“Mama bleached her,” Garlin Romaine said, shaking her head. “And bleached her and bleached her.”
“She’s a kid,” I said. “How the hell did she wind up—”
“She was a kid, even though she’d been working, so to speak, since she was twelve, thanks to Mom and Dad.” Garlin Romaine tapped the cigarette against the glass’s rim, dislodging a plug of ash a fingernail long. “She was still in junior high. They’d tried to get her into movies, and you know the rest of it. She got a little part in exchange for an advanced cuddle, and her name got passed around, and a year later Mom and Dad had a new car.” She waved her own smoke away as though it bothered her. “We didn’t have this kind of thing in Maryland, where I grew up.”
I said, “Sure you did. May not have been out in the open.”
The line of her mouth made it clear that I wasn’t worth arguing with. “So what Jeremy told me was that Suley had been caught in a setup and that her mother and father were headed for jail and she’d end up in a foster home if they couldn’t show she was eighteen. I made them darken her hair so she wouldn’t look so trampy, and I worked up a driver’s license and a birth certificate, both for Idaho. I told them they wouldn’t hold up in court, but they did, because it turned out to be a civil case, not a criminal case, and the issue wasn’t whether she was really of age but whether Jeremy’s boss could show he had good reason to believe she was of age. Poor baby was in a panic about being separated from her parents. God only knows why, but I suppose they were the parents she knew, weren’t they?”
“I suppose,” I said, in lieu of sighing, which was what I wanted to do.
“So,” she said, breathing smoke, “I busted my butt over the papers, and it all went as planned, except that she kept coming back here after it was over, with Mom driving at first and then, when she got her permit, without Mom. She liked to watch me paint. She liked to be listened to. Nobody ever listened to her. She’d sit at the rear of the platform and talk and make suggestions. She always wanted animals in the pictures, and I’m not much on animals, but I put a few in to keep her happy, because she was . . . she was one of those girls who drew . . . who drew horses, and I’d been one, too. She wasn’t, as they say, ‘dating’ anyone then, because Jeremy was paying her—well, paying her parents—to keep her out of circulation. He was getting her parts—you know, ‘short teenager,’ ‘girl with puppy,’ that kind of thing. Her mom was telling her that she had Jeremy by the balls and she should push for more, but Suley—she . . . she just didn’t have any meanness in her. She thought Jeremy was nice.”
I said, “The very word.”
“And then she stopped coming by for a while, but she called to say she was in a TV show. She sounded so excited, like it was the best thing that ever happened to her.”
“Right.”
“Until it turned out to be the worst,” Garlin Romaine said. “And even then there was worse to come.”
“Why didn’t she leave him?”
The cigarette was almost down to the filter, but she hit it anyway. “She was terrified of him. And you know how it is: Every now and then, when he began to sense she was about to break the line and swim away, he’d reel her back in, make nice to her, take her somewhere. Buy her stuff. Tell her he loved her. I don’t think anybody ever really loved her.” She shook her head sharply, probably at the unfairness of it all. “But then, when I talked to her a month ago—on the phone, she’d stopped coming by, because he didn’t approve—she said she’d learned that his first wife had divorced him on charges of mental cruelty, even though he offered her extra money to call it irreconcilable differences. And Suley said she was going to do the same, and he wouldn’t dare to oppose her because of all he’d put her through. She said no one would ever speak to him again.”
“Well, I guess they worked it out somehow, because he’s planning to divorce her.”
“A happy ending. The last thing I ever expected. All men come into this world through a woman,” she said, “and some of them never forgive her for it.”
“So now he’s trying to cheat her again, steal a museum-quality painting so it doesn’t get into the community-property settlement.”
“She should take it,” she said. “Take anything he offers. Even if she winds up with a few thousand a week and a used car, she’ll have her life back.” She was looking at the picture, but not focused on it. “Except that it sounds too easy.”
“I know what you mean.”
“Things don’t work out for her that way,” she said. Her eyes wandered the room. The cigarette was dead between her fingers. She looked over at me and then down at the cigarette butt, and she drew a breath, deep enough to make her wheeze. “Every place I paint has a religion. It’s one of the first things that comes to me. Generally, the more temperate, the more hospitable a place is, the more benign God is. Or the gods are. A lot of places, most places, have multiple gods. Some have hierarchies of them.” She pointed toward the foot of the bed. “See that thing down there?”
“The chalice?”
“If that’s what it is. Go get four snips of paper from the vase. Don’t look, just pick them out.”
I did: a pale blue sea with palms, a Greek ruin, a bustling harbor, and a jagged, snow-clad mountain. I gave them to her.
