Everybody Takes The Money (The Drusilla Thorne Mysteries) (9 page)

Tarzana was much whiter than Panorama City, that was for certain. It was one of the suburbs on Ventura Boulevard, which served as the main artery through the San Fernando Valley; six to eight lanes wide, full of cars, with every conceivable business (and probably a few no one had conceived of yet) on it.
 

The signs on buildings on Ventura Boulevard were large, as they were everywhere in Los Angeles (have to catch the driver’s eye!), but the signs in Tarzana were more uniform in their size and branding then they were in Panorama City. There was almost no graffiti, which always surprised me driving around a giant city like Los Angeles—London and Paris and New York had more graffiti in central areas than Los Angeles did. The building fronts were white and gray. The groups of people waiting for buses were different. Signs for the L.A. Opera hung from the lampposts.

Courtney had asked me to meet her at Tarzana First Christian Church. The building itself was large, in the middle of the block. The triangular facade that faced Lindley Avenue was huge, and the facade’s only decoration, a simple, unadorned cross, was probably ten meters high. The church’s walls were white and plain and three stories tall.
 

The parking lot was huge, too. Perhaps a hundred parking spaces, which meant they had lots of parishioners. And best of all, there was only one way in and one way out, both from Lindley. It wasn’t hard to imagine civil, happy parishioners politely flowing toward the exit in their sedans and minivans.
 

One way in and one way out made it very easy for me to watch both the entrance and the exit from where I was parked in the shade of a California Black Walnut tree, at the corner of the parking lot.
 

The only other cars in the parking lot were far away from the church, on the side of the parking lot next to the First Christian Day Care and Preschool. I could see a small playground with swings, a sand pit, and lots of two- and three-year-olds running around yelling their heads off.

I wondered how many of the little kids on that playground would grow up to appear on shows like
Girls Becoming Stars
. Or would think there was anything the tiniest bit glamorous about the lives those girls led.

A light blue hatchback pulled into the parking lot by the large IN arrow. It had Oklahoma plates and one person visible inside: Courtney. She parked in the center of the parking lot, as I’d asked her to. All of the windows on the car were up. Mine were down. She got out and looked around.

She was wearing a crop top and low-riding shorts. Her hipbones were perfectly outlined in the afternoon sun. When she turned, her top moved and I could see the light shadows marking her ribs. In that hotel room I hadn’t really seen how thin she was, but now I could, and the verdict was she was skeletal. My estimate that she weighed a hundred pounds had come about because the stated goal of many actresses was to weigh no more than 100 pounds, no matter how tall they were. Looking at her now, I was willing to bet that Courtney fell on the wrong side of that number. A light breeze startled her as she stood there, perched on her five-inch-high espadrilles. Adding five inches to her height only made her look bonier and less substantial, but that was the look so many girls pursued. And it was the one they needed, quite frankly, for the business they were in.

I let her stand there for thirty seconds before opening the door of my car. If anyone had been crouched down in her car, waiting, the heat would have driven them out by now.
 

“Courtney!” I said, and she whirled around. She had good balance on those shoes.

I waited in the shade. She came to me.
 

“Well, don’t you look the vision of comfort in this weather,” she said.

“All an illusion,” I assured her.

She looked up at the church. “I love coming here.”

“I wouldn’t have guessed.”

She smiled. She was going to need to visit a cosmetic dentist to give her the smile TV demanded: veneers, whitening, perfect formation. Her teeth were too discolored now. “Well, not the church so much. But there.” She nodded at the preschool. “I worked at a preschool back home. Little kids are just the best. Come on.”
 

We walked over to the cyclone fence between the parking lot and the outdoors play area where the kids ran around screaming. There was a big multicolored play structure, a giant sandbox, and a wall where the kids drew chalk art. The sandbox had six toddlers crawling around, bashing shovels at the sand and dumping as much of it outside of the box as they did in it.

