Damage Control: A Novel Read online

I shook my head.

  “He’s from Ukraine. One of those adoptions that didn’t work out. By seventeen, he’d bounced through twelve foster homes and racked up ten arrests for hacking. Somehow, he landed in the Big Brothers program, which is a charity that Blair does pro-bono PR work for. Faraday got involved, took a liking to the kid, and lined up a lawyer who got everything expunged from Fletch’s juvenile record.”

  “Out of the goodness of his heart,” I said.

  “He does have one,” Tyler said. “Faraday got Fletch an internship here doing computer security and Blair’s generous tuition reimbursement paid for college. He never left. I don’t think he could work anywhere else. You’ll notice Faraday keeps him far away from paying clients.”

  “About those clients . . . how does Blair know whether some celebrity really beat up his girlfriend or some hedge fund manager really ran a Ponzi scheme? Or does he not care, so long as he gets paid?”

  “Mr. Blair operates purely on intuition and gut feeling.”

  “You can’t run a PR business on that New Age bullshit.”

  Tyler shrugged. “Blair said no to Michael Jackson and O. J. Simpson. Last year he turned down Kim Jong-il.”

  “That North Korean lunatic who shoots off missiles and starves his people? Gee, that must have been a tough call.”

  “The Dear Leader himself. And Blair made sure everyone knew it. Great free publicity. But he was impressed they’d heard about him all the way in Asia.”

  Tyler nodded in approval. “Mr. Blair is a corporate visionary. He saw something in us that nobody else did, and he’s molded us into the elite of the business. But he demands absolute loyalty. Your first allegiance is to Blair now. Don’t forget it.”

  “You make it sound like a cult.”

  And indeed, Blair often struck me less as a twenty-first-century firm than a Machiavellian fortress where brilliant and impenetrable strategies were drawn up. An aroma of clannishness wafted about the office. Although it was never discussed out loud, some of our colleagues treated damage control as an aesthetic sport rather than real life where people’s lives and reputations were at stake.

  Tyler laughed. “Damage control is like any other business. It runs on favors and the greased wheels of personal relationships.” He cocked his head. “I’m sure Senator Paxton would know exactly what I’m talking about.”

  Again I saw the senator in the Blair conference room, his shaggy head bent, his brow furrowed. I wanted to do right by Anabelle’s father, to finally prove my worth to the Paxton family. And I wanted to keep my job. And later, when I thought back, I realized that this was where I began justifying things to myself, until I was in so deep that I had no idea where the truth lay anymore and it was too late to break free.

  * * *

  Back at the office, Faraday debriefed us.

  “Good work you two,” he said, when we finished.

  Tyler shot me an I-told-you-so look.

  “Strangulation, scarves, nudity, and pills,” Faraday mused. “I think I can do something with that.”

  “The coroner’s going to do toxicity tests and check if she was sexually assaulted,” Tyler said.

  “Looks like our girl may have led a double life,” Faraday said, lost in his spin. “We want to stay sympathetic while distancing her from the senator. Maggie, grab a cup of coffee if you need it. Then draft me a new statement about how shocked and dismayed Paxton is. The cops won’t be able to keep this under wraps for long.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I looked at my watch: 11:05 p.m.

  “The purse and the BlackBerry make me nervous,” Faraday said. “You know I hate getting broadsided. Tyler, find out who owns the lease on Emily Mortimer’s apartment. Then check if she had a criminal record. Drug bust, maybe?”

  “Wouldn’t the government security check have turned that up when she was hired?” I asked.

  “It’s like the airports. Stuff slips through all the time. Okay, folks, I’m writing the senator a memo outlining what we’ve learned. Let’s meet back up in fifteen.”

  Tyler and I were at the door when Faraday said, “Maggie, c’mere a minute.”

  I shot Tyler a look and walked over.

  Faraday rolled his chair back and spun around so his eyes met my breasts. When I’d started at Blair, I’d wondered whether my boss’s mentoring had ulterior motives. Maybe Tyler wondered too, because he leaned against the doorway, arms crossed and waiting.

  “This is about to get very ugly,” Faraday said. “I’ll be counting on you to keep a cool head and come to me if you hear anything from the Paxton clan that could affect the case.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Dis-missed.”

