Dream a Little Death, page 7
Could it get any worse?
He led me around to the side of the house, stopped under my bedroom window, looked up.
The screen.
It was hanging off of its frame.
“You should fix it,” he said. “Before somebody breaks in.”
It was a little late for that.
And it was hardly like I could call the cops.
After he left, I got out the toolbox Uncle Ray had given me for my sixteenth birthday, and reinstalled the screen. Then I sat in my backyard with a peanut butter sandwich and some Syrah and watched the sun go down. Nothing more spectacular than an L.A. sunset. When the mosquitoes started pricking at my legs I went back inside and called him. No answer. No answer at my grandmother’s either.
I spent the rest of the evening searching the internet for anything—any image, any shred of information, any reference—I could find on Maya Duran or Carmen Luz.
There was nothing.
There was plenty, however, on Big Fatty.
Born in South L.A. to African-American and Salvadoran parents, he’d gotten mixed up with gangs at the age of thirteen. Before long he was stealing cars and dealing drugs. His cousin Floyd da Gangsta introduced him to rap. The two teamed up and, under the name Cuz Til Death, were signed to Hoo-Bangin’ Records. Their debut album was Thugstylin. The second single, “Batshit in da Nite,” featuring C-Murder and D.J. Quik, peaked at number eleven on the Billboard Hot Rap Songs chart.
Before long Freddy split with his cousin, and signed with Death Row Records as a solo artist named Big Fatty. He broke out with “Kill the Fatted Calf.” The multi-layered track, with its slow hypnotic grooves and lazy delivery, is still considered one of the defining G-funk tunes. Fatty’s fourth album featured the hit single “DissReputaBull,” a diss track aimed at 50 Cent, who had earlier accused Fatty of plagiarism. Despite the controversy, the album was certified platinum. While out celebrating in Miami Beach, Big Fatty and his then-girlfriend were the targets of a drive-by shooting. Big Fatty accused his cousin Floyd of being involved. Floyd retaliated by releasing bootlegged Cuz Til Death tapes, which suggested 50 Cent’s insinuations about Fatty were not unfounded. Big Fatty’s career never recovered.
He released an underground single, but it failed to chart. He was accused of stealing beats from Nas. Soon afterward, he was arrested on assault charges for hitting a man with a baseball bat, though the charges were dropped. A year later, during a routine traffic stop, police discovered a loaded handgun in his car. He pleaded it down and served four months. Not long after he got out, his younger brother was killed during the course of a home invasion robbery. In the aftermath of that tragedy, Fatty tried to resurrect his career a couple of times, but with little success. I found a few paparazzi shots here and there, but nothing else until the third anniversary of his brother’s death, when the family gathered to toss the young man’s ashes off the Long Beach pier.
It was a shaky, hand-held video on YouTube.
74,675 views.
657 likes and 11,008 dislikes.
The second time I watched the video I stopped it smack in the middle.
A weeping Big Fatty—former rapper, future rapist—was embracing a woman whose acquaintance I had recently made.
A woman with razor-sharp cheekbones and a vertiginous headwrap.
Who would be the rapper—excuse me, artist—Destiny D-Low.
Chapter 13
The wail of a distant car alarm jolted me awake. I glanced at my phone. Seven a.m. Three calls from my good friend Lieutenant Hepworth. No messages. I staggered to the kitchen, made a pot of coffee, sucked it down, and wondered if it was bedtime yet.
The good news was my car was ready. This morning’s Uber driver arrived in a Camry and didn’t speak all the way to North Hollywood. Vlad the Impaler was more loquacious. He said the problem was a broken flywheel tooth, which he’d caught just in the nick of time. I paid him what seemed like a staggering sum, and remembered to look grateful for his expertise. From there, I headed off to see Destiny D-Low.
I’d checked her Twitter feed and discovered she was in MacArthur Park, shooting a video for her remix of Donna Summer’s disco anthem of the same name. I figured I’d catch her between costume changes and ask a couple of questions. Like how long she’d known Miles. And if she was still close to Big Fatty. And how exactly that was working for her, considering that the latter had raped and nearly killed the former’s fiancée. Not that I expected any clear-cut answers. Given that Maya Duran was going by the name Carmen Luz at the time. And that she’d just tried to commit suicide. Or been the victim of someone who’d tried to make it look that way.
