by Dan Vining
She got out, leaned against the front fender. The air smelled good. Orangey. Blossomy. The light was almost gone. It still wasn’t late enough to go do what she had to go do. She looked up toward the hills. Over time the trees along Beechwood had grown toward each other over the street, blocking the view of the hills. All that was visible of the Hollywood Sign was the enormous Y.
“Good question,” Ava said.
So Beck was two-timing her. Perfect. She’d tried to tell herself that she had seen it coming, but she hadn’t. When it came to Beck, something was clouding her vision, misdirecting her away from her usual wariness. What was it Penny had said? The slavish devotion of a top-notch guy. Was that it, just that Beck was good-looking and somebody’s slave? (And maybe even a little dumb?) This latest thing with VW Girl didn’t make sense. Beck had just found “Chrisssy” in some directory of detectives? Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, Beck walked into hers, Chrisssy’s? He found the one girl detective who happened to be obsessed with Ava Monica, the first girl detective he’d hired? And… Birmingham? An English accent? What was that about? Beck didn’t seem that devious or…capable, if the truth be told. He didn’t seem smart enough be dodgy. But he was good-looking and presented himself well. So was that it? Sometimes the explanation for something is the thing that has the least to do with logic. Ava had learned that the hard way.
Two hours later, Ava was back behind the wheel, still at the curb in front of the pink apartment building, when along came the black VW putt-putting up Beachwood with its buggy, perpetually surprised eyes. Ava watched in the side mirror. The VW nose-dived—as if Chrisssy had hit the brakes when she saw the Hudson ahead—but then she came on forward and turned into the driveway that led back to the carports behind the apartment building.
“Hey,” Chrisssy said, uncertainly, coming out front to the curb after she’d parked in back. She still wore the blue shorts and the knotted belly-button-revealing blouse. She carried the catsuit and boots she’d had on before. “I thought you were done with me,” she said.
“I’m just killing time,” Ava said.
“OK…” Chrisssy said, shaky.
Chrisssy’s one-bedroom apartment was Deco-ed out just like Ava’s digs in The Sunset Tower, white on white on white with pearlescent bowls on crème-colored end tables and black torchiere lamps in the corners of the living room to give some edge to the shadows. It was neat and clean and perfect-on-a-budget and…more than a little disturbing. It made Ava feel old, old and creepy, as in Marlene Dietrich in Sunset Blvd. If they weren’t careful, somebody was going end up floating facedown in the pool.
“I love what we’ve done to the place,” Ava said.
Chrisssy just stood there, kneading her hands. “I really am sorry,” she said. Something had changed in her. Now she sounded halfway like a grown-up.
“Forget it,” Ava said. “At one time or other we’ve all followed someone around, dressed like them, cut our hair like they cut their hair, wore five hundred high-heels like they wore at noon on a Thursday on the strip. Called her office to work up a friendship with her answering service person Penny.”
“I go to thrift shops,” Chrisssy said, very small.
“By the way,” Ava said, “Cute car, kind of like my Hudson before it grew up.”
A luxe silver martini shaker, some bottles of go-go, and a silver ice bucket sat on a glass console table that served as the bar.
“I could use a drink,” Ava said. “You know how to make a martini? Or are you one of those this-isn’t-my-real-job bartenders?”
“Gin or vodka?”
“Please…” Ava said, by way of rebuke.
Chrisssy started toward the kitchen for some ice.
“You can change out of your costume first if you want,” Ava said and plopped down on the white glazed cotton couch. “I’m in no hurry. I’m just hangin’ and doppelgängin’.”
Chrisssy disappeared into her bedroom and returned wearing the catsuit and boots.
“No,” Ava said simply, waving her away. “Try again.”
Chrisssy exited.
A picture on the cover of a tabloid newspaper on the coffee table caught Ava’s eye. It was a snapshot of the lithe Black in the swank tux singing “When Sunny Gets Blue” on the stage of The Shinola the other night. The headline asked: “VIVID?”
“Holy crap,” Ava said. “Really?”
