Everything but the Squeal (6 page)

5 - Aurora

I 
t was still only ten-forty-five, but I felt like I'd been awake for weeks. The world, as seen through the gritty glass of a downtown phone booth, was briefly bright. Even down here, directly across the street from police headquarters in Parker Center, traffic was light. The Saturday before Easter Sunday is usually a nice, peaceful day. I dialed my own number and listened to my answering machine go through its usual rigmarole.

“Hey, Simeon,” Roxanne said, ever effervescent. I dated Roxanne occasionally, and now that Eleanor was in China I was seeing more of her than usual. “I have hidden eggs
everywhere
, and not even the big detective is going to find
one
of them. At least, not without a body search, which is a clue, I guess. What I mean is that I hope you haven't forgotten that you're supposed to be here tonight and that we're going to do eggs tomorrow morning. I'm tending bar at McGinty's until eleven, and I expect to see you there just before we close. If you're not, I've saved a dozen raw eggs and you'll find them in your bed when you get home. They'll be broken, like my heart. Be there, buster, and no excuses.” She hung up.

I'd forgotten all about it. For the tenth time I resolved to get an appointment book and write things down in it. Other people showed up where they were supposed to be. Appointment books had to be the secret. Eleanor's appointment book was thicker than the
Oxford
English
Dictionary
and a lot worse organized, and she was always where she was supposed to be. At the moment, unfortunately, she was supposed to be in China.

The second call was from my mother. “Well, Billy be damned,” she said, getting right to the point,` “if I'd known I was going to spend my life talking to a machine, I'd have given birth to a battery, too. At least you'd be grateful. And speaking of you, I'm sure you remember that you promised to come by tomorrow. I'm sure you know how much your father and I are looking forward to it. Bring Eleanor, if she's speaking to you.” I heard my father's voice in the background. “No,” my mother said, “it's that damned machine again.” Then there was a dial tone. That was how long it had been since I'd talked to my mother. Eleanor had left three weeks ago.

The machine had promised three messages, so I hung on, watching a little Mexican girl, decked prematurely in her Easter best, argue with her mother about something. Her plump brown sturdy legs beneath half a mile of white ruffled crinoline anchored themselves to the sidewalk as permanently as an Ice Age as she tugged her mother in the direction she wanted to go. In about eight years, she'd be the age of the girl on the slab.

“Mr. Grist?” It was a voice I didn't recognize. “This is Jane Sorrell. Something has happened. I'm at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and I need to see you. Please come. I don't know what I'm going to do.”

I pressed my forehead against the glass of the telephone booth and watched the little Mexican girl, victorious, lead her mother down the street in the desired direction. Good for her. Somebody loved her.

To get to the hotel, I headed west on Olympic and then, after miles of stunted architecture and Korean neon signs, swung north on Doheny toward Beverly Hills. Alice was so sluggish and unresponsive that it felt as though she were reading my mind. I didn't want to see Mrs. Sorrell. I didn't want to see Mr. Sorrell. I wanted to go home and spend Easter with my mother and father and pretend that I sold aluminum siding or something that never rusted, never warped, and always looked shiny and new and hopeful. I didn't want anything to do with families that had rotted and turned brown at the edges like Annie's avocado-and-clam dip.

I was in a fine humor as I chugged up the driveway to the hotel. The clown who opened the driver's door, stuffed into a uniform that looked like something willed to him by the Philip Morris bellboy, didn't do much to raise my spirits.

“Yes,
sir
,” he said with a bright smile as he estimated my income and looked Alice over. It was the smile a talent agent saves for a client who isn't working. “We don't get many of these, this far north of the border. We'll be real sure to park her where we can keep an eye on her.”

“Park her on your chest,” I said, climbing out. “I sure hope you don't have to live on your tips.”

“I usually know what to expect,” he said. He aimed Alice toward some unmapped area of the parking lot, the part they reserve for Volkswagen vans with psychedelic designs painted on them.

Mrs. Sorrell hadn't given me her room number, so I had to go through the formality of finding a house phone. As always these days, they were located behind a bouquet of eight-foot flowers that looked like Venus's-flytraps bred to eat airplanes.