While I was getting dressed, I’d noticed five small bruises on my shoulder. In the exact spot where Miles McCoy’s fingernails had dug into my skin.
Could he have been the one who tried to kill Maya?
I didn’t want to believe it.
But maybe.
Maybe he hadn’t known about her past. Maybe he’d never so much as heard the name Carmen Luz. Finding out that the woman he loved had a secret life would’ve felt like a slap in the face. He lived by a code and she’d turned out to be a liar. Miles had a temper. He could have lost it. That day in the hospital, hadn’t he told me he wanted to kill someone?
The sky had turned dark, like my mood. I put the top up, then turned on the radio, hoping for something equally grim, but all I found was Katy Perry, Selena Gomez, and other such peddlers of good cheer. At least traffic was light.
MacArthur Park was located in the Westlake area, just south of historic Filipinotown and west of downtown L.A. At the close of the nineteenth century, when the park was built, the area was swampland, but by the 1920s, it had been transformed into a veritable Champs-Élysées, with fancy restaurants, hotels, and boutiques. These days, not so much.
I parked my car on the northernmost end of the park. Ducking the abandoned shopping carts, chicharron vendors, and a steady stream of Spanish-speaking men offering me something I was pretty sure was illegal, I made my way down to the man-made lake, where you’d be more likely to catch a dirty needle than a fish.
The shoot was underway. People were rushing in every direction. Some were pushing racks of sparkly clothing. Others were shouting into mouthpieces, balancing boom mikes, or ferrying cups of coffee. I tried to blend in, but two youngish guys—one in gold Nikes, the other in silver Pumas—were on me within seconds.
“Excuse me,” Nikes said, “but you can’t be here.”
“This is a closed set,” said Pumas.
“Oh, shit.” Nikes broke out in a sweat. “She’s back.”
Destiny D-Low, looking every inch the disco Cleopatra, was drifting toward us in an inflatable barge. When she finally bumped up against the shore, she started shouting.
“Your turn,” said Pumas.
Nikes said, “Actually, it’s your turn.”
I put my hands on my hips. “Well, one of you better go.”
Nikes rolled up his pants and waded into the water to help Destiny out, but wound up stepping on the hem of her white hooded pantsuit, tripping her, and tearing off a bronze epaulet.
“We’re interns,” said Pumas, quaking. “She’s going to cut off our dicks.”
No time for that, however, because the instant Destiny saw me she flew at me like a bat out of hell.
“Paying Pee Chee to harass me isn’t enough for y’all?” she shouted. “Now Miles is sending you? Look, I’m not taking shit from anybody, not some holier-than-thou Buddhist who doesn’t understand me, and certainly not some skinny little skank like yourself.”
“Miles didn’t send me,” I said. “In fact, he and I are kind of on the outs.”
“Why is that?” Destiny narrowed her eyes.
Because things weren’t adding up.
Because Miles had a mean streak.
Because you always hurt the one you love.
“Money,” I said.
She nodded. “He’s got a Bentley, but he’s cheap.” She pointed to her ruined outfit. “This piece of shit came from Topshop.”
“That’s outrageous,” I said.
“You’re telling me,” she replied. “Yo!” She was waving her arms at the intern in the wet pants and now-ruined Nikes. “You already fucked up the sweet green icing! What the hell are you doing with the hose?”
“Cleaning the grasshoppers off the barge,” he called out.
“Stop! Those are papyrus leaves!” Destiny turned to me. “I gotta go.”
I’d lost focus. I’d come here for a reason. “You know that I organize custom tours of L.A., right? Well, I have one coming up on rap music. And the guy who hired me is a huge fan of one of your old friends.”
“Stupid glue doesn’t work for shit.” She yanked off her false eyelashes, then blinked a few times. “Who would that be?”
“Big Fatty.”
Now I had her full attention.
“I was doing some research on Fatty,” I said, “and came across your name. Coincidence, right?”
Destiny looked like she believed in coincidences about as much as I did.
