The Girl with Kaleidoscope Eyes

by David Handler

  I looked at him in surprise. “Why haven’t you said so? You could have put this whole tabloid mess to rest weeks ago.”

  He didn’t bother to respond. Just sat there, sipping his beer.

  “Silly me. You want the heat turned up so Monette will cave and give you what you want.”

  “Don’t be looking at me that way. I told you I was trash. Besides, everybody in this town lies. I’m just playing the game the way I was taught to play it.”

  “Who is the baby’s father?”

  Patrick shrugged his broad shoulders. “No idea. Could be any of a dozen guys. Kat likes to have a good time.”

  “And you don’t mind?”

  “I couldn’t care less. Enough about her, okay?” he said with an impatient wave. “I want to talk about this book you and Queenie are doing. Is there going to be money in it?”

  “Why are you asking?”

  “Because if she stands to make big bucks then I’m behind you 100 percent. Community property, dude. What’s hers is mine. What I don’t want is our divorce getting shoved onto Queenie’s back burner for months and months because you and her are all tied up writing some serious book. I hate that idea. Am I making myself clear?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Okay, then here it is. Whatever she’s paying you I’ll pay double if you leave town by tomorrow morning. Easiest money you’ll ever make. All you have to do is get on an airplane. How does that sound?”

  “It sounds great, but it’s not going to happen. I’m here to do a job.”

  His eyes narrowed to icy blue slits. “Quit the job.”

  “Or what?”

  “You don’t want to know the answer to ‘or what?’”

  “Are you threatening me?”

  “I don’t do threats. I just tell it like it is. Quit the job or Lou will break both of your legs so bad that you’ll spend the rest of your life in a wheelchair.”

  “Actually, that sounded an awful lot like a threat.”

  Patrick drank down the last of his beer, belching hugely. “You couldn’t be more wrong, dude. That wasn’t a threat.” He treated me to his warmest, folksiest, prime-time television smile. “It was a guarantee.”

  Chapter Five

  I spotted a slim young woman with long black hair standing on the corner of Sunset and Bundy with her thumb out as I was roaring my way back through Brentwood. She wore a sweatshirt and jeans and had a knapsack slung over her shoulder. I noticed her partly because you don’t see many people hitchhiking anymore, not like back in my own college days when hitching was considered very cool, very Kerouac. As in Jack, not Steve.

  The other reason I noticed her was that her long black hair had three streaks of silver in it.

  I made a quick right onto Bundy, turned around in the first driveway I came to and eased the Roadmaster over next to her.

  Reggie approached me slowly, a slight smile creasing her face as she checked out my ride. Then she looked me over, her huge blue eyes glittering at me the way they used to a long, long time ago. “You’ve still got it, Stewie,” she observed.

  “My raw, animal sex appeal?”

  “Your motorcycle jacket.”

  “Flight jacket,” I said, revving the throttle.

  “What happened to your cheek? Did you get thrown?”

  “In a manner of speaking. When did you get into town?”

  “Early this morning. Caught the red-eye.”

  “Are you heading for Aintree Manor?”

  “That’s the general idea.”

  “Care for a lift?”

  “Will Lulu let me ride with her?”

  “I don’t know. That’s entirely up to her.”

  Lulu considered it for a moment before she hopped out of her sidecar and let Reggie get in. Then she climbed into Reggie’s lap and curled up there.

  “You’re a sweetie, aren’t you?” Reggie cooed, getting her nose licked for her trouble as we idled there next to the curb on Bundy with the sun shining down on us and the cars whizzing by on Sunset. “Let’s ride, muchacho.”

  “Not so fast. This is the part where I ask you what you’re doing here.”

  “Pretty simple. I got a lift from the airport to UCLA from a very nice student whom I met on the plane. She’s hoping to go into environmental law. Then I started hoofing, hoping someone would give me a lift.”

  “Okay, and this is the part where I say, ‘I mean, what are you doing in L.A.?’ If you were going to come, why didn’t you just fly out with me?”

