The Evening Star (37 page)

By the time it was ten o’clock, Bruce was feeling frantic despite all the dope he had smoked. Maybe he had got very mixed up and it was her night to work at the deli—but that couldn’t be it, otherwise she wouldn’t have marched off to shoplift their supper.

Still, he got so jittery that he had to do something, so he went down to the pay phone at a nearby laundromat and called the deli. Just as he had feared, it wasn’t her night to work, and she wasn’t there. Since he was already out, he jumped in the car and raced over to the supermarket, but it was closed and the parking lot was empty except for a couple of old people walking their poodles. Bruce felt like running over the stupid poodles, he was so worried, but he managed to restrain himself. He didn’t know what to do. There was a hospital not too far from the supermarket—he passed it every day on his way to the filling station—so he cruised over there, thinking maybe she had been the victim of a hit-and-run, but nope—no Melanie Horton had been admitted to the hospital.

Then it occurred to him that maybe Melanie had finally got caught shoplifting. They had been supplementing their diet with a little shoplifting for several weeks, and Melanie kept complaining that she hated doing it and that it wasn’t right. Even if it was a big, gross supermarket owned by slimy capitalists who exploited the poor, that didn’t, in her view, make it right to steal steaks. Also, just doing it made her feel guilty. The fact that she was shoplifting was bound to be obvious to security people or even just simple grocery clerks: if she kept on doing it, she was bound to get caught, and then what?

Bruce soon concluded that that was probably the simplest explanation for her disappearance, but it didn’t help him much with his dilemma. If she had been caught, where was she? Despite performing some minor crimes, such as hauling marijuana, he had never been anywhere near a jail in his whole life and had no idea how to find the one they might have taken Melanie to. Actually, the mere thought of a cop so depraved that he would arrest an obviously sweet person such as Melanie was pretty nerve-racking.

Thinking about
that
made him regret his folly in demanding steaks. There was an excellent cheap Thai place only two blocks from their apartment: they should just have eaten Thai.

But it was obviously too late for that, and his stomach was so upset he had to stop at a convenience store and buy some Maalox just to quiet it down. He went back to the grocery-store parking lot, hoping a miracle would happen and Melanie would be standing there, but the only ones there were more old people walking even worse dogs than poodles—midget Mexican dogs without hair and dachshunds and Pekinese. The parking lot seemed to be a kind of dog-walking sanctuary for old couples with tiny dogs. Melanie was
not
standing there, and he really didn’t know what to do. If she was in jail, she couldn’t have called him, because of their lack of a phone; she might have called her father, but probably not. She might have called her grandmother, in which case he might as well shoot himself. Her grandmother thought he was scum anyway—what was she going to think now?

Several cop cars passed. Once or twice he thought of flagging one down, but seven or eight passed without his being able to muster the nerve to flag one down. What was he going to say if a cop did consent to stop? Please bring my girlfriend back, all I wanted was a steak?

What he did was drive aimlessly around for about another hour, not getting too far out of the area, in case Melanie crawled out of a ditch or something and appeared on the sidewalk. The mere sight of her would have made him the happiest man alive.

To calm his nerves he stopped at a pay phone and on impulse made a collect call to Beverly in Houston. He didn’t really expect her to be home—after all, it was Saturday night—but she was, and not only that, she accepted the call.

“Hi,” he said tentatively. He hadn’t really expected to get her, and wasn’t really prepared with things to say.

“I’m real pissed off at you. Where are you?” Beverly said at once. Like a lot of Houston rich girls, Beverly was pretty up front.

“Uh—L.A.—I’m just out here trying to be an actor,” Bruce said.

“What about that fat whore you left with?” Beverly asked. She more or less despised Melanie, although they had once been best friends.

“She’s sort of become a missing person,” Bruce admitted.

“Good, I hope she stays missing for the next fifty years,” Beverly said. She displayed no interest in why Melanie might be missing.

Bruce found making conversation a little difficult. Beverly was totally pissed off, just as she said, and it was sort of hard to get around that fact and have a normal conversation, particularly when he was really worried about Melanie.

“Do you still have the Ferrari?” he asked finally.

“No. Thanks to you my parents sold it, you dickhead,” Beverly said coldly.

