SUMMER 1979
They rode in Vince’s emerald-green Firebird, taking side streets down into Echo Park, hooking into the afternoon’s traffic once they turned onto Sunset. They would start with Isabella’s friend Chloe. She had been a child actor, Vince said, playing in a number of kids’ movies a decade or so back. Never the star, but the tomboyish best friend, the girl with more than a little troublemaker in her. That had proved good casting, or Chloe had carried the persona offscreen, because by her early teens she had problems with drinking and drugs. For a while, she hadn’t been allowed in the Serranos’ house. Mrs. Serrano worried that she was a bad influence on Isabella. But they found ways to get together, Vince said. He helped them sometimes, when Isabella asked, telling Mrs. Serrano that Isabella had gone one place when really she and Chloe were together in another.
“She’s been in a few other movies since,” Vince said. “Cheapo horror pictures and comedies. Boobs and blood. I don’t know why she keeps making them. Maybe she needs the money. Or she just likes to be on-screen. She always had to be the center of attention.”
Jess remembered the debutante photo, Isabella’s discomfort in the frame. Isabella and Chloe might have seemed mismatched, but Jess understood that kind of relationship, where one partner’s confidence provided cover for the other’s reservations.
“What did the Serranos do when they realized Isabella was gone?”
“They called the police,” Vince said. “They thought she’d been kidnapped. Some kind of ransom thing, like that oil family kid.”
“Getty.”
“So I told them the truth. They weren’t too happy, but they were relieved. The fact that she had run off was better than the alternative. Then Chloe showed up a couple of days later, looking for Izzy. They had gotten separated somewhere. Mrs. Serrano called the police again, but they didn’t give her much hope. They told her it was a big country.”
“Chloe didn’t know where she’d gone?”
The light ahead turned and Vince eased to a stop.
“If she did, she didn’t tell me. Chloe always thought of me as the help.”
They waited for a moment, until it seemed Vince had run out of patience. He looked up and down the cross street, then stepped on the gas, pushing through what remained of the red light.
“Somehow Izzy ended up in the desert with those people,” Vince said. “In that room you made. We didn’t know she was in there until it was all over. Mrs. Serrano flew out to Santa Fe, but Izzy was gone again.”
They passed liquor stores and carnicerias, their walls branded with graffiti. Echo Park was gang territory, a cluster of scruffy hills warrened with a maze of narrow streets, perfect for getaways. Vince steered off Sunset and started up a steep side street. Between the garage doors pressed close on either side, Jess caught glimpses of the small cottages on the slopes above, half-hidden by palms and magnolia. Dogs behind chain-link barked as they climbed, the Firebird’s engine waking them into action.
After a few switchback turns, Vince pulled to the curb. He lowered his head and looked through the windshield to a garage fifty feet farther along. A stone staircase beside the garage led up a hill covered with orange poppies.
“I’m assuming this is still Chloe’s place,” Vince said. “She bought it when she was in high school. She sued her parents to become an adult or—there’s some other word for it. To control her own money from the movies.” He pointed toward the staircase. “Izzy used to shout up from the street,” Vince said, “but if I remember, that gate doesn’t lock, so you can just go right up to the house and knock.”
“You’re not coming?”
“Chloe won’t say anything if I’m around. She’ll think Mrs. Serrano sent me.”
“How do we know she’ll talk to me?”
“I guess we don’t.”
Jess had imagined herself playing second to Vince’s affable investigator. Going in alone wasn’t a possibility she had considered.
She got out of the car and crossed the street, setting the dogs off again, a wave of barking that rippled back down the hill. For a moment she stood at the gate, which was not only unlocked but had no latch, simply sitting on its hinges, slightly ajar. She looked back toward the car for reassurance, hoping for a nod or—she didn’t know, a thumbs-up, even—but the sun’s glare had washed Vince’s windshield white.
She started up the stairs. Halfway up the hill, in the shade of a flowering magnolia, an ancient VW Bug sat half buried under a cover of dead leaves. The windows were open or broken away. Jess smelled pot and stale cigarettes from inside. She turned and looked out across the smoggy spread of rooftops and telephone poles, the never-ending cat’s cradle of wire, the bright windows of the houses nestled into the neighboring hills. She imagined sitting here with a friend, a high school summer night, smoking, watching the city darken and then come alive again with firefly points of streetlight.
She could be here now, of course, inside the house above. When Jess knocked, Isabella might be the one who answered the door.
Jess looked back down to the street, but the side of the neighboring garage obscured Vince’s car. All she could see was the front bumper shining in the sun. She turned and continued up the steps, brought back for a moment to the opening night of Spectrum, watching the initial visitors step through her studio door into that first dark room. One woman, Jess remembered, looked at her with a nervous smile, and then, as she crossed the threshold, held her breath.
“I know who you are,” Chloe said. “I watched the news.”
She leaned in the doorway, tall and long-limbed, filling the frame at a diagonal. Her jean shorts were cut ragged and high; her sleeveless T-shirt bared pale arms like birch branches. She was a few inches taller than Jess, and probably ten pounds lighter. Willowy was how a movie agent might have once described her, Jess imagined, a gilded description of a girl whose addictions didn’t run to food. But those days were over. The addictions had won. Chloe looked hungry and raw, her lips and nostrils chapped, her hair hanging in greasy tangles.
