Los Angeles Noir - Denise Hamilton [72]
“You’ve been here all this time.”
She shrugged. “Seem like not much longer.” She wore a wig. The hairs were perfect. “After my senior year. I was fine as wine, but even the hookers in L.A. was something else. Hollywood was crazy. I came downtown to get me an apartment and wait for the right movie. Did the dancing place for a month.”
“The dancing place?”
“Over on Olympic. The men dance with you for ten dollars and they gotta buy you them expensive drinks. But they smelled. Lord, they all smelled different, and some of them, the heat comin off their underarms and neck and you could smell it comin up from their pants. Even if they had cologne, just made it worse. I couldn’t do it. I came here, and I was behind the counter forever serving drinks. The guys would tip me good, all the old drunks, and I went to the movies every night after work. Now the theaters are all Spanish. I just get me a video after work. And I sleep till I come in. I live next door.”
I didn’t know what to say. Her eyes were brown and muddy, as if washed in tea. “They were filming your building today.”
She shrugged. “Always doin somethin. Now that Downtown is cool again. Grady can’t even get his food in the alley now. Miss Thang at the bar like a hawk.”
“He comes back for dinner?”
Gloria looked around and nodded. “I used to take my plate out there early, before we got started. Take me two enchiladas and rice. Hold a extra plate under there and gave him half. Used to have Mexican food in here. Not now.” She glanced out over her counter. “Now the little old actors be out in the alley. Think they big time.”
I walked away from her alcove, past the bar, the bowling-shirt watching me with a puzzled look—What is she? Brazilian?—and out to the alley. It must have been just a place to dump trash before—but now huge couches covered with velvet and pillows lay at each end, and the OC boys were already collapsed on one, with two girls. It was cool to be in a dive, in an alley, drinking Grey Goose martinis.
“Where does he eat now?” I whispered to Hattie, to Gloria, as she marked off bottles on a list.
“In the other alley. Next door,” she said softly. “At 6:00. Every night, I take me a smoke break out there. And I take my purse.”
I waited for Grady there. I ignored the other homeless men, the drunks from down the street who stumbled past the Golden Gopher, the snide comments of one girl wearing a slinky dress who said, “Uh, the library is on 5th, okay?”
I saw him turn the corner and lope slowly toward me, steady, knees bending, arms moving easily at his sides. He stopped about ten feet from me and said, “Fantine?”
I nodded.
He said, “I been waiting for you. All this time.”
His hands were rimmed with black, like my father’s when he’d been picking oranges all night. His eyes were tiny, somehow, like sunflower seeds in the deep wrinkles around them. All that sun. All those miles.
“You told me you was gon come to L.A. And you left for college. I married Glorette. I married her.” His four top teeth were gone, like an open gate to his mouth. “Didn’t nobody know. We went to the courthouse. Me and her.”
I said, “Grady, I came to tell you—”
“I knew you was somewhere in L.A. Me and Glorette went to the courthouse after Sere Dakar was gone. He played the flute. But he wasn’t African. I seen his driver license one time. Name Marquis Parker. He was from Chicago. Call his-self Chi-town sometimes. Told me he was goin to L.A. and play in a band. Glorette was havin a baby.”
“He’d be seventeen now,” I said. “Her son.”
But Grady stepped closer, the ripe sweet smell of urine and liquor and onions rising from his coat. “No. My son. I was gon raise him. Dakar was gon leave every time. So I got him in my truck.”
I tried to remember. Grady had an old Pinto back then. “You didn’t have a truck.”
He trembled, and breathed hard through his mouth. “Fantine. All this time I waited to tell you. Cause I know you won’t tell nobody.