A Better Goodbye (5 page)

“That gets old,” Sara said as she and Rachel burst into laughter.

“I've got to go.” Jenny was on her feet, shrugging on her backpack. “You're like totally obsessed with guys and I want to talk about poetry.”

“You mean you were serious about Elizabeth what's-her-name?” Rachel said.

“Bishop. You should read her poems. They'll improve your dirty little minds.”

“I'd still rather hear about the guy you blew off,” Sara said.

Jenny heard her but kept walking, content to let Sara and Rachel conjure up their own fantasy about her life. Most likely the fantasy would never include massage, and yet massage was out there waiting to be discovered by anybody who looked hard enough. It was as obvious as the ad in the campus paper that Jenny had answered two and a half years ago, the one that said, “Cute Asian Girls Wanted—Lots of $, Lots of Fun.” She was sure she wasn't the only cute Asian girl at Bay City who'd answered it.

They were everywhere, hotties who looked like they were majoring in nightlife on the Sunset Strip or in Koreatown or Little Saigon, shaking their asses and searching for sugar daddies who plied them with Crown Royal. The Trendy Asian Bitches shopped at A|X and Bebe, wouldn't wear shoes that weren't platforms, did their makeup like movie stars, and hunted for boyfriends who drove Ferraris. No Benzes or Beemers for them.

Then there were the hoochie TABs, who took everything one step further. If their hair was colored, they wouldn't settle for mere blonde, they would look to L.A.'s chemical sunsets for inspiration and go red or purple, even orange. Their boob jobs were a revolt by girls too long dismissed as the young and the breastless—massive protuberances on tight little bodies, whose owners would go on cigarette-and-bottled-water diets the instant they hit a hundred and five pounds. It was the hoochie TABs who were most likely to do massage—they cultivated a look that screamed horny—but some straight-up TABs had done massage too, when they were fighting with the boyfriends or parents they counted on for money.

Jenny didn't feel like she fit in either category. Her hair was the color it had always been, black, and she was frightened by the thought of what one client had called “bolt-on tits.” Globs of silicone inside her? No, thanks. She couldn't fathom spending a fortune on clothes either, and it was a rare day that she could be bothered to do her makeup according to the teachings of her TAB girlfriends. Her lone concession to fashion was that two-thirds of the things in her closet were black. All right, she liked shoes, too, especially stilettos and platforms, even though they made her feel like she was going to tip over.

But she read way too many books to be a genuine TAB or, God forbid, a hoochie TAB—and the books weren't romance novels. The only time she'd been tempted to dive into those was when a masseuse she worked with swore that reading them would make her better in bed. She didn't have a boyfriend then, so being great in bed didn't matter. The time she would have spent screwing was devoted to reading all the Dickens she hadn't got around to in high school. Halfway through
Oliver Twist
, she knew she had made the right choice.

If people wanted to say she was a little odd, that was fine with Jenny. She lived in a world of her own making, with her books and her extended periods of seclusion, and there was no sense in changing now. She felt safe, secure, even when the occasional troubling thought slipped through her defenses.

Sometimes doing massage bothered her, no matter how much she loved the easy money. But it wasn't a moral issue—some guys just needed to get off, others craved a little tenderness, and if they were married, well, maybe having a stranger pulling their plugs was what they were looking for. What gnawed at Jenny was that she knew she should be doing something with her life besides wondering how to spend her money while jerking off a guy she had never seen before and might never see again. She wasn't a rocket scientist, but she was bright—lots of clients had told her so, lawyers and writers, even a UCLA professor whose class she wouldn't have minded taking—and she appreciated her gifts enough not to want them to wither and die. It was a curse, kind of.

So were the thoughts that dogged her about those girls at the apartment on Sepulveda. Even when their massage names blurred in her memory, names being as changeable as fishnet tops and crotchless panties, she remembered the pain and terror on their faces. And the ominous stain beneath the black girl, the one who was so nasty in so many ways—Jenny remembered the stain most of all. At every recollection she scorned herself for not standing up to them, for not calling the cops or taking them to the hospital. Where had the nearest hospital been, anyway? She had no idea because she had never imagined needing one. But she should have loaded those girls into her car and found it. Instead, she had caved in to the black girl's orders—Contessa, that was her name—and she had been relieved when she ran, glad to have her money and her safety, never pausing to consider the unseen baggage she was taking with her.

The baggage was here now as she went through the contents of the safe-deposit box she kept at a Bank of America branch on Santa Monica Boulevard. She had other boxes at other banks, but this was the one where she stored most of what she saved in cash from massage. Her checking accounts made her nervous. She felt self-conscious when, two or three days a week, she deposited piles of money straight out of an ATM, and she worried about the IRS, too. Some weeks she made thousands of dollars and didn't pay a penny in taxes. She knew she should have saved more, but she was still comforted by those stacks of twenties, fifties, and hundreds, so neat and precise, right down to the rubber bands around each of them.

As she counted fifties in a private alcove, she began to wonder if any of them were from her last day on Sepulveda. It left her feeling disoriented, even queasy, as if the dark stain had somehow spread to her.

Jenny put the money on the table and tried to think of something else, but something else turned out to be the calls she had received after the rapes, all from girls in the business who were scared to death. When it got to be too much, she canceled the number they were calling. Just a few good friends had the number she kept, most of them unaware of what had happened or the life that had provided the money she was visiting now.

She took a deep breath and resumed counting it, wondering how long it would last, and what she would do when it ran out. She knew, of course. She just didn't want to admit it. Not while she was feeling like this.

