Anonymous Rex (5 page)

If there’s one thing I learned from that first week or so last January, it’s simply this: It’s a long, slow, grueling climb to the middle, but the ride down comes at nothing short of terminal velocity.

The bus rambles on.

Three hours later, the car I rented from a cut-rate agency sputters to a halt in front of the Evolution Club in Studio City, and I say a silent
prayer to the automotive gods that the last two miles have all been downhill. This rusted-out warhorse of a 1983 Toyota Camry conked out on me as I was driving up Laurel Canyon, and it took an hour and a half to find someone who would open the door to a total stranger claiming to need a pair of pliers, a length of yarn, and a wire cutter. Turns out I wasn’t the only one who’d ever decided to make some on-the-fly additions to this pitiful automobile—one peek into the Camry’s engine is like a look into an alternate reality where children and mental patients are the only ones permitted to become mechanics. Fraying gift ribbon holds together bundles of wires, one of the cylinders still bears the markings of a Campbell’s-soup wrapper, and I’m pretty darn sure that paper clips do not make for good spark-plug holders. I simply can’t imagine that any of these improvised improvements will hold up for much longer. With luck, I can squeeze a little more money out of Teitelbaum and rent a better car soon, as I can foresee the day in the near future when this little Japanese import will snap beneath the pressure of jerry-built engine parts and stopgap gas hoses and commit hari-kari, happily shuffling off its ’motive coil in favor of a less makeshift existence.

And I refuse to take the bus again.

The Evolution Club—gotta be a dino joint, no two ways about it. We love shit like that, little in-jokes that make us feel oh-so-superior to the two-legged mammals with whom we grudgingly share dominance over the earth. My usual haunt is the Fossil Fuels Club in Santa Monica, but I’ve logged in some classically blurry early morning hours at the Dinorama, the Meteor Nightspot, and mid city’s very own Tar Pit Club, just to name a few. The last Council estimate laid the dinosaur community out at about 5 percent of the American population, but I have a hunch we own a disproportionate amount of nightclubs in this country. But hey—when you spend the majority of your waking hours walking around in human drag, you’re going to need a dino-intensive place to unwind at the end of the day, if only to snap you back into that terrible lizard state of mind.

The rental car complements the new look of the Evolution Club, its crumbling chassis blending nicely with the charred structural supports of the fireswept building. “Maybe I should leave you here, old fella,” I say, playfully slapping the car on its trunk. My hand pops
through the rust, punching out a rough hole in the metal. I head inside.

The Evolution Club, so far as I can tell from my vantage point on what used to be the main dance floor but is now a twisted mess of splintered laminate, must have been a pretty groovy place once upon a Wednesday morning. Three levels, each with its own separate bar, flow organically out of a pair of sweeping Tara-esque staircases, great marble risers disappearing among the shadows. Glitter balls sparkle like distant, dying stars against the meager daylight that manages to sneak its way in through the cracked walls, and I can make out a fancy illumination system that, if the bulbs were replaced, the lenses mended, and the computer control board cleaned of the omnipresent ash, might rival the best Broadway or Picadilly has to offer. Sprawling graffiti art covers the walls, a fantastic mural celebrating the glamour and the glory of unadulterated hedonism throughout the ages.

A hulking refrigeration system lies in ruin, attached to the remnants of what looks to be a walk-in herbidor—I can almost smell the fresh-cut basil and marjoram now, and can only imagine the convenience of walking into that cold, sweet room and taking my pick of any and all substances. Looks like the kind of joint I would have been magnetically attracted to in my younger days, and all my organs are grateful at this moment that I never knew of the club’s existence.

As I climb the staircase to the second level, a pinch lances out from my tucked-away tail. I shake my rump, but the pain persists, small and sharp, as if a minnow with shark’s teeth has found himself at an all-you-can-eat brunch on my tail and refuses to leave the buffet line. It’s my darned G-3 clamp—somehow it has shifted to the left, the metal buckle digging into my hide, and there’s no way to rectify the situation other than to completely readjust the entire G series. It’s a quick process, simple enough, but would necessitate releasing my tail out into the great wide open for a few precious minutes. If any humans were to come in …

But who wanders into burned-out nightclubs at noon on a weekday? Just to be safe, I shuffle up the stairs in a hunchback gallop—the clamp pinching and poking and prodding me all the way—and hop into the relative security of a nearby shadow.

