A Better Goodbye (2 page)

“I've got to tell you this is the nicest car I've ever driven,” Barry said, “and I've driven a lot of nice cars.”

“I'll bet.” She glanced at the dashboard. “Is that real wood?”

“Yeah. The guy I got the car from told me what kind, but I forgot.” He laughed at himself. It was another thing she liked about him.

He was one of those clients who made her forget the life that had brought them together, the life she led in the apartment complex in whose shadow they were still parked. She wasn't ashamed of what she did there, although she did try to stay away from neighbors' prying eyes. She just liked being with a guy who made her feel like they could have met anywhere. That wasn't how it usually was.

Suki didn't know the engine was on until Barry eased the car away from the curb.

“Wow, quiet,” she said.

As they went around the block and got on Sepulveda, the noise from outside the car was still there, but it was filtered through privilege.

“Know what one of these costs new?” Barry said.

“How much?”

“Three hundred and two thousand, five hundred dollars.”

“Really? Wow.” Suki laughed self-consciously. “I keep saying wow all the time. Sorry.”

“I'll take it as a compliment.”

Barry looked at her as if he expected her to say something else.

“What?” she said.

“Don't you want to know what that twenty-five hundred dollars is for?” he asked. “I mean, you'd think three hundred K would be a nice round number everybody could live with, right?”

Suki said, “Sure,” with as much enthusiasm as she could muster.

“Floor mats.”

“Really?”

“No.”

When he began laughing, she joined in, punching him lightly on the arm and saying, “I thought you were serious.” Then she settled back, content, thinking his sunglasses were way nicer than hers and liking how the lines around his eyes crinkled when he smiled.

“It's got a killer sound system,” he said. “Listen.” He pushed a button and a couple of seconds later a woman's voice was filling the Rolls with yearning: “I envy the rain that falls on your face, that wets your eyelashes and dampens your skin . . . ”

“Who's singing?” Suki said.

“Lucinda Williams.”

“I didn't know you liked country music.”

“I'm not sure I'd call her country. I mean, that's how she started, but now she's got lots of other things going on. Blues, rock-and-roll, even gospel sometimes.”

Suki nodded. “She's good. I like her.” It wasn't a lie, either. It was just that Suki didn't know much about music except Coldplay and what she put on during massage sessions. Most of her friends were into rap and hip-hop, and that was cool too. In fact she thought the funniest song she'd ever heard was “Smack My Bitch Up.” But she wasn't going to tell Barry that, not yet anyway.

By the time they were heading east on Ventura, Lucinda was singing about a jukebox getting her through the long nights of the heart, and Suki was back to thinking what a great day it was to be in a car like this. Seventy degrees in the middle of January, and the air was clear the way it never was in the summer.

“Can we put the top down?” she said.

“Absolutely,” Barry said. “I should have done that right away.”

He pushed a button on the center console, and slowly, seductively, the top began to rise and move back. With the first crack of blue sky overhead, Suki felt the sun's warmth.

“Let's go up to Mulholland,” Barry said. “It'll be beautiful.”

“I haven't been up there in, like, forever.”

They'd been hitting green lights all the way and the traffic wasn't as thick as it usually was, all in all a perfect afternoon. Nothing for Suki to do but ride the good feeling wherever it took her.

Then Barry said, “Shit.”

Suki had only heard him swear a time or two before. When she looked over, his smile was gone and he was leaning on the button for the convertible top. The convertible top. That was the reason for his mood swing. It was sticking straight up as they rolled past Tower Records, a block from Van Nuys Boulevard. They were supposed to turn there and head up to Mulholland. But right now Mulholland was the furthest thing from Barry's mind.

“Goddammit,” he said.

Lucinda Williams was still singing, but the only sound that registered on Suki was a low grinding noise. When she looked around, she saw other drivers staring and two Asian guys in a jacked-up Honda Civic pointing at her and laughing, like this was what she got for hanging out with a rice chaser old enough to be her father. Her first impulse was to flip them off.

Then Barry said “shit” one more time, and she turned her attention back to him. “What should we do?” she asked.

He had both hands on the wheel now and he was moving into the right lane, hunting for a parking place. He didn't look at her when he said, “You should get me a brain transplant.”

“No, don't say that.”

“I was fucking stupid enough to try putting it down when we were moving. Should have parked.”

“It'll be all right.”

“Not if I fucked up the goddamn car.”

He hit the brake when he saw a Lincoln Navigator pulling out of a parking space. But it stopped halfway onto the street because the woman behind the wheel was busy yakking on her cell phone. “Fucking bitch,” he said.

Suki flinched. She didn't like the side of Barry that was emerging any more than Barry liked sitting here knowing that everybody who saw his Rolls's convertible top waving in the breeze thought he was a rich idiot. She would have thought the same thing if she'd been driving down the street. And she had to stifle a giggle when she realized she couldn't wait to tell someone about what had happened. Not Contessa, but maybe Brooke. No, not Brooke either, because she'd turn around and tell Contessa. Then they'd both dis Barry the way they dissed most clients, and Suki felt too protective of him for that. But she had to find someone. This was just too good, you know?

Stepping into the apartment, she didn't hear anything except the icemaker in the fridge. There was no sign of Contessa and Brooke—they were probably still in session. She walked toward the living room and saw that the coffee table's glass top had been knocked sideways. A closer look told her it was cracked. One of the cushions had been pulled away from the sofa, too. Suki, starting to feel strange, off-balance, moved to straighten things up, the way she always did, and almost stepped on one of the phones. It was lying on the floor, smashed, as though someone had jumped on it.

