The Two Deaths of Daniel Hayes (29 page)

Laney heard the words but didn’t really process them. Half-awake for a while, she’d been hiding in that hazy dream realm where everything ended before it got too bad. They said you never died in a dream, and she couldn’t remember that she had, though often enough she’d been about to when she woke up. “What?”

Apparently she’d heard correctly. She blinked, sat up. The left side of the curtains were closed, submerging her half of the room in murky shadow. The other side was burning with morning sky, silhouetting Daniel. His hair stuck up in wild spiky directions. He had the gun in his hand.

“Did you sleep?”
“Did you hear me?”
“Yes.” Her mouth was gluey, her brain and body stiff. “I heard

you.”
“It’s the only way. We can’t run, we can’t hide, we can’t get help.
So we have to kill him. Then it all goes away.”
“Okay.” She pointed her fingers like a gun, sighted out the window. “Pow. He’s dead.”
“I’m serious.”
“I need coffee.”
“Would you stop screwing around?”
She had been mid-stretch, but his tone froze her arms. “Would
you?”
“I’m not.”
“I’m a vegetarian. You work for a show called
Candy Girls.
How
are we supposed to kill him? What are you going to do, write him
to death?”
“Actually, yeah.”
“Apparently you need coffee too.” Laney spun, sat on the edge
of the bed. The blood running from her head made the world spin. “Listen. It’s simple. All we need to do is get him to come to us.
We’ll write a scene for him, a play to lure him. He’ll think he knows
what’s going on. But he won’t.”
“Simple as that.”
“Well, not simple. But I did come to it by thinking like a writer.
I made Bennett into a bad guy, a character. And I thought, what
would you do if this was a script?”
“And what would you do?”
He told her.
When he finished, she stood, moved to the window, opened the
other curtain. Stared out at sunlight blinking off the windshields
of moving cars. L.A. smog had gotten better in the time she’d lived
here, but “better” was a long way from “vanished,” and the distance was filtered a nicotine yellow. She stared for a long moment,
feeling him waiting on her the way he always did when he’d pitched
an idea, with impatient hope. “What if he sends someone else?” “He won’t,” Daniel said.
“He did yesterday.”
And in a concrete canyon.
“The difference is, this time we’ll have the necklace. Not only
that, but he’ll know we have it. Not think.
Know.
Bennett is cagey,
right? Yesterday he must have suspected we weren’t going to play straight. So he limited his exposure. But if he’d known for sure that
we were bringing it, he’d have been there.”
“Why?”
“Because he doesn’t trust anybody. A necklace worth half a million dollars is too much temptation. There’s the chance that whoever he sent would run, and then he’d be back where he started.” “What if you’re wrong?”
“We have to make sure that I’m not. We have to use the necklace
as bait. That, and the sense that he knows what we’re going to do.”
I’d buy it in a script. But this isn’t a script.
“So what do you think?”
I think I’m tired and sore and scared so deep that I can’t remember what it was like not to be. I think we’re going to lose.
She said,
“I think I should have given him what he wanted in the first place.” “He would have killed you.”
“At least you would have been okay.”
“Yeah,” Daniel said, and smiled that lopsided grin she liked.
“You can see how okay I turned out when I only
thought
I’d lost
you.” He took her hands. “I know this is scary. But it will only work
if we commit all the way. That’s the only way we can beat him.” There was something in his expression that reminded her of their
first date. It was a couple of years after she’d moved here, midway in
her journey from model to actress. She’d dated a predictable string of
L.A. boys. Producers and finance guys, eager to impress, hitting the
restaurants of the moment, clubs that didn’t have signs. But Daniel
had taken her to an East L.A. taco joint, the kind with laminated
menus and piñatas. He was the first guy she could remember who
didn’t flaunt or flex. Instead he asked about growing up in Chicago.
About her first kiss. Over margaritas he talked about coming from
Arkansas—something the others would never have admitted, not in this town where everyone pretended they’d sprung full-formed from the froth of the cold Pacific—and about his regrets over the relationship with his family. Then, just when things were getting a little serious, he told that stupid joke of his, about sex with twenty sevenyear-olds, and the way he said it was so gleeful and innocent that she couldn’t help laughing, and by the time he drove her home in his Sentra, she’d known that this was what it was supposed to be like, two people connecting, not shiny dangled bait, not motorcycle bad boys, not full-time glamour, but this, two people who talked and
listened and laughed.
Plus he was a really good kisser.
She looked at him now, at his earnest expression and goofy hair
and burning eyes, and she thought,
So we’ll lose. Bennett will take
from you the only thing he hasn’t yet. At least your secret will stay
secret.
You’re an actress. Act.
“I committed all the way years ago.” She held his gaze, matched
it. “What do we do next?”
Something happened to his body, his affect—his shoulders
relaxed, his eyes warmed, his lips unclenched. It was as though
her support was the fuel he needed. “The necklace. I was thinking about it. Do we have a safe deposit box, a storage locker,
anything like that?”
Laney felt a tremor rise, killed it before it made it to her face.
“No.”
“Perfect. Then it has to be at the house.”
“Why?”
“It was there the day you died, right?”
“You think you hid it?”
“It was the worst day of my life. Would I have given a damn
about a necklace? I probably just threw it in a drawer.” He rubbed at his chin with a sandpaper sound. His eyes were red, and he badly
needed a shave. “Only thing I don’t get . . .”
“What?”
“Well, I knew about B ennet t, right? T hat he was blackmailing us.” “Yes.”
“And since I thought you were dead, I must have thought he was
responsible. If I believed that, why didn’t I grab a gun and go after
him? Maybe he’d have killed me, but I wanted to die anyway, and
better to do it trying to pay him back. But it doesn’t seem like I even
tried, and I don’t know why.”
Laney stared. Desperate to think of an improvisation that would
make sense to him. When nothing came, she just said, “I don’t
know, baby. Maybe you didn’t want that on your conscience.” “Come on. I’m sure it’s not easy to kill someone, but that fucker?”
Daniel scowled. “There had to be a reason. Either that, or I really
don’t like the guy I was very much.”
“I do,” she said, and put a hand on his cheek. She smiled, then
changed the subject. “So, the necklace.”
“First we have to figure something out. This all depends on the
location. I was thinking the airport, but it won’t work. We’d need
tickets to go through security, and we can’t show our ID. Can you
think of somewhere else that has metal detectors?”
Laney clicked her tongue against her lip. Metal detectors. Hospitals might have them, in the emergency room. Government buildings, but Bennett would never go for that. A school, but then, no way. She stared out the window at the low sprawl of Los Angeles. The
angle of the sun sharpened contrasts. The 405 crawled along.
The sky was crisscrossed with contrails. A billboard for
Die Today
faced the window, Too G pointing a gun at them. A lot of people made fun of rappers who tried to become movie stars, but as
a model turned actress, her horse wasn’t any higher than theirs. And really, it was too bad that other than Will Smith and Mos Def and Queen Latifah, all they got were movies about urban gangsters and slums and drug dealers. In order to get a role, they had to
maintain all the trappings of ghetto toughness—
Laney laughed. “Want to go to a party?”

