Manifesto for the Dead (15 page)

It hadn't happened that way. Miracle was reversing the roles, making Thompson out to be the guilty party. “You're trying to frame me,” Thompson's voice cracked, his hands trembled, but he still felt calm. He observed his shaking hands as if they belonged to someone else. “You're the one, Billy.”

Miracle ignored him. “Then the police began to close in, and you became more desperate. Your trump card was Michele. Or so you thought. She would defend you. She would provide you with an alibi the night of Lombard's murder. Because after all, she had helped plan the death of The Young Lovely—and if she turned against you now, well, you'd tell the police. But then, that too went astray. Because it turns out your killer—the klutz, the bumbler, the fool—he killed the wrong woman. Some passerby, a woman no one knows, no one cares about. Even her body has disappeared—and how could you threaten Michele with complicity in a murder that never happened? So you begged her to help. You pleaded, but you began to suspect she was going to let you fall. Then—you killed her. You shot her with your father's gun.”

Miracle's version of events had its own inner logic. A flawed logic, sure, but it was the logic that controlled the moment. He could feel its inexorable movement forward. Whether the police would realize this or not, he had no idea, because he knew (and the cops knew) such falterings in logic underlie not just the ravings of lunatics, but the case of the most assiduous prosecutor. There was in every argument a place between the seams, where the clutter lay. No matter how you tried to fill it up with detail, to bridge the abyss, to cover the gap, it was still there.

Himself, he had always been drawn to that place, to that little crack in the fabric of things, the inevitable flaw in the glass.

“You think you know what the dead are asking for?” Miracle asked.

Thompson shook his head. Miracle had gone off the edge. His own knees were knocking now, and he felt a trembling in his chest. His calm had dissipated.

“It isn't justice the dead want. It isn't some kind of explanation. No—it's much simpler than that. The dead, they're tired of being dead. They want to come back.”

Thompson looked at the gun in the man's hand.

“But the dead can't come back, so they want the next best thing. They want company, my friend—they want someone to pay them a visit. So they send their emissaries, spokesmen on their behalf. Cancer. Strokes. Epilepsy. The bogey man in the closet with a long knife. We pretend to ourselves we don't recognize their voices, but we do. The force of all the souls calling out, it's irresistible. Their numbers get bigger all the time, the chorus deafening. There's no choice but to join them.

“A guy like you, you understand what I'm saying, don't you Jimbo.”

Meanwhile, the grimace on Michele's face seemed to have grown tighter, more grotesque. There was blood clotting in her hair, between her teeth. She had gotten it all over herself, rolling about, dying on the carpet.

“It's the women who provide our inspiration, don't they? But in the end, we have to take the trip back ourselves. Make the big plunge.”

“Why don't you put down the gun?”

“You aren't going soft on me, are you? Don't tell me, underneath it all, you're a sap, too. You want to ride into that beautiful sunset. Talk to God. Get a place in Malibu.”

“I think we should call the police.”

“We will. Or I will. Do you want to know what I'm going to tell them, about today?”

Thompson nodded, just to delay the man. He saw his head move in the mirror, and in the mirror opposite, the images embedded one inside the other, all those images of himself moving in unison, and he wondered what it was he had thought himself aspiring to, really, all those days at Musso's. He wondered if there was some golden world, just beyond his reach—or if instead it was just the same world, refracting back onto itself over and over, and the deeper into it you wandered, the more entrapped you became, until finally, one day, the corpse you stumbled over was your own, and you found yourself on the floor, staring into your own face, your own eyes, and in those eyes were the retreating feet of Billy Miracle.

“You see, Michele and I, we have the same answering service. I'm friendly with the girl who picks up the phone. When I called this morning, the receptionist told me you and Michele were having a meeting. It worried me, you've been so erratic lately, so odd and temperamental. So I hurried over.

“Unfortunately, I got here a little bit late. Or that's what I'll tell the cops. Michele was dead, and you were standing there with your gun. I tried to talk you into turning yourself in, but you wouldn't listen. We tussled. The gun went off. Down you fell. Right there, right next to Michele.”

