Aztec Sun

by Judith Arnold

  Was cocaine supposed to be stored in the refrigerator for freshness? Sandra had no idea. Some of the students at private school she’d attended had trifled with drugs. They’d been the rich kids, the ones with the perfect clothing and the Mercedes convertibles, the girls who lived to party, party, party. Sandra, the chicana scholarship student who’d waited on tables at her parents’ restaurant during school vacations, hadn’t been friendly with them. She’d never thought to ask them what temperature was best for storing cocaine.

  She heard the toilet flush yet again. She closed the refrigerator less than a second before Melanie waltzed out of the bathroom. Her face sparkled with residual water; her eyes looked as hard as diamonds. “Are you hungry?” she asked. “I’ve got some pineapple chunks here somewhere.”

  “No, that’s all right.” If Melanie wasn’t high on something, she was the most addled woman Sandra had ever met.

  She surveyed the mess one more time, searching for ideas, clues, anything, that would lead her in the right direction. A script, a framed photograph from home, anything.

  She spotted a fluffy teddy bear half hidden beneath the cushions scattered on the floor. “Oh, look at him! Isn’t he cute!” Sandra wasn’t the sort to go gaga over a stuffed animal, but she was desperate to spark a revelatory reaction from Melanie.

  Melanie reached the bear at the same time as Sandra. Melanie apparently wasn’t the sort to go gaga over teddy bears, either. She lifted the creature by one ear and tossed him onto the sofa. “Diego gave him to me.”

  “Why?”

  Melanie shrugged. “I told him I didn’t like roses. I think it was his way of making a pass at me.”

  “He must be sweet on you.” Sandra smiled conspiratorially.

  Not surprisingly, Melanie giggled. “Diego makes passes at anything with breasts. He probably goes into the supermarket and makes passes at the rotisserie chickens. Has he put the moves on you yet?”

  Sandra recalled his Spanish compliments and air kisses. “I guess he has, sort of. Nothing high-pressure, but he does have a way about him.”

  Melanie nodded. “He’s all right. He’ll do anything I ask. But I think that’s because he gets his marching orders from Rafael, and Rafael tells Diego to keep me happy. Now, if Rafael made a pass at me...” She drifted off with a sigh.

  “Has he?” The idea of Rafael setting his sights on Melanie caused jealousy to nip at Sandra. She had no right to feel that way. Rafael’s love life was nothing to her. Yet, for one irrational, inexcusable moment, she found herself longing to be the woman Rafael Perez made a pass at.

  “Damn the man. He acts like a monk around me,” Melanie complained, then giggled. This time Sandra did her the kindness of joining in. “I mean, he is sexy! Those eyes of his, you know? I’ve worked with sexy actors, and let’s face it—they look better on the screen than they actually are in real life. On A Touch of Madness, I could tell you stories... When you’re working with them, all you see is their pasty make-up, and you smell their bad breath, and you’ve got to pretend they’re turning you on. Now, that’s acting. But Rafael, there’s no make-up, nothing fake. I’d sacrifice my points on this picture just to get a glimpse of him without his shirt on. I mean, you look at him and it’s like the bottom of your stomach drops out. Do you know what I mean?”

  Sandra smiled. She knew too well what Melanie meant, but her sense of self-preservation would never allow her to admit it. “He seems awfully straight-arrow for someone in the film business,” she said.

  “That’s Rafael, all right. Too cool to get down in the mud with the rest of us. He has Diego get muddy instead. Diego’s primary responsibility is to keep me happy.”

  That was the third time Melanie had used that phrase. “When you say happy,” Sandra probed, “what exactly do you mean?”

  Melanie stared directly into Sandra’s eyes. Sandra could see the droplets of water glistening on Melanie’s chin, the raw skin edging her nostrils, the redness rimming her eyes. “Happy,” Melanie said, not a hint of a smile on her lips. “You know what I mean. Happy. Okay?”

  Sandra absorbed everything about the high-strung woman before her—the bloodshot eyes, the chapped nose, the short, shallow breaths Melanie took, the chalky skin stretched too tightly over her cheekbones and chin. Melanie looked wired, she looked intense, she looked slightly crazed—in fact, she looked anything but happy.

