The Cake Girl

A lot had to happen for me to get here – where I am now, writing this.

The first thing was that Doug called me and asked me to come work part time at the camera store in the middle of the shopping center. Doug was a photographer I met when I was on the college paper. I didn’t know much about cameras, though, so I didn’t think I could do it. But he just wanted me to be there for three hours each day so they would have someone to sign for deliveries and just to keep the store open when Doug or the owner took their lunch break. So if there were any questions a customer might have that I couldn’t answer, I could just tell them to come back in an hour or take their phone number and have Doug call them. It was summer vacation, I wasn’t doing much of anything else so I said to myself: What the hell? Might as well.

Some more of my friends worked at that shopping center. It was at the far end of Los Angeles, right before the city gave way to canyons and ranches and dirt roads. Mike worked at the book store. Pete and Kevin worked at the bike place, building and repairing ten-speeds in the back. There were about a dozen or so shops lined up on both sides of Vons. Sometimes a bunch of 12-year-olds would skateboard down the walkway in front of all the stores. One of them was a black kid. Later, I found out he was the son of John Coltrane. John’s widow Alice had moved out to the neighborhood a couple of years before. I starting working at the camera shop four days a week and I’d see Coltrane’s son there pretty often, although I didn’t know who he was at first.

But I wasn’t working the day the Cake Girl came around.

Mike was there that day, though. That’s how I found out about her. She and her friend had baked some cake – pound cake? sponge cake? I don’t know – and they were taking it around the shopping center, stopping in at the bank, the beauty supply store, the shoe repair shop, and the book store where Mike worked. The girls asked people working at the stores – mostly other teenagers like us – to buy a slice of cake for a quarter. Mike bought some. And I guess he flirted with the Cake Girl. She had long black hair, she was thin and really pretty. When the two girls left, the other one came back and said the Cake Girl thought he was cute. He asked for her phone number and her friend gave it to him. That’s how he told me the story a few days later, anyway, when we were standing in front of the camera store while he was on a break.

He took her out to see Weather Report at the Roxy and then brought her back to his parents’ house and they had sex in his bedroom.

“Did she come?” I asked him. I wasn’t doing that well with the girls that summer, and I was hoping for a vicarious thrill.

“I dunno,” he said.

Not only was I not getting laid, I couldn’t even get any second-hand excitement.

A couple of days later Mike and I were driving down Topanga and a girl in the car next to us turned and waved to him.

“That’s her,” he said. “That’s the Cake Girl.”

“Wow, you were right, she’s really pretty. You should call her again.”

“Nah.”

I kept hoping the Cake Girl would come by the camera store one day, but that didn’t happen. Here’s what did happen, though.

The girls at the bank figured out I was dealing coke. I would buy quarter ounces from a guy named Mark who lived on a ranch a mile up from the shopping center. I’d stop at the bank on my way to work, take $500 in cash out of my savings account, drop it off at Mark’s place and he would go to his connection up in the canyon and score. I’d pick it up later in the afternoon or the next morning. Then I’d divide the quarter ounce into seven grams, and sell each gram to my friends for $100 each. Sometimes I’d keep a gram for personal stash, sometimes I didn’t need to. In a couple of days I’d bring $600 or $700 in cash back to the bank. Then I’d the start the cycle again a few days later. One day when I was taking out the $500, two of the tellers came around from behind the counter and slid up close to me, one on either side.

“Whatcha doin’ with the money?” one of them whispered to me, with a knowing smile.

“Oh, just buying stuff, sellin’ it, you know.”

“Hmm. If we come by the camera store, maybe you’ve got something for us?”

“Sure,” I said.

So they started to come in and buy a gram from me once or twice a week. And they told one of their friends, a checkout girl at Vons. And then they told a waitress at the deli. And within a few weeks, instead of buying and selling a quarter ounce a week from Mark, I was buying quarter ounces two or three times a week. And then my friends started buying more and then their friends started buying more and there was a lot of coke being bought and sold.

I’d thought it was going to take me a year of dealing Mark’s coke to save a few thousand for my trip here. But the money was rolling in pretty quickly. And then the couple who owned the record store found out I could get them coke whenever they wanted it.

They had hired a girl named Anne that Mike introduced me to one day when she came to drop off her parents’ clothes at the dry cleaner near the book store. She was wearing an orange macramé bikini, and she was an awesome sight, with long golden hair and a spectacular body. I tried, but I couldn’t get anywhere with Anne – until she found out I could get coke for the record store owners.