“This is Thontein,” she said instantly. “Thontein is a backbone of peaks, the top of a long, narrow mountain range that runs through the Pacific from the approximate latitude of San Diego, down where the palms in this picture are, to the southern reaches of the Arctic Circle and”—she flicked the snippet of mountain with her index finger—“Mount Ice. Ten thousand years ago, Thontein was one landmass, and people traveled freely between the cold and the warm regions. But then a volcano blew its top, about two-thirds of the way up, and the ocean flowed in and cut the country in two, putting ten miles of cold sea between north and south. Over time the language changed into two languages, lots of vowels in the south and bristly consonants in the north, and the god turned into two gods. The southern god is a spirit of affable plenty, worshipped in white stone temples dedicated to the rainbow, and his people grow rich as tourists pack their harbors. The northern god is a trickster who delights in showing his people paradise, dangling it in front of their noses and then snatching it away, leaving them to shiver and die in the snow. The people of North Thontein, asking themselves why their god mistreats them, have happened upon what they call the Rule of Seven. One in every seven people, they believe, is a horrible botch, a mistake, someone God would delete in a moment if he could, but heaven’s rules restrict him to mass exterminations, like the legendary volcano or the huge tidal waves that wipe out their coastal villages every generation or so. So they regard it as a religious duty, their way of cozying up to God, to find and kill that one in seven. And then the next one and the next one.”
“But they keep being born,” I said.
“Of course. So in North Thontein, murder is an unending form of worship.”
I said, “And you just came up with that?”
“I don’t come up with anything,” she said. She dropped the dead butt into the water glass. “It’s already there. Hell, it’s here. That’s the kind of god that’s in charge of what’s been done to Susan Lee Platz.”
22
Lots Going on in Mach One
I was feeling a tiny bit better as I cranked the Toyota into compliance. I’d been unwilling to go into the day carrying the image of the gods of North Thontein with me, so I’d gotten Garlin Romaine to say she’d talk to Casey about working as her assistant.
“What’s she doing now?” she’d asked me.
“Cheerleading. But she’s sick of it.”
“Then she’s got energy.”
“I don’t think energy will be a problem. And she’s big. I mean, she can . . . you know, pick you up and get you into the shower and stuff.”
“Will I like her?”
&n
bsp; I shrugged. “I did.”
“Good enough. I’ll call her today.”
“Great.” I turned to go, but she reached over and put a hand on my arm.
“And try to think of some way to help Suley,” she said.
The day was waning, the sun hanging low in the west, kind of a cheap-floor-polish yellow from all the dust that the wind had stirred up. Looked like a costume-jewelry sun from a discount chain store. Less than three hours before I was supposed to punch in the entry code at Granger’s gate and go in to do the dirty.
On the phone Anime said, “It’s from some messages we managed to harvest from Patty’s Facebook page. ‘Lots going on on Mach One,’ someone wrote her, and she wrote back, ‘Check out Two,’ the number written out like that, so we figure it’s Mach Two, and then she said, ‘And don’t talk about those here.’”
“The speed of sound,” I said. “Mach Two is twice the speed of sound.”
Anime said, “I looked it up. Mach is ‘a dimensionless quantity representing the ratio of flow velocity past a boundary to the local speed of sound.’ That’s the kind of thing that gets Lilli worked up. So we figured maybe it’s machone.com. We searched it as one word, machone.com and it’s available—I mean, for sale—and machtwo.com comes up as a blank page, which usually means that someone has bought the domain name and parked it.”
“Parked it.” I was pulled over on a side street about halfway between Garlin Romaine’s place and my West Hollywood storage unit.
“They’re not ready to use it yet, so they leave it blank. If you put an underline in between mach and either one or two, you get a ‘Page not available notice,’ which can mean the same thing. Or a bunch of other things that have to do with your browser, except we checked the other things, and it doesn’t mean them.”
“Do you think it’s important?”
“It’s the only thing we don’t understand,” she said, “and Patricia didn’t want it discussed on Facebook, so yeah, we think it’s important.”
“Maybe Mach is an abbreviation, or a code word.”
“We’re thinking abbreviation. If it’s code, why tell someone not to use it? We’ve tried machine and macho and Machu and machaca and mach schnell—which is, like, German for ‘hurry up’—machicolation and some other stuff.”
“‘Machicolation’?”
“Oh, good, I really hoped you’d ask. ‘An opening high in a castle through which one drops things or pours molten lead on the enemy.’”
I said, “Tyrone is going nuts.”
“Tell him to come over and go nuts with us. It won’t help, but at least he’ll have company.”
“Anything else interesting?”
“Well, yeah, if you’re easily entertained. She’s changed schools twice in four years. She got most of the way through sixth grade in her first middle school, then moved to one farther away, and then in eighth she moved to Rina’s school.”
“And she hasn’t changed her home address?”
“No. Each school is a little farther from her house than the one before. She’s definitely not in the default area of the school she goes to now.”
“What about quality?”
“You mean, like, did she move because the other school was better or because she couldn’t keep up in the first one?”
“Something like that.” I looked at my watch. I was now fifteen minutes closer to my scheduled arrival at Jeremy Granger’s house.
“None of them is a magnet school or a charter or anything,” Anime said. “Not remedial either, just your basic crappy California middle schools, full of kids trying to qualify as average and teachers getting older with one eye on the clock.”
“Rina likes her school,” I said, and immediately asked myself, Does she? She was okay with it last year, but—
“Well, lucky her,” Anime said, with a certain touch of frost in her voice.
