Angel of the Abyss

26

Saul Veritek’s heart attack happened on a Sunday. The press reported he was home alone at the time, preparing for bed, when the attack struck. People in the know were well aware that he was in the company of a pair of aspiring actresses, without whom he would never have survived. All of this information came to Grace’s ears that Monday morning, when she arrived at the lot for the day’s shooting. Someone suggested a moment of silent prayer for Saul’s full recovery, and though few likely prayed in earnest, everyone remained quiet for a few minutes before Jack took up his bullhorn to address the company.

“We will continue our work,” he told the sullen group of two dozen cast and crew. “Saul would have another heart attack if he thought we were wasting time here. There are only about twenty-five pages left to film, and I think we can do it before the end of the week. In fact, I know we can, and we will. That’s all. Let’s get to work.”

He set the bullhorn on his chair and ran his fingers through his hair. Grace approached, script in hand. He smiled awkwardly, and she wondered if it was her imagination or if he looked a little jittery.

“I’d like to tell you I’m sorry for that mess at March’s,” he said, sounding genuine. “You know I hadn’t any horse in that race, I just wanted to help facilitate your next step.”

“No Frank, no deal,” she said with a half-hearted shrug. “That’s no kind of picture I want to work on, anyhow. All it amounts to is a wasted afternoon.”

“I don’t suppose you’ve heard from the old Red himself?”

“No, and I’d tell you if I had. After March’s driver took me home, my car was waiting right there in front, just like Frank said it would be. My guess is he finally skipped town. That Joe Sommer seems to have it out for him and bad.”

“Joe’s a bit of a bulldog, all right. Used to be a Pinkerton man, way I hear it. Helped the major studios get their footing out here, away from all that labor craziness back east.”

“Well, I won’t be used — not by Joe, Frank, or anybody else. I’ll make the pictures I want to make, the right kind, and not so some Red chaser can make a point to people I don’t even know.”

“That’s fair enough, Grace,” said Jack.

She maintained a hard face, a face designed to express her general distaste for liars and conmen, despite the hurt Frank had caused her. In all the time Grace had spent in Los Angeles she had yet to find a single person she could honestly call a friend. Not a colleague, not someone who could help propel her career or who wanted her to lift up theirs, but a sincere human connection. For a time she thought Frank was going to be that person. Now that she knew different, the sting of disappointment was difficult to mask.

“Say, Jack,” she said, eager to get off the subject of Frank Faehnrich. “Before we get started, a question about your little speech a moment ago.”

“What’s that?”

She flipped through the dog-eared script in her hands, knitting her brow at the dull blue mimeographed pages. “You said we’ve got twenty-five more pages to shoot. By my count there are only nineteen.”

“That’s because I mean to do a little reshooting. Not much, just a few scenes I wasn’t happy with when we were looking them over in March’s projection room.”

“Oh? Which scenes?”

Jack laughed softly and tussled her hair. “Don’t worry, we’ll get around to it. Keep your mind on Billy Goat Gruff over there for now, will you?”

He stabbed his thumb at the graveyard set, where Bob Scaife was being fitted with a grotesque goat’s head. Grace gritted her teeth.

Living death, for Clara, does not come cheap. She may roam the earth, and she may seek her vengeance, but not for free. The same entity to whom she was sacrificed demands recompense for her second iteration, the New Clara, and for this she must now return to the scene of her death, and the scene of her resurrection.

And there, among the moldering tombstones and iron fence posts encrusted with verdigris, he waits — a towering figure with arms outspread from the billowing sleeves of his cloak and massive horns coiled atop its shaggy head. She draws nearer to him, her bare legs swept with lazy mist, and the moonlight reveals the beast’s awful face, the face of a goat with grinning teeth and soulless black slits for pupils.

Intertitle: “Two more!”

The goatman beckons to the sepulchral bed, to consummate their unholy union, and Clara, sneering, slips free from her burial gown and complies…

Much of the cast and crew — Rob Scaife, the goatman, included — planned to descend en masse upon Saul in his hospital room after the day’s filming. Grace needed no time to decide upon a round of drinks at the nearest blind pig instead. She waved off her driver in the lot, hitched the strap of her bag over her shoulder, and walked the quarter mile to Anthony’s, which was reputed to be run by a Chicago syndicate man snaking his fingers into Los Angeles. But the booze was no bathtub moonshine to give anyone seizures and the place never got raided, so who was Grace to complain?

She found a nice dark table in the back and ordered a waitress to set them up — a glass of beer, a shot of whiskey, and a cup of hot black coffee to keep the motor running. The round came back in good time, and Grace dumped the whiskey down with the sharp image of Jack Parson’s leering look as she writhed beneath the Satanic figure of his goatman.

“Hold on a minute,” she gasped at the waitress with her first post-hooch breath. “Another one of those.”

The girl nodded and went back for the bar. Grace started in on her beer and closed her eyes, trying in vain to think of anything apart from the awkward humiliation of that dreadful scene. She’d known it was coming, she’d read the pages weeks ago. But she’d also dreaded it all those weeks, and now that it was done she wondered how Jack would ever get it past the censors, what theaters would dare book a picture like that. And worse still, what studio would stoop to hire the girl who fucked the devil in Angel of the Abyss.

“Thanks,” she said to the waitress upon delivery of another whiskey. It went down as quickly as the first one and the girl vanished before Grace could request yet a third. It didn’t matter. She was feeling it, the burn in her breast and the slowly approaching fog in her brain. She nursed the beer and the coffee in equal measure, bought a package of Chesterfields from the cigarette girl, and watched a mixed-race band starting to set up on a stage barely big enough to hold them and their instruments. By the time the waitress finally returned, she pointed to each empty vessel and said, “And how about a pencil and something to write on, huh?”

27

“An individual’s chances of surviving a thing like this depends upon a number of variables,” the doctor said, his voice even and without much inflection. “It depends on where in the brain the point of impact is, which part of the brain is affected. Also the velocity of the bullet is key, as is whether or not the bullet then exits the brain or stays inside, even in fragments. You lucked out on all counts, Mr. Woodard.”

“Except for the part where he got shot in the head,” Jake said. He was sitting on an unoccupied hospital bed beside me, listening intently. I was surprised he was still in Los Angeles, much less there in the hospital. But I didn’t yet know how long I’d been out.

It was only a couple of days. I’d been awake for most of a third.

One of my eyes was still swollen and my vision was hazy, like I was drunk. Equally impaired were my motor skills and speech. Inside my brain everything seemed fine, but my body and mouth were slow to get the message.

“In your case,” the doctor continued, “your recovery is going to rely much more on physical therapy than the surgery. Your speech is slurred, and your right side appears mildly impaired.”

Almost instinctively I tried to make a fist with my right hand. All I managed to do was smash my fingers together in a weak lobster claw imitation.

“Now whether you feel up to speaking with the police is your decision, Mr. Woodard. I’ve given it my okay, provided that it’s brief and not too stressful. But if you feel the need for more time — more rest, really — then that is what I’ll tell him.”

“Shea?” I asked. It sounded like Thay.

“That’s the detective, yes.”

Jake leaned forward. “He wants to see if the guys who shot you are the same ones who came after us.”

“Us?” I wondered aloud.

“Long story, but I’ll fill you in.”

I blinked my good eye and swallowed, or tried to. My throat felt like it was coated with wax paper.

“I’ll talk to him,” I said.

“You’re sure?”

I nodded. The doctor left and Jake stood up, patted me gently on the shoulder. He said, “This is going to be the best drinking story you ever had.”

“I get all the best breaks,” I said.

“Listen,” he said, “I’m just glad you’re going to be all right.”

Shea came in then, tugging at his lower lip. His shirt was untucked and he hadn’t shaved in a day or two. All things considered, I didn’t feel too sorry for him.

“How are you feeling, Graham?”

I gave a thumbs-up. I was being sarcastic, but he didn’t seem to catch on.

“Mind if I talk to you for a few minutes?”

“No,” I said.

He sat down where Jake had been. Jake remained standing beside me as though he was my defense attorney or something. His protectiveness was more than a little baffling to me, but I tried to keep my focus on the cop.

“I’ll try to make this as quick as I can,” he began. “How many individuals attacked you?”

“Three.”

“All men? Were any of them women?”

“Men,” I said.

“No Mrs. Parson,” Jake cut in. Shea shot him a look.

“Mr. Maitland…”

“Sorry.”

To me, Shea asked, “Can you describe these men?”

I took in a slow breath, thinking it over. “Ordinary,” I said. “White guys. Thirties, maybe early forties. Dressed sort of casual preppy. Polo shirts, suit jackets.”

“Any names?”

“No.”

“David doesn’t ring a bell?”

“No.”

“Ever heard of Cora Parson?”

“No, who’s that?”

“I’ll get to it. What else about these guys? Identifying marks — scars or tattoos?”

“Don’t think so. One of them cut Florence Sommer’s throat.” I groaned, remembering it. All that blood. “Right in front of me.”

“What did they say to you?”

“Not much. They were ready to do it. Just kill us, her and me both.”

“Well, they can’t get to you in here. You’re perfectly safe now, don’t worry about that.”

I said, “Thank you.”

A nurse floated in silent as a ghost and got to futzing with the wires stuck to me and the machine they led to. I mostly ignored her. She did us the same favor.

“Now Mr. Maitland describes his assailant as a man named David, about five foot ten, with a stocky build and short, salt-and-pepper hair.”

Jake nodded, said, “Also a big fucking hole in his skull, but he wouldn’t have had that if you saw him.”

I tried to make a face, but all I really did was drool a little. The nurse wiped my chin.

“Could be,” I said. “Yeah, one of ‘em.”

