Los Angeles Noir - Denise Hamilton [30]
“Won’t Daddy be surprised when he learns it was all a joke?” Mrs. Chen said gaily. A slim briefcase of fine-grained leather lay across the front seat, filled with silicone chips. There was plenty of room left over for passports, one-way tickets to Shanghai, and a paperback novel. They would stroll right through security and onto a plane winging its way over the Pacific.
“Are you sure Daddy’s going to meet us there?” asked Pearl.
“Daddy, Daddy,” chanted four-year-old April.
Leila Chen pursed her pastel lips and allowed herself a moment of silent triumph.
“Of course he will, darlings,” she said finally. “You two are the only children he’s got, and he loves you madly. That’s why he works so hard. To give you everything … But you know your Daddy,” she added in a singsong voice. “His business trip could take a long time. In the meanwhile, there’s a new uncle that Mommy wants you to meet. I think you’re going to like him very much.”
PART II
HOLLYWOODLANDIA
THE METHOD
BY JANET FITCH
Los Feliz
It was cold in Los Angeles. Fifty-eight, sixty degrees. In Nebraska, I’d have been scraping ice off the windshield while the wind bit my face like a Rottweiler, but in L.A., when you have to put a sweater on, that’s winter. The dark deodar cedars brooded over Los Feliz Boulevard, trailing their boughs over the traffic creeping toward Griffith Park and the DWP Holiday Tunnel of Light, all eighty million drive-through lightbulbs of it. Christmas. People complained about being “stuck here” for the holidays, joking about the ribbons on the palm trees, saying how it just didn’t seem like Christmas without the old yule dog. But not me. You’d never catch me whining that I couldn’t get back to Kearney for the holidays, sit around listening to Paul Anka and tracking Aunt Phoebe’s phlebitis.
If you met me, you might think you knew me—a smalltown girl, fresh from state college productions of The Boyfriend and Annie Get Your Gun. Up against Stepford armies of fiveten leggy blondes, former Miss Iowas and Texas, with kilowatt smiles. I’m just five-two, dark-haired, with a small sharp chin and big baby blues. I know, you’d think lunchmeat. But you don’t know me.
I was working the 5-to-11 shift at Orzo, a trattoria on Hillhurst that catered to the Los Feliz/Silverlake hipsters, men in leather jackets and perfect two-day stubble, women with clean hair and long knitted scarves. That night it was busy, customers lined up out the door. Whenever the thermometer plunged below sixty, everybody wanted Italian. A man sat in my section; if I’d seen him on the street I’d have thought he was too broke to eat at a place like this. Dark and bald, in a thick turtleneck and a beat-up leather jacket, about forty-five I’d guess. But there was something about him. I can’t say what it was and I can’t say I liked it. The way he looked at me when I came over and took his drink order.
“What do you recommend?” Brown eyes, with a funny light in them, like he was enjoying a private joke and I was the punch line. He pissed me off. Like me or don’t like me, I don’t give a rat’s ass, but there’s nothing funny about me.
“We have a Barolo, by the glass.” It was fourteen bucks. Even the cuffs of his jacket were worn.
“I think … I’ll have the Classico.” He pointed at the board with a languorous finger, a gay gesture though he didn’t seem gay. He seemed like a straight guy who was being annoying. I guessed him for a writer. They’ve got a look about them. They come alone, watch everything from some corner, sometimes they take notes. This guy didn’t have a notebook, but he had the look.
I brought him his Classico and recited the specials.
“Would you say the ahi, or the osso buco?” He stroked his lips with long fingers. They had hair on them. I imagined shoulders like a gorilla. Hair everywhere but that dome. Too bad for him.
I knew if I said the ahi he’d order the osso. I wanted to tell him to stop wasting my time, it wasn’t intriguing and he was twenty years too old for me. “The osso’s our specialty.”
“Then bring that.” He folded his menu and handed it to me.