“I—” Cochran stopped himself, and just tossed the gun down on the bed and fetched the current pint bottle of Wild Turkey from the windowsill. After he had handed it to her he hesitantly picked the gun up again and tucked it into his belt.
Plumtree tipped the bottle up and took several messy swallows, wincing as the whiskey touched the cut at the corner of her mouth; but she nodded at him over the neck of the bottle as she drank, and when she had lowered it and gingerly wiped her mouth, she wheezed, “Don’t be shy about it,” breathing bourbon fumes at him. “Put one through my thigh if you’ve got the leisure and elbow room, but—if I turn into my dad?—you stop me.” The bottle had been half full when he’d handed it to her, but there was only an inch or so left when she gave it back to him. “How long have I been gone?” she asked. “Not too long, I guess, if you’re still here. I was afraid you wouldn’t be—that, like, everything happened a year ago, and the king was dead past recall.”
“Today is Monday the sixteenth,” he said, “of January, still. You’ve been gone…two full days.” He thought of wiping the neck of the bottle, then just tilted it up for a sip. The whiskey will kill any germs, he thought. “Where were you?” he asked after he had swallowed a mouthful of the vapory, smoldering liquor.
“You’re a gentleman, Sid. Where was I? I—” She inhaled sharply, and then she was sobbing. She looked up at him and her eyes widened. “Scant! You found me!” She clawed the bedspread as if the room might begin tossing like a boat; then she grabbed his arm and pulled him down beside her, and buried her face in his shirt. “God, I hurt all over—my teeth feel like somebody tried to pull them all out—and I’m a mess,” she said, sniffling. “Hold on to me anyway. Don’t let me run away again! You might have to handcuff me to the plumbing in the bathroom or something.” He had both his arms around her now, and felt her shaking. “But don’t—Jesus, don’t hurt him, if he comes out.”
He patted her dirty hair and kissed the top of her head. I’ve got to just throw away that cassette from the phone-answering machine, he thought. Even if it would serve as a potent lure, how could I possibly have thought of—pushing this woman out of her own head, in order to get Nina back?—or even just compounding Janis’s problems by adding one more ghost to her sad menagerie? And Nina is dead, she’d only be what Kootie called a ROM disk, like Valorie. I swear I will not settle for that!
The bottle was in his right hand, behind her, and he wished he could get it up to his mouth.
“Where have you been, Janis?” he asked softly.
“Where—?” She shuddered, and then shoved him away. “Right back to me, hey?” she said. “Janis can’t face this flop? Or did you have Tiffany here, is that why you’re on the bed? How much time’s gone by now?”
Cochran stood up. “It was Janis,” he said wearily, “and just for a few seconds. Cody, I wish you—never mind. So where were you all?”
“I was—well, I was out in the hills. I’ve got to remember this, huh? Out in the woods with people wearing hoods, killing goats.” Tears spilled down her cheeks, and smeared the grime when she cuffed them away, but when she went on her voice was animated, a parody of vivacity: “One of the goat heads wound up on a, a pole, and I was on for just a couple of heartbeats when it was, in the middle of speaking to us, in what I think was Greek. The goat head was speaking, in a human language. Goats have horizontal pupils because they look from side to side, mostly, and cats have vertical pupils because they’re always looking up and down. My pupils are…staying after school for detention. I don’t know who the hooded people were.” She nudged the NADA sign with her hip. “Whaddaya got, a Ouija board? Ask it who they were.” She smiled at him. Her nose had begun bleeding. “The hooded people.”
Cochran glanced at the clock radio on the bedside table. He still had an hour and a half before he was to meet Mavranos. In the last couple of days he had got into the habit of walking up Russian Hill on Lombard to Van Ness and catching the cable car down to California Street and then taking another one east to Chinatown, but today he could drive the old Granada, and hope to find a parking place. He might even get Cody to drop him off at a corner near Grant and Washington. No, she’d be way too drunk—maybe Janis could drive him.
“Okay,” he said. He stepped into the bathroom and hooked a face-cloth off the towel rack, then tossed it to her as he bent down beside the bed to retrieve the clean ashtray. “Your nose is bleeding, Cody,” he said, placing the ashtray on the metal sign. “Put pressure on it.” He sat down on the bed and laid his fingertips on the round piece of clear glass. “Who has…Miss Plumtree been with, during these last few days?” he asked.
As soon as he spoke, it occurred to him that Cody should be touching the ashtray too, and that he should have cleared the ghost of Nina off the line; but the ashtray was already moving.
“Write down the letters as they come,” he told Plumtree nervously.
“I can remember ’em,” she said, her voice muffled by the towel.
“Will you please—here we go.” The ashtray had paused over the L, and now moved sideways to the E.
Letterman,” mumbled Plumtree. “I knew it. I was with David Letterman.”
When the ashtray planchette had spelled out L-E-V-R, Plumtree inhaled sharply and stumbled back to the Wild Turkey bottle and took a gulp from it, wincing again. “Fucking Lever Blank,” she gasped as blood spilled down her chin, “that’s what I was afraid of. Goddamn old monster, he cant leave that pagan hippie cult alone, even though they threw him off that building in Soma.”
“It’s not ‘lever,’ dammit,” interrupted Cochran loudly without looking up from the metal sign. “Will you please write this stuff down? It’s L-E-V-R, with no second E. And now an I, and an E…get the goddamn pencil, will you?” He glanced quickly at her. “And you’re bleeding all over the place.”
“Okay, okay, sorry. Just, my hands feel like I’ve got arthritis.” The alcohol was visibly hitting her already—she was weaving as she walked back to the bed, as if she were on a ship in choppy water. She fumbled at the paper and pencil. “What…?”
“L-E-V-R-I-E-R-B,” he spelled out. “And another L—and an A.”
She was goggling blearily at the board now. “And N…and C…” she noted, painstakingly writing the letters.
After several tense seconds, Cochran lifted his fingers from the ashtray. “That’s it. What, Levrierble…?”
“Levrierblanc.” She held out the blood-spattered sheet of paper and gave him a scared, defiant glare. “That’s still Lever Blank, if you ask me. The French version.” She pressed the towel to her nose again.
“My wife is French,” he said, nodding, realizing even as he spoke that it was an inadequate explanation. “Was.”
“I know. Sorry to hear she died, dirty shame.” She snapped a grimy fingernail against the paper, spiking the blood drops on it. “It’s two words. Blanc’s the second word, like Mel Blanc.”
Cochran nodded. Obviously she was right—and he suspected that if Nina hadn’t been their…operator here, it would have come out in plain English as LEVERBLANK.
“A goat head,” he said, “speaking Greek.” In his mind he heard Long John Beach’s crazy lyrics again. … and frolicked in the Attic mists in a land called Icaree. “I think you’d better write down everything you can remember about this Lever Blank crowd.” He glanced again at the clock radio. “Not right now. I’ve got to meet Mavranos in a little over an hour. Let’s get Janis to drop me near the place, she—” isn’t falling-down drunk, he thought; “—isn’t having a nose-bleed, and then you can come back here and—”