Sometimes Cannon could bring Escobar back down to planet Earth, but not that night. He was obsessed with the scene. I’ve never walked off a set, but I could feel the moment coming. I glanced at glassy-eyed Brittany, who looked resigned to Escobar’s whims.
Escobar brought his face far too close to mine. “You’re supposed to know women, no? You’re the expert? Where are you hiding it? Do I have to show you?”
I was glad he stepped away from me, or I might have broken his nose. No, you can’t actually drive a man’s nose bone into his brain regardless of what your ex-Marine neighbor told you. But it might have been fun to pretend I could.
He sat on the bed beside Brittany and grabbed a handful of hair from the back of her scalp, yanking her face close to his. One of the female interns gasped audibly from the back of the room, but the rest of the set was stone silent. “You see?” Escobar said to me, as if Brittany were a rag doll. “This is how you master a woman. You take control.”
Still tugging her hair by the roots, Escobar pulled Brittany’s face closer and mashed his mouth to hers. Unconsciously, she lightly touched his chest as if to push him away but reconsidered and let her hand fall to the mattress. In the script, Brittany’s character was infected and had seduced me, not the other way around; but the more footage we shot, the more the director was pushing the scene toward visual rape. I never would have agreed to the oldest stereotype in American history for the sake of a horror movie. No thanks.
I still don’t know how I resisted laying my hands on Escobar. I loathe men who mistreat women, no matter what their pretense.
“We’re done tonight,” I said, my voice thick with gravel.
Escobar released Brittany and shot to his feet. “What did you say?”
“Ten, it’s all right,” Brittany said, sitting upright. “He has his vision for it, what he sees in his head, and it’s not a problem. Seriously, I’m fine with anything he wants.”
I felt like the only sane man in a mental ward, but no one crosses the director on a shoot unless he can afford to lose his job. Mine might be lost already, but my dignity matters more than my work. It would cost him a fortune to replace me this late, so I had power, too.
“Sorry, Brit, this scene is over,” I said. “You can put your clothes back on, darlin’.”
Cannon’s feet pattered as she ran from her chair to try to stand between me and Escobar, who was staring at me as if I’d roundhouse-kicked him in the back of the skull. Visions of mayhem danced in my head. “Gus, it’s late,” Cannon said. “He’s tired. Every one’s tired.”
She reasoned with gentle, pleading tones. An observer might have thought she was worried he was about to pull out a gun.
I had nothing left to do but turn and walk toward the dressing room, where my clothes were waiting. I remembered how strange Chela’s voice had sounded when I’d last spoken to her two hours ago. She’d been lying to me. I was furious with myself for the way I’d been wasting my time instead of taking care of my family.
Escobar followed me step for step. “You!” he said. “Get back to the bed.”
I stopped and turned so Escobar could see my eyes. “You,” I said, “are an asshole.”
Cannon moaned, watching her movie unravel.
Escobar’s face wore a tight smile, but his eyes gathered information from mine. Maybe he saw Spider lurking there. Whatever he learned only made his anger glitter with an unspoken, terrible promise. His smile strained but never faltered.
“Yes. I am,” he whispered. He extended his arm toward the exit, in invitation. “Then go, cómo no. Good night, Tennyson.”
The sound of the calm before the storm.
I tried to call Chela as soon as I was in my car, but her phone was off. Please let her be home in bed, I thought, although I knew I couldn’t count on any miracles.
Since L.A. is three hours behind Miami, I decided to call my agent, Len Shemin, while I drove back to my hotel. I wanted him to hear the story from me. I felt guilty for how glad he sounded to talk to me. He said he was driving home from the office, too.
Our pleasantries didn’t last long.
“Jesus,” Len said, his one-word response to every sentence I told him about my night on the set—my last night, I assumed.
“So then I called him an asshole and left.”
“Jesus, Ten.” Len sounded as if he might cry. I almost asked if he needed to pull over. Maybe both of us should have; I almost clipped a midnight Rollerblader wearing glowing bands around his neck as he dashed across the intersection at the yellow light.