A twist here, a turn there, and pop! the G-1 and G-2 clamps spring
open, buckles spinning into the air. My tail swings free of its confines and I breathe a sigh of relief as the G-3 releases its hold and clangs to the floor. There’s a dull throb coming from my nether region, and I can make out the early stages of a bruise where the clamp had nipped my flesh. Now to buckle up again before—

“Somebody in there?” A voice at the nightclub door.

I freeze up. Sweat springs from my pores, instantly cascading my body with rivulets of saltwater. I curse the evolutionary process that brought sweat glands to my species after so many millennia of blissful aridity.

“Private property, buddy. Police scene.”

I can’t believe this is happening. My hands, thick and clumsy inside their pseudohuman gloves, fumble with the buckles, forcing them rudely into place.

“Hey you! Yeah, you!” comes the call again, filtered past the roar of alarm rushing like tidewater through my brain.

With skill and dexterity somewhere between that of a world-class Olympic athlete and a moderately fit executive-league softball pitcher, I leap into the air and, in one swift move, tuck my tail between my legs, wrapping it up and around my torso. Clamp G-3 slides into place, followed closely behind by G-2. Working furiously now, dressing myself faster than ever before. Buckles buckling—snaps snapping—buttons, knots, zippers, Velcro—the race is on …

“You can’t be in here.” Halfway up the stairs. “No public. You’re gonna have to pack it up, pal.”

My G-1 clamp is sticking, refusing to budge. It’s an older model, sure, but these things are supposed to last, damn it! The last vestiges of my tail are poking out through my open zipper, and even if the person coming up the stairs doesn’t recognize it as the tip of a folded dinosaur tail, it looks darned obscene nevertheless. I’ve done the public indecency rap before, two days in a Cincinnati lockup—don’t ask, don’t ask—and have no urge to repeat the incident, thank you very much. I shove and push and mush and tuck and—

“Hey, you—yeah, you, in the corner.”

Slowly, reluctantly, I turn, ready to lie, ready to chortle and say
pardon my weasel
or
must be my shirt. A tail? Dear god, no! It is for to laugh! A tail on someone as undeniably human as I? How absurd!

And then the clamps give way. With the sound of a hundred claws tearing across a hundred chalk-caked blackboards, my tail rips free from its confines, cleanly splitting my new Dockers pants in half. Shreds of the comfortable cotton/polyester blend waft through the air.

Slowly, almost luxuriously, the last remaining years of my life flash before my eyes. They begin with this intruder screaming like a spook-house dummy, running down the stairs, out of the building, making an emergency appointment with his psychiatrist, and spilling his guts about the half-man, half-beast that
practically attacked him, by God
, inside the smoking remains of a Studio City nightclub. He’s institutionalized (just desserts, I say), but that’s no matter. Word gets out about my indiscretion, and I end up lonely and penniless, selling pocket lint on the street corner, formally excommunicated by the Council and ostracized by the dino community for letting out the most classified Secret of all the classified Secrets: our existence.

“Jesus, Rubio,” comes the voice again. “With a tail like that, you must get all the chicks.”

My eyes focus away from their exaggerated, morbid fantasies and return to the second floor of the Evolution Club, where they alight upon a grinning Sergeant Dan Patterson, longtime detective for the Los Angeles Police Department and one of the greatest all-around Brontosaurs I’ve ever known.

We embrace, my heart swinging down off its crazy reggae backbeat, rat-a-tat-tatting away inside my chest cavity. “I scare you?” Dan asks, a sly grin curving the corners of his wide lips. His scent, a mélange of extra virgin olive oil and crankshaft grease, is weak today, which probably explains why I didn’t smell him as he approached.

“Scare me? Hell, man, I’m a Raptor.”

“So I’ll ask again: I scare you?”

We tag-team on my recalcitrant tail, alternately taking turns shoving the bad boy this way and that. Dan’s taut muscles, evident beneath his guise as a middle-aged African-American, ripple with power as we eventually manage to tuck the critter back into its hiding spot, tightening up the G clamps and strapping on the buckles without causing further injury. I’ve got a spare pair of pants in the Camry, and so long as the ones I’m wearing don’t choose to spontaneously dissolve any more than they already have, I should remain
decently outfitted for a few more minutes. I have never known Dan Patterson to be a fashion hawk, and he doesn’t seem all that concerned about my current state of half-dress.

