Money Shot

16.

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?”

The kid put the book down and stood.

“Come on,” the kid said, looking around. “I’m not supposed to leave the station, but...”

We followed him down a narrow first floor hallway that I had never noticed before. At the end of the hall was a door with no number. The Mexican kid opened the door with a key on a ring that extended out from his belt on a spring-loaded black cord. Inside was a closet-sized office cluttered with cleaning products and plastic file boxes.

“They only keep the tapes for ten days,” the kid said, pulling a plastic crate down from a high shelf. “Then they recycle them. It’s a good thing you didn’t wait too long to ask about it. Do you think there could be, like, clues or something on the tape?”

“Could be,” Malloy said.

The kid frowned into the box and Malloy frowned too.

“What?” Malloy asked.

“I hate to tell you this,” the kid said. “But I think last Friday is missing.”

“What do you mean, missing?” Malloy asked, taking the box from the kid’s arms and sifting efficiently through the contents. “Son of a bitch.”

“Where...” I paused and cleared my throat, struggling to deepen my voice as best I could. “Where’s the regular guy?”

“I don’t know,” the kid said shrugging. “I just started this job today.”

Malloy shot me a look.

“Okay, kid,” Malloy said. “Thanks anyway.”

“You think somebody took it?” the kid asked.

“Probably,” Malloy said, shrugging like it didn’t matter.

“Maybe the cops have it,” the kid offered helpfully. “Or maybe somebody broke in and stole it. Like maybe that porno chick snuck in here in the middle of the night so that she could... I don’t know, hide some evidence or something like that.”

Malloy nodded as if he was seriously considering the kid’s theory. I supposed I ought to have been pissed at all this speculation about me, but it seemed so irrelevant, like a discussion of a movie I’d never seen. Like they really were just talking about some chick on TV.

We left Cammarota in the back room and hustled back out to the lobby. As Malloy held the glass door open for me to pass, he leaned in and hissed in my ear.

“You don’t know me,” he said. “Walk down to Victory and I’ll meet you.”

I turned left out the door and started walking quickly, but not too quickly, away. Over my shoulder I heard a man’s voice call Malloy’s name, but I didn’t want to risk a backward glance.

I turned south on Vesper Avenue, the whole back of my body clenched and cringing as if expecting a bullet. My buzzcut scalp felt painfully vulnerable. I was dying to know what the hell was going on back there, but I didn’t want to chance being recognized. I couldn’t hear anything but the sounds of the street. Cars, distant music, a hedge trimmer. I reached Victory Boulevard much sooner than I meant to and stood there on the corner by the 7-Eleven, feeling stupid and unsure. I turned and looked up at the mural on the side of the Family Medical Center building next door. I’d seen that mural about a million times, but I’d never actually paid attention. It showed three guys standing on top of the planet Earth, reaching for a sort of three-way high five. One guy was wearing a winter hat and scarf. The other two were in t-shirts. I had no idea who those guys were supposed to be.

I couldn’t stop myself from looking back toward my building but I was too far away and couldn’t see anything at all. I had no idea where Malloy was. Cars passed and people passed and I was hit with a sudden terror that I was really totally alone. Disconnected. No home, no car, no real identity anymore. Nowhere to go but jail. I pressed my body against the sooty skin of the 7-Eleven building, feeling like I needed to hold on to something solid or else I would just disintegrate or tumble up into the smoggy yellow sky.

Following swiftly on the heels of that fear was a kind of slinking guilt. I kept on telling myself not to become dependent on Malloy, and yet the second he was out of my sight I panicked like a little kid lost in the supermarket. I had money. I could find a motel that didn’t require a credit card and hole up. Find a way to contact Didi. She would know where to find Jesse. I could make Jesse tell me where I could find his boss, that bland-faced fucker who was clearly responsible for everything that had been done to me. I didn’t need a goddamn babysitter.

I unzipped my duffel and pulled out the little robot. I don’t know what I was hoping for. Maybe I thought that holding that talisman from my former life would calm and center me somehow. In the end it just made me feel self-conscious and silly, like some loony homeless person you would cross the street to avoid. Next thing I knew I’d be saving my pee in glass jars and pushing a shopping cart.

“Angel,” Malloy said, hand on my shoulder, and I jumped like he had goosed me, dropping the little robot.

Malloy deftly caught the robot before it could smash on the concrete. I turned back to him and wrapped my arms around myself.

“Christ,” I said. “You scared the shit out of me.”

Malloy looked down at the robot and up at me, then handed it back to me without comment. I stuck the robot back into my bag, feeling more foolish than ever.

“What happened?” I asked.

“It was Erlichman, one of those young hard-ons that caught your case,” Malloy said. “Wanted to know what I was doing snooping around your office.”

“What did you tell him?” I asked, following Malloy as he turned and headed east on Victory. The sun was beating down on my newly shorn scalp, giving me a nasty headache.

“I told him what he already knew,” Malloy said. “That Didi paid me to look into your disappearance. I asked about the tape too. Erlichman doesn’t have it, so I’m guessing either the guy from Vegas or his boss has got it. They’ll be paying a visit to everyone that visited your office that day.”

“Shit,” I said, trying to shake the image of Zandora lying dead in her cotton panties and focus on remembering who all had been into the office on the last day of my former life. “I remember several of the girls came by and at least one director that I can think of.”

“Erlichman is gone,” Malloy said. “Think it would help jog your memory to go back up to your office?”

I shivered. Going back up into my office was the last thing on earth I wanted to do. I shrugged, looking away.

We circled the block and came around to the back of the building. No one in sight. I trudged reluctantly behind Malloy as he slipped in and headed up the steps to the second floor, nodding to the kid behind the guard desk. I didn’t want to do this. Didn’t want to view the corpse of my old life. It didn’t look like Malloy was going to give me a choice.

I couldn’t have prepared myself for that any more than I could have prepared for the first time I saw my beat-up face in the mirror. The lock was busted and the door hung ajar behind yellow police tape. Malloy pushed through the tape and led me into the frozen crime scene my former life had become.

The place was trashed. Didi’s desk was a cluttered mess of emptied drawers and rifled files. Her computer was gone. The comfy purple chairs Didi and I had picked out had been shoved together in one corner. The carafe for my coffee pot lay broken on the carpet. The door to my own office was closed, and I found I was weirdly grateful for that.

“Okay,” Malloy said, heading toward the bathroom door. “You say the girl definitely had the briefcase when she went into the bathroom, right?”

I nodded, unable to squeeze words past the hot lump in my throat.

“She could have taken the case with her out the window,” Malloy said, pushing the bathroom door open. Lia’s expensive heels were still on the floor by the toilet. “Maybe she ditched it somewhere right outside, in a dumpster or something like that, since the boss told you she ‘left without it.’ But I get the feeling she didn’t take it with her. I think it had to be stashed here somewhere. Clearly the boss thought the same thing, only his men didn’t find it. Someone else did. So where could she have hidden it?”

I shrugged and watched in a numb daze while Malloy searched the tiny bathroom. It was much too small for anyone to hide anything. Malloy stood on the closed lid of the toilet, reaching up toward the low, acoustic tile ceiling, lifting each tile one by one. My heart skipped as something black clattered down and bounced off the toilet tank to land on the floor by the sink. It wasn’t the briefcase but as soon as I realized what it was, I saw with forehead-slapping clarity exactly what had happened. I knew who had the briefcase.