  It wasn’t enough to stake a story on. Sandra needed more. She needed to know specifically what Diego did to keep his star “happy,” and why Rafael Perez placed the burden of keeping Melanie “happy” on Diego while he himself refused to get down in the mud, and whether signing Melanie to an Aztec Sun contract had entailed more than simply hiring an actress to play a role.

  But damn, there could be a story in it, if Sandra got lucky. “Diego keeps you happy on Rafael’s orders,” she said carefully, seeking confirmation.

  “Diego would do anything for Rafael.”

  “I understand,” Sandra said, visualizing the letters lining up on her word processor, the words filling the monitor, the print filling the page. With her byline. Her story, so close she could practically taste it. “Thanks, Melanie. I understand.”

  ***

  “WHAT AM I, A NURSEMAID?” Diego glared at Rafael. He had to tilt his head back to meet Rafael’s gaze. It was only when they were standing toe-to-toe that the contrast between their heights seemed significant. Rafael was a shade over six feet tall, Diego a good three or four inches shorter. But what he lacked in height he made up for in anger as he confronted his boss.

  They rarely fought. They often disagreed, but fights—real fights—weren’t in the nature of their friendship. Rafael had known Diego practically forever, and only once had an argument between them led to bloodshed. That time, though, Diego had deserved every blow, every knuckle-bruising punch.

  It had been years ago. Rosa had gotten on with her life and Diego had earned back Rafael’s trust. They had forgiven each other, grown up, and learned to rely on each other.

  At present, Rafael was relying on Diego to keep close tabs on the reporter from the Post. And Diego wasn’t doing the job.

  “You don’t know where the hell she is,” Rafael said, his voice low and taut with rage. “You don’t know who she’s talking to, what she’s finding out—”

  “The only person who could possibly do us any damage is John Rhee. He’s pissed off. But he’d never breathe a word against you, Raf. You know that. We both know that. You gave him his first job, his chance.”

  “John isn’t the only person who could do us damage,” Rafael retorted, breaking from Diego and prowling around Diego’s office. It was smaller than Rafael’s but showier, the walls covered in gaudy art prints and the couch heaped with needle-pointed pillows. According to Diego, a different girlfriend had embroidered each one. He liked to identify them as if they were trophies: “This one was from Anna. This one came from that cute little tart, Corinne. That one with the poppies on it, from a lady named Catherine, a real zorra. I couldn’t get her a part in a movie, and she tried to scratch my eyes out. I have a scar,” he would boast, invariably pointing to a tiny mark near his left temple. Rafael suspected Diego had given himself the scar, but he never contradicted his friend’s story.

  His pacing took him to the collection of pillows. Diego knew how to handle a certain kind of woman—he knew how to get even a zorra to stitch him a pillow. But he couldn’t begin to comprehend a woman like Sandra Garcia, someone shrewd and smart and subtle.

  Sandra wanted something, too, but she’d never come right out and ask for it. And because she wouldn’t, Diego would never begin to suspect that she was on a quest.

  “You shouldn’t have invited her here while the movie was being shot. You should have waited until it was in the can and Melanie was no longer at Aztec Sun before you opened us up to the press.”

  Diego plucked a cigarette from the cherry-wood box on his desk and lit it with a torch-high flame from his lighter. “She wanted to come and wri
te about what a fine Latino citizen you are. She wanted to give you a few good inches in the Post. And hey, Raf, what man won’t take a few good inches when they’re offered?”

  Rafael ignored Diego’s lewd joke. “It could have waited. You ever hear of a closed set? No press until we say so?”

  “We need the press, Raf. It’s important.” He shrugged. “And anyway, I didn’t invite her. She invited herself. She saw the piece in Variety—”

  “You shouldn’t have placed that story in Variety, either.”

  “If I’d held it, it wouldn’t have been news. You give me a drop in the bucket for promotion, Raf. You give me shit to work with. I get you incredible coverage for the money.”

