Scavenger Hunt (21 page)

Chapter 35

The Healthy Life Café smelled of lentil soup and carrot juice and roasted garlic. Men in short-sleeved dress shirts were hunched over the small wooden tables, gobbling down soy burgers while they read the sports pages. An emaciated woman with bulging eyes and bright red lips sipped at a green milkshake—she reminded Jimmy of a dragonfly. Handmade banners on the walls proclaimed FREE TIBET! and MEAT IS MURDER and DEATH BEGINS IN THE COLON! He wondered why vegetarians always used so many exclamation points.

“Table for one?” asked the hostess, a clear-skinned young thing in a paisley sarong.

“I’m looking for some women from the McMahon Building. I was told they ate here.”

The hostess waved a hand toward the back patio. “Smoker’s gulch.”

Jimmy heard laughter as he opened the door to the patio. He made his way through the haze to a table at the rear of the deck, where three women were puffing away over their salads, large women in loud dresses, their eyeglasses big as scuba masks. They quieted slightly as he approached. “Do you ladies work in the McMahon Building?”

“Who wants to know?” said a matron with a Kool Light bobbing at the corner of her mouth.

“I bet he’s the guy Barbara talked about,” said a younger, henna redhead, dropping ashes onto her enormous salad. “Barb said he walked sexy.”

“You the one’s been asking all over about Stephanie?” said a busty blonde with black roots, her eyes undressing Jimmy. “Why don’t you walk for us, let us decide?”

“I like to hold back, maintain a little mystery.” Jimmy pulled a chair up to the table, smiling. “I’m Jimmy Gage. I’m looking for Stephanie Keys.”

“Not Keys anymore,” said the bottle blonde, dipping pita bread in the dip. “ ‘First comes love—’ ”

“ ‘Then comes marriage,’” said Kool Light.

“ ‘Then comes Steffy with a baby carriage,’” singsonged the bottle blonde, grabbing Jimmy’s leg.

Jimmy howled along with the three of them.

“What do you want with Stephanie?” said Kool Light. “She’s a good kid.”

“Not like me,” said the bottle blonde, blowing smoke in Jimmy’s face. “My old man works nights, and I’m sick of making love to my pocket rocket.”

“Angie, you’re awful,” said Kool Light. “Is Stephanie in some kind of trouble? She run up her credit cards?”

“I just want to talk to her about her old boss, April McCoy.”

“That was so sad,” said the henna redhead.

“No, it wasn’t,” sneered the bottle blonde. “April treated her like crap.”

“April was
depressed,
that’s why she killed herself,” said the henna redhead. “My brother is the same way. He’s on Prozac now.”

“Everybody is on Prozac now,” said the bottle blonde. “That don’t mean you can treat people like crap.”

“Suicide is a sin.” Kool Light stubbed out her cigarette in the hummus.

“Stephanie took it hard when April killed herself,” said the henna redhead. “She changed overnight. In some ways I guess it was good, because Stephanie had been in a real rut, overeating and letting herself go. April’s suicide was a wake-up call for her soul.”

“Like on Oprah,” said the bottle blonde.

“Like holy communion,” said Kool Light.

Jimmy rocked in his chair, listening to the conversational rhythm they had going. The three of them had probably been having lunch together for the last ten years, working on their moves, graceful and fluid as double Dutch street champs. Jimmy could watch them eat and smoke and talk all afternoon. He wondered if Stephanie had been part of the group. He hoped so. She would be honest then too, and straightforward. She would tell him whatever she knew.

“You got a nice smile, mister.” The henna redhead bit a carrot in half. “Don’t he have a nice smile, girls?” She chewed noisily. “Anyway, after April did her thing, Stephanie went to work for this homecare-products distributor on the second floor and lost just a
ton
of weight. What was Stephanie on? Jenny Craig? Herbalife?”

“Weight Watchers.”

“Slim-Fast.”

“Whatever,” said the henna redhead, “she lost a lot of weight. It seemed like every time she came back to visit, she had dropped another ten pounds.”

“She’s not working on the second floor anymore,” said Jimmy. “Her last employer said she moved in with her boyfriend and that was the last he saw of her.”

“The boyfriend didn’t last six months. I
told
her he was all wrong for her,” said the bottle blonde, “but she didn’t want to listen to me. I’ve only been married three times—what could I possibly know about the male of the species?” She flipped her cigarette over the hedge surrounding the patio. “The boyfriend was some kind of sweaty sex machine or something from the way she talked.”

“That gets old,” said the henna redhead.

The three of them burst out laughing. Jimmy pretended to be embarrassed.

“Stephanie dumped the sex machine and found a hard worker willing to marry her,” said Kool Light. “She said he was a hard worker, anyway.”

“I couldn’t find a marriage license issued in her name,” said Jimmy. “I checked.”

“Aren’t you the eager beaver?” Kool Light narrowed her eyes. “Stephanie got married in Mexico. She showed me pictures of the ceremony. It was beautiful. The water there is bluer than ours. At least in the pictures.”

“I got married in Vegas,” said the bottle blonde. “Dipshit lost five hundred dollars shooting craps, and we had to come home the next day.”

