Stacy and I were the two biggest sluts in school. As fellow pariahs often do, we formed an immediate alliance. She was a redhead, a tiny freckled thing with mosquito-bite tits and a big mouth. Unlike me, she was a hard drinker from a long line of Irish drinkers and could put away more straight liquor in one night than most guys twice her size. If you measured her from the crown of her teased up mane of red Irish curls to the bottom of her spike-heeled boots, she was my height, around five seven. Fresh out of the shower with bare feet, she was more like four eleven. Maybe 100 pounds, tops. She was my partner in crime. The first girl I ever kissed. She used to call me her getaway driver. We were like Siamese twins for the last year of high school and the two years that followed. We had some wild times, me and Stacy. Stacy loved guys in bands and there wasn’t a venue in the state of Illinois where she couldn’t get backstage. It had been her idea to hook up with an L.A. band and go to Hollywood to make dirty movies. Party with rock stars on the Sunset Strip, buy matching convertibles and never have to wear winter coats over our sexy outfits ever again. We had everything all planned out. A band from Los Angeles was coming through that June. We would take only one bag each, whatever money we had saved, and our best high-heeled boots. It was going to be a grand adventure. Then Stacy got knocked up.
She had no idea who the father was, but as cheerfully sinful as she had always been, she was genuinely terrified of going to hell if she had an abortion. Within a week of the failed pregnancy test, she had some sap all set to marry her and take care of the kid. All our foolish dreams meant nothing now that there was a baby to think about. Something about the resigned look on her face when she told me it was best if we didn’t hang out anymore hurt worse than any guy who’d ever dumped me.
I packed my things. I had to get out, before having a baby and settling down into the tar started sounding like a good idea to me, too.
I went to that concert alone and I got myself backstage. I threw everything in my arsenal at the handsome singer and he took the bait even though I knew he could see the hook. He was a good lover and he was gracious enough to let me hitch a ride with the band back to Los Angeles. I won’t kiss and tell, but that band went on to become hugely famous, then widely reviled and ridiculed, and then famous again. The singer and I stayed in touch; we’re still good friends. Not Stacy. I haven’t heard from her since the day she told me we couldn’t hang out anymore. Come to think of it, her failed pregnancy test would now be old enough to do porn.
“You done?” Malloy asked, pulling me gently back into the present.
I looked down at the remains of my fruit salad.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Right,” Malloy said, pulling out his wallet and signaling the waitress.
That reminded me of something I’d meant to do since I woke up in Ulka’s dungeon. Something that would make me feel just a tiny bit less dependent on Malloy. Something that would make me feel a little more like me again.
I’d kept a storage locker on Haskell and Roscoe by the Budweiser plant ever since the Northridge earthquake back in ’94. I had just bought my house the year before and luckily it didn’t suffer any major damage, but that quake scared the piss out of me. Hence, this storage locker. A secret stash of just-in-case that no one knew about but me. Even though I’d had no idea anything like this could ever happen, I’d still had it in my head that I needed the place to be a secret, so I’d rented it under a fake name. That was back when it was still easy to do that kind of thing, before the whole 9 /11 business. I paid yearly in cash and never caused any trouble. Kept a fat combination lock on it so there was no key to lose. Just in case.
Inside the storage locker was exactly the sort of junk you expect to find in storage lockers. A few boxes. Some books. An old lamp. A trio of vintage hats. A blocky toy robot that used to light up but didn’t anymore. An ugly, floral-print easy chair. Nothing to make a casual observer look twice. Nothing boost-worthy. But the boxes, marked with red Sharpie letters that read things like “Hot Rollers,” “Kitchen” and “Photos,” actually contained bottled water, military MRE rations, a Swiss army knife, a flashlight, extra batteries, a first aid kit and several rolls of toilet paper.
