Authors: Daphna Edwards Ziman
“I’m looking for the girl who does the Marilyn act.”
“Join the club,” droned a tall Asian dancer in a green evening gown. “She left us in the shitter tonight, without a headlining act.” She dragged a tube of red lipstick across her mouth and then pushed past Jake. “Excuse me, I’m on.” Jake stepped back courteously, and the woman winked as she passed him.
“Kelly didn’t show up today,” rasped another voice. Jake looked appreciatively at a petite, pale redhead in a black silk kimono. She dangled a cigarette between her fingers and sat back in her chair, her feet up on the makeup counter. “Some of her stuff is still here.” The redhead poked her cigarette toward a pile of costumes in the corner, abandoning any sense of concern for privacy or confidentiality.
“Do you mind?” asked Jake, gesturing to the pile. “She might have left me a clue or a note,” he added, taking a calculated risk with this falsehood. Perhaps he would be told that Kelly had somebody and it wasn’t him—information that could be helpful.
The redhead shrugged. “I don’t care.”
Jake dug through the dresses, five or six of them, in red and black. Underneath were some high-heeled shoes and gloves. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for, but he knew this wasn’t it.
“She leave anything else?”
“Nope. Took her makeup kit.”
“You could look in here.” Another dancer, who appeared to be seventeen at the very most, materialized at Jake’s elbow. She smiled at him, and Jake noticed the faintest scar running from between her nostrils to her upper lip. At the end of the room was a closet door. The girl opened it and Jake jolted, then laughed. The closet had four shelves, and on every shelf stood three Styrofoam heads, each wearing a wig. There were red, black, blonde, and brunette wigs, along with three platinum blonde ones. His hunch was completely crazy. Like he’d thought before, how many Marilyn wigs were there in Las Vegas? In less than twenty-four hours, he’d seen at least five.
Jake smiled at the young dancer. “Your big bad boss around?”
“I just saw him at the bar.”
“Thanks,” said Jake, then whispered, “Get out of this place as soon as you can.”
The girl looked at him, surprised. “You mean tonight?” she called after him, confused.
Jake entered the club through a door at the end of the hall and headed for the bar. He could see the owner at a dark table in the back, sitting by a showgirl who looked like Britney Spears. His hand was on her back, and his thumb was worming its way under her halter top.
Shrake was known to be a liar and a cheat, a balding cherub of a man with the unforgiving eyes of a hyena. Their meeting the night before had been less than friendly, as Jake recalled it now. While Brooks had been engrossed in “Marilyn Monroe’s” act, Shrake had scurried up to him with a briefcase. He’d opened it on his lap. It was filled with money, of course. Jake had been annoyed.
“You trying to ask me for a favor?” he’d said, jerking his chin at the briefcase.
Shrake had pulled back, feigning injury. Pulling his chubby face into a serious expression, he’d simpered, “I got a pal up on murder one.”
“A hit?”
“I’d say, uh, self-defense.”
Jake sighed. “What does the DA say?”
“Seems they found fifty G’s on my friend.”
“You want me to go to all the trouble of seducing a jury and the media for a bill-collecting hit man? I don’t think so.”
“It’s a retainer. Fifty G’s, to be exact.” Shrake had peered expectantly at Jake’s face. Jake’s eyes flicked to the briefcase, then back to the singer.
“Well?” pressed Shrake.
“Know what I need more than that? Spiritual balance.”
Shrake’s jaw twitched. “You could buy a whole bunch of spiritual balance with this.”
Jake had tipped the last of his drink into his mouth, keeping his eyes on Marilyn. Then something in Kelly’s look caught his attention. While her seduction act was razor-sharp, he noticed a sense of purpose with every movement. She was searching every corner of the room. For a split second, their eyes locked. There was a sudden sense of recognition in her expression. But in an instant a protective shield came across her face.
Who the hell
are
you?
he had said to himself. Aloud, he’d replied to the mobster, “Here’s where we differ, hombre. You see cash in that briefcase. I see a media circus, grueling, tedious work, and boredom.”
Shrake raised his voice. “This guy saved my life once. I promised him I’d convince you to get him off.”
“Relax. Lawyers make up eleven percent of the world’s population. Seventy percent of those lawyers live here in the U.S. of A. You’ll find somebody.” Jake had enjoyed pulling statistics from midair and making them sound real. “I don’t represent bill-collecting hit men,” he had added, noticing the chanteuse just inches away. With his elbow, he had pushed the briefcase closed.