How did the preschool keep the sand clean of debris from passing cats, I wondered.
 

Courtney crouched by the side of the sandbox. She made exaggerated hand waves at them. “Hi,” she said, over and over. “Hi, there.”
 

One little girl, her blonde hair tied up in a multitude of hair bands, waddled over to the fence. She had big brown eyes and a smile with a couple of tiny teeth poking through.

Courtney stuck her fingers through the links to pet the little girl’s hands. “Hey there,” she said, her smile wide.

I wouldn’t have guessed Courtney liked little children.

One of the teachers, a young woman who wore her light brown hair pulled back in a ponytail and rubber-soled shoes designed for playing in sandboxes, walked over and picked up the little girl. The toddler giggled and immediately started fussing with the teacher’s t-shirt.
 

“Courtney,” the teacher said. “You can’t keep coming by here.”
 

That surprised me more. Courtney had come to the preschool multiple times? According to Anne, she’d only been back in Los Angeles a week.

“Don’t pay me any mind. I had to stop by the church today. Just taking a looksee at all the adorable kids.” Courtney stood up and turned away from the teacher. “Let’s go, Drusilla.”

I gave a perfunctory smile to the teacher, who wore a worried expression as she stood at the fence, waiting for us to leave.

Courtney and I walked away from the preschool and headed toward the church. More importantly, we walked into the shade from that walnut tree.
 

“Did you know that everyone who works at that preschool is a member of this congregation?” she said.
 

“That’s nice, Courtney, but we have other things to discuss right now.”
 

“It’s a really great community.”

“I’m not much of a churchgoer, honestly. We need to talk about you dropping your affidavit.”

“I can’t.” She shook her head. “I’m sorry, but I can’t.”
 

And yet she had asked to meet me and showed up at the appointed time, alone. No one would come all the way to Tarzana if they didn’t have to. So she was still open to being talked into it.

“I look forward to talking to your friend,” I reminded her.

“He can help us figure this out,” she said.
 

“Who is he?” I asked.
 

“You’ll meet him. He’s real smart. He knows lots of things and can help us out. And maybe...maybe he can help you out. You need money, right?”

I wondered for a moment if I had said something in the motel room about needing money. But a simple rule to keep in mind is that everybody needs money. It’s the basic motivator for getting up in the morning.

“How much money?” I asked. My voice cracked.
 

“Well, he can help you out, depending on your circumstances.” She sounded so matter-of-fact. She sounded almost practiced.
 

Like she was giving me a pitch.

Who had talked whom into this get-together, exactly?

“Where can we find your friend?”

I assumed she was going to point across the street. Instead, she smiled and said, “He’s a couple of blocks from here.”

“I’ll drive,” I said.

COURTNEY DIRECTED ME to a bland, featureless office building a block off of Ventura, the kind of building with interchangeable tenants. That was one of the things that drove me the most crazy about Los Angeles: because it had grown so fast after World War II, so much of the architecture of anything built post-war was simply disposable. Any given building looked like the one next door and the one across the street and all of them were probably pre-made at some lot fifty miles away.
 

We parked in the subterranean garage. Commercial offices didn’t work in strip malls like retail did in this area. This was an office building, with a door into a lobby and a stairwell with skylights in the central atrium. The plaque on the door Courtney led me to was well-designed and classy, but it bore one major superficial resemblance to the place I’d just visited in Panorama City: the initials down the side read HCFC. Hitchcock Commercial First Construction.
 

There were lots of reasons to do that, the very least of which would be they could share stationery. The more cynical part of me said they could share things like books, too, but I couldn’t see how a construction business and a financial counseling office would serve one another.

