by Dan Vining
With any luck, she’d be asleep in bed. If so, Ava wasn’t going to wake her. Sleep, baby, it’ll all be good in the morning, you’ll see. That lie. She’d just tuck her in and make sure she wasn’t choking on her own vomit and leave a note. Or if Cali was awake—watching the tube or something or staring at the wall, crying some more—Ava would just tell her to call Beck, tell her that’s what big girls did when they wanted to break up with a guy, not pretend to drown themselves in the shore break.
She stepped into the elevator. There were no buttons to push. “Uh…seventeenth floor?” she said to the ceiling. “Cali? About five five, blonde? Or jet black? Or…light brownish? Young? Pretty? Cries a lot?”
It was one of the new whisper-quiet lifts—the doors closed, the doors opened, and you were there—a little creepy. The door to 1717 was standing open an inch. Not a good sign. Maybe it was just carelessness on Cali’s part, upset, distracted, tired, forgot to close the door behind her?
“Yeah, keep telling yourself that,” Ava said out loud.
She pushed open the door. The sprawling flat felt empty. Half dark, too quiet. The only light came from outside, the orange glow from seventeen floors down. There was a balcony, the vertical blinds open, the sliding doors parted.
“Honey Pie?” Ava said. “Cali?”
The living room was dark except for the pink blush from a little night-light made out of a real seashell, down near the floor in the entryway. A souvenir of Florida? The girl in the loo at The Shinola had said something about Cali coming from Florida. There was another shell night-light in the one bedroom, under the nightstand beside the king bed. The bed was empty except for a red satin heart-shaped pillow. The pillow had Beck and Santa Monica Pier written all over it, though not literally. There was something else on the bed: a black wig, curled up like a cat.
On the floor was a large suitcase. Ava lifted it. Empty.
The light was on in the open walk-in closet. Three sad limp filmy bright pretty dresses hung on wire hangers on the rod on the right side. Three identical sad limp filmy bright pretty dresses. The same print. So there was that. The rest of the closet was empty. The top shelf above it was cleared. Was that where the suitcase had been stowed? There was room for it and maybe another one. A smaller, absent one? Had Cali figured out she only needed the one small bag where she was going so she left the other one behind? The shoe rack held a few pairs of shoes—practical and impractical—including one, an orphan, that was the companion to Beck’s keepsake.
“That’s what you call detective work,” Ava said to no one.
A dresser drawer was open. Underwear, all of it white. So Cali hadn’t taken everything with her. Or maybe she hadn’t taken anything, maybe she’d come in, whipped off the black wig, looked at that silk pillow on that king bed, turned around and run back out the door. Maybe she’d just come back to change into some comfortable shoes. Running shoes. But running to Beck or from him?
In the master bathroom were two more seashell night-lights—these imprinted with the name Gulf Shores—and the usual array of girlie stuff on the stone countertop. Cali had left without her lip gloss? A used hand towel hung beside one of the sinks. She’d washed her hands and face, then split? Ava turned back toward the bedroom. She stared at the empty suitcase again. It was cheap, used, dirty white, regular people’s luggage, almost the only thing in the room that wasn’t new, the only thing in the apartment that seemed to have any real history. That and maybe the little shell night-lights from Gulf Shore, Florida. The suitcase seemed terribly sad for some reason, for all it said about coming to Hollywood, about trading there for here. Then for now. Known for unknown.
Once Ava sussed out that she was alone, she went into the kitchen and poured herself a blast from the bottle of vodka she found in the freezer. She walked the drink back out into the living room. This was the kind of thing she did all the time for work, breaking and entering to try to figure out the truth—it was the work—but something about this go-around was creeping her out. She turned on a lamp. And then another. Then one more. She plopped down in a chair, took stock of things. What do we have? A kitchen, a living room, a half bath, a dining room with a table and six chairs in which no person had ever sat, the Xanadu-size bedroom and master bath. Fresh flowers on the coffee table. White roses. Another dry bunch in the kitchen, upside-down in the trashcan. Was Beck sending her roses every day? No, he’d said in Ava’s office he didn’t have an address for Cali. So someone else had sent them, someone who did know where she lived. And maybe was paying for the apartment? Vivid? One of Action Man’s johns? The Shoemaker? Or maybe Beck was a big fat liar and he knew exactly where Cali lived and what her last name was and everything else. And what did Cali mean when she’d said in the lot of The Shinola to tell Beck she just couldn’t? Couldn’t what?
