Stranger Girl
A corporate spook navigates the shadowy tradecraft of business intelligence, losing time and perhaps his mind between vodka and limes and the embers of a love affair that once burned him down
[A Note of Introduction: I first started writing this story in 2010, following the end of my relationship with a woman who had completely fictionalized the backstory of her life, as I learned too late. I liked the term’s play on the cold fact that my girl had actually been a stranger. Stranger. Girl. Stranger Girl. After a few fits and starts and a couple of rough drafts, I set it aside. Five years later, in 2015, journalist and filmmaker Davis Barber, who I knew from my days as a writer at the LA Weekly, approached me about writing segments of a short film he was producing and directing. So, I decided to return to Stranger Girl and revamp it as a companion piece of sorts to a short story that I had written for Low Magazine in 1996 entitled ‘The Invitational,’ which had also been based on actual events surrounding a love affair of mine. My contribution to the screenplay, which was being created by a team of writers contributing segments in a round-robin style, was delivered in the two passages presented here; the scene that was to open the movie and establish the basis of the storyline and then a second stretch that provided more background on the story’s main characters; Alek and Emily. Both are presented here as a single work, albeit unfinished, and is partially set in the Roanoke Tavern on Mercer Island, a place I had become well acquainted with over years of drinking there. In 2017, Davis Barber began shooting his independent film adaptation of Stranger Girl in Southern California’s mountain hamlet of Mt. Baldy and, coincidentally, in the very same lodge that was the real-life backdrop for the woman I had based Janine on in ‘The Invitational’ two decades earlier. In Stranger Girl, the character of Emily is based upon a different woman than the one I had originally started writing about in 2010, and she bridges the two stories by facilitating a reflection back to Janine. Alek is based around my personal and professional experiences, with the name cribbed from one of Lee Harvey Oswald’s aliases. Images published here were taken on the day that Davis invited me up to watch some of the Stranger Girl film shoot. At some point, perhaps, I’ll finish a complete draft of my short story ‘Stranger Girl,’ but now a decade after writing them, I thought I’d let these original sections from the work breathe a little here.]
By Mark Cromer
It’s an ice cream dream topped in dread.
They’re on the sand, together. Twenty years ago like yesterday. It could be any beach, well at least any one from his youth. Newport. Laguna. Ventura. He can feel the sand cradling the back of his head, creeping up to his ears.
But he can’t move. He’s vibrantly aware, but frozen. Transfixed. Terrified.
There’s a crystal blue sky above that beckons with an endless depth. Like those moments in Santa Barbara all those years ago with his mom and her friend Elanore Fox in the early 1970s, listening to them chat and laugh as women can when they think no one else is listening. That gorgeous knowing women have, that liberating laugh that comes with the confidence of an inside joke spoke amongst each other. But now he can only hear the waves. Crashing.
And Janine. She’s back.
He can’t see her, but he knows she’s here, right next to him. He can smell her. He can sense her. All Coppertone and Nose Kote. Legs like a runner and a tit man’s pink-nippled bliss. And that hint of Wrigley Doublemint mist rolling off her tongue. He still can’t see her as she nuzzles into the side of his head, exhaling in a slight giggle. A mild gasp of telling exasperation.
The ghost of a woman past.
A flick of her tongue traces his ear, and then her whisper of that snippet of a song, just to remind him that she once loved him, along with that sarcastic refrain to remind him that she was on to him all along.
And that he’s dead to her, now.
“Well, you’re where you should be all the time
and when you’re not, you’re with
some underworld spy
or the wife of a close friend
wife of a close friend…
you’re so vain”
His head still gripped in the sandy vice, the vast sweep of the blue sky above rapidly fades as he hears her giggle once more as she circles him, her words a smiling Susan Atkins’ blade run across his face, half-singing a sadistic lyrical play for fun.
“And your horse naturally won…but where’d that get you? Where did all that honey get you, lover? I warned you way back when. Just don’t ever say I didn’t warn you.”
And with that, he can finally see her. Janine. Gorgeous Ms. Wide Eyes. She begins to lower her face slowly into his, eyes glowing in her descent, her mouth spreading from a sickly-sweet smile to an all-consuming black hole that finally pulls his head out of its cement dock in the sand to greet her and his fate.
