Damn it, Wes Richer thought. I like Dylan. Why’d somebody want to go and do that to my record? He smiled and took a drag off the fat joint that was slowly burning down between his fingers. Doesn’t matter, he reassured himself. I can buy another one tomorrow. He looked around the room through glazed blue eyes. Stellar. One fucking whale of a stellar party. Tonight he felt he had the answer to a question that had plagued him for most of his twenty-five years. The simple question was addressed to God: Whose side are You on, anyway? As he regarded the glowing eye of his joint, he knew he had the answer right in his back pocket, just arrived in a Cosmic Fortune Cookie: Your side, Wes. God is on your side.
But He hadn’t always been, Wes thought. Damn straight. He fashioned an image of God in his mind—an elderly, slightly doddering being in a white London Fog overcoat with a gold muffler to chase away the chill of the high altitude. God would look suspiciously like Wes Richer in his “old man in the park” bit, and—yeah, give the bit a kick—God might talk a little like a tired Jewish, vacuum cleaner salesman: “Wesley, I got a lot to do, I can’t get around to everybody! Who do you think I am, Santa Claus? There’s this guy over in New Jersey wants to get away with a little cheating on the taxes; a lady in Chicago keeps after Me to send her lost dog home, but the mutt got run over by a bus; a pimply kid in Des Moines wants to pass a history test or he’s completely vermisched; this fella in Palm Springs wants Me to keep his wife from finding out he’s got three women on the side…everybody wants something, Wes! And that’s just right down there in the US of A! What am I, Dear Abby? And you, Wes! You keep wanting to know whose side I’m on, and why your last pilot went down the tubes, and why you can’t win anymore at the blackjack tables! Gevult, what a mess down there! I slap My own hands! Okay, okay, so maybe if I help you out, you’ll quit bugging Me so I can get on to bigger things? Okay, boom, there you go! Happy now? So enjoy it already!”
God had come through for him today; this afternoon he’d won over two-thousand bucks betting on Alabama over USC, and the premiere of his new show, “Sheer Luck” looked good in its seven-thirty spot on ABC. At least everybody here had laughed in the right places and applauded when it was over. And then the party had really started.
The Cars were thundering away now, and from his chair Wes could see some people swimming bare-assed down at the pool. He laughed out loud, his bright Midwestern face crinkling with mirth; he was a medium-sized man with a curly thatch of reddish-brown hair and thick eyebrows that also seemed curly, set high over light blue eyes that, when not totally bloodshot from drugs, seemed more like a kid’s eyes. He had a healthy, friendly, innocent look—a “safe look” one of the ABC executives had dubbed it. It was a look that drew teenie-boppers and at the same time assured Mom and Dad that he was really an okay guy, probably a class cut-up but nothing to worry about. Like the assessment from another ABC brain—“an All-American comedian.”
Someone jostled his elbow, spilling ashes onto the dirty carpet. Wes looked up and smiled but couldn’t tell who was standing there. He thought for an instant that it was his father because the man had a mane of silver hair, but of course it couldn’t be his father—he was back home in Nebraska, fast asleep at this hour. “There you are, Wes!” the man said. “I’ve been hunting all over this place for you! I missed the show, but I heard you were really great in it” A hand found Wes’s and squeezed it. “The show’s got stellar written all over it, boy. Good to see you again.”
“Who are you?” Wes asked, still smiling and thinking about those fools in the pool who were freezing their nuts off because no one had turned on the heat.
The man’s head was split in half by teeth. “Good to see you again, Wes. Great party!” And then he was gone, swallowed up into the crowd that swirled around the chair where Wes sat smoking.
