Hardboiled Crime Four-Pack

by Jack Bunker

  I cruise to the question.

  “Well?” says Melody. “Was I right?”

  I give her one of those looks reserved for softening the blow when you tell your child there is no Santa. “Our bat girl’s secret isn’t CGI, it’s DNA. She’s Lana’s daughter.”

  SIX

  Impersonating your dead mother doing live porn. I’m thinking there’s got to be a commandment against that as I walk down Van Nuys Boulevard and into one of the few five-story buildings built before the local specific plan imposed height restrictions. I found the place by doing a Whois search on “Cybersex with Lana Strain” to find the web-address registration contact information, but that doesn’t mean it’s accurate or current.

  There’s a building directory in the shoebox of a lobby but Fun with Dick and Jane Productions, Inc. isn’t on it. I guess if I was in the porn business I’d keep a low profile, too.

  I check the suite numbers: 101, 102, 201, 202, 301, 401, 402, 501, 502. Doesn’t take a genius to see the hole in the pattern. I step into the elevator and punch three.

  The door closes to reveal purple Sharpie graffiti on the inside, a cartoon drawing of a woman blowing two men at once. The caption reads: “Two heads are better than one.”

  I ponder this deep philosophical thought as the door opens. I step into the middle of a short corridor with an office at each end.

  Number 301 belongs to the Ocularists’ Guild. I’m impressed that they know where to put the apostrophe; most businesses get that wrong.

  The door to 302 says “D&J Modeling.” Pay dirt. I walk in.

  The reception area is about twenty feet square with a decrepit sectional wrapping one corner. The black Naugahyde decayed long ago, revealing a spiderweb of white backing through the age cracks. A cheap oak coffee table that must date back to the seventies holds a selection of automotive, soft porn, and gossip magazines, all at least two years old.

  By the couch is some sort of potted fern that seems to have taken over the entire corner of the room. Must be a lot of moisture in the air. The opposite corner is piled high with boxes full of DVDs, as if they’ve run out of storage in back.

  The highlight of the décor is a wall covered by framed DVD box covers with bad puns for titles. There’s a whiteboard above the couch that has female names organized in a schedule by two-hour blocks. Names like Trixxxie and Roxxxi and Classy and Swallow. I look at the time and see that “Ginger,” who I assume is Lana’s daughter Ginger Strain, is currently online or on camera or up to bat, whatever you want to call it. I also note that her hours appear irregular with the exception of Wednesdays, where a column of red Xs implies that she’s unavailable. I wonder why.

  Opposite the couch is an oak desk that matches the coffee table, and behind it sits a receptionist transferring handwritten invoices into QuickBooks. Short black hair. About thirty. Olive skin, maybe Middle Eastern. He’s dressed up in a sleek black sport jacket, pale-yellow shirt, and gray slacks. His tie looks yellow striped from a distance, but when I get closer I realize the stripes are rows of SpongeBobs lined up like dominoes. The realization makes me wonder whether it’s time to have my eyes checked.

  “Can I help you?”

  “I’d like to see Dick or Jane,” I say.

  His eyes narrow. “Who are you?”

  “I’m a writer. I want to give your website some free publicity.”

  “Who do you write for?”

  “No offense, pal, but I don’t pitch to receptionists.”

  I’m surprised his eyes can narrow even farther, like one of Zeno’s paradoxes, getting ever halfway closer to being closed.

  Then the door opens behind me, and a woman walks in and barks, “Robert! Bring me Arthur’s contract!” She’s taller than I am by a good three inches, and I’m six one, maybe two on a good day, so she’s up there. Willowy, graceful. She breezes past us, looking fine in what must be a twelve-hundred-dollar dress. She swings open a door to an inner office.

  “You Jane?” I ask.

  She swivels on toe, like a ballerina, to look down at me. “And you are?”

  “Nob Brown.”

  “What kind of a name is that?”

  “Mongolian. You got a minute?”

  “Why should I waste my time with you?”

  “I’m funny.”

  “Not so far.”

  “I’m a writer. I’m writing about a murder.”

