FIVE
When Pete Town walked back into the gloomy room, humid as an orchid house, Joe Go scratched at the springy hair under his bucket hat and said, “I have three potentials for you, my man.”
Town stood behind him and looked at a monitor showing a headshot of Catherine Finch in her orange jumpsuit. The adjacent monitor flickered and the face of a woman appeared. A face that bore no more than a passing resemblance to Finch’s.
Another face replaced it. Again, a kinship that was more generic than specific.
When the third face appeared Go said, “Dah, dah.”
Town leaned forward, staring, tugging at his lower lip.
“She’s the shit, am I right?” Go said.
“Yes,” Town said, “she’s the shit.”
SIX
The young woman stepped down from the Metro bus on the corner of Hollywood and Ivar and started up the hill toward her apartment building. She walked with a slouch—very different from Catherine Finch’s upright, almost arrogant stride—but even from behind the wheel of the rental Toyota Town could see the resemblance.
Joe Go, his bag of tricks seemingly bottomless, had been able to track Kirby Chance via her cell phone to Boyle Heights.
“She’s moving,” he’d said, fingers flying over the computer keyboard in his grim Venice man cave, “I’m guessing a bus, and I’m guessing en route to Hollywood. She’s going home.”
Home was the Alto-Nido, a Hollywood landmark, Go dredging this up by plundering the innards of the data base on which he’d found Kirby.
Town had driven from Venice to Hollywood, hoping that he was moving faster through the slurry of traffic than the bus from Boyle Heights, receiving telephonic updates from Go en route.
Rehearsing his pitch as he cruised after the girl who walked up toward the old apartment building, Town felt like some third-rate Willy Loman.
Kirby Chance reached her lobby and hesitated before swinging around and starting back down the hill again. Town thought he’d been spotted, but she passed him without looking his way and he made a U-turn and rolled after her, seeing her enter a diner on Hollywood Boulevard.
- - -
“May I join you?” the man in the gray suit asked.
“Why?” Kirby said, looking up at him through her hair.
“I want to offer you a part.”
She shook her head, hair swinging, and surprised herself by saying, “This isn’t Schwab’s and I’m no Marilyn.” Quite sassy for her.
“You’re thinking of Lana Turner,” the man said, smiling, “and it was the Top Hat Cafe, not Schwab’s.”
She peered up at him. He didn’t seem to be lecherous. “Who are you?”
“May I sit down?”
“Okay.”
He sat, and she saw him wince as he maneuvered his left leg under the table, and found herself—professional interest—wondering about the nature of his malady.
“What’s the part you want to offer me?”
“Before I tell you I need you to sign this.”
He removed a document from his suit pocket, unfolded it, and placed it before her.
“What’s that? A contract?”
“No, it’s a non-disclosure agreement.”
“What studio are you from?”
“I’m not from a studio.” His hand went into his pocket again and he showed her official-looking identification. “My name’s Ronald Abernathy. I’m with the State Department.”
“What does the State Department want with me?”
“Sign the document and I’ll tell you.”
He pushed the page across to her, along with a fountain pen. A Montblanc, she noticed. She kept her hands in her lap.
“What happens if I sign this?”
“If you ever talk about anything we discuss today or anything that may happen from here on in you’ll be guilty of a felony.”
“What if I don’t want to sign it?”
“Then I’ll get up and leave.”
She looked out at the traffic and then back at him. “The government wants to offer me an acting role?”
“Yes.”
“Would I be paid?”
“There would be a gratuity but I’d rather you think of it as your opportunity to be of service to your country.”
“This is weird.”
“I can understand that you’d feel that way.”
“How did you find me?”
“On a casting data base.”
She hesitated, looked out at the cars again, and decided she wanted to know more so she reached over and signed the document.
“Come,” he said, standing, folding the paper away in his pocket.
“Where?”
“For a drive.”
“A drive where?”
“Nowhere. It’ll just be more private in the car.”
“You’re not the Hillside Strangler are you?”
“No, I’m not the Hillside Strangler. And the Strangler was two men. One of them is dead and the other’s still in prison.” He saw her face and lifted his hands to the ceiling. “Sorry, I’ve got one of those memories. Things just stick. Like Velcro.”
Kirby laughed and said, “Okay.”
They went outside to a small white car and he opened the door for her.
“Very old school,” she said.
“That’s me,” he said. “Old.”
He got behind the wheel and started the car let the traffic drag them off down Hollywood Boulevard.
“Of course you’re familiar with Catherine Finch?” he said.
“Yes.”
“You’ve been following the news over the last day or so?”
“I have, yes.”
“Well, the truth is she’s dead.”
She felt sick. “But that text message…?”
“A bit of subterfuge.”
“And what her husband said last night? About a video?”
“He lied.”
“She’s really dead?”
“Yes.”
“Oh that’s terrible.” The man gave her a quick look, as if to gauge that her response was genuine. “I liked her,” Kirby said. “Admired her, I suppose.”
“So did I,” he said. “It’s regrettable.” He paused. “Especially now.”
