Swearing under his breath, Rafael took another drink, then screwed the cap back on. He didn’t want to get drunk. He only wanted to numb himself a little. If he was going to be weak and out of control, he wanted it to be from liquor, not from some damned woman.
He pictured her in Westwood somewhere, in one of those stucco town houses with the rippling red-tile roofs and the wrought-iron gates. Spanish architecture had taken over the city. Everyone wanted to live in a hacienda. The only problem was, those who were entitled by race to live in haciendas usually wound up living in the slums.
Rafael had chosen his house not just because it sat in a staid, peaceful neighborhood but because it was constructed of wood and glass and roofed in cedar. It was an American house, nondescript, comfortable, spacious enough so that a person born in the back room of a trailer set on blocks in the middle of a migrant farm camp north of Bakersfield would know he’d moved up in the world. It was the sort of house that could make a man who’d come of age in a three-room flat above a garage know he could reach a better place, and own it, and call it home.
Who he was, where he’d come from and what he’d become…to someone like Sandra Garcia Rafael’s life would seem alien. Her childhood must have resembled a Latino version of Cosby: parents—two of them—and grandparents, a family business, prep school. Christ. Her life seemed alien to him.
He had been five years old the last time he’d seen his father. Ricardo had been seven and a half, and he still hadn’t completed a full year of kindergarten. His mother had decided to leave the farm camp for Los Angeles, where her cousin lived. “I want my boys in a real school,” she’d said. “I want them somewhere where no one can pull them out of class to pick tomatoes at harvest time. I want them in a real school in a city, where they’ll speak English and learn how to be Americans.”
His father… Rafael had vague memories of a large man, with solid fingers and rough palms and a fierce mustache. He remembered a man who never smiled.
“If you leave me,” his father had said, “you’ll never see me again.”
“I want a better life for my sons. And I want Rosa safe.”
“Rosa’s two years old. You think she’s not safe?”
“If we stay here she won’t be. The men, they look at all the girls. I won’t let any man look at my daughter like that.”
“And what will I do while you’re teaching your children how to be Americans?”
“You’ll get a job. There must be work. Carmelita’s husband—”
“He’s a gangster.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I know enough. I work day and night, I break my back in these fields, and you want to take my children away so they can be Americans? Better than their own father? That’s what you want to do?”
Rafael’s mother had nodded. His father had smacked her across her cheek. That was the other thing Rafael remembered about his old man. His height, his mustache and the sickening sound of his hand slapping his mother’s face. “Then go,” he’d growled. “Take these bastards and go to hell.”
They’d gone not to hell but to East Los Angeles, although Rafael sometimes believed there wasn’t much difference. His mother had parked her three children with her cousin Carmelita and gone to work in a tortilla factory. Eventually she’d moved her family to a flat of their own. She’d rarely been around. Ricardo had been in charge. Rosa had been the smartest, but Ricardo had been the shrewdest. Rosa had always known right from wrong, but Ricardo had always known how to stay alive.
Rafael had hovered between his older brother and his younger sister, observing, absorbing, envious of Ricardo’s shrewdness and Rosa’s wisdom and protective of them both, even as they’d moved in opposite directions and he’d had to stretch to keep his grip on them. He’d mimicked Ricardo’s strut, his machismo, his faith in his own strength. But he’d turned to Rosa with his doubts, his questions. With Ricardo he would act. With Rosa he would think and talk.
Ricardo had argued that men, Chicanos, were judged not by their thoughts and words but by their actions. “Rosa has Jesus,” he would tell Rafael. “That’s okay—she’s a girl. You’re a man. You need brothers. Hermanos.”
There had been no prep school for Rafael. Not even high school. He’d dropped out when he was sixteen, and it was only because Father Andreas had pressured him that, at the age of twenty-one, he’d earned a General Equivalency Diploma. As far as he was concerned, it was just a piece of paper, but the padre had insisted it would give him courage and confidence. At that time, in the months after he’d gone one on one with his own mortality and come much too close to losing the bout, his courage and confidence had been in desperately low supply.