If you actually sat in that ugly chair, you’d find it extremely uncomfortable. The chair’s lumpy seat cushion had a zippered cover that could be removed for cleaning. The zipper was rusty and cantankerous but when you unzipped it, you would find several items stuffed in with the crumbling yellow foam rubber. First, a Saran-wrapped stack of cash adding up to two grand. Enough to smooth things out in a emergency where bank access was impossible, but not more than I could afford to lose if anything should happen to compromise this place. Then, if you reached in deeper, you’d encounter a more recent, post-9 /11 addition: a scruffy old Smith and Wesson .40 caliber pistol that wasn’t nearly as nice as my stolen Sig and about which I knew very little other than a disreputable acquaintance’s assurance that it was untraceable. I had never fired it. I cleaned and oiled it when I came to rotate out the water, batteries or food but in my mind it was really nothing but another piece of my just-in-case juju. I had been thinking earthquake, riots, terrorists. Never in a million years did I imagine that I would be planning on using that gun to commit premeditated murder.
Because when you get right down to it, that’s what this was all about, wasn’t it? I mean, sure, I was going along with Malloy on this whole Nancy Drew song and dance, snooping around and trying to put the pieces together to figure out what the hell was going on, but what I was really doing was biding my time until the time came to even the score. I didn’t want to find myself face to face with Jesse or his boss without a way to make them pay for what they did to me.
I pulled out the box of bullets I had also stuffed into the chair cushion and carefully loaded the unfamiliar clip. I didn’t feel comfortable with the loaded gun in any of my pockets or down the waistband of my pants like some TV gangster, so I dug out a nylon duffel bag from the clutter and put the pistol, the bullets and the cash into one of its interior zippered pockets.
As I turned to go, I found my gaze traveling over the assortment of dusty items around me. It was just a bunch of useless junk, bought at thrift stores as set dressing to cover up the real purpose of the locker, but I realized in that moment that those things were the only personal things I owned that I still had free access to. I picked up the little robot with a hollow kind of feeling in my stomach. It was old, but not old enough to be collectable. Just some cheap plastic Korean thing with a squat boxy body and stubby square arms and legs. The colored lights in its chest were dark and useless and the shiny silver coating on the gray plastic was starting to peel around the joints. I remembered buying that robot at the Salvation Army store for a dollar. Now this cheap broken robot some kid didn’t want anymore was pretty much all I had left. Before I could think too much about it, I stuck the little robot in my duffel bag and got the hell out of there. I didn’t tell Malloy about the robot. Or the gun.
16.
What came next was something I had been dreading, for a complex variety of reasons. Malloy and I went back and forth over the issue of the security tapes in the Daring Angels building on Vesper. In the end we decided that there was no way to get around me going with him. He knew a lot of my girls, but not all of them. I needed to be the one to see the tape and ID the people who’d come and gone in the seven hours between when Lia left and when I did. I had been more than willing to let the whole thing slide and concentrate on finding Lia but Malloy seemed hell-bent on finding that damn briefcase.
“You can bet everyone’s gonna be keeping an eye on that place,” Malloy said. “Cops and crooks. Now I’m good with the former so far, but not so much with the latter. The guy who got away in Vegas clearly hasn’t figured out who I am yet because we haven’t had any visitors at my place but if he’s the one they have on the Vesper Avenue location there’s gonna be trouble.”
I nodded, wordless. The familiar lowbrow landscape of Van Nuys Boulevard scrolled by out
side the passenger window, as distant and meaningless as a swimmy rear projection in a old black and white movie. I must have driven up and down this street a thousand times, four days a week for nine years. Now it felt sort of like watching home movies from when I was a kid, or watching my first scene with Marco Pole. It felt unreal.
Malloy made the right turn onto Archwood, just past Vanowen and I felt a wash of anxiety. He passed the Vesper Avenue building twice, scoping the block. Looking for surveillance, I supposed, but I just couldn’t seem to make myself concentrate. I was lost in the middle of this sudden, vicious gang rape of memories. The past was a bully that day and there were so many memories connected to that place, so much personal history.
