12
My morning is a blur of sick and head split. A series of decisions followed by stunned immobility. Pulling on jeans. Lurching to the toilet. Back to bed. Glass of water. Kim Lord’s flash drive tumbling from my night table. Retrieved. Its flat bullet shape in my hand. Why did Greg have it? More sleep, troubled by nausea and worry. Shoving off damp sheets and stumbling downstairs. The chairs still pulled away from the patio table, where Greg and I sat. My purse open. Phone on, messages blinking. More water. Slipping on sandals, sunglasses. A yearning for milky Thai tea. Coconut curry. I know a place deep in the Hollywood and Highland mall. I know artists destroy their work all the time. Claude Monet, Francis Bacon. Painting slashers. John Baldessari burned everything he made in a thirteen-year span: 123 paintings went into the crematorium; ten boxes of ashes emerged. He baked some of the ashes into cookies and ate them. What did Kim Lord do with the smashed pieces of her flash drives? Chuck them in the trash? Scatter them in the sea? I’m at the Thai restaurant now, slouching in a fish-sauce fog. Metal spatula clangs the wok. I order spring rolls, too. A huge Thai tea. Stagger home over the pink marble stars, sucking sweet orange toothache through a straw.
By the time I pass Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, my head is finally clearing. The sharp pagoda roof and red columns draw my eyes, dizzy, upward into a massive relief of a dragon, while below my feet the handprints and shoe prints of Hollywood stars look absurdly small. Their signatures and well wishes loop in the concrete, made childish by the thickness of their lines. Joan Crawford, Clark Gable, Nicholas Cage, Myrna Loy. These are the names of those who made it in L.A., and they made it by falling in love and shooting one another and dancing and dying on giant screens for everyone to see. They made it by being someone else entirely, and being their own selves writ large, by the same powerful transference I saw in the galleries: Kim as Nicole Brown Simpson as Kim. Kim as Roseann Quinn as Kim.
Beside me, a flash of red and blue. A conspicuously unmuscular Superman flexes for a photo with a family wearing pasty midwestern complexions and jean shorts. Batman lurks behind him, tall, gangly in the thighs, another aspiring actor waiting to be discovered by no one, because no one comes to Hollywood by day but the tourists. I don’t know if a temp agency hires the superheroes or if they arrive of their own accord, but seeing their fixed fake grins ends my brief sugar high and plunges me into my hangover again. My hip aches from last night’s useless leap from the horse.
On the far west side of the theater’s maze of celebrity prints stands Skanky Spider-Man, with his ripped costume and duct-taped mask. Skanky Spider-Man is a frequent feature of this edge of the edge of fame. His ersatz getup and jumpy gestures tend to scare the tourists, so the other superheroes always pose a safe distance from him, with their backs turned, as if he belongs to his own cruddy parallel universe. He can’t possibly make any money, but he shows up anyway. I don’t like to think about what peculiar obsession drives him to shove his legs and arms through his stained blue nylon suit day after day.
Once Greg offered to buy the guy lunch. Greg loves buying lunch for panhandlers and transients—“A real lunch,” he always says.
“No offense, man, but I’m done with that,” said Skanky Spider-Man.
“I’m done with that. I’m done with that. What does that mean?” Greg kept asking me later, shaking his head.
It means what it says. I’m done. As I pass Skanky Spider-Man, I remember how he said it to Greg, brash and unapologetic, as if Greg were the one who didn’t get it. Greg never gets it. He asks his exgirlfriend to believe him when he says he knows nothing about his current lover’s sudden disappearance. And then he gives that ex a key piece of evidence—a flash drive he shouldn’t have in the first place—and asks her to hide it. He’s either stupid or too trusting or cunning or insane. I don’t want to find out which.
I’m done, too.
I’m going to send the flash drive back to him. I’m not going to spy on Bas. I’m not going to answer Greg if he calls. I can’t help him, and I don’t want to suspect him either. Let the professionals step in and handle this. I’ve got five more blocks in this dusty lemon light, five more blocks of loud traffic and gawkers and shoppers, and then I’ll turn off Hollywood Boulevard to my palm-lined street and stroll the last block to my quiet bungalow to enter alone. I’ll eat my salty takeout and jump in the shower. I’ll curl up on my yellow couch and read until I fall asleep. And Kim Lord will soon be found by the police. And Kim Lord will be alive, unscathed, and she’ll be the biggest story of the year in the art world: the artist who vanished and then returned to give all her paintings away.
My phone rings as I’m waiting to cross La Brea. I don’t recognize the number, but the traffic light is taking forever, so I answer it.
“Is this Maggie?” says an alto female voice, and then without waiting for my answer, “This is Cherie Rhys, Greg Shaw Ferguson’s attorney.”
The hello is barely out of my mouth before Cherie relates that Kim Lord’s phone has been discovered, and that a search warrant for Greg’s properties has turned up a bloody cloth in the basement of one of his studios.
A bloody cloth. The phrase snags and doesn’t process.
“At the moment, Shaw has just been placed under arrest, but it is likely that he’ll be arraigned and held in custody without bail. I’m working on the bail part.” She pauses. “On my advice, he isn’t speaking to anyone, but he wanted you to know.”
“He wanted me to know …,” I repeat, faltering over where to begin. He wanted me to know? Did something happen in his basement? Who found her phone?
“If you wish to communicate with him about anything,” Cherie adds, “you’ll need to do it through me.”
My curiosity boils over. “Did he find her phone? Did he know about the … the blood?”
“I’m afraid I can’t divulge many details right now,” says Cherie. “But no, detectives found the phone in Echo Park.”
“You don’t believe Greg—Shaw—did anything to hurt her, though.”
“Of course not.” Cherie’s answer is smooth and quick. I realize she must say this for every client. “Do you have anything you wish to communicate to Shaw?”
I cross La Brea, my mouth growing drier by the second. Does he want me to say something about the flash drive? About Bas and the stalker?
“Um, do you have any questions for me?” I say.
“Not at this time,” she says. “I’ll be in touch.”
“Is he okay?” I ask, but she has already hung up.
“Call the rock critic,” Yegina says in a muffled voice. It’s past noon now, but she is the queen of sleeping in. “He’s got to know something.”
I am back in my tranquil kitchen, exhuming my takeout and nibbling tiny bites of the spring rolls. “I did. He didn’t answer,” I say. “Should I call Cherie back? I feel like I blew my chance to ask her any real details.”
Yegina makes a soft sliding noise, like someone burying herself deeper in her pillows. She’s one of those people who always has a fluffy, soft, floral-smelling bed, while mine invariably resembles gym mats.
“She won’t tell you anything,” she says. “Call Kevin again.”
“I don’t want him to feel forced.”
“He has the hots for you.”
I set down my spring roll. “What?”
“In our interview, I asked him if he liked you—”
I start to interrupt, but she cuts me off.
“And he said he thinks you look like a young Marlene Dietrich. But it doesn’t matter because he’s been engaged for five years to a rich girl he met in Tanzania when he was studying abroad and she was in the Peace Corps. Mindy’s older than he is. She kept him a secret from her family until he graduated college, and now he needs a big career leap or he’ll shame her.”