So now he had a high school diploma. And a lot of money. And his own production company. And a sister who had somehow emerged from the streets clean and pure and blessed. He didn’t have to prove anything to that zorra reporter with her fancy second-generation-American pedigree.
He hated Sandra Garcia because he feared what she could do to him. She could probe his past. She could discover how often Ricardo’s pull had been stronger than Rosa’s, how often two boys without a father could get into trouble. She could find out about Los Hermanos del Sol—the Brothers of the Sun—and about Ricardo currently as much at home in the prison at Chino as Rafael was in this house in Silver Lake. She could start counting the black marks next to the name Perez—not just Ricardo Perez but Rafael Perez as well. Surely he was still in the police files. A kid didn’t join a gang and run up a record and then suddenly get deleted from the law’s computer because he’d gone legitimate and made a lot of money.
Sandra could find out the truth about Rafael and know the story she had to write about was as far from angels, white or otherwise, as it was possible to be.
Or she could do something even worse: she could kiss him again. She could bewitch him into believing he didn’t care what she wrote about him, what became of his new movie, what happened to his stupid blond star.
Sandra Garcia could do more damage than he was prepared to deal with. He had to get rid of her.
Closing his eyes against the dense silence of the night, he pictured her standing before him as she had in the alley, all lissome curves and raven hair, her eyes bright with yearning and her lips soft, parted, waiting for him. And he admitted his greatest fear, his greatest weakness, the greatest threat she posed: that she could destroy him and he wouldn’t care.
Having her would almost be worth it.
Chapter Seven
*
FLANNAGAN FOUND HER hunched over a scanner in the archives room, reviewing old articles. She’d arrived at the Post building at seven-thirty in the morning, hoping to avoid people—in particular, her editor. She had work to do, instincts to trust, a man to investigate. The last thing she wanted to was waste time smiling while Flannagan called her “Sandy.”
She hadn’t slept well last night. She’d had too much to think about: Laurel’s advice to do a number on Rafael, her body’s steamy memory of the number he’d done on her…and her certainty that something was amiss at Aztec Sun. Whether the problem was Melanie or Rafael or both she couldn’t say. She just knew there was an undercurrent there, a scent of tension mixed in with the smog, a whisper of trouble roiling the air.
At six o’clock she’d hauled herself out of bed, fixed a cup of coffee and listened to the random statements she’d managed to capture on her recorder when Rafael wasn’t around to turn off the machine: Melanie’s babbling about being labeled a snow-brain, and the friendly conversation Sandra had had with Vinnie and Hector at Cesar’s. She replayed the recording, played it a third time, and then pulled out her note pad and read her jottings. One phrase leaped out at her, something Diego Salazar had said: Rafael Perez—the soul of the company.
What she needed to discover was the soul of Rafael Perez.
The Post’s archives had nothing more to tell her about him than what she already knew. Compulsively she reread each and every article about all t
he other Perezes—the teacher, the little boy rescued from the burning building… Ricardo Perez, sentenced to five years at Chino for dealing cocaine.
Ricardo Perez. The same initials as Rafael Perez. And what about Rafael’s sister, the nun? Rosa Perez. Same initials. Just a coincidence?
She heard Flannagan’s unwelcome voice coming from behind her: “Sandita, sweetheart. When the hell am I going to get something from you?”
Sighing, she straightened in her chair and rubbed the cramped muscles at the base of her skull. “Good morning, Frank.”
“Here’s the thing,” he announced, hoisting himself onto the counter beside the scanner and presenting her with a smile of strained reasonability. “I ask you to write a simple little profile of a great Chicano citizen. Days pass, and what do I get from you? Nada.”
“I’m working on it.”
“What’s to work on? Are you planning a three-part series or something?”