Courtney swayed on those high heels over to the door. The massive, carved door with the twisted metal handle clearly showed off the design aesthetic of the company, because that door didn’t fit in with the rest of the building’s architecture at all. The door probably weighed more than Courtney did, but she pulled it open easily and sauntered through the doorway with an air that she belonged there. I followed behind and watched the faces of the people working inside. There were four standard-issue gunmetal-gray desks in the main room, all behind a movable partition; one desk was up front with a receptionist, and the other three had guys in short-sleeved shirts working phones. On the movable partition were posters depicting some real-estate developments. I assumed they were projects Hitchcock Commercial was working on.

Everyone looked up, saw Courtney, and went back to what they were doing. I managed to catch instantaneous reactions, flashed across the faces of the men and one woman looking up, and the only thing I could characterize them as was “not welcoming.” No one smiled, none of the guys’ eyes lighted up. Whoever Courtney was in this place, she wasn’t one of the gang.

“Hi y’all!” she said, as though she were. “Is he around?”
 

No one answered. The receptionist kept right on talking to whoever was on the phone.
 

Courtney tapped the desk in front of her. “Hey there, Mary. Is Mr. H here?”
 

The receptionist held up an index finger in a gesture meaning, “Wait a moment.” Mary gave off the distinct impression she wanted to hold up a different finger but was restraining herself. Still talking, she typed something on her computer.

A door at the back of the office opened and a medium-height, slender man walked out. Late twenties, with smooth skin, blond hair, a pleasant, roundish face and glasses that magnified the size of his blue eyes. He wore a short-sleeved button-down shirt and a wedding ring.
 

“Hey, Courtney,” he said. He wasn’t any happier to see her than the guys in the front office had been.

She moved toward the door he’d come through, like she was going to walk through without a care. “Is he back there?” she said idly.

He stood in her way. “Look, we’ve talked about this. You can’t just keep dropping in.”

“Mr. H told me I could come by any time I felt a pressing need to.” Courtney turned toward me. “I’d like to introduce him to my friend over here.”
 

The man glanced at me, disinterested. “You need to call ahead of time, Courtney. We’re running a business here.”
 

“Come on, now, Jonathan, what’s he doing that he can’t take a little break from?”

Jonathan, he of the short-sleeved button-down shirt, lost some of the general pleasantness in his face and glared at Courtney, letting his annoyance show. “He’s working. We work in this office.”
 

She reached out to touch his arm and he backed away. Jonathan did not care for Courtney one bit. “Why don’t you go back to your numbers and your spreadsheets? I can walk on back and tell him I’m here myself.”

Jonathan put his hand on the door. “Go home, Courtney. Set up an appointment. I’ll tell him you want to talk to him.”

“I’ll do what I like.”
 

“Come on, man,” one of the guys seated at the front desks said. “We’re on the phone.”

I knew two things: this wasn’t the first time Courtney had pulled this stunt, and despite how much she disrupted the office and annoyed the employees, she was allowed to do it without consequences.

Courtney grunted and reached for the door handle again.
 

Before her hand could connect or Jonathan could stop her, the door opened, revealing three middle-aged men, chatting cordially as they walked. The one in front nearly walked into Courtney before saying, “Hello there! I’ll be with you in a moment,” in a jovial, impersonal manner. The other two gave Courtney a thorough look-over before walking around her and continuing their conversation.
 

Courtney gave Jonathan a smile and walked through the open doorway.
 

The man who’d nearly careened into Courtney was clearly the one in charge of this office. He had a head of thick steel-gray-and-white hair, a paunch, and a tiny little cross on the lapel of his shirt. The people who advertise their beliefs openly tend to be the ones who are most concerned that you believe them. I was already a mite suspicious of what we were doing here, and between the cross and his fake joviality, I was prepared not to believe a word the man said.

The three men walked past me and all three of them gave me a once-over as well. No one stopped to tell me they’d be ready to talk to me in a moment, so I walked over to Jonathan.
 

Jonathan pinched the bridge of his nose under his glasses. “Go ahead, go on back.”

I smiled politely. “I apologize for the interruption. To be honest, I’m not even sure why we’re here.”