Los Angeles Noir Page 9

  “Holly,” I said.

  “Very Christmasy. I was just making some coffee, Holly, want some?”

  Should I tell her I’d seen her movies? “Yeah, that’d be great.”

  She shuffled in her mirrored Indian slippers back the way the dog had gone, and I followed her without an invitation. There was a dining room up some steps, the long dark Spanish table covered with mail and piles of junk, and then into the kitchen painted salmon with black trim, a Deco feel. The sink was full of dishes. She put a battered blue enamel kettle on the stove and ground some coffee in a small grinder. No maid, no help. The whole thing was pathetic beyond words.

  “Have you lived here a long time?” that high school flute player asked.

  She opened a cat food—sized can of dog food and scraped it into a dirty dish. “Thirty years, give or take. Shoulda sold it when the market picked up, but the mortgage’s paid off now, I couldn’t rent a one-bedroom dump for what this costs me. Except the roof’s gone.” Her dark hair was rough and unbrushed, the mustard-colored shapeless sweater did nothing for her legendary figure.

  She had on some ugly fake emeralds in her ears, and a cluster of pink and green glass on her bony right hand. “I’ve seen your movies,” said Miss Teen Americana. Striking a perfect balance between girlish excitement and Midwestern abashed modesty. “You’re one of my heroes.”

  “Acting,” she snorted. “I like animals. They never act. They’re entirely authentic.” The little greyhound was pushing his dish around the broken tile floor.

  Easy for her to say, now that the work no longer came. “I love acting. It lets you live all kinds of lives. I’m studying with Chris Valente.”

  “You got lucky. All kinds of creeps out there, preying on the hopeful.” She gave me a pitying look. “How long have you been in town, baby?”

  “About a year.” I smiled a vulnerable Midwestern smile.

  She didn’t say any more, as the kettle whistled and she got busy making the coffee, balancing a filter cone on top of a chipped porcelain pot, pouring the boiling water in.

  “It’s harder than I thought,” I continued, feeling my way along. “I just lost my roommate.” I played it brave—grace under pressure. More sympathetic than whining. “I’m waiting tables down at Orzo. I thought I’d be further along by now.”

  “Chapter and verse, baby,” she said, watching the water drip through the grounds. “Orzo. That’s not a bad place. I like their osso buco.”

  So did Richard. “They had it last night.” I tried again to redirect. “I don’t mind working there, but the tips aren’t as good as you’d think.”

  “That’s tough.” She took two dirty cups out of the sink, rinsed them without benefit of soap or hot water, and filled them with coffee. I prayed the boiling water would be hot enough to kill whatever had been growing on the chipped lip of the mug. “You know, I have a room,” she said. “Never thought of renting it out before, but you seem like a nice kid. Any interest in that?”

  “So, did you get in?” Richard asked. He’d gotten dressed, was flopped on my couch like the Crown Prince.

  “You had any doubts?” I said, straddling his prone body. “But she doesn’t have money. You should see that place. It’s falling down around her. You’d hardly recognize her, she’s shlepping around like a bag lady.”

  “Is that what she told you? She didn’t have any money?”

  “No, it’s just what I saw.”

  “Don’t be misled. That woman’s got oodles.”

  “You’re tripping.”

  “Trust me. Just look at that jewelry. She still had it, right?”

  “Dime-store crap, you can get it in a box of Cracker Jacks.”

  Richard laughed, shifted me so my weight did more good. “You looked but you couldn’t see. Paul Rhodes gave her those rocks back in the days of wine and roses. You can see in the magazines. She’d never part with them. I mean, the sentimental value alone.” I loved the invisible ironic quotation marks around that “sentimental.” He put his sensitive fingers to his lips, dancing the fingertips. “Even if it’s as bad as you describe, she’s hung onto a few pesos, I can assure you.”

  What if those emeralds were real? Ten grand? Fifty? I tried to ballpark it, but I had no idea what jewelry like that was worth; I didn’t exactly have a charge card at Tiffany. “She asked me to move in. Help with expenses.”

  He pressed his mouth to my neck, something that drove me crazy. “A generous offer, Holly. You should consider it.”

