Thin Air

Chapter 16

Susan and I were aboard American flight number 11 when it took off without incident at nine a.m. We ate breakfast on the plane and speculated between ourselves as to what it was. Then Susan put on her earphones to watch the movie. And I settled in to read the rest of my current book, Streets of Laredo, and worry about crashing. I worried less while we were flying along. They didn't usually fall suddenly from the sky.

"It's just a control issue," Susan said. "The drive to the airport is probably more dangerous."

"You think it's too early to start drinking?" I said.

"Well." Susan looked at her watch. "It's about seven a.m. in Los Angeles."

"Right," I said. "The movie any good?"

"Oh God, no," Susan said. "It's hideous."

"So how come you're watching it?"

"So I won't think about how high we are," she said.

"You're scared too."

"Of course I am," Susan said and smiled at me. "But I'm a girl."

Over Flagstaff, Susan took her earphones off and said, "Why was it, exactly, that we are going to Los Angeles?"

"To check into the Westwood Marquis and have sex," I said.

Susan nodded. "Check in, unpack, and have sex," she said.

"Of course."

"Didn't you say there was something to do with Frank's wife?"

"Quirk ran down her fingerprints," I said. "LAPD arrested her for prostitution. Twice, 1982 and 1983. At that time her name was Angela Richard."

"My God, does Frank know this?"

"If he does, he's kept quiet about it," I said. "We haven't told him."

We were just above the San Gabriel Mountains now, so close that it seemed you could step out onto one of the peaks.

"And you want to see if you can get some information out here that will help you find her?"

"Yeah."

"How's that going to work?" Susan said.

"I don't know. Maybe it won't. I got no master plan, I feel my way along."

"Why should you be different?" Susan said.

We slid past the San Gabriels, drifted down over the San Fernando Valley, landed without crashing, got our rental car, and drove in from the airport on 405.

"Do we know how old Lisa is?" Susan said.

"Gave her age as nineteen in 1982," I said. "If she was telling the truth, makes her thirty-one."

"I could have done the math," Susan said, "in time."

"Yeah, but we're only here a few days," I said.

The Westwood Marquis is located just out of West wood Village, across from UCLA Medical Center. It has two pools, a health club, and a spectacular brunch, and a lot of gardens. Our room was painted blue. It had a small sitting room, a bath, and a bedroom with a big bed and a bank of mirrored closet doors. Susan looked at them and looked at the bed.

"Are you going to peek?" she said.

"You bet your boots," I said.

"Pornographer," Susan said and began to unpack.

To watch Susan unpack was to witness a process as elaborate and careful as a spider weaving a web. While she carefully unfolded and shook out and hung each item behind the mirrored doors, I took a shower and put on one of the terrycloth robes the hotel provided. It fit me like a hot dog casing on a knockwurst. Susan finished her unpacking, ran a bath, and went into the bathroom "to fluff up." I closed all the mirrored doors she had left open, and checked the angle of reflection. After a while Susan emerged with a white terrycloth robe clutched voluminously around her.

"First we'll have to agree that there'll be no peeking in the mirror," she said.

"Of course not," I said.

My voice was rich with sincerity.

"Can you get your arms out of those bathrobe sleeves?" she said to me.

"Probably," I said.

"Well, why don't you?"

Later in the afternoon we lay quietly in the bed together, with Susan's head on my shoulder.

"What's the plan?" she said.

"I know a cop out here named Samuelson," I said. "Met him when I was out here with Candy Sloan a long time ago."

"I remember."

"I called him a couple of days ago. He said he'd dig up Angela Richard's file and I promised him lunch at Lucy's."

"And then?"

"And then we'll see," I said.

We were quiet for a time, listening to the faint hum of the air conditioner, watching the sunlight on the blue walls. Susan turned her head on my shoulder and looked straight at me from maybe six inches away. Amusement moved in her big eyes, and something else, a hint of depravity, or joy, or excitement, or all three, that I'd never quite been able to figure out.

"Did you peek?" Susan said.

"Absolutely not," I said.

"Are you lying?" she said.

"Absolutely am," I said.

They walked out into the corridor. The guard was there. Not the same one she'd seen earlier; they probably changed shifts frequently. The floor of the hallway was linoleum which had been painted with maroon deck paint so that it had once had a shiny gloss. But the linoleum had buckled and there were cracks spidering across the enameled surface, and the sheen was nearly gone. She felt almost dizzy at coming out of the room into the daylight. It was like the way she felt coming out of an early afternoon movie. She had not seen daylight since he'd brought her here. Before them a small-boned, black-haired young man with two long braids and a blue bandanna tied into a headband like Willie Nelson was backing down the corridor ahead of them, the video camera leveled, the tape whirring faintly. The corridor walls were half paneled with narrow grooved red oak boards that had been varnished once, and were now almost black with age and dirt. The walls above were white-painted plaster grown gray by the same process that had aged the oak wainscotting. "Downstairs, Lisa mia, your people are waiting to greet you."

My people, I don't have any goddamned people. Frank is my people. She kept her face composed. At least she didn't look as ridiculous in her safari outfit as she might have had he chosen to parade her about in her Moll Flanders outfit. They went down narrow stairs covered with frayed rubber mats on each step so you shouldn't slip. At the bottom was the kitchen, with a huge old yellow Glenwood gas range that stood on bowed black legs. The sink was soapstone, and two shabby-looking refrigerators stood side by side against the left-hand wall. One of them had the condenser equipment on top of it. A big table occupied the middle of the room. It was the kind that hotels use to set up banquet rooms. It had a splintery plywood top, and folding metal legs. There were some flowers in a coffee can in the middle of the table, and five or six assorted straight chairs set around the table. Five small children, three girls and two boys, were playing in diapers and little else, on the floor under the table. The slim woman in the pink sweatshirt who had brought Lisa's food was there, and a fat woman in a tight lavender sweatsuit. They were sitting at the table, minding the children, eating occasionally from a large open bag of Vincent potato chips that lay on its side on the table.

Luis said something to them in Spanish. They stared at her and nodded.

"Lisa," Luis said, "this is my cousin Evangelista, and my friend Chita."

"Do you know that he has kidnapped me?" Lisa said.

The two women looked at her without expression. "That is a bad word to use here, Lisa," Luis said. "I have simply reclaimed what is mine. And, of course, they do not speak English."

Beyond the women at the table a door led into the backyard. Through it she could see small children, somewhat older than the babies in the kitchen, playing in the courtyard formed by the enclosing tenements. He walked with her to the door. She went volitionlessly, and stood silently beside him on the back step. There was a bent and rusty metal swing set on one side o f the yard, and a pile of sand on the other. The grass had been worn away and the earth was bare and muddy from the rain. Each of the tenements had a back porch

on each floor and en masse they rose like balconies in a decrepit theater. On the first-floor back porch directly opposite her, seated among the pieces of wash hanging damp on the sagging clothesline, two young adolescent girls watched the children.

"We use the courtyard for the children," he said. "They are safe here."

Lucky them, Lisa thought.