Dog Beach (10 page)

16

ANGEL TOWN

Hektor Garza was the kind of man that excited Zoe. Dangerous, irreverently tattooed, but not beyond making offerings to wooden folk saints and calling his mother on Sundays. Mostly though, it was the way he made other men roll over on their backs in his presence. She saw that, firsthand, when her father brought her to a business dinner one night at Boa Steakhouse (the one in Santa Monica, not Beverly), using her to ornament the table and bolster his reputation.

They had locked eyes that night, Zoe and Hektor Garza—the very night, she often reminded her father—that Hektor and his Guatemalan associates agreed to invest in
Slash
. “Stay away from him, Zo-Zo,” Avi warned, before he could reel the words back in. He knew that forbidding her from a man would only make her want him all the more. Shit, he learned that when she was in seventh grade.

In bed, Hektor Garza was what Zoe called nasty. Sometimes too nasty, but only by degrees. On the second night that they slept together, he tried something that made her resolute in ending the relationship—she had even clawed his chest—but then his cell rang and he took a call from his mother.

From the bed she had watched him sit in a corner, moonlight on his mysterious tattoos, speaking in soothing Spanish to the woman he said lived in crippling pain. Then, only seconds after saying good-bye and kissing the cross on his necklace, he took an incoming call and said, in a terribly calm voice, “I have seen the Devil, on his knees. Begging to pleasure me in exchange for mercy. This is not a story, my friend; it is not some parable. I am an evil that exists outside any concept of darkness in your darkest fucking nightmares. Pay my nephew by Monday or I will come see you.” He had gently disconnected the call at that point, sat for a moment, looked at her, and said, “Do you want to get some ice cream?”

At the ice cream stand on Sunset, he confided that he was enchanted beyond reason by her beauty. That was fifty percent why he invested in Avi's movie and why he was now in trouble with his uncle Ortega Garza, who considered the investment risky.

Impulsive, even.

“What was the other fifty?” Zoe said.

“I love movies.”

Zoe, sitting beside him, also licking Ben & Jerry's, looked up at him and swore she glimpsed the brown-eyed soul of a young boy. “For real?”

“I love movies. I want to be in the game. That's all.”

“Well, you own a piece of an Avi Ghazaryan film. You're in the game now.”

“Yeah,” he said, but he sounded flustered. He was staring across the parking lot at some young guys just hanging out. Zoe felt herself tense. For a moment it seemed like he was going to get out of the car and confront the guys for no reason. Everything in his body language suggested it. Then he turned and kissed her, a vanilla ice cream kiss, and said, “Avi has given me a great opportunity. The American dream, you know? Does that sound . . .”

“No, no,” Zoe said, “I know exactly what you mean.”

“I mean, my mother's dying down there.” He grew sullen again, kept looking in his rearview mirror as if he could see Guatemala in the night smog behind him. “So no motherfucker is going to get in the way of my movie.”

Zoe bit into her baby cone, let the wafer dissolve on her tongue. “What motherfucker would that be?”

“The director. The college kid.”

“Troy?”

“I don't give a fuck what his name is. If he rips your father off, he rips me off. He rips off Ortega Garza. I swear to Saint Paulo, I'll cut his intestines out and make him watch.”

“He's a filmmaker, Hektor. He's temperamental.”

“Temperamental?” Hektor's face darkened and he turned a look on her that thawed her ice cream headache. “You have something going on with this guy?”

Zoe laughed, shook her head at such an accusation. “He's not my type. Not tall enough.”

“I don't care if the motherfucker is as tall as that billboard up there. He doesn't turn the movie in next week, I'm cutting his legs out from under him. I've risked my ass on this. Everything. My whole family is watching to see how this turns out. ‘Hektor's crazy movie investment.'”

He stared at her like he was going to strangle her with his belt. Then he broke into laughter, the most handsome smile she'd ever seen. He kissed her cheek gently. “Why am I telling you? That's not for you to worry about. You worry about your craft. Your craft, baby.”

His cell rang again. He took a call from his nephew and spoke in quiet Spanish as he started driving back to his rented place in Studio City. She thought about her father warning her to “stay away from that bad actor.”

That made everything all right again. That, and Hektor calling what she did a “craft.”

