Hollywood Boulevard (39 page)

    "Shut up."

    She looked agitated. I must have hit a nerve. "No need to get testy. I'm only trying to help."

    "You
sound
like her. . . ."

    "But I am
not
Lucy. Do you understand that, Sylvia?" I think I finally had her off balance.

    She softened her tone. "You're lonely. I can help."

    I laughed without mirth. "Is that what you told Lucy when you locked her up and set the closet on fire?"

    "She was found in bed."

    "So? You dragged her there after the smoke knocked her out. You took a chance; you could have been killed too, but it worked out, right, Sylvia?" She shook her head. "No? Okay, just a thought; can't hang a girl for thinking."

"They're looking for you. You haven't much time left to decide."

    This was a bit of good news. But why tell me? "Oh, for God's sake, decide
what
, Sylvia?" We had begun to snarl. It seemed to me that neither of us meant to; well, I had the right, but why was Sylvia all worked up? I suppose she was on edge, an old lady holding a woman hostage. I looked at her. Nah, she was a pretty tough bird. Besides, she was keeping me docile on sedatives. " Whose idea was drugging me, Sylvia?"

    She ignored the question. "What do you care about?"

    "Me? I care about plenty."

    "Name three things."

    I thought about that. "No."

    "You didn't care about acting."

    She knew how to cut the fat off the meat, get right to the gut of the matter, didn't old Sylvia? Maybe this was what I would have tried to tell Harry if his heart hadn't given out, but Sylvia was doing the asking now: "I probably cared too much."

    She was quiet. Mucho was looking at me, his head cocked. It seemed like he was smiling. I coughed and looked up at Sylvia. She looked stricken. "Sylvia? What makes you so certain I'm not in love with my husband?"

    She waved a hand impatiently.

    "Bluffing? Well, you could be right. We married in a mood: a snowy night . . ."

    "I
am
right."

    I leaned back on my chaise of old clothes, the stale smell of them no longer bothersome. I was hungry; we'd skipped lunch.

    " Maybe I just wanted to be in love. . . ." I heard myself and wanted to laugh, I sounded that drifty— that was my mom's word,
drifting
. Well, well, revelation upon revelation. She was always say ing, "Be clear, Ardennes; be clear." When I was small I thought of windows and Windex. Or like when Grandma would say, "What a perfectly clear day we've been given today; we should learn from it." Which also confused me because I didn't know who gave us the clear day— nor did I have a clue what we were supposed to learn from it. Later I figured my mother meant clear à la the March Hare:
Then you
should say what you mean
. But I don't think that was it either, but more like some tall- order wisdom that I would have to catch on to when I got a little wisdom of my own. In other words, I forgot about it.

    Sylvia put Mucho down. "Is it girl talk now?"

    "Your turn at sarcasm, Sylvia?" I shot back.

    "Ah, whaddaya mean by
love
anyhow?"

    "I don't know." I looked up at the closet ceiling, the bare light fixture that had been my sun for the past couple of days. "Shooting stars? The kind in the sky, I mean."

    "Fireworks, huh?"

    "Sure, except fireworks don't last; then I think moving on to something deeper is the trick." I thought about Billy. He was good on the floor but maybe not so stellar on the job; why hadn't he found me yet? On top of everything else, had I slept with a second- rate cop?

    "How's the deep part going so far?"

    I shrugged. "I'm better at theory. What about you, Sylvia?"

    "What
about
me?"

    "Didn't you ever fall hard?"

    "Lucille . . ."

    I sat up again. "You had it bad for lame little Lucy, huh?" She nodded. "So you were a lesbian stripper?"

    "I had men. One I liked, only he was my uncle and that was a no- no. Didn't stop us, but it couldn't go anywhere, and I was in far more over my head than he ever was. He liked consuming my flesh all right. Not to mention he had a wife."

    "Why your uncle, if you don't mind my asking?"

    "Who knows? My mother's brother; maybe it was father desire— mine took off before we were introduced. I was barely fifteen when I seduced Uncle Jack."

    "Oh." Right about the time in my life when I was innocently pining for literary Mr. Russell.
My
daydreams hadn't gotten past kissing; I didn't know enough to go any further.

    "He was a stinker to let me, not a man of principle, but that type never worked out for me as it turned out. I started dancing and found I enjoyed the girls in the dressing room— ladies' bodies more. Being on stage with nearly naked women was a real turn- on. Imagine my little secret— not that I was the only gal to ever try and climb the harem walls." She massaged her neck. On her right middle finger was a chunky garnet ring. She had a habit of twisting it while holding on to the gun. I wondered if it was glass or the real thing. If real, who gave it to her?

    " Maybe the men I wanted to love were just too clumsy with me. Or we're all just too clumsy with each other . . . who knows?" I said, unintentionally mimicking her.

    Sylvia's head shot forward. She looked at me with total concentration, her expression stern— or maybe alert, animal- alert. It lasted a matter of seconds. "All this reminiscing isn't getting us anywhere." Her tone turned hard as rocks.

    I looked at her, not the way she looked at me but seeing her clearly the way it sometimes happens when you think you're seeing but then, when you do look— really look— you see you haven't seen at all and are only just in that moment seeing what is before you. It was her looking at me the way she did that made me look back at her the way I did. " Where are we trying get to, Sylvia?" I asked softly.

    She pushed herself off the doorway. "Too much chatter! We leave here tomorrow morning."

    I felt a shiver of panic, a snake of fear slithering down from my heart to my gut. The announcement seemed sudden. Where would she take me, to another hideout? Or was she going to dump me somewhere? Were they getting close to finding me?

