days I read whatever she had handy; Rachel Wallace’s new book, Vogue, The Hollywood Reporter, Variety, Redbook, a collection of essays by Joan Didion. I wished I’d brought my copy of Play of Double Senses with me. It would have impressed the hell out of Candy. I could let drop that it was by the president of Yale, and she’d think I was learned. However, the book was in my suitcase at the Beverly Hillcrest along with my clean shirt and my toothbrush. Candy had a razor, so I was clean-shaven, but my breath was beginning to tarnish my teeth.
Late morning of the third day, I was doing sit-ups with my back on the floor and my feet on the couch when Candy came out of her bedroom dressed, with her hair combed and a good job of makeup that covered a lot of the damage. I was looking at her upside down. She looked very good.
“I’m ready,” she said.
“For what?”
“For Roger Hammond, for getting you a real meal, for going out and getting back to work. Not necessarily in that order.”
“No,” I said. “Definitely not in that order. First the decent meal.”
She smiled, sort of. “Okay,” she said. “It’s late enough to make it brunch, maybe. Do you always sleep that way?”
“Sit-ups,” I said. “Isolates the stomach and saves the back.”
“I thought you were supposed to keep your legs straight.”
“You were wrong.”
She smiled again, sort of, favoring the side where the stitches still pulled. I got up.
“How many do you do?”
“A hundred.” I put the gun and holster back on my belt, got my blazer off the back of a chair, and slipped into it. My yellow shirt was in trouble, and my pants were baggy. “How about we go to my hotel while I get a change of clothes and a brush of tooth and then off to some elegant Hollywood bistro for an early lunch.”
She nodded. “I’ll call a cab. I left my car in Griffith Park.”
The cab took us to the Hillcrest, where I showered and shaved and brushed my teeth and put on clean clothes and left the others to be cleaned. I had switched to a light gray blazer, charcoal slacks, white shirt, black and red paisley pocket handkerchief.
“Tie?” I said to Candy Sloan.
She looked as scornful as she could without pulling her stitches.
“I’ll try to find a place that requires one before you leave, so you won’t have brought one out here in vain.”
“I brought several,” I said. “Keeps me in touch with my roots. Where shall we eat?”
“I can’t eat much. Is there any place you’ve heard of you’d like to try?”
“Actually I’d like to go back up to the Hamburger Hamlet on Sunset.”
“Near my apartment?”
“Yeah.”
“After I saw you make that pasta the other night, I thought you were a fancy eater.”
“I am. And a plain one. And a big one. I like Hamburger Hamlets.”
“All right, but you must let me take you to Scandia when I can eat too.”
“I’ve been to Scandia. But I’ll go again.”
At Hamburger Hamlet I had a frappeed margarita and a large hamburger and a big beer. Candy managed a dish of something called Custard Lulu. Then we took a cab out to Griffith Park and found Candy’s car where she had parked it, near the zoo entrance. It was a brown MGB with a chrome luggage rack. She put the top down, and we drove back to Hollywood on the Golden State Freeway then along Los Feliz to Western and then onto Hollywood Boulevard. The sun was Lright. The smog was in remission. I was struck, as I always was, with the shabbiness of Hollywood Boulevard. It was a small-town shabbiness: low stucco with paint peeling, burrito stands with plastic Mexicans and plastic cactuses and plastic burros. There were places that sold Hollywood memorabilia and places that sold papaya juice; there were office buildings about the size of those in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, there were gas stations and record stores, and pink-and-yellow motels, and a steady mingle of street kids and tourists.
“Gee,” I said, “if things really started booming out here, this could become another Forty-second Street.”
“Oh, come on,” Candy said. “It’s not that bad.”
We stopped at a light at Cahuenga Boulevard. A young black man with a haircut like Dorothy Hamill’s crossed in front of us. He wore lipstick and mascara. He wore tight pink pants and spike heels, and his fingernails were long and painted silver. With him was a thin blond boy with a tank top and short shorts and translucent shoes with four- inch spikes. He, too, was wearing makeup and jewelry. He carried a small beaded clutch purse. The black kid blew me a kiss. The blond boy yanked at his hand and whispered something, and they hurried across the street.
The light changed, Candy slipped into gear, and we moved on. Behind the thin gray line of buildings and sidewalks the Hollywood Hills rose to the north, green with trees, dotted with color, and beyond them, looking sere, the San Gabriel Mountains. The old Pacific wilderness, barely at bay. We turned left onto Fairfax and headed south past CBS and the Farmers Market, across Wilshire, with the May Company on the corner. Had Mary Livingstone really worked there?
We crossed Olympic and turned right onto Pico. Along Pico there were a lot of kosher markets. Then we slipped up over a hill and down past a Big Boy burger stand and turned into the gate at Summit Studios. Candy showed her press card to the guard at the gate and asked for Roger Hammond. The guard went into his shack to call and came out in a minute and waved us through. To the right of the gate as we drove in was a Victorian street full of false fronts and, beyond that, the superstructure of an old elevated train. Candy turned left past a sound stage and parked in a slot marked VISITORS in front of a two-story building with a balcony across the front.
