She pulled a Marlboro Lights pack out of her jacket.
“You mind?”
“Go ahead.”
She cracked the window a little and blew the smoke out. Jimmy stole a look over and saw the reflection of Erin’s face in the dirty glass—pretty, but uneasy—floating silently over the streets of LA. She brushed a thin strand of hair off her eyes and looked out into the city—brightly lit stores selling 50’s furniture; valet parkers in their red vests standing at attention in front of one trendoid restaurant after another; two ancient homeless guys, one black, one white, shuffling along with shopping carts overflowing with cans; three ultra-real, ultra-sexy mannequins on the curb outside Trashy Lingerie leaning over into traffic, their perfect but plastic breasts barely covered in tiny green bras. All of it drifting under the reflection of Erin’s soft, sad face.
The Chateau’s lobby was nearly empty. A guy dancing an unlit cigarette in his mouth hurried past them with a pony-sized Great Dane. Behind the desk was a clerk in a Nehru jacket—so far out of fashion Jimmy figured that it must be the cutting edge of fashion. He had very short bleached blonde hair and blue-tinted, tiny, round John Lennon glasses. But what the Beatle had for them was worthless. He searched the computer and came up with the earth-shattering news that the room was charged on Mark Lodge’s Amex card.
“He ever stay here before?” Jimmy said.
“No.”
“He make any impression on you?”
“Impression?”
“Yeah. Was the guy happy? Sad? Pissed off? Anything?”
“In truth—I can’t remember him at all.” He looked at Jimmy with a barely perceptible sneer. The kid was pissing him off. The pecking order around here was pretty obvious. Jimmy was only a lowly cop—a cop who’d taken two bullets, arrested a battalion of child abusers, pimps, and murdering assholes, and on the other side of the desk was coolness incarnate—an actor, model, singer, whatever, wannabe. He may be a twelve-buck-an-hour desk clerk, but he got to print the hotel bills for the stars. And that gave him the right to look down on bottom-crawling cops.
“He was here, right?” Erin said.
“Sure. There were about a hundred cops taking out his body.”
“But he checked in here. At the desk. With you?”
“He’s registered. But you have to understand, with our clientele, no one is going to remember someone like that.”
“Like what?” Erin said.
“Vanilla.”
“Print me a copy of his bill,” Jimmy said.
They went into the huge, nearly-deserted kitchen—and the instant they came in, the back screen door bounced shut as two waiters in white jackets ran out. Jimmy followed fast after them—scooting around tables and room service carts, racing for the door, passing a rail-thin chef at the grill who barked “Fuck!” and stared at him with venom. Jimmy made it to the doorway to see the two guys disappear down the hill and into the night. Uncatchable.
Jimmy turned back around. The kitchen was something out of the thirties, with glass cabinets and floral-pattern tiles everywhere. On a long, pale-yellow tile counter, a small TV was playing a soccer game with an announcer screaming in Spanish. The chef, a tall scraggy guy with a blonde goatee that hung past his chin, and a barbed wire wrap tattoo on his upper arm, paced by the grill.
“Fuck a duck!,” he said, throwing his spatula onto the counter. “Now who’s gonna take this shit upstairs. You, buddy?”
“Sorry, man,” Jimmy said.
“Bet you are.”
“Hey. We’re LAPD, okay?
“Oh. Thanks for telling me. Why do you think they ran like dogs?”
“You tell me.”
“Fucking obvious.”
“People with nothing to hide don’t bolt like that,” Jimmy said.
“What do they gotta hide? They’re makin’ five ninety-five an hour bringing trays to rooms that rent for seven hundred and fifty a night. That’s what they gotta hide. Fuck a duck.”
He slammed a plate on the table in front of him. Jimmy could feel himself getting pissed, but Erin jumped in.
“It’s not green card stuff,” she said. “All we want is to ask them about the night the guy was killed. His last supper came from room service.”
“That’s all?”
