Three

As soon as Sienna got home, I immediately convened her and Emme for a pow-wow. The way I saw it, the police wanted information. I had information. Probably. We’d been too late to see the actual accident, but since we’d been coming from the opposite direction, we had to have seen the car making its getaway. If I could just remember any details of cars that passed us—color, number of doors, if the driver was a he or she—it might be enough to lead the cops to the killer and me to the reward money. Haley’s killer would be in jail and my parents would not be on the streets. A win-win situation if there ever was one.

Still, I had to admit it sounded crazy. But I reasoned that this was Hollywood. Trying to get the reward money for a hit-and-run you witnessed definitely wouldn’t be the craziest thing an actress—or in my case, an ex-actress—had done for cash around these parts.

Billboards aside, actual info on the accident was scarce and went like this: Haley worked at a small consignment shop off Vermont
Avenue. The area was mostly commercial, housing the type of shops more likely to be open at 7:00 a.m. than 7:00 p.m. On August 18th, she stopped by work after hours to help with inventory and didn’t leave until approximately 11:30 p.m. There was a marked crosswalk right outside her job. Like many crosswalks in LA, it wasn’t accompanied by a stop sign or a light. I don’t know if the LA City Council was on a tight budget or just on crack when it came up with that idea.

Haley used the crosswalk to get to her car on the other side of the street. It was unclear whether the driver was drunk, texting, or just didn’t see her. What was clear was that he or she hit her and didn’t bother to stop. There was one witness who arrived minutes after the accident. Police had no leads but believed the car to be a Rolls Royce.

I’d hoped reading up on the accident would jog a memory. It didn’t, besides a few bits and pieces: That a crowd surrounded her. That one of them had bright pink hair. That someone else was gesturing wildly while on his or her cell phone. Unfortunately, Emme and Sienna didn’t seem to remember anything about the car either.

“It’s LA,” I said. “You’re more likely to see a Rolls Royce than a drop of rain. We had to have seen at least one that night, if not two or three.”

“It’s not LA. It’s Silver Lake,” Sienna said. We were on my bed in the bloset. “Hipster central. You’re way more likely to see a hybrid than a Rolls.”

She had a point, but still.

“What about license plates?” I asked, not willing to give up on remembering the car just yet. “Any vanity plates?”

Emme spoke up. She wasn’t in the room but rather on the screen, her eyes constantly roaming between illegal poker games, IM chats, and us. “BigOne6969, you cheating SOB.”

She loudly banged on her keyboard, sending what I could only guess was an all-caps tirade. If you didn’t know better, you’d swear Emme’s jumping eyes were a result of going through withdrawal from some illicit substance that had entered her body through a vein between her toes. But she was probably the only person in Hollywood who didn’t do drugs.

“What do you remember, Sienna?” I asked.

“Seeing MC Ghetto Ghet at that club downtown. His girl’s boob job was horrid.”

“He drive a Rolls?” I would not let her get me off topic.

“Porsche.”

“And you?” I asked Emme. “What do you remember?”

“Wanting to go home,” Emme said, her voice laced with her Valley roots.

All righty, then. “Thank you,” I said.

“NP,” Emme said. No problem.

“A girl was hit by a car,” I said. “Maybe if we just focused, we’d realize we know something.”

“Why?” Sienna asked.

“I don’t know why. Honestly, I only care about who.”

“Why are you doing this?”

I didn’t want to get into it. They’d just offer to let me borrow money. Again. I was sick of using my friends. Even if they didn’t mind, I did. So I settled for a partial truth. “I saw a billboard asking for information and it just reminded me that we’d driven by.”

Sienna still looked confused, so I kept talking before she could ask another question. “What about anyone driving erratically? The guy had to be drunk, right?”

But they both just shook their heads. I silently read an article about the accident for the 50 bajillionth time on Emme’s old old iPad, not to be confused with her old iPad that had displaced it and was succeeded by her new iPad, which would be replaced when the new new version came out. She’d let me permanently borrow it after I sold my own tablet a couple months ago.

