“Says you,” Aurora said, lighting her cigarette. “My mother could handle my father, his father, and all his brothers without losing her place in the Ladies'HomeJournal.” She blew a cloud of smoke at me. “So, game over. What do you want to know?”
“What did Aimee run away from?”
“Well,” she said, puffing away. “Kansas City, for one thing.”
“Not enough,” I said. “You said they never beat her.”
“They don't have to beat us,” she said. “They can love us to death.” The right side of her mouth, the upwardly tilted, kissable side, turned up even farther. Her brown skin gleamed.
“That's not really fair,” I said. “It's a cheap shot.”
“Okay,” she said. “Just for argument, let's say you're all right. I'll tell you an Aimee story. Just one out of hundreds.”
“Shoot,” I said, putting the bottle out of reach.
“She was eight, right? I mean, we're talking about a time of life when anything can kill you. Bad breath, ugly shoes. Buttercups are tough guys compared to an eight-year-old girl.” She looked for the bottle, and I gave up and handed it to her.
“It was Halloween,” she said. “Aimee wanted to be a princess. Well, I mean, who doesn't? She'd been asking for weeks for a princess costume to wear to this big party, this absolutely gigantic eight-year-olds' party, and the guy she had a crush on had even asked her to go with him. No prince was ever better-looking to Cinderella than this little eight-year-old creep-Jesus, his name was Arthur-was to Aimee. And Arthur, the wonderful Arthur, all of four feet tall, had asked Aimee to go to the party.”
She lifted the bottle to her lips.
“You know what my father does for a living?” she asked when she'd finished swallowing.
“No,” I said, realizing that I hadn't asked.
“He's a pork packer. ‘Everything but the squeal,’ that's his company's motto. When he's finished, that pig is gone. He was the first pork packer to advertise on the sides of barns. Farmer Al, he calls himself. To listen to his ads, you'd think Farmer Al owned every pig in America.” She licked a drop of whiskey from her lower lip. “For all I know, he does.”
I waited. “So?” I finally asked.
“So when Aimee goes upstairs to get into her costume, it's a pig costume. He can advertise on barns, so why not on his daughter? It was in a big cardboard box, and when she opened it, it was a bright pink pig's costume made out of rubber. It said ‘Farmer Al, the Pig's Best Friend’ on the side. Aimee took it out of the box and then sat on the floor, which people in our house just don't do, and started crying. She'd wanted a princess costume. Then, I'll give her credit, she got mad. She was still fighting with my parents when her date's father rang the doorbell.”
“Holy Jesus,” I said.
“So she didn't have any choice. She put on the costume, the fat little pink body with the sign on it and the little curlicue tail sticking out of its rear, and the pink rubber mask, and she walked down the stairs. I still don't know how she forced herself to walk down those stairs. I could hear her sobbing from the landing, where I was, but she had this pig mask on, you know? Nobody could see the tears. And down at the bottom of the stairs her date was waiting. He was dressed as a prince. Of course he was dressed as a prince. He had this dumb little sword at his side and this stupid little cape, and as he saw Aimee come down the stairs, his face dropped, and then, because he was a gentleman even at his age, he dredged up a smile. I'm still amazed that Aimee didn't die on the spot when she saw that smile.
“And they went off together, him smiling bravely, the prince who had chosen a pig, and her crying until she must have been soaked inside that rubber costume, and she won first prize at the party. All the other little girls were princesses, except the few who were ballerinas. And she came home with this big fat vulgar brass trophy, and my dad said, ‘See? What was all the fuss about?’ And to this day he doesn't understand why she threw the trophy through the picture window in the living room. He still doesn't know what he did to her.” She remembered her cigarette and stared at it as though she'd never seen it before.
“He thinks he's her best friend,” I said.
“There you are,” she said. “Childhood is so much fun.”
“Did that kind of thing happen often?”