No TVs on the walls, no screens anywhere. Not any pictures, moving or still, personal or general. Against one wall was a bookcase that didn’t hold any books, just row after row of Russian nesting dolls, unpacked, side by side. Over the couch, nicely framed (and hand-signed?) was a red-white-and-blue poster of a big-toothed politician. Block type, all caps, sans serif—a bit Stalinist for Ava’s taste—spelled out his name across the top, JOHN TERN. Along the bottom of the frame was the word, EMPATHY. Actually, EMPATHY! Ava hadn’t heard of him, which didn’t mean much. She’d long ago surrendered her citizenship, in her mind at least. Voting was for voters, the suckers.
“Politically active, idealistic,” Ava said to the empty living room. “Perfect.”
The poster was the only art in the place, if that’s what you wanted to call it.
No, there was something else: a postcard-size print on the bookshelf, leaning against one of the nesting dolls. It was an odd image: a lighthouse alone on a rocky point on a brilliant blue day, gulls banking, waves breaking. The artistic style was similar to a subset of advertising illustration called “California Orange Crate Art.” What that meant was bright colors and lots of light—a childlike sensibility, which wasn’t the same as childish. What made the little print on the bookshelf odd, what caught the eye, were the two cones of black coming out of the lens atop the lighthouse, where beams of light would be in nighttime.
“Hmmph,” Ava said, judgmentally.
So which version of gone was Cali? Gone out of her last known address? Out of LA? Out of the country? Or just out of her mind? Ava started thinking about what she could report to her client. Something vague enough to drag out the case another ten grand but not too vague. Maybe she’d just tell Beck that she hadn’t been able to find Cali, that his dream lover was almost certainly dead, drowned, even if there wasn’t a body. She could lie and let him get on the train to The Gump, get back to his exportin’/importin’ so that in time he could fall in love again with another too-perfect woman. Maybe she’d even type up a paper report, to make it realer than it was. Lovesick clients liked that, clutched the report in their little lovesick paws, something tangible in a world of intangibles.
“This is all I have now,” Ava said, in a mocking voice. Being a smart ass was something else that was going to catch up with her someday.
Then she saw it.
At eye level was an envelope stuck to the half-open sliding glass door that led onto the balcony. She put down her drink. The envelope had no name on it, just the word Happy. Ava turned and looked back toward the apartment’s front door. Line of sight. Beck would have seen it when he walked in, if he did know where she lived and he’d walked in. Or did Cali guess that it would be Ava who found it? Happy. Happy? She pulled it off the glass, half-expecting it to be stuck there with bubblegum. It was unsealed.
The note didn’t say much, just: I’m really sorry. I just couldn’t go backward.
It wasn’t signed. Ava was about to lift the stationery to her nose for a sniff to see if it was perfumed when she saw the white legs, out on the balcony, on a chaise.
Chapter Seven
Cali was sho’nuff dead. A goner.
“Perfect,” Ava said, standing over the body, trying to sound way tougher than she was. Or maybe trying to convince herself she’d seen this coming. She was waiting for the ladies from the coroner’s office to show. For some reason, she couldn’t bring herself to turn her back on the girl. Cali, her Cali. So now she was Ava’s Cali. The night was quiet, even quieter now, the same soft misty breeze off the Pacific. Ava listened for a siren but she’d told the HotCall operator this one was real dead so maybe there wouldn’t be a siren. It had been thirty minutes since she’d called it in. It felt like two hours. The coronettes had probably stopped for a malted milk somewhere or were banging a cop. No rush. After all, they didn’t get paid by the body.
