I swung my knees around so I was facing him, my nose within an inch of his. “What note?”
“The note I knew she must have left when she couldn’t stick around long enough to see me before she went on hiatus. It was in the back of Le Petit Prince. Which was a much better place to hide it in than inside my birthday cake or one of her shoes, though it took me longer to find it there than it should have. I must be getting old.”
“Frank,” I said. “We need to see that note.”
“Why? Didn’t she leave a note for you?”
I considered several possible responses and settled on, “I guess she was in a hurry.” I tried to keep my voice even. “She must have assumed you’d fill me in.”
The note said, I need a month of alone time, Monkey. Can you be brave for me just that much longer? If there’s an emergency, Isaac will know where to find me.
“Is Dr. Einstein Isaac?” Frank asked.
“I’m Isaac, yes,” Mr. Vargas said.
“I thought so,” Frank said. “But Alice insists on calling you Mr. Vargas. I was confused.”
“Isaac Vargas, Frank,” I said. “His name is Isaac Vargas.”
“So Isaac Vargas,” Frank said. “Tell us. Where is my mother?”
( 28 )
AS IT TURNED out, Mr. Vargas did know where to find Mimi. He just didn’t know he knew it.
“Well,” Mr. Vargas said, after Frank had turned the note over for us several times and held it up to the light to prove there was nothing else written on it, not even with invisible ink. “There was a place we met the last time I came out here. I thought that if I saw her in person I could talk her out of marrying that preening nitwit and into coming back with me to New York.”
“What kind of place?” I asked. “A restaurant?”
“Not a restaurant.”
“Was it a museum?” Frank asked.
“No. Not a museum.”
All Mr. Vargas could remember was that it was in the Valley somewhere, close to the studio where Hanes Fuller was shooting interiors for the ill-starred art-house western that would put a bullet in his career. The place Mimi suggested they meet was a bungalow motel, a series of small blue stucco casitas grouped in a crescent around a gravel courtyard. Each had its own little door-less garage attached, he said, so people could drive in and enter their rooms without being seen from the street. The neon sign over the parking lot had a palm tree on it, he knew that. He just couldn’t come up with its name.
Frank was so hot to find his mother that he didn’t bother changing his wardrobe before we left. He clamped his deerstalker hat on his head, grabbed his bubble pipe, and lit out for the rental car. “Allons-y!” he shouted over his shoulder. He dropped the bubble pipe then, skidded to a stop, and picked it up. He took that opportunity to explain to us, “Allons-y is what the French Foreign Legion say when what they really mean is ‘Let’s blow this Popsicle stand, my friends!’” He whooped and took off again.
Mr. Vargas grinned at me. “I love that kid,” he said.
“Get in line,” I said.
THE THREE OF us headed east on Sunset Boulevard and then swung left up Laurel Canyon Boulevard, while tour-guide Frank explained to Mr. Vargas that Schwab’s Drugstore had once stood on the corner to our right before it was bulldozed to make way for the minimall there now. You know, Schwab’s, where a sultry young Lana Turner may or may not have been “discovered”—in the rearview mirror I saw Frank making finger quotes—at the soda fountain. Where, in Sunset Boulevard the movie, Joe Gillis hangs out with his cronies, though director Billy Wilder had a replica of Schwab’s built at the Paramount Studios lot so the movie hadn’t actually been shot where the minimall stood now. Did Mr. Vargas also happen to know that Sunset Boulevard, the boulevard we’d just left behind, not the movie, originated as an eighteenth-century cattle path that followed the rim of the Los Angeles Basin and ran from the original Spanish settlement in downtown Los Angeles all the way to the ocean?
“I didn’t know that, Frank,” Mr. Vargas said. “Thanks for telling me.”