LA is BIG. Likes to celebrate. Likes to party. Likes to eat. And drink. They have a lot of bars to do it in, more that twenty-one-hundred. Rhea narrowed her search for Myrna down to twenty-seven. Doubting that a fifty-something year old Mexican woman would be mixing Twinki-tinis at the Skybar or pulling drafts at Barney’s Beanery or pouring it neat at the Frolic Room, or any other similar scene, she eliminated over a thousand. The massive size of LA knocked out another nine hundred. She settled on the 27 bars closest to Domingos. The closest of those was Traxx, inside Union Station.
Rhea hated Union Station. She hated the air, heavy with stories of people leaving; the echo that footsteps made on the old deco tiles; the memory of racing down the long corridor from the trains to the night outside and finding no one she wanted or needed there. But here she was again. Still looking. She sucked it up and headed inside.
Besides the Christmas Eve Rhea had first arrived in LA., she’d been in Union Station one other time, working security at Tony Villarogosa’s mayoral victory party. Back then, Traxx had an old bartender who was a dead ringer for Nosferatu. The guy was still there. On the night shift. But they didn’t have a Myrna.
Rhea left the station and crossed Alameda to Olvera Street, another self-inflicted wound.
A new joint, Time Out, had taken over where the iconic La Golandrina had once held center stage on the old tourist haunt. Two smooth and creamy thirty-year-olds were blending classic margaritas behind a hundred year old bar. No Myrna. She asked.
Before she left, she grabbed the special at Cielito Lindo, so it wouldn’t be a complete loss. She ate the beef-stuffed rolled tortillas, deep fried and smothered in a classic green sauce, at a little yellow table, wobbling on the brick-paved street.
The third, fourth, fifth and sixth bars were scattered over a few blocks in a radius extending from Domingos. Three of the bartenders were men, the fourth was a transgender Russian woman mixing Zubrovka mules at a vodka bar on San Pedro St. None had heard of a Myrna.
The seventh was a dark 30’s Chinese restaurant bar on Broadway that featured Chow Mein, Mu Shu pork, Won Ton soup and Peking Duck. They were out of duck. Rhea ordered a Tsing Dao and crispy wontons from a snake-skinned old bartender named Madame Wu, who Rhea once knew. This red-walled grease stained joint was the third in Rhea’s tour of her past this burdened night; it was a place she’d come to for help many years before. Madame didn’t let on if she remembered Rhea and Rhea didn’t ask. She did ask if Wu knew of another woman in town who bartended named Myrna. Madame’s dyed-black eyebrow barely raised, but it raised a little twitch in response to the name. Ignoring Rhea, she moved down the bar to pour a shot of Chartreuse for a ninety-year old dancer. Rhea scooted down a seat, tapped on her phone to bring up a photo of the three dead girls and slid her phone down the bar, toward Wu and the dancer. “She used to bartend at Domingos. She might know something about this…” Seeing dead kids, or a photo of them, changes things. Sometimes. It did this time.
“I served her twice. Good gin.” Wu informed her.
“Recently?”
“Once was. Last week.”
“The other time?”
“Years ago.”
Rhea switched her phone app to “notepad” and wrote it all down.
“…write down anything you remember.” Strickland had told her when she was sixteen, a terrified kid looking to him for hope on the darkest night of her life. He’d given her a note pad; wrote his phone number on the pad, “Anything at all, then call me. Anytime.”
His phone number hadn’t changed. Hours later, back in her apartment, she called him, left a message, told him Saldano was Myrna’s last name and she sometimes hung out in Chinatown. So there. She turned to her Cielito notes, started writing a review, making some of it up… “–a sinewy gaucho walking by bought me three taquitos with extra heat for five-twenty-five and he sprung for a Champurrado. In the back of his Camaro parked in a lot on Main…” She couldn’t finish right now; making up the good part sucked. She found a snack sized bag of Maui potato chips and turned on the tv. Not much was on her basic cable. QVC. News. Old PBS shows. She settled on a Huell Howser re-run. He was visiting Porto’s Bakery. It was an entire show about cakes: Mango cheesecake. White chocolate raspberry mousse. Kiwi merengue torte. Grand Mariner with chocolate ganache. Lemon curd pound cake. Vanilla custard cake with pineapple filling… she should have turned it off but her mood was dark and so she watched and let her mind be pierced with thoughts of her sister.
A pledge break reeled her mind in. She turned the tv off and went outside to the courtyard. It was late. All the apartments were dark. She sat in a plastic chair by the pool. The only sound was the constant whisper of cars driving by outside.
A moving shadow startled her. A young coyote darted from behind a trash bin enclosure. It stopped when it saw her – stared her down, unafraid. Finally it skulked away and slipped out between the rails of the courtyard gate, heading up Laurel, toward the hills. A greeting came to it from somewhere in those hills, the sound of its entire pack howling. It died down. Rhea shivered. She looked at her phone. Three AM. When the quiet settles into the cracks of the night and the ghosts in the air kiss your skin.