“Oh yeah, girl, you’re a stone cold killer,” I told the pup, sending her tail into a wild flurry of wags. I was bolting the flap over the hole I’d cut into the back door when it occurred to me that this was the first home improvement I’d made to the place. In the years that I had lived there I hadn’t even driven a nail in to hang a single picture. Kelly had only been in LA for six months and yet she had decorated her door, hung art, made her house a home. Where had she come from? She grew up in a small town in the Midwest, was the only detail she had offered. Thinking I had plenty of time I hadn’t pushed her for more.
After finishing the dog door, I poured a short drink, yes it was early but fuck it, it had already been a long day. Lack of movement was making me crazy.
The pain of the ink filled needle felt honest and real. For a moment, it pierced the dull numbness that had settled over me. I was in Cardo’s kitchen in his small Hollywood apartment. He was a soft faced ex-banger who I’d helped out with some AB boys when they jumped in his shit down in county lock-up. After his last jolt he had left the life, moved from Pico Rivera to Hollywood, crawled out of the closet and reinvented his brown ass. Now he made the bills painting storefront windows and when he was lucky he was hired for a mural or sold a painting from one of the small galleries that carried his art. His soft electric colored view of the world hung on his walls. All dreamy paintings of women, most of whom I knew. He’d come down to Xtasy to sketch the girls. At first he pissed them off by not buying laps. But, when they saw themselves in his work, how beautifully perfect he saw them, they learned to forgive his lack of cash.
“She was a rose in a garden of thorns, Loco,” he said wiping away the blood and ink off my shoulder, so he could see the art he was drilling into my flesh. “Sweet and gentle in a world grown hard.”
“She was something all right.”
“Women are like gem stones, no? They sparkle to get your attention but if you look in a loop, see close up, every one is different and totally unique. It’s the flaws and inclusions that make them special.” With a homemade tattoo gun he was drawing Kelly’s face freehand. Doing it all from memory and capturing her just right. I got my first tat in the joint. In a cage, they take all that is yours, all that is personal. The first ink was there to remind myself I was still alive, still had some control over my body. This was how we marked our time, writing our history in ink and blood.
“Explain something to me,” I started, looking with awe at how perfectly he was capturing all that was beautiful in Kelly.
“If I love women so, why am I gay?” he said, guessing the question.
“Something like that.”
“You breeders get it all wrong. I love roses, no? But I don’t want to fuck them. You can’t imagine love without penetration. I can’t imagine life without beauty. The form it takes is so much less interesting than the beauty itself,” he said, reminding me once again why I hung with him. Like him or don’t what you heard was who he was. He finished the work giving me his usual admonition, not to get in any fights or fall off my bike until the skin had healed. I’m not sure what he cared about more, me or the canvas he painted on.
The next week passed slowly. Every morning I took Angel to the dog park for her daily romp. The fear in the locals’ eyes faded bit by bit every day, but it was never replaced with warmth. If our eyes met they still looked down or away. At some level I would always be the boogie man under their beds. Helen, Bruiser’s owner, and I would chat about the weather and life and dogs. Some mornings we went down the street for coffee. She was a link to Kelly, she kept her alive for me. I shared her deep grief but I was done crying. I stuffed that pain down deep inside and let it work on my ulcer.
I called Lowrie to see if he had made any progress in finding Kelly’s killer. He told me I was still the best suspect they had. The next day I called him again and this time I took a shot and told him the truth. I told him I had been in Kelly’s apartment, what I had seen and again restated that I hadn’t, couldn’t have killed her. By my fourth phone call we slowly began to build trust, if not friendship. My initial feelings proved right. He was a straight shooter. He told me they hadn’t been able to locate any next of kin. The name she’d been living under didn’t show up on any record search, the social security number she’d given to the club was bogus. It was strange he said, he had been through her apartment three times and hadn’t found as much as an address book or a letter from home. I told him I thought she was from Indiana, but it didn’t help much.
“They’re going to cremate her on Friday,” he told me. “You’re the closest thing to family we can find… If you want to claim the ashes, I’ll back you up.”
“What do you want as payback, I don’t snitch. You have to know that straight up.”
“Son, you don’t have anything I want… You’re alright Moses, I just don’t think you know it yet.”
“How many days ‘til they put you on another case, and she becomes a dead file?” I asked.
“Two days ago. But that hasn’t stopped me. You may not believe me, but I’ll keep looking,” he said, and I did believe him, but also knew how little he had to go on. After I hung up, I filled a tumbler with ice and poured in my Scottish Prozac. I had no idea what Kelly would want me to do with her ashes. It wasn’t the kind of subject that came up much in strip club dressing rooms.
“You committing suicide on the installment plan?” Piper asked. I was sitting at the bar knocking back my third scotch of the shift.
“Just trying to slide through the night,” I told her, motioning for Turaj to fill it up again. It took the drinks to quiet my head down enough to go to work wrangling the straights, it dulled my building rage to the point where I might not tear any heads off. Truth was I did very little bouncing, I was just the big scary guy there for show. My experience has been that naked ladies turn most men into drooling pussycats. I watched a tattooed Mexican kid get a lap dance, Ginger told him to keep his hands at his sides and he obeyed like a kid in school.
“So what are you going to do with her ashes?” Piper asked, leaning against the bar.
“I don’t know, I really don’t,” I told her.
“If it was me, I’d want to have my ashes spread into the waves, up by Malibu. Up where the livin’ is easy and the greenbacks grow tall. Get stuck on some matron’s feet and stain her white shag.”
“I don’t really think Kelly was a Malibu kinda girl,” I told her.
“No she wasn’t, not enough irony in her… You’ll know what to do when the time is right. You always do,” she said resting her hand on my shoulder.
“You have a lot of faith in this old man.”
“Yes I do… And you’re not that old,” she said with a wink. Looking past her I saw Sasha, that chestnut haired little Czech vixen, fixing to haul off and hit a dread locked customer. I caught her cocked arm just before she swung. She spun on me, eyes flaring.
“Jesus Christ Mo, this cheap bastard says he give me one hundred. Like I don’t know what a twenty looks like. Am I blind? Am I stupid? “
“No baby girl, but you look pissed off.”
“Pissed off?” She let out a long stream of unintelligible Russian curses, her face growing redder as the volume climbed. It would have been funny if it wasn’t my job to keep the room chilled and blood off the carpet.
“Breathe baby girl, breathe. Go in back, do some of that yoga crap you’re always spouting about and let Moses handle this.”
“He’s trying to steal from me!” I put a firm hand on her head, pulling her towards me. I smiled, to anyone else it looked like I was kissing her ear.
“Keep this shit up, and in three seconds you are over my shoulder and out of here.” I whispered. “That how you want it?” I kissed her neck and stepped back, continuing to smile at her. Sasha’s eyes flared then dropped to a low burn, and like a good little girl she started to walk away. But then Dreadlocks had to open his mouth.