THE BUTCHER’S GRANDDAUGHTER
by
Michael Lion
SMASHWORDS EDITION
* * * * *
Raves for The Butcher’s Granddaughter
“Readers
who like gritty, hard-boiled yarns will welcome Michael Lion’s The
Butcher’s Granddaughter.
The fast action and twisting plot features ‘Bird,’ an
information-broker drawn into a Chinese puzzle of Asian gangs, human
greed, and casual death. It’s a fine debut for Lion and for his
protagonist who is in love with ‘the smog and the garbage and the
poverty and the traffic and the noise’ of the underside of Los
Angeles. LA-noir hasn’t been done any better.”
—Rex Burns,
Edgar Award-winning author of The
Leaning Land
“Are
you nostalgic for a detective hero in the Chandler mode, a ‘complete
man and a common man and yet an unusual man’? Then Michael Lion’s
Bird is your guy. But his adventures in Lion’s timeless, dangerous,
alluring world are in no danger of inducing the been there-done that
sensation. No déjà vu for his readers: the feeling they will
experience (when not consumed by anxiety for Bird’s survival) is
delight.”
—Marianne Wesson, author of Chilling
Effect
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PUBLISHED BY:
New Pulp Press on Smashwords
The Butcher’s Granddaughter
Copyright © 2009 by Michael Lion
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.
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The Butcher’s Granddaughter
Prologue
She was one of the young and the bored that pour into Los Angeles at the rate of about a thousand a week. Four-thousand during the summer. Her point of origin was somewhere in the Pacific, but they come from everywhere, be it the death-hole of New York City or some shit-splat town between highway exits. They get off the bus or the plane or the train or however they wasted their time getting nowhere and they expect pink stucco and palm trees and a cool job. What they find is a soulless style of existence where the traffic and the pollution and the human mass blend into a white noise that turns the midnight sky gray and makes them wonder where the stars went. They learn quickly not to live during the day. Waking up later and later without being able to help it, they wander out onto Sunset or Hollywood Boulevard or La Cienega and see people they’ve met before in the mirror. They come out at night because that’s when things happen.
And I join them. I haven’t seen daylight that isn’t of the late-afternoon variety since I was in high school. I make my living by knowing certain things and being in the right place at the right time, by understanding how the world operates after the sun goes down.
They call me Bird.
I am not from their world, but I am part of it. Because after I figured out how to live in L.A.’s twenty-four-hour-a-day-open-all-night-please-come-again orgy...I figured out that I liked it. That’s one of my problems.
Another one is those early mornings when I lay awake, thinking of her.
Convincing myself.
Trying to believe.
The ride along the Santa Monica Freeway was quick and cold, and my lips were numb when I got off on Olympic Boulevard and made my way back into the Garment District. The dark hole of my former apartment was no longer a refuge, where I could hide from the people or the city or myself. My bike still fit in its space, and I didn’t bother chaining it. There would be no need. I sat on the saddle gazing at the front door until my eyes were drying out from not blinking and I could hear my own labored breathing. Then I reached behind me and pulled the crowbar from the rack.
I took a glance at the lock, even though I knew it had been brazed over. I tore the yellow crime scene tape that was still fastened across my front door, shoved the crowbar into the jamb, and broke the door open with a single heave. A chunk of brick clattered to the ground and there was silence. I stepped inside.
Purple light fell through the high windows and cascaded across the floor in funereal waves. I dropped the bar to the floor and it broke something, a plate or a coffee cup, and then clanged into an echo. My steps across the floor were a sliding, dragging, indistinct sound in my ears.
I stood at the end of my bed and drank it all down in one vicious gulp. I had two choices: burn the place level with the asphalt and leave my pain in the smoking ash, or take her memory and carry it somewhere else, forever.
I wanted her back. But worse than that, I didn’t want it to be my fault that she was gone.
After a while I left and drove around looking for something to do. I didn’t find anything. When I woke up the next morning wrapped in another woman’s arms, my throat was a little sore. It was a long time before I remembered the screaming.