They must’ve just come into an inheritance or made money on the stock market or something, because there’s no way they could sell enough records to make the kind of money they spent buying coke from me. They’d buy two or three grams a day, then ask for a fourth. Sometimes I’d sell them the fourth but sometimes I’d cut them off, for their own good, I thought, or just because I was running out and wanted to save some for my friends. In any case, the record store owners were doubling or tripling my profits pretty soon.

Anne would sometimes let me take her over to my house after I finished work and make out with her, but nothing more. I decided that she did it just to keep me selling to the record store people whenever she asked me to, so I told her to stop coming to the camera place. I used the excuse that Doug and the owner were starting to get suspicious. But then when she started calling me at home I told her to throw away my phone number because I thought the record store people had become addicts and were going to get me busted.

Then the Cake Girl was murdered.

I called Mike one day and he said he’d just come back from her funeral. She had told her mom that she loved the way he played guitar so her mom tracked him down and asked him to play at the service. He did “Naima,” a mournful slow Coltrane ballad. The mom said that the Cake Girl had a jealous boyfriend and he’d found out that she’d been seeing other guys – including Mike, I guess – and he drove her out onto the dirt road that led from the field across from the shopping center into the canyons, strangled her and dumped the body there. He was arrested right away, because the detectives went to her boyfriend’s house and saw he had scratches on his face.

The day after the Cake Girl was killed, someone had driven by Mark’s house and shot a few bullets into his window. Angry customers who thought they’d been ripped off? A rival dealer? Or just a random attack? I’ll never know. But his girlfriend Joanna gashed her forearm while she was picking up big chunks of plate glass in their living room, and Mark decided to take the shortcut down the dirt road to get her to the emergency room sooner.

So Mark drove up to the crime scene just as the cops were taping it off. When I came by to pick up a quarter ounce a couple of days later, he told me it was the one he’d had in his pocket when the cops had blocked the road, so it’s a good thing they didn’t search him. Which they very well could have, because Joanna had showed them her bleeding forearm and begged and screamed at them to let her through so she could get to the hospital as quickly as possible. No dice, though, they had to drive around. The Cake Girl, the beautiful Cake Girl, lying there dead on the dirt road. How sad and awful.

I was alone in the camera shop one afternoon the next week when a tall, well-coiffed handsome man in his late twenties or early thirties walked in, said hello and handed me his business card:

“Trace Rodgers. Private Investigator.”

He explained that there’d been a murder and that he’d been hired by the suspect’s parents to find out if someone else might have killed her.

He told me her name and asked me if I knew her and said I didn’t, which was true. I only knew her as the Cake Girl. He told me she had come around the shopping center a few weeks before, selling cake. And he showed me a picture of her.

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “I think so. Selling cake. Yeah.”

Then he showed me a picture of her boyfriend and asked if I knew him. I didn’t.

“I hear she was going out with other guys,” Rodgers said. “I’m thinking maybe one of them could’ve done it. You know any of the other guys she was going out with?”

I shook my head no.

“Love triangle, you know?” Rodgers said. “Maybe it wasn’t the boyfriend. Maybe it was one of the other guys, when he found out she was going to get back together with her boyfriend.”

I shrugged again and I thought that might be the end of it. But it wasn’t. For a second, he looked like he was about to turn around and leave. But he didn’t.

“I’ve heard there’s been some drug dealing around here,” he said. “The people at the record store. You know anything about that?”

I held up both my palms and said no. I shrugged again.

“I’m thinking maybe she got in the middle of a drug deal gone wrong. Maybe she was even dealing. Or knew some dealer. Maybe somebody just wanted to send a message.”

As he was talking, he was looking at me. Hard. He was watching my face.

This guy is going to try to pin a murder on me, I said to myself.

I frowned and shook my head no and shrugged yet again.

“Well, you’ve got my card,” he said. “Call me if you think of something.”

He half-turned and gave me a half-smile as he walked out, or maybe I just imagined that. The electronic sensor rang the bell – ding dong – as he left.

I was standing alone there in the camera store wondering if he was going to drag me in as a suspect just to please the parents of the boyfriend, just to cloud the case against him. I instantly decided I wasn’t going to stick around to find out.

Fortunately, I already had my passport. I went to the bank and closed my savings account. My parents knew I was saving for my trip here. They knew I’d studied journalism in college because I wanted to be a writer. They knew I wanted to go to Paris and sit at a café and write stories about growing up at the outer edge of L.A., where the tract homes end and the hillsides and canyons sprawl out to the horizon and rattlesnakes crawl through the brush along the trails and everybody was snorting coke and every now and then someone dumped a dead body by the side of the road.

