I pretended to think before shaking my head.
“No.”
“How about that Richard Ness?”
“He wasn’t that big.”
“Can you tell us anything at all?”
“What happened?” I asked. “How did you get here?”
“Your neighbor, Miss Alison, called nine-one-one after hearing a scream. When we got here we found Mr. Lyon kneeling over you. He told us that he’d come up and found you on the ground, that he’d already called for help, but we thought that he might have been your attacker.”
“I came over to visit, Deb,” Jude said, once again in the guise of his mild demeanor. “I was just worried that you might be sad.”
“We’d like to take you to the hospital,” a paramedic said. “It would be best if a doctor took a look at you, maybe take some X-rays.”
“I have my own doctor,” I told the sandy-haired, blue-eyed young man.
“I don’t know,” he said, doubting my decision.
“I’ll make sure she gets there,” Jude told him.
“I’ll need to know where you are,” Perry said.
The conversation felt unwieldy, like a juggling act with one too many balls in the air.
“Okay,” I said.
“You’ll have to sign a release if we don’t take you to the hospital,” the paramedic said.
“Anything,” I told him. “Just stop talking to me.”
It took a good forty-five minutes to get the police and ambulance attendants out of my house. Perry asked four times if I wanted Jude to stay.
“Yes,” I said for the last time. “He’s a family friend.”
When they were finally gone I asked Jude to go get me a glass of water while I called Neelo Brown’s private line. Neelo asked me if I could get down to his offices and I told him that Jude would take me.
After that things happened in a kind of jumble. I took the pistol out of my purse and told Jude that we’d walk out to his car together. He didn’t seem bothered by the gun or the possibility of meeting my attacker again. This brought to mind Theon calling him dangerous.
Jude drove a dark blue Cadillac.
I was sitting next to him drifting in and out of awareness. While driving Jude asked me questions.
“You sure you don’t know who attacked you, Deb?” he asked at one point.
“No. No, I don’t.”
“Because you know you don’t have to be afraid.”
“No? Why not? I mean, the police wouldn’t be able to protect me day and night.”
“I’d take care of you.”
“You? Come on, Jude. That guy wasn’t as big as Richard Ness but he was a foot taller than you.”
“Don’t let my size fool you,” he said. “I can take care of myself.”
I fell asleep for a period there. When I woke up we were close to the clinic.
“Did you love Theon?” I remember Jude asking the question when my eyes were closed.
“Sometimes. Did you?”
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, I did. Very much.”
When I opened my eyes again I was in a bed in a private room at Neelo’s clinic. The pudgy young doctor was shining a small flashlight into my right eye.
“How you feeling, Aunt Deb?” he asked when I looked directly at him.
“Like somebody dropped a ton of bricks on me and then jumped up and down on them.”
“I think you have a concussion but it’s mild. You’re going to have to rest for a day or two. Do you want me to call anyone?”
“Lana Leer,” I said. “Her number’s in my red phone. Maybe she could come talk to me later on.”
The ocean was a big part of my imagined experience after the beating. I was drifting across the surface a thousand miles from land in a field of seaweed as large as a continent. The floating vegetation kept me buoyant, breathing. The sun was hot and unrelenting. Now and again the air-conditioning came on in the room. The cool breeze made me feel as if I were dunking my head in the water below.
There was a deep concussive sound coming up out of the water. It vibrated through my body, making me laugh and shudder.
The sun wouldn’t stop beating down and the waters undulated. I tried to remember why I was there but there was no memory, nothing before the forever ocean and nothing beyond it either.
“Deb? Deb?”
It didn’t sound like my name. It wasn’t real. It was made up on the spur of the moment and stuck.
“Deb, are you awake?”
I felt flattened and dead, like a fish washed up on the shore then dried out by the sun.
I opened my dry fish eyes and saw Lana sitting on a chair beside the hospital bed. She was wearing a peach-colored dress and a cream fabric hat that flared around the edges like something out of the Roaring Twenties.
“Hi.”
“Hey, Deb. How are you, hon?”
“I feel it all the way down between my toes.”
“You look pretty good. The swelling went down.”
“What day is it?” I asked.
“Tuesday afternoon. You been sleepin’ a day and a half.”
I tried to rise and failed. My head spun and my intestines felt loose and watery.
“Help me sit up, Lana.”
She did this. I managed to get my back against the bars at the head of the bed, feeling that if I leaned to the side I’d fall over and tumble to the floor.
“Neel called me and told me you were here,” Lana said. “I called that creepy guy Dardanelle and told him to keep on doin’ what he was doin’ while you rested.”
“What’d he say?”
“He asked who was gonna give the eulogy and I told him you.”
I was breathing in through my nose and out through my mouth. My thoughts kept flitting off in tangents about Coco Manetti and my brother—Cornell.
“Deb?”
“Call me Sandy, will ya, Lana? Sandy’s my name. She’s the woman I want to be.” These words invigorated me.
“Okay … Sandy.”
“You remember the name of that wardrobe and makeup woman?” I asked, then, “The one who used to be in the life but went to work for that movie studio?”
