NightSun

by Dan Vining

  Just?

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  The problem with helping people, especially strangers, is: How do you stop?

  The day before, Ava had given the New Okie family a ride down from Cambria. When they got about to Westwood, the traffic on the 405 went to full stall. Predictably. It was eight o’clock. The four of them had been riding along, talking easily, taking turns telling stories or even jokes, when the traffic stalled and the conversation with it. After ten minutes of creeping along in silence, the father asked Ava if she knew how to get to downtown LA.

  She did. Of course she did. So Ava exited the freeway and took them downtown on surface streets to Union Station, thinking—because she hadn’t really thought this through at all—that was where they’d want to go, Union Station. And what, catch an ElectroLiner for home? Home was gone, home had blown away. Gone with the wind. They’d made that clear with the stories they told on the drive south, not that they were asking her to feel sorry for them or even feeling sorry for themselves. They had a kind of pride—all three of them, even the little girl, Bridget—that was almost certainly going to make things harder for them, whatever happened next.

  Ava stood next to the Hudson in front of the train station as they gathered their belongings. Now what? What’s the last thing you give to the unfortunate before you walk off or drive away, before you leave them in their lives so that you can get back to yours? A smile? Another buck? A big thumbs-up? A piece of advice? A stick of gum? A gun? How do you stop? Ava left the car with the $100 valet and walked the Lindgrens across Alameda to Philippe’s. Philippe’s claimed to have invented the “French-Dipped Sandwich” in 1918, although another sawdust-floored red-boothed place downtown—Cole’s—claimed their chef had come up with it ten years earlier. So Ava fed them, ate with them, French-dipped with them, listened to another story or two, even insisted on three pieces of pie. À la mode, too.

  “Well, good luck…” Ava said and offered her hand to the father, standing again next to the idling Hudson in front of Union Station. The little girl smiled up at her, clutching the pink Philippe’s T-shirt Ava had bought her at the cashier’s stand, while her mother stepped onto the old-timey penny scale next to the door.

  “Thank you. Good luck to you, too,” the man said.

  The mother prompted the little girl with a look and a nod. “Thank you,” the girl said.

  Ava asked them where they were going now, and regretted it almost immediately.

  “They said the ‘TMZ’?” the man said. “It’s supposed to be down here someplace. I don’t know if it’s an old hotel or a park or what.”

  Or what.

  So Ava took them to the corner of Grand Avenue and Fifth Street—as close to the TMZ as common sense would allow—and this time stayed behind the wheel while they got out. She managed not to say “good luck” again and then managed not to break out sobbing as she drove away. She also didn’t look in the rearview mirror.

  “A block over from Hope Street…” Ava said to herself. Maybe irony would save her.

  “That is your current location,” the car’s voice said.

  “Oh, shut up,” Ava said.

  www

  Ava was done, or so she told herself. She was going to find Beck and tell him face-to-face that Cali wasn’t dead. She wasn’t exactly alive, either, but apparently she was just exactly where she wanted to be. Trippin’. Cali wasn’t Cinderella—leaving a shoe behind for the prince to find—she was a Lost Girl, she was in Never-Never Land, playing a childish game, off with Peter Pan. Be There Then. Or off with somebody. Not Beck. Sure, she was high all the time. High, low, or sideways, Cali was gone, living in a Beck-less world, and he needed to get on with his life. That was exactly what she was going to tell him. Of course, the déjà vu alarm was clanging in Ava’s head. She ignored it.

  “Penny!”

  Penny appeared on the dash-screen. “You’re back!” she said. “You have to tell me all about it,” she said. “I’m all ears.”

  “No, you’re not,” Ava said. “And no, I won’t. Who called?”

  “No one.”

  “No one?”

  “Well, Dallas Raines, but he said it was personal. He’s that weatherman, right?”

  “Chrisssy didn’t check in?”

