by Dan Vining
“Hell, I was lucky to have a glove,” he now said out loud. “Used to make fun of me because I couldn’t swim. Not everybody grew up with a swimming pool.”
The room smelled like a clothes hamper. A man’s room. He looked around. Newspapers on the floor, the trash can filled with the fliers they handed you every ten feet on the sidewalks in Los Angeles, coffee cups on the dresser, one of the white shirts thrown over the television, which he hadn’t even turned on. When he’d checked in, he’d told them no maid service.
Not that the place couldn’t use a woman’s touch, he thought self-pityingly as he sat on the unmade bed.
Chapter Fifteen
Ava had a dog. For exactly one month, which was all Ava and the dog could take of each other. It had been her stepfather’s dog, a Jack Russell terrier, which her mother had wanted nothing to do with upon the death of her second husband. This was in the last year before the Domesticated Mammals Release Law went into effect, emancipating all the dogs and cats, basically anything with a face that looked even remotely like a human face. When Release Day came—July 4, 2022—the weepy law-abiding “pet owners” delivered “their” dogs and cats to centralized locations, the parking lot of Union Station in the case of Center City Angelenos. Goodbyes were said and the uniformly confused animals were loaded aboard Electro-Freightliners for transport to their new homes in the wild in less advanced states, like Idaho. Almost everyone complied. A few holdout citizens hid their pooches and kitties behind drawn shades, feeding them “people food” and double-bagging their shit to avoid detection. The less rebellious just turned their pets loose up in the hills.
But that was three years ago, in 2022. Before that, Ava’s stepfather’s dog would sit beside her refrigerator for hours, looking up at her with the most annoying and pitiful look. The dog knew there was food in that food box and that Ava controlled the box, could open it whenever she wanted and retrieve that food, which was all that really mattered to the dog, which the dog knew would make everything right.
That was the look on Beck’s face.
He was standing down on Sunset Boulevard below Sunset Tower. It was noonish. Ava had just gotten up. She hadn’t even brushed her teeth. She’d stirred out of thick slumber when a wayward seabird had slammed into her fourth-floor bedroom window. She had stretched, taken off her sleep mask, gotten out of the sultan-size bed, fluffed her hair, crossed to the living room, and threw open the drapes, then looked down to check the traffic.
And there he was, Beck, looking up at her with that hangdog, pitiful, annoying look.
“Sheesh!” Ava said.
He couldn’t see her up there at her window, no way. Still, she could feel his desperate, questioning eyes on her. She hadn’t talked to him since the night in her office when she had taken his money. She’d ignored all his calls and messages. She hadn’t told him anything. She hadn’t told him about finding Cali at The Shinola, looking for all the world like a hooker, a clinically-depressed hooker. She hadn’t told him about Cali’s “manager,” Action Man. She hadn’t told him about tailing her to the apartment in the Marina or about the sad little seashell night-lights and the empty dirty white suitcase and finding her dead. And she sure as heck hadn’t told him about the cold boot.
She was about to close the drapes and go brush her teeth when she saw that Beck wasn’t alone. Except in the cosmic sense. Someone else was watching him watching Ava’s building. Parked on the other side of the street, up the strip, was the classic Bentley from the parking lot of The Shinola. Mr. DL. Or rather, his driver. The tall shrugging gun-toter was out from behind the wheel, wiping something nonexistent off the hood as he eyeballed Beck a hundred feet away. Then he pretended to check the rear tires. Then he came around to the back of the car, put his foot up on the bumper, and pretended to tie one of his shoes. Smooth.
Beck never even saw the man spying him, his eyes fixed on Ava’s fourth-floor window.
“Go away,” Ava said in her scold-the-dog voice. “Both of you.”
