I almost imperceptibly nodded.
He said, “No, you don’t. You think you do, but you don’t. Trust me, you don’t. Stop doing what you’re doing.”
They walked away, down the trail. I heard twigs snap, and muttering as they faded away.
I sat, my back against that same rock. Some blood had found its way into my mouth. I looked out into the canyon and said to no one in particular, “No.”
27
I had shut my eyes, and fallen asleep. Not a smart thing to do with a head injury. But I didn’t drift off into the infinite of some kind of coma. Instead I just opened my eyes, hours later, no longer sitting up against the rock, but instead lying on the now cool dirt of the trail.
My friend the rattlesnake was nowhere around. At least I didn’t think so. It was dark out. And beautiful. Moonlight dappling the brush and the trail. And a quiet you almost never hear in L.A.
I got to my feet. The world moved and shifted and finally settled before me. I pulled the remaining cactus spines out of my stomach and started down the trail. Taking it slow, pondering where I was with this thing yet again. Neese’s boys were sent to rough me up, so I would stop looking into his ring. But he didn’t send them to kill me. Too risky right now. He doesn’t know enough about what I know, what I might have told, and who I might have told.
I stumbled down the trail, the sky spotted with stars, the moon out, full, hanging over me, its doppelgänger looked to be sitting right in the ocean, right on the ocean.
I made it to my car. I got in. Looked at myself. The spot above my left eye was more swollen than ever and cut too. Looked like I’d need stitches. The swelling caused my left eye to sit slightly closed. I felt the back of my head where the guy had put the rock. Yep, a second golf ball on my head, and lots of dried blood there too. I’d need stitches there as well. Jesus, my head was covered in massive bloody bumps.
I drove to Santa Monica Medical Center. It was a strange, surreal drive down a dark PCH. I was woozy, disoriented, and I had to put an exhausting amount of energy into focusing. Into not crashing my car and dying. At the medical center, they took me right in. As part of a continuous haze, I was behind those swinging doors, then in a chair, then down a hall and into a bed. I had a nurse over me, cleaning, looking at me, concern in her eyes. She was probably thirty, Mexican I’d guess, dark hair, dark eyes, soft features.
She was beautiful.
Her soft touch as she examined me and cleaned my wounds, sadly, was almost worth getting the shit kicked out of me. She was very lightly rubbing my face and head with cotton balls soaked in alcohol. At a few points her face was right up near mine. Her lips right in line with my lips. I almost kissed her. I was opening and closing my eyes. And the comfort I felt with the nurse, and the relief that I was getting the attention I needed, caused me to close my eyes and drift away. In and out of sleep—at one point I saw a doctor with a needle and thread, repairing me like a goddamn sweater. But the nurse still looked on behind him. And then at some point, blackness and deep, uninterrupted sleep.
I woke up alone in a hospital room. Sun streaming in. I looked at my watch: 7 a.m. The nurse from the previous night walked in.
“Good morning,” she said.
“Good morning.”
“You feel okay? You were pretty banged up.”
Man, I was right, she was beautiful.
“I feel okay.”
And I did. I felt okay.
“You’re still here? How long is your shift?”
She narrowed her eyes and gave me a sly smile. “Oh, I’ll do anything to make sure my patients get better.” And then she laughed at her own playful bravado. “I went home. For like eight hours. Now I’m back.”
I felt my face above my left eye.
“Stitches there,” she said. “Just a couple. But about ten more in your head.”
The doctor walked in. I vaguely recognized him from the previous night.
“Mr. Darvelle, you’ve got a couple deep cuts. One on your face, one on your head.” Long pause. Then: “Head injuries are dangerous. What happened?”
Everything he said was very matter-of-fact. Almost no emotion attached to his comments. Judgment, but not much emotion.
“I was hiking, slipped and fell, tumbled down the side of the gulch, rocks banged me up.”
He didn’t believe me. No way. But he was too much of a pro, or maybe too tired, to get into it. “Get some rest. Keep the cuts clean. Nancy, give him cleaning instructions, please. And tell him when he needs to come back to get the stitches taken out.”
