"The guy last night?" Wagner nodded.
"Oh, I don't know. Kind of ordinary. He had a beard."
"Brolan doesn't have a beard."
"Oh, well this guy did."
"See," Wagner said. "I told you it wasn't him."
She decided, at least for a time, to change the subject. Let Wagner calm down a little. It was as if she'd called one of his best friends a dirty name.
She looked around the room at all the mementoes of thirties movie stars. She loved stuff like this. Whenever she was staying somewhere that had cable, she always watched the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies. She loved how they danced. Ginger was so elegant, the way Denise wished she herself was.
There on the glass coffee table was a press book for a Betty Grable movie called Mother Wore Tights. Next to that was a colour postcard that showed the Cathay Circle Theatre in Beverly Hills on the night of April 4, 1936. How beautiful and sleek the fancy cars looked; how beautiful and sleek the movie stars themselves looked. The beams of floodlights criss-crossed against the soft silver night. Hundreds of people stood swooning as movie stars emerged from limousines to the bursting intensity of flashbulbs. "Boy," Denise said. "You've got a neat place here."
"Thank you."
"And I've never seen so many tapes." She nodded to his videotapes. "Do you have Ginger Rogers?"
He smiled possessively at his tape collection. "Do you prefer Ginger Rogers the singer-dancer in Shall We Dance?-or do you prefer Ginger Rogers the serious actress in Kitty Foyle?"
"She was a serious actress?"
"Yes, and a good one."
"Really?"
He smiled again. She got the feeling that he thought she was kind of naive, but that he found it endearing. He wasn't like a john. She wasn't trying to please, but she seemed to be pleasing him anyway. "Really," he said.
As he arranged himself in his chair once more, getting comfortable, she said, "Would you mind if I asked you about-you know, why you're in the wheelchair and all."
"Be my guest."
"I'm not trying to be rude."
"I know."
"Were you born that way?"
"Yes. And I was lucky."
"Lucky?"
He laughed. "Well, not lucky-lucky but luckier than the people who had spina bifida before I did. People like me didn't used to live very long. Not until thirty years ago."
"What happened then?"
"Somebody was kind enough to invent the brain shunt, which drains the cerebral spinal fluid. It allowed us to be reasonably self-sufficient and to live a lot longer."
"I'm glad they invented that, then."
He shook his head. "I keep thinking about Brolan."
"You really like him, huh?"
"Yeah. He seems like a real nice guy-and he's in a lot of trouble. Somebody's really trying to make him look guilty." He sounded as if he wanted to go on, say more, but he didn't.
She said, "You really don't think it was him last night?"
"Who tried to kill you? No."
"But why would somebody do that, then? Pretend to be him, I mean?"
"I'm not sure. Neither is Brolan."
Unable to help herself, she yawned. The warmth of the place, the comfort of the recliner in which she sat, had made her tired after such a long day of tension.
He said, "Would you like to watch a movie?"
"Right now?"
"Sure. We're waiting for Brolan to contact me. We may as well have some fun doing it. What kind of movie would you like to see?"
"You want me to choose it?"
"Why not? You're my guest, aren't you?"
"Then you're not mad at me-for being on your back porch?"
"Not anymore. I was. But not anymore." He nodded to the tape library. "Why don't you go pick one?"
"God, you're really nice."
"So are you."
She got up and went over to the tapes. You could tell by the way that he had everything alphabetized and colour coded that these movies were his life. He was a lot more than just a guy in a wheelchair. He was warm, and he was funny, and he was smart, and he was generous. Somehow, being in this place was like being in a retreat of some sort, a place where people couldn't get to you and hassle you and hustle you. And it was because of him-because of the careful, loving way he'd put this place together, layer after layer of things he loved, to protect him from a world that saw him as a freak. Having always felt like a freak herself, she knew just what he was doing.
"Hey, you've got Cat People," she said.
"You like that?"
"Yeah. It's really spooky. I saw it on cable."
"The man who produced it was named Val Lewton. He made some great horror pictures."
"Could we see that, Cat People, I mean?"
"Simone Simon? You bet."
"How come she had the same first name and last name?"
He laughed loudly at that one. "I'm afraid that's one of those great Hollywood mysteries that we mere mortals will never know."
She took down Cat People and handed it over to him. He flipped across the hardwood floor and put the tape in. "They really screwed it up when they remade it," he said. "Lots of blood and guts. And for no good reason. Did you ever see it?"
"I wanted to. This was back when I still living at home. But my dad wouldn't let me. He thought it would be too sexy." Greg Wagner looked at her, hitting the pause button on the VCR. "When's the last time you saw your sister?"
Denise felt sad. Whenever she thought of her sister, all she could imagine were stark white walls and bars on the windows and long, long hypodermic needles and people in small rooms lying on beds and sobbing and sobbing.
"They took her to a mental hospital. I've only been there a couple of times."
"How come?"
"Rochester's a long way away, I guess."
"Would you like to see her?"
"Sure."
"Good. Why don't we go up there next week?"
"Are you serious?"
"Sure, I've got this friend who's got spina bifida, too, except he's got this big Buick specially laid out so he can drive it. He loves to drive. He'll give us a ride. How would that be?"
"That would be great!"
"Good, consider it done." He turned back to the VCR and punched up the tape. "And now," he said, "for the mysteriously-named Simone Simon."
Denise plopped herself down in the recliner again and prepared herself to watch one good movie.
20
The motel was out past the University, where Washington Avenue intersects with University Avenue. It was modern and brick, with more than a hundred units, and designed to resemble an apartment house. On the west side was a small bar where a sing-along piano (which told you something about the age and the inclination of the clientele) was played five nights a week by a chunky woman in a sequinned gown and at least five huge costume jewellery rings. She preferred songs of the forties (having always had a mad crush on Dick Haymes), but usually relented and played stuff from the fifties, Fats Domino ballads such as "Blueberry Hill" being the most popular.
He knew all this because he'd been inside a few times himself.
That night, however, he was standing in the shadows beneath the overhang by the parking lot. In the blowing snow, the red neon sign over the bar's door was blood red. He had been there fifteen minutes, waiting for her, the hooker who came there on the nights when she wasn't working. The people inside didn't know she was a hooker, of course. They were too respectable even to think about things like that except in a joking way. No, they spent more time contemplating dentures and trusses and support hose than they ever did hookers.
Around nine-thirty she came out. She was tall, and she was drunk, which made for an interesting combination, because instead of just walking, she tottered, like a too-tall building that was soon going to fall over. She'd be just the kind of driver you'd want on slippery roads. She'd probably kill half a dozen people, including herself. Hell, he wasn't going to commit murder. He was going to perform a public service.