Authors: Daphna Edwards Ziman
Then, all of a sudden, he froze. What he saw was so startling, he had to keep himself from shouting out. As Kelly Jensen stared out defiantly from her driver’s license photograph, Jake suddenly realized why she was so familiar. He had seen those eyes, that mouth, those cheekbones. Seen them hundreds of times—in Porter’s office. One of the Sidney Randolph Maurer portraits.
Jake threw some money on the table and tore out of the restaurant to his car. He steered toward downtown, seething with a mixture of anger, revulsion, and curiosity. When he reached Porter’s office building, he was in luck. The police guard at the entrance was a man who owed him a favor from the old days. Jake had gotten his nephew off a drug charge by proving he had been miles away from the scene of the incident. Jake didn’t have many friends left in the Las Vegas PD, so this was an especially good time to run into one of the few he had remaining.
“Hey, Miguel,” he greeted the guard.
“Mr. Jake Brooks,” replied the man and they shook hands.
“Mind if I … ?” Jake gestured at the door.
“No one in or out,” replied Miguel, holding the door open for Jake. “You know where you’re going?”
“Been here hundreds of times,” said Jake over his shoulder, holding up the key Porter had given him. He took the stairs to the third floor. The only difficulty now would be if the cops had put a new lock on the door.
The hallway outside Porter’s office was still and deserted. The door was unchanged. Jake pulled out his key, pushed aside the yellow
police tape, and unlocked the door. He stepped over the threshold, all too aware that he was breaking and entering for a second time in a single night.
Everything was just as it had been earlier during his meeting with Suzanne. Light came in from the street and outlined the objects in the room with a cinematic glow. Jake moved straight for the wall of paintings.
It was unquestionably her.
A younger Kelly Jensen stared him down from within the black frame, her eyes dangerous and intelligent. Her blonde hair was spread over a bare shoulder, a waterfall of bright light contrasting with the shadow of her other shoulder. Jake caught his breath. He had assumed for so long that this was a painting of a dead, unknown starlet from another era. Knowing Kelly Jensen was alive somewhere made it seem to crackle, eerily, with life.
Jake recovered himself and lifted the picture off the wall. With his fingernail, he sliced the backing paper along the edge of the frame, then carefully lifted out the print. The back was signed,
SIDNEY RANDOLPH MAURER
, 2007. So it was an original. Was Kelly Jensen an actress? Why did Porter have this painting of her?
Just then Jake heard footsteps coming down the hall. Hurriedly he slid the portrait back into the frame and onto the wall.
He was able to get across the room, away from the painting, before he heard a loud whisper at the door.
“Mr. Brooks?”
It was the police guard, Miguel.
“Yeah?”
The guard looked sheepish. “FBI is on its way up here. A guy’s downstairs on the phone. You’re not really supposed to be here. I understand you’re saying good-bye to a friend, but this other guy … I don’t know.”
“Thanks,” Jake said sincerely. “I’ll take the back stairs.”
Jake emerged into the service alley as the glow of daybreak touched the eastern sky. He jogged to his car, fired the engine, and drove toward home, trying to force his brain to make all the pieces fit together.
HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT, KELLY SAID TO HERSELF AS she looked over at her kids, trying to figure out how they would make themselves invisible in the middle of the Nogales Greyhound Station.
“Let’s play Halloween,” she said to Libby and Kevin as she led them into the restroom. She took out a brown shoe polish can, one she had often used for disguises in the past, and started to spray their faces.
Soon the kids were having even more fun than she had anticipated, particularly when she began painting her own face.
“Mommy, you look like a Mexican lady,” Libby said.
Kelly giggled as she put a scarf around her face and tied it under her chin.
“C’mon, let’s go!” said Kevin.
“Wait. Not yet.” Kelly held her arm out to stop him. She peeled back a corner of the curtain and peered out. The only vehicles in the diner’s parking lot besides her car were a pair of Harleys. She dropped the curtain and smiled at the kids.
“Okay, ready to roll.”
As she pulled Libby’s arms through the car seat harness, Kelly turned toward Kevin and said quietly, “Buckle up.” She glanced up and down the street, saw a stoplight turn red. She closed the driver’s door gently and started the motor. A calm in the eye of the storm. No rush of footsteps, no hand over her mouth. The road was practically empty. She drove to the bus station.
