The short man beside her laced his fingers together on the table and exchanged a meaningful look with Frank. Grace caught this, but didn’t understand what it meant when Frank pushed out a sigh and said, “The shipment in the car. We’re willing to pay for it all, don’t you see that?”
The thug said, “All right, sure. The car, the shipment, and Petey.”
“What about Petey?” Frank asked.
“You knocked him off. That’ll cost you, too.”
“That was no knock-off,” Frank protested. “That was self-defense.”
“Either way he’s dead, isn’t he? So it’s another grand on top. No discussion.”
“That’s garbage,” Frank said, making to stand. Grace reached over the table, touched his hand and shook her head.
“We accept that,” she said, her eyes boring deep into Frank’s.
“Grace…”
“You have it now?” Shorty said.
“I have it,” she answered.
“The extra thousand?”
“It’s here.”
She withdrew the fat package from her bag and handed it to Shorty under the table. He glanced around, making sure he didn’t have an audience, and then got to counting. While he did that, the tall one said, “This is contingent on a couple other things.”
“What is?” Frank asked.
“Your life, so listen up. You don’t talk. To anybody. Ever. If you do, we’ll know about it and the deal’s off — your head’s back on the block.”
“He won’t talk,” Grace said.
“She your mouthpiece, Frank?”
“I won’t talk,” said Frank. “What’s the other thing?”
“You don’t live in L.A. anymore. As of today. You can go anywhere you please that isn’t here. And you’re never coming back.”
“That’s too much,” Grace said.
Ignoring her, Frank said, “That’s fine. Are we done here?”
The tall man looked to Shorty, who finished counting, stashed the bills in his coat, and nodded.
“We’re done.”
The short one said to Grace, “You never saw us in your life, that clear?”
She scooted out to let him pass. “It’s clear.”
Outside, Frank and Grace found a taxi and climbed into the back. Grace gave her own address and the driver sputtered off in that direction.
Grace said, “Then that’s it.”
“I’ll pay you back, someday. I don’t know how, but I will.”
“Just do it legitimate like.”
“It’s all legitimate for me, from here on out.”
She smiled. “It’s been interesting, Frank. I’ll miss you.”
“Miss me? I’m not going anyplace. I still have to help light that soon-to-be-famous face of yours, don’t I?”
“But that’s….no, Frank. You have to leave. You promised.”
“You say that like I’m lying to my poor old grandmother. I promised a couple of gangsters, darling. Crooks. Who cares what I say to them? As far as they’re concerned, I’m already gone. It’s finished, all of it. Thanks to you.”
He showed his teeth in a broad grin and kissed her on the cheek. The driver looked at them through the rearview mirror for a moment, until Grace met his gaze. She sat still for a moment, her mouth open, before blinking rapidly and asking the driver if she could smoke in the taxi.
“Help yourself,” the driver said.
She helped herself. And while she smoked, she thought about the eighty-five hundred dollars she’d just wasted on a life she knew she couldn’t really save.
23
The Royal Blue was in a wretched state of disrepair. The marquee didn’t look safe to stand under, the concrete façade was crumbling, and the window to the box office was boarded up with a handwritten sign bidding customers to buy their tickets inside. Even the sidewalk was cracked and overrun with tall green weeds. The theater looked like it should be condemned, but sure enough they were in the middle of a late-night revival of The Elephant Man. According to the tattered ad pasted to the front door, tomorrow began their three-day Howard Hawks retrospective, only five bucks per show. Slightly worried that the roof was going to fall on me before we were done, I pulled the door open and let Lou walk in ahead of me.
The inside was somehow worse. I felt like I was in one of those 42nd Street grindhouses from the eighties, with the mildewed carpet torn to ribbons and the musty curtains on the walls festooned with cobwebs and thick dust. We went across the lobby, past ripped posters for forthcoming features of past years, to the concession stand, where a languid teenager with ironic horn-rimmed glasses raised his substantial eyebrows at me. Below him stood a glass cage filled with stale, radioactive-yellow popcorn. My stomach tightened.
“Is the manager in?”
“I’m the assistant manager.”
Lou and I exchanged a look.
She said, “Does Helen Bryan work here?”
“I don’t think I have to answer that. Are you cops?”
“We’re friends of hers,” I said.
“Then you know she don’t work here anymore.”
“Was she fired?” Lou asked.
“She quit.”
I said, “Did she quit, or just stop showing up?”
The kid scrunched up his face.
“You know so much, how come you’re asking the questions?”
“I was guessing,” I said. “Which was it?”
“Look, man, that girl was trouble. I’m not trying to talk about your friend, but she had problems, all right? So when she didn’t show, nobody was really all that bugged by it, you know what I mean?”
“When was that?” Lou asked.
“Her last shift, you mean? Thursday, I think. No — Wednesday. About a week ago now. Norm figured he’d let her know she didn’t have a job no more when she came in for her last check, only she never came in. Far as I know it’s still sitting in his office.”
“Nobody thought that was cause for concern?” I said.
“What, she’s our problem now? Places like this, we got a high turnover, man. I been here nine months and I’m an old veteran.”
“You just like all the old movies, huh?”
“Something like that.”
“How about silents?”
“Sometimes. Some of the European ones were okay.”
“Ever heard of Angel of the Abyss?”
“What about it?” the kid asked. He was losing his patience with me, if there was much there to begin with.
“It’s a lost film from the twenties,” I said.
“I know what it is — why’re you asking about it?”
“I thought maybe Helen had an interest in it.”
“I don’t think she would’ve known about that. She wasn’t really all that into film.”
“She worked at a theater, didn’t she?”
“I used to work at a filling station and I don’t give a shit about gas.”
“Doesn’t everybody like movies?”
“Sure, whatever’s new and popular. Something like that, though? Takes a special breed of film geek to have even heard of it.”
“Like the Silent Film Appreciation Society?”
“I don’t know what that is, but sure.”
“Couple of ladies Helen knows, as it turns out.”
“Hey, I said she worked here but I never said we were best friends. Maybe she was into old silent films, what do I know? She just never struck me as the type, that’s all.”
“You never saw her talk to a nice old lady? Leslie Wheeler?”
“How old? There was some really old broad used to come in here to talk to her. Figured she was her grandma. Seventies, maybe eighties.”