  I had to brush past Tyler on my way out. He turned to watch me walk away. And I couldn’t help it. I swung my hips and gave him a show.

  Soon, I heard the clack of keys, loud and rapid as gunfire, issuing from my boss’s office.

  Faraday was using a typewriter.

  * * *

  When we reconvened, Faraday handed me a manila envelope. “Do you remember how to get to Paxton’s house?”

  I glanced at the address. Villa Marbella, Temescal Canyon Road. Yes, I remembered.

  “Did Tyler behave himself tonight?” Faraday asked in a casual tone.

  I hesitated. Did my boss already know, and this was some loyalty test?

  “He didn’t get us into any trouble,” I said carefully.

  “Glad to hear it.”

  As I walked away, I wondered why I was covering for a guy I barely knew. Maybe it was because as much as I disapproved of Tyler’s tactics, I resented even more Faraday’s attempts to get me to rat out a colleague. Was my boss now grilling Tyler on my performance? Was that the real reason he’d paired us up? Eight weeks here, and already I was growing paranoid.

  7

  The big boulevards were wide open tonight, the caffeine and Adderall clasping hands to sing a duet in my veins. Snug in my metal cocoon, I exulted in the rare beauty of speed. All around me, house lights winked out like snuffed candles until the city slept and only the streetlamps remained, wreathed in marine fog.

  The houses grew bigger and the landscaping lush as I entered the coastal foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains. I remembered these hushed green streets, the jacaranda trees that formed a canopy overhead each spring and showered us with fragrant purple rain.

  Memories flooded me: the tart pulp taste of homemade lemonade, the taut feel of salt water drying on sunburned skin, the smoky tang of barbecued potato chips, the skunky-sweet smell of reefer and patchouli incense—the scent markers of adolescence.

  And other things too: orange blossoms, black leather zipper jackets, Tiffany lamps, candlelight, heavy gold bracelets, full-bodied oaky red wine, chandeliers, cashmere, black coffee, dark bittersweet chocolate, Spanish brandy.

  Long before I met Anabelle, I’d cultivated a rich fantasy life, fueled by books like A Little Princess and The Secret Garden. When reality grew too dreary, I’d escape into a world of sumptuous courts, lost princesses, and castles overlooking the sea. It was so real that I felt the silk and lace undergarments against my skin, heard the rustling of taffeta and velvet ball gowns, saw the sun sparkle off the diamond pendant between my breasts. Maybe that’s why it didn’t seem strange when I stepped through Anabelle’s looking glass. Her world aligned so perfectly with my inner landscape that it felt like coming home.

  But I’d kept my distance the first time Anabelle tried to draw me into her orbit.

  I couldn’t tell her that the real reason I wouldn’t be joining her family at their weekend place in Catalina was that I had to sober up my father for his night shift and cook dinner for my mother, who worked two jobs.

  One afternoon when I was fifteen, I tiptoed into the bedroom where Dad lay snoring and found exactly $7.93 in his wallet to go grocery shopping. I couldn’t believe it, he’d gotten paid the day before. Sitting at the kitchen table in my blue-and-gray plaid skirt and white blouse, I studied a stack of
unpaid bills and came to a decision.

  I changed out of my uniform and into my clingiest dress, put on heels and heavy makeup, grabbed my Polaroid camera, and teetered over to the neighborhood bar where Dad spent his spare time.

  At Dad’s watering hole, I cajoled a half-crocked patron into buying me a martini for my twenty-first birthday. He even snapped a picture of me having my first legal drink. Bottoms up, baby!

  Then I walked into the manager’s office, slapped down the Polaroid, and explained who I was. I told him that unless he banned my father for good, I’d notify the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control that his place sold booze to kids.

  The manager looked like he wanted to kill me, but he agreed. It didn’t stop Dad from drinking, of course, but it did slow him down some. And I learned that while I couldn’t always solve my problems, I could limit the damage if I thought long and hard and desperately enough.

  I likened it to the controlled burns that firefighters here in L.A. use to clear brush and prevent deadlier fires from destroying hillside neighborhoods. My methods weren’t always ideal, and they wreaked their own devastation, but they kept me alive.

