Maya's Notebook: A Novel (29 page)

Finally, I was able to tell Daniel my secrets. I told him about Roy Fedgewick and Brandon Leeman and the men who killed him, about distributing drugs and losing everything and ending up homeless, about how much more dangerous the world was for women, how we should cross the street if a man’s coming toward us and there’s nobody else around and avoid them completely if they’re in a group, watch our backs, look to both sides, turn invisible. At the end of the time I spent in Las Vegas, when I’d already lost everything, I protected myself by pretending to be a guy; it helped that I’m tall and skinny as a board, with my hair hacked off and men’s clothes from the Salvation Army. That’s probably what saved me in the long run, I guess. The street is implacable.

I told him about the rapes I’d witnessed and about which I’d only told Mike O’Kelly, who can stomach anything. The first time, a disgusting drunk, a big man who looked hefty in all the layers of rags he wore, but might have been skin and bones, trapped a girl in a blind alley, full of garbage, in broad daylight. The kitchen door of a restaurant opened into the alley, and I wasn’t the only one who went there to scavenge through the Dumpsters in search of leftovers before the stray cats got to them. You could hear there
were rats too, but I never saw them. The girl, a young, hungry, dirty addict, could have been me. The man grabbed her from behind, threw her facedown on the pavement, strewn with trash and putrid puddles, and slashed the side of her pants open with a knife. I was less than ten feet away, hidden between the garbage cans, and it was only by chance that she was the one screaming and not me. The girl didn’t defend herself. In two or three minutes he finished, adjusted his rags and left, coughing. During those minutes I could have smashed him on the back of the head with one of the bottles lying around in the alley. It would have been simple, and the idea did occur to me, but I immediately dismissed it: that wasn’t my fucking problem. And when the attacker had left, I didn’t go to help the girl who was lying motionless on the ground either, just walked quickly past her and left, without looking back.

The second time it was two young men, maybe pushers or gangbangers, and the victim was a woman I’d seen in the street before, who was very ill, wasting away. I didn’t help her either. They dragged her into an underpass, laughing and mocking, while she fought back with a fury as concentrated as it was futile. Suddenly she saw me. Our eyes met for an eternal, unforgettable instant, and I turned around and ran away.

During those first months in
Las Vegas, when money was plentiful, I hadn’t managed to save enough for a plane ticket back to California. It was too late to think of calling my
Nini. My summer adventure had turned sinister, and I couldn’t involve my innocent grandma in Brandon Leeman’s misdeeds.

After the sauna I went to the pool, wrapped in a robe, ordered a lemonade that I spiked with a shot of vodka from the flask I always carried in my purse, and took two tranquilizers and another unidentified pill; I was taking too many different-colored and -shaped tablets to distinguish one from the other. I stretched out on a chair as far as possible from a group of learning-disabled youths, who were splashing around in the water with their caregivers. In other circumstances I would have played with them for a while; I’d seen them many times, and they were the only people I dared mix with, because they couldn’t be any threat to Brandon Leeman’s security, but I had a headache and needed to be alone.

The sweet peace of the pills was beginning to invade my body when I heard the name Laura Barron on the loudspeaker, something that had never happened before. I thought I’d heard wrong and didn’t move until the second announcement, then I went over to one of the internal telephones, dialed reception, and was told someone was looking for me, and it was an emergency. I went out into the hall, barefoot and in a robe, and found Freddy in a very agitated state. He took me by the hand and pulled me into a corner to tell me, out of his mind with nerves, that Joe Martin and Chino had killed Brandon Leeman.

“They gunned him down, Laura!”

“What are you talking about, Freddy?”

“There was blood everywhere, pieces of brain. . . . You have to escape, they’re going to kill you too!” he burst out,
all in one breath.

“Me? Why me?”

“I’ll tell you later, we have to fly, hurry.”

I ran to get dressed, grabbed what money I had, and went back to meet Freddy, who was pacing like a panther under the alert gaze of the receptionists. We went outside and tried to get away from there quickly, without calling attention to ourselves. A couple of blocks away we managed to flag down a taxi. We ended up in a motel on the outskirts of Las Vegas, after changing taxis three times and stopping to buy hair dye and a bottle of the strongest, cheapest gin on the market. I paid for a night in the motel, and we locked ourselves in the room.

