City of Angels Read online

  Did I really see Rain in her little white hoodie being tossed into a big black car? If so, it was my fault. I told her to leave. I told her I didn’t give a shit what she did anymore. She was only doing what I said. I’d basically kicked her to the curb. My head hurt thinking about it and the drugs weren’t helping.

  Good God, I’d never touched anything stronger than alcohol before. Could taking acid make me see something that wasn’t even there? When would it wear off?

  Whenever Mickey Mouse took a break from his routine, my mind kept replaying what I had seen on the street. It was so dark and the car was far away. But then again, why would a car drive around without lights unless they were up to no good?

  What if Danny was right? What if Rain got into that car on her own, either because she didn’t think she could stay with me or because she wanted drugs? I didn’t know what it felt like to be addicted. I only knew what it had done to people I loved.

  When I was fifteen and my mother chose drugs over her husband and daughter, I swore to myself I would never get high. And here I was lying in a residential hotel in Los Angeles, waiting for the liquid acid to get the hell out of my body.

  I was sure my Radcliffe-educated mother didn’t choose what ended up being her destiny either—having a stillborn baby, getting hooked on drugs, and overdosing in a crack house.

  Her choices tore our little family into pieces. After her death, my dad began drinking heavily and falling asleep in front of the TV every night. One night, more than a year after my mom died, I was trying to pull him off his armchair to get him to bed when he started crying. Deep inside, I already knew he blamed me for my mother’s death—I’d seen it in his eyes when he looked at me. And he was right. But he’d never come out and said it until that night in front of the TV. “You could’ve saved her, you know.” His voice was low and slurred, but to me, every word seemed as if it were yelled through a megaphone. I knew he was talking about my mother, but at that moment, it felt like he was also talking about my baby sister. Two people dead because of me.

  The next morning, I packed a bag with a few items of clothing and my camera. I spent the next month crashing on people’s couches and trying to drink myself to death. One day I was sitting on a curb hung-over, with deep black circles under my eyes and knots in my hair. I was smoking a cigarette and picking at a hole in my tights when I noticed a car had stopped in front of me. It was my dad’s sleek Jaguar. The window slowly rolled down.

  “My clients…they’re all gone. The house—poof, probably gonna be gone, too. This car? A matter of time.” My dad’s voice was tinged with fury. He was drunk. Maybe the drunkest I’d ever seen him. His eyes seemed to be looking right past me, as if he couldn’t even focus. “My life is shit, Veronica. Utter shit. My wife is dead. Dead.” He choked on a sob, staring at the windshield. “And my daughter, sitting on the curb like a crack whore. You’re dead to me. Don’t bother coming home.”

  His car lurched away from the curb, fishtailing a little, kicking back a few small pebbles and sand that hit my shins. I blinked rapidly, trying to understand what had just happened. Not wanting to believe it. When his words finally sank in, I sprang up and, standing in the middle of the street, began pulling things out of my bag, a book, my makeup bag, a full water bottle, and began chucking them in the direction of the car, which was now several blocks away.

  “I hate you! I hate you!”

  I slumped to the ground, tears streaming down my face. I knew he thought it was my fault my mom died. I’d have to live with it forever. But crack whore? I’d never done drugs in my life—not even smoked pot. And I was a goddamn virgin. Right then, I made plans to change that as soon as possible. I met Chad the next day.

  Now, my face pressed into my futon at the American Hotel, I waited for the drugs to wear off so I could feel normal again. I was tired of this new life. I was tired of everything.

  Finally, around dawn, I fell asleep. By noon I pulled myself to the bathroom, hoping I wouldn’t run into anyone in the hall. My jaw was achy and stiff and my entire body was sore, but I wasn’t seeing strange things anymore.

  I’d been foolish to think I could help Rain by letting her stay here with me, by trying to be a big sister to her. What a fool. I hadn’t been able to save her.

  The man in the black car had taken her. I didn’t care what anyone else said—I’d heard her try to scream. Even high on acid, I knew what I’d heard. Rain had tried to scream for help. She hadn’t wanted to go with him.

