Naked in LA by Colin Falconer Read Free Book Online Page B

no shoes, or perhaps they were watching the stripper.
    Angel looked up, surprised. He was even more surprised when I picked up his coffee and threw it in his face.
    It was only then that the two goons actually started moving. Angel jumped up and motioned for them to sit down again.
    “What the hell was that?”
    “You think that’s all I’m good for?”
    “What the hell are you talking about?”
    “He makes blue movies, right?”
    Angel jumped over the table, grabbed me by the arm and dragged me into a back room. There was a guy sitting at the desk, checking off figures in a ledger. He told him to get out and kicked the door shut behind him.
    Then he hit me upside the head. I saw a bright flash and went down. Then he threw a chair at me. “What the fuck?” he shouted at me.
    I just lay there. I really didn’t think he had it in him, the last time I’d thrown things at him he’d run out into the street to try and get away from me. But that was a long time ago, and now he had a reputation to keep up.
    “Don’t you ever do that again,” he said.
    “You know, Angel, there’s no point keeping bodyguards if a woman can just walk up to you and fill you full of cappuccino.”
    He smiled at that. Then he looked down at the stain on his suit and that got him angry again. That was the thing with Angel, you could do what you wanted to him as long as you didn’t untidy his clothes. “You want to tell me what that little show was all about?”
    “You set me up.”
    “I what?”
    “You think I’m a whore.”
    I was still curled up in the corner. He grabbed another chair, and I thought he was going to throw it at me. Instead he put it down right in front of me, so I couldn’t get up even if I wanted.
    “You better start making some sense.”
    “Your friend Marcellis was naked when I got there. Don’t tell me you didn’t know. Some audition. He asked me to do that scene from Casablanca , you know, the part where Ingrid Bergman gets down on her knees and gives Humphrey Bogart a blow job.”
    “I didn’t know about this,” he said.
    “Sure you didn’t. That’s what I am now, right? I’m like one of the showgirls at the Tropicana, someone you can pass around hand to hand like your old man used to do in the old days. Thanks for nothing.”
    ““Thanks for nothing?” Is that what you said? Nothing? When I found you, you were working in that shitty diner on Biscayne. Now you got nice clothes, you sit right up front to see Frank Sinatra, and I pay all your old man’s medical bills. Is that nothing ?”
    “So that means you can hire me out to your sleazy Hollywood friends?”
    “You think that’s what I did? I thought he was the real deal. I swear to God I did not think he would pull a stupid stunt like that.”
    I didn’t know if I believed him. I wanted to.
    He picked up the chair and turned it to firewood on the top of the desk, then threw a battered Remington typewriter across the office and put a hole in the wall. As he was going out he turned around and asked me if I was okay, like an afterthought.
    “Yeah, I’m okay,” I said.
    Two days later I saw in the Miami Herald that a well-known Hollywood producer called Tony Marcellis had been injured in a hit and run while crossing the road outside his hotel. He was in serious condition in hospital. The driver of the car had not been found.
    Angel gave me a diamond necklace because that was the way to solve every problem, with money and a dented fender.
    But I kept the necklace.
     
     
     
     

Chapter 12

     
     
    Angel wanted me to meet him at the Fontainebleau for lunch. As I was walking across the lobby I heard a man laughing. It wasn’t the kind of laugh you could ever forget.
    He was sitting by the windows with a couple of other men who looked as if they had just escaped the pages of Rolling Stone . He hadn’t shaved and his shirt was crumpled. He looked like a journalist, or a private detective perhaps, three years into unemployment.
    I thought