Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story

know.'

'All right.'

'Let's all go away and think about this, Maxine. And you do the same thing. I can see your concern. You've got a legacy here you want to protect. I think the question is—do you do that best by drawing attention to Rooney with a lawsuit, or by letting him publish and be damned?'

The phrase caught Maxine's attention. She'd heard it before, of course. But now it had new gravity, new meaning. She pictured Rooney publishing his book, and then having his soul dragged away to the Devil's Country for his troubles.

'Publish and be damned?' she said. 'You know, that I could maybe live with.'

Tammy hadn't seen a human face, real or televised, in four days; not even heard a voice. The Jacksons, her next-door neighbors, had gone off for a long weekend the previous Thursday, noisily departing with the kids yelling and car doors being slammed. Now it was Sunday. The street was always quiet on Sunday, but today it was particularly quiet. She couldn't even hear the buzzing of a lawn-mower. It was as though the outside world had disappeared.

She sat in the darkness, and let the images that had been haunting her for so long tumble over and over in her head, like filthy clothes in a washing machine, over and over, in a gruel of gray-grimy water; the madness she'd seen and heard and smelled; over and over. The trouble was, the more she turned it all over, the dirtier the washing became, as if the water had steadily turned from gray to black, and now when she got up to go to the bathroom, or to climb the stairs, she could hear it sloshing around between her ears, the muck of these terrible memories, darkening with repetition.

So this was what it was like to be crazy, she thought. Sitting in the darkness, listening to the silence while you turned things over in your mind, going to the kitchen sometimes and staring into the fridge until she'd seen everything that was in there, the rotted things and the unrotted things, then closing it again without cleaning it out; and going upstairs and washing the bathroom floor, then going to lie down and sleeping ten, twelve, fourteen hours straight through, not even waking to empty your bladder. This is what it was. And if it didn't go away soon, she was going to be a permanent part of the madness; just another rag turning in the darkness, indistinguishable from the things she'd worn.

Over and over and—

The telephone rang. Its noise was so loud she jumped up from the chair in which she was sitting and tears sprang into her eyes. Absurd, to be made to weep by the sudden sound of a telephone! But the tears came pouring down, whether she thought she was ridiculous for shedding them or not.

She had unplugged the answering machine a while ago (there'd been too many messages, mostly from journalists), so now the phone just kept on ringing. Eventually she picked it up, more to stop the din than because she really wanted to speak to anyone. She didn't. In fact she was perfectly ready to pick up the receiver and just put it straight down again, but she caught the sound of the woman at the other end of the line, saying her name. She hesitated. Put the receiver up to her ear, a little tentatively.

'Tammy, are you there?' a voice said. Still Tammy didn't break her silence. 'I know there's somebody on the line,' the woman went on. 'Will you just tell me, is this Tammy Lauper's house?'

'No,' Tammy said, surprised at the sound her own voice made when it finally came out. Then she put the receiver down.

It would ring again, she knew. It was Maxine Frizelle, and Maxine wasn't the kind of woman who gave up easily.

Tammy stared at the phone, trying to will the damn thing from ringing. For a few seconds she thought she'd succeeded. Then the ringing started again.

'Go away,' Tammy said, without picking up the receiver. The syllables sounded like gravel being shaken in a coarse sieve. The telephone continued to ring. 'Please go away,' she said.

She closed her eyes and tried to think of the order in which she would need to put the words if she were to pick up the receiver and speak to Maxine, but her mind was too much of a mess. It was better not to even risk the conversation, if all Maxine was going to hear in Tammy's replies was the darkness churning around in her washing-machine of a head.

All she had to do was to wait a while, for God's sake. The telephone would stop its din eventually. Maybe five more rings. Maybe four. Maybe three—

At the last moment some deep-seated instinct for self-preservation made her reach down and pick up the receiver.

'Hello,' she said.

'Tammy? That is you, isn't it?'

'Maxine. Yes. It's me.'

'Good God. You sound terrible. Are you sick?'

'I've had the flu. Really badly. I still haven't got rid of it.'

'Was that you when I called two minutes ago? I called two minutes ago. It was you, wasn't it?'

'Yes it was. I'm sorry. I'd just woken up and as I say, I've been so sick.. .'

'Well you sound it,' Maxine said, in her matter-of-fact manner. 'Look. I need to talk to you urgently.'

'Not today. I can't. I'm sorry, Maxine.'

'This really can't wait, Tammy. All you have to do is listen. The flu didn't make you deaf, did it?'

This drew a silent smile from Tammy; her first in days. Same old Maxine: subtle as a sledgehammer. 'Okay,' Tammy said, 'I'm listening.'

She was surprised at how much easier it was to talk once you got started. And she had the comfort that she was talking to Maxine. All she'd have to do, as Maxine had said, was listen.

'Do you remember that asshole, Rooney?'

'Vaguely.'

'You don't sound very sure. He was the Detective we talked to when we first went to the police. You remember him now? Round face, no hair. Wore too much cologne.'

For some peculiar reason it was the memory of the cologne, which had been sickly-sweet, which brought Rooney to mind.

'Now I remember,' she said.

'Well he's been on to me. Did he call you?'

'No.'

'Sonofabitch.'

'Why's he a sonofabitch?'

'Because the fuckhead's got me all stirred up, just when I was beginning to put my thoughts in order.'

Much to Tammy's surprise, she heard a measure of desperation in Maxine's voice. She knew what it was because it was an echo of the very thing she heard in herself, night and day, awake and dreaming. Could it be that she actually had something in common with this woman, whom she'd despised for so many years? That was a surprise, to say the least.

'What did the sonofabitch want?' she found herself asking. There was a second surprise here. Her mouth put the words in a perfectly sensible order without her having to labor over it.

'He claims he's writing a book. Can you believe the audacity of the creep—'

'You know, I did know about this,' Tammy said.

'So he talked to you.'

'He didn't, but Jerry Brahms did.' The conversation with Jerry came back to her remotely, as though it had happened several months ago.

'Oh good,' Maxine said, 'so you're up to speed. I've got a bunch of lawyers together to find out if he can do this, and it turns out—guess what?—he can. He can write what the hell he likes about any of us. We can sue of course but that'll just—'

'—give him more publicity.'

'That's exactly what Peltzer said. He said the book would last two months on the shelves, three at the outside, then it would be forgotten.'

'He's probably right. Anyway, Rooney's not going to get any help from me.'