A Better Goodbye Page 9

  “Thought you didn’t have no money.”

  “I don’t now. But if there really is a job in that number you gave me, maybe I can get back to sending a little something every month.”

  “He’ll still be dead.”

  “Yeah,” Nick said. “But I got to do something.”

  9

  The desk looked as big as a playground to Jenny, although a playground was a pretty weird thing to think of in a lawyer’s office. It was walnut, polished until it gleamed, and there wasn’t anything on it except a telephone, a pewter pen set, and a notepad. She’d read somewhere that a clean desk went hand in hand with power, but she’d never understood the concept until now.

  Truman J. Beiser, Esquire, sat behind the desk with his elbows propped on the arms of a large carved wooden chair, his fingers making a steeple in front of his expressionless face. He was bald on top, but his gray hair was long enough on the sides to be swept back into a ponytail. Sometimes he nodded, most of the time he stared at Jenny. He spoke only when she paused to wonder if she was making any sense. It was a pretty complicated story she was trying to tell the man she hoped would save her from getting her ass sued off.

  “Go on,” Beiser told her at every lull, his voice as blank as his face, and she would resume the story that had begun eight months earlier on a narrow street in Los Feliz. She and another driver had tried to squeeze past each other, and failed. Suddenly her first good car, a used 1998 Celica that she had bought with massage money, bore a creased fender that looked a lot worse than the nicks its doors had picked up in parking lots. It was, she supposed, the price she paid for being late for dinner at Farfalla with a couple of girls from work she really wasn’t all that crazy about. At least the guy she had traded paint with was cute, and he seemed nice when he looked at the damage to his car and said it wasn’t worth yelling about. They exchanged information—his name was Craig, he was a mortgage broker—and he promised not to get in touch unless there was a problem with the repair. When he didn’t call, Jenny assumed everything was fine, although she wouldn’t have minded going out with him.

  Then she’d had a second accident just before Christmas. Totally her fault. In stop-and-go traffic on the 405—when wasn’t the traffic there stop and go?—she had been digging around in her purse for a phone number when she should have been paying attention to the car in front of her. She plowed into it, of course. Nobody got hurt, but what was it with her driving lately?

  When she opened the letter from the DMV, she discovered she wasn’t the only one asking that question. The litany of sins it contained had led her to Beiser’s desk. She hadn’t filed paperwork for her first accident, prompting the DMV to suspend her license. But she hadn’t found out about the suspension until the paperwork for her second accident began making its way through proper channels. And now the other driver—male, middle-aged, and uptight in the way that only the Bible-thumping religious could be—was making loud noises about a lawsuit.

  “He straight up called me a little tramp,” Jenny said.

  “For driving with a suspended license,” Beiser said, without enough inflection to make it a question.

  “Yes. Do you believe that? He made it sound like I was naked.” Jenny looked for a flicker of reaction, found none, and decided to play it safe. “I wasn’t, by the way.”

  “Best to keep emotions out of this, Ms. Yee,” the attorney said.

  “I know. I mean I understand what you’re saying. What I’m trying to find out is if you can help me. My friend said you’re really good.”

  “I’ve only lost one case.” For the first time, Beiser sounded like his engine ran on something besides soymilk.

  “She told me that, too,” Jenny said.

  Maria, Jenny’s best friend in massage, had recommended Beiser without telling her whether he was one of her clients. All she said was that he had saved her ass when she’d gotten in trouble with the DMV, but Jenny suspected the connection between them went beyond lawyer-client. Maria ran a place in a Chinatown high-rise that catered to professionals from downtown, mostly lawyers and stockbrokers. Beiser’s office, on Wilshire near La Brea, wasn’t so far away that he couldn’t slip down there during lunch. On the outside, he didn’t appear to be Maria’s type—she was a magnet for freaks—but who knew what went on behind closed doors? And what did Jenny care, especially now? She had a more important question to ask.

  “This is going to cost a lot of money, isn’t it?”

  “I’m afraid so,” Beiser said.

