Coldheart Canyon: A Hollywood Ghost Story

EIGHT

Todd and Marco had settled into life at the Hideaway in the Canyon quite easily. Todd occupied the enormous master bedroom which had (as Maxine had boasted) an extraordinary view down the Canyon. On clear days, of which there were many in that early March, Todd could sit at his window and watch the ocean, glittering beyond the towers of Century City. On exceptional days, he could even make out the misty shape of Catalina Island.

Marco had taken a much smaller bedroom on the floor below, with an adjacent sitting room, and did much as he had in the Bel Air home: that is, served with uncanny prescience the needs of his boss, and having provided such services as were required, then retreated into near-invisibility.

The area was much quieter than Bel Air. There seemed to be no through traffic on the single road that wound up through the Canyon, so apart from the occasional sound of a police helicopter passing over, or a siren drifting up from Sunset, Todd heard nothing from the city that lay such a short distance below. What he did hear, at night, were coyotes, who seemed to haunt the slopes of the Canyon in significant numbers. On some nights, standing on one of the many balconies of his new mansion nursing a drink and a cigarette, he would hear a lone animal begin its urgent yapping on the opposite slope of the Canyon, only to hear its call answered from another spot, then another, the din rising into a whooping chorus from the darkness all around him, so that it seemed the entire Canyon was alive with them. They'd had coyotes up in Bel Air too, of course. Their proximity to the house would always send Dempsey into a frenzy of deep-chest barking, as though to announce that the dog of the house was much larger than he was, in reality.

"I'm surprised we've got so many coyotes up here," Marco said, after one particularly noisy night. "You'd think they'd go somewhere with a lot more garbage. I mean, they're scavengers, right?"

"Maybe they like it here," Todd observed.

"Yeah, I guess."

"There's no people to fuck with them."

"Except us."

"We won't be here long," Todd said.

"You don't sound too happy about that."

"Well I guess I could get used to it here."

"Have you been up on the ridge yet?"

"No. I haven't had the energy."

"You should go up there. Take a look. There's quite a view."

The exchange, brief as it was, put the thought of a trip up the hill into Todd's head. He needed to start exercising again, as Maxine had pointed out, or he was going to find that his face was all nicely healed up and his body had gone to fat. He didn't believe for a minute that his face was anywhere near being healed, but he took her point. He was drinking too much and eating too many Elvis Midnight Specials (peanut butter, jelly, crispy bacon and sliced banana on Wonder Bread sandwiches, deep fried in butter) for the good of his waistline. His pants were feeling tight, and his ass—when he glimpsed it in the mirror—was looking fleshy.

In a while he'd have to get back to some serious training: start running every morning; maybe have his gym equipment brought over from the Bel Air house and installed in the guest-house. But in the meantime he'd ease back into the swing of things with a few exploratory walks: one of which, he promised himself, would be up to the top of the hill, to see what the view was like when you got to the end of the road.

Burrows and Nurse Karyn came every other day to change the dressings and assess the condition of his face. Though Burrows claimed that the healing process was going well, his manner remained subdued and cautious: it was clear that the whole sorry business had taken a toll upon his confidence. His sun-bed tan could not conceal a certain sickliness in his pallor; and the skin around his eyes and mouth, taut from a series of tucks and tightenings, had an unnatural rigidity to it, like a teak mask under which another, more fragile, man was trapped. Superficially, he remained unfailingly optimistic about Todd's prognosis; he was certain there would be no permanent scarring. Indeed he was even willing to chance the opinion that things were going to work out "as planned," and that Todd was going to emerge from the whole experience looking ten years younger.

"So how long is it going to be before I can take off the bandages?"

“Another week, I'd say."

“And after that. .. how long before I'm back to normal again?"

"I don't want to make any promises," Burrows said, "but inside a month. Is there some great urgency here?"

"Yeah, I want people to see me. I want them to know I'm not dead."

"Surely nobody believes that," Burrows said.

Todd summoned Marco. "Where are those tabloids you brought in?" he asked. "The doctor's not been reading the trash in his waiting-room recently."

Marco left the room and reappeared with five magazines, dropping them on the table beside Burrows. The top one had a blurred, black-and-white photograph of a burial procession, obviously taken with an extremely long-distance lens. The headline read: Superstar Todd Pickett Buried in Secret Ceremony. The magazine beneath had an unsmiling picture of Todd's ex-girlfriend, Wilhemina Bosch, and announced, as though from her grieving lips: "I never even had a chance to tell him good-bye." And underneath, a third magazine boasted that it contained Todd Pickett's Last Words! "I saw Christ standing at his death-bed, claims nurse." Burrows didn't bother with the others.

"Who starts bullshit like this?"

"You tell me," Todd replied.

"I hope you're not implying that it was somebody in my surgery, because I assure you we've been vigorous—"

"Yeah, yeah, yeah," Todd said. "You're not responsible for anything. I know. See? I finally got smart. I read the small print."

"Frankly, I don't see where your problem lies. All you'd have to do is make one call, tell them who you are, and the rumors would be laid to rest."

"And what would he say?" Marco asked.

"It's obvious. He'd say: I'm Todd Pickett and I'm alive and well, thank you very much."

"And then what ?" Todd said. "When they want to come to take a photograph to confirm that everything's fine? Or they want an interview, face-to-face. Face. To. Face. With this ?"

His face was presently unbandaged. He stood up and went to the mirror. "I look like I went ten rounds with a heavyweight."

"I can only assure you that the swelling is definitely going down. It's just going to take time. And the quality of the new epidermis is first-rate. I believe you're going to be very pleased at the end of everything."

Todd said nothing for a moment. Then, with a kind of simple sincerity he'd seldom—if ever—achieved in front of a camera, he turned and said to Burrows: "You know what I wish?" Burrows shook his head. "I wish I'd never laid eyes on you, you dickhead."