The Vinyl Princess

by Yvonne Prinz

  “Really?” He crosses his arms and leans back in his leather chair. It complains loudly. He still looks doubtful. As an afterthought he leans forward and grabs a pencil. He writes Joel with a question mark after it on the file.

  “So, what makes you suspect this Joel fella and his buddy?”

  “Well, we both work on Telegraph, as you know, and a few weeks ago we started to notice these two guys hanging around the neighborhood.”

  “And what made them stand out?”

  What am I supposed to say here? Oh, one of them was gorgeous and I fell madly in love with him and foolishly imagined a future where he and I were together all the time? I clear my throat. “Well, they were new. We’d never seen them before, and one of them, the one who calls himself Joel, came into the record store while I was working and pretended to be looking for something, and I think he was scoping the place out.” Okay, now I really sound like a whacked-out CSI watcher.

  “You do, do you?” He’s digging around in his ear with his pinkie now. He examines his finger and wipes it on his pants. “And you only recently made the connection?”

  My heart starts to pound. Good question. Officer Davis is sharper than I thought. “Yeah, um, you know, I just sort of put it together all of a sudden.”

  “So?”

  “So, the night of the robbery, when he spoke, I recognized his voice.” I’m definitely not telling him about our coffee date. Kit and I discussed it on the way over. I don’t want to be that connected to the crime.

  “What did he say?”

  “He said, ‘Have a nice evening.’” Now that I’m saying it out loud it really does sound absurd.

  “That’s it? ‘Have a nice evening’? You recognized his voice in four words after only hearing it once?”

  “He has a very distinctive voice. Oh, and I recognized his boots too.”

  Officer Davis rubs his face with his thick hands. “Do you girls think you could recognize either of these two guys if you saw a photo of them?”

  Kit looks at me. We both say yes.

  Officer Davis presses a button on his phone and speaks into it. “Rebecca, I gotta couple of gals here who say they can identify the Telegraph robbers. Can we get the mug books out? Let’s give them California for now, okay?”

  “You got it,” says the speaker.

  He takes his finger off the button. “So, we’re going to get you to look at some photos. It’s probably best that you don’t discuss this with each other as you’re looking. It could push you in the wrong direction. Just let me know if you come across anything that looks familiar. We’ll start with California and go from there, okay? If you don’t find what you’re looking for today, we’ll set you up with a sketch artist so we have something to go on here at the station. Okay?”

  “Um, this Joel guy, he had sort of an East Coast accent, maybe New Jersey.”

  Officer Davis narrows his eyes. His hand goes for the button. “Rebecca, bring New Jersey too, okay?”

  “Yep,” says the box.

  The books are enormous. In each photo, the man wears the same expression. A few pages in, I figure out what it is: regret. I start to get depressed almost immediately. Kit sits on a rolling chair at one desk and I sit at another, flipping through photos earnestly at first, looking for our man, but soon we both become despondent. The room is completely airless. What were we expecting this to be like? Looking through a wedding album or an album of someone’s trip to Paris?

  We don’t find them in California or New Jersey, so we branch out to Texas, Florida and Nevada, all the bad-guy states, I guess. Two hours pass and we’re still suspectless. Our credibility seems to be slipping away. Officer Davis brings in a sketch artist (is there actually a guy with a sketch pad and charcoal just sitting in another room waiting for moments like this?). We start with the bulldog. Since we only caught a glimpse of him, it’s tough to describe him. Kit saw him twice so I let her do most of the talking. For some reason, both of us recall that he was wearing cowboy boots in some kind of exotic leather, like ostrich or crocodile, but the artist doesn’t draw the feet, just the head and shoulders. We end up with something that looks remarkably like the guy we saw. He looks very menacing. I wonder if he’d be flattered by this rendering. I tell the artist that he’s very good but he seems not to care. I want to ask him if he rents himself out to birthday parties and bar mitzvahs to draw those giant-head, tiny-body caricatures for party guests or if this is his full-time gig. I think better of it. We start on Joel. Kit rolls her eyes at me when I use words like sea glass green to describe his eyes, and then I go into minute detail to describe his dark, long eyelashes. I describe him so perfectly to the artist that the final result scares me. I ask for a copy and he looks at me a little strangely but he makes me a copy of it. When he hands it to me he says, “This is police property. Don’t tell anyone I did this.”