“I’ve been listening to his music,” I went on. “‘Kill the Fatted Calf’ blew me away.”
She looked me straight in the eye. “Of course it did. Freddy’s an artist.”
“Totally. The song’s about his brother, isn’t it? So sad.” I shook my head. “You must’ve been close to him.”
She looked down, started fidgeting with her rings. “Yeah, we used to party. Me, Freddy, his brother, his whole posse—Lucius Ramsay, you heard about him? Loco Loverboy, those guys?”
No. “Of course. Those guys are legendary. I’ll bet you’ve got some stories about Miles, too. Heard he wrecked a few hotel rooms back in the day.”
Destiny shook her head. “Miles didn’t have anything to do with that group. They were West Coast, he was East Coast. I only met Miles a year ago, give or take. It’s all about the work with him. Now, those guys, we were close. We were friends. But friends can screw you, too, if you know what I’m saying.”
Like mothers. Like fathers. Like lovers. “I know what you’re saying.”
“Excuse me, Destiny?” It was Nikes again. He was pointing at half a dozen hunks with oiled chests and loincloths. “The Nubian slaves have arrived.”
Destiny didn’t budge. She was lost in thought. And I knew exactly what she was thinking about. I didn’t say a word. I just stood there, radiating calm. I learned it from my mother, who learned it from her mother. If you know how and when to be quiet, people will eventually tell you everything you want to know.
“That was some fucked-up night,” Destiny finally said.
Works every time.
“I really don’t know what happened,” she went on. “Freddy was crazy, but I didn’t think he was that crazy. He was good to his mother, his brother, you know what I’m saying?”
“I think so.”
She gave me a sad smile, then reached into her pocket and pulled out some breadcrumbs, which she tossed to the ducks quacking at her feet.
“You and Fatty still friends?” I asked.
She shook her head. “I heard after he got out he went up into the mountains. He bought some kind of fancy house. He stays up there and doesn’t bother anybody. He served his time. Let him be.”
“Let him be?” My eyes widened. “He didn’t let that girl be. He raped her.”
Now she looked offended. “Are you stupid or what? You think black men in this country get any justice?”
“What are you saying?” I asked. “That Fatty didn’t do it?”
She pursed her lips. “I’m not saying shit. Only that the evidence was tainted. The cops screwed it up. They should’ve thrown out the case. But they didn’t because they had a fat thug to pin it on.”
“Come on, Destiny. Fatty’s D.N.A. was all over the house. And all over her.”
Destiny threw up her hands. “All I’m saying is maybe the cops needed to work a little harder. It’s like that gun they found in Fatty’s car years ago. Somebody planted it. Fatty told them, and told them, but did they listen? No. They didn’t care. What they should’ve done was follow that gun. Find out who it was registered to, how it got into Fatty’s car, whose prints were on it, who it was supposed to jam up.” She looked at me, exasperated. “Everybody damn well knows. If you want to find out shit, you have to follow the gun.”
The gun.
Maya’s gun.
I’d forgotten all about it.
And—as everybody damn well knows—if you want to find out shit, you have to follow the gun.
Chapter 14
Unfortunately, the gun was missing.
To my mind, there were only two possible scenarios.
Scenario #1: It was chaos that night. With the crush of people it had been kicked under the stage, or fallen between some loose floorboards, or been accidentally swept into a corner by the cleaning crew. Which meant maybe it was still there.
Scenario #2: Someone had taken it.
Either way, the answer was back at the Mayan Theater.
According to the website, the box office wouldn’t be open until six. I glanced at my phone. One p.m. I was starving. And from where I was standing, at the edge of MacArthur Park, I could see the line already starting to form outside Langer’s, where cured meat has been king since 1947.
After a short wait, I slid into a booth and ordered the #19: hand-cut pastrami, coleslaw, Russian dressing, and Swiss cheese on double-baked rye. The great thing about the #19 is you don’t have to eat again for several days. Kind of like an anaconda after ingesting a capybara. While I was waiting for my food, Lieutenant Hepworth called again. I wasn’t ready to talk to him. Not until I had more information. A few minutes later, I got a text from Teddy, who asked if he could see me later in the evening. I panicked and said no, then thought it over, and sent him another text saying “maybe,” which was ridiculous, so I had to follow it up with some emojis and an “okay, why not?” which was probably overkill, but I’m a Libra, which means I’m a people-pleaser.
