Long Shot by Paul Monette Page B

made only one mistake.
    Meanwhile, four sympathetic suicides—all of them thin young women—were laid to the Jasper Cokes affair in the course of the first day. It wasn’t clear whether they died because they agreed the world was awful, or whether the knowledge that their particular star was gay had sent them over the edge. When at last the police came lumbering down the hall to Harry Dawes’s apartment, they found it wall to wall with neighbors, all of whom swore the door was broken open when they got there. Nobody really cared. There was nothing to steal.
    At Universal, a couple of jumpy executives scrambled around in the editing rooms and scooped up every scrap of The Broken Trail . This they locked in a vault, with an armed guard dressed like a chocolate soldier. The film’s director, Maxim Brearley, announced to the press (before he went into seclusion) that all of Jasper’s tortured final days were there to see in the picture.
    Of course, you could hardly find an out-of-work actor who didn’t have a story to peddle as to the kinks of Jasper Cokes. But most of the dirt was going to have to wait. In the followup work, they’d prove how his whole life reeked of death and the drift into moral corrosion. At present, the media had all it could do to bury him. Or, as it turned out, to burn him up.
    It seemed he’d remarked to Vivien once that he wanted his ashes buried high in the hills at Steepside. Just like Abner Willis, who’d always had a horror of ending up another stone in a graveyard. At the time, Vivien simply laughed it off as one of Jasper’s ironies. They were eating a mound of crab in the Cecil Beaton suite at the St. Regis, looking out of a big round window down the length of Fifth. Jasper had always been uncommitted, to place above all else. He didn’t seem to require a permanent home. He preferred hotels. So when he spoke that night of a bare and windy grave site, she thought he was saying the opposite. Why would he care about afterwards? He’d had all his candy on this side.
    But when they got together to iron out details, they found he’d made the same remark to Carl and Artie, too, years ago in a low-life bar miles from the nearest cemetery. They saw now that he must have meant exactly what he said. Ashes in the hills was the order of the day. It was only then, when Vivien gave the nod to release these plans to the press, that she first began to see herself as one of three around Jasper Cokes. She’d always thought of them before as three against Carl and his bloodless deals, though here it was she who usually stood and fought. Jasper and Artie tended to be amenable. Furthermore, she always supposed that if anyone split the group, it would be she. But now it appeared the mathematics were over her head.
    They settled on a sunset service for Thursday the sixth, and decided to keep the mourners down to five, forestalling the overland invasion of the press by inviting the lady dean of the anchormen to film it from a hundred feet away. This was not enough for the swollen crowd at the bottom of the hill. By Wednesday noon, the police had pegged it at forty-five hundred. The boulevard up through Beverly Glen from Sunset to Mulholland Drive was all but impassable. Most had come expecting to file by an open coffin, thus to wail at the frailty of life. At the very least, they expected to watch a fleet of limos pass in and out. An urn let into the earth with only five in attendance seemed to them a lousy piece of theater. As the numbers grew on the boulevard, they put on a show of their own.
    The downhill gate was abandoned, except for security traffic and the delivery of goods. In addition, Vivien dismissed the helicopter within hours of her arrival, as being too noisy and disorienting. So whenever she and Carl and Artie left the estate, they were forced to go on horseback. Down the steep and narrow trail on the canyon side, where there wasn’t any road,