While I dyed my hair
black, Freddy told me that Joe Martin and Chino had spent the whole day coming in and going out of the apartment, talking frenetically on their cell phones, without even noticing him. “In the morning I was sick, Laura, you know how I get sometimes, but I realized that fucking pair of brutes was up to something and I started to keep my ears open, without moving off the mattress. They forgot about me or thought I was high.” From the phone calls and conversations, Freddy finally deduced what was going on.

The men had found out that Brandon Leeman had paid someone to eliminate them, but for some reason that person
hadn’t done it; instead, he’d warned them, instructing them to abduct Brandon Leeman and force him to reveal where his money was. It seemed to Freddy, from the deferential tone of voice Joe Martin and Chino were both using, that the mysterious caller was someone with authority. “I didn’t manage to warn Brandon. I didn’t have a phone and there was no time,” the kid wailed. Brandon Leeman was the closest thing Freddy had to family. He’d taken him in off the streets, given him a roof over his head, food, and protection unconditionally, never tried to rehabilitate him, accepted him with all his vices, laughed at his jokes and enjoyed his rapping and dancing. “He caught me robbing him a bunch of times, Laura, and you know what he did instead of hitting me? He told me to ask, and he’d give me what I needed.”

Joe Martin stationed himself to wait for Leeman in the garage of the building, where he would have to put the car, and Chino stood guard in the apartment. Freddy stayed in bed on the mattress, pretending to be asleep, and from there, he heard Chino receive the news on his cell that the boss was on his way in. The Filipino went running downstairs, and Freddy followed at a distance.

The Acura drove into the garage. Leeman turned off the motor and started to step out of the vehicle, but he caught sight in the rearview mirror of the shadows of the two men who were blocking his exit. Driven by the long habit of distrust, with one single instinctive movement he drew his weapon, hit the ground, and started firing with no questions asked. But Brandon Leeman, always so obsessed with security, didn’t know how to use his own revolver. Freddy had never seen him clean it or do any target practice, like Joe
Martin and Chino, who could take their pistols apart and put them back together again in a few seconds. By shooting blindly at those shadows in the garage, Brandon Leeman hastened his death, although they probably would have shot him eventually anyway. The two thugs emptied their weapons into the boss, who was trapped between the car and the wall.

Freddy got there in time to see the carnage and then took off, before the racket died down and the men discovered him.

“Why do you think they want to kill me? I don’t have anything to do with that, Freddy,” I said.

“They thought you were in the car with Brandon. They wanted to get both of you. They say you know more than you should. Tell me what you’re involved in, Laura.”

“Nothing! I don’t know what those guys want from me!”

“I’m sure Joe and Chino went to look for you at the gym, the only place you might have been. I bet they got there a few minutes after we left.”

“What am I going to do now, Freddy?”

“Stay here until we think of something.”

We opened the bottle of gin and, lying side by side on the bed, took turns taking swigs until we were plunged into a dense and deathly drunkenness.

I came back to life
many hours later in a room I didn’t recognize, feeling like I was being crushed by an elephant,
with needles stuck in my eyes, and no memory of what had happened. I stood up with immense effort, fell to the floor, and dragged myself to the bathroom in time to hug the toilet bowl and vomit an interminable stream of sewage. I lay flat out on the linoleum, trembling, with bitterness in my mouth and a claw in my gut, babbling between dry heaves that I wanted to die. A long time later I threw some water on my face and rinsed out my mouth, horrified at the cadaverously pale, black-haired stranger in the mirror. I couldn’t make it back to the bed but lay down on the floor, moaning.

Some time later there were three knocks on the door that felt like cannon blasts, and a voice with a Hispanic accent said she’d come to clean the room. Holding on to the walls for support, I made it to the door, opening it wide enough to tell the housekeeper to go to hell and hang up the Do Not Disturb sign; then I fell to my knees again. I crawled back to the bed with a premonition of immediate and disastrous danger that I couldn’t manage to pin down. I couldn’t for the life of me remember why I was in that room, but my intuition told me that it wasn’t a hallucination or a nightmare, but something real and terrible, something to do with Freddy. An iron crown was circling my temples, tighter and tighter, while I called Freddy with a thread of a voice. Finally I got tired of calling him and desperately began looking for him, under the bed, in the closet, in the bathroom, in case he was playing a joke on me. He wasn’t anywhere, but I discovered that he’d left me a little bag of crack, a pipe, and a lighter. How simple and familiar!

