Aztec Sun Page 11

  For one fleeting instant, Rafael had been as vulnerable to Sandra as she’d been to him. Realizing that made her feel just a little better.

  ***

  RAFAEL AND DIEGO FOUGHT PLENTY. Rosa was the first woman they’d fought about. Unfortunately, she wasn’t the last.

  Damn the lot of them. Damn Melanie Greer, who any fool in the world could see was using. Diego promised, Diego swore he’d keep her clean. Diego insisted that nothing could get past Aztec Sun’s gate, nothing could get past him, he had his fingers on every pulse, his ear to the ground...

  And he vowed to keep the star of White Angel as far from white powder as necessary.

  So why had she been wearing that too-cocky smile throughout the evening’s shoot? Why had her pupils looked as black and round as bullet holes? Why had her nose been leaking like a broken faucet?

  Despite her condition, the shoot had gone well enough. John Rhee had gotten what he needed, and they’d wrapped for the day by ten o’clock. Then Rafael and Diego had returned to Diego’s office to fight.

  About women.

  “She’s a mess,” Rafael said. “You could get high just standing next to her.”

  “She’s fine. A little antsy, that’s all,” Diego protested. “If she was on anything, I’d know it.”

  “If you opened your eyes you’d know it. Anyone can see—”

  “I’m telling you, Raf, everything’s under control. Piece-a-cake. She’s fine. Didn’t the scene come off okay?”

  “Yes, by some miracle it did.”

  “So, fine. I can perform miracles.”

  The air in Diego’s office grew cloudy with cigarette smoke. Rafael was fatigued, drained—and yet he stupidly chose to pick another fight with Diego. “The reporter. She’s around too much.”

  “I told her she could watch the shoot. No problem, hey? She didn’t get in anybody’s way.”

  Rafael couldn’t admit to Diego that Sandra’s very existence got in his way. He couldn’t tell Diego that she sapped his willpower, that the taste of her lips lingered on his tongue like honey hours after he’d kissed her, and that the shape of her body seemed permanently imprinted on his.

  So he said what he could. “Keep her away from Melanie. Pump her with happy news. Brainwash her if you’ve got to, but don’t let her write about Melanie.”

  “Melanie’s our ticket! We’ve got to publicize her.”

  “Publicize her yourself. Don’t let the reporter near her. That woman sees too much.”

  It was edging toward midnight when he finally cruised up the narrow, twisting road to his own house, one of several sharing the crest of a bluff that overlooked the Silver Lake Reservoir. His neighbors’ houses were all dark, the neighborhood fast asleep. He pressed the remote button to open the garage, then slid the T-bird in next to his four-wheel-drive Jeep and shut off the engine. The garage was dark, warm; it smelled of gasoline, a strong, macho aroma.

  He climbed out of his car, shut the garage door and entered the house. It was neither huge nor ostentatious, although it had cost him plenty enough, given its location and view. He could have afforded a fancier address in Beverly Hills or Bel Air or Santa Monica if he’d wanted, but he preferred living on a street where his neighbors included an architect, a veterinarian, two college professors and a retired aerospace engineer. He didn’t want to live in some movie-industry colony. The idea of having people like Melanie Greer next door left him cold.

  He strode through the den, up the stairs and directly into the kitchen, where he hauled an open bottle of tequila from a cabinet. He carried it outside to the deck. The night air was as solid and hot as black wool, although it carried the fragrance of the eucalyptus trees and flowering vines that clung to the sloping hills around the house. He discerned the outlines of the lake in the distance below, a smooth, solid dark against the ragged dark of houses and roads. The quarter-moon flung a crescent of silver onto the surface of the water.

  He was tired. Tired of fighting not just Diego but himself. Tired of the way women could twist a man up inside. Tired of thinking about women, all women, one woman in particular.

  His mother had once told him about a resort island down south, off Yucatan. Isla Mujeres—Isle of Women. He’d like to ship the entire species to that island, where they wouldn’t cause him any more trouble.

