City of Angels

by Kristi Belcamino

  The only thing I knew for sure was that it was my fault.

  The surfer boys were dead.

  I found out skimming through the LA Times before work on Thursday. The small news item made my heart leap into my throat.

  Two USC Students Found Slain in Malibu

  The article said Jonathan White and Charles O’Donnell were found in what “appeared to be a gang-style assassination”—bullets to the head. They were found in a VW bus parked in a Malibu beach parking lot. A young boy walking by the van had asked his dad why the van’s window was splattered with red Kool-Aid.

  I leaned over and dry heaved into a plastic bag I kept in my room for the trash. Sweat poured down my hairline. My hands trembled uncontrollably, making the paper shake and rattle noisily as I read on.

  The article said the students had been reported missing after they didn’t show up for college classes. Police were investigating whether it was a drug deal gone bad, since a small amount of marijuana was found in the vehicle.

  Oh God. My stomach crunched into a painful knot. It wasn’t a drug deal gone bad. I put my head in my hands and tried to regulate my breathing, which had gone wild. My heart was beating double time and I couldn’t catch my breath. I put my head down between my knees, feeling tingly and dizzy.

  The boys had been found in that parking lot where they surfed. Where Big Shot Director’s Jeep had seen us drive away. He had found the surfers and killed them or had someone kill them. Had the surfers told him where they had taken me? Of course they had. It was only a matter of time before Chad and Kozlak found me.

  I had a few hours before work, enough time to visit the police station one more time. I should tell the cops that Kozlak killed the surfer boys. But I had no proof. And I had practically zero faith in cops. They hadn’t helped me when my mom was gone and they hadn’t helped me when I told them about Rain. But I didn’t know where else to turn. I needed someone wise in the ways of the world to tell me what to do.

  I knocked on Sadie’s door.

  It was a gamble since she’d only started acknowledging I was alive this week, but I didn’t know who else to turn to.

  After I knocked a second time, I heard a faint, “Come in.”

  I pushed open the door. She was lying face down on her queen-size bed wearing only a silky nightgown. Her room smelled like expensive perfume and baby powder. She didn’t look up. I stood by the door uncertainly. On the floor was a tiny suitcase upside down, its contents—frilly lingerie and perfume—scattered. It was the first time I had been in her room. Eve was right, it was like a little girl’s fancy bedroom. She had a tiny white desk with a light green chair pulled up to it. Above it, there was a small shelf with books such as Black Beauty and Treasure Island. Her bed had white coverlets, bedside tables, and a canopy.

  She sat up, sniffling a bit more. Her eyes were red and puffy.

  “I thought you were going out of town,” I said, eyeing the dumped suitcase on the floor. She had taken a few days off work saying she was going away for New Year’s Eve, which I then realized had been the night before. I’d spent the night alone in my room with my curtain closed tight and my nose buried in a book. Happy New Year’s to me.

  Standing, Sadie briskly made herself busy, picking up the clothes and hanging them on a big rolling rack next to a small dresser. “Something came up.”

  That “something” was probably her married boyfriend flaking on her. I’d heard her complaining to another waitress about him the other day.

  “Listen, I need your advice.”

  “Shoot.” With her back turned to me, I told her about the surfers and Kozlak and everything. When I finished, Sadie had turned and was staring at me. She didn’t like me much, but I hoped she would at least give me some advice.

  “You think I should go to the cops?”

  “Forget the cop shop.” She stood and held her door open for me to leave. “They won’t do jack. They find out you’re seventeen; they’ll stick you in a foster home. You were lucky that didn’t happen last time you were there.”

  Despite Sadie’s advice, I needed to do something. I needed to something to help stop the guilty feeling crawling across my arms and scalp and making my stomach hurt. I scraped up a few quarters from a jar I kept my tip change in and headed to the gas station payphone. Looking around furtively, I shoved in a few quarters and dialed 911. I spoke fast, worried they could trace the call, which was a ridiculous fear.