  Kit and I are allowed to leave but we’re supposed to come back tomorrow and look at more photos. We both have to work tomorrow, but Officer Davis says we can come in after work. He points out with a chuckle that the station is open twenty-four hours for our convenience. I get the feeling that this is something he says a lot.

  When I get home from my long day at the police station, my mom looks almost back to normal. Her eye is sagging only slightly now and it makes her look a bit sad. She’s showered, washed her hair and applied makeup. She’s wearing a fitted purple long-sleeved dress. She looks nice.

  “Is that new?” I ask.

  “Yeah, you like it? I just bought it today.” She smooths the fabric over her hips.

  “Yes. You look great. Where are you going?”

  “Out for dinner with Jack. I guess he’s over the camping fiasco.”

  “Mom, camping is not a date; it’s an endurance test. If you can survive camping with someone, you should marry them on the way home.”

  She digs around in her bag and comes up with a lipstick. I watch her apply it in the mirror by the front door. Her lips have grown thinner over the years and I think she looks better without lipstick, but I would never tell her that.

  “There was no danger of that on this trip. In fact, if we had been married, we probably would have gotten divorced on the way home.”

  When Jack arrives to pick my mom up, I already know by his face that the relationship is over. I can tell that my mom knows too but she still gets her shawl, waves good-bye to me and walks out to the car with him. I watch out the window as he holds the passenger door open for her and closes it carefully once she’s in. I’m overwhelmed by the urge to run outside and throw a rock at his head. I suppose he thinks he’s doing the right thing, the gentlemanly thing, taking my mom out to a restaurant so he can tell her it could never work between them, so that he can dump her over dessert, like maybe there’s some dignity in that. He has not a clue about what a great person she is. He has no idea how smart and funny and wonderful she can be when she has access to indoor plumbing and a concierge and a warm bed. Who the hell does he think he is in his khakis and his argyle socks, waltzing into our lives from some loser town in the middle of nowhere, expecting dinner, expecting her to put up a tent, expecting her to act normal, when really all my mom’s good at, all she’s ever been good at, is being brilliant?

  I throw a frozen pizza into the oven and flop onto the sofa. I start watching a DVD of Summer of ’42, periodically checking for Jack’s car out the front window, bracing myself for my mom’s return. I know I should be working on my blog but tonight I just can’t. The car pulls up when I’m on the second-to-last scene of the movie, where Hermie goes to Dorothy’s house and finds it empty and he’s reading the note she left him, telling him why she had to leave and that she’ll never forget him. Two pieces of cold pizza sit congealing on the coffee table. Jack doesn’t walk my mom to the door and I know she told him not to. I hear her key in the lock. She walks in, still fresh in her new dress, and sits down next to me on the sofa. She kicks off her heels and pulls her feet up under her.

  “How’d it go
?” I ask.

  “Oh, you know.” She looks at the TV. “Is this Summer of ’42?”

  “Yeah.”

  Hermie is standing in front of Dorothy’s beach house as an adult.

  She watches the TV for a moment. A tear rolls down her cheek.

  “Mom,” I say, sitting up and touching her shoulder. “Forget it. He’s an asshole.”

  “I know. Shit.”

  I go into the kitchen and pour her a glass of white wine. I set it in front of her and she looks at me gratefully and takes a sip.

  “Thanks, doll face, you’re the best.”

  I push my bare feet against her thigh. “You are,” I tell her.

  Chapter 17

  Kit and I are reluctantly making our way to the police station for the second time in two days to serve hard time. We’re not so keen on the whole idea anymore. At first it felt like the right thing to do; it felt like we were helping fight crime and maybe even saving a life, but the place fills us with dread now. It’s one big, bad vibe and it’s exhausting to think about going through those books again, looking at those faces, dealing with Officer Davis, even sitting on the bench in the waiting room with a whole new set of tragic characters.

