She turned back and looked at me. Time slowed. I watched in helpless fascination as she moved her golden eyes across my face, pausing on the scar, down to my neck and shoulders, back up to my eyes.
“You play dirty,” she said finally.
“I play for keeps.”
“Well, then,” she said, and gave a low, throaty laugh that made the skin walk on the back of my neck. She slid a perfect hand over towards me. My mouth felt dry.
“Nancy Hoffman,” she said.
Hoffman, I thought. Hoffman, with that olive tawny skin. I would have thought Mediterranean. Nancy DeLucia. Nancy Sintros. Maybe she was German-Italian. Maybe she was Southern Swiss. Maybe on the day that she was born the angels got together and decided to create a dream come true. It didn’t matter. It had never mattered less in my life.
I don’t think she noticed me gasping for breath as I took her hand. If she did, maybe she thought it was just the heat. At least my hands weren’t clammy. But if this kept up my voice would crack and I’d break out in pimples. “Billy Knight,” I said, concentrating on not holding onto her hand for too long. “You’re not an actress, are you?”
She laughed again. It sounds stupid to say her laugh was musical, but there it was. Her laugh was as full of wistful harmony as Glenn Miller, as raw as Chuck Berry, soulful as Billie Holiday, pure as Ella Fitzgerald, and clean and light as Mozart.
“An actress? Me? Lord, no. What did I say to offend you? I’m a nurse.”
“Fantastic,” I said. I don’t think I use that word twice a year, but that’s what came out. I could feel this thing slipping away from me fast. “And what does your husband do?”
I think I must have said that to hear her laugh again. It worked.
When she was done laughing I felt like applauding. “You cut right to the chase, don’t you, Billy?”
While I was trying to think of a clever answer the plane lurched. The air-conditioning came back on, and we were moving out onto the runway again at last.
There was a ragged, sarcastic cheer from some of the passengers and the intercom came on.
“Sorry for the delay, folks,” the voice said. “We are now first in line for take-off.”
“Hmmph,” said Nancy, “Apology goes a lot further with a complimentary drink.”
“Flight attendants, prepare for departure,” said the intercom, and we were pressed back into our seats as the plane headed down the runway.
We were up in the air very fast. I could just see the clutter of Miami Beach out the window, and then we stood on one wing and turned west: west to the setting sun, west to darkness. I turned and looked at the face between me and the window.
I caught her eye again, that warm golden eye. It held me. “So, uh—you’ve been on vacation? In Miami?”
“No, in the Virgin Islands. Miami isn’t my idea of a vacation.”
“Oh, you don’t like automatic weapons?”
“I get enough of that at home,” she said. “I work at a free clinic and believe me, I get plenty of gunshot work.”
I knew the free clinics. They’re a leftover from the power-to-the-people stuff that was always a little more potent in L.A. and San Francisco than back east. Some of the clinics are pretty good.
“Which one?” I asked her. “I used to live in L.A.”
She made a face. “Crenshaw District.”
“Ouch,” I said.
“Yeah, I know. I started out there all full of idealism and—I don’t know. I’ve been there for five years and things just get a little worse every year. I think I’m ready for a change. In fact, I’ve started looking around for something else, maybe in a nicer place. Maybe someplace tropical. I don’t know.” Her eyes drifted away and she seemed lost for a moment, whether in her past or her future, I couldn’t say.
She snapped out of it abruptly, with another of those glorious smiles.
“Anyway. What about you, Billy? Visiting family in L.A.?”
“No. No, I’m, uh—” I had a little flash of thinking I should try to explain it all to her. The feeling went away. “I just, uh, have some stuff to take care of.”
It seemed like a bad start. But it got better quickly. Maybe I talked too much to make up for the bad start. Maybe she talked too much to keep me from switching seats with the actor. Whatever it was, we filled up three thousand miles with our life stories. She had a brother who was a reporter, her folks lived out in the Valley.
For my part, I left out a lot; marriage, the Rossmore, that kind of thing. But the rest just poured out. I found it easy to be a human being with her. It was something I hadn’t been in a long time.