  “9-1-1. What is your emergency?”

  “I know who murdered those two USC boys, the ones in the paper. A movie director named Dean Kozlak. Kozlak. Go investigate him. He did it.”

  I hung up before the operator could say a word.

  The police had let me down before, so I didn’t expect much, but maybe somebody would take it seriously. It wasn’t enough. The guilt was still there, gnawing away at my insides.

  All night at Little Juan’s on Thursday, I was a nervous wreck, jumping every time the big, heavy, oak front door opened, expecting Kozlak’s big white mane or Chad’s thin little blond ponytail. I was sure that before he killed them, Kozlak had got the surfers to confess they’d dropped us off at Al’s Bar. And if Big Shot Director knew I was in the neighborhood, what would stop him from visiting all the businesses in the area to look for me? What would stop everyone at the American Hotel from just giving me up, telling the director where I worked?

  I was also anxious for that homeless guy to walk in the door with information about Rain. I’d told the man under the bridge that I’d be working Thursday night. And as much as I tried to push back the gruesome image I had of the dead surfer boys, it was there just below the surface. The restaurant was crazy busy, with groups of people wandering around out front, waiting to be seated. The chaos was amplified when the karaoke machine was brought out and a bunch of old guys took turns crooning Mack the Knife and Bennie and the Jets.

  A group of men at the bar started getting rowdy, hooting and hollering and snapping their fingers at Sadie to serve them. One guy, with thinning hair and a bushy moustache, had drunk so much he kept slipping off his stool, catching himself before he fell on the ground. I’d seen him before even though Sadie was always the one to wait on him. He was always falling down drunk and at the bar nearly every night. Tonight, I was delivering some nachos to a guy at the bar when the guy with the moustache started getting obnoxious.

  “Hey, Sadie, how’s about those chips?” His voice was slurred and his eyes bloodshot.

  “Told you, Ernie. Aren’t ready. Nothing I can do about it.”

  “How’s about if I show you this? What then? Can I have chips then?” He unzipped a fanny pack sitting on the bar wide enough to reveal the shiny silver handle of a gun. He started laughing with all his friends, who were slapping him on the back.

  “No,” Sadie said, unfazed. “But if I tell Amir what you did, he’s going to eighty-six you.”

  “Aw, I was kidding.”

  I followed Sadie into the kitchen. “Oh my God, that guy had a gun.”

  “That’s just Ernie,” she said over shoulder, surprising me by answering. “Total moron when he’s drunk. Unfortunately, he’s always drunk. Him and his friends at the bar are all LAPD.”

  “LAPD? They’re cops?”

  Sadie clipped a new food order up on a metal shelf and scooped a paper-lined basket deep into some steaming tortilla chips the cooks had dumped into a huge bin.

  “Here, this is for table four,” she said, handing me the chips and muttering, “The idiot cops cause more problems than the gangbangers.”

  Gangbangers? I’d been here for a while and had never seen any gangbangers. At least I didn’t think I had. Before I could ask more, Sadie launched into a story about Ernie and some bar fight he got into with another cop—a woman detective. They were both drunk and screaming at each other. Ernie tried to leave, but the detective followed him into the men’s bathroom. She clocked him in the face and he fell, hitting his head. There was blood everywhere. Amir called 911, but Ernie ba
iled before the ambulance got here. The bar was dead for a week except for two men in suits who were from LAPD internal affairs, investigating the fight. The female cop got off scot-free. Ernie was still on probation.

  “Everyone knows Ernie’s just a drunk screw-up,” Sadie said.

  “Doesn’t that bother you, having to wait on drunk cops who show you their guns when they want something and get in fights?” I was so surprised she was talking to me, I was almost afraid to ask her anything.

  “No, as long as they tip me,” she said. “You haven’t been around much, have you?” She barreled out of the kitchen, balancing four burning hot plates. “Besides, I’ve seen worse than that.”

  “Like?”

  “When I lived in New York, some guys broke into our penthouse and tied up my boyfriend and me. Thought I was a goner, but they bailed when they found our drugs.”

