Money Shot

11.

“Do you trust Didi?” Malloy asked me, pulling off the freeway and into the quiet streets of Burbank.

I had been asleep for most of the ride back from Vegas. Well, maybe asleep wasn’t the right word. Dazed, out of it, shell-shocked and incapable of processing everything that had happened in the last twenty-four hours. I hadn’t noticed the sun going down and felt disoriented to wake and find it fully dark outside. Malloy had gotten another cheap suit jacket out of the gym bag back in Vegas and at some point during the ride he must have taken it off and used it to cover me. It was warm and smelled like him, cigarettes and supermarket aftershave. I pulled it tighter around myself, bunching it up under my chin.

“Of course I trust Didi,” I said. “I’d trust her with my life.”

He nodded and took the turn into the car rental place across from the Burbank Airport. I huddled inside his big jacket as I waited outside the office. When he pulled around front in his own SUV, he got out, walked around to the passenger side and opened the door for me.

“Thanks,” I said.

He punched some buttons on his cell phone, slipping on a hands-free rig as he pulled out of the rental place.

“Didi?” he said into the mike. “Malloy.” He paused. “Yeah I know.” He looked at me and then back at the road. “It’s terrible. Listen, Didi, I’d like to talk to you about the case. Tonight. Get a pen.”

He gave Didi his address just as we turned the corner onto his block.

“Twenty minutes,” he said and ended the call.

Malloy’s place was one of those little rundown fifties-era bungalow complexes in a so-so neighborhood, just off Hollywood Way. He drove past twice to make sure there was no surveillance before he pulled into the alley behind the complex and let me out, leaving the engine running.

“Go on,” Malloy said, unlocking the door to his apartment and ushering me inside with one hand on the small of my back. “I’m gonna go park the car.”

Inside his place it was immaculate and generic, like an IKEA showroom or a midrange hotel. No personal photos. No funny magnets on the fridge. No clutter of mail or books or DVDs. There was a sturdy gray couch and a black leather chair. A modest television in the corner and a blond wood coffee table with nothing on it. The kitchen was to the left through a doorless arch. It was narrow and yellow and very clean. At the far end, beneath the window, was a small aluminum table with a clean glass ashtray and a single chair. There were two closed doors, probably leading to the bedroom and bathroom.

It felt strange standing there alone in someone else’s apartment. It made me miss my own little house.

Malloy returned a few minutes later.

“Make yourself at home,” he said, setting his gun and shoulder rig on the coffee table. “But stay away from the windows.”

“Okay,” I said, but I didn’t sit down. I just pulled Malloy’s jacket tighter around myself.

There was a moment of awkward silence. I wondered suddenly who the last woman he’d brought to this apartment might have been.

“You want something?” Malloy asked, walking into the narrow kitchen and pulling open the fridge. “Water or a Diet Coke or something? I don’t have any hard stuff.”

“A Coke would be fine,” I told him, thinking the caffeine might do me some good. Sharpen up the dull edges. “I don’t drink the hard stuff anyway.”

He looked back at me with a can of Diet Coke in one hand and a bottle of water in the other.

“You quit?” he asked.

“Never really started,” I replied.

Malloy came back into the main room, handing me the can and twisting open the bottle of water for himself. He downed nearly half in one slug and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, then touched the split in his lower lip with his thumb.

“I quit,” he said.

Before I could think of anything to say about that, there was a rapid knock on the door. It was Didi. Malloy peered out through the blinds and gestured for me to step back through the archway and into the kitchen before he opened the door.

“Lalo,” Didi said, throwing her arms around his neck and squeezing him tight. “God, can you believe this?” She let him go and then wrapped her arms around herself. “It’s a fucking nightmare.”

“Come on in,” Malloy told her, pulling her into the apartment and closing the door, engaging multiple locks.

Didi was wearing a shiny black mini-dress that was about ten years out of style and clung tight to her chubby curves. She had on sparkly silver high-heeled sandals and was clutching a little matching purse that she had packed to bursting. Her mouth was slicked a bright, candy apple red and her mascara was smudged beneath her eyes. She had obviously been on a date when Malloy had called. She and I were very much alike in that respect. When we were upset, we went out and got laid.

“Did you notice that you were followed?” Malloy asked, looking out through the blinds again. “A dark gray Caprice. Not very subtle.”

“Those fucking cops,” Didi said. “They’re following me now?”

“Looks that way,” Malloy said. “They’re probably hoping Angel will try and contact you.”

“Listen,” Didi said. “About Angel—”

I couldn’t stand to stay in the kitchen any longer.

“Didi,” I said, stepping into the main room. “It’s okay. I’m okay.”

