Money Shot hcc-40

by Christa Faust

  I couldn’t stop myself from looking back toward my building but I was too far away and couldn’t see anything at all. I had no idea where Malloy was. Cars passed and people passed and I was hit with a sudden terror that I was really totally alone. Disconnected. No home, no car, no real identity anymore. Nowhere to go but jail. I pressed my body against the sooty skin of the 7-Eleven building, feeling like I needed to hold on to something solid or else I would just disintegrate or tumble up into the smoggy yellow sky.

  Following swiftly on the heels of that fear was a kind of slinking guilt. I kept on telling myself not to become dependent on Malloy, and yet the second he was out of my sight I panicked like a little kid lost in the supermarket. I had money. I could find a motel that didn’t require a credit card and hole up. Find a way to contact Didi. She would know where to find Jesse. I could make Jesse tell me where I could find his boss, that bland-faced fucker who was clearly responsible for everything that had been done to me. I didn’t need a goddamn babysitter.

  I unzipped my duffel and pulled out the little robot. I don’t know what I was hoping for. Maybe I thought that holding that talisman from my former life would calm and center me somehow. In the end it just made me feel self-conscious and silly, like some loony homeless person you would cross the street to avoid. Next thing I knew I’d be saving my pee in glass jars and pushing a shopping cart.

  “Angel,” Malloy said, hand on my shoulder, and I jumped like he had goosed me, dropping the little robot.

  Malloy deftly caught the robot before it could smash on the concrete. I turned back to him and wrapped my arms around myself.

  “Christ,” I said. “You scared the shit out of me.”

  Malloy looked down at the robot and up at me, then handed it back to me without comment. I stuck the robot back into my bag, feeling more foolish than ever.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “It was Erlichman, one of those young hard-ons that caught your case,” Malloy said. “Wanted to know what I was doing snooping around your office.”

  “What did you tell him?” I asked, following Malloy as he turned and headed east on Victory. The sun was beating down on my newly shorn scalp, giving me a nasty headache.

  “I told him what he already knew,” Malloy said. “That Didi paid me to look into your disappearance. I asked about the tape too. Erlichman doesn’t have it, so I’m guessing either the guy from Vegas or his boss has got it. They’ll be paying a visit to everyone that visited your office that day.”

  “Shit,” I said, trying to shake the image of Zandora lying dead in her cotton panties and focus on remembering who all had been into the office on the last day of my former life. “I remember several of the girls came by and at least one director that I can think of.”

  “Erlichman is gone,” Malloy said. “Think it would help jog your memory to go back up to your office?”

  I shivered. Going back up into my office was the last thing on earth I wanted to do. I shrugged, looking away.

  We circled the block and came around to the back of the building. No one in sight. I trudged reluctantly behind Malloy as he slipped in and headed up the steps to the second floor, nodding to the kid behind the guard desk. I didn’t want to do this. Didn’t want to view the corpse of my old life. It didn’t look like Malloy was going to give me a choice.

  I couldn’t have prepared myself for that any more than I could have prepared for the first time I saw my beat-up face in the mirror. The lock was busted and the door hung ajar behind yellow police tape. Malloy pushed through the tape and led me into the frozen crime scene my former life had become.

  The place was trashed. Didi’s desk was a cluttered mess of emptied drawers and rifled files. Her computer was gone. The comfy purple chairs Didi and I had picked out had been shoved together in one corner. The carafe for my coffee pot lay broken on the carpet. The door to my own office was closed, and I found I was weirdly grateful for that.

  “Okay,” Malloy said, heading toward the bathroom door. “You say the girl definitely had the briefcase when she went into the bathroom, right?”

  I nodded, unable to squeeze words past the hot lump in my throat.

  “She could have taken the case with her out the window,” Malloy said, pushing the bathroom door open. Lia’s expensive heels were still on the floor by the toilet. “Maybe she ditched it somewhere right outside, in a dumpster or something like that, since the boss told you she ‘left without it.’ But I get the feeling she didn’t take it with her. I think it had to be stashed here somewhere. Clearly the boss thought the same thing, only his men didn’t find it. Someone else did. So where could she have hidden it?”