The article still wasn’t much help. Neither was my piss-poor job of rallying my friends. The Rolls was a bust. I needed to do something else. Maybe if I actually went back to Vermont Avenue, it would trigger something. I got up and grabbed my bag.

“Where are you going?” Sienna asked, her voice still dripping with accusations.

“Vermont.”

“Shopping? I’m in.”

“Great,” I said. “You’ll have to drive.”

I still didn’t have enough gas.

By the fourth crosswalk drive-by, Sienna began to suspect she’d been bamboozled and wanted to go home. As a compromise, I suggested she shop while I stared at the crosswalk some more before the sun disappeared completely behind the store.

The word “shopping” to Sienna was like “abracadabra” to a magician. Say the magic word and stare in amazement as things magically appeared in her closet. Ready to begin that evening’s performance, she dropped me off right in front of Clothes Encounters. No way was I using the crosswalk.

I was standing there trying to will even the slightest memory when I heard someone behind me. “Hey, are you from Jersey?”

There it was.

She was Asian and looked like she still needed a fake ID. Her face was as wide and round as my grandmother’s fancy plates. Her body looked just as delicate. It barely looked strong enough to hold the maroon and gold University of Southern California book bag she’d slung on her back. She smiled, showing off old school braces, the metal connected with lime-green rubber bands.

I guessed she had come out of the consignment store. What tipped me off was the store name tag. Marina was written in a font designed to look like handwriting. I’d never understood that. Why not just use actual handwriting?

“Georgia,” I said.

Her smile faltered a bit. “Sorry. It’s just you look like someone … ”

“You went to school with?” I finished the thought for her. “I get that all the time.”

Six months ago, I would have explained how she knew me. But after the bajillionth “Oh, what are you doing now?” I had halted that practice. Now I just smiled and let them figure it out, preferably well after we parted.

“Okay, well, have a good day,” Marina said and disappeared into the yonder.

I went back to staring at the crosswalk and trying to conjure up an image of that evening. Instead, images of chicken nuggets danced through my head. I would have preferred them in my mouth. I was hungry, but what else was new?

Sienna strolled up in her four-inch platforms and gasped. I knew that gasp. She’d seen something that would be in her closet by night’s end. I used to gasp like that myself. “Those pants are to die for,” she said.

Considering the circumstances, it was not the best word choice. In the display window of Clothes Encounters was a pair of the ugliest, reddest, sequin-iest pants I’d ever seen. Not my style, but if anyone could pull those off, it was Sienna.

She was inside before I could stop her. I didn’t want to go in there, the place Haley Joseph worked. I was tempted to not follow her, but I knew the best course of action was to get her out of there as soon as possible. Left to her own devices, Sienna would be there until next week.

I walked in, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible. The bell attached to the front door had other plans. “Welcome to Clothes Encounters!” a pack-a-day raspy voice called out, all Wizard of Oz-y. “I’m Betty. Let me know if I can help you with anything.”

I couldn’t tell where the voice came from. The place had two rooms, each packed solid with old school round racks. Someone, Betty perhaps, had strategically left a winding path about a foot and a half wide. I plunged inside the forest of clothes, wishing I could leave bread crumbs in case I needed to find my way out.

The clothes were beautiful. Every era was represented from the last fifty years. They’d even managed to find nice clothes from the eighties. I kept going until I found Sienna adding clothes to a pile an employee was holding. An employee with pink hair.

She was younger than her voice would lead you to believe, but older than the hair would make you think. I pegged her for late forties. She’d had the decency not to go the plastic surgery route, instead looking for youth in layers of foundation the color of unbaked biscuit dough. I expected the lipstick to match the hair. Instead, she’d gone for a deep red, which turned her lips into thin red lines when she smiled at me. Her teeth were perfect. “I’m Betty.”

The last time I’d seen her, she was leaning over Haley’s dying body.

Seeing her immediately made me want to abandon my plan to get the reward money, but I literally couldn’t afford to do that. Instead, I shook off any doubts and looked for a distraction. I found it in Sienna, who was holding up a dress. I glanced at the price tag: 1208. “That’s $1,208!?”

Sienna shrugged. “That’s reasonable.”