She devours him.
And in that consumption, the long road of life and the Temple of Janine dissolves into Emily.
Emily.
Crawling on the floor she finally found it. Buried in the pile of clothes by the bed was his wallet. Slightly damp, its frayed edges perhaps betrayed his subtle references of financial security, but possibly not, as he didn’t seem to be much of a status peacock either. It was a scuffed and stuffed pocket locker, larded with hand-scrawled coded notes, cash and credit cards. Corners of folded old bills poked out the sides.
When she found it, she let out a hushed gasp; he moved. She held still until she was sure he was still asleep. Between his snorkeling breaths she opened his wallet, careful not to make a sound. And there it was, his driver’s license. On it was what she needed to find: his name.
Alek James Hidell.
She took a long look, barely able to make out the fine print amid the shadows that still hung throughout the room even as the dawn approached outside. Laying there on the floor, she held it close to her face and studied it closely in the muted ambient light.
Alek James Hidell, 254 West 11th Street, Claremont, California, 91711. The photo on the license was him, radiating the same crooked little grin framed in a full beard that had faded incrementally from dark brown to Hemmingway gray to Papa white, that rather sly grin that caught her eye the first time she saw him, that almost-smile he cracked that seemed both reassuring and pleasantly sleazy all at once.
As if he really knew something, or perhaps had just survived something else.
Or maybe both.
She suppressed the odd impulse of a chuckle as she considered the past three days of her life.
A long weekend that began on Friday afternoon as she saddled up at the Roanoke Tavern, her favorite drinking spot on Mercer Island, a near-century old establishment along the shoreline of the back channels of Puget Sound that was rumored to have been a brothel in the earlier days of the Twentieth Century.
Perhaps it had been. Or perhaps that was just something the locals liked saying to add a little more color to an island that was seeing its rich history literally bulldozed away in front of their eyes. The cottages and bungalows, the craftsman and Victorian homes that once dotted the island’s hillsides back in those honey days of the 20th Century, the very tangible charm that defined its character disappeared under the horrifically agonizing crunch of the earth-moving machines as an orgy of buy-to-demolish unleashed by real estate ‘investors’ was followed by the rise of the McMansions that were the garish battle standard of the Super-Size crowd and its foreign contingent of Persian Palace visionaries.
The Roanoke was—in the parlance of the limp-wristed university students that navigated academia these days searching for ‘trigger alerts’ simultaneously transfixed and terrified of hearing something that might offend them, seemingly living for the next toxic fix of offense to climax in a fury over—a ‘safe space’ for the island’s locals and safe harbor for transient creative types.
It was a port on the sound that conveniently supplied cold beer, cheap wine and wonderfully hard drinks on an ‘as needed’ basis. All of the above properly poured without the insult of a jigger.
Emily liked it there. Her own redoubt from the world at large and a fine place from which to make a final stand, drink in hand, when and if that moment ever arrived.
On most afternoons or evenings she knew just about everyone that would line the hardwood bar, as well as half or more of the patrons that would take up positions in the pews at the tables and outside on the deck. The occasional passerby from out of state would sometimes slip in, more often by happenstance based on the allure of the tavern’s sign, and there was a fair stream of day-trippers from Seattle proper, but by and large the late afternoon and evening shift was the domain of regulars that flitted in and out of each other’s orbits.
Usually peacefully, but occasionally with a bang.
Last Friday seemed like it was going to be like most every other Friday before it; a series of rounds at the Roanoke unfolding against the gauzy backdrop of 1970s rock coming off the juke and punctuated by intermittent conversations with whomever slid into the bar stools on either side of hers.
She wasn’t finished with her first Bloody Hell (a proper spirit glass filled mostly with Blue Label Stoli yet with a touch of OJ, a splash of cranberry and two quarters of fresh lime for good measure) when she glanced down the bar to see him standing there, not yet seated, ordering a drink from Jake, the evening bartender who had arrived a little early.