“The one who shot you?”

I thought about it, though I really didn’t want to. I was only conscious for a few seconds after the bullet struck, it all happened lightning fast — but in those seconds I knew for a fact that I was about to die. I saw the guy’s face all right, a stoic expression to put Harold Lloyd to shame, but the moment he fired his gun all I was concerned with was the tiny projectile ending my life right then and there. It’s a mind-fuck, dying like that and coming back when you never expected to.

“I think so,” I told Shea. The shooter was the stocky one, all right. And neither of the other guys had salt-and-pepper hair. David. Such an innocuous name for a cold-blooded murderer.

Shea made some notes on his little pad and said, “Okay. All right. Thank you, Graham. I’m sorry to bust your chops at a time like this.”

He then stood and turned to face Jake.

“As for you, Mr. Maitland — no more Junior Detective bullshit, you hear me? I appreciate your willingness to help your buddy and I’m sure he does, too, but there’s a reason for police departments.”

At that moment Jake’s normally smug face sank into a deep, sorrowful frown. I’d never seen him like that and it startled me a little. The detective slapped him lightly on the arm and started for the door. Jake followed him out, and in the hallway muttered something I couldn’t clearly hear, though I was certain I heard my ex-wife’s name. He returned to the room after that, and I kept my one seeing eye on him as he rounded my bed.

“The hell was that about?” I slurred.

The nurse straightened up and told Jake he was going to have to let me get some rest.

“Just a minute,” Jake pleaded. “Please.”

She sighed and left us alone for the moment. Jake sat down on the side of my bed and put his hand on my knee.

And he caught me up.

Sleep was temperamental that night, and when it did come, it was fraught with nightmares. Nightmares about this David bastard, about being shot over and over. Nightmares about a girl I never met named Louise, who didn’t fare as well as me. And nightmares about Helen, appearing in my hospital room in the night, telling me she’d never see me again in the same words I once said to her, but with a terribly different meaning — and consequence. At one point my heart rate spiked and a crew of technicians rushed into the room to check on me. For my trouble I was given a sedative and a juice box. Apple. My least favorite of the fruit juice family.

When I was alone again, I remained awake for a long while. Footsteps and muted voices filled the hall outside my shut door. I stared at the soft white glow of the curtained window and thought about everything Jake told me, about four dead women and almost a million dollars and an old woman with a direct, living connection to Grace Baron’s movie.

As for the movie, or what was left of it, Jake said the police intended to impound the reels we found for evidence. I wished I could watch them again, watch more closely for anything I might have missed. And I was seriously nervous about how a bunch of unskilled people were going to handle the nitrate stock, which I’d never had the opportunity to digitize, much less restore. Moreover, it nagged at my brain — you know, the one a bullet passed through? — that Florence Sommer’s father had most, but not all, of the film’s reels. It seemed to me the rest had to be somewhere. And if the late Mr. Sommer was less careful with how he stored some than others, perhaps the ones still missing would offer some insight into what this horror show was really all about.

If only I had the slightest clue as to where they might be.

28

Grace slept with no dreams at all.

When in the morning the telephone jangled, she came awake with a start and grumbled, “Damn it, Saul.” Her skull felt too small for its contents and the sunlight spilling through the slats of the blinds stung her eyes.

She ignored the telephone as she always did, but as the hard hooch-induced sleep melted agonizingly away, she recalled that Saul was in the hospital still. Reaching for the watch on the nightstand she checked the time and saw that she was terribly late for the day’s work.

Then the sunlight disappeared all at once and darkness was restored to the bungalow. She blinked and wondered had she misread the time? Or had her watch stopped? She’d thought it read two o’clock.

The telephone fell silent and the horn of an automobile sounded outside. Grace sat up and squinted at the window when the glaring white light reappeared, forcing her to squeeze her eyes shut and look away. It hadn’t been sunlight at all. It was the headlamps of the automobile with the blaring horn.

It was two o’clock in the morning.

She pulled the sheet up to her chin and waited, listening to her own breath.

The engine rumbled, and the headlights swept the bungalow before vanishing altogether. The automobile sputtered away, its chugging noise diminishing to silence.

Grace sat still for half an hour, her knees pressed against her breasts. And she stayed awake until her driver arrived to take her to work.

29

My second day post-resurrection Jake returned to visit me. He told me he was heading back to Boston first thing in the morning. I didn’t blame him, and I told him as much.

“I never invited you out here in the first place,” I said, only half-joking.

“I’m not sure if I’m glad I came or not,” he said. He’d been uncharacteristically sad and introspective since my return to the land of the living. I couldn’t blame him for that either, considering what had happened. We had both watched helplessly as women were murdered before our eyes. Well, me more helpless than him — Jake and Barbara took the bastard down. All I did was catch a bullet with my head.

After a slow moment of quiet, I said, “Do you really think Helen’s gone?”

The truth was I hadn’t given the question anywhere near as much consideration as I should have. I pinned it on my injury, on the trauma of my experience. I didn’t need to think about it, so I didn’t. But that didn’t push it out of my mind. For all the anger and near-hatred I felt for my ex-wife, the thought that she might really be dead tore me up inside. Nothing could take away the years we spent together, for better or for worse, despite it being mostly for the worst. Even if I didn’t know exactly how I was supposed to feel about something like that, what I felt was deep sorrow.

“I don’t know,” Jake said, staring at the floor. “Coming from that old psycho, who can tell?”

“Jack Parson’s daughter-in-law,” I said, thinking aloud.

“At least something finally ties it all together. This shitshow and that goddamn movie, I mean.”

I tried to relax, despite the pain in my head and the pit in my stomach. It didn’t take. I made a fist with my left hand and squeezed it tight. My right just twitched.

I said, “I need to get out of here.”

“You got shot, Graham.”

“This isn’t over.”

“For you it is. You’re safe here. There’s a cop right outside the door. It’s a miracle you’re even alive, not to mention not drooling all over the place and crapping your pants. You’re the luckiest son of a bitch ever got shot in the head, and now you’re acting like you’re sorry you didn’t get killed.”

“Maybe I am,” I moped.

Jake’s face darkened and his jaw twitched.

“Fuck you,” he said. “Fuck you, Graham. I saw a girl die because of this. You saw Mrs. Sommer get her throat cut. A shitload of people are already fucking dead but you — you made it. I made it, too. Neither of us should ever have come out here in the first place and by all rights we should both be dead but we aren’t. So fuck you. I’m going home, and as soon as they let you leave—let you leave, you selfish prick — so are you.”

He was breathing hard after that and staring me down. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to say. I might have apologized, told him he was right, but he left after that. The sentry in the hall wished him a good afternoon. Jake just grunted and then he was gone.

The most excruciatingly long days of my life dragged by in Jake’s wake. I didn’t hear a word from him, but I took him at his word and assumed he went back east. Shea dropped around once, but only to tell me there was nothing new to tell me. Helen was still classified as a missing person. I couldn’t help but make the connection to Grace Baron — another missing person, and one who was never found. The connection made my stomach churn.

As for Cora Parson, she too was missing, in a way. Which is to say David’s botched triple murder had likely driven her into hiding.

“The woman is seventy-seven years old,” Shea told me. “One doesn’t imagine she’s gone very far.”

“Olivia de Havilland is almost a hundred and still makes appearances,” I said.

Shea just raised one eyebrow. I didn’t bother explaining.

“Look,” he said, “in a couple of weeks you’ll be out of this bed and into physical therapy, hopefully in Boston. Where you belong. By then we should have caught up with this woman and I’ll personally phone you to tell you all about it. Until then, if something happens, you’ll be among the first to know. So just get your rest, eat your lousy hospital food, and continue sitting this one out, Ms. Marple.”

That last bit he said with a smile. He was not an unkind man, for all his bluster and subterfuge. I smiled back, though mostly on the left side.

“10-4, chief,” I said.

I snuck out of the place the next night.

It was nowhere near the great escape I initially imagined, however. I waited for my police protection to waddle off for a cup of coffee and simply walked out of the room, down the hall, and into the first open room I found. Inside it, a man I judged to be about my size was snoring loudly in his bed with the wall-mounted television on. I rooted through a drawer across from the bed while Richard Boone swaggered on an episode of Have Gun, Will Travel. One blue T-shirt, a pair of shorts, and a couple of flip-flops later, I waltzed right back into the hall and took the elevator down to the lobby. Anywhere else the bandages cocooning my head might have drawn stares, but here I looked more or less in place. There was a different cop hanging around the front desk. He nodded to me on my way out. I gave him a weak salute.

At the end of the circular drive in front of the sliding glass doors, I sat down on a green metal bench and took stock. I’d been limping, my right side functional but drowsy, uncoordinated. Whether this was a permanent condition, I didn’t know. But it didn’t seem as though it was going to get any worse. I decided I could live with that, chiefly because I was probably going to have to.

I took my wallet out of the stolen shorts and counted my available funds, which turned out to be enough to catch a taxi back to Hollywood. The driver wasn’t the chatty type, and that suited me fine. I was too busy thinking about what a reckless imbecile I was being, and how nothing was going to change my mind.

30

A spotlight illumined the broad stage beneath the screen, into which walked a grinning man in a tuxedo and enormous cowboy hat. The audience erupted with applause, and Grace followed suit. This, she knew, was Hoot Gibson, the star of the night’s premiere, The Man in the Saddle. Hoot’s cowboy pictures had been playing for years, but unlike William Hart they continued to bring them in. Hoot was doing just fine, as his goofy ear-to-ear smile attested.

Beside her Saul Veritek clapped and smiled, too. He leaned close to her and whispered, “I can’t stand these dismal oaters.”