  “Because I didn’t know I was coming until I knew I was coming.”

  “What changed your mind?”

  She reached down into her knapsack, pulled out an express mail pouch and handed it to me. It was addressed to her at the Root Chakra Institute in New Paltz. Had been sent from a post office in Trenton, New Jersey. First Edison, now Trenton. I opened it and removed a folded sheet of paper and a sealed letter-sized envelope. On the sealed envelope someone had scrawled the words For Olive Oyl and Sir Reginald.

  I glanced over at her. “‘Sir Reginald’?”

  “Dad used to call me that when I was a kid.”

  “You never told me that.”

  “I didn’t? Actually, my formal nickname was Sir Reginald Van Gleason the Third. He was one of those characters Jackie Gleason invented way back when.”

  “Who else knows he used to call you that?”

  “Besides Dad and me? No one. Except for Monette, of course.”

  I unfolded the sheet of paper. It was a plain white sheet of paper. The letter to Reggie had been typed on an old Hermes 3000. It read:

  Dear Sir Reginald—

  Please do not open the enclosed envelope that is addressed to you and your sister. Not until you two are together in Los Angeles, and I sincerely hope that you will be very soon. It would mean everything in the world to me for my girls to be together again after so many years.

  Love,

  Dad

  “When did you get this?”

  “Yesterday afternoon.” She studied me, her eyes searching my face. “What do you think?”

  I stuffed the letters back in the pouch and handed it to her. “I think we’re both getting moved around.”

  “You don’t sound very happy about it.”

  “I’m not.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “We keep moving.”

  I got back into the flow of traffic on Sunset and continued on past Kenter until I made it to Rockingham and hung a right.

  “God, what a crappy neighborhood,” Reggie declared, raising her voice over the Roadmaster’s engine as we cruised past one camera-ready mansion after another. “I can’t stand this much neatness. And I swear the color green is ten times more electric out here. It’s like green used to look when we were tripping, remember?”

  “I don’t have to remember. I still see flashes of it on my bedroom ceiling every night when I turn off my nightstand light.”

  “Do you see purple, too?”

  “Doesn’t everyone?”

  “Holy shit, there are photographers here,” she gasped as we approached Aintree Manor.

  “This is just the skeleton crew. Wait until Monette gets home from work tonight. Between the Pat ’n’ Kat pregnancy scandal and Monette’s mysterious seven-figure book deal, this has turned into a solid-gold, double-barrel tabloid wet dream. Whoa, I should call Tom Wolfe right away. I just came up with the title for his next book.”

  “Stewie, how long have you been here?”

  “Twenty-four hours, why?”

  “You sound like you’re already starting to lose your mind.”

  “Only because I am. But thanks for noticing.”

  The cops had kept the driveway clear so I could pull up to the gate. I entered the access code on the keypad while the photographers hollered at us.

  “Hey, Hoagy, whattaya got for us?”

  “Hey, look, it’s Monette’s kid sis!”

  “What’s up, Reggie? Did you hear from da-da yet?”
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  “Stewie, why do they always talk baby talk?” she asked me as the gate swung open.

  “It comforts them. They feel less evil that way.”

  I steered up the weathered-cobble drive and came to a stop at the old stone bridge over the babbling brook so that she could experience the full impact of the vast estate’s colossally gaudy fakeness. “Kind of takes your breath away, doesn’t it?”

  “I may vomit.”

  “Wait until you see the inside. You will.”

  I pulled up next to the crouching lions and led her inside by way of the kitchen, where Maritza was making a salad. Maritza raised her eyebrows at me curiously when she saw Reggie standing there, knapsack in hand.

  “Maritza, this is Regina, the senora’s sister. You can call her Reggie or Sir Reginald. I call her Stinker.”

  Maritza smiled warmly and said, “It is nice to meet you, Senorita Regina. You are so little and pretty like a doll. The senora is so tall.”

  “We were always a mismatched pair,” Reggie said.

  “I have not prepared a room for you. The senora did not tell me you were coming.”