So it was easy to explain that I’d decided to push up the plans for my trip. I booked the first cheap flight to London that I could get and flew off a couple of days later. Then I took a night boat across the English Channel.

And less than a week after Trace Rodgers walked into the camera shop and gave me his business card, I was watching from my train compartment as the French countryside rolled by under a gray dawn on my way to Paris. I checked into the Hotel des Bains on rue Delambre in Montparnasse, and after I got unpacked and showered, I walked down the street to buy a notebook.

Then I got a table at Le Dôme café on the Boulevard Montparnasse and wrote this story. A lot had to happen for me to get here. A lot had to happen.

I kept Trace’s business card in my wallet. I called Mike a few weeks later to see if he’d heard any more about the murder, but he hadn’t. Coltrane’s son was still riding his skateboard up and down the walkway of the shopping center, though. I think of the Cake Girl whenever I hear his father play “Naima,” that beautiful, sad, soulful song.

Darren in the Van

Darren and I made friends right away. On the first day I picked him up in the school bus I drove, he called out to me from the back.

“Hey bus driver!” he said.

“Yeah Darren?”

“Yes means no and no means yes!”

“Is that what they taught you in kindergarten today?”

“No, I figured that out myself.”

Sometimes we’d talk, or sometimes we’d just sit silently together in our pointless trajectory across the suburbs.

It wasn’t a real school bus, it was a van. Darren was 5, and for some reason his kindergarten program ended more than an hour earlier than the ones at other schools. Once he’d climbed aboard, we headed off across the valley to pick up Josh at 12:30. We’d sit in the van for about 20 minutes to wait there. Then we went back to the private school where I worked. This struck me as kind of insane for poor Darren in the van with me, driving back and forth across the valley for no reason. I talked to the director of the school about it.

“Cindy, can’t I just take Darren back here at 11 instead of keeping him in the van with me for almost two hours?”

“No. His parents won’t pay the extra for him to have the last part of his kindergarten day here, so this is how I’ve solved that problem.”

It didn’t surprise me. Her husband was a lawyer and they’d set up this school as kind of a large-scale baby-sitting program for their other lawyer friends and some people like Darren’s parents, I suppose, who had the misfortune of happening upon it.

So Darren and I made the best of it. I taught him songs I remembered from elementary school, like “The Cherry Tree.”

White in the sunshine, green in the rain
Leaning out from a hill at the top of the plain
The cherry tree watches the people who go
Down the hill fast, up the hill slow

He’d sing with me, but he wasn’t all that into it. But I was saving for a trip across Europe and I knew a little French, so I figured I’d practice with him – and that, he loved. “Un! Deux! Trois!” he’d shout, repeating after me. I taught him some colors, too. “Rouge! Noir!” When Josh got in the van, they’d show each other their drawings and talk about their families and their pets and what they saw on TV and what they did over the weekend. Sometimes we even practiced a little French together. The three of us were having a pretty good time.

One day, though, we drove to Josh’s school and waited as usual, but when kindergarten got out – no Josh. I walked into the office to ask about him and the woman there told me she was sorry, she was supposed to have gone out to the van to tell me that he would be off school for two weeks. His parents had taken him on a trip.

OK, I said to myself. Cindy doesn’t know or she would’ve told me, probably. This means I’ve got two hours to kill every day. If I tell Cindy, she’ll make an issue about Darren’s parents not paying and she’ll find some other scheme to deal with him, maybe even crazier than having him spend two hours in the van. And she’d find something for me to do, too, like wash windows or help serve lunch. I decided hanging out with Darren would be more fun.

So the next day, when I picked him up at his school I said:

“We don’t have to pick up Josh. Whaddya wanna do?”

“I dunno. Shouldn’t we go to school?”

“Well, we could if you want to. But I asked them and they said you weren’t in the program until the afternoon. Tell you what, I’m going to the bank and then I’m going to go say hi to a friend. Wanna come?”

“Sure.”

So I took him to the bank. I didn’t think the tellers would notice I had a 5-year-old with me, but they knew I was another 19-year-old Valley stoner like them, so they did.

“Is that your little brother?” one of them asked.

I explained I was a school bus driver and I had a little extra time so I was running some errands. Then I went up to Mike’s house. He didn’t think there was anything unusual about me dropping by before noon with a 5-year-old. He knew I was driving the van and I’d told him about some of the kids. I introduced them once we got inside.

Mike had just woken up and was about to have cereal. He poured a bowl for Darren, too. Then he found a channel still showing cartoons that late in the morning. They watched cartoons and ate together. I browsed through Mike’s parents’ copy of Newsweek on the family room table.

