The Bones (27 page)

Lloyd casually patted Frank down to see if he was packing, then looked in the Hummer's glove compartment and backseat. He
was somewhat surprised to find nothing to indicate murderous intent. Still, Lloyd realized Frank's means of entry certainly
displayed an unacceptable level of hostility. There was always the possibility Frank was parking and simply lost control of
the car, but Lloyd could not take that seriously. No one was that bad a driver. And even if Frank's driving skills were so
pitiful that a disaster of these proportions was not incomprehensible, what was he doing dropping by the Melnicks' house in
the middle of the night?

Stillness descended on Frank, blood and the life it carried seeping out of him, running through his hair and down his face
as Lloyd watched helplessly. When the ambulance arrived, Frank appeared to have drifted off to the obituaries.

It occurred to Lloyd as he watched the paramedics, a Mexican and an Anglo who talked quietly to each other as they gently
packed Frank on a stretcher and loaded him into the meat wagon, that if Frank had wanted to kill him, he would not have driven
the Hummer into his spacious living room in the yawning middle of the night unless he remembered that Lloyd had told him he
often sat there reading a book at that hour. Would he have remembered that detail? Unlikely, given the amount of pot he had
consumed that day in Lloyd's office.

Rather than wanting to kill Lloyd, did Frank want to kill himself in Lloyd's home? Lloyd could not at first imagine that his
refusal to either cowrite
My Life and High Times
with Frank or to punch up
Kirkuk
when he'd been asked would provoke this kind of baroque reaction. But it struck him as he watched the red taillights of the
ambulance disappear into the misty night that Frank's moment, his shot at the main chance, had passed, and clearly he was
having some difficulty assimilating that information. While hardly excusing his behavior, Lloyd understood it was nonetheless
the kind of thing that might cause a person to do something extreme. Or perhaps he had intended to kill himself
and
Lloyd. That was certainly a vexing thought.

As Lloyd cogitated on this, a disturbing sound reached his ears, wavering between a low guttural moan and a high-pitched but
still soft keen. He looked over to see Stacy sitting on the love seat in the foyer, her knees pulled tightly to her chest
as she rocked back and forth.

Lloyd walked over, careful not to step on any of the plentiful broken glass that glistened on the floor, the anarchy of its
arrangement a sharp rebuke to the classical lines of the room, and sat next to his sobbing spouse. He put his arm around her
heaving shoulders and squeezed her to him. After a moment she caught her breath and her crying slowed.

"L-Lloyd . . .," she said. "Oh, God . . . oh, God . . ."

Stacy usually pulled her thick hair into a ponytail when she slept, and in this light it accentuated the bareness of her face,
which was entirely without makeup. Lloyd noticed the vein sticking out in her neck, trembling. Finally, through sheer force
of will, she stopped crying and her sobs petered into nothing more than a quivering lip.

"It's going to be okay" was the best he could do under the circumstances, as he removed his arm from her shoulders and rubbed
her back with the palm of his hand.

"Is he going to be alright?"

"I don't know."

"His poor wife."

"Yeah, it's tough. Although I don't think they're actually married," he adds unnecessarily, needing to fill the air. Then
Stacy resumed crying. Softly at first, then a fit of jagged sobs that died away again. She looked at Lloyd, a flicker of discomfiture
in her expression. "What?" he asked gently.

"Honey, I'm embarrassed."

"You can tell me."

"No."

"The place was a mess when the paramedics got here?"

"A-A-Architectural Digest
is coming to take p-pictures tomorrow!"

"They are?"

"I w-wanted it to be a s-surprise! I feel terrible even mentioning it because of Frank but still . . . "

Having articulated that piece of information, hysteria returned with startling speed, and Lloyd was left holding his grieving
wife, staring into the wreckage and wondering if AAA is the group to call when you want a vehicle removed from your living
room.

