Burning Garbo

by Robert Eversz

  “I knew her father too,” he said. “We played football in high school. Defensive tackle was my position. He was the outside linebacker, tough but fast. You know anything about football?”

  “Just enough to know when somebody scores.”

  “On run plays, my job was to plug the hole the running back was trying to run through, tackle him if I could. Force him wide if I couldn’t, where Pete could catch him. If I missed a tackle, Pete was always there, covering for me. I don’t think he missed but two tackles the whole senior season. Hell, we didn’t just play football. We grew up together, best friends since the age of six. Angela’s mom was fifteen when she got pregnant. Anabelle. Beautiful girl. Pete, he tried to do the right thing. He married her, got a job pumping gas. But he was too wild. I tried to get him to enlist in the marines with me, figured Uncle Sam would straighten him out, keep him out of trouble. Lots of servicemen have wives and kids at home. But he wouldn’t go with me. Took off to Phoenix instead, got involved with some people running drugs over the border. He lasted less than a month. They found his body in the desert outside Douglas. Only parts of his head. He’d been shot in the face with a shotgun.”

  Ben scooped a handful of scorched earth and let it filter through the crevices between his fingertips. The wind blew the ash downhill, and the dirt fell with a tapping sound onto his black boots. “I enlisted at the end of the summer. Anabelle gave birth a couple of months later. She hooked up with a rancher after that, had another baby, that’d be Arlanda’s mom. Anabelle drowned the following year. Drowned in the desert. Isn’t that a hell of a way to die? A flash flood got her. She was walking in the dry wash, they said. It wasn’t even raining in the desert where she walked. All the rain was in the mountains. But the water sluices down the mountain and into the wash and if you’re not paying attention it can sweep you off your feet and drown you. But you know what?”

  I met his question with a look, waited for him to tell me.

  “I don’t think she was walking in the wash at all.”

  “What then?”

  “I think she threw herself in.”

  He turned his eyes to the sea and didn’t say a word after that, except “thanks” when he dropped me at my car.

  Frank was waiting for me on the sidewalk when I pulled into a metered parking spot in front of the building where the two sisters who cleaned for Angela Doubleday lived. I made sure the side windows were cracked open, gave the Rott a reassuring thump on the shoulder, and stepped out of the car counting quarters. Frank lit the cigarette dangling from his lips—his last chance to smoke for at least an hour—and said, “You met Doubleday’s niece. Talk to me.”

  I fed two quarters into the meter, which bought me a mere half-hour respite from the steady patrol of the city’s parking police. Frank knew I’d met Arlanda because she had called Scandal Times first, asking for my number. “The meeting went fine,” I said. “Give me some more quarters.”

  Frank dug into his front pocket, cigarette smoke curling over his eyebrows. “How did she seem about her aunt’s death?”

  “Seemed all right about it. Except she didn’t admit her aunt was dead. Just missing. Sure, she knows it looks bad, but nobody’s identified the remains yet, so she’s just, kind of waiting. For the coroner to figure it out.”

  He salvaged three quarters from a handful of copper and fed them one by one into the meter. “They’re doing a dental on her. The heat was so intense it vaporized the flesh from her bones. Nearly vaporized the bones, too. What little was left of the body could be anyone, even that gray-haired guy you saw.”

  “You think they’ll ever be sure who it was?”

  “If they’ve got a couple of teeth, they’ll make the identification by the dental records, you know, comparing the teeth found in the skull with Doubleday’s dental charts.”

  “If it was arson, you think Doubleday’s estate just happened to be in the way or she was burned out on purpose?”

  “You mean an insurance fire or murder?”

  “I don’t know what I mean. I’m just asking.”

  “Hard to collect insurance if you’re dead.”

  “What about another stalker, like the one before?”

  “She hasn’t been in a film for ten years. We’re the only ones who cared about her. Even with Garbo, the only people bothering her were paparazzi scum like yourself.”

  I thanked him for the compliment.

  Frank eyed the length of his cigarette, measuring the number of drags that remained. I could generally count on conversations like this lasting no longer than the length of a smoke. He had a few puffs left, asked, “The niece, what did she have to say about all this?”

