Ben sighed. “Alright,” he said out loud to himself. “Fine. Four-one-one it is.” He headed one city-block north to the HondaWood dealer. “Why not confront Bloodworth directly?” he shouted at himself. “These people already know where I live anyway, right? Right! If they want to kill me, they will.” His arms flailed in surrender, hands briefly abandoning the steering wheel.
“With some luck I’ll wake up while they’re hovering over my bead with a butcher knife and just hand them the wallet.”
He ran a red light, a stop sign, and cut off an old lady. Perhaps the Honda dealership’s manager perceived that he was contending with a man on the edge. It took very little to persuade him that, unlike the stereo, the AC was certainly their responsibility, and they would see what they could do right this minute.
While Ben was waiting he used the manager’s phone.
“Information, what city?”
But after some key-tapping she told him, “No listing in the greater Los Angeles area.”
He hung up to find the dealership manager looking apologetic and a little frightened.
“Let me guess,” Ben said. “You need a part.”
The manager nodded. “If you’d like, you can take the car today and drop it off again later. We should have the part by tomorrow.”
“No, take it. Keep it. Call me when it’s ready. If I’m not dead, I’ll come get it.”
* * *
At seven, the squat buildings and square bungalows of Melrose blazed metallic in the low light, and the temperature still hung in the high nineties. Ben phoned Chloe, left a message, could she drive tonight?
Nobody threatening had shown up at Busta’ Guts, and Ben had spent the night on Heather’s couch. He considered asking Chloe to pick him up from the club, but he needed a shower, change of clothes and the tickets for the art show, which he hoped he remembered correctly as being tacked to his bulletin board.
Back at his little house, nothing seemed amiss, making him wonder if conspiracy theories had finally taken over his better judgment. He heard the phone ring from the shower and found Chloe’s voice on his machine when he got out. “My AC and stereo are broken, too. How weird is that? But my car is not in the shop, so yes, I can drive if you want.”
At nine precisely, Chloe pulled up in her yellow Volkswagen Groundhog, wearing a mint green slipdress, a black feather boa and black vinyl platforms. The stereo seemed healthy enough to Ben, blasting 80’s favorites loud enough to rattle his front windows. But he had more pressing things weighing on his mind.
“Listen!” he hollered over a Duran Duran tune he was embarrassed to admit still made him choke up if he paid attention. “I hope you didn’t split the other night because of Lana!”
Chloe shook her head, made a right onto Melrose.
“Or Josie!”
She shook her head again.
“Can I turn this down!”
“It doesn’t turn down!”
Very funny, Ben thought. If she was pissed at him, why hadn’t she said so earlier? He punched the down arrow, incensed. There was no way he was showing up at his friend’s art show opening with some chick who—it didn’t turn down. It also didn’t turn off, and the next song was Led Zeppelin, which probably ranked as Ben’s most hated band ever, but he couldn’t change the station either.
“Your radio’s broken!”
“I told you that! I also have to turn the heat on now, or the engine’s going to overheat!”
Ben trusted things could only get better.
His friend’s opening ran out of a one-room independent gallery in Studio City, in the Valley. Chloe found a parking space in the bank lot across the street. When she turned the engine off, and the full-blast heater and killer radio with it, Ben stumbled out of the car into the comparatively cool air and pretended to kiss the ground.
Chloe stood, arms crossed. “You can take a taxi home.”
“I think it might be worth it. How can you drive that thing?”
“It’s been broken forever, I’m used to it. Besides, how else were we supposed to get here?”
Ben stood, dipped his head. “Point taken.”
“Can we go see some art now, please?”
“Well, I can’t promise you that.” He took her arm and led her across Ventura Boulevard to Gallery AnArtChy.
Music poured from inside the bright storefront gallery.
“Sounds like they hired the Flintstones band to play,” Ben said.
“I like it. That’s a marimba. The marimba is a great instrument because it can be simultaneously spooky and whimsical. Unlike the poor Theremin, which is always associated with monsters around the corner.”
