The Manipulated (Joe Portugal Mysteries) (22 page)

Joni gave me ten seconds of her precious youth and fled the room. “She’ll be out of here soon,” Sarah said. “Then it’ll be that empty nest thing for Tone and me. Come, have something to drink.”

Soon we were sitting in the living room, her with a cup of coffee, me with a mug of Red Rose. I looked around, noticing how solidly middle-class everything was. Bookcases with an assortment of mystery novels and self-help books, and one shelf filled with an antique World Book. Nice furniture, comfortable, worn. A Hendrix poster, the same one a couple of players in the Toby Bonner affair had had, but this one nicely framed and hung next to a reproduction of those Van Gogh irises at the Getty. There were photos of their three daughters—the others were Judy and Janis—and of the grandkids I’d avoided at Voom. I looked them over, made the appropriate comments, related my own childless state.

We talked about old times, touching on that night up at Pyramid Lake. I told her how good it had made me feel when she pulled me into the huddle with Tony and her. We did the discussion I was having uncomfortably often, the one about where did the time go and how could it be that it was forty years since the Beatles showed up and was it or wasn’t it about time Jagger stopped strutting about onstage like a demented rooster.

Joni stopped by, guitar case in hand, on her way out. She was headed for practice. Her band was called the Felonious Monks, and they did acid-folk-punk. Sarah told her to make sure she got something to eat. Joni rolled her eyes and escaped.

Tony came home from his job at the Mobil refinery, and things grew more nostalgic. They invited me to dinner. I called Gina and told her what was up and accepted the invite. While the food was cooking Tony pulled out a couple of acoustics, and we revisited some of the old repertoire. After we ate we reminisced some more, with the soundtrack to the sixties on the stereo. Tony fell asleep on the couch, woke up, took his leave. When Sarah and I sat down again I remembered what it was I’d come for.

“I wanted to talk to you about Mike,” I said.

“I thought so.”

“Oh?”

“Just a feeling. A vibe.”

“Heavy.”

She smiled, took a candy from a dish on the lamp table, unwrapped it, sucked on it. “Like I need to be eating this.”

What do you say to that?

“It’s okay,” she said. “I stopped worrying about my weight long ago.” She dropped the wrapper on the coffee table. “How long have you known Mike?”

“Month, month and a half.”

“I’ve known him twenty-five years. Almost since he took over at Feed Your Head. Went in one day for a birthday present for Tony. The four of us, we saw a lot of each other for a while.”

“What was she like?”

“She was a good woman. We weren’t that close, actually. Never did anything just the two of us, but Mike and Tony and me really got along and she came along for the ride. She and Mike were really tight.” She eyed me. “By the time she disappeared, we’d stopped hanging out so much. You know how that goes. Saw each other a few times a year.” Her teeth cracked down on the candy. “You probably think he’s a big goof.”

“Kind of.”

“He always was. But there was another side of him back then, a practical one. He may have run a head shop, but he ran it well.”

“He’s not still running it well?”

“He’s got people running it well. He’s pretty much hands off. He just comes in and hangs out with the people you and Tony and I would have ended up as, if we hadn’t gotten straight lives.”

The music had run out. She got up, took out Jefferson Airplane, put on Dylan. “Rainy Day Women” came over the speakers, and I nodded my head in time. Sarah dimmed the lights, lit a couple of candles, sat back down. She took off her shoes and curled her feet under her. “Just like the old days,” she said.

“It’ll never be like the old days. Even the old days weren’t like the old days.”

“You’re saying we remember it better than it was.”

“Everyone does. Our parents did. The thirties, the forties, it was all great. Conveniently forgetting the Depression and the war and all that.”

“You’ve become quite the philosopher.”

“I’ve become quite the cynic, is what I’ve become.”

A key in the front door. It opened and Joni came in. Sarah asked if she’d had fun and Joni said she had, and that they had a new song that was really cool. Generations came and generations went, but
cool
stuck around.

Joni said she was going to bed. She and Sarah hugged. It was clear that they loved each other. Liked each other too.