“What do you mean?”
“There’s a peace process underway. In the Middle East. Confirmation of her death would damage it irreparably. Scupper it.”
“Okay. But what’s any of this got to do with me?”
“Has anyone ever told you that you resemble her?”
She realized she was holding her breath and released it.
“No,” Kirby said, which was true.
“But you know it? That you resemble her?”
She hesitated. “Well, yes. I have thought so. A little.”
“More than a little. With some work, a haircut, make-up and voice training you would be a very convincing double.”
“So that’s the job? I’m going to pretend to be Catherine Finch?”
“Yes.”
“What, in a YouTube video?”
“Yes.”
“To con the world into believing she’s still alive?”
“Yes.”
“It seems kind of desperate.”
“Well, that’s because it is.”
“You think it’ll work?”
“I think we have to try it.” A pause. “So, will you do it?”
“I don’t know if I can.”
“You don’t know if you want to do it?”
“No, I don’t know if I can pull it off.”
“I think you can.” They drove a while. “Are you willing to try?”
They were passing the Dodger Stadium. It wasn’t a game day. She knew she should tell him to stop the car and she should get out and go back to her life.
But she didn’t.
She nodded and said, “Yes. Yes, I’m willing to try.”
SEVEN
Kip Littlefield knew that people who interrogate for a living oft
en balk at answering questions. And Special Agent Amy Branch, even though she was now gussied up as a member of the FBI’s Family Engagement Team, was first and foremost an inquisitor.
So, when she stepped up into the Lincoln Navigator in D.C.’s Shaw district, carrying with her the faint whiff of dry cleaning solvents, Pepsodent and some creepily sexless stick deodorant, he hit her with: “So, why, when I’m paying you a king’s ransom and pumping your career full of growth hormones, are you here instead of in Los Angeles?”
As he drove on past the bars and cafes he could sense Branch bridling at this, annoyed that the initiative had been wrested from her.
“I was recalled for a briefing,” she said through clenched teeth.
“And has this briefing taken place?”
“No. It has been postponed. More than once.”
“So somebody wanted you out of L.A.?”
“I appears so, yes.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“And yet you just packed your little bag and left?”
“What else was I meant to do? It was an order.”
Littlefield ground his teeth. He had been out-maneuvered by the president’s bootlickers.
“Update me about this video the husband has promised,” he said.
“Nothing to update. It’s bluster. He’ll walk it back.”
“You don’t think this was engineered by the people intent on keeping Catherine Finch alive?”
“I can’t see it. Too risky. I’d say he went off script on that one.”
“What’s your reading of him?” Littlefield said.
“He’s just a two-bit hustler.”
The tires of the Lincoln pummeled the cobbles outside the Howard Theater as Littlefield sped past a runtish Nissan. “Yet you haven’t been able to get him to cave?”
She shook her head. “I scared the crap out of him but something is keeping his mouth shut.”
“Fear of somebody way more intimidating than you?”
She swallowed the implied insult and said, “I don’t think so. I think he’s been offered something.”
“What? Money?”
“Maybe, but I think it’s less tangible. I mean, why did he relocate from Kansas to Los Angeles? I think he hopes to spin all this media heat into something ongoing.”
Branch’s phone rang and she answered it and there was enough yessirring, nosirring and thankyousirring for a summer stock revival of Oliver!
She ended the call. “That was my boss.”
“And?”
“There will be no briefing. I’ll fly back to L.A. in the morning.”
“By which time whatever is going to go down will have gone down,” Littlefield said.
“Yes.”
“And because you’ve allowed yourself to be benched I’ll have to watch it all play out on the news?”
Branch didn’t reply.
He stopped the car. “Get out.”
She left the Lincoln and as he drove away Littlefield, even though his apartment was closer by, set course for the suburbs. After this dissatisfying encounter it was time for the joys of home and hearth.
EIGHT
Rick Finch, sitting at his kitchen table at sunset, was doing his damndest to stay sober. He’d been drinking black coffee by the gallon and the closest he’d come to anything narcotic all day was a handful of Tylenols.
He’d woken in a strangely happy, almost euphoric mood. Lying on his bed, still dressed, a nearly empty bottle of Marker’s Mark his bedmate, he’d opened his eyes and seen the light that pierced a chink in the curtains at play on the ceiling.
For nearly a minute he’d had no recollection of the events of last night. No recollection of that interview with the young woman who’d disguised herself as a lowly web scribe only to dash into a metaphorical phone booth and emerge as a fully realized CNN hackette.
In those moments his mind had been all but empty of thought, and he had experienced a pleasant sense of dislocation, of detachment, as if he were floating far above the world of care.
Then a sound slowly intruded on his little patch of serenity, a sound that his still-anesthetized brain interpreted as the chatter of the kids at a nearby kindergarten. He heard them sometimes singing nursery rhymes and chanting their way through the alphabet, following the lead of their teacher, the owner of the strident shriek of an adult who voluntarily kept daily company with small children.
