THE SALESGIRL in the wig shop on Santa Monica Boulevard in trendy West Hollywood thought the midnight-purple number with the Chinese-red swags was a perfect complement to Jane’s complexion. “But then, anything would be with your great skin.”
They had a makeup section with midnight-purple lip gloss and glittery eye shadow. The salesgirl was excited that Jane was going from fade to flash. “The young-attorney look doesn’t do you justice. Your stuff is stashed in the right places, so might as well put it on parade before the long slide starts. What’ll they say at work?”
“I came into some money,” Jane said. “I don’t need to work anymore. I’m quitting tomorrow.”
“So you’re gonna—what?—go in there one last time, flash the hot new you, and tell ’em to screw themselves?”
“Exactly.”
“Sensational.”
“Isn’t it?”
“Beat them into the dirt with it.”
“I will,” Jane said, though she wasn’t sure what that meant.
Across the street and half a block farther east, in a boutique where the salesgirls looked like highly attractive cyborgs from the future, Jane bought a pair of Buffalo Inka flare jeans with a higher rise that gave them a retro look, and a lambskin biker’s jacket that, according to the girls, was a perfect knockoff of one by Comptoir des Cotonniers, whoever the hell that was.
She also chose snakeskin high-heeled platform shoes with ankle straps. They were said to be a drop-dead knockoff of a pair by Salvatore Ferragamo, of whom she believed she had heard, though she had been under the impression he was a hockey or soccer star.
Finally, she purchased a pair of black-silk wrist-length gloves with silver stitching. Without them, her working-cop fingernails would belie her flash-girl image. Besides, she was going where she didn’t want to leave fingerprints.
She had little patience for shopping, especially because, when trying on clothes, she had to leave her rig and pistol under the driver’s seat in the locked Ford. From wig selection to gloves, she felt naked.
Out of West Hollywood, she drove into less glamorous precincts.
For decades, the northwest suburbs of Los Angeles, on the other side of the Santa Monica Mountains, had thrived and expanded. But too many parts of Van Nuys, Reseda, Canoga Park, and other communities were showing signs of the state’s decline.
The sparkling coastal communities remained mostly luxe, but here in the western half of the San Fernando Valley, seediness was creeping in everywhere.
Jane passed by a few motels that had gone to the rats and roaches, that appeared to rent by the week to crack junkies who lived four to a double room.
In a better neighborhood, a national-chain motel still looked family friendly. She checked in, paying cash and presenting false ID, confident she wouldn’t have to get up in the middle of the night to break up a grudge match between a meth freak and a free-baser.
She began her fade-to-flash transformation.
12
* * *
THERE WERE JOBS in the area, some of them high-paying, and the central commercial district was trying hard to be cutting-edge hip, youth-oriented, the Place to Be if you were one of those who thought there was such a thing as the Place to Be. A few empty storefronts put the lie to full prosperity, but vacancies were not an epidemic.
For every three shops or restaurants that looked as if they might have had a poster of Che Guevara somewhere on the premises, there was one stubborn Jurassic retailer offering knit suits for older women or an Italian restaurant that offered all-you-can-eat garlic bread and didn’t call itself a trattoria.
Jane was interested solely in a shop where the sign over the door said VINYL, just that one word, because it was meant to suggest an ongoing business without attracting the annoyance of too many customers. There was no indication of what product or service the place might be hawking. The big windows were painted green, neither displaying merchandise nor providing a glimpse of the interior.
Driving behind the shop, she saw no indications of active surveillance from the buildings on the other side of the alleyway.
After parking a block from Vinyl and around the corner, she walked the south side of the street, tall in her platforms, feeling out-there but not out of place. She had never been comfortable with undercover work.
She stopped at an ill-conceived hole-in-the-wall take-out business that was trying to be a juice bar, a hip purveyor of chai tea and like beverages, and a gelato shop peddling exotic flavors, all in a space so small that grade-school entrepreneurs would be reluctant to set up a lemonade stand.
She paid for a bottle of coconut water, which tasted like palm-tree piss, if there had been such a thing. She drank it anyway as she strolled that block and the next, pretending to window-shop.
After crossing to the north side of the street, she slowly worked her way back to Vinyl. None of the vehicles parked in the area seemed to be conducting surveillance of the place.
When she went through the painted-glass door, chimes announced her. Rows of record bins divided the front room into aisles. They were filled with phonograph albums and even more ancient 78-rpm platters from the era before the compact disc and digitized music.
On the walls hung framed one-sheets, concert playbills, and posters ranging from Bing Crosby to the Beatles. Vinyl catered to audiophiles, black-wax geeks who preferred authentic recordings that hadn’t been engineered to soulless perfection. Such was its apparent purpose, anyway.
On a stool behind the counter sat a long-faced girl with big eyes and ringletted sable-black hair to her shoulders. She sported a small tattoo of a skull in the hollow of her throat, and she must have spent a thousand hours in front of a mirror, perfecting her look of ennui.
Spinning on a turntable near her, an album by Kansas offered their biggest hit, “Dust in the Wind,” and it was easy to suppose that this girl played nothing else all day.
Jane placed an index card on the counter. With a felt-tip pen, she had earlier printed this on it: THE FBI HAS AN OPEN-END COURT ORDER ALLOWING THEM TO RECORD EVERY WORD SPOKEN IN THIS PLACE.
Instead of reading the card, the clerk said, “What—you’re a deaf mute or something? We don’t make contributions.”
Jane raised a black-gloved middle finger to her and then with the same digit tapped the index card.
The girl deigned to read the message, and if she understood it, she maintained an admirable deadpan expression.
On the second index card was this: IF JIMMY RADBURN DOESN’T WANT TO SPEND 20 YEARS IN PRISON, HE NEEDS TO TALK TO ME NOW.
The skull tattoo in the hollow of the clerk’s throat seemed to widen its lipless grin when she swallowed hard.
She plucked the two cards off the counter, swung off the stool, went to a door on her side of the sales counter, and stepped into a back room.
Jimmy Radburn deserved to spend the rest of his life being some gang thug’s main squeeze in Leavenworth or the equivalent.
But Jane needed him. It sickened her to have to turn to him. A lot of things sickened her these days, and yet she didn’t spend any time throwing up.
Kansas finished decrying the bleakness of the human condition and moved on to another cut.
13
* * *
AFTER A COUPLE OF MINUTES, the salesgirl returned with a guy in his twenties. Tall, rangy. A two-day beard. Brown hair cropped close on the sides, longer on top. His gray T-shirt featured one word in black letters: MALWARE. He wore drawstring sweatpants that were too short and Nikes without socks.
Coming through a gate at the end of the counter, he looked Jane up and down but said nothing. He went to the front door, locked it.
Having settled on her stool, the salesgirl took the Kansas platter off the turntable. She slid another album onto the spindle.
The guy returned to Jane and stared at her as if waiting for her to prove something.