Jack Cavanaugh - Death Watch

Hunz sat back, obviously surprised by her outburst. But he didn’t dwell on it long. “What’s this?” he asked. He held up the email printout from Billy Peppers, the one instructing Sydney to meet him at Hollywood Memorial Park Cemetery.

“He claims to know who is behind Death Watch,” Sydney said.

“What do you know about him?”

Sydney sighed. She couldn’t shift emotional gears as fast as Hunz Vonner. “He lives on the street. Cori Zinn did a spotlight news story on the number of homeless people with mental problems. She interviewed him. He preaches on street corners. Says he talks to angels.”

“You’ve met him?”

“I’ve never met him.”

“So you didn’t keep this appointment.”

“An appointment is agreed upon between two people. I never agreed to meet him.” Sydney was feeling defensive. “I told you, I was with Cheryl McCormick.”

“Let’s go talk to him.”

“Now?”

Hunz was buckling his seat belt.

“He asked me to meet him hours ago.”

“You said he lives on the street. He might still be there. It’s not as though he has other pressing business.”

Sydney started the car. “Cheryl McCormick is a waste of time, but a mentally deranged transient isn’t?”

“We won’t know that until we talk to him,” Hunz said. Then he added, “If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years, it’s that to be successful in this business, you have to be a bloodhound. Relentless. You have to track down every lead. Ninety percent of them waste your time. And sometimes, if you get lucky, your best information comes from the least likely sources. We know Cheryl’s story; now let’s go get the angel-talker’s story.”

Sydney’s beige Volvo trolled the narrow roadways of Hollywood Memorial Park Cemetery at a five-mile-an-hour pace, meandering past mausoleums, old-fashioned headstones, and obelisks that marked the final resting places of Hollywood’s greatest legends. Douglas Fairbanks was buried here, so was Rudolph Valentino, Charlie Chaplin, Cecil B. DeMille, Tyrone Power, Victor Fleming, and Darla Hood, everybody’s sweetheart of Little Rascals fame.

In the passenger seat Hunz Vonner was fidgety. His right leg bounced up and down nervously as he searched among the tombstones for a homeless man. Sydney had never seen Hunz on edge like this. The suave international reporter almost seemed human.

They cruised down Maple Avenue past the elaborate marble tomb of Douglas Fairbanks with its sunken garden. Water lilies shared the pool with sun sparkles. On Sydney’s side of the car they rimmed a lake with an island featuring a whitewashed Grecian tomb.

Hunz turned suddenly in his seat, craning his neck.

Sydney slowed the car. “See anything?”

“No,” he said, sounding disappointed. He turned back around. His foot kicked empty breakfast drink cans on the floorboard.

“You can just toss those in the back.”

He left them there. “Why do Americans insist on living in their automobiles?” Hunz groused. “An automobile is a driving machine, not a living quarters on wheels. Here in the States you eat and drink in your cars; you do business in them, with some people turning them into an office; you take naps in them, watch movies, and now videos; you use them as phone booths for cell phones; you convert them to music halls with elaborate sound systems; and, of course, what takes place in the backseats of American automobiles is legendary.”

“What do you drive?” Sydney asked.

“BMW 5er.”

“Figures.”

“What do you mean by that?”

Sydney shrugged. “You look like a Beamer kind of guy.”

“BMW makes a precision machine,” Hunz said. “This may come as a revelation to you, but some people purchase automobiles for reasons other than how many cup holders they have.”

The road turned gently to the right. Through three towering palm trees, Sydney spotted a couple of men trimming a hedge.

“Let’s see if they know anything,” she said.

Sydney parked the car and they approached the groundskeepers, who were both wearing safety goggles and manning electric hedge clippers. One of them looked up and saw Sydney. From the expression on his face, you would have thought Jayne Mansfield had climbed out of her grave to stretch her legs. His coworker shared his rapture. Simultaneously they shut off their trimmers and pulled off the safety goggles for a better look.

“Can I help you, darlin’?” one of them said.

If someone had interviewed them later, it’s doubtful either of them would have remembered a man accompanying Sydney.

“This may sound a bit strange,” she began.

“Darlin’, you don’t know strange. Herb and I have worked in this here cemetery for nigh onto ten years. We got stories that’ll straighten the curls right outta that gorgeous blonde hair of yours.”

Sydney ignored the banter. Two or three times a day men made fools of themselves over her. “We’re looking for a homeless man,” she said. “We don’t have much of a description other than that, but he said he’d be here today about noon. Did you happen to see him?”

“Yeah, we did!” the shorter worker, Herb, exclaimed, obviously overjoyed at being able to help out a beautiful woman. “There was this one guy. About noon, too, wouldn’t you say, Al? He was a strange one. Real strange. We was gonna run him out ‘cause it’s not good for business to have bums hangin’ around here, you know what I mean? I mean, we get a lot of tourists comin’ here to see stars, and the last thing we want them to see is bums layin’ all over the place. Gives the place a bad name, if you know what I mean. And, believe me, we get ‘em all the time. Two maybe three every—”

His coworker interrupted, “We approached this guy.”

“Al! I was telling it. Let me tell it!”

“Then tell it, and quit blabberin’ nonsense,” Al replied.

“Anyway, like I was saying, he was a strange one. And when we approached him, he was talkin’ to someone, but no one was there with him! I mean, he was standin’ there all alone, plain as day. And then, when we told him to leave, he seemed real perturbed, you know? Like we was interruptin’ a private conversation or somethin’.”

“He was talking to someone?” Sydney said. “Maybe he had a cell phone.”

“Naw, bums don’t got cells,” Herb said. “He was talkin’ to the air. Usin’ both hands, like he was arguing with someone, or somethin’. Only no one was there.”

“Hey, Herb. Maybe he was talkin’ to Harvey. You know, Harvey? Jimmy Stewart’s invisible rabbit?”

Herb guffawed, obviously thinking that was funny.

“Thanks, guys,” Sydney said. She’d seen enough of the Herb and Al act.

“Wait! There’s more!” Al said. “He kept complaining about having to go to Chicago.”

“Chicago?”

“Yeah. Then he said something real strange. He said, ‘How do you expect me to get there? I ain’t got wings!’ That’s exactly what he said. ‘I ain’t got wings.’ I’m not making this stuff up.”

“Al! I was gonna tell her that,” Herb complained. “You said I could tell. That’s the best part.”

“He said he was going to Chicago?” Sydney asked.

“Now I wouldn’t say that, darlin’,” Al said. “This guy was loonier than Mel Blanc. I’ve seen his kind before. They talk and talk like that, but it don’t mean nothing. After that, he just took off.”

“Yeah, we chased him outta here.”

“Thank you, guys,” Sydney said. “You’ve been a big help.” She and Hunz turned to leave.

“Hey, darlin’,” Herb called after her. “If you’d like to stick around, we can give you a personal tour of the place. Show you things tourists don’t get to see.”