“Why would Patty change schools like that?” It seemed a safer topic. My phone buzzed, and I looked down to see a number I didn’t know. “Hang on,” I said, and put her on hold.
“Junior?” Garlin Romaine said. “Tell me, is your father still alive?”
I said, “Afraid so.”
“Well, dear, when he dies, you know, you’re perfectly free to use your real name. No adult should have to call himself Junior.”
“Junior is my real name,” I said. “My father wanted to name me after himself, but his name was Merle, so—”
“How appalling. When there are so many good names. Rex, for example.”
“I don’t see myself as a Rex. Listen, I’m on another—”
“I’m sorry, I won’t keep you. Just wanted to tell you I called your young woman, and she sounds perfect, if a bit Mason-Dixon. She’s coming over in half an hour.”
“Good to hear.”
“She sounds . . . sunny,” Garlin said. “We could use a little sunshine around here.”
“Hope you get some. Gotta go.”
I switched back to Anime. “So,” I said.
“Obviously, disciplinary problems,” she said, as though speaking to someone fresh off the boat from Thontein. “But forget learning any more about it. Not even Lilli and me can—”
“And I,” I said automatically. “Lilli and—”
“Oh, my God,” she said. “I could have endured a lifetime of embarrassment. Wait while I write that down . . . And . . .” she said, slowly, “. . . I. There. Now, to return to the topic, the school system buries that kind of information, about disciplinary issues, at the bottom of a hundred-foot-deep pool of radioactive water, full of glowing sharks. You know, even if a kid gets transferred for bringing a weapon to school, the school they stick him in doesn’t get told about the weapon?”
I looked at my watch again. “Hard to believe,” I said, mainly to say something.
“You think? Well, we’ll keep trying to figure out mach, okay?”
“Fine,” I said, but she’d hung up.
As much as the deadline for tonight was pushing at me, I was worried about Stinky. He hadn’t phoned me, he hadn’t given me the money he’d promised for the stamp or even tried to talk me down. That was a problem, because when Stinky wants something, he wants it now. He hadn’t answered my calls, of which there had at last count been five.
It was enough to make me wonder whether the Slugger had found him.
That was worrisome, not solely because I liked Stinky—I didn’t, really, or not very much—but also because Stinky was the only way the Slugger would be able to find me. And even though I wasn’t staying anyplace anyone would associate with me, a name is a great start when you want to find someone. Crooks being the way they are, the Slugger could probably locate lots of folks who would agree to set me up for an amount of money that wouldn’t strain his budget. Once, years ago, during our usual fight, Kathy had asked me, “Don’t you ever want to associate with a better class of people?” and I’d made the unforgivable mistake of laughing. At this juncture that question had the aura of fate, ignored while rapping on the window.
So it was important for me to know whether Stinky was alive and just being Stinky or not. If he was alive, I was pretty certain I knew where he was. But it was way the hell out in Santa Monica, more than two hours there and back, maybe three at this time of day, and time was getting tight.
I also wanted to stop by my storage unit and get my tools, although I could do without them in a pinch, since I had the codes. The storage unit at least had the virtue of being nearby.
So, with the clock ticking, I wanted to go to Santa Monica and I wanted to pop into the storage unit. But I needed to make a call.
Need won. I put the car in gear and headed north, crossing Santa Monica Boulevard until I was only a block or two from Ronnie’s place. Then I pulled to the curb and dialed.
“What?” she said.
I said, “Than
ks for picking up.”
“I decided I can’t change you if I don’t talk to you. You need changing so badly.”
“Change me tonight,” I said.
“It’ll take longer than that.”
“Well, you can start tonight. I . . . uh, I need a ride.”
A moment passed as I replayed the words in my mind, remembered how Tyrone had kicked himself, and followed suit. It hurt. I said, “Ow,” but she’d hung up.
I counted to ten and pushed the button again. Her phone rang.
She said, “What time?”
“Around eight.”
“Are you about to tempt fate again?”
“I am.”
“I’d have thought you’d have learned by now.”
“You’re speaking to me,” I said.
“Yeah, but I’m not through being mad.”
“I haven’t got much choice. I have to go tonight.”
“Or what?”
I told her.
“Well, as much as I don’t want to help you put your head into the lion’s mouth, I will. But not at eight.”
“Why not?”
“I’m not home, and I won’t be home until about eight fifteen.”
I chewed on my lower lip for a moment. “Are you someplace we can meet up?”
“Not unless the lion lives in the general direction of Disneyland.”
I said, “No one lives in the general direction of Disneyland.” Granger had said I could go in as early as seven thirty and that he wouldn’t be back until midnight. I looked at my watch again, without having consciously decided to do it, and when I stopped looking at it, I realized I hadn’t read the time. “Around eight thirty?” I said.
“I guess. My GPS says I’ll get there about eight twenty, but it’s always optimistic. Eight thirty is probably safe. What’s the plan?”
“I pick you up and we go get another car. Then you go have a coffee or a foie gras or something not too far away until I call you. It should be less than an hour.”
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