  He opened the bottle and took a swig. The tequila was amber, well aged, nothing like the cheap rot-gut he and Diego used to drink in their youth. That stuff had to be downed with salt and lime to disguise the wretched flavor.

  In those days he hadn’t cared about flavor. He’d cared only about the kick of the liquor, the rush of heat and power as it flooded his veins. He’d cared about being tough and invincible and respected, and in the world where he’d lived, tequila had a way of convincing a man he was all those things.

  Rafael and Diego had fought then, too, despite their friendship, because of it. They’d been just two more street kids living from day to day, from battle to battle and dollar to dollar. Fighting had been second nature to them. The only thing more important than physical strength had been control.

  Swearing under his breath, Rafael took another drink, then screwed the cap back on. He didn’t want to get drunk. He only wanted to numb himself a little. If he was going to be weak and out of control, he wanted it to be from liquor, not from some damned woman.

  He pictured her in Westwood somewhere, in one of those stucco town houses with the rippling red-tile roofs and the wrought-iron gates. Spanish architecture had taken over the city. Everyone wanted to live in a hacienda. The only problem was, those who were entitled by race to live in haciendas usually wound up living in the slums.

  Rafael had chosen his house not just because it sat in a staid, peaceful neighborhood but because it was constructed of wood and glass and roofed in cedar. It was an American house, nondescript, comfortable, spacious enough so that a person born in the back room of a trailer set on blocks in the middle of a migrant farm camp north of Bakersfield would know he’d moved up in the world. It was the sort of house that could make a man who’d come of age in a three-room flat above a garage know he could reach a better place, and own it, and call it home.

  Who he was, where he’d come from and what he’d become...to someone like Sandra Garcia Rafael’s life would seem alien. Her childhood must have resembled a Latino version of Cosby: parents—two of them—and grandparents, a family business, prep school. Christ. Her life seemed alien to him.

  He had been five years old the last time he’d seen his father. Ricardo had been seven and a half, and he still hadn’t completed a full year of kindergarten. His mother had decided to leave the farm camp for Los Angeles, where her cousin lived. “I want my boys in a real school,” she’d said. “I want them somewhere where no one can pull them out of class to pick tomatoes at harvest time. I want them in a real school in a city, where they’ll speak English and learn how to be Americans.”

  His father... Rafael had vague memories of a large man, with solid fingers and rough palms and a fierce mustache. He remembered a man who never smiled.

  “If you leave me,” his father had said, “you’ll never see me again.”

  “I want a better life for my sons. And I want Rosa safe.”

  “Rosa’s two years old. You think she’s not safe?”

  “If we stay here she won’t be. The men, they look at all the girls. I won’t let any man look at my daughter like that.”

  “And what will I do while you’re teaching your children how to be Americans?”

  “You’ll get a job. There must be work. Carmelita’s husband—”

  “He’s a gangster.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I know enough. I work day and night, I break my back in these fields, and you want to take my children away so they can be Americans? Better than their own father? That’s what you want to do?”

  Rafael’s mother had nodded. His father had smacked her across her cheek. That was the other thing Rafael re
membered about his old man. His height, his mustache and the sickening sound of his hand slapping his mother’s face. “Then go,” he’d growled. “Take these bastards and go to hell.”

  They’d gone not to hell but to East Los Angeles, although Rafael sometimes believed there wasn’t much difference. His mother had parked her three children with her cousin Carmelita and gone to work in a tortilla factory. Eventually she’d moved her family to a flat of their own. She’d rarely been around. Ricardo had been in charge. Rosa had been the smartest, but Ricardo had been the shrewdest. Rosa had always known right from wrong, but Ricardo had always known how to stay alive.

  Rafael had hovered between his older brother and his younger sister, observing, absorbing, envious of Ricardo’s shrewdness and Rosa’s wisdom and protective of them both, even as they’d moved in opposite directions and he’d had to stretch to keep his grip on them. He’d mimicked Ricardo’s strut, his machismo, his faith in his own strength. But he’d turned to Rosa with his doubts, his questions. With Ricardo he would act. With Rosa he would think and talk.