“There’s a story at Aztec Sun,” she said, doing her best to filter the impatience from her tone. She had to play this correctly, or Frank would yank her off the assignment and give her something even worse. She’d wind up doing cute pieces about neighborhood street fairs and new taco recipes, or else she’d get stuck writing the daily miseries. “I know there’s more to this than just a studio run by a successful Chicano businessman,” she explained. “I’m close to finding out what it is. If you could cut me a little slack—”
“Give me a hint, Sandy. What more is there?”
“The star of their current movie uses cocaine.”
Flannagan rolled his eyes and slapped his forehead in exaggerated astonishment. “Oh, my God! An actress on drugs! Stop the presses!”
Patience, she cautioned herself. “Okay,” she said, measuring each word, speaking calmly and precisely. “I know drug use on a movie set is not exactly above-the-fold material. But when it happens, you’d think a studio would try to keep a low profile. It’s not the sort of situation where you invite the press to come in and witness your star making an ass of herself on the set. Right?”
Flannagan frowned, as if following her logic posed an enormous challenge for him. “Yeah, so?”
“So why did Rafael Perez’s right-hand man plant that article in Variety? Why does he want the press poking around? Why has he given me the run of the studio? Why am I allowed to interview Melanie Greer without anyone else present? I went into her trailer and listened to her ramble incoherently, and when she went into the bathroom I found a coke spoon among her things.”
Flannagan looked marginally less dubious. “So?”
“So, if the studio has a problem actress on its hands, not a big deal. These things happen. But Diego Salazar—that’s Perez’s mouthpiece—is dying for publicity. He fed that blurb to Variety to drum up interest in this new movie Aztec Sun is producing, and when I took the bait he was thrilled to have me there, seeing everything—including Melanie Greer’s coke spoon. And meanwhile, everyone in the whole damned company can’t say enough about how down on drugs Perez is. And Perez is as allergic to publicity as his mouthpiece is addicted to it. And then there’s a guy named Ricardo Perez serving five years in Chino for dealing cocaine.”
Flannagan took a minute to digest this. “There’s probably a million guys in East L.A. named Ricardo Perez. And half of them probably deal cocaine, too.”
“Rafael has a sister named Rosa, who’s a nun,” Sandra said, hating to reveal her best material but knowing Flannagan wasn’t quite convinced. He was close, though, so she kept going. “I want to track down the sister and find out if this dealer Perez has anything to do with her family. I want to find out why her brother has everyone who works for him telling me what a great guy he is, how righteous and upstanding and anti-drug. If that’s the reputation he wants to maintain, why on earth would he let me sit in and watch a shoot being ruined by a stoned actress?”
Flannagan mulled over everything she’d told him. He was outfitted in one of his typically clashing ensembles—a faded blue madras shirt and textured polyester trousers in a mustard-yellow shade. Sometimes she wondered whether he dressed tastelessly simply because it made a statement about his power, declaring to the world that he was so important he didn’t have to dress to please anybody but himself.
“How much more time do you need?” he finally asked.
She couldn’t begin to guess. “Give me twenty-four hours,” she said, her voice rising at the end so it sounded less like a demand than a question.
“Twenty-four hours.” He mulled that over, too, as if she’d asked for a thousand-dollar-a-week raise. “This isn’t supposed to be a major breaking story,” he muttered.
“Supposed-to-be is irrelevant, Frank,” she argued. “The story is what it is. Let me write it. You know I’ll come up with something good.”
He didn’t know that. Neither, for that matter, did she. She might spend the next twenty-four hours tracking down her scant leads—a nun named Rosa, a convict at the medium-security prison in Chino—and come up empty.
But she gave Flannagan her most beseeching smile, and he fell for it. “Twenty-four hours, Sandy, and then I’m pulling you off it.”
She kept her smile in place as he slid off the counter and lumbered away. Once he was gone, she closed her eyes and muttered a few pungent curses. Twenty-four hours wasn’t much, and what she had wasn’t much. But reporters didn’t earn their bylines by complaining about what they didn’t have. They went out and got what they needed.
Resolved, Sandra clicked off the scanner, gathered her notes, and went out to get what she needed.