She snatched it up, thumbed through to the text. There was another surreptitious snapshot from inside The Shinola, the lithe White poetry-reciter, The Duke. The head read: “VIVID TOO?”
“Holy crap, too,” Ava said. They were right. Didn’t anyone just want to be themselves anymore?
Chrisssy came back in a wispy dress and heels. “What?” she asked. “Holy crap, what?”
Ava tossed away the tabloid. “Nothing,” she said.
Chrisssy modeled the change of clothes. “Is this acceptable?” she said, sort of snotty.
Ava said, “Whatever makes you feel good about yourself.” She had a dress just like it in her closet. This had never happened. No one had ever bit her style. Well, except for underwear. Chrisssy didn’t seem to be wearing a brassiere; the dress was unbuttoned enough to show off the lack thereof.
Wait. Maybe Chrisssy really liked her, in that late-night cable TV your-skin-is-so-much-softer-than-mine way. Ava was a teeny bit flattered in spite of herself.
Chrisssy exited stage right with the ice bucket and came back with it full. She stepped to the bar and went to work. The silver shaker made a sweet, end-of-the-day sound when Chrisssy loaded it and gently swirled it around.
“Do you want an olive?”
“Well, I guess you don’t know everything about me, do you?” Ava said. It was almost as if Ava were flirting. Flirting with herself? Her younger self? Now that was creepy. Chrisssy came away from the bar with what looked like a principled, timeless martini. Ava took it, took a sip. An eyebrow went up, all on its own.
Chrisssy sat on the front edge of a white chair across from the couch, her hands in her lap. She looked down at her crossed legs, pinched a pinch of silk over her knee and then let it fall. Before long she had a tear in her eye. Fortunately, it was the left eye so she could turn her ahead away from Ava to keep her from seeing it.
Ava saw it. People were always crying around her.
“This is too complicated,” Chrisssy said. “I don’t understand what he’s doing…Beck or Birmingham or whatever his name is.”
“Where are you from?” Ava said.
“Oklahoma.”
“Why is it always Oklahoma?”
“What do you mean?”
“Everybody is always from Oklahoma,” Ava said. “The girls, anyway. What’s so awful about Oklahoma?”
Chrisssy turned her full face to Ava. The tear was still on her cheek but at least it hadn’t been followed by another. “I was born there. It was boring. Flat. I felt like I always knew exactly what was going to happen next. Forever.”
Ava liked her.
“Where were you from?” Chrisssy said.
“Here,” Ava said. “So I’ve never known what was going to happen next.”
“He was my first real client,” Chrisssy said, sadly.
“Jeez, now I feel bad,” Ava said. Maybe this was what it was like having a best friend, she thought. Or talking to a therapist. But which of them was the therapist?
“Will I get in trouble?” Chrisssy asked.
“What do you mean? Trouble with who? Whom.”
“I don’t know, the authorities. For taking on a client who was already your client.”
“Yeah,” Ava said, “that damn Detectives’ Code of Honor. You don’t want to run afoul of those boys.”
Chrisssy smiled but still didn’t relax.
“Do you have a boyfriend?” Ava said.
“Not here,”
Chrisssy said. “Not anywhere now, I guess.”
“Grab a sweater,” Ava said and drank up.
Chapter Seventeen
On the other hand, sometimes LA and its architects looked ahead to the past. The Garden of Allah had been a Hollywood haunt on the corner of Crescent Heights and Sunset in the twenties and thirties, the party pad of a Russian silent film star that was turned into a hotel and bungalows when she went bankrupt. Alla Nazimova ended up living in a few rooms in an apartment on the back corner of the property—beyond the pool shaped like the Black Sea—while all around her movie stars and directors and writers and hangers-on drank and diddled each other. Maybe she joined in. Maybe Alla Nazimova liked the present just fine, unlike almost everyone else in Hollywood. Maybe she’d come from someplace that was deadly dull and at least this wasn’t deadly dull. There was a private bar where the girls dressed like boys and the boys dressed like girls, a restaurant with a help-yourself kitchen, the pool, the grounds, rented rooms, bungalows. Everyone left their doors open, so as not to impede the flowing party. “A light-hearted, unrealistic place…” gossip columnist Sheilah Graham called it in 1939. Natch, Hollywood changed—just the sinners, not the sins—movie stars fell and the GoA emptied out and went to ruin. In 1959, a bank bought it up. Developers bulldozed it, threw up a branch bank and fast food joints and an acre of hot striped asphalt, prompting Joni Mitchell—who lived up Crescent Heights in Laurel Canyon—to complain about those who paved paradise and put up a parking lot. Or so some said.
