Everybody Takes The Money (The Drusilla Thorne Mysteries) (19 page)

“Yeah, well, I don’t have a lot of money,
obviously
,” I said.

“We charge only a small percentage of the total amount you end up saving,” Dan assured me. He wrapped up the second half of his gyro wrap and wiped his mouth with a napkin. He still had sauce in his mustache. “Why don’t you come next door with me and we can run some numbers?”

He’d already told me two things about Hitchcock Financial and both things were clear indicators the entire operation was a scam. “Great!”
 

Dan held the door open for me at the gyros place and at the financial counseling office like we were on a date.
 

The interior of Hitchcock Christian Financial looked pretty much the way I expected it would: a lot of plastic and a lot of linoleum. The stale air in the waiting area smelled of sweat and spices and something sweet, like spilled soda. Everyone working behind the front desk was Caucasian, everyone sitting in the orange plastic chairs was Hispanic. Two of the women I’d seen, including the one with the two little kids, were still waiting. The one with the kids was talking to the woman next to her about
Señor Hache
. Two middle-aged men and one man in his early twenties. Everyone waiting had headphones on or around their necks.

Behind the front desk were eight cubicles, curtained on all sides with heavy gray drapes.

The receptionist was a woman in her sixties, her hair dyed slightly too dark for her skin tone, wearing a polyester scoop-neck blouse and jeans. She also wore a headset, had a fan on her desk, and was ignoring the woman who was trying to talk to her in halting English. The receptionist did a double-take when I walked in with Dan. Perhaps I didn’t look like their usual customer.
 

Dan pushed open the gate by the receptionist’s desk. “Hey, Linda, I’m going to talk to her right now. Let me get her started on some forms.”

Linda picked up a clipboard with a cracked ballpoint pen attached by a chain and handed it to Dan.
 

He held open the wooden gate for me. “Right through here.”

I followed him to the first curtained cubicle on the left. “Randi didn’t say I’d have to fill out any forms,” I said.
 

“Okay, so let’s just talk.”

“Is Mr. Hitchcock coming by?”

Dan smiled tightly. I was his, not Hitchcock’s. “No, he’s not coming in here today.”

“Randi said I had to talk to him.”

“Well, why don’t you just talk to me for a couple of minutes.”
 

We talked for five minutes. I whined a lot, he kept trying to get me to fill out the forms. Finally I burst into tears and ran out, calling him “mean.”
 

I hoped no one got a good look at my completely dry eyes.
 

Nevertheless, I went back to my car, which was broiling, and waited. I needed to talk to one of the women who were in there, and if I got lucky she’d be someone who’d visited more than once. I had the feeling the financial counseling office wasn’t just a way to skim a little money off a lot of desperate people.
 

The young woman with the two kids came out. The toddler, a little boy, was crying. The woman, who was twenty-two at the most, yanked him by the arm hard and pulled him along with her. I grabbed a handful of tissues out of the box in my car and ran to intercept them.

“
Perdóname, señora, por favor
,” I said. “
Para su niño
.”
 

My Spanish is Castilian and not Mexican or Guatemalan or any of the other dialects popular in Los Angeles. They’re practically different languages, and when you start lisping everything, you stand out like the stranger you are.

She was going to be suspicious of me. If I was right about the financial counseling office, she was right to be.

“May I talk to you?” I asked her.
 

“What about?”

“There’s a McDonald’s on the next block,” I said. “Can I buy the three of you some lunch?”
 

She shrugged and we walked over to the Golden Arches. I bought her and her son three burgers and a large fries, which cost all the money I had on me. The little boy looked at her for permission before digging in. She ruffled his hair and he started inhaling the food so fast I thought he might choke.
 

“Slow down,” I told him. “It’s not going anywhere.”

He kept his gaze on me, as though I might snatch it away at any moment. I tried smiling. It didn’t help.

“I wanted to ask you about the financial office place.”
 

Her walls went up hard. She glared at me and leaned back. “What about it?”