  “Can you give me an idea how much?”

  “Off the top of my head, I’d say your DMV fine will run in the neighborhood of three thousand dollars.”

  “Even when they never notified me by mail?”

  “They notify everybody by mail, Ms. Yee.”

  “But I never got it.”

  “Which is your problem, not theirs.”

  The unfairness of life washed over Jenny like acid rain. She could feel herself starting to pout, and she didn’t like it. But she liked what was happening with the DMV even less.

  “Look at the bright side,” Beiser said. “You’ll have your license back, and you’ll have taken a major step toward avoiding a lawsuit.”

  “I just hope a cop doesn’t stop me when I’m driving home,” she said, trying to laugh.

  “Should be an incentive to drive safely,” he said, without a glimmer of a smile. “But before you go, there’s one other subject we should discuss. My fee.”

  “Oh, right,” Jenny said. “That.”

  “It will run between three and four thousand dollars.” He waited for Jenny to say something, but she had lost the power of speech. “Does that sound like an amount you’re capable of handling?”

  Another ten or fifteen seconds passed before Jenny could offer up a tiny yes.

  “Good,” Beiser said, letting just enough enthusiasm creep into his voice to prove that he liked money. “I’ll need a small retainer, say a thousand dollars, and once your check clears, I’ll get to work.”

  Jenny told him she would write a check and put it in the mail as soon as she got home. It was a perfect time for him to suggest that they could take money out of the equation and trade his services for hers. To her relief, he didn’t. There was enough shady stuff in her life already, and now there would have to be more. She was already picturing how empty her safe-deposit boxes were going to look. She only knew one way to fill them back up in a hurry.

  Asian girls were always in demand, even the snotty princesses who didn’t want to get all the way naked, acted like they were afraid to touch guys and, when they did, accused clients of making them break a nail. Guys put up with it, Jenny supposed, because they wanted something different from what they were getting at home, and since most of them were white, it didn’t take a genius to figure out the rest. So Jenny, driving west on Wilshire with her suspended license and wishing she could just read Robert Lowell’s poetry now that her Vietnam paper was finished, knew she wouldn’t have a problem finding a job. Where the job was would be the problem, because everywhere she had worked was a place she never wanted to see again.

  Her journey through the netherworld of massage had begun in East Hollywood, in an apartment that was worse than the neighborhood, as hard as that was to believe. The girls thought they were too hot to change the sheets, and her boss was a cokehead who never bathed and slapped his wife around when she was seven months pregnant. Two weeks and Jenny was out of there. She was gone even faster from her next stop, a flea-infested apartment on Laurel Canyon run by a Russian couple who just grunted when the masseuses complained about bites all over their feet, ankles, legs, and asses. Then it was Woodland Hills, where she met Rosie and ate mushrooms while a big orange cat named George sniffed the ’shroom dust off the floor and ricocheted around the room like a furry pinball.

  When she and Rosie stopped laughing, they went to work for a black woman who had set up shop in the North Hollywood condo where she lived with her husband and daughter. Jenny and R
osie passed themselves off as Japanese sisters, and even though they kept it to hand jobs, they were making two thousand dollars each, sometimes more, for a four-day week, in by eleven, out by five. And that was on a dead-end street so creepy that clients were always saying they didn’t want to park their Porsches there. But the worst thing about the condo was when they had clients at the same time and one of them had to use the little girl’s bedroom. It was pink and lacy and Jenny noticed how it unnerved some guys, probably because it reminded them of the children they had at home. The ones it excited, she jerked off as quickly as possible.

  North Hollywood ended when the black woman got crazy greedy and doubled what Jenny and Rosie each had to pay her to two hundred dollars a day. A couple of months later they stopped working together. Too much jealousy, even though Jenny was glad Rosie had taught her how to use blush: all over your face, not just on your nose. They just partied together now, and Rosie still thought she was prettier, and Jenny still felt queasy whenever that little girl’s bedroom crossed her mind.

