by Dan Vining
“What’s your name?” Ava threw back the last of the Old Grand-Dad.
“Beck.”
Ava pushed a paper pad across the desk. “Give me your numbers. I get two thousand a day plus bribes. Let’s say ten thousand now, the rest later.”
She was about to tell him how to zap the money to her when he went to his pocket and came out with a clip of bills. He dealt off $10,000.
“You have a picture of her?” Ava said. “Maybe a candy snap, something from the photo booth at the Ninety-Nine Cent Store?”
“Only this,” he said. He held out a heart-shaped gold locket.
Ava took it. It was warm. Of course it was, he’d been clutching it all along. She popped it open. It was one of those new jobbers with a microchip in it, a little screen. There she was, Cali, a shimmering image, a talking head that mouthed the words, I love you… over and over. She had soft, magical blonde hair, like Veronica Lake, over one eye like Veronica Lake, and each time she said, I love you…she brushed her hair back off her face.
“Can I keep this?” Ava said.
“No, please,” Beck said and snatched it back. “It’s all I have now.”
“How’s about I just download it, then?” Ava said. She was half past tired of him and the lovesick horse he rode in on.
But she took his money, scooped it right up, the way they do in the casinos, quick, before it sinks in that you’re a sap.
www
She drove the Hudson out of Westwood. It being late and with the rain and all, the traffic was light. She steered down Gayley to Wilshire. Ava Monica was one of the last of the free-drivers, Queen of Surface Streets. When she spotted a slowdown ahead or when a monitor on the dash alerted her of a looming dead-stop jam—what the locals called a “Sig Alert” for some reason—she would crank the wheel and power down a side street, blowing past stuck traffic until she found herself an escape route, a “surface street” somehow undiscovered and clear. Sometimes she would drive twenty circuitous miles to go three miles across the city, three miles as the crow flies. The light was red at the corner of Gayley and Wilshire, so she squeezed around a couple of Feds, law-abiders, and turned left, heading up the wrong side of Wilshire Boulevard through the grand canyon of high-rise condos where the Saudis and undead old movie stars lived. When she met some traffic, she ducked over into the alleyways behind the towers then cut across onto Little Santa Monica, into West Hollywood.
Where was everybody? Maybe another bomb had gone off.
Cali was on the monitor on Ava’s dash. “I love you, I love you, I love you…” Cali said and brushed, brushed, brushed her hair off of her face.
“I love you, too, honey,” Ava said.
She punched a button and another face replaced Cali’s on the screen.
“Hey,” Penny said a second after she appeared. She was behind a panel of switches and wires and old-style monitors, filing her nails, her legs crossed. Penny looked to be in her low twenties with a waist in the same range, straight blue-black hair, bangs. In the background were other girls behind other switchboards, a room full of them, wearing headsets. Maybe. Ava didn’t know if Penny was real or not, had never been face-to-face with her without some electronics between them. It didn’t much matter anymore, if Penny was real or not. Funny thing about progress, take it far enough and it’s people who get cheap. If Penny was human, she worked a twenty-hour-a-day shift. She was never not there and perpetually as bright and chirpy as a bird. If there was one thing the world had perfected, it was manufactured attentiveness. Her real name was Penelope, after her mother’s favorite movie star. Or so she said. Her last name was Lane, which only confused things further, but interestingly so.
“Got any messages for me?” Ava said.
“What were you just watching?” Penny said.
“New case. Missing love of his life.”
“OK,” Penny said, confessionally. “I was listening in when you were back in the office. You left the service monitor on. I heard it all. Beck & Cali. Malibu. Sorry. You know, Ava, I was thinking—”
“You got any messages for me, Penny?”
“Roland Turnbull, twenty ten,” Penny read. “WCB. Your Auntie Eve, twenty sixteen. She loves you, wants to borrow some money. Roland Turnbull, twenty twenty, twenty twenty-five, twenty twenty-eight…”
“Put him up,” Ava said.