“Bertha. Bertha Renoir.”
“Yeah. Could you figure out how to get in touch with her and tell her that I need to talk? You can give her the red phone number.”
“You bet.”
Lana told me how they replaced my character in Linda Love’s film with this girl out of Georgia—named Georgia Peaches—who was four inches shorter and three shades lighter than I. She also had a thick accent even when she was moaning during sex.
Lana left after we had a good laugh and I almost felt strong enough to stand.
I was wanting a book to read when the door opened and a nurse came in. She was short and Korean, stern faced but still pretty in her light blue uniform.
“There’s a policeman here to see you, Mrs. Pinkney,” she said. “Dr. Brown asked me to ask you if you wanted to see him.”
“What’s his name?”
“Lieutenant Mendelson.”
“Perry,” I said to myself, imagining a road in front of me that broke off into so many pathways that it seemed like a fan.
“Mrs. Pinkney?” the nurse said.
“Yes. Send him in.”
For a moment the young woman stared at me, as if questioning my ability to make a decision.
“It’s okay,” I said. “I know him quite well and I know how to take care of myself.”
Time moved in ripples between the young woman’s departure and when Perry Mendelson knocked on the door. I thought about calling my mother but Theon’s voice interrupted, telling me that family was the quickest route to demolition. I wondered about Rash Vineland and if he’d called over the last two days. And then there was the stone in my passway, Coco Manetti, who seemed to hate me for some reason I couldn’t quite grasp.
“Come in,” I said to the closed door.
Perry Mendelson was wearing a tan suit and medium blue shirt with
a dusky orange tie. There were little clocks on the tie here and there, and there were other shapes, something like yellow commas. It was one of the ugliest ties I’d ever seen and for some reason this enhanced the fondness I felt for the cop.
“How are you?” he asked, approaching the bed.
I nodded and said, “Have a seat.”
We were silent a moment there, like short-term lovers who had decided, each on their own, that the relationship would never work.
“You’ve been having a pretty hard time of it lately, huh?” the policeman said.
“Yeah.”
“Have you remembered anything else about the man who attacked you?”
“No. Nothing.”
“But you’re sure it wasn’t Lyon.”
“Why do you keep asking that? Jude was a friend of my husband’s. He’s just a mild little man. I can’t imagine him hurting anybody.”
“So you really don’t know,” he said, as if he were having a separate discussion with another me in a different time and place.
“Know what?”
“Your husband’s friend is deeply involved with organized crime here in L.A.”
“That’s ridiculous. What would he be doing with people like Ness?”
“Ness is just a wannabe enforcer,” Perry said. “He’s nothing compared to Lyon.”
“Jude? What could he possibly do that’s so bad?”
“He’s a person of interest in six murders in Southern California.”
Suddenly I was no longer tired or light-headed. A chill ran down the length of my body.
“No.”
“He went to college at UCLA studying theater. Him and his friends made their money dealing grass and hash. But they ran into trouble with an outside group that wanted to take over distribution for Westwood. The gang sent out a couple of guys to beat up Lyon’s business partner and boyfriend. They went too far and killed him. The two men turned up dead three weeks later, and Jude formed a new gang that drove off the outsiders. Since then he’s been the guy people turn to when there’s no more talking. No one knows how many people he’s killed, but they know the number is higher than what they can put on their charts.
“I’ve been asked by the squad investigating organized crime in L.A. to get you to help them get something on Lyon.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said. “Even if he wasn’t a friend, what you just told me is the fastest way to get killed.”
Perry sighed, telling me without words that he’d hoped this would be my answer.
“I’m sorry about taking off my clothes and calling you a perv, Lieutenant.”
“No problem, Mrs. Pinkney. Like I said—you’ve had your share of troubles lately.”
“Lately? For the past nineteen years I’ve compared troubles before getting dressed in the morning.”
He smiled and I thought, not for the first time, that we might be friends in a world far different from the one we lived in.
“You really are something else, Mrs. Pinkney.”
“Call me Sandy. That’s my given name.”
“You have to be careful, Sandy,” he said. “I’m here unofficially, but other cops will lean on you. They want your friend in prison or dead.”
“Why?”
“Because he’s a hit man.”
“No. Why do you like me? Why are you here?”
We gazed at each other across the small space between the bed and visitor’s chair.
Perry tilted his head to the side as he did when he didn’t want to tell me that Theon was dead. My question called up an answer that didn’t want to come out; it didn’t want to but had no choice.
“I spend every day talking,” he said. “I talk to cops and criminals, unwilling witnesses, family and friends, bystanders, strangers, and voices on the telephone. And nobody ever says anything that I don’t expect. Nobody looks me in the eye and says anything that means something. I don’t care if it’s a lie or the truth; that doesn’t matter. Some people lie to be helpful; that might be the only way to do right. But what I hear is the same old shit over and over.
“But everything you say is on the ground floor. You’re right there in front of me like nothing I ever saw.”
“I thought you were married, Perry.”