I don’t know that guy, do I? he wondered. Jesus! Where did all these people come from? He looked around but didn’t seem to recognize any of them. Who were they? What the hell. They were all friends, or friends of friends. Or somebody’s fucking friends! In another moment a couple of young women were standing over him, one in a violet dress, her breasts spilling over the top. He stared at those breasts, still smiling easily, while the two girls chattered on about how good “Sheer Luck” had been and how they’d never ever been to a party anywhere near this fine, not even at Hef’s place. Who the hell were these girls? One of them—he wasn’t sure which—put a hand on his knee and slipped a little white card into the pocket of his blue Ralph Lauren cowboy shirt. He knew it would have her name and phone number on it in elegant black script; everybody carried those around these days, it was essential to the wardrobe.
He caught a glimpse of her Ultra-Brite smile before the party closed in around him again. A group called 1994 hammered away on the stereo now, Karen Lawrence’s lead vocals making the windows shake. Christ, what a set of pipes! Wes thought languidly. He stared down at the reefer and said to himself, “You’ve hit, Wes. You’ve come back. God…is…on…your…side.”
“Wes?” someone said, gripping his shoulder. He looked up and saw his manager, Jimmy Kline, standing over him; Jimmy’s broad face looked beatific, his dark eyes shining like little black buttons behind his wire-frame glasses. There were two older men with Jimmy—Wes recognized one of them as Harv Chappell, an exec at Arista Records. Wes tried to stand up, but Jimmy pushed him back down. “Stay right there, my man,” Jimmy said in his thick Brooklyn accent. “You know Harv Chappell, don’t you? And Max Beckworth? They liked the show, Wes. Every-fuckin’-body liked the show!”
“It was great, Wes,” Harv said, smiling.
“Fantastic. Three seasons at least,” Max said, smiling.
Wes nodded. “Hope so. You men need a drink, something to get mellow on?”
“We’re going to be talking record contract with Arista on Monday,” Jimmy said, his eyes getting brighter and brighter. The Hawaiian print shirt he was wearing, a wild mixture of purples and oranges, seemed to glow in the dim, living-room light. “How’s that grab you?”
“Great, just great.”
“Of course,”—Jimmy turned to smile at the Arista execs, “we’ll be negotiating with Warner’s and A&M, too. You know Mike Steele over at A&M, don’t you, Max? He’s talking six figures on a single record deal with options.”
Max shrugged. “Comedy records are risky,” he said, glancing around the room to take stock of who was there. “Only Steve Martin and Robin Williams turn a profit these days, sometimes Richard Pryor if his material appeals to the kids. It’s just too easy to take a bath with comedy these days.”
“Baths? Who’s talking about taking fucking baths? I’m talking about mass appeal, man, everybody from Farmer Jones to the punk crowd. Wes covers all the bases.”
“We’ll see, Jimmy. Let’s wait for the ratings on ‘Sheer Luck,’ shall we?”
“Yeah, yeah. Uh…Wes, where’s Solange?”
“I don’t know,” Wes said. “She was here a few minutes ago.”
“The hospitality bowls are going dry. I’m going to get Joey to fill ’em up, okay?”
Wes smiled and nodded. “Sure. Anything you want to do. ‘Sheer Luck’ was pretty good, wasn’t it?”
“Good? It was terrific! It’ll be leading the schedule in three weeks!”
Wes reached up and caught Jimmy’s arm as he and the Arista men started to move away. “Don’t bullshit me,” Wes said quietly. “It was good, wasn’t it?”
“Stellar,” Jimmy said; he flashed a quick smile and was gone.
God is on my side, Wes thought, relaxing again. And then: Solange? Where the hell is she? He rose unsteadily from the chair, and immediately a path cleared before him. Hands clapped him on the back, faces mouthed words he couldn’t hear. He wandered around looking for Solange, the last of his reefer crumbling in ashes to the floor.
