Wright and Barney come puffing up the walk just in time to see Carlos banging on the door again. The knuckles thud against the boards again, to no avail. The man turns his flushed face to Amaryllis, Barney, and Wright. She searches the landlord’s black eyes and sees fright hiding inside the pupils. People don’t simply disappear in the middle of the day, even in Hollywood.
Now, after enough pointless knocking, Carlos goes over to an older Hispanic man, who pulls from his deep pockets a dazzling display of bronze keys, all hanging from a single chain. He sorts through the metal objects as if he knows each one intimately and finds Lucas’ number. At the key master’s command, the door lets out a deep squeal before yielding. The inner chains, un-fastened, rattle as Barney, Wright, Carlos, and Amaryllis crowd the opening for a peek. From the bathroom to the minuscule efficiency kitchen, the little dwelling looks tidy, for a bachelor living alone. But one peek at the bedroom turns Amaryllis’ skin cold.
“Oh, Lord,” Wright moans as he takes a step inside. The entire group moves as a unit behind him, each one seeming afraid to penetrate Garret’s private space without comrades.
“We better get a cop over here,” Barney grumbles.
All over the bed are jumbled objects: clothing, cameras, maps, and hats. The photographer’s bags are unzipped. From behind Wright’s broad shoulder, Amaryllis sees that Garret’s film pouches are open and empty. She had watched Garret fill each compartment with film with great care before the flight home. Now the flaps hang open and the space inside is as void as her story soon will be.
Wright holds his hands up in the air as if to beg some photographic god for forgiveness. Amaryllis takes another step forward, under his beseeching arm, and pushes into the bedroom. The pillows are still fluffed and the comforter smooth from the headboard to the foot of the bed. No one had slept here last night.
“Where’s Garret?” Amaryllis says, feeling the hot churn of concern and misplaced guilt in her gut. Everyone turns to her, and Barney covers his brow with one shaking hand. They care more for the photos than the man. Only Barney sees the shame in that.
#
The cops finish without much commentary, taking fingerprints from the only places where they can get good images: the headboard, the nightstand, and the bathroom mirror. The luggage has been wiped clean. Amaryllis figures the prints they found were Garret’s anyway, but what the heck. These poor investigators have to come away with something.
The thin kid, who must ride shotgun in the squad car, asks the newspaper people some routine questions and then spends most of his time quizzing Carlos about the lock. The older guy, perspiring like a prize fighter in the close room, jabs his pen at his notebook as he takes down information. He listens to someone squawking on his walkie-talkie and declines any aid. Then he scoops the cameras and bags into a large evidence bin. The cameras, backs open, are empty. The cops let Garret’s clothing and personal items lie in heaps on the tidy bed.
“Doesn’t measure up as a standard burglary,” the older cop says, half to Amaryllis and half to the rookie. “These cameras themselves could fetch a cool couple thousand on the streets. Passport’s still there.” He picks it up and stashes it in the evidence box. “Even his cash is still in his wallet.” The wallet goes into the bin also.
“What kind of a guy goes out without his wallet?” the young buck says. His gaze moves to Amaryllis, his bleary blue eyes radiating the same sort of professional distance one sees in oncologists or funeral directors. He’s learning fast.
“Lady,” he says. “This looks like a targeted job, professional. Not a random break-in. We’ll do our best to find him, but we don’t have much to work with.”
She tells him about her apartment and the missing tapes and digital photo chips. The older guy takes more notes.
“We’ll send a squad car over to your place, too,” he says with a peeved look. “Why didn’t you mention this earlier?
“I was too concerned with Garret.” The floor feels as if it’s dropping. The cop gets her address and she is dismissed. When they leave, Carlos locks up and Barney, Wright and Amaryllis stand on the slate walk and stare at each other.
The silence is bitter. The heat is absurd for a mid-winter day. She’s made a mess of everything. Now the story is gone. It’s all her fault for not paying attention. She hears herself breaking the stagnant gloom by offering to resign her job. Before anyone can stop her, she turns and lopes to her car, and soon is lost in traffic with a loud shifting of gears.
