by Dan Vining
“That’s because he didn’t hire you to look for her. You’re following me, remember?”
“She looks exactly like her.”
“You should see the other ones.”
“What other ones?”
“The Vivids. The ones who are actually trying to look like Vivid. I think this one was, or is, just a friend of hers. I don’t know, I don’t think she looks that much like her.”
“She’s friends with Vivid?”
“What, you’re a fan?”
“A little. I like the way she keeps changing, keeps you guessing.”
“Now don’t you start copying her, Chrisssy!” Ava mocked.
In this light, alive, Cali did look like Vivid, at least more like her than she had looked in the looping picture in Beck’s locket. Or out in front of The Shinola with black hair, fighting with Action Man. Or on the lobby directory down in the Marina. Or dead, on that other balcony.
“I thought she’d be older,” Chrisssy said.
“People used to say that about me,” Ava said.
“She doesn’t belong here,” Chrisssy said. “In LA.”
Ava didn’t know what to make of that line, other than that sometimes people say things about others that are really about themselves. Chrisssy had such a sad look on her face, looking down at Cali.
Ava had to get away. “I have to tinkle,” she said. “Take over. You’re on duty.”
“What are we doing?” Chrisssy said. “Just guarding her?”
“We’re waiting until she wakes up or we wake her up and then we take her to…” Ava let the ellipsis hang in the air. Oh so many ellipses these days, so many thoughts trailing off inconclusively. “Well, I don’t know where we’re going to take her. But, as God is my witness, we’re going to take her…somewhere!”
“We should call him, Beck. Or Birmingham, whatever his name is.”
“No,” Ava said firmly. “I’m not turning her over to him until I figure this out or... Well, I don’t know what needs to happen before I turn her over to him. So… no. No Beck, no Birmingham.” She waited until Chrisssy nodded.
In the bathroom, Ava checked herself out in the mirror above the sink. She ran her tongue over her red lips, fluffed her hair. She was thinking, Who are you? She almost said it out loud. What was she doing here? How had she ended up doing this for a living? Whatever this was. With this case, she half felt like a pimp, like Action Man. How did that happen? She was about to move on to the next existential query when she heard voices outside, girl voices, alarum.
Cali was up on her knees in the bed with Chrisssy holding her by the wrists. Cali was panicky and angry and unblinking, as if just coming out of a chase dream. She was also all the way naked.
“Cali,” Ava said.
When Cali saw Ava she went slack. Chrisssy let go of her wrists. Cali’s hands fell into her lap. Chrisssy couldn’t take her eyes off of her.
“You remember me, right?” Ava said.
“I recognize you,” Cali said, wearily. “I don’t know your name.”
“Ava. Ava Monica. Beck sent me to find you.”
Cali brushed her hair off of her face.
Ava looked at Chrisssy. See?
Cali collapsed back against the headboard. She made no effort to cover herself with the sheet or anything else. “Beck. I don’t know who that is,” she said, with almost no inflection. Her panic was gone, replaced by…surrender?
“Birmingham?” Chrisssy offered.
“What?” Cali said, turning to look at her. It was impossible to say if she was confused or alarmed at hearing the second name. “Who are you?”
“This is Chrisssy,” Ava said, before Chrisssy said something that would only confuse things further for the poor girl. “She works with me. We’re going to get you out of here. We’re not going to do anything to hurt you.”
Ava started opening and closing dresser drawers, looking for clothes. The drawers were all empty. The surfer EMT miracle-worker could have at least thrown some of those white panties and tees and jeans from the apartment into a bag before he dumped her here. Then she looked in the closet. A single dress hung on a Lucite hanger, a brand-new dress. And not a cheap one, a cute one with a floral print. Or maybe they were butterflies. Size zero. Ava threw it to Chrisssy. It floated through the air prettily, the only light-hearted thing in the scene.
