Archer sat on the bed in Callahan’s spare room staring at his shoes. The house was decorated with a Bohemian flair that he knew was all Callahan. This was not the land of tea cozies, patchwork quilts, and dusty knickknacks. The woman had hit the 1950s in full stride with colorful walls, minimalist chrome and wood furnishings, and large ceramic dishes like the kind they made in Laguna Beach hanging on the walls. The kitchen had every convenience GE and others could offer, like a dishwasher, a garbage disposal in the sink, an electric range, and even a deep freezer that was large enough to hold an elk. The coffee table was topped by recent copies of Daily Variety and The Hollywood Reporter. He had brought along a map of the stars and pretended to have found her new house on it. Her laugh had been worth the fifty cents.
There were also paintings that would never have seen the light of day in any grandma’s house. On the wall of his room was a painting of a naked woman. She was grotesquely large, with bloated breasts and swollen thighs and belly, and was holding what Archer would delicately describe as a cucumber broken in half. Callahan said it was done in the avant-garde style. He’d asked her what she saw in it, and got, at first, a coy look in return. “Life, Archer, only from a woman’s perspective.”
He and Callahan had kissed on the stroke of midnight in the Ambassador’s penthouse. Then they, and apparently everyone else, had gotten the hell out of Dodge, including at least one of the hosts. As Archer was waiting in the valet line, he had seen Danny Mars driving off with Miss D-cup in a silver Rolls. He didn’t know where Gloria had gotten to. Maybe she was still in the penthouse with one of the Mexican waiters, shorn of slitted gown and gilt slippers, and white jacket and pants, respectively. They could be lying on their backs on the dining room table looking up at the ceiling mirror and contemplating the prospects of a heady 1953.
He continued to sit there until he saw Callahan’s light go out in her bedroom. He waited ten minutes more and then went into the next room, found the phone book, and looked at his watch. It was five past two. He looked up Eleanor Lamb’s number in Malibu and made the call. If she was there, he’d hang up. She might be more than just the worker-bee writer with nothing more complicated in her life than reams of heavy bond paper and a mountain of Corona ribbon and dreams of crafting comeback stories for aging stars. If so, he wanted to understand her and maybe help the woman.
The phone rang three times and then a voice said, “Hello?”
It was a man. Okay, this was not starting off like he wanted it to.
Archer made his voice high-pitched and echoey. “Can I speak to Eleanor Lamb?”
“Do you have any idea what time it is?”
“Yeah, I do. What are you doing up?”
The man didn’t answer.
“Can I speak to her?”
“Who the hell are you?”
“Her brother. I wanted to wish her Happy New Year.”
“She doesn’t have a brother.” The line went dead.
Archer slowly put down the phone. He could call in the LA County cops. But when the dispatcher asked him what was wrong, what was he supposed to say? That a guy had answered an unmarried woman’s phone at two a.m. and hung up on him? They would just tell him that Eleanor Lamb had gotten lucky on New Year’s Eve. If Archer pushed it, that would get him a quick trip to the can for wasting police time.
He left a note for Callahan just in case he didn’t get back before she woke up. She had told him she wasn’t due on set today. That meant the lady would be sleeping until well past noon.
He pulled his street map from the Delahaye’s glove box, found Las Flores Canyon Road on it, and set off.