Ronnie said, “And what they’re recording is . . . ?”
“Unpopular kids turning things upside down. Getting in with popular kids. Fucking with them. It’s like serials. There’s a few new minutes on every story every week, all these stories going on at the same time. The thing where Patty and her drizzly little friend saw Rina’s BF holding hands with that hashtag hottie, what’s her name?”
“Denise,” Anime said. “What a numbskull.”
“Yeah, but hot. So that took like three chapters to set up, one where Patty explains what she’s going to do, right to the camera like some plotter on Big Brother, and then two, she talks Denise into it, not that it would be hard to talk Denise into anything, and then three, when she and her tagalong see them together.”
“Did they actually film Rina?” Ronnie said.
I said, “They did. I saw it when Anime was setting up the iPad.”
“And then four, the big payoff,” Lilli said. “The money shot. Her and the lapdog are in Rina’s room, and Patty tells Rina about how the BF is messing with this other girl, and then the lapdog backs her up and Rina calls the BF—”
“His name is Tyrone.”
“—and breaks up with him, and then Rina gets weepy, and Patty and the tagalong are, like, comforting her.”
Ronnie said, “How did they film all that?”
“They had their phones on video, and Patty’s lens was sticking out of her pocket and the sidekick’s was on a table in Rina’s room, propped up on something. They’ll be filming this party today like it’s Survivor. This is triumph time.”
“And you guys think this is okay,” I said.
“We know you, and we think your daughter is probably nice,” Lilli said. “But if everybody was strangers? Yeah, we’d be down with it. You bet.”
Ronnie said, “They’re selling subscriptions?”
“Looks like,” Lilli said. “The audience builds by word of mouth. But it’s more than a show, you know? They think of themselves as, like, an underground, like revolutionaries. They think they’re going to show a million loser kids how to infiltrate the ranks of the local cools. Like it even matters.”
I said, “It matters to Rina.”
°°°
“We’re about five minutes away,” I said into the phone. “Are you sure you want me to do this in front of everyone?”
“I want Rina to see what this little monster did to her,” Kathy said, “and I want the other kids to see it, too. They need to know who she is, this Patty, or she’ll just start over again with one of them.”
“No she won’t,” Anime said from the backseat. I had the phone on speaker so I could use it hands-free.
“Who’s that?” Kathy said.
“Anime Wong.”
“Is that a joke? Anna May Wong was an oldtime movie—”
“No, it’s her name. Spelled differently.”
“Patty’s gotten kicked out of two schools for this already,” Anime said. “If you catch her, I’ll bet she quits, because she’ll probably get expelled if she doesn’t.”
“Anime and her friend Lilli are the people who figured this out,” I said, “and if there are questions, they’re the ones who can answer them.”
“How old are they?”
“About Rina’s age.”
“Do you have any friends your own size?”
“I’ve got Ronnie,” I said. “I think she’s friends with me right now.”
“Hi, Kathy,” Ronnie said.
Kathy said, “Oh, good. Someone for me to talk to.”
“Wow,” Rina said at the front door, checking their hair. “You guys are a couple?”
Anime said, “You got it. Your father didn’t.”
“We try not to let him know how dense— Oh, hi, Dad.”
“Hey, Rina. How is it?”
She tried on a smile that didn’t fit. “It’s, like, meh. Kind of like life.”
“You’re not old enough to think life is meh.”
Kathy appeared in the hall behind Rina, looking frazzled, but managed a smile at Ronnie, who returned it.
“I’m a lot older than I was a week ago,” Rina said.
“Well,” I said, “we’re going to see what we can do about that.”
Anime said, “We brought a time machine, sort of.”
“I really like the hair thing,” Rina said.
“Come on, come on in,” Kathy said. Now that we were down to it, she was nervous. She can’t handle conflict, unless it’s with me.
We went into the living room. There were only seven or eight kids there, because Tyrone’s friends were missing. It was pretty glum, for a party. A lopsided cake with some unlit candles was being ignored on the dining-room table, a few presents were scattered here and there, and some crap music—to my ears anyway—was playing, just loud enough to be irritating. The party seemed to have fallen into one of those uncomfortable group silences that always threaten to go on forever, or at least until all the adults leave.
Rina introduced Anime and Lilli to the room while I looked at Patty, sitting in the chair I’d usually occupied when I lived there. She had her cell phone hanging around her neck in a little leather holster suspended on a lanyard, and the camera lens peeked just over the top of the holster. She was shorter and more ordinary-looking than I’d thought she’d be, in spite of a skin condition bad enough to earn her the awful nickname, Leatherface, that Lilli had used. She looked sour, as though she smiled only when something dicey happened to someone else. I could see an unpleasant-looking adult trying to push her way through the still-soft adolescent face, and her eyes, as they bounced from Anime and Lilli back to Rina and the others in the room, gave away what it was that would eventually make that adult so unpleasant: want. Absolutely everyone in the room had something Patty Gribbin wanted: friends, self-assurance, grace, wit, clear skin. Lilli’s word thirsty came to me, and once again I had a pang over what I was about to do.