•    •    •

Dutch was surprised to find no one home at the Laurel Canyon house. The front door was unlocked and ajar. The plasma TV in the living room was flickering silently with a Western movie.

Drunk for the first time in many months—and it hit her hard with painkillers still in her system—she navigated the course past the kitchen, saw no sign of Jen or Charles or any of the usual hair-and-makeup suspects who tended to gather at all hours.

She stopped in the living room and considered the silent TV for a long moment. The Western, she realized, was actually a gay porno rendition of
The Wild Bunch
. For some reason it semi-fascinated her and she drunkenly sank into the couch.

That's when she saw him.

Charles was on the carpet. His glasses were off and his head was damaged, blood everywhere. Blood on his half-buttoned purple shirt, blood on the leather couch she was sitting on. Blood on the walls like something out of
Helter Skelter
.

Dutch could not remember screaming in her life. Ever. Not even the time the accelerator on a stunt Camaro got stuck flat and she nosed into the side of the catering truck. She had merely whispered “Fuck,” then lit a cigarette. Now she screamed. She screamed so loud they must've heard it up at the Hollywood Bowl.

Charles wasn't moving.

•    •    •

Driving back to her father's house in the Hills, Zoe texted, changed CDs, logged onto Facebook—posted even—and checked her e-mails. Twice she nearly rear-ended the same Audi. At a red light on Sunset, she saw an incoming e-mail from Troy Raskin. “See attached,” it said. “Hope you like.”

This was it, she surmised. The scene in which she blows Alexis to zombie pieces under the Santa Monica Pier.

Just as the light turned green, Zoe floored it, passed the Audi, and darted her way to King's Road and the winding ascent to Avi's house. Avi was out making deals, of course, so she let herself in and took an urgent pee in the downstairs bathroom, then hurried to her upstairs princess turret to check her computer.

With every echoing click of her strap-and-buckle riding boots up the staircase, the anticipation of gunning down the ginger bitch grew more heady. She sat down, undid the top button of her skinny jeans, and liberated a breath. The attachment from Troy was five script pages. But it wasn't
Slash
. A note above the script pages read:

Damn the Torpedoes, I'm Going for Broke. Need You.

Zoe read the note twice, shook her head, bewildered. Then she started reading the pages.

•    •    •

Dutch stopped screaming when she heard a mewling on the bloodied carpet. Charles was gazing up at her, nearly blind without his glasses and blood matted at the bridge of his ­Romanian beak. She slid off the couch, tried not to move him. She noticed then that he was still gripping the TV remote.

“They hit me.” Charles sounded like a first grader in the schoolyard, as if he merely had a bloody nose, not a hemorrhaging ear and mouth.

“Who?”

When he didn't answer, Dutch tried again, even as she dialed 911. “Who, Charles? Who hit you?”

“Pray to Jesus.”

“
Who fucking
hit you?”

“Man said, ‘Go with Jesus,'” Charles whimpered in confused agony, “pray to Jesus.” He was fading in and out. Dutch heard the door open and she wheeled. For a moment, she thought the heat had showed up in record time, but it was Jen coming through the door with her makeup bags. First her crazy eyes went to the TV screen where a guy wearing nothing but chaps was getting it on with a Mexican saddle. Then she saw Charles bleeding on the carpet. She dropped her kit, screamed louder than Dutch had, and far more shrilly. She was still screaming and kicking in place when the LAPD
did
arrive.

In the chaos and crackling police radios, Dutch told a female cop what Charles had said. A guy hit him, said something about Jesus. Pray to Jesus, maybe. When Jen heard this, she whiplashed around and began screaming herself hoarse again. “Oh my God,” she wailed. “It was them!” She kicked her legs again and Dutch tried to calm her as paramedics worked on Charles from all sides. “Those guys!” she screamed. “Those big guys from Mount Olympus. Those big guys from Mount Olympus.”

The chick must be smoking crack, thought Dutch. Telling the cops that Zeus and Neptune had come down to lay a beating on the little Romanian hair stylist. But the female cop didn't seem to blink as she took the statement. Dutch realized then that Jen was talking neighborhoods, not Homer. Mount Olympus was a community bounded by Laurel Canyon Boulevard. “Those biker guys,” she went on between breaths. “Fucking right-wing Christian motorcycle gang. They followed Charles home from the Roosterfish one time. They stuck a bumper sticker on his car.”

