Orange County Noir Read online

  The next day, after Shepard's sister picked up his kids for an overnight, he said, "Let me take you to the fair. You've been to the Orange County Fair, right?"

  "Um, no," I answered. I'd left Bumfuck where "hooptedoo- dle" was a favorite expression, and I had no desire to return.

  "Then you got to let me take you."

  "Fairs are a Republican thing."

  "Pshaw!" he said, tucking in his turquoise polo shirt with a tiny alligator over the left breast.

  "Shouldn't you take your kids?"

  "They've been, and I'll take them again before it ends. Tonight it will be just you and me. How about it?"

  I said yes. I said yes to everything-to Levi and his schemes, now to Shepard.

  I went to freshen up.

  Levi called from another job while I was in the bathroom; Shepard had run out of work for him. I told him I had to work late. I'd been spending more and more time at Shepard's and less and less time at our sorry excuse for a home. It was getting to Levi. I knew because when he talked about Shepard, he no longer used his name.

  "The motherfucker tell you anything interesting?" or "What's up with the motherfucker?" I found a bindle with white powder in Levi's things. His skin was becoming all mottled and he was losing weight. He denied using crank, said he had gotten it for a friend, but he was short-tempered and negative. Now I just wanted to escape with Shepard, go someplace where Levi couldn't find me.

  Shepard and I walked hand in hand to his dusty blue jag and moments later were gliding down Broadway to Newport and up to Del Mar, his hand on my knee, my hand on his thigh, to where the dark sky was lit up all red from the lights on the rides and the midway. The Ferris wheel spun lazily around, its colorful, happy life temporary-like mine, I feared. This happiness wouldn't last-it couldn't; it hadn't been a part of the plan for me to fall for an Orange County Republican. Levi would never let me have Shepard. I wanted to confess and tell him what Levi was planning, but I didn't know how I could put it where he wouldn't just fire me and tell me to be on my way.

  We parked and walked toward the lights, toward the Tilt-a-Whirl and the rollercoaster with purple neon cutting the black sky, teenagers on all sides of us running amok, clutching cheap stuffed animals and stalks of cotton candy. Shepard bought us caramel apples, fried Twinkies, and roasted corn on the cob. We got wristbands and drank draft beer.

  It was going on 11:00 and the fairgoers were pouring through the gates, probably to get a jump on the freeways. Shepard and I moved against the flow, heading toward the livestock area, past Hercules, the giant horse, llama stalls, and a corral where the pig races took place. He said he'd been coming here since he was a kid. Fair diehards moseyed about. My phone rang-Levi's ringtone-but I ignored it, and I feared it. Levi said he could always find me. Something about the GPS positioning on my phone and how he'd rigged it. Cell phones didn't make you freer-they made your whereabouts known, and I didn't like it one bit, this hold Levi had on me.

  Couples lingered in the shadows. Shadows scared me. I worried Levi might be hiding in them. Lately everything got on his nerves and he suspected everyone. He'd screamed at the next-door neighbor to quit his fool singing. He'd even pierced the pink inner tube in the pool because he no longer liked seeing it floating there.

  Shepard directed me to the metal bleachers around the cattle arena. He picked me up, set me on one so our faces were level, and kissed me. "You make me so happy," he said.

  This tall bulky man had grown on me. He pulled a little robin's egg-blue box from his pocket and flipped it open. A diamond solitaire.

  He took the ring from the box and slid it on my finger. "You will, won't you?" he said. "Marry me?"

  Levi was leaning over the railing of the balcony, smoking with one of his lowlife loser buddies, when I arrived home at midnight. I'd taken off the ring and sequestered it at the bottom of my tampon holder.

  The light from the water bounced off Levi and his buddy whose name I forgot. I gave them a half-hearted wave. Levi nodded and smiled his lizard-cold smile.

  "Where've you been?" he asked, flicking his cigarette butt down into the pool as his buddy took off.

  "Had to stay with the kids until Shepard got home." I took a cigarette from Levi's pack on the cement floor.

  "Fuck you did," he said.

  I gave him a long look. It was always better to say less than more.

