The instruments were all sturdy enough, but even with the ocean, L.A. got dry enough in the summer that Andi liked to keep her guitars somewhat humidified. She’d like to keep herself somewhat humidified as well, but in the tiny house, with the piece-of-shit air conditioner that she suspected had fallen off a truck, probably in Chechnya, that was difficult.
She was a dry-looking girl; parched.
And she hadn’t seen Helen.
She got a beer from the refrigerator, popped the top, and since the house was too hot to stay in anyway, she walked next door and knocked. No answer. Knocked harder. Still no answer. She trudged back to her place, a little apprehensive now, a little scared, and found the key that Helen had given her.
She opened her neighbor’s door and smelled the death.
Not stinky or especially repulsive, but death all the same. To be sure, she walked back to Helen’s bedroom, where the old lady lay on her bed, in a nightgown with embroidered flowers across the chest, her head turned to one side. She looked desiccated, like a years-old yellowed cigarette found under a couch when you move.
“Helen?” Andi knew she was dead but called her name anyway. Then she called the cops.
Of all the stories Helen had told Andi, the most interesting was about a famous artist who’d painted her back in the late thirties, and that the painting itself had become famous, and now hung in a Kansas City museum. Helen had never been the star of a movie, or even the third banana, but she’d been the star of Thomas Hart Benton’s Hollywood, standing straight, tall, and only skimpily clothed in the center of the work. She’d shown Andi a book about Benton’s relationship to motion pictures, and to Hollywood in particular; and a black-and-white photograph of herself with Benton, who was holding a paintbrush and whose head came barely to her shoulder.
Andi knew some famous people — singers — but they were workaday people who’d happened to push all the right buttons and had gotten rich and famous, or one or the other. Just people. To be in a famous painting was something else: something that would carry you into the future, long after you were gone, and your music was gone, and your songs were gone...
The cops came and were quick and professional. They looked at the undisturbed body, sat Andi down, interviewed her and took a few notes, especially emphasizing the time between her discovery of the body and her call to 911 — Andi estimated it at thirty seconds. She was allowed to return to her house but was asked to stay around until a medical examiner’s investigator could speak to her.
That happened an hour and a half later. The investigator, a weary-looking woman in shoes like Andi’s, named Donna, told her that the cops had been interested in the timing of her call to be sure she hadn’t looted Helen’s house after she discovered the body.
“She didn’t have anything to loot, except maybe her wedding ring,” Andi said. “She was living on Social Security and payments on a reverse mortgage.”
Donna asked if Andi knew about survivors.
“Her son died two years ago, from being too fat. That’s what Helen said. She has a granddaughter and some great-grandchildren who live in San Diego, I think. She has one of those old Rolo things with their names written in them. Their name is Cooper. The daughter’s name is Sandra Cooper. I met her once, a couple of years ago.”
“A Rolodex, I saw that. I’ll notify the Coopers...” Donna made a note and asked, “Do you think she might have taken her own life? There was no note, no pill bottle or anything.”
“No, I don’t think so. She was a lively old lady. Not in pain or depressed or anything, as far as I could tell. She was looking forward to turning a hundred next fall. She was ninety-nine.”
They talked a while longer, and Andi cried a little, and Donna patted her on a knee, and when she was leaving told her, “I kind of think that most people wouldn’t want somebody to say this after they die, but... her death looks to me like it was totally routine. She got old and died.”
Andi nodded. “That’s what I think. But she lived so long. She knew so much. Now that’s all gone. Gone.”
“You gonna be okay?”
“Sure. I’m okay. Sad.”
“And you’re a musician?”
“Yes. Play guitar, I do session work. I work a couple nights a week over at the Guitar Center on Sunset,” Andi said.
“I think you’re probably good folks.” Donna nodded. “You take it easy, girl.”
The girl with the ax got off the bus at the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and Gower Street and started walking the superheated eleven blocks down Gower to Waring Avenue, where she still lived by herself in a four-hundred-square-foot bungalow with an air conditioner designed and manufactured by cretins.
She took the right on Waring, and the first thing she saw was a U-Haul truck and an SUV parked outside Helen’s house. The truck’s back doors were open, and she could see Helen’s two-cushion couch and television inside it. She walked past, looking through the open door, and could see a man pushing a desk across the wooden floor. He looked out and saw her, and she lifted a hand and went into her own house, unlocked it and put the ax in the humidifier cabinet and got herself a beer.
It had been two weeks since Helen died, and a piece of cop tape had been stuck on the door ever since, to keep people out. Andi had gotten her guitars and amps back from the Bridge and had been working at a place called Grassroots in Pasadena, laying down tracks for a Bakersfield country band that was, she had to admit, really pretty good. The front man had spent some time chatting her up, and she’d liked it; and she’d noticed that the band’s own lead guitarist had some kind of ego conflict going with the front man.
She was thinking about the singer, whose name was Tony, and thinking that if he lost his lead guitar and she went on the road with the band, how she’d wind up sleeping with him. That prospect was pleasant enough — the sex part, not the road part — but then she’d lose her place in the L.A. session world, which kept her in a house, and the job at Guitar Center, which kept her in fish sticks and fries.
The fact was, she was $1,450.88 from being broke, and the transmission was broker. Summer was slow; even with no crises along the way, she needed every dollar she could find to keep her head above water until the busy season started again, in October. She wasn’t desperate, she’d been here before, financially, but from where she was, she could see desperate.
Halfway through the beer, the man she’d seen at Helen’s house rang the doorbell. He was sort of piggish, she thought as she walked toward the door. Probably her age, in his later twenties, middle height, overweight, with a short, oily flattop over heavy pink cheeks. He was wearing a black T-shirt and tan cargo shorts. The T-shirt showed a slogan: THAT’S TOO MUCH BACON and in smaller letters, beneath.... SAID NO ONE, EVER. He apparently tried to live up to it.
“Can I help you?”
The man looked at a piece of paper in his hand. “Are you Andi Holt?”
“Yup.”
“You found my great-grandma when she died?”
“Yes, I found Helen.”
“Could you come over for a minute? My brother and sister and I are going through the place, checking out what she had.”
“Sure.”
On the way over, she asked, “What’s your name?”
“Don Cooper. My brother’s Bob, my sister’s Cheryl. There’s about a ton of paper shit in there; we’re trying to figure out what to do with it.”