  Every stop she made, she seemed to lose a little more of whatever innocence she’d possessed when she started. But she didn’t begin to notice it until she had gone through the phony bust on Beverly Glen and started working downtown with Maria. This was before Maria got her own place; the boss was a music producer who always fell in love with the girls he had working in a fancy condo. Maria was one of those smart people who never thought about going to college because nobody in her family ever had. Like why bother, you know? She was seven or eight years older than Jenny, and she knew how to play the game.

  She was also the first person Jenny had ever watched have sex. They were in a two-girl session—another first for Jenny—when the client said he would pay an extra hundred for full service. Maria had seen him before, so maybe that was why she said yes. Afterward, she tried to give Jenny half of the extra hundred he had paid, but Jenny told her it wasn’t necessary, she’d just take what she earned for the massage; the rest was Maria’s. They had been friends ever since.

  They worked together until Jenny couldn’t stand their boss hitting on her any longer, probably four months, which was an eternity in the business. By the time she left she had slept with a client for the first time. He was so good-looking, she blushed when he walked in the door, but they didn’t do anything serious until he was back for his sixth visit in a month—and then all she let him pay her for was the massage. But after they went out a few times—real dates, to a movie, to dinner and dancing—he stopped calling. It was what happened with every regular eventually, but she still felt bad. The second client she slept with, an older guy this time, was a lawyer with a wife and three kids and a plan to pay Jenny’s rent and tuition. Jenny took him up on his offer and left the business. But after three months of his obsessive behavior and phone calls from his wife telling her she was stealing the children’s private school tuition, Jenny bailed.

  “I’m too young to have so much baggage,” she told Maria, and Maria responded by asking Jenny to work for her at the place she’d opened in Chinatown. She said clients from downtown still asked about Mika, which was the name Jenny had used there. But Jenny wanted to work on her own. More and more girls were going independent now that they could advertise on the Internet and get a classier clientele than they did from ads in in L.A. Weekly or the L.A. Xpress. But a funny thing happened once she started working out of her own place. She got lazy, and she had never been like that in her entire life. Too much easy money, she decided. She made almost twenty thousand dollars in her first month and a half on her own, and after that, she couldn’t be bothered to book more than two or three clients a week, one of them being the guy who became her deadbeat cell phone boyfriend. Finally, when her cash reserves barely covered her rent, she decided she would be better off working for someone else, someone who would give her a place to be and a time to be there. And Sherman Oaks had been perfect, right up to Barry with his nice ass and his convertible top that didn’t work.

  The thought of what had happened after he dropped her off that fine January afternoon still made her shiver, the way she was shivering now as she pulled into her apartment building’s underground garage. It was one of those things her memory would never turn loose of, and it would only get worse as the business beckoned again. She had made so many stops, even if they were all really the same, right down to the girls and the clients. One big treadmill, and where could she go on one of those? Sometimes she wished she could get off it. But that scared her too.

  10

  It must have been the wee small hours of the morning when the apartment manager slid a note under Nick’s front door. Nick pictured the poor guy staying up past his bedtime to make sure the lights were off, then carrying out the landlord’s orders on tiptoe. The apartment manager looked like a mouse, even had a rodent mustache, and he had probably been ready to scurry away if he got caught in the act.

  Nick didn’t want anyone to be afraid of him any more than he wanted to be reminded that rent for April was due in two weeks and he still hadn’t paid for March. Worst of all, he didn’t want to think Coyle was his last best hope before he dialed the number Cecil had given him, but that was what Coyle was.

  “I was hoping you’d heard something,” Nick said on the phone that morning. “You know, about the job you said might open up.”

  “Right,” Coyle said. “There was a driver supposed to be moving back to Oklahoma, but every month he’s got some new reason he’s still here. This time I heard it’s his old lady. Says she don’t want to go somewhere there ain’t a beach, like anybody would want to see her fat ass in a bikini.”

  “So what do you think? Should I try chasing down something else?”

  “You got something?”

