“I don't remember. Please, can I go home now?” He was wringing wet.
“The agent's name, Wayne.”
“I told you. Holy Jesus, I told you. Some kind of vegetable.”
I looked at Jessica, who was watching openmouthed, and closed the knife.
“Some kind of vegetable,” I said.
12 - The Halls of Academe
A n hour later Jessica had talked to Annie and Wyatt, and I'd been hung up on by my parents and Roxanne. My mother had sworn at me with Irish creativity, and Roxanne had made me listen to a page being torn out of her phone book.
“You know my number by heart,” I'd said unwisely.
“I didn't before,” she said, “and now I won't again.” That was when she'd hung up.
Jessica was sitting on the bed, regarding me as though I were someone new. The business with the knife had impressed her, and not in a way I'd hoped to impress her.
“Mad, huh?” she said.
“Madder than Qaddafi.”
“Who?”
“Jessica, don't you know anything?”
She sat back, stung. “He's that greaser in the Gulf,” she said. “I just needed to think for a second.”
“Well, think for a minute more. When I get back, we'll have a quiz on the politics of the Mediterranean.” I got up and went out the door.
“Hey,” she said plaintively as the door closed, “don't leave me alone.” It was a little late in the day for plaintive.
The old dame in the Lucite fortress stared up at me disbelievingly. It had only taken eight rings on the bell to get her to turn away from a late-night rerun of Wheel of Fortune, the last three minutes of which I'd watched over her shoulder on a tiny black-and-white TV so old that it probably ran on steam.
“Another room?” she repeated as though I were crazy.
“Another,” I said very slowly. “Room.”
“You mean, two?” she said.
I sighed and held up two fingers. Verbal communication was getting me nowhere.
“Full up,” she said, as pleased as her place in life made it possible for her to be. “Where's my twenty?” She grinned, showing me a raddled picket fence of decaying calcium with much potential for expensive dental work.
“Waiting for a room key.”
“You already got a room key.”
“Yes, I do,” I said wearily, “and I need another.”
“Can't have one,” she snapped. “No vacancy.”
“In this rathole?”
“My twenty,” she said, looking over her shoulder at the TV. “I could rent your room too,” she added. “Rent it five times by sunup. Rats or no rats.” She gave me the ruined teeth again, like a preview of a mine collapse in West Virginia.
“But you'd have to stop watching Vanna,” I said, tearing my gaze from the dental disaster area and up to her fierce little eyes.
“She's over in a few minutes. The twenty. I don't get it, I call the cops. They'd love the Little Woman.” She infected both words with a kind of swampy, virulent meaning.
“What about a roll-away?” I said.
“The twenty.”
I gave it to her. There was nothing else to do.
“Don't got no roll-aways,” she said maliciously. “The kids we get here, they sleep with the adults.” She went back to The Wheel of Fortune.
“It's To be or not to be,’ ” I said, to spoil the game. The only things missing were the vowels.
“Awww,” she said, exhaling decay. “I was just about to get it.”
I went back to the room. The prospect of a one-hour drive to Topanga loomed unpromisingly before me. I needed an early start in the morning, and I wanted Jessica with me for at least the first half of the day.
The Little Woman was flat on her stomach on the bed, writing a postcard with the pen I'd used to terrorize Wayne Warner.
“Who's that to?” I said.
“Blister,” she replied, none too clearly. Her tongue was wedged in the corner of her mouth.
“Well, forget it,” I said. “Or finish it in the car. Anyway, I doubt that he can read.”
She sat up. “The car? Where are we going?”
“Home.”
“Oh, Simeon,” she said, giving it an extra half-octave. “You promised we could sleep in town.”
“That was a lie,” I said. “We detectives lie a lot.”
“But why?” She was working up to a daughterly wail. “Why can't we?”
“Because we can't get another room.”
She wriggled fitfully around on the bed, grabbing fistfuls of fabric. Then she pulled herself up to a full sitting position and threw the bedspread at me. “No problem,” she said. “Look, there's even another pillow.” She threw that at me too. A corner of the pillow slip caught me in the eye.
