Night Night, Sleep Tight (2 page)

Chapter 2

B
y the time Deirdre Unger reached the Sunset Boulevard exit off the San Diego Freeway, her stomach burned. The Egg McMuffin she’d wolfed down an hour and a half ago had been a mistake.

Used to be this was an easy turn, but traffic had grown heavier over the years. As she waited, she took a sip of what was left of her coffee. It tasted mostly of waxy cardboard and only made her stomach seethe. She set the cup back in the drink holder and foraged with one hand in her messenger bag, feeling for an errant Rolaid or Life Saver and coming up with only lint.

“How hot is it, kiddies?” The voice on the radio sounded maniacally overjoyed. “So hot trees are whistling for dogs!” A buzzer sounded, then hollow laughter. “Seriously, it’s hot out there, so drink plenty of water. Red flag warnings have been issued for today and tomorrow. Heat and dry winds are expected to turn Los Angeles and Ventura County mountains and valleys into a tinderbox.”

Yippee.
Deirdre snapped the radio off and gripped the wheel. Another reason to have stayed in San Diego.

At last there was a break in the traffic and she turned onto Sunset. Why on earth was she doing this? Couldn’t Henry for once in his life have stepped up to the plate? She wondered, what would he do after the house sold? No way he’d want to live with Arthur in a condo complex filled with actual grown-ups. He’d have to find a place for himself and Baby and Bear—those were his rottweilers—and his Harleys. She had no idea how many bikes he had at the moment, but she wouldn’t have been at all surprised if he’d named them, too.

It was a shame about Henry. He’d wanted desperately to be a jazz guitarist, and if he’d worked at it, he might even have made a career of it. But freshman year of college he dropped out, stopped playing, and moved home. Not that he’d done badly after that. He made a good enough living selling bikes for a Harley dealership in Marina del Rey. Problem was, he “invested” his earnings in vintage bikes, Stratocasters, and the best pot that money could buy. Girlfriends came and went so fast Deirdre had stopped asking. Henry seemed to be allergic to any kind of personal commitment.

A loud
blat
came from a passing car. Deirdre realized she’d nearly sideswiped it. She jerked her car back in its lane.
Get a grip,
she told herself. Her father had asked for her help. He’d mellowed a lot in his old age, and even took the occasional break from his monologue to ask what she was up to. And it was just a weekend, not a lifetime.

She’d intended to drive up last night, but at the last minute her business partner, Stefan Markovic, got a call from an arts reporter for the
Wall Street Journal
who wanted to meet with him to talk about the new arts district that was taking shape in San Diego. She and Stefan had agreed it was potentially great publicity. But that meant he wasn’t there to help install their new show, so she’d been at the gallery with the artist’s assistant until after midnight. By then it was too late to start driving to L.A., so Deirdre had gone home. Before she went to sleep she’d turned off her phone’s ringer. Her father had a nasty habit of calling at all hours of the night, using her silence as permission to rattle on about his latest brilliant idea or vent his spleen, depending on how much he’d had to drink. When he was done, he rarely said good-bye. He’d just hang up, and she’d end up lying in bed for an hour, trying to fall back asleep.

Deirdre crossed into the left lane and accelerated. Power surged and her Mercedes SL automatically downshifted and shot forward, hugging the road as she pushed it around a bend. She braked into the curves and accelerated coming out, weaving between cars on the winding four-lane road. Forty, forty-five, fifty. The end of her crutch slid across the passenger seat, the cuff banging against the door.

The car drifted into the right lane coming around a tight curve and she had to slam on the brakes behind a red bus that straddled both lanes and poked along at twenty miles an hour, idling just outside walled estates.
STARLINE TOURS
was painted in slanting white script across the back.

Deirdre tapped the horn and crept along behind the bus, past pink stucco walls that surrounded the estate where Jayne Mansfield had supposedly once lived. It had been a big deal when the actress died, had to have been almost twenty years ago. And still tourists lined up to gawp at her wall. Breasts the size of watermelons and death in a grisly car accident (early news reports spawned the myth that she’d been decapitated)—those were achievements that merited lasting celebrity in Hollywood. That, or kill someone. It was the same old, same old, real talent ripening into stardom and then festering into notoriety. Deirdre sympathized with Jayne Mansfield’s children, though, who must have gone through their lives enduring the ghoulish curiosity of strangers.

