I shuffled through the pages, finding Preston’s final note. Then I tugged my cell phone from my pocket and dialed.
Over the pulsing beat of club music, a guy with a strong Brooklyn accent: “Johnny Ordean’s phone.”
Ever since Aiden’s Law had racked up enough episodes for a DVD box set, Johnny had assumed the affectation of unavailability, putting nine layers of entourage between himself and others.
“Surprisingly,” I said, “I’m calling for Johnny. This is Drew Danner.”
“Andrew Danner? The…?”
“Murderer,” I said. “Sure. That’s me.”
Animated shouting, then Johnny’s voice, hoarse and loud: “Drew? That you? Crazy days, bro. Crazy days. You kill that broad?”
“Twice.”
“Drastic.” Johnny partook vigorously of the bad slang that seemed to sweep through L.A. every other season like a crimson tide.
“How’s it going?”
“Solid. The show’s kickin’. We’re doing a spin-off next year.”
“Aiden’s Law Omaha?”
“Very funny, bro. It’s called Mary’s Rule, and the sister—”
“Listen, I need a favor. You still have criminalists on staff as expert consultants?”
“Yeah, a handful.”
“I have a hair that I need to get run by a crime lab. It could prove me innocent.” Of course, it wouldn’t prove me innocent, but I was trying to feed him the kind of dialogue to which he was accustomed to responding. “I need to know who it belongs to.”
“Like a clue?” Noticeable excitement in his voice.
“Yeah, Johnny. Like a clue. Can you have one of your guys do it?”
“Sure, I’ll take it in to them, say I need to see how it works for an episode idea I’m developing. They love walking me through that stuff at the lab. When you need it by?”
“As soon as possible. It’s hard for me to describe how important this is.”
“Bring the hair by Flux. It’s a closed party—I’ll have you put on the list. I’ll call one of the consultants, have him check out the hair tonight.”
“You can get that done? Tonight?”
“I’m Johnny Ordean. I can get anything done.”
35
Flux is the Hollywood club of the minute, trending hot with wheatgrass martinis, bamboo walls, and a bump-and-grind DJ beat ideal for ecstasy humpers, film-industry underlings, and clubbies. I paid twenty bucks to park in a space fit for a lawn mower and legged it down Sunset.
Beneath every windshield wiper, a glossy postcard hawking bad theater. At every street corner, a woman stomping her boots against the cold. Even at this hour, bodies spilled from gyms, where would-be scribblers and bit players simulated honest work. Bodies so sculpted and chiseled they seem of a different species, bodies that have endless time to devote to themselves, to do that extra six sets of ten on the cable pull that defines the inner prong of the triceps or the outer slab of the quad. I used to have a body like that, a lesser model built from a matching mind-set before both grew too weary to keep up. I walked on, taking in the night, these bits of a past persona I never quite inhabited. The tangy scent of deodorant, candy-colored i Pods strapped to glistening arms, steam lifting from overheated Dri-FIT shirts like cartoon sizzle.
The velvet ropes that in other, more reasonable cities are consigned to museums and musicals sprout from the sidewalk like futuristic shrubs. Massed at the imaginary walls before the bouncers are dime-store vixens and cultivated tough guys. Everyone is in costume; everyone has a getup; it’s perennial Halloween. Pearl Jam plaid, skullcap chic, scruff faces and denim vests cut to show off shoulder tats. A girl, for no reason, wears a Gatsby cap and a wide tie snaking into a 1920s vest. Even the firemen shuffling through the bars are done up and done down, T-shirts announcing their stations, blond wisps grown just long enough to curl out the bottoms of their stocking caps, models in search of calendars. They are all children, and yet they are all adults. They unpack from Jettas and Navigators and the occasional Lotus. They cross streets in packs, like wolves, sipping Vitawaters and smoking American Spirits, yammering on cell phones with customized bleats and chimes, the night lit with a psychedelic rainbow of LED screens—cotton-candy pink, toilet-bowl blue, horror-show green.