Please let this be the right thing to do
, she kept repeating in her mind, over and over.
Kelly steered into the Greyhound lot and found a spot in long-term parking. She paid for two weeks.
Inside the depot, while Kevin and Libby watched Nickelodeon on the little TVs attached to their seats, Kelly chewed on her thumbnail and tried to keep from fidgeting.
Her mind wandered to a makeup artist’s trailer in the desert, where a movie was being filmed on location. She had drifted onto it as a teen runaway, still clumsy then as an “escape artist” in her own right. But instantly she fit right in to this fantasy world, where everyone belonged yet everyone was a stranger.
She had never forgotten watching the film
The Stunt Man
on AMC, about a criminal escaping into a film set and finding sanctuary within the world of imagination.
And that day in the desert, when the makeup artist had handed her a tray, as though Kelly was meant to be there, she had found her refuge on a movie set. She was fascinated by the many different colors of stage makeup and putties the woman used to change each actor’s features, and she let her fingers touch them, knowing that in her hands lay the tools she would have to master—the key to the many escape hatches she envisioned her future must take. She watched each step carefully as the makeup artist worked diligently, and the young actress sitting in front of a mirror aged forty years right in front of her eyes.
A couple of days later the makeup artist was smiling from ear to ear, watching Kelly mimic her technique. Kelly heard the woman utter the words that had remained a mantra in her memory until now: “Remember one thing, honey. You can look like someone else, but you can never
be
someone else.”
“Mommy, it’s over.” Kevin tugged at Kelly’s sweatshirt, and she gave each child another quarter. They plugged these into the TVs, and the machines revved back to life. Through the window, Kelly saw a pink sign on the shabby storefront across the street, and her mind drifted again, to other memories.
Pink neon.
She almost smiled, remembering. It had been just before she’d met her husband, on one of her escapes from the Gordons, when no one had found her for five nights. The first night she had slept—if you could call it that—in a doorway across from a nightclub called Juicy, its name spelled out in a cursive spool of hot pink. A wash of bass and voices spilled out every time the door opened, and Kelly studied the couples swishing in and out.
The next day, she stole a dress and shoes from a K-mart and made herself up in a gas station bathroom. She waited in the doorway until late, then found the club’s kitchen entrance and slipped in. The Mexican prep cooks looked her up and down as she entered, but said nothing. She sneaked into a seat in the back and let the blues rush over her. The singer was exquisite, a small black woman named Kelly Jensen who was able to seduce the audience just by inhaling. Kelly had absorbed the singer’s modulation and tone, sponged up her subtle weight shifts and hand movements. When a cocktail waitress came by, Kelly ordered Perrier.
She slipped in the next two nights, too, but on the last night, a few minutes after the waitress took her Perrier order, the manager came to the table and asked Kelly for her ID. She had stood up and left without a word. But she’d had a new identity to aspire to, a new name to take on when she was free. Someday she would become
Kelly Jensen, and she would entertain as unself-consciously as her namesake did.
* * *
After tiring of the Nickelodeon shows, the kids had curled up in their bus depot chairs and fallen asleep.
Kelly gazed out the window at two young girls, obviously immigrants, obviously trafficked, awaiting their tricks. Their pimps were out of sight now, watching from behind the buildings across the street. Kelly felt pangs of hopelessness and compassion for the girls, working at all hours.
Why doesn’t anyone care?
she asked herself.
Later, on the bus, the kids mostly slept again, their heads resting on each of her shoulders as mile after mile passed under the wheels—putting distance between them, their car, and their former lives. Kelly, on her Sidekick, went over and over the information she had downloaded at the library in Arizona, feeling the plan start to come together. Finally, she put the smartphone away and let the lurching of the engine work like a hypnotist’s pendulum on her exhausted mind.
She jolted awake in her seat as the bus rumbled to a stop at the terminal. Through the window she saw a row of cardboard boxes leaning against a gray cinder-block wall. Various body parts poked out of the cardboard—a bare foot, a hand, a stocking-capped head. The shantytown was heated by a fire in a garbage can.
