Free Los Angeles by Peter Moore Smith Page A

name?
    And if it was, why had she told me her name was Angela?
    There were only a few envelopes, one electricity bill, a couple of solicitations, and one thick envelope without a return
     address. It was the same shade of blue and addressed in the same blocky handwriting as the empty one I found in Angela’s trash
     back home, the word
Jessica
emblazoned across it in letters a half inch high. It occurred to me that she probably had received the other blue envelope
     at this address, too, and had brought it with her, along with her old utility bills, to the apartment in West Hollywood. Whatever
     it contained, I knew, had something to do with her old life.
    Furtively, I slipped the blue envelope into my pocket.
    “Are you stealing peoples mail?”
    I turned around to see a boy, maybe ten or eleven years old, with an oddly shaped face. I gave him what I hoped would appear
     to be a friendly smile but probably turned out to be the usual grimace. “I was looking for Angela,” I answered. Then I corrected
     myself, saying, “I mean, Jessica… Ms. Teagarden.”
    “She used to be our next-door neighbor,” the boy announced. He had five or six heavy library books under his arm, plus a full
     backpack. “But she moved away.”
    “Oh.” I stood up.
    “No one lives there now.”
    “Really?”
    “Not yet. I was hoping for some kids.” He reached into the pocket of his jeans without dropping his books and fished out a
     single key on a shoe lace. “My moms not home,” he said. “She’ll be back around twelve-thirty.”
    “She’s at work?”
    The boy smiled a bored, completely adult smile.
    “Did you know her?”
    He arched a single eyebrow and said this like a fifty-year-old man: “Are you referring to Jessica Teagarden?” He had the kind
     of cheekbones that made his eyes and nose seem almost concave.
    I reached in my side pocket for the photo I had grabbed before I left the apartment, thinking I might at least be able to
     verify her identity. “Is this her?” In the picture, Angela half-sneered, half-smiled, holding that middle finger directly
     up to the lens. I could feel the migraine growing now, a piercing needle stabbing the back of my eye, the point touching the
     interior of my pupil.
    The boy examined it, and his own gray eyes narrowed. “That’s her, I guess… well, maybe… but why is she doing that?”
    The inappropriateness of showing a ten-year-old kid a photograph of a half-dressed woman extending the fuck-you finger suddenly
     dawned on me. “That sure is a lot of books you have there,” I said, slipping the picture back into my pocket.
    “Yeah, well,” he said, “I just came back from the library because I’m doing a report.”
    “What on?”
    “The gecko.”
    “Interesting,” I nodded appreciatively. “The gecko.”
    He dropped his books onto the ground. “Do you want to hear it?”
    I blinked.
    He turned his satellite-shaped face toward the sky, keeping his eyes wide. They watered, absorbing the light, then started
     to flicker. I was about to tell him it wasn’t a good idea to stare into the sun, when he began speaking in a low voice, his
     lids half-closed.
“They are found in tropical regions all over the world,”
he said.
“Nocturnal, hiding in cool shadows during the day and foraging
     for insects at night, the gecko frequently makes his or her home in high tree branches… suction cups which can enable the gecko
     to walk across a smooth ceiling as if he is walking across the floor.”
Suddenly, his eyelids fluttered wildly.
    “Are you all right?”
    He enunciated every syllable like a television voice-over actor. His face twitched, as though he were in the middle of a seizure.
“A highly developed sense of hearing… relatively unique in their ability to chirp or click. In fact, the very name gecko is
     believed to be a derivative of a Malay word which…”
    Now he paused, but his eyes kept pulsating.
    “Hey!” I shouted.
    He stopped, breathing heavily. The