  The city was subdued and wary in 1993. The L.A. riots had erupted the previous April, and many people had moved away, including Anabelle’s best friend, Charlotte, which must have left her lonely and at loose ends. Then suddenly my dad dropped dead of a heart attack. When I returned to school after the funeral, listless and hollow eyed, Anabelle must have sensed the chink in my armor. Or maybe she just felt sorry for me. Holding up two tickets, she asked if I wanted to go to the PJ Harvey concert at the Hollywood Palladium that weekend. She’d bought them months ago for herself and Charlotte.

  Soon we were doing our homework together and bonding over our shared passions for Tori Amos, John Keats, and the German Expressionists. We talked on the phone five times a day and spent weekends watching old gangster movies, eating two-pound bags of peanut M&Ms, and playing dress-up, Anabelle styling her long blond hair like Veronica Lake in The Blue Dahlia while I was Barbara Stanwyck in The Lady Eve. I loved the cool whitewashed rooms and dappled turquoise pool of her Spanish house in Temescal Canyon, Villa Marbella. It was a universe removed from the stifling apartment above a North Hollywood alley where my mom nagged me incessantly to keep up my grades so I wouldn’t lose my scholarship.

  Until I met the Paxtons, I’d never heard of houses with names. And I hadn’t imagined that parents could be witty and charming and, most of all, relaxed. Anabelle’s parents embraced a policy of benign neglect toward their children. They traveled frequently, collected modern art—Anabelle’s mom made strange feminist sculpture—and insisted we call them Henry and Miranda. Oh, and Henry was a Vietnam War hero, with an award from the president to prove it.

  As my friendship with Anabelle deepened, life with my mother grew less and less real. A kind of seasonal affective disorder set in each time I returned to our apartment, where the trash cans rattled in the alley at night and a homeless drunk mumbled himself to sleep.

  By then I was lightening my hair with Sun-In and growing it out to look more like Anabelle’s. A thrill went through me when ancient, birdlike Madame Louvray mistook me for “Mademoiselle Paxton” in French class. Sometimes I fantasized that the Paxtons might adopt me so Anabelle and I would be real sisters and I could live there with her and Luke forever.

  Luke was a year older than we were, tall and lean with razor-cut hair that the sun bleached to spun gold. He’d been at an East Coast boarding school when Anabelle and I first became friends but had returned home for senior year because he missed L.A. and his friends.

  On nights when I slept over, I found myself listening for the rumble of his Mustang in the driveway and lingering in the upstairs hallway, hoping to “accidentally” run into him. But actual Luke sightings were rare. More often, I nourished myself on the skunky weed smell that seeped from under his closed door and the muffled music and laughter that told me he was in there with friends.

  I didn’t risk telling Anabelle how I felt. My own position in her life was still too precarious. And something else held me back—Anabelle herself veered between wild affection for her brother and sisterly disdain. What if my confession made her jealous? Or disgusted? What if she told Luke and he merely found me pathetic?

  One Saturday morning when the yeasty aroma of pancakes roused Anabelle and me from our beds of lazybones, we found Luke at the stove in his board shorts, already back from a dawn surfing expedition.

  He turned, spatula in hand, and in the morning light, he looked like an angel from an illuminated manuscript. A ridge of golden hairs marched up his belly, fine grains of sand nestled within.

  Unthinkingly, I reached out a hand to dust them off.

  Laughing, he twisted away.

  “They’ll be off the griddle in a sec, hungry girl,” he teased.

  I hurried to the coffeepot to hide the blush that was stinging my cheeks because Luke refused to see me as anything other than his little sister’s dork friend.

  But Luke was right about one thing—I was hungry that summer, filled with a ravenous need that threatened to consume me. And as the Paxtons moved through their lives of burnished ease, I studied them like a mathematical algorithm that I might apply to my own life. I wanted to be just like them. I even dreamed of them, though I must confess it was Luke that I dreamed of most often. Gorgeous, unattainable Luke.

  * * *

  Traveling purely by instinct now, I slowed at a giant eucalyptus tree. The driveway was just where I’d remembered it, half obscured by a giant bougainvillea. The wrought-iron gate with its fleur-de-lis pattern was open, the Paxtons anticipating my arrival. I turned in and drove past the row of Spanish lampposts that illuminated the rolling grounds, the spreading oak trees, the wooden chicken coop, the rusty jungle gym that had been old when I first saw it. The familiar sculptures and artworks I’d seen reproduced in books and magazines.