  “You think I should, do you?” I said, trying to keep some illusion of independence, but I was already slipping.

  “Oh, the savings alone. And the link to a bygone Hollywood. The cachet, the entrée. Not to mention what she might have been lying about, forgotten under the couch or in a spare room. I think you owe it to yourself.”

  I waited a few days to return to the house off Commonwealth. Her car was in the driveway, an old blue-gray Mercedes like a tank. I knocked, figuring it was late enough that she would have slept off even a heavy drunk, but early enough that she wouldn’t have gone out had she a mind to. No answer. I rang again and knocked. It was such a pretty house, it didn’t deserve to be as neglected like this, leaves lying moldy, cracks running through the concrete steps.

  I had just given up when the little window in the door opened. She fumbled with several locks and a chain. Gilbert raced out, danced around my legs, jumping on me, he weighed about as much as a handful of chicken bones.

  “I’ve been thinking about the room,” I said, hesitantly, vulnerable as all get-out.

  Her ruined face smiled. Her hair still hadn’t been washed, either that or it always looked that way, long and dark and stringy. “It hasn’t been used in a while,” she said, leading me through the cloisterish living room with its heavy beams, and up through the dining room, around to the kitchen and a set of wooden stairs I hadn’t noticed before, narrow with an iron handrail and a sharp bend under a low overhang.

  “Myrna Loy lived here in the ’30s,” Mariah said. “Gale Storm.”

  We climbed the stairs into a little hall flanked with a couple of doors. She opened one. A dirty window illuminated an odd-shaped room full of boxes, obviously a former maid’s quarters.

  “Of course, we’ll move this crap somewhere.” She stood in the doorway, scratching her dirty hair. “So what do you think?”

  It was cold in the room, though I couldn’t tell if it was because it had been closed off or because the heat didn’t work. A stained mattress leaned against the wall. What a fucking dump. But it would probably save me close to $800 a month and there might be some fringe benefits. “How much would you want?” I asked her.

  She shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know. What do you think? Couple hundred?”

  Not bad, for in a mansion in Los Feliz. Wouldn’t that look good on my portfolio. Even if I would have to wash the dishes in bleach.

  And so I joined the ranks of the oddly housed. Los Angeles is full of us—house sitters, subletters, permanent house guests.

  It wasn’t much of a move—clothes, a few books, a TV and boom box, and my laptop. But it took two days to clear the boxes out of the room. Memorabilia, just as Richard predicted. A gold mine. Letters from Belmondo and Bertolucci and Bianca Jagger, David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane shirt, a drawing by Larry Rivers on a restaurant placemat. A lamp she’d taken from the set of Riverside 88, the Paul Rhodes film that put her on the map. YSL gowns in the closet, still in their designer bags. Old scripts marked with her handwriting, photographs, scrapbooks of reviews, and fashion layouts she’d been in, Bazaar and W and Interview. We sat on the floor and looked at a spread of her in Vogue, wearing Oscar de la Renta and Halston. She showed me the gown in the photograph, a Russian velvet dress with mink on the sleeves.

  But the pictures made me sad. How bright she had been, blindingly alive, lit up from inside like a circus midway. And now here she was, a single lightbulb that had almost burnt out. I could smell her sadness, sitting next to me, in a pilled
mustard sweater, and those lips, and her square cut emeralds dull with dirt. The way people’s lives turned out when they just ran them into the ground, like a rental car.

  As we moved the boxes into another room across the hall, I saw something I didn’t much care for—rat droppings in the corners. Mariah said not to worry, she used these little traps that didn’t hurt the poor rats, you could carry them out to the backyard and let them go. I didn’t say anything, but later went out and bought some traps big enough to kill a cat. When I heard them pop in the night, all I felt was satisfaction.

  So I hung out with Mariah, and took class and visited Richard in his apartment, around the corner from the bookstore on Vermont, the second floor of an old Spanish quad. It was small but dramatically decorated with handpainted red walls and gilded beams. Not at all what you’d expect, but that was Richard. His bed took up most of the floor, covered in brownand-black—striped cotton. Made seductions simple—there was nowhere else to sit. I teased him, that he should just come to my place sometime.

