The Manipulated (Joe Portugal Mysteries) (3 page)

She held onto my hand. “You don’t remember, do you?”

“Should I?”

“The Velour Overground.”

One of the many bands I’d been in after the demise of the Platypuses. I was twenty or so.

“I was Sarah Halliwell then. Tony’s girlfriend.”

Tony Jennings was our singer. I thought back …

It was 1971, give or take a year. Tony and one of the other guys in the band lived in a trailer up in Newhall. We spent endless hours up there jamming and smoking dope. Sarah would sometimes noodle on the decrepit upright piano the guys had picked up in a garage sale.

One night between Christmas and New Year’s we got hold of some mescaline. We were up all night, listening to Rotary Connection’s first album over and over, looking for hidden meanings in the lyrics. Around five in the morning Tony suddenly announced he was going for a drive in his Alfa convertible. He wanted company. I decided to provide it. Somewhere between the sofa and the front door Sarah joined us.

She was a lot thinner in those days and could squeeze herself into the little area behind the seats. I rode shotgun. We kept the top up. We still had a little of our sanity. Tony drove well for someone tripping on mescaline.

We ended up at Pyramid Lake. We sat freezing our asses off on the shore, while the sun came up, discussing whatever kids that age think is deep. Tony sat with his arm around Sarah, with me a couple of feet away, the third wheel as usual. Then she looked at me, smiled, motioned me to come over. I did, and she put her arm around me. We sat like that, watch-ing the colors. I felt good. I felt loved.

Then the cops came.

We weren’t carrying, having used up our last joint half an hour before, smoking it down to the tiniest of roaches before Tony flicked it into the water. The cops dragged us down to the station anyway. They made us sit on hard wooden benches while they lectured us on the evils of drugs.

I was living with my cousin Elaine at the time, in my parents’ Culver City house, the one I still live in. She had to drive up there and pick me up. Tony and Sarah were still there when I left. It was the last I ever saw of them. The Velour Overground disintegrated and I went on to another lame band.

“Whatever happened to Tony?” I said.

“I married him.”

“You still married?”

“Thirty-one years last March. Want to see pictures of my grandchildren?”

“Uh …”

“I’m kidding. So. I’d ask what you’ve been up to, but I’ve seen your commercials. Also saw you on the news a couple of times.”

The commercials were for Olsen’s Natural Garden Solutions. The ongoing gig brought in a significant chunk of my income. My appearances on the news resulted from an accidental crimefighting career that had resulted in the apprehension of two murderers and the demise of two would-be ones. The last episode had been around the time of the Platypus reunion.

I told Sarah the only thing that had changed lately was my marital status. We shot the shit until the drummer said they ought to be getting back. After the second set Mike and I hung out with the band over a beer. When I left I traded phone numbers with Sarah.

Mike and I went outside and decided to get something to eat. We went to a coffee shop farther east on Sunset and grabbed an open table. The waitress came by, swept up the two quarters on the table, said, “Big spenders, that last crew.”

“We’ll do better,” Mike said.

“See that you do,” she said, handing us menus.

We ordered burgers, fries, Cokes. Then cherry pie for me, Jell-O for Mike. We yakked for a long time, until the waitress loomed over us. “Need the table.”

Mike insisted on paying. He left a third of the bill as a tip. “Make up for the last prick,” he said. We went outside, climbed into his ancient Mustang, drove north on Crescent Heights into Laurel Canyon.

“Where we headed?” I said.

“Take a ride with me.”

“It’s kind of late. Maybe I ought to be getting home.”

“You really want to go home?”

There was something appealing about the prospect of gallivanting around all night. I’d done it regularly when I was young, on occasion in my theater years, not at all since. I remembered the first time I’d stayed out all night, wind-ing up in San Pedro watching the ships as the sun came up. A treasured memory of my wasted youth.

And the later you get home,
some voice in my head said,
the more likely Gina will be asleep.

“Drive,” I said.

We continued up the canyon and turned left onto Mulholland. Neither of us said much. The first Moby Grape album was in the stereo. You know you’ve found a kindred soul when they play Moby Grape in the car.