“Thank you, professor.”
“Don’t mention it.”
Inside, amidst the brilliant lights and dazzling paintings, Ben found his friend, the artist, Alrik. Despite the man’s Scandinavian name, he stood less than six feet, talked like a surfer, and had trim, dark hair that would have looked absurd underneath a Viking helmet. His paintings, too, were quintessentially American, a high-energy blend of comic book and graffiti art. Not “moving” or poignant perhaps, but an awful lot of fun.
Chloe assembled a cheese and fruit plate for them to share, and Alrik pressed plastic goblets of wine into both their hands. But he pulled Ben aside, “There was a guy here asking about you, man. I mean he was looking for somebody else, but kinda asked about you. You know some guy name a’ Blood…something?”
Ben’s stomach tightened. “Was this guy in a leather coat?”
“Naw, business clothes. Blonde hair, goatee. He left a card.”
“Did he say what he wanted?”
Alrik shook his head. “Something about owing him money.”
He handed Ben a card, which Ben surreptitiously pocketed.
“Did he seem…dangerous?”
His friend shrugged. “It’s hard to seem dangerous in a Hugo Boss suit.” He sent Ben to view the show.
Ben gulped his wine, snagged another glass. He scrutinized the other visitors. They seemed divided between hip kids and Euro-trash. The kids were skinny, had spiky hair bleached at the tips or shaved heads and goatees. They wore Glitter Baby and Rock Star Arsenal gear, greeted the artist with congratulatory hugs, wolfed cheese, shied away from the wine. The others—older, darker—frowned at them. Frowned at the art. They leaned into each other to whisper in foreign snatches, broke apart in nasty laughter.
“Know any of those clowns?” Chloe asked. “They look like they got lost on their way to Tattoo.”
“Listen, I hope you didn’t split on Sunday because of that woman at the bar. Or the chick in the cat suit.”
“None of the above. One of those guys? Was my boss.”
“I thought you work in an office.”
“I’m not saying I can account for it, I’m just telling you why I left.”
“What’s the name of your company again?”
She laughed at him. “Why, you think I’m lying? That I’m actually a porn star?”
“No. If you were you’d have a nicer car.”
“Those girls make a lot, huh?” She sounded like she might be considering it in earnest.
Ben wanted to avoid a public hard-on. “Want to go?”
“I guess. Where?”
“Are you hungry?” he asked. “I could eat.”
“There’s this weird place I stumbled on, serves Romanian food. I was going to wait until Saturday to take you.”
“But we seem to need something to occupy us.”
Ben nodded, felt warm from the wine. “Occupy. Exactly.”
“What is Romanian food?”
He led her back across Ventura to the car. “I have no idea. I thought you’d know, you’re the chef.”
“Dracula was from Romania
. Maybe they’ll have blood pudding.”
She started the car, killing the conversation.
The restaurant proved elusive, having no sign. But an odd building housed it, a long white box with a sharp peaked roof. Stucco, no windows—just an oversized, wooden door that could have been attached to a castle. Vaguely reminiscent of a church, sans steeple.
Chloe stepped out of the car and looked around. “I have no idea where we are.”
Ben pointed up the road. “Three blocks that way is the 110-105 interchange.”
The castle door opened to a long foyer, and inside was cool and cozy. Dim lighting, much of it from candles, dark wood on the floors and the steeped ceiling remained exposed. At the far end of the foyer, a brunette, college-age girl sat in front of a register. She hopped off her stool when Ben and Chloe entered. “Welcome to Vlad’s!” She gave them a warm smile.
“I love your dress!” Chloe spouted in admiration of the girl’s floor-length black and purple velvet gown. The top fit like a vest, while the bottom belled.
“Thanks! My Gramma made it.”