  There was no mistaking the hopefulness in Coyle’s voice. He was looking for a way to get off the hook.

  “Maybe,” Nick said.

  “Maybe’s better than nothing.”

  “Yeah, I haven’t even talked to your boss yet.”

  “Oh, it’ll happen, trust me,” Coyle said. “Just hang in there a couple more months.”

  “I’ll do that,” Nick said.

  But when he hung up, he marked Coyle off as one more bullshit artist, one more source of empty promises. Everybody lies, Coyle had said so himself, and now he had proved it.

  Scott could tell the fighter didn’t want to call. Okay, ex-fighter if that’s what he insisted on, like these animals ever really changed no matter what happened to them. Anyway, this guy Pafko’s voice gave away his reluctance and uncertainty, maybe even his embarrassment at having to phone a stranger about a job, particularly when he didn’t know what the job was.

  Scott felt good about how he picked up on all that. It was his acting classes paying off again, keeping him alert to human behavior whether it was with his eyes or his ears. He remembered how he had tried for the same qualities in his own voice when he was doing a scene from Chekhov or Arthur Miller, somebody like that. It had been years ago, before his rise and fall on TV, and he kept meaning to take classes again to see if he could tap back into whatever it was he’d had in the beginning. Something always came up, though, like the indie feature his agent mentioned yesterday—a long shot, but what wasn’t in Hollywood?—and, well, like the call from this guy Pafko.

  About time, Scott thought. The girls had been on his ass to crank up security since they started hearing there was at least one rape and robbery every week lately. Then again, it wasn’t like they were getting their news on TV or in the newspaper. The attacks were the kind of cheap shit that never turned up anywhere except the blogs and chatrooms the girls flocked to. They took it as stone fact that these motherfuckers had decided they preferred pussy and money to time off. Scott did his best to tune out the growing hysteria until Sierra showed up one morning saying the animals had attacked jack shacks in Santa Monica and Mid-Wilshire. Sierra was his best earner, and she believed that fucking the boss was part of her job. Attention had to be paid.

 
; The way it normally worked, Scott watched over his flock himself, but only on Thursdays and Fridays, when business was off the hook. The other days, he’d drop in every three or four hours, just enough to let the girls know he cared. To tell the truth he couldn’t stand being around them all the time. They were worse than actresses—too needy, too neurotic, too nuts.

  Scott had hoped that DuPree would lend him some muscle. Of course the girls would have shit if DuPree had. No matter what their race, they weren’t crazy about black guys to start with. But DuPree was in a category all his own: he was butt-puckering scary. He swung by maybe once a month to check out the new talent—and there was always new talent, stability being no more necessary than sanity for a hand-job queen. He never paid or left a tip, and if the girls who saw him had horror stories, they either kept it to themselves or never came back to work. Scott let it all slide. He figured knowing DuPree had its advantages.

  He was enjoying one of them now, in fact. DuPree’s old man—drunk most of the time, DuPree said—had found a way to get his number to this guy Pafko. Next thing he knew, Pafko was on the phone, listening to Scott refuse to get into specifics about the job until they met in person. Reluctant, uncertain, embarrassed, or whatever else he might have been, the fighter still wound up saying yes. Holy shit, Scott thought after he hung up, this guy might actually be desperate. Scott liked that possibility a lot.

  They were supposed to meet at two-thirty and it was almost three now. Nick found himself wishing he had picked up a paper before walking into Junior’s Deli, then remembered all over again how pissed off he would have been if he had seen Andy Rigby’s name in it. The only thing that interrupted his boredom was visits by a waitress with a bright red dye job. Every five minutes she wanted to freshen his coffee, or maybe get him something to eat—she was pushing the Reuben hard. Nick kept telling her he’d wait until the guy he was meeting got there. “You sure it’s not a girl that stood you up?” the waitress said at last, walking away with a wink and a laugh. Nick shook his head and resumed looking out the window onto Westwood Boulevard. Only problem was he didn’t know who he was looking for. Fifteen minutes later he stopped caring.