The doctor looked at both my cuts quickly, then flipped around and exited the room. Nancy did as told and gave me cleaning instructions. Then she told me to get dressed and she too left.
I got up, put my shorts and T-shirt back on, not sure how they got off, and walked out of the room. Nancy was there waiting.
“Do you play Ping-Pong, Nancy?”
“Oh yeah,” she said. “I’m excellent.”
Then she looked at me. “All those scrapes and bumps on your head. That’s nothing compared to what I’d do to you if we ever played Ping-Pong.”
I was in love with her.
I left the hospital, got in my Cobalt, and sat there for a moment. Then I got back out, walked back in the hospital. Nancy was still in the waiting room. I motioned for her to come over to me.
“Nancy, I might need to call you with questions about my injuries.”
“You can call the center. The nurse on call will answer any questions you might have.”
“Well, maybe I want to call you and ask you to play Ping-Pong sometime.”
She looked at me. Made me wait for what seemed like an interminable amount of time. Then she forked over the digits.
I was beat to shit. I was in a wild, concussive fog. And I still had lots of unanswered questions about the case. But I did have the phone number of a nurse named Nancy Alvarez.
28
I was back at my desk, the big slider open, by 9:30 a.m. You know, I actually felt better. I’d taken some blows. But I actually felt good. Like Vonz’s movie Starlight, my perspective had been changed. I was now looking at the world through a swollen left eye and a throbbing, pounding, unrelenting headache. But I did have a new idea, and I needed to call Clay Blevins to act on it. And I had made a new decision: Do nothing else on this case without my gun. I’m talking, don’t take a shower without my gun. Which is fine. I should have been operating that way already.
Before I called Clay, I opened up my desk drawer and pulled out the letter Vonz had written to Suzanne. The letter I’d never opened. I sliced it open with a pocketknife, unfolded it, and looked at it.
It read:
Suzanne. I miss you. I want to see you. Call me, Suzanne. I have to talk to you, to tell you something I never had the courage to tell you before. But if you don’t call me, I want you to know that you changed my life forever. It wasn’t just your beauty, your smile, your light. You unlocked something in me that I’d hidden away out of fear. And I’m forever grateful. Call me, Suzanne.
Love, Arthur
You know, not much. I was sorry I’d read it in a way. Invaded the privacy of it. I was a bit embarrassed by it. By my intrusion and by the content of the letter. Vonz’s writing, it was nice, direct, sincere, but to a third party this kind of stuff almost always comes across as cheesy. Sentimental. Prosaic. Vonz probably wouldn’t let lines like that in one of his movies. But apparently in his life a little sentimentality was okay. Which I have to say I respect. But, still, reading it gave me the willies a bit. Sentimentality, to people outside the immediate communication, never quite works. It feels gross. Suzanne probably wouldn’t have thought so though. Suzanne was in the immediate conversation. She probably would have liked it. I put the letter in my drawer and called Clay Blevins.
“Clay, it’s John Darvelle.”
“Did I help?”
That’s what people always wanted to know. People. We’re simple. Did I help? Did I contribute? Am I i
mportant and worthy?
That’s all we care about.
“Yes,” I said. “But I need to talk to you again.”
I drove to Clay’s apartment in Los Feliz. Los Feliz is way east. East of Hollywood, east of Hancock Park. A neighborhood that for years was inhabited by poor people, fringe characters, even small-time criminals. But as the nice, gentrified areas of L.A. got more and more full of people, prices went up and people went looking for new places to live. Not everybody could handle Los Feliz and Silverlake, but the artists could. So the two neighborhoods became artist communities of sorts. And the posers followed soon after. What are you going to do? It happens. These days, these hoods could be described simply as: Hipsterville. Cooler than cool. Radder than rad.
Drowning in irony.
As I pulled onto Vermont, the main drag through Los Feliz, I saw residents, young residents, bopping down the streets. Wearing: Polyester pants, cheap dress shoes, old cardigans, and plaid blazers. Smoking: Old-school pipes and cigarettes out of long extensions.
