Dream a Little Death, page 2
(Yes. Bruce is one of my uncles.)
The neighborhood was, as they say, in transition. I found a metered spot in front of a check-cashing store, then jogged across the street, past a cold-pressed-juice bar and a boutique selling dresses for quinceañeras, and through the building’s front entrance, with its recessed two-story vestibule adorned with a blue and gold terra cotta sunburst. Inside the lobby were some plush armchairs, one of which was occupied by a homeless man holding up a piece of cardboard that read, “Let’s Do Lunch: You Buy.” Sign of the times. Like the brochures fanned out on the front desk advertising two-bedroom, two-bathroom loft-style condos affordably priced at just under $2 million.
The concierge directed me to Miles’s private elevator, which was playing a Muzak version of “Que Sera, Sera.” I hummed along. Then the doors slid open.
The woman standing in front of me was a cross between Jessica Rabbit and a Maori shaman. Between the boobs and the tattoos, it was hard not to stare.
“Hi!” I focused on a spot just above her left shoulder. “Sorry I’m late.” I pointed to my sandals. “I twisted my ankle running in these stupid things.”
The woman looked me up and down, pausing at the small picnic basket slung over my arm. “We don’t do sandwiches. We’re gluten-free.”
“Do you mean this? It’s my purse.” I’d stolen the idea from Jane Birkin, whom I’ve been told I resemble. She’s the British model from the sixties they’d named the handbag after, though only a lunatic would buy a Birkin at Hermès when you could buy one of these at Bed Bath & Beyond. Plus, no waiting list.
“Oh, my god,” she said. “Do you not get that we’re busy here? Mookie!”
Mookie was a XXXL easy. As he approached, the windows shook, the floor vibrated, the crystals on the chandelier trilled.
“Can you please remove this person?” The woman studied her nails.
“Excuse me, but I have an appointment. Dreama Black?”
“How nice of you to make an effort,” she snapped.
In L.A., skinny jeans, a black tank, and designer footwear usually counts as business casual.
“It’s not like anybody could compete with your outfit,” I said. Which would be a green sequined corset worn with cream-colored gauchos and matching platform clogs. “Or your hair, which is so great.” Did I mention it was the precise color and texture of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos?
“It isn’t natural,” she said.
“Mine either.”
She slapped her forehead. “No kidding.”
Enough was enough. “I believe Miles is expecting me?”
“Miles and his expectations,” she muttered under her breath. “This way.”
The living room was enormous and lined with bookshelves. I caught a glimpse of Little Women, The Hindu Book of Astrology, and a biography of Steve McQueen. A large sandstone Buddha sat crossed-legged in the middle of the space, a bowl of oranges at his feet. At the far end was a baby grand piano, flooded in natural light. Outside the window were gray clouds and a vintage neon sign reading, “JESUS SAVES.”
The two of us approached a black leather couch. There was a leg hanging over the edge, and a bare foot buried in a furry white rug.
The woman cleared her throat. “Miles? Your nine o’clock is here.”
We waited.
“Earth to Miles,” she intoned.
No response.
“Miles!” She shook his shoulder. “Get the fuck up!”
He whipped off his earphones. “No echo, no slap-back, no overdubbing, no mixing. It’s brilliant. But the bridge.” His eyes were closed. “I’m, like, dismayed with the bridge.”
The woman wrinkled her brow. “I knew you were going to say that.”
Miles wiggled his toes, then opened his eyes like he was coming out of a trance. “Dreama Black?”
“Hey,” I replied. “Nice to meet you.”
He padded around to the other side of the couch. Miles wasn’t as enormous as Mookie, but he was still larger than life. If he’d been garbed in flowing robes instead of an oversized white T-shirt and khakis you could totally imagine him pairing up goats and wildebeests on the Ark.
“The pleasure is all mine,” he said. “You keep popping up on my radar these days. Great article in the Times.”
The tenth anniversary of “Dreama, Little Dreama.” They ran a photo of me holding up the C.D. with the photo of me on the cover. Humiliating. As a small business owner, however, you do what you have to.
“And then,” Miles said, “a buddy tells me about this cool chick who ran a deathrock tour a few weeks back. Heard it was awesome.”