“Peachy,” I said, wiping away a tear.
“Take the towels from the bathroom,” she said with the unemotional assurance of a hired expert. “You can sleep on top of them. They're pretty clean.”
Considering the loss of time involved in going home, I got up and went into the bathroom for the pillows. “Don't be in there too long,” she called. “I may need it again.”
“What do you do, Jessica,” I said, “draw moisture from the atmosphere? Have you got gills or something?”
“You just don't know anything about girls,” she bellowed. I grabbed all the available linen, left the bathroom, and went into the other room, where I laid the towels on the floor, end to end. They had holes in them. I dropped the washcloths over the holes in the sad little arrangement I'd made, and put the pillow at the top. “If you did,” she continued implacably, “you wouldn't have let that snotty one hang up on you.”
“And what should I have done?” I asked, just for form's sake, getting up to turn off the lights.
There were contented little burrowing sounds from the bed. “I can't tell you,” she said airily. “You either know or you don't.”
Reflecting that I obviously didn't, I tried to get comfortable on the linoleum. My hip bones seemed determined to inflict internal injuries at the slightest provocation. If I did know anything about women, I thought, Eleanor and I might still be together. In what already promised to become an eternal quest for a comfortable position, I turned around so that I faced the window. The Sleep-Eze's extravagantly large neon sign blinked in my eyes. I was being bombarded by fuchsia photons and serenaded by sound waves from motorbikes. It was like trying to sleep in a microwave oven. Nevertheless, I dropped off into a Technicolor doze.
I had barely begun a bright tropical dream, based loosely on the upholstery in the Sorrells’ hotel suite, when two very loud shots broke the night into splinters, and I found myself sitting bolt upright, grabbing for a gun that I didn't have. There was a rustle from the bed.
“It's the dealers,” Jessica said. “Remember?”
“Swell,” I said. “The walls in this place are made out of Saltines.”
“Oh,” she said dismissively, “don't be an old lady.”
I lay down again and tried to get comfortable. A moment later I heard the bed rustle again.
“Simeon?” Jessica said, sitting up. “You know what? This is fun.”
The next morning, after Jessica called Annie to assure her that she was alive and well, and I had brushed my teeth with my index finger and scratched at the whiskers sprouting in the folds of my neck, we drove Alice across town to UCLA. I introduced Jessica to the dragon who guarded the towels in the women's gym so she could take a sauna and a shower, and I slogged to the men's gym to tend to my own needs.
An hour later I was in the Powell Library, looking at the only book I could think of that might lead me to the name of Aimee's agent. Jessica, her hair still wet from her shower, was sublimating her impatience by breathing over my shoulder. “He's cute,” she said, indicating a malnourished juvenile with a tennis racket over his shoulder. The book was the Actors' Directory, published by the same folks who impose the Academy Awards upon you each year.
“He's cute,” she said again. “You're earthy. I'm lissome,” she added as an afterthought.
“Kale,” I said.
“What?”
“Write it down. Homer Kale Agency, 9255 Sunset. He represents this little creep,” I said, pointing at her cutie. I'd deputized her to take notes as a way to keep her fidgeting from distracting the scholars.
“Kale is a vegetable?”
“It's like okra. Or maybe not.”
“Yuk,” she said deep in her throat. “Okra is nauseating.”
“Well, Mr. Kale may be too. Just write it down. And try not to stick your tongue out when you write.”
“I don't stick my tongue out,” she said, sticking her tongue out. She wrote his name and address on her pad. It was only the third entry on the page after half an hour of scanning the “Juveniles” section for agents whose names sounded like vegetables. We already had a Leaf and a Green.
“I think Green is stretching it,” she said, referring to the second name on the pad.
“Jessica, there's no delicate way to say this, but I don't really care what you think.” I was flipping through the pages. I'd finally gotten to the section on girls.
“God, you wake up grumpy.”
“And so would you, if you'd slept on the floor.”
