Naked in LA (16 page)

“You’ve got a tan.”

“Yeah, I was in Florida.”

“Running guns again?”

“You know Florida. There’s a lot of gunplay down there.”

“Liar. When does anyone fly to Florida through Hong Kong. And why is there an opium pipe sticking out of your carry-on?”

“Souvenir of Fort Lauderdale.” I handed him the car keys but he shook his head. “I’m tired, you drive.”

As we were driving away from the airport he ran his hand through my hair and grinned. “You look damn good in this car.”

“I know.”

He settled his sunglasses back on his nose and stretched. “Sure is good to be back.”

“I wasn’t sure you were coming back. No word for six months.”

“I sent you a postcard with all my news. Anyway, you knew I was coming back--you had my Roadster. I’ve been keeping track of you, anyway, I hear you’re a starlet now.”

“I have my own Roadster now, a new one. I’m slumming it in this old heap.”

“This time next year you’ll have your own chauffeur.”

“I thought you might have another girl. You probably have a harem down in Fort Lauderdale.”

“What about you, princess? How is life as a Hollywood starlet? Tell me about the casting couches, the string of handsome leading men you’ve been stringing along, the cocaine and the orgies. Spare me no details. I’ve been living in the jungle for the last year and I’ve been starved of sex and gossip. Shock me.”

His mischievous grin melted me.

“Oh, don’t look so shy. I’ve been keeping up with things while I’ve been away. They tell me the press are calling you the next Marilyn Monroe. You must be fighting them off.”

“It’s you I want, Reyes.”

There, it was said. He lifted up his sunglasses and looked at me, hard. “You don’t even know me.”

“You’ve been chasing me for four years, Reyes. Do you get what I’m saying? You’ve caught me.”

He pointed to the off ramp. “Go down there,” he said.

Chapter 22 

He pointed towards the ice rink on Sepulveda Boulevard. “Pull in there,” he said.

“We’re going ice skating?”

I pulled into the parking lot. He got out of the car and wandered down the line of parked cars. He ran his hands over the front tyres and behind the number plates. Less than five minutes later he was back with the key to a green Ford Custom. It had been fixed to the tags with tape. He peeled if off and tossed it in my lap.

“What’s this?”

“It’s how I used to make a living.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Drive.”

“What’s this about?”

“We’ll toss it in the trash when we get home. I just did that guy a big favour.”

I pulled back onto Sepulveda, and in a few minutes we were heading north again on the freeway.

“Everyone worries about locking themselves out of their car so they try to think of a smart place to keep the spare, but guys like me have already figured out the smartest place to keep it: in your wallet. The dumb place is behind the tags or taped under the wheel arch. You would not believe how many people do it.”

“I always thought you had to force the lock or hot-wire the engine.”

“You’ve been watching too many movies.”

“When did you start stealing cars?”

“Me and my kid brother were sixteen when we left Cuba. We stayed with an uncle in Tampa--nice guy, played guitar—and my aunt, she was real good to me, they both helped me out all they could, but they had no money. It was like they thought poverty had some kind of moral virtue to it.”

“What about you?”

“I’ve no objection to money. But sometimes I get tired of the things I have to do to get it.”

“Like stealing cars?”

“Hell no, stealing cars was the easy part.”

“So how did that happen? Your uncle didn’t teach you that, right?”

“No, he wanted to get me a job in the same factory where he worked, hand rolling cigars. You know what that’s like? There’s hundreds of guys sitting at a bench and They’re getting paid nothing - minimum. So this was my alternative career choice, stealing cars. I fenced them to this guy, father of a friend of mine, turned out he was seriously connected.”

“You were sixteen?”

“Not old enough to drive, but old enough to steal. It was good money and I never got caught, not once. I didn’t joyride. If I wanted to go anywhere, I took the bus. Stealing cars was strictly business. It was my first lesson in life: you never mix business and pleasure. The second lesson was never underestimate how stupid people are.”

“What did you do with the money?”

“I put it in a tin box and I kept it under a floorboard in my room. When I had enough, I said thanks to my uncle and my aunt and I walked out. I left half the money in the tin for my kid brother. I told him to give it to my uncle after I’d gone, I knew if I gave him the money he would have asked me how I got it, and knowing him, he would have shopped me to the police. But I wanted to show him some gratitude, and that was the only way I could think of.”

“Where did you go?”

“I’d met these people through my car racket and they gave me some names to look up, in Miami. So I went down there and hooked up with this guy running a
bolita
racket for Santo Senior. A year in and I knew everything there was to know about numbers rackets, cockfighting, sports betting. Like I said, people are stupid, they tape their car keys to their tags and bet on chickens, it’s like they want to give you their money. Anyway, I learned fast, and when I was twenty they asked me to go back to Cuba to be pit boss in one of the casinos.”

