“I’ll be the one in the fedora.”
2
I pull my vintage, blood red Mercedes-Benz 300 SL Roadster into a metered slot just up the street from the Tropicana. I bought her new back in ’57 and it’s a love affair that has stood the test of time. Ain’t love grand?
I’m early so I take my kit out and go through the familiar process of fixing. I assemble the needle, tie off my arm, draw the blood. Because my skin is almost translucent in its alabaster whiteness I rarely have trouble finding a vein. Even the recessed ones. I slip the tip in, depress the plunger and... everything’s Jake.
Settling back into the Benz’s loving embrace, I let myself drowse in my euphoric state for a few minutes, enjoying my high. Lids at half-mast, I watch the red taillights of cars as they motor past on Melrose. When I slowly rise to full awareness fifteen minutes later I see it’s ten-o-five. Now I’m late. Swell. I shake my head to clear it, get out, head back up the street to the club.
I move past the long losers’ line at the door and walk right up to a pony-tailed doorman with a chest like a beer keg. I tell him I’m on the list. Turns out I am. He unhooks a purple velvet cordon and lets me in.
The small dark forties-style lounge smells of beer and cigarettes and betrayal and sex. Old pick-up lies hang faintly in the air. The joint hasn’t changed a bit, which I take to mean the owners are either visionary about the cyclical nature of trends or just cheap. Maybe both. Small, intimate candlelit tables punctuate the room. On one side, a small thrust stage takes up the entire west wall. Big bare glowing light bulbs stand like soldiers at attention along the perimeter of the stage, as if protecting the six-piece swing band from the riff-raff. Aside from me, the members of the band are the only ones in the place dressed the part.
I look around for the bar. I find it set back into the wall opposite the stage. The band plays me over the shoe-worn carpet to a tall stool. I order a Scotch on the rocks from a bartender with a thin moustache and watery eyes that remind me of two black pearls sunk deep in oysters. Judging from the gin-blossoms in his cheeks, slinging drinks isn’t the job for him. Kind of like a pill-head working the counter at a pharmacy. But that’s his problem, not mine.
I swivel around on the stool, eyeing the people that take up the seats at the tables scattered about. Reesa draws an eclectic crowd. Mostly gay couples of both sexes, but thrown in among them are tie-loosened Hollywood types, horny college students, and a few leering Persians.
All eyes are directed at the stage where the white-tuxedoed bandleader tempos the Cole Porter down and takes to the mike to introduce the delightful, delicious, de-lovely Reesa Van Cleef. Cheers, applause, whistles, and hoots follow the introduction, growing in volume and intensity as the lady herself, veiled behind a wall of red feathers, takes center stage.
She’s gorgeous; stunning in that golden era Hollywood screen siren way, when women carried an alluring air of mystery about them. When they all seemed to know something you didn’t, and found the fact amusing. She might have walked right out of a frame of an old black-and-white Bogart flick. The only tip-off that she is not a product of my own bygone day is the fact that her hair, which she wears in a forties-style forward-curled pompadour, is brilliant Kool-Aid red. My favorite color. I’m not much for smiling, but I smile now. I didn’t think they were making them like her anymore. Glad to see I was wrong.
Somewhere a bubble machine works its magic. The band dusts off an old tromboney ditty and Reesa glides into motion. Her bright eyes flirt as she teases the crowd, giving us titillating peek-a-boos of her moon-pale skin, racetrack curves, and full Jane Russell bosoms with small rosebud-pink nipples. Call me old-fashioned, but this is what a strip show should be. The term striptease suggests nudity with a sense of fun and playfulness. There’s none of that in the way the strippers of today ply their trade. It’s all just gyrating, g-string-in-your-face, mercenary flesh for hire. Ugly. A show like that leaves you feeling low, like you’re lesser for it, like you’ve been conned. Not that I don’t ever go. I do. Joints like that are open late and I’m a late-night kind of guy. But watching Reesa do her red-feather shimmy reminds me of something I’ve almost forgotten. It’s as if her seductive movements are capable of weaving a spell and casting me back in time. I feel transported. I feel like a kid again.
I feel alive.