In one of those alternate universes, Sarah and I got off on a discussion of kids, my childlessness, the possibility of adopting, all that crap. We never talked about the late Dennis Lennox.

In the one we were actually in, I said, “You knew Dennis when he was growing up, right?”

Her eyes met mine. “Uh-huh.”

“When did he start being such a shit?”

“He wasn’t so bad.”

“Sarah. This is Joe you’re talking to. Velour Overground Joe. Pyramid Lake Joe. I spent a rotten evening up at his house with a bunch of people he’d screwed over, while the cops scraped him off the rug.”

“Okay. I can tell you exactly when it was. It was in high school. His junior year. There was a girl. They were in love, in that high school way. They one day she was in love with another boy. Dennis took it hard.”

“How hard?”

“Trying-to-kill-himself hard.”

“I didn’t know.”

“Only other person you’ve met who’d be likely to know is Mike—well, and Tony—and Mike’s not likely to bring it up.”

“What’d he do?”

“Tried to hang himself in his room. They put him in an institution for a while. Got him therapy. He got better.”

“How much better?”

“Enough to go back to school and on to college. Not enough to ever have a normal relationship with a woman again.”

“He wanted to hurt them before they hurt him.” She nodded.

“And that never stopped,” I said.

“Right.”

“And he found out he liked it.”

“That’s the feeling I get.”

“So much that he started acting that way with everyone.”

“Yes,” she said.“There were only two people who weren’t fair game for getting run over.”

“Mike and Donna.”

“They never stopped trying to straighten him out. It was very frustrating for both of them. But when Donna disappeared, Mike did stop trying. He just let Dennis do his thing.”

“You know a lot about this,” I said. “Considering you and they weren’t that close anymore.”

“We had an interest,Tony and I.”

“What kind?”

“Our oldest. Judy. They went out for a while. Six, seven years ago.”

“I’m sorry.”

“By that time, we knew what he was like. We warned her. She wouldn’t have any of it. She thought she was the one who could make him straighten up and fly right.”

“What did he—no, forget that. I don’t need details.”

“She was lucky. She met a guy not long after.” She turned to the pictures of her grandkids. “There’s the result.”

I left Sarah and Tony’s near midnight with promises that the four of us would get together soon. That would go one of three ways. It might happen, and we’d all really hit it off and become good buddies. Or it would never happen; there might be a call or two, but somehow we’d never find the right date and after a while the calls would stop.

The most likely scenario was that we would uncover a night that matched all our schedules, and one couple would come to the other’s house, or we’d meet on neutral ground, and the evening would be pleasant enough. There might even be one more. But after that I’d never see Sarah and Tony again.

Gina barely noticed when I got into bed, and I fell asleep quickly. We both woke up a little after three. There was a helicopter overhead and a searchlight flashing in and out of our window. I felt my way into the living room and peered out into the street. A man was running by, wearing only a sweatshirt and one flip-flop. He stopped in front of the Clement house, looked up at the helicopter, turned and ran back the way he came. A few seconds later a cop car went by, siren blaring, lights flashing. This major threat to society must have been captured shortly thereafter. The loud noises went away. The lights that had popped on up and down the block blinked out.

We went back to bed, but I couldn’t sleep. I tossed and turned and drove Gina crazy. I got up and went in the living room and watched more James Bond. When it was over the penis enhancement infomercial came on. I switched channels until I found a show about otters and watched it until I fell asleep. In my dream, I was playing a beat-up acoustic guitar. I’d removed all the frets above the seventh because I never played that far up the neck. Then the frets I’d taken off turned into worms and grew enormous and took over the world. I woke up on the floor between the couch and the coffee table. There was vague daylight beyond the windows.

I hauled myself up, went out and retrieved the newspaper from the lawn. I checked out the obits and Ramirez’s latest reactionary editorial cartoon. Then a quick scan of the front page. Then onto the Calendar.

Where, on the first page, there was a big article about Beyoncé Knowles. How she was going to continue recording with Destiny’s Child, even though her solo career was going great guns. She seemed like a nice enough young woman. Levelheaded. Probably kind to dogs and children. Multitalented too, judging from that Austin Powers movie.

