Graves tried, unsuccessfully, to conceal his jealousy. He knew Hannah felt his spine tightening up. “Well, hey,” he said, way too jovially. “Let’s shake that deadbeat outta bed, is what I say. I’m damn curious to meet the man who can tame our Lia.”
“Can you guys just stop it?” Lia said. “Please?”
They all looked at her. Her eyes were bloodshot and more than exhausted. Graves thought she looked absolutely spent.
“Lia…” Riley said, his brow creasing with concern. “Are you really okay?”
“I’m fine,” Lia said, rubbing at her forehead. “But maybe I could lay down… somewhere… for just a little… little bit…”
Her knees buckled and she collapsed to the driveway pavement. Graves could see she was unconscious before she hit the ground.
Riley and the short phantom with the cane were at her side in less than an instant. Graves lurched back over with Miss Hannah draped across his shoulder so that they might help her, too.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Graves brushed an unconscious Lia’s hair back from her forehead, taking care not to scratch her with his bony fingertips.
That Riley character and his people had laid her out on a big, comfortable bed in a palatial guest room. It had rough plaster walls with dark wood trim, in the old Mission style, and there was a lush Persian carpet spread out on the red tile floor underfoot. The rug felt soft and rich against Graves’ exposed metatarsals.
There were also a number of framed movie posters decorating the walls. One eye-catcher advertised a flick called Pulp Fiction and featured the image of a dangerously beautiful woman with Lia-style black hair. Another bore the title Scarface, which Graves figured might refer to Al Capone, ol’ Public Enemy No.1 (although the film’s skinny star, some mug named Pacino, bore no resemblance whatsoever to the pudgy criminal visage he’d seen staring back at him a hundred times from the front pages of newspapers).
The poster right over Lia’s bed, however, was related to a picture Graves had actually seen before, all the way back in ’46. The Big Sleep, starring Bogart and Bacall. He’d even read the novel it was based on, and it’d given him an idea for something he might do with himself after the war. The paper the poster was printed on had turned brittle and yellowed with age, but the artwork was still vibrant, and long-faced Bogie still looked cool in his floor-length trench and canted hat.
Graves adjusted the lapels of his own copycat coat, feeling a touch self-conscious about it. He pulled a light blanket up to Lia’s chin and straightened up to go out into the hallway.
The ghost Lia had said was called Black Tom (after Graves confessed to seeing him on the drive up here) remained at her bedside, sparing the departing skeleton only a momentary glance and a brief nod before he went out the door. Graves felt good about that. He trusted that Lia’s tightlipped and selectively visible pal would come to fetch him at the literal instant anything about her condition changed.
There were two guards stationed out in the hall, both of them wearing black suits with skinny black ties and holding automatic weapons the like of which Graves had never seen before. One man stood to either side of the bedroom’s arched doorway.
Graves ignored them, and they returned the favor. His footbones clicked against the corridor’s terracotta tiles.
He went out into a living room crowded with party people. It had yet another cadre of those blacksuited guards stationed around the doors. The wood-beam ceiling above was vaulted; the room flooded with natural light from high windows. There were big canvases covered in splotches of paint that didn’t look like anything hanging in frames up on the walls. Like someone was excessively proud of their toddler. Music poured from unseen speakers and frenetic images of a longhaired, half naked guitarist flashed too fast to follow across a cinema-sized screen that was set above a fireplace you could’ve barbecued an ox in. Riley’s guests held colorful drinks in their manicured hands while they socialized, many of them showing each other pictures and video clips on tiny personal viewers that somehow doubled as telephones even though they were thinner than a pack of cards. People either wore a lot of black or else wore very little at all. The crowd that had gathered for whatever the hell this was-some sort of a cocktail soiree held in the middle of a weekday afternoon-felt moneyed yet bohemian to Graves, with his plainly outdated point of view…
But they still weren’t jaded enough not to fall silent when a skeleton in a trenchcoat made an entrance, as he was quietly pleased to notice.
He felt like a movie star in this room.
Graves turned to a nearby hipster in a crisp new fedora. He plucked the guy’s hat right off his head and replaced it with the chintzy replica he’d been making do with since his spontaneous exhumation yesterday morning. The kid’s only response was a single gulp, as audible as a sound effect in the hushed, cavernous space.
“Thanks, pal,” Graves said, adjusting the brim of his newly-acquired skullcozy. “I owe ya one.”
Graves nodded to Riley on his way across the subdued room. Riley nodded back, and everybody in the joint gaped at him, impressed by his connections.
Graves went out a sliding glass back door that rumbled on a metal track, shaking his head. “You’d think they never seen a fella that looks good in a hat before,” he muttered to himself, emerging onto a back deck that boasted a predictably spectacular view of the descending foothills. The vast LA basin stretched away beyond that, the city awash in autumn sun.
Hannah was sitting at a small cafe table at the far end of the deck, taking in the scenery with an unlit cigarette waiting in her hand. Somebody’d dug up a pair of bluejeans and a clean white t-shirt for her to wear, both garments free of bloodstains and bulletholes.
Graves stepped up beside her and clicked his old Zippo alight. “You gonna fire that thing up or what, sister?”
Hannah looked up at him, then down at her cigarette. “Oh… no,” she said, after a moment’s consideration. “I suppose not. Lia made me quit. A long time ago, actually. She hates these things. Says they dishonor the relationship the old people had with an important plant.”
Graves shut his lighter and pocketed it. He sat down in the chair opposite Hannah’s. “I guess she’d be the one to know about that,” he said.
Hannah nodded and shrugged, still contemplating the efficient nicotine delivery device trapped between her first two fingers. “She says the same about teabags, though. And it can still calm me down to hold one of these things, sometimes.”
“Sure it can,” Graves said. “Gives those nervous hands something to do. I getcha. I sorta think that’s the whole reason I ever took it up in the first place. My hands were nervous a lot, back in the war.”
Hannah nodded. They looked at the view together. The sun was warm, the breeze cool. Tall clouds marched across a crisp blue sky, casting large pools of shadow onto the landscape below. The tower-clusters of Century City and downtown jutted up in the southeastern distance like strange crystal formations. They both could smell the ocean on the winds that gusted in from the west. It would rain in the next few days. Graves could feel that in his bones-not that he could expect to feel it anyplace else.
“Doctor Ironic says it looks like she’s just exhausted, by the by,” Graves said, feeling no need to state that he was talking about Lia. She was right up at the forefront of both their minds. “Needs some rest. Guess it’s no big wonder why.”
“That’s his full name?” Hannah said. “Riley Ironic?”
“What he’s got that pack of sycophants in there callin’ him, anyway. Don’t know who he thinks he’s fooling, myself.” Graves huffed in frustration, and Hannah glanced across the table at him. “Miss Hannah, who the hell are these nutcakes?” he asked, searching her face for answers. “This place is just plain weird.”