Teddy didn’t answer.
I ate my sandwich, then read a Buzzfeed listicle entitled “36 Things to Do while You Wait for Your Crush to Text You Back,” which included signing up for a two-week free trial of Ancestry.com, and crying. Libras, I should mention, can also be self-indulgent and solipsistic.
Still no Teddy.
On the way back to my car, I was waylaid by a Luke Cutt fan from Des Moines, who blithely informed me that she’d lost her virginity to “Dreama, Little Dreama.” After taking a couple of pictures with her, I drove to my favorite newsstand and paged through Paris Vogue, Paper, Bon Appétit, Star, and US Weekly, the last of which featured a side-by-side comparison of my mother and Taylor Swift clad in the same plaid crop top and mini (unsurprisingly, 93 percent of the respondents thought Taylor wore it best). That killed an hour. Three more to go until the Mayan opened for the evening. I could read more magazines. Check my phone again for texts from Teddy. Work on my Jewish foodie tour.
Or I could pay an impromptu visit to Maya Duran.
Maybe the doctor would be around, and she and I could have a chat without Miles breathing down our necks. Maybe I’d even bump into Lizeth the housekeeper again. Strange to have seen her there yesterday. She must’ve heard about Maya, and known that she and Carmen Luz were one and the same. I wondered what else Lizeth knew.
My grandmother taught me to always bring flowers. Maya liked roses, but $49.99 the dozen seemed excessive, so I chose a single long-stemmed rose with complimentary baby’s breath for $7.99. The girl was in a coma, after all.
On the way up to the sixteenth floor I pondered what I might say if she happened to choose the moment of my arrival to wake up. Nothing appropriate came to mind. Not that it mattered. As soon as the elevator door opened I knew something was wrong.
It was a private floor, true. But last time I visited there were a couple of nurses milling about, a janitor pushing a mop, and Miles, standing there looking like death warmed over. Today, the place was empty. I mean empty like the morning after the zombie apocalypse.
My footsteps echoed as I made my way down the hallway to room 111. I knocked once, then pushed open the door.
There she was, all alone in her gilded bed.
Sleeping Beauty.
Who didn’t exactly lead a charmed life.
Take the whole cursed-at-birth fiasco. As if that weren’t bad enough, she gets booted from the enchanted castle and has to make do with a tiny cottage in the forest. And has to exchange her princess name, Aurora, for plain old Briar Rose. Not that that ruse does her any good. She pricks her finger anyway, and falls asleep for a thousand years. It was all sounding depressingly familiar.
“Maya?” I pulled up a chair and sat down. “It’s Dreama. We met the other day. How are you?”
Awkward. I tried again.
“Carmen?” Pause. “Can you hear me, Carmen?”
Nothing.
“Listen.” I took her hand. “You can call yourself whatever you’d like. It doesn’t matter to me. I know who you are. And I know what happened to you. I’m truly sorry.”
Against the pallor of her skin her large tattoo looked almost garish. A pink lotus flower, floating above the blue water. In Buddhism, the lotus symbolizes purity. Though rooted in mud, it remains unstained. It is immaculate, uncorrupted, order as opposed to chaos, silence as opposed to noise.
Noise.
That was what was wrong.
No birdsong.
No sirens.
No horns.
No voices.
No beeping heart monitor.
I spun around in my chair and looked at the machine. The red lights were off. The green indicator number was black. And her hand. I dropped it in horror. The IV was gone. It had been taken out, a tangle of tubes and clamps hanging off the edge of the bed.
I tore out of the room.
“Help!” I cried. “Is anybody here? We need help!”
I ran down the hall, flinging open doors as I went, calling out for someone, anyone. But there was no one. No one at the nurses’ station. No one in the waiting area. No one in any of the rooms. And I was useless. I didn’t know CPR. I didn’t know the Heimlich maneuver. My head was filled with half-remembered song lyrics and celebrity trivia gleaned from daily scrutiny of the tabloids.
