by Dan Vining
Chapter Nineteen
It was nine o’clock at night. “You can’t sleep anymore,” Ava said. “Get up. Brush your teeth. Wash your face. Eat something. Pretend.”
Cali stirred just enough to establish that she wasn’t dead again. Ava kept poking her until she got out of the bed. Naked. Cali stood there a moment, then sat back on the edge of the bed with her face in her hands.
“Today is the first day of the rest of your life,” Ava said. “Or tonight is.”
Ava left her sitting there on the bed and went to take a shower. She took her sweet time, too, violated all kinds of city water-conservation diktats, hitting the flow button again every time it shut itself off. She took the kind of shower she used to take when she had been a school girl, tipping her face up into the downpour as if she were outside in the rain. Or in a Clairol shampoo commercial. Or under a waterfall in Hawaii, though she’d never been to Hawaii. When she was a little girl, she had taken long showers because they were a place to hide from her mother. Ava didn’t know what this particular twenty-minute shower was about, who or what (or when?) she was hiding from now. But she was enjoying it.
Then Sean the Resuscitator, the surfer EMT, called.
“Yeah, what?” Ava said when she saw his face.
His eyes went wide. “You have a vid-phone in your shower?”
“Most people have the decency not to look,” Ava said.
“I just…I…”
“What?”
“I just wanted to make sure everything was cool with the deceased babe,” he said.
“She sleeps a lot.”
“That’s cool, that’s what happens. So everything was cool at The Garden of Allah?”
“Frozen,” Ava said.
“Excellent,” he said.
“Pleasure doing business with you, Everett,” Ava said, reaching for the bye-bye button.
“Whoa,” he said.
“Whoa what?”
“If you are asked to rate my service, you should know that an eight, nine, or ten means you are—like I think you said—very satisfied.”
“What you do is illegal. Completely. Who is going to ask?”
“I value your business.”
“Who’s going to ask? The cops? The DA? American Medical Association?”
“Pssst.”
“What? Pssst what?”
“That’s who would ask. P-S-S-S-T. That’s the rating service for, you know, sketchy transactions.”
“I want to go live on another planet,” Ava said, reaching again for that exit button.
“Wait,” he said.
“What!”
“I was wondering, could I, uh, speak to the babe?”
Ava sent him on his way.
The mirror was all fogged up when Ava got out of the shower. She didn’t wipe it off. Lately, seeing herself naked—flat-footed, with no makeup—didn’t make her happy. Time was when her naked flat-footed self made her happy. And it wasn’t that long ago. She used to like mirrors. Now seeing herself in a mirror was like running into somebody she used to know. LA was a hard place to have a birthday. It was filthy with mirrors. And worse, there were all those Calis, newly arrived from wherever, who were their own kind of looking glass. She threw on a fluffy white robe and knotted it at the waist. She brushed her teeth and combed out her wet hair. The fog in the bathroom was starting to clear. Before it got too clear, she looked at herself, turned to a three-quarter pose. Her breasts still made her happy.
“Money in the bank,” she said.
When she came out of the bathroom and walked past the guest bedroom, she was expecting to see Cali back in bed. Actually, what she half expected to see was the window standing open, the gauzy curtains blowing out into the night like a white flag. She expected sirens, Crows, TV news crews. Was that why she had lingered forever in her shower, to give Cali the time to do the wrong thing?
“But that would mean I’m a bad person,” Ava said to herself.
She found Cali sitting at the little round table in the kitchen over by the window, eating as if she hadn’t eaten in a week. Or ever. A bagel, a bowl of Cheerios, a bunch of green grapes. A leftover sparerib from a barbecue that operated sub rosa in South Pas. A big glass of milk. Breakfast at nine o’clock at night. She was still naked, of course. Ava stood in the doorway watching the girl stuff her face. She couldn’t help but stare at Cali’s perfect body. She had a surfer’s tan, thin stripes of white flesh over her hips from what must have been an itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny bikini. Naked, barefoot, her blonde hair loose and beautiful, Cali had never seemed more like a girl than she did now. A California girl. Now Ava really felt old.
“Who brought you the dress that was in the closet at the hotel? Or, said another way, who brought you the dress and why are you not wearing it now?”
“I never liked wearing clothes,” Cali said between bites. “I always pretended I did, went along with it like everybody else. Because I had to. Or I thought I did.”
It was only then that Ava remembered the three identical bright pretty dresses in the closet at the apartment in the Marina. Butterflies. Or maybe they were flowers. Was this one of them?
Cali got up, opened cabinets until she found the dishware—Ava’s mother’s china—then poured herself a cup of coffee from a saucepan sitting on a burner on the stove. Ava had never seen anybody do that—warm up yesterday’s coffee on the stove. It felt like something country people would do, but Cali was about as far away from a country girl as a person could be.
“You could have made another pot.”
“I don’t like to waste,” Cali said. The milk bottle was still on the table. Cali poured two splashes into her cup and took a sip. Then she got up, gathered her dishes, and took everything to the sink.
“You don’t have to do that,”Ava said. “I have a woman who comes in.”
