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“Aren’t we all?” she says. “Now get out of here. I’ll look for your smut this evening.”
I go through the airlock fast, for both her sake and mine. I can’t feel my feet anymore, but at least I got my connection to Little Cairo.
In the foyer, Maggie gives me some stationery so I can write the address of the abandoned nail salon that’s the front door to the flying saucer house.
Going outside into the L.A. heat, I feel like my skin is going to crack like broken glass. It’s too bad about Thivierge and the ice queen act she’s been forced into. But she’s survived all these years. A tough old broad. I like her. In case someone did sabotage her all those years ago, when this is over, I’ll come back with Vidocq and we’ll put up some better protection around her haunted mansion. Let her live out the rest of her small, cold life in peace.
It’s late at night and I can’t sleep, so I walk down to Hollywood Boulevard.
Talking to Thivierge and thinking about the Pussycat Theatre brought me back to Samael. Now that I have a tight connection to his lost angel I wonder if I should have started with her in the first place. But I’m pretty good at getting things backward. And, anyway, before Chris I had nowhere to start.
What the hell is it about the Pussycat Theatre? Chris Stein partied there. His girlfriend Samantha partied there. And goddamn Zadkiel hung there too. What weird magnetism does the Pussycat possess?
They hosed the old theater down, so now it’s a regular movie house playing the current crop of Hollywood crap. Nothing special about it at all anymore. Ninety-nine percent of its clientele and employees probably have no idea where they are. The place seems a lot more suited for an angel now, with dull new movies full of CG and easy morality. Angels eat that kind of stuff up. What would send the Opener of the Ways from Heaven to a classic seventies porn palace? Doc Kinski—the archangel Uriel—stayed on Earth, but he kept a low profile. But angels are a lot more like people than the Church or anyone in Heaven wants to admit. A lot of the same desires and hang-ups. Who says an angel escaping Uptown’s goody-goody hosannas wouldn’t want to walk on the wild side? I sure as hell would. You might be a crazy killer, but on this one thing, good for you, Zadkiel. Follow your dreams, even if they are to watch skin flicks 24/7.
It all brings me back to my other question, whether Samael really wanted me to find his angel at all or if he’s playing some other dangerous game he doesn’t want to get involved with. Being him, he’s capable of doing both things at once. Did he really come to see me on his own or did Mr. Muninn send him with a whole other agenda in mind? They both want the war in Heaven over, but do they really believe a single angel can pull it off? I have serious doubts. Still, they might be getting desperate enough to try anything, because what do they have to lose?
When I get sick of the boulevard, I turn onto North Cherokee Avenue, to the site of the Masque club. Like the Pussycat, its heyday was in the late seventies. In fact, the club was located in the Pussycat’s basement. I wish I could have seen it back in the day. Just about every punk band in L.A. played there. X. Germs. Alice Bag. The Screamers. The Weirdos.
Who knows what kind of demented stuff went on in that musical dungeon when it was open? I’d kill to know. What was it Maria said Brendan Mullen told her? “If everyone knew where all the bodies were buried, no one would dance for fear of treading over some poor bastard’s face.”
That’s what I feel like right now: a dead slob with people dancing on my face. I’m in the middle of something but can’t get a handle on any of it. Stein. The Stay Belows. Zadkiel. What the Lodge Within the Lodge really wants. Janet. Candy. How does it all fit together?
The second time an LAPD cruiser rolls by to check on me, I head home. The last thing I need right now is cop trouble.
I wake up groggy after a night spent dreaming about William Blake’s Great Red Dragon doing coke off Farrah Fawcett’s ass in a Gothic mansion hidden under the Pussycat.
Yesterday’s conversation with Thivierge has left me with a hundred more questions, but there’s no way I’m going back to Ice Station Zebra for another chat. The smartest thing to do is talk to someone else who was there all those years ago. Someone who can confirm Thivierge’s story about Stein’s going visionary on everyone.
I dial Danny Gentry’s number and the phone rings a few times before going to voicemail. But when I try to leave a message, a damn computer tells me that his mailbox is full. I wouldn’t have guessed a guy like Gentry had that many friends. Or maybe he’s just ducking creditors. I make sure to have money in my pocket when I ride the Hog to the Kiernan Arms.
I buzz his apartment on the building’s Fort Knox front gate directory. No answer. After a couple of more long tries, I give up and go into the lobby through a shadow. I check his mailbox. It’s stuffed full and there’s a notice saying that he has to pick his letters up from the post office since it’s too full for the mail carrier to fit anything. On the off chance something funny is going on and Gentry isn’t just sleeping one off, I get out the Colt and go up the stairs to the fourth floor.
I knock on his door hard. Then harder. I twist the doorknob. It’s locked. Then I knock fucking hard. Nothing.
Gentry’s neighbor is still blasting the same teeth-grating country pop he was playing last time I was here. When the frowning dumbass sticks his head into the hall to complain about the noise I stick the Colt in his face.
“Play Taylor Swift one more time, motherfucker.”
He turtles his head back into his apartment and the music stops.
I’m fed up with the whole situation. Technically, I could go into Gentry’s place through a shadow, but kicking his door in is much more satisfying.
I keep the Colt up as I go through his place, room by room. I finally find him exactly where I left him last time—in a chair by the window, his Marlboros on a little table next to him. Only Danny isn’t smoking. Danny is dead.
Whoever killed him has a sick sense of humor. Gentry’s head is tilted back so far, another inch or two would have snapped his neck. But it wasn’t the neck that killed him. Someone took that stupid plastic Academy Award that Stein gave him a thousand years ago and shoved it all the way down his throat. The poor fucker must have choked to death staring right up into the eyes of his killer.
I look around the room for anything that might give me a clue to who might have done it. But who am I kidding? I’m not a real detective. Maybe if the killer dropped an eight-by-ten and their Social Security card I could figure things out, but the room looks just how I remember it, and Gentry’s door was locked.
When I look down the hall again, there’s a small mob of the Kiernan’s ragged tenants in the doorway staring at me.
“That’s him with the gun,” yells the country-pop dumbass. “Someone call the cops.”
I give the place one more quick look over, and as one brave jackass advances on me with a baseball bat, I step through a shadow and come out near the bike.
I’m sorry, Danny. You had a tough life and a worse death. If I can find out who did that to you, I promise I’ll make them cry.
Then I have a really bad thought.