  Her left eyebrow rises half an inch. “Murder?”

  “Just give me a couple minutes. Everybody loves a good murder. It’ll be worth it for the amusement value if nothing else, and it could get your site a mention in Playboy.”

  She breaks into a hearty laugh. “Okay, Mr. Nob Brown. I’ll give you two minutes to win me over.” She flows into the office, leaving the door open behind her as an invitation.

  Her office looks like a display in the back of an Office Depot: a bunch of cheap generic furniture arranged to look like an executive office by a seventeen-year-old stock boy who’s never been in one. Jane looks far too sophisticated for the environs. Then I notice the movie poster behind her. It’s Jane, a few years younger. Different hair. Wearing nothing but heels and a translucent purple strap-on. The film was called Cheeks Asunder, starring Vajayna. Very classy.

  She follows my gaze and laughs as she sits in her black vinyl executive chair and rocks back. “What’s the matter, Mr. Brown. Never seen a CEO portrait before?”

  “They’re usually wearing a watch.”

  She holds up a diamond Rolex that must have cost fifty grand. “Here it is. And it’s ticking.”

  “I’m here about Lana Strain.”

  “What about her?”

  “She’s no longer with us.”

  She deadpans, “Does anyone else know?”

  “I’m supposed to be the funny one.” I feel an itch on the arch of my foot and try grinding my shoe into the ground to scratch it, but it doesn’t work.

  I say, “I want to know how come she’s pole vaulting on your website if she’s dead.”

  “I’ll let you in on a little secret, Mr. Brown. That’s not really her.”

  She winks conspiratorially, and I wonder what she’d do if her false lashes snagged shut.

  “You think maybe there’s something a little sick about pimping a daughter to play her dead mother?”

  She laughs. “It’s about eyeballs, Mr. Brown. She attracts them.”

  “Maybe she’s attracting the eyeballs of her mother’s killer.”

  She laughs again. “You are a funny man.”

  “Well, here’s the punch line. I’ve got a list of all the people questioned by the police regarding Lana Strain’s murder. You let me cross-check my list against your subscribers, and maybe we can find Lana’s killer, get you a few brownie points with the cops.”

  “Sweet little Ginger draws thousands of paying customers to our site every day,” she says. “All kinds of people. Doctors, lawyers, candlestick makers, murderers, whatever. They’re paying customers and I, being an advocate of the Bill of Rights, am determined to protect their privacy. It’s a promise we make in their registration agreement.”

  “You’re claiming the moral high ground here?”

  “I’m sure a lot of unsavory people shop at my local market, too, but that doesn’t make the milk go sour.”

  I shrug. “Maybe it would be better if I took my suggestion to the police.”

  She holds up that sparkly Rolex. I wonder if it was a gift or a purchase. “You’ve failed to amuse, Mr. Brown. Your two minutes are up.”

  I check the time on my cell phone as I leave. Three thirty-eight. Lana’s shift is over in twenty minutes. From what I could gather in chat rooms, most of these places have girls broadcasting from home, but Dick and Jane has a reputation for “quality,” i.e., they care about lighting and sound, so their girls work out of the studio.

  I get into my stick-shift ’91 Legend—once a luxury car, now my comfort food—and drive around the block. I pull into the alley and pick an empty parking
lot behind a Thai restaurant. There’s steam coming from the roof vents. Smells like garlic and fish. They don’t open for two hours, but they’re already cooking.

  I choose a spot that lets me see through two chain-link fences into the lot behind Dick and Jane’s building. I watch and wait.

  At 4:04 the back door opens and Lana steps out. I know she’s really Ginger, but the likeness still takes me by surprise. I assumed she used makeup or something to look so much like her mother, that when I’d see her in real life she’d look different, but no. She’s the spitting image of Lana, only with her head intact.

  She’s wearing a stretchy tube dress, slinky, clingy, cut low on top and high on the bottom to show off what she makes her living with. Too explicit to be sexy, at least to me.

  She gets into a fairly new, black Honda Civic and takes off. I let her get fifty yards down the alley then pull into her wake.