He looked somewhere just around 5’10” and hovering perhaps not quite a dime south of 200 pounds, his halcyon days having clearly lost the marathon to the consequences of his relentless appetites as they finally caught up with him to fatten his liver in lieu of being able to shut it down completely (rumor had it that post-mortem his liver was to be bequeathed to The Smithsonian as a permanent installation curated for its planned Keith Richards annex). He had a rapidly graying hairline locked in a slow retreat and a face that seemed on pause between the glory days and the grizzled aftermath that inevitably awaits. In jeans and a collared, blessedly untucked dress shirt, he wore plain leather cowboy boots that were worn but not yet dying. He seemed at ease as she watched him exchange some words with Jake, she couldn’t make out what they were, but she saw Jake smile and nod as he put down a Bloody Hell in front of him and take a piece of plastic in return.
She could, however, make it out when he said: “Keep it open.”
He lifted the glass to his lips, took an admirable drag—not too light and yet not the absurd ‘Watch This!’ chug-a-slug of a frat boy with something to prove—and then took in the sweep of the tavern, his gaze stopping at the end of the bar. His eyes locked with hers. She didn’t react, but she didn’t look away. He didn’t either.
“This guy’s got some balls,” she thought to herself, finally breaking off the eye contact long enough to take another hit of her drink.
The Eagles had come on, ‘Victim of Love,’ and the dirty dual guitar work of Don Felder and Joe Walsh sounded as deliciously wicked as it did in 1976, but she muttered something like ‘Oh dear God’ as Don Henley’s voice observed “Some people never come clean, I think you know what I mean…”
She looked back down the bar. He was still looking dead at her.
But this time there was this slightly crafty smirk spread ever so gingerly across his weathered face. His graying weeks-old beard framing it nicely. A smirk as an invitation? Less than pleasant salutation? A dare?
She was certain it was not a dismissal.
She felt the blood rush to her face as she offered the faintest of smiles back before dropping her gaze to the glass she seemed to be holding just a little tighter now. From the corner of her eye and through the bustle of the bar that was picking up, she could see he was walking toward her.
Henley was still coming off the juke.
“Tell me your secrets, I’ll tell you mine. This ain’t no time to be cool…”
“Fucking perfect,” she thought to herself. “Oh well, so much for ‘Stranger Danger.’ And anyway, Ted Bundy stopped fishing these waters since well before his date with Florida’s Old Sparky all those years ago. Gary Ridgway and most of the others too, so why not?”
Her thought trailed off as he sidled up next to her, smelling vaguely of the ocean air tainted with a slight residual edge of tobacco smoke, and looking a little more sun-kissed than he had from a distance. His eyes were a vibrant green and probably the only remarkable feature of his face up close, they didn’t seem so much misplaced as much as they appeared as an unveiled surprise that revealed a bright gift lit from behind by something else altogether.
“I’ve never been much for long distance ‘hellos’,” he said. “So I thought I’d come a little closer. Hello.”
She paused for a moment in his eyes, and then smiled more completely.
“Well, hell-o to you, Mr?…”
Alek crossed his boots underneath the stool and eased forward slightly over the bar as he fished another Camel Crush from the pack he’d been slowly killing since the night before. Smoking wasn’t allowed in the Roanoke, not since the soy boy sissy squads seized power in Olympia, and yet like so many other prohibited little things they seemed to happen anyway, depending on who was around and who wasn’t. He lit his cigarette and looked over at his glass, which still had about a third of a drink left in it. Pacing himself. He wasn’t in any hurry.
“Well, the name’s Alek,” he said. “But you can call me Charlie.”
Emily studied his face a moment more, then asked “If your name is Alek, why would I call you Charlie?”
“Charlie is a nickname of sorts, I suppose, from my way back,” he said, then started to softly hum-sing “Some gotta win, some gotta lose…good time Charlie’s got the blues…”
“So, you were nicknamed for that song?” she asked.
“Um, more like I am that song,” he replied.
She looked back into her Bloody Hell and then softly sang the refrain “You play around, you lose your wife…”
And he finished it looking at her: “You play too long, you lose your life.”
They both smiled.
