If she put on a burst of speed, would she leave him here?
No, he’d catch her. Or she’d go off the cliff into the Pacific.
The knuckle rap came at her window. The cop didn’t bend down. She saw the leather jacket through his transparent slicker. A wild one, after all.
She tried to roll the window down and the handle came off. It did sometimes, but there was a trick to fixing it back. She didn’t bother with the trick. She opened the door, first a crack, then halfway, using it to shield against the rain, and ducked her head out to look up at the cop. His goggles gave him the eyes of Death.
Two little television sets strapped to his face, playing the opening of that show. Dump-da-dumpity-dump-da-dump…there Hitch was, in a fright-wig, being funny, holding a noose or a big bottle with POISON stamped on it. A non-speaking woman boiling in a pot or strapped to a saw-horse.
“Good eeev-ning,” he said.
Not Hitch, the cop. And not with a British accent.
She waited for it. The come-on. Tonight’s stawww-ry.
“Going mighty fast?” “Where’s the fire, lady?” “The way you look, the things you do to a man … that ought to be against the law …” “See what you’ve done to my night-stick, ma’am …” “Swallow, huh? Well …?”
“License and registration?”
He was unreadable. Not a movie cop.
She didn’t ask what she’d done wrong. She knew enough not to open up that debate. She found her documents, sodden and fragile as used tissue, in the glove compartment.
Whenever she showed her papers, she was irrationally afraid they’d turn out to be false — or the cop would say they were. That blanket of guilt was impossible to shuck, even when she hadn’t had things to feel guilty about. She knew these papers were legit, but they weren’t in the name she was using. In the photo on her driver’s license, Jana wasn’t as blonde as Jayne.
Her papers got wetter as the cop looked them over.
“Wróbel,” he said, pronouncing it properly.
Then he asked her something in Polish. Which she didn’t speak.
She shrugged.
“Not from the Old Country, then?”
It might as well have been Transylvania.
“Santa Rosa, originally,” she admitted.
“Hollywood, now,” he said, clocking her address.
She was too cold to give him a pin-up smile. Usually, cops asked if she was in pictures … she must be too bedraggled for that now.
“You must be in pictures … dirty pictures,” was the usual line. Said with a grin, and a hitch of the belt buckle into the gut.
“You must be in pictures … horror pictures,” was the new take. “You must be in pictures … Alfred Hitchcock pictures.”
“Watch your driving,” the cop actually said. “This is accident weather. How far have you got to go?”
She had no definite idea, but said “San Francisco.”
“You won’t make it by nightfall. I’d stop. Check into a motel.”
“That makes sense, sir.”
“No need for ‘sir.’ ‘Officer’ will do.”
The cop’s skin, under the rain, was grayish. This weather grayed everything out, like a black-and-white movie. The hillside mud should have been red, like blood … but it washed over the road like coffee grounds. Dark.
“Makes sense, officer.”
“Good girl,” he said, returning her license and registration.
A motel. Not likely. When Hitch’s film came out, people wouldn’t check into motels without thinking twice. People wouldn’t take showers. Or climb stairs. Or go into fruit cellars. Or trust young men with twitchy smiles who liked to stuff (and mount) birds.
If the film came out now. She might have scratched that.
The cop turned and walked back to his motorcycle. Rain on his back, pouring down his neck.
Why had he stopped her? Suspicion, of course. But of what?
The theft can’t have been reported yet. Might not be until Monday morning. Word couldn’t be out. This cop wasn’t rousting a woman motorist for kicks, like they usually did. Maybe he was just concerned? There had to be some cops like that …
While she had the door open, water rained in. Her shoes were soaked.
She pulled the door shut and tried to start the car. The motor seized up and died. Then choked, then drew out a death scene like Charles Laughton, then caught again … and she drove on.
Damn, December night fell quick.
Now, she was driving through dark and rain. The road ahead was as murky as a poverty-row back-projection plate. Her right headlight was on the fritz, winking like a lecher at a co-ed.
The cop was right. She had to pull over. If she slept in this leaky car, she’d drown. If she drove on, she’d end up in the sea. The Ford Custom did not come with an optional lifeboat. She wasn’t sure hers even had a usable spare tire.
Through blobby cascades on the windshield, she saw a flashing light.
VACANCY.
A motel. She remembered her vow. No motels, never again … she knew, really, there was little chance of being butchered by a homicidal maniac. That was just the movies. Still, there was every chance of running into a travelling salesman or an off-duty cop or an overage wild one, and being cajoled or strong-armed or blackmailed into a room with cheap liquor and “Que Sera Sera” on the radio. The ending to that story would surprise to no one.
She’d been photographed in motel rooms. She’d been interviewed in motel rooms. She’d auditioned for movie projects that didn’t really exist. If some dentist wanted to call himself a producer and play casting couch games, he hooked onto a script about giant leeches or dragstrip dolls just to set up his own private orgy. She’d checked into a motel with a young actor — not Tony Perkins, but someone a few steps behind him — and posed for bedroom candids leaked to the scandal sheets to squelch whispers that the rising stud preferred beach boys to bikini babes. In print, they put a black bar across her eyes.
She’d been abandoned in motels, too … left with bills for booze and damages. Some guys couldn’t have a party without breaking a lamp or knocking a picture off the wall. Or hurting someone, just to hear the squeal and see blood on their knuckles.
VACANCY.
The light flashed like a cliff-top lantern on a cliff in a three-cornered hat picture, luring storm-tossed ships onto the rocks to be looted.
She was more likely to die on the road than in this place.
So, she pulled off the highway and bumped downhill into a parking lot. There were other cars there. The lights were on in a single-storey building.
HACIENDA HAYSLIP.
Like every other place in California, this motel impersonated an Old Spanish Mission — protruding beams, fake adobe, concrete cactus, a neon sombrero over the name.
Once, the Pacific was the far edge of the world. The Jesuits got here first, even before the bandits. Jayne had been to Catholic school. She was more afraid of priests than outlaws. Priests were worse than cops. Beyond the shadow of a doubt. Cops just played the game by rules that favored them. Priests took the same liberties, but told you it was God’s will that you got robbed or rousted or raped.
She parked as near the office as possible and made a dash from her car to the lit-up shelter. By now, she couldn’t get much wetter.
Pushing through the front door, she was enveloped by heat. The office was built around an iron stove that radiated oppressive warmth. Windows were steamed up. Viennese waltz music came from an old-fashioned record player.
In a rocking chair by the stove sat a small thin woman, knitting. On a stool behind the front desk perched a fat young man, reading a comic book. They both turned to look at her. She must be a fright. Something the cat would drag in.