*
RAFAEL HUNG UP THE TELEPHONE and allowed himself a brief, rare smile of satisfaction. Martin Robles’s agent had just called to let Rafael know that while Martin had greatly enjoyed his dinner at Spago last night, his loyalty remained with Aztec Sun and he was fully prepared to rework his new script to meet Rafael’s specifications.
That wasn’t the only good news of the day. The folder Sloan Palmer had given Rafael over breakfast that morning contained the financial data on El Padre, Aztec Sun’s most recent movie. It had gone straight to video in the United States but had been released into theaters south of the border, and it was doing excellent business in Mexico and South America. The movie had been a piece of excrementos; three different directors had tinkered with it before Rafael had finally sent the damned thing into distribution. But Sloan had once again proven he knew how to milk every last peso from the Spanish-language market.
So did Rafael. Sometimes he wondered whether this was his father’s legacy to him, the wetback blood in Rafael’s American veins clueing him in to what the folks back in Mexico would want to watch on the screen. When he rented a movie for himself, it was as often as not an old oater, John Wayne or Gary Cooper, or occasionally one of the Clint Eastwood spaghetti westerns. Rafael didn’t like watching the oceans-of-blood movies that came out of his studio. He’d seen enough real blood in his life to find fake blood far from entertaining.
But his landsmen liked the gory films Aztec Sun produced. And enough gringos liked it to keep his business profitable. El Padre had cost him under six million to make and it had already brought in close to twice that much in the foreign markets.
He lifted his phone and dialed Diego’s extension. Diego would be thrilled by the numbers on El Padre, and he’d be pleased that Robles wasn’t planning to defect to another studio. One of the benefits of having an old friend like Diego working down the hall was that Rafael always had someone to share his good news with.
The phone rang three times and then Diego’s secretary answered. “Mr. Salazar’s office.”
“Suzy, it’s Rafael. Where’s Diego?”
“He’s with Melanie Greer.”
Rafael smiled. This too qualified as good news: Diego was doing his job, keeping tabs on Melanie. “Where are they? Over on the set?”
“I don’t think so. Diego said he was going to her trailer.”
Rafael’s spirit deflated slightly.
It was nearly ten a.m. Melanie was scheduled to shoot interior scenes all day. If she was in her trailer with Diego, it was probably because she was on another jag, being difficult, needing Diego to unkink her.
So, the day wasn’t going to be perfect, after all. “I’ll try him there,” he said.
“No,” Suzy said quickly, then let out a nervous laugh. “Diego said he didn’t want anyone to disturb them.”
Rafael groaned. “Jesus. Is he sleeping with her?”
Suzy had worked for Diego long enough to know his ways. “I don’t know. He’s certainly been trying.”
“That imbecil doesn’t know when to keep his pants closed. She’s supposed to be shooting interiors this morning.”
“She gets tense,” Suzy observed. “Maybe he figures he can get her to relax.”
“Yeah.” Thoughts raced through Rafael’s head, none of them suitable for Suzy’s ears. “Tell him to call me when he catches his breath,” he said, then hung up.
He rested his head in his hands and spewed out all the expletives he’d spared Suzy. That Diego was a scoundrel was no surprise—and in fact, Diego’s peccadilloes weren’t the source of Rafael’s irritation. He knew that no matter how many women Diego bedded, his top priority was always Aztec Sun. He wouldn’t do anything with Melanie unless he believed it would improve conditions on the set. If she needed to get laid in order to settle down and do her job, Diego would oblige. If she didn’t need it, he would put his urges out of his mind. His primary concern would be to get the movie made.
What rankled was something much more selfish, something basic, something that bore not at all on the making of White Angel or the functioning of Aztec Sun. It was the understanding that Diego was scoring and Rafael wasn’t.
Not that he was desperate, not that he couldn’t have some adorable young chica eagerly servicing him at the snap of his fingers. But he didn’t want a young chica, and he didn’t want to be serviced.
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