He led me around to the side of the house, stopped under my bedroom window, looked up.
The screen.
It was hanging off of its frame.
“You should fix it,” he said. “Before somebody breaks in.”
It was a little late for that.
And it was hardly like I could call the cops.
After he left, I got out the toolbox Uncle Ray had given me for my sixteenth birthday, and reinstalled the screen. Then I sat in my backyard with a peanut butter sandwich and some Syrah and watched the sun go down. Nothing more spectacular than an L.A. sunset. When the mosquitoes started pricking at my legs I went back inside and called him. No answer. No answer at my grandmother’s either.
I spent the rest of the evening searching the internet for anything—any image, any shred of information, any reference—I could find on Maya Duran or Carmen Luz.
There was nothing.
There was plenty, however, on Big Fatty.
Born in South L.A. to African-American and Salvadoran parents, he’d gotten mixed up with gangs at the age of thirteen. Before long he was stealing cars and dealing drugs. His cousin Floyd da Gangsta introduced him to rap. The two teamed up and, under the name Cuz Til Death, were signed to Hoo-Bangin’ Records. Their debut album was Thugstylin. The second single, “Batshit in da Nite,” featuring C-Murder and D.J. Quik, peaked at number eleven on the Billboard Hot Rap Songs chart.
Before long Freddy split with his cousin, and signed with Death Row Records as a solo artist named Big Fatty. He broke out with “Kill the Fatted Calf.” The multi-layered track, with its slow hypnotic grooves and lazy delivery, is still considered one of the defining G-funk tunes. Fatty’s fourth album featured the hit single “DissReputaBull,” a diss track aimed at 50 Cent, who had earlier accused Fatty of plagiarism. Despite the controversy, the album was certified platinum. While out celebrating in Miami Beach, Big Fatty and his then-girlfriend were the targets of a drive-by shooting. Big Fatty accused his cousin Floyd of being involved. Floyd retaliated by releasing bootlegged Cuz Til Death tapes, which suggested 50 Cent’s insinuations about Fatty were not unfounded. Big Fatty’s career never recovered.
He released an underground single, but it failed to chart. He was accused of stealing beats from Nas. Soon afterward, he was arrested on assault charges for hitting a man with a baseball bat, though the charges were dropped. A year later, during a routine traffic stop, police discovered a loaded handgun in his car. He pleaded it down and served four months. Not long after he got out, his younger brother was killed during the course of a home invasion robbery. In the aftermath of that tragedy, Fatty tried to resurrect his career a couple of times, but with little success. I found a few paparazzi shots here and there, but nothing else until the third anniversary of his brother’s death, when the family gathered to toss the young man’s ashes off the Long Beach pier.
It was a shaky, hand-held video on YouTube.
74,675 views.
657 likes and 11,008 dislikes.
The second time I watched the video I stopped it smack in the middle.
A weeping Big Fatty—former rapper, future rapist—was embracing a woman whose acquaintance I had recently made.
A woman with razor-sharp cheekbones and a vertiginous headwrap.
Who would be the rapper—excuse me, artist—Destiny D-Low.
Chapter 13
The wail of a distant car alarm jolted me awake. I glanced at my phone. Seven a.m. Three calls from my good friend Lieutenant Hepworth. No messages. I staggered to the kitchen, made a pot of coffee, sucked it down, and wondered if it was bedtime yet.
The good news was my car was ready. This morning’s Uber driver arrived in a Camry and didn’t speak all the way to North Hollywood. Vlad the Impaler was more loquacious. He said the problem was a broken flywheel tooth, which he’d caught just in the nick of time. I paid him what seemed like a staggering sum, and remembered to look grateful for his expertise. From there, I headed off to see Destiny D-Low.
I’d checked her Twitter feed and discovered she was in MacArthur Park, shooting a video for her remix of Donna Summer’s disco anthem of the same name. I figured I’d catch her between costume changes and ask a couple of questions. Like how long she’d known Miles. And if she was still close to Big Fatty. And how exactly that was working for her, considering that the latter had raped and nearly killed the former’s fiancée. Not that I expected any clear-cut answers. Given that Maya Duran was going by the name Carmen Luz at the time. And that she’d just tried to commit suicide. Or been the victim of someone who’d tried to make it look that way.