“Do you guys like alligators?” Darren asked us.

“They’re OK,” Mike said.

“I guess I like ’em,” I said to Darren. “Do you?”

“I love alligators.”

“Why?”

“Because they’re the closest things we’ve got to dinosaurs!”

We killed half an hour or so that way – we talked about helicopters, too, and we all agreed they were pretty great, along with trumpets, pianos and guitars – then I took Darren back for day care with kids his own age and headed out for my afternoon pickups.

The next day, though, I really didn’t know what Darren and I could do to waste time, so we took a drive around the Valley. I drove to the top of a hill that looked out on a huge expanse of chapparel, an undulating plain covered with brush that would turn into tumbleweeds when summer came. They were going to build a freeway there. It had been a foggy morning, and there was still some mist clinging to the barren landscape.

Darren and I climbed from the van to stand on the ridge and take in the view. We were out of our usual element of storefront-lined avenues and suburban tract homes in the neighborhoods behind them. It looked otherwordly up there.

“You know where we are?” I asked him.

“No.”

“This is where people go when they die.”

He looked up at me with wide eyes and an open mouth. A cool breeze blew over us, tousling his hair slightly.

“Is my dog here?”

I felt bad immediately.

“No – ” I was about to tell him I was just messing with him. I didn’t want him climbing out of his window at three in the morning and trying to find his way up there to look for his dog. But before I could, he asked:

“Is my grandma here?” He was getting intense. I knew I had to calm him down.

“Darren, Darren, I was just teasing. Man. Don’t take me so seriously. It’s just a field. I was just kidding. They’re gonna build a freeway here. That’s why there’s nothing up here. It’s just a field.”

He was still looking at me.

We got back in the van. He was silent.

“You know I was just kidding, right?” I asked him as we drove away.

“No.”

He didn’t believe me when I said I was kidding. He thought I’d showed him where people – and dogs – go when they die. He figured I was trying to cover it up.

I pulled over and stopped the van and turned around to look at him.

“Darren, you gotta believe me. Nobody knows what happens when you die. Nobody knows. Some people believe in heaven. Some people don’t. But nobody knows. It’s a mystery. But one thing you gotta know, guy: That field I just showed you has nothing to do with it. I was just kidding.”

I had forgotten what it was like to be 5. And I’ll never know what it was like to be Darren, Mr. Yes-Means-No.

“You believe me, now, right?” I asked him when we got back to the school. He just stared at me. I could tell what he was thinking: “You let me in on a secret and now you’re trying to tell me it’s not the truth.”

Cindy saw us and asked me where Josh was. I gave Darren a signal to go ahead to his classroom and explained that the woman at Josh’s school told me he went on a trip with his parents.

“Yeah, I just got the note on that. So where were you?” I had underestimated her attention to detail. One kid, two kids, one hour, two hours – I really didn’t think she’d notice.

“I took Darren with me to gas up the van.”

“All this time?”

“I talked to the guy at the gas station for a while. I had him check the van over. Then we went for a drive. You told me you didn’t want Darren here too early, so I was taking as long as possible.”

I could see the gears working in her lawyer-wife head: “Should I challenge him? What’s the upside? What’s the downside?” She decided to walk away.

A couple of days later, though, she called me into her office.

“I’ve had some complaints.”

“About …?”

“Well, some of the parents said you take their kids to the doughnut shop.”

“That’s Joan. She used to work at Winchell’s. They give her free doughnuts. It’s a treat for the kids. She told me she does it sometimes. I wouldn’t do it. They wouldn’t give me free doughnuts.”

“And Darren said you took him to a restaurant.”

“Nope. Never happened.” Where’d he get that?

“And to the bank.”

“I stopped at the bank for a minute that day I didn’t have to pick up Josh. I was killing some time. Remember, you told me you didn’t want Darren here too early. Speaking of which, what are you doing with Darren now that I bring him at 11?” She didn’t answer, though.

“He said you brought him to your friend’s house.”

“No. I would never do that.”

I was waiting for the next part. What was I going to say? I was waiting in dread. But it didn’t come.

“OK,” Cindy said. That was the end of our meeting.

I wonder why Darren didn’t tell her I took him to the place where people go when they die. Maybe he thought she’d just deny it, too, like I did. Just another liar in a world full of them, huh Mr. Yes-Means-No? They built that freeway up there. You can’t see that field anymore, so dreamlike in the morning mist. It’s gone. I know. I’ve looked for it.