Gathering Dark

I laughed. “I asked for ice water.”
“To throw all over your steaming crotch?”
“Sneak!”
“You haven’t broken the curse yet, have you?” She shook her head at me. She seemed grateful for something to latch on to that wasn’t her missing daughter. “You’ve been out a year and you haven’t been dicked.”
“Can you just … Don’t say ‘dicked.’” The waiter came and deposited our meals and the ice water, and I completely ignored him. “And put the salt and pepper shakers back.”
Sneak rolled her eyes and produced the items from her handbag, shoving them back onto the table.
“This video of Dayly,” I said. “It’s amateur porn.”
“From a paid site.” Sneak nodded as she spoke. “Viewer pays a fee to watch. The poster gets a cut of the profits. Maybe she was hard up for cash and did something stupid. Maybe her boyfriend filmed them and posted the video, hoping she’d never find out about it.”
“This guy is her boyfriend?” I asked. “Or is he just some douchebag?”
“Boyfriend, apparently. I’ve got the name, the address. Dimitri Lincoln. He’s bad people. We need to talk to him, see what he knows. But he lives out in Temple City. If Dayly was willingly doing amateur porn, she was starting to circle the toilet. It’s how I started in the industry. I let a guy take some pictures of me to get money for Vicodin. Then I was giving blow jobs. Then I was out on street corners. If she was mixing with the wrong crowd, I want to know who was in that crowd.”
“Okay.” I nodded. “Sounds like a good lead.”
“But Temple City is a hell of a cab ride. We’re going to need money and a car.”
“Right,” I said.
“I spent some of last night trying to get hold of a car,” she said. “No luck. Money’s tight. What about you? What about that woman who’s got your kid? Will she loan you a car for a couple of weeks?”
“She might, but I don’t want to do that,” I said. “I look like enough of a fuck-up already. I can’t have her and her husband thinking I can’t handle myself, or they’ll never agree to increased custody of Jamie.” I tapped the tabletop with my fork. A thought that had been pushing its way into the back of my brain was now surging toward the front, and try as I might to suppress it, it was demanding to be acknowledged. Sneak seemed to know it. She was watching my face.
“I have to go see my kid,” I said. “We’ll meet up after that.”
“You got an idea?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I sighed. “But I really, really don’t want to do it.”
Dear John,
My name is Dayly Lawlor. You don’t know me, but if you’ve got a good memory, maybe you’ll recognize my last name. A week ago I was sitting watching the news in my apartment with my mother, and a report came on about three million dollars cash found in suitcases, buried in the desert in Pasadena. Some builders found it, I think. (I have no idea why they involved the police and didn’t just run off with it.) The report said the money probably belonged to a San Quentin death-row inmate named John Fishwick, who buried it there for safekeeping before he was arrested. Some criminologist they dragged on the show said he agreed. I’d never heard of you before, but my mom laughed and said she slept with you a long time ago. Actually, she knew exactly how long it had been: twenty years. I’m 19 years old in February.
You probably get a lot of letters from people you’ve never met on the outside. Crackpots and weirdos who want to know about your crimes. I’ve actually written to a couple of other guys who my mother was hanging out with around the time that I was conceived, and two of them are currently incarcerated, like you. She has always been a rough sort of person. Fell in with the wrong crowd really young, I think. She is an addict who gave me up when she was sixteen. I have mixed feelings about her, but I don’t want to bore you with all that. I wonder if you remember her? You must have been hanging around a lot of bad people. At the time, you were at the height of your career. That was just before Inglewood. My mom said you would turn up to parties at clubs and throw cash around, then leave before the police arrived to get you. I can see the attraction, I guess. You were probably thought of as a kind of Robin Hood. But I have to say before I go on that what you did on May 11, 2001, in the Inglewood Chase Bank was truly shocking to me. I read everything I could find about you and the massacre, and the internet these days has all the grisly pictures available if you happen to take a wrong turn and stumble upon them.
I’m not writing to interrogate you about your crimes. I’m sure you get enough of that. I’m writing to see if you remember Emily Lawlor, who some people called “Sneak.” Is there any truth to her saying that the two of you were together around that time? Has she ever contacted you to tell you that you might be my father? Have you had any contact with her at all over the years?
I realize I’ve written this whole letter so far without saying anything about myself, in case you were interested. I guess it’s weird to think that I’d be curious about you and you wouldn’t be curious about me. I live in Toluca Lake, near the studios, because my housemate is an aspiring actress. I’m taking community college classes in animal studies, and I like to rescue and rehabilitate animals when I can. At the moment I’m raising a juvenile Botta’s pocket gopher, if you’ve ever heard of one of those. They’re native to