“Angel?” she said, rushing over to me. She looked me up and down, and her painted eyes went wide. “You call this okay? Holy shit, Angel, who did this to you?”

I couldn’t speak, I just pulled the ugly hat off my head and twisted it in my hands. Didi threw her arms around me, stroking my hair. Every time her fingers would find some lump or scab she would curse under her breath, swearing she was going to kill whoever did this. Her perfume made me feel like sneezing and I felt uncomfortable being hugged, as if the fact that I had just watched two people die was all over my skin like the stink of that trash bag dress. And of course it hurt, too. But I didn’t want her to let go.

“Lalo,” Didi said. “You want to tell me what the hell is going on?”

Malloy gave Didi the Cliffs Notes version while Didi hung on to me like someone was going to try and take me away. When he was done, she sat down on the sofa and pulled me down next to her.

“Give me a cigarette,” Didi said to Malloy.

Malloy took the pack out of his pocket and shook out the last two cigarettes. He parked one in his own mouth and handed the other to Didi.

“I thought you quit,” I said as she accepted a light from Malloy.

“Fuck that,” she said, sucking smoke like it was oxygen. She ran her fingers through her hair and exhaled slowly. “What are we going to do?”

“First off,” Malloy said. “We need a cover story so I can talk to people without raising too much suspicion. I want you to tell everyone you hired me as a private investigator to find out what happened to Angel. I’ll need you to write me a check for my services. I’ll cash it and then give you the money back but I want a solid paper trail between us. That’ll explain this visit for your buddies in the Caprice.” He lit his own cigarette. “Also, people will be more likely to talk to me if they think I’m asking on your behalf.”

“If you find the fuckers who did this, you can keep the money,” she said. “What about Angel?”

“What about me?” I asked.

“She needs to keep a low profile,” Malloy said. “As soon as the guy that got away in Vegas reports back to his boss, then the boss is gonna know Angel isn’t dead. He’ll be looking for her too.”

“Jesus,” Didi said softly. “Jesus, this is bad.”

The three of us were silent for a stretch, all contemplating how bad it really was.

“Didi,” Malloy said, breaking the silence finally, “can you tell me everything you remember about the blonde with the briefcase?”

“You know, it’s funny,” Didi said. “After I left the office, I started thinking about her. I was pretty sure I recognized her. I’m sure she’s done videos, but I can’t remember the name she went by or the name of the series I saw her in. It was some super-low-budget amateur line. Mostly girl/girl and solo toy stuff but I’m pretty sure the one I saw her in was a boy/girl scene. It think it had ‘teen’ in the title.”

“Great,” I said, “That narrows it down to about seven billion.”

“It was a real boring title,” Didi said. “Very generic.”

“Teen Pleasures?” I suggested. “Teen Tryouts? Teen Cream? Teen Beaver?”

“No.” She shook her head. “It was more like Horny Teens or Dirty Teens.” She turned to Malloy. “You got Internet access in this joint?”

He nodded and gestured with his chin toward one of the two closed doors.

“In there,” he said. “But I don’t know if I want to go surfing a bunch of teen smut on my PC. Won’t I get logged by the FBI or something?”

“‘Teen’ just means girls with no implants and an amateur look,” I said. “There’s nothing illegal about adult videos featuring girls that are over eighteen and besides, most of those girls are older than they look. I was twenty-one when I did Teen Temptations.”

Malloy shrugged.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Me, I like real women. You know, grownups.”

Didi flashed him a smile and stood, smoothing her tight skirt.

“Well,” she said. “We’ll discuss that later, honey.” She winked and took my hand. “Come on.”

Inside Malloy’s predictably spartan bedroom was a small metal and glass desk with an inexpensive laptop sitting beside a jar of pens, a small printer and a cordless telephone. There was just the one chair so Didi and I sat on the bed behind Malloy like backseat drivers.

A Google search for the word “Teen” plus “Adult” and “DVD” gave us a staggering 20,000,000 hits.

“Forget that shit,” Didi said. “Try slutfinder.com.”

Malloy shook his head as he typed.

“Right,” Didi said. “Pick the ‘amateur’ category and then put ‘teen’ in the title field.”

“Jesus,” he said as his screen filled with flashing photos of teen beaver. I could see the muscles in his jaw bunch up as he watched the screen.

“What?” I asked.

“This,” he said, gesturing with his chin. “I don’t know about this shit.”

“What’s not to know?” I said. “It’s just pussy. It won’t bite you.”

Malloy didn’t respond and I felt myself starting to get hot and defensive. The last thing I needed just then was some moralistic argument about the evils of smut.

“You’re not getting squeamish on us, are you Lalo?” Didi asked.

“It’s just...” He shrugged.

“You got something to say,” I told him. “Say it.”

