The most interesting adornment was sprawled on the sofa. He had long frizzy hair. A beer was in his hand and a cigarette in his mouth. Bare feet, jeans, naked torso featuring a nice round potbelly with a few curly black hairs.
Deanna picked up the clicker and muted the TV. “Joe, this is Mott. Mott, Joe.”
He managed to raise a hand. “Hey, man.”
“Hey.” I took the hand. Hard yet limp. Like he had a good grip but it was too much trouble to use it. “Want a beer?” he said.
“No, thanks. What’s the movie?”
“Dirty Dancing.”
“You mean Dirty Dozen, don’t you?”
“Yeah, that. Lee Marvin, Charlie Bronson, all those guys. Ernie Borgnine. You watch McHale’s Navy?”
“Once in a while.”
“Far out.” His attention returned to the screen. He didn’t seem to care that there was no sound.
I resisted the urge to say “far fucking out” and looked to Deanna for guidance.
“Let’s go in the bedroom,” she said. “Sooner or later he’s going to realize the sound’s off, and he’ll turn it back on. It’s the only place we’ll be able to hear ourselves think.”
I followed her in. If you’d seen the living room you knew what the bedroom would look like. “Hey,” Mott yelled. “If you’re gonna ball her, close the door. She makes a lot of noise.” The explosions returned.
She looked at me, smiled, said, “He’s right, you know.” Then she closed the door and directed me toward a small desk along the wall. A photo album sat atop it. She pulled a wooden chair out from the desk and told me to sit down. Then she opened the album and stood behind my right shoulder.
It was a scrapbook. Scenes from a middle-class childhood. Photos of children standing stiffly at amusement parks, birthday party invitations, report cards. Deanna pointed at one of the kids in one of the photos. “Me. And my brother Damon and my sister Daphne.”
I turned a couple of pages. The kids got older. There was a shot of Damon with a toy rocket, one of Daphne in a big-girl dress. More pages, more nostalgia. Her parents, I assumed, on a cruise ship. Deanna looking very small behind a drum kit. Then, a ticket stub. The Beatles at Hollywood Bowl, August 29, 1965. “You went?”
“Yes. Both times, but I lost the ticket from the first one. I cried for days.”
“You didn’t.”
“Okay, not days. Hours, maybe.”
“Woodstock and the Beatles at the Bowl. Lucky you.”
“That wasn’t all.” She bent and reached for a photo in a cheap frame sitting at the far left corner of the desk. This put her left breast six inches from my face. The tank top fell away, revealing all. It might have been deliberate and it might not have. She stood straight again and handed me the photo. The girl facing the camera was her, with long straight sixties hair, wearing a miniskirt. The other person was a man with his back to the camera.
“This must be someone significant,” I said.
“Keith Moon.”
“Wow.” I looked again. I couldn’t tell if it was the Who’s drummer or not. “Who took the picture?”
“My dad. He had an in at Capitol Records. That was how I managed to get into both Bowl concerts.”
“The Who was on Decca.”
“You know your rock trivia. His in at Capitol had an in at Decca.”
I put the picture down on the desk and returned to the scrapbook. There were more photos of Deanna and her drums. One of them showed two longish-haired boys on guitar and a black kid with a rudimentary Afro on bass.
“My first group. The Dalmatians.”
“Black and white.”
“We thought we were so clever.”
“Must have been weird to be a girl drummer in those days.”
“Very. Honey Lantree was my idol.”
“Who’s that?”
“The chick in the Honeycombs.”
“One-hit wonders.”
“Over here. They had another in England. Honey sang lead.”
“Didn’t the Velvet Underground have a chick drummer?”
“They did. She ended up working in a Wal-Mart.”
“You know your rock trivia.”
It raised a laugh. I kept going. Deanna and her siblings got older. Her groups looked more professional. The backgrounds changed from family rooms to clubs. Another ticket stub, from Blues Palace in Ventura. “My first paid gig. Twenty dollars. A group called the Ridgebacks.”
