The Empty Glass (10 page)

26.

W
eather we’re having,” the driver said over the sound of the wind wings.

“Sure enough.”

“Santa Anas, you know.”

“I know.”

“The devil’s wind, what they call them. What is that phrase? An ill wind blows no good.”

“I don’t know.”

“Sorry? Can’t hear you. Gotta speak up.”

“I said I don’t know! I wouldn’t know.”

“Wouldn’t want weather like this to continue.”

“No, sir.”

“Coyotes come down from the mountains. They say the other day a woman gave birth to a lion.
Or
a prince.”

“You don’t say.”

“Mud slides and all that. One day it will all just continue, you know. The fires will start and not stop. They say that. It’s the end times. Like the Whore of Babylon. The woman who died. The actress. What’s her name?”

“Marilyn Monroe.”

“Oh, sure. You a churchgoing man?”

“Not exactly.”

“Oh, no? Well, it’s all in the Bible. You don’t live in the mountains, do you?”

“I told you. I live on Wilshire.”

“Oh, sure. By the big hotel.”

“Yeah. That.”

“Up-and-coming neighborhood, I heard.”

“More or less. The place is smoky, though. And old.”

“Oh, that can’t be good.”

“No.”

“Can’t be good for you, I mean,” he said. “Or your son.”

“Well, I’m trying to—” I started to say
save up enough money to move
. But I stopped, of course. “How did you know that I have a son?”

I saw his eyes in the rearview mirror. I thought I saw his mouth, too, smiling. But that must be a memory that I applied later, because I could not have seen his mouth. Not in the rearview mirror. I saw his eyes, though, in the light from a passing car as we drove onto a deserted road.

“You told me you had a son,” he said.

“I didn’t.”

“Of course you did. How else would I know?”

“That’s my question.”

“And my answer is: You told me.”

The lights were dying behind us. “Where are we going?”

“To your hotel.”

“I don’t know where we are.”

The radio was filled with static. It was tuned to a talk show featuring a man playing muted music and speaking in a throaty voice: “Whatever happened to ‘Good night, stars, I love you’? Or whatever happened to ‘Starlight, star bright, first star I see tonight’? Whatever happened to Jack Armstrong, the All-American boy? As the aging hand of time runs her fingers through my hair, all I can think of is: Whatever happened to ‘Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep’?”

The driver adjusted the knob, the passing stations fuzzy and crackling. Here and there he got a signal:

“—live, coming to you from the world-famous Cocoanut Grove where—”

“—on the floor of the bathroom as the children—”

“—cruise with a throng of the other Kennedy clansmen Sunday and then a bit of solitude, just the president and Mrs. Kennedy, before they part today.”

We were moving through the hills, lightning in the clouds. I figured we were taking the back roads around 101, what locals call Freeway 101, following the old thoroughfare that linked the Spanish missions. The roads are mostly rural, black stretches heading into a midnight broken only by abandoned hotels and railroad quarries and gas stations lit by Coke machines. There weren’t any cars, and though for maybe twenty minutes I contemplated pulling on the handle and jumping into the night, we were speeding, and a roll across that pavement would have killed me.

We finally pulled up a winding muddy canyon road. The words
TRIPLE XXX RANCH
were set in dead neon on the arched entrance.

“Right,” the driver said, parking just under the sign. The wings went back and forth. “That’ll be five sixty.”

“This isn’t my building.”

His eyes lifted in the mirror. “You asked me to drive you. I drove you. It’s a simple transaction: You owe me five sixty.”

“I’m not paying you for leaving me out in the middle of nowhere.”

“I have ways of dealing with deadbeats.”

He pushed his palm against the padded horn.

Headlights from another car flashed through the rain on the windshield.

Someone opened the cab’s back door, and I was yanked into the mud, staring up at a man with a psychopathically grinning Jimmy Cagney face and a porkpie hat as the cab pulled away, rolling through the arches.

“You’re supposed to be on vacation,” the man said. He was short and wiry, like an Irish boxer. “Why aren’t you on vacation?”

“I got bored.”

“Where is
The Book of Secrets
?”

Rain fell like a veil around his head.

“I don’t know what—”

There were other men. I hadn’t seen them at first, but now they were behind me. One of them picked me up, both hands under my armpits, and held me close to his hard heavy chest as the small man in the hat hauled off and punched me in the jaw.

