“Karma? Kismet? The fact that almost eight million people live in Los Angeles?”
A tiny but decisive shake of the head. “I know Doris’s friends.”
“Well, I lied to you. I’m actually a friend of Doris’s mother, Marge. Marge is worried about Doris, and she’s asked me to talk to people, see if I can get some kind of fix on what’s happening with her.”
A beat, while she seemed to try to figure out what to say, as though there were a lot of possibilities. Then she licked her lips. “Worried why?”
“Either you know or you don’t. If you don’t, I can leave now.”
She started the shake again but broke it off with her head angled away from me. Regarding me from the corner of her eye, she said, “You’re not a cop.”
“If you’re Doris’s friend, you know Marge wouldn’t send a cop after Doris.”
She looked at me long enough to take my pulse, her head still turned partly away as though she might decide to call over her shoulder for help. “I’ll phone Marge.”
“By all means.”
Her mouth twisted to the right, and she chewed on the inside of her lip. Then she said, “Forget it. Ask your questions. But no coming in.”
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll sit here.” And I sank cross-legged onto her welcome mat.
She said, “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” and popped the lock.
A big grandfather clock beat time in the living room, one of the tall ones in dark wood with the brass pendulum, ticking loudly enough for us to hear it in the kitchen, or the kitchenette, or whatever you’d call it. The kitchen was almost as small as Marge’s and much messier. Other than Amber’s voice, the clock made the only sound in the house.
“Maybe two weeks ago, maybe a little more,” Amber said. Across the kitchen behind her, the window over the sink offered a view of a dead-brown backyard. “Doris was—well, she wasn’t happy. It was getting kind of old with Lem, although you’d think someone named Lem would remain ever fresh, wouldn’t you? First time she told me about him, I said, ‘What is he, Dodo? A leftover from Deadwood?’ So after that I didn’t hear from her for a while, you know how women are sometimes. If the old girlfriend doesn’t like the new boyfriend, guess which one gets the ax?” She picked up a cup of herbal tea and blew on it, surrounding me in a cloud of cinnamon and mint. The phrase fields of asphodel ran through my mind, barefoot and trailing pastel gauze, even though I had no idea what asphodel was.
I said, “And?”
She chewed the inside of the lip again. “Yeah, right, old story. So we didn’t see each other for a while. She felt sorry for him. He was such a sad little man. She said he reminded her of her father. You know about her father?”
“Yeah. Marge and I have had long talks.”
“I’ll bet they were long,” Amber said. She leaned back in her chair, which was too banged up to be retro. It was just old—bent chrome, patched with rust in spots, with heavily taped plastic cushions that had hosted fannies since the fifties. I was in a matching number, facing her across a veneer breakfast table that looked like it was used for everything girly; it was littered with dirty, lip-printed cups, napkins that had been used to blot lipstick of many colors, a makeup mirror with a snowdrift of face powder, a day-book open to an empty week, a pencil diagonally optimistic across the page. At the edge of the table against the wall was a chipped ceramic mug filled with pens, and a hinged picture frame, open wide and facedown. Amber followed my glance to the frame, looked up to me, and said, “That Marge could talk the paint off the walls. That was one of the reasons Doris wanted to get out.”
“Marge is lonely,” I said. “Her husband’s dead, and everybody she meets stays one night and leaves.”
“Well, that’s pitiful and all, but Doris got decades of it. Talk and vodka, vodka and talk. So when Lem appeared and needed so much work, Doris was gone like a shot.”
“But then she called you—what?—a couple of weeks ago?”
Her eyes slipped from my face. “Something like that.” She sipped the tea. Her hair was streaked unevenly, and the roots were dark and looked oily. The light through the kitchen window made sharp furrows out of the creases on either side of her mouth, the fan of crinkles at the corner of her eyes. The powder on her face was splotchy. Her T-shirt needed washing and her nails were not so much bitten as gnawed. We’d walked a path through a dusty living room to get here, and the house felt like most of its rooms had been unused for a long time.