“All. After that, they can work here forever as far as we’re concerned.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Then stick around. They need the bucks. They’ll be back.”
Nice job, Jimmy thought.
The Chateau pool was lit by half a dozen flood lights below the surface turning the water a cool, pale blue. It was too cold for anyone to swim, and Jimmy and Erin sat at the edge on green iron chairs. Over a tall hedge, there was a model photo shoot in the hotel driveway and one flash after another heated up the night sky, like they were next to a war—too far to hear the exploding bombs, but close enough to see the flashes. Every so often faint voices of drunken laughter could be heard going into cottages on the hill behind them—but mostly it was quiet. In front of them, past the pool, was the Sunset Strip and the lights of the city.
Jimmy glanced over at Erin and wondered what to say. He had to say something—or did he? He could avoid it altogether. That’s what most of the guys were doing, and he was tempted to do it himself—but he thought it would be crummy, and it was exactly what the guys did to him about Rancher. On the other hand, what if she didn’t want to talk about it?
“I heard you were off for awhile?” he said.
“You know what happened?”
“Kind of. I’m sorry.”
This was tough for him. Then he got mad at himself. Tough for him? How about her?
“How long? … Sorry, bad question.”
“It’s okay. He lived for four months.”
“Sorry.”
“They were a good four months. I tried to make them good anyway. You want to see a picture?”
“Sure.”
Erin passed him a small photo of her baby from her date book. He was beautiful, with a sweet round face and wisps of light blonde hair. Erin was cradling him in her arms as she sat in a rocking chair in the infant ICU. As Jimmy held the picture he could sense Erin’s sad eyes looking over at the photo too.
“He looks just like you.”
“Yeah. I always thought so. His name was Timmy.” She smiled a little.
“You got any more pictures?”
“Really?”
She reached into her date book and seemed to freeze up for a moment.
“You okay?” Jimmy said.
“It’s nothing.”
“Sure?” He noticed a bit of white paint on her right thumb which she was subtly rubbing off with the other hand.
“No. Not really. But you don’t wanna hear it, right?”
“No. Tell me.”
“It’s just … you know … It’s with you all the time … He was the most wanted baby ever. And before he was born, I painted his room with pictures of farm animals—friendly faces of sheep, ducks and cows to wake up and go to sleep to. But he was born with these big problems. And instead of us taking him home, we were meeting with heart surgeons, a lung expert, kidney doctors. Two days after he was born he was operated on, for six hours. And three weeks later they did it again. For even longer. It’s the worst feeling in the world, waiting while your child is in the operating room. But he was a tough guy and hung in there until he couldn’t hang on any longer. I just about lived at the hospital, holding him all day while he slept, as I fed him, as the nurses changed his IV’s. He didn’t have a long life, but it was filled with love, and in his own way I think he loved us back. Well, today, since I was coming back on, I went into my baby’s room, which he never saw, and I took down the crib and painted over the pictures of the animals.”
They sat in silence for a moment. She turned back to him, her face lit by a gently moving blue light, reflected from the pool.
“You have kids?”
“A boy. Sixtee
n.”
He looked back down at the baby’s picture. Jimmy didn’t know why—he never knew the baby, and this was his first conversation with Erin longer than two minutes in the stationhouse hallway—but he felt his eyes becoming moist, and he was glad it was too dark out here for her to tell.
She took out her pack of smokes, but then put it away. “Trying to stop,” she said.
“Been there.”
“But you did it. Not like me. How long did you smoke?”
“Only fifteen years plus. I started when I was a kid.”
“You miss it?”
“I miss the way it sorta punctuates the day. No matter what happened at work or anything else, before I’d go to bed, I’d go outside and have a smoke. Every night. It was great.”
“I do the same thing. But Rick thinks I should be able to stop.”
“He never smoked?”