Then she looked at me and held my gaze in a way that felt oddly like a challenge, as though she knew why I was there. I went over to her.
“You’re Patty, right? I’m Rina’s dad.”
“I figured,” she said. “You look like her.”
“Really? I’ve always thought she looked more like her mother.”
“Right in the middle,” Patty said. “She’s got both of you all over her face.”
I said, “Happy birthday.” And I reached down and put my finger over the lens on her phone.
Her eyes widened for a split second before she got them under control. I had a sudden conviction that she lived like this, suspecting every new actor on the stage of possessing the information that would reveal her for what she was, and all I could think of was the despair that had shaped her. She shifted, moving her phone away, and said, “Thanks. It . . . uh, it means a lot to me to have my party with Rina like this.”
I said, “I’ll bet it does.”
She started to chew on the inside of the left corner of her mouth.
I leaned down toward her and lowered my voice. “I’m not going to cover your phone again, so the rest of this is on camera. You can leave now if you want. Tell them you don’t feel good.”
She said, with some steel in her voice, “What good would that do me?”
“Up to you.” I felt Anime’s eyes on me, and when I looked in her direction, she had her eyebrows arched in inquiry.
I turned back to Patty and figured, let the kid have a last chance to escape the unveiling. I said, “I’ve got something for you.”
“A present?” Patty said, giving the word a nasty twist.
“I guess.” I reached into my pocket and pulled out a little box. She hesitated but then took it. Elsewhere in the room, conversation had finally broken out, and it made the moment more endurable.
She opened the box and saw the k
ey chain bearing the capital H with its two vertical strokes curving inward toward the center—the abstraction of two fish bellies that signifies Pisces. When she looked up at me, she’d forced her mouth into a smile. “Well done,” she said.
I said, “You understand that I have to tell Rina about Machiavelli. You broke her heart.”
Patty said, “It’ll heal. She’ll break it a dozen times before it breaks for good. But of course, her being her, it’ll never break for good.” She got up and brushed past me, heading for the door.
Rina said, “Patty?”
“Gotta go,” Patty said. “I hear my mother calling me.” The door closed behind her, and as Rina started after her, Lilli put a hand on her arm and handed her the iPad. “Unwrap this,” she said. “The thing you need to look at is all cued up. Just turn it on and push play.” Then she followed Patty through the door.
The clip they’d lined up was the four-minute one where Patty persuaded the dim, beautiful Denise to keep grabbing Tyrone’s hand. The lines that echoed in the room were Patty’s, after Denise said, “I barely know him.”
“Come on,” Patty had said, “what’s he gonna do, call the cops? He’s a nice guy—he’ll just let you hang on to his hand.” When it was over and all the kids had been drawn to the screen and were looking at each other, Anime said into the silence, “It’s sort of an Internet TV show. The whole thing was a setup.”
With her fingers raised to her lips, Rina said, “But I . . . I called . . . I mean, I broke up with—”
“It’s okay, honey,” Kathy said from the kitchen door. “Here’s your other present,” and she stepped aside and Tyrone came in, looking like someone who didn’t know whether his face was about to be kissed or slapped, and Rina choked a couple of times and burst into tears. Kathy said to the kids, “Why don’t we all take the cake outside and leave them alone for a minute?”
Fifteen minutes later, as Ronnie and Anime and I were leaving, Rina and Tyrone were still face-to-face, only inches apart, in a corner, and he had her hand between his. As the door closed behind us, we saw Lilli coming toward us from her talk with Patty. I said, “What did you say to her?”
Lilli looked at me, lifted her chin high, and said, “I offered her a job.”
31
Dead Will Be Fine
It was almost eight as we rounded the corner that took us back to the storage unit. When the gate opened for us, Ronnie said, “Where in the world are we?” and Anime said, “You’ve never been here? Come on in.”
Ronnie said, “Into a storage unit?”
“You’ll love it,” Lilli said. “Free vending machines.”
“Gummy bears?” Ronnie said.
“And some. We’ve even got Japanese Kit Kats, weirdest candy on earth. Matcha Green Tea, Wasabi, Baked Potato, Shinshu Apple, tastes exactly like hairspray—”
“I am so in there,” Ronnie said, opening the door. “You coming?”
“In a minute. I’ve got to make a call, and I’m hoping to get one.”
“Your loss.”
I watched the three of them go as I tried to organize my mind. Louie was around the corner from the Slugger’s, waiting to see if he’d go out to dinner again, as he apparently did virtually every night, and if he did, I needed to be ready. And the man I was calling, the man I had to talk to before I moved to the next stage of the evening, did not cheerfully accept waffling; I needed an agenda. I thought for a moment, eyes closed, took a few seconds to appreciate the apparent end of the windy season, and dialed.
“Yeah?” It was Babe, one of the Man’s hired muscle flexers.
“It’s me,” I said. “Junior. Is he there?”
“He’s busy.”
“What,” I said, “is he watching reruns of Taxi?”