A man appeared on Ava’s dashboard screen, a middle-aged man with a flushed face, blood red with frustration. A graphic overlay showed his rising BP. Little jets of steam coming from his ears would have been fitting.
“Yikes,” Ava said. “Get him off.”
Roland Turnbull went away and Penny came back on the screen. “Who is he?” Penny asked.
“Domestic surveillance job from six months back. His girlfriend skipped away with a prep chef. Ol’ Roland just had to know. She was nineteen. These guys kill me. Reality clears its throat and they get mad at me.”
“You know what?” Penny stopped filing her nails and said, “I bet she was terminally ill and couldn’t bear for him to know.”
Ava said, “I’ll show you the pics. She was nineteen. And acting all nineteen-ish.”
“No, I meant Cali,” Penny said. “She couldn’t bear to see how it would hurt Beck, that she was dying and all.”
Ava said, “I love how everyone just acts like ‘Cali’ is a reasonable name for a woman in twenty twenty-five. I can’t wait to find out what her last name is.”
Penny continued, “She wouldn’t/couldn’t allow her personal health problems to weigh on him so she chose to harbor her secret alone, deep within, bear that burden in secret, right to the end. It’s so romantic.”
“What I’m trying to figure out is how to drag it out over another week. This guy’s rich as sin. The jerk.”
“She’d been so long at the beach she even tasted like the sun…” Penny repeated and sighed.
“Yeah, right.”
“That’s so beautiful,” Penny said. “Of course Beck stole it from that Rod McKuen spoken-word album that won a Grammy in nineteen sixty-eight. Still, I’ve never had a man steal from a best-selling spoken-word album to describe me. And I don’t believe you have either.”
“No,” Ava said, trying to sound sarcastic but coming off wistful.
“You know what I think it is about this one, Ava?” Penny said. “What it is about it that gets us where we live? It’s our dream. The slavish devotion of a top-notch guy…”
“He had beautiful hands,” Ava said, mostly to herself.
With just three more detours she’d already made it to her destination, West Hollywood, Santa Monica Boulevard, a strip of shops and fussy restaurants and bars. With the rain gone and the chill after the rain gone too, the gay bars were all fired up, the guys out on the sidewalk, having more fun than anybody else in LA. Or at least trying to make it look that way. The Hudson took itself over to the curb. “Eighty-eight seventeen Santa Monica Boulevard, West Hollywood,” the car’s voice said, a man’s voice. A chick voice had come stock with the nav system. Ava put up with it for a day or two but then took it back in for an after-market retrofit. This voice sounded like a Hudson Hornet. He was real—a real man—a burned-out actor from the nineties most people thought was dead.
“I’m there, Penny,” Ava said. “Don’t wait up for me.”
“I guess,” Penny said absently, sounding sweetly sad now. “Ava…” she said.
“Yeah?”
“Let him down easy, if you can. So he won’t be busted for the next girl.”
As Ava got out of the car, a flying wedge of eight Crows cruised softly overhead, headed due south toward downtown, big trouble somewhere.
Chapter Five
On the north side of Santa Monica Boulevard was a candy store, the windows dark. Ava rang the doorbell using the toe of the shoe she’d pried out of Beck’s hands before she pushed him out the door. While she wa
ited for somebody to answer, she leaned against the doorjamb and tried it on. Too tight. Ouch. After a moment, a speakeasy window slid open, revealing the face of the Candy Lady. A sour face it was, too.
“Closed,” she said, darkness behind her.
“Oh, I bet that’s why all the lights are out,” Ava said.
“What do you want?”
“Not candy,” Ava said. “Starts with an S…”
“Shoes?”
“That’s it.”
“Do you know the word?”
“You mean besides, ‘shoes’?”
“You have to know the word,” the Candy Lady said.
“Money?” Ava said.
“That’s not the word,” Candy Lady said. Ava could hear someone grumbling in the background, a man.