CHAPTER THREE: THE PRIVATE RIDE
Fiona O’Malley leans against her kitchen sink and swallows a long draught of ale while gazing at Amaryllis with blazing blue eyes.
“Are you sure you’ve thought this through?”
Amaryllis shakes her head and slumps on the counter opposite the sink. Of course, she hasn’t. She has been thinking of leaving Los Angeles for a long time, to get away from the cars, the smog, the flashing white teeth, collagen-swollen lips, and liposuctioned thighs. But she always thought she’d do it in a blaze of glory. Win a prize, piss off the Times, and then blast out of town. This was like slinking away from a catfight.
“I guess you think I don’t have both beaters in the batter, do you?”
Fiona brushes away the wisecrack as it were an errant gnat.
“Well, what did he say when you quit?” Fiona isn’t used to having her questions unanswered, and she looks at her friend with concern crossed with outrage.
“Wright?”
“Yes, Wright. He is your boss, isn’t he?”
“Well, technically, yeah. But I talked to Barney.” Fiona goads her on with her eyes, pressing Amaryllis to finish the thought. “And Barney told me I was crazy. He told me to get back to the office, but I just went home and refused to take any calls. Then I decided to hide out over here.”
Fiona crosses her arms—refreshingly milk-white in this city of bronzed demi-gods. She looks about to explode, her red-topped head slightly vibrating with emotion. Amaryllis hates it when her best friend gets like this. Disapproval is hard to take from anyone, but from Fiona, her Irish stalwart pal, it hurts like betrayal. Amaryllis knows she made a dumb mistake; Fiona is just driving that thought home.
She still remembers the first time she saw Fiona, all fiery hair and freckles, standing on mat at a yoga class in the Hollywood Hills. Fiona was having trouble with a pose that required her to put pressure on her neck, and she wasn’t having any more of it. The teacher, a dancer-like woman in her fifties who still moved like a teenager, was trying to tell Fiona that the posture, called the Plough, was really not dangerous and elementary for beginning yoga students. Fiona explained that she sprained her neck once and wasn’t about to cause more harm. She wasn’t pleading with the teacher. She was telling her not to mess with her neck. The teacher backed away with delicate steps, unused to ruffled feathers in her studio.
Amaryllis liked her on the spot. The truth was yoga was not agreeing with her, either. She could hardly sit still as the regal teacher lead them through twisting and—to Amaryllis—torturous movements. She turned when the teacher wasn’t looking and caught Fiona’s eye. Fiona gestured with her chin toward the door. Without a sound, the two of them swept up their mats and escaped. Twenty minutes later, they were in a bar on Sunset Strip enjoying Guinness stout.
Fiona is rock solid. I better listen to her.
“Okay, okay,” Amaryllis says, letting out a withheld sigh. “I’ll talk to Wright about getting out of this quitting business gracefully. It was a stupid idea.”
Fiona nods.
“But it seemed like a good idea at the time.”
Fiona sighs with a rush of withheld air and turns to the sink, her back to Amaryllis. She rinses out her ale glass and places it in a neat row of cups and mugs in her dishwasher. Amaryllis can’t believe that even the inside of Fiona’s appliance is neat.
“Maybe we ought to go over this burglary again and see if there’s something you’re forgetting,” she says, flipping the dishwasher door cl
osed with care. They move to the living room and flop on the deep, soft cushions of the burgundy velvet couch. Amaryllis spills all she knows, from the wondrous days of exploring the caves and pyramids, to the paranoia when the flood buried the treasures, to the anxious flight home. She natters away right up to the point of leaving Garret at home with his precious bag of film. She leaves out the story of the crystal. That’s her own secret, but she reaches into her purse to feel for the silky texture of the dazzling ball. It doesn’t leave her side anymore.
“So Lucas said, ‘I’ll get these developed right away.’ He was pointing to the camera bags of traditional, light-sensitive film. The digital images he was going to e-mail to me as soon as he could.” She remembers him leaving the taxicab, heaving his heavy bags onto his shoulders and scurrying up the empty walk to his bungalow. The owner was chipping away at flaking brick-work. No one else was around.