  The police might believe me, though. I’d get dressed and head to the substation I’d gone to that first night with the surfers. That would be my first stop. I’d tell them she’d been kidnapped. If only I knew the man in the black car’s identity.

  I yanked Rain’s futon up. The magazine was still there, pressed flat. I flipped through the pages, analyzing each celebrity face. Who was her mystery man? He was always in the backseat, rolling down the dark-tinted window. You had to be rich to have a car with a driver, right? She’d said he was important, famous.

  I quickly flipped through the pages until I came across one that was carefully dog-eared. Here we go. The page contained articles about three men.

  Andy Martin was a thirty-year-old Los Angeles comedian who was going through a messy divorce after his wife caught him sleeping with the nanny. He was good looking in a nerdy way with big, black Elvis Costello glasses and a sensuous mouth. His shtick was performing at comedy clubs and producing sexy plays attended by bachelorette parties.

  Rex Walker was the most famous of the three, starring in a series of blockbuster action flicks. He smiled out from the photo like a superhero with his sculpted cheekbones, perfect black hair, and Dudley Do-Right chin. He was in his early forties and married to a British stage actress with her own busy acting career. He split his time between L.A. and the London house where his wife stayed with their two children.

  Matt Macklin, in his late twenties, was the bad boy of the bunch and the best looking with his shoulder-length strawberry blond hair and scruffy five o-clock shadow. His hatred of paparazzi gave Sean Penn a run for his money. He was from Ireland, but the article said he was staying in Los Angeles. He was a notorious drunk and womanizer known for bar fights and destroying hotel rooms.

  I ripped out the page and taped it to my wall. I paced and looked at the men in the pictures, wishing they could talk.

  I was coming back from the bathroom when Danny loped up to me with his usual loopy grin and guitar strap strung around his neck.

  “Hey, home girl. Rain back?” He seemed so sure and hopeful that she was in my room, sleepy from her adventures but safe.

  “No,” I said, my eyes narrowing. “I asked you to keep an eye on her. But you decided to get high instead.”

  Even as I said it, I knew it was wrong. It was my fault Rain was gone. I had no right to blame it on Danny.

  Danny mumbled something about only being in the bathroom a few minutes. “And sorry about the brownies, man, I thought you knew.”

  I tuned him out. He was right. I was so naïve, I deserved to have eaten his stupid brownies. I didn’t say anything more, just slipped inside my room and softly closed the door. I hated myself so much that I couldn’t bear to see his kind face. He should hate me, just like Rain did.

  “Damn,” he said from the other side of the door. I was leaning back against it, listening. It was silent on the other side. A few seconds later, the squeak of his sneakers told me he’d headed back toward his room.

  My insides wrenched and knotted with guilt. I didn’t want—or deserve—anyone’s friendship right then. It hurt too damn much to have friends and care about people. I had started to really care about Rain—foolishly thinking of myself as her big sister—and now she was gone.

  I straightened up and grabbed my bag. I had to find her. It was my fault she left. I told her to leave and she ran out in the street and that guy in the black car grabbed her. Because of my temper. It was my job to find her. But I’d have to do it on my own.

/>   The only person I could count on was myself. When would I ever learn? Once upon a time, a girl named Veronica Black had cared about other people, had relied on other people, and look what happened. As far as I was concerned, Veronica Black was dead. Just like my dad wanted her to be.

  The woman behind the desk at the police station on East Sixth Street wrinkled her nose when I told her why I was there.

  “How old are you anyway?” she said, loudly cracking her gum and patting her tight gray curls. “Aren’t you supposed to be in school?”

  “I graduated early.”

  “Well, you look like a teeny bopper. Go ahead and have a seat. You know, I got a niece looks young like you. Hates it. She’s treated like a little kid and she’s got kids of her own now.”

  The door slammed open and a skinny man wearing a hoodie came in, wildly looking around. When his glance fell on me his eyes grew wide and he crossed to the other side of the room, standing in a corner behind a fake potted palm like he was trying to hide.

  The clerk rolled her eyes.

  “What is it today, David?” she said, drawing out her words with a long sigh.