“Welcome to beautiful downtown Los Angeles, the city of dreams!” the bus driver crowed through the scratchy speakers. Kelly quickly gathered their belongings before waking the children, wondering if she would live long enough to see her dreams come true.
THE DRAGON BAR WAS ONE OF THE MORE SUBDUED clubs on the Strip. Sinewy plaster dragons with jeweled eyes twined around posts and soared along the ceiling, belching smoke. The walls erupted with electronic fireworks, bursts of blue and red and green flashing luridly through the cigarette smoke. Music throbbed from speakers disguised as cauldrons spewing steam. Showgirls slithered through the crowd and posed on the velvet sofas, their sleek hips poured into blue jeans and their breasts billowing out of corset tops. Men in jeans and leather jackets appraised the various body parts as they passed, their eyes clicking like the gears on a slot machine: eyes, hair, shoulders, breasts, midriff, ass, thighs, ankles, toenails. Any time, day or night, the candy store was stocked and open for business.
Alana Sutter’s impassive eyes stayed on Jake’s. “They’ve got some mileage out of Natalie St. Clair—the shoplifter whose prints they picked up in Porter’s room? This is what they’ve got so far: When she was six years old, her father offed her mother. The poor
kid had to testify. The father got life. No protest from his family. They had dropped him like a hot potato as soon as he was arrested—didn’t want to be burdened with a child of a killer. The fastest open-and-shut murder one case Texas had ever witnessed.
“Natalie goes into foster care. For six years, she bounces from family to family. You know much about foster care?”
Jake pulled on his soda water. “I see these kids eventually in court. I know the statistics. Around eighty percent of all inmates in penitentiaries have been in the child welfare system. Et cetera, et cetera.”
Porter’s former political strategist nodded stiffly. Her conservative dark suit was out of place in the bar.
“Basically. Usually at some point the kids figure out that most foster parents are in it for the money. They get $5,000 a month for kids the system brands as ‘difficult.’ The more difficult the kid, the more money the families get. Some foster parents confine their toddlers by making them wear helmets all day so that when the helmets are taken off, the toddlers’ reactive behavior appears to be a frenzy of uncontrollable movements. And when Child Protective Services makes home visits, they qualify for extra cash.”
Sutter jiggled the ice cubes in her Diet Coke. “There was one family—the Gordons; Natalie was with them for a while. Apparently Natalie made accusations that the foster dad beat her while the mom stood by and did nothing. No one pursued the complaint. The checks kept coming from Child Protective Services in Texas. Natalie ran away. Something like twenty times. Once, it took them five weeks to find her. Each time, she was sent back to the Gordons. Once she was booked on shoplifting. But she finally did manage to escape. She got away, and disappeared. Nothing at all on her—until her prints show up all over Porter’s suite.”
Jake flicked his lighter and stared at the flame for a moment before bringing it to the tip of his cigarette. The burning smell
personified his love/hate relationship with smoking. Sutter watched him. Jake took a drag and exhaled, away from Sutter’s face. He traced a circle on the lacquered table with the bottom of his water glass.
A year or so before, Porter had suddenly taken up the cause of at-risk children. It had seemed like a sound platform, and one that he had been campaigning on, quite successfully, with Suzanne. Now Jake was suspicious of his motives for choosing this particular area to focus on.
He thought through what he had found out the night before: Kelly Jensen was the Marilyn Monroe showgirl at Shrake’s nightclub. A painting of her hung in Porter’s office. What were the chances now that the Marilyn wig in Porter’s room was
not
Kelly Jensen’s? Kelly Jensen’s fingerprints had not turned up, but Natalie St. Clair’s were everywhere. Jake took a breath. Not telling Sutter—and the rest of the investigators—about Kelly Jensen was withholding information. But telling them meant turning her over to the FBI. Jake felt the watery sensation of betrayal.
Coming clean with what he knew about Kelly meant exposing Suzanne, too. But most of all, it meant handing over Porter himself, erasing every damn good thing he’d ever done and replacing it all with tabloid-style, salacious details of an affair with a nightclub singer. Jake stubbed out his cigarette and made his choice. He changed the subject.