City of Angles by Jonathan Leaf

Author:Jonathan Leaf [Leaf, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781637587898
Publisher: Bombardier Books
Published: 2022-12-17T12:48:35+00:00

Chapter 22

The front gate of the apartment building was identical to Billy’s own. Now he placed Vincenza’s key in its lock and turned the tumbler, opening it.

Finding her address wasn’t hard. All that was required was a search of the internet. A site providing unknown phone numbers revealed not only where she lived but that they were the same age, each about to turn thirty.

As in his building, the front gate led out to a courtyard with a swimming pool and apartments formed into a rectangle flanked around it. Climbing a flight of steps, he approached her apartment on the second floor. While he had a high degree of certainty that there was no meth den and there were no armed drug dealers inside, he advanced with deliberate steps, and, reaching the door, he pressed his ear—and his nostrils—to it. These provided him with no peculiar scents and no noises from within. There was likewise no response to his knock.

He was discomfited by what he was doing. The inspiration for it was less a sense of grievance that he had been conned than curiosity. Who was she? Why had she done this to him?

The door was alike to his own. Painted a slate gray, it was surmounted with a pewter knocker. Beneath this was a pewter knob. His unease was partly assuaged by the feeling that he was opening his own door. He reminded himself that he had given her keys to his place, and she might well be examining his apartment. Setting a key into the lock, he unbolted her door. Behind it lay carpeting of the sort one encounters in beachfront cottages: a white cotton rug with a pattern of blue waves on it.

The room was ordinary: neither shockingly messy nor frighteningly tidy. It was lived in. There was a bookcase on one side and an armoire on the other. He remembered that when he had met Vincenza she had mentioned her involvement with the International Church of Life, and he noticed that its handbooks and therapeutic guides were among the volumes on the bookshelves. There were also coffee-table tomes on old Hollywood style, volumes on the environment and an assortment of cookbooks. Half-open, the armoire displayed an assortment of vintage dresses, blouses, and skirts.

On the wall beside her bed he spied a framed poster calling for a ban on whaling. Alongside this were DVDs of classic black-and-white movies from Hollywood’s Golden Age and hardcovers on old-time actresses like Joan Blondell and Carole Lombard.

Something, he understood, was wrong. This was not the apartment of a grifter. Billy knew that the conventions of B-movies were false. A criminal didn’t have fake passports and stacks of cash lying around. But a woman who was in the business of preying upon scuffling writers didn’t live like this. For that matter, a bona fide fraudster—if such an oxymoronic concept existed—didn’t target people like him. She went after celebrities or aging men with comb-overs who drove Bentleys. Her name was fake. That was proven by the website that had given him her address.

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