Shamus In The Green Room (24 page)

cheek, which stayed white even though the rest of his face had

turned bright red.

CHAPTER

TWENTY-EIGHT

Gambino came over sometime after midnight. He held

me close, massaged my sore back, changed my bandage,

gave me Advil, and didn’t say much, all of which I appreciated.

I wasn’t ready to talk.

I don’t think he was either.

I slept like a log. When I woke up, it was close to eleven. He

was gone and the house felt empty. I went into the kitchen to

make coffee and saw that the pets had been fed, which was the

only reason I’d been able to sleep in unassaulted. I was duly

impressed—and that was before I glimpsed the croissants.

They were arranged on a plate, next to a bouquet of dahlias.

There was also a note, the contents of which are private. But I

smiled as I read it.

The glass company called back around noon. Gus would be

over later. They apologized for the delay, but they were really up

to their ears. It was a seasonal thing. September to December

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were good months. Crime was up. Holiday season and all. The

weight of family obligations, personal demons, existential

angst—lots of bad cheer. January to April: those are the slow

months. That’s when I should get in touch. They’ve got noth-

ing but time then.

After my shower, I telephoned Annie. I had an important

question to ask her. Unfortunately, she didn’t know the an-

swer. She did mention that Alexander was doing better. He’d

made a friend in the neighborhood, a little girl. They were over

at her place today, playing. I was happy to hear that. As for my

question, she recommended I consult her Rafe Simic scrap-

book, which I did. But that turned out to be no help either, so

I walked to the video store on La Cienega, rented every Rafe

Simic film they had on the shelves, and invited Bridget and

Lael over for movie night.

Though both led busy and exciting lives, they were available.

t

B r i d g e t a r r i v e d a t s i x o n t h e n o s e . S h e

was decked out in a silver-and-maroon Thea Porter caftan,

influenced in equal parts by Art Deco, Chekhov, and the de-

signer’s native Israel. Or so she said, sashaying through the entry

hall. She might have sashayed more gracefully had she not been

juggling, in addition to her small dog, Helmut, an obscene

profusion of movie snacks: Red Vines, Hot Tamales, Junior

Mints, peanut M&M’s, Cool Ranch Doritos, and microwave

popcorn.

The caftan was probably a wise choice, considering.

After the grand entrance, she tossed the snacks and Helmut

onto my green velvet couch, agitating Buster and sending

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Mimi skittering down the hall to one of her many hiding

places. Thus unencumbered, Bridget headed into the kitchen,

where she appraised the dirty dishes with a raised eyebrow and

tore open the cellophane-wrapped popcorn envelope with her

small, white teeth. She handed it to me and I shoved it in the

microwave. Before long, the smell of Butter Light was wafting

through the room.

Bridget immediately reached into her pocket for a pillbox.

“Does this stuff give you a headache? I don’t know why I buy

it. It gives me a headache. And when I get a headache, it lasts

four entire days.”

I still had a wicked headache from the accident, but I’d

maxed out on Advil. Even the sound of my own voice made

me nauseous. Good thing Bridget didn’t consider conversation

a give-and-take proposition.

“Do you know I practically stole this caftan from a dowager

in West Palm Beach? It was very satisfying.” She popped two

aspirin into her mouth and swallowed them without water. Im-

pressive. I ate three Red Vines simultaneously, which was also

a talent of sorts.

“No luck at the video store, by the way. Sorry, Cece. Peo-

ple keep the ones they like. Pretend they’re lost. I’ve done it

myself.”

I’d asked Bridget to check for copies of Rafe’s first three

movies, Tahoe Nights, Uptown Boy, and Margaritaville, in which

he played, successively, an amorous ski instructor, an amorous

masseur, and an amorous bartender. Having seen Margaritaville

when it’d first come out, I knew for a fact that nobody had kept

that one because they liked it. I suspected Will of having per-

sonally destroyed all copies. Unbelievably, they’d made a Mar-

garitaville 2, which I’d also had the misfortune of seeing, on a

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blind date. I had no particular memory of Rafe in it, but the

Turks and Caicos setting was indelible. Picturesque grass huts.

White sand beaches. Gratuitous nudity in picturesque grass

huts and on white sand beaches. It’d been an awkward evening.

No copies of the early films, then. So much for my plan.

Well, I was happy to have the company. Gambino wouldn’t be

back until late. I’d have to tell him about the gun, of course.

And that would be the end of that. Then I’d have to tell him

everything. And what would that mean for Maren?

“Did you hear me? I’m persona non grata at Blockbuster,”

Bridget said.

“Officially?”

“She speaks. I dropped a one-pound Hershey bar and they

tried to make me buy it, but I refused to pay for a broken

candy bar.”

“But you broke it,” I said.

“And how precisely might that be relevant?”

Lael’s arrival saved me from having to debate moral philos-

ophy with the essentially amoral Bridget. Lael made a big to-do

over the cut on my forehead, which Bridget had not even no-

ticed. She also brought homemade lemon squares and a copy

of He Loves Me Not, Rafe’s only big-budget flop. After the run-

away success of Dead Ahead, the studio had decided to try him

in a light romance, but screwball comedy is harder than it

looks.

“Let’s watch this one first,” said Lael, who loved romance

even when it was a disaster. “Is that okay with you, Cece?” she

asked, squeezing in next to me. She patted my knee. “Bridget,

make yourself useful here!”

Bridget turned down the lights.

The movie opens with Rafe seated at a drafting table. He

227

takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes, then leaps up to hurl a

cardboard model of an office park across the room. He takes a

weathered wooden oar down from the wall and strokes it long-

ingly. A secretary rushes in to sweep up the mess and hands

Rafe a message from his mother in Maine: that run-down

oceanfront property, by old Doc Sweeney’s place, is up for sale

again.