It was like fishing. Not that Bennett had ever been fishing, but he’d read Hemingway. He liked Ernest. The man would have been hard to beat. When it came to his sinning, he was up-front and unabashed. And he was a self-contained dude too. Hence all the wives.

Anyway, from what Ernest had to say about fishing, if you were fighting a big one, you had to let it out some before you pulled it in. You couldn’t just yank the whole time, or the line would break.

So he’d given them the night. Let them twist and run and flounder, wear themselves down trying to fight his hook. Let them run the options over and over and over trying to think of a way out.

When his phone rang, he was taking in the sun on Jerry D’Agostino’s pool deck, shirtless and pants rolled up so his feet could dangle in the water. He answered without looking at the display. “Morning. You sleep okay?”

But there are conditions. First, you stay away from us. Forever.” “You got my word.”
“Second, we’re going to do it where we choose, not you.” “No.”
“Listen to me, you psychopath. You wanted to scare us? It

“Sociopath.”
“Huh?”
“I’m really neither, but probably closer to a sociopath. A psychopath is in it for the fun. I don’t get off on hurting people. I’m just willing to do it for money.” He swung his legs, watching sunlight dance on the bottom of the pool. Were they recording this? It didn’t matter. All they’d end up with was a voice on a tape, and a phone number he would walk away from tomorrow. “Anyway, what do you have in mind? What will make you feel safe, brother?”

