“And where did you find Ridley?” Eden chided Haddock. “Ridley, darling, come over here.” Ridley did and they embraced and air-kissed.
Anger vied with wilting despondency as I watched the three of them greeting. Haddock glanced at me and just as quickly dismissed my presence. Not a hint of jealousy or even curiosity in his face. He was tall, slender, silver-gray, a John Forsythe knockoff.
“I dropped by Ridley's on the way over,” he said, looking around and giving a preoccupied nod to Ridley. “The AIDS auction looks promising.”
“I put him to work,” said Ridley, playing to me at the corner of one eye as I leaned in the archway. “Tomorrow night's closing in and I've been positively busting my ass to get ready.” Her slightly patrician accent was as husky as a Schubert cello.
Eden remembered me and said, “Emerson, you must meet Nick Tranor.” She turned to me as I stepped into the room. “Nick is in real estate in Beverly Hills.”
I walked to the councilman and extended my hand. Haddock received it weakly and we shook.
“Mortgage investments, isn't that right, Nick?” added Eden. “He made a tempting offer on the restaurant but I, of course, refused.”
“That's right,” I responded. “Not real estate—real estate investments. This is a sweet location.”
Haddock lifted his nose, gave me a smog-brown stare, and jutted his chin slightly. “How nice for you . . . did you say Tranor? I'm afraid it's not for sale, at any price.”
Emerson Haddock was pretentious. He was so pretentious it broke the word for me.
“I'm the Ridley the cat dragged in,” inserted Ridley. “Ridley Notions,” she said, holding out her hand palm down and giving me a dangerous smile.
I took it. “Nice to meet you, Ridley.” And it was.
“There will be a dearth of heterosexual men at the benefit, Nick,” Ridley said with that stilted economical smile still in place. “You must come.”
“Ridley, quit it!” scolded Eden. “How do you know he's—”
“No, no,” I chortled, throwing up my hands. “I'm guilty as charged.”
“The other option would have been a disastrous waste,” said Ridley. “Me, I'm as bisexual as an earthworm.”
“Ignore her, Nick,” said Eden, slapping Ridley's hand playfully. “Everybody sit—I'll get wine and see what Luc Pierre has in the kitchen.” She scooted back a chair and motioned.
I played along with it. I seated myself and had a glass of wine and swapped quips with the wry Ridley. I let myself put up with the councilman and realized I had misjudged the wealthy, powerful, Honorable Emerson Haddock. He wasn't pretentious—he was an insufferable prick. I found my exit and left without a scene. He wouldn't believe in a lifetime someone like me could walk away with his woman.
I wasn't sure of it at the moment myself.
* * * *
I was partly steamed, partly heartbroken, and all humiliated, but I attended the art benefit the next evening anyway. I didn't know why and by the time it was over I had plenty of cause to regret I had, but Ridley had taken a liking to me, and maybe just a little I wanted to light a fire under Eden Folet.
The benefit was for AIDS research and took place in a cozy little gallery on San Vicente in Santa Monica. Ridley's place. The room was an inverted T with a lobby in front where wine and hors d'oeuvres were being served.
The gallery was stark white and the displays stood out against the walls. The pieces were so-so, the wine was good, and the Hollywood theme brought in a cortege of traffic with red ribbons on their chests and bosoms. There were a lot of pieces donated by celebrities. There was a Red Skelton clown and several dozen original photos signed by the photographers of famous actors present and past, other overvalued art. I bought a black-and-white of Marilyn Monroe barefoot and laughing a haunting laugh.
Ridley was right, I was in the minority of straight males.
Well, there was, perhaps, Emerson Haddock.
Eden brushed my hand softly with hers as she showed me the Marilyn photograph but I recoiled enough to tell her thanks but no thanks. Playing it out.
I hadn't quite reached my Porsche in the dark parking lot when two beer trucks in complementing body shirts hit me and ran their wheels up my ass. I took a shot high in the solar plexus that knocked the wind out, and then a blast to the head sent a light show through my brain.
“Leave it alone, Jack,” said one shadow. “Next time it's ICU.”