  “Nope. Well, once, right after you left. She said she was on the Beck case, working it. Here it is…”

  Chrisssy’s face replaced Penny’s on the screen. “Hi, Ava, I’m on the case, working it,” Chrisssy said. “The subject is staying at the Motel Sixty on Little Santa Monica. Laying low, looks like. I’m going to surveil said location, avoid direct contact, like you said. Right now I’m getting my hair done.” A beautician appeared behind Chrisssy, fluffed up her hair, then pulled it back to show off Chrisssy’s cheekbones. “Let’s do it,” Chrisssy said, apparently to the beautician.

  “Call her,” Ava said to Penny.

  Two seconds later, Penny reappeared saying, “Nope. No answer.”

  “Call the numbers you have for Beck.”

  Five seconds later, “Nope. No answer.”

  “Call the Motel Sixty on Little Santa Monica.”

  “Just did, while you were watching Chrisssy,” Penny said. “He’s a guest at the motel, but hasn’t occupied his room since Wednesday. No use of bed, bed linens, or towels.”

  “What about the little strip of paper across the toilet?”

  “You’re not happy, but you’re funny,” Penny said.

  “What?”

  “It’s a line from a song.”

  “I like that lipstick,” Ava said, a sincere non sequitur. “It brings out the blue in your eyes.”

  “Gosh, thanks,” Penny said.

  www

  About lust and longing, she was (almost) never wrong, Ava Monica.

  It was after 11:00 p.m. when she pulled over to the curb on Beachwood Drive, parked, and got out. She looked up at the Hollywood Sign as she walked across the front yard of the apartment building. They had the sign’s lights on—they only turned them on two nights a month now. It drew too many people up into the hills, they said. Too many tourists taking a leak in the bushes, too many suicides.

  Ava went around the back of Villa Ventura. Chrisssy’s black VW bug was under the unlighted carport. It was covered in dust, powdery dust, as if it hadn’t moved in two or three days. Ava wrote WASSSH ME! with her finger on the back window.

  “I knew it!” Ava said, when after her tenth knock on Chrisssy’s door it opened and there stood Beck, wearing nothing but pajama bottoms. His silver hair was mussed and he had a stupid cat-that-ate-the-bird grin on his unshaven face. Shirtless like this, he was a bit fleshy. But still kind of perfect.

  “It’s Ava, babe,” he said, looking away toward the bedroom. “Busted.”

  At least Chrisssy had the decency to look slightly embarrassed when she came up behind him in the barely buttoned top to Beck’s jammies and put her arms around his waist. She had shorter hair now.

  “Hey, Ava,” Chrisssy said, trying to sound down. “Sorry about this.”

  Ava heard their confessions at the Formica table in the dining room, after she made Beck throw on a shirt and a pair of real pants. Chrisssy mixed a shaker of martinis without being told. Ava hadn’t touched hers, trying to make a point about the utter wrongness of this.

  “I’m an actor,” Beck said.

  “No!” Ava pretended.

  “Did you see The Fire Next Time?” he asked. “I was Craig T. Nelson’s middle son.”

  “Didn’t see it,” Ava said. “Or if I did, I don’t remember it.” Beck looked hurt, which she enjoyed. “What’s your real name?” She gave in and took a sip of her martini.

  “Beck. Beck is my real name. Roland Beck. Actually, my birth name was…”

  “I guess you knew you didn’t have to worry about anyone recognizing you: ‘Wait, a
ren’t you the actor who played Craig T. Nelson’s middle son in The Fire Next Time?’”

  Beck laced his fingers together on the table top.

  “Ava, I’m so sorry,” Chrisssy said. “Honestly.”

  “Hey, what’s a girl to do?” Ava said. “The heart is a lonely hunter.”

  “Wow,” Chrisssy said. “That’s beautiful. And so true.”

  “It’s the name of a movie, honey,” Beck corrected.

  “Who hired you?” Ava said.

  “Initially, on the phone, when he cast me, he just said his name was ‘Don,’” Beck began, heavily, as if this were an audition for an episode of a police procedural. “He said he was from Chicago. He called himself an ‘intermediary.’ Subsequently, he mailed me my character’s profile and backstory and a goodly sum in hundred-dollar bills as well as a cashier’s check for a larger sum. All in one package. Along with your name and the address of your office in Westwood. And the name of a tailor. Mailed it. He didn’t even insure it. He’s something of a throwback, out of the past.”