***

Frank lay unconscious in the back of the ambulance while the two paramedics, Miguel and Freddie, carried on a curious debate.
Los Angeles had more celebrities per square foot than any other place on earth. From gangsta Long Beach to the deep North
Valley, from the parched San Gabriel Mountains to the wide beaches of Malibu, celebrities almost literally fell from trees.
A trip to the gas station, the dry cleaner, a restaurant, a dojo, or a bookstore could result in a sighting of the famous
and near-famous, whose visits to these establishments were often immortalized in framed autographed photos proudly mounted
on the walls, announcing in cheap black and white, CHEVY CHASE GETS HIS SUITS CLEANED HERE! This proliferation of stars, all
of whom, despite their fame, were treading the same high wire as the rest of us, meant that when the life's breath left them
and their souls journeyed toward whatever heaven they believed in, their earthly remains stayed put, resulting in the Corpse
of the Dead Celebrity. Given the rapacious hunger for visual aids on the part of the less scrupulous members of the journalistic
community who were serving a market that could only euphemistically be called readers, it didn't take much to imagine the
financial opportunities available when it came to photographs of famous cadavers.

For the past year or so Freddie had brought a camera to work in the event of just such a golden opportunity, and while Frank
Bones may not have been the jackpot, his death mask would bring in a nice piece of change from some unscrupulous publishing
outfit in Florida.

The camera was loaded with film, and as Miguel sped along the tree-lined Brentwood lanes, past darkened homes whose sleeping
occupants had accumulated large fortunes feeding the fancier relatives of the same beast Freddie was looking to nourish, the
enterprising shutterbug scrambled into the rear of the ambulance and tried to calculate how much light he needed to get an
image. He wanted to do this back at the house, but that guy and his crazy wife wouldn't leave the room so he had to shoot
on the fly, before they arrived at UCLA Medical Center at Wilshire and Fifteenth and unloaded the cargo.

"Slow down, man," Freddie ordered Miguel. "I need a smooth ride for this." Miguel obediently pressed his foot to the brake.

"Fifty-fifty, right?"

"Are you crazy? It's my camera!"

"You said fifty-fifty."

"No way. Seventy-thirty."

With this, Miguel began to swerve the ambulance, hitting the brakes hard, then speeding up.

"What are you doing?" Freddie asked reasonably as he tried to keep from lurching into the front seat.

"Negotiating." Miguel almost sideswiped a Lincoln Town Car doing a middle-of-the-night pickup. "Fifty-fifty, you greedy bastard."

"I'm greedy?"

"We're partners in this, man. Where your ethics and shit?"

Their argument was interrupted by a soft sound, and it presaged a rather larger problem for Freddie and Miguel.

"My f-fuckin' head" was all Frank managed to mumble, but it was enough to encourage the aspiring death paparazzo to lay his
camera down and attend to Frank's needs, which were manifold.

Frank's disappointed escorts unloaded him in the emergency room, where he was instantly set upon by a trauma team, which began
the laborious process of putting him back together. He had multiple contusions and several broken bones, including his jaw,
along with lacerations of his face and head, which took more than a hundred stitches to close. His blood loss required a transfusion
and he was supplied with intravenous antibiotics to keep an infection from setting in.

As Frank lay on his back, enduring the well-meant medical attention, his body felt pain in every corner. He drifted in and
out of consciousness and reflected on his behavior in the intermittent moments of lucidity that arrived and departed, floating
like soft dirigibles over a blasted landscape. By the time the doctors stabilized him and administered an anesthetic that
was going to deposit him in the easy arms of Morpheus for the foreseeable future, he had cobbled together enough coherent
bits of thought to acknowledge the incontrovertible truth he was going to have to face when he awoke: things were worse now
than they were yesterday.

His first visitors upon returning to consciousness in the late afternoon are two dour members of the Los Angeles Police Department,
who inform Frank he is in a lot of trouble. Lloyd, over Stacy's strenuous objections, had refused to press charges, but the
combination of not stopping for a police officer when ordered to do so and crashing into someone's house was a toxic cocktail
that only became more hangover-inducing when the amount of illegal things in his system was revealed. Frank is issued a summons
and is told he does not have to be present to be arraigned. He says nothing to the cops the entire five minutes they are there.

