A Better Goodbye (13 page)

North Hollywood ended when the black woman got crazy greedy and doubled what Jenny and Rosie each had to pay her to two hundred dollars a day. A couple of months later they stopped working together. Too much jealousy, even though Jenny was glad Rosie had taught her how to use blush: all over your face, not just on your nose. They just partied together now, and Rosie still thought she was prettier, and Jenny still felt queasy whenever that little girl's bedroom crossed her mind.

Every stop she made, she seemed to lose a little more of whatever innocence she'd possessed when she started. But she didn't begin to notice it until she had gone through the phony bust on Beverly Glen and started working downtown with Maria. This was before Maria got her own place; the boss was a music producer who always fell in love with the girls he had working in a fancy condo. Maria was one of those smart people who never thought about going to college because nobody in her family ever had. Like why bother, you know? She was seven or eight years older than Jenny, and she knew how to play the game.

She was also the first person Jenny had ever watched have sex. They were in a two-girl session—another first for Jenny—when the client said he would pay an extra hundred for full service. Maria had seen him before, so maybe that was why she said yes. Afterward, she tried to give Jenny half of the extra hundred he had paid, but Jenny told her it wasn't necessary, she'd just take what she earned for the massage; the rest was Maria's. They had been friends ever since.

They worked together until Jenny couldn't stand their boss hitting on her any longer, probably four months, which was an eternity in the business. By the time she left she had slept with a client for the first time. He was so good-looking, she blushed when he walked in the door, but they didn't do anything serious until he was back for his sixth visit in a month—and then all she let him pay her for was the massage. But after they went out a few times—real dates, to a movie, to dinner and dancing—he stopped calling. It was what happened with every regular eventually, but she still felt bad. The second client she slept with, an older guy this time, was a lawyer with a wife and three kids and a plan to pay Jenny's rent and tuition. Jenny took him up on his offer and left the business. But after three months of his obsessive behavior and phone calls from his wife telling her she was stealing the children's private school tuition, Jenny bailed.

“I'm too young to have so much baggage,” she told Maria, and Maria responded by asking Jenny to work for her at the place she'd opened in Chinatown. She said clients from downtown still asked about Mika, which was the name Jenny had used there. But Jenny wanted to work on her own. More and more girls were going independent now that they could advertise on the Internet and get a classier clientele than they did from ads in in
L.A. Weekly
or the
L.A. Xpress
. But a funny thing happened once she started working out of her own place. She got lazy, and she had never been like that in her entire life. Too much easy money, she decided. She made almost twenty thousand dollars in her first month and a half on her own, and after that, she couldn't be bothered to book more than two or three clients a week, one of them being the guy who became her deadbeat cell phone boyfriend. Finally, when her cash reserves barely covered her rent, she decided she would be better off working for someone else, someone who would give her a place to be and a time to be there. And Sherman Oaks had been perfect, right up to Barry with his nice ass and his convertible top that didn't work.

The thought of what had happened after he dropped her off that fine January afternoon still made her shiver, the way she was shivering now as she pulled into her apartment building's underground garage. It was one of those things her memory would never turn loose of, and it would only get worse as the business beckoned again. She had made so many stops, even if they were all really the same, right down to the girls and the clients. One big treadmill, and where could she go on one of those? Sometimes she wished she could get off it. But that scared her too.

It must have been the wee small hours of the morning when the apartment manager slid a note under Nick's front door. Nick pictured the poor guy staying up past his bedtime to make sure the lights were off, then carrying out the landlord's orders on tiptoe. The apartment manager looked like a mouse, even had a rodent mustache, and he had probably been ready to scurry away if he got caught in the act.

Nick didn't want anyone to be afraid of him any more than he wanted to be reminded that rent for April was due in two weeks and he still hadn't paid for March. Worst of all, he didn't want to think Coyle was his last best hope before he dialed the number Cecil had given him, but that was what Coyle was.

“I was hoping you'd heard something,” Nick said on the phone that morning. “You know, about the job you said might open up.”

“Right,” Coyle said. “There was a driver supposed to be moving back to Oklahoma, but every month he's got some new reason he's still here. This time I heard it's his old lady. Says she don't want to go somewhere there ain't a beach, like anybody would want to see her fat ass in a bikini.”

“So what do you think? Should I try chasing down something else?”

“You got something?”

There was no mistaking the hopefulness in Coyle's voice. He was looking for a way to get off the hook.

“Maybe,” Nick said.

“Maybe's better than nothing.”

“Yeah, I haven't even talked to your boss yet.”

“Oh, it'll happen, trust me,” Coyle said. “Just hang in there a couple more months.”

“I'll do that,” Nick said.

But when he hung up, he marked Coyle off as one more bullshit artist, one more source of empty promises. Everybody lies, Coyle had said so himself, and now he had proved it.

Scott could tell the fighter didn't want to call. Okay, ex-fighter if that's what he insisted on, like these animals ever really changed no matter what happened to them. Anyway, this guy Pafko's voice gave away his reluctance and uncertainty, maybe even his embarrassment at having to phone a stranger about a job, particularly when he didn't know what the job was.