“Do you know where Stephanie is living now?” said Jimmy.

The henna redhead shook her head. “Someplace out in the desert, I think. She sent me a Christmas card a couple years ago. Her little girl was dressed as an elf. Even fixed her ears so they looked pointed.”

“Did you write down the address?” said Jimmy.

“No, sorry.” The henna redhead brightened. “I might have kept the card, though. I got a big box full of pictures and photographs that I’m saving for this big decoupage project. I want to do all my kitchen cabinets in pictures of little kids. My husband’s sterile—at least he says he is—but I like kids.”

“Decoupage is so over,” said the bottle blonde.

“Could you check your box of pictures and see if you kept the Christmas card?” Jimmy asked the henna redhead.

The bottle blonde picked up the check and fished a calculator out of her purse. “Okay, I had the potato blintzes, the hibiscus iced tea”—her manicure flew across the keys—“and the eggplant appetizer, which we split three ways.”

“I hardly touched the appetizer,” said Kool Light. “Eggplant gives me gas.”

“What’s Stephanie’s married name?” asked Jimmy.

“I had the hummus, the wheatgrass surprise—” The henna redhead glanced at Jimmy. “Something Spanish, I think. Or Jewish. One or the other.”

“Jews don’t move to the desert,” said the bottle blonde.

“Moses led the children of Israel into the desert for forty years,” said Kool Light, watching the bottle blonde add the bill. “My hearts of palm was three ninety-nine, not four ninety-nine.”

“My second husband was a Jew,” the bottle blonde said, “so don’t go telling me about the children of Israel.”

“Your Christmas cards?” Jimmy reminded the henna redhead. “Will you see if you have Stephanie’s address?”

“You’re
sure
you’re not from a collection agency?” asked the henna redhead.

“Yeah, like he’d tell you the truth if he was,” said the bottle blonde. “You need to stop trusting everything in pants. Okay, your share, with tax and tip, make it eight twenty-five.”

“I’m a reporter,” said Jimmy. “I’m writing a story on April McCoy. I just want to talk to Stephanie—”

“Let me see the bill,” the henna redhead said to the bottle blonde.

“What, you think I’m cheating you?” asked the bottle blonde.

“I had a
small
wheatgrass surprise,” said the henna redhead.

Jimmy plucked the check from the bottle blonde and pulled out his wallet.

“Look girls, we got a real strongman here,” said the henna redhead. “He picked that check up like it was nothing.”

The women laughed so hard that people at the other tables turned to see what had happened.

Chapter 36

An emerald tree boa and a brown-and-red-striped Burmese reticulated python placidly watched Jimmy as he walked into Santa Monica Exotics. The snakes were piled in the front windows, draped across fake tree limbs, ten and twelve and fourteen footers, their wide flat heads draped across their coiled bulk. Two black-clad goth kids stood outside, holding hands as they stared at the snakes. The girl, draped in silver ankhs and crucifixes, eyes blackened like a raccoon, flicked her tongue stud at the python.

A two-toned colobus monkey screeched, its black and white fur looking like formal attire, but Jimmy ignored it, looking for Samantha Packard. A caged red-green macaw followed his progress as he passed the gekkos and iguanas. A West African dwarf crocodile, an ugly beast no larger than a dachshund, opened wide its mouth as Jimmy walked past, its teeth like sharpened dice. A small boy pressed his face against a glass front, and the tarantulas inside waved back. A nearby cluster of black Mexican scorpions clicked their claws against the glass. The sound gave Jimmy the creeps.

Samantha Packard had called him at the office this morning, sounding out of breath, her voice little more than a whisper. “Santa Monica Exotics—do you know it? Three o’clock.”

The store was a collection of nooks and crannies, narrow aisles leading into large open areas like clearings in the jungle. A sales-woman in black leather pants was showing a gold chinchilla to a middle-aged couple, brushing out its fur before handing it over to the wife, who cuddled it like a child. The chinchilla had tiny black eyes, a silky yellow pelt, and the face of a sewer rat.

Jimmy turned the corner and saw Samantha Packard at the end of the aisle, staring into one of the cages, her shoulders slumped. She was wearing a lively orchid-colored dress and her hair was coifed, but her posture gave her an air of fatigue and defeat. He came up behind her, moving so quietly that she jumped when he spoke her name.

Samantha pressed her back against the glass wall of the cage, terrified. In the dim recesses a ring-tailed lemur dangled from a tree limb, sleeping.

“It’s okay,” said Jimmy.

“You’re—you’re a little early.”

Jimmy could see a small bruise on the side of her jaw, barely covered by makeup. “I’m glad you called me. Does he know?”

Samantha blinked. “Know what?”

“About the letter?”

Samantha glanced away, then back. “I’m sorry.”

“It wasn’t you, it was me. Walsh tried to tell, but I didn’t believe him.”

Samantha acted like she hadn’t heard him, turning back to the cage, watching the lemur snooze, a silvery marsupial with bony humanoid hands. “They sleep sixteen hours a day, eighteen hours sometimes, dreaming their life away. They’re very intelligent. They’re so much smarter than us—” She jerked as Jimmy touched her shoulder, flinging off his hand, still watching the lemur, her dull eyes reflected in the glass.