Crack was Freddy’s paradise and his hell. I’d seen him using it daily, but I’d never tried it because of the boss’s
orders, obedient girl that I was. Fuck that. My hands were barely functioning, and I was blinded with pain from my headache, but I managed to get the little rocks into the glass pipe and light the torch, a herculean task. Exasperated, insane, I waited eternal seconds until the rocks burned to the color of wax, with the tube burning my fingers and my lips, and finally they broke and I deeply breathed in the redeeming cloud, the sweet fragrance of mentholated gasoline, and then the unease and premonitions disappeared and I rose to glory, light, graceful, a bird in the wind. For a brief time I felt euphoric, invincible, but soon I came down with a bang in the semidarkness of that room. Another drag on the glass tube, and then another. Where was Freddy? Why had he abandoned me without saying good-bye, with no explanation? I had a bit of money left, so I staggered out to buy another bottle, then came back to lock myself in my hideout.

Between the liquor and the crack I floated adrift for two days without sleeping or eating or washing, dripping with vomit, because I couldn’t make it to the bathroom. When I finished off the booze and the drugs, I emptied the contents of my purse and found a paper twist of cocaine, which I immediately sniffed, and a little bottle with three sleeping pills, which I decided to ration. I took two, and since they had not the least effect on me, I took the third. I don’t know if I slept or if I was unconscious; the clock showed numbers that meant nothing. What day is it? Where am I? No idea. I opened my eyes, felt like I was suffocating, my heart was a time bomb,
tic-tac-tic-tac
, faster and faster, I felt electric shocks, shakes, death rattles, then the void.

I was awakened by more
knocks on the door and urgent shouting, this time from the hotel manager. I buried my head under the pillows, crying for some sort of relief, just one more drag of that blessed smoke, just one shot of anything to drink. Two men forced the door open and burst into the room, cursing and threatening. They stopped dead at the spectacle of a crazy, terrified, agitated girl, babbling incoherently in that room converted into a fetid pigsty, but they’d seen it all in that fleabag motel and guessed what was what. They forced me to get dressed, picked me up by the arms, dragged me down the stairs, and pushed me onto the street. They confiscated my only valuable belongings, the designer handbag and my sunglasses, but they were considerate enough to give me my license and my wallet, with the two dollars and forty cents I had left.

Outside it was scorching hot, and the half-melted asphalt burned my feet through my sneakers, but nothing mattered to me. My only obsession was to get something to calm my anguish and fear. I had nowhere to go and no one to ask for help. I remembered I had promised I’d call Brandon Leeman’s brother, but that could wait, and I also remembered the treasures there were in the building where I’d lived for those months, hills of magnificent powders, precious crystals, prodigious amounts of pills, which I used to separate, weigh, count, and carefully place in little plastic bags. There even the most miserable person in the world could have a piece of heaven at their disposal, brief though it might be. How could I not get a hold of something in the caverns of the garages, in the cemeteries of the first and
second floors, how could I not find someone who would give me something, for the love of God? But with the scant lucidity left to me, I remembered that approaching that neighborhood would be suicide.

Think, Maya, think, I repeated out loud, as I seemed to do more and more over the last few months. There are drugs everywhere in this fucking city, it’s just a matter of looking for them, I protested, pacing back and forth in front of the motel like a hungry coyote, until necessity cleared my mind and I was able to think.

Expelled from the motel where
Freddy had left me, I walked to a gas station, asked for the key to the washroom, and cleaned myself up a little. Then I got a lift with a driver who dropped me off a few blocks from the gym.

I had the keys for the lockers in my pocket. I stood near the door, waiting for the opportunity to go in without attracting attention, and when I saw three people talking to each other approaching, I pretended to be part of the group. I crossed the reception hall, and when I got to the stairs I ran into one of the employees, who hesitated before saying hello to me, surprised by the color of my hair. I didn’t talk to anyone at the gym—I suppose I had a reputation for being stuck-up or stupid—but other members knew me by sight, and several employees by name. I ran up to the dressing rooms and emptied the contents of my lockers on the ground so frenetically that a woman asked me if I’d lost something;
I came out with a stream of curses, because I hadn’t found anything I could get high on, while she stared at me openly in the mirror. “What are you looking at, lady?” I shouted and then saw myself in the same mirror she was looking at and didn’t recognize that lunatic with red eyes, blotchy skin, and a black animal on top of her head.