“My mother was a twin. And…there was a car accident, when she was a little girl in Rhode Island. Everybody was killed except her. Her parents. Her aunt. And her twin brother.”
“That is a horrible thing for a little girl to survive.”
“My mom’s brother fell over her, that’s what saved her. She never talked about it—not a word. But…the way I see it, it’s like she spent the rest of her days trying to…bring him back. Fucking everybody, trying to rejoin with him, with some missing part of herself.”
“Is it true she slept with Rey?”
“She slept with everybody, and nobody could hold on to her—my dad was the only one who could handle her. That’s why she married him, she couldn’t drive him crazy. Though she sure as shit tried.”
Cinnamon eyed for the waitress. Round two came like a pair of tooth-clenched soldiers. She drank. I sipped. The fruit wasn’t disguising the potion much.
“Anyway,” she said, “the night Rey was killed, I was with Emil, the whole time. Believe me—I’ve been over every detail in my mind ten zillion times. It’s my main occupation.”
“Well—what do you remember?”
She held herself with a funny mix of reluctance and the desire to connect. I worked to be still as possible, to let it happen. There’s no other way.
Finally, she said, “It was Oscar night. My parents had another one of their screaming matches in the afternoon and Daddy got all tuxed up and went alone. Then me and Mom and Emil watched the ceremonies in the living room on NBC, full color on the Zenith—big wow. Mom was…seething the whole time. Daddy accepted an award for Tiger Blue, he was one of the producers, and just as he got up onto the podium with his cronies, Mom stood up and stormed off out of the living room. And it all was a little extra dramatic because Emil and I had dosed.”
“On LSD?”
“Yeah, we were just coming on and it was superstrong.”
“Did your mom know?”
“Naw, she was off where she always was—in her precious studio, the one Daddy built for her in the backyard. It was a guesthouse with a piano and her easels and paints and a six-thousand-dollar Italian couch and everything. Anyway, me and Emil went up to my room and by this time, we were just gassed out of our minds, listening to Iron Butterfly.”
Then she slugged her drink. “We were gone. And right in the middle of peaking—you know, the part where, like, nothing stays still, all of a sudden there was Daddy, standing in my bedroom doorway with his bow tie loose.”
She scrunched her face like she was begging for an exit from the story.
“I turned down the music but it was too late, he popped his head in and we were busted. I got up to hug him, congratulate him, and he was all convivial, Oscar in hand. At first he was clueless. ‘Hi, Emil, hi, Pumpkin Pie.’ Then he asked where my mom was and like a total freak I started laughing hysterically—he turns to Emil and says, ‘What the heck’s the matter with her?’ And Emil’s cool as a cucumber. ‘She’s just happy. She got excited seeing you on the television.’ But I wouldn’t stop, I mean, I was really off my rocker. Daddy tried to shake me and I started crying. He might’ve even slapped me or something because I started babbling like a psycho until finally I remember screaming—‘Daddy, I’m scared! I’m gonna die!’ That was the last straw. Like, he finally got it. ‘Are you two on drugs?!’ Emil was scrambling to calm him, but Daddy wasn’t listening. ‘Where the hell is Foxy?’ That was his nickname for my mother. Neither of us answered. Daddy almost, like, tossed me on the bed. Then he went looking for her. And I knew…”
“Knew what?”
“She probably had someone back there. I mean, she often did. My dad went up the path to the guesthouse. It was dark. I don’t think he’d been there five times in his life, not after his studio guys built the place, and I don’t know why he decided to interrupt her this time.”
“Because his daughter was having a bad acid trip?”
“Yeah, well, anyway—off he went, and I followed him. It was dark but when you’re flying on 270 mikes of purple microdot, the colors don’t slow down for nighttime. The music was still playing loud or…maybe it was just playing in my head. But everything that happened next…went very fast. Complete confusion. I don’t think I will ever know exactly…”
She closed her eyes, warding off the juju.
“What?”
“My mother was in a robe, dark silk in the doorway. She was frightened, frantic, explaining something. I could see them but I couldn’t see them—they kept morphing into shapes. She led Daddy back around the side of the bungalow and I heard a wail—I didn’t know what he saw, not yet. I recoiled, back into the house, the kitchen. I never saw the body but Emil, he made, like, a dash to look. He came back to me freaked out of his fucking mind—but for real.”
Cinnamon opened her eyes.
“You sure you need to hear this?”
I nodded.
“Daddy returned in a blind panic. He gave Emil a weird look, like…the way you might look at a rabid dog. ‘Son—I want you to tell me what happened out here.’ Actually, no—first my dad grabbed him. ‘Marj says she saw you and this boy fighting. Is that true?’ Emil couldn’t speak, he was stuttering too bad to defend himself. ‘Look, whatever happened with this Mexican boy, I’m sure it was self-defense, a bad accident—’ My mother was behind him, pale as death; Daddy was rambling like a producer pitching a movie—‘This drug dealer came to sell marijuana and…and other narcotics to Emil and things went sour and Emil did what he had to do to protect you and your mother and—’ Even blazing on acid, I knew it was wrong, insane. He said he had the power to talk to some people, get it off the books. Then my mom shrieked—‘Herbert, call the fucking cops already!’ ”
“So there’s a body in the backyard, Rey’s body, and your parents are scrambling, blaming Emil. And then?”
“And then Emil shot out of there like a wild man—who wouldn’t?”
She exhaled, looked around the Bootlegger like it was the flimsiest bamboo hut in a tropical storm.
“Even the next day Daddy kept going on about how it was an accident, and he promised me they wouldn’t take Emil away—he swore to me he would protect Emil all the way, even while he was accusing him. And my father was a bigshot—he did have power like that. I mean, Senator Cranston used to come over for dinner when I was in grade school; Tom Bradley saved a box for us at the Rose Parade. I really thought he would look after Emil.”
She looked up at me with a fractured smile.
“And he didn’t. He betrayed me. My own dad.”
“That is crazy,” I said. “So harsh. But I still don’t see why Emil didn’t try to defend himself.”
She leaned forward in the grip of drunken memory. “Two things my father didn’t count on, okay. First, Emil was not a citizen yet. Emil did not want to get sent back to Israel, he was draft age. Any conviction could’ve been deadly. Plus, Daddy thought Reynaldo Durazo was just some sorry Mexican kid from nowhere. You know that soft-pedal racism—the reasonable middle-class kind. It could make you puke. Well, actually Daddy had it all wrong—Rey was from this gnarly family, his uncle was a big union organizer. And maybe Mayor Bradley got a kick out of having a few Hollywood Jews at the Rose Parade, but the Durazo family were not showbiz, they had pull, they were real life.”
She leaned back. I put down my drink and pushed it away. “And then you took off.”
“And then I took off. In my mom’s Civic. It wasn’t like now. A person could disappear back then. I used to have these paperbacks all about runaways—Go Ask Alice, What Really Happened to the Class of ’65. And I was all, like, if they could do it, so can I.”
“But why—” I made a hand gesture to the bar. “Why this? Why fake your own death?”
“I just got so tired. Tired of running. Living in crash pads, ducking the cops. Some people hid me out and—”
