Expiration Date (17 page)

Curaçao was some orange-flavored liqueur, he believed. He couldn’t recall ever having drunk any, and it probably wouldn’t complement a cheeseburger, but for a moment he envied all the people who had the option of choosing that breakfast, and who would be able to taste it.

He sighed, picked up a cellophane bag, and shook half-a-dozen Eat-’Em-&-Weep balls—red-hot cinnamon jawbreaker candies—into a coffeepot, filled it with water from the faucet he had piped in last year, and put it on a hot plate to brew; then he lowered his considerable bulk into his easy chair and unfolded the newspaper.

The front section he read cursorily—Ross Perot was back in the presidential race, claiming that he had only dropped out three months ago because Bush’s people were supposedly planning to wreck his daughter’s wedding; “Electrified Rail Lines Would Energize Edison’s Profits”; a Bel-Air couple named Parganas had been found tortured and killed in their home, and police were searching for their son, whose name Shadroe didn’t bother to puzzle out but seemed to be something like Patootie, poor kid; country singer Roger Miller had died at fifty-six—that was too bad, Shadroe had met him a few times in the sixties, and he’d seemed like a nice guy. He was about to toss it and pick up the Metro section when he noticed something in a little box on the front page:

FANS SEARCHING FOR “SPOOKY” FROM OLD SITCOM

There was also the telephone number of a Find Spooky hotline.

Solomon Shadroe put down the front section of the paper and, with a steady hand, poured some of his Eat-’Em-&-Weep tea into a coffee cup. The dissolved candies gave the stuff the bright red color of transmission fluid. After a long sip he chewed up a couple of fresh ones out of the bag. The jawbreakers, and the tea he brewed from them, were all he had eaten and drunk for seventeen years. He never turned on the light when he went to the bathroom here, nor in the head on his boat.

Heavy footsteps clumped overhead, letting him know that Johanna was up. He reached across the table for his long-handled broom and, squinting upward to find an undented section of the plaster, thumped the end of the broom against the ceiling. Faintly he heard her yell some acknowledgment.

He put the broom down and fished a little flat can of Goudie Scottish snuff out of a pile of receipts on the desk. He twisted the cap until the holes in the rim were lined up, then shook some of the brown powder onto the back of his hand and effortfully snorted it up his nose. He couldn’t smell or taste the stuff anymore, of course, but it was still a comforting habit.

He glanced at the three stuffed pigs he had set up on the empty bookshelves in here. They weren't burping right now, at least.

Can she find me, he thought. I live on water…but she lives right over there on the
Queen Mary
. I make Johanna do all the shopping, and anyway deLarava wouldn’t be likely to recognize me these days. And she’d have a hard time tracking me—when I do drive, my car always points off to the left of wherever I’m really going. Still, I’d better take some measures. It would be hard at my age and in my condition to find another slip for the boat, and it’d probably be impossible ever again to get out to the Hollywood Cemetery and visit the old man’s grave—though even now I don’t dare sweep the dust and leaves off the marker.

When the knock came at the door he clomped his uninjured foot twice on the floor, and Johanna let herself in.

Shadroe inhaled. “Draw me a bath, sweetie,” he said levelly, “and put ice in it.” Again he drew air into his lungs. “Today I gotta start re-wiring the units, and then I think I’ll re-pipe the downstairs ones so the water’s going north instead of south.” His voice had gone reedy, and he paused to take in more air. “If I can find the ladder, I think I’ll rearrange all the TV antennas later in the week.”

Johanna brushed back her long black hair. “What for you wanna do that, lover?” The seams of her orange leotards had burst at the hips, and she scratched at a bulge
of tattooed skin. “After the painting men the other month—your tenants are gonna go crazy.”

“Tell ’em…tell ’em November rent’s on me. They’ve put up with worse.”
Gasp.
“As to why—look at this.” He bent down with a grunt and picked up the front section of the paper. “Here,” he whispered, pointing out the article. “I need to change the hydraulic and electromagnetic…”
Gasp. “…fingerprint
of this place again.”

She read it slowly, moving her lips. “Oh, baby!” she finally said in dismay. She crossed to his chair and knelt and hugged him. He patted her hair three times and then let his hand drop. “Why can’t she forget about you?”

“I’m the only one,” he said patiently, “who knows who she is.”

“Couldn’t you…
blackmail
her? Say you’ve put the eddivence in a box in a bank, and if you die the noosepapers will get it?”

“—I suppose,” said Shadroe, staring at the dark TV screen. It was set on CBS, channel 2, with the brightness turned all the way down to blessedly featureless black. “But nobody thought it was…murder, even at the time.” He yawned so widely that pink tears ran down his gray cheeks. “What I
should
do,” he went on, “is go to her office when she’s there”—he paused to inhale again—“and then take a nap in the waiting room.”

“Oh, baby, no! All those innocent people!”

Too exhausted to speak anymore, Shadroe just waved his hand dismissingly.