“That’s not the price,” Betty said.“It’s the seller. We’re a consignment shop, so we don’t actually own what we sell. We’re more a middle man. All our sellers are assigned four-digit numbers. So if you find someone you like, you can specifically ask for their clothes.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, so I just kind of nodded and smiled. Luckily, Betty left me alone while Sienna grabbed one thing after another. It wasn’t until she had Sienna settled in a fitting room that she gave me a second glance. She smiled. I smiled. She smiled. I smiled. It went on like this for longer than I cared for it to.

Desperate to end the world’s friendliest staring contest, I examined a vintage wrap dress. “That color would be gorgeous with your skin tone,” Betty said. “Go look.”

She motioned toward a mirror near the check-out counter. I walked over and set my phone on the counter while I held the dress against me. She wasn’t lying. The dress and my skin didn’t go together as well as, say, peanut butter and jelly. But it was close. I handed the dress back to her. “Maybe next time.”

We had another awkward few minutes of smiling silence before she came up with another topic. “You guys come to this area often?”

Sienna had told her we lived in Beverly Hills. I shrugged. “Not really. The last time was August.”

Betty glanced off to the side, remembering what happened in August. Why did I say that? Since I’d already been dumb enough to inadvertently bring up the subject, I decided I might as well go all in. Maybe I could ask her a few questions, learn something that could finally trigger my memory and help figure out who hit Haley Joseph. “We, uh, happened to drive by the hit-and-run.”

As soon as it was out, I got scared she’d wonder how I knew she was related to it. So I tried to clarify. “I remember seeing your hair. I read somewhere the girl died. I’m so sorry.”

“Me too,” Betty said. “That was one of my employees. Haley. She’d only been in town for nine months. She came out here to act, naive enough to think she could move out here Monday and be famous by Tuesday. I feel for these poor girls so desperate to be famous they actually believe that it’ll be easy, which is complete BS. I can’t understand why these girls waste their time and their talents.”

She looked at me then, as if realizing exactly what she was saying and that she may have offended me in the process. “Oh, you’re not an actress, are you?”

“Oh, no! I came out here for business school,” I said, which was the truth.

“You graduate yet?”

“One more semester.” I didn’t mention it’d been one more semester for the past three years.

“We had a viewing party the other day for this show she was on,” Betty said. “Something on USA. And she was … What’s it called when your character doesn’t talk but you’re still important in the scene?”

“Featured extra?” Extra work was a rite of passage for any and every acting wannabe, except for me. I’d gotten my Chubby’s gig on my third audition.

“Yes!” Betty said. “She was ‘Hooker number 2’ in the credits. She was so excited, which is why I was surprised when she came in that night and told me she was leaving LA. Said it wasn’t what she’d thought. I was so distracted with the inventory I barely paid her any attention. She realized it too and left. I was going to text her to do lunch the next day … ”

Haley getting killed right before she planned to move made it even more tragic. “I’m sorry for your loss,” I said, meaning every word. Then I dragged Sienna out of there before she had a chance to make a single purchase. She was not a happy camper.

I couldn’t stop thinking about Haley, even after we were back home later that night. Like Haley, I’d been a kid who wanted to act. I just hadn’t had the balls to come out here with nothing but the clothes on my back. I’d gone the more roundabout, and expensive, way of b-school. Because of that fear, I admired the Haleys of the world who weren’t afraid to go for what they wanted.

This was not just someone on some TV show. This was a real person with real dreams and real friends—exactly like me. Of course, I was also a person with a real problem. I’d already called my dad back and told him that I was working on getting the money. I had to keep at it, but I made sure to make a new vow: no more personal info about Haley until I had something for the police tip line. It would just make me feel horrible.

Sienna sliced through my thoughts. “God, I look good.”

And she wondered why some people hated her. Not that she was lying. She did indeed look good, which just made people hate her even more. She was at my mirror, primping. It was Monday night, and for Sienna, that meant club night. But then so did Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. On Sunday, she rested. She gave herself one final once-over and spoke. “Ready for my close-up.”

