THINGS WERE PRETTY strained between Chris and me on the way to Angry Elephant. He sipped on his coffee petulantly, and I silently seethed that he hadn’t brought me one. Even though we both knew I wouldn’t drink it. Couldn’t, after all this time of rejecting his coffees. It was my thing.
Most of our sentences were logistics-related. Do you know where you’re going? I’ve got the GPS programmed. Watch out for that car. Do you see that pothole? Do you mind if I turn on the radio? Nope. Do whatever you want.
It was so uncomfortable, the giant cinnamon roll I’d gotten from room service balled up into an angry wad in my stomach.
I didn’t tell Chris about seeing the white-blond man back at the Luxor. I didn’t, mostly because I was afraid of where my mind would take me if I began to consider what might have happened if he’d still been standing there when I foolishly threw open the door, thinking it was Chris looking for his jacket. Plus, I didn’t really get the best look at him. He could have been any number of blond men, and the only reason I saw him as the blond man was because he was on my mind. After all, that was part of why I was here in the first place, wasn’t it? To find out who he was and what he had to do with my parents.
I yawned. I hadn’t slept well the night before. I’d been too busy tossing and turning, thinking about Heriberto and Leon and Rebecca and how Chris fit into all this. Why he didn’t arrest Heriberto and be done with it. At some point just shy of dawn, it occurred to me.
Just a few minutes before reaching our destination, the thought got the better of me and I couldn’t keep from saying it any longer. “It’s because you were in love with her, isn’t it?” I asked.
Chris, who had been staring out the passenger window, turned. “What? Who?”
“Rebecca Moreno. You haven’t busted Heriberto because you were in love with her and you’re afraid that if Heriberto goes down, so will Sam.” He made a pssh noise and went back to staring out the window. “Were you selling, too?” The question seemed ludicrous, even to me, but it had to be asked. “Were you helping? Was the hit-and-run maybe just a drug deal gone bad?”
“Of course not,” he said, dropping his empty cup into the cup holder in the center console. The scent of coffee wafted up to my nose and made me salivate. I needed a cigarette, bad. “I wasn’t selling anything. And I was never in love with her, Nikki.”
“You were just, what? Getting revenge?”
“At first, yeah. It was about the fact that she was Leon’s sister. But after a little while, it just didn’t feel right to use her like that. We were more like . . .”
“Friends with bennies. Charming.” Although, after how I’d treated my relationship with Jones, I supposed I couldn’t get too uppity about it.
“Big sister, little brother,” he corrected. “She worried about me. She knew the things the gang was trying to have done to me. She tipped me off, over and over again, and I managed to stay alive somehow, and I started to realize how stupid it all was. People dying all the time, and what for? She got me out of that world, Nikki. She is the reason I’m a cop today. I haven’t even talked to her since I moved out of the neighborhood. But I’ve seen her around. I knew about Sam. I still cared, and sometimes the best way to care about somebody is not busting them when you really want to bust someone bigger than them.”
“So that’s what you were doing? Waiting to bust the big guy? And it never occurred to you that the big guy could also be the one who ran you over?” The Angry Elephant logo appeared on my right—orange, lunch-meat pink—and I pulled into the lot.
“I think I was buying,” he said as I parked the car.
“You were what?”
“I think I was buying. I have little pieces of memories, and in them, I’m buying. From Sam. From some other boys.”
I shook my head. “No way. I don’t believe it. It’s wrong. It’s a wrong memory.”
He opened his door and got out. “You don’t have to believe it for it to be true.” I got out, too, and he eyed me over the roof of the car. “I wasn’t taking them, Nikki. Or selling them. I was putting them somewhere. I just can’t remember where. Or why.”
ASIDE FROM BEING orange and meaty pink everywhere I looked, Angry Elephant was pretty disappointing. Nothing like the studios in Hollywood. Not even like Pear Magic. It was a crackerbox of a building, tucked back in a neighborhood with no personality. Nothing at all that said movies.
I’d grabbed a file folder from the backseat. Inside were the clippings from Dad’s closet, which I had taken before leaving for Vegas, along with photos of Luna. We went inside, where two women sat, side by side, behind a tiny desk. They were gazing at a computer screen and laughing, like they were watching something funny online. They both looked up when we walked in.
“Hi,” one of them said. “Can I help you?”
I had rehearsed what I was going to say about a billion times between Brentwood and here, and also in my hotel room last night and this morning. Still, my mind went blank for a second. The woman shifted her gaze from me to Chris, her smile fading a little.
Chris cleared his throat. He dipped into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet, then opened it and showed it to the women.
“I’m Detective Chris Martinez. I’m wondering if I can ask you a few questions.”
One of the ladies placed her hand on her chest, a worried look overtaking her. “Oh, I don’t know if we should—”
Chris held out a hand to silence her. “Nobody’s in trouble,” he said. “We’re just trying to find someone. Have you heard of Luna Fairchild?”
The two women looked at each other questioningly, and then shook their heads in unison.
“What about Jetta? Is Jetta here?” I asked, finally finding my voice.
“Jetta?” one of the ladies repeated. The nameplate on the desk read Barb Jones.
“I was told Jetta was working here.”
“Never heard of anyone named Jetta,” the other woman said. She had scooted her chair back over behind a second desk. The nameplate on that one read Deb Thurston. She tapped a few keys on her keyboard, then shook her head again. “No, there’s no record of a Jetta ever working here.”
This time Chris and I exchanged glances. Blue had been wrong. “Is the owner here, by any chance?” Chris asked.
Barb’s eyes lit up. Finally a question she could answer. “Mr. Weers? No, I’m afraid he’s out for the day. On location.”
On location, meaning spying on me at the Luxor? I wanted to ask. Instead, I opened my file and pulled out the article and pointed to the photo. “This is him, though, right?”
Barb leaned over the photo, her brow creased as she studied it. She shook her head as she gently took it from me and passed it to Deb. “No, that’s not him. Mr. Weers is completely bald. And much shorter than this man.”
Strike two.
“But I have seen that guy before,” Deb said. My ears perked up. “He came in several months ago trying to get a job for a girl. Said he was an agent.”
An agent? The white-blond man was an agent, too? I was beginning to understand that he was a chameleon, able to do anything as long as it benefited him.
Deb had passed the photo back to Barb, who held it under her lamp to study it again. “Oh, yes, now that you say that. She was the girl with those creepy eyes.”
I practically lunged over the desk at her. “Creepy how?”
Deb and Barb looked at each other for silent confirmation again, and then Barb wiggled her fingers in front of her face and said, “I don’t know, they seemed really . . . dull. Like serial-killer flat, if that makes sense. We both noticed it.”