When I started Daring Angels back in 1997, I had been doing dirty videos for nine years. I was tired of the on-camera grind and I had this strange, almost superstitious fear of that tenth year that I still can’t quite explain. I guess I didn’t want to spend a full decade of my life making ooh-baby in front of a camera. For the last couple of years before I retired, so many younger women had come to me, asking for advice, for backup, for help navigating the shark-infested waters of the smut racket. Eventually my friends started joking that I ought to charge for my advice. As that dreaded tenth year loomed closer and closer, I stopped laughing and started planning.
I remembered going to look at the hot, echoey space that would eventually be the Daring Angels office, sneezing from the construction dust and wondering if I was making a big mistake. See, I wanted out, but I couldn’t stand to leave the business altogether. After all, I was a star. A big name. Angel Dare. I just couldn’t bear to give that up. Sure, the porn industry can be infuriating, but in its own brash and vulgar way it’s kind of like a big, dysfunctional family. A lot of women wound up feeling used by the porn industry, but they were just the ones who never figured out how to use it right back.
Starting up Daring Angels, I was banking on the idea that girls in the business needed a positive alternative to the boyfriend/managers, the suitcase pimps and the predatory, mostly male-run talent agencies. They needed a female-owned and -operated agency that treated the girls with respect, that had their backs and made sure that they didn’t get eaten alive and spat back out in under a year. I had a solid business plan, an electronic Rolodex to die for and Didi as my right-hand woman. I had a modest roster of four fresh, gorgeous girls and I even had cute business cards featuring a sexy, winking angel drawn by a famous comic book artist I had been banging at the time. I felt ready to take on the world.
That first year was hard. The second was harder. I fucked up a lot, lost money and learned some painful lessons. But by the third year, I had my shit down. I had a Web site up and running and was working to add a special members-only area with original content featuring the Daring Angels girls. I was doing recruiting trips out to strip clubs in bumfuck nowheresville, sniffing out fresh talent anywhere I could find it. I’d never made a mint off Daring Angels, but combined with interest from my investments, I managed to make a pretty comfortable living. Until all this.
“Looks clear,” Malloy told me, pulling into a free slot on the other side of Archwood. “I can’t believe it, but the place looks pretty much deserted.” He killed the ignition. “Still, stay close.”
I got out of the car, hoisted my duffel on my shoulder and made my legs carry me toward the place that used to be my office. My mind brushed briefly against a murky, buried question about the ultimate fate of Daring Angels
I got out of the car, hoisted my duffel on my shoulder and made my legs carry me toward the place that used to be my office. My mind brushed briefly against a murky, buried question about the ultimate fate of Daring Angels and flinched away, as if it had touched something repulsive. I just couldn’t handle speculation on the future right then. All I needed was to get through this moment. I would worry about the future... well... in the future.
The building was nondescript and so familiar that I barely saw it. Now that I was on the outside of my old life looking in, every detail seemed weirdly intensified. The dried-blood-maroon-and-bone-white paint job. The ugly, functional architecture, everything featureless and rectangular. Long, uninviting balconies along the building’s Archwood flank, the one on the first floor fenced in like a zoo cage. My office didn’t have a balcony so my rent was two hundred dollars cheaper and you had to go downstairs and outside if you wanted to smoke.
Inside the lobby, beside the staircase leading up to the upper floors, was a security station. Nothing but a cheap metal desk with a guy in a uniform behind it.
The security guard was a new kid I’d never seen before. The usual guy had been a thick, oily walrus of a man with a white pushbroom mustache and a lascivious wink for any female who entered the building. This new kid was lanky and Mexican and afflicted with a plague of acne so juicy and virulent that it looked almost radioactive. Beneath the zits lurked a handsome, square-jawed face and you could see that he would have a hard, sexy tough-guy look about him once he did a little growing up and his overzealous hormones finally gave it a rest. He was sitting behind the crummy little desk reading a dense legal textbook that he did not bother to put down when we approached him. His nametag said CAMMAROTA.