And far too soon, well before I was ready or thought it was possible, we were sliding down over that red desert, over the last range of mountains, and into LAX.
I leaned over Nancy and looked out the window. The smell of her still made me dizzy—or maybe it was just the plane’s loss of altitude.
It was dusk outside. It always seems to be dusk when you land in L.A. They call it the City of Angels, but that’s just cheap sarcasm. L.A. is the City of Night.
Something about that last approach to LAX always gets to me. You see the red desert, the soft tan and green and gray of the mountains, and suddenly there it is, the biggest man-made sprawl the world has ever known. From the center of the L.A. basin you can drive for an hour in any direction and nothing changes. There is a bank, a gas station, a convenience mart and a mini-mall at every intersection in all that vast spread.
From the air it is a grid of lights that stretches neat and symmetrical for as far as you can see, from the edge of the mountains down to the ocean. The freeways and larger surface streets are lined by pink lights and marked by the thick ribbons of traffic, yellow dots of headlights running one way and red the other.
Even in a jet it takes a long time to cross that huge and foul basin. It seems even longer when you are trying to think of something to say so the flight doesn’t end when the plane lands.
I didn’t want to say so long to Nancy and have it end. But the closer I got to L.A. the more that old feeling of dread closed in. As we went into our final approach I couldn’t think of anything except that double-casket funeral. Out the window I thought I could see the cemetery along Sepulveda. I knew that was stupid, but I thought it anyway.
So the plane taxied up to the terminal and stopped, and the big guy in the next seat lurched off, sulking. The other passengers jammed into the aisle and started shoving for the exits. I looked for something to say, some way to climb out of the cloud that had settled on me as we landed. I couldn’t find it.
Nancy gave it a good long three minutes. She pretended to be watching for an opening in the line of passengers kicking and elbowing past us. She gave me plenty of time to say something to her. I started to say something twice, but I suddenly felt like Jennifer was watching me. The thought paralyzed me. I couldn’t even stand up.
Nancy finally gave up. “Well,” she said firmly, “thanks for a lovely talk.” She stood up. I moved aside to let her out and she grabbed a bag from the bin above our seat. Something witty and endearing was on the tip of my tongue, but it stayed there. She was down the aisle and off the plane and I just sank back into the seat and sat there.
I watched her go. She moved carefully up the aisle, and just before turning left off the plane she looked back at me with a brief, unreadable expression. Then she was gone.
I just sat for three or four minutes. There was no one else left on the plane. I thought I had felt bad when I was trying to talk to her. Suddenly I felt much worse. I grabbed my bag and pushed off the plane, pretty sure I’d just blown some kind of last chance.
The feeling grew on me as I walked into the terminal. LAX is one of the biggest and most modern airports in the world. It always makes me feel fat, cheap, and guilty of something. But this time I didn’t pause to watch the anorexic fur-bearing bimbos in their leather jeans. I hurried, just short of running, all the way down the long corridor. I took the escalator two steps at a
time.
I found her again outside baggage claim. She had crossed over to the traffic island. One brown canvas bag with leather straps was beside her on the pavement. She was about to climb into a blue van with gold lettering on the side saying SUPER SHUTTLE. The electronic destination sign on the front of the van said WILSHIRE DISTRICT in letters made of yellow dots.
“Hey,” I said, sprinting across the road between a stretch limo and a Bentley. “Hang on. Just a second. Wait up.” The words tumbled out stupidly as she turned and looked at me, arching one perfect eyebrow. Her right foot was on the step leading up into the van, presenting me with a view of her leg. I took back everything I had ever said about legs just being something you walk around on. Hers were a lot more than that.
“Yes?” she said. There was polite curiosity in her voice, as though the interlude on the airplane was long past and nothing more was supposed to happen.
I came up to her, breathing a little hard. A bus went by. Its exhaust washed over me and I got my first L.A. headache in a year and a half.