The flaw in his logic was still there, underneath all that detail, and Thompson knew now how Miracle meant to keep it from becoming visible.

He was going to kill Jim Thompson.

It was like something out of one of his own books, the killer pulling a double murder, then rearranging the corpses so it looked like one had killed the other. Truth was, such schemes rarely worked. There was always hell to pay: men who analyzed the angle of fallen bodies, the splatter of blood, the residue of gunpowder upon the hand. None of that made any difference now, though, in the land of the mirror, where Miracle spun his story and Thompson stood listening.

Thompson remembered something else. Miracle had called him at home, back when this whole thing had started. Alberta had given him the address of the Hillcrest Arms. That meeting had never materialized, but it was the last piece of the puzzle. Because when Alberta told him the address, Miracle must have written it down. On the backside of the same paper where he had written the address of the El Rancho Motel. Where the corpse was to be delivered.

“You're Sydney Wicks,” Thompson said.

Miracle's eyes glinted, and he knew it was true. Miracle had used the name of Sydney Wicks when he set up the murder. He'd given the delivery address to his contact at the Satellite, and the contact had given it to the Okie, not realizing Thompson's address had been scrawled on the other side. Then the Okie had flipped the paper over, and driven to the wrong place.

“Turn around,” said Billy Miracle.

Thompson hesitated. The whole conversation so far had taken place in the mirror. He feared what would happen when he faced the man directly.

“At the Satellite, it was you the man called. And you ransacked my room. Stole my gun.”

“Turn around. Or I'll plug you in the back.”

Thompson obeyed. He did not know what else to do. The tremor was on the surface now. He shivered hard, and shivered some more, and his body felt no longer his own. The walls vibrated, the room swooned, and every shadow had something to say.

“I need a drink,” said Thompson.

“Not now. There's no time.”

Miracle approached him, swaying as he walked. Thompson stepped away. “It won't work. No one will believe you.”

Thompson moved towards the hall, but Miracle moved with him. There was nowhere to go. Miracle stood at point blank range. If he takes another step forward, Thompson thought, maybe I can reach out, knock the gun away. Miracle lunged. Thompson backed up instinctively, his hands rising at his sides, and there was an instant in which Miracle glanced at him, his eyes moist, his lips parted, when Thompson thought it impossible the other man would shoot. No. It couldn't happen.

Miracle fired.

Thompson felt the recoil in his chest, and heard the explosion loud in his head, and saw the astonished look on the producer's face. Staggering, glancing towards the far mirror, he saw too his own gruesome expression. The room filled with noise. I'll die looking in the mirror. Me too, just like Michele. He expected to see blood blossoming on his chest. But no, there was no blood. The noise came from Miracle. Howling, reeling away, holding the gun in his hand, a blister of flesh. His father's gun had misfired.

He might have escaped out the front door, but Miracle lurched clumsily towards the hall, blocking Thompson's path. The producer fell to his knees in pain. Thompson ran to the other end of the flat, looking for the balcony. He yanked open the living room drapes, but they revealed only a picture window overlooking the street. Miracle was behind him now, back in the dining room.

Thompson hurried into the bedroom. A queen size bed lay unmade before him. A larger dresser stood off to his left, a closet to the right. A narrow line of windows ran along the top of the far wall, but no door that he could see, no balcony. If he had another instant, he might have tried hoisting himself through one of the windows, then trusting himself to whatever lay below. He heard Miracle, closer now, yammering. Thompson stepped into the closet, as far back as he could, hiding himself in the fragrant depths of the dead woman's clothes. The closet doors were slatted. Through those slats, in the instant before Miracle entered, Thompson saw his mistake. The balcony was directly across from him, outside an alcove in the opposite corner of the room. When he had first come in, the dresser had blocked it from his view. Now he could see plainly his avenue of escape. The sliding door was open, and he could see the rustling date palm and hear the sweet singing of some desert bird.

It was too late. Miracle stumbled in.

Thompson shook. His teeth chattered, as if from fever, and that sound alone, he feared, would draw Miracle to him.

The producer was more familiar with the room's layout than Thompson. He went directly to the alcove, then stepped onto the balcony. He peered down, studying the courtyard. He came back in, wild-eyed, and sat on the edge of the bed.

