New River Blues (12 page)

‘Nearest the door. So Patricia's Mom was on the wrong side of the bed?'

‘Uh . . . yes. Does that make this a cautionary tale?' They were suddenly grinning inanely at each other, remembering all the wrong-side-of-the-bed jokes they had ever heard. Then Menendez got serious and said, ‘So . . . I guess this must have been their first time together.'

And Sarah, following his thought precisely, said, ‘First time in that room, anyway.'
Always one of the first things settled between lovers, which side of the bed is mine? And I still don't know how we decide it.
Astonished to find herself trading intimacies about love-making with Menendez, she stood up and closed her notebook without quite meeting his eye.

This case had surprised her several times already and the first day wasn't over yet. Delaney wasn't going to have to tell her again to proceed with care.

Felicity Linderman had always known she was a star. She was Rita Mae Linderman's only child, conceived in her mother's fortieth year. Her father was a vague and distant figure, a blurry image in what Mommy said was their wedding photo. His absence never bothered Felicity much because it never seemed to matter to her mother. Rita Mae didn't need a husband. All her energy was absorbed by the need to make the world realize she had given birth to a multi-talented beauty, a prodigy born to thrill an audience.

Felicity's part of the job was to develop her amazing talents as fast as she could. You had to be ready when your big chance came.

In the beginning, her fees as an adorable child model paid for most of Felicity's lessons in dance, singing and acting. Rita Mae's function was to seek out the best teachers and get her daughter to the lessons.

At about age ten, though, most of the modeling jobs dried up and the task changed for both of them. Rita Mae had to come up with more of the money for training and Felicity had to learn to work around her limitations. She was a fair singer, not a great one, and a graceful dancer with ankles too weak for ballet. What she was, she knew by her middle teens, was a very good actress with the wrong face.

Alone on her most recent birthday (she no longer mentioned birthdays to anybody else), Felicity had faced the terrifying reality that she was
ohdeargod twenty-two years old already
. With a portfolio that, after hundreds of hours of lessons, still held only those three voice-overs on the exercise-machine ads; the stills, admittedly lovely, from the underwear catalogue; and the tiny walk-on as a maid in the slasher movie. Plus a long string of parts in regional theater, and letters of high praise from third-rate directors out in the boonies, but who gave a damn about those?

Her desperation had moderated last month when Madge, looking for kicks he said, started hanging around the theater and discovered her. Before long he was talking to her about her ‘prodigious talent,' the way her mom always did.

‘Sweetie,' he said, ‘you're so much better than anybody else here that it's actually somewhat embarrassing. Why aren't you in the big time?' All she needed, he said, answering his own question, was a nose job and caps on her teeth. ‘Remember what it did for Tom Cruise?'

She said she knew that but she'd never been able to afford it. Money's just a detail, Madge said, waving it away – he could always find money for friends in need. But . . . was Felicity open to trading a few favors?

It was really just a series of small, harmless things he needed her to do. A little play-acting, think of it that way. Zack would explain the game as they went along; Madge wasn't going to discuss this with her ever again. ‘No, really, sweetie, it's better this way, you'll do better if you're not worrying about the small stuff.' Yes, he knew she was an actress and he'd seen she could play any part, wasn't that why they were talking? But this whole thing would work better if she honestly didn't know what came next.

He gave her the first half of the money for the plastic surgeon and her credit card covered the rest of the fee. The surgery left some serious bruises, she played all the maid and mother-in-law parts for a while. But it was almost healed by the time Madge brought the boys to the theater. She helped get them hired as she'd promised, guided them into the catering job – Madge already had that set up with Zack – and watched over them on the first party jobs so they didn't totally screw up. Nothing hard about any of that, but she had refused, Sunday night, to even talk about going upstairs. When Zack came down and said he needed her help, she shook her head, picked up a bus-box full of glasses and headed for the back door. ‘No way,' she said. ‘You can't ask me to do that.'