    I made my voice sound unconcerned. I'd cooked up a plan and decided now was the time to play it. "Ah, gee, I was just settling in. Must we leave?" She didn't react, seated now in her chair with the gun at her side, in her right hand. "Sylvia, listen." I made myself sound embarrassed. "I had my little bath earlier, and there was spotting." No response. "Did you hear? I'm about to get my period. Could you go to the pharmacy and get me tampons? I'll pay you back. Sylvia."

    She just stared at me. For a minute I thought she was going to ask for proof. I was lying. In fact, I was a day or two late and trying not to panic, though I didn't see how it could be possible. I'd thought of that too, to ask for a pregnancy test, but decided not to jinx myself. My plan, once she was gone, was to bang on the walls with her shoes. It wasn't much, but it was all I had. The subterfuge was the only way I could be certain she'd be out of the way. But she just kept on staring. My little trick, this entirely unanticipated piece of information, had her stumped. She looked seriously flummoxed. "Sylvia?"

    She finally snapped out of it, seemed to decide what to do. Of course I was gambling she didn't have any monthly gear lying around anymore, also that she wouldn't just let me bleed all over the closet. "Sylvia, if you don't get me some sort of sanitary aid I'll have to use your clothing. I think the white blouses and gowns would go first, and of course there's the nice white carpeting. C'mon, Sylvia!"

    She agreed. She'd be gone twenty minutes, she said. She closed me in and turned the TV on, blaring again. I waited what I thought was ten minutes, then started banging and yelling with all I had. I stopped to listen. No Sylvia running back in to stop me. And nobody else either. The only gambit I had failed. Nobody heard me pounding for my life.

D
etective Collins finished with Zaneda and Alma and headed back to see Andre. He nodded to Officers Berry and Bedford, waiting in their squad car, on his way up to the suite. A few minutes later he was talking on his cell phone out on the balcony when he saw Sylvia Vernon walk out to her car. She waved girlishly to the uniform cops. The Detective went inside and asked Carola— who had just returned with Andre from Century City— to follow her. "Just follow, Carola. Call me immediately as soon as she stops anywhere. Don't go after her. No heroics, got it?" Carola nodded. She looked nervous but game. "Good."

    He walked Carola to the stairs, then called Berry and Bedford to tell them to follow her, telling them Sylvia Vernon was their objective. "The subject's car is a light blue, two- door Toyota. Follow at a distance." He read out the license number. "Go easy, like you're on a break, not looking for anything particular."

    Carola called fifteen minutes later. Sylvia had parked in the garage, taken a ticket and gone up in the elevator to Long's Pharmacy, on Hollywood. "You were supposed to call me, not stop." the Detective said.

    "I know, but I didn't want to lose her. I'm going into the store. I'll say hello if she sees me, and I'll see what she is doing." She hung up.

    Detective Collins stepped into the hallway and called Officer Berry to tell him to stay close to the parking garage exit. " Watch for the subject. When she exits follow her, again at a distance. Got it?" He called Carola to tell her to come back to the hotel immediately.

    "I don't like this," Andre said when the Detective came back into the suite. "Carola should not be doing this."

    " Doing what?"

    "Police work!"

    The Detective didn't like it any more than Andre. He knew his captain would hang him out to dry if he found out he'd used Carola. "I don't like it either."

    "I assume you know what you are doing?"

    "Don't you have some paperwork, an actress to hire?"

    Ten minutes later Carola burst into the suite, out of breath and excited. "I sped like wild! She didn't see me. Can you believe she was buying
tampons
? Isn't she a little old?"

    The Detective smiled and told her she'd disobeyed orders.

    Andre put his arm around her shoulder. "That was foolish," he said, but lightly.

    "I know. I was so scared!"

    Detective Collins didn't let her know he'd told Officers Berry and Bedford to stay with Sylvia once Carola was out of the way. He did his best to confuse everyone. Officer Bedford called to say Sylvia was on her way up to the hotel. "Good," the Detective said into his phone. "Were you seen?" Officer Bedford said he didn't think so, and they'd continued straight on the avenue when she turned up to the hotel. The Detective told him they could head back to the pre cinct, where he would have been already if Sylvia hadn't sidetracked him. He hung up, looked at his watch and swore. "I have to go back to Beverly Hills. Don't talk to Ms. Vernon, either of you," he told Andre and Carola. "That's an order, Ms. Santosa. I have a hunch she may have seen something and is afraid; that's why I wanted to know where she went. It looks like that turned out to be nothing, but we don't want to spook her and lose a possible lead." He was manufacturing and thought it had to be obvious.

    Andre looked skeptical. He said he was confused. "What would the lady next door have to do with Ardennes?"

    " Quite probably nothing," Detective Collins said. "So everybody sit tight."

    Andre and Carola promised not to do anything. "We have no wish to do your police work for you, Detective." Andre said, sounding irritated.

    The Detective looked at his watch again. Rush hour had begun. He made a showy exit, hoping Sylvia Vernon would see him leave the hotel. He felt certain now she was up to no good, had maybe been paid to make Ardennes available to someone with foul intent. Even he did not think to conclude— yet— that Ardennes was being held by a seventy- year- old former stripper.

    Municipal offices were closed by the time the Detective made it back to the precinct to ask his boss to clear a search warrant affidavit. He knew the request would not go over well.

    
"On what grounds?"
Captain Cortez bellowed. "I gave you the actress when the talent agent's housekeeper yelled foul, a simple open and shut;
you
turned it complicated. I let you go ahead with this, Collins, to my eternal regret. We don't even know the woman is missing." He tugged at his sort- of- off- white, too- tight collar.