  "Where's the ring?" he said.

  "What ring?"

  "Mimi, this'll only work if you're straight with me about the motherfucker."

  I went to go into the apartment, but he grabbed my arm. "I'm gonna tell him all about you, Mimi. You weren't supposed to fall in love with the asshole. You love me, remember?"

  I wrenched my arm away and hurried inside. I poured a glass of water, trying to think.

  Levi hurried in behind me. "Don't fucking walk away from me, Mimi."

  "I'll do what I want."

  "Fuck you will." He pulled me to him, pressed his mouth against mine, hiked his hand up my top. "C'mon, baby, what happened to us?"

  I pulled free. "Leave me alone, you asshole."

  "I own you," he said. "I came all the way out here to find you and claim you and now you're mine."

  "Whatever drug you're doing, it's making you crazy."

  "Crazy for you," he said, grabbing me with one hand and undoing his belt buckle with the other.

  I'd never given into a man forcing me and I wasn't about to now. I tried pushing him away, but his grip on my arm only grew tighter.

  "You always liked it with me before," he said. "Mr. O.C. motherfucker better'n me now, Mimi?" His face looked strained, a Halloween mask. "He won't want you when I tell him who you really are, when I tell him everything you planned. He'll take his ring back and then where will you be?"

  "What I planned?"

  He jammed his hand down my pants and hurt me and that's when something snapped. My prized marble roller sat on the counter behind me, where it always was. I felt for it with my free hand and almost had it, but it slipped away. My hand landed on Levi's hammer. I brought it around and cracked it against his skull as hard as I could. His sea-foam green eyes went wide, as if he were seeing me for the first time. Then he crumpled to the linoleum. A trickle of blood issued from his ear.

  "Levi!" I gasped. "Shit!"

  The way his eyes gazed into the living room without blinking gave him a peaceful look I had never seen.

  I tried to think. Should I pack up my things, including my pastry roller, and split? I considered cleaning my fingerprints off everything in the apartment, but I wouldn't be able to get rid of every little hair, every little cell of mine that had flaked off. I knew about DNA. I could be easily tied to Levi, even without a car or California driver's license. Even without my name on the month-to-month lease or on bills; I still received my mail at Leonora's. To the mostly Latino transient residents, I must've looked like any other gringa. But I talked to Levi on my cell phone all the time. I could even be tied to him through Shepard. They would visit Levi's former employer and find me there, loving my new life.

  No, I couldn't simply leave.

  I pulled down the shades and locked the door. I wiped my fingerprints off the hammer after placing it near Levi. I turned on the shower as hot as I could stand, peeled off my clothes, and stepped in. This would calm me and help me think.

  As the scalding water poured down my face, it came to me, what I would say and do: I came home, Levi was here with a drug-dealing buddy, I took a shower and heard something. When I got out of the shower, I found my boyfriend on the floor.

  I turned off the water, wrapped myself in a towel, and jumped into my role. I hurried out to the kitchen, as if I'd heard something bad and found Levi hurt on the kitchen floor. I bent down to see what was wrong. Water puddled about me and mixed with Levi's blood. I ran screaming from the apartment onto the balcony. As I started down the steps, the towel slipped from my body, and I let it. I was a crazy naked lady. Residents-men in underwear and T shirts and wome
n in nightgowns-started emerging from their hovels.

  "Call the police!" I made a good hysteric. Someone had done my poor boyfriend in.

  Women called in Spanish to each other. More than once I heard the word "loco." A short dark woman with gold front teeth wrapped me in a Mexican blanket, patted my wet hair, and cooed to me in Spanish. The sirens grew closer. A crowd had gathered around us and upstairs at the doorway to the apartment.

  There would be an investigation, but after a while I would be cleared. No one ever saw us fight. There was no insurance settlement coming. Why would I kill my boyfriend? The authorities would search instead for the lowlife who did him-or not. Probably not. Who cared about one more druggie dude going bye-bye? My first chance I would call Shepard, tell him details about what happened that he would have heard about on the news. I would tell him how Levi made me say I was his sister, had threatened my life even, had never wanted me to fall for him. I would remind Shepard that I loved him, every inch of him. Shepard believed in me, would never think I could do something like this.