“Uh,” I said. Not original, not very witty, not a good start. I coughed.
“I think my shuttle is leaving,” she said, a light brush of throaty giggle dragging across her words.
“Uh,” I said again. “Uhm, I.” I stopped. I couldn’t say any more to save my life. I looked at her; actually, I goggled at her. My tongue felt like it was twice the size of my mouth and made from some rare heavy metal. She started to smile; that made me blush. I looked away. Another bus went by, followed by a van, a Mercedes, a battered Chevy, a Corniche, and two shuttles.
“You’re not very good at this, are you?”
“No. No. I’m not, no.”
“Never asked anybody for a phone number before?”
I looked at her, then looked away again. “Not for a long time.”
The shuttle driver leaned over, a lean young black man with a goatee. “We leaving now, miss. Got to close the door,” he said.
I looked back at Nancy in a panic. I could feel sweat break out over the entire surface of my body. She smiled at me, and for a half-second a different kind of sweat took over.
“Could I, uh—” And I stopped dead, looking into her golden eyes. It had never been this hard the first time around, when I was a teenager.
“Call me sometime? Absolutely. Here.” She rummaged in her shoulder bag and tore a deposit slip out of her checkbook. “My number’s on here,” she said, handing it to me. “Don’t wait too long, Billy.”
And she was gone into the shuttle. Before I could even take another breath of acid brown bus fumes, the shuttle driver slammed the side door shut, ran around and hopped in the driver’s seat, and the shuttle was gone in traffic.
I stood there and watched the spot where it had gone for a good ten minutes before it occurred to me that I didn’t know where I was going. I had been so concerned with Nancy that I hadn’t thought about what happened next. It hadn’t even hit me yet that I was here, back in this place I said I’d never see again.
But here I was. And now I had to figure out what to do with me.
I walked back into the terminal.
Chapter Nine
Somebody once said Los Angeles isn’t really a city but a hundred suburbs looking for a city. Every suburb has a different flavor to it, and every Angeleno thinks he knows all about you when he knows which one you live in. But that’s mostly important because of the freeways.
Life in L.A. is centered on the freeway system. Which freeway you live nearest is crucial to your whole life. It determines where you can work, eat, shop, what dentist you go to, and who you can be seen with.
I needed a freeway that could take me between the two murder sites, get me downtown fast, or up to the Hollywood substation to see Ed Beasley.
I’d been thinking about the Hollywood Freeway. It went everywhere I needed to go, and it was centrally located, which meant it connected to a lot of other freeways. Besides, I knew a hotel just a block off the freeway that was cheap and within walking distance of the World News, where Roscoe had been cut down. I wanted to look at the spot where it happened. I was pretty sure I wouldn’t learn anything, but it was a starting place.
And sometimes just looking at the place where a murder happened can give you ideas about it; cops are probably a little more levelheaded than average, but most of them will agree there’s something around a murder scene that, if they weren’t cops, they would call vibes.
So Hollywood it was. I flagged down one of the vans that take you to the rental car offices.
By the time I got fitted out with a brand new matchbox—no, thank you, I did not want a special this-week-only deal on a Cadillac convertible; that’s right, cash, I didn’t like credit cards; no, thank you, I did not want an upgrade of any kind for only a few dollars more; no, thank you, I didn’t want the extra insurance—it was dark and I was tired. I drove north on the San Diego Freeway slowly, slowly enough to have at least one maniac per mile yell obscenities at me. Imagine the nerve of me, going only sixty in a fifty-five zone.
The traffic was light. Pretty soon I made my turn east on the Santa Monica. I was getting used to being in L.A. again, getting back into the rhythm of the freeways. I felt a twinge of dread as I passed the exit for Sepulveda Boulevard, but I left it behind with the lights of Westwood.
The city always looks like quiet countryside from the Santa Monica Freeway. Once you are beyond Santa Monica and Westwood, you hit a stretch that is isolated from the areas it passes through. You could be driving through inner-city neighborhoods or country-club suburbs, but you’ll never know from the freeway.
