I took her arm again, harder this time. "Say good-bye to your friends. We're leaving."
"And now," said the clown at the door, speaking into a hand mike and trying for a swinger's drawl, "here's our hot little treat from south of the border. Five feet two of pure salsa and cucarachas." He obviously didn't speak Spanish. "Let's hear it for Chili." The Hispanic girl I'd seen before climbed up onto the big stage wearing nothing but a T-shirt and a spangled red G-string that looked like leftover yardage from Dorothy's ruby slippers. Business was slow, but the girls weren't. A few customers applauded laconically.
Nana yanked her arm away and cranked her eyes around to look at me again, but I was too close and she couldn't focus. The tub of lard at the front door, the one who'd demanded seven dollars earlier in the evening, had put the mike down and was staring at us. It wasn't a sweet stare.
"I'm not going anywhere. Not with you, anyway. Someone reminded me of a word for you about an hour ago. You're a louse. 'He's a louse,' he said, and I said, 'You're right.' " Her voice was thicker than maple syrup.
"And you're loaded. In fact, you're loaded beyond any kind of civilized belief."
"Get off my back," she said. "In fact, as you might say, college boy, get out of my sight. You're on that toadstool's side. Lips that touch toadstools shall never touch mine." She giggled halfheartedly and then hiccupped.
"Honey," I said, "I don't mean to go all masculine on you, but if you don't get your ass in gear, I'm going to go up to that cretin over there and take his microphone away, and then I'm going to tell the crowd exactly where they can find Tiny's stash of loads. I might even tell them who gave me the key to this shithole."
"You wouldn't," she said. She was having no trouble focusing now.
"Watch," I said. I put down her drink and started around her. She made a feeble grab at my arm and missed. I was up the steps toward the door in two long strides, and Mr. Adipose was looking up in a dimly alarmed fashion when Nana finally caught up with me.
"Okay," she hissed with a slight stagger as she tried to stop moving. "Let's go." The lump of animal fat on the stool looked at us suspiciously, and she added, "Darling." She rubbed her forehead on my arm, teetered precariously, and said to him, "Some men. You never know when they're going to show up."
Fatso started to say something, but I shoved the curtain open and hauled Nana outside.
Nana shuddered, and I started to laugh. Now that we were outside she was subdued. "You're crazy, you know that?" she said. "Tiny could take your head off."
"It's time to be crazy. Nothing else will work now. Our whole problem is that we've been acting like we were dealing with sane people. If anybody on this case were sane, it wouldn't have happened in the first place. Get in." I held Alice's passenger door open.
She did, a little more cautiously than usual, and then slumped onto the seat. She was silent until we were a couple of blocks up Santa Monica. Then she snickered. "Boy," she said, "I've been kidnapped. Right out from under Tiny's nose." The snicker turned into a laugh, and she leaned back and shook her head.
"I'm glad you're amused. It may have cost you a job."
"Who cares? There's other nude bars. I can always go back to the airport." She waved a loose hand in front of her face as though she were too warm. "Swept away," she said.
"Or go back to computer school."
"Oh, sure," she said. "DOS eight-point-oh or whatever it's up to now. It could be DOS thirty-six for all I know. Or care."
"DOS thirty-eight sounds like your IQ this evening. In your case, DOS stands for Downers Over Sense."
"You're not my mother. You're not even dead old dad." She stopped talking abruptly and swallowed. Eventually she said, "He was there tonight, by the way."
"Who was?"
"Dead old dad. Aren't you listening?"
"What'd he want?"
She squinted fuzzily through the windshield. "Where are we going?"
"We're going home."
"Whose home?"
"What did your father want?"
She tangled her fingers together and twisted her hands. "If I answer you, will you answer me?" It sounded like a kids' game.
"Sure."
"Promise?"
I kept driving.
"He had this great idea," she said. Her voice was very tight. "He thought maybe we should move to Hawaii. Just the two of us, just Daddy and Nana. He wants to buy a club there."
"Club? What kind of club?"
She made a strangled sound that was somewhere between laughing and crying. "Sherlock Holmes," she said. "What kind of club do you think? Honest to fucking Christ, what kind of club do you think? Oh, Jesus," she said, and then everything fell apart and she was crying full out, nothing cosmetic or dainty, the kind of crying that puffs up people's eyes and makes stuff dangle from their nose.
I pulled Alice over to the curb and tried to get an arm around her. "No," I said. "He didn't mean that."
She yanked herself away from me. "Don't you tell me what he meant, you middle-class white asshole. He meant a nude club. He meant a place where girls dance naked and be real sweet to the customers." She leaned against the door opposite me.
"And what were you supposed to be?"
"Me?" she said. "I'm supposed to be Miss Oriental Universe. That way he gets to make money and watch me at the same time."
Traffic, L.A. traffic, whizzed by us as if it knew where it was going. The stoplight in front of us turned from green to red and then back again before I had any idea what to say.
"Honey," I said at last, "you're an orphan. Shine him on, say good-bye. Give Daddy a good punt into the far, far end of the end zone where Toby lives and start over."
She looked up at me, and her face, reflecting the bluish glow of the streetlights, was streaked with tears. "Right," she said. "Sure. Except you're talking about my father. When I was a little girl, you know? I mean, a real little girl, before. . Oh, shit. Forget it."
"Nana." I put my hand on her arm. "I'm not going to forget it. For God's sake, trust me. I deserve that much."
"Why should I trust you all of a sudden? I haven't trusted anybody since I was twelve."
"Then don't trust me. You're on your own anyway. You've known that for years."
"I used to pray, you know? When I was eleven, twelve years old and he started coming into my room, I used to pray. I prayed real loud. I hoped Mom would hear me even if You Know Who didn't. Nobody heard me."
"I hear you."
"And who knows what you want? Why should you want anything different? I'm shit. I've always been shit." She lifted her knees and dropped her chin onto them, crumpling into a smaller space than I would have believed possible. "If I hadn't been shit, he'd have treated me like a good little girl. He wouldn't have wanted me."
"He's shit," I said. "Toby's shit. Listen, everybody's shit sometimes. Everybody's crazy, and nobody wants to be. You never had a chance."
She threw both arms over her face and wailed. I sat as far from her as I could get in the enclosed space of the car and concentrated on counting to twenty. There was nothing else to do. She had her face cradled in her arms.
"Nana," I said into her sobs, "I can't fix anything. I can't make your life right, only you can do that. But you can do that. I'm not trying to sound like the Hour of Power or Ann Landers, but you can. And you already know it."
No answer, but she was crying more softly. Maybe she was listening. Great. Now I had to say something.
"I can't tell you anything you don't already know. Most of the time I don't even believe anybody can help anybody. But I do believe you've got to try."
Nana was sitting up now, gazing out the windshield through swollen eyes. Tears dripped from her chin. "So what should I do?" she asked.