  “Oh,” I said, trying to digest that. She misread my look.

  “I don’t do any of that shit now. I’m clean as a whistle. In fact, I’ve been straight for sixteen months now.”

  “Did you live in a bad area of New York?”

  “Only if you consider Fifth Avenue a bad area,” she said, and walked away. I let that sink in before scrambling to catch up to her.

  After being a bitch and ignoring me for the past few weeks, Sadie had finally warmed up. Go figure. And boy, did she have a lot to tell. By the end of the night, I learned that Sadie had once been a cover girl. No wonder she looked familiar. Her face had graced magazines around the world and her rich suitors thought nothing of chartering private jets for her Parisian shopping sprees. I could see traces of that one-time beauty with her long legs, carved cheekbones, and pouty full lips. But now she had dark circles under her eyes and a grayish, tired pallor to her skin. She told me she was twenty-two, but she seemed older.

  I asked how she ended up at the American Hotel, which seemed like such a slummy slide from a Fifth Avenue penthouse.

  “Shit happens. But I’m not sticking around here long. I’m saving my money. My boyfriend and I are moving to the west side. Waitresses there make thirty grand a year.”

  I kept thinking about what Sadie said about Ernie. Did “drunk screw-up” equal crooked cop, someone who might help me find Rain by unorthodox methods?

  So, for the rest of the night, when I wasn’t keeping an eye out for Kozlak, Chad, or that homeless guy, I steeled myself to approach the cop. Finally, he got up to use the bathroom and I cornered him in the hall. He turned. I stood frozen, unable to form four little words. He was about to turn away. It was now or never.

  “I need your help.” I stuttered a bit, but somehow made a complete sentence.

  He looked at me out of the corner of one eye as if he were suspicious I was going to ask him to do something untoward.

  “My friend. She’s missing. I’m worried…” I paused. This was the part I had been afraid to say out loud or even admit to myself. “I’m worried she’s dead somewhere—her body unidentified in some morgue—and no one will ever know. You can check stuff like that, right?”

  The words tumbled out with a sob I hadn’t known was there. I swallowed hard and looked down. When I looked up, Ernie’s eyes seemed less bloodshot and more focused.

  “What’s her name?” He stroked his bushy moustache and ran his hand back over his thinning hair.

  “Rain. She’s twelve, only about this high, and has pink streaks in her hair.”

  He nodded with his lips pressed together and made his way past me into the men’s room. I sat there, dumbfounded, as the door to the bathroom swung shut behind him. Was he going to help or not? Looking around, I pushed open the door to the men’s bathroom, keeping my eyes on the floor, “So…are you gonna help me or not?”

  There were a few seconds of silence before he gave a loud sigh.

  “I don’t know yet.”

  I let the door slam closed.

  Ernie left shortly after. I still jumped every time the big, heavy, oak front door opened. Right before ten o’clock, as we were cleaning up and preparing the restaurant for the next day, I spotted a figure standing outside the front door. I hurried outside. This man was a different one than the older guy I had spoken with under the bridge. I reared back. This guy had a stocking cap pulled low, hood pulled up, and jacket zipped up to his nose, big eyes peering out at me.

  “You looking for the girl?”

  I nodded. He seemed skittish, glancing over his shoulder every few seconds as I spoke to him. He seemed more scared of me than I was of him.

  “Do you want to come in and have something to eat? I was about to eat my dinner.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t want nobody to see me here.”

  “Okay. Hold on. I’ll be right out.”

  Inside, I grabbed the food I had bagged for my next day’s lunch, added a few more tacos and an extra load of chips and headed out front. I handed him the bag, “This is for you and your friend.”

  “Frank?”

  That must have been the name of the older guy with the mahogany wrinkles.

  “Yes, Frank. What’s your name?”

