Danny drove to the Chateau Marmont, an apartment house-hotel done up like a swank Renaissance fortress. The main building was festooned with turrets and parapets, and there was an inner courtyard of similarly adorned bungalows connected by pathways–high, perfectly trimmed hedges surrounding them.
Gaslights at the end of wrought-iron poles illuminated address plates; Danny followed a winding string of numbers to 7941, heard dance music wafting behind the hedge and started for the path to the door. Then a gust of wind scudded clouds across the sky and moonlight caught two men in evening clothes kissing, swaying together in the dark porch enclosure.
Danny watched; the moon was eclipsed by more cloud cover; the door opened and admitted the men–laughter, a jump crescendo and a few seconds’ worth of brightness easing them inside. Danny went pins and needles, squeezed between the hedge and the front wall and scissor-walked over to a large picture window covered by velvet drapes. There was a narrow space where the two furls of purple were drawn apart, with a strip of light giving access to tuxedos swirling across parquet, wall tapestries, the sparkle of glasses hoisted. Danny pressed his face Side 71
Ellroy, James – Big Nowhere, The to the window and looked in.
That close, he got distortion blur, Man Camera malfunctions. He pulled back so that his eyes could capture a larger frame, saw tuxedos entwined in movement, cheek-to-cheek tangos, all male. The faces were up against each other so that they couldn’t be distinguished individually; Danny zoomed out, in, out, in, until he was pressed into the window glass with the pins and needles localized between his legs, his eyes honing for mid-shots, closeups, faces.
More blur, blips of arms, legs, a cart being pushed and a man in white carrying a punch bowl. Out, in, out, better focus, no faces, then Tim and Coleman the alto together, swaying to hard jazz. The pins and needles hurting; Tim gone, replaced by a blond ingenu. Then shadows killing his vision, his lens cleared by a step backward–and a perfectly framed view of two fat, ugly wallflowers tongue-kissing, all oily skin and razor burn and hair pomade glistening.
Danny bolted home, seeing San Berdoo ’39 and Tim giving him the fisheye when he wouldn’t take seconds on Roxie. He found his spare I.W. Harper, knocked down his standard four shots and saw it worse, Tim reproachful, saying, yeah it was just horseplay, but you really liked it. Two more shots, the Chateau Marmont in Technicolor, all pretty ones that he knew had Timmy’s body.
He went straight to the bottle then, quality sourmash burning like rotgut, Man-Cameraing women, women, women. Karen Hiltscher, Janice Modine, strippers he’d questioned about a stickup at the Club Largo, tits and cunt on display in the dressing room, inured to men looking at their stuff. Rita Hayworth, Ava Gardner, the hat check girl at Dave’s Blue Room, his mother stepping out of the bathtub before she got fat and became a Jehovah’s Witness.
All ugly and wrong, just like the two wallflowers at the Marmont.
Danny drank standing up until his legs went. Going down, he managed to throw the bottle at the wall. It hit a pinup of the blood patterns at 2307
Tamarind.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Mal got his lies straight on the doorstep and rang the bell. Heels over hardwood echoed inside the house; he pulled his vest down to cover his slack waistband– too many meals forgotten. The door opened and the Red Queen was standing there, perfectly coiffed, elegantly dressed in silk and tweed–at 9:30
in the morning.
“Yes? Are you a salesman? There’s a Beverly Hills ordinance against soliciting, you know.”
Mal knew she knew otherwise. “I’m with the District Attorney’s Office.”
“Beverly Hills?”
“The City of Los Angeles.”
Claire De Haven smiled–movie star quality. “My accumulation of jaywalking tickets?”
Cop-quality dissembling–Mal knew she had him pegged as the nice guy in the Lopez/Duarte/Benavides questioning. “The City needs your help.”
The woman chuckled–elegantly–and held the door open. “Come in and tell me about it, Mr. . . .”
“Considine.”
Claire repeated the name and stood aside; Mal walked into a large living room furnished in a floral motif: gardenia-patterned divans, tufted orchid chairs, little tables and bookstands inlaid with wooden daisies. The walls were solid movie posters–anti-Nazi pictures popular in the late ’30s and early ’40s.