“After that,” she tells Fiona, “I rushed back to the cab and gave directions to my place in West Hollywood.”
Fiona asks about the cabbie, and Amaryllis sees little chunks of remembered scenes, playing like interrupted film clips in her head. Little dreams, maybe jet-lag hallucinations. The driver was a standard American WASP type, which, now that she thinks of it, is odd. Most cabbies are from some other country, and many cannot speak English at all. But this guy was as whitebread as a Joe in a sitcom. She shifts in the couch as more memories flood in.
“The weird thing is how he didn’t have to wait in the taxi queue,” she says, her gaze drifting into space. “He just whipped up there as if we had ordered a private ride. In fact,” Amaryllis presses her brow as she fights for focus, “he seemed to be expecting us.”
“And that didn’t seem odd to you at the time?”
“No. We were too preoccupied with keeping the baggage safe. Garret didn’t want to let him touch a thing.”
Fiona bobs her sandal on the pedicured toes of her crossed foot. “What did you talk about in the cab?”
Amaryllis leans back on the couch in exasperation.
“I don’t think we spoke at all. Directions, mainly. Garret asked the chauffeur about the weather while we were gone—as if there were ever any weather in L.A. The cabbie seemed to perk up. He mentioned Garrett’s dark crimson sunburn, and, yes, Garret told the guy we’d been to Mexico.”
Fiona winces.
The words are pouring out now, as Amaryllis remembers the entire scene with Garret complaining about the Mexican sun, the cabbie wondering if we’d been in Cancún. Did we miss the tropical storm that had been raging through the area? Did we do all the touristy stuff? He just was far too interested in our trip, Amaryllis thought, when he should have been jaded after picking up hundreds of vacationers in his job.
“So, I cut him off,” Amaryllis says, feeling a bit astonished at her own action. “I gave Garret a little kick and told the cabbie it was a business trip, and we weren’t supposed to discuss it.”
“Well, I bet that got his radar up,” Fiona answers. She’s still bouncing the sandal.
“Instead of being offended, the cab driver seemed extremely pleased, as if I had confirmed something.”
“Oh, Lord. Did the bloke have a little radio in his ear, black suit…?” This is Fiona’s idea of a joke, but her eyes emit no sparkle. She still looks worried.
“No, no. He looked like, like anybody. But his bearing, the questions, it was all out of context.” She ponders the situation a little more and remembers the cabbie taking special note of which bungalow Garret lived in. “He even asked if he lived alone.” And, then, there was a minivan behind them. It stopped a few streets back from Garret’s bungalow, then pulled out again when the cab started for her home in West Hollywood. Amaryllis gives herself a start as another memory comes pouring out.
“The driver wanted to help me with my bags and asked what apartment to bring them to.” She covers her hand with her mouth after blurting this out, realizing how she was being stalked. She never caught on at the time.
“Well, did you tell him?”
“No, no, I told him to leave it all alone. But my name was all over the baggage, as easy to read as a neon sign. I’m sure he read it, right along with my apartment number. I told him not to take the bags and went off on my own.”
“Did he know you were going to work afterward?”
Amaryllis thunks herself on the head. “Garret said to me that he was going to get the photos processed. He said it quietly in the back seat. And I replied that I was going right to work. I don’t think anyone could have heard.”
“Unless the cab was bugged.”
Amaryllis’ stomach drops. “Unless it was bugged.” She has never felt like such a bungler in her entire career. “Or if the driver was using one of those hearing enhancers.”
“You two were like goldfish in a shark tank,” Fiona says, nodding her head with certainty. She leans forward and pats Amaryllis on the knee with her freckled hand. “Listen, lovey, I wouldn’t quit my job over this. I’d stick around and see what becomes of the missing-person case. But, for Lord’s sake, be more careful of who you talk to.”
“I’m talking and I can’t shut up,” Amaryllis says, throwing up her hands. Then Fiona rockets to her feet, grabs some sheets from the hall closet and makes up a bed on her spare futon. All the while, her Irish accent lulls her friend into a sleepy state of mind.
