He sat on the curb, head in his hands, almost in tears. All his planning, his hope, his chance, gone. Claudia must have found out he was having an affair. She’d have searched through his BlackBerry, looking for a name or phone number. The passwords to the accounts were in the PDA. And it wouldn’t have been too hard for her to figure them out, as she’d chided him more than once that he used his mother’s maiden name, his favorite movie, or his father’s nickname way too often.
He sighed, and as if trudging through wet cement, he returned to his car. Driving aimlessly, he realized he wasn’t going home. Roger knew Nanette wouldn’t tell the cops anything since she risked trouble if he was arrested. But that nosy neighbor might have noted his license number. And for all he knew, the law was running his plate now.
He drove, alone and deliberate in his thoughts.
What if Claudia had a boyfriend? Had she run away with some young stud she met at the gym or that class she took at UCLA last year? Had she played him for the fool all along? Nanette’s phone numbers were in his PDA. Claudia was smart, she’d put it together and hadn’t given anything away. She’d waited until he’d amassed enough, and then took it from him like a vandal sacking a village.
He slowed near the 10 freeway and Fairfax Avenue. He hadn’t allowed himself to imagine the depth of the disgust she’d feel once it was known he’d stolen money and run off with another woman. But now
he
could be the hero. At least he could have that over Claudia.
“Your mother has done us wrong, Janice,” he told her after reaching her at home on one of his cell phones. He’d crawled through the hole in the cyclone fence to get down to Ballona Creek. It was an old tributary of water dating back to the days of the
ranchos
in this once small pueblo. But like everything else in this city, the creek was walled in with concrete. Ballona ran under the Fairfax Avenue overpasses from the freeway and meandered west for nine miles or so to the Pacific.
“What are you talking about?” his daughter replied. Then he heard a knock and a muffled voice. “Dad, there’s a man at the door saying he’s from the police. What’s going on?”
“Tell him your mother’s run off with another man.” Hell, maybe it was true.
“Dad, what are you—”
“It’s okay, sweetheart. She’ll get hers. I’m going to find her. I’m going to make sure she doesn’t get away with this.” He hung up and smashed both of his cell phones against the concrete walls of the creek. There were ways of tracking you with those things.
Roger started jogging through the shallow water, which barely splashed above his dress shoes. In nearby Culver City, there was a bike path that paralleled Ballona. He and Claudia and Janice had ridden it many times out to Marina del Rey. Tonight it wasn’t for recreation that he would travel it—this was his lifeline. He picked up his pace, arms pumping, legs churning. Ahead, in the dark at the curve of the concrete wall, something disturbed the water. Roger didn’t slow down. Be it a possum or human predator, he didn’t care. He was on a mission. Claudia would not escape him.
In the morning he awoke in the stale motel room with its walls bleached of color and greasy cracked windows. He took the toiletry items out of the black plastic bag from the 7-Eleven. Overhead yet another plane rattled the threadbare room. In the few pieces left of the broken mirror over the rust-stained sink, he studied his face while he lathered.
Wasn’t there more gray in those whiskers today? The bags more pronounced? And wasn’t that some gray edging into his temples? No matter. He had big things to do. Razor poised, having lubricated his stubble for the requisite five minutes, Roger Crumbler considered his shave.
THE GIRL WHO KISSED BARNABY JONES
BY
S
COTT
P
HILLIPS
Pacific Palisades
I
t’s 2:30 in the morning and I’m all alone closing down Burberry’s when my cell goes off. The caller ID says it’s Cherie, which probably means a conflict with tomorrow’s schedule, but I pick up anyway.
“Hi, Tate. I need you to help me out with something.”
“Right now?”
“Are you almost done closing?”
“Fifteen minutes.”
“Can you come out to Pacific Palisades when you’re done?”
“I guess so.” I live in Koreatown, so the Palisades is miles out of my way; like half the guys who walk into Burberry’s, though, I have a great big boner with Cherie’s name on it, and if she asked me to shovel shit I’d ask her how fast she needed it shoveled. “Where, exactly?”