Cali’s right hand was stiff against the left side of her face, that brush-back-the-hair gesture one last time. Her blonde hair—her real hair?—was pinned up. She’d cleaned off all her makeup. That would be what she’d used the hand towel in the bathroom for. Her eyes were closed. She didn’t look “at peace” or asleep. She looked dead. Gone. On the little teak table beside her were six plastic pill bottles, in a sad straight line as if they were game pieces on a board. Ava picked up the littlest bottle, figuring correctly it would be the most powerful of the drugs. It was a painkiller called Hark. (The pharmaceutical companies had given up on the multisyllabic, made-up, Greek-root drug names. They’d gone simple. And fricative.) Hark, 0.5 mg, quantity thirty. They should have named it Hark! Hark the herald angels sang. The bottle was only half empty.
Ava hadn’t really looked at the body yet, really looked. Now she looked. Cali’s lipstick—so red, so vivid out in front of The Shinola—was gone. Her uncolored lips made her look more like a person, like somebody’s daughter instead of somebody’s piece of ass. Her lips were parted a bit, just enough for a last breath. Or maybe she’d whispered a name. Something told Ava it wasn’t Beck.
It would surprise most of Ava’s friends and clients to learn that she had only seen three dead bodies in her whole life. She liked to project an I’ve-seen-it-all attitude, but in a moment like this Ava was less a cop and more…somebody’s daughter, a young woman who talked a good line but who—like most of the rest of the populace—knew blessedly little about death and dying. She had seen her father’s body at Forrest Lawn in Glendale, before it was dressed, because her mother was out of town—conveniently out of town, Ava had thought at the time—but she was just a teenager then and almost everything she said or thought about her mother was bitter and preemptive. That was the first body she’d seen. Her grandmother she’d seen in a coffin on the bema of a Pentecostal Holiness Tabernacle in Glendale. Two. Ava’s third moment of grim witness came when she’d come upon an accident on Little Santa Monica Boulevard. It had been the middle of the afternoon on a Thursday, a bent bicycle and a girl who never got to be thirteen, never got to say bad teenager things about her mother. Ava had pulled over and stopped and got out. No one had covered the girl’s body. It was summer and it was LA, nobody had coats, much less long coats to put over a body. Ava just stood there in the street until the CROs and EMTs came on scene. God bless The Interveners, Ava thought then. How many of these have they seen? And at what cost to them?
The crew from the coroner’s office didn’t knock or ring the bell, just walked right on in, three of them, two proper coronettes and a guy, a tagalong, an EMT, Emergency Medical Tech. All of a sudden they were standing behind Ava, one more thing she didn’t see coming. Or hear coming. They would have arrived in a helo, probably landed on the roof. Those things really were quiet.
“Hey,” the EMT guy said. Generally speaking, he was as loose as a pair of board shorts, even blonder than Cali and dangerously tanned. These days most EMTs were med school bounce-outs, usually because they had thrown themselves a bit too eagerly into the drug training. Or else they were former firefighters, fed up with dying on the job. “What we got?” the surfer EMT said. He liked his work. You could just tell.
Ava pocketed the Hark—why, she didn’t know.
The two twenty-something coronettes pushed the EMT and Ava aside and kneeled beside Cali, started working their way down the checklist. A carotid reader confirmed what everyone already knew. One girl called out a number from the readout on the meter—presumed time of death, 3:55 a.m., almost an hour ago—and the other coronette tapped it into the form on a tablet.
“Epic,” surfer boy said.
He pulled a big fat windup watch on a chain out of his right pants pocket and stole a look at it. The second coronette slid back the sliding glass door to give them more room on the balcony and snapped open a rubber-tire gurney while the other coroner’s assistant bent to scoop the five remaining pill bottles into a purple plastic bag.
The EMT stopped the pill-scooper. “Wait. Let me see, Carlotta,” he said and started looking at the labels on the pill bottles.
