2 Sisters Detective Agency(38)

Baby stormed out the back door and slammed it so hard behind her that the windows looking out over the Strand shook. As she crossed away from the house, a Rollerblader with a Weimaraner on a leash almost slammed into a lamppost trying to get out of her way. I stood stunned for a long time, looking after her, then climbed the stairs to her room. With the kind of reverence reserved for an ancient temple, I crossed the threshold and stood inside on the Hoover-tracked carpet. The closet stood open, overpacked with washed, folded, and hung clothes that were threatening to burst from the shelves and hangers. The space had clearly never accommodated all of Baby’s clothes at once. There was a desk against the window overlooking the distant surf that was neatly arranged with things the cleaners had had no clue what to do with: ornate candle holders and notebooks, piles of oversize sunglasses, hair clips, old iPhones with their tangled chargers.

I looked at the room around me and tried to imagine what was so precious that Baby would flip out with the kind of shock, panic, and dismay she had failed to demonstrate when we were almost killed in a car bombing only hours earlier. When I saw nothing that answered my question, I left the room and closed the door with a strange sense of certainty that I would end up paying for what I had done to the teenage girl whether I understood it or not.





Chapter 47



Ashton knew that Sean and Penny’s driver was named Tom. He’d heard their father call him that. The twins had been driven around by the same withered, white-haired man since Ashton first met them at some Brentwood mansion pool party, their parents getting drunk in cabanas while the kids were taken out for gelato by the help. Ashton remembered climbing into the big passenger cabin of the limo with the smirking, pointy-faced twins and a handful of other kids. They rode all the way to Venice Beach, young Ashton trying to work out how much richer the Hanley family was than his. He’d listened while Penny bragged about the private jet her mom had bought her for her twelfth birthday. The jet’s interior was all pink suede.

Ashton glanced through the darkened privacy screen of the Mercedes-Maybach S650 Pullman while they were stopped at an intersection. He’d never heard Sean or Penny call him anything but Driver. He wondered about Tom’s life as a private driver to a pair of spoiled rich brats, shepherding Penny from nail salon to hairdresser to laser facial rejuvenation clinic, picking up Sean from The Abbey at 2 a.m. with coke all over his face. He wondered if Tom questioned his existence, the fairness of Sean and Penny’s place in the back of the vehicle and his in the front.

Ashton sure questioned it. He questioned his own place with the two. He questioned the dangerous, humiliating games they liked to play. They played them so often that Ashton could see them coming a mile away. He watched Penny’s attention prick up as they approached Lincoln Park Skate Park. Tom had gotten stuck behind a Hummer, and Penny was eyeing a small kid moving back and forth down the main skate run.

“Have a look at this little shit, will you?” Penny said.

Ashton and Sean followed her gaze. The boy, maybe eight or nine, was doing complicated flips of his skateboard at each bank of the run while a gaggle of other young kids cheered him on from the sidelines. Penny ordered Tom to pull over, just as Ashton anticipated she would.

The twins watched the boy on the run, and Ashton watched the twins. Ashton saw a flicker of something in Penny’s eyes. Hateful, jealous admiration. Penny hated anyone demonstrating a hard-won skill. Her apartment downtown was cluttered with broken toys she had taken up on a whim, ruined dreams of playing the violin, mastering archery, oil painting, dressmaking. If Penny wasn’t immediately an expert at something, she gave it up. Ashton had once seen her purchase a seventeen-thousand-dollar electric guitar signed by Dave Navarro that she left untouched in one of the spare rooms of her apartment for a year before having it taken to the dump.

Penny rolled down her window.

“Oh, come on.” Ashton huffed. “We’ve got to meet Vera.”

Penny ignored him. She called out to two lanky teen boys heading for the skate park with boards under their arms.

“Hey, you! Yeah, you. Come here.”

The boys approached the car. The teen with tight, curly hair bent his head to look in the window.

“We ain’t carryin’, lady.”

“I’m not looking for drugs, you idiot,” Penny barked. “Are you kidding me? This is a six-hundred-thousand-dollar car. You think I have to buy my coke from two dumb-ass kids in a skate park?”

The teens looked at each other. Ashton’s phone buzzed. Vera was asking where they were, impatiently sending her location, on the corner of West Fourth and South Main. He didn’t know what made him more nervous: leaving Vera hanging or whatever Penny was planning to do with these kids.

“I want you two to go over there.” Penny pointed. “See that kid on the skate run? The little one flipping his board? Go get his hat. Bring it back here to me.”

She pulled a roll of cash from her handbag, peeled off a hundred, and waved it at the boys. The teens didn’t need to think. They took off running. Ashton watched them intercept the small boy on his way back up to the top of the run, pushing and bullying the boy until he relinquished the hat.

The boys returned, laughing guiltily. Penny handed them the hundred-dollar bill and tossed the hat onto the floor of the car.

“Okay,” Ashton said. “That’s enough. We gotta go.”