She’d read that the stylist for singer/rapper Kandy Wrapper always took pics of her client to ensure her outfits looked good in photos. Since then, I’d spent a good portion of my waking hours taking pictures of Sienna on the off chance she got caught in the background of a paparazzi shot of a celebrity leaving a club.

Sienna placed one hand on her tiny hip and smiled with her eyes. She topped out at five feet tall, but we were eye-to-eye if you counted her ever-present stilettos. I didn’t know her exact weight, but it was nowhere near triple digits. She’d drunk too much once and needed me to carry her to her apartment. I’d had grocery bags that weighed more.

Sienna was an itty-bitty thing, but her appeal wasn’t her height. It was her look. Her eyes and skin were almost the same light caramel color. Both looked store-bought. They weren’t, though the jet-black hair most certainly was. She wore it stick straight, midway down her back. Tourists were always asking her directions in their native tongue. She could have been Italian, Indian, Dominican. The list went on and on. But she was black.

I think.

She never explicitly said, and there wasn’t a single family photo to be found, not even a shot from her wedding to her rich ex-husband. You only really have a three-month window to ask those sorts of things and I’d missed it. So I resorted to context clues. She said weave, not extensions. Ashy, not dry. Thick, not plus-sized. And last Thanksgiving, she’d made the most amazing sweet potato—not pumpkin—pie.

I thought fondly about the pie as I snapped a final full-length shot with my tablet and examined my handiwork. “You can tell you’re not wearing a bra.”

“Good! I wish you’d come, Day.”

She’d asked me to hang out every night since I moved in, and every night I refused. Tonight was no exception. I wasn’t in the mood for any party that didn’t have the word “pity” in front of it. “I’m too tired.”

I wasn’t anti-club. In fact, Sienna and I had met in a club bathroom right after my first Chubby’s commercial. She’d yelled over the stall that she was my biggest fan. I was flattered. By the time I figured out that she said that to everyone who got a paycheck for stepping in front of a camera, we’d already bonded over a mutual shoe size and bladders the size of a pin prick.

“You know the rules,” I told her. “Call if you think you’ve drunk too much to drive. I’ll come get you.” Of course, I still had no gas in my car, but that was a problem for Future Dayna.

“Yes, Mom,” she said.

I didn’t answer. I was too busy looking for my phone. Curiosity morphed into panic as Sienna and I searched the entire condo. Sienna tried calling it to no avail. I was wedged halfway under my bed when I remembered I’d last seen it at Clothes Encounters. Fudge.

People survived for centuries without cell phones. Today, however, lose your phone and you might as well have chopped off your right hand. It was like you’d suddenly forgotten how to talk.

It wasn’t that I thought I’d have tons of missed calls. Sienna never called when partying, Emme would rather give you a kidney than a phone call, my parents were both snoring by nine, and the bill collectors all got off at five. But what about tomorrow morning?

With my luck, one of the temp agencies I’d signed up with would call with a job paying a million dollars an hour and requiring three semesters of business school and the ability to juggle while speaking in a German accent.

I remembered from reading about Haley’s death that someone sometimes stayed late at the store to do inventory. I looked up the number and called on Sienna’s phone. No one answered, but it was after hours. Why would they? I hung up and grabbed my keys.

Looked like I was going out after all.

The only smart thing I’d done the last three years was not open a kajillion credit cards. I had one for emergencies. But everything qualified as an emergency lately, like the gas I put in my tank before heading back to Silver Lake. I took the 10 freeway so I could drive north on Vermont like we did the night of Haley’s death. I figured it might trigger something. It didn’t.

I got back to Clothes Encounters a touch before midnight. The light was on, but otherwise the place was deserted. I wasn’t scared. It wasn’t that type of neighborhood. It could be 2:00 a.m., my doors unlocked, all four windows down, and a thousand dollars in untraceable bills in the front seat. No one would touch it. If anything, someone would probably thoughtfully roll up my windows, lock my door, and leave me a gift-wrapped wallet.

I knocked. And waited. Then I cupped my hands around my eyes and peered inside the store. Lots of clothes. No people. I headed over to check the other half of the store.

And that’s when I noticed him.