Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story

SEVEN

On Thursday, the 18th of March, Maxine got a call that she knew was coming. The caller was a woman named Tammy Lauper, who ran the International Todd Pickett Appreciation Society, which despite its high-falutin title had its headquarters, Maxine knew, in the Laupers' house in Sacramento. Tammy was calling to ask a very simple question, one that she said she was "passing on" to Maxine from millions of Todd's fans worldwide: Where was Todd?

Maxine had dealt with Tammy on many occasions in the past, though if she possibly could she ducked the calls and let Sawyer deal with them. The trouble was that Tammy Lauper was an obsessive, and though in the eight years she'd been running the Appreciation Society—(she'd once said to Maxine she hated to hear it called a fan club. "I'm not a hysterical teenager," she'd said. This was true: Tammy Lauper was married, childless, and, when last spotted, an overweight woman in her middle thirties)—though in that time she'd done a great deal to support Todd's movies, and could on occasion be a useful disseminator of deliberately erroneous information, she was not somebody Maxine had much time for. The woman annoyed her, with her perpetual questions about trivia, and her unspoken assumption that somehow Todd belonged to her. When she was obliged to speak to the Lauper woman—because there was some delicate matter in the air, and she needed to carefully modulate the flow of news—she always aimed to keep the exchanges brief. As courteous as possible—Tammy could be prickly if she didn't feel as though she was being given her due—but brief.

Today, however, Tammy wasn't about to be quickly satisfied; she was like a terrier with a rat. Every time Maxine thought she'd satisfied the woman's curiosity, back she'd come with another inquiry.

"Something's wrong," she kept saying. "Todd's not been seen by anyone. Usually when he goes away, members of the Society spot him, and they report to me. But I haven't heard one word. Something's wrong. Because I always hear."

"I'm sure you do."

"So what's going on? You've got to tell me."

"Why should anything be going on?" Maxine said, doing her best to maintain her equilibrium. "Todd's tired and he needs a break, so he went away for a few weeks."

"Out of state?"

"Yes. Out of state."

"Out of the country?"

"I'm afraid he asked me not to say."

"Because we've got members all over the world."

"I realize that, but—"

"When he went on his honeymoon to Morocco," Tammy went on, "I had six reports of sightings." (This was a reference to the event which had caused Maxine more publicity problems than any other in Todd's life: his short-lived marriage to the exquisitely emaciated model Avril Fox, which had been strewn with potentially image-besmirching scenes: adulteries, a ménage-a-trois involving Avril's sister, Lucy, and a spot of domestic violence.)

"Sometimes," Maxine said, a trace of condescension creeping into her voice now, "Todd likes to be out in public. Sometimes he doesn't."

"And right now?"

"He doesn't."

"But why would he mind being seen?" Tammy went on. "If there's nothing wrong with him . . ."

Maxine hesitated, wondering how best to calm the suspicions she was clearly arousing. She couldn't just drum up an excuse and jump off the phone; that would make the Lauper woman even more curious than she already was. She had to maneuver the conversation away from this dangerous area as carefully as possible.

"I'll tell you why," she said, dropping her voice a little, as though she were about to share something of real significance with Tammy. "He's got a secret project in the works."

"Oh?" Tammy said. She didn't sound persuaded. "This isn't Warrior, is it? I read that script, and—"

"No, it isn't Warrior. It's a very personal piece, which Todd is writing himself."

"He's writing it? Todd is writing something? He said in an interview with People last July he hated writing. It was too much like hard work."

"Well, I lied a little," Maxine said. "He's not doing the actual writing. He's working with somebody on the project. A very well-respected screenwriter, actually. But he's pouring out his heart, so it'll be a very personal project." There was a silence. Maxine waited. Had Tammy taken the bait or not?

"So this is autobiographical, this movie?"

"I didn't say it was a movie," Maxine said, taking some petty pleasure in catching Tammy out. "It may end up on the screen, but right now he's just working hard to get his feelings down. He and the writer, that is."

"Who is the writer?"

"I can't say."

"You know it would make all this very much more believable if you gave me some more details," Tammy said.

That was it. Maxine lost her composure. How dare this little bitch suggest her lies weren't believable?

"You know I've really said more than I should already, Tammy," she snapped. "And I've got six calls waiting. So if you'll excuse me—"

"Wait—what am I going to tell the members?"

"What I just told you."

"You swear Todd's fine?"

"Good God, how many times? Yes. Todd is perfectly fine. In fact, he's never been better." She drew a deep breath, and attempted to calm herself a little before she ended up saying something she would regret. "Look, Tammy, I really wish I could tell you more. But this is a matter of Todd's privacy, as I'm sure you understand. He needs a little time away from the pressure of being a celebrity, so he can work on this project, and when he's finished I'm sure you'll be one of the first to hear about it. Now really, I've got to go."

