A Better Goodbye Page 6

  Now Nick sat with a hollow feeling in his chest and the sports section in his hands, consumed by thoughts of what might have been. It was as close to self-pity as he allowed himself to come, and he always beat it back with guilt and embarrassment. Alonzo Burgess was dead—no way the toughest guy in the old neighborhood could feel sorry for himself. What kind of joke would that have been? Nick smiled ruefully. He even laughed. There wasn’t anything else for him to do until a reason to live came along, and he hadn’t had one of those since the night the lights went out in Oakland.

  6

  Scott Crandall wondered if the Pink Dot geek had run over old ladies to show up so fast. Okay, geek was harsh, but really, what else could the guy be, fighting Westside traffic all day to deliver smokes and groceries, wine and home pregnancy tests? He might even have been driving one of the original Pink Dot VW Bugs, with the royal blue body, the Pepto-colored dots, and the pink-and-white propeller hat on the roof. Honest to God, a propeller on the ugliest car the sixties ever saw. Scott had heard Pink Dot still had a few of them on the road. Geekmobiles. And he knew there was only one species that could drive them. Geeks.

  He handed over three twenties and a ten and told the geek to keep the change. Then he closed the door without waiting for a thank you and carried his two bags of goodies back to the IBM ThinkPad he’d fired up as soon as he had dragged his ass out of bed. He kept his computer on the dining room table, not that there was a dining room in his one-bedroom. It was more like a place to eat if he wasn’t standing at the kitchen counter, wolfing down cold pizza or takeout Thai or—talk about inescapable for the man who couldn’t cook—something from Pink Dot.

  In fact, he planned on having a late breakfast/early lunch/whatever there before he headed to Warner Bros. for a 1 P.M. casting session. So would it be spaghetti with marinara sauce or the Southwest taco salad? Better go with the salad. The spaghetti felt like it was frozen solid. Good thing it was in the same bag as his Smirnoff vodka and Twix candy bars. That would be everything for the evening if he spent it at home. Well, maybe he’d have a Twix now. Just one. And a cigarette.

  Scott was chewing the last bite of his candy bar when he lit up an American Spirit. He swallowed, took a drag and returned his attention to tailfeathers.com. With Daily Variety and the Hollywood Reporter out of the way—took you twenty minutes to get through them and two hours to get over them—it would complete his Internet reading for the day. His only reading of any kind, not that anybody cared.

  Tailfeathers was devoted to hookers and johns all over the country who preferred to call themselves providers and hobbyists. There were masseuses in the mix as well, very few of them certified by any board of health, more and more turning tricks the way masseuses never had a decade ago, when a pretty girl could bankroll her education or her lingerie and drug habit with hand jobs. Now they joined escorts under the imagined protection of the euphemism “provider.” Scott supposed that such self-deception came into vogue after the people who ran Tailfeathers prefaced their home page by saying, “This site was created purely and solely for entertainment purposes.” Still, the announcement always made him laugh, because it was partly bullshit and partly the absolute truth. He’d always found pussy entertaining.

  Once a week or so, he would scan the L.A. escort reviews on Tailfeathers to make sure his girls weren’t in there. He’d given them specific instructions not to draw attention to themselves that way. Vice cops probably spent more time reading Tailfeathers than the perverts did. Worse, the guys who wrote the reviews—assuming it wasn’t the girls doing it themselves to drum up business—couldn’t resist exaggerating golden showers, rim jobs, and ass banging. Back when he didn’t care about reviews, Scott had checked one of his girls on Tailfeathers and saw that a guy had created a friend for her: “Sometimes one girl would fuck the other with a vibrator while simultaneously fucking me.” The girl in question was a psych major from UCLA—killer body, desperately broke—who had shown up a virgin, so naive that Scott had to have a redheaded porno washout teach her how to jerk a guy off. When the virgin quit three weeks later, the other girls still hadn’t seen her naked, much less getting creative carnally.