Marilyn Manson types from Chicago. They wanted B-horror movie locations, taxidermy shops, and the Museum of Death. After we finished up at Hollywood Forever Cemetery, I threw in a stop at La Guanaquita because after a long day, even Goths need pupusas.
“I see you’ve met my right-hand woman,” Miles said.
I glanced her way. “Unofficially.”
Miles shot her a warning look. “Pee Chee.”
“That’s your name?” I asked.
Her smile was as warm as liquid nitrogen. “P-E-E space C-H-E-E. As in the school folders.”
“They come in multiple colors now,” Miles said. “But I’m partial to the original goldenrod.”
“Flatterer.” Pee Chee walked over to the door, spun around. “I’ll be in the study, if you need anything.”
Miles turned to me. “Let’s sit. I want to get right to the point.”
I sat. He remained standing.
“You’ve heard a lot about me,” Miles said. “We established that in our previous conversation.”
“Right,” I said. “Also, that I shouldn’t believe everything I hear.”
“True that,” said Miles. “Anyway, one of the things you might have heard is I’m getting married in two weeks.”
I got it. “And you’re not.”
“Are you crazy? Fuck, yeah, I’m getting married.” He lowered himself onto a white leather chaise. “Her name is Maya Duran. She is incredible. My green-eyed goddess. Not that anybody knows. She’s had issues with stalkers, so she’s militant about her privacy. No red carpet. No social media. Nothing out there for pervs to pin up in their weird-ass storage spaces, if you know what I’m saying. Maya’s, like, my little secret.”
Strange comment. I should have called him on it. First mistake.
“We met in the summer.” His eyes misted over. “I don’t know how I got so lucky. She’s a dancer. Burlesque. Like Dita Von Teese, but younger. I’d introduce you, but she’s locked in her studio all week rehearsing, and swears she’ll beat the shit out of me if I so much as knock on the door. You’ll meet her on Sunday. That’s the night of her big debut. So much for privacy after that, am I right? Hey, Dreama? I want to show you something.”
Miles bolted upright. Attention deficit disorder. Increasingly common in adults. He pulled me down the hall. “We’re going to the inner sanctum.”
The inner sanctum was his bedroom, judging by the king-sized bed. He saw me square my shoulders.
“Now don’t go worrying about ol’ Miles.” He squeezed my arm. “I’m kind of a monk these days.”
He walked me over to a revolving magazine rack in the corner of the room, right by his nightstand. I knew it was his nightstand because the other one had a vase of red roses on it. His had the remotes. Also, a pair of handcuffs. Some monk.
“These look like junky old magazines, right?” he asked.
“Actually—”
“Wrong. These are the original Black Masks, with the original stories by every important hard-boiled and noir writer. Along with filler by hacks nobody’s heard of. All in all, the crème de la crème of pulp fiction. And I’ve got the full run.”
He pulled out an issue. “This one’s my pride and joy.” The cover featured an illustration of a Chinese gangster holding a smoking gun. “December 1933. Raymond Chandler’s first appearance in print. ‘Blackmailers Don’t Shoot.’ The story’s got it all. The chivalrous detective, a modern-day knight in shining armor. The fucked-up damsel in distress. Melancholy. Corruption. Murder. And Los Angeles, great and gaudy and neon-lit. Which is where you come in.”
At last.
Miles started pacing. “Couples should share interests, am I right? Unfortunately, Maya doesn’t exactly get my stuff. Dusty old pulps. Bad prints of black and white movies. I get it. She’s a young girl. But there is one thing we both like, and that’s driving around and looking at cool shit. So Pee Chee had this, like, vision: the whole wedding party, dressed to kill in a fleet of cherry forties Plymouths, gunning down dark alleys and ducking into cheap hotel rooms and low-rent apartments on this fucking amazing, one-of-a-kind noir-themed tour of L.A. that you will organize as my wedding present to my fiancée.”
I sucked in some air. “Wow. This is quite an honor. But—”
“With craft mocktails. In an historically appropriate setting. Followed by dinner. Vegan preferred. And dancing. No floor show. We can skip that part.”
Let’s see if I had it right. He was looking for a tour guide. Who was also a location scout, art director, local history buff, film scholar, event coordinator, plant-based nutritionist, sober minder, and couples counselor. “Miles, I—”
“And it’s got to happen next Thursday.”
