“Is that Bette Davis?”
“Five months before she died. My first boss, Lew Wasserman, used to represent her.”
“Was she ever up in the Canyon, do you think?”
“No, I don’t think Bette’s ghost is up there. She had her own circle. All the great divas did. And they were more or less mutually exclusive. At a guess a lot of Katya’s friends had an interest in the occult. I know Valentino did. That’s what took them up there at the beginning. She probably introduced them to it all very slowly. Maybe tarot cards or a ouija board. Checking out which ones were in it for the cheap thrills and which ones would go the distance with it.”
“Clever.”
“Oh she was clever. You can never take that away from her. Right in the middle of this man’s city, where all the studio had men at the top, she had her own little dominion, and God knows how many people wrapped around her little finger.”
“It sounds like you admire her a bit.”
“Well I do. I mean she’d broken every commitment, and she didn’t give a shit. She knew what she had. Something to make people feel stronger, sexier. No wonder they wanted to keep it to themselves.”
“But in the end it drove some of them crazy. Even the ones who thought they could take it.”
“It seems to me it affected everyone a little differently. I mean, look at us. We got a taste of it, and it didn’t suit us too well.”
“I should tell you, I thought I was heading for the funny farm.”
“You should have called me. We could have compared notes.”
“My mind was just going round and round. Nothing made sense any more. I was ready to do myself in.”
“I don’t want to hear that kind of talk,” Maxine said. “The fact is: you’re here. You survived. We both did. Now we have to do this one last thing.”
“What if we get up there and don’t find anything?”
“Then we just leave and get on with our lives. We forget we ever heard of Coldheart Canyon.”
“I don’t think there’s very much chance of that, somehow.”
“Frankly, neither do I.”
It was hot. In the Valley, the temperature at noon stood at an unseasonal one hundred and four, with the probability that it would climb a couple of degrees higher before the day was out. The 10 freeway was blocked for seven miles with people trying to get to Raging Waters, a water-slide park which seemed like a cooling prospect on a day like this, if you could only reach the damn thing.
Later that afternoon in a freak mirror-image of the fire at Warner’s, there was a small conflagration at a warehouse in Burbank, which had been turned into a mini-studio for the making of X-rated epics. By the time the fire-trucks had wound their way through the clogged traffic to reach the blaze, there’d already been five fatalities: a cameraman and a ménage-à-trois whose versatility was being immortalized that afternoon, along with the male star’s fluffer, had all been cremated. There was very little wind, so the sickly smell of burning flesh and silicon lingered in the air for several hours.
Even if that particular stench didn’t reach the Canyon, there were plenty that day that did. Indeed it seemed the Canyon had become a repository for all manner of sickening stenches in the weeks since its sudden notoriety, as though the rot at its heart was drawing to it the smell of every horror in the heat-sickened city. Every unemptied dumpster that concealed something for forensics to come look at; every condemned apartment or lock-up garage where somebody had died (either accidentally or by their own hand) and had not yet been discovered; every pile of once-bright flowers collected from the fresh graves of Forest Lawn and the Hollywood Memorial Cemetery, and were now piled high in the corner, along with their tags carrying messages of sympathy and expressions of loss, rotting together; all of it found their way into the cleft of the Canyon, and clung to the once healthy plants, weighing them down like a curse laid on the air itself.