“Oh, it was all right.”

“Dismal,” he repeated, still clapping.

When the applause died down, Hoot waved both hands at the assembled colleagues and started in on a drawling message of thanks. Grace tuned him out. She had not been able to stop thinking about her late-night visitor, the lights and noise, who it was and what they wanted. Frank Faehnrich was her best guess, but her mind turned blank when she tried to suss out the reason Frank would have to harass and frighten her in that way.

Was he angry that she didn’t get into the car with him that day? Did he consider her a traitor now? Would he burn down her bungalow like he burned that set, with her asleep inside?

Grace shuddered.

Saul said, “Bit chilly in here.”

“Yes,” she said.

In front of the theater, well-dressed men and women shook hands and congratulated one another and themselves for their successes and conquests. The preponderance of the attention was focused on Hoot Gibson — it was his night after all — but Grace couldn’t help but gawk at the bevy of recognizable faces surrounding her: Tom Mix, Blanche Sweet, Billy Bletcher, Antonio Moreno. Phantoms of Hollywood she had never seen so small, so real. She managed to keep her mouth closed but stared all the same.

“Don’t look like such a star-struck bumpkin,” came a voice beside her. Grace shook it off and turned to find Jack Parson at her side. “These are your peers, or soon shall be.”

“It’s so odd seeing them in the flesh,” Grace said. “Smaller in real life.”

“In full color and sound, too. They’re not just people, though. They’re stars. It’s another level altogether.”

“Aren’t they artists?” she asked, her voice tinged with sarcasm.

“Some, yes. Not most. Art requires suffering. I think so, yes. Nobody suffers in Hollywood. This country is riding much too high, all this post-war giddiness. We’ve forgotten about the dead, about the lean times.”

“Isn’t that what we’re here for? To help people forget?”

“Hmn,” Jack grunted. “It’ll be worse when sound comes. Cinema should trump vaudeville, the Follies and all that nonsense. But that’s all it will be. All singing, all dancing. The pictures won’t be pictures anymore. This will all degenerate into just another low entertainment. Watch.”

“You’re the biggest cynic I ever knew, Jack. There will be enough room for everything under the sun. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater yet. You’ll be able to say a lot more with talking pictures, won’t you?”

Jack lighted a cigarette and narrowed his eyes at the bright marquee.

“I may just say everything I need with Angel of the Abyss,” he said. A faint smile played at his mouth.

Grace studied him for a moment, failing to decipher his meaning, when Saul came out of the milling throng to shake Jack’s hand and bring him back to earth.

“I hear you haven’t ruined our picture yet,” Saul said.

“The ship’s still sailing, captain,” Jack told him.

“Never doubted it for a moment, my boy. Never for a moment. I didn’t bring you on for your good looks.”

Jack’s face was inscrutable. A near poker face with a Mona Lisa smile. Saul continued talking, gesticulating as though the heart attack never happened at all, but all the while Jack’s eyes remained on Grace.

“There’s a party starting up at the Brown Derby,” Saul said to Grace, touching her on the arm. “Why don’t you two come along? Only the best and brightest there — well, and me.”

He chuckled again and Jack assumed a stern frown.

To Grace, he said, “That new place on Wilshire, shaped like a hat.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Parson,” Saul groused, though he still grinned. “Let some air out once in a while, would you?”

He jammed a fresh cigar between his teeth, slapped Grace on the behind, and sauntered back off into the throng.

“Listen, Grace?” Jack said, rocking on his heels and sniffing the warm evening air. She snapped her attention back to him — she’d been staring at Richard Dix. “Let’s skip the revelry for once, shall we? I’m not much in the mood for it. And besides, I’d like to talk to you.”

She raised one eyebrow and found a cigarette in her handbag, which she slid between her lips.

“About the picture?”

Jack lighted the smoke and said, “What else is there?”

Grace sucked deeply at the cigarette and rolled her eyes over the crowd one last time.

“FitzGerald’s?” she asked when they refocused on her director.

“No, the studio. There’s something I’d like you see.”

31

It was weird how much I missed sitting in my swivel chair and feeding old film stock through a computer. All I ever wanted to do since I was seven years old was make movies myself, my own stories on my own terms, but one sour experience made me slam the door on that old dream forever. Still, in spite of everything, there was nothing in the world I loved and desired more than cinema. Even during those turbulent years with Helen — and this was something I never admitted to myself until she was gone — my wife was always going to come in second to my one true love.

These were my thoughts when I limped up to the front desk of the Wilson Arms and introduced myself to the startled attendant, to whom I probably looked like a refugee from a B horror picture. Half-Igor and half-Invisible Man, with a liberal sprinkling of Frankenstein’s monster to enhance the whole deal. I told her I’d had a room there, paid for by the Silent Film Appreciation Society, and I wanted to know if I could reclaim it.

No dice.

And the place was well beyond the realm of my price range, so I had her wheel out my luggage and line up another taxi for me, and I rode downtown until I found a place wretched-looking enough for me to afford. The roof sagged in front of its tiny office and there was an aging prostitute just standing out front, smoking and picking a scab on her lip, like it didn’t make any difference, which it pretty much didn’t. I checked in on my own credit card, got the key, and when I came out again, the working girl was still there. I bummed one of her smokes and she made a sad joke about how she doesn’t usually give anything away for free. I guessed she felt sorry for me, the way I looked, and that made it a little sadder still.

I went to my room and lay down on the musty bedspread, where I finished the smoke despite the state’s strict laws on that sort of thing. I didn’t figure anyone would give a damn. I put it out in the sink.

Then I checked my old-school horror show appearance in the mirror, heaved a sigh, and went for the telephone. It was bolted down like everything else in the room. Nothing was attached in my old room. That place was plush enough they could afford a few stolen items. I picked up the phone and dialed information, asked for the number for Cora Parson. Unlisted, but I counted on it. It was a long shot.

The old lady was probably still riding pretty high on her family fortune, and in some quarters the name still meant something. She wasn’t going to be like the rest of us plebs and keep a public listing. Nevertheless, I wanted to find out where she lived and fast. She might have skipped out somewhere to hide, but she was also an elderly woman and couldn’t have gone terribly far. I was betting she was still in L.A., or at least very close by. Her residence would be my first point of contact to get anything more to go on, if I could find it.

I leaned against the wall and listened to the people going at it in the next room, longing for another cigarette and thinking about what Shea had told Jake—no more Junior Detective bullshit.

But hell: he hadn’t said it to me.

When I was in Hollywood in the 90s, there was a place near the old Tower Records where actors and filmmakers and, more than they, dreamy wannabes could go to file their résumés and head shots. It was a small office in an ugly seventies-era office building and the way it ended up working was producers low on cash or just plain sleazy would track down crew and bit players desperate for work so they didn’t have to pay them. For about two months I was bouncing around this notion about making a short film with this Jordanian guy I’d met; it fell apart before it went anyplace but he was the one who sent me to this office to get some names of people who might work on the cheap. I remembered how surprised I was to see more than few familiar names and faces among the dozens of three-ring binders I went through that day. The joint was like an archive for everybody working in the movie business below the superstar level.

There was no telling if the place would still be around all these years later — there’s nothing like turnaround in Los Angeles — but for once my luck held and I found the office still going strong, though now most of the shelves full of notebooks were gone and there was a bank of five computer monitors crowded around a small plastic table.

A smarmy-looking kid with retro glasses and an ironic, too-tight sweater vest asked me if I needed some help. I wondered if I was ever going to get used to the pity/disgust stare, and wondered about toning down the whole giant-bandage-on-my-head look before my next step. Whatever that was.

“I’m looking for information on a producer,” I said, leaning against the doorjamb to give my right side a chance to rest. “Used to work with the guy and I’m getting a small production together.”

“This isn’t really an information bureau,” he snarled, rudely. “If you’re looking for talent, that’s where we can help. But if you’re looking for someone to bankroll your little movie…”

I wanted to slap him, but I knew if I did, I’d probably end up on my ass. So instead I cut him off and said, “Actually, my little movie is funded. I only wanted to bring somebody in on it since he’d done me a favor before. We’ve got some major talent attached and I think he’ll be very excited to hear about it.”

My words were beginning to slur again and I worried the kid was going to assume I was some drunk or junkie off the street, which would have been a pretty safe bet from his perspective. That I was a miraculous survivor of a gunshot wound to the head would probably not even be his second guess. At least I’d been able to change into my own clothes.

“What might be this gentleman’s name?” the snotty bastard asked.

“Parson. John Parson.” I remembered it from the bio I read on the plane.

Of course, I knew the younger Parson was as dead as his father. I just hoped this kid didn’t.

“All right, let’s take a look, then.”

He went to the nearest monitor and sat down in front of it. After hunt-and-pecking his way through the username and password, he brought up an ancient interface that looked like it could have run on DOS. Still, there was a row of tabs at the top labeled with professions, and among them was producer. He clicked the tab and scrolled down the list, some of which appeared in red for some reason.

“P, P, P,” he mumbled until he reached that letter. “No, sir. No John Parson. I’m sorry we couldn’t have been more help.”

I’m sure you are, I thought, again fantasizing about whacking him across the jaw. My daydream was interrupted by another young person, a girl with Lucy-red hair, who leaned back in her chair two monitors over and said, “Did you try the old notebooks, Shawn?”

I raised my left eyebrow at him and said, “Did you try that, Shawn?”

Shawn groaned.

The girl rose from her chair and walked over to one of the remaining shelves, sagging from the weight of its contents. I followed her over and she selected a particularly thick white one, flipped to the back and ran her finger down the columns until she found what she was looking for. What I was looking for.