Jimmy heard something behind him.

Mick Packard acted startled that he had been caught, his surprise turning to anger. “I
told
you to stop bothering my wife.” He was a lousy actor.

Jimmy glanced at Samantha, who maintained her vigil on the lemur cage.

Packard advanced, looking tough in black turtleneck and black pants, hands poised in martial arts readiness. “You picked the wrong woman to harass.”

“I think there’s been a mistake.”

“
I’m
not the one who made a mistake.”

“You gave me the idea when we met at Garrett Walsh’s funeral. I’m doing a profile on action stars and their wives. I wanted to interview Mrs. Packard first—”

Packard did one of his signature spin-turns, and Jimmy dodged, the kick just grazing his head. Packard looked surprised again. He had slowed down since he was a top box-office draw, but even the near miss almost tore Jimmy’s ear off.

Jimmy backed away, fists cocked, watching Packard’s eyes as the man closed in.

“Running away?” Packard was talking too loudly.

Jimmy glanced around and saw a video cameraman shooting from the far end of the aisle. The sight distracted him for a moment, long enough for Packard to attack again, his roundhouse kick slamming into the wall next to his head. Jimmy grabbed his outstretched foot and twisted, sending him to the ground bellowing.

Packard got quickly to his feet, limping slightly. “You’ve had training.”

“I told you, this is a mistake.” Jimmy backed up, looking for an exit.

“Hey, don’t you want to play?” The question had been the oft-repeated tagline of Packard’s last box-office hit.

Jimmy edged into the main corridor. Halfway down the middle-aged wife nuzzled the golden chinchilla. The cameraman stepped into the aisle from behind her, still filming. Jimmy feinted, then threw a punch at Packard, a hard left hook.

Packard swatted the blow aside, hit Jimmy twice on the side of the head, and knocked him down. Packard mugged for the camera, beckoning Jimmy to rise to his feet.

Samantha Packard faced the lemur cage, her hands clenched at her sides.

Jimmy got up, his ears ringing as he rocked on the balls of his feet. He never saw the blow coming.

Packard moved in, low-kicked, then drove the heel of his left hand into Jimmy’s chest and sent him stumbling back against a wall of glass cages.

Jimmy heard the scorpions scuttling behind him but kept his eyes on Packard. It hurt to breathe. He was scared.

Packard bounced forward, dodging and weaving, a smug little smile on his face. He was right where he wanted to be: in a big-screen moment.

Jimmy kept trying to box him, but Packard slipped past his punches, smacked him and retreated, then smacked him again. Jimmy was fast, faster than Packard, but Packard’s timing was perfect.

Packard hit Jimmy again and again, hit him in the exact same place each time, smiling broader now as Jimmy got angrier and more desperate. Packard stuck his head forward, daring Jimmy to take a shot.

Jimmy lashed out, and his fist grazed Packard’s chin before he got nailed again. The side of his head was numb now, and blood trickled from his ear. He backed up, gasping for breath. The middle-aged wife was right behind him now, asking her husband if they were filming a movie, her voice echoing, sounding like she was speaking from inside a seashell.

Packard grinned at him, easing forward.

Jimmy grabbed the golden chinchilla from the wife and tossed it to Packard.

Packard deftly caught the squealing chinchilla, then, confused, looked at the camera.

Jimmy punched him in the face, catching him good. The chinchilla clawed its way free and scampered down his leg. Jimmy hit him again, just below the nose this time, a pressure point where all the facial nerves gathered—right where Jane had taught him. Packard grunted, and Jimmy tripped him, drove him to the ground.

Packard got halfway up, cursing.

Jimmy kicked him, sending him sprawling. Packard tried to stand, but Jimmy didn’t give him a chance. No marquess of Queensbury bullshit, no time-outs, no Geneva Convention, no director calling “CUT!” Jimmy kicked Packard’s knee out from under him, kicked him when he struggled up, and punched him in the throat when he tried to explain. When Packard stopped trying to get up, Jimmy stopped hitting him.

The cameraman caught every moment of it.

Samantha Packard hadn’t moved. She was still slumped against the glass, watching the sleeping lemur.

“Samantha?” Jimmy’s voice was raspy.

Samantha pressed her hands against the thick glass, moaning, but the lemur didn’t move, lost in some solitary rain-forest reverie where the light was cool and deep and green and the trees were heavy with fruit. If the lemur heard Samantha’s soft cries in his dream, he didn’t respond.

“Turn around, buddy.”

Jimmy ignored the cameraman.

“You a stuntman or something, buddy?”

Jimmy shook his head. “Samantha, you have to get away from him.”

Samantha Packard didn’t move. “I’m sorry.”

“This was for real then?” The cameraman zoomed in. “So could you please tell us why you’re stalking Mick Packard’s wife?”

Packard coughed and curled up on the floor. The macaw screamed at them, fluttering its bright wings.

Jimmy stared at Samantha Packard. He felt sick. “You’re not the good wife, are you?”

Samantha Packard hung her head. “I’ve tried—I’ve tried to be.”