Then he realized that the voices were coming from the front of his house and he understood that the media that had returned in force, and, all at once, he had total recall of what he had done and said the night before.
Finch sat up too quickly and the room spun and he vomited something acid into his mouth. He coughed and staggered into the bathroom and spat the cuddy puke into the sink and gripped the faucets to steady himself, dry heaving, strings of bile metronoming from his cracked lips.
He washed his face and went back into the bedroom and had the bourbon in his hand ready to swallow the dregs to give himself courage, but he couldn’t tolerate its sweetish smell and dropped the bottle. He crossed to the window, putting his eye to the chink in the drapes.
Finch blinked, his retina slowly adjusting to the assault of the morning glare, and saw the vans and the cars and the satellite dishes and the cameras.
Uniformed cops kept the media scrum away from his yard. He spotted the Dodge Charger parked amidst the vehicles, and wondered why he hadn’t already been rousted from his bed and interrogated about going AWOL last night.
He went through to the kitchen, the room most protected from outside eyes, and made himself coffee. While the water boiled he steeled his nerves and roused the little TV on the counter and surfed until he landed on a clip of himself in Margo Banner’s hotel room, delivering his lunatic fiction.
The image shocked him.
Not because he looked like a drunken liar, but precisely because he did not.
Somehow the perfect storm of booze and drugs had lent him a calmness, an assuredness that he would never have been able to summon sober. The timing had been perfect. He’d arrived at the journalist’s hotel room at that golden moment, afloat on a beneficent raft of chemicals and liquor.
Thirty minutes later he’d been a mess. He vaguely remembered the camera crew having to forcibly eject him from the woman’s room, so ardent had he been in his attentions.
How he had gotten home he could not say.
Finch switched off the television, wondering what he had wrought and when the gray-haired man would come. He went to the living room window and shifted the blind a little, peering out. He was almost pleased that the media were here in force. The gray man could hardly trouble him while they laid siege.
But their ranks thinned over the next hour and soon there were just a couple of diehards sitting in their hot cars as if they were some kind of a poultice that would draw him boil-like from his house. And then they too were gone, and with them the cops in their Interceptors and all that was left was the Dodge Charger, gleaming swartly in the sun.
Finch sat at the table in the kitchen and drank yet another cup of coffee and thought about what he had promised Margo Banner—and the world—in that moment of madness.
It wasn’t his fault, he decided, as adept as a balloon sculptor at twisting the truth. The gray man had come to him with this wild notion and had then thrown him to the media wolves and Kommissar Amy Branch.
Where was his back-up?
Where was his support team?
And, anyway, had he really veered so far from his brief? The gray man’s stated mission was to keep Catherine alive long enough to get pens to paper on a peace accord that was crumbling like the Dead Sea Scrolls.
In the service of that mission Finch had merely used his initiative.
Used his talent for fiction.
For that was his talent, or so he had once believed.
Finch had been in the final year of the M.F.A. program at the University of Kansas when he’d met Catherine Br
own in a bar. She was an intern at the backend of a twenty-four shift in the local ER, coming in to get a double Teachers before she went home to crash.
She’d ended up inviting him home with her, this oddly fierce girl, and had proceeded to take her pleasure in a way that was almost masculine in its singular carnality. And she’d wanted more, unselfconsciously reaching out to him on his cell, setting up assignations.
That kind of young woman was all over cable TV these days, on the prowl in New York and L.A., talking about their vajajays and their orgasmic fireworks. But ten years ago in Lawrence, Kansas, they were a rarity, and Rick Finch—cutting an easy swathe through the fields of corn-fed sorority girls with his handsome face and reliably stiff cock—was smitten.
Catherine was less so, her gaze already fixed on a life of noble sacrifice. Then she fell pregnant. Surprisingly for a woman so certain of her reproductive rights, she refused to consider a termination.
“Rick, you’re just a kid yourself,” she said. “There’s no need for you to get all noble about this. Go on out there and live your life, I can handle this thing alone.”
And he’d never doubted that she could, but he’d fallen in love with his own fiction of devotion and parenthood, and she’d reluctantly allowed him to stay in her life.
When she was six months pregnant, and showing very visibly, he proposed and she laughed at him at first and then, swearing that her common sense had been washed away by a tidal wave of hormones, accepted. They were married in a small civil ceremony attended by one of her aunts—the only family she could claim—and his sport of a father, all dentures and whiskey breath, who tried to make time with the one friend of Catherine’s who’d bothered to show up.
Rick moved his few belongings from his dorm room to Catherine’s apartment and he took endless photographs of her swelling belly and breasts and they rutted like a pair of Bruegel’s peasants.
A month later Catherine miscarried and she withdrew into her studies, and he spent a lot of time wondering about what he was doing and stopped writing and dropped out of the M.F.A program and tended bar—not the smartest thing to do. A couple of years passed in a smear of drink and one-night stands (for him) and work (for her) and bitter recriminations for them both, and they’d clung to one another for no good reason, in the manner of his Carveresque short stories,
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