7. It’s 11 am, Doesn’t Anyone Here Go To Work?
I’D WOKEN UP EARLY to throw out the shirt I’d worn the night before, which I’d stuffed inside a double layer of garbage bags.
It was covered in vomit and two people’s blood.
Then I’d gone to meet Roro at the salon, something I could do without the phone I still hadn’t retrieved—in the haze of last night, I’d forgotten about it completely.
Ro, upon seeing my face, had taken me to the new gastropub next door so we could talk privately, away from the hypervigilant ears of the salon. Now, unbelievably, we were brunching with everyone else in this city who didn’t work a traditional nine-to-five.
“So you watched this guy almost kill a man,” she posited emphatically, reaching over to steal one of the fries she’d ostensibly ordered for the table, “and then you thought you’d just take him to the ER instead of calling the fucking police?”
“It’s not like he found some stranger in a back alley to beat to death.
It seemed like they did that kind of thing all the time, like it was a fight club or something.
” Roro was looking at me like I was willfully mid-delusion.
“What was I supposed to do? He was beaten half to death himself, Ro, it wasn’t exactly an unfair fight.
” At least, I hadn’t thought it was at first, until that flicker of something changed in his eyes.
“Actually, at first it looked like—” I hesitated. “Honestly, when I first got there and saw him getting his ass handed to him, it seemed like he was trying to…” It felt too dark for a Friday morning to say what I thought he was trying to do.
Roro disagreed. “What, die?” She rolled her eyes. “There are easier ways.”
“Yeah, like a bus?” I’d already told her how we’d met him before.
Roro let the fry drop from her hand with a shudder. “God. So what did you do with Lazarus after that?”
I told her about the aftermath of the fight, when he briefly regained consciousness in my car, long enough to tell me which doctor to call. The way he’d thrown up nothing but stomach acid and some partially digested pills. “Then I left him there and went home. And now I don’t know what to do.”
“Quit,” Roro offered succinctly, helping herself to more fries.
She chewed like Grandma chewed, like JR chewed.
My mother hated it. It didn’t bother me, but I wouldn’t be partaking.
As I’d explained to Roro many times, it wasn’t an eating disorder if I was doing it for my career.
It was a business decision, caloric transaction.
“Get the fuck out of there, Anya, no shit.” She dusted salt from her fingertips and added, mouth partially full, “Want a gloss while you’re here? Your highlights look brassy.”
“Fuck you,” I said listlessly, and shook my head.
I remained unsure what exactly I found less than straightforward about the Julian situation.
It should have been as simple as Roro said it was—I should just rack up some (more) credit card debt for a new phone and never see any of the de Witts again.
But something else was bothering me, something I couldn’t set right, like someone had set my brain on fire.
Like one of those perpetual motion machines, ticking back and forth.
I’d already DMed Teddy about it from my Instagram account. I logged in from my computer, since I didn’t have my phone, and said: do you ever have to do weird shit for the de witts?
better question is am I ever not doing weird shit for the de witts was his reply, which didn’t help. why, everything okay?
have you ever met julian?
who’s julian? I don’t know everyone at ara yet. just the business side
what about emmanuelle? is she … like …
sane? questionable. no personality diagnoses on the record but everything else is a real gray area
cool … I’d actively tried to think of something else to say and couldn’t.
busy later? wanna come over after work?
I left that one on read, temporarily. Or not. I’d decide later.
Back to the conversation with Roro, I shifted in my seat. “Obviously I’m going to quit—”
“Good.”
“—but I just sort of feel like—”
“But nothing.”
My mouth snapped shut inadvertently—I had lots more where that came from, but Roro was Ate, she was the elder, and I didn’t have words yet for my hesitation.
It was mostly a lot of??? regarding the upside-down I’d entered the moment I walked into the de Witt house.
The ending of the sentence I just sort of feel like would have been there’s more to the story, which famously wasn’t the path to smart choices.
This wasn’t a situation I could enter safely from the perspective of the audience.
The sane choice, the only choice, was to bail.
“Listen to me, Anya.” Roro was using her bossy voice. “You don’t want anything to do with these rich assholes. They probably hunt their staff for sport.”
I rolled my eyes. “I told you about the money, though, right?” The ten thousand dollars a month that was probably what Emmanuelle thought a banana happened to cost.