—Lewis Carroll,
Through the Looking-Glass

F
F
you follow the Long Beach Freeway south from the 405, the old woman thought, you’re behind L.A.’s scenes. To your left is a scattered line of bowing tan grasshoppers that are oil-well pumping units, with the machined-straight Los Angeles River beyond, and to your right, train tracks parallel you across a narrow expanse of scrub-brush dirt. High-voltage cables are strung from the points of big steel asterisks atop the power poles, and the fenced-in yards beyond the tracks are crowded with unmoored boxcars. It’s all just supply, with no dressing-up. Even when the freeway breaks up and you’re on Harbor Scenic Drive, the lanes are scary with roaring trucks pulling big semitrailers, and the horizon to your right is clawed with the skeletal towers of the quayside cranes. The air smells of crude oil, though by now you can probably see the ocean.

Loretta deLarava sighed and wondered, not for the first time, what the stark logo on the cranes stood for—
ITS
was stenciled in giant black letters on each of them, easily readable across the water from where she stood high up on the Promenade Deck of the
Queen Mary.

Its?
she thought.
What’s?
Will
it
be coming back for its branded children one of these days? She imagined some foghorn call throbbing in from the sea, and the cranes all ponderously lifting their cagelike arms in obedient worship.

She gripped the rail of the open deck and looked straight down. A hundred feet below her, the narrow channel between the
Queen Mary
and the concrete dock was bridged by mooring lines and electric cables and orange hoses wide enough for a kid to crawl through. Down there to her left the dock crowded right up against the black cliff of the hull, and the morning shift was unloading boxes from trucks. Faintly, over the shouts of the seagulls, she could hear the men’s impatient voices, not far enough away below.

The mechanics of supply and waste disposal, she thought. Always there, if you look.

She turned away from the southward view and looked along the worn teak deck, and she took another bite of the half pound of walnut fudge she’d just bought. In a few hours the deck would be crowded with tourists, all wearing shorts even in October, with their noisy kids, stumbling around dripping ice cream on the deck and gaping at the glassed-in displays of the first-class staterooms and wondering what the bidets were for. They wouldn’t recognize elegance, she thought, if it walked up and bit them in the ass.

During World War II the
Queen Mary
had been a troopship, and the first-class swimming pool had been drained and stacked with bunks, all the way up to the arched ceiling. Before that, in the thirties, the ceiling had been lined with mother-of-pearl, so that guests seemed to be swimming under a magically glittering sky; but the top shelf of soldiers had picked it all away, and now the ceiling was just white tile.

She tried to imagine the ship crowded with men in army uniforms, and trestle tables and folding chairs jamming the pillared first-class dining room under the tall mural of the Atlantic, on which two little crystal ships day by day were supposed to trace the paths of the
Queen Mary
and the
Queen Elizabeth.
The crystal ships had probably been stopped in those days, with around-the-clock shifts of soldiers inattentively eating Spam below.

The unconsidered life, she thought as she took another bite of the fudge, is not worth living. And in spite of herself she wondered if the soldiers would have considered her.

The tourists didn’t. The tourists didn’t know that she lived aboard, on B Deck, in one of the nicest staterooms; they just thought she was another of themselves, fatter than most. And sometimes older.

Such tourists as might be around on this upcoming Saturday would at least see her in a position of some importance, when she would be directing the filming of her
Ship of Ghosts
feature aboard the ship.

Her scalp itched, and she scratched carefully over her ear.

It was time to be starting for the studio. She wrapped up the end of the fudge-brick in the waxed paper it had been served on, tucked it into her big canvas purse, and started walking toward the elevators. She had of course been careful to leave the door of her stateroom not-quite-closed, so that a push would open it, and today there was a big, diamond-studded 18-carat gold bangle on the bedside table, right where the light from the porthole would show it off. Attractive to a thief, and too heavy for a ghost. And the doors of the Lexus in the parking lot were unlocked, with the key in the ignition. Maybe today she would wind up having to rent a car to drive to work in—there was an Avis counter in the lobby area of the ship.

O
N
H
ALLOWEEN
of 1967 the
Queen Mary
had made her last departure from England; and for these past twenty-five years the world’s grandest ocean liner had
been moored at the Port of Los Angeles in Long Beach, a hotel and tourist attraction now. The Cunard line had sold her to the city for 3.2 million dollars, and had insisted that the boilers be removed so that the ship could never again sail under her own power.

Under another name Loretta deLarava had sailed aboard her in 1958, and had once danced with Robert Mitchum in the exclusive Verandah Grill at the stern, where you never ordered from the menu; the head waiter, Colin Kitching, would find you at lunch and ask what you’d like for dinner, and you could order anything you could think of, and they’d have it ready by eight.

The Verandah Grill now served hamburgers and Cokes and beer, and anybody on earth could get in. The tables and benches now were contoured sheets of vinyl-covered particleboard, and the floor was hard black rubber, with a herringbone pattern of bumps on it so people wouldn’t slip on the french fries.