“The bed was no bargain. I think there was a pea under the mattress.”
“At least it didn't have legs,” I said. “I was the only one on the towels who didn't have an exoskeleton.”
“Oh,” she said, her impatience flowering, “speak English.”
“Shhh,” someone said near us. Jessica favored him with the glare that had wilted Tammy in the Oki-Burger. I turned to a new page.
“I don't believe this,” I said.
“Shhh,” the scholar said again.
“You must have no powers of concentration at all,” Jessica said loudly. The scholar quailed visibly and retreated to his book. “You don't believe what?” she said to me.
“This,” I said. ”Marjorie Brussels.”
“Brussels is a place,” Jessica said.
“Her agency,” I said. “It extends the threshold of the gag reflex. It's called Brussels' Sprouts.”
“Skunks and cabbages,” Jessica said, writing. “That's worse than okra.”
13 - Ten Percent for Starters
M r. Leaf was wispy and tremulous and saturated with failure, Mrs. Green was large and black, and Mr. Kale was slimier than okra, and a lot greener. Mr. Leaf and Mrs. Green had been all too obviously on the up-and-up, mostly because they both insisted on seeing my bona fides. I didn't have any bona fides, which was part of the point. Mr. Leaf had thrown up his hands and Mrs. Green had ejected us in a rather forceful fashion. We'd moved on to Mr. Kale. The day, as they say, was still young, and three is popularly supposed to be the charm.
“My, my,” Mr. Kale kept saying, glancing furtively at Jessica. “My, my. What a lovely child.” Three notwithstanding, Mr. Kale was no charm. He was small and olive and balding and threadbare, and one of his nostrils was twice as large as the other. The small one was pretty big. He wore loafers without socks to capitalize on his resemblance, from the ankles down, to Don Johnson.
“What's your standard arrangement?” I said. He was awful enough to qualify for serious consideration.
“Your regular agent gets ten percent,” he said, making a visible effort to wrench his eyes from Jessica to me. If it had made a noise it would have sounded like Velcro ripping. “But I'm not your regular agent. What we have here is a total package. Agent, manager, all in one. Image, training, preparation, representation, what-have-you. ‘No representation without preparation,’ that's our motto. Complete career guidance for the little thespian.”
“I beg your pardon,” Jessica said, straightening up as though she'd slipped her toe into a socket.
“Thespian,” I said correctively, “thespian.”
“She'll need head shots,” Mr. Kale said, gazing longingly at her.
“Sounds like a fatal wound,” Jessica said, her nose still out of joint.
“Can you recommend a photographer?”
“Best in the business,” Mr. Kale said promptly. “Nothing but the best, that's our motto.” The motto apparently didn't extend to his office, which was smaller than Blister's sinuses.
“So what's your percentage?” Jessica asked meanly.
“Twenty-five,” he said with a negligent little hand gesture. “Plus expenses.”
“Who's the photographer?” I said, putting my foot on top of Jessica's.
“Ah-ah,” he said, chiding me in a leaden fashion. The relatively smaller of his nostrils flared unappealingly. “Papers first.” Whimsy was not his strong suit. It was hard to imagine what might be. The room swam in front of me.
“Mr. Okra,” I said, without thinking. Jessica made a snicking noise and spit her gum into her lap.
“Okra?” he said, looking bewildered. “Who's Okra? Kale's the name, Homer Kale.”
“Mr. Kale,” I amended. “We can't do business unless we know you're really top-notch. What's the photographer's name?”
He gave me a con man's look, full of honesty and candor. The man could have dealt three-card monte one-handed. “Fink,” he said. “Norman Fink.”
Jessica gave up searching her lap for her gum, threw up her hands, and just laughed. “This is the pits” she said.
“Jewel,” I said, “shut up. On Melrose?” I asked Mr. Kale.
It was over for Jessica. “Jewel?” she said, choking. “Excuse me.” She got up and left the office. I heard her laughter even after the door closed.