“How often does it have to happen? It's not like they were belting us or hanging us up by our thumbs all the time. They've both just forgotten completely what it's like to be a kid. They take family votes to settle things, but their votes count for more than ours do. We're supposed to be little adults about it when they outvote us, two to four. Well, fuck that, we're not little adults. Aimee's still a baby. And two against four isn't a majority. Kids have a sense of justice, and you can't screw with it.”
I retrieved the bottle and knocked back a swig. “Did you ever run away?”
“No,” she said.
“Why not?”
“Aimee had all the guts,” she said.
“Has,” I said. Aurora looked at me, stricken by what she'd said.
The knob on the front door turned, and I snatched the cigarette away from her so that I was holding both the Marlboro and the bottle when Mrs. Sorrell came into the room.
“Rory,” she said in a voice that was already furred by drink, “what in the world are you doing?”
Rory settled back onto the couch and crossed her arms. “I'm watching Mr. What's-his-name here drink and smoke,” she said. “Just honing the skills I picked up at home.”
Her mother swatted away some invisible gnats in front of her. “Well,” she said, “go into the other room.”
“Hey, don't worry,” Rory said, glancing at me. “I've got potatoes in my ears.”
“Is that supposed to be funny, miss?” Mrs. Sorrell said. “Don't you think I've got enough troubles without my own daughter turning into Henny Youngman?”
“Henny who?” Rory asked in honest bewilderment.
“Never you mind. Just make yourself scarce.”
“Oink,” Rory said, looking back at me as she stood up. Her elegant legs, brown below the white shorts, twinkled at me as though they had been dusted with Tinker Bell's goofus sparkles as she walked away. “Oink, oink,” she said. “Everything but the squeal.”
“What have you been telling him?” her mother demanded.
“Oh, Mother,” Rory said. “The truth will out.” She gave me another glance, walked very slowly to the door to what I supposed was the bedroom, and pulled it shut softly behind her. Mrs. Sorrell watched the door for a moment as though she expected it to open again, and then shook her head.
“We shouldn't have brought her,” she said, “but we were afraid to leave her alone, after, well, after Aimee. And it's Easter vacation and she wanted to see L.A. And, I don't know, I thought if we found Aimee she might be more willing to come home if Rory were with us. If we found Aimee,” she added bitterly. She rubbed at the bridge of her nose, stretching the skin tight over the fine bones of her face, and I could see Rory's face peeking out at me through her mother's. “So I'm drinking,” she said. “The one thing I shouldn't be doing.”
She was wearing a white blouse with little red cherries embroidered on the collar and a pair of navy-blue slacks with big safari-style pockets. There were three long scratches on her forehead from where she'd raked it with her nails, red, angry parallel lines. Hers wasn't the kind of face that should have had scratches on it. They made her look younger and softer than her daughter.
“Well,” I said, hoisting the bottle, “at least you're not drinking alone.”
“Put it down,” she said in a tone that brooked no discussion. “One of us has to be clear-headed. I have something to show you, but first I have to know if you've learned anything.”
“Not much,” I said. I wasn't going to tell her about the girl on the slab and the burn in her navel. Not until I had to, at any rate. “I've been on the street for four days but I haven't found anyone who can put her there with certainty. That's where she was,
though. There's a whole community of them out there.”
“She's not there anymore,” she said. “Come out on the terrace. I don't want Rory listening through the door.”
I put down the bottle as she crossed the room to a big sliding glass door and pushed it open. I couldn't figure out what to do with the cigarette, so I carried it out onto the terrace and crushed it underfoot.
The terrace was enclosed by ten-foot pink walls and overgrown vegetation. A hummingbird that had been feeding on a big leathery copadeoro gave us an indignant midair stare and thrummed off over the wall.
“I hate those things,” she said vaguely. “They're neither birds nor insects. They're like leftovers from some time when lizards flew and snakes swam. I always think they'll have dandruff.”
I like hummingbirds, but I kept quiet. Mrs. Sorrell fished in the pocket of her slacks and pulled out a piece of paper. “We have to go home,” she said wearily. “I guess I knew this was going to happen. I just hoped we'd find her before it did.” I put out a hand and she put the paper into it. Then she sank onto a chaise and crossed her ankles, looking down at her hands resting in her lap. I opened the paper.
