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.