Lullaby Town

town, it's like saying open sesame.'

'Ali Baba.'

He smiled. 'Yeah. Just like Ali Baba.'

He walked over to Langston.

Pat said, 'Well?'

I shook my head. 'He knows about him, but he doesn't know about her. How long were they married?'

'Fourteen months.'

I shook my head some more. You do that a lot in this business.

Pat and I went past the electrical cables and between the flats and toward the big doors. We were most of the way there when Peter Alan Nelsen yelled, 'Hey, Cole.'

I turned around. Peter was up on one of the framing catwalks, grinning at me. Dani was with him and the fat guy Langston, and a couple of other people who probably had to do with the construction rather than the design. He said, 'I'm glad you're on this for me. I like your style.' He tossed down a Mars bar. Maybe there was another candy machine up on the ceiling. 'Me and you,' he said, 'I think we're two of a kind. You're my kind of guy.'

I thought about ripping off the candy wrapper and dropping it on the ground, but decided that that would be small. I bit through the paper instead.

Peter smiled wider and said, 'Man, you are wild.'

Pat Kyle shook her head.

We walked out through the big doors and into the light. The paper tasted terrible. If Daryl Hannah was watching, I hope she was impressed.

CHAPTER FOUR

Pat Kyle and I walked back to the Kapstone offices where someone had set up a Sony Betamax VCR along with several yellow legal pads and sharpened pencils for the taking of notes. There was a check for four thousand dollars in an envelope taped to a Beta cassette on top of the VCR, along with a fresh pot of coffee on a side table with a tray of bagels and cream cheese and lox and sliced tomatoes and red onions. Pat said, 'Would you like company?'

'Sure.'

Pat turned on the machine and inserted the cassette and we watched as nineteen-year-old Karen Shipley Nelsen walked into an empty room and stood next to a stool. She wasn't made up like the waitress now. Now she was wearing faded jeans and an airy white top and red boots and she looked tanned and outdoorsy. The brown hair was cut in a sort of fluffy shag and the eyes were hazel. No makeup.

She looked at someone behind the camera and said, 'What do you want me to do?' The sound coming out of the television was hollow and sort of tinny. Even with that her voice was light and girlish. She giggled.

Peter Nelsen's voice came from where she looked. 'Give us the left and the right and the back. Try not to giggle.'

She showed her left profile, and then her back, and then her right. She said it as she did it, and when she moved she sort of squiggled and swayed and bounced, the way fifteen-year-old girls do when they're acting grown-up and people are watching. 'This is my left side, and this is my back, and this is my right.' And then she giggled. 'Hee hee hee.'

Pat Kyle said, 'Oh, God.'

'She's not impressing you with her talents?'

Pat smiled sympathetically. 'I get tapes like this every week. Young women and young men come into my office and read for me, and they want you to like them so badly that you can feel them ache, but they aren't any better than this and they never will be any better than this.'

'Then you suspect she has not pursued acting as a vocation?'

She made an I-hope-not shrug.

The shot changed abruptly into a tight close-up. Closer, Karen's eyes showed an absence of line or character. She was talking about herself and trying to look serious. '… think my strengths lie in comedy, but I can also do drama. I think I'd make a really good ingenue.'

Peter's voice cut in sharply. 'You sound like an idiot in a malt shop, 'really good ingenue.' If you're an ingenue, just say it. Say 'I'm a perfect ingenue.''

Karen looked unhappy and said, 'Oh, Peter, do I havta?' When she addressed Peter, she looked off camera. When she was acting, she looked directly out of the screen.

Peter's voice said, 'Why am I wasting my fucking time?'

Karen looked unhappy some more, then made a little smile and stared back into the lens and made herself serious and said it. Then she giggled.

It went on like that, cutting from bit to bit. Most of the bits were just fragments, five seconds of this, eight seconds of that, and many of them were repetitious. Peter would ask her a question or tell her to do something and she would answer or do it. There was something hopeful and naive to her manner, maybe because she was nineteen. She tried hard even when she looked unhappy.

My stomach grumbled and I kept looking at the lox and bagels. I had to keep reminding myself that lunch at Lucy's was only moments away.

At one point, Peter walked into the picture and handed her a couple of script pages. He was wearing an orange Marine Corps T-shirt with a couple of stains on the back. They wouldn't take me because of this hip thing. He was young and skinny and built exactly as he was now, all wide butt and coat- hanger shoulders and intense eyes. His hair stuck out in a tremendous natural that, within the small confines of the TV monitor, seemed to be a full three feet across. Karen cleared her throat and read the speech from Rocky that Talia Shire says to Sylvester Stallone to give him the courage to go on. She didn't read it well. She giggled when she finished and asked Peter if that was okay. He said no.

The tape lasted twenty-two minutes. Karen Shipley never once mentioned her family or her friends or her hometown. She giggled sixty-three times. I counted. Giggling is not one of my favorite things.

When the tape ended, Pat Kyle turned off the monitor and we went to lunch. Kapstone Pictures paid.

One hour and ten minutes later, full of pork burrito and Dos Equis beer, Pat Kyle resumed work and so did I.

Las Palmas above Santa Monica Boulevard is a community of flat, faceless costume-rental shops and film- editing outfits and little single-story houses with signs that said things like flotation therapy. Women in flowered tops pushed baby carriages and men who looked like they wanted day work stood outside little markets and kids on skateboards practiced jumping curbs.

I stopped in a 7-Eleven on Fountain just past La Brea, bought two dollars' worth of quarters, and ran outside to beat two fat guys to the pay phone on the side of the building. One of the fat guys was in a hurry and the other wasn't. The one who was in the hurry made a face like he had bowel trouble and said Ah, shit, when I got to the phone first. The one who wasn't leaned against the grill of a white window- repair truck and sipped at a Miller High Life. Did Mike Hammer use a 7-Eleven as an office?

I fed in a quarter and called a woman I know who works for the phone company and asked her if they had a listed or unlisted number for either Karen Shipley or Karen Nelsen anywhere within the state of California. She said she would have to get back to me, but it probably wouldn't be before tomorrow. I asked if she needed my number. She laughed and told me she's had my number for years. It's something I've been told before.

When I hung up, the fat guy in the hurry started forward. When I fed in another quarter, he raised his hands, rolled his eyes, and went back to the truck. Guess it wasn't a good day. His friend had a little more of the Miller and belched. When he belched, he covered his mouth with two fingers and said excuse me. Polite.

I called another woman I know who works the credit-verification department at Bank of America and asked if she would run a credit check on both Karen Shipley and Karen Nelsen, those names being either primary account names or maiden names listed to another unknown name. She said she would if I took her to a Lakers game. I told her to think of something else because I was going to take her to a Lakers game anyway. She made a little swooning sound, told me she'd get back to me tomorrow, and hung up. Some charmer, huh?