‘I'm not asking, I'm telling. He's too heavy for me alone, so you have to help me.'

‘Get Madge—'

‘Will you cut out the diva crap? You know Madge is gone.'

‘I don't know anything, how could I? I've been out there in the dark, breaking my back loading the van—'

‘Yeah, yeah, you were outside so you don't know anything, that's your story. I don't give a crap what you say later on, but right now you gotta help me get this piece of dog shit out of the house.'

‘Forget it.' Felicity began to unbutton the frogs on her white service jacket. ‘I did all this clean-up by myself and now it's done and I'm going—' She drew in a hoarse, shocked breath as Zack reached across the two feet between them and grabbed her almost-healed nose in a steel grip. Silently, watching her through his mean little slits of eyes, he forced her to her knees.

‘Blease,' she blubbered in a panic, ‘blease blease blease don't hurd by dose.'

Because her new nose was the whole point of everything! She'd never wanted any part of this cockamamie scheme, whatever it was, for one second. But if it was the only way to get the money for a nose job and caps on her teeth – and there were just these few little things she had to do – then why not go ahead and fulfill her destiny at last?

She'd never wanted to know any of the details. By the time they finished whatever it was and went on to the next whim, she would already have collected the rest of the money and paid off the card. And whatever happened she couldn't be expected to return it. You don't return a correction on a deviated septum.

By the day of the party she felt excited and happy, because the surgery was healing nicely. In her mind she was already on her way to Hollywood. Even if her legs were too short to be a top model and her dancing talent and singing voice were serviceable but not outstanding, she knew she was a very good actress now, and could be outstanding, maybe the best, with the right direction. But she was never going to get her chance in movies as long as she faced casting directors with a too-long, slightly crooked nose and an overbite. Her face had to be fixed! She didn't care what happened to Pauly and Nino, why would anybody? Louts, they were just louts.

‘I know I have to suffer for my Art,' she'd told her mother on the phone, the day she showed the boys to their little room under the eaves. ‘But really, some of the people I have to put up with in This Business.' They gave her the creeps, watching with dead eyes while she found sheets and towels for them in the prop room, scrounged soap and toilet paper from the actors' john. Then that pig Pauly asked, ‘Ain't you even going to make up the beds?'

Her mother had put on her super-soother voice as usual, so familiar from the years of auditions, urging, ‘Be patient, baby, your day is coming.' Her mother avid to hear every detail of the parts she was assigned at the theater, the only return she ever got on the long years of hauling Felicity to lessons and paying, paying. But then that's all she ever wanted. And God, who asked her to start the stage-mother stuff, anyway?

Not that Felicity would have changed the striving years if she could. What would life be worth without that extra heft, the zing that only achievement provided? The joy when you knew you nailed a part. To be in This Business, what else could possibly compare? But her mom put so much pressure on. Felicity dreamed of a short phone call in the future, her mother crooning with pleasure over her latest triumph, Felicity finally able to say, ‘Gotta go, Mom, got all these people waiting . . .'

It would not be long now. As soon as the surgery healed she was going to take her newly beautiful face back out to LA and show everybody what she could do.

But first she had to stop this filthy pig of a caterer from wrecking everything, by breaking her nose all over again.

‘Blease,' she begged him, ‘led go of by dose and I'll do whadeber you zay.'

Naturally she had not been sincere about
that
. Being in the room with a slug like Zack was tantamount to being in the room alone, so why would you waste a moment being sincere with him? Felicity was going to say whatever she had to say to get him off her nose and then do what she had to do to get him out of her life.

As she rose from her knees and followed him up the deeply carpeted stairway she was already making plans not to remember any of this. She would focus on a bare white spot in the middle distance, the way she did when an actor in a love scene smelled bad or had a suspicious cough. She could always do that, focus on her part and delete the rest. Zack would fade and soon be erased entirely. His mean pig's eyes and crooked front teeth and his name that sounded like a grackle's cry,
Zack
, were only faintly in the room with her now and would soon be entirely gone.