Chapter Eighteen
Beck was alone in a booth in Barney’s Beanery with a lot of money in front of him, two banded stacks of clean hundreds so crisp and new you could smell them, the kind and amount of money that said, I can fix anything, no matter how far gone. That lie. The big man who had been sitting across from him until a minute ago had left his fedora behind on the table, next to the cash. Who wears a brown fedora in LA in 2025? Beck put the man’s hat over the money and looked around. He thought about just pocketing the cash and walking out of there—forgetting all about this—but he knew he wouldn’t/couldn’t/shouldn’t. For one thing, the man would probably track him down and kill him. He looked over his shoulder. Where was he? The other man had suggested Barney’s as the meeting place, even though Beck had called him and not the other way around, Beck who’d decided it was time to go to the next level. Then he’d been made to wait alone for a half hour before the man showed.
It was the middle of the morning and Barney’s was a bar-with-food, not a restaurant-with-a-bar, so it was just barely open. Twenty minutes ago, the bartender had punched up a song on the eighties-style jukebox. A guy sitting at the bar with a plate of eggs and a Bloody Mary in front of him had waited a second and then got up and went over and yanked the plug out of the wall. It was early like that.
Beck polished a spoon with a paper napkin. Suspended over one of the pool tables was a gaudy motorcycle. What had they called them back then? Choppers, hogs. Barney’s idea of decorative art. Beck made a face. Who hangs a motorcycle from the ceiling in a restaurant?
Barney’s Beanery was on Santa Monica in WeHo, West Hollywood. It had been there a hundred years. Literally. The lead singer of an LA band, The Doors—who sang of breaking on through to the other side—had climbed onto the same bar in the nutty sixties and taken a whiz and gotten banned for a week or two. Old-timey blues singer Janis Joplin spent the last night of her life in Barney’s, shooting pool, before breaking on through to the other side alone in a motel room up Highland next to the Hollywood Bowl.
Beck didn’t know Barney’s history or much care about it. This was a different Beck, more focused, less heartsick. Or not heartsick at all? Was that possible? Had his desperation driven him to this version of himself, dry-eyed, resolved to some new sense of reality about Cali? Or maybe this was a new, stuff-it-down Beck. Barney’s was the kind of joint with fifty sports screens, the kind of bar where the women only showed up at night, the kind of place where women-broken men put up a good front for the sake of the other men. Maybe this new Beck was just responding to the setting, acting, playing yet another role. He didn’t even seem as handsome or as rich-looking today, though he was wearing the same million-dollar suit and had the same million-dollar face.
A girl brought a cup of tea to the table. “He doesn’t want anything?” she asked, hooking a thumb in the direction of the empty side of the booth.
Beck said, “Who knows?”
She looked down at the fedora, shook her head, and went away.
Beck picked up the wedge of lemon on the saucer and put it aside, pretending to be offended by it. He thumbed opened the cheap tin of creamer, looked into it, and then poured a splash into his cup. He watched the milk swirl around in the tea, stared at it until it came to rest. It was as if it reminded him of something. Or was it somewhere? Clouds back home? Wherever that was.
Then the big man was back, standing over Beck. He just stood there for a long, pregnant moment, looking down at him. Finally, he slid into the booth again. It was a tight fit. H
e was a man with the kind of weight that once said prosperous, notable. Big like a banker in a black-and-white movie. It was hard to say what his heft meant now, here in LA in 2025. He wasn’t going to be a movie star, that was clear, maybe a character actor. He was younger than his clothes would suggest—the fedora and matching brown suit and too-wide tie—but he wasn’t all that young, probably in his forties. He looked like somebody’s gruff uncle or a travelling salesman, somebody out of another time, possibly trying to get back to it, something everybody knew was flat out impossible. He never smiled, as if smiling was something he’d put away, grown out of, had no time for now. He had black hair that must have been dyed. Nobody but a Kentucky coal miner had hair that black at this man’s age. It was greased up and combed back in a Sunday-go-to-meeting almost hick kind of way. He had said on the phone for Beck to call him “Don” but it obviously wasn’t his real name.
