Hot Shot (5 page)

Felina may have been a whore, but at least her clients got what they paid for.

That's why they pay you the big bucks, Peaches.

I popped a Jujyfruit disconsolately. Pinocchio had Jiminy Cricket. I got Jocelyn Cricket. My anti-conscience.

*   *   *

Nine o'clock. I bought a copy of the San Diego paper from the desk clerk and read it while slumped in a squishy chair in the lobby. At nine-thirty, Felina still hadn't shown. At ten, I left a note with the clerk and went to get breakfast at the Denny's down the street. The
huevos rancheros
tasted just like the ones at the American Denny's—which is, I guess, the whole point of Denny's. I lingered over coffee until 10:45 before strolling back to the hotel. Felina could be the one to wait for a change.

Only she still wasn't there.

A vague foreboding—a pre-premonition—prickled under my collar.

There was an old-fashioned phone booth in the corner of the lobby. I called Jocelyn, got her machine, and left a terse message. At Kitty's office, I got a maternal-sounding secretary who clicked her tongue and promised to give Ms. Keyes my message “just as soon as she sashays in the door.”

I hung up, feeling my breakfast congeal in my stomach. Almost two hours late.

She wasn't coming.

If I left for L.A. now, I could be home by mid-afternoon. Jack Danziger could keep his money, Felina could have her manuscript back, and Kitty could find a ghostwriter who was more astrologically compatible than I was.

Back in my room, I was throwing shirts and notebooks into my suitcase when I came across the folder with Felina's manuscript. Remembering something, I took off the rubber bands and opened it to the title page.

There it was, in the bottom right-hand corner.
Felina Lopez, 2 Puesta del Sol, Via del Paraiso, B.C.
No phone number, though. Felina probably couldn't afford one.

I checked my watch. Eleven-fifteen. Even if Via del Paraiso was an hour down the coast, I could drive down, beard the lady in her beach shack, give her back the manuscript and a few well-chosen words, and be back in Santa Monica in time to surprise Claudia for dinner.

*   *   *

The desk clerk at the hotel gave me a map of upper Baja. It was in Spanish, but I found Via del Paraiso—a tiny dot on the coast just north of Ensenada, a straight shot down Highway 1.

Back in San Ysidro, I bailed my car out of the U-Park. It was intact, except for a big smear of seagull shit on the windshield. I stopped at a Shell station right before the border and filled up. I didn't trust the Mexican gasoline any more than I did the water. After crossing the border and paying my toll, I headed down the coast.

Just out of TJ was the resort town of Rosarito Beach. The last time Claudia and I had been down, it was a sleepy place with cheap grub and cheaper accommodations, but the Jose O'Brien's and Paco MacTavish's of the world had invaded. Why did people travel just to go someplace they could have gone at home?

A few miles farther, and the Pacific spread out to the right, a more brilliant blue than the dirty water of Santa Monica Bay. Seafood stands appeared on outcroppings over the rocks. Tourists sat on picnic benches right by the highway, eating huge plates of lobster and boiled corn. A parasailor appeared on the horizon, being dragged through the sky by a skiff. Sunlight glittered like dimes on the water. I passed a hamlet called La Misión and kept going.

The sign was so small and weatherbeaten that I almost missed it:
VIA DEL PARAISO
and an arrow. I turned off the highway and found myself on what wasn't even a street, just a paved road heading toward the water. No Jose O'Brien's or Paco MacTavish's here.

No street signs, either. I bumped along the road, passing a scattering of stuccoed shacks, each of which had a truck up on blocks in the front yard. One building had a hand-painted shingle tipped crazily toward the road:
PELUQUERIA
. Barbershop. I wondered who trimmed Felina's leonine mane. Did Via del Paraiso have its own José Eber?

Right before the beach, the blacktop dribbled out into a dusty intersection. To the right was an unpaved little street that threaded through a collection of seaside shacks. Smoke from a chimney or a cooking fire smudged the sky. To the left, another paved road climbed a small rise. The houses along the bluff were nicer. I could even see the top of a satellite dish behind one of the homes, a bristly steel sea urchin.

Uptown and shantytown, neatly cleaved by the main road: economic apartheid in action.

