Dream a Little Death, page 6
“You should let go of your anger.” She handed me a bottle of water. “Are you drinking eight of these a day? I don’t think so. Your skin looks off.”
“You have another customer.” I pointed to a man in dark sunglasses holding up an inflatable Care Bears pool toy.
“How much?” he asked.
My mother gave him a withering stare. “$1,000.”
“Excuse me?” he said.
“Fine. Ten percent off for seniors.”
I shook my head.
“Cheapskate,” she muttered as the man walked away. “That highly coveted item was used by Whitesnake and the assorted members of their entourage during the pivotal 1990–1991 Liquor and Poker World Tour.”
“Mother.”
“I’m listening.”
“I just want to know what Gram has told you about Ray’s situation.”
She took a slug of water. “As you know, Ray has been accused of being on the take, which is, of course, bullshit.”
“Of course it is. Right?”
“Dreama! You know better than that.”
“I know, it’s just that this is all so incredibly—”
“Fucked up?”
“Exactly.”
“And of course Ray is especially upset that whoever’s out to get him has chosen this particular moment in time, when he’s up for Deputy Chief.”
On Thursday. A week from now. When Maya was going to be walking and talking. And I was betting she was going to have plenty to say.
“On top of that,” my mother continued, “there’s some kind of hearing next week where Ray’s supposed to testify, but the judge who’s presiding is the same person who signed the search warrant on his house so he’s worried that that’s yet another thing going down in flames because of this ridiculous witch hunt. Oh, hello!”
Mom paused to pose for duckface selfies with a woman wearing a Grumpy Cat sweatshirt.
“One of my many fans from the lesbian community,” she explained. “Anyway, adding fuel to the fire, after all these years, Ray is trying to quit smoking. For Gram, which is totally adorable. He swears by nicotine gum, but I told him to try self-massage—”
“You would.”
She gave me a dirty look.
“I guess what I’m really asking,” I said, “is about Uncle Ray’s state of mind. Do you think he’s okay? I mean, has this whole thing driven him over the edge? To the point where he’s not really acting like himself?”
My mother raised her chin in defiance. “What is the self, Dreama? I don’t like to put limits on people. I’m all about fluidity.”
Just then, another car pulled up in front of Mom’s house.
A black stretch Bentley.
Miles McCoy.
Was he following me?
The back window went down. Miles was absently stroking his beard. “Hey, Dreama. How’s tricks?”
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
Miles held up his phone. “Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you’re all over social media. E! Online, among others, is wondering if your mother is bankrupt, and if not, what percentage of today’s proceeds is being donated to charity. When Teri Hatcher had a yard sale, she raised thousands of dollars for local food banks.”
My mother said, “Miles! It’s been a long time.”
Miles took off his dark glasses. “Good to see you, Desirée. You’re looking well.”
My head swiveled. “You know him?”
My mother smiled enigmatically.
“Did you guys ever—you know?” I whispered.
She mouthed, “Not my type.”
Thank god.
“Good timing, by the way,” my mother said to Miles. “Dreama’s car isn’t working. She needs a ride.”
I shot a glance at her. “It’s fine, Mom. I’ve already called Uber.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” Miles feigned nonchalance. “Why spend a penny of your hard-earned money?”
“Speaking of money,” my mother said.
She made her way over to her stuff and came back waving a dog-eared photograph of herself draped across the laps of the visibly addled members of Guns N’ Roses.
“For you,” she said to Miles. “A souvenir of the night the boys played a fraternity basement at UCLA for beers and thirty bucks. It was 1985, right before they were signed by Geffen Records. A must for any collection at the bargain price of $2,500.”
“Mom.”
“Okay, $3,000. All of it going to local food banks,” she added.
The front window of the Bentley went down with a whoosh and Mookie handed my mother a check, which she promptly tucked into her sports bra.
“Take that, Teri Hatcher.” She looked like the cat who ate the canary. “Now, dear Miles, you can have my daughter.”