We passed Coldwater, then Beverly Glen. “Omaha” came on.
Listen, my friends
, the Grape insisted. We came around a curve, and Mike suddenly pulled the wheel to the right and skidded to a stop at an overlook. Down below the lights of the San Fernando Valley blossomed, myriad random pin-pricks superimposed on a gridwork of streets and avenues.

“I got to tell you something,” Mike said. “Do you want to hear it?”

“Depends on what it is.”

“Nope,” he said. “It doesn’t.”

This surrealistic exchange had me a little frightened, especially when shared with someone who’d lured me to a deserted section of Mulholland Drive at two o’clock in the morning.

“Yeah,” I said. “I do.”

The dim light cast by the instrument panel revealed his nod. He turned off the lights and engine, rolled down his window.“Donna and I were married in 1975.” Donna was his wife’s name. That much I’d gotten out of him. “Denny came along a little after that. You’re sure you want to hear this?”

“I said I did, didn’t I?”

He paused, reached into a jacket pocket, and suddenly he had a lit cigarette. “You know DL Tea? On San Vicente in Brentwood?”

“I’ve seen it.”

“DL’s for Donna Lennox. She started the place in ’83. A tearoom at first, but things changed. She kept the tearoom for the little old ladies, but mostly she sold loose tea. Turned out lots of people weren’t happy with the crap they put in teabags.” He took a hit off his cigarette, blew smoke out the window. “There’s five DLs now. Besides the first one, there’s Santa Barbara, Long Beach, South Coast Plaza, San Diego.” Another pull on the cigarette, more smoke out the window. “Four and a half years ago, Donna went on a buying trip to China. I was gonna go with her, but the week before we were supposed to leave I broke my leg playing softball and the doctor wouldn’t let me travel. So she went alone. She never came back.”

The lights below fascinated me. I could spend hours just watching them. Counting the red ones down on Woodman Avenue, starting all over again every time one of them changed. Trying to figure out where there was a park, or a school, or anything at all that could occupy my mind.

Because I had a feeling, and I wanted it to disappear. Some people have feelings all the time. And if any of them ever pan out, you hear about it forever, no matter how low a percentage proves to be true. But I hardly ever get them. I had one the day I met Gina, knowing our lives would be intertwined somehow, and that’s how things turned out, though we only knew each other a little while back then, and it was nine years until we got back together and things got interesting.

And now I had another feeling, and I was dead sure that unless I jumped out of the car, found my way down the hill and back home by myself, and never again had anything to do with Mike Lennox, from then on our lives would be connected.

I put my hand on the door handle … and remembered my recent midlife crisis. The one I was probably still going through. And how over and over I’d thought about my life likely being two-thirds over, and how many things I’d failed to appreciate, and how many things I’d avoided because of the possibility of pain or disappointment or even a little inconvenience.

My hand dropped from the door. “What happened?”

He snuffed his cigarette in the ashtray.“She had an appointment with someone at one of the plantations. He had a new oolong, and she wanted to bring it into the States. A driver picked her up at the hotel. They never made it.”

“The driver?”

“Dead. Skull crushed. On the road a couple of miles from where they were going.”

“I’m sorry.”

“The Chinese government blamed bandits.”

We sat quietly. Below, traffic lights traversed their endless cycle. Green, yellow, red. Green, yellow, red.

“You went over there,” I said. Don’t ask me how I knew. Like I said, connected.

“Broken leg and all. Spent five weeks in China. Went to the hotel, the tea plantation, the place they found the car, over and over. Found a guide, an old guy who got a kick out of bugging the officials, and he took me some places I wasn’t supposed to go. But after all was said and done, nothing.”

“What about our government? Couldn’t they help?”

“I suppose they
could
have, and they did, as much as was convenient. But I always felt this pressure from them, like they wanted to tell me without actually saying the words to forget about her, it was over and done with, and in the long run things would be better if I just left it alone. I went through that whole five stages of grief business, but the whole thing was screwed up because I still wasn’t convinced there was anything to feel grief about. So I spent a lot of time in denial, bounced back and forth between the others, ended up back in denial. Which is where I still am, basically.”