She gives me an address in the highlands accompanied by minutely detailed instructions, including a warning to park at the base of the street. I rush through the rest of the closing process and on the way out buy a package of condoms from the machine in the men’s room, dropping an extra fifty cents for the strawberry-flavored ones. When I set the alarm my hands are cold with sweat, and pressing a finger to my wrist I clock my pulse at eighty. Thirty-four years old and I feel like a teenager heading to the prom with a diabolical cross between the homecoming queen and a middle-aged hooker.
It broke a hundred in the Valley today for the fifth day in a row, but the night air is cool and quiet. I pull my old Saturn onto the westbound 101, so nearly deserted at a quarter to 3:00 that I hate to merge onto the 405 after a mere three exits. The 405 is even better, though, ten lanes of empty, untrammeled joy; I’ve had flying dreams that were less spiritually nourishing, and I’m not even speeding. Well before 3:00 I’m headed west on Sunset toward the Palisades, window rolled down for the breeze on my neck and bare arms.
The shops and restaurants of the village are dark as I pass through, the only moving vehicle in sight an LAPD cruiser that crosses in front of me just before my right turn onto Via de la Paz. At the crest, the cruiser turns left and I turn right, taking it slow, careful not to miss any of the indicated streets. The house is at the top of a nearly vertical, circular one, and when I park the Saturn at the bottom I make sure the hand brake is on and the wheels turned out.
Cherie is the ur—cocktail waitress, tall and leggy with hair dyed blond, hanging straight with an inward flip just below her jawline, and looking at her face and body you wouldn’t take her for more than forty.
In which case you’d be wrong. She came to L.A. from East Lansing, Michigan to be an actress back in the ’70s. Knowing that, you might take her for the embodiment of a cliché—prettiest girl in some provincial town comes to L.A. with dreams of stardom, never gets a part, ends up bitter and old, taking drink orders in the Valley—but here again you’d be wrong: Cherie did make it for a while. On cable you can still catch her in old episodes of
Starsky and Hutch
and
Barnaby Jones
, and at least one
Columbo
(in which she plays—unconvincingly—a cocktail waitress). Once in my presence she made the unlikely claim that she was the producers’ first choice for the Linda Evans part in
Dynasty
, and Dean Berg, who tends bar in the afternoons, swears she did an episode of the original
Star Trek
. While we all cherished the thought of her in one of those short red uniforms with the leather boots, when he repeated the claim in front of her, she busted a gasket and said she didn’t even come out here until years after the show went off the air. When Cherie’s annoyed she clenches her teeth, and she’s spent so much of her life in a state of annoyance that the muscles lining her cheeks actually bulge outward. Her jaw didn’t unlock for three days after that.
We get guys all the time with crushes on her, some of them very young; they come in on a daily basis for months sometimes before they accept the fact that she’s never going to respond to their devotion, and lots of them keep coming even after that, just to pine. She’s worked at Burberry’s since at least ’91, long after the end of her acting career. What she did in the meantime is a mystery, but according to Dean she lived for a while with Lyle Hobart, one of the owners. Lyle is married these days to a former Playmate of the Month who doesn’t let him set foot in Burberry’s without her, so terrified is she of Cherie’s lingering influence on her weak-willed husband. Her fears aren’t misplaced; it’s due only to Lyle’s protection that she’s still employed. I’ve been at Burberry’s since my divorce, a year ago, and she’s the most unreliable waitress I’ve worked with in ten years of on-and-off bartending: noshows, bad arithmetic, ignored customers, the whole roster of waitressing sins. Her looks, combined with a certain flirtatious affability, have kept me—have kept the entire male portion of the staff—from turning on her, but the other waitresses loathe her, and she wouldn’t last a week anywhere else.