  I shrugged and watched in a numb daze while Malloy searched the tiny bathroom. It was much too small for anyone to hide anything. Malloy stood on the closed lid of the toilet, reaching up toward the low, acoustic tile ceiling, lifting each tile one by one. My heart skipped as something black clattered down and bounced off the toilet tank to land on the floor by the sink. It wasn’t the briefcase but as soon as I realized what it was, I saw with forehead-slapping clarity exactly what had happened. I knew who had the briefcase.

  17.

  The black object lying on the bathroom floor was a sleek, spike-heeled calfskin boot by Manolo Blahnik. Those boots, I had been informed by a very huffy director, cost over twelve hundred dollars and she would not be inclined to press charges if they were simply returned, no questions asked. The shoot had been for Top Notch and the girl who had been fucked in those twelve hundred dollar boots was Roxette DuMonde.

  Roxette was not a bad kid, but she had a magpie’s eye and a compulsion for nicking shiny things. She was the black sheep child of New York high society and had been a fashion model in her early teens. I guess her rich but distant daddy didn’t hug her enough when she was growing up, because she rapidly tumbled from Vogue to Penthouse to porn and bottomed out at twenty, declared clinically dead for nearly two minutes after an overdose of crystal meth. After she got clean, she came to me. I was very leery of taking on a girl with a drug problem, reformed or not, but Roxette was just that gorgeous. Directors and fans could not get enough of her. She looked kind of like a bratty, juvenile delinquent version of Linda Evangelista. Terrifyingly flawless, yet she was willing to do almost anything on camera. Even before I had officially agreed to take her on, I was getting phone calls from guys who wanted to book her, just on the rumor that she might be getting back into the business. It was crazy, but I guess eventually the dollar signs won out over any doubts or misgivings. We had the biggest traffic spike in the history of our Web site the day I uploaded the first set of exclusive new Roxette photos.

  She’d been with me for a little over a year and had never fallen off the wagon like I feared, but she... borrowed things. It seemed to happen all the time. Never anything of real value, just trinkets mostly. She stole gaudy baubles, stockings and lipsticks from the other girls. She pinched figurines, silver forks and fancy coasters from the locations where she did shoots. She had plenty of money from her bazillionaire parents and from all the top-drawer shoots and feature tours she did, so it’s not like she needed the things she took. Whenever she was confronted, she would just arrange her famous mouth into its signature sexy pout and somehow she would be forgiven. The scary-pretty ones always were able to get away with murder.

  But those boots were a different story. They were not cheap trinkets, they were pricey designer items that Celestine, the dragon lady director in charge of Roxette’s last shoot, had instantly missed. I had Didi call Roxette and tell her to come into the office at 9AM sharp. I told Celestine ten, since I knew I could count on Roxette to be at least an hour late. When Roxette showed up lugging her enormous gig bag and drinking iced green tea from a trendy coffee bar, she saw Celestine sitting beside my desk and blanched. She asked to go to the bathroom first and I let her. She took her bag with her.

  When she came out she was all big-eyed and cute. She seemed totally baffled, denied having the boots
and offered to let Celestine search her bag. She told Celestine she didn’t know what possibly could have happened to the boots after she took them off, but offered to do an extra set of stills for the Top Notch website to smooth over any hard feelings. Like everyone always did, Celestine somehow went from pissed off and ready to call the police to hugging Roxette and apologizing for the accusation. I just shrugged and let it go. What else could I do?

