There he was: Jake. I looked at the time on the message: 4:20 a.m. About twelve minutes ago. Whatever he and Laney Profitt had been doing, it hadn’t made him sleepy. The message read, Have info. $1500 cash.
Like an idiot, I emailed him back, How could it possibly be $1500?
My phone sang. It said Jake, and I thought there should be a nightmare font a phone’s user can assign to people he doesn’t want to talk to.
“Because you’re my friend,” he said when I picked it up.
I said, “Do you know what time it is?”
“I’ve got it,” he said, “the name you wanted. I thought this was important to you.”
“At this hour? And fifteen hundred dollars’ worth of important?”
“Sliding scales,” he said. “Every value has its place on a sliding scale. And night is the same as day, except it’s darker and I look better.”
Ronnie sat up and surveyed the room. “Damn,” she said. “I hoped this place was a nightmare.”
Jake said, “You got a girl there?”
“How much would it be if you weren’t my friend?”
“A price far above rubies.” He inhaled sharply, with the kind of decisive vigor that usually means it’s not for the purpose of respiration.
“The Book of Proverbs?” I said.
“Practically the only book in the Bible no one’s tried to make a movie out of. You know why?”
“Too episodic.”
“Smartass,” he said. “So come over. You’re awake. As awake as you get, anyway.”
“Who is it?” Ronnie said.
“It’s Mister Movie.”
“What?” Jake said.
“Tell him to go to bed,” Ronnie said.
“Mortals go to bed,” Jake said. “So look, I want fifteen hundred now. It’s not that I’m broke, it’s that I no longer keep cash around. Now, as in within thirty minutes. Otherwise, you can go whistle for your name because I’ll be asleep most of tomorrow. And it will cost more tomorrow, too.”
I said, “Okay.”
Jake said, “Make it two thousand.”
I hung up. Ronnie was looking at me questioningly, and I raised a finger. The phone rang.
I said into it, “You were saying?”
“You can’t get a yes if you don’t ask the question,” Jake said. “Fifteen. But thirty minutes. I’m not kidding.”
“Fine.” I disconnected. To Ronnie, I said, “I’m contributing to the delinquency of a senior citizen. Good thing I’ve got the stash from the Bride of Plastic Man.”
Outside, it was definitely nighttown. The world felt abandoned and thick with sleep, and the gleam of my headlights shifted the colors in front of me toward the yellowish area of the spectrum, the colors I associate with bruising and decay. The clouds had cleared but the moon was mostly a memory, an icy curl as thin as an eyelash, far, far to the West as it lowered itself toward the Pacific. The stars are never much in Los Angeles, but with the moon on its way out they stippled the sky in an orderly, domesticated fashion as though they weren’t all lethal, perpetual atomic meltdowns burning their way toward us across billions of miles. They disappeared deferentially near the horizon, where the city lights absorbed their glow.
Traffic was as light as one would expect, so it was just a couple of long straight hops and an uphill climb from the cheap kitsch of Minnie’s Mouse House to the expensive kitsch of Jake’s transplanted chateau. The valley’s lights in the rearview mirror signaled me to turn around and go back as I took the curves up Coldwater Canyon.
In my headlights, Jake’s fancy foreign foliage looked even rattier than it had that afternoon. When I got up to the top, I found Profitt’s old Beamer angled carelessly across the circle with the driver’s door still open. The inside light was out, so I figured Laney might have some trouble starting it in the morning. The thought was accompanied by a twinge of sympathy at the idea of anybody wanting to leave Jake’s place and not being able to.
I went to the door and lifted the five-pound iron knocker, but it was pulled out of my hand as the door was yanked open.
Laney Profitt looked like she had spent the evening in a clothes dryer. Her hair was in her eyes, she was missing one shoe, and her clothes were disheveled in a way that suggested they had been repeatedly ripped off and rebuttoned wrong. The thick mascara on her left eye had been smudged into a diagonal line that took off at a jaunty angle in the direction of her hairline. She looked ten years older than she had nine hours ago. I could have stood behind her in a supermarket line for half an hour without recognizing the woman I’d enjoyed so much on TV.
