Los Angeles (26 page)

The engagement ring. I had been so lucky my muggers hadn’t found it. Or perhaps when I pissed myself, they had grown disgusted
and no longer wanted to touch me. In any event, there it was, and I projected myself into the moment I would give it to her.
Angela would gasp, of course, placing an elegant hand over her sensual mouth, and then she would say, “Yes, yes, little prince,
oh yes.”

Frank opened his briefcase and worked his way through a stack of legal documents, sifting through his pile of papers, contracts,
finely printed deals, and proposals. He had become one of Hollywood’s most influential entertainment lawyers and had even
executive-produced a few movies himself, yet here he was flying all the way to South America, to Rio de Janeiro, to collect
me. I had been studying his face through half-open eyes, watching him work in the dusty spindle of light that shone down from
the airplane ceiling. But what did I really know about him? What did my father even know about Frank Heile? I knew he lived
in Beverly Hills. I knew he had a wife named Sara, small-boned and gray-haired and practical, a little sparrow of a woman.
I knew that he only drove his Porsche on weekends and that he was embarrassed to admit it. But otherwise, he was just Frank,
a portrait of evil. I wondered how many lives he had ruined, how many careers he had destroyed. I remembered how he used to
pull me aside when I was a little kid, especially when my mother wasn’t around, and threaten me, the grip of his huge hands
on my bony arms.

I slept through the rest of the flight, waking just long enough to wedge myself against the corner of the seat and adjust
the tiny blanket. It was cold, and a sharp fissure of freezing air kept finding me, chilling my flesh. I longed for the warm
darkness of my apartment in West Hollywood. I dreamed of sitting at my computer and working on my garbled dialogue and senseless
camera directions, the meaningless utterings, I knew, of an insane dreamer. I even missed old Silowicz. There was an emptiness
inside me when I woke up that was beyond hunger. “Frank,” I said then, “have you ever lost anyone?” I don’t know why I was
asking him, but at this point I was past giving a shit about anything.

He had finished his paperwork and was now reading the
Wall Street Journal,
tracing his silvery pen down the length of a column. “Come on, Angel,” he said.

“Answer the question.”

“Why are you letting this get to you so much?” He didn’t even look up from his reading. “She was just some stupid girl.”

I glared at him.

“We’ll be landing soon.”

“What’s going to happen?”

“First, we’re going to find your car.” He sighed. “And then I’m going to take you to your father’s house. And then I’m going
to go to my office and get some work done.”

“What happened to her, Frank?”

He shook his head.

“Is she gone?”

“Take it easy, Angel. Just take it easy and get some rest.”

I pressed him. “What really happened?” I knew he knew. For some reason, I knew he just wasn’t telling me. He had sent me on
a wild goose chase, had led me all the way to Rio to keep me from finding out.

“Angel,” he said, “sometimes these women, especially the ones you meet… under those circumstances, they just vanish.” He
was shaking his head. “And you don’t ever find them again. And believe me, you don’t want to.”

I asked him again. “But what happened to her?”

“Angel, listen to me —”

“Frank,” I said, “tell me what happened, what really happened.” I knew he knew something. I knew Frank was aware of more than
he was telling me.

He always did. He was omniscient.

He turned to me, and in the faint light of the plane, his face was black and white, drawn like the face of a villain in a
comic book. “Angel,” he said, “you don’t want this girl, trust me. This is —”

“Don’t tell me what I want, Frank. I have never wanted anything in my entire life. I have never asked you for anything, never
bothered you or my father for any —”

“Angel,” Frank said, and the muscles of his face constricted like a fist, “she’s gone, and the worst thing you’re imagining,
whatever that is, that’s what happened, all right?”

______

Observe. Hypothesize. Predict. Experiment. When Angela left the Mask that last night, if anyone had seen her with the man
in gray, I reasoned, she would have had to walk through the rear entrance like everyone else. And there was one person who
would have seen them, one person I still hadn’t spoken to.

