Dating Dead Men (15 page)

Her feet stuck out from the other end of the blanket. She wore dirty sneakers, untied. I was glad to see Doc take them off. I wanted her to feel safe here, not poised for flight. She didn't look like someone who felt safe anywhere, though, her pale face tense and troubled, even in sleep. Around her neck she wore a ribbon. The ribbon had a plastic-covered picture on the end of it, the size of a sugar packet. A scapular, it was called, a sacred trinket I hadn't seen since the religion classes of my Catholic childhood. Ruby's hand rested against it, her fingernails ragged and showing the remnants of ruby-colored enamel.

The portrait on the scapular was Saint Anthony. I remembered him well. He was the patron saint of lost things.

chapter eighteen

“W
hat is this, do you think?” I asked Fredreeq, handing her a prescription.

Wednesday morning was as sunny as Tuesday had been, but today, walking to the bank, I was ready for it. I wanted to polka down Sunset.

Fredreeq squinted at the prescription. “Vulcan cylinders,” she guessed. “Alpine cyclist. Who knows? This handwriting is a pharmacist's nightmare. Why don't you fax it to Dr. Cookie?” Dr. Cookie, while not an actual physician, had a degree in pharmacology.

But would Dr. Cookie have an ethical problem deciphering a prescription that wasn't mine? I'd rescued it from the pocket of a dirty button-down shirt, along with a Swiss Army knife, engraved “To Daddy—Love, Ruby.” When Doc passed out again in the armchair, I'd caught a few hours of sleep on a quilt-covered floor, then gone to the shop to shower. I took Doc's plastic bag of clothes with me. The back room had a lovely washer-dryer set and the Gomez family wardrobe was now in the spin cycle.

“So how'd it go with your cousin last night?” Fredreeq asked.

“My—?” I stopped in my tracks.

“The guy I met at intermission. What's his name again?”

“G—Gomez?” I had no cousins, as far as I knew. It could only be Doc, making up cover stories for my friends. And neglecting to tell me.

Fredreeq said, “Lord, you'd think I'd remember that. Is Ruby talking today?”

“You met Ruby too?” I resumed walking.

“Stumbled over them in the back room, and struck up a conversation. With your cousin—not with Ruby, of course. What's that thing she's got? Selective—? No. Elective muteness.”

“Elective muteness?” I focused on Fredreeq's turquoise jumpsuit, avoiding her eyes. “He hasn't really told me about Ruby's condition. We're a—reserved—family.”

“Reserved? You and Uncle Theo?” Fredreeq sounded skeptical. “Or this Mexican branch that's turned up?”

“People can be very sensitive about diseases, so I didn't like to ask.”

“Well, I asked. You know that Catholic boarding school Ruby was in? A few weeks ago, she stopped talking. No warning. Boom! Verbal anorexia.”

We reached the bank. I held open the heavy door as Fredreeq continued. “The nuns at the school couldn't find the next of kin, the phone was disconnected or something, so they called Child Protective Services. Not that the nuns cared about
her,
I suspect, but when the tuition check bounced . . . So, okay. Social Services sends her from one department to another, and last week there's a fire at one of the foster care facilities, and they're plopping kids all over the county, finding beds for them, and Ruby ends up at Rio Pescado. What's wrong?”

My jaw must've been hanging open. “He
told
you all this, at intermission?”

“He told me all this in three minutes,” Fredreeq said, “after I told him about Franceen's ADD. It's a parent thing, one parent to another. He was dying for advice. They call Ruby's condition elective muteness and told him to get her into therapy. I told him to enjoy the peace and quiet. I'd pay my kids to go mute for a month.”

I wanted to know all about Ruby, and more about Doc, but I had my own responsibilities, as the mention of Rio Pescado reminded me. I asked Fredreeq to open my shop once the manicurists showed up at Neat Nails Plus; it was a risk, opening an hour late, but midweek mornings were slow at both establishments, and with luck, Mr. Bundt's spies wouldn't be on the job at 9
A
.
M
. If I hurried, I'd be back by noon.

         

H
OLLYWOOD
B
OULEVARD WAS
a playground of orange construction cones. These were my tax dollars at work, a project sprung up like weeds over the weekend, for the apparent purpose of slowing traffic to the speed of “park.” The only real movement was my journey through radio stations, in search of news, to see if I was in it.

“. . . synagogue spokesperson said that the vandalism was minimal and there was no clear indication this was a hate crime. Moving on to sports, weekend NBA—”

Hate crimes.