  I knew how to be patient. Shepard and Piece of Heaven, California, would eventually be mine, and before long, the ring would be back on my finger.

  obbie froze as he felt a cold, metallic object press into the back of his neck. He realized what it was. The barrel of a handgun. This night was not turning out the way he'd hoped.

  It had been the longest six months of Robbie's life. Hiding out in a rented room in a crappy apartment building in the unincorporated part of East Orange County just off the 241 toll road, waiting for the heat to die down back in Laguna Beach, the town he'd grown up in, the town he could no longer afford to live in, the town he wanted to get back to as soon as possible. All he wanted was another chance.

  When the call had come from Michele late that August afternoon, he was stoked. She wouldn't elaborate on the phone, but she had a job for him. That was all he needed to know.

  It was a little after 3 o'clock the next afternoon when he hopped in his two-tone-rust and primer-road-weary Corolla and headed toward Laguna. He didn't like the sound the battered Toyota was making-bearing or ball joint?-as he pulled up alongside the 241 toll plaza and heaved a handful of coins at the bin. Car repairs were going to have to wait.

  "Fuckin toll roads," he muttered as a BMW with a FasTrak transponder raced by him. He grimaced. That's what this place is all about now. They make you pay to get where you're going and pay to come back. It's all about the cash. He'd been around long enough to know the difference between the old money that seeded this area and the new, stupid money that was spoiling it for everybody.

  Robbie had grown up in Laguna and graduated from Laguna Beach High back when their teams were still called the Artists, not the newly minted Breakers. After school, he'd been eager to get away from the domestic horror show at home, but he'd always assumed he'd stay local and figure out a way to coexist among the filthy rich and infamous who were determined to price him out of his hometown market. For somebody with no real sense of direction or ambition, Robbie quickly learned the score.

  Influence, that's what it was all about. And most of the locals didn't really want to get their own hands dirty when it came to passing along "financial or psychological incentives" to make things work. Robbie was happy to do what he was told without leaving a trail. He thought of himself as smart enough to know better, pissed off enough to not give a shit, and savvy enough to get his assignments done without making the O.C. Register's back pages.

  Bottom line, between 2002 and 2007, if Michele and Jeff had a case in Laguna they didn't want to go to trial, or a business dispute or vendetta that needed settling the old-fashioned way, Robbie had a hand in the "mediation." And there were plenty of opportunities: planning commissioners trying to play both sides, hotshot developers eager to flip properties before the next landslide, mayors caught with their hands in the till, lawsuit-happy execs with a taste for the strange, or city council members laboring under the notion that they were appointed to think for themselves.

  This was no longer the sleepy little coastal hideaway that had bored him to tears-not to mention various pharmaceutical diversions-during his teen years. No, now even a teardown shack a mile from the beach would run you a minimum of a million bucks. Face it, the only thing tennis pro Lindsay Davenport, the dude who played Freddy Krueger in the Nightmare on Elm Street movies, and the guy who made those Girls Gone Wild videos had in common was they all made the kind of "fuck you" money it now took to call Laguna Beach home.

  Robbie had to laugh as he cruised past that BMW pulled over to the side of the 241 by a state trooper. Tickets on a toll road! He leaned back and shook his head. They know how to hit you where it hurts. In the fuckin' wallet.

  Next stop, the toll plaza for the 133 South. More coins in the basket for the privilege of heading west. Looking around, Robbie remembered when this area was all orange groves and strawberry fields, not corporate headquarters, industrial parks, and high-end playgrounds for shopaholics. What Robbie saw now was the reassurance of returning job security.

  He'd learned his lesson: Don't let it get personal. Never lose your cool. You're a messenger, that's all. He wasn't about to forget these past six months of purgatory, going stir-crazy and watching his meager savings run out in the middle of nowhere. All because he got a little too rough and didn't cover his tracks well enough after a job.