The show goes by faster than summer vacation. When it’s over I blink and look around feeling like I’ve come out of a trance. My highball of McAllen, which was delivered unbeknownst to me, sits melted and untouched at my elbow. I shake my head to clear it. I need to get a hold on myself. I’m here on business. It won’t do to come across like some drooling schoolboy.
To have something to do, I shake out a butt, light it. The bartender is instantly on the spot to play the ever-popular game of fuck with the smoker.
“Sorry, you’ll have to put that out, sir. There’s no smoking allowed in the Tropicana,” he says.
He doesn’t sound too sorry. In fact, he sounds like he enjoys spoiling my good time. I lock eyes with him, my hypnotic stare as impossible to resist as a Star Trek tractor beam, and tell him, “I’m not smoking.”
A glazed cow-dumb stare comes over his ruddy face. “You’re not smoking,” he repeats.
“That’s right. Now you’re going to give me an empty rocks glass to use as an ashtray.”
He nods, says nothing, just does it.
“Now you’re going to leave me alone until I call you.”
“I’m going to leave you alone,” he murmurs.
Being undead has a lot of drawbacks, but it’s got its advantages too. The hypnotic gaze is one of them.
Grinning, I blow a cloud of secondhand smoke in the guy’s face as he goes to stand over by the cash register, which seems to serve the additional purpose of propping him up.
Intermission. The lights come up. Patrons—fags and dykes and Persians alike—file out. I smoke, trying to ignore the butterflies that flop like dying fish in my stomach as I await Reesa’s company. I reassure myself that she’s probably not half as attractive up close. Can’t be. I only ever met one other dame who was. This was all just a trick of the distance, the makeup, the lights. Up close I’ll see the flaws; the chinks in her Venus di Milo complexion; the cracks running through her Mona Lisa smile.
I check my watch and toss back my drink and signal for another, a double. Why the hell not? I can’t get drunk unless the alcohol has already been absorbed into a victim’s blood, and besides it gives me a prop; something to do with my hands. I mash my smoke out, light another.
“How do you do it?”
I swivel around to find her standing there in a red silk kimono embroidered with dragons. Immediately I realize I couldn’t have been more wrong about her looks. She’s the real deal; every bit as lovely up close as she appeared on stage. Lovelier. I feel a strange disappointment. A noticeable flaw would have been a welcome thing; would have put me back in control of myself.
“What’s that?” I ask, glad at least that I don’t sound like a nervous schoolboy. It’s about eighty years too goddamn late for that.
“Get away with smoking. I can’t believe no one’s said anything to you yet. Usually they’re real pricks about it. Won’t even let me do it in my own dressing room.”
“Yeah, well, we came to an agreement. Would you like one?” I say, picking up the pack and shaking one out.
Reesa hesitates a moment, but finally takes it, game if I am. Red manicured nails carry the butt up to a mouth like a Christmas bow. I’ve never felt jealous of a cigarette before. Guess there really is a first time for everything. She waits for me to light it. Her wish is my command.
“I hope you’re Mick Angel,” she says, drawing in a lungful. “Otherwise I’m gonna feel real silly.”
“That’s me,” I say. “Can I buy you a drink?”
“I drink free here, but you can order me one.” There is a whisper of silk on vinyl as she slides onto the stool next to me. Now I’m jealous of the stool.
> “All right. Let me guess—you look like a martini kinda gal.”
“Good guess. And I bet you’re having Scotch.”
We smile. Kindred spirits.
“Vodka?” I ask, hoping it’s not.
She shakes her head, electric-red curls bouncing around that lovely face. “Gin. Three olives. Dirty.”
“Dirty huh?”
“The dirtier the better.”
I call the bartender over and order her drink. He notices Reesa smoking and starts to put the kibosh on it, but I cut him short, telling him he’s got it all wrong again. This time a flicker of doubt crosses his face. That’s the problem with the hypnotic gaze. It’s a nice tool to have, but some people are more receptive to it than others. It usually correlates with intelligence. I wonder if I’ve already over-used it with this fella, and if the situation is about to become awkward, but then the troubled look in his eyes disappears and he goes to mix the drink.