"One more question," Tammy said.

"Yes."

"What's it called?"

"What's what called?" Maxine replied, playing for time.

"The script. Or the book. Or whatever it's going to be. What's it called?"

Oh shit, Maxine thought. Now she was in deep. Well, why the hell not give the damn woman a title? She'd lied herself into a hole as it was, one more shovelful wouldn't hurt. She pictured Todd in an image now indelibly inscribed in her mind's eye, sitting waiting for Burrows to start cutting away the bandages. And the title came:

"The Blind Leading the Blind," she said.

"I don't like that," Tammy said, already proprietorial.

"Neither do I," Maxine replied, thinking not just of the title, but of this whole, sprawling, exhausting mess. "Trust me, Tammy. Neither do I."

Tammy Jayne Lauper lived on Elverta Road in Rio Linda, Sacramento, in a one-story ranch-style house fifteen minutes from the Sacramento International Airport, where her husband had worked for eight years as a baggage handler. They had no kids, nor any hope of having any, this side of a miracle of Biblical proportions. Arnie had a zero sperm count. Tammy didn't mind much. Just because God had given her breasts the size of watermelons didn't mean she was born for motherhood. And of course the absence of children left plenty of space in the house for all the files relating to what Arnie sneeringly called "Tammy's little fan club."

"It isn't a fan club," Tammy had pointed out countless times, "it's an Appreciation Society." Arnie said Tammy wasn't no appreciator, she was a fan, plain and simple, and he knew every time they'd used to sleep together and she closed her eyes it was that dickhead Pickett she'd been imagining on top of her fat ass, and that was the whole unvarnished truth of it. When Arnie got to talking like that, Tammy would just tune him out. He'd stop eventually, when he knew she wasn't listening; go back to sitting in front of the TV with a beer.

The main center of the Todd Pickett Appreciation Society's operations was the front bedroom. The room she and Arnie slept in was considerably smaller, but as she'd pointed out to him, it didn't really matter since all they did was sleep in it. They still had a double bed, though God knows why; he never touched her; and a couple of years back she'd stopped wanting him to. The third bedroom (and all the closets) were used for storage: files of clippings, issues of the fanzine (quarterly for the first year, then monthly, now quarterly again), photographs and biographies to be distributed to new members, copies of press kits from every film Todd had ever made, in twenty-six languages. Downstairs, in what would have been the family room, she kept the Collection. This was made up of items related to Todd and his career, all of them relatively rare, some one-of-a-kind items. Hanging in zipped-up plastic laundry bags were articles of clothing made for the cast and crew of his pictures. On the mantelpiece, still sealed in their boxes, were six Todd Pickett dolls that had been the hot thing to own during his teen-idol period, the boxes signed by Todd. Preserved in a vacuum pack were several unused latex makeup pieces for his Oscar-nominated performance as the maimed firefighter in The Burning Year. She didn't ever look at those. She'd been warned that they deteriorated when they were exposed to sunlight.

The collection also contained a comprehensive library of scripts for his movies, with all their addenda, including one marked up in Todd's handwriting, along with a complete set of novelizations of the movies, leather-bound with gilt lettering. There were also credit-listings on all the crews who worked with him, costume sketches and call-sheets, and of course, posters of every size and nationality. If the Smithsonian ever wanted to open a wing dedicated to the life and career of Todd Pickett, Tammy had once boasted, they need look no further than her front room. Once, she'd attempted to enumerate the items she owned. It was something in the region of seventeen thousand three hundred, not including those pieces of which she had more than one copy.

It was to this shrine that Tammy had come after her frustrating exchange with Maxine Frizelle. She closed and locked the door (though Arnie would not be back from work and his after-hours carousing for several hours), and sat down to think. After a few minutes, turning over the conversation she'd just had, she went to the very back of the room, and took from its place among the treasure-trove a box of photographs. These were her special pride and joy: pictures of Todd (fourteen of them in all) which she'd managed to buy from somebody who'd known the still photographer on Todd's fourth picture, Life Lessons. This was Todd's coming-of-age picture: the one in which he'd changed from being a Boy to being a Man. Of course, his smile would always be a boy's smile, that was part of its magic, but after Life Lessons he went on to play tougher roles: a homecoming soldier, a firefighter, a man wrongfully accused of his own wife's murder. Here then, caught in the moment before his cinematic adulthood, was the boy-man of Tammy's dreams. She had even purchased the negatives from which the series of pictures had been printed, and along with them the assurance from the person she'd got them from that they had been "lost" in the production offices before they were ever seen by the director, the producer or by Todd himself. In short, she had the only copies.