“He’s lucky I didn’t knock his teeth out,” I said.
“So you could go to jail instead of just getting fired?” Len said. “You’re the lucky one.”
So much for wondering if Len would share my outrage. Len and I have had difficult moments during our agent-client marriage—through my sex work, two murder investigations, and a kidnapping debacle—and he’d rarely sounded so grave. Now that Len was on the phone and my clothes were back on, the second-guessing began. Had I overreacted?
I hated to care whether or not I was fired, but I did. Asshole or not, Gustavo Escobar was one of the few players in Hollywood who had been willing to work with me. Len had warned me for years that I was trashing my career. Maybe I’d finally managed to do it.
“You had to be there, man. Something about Escobar wasn’t right.”
“You’re telling me you put it all on the line to defend the honor of Brittany ‘Look at My Tits’ Summers? Who, by the way, everyone knows has been vaginal bungee jumping with Escobar from day one. She’s tweeting about it! Is that what you’re telling me?” He was nearly shouting by the end.
Again, I was silent. My anger was burning off, dampened with doubt. I didn’t want to get into a shouting match with Len.
“Ten, I have a migraine, so I blew off Scott Rudin’s premiere party to go straight home. But now, instead of closing my eyes in a dark room, I’ll be on the phone with my buddies at CAA begging to kiss Escobar’s ass so I can make sure you still have a job in the morning.”
“You don’t have to do that.” I wanted to say, Forget it, I quit. But I didn’t.
“Yes, I do have to do that,” Len said, “because I put myself on the line for you. I’m one headline away from being a laughingstock because I didn’t cut you loose a year ago.”
Len wasn’t just my agent; he might have been my best friend. That’s how much that hurt. I wouldn’t have minded his bad mood, or his candor, but he’d snapped to judgment without respecting my opinion.
“Don’t do me any favors, man. If I’m that much trouble, don’t represent me.”
I was trying to give him an escape hatch, just as I had with April. Neither of us spoke for the next half a block. A full moon hung over the Atlantic, painting the flat ocean in a sheet of golden white. A beautiful lie.
Finally, Len sighed. “Goddammit, Ten. Get some help.”
My phone beeped to let me know he had hung up. If iPhones weren’t so expensive, I would have thrown it out my window.
I almost called Louise Cannon to try to fix it myself—I wasn’t the first actor who’d called his director an asshole and stormed off the set, and I wouldn’t be the last—but I put my phone away when I remembered what I had seen roiling in Gustavo Escobar’s eyes.
Please let Chela be home, I thought. I needed some light to sleep by.
But her room was empty.
Chela was gone.
SOMETIMES IGNORANCE IS bliss.
If I’d stayed at the shoot or come home fifteen minutes later, I might never have known that Chela went out. Not knowing might not have changed anything to follow—or might have made what happened worse—but I still dream about coming home that night and finding Chela asleep where she belonged, the events of the real world forever undone.
She had lied to me, but after my episode with Escobar and my conversation with Len, I was drained of anger. I felt a sense of calm reflection as I waited in the uncomfortable art deco lounge
chair in Chela’s room for her to come home. I’d decided that Dad was dead wrong. I wasn’t going to allow Chela to run wild on South Beach with a fake ID, no matter what her reasons. No more nightclubs and no more staying out till the cows wandered home. If she didn’t like my rules, she could either pay for her own hotel room or go back home.
That was what I’d planned to tell her.
Our suite’s front door opened quietly at 12:45, and I heard Chela slipping into her room. Her breathing was shallow, relieved, when she closed her door.
When she flipped on her light, she found me waiting. Her party dress barely qualified as clothing.
She didn’t start, or scream, or even blink. She stood frozen, staring at me with wide eyes that told me more than I wanted to know before she said a word. Chela looked smaller, as if her insides had shriveled while she was gone. I forgot my speech and my ultimatum.
“What happened, Chela?”
At first, she shook her head as if to say nothing. But her eyes said something else.