The cops calmed Jen, got her to slow down, speak more slowly. “Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve,” she said, describing the bumper sticker. But when the paramedics carted Charles's bloodied form toward the door, she collapsed in hysterics again and began wailing his name.

“Who lives here?” the female cop kept saying, unruffled by it all. Dutch noticed that the lady cop, too, had bags under her eyes. If Charles wasn't half-unconscious he probably would have advised the cop to ice them. One of the white-gloved paramedics was telling Jen that Charles was going to be okay, that the bleeding appeared worse than the damage. Was he a hemophiliac? Was he HIV positive?

Jen kept shaking her head no as she wept, but she seemed uncertain. Lost. Dutch felt some guilty relief. Not just hearing that Charles was going to live, but that the beating was possibly a hate crime, or maybe related to some kind of L.A. sex play Charles had gotten himself entangled in.
Not
anything to do with her and the getaway-driver lifestyle Charles had warned her about.

She hurried for the door, caught up to the gurney at the ambulance. The paramedics kept her back, but she managed to get a hand onto Charles's arm. “You're going to be okay,” she told him, but he had an oxygen mask on and was unresponsive.

“Whose car is that?”

A black cop near the curb was asking the question a few feet away from the parked Chevy. Then a radio call came in, distracted him. Dutch could hear Jen still weeping like a little girl inside. Dogs were barking from the house next door. Sirens were coming and going.

Suddenly exhausted, Dutch made her way to the front porch and sat down. She fished out a smoke, lit it. Just let it all pass, like a bad dream. That's what she told herself. Bad dream. And when it passed, she knew what her next move would be. Pack up her shit and move on from Laurel Canyon. Just in the event it wasn't Bikers for the Bible or the hammer of the gods; just in the event it was the curse of Dutch Dupree, following her like that ghost in the desert.

17

DAY FOR NIGHT

Zoe was crying, mascara all a mess.

“You're my father, and all this time I didn't have a clue?” Her top lip quivered like she was trying to fight an ironic smile. “You just show up after twenty years and I'm supposed to be, like, yo, Dad, hello?”

She was half-lit in halogen, sitting in a shuttered-up Malibu bait shack, facing a stern-faced Louie Mo. “How do I even know you're who you say you are? It's all been one big lie. And now I should forgive you?”

Louie stared hard at her, but it was impossible to meet her gaze. He searched for the words in English, sweat at his brow, then said, “Line.”

“I only tried to protect you,” Troy fed the dialogue from the shadows.

“Only I try to protect you,” Louie said, a bit wooden.

“Okay, cut,” Troy said, springing to his sneakers. “Nice, Zee. Really nice.”

She was playing Cho's twenty-one-year-old daughter on meeting her estranged father for the first time in a remote shack. Troy had told her in his e-mail that he wanted to cast her in the role—she had a great ethnic look and was the right age—but the film was a secret project, a labor of passion. “Classified stuff, Zee,” he wrote in the e-mail.

She had called him back within ten minutes, said she loved it. This was no run-around, tits-bouncing zombie crap; it was a real scene, she said, a chance to really act, and great material for her reel. But something more was happening out here near Point Dume, late at night, just her, Troy, Louie, and a silent, focused T-Rich, who was lighting and shooting the scene with the 435.

“I want you to try it again,” Troy said, sitting at the back wall near the halogen lamps. “This time, I want you to think about your own father.”

“You think I haven't been?” she said.

“No, I know you have. Just own it more. Real stuff.”

“Real stuff . . .”

“When you say, ‘How do I even know you're who you say you are?,' I want you to see Avi and his BMW, his breakfasts at the Polo Lounge, the big house in the Hills. Is he who everyone thinks he is? Are all his houses really paid for?”

T-Rich eased his eye back from the camera and tried not to be too obvious in looking at Troy. Louie just sat there, firm in his role of Cho the outcast.

“Has your father,” said Troy, “created a web of lies that's endangered people you might care about, even if you really don't know you care about them?”

“What the fuck are you even saying?”

“One simple thing: Has he lied to his daughter about who he really is? And are you in deep, fucked-up denial?”

Zoe just stared at him as he went back to his director's seat behind the camera. “That's all I'm saying.”

They shot the scene again, and this time she began to improvise, going off-script and, at one point, breaking into cold laughter that was unexpected—and perfect. When Troy called cut, he went to her, kneeled beside her, and gently gripped her arm.