  “Oh, you don’t want a stream of men interfering with your new friendship,” he said, tracing spirals on my skin.

  I tossed the Bertolucci letter onto the bed, lay back, and folded my arms under my head. “She knows you, doesn’t she?” I asked.

  He didn’t say anything, opened the letter, read it.

  I pinched him. “Tell me. Was she a good fuck? Good as me?”

  “She was very beautiful.”

  It hurt. I was surprised how much it hurt.

  He laughed and caught my hand, put it on his cock, which moved again. When I fucked him, I didn’t care how beautiful Mariah McKay had been, she looked like a bag lady now, and she wasn’t fucking anyone, unless it was the delivery guy from Whole Foods.

  “I want you to do me a favor, Holly,” he said. He sipped his wine, arm tucked behind his head, the pillows piled up there, the fan of his pit hair like a dark blossom. His smell drove me mad.

  I pulled gently at that nest of hair. I knew I would be attracted to hairy men for the rest of my life. “It wouldn’t be anything illegal, would it?”

  “Oh, Midwest,” he said, drawling with irony. “Oh, Pioneers.”

  I sat with Mariah on her row of theater seats, watching Valley of the Dolls. Mariah knew all the dialogue. “So now you come crawling back to Broadway,” she said along with Susan Hayward. “But Broadway doesn’t go for booze and dope.” Then Patty Duke snatched her wig and flushed it down the can. “Meow,” she said as she drowned it, Hayward pounding on the stall door.

  What I could do with a part like Neely O’Hara. Not fucking Laura Wingfield, whom Chris had given me. He wanted me to find my soft side. Talk about miscasting. “It’s your job to find her, Holly. Allow her to live in you.”

  I watched Mariah in her weird crocheted sweater and tights, unconsciously splitting the ends of her ragged hair. Her and Richard. Really? I wondered whether he was just yanking my chain. And how long ago?

  “Poor Sharon,” Mariah said, watching the screen, Sharon Tate doing her breast exercises. “Did you know the La Bianca house is right around the corner, across from the nuns?”

  The first Manson killing. Right here in Los Feliz. Better look out for Charlie’s girls …

  It was a cold afternoon and I shivered, thinking of that freaky guy with his flock of bizarre little girls, exactly the kind of thing people in Kearney worried about when they thought of L.A. I wrapped my fingers around the packet of white powder Richard had given me. I was supposed to put it into Mariah’s drink. Some ground-up barbs to knock her out for a few hours. So far I’d taken a few things—a letter here, a signed picture there—but it was time to get into her Deco bedroom for a little scout around.

  Yes, Grandma, there was lots to worry about in L.A., and they didn’t always look like Charlie and his girls. There were people like Richard. People like me.

  And yet, I couldn’t help wondering how he knew her. If they’d really been lovers. She might have known him when he had hair, and she was a movie star. I was jealous of her, having had him, this fuzzy-headed has-been in the goat-hair sweater. I could imagine them together, how it was. I thought of it all the time, knowing what it was to have Richard; I’d never known sex could be like that. He was a drug. He hardly even came, just got you off about twenty times. I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

  “I met this guy at Orzo’s,” I said, sipping my Corona. “He said he knew you.” I was taking a chance, but couldn’t stop myself. I didn’t know one fucking thing about Richard. Who his friends were, what he liked to do besides fuck. “His name was Richard something.”

  She shrugged, sipped at her Scotch, watching Sharon Tate and Lee Grant on the flickering screen.

  “Kind of intense, brown eyes?” I added.

  The speed at which she turned to me, I knew. And it was either big or recent. But it hadn’t been good. She looked downright scared. “Was he tall, lanky? Attractive in a sort of reptilian way?”

  I backpedaled fast. I didn’t want to tip her off. “No, this guy was stocky. Sort of like a wrestler. He said he interviewed you in the ’80s. You snorted coke together.”

  She relaxed, went back to watching the TV. “Oh, a journalist. Yeah, I seem to remember someone like that. Richard somebody. Stevens. Sheehan.”

  Onscreen, Sharon Tate was launching a porn career to care for her declining husband.

  “So,” I said, natural as all get-out. “Who was this other guy?”

