The Last Tomorrow

FOURTEEN

1

And here we are again: Thursday, the tenth of April: the day Eugene Dahl meets Evelyn Manning; the day he drives home and discovers a white envelope nailed to his apartment’s front door. We are, in fact, smack-dab between those two events, standing outside the bar on the first floor of the Galt Hotel.

Step inside.

2

Evelyn sits on her stool, smiling at Eugene. He’s just asked her out to dinner, as she’d hoped he would, as she needed him to, and she of course has agreed. She watches him get to his feet. He grabs the edge of the counter to maintain his balance. He bends at the waist in a drunken imitation of a bow.

‘It was lovely meeting you,’ he says, taking her hand in his and kissing the back of it. His lips are soft. They feel good against her skin and send a pleasant shiver through her body. ‘I look forward to tomorrow night, Evelyn.’

‘Room three twenty-three,’ she says.

‘Room three twenty-three.’

Then he turns and walks away. She watches him leave, watches him disappear into the night. She’s surprised she likes him, she didn’t expect that she would, but even liking him, liking him and knowing what she has to do to him, she feels only a slight twinge of guilt, and if you asked her she would deny feeling even that. It can’t be guilt. This is business, where guilt has no place. It’s nothing more than one too many glasses of that low-grade whiskey he likes.

Speaking of which. . she finishes her last swallow, sets down the tumbler, wipes moisture off her fingertips and onto a napkin, and gets to her feet.

She waves goodnight to Jerry, the bartender, and heads outside, the door swinging shut behind her. Eugene’s milk truck, which was parked on the street when she arrived, is now absent. The spring air is cool and brings gooseflesh to her arms. She’s glad she doesn’t have far to travel. She stands on the sidewalk and waits for traffic to clear. Once it has she walks across the street, heels clacking against gray asphalt.

She walks into the lobby of the Fairmont Hotel to find great white columns holding the ceiling up, red floral carpeting spread across the floor, leather couches littering the carpet, and dark hardwood wainscoting lining the outer walls.

She weaves her way through this feeling slightly dizzy, cuts past the sounds of people talking and the telephone ringing at the front desk, and takes the elevator up to the third floor. She walks down the wide corridor — past several pairs of shoes set out for the night, waiting to be collected and polished — to room 321.

She raises her fist, hesitates, and, after a brief pause, knocks.

A moment later Louis Lynch opens the door. He wears only slacks and an undershirt, his pale arms thin to the point of emaciation. His joints, elbows and shoulders, are thick knots holding together mere twigs. A revolver hangs from his right fist, comfortably, like it grew there. His long narrow face is pockmarked, cheekbones jutting, cheeks hollow, the eyes buried beneath heavy lids and set deep. His hair is slicked straight back with pomade, adding to an already skeletal appearance.

‘Would you like to come in?’

‘No,’ Evelyn says. ‘I’m a little tight. I want to hit the mattress and sleep it off.’

He nods. ‘But it’s done?’

‘Tomorrow night,’ she says.

‘Good. Have him home by midnight.’

She nods. ‘Yeah. I’m going to bed.’

‘You got everything you need?’

‘I have the knife. Is there anything else?’

After a moment’s pause: ‘I guess not.’

‘Okay.’

She turns away from his door and toward her own.

3

Lou stands in the doorway, looking out into the corridor. He watches Evelyn key open her room. She looks at him and smiles a tight-lipped smile he knows she reserves only for people she dislikes. The feeling is mutual. He smiles back. She disappears into her room and the door latches behind her. He closes his own door and walks back to the bed and lies upon it, setting the revolver on the night table next to the Gold Medal paperback novel he was trying to read when she knocked.