“Is that your first time there?”
 

She shook her head.
 

“Have they helped you?”
 

“Yeah, Mister H helped me.”
Señor Hache. Mister H.
Something about the way she said it told me it was the standard way they referred to him. She grunted a laugh and it was not a happy sound. “I didn’t want to come back, you know?” She curved her arm around the boy, who was still staring. “But this one had to go to the doctor’s and I need the money.”

“They give you money. Mister H gives you money.”
 

She stared at me, chewing on a couple of fries. “Hey, no offense, but I don’t know you.”
 

“I’m not a cop.”

“You can say you’re not.”
 

“Look, I don’t know your name. I don’t want to know your name. But a friend of Mister H’s is causing me a lot of problems.” My injuries had made my point for me a couple of times this week, so what was one more? I lifted up the edge of my blouse, careful to turn so as not to show the little boy. “I need to make him go away.”
 

She shook her head. “Mister H never hits. You’re nice to him, he’s nice to you.”
 

Not hard to guess what “being nice” entailed.
 

“No. Mr. Hitch—Mister H didn’t do this. These marks were given me by a man by the name of Roger Sabo. You know him?”
 

After a couple of seconds’ hesitation, she nodded.
 

I paused, trying to tamp down my eagerness. I had to tread very lightly now and get her to give me something.
 

“How do you know him?” I asked.
 

“He hangs around the construction site.”
 

“What’s that?”
 

“Mister H is working on this big building. The guys who are working on it, they get tired, you know.”

“Where is it?”

She gave me the address. Just off Ventura Boulevard in Woodland Hills. Closer to Tarzana than Panorama City, that was for sure.

“Roger is selling his supplies there?”

She nodded. “The construction workers are there all the time. Sometimes Mister H asks a couple of us to stop by.”
 

“And he helps you pay off your bills.”

She nodded. The toddler reached over for her French fries and she pushed his hand away. “You’ve had enough, José.”

The baby woke up and started crying. She jostled him roughly, trying to get him to stop.
 

“Do yourself a favor,” I said. “Don’t go to the construction site for the next week.”
 

“I got doctor’s bills, lady,” she said. “Thanks for the lunch.”
 

I left the three of them there and walked back to my car. I couldn’t decide whether I was surprised or not. Whenever men had money they liked to use the power of it, particularly with women. Everywhere, every time. I didn’t see why Los Angeles, a city built on a transient population with big dreams and few opportunities, would be any different. I wanted to forget it, forget the images she’d left with me.
 

On the other hand, the woman’s story would allow me to pressure Hitchcock to help me with Roger Sabo, so it wasn’t like the entire day had been a loss.

Now to take care of Roberto’s little errand.

SEVERAL MILES NORTH of Panorama City was the upscale suburb of Sherman Oaks. Right in the middle, placed near the freeway, was the Fashion Square Mall. A large enclosed mall that followed the template of all modern shopping malls, with all the usual stores lining its corridors, like Macy’s and Bloomie’s and bath shops and high-priced denim shops.
 

Every large, cylindrical kiosk I passed had posters of a grinning Erica Rose, wearing a polka-dotted tank top and a short skirt with orange tights and her red hair splayed out behind her, leaping into the air and strumming a pink guitar. I sent a picture of it to Stevie, who called me back to say the poster was advertising both Erica Rose’s TV show and her live appearance here at the mall.

Which was the reason I was there, of course.

I stopped in the jean shop to watch a bunch of teenagers take stacks of jeans into the changing room, casually dropping the ones they didn’t like in piles on the floor. One girl picked up a pair of jeans and her friend immediately looked over at them. “Size
four
! Guys, she wears size four!” The girl dropped the pants like they were on fire. She was thin, approaching emaciated, but she wasn’t
L.A. thin
, and around here that’s all that counted.