When she began to feel somewhat faint, on her way out the door with the stinking weight of Nino crushing her right shoulder, on impulse she grabbed with her left hand for a few of the delicious-looking wrapped candies in the dish by the door. Zack felt her weight shift and growled, ‘Hang on!' and she dropped the candies back in the dish, snatched the glass handle instead and brought the whole thing along. But outside by the fountain Nino began to mumble and pull away, and Felicity had to drop the dish and hang on to Nino with both hands. It took all the strength they had between them to get him into the back of the van, and the trip up the steep stairs at the theater was a sweaty nightmare that she was never quite able to disremember.

By the next afternoon, though, hugely relieved that her nose looked completely undamaged and was not even sore, Felicity watched the stage door close behind Nino and heaved a sigh of relief. He was out of her life and her money would be along soon. As she picked up the push-broom to finish sweeping the stage, she noticed the plastic sack he'd been carrying when he came downstairs. He'd forgotten it on the floor by a small table.
Should I try to catch him?

She thought about it for one second and shrugged. Whatever it was, he wouldn't need it now. Would that braying jackass of a director never stop shouting? She broomed the bag offstage with the rest of the trash.

SIX

G
iving in gladly to sleepiness, Nino reached for the lever to put his seat back. He could see that Zack was in the front rank of a cluster of traffic on North Oracle, heading for the light on Orange Grove. It was just turning green and he was holding his speed steady, expecting to sail on through. But just then the driver of an old Taurus heading east on Orange Grove convinced himself that the amber light he had been speeding toward was going to last for him. When it changed he apparently decided that red was a fine color too, and shot across the intersection immediately in front of Zack.

By hitting his brake hard, Zack managed to miss the rear bumper of the Taurus by a couple of inches. By about the same margin, the Hummer behind him somehow contrived to stay out of Party Down's rear cargo space. There was an electric moment when Zack's terrified eyes met the angry stare of the Hummer's driver in his rear-view mirror, and then Zack yelled, ‘Asshole!' and leaned on his horn. The horns of the Hummer and the next two vehicles followed suit.

Nino had forgotten all about napping by then. He was watching his driver with growing alarm.

Working parties for Party Down, he had known Zack as an ugly, gloomy man who rarely spoke except to give orders. His directions were short and clear, though, and you could count on him to have everything he needed in the van. His events ran like clockwork and he paid what he'd promised on time. That was all Nino knew about him, all he'd ever wanted to know.

Now the grim but rational man of the party scenes was gone, replaced by a fuming nutcase. His face had turned purple with rage, his eyes were bloodshot and his snarling lips were drawn back in a fury over his crooked teeth. Once started, he could not seem to stop swearing. Curses poured out of him. He sounded meaner than Nino's grandmother on her worst day.

It didn't take a subtle thinker to recognize that this was not the face of a man who'd go out of his way to help out a part-time employee in a jam. Why, Nino began to ask himself, did I let myself get suckered into a van with this person?

And how could I ever have believed he would take me to his secret hideaway for the night and fix me up with a free ride to the bus station tomorrow?

I mean, why not believe he was going to drive right up to the North Pole and turn me over to Santa Claus?

He didn't think it through any more than that, he just got ready to run the way he always did. But they were in the middle of traffic on a busy six-lane highway and he had no idea where to go. So he did the next thing his instincts told him to do. He yelled, ‘Oh shit, Zack, look out!' and pointed across Zack's chest at the west side of the highway.

There was nothing over there; they were in the middle of a block. But it was the side the Taurus had just come from so it worked. Zack quit swearing and turned his head to look. In that instant Nino unbuckled his seat belt, leaned across Zack, and opened the driver's-side door.

Zack was looking into his left ear by now, yelling, ‘What the fuck?' Nino slid back quick as a snake, unbuckled Zack's seat belt as he slid past it, braced his feet on the floor, and pushed Zack out the door.