Los Angeles (18 page)

______

The same FedEx truck was making its rounds; the same old woman power-walked down the street, arms pumping like pistons, hand
weights tightly gripped; the same sprinkler sprinkled; it even seemed like the same kids were playing that same game of Wiffle
ball. It could easily have been the same day, the same afternoon, the same everything — everything, of course, but me. When
I arrived at Jessica Teagarden’s former duplex in Santa Monica, it was all the same as before, but, luckily, I wasn’t puking.
This time, I had remembered to wear my asshole shades, and I wasn’t trapped in the violent throes of a vicious migraine.

I stopped the Cadillac directly in front of the walk and immediately identified Victor’s unique, dish-shaped face in the window.

Seconds later the door opened and he was calling my name.

“I need to ask you something,” I told him.

There was the same stillness inside, that cool, heavy smell that I recognized this time was lemon furniture polish. I could
hear the perpetual sigh of forced air. As usual, the scene had been pre-lit, props set up beforehand by that make-believe
lighting crew.

“You want to come upstairs?” Victor asked. “I’ve got a microscope.”

“Sure.” I followed him up, taking the stairs two at a time, and turned down a little hallway.

He slipped into a miniature, shelf-lined room that contained a neatly made bed jammed into a corner and a tidy desk of white
particle board. Above the bed were obsessively organized shelves containing books and science kits; a familiar Junior Genius
chemistry set was displayed prominently above the headboard.

“Yeah.” Victor noticed me looking at it. “My mom’s afraid some kind of toxic chemical is going to fall in my mouth in the
middle of the night.”

I laughed.

“But I keep telling her that they’re not going to put anything very poisonous in a kid’s chemistry set.”

“Did you make the disappearing ink?”

“I made it.” Victor shrugged. “It was boring.” He pulled a kid-size chair away from the desk and sat down.

I took a seat on the edge of his bed. “My mother always thought I would burn up in the sun,” I confessed.

“You probably will,” he said, turning to look at me. “What did you want to ask me anyway?”

I thought for a moment. “Did you ever overhear anything about Jessica Teagarden? Did you ever hear any conversation your mom
had with her, or even about her?”

“Like from when?”

“From any time,” I said. “Your mom said she came over for coffee. Do you recall anything about what she said? Were you here?
Were you in the house?”

Slowly, Victor moved his tongue around in his mouth, considering the idea like it was a piece of candy. I imagined that his
wide, flat face was a satellite, ready to receive the signal. “Yeah,” he said tonelessly. “I guess so.”

I leaned forward. “I thought you said you can remember everything you hear.”

“Sometimes it doesn’t just come, you know? It has to” — Victor made a slashing gesture across his face — “start flashing.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. “What flashes?”

“I see them, white flashes in my eyes. Like, like… headlights at night.”

“Is there any way to control it?”

“You can start it sometimes, you know, but it’s hard to know what you’ll get.”

I recalled the way he had stared into the sun the last time I met him, repeating the voice-over from the nature documentary.
“You were able to tell me about the gecko,” I said, “remember?”

“Yeah, but that’s what I was remembering then.”

“How does it usually start?”

“If I press down on my eyes,” Victor said, “or sometimes when I sit too close to the TV.”

I looked around the bedroom. There was probably a chemical in that science kit that would launch Victor into an epileptic
fugue, I thought, but I certainly didn’t want to chance that.

Then I noticed the lamp on his desk. “What about when you look into a light bulb?” I asked, lifting the shade.

“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “I don’t think I’ve ever tried that.”

I was taking a chance, I knew, but it was all I had. “Stare at it.”

“You really want me to?”

“Why not?”

Victor squinted against it, involuntarily closing his eyelids.

“Keep your lids open,” I said, “even though it hurts, even if it stings.”

He faced the bulb and held his eyelids open with his chubby fingers.

“Are you getting anything?”

He just blinked, and I could see tears welling up.

“Think about Jessica Teagarden, try to picture her face.”

He shook his head and looked away. “This is just hurting my eyes.”

“Keep looking.”

“It burns.” He shut his lids.