“Yeah?” said a new voice, a sullen, young-sounding voice that I'd never heard before. It could have been a girl or a prepubescent boy.

“Is Mrs. Sorrell there, please?” I asked, yanking upward on the frayed bootstraps of whatever residue of courtesy I had left.

“No,” the new voice said. Its owner hung up.

I resisted the urge to rip the phone out of the wall and feed it to the flowers, and once again requested the operator to connect me with the Sorrell suite.

“Listen,” I said the moment the phone was lifted on the other end. “I've had to endure a lot of things today, not the least of which was a parking attendant so snotty that he should blow his nose into a parachute, and if you hang up one more time I'm going home, and you're going to have to deal with your mother, who will undoubtedly remove your skin in one-inch strips when she learns you sent me away. Do you understand?”

There was no response.

I squeezed my eyes shut until I saw little orange dots. “Is she coming back?”

“Sooner than I'd like.”

“Fine. I'm in the lobby.”

“Well, lucky you.” It was a girl, no doubt about it. Boys don't learn to be that nasty until after their voices change.

“There's a bouquet here that wants to eat me,” I said. “It's already got one of my buttons.”

“Call me when it reaches your fly,” she said. But she didn't hang up.

“That's the problem. It's a button fly.”

She exhaled heavily, and I could imagine her rolling her eyes toward the ceiling, in the gesture of put-upon teenage girls everywhere. “I suppose you want to know our room number,” she said. “It's eleven.”

Number eleven was a pink stucco bungalow that squatted behind a hedge of birds of paradise that was obviously the pride and joy of a gardener who liked birds of paradise. I wondered where they'd found one. After I pressed the bell twelve or thirteen times I found myself looking at a trim little naiad of seventeen or so with the same pouty mouth that Aimee had pointed toward the camera in her yearbook pictures.

“Not bad,” she said appraisingly. “A little old, but not bad.”

She had her mother's careless, honey-colored hair, blue eyes, and the longest legs I'd ever seen, holding up a pair of creased white tennis shorts. I pressed my fingers to my temples and closed my eyes. “Wait,” I said, “it's coming to me. Your name ... it begins with an A and it's got more vowels than a Hawaiian road map. It's . . . it's . . . Adelle.”

“Fold your map and sit on it,” she said. “Adelle’s my older sister. I'm Aurora.” She gave me something that might have passed for a smile in a lockjaw ward. “My mother's expecting you?”

“Your father calls her Mommy. How come you don't?”

“I don't know,” she said. “It's a word I can't seem to wrap my mouth around.”

“So what do you usually call her?”

“You. That is, when we're speaking.”

“As long as she's gone, let me ask you some questions.”

“Why should I?”

“Because your sister has gone thataway. Because she could be in some very deep trouble.” She didn't drop to her knees or cry out helplessly, so I said, “Where is your mother, anyway?”

“Drinking,” she said. “Me too.”

She opened the door and I stepped into a carpet so deep that I nearly stumbled. The room was furnished in rattan and tropical prints. Palm trees waved balmily at me from the upholstery. There was a definite bite of whiskey in the air.

“You started without me,” I said as she sat down on one end of a couch that looked like a great place to catch yellow fever, folded those legs, and picked up a half-full bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label. Even with her legs crossed, her knees were perfect. Not a knobby patella or a skateboard scar in sight. Aurora slugged back an inch or so and handed the bottle to me, a challenge in her blue eyes. My mouth tasted like formaldehyde, so I took it. “Let's see if we can finish together,” she said as I tilted it to my lips and drank.

It was like drinking smoke. I lowered it to take a breath, feeling something hot and red and alive burrowing down through the center of my chest, like an animated floor plan of hell. You Are Here, said the sign that had been posted at my mouth.

She reached out for the bottle. “Uh-uh,” I said, pulling it away. “You can lose a hand that way.” I drank again and then handed her the bottle. She tilted it upward and made a gurgling sound. When a girl looks good with a bottle of whiskey in her mouth, it's time to be careful.