L.A. is a city of memorable faces. Even the unattractive character actors have that certain something, that exemplification of type. The others, too, lodge in the mind. The near misses. All lacking that extra it that would catapult them, that would mean they’re not here at this place with these people, with you and me. Perky girl in a White Sox cap, nose-job-enhanced but not quite there. The wrestler who won best smile at Wichita High. The cheerleading captain who gave great backseat head in Short Hills. They come like pioneers, bringing abdominal six-packs and twenty-two waists and little else, seekers of prepackaged glory without the talent for Broadway or the balls for the service. L.A. is the edge of the American dream, the farthest your hopes can carry you before you topple into the Pacific, Icarus without water wings. And yet still they come. They come out and crowd the cliff edges, penguins above dangerous waters.
L.A. will devour them. It will crush them into inconsequentiality, grind them into a paste and smear them through the city’s forgotten alleys. They will clip coupons and pre-party to save money on bar tabs. They will inhabit dojos and Coffee Beans during working hours—sunny L.A.’s businesses thrive with patronage from the idle keeping their empty audition hours open—and they’ll scour online job sites for graveyard shifts that don’t exist. They will get gigs as trainers and waiters and Cuervo girls, and their friends will mumble, That’s cool, that’s cool. They’ll turn into third-rate entrepreneurs, making bamboo purses, designing jewelry in Reseda, marketing a blue-colored vodka in college bars. Their days must be open for auditions that come less and less frequently, but just when they’re about to lose hope, they’ll land Laura in a small-theater production of The Glass Menagerie and the rush and promise will fuel ungainful employment for another few years. And then, if they haven’t wised up and beat a retreat to Billings or Sioux City, someone will offer them a pinch of escapism or a skin flick—not porn but tasteful erotica—and so the next downward spiral will begin. And new meat arrives by the busload. It pours out of LAX and off the freeways, chattel for the abattoir, oxen groomed for the altar.
I reached Flux, fighting through a mosh pit of wannabes mobbing the unmarked double doors. No one has a name here. They are all “dawg” and “baby doll.” They gain position in the scrum by working in concert, like raptors, with the friends they’ll be only too eager to drop once they book their first pilot. They call out to the bouncer using his first name, which they’ve researched. Their boss’s brother knows the bartender, or their brother’s boss knows the owner. They swell and shove politely, and a chirpy girl with a clipboard feigns exasperation through her ecstasy of purpose and rank, chiding them and distributing wristbands as if feeding chimps at a zoo. A few older women, indistinguishable from prostitutes by garb and makeup, have ceded bitchiness with their age; they can no longer compete directly. Instead they switch strategies, cooing support at the czarina working the door. That poor girl. Look, she’s all alone managing the line. You go, honey. You tell them. Still, they do not curry enough goodwill to pass Go. The girl with the clipboard knows their type, knows that in a different life they’ve blown smoke in her face at a cattle call or discarded her head shot while working nights filing in a casting office.
Consigned to club-line purgatory, the crowdlings bicker and pop pills and talk loudly of embellished career developments and pretend not to be where they are, waiting outside in the bitter Hollywood night. That is where they will wait, night after night. And then one day Fame will pluck one of these poor unfortunate souls and elevate her like a priestess to the top of the ziggurat, and thenceforth, she will never know cordon ropes and lines and bouncers named Ricky, and it will make it worth it for everyone else who still does.
Chic’s voice, like warning bells in my
head: Always easier to take somebody else’s inventory.
What made me any different? About how I got here? Where I’d wound up?
A shorter bus ride and a longer stain.
Then what? Envy? I thought I’d sworn off that with the single-barrel bourbon. Envy for what? The exuberance? The hopefulness? The youth? As Chic had said, life leaves you behind. By Hollywood standards I was long in the tooth, like Morton Frankel. I had a few successes under my belt and access to rooms behind some of the city’s locked doors—as a writer, as an alleged murderer—in a way that others might envy, but I’d have traded it in a stockbroker’s minute to be back on the other side, out in the unforgiving night, with all my solutions lying inside. I’d have traded it all to believe in the myth once again.
But instead I am here to deliver a hair.
