She spoke wistfully. “I call it Gypsy Joker, Long Blonde Hair, Twenty-Seven Years Old, Tortured to Death, Heat Gun.” She lifted her sunglasses, but only for a wink. “Catchy title, don’t you think?”
Schlo plucked out an earbud. Bumped his cup and sloshed coffee. Snatched a napkin from the dispenser and mopped the table. He ripped out the other earbud and flung them both at her. Pushing himself away from the table, he shoved, red faced, past the waitress. As his parting shot, he muttered, “You should maybe see a priest.”
Mitzi gathered the fallen earbuds, calling after him, “My work is its own church.”
The server watched him exit through the glass doors and stagger across the parking lot toward his Porsche. She said, “I love his films.” A waitress playing an actress playing a waitress.
Mitzi looked her up and down. She nodded after the Porsche. “You want to be in his next release?”
The girl asked, “You a producer?” She looked to be twenty-three, twenty-four, with just a trace of corn-fed twang to her words. She hadn’t been in the Southland long enough to fry her skin and hair. No wedding ring, either. Promising details.
Mitzi looked at her nametag. “Shania? You know what a Foley artist is?”
She shook her head, Nuh-uh. “But you know people, right?”
In response Mitzi lifted the packet from the table and fished out a thick bundle of bills. She thumbed off one, two, three hundred and held them up, waiting to see whether or not this new talent would take the bait.
Robb called him at home. To check in, he said. He asked if Foster would be at the group for their next meet-up.
Foster studied the bite mark on his hand. The small horseshoe of baby teeth, scabbed over in fresh blood. And he told Robb to look for him in the church basement.
Before he could hang up, Robb’s voice barked something, words pent up until this last chance. Foster brought the phone back to his ear and waited for a repeat.
Robb asked, “Why Denver?”
Foster fished his memory for how long he’d known Robb. When they’d met in the group, any details Robb had shared about Robb’s own dead child, an infant, a son, back when Foster had first joined the support group.
Again, Robb asked, “What’s so important in Denver?”
Foster bit back the truth. A monster was in Denver. A chat room avatar had let slip that Paolo Lassiter would be doing a piece of business there. Nobody was anyone on the dark web, but this chat room stranger had called Lassiter a big name in child sex trafficking, and said he’d be stopping over in Colorado for a day, maybe two.
Denver had been a long shot. But Foster had loaded his phone with screen grabs of Lassiter and made a list of the most likely hotels and set off on a fantasy of throttling the kingpin and beating out a confession about Lucinda.
If he told Robb that much, Foster would be needled to confess about his entire descent into chat rooms and galleries, and that would negate all his good intentions.
Instead, Foster said, “I was meeting a girl.” He paused as if he were embarrassed, but actually to cobble together more lies. “I met a girl online. We might, you know, get married.”
By now his luggage would be touching down in Denver. Going around the baggage claim carousel. Maybe even in transit back to him.
The line went quiet. Foster listened for sounds in the background, hints of Robb’s life since his son’s death. There was nothing. His wife had walked out. Robb might’ve been calling from a government bunker, the silence was so thick.
“Don’t lie to us,” said Robb, his voice burning with contempt. “You’re not trying to resolve anything.” Playing some ace, he added, “We know exactly who the girl in Denver is, and you ought to be ashamed of yourself.” And as if to drive home the shame, he lowered his voice and said, “The entire group knows!”
It was Foster’s turn to be stumped and confused, confused and frustrated, frustrated and to hang up the phone.
The past lived on in her hands, the way they’d shaken when Mitzi took her first DAT into a pitch. The memory lived as pain in her scalp, the old tug of her hair. She’d such long hair back then. High school–long hair, she’d pulled it tight, knotting it into a French braid she’d pinned down. Her French braid pinned to the back of her head, pinned as cruelly as any butterfly or scarab beetle pinned to the board in freshman-year Biology of Insects.
Mitzi Ives, schoolgirl Mitzi, she’d suffered the pins as both the board and the bug to be stared at.
Her hairstyle she winced to recall, the way it showcased her neck. The way her neck skin had glowed red when the producer eyeballed her chest and rubbed a hand over the blue stubble of his cheeks and chin.
The way her shoulders curved inward. How Mitzi hunched forward and crossed her arms. Her entire body was a recording of that first sales pitch.
“Miss Ives,” said the producer, not Schlo. He looked at something written on his blotter. “Mitzi.”
He wasn’t Schlo. She’d worried Schlo would recognize the scream. Her career would begin and end with that sit-down. A rival of Schlo’s this had been. He’d nodded for her to take a seat opposite his desk, then he’d sat. Perched he had, on the front edge of his desk, perching himself in her face, so close she could smell the starch in his shirt.
She’d skipped school half a day. Ditched a quiz in Popular American Politics, and missed a session in the language lab and a lecture on Intro to Fractals.
She’d worn her school uniform on the bus, her pleated, plaid tweed skirt. The blouse with capped sleeves and a Peter Pan collar with the top two buttons undone. Her feet remembered the shoes, too-big high heels left behind after her mother had taken