“I’d worry about you if you went home with all those bad blokes lurking about,” Fiona says as she tucks in the last, hospital-neat corner of the futon.
“Well, I might as well put a Welcome mat outside the front door,” Amaryllis says. “It looks so easy to pick my locks, they might as well tote away all my boxes of junk, too.” Amaryllis is not eager to go home tonight. Not after the burglary and Garret being snatched away in the night.
As she snuggles into the floral-scented sheets, Amaryllis thinks of how much nicer Fiona’s apartment is than her own. But as comfortable as the surroundings are, she fidgets. Instead, her mind is speeding from subject to subject, first focusing on herself in Mexico, then imagining scenes of Garret tied up in a mobster’s trunk, then alighting on thoughts of faceless villains burglarizing her apartment. Her poor apartment. Newspapers pile high on the dining room table. A file cabinet bulges with folders full of useless paper—receipts and insurance forms she should have tossed with her last move.
She rolls over and tries to change the mental channel, but it’s stuck on domestic dowdiness and she can’t turn it off. The apartment, she decides, is just a reflection of her life in LA: spare, unfocused, and undernourished. She spends nearly every waking moment at work. She goes to the gym a couple times a week with Fiona, mainly to look at guys. She never dates. Well, hardly ever.
She flops onto her back and rearranges the pillow so that it cradles her neck. And what’s the deal with the men in this town? Don’t they want to talk about anything but films and acting? She groans in her chest as she remembers the last party Barney and his wife dragged her to. She dressed to the nines, fluffing up her luxurious fall of wavy brown hair, outlined her hazel eyes in kohl, and wore a silver miniskirt that showed off her long legs. The only man in the entire room who talked to her was a beach-blond pretty boy who asked what she did for a living. When she told him she was a reporter at the Star, he said, ‘Well, I hope you’re making it better,” and stomped off.
How do you talk to men like that? When was her last date? The pillow is poking into a cervical disc, so she pounds it flat.
What had she been covering before the Mexico story? Oh, yes, grandparents who had become parents all over again when their own sons of daughters were in jail or halfway houses. She’d spent a lot of time in South Central and Compton researching the story. The women would call at midnight with their stories and the whole experience was bringing Amaryllis to her knees emotionally. A rough story and no guy to share her tears or triumphs. Only plenty of praise from Wright. Big deal.
Deep down, she knows why she can’t find a man. To enter into a so
lid relationship will bind her to this city. And that she cannot bear. L.A., L.A. It just isn’t home and never will be. She’s a Chicago girl to her the marrow of her bones. She longs for it, a real city with neighborhoods filled with people who stick together, massive skyscrapers, Wrigley Field, and a landscaped lakefront. But she hasn’t been home in six years, not for a Christmas, not for a birthday. But she can’t go back now. Not now….
Somehow, between listening to sirens on the street and thinking of Aunt Freya’s homemade fudge, Amaryllis falls into deep dreams.
#
After a croissant and a friendly chat with Fiona in the morning, Amaryllis stumbles into her subcompact and drives up West Hollywood to her one-bedroom apartment. The Times sits on her doorstep side by side with the Star. Pulling the plastic wrap off the newspaper, she rips open the Times before she even sees the Star’s front section. On page three, Garret’s face peers out under a story headlined “Local freelance photog out of focus.”
The Times has every fact that the police had furnished—pretty much the sketchy truth—but at the end is a curious sentence: “Lucas was last working with a Star reporter on a touchy political story in Mexico.”
Where had that come from? Amaryllis opens the front door, and after a cursory check of the rooms, sits at her kitchen table, pushing aside enough clutter to spread the paper out flat. She thinks of calling Sandy Starr, whose name floats over the story. Sandy once worked in Metro news with her at the Star. They still get together for a quick burrito for lunch now and then. She goes halfway to her phone when she realizes her near blunder. Sandy knows something, and she is Times property now. It is the sad truth that if you cross the block, or the valley, your loyalties change. Amaryllis will tell Sandy plenty about a routine cop story—but not about her Mexican discovery.
Dateline: Atlantis Page 4