Hot Shot (3 page)

Danziger rolled his eyes. “Felina said she'd only do the book with a Libra or an Aquarius.”

“She doesn't get on well with Capricorns or Tauruses,” Kitty explained. She gave Danziger a worried glance.

Jocelyn tossed her Mont Blanc on the table. “Well, I'm a Feces with Asparagus rising,” she said, “and I think this is preposterous. If Kieran's bloody birthday is enough to queer this deal—”

“Jocelyn—”

“—you've been wasting my time and my client's.”

“Now, everybody just simmer down.” Danziger tried for a smile and didn't quite make it. “I'm sure we can work this out. Kitty, what if Kieran tells Felina he's a, whatchamajigger—”

“A Libra or an Aquarius?” Kitty blinked. “I don't know. Dear, do you think you could pull off impersonating a Libra or an Aquarius?”

“Hey, I'll be a Libra for a month,” I said, and Jocelyn snorted.

More warning bells. At that point, a smarter person would have called the whole thing off. I had no idea that by the end of the month one person would be dead and I'd be in hiding. All I was thinking was, For that kind of money I could be a lesbian Scientologist.

3

D
ANZIGER'S OFFICE HAD MADE
reservations for me at someplace called the Hotel del Toros in downtown Tijuana. According to Kitty Keyes, I was to meet Felina at five on the dot in the hotel restaurant. It seemed awfully cloak-and-dagger to me.

“Drama queen. She thinks she's Deep Throat,” was Claudia's assessment. We were standing in front of Café Canem, saying our good-byes.

“Interesting choice of words.” I pecked her on the cheek. Neither one of us was very kissy, especially in public. “I feel guilty leaving you with this place half-finished.”

Claudia kicked me in the shin. “You've got a job to do. Besides, face it, Kieran. You're not exactly Mr. Home Improvement.”

“See you next week.”

In the back of my newly rented car I'd packed several changes of clothes, my laptop, two tape recorders, forty blank cassettes, several notebooks, my research materials, a Spanish-English dictionary, and six gallons of bottled water. The water was a precautionary measure. I didn't want to spend my Danziger-paid days holed up in a hotel with the squirts.

When I was younger, Tijuana was scurvy, the civic equivalent of a dive bar. Underage kids went there to drink cheap beer and get the clap, while older folks bought ugly trinkets and got their photos taken on the back of scrofulous burros. In the last few years, though, Tijuana had changed its image. Southern California magazines were always praising it as a hip day trip, a place with good music clubs, inexpensive food, and shopping bargains. The shopping I could do without, but I did like ceviche and margaritas.

Billboards lined both sides of the freeway, and industrial chimneys rose to my right in a ziggurat maze of refineries and factories. Some of the factories had flames leaping out of their chimneys, hazy under the yellow-white ball of hell in the sky. Palm trees stuck their heads out of the smog, matches waiting to ignite. In the distance, a billboard from some now-failed S&L delivered the news: ninety-eight degrees at 9:47
A.M
. This was the real Southern California, the one they never put on the postcards.

After the hills of Irvine rolled by, the 405 merged with I-5, and the views got prettier. Even the chain outlets were white stucco, with terra-cotta roofs and splashes of scarlet bougainvillea. Another few miles, and I was driving along the Pacific Ocean. The sky looked cleaner, and I was thinking that Southern California wasn't such a bad place to live after all.

Then I saw the yield sign on the side of the freeway: a yellow diamond with the silhouettes of running human beings.

Warning. Human crossing.

I was getting close to Mexico.

Since the lines at the return inspection station could be long, and American car insurance isn't valid in Mexico, I decided to park in San Ysidro and walk across the border.

Tijuana might have changed, but San Ysidro hadn't. It was still a weatherbeaten collection of dingy motels, fast-food outlets, and U-Park lots that advertised daily and weekly rates. I pulled into the first U-Park I saw, grabbed my bags, and said a silent prayer to whatever gods are in charge of broken windows and stolen hubcaps.