“I am. And I will be five years from now. I’m not talking about getting together. Getting together is what everybody expects. If I told my wife how much I like talking to you she’d ask if I wanted a divorce. She wouldn’t ask what is it that makes our life feel like it comes out of a box of prefabricated wood and plastic screws. I don’t wanna have sex with you. We don’t even have to be friends. I just want to do my job and make sure that a wonderful person like you survives this mess.”
“Wow.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
“Yeah,” he agreed.
I remember that we both smiled and, after a few minutes, Perry stood up. He put a business card on the stand next to the bed and nodded.
“Thank you,” he said. Then he left the room.
I took in a deep breath and when I exhaled I felt healed. If I were of my mother’s persuasion I would have called myself blessed.
Two hours later Neelo, against his better judgment, discharged me. I was wearing clothes that Lana had dropped off from my new purchases. My Jag was in the underground lot—another gift from Lana. I had my blue bag, chrome pistol, and red phone. Life was flowing on and I wouldn’t have been able to change course even if I wanted to.
I connected the phone to the speaker system of my car and listened to the messages.
“Hi,” Rash Vineland said. “I’m crazy for you. I will do, or … I won’t do anything to be with you. Call me and tell me when I can see you again.”
I would surely call him. I worried, though, that his life might be ripped up over the feelings he harbored.
“We didn’t get to finish our dance,” Coco Manetti said. “I’m looking for you. So either you hide or you give me what I want.”
The one thing I was sure of, the thing Perry told me with a sigh, was that the police would not save me from men like Manetti. I would have to dig myself out of that hole alone—either that or be buried in it.
“Hello?” a mild male voice answered on the second ring.
“Jude?”
“Hey, Deb,” he said. “How are you?”
“Can I meet with you?”
“Sure. When?”
“Now.”
“Okay. I’m at the Bread and Chocolate Theater on Robertson and Olympic.”
“I know the place.”
It was a small, eighty-seat theater behind an Oriental rug store on Robertson. There was no marquee, just a glass-encased space the size of a movie poster with a list of the performances and events going on at the playhouse. The double doors were ajar and I walked in without anyone challenging me.
A red-haired young woman was sitting in a folding metal chair just inside the theater doors. She was reading a script and chewing gum.
“Excuse me,” I said.
“Uh-huh?”
“I’m looking for Jude Lyon.”
“Judy? Yeah, he’s in the house. You work for him?”
“Yes. He asked me to drop by.”
“Go on in,” she said, and before I could thank her she was back in her manuscript.
The whole room, stage and seating, was brightly lit. There were carpenters and painters banging, sawing, and painting on the set. Jude was standing to the side of the slightly elevated stage, looking at the work with a serious eye. When I walked in he seemed to sense my presence and turned to look at me.
He smiled.
I gave him a little wave and he jogged over.
We kissed cheeks. He took me by the wrists and examined my face.
“You don’t look much the worse for wear,” he said.
“Neelo’s a good doctor.”
“What can I do for you, Deb?”
“Can we get a cup of coffee?”
“Sure,” he said, a
nd then he turned toward the stage and piped, “Hey, boys, me and the girl are going to powder our noses. See you in twenty.”
As we walked from the theater I wondered at the many faces of Jude Lyon.
Whenever I saw him with Theon or as an escort he was a timid, shy man—not masculine, not flaming. It made me smile to think that even the bedrock of my beliefs was soft and yielding.
In the coffee shop Jude ordered us lattes and chocolate croissants. We brought these to a little round table set in the window, removed from any other seats and on display to the world.
We sat there for a while in silence, our food and drink forgotten. There was no room for small talk between us right then.
“So, did they figure out who attacked you?” he asked at last.
I shook my head and said, “The police came to my hospital room and told me that they thought you were some kind of criminal and that they wanted me to try to help them trip you up. I told them no, but I wanted you to know what they were saying.”
I knew from Jude’s blank expression that the things Perry said were true. His eyes turned feline, filled with the kind of trouble no one ever saw coming.
“I don’t need you to talk to me about it,” I added. “I just wanted to say that they’re looking at me now and you should be careful calling me or talking in my house or car or whatever. Not that you’ve ever said anything. Theon didn’t either.”
While I spoke, and after, Jude scrutinized me. His brown eyes, under slightly creased brows, could have been humming—he was that intent.
“Are you frightened?” he asked.
“No.”
“Why did you come to me?”
“You’ve been really good to me. And anyway, you were always nice to Theon. I don’t need to help the cops take down my friends.”
He sat back and picked up his paper coffee cup. Suddenly he was a mild-mannered little man again.
“Why do you act so different in different places?” I asked then.
“What do you mean?”
“I never knew anybody to call you Judy, for instance.”
Jude smiled.
“I love the theater,” he said. “The people there are so wrapped up in stories, and how they look in those stories, that they don’t pay so much attention to you. It’s like being in a thick forest where sound doesn’t travel far and the sun is weak. It’s like you’re hidden so deep that you don’t even know where you are.”
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