“Shit,” she said, obviously expecting someone else. “He’s waiting.” She turned her back and went down the hallway, walking like someone who hurt.
“Waiting is good for him,” I said, following her down the hall. “It builds character.” Somewhere inside me there’s a tiny alter ego that goes messianic in a snap when I encounter certain kinds of self-induced tragedy. He’s rarely greeted warmly when I let him out to play, so I’ve learned to keep him under control.
“That’s my boy,” Jake bellowed from the sunken room with a ghastly attempt at heartiness. “He comes on the wings of the wind.”
“Sounds messy,” Laney said, drifting to her right to take the steps down.
I stopped on the top step. The place looked like giant babies had been wrestling each other. The lights were off, so the only illumination came from the hallways that opened into the room on either side. The armchair I usually sat in was on its side and Jake’s buttery throne was askew, two or three yards from its usual place. Pieces of wood, some of them substantial, littered the floor in the approximate area of the fireplace as though they’d had a contest to see who could miss it by the widest margin. Wads of what looked like toilet paper were crumpled here and there. On an almost never-used couch against the wall on the side of the room opposite the fireplace were two small, white-streaked mirrors and a glass pipe, caked inside with residue that had achieved the shade of brown I used to see in the filter of a cigarette that I’d smoked to the point where I burned my fingers. The place smelled too sweet, like overripe melon, and the heat was pumping. The fire, though, was just a few sullen coals.
Jake was sprawled on the stairs across the room. He looked like he might have fallen anywhere from a minute to an hour ago and hadn’t yet made his mind about getting up.
I asked Laney Profitt, “Is he okay?”
“Talk to him directly,” she said. “He can hear.” She went to the couch in the center of the wall to my right, moved a mirror aside, and sat, bending forward so sharply her head was almost between her knees.
I said to her, “Well, then, how about you? Are you okay?”
She didn’t straighten up. “Ask him,” she said. “It’s his stuff.”
“See?” Jake said. “One way or another, you gotta talk to me.”
My messianic alter ego shoved me aside long enough to say, “Jake. You’ve got to get hold of yourself.”
“Don’t start,” he said. “You got it?”
I said, “Do you?”
“Sure, sure.” He fished in the pocket of his safari shirt and then fished in a different pocket. “Fucking shirt,” he said. “More pockets than a pool table. Ah-ha.” He brought out a little piece of paper, obviously torn from a larger one. “Let’s trade.”
“Name?” I said. “Address? Company name? Phone number?”
“Come on, come on, come on.” He waved the paper in the air. “The old swapperoo. I’m sure you’ve got someplace you want to go.”
“Almost anyplace,” I said. I didn’t want to go into that room.
“Well, it’s not going to come to you,” Jake said. “Come on, have pity on an old man and bring it over here. Move it.”
I fished the money out of the pocket of my jeans and counted it in front of him. “Fift
een hundred-dollar bills, okay? Want me to do it again?”
He said, “Don’t be an asshole. Just get over here.” He tugged up at the piece of paper like someone testing resistance on a fishing line, and I went.
I tilted the paper to the light coming in through the hall and read, in a fine, slanting Spencerian hand,
Althea Beckwell-Stoddard
The Beckwell-Stoddard Agency
Your Gateway to Stardom
Then an address in a not-very fashionable area of North Hollywood and a phone number.
I said, “Whose handwriting is this?”
“Mine,” Profitt said without looking up. “Centuries of nuns.” She sneezed. “You know why nuns wear black and white? Because they’re the whole keyboard of misery.”
“She’s a shuck,” Jake said. “Not Laney, but that broad. That’s what my guy says. On the side, runs a school for young thespians, charges their parents a fortune, teaches kids how to walk using one foot after another instead of hopping like kangaroos, takes a markup on head shots, takes a markup on everything, does a little ‘screen test’ at a markup of about a thousand percent. Then, when the kids get to be fourteen, fifteen, she cuts them loose.”
“Well,” I said, “thanks.”
“Other side of the page,” Jake said. “Names of two of the kids, the girl and one of the boys.”
I turned it over. “My, my. A bonus.”