“I was hoping I could ask you some questions,” Jess said. “About Isabella.”
“There’s nothing to say.” Chloe straightened up to her full height, an attempt to intimidate, maybe. “I haven’t seen her in years.”
“Could you tell me what happened in Vegas?”
Chloe expelled a single derisive snort. “You’re a little late, don’t you think?” She stepped back inside and started closing the door.
“She’s missing again,” Jess said.
Chloe paused. “I thought she was in jail.”
“No one knows where she is.”
Chloe stared at Jess for a moment, searching for the lie. She looked over her shoulder, back into the house, listening, considering. Finally she opened the door again and turned away, walking barefoot across the living room. It was an actress’s stock gesture, an ambivalent invitation. Jess had seen it many times in Zack’s favorite noir films. Which made Jess the reeled-in heavy. It was her job to show some interest and follow.
The house was a Spanish-style cottage with a terra-cotta floor and low, arched doorways. A charmer at one point, but now a murky, slummy cave, with dark bedsheets over the windows and paint scabbing from the walls. In the living room, a half stick of incense burned on the fireplace mantel. The only decorative touch was a movie poster hanging above the saggy couch: Sorority Psycho. Chloe’s name was there in the credits below the painted image of a buxom, screaming co-ed in a torn nightie.
Chloe dropped onto the couch and nodded to a wooden dining chair by the front window. A big cereal bowl sat on the wicker coffee table, Sesame Street characters parading around its sides. Big Bird and that hairy elephant-looking creature, the imaginary friend. Jess couldn’t remember its name. The bowl was filled with a rainbow assortment of pills, which Chloe began sorting by color into little baggies.
Jess took off her sunglasses and sat in the dining chair. Chloe looked up from her bowl. Her eyes widened at Jess’s scar.
“Shit,” she said. “Izzy did that to you?”
Chloe lifted a thin joint from an ashtray. She lit it with a kitchen match and took a hit, watching Jess through the smoke.
“You two have been friends for a long time,” Jess said.
“You’ve obviously talked to Vince.”
“He’s worried.”
“And you’re worried, too? After what she did to you? That’s a serious guilt trip you’re on.” Chloe waved some of the smoke from her face, looked back down at her work.
“Why didn’t you go any farther than Vegas?”
“We ran out of money.”
“But Isabella went on,” Jess said. “Alone.”
“Not alone. She made a friend.”
“Who?”
“A waitress at one of the casinos. She brought us drinks and we tipped her until we didn’t have anything left. The drinks kept coming, though. I thought maybe she was into me, like it was some sort of come-on. But then Izzy had her breakdown and it was obvious who the waitress was interested in.”
Jess heard noises from another room—buzzing, muffled voices, a TV or radio. Chloe followed Jess’s gaze, looking down a hallway that disappeared back into the house.
“My roommate,” Chloe said.
Jess thought of Vince, down in the car. She wondered how loudly she would have to yell for him to hear.
“We lost all our money,” Chloe said, “and it really hit her, that this was as far as we were going to get—five hours from L.A. We weren’t going to make the break we’d always talked about. And maybe she realized that I probably never wanted to make the break in the first place. It was just a game to me, I guess. A fantasy. But Izzy fell apart. It was like all the glass inside her broke. That was when the waitress stepped in.”
“Do you remember her name?”
“Are you kidding? They’re all the same—the casinos, the waitresses.”
Chloe reached to the ashtray, stubbing out her joint. Something caught her eye. She blew the ashtray clear and held it up for Jess to see. The Tahitian Hotel & Casino was imprinted in the tin.
“This was the place,” Chloe said. “I took this on my way out.”
Jess saw movement at the edges of her vision, what she thought was another empty shadow, but when she turned she found a man standing in the hallway. He was tall and bony, bare-chested. His eyes swept the room, then Jess, edgy and suspicious.
“Everything cool?” he said.
Chloe smiled and nodded to Jess. “An old acting friend,” she said. “She played my mom in an Afterschool Special.”
The man scratched his neck, looking at Chloe, then Jess. Dark purple marks covered his chest, radiating out from his heart, a starburst of broken capillaries.
“Toss me one of those,” he said. Chloe picked up a baggie of blues and underhanded it across the room. The man caught the baggie, gave Jess another bald appraisal, then turned back down the hall.
Chloe looked at the ashtray and lowered her voice. “I left the casino with a guy I met. I didn’t want to deal with Izzy. She was so upset, making it seem like it was my fault.”
“And this waitress stayed with her?”
Chloe began picking pills from the bowl again, little octagons, butter yellow.
“I went back to the casino the next day, but Izzy wasn’t there. Neither was the waitress. I waited, but they didn’t show.” Chloe frowned. “I shouldn’t have left her. But that’s easy to say now, right?”
Jess watched Chloe’s face, the first admission of regret complicating her features. She nodded to Jess, her scar.
“She would never have done something like that before whatever happened in the desert.”
“Chloe.” The man’s voice called out from the other room.
Chloe looked to the hallway, then back to Jess.
“You should go,” she said.