He turned to me, tried a smile. “Been a long time since I’ve told anyone about this.”

“Why me?”

“A vibe.”

He started the car, checked the road. A motorcycle came whipping past, its rider wearing one of those silly little helmets like Arte Johnson’s on
Laugh-In
. As the rumble faded we got back on Mulholland and drove west. Mike picked up the 405 and drove me home. Neither of us said another word except, “G’night, man.”

I filled a water glass, brought it to my nightstand. I brushed my teeth. I got undressed, climbed into bed, and after a moment rolled over to nestle next to Gina. She stirred, said, “What time is it?”

“Three-something.”

“You were with Mike the whole time?”

“No, I picked up a woman.”

I’d made similar dumb jokes dozens of times. It just slipped out.

“Funny,” she said.“You and another woman. Never happen.”

Now’s the time. Now or never. Come clean.

I gathered my thoughts. “Gi?” I said. “I have to tell you something.”

No reply. “Gi?”

Nothing. She was out again.

I lay there thinking about her, how for the first time in my life I was being dishonest with her, how I should just shake her, wake her, tell her the story. I put a hand on her arm, gave a jiggle. Not much of one. Not enough to awaken her. But I could tell myself I tried.

I thought about how devastated I’d be if she disappeared. How strong Mike Lennox was even to survive. Then I was out too.

Wednesday morning. I’d told Gina about the missing Donna Lennox. But not about the missing hours of my life. The optimum moment was gone. My resolve had been dashed.

I went into my parents’ old bedroom to feed the canaries, a legacy from one of my murdered friends. All eight were glad to see me. At least I convinced myself they were. The telephone rang and the birds all provided harmony. I told them to shut up and went to get it. It was Elaine, with an audition late that afternoon for a new drug called Lidovec. I’d noticed more pharmaceutical commercials on TV lately, people high on Claritin cavorting in the fields, little oval entities pushing Zoloft, a guy who took some pill and suddenly found his aim so improved he could throw a football through a tire swinging at the end of a rope. With some of them, they never even said what the drug was for. If you had the affliction, they assumed, you’d know all about the possible treatments. If you didn’t, they didn’t care about you.

“What’s this Lidovec stuff for, anyway?”

“Herpes.”

The audition went okay. The casting director wanted to know if I’d ever had herpes. I told her you don’t “ever have” it, you get it and have it forever. I didn’t usually mouth off to casting people, but she looked barely out of her teens and she irritated me. I walked out figuring I’d blown it, and not caring. It surprised me when Elaine called in the morning with the callback. It surprised me more when, a day later, I got the job.

On Sunday night Mike took me to another hockey game. There’d been a ticket available for Gina too, but she had plans with her mother. “Basketball, I would blow her off,” she said. “All those sweaty young black men. But not hockey.”

This game was even tighter than the last, with the Kings and Rangers tied at the end of regulation. They went into overtime. With less than a minute left, with the whole crowd on its feet, a fight started on the ice, against the boards on the far side, right opposite us. Mike grabbed his binoculars and peered down at the action, as each combatant tried to pull the other’s shirt over his head. Each one got a couple of good shots in; then the officials separated them and started doling out penalties.

I turned to Mike to say something. He was still staring through his binoculars. He wasn’t pointed at anything happening on the ice, as far as I could see, but was still focused on the area the fight had been in.

“What are you looking at?” I said.

He didn’t say anything. His expression didn’t change. But something about him did, like a load had been lifted and another dropped in to take its place.

He climbed past me, headed for the back of the box. The binocular strap dangled from his hand.

“Mike?” I said.

He kept going, ripped the door open, went flying out.

Whatever it was that got him going like that, he might need help.

I ran after him.

I spotted him at the end of the corridor, near the escalators, elbowing his way into the crush of people who couldn’t bother to stick around for a couple more minutes to see how the game came out. Then I lost sight of him. I ran down there and inserted myself into the crowd, let the mass of people carry me to the top of the escalator. Halfway down I caught another glimpse of Mike. He’d made it to the bottom and was running along the concourse. When I got off I went the same way.