The house is at the summit, the street curving downward in either direction away from it. The front door is locked, the windows all dark, so I double-check the address before ringing the bell. From the outside it looks modest, but in this neighborhood at this altitude facing seaward you’d be looking at a couple million dollars’ worth of bungalow. When the door finally opens it’s Cherie, and she greets me with a finger to her lips.
“Hey, Cherie,” I say.
“Shut the fuck up,” she hisses, beckoning me inside.
It’s completely dark, and she takes my hand and leads me down a staircase into what turns out to be an enormous living room with a panoramic view of the Pacific. There’s another staircase leading down, and outside I can see more house going down the hill, and I understand that this is one of those four-story houses that you enter through the insignificant-looking top floor. I try to revise my estimate of the house’s worth and fail. This is one of those places you read about on the front page of the
Times
’ real estate supplement, the part Harry Shearer reads aloud on the radio Sunday morning. For the first time I begin to feel uneasy about what Cherie might be doing here.
She’s in her uniform, and she sidles up to me and slops her mouth onto mine. Up close she smells like cigarettes and perfume and wine, and her mouth doesn’t taste half bad, considering.
I pull away, determined to find out while I still can exactly what I’m buying into. “So what’s the favor, Cherie?”
“The favor is I’m horny, stud, and I want to make it with you.” One of Cherie’s more endearing traits is a tendency toward ’70s slang that dates her in ways her face and body fail to.
“Just all of a sudden out of nowhere?”
“All of a sudden I got this great housesitting gig and I thought it was sad to be staying in a beautiful pad like this without a lover to share it with.”
This is the first I’ve heard about any such job, and just as I’m thinking,
Who in God’s name would be fucked up enough to hire Cherie as a housesitter?
I find myself distracted by how nice her tits feel pressing against my rib cage, and the sensation of her tongue in my mouth is having its own clouding effect on my wits.
“You’ve never shown any interest before.”
“Oh, but I’ve been thinking about it, big boy. I see the way you watch me. Parts of me. You want a glass of wine?”
“No thanks.”
“Meth?”
I shake my head no and she takes me by the hand down the other staircase and down a hallway to a magnificent bedroom, and for the first time since I got there she turns on a light, a bedside lamp. The bed is made, the walls covered with framed gold records and what looks like dark red velvet. In the light I give her a careful up-and-down appraisal and find that she looks very, very nice indeed, down to the one nonregulation item in her uniform: a pair of black high-heeled shoes, the kind that would kill her on an eight-hour shift.
“You want to get naked, or are you one of those guys who gets turned on by the uniform?” she asks, and by way of an answer I jump her.
* * *
In three and a half minutes it’s over, which embarrasses me but seems to be fine by Cherie. Cheerfully she doffs the remainder of her uniform and heads for the bathroom, and while she’s in there I wander to the wall to take a look at one of the gold records. To my surprise I know not only the record but the guy who produced it, Gary Hinshaw. Gary is the nicest famous person I’ve ever met; he used to hang around the bar when I worked at Chez Kiki, and he switched allegiances when they fired me and I moved over to Burberry’s. This was a serious step downward in the hierarchy of Valley restaurants, so it was encouraging to have a friendly face following me to the new job, especially one who quickly endeared himself to the rest of the staff as a talented raconteur and prodigious tipper. The funny part is, I didn’t even know what Gary did for a living until Dean told me one day.
“He’s a record producer. You never heard of him?”
“I guess I’ve heard his name. I knew he did something in the music business.”
“Starting in the early ’60s. You ever hear of the Carlottas? The Essentials? Jesus, you kids have no sense of musical history.” Then he went on to name some later groups, a few of whose records I remembered fondly from high school, and I was finally impressed. This also cleared up the question of how, even in L.A., even with money, a guy who looked like Gary had such a way with women. When a 350-pound man with hairplugs and a nose like a yam walks in with a different stunning woman every other week, the temptation is to think call girls, but they didn’t strike me that way. Several of them became regulars at Chez Kiki in their own right, and from what I could see they mostly stayed friendly with Gary once he’d moved on to fresher game.