  No time for Scott to read reviews today, though. No time to use the links on the reviews to check out the competition, either. He still hadn’t taken a look at the scenes for his audition, and he wanted to do that before lunch. But the one thing he couldn’t ignore was the discussion board. The board in L.A. was Tailfeathers’ liveliest and busiest, hobbyists and providers exchanging sometimes surprisingly insightful notes on everything from STDs to falling in love on the job. Clients were warned when cops started busting massage operations, girls coming from out of town could line up business, and the rip-off bitches got outed.

  Scott scrolled down the page, seeing the same names he saw on posts every time he checked Tailfeathers, not noticing anything out of the ordinary until he reached the bottom: “Providers Beware: Real Criminals Resume Rampage, LE Wants to Help.” LE was shorthand for law enforcement. Everything else spelled trouble. “Shit,” Scott said, clicking on the post with no more enthusiasm that he would have had for walking on hot coals.

  The poster was a guy who called himself Concernedcitizen, a know-it-all douchebag who really did know a hell of a lot. Scott skipped the part where Concernedcitizen complained about having been called a grandstander for his previous warnings to providers. Nor did Scott want to waste his eyesight reading when Concernedcitizen got all liberal and sensitive, writing, “I’m sorry the men in question are African-American, but I have a moral obligation to report the reality as it has been reported to me.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Scott said. Then he arrived at the heart of the matter. These assholes had spent the last year raping and robbing massage girls all over the city, bouncing from the Westside to Los Feliz to the Valley, striking twice in a month, then crawling back under a rock until you damn near forgot about them. It wasn’t the kind of story the straight media was going to pay attention to—Christ, they didn’t have the time or space to chronicle all the murders in L.A.’s ghettos. So this unholy tag team came and went at will, and now they were back at it, having turned a two-girl operation on Beverly near CBS into a nightmare.

  Concernedcitizen was on the case. “These predators may be responsible for as many as ten attacks,” he wrote. Some of the victims apparently had gone to him instead of the police because he was a lawyer who would counsel them, not sell them out. But he made it sound like the cops sided with the girls this time: “While LE is our opponent on the issue of prostitution, LE is with us in deeming these two criminals far more dangerous than the hanky-panky of the providers. Should a well-dressed African-American gentleman show up at your door saying he works for a bank, he may have an accomplice waiting out of sight. Please do not let him in. Even call LE if he bangs on the door.”

  Scott skimmed the responses to Concernedcitizen’s post—lots of outrage and indignation from other hobbyists, nothing from any girls. But he knew that in the provider community the drums were already beating. Hookers and hand whores read Tailfeathers devoutly, pissing about clients whose reviews made them sound like sluts and moaning about girls who claimed they were twenty-two when they wouldn’t see thirty-five again. He’d heard that providers had their own website too, talking shop and rating both clients and bosses, but he’d never taken the trouble to track it down. That was more bitching than he could handle.

  He caught enough shit every day from his own girls. There were seven of them now—the number seemed to go up or down every few weeks—and he knew they were primed to freak out at the bad news Concernedcitizen had passed along. At times like this, rampant fear was as much a part of the business as eye shadow.

  When Scott had set up his first operation three years before, there had been a little accountant-looking dude who would take masseuses up on their offer of a shower and come out of the bathroom waving a gun and demanding all their money. The next year it had been a carpenter who preyed on skin
ny blondes, trussing them up, throwing them in the back of his van, and driving out to Palmdale to go animal on them. The carpenter wound up killing himself, although there was still talk that one of his victims’ boyfriends had pulled the trigger. As for the accountant, who knew? He had vanished into the ether that seemed to consume most of the crazies who declared open season on girls who, when you got right down to it, were all but defenseless.

  Not that the girls didn’t try to do something. Scott knew that some of them hugged first-time clients coming through the door, thinking they could feel hidden weapons. There were probably also girls who carried Mace or even a small pistol—if wide-load pro football players could pack, why not hundred-and-five-pound hand-job artists? But Scott didn’t want to think about a gun in the hands of some of the women he’d employed. Too many of them were so scary stupid that they’d wind up shooting the wrong person, and the wrong person might be him.