“Good to see you, my man,” Dan says. “It’s been too long.”

“I meant to call you …” I begin, and then trail off into a wan smile.

Dan puts a meaty gloved hand on my shoulder, squeezing tight. “I understand, man, trust me. How you holding up? You finding work?”

“I’m great,” I lie. “I’m doing great.” If I tell Dan about my financial situation, he’ll offer me money—practically force it upon me, if I know the guy—but I don’t go in for handouts, even from the closest of Brontosaurs.

“Listen, you get that watch I sent you, the one—”

“Yeah, yeah I got that. Thanks.” A while back, Dan came across a watch that Ernie had accidentally left at his place a month or so before he was killed. After my ignoble return from New York, Dan had the watch messengered over to my house, which I took as Dan’s way of saying he was there for me without actually having to say it. It was the greatest consolation I received during the entire affair.

“You investigating for the insurance company?” he asks.

I nod. “Teitelbaum sent me.”

“No kidding—you’re working for TruTel again?”

“This job, at least. Who knows, maybe there’s more in it down the road.”

“The good old days, huh? Mr. Teitelbaum.… Man, there’s a T-Rex I’ve been trying hard to forget.” Dan spent a miserable year and a half working as an outside contractor with TruTel—that’s how we met—before he quit the freelance life and joined up with the LAPD, and his run-ins with Teitelbaum were the stuff of legend around the office.

We talk a little more of old times—the Strum case, the Kuhns trial, the Hollywood Boulevard hooker fiasco—don’t ask, don’t ask—and a little of plans for the future. He’s interested in catching some time at Expression, that dino nudist colony up in Montana—hundreds of us, roaming free, unencumbered, baring our natural hides to the warmth of the sun—and though that sort of ego massage sounds like a great way to spend some lazy days, I don’t want to tell him that I can’t afford any lazy days, much less the cost of a good suntan lotion. “Sounds great,” I say. “Make some plans, give me a call.”

Eventually, after the conversation of two old friends runs its
course, I come back to the matter at hand. “What are you doing up here?” I ask. “Isn’t this a little out of your jurisdiction?” Dan usually works out of Rampart division; the San Fernando Valley’s far outside his stomping grounds.

“They called in our arson unit,” Dan explains. “We give crossover help like this, do it all the time. I’m just here to finish securing the scene; seems I didn’t do a good-enough job.”

“So,” I ask, “whaddaya got for me on the fire?”

“Tired of doing the actual investigating, Mr. Private Investigator?”

“Figure if I can get you to do it for me, I can go home and sleep. Been a long week.”

Dan pulls out a faded yellow notepad, mumbling to himself as he flips through the pages. “Lessee.… Wednesday morning, ’round 'bout three in the A.M., Fire House Eighteen gets word that the Evolution Club on Ventura is goin’ up, and fast. Anonymous caller says there’s a big ol’ blaze.”

“Where’d the call come in from?” I ask.

“Outside source, pay phone. Across the street. Three engines dispatched, along with a fleet of special-service vehicles—ambulances, paramedics, that sorta thing.”

“That standard protocol? The whole fleet, I mean?” I whip out my own pen and paper, scribbling down whatever tidbits—obviously important or otherwise—I come across. Never know what you’re gonna find.

“Nightclub fire, yeah. Usually it ain’t the smoke or the flames that does the damage—it’s the patrons scrambling to get out. Gets so everyone turns into a herd of spooked Compys, don’t care who they trample on.” He licks his fingers, skims the pad again. “The engines arrive, start work on the fire. Patrons are streaming out, they’re evacuating left and right …”

“Fifty, a hundred, what?” In other words, how many damn witnesses am I going to have to interview?

Dan laughs and shakes his head. “You ain’t been to a Valley party in a long time, have you?”

“I try to stay on the west side,” I say. “Health’s bad enough without me killing my lungs down here in the smog bowl.”

“Place like this could pack in four hundred on a good night. Lucky for you—and them, I guess—Wednesday morning’s not exactly a
club-hopping kinda time. All told, estimates range around one eighty, two hundred.”

“Names and numbers?”

“About twenty of ’em.”

“Good enough for me.”