The Prince of Venice Beach

by Nelson, Blake

  “One of the people said…” Ailis swallowed hard. “If it’s felony assault… you could go to the state penitentiary.”

  “Great.”

  Ailis was doing her best to remain upbeat and positive. “I’m going to talk to Hope about it. She’s been very helpful. She knows a lawyer who helps poor people.”

  “Okay.”

  “There’s another thing,” she said. “They found Strawberry.”

  I braced myself for the worst.

  “She’s been living in the storage room at the animal shelter. They’re letting her volunteer there. And she was sneaking in the back after hours.”

  I almost laughed with relief.

  “The people there think she’s weird,” continued Ailis. “But I guess the animals like her.”

  “You gotta tell Jax. Do you know where he is? He wasn’t in the holding cell—”

  But just then a door opened behind Ailis. A cop in full uniform appeared. Then another. Behind them a tall, serious black man in a suit coat hurried forward. He was wearing glasses. It was the glasses I recognized first. And then the face underneath them.

  It was Darius Howard.

  “Hey, kid,” he said.

  “Detective Howard!” I said.

  Ailis, too, was surprised to hear his name.

  A plainclothes cop who was also with Detective Howard went immediately to the side door that separated my area from Ailis’s. He unlocked it. He gestured to the guard standing over me, who immediately undid my handcuffs.

  “I got a situation, Robert,” said Darius. “I need your help.”

  I was led through to the other room. Some more police had appeared. A woman cop handed me my clothes, my wallet, and Chad Mitchell’s gold watch.

  The half-dozen adults and Ailis stood watching while the woman cop helped me change out of the jumpsuit.

  “Is he free?” said Ailis.

  “For now,” said Darius, who was watching his phone. The other men with him were also watching their phones. Or talking urgently into them.

  “What is it?” I said.

  “Can’t say. It’s sensitive. But we gotta move.”

  “Wait, you’re taking him somewhere?” said Ailis.

  “Just for now. We need him. It’s police business.”

  Ailis’s mind began to work. “Well, if you want his help, you have to drop the assault charges,” she said.

  Darius Howard looked at his phone. “That’s a separate issue.”

  “No, it isn’t,” said Ailis, emphatically. “If he’s gonna help you, you have to help him.”

  Darius Howard held up a finger and turned away from Ailis. He was taking a call. “Yes, sir,” he said into his phone. “I know, sir. Tell the governor we’ll be there in thirty minutes.”

  He ended the call and slipped the phone into his jacket pocket. “Come on, Robert,” he said.

  But Ailis jumped in front of me. “No! He’s not going anywhere until you agree to drop the charges. He didn’t start that fight. He was trying to help his friend.”

  Darius considered Ailis for the first time. “Who are you?”

  “I’m Ailis. I’m Cali’s partner.”

  “We don’t have time for this,” someone said to Darius. “We need to go.”

  “All right,” said Darius, waving me forward. “All charges are dropped.”

  And with that, Darius, myself, and two of the plainclothes cops left the room and began running down the hall.

  We ran up four flights of metal stairs and onto the roof of the detention center, where a police helicopter had just set down. Needless to say, I’d never been around a real helicopter before. It was very loud and powerful. You could barely run toward it. But we did, Darius and then me and then two other men in suits.

  We’d barely strapped in when we lifted off the building and banked wildly to the right. My stomach felt like it might fall out through my feet. We accelerated upward and in a few seconds I could see all of Santa Monica and Venice and the dark ocean spread out before us. The chopper leaned far forward and began to speed up the coast toward Malibu.

  We flew up the coast for about twenty minutes, and then descended at gut-dropping speed, landing in a gravel parking lot near the beach. There we unbuckled ourselves and ran through the noise and the dust to an unmarked police car that immediately took off down the highway at about ninety miles an hour. The trip had been so noisy and chaotic, I hadn’t even had a chance to speak with Darius. Now I leaned forward and tried to ask him what was happening. But he was on his phone again.

  A moment later, the car turned into a gated entrance. Two men in suits and headsets stood on either side of it.

  My heart began to pound. What was happening? And why did they need me?

  We sped down a private driveway and approached one of the largest mansions I had ever seen. There was a squad car and several other unmarked police cars in the circular driveway in front. There was also an ambulance and a black Suburban with tinted windows and government plates. Two men stood beside it, like bodyguards.

  What on earth was this?

  Our car skidded to a stop. Darius and I jumped out of the car and were guided in through the front door.

  The inside of the house was mostly dark. People had small, pen-shaped flashlights to guide us along a hallway and then down a wide stairwell. In front of the stairs was a huge plate-glass window that looked over the backyard and out to the ocean. I heard someone behind me whisper into a headset, “Darius is here. With the kid…”

  We continued down the stairs and then came to a back door, which was guarded by two more men. One of them walked with us into the backyard, stealthily guiding us across a wide patio, around a swimming pool and into a large pool house.

  All of this was in the dark. No one else was in the backyard. It was so quiet and still out there, I could hear the lapping of the pool water as it bumped against the tiles.