Dusk had settled over the Pacific Northwest and as he gazed across the top of the tree line that rolled down the sloping descent of Mercer Island toward Lake Washington and beyond that Puget Sound, Alek was always struck by how long twilight lingered in the sky this far north. There wouldn’t be much of a discernable difference between 8 p.m. and 10:30 p.m., only an incremental deepening of the blue above and when darkness finally fell, its hold on the sky was tenuous and would evaporate by 5 a.m.
Ah, Washington. The old girl had nothing on California, his homeland.
Yet he wasn’t in Seattle to look at the sky, but rather a girl. A good girl. A bad girl. A one and the same girl. That Girl. And in the process of that case work, the specter of Janine had returned to his thoughts. Well, she had never really left, merely subsided. Receded enough into his deeper subconscious to allow him to work more and drink marginally less. Marginally.
When he first caught the assignment, he wasn’t sure what to make of Emily as he began to put together the background research file, assembling all of her vitals from the network of databases that now collected and archived a vast array of details on every American old enough to apply for a credit card since the Nixon Administration. Like all the rest of the assignments he’d worked through the years, she began to emerge slowly like a jigsaw puzzle; an academic firebrand with a keen intellect and a wicked mouth but not enough of a filter to keep her from coming precariously close to being exiled from the Ivory Tower, not that she would have minded all that much, he figured.
A young marriage and subsequent early divorce. A few financial scrapes, then bruises but nothing that looked terminal. Some nickel and dime brushes with Johnny Law, including a drunk in public charge that was later dismissed.
But she clearly had pissed someone off, or more specifically, a somebody. It was one of those moments worth repeating over in his head: a somebody.
The clients of his firm—whoever they were—clearly wanted to preset a response to Emily in the event hard intervention became necessary. Alek rarely knew who the actual end-users were, so to speak, as the multiple layers of law firms, crisis communication managers and other assorted suits in the C-Suite offices of the firm he helped found provided the opaque veil that real power players prefer to operate behind.
Not that he particularly cared, he didn’t. A case was a case was a case. As long as the checks cleared.
While Hollywood fare had somewhat glamorized the profession of corporate intelligence, the reality of cats like Tony Pellicano was far more rooted in a bleak truth than a beautiful and affable Jewish queer like Harvey Levin made it out to be.
Despite all the printed and cinematic mythology surrounding private dick work, Alek figured the film Michael Clayton had probably come the closest to the actual reality of the line of corporate intelligence he found himself swimming in after the heyday of print newspapers and magazines imploded.
It was indeed a world of spooks in the shadows; where people, places and things were not always what they seemed to be and often very real danger lurked, in a sly and sometimes sleepy sort of way, but there weren’t too many spectacular rooftop jumping getaways or repelling down the glassy sides of skyscrapers. Tom Cruise may have perfected that silly fantasy life after he achieved OT VIII and the improved conditions permitted him to defy odds, gravity, death and all other forms of reality in the Omission Intolerable franchise, but the truth was that corporate spying was filled far more with stupefying banality performed in silence and occasionally peppered waves of dread that could washed over you in clutch moments.
Those moments could happen amidst the ferns in a piano bar or in the shadowed booths of a dive, on the doorstep of home whose residents mistook as safe haven behind the gates and private security patrols, or in passing someone at just the right time in a transit lounge.
It could also happen in a keystroke.
Like an old cop told him one time when he was working the crime beat for the newspapers: “Gang members spend 90-percent of their time getting loaded, shootin’ dice, downing 40s, talking shit and chasing pussy. The other 10-percent involves the gunplay; either waiting for it or carrying it out. It’s actually rather boring.”
Again, in business intelligence, there’s not a lot of disarming neutron bombs or turning inert the airborne super pox that will cull the global human herd. And just as well, as Alek knew he would never disarm the dissemination device of a Zobrist virus to save the world for humanity. Hell no.
Alec would raise the doomsday device above his head as if it were the Holy Grail, his bedazzled eyes burning with pure delight and happily detonate it.
He’d ensure its secret sauce ingredients were released to save the planet from the human plague and gleefully celebrate it with a final human vector happy dance a la Mick Jagger doing the Crazy Rooster at Altamont in order to spread the good news as wide and far as possible. He’d become beyond jaded long with the human condition a long time ago, the crime beat will do that to you, yet he retained some sliver of optimism that allowed him to remain hopeful that global civilizational collapse may still occur at any moment and just in the nick of time to save the planet.