The night went white, my head rocking back. I blinked, lips drooling blood and rain, and stared at him. The headlights blinded me. He was a black shadow surrounded by light.

“I’m not going to ask you again,” he said. “Where is
The Book of Secrets
?”

“I don’t know.”

He punched me again. Harder, this time. My head jolted back. I heard a crack. I saw stars. I saw more stars than were in the heavens. Or MGM. The second man tightened his grip as Cagney reached into his jacket pocket, LAPD shield flashing, and pulled out a cucumber.

“It’s in the library,” I said.

27.

B
en.”

I took the ice pack off my face and opened my eyes. As much as I could. They were bloody slits, but I could see Jo.

She stood above me as I lay on a gurney near a moaning guy on yet another gurney just two feet away. She was dressed, as always, like Edith Head. She wore a clean-lined bias-cut cream dress with oversized pink buttons. (Don’t ask me how I know all this.) She wore jet earrings, too. At her sides, like matching luggage, sat a bag from I. Magnin and her purse.

“Jo.”

“Shh!”

“What time is it?”

“Eleven or so.”

“That means nothing to me. Why are you here?”

“Hospital called.”

“Why?”

“You put me down as next of kin.”

“What?”

“They asked for next of kin, and you said me.”

“Must have been delirious.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “I’m touched.”

“Yeah, well, I was touched myself about a hundred times tonight, and right now I’m not feeling so great.”

“They said blunt trauma to the face and chest. A fractured rib and nasal fractures. And echees . . .”

“Ecchymoses.”

“What’s that?”

“Bruises. They tried to put a cucumber up my ass.”

“Jesus, you poor kid.”

“I’m not a kid.”

“You are to me. I’m old enough to be your mother.”

“Sure, if you reached sexual maturity at five.”

“I was very advanced for my age,” she said. “Can I smoke in here?”

“If
he
doesn’t mind.” I tilted my head in the direction of the guy on the gurney next to mine. “Do you mind, mister?” I said. “If she smokes?”

He merely groaned.

There was a red prayer candle under his gurney. It was technically illegal, a fire hazard, but this was a Catholic hospital, so what’s illegal?

“Now.” Jo lit a cigarette. “What happened?”

“They beat me up.”

“I can see that. Who’s they?”

“What do you get when you cross an elephant with a rhinoceros?”

“What?”

“Hell-if-I-know,” I said, and told her everything: the B. F. Fox van, the intruder in the Savoy with a work order for nonexistent work, done by a nonexistent company at a nonexistent address, and ending when I told them where the diary was. As I spoke, she wrote in her reporter’s notebook, quickly slipped from her purse.

Ah, so this was no mere social call.

“How did you get
here
?” she asked.

“I woke on the grounds of the Triple XXX Ranch, and the next thing I knew . . .”

I was at a liquor store along the service road. The rain had stopped, leaving puddles in the lot. The neon sign above the door buzzed like an insect, the
I
missing from
LIQUORS
.

A bell rang overhead when I stepped into the fluorescence. A man stood on the ladder to the right, stocking shelves above refrigerator cases in his overalls. A woman sat on a swivel chair behind the counter covered with cigar boxes and small racks of sexual aids. On the shelf behind her, “nature” magazines were wrapped in brown paper. The cigarette dropped from the woman’s lips when she saw my bloody clothes and face.

She opened her mouth, as if to scream, but “It’s okay,” I said. “I need a cab.”

“I’m calling the police!”

“Please.” I took my wallet from the pocket of my bloody pants and tried to hand her money, but all I found was the Get Out of Jail Free card.

Thirty minutes later, the paramedic in the back of the ambulance was leaning over me, saying, “Do you know your name?”

“Ben Fitzgerald.”

“Do you know where you are, Mr. Fitzgerald?”

“In the back of an ambulance.”

“What happened, Mr. Fitzgerald?”

“I took a cab.”

“He’s delirious.”

At the hospital, the resident injected me with morphine and packed my nose to stop the bleeding and applied the cold compress. And the next thing I knew I opened my eyes to find Jo looking like Vivien Leigh. Dressed like Edith Head. With her bag from I. Magnin.

I. Magnin was where she bought most of her clothes. That and Bullock’s on Wilshire. But the clothes inside this particular bag were men’s clothes, nice ones: Sulka underwear, socks, a silk undershirt, a Van Heusen shirt, a striped tie, high-rising slip-on Bond Street shoes with square toes and wingtips, and a chocolate-brown worsted pin-striped suit.