When he’d walked in off the street and Beck saw him face to face for the first time, Beck had thought he looked like a tough, a brutal man. Who else would be caught up in a thing like this? He’d scanned the room, ID’d Beck, come over, thrown his hat on the table, and squeezed into the booth. The money had been put on the table. Then the big man had looked at Beck with an unblinking, judging look, said he had to “take a slash,” and then he’d gotten up and walked away, leaving the cash right out in the open. A hard case, or at least putting on a good act. Still, looking at him now across the table again, Beck saw in the man’s eyes at least a hint of humanity. Or was it empathy? Maybe he was as desperate as Beck, in his own way. Maybe more desperate, more heartbroken. But whatever else was there, there was a very intentional look in those eyes, a look that Beck told himself he should remember, that it would be healthy for him to remember.
The man lifted his hat off the table and put it on. The money was gone.
“Don” slid out of the booth. “Give me whatever addresses you have for her,” he said.
Beck handed him a folded white piece of paper. “The first one’s right around the corner, a big white building. There’s a…a bench out front. What are you thinking in terms of time?” Beck said, his voice quavering slightly.
The big man just shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said, annoyed by the question. “Yesterday. Tomorrow. Today. A week from today.”
Beck nodded, stung.
“I don’t like Los Angeles,” the big man said. “I guess that’s as plain as the nose on your face.” The second line was almost an apology for the first line or how he’d said it, how he’d bit off the words. One got the idea that he didn’t apologize much. “Nothing personal,” he said.
Beck hesitated, then said, “What do I do now? Are you going to call me or am I supposed to call you?”
“I don’t understand why you would ask me that,” the man said, standing over him.
“I…I don’t know if this is the right thing anymore,” Beck said. “I don’t want to think about her being hurt unnecessarily.”
The man just looked at him.
“I’ll call you,” Beck said.
Then the man did something that caught Beck off guard. He put a heavy hand on Beck’s shoulder and just left it there. He was like a preacher on the front steps of the church after the sermon, or after the funeral. Or like a father with his son. Or the other way around. It was as if he were trying to get something across to Beck, something elemental. He wanted punctuation.
He squeezed Beck’s shoulder. That was it. Beck expected him to say something else to seal the deal, but he just left.
www
The big man looked up and snugged his hat down tight. The sky was churning overhead. It looked like dirty water circling a drain. To the south, down low, sat fat cumulonimbus clouds a thousand feet high, like clouds in an illustration in an old Bible or on the edge of an ancient map. Or like faces, disapproving gods or pouting babies. The clouds were dark and dense but he knew that didn’t mean it was going to rain, really rain. Nowadays, they said, LA rain was almost as rare as LA snow, and it had rained just the other night, a two-minute drizzle and that was that. They said lately that had been the norm, stormy skies that looked like rain but then the rain never came or just a meaningless two-minute drizzle. There it was: LA in a nutshell. All show, no go. Dry. The big man hadn’t even noticed the nothing showers the other night. He’d stayed in his hotel room and missed it altogether. The downtown streets weren’t even wet the next morning. And certainly not clean. He came from a place with real rain, summer storms so intense you had to pull off the road, driving rain too rainy to drive in.
He looked left and then set out walking to the right, west. If somehow it did rain, he would keep walking. He had someplace to be now and his gait showed it. Somebody driving by would think, There’s a fat man going somewhere.
The old silver D. L. Bentley was parked down the street. The tall gunsel behind the wheel started it and eased forward. The big man glanced back and saw the car but didn’t make anything of it. The driver hiked his shoulders reflexively and sped forward, turned right at the first light.
The big man went straight on Holloway Drive into a canyon of modern high-rise apartment buildings. He didn’t know it but he was already lost. He felt the apartment buildings leaning over him, judging him. Every apartment had a wide balcony and a picture window; still there wasn’t a soul to be seen anywhere, nobody at a railing or framed in a window looking out at the sky or looking down at him. Not a single soul. Twenty million people lived here, and unless you were downtown about the only place you ever saw them was in their ugly cars stuck in traffic or in weird restaurants and gaudy bars. Nobody strolled.