* * * *
I came to with a killer headache, something sticky running down the back of my neck, and an a cappella chorus of oohs and aahs harmonizing in B-flat.
I sat up and made an attempt to get to my feet. I knew it was like riding a bicycle, once you learn it you never forget, and I had done it before so on the second try I almost got it right.
I heard a familiar but alarmed wail. “Oh, my goodness, Nick!” Eden scuffed pavement getting to me and dropped to her knees next to me on the cold asphalt. “Nick, what happened?”
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” I heard another familiar approaching voice exclaim. “Ridley, do you have your phone?” shouted Emerson Haddock, now standing over his wife's shoulder. “My God, call nine-one-one . . . the police!”
“I have them on the line now,” said Ridley stepping around Haddock and kneeling on my other side. Ridley shot a look at Eden and gently took my head from her hands and moved it into her lap. She raised her phone again.
“Jesus, no,” I said. “Leave the police out.” My eyes found Emerson Haddock standing in a soft halo of lamplight, and I knew. “I'm okay . . . I'll be all right.” I started to rise but looked up again instead.
Haddock gazed down on me with both hands stuffed in his pockets and something that in the sparse lighting of the parking lot reminded me of a smile. It wasn't a smile and it wasn't not a smile. It was the kind of look you could guess at and have a fifty-fifty chance of getting right.
* * * *
The police did come. Two Santa Monica prowlers and an LAPD lookie-loo out of West Los Angeles. Emerson gave a statement to the one reporter who showed up from KABC News.
“My dear friend Nick Tranor was assaulted by thugs tonight,” issued Emerson. “I can only say that I'm glad he wasn't seriously injured and that this didn't happen within the confines of Los Angeles. I expected Santa Monica to be safer, I really did.”
After the EMTs were finished, the reporter approached me for a statement. I glanced at Haddock and said, “What he said.”
Ridley Notions was devastated that the assault happened in her parking lot, and when I declined Emerson's insistence that he deliver me home in his limo for the third time, she asked if I would drive her out to Malibu.
“Just what the doctor ordered,” I said.
* * * *
The brisk June evening was everything the travel brochures say Southern California is 365 days a year. Ridley and I swung off the California Incline onto Pacific Coast Highway in my new Porsche Targa and I accelerated to 75 mph. The tide was in, the full summer moon dumped beams onto the inky Pacific like molten white gold, and the smell of dead kelp, washed ashore in the briny spume, wafted on the breeze as I pressed down on the throttle. Funny—the smell of death, yet as pleasant as a bouquet of roses.
Ridley rummaged through my discs and found Norah Jones.
“This okay with you, Brown Eyes?” she said, holding out the CD. Her boyish blond hair glistened white in the moonlight and ruffled perfectly, as it was designed to do, in the stream blowing over our heads.
“That's fine.”
I was still steaming from the humiliation of the day before and now the beating I was sure Emerson Haddock had hired out in the parking lot. I was trying hard to disguise it, but it no doubt showed through. I turned on a smile and glanced at her.
“Yes, that one's perfect,” I said as she slipped Come Away with Me into the deck.
“You'll be fine, Brown Eyes,” said Ridley as the music began. “The bruises will heal.”
I suspected Ridley was
speaking of something more than the bump on my head.
* * * *
Her place was a pyloned bungalow off Malibu Road, right on the beach. It was probably built during the 1940s but had undergone recent remodeling. There was a Jacuzzi under the house and a good stretch of shared beach. We entered from the leeward side and it opened to a wide living room with a sliding glass front onto the ocean. I imagined but couldn't see a deck. When Ridley flicked the lights we could see our reflection in the glass against the black abyss beyond. The room was casually but expensively furnished. There were paintings and pencil sketches tastefully distributed in every nook and cranny and what looked like red porcelain Asian vases on each side of the low rattan furniture in the center of the room.
I liked it and I liked Ridley.
“You can find what you drink behind that cupboard in the corner,” she called, hustling into another room. “I'll be out in a flash.”
I went to a caned teak cabinet behind the crescent-shaped bar and pulled back the doors. I found a bottle of Chivas and poured a drink. There was ice in a mini fridge under the bar.