“So, you’ve been here before?” she asks.
I nod. “But it’s been a while.”
“Ever catch my show?” she asks.
I shake my head. “I don’t think you were doing the show last time I was here, but I’d’ve been back sooner if I’d known what I was missing out on.”
She likes this. It earns me a smile.
“This seems like your kind of place.”
“Yeah?”
It’s her turn to nod. “I mean, this place is old school and you seem like an old school kinda guy.”
I smile wryly. “Old school. That’s me all right.” Emphasis on the old.
“I like old school,” Reesa assures me. “It’s a compliment.”
“Then that’s how I’ll take it.”
We smile. The drinks come. I enjoy seeing the perfect imprint her full bottom lip leaves on the rim of her martini glass.
As much as I’d like to make this about pleasure, it’s about business, so I get to the point and ask her how I can help her.
“I want you to find my fourteen year-old sister, Raya. She’s gone missing.”
“How long?”
“A couple months now. She was living with me and my boyfriend, but she ran away.”
I smell a lie in there somewhere, but I let it go. Everybody lies. I’m more disturbed by the fact that she has a boyfriend, if you want to know the truth.
“And no one’s looking for her?”
“The cops say they’re looking, but they haven’t found her. What’s one more teenage runaway to them?”
“Why was she living with you instead of your parents?”
“If you knew my family you wouldn’t have to ask. Let’s just say my dad put the fun in dysfunction and let it go at that.”
I nod. “So she was living with you and your boyfriend?”
“Ex-boyfriend. I left him a week or two later.”
Hearing it does my heart good. “Mind if I ask why?” I’m prying. So sue me.
“You want the short list or the long?”
“Just gimme the highlights.”
“Well, on top of being a complete shitbag of a human being, it turns out he was fucking everything he could get that little pecker of his into.”
“I see.”
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t talk like that. It’s not ladylike.”
“No one would ever mistake you for anything but a lady,” I say, cashing in on another smile.
“Anyway, it’s my own fault. I broke my rule about never dating anyone with anything to do with Hollywood. I know better. Of course the icing on the shit cake was his endearing meth addiction.”
“He was a tweaker, huh?”
Reesa nods, absently pulling a red curl out and letting it spring back into place as she speaks. “We both were. That’s part of why I left. I was sick of it. I hated living that way. I wanted to clean myself up. So I left. Went into rehab. When I got out six weeks later I tried to find my sister, but... ” She shrugs helplessly, shakes her head.
“No dice,” I finish for her.
She shakes her head again. “So, do you think you can help me, Mr. Angel?” Holding her martini glass in both hands, Reesa drinks, watching me with big gorgeous doe-eyes as she does it.
“I could, but I’ll be honest, I don’t come cheap. I charge five hundred a day plus expenses.”
“Money I’ve got. A girl can make a pretty good living taking her clothes off, or hadn’t you heard?”
I match her smirk for smirk and take my notepad out and flip it open to a blank page. “Have you talked to your ex since you left?”
“Do you call the warden after you break out of prison?”
“Good point. But I should talk to him. Your sister lived there with you. Maybe she forgot something when she left and went back for it. Maybe she’s tried to call and get in touch with you. Anyway, it’s a place to start. What’s his name and number?”
Reluctantly she gives them to me. I chicken-scratch the name Vin Prince and two numbers in my pad—one for a cell, the other for his production company. “Address?”
“I don’t know,” she tells me. “We lived in Los Feliz when we were together, but last I heard he’d moved to some fancy-schmancy place up in the Hills I’m sure he can’t afford.”
“I’ll find it,” I say. Then I ask for the names and numbers of anyone else who might know something about where I can find Raya, along with the addresses of places she frequented. Reesa’s embarrassed at how little she can come up with, proving once and for all that the best parenting doesn’t get done on crystal meth. In the end I’ve got the name of an eighteen year-old boyfriend of Raya’s and the name of a Hollywood Goth club they went to together, and that’s all I’ve got. It’ll have to do.
The last thing I ask for is a picture of Raya; something I can show around. Reesa says she thinks she has one in her dressing room and goes to get it. I watch her go. I’m reminded of the ocean. I light a cigarette. I wait.