It came to me with some force that she’d been abandoned. And although my departure from the house I’d shared with Kathy had been a mutual decision, it was impossible for me to look at Amber and not see Kathy.
I vaporized the image and said, “And she said she wanted to leave him.”
She blew a wisp of hair from her face, and it promptly fell back. “Didn’t take it that far. Said he was weirder than she thought. Said the house was getting way small and he was like everywhere in it all the time.”
“Did she elaborate?”
“No. She’s the opposite of her mom that way. Doesn’t talk much. Just said he was—what’s the thing about still waters?”
“They run deep.” She sipped the tea again, her eyes on me, but there was no evidence of a penny dropping. “Still waters do,” I said helpfully. “They run deep.”
“Jesus, beat it to death, why don’t you? I was just thinking that old Lem was about the stillest water I ever saw. Guy was practically a photograph. So what if they run deep? I mean, what’s that supposed to mean?”
“Ummm, unexpected depths. Intelligence, some kind of hidden trait. It’s generally a compliment.”
“It wasn’t when she said it. It was like the water was deep, deep, deep, and there might have been things swimming around way down there.”
“In the dark,” I said.
She made a little shiver, bringing her shoulders up practically to her ears. “We need a campfire,” she said. “You could tell the one about The Hook.”
“Mmmm.”
She leaned toward me, her eyes tightening at the corners. “Where’d you go? What does Mmmm mean?”
“It means I don’t know whether you’re serious or not.”
“Serious about what? Old Lem?”
“About being worried about Doris.”
She looked down into the mug of tea and took hold of the string, pulled the teabag out, and then picked up a spoon. Said to the spoon, “I didn’t actually say I was worried.”
“Are you?”
She centered the bag on the spoon and then wrapped the string around the spoon and the bag a few times and pulled it to squeeze liquid out of the bag. “Naw,” she said, watching the droplets fall into the mug. “She told me she was going away for a while. When we talked. Said she was going someplace, maybe to Vegas or like that, you know, someplace where she could have some fun.”
I inhaled the mint and cinnamon. “So as far as you’re concerned, there’s nothing to worry about.”
She gave the spoon a final shake and then painstakingly unwrapped the string. Then she got up and went to the stove to pour more water into the cup. Without looking back, she said, “Nothing. She’ll be fine.”
Keeping an eye on her, I picked up the hinged picture frame. The left-hand photo was a pleasant-looking guy with a low hairline and a square jaw. The one on the right was the same guy and Amber, and between them was a boy of three or four with a shadow of his father’s square jaw. They all looked happy.
I put it down and pulled my hand away. “And that’s how you felt after the conversation a couple of weeks ago, that Doris would be fine.”
She turned to me and lifted the cup to her lips but kept her eyes on the floor, as though just noticing how badly it needed a mop. “Sure. Back then.”
“She told you all of that then, about Vegas and so forth. You haven’t talked to her since.”
“No,” she said. She grabbed a big breath and blew it out, then slid her slippered foot over the floor experimentally, back and forth.
“Only that once.”
“Well, thanks,” I said. “You’ve been a big help.” I got up and smiled goodbye and went through the dusty living room, with no sign of a child in it, and out across the dead yard and past the abandoned tricycle to my car. I sat there for a few minutes, exploring a tangle of emotions that included pity for Amber Schlumberg and a certain amount of guilt about Kathy, about my not having been able to work things out with Kathy. Something my mother had once said to me suddenly took on fresh meaning. Women fall in love with a man thinking they’re getting a ship that will take them somewhere, she’d said, but most of the time what they get is the anchor, and it drags them down.
I caught myself sighing in imitation of Amber Schlumberg and banished the regret so I could try to figure out why she had lied to me.
Doris’s second friend wasn’t home. Her third was, but she didn’t want to talk at all. The moment I said Doris’s name, she said, “Oh,” and brought the tips of her fingers to her mouth. Then she said, “Oh,” again and closed the door in my face. The owner of the fourth starred name, the euphonious Melissa Simmons, lived over the hill, which is the term people in the Valley use to refer to the Los Angeles basin proper, and that people in the Los Angeles basin proper use to refer to the Valley. Either way, over the hill means a long, boring, bumper-to-bumper drive in a rich atmosphere of carbon monoxide at rush hour, which was what it now was.