  Scott’s first impulse with the latest maniacs to descend on the business had been to call them the Love ’Em and Leave ’Em Bandits, but his girls didn’t laugh, they just became more skittish than ever. Now it was clear that the only way he’d be able to stop them from getting any crazier was to hire security. He’d done it before, but that didn’t mean he liked it or anything he had heard about it. There were stories of off-duty LAPD providing muscle for a girlfriend in the business, but that could have been bullshit. What your average massage operation got for security was several cuts below the knuckle draggers who worked as rent-a-cops at shopping malls and car shows. The best Scott had come across were an apartment manager’s kid brother, a recovering car salesman with a speech impediment, and a guy in one of his acting classes who wanted to be a professional wrestler.

  His head swimming at having to choose from a pool of morons, Scott lit another smoke off his old one, flipped open his cell, and dialed. One ring later, he heard the voice he was counting on to reassure him that things would be cool.

  “What?”

  DuPree never turned off the attitude for a second. Sometimes Scott was tempted to call him Junior just to annoy him, but even on the telephone, the motherfucker was intimidating. One word and Scott could picture him, elegant and dangerous at the same time, shaved head, high cheekbones, ropy muscles, and a stare that could shrivel your balls to the size of raisins. Scott was sure he’d done time.

  “Where you at, yo?” Scott couldn’t help himself. He lapsed into black-speak every time he talked to the guy.

  “Having my morning latte, checking out the foreigners.” DuPree started most days at the Coffee Bean at Sunset Plaza, Eurotrash central. “You going to waste my time with questions you know the answer to, or you going to tell me why you’re calling?”

  “You know me too well, man.”

  “So?”

  “So you hear anything about a couple brothers robbing trick pads? Raping the girls?”

  “Brothers?” DuPree was keeping his voice down, making sure nobody could overhear his business. “As in African-American males?”

  “Yeah, that’s right.”

  “And you sure that’s what they are? Brothers, I mean.”

  “Well, it’s what they’re saying on the Internet.”

  Scott tried to sound cool. It should have been easy; he was an actor, after all. But DuPree was the shit, and sometimes Scott couldn’t get around that.

  “They?” DuPree asked. “They who?”

  “Some lawyer. That’s what he says he is, anyway. On Tailfeathers. You know, the website. Said he’d heard from some girls that these motherfuckers—”

  “The brothers.”

  “Yeah. They’re out there running around, menace to society and all that shit.”

  “Okay. Okay. It’s clearing up for me now. You make these assumptions, and then you come to me because I’m what, your connection to the thug life?”

  “Look, man, I’m not dissing you.” Scott hated to backpedal. It happened every time they talked about something serious, and DuPree never broke a sweat. “I’m just trying to see which way the wind is blowing, that’s all.”

  “I didn’t even know it was blowing. You want something specific, you better call up the”—DuPree’s voice dropped to a sinister mocking whisper—“Bloods and Crips, ask ’em yourself, ’cause I got nothing to do with them. You hear what I’m saying?”

  “Hey, I’m sorry. I just thought—”

  “I know what you thought and it was wrong. Now, we done?”

  Hardly, Scott thought. He wanted to ask DuPree if he knew any guys—okay, thugs—who could provide security at the apartment. He’d hoped DuPree might be interested himself. The guy had never passed up a session with one of the girls, free, of course. But all Scott could say was, “Yeah, I guess so. We’re still cool, right?”

  And for the first time since DuPree had picked up, Scott heard him chuckle. “You know we are,” DuPree said. “You my nigger.”

  He didn’t shave for his audition, but how many actors did anymore? He didn’t bathe either, which was a private joke on Hollywood that he shared with Steve McQueen. He’d heard that anybody who wanted McQueen back in the days of Bullitt and The Thomas Crown Affair had to be willing to scrub his unwashed ass because he wasn’t going to do it himself.

  That was how Scott wanted it, too. Obviously, suits from every studio trampled each other to do the honors for McQueen. Scott’s ass, meanwhile, wouldn’t have meant anything to anybody important if it were stuffed with silver dollars. And yet Scott maintained the fiction of his spiritual connection to McQueen. It helped get him over the rough spots careerwise, of which there had been many for, oh, the last decade or so.