While I was getting dressed, I’d noticed five small bruises on my shoulder. In the exact spot where Miles McCoy’s fingernails had dug into my skin.
Could he have been the one who tried to kill Maya?
I didn’t want to believe it.
But maybe.
Maybe he hadn’t known about her past. Maybe he’d never so much as heard the name Carmen Luz. Finding out that the woman he loved had a secret life would’ve felt like a slap in the face. He lived by a code and she’d turned out to be a liar. Miles had a temper. He could have lost it. That day in the hospital, hadn’t he told me he wanted to kill someone?
The sky had turned dark, like my mood. I put the top up, then turned on the radio, hoping for something equally grim, but all I found was Katy Perry, Selena Gomez, and other such peddlers of good cheer. At least traffic was light.
MacArthur Park was located in the Westlake area, just south of historic Filipinotown and west of downtown L.A. At the close of the nineteenth century, when the park was built, the area was swampland, but by the 1920s, it had been transformed into a veritable Champs-Élysées, with fancy restaurants, hotels, and boutiques. These days, not so much.
I parked my car on the northernmost end of the park. Ducking the abandoned shopping carts, chicharron vendors, and a steady stream of Spanish-speaking men offering me something I was pretty sure was illegal, I made my way down to the man-made lake, where you’d be more likely to catch a dirty needle than a fish.
The shoot was underway. People were rushing in every direction. Some were pushing racks of sparkly clothing. Others were shouting into mouthpieces, balancing boom mikes, or ferrying cups of coffee. I tried to blend in, but two youngish guys—one in gold Nikes, the other in silver Pumas—were on me within seconds.
“Excuse me,” Nikes said, “but you can’t be here.”
“This is a closed set,” said Pumas.
“Oh, shit.” Nikes broke out in a sweat. “She’s back.”
Destiny D-Low, looking every inch the disco Cleopatra, was drifting toward us in an inflatable barge. When she finally bumped up against the shore, she started shouting.
“Your turn,” said Pumas.
Nikes said, “Actually, it’s your turn.”
I put my hands on my hips. “Well, one of you better go.”
Nikes rolled up his pants and waded into the water to help Destiny out, but wound up stepping on the hem of her white hooded pantsuit, tripping her, and tearing off a bronze epaulet.
“We’re interns,” said Pumas, quaking. “She’s going to cut off our dicks.”
No time for that, however, because the instant Destiny saw me she flew at me like a bat out of hell.
“Paying Pee Chee to harass me isn’t enough for y’all?” she shouted. “Now Miles is sending you? Look, I’m not taking shit from anybody, not some holier-than-thou Buddhist who doesn’t understand me, and certainly not some skinny little skank like yourself.”
“Miles didn’t send me,” I said. “In fact, he and I are kind of on the outs.”
“Why is that?” Destiny narrowed her eyes.
Because things weren’t adding up.
Because Miles had a mean streak.
Because you always hurt the one you love.
“Money,” I said.
She nodded. “He’s got a Bentley, but he’s cheap.” She pointed to her ruined outfit. “This piece of shit came from Topshop.”
“That’s outrageous,” I said.
“You’re telling me,” she replied. “Yo!” She was waving her arms at the intern in the wet pants and now-ruined Nikes. “You already fucked up the sweet green icing! What the hell are you doing with the hose?”
“Cleaning the grasshoppers off the barge,” he called out.
“Stop! Those are papyrus leaves!” Destiny turned to me. “I gotta go.”
I’d lost focus. I’d come here for a reason. “You know that I organize custom tours of L.A., right? Well, I have one coming up on rap music. And the guy who hired me is a huge fan of one of your old friends.”
“Stupid glue doesn’t work for shit.” She yanked off her false eyelashes, then blinked a few times. “Who would that be?”
“Big Fatty.”
Now I had her full attention.
“I was doing some research on Fatty,” I said, “and came across your name. Coincidence, right?”
Destiny looked like she believed in coincidences about as much as I did.