Shrake had scuttled angrily away.
Now, Jake sauntered over to Shrake’s table and planted both hands on it as he leaned over the small man.
“What the fuck?” Shrake shouted. The Britney Spears showgirl took a drag on her cigarette.
“I hear your prized possession didn’t show up today. I’d like to lay an eye on her again.”
“You’re right. Bitch isn’t here. Those kinds of girls disappear overnight.”
“What’d you do, try to rape her?”
“Fuck, man, are you kidding?” whined Shrake. “That one was untouchable. Tough as nails.” The girl next to him smirked. Jake smiled at her. “You’ll never see her here again.”
“I want her address.”
Shrake’s eyes narrowed. “Well, get in line.”
“I can turn you into a quivering mass of snot in the courtroom.”
“You’re not scaring—”
“The juvenile prostitutes you’ve got working at your bar. Your friend with the fifty G’s. Your needle dick—”
“Alright, alright,” the club owner scowled. Jake followed him back to his office, which stank of beer and dirty socks. Shrake undid the combination lock on a small black filing cabinet. Shuffling through a stack of papers, he mumbled to himself, “Fucking lawyers.” He threw a page at Jake. “This is what she filled out when she started working here.”
Jake looked at the paper.
NAME: KELLY JENSEN. AGE: 24. ADDRESS: 2518 MANZANITA LANE
. Stapled to the sheet was a Xerox of her driver’s license. Jake squinted at the picture. The woman wasn’t smiling, but her eyes were intensely focused, set above high cheekbones. Her hair looked sleek and glossy, even in the photocopy. She looked nothing like Marilyn Monroe. But she did look familiar, even without her costume, in a beautiful-showgirl sort of way. Jake folded the papers in half lengthwise and slid them into his inside jacket pocket to keep himself from staring too hard.
Shrake had seen him looking, though.
“That girl thinks her shit don’t stink,” he said, running the back of his wrist across his nose. “She ain’t gonna give you the time of day.”
“You know, Shrake, you’re the kind of guy who thinks it’s raining when someone spits on you.”
Shrake grumbled as he put the folder away. “You got what you wanted. Get the fuck out of my club.”
* * *
Jake’s heart pounded as he drove to Kelly Jensen’s house. He wasn’t sure what he would say if he found her there. It was the middle of the night. He knew this might not go over well.
Reaching Manzanita Lane, a street of circa-1970 tract houses, he slowed. A few of the driveways had boats or RVs in them. Most of the houses, however, appeared to have huddled down, as if shivering in the desert-cold night. Twenty-five-twelve, twenty-five-fourteen, twenty-five-sixteen. Jake drove two houses past Kelly’s, shut off the lights and engine, and watched the house in his rearview mirror. It was completely dark. No porch light. Jake reached for the flashlight in his glove box and got out of the car. The street was deserted too. The only sounds were the whoosh of traffic on a nearby boulevard and the crackling of power lines overhead.
Jake crept up to the house, gauging the windows. There were no signs of life. He edged over to a side gate, trying the latch. It opened easily, and he stole along the side of the house. The backyard was overgrown with flowers and decorated with an assortment of scarecrows obviously created by children. A concrete patio covered by a wooden pergola painted red was just outside a sliding-glass door that led inside. On impulse, Jake tried it. To his surprise, it slid open. Fighting logic, he stepped in and closed it behind him.
When his eyes adjusted to the darkened interior, he found himself in a room that seemed entirely beige, from the carpets to the walls to the canvas sofa that looked newly covered. Long, parallel strips of moonlight stretched across the floor, swaying in time with the swinging vertical blinds. Jake flicked on the flashlight and threw some light
around the room. He was in a little living area. The front door was directly across from the sliding-glass door he had entered; a hall cut through the room to both the left and the right. The place seemed small and old-fashioned, but clean and freshly painted.
Jake chose the hall to the left and crept lightly across the carpet, stopping every few seconds to listen. Three doors led off the hallway. The first was a bathroom. Jake wiggled his arm up into his shirtsleeve and used the fabric to cover his hand before opening the drawers. He saw about two dozen plastic makeup containers and gobs of assorted skin-colored putty. In contrast, the medicine cabinet was empty.