Only her name bugged me. That accent over the second
e.
It seemed pretentious. But I supposed it was necessary. Because her name was
Bay-on-say
, not
Bay-onss
, and—

I called myself names.

It wasn’t “Beyoncé” that Lu had mumbled as she was nodding off. It was something else entirely. She’d swallowed the first syllable. And I was the one who’d added the
-ay
sound.

What she was saying—and what she had referred to as a club, something I conveniently forgot—was “Ambiance.”

And I knew just who to call to find out more about that.

I searched the file Claudia Acuna had given me, found the number I needed, dialed it. The woman who answered said she’d been awake; her tone said otherwise. I told her what I wanted. She said she’d be happy to see me. She either meant it or was a better actress than I’d suspected.

Trixie Trenton’s place was in Beachwood Canyon in Hollywood. It was just up the block from the former home of another actress I once knew. I hadn’t been up the canyon since, and as I drove past Laura’s place I saw her orange cat, which a couple of neighbor boys adopted after she was murdered. He was sunning himself on the hood of a car. He lifted his head and watched as I drove by.

Trixie lived upstairs in one of the dozens of dingbat-style apartment buildings that lined the street. There was a bookcase with five or six books. The rest of the shelves were loaded with cheerleading trophies, cast-and-crew photos, porcelain animals, a bowl with two goldfish. And a shrine. It included a foot-tall stone statue of some Asian deity with several extra arms, a couple of candles, a bowl of what looked like cornmeal. Plus a wooden frog and a plastic duck. The candles were lit and made the place smell like vanilla. The whole thing reminded me of Donna Lennox’s memorial at DL Tea, though this one was a fair bit tackier.

Exercise equipment dominated the living room. A stair-climber and a Bowflex were the main pieces of apparatus. The Bowflex looked a lot more like a medieval torture machine than it did on late-night commercials.

Trixie was barefoot, wearing a loose T-shirt and running shorts and an Angels cap with a ponytail pulled through the opening in back. She came across a whole lot better than in the urban slut outfit she’d worn at Dennis’s.

Snoogums, though, looked the same. He flew in from the bedroom, sniffed my shoes and cuffs, sneered, hid behind the stair-climber.

I sat on the sofa, accepted a cup of chamomile tea, commented on all the exercise gear.

“I’m kind of a fanatic,” she said. “Always have been, ever since I was a kid.”

“Why here? Why not go to the gym? This stuff takes up a lot of space.”

“This is so much easier. And here I don’t have to worry about guys staring at my boobs and coming on to me.”

“Don’t they have all-women gyms?”

“Then I’d have girls staring at my boobs and coming on to me. Who do you think goes to all-women gyms?”

“Never thought about it. Did Dennis ever come over here?”

She picked up her mug, blew on her chamomile. “He never saw the place. His driver did once.”

“He sent a driver?”

“And I, stupid little idiot that I am, thought that was oh so romantic.”

“You must have known about him when you went out with him the first time.”

“I’d heard stories. You hear stories about a lot of men. Sometimes you know they must be true, and you think, who cares, I’ll have a good time, I’m not looking for Mr. Wonderful. I didn’t think I’d fall for him.”

“How long did you go out?”

“Just a few weeks. Maybe a month”

“Where did Cozumel fall in there?”

“You know about that?”

“Samantha told me.”

“Samantha. That girl and I ought to get together.” She’d curled herself up on her end of the sofa with her feet under her, just like Sarah the night before. “It was about a week in. That was where he wove his spell on me.”

Wove his spell
. This didn’t sound like the ditz I’d seen up at Dennis’s place. And her voice hadn’t a trace of the grating quality I’d heard before. “Was this before or after you took him to Ambiance?”

“Before.”

I turned to the shrine.“How long have you been involved?”

“Two years.”

“Has it helped?”

“It got me out of those Playboy Channel things I was doing.”

“What about the hardcore stuff ?”

She frowned. “Let’s make a deal. Why don’t you tell me everything you know about me, and stop dishing it out one little piece at a time.”

“That’s everything.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“Okay, then. Yes. It got me out of hardcore, softcore, the website, everything.”