“Excitable little girl,” Mr. Kale said, licking his lips with a tongue a Komodo Dragon would have envied. “But lovely.” He wiped his brow. He was wearing more rings than I would have thought he could have lifted.
“On Melrose?” I said again.
“Naw,” he said, waving the rings at me. “Way down. South. On Olympic.”
I got up. “Mr. Kale,” I said. “You'll hear from us.”
“It could be on Melrose,” Mr. Kale said, sounding surprised. “You want Melrose, maybe I could find one on Melrose.” I let the door swing closed while he was still speaking. Outside, I grabbed Jessica by the elbow and marched her into the daylight.
Brussels' Sprouts was something else again. It occupied the entire lower floor of a two-story ersatz Greek building tucked just above Sunset on Sunset Plaza. Doric columns guarded the door like erect concrete watchdogs. The door whispered inward as we stepped on the mat in front of it. The mat had little blue and yellow puppies frisking on it.
“Shit,” Jessica said, looking down at the mat. Air conditioning rolled over us through the open door.
“Try Jeez-o-crips,” I suggested. “You're a little girl here.”
She gave me an arch look. “I'm a little girl everywhere. Ask my mom.”
“Yessss?” someone hissed. It sounded like Kaaa the Python in The Jungle Book.
“Where are you?” I said defensively. The sheer sibilance of it unnerved me.
“Over here,” the someone said as I blinked into the dark. “Behind the desk.”
“Jeez-o-crips,” Jessica said obediently as the door closed behind us.
The waiting room was bigger than the Nina and the Pinta combined. As my eyes adjusted to the gloom I saw that its walls were lined with enormous black-and-white photographs, pictures of the kind of little kids who go through life just begging for a pie in the face. They had freckles. They had missing teeth. They had straw in their hair. They featured suspenders, gingham neckerchiefs, and catcher's mitts. One or two had a burnt-cork black eye. All in all, they were about as cute as an advanced case of bubonic plague, but less contagious.
“Oh, good,
you've got the door closed. May I help you?” the voice said.
The voice belonged to a tiny man in the kind of pleated linen shirt that's been popular for inexplicable decades in the Philippines. He was seated behind a big desk at the far corner of the office. No, I decided, he was standing. He had a pinched little face, topped off by a widow's peak that was pronounced enough to symbolize all the wives bereaved by World War One. He also had very hairy forearms. Short as he was, he could have traded forearms with Bluto, and Bluto wouldn't have noticed the difference. On top of it all was the kind of haircut that a friend of mine had dubbed turban renewal: to cover the fact that he was balding on top, he'd grown the hair on the back of his head about a yard long and combed it forward. It sat on his forehead like a knickknack shelf from which someone had stolen the knickknacks.
“Help me?” I said. Jessica nudged me. “Of course you can help me. We'd like to see Miss Brussels.”
“Mrs. Brussels,” he hissed. The phrase offered a lot of opportunity for hissing.
“Well, sure,” I said, feeling larger than I was by about two feet. His widow's peak hit me at the nipples. “That's what I said. Mrs. Brussels.”
He gave me a bright, cockeyed little bird's stare. “You didn't, of course,” he said. “What you said was Miss. Have you got an appointment?”
“Yes,” Jessica said bravely.
“No,” I said.
“Darlings,” he said, “make up your minds. I always have a headache on Mondays. You could be a tumor or you could be an aspirin. Personally, of course, I'd rather you were an aspirin. For one thing, you can get a refund on aspirin.”
“No,” I said, taking the frank, honest approach. “We don't have an appointment.”
“Well,” he said, looking at a book in front of him, “of course you realize that Mondays are very busy.”
“You'll be Birdie,” I said, reading the nameplate on his desk. That's what it said, Birdie. Other than the nameplate and the appointment book, which was the size of the average aircraft carrier, the desk was nearly barren. At one end of it stood a computer terminal, swiveled so that the screen was turned away from us.
“I'll be Birdie when the headache fades,” he said. “Until then I'll just be miserable. What would your business be with Mrs. Brussels?”
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