  “The senora did not know. And I wouldn’t prepare that room just yet if I were you. She may not want me here.”

  Maritza’s eyes widened. “But you are family.”

  “Exactly my point.”

  “You can always stay in the pool house with me,” I assured her.

  Reggie batted her eyelashes at me. “You don’t waste any time, do you?”

  “You know me. I’ve always been a fast worker.”

  “Really? I seem to remember you liked to take it good and slow.”

  “And I seem to remember that you liked that I liked to take it good and slow. You certainly didn’t complain that week we were staying in that decrepit old hotel in Cadaqués.”

  Her eyes gleamed at me. “I loved that old hotel.”

  Maritza peered at us. “You two were much in love once. I can see this,” she said as Lulu ambled past her to the refrigerator, sat down and stared at it. “She wants her anchovy?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  Maritza found a jar on a shelf in the door, pulled one out and offered it to her, almost losing a finger in the transaction.

  “You must be hungry,” Maritza said to Reggie. “I am making a salad with grilled chicken for Senor Hoagy’s lunch. Do you eat chicken or are you vegetarian? You are so thin.”

  “I eat everything,” Reggie said. “Just not very much of it. Will you be joining us?”

  “Oh, no, I have much to do. But thank you. Would you like to see the rest of the house before lunch?”

  Reggie glanced up at the exposed hand-hewn beams with those oh-so-artfully arranged bunches of dried herbs and flowers hanging from them. “I really wouldn’t. Not if I’m about to eat. But thank you.” She went out onto the patio, gazing with horror at all of the perfectly pruned rose bushes that lined the walkway out to the pool. “I’m being tested, Stewie. I may not survive the next twenty-four hours without totally flipping out.”

  Maritza brought out a pitcher of iced tea and a place setting for Reggie, then a baguette and a wheel of brie and a big bowl of salad topped with grilled chicken.

  “The pool’s nice. I swam this morning. Did you bring a suit?”

  “Don’t need one. It’s not as if you haven’t seen me in the buff.”

  “Hector hasn’t.”

  “Who he?”

  “The garden beautician. He hovers.”

  “I could get you one of Senorita Danielle’s,” Maritza offered. “She is tall like the senora, but thin like you. It will be no problem.”

  “That would be great, Maritza.”

  Maritza went back inside while we sat at the table and helped ourselves to lunch. Reggie took only a very small amount of salad and nibbled at it with scant interest. She was never much of an eater. Merilee, on the other hand, can put away an aged thirty-two-ounce porterhouse at Peter Luger and then dream about dessert.

  Maritza came back with a skimpy little yellow bikini of Danielle’s for Reggie to wear. Reggie thanked her and went inside to put it on while I ate. She returned a few moments later wearing the bikini and nothing else. She was riding a teeny tiny bit lower in the caboose than I remembered, but not a whole lot considering that twelve years had gone by since I’d last set eyes on said caboose. She still looked like that same nimble little ballerina she’d been when we were together.

  “Why are you looking at me that way?” she demanded.

  “When I saw you standing on Sunset with your thumb out, I thought you were a college kid.”

  “When I saw you pull over on that Roadmaster, it reminded me of that morning in Yellow Springs when you showed up way late at the inn on your Norton, looking like a wild animal. I wanted to have crazy monkey sex with you right then and there.”

  “It’s the jacket. Must be the jacket.”

  She walked barefoot down the path to the pool and sat on the edge of it, paddling her feet in the water. Lulu and I joined her, Lulu watching her carefully in case she was planning to swim. I stretched out in one of the lounge chairs.

  “Those were some pretty awesome times we had, weren’t they?” Reggie recalled fondly. “And I don’t just mean the part about how we couldn’t keep our hands off each other. We had so goddamned much fun, too. I mean, we jumped out of an airplane together, remember?”

  “I remember.”

  “So how come you haven’t written about us?”

  “That’s a good question.”

  “I’m sitting here waiting for a good answer.”

  “All right. Because I never understood us.”