What did the woman see in this place?
Or anybody else? He’d been almost everywhere, coast to coast, top to bottom. He’d never been out of the country but he sure as hell knew the United States. He had spent a good part of his life on the road, for one thing or another. Most of his life had amounted to the same thing: coming into a city or town, checking into a hotel or motel, meeting a man, cutting a deal, signing on the dotted line or shaking the man’s hand, looking him dead in the eye so you could know if he was going to do what he said he’d do, hold up his end of it. You did what you said you’d do; that had been his life, for better or worse, high dollar or low. Oh, he’d done some business with women a time or two, or tried to. It had never seemed to work out to either party’s satisfaction. He didn’t know how to close with a woman. He could never tell if they were being straight with him, if they even halfway meant the words they said. Look them dead in the eye and you might as well be standing on the beach somewhere, looking out at empty blue water.
“I mean, they paint their eyes,” he said aloud.
He wasn’t alone on the sidewalk anymore. A few people were coming at him from whatever was up ahead, probably headed toward their cars parked on the street, fretting about the possibility of rain. Or the impossibility of it. They weren’t out strolling, that was for sure. None of them paid him any mind. One thing he liked about Los Angeles, maybe the only thing: nobody thought a thing about a man walking down the sidewalk talking to himself. Here they’d probably call the cops on you if you didn’t talk to yourself, if you kept what you were thinking bottled up inside.
He walked until he was out the ass end of the canyon of apartment buildings. Now he was walking past the backs of restaurants with the busboys outside smoking and shooting the bull beside the trash cans. They looked him over good and he looked them over good too. He might have been guilty of a number of things, but being afraid of action wasn’t even on the list. One of the busboys said something in Spanish and the others laughed roughly. If it had been dark, he figured they probably would have jumped him. Or tried to. They weren’t that far away. They weren’t kids either, probably gang members. He stared at them until they stopped looking at him. They had no idea how close they had come to getting their asses kicked. He was full of aggression and frustration that want
ed an outlet.
“Hasta la vista,” he said, looking over one last time.
At last he came to the Sunset Strip. The long way. The sidewalks were as jammed with people as the street was jammed with automobiles. On the sidewalks, people divided up into lanes too, keeping to the right, sticking to the rules. It seemed to be working. The people out of cars were moving faster than the people in cars. The big man merged into the human stream on the sidewalk, heading westward. He said, “Excuse me” to a dozen people before anyone stopped and read the address on the paper in his hand, the paper Beck had given him. The fourth person he said “Excuse me…” to gave him a dollar coin without looking at him. Finally a young man in preposterous yellow high-waisted pants stopped, looked at the address on the paper, and pointed in the other direction—pointed east—without saying anything.
The man turned around and started walking eastward. He regifted the buck to an older, legless lady in a motorized wheelchair with a string of pearls around her neck and a scrawled cardboard sign that said…
Mother, Father Raped at Hollywood Bowl
On 2 Separate Occasions
“What are the odds?” the big man said, continuing on.
“That’s it, a buck?” she called after him. “After all I’ve done for you?” He looked back at her. He couldn’t tell if she meant what she’d said to be funny. Or the sign, for that matter. That was Los Angeles in a nutshell, too.
Then he found it: a high white old-fashioned apartment building with rounded corners all the way up, white with black trim. Ten stories, with what looked like a single penthouse apartment that took up the whole top floor. The place had a circular drive out front. He had to admit he liked the looks of it. It had character. It had been there awhile. They hadn’t painted it orange. He stood across the street from it.
He told himself he was just getting the lay of the land—casing the place, coming up with a plan—but the truth was he wasn’t ready for this, wasn’t even ready to cross the damn street. He sat down on the bench. He sat there like that for all of the afternoon, until it went dark. Or half dark. Of course, it never did rain.