“
Banzai
,” she said, wiping her lips with the back of her wrist. “The divine wind, right?”

“What's the divine wind?” I asked, taking the bottle back and drinking. Her eyes watched the level of the whiskey as I drank. With every gulp the girl on the slab grew smaller and farther away.

“I don't know,” she said. “Those retards who flew their airplanes into the sides of aircraft carriers or whatever. They were the divine wind or something like that.” She reached out a brown hand and grasped the bottle and chugged at it. A flush came into her cheeks.

“
Kamikaze
,” I said as the penny dropped. “
Kamikaze
, the divine wind.”

“Yeah,” she said, eyeing me over the mouth of the bottle, which was considerably emptier than it had been a moment ago. “What I want to know, when those guys finally got their orders and learned that they were supposed to go out and never come back, what I want to know is how come none of them ever said, ‘Are you out of your fucking
mind
? ”

“The emperor was daddy,” I said. A wisp of pale hair hung over her brow, and I leaned forward and brushed it back. She didn't move away from me, so I sublimated the next impulse and took the bottle from her hand and drank. “It was an ancestral society. They did what daddy said they should do.”

“Hey, you,” she said, her blue eyes level. “You're talking to me like I'm an adult now. Before, you talked to me like I was a kid.”

“Before?” Before, as far as I was concerned, was the morgue.

“On the phone. Strips of skin, you talked about. Would you have said anything like that to an adult?”

“Um,” I said.

“If adults talked to each other the way they talk to kids, what do you think would happen?” She retrieved the bottle and put away a slug that would have elicited cries of admiration on skid row.

I thought about it. “The homicide rate would zoom.”

“The title of
War
and
Peace
would be
War
and
War
,” she said.

“The neon signs at the corners,” I said, “would read DON'T WALK, STUPID.”

“Sometimes,” she said, “I think I'd like to kidnap an adult and tie him up in the cellar and talk to him like he's a kid until he dies.”

“How does anybody grow up?” I asked rhetorically.

She hoisted the whiskey and swallowed. “Don't ask me,” she said. “I haven't done it yet. Bass—that's a fish, and I learned this in biology—bass parents spend days guarding the hole where their eggs have been laid. All they care about in the whole world is guarding those eggs. They drive away anything that comes close, no matter how big it is. Even snapping turtles, the ones that could take your thumb off like macaroni. They don't even take a break to eat. For all I know, they don't go to the john.”

She took a more moderate sip. “Finally,” she continued, “after four or five days, the eggs hatch. By then the parents are ravenous. When the baby bass swim up out of the hole, their mommy and daddy eat them. Just snap them up as fast as they can. So what's the difference between bass parents and human parents?”

“I give up.”

“Bass parents eat the child all at once,” she said. “Human parents take years.”

“Some bass babies survive,” I said. “If they didn't, there wouldn't be any more bass.”

“So do some human babies,” she said. “The ones who manage to swim away before they get eaten.”

“Let's make a deal,” I said.

“What?”

“I ask you questions about your family, questions about Aimee. You answer them.”

She examined the level of the whiskey in the bottle, swinging her upper shin back and forth. It shone as if it had been polished. “Some deal,” she said. “Why don't you wait for my mother?”

“You didn't let me finish. You get to talk to me as if I were a kid and you were an adult.”

Abruptly she stopped swinging her leg and banged the bottle down onto the table. “Don't be idiotic,” she said.

“Beg pardon?” I asked.

She flicked the bottle with a fingernail and I saw her mother snapping her nail against the edges of the Polaroids. “Aren't you listening?” she demanded. “How many times do I have to ask you? What's the matter, you got potatoes in your ears?”

“Oh,” I said, “right. Did you have any idea Aimee was going to run away?”

“What a stupid question. Do you think I can read minds?”

“Did she ever say anything about it?”

“Oh, come on.
Think
for a change, would you? No, she didn't.”

“Did she have a boyfriend?”

“That's none of your business.” She raised the bottle and drank, and I watched her delicate throat work as she swallowed. “No,” she said, wiping her lips again, “she didn't. Jesus, stupid, she's only twelve.”