“You drinking?”
“One of whatever you're having.”
Ridley reemerged through the soft arch wearing a cropped white tank top and frayed low-slung Levis. She was barefoot. She reached for the dimmer and lowered the lights to a comfortable level and joined me at the bar where she picked up a remote and turned on music.
Steely Dan, Aja.
Her sparing smile was in place and she turned to the floral-patterned sofa and lowered onto it, patting the cushion next to her. I sat down.
“I'm not sure I should do this,” said Ridley, reaching to a small ebony box on the cocktail table in front of us. “You being a cop and all.” She retrieved a long, thin cigarette.
“I'm not a cop anymore.” I watched her swirl the end of the joint in her scotch like someone would a fine cigar in brandy. “Not in a long time now.”
* * * *
I had been a patrol officer in the West Valley three years earlier, when I put a .40-caliber Smith & Wesson slug in one of the mayor's favorite patrons, a strip-bar owner named Felix Salazar. I was off duty at the time but in uniform, and the greaseball pulled a gun on me. Long story short, I was not where I was supposed to be. The rumor floated I was banging Salazar's woman, and that was that. The media labeled it “The Jilted Lover Shooting.” Salazar died.
It rocked the LAPD and the mayor's office. But the shooting was ruled clean and the mayor didn't want to answer the obvious questions about his relationship with a known drug dealer and God knows what else, so he called in favors and managed to bury most of it. I was the second casualty.
The rumor was true.
And, as with all rumors, this one had a shelf life and Ridley had heard it. I didn't give her my side; I really didn't have a side that would sell.
The flame danced on the dry end for a long second, putting out a sweet pungent aroma as Ridley toked it between her full red lips. She handed it to me.
“I knew you were a hot rod,” Ridley said, exhaling.
I smiled and took an educated hit.
“Not so much anymore,” I said. “But I can still be a bad boy once in a while.”
Steely Dan was playing “Home at Last.” I didn't quite feel at home but did feel better, comfortable with this stunningly attractive woman. Maybe it was because of the rejection I was feeling over Eden, or anger because I was sure Emerson Haddock had set his dogs on me, but I wanted Ridley Notions.
“Something's going on in that pretty head of hers,” said Ridley, as though she'd read my thoughts. “I can't say she's in love with you, but something.” Ridley picked up her drink and held it to her chin a moment. “Emerson has her nailed down tight, though.”
I didn't respond, just took another hit when she passed it.
“You know something, Brown Eyes?” Ridley finally said. “The minute I asked you to bring me home tonight you knew what this would be.” Her green eyes were as luminescent as a pair of Tiffany plates.
“And what is that?” I said, looking into my glass with a small self-conscious grin.
“You want me to help you with Eden, but that's not why you're here. You are here to have your blues bonked away.” I spontaneously shook my head, although it was true. “Oh yes. I don't care what reason you use to justify it.” There was daring coquettishness in her sabulous voice. “Maybe you're pissed, maybe you're just bummed—but you want it. Right now you need to forget about Eden and you know I can make that happen. Our little secret.”
I raised my eyes. I waved the joint away when she extended it. Ridley's eyes smiled the practiced naughty smile of a woman who'd learned it all and learned it early.
I plucked the joint from her fingers and tossed it into the brass tray on the table.
“Our little secret,” I said.
* * * *
I took her right there on the floor sofa and again in the bedroom and again on the beach in the first whimpering gray light of dawn. Ridley Notions and I spent three and a half hours in straight-up, no-bullshit, pissed-off sex.
Afterwards, she pointed out Haddock's summer condo, three doors south of hers. The lights were off, as they would be, but she assured me Eden wasn't there anyway. “I'm going to help you with her, Brown Eyes,” Ridley said on the billowy sand in front of her house. “Emerson's an asshole and Eden made a mistake.” She turned to me with that playful, worldly grin. “Who knows, maybe I can talk you both into sharing.”
Before I left, Ridley made me promise to come again the following Saturday to an afternoon beach party, her “beach-ball soiree,” she called it. Eden would be there and Ridley thought some good business connections, as well. Maybe I knew then how it would end up; maybe I had willed it in my heart from the moment I kissed Eden Folet.