“Lotsa money?” Ava said. “No, that’s two words. Let me think…”
The door opened. Ava stepped in. Candy Lady, who was seventy-ish, moved to one side with a practiced the-customer-is-always-right smile. It was dark inside but there were countertops covered with candy, some of it obscene. The air was all sugary. A door stood open in the back of the store, a wedge of light thrown onto the floor, and a spry older man was moving into a back room, looking over his shoulder to make sure Ava was following. A four-foot-long lizard crawled across the floor and disappeared down an aisle, unremarked upon by any of the principals in the scene.
Once they were back in the workshop, Ava handed him the red shoe.
“You wish a…replacement?” the Shoemaker said. He examined the shoe, but not for long. He knew what he knew and he wasn’t much of an actor.
“Did I come to the right place?” Ava said. “I saw the mark, on the inside of the heel.”
The Candy Lady had followed Ava into the back room. “We don’t know you,” she said. “This is real animal skin. It’s—”
“Illegal,” Ava said. “Look, if I was an animal lover, I would have gone to Walmart. Hey, even my underwear is leather. I don’t want shoes, I want information. I know you made the shoe. I want to know who you made it for.”
Ava put one of Beck’s new hundred-dollar bills on the work bench. The lizard made another appearance, stood its ground below Ava, looking from face to face.
“How do we know you’re not a Regulator?” the woman said.
“Because I speak in complete sentences and I don’t have my hand in your pocket?” Ava said. “Because I have a hundred dollars?”
The Shoemaker turned the shoe over and over in his hand. He licked the tip of his finger and touched it to the toe to wipe away some stain. He started, “I think it was—”
The Candy Lady interrupted, “He’s proud of his work. To a fault, given the times we live in.” She slid the hundred off of the workbench. “We didn’t use names,” she said. “Names are never used.”
“A beachy blonde?” Ava said. “About my size? Maybe a little fuller up top.”
“A little younger, too,” the Candy Lady said, too quickly.
“Her Hobarts or the whole package?” Ava said. “Never mind. How’d she pay?”
“Same as you,” the Candy Lady said. “Hardware.”
“Wait, let me guess,” Ava said. “She didn’t tell you her name, didn’t give you an address. No digits, no diggity. She came back to pick them up herself in the dead of night. No paper trail.”
The Shoemaker said, “We have to be very careful.”
“Very,” the Candy Lady said.
“So you don’t know anything else about her,” Ava said, not really a question.
The two had nothing to say. The lizard shook its head wearily and went under the workbench. The Candy Lady shoved the C-note deeper into her pocket.
Ava took the shoe and started back out through the store, the couple right behind her, as if they thought she might swipe one of the penis lollipops. She stopped at the front door. “You don’t have any chocolate, do you?”
The Candy Lady said, a little less guarded than before, “Nobody does. The heat is on again.”
Ava put her hand on the knob. “They’re always afraid somebody somewhere is having a good time…”
She was halfway out the door when the Shoemaker said, “She wasn’t alone. She came in with that star. The crazy one, the singer-slash-actress.”
“She only looked like her,” the Candy Lady said, sharp. “And not very.”
“It was her,” the old man said to his wife. “The crazy one.”
“Oh, go to hell, Leo,” the Candy Lady said and disappeared back into the workshop.
When they were alone, the man said, “Vivid. She came in with Vivid.”
“Really?” Ava said. “Vivid. She is crazy. I like that one song though…”
The Shoemaker looked back at the workshop, made sure his wife was beyond hearing. “I made her a pair two months ago, Vivid herself. It was right after that business in Milan and just before the bed fire at The Cliff House. My wife never knew about it. A pair of open-toes. Gold-colored. She was very pleased. And the next time, she brought your girl back with her. For the red ones.”
“You’re sure it was Vivid?”
“I had a dance band,” the Shoemaker said. “In the seventies. We cut a few records, toured with Sylvester and The Gap Band.” He stood with his feet apart, pointed with one hand toward the ceiling and put the other hand on his hip, a pose that apparently had meant something once.
“You know, Vivid’s fans like to dress up like her,” Ava said, gently. “She could have been an imposter.”
