I didn’t drain the pink water from the tub. I didn’t wipe the blood off the tile. I didn’t hide the bloodstained bedspread. My wallet lay on the floor, stuffed with I. D. that bore the name my father had given me, and I didn’t pick it up. Maybe somebody would make something of it. Maybe they wouldn’t, but I had a hard time believing that. The California-Nevada state line bisected the Cal- Neva. Maybe it bisected Room 602. If that were the case, the FBI might enter the picture.
It was late. I didn’t want to think about it.
I passed the desk, showing my left profile. My right hand covered my swollen eye while I pretended to take care of an itch on my forehead. It didn’t matter. No one noticed me. I got to my car without attracting any attention.
I pictured my half-brother and my sister driving down Dad’s road, running south toward Hollywood, wearing Dad’s signature grin on their faces.
I knew they were heading for a wrong turn.
I drove north.
SPYDER
The sun is the best bullfighter, and without
the sun the best bullfighter is not there.
He is like a man without a shadow.
-Ernest Hemingway,
Death in the Afternoon
I’ll never forget Layla. Even though nearly thirty years have passed, I still picture her every time I hear a woman laugh. Still. But I see her now the same way I once saw my face up there on the screen, chiseled flat and somehow unreal. Just a dream in the dark, but spooky as hell.
The things we did together. Like the time we drove from Hollywood to the Napa Valley and back, all in one night. Impossible. I mean the Spyder was fast, but it wasn’t that fast. Layla knew how to make it move, though. A couple of drops of her blood in the carb, and that little Porsche sports-car roared like a Sabrejet.
Nothing could slow us down on a night like that. I’d worked all afternoon under a director who’d jabbed at me until I was nothing but a tangle of emotional razor-wire, and Layla had spent the evening doing her spook show, but that didn’t keep us from flying up 101 like a couple of ghosts. Layla even looked like one in her trademark ghoul makeup and the black dress with the plunging neckline, the costume she wore when she did her Rigormortia routine on TV.
It was all kind of cute. Me stealing a look at her cleavage when I had the Spyder cranked on a straightaway, just because I knew she wanted me to look. Layla laughing, catching my telegraphed glance, now and then flashing suntanned breasts knifed by Lugosi’s favorite greasepaint.
Layla loved me, I guess. In her way, she loved me more than anyone else. Maybe it was because I never surrendered to her like the others did. Maybe that’s why she kept coming back for more, each time expecting that she’d finally break me and I’d be all hers. I guess that’s a strange kind of love, but Layla was strange. She had her own way of getting what she needed, even if it meant settling for less than she wanted.
Like the trip to Napa. She said what we needed was something heavy, bloody, nothing less than a good California Zinfandel. None of that sour piss they bottled in the Central Valley would do. We needed the real deal — the product of foggy nights and sunbaked days and oak barrels coopered in the Valley of the Moon.
That sounded good to me — sucker for escape that I am. The day hadn’t been one of my best. I was worried about the picture and the director (who’d been whittling my brains for four straight months), but most of all I was worried about where I was going to be in a couple of years. I’d always wanted to be on top, and once I was on the verge of getting there all I could think about was fading. Just fading, and that isn’t even romantic. Nothing so Hemingwayesque as a bullfighter dying beneath a sun that gleams like a Spanish doubloon.
When I was like that — morbid and scared and way too romantic — I turned to Layla. Back then, in the beginning, she made me feel indestructible, like I’d go on forever.
So we had our little trade-off, Layla and me. It seemed so simple at first. Too bad it changed to something else. Like I said, it was all tied up with our wants and needs — what we wanted from each other, and what we needed to survive; what we were willing to surrender, and what we needed to keep to ourselves. An ace in the hole, some secret part held back for the final hand. It was a very fine line, and we walked it like the edge of a razor blade, and damned if both of us didn’t end up stumbling.
Whoa. I’m getting ahead of myself.
Anyway, like I was saying — red lips laughing in the dark. Night wind of California slashing a dead white face with tangles of long black hair. A Spyder sports-car, a would-be movie star, and a gorgeous corpsette riding shotgun.
A quiet graveyard.
How Layla found just the right grave, I’ll never know. But she did. She eased out of the Spyder, cocked those sexy hips of hers, and stared down tilting rows of marble and granite. Then she pointed, her fingers extended as straight and stiff as marble daggers.
We waited in the darkness, the radio cutting in and out, snatches of Fats Domino and Bill Haley worrying the static that ruled the fog-choked night. Layla stood there in the dark, as quiet as stone, and I found myself remembering the crazy party where we’d met. Layla had been as quiet as stone that night, too, until she whispered that she could help me get a break. Whispering hot in my ear as she tried to maneuver me into a dark closet. That was the moment I’d been waiting for since first hearing about her. I told her no, it wasn’t going to be that way between us. And I kissed her, and I let my hand brush her breast so lightly that she couldn’t help but feel it way down deep, and I walked out on her.
And the phone was ringing in my apartment when I got home.
I’d heard all the stories, you see, and the funny thing is that there was something inside me that let me believe every damn one of them. Layla the vampire. Layla the witch. Layla and graveyards, and dead cats, and midnight rituals.
My story: Layla, as quiet as stone, in a Napa Valley cemetery
Momentarily, we felt the earth shudder.
Heard clumps of clipped grass tearing beneath the shroud of fog.
Saw his silhouette rise before us.
I guess Layla didn’t know everything, though, because she had to ask him the name of the winery where he’d worked.
I wanted to put him in the trunk. He smelled pretty ripe, and I didn’t want his muddy ass messing up the Spyder’s upholstery. Layla pointed out that we didn’t know how to get to the winery. I asked him for directions, but he couldn’t speak well enough to get them out.
So down the two-lane blacktop we went with a dead vintner sitting behind us — his feet jammed in the little space between the bucket seats; his moldy butt on the trunk; his dead hands on our shoulders, holding on for dear life… or whatever.
The winery grounds smelled of oak and stone. The place was even quieter than the graveyard. The dead man knew where a passkey was hidden. He led us across the grounds, through a heavy oak door, and down a stone-lined corridor that cut into the side of a hill. Being a man of discriminating taste, he chose a rare Zin from prohibition days, when the wineries had managed to survive via sacramental contracts.
He uncorked the bottle with precision and a certain grace, as if he wasn’t dead at all. We all had a little taste. Then we got down to business.
Layla stood behind me. With one hand she undid my fly and took me between those marble fingers. Her other hand held the open bottle.