  “This movie has plenty of promotion money. But as long as we’ve got a crazy gringa going through withdrawal and giving our director all kinds of crap—”

  “Yeah,” Diego snapped, jabbing his cigarette into the air. “I’m supposed to take care of her, and I’m also supposed to take care of the Garcia chick, and meanwhile I’m supposed to be pushing through the other two projects we’ve got in development.”

  Rafael turned from the sofa and glowered at Diego. “Life is tough, eh? So much to do, so little time. You want to quit? Just put it in writing, in triplicate.”

  “Don’t play boss-man, Raf. You’d be dead without me, you know that.”

  Rafael knew he and Aztec Sun could survive well enough without Diego’s assistance. Other people could do the job Diego did—Carlotta, for instance. She said she didn’t want to be anything more than a secretary, but he paid her an executive salary and she earned every penny of it. She could probably slide into Diego’s position without any difficulty.

  But there had been a time, long ago, when Rafael would have died without Diego. And for that alone, Rafael would keep Diego at the studio for as long as he wanted.

  “You told me you could handle two women.”

  “I’ve handled more than two on occasion,” Diego bragged. “But Melanie takes a lot of handling. She was all over the set this morning. John hit the ceiling. I had to intervene before things got nasty.”

  “So you took off with Melanie and left the reporter to her own devices.”

  “I’m telling you, Raf—Sandra Garcia is under control. She’s fallen for my charm. No sweat, okay?”

  The thought of Sandra Garcia falling for Diego’s glib charm made Rafael’s stomach churn. He didn’t want to believe she was that superficial—even though he’d have a lot less to worry about if she was. “What did you do to calm Melanie down?” he asked, deciding his star’s mental state took precedence over an irksome reporter’s whereabouts.

  “I brought her back here, I gave her a drink and told her to unwind.”

  “A drink of what?”

  “Agua mineral. Stop being so suspicious, pal. If I wanted to cause you grief, I wouldn’t do it by giving your little blond starlet booze, okay? Lay off.”

  Rafael raked his hand through his hair, pushing the long, dark locks from his brow, and crossed to the office window, which looked out on the spark plug factory across the street. “Do you know where she is now?”

  “Melanie? She said she was going to have lunch in her trailer, and then get touched up to do the scene this afternoon.”

  “Not her. Sandra.”

  “Don’t worry.” Diego snubbed out his cigarette in a crystal ash tray—another gift from a fawning woman, Rafael recalled—and grinned. “She’s probably roaming around the studio, listening to everyone tell her what a swell guy you are. I put out the word, people can talk to her. Most folks around here have only nice things to say. You pay more than they do across the street.”

  Not at all reassured, Rafael turned from the window and moved to the door. “Find Sandra. Make sure she stays out of trouble.”

  “I’ll just use my famous charm,” Diego promised.

  Rafael clenched his teeth to keep from warning that when it came to Sandra Garcia, Diego had better keep his famous charm to himself. Diego was doing his job the best way he knew, and in any case it was none of Rafael’s business whether Sandra was captivated by Diego’s handsome face and smug personality.

  Still...he wanted to believe she was too intelligent to fall for his friend’s routine. He wanted to believe that the light he saw in her lovely brown eyes was the glow of wisdom, and the determination she revealed arose from inner strength. If she was all that wise and strong, he might find himself in a hell of a lot of trouble, but... He wanted to know that when he saw her and felt that tightness inside him, that sharp, unwelcome tug of desire, it wasn’t just her physical assets he was responding to but something more, something within her.

  The more there was to her, of course, the greater the risk that she would figure out what lay behind Melanie’s antics, or dig up dirt about Rafael’s past, about Ricardo and the dishonor that sat heavily on the family.

  That morning he’d arranged to send funds to cover Ricardo’s cigarettes. He’d also written checks for three local churches. As if one act could outweigh the other, as if he could salvage his soul and his brother’s by donating money to poor parishes. The priests hinted that he could, but he wasn’t convinced.

  And he wasn’t convinced that, as troublesome as she could be, as great a threat as she posed, he would have preferred never to have crossed paths with Sandra Garcia.

  ***

  WHAT DID SHE HAVE?