She led them through an oversized entranceway to the main room, where crisp white linen covered three rows of square tables. In the corner by the fireplace, two men crouched over a chess game while an enormous black dog slept under the table. Aside from them, Ben and Chloe were the only customers.
The girl sat them at the table farthest from the concentrating men, explained the menu and made suggestions in good, only slightly accented English. While she was talking, an older gentleman in his shirt sleeves and wearing an apron sneaked around her to set a basket of warm bread on the table.
“Take your time. Let me know if you have questions.”
Ben set the menu aside. “Apparently Romanian food is organ meats, wine, and vodka. And bread.”
Chloe broke the loaf into two large chunks. “Our question has been answered.”
“Ours has but mine hasn’t.”
“What?”
“You never told me where you work.”
“I did so, on our first date.”
“Tell me again.”
The girl brought a bottle of wine, made an elegant ceremony of opening it and letting them smell the cork, then pouring just enough in each glass to obtain their approval before leaving the bottle.
“Survivanoia,” Chloe told him once the waitress had left.
Ben snapped his fingers. “Ah! There was a reason I forgot, which is because I wanted to, because of that whole scandal with the Flower Flu.”
Chloe squinted at him. “Scandal?”
“The week I met you, in fact, some lawyer ran an ad looking for people whose relatives died of Flower Flu. She’s claiming that Survivanoia has a treatment and won’t release it, so she’s doing a class action suit.”
“Class action. And it’s ‘filing’.”
“What?”
“It’s just called class action.”
“Oh. Anyway, I—”
“I don’t know anything about this. You saw it in the paper?”
Ben nodded, feeling that something had the potential to go very wrong very soon, like a soaring kite the moment before it pitches to the ground. “I’m not saying you’re responsible. It’s not like you run the place, you’re…inside sales, right?”
“Right.”
“See, I was listening. I just suffer from short term memory loss.”
Chloe’s face brightened—the kite finding the wind. “So if I ask you next week, you’ll remember?”
“You’re pretty funny.”
“You say that a lot, are you aware? But you never laugh at anything I say. You don’t even smile, you just give me this sort of smirk.”
Ben gave just the smirk she spoke of. “That’s my Afterschool Special, as you termed it.”
“Go on, I’m tuned in. I’ve got popcorn and everything. Even better, I’ve got wine.”
“Really good wine, too.” He helped himself to another glass. “Okay…I came here from Pittsburgh to do comedy. Believe it or not, Pittsburgh has a good reputation, comedy-wise.”
“Vonnie confirms that, yes.”
“I did pretty good out there, and I don’t have that Pittsburgh accent.”
“True. You haven’t said ‘yuns’ or ‘Stillers’ once since I met you.”
“So, I figured I had a shot. I come out here and I’m doing all right, playing places like Adlibs, and getting good reviews and a word here and there from some bigger names.”
“And then? Tragedy struck.” Chloe mimicked a violin.
Ben tossed back the rest of his wine. He told her about how his taste buds went funny on him one day, apples tasted salty. Then his lip tingled and went numb, and that night at the club, he laughed at somebody’s joke and his face felt weird, like half of it was taped down. He ran to the men’s room to see.
“Bell’s palsy,” Chloe guessed.
“Right. You had it?”
“A friend, briefly. They gave her some steroids and something else, antibiotics? And it went away in a couple weeks.”
“Mine didn’t.” Ben had been saddled with a broken face for almost ten months. “So in the interest of not scaring anybody, I taught myself this smirk. It used to go along with a shoulder raise and a little snort.” He demonstrated. “I thought I’d appear clever and refined. They though I was a stuck-up prick. I got blacklisted.”
Chloe’s brow furrowed. “Why didn’t you just tell them the truth?”
“Embarrassed! Palsy? Everybody makes fun of the palsy kid!”
The black behemoth under the chess table raised his head at Ben’s outburst.
Ben leaned in and said in what sounded to him like a whisper, “That’s the biggest goddamn German shepherd I’ve ever seen. Or Doberman. I mix all those pointy dogs up. That’s one of the few things I can say in Spanish. I can ask where the bathroom is, call somebody nasty names, and I can say the dog is big and black.”