“Hey,” Malloy said.
“Hey,” the kid replied over the top of his book with a great show of sullen indifference.
“I’m investigating the disappearance of Angel Dare.” Malloy said. He indicated the dusty camera up above the kid’s head. “I was wondering if it might be possible to take a look at the security tapes from last Friday.”
“You a cop?” the kid asked, finally looking up at Malloy. His dark eyes were sharp under the mask of acne.
“Used to be,” Malloy said. “I’m just looking into the matter for a private party.”
“Angel Dare, that’s the porno chick, huh?” the kid asked, warming to the topic. “The one on the news who shot that guy.”
“Right,” Malloy said.
I had been standing slightly behind Malloy, keeping a low profile. It wasn’t until that kid mentioned me that I started to feel like I had big arrows flashing over my head. Like the whole dressed-up-like-a-boy business couldn’t fool a blind man. In spite of that unshakable feeling, the kid didn’t even look at me. He was just talking about some chick on TV.
“That’s messed up,” the kid said.
“Right,” Malloy said again. “How about those tapes?”
The kid put the book down and stood.
“Come on,” the kid said, looking around. “I’m not supposed to leave the station, but...”
We followed him down a narrow first floor hallway that I had never noticed before. At the end of the hall was a door with no number. The Mexican kid opened the door with a key on a ring that extended out from his belt on a spring-loaded black cord. Inside was a closet-sized office cluttered with cleaning products and plastic file boxes.
“They only keep the tapes for ten days,” the kid said, pulling a plastic crate down from a high shelf. “Then they recycle them. It’s a good thing you didn’t wait too long to ask about it. Do you think there could be, like, clues or something on the tape?”
“Could be,” Malloy said.
The kid frowned into the box and Malloy frowned too.
“What?” Malloy asked.
“I hate to tell you this,” the kid said. “But I think last Friday is missing.”
“What do you mean, missing?” Malloy asked, taking the box from the kid’s arms and sifting efficiently through the contents. “Son of a bitch.”
“Where...” I paused and cleared my throat, struggling to deepen my voice as best I could. “Where’s the regular guy?”
“I don’t know,” the kid said shrugging. “I just started this job today.”
Malloy shot me a look.
“Okay, kid,” Malloy said. “Thanks anyway.”
“You think somebody took it?” the kid asked.
“Probably,” Malloy said, shrugging like it didn’t matter.
“Maybe the cops have it,” the kid offered helpfully. “Or maybe somebody broke in and stole it. Like maybe that porno chick snuck in here in the middle of the night so that she could... I don’t know, hide some evidence or something like that.”
Malloy nodded as if he was seriously considering the kid’s theory. I supposed I ought to have been pissed at all this speculation about me, but it seemed so irrelevant, like a discussion of a movie I’d never seen. Like they really were just talking about some chick on TV.
We left Cammarota in the back room and hustled back out to the lobby. As Malloy held the glass door open for me to pass, he leaned in and hissed in my ear.
“You don’t know me,” he said. “Walk down to Victory and I’ll meet you.”
I turned left out the door and started walking quickly, but not too quickly, away. Over my shoulder I heard a man’s voice call Malloy’s name, but I didn’t want to risk a backward glance.
I turned south on Vesper Avenue, the whole back of my body clenched and cringing as if expecting a bullet. My buzzcut scalp felt painfully vulnerable. I was dying to know what the hell was going on back there, but I didn’t want to chance being recognized. I couldn’t hear anything but the sounds of the street. Cars, distant music, a hedge trimmer. I reached Victory Boulevard much sooner than I meant to and stood there on the corner by the 7-Eleven, feeling stupid and unsure. I turned and looked up at the mural on the side of the Family Medical Center building next door. I’d seen that mural about a million times, but I’d never actually paid attention. It showed three guys standing on top of the planet Earth, reaching for a sort of three-way high five. One guy was wearing a winter hat and scarf. The other two were in t-shirts. I had no idea who those guys were supposed to be.
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