  When we’re a block away from Telegraph, a cop car whizzes past us, lights on, siren whining, then another cop car, then an ambulance, then a fire truck. They all turn left onto Telegraph, going the wrong way on a one-way street. Kit and I look at each other and turn around and follow them. It doesn’t take long for us to catch up with the cops. They’re only a block and a half away. They’re all parked out in front of Fabulous Falafels with their lights still flashing. The EMTs are unloading two stretchers from the ambulance and rushing them into the restaurant. The cops already have everything blocked off and a couple of them are keeping people out of the area. Kit and I stand on the periphery and strain to see what’s going on. Kit sees a friend of hers in the crowd, a guy who used to work with her. He works at Mario’s now.

  “Darnell!” She waves at him.

  “Hey!” He walks over to us like he just spotted us at a social event. He’s sipping on a Frappuccino.

  “Did you see what happened?”

  “Man, you didn’t hear the gunshots? The Telegraph Avenue robbers, man, that’s who it was. Tried to rob Sanje but he was havin’ none of that. He came out of the back with a shotgun and Blam! Blam! Blam! He blew those two away. Man, it’s a bloodbath in there. One man down, one injured.” He sips his drink, his eyes wide.

  My heart starts to pound.

  Through the window of the restaurant I can sort of make out Sanje. He’s sitting in a chair while a cop interviews him. He’s making a lot of hand gestures. Another cop emerges from the restaurant carrying a large assault rifle. It looks almost cartoonish, like something Elmer Fudd might carry during rabbit season. Does Sanje have some sort of weapons arsenal back there, hidden amid the tahini and the pita bread? Or did he figure that sooner or later these guys were going to get around to him and he’d better find something to protect himself with? I peruse the small crowd. Behind us, Bob is standing next to Jimmy the Rasta dude. I catch his eye and he waves at me. Shorty and Jam are here too. They’re working the crowd, trying to drum up a little dinner (Colt 45) money, but no one pays much attention to them even though Jam is wearing a hot-pink boa around his neck and Shorty’s wearing a pillbox hat and carrying a matching handbag.

  The first stretcher emerges, wheeled out by an EMT on either side. I know it’s Joel immediately. He has a big piece of gauze strapped to his right thigh but the blood is soaking through it quickly. He’s pale as a corpse but conscious. His jeans are cut open and there’s blood all over them. His hands are streaked with drying blood too. He’s grimacing in pain but underneath that he has the same look on his face as all the men in the mug shot book: regret. Kit grabs my clammy hand and we watch as he passes within a few feet of us. The medallion around his neck that I couldn’t read before is dangling off to the side. It’s a Saint Christopher medallion. The EMTs collapse the stretcher’s wheeled legs and slide it into the ambulance. They jump in after him and slam the doors behind them. The ambulance takes off seconds later, howling up the street. Another ambulance pulls in right behind it. Two more EMTs roll the other stretcher out of the restaurant. The urgency is missing from their steps. The stretcher rolls past us with a blue sheet over it, covering the face. A snakeskin cowboy boot pokes out from under the sheet. They load this stretcher slowly and drive away without turning on the siren. Kit and I exchange a grim look. Another cop car comes sailing around the corner and parks next to the others. Officer Davis eases himself out from behind the wheel and lumbers into the restaurant. He probably resents having to put down his sandwich for this.

  The crowd that’s gathered starts to disperse but Kit and I stand there for a while, dumbstruck at what we’ve just seen. Eventually, the cops escort Sanje out of the restaurant and into the back of a police cruiser. He looks directly at the crowd. His face registers no fear at all. In fact, he looks almost smug, like he just provided the neighborhood with a much-needed service. A few people in the crowd start to applaud when they see him but most of us just gape at him, not sure what to think. Even in this neighborhood, we don’t see vigilantism of this magnitude very often. A couple of months ago, there was this punk-ass graffiti artist tagging all the businesses up and down the avenue in broad daylight. One afternoon he tags a panel van that belongs to Gus, a Greek guy who owns the produce stand that the van was parked in front of. Gus chases the kid and tackles him. He throws the kid down on the sidewalk and sits on him, grabs his spray paint can and sprays his face with it. Needless to say, the kid stopped tagging the avenue. That’s about the height of it around here. You really don’t hear about business owners blowing thieves away with assault rifles.