  The man cast me a fearful look and ran out the door, mumbling something I couldn’t quite understand, but that sounded like “white devil.”

  “Don’t take it personally,” the woman said. “David thinks if you aren’t black, you’re out to get him. We only have one white officer here at the substation and if he wanders by the front desk, David runs away. It used to be sort of entertaining. Now, it’s just tiresome. It’s not really his fault. He says it’s because of the radio the government surgically implanted in his head. That’s what happened when Reagan kicked all crazies out of the institutions and onto the streets. Made our life more interesting, I guess. At least that’s one way to look at it.”

  The tiny lobby had one chair, a mint green vinyl one, next to a small round coffee table with magazines and the LA Times. I pushed aside the fashion magazines and picked up the newspaper.

  The front-page story was about some cops on trial. Last year, four L.A. cops had pulled over this black guy, Rodney King, and hit him more than fifty times with their metal batons. My eyes grew wide reading it. A bunch of cops stood around and watched the other cops beat the crap out of this guy and didn’t even try to stop it.

  Thinking back, I sort of remembered something about it on TV last year. At the time, sitting in my Forest Lake bedroom with neighbor’s driving by in Range Rovers and Porsches, it seemed like something happening in a third world country, sort of like the surreal coverage of the Persian Gulf War.

  The grainy black-and-white home video the news kept showing of the guy getting beat up had sickened me. I finally changed the channel when they showed a photo of the guy with his bloody eye nearly swelled shut and his face so disfigured that his moustache drooped down by his jaw. I knew it was awful and wrong, but it didn’t seem real. It didn’t seem like anything that could affect me in my life.

  But now, reading the L.A. Times, it became clear that my childhood had sheltered me from the reality of the outside world. Even though the horror of my mother’s drug addiction and death had marked me forever, I still hadn’t known what it was like to live in a world not shielded by extreme wealth and privilege.

  Until now.

  Reading about the Rodney King beating now didn’t only make me sick, it made me furious. What the hell was wrong with people? When that crazy man, David, hid from me and called me a white devil, I’d felt a flush of shame at my privileged upbringing as a white person, even though feeling ashamed about it was just as ridiculous as him calling me a name like that.

  As I read more of the story, I realized that at least one decent person in the world had taken a stand. Thank God for the guy who woke up, videotaped the beating, and had the guts to take it to the news station when the police department wouldn’t answer his questions.

  I sat back and thought about that—the impact that one person could have against an organization as powerful as the Los Angeles Police Department. I read on. After an FBI investigation, a grand jury returned indictments against four officers who beat Rodney King. The trial was supposed to start in a few weeks.

  Thirty minutes later, after I’d read most of the paper, the door to the back offices opened and a police officer came out.

  “Come on back.” I followed his broad straight shoulders back to a dingy office. He sat down, leaning forward, his fingers splayed in a “church temple” stance on the desk. His tight, neat crew cut, starched uniform, and intense demeanor made him seem more like a drill instructor than a cop. “You want to report your friend missing?”

  I told him about Rain and everything that had happened the night before, leaving out the part about ingesting a drug-laced brownie and the part about meeting her at Kozlak’s house. For some reason I was afraid to bring up Big Shot Director’s name. When I finished, the police officer sat back, his lips drawn back in a thin line.

  “So your friend—who is twelve and a minor and a homeless junkie to boot—up and disappeared during a party last night after you guys got in a fight. And for some reason, you think she was kidnapped, taken against her will by some celebrity or something in a big black car? Did I get all that right?”

  “Yes. I heard her start to scream.” I was pissed off that he dismissed Rain so easily as a “junkie.” My anger was growing the more he said.

  “Is that your story?” he interrupted.

  “Yes, but you’re making it seem like she took off on her own. She didn’t. She screamed.” My voice rose and I gritted my teeth.

  “Do you have any proof she didn’t leave on her own volition? You guys were in an argument, right? Maybe she just needed some time to cool off.” He raised both of his eyebrows.

  I was starting to get angry. “She wouldn’t have left without saying something first.”