When she comes back she hands me a snapshot of an attractive fourteen year-old girl with dyed black punk-cut hair caught in the act of rolling her eyes at the camera. The resemblance to Reesa is undeniable. I pocket it.
Though I want to linger, my own addiction is tightening the leash, so I tell Reesa I will look into it, drain my drink, and stand to go.
“Don’t you want some money up front?” she asks, batting her lashes at me playful-like. “I thought that’s how it worked.”
She reaches inside her robe and takes a stash of hundreds from somewhere I don’t dare think too long about, being as I’m standing up and all.
“Will a thousand do to start?” I want to tell her to put it away, to keep it ’til I get some results. That would be the classy thing to do. But I don’t. I take it. I take it and hide it in my pocket like something shameful. “It’ll do.”
“Aren’tcha gonna count it?”
“I trust you,” I say.
“But you don’t even know me.”
“I don’t have to. I know where to find you.”
One last smile. One last look. I try to acid burn the image of her into my memory. I want to be able to remember her exactly when I fantasize about being that barstool later. I turn and retrace my steps to the door, a cigarette smoke snail-trail the only evidence I came and went.
3
I go back to the car. I fix. I fire up the engine. I drive. Every store, every street that flashes past holds a memory for me of an earlier day, and as always, I find myself reconciling the landmarks of the ghost-of-L.A.-past with that of the present. The dry-ice inland fog that’s come smoking in from the Pacific makes the town look all the more spectral.
I hang a right at Fairfax and head south. In the rearview, a set of constant headlights begins to make me wonder if maybe I’m being tailed. Feeling a nervous tightness form in my chest, I take the next left just to see. The headlights, which belong to an older-model Ford pickup, blow past without so much as a hiccup. My chest loosens. I shake my head and fire up a smoke. Maybe I’m getting paranoid in my old age, but if the
re’s one thing I’ve learned over the years in this business it’s that paranoia pays.
I U-turn and continue down Fairfax and pull into the small lot behind the big Canter’s Delicatessen sign. I used to love Canter’s back when I could still digest solid food. I would go and eat there after shows way back in the thirties when the deli was still located over in Boyle Heights. I got the pastrami sandwich every time. I liked theirs because it was so lean and rare. I guess I liked things bloody even then.
I get out. I go in, not in search of a pastrami sandwich, but a pay phone. It’s bright and busy at this hour. The smell of greasy cooked food washes over me, making my delicate stomach roll uneasily. I swallow hard and make my way over to the phone. Times like this make me rethink my stubborn refusal to adopt a cellular.
I flip my notepad open, drop some change in the slot, and punch up Vin Prince’s number. His assistant, a perky skirt by the name of Barbara, picks up. I give a fake name, something Jewish-sounding, and ask to talk with the boss-man, but she tells me he’s incommunicado all night. I act all pissed off, telling Babs her boss and me were supposed to get together for drinks to discuss a picture I wrote. I tell her that I’m at the restaurant, that I don’t like being stood up, and that if this is how Prince deals with writers I’ll just take my script to the next production house down the block because the goddamn town’s full of them. Babs gets all flustered-like and explains that Mr. Prince probably just forgot because of some big shindig he’s throwing up at his house in the Hills tonight. I ask the address and she tells me before she can think the better of it. Then she asks my name again and I hang up because I can’t remember what I told her. Doesn’t matter. I found out what I wanted to know. These days this sort of thing is called social engineering. In my day we just called it bullshitting.
I scratch the address down in my pad, cradle the phone, and exit Canter’s, leaving the smell of greasy food and my queasiness behind.
Fancy-schmancy is right. Prince’s house is a sight to behold. From a parking spot thirty yards up the winding street at the top of Beachwood Canyon I smoke and take in the splendor of the vintage 1920s home. Nestled in under an oak tree canopy, the expansive Spanish tile roof rests on the tired shoulders of two-story bone-white stucco walls. I can tell at first glance it’s too good for a Hollywood asshole like Prince. How do I know he’s an asshole? Simple. He works in Hollywood.
Angel of Vengeance Page 2