Same kind of paper, same dot-matrix printer as before. GET $20,000, it said, all in caps. BE HOME TUESDAY AFTERNOON. I'LL CALL.
I felt a sinking sensation in my stomach. “When did this arrive?”
“Here? Today. It got to Kansas City yesterday. The maid sends my mail out every day, Federal Express.”
“Has he seen it?”
“He went home yesterday. I made him. I was worried about his heart.”
“You're going to have to tell him now.”
She looked up at me. “The hell I am,” she said.
“But the money.”
She lifted one hand from her lap and waved it away. “I've got money of my own,” she said. “I'm richer than Daddy will ever be.”
“You'll get the money, of course.”
“Certainly I will. She's my little girl.” She blinked twice, very quickly, and then drew both hands into fists. “The question,” she said, after a moment, “is what you'll be doing.”
“I've got two places to go today,” I said with more confidence than I felt. “One of them, I'm not so sure about. I'll get something at the other one.”
She looked back down at her lap, at the two sharp little fists and the expanse of navy-blue cloth drawn tight over her childbearing hips. “Please,” she said in a very small voice, “see that you do.”
6
Jack's Redux
The place I wasn't sure about was Jack's Triple-Burgers, but I had to go there anyway. Even if the note hadn't arrived to speed things up, I'd realized when I was looking at the little girl on the slab that I was finally too old to pass as anything but an undercover cop. It was time to come out from whatever meager cover I'd managed to establish, and the place to do it was the place where I was less likely to find anyone who knew Aimee. That way, if the approach failed, at least I wouldn't have locked myself out of the Oki-Burger.
It was pretty early for Jack's. Even after I'd killed a couple of hours in the B. Dalton bookshop on Hollywood Boulevard, ignoring the pointed stares of the clerks while I read Philippe Aries' CenturiesofChildhood and Gesell and Ilg's ChildDevelopment, it was only five-thirty. Most of the clientele at Jack's didn't even get up until five-thirty. I was feeling the muzzy aftereffects of Aurora's whiskey. I was also very tired, and once or twice I noticed that the book in my hands was shaking slightly. The morning at the morgue and the fact of the note had taken even more out of me than I thought it had. I felt like I needed a soul transplant.
Figuring it couldn't get any worse, I headed for the sidewalk.
As I emerged, blinking in the late sunlight, onto the Walk of Fame, the first thing I saw was a woman walking two little girls, aged ten or eleven. They might have been twins.
Although it was cold, the girls wore white T-shirts, knotted above their navels, identical green-and-white running shorts that ended several inches above the bottoms of their buttocks, and identical black patent-leather collars around their necks. Hooked into each of the collars was a short black leash, the end of which the woman held in her hand. She scanned the faces of the passersby, looking for takers. Well, I thought, at least now Jack's can't get to me.
I was wrong, as I had been so often since my first conversation with the Sorrells. The ice-cream pimp and his girl were there, and so was a Korean or Japanese teenager whom I'd seen several times before. The Oriental girl was tiny, impossibly fragile-looking, capable of ingesting vast amounts of drugs if her behavior on previous occasions was any indication, and heartbreakingly beautiful except for a ravaged coarseness in her skin that advertised bad acne in the past. She had her keeper with her, a skinny hardcase in his middle twenties whose mouth curved raggedly upward, courtesy of an old knife scar. He was sitting now, but on the move he walked like he was trying to slice his way through solid ice, elbows held away from his body, feet taking big stiff strides. His feet were encased in heavy scuffed black engineer boots, and his shirt, as always, was open to reveal his overdeveloped stomach muscles. He was smoking with jerky gestures and talking. When he wasn't hurting somebody he was always talking. Sometimes he talked when he hurt people. She, as usual, was looking down at the table. Given her probable condition, maybe her head was too heavy to lift.
“Hey, plainclothes,” Muhammad said pleasantly as I sat down at the counter. “Coffee again? Hold the sugar?”