“Carrying on the canine theme.”
I turned a couple more pages and came face-to-face with Toby Bonner. He was standing in a studio with his Les Paul around his neck and a bottle of Coke in one hand. Then there were more, lots more, some with Toby and Deanna, some of Toby playing, a couple of the the two of them at an amusement park. A tiny newspaper ad for Toby Bonner, with a tinier picture of Toby and itty-bitty ones of Deanna and Spencer Sommers. A review from a rock and roll mag I’d never heard of. An unpasted copy of the label from Side 1 of their record. And a stub from a royalty check for six dollars and seventy-seven cents.
After that, nothing. Almost half the book was blank pages. “What happened?”
“I lost interest.”
“How come?”
“It started to seem stupid. Pointless. I nearly tossed the thing half a dozen times. I’m glad I didn’t.”
“You’ve been looking at it a lot lately.”
“How’d you know?”
I turned my chair around to face the room. “That midlife crisis stuff we talked about.”
She nodded and moved toward the bed. She slipped off her sandals, swung her feet up, scooted back until she was leaning against the pillows stacked against the wall. Early in these maneuvers the right strap on her top worked its way loose, and as she shimmied back I got to view the previously unseen breast. It looked a lot like the other one. Once she was settled back there, she “discovered” the strap, touched it, left it where it was.
“Mrs. Robinson,” I said. “You’re trying to seduce me, aren’t you?”
“Is it working?”
“Deanna, you have a fine set of breasts, but I really don’t want to see any more of them.” Okay, the last part wasn’t exactly true. “I told you, I’m spoken for. I thought we were past this.”
“I guess not.”
“And if I wasn’t attached, I don’t know that I’d be up for screwing with your boyfriend watching Charles Bronson in the other room. Or being on sheets he’s been on, for that matter.”
“He wouldn’t mind. He really wouldn’t. And I have other sheets.”
“The scary thing is that I believe you.”
“About the sheets?”
“Stop it. You know what I meant. Let’s keep this strictly business, okay?”
“He’s not very good in bed. Especially when he’s high, which is most of the time.”
“He runs off with teenyboppers, he’s lousy in the sack, and he doesn’t care if you have sex with other men. So why do you stay with him?”
“He has really good dope.”
“That’s a crummy reason.”
She put the strap back into place, glanced at me, wouldn’t meet my eyes. “I guess it’s lame to say that I love him.”
“Not if you really do.”
“I really do. Loser that he is, I really do.” Now she looked right at me. “I’m one of those women you read about, who keep picking the worst possible men.”
“I’m not the one to talk to about it. I’ve had my share of worst possibles in my life.”
“But now you’re with someone good.”
“So you see? There’s always hope. Can we—”
What I was going to say was, Can we get back on track here? But I stopped, because I didn’t want to get back on track. What I wanted was to be somewhere else.
So what I said was, “Can we do this another time?”
“What’s wrong?”
“Too much on my mind.”
“That sounds like a bullshit excuse.”
> “No, I … you’re right. It’s bullshit. I just don’t want to talk about finding Toby now. I’m not sure if I want to talk about finding Toby ever.”
I thought she was going to try to change my mind. But she just got up, went to the closet, and got a denim shirt that she pulled on over the tank. “Call me if you change your mind,” she said.
“I will.” I got up, opened the door, and walked out, into the living room. Things were still blowing up on TV. Things were also status quo on the couch. I went to the front door, looked back at Deanna. She was watching Mott watch TV. She glanced over at me, waved a tiny good-bye, and went to sit on the arm of the couch. I let myself out.
The Kids Are Alright
Half an hour later I was seated at Gina’s dining room table. The TV droned on, with the volume down. I’d briefed Gina on the latest.