“Parson, John. This lists him on the board for a company called Monumental Pictures in Culver City. Think it could be the same person?”

Monumental was the name of the production company behind Angel of the Abyss. It went under before my parents were born, but it certainly wasn’t unheard of to resurrect old names for new uses. Then again, I had no idea how long Parson had been dead, or if this second iteration of Monumental was still a going concern.

I said, “That’s John, all right.”

“I’m afraid all this has is that and the web address. MonumentalPictures.net. This is a pretty old book, though — at least eight years, I think. I’d say visit the site and hopefully it will have all the info you need.”

She gave me a caring look, her eyes unable to stay away from my bandages for too long.

“Thank you so much for your help,” I said to her. To the other little shit, I said nothing at all.

I left and found a pharmacy where I bought some gauze and other items to redress my head. I also bought a cotton beanie to cover most of it up. From there I took my bounty to the nearest copy center, which in the post-Internet café age were just about the only places other than libraries where you could find a computer for public use. I paid for an hour but I only needed five minutes.

The website was so old it had frames and clip art, but there was an address and a phone number. I copied them down and rushed back to my motel room, where I dialed the number before the door slammed shut behind me. Out of order.

But I still had an address.

The next half hour I spent carefully unwrapping my mummified head to redress before I went back out again. It was the first time I’d seen the wound, and it was horrific. My right eye was still swollen shut and the entry point was black and crusted. There was some kind of cotton or cloth stint lodged in the tiny hole, but I didn’t go prodding at it to find out more. I developed a fear of exposing it too long and, after wiping my half-shaved head down with some antiseptic wipes, wrapped it quickly and cinched it with metal teeth. Then the beanie went on and I looked less like a horror creature and more like a derelict who lost a battle with a baseball bat in some back alley.

I couldn’t decide which was worse.

West of the 405 and not too far from the Mar Vista projects there stood on South Slauson a large gray obelisk of a warehouse. There was no signage to identify its purpose, no windows on the street-facing side. The place could have been used for anything, or nothing at all. Either seemed equally dangerous to me. There was no telling who was in a place like that and what they were doing there. Possibly something perfectly innocuous and above-board, but given the way my little working vacation to L.A. had turned out so far, I wasn’t interested in putting any money on that.

Not that I had much in the way of money — once again I’d charged my taxi ride out there, forty bucks. It was a miracle my credit card company hadn’t cut me off yet, decided the damn thing was stolen. As things stood, I was going to be looking at one hell of a bill, assuming I lived long enough to be shocked by it.

I stood on the sidewalk as the cab drove off, listening to the city and the dull roar of the 405, and tried to imagine whether the junior Parson did anything remotely related to moviemaking in this place, once upon a time. I had my doubts. Monumental Pictures folded in the year between the disastrous premiere of Angel of the Abyss and Grace Baron’s official “death.” I didn’t know exactly when John Parson decided to resurrect the name, nor why, but it seemed a good bet to me whatever it was, it was something his widow was willing to kill just about anybody to conceal.

At the front door I found a small button, presumably a doorbell. I didn’t touch it, but I tried the handle. Locked. From there I walked around the side, past a rickety-looking ladder leading up to the roof, and around to the back. There was an empty parking lot back there, the macadam cracked to hell and the cracks filled with tall weeds and crabgrass. The back of the warehouse sported two steel doors just like the one in front and a loading dock situated atop a broad concrete slab. I tried both back doors with the same result.

I was just about to start weighing the pros and cons of trying that ladder when the left side door crunched open and a hairy face poked out. I jumped a little, startled.

The face, almost all beard, said, “Jinx, that you?”

The temptation to run popped into my head, but then I remembered that running was off the menu for me for the foreseeable future. Instead, I said, “No, sorry.”

“You need to sleep here, man? It’s cool. It’s safe.”

The door opened the rest of the way and a thin, pale man stepped out. His long hair was brown and gray, matted like his beard. He didn’t seem particularly dirty, but he was clearly homeless. He looked at me with watery blue eyes that said he could tell I was in dire straits, that he knew a lot about that.

I said, “I kinda…just wanted to look around, actually.”

“No trouble?” He seemed skeptical. I couldn’t blame him.

“No trouble,” I agreed.

He bit his thumbnail and traded glances with me and whatever was behind the door. While he thought it over, I decided to introduce myself.

“My name’s Graham. I’ve been looking for somebody, and I think maybe she’s been here. Maybe not for a while.” I didn’t know if I meant Helen or Cora Parson. Or both. It didn’t really seem to make a difference.

“I been squatting here off and on about a year,” the man told me. “A couple guys a little longer. I guess the place shut down ‘round 2000. S’what I hear, anyway.”

“What was it before that?”

“I dunno. Marky would know. You should ask him.”

“Is he here?”

“Marky’s always here.”

The guy pressed the door all the way to the wall and stepped aside to let me by. As I passed him, he squinted one eye and reminded me: “No trouble, man.”

I showed him my palms and smiled, and I walked into the dark, musty space.

There were no fires burning in barrels as I might have expected, and in fact most of the open area was completely dark and vacant, apart from rows of empty metal shelves and cardboard boxes here and there. The residents — the squatters — were concentrated in a smaller space walled off with particleboard and strung with multicolored Christmas lights. The man, my friend, went toward it and motioned for me to follow. The guy seemed a lot more the hippie type than the murderer type, so I followed and tried not to think about the Manson family.

Seated on a surprisingly decent-looking love seat were a man and woman, both in their thirties or early forties. She was black and he was Hispanic. Both were smoking cigarettes, or what I assumed to be cigarettes. When my guide approached, the man sat up straight.

“Who’s that, Duff — Jinx?”

“Nah, it ain’t Jinx. This guy’s called Graham.”

Now both of them perked up as I emerged from the shadows behind Duff. The man, who I gathered was Marky, stood up to assess me. I smiled stupidly at him.

“Graham,” he said, spreading it out so it sounded like Gray-um.

“Hi,” I said.

“I got no problem with you, Graham,” he said, as though that were an issue already raised. “No problem at all. But we do got a couple rules here before you can set down and rest.”

“He said he won’t make no trouble,” Duff assured him.

“Junkies lie all the time, bro,” Marky countered. “You know that.”

I sighed and said, “I’m not a junkie and I don’t need to rest here. Marky — you’re Marky, right?”

“That’s right.”

“Marky: I’d like to be straight with you.”

“I like that,” he said.

“I’m here because this place used to be run by a man, a man who’s dead now, but his widow has caused me and my friends a lot of trouble.”

“Trouble like that bandage up on your head?”

“That and worse. I want to find this lady and put an end to it before anybody else gets hurt, and this place is the only lead I got.”

“This place used to store old movies,” Marky told me, matter-of-factly. My ears pricked up. “Still some of them old movie cans around, too. This one time a dude dumped one of ‘em on a fire and that shit blew up — no lie, just like a bomb.”

“Nitrate,” I said.

“I dunno, but we hauled his ass right on out of here, I tell you that.”

“Can you show me some of those cans?”

“Look bro, you said you wasn’t going to cause no trouble. You’re talkin’ about people getting hurt and you look like you already been worked over good. That’s against the rules, man. I told you, we got rules.”

I wished I’d only been worked over, but I kept that much to myself.

I said, “Nobody’s after me, at least not at the moment. I’m supposed to still be in the hospital, actually, and the folks who did this to me still think I’m dead, as far as I know. All I need is a little information, and I promise you it won’t break any of your rules for me to get it, if it’s here.”

He wrinkled his nose and mulled it over. While he was thinking, the woman passed a bottle up to him and he took a long pull. Then, without a word or even looking me in the eye, he passed the bottle to me. Its contents were radioactive green and the label read MD 20/20—KIWI–LEMON. It felt like a moment of truth, or a test of courage, or something. I didn’t want to offend my gracious host, so I took a belt and gagged the stuff down. I coughed hard after that and Marky took the bottle back, laughing his ass off.

“Shit, bro,” he said, “you didn’t have to drink it.”

Now the woman and Duff joined in on the hilarity and, once my retching coughs were under control, I chuckled a little too.

“Come on,” Marky said then. “Lemme show you something.”

32

“Give me a minute.”

Grace waited in the doorway while Jack went into the darkness of the studio, his footsteps echoing loudly throughout the shadowed stages. A few moments later she heard a metallic crunch and a row of lights hanging from the rafters burned on.

“And God said,” Jack boomed from the opposite end of the broad space, his arms outstretched.

Grace walked in, her heels clacking a different tempo from the director’s shoes, and paused between the city street and the cemetery. The rafter lights illumined the fake gravestones like sunlight after a storm, streaming through the dissipating clouds.

Only the sacrificial tomb evaded the light, masked by the length of her own shadow.

33

Some of the titles on the decaying labels I recognized. A few I didn’t. Part of me was looking for Convention City, despite the urgency of the situation. Mostly I just wanted to see if there was anything among the three towers of dusty silver cans that would lead me where I needed to go.

The reels were stacked as far away from where Marky and his cohorts resided as possible and, like their little area on the other side of the warehouse, they had built walls around them. Unlike the particleboard from their apartment, however, these walls were wooden and cut into odd shapes, and blanketed with dust.

“After that film blowed up the way it did, I didn’t wanna be any too close,” he explained.

I gritted my teeth, hating to think what that guy might have destroyed. Some years earlier I’d read a story about a conservative church group in Florida who bought an old, defunct drive-in and held a nice little Nazi burning party in the parking lot when they found a closet full of films. I raged about that for weeks.

“Why didn’t you just get rid of them?” I asked him.

“One of these days I’ll find somebody wants to buy ‘em, I figure. You interested?”