“A suit.”

“It’s brown for town,” she said. “With black stripings, see?”

“Sure.”

“Now let’s get you into some respectable drawers.”

“I’m not supposed to put on underwear, Jo. I’m in a hospital gown.”

“I wouldn’t be caught
dead
in a hospital gown.”

“So you’ll die at home.”

“With dignity—and stiletto heels. Come on.” She held the underwear up. “It’s lovely. Sulka makes such a
dor
able vicuña dressing gowns.”

“You know you have a tendency to overemphasize certain syllables in words? Webster is turning over in his grave.”

“Webster never wore Sulka. Go on: I won’t look.”

She dropped her cigarette to the floor, crushed it with her heel, and handed me the pair of briefs.

I had some trouble slipping them on under the hospital gown. She helped by lifting my legs.

“No fair,” I said, adjusting the briefs. “You peeked.”

“I didn’t have much choice,” she said. “Did anyone ever tell you that you have a great ass?”

“No.”

“With or without the cucumber. You could bounce a quarter off that ass.”

“Wouldn’t you rather buy a Clark bar?”

She leaned over and kissed my forehead.

“Hey, that’s nice,” I said.

She kissed me again: this time, on the mouth.

“You shouldn’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“Makes my head hurt.”

“That’s what morphine is for.”

“Morphine doesn’t work for that kind of hurt.”

“Maybe this will.” She took a pint of Canadian Club from her purse. “I figured you could use it.”

“Just don’t let the nurses see.”

She cracked the seal and looked around. She frowned. “This is awfully familiar.”

“What?”

“No water glass.”

“The service here is awful,” I said. “Waitress!”

Jo put her left forefinger on my lips. “Shh!”

“Nurse!”

The nurse arrived. “Mr. Fitzgerald?”

Jo spun around, shoving the bottle into her purse.

“May we have a water glass, ma’am? Make that two?”

“Mr. Fitzgerald.” The nurse did not move. “I’ll have you know that this is not a restaurant.”

“No wonder the food is so bad.”

But the whiskey was good. It helped all kinds of hurt. Jo sat on the edge of the gurney, and we drank it straight from the bottle, since the Evil Nurse never returned. Jo passed it to me, and I passed it to her as I told her that Bobby Kennedy was “the enemy within.”

“Well, of course!” Her eyes widened. “That’s it! The diary is about Bobby. Well, it’s right there: She called him the General. He was the
attorney
general, and he wore white socks with a black suit, and he was the ‘altar boy,’ the mama’s boy. Which is what Bobby is. Or was.”

“It just seems odd.”

“What?”

“The attorney general of the United States was fucking Marilyn Monroe? Seriously?”

“I’ll take that and raise you twenty: The
president
of the United States was fucking Marilyn Monroe.”

“Ridiculous.”

“Why?”

“He’s the president of the United States.”

“So that makes him perfect? He has a cock.”

“
I
have a cock.”

“I noticed.”

“Not all men are cheaters, Jo.”

“Oh? And you?”

“The heart of all morality is staying out of certain rooms.”

“You were caught in a woman’s hotel room.”

“I was drunk.”

“That’s an excuse? Tell that to the Kennedys.”

“I believe in the New Frontier.”

“The New Frontier is hooey, Ben, like everything else about the guy: It’s public relations, advertising. They sold Jack into that job the way they’d sell soap. Joe Kennedy said this, in an interview. You think that guy believes in what he’s selling? JFK has been packaged for your consumption. You think he’s not cheating on Jackie? When he was elected, one of his aides said, ‘This administration is going to do for sex what the last one did for golf.’”

Jo said that Kennedy had carried on an “illicit relationship with another man’s wife” during World War II and [redacted] with a woman in Las Vegas. He dated a woman named Inga Arvad, who’d attended the 1936 Summer Olympics with Hitler. He dated a woman named Judith Exner, who was also dating Mafia chieftain Sam Giancana. There were others, too—so many that Jack could never remember their names. “Kid” was what he called them. “Hello, kid,” he once told a woman in his hotel during the 1960 campaign. “We have only fifteen minutes.”

Fifteen minutes was all he ever needed.

“And then,” Jo said, “there was Florence.”

“Who?”

“Florence M. Kater. You never heard of her?”

“No.”

She handed me the bottle and said, “Drink.”