  But clearly Roxette had taken the boots. She must have stashed them under the acoustic tile in the bathroom ceiling right before the meeting with Celestine. I also remembered how Roxette had come back just after the weird business with Lia, saying she had been doing some errands nearby and had to pee really bad. She’d claimed she was recovering from yet another urinary infection and wasn’t able to hold it until she got back to her Malibu condo. Anyone who’s ever been in the industry knows those kinds of female troubles all too well, plus she’d looked so cute with her knees pressed together like a squirming child. She’d still had that big gig bag with her and lugged it into the bathroom again, using it to prop the broken door closed. In retrospect, I figured she’d been planning to retrieve the boots, but instead, she’d found a mysterious briefcase. Curious magpie that she was, she’d forgotten all about the boots and snagged the case instead, stashing it inside the roomy gig bag.

  I made Malloy get the other boot out from under the ceiling tile and put the pair into my own duffel bag. I mean, hey, Celestine had already written them off, and it seemed a shame to leave such expensive designer boots just lying there on the bathroom floor. Especially since Roxette and I have the same size feet.

  I filled Malloy in on the way back to his car. I tried phoning Roxette, but didn’t get an answer and didn’t want to leave a message. She wouldn’t be too hard to find. I knew her address, the gym where she worked out and all her favorite clubs. The only thing we really needed to worry about was that she might have broken open the lock on the case and gone hog-wild with the money inside. Malloy seemed to think that if we had the money, we would have a bargaining chip, a way to draw out the boss and make him come to us. Me, I figured that money was mine. Compensation for the wholesale destruction of my life. The world’s highest asshole tax.

  Faced with another long night on Malloy’s sofa, I decided to spring for some over-the-counter sleeping pills along with the Sweet’N Low, green grapes and salted almonds I picked up for myself at the Ralph’s on the way back to Burbank. I also impulse-bought a pretty blue coffee mug, because it felt inexplicably important to have my own cup. Money might not buy happiness, but I’ll tell you what, it doesn’t hurt.

  In the end, I couldn’t take the sleeping pills after all. I just sat there staring at the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval on the Sominex label, wondering what would happen if bad guys with guns showed up in the middle of the night and I couldn’t wake up.

  Eventually, morning came instead of bad guys. That was the thing about mornings. No matter how fucked up your life got, how deep and black your despair, how sure you were that you just couldn’t take another second of this shit, morning just kept on coming. Over and over. Morning didn’t give a damn about your little drama.

  Morning brought Malloy from his bedroom lair again, just like the day before. He looked the same as ever. I showered while he made coffee and read the paper. Ozzy and fucking Harriet. If you squinted, it all seemed almost normal. Except for the part about me being an ex-porn star dressed up like a boy, wanted by the cops and on the run from the psycho ringleader of some kind of prostitution slavery racket who’d tried to have me killed once and wanted to finish the job. Noon seemed to take forever to show up.

  When it was finally time to head over to the mall in Sherman Oaks and see if Lia would be there at the hour specified in her note to Zandora, I quickly wrapped my tits and waist and put in the blue contacts. It had been so nice to just relax without all those sweaty uncomfortable mummy bandages. As we were headed out the door, I decided at the last minute to wash out my new blue cup, wrap it in my last two t-shirts and stick it in the duffel bag with the little robot and the boots. I couldn’t shake this powerful need to keep my meager possessions with me at all times. Of course, I could get into serious trouble for bringing a loaded gun to the mall, but hey, at this point that was the least of the reasons why I might be arrested. I didn’t worry all that much about it.

  18.

  What can I say about the Sherman Oaks Fashion Square mall? You’ve been to any mall in America, you don’t need me to describe the place. Stores. Shoppers. The American consumer dream all spread out and waiting, available for a price. Everything your sheep-like heart has been trained to desire. I hate malls. They’re like strip clubs for women. All tease and sparkle and the empty promise that if you just drop enough cash, somehow you’ll be fulfilled. The slick, shameless, never-ending hustle of a shopping mall makes places like Eye Candy look downright charitable by comparison. When I need to buy stuff, I’d much rather shop online. That way I don’t have to battle my way through all those lonely, desperate, retail-therapy junkies. Nothing more depressing than watching these skinny, manic women digging their own graves with a credit card while their bored husbands furtively eye my assets, trying to figure out if I really am Angel Dare or just look like her. The only kind of store I really love to browse in is a hardware store. I’m a compulsive fixer-upper, always on the lookout for new things for my house. At least I used to be. I have no idea what I am now.

