Arnie swallowed some of the coffee in his cup. Maybe the reason it tasted so bad was because they needed a new machine. He was going to ask Kramer about getting them one. They had to be able to do better than this.
Victoria smiled a smile that showed her jarring white teeth. Twenty-three years old, Martinson thought, capped teeth and breast implants. The kid was a mess.
There was a television producer, a very successful television producer, Victoria said, that loved her. He put her in many episodes of a show that ran for three years in syndication. Maybe they had seen it. It was a cop show called Do or Die.
Martinson didn’t know that one. Acevedo went, “Mmmmmm.”
After those three years, the show had run its course. The producer couldn’t sell it to anybody, and it ended. Victoria drifted into projects she was far too talented for, things she never imagined she’d have to do, especially not when she was shooting Do or Die and watching herself on TV, twice a day sometimes.
Arnie assumed she meant porno, and maybe Acevedo did, too, but Victoria said, “Not what you think.”
They were a series of cut-and-run features that cost nothing to make, relatively speaking, movies that went straight to video or cable. She played the girl in the bikini, the hapless co-ed in five beach-blanket slasher movies. She’d have half a dozen lines before she got killed, and she got killed in every picture. They shot the principal photography in a week, and a project could go from script to screen in a month.
In the meantime, she was getting older.
Acevedo pushed herself away from the table. Victoria picked up on her body language.
“I know I’m not old,” she said. “And I was even younger then. I mean my face was getting old, because everybody had seen it. And you wouldn’t believe how fierce it is, the competition. These producers, they can find a hundred girls right behind me to do exactly what I did, all cute, and all younger than me.”
Suddenly, nobody would hire her. She didn’t work for almost a year. They both knew how fast money went when you didn’t have any coming in. And it wasn’t like she’d been thrifty while she was making it.
Victoria had gotten close with an actor from one of her movies, a guy named Lawrence Lendesma, who lived here. Actually, Lawrence was a model, but he was trying to make it in acting. It was what they all did. Lawrence was why she decided to come to South Beach.
Victoria and Mimi landed in Miami on December 27th. But once Lawrence had to deal with her face-toface instead of coast-to-coast, things between them changed. Acevedo rolled her eyes.
“It was Lawrence who introduced me to Leo. We met at a New Year’s Eve party Leo was throwing at his house.”
“Who’s Leo?” Acevedo said, and Martinson shot her a glance that was supposed to remind her to save the questions for later.
But when Victoria looked at him, he said, “Go ahead.”
Victoria hit it off with Leo, and he invited her to stay at the house. He had this big house he was living in all by himself.
It was a good thing, too, because she was very low on money, and a girl who was low on money could get herself into a lot of trouble down here on the Beach. Or anywhere, for that matter.
Leo was nice to her, the way they’re all nice at first, she said, but life around that house got extremely freaky after Leo moved in two of his friends. One of the boys, Alex, she never did get his last name, he was nice. Alex was cute. Victoria liked Alex. But she did not like JP Beaumond. That was the other one. There was something wrong with JP Beaumond, besides the fact that he was short, dirty and mean, and he was always trying to rub his scratchy whiskers against her face. They were together a few times, but he was gross, and one night after she told him no, JP came into her room and raped her.
Victoria Leonard said, “I think I’m pregnant.” She started to cry.
She dug through her dog bag, trying to come up with a clean tissue. Martinson handed her a box and topped off her cup with some more lousy coffee. Mimi, who had recovered from her sneezing attack, licked Victoria’s wrist. They waited. The dog seemed to be waiting, too, for Victoria to regain her composure. It didn’t take long.
“Leo was always talking about his Dutch Uncle.”
Okay, enter the Dutchman.
He had arrived in South Beach right around the time Victoria did, though Leo knew him from before. Some kind of European wheeler-dealer. Throw a rock on Ocean Drive and you were liable to hit a few of them.
“Why did he call him that?” Arnie said.
“Because he was older and he had lots of money and because he was... Dutch?”
Arnie said, “Yeah, but... never mind. Keep going. I’m sorry.”
Anyway, he was looking to make a big cocaine score. According to Leo, Leo put the deal together, but Leo was always talking like he was such a big shot.
It was a night like any other night at Leo’s house. The four of them awake into the morning, snorting cocaine and drinking. Leo brought it up as a joke. Manfred, Leo said, would be the perfect sucker to rip off. He laughed. The boys laughed. Victoria laughed because everybody else was laughing, but she wouldn’t have known Manfred from a bag of apples.
But JP brought it up again. JP had taken the idea seriously. Like very seriously.
Victoria broke small bits off the Kit Kat bar and fed them to Mimi. The dog’s ears pricked straight up for Victoria’s babbling baby talk, and she smacked her tiny chops for those crumbs of chocolate.
It was easy for her to get next to Manfred. She approached him one afternoon on the beach and poured out this sob story, how she was a little lost lamb with a little fuzzy dog, thousands of miles away from anybody who cared about her. She might’ve cried. She was, after all, an actress.
Manfred said Victoria reminded him of his daughter. He had a daughter about her age.
“He was a wreck. He drank too much and he snorted too much, but he had a good heart. He was just a sweet guy, and he was easy to get over on. The whole time, he thought my name was Jennifer, because that’s what I told him.”
He had a very definite agenda of his own for Victoria/Jennifer. This was what people did to you in this life, she said. They used you.
“They will if you let them,” Acevedo said.
It was funny. The boys used her to get at Manfred, and Manfred used her to get at other boys. And he sure knew how to pick them. One of these college kids turned out to be such a complete homo that once she lured him back to the room, he spent the rest of his vacation in Manfred’s bed.
Acevedo said, “I don’t understand. He needed you to help him pick up guys? On South Beach?”
“Manfred said anybody could have the queers here. The ones he went after were supposedly straight. They were straight, all right. Straight to the next man.”
Anyway, Manfred was delighted with the way things were working out. He let her stay in his room. He gave her money and he gave her drugs. He bought clothes for her. Leo’s plan was working like a charm.
According to Leo’s information, the big cocaine deal was supposed to be made in Manfred’s hotel room. As soon as it happened, she was to alert Leo. She was kind of bleary on the details, but one day she saw Manfred shaving pieces off a brick of cocaine wrapped in butcher paper. He had it stashed in a suitcase at the top of the closet. She made the call.
She lied and told Manfred she’d decided to go back to L.A. She packed up her things and went back to the house on Pine Tree. But then she heard that Manfred was dead. She’d been hiding in Key Biscayne ever since.
“I’m not particularly bright, okay? I know that. But I’m sure Manfred’s death had something to do with that cocaine deal, and I think I know who killed him.”