“I’ve been listening to his music,” I went on. “‘Kill the Fatted Calf’ blew me away.”
She looked me straight in the eye. “Of course it did. Freddy’s an artist.”
“Totally. The song’s about his brother, isn’t it? So sad.” I shook my head. “You must’ve been close to him.”
She looked down, started fidgeting with her rings. “Yeah, we used to party. Me, Freddy, his brother, his whole posse—Lucius Ramsay, you heard about him? Loco Loverboy, those guys?”
No. “Of course. Those guys are legendary. I’ll bet you’ve got some stories about Miles, too. Heard he wrecked a few hotel rooms back in the day.”
Destiny shook her head. “Miles didn’t have anything to do with that group. They were West Coast, he was East Coast. I only met Miles a year ago, give or take. It’s all about the work with him. Now, those guys, we were close. We were friends. But friends can screw you, too, if you know what I’m saying.”
Like mothers. Like fathers. Like lovers. “I know what you’re saying.”
“Excuse me, Destiny?” It was Nikes again. He was pointing at half a dozen hunks with oiled chests and loincloths. “The Nubian slaves have arrived.”
Destiny didn’t budge. She was lost in thought. And I knew exactly what she was thinking about. I didn’t say a word. I just stood there, radiating calm. I learned it from my mother, who learned it from her mother. If you know how and when to be quiet, people will eventually tell you everything you want to know.
“That was some fucked-up night,” Destiny finally said.
Works every time.
“I really don’t know what happened,” she went on. “Freddy was crazy, but I didn’t think he was that crazy. He was good to his mother, his brother, you know what I’m saying?”
“I think so.”
She gave me a sad smile, then reached into her pocket and pulled out some breadcrumbs, which she tossed to the ducks quacking at her feet.
“You and Fatty still friends?” I asked.
She shook her head. “I heard after he got out he went up into the mountains. He bought some kind of fancy house. He stays up there and doesn’t bother anybody. He served his time. Let him be.”
“Let him be?” My eyes widened. “He didn’t let that girl be. He raped her.”
Now she looked offended. “Are you stupid or what? You think black men in this country get any justice?”
“What are you saying?” I asked. “That Fatty didn’t do it?”
She pursed her lips. “I’m not saying shit. Only that the evidence was tainted. The cops screwed it up. They should’ve thrown out the case. But they didn’t because they had a fat thug to pin it on.”
“Come on, Destiny. Fatty’s D.N.A. was all over the house. And all over her.”
Destiny threw up her hands. “All I’m saying is maybe the cops needed to work a little harder. It’s like that gun they found in Fatty’s car years ago. Somebody planted it. Fatty told them, and told them, but did they listen? No. They didn’t care. What they should’ve done was follow that gun. Find out who it was registered to, how it got into Fatty’s car, whose prints were on it, who it was supposed to jam up.” She looked at me, exasperated. “Everybody damn well knows. If you want to find out shit, you have to follow the gun.”
The gun.
Maya’s gun.
I’d forgotten all about it.
And—as everybody damn well knows—if you want to find out shit, you have to follow the gun.
Chapter 14
Unfortunately, the gun was missing.
To my mind, there were only two possible scenarios.
Scenario #1: It was chaos that night. With the crush of people it had been kicked under the stage, or fallen between some loose floorboards, or been accidentally swept into a corner by the cleaning crew. Which meant maybe it was still there.
Scenario #2: Someone had taken it.
Either way, the answer was back at the Mayan Theater.
According to the website, the box office wouldn’t be open until six. I glanced at my phone. One p.m. I was starving. And from where I was standing, at the edge of MacArthur Park, I could see the line already starting to form outside Langer’s, where cured meat has been king since 1947.
After a short wait, I slid into a booth and ordered the #19: hand-cut pastrami, coleslaw, Russian dressing, and Swiss cheese on double-baked rye. The great thing about the #19 is you don’t have to eat again for several days. Kind of like an anaconda after ingesting a capybara. While I was waiting for my food, Lieutenant Hepworth called again. I wasn’t ready to talk to him. Not until I had more information. A few minutes later, I got a text from Teddy, who asked if he could see me later in the evening. I panicked and said no, then thought it over, and sent him another text saying “maybe,” which was ridiculous, so I had to follow it up with some emojis and an “okay, why not?” which was probably overkill, but I’m a Libra, which means I’m a people-pleaser.