We were eating ice cream, the three of us. I had a bowlful. They each had a pint of Häagen-Dazs, Vanilla Swiss almond for Gina, chocolate chocolate chip for Aricela. I looked from one to the other and back again. There was definitely a resemblance. Around the eyes. Maybe around the mouth. Definitely around the attitude.
My latest fantasy: Aricela was Gina’s daughter. She’d given her up for adoption back when the kid was born, just before Gina and I re-entered each other’s lives. Fate had conspired to bring Aricela into our world again.
You’d think they’d known each other for years. Looking at each other and bursting out into giggles. Finishing each other’s sentences. I didn’t like it, not one bit. This was going to turn out badly, when we figured out who the kid belonged to and she went home. Because I was sure her story was just that. The more I saw her, the more I was convinced she wasn’t an urchin who’d spent the last several years, at least, depending on the kindness of strangers. She had some street smarts, yes. But she didn’t fool me. Somewhere there was someone who cared about her. In the morning we would start finding out who that was.
Except … that part about not liking it one bit, this familiarity between the two of them. It wasn’t quite true. Because Gina was clearly loving every minute of it, and was happier than I’d seen her in a long time. That was the bit I liked. Maybe the business about her mortality, about the bloody episode the other night opening her up to all sorts of new things, maybe that was true. Or maybe she’d felt this way all along and, knowing I didn’t want kids, hid it. But that didn’t make sense. Because all the years we were best buddies, she said the same sorts of things. And why would she have hidden her true feelings about children from me then?
At ten I went in the living room, sat on the sofa, boosted the volume on the TV. It was set to Channel 6 and I left it there. On the left side of the screen were scrunched-up sitcom credits. On the right the anchor tandem was telling us what exciting stories they had in store for us. “More bloodshed in the Middle East. A high-speed chase ends in a spectacular crash near LAX. And a heartwarming story about a boy, a ferret, and a school lunch worker. Stay with us.”
High-speed chase. Spectacular crash.
LAX. Not terribly far from Frampton’s neighborhood.
“Hey, Gi. Come see this.”
She shared a final chuckle with Aricela and, ice cream container in hand, sat beside me. The kid got up too, capped her pint and put it in the freezer, came and squeezed in between us.
“What are we going to see?” Gina said.
“Just watch.”
Two commercials, a promo, FX shots of L.A. over theme music. Then: “Good evening, I’m Jim Abernathy.”
“And I’m Lilah Pike. A high-speed chase ended badly today when the suspects’ car went off an overpass. Terry Takamura has the report.”
There was Takamura again, her hair rigid as ever, standing straight and tall in a dark street with a couple of cop cars in the background. “Yes, Lilah, I’m standing near Los Angeles International Airport, just a few feet from where two suspects’ car went off an overpass this evening, a spectacular ending to a high-speed chase.”
“Kind of what the other guy just covered,” Gina said.
“Ssh.”
They switched to an aerial shot, taped earlier. Even from above, I could tell it was a Beetle. I couldn’t make out the color, but it could well have been silver. It was zooming down the freeway, cutting in and out of traffic, followed by a brace of police cruisers. Terry Takamura’s voiceover: “It started in a quiet residential neighborhood near Marina del Rey. Police responded to a 911 call of suspicious characters lurking in front of a house.”
“‘Lurking’?” Gina said. “Did she really say ‘lurking’?”
“When police responded to the call, the suspects fled. They drove onto the Marina Freeway, then south on the San Diego Freeway, in the waning stages of rush hour. Our Chopper 6 beamed back these exclusive images.”
Back to the live shot of Takamura. “The suspects’ vehicle, driving on the shoulder with police in hot pursuit—”
“Did she say ‘hot pursuit’?” Gina said.
“—tried to go around a van that was stopped for a tire change at the side of the road. The driver lost control and—”
She pointed, and the camera followed her finger to a shot of the freeway, crossing over a surface street, with a broken guard rail. Below were more cop cars and a wrecker.
