Strip (7 page)

Jeff went into Lila’s tiny bedroom, opened the small closet that she let him share, and began to move aside the pile of shoes on the floor. He found the white laundry bag he’d left there, carried it to her bed, and poured out the bills. Most of them were small now—ones, fives, tens. That was chump money, not the kind of money you could flash. If he wanted to show off and buy a bottle of Cristal at a club, he would have to count out around fifty five-dollar bills, even more at some places. It completely defeated the purpose of buying the Cristal at all. Over the past month, he had spent hundreds of dollars every night buying dinners, champagne, the occasional hotel room for a few hours.

He plucked the twenties and the two fifties out of the pile and stuck them in his wallet, then dutifully gathered the smaller bills and made them into a four-inch stack. He went to Lila’s dresser, found a black elastic hair band, slipped it over the stack, and tossed it on the bed. He began to open drawers, found a pair of black stockings still in a package. He opened it, lay the stockings out on the bed, put a pair of high heels where the feet would be, put a black bra up above, and put a big pair of sunglasses above that to indicate the eyes. He took her nail scissors and cut the cardboard backing from the package into the shape of a heart, wrote “I love you” on it in lipstick, and placed it in a strategic zone above the stockings. In the lowest drawer of her dresser, he found her leather gloves, put them on either side of the effigy, and put the stack of bills in the right glove.

Two last items had fallen from the laundry bag—his Browning .45 Hi-Power pistol and the spare magazine. He checked to be sure the gun and the extra magazine were both loaded, the way he had left them. If Lila had found them sometime while he was out, it would be just like her to unload them and think she was making him safe. No, she hadn’t found the gun. He clicked the safety off and on again, put it into the inner pocket of the leather jacket hanging in the closet, put on a pair of jeans, a blue shirt, and a pair of running shoes.

He took the jacket and turned off the lamp by the bed so when Lila came in she would turn on the light and see what he had left for her. He stepped out to the kitchen feeling good. He had been feeling bad—uncomfortable, at least—about letting her pay for everything when he had a bag full of money, and this was the last chance to throw some her way. As of now, there was no bag of money.

That meant today was the day to go out and get something to fill the bag again. He went to the door, picked up his keys from the sideboard, and pulled his gloves and ski mask out from under the couch.

Eldon walked to the door, stood still, and stared at him patiently.

“Yeah, what the hell. I’ll take you out for a few minutes before I go.” He took the leash off the hook behind the door and snapped it onto Eldon’s collar, then pulled some plastic bags off the stack Lila kept by the door for walks.

Eldon went out ahead of him, and his step seemed livelier and more youthful than it had before. Eldon was no puppy, but walking seemed to make him happy. Jeff followed the dog. He went down the sidewalk to the curb, then across the street with a slight diagonal to the left, and Jeff decided he understood. To the left were the little women’s stores that Lila liked, and the coffee shops. The dog apparently didn’t realize there was anyplace to go to the right. Jeff tugged his collar in that direction once, and the dog turned and eagerly headed to the right.

Eldon stopped now and then to sniff each object along the way and then to work up some urine to mark his trail, but otherwise he was all for the road ahead. Eldon was Lila’s dog, but since Jeff and Eldon had both been living in Lila’s apartment at her discretion, they shared a certain feeling of fellowship. Lila had that strange female mixture of emotions about taking in useless creatures and raging fits of hormone-fueled ferocity that made her shout and throw things and slam doors.

Eldon and Jeff liked peace. One of Lila’s sudden rages a month ago had caused Jeff to stumble on his new profession, robbing people who did their banking at night. Jeff had weathered her anger that day until she slammed the door shut on her way to work. He had contemplated the situation and begun to wonder if she was simply trying to drive him off so she didn’t have to throw him out. Then he wondered if her nasty mood was because she had another man she wanted to move in to take his place.