When she looked up, tears dirty on a cheek, she saw that Louie Mo had welled up himself. Just from her reading. In fact, he had to leave his seat on an old lobster trap and go outside.

“I know what my deal is,” Zoe said, her eyes pooled. “But what's up with him?”

Troy watched through a small window as Louie limped, hunched, toward the moonlit surf. “Might have something to do with why he wanted me to change the son character to a daughter. Only note he gave.”

For a moment Zoe almost felt something for the broken-­down stuntman she hardly knew. While she'd been drawing on her relationship with her real father, maybe the guy, Louie, had been playing to a child he hadn't seen since leaving China or Japan or wherever he was from.

More than that, she felt something for Troy, who brought raw emotion out of them both. Maybe he
was
a director to watch, like so many had said when he came out of film school. Maybe he
was
wasting his talent on her father's high-concept pics.

As for Troy, he felt he had learned something about Avi that had been haunting his sleep ever since the night Zoe came to his bedroom; she had said her father felt Troy could make a low-budget film look like twenty mill. That had stayed with him. It had landed as a compliment but took root as something foreboding.

“How'd we do, T-Rich?” Troy said, standing up and stretching.

“Beautiful shot, man. The light, the wild track, everything.”

“Nice work.”

Louie Mo was back, his eyes clear now. He stood in the doorway of the little bait shop and said, “Martini shot?”

“Martini,” Troy said. Then he looked at Zoe. “You have another one in you?”

She straightened her back, flipped her hair off a shoulder. “How about you, Louie?”

Louie looked at her and knew what she meant, knew she had picked up on some buried feelings. He nodded and took his seat on the old lobster trap.

“Rolling,” Troy said. “And sound . . .”

•    •    •

Later that night, Troy and Zoe sat on the bar patio at Moonshadows, cooling down after the shoot. They were drinking Hendricks martinis and talking about her scene, which takes they thought were keepers.

Troy had never had a martini before, but after his third beer, Zoe had dared him. “If you're going to be a player,” she said, “you need to upgrade from keg party fare.” Hemingway drank gin, she footnoted.

“How do you know about Hemingway?” Troy said.

The insult was so blatant that Zoe smiled, incredulous. “Actually, he drank Gordon's. But if he were alive today? He'd be a Hendricks man.”

“And where'd you get that from,
Midnight in Paris
?”

“UC Santa Barbara. Before I dropped out.” She took a sip and said, “Didn't want college to fuck up my education.”

“So, this is what?” Troy said, feeling his head begin to birl. “Just gin and vermouth?”

“Vermouth?” Zoe said. “Hemingway would never commit that sin on a perfectly good martini.”

Troy flagged down the waiter and ordered two more.

“Easy there, big guy,” she warned.

When the fresh drinks arrived, Troy raised his, made a toast to the night's work. Zoe clinked her glass off his.

“So . . . is this my only scene?” she said. “The bait shack?”

“Yeah, but it's the money scene. I mean on an emotional level.”

“You really pulled some stuff out of me, I guess.”

Troy sipped, content in the moment. He ditched the cucumber from his drink, breathed in the surf air. “Louie Mo had it going on too, didn't he? I mean, as much as a stunt guy can.”

“What about you?”

“What
about
me?”

“You wrote the shit, Troy. Where'd it come from?”

“Where'd it come from?”

Zoe studied his eyes in the candlelight, could see he was feeling the eighty-eight proof. “Little NYU rich boy, what do you know about broken souls and abandonment and all that shit?”

“You want to know the truth?”

Zoe bit delicately into the gin-soaked cucumber, waiting on his answer.

“I got it from a movie called
The Gunfighter.
Gregory Peck, directed by Henry King. You ever see it? It was part of this Western noir thing going on in the early fifties. Kind of weird. But kind of cool.”

“So your life's just a mash-up?”

“What kind of rude question is that?”

“I don't think you borrowed that emotion from a Gregory Peck movie.” She leaned closer, took his cucumber, and dipped it in her drink. “My father does have you wrong, doesn't he?”

“About the shit I do best, you mean?”

“No, about you being some rich film-school brat. He thinks that if you fail, your mommy will bail you out. Pay him back his investment.”