  Darius and I entered the pool house. Inside were four men in suits as well as several men with weapons and full SWAT gear. One of them was holding a tranquilizer dart as I stepped around him. No overhead lights were on, but you could see from the glow of people’s phones and the tiny flashlights. Along the back wall was a large window, where most of the people were gathered. From the window, I finally saw what the focus of all this attention was: a small one-room building—an art studio, someone said—sat just downhill from us. It was at the edge of the lawn, very near the cliff that I assumed dropped down to the ocean. It had no lights on inside. The drapes were closed. It looked empty.

  Darius Howard, beside me, stared at it through the window and took a long breath.

  “Any movement?” he asked the other men.

  “No, sir.”

  “Any phone contact?”

  “Not a word.”

  Across the room, I spotted another familiar figure in the dim light. I couldn’t see him clearly but I recognized his shape, and then his voice, when he began arguing frantically with one of the plainclothes cops.

  “Mr. Abernathy,” said the cop. “Please. Keep your voice down!”

  TWENTY SEVEN

  Darius explained the situation: Reese was in the studio. She had a gun. She had fired a single round at the house, earlier in the evening, when the first police officers had arrived.

  “She’s off her medication,” Darius Howard said in his low, steady voice. “And it’s not a pretty picture.”

  “A psychotic breakdown,” said someone else. “She could do anything in her present state.”

  Mr. Abernathy remained agitated on his side of the room. There was a hushed argument going on. Again, someone told him to be quiet.

  “You be quiet!” he hissed. “That’s my daughter out there!”

  Darius Howard pulled me closer to the window, away from Mr. Abernathy.

  “We had her on the phone earlier,” he said quietly. “The line is still open but she’s not speaking to us. We need you to talk to her. We need you to get her outta there. Without the gun.”
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br />   I nodded that I understood. But really I was confused. Reese was in that little house? How had that happened? She was supposed to be back East by now. And where did she get a gun? And whose mansion was this?

  “Gimme the phone,” said Darius to one of his men. The phone was passed forward. It was patched into a small speaker so everyone could hear.

  Darius handed it to me. I reluctantly put it to my ear. Through the glass I watched the darkened studio. It showed no signs of life.

  “Hello?” I said into the phone.

  No answer.

  “Reese?” I said. “This is Cali. Are you there?”

  I looked around at the grim adult faces staring at me. A full five seconds passed.

  Then a sound… a bump… A female voice said, “Cali? Is that you? Oh my God!”

  “Reese!” I said. “Hey. What’s up?”

  “Are you here? Where are you?”

  “I’m…” I looked out the window. “I’m right across from you. I’m in the pool house.”

  “Oh my God,” said Reese. “Are you serious? I’m so glad. I want to see you! Cali! The prince of Venice Beach!”

  “I wanna see you too,” I said back.

  Her voice changed then. “You have to get away from those people. I’m in the studio. Get rid of those people and come out here.” She paused for a moment. “But just you. Not them. Tell them I’ll shoot if they try to follow you.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  But Darius was already shaking his head emphatically no. One of the SWAT guys was studying the studio with night-vision binoculars. The other SWAT guy, with the tranquilizer dart, was on his knees on the floor, drilling a hole through the wall.

  “Actually,” I said. “I’m not sure they’ll let me.”

  “They’ll let you. You just have to wait for the right moment.”

  Darius continued to shake his head no. I said into the phone, “They seem really serious that I can’t come there.”

  “Let me talk to them,” said Reese.

  I handed the phone to Darius.

  Darius took the phone. “Hello?” he said.

  The room became even more quiet. Everyone leaned forward to hear what Reese would say to Darius.

  “Reese?… Hello?” he said.

  There was no response.

  Then: a gun shot. It was loud and it shook the glass of the pool house. Everyone ducked or jumped away from the window. The guy to my left, who was guarding a side door, dove behind a chair. This was apparently the “right moment” Reese had been talking about.

  I slipped to my left and tried the side door. It opened. A second later, I was outside, on the lawn, untouched.

  I hurried down the grass slope toward the artist’s studio. Again, the outside world was perfectly calm and quiet. You would have not known there was anyone on the property. A warm, light breeze drifted in off the ocean. Stars were visible in the sky.

  I reached the side door of the little house and knocked.

  “Who is it?” came Reese’s suspicious voice.

  “Cali.”

  “Are you alone?”

  “Yes.”

  “If you’re not I’m going to shoot.”

  “I’m alone.”

  I heard a lock turn in the door. I waited a moment, then pushed it gently with my fingertips. It opened. Slowly, I entered.

  With the windows covered, and no lights on, it was totally dark inside. I came in anyway, completely blind, and shut the door behind me.

  “Cali?” came Reese’s voice in the darkness. “Do you have a recording device or a gun or anything else hidden on you?”

  “No,” I said, keeping my hands out where she could see them.

  “Are you trying to trick me in any way?”

  “No.”

  My eyes were adjusting to the blackness. I could make out Reese’s figure standing before me. She held a silver pistol, with both hands. It was pointed at the wood floor between us. By her stance, it looked like she’d shot a gun before.

  “You know about guns don’t you?” I said to her.