Which way to go? I couldn't imagine Felina being able to afford the houses on the hill. But could she really be living in the shantytown? Poverty was one thing for a Hollywood hooker. Third World living was another.

I got out of the car. The salt air hit me like a splash of aftershave. But something felt odd, and I couldn't quite place it.

Down by the fork in the road was a seabeaten street sign half-covered by a stand of palms. I got the manuscript, locked the car, and walked over to check out the sign. Rust had eaten at it mercilessly, but beneath the orange freckles I could make out that the shantytown road was Salida del Sol; the bluff road, Puesta del Sol. Sunrise and sunset.

So Felina was living on the hill after all. Maybe the houses on the bluff belonged to American expatriates and retirees, lured by the beach and the weak Mexican economy. Hell, if Felina could afford to live here, it couldn't be that expensive. I wondered how the locals viewed the invasion of the gringos.

Then it hit me, the source of my odd feeling: I hadn't seen a single person in Via del Paraiso. More than that, I hadn't heard a sound.

I stood and listened, but all I heard was the rush of the sea wind. This place was the Twilight Zone.

Shaking off my jitters, I began walking up Puesta del Sol. The first house was number 24 and the second 22. Felina had to live at the end of the road. What I had assumed were the fronts of the houses were actually the backs; the fronts faced the Pacific. I passed kitchen doors, garage doors, and garbage cans. Still no one anywhere.

After 14, the road made another sharp rise that left me panting. I came upon a weatherbeaten wooden staircase, which zigzagged down the bluff toward the beach through a thicket of purple ice plant. The sand was as deserted as the streets.

A couple hundred more feet, and I was relieved to hear a few voices around the next switchback. I made the turn and stopped dead.

Puesta del Sol ended in a little cul-de-sac of three homes. Twenty or thirty people were standing in the road in front of the biggest house, a spread that wouldn't have been out of place in Laguna or Malibu. I took in the landscaping, the red tile roof, the satellite dish. Back in Santa Monica, this would be nearly a million dollars. The house stretched down the bluff in a series of wooden terraces angled to catch the sun and the view.

There were a number of Americans in the crowd. Though they were dressed casually, they all had the Southern California good-life look: brown skin, white teeth, flat tummies. To the side was a group of Mexicans—the residents from down the hill, no doubt. Most of them looked worried. One old woman threaded a rosary between her fingers.

What the hell were they staring at? I skirted the crowd and moved around to the side.

Three Ensenada police cars had made a barricade in front of the garage door. A mustachioed cop talked into a radio. Behind him, two men in coveralls were coming out of 2 Puesta del Sol, carrying something.

A stretcher. With a green plastic bag on top of it.

Next to me, the old woman fingered her rosary. Her lips moved, but no sound emerged.

4

“
F
ORCE MAJEURE
?
T
HAT'S PREPOSTEROUS
, Jack. Despite what happened to Felina—and it's a tragedy, I'm well aware of that, we're all well aware of that, that's completely beside the point, completely—we have a book here.”

Jocelyn's agitated voice was coming out of a square black box on the table in the Danziger Press conference room. I half expected it to start hopping around the room like a cartoon.

“We have a manuscript. We have hours and hours of interview tape. We have Kieran ready and raring to go.
Force majeure,
acts of God, none of this is relevant.”

“Death is an act of God, Jocelyn.” Danziger sounded tired.

“Of course it is,” said the Jocelyn box. “But Felina fulfilled her obligation. She got her story down. The rest was up to Kieran. Let him do his job.”

Even by Jocelyn's rip-'em-to-shreds standards, this was really pushing it. Felina hadn't been dead twenty-four hours, and she was bucking to keep the project in play.

I sagged in my chair. The ride home had been physically and emotionally exhausting. By the time I hit Orange County, the traffic was metallic sludge and my A/C had conked out. I spent the last fifty miles with my window down, and now had a sunburn on my left arm that looked like radiation poisoning. There hadn't been time to go home and change before I had to meet Danziger for our powwow. My butt ached, my lungs burned, and the back of my shirt was still wet from the long drive.

Danziger didn't look much better. He rubbed his eyes. The coppery hair on his knuckles shone in the late-afternoon sunlight. “What do you think, Kitty?”

