“So how long is it going to be before I can take off the bandages?”
“Another week, I’d say.”
“And after that … how long before I’m back to normal again?”
“I don’t want to make any promises,” Burrows said, “but inside a month. Is there some great urgency here?”
“Yeah, I want people to see me. I want them to know I’m not dead.”
“Surely nobody believes that,” Burrows said.
Todd summoned Marco. “Where are those tabloids you brought in?” he asked. “The doctor’s not been reading the trash in his waiting-room recently.”
Marco left the room and reappeared with five magazines, dropping them on the table beside Burrows. The top one had a blurred, black and white photograph of a burial procession, obviously taken with an extremely long-distance lens. The headline read: Superstar Todd Pickett Buried in Secret Ceremony. The magazine beneath had an unsmiling picture of Todd’s ex-girlfriend, Wilhemina Bosch, and announced, as though from her grieving lips: “I never even had a chance to tell him good-bye.” And underneath, a third magazine boasted that it contained Todd Pickett’s Last Words. “I saw Christ standing at his death-bed, claims nurse.” Burrows didn’t bother with the others.
“Who starts bullshit like this?”
“You tell me,” Todd replied.
“I hope you’re not implying that it was somebody in my surgery, because I assure you we’ve been vigorous — ”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Todd said. “You’re not responsible for anything. I know. See? I finally got smart. I read the small print.”
“Frankly, I don’t see where your problem lies. All you’d have to do is make one call, tell them who you are, and the rumors would be laid to rest.”
“And what would he say?” Marco asked.
“It’s obvious. He’d say: I’m Todd Pickett and I’m alive and well, thank you very much.”
“And then what?” Todd said. “When they want to come to take a photograph to confirm that everything’s fine? Or they want an interview, face-to-face. Face. To. Face. With this?”
His face was presently unbandaged. He stood up and went to the mirror. “I look like I went ten rounds with a heavyweight.”
“I can only assure you that the swelling is definitely going down. It’s just going to take time. And the quality of the new epidermis is first-rate. I believe you’re going to be very pleased at the end of everything.”
Todd said nothing for a moment. Then, with a kind of simple sincerity he’d seldom — if ever — achieved in front of a camera, he turned and said to Burrows: “You know what I wish?” Burrows shook his head. “I wish I’d never laid eyes on you, you dickhead.”
NINE
Tammy knew only a very few people in Los Angeles, all of them members of the Appreciation Society, but she decided not to alert anybody to the fact that she’d come into town. They’d all want to help her with her investigations, and this was something she preferred to do alone, at least at the outset.
She checked herself into the little hotel on Wilshire Boulevard, within a few hundred yards of the Westwood Memorial Park, where a host of stars and almost-stars were buried or interred. She’d made her rounds of the famous who rested there on her last visit. Donna Reed and Natalie Wood were amongst them, so was Darryl F. Zanuck and Oscar Levant. But the Park’s real claim to fame — the presence that brought sightseers from all over the world — was Marilyn Monroe, who was laid to rest in a bland concrete crypt distinguished only by the number of floral tributes it attracted. The crypt beside it was still empty, kept — so it was said — for the mortal remains of Hugh Heffner.
Tammy had not much enjoyed her visit to the Park. In fact it had depressed her a little. She certainly had no intention of going back this time. It was the living she was concerned with on this visit, not the dead.
When she was settled in she called Arnie, gave him her room number in case of emergency, and told him she’d be back in a couple of days at most. She heard him pop a can of beer while she was talking — not, to judge by his slightly slurred speech, his first of the night. He’d be fine without her, she thought. Probably happier.