I cut through the crowd, and it yielded to my apathy. Inside, over an ungodly remix beat, some kid covered Bob Seger without the grit or gravitas.
“Drew Danner,” I told the girl at the door. “I’m with Johnny Ordean.”
At both names the frontmost constituents of the throng stilled and the girl dropped the clipboard against her thigh, revealing it for the prop that it was, and wordlessly unhooked the maroon rope.
Sliced-and-diced Seger had given way to pump-and-hump rhythm. Threesomes were freaking under seizure-inducing lights. I find me bitches left and right. I find me bitches every night. Production-development girls in Chanel grooved in a circle, their oblivious movement an inadvertently droll endorsement of the lyrics. The club had a kind of magnetic energy that pointed to the rear corner, where indeed I found Johnny Ordean and his franchise face. Fulfilling the no-neck contingency of the entourage, his cousin sat deep in the booth, hammering cigarettes into his face one after another.
He slid out and I slid in. Johnny wrapped an arm around my shoulders, raised his brows at my vibrant eye, and gave my neck a squeeze like an old-school mobster. Playing the part, I reached inside my jacket pocket, removed the envelope, and dropped it on the table like a payoff. The envelope held a Ziploc containing a single specimen of Morton Frankel’s hair. The others I was saving for a rainy day.
Johnny wound his finger in the air, a let’s-get-moving gesture, and his cousin shifted the cig from one end of his mouth to the other and pressed a cell phone to his sweaty cheek.
“Fast and quiet,” I said.
Johnny squeezed my neck again.
“And thank you.”
“Of course, bro. What good is celebrity if you can’t put it to work?”
It was, I thought, an excellent question.
36
Far from the madding crowd, I sat like a tailgater on my little rented rectangle of Hollywood asphalt and dialed my cell phone.
“I’d like to see you,” I said. “I’m in your neck of the woods.”
“Ah, yes,” she said, “I can hear the excess in the background.”
The parking-lot attendant gave me a peculiar look as I pulled out. For twenty bucks I should’ve set up camp for the night.
Caroline proved to live in a corner unit on the sixth floor of a recently renovated building on Crescent Heights. I tripped over some vestigial scaffolding on my way in, the doorman kindly pretending not to notice. I waited in the freshly carpeted hall while she undid a profusion of dead bolts. She double-checked me through a veil of security chains, and then the door closed on me again. More metallic unhooking and we were face-to-face.
She reached out, gingerly touched my right temple just beyond the stitches. “Have you iced that?”
Minutes later I was sitting on her plush sofa, she on the adjoining coffee table, the better to press a bag of frozen corn kernels to my eye. I described to her the nature of my disagreement with Mort. To my surprise she didn’t reprimand me for Junior’s role, but then, she knew him better than I and, given her profession, likely applied a stringent doctrine of accountability regardless of age.
The edge of the bag caught a stitch, and I grimaced. Leaning forward, she adjusted, and then our faces were close, the air chilled from the frozen bag. She brushed the hair off my forehead gently, and her lips parted a bit, her gaze on my mouth. I moved the bag aside, but she stood abruptly and said, “What are we doing here, Drew? I mean, why do you like being with me?”
“Your trusting nature?”
“I’m serious.”
I set the bag on my knee. “Because it’s the only time I don’t want to be anywhere else.”
She opened her mouth to say something, but instead she held up a finger and walked swiftly down the hall, and then I heard a door close and the sounds of retching. The sink ran for a while, and there was toothbrushing and gargling, and soon she returned, red-faced, reluctant to make eye contact.
I said, “If I kiss you, does your head explode?”
She said, incredulous, “You still want to kiss me?”
“I do. I also want to wake up next to you.” I held up both hands. “Today, a year from now, whenever. I’m just letting you know that I find you—”
She said, “Come here.” She was shaking. She took my hand and led me to her bedroom, and then she turned off the lights and stepped out of her sweatpants. She kissed me nervously, too hard, and said, “Get a condom. It’s in the drawer,” and as I fumbled out of my clothes, she tugged me on top of her. I moved to lift her shirt, but she grabbed my wrist, firmly, and said, “I want to keep it on,” and then guided my shoulders and set her jaw in the best spirit of let’s-get-it-over-with.