Troy shrugged but lowered his eyes. Zoe caught it. “You know who else was in that movie?” Troy said. “Karl Malden. I always find it unsettling when fucking Karl Malden shows up in one of these—”

“Troy, you don't have any safety net, do you?”

“Of course not.”

“What about your mother in Connecticut?”

Troy took another sip of the extra-dry gin; his third Hendricks was now close to spent.

“Why is it,” he said, “that whenever people hear Connecticut they always assume you're from Greenwich or Darien, or someplace. I mean, does everyone from Tennessee play the fucking banjo?” Troy drained the martini then looked over his shoulder toward the men's room line. He excused himself, a bit unsteady on his sneakers.

•    •    •

Zoe found him down on the beach, relieving himself behind a cement pylon and singing something that sounded like Coldplay. Normally, he'd get a shy kidney, but for some reason he felt comfortable with her standing there. Mostly because the gin had taken the edge off.

“Compact and portable,” Zoe said. “Hate you guys.”

Troy tried to get past her, told her he needed to go pay the bill.

“I took care of it,” she said.

“I do have a mother in Connecticut,” he said, hardly realizing that they were walking north toward the lights at the Point. Zoe was feeling the drinks, but Troy was downright wobbly. “She's the youngest daughter of Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia.”

“Get out.”

“That's what she thinks anyway. She's been in an institution since I was eleven.”

“For real.”

“When she first started seeing Freemason code in postage stamps, my father freaked out. He ran away from her when I was six. I went to live with my uncle Ronnie. That would be Bridgeport, not Westport.”

It was in an apartment above Harbor Video, he confided, where he spent most of his childhood and teens, surrounded by movies, watching compulsively. Other than school, he rarely left “the vault,” as Uncle Ronnie called it. Yet, he felt like he was traveling constantly, entering movie worlds where characters became like family. He spent his childhood backtracking those films to their sources. Started with Spielberg and Lucas and worked his way back to Howard Hawks and John Sturges, to the spaghetti Westerns of Leone, films inspired by the masterworks of Kurosawa. He told Zoe about the excitement he'd felt when he discovered—just by studying Kurosawa's use of telephoto lenses, depth of field, and mise-en-scène—that the Japanese director had, in fact, been influenced by John Ford Westerns. He'd sit there for hours, inserting and ejecting and cross referencing. He devoured flicks by Italian B-movie directors with the same insatiable appetite with which he downloaded, in his mind, every shot from every Shaw Brothers movie to come out of Hong Kong in the '60s and '70s. Over time, Uncle Ronnie even stopped using the computer to catalog and check DVDs; he'd just ask Troy.

When he was seventeen, watching movies was no longer enough; he hungered to make his own. He used his entire four-thousand-dollar savings to make an HD short on the sordid docks of Bridgeport; it got him into NYU. So did the completed screenplay that would become the template for his bachelor's thesis—the heist film called
Game Clock
. The Austin Fest brought him to the attention of Avi Ghazaryan, and now here he was, walking on Las Flores Beach with the producer's daughter, baring his drunken soul. He didn't realize, until he was done, that he was holding her hand. She was carrying her heels in her other, which made him suddenly aware that his sneakers were soaked and he didn't care.

“Hey,” Zoe said, “you're not that short after all.”

“Not with your eight-inch heels off,” Troy said. She laughed as they strolled on, Troy seeming to sink into another thought.

“The guy with the dolphins,” he said. “When he went up to Alaska, do you think he knew? You think he knew he was feeding himself to the bears?”

“Let's get you home,” she said. “You've got to finish your movie.”

“Which one?”

“
Your
movie, Troy.”

Troy dug for his keys. Zoe told him they were going to walk to Dog House and he could jog back for his car in the morning. He turned a defensive look on her, clutched his keys in his fist. “I am perfectly capable of driving into a cement mixer,” he proclaimed. Then he surrendered his keys.

At the house, she saw him inside, but they both hesitated when they found someone asleep on the couch. It was Dutch the stunt driver, out cold. She had Louie's white denim jacket tucked at her chin like a blanket. Troy and Zoe stared at her like she was a stray cat for a second then moved to the bedroom, where Zoe helped him out of his salty-wet sneakers and socks.

“I love you,” he said, with all the conviction of a frat house drunk. Zoe laughed, tucked him in, and left.