“—smashed right through this guard rail and onto Arbor Vitae Street below. Miraculously, none of the cars on Arbor Vitae were struck, though vehicles avoiding the falling car caused a multi-car pileup. Fortunately, only minor injuries resulted. The driver and passenger of the Volkswagen, seemingly not seriously hurt, bystanders reported, fled the scene into the underbrush.”
The camera swung back to Takamura. “Police are mum on the possibility that the two men were involved in a series of gunfire incidents over the past week. You may remember the shooting of forty-eight-year-old Leonard ‘Squig’ Jones on earlier this week. The gunmen in that incident were also driving a vehicle similar to the one that crashed here. Then, just last night, a shootout in Hollywood, where a bullet-riddled vehicle similar to this one was left behind.”
Tape of a police spokesman. Cop-speak, the gist of which was, we don’t know anything, or if we do we’re not telling. Then one of the people who was traveling on Arbor Vitae: “It came down like a bat out of hell.”
Takamura, in her wrapping-up voice, said, “Police have reported that the car that crashed was stolen, as was the one shot in the previous incident. Investigators will work on into the night, looking for clues. This is Terry Takamura, reporting from near LAX. Back to you, Lilah and Jim.”
“Thank you, Terry,” said Jim. “In other news, seventeen people died today as a suicide bomber struck at a fast food restaurant in Jerusalem.”
I muted the TV. “Were those the men who were shooting at us?” Aricela said.
“I think so, honey.” Honey?
“Too bad they didn’t die.”
I almost said something parental. Something like, “We shouldn’t ever wish anyone to be dead, no matter how bad a person they were.”
But fact of the matter was, I wouldn’t have shed a tear. If they were dead, whoever they were, they wouldn’t be popping up in any of the Platypuses’ neighborhoods anymore. We could get back to the serious business of making rock and roll music. Frampton would get over his mad and return to lay that backbeat down. I’d find Toby Bonner, and Bonnie and the boys would make a record and everything would be cool.
Yeah, right. And the suicide bombings would stop too. And every little boy and every ferret would have a kindly school lunch worker to get them out of every predicament they ever got into.
Like Aerosmith said … “Dream on … dream on … dream on …”
An hour later. Aricela, after protesting that she wasn’t tired, had fallen asleep as soon as we put her to bed. Gina and I had climbed into the sack too. “Hey,” I said.
“Uh-huh?”
“I got a package from New Jersey today.”
“Oh?”
“An autographed photo
of Pete Townsend.”
“Really? I wonder who could have sent you that.”
“One of my legions of female admirers.”
“You’ll have to thank her properly sometime.”
“Yes,” I said. “I will.”
We lay there for a few moments. Gina said, “So.”
“So. You know what we have to do tomorrow.”
“Yes.”
“Do you want help?”
“I don’t think so. I’ll take her down there myself.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yeah.”
A couple of minutes later: “Gi?”
“Yeah?”
“You want to talk about it?”
“Talk about what?”
“The kid.”
“She’s not an it. And she has a name.”
“Sorry.”
“What is there to discuss?”
“For starters, how come you have these sudden maternal feelings?”
“What maternal feelings?”
“Come on. You’re treating her like she’s your daughter.”
“Bullshit.”
“Oh. Excuse me. I was mistaken.”
She let it go a few seconds, then said, “Not like my daughter. More like my niece.”
“The difference being?”
“A niece goes home at the end of the day. You’re not responsible for her. A daughter, you’re responsible for.”
“So what you’re saying is, you like having a kid around, but you don’t want the responsibility that goes with it.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Yet you’re not wanting her to go home at the end of the day.”
“Not yet. It’s kind of like she came to visit for the weekend. I’m having fun with her, damn it. I’m as surprised as you are.”
“I see.”
I had more to say. While I was figuring out which part of it to bring up next, Gina fell asleep. I kissed her cheek, adjusted her pillow, and rolled over.
One Last Hit (Joe Portugal Mysteries) Page 17
