Now that he was nearly there—only one turn remaining, a right onto Laurel Canyon once he’d got out past this tourist area of the boulevard—he was in no hurry to get to the ruins he and his sister had explored on that spring day in ’86. At Wilcox he impulsively decided to turn north—and when he’d made the turn he saw that the Shelton Apartments had been torn down, replaced by some sprawling new pink apartment building.
He pulled the van over to the curb and switched off the engine for the first time since stopping for eggs and bacon in Blythe, four hours ago. Then for several minutes, while he lit a cigarette and stared across the street at the new four-story building, he tried to remember the old Shelton.
Like the Lido and the Mayfair, both of which were still standing a block farther up the street, the Shelton had had one of those big signs on the roof, separate ornate letters in line, supported by a lattice of steel beams, and had had a lot of the decorative cornices and balconies that architects never seemed to bother with anymore. The only eccentricities of this new place, the HOLLYWOOD STUDIO CLUB APARTMENTS, were inset windows and an apparent blanket policy of having all corners be rounded. A banner across the top announced $777 MOVES YOU IN! Probably not a bad price around here, he thought absently, these days. It had been while filming a documentary in the lobby of the old Shelton in the winter of ’84 that he and his sister had finally got a strong clue about what Loretta deLarava really did.
DeLarava had hired the twins right out of college ten years earlier, and they’d been working for her ever since as “gaffers”—lighting technicians. DeLarava produced short-subject films—in-house instruction pieces for businesses, nontimely human-interest bits for news programs, the occasional commercial—and for twelve years the twins had spent their days driving to what seemed like every corner of Los Angeles, to lay cables and set up Genie lifts and hang lights over some beach or office floor or sidewalk.
DeLarava had been a disconcerting boss. One of the first jobs the twins worked on with her had been a short film about the vandalizing of Houdini’s grave in Brooklyn in 1975—and deLarava had been the first to cover the event because it hadn’t even occurred before she arrived. It had been deLarava herself who shattered the stone bust of Houdini in the Machpelah Cemetery and took a mummified thumb out of a hollow inside it, and who had dug two plaster hands out of the soil in front of the grave. The twins had of course not even been tempted to turn their new boss in to the authorities—but, apparently on a drunken whim, Sukie had stolen the thumb and the hands from deLarava’s luggage on the drive back to the airport.
DeLarava had cried when she’d discovered the loss, and ransacked the car, and had even had to make new airline reservations because she insisted on driving back to the cemetery to look for the items, but Sukie had not ever admitted to the theft.
From the beginning Sukie had taken a perverse pleasure in tormenting their boss, and certainly deLarava was an easy target. The fat old woman always wore a rubber band around her scalp, with her hair brushed down over it to keep it from showing, and after Sukie had discovered the habit she made a point of finding opportunities to bump the woman’s head, dislodging the rubber band so that it sprang to the top of her head, making a wreck of her hair. And deLarava’s clothes always had Velcro closures instead of buttons or zippers, and Sukie frequently managed to get the old woman’s shoes or jackets attached to upholstered chairs or textured wallpaper, so that deLarava had to pull herself loose with an embarrassing tearing sound. And once, after a minute or so of silence during a drive, Sukie had glanced brightly at the old woman and said, “Yeah? Go on—? You were saying something about a picnic?”—acting as if their boss had just begun a sentence and then forgotten it—but deLarava had reacted with such fright to the disorienting gambit that Sukie had never tried that particular trick again.
At the Shelton they’d been filming in the lobby and in an upstairs hallway, and of course Pete and Sukie had arrived three hours before the rest of the crew to locate a 220-volt power source in the old building and set up the hydraulic lifts and hang the key lights. Sullivan remembered now that for an outdoor shot of the hotel they’d rented battery-powered lights made by a company called Frizzolini, and that Sukie had kept saying that deLarava had better be careful of getting her hair all frizzied. Possibly Sukie had been drunk already.
DeLarava herself had arrived early for that shoot. She would have been in her mid-fifties then, and for once she had been looking her age. She had always smoked some kind of clove-flavored Indonesian cigarettes that made a room smell as though someone were baking a glazed ham nearby, and on this morning her chubby hands had been shaking as she’d lit each one off the butt of the last, sparks dropping unnoticed onto the carpet, and her pendulous cheeks had quivered when she inhaled. She had brought with her a whole hatbox full of props to distribute around the shooting area; Sullivan remembered pocket watches, a couple of diamond rings, even a feather boa, in addition to the usual antique, still-sealed bottles of liquor.
The project had been a short morbid piece on the suicides that had taken place in the old building; perhaps the film had been done on spec, for Sullivan couldn’t now recall any particular client for the job, and he couldn’t remember it having gone through the post-production or screening steps. Incongruously, they had been filming it on Christmas Eve. The old woman had never let a Christmas Eve or a Halloween go by without filming something, somewhere.
Sullivan wondered uneasily what she might have scheduled for this upcoming Saturday.
DeLarava had been interested in only two of the suicides that had taken place at the Shelton. The first was a woman called Jenny Dolly—around the turn of the century Jenny Dolly and her twin sister Rosie were a celebrated dance team, renowned for their beauty; but Jenny’s face had been horribly scarred in a car crash in 1933, and she had hanged herself in her apartment here in 1941. The other suicide had been the actress Clara Blandick, who, one day in 1962, had got her hair fixed up and had carefully done her makeup and put on a formal gown and then pulled a plastic bag over her head and smothered herself. She was chiefly remembered for having played Auntie Em in the 1939 version of The Wizard of Oz.
Auntie Em, Auntie Em, thought Sullivan now as he puffed on his cigarette echoing in his head the mocking voice of the Wicked Witch of the West in the movie.
And, he thought as he squinted through the smoke, a twin sister who killed herself. How’re you doing, Sukie?
The shoot had been what gaffers called a bad-hang day. The lights had been plagued with “ghosting,” the lamps glowing dimly even when the big old dimmer boxes indicated no power being transmitted, which called for a lot of laborious checks of the light board and all the cable connections; and then when the cameras were finally running, the shoot had repeatedly been interrupted by power surges and blackouts.
Apparently a lot of people had died at the Shelton, he thought now.
Live and learn.
DeLarava had kept looking at her watch, though the clock on the lobby wall was accurate. Twice Pete had peered at her watch as she glanced at it, and both times it had been wrong—differently wrong: once it would read, say, 6:30, and a few minutes later it would be indicating something like 12:35. At one point he had called Sukie over to one of the malfunctioning lights and in a low voice had told her about their boss’s erratic watch.
Sukie had followed deLarava around the carpeted lobby for a few minutes after that, ostensibly to ask about the placing of the props and the fill lights, and then she had come back to where Pete was still crouched over the flickering lamp; and she had told him in a whisper that no matter which way deLarava was facing, the hour hand of her watch always wobbled around to point up Wilcox—north. It was a compass.