Lost Angels Page 3

  "Yeah. We'll all get together later."

  He escorted her to her car and kissed her. It was like cold, damp fog on her lips. Like nothing.

  Terrific - some moron was trying to pummel the front door right out of its rickety frame.

  Mick's brain thumped right along. A caber had crash-landed on his skull. He shot to wakefulness muggy with sweat, his throat arid, his mouth clogged with a thick, dog-turd tang that had reached up and nailed his sinuses shut. He had come up from sleep too fast; his eyes had the bends. This was definitely the most cacklingly awful biorhythmic phase of his entire life. He arrghed to the corners of his studio apartment. The mambo beat between his head and the door just kept right on rocking.

  The doorknob began rattling. Foot-shadows interrupted the clean crack of daylight separating the bottom of the door from its threshold. "Coming!" he croaked, at his faceless tormentor. He rubbed his face, and his palm came away glistening with perspiration and oil. Falling asleep fully dressed had made him look like his own unmade bed. His hair was awful. His stereo stylus, long since finished with side one of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, skritched out a soft cadence. Mick had once bragged - to somebody or other - about his totally manual, belt-driven, smooth-as-lucite turntable with its twelve-pound professional deejay platter. Now a forty-dollar needle was grinding itself to diamond dust because he had passed out, and not even in the middle of a decent album. Whatever had inspired him to unsleeve the Elton John oldie was forgotten now, irrelevant.

  Pound, thump, pound, skritch-skritch. It was not a sterling afternoon.

  He yawned cavernously, smoothed back his hair, and struggled to look intelligent as he unbolted and opened up.

  "Christ, Mickey, I've been beating on this goddamned thing for five minutes! Why aren't you answering your phone?"

  The adrenaline jolt helped wake him up. The woman on his stoop was simply lovely. His brain raced to catalogue her assets and did not resist the list as it rolled up. Though cogent, he was still woozy and fantasy-inclined.

  The gray suit-dress was strictly conservative chic. Short, peppy dark brown hair. Large-lensed glasses in spidery frames, more young-exec stuff. The eyes, the color of amber and brandied chocolate. She was sinfully tall, cut with confidence and regal bearing. Strong chin, small mouth, laugh lines. His eyes gave her the once-over. Twice. A

  "What the hell is wrong with you? Do I have a tarantula on my head?" She rolled her eyes and began to push past him. "Let me in - it's broiling out here."

  A charming stranger indeed, Mick's romanticist brain concluded. But his body instinctively shifted to block intrusion into his home by a stranger, charming or less, and when they collided she dropped her shoulder bag.

  "I'm sorry?" he said, bending to retrieve. They nearly bonked heads. "I mean, I beg your pardon? You're not a Jehovah's Witness or something ... I hope?"

  She yanked the bag free of him without thanks and gaped as though he had just asked her to suck his toes.

  He shrugged. "So what is it? Census bureau? Meter reader? Avon lady? What can I do for you, um ... ?" His eyebrows went up, urging her to reveal her identity. It was a good place to begin.

  She stopped dead for only an instant, then shook her head with the fatefulness of a woman who must endure a thick-headed little brother. "You picked a hell of a day to screw around with stupid jokes, love. It hasn't even been six hours. You going to tell me you forgot to set your alarm?" Her anger was growing. Past the frank glare in her eyes, Mick could see the redness of some recent hurt.

  He coughed out a commiserative laugh, which she did not share. "Uh ... what are you talking about, Miss?"

  "Mickey! What's the secret word today? Too much blow on our Fruit Loops this morning? Why are you being such an asshole?"

  She tried to enter; he rebuffed her again.

  "I'd really rather not let anyone in," he said. "My place is kind of a mess."

  She looked upset, disoriented. "Your place is always a hog wallow, Mickey'

  That was another thing, Mick thought, his pique kicking up from preheat to simmer. Where did this (admittedly gorgeous) nonentity get off calling him that? Mick was clipped, sharp, rock and roll, he liked it. Mickey preceded mouse, and he could live without either.

  He overrode her, firming up. "Lady. I do not know what you're talking about. Honest. I do not know who you are. And I don't know if I'm as eager to talk to you as I was fifteen seconds ago."

