“Hours, sometimes,” Martine answered.
“Sometimes they don’t even show at all,” Des said.
Esme flopped down carelessly next to Des on the pavement, reeking of tequila and sweaty girl. She was highly unkempt, in contrast to her spotless, stay-pressed mother. Her hair was unclean, armpits unshaven, ankles soiled. Des noticed that she also had splotchy bruises around her upper arms, as if someone had grabbed her and squeezed her hard. Also a number of scratches on her neck and shoulders.
“Girl, what happened?” Des asked her, as Bella joined them. “Did you get in a fight?”
Esme immediately reddened. “It’s not what you think.”
“Me, I’m thinking Tito beats the crap out of you,” said Bella, who did not know how to mince words.
“No, never. We just get physical sometimes when we’re, you know. ..”
“Getting physical?” asked Des.
She nodded, glanced awkwardly at her mother, who bristled noticeably.
“I never did understand that,” Bella said flatly. “If Morris ever put a welt on me when we were in the throes of connubial passion he would have found his bags on the front porch in the morning, packed and ready to go.”
“He’d never hurt me,” Esme insisted, a defensive edge creeping into her voice. In the flesh, she didn’t seem nearly as bright or mature as the characters she played on screen. “I bruise easy, that’s all. Honest.”
“I believe you,” said Des, who believed no such thing. Not with Tito Molina’s reputation for violent eruptions.
“I wish they’d get here.” Esme sighed, scratching irritably at a mosquito bite on her thigh. “This waiting thing sucks.”
“Patience is everything in life,” Bella said. “Allow me give you an example. When I was your age I desperately wanted to look like Elizabeth Taylor. Which, God knows, I did not. But guess what?” Bella raised her bunched fist of a face to the sky, preening. “Now I do, see?”
Esme gaped at her blankly. “Not really.”
“Time, tattela,” Bella explained. “It’s the great equalizer.”
“Do you still date men, Bella?”
“When the occasion arises. Lord knows, the men don’t. But you have to be very, very careful when you get to be my age.”
“Careful how?”
“One of Morris’s dearest friends, Velvel, started wooing me last year. Very cultivated man. A renowned mathematician, seventy-four years old. Before I’d so much as let him give me a peck on the cheek I had to, you know, check him out,” Bella said waggling her eyebrows at Esme.
“Wait, check him out how?”
“I made a date to go dancing with him, okay? Waited for a nice slow dance, got out him out there on the floor…”
“And?…”
“I gave him a good hard whack on the leg. That’s when I heard it.”
“Heard what, Bella?” Now Martine was curious, too.
“The slosh,” Bella replied. “You hear a slosh it means the man’s wearing a catheter bag. You don’t want nuttin’ to do with him.”
Esme smiled at her, a smile that lit up her entire face. “Bella, you are the coolest.”
“That’s me, all right, the queen of cool.” Bella stood there staring down the front of Esme’s halter top at her considerable cleavage. “So did you have your boobs done or what?” she asked her bluntly.
“No way. These are all mine. Want to feel them?”
“Not necessary.”
“That whole deal was just Crissie doing what she does,” Esme explained.
“Which is what exactly?” Martine demanded.
“She plants the denial before there’s ever a story.”
“So as to create the story?” asked Des.
Esme nodded. “That way she keeps the tabloids fed and off of our backs.”
“That woman is so crass,” Martine said. “Honestly, I can’t tell if she’s part of the solution or part of the problem.”
“None of it’s real, Mommy. It’s just some tabloid trash about tits.”
“Those are your tits they’re talking about. And I don’t care for it. Or Chrissie.”
“Yeah, I kind of sensed that,” Esme shot back. They had a definite mother-daughter thing going on. “But don’t blame me. Tito’s agent hired her. He had to. That’s how the business is-if we don’t give them something then they just make up stuff about how our marriage is in ruins or whatever. It’s not like we’re real people to them. We’re just characters in some twisted interactive soap opera. They shout things at Tito, you know. To bait him.”
“What things?” asked Des.
“They tell him I’m a slut. That I’m having sex with Ben Affleck or Derek Jeter or Justin Timberlake, anyone. They’re hoping he’ll lose it so they can sell a picture of him attacking them. They try to climb over the wall of our Malibu house. They follow us when we leave. It’s horrible. If the public knew what really went on, they’d freak. But since it’s the press they somehow think it’s all noble and decent.”
“Those people aren’t the press.” Bella sniffed.
“No, they totally are,” Esme insisted.
Des couldn’t disagree. She’d seen the tabloids in action when she’d worked murder investigations. “Do you two keep a bodyguard around?”
“Tito won’t live that way. He wants to keep it real, or at least try. He figures, how can you hold on to your street edge when you live like royalty?”
“You can’t,” Des concurred.
“Besides, Chrissie’s staying in the guesthouse while we’re here, so she keeps them at bay. And the road we’re on is private. The beach association has a gate, and they can’t get past that. Or at least they aren’t supposed to.”
“If they do, let me know,” Des said.
“I would, Des, except Tito’s deathly afraid of the police. He has so many childhood scars.” Esme let out a soft laugh. “But, hey, who doesn’t, right?”
Martine stiffened at this last comment, Des noticed.
“Everyone thinks they know us, but they don’t. Especially Tito. Nobody knows Tito.”
“So tell us something we don’t know about him,” Bella said.
“Seriously?” Esme tossed her head, running her hands through her mane of golden hair. “He’s the most deprived boy I’ve ever met, okay? Growing up, he went without so many things that the rest of us take for granted. Like pets-he’s never, ever had one. I mean, God, he’d never even had a Christmas tree until he met me. You should have seen the joy in his eyes when we decorated our very own tree last Christmas.” Recalling it, tears began to spill out of her own eyesright down her flawless cheeks. “All the things I took for granted growing up. A nice home, friends, parents who I believed I could trust
…”
Des felt that there was something deliberately pointy about the words Esme used to describe her parents. Crouched there beside her on the pavement, Martine definitely seemed ill at ease.
“Tito never knew any of those things. That’s why he’s so out there as an actor. It’s like he’s experiencing everything for the first time.”
Des thought she heard some small movements now in the forsythia bushes out behind the Dumpster. “We better get on that other trap,” she whispered, tiptoeing around to the other cage and grabbing on to the string attached to its door.
Esme joined her. “Here, let me,” she whispered, holding her hand out to Des.
That was when Des noticed the thin white lines on the inside of her wrist. Both wrists, in fact. On-screen, the makeup artists were able to cover them over. But up close and in person Des saw them instantly for what they were. Esme Crockett had tried to slit her wrists at some point in her past. Des found herself wondering what could possibly have driven someone so lovely, gifted, and privileged to want to end her life?
“Shhh, hear them…?” she whispered, clutching the string anxiously.
Des did hear the tiny mewings. And now she could see the two of them coming out of the brush together. They were mixed gray, no more than four or five weeks old.