I squinted in the low glow of his flashlight at an almost illegible label that read What Has To Be Done.

“Well,” I stalled. “Possibly.”

I set What Has To Be Done aside and kept sifting through the stacks. Just when I finished the second and started in on the third, Marky said, “There’s an old office, too. Way over there, on the street side. Kind of a dressing room and office, I guess. Big mirror in it, all broke up.”

“I’ll want to see that,” I started, when I saw I was holding a missing reel from Angel of the Abyss in my hand. The hand shook and my heartbeat quickened. I went through the next few reels in a hurry, and two more were from Angel. Another just had TEST written on the label, the ink so faded it was almost gone. Screen test? I wondered. I planned on finding out.

“Looks like you found you something good,” Marky said. “I saved ‘em, though. They mine, man.”

“Please tell me there’s a projector in here someplace.”

“What’s that?”

“The thing you feed the film through, to show it up on a screen.”

“Oh, right, right. Like at the movie theater.”

I clutched one of the Angel reels to my chest like it was my own baby and widened my eyes, awaiting a response.

“Yeah,” he said at last. “Yeah, there’s one of them. Back in that office. Or dressing room. Or whatever the hell it’s supposed to be.”

“God, I hope it works,” I moaned, and in my shaken state I brushed up against one of the diving walls, nearly knocking it over. Marky rushed forward to right it, and between the two of us we kicked up quite a dust cloud. Once again I was coughing my lungs up in front of this man, who didn’t seem fazed by it at all. And when the glare of his flashlight settled upon the oddly shaped platform, my heart almost stopped dead.

That first reel, the third, that I saw when Leslie Wheeler emailed me the video of it, had been playing and replaying in my mind ever since I first got into this mess. Even when I was unconscious in the hospital, I saw Grace Baron emerging from the fog on that crazy, avant garde street lined with painted backdrops of bricked façades and shop fronts.

There was no doubt in my mind that I was standing two feet from one of those backdrops now, a piece of Angel of the Abyss.

“Jesus,” I gasped.

“You wanta see that project-a-thing or what?” Marky barked.

I swallowed hard and gathered up all four of the reels I wanted.

“Yeah…yes. Lead the way, Marky.”

“Them damn things best not blow my head off.”

I grunted to signify that I’d heard him, but my attention was focused on the oldest damn film projector I’d ever put my hands on.

It was a twenties model Zenith safety projector, in astonishingly good shape. The lamp house was brown with rust but there was a relatively new bulb in it; the diffuser and lens were either restored or just remarkably well looked after. I snaked the cord up from the floor, covered in woven cloth as they were in those days, and sighed with relief to find the plug was suitable to a modern outlet.

“You’ve got some power,” I said to Marky. “To get those Christmas lights going. Is the whole place wired?”

“I guess I could run the extension cord over,” he said. “We juicing off the city, actually.”

I nodded and he ran over to start pulling up the cord. When he came back, I gently fit the plug into the cord’s outlet and held my breath as I switched the antique on. And glory hallelujah, the damn thing worked.

Marky said, “Don’t make ‘em like they used to.”

“You got that right.”

About everything, I thought, feeling sentimental for a past I never knew. Common pitfall in my profession.

Duff and the woman got to singing back in their corner of the warehouse, drunk as lords on that foul green stuff, and though Marky’s eyes shot that way he stayed with me. He kept the flash on my hands while I fed the first of the reels into the sprockets. Once it was ready, I turned the machine to face the dirty gray wall and started the show.

34

Hugging herself, Grace turned her gaze from the faux tombstones to Jack and forced herself to smile. The liberally flowing booze from the premiere was starting to wear off as she started to question why she agreed to come to the studio in the first place.

“What’s doing, Jack?” she asked with a small, artificial laugh.

He laughed back and went directly to the camera, which he heaved up by its wooden tripod. Grace narrowed her eyes, watching him carefully as he carried the equipment over to where she stood.

“Don’t tell me you’re this overworked,” she half-jested. “Surely the next scene can wait till morning.”

“No,” he said. “Not this one.”

His smile and laughter had faded. Now he set to arranging the camera, peering through the viewfinder at the cemetery, muttering quietly to himself.

“Jack?”

“Just a minute. Say — would you stand beside the tomb? Just to the left.”

“What was it you wanted to talk about, Jack?”

“Just to the left of it,” he repeated. “I’ll need to set the lights.”

“Come off that,” Grace said with as much force as she could muster. “We’re not really going to film anything — at this hour? Alone, and without Saul?”

“We worked a week without Saul.”

“He was ill. He’s back now.”

“We don’t need him,” Jack hissed. “Who’s making this picture, anyway? Jack Parson and Grace Baron, that’s who. All that tubby Jew does is interfere. And this—this—is something he could never wrap his dry little mind around, anyhow. No sirree.”

She stepped back, away from him, and rubbed her bare arms despite the muggy warmth of the studio.

“You’re frightening me, Jack.”

His grin returned and he paused for a moment, shaking his head. He then looked up at her, his face in shadow behind the rafter lights.

“That’s only because you don’t listen, dearheart. Dear, sweet Grace. You haven’t listened to me at all, not from the start.”

“I’m listening now. I’m here, Jack, and I’m listening. What was it you wanted to say?”

A small tremor worked its way up her back. She tried to shiver it out.

“Don’t you remember? The steps? The soldiers? Potemkin?”

Grace nodded vigorously, feigning comprehension she did not have.

“Yes, yes I remember.”

“What did I say? That day, Gracie. About art — the key. The secret.”

She recalled the troubling scene as clearly as though it were playing before her now; the screams, the blood, the terror. And she recalled her director’s words, too — words that puzzled her then and terrified her now.

“Darkness,” she whispered. “You said, ‘human darkness.’”

Jack Parson wiped the sweat from his brow with the sleeve of his topcoat and sighed loudly.

“That’s right, Grace. Gracie Baronsky. My star. You understand. Oh, thank God! You understand.”

He left the camera and walked stiffly toward her. She flinched, but he did not appear to notice as he wrapped his arms around her and squeezed her tightly.

Into her ear, he softly whispered, “What we do here tonight is the end of cinema, my lovely girl. Talkies will never top what we’re about to give them.”

Her eyes spilled over, tears falling in dark spots on his shoulder.

35

Having watched Angel of the Abyss with three missing reels alongside Jake before my little accident, I was now finally putting the film together by way of memory added to the remaining footage glimmering on the wall before me.

Marky murmured, “Shit, man, this flick’s so old it’s silent.”

I shushed him as politely as I could and fell back in step with the nightmare beauty of Grace Baron’s Clara, a murdered woman returned from the grave to wreak vengeance on the men who wronged her. She slinked through densely fog-laden alleys in a sheer garment, her alabaster body barely concealed and her jet-black bob a stunning mess atop her scowling face. Even in rage — in death — she was astonishing. Not just her looks, but her range; even without intertitles her every thought was communicated through her eyes, through her flaring nostrils and small, dark mouth.

The world would have fallen in love with her, had it ever been given the chance.

I went through the three reels quickly. At about ten minutes apiece, they went by too quickly, and I sat in silence for several minutes absorbing them. Clara got them, of course, all the men who took her and made her their victim. And when that was done, the goat-headed beast with whom she’d made her carnal pact took her into its arms, enveloping her in its great, dark cloak, and she vanished with him in a wisp of smoke. The picture was harrowing and gorgeous, and much too sinister for its time. Even now it jarred me — me, who went through every stomach-churning 1970s Euro-horror film in my college days — even as it bewildered me with its breadth of design and the depth of Baron’s extraordinary performance. As sure as I was that Parson and his heirs had everything to do with the violence and secrecy taking hold of my life at that moment, I had no other choice but to admit the man had made a masterpiece.

So why must it be kept secret?

That question was answered by the fourth and final reel. The one that had only TEST on it.

I fed it into the projector, and in the horrible minutes that followed, I understood everything completely.

36

Squirming in his strong grasp, Grace sniffed and fought the cloud that seemed to envelop her senses.

“Jack,” she said, “listen to me. I have an idea.”

His fingers dug into her ribs and he shook slightly. As if weeping. She exhaled sharply and continued: “We’re going to make an astounding picture together. You and me. Like nothing anyone’s ever seen, or done. Because you’re an artist, not like these Hollywood types. You’re not one of them, Jack. You’re our Eisenstein, and you’re going to prove it to everybody.”

“I am,” he rasped. “I will.”

“But not tonight,” she said, her tone motherly. “It’s not the right time, Jack. We’ll need more crew, won’t we? To get the lights just right? To keep your mind on the direction? Why, you can’t run it all. You’re the mind, Jacky. Not some mean crewman. Let’s do it tomorrow.”

Jack groaned sorrowfully and leaned away while still grasping her at the waist. His eyes were pink, puffy. He looked devastated, sad.

“You never understood this picture at all, did you?” he asked.

“What do you mean? Of course I—”

“No one does. It’s a nightmare. Someday, Lord willing, they will see what I’ve done, and they’ll see that I closed the gap. That pictures don’t have to exist on the other side of the screen, separate from the people who see them. That the darkness in them — in all of us, Gracie, in you and me — is what binds us to art.”

He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment and shuddered. The movement went from his hands into her body, and she stifled a cry.

“Only we can do this, Grace,” he said, opening his eyes and staring hard into hers. “You, and I. The artist and his subject. No one else can help us. And no one else can know.”

“Know? Know what, Jack?” She struggled and he moved to grasp her roughly by the arm. “Know what?”

37

I said, “Oh my God.”

“What the shit, man?” Marky responded. “What the shit is this?”