Nobody tells you when you get into this kind of life that you spend most of your time looking for ways to fill the hours. Jobs require some planning, of course, but mostly, in Lou’s experience, they require patience. It doesn’t matter what the job is, it will require many hours of not doing a goddamn thing. You wait for the time to strike or else you wait for others to move so you can see if they step into the trap you’ve set or else you do the job and must lie low until the heat dies down. You learn to fill the time. You have a few paperbacks handy, a deck of cards, a bottle of something that’ll blur your vision.

You try to stave off boredom.

He feels impatient sometimes when he knows what he has to do but must wait. This is the case now. But everything must be laid out properly for this to work. It’s chess with living players, with people, and with people there are no rules. There’s simply no telling what they’ll do, how they’ll react to a given situation. In chess you know it’s safe to put a piece directly in front of a pawn, for pawns can’t get at you straight, but people aren’t predictable in that way. They don’t live by such rules. But you do the best you can, and that requires forethought. And patience.

But he wasn’t born patient. fourty-two years ago he forced his way into the world months early, with underdeveloped lungs and fingers with no nails, and he hasn’t developed patience since. His seeming patience is not patience at all. Only through force of will can he find it in himself to wait. He must will himself to sit still. Every muscle tight, ready to twitch. The waiting period in this case, though, is almost finished.

Lou is glad.

4

Seymour Markley in bed beside Margaret. She lies prone, her head resting on his shoulder, her arm stretched across his chest, fingers combed into the hair at the back of his neck. He stares at the ceiling. Since his plans went public he’s fielded many worried phone calls, most of them from people in the movie industry, people who contributed to his last campaign, people worried that what he’s doing will have repercussions they don’t like. They already must work within the confines of the Hayes Code. They already must worry about McCarthy’s unsubstantiated redbaiting. This could be one step too far. Fletcher Bowron himself called and expressed concern. He’s tried to alleviate all worries, telling everyone who’d listen that he’s only going after entertainments for children, that movies for adults can and should have adult themes, that he’s not at all interested in changing that, but he isn’t certain he’s convinced everyone. He will, but it’s going to take time. Probably he’ll have to speak with the press again, put it on public record.

Tomorrow he’s meeting with the whore and her husband to collect the photographs. First thing he intends to do is burn them. He’ll not even wait till he gets home. He doesn’t want them within a mile of his wife. He’ll find an alley and set them on fire and watch them bubble and blacken and curl and melt.

He turns to the right and kisses his wife’s forehead. He loves her very much.

He closes his eyes.

5

Carl Bachman sits in his car and looks through the window to the house across the street. He hasn’t stepped foot in it since the day after his wife died. The yard is dead, the house dark; it should feel abandoned. But it doesn’t. His wife’s presence fills it even now; a warmth that shouldn’t be here, but is.

He lights a Chesterfield and smokes it down to the knuckles of his yellowed fingers. He flicks the butt out to the street, starts his car, and pulls away from the curb. His headlights splash on the gray asphalt before him as he cuts his car through the dark night. He drives to the boarding house where he’s been living, and as he thinks about what he plans to do when he gets up to his room, he feels saliva building up at the back of his mouth, as if in preparation for being sick.

By the time he parks and steps from the car his face is beaded with sweat. There’s an unbearable itch at the back of his brain that demands scratching.

He walks into the boarding house. Mrs Hoffman is washing dishes in the kitchen. She says hello as he walks past the door, you’re coming home late, and he says mind your own business and heads up the stairs and down the hallway to the bathroom. The door’s closed. He knocks. No answer. He opens it and finds the room empty. He steps into the room and closes the door behind him and locks it. He walks to the toilet and pulls down his pants and sits. If he doesn’t take a shit now, it’ll be another day before he’s able to, and it’s been two days already. He’s trying to remain as healthy as possible, trying to function normally.

He spits between his knees.

He looks at the wall across from the toilet and sees a framed Norman Rockwell picture. It shows a little girl holding a doll out to a doctor. The doctor holds his stethoscope to the doll and pretends to listen to its heartbeat. He’s never noticed it before. He idly wonders how long it’s been there, but doesn’t really care.