But lighthearted unreality proved hard to suppress and in 2018 another group of developers tore up the parking lot and rebuilt paradise, brick for brick, tile for tile, stucco wall for stucco wall, fountain for fountain, palm for palm. It was so compulsively identical to the first Garden of Allah it seemed—even for Hollywood—a little mental, as if some time-ruined rock star or actor were behind it. They didn’t even think to call it The New Garden of Allah.
By now it was after midnight. Ava was parked on Crescent Heights, in the front row of a hundred-dollar-a-spot parking lot. They were just sitting there, Ava and Chrisssy, lit by the glow of the Hudson’s dash lights. The old, quirky music on the radio kept fading in and out. Playing now was a sad song called “A Whiter Shade of Pale” that sounded like it could have been written about LA. Or even about the Garden of Allah, old or new. The DJ had introduced it by asking, as if in no way were it a settled matter, “Life is good, isn’t it? All in all?”
“What are we listening to?” Chrisssy said.
Ava hadn’t said anything yet, was just staring at The Garden across the street, on the other side of the four lanes of stalled traffic. The new/old hotel was lit up—red and green and yellow—but somehow it didn’t look all that inviting. The up-lights made the palms out front look like they were on fire.
“The All-Night Man,” Ava said. “We could all use one of those, right?”
Chrisssy tried to see what Ava was seeing across the street. “Thank you for letting me come along,” she said. “I just want to learn.”
“Watching and waiting, that’s the work,” Ava said.
A private helo dropped out of the sky and landed on the motor court in front of the hotel. A black limo helo. A dressed-up couple got out, ducking down as they ran toward the entrance. You could hear them laughing, all rich and fun, even from across the street.
“Have you felt an earthquake yet?” Ava said, still not looking away.
“A five-point-one the first week I was here. I had just moved in.”
“Talk about not knowing what comes next.”
“I told my mom it was LA saying hello, telling me I’d come to the right place. She didn’t think it was very funny.”
“Did anything break? Besides the space-time continuum.”
“A picture of my boyfriend fell off the shelf.”
“You need to stick everything down with Silly Putty,” Ava said absently. Since they’d parked, every line Ava had said she’d said absently. “I lost a perfectly good glass menagerie in the La Habra quake. The only thing that survived was the unicorn.”
“Why are we here?” Chrisssy said. She wasn’t being philosophical.
“The Garden of Allah. The top floor of the main building, people go to heal after plastic surgery,” Ava said. “You don’t leave your room. They bring everything in. You don’t have to worry about anybody seeing you with bandages and stitches and bruises. Or if it’s not surgery, people seeing you slightly crazy. Sometimes people will check in just to fall apart for a week or so, with someone keeping an eye on them.”
“I’ve heard about the stars, the parties, the drugs.”
Ava said, “Friends of ToD.”
“Who’s Todd?”
“You really are from Oklahoma,” Ava said. “ToD stands for Tail of the Dragon. It’s a drug. Speedy, trippy. It came out of nowhere a few years ago. A friend of mine calls it the coke cocaine would take if cocaine wanted to get high. It’s brown, looks like a ball of wax. You suck on it like a cough drop. So I’ve been told. It’s stupid expensive. It comes from the tip-end of the tail of this lizard that’s only found in Venezuela. Or maybe it’s Honduras, somewhere where they have lizards. The tails grow back. So it’s sustainable.”