I couldn’t answer him. I was choked on my own quiet sobs.

Probably I knew it all along, or at least suspected it. I’d read that she was present at the film’s abysmal premiere, but I knew now that could not have been true. Because Grace Baron was dead by then. There could be no doubt about it. I was watching her die.

Not Clara — Grace. I was watching Grace Baronsky die.

The thing was so clumsy it looked more like behind-the-scenes footage or a home movie than a scene from the brilliant production I’d just seen. The camera shook as it was positioned, already rolling, and in flashes bodies moved in the periphery of the frame. I longed for impossible sound, to hear what was happening just off camera, but it became clear soon enough.

Though the framing was off and the lighting bright and ill-designed, if indeed designed at all, once the camera was steady I watched as a man in a rumpled tuxedo dragged a struggling woman to the same cemetery set from Angel of the Abyss and threw her down, violently, upon the sacrificial tomb. Her gown was torn and her makeup streaming down her still unbelievably angelic face — Grace. Grace Baronsky from Idaho, the starlet who never was.

She lunged up, swinging at the man with an open hand, but he was quicker than she and put down her rebellion with a close-fisted punch to the jaw. Grace rocked back and the man climbed atop of her, planting a knee on her chest. He tore her gown open, right down the front, and when he moved aside again, she was exposed to the waist.

“Is this for real, bro?” Marky said, his voice uncharacteristically quiet.

I said, “It’s for real.”

Grace lolled on the fake tomb, raised her hand to her face and stretched her mouth open wide. Whether she was screaming, or crying, or making any noise at all, I couldn’t tell. I cried for her. I think maybe Marky did a little, too.

The man went off screen for a moment while she lay there, stunned. When he returned, he was pulling himself into one of the long cloaks, the costume of the sect who killed Clara in the picture. He then went back to the camera, his body filling and darkening the frame for several seconds. When the light came back, he had moved it, set it up to angle down at Grace, at her anguished face and exposed torso. He tore the gown the rest of the way down, and off. I felt awful watching — disgusting, down to the pit of my stomach — but I somehow knew I had to. I had to bear witness to this. It was eighty-seven years too late, but it had to be me.

I wiped my eyes on the back of my hand and forced myself to keep looking. And that was when the man showed the dagger to the camera.

38

“Jack,” she pleaded, her voice wet and slurred with pain. “Please don’t. Please, Jack.”

“Clara doesn’t speak in this scene,” he said. “You know that. Be quiet.”

“I’m not Clara. Jack—I’m not Clara. It’s Grace. Please, it’s Grace you’re hurting. I’m real. This is all real…”

He spun around, the hood of the cloak falling from his head and his teeth grinding with anger.

“Of course it’s fucking real!” he roared. “Don’t you think I know that? Why else would I bother? Can’t you even try to imagine the impact had Eisenstein actually shot those people on the stairs? Had he actually had them slashed and stomped down? The curtain would be torn down, damn it! Art and life! Cinema and death! Human darkness, just as I’ve been saying all along. For Christ’s sake, Clara—Grace—can you see now? Can’t you finally see?”

Jack moaned and swung around to kick over an adjacent gravestone. Grace whimpered, started to rise from the tomb. Her vision blurred and her jaw throbbed, but she pushed past it, lifted her weight and tried to focus on the door leading out. It seemed miles away.

“No, Clara!” Jack shrieked.

Grace cried out and tumbled off the tomb, rolling away from the set. The cold floor of the studio slammed against her naked body, and she got to her knees, ready to leap up for the door, for escape. But he was upon her before she could move another inch, slinking his arm around her neck and dragging her back. Back to the set. Back to the tomb. To her final performance.

Fighting for breath, Jack Parson lifted her kicking from the floor and threw her down, a second time, on the tomb. She yelled out and he drove his fist into her diaphragm, knocking the wind out of her lungs in a prolonged gasp. The studio spun like a merry-go-round and she saw the glint of the blade and she knew it wasn’t a prop, it wasn’t the spring-loaded, retractable dagger the day players used to act out her demise weeks ago.

No fake knives. No more acting. After all she’d done, all she’d survived for the privilege to perform on celluloid, Grace Baron was going to die for art.

Jack snapped his head to look at the camera. The machine was still rolling, with only a few minutes left in the reel. He turned back to Grace, wheezing under him, her eyes wide and mouth set tight.

“For history,” he said, calmly. “Thank you.”

And then he raised the blade.

39

The blood welled up, impossibly dark and thick, like oil. The dagger only sank so deep, about three-quarters of the blade, where it stopped. And the man — Parson himself, of that I was sure now — held fast to the handle, permitting the wound to pour, Grace’s life to leak out from between her breasts in what was now scratchy, flickering black and white. It spilled down her side, following the groove of her ribs, and pooled beneath her still white body on the fake tomb. And there the reel ended, leaving nothing on the warehouse wall but a bright square of light as the projector continued to turn and click, the only thing making my soft, hitching sobs inaudible.

“Turn it off,” Marky said, his voice low and grim. “Turn that thing off, man.”

“I think it happened here,” I said, half to him and half to myself.

“What’choo mean, it happened here? That murder? That’s what that was, isn’t it? A murder?”

“It was. And I think this place used to be the movie studio where that happened. The movie before, and then that. Grace Baron’s killing. It happened right here, and…Jesus. That’s what this has been about all along.”

“What, bro? What kinda shit is this, anyway?”

“That old woman was just protecting her good family name,” I said, knowing I wasn’t making any sense to him. In the far corner, the woman was no longer singing, but Duff still was. Completely oblivious to the horror Marky and I had just seen. I envied the hell out of him for that.

I dragged a deep breath into my chest, my mind racing from the moment I got the phone call from Leslie Wheeler to waking up in a Los Angeles hospital with a hole in my head, wondering if it was even remotely possible that I could explain any of it to this homeless man who trusted me enough to permit me into his safe place. Somehow it seemed I owed him some kind of explanation, if only to calm his obviously rattled nerves — but that wasn’t something either of us were much concerned about when the gunshots started.

The woman shrieked and I hit the floor, knocking the projector to the ground where it broke apart noisily. Duff shouted something I couldn’t understand and then there were rapid footsteps, followed by another pair of popping shots. Marky cried out, scrambling toward the noise.

“Marky, don’t!” I called after him.

He sped out of the back office area, just barely clearing the doorway before another report sounded and he dropped backward like a brick. His flashlight clattered to the floor and the light went out. The shooter was close enough that I could smell the cordite. My ears rang slightly from the shots, but all I could hear now were slow, deliberate steps drawing near to the doorway. As quietly as I could, I picked up the empty can from which I’d taken that awful reel of nitrate film. Rust flaked off on my fingers.

The office and warehouse were almost pitch-black; only the faintest glow emanated from the Christmas lights across the building, but it was enough to illumine the shape that appeared in the doorway and bent over Marky. I held my breath and tried to keep from shaking, scared as I was. Any second this guy was going to come in the room, and I wanted to be as focused and ready as I could.

Next thing I knew, Marky coughed. It startled me and it sounded bad. The shooter made a surprised sound and then grunted. I jumped to my feet, took two long strides toward the door, and threw the can as hard as I could at the guy. It struck him in the neck and he shouted, turning and grasping at his neck as his gun went off. The muzzle flashed brightly in the air, and I was thankful it hadn’t been pointed at Marky. Or me.

The gunman roared, “Goddamnit!” I flung myself at Marky, seized a handful of his shirt and dragged him roughly back into the office, where I slid him across the floor and up against the inside wall. My hands were tacky with his blood. I couldn’t tell where he’d been hit, but he was wheezing and moving lazily about, dazed.

“Fuckin’ bums,” the shooter yelled. “Fuckin’ shit-birds!”

Shit-bird. I’d heard one of the goons at Florence Sommer’s house say that, moments before they killed her and shot me. I guessed this guy had to be on cleanup duty — hit the warehouse, get rid of everything, kill anyone you see. Old Cora Parson must not have known the place was being used by squatters. I’d never have gotten in had they not been there, but now it seemed like my interfering with their quiet corner of L.A. had gotten most of them killed. And that really pissed me off.

I gently patted Marky on the shoulder, hoping to Christ he was going to make it through this shitstorm, and then did probably the stupidest thing of my life thus far: I rushed out of the office and lunged right for the guy with the gun. He made a noise in his throat, spinning to get the drop on me, but I threw a left-handed punch at his throat that left him sputtering for air instead. My knuckles throbbed and the way my brain was going, the pain only served to make me angrier. So I punched him again, same place, and felt his windpipe collapse like rice paper. For my trouble my right leg turned to Jell-O and I went careening toward the hard cement floor.

It was the worst violence I’d ever committed, which wasn’t saying much, me being a generally pretty peaceful guy. With his air supply cut off, the man forgot all about his gun, which he just dropped so he could claw at his throat. I couldn’t make out his face very well in the nearly nonexistent light, but the flat, dry gulping noise he made in his mouth was enough to turn my stomach. It was almost enough to make me feel bad for what I’d done too, but not quite. Not after what he’d done to Marky and what I imagined he must have done to the other two. So when he dropped to his knees beside me, I didn’t shed any tears about lifting my left foot and kicking the son of a bitch over. I didn’t stick around to watch him suffocate to death either; I stumbled around to find his gun and Marky’s flashlight, got both, and hurried back to the office.

After screwing the flashlight back together, I switched it on and turned it at Marky. He squinted and grumbled, “Man, get that damn thing out my eyes.”

“Where are you hit?”

“My goddamn arm,” he complained. I shone the light on his right arm, which was soaked with blood, the nucleus of which was a dark hole in the bicep. “Hurts like hell, man. Shit, I never got shot before. It hurts.”