Laney Profitt straightened and fell back against the couch with the heavy sigh of someone whose stimulant of choice has ceased to amuse. “So you can go now.”
“Gee,” I said. “I guess I can. Hope you guys don’t overdo it.”
Profitt snorted. I guessed it was a laugh.
“See you, Jake,” I said. I turned around and went back down the hall and out the heavy front door. The world was just perceptibly brighter than it had been when I came in, daylight slipping the thin edge of the wedge beneath the darkness.
Silhouetted on the other side of Laney’s dead BMW was a car that hadn’t been there when I arrived, a low, mean-looking Maserati that might have been red. I could see the silhouette of someone behind the wheel, but he or she didn’t bother to track me as I crossed the circle, just sat staring dead ahead. I started my car, did a three-point to turn it around, and as I began to drop down the driveway the light came on in the Maserati and the door opened. I couldn’t see much of whoever got out, but I figured it was probably someone who knew a lot of movie stars.
18
Why, Miss Peabody, You’re Beautiful
One night a million years ago, or so it seemed—I was seventeen—Herbie Mott caught me idly casing a house he planned to burglarize. Although I was a rank amateur who had never broken into anything riskier than a box of cookies, Herbie didn’t chase me off, even if he did briefly threaten me with a squirt gun. Instead of giving me the boot, he deputized me to stand lookout. This was before cell phones were omnipresent, so I was told simply to park, facing out, at the mouth of the circle on which the house sat and, if someone entered it, honk twice and then get the hell out of there. He had confounded my stereotypes about crooks by paying me $500 in advance, trusting that I wouldn’t just peel off into the night the minute he was inside the house.
About forty minutes later, he came out with a satisfied expression and a bag of swag, gesturing me to follow as he climbed into his car. He led me down the hill to an all-night Du-par’s coffee shop a few blocks away. There, in a booth he claimed as though he’d owned it for years, he gave me the first of what was to be a series of seminars on The Art of the Steal. It was, so to speak, my baptism, and the seminars evolved over almost eight years into a transfer of a lifetime of both knowledge and philosophy, including a set of ethics designed to allow the sensitive burglar to go to sleep at night. Foremost among those was never take the best thing they own. It might not sound like much to you, but I’d seized the line as a lifetime maxim and it had spared me a good many guilty sleepless nights. Even crooks, at least the ones who aren’t sociopaths, have a conscience.
Actually, some of the sociopaths I know are all right, too; Eaglet, who would probably shoot a troupe of Girl Scouts in full uniform if the price were right, seemed to love Ting Ting and had been surprisingly sympathetic to Anime. I’d gotten along with a couple of other hitters, too, although it would have been nice to have been certain, each time I saw them, that they hadn’t just accepted a contract to turn me into fertilizer.
Du-par’s, which has been pouring bad coffee and serving so-so food since the 1930s, used to be all over the place, but tastes, thank heaven, change. One doesn’t want to go to one’s parents’ favorite restaurant, and the management had fiercely guarded against anything that could be called hip, so the customer base had aged and died, and the chain had dwindled to four or five outlets that weren’t visually interesting enough even to qualify as retro. What they had, mainly, was that the surviving restaurants had been in the same locations for generations and they were open twenty-four hours a day. My personal Du-par’s, the one in which Herbie initiated me into the art of burglary, was right on Ventura Boulevard, only a couple of blocks from where Coldwater emptied itself into the valley, and I headed for it so automatically that I was slightly surprised to find myself in the parking lot. Since I was there, I went in, perhaps thinking I might commune with Herbie’s spirit.
I was so tired that the restaurant floor seemed to pitch beneath my feet, and the place was bright enough to feel like a personal insult after the slowly warming gray of the early morning. What I always thought of as Herbie’s booth was full up with a party of—as the gods of cheap irony would have it—cops. Three beefy males and a relatively wispy female, the female practically driven into the wall by an epidemic of manspreading. On the other hand, she was the one who was talking, and the three beefers seemed to be listening.
I could almost hear Herbie saying dismissively, “Female cops.” Herbie wasn’t much bigger on change than DuPar’s was.