Chrisssy said, “Did he ever hit on you? Beck or whatever his name is.”
Now Ava looked at her. Waited.
“He was all over me when he came to the bar,” Chrisssy said, almost sounding embarrassed. “I guess that goes with the territory, huh?”
“Yeah, I guess,” Ava said, almost wistfully. “Come on.”
Ava opened her door and got out. Chrisssy followed and they crossed the packed street, one in front of the other. People left walking space between the front bumpers and back bumpers for jaywalkers. Of course jaywalking wasn’t illegal anymore, just rude, rubbing it in, that you were getting somewhere and they weren’t.
The hotel had a wide motor court out front, an entrance paved with Saltillo tile. The limo helo still idled, parked like a car. Ava strode toward the front door of the hotel. The doorman was smoking a jay, which was completely legal but also considered rude. For the same reason.
“What are we doing?” Chrisssy said, trying to keep up with Ava.
www
Cali was asleep. She was on her side with a sheet over her, her face a whiter shade of pale. She looked deader than she’d looked when she’d been actually dead, but she was breathing, her shoulder rising and falling.
“She looks so lifelike,” Ava said. “Cali, Chrisssy. Chrisssy, Cali.”
Chrisssy just stared. “So this is her?”
“Yep. When she wakes up, she’ll brush her hair out of her eyes. You watch.”
“Why is she here?”
“It’s complicated,” Ava said.
“So Beck was right. You did have her or at least know where she was.”
“It’s complicated.”
“He’s really desperate to get her back. There’s no telling what he might do. He said things like, If I can’t have her, then—”
“They always say that,” Ava said.
“He asked me if I knew anybody who could ‘take it to the next level.’”
“What does that mean?”
“It scared me,” Chrisssy said.
Cali hadn’t moved a muscle. The two women stood over her, like concerned relatives or best friends bedside in a hospital. Only they weren’t really concerned and this wasn’t a real hospital and the beds weren’t hospital beds. The thread count of the sheets was probably in the thousands. The headboard bore a Garden of Allah™ insignia, for those who awoke in the night or of a morning and couldn’t remember where they were. The linens were gold-colored, the pillows probably filled with flamingo feathers. Someone had combed out Cali’s hair. Her blonde hair spread out over the golden pillowcase made her look sort of beautiful, like something out of the past, or t
he future. Or a comic book. Right now, anyway, she looked like someone worth chasing, or at least someone near impossible to get over or forget.
It was a nice little room, a $1,500 room, with a narrow wrought-iron balcony. The double doors were open to the night, the gauzy curtains shifting on the breeze. The floor was covered with white Berber, just as in days of old. The furniture—a pair of easy chairs, a dresser and a desk and chair—was made of heavy, dark wood and didn’t seem like reproductions. It looked like furniture out of the Hearst Castle or the Doheny Mansion. On the desk was a Tiffany lamp that matched the octagonal shade covering the overhead light. Soft. Everything was soft. Healing. Illusory. It was stagecraft, as were all overpriced rooms-for-hire.
Ava walked out onto the balcony. The pool below in the courtyard was like a photographer’s light table, jade, empty of swimmers. She breathed in a little of the night. She had paid off the desk clerk, a pudgy man/boy in this twenties who spoke in whispers because someone had told him people with money always had hangovers. Or something like that. It had taken $300 to buy their way up. The desk clerk knew the girl upstairs was a nobody, so there wasn’t much reason for him to be cautious. He also knew who Ava was and what she did for a living—and that she bribed her way through life. The clerk had eyed Chrisssy with a pitiful hunger. If Ava hadn’t been there, he would have let Chrisssy go up for free, maybe even tagged along.
“She looks like Vivid,” Chrisssy said, still standing over the bed.
“You think so?” Ava said, coming back in off the balcony.
“Wait. Is that why you were gaping at that story about Vivid?”
“I wasn’t gaping. I was working, noticing stuff.”
“He didn’t say that she looked like Vivid,” Chrisssy said. “Birmingham.”