A moment later he found her, sitting with a group of people on the long, dark brown sofa near the center of the room. She was drinking white wine from a crystal goblet, her long b
rown fingers curved delicately around the stem. On a low table in front of her, three candles burned in brass holders, the golden light setting amber fire to her skin, glittering in the black pools of her slightly almond-shaped eyes. A backgammon board and a huge vase of dried flowers had been cleared away to make room for a Ouija board; Solange was staring at the white planchette as she drank her wine, her gaze at once vacant and intense. A few people sat around her, smoking pot and drinking wine, looking from Solange’s beautiful, sculpted, Oriental-African face to the board. “Come on, Solange,” Wes heard one of the men say. “Do it for us. Call up…oh…call up Marilyn Monroe or somebody.”
Solange smiled faintly. “You want party games. You don’t want to be serious,” she said in a voice as cool as the October wind.
“We’ll be serious,” the guy said, but he was smiling too widely. “Promise. Come on, call up…Sharon Tate…”
“Oh, Christ, no!” a girl with long, shimmering waves of blond hair said, her eyes terror-stricken; Wes recognized her from the current NBC hit, “Skate Fever.”
“How about Oswald?” somebody else said, blowing on a stick of jasmine incense just to make the sparks fly. “That fucker’ll talk to anybody.”
“Clifton Webb.” The NBC starlet slid over closer to the Ouija board but seemed afraid to touch it. “I hear he’s prowling around again.”
“No.” Solange looked into a candle, her cat eyes narrowing. The candle flame flickered very gently. “I don’t think I want to do this tonight. Not here, not with everyone standing around.” The light glittered off the hundred or so tiny brass beads strung in the tight braids of her ebony hair. “The spirits won’t answer if the mood isn’t right.”
“What’s wrong with the mood?” the guy who wanted to talk to Oswald asked; he waved the incense stick around, his glazed eyes hypnotized. “Seems fine to me. Do it, Solange. Call somebody up for us.”
“The spirits don’t like to be laughed at.” She sipped at the wine but did not move her gaze from the candle’s flame. From where he stood, Wes could see the flame undulating very slowly, and a sudden chill skittered down his spine. It was the same kind of chill he’d felt when he’d first looked into Solange’s eyes in the Presidential Suite of the Las Vegas Hilton almost a year ago.
“I’ve got it, luv,” the thin young man sitting on Solange’s left said. He was Martin Blue, the British whiz-kid who’d produced Wes’s first comedy album for Warner’s over three years ago. Blue smiled like a fox. “Conjure up…oh, what was his name?…Kronsteen. Orlon Kronsteen.”
The NBC starlet—Missy something, Wes thought her name was—laughed nervously. There was a moment of silence while the party swirled around the group at the table; Wes thought they looked afraid, all except Solange who wasn’t smiling anymore.
Time to save her ass, he thought and stepped forward into the candlelight. “What is this?” he said, his voice somewhat slurred. “Ghost stories? It’s not Halloween yet, kiddies.”
“Hi there, Wes,” Martin Blue said. “We’re trying to get your woman here to conjure us up…”
“I don’t conjure,” Solange said softly.
“Yeah, I heard all this bullshit.” Wes plopped himself down on the sofa and stretched. “You want to talk to Kronsteen so bad, Martin, why don’t you hike on up to that little fortress he built and give out a yell? He’ll probably come floating out with his head in his hand.”
“Oh, don’t!” Missy said and squirmed in her seat “Wasn’t he that old actor who…?”
“Horror flick actor,” Wes corrected her. “Made about a hundred of ’em. Enough to get rich on, at least. They still play some of them on Creature Features.”
“What happened to him?” she asked, looking at Martin and Solange, then back to Wes.
“Kronsteen married a European heiress he met on location. It turned out she had cancer, leukemia, something like that; after she died, he went a little nuts and used the rest of their money to bring that castle over from Europe. About ten or eleven years ago, somebody stripped old Kronsteen naked up there, tortured him with cigarettes and a hot poker, and hung his corpse up from a chandelier when they were through. Oh, yeah, whoever did it cut Kronsteen’s head off with a rusty hacksaw and took it with ’em when they left. One of the legends of Hollywood, my dear, guaranteed to send you out shopping for an electrified fence or a couple of guard dogs.”