  “I talked, they listened. I finished, they said good night.”

  “Who’s the guy with her?”

  “Ex-cop,” I said. “Somewhere local. Old guy. Retired.”

  “You get any photographs?”

  “Get a heart, Frank. The woman just lost her aunt.”

  “I got the Cubs on satellite and a refrigerator full of beer. What do I need a heart for?”

  “Mind if I keep mine?”

  “A heart in a tabloid photographer is like an appendix,” Frank said. “A useless organ.” He crushed the butt of his cigarette between heel and sidewalk and jaywalked across the street.

  Doubleday’s maids rented a one-bedroom unit on the second floor of a two-story stucco box on Santa Monica Boulevard, facing the street. Santa Monica is one of the city’s most heavily trafficked boulevards and exhaust fumes tinted the stucco a sooty gray. I followed Frank into the courtyard. The lids to half the mailboxes on the wall inside the door bent away from their frames or didn’t close at all, jimmied by mail thieves. The interior courtyard was paved in concrete. The only public plant was a dead geranium. The railing that led to the second floor had pulled loose at the top of the stairs, and the paint on the steps had worn clear through to concrete. Across the courtyard, a radio played “Besa me, besa me mucho.”

  The woman who opened the door to Frank’s knock didn’t stand much taller than the knob, and the color of her skin matched the door that framed her. Her face was round as a handmade doll’s, and her body was round, too, with the same lumpy look dolls used to have, before they were all pumped from a plastics extruder to look like an anorexic after a boob job. The woman behind her in the hallway stood even shorter, and she was smiling at us like a long-lost cousin. The tall one at the door introduced herself as Yolanda and the woman in the hall as her older sister, Maria.

  I offered my hand, said, “Mucho gusto.”

  The younger sister, Yolanda, looked back at the older one. “Did you hear that? She speaks Spanish!” She said this as though talking about a talented dog that had learned to bark the opening bars to “Jingle Bells.”

  “Solo un poco, y muy mal,” I answered. Only a little, and badly.

  She invited us into the living room, and before we had the chance to sit, Maria emerged from the kitchenette with a pitcher of fresh-squeezed orange juice. Coffee was coming, she said, but they thought we might be thirsty first. I scanned the apartment like a camera lens, imagining how I might photograph the sisters. My job was important. Scandal Times gave equal space to text and photographs. They did so not from commitment to the art of photography but in consideration of the paper’s many literacy-impaired readers. People don’t see your lips move when you’re looking at a photograph.

  Vibrant red and green shawls draped the backs of the sofa and chairs, brightening furniture worn thin by a long history of use. A framed print of Christ on the cross hung above a shelf braced to the wall like an altar, surrounded by portraits of Salvadorans from a time not so long ago. The apartment shook with the roar of a bus passing on the near side of the boulevard outside.

  “How long did you work for Angela Doubleday?” Frank asked when the bus had passed.

  Yolanda looked at Maria while she poured a glass of orange juice. “We started how long ago? Four years?”

  “Five,” Mari
a answered. “Five years and three months.”

  “A little over five years,” Yolanda said.

  Frank made a scratch mark in his notebook. “Did you work every day?”

  “Not every day, no.” Yolanda glanced at her sister.

  “Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.”

  “Three days a week,” Yolanda said.

  “You weren’t there the day of the fire, then. Say, in the morning?”

  The fire had been on Thursday. The sisters looked at each other to confirm what each thought and shook their heads in unison.

  “What was Ms. Doubleday like the day before the fire, the last day you saw her?”

  “Just like always,” Yolanda said. “She never changed. The whole four years we work for her, every day she was the same.”

  “Crabby,” Maria confided.

  “We thought she should get out more. Go visit people. We tell her, Señora, you have to get out more! Is good for you! But she didn’t listen. Told us mind our own business. You know what I think?”

  “She didn’t have any friends,” Maria said.

  “Can you imagine that? A big movie star, the way she was? And no friends in the world. She was never mean to us …”

  “But she didn’t like us.”