“Thank you for your hospitality,” Cali said. If she was being sarcastic, she wasn’t nearly obvious enough.
Cali started washing the dishes. She seemed lost in thought. Ava remembered CRO Nate Cole’s line downtown at the story bar: “Young Mom Washing the Dishes is next, I think.”
“So who brought you your magic butterfly dress?” Ava said.
“I don’t know,” Cali said.
“Somebody did. They left it in your closet at the hotel. I guess they figured you didn’t need any underwear to go with it. Maybe that narrows it down.”
“I didn’t see anyone come in. I don’t even know how long I was there.”
“Two days.”
“Who brought me there? You?”
“I…enabled it,” Ava said. “The guy who brought you wasn’t the kind to think about bringing along a dress for you.”
“Once I woke up and there was someone there. I think. A man. A slender man. Very.”
Ava thought: very skinny man…the Bentley driver, the gun-toting shoulder-shrugger? The Shinola’s manager Silky Valentine was skinny too. And so was Action Man, come to think of it. Almost everyone was skinny now. It was almost against the law not to be.
“So a skinny man you didn’t know put a frilly expensive dress from your closet at home into your closet at The Garden of Allah and left? No note, nothing?”
Cali didn’t like Ava’s tone. “Maybe I dreamed it. I’ve been having the sickest dreams,” she said, arranging the dishes in the dish drainer, drying her hands, and sitting back at the table with her coffee. “You’re a detective, right? That he sent after me?”
“Yeah. You broke his heart.” Ava poured herself a cup of the warmed-up java. It wasn’t half bad. She stayed put in the doorway.
“I broke his heart,” Cali said. “Mine was broken a long time ago. My spirit, too. It’s what men do, break you.”
“Tell me about it,” Ava said.
Cali just stared at her coffee.
“No,
seriously,” Ava said, “tell me about it.”
Apparently that wasn’t going to happen. Not yet, anyway. Instead, Cali asked, “Who was that with you? The girl my age. Where is she?”
“She was working with me, for one night. She went home.”
“Home to where?”
“Beachwood Canyon. Down the hill from the Hollywood Sign.”
“I thought you meant home-home.”
“Nobody ever goes home-home.”
“What’s her name?”
“Chrisssy. With three S’s, if you can believe it.”
“She’s on the run from a man, too,” Cali said. “It’s so obvious.”
“It is?”
“Of course. What was the name you said?”
“Chrisssy.”
“No, in front of the club. And then again last night, in the hotel, or whatever that place was. You said a man’s name.”
“Beck. Don’t get cute.”
“What does he look like?”
“I guess a lot of guys fall desperately in love with you after you run into the ocean in the middle of the night to drown yourself, huh? Hard to keep track of all of them.”
Cali looked at Ava as if she had just spoken a line of complete gibberish. “What did he look like?” she asked again.
“Dreamy.”
Cali sank down into herself, as if something had pricked her internally, not a fatal wound but one that hurt just the same. She took a sip of her coffee, held it with two hands, like a little girl with a cup of cocoa her momma gave her, home sick from school. When she put down the cup, she stared at the back of her hand. Her left hand. She wasn’t wearing a ring.
“Good Lord, he asked you to marry him?” Ava said. “He ringed you? He didn’t tell me that.”
Cali got up and walked out of the kitchen.
“You have to talk to him,” Ava said after her.
“Talk…” Cali said, walking off. “I think he wants just a little more from me than that.”
After a moment, she came back wearing the filmy bright pretty dress. With nothing underneath it. Somehow she was even sexier clothed than when she was naked. She looked like a model, a California girl in a fashion spread, hot as the sun, cool as the breeze.
“You’ve been so long at the beach you even smell like the sea…” Ava said.
“That kind of creeps me out,” Cali said and left for the living room.
Ava called after her, “It kind of creeps me out that you had three of those exact same dresses in your closet.”
Nothing. Ava went after her. “So I can call Beck and you guys can talk somewhere?” she said.
Cali was in the living room, looking at the silver-framed pictures that covered one wall. They were all casual shots from more than a few from years ago, Ava with boyfriends and then man-friends. Lush locations, suns dropping, moons rising, white teeth and Chablis, and what cinematographers called the “golden hour.” Life is good was the subtext. There wasn’t a single picture that hadn’t been taken in LA—something that Ava had likely never realized—and only one picture of her father, none of her mother.
“There are no women,” Cali said. “No other girls, no women. You don’t have any women friends.” The last wasn’t a question.
Ava came in. “You’re the one who tried to kill herself.”
“I was out of my head,” Cali said. “Or all the way into it. The pills were sitting there. I took a handful.”
“You tried twice. You swam into the ocean in front of the Rings of Saturn restaurant. On your last date with him.”
“You said that before. That never happened,” Cali said. “Somebody is pulling your leg.”
“That’s called denial.”
“Yeah, I deny that it ever happened. I took the pills out on my balcony but I didn’t swim into the ocean on a date with anybody. I wouldn’t do that. Maybe you’re thinking about yourself, what you feel like doing sometimes.”