* * * *
The Porsche raced through the turns into the low foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains like a cat let out of her cage, as I drove western Sunset Boulevard back to Beverly Hills. My mind raced just as rapidly. The early morning air had the flavor of pine and sage and faintly of the sea below, as the cerulean waters of the Pacific diminished to a thin blue line and finally disappeared behind the mountain in my rearview mirror.
I had known dangerous love before. I had murdered Felix Salazar for his wife. Yes, Salazar had a gun, but he wasn't pointing it at me, and, as Internal Affairs correctly suspected but could not prove, I hadn't given him the option of putting it down.
Now I was in love with another powerful man's wife and I knew it couldn't end well. But I also knew I had to have Eden Folet, even if it destroyed me.
* * * *
Saturday came fast. I hadn't been back to the restaurant. I'm not Brad Pitt, but I have never made a fool out of myself over a woman and I wasn't going to make Eden the first. If Eden wanted me it would have to be on my terms.
I arrived a little after three o'clock on a bright blue Malibu afternoon to the carefree clamor of frolicking young people in skimpy bathing suits hurling Frisbees across the sand and chugging beers like soft drinks. Women younger and older than Eden and Ridley but every bit as toned stretched and leaped for high serves across the beach-volleyball net, and young men sprawled on blankets, ogling and making crude remarks to them.
“Brown Eyes!” shouted Ridley from across the blinding sand. She spiked the ball over the net and came running toward me in a red floral side-tie bikini that she would have filled out well had there been material to fill. “You did come,” she said, gulping for breath. “I was afraid I'd run you off.” Her skin was light coffee brown and shiny from oil.
“Nuh-uh.” I stooped slightly for a peck on the cheek. “I'm a closet masochist but I'm coming out.”
Ridley grabbed my hand and pulled me toward the bungalow. “I must get you something to drink,” she said, scowling at my T-shirt, Levis, and Adidas. “You're overdressed.”
“That's all right.” I fell in beside her as she set out. “Three of your volleyball teammates
undressed me when I walked in.”
Ridley spun and kicked sand on me.
Tall, sinuous Ridley led me across the beach from the net, roping us around the bungalow and passing the Jacuzzi beneath the house's stilted undercarriage, where two young women and a man of fifty or so splashed in the spewing jets, howling and shrieking. Ridley latched onto my hand behind her again and hopped onto the stairs to the white cedar deck. At the top we entered through the sliding glass front. More strangers sprinkled the living room, the men in trunks and shorts, the women dressed much as the others on the beach, in bright skimpy bikinis, some with sari waist wraps. Ridley introduced me to Mac and Devon and Lloyd and Tremaine and Justin and Jerome—a lovely couple—then trotted me to the bar.
We crashed on the low sofa sipping our drinks and talking, playing catch-up, she asking about my head, I inquiring after Eden.
It was then I knew something was up. Ridley suddenly took my hand and tugged me across her artsy Eurasian living room, through a white swinging door into the kitchen. It was state-of-the-art and had large restaurant-style stainless-steel appliances like on the Food Network, and a wide butcher-block island in the center with an array of kitchenware surrounding it on an overhead rack. The counter nearest the door had bar liquors lined three deep and the rest supported the catered fare for the party.
A good-looking, well-built man had his elbows hitched on the counter's edge and one leg crossed over the other, obviously posed for our entrance. He was gay and he was butch, no question about either.
He had on a hot-pink straw cowboy hat parked back over a shock of jet-black hair, a canary-yellow T-shirt cropped across his washboard midriff, denim short-shorts he'd hacked off too high for public display, and a pair of blood-red cowboy boots. His biceps, pecs, and delts walked around under the tee.
Ridley said, “Nick, this is Terry Hensley,” and reached out to take the man's hand. “Terry is Eden's best friend and confidant.” Terry stepped out and Ridley glanced at me.
I extended my hand. Terry turned his palm down much the way Ridley had the day I met her, taking only my fingertips, as delicately as touching a sprig of Spanish moss.
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