  The other thing Scott hadn’t done as he drove his 1988 Porsche Carrera onto the Warner lot was give the sides for the casting session so much as a glance. His agent had faxed them over last night, but out of habit and a severe lack of enthusiasm, he had put off reading them for this morning. Then the Internet gossip about the rapes had screwed things up, and DuPree had done absolutely nothing to unscrew them. DuPree had spoiled his appetite, too. Scott had planned on using the time he was stuck in traffic to get his head around the scenes he was supposed to do, but the 405 was wide open, and so was the 101, and he couldn’t remember the last time that had happened.

  He couldn’t celebrate being twenty minutes early, though, because if he showed up now, he would just look desperate. And he wasn’t desperate, not for a guest-star gig on yet another cop drama, this one called Stringer. He was pissed off was what he was. How could he be anything else at the prospect of his ten thousandth audition? Even with a career at low tide, he thought he deserved better. He should be taking a courtesy meeting with the executive producer and the director, and the job should be his if he wanted it.

  This was TV, for Christ’s sake. He’d done it, been a star as a matter of fact. Well, a little bit of a star. Fifth lead on a young doctors-in-love show at the end of the eighties, one of those ensemble things loaded with actors who were still turning up in big-budget features and playing leads in artsy-fartsy indies. He, on the other hand, had gone on to play the title character in Stormy Weathers, which was what the trades called “a syndicated actioner.” Translation: off-network, non-prime-time junk. If the show contained one legitimate surprise, it was that Scott didn’t lose his mind doing it for three seasons and sixty-six episodes. His salvation was the fifty grand he made per ep, just about what he needed to afford his bad habits, an ex-wife, and two kids. And he’d assumed his price would go up as soon as he jumped back on the prime-time gravy train. But the only train he found was the one that hit him with the news that he didn’t count for much anymore.

  He was thirty-one then, and now it was ten years later and all he had to show for the passage of time were two failed pilots, twenty or so guest-star gigs, a handful of bad cable movies, and a spreading girth that told him he needed to get to the gym more often. He still had his hair, though, as well as enough ego to believe he was better than any of the other clowns who were there on the
second floor of Building 9 to read for the part of—what was this scumbag private eye’s name? Grondyke, that was it. Al Grondyke. He sounded about right as fodder for Stringer’s hero.

  After killing time smoking and feeling sorry for himself, Scott checked in with a pleasant middle-aged woman who must have been the executive producer’s assistant. Then he scoped the waiting area for actresses who had worked massage for him—didn’t want any embarrassing moments—and actresses who gave off a vibe that they might. It was a no on both counts. There were two girls who looked like they should play nuns; everybody else was male, and at least two of them had to be up for the same part as Scott. The moment he looked at the lines for his first scene, another prospective Grondyke walked in, talking loud enough on his cell phone for everyone to hear and sucking the energy out of the room.

  “Yeah, I just did a twenty-minute short. Corporate espionage, definite Hitchcock overtones. It was some kid just out of USC. He was going to use it as his student film, but it screened at Harmony Gold and now they’re trying to get it in some festivals. Dante Spinotti took a liking to him. How’s that for being anointed, a genius cinematographer like him? Anyway, Dante called over to Paramount and arranged camera packages. We were shooting every day with two- and three-camera setups, ten different locations around town.”

  The show’s casting director shut up the energy thief by calling him in ahead of everybody who had gotten there before him. By then, there was a bad echo in Scott’s head, courtesy of the lines he was trying to memorize. “You’re playing on my front lawn, Stringer. I want you off.” Hadn’t he given Sonny Crockett that warning on Miami Vice? “If you get any deeper in this mess, you might as well say, ‘Goodbye, cruel world,’ and pull the flusher.” That was Hunter, wasn’t it? Or maybe Silk Stalkings, not that anyone remembered Silk Stalkings. No wonder reality TV was on fire—all those old cop dramas had been the same show, just different actors, settings, and budgets.