Buses like the one belching exhaust in front of her now used to pull up in front of her own parents’ house, passengers glued to the windows. Most writers, unless they married Jayne Mansfield, did not merit stars on celebrity road maps. And in the flats between Sunset and Santa Monica where her father lived, notables were TV (not movie) actors, writers (not producers), and agents, all tucked in like plump raisins among the nouveau riche noncelebrity types who’d moved to Beverly Hills, so they’d say, because of the public schools. You had to live north of Sunset to score neighbors like Katharine Hepburn or Gregory Peck. Move up even farther, into the canyons to an ultramodern, super-expensive home to find neighbors like Frank Sinatra and Fred Astaire.

Arthur Unger had earned his spot on the celebrity bus tour through an act of bravery that had lasted all of thirty seconds. It had been at a poolside party to celebrate the end of filming of
Dark Waters,
an action-packed saga with a plot recycled from an early Errol Flynn movie. Fox Pearson, the up-and-coming actor featured in the film, either jumped, fell, or was pushed into the pool. Sadly for him, no one noticed as the cast on the broken leg he’d suffered a week earlier doing his own stunts in the movie’s finale dragged him to the bottom of the deep end. Might as well have gone in with his foot stuck in a bucket of concrete.

A paparazzo had been on hand to immortalize Arthur shucking his shoes and jacket and diving in. Fox Pearson’s final stunt, along with its fortuitous synchronicity with the movie’s title, earned more headlines for the dead actor than any of his roles. Suddenly he was the second coming (and going) of James Dean, a talent that blazed bright and then . . . cue slow drumroll against a setting sun . . . sank below a watery horizon.

When talking about it in private, Arthur liked to quote a line from
Sunset Boulevard
. “The poor dope—he always wanted a pool. Well, in the end, he got himself a pool.”

Deirdre used to dress up in her mother’s silver fox stole and wave at the bus from the window seat of their dining room. She perfected an open handed, tilt-to-tilt wave like one of those gowned-up girls in the Rose Parade. Back then she could dream of being in the royal court. Queen, even. But beauty queens didn’t have withered legs.

Finally the bus pulled over so that Deirdre and all the cars backed up behind her could pass. A few minutes later she cruised past the familiar brown shield, its message printed out in gold letters:
W
E
L
C
O
M
E
T
O
B
E
V
E
R
L
Y
H
I
L
L
S
. After that, the twisty road straightened into a divided parkway and the speed limit dropped to thirty, as if chastened by the wealth surrounding it. There was not a single pedestrian on the sidewalks. Not a soul in the crosswalks or waiting at bus shelters.

A half-dozen blocks farther along Deirdre turned south. Two blocks down, she pulled over and parked in front of the house where she’d grown up: stucco façade, front courtyard, and arched living room window screened by an elaborate wrought-iron grille. That was Henry’s black Firebird parked in the driveway. Arthur kept his red TR8 in the garage. To the casual observer the house seemed the same as it had for years. Decades, even. She could imagine the ad:
Charming one-story Spanish colonial, three bedrooms, two and a half baths, in-ground pool.

Deirdre sat there for a few moments, listening to the car’s engine tick in the silence and wishing she wasn’t such a compliant daughter. Then she reached for her messenger bag, looped the strap over her head and across her chest, and grabbed her crutch. She climbed out of the car and leaned against the door. Heat seemed to pulse off the macadam. She put on her sunglasses and took a harder look at the house. Terra-cotta roof tiles were missing, and the once white exterior was more the color of weak tea. Deirdre doubted it had been painted since her mother left, the last time for good, nearly twenty years ago. Maybe that real estate ad should include the chipper warning:
Fixer-upper
.

Not that everyone fixed up Beverly Hills houses these days. Parcels of land had become so much more valuable than the houses on them, why bother? Buyers tore down and started over, erecting new houses that looked like they were worth the million or more you had to shell out to get an address with a 90210 zip.

Case in point: Across the street from her father’s house, where there had once been a gracious, one-story Spanish colonial, there now sprawled a house worthy of a southern plantation. Two-story columns and Palladian windows flanked a magnificent pair of coffered front doors: Tara with vertical blinds, and badly out of scale for its third-of-an-acre lot.