A couple of protect-and-serve antennae went up as I passed, prompting glances from the woman and the porkiest of the men, but it might have been simple curiosity. This was definitely the cigarette-butt end of the night, and cops on the late shift are always interested in the people who share the dark hours with them. I nodded as I went past, and the porkiest one nodded back. I skipped the booth behind theirs and slid into the next, and then I closed my eyes and rested my face in the palms of my hands and felt the restaurant rock on the swells of my exhaustion.
I don’t know how long I held the pose, but I suddenly became aware that someone had spoken to me and that she was clearing her throat to give it another try. I opened my eyes, and there was my waitress, a night bird if I ever saw one: a 1960s beatnik, or perhaps an homage to Nico in the Velvet Underground, with enough eyeliner to stripe a zebra, hair so straight that it might have been ironed falling to mid-back, the fashionably starved look that amphetamines once made so easy to attain, and, in a nod to the twenty-first century, what seemed to be an entire graphic novel tattooed on her forearms and neck.
She said it again. “Help you?”
“Is it that obvious?” I rubbed my eyes. “Yeah, thanks. Coffee, two cups, black, and what are the pies?”
“You expecting somebody?”
“No. I drink coffee with both hands.”
“See, here’s the thing,” she said. She leaned forward, put a hand on the appropriate hip, lowered her voice, and glanced at the cops. The two male ones facing us were already looking at her. “I don’t know, maybe you’re made of money or something, but you order two cups, I gotta charge you for two cups. You order one cup and I promise to keep it filled, it costs you half as much, and you can switch hands whenever you want. Apple and lemon meringue.”
I glanced at her name tag. It said Glinda. I said, “Witch of the north part of Oz?”
“Everybody gets it wrong,” she said. “The south. I’m the leader of the Qua
dlings, I am attended by fifty beautiful maidens—in the traditional sense of the word—and protected by a large army of female warriors. It’s heaven.” She rolled up her already-short left sleeve and I saw a line of women wearing armor and holding spears at various martial angles.
I said, “Do you need a recruit?”
“Pffff,” she said. “You wish. Go for the lemon meringue. The apple has been here since the fruit was picked.”
“Thanks. You don’t hear much about the Quadlings these days.”
“We keep a low profile,” she said, turning away. There was a period, during my long development into a responsible adult male, when I was known to glance appropriately at the female derriere from time to time, so glancing at hers was sheer force of habit. I won’t objectify her by describing it.
“Hey, Glin,” the porkiest cop said, waving her over.
I thought Glin, and pulled out my $1500 piece of paper. There, in Laney’s throwback parochial-schoolgirl script, was the information on the hyphenated Ms. Beckwell-Stoddard. Hadn’t seen the name Althea in a while, but the whole thing, hyphen and all, felt like a Gatsbyesque invention masking something much less glamorous, something along the lines of Ethel Frimp.
Your gateway to stardom. A particularly unpleasant racket, pitching people who, like most parents, thought their children were exceptional, milking them for everything she could get, and then, as Jake had said, cutting them loose, poorer and disillusioned, with the kids probably doubting, possibly for the first time, their talent and their beauty or whatever it was that they hoped made them special, different from everybody else.
What kind of person could do that to family after family, child after child?
I suddenly found myself thinking about three dark women—dark, at least, in the way the word is commonly used to describe a personality: Althea Beckwell-Stoddard, Itsy Winkle, and the Bride of Plastic Man. The landscape was littered with dark females. Perhaps the least remembered of the major Greek deities was the amazingly named Nyx, one of only two beings to be born directly from the very first form of creation, Chaos. (The other was her brother, Erebus, who was darkness itself.) At first Nyx played the ingénue: she created light, for one thing. But either she soured over time or she let all that primal power go to her head, turning out one downer after another—pain, death, doom, jealousy, retribution, strife, a whole bouquet of miseries, everything except adolescent acne and singing out of tune. (In fairness, she also came up with friendship.) By 700 BC, she had also become the mother of the goddess Hemera, who personified day, and that relationship locked her into a sort of permanent rotation, fighting Hemera to a standstill at the close of every day until she could take over as night and, in turn, losing a struggle each morning to her niece, Ushas, the dawn. Sort of musical chairs, but with light.
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