Steve Erickson - Rubicon Beach

“No,” said Lowery, “this bunch has spent itself, I think. But we’ve got a disaster here, and we can use more paramedics and ambulances. People in extreme shock, also apparent loss of vision among most of them when the hotel generator blew. That includes the fire fighters and people jumping from the upper floors. I got a girl here, they were trying to tear her eyes out of her head.” He snapped his fingers in front of her face and she blinked.

“How’d she get so lucky,” came the other voice.

“Good question. Maybe she didn’t see the blow. Maybe it didn’t see her. Anyway I have a few other theories about this one.”

“Yeah?”

“Remember,” said Lowery, “the Hancock Park business a few weeks ago?”

“No kidding.”

“Well, it’s a theory,” he said. He cut off the radio, and when he looked at Catherine again he sat up straight. Her eyes were still open but spinning in her head; he snapped his fingers again in front of her and this time she didn’t react. “Don’t flip out on me now,” he said to her, “I’ve got some questions for you.” He didn’t believe she had suddenly gone blind; he knew it was something else. He didn’t know that she was asleep with her eyes open, but he might have figured from the movement of her eyes that she was dreaming. He wouldn’t have any way, sharp detective though he was, of investigating where she went, of following her back through the hotel, which stood in her dream husklike and black, a mammoth tunnel ripped through the ceiling and starting toward the stars, lit only by a fire in the far lounge where a tall middle-aged actor waited for his last shot against failure while the other haunted incarnation of the poet approached her from out of the dark. “It. . is you?” R. O. Lowery heard her say in awkward English.

“It’s me,” he said, still snapping his lingers and waving his hands before her eyes.

But it wasn’t to him she spoke.

Catherine was treated for shock in the emergency room of General Hospital, then taken after several days to a sanitarium in Malibu. There she had a bed on the second floor, next to a window that looked toward the sea. Her eyes were always open and moving in a dream, and she answered to no one who called her. Doctors who examined her found nothing wrong physically. Psychiatrists, speculating on what might have happened to her, were at a loss to account for her condition. The police had no idea who she was or where she had come from, except that for two months prior to the Ambassador fire she’d been reported walking at night in Hancock Park, looking in people’s windows. There were witnesses who saw her start the fire in what appeared to be a dispute with an unidentified man in the ballroom of the hotel, and there were also witnesses who had seen her just prior to the fire on the fourth floor of the hotel, in the room of a man who had succumbed at some undetermined point to a toxic overdose, perhaps by his own choosing. The “Wilshire Holocaust,” as the papers called it (several other buildings in the proximity of the Ambassador had also burned), was one of the worst disasters in the city’s history. Catherine, a Jane Doe to the police until they determined differently, was charged with arson and one hundred and sixty-seven counts of second-degree murder.

Lowery’s case was at an impasse before he began. The logical starting point was the man found dead with the bottles and pills in his room on the Ambassador’s fourth floor; the statement of a bellhop and other guests on the floor put the girl in that room ten minutes before the fire began. She’d been carrying what looked to be a dead animal. But the body and identity of the man had gone up in smoke along with the hotel records. Two maids said the description given by the other guests sounded like that of a man who had been at the hotel a while — tall and fiftyish, polite but recently reclusive. The manager of the hotel, who was aware that two medics had been sent up to the fourth floor a few minutes before the fire, thought the man might have been one Richard Dale, who lived on that floor and had been in the hotel long enough to have not paid his bill in some time, which was the only reason the manager remembered his name at all. Over the course of a week Lowery’s detectives couldn’t find a single person in Los Angeles who knew or had heard of Richard Dale.

The case didn’t break for another week, during which time the papers diligently reported the degree to which the police were stymied. Each day Lowery drove up to Malibu to see his suspect, to the disapproval of the doctors. None of these trips was fruitful. He’d returned from one such trip one afternoon and was sitting at his desk trying to think of all the ways one leaves tracks across the landscape of one’s life and how he could find those tracks and follow them, when his door opened and the tracks led to him. Bingo, Lieutenant, said one of his men.

Lowery lowered his feet from the desk. The detective came into the office and laid an open magazine before him. Lowery found himself looking at a picture of Jane Doe in a bed sheet. For several minutes he sat gazing at the picture and the photo credit with it. When he closed the magazine he said to his man, Then let’s locate Mr. Crow and have a talk.

After that things fell into place, up to a point. Larry Crow sent the police straight to Llewellyn Edgar’s house, which they found with several walls missing, two new doors six feet off the ground, and a window erected out by the curb. Edgar himself was in the only part of the house still intact, a servant’s room in back, where he was trying to fit together a hundred bits of shattered pink glass over a black photograph, as though all the pieces of a puzzle had fallen out, leaving an empty hole. Over the next forty-eight hours the police also talked to Madeline Edgar, Eileen Rader, the guests at a party given by Eileen Rader three months before, and several workers at a local construction company who had, around the same time, done some curious work for Mr. Edgar on the house, the results of which were now so unmistakable. In return for a promise of immunity from prosecution Mrs. Edgar made a statement. Lieutenant Lowery asked for medical reports on both Llewellyn Edgar and Catherine, and received the preliminaries the next day in a phone call. “Don’t know that I have much for you, Lieutenant,” the doctor said. “You know the mental state the girl’s in, and Edgar isn’t exactly bowling with ten pins either. At this point it’s tough to make a case against him for assault. Also, molestation’s out.”

“Yeah?” said Lowery.

“Girl’s a virgin. Of course there might have been some other form of sexual contact, but somehow I don’t think so.”

By now the press had gotten the photograph and were running it incessantly. When more details of the story came out, the district attorney’s office settled for slavery charges against Edgar and reduced the second-degree murder charges against Catherine to a hundred sixty-seven counts of manslaughter. Lowery drove up to Malibu to see her again on a shiny blue fin-de-June day. Sitting by her bed watching her dream, he said, Wherever it is you are now, girl, don’t come back. You won’t like it here if you do.

When she opened the door of the cell he was hunched on the floor asleep. She stood beside him and waited for him to wake. He stirred and opened his eyes; he looked as though he didn’t believe he saw her.

She knelt and watched his hands, He held them open before her and then dropped them and said something to her she didn’t understand. Somewhere behind her a door closed, and there was a wiry little man with red hair outside the bars who appeared very startled to see her. He said something and approached the door and then turned and left.

She looked at the prisoner; his face was bathed in the purple light of the sun going down. He moved toward her slowly: he’s afraid he’ll frighten me, she thought to herself — as though anything can frighten me now. He was very near her, and the shadows of black bars rose through the purple light on his face. Looking at him closely, she realized he didn’t seem so much like the other one. He was tired and gray and his eyes hummed with something sad; he looked at her in a way no man had ever looked at her, not held by her face but rather as though he was the poet of a different destiny, of a different choice made long before, who had never consumed so easily his own vision. His eyes said, I was born in America. They said, I believed one was guiltless as long as his faith was true; I thought the act of treachery was beyond those who did not know its name. I never thought treachery was like a face. I never thought it was something one wore whether he knew it or not.