She glanced around the room, the sun sinking in the west, its light streaming through the vertical blinds. There was a dark slash on one of the walls that hadn't been there when she left. Below it lay what she guessed had put it there: the other phone, now cracked and useless.

Suki's breath caught in her chest. The cops must have busted Contessa and Brooke. Alarms were going off in her head as she wondered if there had been anything with her name on it lying around. And were the cops waiting for her to come back? This was all new to her. The only other time she'd thought she was going to get busted, she was working in a musician's guesthouse on Beverly Glen and another masseuse got all cocaine paranoid and started playing head games. Suki had forgotten her purse in her rush to get out of there, and when she went back to get it she was so scared she almost wet herself. That wouldn't happen now.

Purse in hand, she was starting to leave when she heard something besides the fridge and the hum of traffic out on Sepulveda. Crying, maybe. Or a moan. Wait, there it was again, coming from behind the master bedroom's closed door: “Motherfuckers.” Definitely Contessa. But she didn't sound nasty, the way she usually did. There were tears in her voice. And pain.

Suki reached for the doorknob as if it were a coiled snake. When she finally made herself turn it, she opened the door an inch at a time. Six inches in, she was greeted by a scream and Brooke shouting, “No, go away! Leave us alone!”

“What are you talking about?” Suki said.

Then she stepped inside and saw for herself.

Brooke and Contessa were on the futon, both in their robes, sheer little things that were their greatest concession to modesty. Contessa was lying on her side, looking back over her shoulder at Suki, a pillow pulled tight against her chest, the towel beneath her stained with something dark. Brooke was kneeling beside her protectively, eyes wild and desperate. Her hair was a tangled mess, and there was a mark on the left side of her face and what looked like dried blood under her nose.

“They raped us,” Brooke said.

“Who?” Suki asked, barely able to get her voice above a whisper.

“That new client. I buzz him up and he's all well dressed and everything, and before I close the door behind him, his friend comes charging in.”

“Niggers,” Contessa said.

Brooke sank back on the futon and started to cry. “They said they'd kill us. Oh, Suki, they had guns.”

“We've got to call the police,” Suki said. She was fishing around in her purse for her cell phone when Contessa stopped her with a derisive snort.

“And tell 'em what, a couple ho's got raped? Yeah, those cops'd love that. We can tell 'em the motherfuckers stole all our money, too. And you know what they gonna do, little girl? They gonna laugh and say it's the price we pay for peddlin' our pussies.”

“At least call Derek.”

“Bitch, all that motherfucker want us to do is clean up our mess and disappear.”

Suki tried to think of what to say next. Contessa beat her to it.

“Just get the fuck outta here, all right?”

Suki looked at Brooke, hoping to find an ally but knowing that now more than ever Brooke wouldn't stand up to Contessa. She wouldn't even raise her head.

“Goddammit, go,” Contessa said.

Suki hurried from the apartment without so much as a goodbye, shedding her name like a second skin. By the time the elevator stopped in the underground parking garage, she was back to being Jenny Yee and nobody else. She doubted the process would be that easy for Contessa and Brooke, cursed now with their terrible secret. And she wondered, as never before, what their names really were.

The Mexicans woke Nick Pafko at six straight up, the way they always did, their radio blaring music that was heavy on happy accordions and
ai-yi-yi-yi
's. They were gardeners who lived in the termite palace next door, anywhere from four to six in a one-bedroom. Nick had watched them come and go, probably back and forth across the border with as many Yankee dollars as they could squirrel away while tending the lawns of anybody with enough money to afford them. The only ones who never left were the guys who drove the two trucks, both of them in their fifties and easy to imagine respectfully taking off their ball caps when the lady of the house came out to say bugs were eating her roses. Once they figured out Nick didn't work for La Migra, they stopped watching him out of the corners of their eyes. They'd smile or nod, sometimes offer him a beer, as though they understood he wasn't any better off than they were. Good guys, but they couldn't keep it down in the morning.

Nick rolled out of bed and into the chilly March dawn. The rising sibilance on the 405 let him know that last night's rush hour was already turning into morning drive time without a break. The trick with the traffic was to pretend it was the ocean, waves washing up on a concrete shore. He didn't hear many people spoiling the illusion by honking, the way they did back home in Chicago. With nothing between him and the freeway except the two apartments up front, a street the city never fixed, and a half-assed wire fence, Nick took his blessings where he found them.

Sleep had come hard last night, refusing to budge until exhaustion got the best of the voices in his head. The voices had shouted loudest when the rest of him was ready to shut down, and now, looking at himself in the bathroom mirror, he could see the weariness in his eyes. There were still women who liked his looks—they liked his smile too, though a smile was a sometimes thing for him. It was as if his mind was always focused on what he saw now, scars above and below each eye and a broken nose that had never been set properly. At least those wounds had healed. It was the deeper ones he feared never would, the ones he was forever struggling to keep at bay.

As he walked out of the bathroom, he shook his head disapprovingly at how he'd slept in his sweatshirt and jeans. That wasn't his style. His apartment proved it, everything squared away, no matter how big a mess his head might be. The place wasn't much, but it was all he needed. That and the money to keep him in it for another month. He was trying to think of a way to come up with it when the phone rang. It was Coyle, sounding like a call so early made him some kind of a comedian.

“Yeah, I'm awake,” Nick said. “What's going on?”