Right turn onto Hamlin, ease a block north, and park.
Mirror check. Ruben says the Koreans don’t know my real name—yet. They’d love to ID my neon-red ’69 VW. Mirror check—last chance to be smart? I’m not, and slide the pistol into my jeans; my blouse drops over the grip. Deep breath—be an actress, play the role, not the reality; don’t go to the restaurant’s back room or the basement. Shudder. Tell the Koreans Ruben’s story and make them believe it. Actress. Actress. Actress. Do what you do. Own the stage.
No part of me exits the car.
C’mon, baby, the Koreans are gangsters and have to believe you are, too; that’s how you played it the first time. Played it perfect and they bought it. The Koreans want their property. If they’ll wait seven more days and stop trying to kill people, they’ll get their property back. Simple—wait seven and everyone’s happy. Seven days for Ruben and Robbie to coax their partner into capitulating—that’s the script; who knows what the truth is.
Ruben’s .38 bites into my skin. I could use stronger deodorant. The Valium must have been a placebo. Two Korean women walk past; both peek at me.
Out of the car, Arleen, or out of the neighborhood. Brave the horror-house restaurant or give up Streetcar. My door opens before I can stop my hand. ’Cause I’m a goddamn actress and we can’t help it.
Lawrence Avenue is hundred-degree hot. Standing mid-block, five tiny storefronts before Mr. Choa’s restaurant, is a blockish man in an inexpensive black suit, the sleeves bunched at his elbows. The man squares up, obstructing my path. Late thirties, pockmarked cheeks, cruel hands, and a rose tattoo on his forearm.
“You have?”
“I’m here to see Mr. Choa.”
“You have?”
Arleen is a gangster. “Want me to leave, Chopstix?”
He stares. I stare back.
“You have?”
“Yeah. But not for you.”
On my right, a second black suit crosses Lawrence Avenue. He’s older, better dressed, a lieutenant in Mr. Choa’s family or whatever the mafia calls them in Korea. “Where is Ruben Vargas?”
“Couldn’t make it. Double homicide uptown.”
The three of us stare. Cars pass. The sun dips behind a cloud.
The lieutenant has a cell phone open in his hand. He grunts in Korean and nods the first man back toward the restaurant, then turns to me. “Mr. Choa is unhappy.”
Shrug. “Not my problem, but tell him I’m sorry.”
“Mr. Choa speaks with you inside. First, I must search your person.”
“No.”
“We go to the back, not to interrupt those who eat.”
“No.” I’m a gangster and will my hand away from the pistol.
“First, you must be searched, then we meet Mr. Choa.”
Where they’ll torture me for any information I have, then slaughter me to make their point to Ruben. The Korean nods small and smiles smaller. His open palm invites me to walk between shadowed buildings to the back.
“The front, Chopstix; not the back, not the basement, either.”
Negligible Korean headshake. Veins in his neck.
“New deal; Mr. Choa comes out here.” I step back as my hand drifts to my waist. “Find some other girl to kill.”
His eyes go tight to my hand. “Furukawa will be our client, not belong to you. You must do as told.”
Blink. Furukawa? I flash on the Olympic headlines, their table in Hugo’s for lunch, Ruben lingering. What does Furukawa—
A Ford Taurus screeches to the curb. I jump back and reach for the pistol. The driver’s door pops. It’s Ruben’s partner, bull-necked, six-foot-two, two-hundred-pound TAC cop Robbie Steffen. The silk Tommy Bahama camp shirt doesn’t soften Robbie’s appearance. Robbie reaches the sidewalk in two steps, squares up on the remaining Korean, slaps the man’s chest with a butcher-paper package that bounces off and lands on the sidewalk. The butcher paper unravels, revealing the meat—a man’s severed hand and forearm, a rose tattoo obvious on the gray-yellow skin. I gag and stumble backward. Steffen cocks his head sideways, then screws his face into the Korean’s.
“Next time you wanna kill somebody, motherfucker, send Luca Brasi.”
The Korean’s eyes cut to the severed arm, hesitate, then refocus on Robbie. The Korean’s cell phone rises slowly to his ear. My part in this play has ended. Robbie Steffen pivots to tell me something I know I don’t want to hear. Mid-turn, Robbie stops, draws a blue-black .45 automatic from the back of his jeans, slams it into the Korean’s hip. And pulls the trigger. The Korean screams, spins in the explosion and blood spray, and lands in a pile.