“We seem to have gotten off topic.”
“Oh, yeah.” Ben shrugged. “So I took up bartending. I’m a loser, baby.”
Chloe sat back. “I’m to believe that a successful, clever guy—at least when he’s not drunk—traveled three thousand miles, got himself on a stage, and then let a temporary embarrassing inconvenience kill his career?”
He struggled with her words for a moment, then asked, “What would you believe?”
“You wanted to be a bartender.”
“Nice. Thanks very much.”
“What’s wrong with it? You make a lot of money. You’re good at it.”
“Who the hell are you to tell me what I’m good at? I was funny, goddammit!”
The dog looked up again, grumbled.
Chloe folded her arms. “Funny haha or funny peculiar?”
Ben smirked. “Very clever. Touché.”
“I have another friend like you, he’s this great teacher—”
“Please. Drop it.”
“—but he scorns teaching and continues to struggle with his painfully mediocre—”
“Will you please! Shut—”
Two huge hands shoved him backward. No, not hands—paws. Ben’s chair tipped, and a maw of white teeth snarled beneath smoldering brown eyes. He heard a sharp cry in a foreign language. He scrambled out of the chair, landed on his belly. Something dropped from his pocket.
The chess players circled him, he heard their bantering, saw their formal shoes. He noticed the one man’s pants were two inches too short and that his socks were stark white.
Then he heard Chloe’s voice rise above the chaos. “Hey! Where’d you get these?”
He squinted up at her, pinned by the weight of the dog, who stood on his back and held gently but firmly to his neck, police dog style. She held a wallet. N
ot his. A worn, black wallet. And now she rubbed his nose in the funny orange money.
“These are pollution credits,” she informed him. “Stolen from my company. You’re in a lot of trouble, mister bartender.”
“That’s not m—”
A growl cut him off, made convincing by its teeth. The stranger’s wallet hit the floor, near his head. He saw the flame of orange certificates against the minty green whirl of Chloe’s dress and watched her platforms clomp out the door. A rivulet of drool ran down the side of his neck.
At least it wasn’t blood, he thought, that’d come later when the Porno Mafia people came after him for a wallet they knew he had. Overhead, the distraught chess players flapped and squawked and then Chloe’s stereo rose above them with that same damn Duran Duran song. “Don’t say a prayer for me now…”
It would not be denied. His lips pulled away from his teeth, and his mouth fell open and for the first time in years, Ben smiled. Really smiled. He smiled so big he thought he must be buzzing, like fluorescent lights or a muted television. “You’re in trouble!” she’d said. He savored this. The understatement did it, pushed a hearty bark from the back of his throat, a laugh! Benjamin Myers, Bartender Extraordinaire, laughed and laughed and laughed.
CHAPTER 8
“Are you insured?”
Geo Rivera peered over his shoulder at the woman. Her voice, simultaneously buttery and malice-laced, matched her demeanor.
“Excuse me, what?” He spun in his office chair to face her.
“Insurance. Medical, life, car.”
“Are you…selling some?” His brow rumpled. He wondered why this woman—sexy though she may be—was going, what, office to office? Cubicle to cubicle? Didn’t they have meetings for this sort of thing?
The woman, model-tall but curvy, strolled to the center of Geo’s office. Geo stared in awe at her hair, a complicated wine-red braid that fishtailed below her hips. She, meanwhile, took in his office.
Being the head of the sales department got him out of a cubicle. But not being a VP meant that instead of the courtyard garden, his window faced the parking lot and the mountains beyond. Originally, Geo had centered his desk in this picture window, facing it out to the mountains. He’d lined the walls with bookshelves and occupied the visitor chair with the giant rubber plant they’d issued him, leaving both plant and chair to stand guard off to his left. But having has back to the door incited his paranoia.
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