I wish I could say it was the first time the woman had sold me down the river.
Chapter 11
The inside of the car smelled like late nights and cold sweat. Miles shoved aside some newspapers and a couple of empty Starbucks cups.
“This isn’t necessary,” I said, climbing in.
“Not a problem.” He rapped on the glass and Mookie pulled away from the curb.
I immediately started snapping pictures and posting them to Instagram. It never hurts to establish a timeline.
“Now where’d I put my detox tea?” Miles murmured. “Ah. There’s the little sucker.” He popped open a plastic bottle and took a long swig of his beverage, which happened to be the exact same color as bourbon—his drink, when he was still drinking. Just saying.
“There’s something I wanted to talk to you about,” Miles said.
“Me, too.” I wasn’t sure how to begin. I wasn’t even sure if I should begin. But Uncle Ray’s neck was on the line. I had to ask about the $40,000. “It’s kind of awkward.”
“It’s the money, right?” Miles shook his head. “Yeah, I feel really bad about it. You must think I’m a total shit.”
Well, that was easy. “What I need is an explanation. Other people are involved. People I care deeply about.”
Miles started fingering his prayer beads. “The thing is, I’m having a bit of trouble right now. It’s a personnel thing. Which is kind of fucked up because as you know I already have my hands full with the whole Maya commotion.”
That was an interesting way to describe it. “Any changes in the last few hours?”
His face brightened. “Still out like a light, but I’m starting to see some color in her cheeks. Hey! Mookie!”
The glass went down.
“Don’t you think Maya looks better?”
Mookie’s hair was gelled into spikes. He looked like Sid Vicious on steroids. “Yeah, boss.”
Miles nodded. “Mookie’s not a yes man, so if he says she looks good, she looks good.”
But people lie.
People lie.
“The police completed their investigation,” Miles offered.
“That was quick. What was the verdict?”
“Attempted suicide. Not surprising given there were over two hundred eyewitnesses.”
Only a fool trusts an eyewitness. “And you never found a suicide note?”
He shook his head. “Nope. Never found the gun either.”
“That’s kind of odd, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, I guess. Cops said in all the commotion, all those people rushing the stage, it must’ve gotten lost.”
Just then Miles got a text.
“Excuse me.” He looked down at his phone, then said, “Goddamn it! I can’t believe this shit.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Bad news?”
He pulled a mini legal pad from his back pocket and flipped through the pages. “Fucking Destiny D-Low. Yesterday she’s pissed about having to go on tour. Goddamn One Direction goes on tour! Goddamn Christina Aguilera! Today she’s pissed about the title of the album. I take it personally, actually. Destiny’s career was nothing. In the toilet. Have you heard anybody say a word about her in years? Who pulled her up, hosed off the shit, and gave her one last chance? Me. Because I believed in her. Fat lot of good it’s done me.” He took another swig of his “detox tea,” then said, “Maybe I should go back to being a hit man instead of a goddamn white knight.”
Good line.
I recognized it from one of the articles I’d read about him.
Miles scrawled something on the pad, then tucked it into the seat pocket in front of him. “Anyway, back to the money. Sorry. Even though we had to postpone the noir tour, you should have been paid by now. We’ll get things straightened out.”
“Wait, what?” Now I was totally confused. “But you already—”
“Look, the tour’s going to happen as soon as Maya’s better, which means you are still on the payroll. You have my word on that. I’ve done a lot of shitty things, but my word still means something in this town.” Miles unzipped his backpack and pulled out some headphones.
This situation was getting stranger by the minute. Hadn’t I seen a black stretch Bentley driving away from my house? Was it possible that I was mistaken? And that Miles hadn’t left that $40,000 on my doorstep? But if he hadn’t, who had? And why? And who’d broken into my house and taken it back?
Just then my phone started to ring.
Unknown caller.
“I’d better take this,” I said.
Miles put on the headphones and closed his eyes.