They all wore latex gloves, DayGlo green, glow-in-the-dark gloves. Ava had never seen them in use before. The glow-gloves gave the whole grim, matter-of-fact bagging-up-the-body routine a clownish feel, like the least funny circus bit ever.
The other coronette was digging through her go-kit. “We don’t have an eighty-eight,” she said. The first girl cursed. The EMT guy said, quickly, “I got a box of seventy-sixes up top,” and pointed at the ceiling. “Same thing.”
“I don’t even know what they look like,” the first coronette said.
“I could go with you,” the EMT said. “Or not.” They exchanged a look that would make more sense in a minute.
The first coronette followed the other young woman off the balcony, but not before she snatched a pill vial out of the EMT’s hands, put it with the other dope in the purple dope bag, zipped it and locked it. The lock beeped twice.
So then it was just Ava and the EMT. And the deceased Cali.
“You aren’t a big sister,” the beach-boy EMT said to Ava. “Or a neighbor or a friend. And no way you’re her mom.” The coronettes had just gone out the front door, headed for the roof, so now Ava and the EMT were really alone. “You’re a fixer, aren’t you?”
“I’m a private cop. What we used to call a detective. I go around detecting.”
“What did you pocket?”
Ava wasn’t up for a fight. She pulled out the bottle of Hark.
“Cool,” he said.
Ava put it back in her pocket.
The EMT had good eye-contact skills, like every other hustling salesman. He looked Ava right in the eye and kept nodding yes. Little yesses. The setup. Then he looked away from her to let his eyes fall on Cali’s face and body and for a while both of them just considered her. Cali hadn’t changed out of the white dress she’d worn to the club, a white dress with a full, pleated skirt. The wind off the marina had blown the skirt up, like Marilyn Monroe standing over the manhole cover, baring those white legs, only this time there was nothing fun about it and no one with a heart would take a picture of it.
The EMT shook his head slowly. Was he actually, legitimately, ever so slightly sad?
“She’s hot,” the EMT said. So much for the empathy.
“What’s your name?” Ava said.
“Whoa. Why?”
“What’s your name?” she said again, with less threat in it.
“Sean. But some people call me Shawn. I gave up on trying to correct people.”
“Everybody gives up on a lot of things,” Ava said.
“That’s heavy,” he said. “Actually, my actual name is Everett.”
She wanted to like him, one human being to another. It was just the two of them, standing out there in the sea breeze in the thinning night over a dead body. What could make you want human contact more than that? It was almost five o’clock in the morning. It was an hour for forgiveness, an hour for letting things slide.
Ava was about to say something genuine and not smart-ass when Sean or Shawn or Everett said, “Cold boot.
”
Cold boot. Was it that obvious that she had a stack of hundreds in her pocket?
“Do you know what I’m talking about?” he said.
So much for forgiveness, so much for almost liking the surfer boy. Ava had an exit line with a bad word in the middle of it but she didn’t use it. While she hesitated, he pulled out that watch-on-a-chain again, like The Stage Manager in Our Town. He looked at it, put it away.
“How much?” Ava said. Apparently, she had left her better judgment in her other pants.
“We have to hurry,” the kid said.
“How much?”
“Three grand.”
“You can do it?”
“Not five minutes from now,” the EMT said, blustering.
The front door opened, the coronettes returning. “What about them?” Ava said.
“They’re hella cool.” He started to reach for his watch again.
“Yeah, I know, time flies,” Ava said and went into her pocket and came out with her bankroll. She dealt off thirty hundreds. He stuck the bills in with his pocket watch. He was good at making money disappear too.
He went right to work, unpacking his goodie bag—four vials of something red that wasn’t blood, a syringe the size of a turkey baster, and a chunk of electro gear that appeared to be homemade. He ripped open Cali’s dress. Her breasts looked like they were made out of wax. With just his finger, he drew an X over Cali’s naked heart, a target. The gesture seemed almost religious. First rites?
