Los Angeles | September 1985
Hallie waits for him in a diner just off Hollywood Boulevard.
The tables are filthy, the food looks terrible, and across the street is a crumbling movie theater, lit up in dying blue neon. As she waits, she glances around at some of the other customers and realizes the diner must be where the local debris blows in. It’s full of hustlers, pushers, and scammers; of washed-up actors and spillovers from the rundown stores that sell bongs and bootleg cassette tapes on the blocks nearby.
In the booth in front of her, she can hear a gaunt, balding man talking to a wannabe actress—no more than twenty—about a role he has for her on a “European-style art movie.” As he smokes, he doesn’t take his eyes off the girl once—an eagle circling its prey from the sky—and in her head Hallie screams for the girl to get up, run away, and take the first bus back to whatever tiny town she came from.
But she doesn’t.
The girl laughs at the right moments, she tells the man that she’s okay with nudity as long as it’s tastefully done, and then, a couple of minutes later, he’s leading her out of the diner like he can’t get to wherever they’re going fast enough.
As Hallie watches the two of them vanish into the night, she feels guilty for not stepping in. But warning the girl, or trying to save her from the man, would have been like sticking a Band-Aid on a severed artery. Hallie might have been able to stop this girl from ending up in front of a camera at some shitty motel, being leered at—and worse—by a bunch of disgusting, bestial men, but there are a hundred other girlsjust like her arriving every day, and there’s no way to protect them all.
Or, at least, that’s what Hallie repeats to herself.
That’s how she shuts out the noise in her head; how she deals with the guilt of being a passenger as this city stalks its victims. Most of the stories she hears in this town, most of the stories she’s ever tried to write, have been marrow in the same withered bone—ambition and naivety, lies and lust, misfortune and oblivion.
The battle she faces daily is trying to pretend none of it affects her.
A couple of years back she went for a job at theHerald Examiner, and one of the major reasons the interview imploded so spectacularly was because the editor told Hallie that she wasn’t tough enough to be a reporter. His assessment made her blood boil. Her parents had died in a car wreck when she was barely out of diapers and, in the aftermath, she’d survived group homes and foster care, clawed her way through high school, and emerged out the other side still functioning. It was why she told the editor straight that his comments were just shameful, sexist bullshit. “I could writeHeraldstories in my sleep,” she said to him. “I only just turned thirty and I’m already tougher than you’ll ever be.”
It was only afterwards that she realized what he’d actually meant.
She feels too much.
She can’t dial it down. The stories become too personal for her—the people involved, the tragedy of it—and she starts to lose her objectivity. When she’s writing properly, when she’s not on autopilot, when it’s from the heart, her inability to remain detached and dispassionate bleeds into her words. And that was what the guy at theHeraldhad seen. She’s never got close to another interview in the time since—not at theHerald, whose hyperbolic headlines and crime-and-scandal stories she was prepared to swallow in exchange for a foot on the ladder; and certainly not at theTimes, the dream gig for any journalist in LA, where her phone calls and pitches have been met with radio silence. It’s why the fallout from that failed interview at theHeraldcontinues to tremor. It’s why she’s still selling low-grade, hundred-buck stories to theEnquirerandStar, magazines she hates and hates herself for taking dollars from. And it’s why she’s just let a young woman walk out of a diner in the looming shadow of a predator. She’s trying to prove something to herself, to that douchebag editor who sabotaged her interview, to all the men who’ve ever told her she doesn’t have what it takes.
She blinks, resets, her eyes returning to the window, to the liquor stores and pawn shops she can see close by. The first half of the eighties hasn’t been kind to Hollywood Boulevard. The decay is everywhere now, incapable of being washed out. Hallie even hates how it smells around here—the exhaust fumes, the stale tang of old popcorn, the sweat scorched into the asphalt by the relentless Californian sun.
Next time, she thinks,I’m deciding on the meeting place.
That’s when Malcy Simmons appears.
He’s darting between cars, crossing moving traffic to the gum-spattered sidewalk at Highland. He’s in his fifties, flushed red in the face, and has sweated through a white T-shirt with Tom Selleck’s face on it. It’s too tight for him, Magnum PI’s mustache distended, his face misshapen, as it clings to the swollen mounds of Malcy’s ugly, baggy belly. As soon as he enters, he spots Hallie, hurries over, and slides in at the booth. He doesn’t say anything, just wipes the sweat from his face, and then immediately searches the room for waiting staff.
“You’re late,” Hallie says.
“We said eight-thirty,” Malcy responds, not looking at her.
“We said eight.”
“Can I get a Coke?” he shouts at the nearest waitress.
The waitress ignores him.
Malcy turns to Hallie. “Okay, okay, I’m sorry.”
“Why are we meeting here?”
“Take a look around, Hals,” he says, leaning back, his belly pressing against the edge of the table. He goes to his pocket and gets out his cigarettes, shaking one loose. There’s one more left in the pack, which he offers to Hallie, an act of chivalry which might have been impressive for a slob like Malcy if it weren’t for the fact that he knows she doesn’t smoke. “The only people coming in here are low-level grifters and high-level losers. You like meeting in places where the walls don’t have ears.Et voilà.”
“Malcy, I’m pretty sure we don’t need to creep around like what you’re bringing me is the next Watergate.”
“It might not be Watergate but it pays your rent.”
“Not by the time you’ve taken your cut it doesn’t.”
“You wouldn’t have a roof over your head without me, Hals.” He props the cigarette between his lips. “I hear things and then I pick up the phone to you.”