“There’s a party tonight. After a screening. It’s at a club downtown, Lux. The cast from the movie has rented out the VIP room. They’re rap stars, and they want to look tough, so there are going to be metal detectors at the entrance.”

“We’re going to get the necklace now. We’ll be at the club at nine-thirty.”
“Sounds like fun. I’ll see you there.” He started to hang up, then said, “Hey, what’s the movie?”
“What?”
“The screening, what is it?”
A beat. “It’s called
Die Today.
”
“Yikes. Bad omen, huh?”
Another long pause. “Nine-thirty. After that, you leave us alone.” The line went dead.
Bennett smiled. Leaned back on the stone of the pool deck. The sun had cooked the tiles, and the warmth felt nice against his back. He traced the dimpled scar tissue on his stomach, fingers finding the pockmarks of healed bullet holes, one-two-three. Mementos of a deal in Baltimore.
It was possible that Daniel and Laney still believed he’d let them live. But he doubted it. Before, maybe, but now things had gone too far.
No, they’d try to get clever. Maybe have police there undercover. Or a friend, some half-assed tough guy to help. Could even be the rap star.
Most important, they’d be counting on him not having his gun. Taking comfort in the location. Feeling safe because he was unarmed and all those witnesses were about, as if that meant nothing bad could happen to them.
It showed a lack of imagination on their part.

Daniel closed his phone, set it in the cup holder. Squirmed in his seat. The half a bagel and coffee he’d managed to choke down lay heavy in his stomach, and the ride out to Malibu wasn’t making it better. Last night he’d treated this like a story, and written an ending for it. But Bennett wasn’t a script problem. And no story had just one ending.

“They fixed it already,” Laney said.
“What?”
She took a hand off the steering wheel, pointed. He didn’t see

“I’m fine. It’s just strange.” She spoke to the windshield. “It’s as though nothing ever happened. Already.”
“Life is a raindrop.”
“What?” She turned to look at him.
“Something Sophie told me. Life is a raindrop.”
“It’s pretty. What does it mean?”
“I don’t know.” He paused. “I guess that every life is beautiful and self-contained and unique and yet also short and totally insignificant.”
“You really know how to cheer a girl up.”
“Sorry.”
The traffic on Highway 1 was light. She kept it at the speed limit. The road was as beautiful as ever, the homes as magnificent, the view as lush, but it felt distant, as though seen through thick glass.
“Are you sure the cops won’t be there?”
“I don’t think so,” Daniel said. “They’re busy. Having someone parked on our block day after day would add up, especially since they wouldn’t guess we’re headed there.”
“They came when you were there before. Getting our wedding photo.”
“Yeah, but it was just a patrol. They probably drive by once an hour. And more at night.”
“What if—”
“We don’t really have a choice.”
She nodded slowly. Her grip on the wheel didn’t loosen any.
Half an hour later, they’d made it to their neighborhood. Everything seemed calm as ever. The PT Cruiser was spotless and shiny and no one should be looking for it. Laney had her makeup back on, the port wine stain painted around her eye, her now-blond hair down. At a glance, they were normal people.
They drove the neighborhood first, avoiding their street, just getting a sense of things. He used the time to review the plan again. Picturing it as a plot outline. Looking at surprises, at twists, at the expected actions of their antagonist. On paper, it looked good.
But she’s right. You don’t write the world.
His stomach churned, but he kept his face calm. “Looks clear. Let’s go.”
Three minutes later, they were pulling up to their security gate. It was strange how many different things it meant to him, this California Contemporary with a lot of glass. The house he’d seen on television. In his dreams. The one he’d visited when he didn’t know who he was, and returned to in order to find out when his life had begun. And now, this final visit, and final incarnation. The central element in their plan to win back their life—or die trying.
Laney keyed in the code. Their anniversary. Of course. The gate swung open, and she pulled in, then around the circle so the car was out of sight and facing forward.
The keys jingled in her shaking hands as she shut off the motor.