Rafe leaves and hits the local Chili’s. He orders a big fried

onion and a double scotch at the bar. The bartender is a

woman, busty, with great hair. She wants to open up her own

seafood restaurant someday. She hates big cities. Her dead fa-

ther was a fisherman. Did I mention she was busty? It’s clear

where this is going.

I bit into a Junior Mint, then remembered I don’t like

mints. “What I want to know is why the leading man is always

an architect.”

“The dad in The Brady Bunch was an architect,” said Lael.

“I think it’s supposed to be macho.”

“He was gay,” Bridget said. “I met him several times.” She fed

Helmut some Hot Tamales because chocolate is bad for dogs.

Rafe didn’t look all that great in a suit. Good thing he

stripped it off fifteen minutes into the movie. Several close-ups

of him and the bartender exchanging loving, postcoital looks

followed. I saw Rafe’s scar and pointed it out to Lael and Brid-

get, who likewise had never noticed it before.

By mutual agreement, we moved on to Lords of Venice,

which was Rafe’s breakthrough film. He played a cop in the

seventies who goes undercover as a skate punk in Venice Beach

to quell gang violence. I wouldn’t call it a nuanced perfor-

mance. Nobody had ever accused Rafe of being much of an

actor. But he had an amazing physicality. He filled the screen.

228

You couldn’t take your eyes off him. It was actually sort of

uncanny.

We watched that one all the way through. Lael cried at the

end, when Rafe’s girlfriend took a bullet meant for her man,

but the dry-eyed Bridget was more interested in the girlfriend’s

trampy seventies attire. I was interested in Rafe’s scar. The

makeup and lighting couldn’t hide it, once you knew it was

there.

We fast-forwarded through most of The Cut of the Sword.

None of us was particularly enamored of all-male movies. No

one to identify with. Well, Bridget sort of identified with the

relentless samurai master. He would strike his students with a

wooden sword at random times of the day and night until they

learned never to let down their guard. Rafe was good wielding

the deadly, curved katana. This was the movie that cemented

his reputation as a Zen mystic, which is what the media, when

they’re being generous, call Californians who practice yoga and

drink green tea.

Blue Sky in the Dark had been a huge hit. Lael hadn’t much

liked it. She said, without elaborating further, that she’d

known a confidence man or two in her time, and Rafe was no

confidence man. Bridget, not about to be outdone, said she,

too, had been around the block, thank you very much, and

Rafe was absolutely the type. Then it was my turn, but since I

had no experience whatsoever with flimflam men, unless you

counted my ex-husband, I really didn’t know. There was one

scene, however, that chilled me to the bone.

Rafe, playing a con artist named Joe Allan, is ten months

into a long scam where he’s pretending to be a car-parts sales-

man named Al Joseph. Al is telling a story to a guy he meets in

a bar. The story is about his mother, who hanged herself in the

229

bathroom when he was eight years old. The story is long and

involved and painful. After it’s done, the con man looks up,

dazed, and you realize that not only do you, the audience, have

no idea exactly whose memory has just been recounted—the

con man’s or that of his alter ego, Al—he doesn’t know either.

Liars lie, even to themselves.

Joy Popping had come out last year. We’d all seen it. Rafe

plays a rock climber and recreational drug user who has to re-

build his life after his girlfriend plunges to her death during a

climbing expedition somewhere in Cambodia.

We skipped to Hollywood and Vine, Rafe’s most recent film,

the one that didn’t get him the Golden Globe nomination

everyone thought he deserved. We watched the last half hour,

which included the pivotal scene where Rafe the hustler con-

fronts Gordy the pimp, now dying of AIDS. We then fast-

forwarded to the kiss, which fueled rumors for months on end

that Rafe and his male costar were romantically involved.

By that point, we’d finished off the candy and both pizzas

(sausage and green peppers followed by pepperoni and olive),

which meant it was time for dessert. After the lemon squares,

we were exhausted. I walked Bridget and Lael out to their cars.

They made a big fuss over my rental, which was a newer,

cleaner version of my own car, still at D.J.’s. The people at the

rental place had tried to give me a red Ford Escort that smelled

of disinfectant, but once I spied the white, late-model Camry

on the lot, that was that.

As a parting gift, Helmut threw up on my lawn.

I was about to close the front door when Lael screeched to a

stop halfway to Santa Monica Boulevard and backed up at

what had to be fifty miles per hour.

“Sorry, Cece!” she yelled. “I forgot all about this.”

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I walked out to the middle of the street in my slippers and

took a videotape out of her hands.

Tahoe Nights.

Rafe’s first movie.

“I found it in the back of Tommy’s closet. You know boys,”

she said, smiling. “Yucky.”

I went back inside and settled down on the couch.

It smelled low budget from the opening credits, a cheap

James Bond rip-off with ski bunnies in silhouette performing

unseemly tricks with ski poles. Perhaps in some alternate uni-

verse people did ski double-diamond runs in lingerie, drink

pink champagne in hot tubs, have sex in pro shops, outrun po-

lice cars, only to return to their Ivy League colleges to pursue

degrees in kinesiology and special education. I was obviously

not getting out enough.

Rafe was the kinesiologist-to-be.

Buster and Mimi joined me for the penultimate scene, in

which Rafe valiantly rescues the beautiful townie girl (the

special-ed teacher-to-be) from an avalanche, realizing only at

that moment that she—not the vacationing debutante he’s

been bedding for most of the film—is the one for him. Just be-

fore they make love in the pine trees, there is a close-up on

Rafe’s face, a smile slowly spreading across it.

I froze the frame for a minute, rewound for a couple of sec-

onds, then froze it again.

Caught.

CHAPTER

TWENTY-NINE

There was no scar on Rafe’s cheek. Not a trace of one.