That all changes as you approach downtown. Suddenly there is a skyline of tall buildings, and if you time it just right, there are two moons in the sky. The second one is only a round and brightly lit corporate logo on a skyscraper, but if it’s your first time through you can pass some anxious moments before you figure that out. After all, if any city in the world had two moons, wouldn’t it be L.A.?
And suddenly you are in one of the greatest driving nightmares of all recorded history. As you arc down a slow curve through the buildings and join the Harbor Freeway you are flung into the legendary Four-Level. The name is misleading, a slight understatement. It really seems like a lot more than four levels.
The closest thing to driving the Four-Level is flying a balloon through a vicious dogfight with the Red Baron’s Flying Circus. The bad guys—and they are all bad guys in the Four-Level—the bad guys come at you from all possible angles, always at speeds just slightly faster than the traffic is moving, and if you do not have every move planned out hours in advance you’ll be stuck in the wrong lane looking for a sign you’ve already missed and before you know it you will find yourself in Altadena, wondering what happened.
I got over into the right lane in plenty of time and made the swoop under several hundred tons of concrete overpass, and I was on the Hollywood Freeway. Traffic started to pick up after two or three exits, and in ten minutes I was coming off the Gower Street ramp and onto Franklin.
There’s a large hotel right there on Franklin at Gower. I’ve never figured out how they break even. They’re always at least two-thirds empty. They don’t even ask if you have a reservation. They are so stunned that you’ve found their hotel they are even polite for the first few days. There’s also a really lousy coffee shop right on the premises, which is convenient if you keep a cop’s schedule. I guessed I was probably going to do that this trip.
A young Chinese guy named Allan showed me up to my room. It was on the fifth floor and looked down into the city, onto Hollywood Boulevard just two blocks away. I left the curtain open. The room was a little bit bigger than a gas station rest room, but the decor wasn’t quite as nice.
It was way past my bedtime back home, but I couldn’t sleep. I left my bag untouched on top of the bed and went out.
The neighborhood at Franklin and Gower is schizophrenic. Two blocks up the hill, towards the famous Hollywood sign, the real e
state gets pretty close to seven figures. Two blocks down the hill and it’s overpriced at three.
I walked straight down Gower, past a big brick church, and turned west. I waved hello to Manny, Moe, and Jack on the corner: it had been a while. There was still a crowd moving along the street. Most of them were dressed like they were auditioning for the role of something your mother warned you against.
Some people have this picture of Hollywood Boulevard. They think it’s glamorous. They think if they can just get off the pig farm and leave Iowa for the big city, all they have to do is get to Hollywood Boulevard and magic will happen. They’ll be discovered.
The funny thing is, they’re right. The guys that do the discovering are almost always waiting in the Greyhound station. If you’re young and alone, they’ll discover you. The magic they make happen might not be what you had in mind, but you won’t care about that for more than a week. After that you’ll be so eager to please you’ll gladly do things you’d never even had a name for until you got discovered. And a few years later when you die of disease or overdose or failure to please the magic-makers, your own mother won’t recognize you. And that’s the real magic of Hollywood. They take innocence and turn it into money and broken lives.
I stopped for a hot dog, hoping my sour mood would pass. It didn’t. I got mustard on my shirt. I watched a transvestite hooker working on a young Marine. The jarhead was drunk enough not to know better. He couldn’t believe his luck. I guess the hooker felt the same way.
The hot dog started to taste like old regrets. I threw the remaining half into the trash and walked the last two blocks to Cahuenga.
The World News is open twenty-four hours a day, and there’s always a handful of people browsing. In a town like this there’s a lot of people who can’t sleep. I don’t figure it’s their conscience bothering them.
I stood on the sidewalk in front of the place. There were racks of specialty magazines for people interested in unlikely things. There were several rows of out-of-town newspapers. Down at the far end of the newsstand was an alley. Maybe three steps this side of it there was a faint rusty brown stain spread across the sidewalk and over the curb into the gutter. I stepped over it and walked into the alley.