Hate crimes were the first crimes I knew about, the reason Ruta had spent World War II hidden in the cellar of a general store. Years later I understood the broader context of Ruta's personal adventure story. At the time, I just wanted to be Jewish.

But there was no shame in being Catholic, Ruta said; yes, the Polish soldiers were Catholic, but so were the owners of the general store. “Does a duck pray to be a horse? You just be the best duck you can be.”

I didn't want to be a duck or a horse, I'd said. I just wanted to be like her.

Cars moved forward a foot. My thoughts moved to the top of my head, where the wig I'd purchased an hour earlier from Cinema Wigs was giving me a headache.

The salesman who'd taken it down from the pegboard called it the Ava Gardner. Possibly a professional stylist could achieve a passing resemblance, but in my inexperienced hands it was more like the Don King. Still, it covered up my blond hair and this, along with sunglasses and the Tiffanie's Trousseau off-the-shoulder top from my Benjamin Woo date, would, I believed, disguise me from the guards at Rio Pescado.

I glanced in the rearview mirror to push down on the top of the wig, trying to flatten its fluffiness. Then I saw it.

The blue Hummer. A block behind me.

Panic coursed through me, the seat belt suddenly tight against my tensed body. I had a mad impulse to abandon the car and run. Then I realized that if the Rabbit was stuck, so was the Hummer. Traffic was bumper to bumper. Nobody was moving anytime soon. You're safe, I told myself, safer in the car than on foot.

Unless he got tired of waiting.

I surveyed the cars around me. My fellow travelers were occupied with cell phones, makeup, or fast-food breakfasts, windows rolled up to keep out the world. I could imagine the Hummer man striding up to the Rabbit and hauling me from it. Other drivers might not even notice or, noticing, would figure it was one more wacked-out bewigged woman on Hollywood Boulevard in trouble with her pimp.

I searched my car for something with which to defend myself, if it came to it. Pens, quarters, a sketchbook. My paperback. A dry-cleaning receipt for Gomez.

I couldn't just sit here, awaiting my fate.

To my right was a bus lane. It was cordoned off by orange cones, placed every few feet in anticipation of construction work, but the work had not yet begun. The lane, therefore, was empty.

I'd never driven over orange cones. Could they get caught under the car? Cause damage? I didn't know, and didn't want to find out. I undid my seat belt and hopped out of the Rabbit, leaving the engine running.

The cones were lighter than I expected. They stacked as neatly as paper cups, and I cleared a path, fast, and set them on the sidewalk. Amazingly, nobody stopped me. Then I heard a cacophony of horns, a block back.

I couldn't believe my eyes. The Hummer appeared to be driving over the car in front of it, bound for the very lane I was clearing of cones. Like a tank, it rolled up onto the bumper of a white compact, whose driver jumped out, screaming. I jumped back in the Rabbit, and with forward and backward maneuvers extricated myself from my place in line and squeezed into the bus lane. I didn't dare look in the rearview mirror.

Everyone was honking now. A hard-hatted and no doubt hard-hearted man in thick work boots strode toward me, his arm stretched out, threatening and authoritative as a traffic cop. “Tell it to the Hummer,” I yelled, as I turned the wheel to the right and stepped on the gas, plowing up over the curb and onto the sidewalk.

There was a streetlamp on the sidewalk, and a concrete bus bench to the right; the space in between didn't seem big enough for me to squeak through, but I kept going. I sucked in my breath, as if to make the car skinnier, and kept my eyes straight ahead.

I did it. I got through a space that big lug of a Hummer couldn't. As my Rabbit went over the sidewalk and came down over the second curb, it emitted a sound so dreadful, I apologized out loud. “Floor it!” Ruta yelled in my head. I floored it.

Heading south on the side street, I went a full mile before I began to relax. I unclenched my teeth and loosened my death grip on the steering wheel. There was no longer any thought of driving to Rio Pescado; the stress alone would kill me, and Doc was right, I couldn't risk P.B.'s safety. Maybe there was some sort of homing device on the Rabbit—or me, for that matter—that made us easy to follow; I didn't know beans about surveillance gadgets. I drove five blocks southeast of the shop and parked on a street called La Mirada, blessed my car for cooperating, locked it, and started homeward.

A pair of pedestrians walked toward me on La Mirada. As I got closer, they turned into Doc and Ruby, the latter carrying Margaret's metal crate. By the time I realized why I might not want to run into them just now, it was too late.