Kitty Keyes looked drawn; her face was powdery and her lipstick was cracking around the edges. “I don't know, either. This has been so…” She searched for a word, but all she came up with was “… much.”

All I could say was “Yeah.”

I had hung out on Puesta del Sol for a while, getting secondhand chunks and niblets of the story from some of the American neighbors. Apparently Felina's cleaning woman had arrived that morning, let herself into the house, straightened up the kitchen, got out the vacuum, went to plug it in, and found her employer's body stuffed behind the couch. Screaming, she had run out of the house, down the deck stairs, and onto the beach, where two local fishermen had come to her aid.

From there, the stories started to diverge. Some said the house had been robbed; others swore that it was a maniac on the loose. The cleaning woman had used
asalto
—the Spanish word for assault—but no one was quite sure if Felina had been raped. In any case, none of the neighbors had heard any noise, seen any cars, noticed any strangers in town. Except me, of course.

My press I.D. took off some of the heat, but I still got out of Via del Paraiso soon after that. All I needed was some paranoid busybody tipping off the Ensenada P.D. An interrogation by a Mexican cop—in a Mexican jail—wasn't my idea of fun. So I'd gone back to the Hotel del Toros, called Jocelyn and Danziger, got through the border check, and headed up the San Diego Freeway toward L.A.

“So, Sport. Where's the manuscript?” Danziger asked.

“I've got it.”

“Great. I'll have Daria make a copy and go over it tonight.”

I shifted in my chair, looking at the Jocelyn box. “Actually, I don't have it on me.”

That was true; it was down in my trunk, hidden under the spare tire. Jocelyn had told me not to turn it over to Danziger under any circumstances. It was our only chance to keep the project alive.

Danziger grunted. “How is it?”

“Felina never showed it to me,” said Kitty.

“I think it's what you want. Combined with the interview tapes, that is.”

He nodded, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Let's sleep on it. I've got my lawyer talking to the Mexican police. When he gets some answers, maybe we can decide how to proceed. I don't want it to seem like we're profiteering off this tragedy.”

I looked at the framed book covers on the walls and didn't say anything.

“Jack, who's your lawyer?” asked the Jocelyn box.

“Gilbert Françon at Dunne, Dunne, and Lambert.”

More bad news. Dunne, Dunne, and Lambert was L.A.'s biggest entertainment law firm. Their hourly billable was more than I paid for rent in a month—
used
to pay. Françon was one of their hotshots, with a daughter at Marlborough and a wife on the Blue Ribbon board at the Music Center. If Danziger was inclined to invoke
force majeure
and drop the project, Jocelyn and I didn't have a chance against Gilbert Françon.

“Fine,” said Jocelyn. “I just wanted to make it clear that my client is ready and willing to go on this project. You'll both be getting a fax to that effect in the morning. And you do want to go ahead with this, don't you, Kieran?”

Danziger and Kitty Keyes looked at me.

No,
I wanted to say.
No, this is a project that turns my stomach. No, I can't turn a badly written memoir into a sizzling tell-all. No, even though I'm temporarily homeless and my bank account is running on fumes, I won't stoop to the level of—

“Kieran?” said the Jocelyn box.

“Yeah,” I said again. “Let's do it.”

*   *   *

In the elevator, I offered to escort Kitty to her car. “That would be lovely, dear,” she said tonelessly, offering a tired smile. “Your agent is very protective of you.”

“I'm sorry if she seemed insensitive.”

“Jocelyn was thinking of the book. Besides, that's what agents get paid for. To be unpleasant so our clients don't have to.”

She gave me another tired smile as the doors slid open on P-2, and took my arm as we walked through the garage. Her heels clicked on the concrete. “I am sorry about Felina,” I said. “Really.”

“I was close to her, you know. Despite her past and her eccentricities, she was a good person. She had a spark.”

Kitty stopped in front of a car and opened her bag. I'd envisioned her driving a Mary Kay–pink Cadillac convertible, so it was a disappointment to see that her car was a plain Mercedes, painted banker's-lamp green. She got out her keys and deactivated the alarm. The Mercedes gave off a metallic chirp. “Can I drop you anywhere, dear?”