The border was just down the street, looking like a toll plaza. Even though it was only noon on a Friday, cars were lined up for a mile at the return inspection station. Border guards threaded through the traffic, letting their drug dogs sniff at tires. Heat waves rose from the road, baked by a urine-yellow sun. The pedestrian entrance was next to the motor crossing—nothing more than a dirty orange turnstile, like something you'd find at a dilapidated amusement park.

Welcome to Mexicoworld, I thought, and went through the turnstile.

*   *   *

The Hotel de Toros wasn't exactly the Four Seasons. My room was Spartan and threadbare as a dorm, decorated with faded prints of matadors and picadors sticking it to the bulls. It smelled of mildew and air freshener. A crack in the shower door was mended with duct tape. At least the phone worked, the linens were clean, and there was a bottled-water dispenser in the hall—a concession to gringo stomachs. I sacked out for a couple of hours before I went down to meet my co-writer.

I was there at five. Felina wasn't. Nor was she there at five-fifteen or five-thirty. At quarter to six, I went out to the lobby to use the phone. The receptionist at Danziger Press said that Jack Danziger had left for the day, and all I got at Kitty Keyes's office was a chirpy voice requesting that I leave a message.

“Señor O'Connor?”

It was the kid from the front desk. He held out an old-fashioned manila envelope, the kind with a string instead of a clasp. It bulged in the middle like a football.

“A lady came by and left this for you. I rang your room, but you weren't in.”

I took the envelope. “What did the lady look like?”

“
Muy bonita.
Long hair. And these.” He grinned and held his hands at chest level, curling his fingers.

Either my visitor had breast implants or severe arthritis.

*   *   *

Back in my room, I cracked a bottle of water, found a
tejano
station on the clock radio, and sat down with Felina's manuscript. On the back cover I discovered a hastily scribbled note:

I had an appointment and couldn't wait. So here's the book.

Read it and let me now what you think, alright?

I'll meet you back here at 11 tomorrow.

Felina Lopez

I frowned as I undid the string. This did not look promising.

Inside was a mishmash of notebook paper and yellow sheets from a cheap legal pad, written in longhand with at least three different ink colors, lots of marginalia, cross-outs, and clumpy blobs of Liquid Paper that kept sticking the pages together. Grains of sand fell out of the spine of the folder. It didn't take the Hardy Boys to figure out that she'd probably written it during long afternoons at the beach.

I sprawled across the bed, turning the pages slowly, trying to decipher her sloppy handwriting, her sloppier transitions, and her impenetrable spelling. When it got dark, I turned on the lamp and kept going. Outside, noise began to float up from Avenida Revolución: hard-driving rock, car horns, hoots and hollers from the
turistas.

When I finally turned the last page, I checked my watch. Nine-thirty. After midnight Manhattan time. Too bad. This was an emergency.

I dialed Jocelyn's home-slash-office in Chelsea. The machine picked up.

“Houston,” I said, “we have a problem.”

*   *   *

“It can't be that bad.”

“It is.”

It was four in the morning, Tijuana time, but I hadn't been able to do more than doze and channel-surf.

“Well, what's the problem?” I heard a coffee grinder running at the other end of the phone. “Isn't there enough on Dick Mann?”

“There's plenty. But it's all good. She loves him, Jocelyn.”

“She loves—”

“Pardon me. Not loves. She
worships
him. It's the romance of the ages. It's
The Bridges of Madison County
with a hooker in it.”

“Oh, dear…”

“You bet ‘Oh, dear.' It's the sensitive tale of an innocent young sex worker—her phrase, not mine—who's been mistreated by every man in Hollywood until the wonderful Dick Mann taught her what real love meant.”

There was a long silence. Jocelyn finally said, “This complicates things.”

“Complicates? It ruins things! Jack Danziger is expecting fifty thousand words of dirt on Dick Mann. What the hell are we going to do, Jocelyn?”

“I'm not going to do anything.
You're
going to have to get her to talk, Peaches.”

“Even the best writer in the world couldn't turn a love story into
Dickie Dearest,
Jocelyn. And I'm not the—”

“Shit.”

“What?”

“I got coffee grounds all over my new Donna Kieran, Karan. I mean Kieran.” Jocelyn wasn't at her best in the mornings. “And I've got a breakfast meeting in midtown in forty-five minutes.”