“No. He’s this serious athlete and all. He thinks you should have enough control over your body to quit. When I was pregnant I stopped. It was actually pretty easy. But at the hospital, when the baby was sleeping, I’d go to this nice little courtyard they had there, smoke, and think about the baby. Sometimes I’d try to get Rick to come outside and talk. But it never happened.”
“Know how that is.”
“The person wanting to talk? Or the one not saying a word?”
“Both. But mostly the one who should’ve been talking, but wasn’t.”
She turned towards him. Their eyes met for a moment, as though she didn’t know whether or not to go on. It was quiet. Only the distant rumble of traffic from the Strip. Erin smoked. Jimmy wanted to say more. He wanted to talk about Rancher. It was different, he knew. But pain is pain. He wondered if Erin was the person to talk to about him. No one else was. Jimmy turned to her—then heard a noise by the kitchen. The screen door swung open, and both waiters were back, each with a can of Tecate.
Seconds later, Jimmy, with Erin just behind, came into the kitchen. The waiters looked over in a panic, but then held still, seeing they had no place to run. One was about twenty. The other was a couple of years younger.
“Okay. Okay. I go with you,” the older one said.
“Hold on,” Jimmy said. “We’re not migra, we’re LAPD.”
“It’s about the man who was killed,” Erin said.
“The governor friend?”
“Close enough,” Jimmy said. “You brought an order up to him the night he died, right?”
“I no give it to him, sir.”
“You went to room 310?”
“Si. But I no give it to him.”
“Yeah? Who’d you give it to?”
“The girl.”
“Girl? What girl?” This was news.
“She took the tray. Gave me good tip.”
“What did she look like?”
“Brown hair. Long. She pretty.”
“How old was she?”
“Dunno, sir.”
“Take a guess.”
“Sixteen—fifteen?”
“How tall?”
“Dunno. Not big. Not tiny.”
“Anything else you can remember about her?”
“No, sir.”
“How about you,” Jimmy said to the other waiter, “You see her?”
“No, señor.”
“Sir, there was something,” the older waiter said.
“What?”
“I do remember something about her. She was wearing two earrings in both ear.”
Jimmy laughed. The waiter looked at him.
“Señor?”
“No. You just gave me a description which only fits two thousand girls in Hollywood.”
“No señor. She was muy pretty. No like every girl.”
Jimmy looked at Erin. She gave him a shrug.
“Thanks, guys.” Jimmy and Erin went for the door. The waiters followed them. Jimmy stopped by the door and turned back around.
“Help you?”
The waiters got it. They were happy. Jimmy had next to zero. On the other hand, all that garbage about working alone, it was just that—garbage. As they walked through the Chateau courtyard, Jimmy looked at Erin and thought, she was beautiful, she was sweet. He liked talking with her, and she had a heart the size of the Chateau. He wondered, if there was any chance? He had Dani, and things were okay there. And after what she had just been through, Erin was a definite no. Any chance?—no chance.
13
Casey
Casey followed the boy from the alley up the narrow path beside Laurel Canyon Boulevard. There was no sidewalk, and the road, which twisted through the Hollywood Hills, was so steep her thighs throbbed. She was nearly out of breath. The boy’s name was Paul. He barely knew her, but thanks to him, she was wearing red high-tops, too big, but it was the best they could come up with at the 24-hour Thrifty’s. He also bought her a pink sweatshirt with Hollywood written in swirling multi-colored glitter. It was about as far from cool as you could get. She didn’t care, it was cheap and a million times warmer than the stupid tube top Dennis had forced her to wear. Best of all, her stomach was full from a strawberry-banana smoothie.
While they were in the smoothie place, Casey looked right at him and said, “Why are you being so nice to me?”
“Look, you’re driving down the street and see a dog wandering around without a collar—”
“Thanks.”
“Okay, a cute Labrador Retriever puppy,” he said with a smile. “You stop. Try and find the owner, give him some food and water. Anyone would do it.”
“Anyone like you.”
“You’d do it, too.”
