I pulled out the box of bullets I had also stuffed into the chair cushion and carefully loaded the unfamiliar clip. I didn’t feel comfortable with the loaded gun in any of my pockets or down the waistband of my pants like some TV gangster, so I dug out a nylon duffel bag from the clutter and put the pistol, the bullets and the cash into one of its interior zippered pockets.
As I turned to go, I found my gaze traveling over the assortment of dusty items around me. It was just a bunch of useless junk, bought at thrift stores as set dressing to cover up the real purpose of the locker, but I realized in that moment that those things were the only personal things I owned that I still had free access to. I picked up the little robot with a hollow kind of feeling in my stomach. It was old, but not old enough to be collectable. Just some cheap plastic Korean thing with a squat boxy body and stubby square arms and legs. The colored lights in its chest were dark and useless and the shiny silver coating on the gray plastic was starting to peel around the joints. I remembered buying that robot at the Salvation Army store for a dollar. Now this cheap broken robot some kid didn’t want anymore was pretty much all I had left. Before I could think too much about it, I stuck the little robot in my duffel bag and got the hell out of there. I didn’t tell Malloy about the robot. Or the gun.
What came next was something I had been dreading, for a complex variety of reasons. Malloy and I went back and forth over the issue of the security tapes in the Daring Angels building on Vesper. In the end we decided that there was no way to get around me going with him. He knew a lot of my girls, but not all of them. I needed to be the one to see the tape and ID the people who’d come and gone in the seven hours between when Lia left and when I did. I had been more than willing to let the whole thing slide and concentrate on finding Lia but Malloy seemed hell-bent on finding that damn briefcase.
“You can bet everyone’s gonna be keeping an eye on that place,” Malloy said. “Cops and crooks. Now I’m good with the former so far, but not so much with the latter. The guy who got away in Vegas clearly hasn’t figured out who I am yet because we haven’t had any visitors at my place but if he’s the one they have on the Vesper Avenue location there’s gonna be trouble.”
I nodded, wordless. The familiar lowbrow landscape of Van Nuys Boulevard scrolled by outside the passenger window, as distant and meaningless as a swimmy rear projection in a old black and white movie. I must have driven up and down this street a thousand times, four days a week for nine years. Now it felt sort of like watching home movies from when I was a kid, or watching my first scene with Marco Pole. It felt unreal.
Malloy made the right turn onto Archwood, just past Vanowen and I felt a wash of anxiety. He passed the Vesper Avenue building twice, scoping the block. Looking for surveillance, I supposed, but I just couldn’t seem to make myself concentrate. I was lost in the middle of this sudden, vicious gang rape of memories. The past was a bully that day and there were so many memories connected to that place, so much personal history.
When I started Daring Angels back in 1997, I had been doing dirty videos for nine years. I was tired of the on-camera grind and I had this strange, almost superstitious fear of that tenth year that I still can’t quite explain. I guess I didn’t want to spend a full decade of my life making ooh-baby in front of a camera. For the last couple of years before I retired, so many younger women had come to me, asking for advice, for backup, for help navigating the shark-infested waters of the smut racket. Eventually my friends started joking that I ought to charge for my advice. As that dreaded tenth year loomed closer and closer, I stopped laughing and started planning.
I remembered going to look at the hot, echoey space that would eventually be the Daring Angels office, sneezing from the construction dust and wondering if I was making a big mistake. See, I wanted out, but I couldn’t stand to leave the business altogether. After all, I was a star. A big name. Angel Dare. I just couldn’t bear to give that up. Sure, the porn industry can be infuriating, but in its own brash and vulgar way it’s kind of like a big, dysfunctional family. A lot of women wound up feeling used by the porn industry, but they were just the ones who never figured out how to use it right back.
Starting up Daring Angels, I was banking on the idea that girls in the business needed a positive alternative to the boyfriend/managers, the suitcase pimps and the predatory, mostly male-run talent agencies. They needed a female-owned and -operated agency that treated the girls with respect, that had their backs and made sure that they didn’t get eaten alive and spat back out in under a year. I had a solid business plan, an electronic Rolodex to die for and Didi as my right-hand woman. I had a modest roster of four fresh, gorgeous girls and I even had cute business cards featuring a sexy, winking angel drawn by a famous comic book artist I had been banging at the time. I felt ready to take on the world.
That first year was hard. The second was harder. I fucked up a lot, lost money and learned some painful lessons. But by the third year, I had my shit down. I had a Web site up and running and was working to add a special members-only area with original content featuring the Daring Angels girls. I was doing recruiting trips out to strip clubs in bumfuck nowheresville, sniffing out fresh talent anywhere I could find it. I’d never made a mint off Daring Angels, but combined with interest from my investments, I managed to make a pretty comfortable living. Until all this.
“Looks clear,” Malloy told me, pulling into a free slot on the other side of Archwood. “I can’t believe it, but the place looks pretty much deserted.” He killed the ignition. “Still, stay close.”
I got out of the car, hoisted my duffel on my shoulder and made my legs carry me toward the place that used to be my office. My mind brushed briefly against a murky, buried question about the ultimate fate of Daring Angels
I got out of the car, hoisted my duffel on my shoulder and made my legs carry me toward the place that used to be my office. My mind brushed briefly against a murky, buried question about the ultimate fate of Daring Angels and flinched away, as if it had touched something repulsive. I just couldn’t handle speculation on the future right then. All I needed was to get through this moment. I would worry about the future... well... in the future.
The building was nondescript and so familiar that I barely saw it. Now that I was on the outside of my old life looking in, every detail seemed weirdly intensified. The dried-blood-maroon-and-bone-white paint job. The ugly, functional architecture, everything featureless and rectangular. Long, uninviting balconies along the building’s Archwood flank, the one on the first floor fenced in like a zoo cage. My office didn’t have a balcony so my rent was two hundred dollars cheaper and you had to go downstairs and outside if you wanted to smoke.
Inside the lobby, beside the staircase leading up to the upper floors, was a security station. Nothing but a cheap metal desk with a guy in a uniform behind it.
The security guard was a new kid I’d never seen before. The usual guy had been a thick, oily walrus of a man with a white pushbroom mustache and a lascivious wink for any female who entered the building. This new kid was lanky and Mexican and afflicted with a plague of acne so juicy and virulent that it looked almost radioactive. Beneath the zits lurked a handsome, square-jawed face and you could see that he would have a hard, sexy tough- guy look about him once he did a little growing up and his overzealous hormones finally gave it a rest. He was sitting behind the crummy little desk reading a dense legal textbook that he did not bother to put down when we approached him. His nametag said CAMMAROTA.
“Hey,” Malloy said.
“Hey,” the kid replied over the top of his book with a great show of sullen indifference.
“I’m investigating the disappearance of Angel Dare.” Malloy said. He indicated the dusty camera up above the kid’s head. “I was wondering if it might be possible to take a look at the security tapes from last Friday.”
“You a cop?” the kid asked, finally looking up at Malloy. His dark eyes were sharp under the mask of acne.
“Used to be,” Malloy said. “I’m just looking into the matter for a private party.”
“Angel Dare, that’s the porno chick, huh?” the kid asked, warming to the topic. “The one on the news who shot that guy.”
“Right,” Malloy said.
I had been standing slightly behind Malloy, keeping a low profile. It wasn’t until that kid mentioned me that I started to feel like I had big arrows flashing over my head. Like the whole dressed-up-like-a-boy business couldn’t fool a blind man. In spite of that unshakable feeling, the kid didn’t even look at me. He was just talking about some chick on TV.
“That’s messed up,” the kid said.
“Right,” Malloy said again. “How about those tapes?”
