forehead-slapping clarity exactly what had happened. I knew who had the briefcase.
The black object lying on the bathroom floor was a sleek, spike-heeled calfskin boot by Manolo Blahnik. Those boots, I had been informed by a very huffy director, cost over twelve hundred dollars and she would not be inclined to press charges if they were simply returned, no questions asked. The shoot had been for Top Notch and the girl who had been fucked in those twelve hundred dollar boots was Roxette DuMonde.
Roxette was not a bad kid, but she had a magpie’s eye and a compulsion for nicking shiny things. She was the black sheep child of New York high society and had been a fashion model in her early teens. I guess her rich but distant daddy didn’t hug her enough when she was growing up, because she rapidly tumbled from
She’d been with me for a little over a year and had never fallen off the wagon like I feared, but she... borrowed things. It seemed to happen all the time. Never anything of real value, just trinkets mostly. She stole gaudy baubles, stockings and lipsticks from the other girls. She pinched figurines, silver forks and fancy coasters from the locations where she did shoots. She had plenty of money from her bazillionaire parents and from all the top-drawer shoots and feature tours she did, so it’s not like she needed the things she took. Whenever she was confronted, she would just arrange her famous mouth into its signature sexy pout and somehow she would be forgiven. The scary-pretty ones always were able to get away with murder.
But those boots were a different story. They were not cheap trinkets, they were pricey designer items that Celestine, the dragon lady director in charge of Roxette’s last shoot, had instantly missed. I had Didi call Roxette and tell her to come into the office at 9AM sharp. I told Celestine ten, since I knew I could count on Roxette to be at least an hour late. When Roxette showed up lugging her enormous gig bag and drinking iced green tea from a trendy coffee bar, she saw Celestine sitting beside my desk and blanched. She asked to go to the bathroom first and I let her. She took her bag with her.
When she came out she was all big-eyed and cute. She seemed totally baffled, denied having the boots and offered to let Celestine search her bag. She told Celestine she didn’t know what possibly could have happened to the boots after she took them off, but offered to do an extra set of stills for the Top Notch website to smooth over any hard feelings. Like everyone always did, Celestine somehow went from pissed off and ready to call the police to hugging Roxette and apologizing for the accusation. I just shrugged and let it go. What else could I do?
But clearly Roxette had taken the boots. She must have stashed them under the acoustic tile in the bathroom ceiling right before the meeting with Celestine. I also remembered how Roxette had come back just after the weird business with Lia, saying she had been doing some errands nearby and had to pee really bad. She’d claimed she was recovering from yet another urinary infection and wasn’t able to hold it until she got back to her Malibu condo. Anyone who’s ever been in the industry knows those kinds of female troubles all too well, plus she’d looked so cute with her knees pressed together like a squirming child. She’d still had that big gig bag with her and lugged it into the bathroom again, using it to prop the broken door closed. In retrospect, I figured she’d been planning to retrieve the boots, but instead, she’d found a mysterious briefcase. Curious magpie that she was, she’d forgotten all about the boots and snagged the case instead, stashing it inside the roomy gig bag.
I made Malloy get the other boot out from under the ceiling tile and put the pair into my own duffel bag. I mean, hey, Celestine had already written them off, and it seemed a shame to leave such expensive designer boots just lying there on the bathroom floor. Especially since Roxette and I have the same size feet.
I filled Malloy in on the way back to his car. I tried phoning Roxette, but didn’t get an answer and didn’t want to leave a message. She wouldn’t be too hard to find. I knew her address, the gym where she worked out and all her favorite clubs. The only thing we really needed to worry about was that she might have broken open the lock on the case and gone hog-wild with the money inside. Malloy seemed to think that if we had the money, we would have a bargaining chip, a way to draw out the boss and make him come to us. Me, I figured that money was mine. Compensation for the wholesale destruction of my life. The world’s highest asshole tax.
Faced with another long night on Malloy’s sofa, I decided to spring for some over-the-counter sleeping pills along with the Sweet’N Low, green grapes and salted almonds I picked up for myself at the Ralph’s on the way back to Burbank. I also impulse-bought a pretty blue coffee mug, because it felt inexplicably important to have my own cup. Money might not buy happiness, but I’ll tell you what, it doesn’t hurt.
In the end, I couldn’t take the sleeping pills after all. I just sat there staring at the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval on the Sominex label, wondering what would happen if bad guys with guns showed up in the middle of the night and I couldn’t wake up.
Eventually, morning came instead of bad guys. That was the thing about mornings. No matter how fucked up your life got, how deep and black your despair, how sure you were that you just couldn’t take another second of this shit, morning just kept on coming. Over and over. Morning didn’t give a damn about your little drama.
Morning brought Malloy from his bedroom lair again, just like the day before. He looked the same as ever. I showered while he made coffee and read the paper. Ozzy and fucking Harriet. If you squinted, it all seemed almost normal. Except for the part about me being an ex-porn star dressed up like a boy, wanted by the cops and on the run from the psycho ringleader of some kind of prostitution slavery racket who’d tried to have me killed once and wanted to finish the job. Noon seemed to take forever to show up.
When it was finally time to head over to the mall in Sherman Oaks and see if Lia would be there at the hour specified in her note to Zandora, I quickly wrapped my tits and waist and put in the blue contacts. It had been so nice to just relax without all those sweaty uncomfortable mummy bandages. As we were headed out the door, I decided at the last minute to wash out my new blue cup, wrap it in my last two t-shirts and stick it in the duffel bag with the little robot and the boots. I couldn’t shake this powerful need to keep my meager possessions with me at all times. Of course, I could get into serious trouble for bringing a loaded gun to the mall, but hey, at this point that was the least of the reasons why I might be arrested. I didn’t worry all that much about it.
What can I say about the Sherman Oaks Fashion Square mall? You’ve been to any mall in America, you don’t need me to describe the place. Stores. Shoppers. The American consumer dream all spread out and waiting, available for a price. Everything your sheep-like heart has been trained to desire. I hate malls. They’re like strip clubs for women. All tease and sparkle and the empty promise that if you just drop enough cash, somehow you’ll be fulfilled. The slick, shameless, never-ending hustle of a shopping mall makes places like Eye Candy look downright charitable by comparison. When I need to buy stuff, I’d much rather shop online. That way I don’t have to battle my way through all those lonely, desperate, retail-therapy junkies. Nothing more depressing than watching these skinny, manic women digging their own graves with a credit card while their bored husbands furtively eye my assets, trying to figure out if I really am Angel Dare or just look like her. The only kind of store I really love to browse in is a hardware store. I’m a compulsive fixer-upper, always on the lookout for new things for my house. At least I used to be. I have no idea what I am now.
Our destination was the food court and at that weekday lunch hour it was packed with cubicle drones wearing sensible shoes and laminated IDs around their necks. The ring of fast food options represented all the usual franchise suspects. Chinese, Italian, American, Middle Eastern. Ostensible variety that was really all the same school lunch food under different-flavored sauces.
Still, as much as I might hate malls, you had to admit Lia had made a smart choice for a meeting place. It