Jake moved to another room and saw a queen-sized bed stripped of sheets, a dresser, a TV. The dresser was empty except for a lavender sachet in the corner of the top drawer. The closet contained only coat hangers. Jake turned on the TV: MSNBC. He turned it off.
He went through the third door and found two twin beds, also stripped. A poster of van Gogh’s
Irises
was on the wall and a basket of dried flowers on a side table. He slid open the closet. It was empty except for some child-sized coat hangers.
Did this woman have kids? Jake’s curiosity deepened.
He went back down the hallway and crossed through the living room into the kitchen. It was very clean and, like the other rooms, almost totally empty. A narrow yellow countertop ran underneath a window that overlooked the front yard. Yellow curtains with red cherries on them framed the window. The fridge was yellow too. Inside, it was pretty bare: an old milk carton, some slices of American cheese. A small round table, painted red, stood next to the fridge, along with three chairs. Jake found some empty soup tins in the trash can under the sink.
He wandered back to the living room again, not sure what he was looking for. He turned on the TV. It was tuned to QVC. He turned it off, pushed
EJECT
on the DVD player. After a whine and
a click, a disk slid out:
Sesame Street Dance with Me.
So she did have kids, or at least kids lived here too. Jake sank down on the couch and let his mind wander. What was he really doing here? Breaking into a woman’s house to try to get a date?
His thoughts looped back to his original excuse for coming here. A platinum blonde wig had been found in Porter’s hotel room. This nightclub singer, Kelly Jensen, had worn a platinum blonde wig on the night of Porter’s murder. Jake laughed aloud. Not much of a connection. He pictured a hairstylist being cross-examined into admitting that any number of platinum blonde wigs could be combed into a Monroe style. Even so, he pressed the idea further. Kelly Jensen left her job—and her house—the day after Porter’s murder. Still not much of a connection. There had been blonde hairs in Porter’s hotel room bed. Kelly Jensen’s driver’s license said she had blonde hair. It was too ridiculous. Jake knew that even he could never lead a jury to connect those faint dots. So again the question raised itself, why was he here?
A second later, someone was pounding on the front door. Jake flew behind the end of the couch and held his breath.
“Who’s in there? I’ve got a bat.” A man’s voice.
Boom, boom, boom
. Something heavy, presumably the bat, struck the door. “Open up. We know you’re in there.”
Jake tried to calculate the time it would take him to open the sliding-glass door, sprint across the weedy backyard, and scale the cinder-block wall.
The front doorknob jiggled.
“We seen your light,” came the man’s voice. There was some mumbling, and Jake thought he heard a woman’s voice, too. Even if he got across the yard and over the fence, he would have to come back for his car. He couldn’t risk doing that right away, with the man standing there, but he didn’t want to leave it either. Even
though it was two houses down, the Mercedes was out of place in this neighborhood.
“What do you mean, you
think
you saw the TV?”
“Well, I thought I saw a flickering.”
“Did you or didn’t you?”
“I’m almost sure I did.”
“Shit, woman. I’m calling the cops.”
Boom, boom, boom
. “You hear that? I’m calling the cops.” Jake heard more mumbling as footsteps receded off the porch.
He sank even further into the floor until he was sure the people were off the porch. Then he crab-crawled to the sliding-glass door, opened it just enough to squeeze through, and ran like hell for the back wall. It was six feet tall, and he took it like a high jumper, vaulting over it, his body nearly horizontal. He landed in a crouch on the other side and waited. Nothing. No dog. No man with a bat. He raced across the neighbor’s backyard, took the next fence, then the next, and eventually exited through a gate.
Knowing that to someone watching through a window, a man running to a car would look more suspicious than one walking, Jake forced himself to saunter out to the Mercedes. He hoped it would look as though he had come out of the house it was parked in front of. He fired the ignition, U-turned, and drove back down Kelly Jensen’s street. He saw no sign of the couple with the bat, and he was several streets away when he saw a police cruiser heading toward Manzanita Lane.
Jake drove, his mind and pulse racing. He was too keyed up to go home. He swung his car into a Denny’s parking lot and killed the engine. He chose a booth with a view of the door, ordered black coffee, and spread the papers Shrake had given him on the table in front of him, willing the scanty information on the forms to give him a clue. He read and reread her name and address, scouring her handwriting
for insight into her personality. He looked at her address and thought again about her house, reviewing every detail one by one for something he might have missed. The coffee took the fuzz off his brain, and he began to twitch his foot absently against the table leg. What was it about this woman?