  Our destination was the food court and at that weekday lunch hour it was packed with cubicle drones wearing sensible shoes and laminated IDs around their necks. The ring of fast food options represented all the usual franchise suspects. Chinese, Italian, American, Middle Eastern. Ostensible variety that was really all the same school lunch food under different-flavored sauces.

  Still, as much as I might hate malls, you had to admit Lia had made a smart choice for a meeting place. It was public, patrolled by security guards and packed with potential witnesses. I wondered how a girl who was essentially a captive sex slave from another country knew about this mall, but remembering her note claiming to have gotten one guy to “like her like a girlfriend” made me remember her expensive hair and nails. Her fancy heels. I pictured her working on her erstwhile beau to take her shopping. Batting her eyelashes and talking of lingerie and sexy shoes and all the while taking mental notes, memorizing everything. That girls had brains, I’d give her that. Brains and balls.

  Malloy wanted us to move through the mall separately. Close but not obviously together.

  “That way,” Malloy told me as he had parked the car up on a high, nearly deserted level of the parking structure, “if I get recognized, you won’t. We don’t know if your pal from Vegas got the note or information about its contents out of Zandora before we showed up or not. No point taking unnecessary chances.”

  I opened the make-up mirror inside the visor on the passenger side and snuck a quick glance at the reflected image of that blond guy, Daniel. Imagining I was someone else made mirrors less of an ordeal.

  The fading bruises around my eyes made the new blue contacts look lurid and too bright. The white tape had peeled off my nose in the shower that morning but some black sticky adhesive gunk was left behind and I couldn’t get it off because it hurt to scrub too hard. I ran a hand over the bleachy yellow buzz cut. I wouldn’t recognize me.

  We left the car and headed down into the mall. I tailed Malloy past the Gap, past the Body Shop, threading through the lunchtime crowd in his wake until we reached the abovementioned food court.

  I stationed myself by a smoothie stand where I had a decent view of the whole court and several exits. Every skinny blonde that passed made my heart twist under my ribs but none of them were Lia. Noon came and went without incident.

  I watched Malloy lingering by the Sbarro and then without meeting my eyes he made a tight little gesture with his chin toward the stairs that led up to a second-level seating area. Unsure if he meant for me to follow him or not, I watch
ed him head up, out of sight. Then, less than ten seconds later, he was heading back down. I could read the tension under his casual stroll and I wasn’t all that surprised when I spotted the weasel, my pal from Vegas, coming down the steps behind him.

  I turned away, pretending to study the smoothie menu while watching Malloy out of the corner of my eye. He walked right past me and went into the bookstore on my left. I had no idea what he was doing. Apparently, neither did the weasel, but he followed Malloy into the store anyway.

  I knew nothing could happen here in the mall, in full view of the security guards and all these civilians, but I also figured the weasel would follow us up through the parking structure and in that big hollow empty space it would be a whole different story.

  Malloy and I had agreed that if anything went wrong in the mall, I was supposed to get the hell out and catch a bus back to his place. He had given me a spare key and when he’d slipped it into my hip pocket, I’d felt almost like we were dating or something. I had spent more solid back-to-back time with Malloy than with anyone else since I’d moved out of my parents’ house back in Chicago, yet we were not sleeping together. It felt so strange, unnatural somehow.

  Watching Malloy browsing through the bookstore like there wasn’t a homicidal scumbag following him around, I wondered if now wasn’t a good time to bug out. Before I could decide one way or the other, I saw Malloy stumble and bump into the weasel, slapping his shoulder and smiling in that same dumb, friendly manner he had when he went into Eye Candy. I watched with baffled amazement, squinting and trying to figure out what the hell he was doing.

  After his collision with the weasel, Malloy made his roundabout way out of the store. When the weasel followed, the shoplifting alarm went off.