  Ricardo had argued that men, Chicanos, were judged not by their thoughts and words but by their actions. “Rosa has Jesus,” he would tell Rafael. “That’s okay—she’s a girl. You’re a man. You need brothers. Hermanos.”

  There had been no prep school for Rafael. Not even high school. He’d dropped out when he was sixteen, and it was only because Father Andreas had pressured him that, at the age of twenty-one, he’d earned a General Equivalency Diploma. As far as he was concerned, it was just a piece of paper, but the padre had insisted it would give him courage and confidence. At that time, in the months after he’d gone one on one with his own mortality and come much too close to losing the bout, his courage and confidence had been in desperately low supply.

  So now he had a high school diploma. And a lot of money. And his own production company. And a sister who had somehow emerged from the streets clean and pure and blessed. He didn’t have to prove anything to that zorra reporter with her fancy second-generation-American pedigree.

  He hated Sandra Garcia because he feared what she could do to him. She could probe his past. She could discover how often Ricardo’s pull had been stronger than Rosa’s, how often two boys without a father could get into trouble. She could find out about Los Hermanos del Sol—the Brothers of the Sun—and about Ricardo currently as much at home in the prison at Chino as Rafael was in this house in Silver Lake. She could start counting the black marks next to the name Perez—not just Ricardo Perez but Rafael Perez as well. Surely he was still in the police files. A kid didn’t join a gang and run up a record and then suddenly get deleted from the law’s computer because he’d gone legitimate and made a lot of money.

  Sandra could find out the truth about Rafael and know the story she had to write about was as far from angels, white or otherwise, as it was possible to be.

  Or she could do something even worse: she could kiss him again. She could bewitch him into believing he didn’t care what she wrote about him, what became of his new movie, what happened to his stupid blond star.

  Sandra Garcia could do more damage than he was prepared to deal with. He had to get rid of her.

  Closing his eyes against the dense silence of the night, he pictured her standing before him as she had in the alley, all lissome curves and raven hair, her eyes bright with yearning and her lips soft, parted, waiting for him. And he admitted his greatest fear, his greatest weakness, the greatest threat she posed: that she could destroy him and he wouldn’t care.

  Having her would almost be worth it.

  Chapter Seven

  FLANNAGAN FOUND HER hunched over a scanner in the archives room, reviewing old articles. She’d arrived at the Post building at seven-thirty in the morning, hoping to avoid people—in particular, her editor. She had work to do, instincts to trust, a man to investigate. The last thing she wanted to was waste time smiling while Flannagan called her “Sandy.”

  She hadn’t slept well last night. She’d had too much to think about: Laurel’s advice to do a number on Rafael, her body’s steamy memory of the number he’d done on her...and her certainty that something was amiss at Aztec Sun. Whether the problem was Melanie or Rafael or both she couldn’t say. She just knew there was an undercurrent there, a scent of tension mixed in with the smog, a whisper of trouble roiling the air.

  At six o’clock she’d hauled herself out of bed, fixed a cup of coffee and listened to the random statements she’d managed to capture on her recorder when Rafael wasn’t around to turn off the machine: Melanie’s babbling about being labeled a snow-brain, and the friendly conversation Sandra had had with Vinnie and Hector at Cesar’s. She replayed the recording, played it a third time, and then pulled out her note pad and read her jottings. One phrase leaped out at her, something Diego Salazar had said: Rafael Perez—the soul of the company.

  What she needed to discover was the soul of Rafael Perez.

  The Post’s archives had nothing more to tell her about him than what she already knew. Compulsively she reread each and every article about all the other Perezes—the teacher, the little boy rescued from the burning building... Ricardo Perez, sentenced to five years at Chino for dealing cocaine.

  Ricardo Perez. The same initials as Rafael Perez. And what about Rafael’s sister, the nun? Rosa Perez. Same initials. Just a coincidence?

  She heard Flannagan’s unwelcome voice coming from behind her: “Sandita, sweetheart. When the hell am I going to get something from you?”

  Sighing, she straightened in her chair and rubbed the cramped muscles at the base of her skull. “Good morning, Frank.”