  “She didn’t like anybody.”

  “Except …” Maria held up a single finger.

  “Oh yes, Toy, her chauffeur.”

  “Toy?” Frank asked.

  Yolanda nodded. “Toy. Funny name for a man, yes? She always talked about how handsome he was, how good he take care of her. He drove her around on Fridays.”

  “And Sundays.”

  “That’s right, Fridays and Sundays. We think …” Yolanda’s eyes went blank for a moment, as though waiting.

  “We don’t really know for sure,” Maria whispered.

  “We don’t have any proof but we think …”

  “They were having an affair.” Maria’s face brightened at the sound of hot water spitting in the kitchen. “The coffee is ready. You take cream or sugar?”

  I pulled the camera from my bag while the older sister stepped into the kitchen. Yolanda looked like she sat in front of a speeding train when I first pointed the lens at her. I ran off a few frames to get a feeling for the light and the planes of her face and asked her about the gardener.

  “Lupe,” she said and glanced to the spot where her sister had sat on the couch, stymied by her absence.

  “Was he good at his job?”

  “Lupe?” She frowned as though the question required serious consideration. “The thing about Lupe is, I tell him every week, Not again, Lupe! It was the same thing with you last week and here you are again. Does he listen? He tries. He agrees with me, he says, You’re right, Yolanda, I can’t keep doing this, is not good for me. Next week, is the same thing.”

  “What thing?”

  Yolanda stared at me as though I was deaf. “The thing that’s not good for him! Lupe’s problem.”

  I glanced at Frank.

  He shrugged.

  “The problem,” I said. “What exactly is Lupe’s problem?”

  “Didn’t I already say that? I thought I already said that.”

  Frank and I assured her that she had not.

  That she had not already told us took her aback. “The thing with Lupe is—”

  “He drinks too much,” Maria said, carrying a coffee tray from the kitchen.

  “El boracho.” Yolanda’s curly black hair bounced with the vigorous nod of her head. The drunkard. “Every night he drinks too much. But he’s not a bad man. His life, it was hard. His brothers … he’s very sad, you know? Both of them—”

  “Killed in the war, in El Salvador.” Maria poured a cup for Frank after I waved away the offer. “His brothers were our husbands.” She glanced to the wall behind our heads, which bore a photograph of two couples standing before a Spanish Baroque church, dressed for a wedding. Two studio portraits of serious young men, unsmiling for the camera, flanked the wedding picture.

  “The village where we were born, everyone is dead now.”

  “Not everyone,” Maria corrected. “Not Lupe. And not us.”

  “We’re happy.” Yolanda’s smile was sudden and radiant. “Life is good here. But sometimes I think …”

  “Death follows us everywhere.” Maria’s eyes peered at me, over the rim of her cup, as black and shimmering as the coffee she sipped. “And last week it found Señora Doubleday.”

  I met Arlanda for dinner at a surf-and-turf place off the Pacific Coast Highway, where they served exotic cocktails with little umbrellas and spotlit the surf with klieg lights. The dinner was her idea. Ben was off talking with other cops, and she didn’t want to eat alone. The restaurant was my choice. The waiters wore rayon shirts in bright Hawaiian prints, white cotton pants, and easy smiles. They were pleasant and handsome young men whose windblown hair and tanned faces made abundantly clear that waiting tables was just a job; their real ambition was to surf. One whose name tag read “Brad” led us to a table one row back from an ocean view. It had been a couple of months since I’d gone out to dinner with someone, and I’d dressed for the occasion in black toreador pants and an emerald green top. I even applied eyeliner, grudgingly, and lipstick from a tube that promised the color of scarlet mist but looked more like ordinary red by the time it reached my lips. More than one man seemed to be working the kinks from his neck as we passed, and from the looks of the crew at the bar, we could have been the evening’s entertainment. The stares I usually encountered were more guarded in their admiration, so I figured it had to be Arlanda. Her hair had been brushed to a high gloss and spilled down the back of a short black dress tapered at the waist. Amid the strands of her jet-black hair, blue highlights skittered like static electricity. The dress showed her well-tooled calves and a scoop of spine and clung in testament to the slim and firm figure beneath. She may have been a petite but what little she had fit in all the right places. I said, “I think the dress is a hit.”