In one week, that would be. I was about to ask for aspirin when he said he’d be paying me in cash. Apparently, his accountant didn’t approve of his extravagant gestures. Then he threw out a number. An insane number. I’m talking five figures insane. I could pay off my credit cards. Pay down my mortgage. Invest in my business. Buy my mother and Gram some decent restaurant equipment.
“I’m in,” I said breathlessly.
“Before we shake,” Miles said, “there is one thing.”
There’s always one thing.
Miles said, “Your website promises ‘satisfaction guaranteed.’”
My mother’s idea. Also, the name of her unpublished autobiography.
“I just want to be clear that I’m going to hold you to that.” Miles looked at me. “I mean, Maya’s kind of hard to please. And if she’s not happy . . .” He shook his head. “Well, I’m sure as fuck not going to be happy. So are we cool?” He stuck out his hand.
I shook it. “We’re cool.”
“Boss.” Mookie lumbered into the room, knocking over a lamp. “Sorry to interrupt.” He picked up the lamp. “But you got an appointment with Destiny.”
“Destiny D-Low,” Miles explained. “The rapper.”
“You know she doesn’t like that word,” Mookie chided. “She’s an artist.”
Miles took a deep, cleansing breath and pulled out his prayer beads. “Like I’m a fucking artist. She’s just pissed because I’m on her to tighten up the structure. Everybody thinks all the problems can be worked out in the mix, but like I keep saying, I’m not a goddamn knob-turner. Is the car ready?”
Mookie said, “Yeah, boss.”
Miles turned to me. “Wait for me in the living room, then I’ll walk you out.”
In the living room I took a seat on the white chaise. Something hard pressed into my back. It was a wallet. I looked up for a minute. No one around. No harm in flipping the thing open. Interesting. Miles’s Wikipedia page said he was forty-five, but according to his driver’s license, he was fifty. And what was this? Opposite his license was a photo of a beautiful girl. Twentyish, with pale skin, red lips, a cap of dark, glossy hair, and huge, green eyes. The fiancée. Maya Duran. Talk about smooth, shiny, and loaded with sin. Jesus. I hoped I hadn’t just sold my soul to a she-devil for financial security and a walk-in refrigerator.
“Dreama?”
I shoved the wallet back into the chaise, and snatched up my basket. “Ready!”
While we were waiting for the elevator, Pee Chee came clomping out in her platform clogs. “You almost forgot this.” As she handed Miles his wallet, she cast a baleful glance my way.
“What would I do without you?” Miles pecked her on the cheek.
She turned her face up to his. “I think we both know.”
I thought it was harmless banter.
Second mistake.
By the time Miles and I stepped out onto Broadway, the air was warm and the sky a cloudless blue. Mookie was at the curb, holding open the door of a shiny black stretch Bentley, but Miles signaled that he’d be a minute. We walked down the block in companionable silence. Then he pointed to a building. “You know what that is?”
I looked up. Samsung. Sony. Toshiba. Sanyo. “A place to buy a camera?”
Miles shook his head. “When that building went up in 1910, it was one of the finest motion picture houses in the country. Now it’s a swap meet. But if you go into the storage room and wade through the cardboard boxes and counterfeit crap there’s the original screen. The original projection booth. The original decorative walls. And nobody knows a thing about it.”
Another one of Miles’s little secrets.
We stopped at my car. “Figures.” I plucked a parking ticket off of my windshield. “That’s the last time I’m parking at a broken meter.”
“Let me take care of it.” Miles pulled out his wallet and handed me a hundred-dollar bill. “You’re on the payroll now.”
As I pulled away from the curb, I caught a glimpse of a frowning Miles, thumbing through his wallet, like he was looking for something.
His snapshot of his fiancée, Maya Duran.
Which I’d apparently just stolen.
Chapter 3
“Yesterday you did what?” My best friend, Cat, put down her tattoo liner and peeled off her gloves. Who knew that a girl who spent her formative years swallowing fire at the Coney Island Freak Show could be so easily shocked?
Her second-in-command, Tigertail—nine months pregnant and ready to pop—yelled from across the room, “I never figured you for a klepto, Dreama!”