  My head is pounding. Lately I’ve been dealing with too many things that are way outside my comfort level: robberies, dead bodies, police stations and mug shots. I’m ready to hide under my bed again but when I get home my mom takes one look at my face and tells me we’re going for sushi. I’m up for it. I could use a break from my life in the form of a California roll. From the look on my pale face, she’s probably also getting a sense that I’m running a bit wild and it’s time for a parental update. We walk up the street together, passing Florence, who’s watering her new flower beds. We say hello and compliment her flowers.

  “Did you start a fire in your house?” she asks, looking accusingly at me.

  I’d forgotten all about it. “Yeah. Just a small one.”

  “I smelled it, the smoke . . . very bad. You should be more careful. Silly girl. You’ll burn down the neighborhood.”

  She doesn’t know the half of it. “Sure, Florence, I will.”

  Over miso soup and sashimi, I tell my mom about the whole M/Joel business. She watches me tell the story like I’m unraveling the plot of a James Bond film. When I finish, she stares at me in disbelief. Then she looks like she wants to kill me; then she hugs me like she’s glad I’m alive.

  “Allie, what in the hell were you thinking? He could have killed you!”

  The sushi chef puts an order of yellowtail down in front of us and glances at my mom.

  “I know that but I didn’t want to be a snitch, and anyway, it didn’t matter; we never did find him in the mug-shot books, so it probably wouldn’t have made much difference if we’d gone down to the station a couple of days earlier.”

  “Sure it would have. They send those sketches across the country. If someone had recognized him, the cops might have found out who they are.”

  “Yeah, but that doesn’t mean that they’d find them, just because they might know their names.”

  She waves my comments aside with her hand. “Okay. Look. You have to tell me this stuff. No more secrets. Why would you keep something like that to yourself?”

  “I did tell you about the robbery part but you were camping with Jack when it happened.”

  She winces at the memory. “God, I’m a ho
rrible mother.”

  “What are you talking about? You’re a mediocre mother. Horrible is much too strong a word.”

  She pinches my arm. “Promise, promise, promise me you’ll talk to me if anything like this ever happens again. You’re a sixteen-year-old girl; you’re not an FBI operative. You’re supposed to be having fun, not chasing criminals around town.”

  “Who’s chasing? I wasn’t chasing.”

  “Promise,” she says sternly.

  “Okay, I promise.”

  “Good. And I want you to quit that job.”

  “Mom, they caught them. One of them is dead. One of them can’t walk. I don’t think I’m in danger anymore.”

  “For now you’re not but what about the next time? Yesterday I saw a help-wanted sign in the window of that muffin place on Euclid. Why don’t you apply there?”

  “Muffins? Mom, you want me on antidepressants? You want me to weigh three hundred pounds?”

  “Okay, you’re right; forget the muffins, but I want you to look for a different job. I mean it this time.”

  “Sure, Mom. I will,” I lie. Personally, I think the danger has passed. My mother might believe that there’s danger lurking around every corner waiting to point a gun in my face, but before Joel and his buddy arrived on the scene, nothing much happened on Telegraph that represented real crime.

  My mom sips her tea, looking thoughtful. “Hey, can I ask you something? You helped me put my personal ad online. Is there anything in there that would suggest to anyone that I’m outdoorsy?”

  “No. We specifically tried to make you sound indoorsy.”

  A Japanese waitress refills our green tea.

  “Okay, so, since Jack contacted me and asked me out, shouldn’t it be his problem if I’m not quite ready to dangle off the side of Mount Everest? I mean, why would he contact me at all when I’m clearly not his type?”