He grunts, trying to get something out. He looks down at the tile floor between his knees and curses. After a while he gives up. He wipes anyway and pulls up his pants.

He walks to his room and closes the door behind him and locks it.

He pulls open his dresser’s top drawer and there he finds a crumpled paper bag. He grabs it and holds it tight, as if someone might try to take it from him, and walks to his bed. He opens it and pulls out a blackened piece of foil, a pen casing, a pocket knife, and a small paper bindle.

The first time Carl smoked this stuff, in the weeks following his wife’s death, he can’t remember exactly how soon after, it’s all a fog to him now, he overdosed himself, smoked far too much, and vomited. Next thing he knew he was lying on the floor beside his own sick feeling nothing at all but quiet calm. There was no feeling of elevation. There was just conscious nothingness. Which, to him, was better than bliss. He understood what Heaven must feel like, and he knew his wife was there, and he was glad, because he was there too. They were together even though they were apart. They were together in feeling. The feeling was not-feeling, and it was perfect.

Everything was perfect.

With shaking hands he unfolds the paper bindle and knifes a bit of the brown powder from the bindle into the foil, which he has creased into a canoe shape. He puts the pen casing into his mouth like a straw, holds the foil under his chin, and with a lighter slowly cooks the brown powder. It forms a bead and runs along the length of the foil, leaving a trail of black behind it. He inhales the vapors through the straw, chasing the bead across the foil, the taste like rotten tomatoes and vinegar, and it burns the back of his throat harsh and strong, and he closes his eyes, and tears stream down his cheeks. He feels slightly sick, but he doesn’t care. He smokes another hit, and sets the foil and lighter down on the table beside his bed. He falls back on his mattress and looks up at the ceiling. At first there’s nothing but anticipation and mild nausea. Then the anticipation fades. For some time he thinks he’s simply stopped waiting for the drug to take hold, stopped caring, then he realizes it has.

6

Sandy lies asleep in bed, a small boy in a big world.

7

Teddy Stuart stands at a window and looks to the night street six floors down. He’s alone in a small hotel room. Below him the hotel’s sign hangs from the corner of the gray stone building, giving it a name:

THE SHENEFIELD HOTEL

He wonders, not for the first time, if he’s made the right decision.

He’s afraid he hasn’t.

Two days ago, on the eighth, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department turned him over to the LAPD and the LAPD brought him here, to this downtown hotel where they keep a block of rooms. A series of uniformed police officers have been standing outside his door since, working in shifts. They don’t speak to him except to tell him it’s time for a shift change, or to tell him room service has arrived.

Teddy doesn’t think they’ll be able to do anything to stop the Man if he decides he wants to silence him, but worrying about such things does no good.

He pulls the curtains closed and walks toward the bed. He pulls off his coat and tosses it onto a chair in the corner. He slips out of his suspenders, unclips his cufflinks and sets them on a table, unbuttons his shirt and tosses it on top of his coat, sits on the bed and kicks off his shoes.

He wonders if part of him doesn’t want the Man to come after him, if part of him, that small biblical corner of his mind, doesn’t view that as the necessary next step in the righting of the world. His sins absolved in blood. He thinks maybe part of him does want that. A very small part of him. Some pure ancient part uncorrupted by everything else that surrounds it, by everything else that he is.

But he can’t worry about that either. He can only do what he’s agreed to do.

Whatever else happens happens.

8

Outside, the stars shine. The moon, nearly full, moves across the sky. The drunks leave bars and head toward home, some of them losing control of their vehicles, running them into streetlamps, into the sides of buildings, into other people; some of them making it home and passing out; some of them furiously beating their wives or their children with clenched fists or open hands. The streets empty of people but for the homeless, covered in newspapers and rags. The city goes quiet. The world turns on its axis, grinding away the hours like a great stone. The dark night turns gray as morning approaches. A light touches the horizon. Tomorrow becomes today.