And as she pushed through the high weeds lining the canyon road, she thought Paul had done more for her in the last hour than all of the other people in her life who claimed they loved her but really didn’t give a shit at all, had ever done. The path widened a bit, and Casey walked beside him.
“How’d you end up here?” she said.
“Same as everyone. Stupid shit.”
Casey looked at Paul, wanting him to tell her. He turned away and kept moving up the hill. “It’s boring,” he said.
“But you wanna be here, right?”
“Sure. Where else am I gonna go?”
They turned off Laurel Canyon and went up a smaller road, deep into the canyon. It was even steeper, with huge trees alongside it. The trees had a nice smell, eucalyptus, and the noise of the main road faded away. They passed houses jammed into the hillside. A lot of them had picture windows and the lights still on. In one house, with a smoking chimney, five or six women in their twenties sat around a table crowded with wine glasses and bottles, laughing. Next door, in a house that looked like it was made of glass, she saw two girls a little older than her, playing pool and listening to the old Rolling Stones song Ruby Tuesday which slipped through the glass walls. At the corner, they passed an elementary school surrounded by the hills of the canyon. Casey read the school’s name, and thought, they sure got that right—Wonderland.
Just past the school was a weed-covered piece of hill surrounded by a chain-link fence. There was a sign with some construction company’s name, but there wasn’t any building going on that she could see. Paul went to the corner of the fence and, by taking off a couple of rusty rings, opened a space wide enough for them to slip through.
“It’s not a suite at the Chateau Marmont …” he said with a smile.
“But it’s perfect,” Casey said.
It was. There was no Dennis, no anybody, ruling over her life, forcing her to do what they wanted—not what she wanted. Paul led her to the top of the hill, and when she looked back, she was in awe. Below her were millions and millions of glistening lights that went on forever. Towards the ocean, there were actually searchlights crisscrossing the sky, like for the premiere of a movie that you see in the movies. In the far distance, an endless line of tiny planes slipped lower in the sky and turned their landing lights on as they descended into the airport. For the first time, Casey thought LA was beautif
ul.
“Los Angeles—you know the name means?” Paul asked.
“Something about angels?”
“Yeah. It means City of Angels—but if you ask me it’s more like the gates of hell.” Casey nodded. She just met him, but everything he said was right.
Casey slept on the cold, wet, grass with one of Paul’s blankets wrapped tight around her. It was freezing and every fifteen minutes—sometimes less—she would wake up shivering. Each time she did, she caught another glimpse of the city and heard Paul’s words echoing in her head—the gates of hell. Finally, she fell asleep for good.
Something soft and fuzzy tickled her nose, waking her. It also smelled good. Casey opened her eyes and had to smile. Paul was giving her a sugar mustache with a powdered doughnut. He also had two enormous cups of coffee.
“You called for room service?”
“Awesome! Where’d you get it?”
“They’re building a house a couple of blocks away. A food truck comes for the construction guys.”
She sat up and scarfed down the doughnut. A fog hung over the canyon, and through the mist she could hear faint voices of children as they were being dropped off at Wonderland. She sipped her coffee and knew she had survived. She’d been beaten, she’d been raped. She was sore all over. But she had survived. Yesterday, she never felt so weak, now she was stronger. A lot stronger. She was ready to put all of this behind her.
As she laced her high-tops, she said, “If I just keep going downhill, I’ll end up in Hollywood, right?”
“Sure. But where are you going?”
“Home.”
“Home?”
“I’m gonna find a phone and beg my mom to give me enough money for a ticket back.”
“And you’re really gonna go back?”
“I’m not staying here,” she said.
“You really sound like you mean it.”
What was he saying?—she did mean it. “I’m gone,” she said.
“Sure you are.”
“I am.”
“See ya.”
Paul turned away and rolled up his blanket.
“Hey … thanks,” she said, “without you … I don’t know what would’ve happened to me. I way owe you. But I gotta go.”
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