1.
Manny found me after my set on the Giggle Lounge’s second stage, the smaller one where they dump the newbies and terminally unfunny. I was working on new material but nobody in the audience laughed until I made jokes about traffic. When all else fails, you can always joke about traffic and Angelenos will at least give you a chuckle, even the hipsters from Silver Lake who work from home and travel around on electric scooters.
“You really bombed,” Manny said. He had followed me from the stage to the far end of the bar, where he cornered me against the wall – one of his classic moves, allowing him to use his massive girth to its most intimidating effect. “They pay you for that?”
“They pay me in alcohol,” I said, shoving a free drink ticket at the bartender, who retaliated with a watered-down rum and Coke. “Why are you here, Manny? You finally develop a sense of humor?”
“I got a sense of humor. I hired you, remember?” He jabbed a finger at my neon-orange Hawaiian shirt. “I also remember when you, the great Dash Fuller, the terror of paparazzi everywhere, used to wear lovely suits instead of that abomination.”
“Helps me blend with this crowd,” I said, noting how Manny’s two-piece Tom Ford suit was impeccable as usual, but his dress shirt was wrinkled around the collar. Given his intense dedication to always looking faultless – my image is the job, he liked to say – it was a startling flaw. Something big was distracting him.
“Maybe it’s time for you to unleash the bespoke,” he said. “I have an urgent quest for you.”
“I quit, remember? I’d rather dunk my head in a barrel of fire ants.”
“Oh, stop being dramatic. We need someone who’s not on the payroll. The scumbags are all over this one.”
“Not interested,” I said, draining the drink. Onstage, a shaggy dude in a Scooby-Doo t-shirt launched into his first joke of the night, about the ghost of Marlon Brando watching a Marvel movie. He was unfunny enough to make me feel better about my own performance.
“Yeah, like your standup career is going so well,” Manny snorted. “Come on, we both know you could use the cash. And you won’t have to hurt anyone this time. Promise.”
I considered it. It was five days until the end of the month, and I was down to a couple hundred dollars in my bank account. I had originally planned to re-download the usual gig apps and spend fifteen hours a day delivering food and driving people around until I could cover my rent. I preferred gigging for ZoomFood, a local app that paid a great rate but forced its drivers to wear a purple vest and baseball cap stamped with its yellow ‘Z’ logo, a humiliating costume I kept wadded in the corner of my car trunk. A job with Manny could spare me that exhausting fate.
I didn’t want to dip a toe back into his swamp.
But I didn’t want to end up on Skid Row, either.
“Half in advance,” I said, already hating myself. “And if I don’t like where the job is going, I’m keeping the cash and walking away. Can you live with that?”
Manny nodded. “It’ll have to do. I’m not explaining the job here. Come outside with me.”
“Why? It’s a hundred degrees out.”
“More like eighty. Don’t tell me you’ve gone soft like all these twits in here.”
“Careful,” I said, gesturing for him to lead the way to the doors. “They’re very sensitive.”
We exited the Giggle Lounge. The air smelled faintly of smoke and the night sky had an orange tint. There was a fire in the rolling hills near the Getty Center, three hundred acres burned and counting, powered by the Santa Ana winds. As we stepped beyond the club’s bubble of air conditioning, the heat was like a feverish hand over my face.
Manny’s blue Mercedes SUV sat at the far end of the parking lot. He unlocked it to disable the alarm before leaning against the driver’s side door and pulling a vape from his suit pocket and sucking on it. “I get the comedy thing. It’s the girls, right?” he said, blowing a cloud of apple-scented vapor. “You’re still relatively young. You can score those hipster chicks, they’re fit from all that Pilates, they’ll do anything to show they’re marriage material. It’s got to be that. It’s sure as hell not the money. How much does the average comedian make? A buck-ninety?”
“Instead of exposing me to your grodiest fantasies,” I said, “how about you tell me what the wonderful world of Hollywood PR needs tonight?”
“Okay.” He blew a cloud of apple-scented vapor. “You follow Karl Quaid on social media?”
“I don’t do social media, remember?”
“Oh yeah, you’re one of the few smart people on that front, I forget. But even in your precious bubble, you know about the Karl Quaid situation, right?”
I nodded. How could I not? Karl Quaid was the front-page story on every tabloid website from here to Karachi. The studio had structured a superhero franchise around his performance as Doppler, a heroic
vampire with the powers of eco-location and flight, and the first two movies had racked up almost two billion dollars at the box office. Of course, that was before Quaid went nuts.
“As of now, Karl’s officially crossed the line from weirdo to dangerous,” Manny said, taking another hit of nicotine. “Filming on the next movie starts in three weeks, and nobody can find the guy. One of the biggest stars in the world, and he disappears, poof. What makes it even worse is–”
“News said he’s got that actress with him, right?” I said. “The parents are upset?”
