down at it severely, then waved her hand in the direction of the painting on the wall. “When I'd been doing this—this art, this work, whatever you want to call it—for a few years, a friend arranged a show for me in a little gallery in Venice. It was a surprise that I sold three of them, because we'd had a terrible time trying to figure out how to display the stuff, which is supposed to be experienced by going through the folder it comes in. Anyway, it turned out that one woman had bought all three, and that she produced a series about lawyers.
Caseload
, it was called. Or maybe
Hard Case
—they all sound alike to me. Overworked public defenders with good hearts and great hair, and the men wear more makeup than the women. She called me up and came to meet me where I was living then, which was a convalescent hospital in Santa Monica, and made me an offer. She'd seen the documents, the passports and customs forms and so forth, in the folios she bought, and she needed some for her show. Subpoenas, arrest warrants, lawsuit filings, ID cards, on and on. Her actors were a little sticky. If the arrest warrant was for Josephine Blow, they wanted it to read Josephine Blow even if it would never be seen in close-up.”

“Actors,” I said.

“Might have been silly, but it was good for me. I did four or five pieces a week, all sorts of stuff, everything from crime-scene reports and arraignment forms to laminated name tags, and then word got out. Within a few months, I had more clients than I could handle, and I had to start saying no so I'd have time to work on my countries. Eventually I met the assistant to a real dickhead of a producer named Frankie Greff.”

“The assistant was Jeremy Granger,” I said.

“I'd said I wouldn't work with Frankie anymore, because he was a screamer.” She patted the many layers of her gown and came up with the pack of Merits. “So he sent Jeremy, who was, if nothing else, soft-spoken. We got along okay, compared to Frankie anyway. He even bought a folio from me.”

“And then.”

“And then a few years passed, and gradually I began to sell my
real
work often enough that I could monkey with the prices, make enough to live on.” She put the cigarette between her lips, slapped around the gown for a moment and came out with a lighter. “So I quit the documents. And then, a year later, Jeremy showed up with Suley and Suley's mother.”

My phone buzzed, meaning someone had texted me. No one texts me except Rina, so I said, “Hang on, it's my daughter,” and looked at the screen.

It wasn't Rina, It was Anime, and it said,
mach one? mach two?

“Sorry,” I said, putting the phone back. Mach One and Two, whatever that meant, would have to wait.

Garlin Romaine lit her cigarette, and through a cumulus cloud of smoke she said, “How old is your daughter?”

“Going to be fourteen at the end of the week.”

“Same age as Suley when I met her, then.”

“Sorry? I thought—I mean, Louie said Suley was sixteen when all this happened.”

“Nope. Fourteen.” She pointed at one of the sets of metal shelves along the wall of the big room. “Shelf on the right,” she said. “Second from the top, on the bottom of a stack of four boxes. Says ‘Suley' on it. Bring it over.”

I eased the box out and took it back to the director's chair. Handed it to her. She parked the cig in the corner of her mouth so she could look down without getting smoke in her eyes and popped the lid from the box. Then she rifled through a few odd-size pieces of paper and brought one out, which she looked at for a moment, her face empty, and handed to me.

The girl in the photo, which had been taken in front of a splotchy, neutral seamless-paper background that said “Yearbook,” still had baby fat, the vestigial chubbiness in the face that has little to do with weight and that disappears as the body reshapes itself. She smiled at the camera as though she was afraid it didn't like her, a pretty but not beautiful girl who badly needed to please. The anxious eyes peered out of an aura formed by a dry frizz of white-blond hair that didn't go with her skin and eyes.

“Mama bleached her,” Garlin Romaine said, shaking her head. “And bleached her and bleached her.”

“She's a kid,” I said. “How the hell did she wind up—”

“She
was
a kid, even though she'd been working, so to speak, since she was twelve, thanks to Mom and Dad.” Garlin Romaine tapped the cigarette against the glass's rim, dislodging a plug of ash a fingernail long. “She was still in junior high. They'd tried to get her into movies, and you know the rest of it. She got a little part in exchange for an advanced cuddle, and her name got passed around, and a year later Mom and Dad had a new car.” She waved her own smoke away as though it bothered her. “We didn't have this kind of thing in Maryland, where I grew up.”

I said, “Sure you did. May not have been out in the open.”

The line of her mouth made it clear that I wasn't worth arguing with. “So what Jeremy told me was that Suley had been caught in a setup and that her mother and father were headed for jail and she'd end up in a foster home if they couldn't show she was eighteen. I made them darken her hair so she wouldn't look so trampy, and I worked up a driver's license and a birth certificate, both for Idaho. I told them they wouldn't hold up in court, but they did, because it turned out to be a civil case, not a criminal case, and the issue wasn't whether she was really of age but whether Jeremy's boss could show he had good reason to
believe
she was of age. Poor baby was in a panic about being separated from her parents. God only knows why, but I suppose they were the parents she knew, weren't they?”