Before she spoke, Chela opened her drawer, found a gray UCLA sweatshirt she often wore at home in L.A., and pulled it on over her mini-dress. It hung to her thighs, nearly as long as the dress. Next, she tied on her robe, covering herself. I told myself she was being modest because she was embarrassed that her dress was so skimpy, but it might be worse than that. When she sat on her bed across from me, she gathered a rumpled bath towel into her lap, playing with the edges. She wanted to bathe.
“I went to Club Phoenixx . . .” she began.
While I was at work, Chela had been conducting an investigation. Her report was so detailed that I asked her to wait while I grabbed a pen and hotel stationery to take notes. She produced Maria’s driver’s license and showed me a photo on her cell phone with the license tag of the van of the man who had given it to her, a fake ID vendor known as Julio. Impressive.
She told me about the escort operation at the Swordfish Hotel and the kinds of men Maria might have been working for. She told me her pimp’s name was Raphael, a.k.a. Raffi, a.k.a. El Santo, and apologized because she hadn’t had a chance to snap a photo of his license plate. But the older-model black Mercedes limousine she described wouldn’t be hard to spot.
Her voice grew soft when she talked about the limousine, so I underlined Raphael’s name twice. My fingertips felt cold as I held tightly to the pen, grinding the tip into the paper almost hard enough to tear it. I had questions, but I kept them to myself.
“Go on,” I said.
She matched my measured tone. “Still nothing on the big-nosed guy I saw that night, but her friend thought she went after him. Maybe Raffi didn’t like her chasing a john on her own. Maybe Maria found the guy in the VIP room and left with him. Maria’s friend said movie people hang out up there, by the way. From Freaknik.”
My eardrums seemed to foam, so I gave my head a firm shake. I hadn’t expected my bad night to converge with Chela’s. Could someone from my movie be connected to a pimp whose girls were turning up dead?
Chela went on. “The first girl disappeared about three weeks ago, and another one, Lupe, two weeks ago. Were any of the movie people around at the beginning of the month?”
The shoot had started two weeks before, but plenty of crew had been there before the cast arrived. “They think someone connected to the film is killing the girls?”
“I didn’t say that,” Chela repeated patiently. “It’s just an interesting coincidence.”
I could be talking to a homicide detective; she sounded as if she had aged a decade. Chela’s work was stunning. The driver’s license alone would have been a coup for a cop.
“Chela . . .” My questions tried to form but got caught in my throat. I couldn’t bring the thoughts to my mind’s surface, much less into the quiet room. Chela’s eyes retreated far into her head as she stared at me. I had seen that mask dozens of times. I’d worn it, maybe. Don’t ask me, it said.
But I didn’t have to ask. A high-end pimp like Raphael would not give his trust away easily, especially when a dead prostitute was involved. Chela had told me plenty, but information like hers never came free.
“I wish you’d let me come with you,” I said, my voice hollow. “That you’d waited.”
Chela shrugged. “You weren’t here. You were working. But it’s okay. Now you have something to go on, right? I’d start with the VIP room at Phoenixx. I’m going to sleep now.”
I’d barely had a chance to close her door before I heard Chela’s shower go on. She must have run to her bathroom as fast as she could.
In the dark living room, I counted twenty long minutes before she turned the water off.
Sometimes a night goes so wrong that you can only ponder the immensity of it, your mistakes laid bare beneath a magnifying glass. In one night, I had lost my job, probably my agent, and maybe four years of work with Chela. I felt gut-punched. I’d had a similar feeling before, usually related to my cases, when the wrong move convinced me that I had failed, leaving a murderer to go free or a kidnapping victim to die. But that night, it was my own home, my own world. A dozen razors were slashing my insides to the bone.
I wished Chela had screamed curses at me, calling me a coward for avoiding the police after Maria died. But instead, her calm sweetness, the way she’d reassured me and sent me on my way, was ripping me apart. I was no longer the father figure, nor she the child. We had become something else. She had become something else. And it was my fault.