“Excuse me, but are we done yet?” The half-naked man spread-eagled in front of Cat mopped his forehead with his flannel shirt. “I need to throw up.”
“I still have to put the wash in the background,” Cat said. “Stay strong.”
Five years ago, Cat had opened a tattoo shop, Cat House, with the money she’d gotten after divorcing Max the Human Pin Cushion, who turned out to have a sizable trust fund. Since then, Cat had expanded twice, turned down three reality shows, and been voted president of the board of the West Hollywood Chamber of Commerce. Some people have a gift.
“Our shit-for-brains intern didn’t restock the candy machine,” grumbled Cat’s third-in-command, Rory, who also happened to be Tigertail’s babydaddy. “And I can’t find the release forms. And the hordes are descending.”
As Cat liked to say, Friday night is Monday morning in the tattoo business. True enough, there were already a dozen customers lined up outside, anxious to get a tribal marking, religious icon, or flower inked onto their skin for eternity before they changed their minds and bolted.
And koi. For some reason, everybody always wanted koi.
“It was the stupidest thing,” I said to Cat.
“I get you,” the half-naked man said. “My girlfriend kept saying, do you really want a six-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon tattooed on your stomach?”
Ignoring him, Cat pressed the foot pedal and her shader started whirring. “You really need to work on impulse control, Dreama.”
“It’s not like I meant to steal it,” I said over the din. “But then Miles came back and there was no time to slip it back into his wallet. What was I supposed to do? And how am I supposed to get it back to him?”
Cat sighed. “I think the real question is why do you keep getting yourself into these kinds of situations?”
“I was just trying to do my job,” I said. “Which apparently entails figuring out this mystery woman Miles is besotted with so that I can somehow make her happy.”
That was part of it, at least.
“You?” Rory snorted. “How are you supposed to make a total stranger happy when you couldn’t even make your ex Luke Cutt happy?”
That was the other part.
I wanted to know what Maya Duran had that I didn’t.
“Luke Cutt is your ex?” The young woman at Tigertail’s station, who was getting the outline of a tiny butterfly inked onto her shoulder, sat straight up. “Are you Dreama? Oh, my god!”
Before I could answer, she and the two friends she’d brought with her started harmonizing on the chorus of “Dreama, Little Dreama.” After posing with them, and answering their many queries about Luke, like whether or not he waxed his chest (yes) and whether or not he’d been high at his Bar Mitzvah (no), I was desperate to change the subject.
“Have you decided on a name for the baby?” I asked Tigertail.
She looked over at Rory. He stroked his goatee, then nodded.
“Sprite.” Tigertail patted her tummy.
“That’s so cute,” said the girl getting the butterfly tattoo. “Like the soda?”
Rory looked appalled. “Sprite, as in fairy, elf, pixie, gnome?”
“I should go,” I said. “It’s a long drive back to Venice. And I still have a lot of work to do on this tour.”
Cat glared at Rory, then turned to me. “It’s going to be incredible. I feel like this is your moment. Don’t you?”
I had to admit I did. Yesterday, after leaving Miles’s, I’d gone straight to the library, and by the end of the day I’d come up with an amazing itinerary. Among the highlights were visits to the High Tower Court, a Streamline Moderne complex in the Hollywood Hills with a five-story private elevator, described in Chandler’s The High Window as P.I. Phillip Marlowe’s residence; the crumbling Alto Nido apartments on Sunset and Ivar, immortalized in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard as the home of the suicidal screenwriter played by William Holden; and the Formosa Cafe, founded in 1925 inside a defunct Red Car trolley, where gangsters Bugsy Siegel and Mickey Cohen would drink, smoke, and order hits, hiding the spoils in a safe still visible under one of the curved red leather booths. After seitan “ribs” and virgin Mai Tais, we were going to drive south to Leimert Park, where on the morning of January 15, 1947, a local resident discovered the body of twenty-two-year-old Elizabeth Short—naked, mutilated, and drained of blood. Like so many before and after her, Short came out West to seek her fame and fortune. Who could’ve predicted she’d find it as the Black Dahlia, pin-up girl of L.A. noir? And how ironic was it that if you stood on the very spot where she was found and cast your eyes due north, you could see the Hollywood sign, forever icon of the fatal lure of Los Angeles?