“What am I supposed to do?”

“Just fix it the best you can. That's what they're paying you the big bucks for, remember? Work with her. You can be diplomatic when you have to. You're meeting with her today, yes?”

“Yeah. But I've got a bad feeling about this.”

“All right. All right. Meet with her. Give it a day or two. If you're still getting nowhere, I'll put in a call to Jack and have him talk to Kitty Keyes. And if that doesn't work, I'll call Kitty and have a word with her myself. That's the best I can do. Do you feel better now?”

“Yeah,” I said. I didn't.

“Good. Now let me go put on my face. Call me after you meet with Felina. And don't panic, Peaches. It's all fixable.”

I hung up the phone and switched on the TV moodily. A cheesy cubic-zirconium necklace was rotating on a plinth. How did we ever get along without herringbone necklaces and porcelain unicorns?

Normally the Home Shopping Channel knocks me out faster than Sominex, but thin blue streaks of daylight were coming through the windows before I finally drifted off to sleep.

*   *   *

Eleven came and went. I bought a copy of the San Diego paper from the desk clerk and staked out a chair in the lobby. At eleven-twenty, I decided to give her ten more minutes before I called Jocelyn again. At 11:29, she walked through the door.

Felina Lopez was thinner than I remembered, but she was still a head-turner. She wore a man's denim shirt, unbuttoned to show a good bit of implant décolletage. A pair of stovepipe jeans was tucked into leather boots. Over her shoulder was a large leather satchel.

She scanned the lobby briefly before spotting the tape recorder on the table. I'd left it there on purpose—a beacon, a signal, a reporter's equivalent of the red carnation in the buttonhole.

“Hi. I'm Kieran O'Connor,” I said, standing up.

“Hello.” Not enthusiastic. From the look she was giving the lobby, she had expected something a little more luxe.

“We met briefly a couple of times before. Once at the premiere of
Bad Medicine,
and again at that party for Steve Martin at the museum. You were with—”

“I remember.”

“You do?”

“Not you. The party.”

Felina stared at me. It was a look I'd seen on too many Hollywood types, a look that analyzed you from one point of view only:
What can this person do for me?
And from the purse of disapproval at the edges of her Lancômed lips, the answer was:
Not much.

She looked around the lobby again and shook her head. “I can't work here.”

“Where do you want to go?”

“I don't know. I don't live in Tijuana.” She shrugged. “We'll find somewhere.”

Out on Avenida Revolución, tourists blocked the sidewalk. The exhaust fumes were stifling. Felina moved off down the sidewalk without a word. I had trouble keeping up with her long legs, and she didn't wait for me.

Avenida Revolución was pretty tatty by day. Past the jai alai arena, there were a few tired-looking titty bars, but most of the joints on Revolución were Americanized Mexican. Pastel-colored, with wooden parrots in the windows, they all had names like Jose O'Brien's and Paco MacTavish's. In this district, at least, Tijuana's renaissance seemed limited to capturing the college-kid dollar.

Felina detoured off the main drag after a block, cutting through an open-air
mercado
where a raggedy-ass band of mariachis was playing
ranchero
songs for a group of tourists. Heat waves and a nauseating smell rose from a nearby pushcart where a man peddled frankfurters and
chicharónes.
We wove our way through a maze of little stands and vendors hawking leather purses, plaster cobras, rosaries, Kahlua and tequila, genuine faux snakeskin belts, and Elvis walking hand in hand with Jesus on black velvet. Claudia would have loved it.

I spotted a restaurant across the street. “How about there?”

Felina shook her head and kept going.

The street narrowed, and I began to notice dilapidated storefronts hung with signs that advertised
FARMACIA
. People with everything from cancer to AIDS made drug runs to TJ for dubious
prescripcións
that were unavailable in the United States. Laetrile was still popular, but now the
farmacias
also did a big business in kombucha mushrooms, black-market AZT, protease inhibitors, and Rohypnol.

Another block, and suddenly the asphalt turned to dirt and the signs were all in Spanish. The street was busy, but I didn't see another American. Passersby were beginning to stare, and I wasn't sure what attracted attention: Felina's figure or the gringo trotting along beside her.