  “That’s the name of another movie,” Ava explained to Chrisssy.

  “It was remade as Against All Odds,” Beck added.

  “Who was he an intermediary for?”

  “He wouldn’t say. He called him ‘The Mister.’ Something tells me she is married, Cali. Or whatever her real name is. To someone from somewhere other than Chicago or Los Angeles. He said as much.”

  “Florida?” Ava was remembering the souvenir seashell night-lights in the high-rise apartment down in Marina del Rey.

  “Nothing I heard said Florida.”

  “Why did he pick you?”

  “The Mister supposedly found me on the Screen Actors Guild Virtual Headbook.”

  “What else do you know about ‘Don’?”

  “He described himself as a repairman. But there is clearly some money behind this.”

  “You mean a fixer?”

  “I guess. What he said was repairman. In time, I learned that his name is Nico Passarelli. After our third in-person meeting—after you lost Cali for the second time—I pressed him for his actual name and he told me. Nico Passarelli.”

  “You lost Cali?” Chrisssy said to Ava. “When?”

  It made Ava feel like a bad person. “I’ll tell you later,” she said.

  “I think he may harm her,” Beck continued, sounding almost like a regular person. “That may not be The Mister’s will, but I believe he intends to deliver her back home to him by force.”

  “Maybe it’s her daddy who hired him,” Chrisssy said. They both looked at her. “Maybe he just wants his little girl home.”

  Ava drained her drink. “Here’s what you’re going to do,” she said. Chrisssy took Beck’s hand. “Both of you.”

  They waited.

  “Nothing,” Ava said.

  Only Chrisssy looked disappointed.

  Ava’s conscience—or something—made her turn off the autopilot and take the wheel, and before she knew it she was idling in front of Vivid’s place up on Lookout Mountain. Everyone knew where Vivid lived: on Appian Way, off Lookout Mountain Avenue, off Laurel Canyon. Tonight it felt more like Lookout! Mountain. It was party night, lights blazing, music and squealing. A party before the next big show downtown. The classic silver Bentley was parked against the wall that surrounded the modern low-and-wide house. Ava parked across the street, got out of the Hudson. She walked on by Vivid’s house to the end of the street to check out the view. And stall for time. That tiny voice telling her what she should do had gotten so tiny she couldn’t hear it anymore over the ambient noise of LA.

  What a sight! The night was very clear, if noisy. At Ava’s feet was the curve of Sunset Boulevard, clogged with traffic and looking lovely, like a necklace. Costume jewelry? Paste? Directly below was The Sunset Tower, Ava’s Sunset Tower. It was as if Vivid wanted a place that overlooked it and all that it represented. At least, Ava told herself that. She counted down from the penthouse and found her apartment. She had left all the lights on. She’d been doing that a lot lately. She wondered if she should talk to someone about it, if she could find someone who wouldn’t roll their eyes.

  Beyond Sunset was the spread of lights, a twenty-mile view—half of LA—east, south, and west. The grid of streets and streetlights made it all seem thought-out. From up here, it looked like a complicated board game, one played solo and only at night, you against the grid. Above the streets and freeways, crisscrossing helicopters. Any given night there were hundreds of Crows, all headed somewhere fast. Somewhere and back, if the cops were lucky. Tonight there was a ton of air traffic, EMT rigs and fire trucks and other law enforcement aircraft flying on the same level as the Crows. Sky cabs, commercial haulers, and the occasional private helo were restricted to the lower altitudes. Ten miles south, two queues of descending jetliners and the new prop steam planes stretched from LAX halfway to Palm Springs. Two other lines of ascending planes escaped out over the black water. It looked almost as if they were doing touch-and-gos. Out of necessity, every flying thing was outfitted with automatic separation and isolation gadgetry—fore and aft, side to side, over and under—to keep them apart. Sometimes Ava wondered if everybody in LA secretly had been fitted with it, too.

  She looked back at Vivid’s house. The living room was all glass. The party looked hilarious. Or was it hysterical?