  He ignored my question. “Let’s go over here,” he said, walking over to an area in shadows. I was still a little nervous so I stayed under the circle of the streetlight a few feet away. The smell of fresh tortilla chips in my bag was making my mouth water. I didn’t know how often this guy ate, but I was surprised he hadn’t torn into the bag right away. Instead, he sat the bag down on a low wall beside him. “I seen your friend,” he said in a stage whisper. “I seen her lots of times a few weeks ago.”

  I came closer. He leaned over and whispered louder. “Yeah. I seen her the other night. She was talking to that dude in that big black car that’s been cruising around downtown. You know the one?”

  “Yes,” I said in excitement. “Do you know who that car belongs to?”

  He looked over his shoulder again before he said something I didn’t hear.

  “Excuse me?”

  Again he looked both ways before answering, a little louder this time. “I said, that dude is bad news.”

  My heart sunk at the same time I felt a surge of adrenaline. He knew the mystery man. “What do you mean? My friend got in that car. Who is he?” I searched his eyes, but the shadows hid his expression.

  “When girls get in that car, they don’t ever come back.” He stared at me as he said it.

  “What do you mean? I don’t understand.”

  “I hear things from my girl who works the streets up on Sunset. She say they into some evil, deranged shit.”

  “They? Who are they? What do you mean ‘they’?” My voice grew shrill.

  A car passed and its lights flickered over us, sending the man cowering deeper into the shadows. I followed, afraid myself until I saw it was a small sedan with a crushed fender and Bondo on it, a vehicle that neither Big Shot Director nor Chad would be caught dead driving.

  “I gotta go. Thanks for this,” the man said, and picked up the bag of food from the small stone ledge he’d been sitting on.

  “Wait. Do you want some money? Is that why you won’t tell me? Here’s twenty bucks.” I thrust the money toward him, but he ignored it. “How can I find them? Who are they? Please, you have to help me!” I was begging, but he kept walking. “Can’t you give me any more information? Anything? At least tell me your name?”

  He didn’t turn around. The people in the beat-up car must have been lost because they did a U-turn and started heading back our way. Momentarily blinded by their headlights, I put my hand up to shield my eyes. When I turned back, the man was gone—he had dissolved into the shadows.

  I kicked the curb in frustration. Then I noticed something on the ledge where the man had picked up the bag of food. It was a book with a picture of a super nova exploding on its cover. The book was called Insights.

  Right before eight on Friday, I stood poised to knock on Taj’s door, staring at my hand raised in the air. I didn’t know why I was so nervous. It wasn’t
a big deal. We were just going to listen to some music.

  I was also nervous about whether Danny was inside that room. Every time I thought about how I had spoken to him, my stomach hurt.

  I double checked my jacket pocket to make sure I had my cigarettes and finally rapped on the door.

  “It’s open.” Taj’s voice sounded very far away.

  I twisted the knob. A hodge podge of old candles lined the hallway before me. One room lay to my right then the hallway appeared to open up into the second room at the end. “Back here.” He sounded distracted. Maybe eight meant eight thirty or something.

  The first room, which must have been John’s room, had a Mexican blanket crumpled on an old mattress and a poster of Jim Morrison taped to the wall. A display of various bongs—red, blue, and yellow—lined the floor under the windowsill. Clothes and overflowing ashtrays covered every other inch of the bare floor. The whole apartment smelled like guys—like spicy aftershaves and cigarettes and stale coffee.

  It was quiet. I followed the trail of dripping candles that led into the back room. Taj was alone.

  He sat at a small desk in the corner near the window, scribbling into a black sketchbook. His messy hair stuck up even more than usual and I soon saw why as he forcefully ran his fingers through it. He looked up and seemed confused why I was there, which made me squirm.

  “Where are John and everyone else?” I asked.

  “Huh? Oh, they’re all at Eve’s smoking some new bud from Amsterdam or something.” He seemed distracted, half turned toward me, but his eyes kept wandering back to his sketchbook. He kept writing in the big black book. I could see from across the room that his handwriting was neat and precise. A skateboard and a baseball bat were propped against the wall near his desk.