Onus DuPree Jr. strolled into Skybar, on the roof of the Mondrian Hotel, and right away started feeling seriously antisocial. Even with the city lights twinkling below on the Sunset Strip and standup heaters keeping the customers nice and toasty, he wondered what it would be like to rob the movie stars he rarely saw there but always heard tourists gossiping about. He wondered, too, about making victims of the singers who had just gone platinum and the moneychangers who were forever inviting presidents and would-be presidents to their big-assed houses for cocktails and campaign contributions.

And here was the thing about DuPree: with his shaved dome and a navy blue turtleneck under his suede windbreaker, he could have passed for Skybar royalty. In fact he would have, at least on this night, if some sissy hadn't waltzed over the minute he got there and asked did he really produce Mary J. Blige's last album. “Get away from me, faggot,” he said, knowing his words would spread through the bar like napalm, and not caring. For DuPree, half the fun of a place like this was fucking with the clientele.

He ended up at the bar with people giving him plenty of room as he sipped his cranberry juice and club soda and thought about the work he'd be putting in later. Three seats down was a porcelain blonde who had seen the guy she was with abandon her for some buddies, all of them turned out like lawyers or agents and big on laughs and high-fives. While DuPree shook his head at the waste of prime pussy, the blonde looked his way every now and then. When he finally looked back, she held his gaze. He took it as an invitation.

“Shouldn't never be an empty seat next to you,” he said as he slid onto the stool. “Hope you don't mind.”

“You haven't heard me scream for help, have you?” she said.

“You a screamer?”

She raised her eyebrows and drained the last of her white wine.

“You better have another,” DuPree said, and moved to flag down a bartender.

“A little on the assertive side, aren't we?” the blonde said.

“Got to be. I'm workin' against the clock.”

“Oh.” She feigned a pout. “So you're going to go off and leave me too.”

“I'll come back—if I'm invited.”

The blonde smiled and made a purring noise. An instant later, DuPree felt a hand clamp his right shoulder.

“Move along, LL Cool J,” the hand's owner said. “The lady's spoken for.”

DuPree turned in his seat and found himself looking at the guy who must have just remembered the blonde was with him. Had one of those dents in his chin and a tan he probably got on a boat of his own. He wasn't in any hurry to let go of DuPree's right shoulder.

“You don't take your hand off me,” DuPree said, “I'm gonna give it back to you in pieces.”

“You can talk all you want on your way out the door,” the guy said.

“Marty?”

It was the blonde, trying to get the guy's attention. She'd seen the change in DuPree, how he wasn't the charmer who had sat down beside her any longer. Now he was what you never want to see step out of the shadows. But the guy was too wrapped up in his own drama to realize he had no chance against DuPree. None at all.

“Marty!” The blonde was close to losing it.

The guy turned to her, annoyed, and DuPree came off his stool, uncoiling like a rattler. He turned his left hand into a club that broke the grip on his shoulder, spun the guy a hundred and eighty degrees, and put him in a hammerlock so cruel it buckled his knees.

DuPree leaned close and whispered, “My name ain't LL Cool J, motherfucker.”

The only response the guy could muster was the strangled sound of someone in severe pain. It fell to the blonde to say, “Don't hurt him, please.” But that just pissed DuPree off more. And then he saw the guy looking desperately for his buddies.

“Ain't nobody gonna help you, bitch,” DuPree said, grabbing the first finger he came to on the guy's hand and twisting it like a swizzle stick. The guy tried not to scream, but people nearby still heard him. DuPree didn't care about them. “Please,” the blonde said. DuPree didn't care about her either.

The guy was whimpering now, and there had to be bouncers on the way. Maybe the guy's buddies were coming, too. DuPree looked the blonde up and down once more. “Damn, you are fine,” he said. Then he snapped the guy's finger like a no. 2 pencil.

The guy's scream filled the air as DuPree shoved him to the floor face first and started toward the elevator. He had to wade through the gawkers who were already gathering. Those who saw what he'd done stepped out of his way. And all the while he kept telling himself to be cool. Just take his time. No need to run, no need to even walk fast. He was the king of the fucking jungle.

A little before ten-thirty, as lights started to go out all along Hollyridge, DuPree pulled up beside the fence behind Chuck Berry's old house and parked looking down the hill. The night was too dark and the shrubbery too thick for him to eyeball things, but he knew from the changes out front that there had been a lot of work done on the motherfucker. It needed some serious beautifying after the way the bands that rented it had trashed the place, thinking they were honoring old Chuck by living like pigs—empty bottles, dirty needles, and women's stained drawers everywhere.

White boys acting like that's what it took to be black, DuPree thought. It hurt to contemplate the enormity of what they didn't know. Of course, being partial to Nas's bad-assed rap, DuPree might not have known either if the old man hadn't told him. Not that the old man was tight with Chuck or anything, but he had been to parties here even before he signed with the Dodgers, just out of Fremont High and acting like there wasn't any kind of shit he couldn't get away with. Said he shared the first white woman he ever had with Chuck himself, a bad-talking blonde straight out of that old-time porn where hairy ofays never wore anything except black socks. Of course it could have been bullshit, too. DuPree's old man threw bullshit around like he was running for president. But that had been his time back then, the fifties turning into the sixties, and Chuck Berry riding high before he took that underage Apache girl across a state line for what the law said was immoral purposes.

Thinking about it made DuPree glad he wasn't famous. Better to be a clean, well-dressed African-American criminal sitting in his black 5 Series BMW, a ride just right for looking like it belonged in the neighborhood. If any of the neighbors peeked out their windows and saw his car before going nighty-night, they'd most likely assume he was visiting somebody on the block. The fact that he was black wouldn't upset them as long as he wasn't coming through a window and pinning them to the wall with a spear.