As if he’d heard her, Beck lowered his head and ran his fingers through his hair, exasperated. He turned his back on the Sunset Tower and went over to sit on a bus bench. He looked over his shoulder again, a perfect three-quarter profile, like an actor’s eight-by-ten headshot. He wore the same million-dollar silver suit. Ava had only seen him in the middle of the night before this, yet here he was, handsome as ever. Somehow he got better looking the sadder he was.
Along came a subplot. A half block to the east, a vintage black Volkswagen bug jumped out of the creeping outside lane of traffic and drove up the sidewalk. A girl was driving. Everyone was honking, furious at her for violating protocol, for being impatient, for acting exceptionally. She parked the bug on the sidewalk right across from The Tower and jumped out and waved gaily at the honkers and zigzagged her way through the cars and trucks.
And then she was standing right in front of Beck.
“And who are you?” Ava asked, from a great height.
The girl looked familiar. She was Ava’s size and build, had the same color hair, cut like Ava’s. She wore low high-heeled boots and a tight catsuit with a flip-up hood, though it was un-flipped. The whole outfit was completely inappropriate for the middle of the day on a Thursday.
“Wait! You look like me,” Ava honked. The girl was ten years younger than Ava, which made the look-alike lass extra nervy.
Beck lifted his head and looked at the girl, who went straight to chewing him out, gesturing theatrically, pointing one way down Sunset and then pointing the other way and then pointing at Ava’s building. Indicating, they call it in acting. Beck hung his sorry head. Even without seeing his face, it was obvious he didn’t want the girl there, ragging on him like this. In spite of herself, Ava felt sorry for him.
The Bentley gunman was watching intently, not even pretending not to be watching.
Beck reached into his pocket and gave the girl some money. Magic, she gave it a rest. The girl said another line or two, tilted her head to one side empathetically, and said something else. Beck nodded. She said something else. He nodded again. She shook his hand that way girls do when they’re trying to convince themselves they’re grown-ups now and turned around and threaded her way back across the four lanes to her black bug, almost skipping. She got into the VW, turned the key, cranked the wheel, and waved out her window, all friendly-like, until someone—meaning a guy—let her back into the outside lane as if she’d never left. And off she went. At a half mile an hour.
Ava growled.
She took a shower and got into her work clothes and toasted an onion bagel, buttered it, and went back to the window, hoping that…
Nope. Beck was still there, looking up at Ava’s fourth floor window again.
“Fine!” she said.
A few minutes later, Ava had him by the arm, walking him down Sunset to Carney’s, a hotdog joint retrofitted into an old Coast Starliner train-car planted diagonally on a $5 million lot. The chilidogs were twenty-eight dollars.
“Drink,” Ava said. She pushed the cup of joe across the red-top table.
“It’s been three days since I—” Beck began.
“Actually, two and a half…”
“I couldn’t help but think the worst,” he said.
“Well,” Ava said, “the starting point with Cali was that she was dead so you could say the worst was—”
“She’s not dead, I told you that. I would know if she was dead.” Then something overtook him, overtook his face, starting in the eyes. After a moment he said, in an altogether different voice, “At least that was true then, when I hired you the other night, in your office,” he said. “That’s what I thought then, that she was alive. I don’t know what I feel now.” He looked for the words and then said, pitifully, “Now I’m getting…mixed messages. Mixed emotions.”
“Hey,” Ava said, “if wasn’t for mixed emotions I wouldn’t feel anything at
all.” She looked down at the three feet of Formica between them. Holy cow! One of her hands was reaching across the table to take his hand. She stopped it in time.
Beck hadn’t noticed. “You’ll tell me, either way,” he said, a question, a plea.
“Yes, I will.”
“Even if—“
“Yes, even if.”
“I just think it would be better to know.”
“How could it not?” Ava said, getting up. “Now it’s time for me to get crackin’. And it’s time for you to suck it up, big fella.” She pulled him to his feet, straightened his suit, patted his lapels.
“Do you need more money?” Beck asked, already reaching into his pocket.