Later that evening he turned off the television and drove to the club where Lila worked. She was a waitress at Siren, one of Manco Kapak’s clubs. Since it was a strip club, he had assumed that the atmosphere would be charged with pheromones and that a beautiful girl like Lila would be mired in temptation—the attraction of a really pretty girl who worked in a place that sold at least the idea of sex, and at times, pretty much the actual commodity, must be overpowering, he thought. Men must be hitting on her at a frightening rate. All of these dumb, half-drunk guys probably thought that the waitresses were strippers-in-training, at the very least.

Jeff went in, pretended to watch the show from a dark, remote table in the bar area, but actually watched Lila. He couldn’t spot any boyfriends hanging around waiting for her to get off work. She didn’t treat any customers as if she had ever seen them before. She was a waitress in a place where men got drunk and loud and gave big tips, but she was still a waitress. Early in the evening, she had to serve actual meals. Later on she had to concentrate mainly on carrying a tray through a tight, clumsy crowd without spilling the drinks—mainly heavy beer glasses—then making change and noticing the next customer who wanted a fresh drink. And being in a strip club, where other women were all over the place uncovering their particulars, didn’t appear to make her feel especially romantic. In fact, it seemed to have the opposite effect. After Jeff had completed an hour and a half of surveillance on her, he got distracted by one of the acts for a minute, and Lila caught him.

She told him that if he thought she was going to work her ass off so he could sit in the bar wasting money paying other women to show him theirs, he was out of his mind. She was pretty mean about it. She followed him all the way to the front door, yapping at him like a little dog until he escaped.

Afterward, while he was walking across the parking lot to the back, where he had hidden his Trans Am, he happened to see a man he figured was Lila’s boss, Mr. Kapak. He was coming out the kitchen door at the back of the building carrying a maroon canvas bag with a zipper on it. It was the kind of bag he’d seen store owners holding in the business teller’s line at the bank. The man got into a Mercedes and drove off.

Jeff started his car and followed him. It was a dark, quiet summer night, and he drove with his window open, listening to the silence. He realized he knew exactly what to do. He parked his car on a residential street that was out of range of the cameras mounted on the bank. He took his gun from under the seat, pocketed the ski mask he’d used to rob a liquor store in Arizona, and ran up the alley between the commercial buildings along Ventura Boulevard and the Los Angeles River’s concrete channel. All he did was come up behind the older man beside the bank’s night deposit, stick the gun in his face, and take the bag away from him. He stepped back into the alley behind the building, ran for the car a street away, and drove back to Lila’s apartment.

She came in an hour later, reminded him that he was stupid, went into her bedroom, and locked the door. He hid the money in his car and slept on the couch. When he had time to look at his money, he discovered that he had a lot. He didn’t count it, any more than he would have stopped to count the potato chips in a bag. The meaningful measures were a lot, a little, and none. He put the money and the gun in the laundry bag in Lila’s closet and spent the money happily over a period of about a month.

During the month he took Lila to restaurants and clubs, and on a couple of shopping trips. Her mood improved and she let him leave the couch to Eldon and join her in the bedroom. But Lila worked nights, so he could hardly be blamed if he went out by himself while she was gone. He had discovered that one of the best things about having money was not having to count. Every night he would reach into the money bag, take out bills, and make a roll of hundreds and fifties of a size that felt good in his hand. The next night most of it would be gone and he would make another. It was a life without worries—almost without thought.

Eldon and Jeff went around the block and returned to Lila’s apartment just as the twilight reached its best moment, with the last rays of the sun tinting the clouds above the western horizon bright orange, leaving the sky in the east a deep, luminous purple about to turn to black. Jeff took Eldon inside, refilled his water dish, and poured some more kibble into his bowl. “There, dude,” he said. “That should hold you until she gets back. Got to go.”