  “A little. Enough to shoot someone.”

  “I’ve been trying to learn about guns,” I said. “For my business. It seems like everyone in the world knows about guns except me.”

  “This used to be my grandfather’s. It’s Swiss, I think. I don’t remember what it’s called.”

  “Maybe you can show it to me sometime.”

  “It’s not that hard to figure out.”

  It seemed so natural, this conversation. It was like we were just chatting away, like before. That’s how easy it was to be with Reese. She was like my instant best friend again.

  “How’s your detective agency going?” she asked.

  “We don’t have any new cases,” I said in the dark.

  We both stood there, on guard, on alert, watching each other.

  And then we both realized how silly that was.

  “You might as well sit down,” she said, lowering the gun to her side.

  I could see there was an old armchair near me and moved in that direction. I sat. Reese moved the opposite direction and sat down on a small couch across the room.

  “Sorry to be so paranoid,” she said.

  “That’s okay,” I said.

  “Being surrounded by SWAT teams kinda does that to you.”

  “I’m sure it does.”

  “How many people are out there?”

  “Quite a few,” I said.

  She sighed. “It’s so nice to see you though. And hear your voice.”

  “It’s nice to see you,” I said.

  We sat in the darkness for a moment without speaking.

  “You know why I’m here don’t you?” she said.

  “No, actually, I don’t.”

  “My mother didn’t commit suicide.”

  I nodded in the dark. “So it was your dad then? Like you thought originally.”

  “No. It wasn’t my dad.”

  There was a coldness in her voice I had never heard before. She sounded older suddenly, like a different person. Not like the Reese I knew.

  “My mother,” she said. “There are things I didn’t tell you about her.”

  “Like what?” I asked.

  “Things that change the situation.” She sat quietly for a moment. “Do you really want to hear?”

  “I do.”

  Reese stared down at her knees. “My mother made things possible for him. For my dad. She gave him permission in a way. To do things. To her. And to me.”

  I nodded, though I still didn’t have a clear picture of what she was talking about.

  Reese said, “I would tell her things. Things that happened. And she would look at me and she would say: ‘Why are you talking about your father that way? Why would you accuse him of that? Your father loves you.’ Then she would refuse to talk to me, she would leave me alone, she would go away and leave me alone in the house… with him….”

  I didn’t speak. I sat there.

  Reese stared at the gun in her lap. She shook her head. “I should have killed him,” she said. “I’d be a hero if I’d killed him.” She stared thoughtfully at the drapes covering the window. “I might kill him still.”

  I tried to see her face in the dark, to see if this was a joke or not. “You should probably not kill anybody,” I said. “If you can help it.”

  “Oh my God, Cali,” she said with sudden brightness from the couch. “I love your sense of humor. I’ve really missed you.”

  I tried to smile at her. But it was still too dark to see her facial expression.

  “So what else is happening?” she said, completely changing her tone. “How’s Ailis? Are you two still partners?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What about Strawberry?”

  “She’s around,” I said. “She’s volunteering at the animal shelter.”

  “Oh, that’s great. I love your friends, Cali. You’re all so free. I love thinking about how free you all are.”

  �
��I’m sorry about your mother,” I said.

  “I know,” said Reese, being even more weirdly cheerful. “You know what the interesting part is? Psychologically? After my mother died, my whole personality changed. Like really changed. I turned into a completely different person. I sort of had to. I couldn’t handle it, I guess.”

  “What did you change into?”

  “The person you met. The person you helped create. A totally new, awesome person who was going to travel and be young and free and maybe live in a tree house and go off the grid and start everything over. I was going to be the girl version of Cali. The only problem was, the whole changing myself thing, it didn’t work. All that happened was I started to break apart. And then it started to go bad. That was when I was on the bus. Heading East. It got so bad. I don’t even want to tell you….”

  “What about your medications? Didn’t they help? You seemed okay before.”

  “That wasn’t the medication,” she said. “That was you, Cali. You did that. That was your positive influence on my poor, damaged soul. That was your innocence. That was your belief in the goodness of the world.”

  “But if you were happy once, can’t you be happy again.”

  “Do you think that’s possible?”

  “Of course,” I said. “You can get help. People want to help you. That whole pool house is full of people who want to help you.”

  “Oh, Cali, you are the sweetest boy. You are sooo sweet. You always think everything is going to work out. And so for you, it always does.”

  Somewhere outside there was movement. I could sense it deep in my being. Someone was running or maybe a vehicle was crawling slowly over the lawn. I half expected the door to be broken down, or a tear-gas canister to come flying through the window. But neither happened.

  Reese rested her head on the back of the sofa and stared dully at the wood ceiling. There were paintings I now saw, against the wall. The whole room was full of brushes and canvases and art stuff.

  “You’re probably getting bored,” she said finally. “I’m sorry. I’m gonna fall asleep if I’m not careful.”

  “What are you gonna do?” I asked her.

  “I think I want to talk to my father. In public. Where everyone can hear.”

  “You think that’s a good idea?”

  “I don’t know. But that’s what I want to do. I want to talk to him once, in the open, with the whole world as my witness.”