  I follow her down Van Nuys to Ventura, then east to Laurel Canyon where she heads over the hill into Hollywood. We wind through the fabled wooded canyon where the likes of Joni Mitchell, Frank Zappa, the Mamas and Papas, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, and the Byrds once lived and played.

  About halfway up the canyon, she turns onto a narrow, winding street called Weeping Glen. Another quarter mile, and she pulls into a driveway. I recognize the address from Lana’s file. The murder scene. I park a half block away and watch Ginger get out of her car and head up the steps toward a wood-shingled two-story geodesic dome surrounded by trees.

  She flips through her keys until she finds the right one. I try to imagine what it must have been like for her, thirteen years of age, coming home from school to this same house and finding her mother’s brains sprayed across the Dotted Babe. I wonder if she unlocks that memory every time she unlocks the door.

  SEVEN

  I feel like a gangbanger stuffed into my first suit to mislead a jury. I wait nervously in the fading light, squeezing my finger into my collar to give it a yank, hoping to admit some airflow behind my tie. No such luck.

  The peephole finally goes dark. She’s looking at me. I drop my hand and wonder if my hair is combed. I should have checked the mirror sometime during the half hour I just spent in my car screwing up the courage to knock on this door, but it didn’t occur to me until now. My hair usually sprouts a cowlick by noon, oddly never in the same place. It’s a mystery of nature. A forensic lab tech named Edsel once told me I should tame it with “product,” but I have no idea what that means.

  I hear the bolt clack open, and my heart steps up to a mambo as the door swings in a few inches then catches on a security chain. I’m staring into Lana Strain’s astounding eyes, only they’re looking back from her daughter’s face.

  “Yes?” With only one word, her voice whips up my heartbeat. She sounds just like Lana with that dusky timbre of whiskey and smoke. The precious libidinous cravings that died with Lana so long ago are suddenly resurrected, but they’re fleeting. She looks like Lana, yet she doesn’t. It’s discomfiting. There’s some indefinable flaw in the re-creation, something that whispers “imposter,” something Madame Tussaud got wrong.

  “I’m sorry to just show up unannounced like this, but I didn’t have a number or an e-mail address. My name’s Brown. Nob Brown. I’m a freelance writer, working on a retrospective on your mother for Playboy. I was hoping we could chat for a few minutes. I mean, if it’s convenient. If this isn’t a good time, I could come back or meet you somewhere.”

  “And just what sort of writer might you be, Mr. Brown?”

  “Magazines, mostly. Crime stories.”

  “My mother’s been dead for twenty years. Why would you write a story about her?”

  While Lana was pure southern wildcat, Ginger seems more southern belle, only without the accent. Graceful, polite, yet shy and wary. Not at all what I expect after seeing her raunchy slut performance on the website.

  “She had a big influence on my life,” I say. “I’d like to see her killer brought to justice.”

  This seems to interest her. “And what makes you think you can succeed where so many others have failed, Mr. Brown?”

  “There were a lot of people involved who might not have felt comfortable opening up to the police in those days. There were a lot of drugs around. Sometimes the passage of time loosens tongues. People have things bottled up that they’re relieved to let out. Or they just feel freer to talk about others they’re no longer in touch with.”

  She doesn’t seem convinced. I change tack.

  “Besides,” I add, “Your mother’s music just went up on iTunes. The timing of this story couldn’t be better to promote sales. I’m assuming you share in the royalties.”

  This argument seems to bear weight. “You have some sort of credentials, I suppose?”

  I pull my wallet from my back pocket. “I’ve got a card here somewhere.” I rummage through until I come up with an old business card from Crime Time magazine. They’d printed them for me once, hoping I might recruit some cheap talent at some Mystery Writers of America event. Afterward they’d deducted the printing costs from my paycheck. I hand the card to Ginger.

  She reads it and laughs. “I never even heard of Crime Time.”

  “It’s big in England. Web-only these days, but like I said, this piece is for Playboy.”

  She assesses me warily, presumably weighing the publicity value. I give her the kind of pleading look that a five-year-old might give his mother as he’s begging to keep the kitten. I can be cute when I have to.