The critic picked up a different pair and said, “Oh my God, these are so cute, I have to try them on right now.” She was already wearing a pair of designer jeans, but what was one more? My first reaction was that I wanted to slap her, but in reality I wanted to slap myself. One time, when I was fifteen, I’d whined incessantly about only having ten pairs of my favorite jeans. Each of which had cost over $300. And needed its own special pair of shoes to go with it. And my mother had given in and let me go on a much-needed shopping trip, because I had
nothing to wear
.

The Fashion Square also had a large area in the center, open to both floors, where promotions could be held. Today’s promotion was a midday concert by TV star Erica Rose. She was going to do a couple of songs and sign pictures.
 

I arrived at the mall fifteen minutes before Erica Rose was supposed to take the stage and I settled myself by a pillar where I had a view of the stage and of the crowd.

Problem one: there was no crowd. It was the middle of the week, after school, and a teenaged tween star was going to perform. I didn’t see many of the middle schoolers I assumed she appealed to. College-aged teenagers, moms with babies in strollers, and other people who had the freedom to be out shopping in the middle of the week were here. But no tweeners.

Problem two: Erica Rose wasn’t setting up, doing sound checks, double-checking that the stage was set up correctly. There could only be two reasons for that: she was running late, or she didn’t waste her time worrying about what she was going to sound like because the entire thing was a farce anyhow. Either reason pointed toward her being both manufactured and unprofessional.
 

Five minutes after I started waiting, a large group—forty or fifty, it seemed like, probably one bus full—of young teenagers was herded down the hall toward the concert area. They had to dodge shoppers and one chaperone had to lean over and pull one from the clothing store she’d gone to check out.
 

The chaperones settled the tweens on the floor near the stage, and as they gave the kids last-minute instructions—including lots of clapping! —I counted. Forty-one. I suspected they hoped the group of ringers—what these newcomers clearly were—would spark interest from other kids in the mall to join in.
 

Or maybe they were there for the video crew, who came down a different corridor of the mall, following the prancing and buoyant tween star, Erica Rose, who came frolicking toward the stage. She had bright red hair teased out in a mane behind her, and she wore the same outfit as she had on the poster: green tank top, bright purple short skirt with yellow leggings. She waved gaily at everyone who stopped to watch her pass, which was most of the people in the mall, because this was Los Angeles, and there was a video crew. One girl seated on the floor near the stage popped to her feet when Erica Rose was twenty feet away, a book and pen in her hand. The left-side chaperone immediately signaled her to sit down, which she did. When Erica Rose started wending her way through her audience, the same girl popped up again and Erica Rose gave her a big hug and then signed her book.
 

The starlet then hopped her way up on stage to begin the show. She attached her stage mic and waved out at the audience. “Hello, Sherman Oaks!” she cried.

Well, I think that’s what she said. Because she was drowned out by tremendous electronic feedback, which had everyone, including me, covering their ears.

And Erica Rose lost her smile and looked off-stage.
 

Mistake numero uno. You never lose your smile when something goes wrong. You continue on as though everything’s perfect.
 

After glancing nervously off-stage, Erica Rose smiled broadly again and called out to the audience. She tried valiantly to be heard over the growing din of onlookers talking. Mistake number two: she was going to make herself hoarse trying to speak loudly. The acoustics in this mall weren’t built for people to project their voices long distances; they were designed to spread sound around so the place always sounded like there was a lot going on.
 

Finally, the music—pre-recorded electronic dance music, with a standard 4/4 beat—started up, and Erica Rose launched into her routine. She was doing her own singing—lip syncing is a talent that not every performer has and I doubted she’d learned it yet—but it was being filtered through Autotune. I could have been the one up there singing and I would have sounded halfway decent, which was a testament to the power of software that can make someone sound like they can sing on key.

Erica Rose finished her song and bounced around the stage, waving at all the kids in the audience, most of whom were duly unimpressed. The handlers off to the sides clapped their hands over their heads and smiled gaily, indicating what the kids were supposed to do. A couple of them followed suit, and the cameramen walking through the audience immediately focused on them, which was a much bigger incentive to the other kids to get into the spirit. Clap loudly, get photographed!