Ruby seemed not to recognize me, but Doc's face went through surprise and disbelief before settling on amusement. He came to a stop six inches from me.

“Please tell me that's a wig,” he said.

“Of course it's a wig.”

“Is it supposed to look like that? And what are you doing in it?”

I looked at Ruby's upturned face, her eyes fixated on my head. “It's personal.”

Doc smiled. “I'm sorry to be the one to tell you, it's not very attractive.”

“It couldn't be helped. I had some—business to attend to this morning.”

“I thought you said it was personal.” He was enjoying this.

“Personal business,” I said. “But enough about me.” In half a minute he'd figure out why I was disguised. “Did you get my note this morning, about your laundry? Find everything? Towels, coffee—?” I noticed they had wet hair. “Great,” I said, not giving him time to reply. “Where are you off to, and mind if I join you? Because it's a good time for you to tell me what's going on.”

         

B
Y TACIT AGREEMENT
, we saved the real talk for our destination. Walking, we discussed the sketchbooks Ruby had found in my apartment, greeting cards in various stages of gestation. Doc was kind enough to compliment my rendering of crustaceans, saying I humanized without sentimentalizing them. I felt myself blush.

The park and recreation center at the corner of Cole and Santa Monica was on the grubby side. Watching Ruby prance ahead of us, with Margaret on her leash, I wished I lived in a better neighborhood, one where parks had flowers instead of potential. Ruby wore an unappetizing mustard-colored fleece shirt, the same one she'd shown up in last night. It looked right at home in the park, and that made me sad.

“She found Margaret last year, abandoned,” Doc said, seeing me watch them. “She said Genghis Khan had a ferret, and Queen Elizabeth I, and that da Vinci painted them. Trying to win me over with the scholarly approach. But it was the look on her face that got me. It always is.” He waited until they were out of earshot, then gestured to the patchy grass. We sat.

“Shebby,” I said. “The kid with the speech impediment. What was it he told you?”

Doc looked down. “He was dying fast. He didn't know the guy who stabbed him, but he knew who was behind it: his cellmate in Corcoran, the last prison he was in. A guy he'd looked up to like a father.”

“But this was—Tehachapi, you said? Can inmates arrange murders at other prisons?”

“There's not much you can't do on the inside, if you have the means, and this cellmate did. He was a regular cottage industry, the number of guys he had working for him. He'd hired Shebby to do a job on the outside, once he got out.” Doc stopped, glancing up to my hair. “Think you could take that off?”

I touched my wig. The bangs felt puffy and stiff. Whatever my hair looked like underneath, it couldn't be worse than the Ava Gardner special. I pulled it off and began to pluck at my own blond strands. “This cottage industry—did he have a name?”

Doc hesitated. “Shebby called him Juan.”

“What kind of job did Juan hire Shebby for?”

“Pickup and delivery. He'd pick up a package hidden somewhere in L.A.—”

“Why does everyone speak like they work at the post office? What ‘package'? Are we talking drugs? Vital organs? Gutenberg Bibles?”

“Shebby didn't know. He was only told what it was hidden in: a box. We can assume it's not perishable, because it's been sitting for a year, since Juan went into Corcoran. Shebby was to hold on to the box for a decade or so, till Juan got out. He'd get five grand for the pickup, twenty-five more on delivery.”

“Easy money,” I said, thinking about what I was doing for five grand.

“The problem was, around the time Shebby got transferred to Tehachapi, Juan had a change of plans. He wanted out of the deal, but instead of just firing Shebby, he put out a contract on him. He had to figure the kid knew too much.” Doc stood and stretched and looked to where Ruby and Margaret were playing in the dirt.

“But he didn't even know what he was picking up,” I said.

“He knew its location, something worth thirty grand just in—postage.”

“And Shebby felt compelled to share all this with you?” I asked.

Doc sat again, then leaned back on his elbows in the grass. He squinted up at the sun. “God, I love sky,” he said. “I should be doing research, but I wanted Ruby to have some outside time before dragging her off to sit in an office.”

“What kind of research?”

He shaded his eyes and looked at me. “I'll let you know when it's done. You ask why Shebby confided in me. His guts were coming out of him. Literally. The MTA—med tech assistant—wasn't equipped for that, so he was on the phone to the county hospital, and I was assigned to stand there with this kid who was scared and mad and desperate to screw the guy who'd done this thing to him. Shebby thought I'd jump at the chance to steal a fortune. I was happy to let him think what he wanted, but then they brought in his assailant, for twelve stitches and a tetanus
shot.”