I was toodling aimlessly north on Ventura through the darkening day, headed vaguely for Tarzana, when Paulie DiGaudio called with the info to go with the license plates from Vinnie’s driveway. I pulled over to write it down. “Any of these guys got anything to shake Vinnie loose, you’ll let me know, right?”
“Why wouldn’t I? I’ve had more fun in Burglars Anonymous meetings.”
“They really do that, you know,” DiGaudio said. “In the joint. Hi, I’m Junior and I’m a burglar.”
“Thanks for the info,” I said, folding the pad.
“Call me if you learn anything. And get moving. Sooner or later, Vinnie’s gonna get arrested. Right now, the DA’s not sure they can make the case, but every day there’s a little more pressure, know what I mean?”
“I’m on it,” I said and powered off. I’d always wanted to say I’m on it, and now I had. I didn’t feel much different. I checked the nearest address and pulled into traffic. If I were to keep drifting toward Tarzana, one of the guys who’d been parked at Vinnie’s was just about half a mile out of the way, a few long blocks north of the Boulevard, off of Woodman. I checked the guy’s house number to make sure, then looked at the name. I looked at it again, but it hadn’t changed. Ace Rabinowitz. I thought about calling old Ace and then figured he’d either be there or he wouldn’t, and I was going that way anyway.
Going, I now permitted myself to acknowledge, to check in on Kathy and Rina.
Amber Schlumberg was not Kathy. Kathy wasn’t adrift and abandoned. Wherever Mr. Square Jaw had gone, he’d taken the kid with him, while Kathy still had Rina. For that matter, Kathy still had me, if she actually wanted me. Which, with Bill on the scene, didn’t look likely. So Kathy also had good old Bill. Who laughed at the funny papers at the breakfast table early in the morning, sitting across from my daughter. Who was involved, or getting involved, with Tyrone. Who was so black it was as though he’d been set intentionally in front of me, a ring of fire through which I had to pass unburned in order to continue being the person I’d always thought I was instead of the boring middle-class bigot I seemed to have become.
All of this had happened in my absence. My self-imposed absence.
My mother notwithstanding, I hadn’t been a ship for Kathy, or if I had been, I’d abandoned the helm. Or maybe that was exactly the wrong way to look at it. Maybe it had been Kathy’s ship all along, and she was steering it exactly where she wanted to go. Maybe I was just ballast, no longer needed now that Rina was aboard, just dead weight to be tossed over the side.
Or maybe, just maybe, the whole fucking world wasn’t about me.
I was so busy trying to keep my head above the dark and bottomless pool of myself that I almost missed Woodman. I angled sharply across the right lane, deeply satisfying someone who’d been wanting all day to plant both elbows on his horn. Ace lived on Burbank Boulevard, a street with so little character it might as well have been a dry gulch, in one of several hundred rectangular, two-story apartment houses set too close to the street.
I’ve always thought that one- and two-digit addresses have an aristocratic you don’t live here quality, while five-digit addresses sound like shorthand for trailer park with large dogs. Ace Rabinowitz lived squarely in five-digit territory, at 12478 Burbank Boulevard, a two-story building designed by someone to whom the French Quarter in New Orleans had once been described, badly. Apartment five was on the second floor facing the street, with double doors opening onto a balcony so shallow the edge of the door would have hit the railing before it was completely open. The day was far enough gone that lights were on here and there, and as I stood there, looking up, one snapped on behind Ace’s windows.
I felt elephant-heavy going up the stairs. Maybe it was lack of sleep, or maybe it was all the psychic weight from the chains of shattered relationships I was dragging around. Whatever it was, it made me want to fix my entire life somehow, to clear away all the fragments and false starts and buried bones and broken hearts, and start to redig the foundations, laying them true and straight and deep.
It sounded like a lot of work. As an alternative, I pressed Ace Rabinowitz’s doorbell.