Scott felt good about how he picked up on all that. It was his acting classes paying off again, keeping him alert to human behavior whether it was with his eyes or his ears. He remembered how he had tried for the same qualities in his own voice when he was doing a scene from Chekhov or Arthur Miller, somebody like that. It had been years ago, before his rise and fall on TV, and he kept meaning to take classes again to see if he could tap back into whatever it was he'd had in the beginning. Something always came up, though, like the indie feature his agent mentioned yesterday—a long shot, but what wasn't in Hollywood?—and, well, like the call from this guy Pafko.

About time
, Scott thought. The girls had been on his ass to crank up security since they started hearing there was at least one rape and robbery every week lately. Then again, it wasn't like they were getting their news on TV or in the newspaper. The attacks were the kind of cheap shit that never turned up anywhere except the blogs and chatrooms the girls flocked to. They took it as stone fact that these motherfuckers had decided they preferred pussy and money to time off. Scott did his best to tune out the growing hysteria until Sierra showed up one morning saying the animals had attacked jack shacks in Santa Monica and Mid-Wilshire. Sierra was his best earner, and she believed that fucking the boss was part of her job. Attention had to be paid.

The way it normally worked, Scott watched over his flock himself, but only on Thursdays and Fridays, when business was off the hook. The other days, he'd drop in every three or four hours, just enough to let the girls know he cared. To tell the truth he couldn't stand being around them all the time. They were worse than actresses—too needy, too neurotic, too nuts.

Scott had hoped that DuPree would lend him some muscle. Of course the girls would have shit if DuPree had. No matter what their race, they weren't crazy about black guys to start with. But DuPree was in a category all his own: he was butt-puckering scary. He swung by maybe once a month to check out the new talent—and there was always new talent, stability being no more necessary than sanity for a hand-job queen. He never paid or left a tip, and if the girls who saw him had horror stories, they either kept it to themselves or never came back to work. Scott let it all slide. He figured knowing DuPree had its advantages.

He was enjoying one of them now, in fact. DuPree's old man—drunk most of the time, DuPree said—had found a way to get his number to this guy Pafko. Next thing he knew, Pafko was on the phone, listening to Scott refuse to get into specifics about the job until they met in person. Reluctant, uncertain, embarrassed, or whatever else he might have been, the fighter still wound up saying yes.
Holy shit,
Scott thought after he hung up,
this guy might actually be desperate.
Scott liked that possibility a lot.

They were supposed to meet at two-thirty and it was almost three now. Nick found himself wishing he had picked up a paper before walking into Junior's Deli, then remembered all over again how pissed off he would have been if he had seen Andy Rigby's name in it. The only thing that interrupted his boredom was visits by a waitress with a bright red dye job. Every five minutes she wanted to freshen his coffee, or maybe get him something to eat—she was pushing the Reuben hard. Nick kept telling her he'd wait until the guy he was meeting got there. “You sure it's not a girl that stood you up?” the waitress said at last, walking away with a wink and a laugh. Nick shook his head and resumed looking out the window onto Westwood Boulevard. Only problem was he didn't know who he was looking for. Fifteen minutes later he stopped caring.

He was sliding out of the booth, thinking it could use new vinyl, when someone behind him said, “Nick, right?”

He turned and saw a guy who would have looked like a lot of other handsome guys in L.A. if he lost his second chin and started running and doing crunches. Even the blue V-neck sweater the guy was wearing over a white T-shirt couldn't conceal how thick he was through the middle. But he had the kind of sandy brown hair that probably always looked right, he was fashionably unshaven, and there was mischief in his brown eyes that must have raised hell with the ladies.

“I thought it was you,” the guy said. “From your picture in the paper.”

“I guess that makes you Scott,” Nick said.

“Yeah. Sorry I'm late.”

Nick thought the guy looked too pleased with himself to be sorry.

“Sit down,” Scott said, already doing so himself, not bothering to shake hands. “You're gonna have some lunch, aren't you?”

“Already ate,” Nick said.

“Well, I didn't.” Scott waved the waitress over, probably winning her undying affection by saying, “Hey, good-lookin'.” He ordered a Reuben with potato salad and a cream soda while Nick sat there wondering why everybody in this town gave you a first name and let it go at that.

“So, Scott,” he said when the waitress was gone, “you always have people you never met deliver messages for you?”

“You talking about anyone in particular?”

“Cecil Givens.”

It took a moment before Scott said, “Oh yeah, right. He lives next door to a buddy of mine's pops.” Scott gave Nick a strange look. “What's the matter, you don't trust me?”

“Not really, no. And by the way, you were forty-five minutes late.”

Nick was surprised to see the guy smile and nod like some wise old professor.

“I like it,” Scott said. “You really don't give a shit.”

“What's there to give a shit about?”

“A job.”

“The one you wouldn't talk about on the phone? I don't think so.”

“Relax, we're going to talk about it. What's the rush?”

“I don't want to waste my time.”