  She sat in her car in the gloomy subterranean garage of the Post building, her eyes closed and her fingertips tracing circles against her temples, as if she could unravel the snarls inside her skull and be left with a single smooth thread.

  She had a three-minute exchange with John Rhee, during which, in terse, aggressively tactful words, he had told her that working for Rafael Perez was an honor but working with Melanie Greer was a tribulation. “She needs a lot of attention,” he’d said. “I guess she’s Diego’s full-time job these days. She’s just very needy.”

  “Any opinions as to why?” Sandra had asked.

  “Lots of opinions,” the young director had admitted, tugging off his baseball cap and rearranging his shaggy hair under it. “But I think I’d better keep them to myself.”

  She’d driven back to the Post building and spent a couple of hours in the archives, culling the microfiche for anything the newspaper had ever written about Melanie Greer or Rafael Perez. Melanie Greer was mentioned a couple of times in the “Profiles” column that ran alongside the television listings: in one blurb she was quoted as saying that in her performances on A Touch of Madness she drew “from the deepest part of my psyche to find the emotional truth of my character,” and in the other she was mentioned as having shown up at last year’s Academy Awards ceremony on the arm of a well-known rock musician who wasn’t quite divorced.

  About Rafael Perez Sandra had found that, besides the movie reviews she’d read yesterday, a year ago he’d been the subject of a feature in the business section for his ability to produce consistently profitable movies. “His past remains shrouded in mystery,” the article reported. “Yet investors look at his track record and eagerly ante up. Said one investor who asked that his name not be used, ‘Who cares where he came from? So he grew up poor in the slums. This is America. Anyone can become anything if he’s willing to do what it takes.’”

  Where had Rafael Perez come from? Why didn’t anyone care? What had he been willing to do?

  She’d run a cross-reference on the name Perez and found dozens of stories in the pages of the Post. The name Perez in the Latino community was about as common as the name Smith in the Anglo community. Over the past few years, Perezes had been robbed, had won contests, had been photographed skateboarding in Venice. Five years ago, Angela Perez sued her employer for sexual harassment and won. Last spring in Downey, a little boy named Jason Perez was rescued from a burning building. In Santa Monica a special-education teacher named Gladys Perez won a grant to develop new strategies for working with dyslexic children. Shortly after Thanksgiving last year
, a thirty-seven year old punk named Ricardo Perez from East L.A. was sentenced to five years at the state prison in Chino for dealing drugs.

  Sandra had reread that item a few times. It had been buried at the back of the metro section with the rest of what she and Ella Connors called “daily miseries”—depressing three-graph articles about spouse beaters, Alzheimer’s patients who wandered away from nursing homes, neighborhood feuds over barking dogs, convenience store robberies and the like. All of it was news, all of it so pathetically mundane it was relegated to the back pages, squeezed among advertisements for retread tires and finance companies offering second mortgages. She’d spent her first year in Metro writing daily miseries before moving up to “serious” stories like the one Flannagan had assigned her to with Aztec Sun.

  After combing through the archives, she’d returned to her desk upstairs, where she remained long enough to tell Flannagan to go soak his head when he asked her if she’d taste his fast-food burrito and tell him if she thought the sauce had gone funny, and to make two phone calls. The first had been to Melanie’s agent, who described Melanie at length as a wonderful girl, as pure as the Kansas soil that had nurtured her. The second had been to an assistant director at A Touch of Madness, who told Sandra that Melanie could be “difficult” and she really had a lot to learn, but she had a good heart and he hoped Sandra would write nice things about her.

  “To your knowledge, has she ever fooled around with drugs?” Sandra had asked.

  The assistant director had answered, “All the girls take appetite suppressants. But there’s nothing illegal in that.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Um...off the record?”

  “Off the record.”

  “Um...” He’d hesitated for a long minute. “Let’s just say they had to use a little extra pancake on her nose sometimes.”

  It still wasn’t a story. Melanie Greer wasn’t even supposed to be the story; Rafael Perez was. So what if an actress was flaky, so what if her trailer looked like a toxic waste dump and she was rumored to have indulged in an occasional toot of cocaine?