Gary hasn’t ever brought any of those women into Burberry’s; I had assumed that this was because it wasn’t the kind of place you could bring the kind of woman you might take to Chez Kiki. Now that I think of it, though, one of the prime beneficiaries of his largesse has been Cherie, and it becomes suddenly obvious to me that he’s one of the abject worshippers. The housesitting gig makes sense now, and I ever so briefly feel ever so slightly bad about fucking Cherie right in what I assume is Gary’s bedroom.
After maybe five minutes she comes out all dressed back up.
“Maybe we can go again after we’re done, if you feel like it.”
“After we’re done with what?” I ask, trying to come up with a graceful way of declining her request, whatever it’s going to be. I have the uneasy presentiment that what she wants me to do is something horrible and pet-related: a faithful Irish Setter, dead of thirst, or maybe a million-dollar showcat roaming around the neighborhood in heat.
She leads me back up the staircase to that room with the view and through to the kitchen, where something smells funny. Not food-gone-bad funny, but it’s an aroma not completely out of place in a kitchen. When the light comes on, I see that the source of it is a quantity of Gary’s blood, which has pooled on the tile floor beneath his enormous torso.
“What the fuck,” I say.
“Yeah,” Cherie says.
He looks even bigger lying there on the peach-colored tile, the force of gravity pulling all that adipose tissue down from his chest toward the floor. There’s a blood-soaked hole on his tentlike yellow shortsleeved shirt, quite low on the abdomen. I take a good long look at that shirt and note that it’s moving, slowly and rhythmically.
“Holy shit, he’s alive!” I yell.
“He won’t be for long.”
“When did this happen?”
“About fifteen minutes before I called you.” She leans back, arms folded under her breasts, hips against the counter next to the sink, waiting for me to ask her what I’m supposed to do next. What I do is take out my cell and start to dial 911. She grabs for it, and I have to yank it out of her reach.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“Calling an ambulance.”
“If I wanted a fucking ambulance I’d’ve called one myself. You’re going to help me cover this up.”
“Was it self-defense?”
“Are you kidding me? The big fucking ape. Take a look at this.”
She unbuttons her sleeve and pulls it back to reveal a big pink rectangular bandage. When she peels away its corner there’s a fresh red welt, round and dark.
“Cocksucker burned me with a cigarette, and when I objected he pulled a gun on me, swear to God.”
For the first time it occurs to me how fast she’s talking, and I remember her offering me a hit of meth when I first got here. “How fucked up were you guys when this happened?” I ask.
“He had some crank, we were messing around a little bit.”
Something else strikes me. “How come you’re in your uniform? You didn’t work today.”
“Sometimes I wear it on my off days.” This, I know, is a lie, and under the pressure of my stare she cops to it. “Gary likes to fuck me while I’m wearing it, okay? Just like you do, so don’t smirk. Sometimes he likes to tie me to a chair and do stuff. That’s what he wanted to do tonight, but with him being so cranked up and things already getting out of hand”—she holds up the burned wrist as evidence—“I decided that was a bad idea. So he got the gun and started trying to force me into the chair, and I took it and shot him. Simple.”
“That’s a pretty good story, why don’t you just flush the crank down the toilet and tell it to the cops?”
“I don’t function well with cops. They give me the willies.”
“They give everybody the willies, but we have to call 911 and get an ambulance.”
“Like fuck we have to. Look, Tate, I want to be famous again someday, but not for being in this year’s trial of the century, got it? That’s why I called you.”
“What did you think I was going to do? Finish him off?”
She shrugs. “He’s not long for this world anyway. Just help me get rid of him, someplace where nobody’ll find him for a long time. What do you think of the Angeles National Forest?”
“Never been.”
“Doesn’t it seem like they’re always finding corpses out there? Angeles National
Cemetery
, more like.” She laughs, a staccato, high-pitched giggle I’ve never heard from her before, and the batshit crazy sound of it scares me a little bit more than I already am.