  That wouldn't happen again. And when Michele had finally called, Robbie knew he'd be on probation for a while, but that was okay. He wouldn't let them down.

  Just past the 405, the toll road portion of the 133 ended and he cruised into Laguna Canyon. After his "sabbatical," it was like he was seeing the place with fresh eyes. When he was growing up, this was an eight-mile, funky two-lane road that twisted toward the Pacific like a sidewinder on peyote. Now there were four lanes most of the way and shuttles from the Act V parking lot a mile from downtown. But on an August day like this, it was still stop-and-go from El Toro Road on into town where finding a parking place for less than ten bucks still felt like winning the lottery.

  So, the Corolla inched along that final mile, until, at last, he cruised past the grounds of the arts festivals-the Sawdust Festival and Art-A-Fair on the left, the Festival of Arts on the right-a mere six blocks from the "T" where the Pacific Coast Highway briefly parallels the Main Beach boardwalk and Laguna's famous "window to the sea." With its surf, sand, volleyball and basketball courts, and a relatively unobstructed view of the Pacific, Main Beach owed its existence to a movement to stop its development back in the 1960s. Its preservation was made possible by the Festival of Arts with funds skimmed off thirty years of ticket sales to the Pageant of the Masters. As always, money talked, and that only-in-OrangeCounty theatrical show with its "living pictures" still pulled in crowds from all over the world every summer. And as long as it did, the city made certain it got its cut.

  Once, when he was nine, Robbie had volunteered as a cast member in the Pageant. As a porcelain figurine. As crazy as it sounded, that summer was just about his only decent childhood memory, a brief refuge from the endless fights, the drunken beatings and humiliations at home. Now, as he passed the front entrance of the Festival of Arts with its banners and gated grounds filled with artists' displays, Robbie remembered how, back in high school, he'd thought about becoming an artist. Laguna certainly had enough of them. But even then he knew himself well enough to know it wasn't in the cards. Instead, he'd just drifted after school, a loner with no real sense of direction.

  Michele and her husband Jeff, lawyers and partners in their own two-person legal firm, had originally hired him to run errands and do odd jobs. They liked that Robbie didn't ask too many questions and he paid attention to details. When had his work for them turned from just being a gofer to the more delicate tasks of money drops and eventually "enhanced mediation"? It had been a natural progression, with Robbie quickly developing a feel and taste for anonymous intimidation. Most of his targets were basically smalltown cowards who were dea
thly afraid of having their dirty laundry aired in the pages of the Coastline Pilot. But Robbie didn't really care why Jeff and Michele had him do what he did. As far as he was concerned, he got paid to turn "no" into "yes, of course, it'll never happen again" by whatever means was necessary.

  The Corolla angled into the left lane, and when the light changed, he turned onto Forest Avenue and cruised past the lumberyard parking lot, City Hall, and the fire station. There wasn't much of a chance to build any momentum before climbing the steep "blind crest" hill up to Park Avenne, but he was pleased that the old Toyota managed it without much complaint. Turning left on Park, Robbie slowed just a bit as he drove past the high school. Was he kidding himself that his time there hadn't been so bad after all? Is this what nostalgia feels like? If it is, it really sucks.

  Park Avenue continued its winding ascent up through the canyons and steep turns that eventually led to Thurston Middle School and Top of the World, that elite enclave of homes with multimillion-dollar views overlooking Laguna Canyon. Everywhere he looked, Robbie saw new houses under con struction. He'd watched most of the homes on these same hills burn to the ground in the Laguna Canyon fires in the fall of'93, but you'd never know it now. Taking a left at the middle school, Robbie made his way through the maze of houses to Skyline Drive.

  Parking on the street across from another mansion-inprogress construction site, Robbie walked to the front door of Michele and Jeff's house, a California modern, split-level bunker of interlocking concrete and glass boxes. Checking his watch, Robbie rang the bell on the bronze and wood double doors. After a moment, a guy Robbie had never seen before, about six-two, 240, opened the door and peered down at him. Tan and ripped, the guy looked to be in his twenties. Robbie noted that he was barefoot and wearing a Hawaiian print shirt and shorts.