Los Angeles Noir - Denise Hamilton [64]
No one I knew now, in this life, at all the parties and receptions and gallery openings, felt like that—like the boys with us back home, in someone’s yard after midnight. Throats vibrating close to our foreheads, hands sliding across our shoulder blades. Girl, just—Just lemme get a taste now. Come on.
When I was home lately, I had trouble working. I looked at old things like my mother’s clothespins and a canvas bag I used to wear across my shoulder when we picked oranges in my father’s grove.
But walking, I was who I had become—a travel writer everyone wanted to hire.
I’d written about the Bernese Oberland for Conde Nast, about Belize for Vogue, about Brooklyn for Traveler.
I passed vacant lots tangled with morning glories like banks of silver-blue coins, and the sheared-off cliffs below an old apartment complex, where shopping carts huddled like ponies under the Grand Canyon.
I looked at my watch. 8:45. I smelled all the different coffees wending through the air from doughnut shops and convenience stores. Black bars were slid aside like stiffened spiderwebs. Every morning in late summer, my mother and I would brush aside the webs from the trees in our yard, the ones made each night by desperate garden spiders. Here, everyone was desperate to get the day started and make that money.
My cell rang while I was waiting for the light at Beaudry.
“FX?” It was Rick Schwarz, the editor.
“Yup,” I said.
“So what does that stand for?” He laughed. He was in his car.
“It stands for my name, Rick.”
He laughed again. “We still on for 1:00? Clifton’s Cafeteria?”
“Sounds fine,” I said.
“So—I don’t know what you look like. You never have a contributor’s photo.”
“I look absolutely ordinary,” I said, my body lined up with a statue in the window of a botanica. “See you at 1.”
I stood there for a minute, the sun behind me, tracing the outline of the Virgen de Soledad. These people must be from Oaxaca, because this virgin, with her black robe in a wide triangle covered with gold, her face severe and impassive, was their patron saint. I had prayed before her in a cathedral there, because my mother asked me to do so each place I went. My mother’s house was full of saints.
Across Beaudry, I could see the mirrored buildings glinting like sequined disco dresses in the hot sun. My phone rang again.
“Fantine?”
“Yes, Papa,” I said. I tried to keep walking, but then he was silent, and I had to lean against a brick building in the shade.
“That your tite phone?” he said. My little phone—my cell.
“Yes, Papa.”
“You walk now?”
“I’m going downtown,” I said. “Does Mama want something? Some toys?” I could stop by the toy district today, if my nephews wanted something special.
My father said, “Fantine. Somebody kill Glorette. You better come home, oui. Tomorrow. Pay your respect, Fantine.”
Then he hung up.
No one ever called me by my name. I had been FX Antoine for ten years, since I decided to become a writer. Only my family and my Rio Seco friends knew my name at all.
That was why I’d always loved L.A., especially Downtown. No one knew who I was. No one knew what I was. People spoke to me in Spanish, in Farsi, in French. My skin was the color of walnut shells. My hair was black and straight and held tightly in a coil. My eyes were slanted and opaque. I just smiled and listened.
But Glorette—even if she’d worn a sack, when she walked men would stare at her. They wanted to touch her. And women hated her.
Glorette had skin like polished gold, and purple-black eyes, and brows like delicate crow feathers, and her lips were full and defined and pink without lipstick. She was nearly iridescent—did that fade when blood stopped moving? Now she was dead.
I bit my lip and walked, along Temple and down to Spring Street, where crowds of people moved quickly, all of them