“Trust me,” I said. “I know.”

“The hell was that dude?”

“Somebody who doesn’t want that film to ever get out.”

“What about Duff? And Shawna?”

“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “But I don’t think it’s good.”

He squeezed his eyes shut and said, “Damn.”

“Hang tight,” I told him. “I’m going to find a phone and call 911. But listen, I’m getting out of here. I just — Jesus, I just killed that guy.”

“Good,” was all he said about that.

Duff was dead, shot in the chest, but Shawna was gone. It was a gruesome sight made worse by the cheerful glow of the colorful Christmas lights. Pangs of guilt ripped through me when I found him, though I tried to convince myself it wasn’t really my fault. I didn’t exactly believe that.

The gunman hadn’t forced his way in through the front door, wouldn’t have needed to; he had a key. Outside I found a late-model Saab parked at the curb. There was no doubt in my mind whatsoever that it was the same car I saw racing down Hollywood Boulevard after somebody took a couple of potshots at me in front of the Wilson Arms. I ran back inside and snatched the keys from the dead man’s pants pocket. I snagged his wallet while I was at it. For good measure, I shone the flashlight on his face.

It was the piece of shit who cut Florence Sommer’s throat.

From the office, Marky called out to me, so I went back in one last time.

“They gone?” he said.

I nodded somberly. “Duff is. I’m sorry. I–I don’t know what happened to Shawna. She’s not here.”

“Why’d you bring this shit to us, man? You wasn’t supposed to be no trouble. You said you wouldn’t.”

My chest felt too tight for what was in it and my neck burned at the back. I said I was sorry again and felt horrible for repeating something that didn’t help at all.

“We was safe,” Marky said. “We was safe here.”

I wanted to puke. I wanted to puke all over the floor until there was nothing left inside and I could just lie down and die. Everything was finally coming to a head but it was too much, more than I could handle. I couldn’t even stick out the movie business when I tried, how the hell was I supposed to deal with all of this?

“I’m going to get help for you,” I said. “I never wanted any of this to happen. I hope you know that.”

The last thing he ever said to me was “Go.”

I went.

The Saab was his, the killer’s. Cora Parson’s man. Started up easy, the radio softly playing the classical station. Goddamn Bach. Real relaxing stuff to get in your head before you go murder a bunch of strangers. I slammed the button to turn it off.

It took me a minute to regain what little composure I had left. Once I was calm enough to function, I saw the cell phone in the cup holder, with which I dialed 911 and said enough to get somebody out there before abruptly hanging up. Marky was going to be okay, or at least as okay as possible, considering. That accomplished, I dug into that dead bastard’s wallet to see what it could tell me. And the first thing it told me was that I’d just killed Jack Parson’s grandson.

Gary Alan Parson, to be precise. Height, 5’9”. Eyes, brown. Hair, brown. Age, 44. He was never going to be 45. I could hardly wait to tell that to his mother’s face.

The address listed on the dead man’s license was in El Centro, in Imperial Valley. Luck was with me insofar as there was a road map in the glove box that would get me there. The needle on the gas gauge indicated three-quarters of a tank in the Saab. I looked at my hands on the wheel in the dim green light of the dash and they looked like they were only dirty, rather than sticky with Marky’s blood. I felt my gorge rise a little. I didn’t want to see any more blood, mine or anybody else’s.

But I was damn ready to end this. I jerked the stick into drive and hit the gas.

40

Angel of the Abyss wrapped after four more shooting days. They were tense and largely quiet days. They were days without Grace.

Saul and Jack scrambled to shoot around a double, hastily hired through an agency. The girl had a vague resemblance once her hair was cut to match Grace’s bob, but there wouldn’t be another close-up, another frame to capture Grace’s emotive face. She was gone.

Saul kept a key to her bungalow, since he paid for it, and wasted no time letting himself in on the afternoon of her first missed day. Nothing was missing, nothing amiss. The watch he’d given her, her wardrobe, the telephone he installed for her. And not so much as a note to thank him for all he’d done, for his exhaustive efforts to make her more than merely Gracie Baronsky. More than just a girl. All those weeks it was Jack he worried about, but somehow along the way he’d managed to straighten up and fly right. In the end, it was Saul’s protégé who failed him.

He ordered the bungalow cleaned out by the end of the week.

The pressure of incumbent stardom deemed too much for the poor thing, went one of the hushed rumors blazing around the set and through somber speakeasy conversations at night. Hiding out back home — where was it? Iowa? Maybe under an assumed name.

Others cast the blame on the Communist apprentice electrician. Privately, such was Saul Veritek’s assumption. Eloped…or worse. Who could say? They had a production to finish. The picture business didn’t wait around for anybody.

Such were the vagaries of Hollywood.

41

Imperial Valley was about 220 miles from Culver City, which made for a four-hour drive. I drove south along the coast and the sun was just starting to come up over the horizon, burning down over the Pacific from mountains in the east, when I was north of San Diego. The water sparkled blue and orange and the air was so fresh I realized how bad it had been up in L.A. From there I went east on I-8 with the sun in my rearview mirror.

I filled the tank back up west of La Mesa and used the sanitary wipes by the pump to finally get the blood off my hands. The knuckles on my left hand were red and raw from where I’d twice punched the late Gary Parson to death. I idly wondered how much trouble I was going to be looking at once this was all finished, for his death and the theft of his car. And for whatever I was going to have to do once I reached El Centro. I got a couple packs of Parliaments and a tall cup of crappy convenience store coffee for the road, and then I went to find out what that was.

In front of a midsized Spanish-style house a few blocks south of the town’s country club, I sat in the idling Saab and waited for someone to notice me. The curtains were all drawn and there weren’t any cars in the drive. The yard was impeccably manicured, the grass greener than any real grass, perfectly squared hedges bordering the small property. I smoked three cigarettes in a row while I watched the house, hoping Gary didn’t permit it in his ride, and even took the time to put one of them out on the upholstery, just for kicks.

As I lit a fourth I started to worry I’d come all this way for nothing, though I’d known that was a risk. It was the only lead I had so I ran with it. And since nobody saw fit to come out to me — if in fact anyone was in the house at all — I killed the engine, left the key in the ignition, and limped out of the car so I could go to them.

Rather than ring the bell, I went around the side of the house, edging up against the hedges, and came into the equally well-kempt backyard. A red and yellow plastic tricycle was turned over on its side on the grass. I didn’t like that, but I took the gun from my pocket anyway. I’d come all the way across the country to work with a stranger’s equipment, and it seemed like that was just what I was about to do. It was just a different kind of machine than I was used to. My machines back in Boston restored the dead to their former glory; the one in my hand now was purposed for quite the opposite effect.

A box window in the kitchen jutted out with potted plants pressing against the glass. There was also a small patio extending away from a clean plate glass sliding door. I couldn’t see through the glass; the morning sun threw a glare that made it impenetrable. My left hand tightened around the grip of the gun and I wondered how well I’d be able to shoot with my southpaw. Trouble was, I’d never fired a gun with my right hand, either. And my right still wasn’t in the mood to make a proper fist, much less squeeze a trigger.

I lingered at the corner, out of view of the windows, mulling this over. My aim was going to be shit, my visibility was nil, and I hadn’t the slightest idea who was inside or what they were going to do when they saw me. I was sweating beneath my bandage and my right foot was starting to tingle like it does when it falls asleep. A one man-army I was not.

My solution was simple and, I guess, a bit on the dramatic side: I lurched into the backyard, took aim at the sliding glass door, and fired a shot that obliterated it in a noisy explosion of glass.

Ta-da.

I wanted to create confusion and panic, and judging by the frenzied shouts that came from within the house I decided I was successful. As fast as I could, I moved past the destroyed door and pushed up against the siding. I was waiting for someone to come out to investigate or, failing that, to kill me. I’d had enough time on the drive down to give some thought to my feelings about killing, and I came to the conclusion that I didn’t care for it. As worthless a human being that murdering bastard in the warehouse was, it still disturbed me that I was responsible for somebody’s death. For that reason my plan was clear in my otherwise foggy head — the second I saw someone come through that door, I was going to shoot them in the leg.

Only nobody came through the door. And in the aftermath of the shot, the shattering glass, and the shouts from inside, all I could hear was a woman crying.

Oh for Christ’s sake, Graham, I scolded myself. Don’t tell me you went to the wrong goddamn house.

I felt like running away, or limping as the case would have been. Like getting back in the Saab and getting the hell out of Imperial Valley. Another four damn hours, sure, but I’d go directly to the Hollywood police, march right into Detective Shea’s office, and explain everything. And hope to God I wasn’t looking at some kind of serious charge.

Then I heard the weeping woman say, “What’s happening, Cora? Why is this happening to us?” This was punctuated by the shrill wail of a small child.

Cora.

I went inside, gun first.

Though I saw the old woman, my attention was focused entirely on the other woman, who cowered on a suede love seat, shaking and clutching a weeping toddler in her arms. The woman was around thirty-five or so — my age — with curly brown hair and a plain but pleasant freckled face. She wore an oversized T-shirt and sweatpants, casual clothes for relaxing at home, but she was anything but relaxed. Rather, her wide, ice-blue eyes stared me down with equal parts horror and hatred, leaking tears and shimmering in the light of the faux Tiffany lamp between her and the old woman.

Gary Parson’s gun was more or less pointed at the lamp. I couldn’t aim it at any of the unarmed people in the room — two women and a child — but I wasn’t quite prepared to put it away, either. And despite the fact that I’d never laid eyes on Cora Parson, the still, scowling woman in the Queen Anne chair beside the love seat struck me as the very person I’d come looking for.