“He got away,” Miracle said to himself, “the lousy son-of-bitch. Third-rate writer. Fucking hack.”

Inside the closet, Thompson could not control his shaking. He breathed deep. A sob rose from the room—he felt it in his chest, it seemed, a horrible, ugly, gut-wrenching sob that put a terror in his heart. He sucked in his breath, doomed. Miracle did not move from the bed. The producer's shoulders were shaking, the sobbing went on, and Thompson realized it was the other man, not himself, from which the noise came, and the sound of his wailing bespoke how far things had drifted out of his control.
He needs my corpse,
Thompson thought.
With me alive, out in the world, it's too messy.
The man's story was unraveling in his head, and as it unraveled the tear in the seams became wider, and the details and the clutter came swarming up out of the abyss. Then the sobbing stopped. Miracle raised his head. He placed the gun into his mouth and pulled the trigger.

This time, the revolver's mechanism worked perfectly. The producer's body reeled backward, his skull exploded, and bits of red pulp and white bone flew into the paneling where Thompson stood watching.

Thompson stepped out of the closet. He thought about going down the balcony, but decided no, someone might have heard the gunshot. He did not want to be seen in the courtyard. So he went out of the apartment the way he had come, slipped out a side door. Outside, the flowers were whispering to one another, beasts were loose in the streets. The delirium had come. Thompson closed his eyes, and walked the best he could under that trembling line of palms.

THIRTY-FOUR

Several weeks later, Alberta stood on the steps outside the Hillcrest Arms, directing the moving men as they struggled the couch through the building door, then down the long hall to their apartment. Thompson stood watching his wife. She should be glum, but if she was, she wasn't going to let any one see it, not the neighbors, for certain, and not these moving men. She walked with a certain bounce. Her slacks were stylish, her blouse new, and she had given her hair a fresh rinse, not out of the bottle but hand-done at one of the professional joints, so she didn't look like just anyone.

Even so, something about her had changed. When it had happened, exactly, he wasn't sure. In the last few weeks, maybe, or maybe it had been happening all along—and he'd only just now noticed. For years, he had seen in her the seeds of the old woman she might someday become: the wrinkles; the dowager's hunch; the long blue veins emerging on her feet and hands. Always, though, it had been the woman she was at the moment who dominated: the girl being courted; the young wife; the taut, wiry female of middle age. Now, when he looked at her, he only occasionally saw those others. The young girl living at the edge of the cornfield had become an old woman in slacks, standing on a street corner in Los Angeles, smiling with a forced cheerfulness—and a deep embarrassment—at the young Mexican men who moved box after box of memorabilia into her too small apartment.

“How are you feeling?” She handed him a glass of water.

“Fine.”

He took the glass, drinking it down as greedily as if he were one of the moving men, sweating in a sleeveless t-shirt.

“This apartment is cute,” she said.

“It's a dump.”

“The only trouble, it's too close to Musso's. The doctor said to keep away from temptation, you know, and …”

Thompson interrupted. “I'm not drinking anything stronger than this.”

He handed her the empty water glass, and she walked away, back to the business of supervising. He hadn't had a drink since the day after he'd sneaked out of the hospital, but then he hadn't had much opportunity. After he'd left Michele Haze's apartment, he'd caught himself a taxi back to the Ardmore penthouse. His teeth had begun to rattle again in the back seat, more wildly, his bones to shake, and by the time he reached the door his whole body was in tremors. He knew it was no ordinary episode from the look Alberta gave him—and how quickly Doctor Rufus appeared. They'd taken him to the sanitarium, and there some white-coated doctors and a lisping nurse administered the nebutal and the anabuse and weaned him off the alcohol, but no matter the drugs, eventually it came down to himself alone, strapped to the bed, sweating and flailing while the phantasms uncoiled in the darkness and spoke to him in hissing tongues that he could feel wrapping around his body, licking, probing, crawling up his asshole, his intestines, then back out his mouth in hideous screams that shook the leeches from the ceiling and brought them tumbling onto his flesh, and these leeches had a new, strange language of their own.