“No,” Ava said. “No.” Today was one surprise after another.
www
“Trouble is looking for someone to drain,” Vivid sang on the juke. It was a good song.
The dive bar was on Main in Santa Monica, four or five blocks away from anything even close to hip. It had a name, but “Dark & Dank” would have been good. Or “Dante’s Abandon-All-Hope Lounge.” It was a quarter-full of day-drinkers and fifty-cent criminals. And actors who no longer had representation. Ava had just stepped in off the sunny street and stood waiting for her eyes to adjust. She had tailed the black VW with the ten-dollar help of Edward Chang who had a tap into the traffic surveillance cam circuit and his own bootleg vehicle recognition software. It wasn’t that difficult. There weren’t but six old Volkswagens in LA proper and only one that was black. The bug was parked on the sidewalk out front. Ava groped her way toward what she hoped was an empty stool at the bar and sat down, all before Vivid finished her cautionary tale.
VW Girl was the bartender. She was working the place alone. She had her back to Ava, putting a new spool of paper into the old-school cash register. She looked even younger than she’d looked seen from on high. Maybe it was her outfit. She’d gone from the knockoff of Ava’s catsuit to blue hot pants and a white short-sleeve shirt knotted in front just high enough to expose her belly button. Her high-heeled boots had been replaced by white sneakers. It took Ava a minute, but then she realized where the look came from: Dallas Cowboy Cheerleader, 2001.
“Who are you?” Ava said.
When the girl turned around, her face lit up and she said, “You cut your hair!”
“Six months ago,” Ava said. “Who are you? Do I know you?”
“It’s so cute,” the girl said. She sounded about sixteen.
“Thanks, I like yours too,” Ava said. It came out nowhere nearly as nasty as she meant to sound. “Yours is just like mine from six months ago. I saw you with Beck. Who are you?”
“I can’t believe this!”
“I know, me either. Who are you?”
“I’m you,” the girl said. The line sounded like she’d rehearsed for use in the unlikely event she ever got to meet Ava Monica. “Or,” she said quickly, “I’d like to be someday. A detective, a woman detective. Well, I already am, a detective. I’m licensed. You’re my inspiration. I studied and took the test and got my license after I saw you on TV the first time. You were talking about the Galton case.”
“You’re a detective,” Ava said. Ava’s questions were all becoming statements. And vice versa.
The girl pulled a business card out of her top and put it on the bar. It had a drawing of a cute girl with a big ol’ magnifying glass. Her name was Chrisssy. Yes, with three S’s. That’s all it said, “Chrisssy” and “Investigations” and a number.
“I thought you were a whore,” Ava said.
“No,” the girl said. “No!”
“Beck,” Ava said.
“What?” the girl said.
“I saw you with Beck, out in front of my place.”
The girl looked caught, embarrassed. A woman at the end of the bar, who could’ve been a Ziegfeld Follies girl a hundred years ago, rattled the ice in her rocks glass and held it up. VW Girl, grateful for the interruption, pulled a bottle out of the well and went to her.
When she came back, she said, “Birmingham.”
Now it was Ava’s turn to say, “What?”
“He said his name was Birmingham. I think it’s English. He had an English accent anyway and said he was from Britain. That’s the same as England, isn’t it? Birmingham isn’t his name?”
“Beck,” Ava said. “His name is Beck. I guess.”
“I am so sorry,” the girl said. “I can tell you’re angry and that’s the last thing I want. I didn’t think it would matter. I didn’t see how it would hurt. I just thought what a coincidence it was, that he wanted to know about you and of all people he looked me up.”
“He hired you.”
She nodded. “He came here to the lounge. He was sitting where you’re sitting. Well, one stool over. I told him I was…undercover, working here. On a case. He told me he had hired you to look for his girlfriend, Cali. Her hat blew off when they were at the beach and she swam in after it and he never saw her again…”
“What else did he tell you?”