“So what are you driving?” Bruce asked.

“Just a stupid little BMW, thanks to you,” Beverly said.

“BMWs are nice cars, though,” Bruce pointed out.

“Not as nice as Ferraris,” Beverly said. “Half the kids I know have BMWs. I hate having the same car as half the kids I know.”

You’ll live, Bruce thought, but he didn’t say it. Beverly was ticked enough as it was.

“I heard Melanie is pregnant, is that true?” Beverly asked.

“Uh, yeah, she’s pregnant,” Bruce said.

“If you marry her, that’s it for us,” Beverly informed him. “You’re not fucking me again if you marry that fat whore.”

Bruce didn’t know what to say to that. After all, he lived in L.A. and she lived in Houston, and she hadn’t much liked having sex with him anyway. Why was she suddenly talking about fucking?

“So do you care whether you ever fuck me again, asshole?” Beverly asked.

“Yeah, sure I do,” Bruce said. He didn’t feel that he should stop and consider when asked a question like that by a girl. Was he going to tell her he
didn’t
care whether he ever fucked her again? No way—better just to lie.

“What if I show up in Beverly Hills?” Beverly asked. “Are you going to be too scared of your wife to get it on?”

“She’s not my wife,” Bruce reminded her.

“Answer the question,” Beverly said.

“Why would you come out here?” Bruce said—he felt he should stall on this one.

“Are you just gonna be dull?” Beverly asked. “My mother comes out there all the time to shop. I could come with my mother if I wanted to.”

Bruce was thinking that a pretty big change must have come over Beverly. In Houston she had rarely been too eager to get it on, and when he did manage to persuade her, she mainly seemed interested in getting it over with. Not once had she ever seemed to get
into
it to the extent that Melanie did. Melly was a girl who really got into having sex—whatever was happening, she was
there;
it was not too surprising that she’d got pregnant.

Beverly, though, had quite a few hang-ups in the sexual area. Most of the time she seemed more interested in makeup than she did in sex. So why was she suddenly talking about journeying to L.A. just to fuck him?

“I could probably talk her into coming next week,” Beverly said. “Have you got a job, or what?”

“Uh, yeah, part time,” Bruce said. “I’m in an acting class.’”

“Big deal,” Beverly said. “How do I get in touch with you, if we come?”

“I’m not sure,” Bruce said. “We haven’t been able to afford a phone. I guess you could leave a message at the filling station.”

“You don’t even have a phone?” Beverly said.

“Out here it costs a fortune just to get one,” Bruce informed her. Sometimes her rich-girlness was pretty hard to take. It was clear she was shocked to discover that she actually knew someone who was too poor to afford a phone.

At that point the conversation stalled. Bruce gave her the number of the gas station, though he wasn’t too sure he wanted to get himself involved with Beverly again even if she came to L.A. for the specific purpose of having sex with
him. It was a little weird. Of all the people in the world he could have called to calm his nerves, Beverly was probably the number one worst choice. As he now remembered, nothing that happened with Beverly had ever made him calmer. It just made him feel more zingy, usually. At the moment, his big problem was finding Melanie, Beverly’s deadly enemy. So what was he doing standing at a pay phone at Burbank and Vineland, talking to a girl in Houston who thought he was an asshole? He had done it himself, but it didn’t add up. Now the question was, how to get Beverly off the phone?

“If I come, you better show up, and you better do something pretty special, or that’s it,” Beverly said, while he was considering the problem of how to get her off the phone.

“You better at least take me to the Ivy to make up for all the trouble you’ve caused,” Beverly said. “I’d still have a Ferrari if it wasn’t for you.”

“What’s the Ivy?” Bruce asked.

“It’s a restaurant, dumbbell,” Beverly said. “All the movie stars go there. You live in Hollywood—haven’t you even heard of the Ivy?”

“We live way over in the Valley,” Bruce told her. “We don’t get to Hollywood too much.”

“We, we, we, and this little piggy went to the market,” Beverly said meanly. “I’m looking at my calendar and next Wednesday looks clear. You just better show up at the Beverly Hills Hotel next Wednesday and take me to the Ivy or you’re never getting any more from me.”