  Seeing the planes coming and going made Ava realize she hadn’t been out of the state in a couple of years. When this business with Cali was wrapped up, she was going to get on a plane and go to…Paris. No, Barcelona. She was going to go to Barcelona where she’d never been, and she was going sit in bars and eat tapas and drink sangria and make small talk with a handsome unmarried man whose English wasn’t good enough to get in the way of the two of them falling for each other. That was it, that was the plan. After she nabbed Cali and got her away from Lynch and Vivid and SoCal and back to her daddy or husband or parole officer or whoever he was. The Mister. Someone who cared enough to send a man—and a woman and a half—after her. She was going to grab Cali by the hand and take her to the airport. Or somewhere.

  But it wasn’t going to be tonight and it wouldn’t be here.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Ava was walking! When she was still a block from the arena, Ava saw a very large electric sign that hung over the middle of the street. It was fully lit up, even though it was still daytime, the sun still well above the surrounding buildings. In letters ten feet high, it said…

  L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux

  Figueroa was packed with people, even ten blocks south where she’d left the Hudson. Being among the crowd on the sidewalk and in the street was like being caught in a riptide. She was going where they were going, but even if that wasn’t her intention, she still would have been taken along with them. That they were all smiling, laughing, and singing Vivid songs made it a bit less frightening. At least until the energy level cranked up as they neared their destination.

  Ava had had a plan—get there early and ambush Cali as she arrived with her friends and enablers—but she hadn’t anticipated the level of the chaos. It wasn’t the first time. She also wished she’d worn different shoes.

  That which is essential is invisible to the eye

  The hanging electric sign was self-translating. Give it another minute and it would go to Spanish or Japanese or German.

  “It’s been a while since I’ve been to a big show,” Ava said to a perfect stranger pressed against her, a girl in her twenties wearing a wig made of foil. They were so close together it was almost as if the two of them were slow-dancing cheek to cheek to the song the crowd was singing.

  “I’ve been to every show since the Straitjacket tour,” the girl in the silver wig said. She managed to free her right hand from the tangle of bodies and offered it to Ava to shake.

  “Vivid,” the girl said.
/>   Ava shook the hand and said, “Ava,” as they all surged under...

  필수 는눈에 보이지

  www

  Everyone in Lynch’s skybox was down at the rail watching the show—everyone except Ava, who instead was watching the Cali show. Cali was re-blonded, blonder than the first time Ava had seen her, blonded to within an inch of her life. Of course, Cali had seen Ava, but she was acting as if she hadn’t or as if she thought Ava wasn’t really there. Maybe it wasn’t an act. They hadn’t had a chance to talk yet. Ava hadn’t dragged her off to a service elevator yet either, but that was the plan. Cali was looking down at the arena floor. She didn’t look happy, didn’t look sad, though a tear was slow-rolling down her cheek. Maybe it was the song. Vivid had found a pretext for wedging one of her hits into the thin storyline of Beauties of the Night, a confusing love song of hers called “I Love You Too (Much).” Vivid was alone on the front edge of the stage in a puddle of pink light, selling the lyric. And especially the parentheses. The show was almost an hour in and the crowd was still wholly engulfed in Vivid-Love, especially those down on the floor in front hungrily reaching out to her.

  “She isn’t a woman, but isn’t she pretty?” a voice behind Ava said.

  She turned. “Nate Cole,” she said. “Music lover.”

  “How’d you get in?” Nate said.

  “The usual. Stuck a gun in a guy’s face, showed him my badge,” Ava said, tough, playing a game. “How about you?”

  “A hand-job in the stairwell,” Nate said.

  He was in his flight suit, on the job, though as far as Ava knew he was always on the job. She doubted he had any regular clothes. But he did look good in a flight suit. The left side of his face was bruised from the eye socket to the chin and he had a black cast on his right wrist. She was about to ask him what had happened to him but thought better of it. She knew a joke was the only answer she’d get out of him. Cops.

  “Check this out,” Nate said, nodding toward the stage. “Watch what happens.”

  Ava watched as Vivid—not missing a word of the song—knelt to take a wrapped gift from a front-row fan. A second later, a stagehand ran out and took the package from the star and disappeared back into the shadows.