And was surprised to recognize the guitar riff from “Blue Tubes,” a surf instrumental from the late 1960s that introduced me to the glory of the French horn when I first heard it in about 1985. I fell in love with the horn’s sound and, because of it, the record, although it was just another attempt to cash in on the Beach Boys.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I heard from inside. It was a high, reedy voice, a kind of vocal clarinet, and it sounded harried. “Just stand there. Shift your weight from foot to foot. Sing ‘A Hundred Bottles of Beer on the Wall.’ Imagine a couple dozen doughnuts and fill in the holes. Be there in a minute.”
Instead, I tried the knob and it turned. I opened it a couple of feet and watched a scrawny little guy with sparse gray hair hanging to his shoulders scurry around an over-furnished living room shoving evidence out of sight: mirrors with razor blades and straight white arctic lines of cocaine, decks of rolling papers, Ziploc bags bulging with marijuana, a brown golf ball that could have been opium. The little man was barefoot, dressed in faded jeans and a blue work shirt that had battered sequins sewed across the shoulders. The room reeked of pot and patchouli.
“Relax,” I said. “I’m not the cops.”
He whirled on me, one hand wrapped around a hookah holding a pint of water that had turned the color of something a big-league pitcher might spit. He was hugging the bong to his chest as though he expected me to snatch it away from him. A quick step back, away from me, brought his foot into contact with one of the room’s many, many guitars. It had been propped in front of a battered brown leather couch, and when he kicked it, the guitar described a lazy sideways arc toward the floor. For a millisecond I saw in his eyes a glimpse of what hell must be like as he tried to choose between the guitar and the hookah, the hookah and the guitar. He dropped the hookah and grabbed the guitar, and the hookah hit the hardwood floor and exploded in a malodorous splash.
“Awwwww, shit,” he said. He picked up the guitar and laid it down on the sofa, pulling the nearer foot away from the spreading, reeking brown lake. “Man’s home is his castle, dude. Where’s your fucking manners at?”
“Hey, Ace,” I said.
He parted the hair in front of his face with both hands and peered through it at me, or just past me. He seemed to be having some trouble coordinating his eyes. He opened his mouth wide and worked his lower jaw from side to side. For some reason, this activity centered him, and his eyes settled on mine. “Yeah? Yeah? We know each o
ther? Am I supposed to remember you from someplace?” He looked down at the floor. “Look at this shit, man. This is messed up.”
“Sorry. Where are your paper towels?”
“Kitchen, man. Wait, wait, I didn’t invite you—”
“No problem,” I said. “Through here, right?” I angled through the tiny dining area into the kitchen of someone who intended to live forever. Fresh vegetables were everywhere, piled highest in the vicinity of an enormous juicer that sat in the middle of a thick pool of green stickum. Eight or nine big glasses stood in a line on the counter, each coated with a residue of green, except for one that was lined in a viscous, arterial red that might have been a coating of beet juice. If it wasn’t, I didn’t want to speculate on it. I pulled the entire roll of paper towels from the holder next to the sink and carried it back into the living room.
“I mean, seriously, man,” Ace said the moment I came into sight. He was in the same place I’d left him. “Am I like supposed to know you? Is it in your head that we’re like buds or something? ’Cause I gotta tell you, there’s no bells ringing in here, where I keep the old bells.” He was tapping his temple. “And I don’t forget, man. Once it’s in here, it’s in here for good.”
“Aww, Ace,” I said. “Can’t believe you forgot. Here.” I lobbed the roll of towels underhand at him, and he turned his head and watched them sail slowly past. He seemed to enjoy the sight. I said, “How’s what’s her name?”
He blinked heavily, trying to assemble the question in his mind as the brown liquid spread at his feet. He had the air of someone with a selective hearing impairment that removed all the important words from a conversation. After a couple of false starts, he said, “Fine, man, she’s fine.”
“Beautiful as ever?”
“She’s not—I mean, she’s never been all that beautiful.”
“Sure,” I said. “But as beautiful as she was, she’s about that beautiful?”
Little Elvises Page 16