“What do you want from us?” the younger woman cried. Her outburst set the little girl into a fresh bout of screaming and sobbing. “My husband is dead! Do you understand me? Dead!”

David, I supposed. The thug Cora left to kill Jake and Barbara. The human monster who did kill Jake’s friend, or whatever she was. I narrowed my eyes and turned them on the old woman. She neither trembled nor cried. Her veiny hands curled like talons over the arms of the chair and her clear gray eyes regarded me with steely revulsion.

“Cora Parson?” I asked her.

“Mr. Woodard,” she answered me. It wasn’t a question.

“Cora,” the woman said, “who is this? Is this the man who killed David?”

Cora pursed her papery lips and said, “No, Sarah. This is not the man.”

“Then who is he?” She pressed the child’s head tight against her breast and redirected the question at me: “Who are you? What do you want from us?”

“My name is Graham Woodard,” I said. My voice was steady, but my heart was pounding out of my chest. This was not the scene I anticipated. “I was hired by a woman named Leslie Wheeler to help restore a motion picture — a very old motion picture that was thought lost for a very long time. That film was made by Mrs. Parson’s father-in-law, back in 1926.”

Cora shot me a bemused, smug look. Sarah knitted her brow and snarled, “I know what my husband’s grandfather did for a living, damn you. What has that to do with anything?”

“Then let me tell you something you don’t know. In fact, I can tell you a lot of things you probably don’t know, from the looks of it.”

“Don’t listen to this man,” Cora cut in. “He is clearly a lunatic. He may not be the one who murdered our poor David, but he is most assuredly allied with the killer.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that, Mrs. Parson,” I growled. “I’ve become a killer too, now. Your boy Gary paid a visit to me and some of my friends. This is his gun, as a matter of fact. I took it from him. I took his shiny car, too. He won’t be needing either of them anymore.”

“Oh, God!” David’s widow wailed. “Oh, my God!”

“But I’ve gotten ahead of myself,” I continued. I changed my mind about the gun and angled it to point directly at Cora. She didn’t change her expression one bit. “You see, Miss — it’s Sarah, right?”

“Go to hell,” she said.

“Right. You see, Sarah, Jack Parson — the elder Jack Parson — was apparently something of a sadist. I mean a real goddamned pyscho.”

“You shut your lying mouth,” Cora snapped. “Don’t you dare come into my house and disparage my husband’s father.”

I shook the gun at her. “Be quiet, Cora,” I said. “I’m nowhere near finished yet.”

“Jack Parson died before you were born!” Sarah said. “This is goddamn crazy.”

“Oh, it’s crazy all right. And I suspect Parson was pretty damn crazy, too. Christ, runs in the family, from what I can see. Maybe he was a genius, as well — I saw Angel of the Abyss, Cora. All of it, every reel. It’s a masterpiece. An honest-to-Christ work of art. It’s just such a crying shame a young woman had to die for it, which is why you’ve gone to such insane lengths to keep it buried, am I right?”

She only glared.

“Very few people ever saw it, but in Europe your father made a name for himself after Monumental folded — though that’s not why he left the country, is it? He’s well remembered, and that name still means something, doesn’t it? Your name. Parson. Your husband traded on it and so do you. It would be a hell of a blow should the world find out that the great Jack Parson murdered Grace Baronsky on film to satisfy whatever monkeyfuck crazy bloodlust he had eating away at his brain, don’t you think?”

“My father-in-law was an artist!” Cora shouted suddenly, lurching forward in the chair, her face twisting with impotent rage. “And my husband revived Monumental from the ashes when nobody else gave a damn. My family does have a good name in this business, Mr. Woodard, in this state. And I intend to make absolutely certain it remains that way.”

“Even if it means murdering anybody who threatens you with the bloody truth.”

“M — murder?” Sarah screwed up her mouth and looked at me as though I’d just dropped my pants.

“That’s right,” I said evenly. “Leslie Wheeler was the first. I took a bullet in the head that was supposed to kill me — I think that must have been your husband who pulled the trigger there. Then there was Florence Sommer, and a girl named Lou, and tonight two people who had nothing at all to do with any of it. Their names were Duff and Shawna, if you’re interested.”

“You’re lying,” she muttered. “What an awful thing to say. You’re a goddamn liar.”

“I didn’t leave the hospital with a fucking hole in my head and drive four hours to El Centro to tell you lies, lady. I came here to put an end to this nightmare, to stop your horrible mother-in-law from causing any more damage to me and my friends. I am a goddamned film restoration technician, for Christ’s sake. All I ever wanted out of this was to see Grace Baron’s only performance, and I sure as hell did. And by seeing it, I opened up Pandora ’s box and unleashed this piece of shit on half of Southern California.” I gestured at Cora with her dead son’s gun.

The child continued to quietly whimper, but thankfully she did so in her sleep. The trauma and excitement had been too much for her and she crashed right out. Her mother kept looking at me with those huge wet eyes for another minute before turning them on Cora.

She said, “Cora? What is he talking about?”

“I’m sure I don’t know. But certainly someone has called the police by now. That shot couldn’t have gone unnoticed. Not here.”

“I hope you’re right, you nasty old bag,” I said. “The Hollywood Police Department has been looking for you, Mrs. Parson. Showing up at Leslie and Barbara’s office was not a wise decision on your part.”

“What is this, Cora?” Sarah repeated.

Cora drew a breath in through flared nostrils and her right eye twitched. I guess she was imagining the tables turned, maybe one of her sons putting another bullet in my skull. It didn’t really matter. Not anymore.

“I loved my father-in-law,” she said after a while. “I loved him better than my own father. He was a great man. Can you understand that, Mr. Woodard? Only one in a million men are truly great, and Jack Parson was one of them. He was a visionary artist. And had the world been in any intellectual position to comprehend it, he would have changed the face of cinema while it was still in its infant state.”

“By sticking a knife in a girl’s heart? Is that what passes for genius in your family?”

Her daughter-in-law’s eyes remained fixed on her, and for a brief moment Cora exchanged glances with her before coming back to me.

“He was a passionate man, Jack Parson. Something of an enfant terrible, I suppose. In Europe he saw many dreadful things, as anyone there did in those days. I think that was what finally calmed him, brought him back down to solid earth. Only then did he fully see how far he’d taken things. Before, with that film.”

“You mean with that murder.”

“If that’s what you prefer. I believe he regretted deeply what he had done, for what it’s worth to you. But he could not very well bring her back, could he? And should the world be deprived of the many important films he made after, just because of some low, Midwestern vaudeville slut?”

With that, the old bitch smirked. She actually smirked at me, daring me to make something of it. For a fraction of a second, I considered it. I considered pulling that trigger and putting that inhuman woman down like you would a rabid dog. But that would have been too easy and too much trouble for me. Instead, I switched gears to what I’d really come to know.

“Your time is running out, Mrs. Parson,” I said, my voice finally breaking as I prepared myself for what I was about to say. “Probably you’re right about the cops. I made quite a racket coming in here and I doubt the nice people you live around are used to that sort of thing. So you might as well tell me now, and damnit, don’t make me ask twice — what did you do with Helen?”

Almost beyond my control the gun in my hand inched closer to her pale, stolid face. She blinked and said, “Nothing at all.”

Police sirens wailed in the middle distance. There was no question where they were heading.

“Here they come, Mrs. Parson. You’re done and you damn well know it. They already know what you’ve done. Why lie about one more killing?”

“I’ve told you, Mr. Woodard. I haven’t harmed a hair on her drug-addled little head.”

“She was my wife, you old bitch. Jake said she’s dead. What did you do?”

A small, wry grin formed at her white lips and she emitted a throaty little laugh.

“I met her in what I gather was the same way Ms. Wheeler met her, at that little theater where she worked. She proved useful to me, keeping me informed of that homosexual woman’s plans, and when I grew worried that there might be police involvement, I convinced her to hold a significant amount of money for me. Lest it be seized, of course. It’s extraordinary what you can persuade an addict to do with a little help from their chosen vices, Mr. Woodard. Though I suspect you already know that perfectly well.”

“Cora,” the other woman whispered, astonished and horrified. Finally she got it. She believed and she understood. She’d married into a family of monsters. I felt sorry for her. “Cora, my God.”

“Oh shut up,” Cora answered her. “We’ve all suffered here. I’ve lost both of my sons.”

“And you seem so broken up about it, too,” I hissed. “You’re a real piece of work, Cora Parson.”

The sirens pierced the air as they came onto the street. Through the drawn curtains of the window behind the women I could see the blue and red lights pulsing right in front of the house. As soon as I heard the shuffle of approaching footsteps, I gently set the gun down on an end table — away from Cora.

And before the police reached the door, I turned back to the old woman and looked deep into her soulless eyes, and I said, “Where is she, Cora?”

The old hen half-grinned, her age-worn lips all but cracking at the strain. She said, “For the record, that colored girl isn’t dead. Shawna, you said? Yes, I think that’s right. It isn’t as though I didn’t know my building had squatters. How did you suppose Gary found you there?”

My stomach dropped, half-turned over at the thought that Shawna’s willingness to tattle to Cora had gotten Duff — her friend — killed. I wondered if she would be able to live with herself when she found out, but pushed the thought away in favor of getting my question answered.

“Where, Cora?” I persisted. “Where is she?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea where your wife is, Mr. Woodard. In some gutter, I’d imagine.”

“Not Helen. Grace. Where is Grace Baronsky?”

Fists pounded on the front door and a deep male voice shouted, “El Centro Police Department — open up.”

Cora met my gaze and raised her eyebrows.

“Oh,” she said. “Grace.”

She told me.