He went out, got into his old Trans Am, fired it up, and listened to its low, throaty growl. He had bought a new muffler while he still had money, and new tires, and had the oil changed. After nine years he could tell from the sound that the engine was okay. He had driven it here from Arizona only a couple of months ago, and he had decided the night when he had begun his new career that a new muffler was a good idea. He drove out to the Valley, stopped at a Mobil station to fill up his tank, and paid in cash. When he went into the little store to pay, he was at the end of a line of four men, all about twenty to thirty, all six feet to six-two and thin, all wearing denim and dark-colored T-shirts. He was sure that five minutes from now nobody would remember him, because in five minutes he would be replaced ten times by the next guys who looked just like him. One of the things he loved about L.A. was that there were a million of everything.

Jeff drove to the Siren Club and checked the parking lot for Lila’s shiny little red Honda. It was there, right where she liked to park it, under the bright lights mounted along the edge of the roof. Jeff turned south and west and drove to the diner he liked best because hardly anybody else did. He wanted a chance to be by himself and think through the acts he was going to have to perform later.

In the only stint he had ever done in prison, he had met a man named Girard. He preferred to be from France, but when he spoke French it didn’t sound like the French that Jeff’s teachers spoke. He was about sixty years old, but he could still do all sorts of gymnastics. During exercise periods he would do flips and cartwheels, and when he was in his cell he would walk around on his hands. He told Jeff that walking upside-down on his hands was the secret of his strength. It was true that he had very muscular arms and shoulders. He also told Jeff that his way to do anything difficult was to visualize it first, step by step in proper order. The method didn’t work very well for Jeff, because he usually did things on impulse and was very easily distracted. But he was determined to try again tonight.

He went into the diner and sat down facing away from the door. When the waitress came, he ordered a turkey dinner with gravy and potatoes and green beans, looked up at the mirror that ran the length of the back wall of the restaurant, and watched her walk away to hand in his order. Then he began the work of visualizing. He would arrive near the bank at 1:30
A.M.
and spend some time studying the area to be sure there were no cops watching the building. He would then place himself in the parking garage near the back of the bank.

He looked straight ahead and saw the reflection of two young women walking in the front door. They were both about twenty-two or twenty-three, and they wore tight, low-cut, straight-leg jeans, and tops that had a little lace along the edge and straps like camisoles. They both had long brown hair with highlights streaked in to look like the effects of the sun, and skin that probably hadn’t been exposed to direct sunlight since they were nine. They saw the sign that said
PLEASE SEAT YOURSELF,
walked deeper into the restaurant, and stopped at the table right behind him. They both looked into the mirror briefly—first at themselves, then at him. His eyes met theirs and they looked away, kept smiling at each other and talking, and sat at that table anyway.

Jeff’s consciousness opened and filled itself with the two women until there was room for nothing else. His mind was captive. He listened only to them. The waitress brought his turkey dinner, and he was glad because it drew the attention of the two women, whose eyes followed it to his table. He cut his food into half-inch bits so he could eat slowly, letting his eyes move upward to the mirror at varying intervals to stray across the women. The one in the lime-green camisole had no trouble catching him at it every time. The first couple of times she pretended to give him a reprieve, looking away as though she thought he might actually have met her eyes accidentally. The third time she looked directly at him, gave him a quick smile, and raised her eyebrows in a question.

The woman seated with her back to Jeff glanced at her companion, half-turned to verify that the one she was silently communicating with was Jeff, then leaned forward to whisper to her. She set her napkin by her place, stood up, and walked past Jeff to the stairway that led to the restrooms. Jeff was aware that everything was some kind of test, so he willed himself not to watch her.

“I’m sorry if she looked at you in a weird way.” It was the girl in the lime green, who was still at her table behind him.

He looked into the mirror at her. “No, please. Don’t feel that way. I was trying to think of a way to talk to you anyway.”

Her smile came back. “What did you want to say?”

“That I wanted to talk to you”

“So
now
what do you want to say?”

He shrugged. “That you’re beautiful. I suppose everybody who talks to you says that.”

“Pretty much. Men say that to every girl the first time they talk, no matter what she looks like. After that, most of them seem to think of something smarter to say.”

“I’m not very smart. Did your friend get mad because you were looking at me?”

“Not really. She went to the ladies’ room to give us a chance to see if we had anything.”