Robbie steps over him, aims the smoking .45 at the Korean’s head, and … I’m already running when I hear the second shot.
FRIDAY, 7:45 PM
Drive. Steer. Talktofuckingme—My skin won’t quit vibrating. Dan Ryan, southbound, never setting foot on Lawrence Avenue again. Are the car doors locked? My knees are butter, pistol on my lap. Streetcar pages on the passenger seat. I’m breathing in fits, sweating. Sweet Jesus—
The DJ voice says Chicago is sweltering. I’m shivering in some kind of fog. The DJ segues my car radio into “Highway to Hell.” I can’t quit seeing the severed arm, hearing the explosions, then—cold-blooded first-degree murder. Mirror check, window check. Robbie Steffen sawed off somebody’s arm—Then he executed … a made man in the Korean mafia. I have to get help, apologize. The Koreans are old-school butchers, Ruben said. Guys who massacre entire families to prove a point.
I can’t know people like this, not for real. I’m an actress.
And Robbie Steffen’s not afraid of them. And Robbie Steffen knows where I live. Make a plan. Go home, get my Blanche clothes and— You can’t go home— But Robbie shouldn’t want to hurt me, should he? The sun drops the last inch behind the West Side. Shadows cover the rear-view mirror and my mom’s crucifix but not the blood splatter on my arms and blouse. OFF-RAMP. I veer, miss the concrete abutment, back off the gas, and drop my window. The scent of storm replaces blood and fear-sweat. I can ID Robbie for murder, of course he’ll want to hurt me. Kill me—
My brain’s not working, won’t keep thoughts together, just jumbled flashes …
Go to the cops.
Robbie is a cop. His father’s one of the most powerful players in the city.
Thunder crashes to the east. A siren wails, then another. Rain sheets across the windshield. I hurry the window up and hit the wipers. The light ahead blinks to green as a CPD cruiser shoots across the intersection. I duck and steer toward the inside lane. Sweat drips onto my lips; my hand squeezes the wheel. Mirror check—blurry cars crowd behind me—oh, God, Robbie Steffen. No, stop it. You’re not Coleen. Lightning drills into the city. Not a victim. Not alone in that alley … their hands, their … tearing you apart. I suck air to scream but fight it down. More lightning—the city goes staccato black-and-white—the gun on my lap, the crucifix hanging on the mirror. Thunder crashes again. The night Coleen was attacked I started screaming and couldn’t stop, woke up and knew Coleen was dying. Spent the next six nights in a child psychiatric hospital.
Go to the FBI, the U.S. attorney.
Right, innocent good guy was a tough sell before I was an accomplice to first-degree murder.
You can try to convince them.
And then, win or lose, you can give up everything.
The steering wheel sweats in my hand. My radio says the police are at a gangland murder scene on Lawrence Avenue … Wake up, goddamnit. Out of the fog. Shift gears. Eyes in the mirror. Don’t end up alone in that alley. Don’t be Coleen.
Sorry, sorry, I love you, honey. This is for us. Matching hopes and dreams. I’m the actress for us both. We are one, then and now, identical twins forever. I tell the windshield: “Streetcar. Twenty years for one chance. The Brennan sister who didn’t die. Who didn’t quit.”
Actress. Both of us brave and bold. Venice Beach. L.A. Hollywood. Santa Monica. We bought this ticket. Paid for it. Paid big. It’s ours,
goddamnit.
Since we were three feet tall, actresses were what we wanted to be. Coleen died; I ran. By the ’90s I’d made it to actress. Two waitress jobs in L.A.—not just one—in Hollywood, that’s how I knew I was a serious actress. Add regulation 34C’s from the best guy I could afford in West L.A., the strawberry blond hair from a salon on Sunset. And the teeth—a $16,000 smile I agreed could be billed one weekend a month in Palm Springs. Aspiring actors and actresses call those weekends paying the dentist, or the plastic surgeon … or the rent if things get bad enough.
Oh, and they can. Be a runaway in the City of Angels for a year or two. Rely on the kindness of strangers. Swallow. Gun on my lap—my new solution? No. No. Not a … or a victim, an actress, the lead in Streetcar.