“Open your eyes.”

I suddenly remembered standing in the darkness, wearing that blindfold, right before I opened my own eyes, and seeing the
shimmering blue pool on the health club rooftop.

“Keep them open.”

Victor stiffened, his whole body going rigid. Then his head twitched, and he said,
“If a short-sighted, mucus-covered messy eater which grows up to three meters long doesn’t sound like the ideal diving companion,
think again.”
Victor’s eyes hardened, turning away from the bulb, and he stared straight through me.
“When you understand the moray eel, you may well start to love it, says marine biologist Gavin Anderson… in a stunning array
of colors, with a slippery mucus-covered body and a head full of glistening white, razor-sharp teeth. At first sight, a moray
eel can send shivers down your…”

Victor went on this way for a full five minutes more, repeating the narration about moray eels. He even slipped in a couple
of commercials, one about mattress discounts and another about a teeth whitener.

I shook him by the shoulders. “Victor,” I said, “I need you to remember Jessica. Try to remember something about Jessica Tea-garden.”

I needed Angela.

I needed to hear her voice. I knew Victor must have heard her say
something,
but the kid only went on repeating a bland nature documentary, and these memories, however perfectly recalled, were perfectly
useless, an exact audiographic recollection that came to nothing, just a purposeless recitation of facts, a trivial collection
of data that, at best, only served to take him out of the present and turn him into a drooling imbecile.

I left Victor in his perfectly tidy junior-scientist bedroom, feeling like I was leaving a piece of my own scientific childhood
there with him. He was practically catatonic now, spittle running down his chin, repeating those boring things he had heard
on television. I had needed him to remember Angela, needed him to repeat her voice, but all he was able to find inside his
head were pointless facts about a vicious sea creature.

Memory wasn’t helping, I realized. Memory itself had failed.

______

A few minutes later I was driving home. There had to be something I had overlooked, I thought. I still hadn’t spoken to any
of my neighbors. Maybe someone had a forwarding address; maybe it was that simple; maybe somebody even had Angela’s new telephone
number. I imagined dialing, the phone ringing, her voice answering. I parked in my usual spot in the parking lot and started
looking around for that cat before I recalled that I had buried her in the old man’s backyard.

Christ. I was really out of it.

All I wanted was a warm shower, to crawl under the black sheets, and to sleep through this nightmare.

I stepped through the doorway of my apartment and immediately started pulling my clothes off.

I stopped though, my shirt suspended over my head.

To experience fear requires a matter of milliseconds. That’s because the emotion comes from the amygdala, the deepest, darkest
part of the human brain, and evolutionarily the oldest section of our minds. It controls autonomic processes, too, like breathing
and the beating of the heart. Sometimes this reaction is called fight or flight. Adrenaline courses through the bloodstream,
blood pressure soars, the heart rate increases. The reaction of fear, it seems to me, can come from one of two main sources:
the unknown or, even worse, the known.

In this instance I experienced both.

“I made myself a cup of coffee, Angel,” a voice said. “I hope you don’t mind.”

Frank was sitting at my desk, taking a long last drink from my coffee mug.

I pulled my shirt back down. “Jesus Christ,” I said. “You could scare someone half to death doing that.”

I noticed someone else in my apartment, too. Standing in the kitchen, a young man in expensive glasses.

Both he and Frank were dressed in what could only be described as Hollywood-entertainment-lawyer clothes. Frank’s tie was
shiny pink and his suit was chocolate brown, with wide lapels and widely spaced pinstripes. The young guy wore a jacket so
black and a shirt so white he was graphic, like a piece of human typography.

“How did you get in here?” I wanted to know.

“You must have left the door unlocked.”

“I don’t think so.” I shook my head. “In fact —”

“It’s immaterial.” Frank got up, a big man with a deep voice, and my swivel chair squealed in relief. “We’re here, aren’t
we?” He stepped toward me, gripping his hands around my upper arms and digging in with his fingers. He used to grip me like
this when I was a kid, too, I remembered, his voice low and threatening.

I squirmed away. “It was the wrong girl, Frank.”

“I know, Angel. I’m aware of that.”