  He saw the change wash over her expression, and its speed caught him unprepared. He could sense the gooseflesh scaring up on her back, the snap chill of a suppressed shudder, so out of place in the midday heat. Her mouth unhinged, drifting open. She seemed to dwindle horribly, like a person trying to shrink against an unyielding wall.

  "Oh ... no," she whispered. Not to him.

  He fought to lighten up, be boyish on short notice, to bring her back to where she had been seconds before, because her irritation was better to experience than her abrupt fear. He could hate himself later. "Hey, no, I -"

  At the sound of his voice she began to edge back along the narrow breezeway, as though she could see him transmogrifying into a drooling werewolf.

  He shook his head and got pain. The woman on his stoop was crazy; next case. His concern was easily overwhelmed by the idea that this was more than a joke ... it was an assault entrapment, or apartment flimflam, or other setup. Los Angeles was packed to the spires with predators that could look like this woman.

  "Fine," he said, shutting the door. The bolt sprang automatically.

  He heard a muffled no, almost a cry of pain, and the futile thump of a small fist against the door. He ignored it, making for the bathroom and many aspirins. He was in no mood; he just wanted to lie down and go away for a while. His bones and muscles ached, empty of vitality. He felt like a train wreck.

  After a while the woman, whoever she was, however she had gotten his name, gave up and went away for good.

  Jaime tried to swallow hot tears and her throat knotted shut. Strangers gawked at her wet face from their own cars.

  It was Mickey, Mickey Banks, he of the corduroy jacket and cowboy boots and athlete's sheet, who had just slammed his door in her face. His rejection, his wariness, his utter non-recognition of her was frightening. It made her stomach cramp helplessly. His eyes held the same lost expression as Jason's had, at Pamela's gravesite. Jaime's hand tried to quiver; she gripped the wheel tighter.

  Jason's machine had answered five times when Jaime ran out of payphone change. When she pulled up at his address, she saw exactly what she would see again on that evening's metro news.

  The manner in which Jason Parrish had killed himself after Pamela Drake's funeral was reeled off in a hydrophobic torrent of babble by a TV newshound broadcasting from inside a fluttering yellow LAPD cordon. Jaime watched the slow zoom up to the wide-open main door and the equally predictable closeup of a body-bagged shape on a stretcher en route to the ambulance. It lolled.

  Tomorrow the Herald Examiner would bid adieu to one of its own, with an even bigger wallow in the grisly Known Facts.

  Jason Arthur Parrish, 31, was found dangling from his dining-room archway, his neck pulled long, face a deep indigo from cyanosis, eyes bloated and dry. His tongue had swollen to the size of a black hockey puck. The nylon cord that had strangled him had stretched as his corpse sagged, but the give did not matter. His feet still cleared the floor by ten inches.

  There was a note, displayed prominently on an antique writing desk Pamela had helped him pick out at Poor Ruth's. The nylon cord had come from a camping trip to the Sierra Nevada range that life in retail had prevented Jaime from joining.

  Mercifully, the only photo to be included in the paper would be a staff glossy three years old. The note would not be reproduced. Jaime already knew it was about nothing but Pamela.

  Jason was gone. Mickey was gone. While Jaime had endured a nasal recitation of the Twenty-third Psalm by a hired minister with a game leg, Pavel Drake's hired movers had laid siege to Pamela'
s apartment. They received time-and-a-half for Sunday work, plus a fat tip for speed. By the time Pamela had filled the boxlike hole she would never leave, another box - a U-Haul storage locker much like a tomb itself - had been efficiently loaded with her possessions. The slickness of the arrangement would have offended Pamela, who would resent being so easily erased.

  There was only one piece of Pamela left, and Jaime fled to it.

  The anarchic untidiness of Jaime's clothes closet was a source of queer pride. With her promotion had come total whirlpool chaos in this one niche of her otherwise ordered living space; here was a guilty pleasure she could hold in common with Pamela. In the back of the closet (perhaps sucked back there as food by the forgotten and now-sentient blobs of polyester waiting in the darkness) was the Knudsen crate. In it were the letters, the snapshots, the physical residue of Pamela's passage through her life. It was more than enough to get drunk on.