He held up a wait-here finger. He went back into the workshop, there was the sound of a drawer opening and closing, and he returned with a picture clipped from a magazine. There she was, Vivid, on stage somewhere wearing what anyone not in the fashion trade would call a one-piece bathing suit. And a pair of high-heeled, open-toed gold shoes.
“She was crying the whole time, your girl, Blondie,” the Shoemaker said. “I guess Vivid was trying to cheer her up, buy her some custom kicks, like hers.”
www
The Shinola Supper Club overlooked the ocean at Santa Monica where San Vicente dead-ended. Off to the left was The Pier, to the right the curving stream of headlights and taillights that was Pacific Coast Highway. Like all of the best places, The Shinola wasn’t open to the public and had no signage other than the noise of the bands and the sound of people laughing and honking and calling out to each other when they left drunk. You had to know somebody to get in. Ava knew everybody, everybody knew Ava—at least among the up-all-night monied crowd—so she didn’t even slow down as she pulled past the guard tower. It had taken her the better part of an hour to zigzag across the Westside from the candy shop in West Hollywood, so by then it was bumping on 3:00 a.m., not that the night was anything like over. The parking lot was packed. The bulbous Hudson stopped right at the head of the silver red carpet and a valet guy snapped to and opened her door.
“Hey, Ava. You want a hand wash?” he said.
Ava got out. “Oh. You mean the car,” she said. “Why not?”
Ten feet away, a pimp named Action Man was just then shoving four girls into the back of an idling stretch limo helo, his clients a couple of out-of-towners wearing the short-sleeved business suits that had been in style a few years ago.
“I’m happy, hope you’re happy, too,” Action Man said, loud enough for everyone to hear. It was his catch-phrase. He was the sort of lowlife who thought it important to have one, a catchphrase. He closed the limo door and turned his back and the helo rose behind him.
He glanced at Ava as she went into the club. They didn’t like each other. How could they?
A lithe Black in a black tux stood on the stage in a shaft of blue light so intense it reminded one of a transporter beam in a science fiction show.
What he was singing was…
When Sunny gets blue, her eyes get gra
y and cloudy
Then the rain begins to fall, pitter-patter, pitter-patter
Love is gone, what can matter?
No sweet lover man comes to call…
The room was round, the small stage across the way through a grove of chrome palm trees. There was no curtain for the stage, just the open windows with the glassy ocean as a backdrop. A light sea breeze moved everything dreamily. A crowd of a hundred or so late-nighters seemed pleased with themselves for being there. A half moon cracked a smile out over the water.
Ava took a stool at the bar, her back to the singer and the room and the moon. The bartender was a war vet missing a hand, Tommy Cairo. “What’ll it be, Ava?” he said.
“Surprise me,” Ava said.
The bony manager of the place, Silky Valentine, was three stools down. “Use my bottle,” he said to his bartender.
“I’m surprised already,” Ava said.
Valentine wore a slick white dinner jacket. “Silky, you’re looking deceptively handsome tonight,” Ava said, without looking at him. Valentine ignored the modifier, heard it only as a compliment. He made a double clicking sound with one side of his mouth, his patented way of acknowledging things. Ava’s drink came across the bar. She lifted it, took a sniff and then a sip. It tasted like very expensive cotton candy.
She spun on the stool and turned her attention to the Johnny Mathis on stage. Or was it supposed to be Nat “King” Cole?
“I like him,” Ava said. “He seems sincere.”
Valentine and Cairo exchanged a look. “I’ll tell him you said so,” Valentine said. “Who are you looking for, Ava?”
“The man of my dreams,” Ava said, eyes still on the singer on stage. “Or maybe my mother’s dreams.”
“Seriously,” Valentine said. He hated not knowing everything, or what he had convinced himself was everything.
“Who said I was looking for somebody?”
“You don’t talk to me unless you are,” Valentine said.
“A blonde. With a funny name, even funnier than normal,” Ava said. “Cali.” She tossed him a little dub-player with the “I love you…” loop.