“Muhammad,” I said. “This is a nice little place.”
Muhammad looked around, his dark eyes unreadable. “You got a funny idea of nice,” he said at last. “I don't know, sometimes I feel like I should go back home, except home is so crazy now. The Shi'ites, all the crazies.” He wiped his hands on the damp towel that hung from his belt. “I guess maybe I don't know where home is anymore. Same like these kids.” His eyes traveled over the tables and then came back to me. “You know what I mean?”
“What I mean,” I said, “is that it's nicer open than it would be closed.”
He put up both hands and waggled them. “Hey,” he said, “no argument there.”
“Open, it's a living,” I said remorselessly. “Closed, it's just another Hollywood rathole.”
“I'm listening,” he said.
I took out one of the yearbook pictures of Aimee Sorrell and dropped it onto the counter. His eyes flicked down to it and then back up at me.
“So,” I said, “have you seen her?”
“Cop,” he said. “I knew you were a cop.”
“You get an A,” I said. “Seen her or not?”
“I don't know,” he said. “There's twenty girls in here look like her. She's a blond, you know? How do you tell blonds apart?”
“Very carefully,” I said. “Right now, you tell them apart very carefully.”
He picked up the picture and squinted at it. “How old?” he said.
“Twelve, thirteen.”
“How tall?”
“Four-eleven.”
“This isn't fair,” he said. “There shouldn't be such a world. Somebody should have this baby on his knee.”
“Somebody does,” I said. I pulled out one of the Polaroids and handed it to him. He went green, which is something Meryl Streep couldn't do on purpose.
“Ahhh,” he said, losing another chunk of his innocence.
“Don't talk to me about there shouldn't be such a world,” I said. “What are you doing here? Without you, where do these kids go? What's this place about, anyway?”
“Hamburgers,” he said. “We make hamburgers.”
“Throw the shit in another direction,” I said. “I'm not catching. Have you seen her or not?”
He looked down at the Polaroid and then up at me. “I don't think so,” he said. I sat up and he took a step backward. “No, really, really, I don't think so. We get a lot of kids in here, right? But she's too pretty. I'd remember.”
“Make an effort,” I said as his eyes slid t
oward the ice-cream pimp. “Don't look around for help. If you're lying to me, there isn't any help. There's only me, Muhammad, and I'm not fucking around.”
“No, no, me neither. You've always been straight with me, right?” He remembered that he thought I was plainclothes, and reconsidered. “Considering your job, I mean. You've always been straight. Now I'm being straight with you.” He dropped the Polaroid onto the counter and wiped his hands again, more thoroughly this time. “What am I supposed to do?” he said. “I got a family to support.”
“Any little girls?” I asked unnecessarily. I wanted to bite someone.
“Three,” he said before he thought. Then his eyes dropped to the picture, and he said “Ahhh” again.
“Aside from the two specimens in here, and the guy with the Mohawk and the tattoos who was here on Thursday, how many regulars you got who deal in the little ones?”
He poured me some coffee to look busy, and I swiveled my chair around. The hardcase with the Japanese or Korean girl was looking at us. He was giving me what he probably thought of as his chain-saw look. I managed to get my metabolism back under control, nodded to him, and turned back to Muhammad.
“So,” I said, “how many?”
“You don't want to mess with that one,” Muhammad said without moving his mouth as he wiped the counter. “He's a knifer.”
“I'm not messing with anybody. I asked you a question.”
“You're messing with me,” he said.
“You don't count.”
He looked out the window at the freak parade, a uniquely Hollywood mixture of earnest tourists looking for glamour and sidewalk carnivores looking for tourists. An overweight man in greasy jeans, a white T-shirt, and a motorcycle jacket came in and grunted at Muhammad. There was enough oil in his hair to keep his bike running for weeks.
“Him, for instance?” I said, stirring my coffee. The fat man headed for a table at the back.
“You got a death wish, you know that?” Muhammad said, giving the fat man a terrified grin. “Anybody who can get them. Everybody wants the little ones now. Big business.”
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