In the interim, he’d write and enjoy the good times that still arrived.
Alek took another drag off his smoke and followed it with a long pull from his now dying drink where the vodka had disappeared below the ice and limes. As he played the past four days over in his mind he realized he’d accomplished the required end of the assignment, at least this leg of it, but he’d opened something else up all together.
Janine. Emily. Janine. Emily. Emily.
Her name kept drifting around his mind like a persistent whisper. He could still smell her. He could still taste her. He could still feel her. His head dropped back onto the chair and he let his eyes unfocus. He knew he wasn’t supposed to ponder much of anything after his assignments were done, there wasn’t a lot of post-mortem analysis in this line of work, unless something went terribly awry, in which case you weren’t in this line of work for very long at all.
With Emily it went quite right. Well, sort of. Depending on how you look at it.
Alek compiled the file and burned enough shoe leather and road dollars to make the necessary arrangements to ensure that, should it become necessary, the client could execute to ‘deal with’ her. Not a black bag job or ‘wet work’ as the slang of the underbelly called it (which, like ‘snuff films,’ were mostly the realm of urban legend until the advent of ISIS and the marrying of its ritual slayings to the global movie gore house of the Internet), but rather material that would allow them to track, confront and contain a woman that potentially posed a liability to them.
Generally speaking, people aren’t killed in corporate espionage. But they are often destroyed.
Things just got a little sticky and considerably more tricky on this case. He ended up in bed with her, sure, and of course that wasn’t specifically prohibited, but it also wasn’t advisable either. It’s just that he ended up actually experiencing a gravitational attraction to her, all of her, and was trying to sort out the underpinnings of the fact that he liked her. He felt drawn to her, all of her. He more than liked her.
And that was never advisable.
Of course, it happened now and again, Alek thought to himself, like that chick in Dallas. That was an unfortunate turn of events. And there was his colleague’s misstep with that girl out in Port Jefferson on Long Island. The Atlantic tried to pierce the veil with a snotty write-up that missed the mark, but it was a close call that got a little dicey.
By and large, Alek had been able to maintain his cold mercenary sensibilities intact and simply go about the task at hand, employing his talent for improvising on the fly to close each assignment as needed. A liar with a smile indeed.
And as Carly Simon had once teased about one of the most mercurial lovers of the 1970s, Alek had also mostly managed to be where he should be, almost all the time, and when he wasn’t, well, he too had been found with the wife of a close friend.
Wife of a close friend.
Saying it twice, Alek knew it was as bad as it sounds. It just was, regrettably so. But it was also so wickedly delicious, too, as the rush of the forbidden crush finally brought to fruition can be worth the price of admission once she is in your arms, in your bed, in one of your dress shirts the morning after curled up with a coffee on your couch and wearing a smile that read ‘Good morning, lover. Ready for Round Two?’
It was ‘delickedly,’ as he liked to say in an amalgamation of the terms for something deliciously wicked.
Speaking of which, now there was Emily.
She was not what he had expected. She was a strange one. A strange girl.
“A stranger girl,” he thought to himself as he finally put his feet down and eased himself up off the chair to make his way back into the kitchen and pour some life back into his glass.
He walked back out onto the deck, lit another smoke and pondered a question most unthinkable in the years of casework before: what to do about it?
Alerting her or spiking the intel would by any estimation be suicidal to a line of work he had become quite accustomed to and one that had afforded him a comfortably casual life while feeding his occasional voyeurism and offering him a covert supply of adventure dressed up as business trips and vacations. Early in the game, when he still had long hair and grew his beard out, one of chieftains in the LA office had taken to affably calling him ‘Brother Serpico,’ but as the years rolled by Alek self-assessed that he was more of lower-rent Arnaud de Borchgrave in Saigon, professionally applying a penchant for finding his way into the right places and getting the right people to talk to him at the right time.
In the American landscape of 2015, this was not bad work if you could find it.
But now, this most unexpected complication. Emily.
Emily.
What to do about the stranger girl?