And I felt exiled from my one place of rest—April. Yes, she would listen and give me good advice, but every word I spoke would only reinforce her worst fears about me. I wanted to put off that final day of reckoning as long as I could. How could I tell her I was being drawn into another murder case? Or that she’d been right all along when she warned me that I couldn’t save Chela from her damaged past by hiding her and pretending we were a family?
If I’d been a crying man, I’d have spent my night in tears.
My first impulse in the face of catastrophe is to find a way to fix it, but no ideas came. I didn’t have any cop sources in Miami. I couldn’t let Chela stay in Miami now, much less use her as a tour guide through Maria’s world. And any connection to Freaknik, no matter how far-fetched, was beside the point; I would be banned from the set unless I crawled back to Escobar. I could humiliate myself if I knew it would lead somewhere, but over wild speculation?
“This ends tonight,” I said to the empty room. I didn’t recognize my own voice.
First thing in the morning, I would send Chela back to L.A. Dad and Marcela could keep the suite through the end of the week for a honeymoon, but my business in Miami was finished. I would try to find a police source to use Chela’s hard-won information, but from a healthy distance. Maria had created enough destruction in my life. I wanted to raise that girl from the dead just to slap her face.
I thought I felt better by two in the morning, when I made my decision, but instead of going to bed, I went to the kitchen and opened the cabinet where we’d stashed the leftover booze from Marcela’s party. I drink beer or a few glasses of wine now and then, but I’m not a drinking man. I don’t like the headaches, dehydration, and judgment lapses alcohol brings. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been anything close to drunk.
But that night, I poured a glass of rum and splashed it with stale Coke. When that one was finished, I poured another. Maybe I wanted to make sure I slept, but I was wide awake. The walls of the hotel suite seemed to close in on me, blurry blandness, so I decided to go outside.
I needed a swim. In my hurry, I didn’t bring bathing trunks or a towel. I was so drunk that I would have been weaving if I’d climbed into my car. But I could walk to the beach.
South Beach never truly shuts down for the night, but by two, it had gone from a boil to a simmer. Traffic on Ocean Drive was at a steady pace, no longer clogged, so I dodged honking drivers while I reeled toward the sand. Saltwater perfumed the night air. Wind whipped sand granules across my cheeks as storm c
louds hid the fat moon.
On the beach, the precious solitude of a night swim. Not a single person was in sight. Despite whatever hazards lay in the dark—beached jellyfish balloons, broken glass, even a shark fin gliding in the distance—the peace was worth the risk.
One of my loafers came off in a clump of damp sand near the shoreline. I flung off the other without slowing my pace, too drunk to care if I found either later. I stumbled out of my pants next, racing the rainclouds. My abandoned T-shirt turned invisible on the sand behind me. I splashed into the water, wearing only my briefs.
Cool water embraced my bare ankles. The Pacific had taught me to expect a shock of cold every time I waded into water, but I could handle the Atlantic. I barely noticed the chill. I closed my eyes and sank to my knees, up to my neck in water.
I wouldn’t call what I did swimming. It was more some groggy kind of surrender. I floated on my back, only stroking when the waves upset my balance or plugged my nose. For all I know, I might have dozed. Half-formed thoughts and images about Chela broke through, dogging me.
The wind picked up, matching my mood.
The ocean floor rose as I approached a sand bar concealed beneath the water to the right of me. I was ready to swim to the sand bar to give myself a rest when the rip current hit me.
Every time I get drunk, I remember why I don’t like to drink.
If I’d been sober, I would have paid more attention to the wind conditions and noticed the telltale swirling of the current near the sand bar—the perfect recipe for rip currents. But I wasn’t sober. I was so drunk that I’d barely been able to walk straight, and I was a long way from walking anywhere.
We forget how mighty nature can be. That current pulled me like a tractor towing a log.
Instead of snapping to alertness, my mind went blank with surprise. Instinct made me open my mouth wide and yell. Big mistake. I drank in so much saltwater that my throat and nose burned. The alcohol haze lifted, stripped.
Ten, you’re in trouble, a calm voice inside me said. I’d heard that voice before, and that voice was always right.
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