Teddy didn’t answer.
I ate my sandwich, then read a Buzzfeed listicle entitled “36 Things to Do while You Wait for Your Crush to Text You Back,” which included signing up for a two-week free trial of Ancestry.com, and crying. Libras, I should mention, can also be self-indulgent and solipsistic.
Still no Teddy.
On the way back to my car, I was waylaid by a Luke Cutt fan from Des Moines, who blithely informed me that she’d lost her virginity to “Dreama, Little Dreama.” After taking a couple of pictures with her, I drove to my favorite newsstand and paged through Paris Vogue, Paper, Bon Appétit, Star, and US Weekly, the last of which featured a side-by-side comparison of my mother and Taylor Swift clad in the same plaid crop top and mini (unsurprisingly, 93 percent of the respondents thought Taylor wore it best). That killed an hour. Three more to go until the Mayan opened for the evening. I could read more magazines. Check my phone again for texts from Teddy. Work on my Jewish foodie tour.
Or I could pay an impromptu visit to Maya Duran.
Maybe the doctor would be around, and she and I could have a chat without Miles breathing down our necks. Maybe I’d even bump into Lizeth the housekeeper again. Strange to have seen her there yesterday. She must’ve heard about Maya, and known that she and Carmen Luz were one and the same. I wondered what else Lizeth knew.
My grandmother taught me to always bring flowers. Maya liked roses, but $49.99 the dozen seemed excessive, so I chose a single long-stemmed rose with complimentary baby’s breath for $7.99. The girl was in a coma, after all.
On the way up to the sixteenth floor I pondered what I might say if she happened to choose the moment of my arrival to wake up. Nothing appropriate came to mind. Not that it mattered. As soon as the elevator door opened I knew something was wrong.
It was a private floor, true. But last time I visited there were a couple of nurses milling about, a janitor pushing a mop, and Miles, standing there looking like death warmed over. Today, the place was empty. I mean empty like the morning after the zombie apocalypse.
My footsteps echoed as I made my way down the hallway to room 111. I knocked once, then pushed open the door.
There she was, all alone in her gilded bed.
Sleeping Beauty.
Who didn’t exactly lead a charmed life.
Take the whole cursed-at-birth fiasco. As if that weren’t bad enough, she gets booted from the enchanted castle and has to make do with a tiny cottage in the forest. And has to exchange her princess name, Aurora, for plain old Briar Rose. Not that that ruse does her any good. She pricks her finger anyway, and falls asleep for a thousand years. It was all sounding depressingly familiar.
“Maya?” I pulled up a chair and sat down. “It’s Dreama. We met the other day. How are you?”
Awkward. I tried again.
“Carmen?” Pause. “Can you hear me, Carmen?”
Nothing.
“Listen.” I took her hand. “You can call yourself whatever you’d like. It doesn’t matter to me. I know who you are. And I know what happened to you. I’m truly sorry.”
Against the pallor of her skin her large tattoo looked almost garish. A pink lotus flower, floating above the blue water. In Buddhism, the lotus symbolizes purity. Though rooted in mud, it remains unstained. It is immaculate, uncorrupted, order as opposed to chaos, silence as opposed to noise.
Noise.
That was what was wrong.
No birdsong.
No sirens.
No horns.
No voices.
No beeping heart monitor.
I spun around in my chair and looked at the machine. The red lights were off. The green indicator number was black. And her hand. I dropped it in horror. The IV was gone. It had been taken out, a tangle of tubes and clamps hanging off the edge of the bed.
I tore out of the room.
“Help!” I cried. “Is anybody here? We need help!”
I ran down the hall, flinging open doors as I went, calling out for someone, anyone. But there was no one. No one at the nurses’ station. No one in the waiting area. No one in any of the rooms. And I was useless. I didn’t know CPR. I didn’t know the Heimlich maneuver. My head was filled with half-remembered song lyrics and celebrity trivia gleaned from daily scrutiny of the tabloids.