Several more properties on either side of the street had been similarly perverted, and another was in process. Her father’s house, once typical for the neighborhood, had turned into an anomaly.

Deirdre popped the trunk and slammed the car door. She eased her arm through the crutch’s cuff and grasped the grip to which she’d duct-taped an extra layer of foam padding. She stumped to the back of the car and pulled a small duffel bag from the trunk. She’d packed light.

As she crossed the lawn she felt the rubber tip of her crutch sink into the grass. It made a little popping sound as she pulled it out. The courtyard was a tad cooler, shaded by a leaning olive tree. The ground under it was awash in rotting olives, some of them squashed and bleeding red slime on the gray stepping-stones. Deirdre knew from experience they could be treacherous to her crutch, so she picked her way carefully around them.

Many of the blossoms on the pair of camellia trees, one planted when Henry had been born and another about a year later for Deirdre, had turned brown and rotten, their season ended, though Deirdre’s tree still bore white camellias. Once smaller than she was, the tree was now about ten feet tall. It was probably the only thing she wanted to take when the house was sold. She hoped it could survive being dug up and transplanted in the backyard of her little bungalow in Imperial Beach.

Deirdre tried the front door. It was locked, so she had to ring, which set off Henry’s dogs. She didn’t have a key to the house because Arthur kept forgetting to send her a set. That was his way, everything always and forever at his convenience.

When still no one answered the door, Deirdre knocked again, then rang some more. The dogs were going bananas. None of it roused anyone. Now what?

She dropped her duffel on the front step and walked back across the courtyard, trying not to slip on the olives or get the tip of her crutch stuck in the pillowy moss that grew between the stones. On the driveway the air was fifteen degrees hotter. A shovel was lying behind Henry’s car. Deirdre picked it up, leaned it against the two-car garage, and peered in through one of the little windows in the overhead door. Motorcycles, at least two of them, were lined up in one bay. Her father’s car was in the other. Which meant he had to be there, too. He was probably in his office up on the second floor of the garage.

Deirdre tried the overhead doors. They were both locked. Then she tried the regular door that led to the stairway. It was locked, too. She knocked. Hollered. Whistled. Was he asleep? She ought to just go over and bang on Arthur’s bedroom window. It was nearly noon, for heaven’s sake.

She was crossing the yard when she noticed the gate to the pool was open—wide enough for a pet or a child to easily slip through and fall in. Keeping that gate secured was one of the few things that her parents had agreed upon. She was about to go over and shut it when the dogs started up again. There they were, on the other side of the living room’s sliding doors to the patio, their claws scratching the glass.

Deirdre went over to them. “Hi there, knuckleheads,” she said. Bear whined and wagged his butt where there was the stump of a tail. Baby, who was a little smaller and had a bit more golden brown over her eyes and around her muzzle, woofed and stood up, her front paws resting against glass smeared with doggie saliva. She was nearly as tall as Deirdre.

Deirdre tried to slide open the door, but of course it was locked too. “Dad! Henry!” she shouted. “Would one of you please get out here and open a damned door so I can come in, preferably before one of the dogs has a heart attack. Come on! It’s hot as hell out here.”

She waited. Someone had been out there not all that long ago: on the patio table sat a cut-glass tumbler with a bit of pale amber liquid at the bottom of it.

The only vestiges of Gloria, who’d long ago walked out on Arthur, were barren terra-cotta pots surrounding the patio. Once they had contained her collection of scented geraniums. Now they held only dried-out soil and the skeletal remains of weeds.

How her mother used to fuss over her prized
specimens,
as she called them, picking off dead leaves and pruning the branches into striking, bonsai-like shapes. Now she grew herbs and taught serenity and was well along on “the path,” as she termed it, in the midst of a Buddhist retreat that required her to shave her head and—something Deirdre could barely imagine—remain silent. Deirdre had known her parents’ marriage was over when her mother started carrying
malas,
prayer beads, that she fingered in quiet moments as she meditated and whispered mantras under her breath. When she’d moved to the desert commune near Twentynine Palms, she’d taken only one plant with her, a rare hybrid that smelled like smoked chili pepper, abandoning the rest to Arthur’s inevitable neglect.