Page 70 of The Happy Month

I asked him to continue reading. At the time, Vera was living a few blocks from where she worked in the rundown Hollywood Hotel. Philburn claimed she’d walk further down the boulevard to either Grauman’s Chinese Theatre or The Egyptian most nights.

“Do you think there were any lesbian bars on Hollywood Boulevard?”

“No,” Ronnie said. “The bars were in West Hollywood. As Junior has explained a million times, it was unincorporated, so the LAPD didn’t patrol there. It was the county sheriff. They were less likely to raid bars, that’s how they all ended up there.”

“Of course, Rocky said she liked straight girls. There must have been some straight bars on Hollywood Boulevard.”

“There was probably a bar in her hotel. But it wasn’t okay for women to go into bars by themselves.”

“Not nice girls, no. But girls who were in a little trouble. Girls who might have been relieved to find Vera there.”

Ronnie frowned at me and went back to reading. Thursday evening, she had dinner with Betty Brooks at a drugstore and read fan magazines they didn’t pay for. Betty didn’t think anything was wrong with Vera, she seemed pretty normal.

“Do we have to keep doing this?” Ronnie asked. “It’s not getting you anywhere.”

“No, you’re probably right.”

“Good,” he said, and then popped the soundtrack toThe Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desertinto the CD player.

Before he could say anything, I said, “No, I am not strapping you to the roof of this car sitting in a giant high heel.”

“Spoil sport.”

We got to Riverside just after three o’clock. Ronnie had found something on the Internet called MapQuest and had printed out directions to Andrea Grubber’s house on Granada Avenue. When we found her house, it was beige with a low façade of phony brick. There was an old-growth tree in the front and a row of scrunchy-looking shrubs along the concrete driveway.

“She’s not home,” Ronnie said.

“How do you know?”

There was a garage. It was shut so who knew if there was a car inside.

“I’m a real estate agent, I can tell when someone’s home.”

“That’s a telepathic gift that came with your license?”

“Okay, don’t believe me.”

I opened the car door and went into shock. It had beenin the mid-seventies when we left Long Beach; in Riverside it was at least a hundred. There wasn’t much humidity though, so it felt more like being dropped into a basket of just-out-of-the-dryer laundry than the strangled, underwater feeling you got in Chicago when the temperature went that high with humidity.

I knocked on the door. Waited. Nothing. After a minute or so, I stepped into the bushes and looked through the front window. There were kids toys all around the living room. Various ages from the look of the toys, from toddlers to grade-schoolers. At least one boy and one girl.

She wasn’t home. If she were, the kids would be in the middle of the mess they’d made of the living room. I walked back to the car and climbed in. I started it up immediately so we could run the air. Even after just a few minutes it had gotten noticeably warmer.

“Go ahead, say it. You told me so.”

“I wasn’t going to say anything.” That was clearly a lie.

“She’s got at least two kids. I’d say she was picking at least one of them up from school. Do you think we should wait?”

“Hell, no. It’s going to be a hundred and twenty in Palm Springs and close to that here.”

Someone had been listening to the weather report.

“Should we be doing this?”

“Absolutely. As long as the air conditioner is running. But we shouldn’t sit for an hour waiting. We can stop on the way back,” he suggested.

I pulled away from the curb and we were on our way to Palm Springs. Once you’re out of Riverside, the scenery gets increasingly barren. There’s not much to look at but scrubby plants and sandy hills, until you get to Cabazonwhere there’s an outlet mall smack dab in the middle of nothing.