“I suppose,” I said, in lieu of sighing, which was what I wanted to do.

“So,” she said, breathing smoke, “I busted my butt over the papers, and it all went as planned, except that she kept coming back here after it was over, with Mom driving at first and then, when she got her permit, without Mom. She liked to watch me paint. She liked to be listened to. Nobody ever listened to her. She'd sit at the rear of the platform and talk and make suggestions. She always wanted animals in the pictures, and I'm not much on animals, but I put a few in to keep her happy, because she was . . . she was one of those girls who drew . . . who drew
horses
, and I'd been one, too. She wasn't, as they say, ‘dating' anyone then, because Jeremy was paying her—well, paying her
parents
—to keep her out of circulation. He was getting her parts—you know, ‘short teenager,' ‘girl with puppy,' that kind of thing. Her mom was telling her that she had Jeremy by the balls and she should push for more, but Suley—she . . . she just didn't have any meanness in her. She thought Jeremy was
nice
.”

I said, “The very word.”

“And then she stopped coming by for a while, but she called to say she was in a TV show. She sounded so
excited
, like it was the best thing that ever happened to her.”

“Right.”

“Until it turned out to be the worst,” Garlin Romaine said. “And even then there was worse to come.”

“Why didn't she leave him?”

The cigarette was almost down to the filter, but she hit it anyway. “She was terrified of him. And you know how it is: Every now and then, when he began to sense she was about to break the line and swim away, he'd reel her back in, make nice to her, take her somewhere. Buy her stuff. Tell her he loved her. I don't think anybody ever really loved her.” She shook her head sharply, probably at the unfairness of it all. “But then, when I talked to her a month ago—on the phone, she'd stopped coming by, because he didn't approve—she said she'd learned that his first wife had divorced him on charges of mental cruelty, even though he offered her extra money to call it irreconcilable differences. And Suley said she was going to do the same, and he wouldn't dare to oppose her because of all he'd put her through. She said no one would ever speak to him again.”

“Well, I guess they worked it out somehow, because
he's
planning to divorce
her
.”

“A happy ending. The last thing I ever expected. All men come into this world through a woman,” she said, “and some of them never forgive her for it.”

“So now he's trying to cheat her again, steal a museum-quality painting so it doesn't get into the community-property settlement.”

“She should take it,” she said. “Take anything he offers. Even if she winds up with a few thousand a week and a used car, she'll have her life back.” She was looking at the picture, but not focused on it. “Except that it sounds too easy.”

“I know what you mean.”

“Things don't work out for her that way,” she said. Her eyes wandered the room. The cigarette was dead between her fingers. She looked over at me and then down at the cigarette butt, and she drew a breath, deep enough to make her wheeze. “Every place I paint has a religion. It's one of the first things that comes to me. Generally, the more temperate, the more hospitable a place is, the more benign God is. Or the gods are. A lot of places, most places, have multiple gods. Some have
hierarchies
of them.” She pointed toward the foot of the bed. “See that thing down there?”

“The chalice?”

“If that's what it is. Go get four snips of paper from the vase. Don't look, just pick them out.”

I did: a pale blue sea with palms, a Greek ruin, a bustling harbor, and a jagged, snow-clad mountain. I gave them to her.

“This is Thontein,” she said instantly. “Thontein is a backbone of peaks, the top of a long, narrow mountain range that runs through the Pacific from the approximate latitude of San Diego, down where the palms in this picture are, to the southern reaches of the Arctic Circle and”—she flicked the snippet of mountain with her index finger—“Mount Ice. Ten thousand years ago, Thontein was one landmass, and people traveled freely between the cold and the warm regions. But then a volcano blew its top, about two-thirds of the way up, and the ocean flowed in and cut the country in two, putting ten miles of cold sea between north and south. Over time the language changed into two languages, lots of vowels in the south and bristly consonants in the north, and the god turned into two gods. The southern god is a spirit of affable plenty, worshipped in white stone temples dedicated to the rainbow, and his people grow rich as tourists pack their harbors. The northern god is a trickster who delights in showing his people paradise, dangling it in front of their noses and then snatching it away, leaving them to shiver and die in the snow. The people of North Thontein, asking themselves why their god mistreats them, have happened upon what they call the Rule of Seven. One in every seven people, they believe, is a horrible botch, a mistake, someone God would delete in a moment if he could, but heaven's rules restrict him to mass exterminations, like the legendary volcano or the huge tidal waves that wipe out their coastal villages every generation or so. So they regard it as a religious duty, their way of cozying up to God, to find and kill that one in seven. And then the next one and the next one.”

“But they keep being born,” I said.

“Of course. So in North Thontein, murder is an unending form of worship.”

I said, “And you just came up with that?”

“I don't come up with anything,” she said. She dropped the dead butt into the water glass. “It's already there. Hell, it's
here
. That's the kind of god that's in charge of what's been done to Susan Lee Platz.”