  “I don’t think so,” she says, then starts closing the door.

  “There’s a possibility that your mother’s killer is the same person who looted your inheritance.” The door freezes for a moment, then reverses direction.

  “All right.” She releases the security chain and waves me in. Even this simple gesture reminds me of Lana. She’s changed into a pair of denim cutoffs and a simple spaghetti-strap top. It’s a much more appealing look—suggestive, not revealing.

  My mind tries to reconcile a confusion of visions—Ginger on a stick, Lana by the pool—hot, unwholesome images that make me feel like the inside of my skull is sweating. I need to get a grip.

  Ginger leads me into the living-dining room under the dome ceiling. The place feels like a tree house, with windows all around looking out over a circular veranda into the tops of the sorts of trees that Holly used to bring to life for me. She’d tell me what they’re called, what the Indians used to do with their bark or their leaves, what sort of climate they prefer, what their flowers look like, what sorts of animals they house. These days they’re just trees.

  We sit down on a semicircular couch, and I rest my reporter’s notebook on the ship’s-hatch coffee table. Ginger leans back, and her eyes lock on a mirrored disco ball that hangs from the ceiling of the dome.

  “I always hated that ball,” she says, “especially when Mama turned the spots on to spray the walls with those hokey spangles.”

  A blinking red light reflects annoyingly from dozens of tiny mirrors on the ball. It’s the message light from an ancient answering machine on the side table beside her. It looks like the same recorder that was here the night Lana died, the one referenced several times in the murder book. Ginger grabs the power cord and yanks it from the wall socket, knocking a narrow, plaid pleather address book from the table.

  “My father refuses to redecorate,” she says as she gets up to retrieve the address book. She sits back down, absently thumbing the pages. “Can I ask how you found me?”

  “I found your website.” I regret it as soon as I say it, but she doesn’t even blush.

  “I hope it didn’t shock you.”

  “I’m not easily shocked.”

  “Did you like what you saw?” She says it softly, toying with me. But it feels like an act. Trying for coy but achieving awkward.

  “I’d be lying if I said no, but that’s not why I’m here.”

  She smiles as if relieved. “Ask away, Mr. Brown.”

  A
s I reach for my pen, it snags my pocket and falls. I reach down to retrieve it, and my hand accidentally brushes her bare thigh. She starts as if she’s been zapped by a defibrillator. Her smile disappears like a popped bubble. She scoots away from me on the couch, suddenly nervous, staring at her hands, avoiding eye contact. Some mental switch has been flipped. The silence is abrupt, uneasy.

  I end it. “You wouldn’t happen to have any water, would you?”

  “Where are my manners?” Still shaken, she gets up and heads past a dining area through a swinging door, the kind you can open in either direction with your back when your hands are full of plates.

  I try to make sense of what happened, but there’s a definite disconnect. Here’s a woman who brazenly unfolds her genitalia to the world, who performs the most private acts imaginable for public consumption, yet she shrinks at an inadvertent touch like a homophobe at a gay orgy.

  I pick up the address book and open it. Most adult scrawls require some interpretation to read, but Ginger’s cursive is strikingly legible, like a script font or the writing of a prissy preteen girl.

  I leaf through to the Ks. There’s a number for her sister, Sophia Kidd, and another for Billy with a “c” beside it, presumably his cell. I copy them both, wondering why Ginger took her mother’s last name while her sister kept her father’s.

  I hear a fridge close and replace the book where it was. Then the kitchen door swings outward and Ginger walks through, cracking the seal of a small bottled water.

  “They say tap water is purer,” she says, “and the carbon footprint of these bottles is awful, but I’m a creature of habit.”

  She hands me the bottle and sits down again, this time beyond arm’s length, her eyes darting around the room as if checking the shadows for hidden assailants. She appears to be on a hair trigger.

  “You were saying?” she says.

  “Why don’t we start with your father.” I click my ballpoint like a cheap hood cocking his gun.

  She laughs as if I’ve made a joke, only it’s the kind of laugh you hear from the back ward of a mental hospital. “You sound just like my therapist.”