  “Too inappropriate?” She glanced at me just before she sat, nipping at her lower lip and raising an eyebrow, concerned.

  “Inappropriate for what?”

  “I’m almost in mourning, for one.”

  “Sure, but you’re not the one that’s dead.”

  “Glad someone noticed.”

  “I think everyone in the restaurant noticed.”

  “A town like Douglas, you live there long enough, nobody sees you anymore. Particularly when you have kids.” She opened the menu and flipped to the drinks page. “My treat. No arguments.”

  I didn’t have a problem with that. I said, “Talked to your aunt’s housekeepers today.”

  “What’d they say?”

  “The gardener is a drunk and your aunt was having an affair with the chauffeur.”

  “Good for her. About time she had some fun.”

  Came a little late, I wanted to say.

  She glanced up from the drinks menu and tried to catch a waiter’s eye. “What are you drinking tonight?”

  “Can’t drink. I’m driving.”

  “But you get two drinks don’t you? What’s the law here?”

  “Most people get two drinks, three or four if they space it right. But I’m on parole and the cops sometimes play games with people like me. If I have zero-point-zero-one alcohol in my blood, they can plant an open bottle in the car and claim it’s mine. That’s a parole violation and technical grounds to ticket me back to the joint.”

  “They’d do that? Plant evidence?”

  “Don’t sound so shocked. I’m one of the bad girls, remember?”

  “It’s not as much fun drinking alone. I’ll drive.”

  “Baby’s not drinking. Maybe he can be the designated driver,” I said, and we laughed at the image of the dog behind the wheel. Brad dropped by again, with his easy, empty smile. I ordered a Jack Daniel’s neat, water back, and figured I’d wing it.

  “I love my kids but the life of a single mom in a small
town, it gets claustrophobic. Bars are about the only place to go for fun but I can’t go in one, because word gets around. Even if I go home after one drink, chaste as a nun, people hear you’ve been in a bar and think you’re a slut, shame about those poor li’l kids left home alone.”

  We talked about that, and then the drinks came and we clicked glasses. I nearly spilled mine when I pulled it from my lips and saw the red half-moon on the lip of the glass; it had been so long since I’d worn bright lipstick that I’d forgotten how it marked whatever I kissed.

  “What’s it like living here?” Arlanda asked. “For a single girl, I mean.”

  “The work is good.”

  She said that wasn’t what she meant.

  “I know. You got lots of movies, dance clubs, and more restaurants than people. The only thing that’s missing is someone to share it with.”

  “You’re not seeing anyone?”

  I finished my drink and shook the fumes from my head.

  “Why not? You’re a good-looking girl. A little unconventional maybe, but I wouldn’t think you’d be hurting for dates. Something wrong with the men here, they don’t see it?”

  “L.A. is not a true-love kind of town. Like I said, the work is good.”

  We looked through the menu, and when Brad saw we were ready he ambled by to take our order. Arlanda talked about her kids, how the older one was a desert rat, never could get him to come inside, and the younger one always had his nose in a comic book, she couldn’t get him to go out and play. The food, when it arrived, was classic steakhouse by the sea, prepared with a minimum of fuss between kitchen and table.

  Midway into a grilled swordfish I said, “Los Angeles is a city where people move to become someone they imagine themselves to be but aren’t yet and most likely never will be. Most have great ambitions, but it’s not an ambition to do, it’s an ambition to be. You meet somebody here, chances are they’re doing one thing while wanting to be someone else. Waiters, bartenders, hairdressers, telemarketers, real estate salespeople, even high-priced call girls, they all want to be actors, models, rock stars, film producers. Everybody is in the process of denying what they are now while trying to become somebody else. Tough to have a real life if you aren’t who you are. Nobody wants to settle, because who’s to say you won’t be rich and famous a couple years down the line? Why settle for something or someone you’ll just have to dump when you make it big? And the egos we carry aren’t sized to who we are now but who we imagine we’ll become.”