  The crate was the only piece of Pamela that Pavel Drake had not absorbed. There had to be a reason Jaime was permitted this one piece, and she found it, forgotten, buried in the back of the crate, Jaime thought of a Chinese box puzzle.

  It was a fireproof Smythe document box, a steel rectangle in outdated industrial maroon, with a lock. Pamela had provided no key. Dimly, Jaime remembered being handed the box and being asked in a casual way to stash it.

  Pamela's irresponsibility with minutiae was legendary. Jaime maintained a rolodex; Pamela had been known to write phone numbers in ink on the back of her hand. She only threw out the receipts she would later need. Jaime balanced her checkbook; Pamela's utilities usually avoided termination by scant hours. Clearly, more complex items like insurance - or wills, say - were scheduled for the turn of the century, because twenty-eight-year-olds should not have to worry about dying until later.

  The incidents with Mickey, with Jason, had flooded Jaime with a sense of lost control, urgently accelerating. If her best friend Pamela had anything to say to her after her death, now was the time to hear it.

  Breaking the Smythe box's lock with the blade of a butcher knife was distasteful, akin to violation. A rape. Jaime wondered whether Pavel Drake's movers had broken into Jaime's apartment, similarly, to plunder.

  The lid squeaked when she bent it back. Even if she had recalled the box earlier, she never would have considered peeking. Pamela had banked successfully on her trust. Jaime felt a pang of resentment at being so predictable.

  Boxes within boxes. Suddenly this did not look so random, so unplanned, so Pamela.

  The tear tracks were dry on her face. She lifted out long pages, legal sized, stapled to sky-blue stock backings, folded into oblongs and tucked into a vinyl folder. Her heart thudded and her breath pulled short. From Pamela of all people, could this be something for the record in black on white?

  A handwritten note had been placed on top but had fallen to one side and gotten creased thanks to the box's rough ride. Jaime immediately recognized the distinctive paraph of her best friend's script:

  Dear Jaime,

  Please trust me when I say what your going to see here is real. I'm sorry you have to find Out this way, but if your reading this than I'm probabbly dead. You know how! work, your my best friend. So maybe youll understand without bad explanations. Your the puzzle solver. I love you.

  Pamela

  It was Pamela, sure as hell. The horrific spelling and grammar were ironclad verification. New tears made a bid for escape but Jaime swallowed them down. The note had been rendered with a soft-tipped art pen, in purple, Pamela's favorite color. She favored such pens for all kinds of jotting and had thrown a fit when the manufacturer terminated them a couple of years back. The violet ink had already begun to fade.

  You could not buy these pens anymore at any price. Like Pamela, they were part of the past now.

  Jaime unsnapped the folder and counted three separate documents, each headed with the legend AGREEMENT in Gothic. The text nosedove straight away into legalese so dense that Jaime's eye rejected such unpalatably large glops. These were contracts. Her recognition of them scared her a bit - it was like Pamela sneaking into the paperwork she hustled daily at Sanger Harris.

  The top one was drawn between PAMELA LYNN DRAKE and JAIME ANYA RAWLSTON. On the last page she saw Pamela's signature, again in florid purple ink.

  In the adjacent blank, written with the same pen, Jaime found her own signature.

  The contracts seemed to jump from her lap, to fan themselves across the floor. Her throat dried up and began to pulse achingly. She had never seen these papers before.

  Nervously, she gathered them, checking the other two, fearing what she would see.

  The second bore the name JASON ARTHUR PARRISH. Jason had been at the funeral, holding Jaime because there was no longer a Pamela to hold. The third contract was in the name of MICHAEL MARQUIS BANKS.

  Known to his intimates as Mickey.

  Her eyes hurt from scrutinizing the contracts. She squeezed them shut; tried to force more tears to come ... and got nothing.

  She sat rereading Pamela's postcard, the specific one from Chicago she had remembered earlier. It had waited for her in the crate. Her eyes drifted over it dryly. Here was Pamela's description of their cozy little foursome in the days before madness and funerals.

  From the be-damned contracts to the postcard and back again she went ... and her heart began to thud hard and fast. The love had been drained out, but there was still enough muscle remaining to give her whole body a sound jump at a sudden shock of inspiration.