  “Here’s the thing,” he announced, hoisting himself onto the counter beside the scanner and presenting her with a smile of strained reasonability. “I ask you to write a simple little profile of a great Chicano citizen. Days pass, and what do I get from you? Nada.”

  “I’m working on it.”

  “What’s to work on? Are you planning a three-part series or something?”

  “There’s a story at Aztec Sun,” she said, doing her best to filter the impatience from her tone. She had to play this correctly, or Frank would yank her off the assignment and give her something even worse. She’d wind up doing cute pieces about neighborhood street fairs and new taco recipes, or else she’d get stuck writing the daily miseries. “I know there’s more to this than just a studio run by a successful Chicano businessman,” she explained. “I’m close to finding out what it is. If you could cut me a little slack—”

  “Give me a hint, Sandy. What more is there?”

  “The star of their current movie uses cocaine.”

  Flannagan rolled his eyes and slapped his forehead in exaggerated astonishment. “Oh, my God! An actress on drugs! Stop the presses!”

  Patience, she cautioned herself. “Okay,” she said, measuring each word, speaking calmly and precisely. “I know drug use on a movie set is not exactly above-the-fold material. But when it happens, you’d think a studio would try to keep a low profile. It’s not the sort of situation where you invite the press to come in and witness your star making an ass of herself on the set. Right?”

  Flannagan frowned, as if following her logic posed an enormous challenge for him. “Yeah, so?”

  “So why did Rafael Perez’s right-hand man plant that article in Variety? Why does he want the press poking around? Why has he given me the run of the studio? Why am I allowed to interview Melanie Greer without anyone else present? I went into her trailer and listened to her ramble incoherently, and when she went into the bathroom I found a coke spoon among her things.”

  Flannagan looked marginally less dubious. “So?”

  “So, if the studio has a problem actress on its hands, not a big deal. These things happen. But Diego Salazar—that’s Perez’s mouthpiece—is dying for publicity. He fed that blurb to Variety to drum up interest in this new movie Aztec Sun is producing, and when I took the bait he was thrilled to have me there, seeing everything—in
cluding Melanie Greer’s coke spoon. And meanwhile, everyone in the whole damned company can’t say enough about how down on drugs Perez is. And Perez is as allergic to publicity as his mouthpiece is addicted to it. And then there’s a guy named Ricardo Perez serving five years in Chino for dealing cocaine.”

  Flannagan took a minute to digest this. “There’s probably a million guys in East L.A. named Ricardo Perez. And half of them probably deal cocaine, too.”

  “Rafael has a sister named Rosa, who’s a nun,” Sandra said, hating to reveal her best material but knowing Flannagan wasn’t quite convinced. He was close, though, so she kept going. “I want to track down the sister and find out if this dealer Perez has anything to do with her family. I want to find out why her brother has everyone who works for him telling me what a great guy he is, how righteous and upstanding and anti-drug. If that’s the reputation he wants to maintain, why on earth would he let me sit in and watch a shoot being ruined by a stoned actress?”

  Flannagan mulled over everything she’d told him. He was outfitted in one of his typically clashing ensembles—a faded blue madras shirt and textured polyester trousers in a mustard-yellow shade. Sometimes she wondered whether he dressed tastelessly simply because it made a statement about his power, declaring to the world that he was so important he didn’t have to dress to please anybody but himself.

  “How much more time do you need?” he finally asked.

  She couldn’t begin to guess. “Give me twenty-four hours,” she said, her voice rising at the end so it sounded less like a demand than a question.

  “Twenty-four hours.” He mulled that over, too, as if she’d asked for a thousand-dollar-a-week raise. “This isn’t supposed to be a major breaking story,” he muttered.

  “Supposed-to-be is irrelevant, Frank,” she argued. “The story is what it is. Let me write it. You know I’ll come up with something good.”

  He didn’t know that. Neither, for that matter, did she. She might spend the next twenty-four hours tracking down her scant leads—a nun named Rosa, a convict at the medium-security prison in Chino—and come up empty.