Around three-thirty they started coming out: customers dragging their feet through the rear entrance of the Velvet Mask, stepping
reluctantly across the parking lot to their Nissans, Hondas, and Jeeps, emerging like light-sensitive moles from the underground.
Then the dancers started leaving, too, most of them dressed in their street clothes, lighting cigarettes and waving their
quick coworker good-byes to one another like cashiers leaving the late shift at a convenience store. Every now and then, one
of them emerged from the club still dressed in a sparkling gown and hanging on the arm of a man, always a white man, almost
always in a gray suit. Any one of them could have matched the description of the man Angela had supposedly left with. Any
one of them, I realized, could have been the man I had seen in her apartment when I stepped out of the closet.

I had slipped away, of course, had casually told Frank that I needed to go to the bathroom and had disappeared while he waited
for Marcel to get the limo. I found the Cadillac where I had parked it and came straight here.

All around me, engines were turning over, headlights blossoming, cars pulling away and going home.

At around four in the morning, he came out, too. The hulking giant in the ridiculous butler costume stood in the pool of inadequate
illumination under the high yellow bulb and lit a small joint, smoking it down to the roach in a few powerful drags, then
flicked it unceremoniously across the darkness of the lot. It had rained earlier, and I even heard the faint
ffssstttt
of the ember going out when it hit the damp pavement. A blond dancer, the one who had put me in mind of concentration camps
the last time I was here, came out behind him. She wore a clinging fluorescent orange pantsuit and six-inch plastic heels.
Lester turned to face her, and it looked for all the world like he was talking, but from where I sat inside the Cadillac,
I couldn’t be sure.

Maybe he was reading her lips. Maybe he was speaking, but in the distorted cadences of the deaf.

Eventually the blonde went back inside, and Lester waddled across the lot toward his extra-long black limo. It wasn’t a hearse,
exactly, but the kind of vehicle a funeral home uses to transport the family of the deceased. He opened the door, tucked himself
into the driver’s seat, and started the engine, igniting the headlights and flooding the parking lot with a luminous glare.

I waited a few seconds, then pulled out behind him.

Lester drove onto Sunset and turned right after only a short distance onto La Brea, eventually finding Pico and heading in
the direction of Santa Monica. At Lincoln Boulevard he turned onto a side street, then slowed into the front parking lot of
a low stucco building, finally coming to a full stop around the side. On the building was a discreet enamel plaque that, like
the sign on the side of Lester’s car, said Horace & Geary. The building was made of cinder block and stucco, like almost everything
else in Los Angeles, and the small, underlit emblem had faded over the years, having become almost illegible. I drove past
it and turned into the parking lot of the old piano store next door, taking the Cadillac around the back and stopping behind
a Dumpster. I got out and made my way on foot just in time to watch Lester open the rear door. I saw a peel of incandescence
issue from inside, which meant, I thought, that it was open, that people were already there. Was that policy? It was four-thirty
in the fucking morning. Was someone required to guard the dead through the night? Do funeral homes, like morgues, have a night
shift? I crept around the gray building warily, careful, for some reason, to keep my distance. The facade was an ordinary,
though slightly more sedate, version of the usual strip mall storefront, but the back looked like something else entirely:
It was a virtual factory, a huge metal structure with pipes protruding and projecting from every angle. I didn’t quite realize
what this meant until I noticed the single smokestack soaring from its rooftop like a spire.

An incinerator, I thought coldly, and I felt a flash of something familiar.

This is where people are cremated.

It was precisely at that moment that I felt the sky opening and heard a distinctive
crack,
which I realized almost instantly was the sound of an enormous gold ring against my fragile albino skull. My body twisted
as I dropped to the ground, and what I saw from my sudden new position, looking up, was Lester, a contorted grin disfiguring
his Buddha-like face, and his fat fist recoiling. The world went momentarily black and then became bright again as my consciousness
slipped away and then came rushing back. I watched shimmering spots of light form in my field of vision and felt a wave of
nausea slash through my body, starting in my stomach and pushing its way toward my mouth.

This would spawn another migraine, I knew, a real monster.

I tasted bile at the back of my throat and almost puked right there.

Lester was picking me up by my shirt now, lifting my whole body to his face, saying, “What the
fuck,
just what the
fuck,
the
fuck
do you think you’re doing?”