Actress. Actress. Actress. When I stepped off that bus into Venice Beach I was fourteen, scared and alone, but would’ve laughed out loud had anyone told me how far I’d go to become an actress. But promise something every night, crave it down to your heart and soul, more than food, sex, and safety, and a teenager starts to see things differently. Flirting with the devil seems doable … or as things begin to unravel, survivable. But by then you’re often alone in a dark room with something the old you couldn’t quite have imagined, and he has his hand out.
So you pay him—and you never, ever talk about it—and just for that one time, never again. And like the thousands of ingenues who preceded me, each time I confronted the next time, I closed my eyes tighter. And buried deeper those parts of me I wanted to keep real and mine. And paid him again. I said yes.
Yes to the City of Angels—her casting calls and lineups, and readings when you could get one, each office or waiting room electric with preparation and hope … and then invisibility. I said Yes to the big theaters with bright marquee promises and darkened empty seats, heartbreaking voices saying “Thank you for coming”—because that’s all an aspiring actress does every day until she aspires so hard and so often she can’t remember which parts of her are the real ones, not with any certainty, not like back home in wherever you came from, population 6,042.
So you stay in L.A. or Los Feliz or West Hollywood, hanging on as part of the glittery nightlife that passes for real life, enjoying the dead desert wind and smog-filtered afternoons that pass for golden California; you stay through your new family’s overdoses, doomed Vegas weddings, bankruptcies, and spikes of hope; all of you living for the next call, the next brush with career something. And when there’s just a few of you left, after years of holding on to each other’s dreams and promises and the next audition, 80 percent of those valiant, tenacious, bet-everything souls hit the wall … career finito. Your dreams and family are over. Then you die or you run.
I ran. Got so scared one night on the Santa Monica pier that I didn’t bother to pack; ran ocean to ocean, to New York. But when I got there I couldn’t quit, couldn’t transition out as they say at the SAG office on Wilshire. A fellow actor once said that the life wasn’t a lot different than a heroin addiction, Hollywood just takes longer and the methadone clinics are waitress jobs.
Rain continues to sheet. The street’s a blur. I wipe at my fogged windshield and drop my window, downshift, and—POP, POP, POP echoes somewhere in the grainy streetlights. Gunshots? Mirror check. Robbie Steffen doesn’t care that I’m an actress; he’ll be coming for me. Can’t go home; Robbie will figure me for home.
My radio crackles. Billy Idol and band pound into “L.A. Woman” circa 1992, tonight’s gunshots, Billy and me doing Hollywood déjà vu: “Another lost angel … City of Light … City of Night.” POP, POP, POP.
Back then the Hollywood dream was my fix-everything plan. Erase it all—my da, the Four Corners, the sunny California runaway years that followed … backseats of rental cars, teen modeling offices, the afternoon dinner-vigils at supermarket Dumpsters. All gone. Coleen would see the marquee lights, she and I would build a brand-new girl, a bright-and-shiny actress with no history, only future.
“Hollywood” officially began after a juvenile court judge pulled me off the street and placed me in an L.A. County youth home run by a couple from South Africa. They were ex-military, tough and blunt Afrikaners, but protective. I stayed there until I could work my way into a crowded six-flat near Western and Wilshire. Every boy and girl in the building had both hands gripped on the show-business express. The Rodney King riots had just ended, and just like tonight, “L.A. Woman” was on the radio, Billy Idol singing to me over the sporadic pops and early days of the truce between the Koreans and the looters.
Billy’d come in the Troubadour the night before, lit the place up, tipped me my first hundred, and left with every girl who could fit in his limo, a death-trip rock star who told me it was safe to walk with angels. I believed him, too starstruck to wonder how he’d know the angels’ intentions were good, that my trip wouldn’t be through the Old Testament.
Rain splatters through my open window.
Both hands begin to steady. The windshield’s clear.
I could hide from Robbie at the L7 Bar with Julie. Julie McCoy’s my best friend … or the Playhouse Theater; talk to Ruben from safety. Threaten, talk, something. I could make a plan that includes my hopes and dreams. And safety—my back stiffens—feel good? Arleen Brennan, victim? Lap glance … the .38.
I’m not a victim.
My mom’s crucifix glints as I pass underneath a tight series of streetlights. The lights flash my Streetcar pages on the passenger seat then the .38 in my lap. Light to dark; dark to light. Is that the message? God gives me an asterisk on the Fifth Commandment? He’ll consider Robbie self-defense even if I shoot first? God doesn’t answer; the voice that does, doesn’t care about self-defense. He’s a recurring nightmare, always with the same solution: Just pull the trigger.