  “Someone I had a thing with,” she said, not turning away from the TV. “Years ago. But what a psycho. I had to get a restraining order.”

  I thought of Richard. Had he threatened her, had he hurt her? Was he capable of that? I had imagined him as dark, but was he dangerous? You’ve got to layer. Hold something in reserve. Easy. Casual. “What was his name?”

  “Anthony. Karras. I had him fired off a set. People don’t take too kindly to that.”

  “That’s kind of harsh, isn’t it?” I searched for my inner Laura. “Makes you kind of feel sorry for him.”

  She patted my leg. “You’re a nice kid. Don’t feel too sorry for him. He was one of those guys who’s exciting in a kind of bad boy way … and then you get involved, and they’re just freaks. I got wise and told him it was over, to move the fuck out, but he wouldn’t. Had to call some people to get rid of him. He said he’d kill me. Showed up at my house. Called my friends. I took him off the picture and got a restraining order. Told the casting agents to watch out for him, he was a definite freak.” She got the remote, turned up the sound. “Learned my lesson, baby. No more smart men. Only nice and dumb and hung.”

  I thought of the white powder concealed in my hand. Gilbert shoved his nose under my arm to be petted. I could feed him this shit, but he was a nice dog. I excused myself and went back to the kitchen, found Mariah’s stupid catch-and-release rat trap in the pantry. I opened the odiferous refrigerator—I’d scrubbed it out once, but it had lain rank too long, the smell was now part of the enamel—cut a little chunk of her $20-a-pound Whole Foods cheese, and blended it with a pinkie-nail’s worth of white powder. “Bon appetit,” I whispered as I pushed it through the door of the rat trap with a pencil. “My name’s Holly and I’ll be your rat-waitress tonight, we’re serving Humboldt Fog with a reduction of Nembutal.” Stuck the trap back into the pantry.

  By dinnertime, there was a nice big guy in there. Stone cold dead. Teeth bared and claws curled to a chest solid as a pit bull’s.

  * * *

  I thought of it all through dinner. Richard sitting in his red room above the market, pouring himself a glass of wine, thinking he’d gotten away with murder. With me to take the rap. How satisfied he was with himself. You’re such a special girl, Holly. You’re going to go far. Yeah, I was going to go far. Right to fucking prison. Was he jerking off, imagining her dying? He sure as hell wasn’t thinking of me, walking away in handcuffs, trying to explain that my boyfriend put me up to it. I didn’t know, I just thought I was going to knock her out an
d rob her.

  To think I’d imagined he really was hot for me, wanted me. He hadn’t even seen me. He’d been fucking me and thinking of her. How he was going to screw her. Thinking of her not as she was now, but as she had been back then, beautiful and famous and spoiled, when she’d had him thrown out and the locks changed. Just because I’d gotten the best screwing of my life, I was assuming it meant something. Oh, Midwest. Oh, Pioneers.

  Well, I’d always known he was a wrong guy, fake as tendollar Prada. That every word out of his mouth was a lie. But not about us. Not how beautiful he thought I was, how exciting. Such a special girl. You’re going to make it. You just have to hide the barbed wire.

  I’d hide it all right. Now he’d see how special I was.

  At about 11:00 the phone rang. I picked up. Mariah didn’t like to answer her phone if there was someone else to do it. Hard not to have help when you’re a former film goddess. “Hello?”

  It was Richard. I imagined how shocked he must be, hearing my voice, that son of a bitch. I listened for the tell, the little gasp, the hesitation, but he was good, he was always so fucking good. He didn’t waver for a second. “Holly. I thought you were going to call me. Did you do it?” He was calling to see if Mariah was dead.

  Quickly, I scraped my own part together. Naïve cockstruck dupe wasn’t much of a stretch. “Yeah, but it sort of didn’t work out,” I said. “I put it in her Scotch like you said, but the dog knocked it over.”

  “That’s too bad,” he said, carefully. “Did you use it all?”

  “Yeah.” I lowered my voice, conspiratorially. “I didn’t want her waking up as I’m taking an earring out of her ear, right? Hey, I miss you.”

  “What are you doing right now?” he asked.

  “Working on my scene. Laura. It’s coming pretty well,” I said. “You’ll be surprised.”