His first unofficial visitor is Honey, who learned of the accident on the local Lynx morning show, which she watches each
day while doing yoga. In the middle of a downward-facing dog she heard Frank's name and looked up to see a reporter standing
in front of Lloyd's home, recounting last night's events. Honey ran to the phone and dialed the police, who, given she was
not a relative and didn't think quickly enough to lie, suggested she call around to the various area hospitals. It took her
a few minutes to locate him, and not bothering to change out of her workout clothes, she immediately drove out to Santa Monica
and parked herself in the lounge area down the hall from his room, awaiting an explanation, which she intended to get the
moment he returned to waking life.

Honey is curled up in a chair reading an eleven-month-old copy of
People
when Robert arrives in the late afternoon.

"I'm getting him into rehab" are the first words out of his mouth after the full-body hug and cheek kiss he gives Honey. Frank
may have been recovering from a near-death experience down the hall, but an opportunity to pull Honey's surgically enhanced
form to his and luxuriate in her comfortable sexuality, if only for a fleeting moment, was something the husband of Daryl
Hyler was not going to miss. "I've already called Four Winds up in Malibu, and the second he gets out of here, he's checking
in, assuming he's okay."

But what if he isn't okay? That is something neither of them wants to contemplate. What if he has lost brain function, distressingly
common in these situations, and is facing life as a vegetable? For a man who made a living in Frank's line of work, that would
cause insurmountable problems. Then there was the vexing question of insurance. In the tradition of artists everywhere, the
subject of disability coverage did not come up in the rare moments Frank entertained the hopelessly middle-class habit of
estate planning, which, given the life he led, he considered a whimsical concept anyway.

Honey and Robert are thinking about all of these disturbing possibilities, but neither wants to alarm the other so they just
smile wanly at one another as they settle into chairs where they wait for permission to see the patient. After a few more
minutes of discussing Frank's future (assuming he had one), which, it was clear to the two of them, he was not capable of
managing without a great deal of help, Robert, casually and with a little reluctance, hands Honey a script, saying, "Look
at this when you get a chance. Lynx is giving it a midseason pickup and there may be something for you." Honey grasps it in
her warm hands and immediately begins reading, grateful for any distraction, particularly one such as this. She has read it
three times and made copious notes in the margins when the nurse appears and says they can see Frank.

It is never easy to see someone you love lying in a hospital bed, but it is particularly difficult when that someone looks
as ghastly as Frank. His head and face are wrapped in thick gauze, giving him an ancient Egyptian aura. One arm is in a cast
and a bulky bandage, which straps his forearm to his chest and immobilizes his clavicle. He looks as if he has been hit by
a truck, which, in a sense, he has. Honey and Robert enter silently, the way you do in the presence of the dead or the grievously
injured, and shuffle respectfully to the bed, where they stand over the broken Bones.

You can never say "How are you?" in this situation since the answer is painfully obvious, so Honey and Robert quietly say,
"Hi," to which Frank, having had his fractured jaw wired shut and barely able to move his lips, responds, "I look like Claude
Rains."

Frank's
Invisible Man
reference comes as a great relief to his visitors since it indicates, however battered he may be, however many bones have
fractured and however much blood has been lost, his sense of humor remains intact; he is still the Bones. When Honey realizes
Frank is not headed for life as an asparagus stalk, she has to control the impulse to begin yelling at him, much in the manner
of a mother who has anxiously been waiting for a wandering child to come home, only to feel, after the initial overwhelming
relief at the kid's safe return, a desire to brain him for putting her through this trauma. The more circumspect Robert, curious
to know exactly what has transpired, murmurs soothing bromides to his friend before telling him he has contacted a lawyer
and arrangements are being made for Frank to formally detox in lieu of more draconian punishment. Frank appears to take this
news stoically, although you couldn't really tell, since the morphine trickling into his willing veins has relaxed his facial
muscles to the point where they can form only the mere suggestion of an expression.

"And Melnick's not pressing charges, Frank," Robert tells the battered comic.

"That's awfully white of him," Frank says before drifting off.