And that’s what’ll happen if I go home to my apartment—my goddamn house. No threats, no discussion; just Robbie Steffen, the dark, and me.
HORN. I jolt into the steering wheel and turn into a motel parking lot. Just get a grip, ease up long enough to think. Be present—you’re on the South Side, the L7 is way north, lots of cops between here and there—maybe they’re after me, maybe not. Robbie’s a cop, Ruben’s a cop—who knows what that means? My phone rings. RUBEN VARGAS on the screen. I don’t answer. It rings again. RUBEN VARGAS.
“Stop calling me, goddamnit.”
I look left. A squad car is alongside my window, the cop staring at me. I jolt back, then struggle the window all the way down.
He says, “Nice car.”
Actress smile. Heart hammering.
“Are you all right, miss?”
“Ah, yeah.” I point at the motel. “Checking in, got a call and—Sorry.”
He nods. “You’re stopped in the middle of the road.”
“Shit. Sorry.” I drive into the parking lot I thought I was in, stop, kill the lights and engine, pop the door, and—BLOOD on your blouse. Cop still watching me.
Can’t sit here.
Can’t drive away. Mirror check. The cops know something’s wrong.
Deep breath; do something; move.
Purse to chest, I slide out into the rain with my shoulder to the police car, shut the door, and walk fast toward the motel office. Please, please, please, give me this one.
Officer Terry Rourke died in his front yard, shot to death from a slow-passing 1962 Chevrolet Bel Air. His daughter, Siobhán, died with him. Two thousand Chicago police officers attended their funeral. Before the sun had set on that snowy day in February, 29 Hispanic members of the Twenty-Trey Gangsters had been arrested. Four were killed and 16 critically injured.
—“MONSTER,” by Tracy Moens; © 2011 Chicago Herald
OFFICER BOBBY VARGAS
FRIDAY, 8:00 PM
Meeting here at the Levee Grill, now, my brother is taunting the lion, telling the FBI: Suck my dick.
Out front, sixteen summer tables are topped with red-checked tablecloths and Chianti-bottle candles. A box planter spilling bougainvillea separates customer from
passing pedestrian, ward heeler and political fixer from civilian.
Ruben rises from the table nearest the front door and introduces me to his attorney, James W. Barlow, mid-fifties, no necktie, 2016 Olympics pin, starched cuffs; a man known for his appetites, not his philanthropy. Mr. Barlow and I shake hands; he eyes my gun, jeans, and vest, then motions me to sit. The long patio is mostly men in expensive suits with happy hour or regular tee times glowing in their faces. Twenty-five years ago Chicago’s power structure imploded right here. The feds tape-recorded and convicted a slew of judges, policemen, deputy sheriffs, Outfit bosses, union bosses, and forty-eight members of the Illinois State Bar. Operation Greylord remains the FBI’s single biggest case against the Chicago Machine. Half these men probably don’t know that; the half that do are the ones who worry me.
I scoot my chair toward the wall, but still have to sit with half my back to LaSalle Street. Mr. Barlow’s nails are manicured; the TAG Heuer watch is the only non-knockoff I’ve ever seen and probably cost as much as my car. But then, any watch that runs probably costs more than my Civic. This morning’s Herald is open on our red-checked tablecloth.
Mr. Barlow swishes a highball above “MONSTER.” “Whatever you have to hide, Bobby, I should know.”
Ruben sips Scotch.
“Have we met, Mr. Barlow?”
Barlow levels his eyes, accustomed to making demands that border on insult. A courtroom lawyer unconcerned with real-world reprisals.
“And we’re not engaged?”
“No.”
“So, ah, why would I answer a question like that … at a time like this?”
Ruben winks at me, then rolls his eyes at Barlow. “Told you.”
“Two reasons, Officer Vargas—money and jail.”
Cute. I ask Ruben how well he knows Mr. Barlow.
“Well enough I take him to the cockfights.”
I nod small, but don’t answer.
Ruben quits smiling and adds diction. “When Mr. Barlow isn’t assisting slandered and libeled police officers from the Hispanic community, he walks and golfs with the city’s movers and shakers. His firm is the firm for a fight with the Herald and he’ll take our case as a personal favor.”
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