Their rarity wasn't the reason she valued them so highly, however. What made them her special treasure—the quality that made her return to them over and over, when Arnie was out at work, and she knew she had time for reverie—was the fact that the photographer had caught his subject unawares. Well, shirtless and unawares. Todd was sleek and pale, his body not heavy at all, not all muscle and veins popping out, just a nice, ordinary body; the body of the boy next door if the boy next door happened to be perfect. She had never seen a body she thought so beautiful.

Then there was his face. Oh that face! She'd seen literally thousands of photographs of Todd in the last eleven years—and to her adoring eyes he was handsome in every single one of them—but in these particular pictures he was something more than handsome. There was a certain lost look in his eyes that allowed her to indulge the belief that if she'd been there at that moment—if he'd seen her and looked at her with the same forsaken feeling in his heart as was in his eyes—everything in her life would have been different; and maybe, just maybe, everything in his.

When she was thinking clearly, she knew all this was romantic nonsense. She was a plain woman; and, even though she'd shed thirty-two pounds in the last two years, was still thirty overweight. How could she hope to compare with the glossy beauties Todd had romanced, both on screen and off? Still she allowed herself the indulgence, once in a while. It made life in Sacramento a little more bearable to know that her secret glimpses of Todd were always there, hidden away, waiting for her. And best of all, nobody else had them. They were hers and hers alone.

There was one other wonderful thing about the fourteen pictures: they had been snapped in such quick succession that if she leafed through them fast enough she could almost create the illusion of movement. She did that now, while she thought about the way Maxine had talked to her on the phone. That nonsense about Todd going away to write his life-story, or whatever she'd said it was going to be; it didn't ring true. It simply wasn't like Todd to be so inaccessible. Every vacation he'd taken—in India, in New Guinea, in the Amazon, for God's sake—he'd been spotted. Somebody had had a camera, and he'd posed; smiled, waved, goofed around. It just wasn't like him to disappear like this.

But what could she do about it? She wasn't going to get any answers out of anybody close to Todd: they'd all trot out the same story. She'd already exhausted her contacts at the studios, all of whom claimed not to have seen Todd in a while. Even over at Paramount, where he was supposedly making his next picture, nobody had seen him in many months. Nor, according to her most reliable source over there, the secretary to Sherry Lansing's assistant, were there any meetings on the books, with either Todd or any of his production team. It was all very strange, and it made Tammy afraid for her man. Suppose they were covering something up? Suppose there'd been an accident, or an assault, and Todd had been hurt? Suppose he was in a hospital bed somewhere on life-support, his life slipping away, while all the sonsofbitches who'd made fortunes off his talent were lying to themselves and anyone who'd listen, pretending it was going to be okay? Things like that happened all the time; especially in Hollywood. Everyone lied there; it was a way of life.

Her thoughts circled on these terrible images for an hour or more, while she sat among her treasures. At last, she came to a momentous decision. She could do nothing to solve this mystery sitting here in Sacramento. She needed to go out to Los Angeles, and confront some of these people. It was easy to tell somebody a lie on the telephone. It was harder to do when you were face-to-face with someone; when you were looking into their eyes.

She took one last look through the sequence of photographs, lingering on the last of the fourteen, the one in which Todd's gaze was closest to making contact with the camera. Another shot, and he would have been looking directly at her. Their eyes, as it were, would have met. She smiled at him, kissed his picture, then put the photographs away, tucked the box out of sight and went through to the kitchen to call Arnie at the airport, and tell him what she planned to do. He was in the middle of his shift, and couldn't come to the phone. She left a message for him to call her; then she made a reservation on Southwest for the flight to Los Angeles, and booked a room in a little hotel on Wilshire Boulevard, which she'd stayed in once before when she'd come into LA for a Todd Pickett convention.

The flight was scheduled for 3:10 that afternoon, and was to get into Los Angeles at 4:15, but the departure was delayed for almost two hours, and then they circled over LAX for almost three quarters of an hour before they could land, so it wasn't until half-past seven that she stepped out of the airport into the warm, sweet-smog air of her beloved's city.

She didn't know what she was going to do, now she was here; how or where she was going to begin. But at least she wasn't sitting at home brooding. She was closer to him, here, whatever Maxine Frizelle had said about him being off in some faraway place. That was a lie; Tammy knew it in her bones. He was here. And if he was in any trouble, then by God she would do her best to help him, because whatever anybody might say she knew one thing for certain: there wasn't a soul on earth who cared for the well-being of Todd Pickett more than she. And somewhere, tucked away in a shameful corner of her head, she almost hoped that there was some conspiracy here; because that would give her a chance to come to his rescue; to save him from people like Frizelle, and make him understand who really cared about him. Oh, wouldn't that be something! She didn't dare think about it too much; it made her sick with guilt and anticipation. She shouldn't be wishing anything but the best for her Todd. And yet the same thought kept creeping back: that somewhere in this city he was waiting for her—even if he didn't know it yet; waiting to be saved and comforted. Yes, she dared think it: perhaps even loved.