“Amber Rodney, yeah, and the shooting on her new show kicks off in a month. Thank everything holy she’s a couple years too old to be jailbait, but her parents are threatening to sue the studio, and so’s the streamer producing her show. That’s not even the worst of it. Karl’s posting about crazy Jonestown stuff – demons run the world, everyone needs to commit suicide at the same time, one big adios to save the environment. Police are getting a little too interested.”
“And you can’t find him?” I grinned, enjoying Manny’s discomfort. “Even with all his posting?”
“No. He’s smart enough to never post a photo of a place we recognize. It’s not a criminal investigation, technically, so we can’t get a court order for the location metadata. I got people sitting outside his houses – he’s got three, if you’re wondering. We’re watching his mom in Utah, his sister in Colorado, anyone else he usually hangs out with. Nothing.”
“And you think I can do something.”
The front doors of the Giggle Lounge crashed open, ejecting a crowd of drunken twentysomethings into the parking lot. Manny quieted until they stumbled past. “You were my best guy,” he said, not quite meeting my eyes. “Look, I’m sorry how it ended. I shouldn’t have asked you to do certain things. But I appreciated it, and I know the studios did, as well. This situation with Karl, it won’t be like the old days. We need fresh eyes on it.”
“Ten thousand,” I said.
“You don’t come
cheap,” he said.
“You’re well aware of what I can do.”
“Sure, but I can’t do that amount. How about four?” He nodded at my ancient Nissan Altima in the far corner of the lot, beyond the flickering edge of the Giggle Lounge’s neon lights, where I’d parked it in the forlorn hope that the shadows would cloak its rusted panels, the dented driver’s door, the sky-blue paint bleached in odd patterns by years of fierce sun.
“I can’t believe you’re driving that,” he said, “instead of that beautiful Benz you used to have.”
“I couldn’t deal with the Benz,” I said.
“Then upgrade to something that doesn’t burn as much oil as gas, mother of God. Please tell me it’s got more power than a Prius,” he said, and winked.
“Ten grand,” I said again, before dropping into a passable Liam Neeson imitation: “You need my very particular set of skills.”
We regarded each other. Manny’s gaze was like a laser heating flesh, and the longer I stayed within its focus, the harder it was to keep my face stony and my eyes neutral. Except I was tough enough to win this round. He notched his head to the left, his laser drifting to the front of the club, and said, “Fine.”
“Half in advance.”
He patted his jacket. “Got it right here. Figured you’d drive a hard bargain.”
“Plus expenses.” Maybe I couldn’t tell a joke that brought down the house, but I could leverage a desperate soul.
He raised a hand. “Just a couple hundred bucks at most. I won’t give you more leash than that. You know what you’d do with it.”
Yes, something unbearably stupid. Deep in the tailspin of my former life, I’d tried to expense a bad weekend in Vegas. Studio accounting is a wiggly game, and its high priests ensure even the biggest blockbuster never earns a profit on paper, and yet they’d objected to my attempt to pass on several thousand dollars in liquor and gambling expenses. Nor had Manny appreciated my joke about itemizing Krystal (the champagne) and Krystal (the stripper).
“Fine,” I said. “But I’m not signing anything. No NDAs, no non-disparage agreements.
I’ll never talk.”
“Yes, yes, okay. I love how you get more annoying with age.”
“Making sure we’re clear.”
Manny puffed again, tilting his head to follow the roaring lights of a 747 descending toward LAX. I wondered if he regretted his choice of profession. I could have told him that quitting feels liberating at first, but the memories never leave. I had cracked the heads of hangers-on who’d leaked to the press, stolen phones and laptops from expensive villas, rescued kidnapped dogs, and escorted pregnant girlfriends onto buses bound for Omaha, all so the studios could keep their stars untarnished and the money rolling in. How do you ever scrub clean of that?
And now they wanted me back in.
I hated how that idea made my stomach tingle, but I couldn’t deny a part of me had always loved the hunt.
Manny prodded my elbow with a thick envelope. “Here’s the first payment,” he said. “You know the drill: absolute discretion. You find Karl, you call me immediately, and only me. You got it? Silence, cunning, and deceit.”
2.
After Manny left, I returned to the Giggle Lounge’s second stage. The shaggy dude was still working the microphone, telling a long and convoluted story about how he ended up in the emergency room with a beer bottle stuck on his thumb. The audience was silent as deep space. I ascended to the stage and the dude – I vaguely remembered his name was Trevor – trailed off, squinting in confusion.
“Give me the mic,” I said, snapping my fingers.
Trevor handed it over, proving yet again the maxim I’d learned as a fixer and bagman for Hollywood’s finest: do anything with confidence, and people will follow your lead without hesitation. We all have a reflexive need to obey someone in clear command. I took the sweaty microphone and turned to the crowd, figuring the club’s management would ban me from the premises after performing this stunt, but I was never going to become the next Robin Williams anyway.