It was Uncle Ray. “I saw your Instagram and Twitter.”
Just as I’d suspected. Following me on the internet was as good as following me in real life. Better, actually, because it saved gas.
“Cool car, right?” I snuck a glance at Miles, who was absorbed in his music. “Did you get it?” I whispered. “The license plate is ‘25 A DAY.’”
Miles said, “I can hear everything you’re saying.”
I turned to him. “I’m just telling my uncle I finally figured what the name of your company, 25-A-Day, refers to. It’s what Philip Marlowe charged his clients. Plus expenses.”
“I knew you were smart.” Miles’s phone started ringing. He ripped off his headphones. “This better be good,” he snarled into the phone.
Ray said, “Dreama. Can I get you to focus? I’m not talking about a car.”
I didn’t get it. “You’re not?”
“No. I’m talking about something you posted last week. A picture of a house in Glendale. A small house in the foothills. One story, pink stucco, gray roof. Inside there’s some faded flowered wallpaper and a peacock chair. Ring any bells? #hauntedhouse? #ghostsofglendale? #DreamaDoesLA?”
Busted.
“What the hell were you doing there?” Ray yelled.
“Yeah, well, fuck you, too!” Miles tossed his phone onto the seat.
“Me?” I was trying not to get distracted. “I don’t know why you’re getting so upset.”
Miles roared, “Because the fucking doctor isn’t calling me back with the results of the lab work, and fucking Destiny is a psycho, and fucking Pee Chee isn’t taking care of the shit I pay her to take care of, that’s why I’m upset!”
“Sorry, Miles, but I wasn’t actually talking to you.” I scooted away from him, cupped my hand over my mouth. “Uncle Ray. Why are you so upset?”
“I’m going to ask you one more time.” Ray was struggling to control his voice. I’d never heard him so angry. “What were you doing in that house?”
“I was doing research.” Which was true. “For my noir tour.” Which was not.
Then he lost it. “So you found an old crime scene to photograph? What are you, crazy? How did you even get inside? Please don’t tell me you broke in. Jesus Christ, do not tell me that.”
I dropped my voice to a whisper. “The door was unlocked. I thought the place was abandoned. What do you mean it was a crime scene? What are you talking about?”
Ray was quiet for a minute. Then he cleared his throat. “You do this job long enough, you see a lot of bad things. You see the dark places people go, and the devastation they leave in their wake. You want to know what I’m talking about, Dreama? I’m talking about the photos the techs took of that goddamn house in Glendale. As long as I’m breathing I’m never going to forget them. The guys working the case pinned them up in the squad room and everybody going in and out had no choice but to stare at them for weeks on end. Broken bottles, broken plates, overturned couch, blood all over the cushions, that goddamn flowered wallpaper, that poor girl.”
Oh, god.
The poor girl he was talking about was the same poor girl I’d just seen in the hospital.
Maya Duran, a.k.a. Carmen Luz.
“What happened to her?” I whispered.
He was quiet for a minute. Then he said, “She was raped, beaten to a pulp, and left for dead.”
“Did she—? Ray? Ray? Are you still there? Hello?”
Ray was gone. The phone had died. Or maybe he’d hung up on me.
“Dead men weigh more than broken hearts,” said Miles, reading from his mini yellow pad.
“Excuse me?”
He looked up. “What do you think? As the title of Destiny D-Low’s album? Nobody’s gotta know I stole it from Raymond Chandler.”
More secrets. More lies.
“Dreama!” Miles grabbed me by the shoulder, harder than he should have. I could feel his nails digging into my flesh. “I asked you a question. What do you think? Isn’t it fucking perfect?”
I waited for him to take his hands off of me. Then I looked at this person and suddenly realized I had no idea who he was, much less what he was capable of.
“Yeah,” I said. “Fucking perfect.”
Miles and I drove down the hill to Sunset, then all the way back to Venice without either of us saying another word.
Chapter 12
It happened three years ago.
