“Help me, miss,” she said as I was drying her off.
“Do you know where you are?”
“No.”
“Did somebody bring you here?”
“They must have but I don’t remember.”
Someone banged on the door.
“She’s throwing up!” I yelled.
Then I took out my cell phone and hit a special code.
“Hello, beauty,” he said on the second ring.
“I need help.”
“Give me the address and I’ll be there as soon as I swap out this passenger.”
Forty-five minutes later I had the half-conscious child wrapped in a bathrobe. We were sneaking as best we could through the back of the house. From there we made it to a small gateway and down to the canyon road.
Short, dark, and unmistakably South American, the Brazilian Leonidas Asimante stood next to a black Lincoln Town Car waiting for us.
Once we were driving away I told him that I needed to take the girl (I had yet to learn her name) someplace where she could sober up.
“I have a client who keeps a house at the beach in Malibu,” the flawless English — speaking driver said. “I look after it for him when he’s out of town. You two can stay the night if you want.”
I sat up with Jolie until the distant ocean glinted orange. She vomited bile and cried, thanked me over and over, told me her life story, and then fell so soundly asleep that she seemed dead, more so than in the photograph that Lieutenant Mendelson was showing me.
In the afternoon Leonidas came with clothes I had him buy. We dressed her and drove her to a rooming house I knew of down around Venice Beach.
“I have no idea who she is,” I said, answering Perry Mendelson’s query.
A look of concern creased the policeman’s already doubtful visage.
Lana put a cup of black coffee down in front of the detective.
“What?” I asked.
“Excuse me,” Lana said as she climbed over my lap to sit on the other side.
“It’s just that I find it hard to believe,” Perry said, “that a woman would have no idea how to at least find out what her husband is up to.”
“You want Theon’s cell phone?” I asked. “He never finished high school and didn’t even know how to spell the word computer. But maybe there’s a phone book in there somewhere.”
“That won’t help me if I don’t know a name.”
“You could just call every name until somebody doesn’t answer,” Lana offered.
“We don’t have that kind of manpower,” Perry said, taking her seriously. “I mean if this was a murder or something, but right now the worst is that it’s an underage runaway that died.”
“If she was underage like you say,” I offered, “and she died having sex with a mature man like my husband... you could construe that as some kind of homicide.”
“Yeah. Maybe second-degree manslaughter, I guess. But the chief of police and the city prosecutor wouldn’t want to use public funds in that manner. You weren’t here and so there’s no living perpetrator.”
“Can I be straight with you, Perry?” I asked.
“Sure.”
“Do you recognize me?”
“Um... no. Not personally.”
“Did some of the other cops last night make jokes?”
“Uh...”
“It’s okay. I’m not shy. I take off my clothes in front of a camera and fuck for a living. That’s the kind of business we’re in — me and Lana... and Theon too, when he was alive. We’ve all met thousands of girls like the one from last night. With most of them I’m more likely to remember if their ass stank than their names.
“A dozen girls like that flutter around me every single day. To tell you the truth, Theon might not have known her name. And even if he did it wouldn’t have been a real name. Nobody gives their real name — no, no, no.”
He picked up on the reference to Fats Waller with a Lana-like smile and glanced down at his hands.
“You listen to Waller?” His words told more than they asked.
“My father loved old-time jazz. I used to sit on his lap and listen with him.”
Our eyes met and I saw that he was experiencing hunger that was unfamiliar to him. He felt a connection with me and that made him uncomfortable.
“You like being a policeman?” I asked to relieve his tension and to explore it at the same time.
“I used to.”
“Not anymore?”
“I still do the work,” he said. “I think it’s important but I care too much. A cop can’t really care. We come across a dozen tragedies every day.”
“I know what you mean.”
“You do?”
“With me it’s even worse. I have to pretend to care and I don’t give a shit.”
“I better be going,” he said.
He stood up.
I nodded.
He turned.
I wanted to say something: the kind of words that held out hope for a next meeting.
He walked the distance to the kitchen doorway and I remained silent, telling myself that it wasn’t the time and he wasn’t the man.
“Deb!” Lana yelped maybe three minutes after Perry had gone. “We have to get to work. It’s a ten-o’clock call.”
“I thought you quit the business?”
“Uh... um... But Linda expects us.”
“I thought you were breaking up with Linda?”
“I am but... but this is our job.”
The bewildered look on her childlike face was perfect. Decisions and actions didn’t have anything to do with each other in her mental life. She was a kid, from Ohio I think, who was still looking for the magic door that led to a place where things fit together because you wanted them to.
“Tell Linda I couldn’t make it today,” I said.
“She’s gonna be mad.”
“My husband died last night, honey. He was electrocuted in the bathtub where he was fucking an obviously underage girl. The police are questioning me. Richard Ness is on my ass. And in the meanwhile I have to bury Theon. You tell Linda that, and then, if she gets mad, you tell her to bring her skinny ass and her razor blade over here.”
“O-okay, Deb. Don’t be mad at me. I wasn’t really thinking is all. Do you need a ride somewhere?”
“Back to my car?”
“It was parked on the street and so I gave Linda your keys. She said she’d have someone drop it off in the afternoon.”
“That’s okay then. I’ll take Theon’s Hummer.”
“Do you want me to stay and help you?”
I could have said yes but that would have torn Lana apart. She had to go back to Linda and the set. She had to do what she was told because that was how she had survived all these years.
“No, baby,” I said.
“What are you going to do?”
“What every girl does when she needs to think.”
“Hairdresser?”
I smiled and she did too.
Half an hour after Lana had gone I went out to the driveway to ignite Theon’s bright yellow Hummer. It was the largest model ever made and even a tall person needed the extra step to climb up into the driver’s seat.
I grabbed onto the door handle and was about to pull myself up when he spoke.
“Hey, Deb.”
I should have known that Richard wasn’t the kind of dog to let a bone go so easily.
The pistol was in the house so I was on my own against the huge bundle of woman-hating violence. The fact that he was a coward only made him more dangerous.
“Hey, Dick.”
“I don’t like people callin’ me that.”
“That’s okay, Dick. I don’t like you.” My heart was thundering and there was too much blood in my brain to make room for the underlying fear.