Read Online Los Angeles by Peter Moore Smith - Free Book Online

darkest of circumstances, the light finds its way in. Photons force their way one particle at a
     time, if they have to. In a closet, for instance, or a dark room, a sliver of light will appear around the door, a gray line
     that, over time, will become to the person hiding there like a razor of illumination.
    Try it. Turn out the lights.
    A room that was formerly black will gradually become gray, and shapes will appear, eventually shadows will form.
    The
picture,
I thought.
    Of course. I had taken a photograph.
    Surrounding my computers were stacks of junk mail, illegible notes on my screenplay, and old unfilled prescription slips.
     Frantically, I searched through the clutter until I found the thick envelope I had picked up a week ago at the one-hour photo
     place.
    My hands were shaking as I sifted through them.
    The first photo was of a house, an ordinary one-story dwelling in the Valley with a red-tiled roof, a lavender bougainvillea
     half in bloom. The next one was of the same house at night, the windows glowing like bug lamps over a darkened lawn. I stared
     at it but did not remember taking this photograph. Here was a brown-haired woman inserting a key into the door of a gray-morning-mist
     Ford Taurus. She was thin, with limp hair that hung halfway down her back, wearing a canvas tote bag over her shoulder. Behind
     her, sunlight perforated the trees of a parking lot like a thousand prismatic needles piercing a veil. There were other pictures,
     too, photos of the same woman walking through a long, linoleum corridor. Here she emerged from a Hallmark store. In this one,
     she entered a gray institutional building.
    I had no recollection of taking any of these pictures. Maybe there had been a mistake at the processing place, I thought,
     and these photos belonged to someone else.
    But then I came to the last one.
    It was Angela all right, sneering into the lens, her face completely out of focus, offering that petulant middle finger.
    Okay, I thought. That’s a start.
    In the bedroom, I slipped out of my robe and into a pair of black cargo pants and a black shirt, the same uniform I had worn
     to the Velvet Mask a couple of weeks ago. It was morning now, and I noticed through the kitchen window that the sky outside
     had turned the color of that scary Buddha’s tie, silvery gray, with an argentine glow originating from the east. A heavy smog
     had lowered, too, and it seemed like the city itself wore that old charcoal-colored robe of mine.
    I stepped next door into Angela’s apartment and found that the cops, thankfully, had left the door unlocked. I was thinking
     there must be
something
with her full name on it somewhere… an envelope, an old credit-card receipt, a magazine. I took a look around the living
     room. There was the blue love seat, the cheap rattan table and aluminum folding chairs, the matching rocker. Nothing. I went
     into the bathroom. The medicine cabinet contained a single bottle of Motrin, nothing else. The sink featured a red toothbrush
     and a tube of Crest. In a kitchen drawer, I found a set of cheap utensils, newly bought, but nothing useful. On the counter
     was Julia Child’s
The Way to Cook.
I flipped it open, and it automatically settled on the recipe for lamb stew. There was a gravy stain on the list of ingredients,
     a splash of savory brown obscuring the words. I looked in the trash and found an empty carton of orange juice, a few paper
     napkins, and finally — yes,
this
was what I was looking for — way at the bottom, a couple of envelopes.
    One was just an offer for a credit card and was addressed to someone named
Jessica Teagarden,
indicating a street in Santa Monica called Orange Blossom Boulevard. The other envelope, turquoise blue, greeting card-size,
     bore the same Santa Monica address and said
Jessica
in blocky handwriting. It had been torn open, and whatever it had contained, like Angela herself, was gone.
    Jessica Teagarden—was that her name? So why would she tell me