“Just that he was a businessman from London and he needed to know if you were legit—Well, yeah!—and where you lived. I told him that everyone knew where you lived, The Sunset Tower. But of course he isn’t from LA. Are you mad?”
“How did he find you?”
“I’m in the book. With a picture. I don’t have an answering service like you do with Penny so when I get a call I pretend I’m the service.”
“You know about Penny.”
“She’s so sweet. I call and we just talk. I feel like I know so much about you.”
“He gave you more money today,” Ava said. “What was that for?”
“To follow you. To tell him where all you went, who you saw. He’s desperate and…” She trailed off.
“And what?”
“He thinks you’re not telling him everything you know. He thinks…” She looked down at the bar, wiping it idly.
“Stop trailing off like that,” Ava said. “He thinks what?”
“That maybe you found Cali and you’re…that you’re, I don’t know, holding her hostage or something. He told me to threaten you, if that’s what it took. Are you mad? I’m so sorry.” She retrieved her purse from under the bar.
“What are you doing?” Ava said.
“Giving you the money he gave me,” she said. “Don’t hate me.”
Ava glared at her until she put away the money. She turned for the door. “Don’t follow me,” she said. “I follow people, people don’t follow me.”
“But…” the girl said.
Chapter Sixteen
Remnants of the future were all over LA. Driving along on surface streets or flying low over the city in a helo-cab, an angle would poke out at you—or a color or a shape—pull you out of Now and throw you head first into Next. Everywhere you went there were run-down “futuristic” car washes and hamburger joints, mirrored office buildings, flying saucer houses in the hills, glass box houses in the flats. On the face of an otherwise blank apartment building there’d be an aluminum disk with golden arms sun-bursting out from the center. A decoration.
Or was it a declaration? Come tomorrow!
When academics and historians catalogued Southern California’s iconic architecture, they tended to dwell on the hot dog stands shaped liked hot dogs or the teepee tourist courts on what had been Route 66 coming in through Rancho Cucamonga or the big doughnut on the roof of Randy’s. But those were just jokes. They were cartoons. The futuristic designs all over LA weren’t cartoons, they were movies—sci-fi—that challenged Angelenos to look ahead, to dream, to be unwilling to accept the ordinary. To say No! to the here and now. The futuristic designs were advertisements for tomorrow and—like all advertising—were meant to keep you dissatisfied.
Ava was parked in front of a pink apartment building on the street that craw
led up Beachwood Canyon toward the Hollywood Sign. The day was ending—dying like an actress in a silent film, histrionically—which meant the pink tone splashed onto the face of the otherwise white apartment building had an exclamation mark after it. Pink! Three aluminum chevrons flew across the front of the two-story building, like spacecraft flying off to a sky battle. The place was called Villa Ventura.
Ava was just killing time, waiting for dark, waiting to go do what she knew she had to go do. She was listening to a pirate radio station, The Beach Boys, “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” which she just now realized was futuristic, too. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could live together in a world where we belong? The song was wistful and sad and happy and bold and naïve, all at the same time. Very SoCal, she thought. The song made her think of her dad. He had liked The Beach Boys, though he was about as far away from being a surfer or a hot-rodder as it was possible to be, a Pasadena accountant who wore suits to work right up until the last day when he collapsed face-first onto a ledger on his desk, eyes open, getting one last look at that bottom line. Ava was thirteen when he died and it had nearly destroyed her, though she’d been at an age when it seemed best to stuff it down, not let it show, crying in her closet or on the back of a horse going around the ring at the Burbank Equestrian Center. (Her mother had made her take dressage lessons, trolling for a second husband.) I wish they all could be California girls… Ava had heard her father singing as he shaved one morning. Was that what her father had against her mother, that she didn’t smell like the beach? The song ended and the pirate DJ came on, spoke a line or two. He had a deep and dark voice, the kind of voice that sounds familiar even the first time you hear it. He sounded lonely but used to it, like Los Angeles.