  “At the time, you mean? We weren’t meant to understand. Just be living in the moment. But you understand us now, don’t you?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “No, I really don’t. And feel free to change the subject anytime.”

  “Sorry, Stewie, I can’t do that. This is too important.”

  “Why would I want to write about us now after all of these years?”

  She gazed at me penetratingly with her huge eyes. “Because you need to.”

  I left that one alone because she wasn’t wrong. She was never wrong. That was the single most maddening thing about Regina Aintree.

  “Tell me what you’ve figured out about us so far,” she urged me. “Please?”

  “Well, okay, but it’s not much. Seriously, it barely qualifies as a Hallmark card. All I know is . . .” I trailed off at the sound of the soft snip-snip-snip of Hector’s pruners. He’d appeared on the path nearby to primp the rose bushes and spy on us. “Hector, this is Monette’s sister, Reggie,” I called out to him. “She’s come to stay for a few days. Patrick will want to know.”

  Hector said nothing in response. Didn’t smile either, for once. Just stared at me with a stony expression on his face.

  Reggie’s eyes hadn’t left me. “All you know is . . .”

  “There’s a brief slice of time in our lives, a sweet season of madness, that falls right in between who we want to be and who we end up being. That was you and me. While it lasted, it was amazing. And then it was over. That’s all I know. Like I said, it’s hardly anything.”

  “Are you shitting me? It’s everything. Stewie—what if I told you that those were the best three years of my life? That absolutely nothing tastes as good, smells as good or feels as good as it did then?”

  “It’s different now,” I conceded. “We were wild and crazy kids. That was a special time.”

  “I want you to write about how special it was.”

  “No, you really don’t.”

  “Yes, I really do. I’m serious about this.”

  “But everyone will know that it’s you. What if it’s not flattering?”

  “I don’t care. Promise me that you’ll write about it, okay? No matter what happens.”

  “Why, what’s going to happen?”

  She lowered her gaze. “I don’
t know, but I’ve been feeling a weird, edgy vibe ever since you walked into my meditation room. Dad feels it, too. That’s why he’s reached out to me. And it’s why I came. Something’s very wrong here. I can feel it. You can, too, or you wouldn’t be here.”

  “I’m here because they made me a very lucrative guaranteed offer.”

  “Guess what? I don’t believe you.”

  I heard the paparazzi clamoring outside the front gate. The gate opened and a car cruised up the driveway, pulling to a stop at the gravel turnaround by the crouching lions. A car door opened and closed, and none other than Boyd Samuels came striding up the path toward us in the bright sunshine, looking way too much like a cast member of Reservoir Dogs in his regulation HWA black suit, white shirt, black tie and Ray-Bans.

  “What are you doing here?” I wondered as Lulu growled at him.

  “Mr. Harmon Wright phoned me late last night,” Boyd answered, whipping off his shades. “He’s seen all of the press attention our project’s getting and asked me to fly out and get personally involved. So I snagged a ride on the Universal jet, dropped my bags at the Four Seasons and here I am.”

  “Personally involved how?”

  “When Mr. Harmon Wright makes a request like that you don’t ask how. All I can tell you is that the publishing world’s in a total lather over Richard Aintree. No one’s talking about anything else.” He gazed around at the lemon trees, very pretty, and the genuinely unreal babbling brook and, finally, at the mansion itself. “Is this place beautiful or what?”

  “Or what,” Reggie said, squinting at him suspiciously as she sat there on the edge of the pool.

  “Boyd Samuels, say hello to Regina Aintree.”

  His face lit up. “This is a real honor, Miss Aintree.”

  “Oh, yeah? Why is that?”

  “Because you’re a distinguished modern American poet, not to mention a living, breathing part of our literary heritage.”

  She arched an eyebrow at me. “Does he always talk like that?”

  “He’s in the process of trying to reinvent himself.”

  “As what, a dickhead?”

  “I prefer to think of him as a kinder, gentler asshole.”

  “I know all about you, Boyd Samuels,” Reggie said to him with withering disapproval. “You’re the single most amoral agent on the planet.”