“This…
Annette
person just sent someone who was vaguely like Angela. The only resemblance was that she was black. That’s not exactly —”

“It was probably just a misunder —”

“I still need to find her. I still have to —”

“Before you do that,” Frank said, “you have to come with me to your father’s. Right now. You can spend some time with your
little brother and catch up with Melanie, and it will mean a great deal to Milos.” Frank’s face was usually tanned and hairless,
with sparkly green eyes and an overly stylized fifties-movie-star coif. But at the moment, he just looked old. His eyes had
gone fish gray, his complexion sallow; it even seemed that he hadn’t shaved this morning.

“What’s this about?” I started waving my arms around. “You break into my apartment, you —”

“This is about your father wanting to see you,” he said flatly.

“He sent his fucking lawyer.” I shook my head, then indicated the young guy standing in my kitchen. Fair, thin, pink-skinned,
with the overly eager look of an incipient marketing executive, he couldn’t have been more than twenty-five. “Who’s this,
anyway?”

“This is Marcel, my new associate.”

The kid in the impossibly black suit smiled abashedly, then moved toward me, hand extended.

I ignored him. “You couldn’t come alone? It’s fucking ridicu —”

“Angel,” Frank said, “you’re coming home with us, all right? Do you have everything you need?”

“This is like a scene from a bad movie.”

“Everything is like a movie, Angel.” Frank smiled like he was talking to an idiot. “Don’t you know that by now?”

“First of all,” I began, “you come here completely unannounced. You break in —”

“Are you listening, Angel?” Frank raised his voice. “Your father wants to see you.”

“I’m really not in the mood to see him at the moment,” I said. “Or you.”

He let out a heavy breath. “We can tell you what happened to her.”

I stopped.

“The girl you’re looking for. Your father and I can tell you what —”

______

Only minutes later we were sitting in the back of Frank’s limo. The young associate who had been introduced as Marcel had
gone to sit in the front with the driver, so it was just me and Frank, the two of us resting on a sea of pliable automotive
leather.

“Tell me,” I said.

“I’ll let your father give you the details.”

“Jesus.” I sighed. “You tell me you know something but not what it is.”

“I’m telling you what he told me to tell you.”

“You don’t have a mind of your own?”

He smiled a Grecian Formula–model smile. “Not when it comes to Milos Veronchek.”

“And didn’t I ask you not to tell him? Didn’t I specifically —”

“It’s not what you think,” Frank said. “Angel, it’s —”

“Did Silowicz say something?” I asked angrily. “Because that is a breach of doctor-patient confidentiality, that is a very
serious —”

“No.” Frank shook his head vehemently. “No. Your father already knew. When you mentioned her to me, he already knew all about
her.”

“How?”

“When you went to the club —”

“Hold on. You’ve been
following
me?”

I knew Frank and my father monitored my spending, but had they actually resorted to following me around the city?

Jesus Christ.

I was staring at him now, trying to burn his face off with my eyes. “You’re having me tailed, is that it? Is it your fucking
associate? That Marcel guy, is that his —”

“Angel.” Frank closed his eyes. “Just wait, okay? Your father will answer all of these questions.”

I sat there stonily, tracing my finger along a seam in the leather of the seat. The limo’s interior was dark gray, almost
charcoal. As long as I remembered, Frank had traveled in limos, never driving anywhere by himself.

“Don’t you drive, Frank?” I asked out of nowhere.

He looked at me. “What do you mean?”

“How come you always take a limo?”

“I like to work while I’m in traffic. I use the phone. I do my reading.” He paused, thinking. “I drive on weekends.”

“What do you have?” I didn’t even know why I was asking. I just wanted to know something personal about him.

“Pardon me?”

I wanted to know because I had never known anything about Frank’s life beyond that he worked for my father, that he paid all
the bills, oversaw our family finances, organized practically every aspect of our lives, the architect behind my father’s
evil empire. For some reason, perhaps my advanced state of fatigue, I had actually developed a perverse curiosity about Frank.
“What do you drive on the weekends, Frank? I mean, when you’re not working.”