Ava was getting honked off. She went to the window and yanked open the drapes. It was almost ten o’clock, the nighttime ten o’clock. She looked out over the strip at the Hollywood Hills, the zigzagging climbing streets, the houses theatrically lit. The close sky was battleship gray, that typical blank Los Angeles night sky. Ava wished she were out there. Alone. Riding around. Cali was right: Ava didn’t have any women friends. Unless you counted Penny, who may have been virtual.
Cali watched her a minute before she said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean anything. It’s just that everybody’s story seems like the same story to me lately.”
Ava turned away from the window and said, “Everyone’s story is different.”
“People should be happy, don’t you think?” Cali said.
“That’s not the business I’m in,” Ava said.
“But what do you think? We have just this one life. People have a right to be happy.”
Ava said, “What about Beck? Does he have a right to be happy?”
“There is no Beck.”
“You mean metaphorically, right?”
“I don’t know what that means.”
Ava was about to tell her what metaphorically meant when Cali came over to her at the window. She came over and wrapped her arms around Ava, just held her, as if Ava was the one who needed consoling, for believing the foolishness she believed.
Ava didn’t pull away. Where’s the harm in letting a crazy, pretty, semi-naked girl hold you?
But then Cali broke it off.
“What?” Ava said.
Cali had looked out the picture window, looked down, and seen the big man on the sidewalk staring up at the building. He was wearing the hat and she couldn’t see his face but she didn’t need to.
www
Cali was curled up on the bed in the guest room.
“You’re not going back to bed,” Ava said. “We’re going out.”
“I’m not going out there. I can’t.”
Ava left the room and came back a second later with a pair of shoes. And a raincoat. “Just in case,” Ava said, handing everything to Cali.
“It’s not going to rain,” Cali said. “It never rains here.”
“Still and all, everybody has a raincoat, honey,” Ava said.
“You keep saying things as if they explain everything but they don’t.”
“Put the shoes on, before I smack you. Baby steps.”
Cali sat on the end of the bed and slipped on the shoes. “They’re too loose.”
“Yeah, I know, I have big feet. Everyone has bigger feet than you do. Except for those poor little girls in China whose mothers bind them.”
Cali stood. She brushed her hair off her face.
Ava said, with some finality, “I know Beck doesn’t exist in your mind but I just called him anyway. He’s staying at a hotel in Beverly Hills. We’re going there and you’re going to talk to him.”
“Please, no,” Cali said.
Ava took her by the upper arm, the way cops do.
They rode down to the parking garage in the elevator. Cali looked like a convict being led to the gas chamber.
“You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do,” Ava said. “Just talk to him. He’s a blubbering fool but he loves you.”
The elevator doors opened and they stepped out, Ava still holding onto Cali as if she expected her to rabbit any second. “I feel good about this,” Ava said. “We’re headed toward some closure, for everybody involved. It’s going to be all right, sweetie. Have you been to the Beverly Hills Hotel? It’s lovely. Pink and green, if you can believe that.”
When they got close to the Hudson, the car sensed Ava’s presence and came to life, the headlights blinking awake. Behind them, the iron garage gate rattled and began to slide aside. Ava put Cali in the passenger seat up front and got behind the wheel. The door locks clicked
.
It was right about then that the big man in the fedora appeared. He stepped out of the bushes just outside the open gate and started down the slope.
Cali saw him before Ava. She stopped breathing.
“Where to, Ava?” the car said.
“Hold on,” Ava said. She saw the big man.
He stopped ten feet in front of the car, blocking the way out of the garage. Standing there with his hands on his hips, he was like a wall, a wall wearing a brown suit.
“Hey,” he said, hard, looking through the windshield at Cali, ignoring Ava.
“Who are you?” Ava said.
Still with his eyes locked on Cali, not looking at Ava, the man drew a gun from under his coat. It was a blue revolver with a barrel a foot long, almost a joke-gun, like something out of the past or out of a cartoon. He kept the gun lowered, at his side, as if it was the answer to Ava’s question.
“Oh,” Ava said.
The man took a step closer. “I don’t want any trouble from you,” he said to Ava. “I would guess you don’t know who I am, but I know who you are. I’m going to need for you to let her go, right now.”
“Where to?” the Hudson said again.
“The Pink Palace,” Ava said. “Go!”
“Go!” Cali said.
The man took a step forward until he was right in front of the bulbous nose of the Hudson. He wasn’t going anywhere, his big body was saying. Even a humungous Hudson wasn’t going to get past him. The way he stood there said everything depended on the Hudson not getting past him. But he still hadn’t raised the gun.
“Come on, go!” Ava said to the car.
“Obstruction,” the Hudson said, maddeningly matter-of-factly.
As if enough wasn’t going on, it was then that the other bad actors arrived: the Bentley screeching up to the mouth of the garage, the skinny gunsel behind the wheel and Action Man in the passenger seat in a purple suit, leaning forward. The old car’s smoking exhaust made it look like it was coming out of a cloud. The big man turned toward the round staring headlights—recognizing the Bentley from in front of Barney’s Beanery—and raised the hog-leg pistol. Action Man jumped out of the front seat, leaving the door open. A second later, the gunsel was out from behind the wheel.