“Beverly, I can’t even afford to
park
at the Beverly Hills Hotel,” Bruce said. “I just work part time at a gas station. That restaurant probably costs more than I make in a month.”

“Are you telling me nothing doing?” Beverly said. The next thing he knew she had slammed the phone down, accomplishing just what he had been trying to think how to accomplish. The phone call was definitely over. Calling her in the first place had been one of his worst ideas in recent times—not as bad as sending Melanie off to shoplift steaks, but not a prize idea, either.

Still, he felt a little jittery. Beverly was perfectly capable of hanging up on him and then expecting him to show up at the hotel anyway even though he had just pointed out that he couldn’t afford the restaurant. Beverly had a real blind spot when it came to money—she just assumed he could get it and spend it on her if he really wanted to. If he didn’t get it and spend it on her, then all the problems of life were his fault.

Just thinking about Beverly made Melanie seem a thousand times better than he thought she was when she was in the dumps or had had a fight. The phone call shook him up and made him really want to solve the main problem, which was Melanie. It made him want to solve it so badly he even stopped a cop car. He waved his hands and the car wheeled over and stopped. The cop behind the wheel looked at him as if he were a banana peel or something. He did not look even the slightest bit friendly.

“Hi,” Bruce said. He felt he had better talk fast before the cop got out of the car and beat the shit out of him. “If someone living in this area got arrested, where would they take her?” he asked nervously.

“What’d she do?” the cop asked. He had a kind of southern voice.

“I don’t know, she just hasn’t come home,” Bruce said.

“
She
who?” the cop asked.

“Her name’s Melanie Horton—she’s my girlfriend,” Bruce said. “I checked with the Valley hospital and she’s not there. I thought maybe she got drunk and made a disturbance and got picked up.”

“You mean she’s a hooker?” the cop asked.

“Oh, no,” Bruce said. “She’s not a hooker. I just thought she might have got drunk and caused trouble.”

The cop who had been sitting in the passenger seat got out and came around the back of the car. He was a hefty white man with a gun on his hip that looked big enough to stop an elephant. Bruce was really beginning to wish he hadn’t had the idea of stopping the police car.

“What’s this hooker’s name?” the hefty cop asked.

“Sir, she isn’t a hooker,” Bruce said, as politely as possible. “She’s my fiancé. She’s way late getting home, and I just got worried, that’s all. Her name’s Melanie Horton.

“She’s pregnant,” he added, thinking that fact might make the cops a little less hostile to him.

“You think this fucker’s a pimp?” the large cop asked his partner.

“Could be,” the other cop said. “A pimply pimp.”

He smiled at his own wit, but the other cop didn’t smile. He took a little sinus sniffer out of his pocket and used it on both nostrils, all the while looking at Bruce as if Bruce were a bug it might be nice to step on.

“Sir, I’m not a pimp,” Bruce said. “I work at a gas station on Van Nuys Boulevard.”

The cop put the cap back on his sinus sniffer and strolled back around the car.

“Try Oxnard,” he said, “If she got picked up around here, that’s where they took her.”

It took Bruce a few minutes to calm down enough to drive, once the cops left. Talking to cops made him feel some high anxiety even if he was just getting a speeding ticket. Once he had got stopped for speeding when he had marijuana in the trunk; the highway patrolman hadn’t looked in the trunk, but Bruce had been so scared he had trouble even driving to Dallas. His legs were so weak they didn’t want to work the pedals.

When he finally located the Oxnard police station, five or six women who definitely looked like hookers were standing on the sidewalk, redoing their makeup while they waited for cabs. Inside, he had to wait so long that he almost nodded off; it was hot and boring in the waiting room, and the clerks had a tendency to do absolutely nothing unless you bugged them. He himself had always had a problem with public officials—he didn’t enjoy bugging them, or even approaching them. Still, it was obvious he would sit there all night if he didn’t bug somebody: every fifteen minutes or so he would head back to the counter and stand there, trying to look polite. Two or three sad Mexican men who looked as if they
might be gardeners were also standing there looking polite. Actually, everyone waiting in the police station
was
polite—it was only the clerks on duty who had a don’t-give-a-shit attitude.