After he dropped me again, I held my hands up and formed a crouching position, a posture I hoped would be sufficiently pitiable.

“Why the
fuck
are you following me, you
fucking
vampire-looking piece of —”

“Don’t hit me.”

“You’re lucky I don’t kill you right here, you
fuck.
” Lester had a speech impediment, it seemed, a distinct lisp, and there was something effeminate about the high pitch of his
voice that jarred incongruously with his size.

This was why he didn’t speak inside the club, I realized. He wasn’t deaf, he was embarrassed. “I thought you were deaf.”

“I’m not deaf.” He cocked his arm back and made a blunt, threatening fist. “I just don’t
fucking
talk that much. Is that all-
fucking
-right with you?”

The sun had started to glow over the eastern horizon, and a soft gray-gold had developed in the faraway sky. “I was only looking
for Angela — for Jessica Teagarden — for Cassandra,” I said, remembering to use all of her names. “Please don’t hit me again.”
The rays of light from the sun were bending toward the planet, curving around to meet us.

“Cassandra is
fucking
gone.”

“Where?”

Lester released me, throwing me back on my heels so violently that I almost lost my balance. “You want to know what the
fuck
happened to her?”

“Yes,” I said. “That’s all I want.”

“You really want to
fucking
know?”

I went ahead and told him. “She called me from the dark.”

“From the dark?”

“She said my name.”

Lester shook his huge head, not understanding.

“My phone rang and it was her. She said my name and then she was cut —”

“If I show you what happened to her, will you stop
fucking
looking for her? Will you leave her the
fuck
alone?”

I nodded.

“Come the
fuck
inside,” he said in his crazy voice, “and I’ll show you what the
fuck
happened to her.” He walked around the corner of the crematorium and through a side door, his head twitching oddly.

I stood up and followed, my hand rubbing the back of my head. There didn’t seem to be any blood there, at least, but I could
feel a hard knot growing, the size of my knuckle. I wasn’t seeing the full aura yet, either, but I knew it would come, I knew
at this point it was inevitable. I stepped inside, following Lester’s broad back into a gray room containing a metal desk
with a tiny plastic Scrabble set on it, midgame. The entire wall above the desk was a control panel. There were dials and
knobs, gauges and meters and switches. This whole room was a machine: a set of rails ran from one wall into a gaping opening,
and on these rails was a metal box, the mouth of which was just large enough to hold a casket. “It reaches thousands of
fucking
degrees in there,” Lester said, a hint of pride in his lispy voice. He slid the door in the wall open and revealed a stainless
steel channel. It was lined with ashes. He turned to face me. “And I guess when I put her in there, she still had her
fucking
phone with her. She must have called you.” He overpronounced each word. “She must have called you,” he said again, speaking
slowly and deliberately, “from inside the incinerator… right before… she burst into flames.”

“Frank paid you?”

“Frank?” He could hardly say the word. It came out,
Fthlank.
Lester smiled, revealing the glitter of a single gold tooth. “Who the fuck is Frank?”

I backed away, moving toward the door. Those ashes… that was a human being?

Lester was laughing now, chuckling almost good-naturedly, the fat of his body jiggling. He was practically doubling over,
flashing his gold tooth, jolly as Santa Claus.

“She called me,” I said, “from the dark.”

The heavy flesh of Lester’s neck twitched, his head correcting for each involuntary movement. “She must have called you right
before I turned on the
fucking
flames.”

“You’re lying.” Inside, I was begging for him to tell me he was lying. “You’re just saying this to scare me.”

“Yeah,” Lester said, “Frank paid me to do it.” He started to move toward me. “Whoever that is. He paid me to do it to you,
too. Said you’d be here.”

I reached the door behind me and burst through it. The light was nearing the horizon, and the gray haze was giving way to
a dazzling yellow. The Los Angeles sun was arriving, gold beams cascading from the filmy sky. I didn’t turn around to look
back. I just ran. I found myself seconds later inside my mother’s Cadillac. I was hyperventilating, and I had to remind myself
to take slow, deep breaths. My entire body was shaking while I fumbled with the keys.