“Are you in the mob, Reyes, is that what you’re saying?”

“I know a lot of mob guys; there’s a difference. Fact is I know a lot of people. But mob guys get a lot of money, or they get dead, and neither situation appeals to me. I make a nice living and keep my head down.”

“Why are you telling me all this?”

“Before you get in too deep with me, I want you to know who I am. I don’t want you yelling at me later, asking me to be something I’m not. I am not a taxpayer, princess. Life with me wouldn’t be like living with a regular guy.”

“I guess I figured that.”

“So now I laid it out for you.”

“You still haven’t told me where you’ve been the last six months.”

“I can’t tell you that. It’s classified.”

“Were you working for the CIA or working for yourself?”

“I freelance for the government from time to time. Jobs they don’t like using their own people for. This job was in Asia. Believe me, you don’t need to know more than that.”

I had guessed most of what he told me. What shocked me was that he had chosen to tell me anything about it at all.

“What happened to your kid brother?”

“He’s still in Ybor City. The factories have all closed down now. I don’t know what he’s doing, I send him money but he doesn’t write much.”

“Runs in the family.”

He smiled but let that one go. “You know, princess, I always figured that I’d never fall for any woman. As far as I could see, it tied a man down and made him act stupid. You almost changed my mind, but then that night I saw you with Angel, I swore I’d never forgive you. It’s not in my nature, or that’s what I thought. You get one chance with me, and you blew yours. I worked hard at forgetting about you before you came to LA, worked at it as hard as I could. But something keeps bringing us together. When I saw you in Miami, it was just like that first time all over. I don’t know what it is about you, but I can never get you out of my head, no matter how hard I try.”

We were driving up into the Hills. There was warm wind in my hair and a warm hand on my knee, four of us in his two-seater Roadster, driving with the top down: Reyes, my papi, Marilyn and me. Papi was telling me I couldn’t trust him and Marilyn had her arms on my shoulders, saying:
The people you love always leave you. That’s the only truth there is.

I let them both out of the car before we got to Reyes” place. I guessed they wouldn’t want to come in and watch me make a fool of myself, because that was what I’d decided to do.

Chapter 23 

Reyes had leased a redwood tree house bachelor pad with views over the valley. When we got there it was right on dusk and the lights were twinkling on all over the city. He started throwing open the windows and shutters. “It’s good to finally breathe some air that doesn’t stink of rot,” he said.

I took a look around; there was a pool, a deck with views right over the Hills, a couple of bedrooms. It might have been a display home--there was no sign that anyone actually ever lived there. I looked for photographs and couldn’t find even one. He was a man who had no history except the chapters he selected himself for public view.

“I’m going to have a shower,” he said.

“Sure.”

I listened to the faucet run.

I opened the pantry. The cans were lined up in rows in perfect alphabetical order. If there were a world war he’d be able to survive for weeks. There were no bookshelves, but there were two bookmarked novels on the coffee table; Harper Lee’s
To Kill a Mockingbird
and the latest James Bond bestseller,
Doctor No
. I smiled. There were the two sides of his character, right there.

Even the liquor bottles in the bar were lined up like soldiers. I wondered how a woman like me would fit into such an ordered life; I left my clothes on the bedroom floor and I never put anything back in its place. Records were put in the nearest sleeve, I was always buying milk in the summer because I kept leaving it out. Perhaps it was because I’d been brought up with a maid. Like he said, I really was a princess.

He had chased me for so long and now I was here, I was his, another conquest. He was right, even though I’d first met him four years ago I still hardly knew anything about him. Who was he really? He lived an utterly unreal life, even by Hollywood’s rules. He’d pretended to confess to so much but I was sure he’d only given me a sanitized version of his life. Running betting rackets for the mob and running guns for the CIA might sound glamorous, but what sort of things had he done to stay alive and turn a buck? I didn’t imagine that Reyes was any kind of hero. You didn’t get a house like this by being a good person, that’s what Papi had been trying to tell me.

Here was a man who lived in a redwood eyrie high above everyone else, living by a code unique to the clique of gangsters and spooks, gamblers and gun-runners, he chose to call friends.

This was not real, none of it. It was as solid as smoke.

A man like this, he would get bored with me soon enough, he liked new, shiny things. He had told himself it was love at first sight but I was just a woman he once didn’t think he could have. My novelty would soon wear off. I could not invest too much of my heart in Reyes Garcia or I was going to get hurt.

It was easy for him to hide behind his secrets. He had the freedom to come and go, but did he really want me to think there had been no other women in his life all this time? He probably had a Magdalena Fuentes in every city he went and he told them he was fated to be with all of them. It was a good line, it had worked on me.