  I wound the last few hundred feet to Villa Marbella, a rustic two-story home that had always reminded me of a Tuscan farmhouse (not that I’d ever been to Tuscany, mind you). The tires crunched as I drove onto the gravel and killed the engine.

  I dug into my purse and pulled out a mini bottle of perfume, Serge Lutens’s Féminité du Bois. Tart plum and sweet, spicy woods, but light and shimmery too. A secret talisman. I dabbed my wrists and felt the scent wreathe me. I was a girl knight donning armor, mounting my horse, lowering my visor as red ribbons trailed behind.

  Invincible.

  I walked up the flagstone path to the thick, wood front door bound with black iron straps.

  It was spooky, I could almost hear New Order fading on the car stereo, doors slamming, then the slap of our leather slave sandals as Anabelle and I raced inside. I felt awkward and sixteen again, the straps of my backpack digging into my shoulders as textbooks jostled inside.

  I rang the doorbell. Far away, an owl hooted mournfully. A man opened the door and stood, pooled in shadow, his hair reflecting gold in the porch light. A lurch of vertigo, then a crashing time skip.

  “Luke?”

  A light flipped on and the shadow stood revealed. A tall man with light-blond hair in his early twenties. Not Luke, who’d be in his midthirties now, I realized with a shock. And had his own house somewhere, just like me.

  I thrust out my hand, introduced myself, and apologized for arriving so late.

  “Jeff Canin with the senator’s L.A. office,” the young man said. “And it’s fine. We were expecting you. Please come in.”

  I stepped into the foyer. I remembered the floor tiles. They’d been hand-painted in Mexico from a design created by Miranda Paxton.

  I lifted my eyes, determined to banish these cluttered memories, but the past was a minefield exploding behind my eyes. There was the wrought-iron balustrade along which we’d wound tinsel at Christmas. The fifth stair from the top creaked. Upstairs to the left was Anabelle’s room with its canopied bed, porcelain lamps with fringed shades, carved wood furniture.
Anabelle had melted a purple candle on my Al Green’s Greatest Hits record and we’d watch it spin on the turntable, growing dizzy with the revolutions, with the kaleidoscope of unlived life that lay before us.

  “Please wait,” Jeff Canin said, and disappeared down the hall.

  I examined the photos on the walls. Faded Kodachromes of the Paxton family lined up on skis, the snowy, pine-tree mountains and startling blue of Lake Tahoe behind them. The Paxtons tanned and wearing leis on a Hawaiian beach. There was Henry—here, in his own home, it felt weird not to call him Henry—in his air force uniform, receiving an award from the president after his plane was shot down. Photos of the Paxton kids with beloved family pets, long laid to rest. My eye went to a photo of me and Anabelle in mortarboard and robes at high school graduation, arms slung around each other, clutching our diplomas. I felt obscurely pleased to see us there, frozen in time.

  Suddenly, voices drifted from upstairs. From the Paxtons’ master bedroom, to be precise. Too low to make out, though I thought I heard the clipped diction and sibilant tones of Miranda.

  Not wanting to be caught eavesdropping, I moved to the wood coatrack, where I could swear the same umbrella and L.L. Bean jacket with the plaid hood had hung fifteen years earlier.

  This house had been a refuge when I was in high school. But tonight, the familiar terrain had turned murky. Was I a family friend, a hired hand, a spy, or some weird mix of all three? How should I act? Where did my loyalties lie?

  The voices grew louder. I could hear occasional words now.

  “I won’t have it,” came the impassioned voice of Mrs. Paxton.

  “Now, Miranda,” said the senator in a wheedling, pleading tone, and then the conversation grew inaudible.

  Then all of a sudden Paxton’s voice rose. “It’s the lesser of two evils. At this point, we’ve got no choice.”

  Miranda Paxton began to make soft, stifled sounds. It shocked me to think of her crying. In my memories, Mrs. Paxton was forever elegant, steely, and unflappable. What had happened to this family?

  And then Jeff Canin was standing in the foyer, frowning as if I’d done something wrong. When all I’d done was wait where he told me.