Missy shivered, and the guy next to her, the incense waver, took her hand.
“So you see?” Wes continued, his eyes scanning the group, “there are a lot of Roaches in this town, a lot of homicidal nuts, and some of them would just love to go running around up here in Bel Air with a machete or an icepick. Sooner or later all us celebs have to wall ourselves in.”
“You’re kidding me. That’s not true about Kronsteen…about his head.”
“God’s truth, luv,” Martin said with a pleasant smile. He turned back to Solange, who was passing a finger back and forth through the flame. “Let’s hear from Orlon, luv. If you can do it. If you’re really a medium.”
“Knock it off,” Wes said. “This is a party, not a goddamned séance.”
“Oh, but séances can be so much fun. And so informative. Maybe Orlon can tell us who the Roach is. A ghost can see everything, can’t he?” He glanced at his gold Rolex. “Two minutes until midnight. The witching hour, eh?”
“Martin,” Wes said sourly, “you’ve got your head up your ass.” But when he looked at Solange, she was staring intensely, right through him.
“There is no need to call those who are already here,” Solange whispered.
“Huh? What’d she say?” Martin leaned forward, but for a minute or so Solange didn’t speak. Finally she whispered softly, “You’re a fool, Martin. You want to play games with something beyond your understanding. The spirits see and know everything, and they are always here—in the shadow of a candle, at the center of its flame, stirring like smoke through the air. They are always trying to break through, to speak to those of us on this plane. Though most often we would not like what they have to say.” She turned the full force of her gaze on Martin Blue.
“Well,” he said, but his voice had climbed a pitch. “What are we waiting for? Let’s find out who the Roach is, shall we? Or at least what happened to Mr. Kronsteen’s head.”
Solange glanced at Wes through heavy-lidded eyes. “Very well,” she said softly. “Wes, will you sit beside me and help me guide the planchette?”
“How about letting me?” Martin asked quickly. “I’ve heard tales of your being able to do this sort of thing, but…I’d like to be sure it isn’t faked. No offense of course, luv.”
“Of course. None taken. Then slide over here so you’ll be touching me, thigh to thigh. Now place your fingertips on the planchette opposite mine. That’s too heavily, you have to let your fingers just graze the top of it. Ah. Better.” She closed her eyes and smiled slightly. “I can feel the electricity already.”
“I don’t feel a fucking thing,” Martin announced to the others.
“Solange,” Wes said, “you don’t have to prove…”
“I think I do. You’re pressing again, Martin. Let your fingers relax.”
Wes looked around; for the first time he realized that a lot of people had gathered around them and were watching with interest. The thunderous sound of the stereo had quieted to a dull rumble; the grand piano was silent.
“It’s too loud in here. I can’t concentrate,” Solange said. A mumble rippled through the audience, and the stereo went off. Wes could hear drunken laughter from the pool. He leaned back on the sofa, watching Solange’s brown face turn dreamy; Martin was smiling, mugging at people who stood around him.
“I don’t think I like…” Missy began nervously. But Solange hissed, “Quiet!” From somewhere in the distance Wes thought he could hear the shrill pipings of wind through the Bel Air streets, over the manicured lawns and brick walls and wrought-iron gates, around the sharp angles of the million-dollar mansions. Solange’
s eyes had narrowed into slits; they rolled back until Wes could see the whites, and her mouth slowly opened. Missy gasped suddenly, and the gasp was repeated through the room. Wes felt his heartbeat quickening and wished he had another joint. “My mind is open,” Solange said in an odd, faraway tone just above a whisper. “The pathway is open. Use us as your voice. My mind is open. The pathway is open. Use us as your voice…”
“Shall I intone anything?” Martin said. He laughed, but no one paid any attention.
“…pathway is open. Use us as your voice. My mind is…”