“Some things aren’t worth the money.” Roro leveled a fry at me. “Didn’t that woman take your phone from you? That’s fucked up. With things as they are, some psycho killer just roaming the streets? You’re basically asking to get yourself killed.”
“Come on.” Roro had a tendency for dramatics; it was born into all of us, inherited from our grandmother without the requisite migrant trauma to keep it in check. “It’s not like she put me in any real danger, she’s just weird. And aren’t you sleeping with a rich asshole?”
“Ricky’s a lawyer, you bitch. He’s not that kind of rich. He doesn’t take his employees’ personal property or have his own private doctor on call.” I’d already told her about Dr. Hodel, who even after midnight had answered the phone within two rings and told me he’d meet me outside the hospital.
When he arrived—a white-haired septuagenarian who looked like the Hollywood interpretation of a concierge doctor—he told me that I could leave, and that was that.
I mentioned to him that Emmanuelle still had my phone, and he curtly suggested I get it in the morning.
Then he called for a stretcher and led Julian to some other vehicle, and I navigated my way home using the stars. (The ones on Hollywood Boulevard.)
“That’s the thing, though.” I picked at the fries to keep Roro off my back, and to have something to do with my anxious fingers.
“I didn’t feel like that was a rich person thing at all.
I mean, who would keep a guy that battered out of the hospital?
His ribs looked broken, and I was pretty sure he had a concussion …
I don’t know.” I shrugged, even though the last thing I felt about the whole situation was that I could shrug it off.
I hadn’t even brought up the nature of Julian’s condition, which I doubted Emmanuelle had been honest about. “Something’s sketchy.”
“Yeah, it is, so take it from someone older and wiser: Run.” Roro threw a napkin over the fries to stop herself from eating them and rose to her feet.
“Quit the job, end of story. I’ve got a new client, you know.
A screenwriter. Maybe the two of you can meet up and talk shop.
” She wagged a finger at me. “What you need is industry connections, not an arrest for being some dude’s accomplice to murder. ”
“I know that.” I sighed heavily. “But this was supposed to be a connection for me, remember? It’s William de Witt—”
“How old’s that guy now? Forty?” Roro was already looking it up on her phone.
“Probably older,” I said. Everything I knew about time suggested he had to be well into his fifties at least, though he didn’t seem that way to me. Roro, meanwhile, held up the IMDb page that said he was born in 1972, which meant nothing to me.
“Still hot, though,” I said, nudging the phone back toward her.
“Whatever. Nothing’s worth this shit.” Roro gestured for me to follow her back to the salon. “The world’s fucking dangerous, Anya. You see that new girl they found dead?”
“Which one?”
“Exactly.” She arched one laminated brow as she reached for her purse.
“One day she’s missing and the next she’s dismembered in the middle of a parking lot with a bunch of cheap lipstick drawn on her face.
” Roro illustrated this with a hideous Joker smile, then let it drop. “People out there are fucked, Anya.”
All around us, heads turned. I offered an apologetic smile and nudged Roro firmly to the door. “So I take it you’re still keeping tabs on dismembered girls?”
“Hell yeah, bitch. I’m calling the show Santa Ana.
” She pulled out her phone as we walked to show me a long scroll of sketches, all drawings of corpses with stained glass flowers where their internal organs should be.
“See? And then all these faces make up the face of Santa Ana herself. It’s going to be huge.
” She motioned over to the restaurant wall to indicate something like a mural.
“This one’s gonna be for a contemporary gallery—that one on Hollywood. ”
“What, the one by the wax museum?” I zoomed in on one of Roro’s more finished sketches.
It was her most recent, from sometime in the last couple of days.
There were stained glass daisies splitting the girl’s chest cavity.
A rendering of the sacred heart—the one with chains, a cross, and a halo of flames—slipped out from garish painted lips like a Catholic take on a comic book sigh.
All the girls in Roro’s drawings looked vaguely similar—they were all young and fashionably LA pretty, depicted in shades of bisque and taupe like a Covergirl ad.
I suddenly remembered the pictures I’d seen of the girl from the Amber Alert, the dress she had probably thought was a serve, never knowing how the night would end.
I remembered reading something once about people who loved true crime as a form of entertainment—that everyone believed they could die in a mass shooting, but nobody saw themselves as a plausible victim for some sadistic crime.
For a moment, I felt the weight of something—significance.