  The trendy pressure to have babies before thirty-five was nothing compared to the deadline with which she was now squared off. She raced back to her closet. An old Smith-Corona manual typewriter had been lost in there for at least as long as the Knudsen crate, and now she needed it as badly as air to breathe.

  When she found it, she phoned Pavel Drake.

  The silence on the line was adjudicatory, punctuated by the measured respiration of a self-important man, weighing trifles. Drake had delivered a terse reminder that any imposition less than twenty-four hours after his only child's funeral deserved nothing from him past an angry hang-up. Jaime had known he would not disconnect for two reasons. Once she had rejected him. By making contact now, she was offering him another shot, an opportunity to salve his bruised ego. His was the type of mercenary business mind that would never forget any slight, no matter how trivial. Now he might make her crawl, or wait, or beg his help. Now he might do something so small as make her run the telephonic gauntlet to be granted the privilege of speaking with him.

  More important, she mentioned the Smythe box - the single item that had eluded the neat dragnet of Pamela's life arranged by Drake's legal bulldogs.

  Beats of silence on the telephone can be exquisitely cruel. Drake wanted this acid quiet to slowly tear Jaime's heart out. He could not know that an hour ago she had run out of tears, and now her heart functioned only as a pump.

  He instructed Jaime to ask for his table at That Obscure Object of Desire in half an hour. He called her Miz Ralston and made sure that he sounded properly put upon.

  Before she flew out the door, she tried one last time to call Mickey. Or Mick. His line was already out of service.

  Charlene the waitress faded, butt switching saucily to let Pavel Drake know she was still on call. Jaime took a tentative sip of her white wine, watching as the frost of condensation filled in her lip prints and restored uniformity to the surface of the glass. Drake had just made his snide remark about scams and polish and crust... whatever the hell that meant. "You want me to sign this" he said. His voice was low, disbelieving, calculatedly ugly.

  "You have Pamela's power of attorney" Jaime said. "She can't sign it."

  He caught her off guard by evidencing interest in her explanation. It was a trick of executive strategy - the lull before the kicker - but Jaime knew it. She had seen the momentary glint in his eyes. "Now you're trying to say that Pamela ... made up her friends? Imaginary friends, like little kids have?"


  "She conceptualized her ideal friends. Then she created pacts, promises of duties including every trait from loyalty to good housekeeping, and inscribed them with pseudonyms. See? They're even notarized. I don't have to remind you how imaginative she was."

  No, that was the thing Drake had disliked most about his daughter. It had prevented her from becoming like him and following his corporate footprint trail. That would have been an alternative version of Pamela ... and what had become of that possibility, Jaime now realized with abrupt horror. It was spelled out in one of the clauses on the contract headed JAIME ANYA RALSTON, because there is a fragment of every daughter that wants to please Daddy. Even if Daddy is a philistine, even if the daughter is intractably rebellious.

  "Pamela is dead. That hurts me more than I can say, Mr. Drake. I'm sure it hurts you, too, and people tend to lash out when they're in pain?"

  Again she spotted what might have been a ghostly wisp of human feeling, trapped in the darkness of his eyes, quickly engulfed. "Yes," he said, lifting his drink, then replacing it unsipped as though thinking better of the action. His stiff silence, just now, was a license for her to continue.

  "If the contracts are bona fide, then my whole life history came out of Pamela's head. It's a great system - with one flaw. There is no provision for the contractor's death. She didn't factor it in; how many people under thirty bother with wills? But now that she's gone, the obligations of the contractees are discharged. Jason is dead. Mickey is gone ... or changed, I don't know. Either way he's not Mickey anymore. I was on the scene before either of them. Maybe that's how I lasted long enough to talk to you now."

  Drake looked the page in his hand up and down one more time. It did not seem to surprise him.

  "That's a new contract," said Jaime. "It supersedes Pamela's and grants me an existence independent of hers. It's simply worded to assure you I'm trying to gain nothing through trickery. A simple business proposition, Mr. Drake. You sign, and I hand over Pamela's file box, plus all her letters to me. A whole aspect of her you didn't see and never owned. No strings. All I get out of it is my own life, and I never bother you again:'