“That’s funny,” Babe said. “Okay, I’ll tell him you’re calling, see if he laughs.”
There was a pause, a snatch of loud music, and then Irwin Dressler said, “So? Make it quick, I’m busy.”
I said, “I need a favor.”
“And I should do one for you why?”
“Oh, I don’t know. The memory of good times past?”
“Ten, nine, eight.”
“Because then I’ll owe you one.”
“This is a joke, right?” he said. “A favor from me is worth twenty from you.” Pulling away from the phone, he said, “Just a minute, sweetie.”
“Sweetie?” I said. “And what’s that music?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“Of course I do. Everything about you fascinates me.”
“You know what it is, you schlub.”
“I do,” I said. “It’s that song from Frozen, but that would imply that you have very small female children in your living room.”
“Me?” he said.
I said, “Sweetie?”
“I’ve heard this song three thousand times today alone,” Dressler said, “beginning about nine in the morning. About the two-thousandth time, it gets kind of catchy. Then, around twenty-five hundred, it becomes everything you hope the rest of your life won’t be.”
“What’s that?”
“Repetitive, perky, optimistic, perky.”
“You already said perky.”
“Three thousand times I’ve heard it,” he said. “And even if it was only two thousand, perky pisses me off. I see someone who’s perky, I see someone whose hat I want to shoot off.”
“You should look out the window once in a while. Nobody wears hats anymore.”
“And I’m why. So what’s the favor?”
I crossed my fingers. “I need to tell someone I know you.”
“That runs high. You’ll owe me big. Who?”
“A hitter.”
“Junior,” he said, “hitters are out of your league. Petty larceny, okay. Jaywalking, okay. Wait, hang on.” He partially covered the mouthpiece with his hand and sang, “‘Let it go.’” Then he said, “Small-time con games, okay. But for you—”
“You do,” I said. You’ve got a kid there. You, Irwin Dressler, the Dark Lord of Los Angeles, are singing along with—”
“I’ve been running a big part of this town since your whole life. I’ve been in the business, here and elsewhere, more than twice your life. I seen a lot of bright boys come and go—”
“Thank you.”
“—and you’re not one of them. I mean, you’re smart, but it’s the kind of smart you can buy a lot of, and you don’t got to go to Beverly Hills to get it.”
“Ah,” I said.
“So hitters, no, out of your depth, take my advice. It may not seem like it—‘Let it go’—but I have a modest affection for you, Junior. Nothing you could mortgage a house on, just the kind of affection says I wouldn’t prefer you dead.”
“Here comes the chorus again,” I said.
“‘Let it go,’” he sang, although most of the notes he hit were the ones they store in the spaces between the piano keys. Then he said, “It’s Babe’s daughter, she’s four, and this is what she needs to be happy now, okay? Believe me, she’s not happy, you don’t want to be around.”
“It’s the Slugger,” I said. “And I have to talk to him. If you wouldn’t prefer me to emerge from the conversation dead, let me use your name.”
“Look, I gotta sing here.”
“Well, you know how to make me hang up.”
“Fine, use my name, live in health. I’m told he swings high, so maybe you’ll duck. We’ll talk later about what this costs.”
“Thanks.”
He said, “Aaaahh,” and hung up, but he was singing again before the connection was severed.
I sat there in the car, feeling distinctly uneasy about the rest of the evening, just daring the wind to kick up again. If it had, I’d probably have called it all off, but it stayed as still as it apparently does when it
becalms sailboats in the Doldrums, so I went inside to try a Matcha Green Tea Kit Kat and ask Ronnie if she’d mind my leaving her there for an hour or so.
It was a very expensive, very noisy, very famous-face, and not very good Italian place on San Vicente in that weird little boutique area before it curves to the right to meet up with Wilshire. I’d eaten there once and sworn not to come back, but here I was, breaking my promise to myself.
“Had any wind?” I asked the parking guy as he handed me the ticket.
He said, “Huh?”
I said, “Park it close. Get it to me within a minute, it’s an extra twenty.”
The noise clapped invisible hands over my eardrums as I went in. I paused, ignoring the maître d’ as he shouted over the din for my name. The place was packed with second-string talent, and there he was, sitting with another man at a table for four, up against the wall. I said, “There’s my party,” and zigzagged between tables that were so close together the diners could have eaten off the dishes of the customers on either side. They didn’t hear me coming, so they were unprepared when I pulled out an empty chair and sat down. That put the two of them—the other one was the Spinal Tap reject who checked under the beds—across from me with their backs to the wall. Looking startled.
The Slugger, who’d been staring at a very watchable waitress two tables away, said, “What the fuck?”
Up close it was difficult to imagine him as the man I knew him to be. He was slender, with a strong jaw, cold blue eyes, and a patrician nose. The swipe of gray hair over his forehead was tinted slightly blue and meticulously cared for. He looked, in fact, a little like a fussier, vainer Charlie Watts, whose elegant older-guy appearance I’d long hoped I’d grow into.
I said, “Hi.” Then I took out the stamp, in its transparent envelope, and held it up.
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