I saw a guy wearing a brown three-piece suit with a pocket watch. He was probably twenty-three. I pictured a giant, pencil-thin mustache walking down the street with a cane, wearing some seventies sunglasses. I have no idea why.
Los Feliz did still have some genuine charm. Old Spanish-style California buildings. Funky hills and undulations to the landscape. Palm trees somehow right in the medians of the roads. And lots of classic old bars, some of which were frequented by real Los Angelenos.
Clay lived in an eight-plex, one street off Vermont. A mistake of a building built in the sixties or seventies. He opened the door, let me in. Bad carpet, popcorn ceiling. Strange, as one of the reasons this area became chic was because of the old-school Spanish buildings built with big rooms, high ceilings, interesting archways, and hardwood floors.
Not this place. This place could have been in a lower-class neighborhood in Phoenix. The place was fairly trashed, looked like he had a roommate who wasn’t around. I saw a couple pizza boxes next to the garbage in the kitchen. Inexplicably, there was an Eddie Rabbit poster on the wall, Eddie looking pensive and serious.
Clay was all smiles as he welcomed me in, but then he took in my battered face and his smile went to a frown. I pressed on. “Clay, your memory of the blond dude in the Mercedes was very helpful.”
“Excuse me? Excuse me?”
“Yeah, what?”
“Um. What happened to your face?”
“I fell, hiking.”
He laughed. But it was a laugh diluted with fear. It was a laugh that said: Are the guys who did that to you going to come after me?
“Don’t worry, Clay. No one is going to come after you. Now, I want to ask you something.”
“Yeah?” he said in an unsure way.
“When we were first talking you said you ran into Suzanne once when she was with a friend.”
“I did? No, Suzanne was a total babe! You know how it goes with totally hot babes. They don’t have any friends.”
I laughed. Often true. Not totally true. But in L.A. it could be very true. Some beautiful girl with a lost soul, always, always pursued by some rich guy, then never fosters any friendships—or much of a personality, for that matter.
But I didn’t get that vibe from Suzanne.
Or, wait. Had her beauty and charm just created that illusion? Caused me to give her this magical real quality that she didn’t even have? Could be. Ever seen a guy who’s really pussy-whipped, even though the girl is just terrible? You ever see that? You’ve seen that. It’s a horrible, horrible sight. Just horrible. It’s like an actual sickness that you just have to wait for him to heal from. Like he’s got the flu or something.
“I’m kidding, man,” Clay said. Even though he seemed a bit scared, Clay still busted out a routine or two to keep his acting chops sharp. Hey, you know what I’ve noticed? Hot girls don’t have friends.
I admired it.
“Yeah, Jenny,” Clay continued. “Jenny was her name. Jenny Bickford. At the Newsroom Café. That’s who she was with that time I ran into her.”
Jenny. I hadn’t written down the name. It happens from time to time.
“She’s a news producer or something. That’s what you said.”
“Yeah. And cute too. Not like Suzanne. Not like I’d let a guy punch me in the face twenty-five times straight if that meant I got to bang her.”
Here we go.
He continued, “But pretty. Real. Come to think of it, in that moment, I kind of had a crush on her. I kind of have a crush on every girl though.”
I knew the feeling.
And then Clay said, “Hey, you want to smoke some weed?”
“I have to run.”
“This shit is good.”
“I believe it. The shit these days appears to be quite good.”
“Ohhh, yeah.”
I was about to leave, but I had another question for Clay.
“So, what do you do when you get high, Clay?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, you’re going to smoke some weed when I leave and then what are you going to do?”
“Sit here.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
I split.
29
Called Ken Booth. I could hear him not smiling or producing any emotion whatsoever over the phone. He found Jenny Bickford quickly. She was a TV producer for a company that produced reality shows and talk shows. She too worked on the Raleigh Studios lot, but the Manhattan Beach location, not the Hollywood location. Damn. I was way east. I now had to go way west, then way south.