I kept thinking I had the angle or position wrong until it struck me that she had tightened up, locked down her body in panic until it was as though there were no aperture. We shifted and reshifted until she laughed and said bitterly, “Hey, you wanted to,” and rolled over, and then her shoulders shook once, and I realized she was crying.
“I’m not crying,” she said.
I lay there in the dark beside her, wanting to touch her but not sure if that was the right call.
“That moved a little fast for me,” I said. “I’d imagine it felt the same way to you.”
She kept on her stomach, angled away, her head lowered to the cross of her arms. Her voice was hoarse and unsteady, but gentle. “Just lock the front door behind you, okay?”
“What are you feeling?”
“Philosophical.”
“That’s not a feeling.”
“Oh, great. This game.”
“Knock it off,” I said.
She was silent for a long time, and then she said, “I’m sorry. That’s a reasonable question. I don’t know if I’m clear enough to answer it.”
“So make it up.”
“How do I feel…?” A car horn blared in the distance. From one of the apartments in floating proximity came Eric Clapton, an accompaniment to someone’s romantic dinner. Caroline’s shoulders seized a bit more, but she didn’t make a noise, and then she hung her head off the bed and miraculously came up with a tissue and blew her nose, all the while keeping her face from view. She settled back into position. Her voice cracked when she spoke. “That if I’m not vigilant, undisclosed awful things will happen to me. And.” A deep breath. “That I may not be brave enough to allow myself something like this.”
We breathed for a while in the semidarkness, and then eventually I said, “Do you mind if I take the rest of my clothes off?”
She turned slowly, hair hiding one eye. Sheer lavender curtains filtered the faint lights from the street below. She watched me for a long time. “No.”
She’d pulled me to her so furiously that my clothes were still clinging to me—one shoe, both socks, a tangle of boxers at my ankle. I stripped and she watched me, and then I lay flat on her bed, hands at my sides, and said, “Okay. I have no expectations. I’m just lying here naked so you can look at me.”
She pulled her shirt back into place, sat Indian style before me, and studied me clinically.
After a time I asked, “How do you feel now?”
“Anxious. I haven’t, obviou
sly, since…”
“I figured.”
“Can I touch you?”
“Yes.”
She pressed both palms flat against my chest and leaned, as if testing my consistency. She stroked my thigh with the tips of her nails. She cupped me in her hand and said, “You’re so soft.”
“Not if you keep that up.”
She laughed, covering her mouth as if the sound had caught her off guard. She tugged out her ponytail holder, and her lank, sandalwood hair relaxed into wisps, which brushed my chest as she leaned over me. She felt my entire body, inch by inch, a blind person learning a new shape. After maybe twenty minutes of silent examination, she lifted off her own shirt.
Her torso, too, bore the marks of the abuse she’d endured, though they were less striking, inlaid against her splendid form. A short run of mottled flesh at her left shoulder, a ridge of stomach muscle, a gnarl of scar tissue at her ribs, the swell of her breasts.
“You can touch,” she said. “Me.”
I lifted my hands from my sides and explored her delightful, unpredictable body. Her breathing shifted. She tilted her head, let her hair spill across her face. Falling back, she pulled me on top of her again and clutched my back. Her breath came hot against my neck. It took time for her to unclench; we moved slowly, with patience, murmuring and kissing, one vivid moment at a time. And finally we were making love. It was not without awkwardness, but it wasn’t without grace either.
Afterward she clung to me, started crying, and didn’t stop. She wept with the abandon of a child, until she was limp, until her face was drained to a dishwater gray. Beneath the veneer of exhaustion and terror, she looked elated.
She slung a leg across my stomach and propped herself up on an elbow, her face beside mine. “Sorry I cried.”
“I don’t mind. Apologize to yourself if you want to.”
She lowered her chin to my chest. “I used to be good at this, you know.”
“I’m told I never was.”
She laughed, hit me weakly.
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