“Well, look at this girl here.” He pointed to a skinny blonde on the cover of a DVD titled Goodbye Seventeen. “She’s still got braces on her teeth, for chrissake.”

“A lot of the amateur girls get braces,” I said. “It’s a better investment than implants and the guys love it.”

“That’s sick,” Malloy muttered, clicking away swarming pop-ups with lurid headlines like TEEN TWATS WANT YOUR SPUNK NOW!!! and SEE WHITE TRASH TEEN TRAMPS TAKE ON THE TEAM! “I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m all for dirty movies, but this... I don’t know. I know it’s legal, but I just don’t think it’s right for a man my age to be looking at girls that seem so young. Christ, half these girls look younger than my daughter.”

“I never knew you had a daughter,” Didi said.

“Yeah,” Malloy said. “Her name’s Paloma. She was eighteen back in April.”

He took a drag off his cigarette and looked away from the images on the screen. He opened a desk drawer and pulled out a posed school photo and handed it to Didi. I peered over Didi’s shoulder. The girl in the photo was plain and a little heavy and looked way too much like Malloy to be considered particularly attractive, but she had a crooked smart-ass grin that I liked. She looked like she wouldn’t take any shit from anyone. I wondered why Malloy had never mentioned her.

“She looks like a real smart kid,” Didi said, handing the photo back to Malloy.

“She lives with her mom out in Santa Fe,” Malloy said, looking at the photo for a second and then putting it back in the drawer, face down. “We’re not all that close.” He looked back up at the screen. “But I sure as hell wouldn’t want a bunch of dirty old men jacking off over her on the Internet.” He closed the drawer. “You think these girls don’t have fathers too?”

I frowned and stood up.

“Yeah, well, these girls are all legal, consenting adults,” I said, taking Malloy’s jacket off and tossing it on the bed beside me. “Whether their daddies like it or not.”

“You can’t tell me something called Teenage Nympho Cheerleaders isn’t meant to get older guys off on the idea of nailing underage high school girls,” Malloy said. “It’s like one step away from statutory rape.”

“It’s a hell of a step,” I said. I was really angry now. “It’s just a fantasy. What are you, the thought police?”

“Come on, now,” Malloy started to say but I cut him off.

“Besides, who the hell are you to be getting all high and mighty about what’s right and wrong after...”

I had to stop myself before I said another word or things were really going to get out of hand. I turned away and tried to get a handle on my anger. I wished that I could stop being so defensive about all this. Malloy was probably right that some of the teen videos went a little too far. It’s not like he was criticizing me personally. But I was feeling fragile and ugly and couldn’t seem to help taking Malloy’s distaste as a personal attack. Plus, my own father broke my jaw when he found out about my videos, so my sympathy for fathers who don’t approve of their daughters doing porn is basically nonexistent.

“Listen...” he started to say, but Didi could see it was getting ugly and quickly cut him off.

“Enough, already,” she said. “Knock it off, Mr. Fucking Sensitive and just read off the damn titles. You want to find that blonde or don’t you?”

Malloy was silent for a handful of seconds and so was I. I looked down at the back of Malloy’s flushed neck and I realized abruptly that this little spat was the most Malloy had revealed about himself since I’d known him. I think he knew it too and was regretting it.

“Right,” he said and started reading off the list of titles on the screen.

Listening to Malloy read off titles like Teen Cum Dumpsters or Pop My Tight Teen Poop Chute in his gravelly, deadpan voice was suddenly way funnier than it had any right to be. I had been sulky and pissed off just seconds before and now I was fighting to repress a fit of crazy giggles. I was afraid to start laughing. I might never stop.

“There,” Didi said, getting to her feet and putting a hand on Malloy’s shoulder. “Click on Dirty Teens.”

Turned out there were only three DVDs in the Dirty Teens series. Didi was pretty sure the DVD she’d seen the blonde in had a high number.

“Try Naughty Teens,” Didi said.

There were twenty-one DVDs in that series and the box covers were cheap and inept, all bad Photoshop and tacky yellow titles. I didn’t recognize any of the girls but they were all very similar. Wan, pale and sickly. Probably junkies. All natural and all very young looking. Each one had a bland, unimaginative GND name like Beth or Tracy or Heather. No last names.

“There she is,” Didi cried triumphantly when Malloy clicked on number seventeen.

She was right. The blonde who had called herself “Lia” and wriggled out my bathroom window was prominently featured on the cover of Naughty Teens 17. She was billed as “Kimberly” and she had a male friend posing with her in the photo. A very close friend, apparently. The friend’s head was blocked by the ‘g’ in Naughty but I didn’t need to see his head to recognize him instantly. I felt a sick flush of anger.

“Jesse Black,” Didi said. “Motherfucker.”