So I busted over to the 10, then hit the 405 South, got off on Rosecrans, headed west to Manhattan Beach. Most people say, “Manhattan Beach isn’t really L.A.” The knock being that it’s white-bread, homogenized, Orange County–ish. Full of rich, douchebag USC graduates who party hard, and do Jell-O shots, and pump iron, and have really good bodies and really bad haircuts. That, and successful, rich white people. All that is true. But the thing is, it’s beautiful, on a really nice stretch of beach. And the girls there, the women there, aren’t part of the Hollywood scene. They aren’t heroin chic with smug attitudes and empty bank accounts. Instead, they’re healthy, and they have jobs during the week. And on the weekends, they wear bikinis all day and smile a lot and play beach volleyball. I heard Shaq lived down here when he played for the Lakers. You know why? You know why?
Because Shaq is smart.
I wasn’t going to make it all the way down to the beach. Raleigh Studios Manhattan was closer to the 405. I pulled up to the security gate, and, good news, Ken had actually gotten me a lot pass too. Ken, that’s what I was saying about him. He acts like a friend, he does nice gestures like that. But he never gives any indication that we’re buddies. He didn’t even tell me about the lot pass. I just got there and discovered it. Hey, man, I’ll take it.
I pulled on the lot. Newer than the Hollywood location. And a lot less activity. They used to film some of CSI: Miami here, I knew that. A lot of people don’t like that particular CSI. Think Caruso is a joke. I will ask you to look at Caruso in a different way.
As a total genius.
I’m serious. I like his mannered, ridiculous, over-the-top vibe. But let’s get back to the story. I’d gotten directions from the gate guard for the building of Pacific Productions, the company Jenny worked for. In the lobby there were big posters of all the shows Pacific Productions produced. Some dumb reality shows, Moving Back In with Mom. Seriously. That’s a show they produced. I know, I want to see it too. But they also made a few decent, reasonably intelligent talk shows. The Danny Baker Show. Actually liked that one. Sort of a West Coast Charlie Rose.
At reception, the freaked-out receptionist—my face was a bit of a train wreck—told me to sit and wait while she got Jenny. After five minutes and three small installments of cold water out of a little paper cup, Jenny appeared. Clay was right. Jenny was cute. The kind of woman people refer to
as the “marrying type.” Which is an annoying and patronizing term. But she was indeed the marrying type. That’s how I would probably describe her.
Except there was nothing bland or common about her. She had mystery to her. Black-rimmed glasses, soft brown eyes, and a slight upturn to her mouth at the corners.
I stood as she approached, and we both instinctively moved away from the seating area where I had been to another one a little farther away from the receptionist’s desk. We landed on a black leather couch.
“Hello. How can I help you?” she said.
“My name is John Darvelle. I’m a private detective. I’m looking into the murder of your friend Suzanne Neal, and I’d like to ask you some questions.”
She looked at me. I could tell she was processing the cut above my left eye and my lumpy, bumpy, stitched-up head. “Okay. This is a little . . . surprising. Who . . . who are you working for?”
“Myself.”
She didn’t press it.
“I’ve already talked to the police.”
“Good. I hope they figure it out. I bet they won’t. But I hope they do. Can I ask you a few questions?”
“Let’s go outside on the lot.”
We walked out of the building, out onto the lot, back out into the sun. It wasn’t the Hollywood Raleigh in terms of activity, and it sure as hell wasn’t the Paramount lot in terms of glamour and history. There was no New York street here. This lot was quiet, clean, new. Big white buildings and stages. I guessed there was some filming going on somewhere but it didn’t seem like it. Peaceful almost. No Hollywood tension. And you could smell the ocean. Which is always nice.
We walked sort of aimlessly around. “So, what do you mean you’re working for yourself? No one hired you?”
Shit.
“I knew Suzanne. I met her just before she was killed. And I’m a detective. So, I’m giving it a look.”
She looked at me. “What happened to your face?”
The Detective & The Pipe Girl: A Mystery Page 16