  He scanned a piece of paper on the desk. “So, you don’t even know her last name? And her first name is…what, Rain? Are you even sure that’s her real name?”

  “Yes.” I rolled my eyes. “I told you. Her parents were hippies. That’s her name.”

  “And her parents were also homeless in Santa Cruz? And she has no living relatives other than her parents who ran away to Mexico? So, in other words, she’s a runaway who should be in the foster care system instead of living in some residential hotel in downtown L.A.?”

  “Yes,” I said dully. He was not going to help me. He didn’t take me seriously at all. I was relieved I hadn’t mentioned Kozlak and Chad in case he decided to get in touch with them about Rain.

  “I’ll take down a report, but I’m going to warn you there isn’t much here to go on. I think you’re out of luck. The most you can hope for is that she gets sick of being homeless and on drugs and comes back to you. But I’ll tell you right now—that never happens.”

  It was almost what the Chicago police had said about my mom. I stared at him without blinking.

  “And,” he said, holding his door open for me, “when she does come back, you need to bring her down here. She should be in a foster home and in school.”

  When I stood and he saw how short I was, he raised an eyebrow. “How old are you anyway?”

  “Eighteen. I moved here the minute I turned of age.”

  He looked at me for a second as if he didn’t believe me. I stood and walked out before he asked to see my ID.

  I raced out of the police station, slamming the glass door behind me. The cops were useless. What had I expected? L.A., Chicago, they were all the same.

  The shadowy streets of downtown L.A. were dirty, strewn with cigarette butts and litter, and cast in deep shadows by the surrounding skyscrapers. But unlike at night, during the day they were alive with people. Walking back from the police station, I found the alley where that man had attacked Rain. If I was wrong—if everyone else was right—then she hadn’t been kidnapped and had gotten into the black car on her own. If she’d gone with the man to get more drugs and had been let out a few
blocks away, she might still be around.

  Keeping an eye out for a pink-streaked head, I nearly ran into a homeless woman pushing a shopping cart. She smiled and it gave me courage. “Have you seen a girl with pink hair around?”

  The woman nodded vigorously.

  “I did see that girl.” She eyed my bag meaningfully. I took out a five dollar bill.

  “Where did you see her?”

  The woman plucked the money out of my hand. “She was here the other night and then I saw her under the bridge. Yup. That’s where she is now.”

  I hurried away, casting a last glance down Skid Row, which suddenly seemed darker than the surrounding streets. That night I found her in the alley, Rain kept talking about finding someone under the Fourth Street Bridge.

  Pounding up the stairs to my room, it was clear what I had to do, but every inch of me screamed against it. It seemed like fate wanted me to retrace my footsteps and tread the same path I had trod trying to find my mother. I only hoped it wouldn’t end the same way.

  I collapsed on the floor, leaning against the wall with my eyes closed. My heart was racing, thudding up in my throat. My breath came in short gasps and I was gulping for air. I put my head down between my knees and tried to regulate my breathing, but every time I thought about where I was going and what I had to do, my pulse began pounding in my ears, drowning out any other sound. It was a panic attack. Not the worst one I’d ever had, but still.

  Entering a homeless camp, even in the middle of the day, seemed impossible to me. Ever since that day I’d found my mother, I’d had an irrational fear about homeless people. But I needed to do this. Once I calmed my breathing and my heart rate seemed to return to normal, I remembered the promise I’d made to Rain as she went through her withdrawals—I won’t leave you. I had told her to get the fuck out and now my job was to bring her home.

  As I sat there, steeling myself to get up, my neighbors passed by outside in the hall, their voices carrying as they laughed and joked. Probably on their way to grab a beer at Al’s. A small part of me wondered what it would be like to open that door and ask them for help, but I shook my head, knowing once more I was on my own. My freak out the night before had ruined everything. I stood, taking a deep breath. The sun was growing lower in the sky and there was no way I was going to go under the bridge at night. I wasn’t the naïve, sheltered girl with the pink bedroom anymore. That night, long ago, when I went to find my mother, I’d foolishly traipsed into that abandoned house in a pretty flowered dress and ballet slippers.