“I have money,” I said, holding up the fat envelope from Manny. “If anyone can give me any information on where I can find Amber Rodney and Karl Quaid, I will give you a thousand bucks. Potentially a lot more. But the information needs to be good, you understand? I’ll be waiting in the parking lot if any of you want to take me up on it.”
Someone at the bar broke into hysterical laughter.
“This isn’t a bit,” I said. “Everyone in this room is an actor or knows an actor, even you D-list reality show wannabes. I know how all of you talk. I’m not interested in harming Amber or Karl, but I do need to find them. You know where I’ll be.”
Someone to my left giggled. Maybe I should have built my comedy routine around my old job. There’s always humor in doing horrible things, right? Trevor stared at me with big puppy eyes as I handed the microphone back and whispered, “Good luck.”
Outside the club, I took position in the most well-lit portion of the parking lot, within sight of the bouncers, and waited to see who bit at my lure. Discretion and silence are all well and good, but I’ve learned you sometimes need to go loud if you want results.
Trevor’s set must have ended, because a sizable crowd pushed through the doors, some of them hollering and pointing at me. I waited. If anyone wanted to volunteer information, they would hold back until the bystanders thinned out. There was a slim chance that someone in a crowd of fifty would have what I needed, but I had to start somewhere.
Fifteen minutes later, as I was debating whether to leave, a thin blonde girl in a tank top crept toward me. She had a spider tattoo on her left shoulder and a ring through her nose. She stopped well beyond my reach and crossed her bony arms over her chest.
“A thousand, huh?” she asked.
“If you got something good.”
She waggled a hand. “I might. What are you? Reporter? Paparazzi?”
“Private detective.” That was a lie, of course, but it felt like the right thing to say.
“You got a license, something like that?”
“Working toward it. You need three years of investigative work.” I’d read that in a magazine once.
She tilted her head. “Okay, well, I’m not telling you my name. Show me the money first.”
I pulled the envelope out of my pocket and opened it enough for her to see the crisp hundred-dollar bills inside. “If the info’s good, ten of these bills are yours. What is it?”
“ZenKittenThree, no spaces. It’s a profile on Instagram.”
“Whose profile?”
“A friend of Amber’s. She’s got, like, three followers. Doesn’t use tags, hashtags, anything like that.”
“A friend of Amber Rodney.”
“Yeah.”
“And Amber’s in her posts?”
“Yeah, but she’s all disguised. Big hat, sunglasses, scarves. Karl Quaid is with her, too, but he’s wearing a mask in all her shots, like a cloth one with an octopus design on it, plus sunglasses.”
I pulled out my phone and opened Instagram. I’d half-fibbed to Manny about social media: I didn’t maintain any accounts under my own name, but I had a few ghost profiles sprinkled around, just in case. I tapped ‘ZenKittenThree’ into the search bar. “And the posts are all recent?”
“Within the last day or two.”
As the profile popped into view, I flicked through the images. The most recent ones were snapped in what was clearly West Hollywood: a stretch of Laurel Avenue, a popular brunch place with a line of angel-headed hipsters stretching out the front door, the public entrance of the Chateau Marmont. Against this glitzy-gritty backdrop paraded young people dressed in hip, expensive clothes, their faces covered by hats and sunglasses and cloth masks – but their clothing couldn’t fully cloak the profiles of two of the world’s most famous people. I noted Karl Quaid’s razor-sharp cheekbones poking above the edges of his colorful mask, and the galaxy-dark eyes of Amber Rodney below
a wide-brimmed cowboy hat.
The next few images were bleak: baggies of pills on a table, alongside a gold-plated 9mm handgun. A thin forearm with a nasty bruise near the wrist. A gleaming white sink smeared with blood.
“Is your friend in trouble?” I asked.
The girl shifted from foot to foot. “She’s been friends with Amber since they were kids. Maybe ‘friends’ is too strong a word – she’s more like a follower? Amber lets her post if she doesn’t tag anyone, mention the location, whatever.”
I tilted my phone so she could see the image of the sink. “Whether or not this blood is real, it’s a call for help.”
“You think I don’t know that?” she snarled. “I been telling her to get away, but she says she needs to protect Amber. Karl’s got a whole lot of girls around him. There are guns, pills, plus he’s making them fast for, like, three days at a time to boost their chi–”
I put my phone away and slipped ten bills from the envelope. “Before I give this to you, I have one last question: where are they?”
“I don’t know, okay? If I did, I would tell you. Was that good enough? Do I get my money?”
“Sure,” I said, holding out the bills. “Don’t tell anybody about this, okay?”
“I swear.” She snatched the money and backed away. “You’ll make sure they’re all okay?”
I didn’t answer her. I’d seen too many bad things to promise anything to anyone. ...
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