Friday night, late winter, full moon.
Everybody remembered the moon. It looked like a ball of fire floating over the Hollywood Hills.
Everybody also remembered the girl. She was drinking. She was smoking. She was twenty-one years old.
That night she’d left her house at eight and met up with three men. They were in the music industry, and she had dreams of becoming a star. After stopping for gas, they went to a bar on the Sunset Strip. They flashed some cash and got a table. They invited two blondes visiting from New York to join them for a second bottle of Grey Goose, but the blondes weren’t interested so they finished it off themselves. They paid for the drinks with a credit card, but left the tip in cash. They were excellent tippers.
It was ten-thirty when they left the bar. The red moon was rising. They pulled over on Mulholland, opened the sunroof, studied the night sky. Someone pointed out the brightest of the stars. Jupiter, fifth planet from the sun, traveling in sync with the moon.
After a quick detour for cigars, they made a stop in Highland Park, then drove back to the girl’s house in Glendale. Things got hazy after that.
The girl wasn’t sure which of the men came home with her. She thought she’d blacked out at some point. What she did remember was listening to music with her head on someone’s lap. Dropping a dozen eggs on the kitchen floor. Somebody yelling about a phone. Waking up in the hospital, one eye crusted shut, bandages on her legs, wrists bruised, her arm in a sling.
She remembered the nurse refusing to give her a mirror.
They arrested one of the men. His name was Freddy Sims. He was a rapper who went by the name Big Fatty. His D.N.A. was everywhere: on the girl’s underwear, on the bloody couch cushions, on the ropes he used to tie her hands to the bed, on the shards of glass the nurse had painstakingly picked out of her thighs. Big Fatty confessed after a twenty-two-hour closed-door interrogation. But that was hardly the end of it.
An internal review of the crime lab revealed significant errors. Sixteen pieces of evidence were initially placed in the wrong rape kit and were deemed unusable because of cross-contamination. An inexperienced lab tech failed to upload fingerprint evidence in a timely manner. And then there was the girl.
She’d been drinking. They’d found two hits of Ecstasy in her purse. She didn’t remember the struggle. She couldn’t identify her attacker. She was not a perfect victim.
The D.A. dismissed the rape, criminal deviate, and confinement charges, and talked Big Fatty into pleading guilty to battery, a class C felony. The judge sentenced the latter to two years in prison.
Two years, and Big Fatty’s nightmare would be over.
What about the girl’s nightmare?
The newspapers never identified her by name. It was the one and only courtesy they’d granted her. But I knew who she was. First a black eye, and then a brutal rape. No wonder Carmen Luz had changed her name to Maya Duran. Who wouldn’t want to start over?
“Excuse me? Mrs. Dreama?” My gardener, Jovani, was rapping on the kitchen window. “Can you come outside for a minute?”
It was time to stretch my legs. I’d been on the computer for a while.
Jovani was in the backyard fussing with the sprinkler timer.
“Don’t get mad,” I said. “I forgot to reset it after it stopped raining.”
“Do you think I care if you let everything die?” he asked. “It’s your garden.” He brushed past me, grabbed the hose and aimed it at the glorious thicket of angel’s trumpet I’d inherited from the previous owner. “Although I would congratulate you if you killed this terrible plant, the Brugmansia. My friend told me about a young man who amputated his own penis and tongue after half of a cup of Brugmansia tea.”
Jovani was full of garden horror stories. Infected plants sold by big-box stores, blight spores run rampant, fellow gardeners being overtaken by the toxic fumes of laurel leaves, toddlers sucking on oleander.
“Please look under the deck.” Now he was spraying the bougainvillea, in hopes of getting rid of the long-tailed mealybugs he’d pointed out to me last week. “Do you see the holes in the ground?”
I squatted down. There they were. Nothing good, I was guessing.
“Rats.” He nodded. “The holes lead to their nests. One more thing, Mrs. Dreama.”