Chapter 1
It started upstairs with the books at The Reading Room, an underground club on the edge of Los Angeles that’s usually someplace along the beach.
I say usually because sometimes it’s there and sometimes it’s not. When it’s there it’s really basic: the bar is downstairs and once in a while some local band looking for exposure will set up and scream for free; upstairs there’s one big room with no furniture and all these books spilled on the floor and stacked against the walls up to the ceiling. You can do what you want. Some people take them and some people leave them and some people read them. Everything is up there, from old wordy classics by Proust and Dickens all the way up to the slick Japanese things they call “graphic novels,” which are basically just thick adult comic books. Nobody I know can read them, but they’re there. And sometimes, so am I.
I was casually searching for a copy of Camus’ The Stranger, no one in the room but me and some leatherette who had successfully passed out on a mound of Dr. Seuss. There was no band that night and except for the static hum of humanity the place was relatively quiet. I had just stumbled across a small trove of French philosophy when a gentle hand on my arm turned me around so I could stare into Li Nguyen’s large, moist eyes.
A coffee-colored product of French-Vietnam, Li was smooth and beautiful as a Buddhist statue come alive. I had met her a few years earlier in a downtown café, coming off a monumental bender that had made me more talkative than I would have liked. Her mind spoke three languages and enjoyed getting lost in the noise of the metal clubs at the end of the Strip; her body tried to hide in loose-fitting t-shirts, jeans, and leather jackets, but never quite succeeded. She looked like a girl, spoke and acted like a woman. I was probably in love with her but over time had convinced myself otherwise.
Her face needed no makeup and was flawless except for honeyed tears gliding down each of her cheeks. A single strand of black, straight, glossy hair was stuck in one of her eyelashes. At first, she didn’t say anything and neither did I. But weeping women cause mistakes.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, brushing the strand away from her face.
She goofed around with the books strewn at our feet for a minute and then mumbled, “You know things, don’t you Bird?”
“Some things,” I said, playing along.
“You know a guy named Jay, right?”
“Jay with a ‘y’ or just ‘J’ with a period?”
My unfair teasing made her well up again, but she managed, “He steals cars.”
I coughed. “Ballesteros. Yeah. I know him some.”
She nodded rapidly, keeping the tears at bay.
“He’s a repo man, or was. Been a long time since I boosted cars for a living. He worked the South Central grid, if I remember right.”
“Yeah, that’s right. He’s got a girlfriend named Naomi.”
I shrugged. “I don’t walk around arm-in-arm with the guy, but I’ll take your word for it. Girl’s name is Naomi. Check.”
She asked for a cigarette. I gave her one and said, “Li, you know I’d pretty much do anything for you. All you have to do is ask. So why not just ask?”
She lit up and dragged on the cigarette. “Just listen, OK? I’ve got something important to tell you, and I don’t wanna get ahead of myself. And whatever you’re going to charge me is fine.”
I didn’t say anything to that. Friend or not, in love or not, some things I do aren’t free for anybody. And I knew Ballesteros well enough to understand he was dangerous. Emotionless, with a dove-ish, friendly-sounding voice, he had talked everyone from crack dealers to housewives out of their car keys. From what I knew he was honest as a seeing-eye dog—never did any chop-shop work or took any payoffs from the people in hock. I also know he killed a black guy with three kids and no wife down in Athens one night. I know it was self-defense and the cops considered it a favor to society and forgot about it...and Ballesteros would have drilled the guy even if it wasn’t self-defense.
Li continued. “This girl, Naomi...I need you to...um...protect her.”
“Whoa,” I said, waving a hand and shaking my head. “First of all, I don’t do that stuff any more, and second of all, even if I did, you couldn’t afford it.”
She didn’t look at me, but I thought I could see the tears start to well up again. I took a deep breath and said, “Look, I don’t do bodywork anymore. You know that.” I absently rubbed an old scar on my shoulder while I talked about it. “But just out of curiosity, why?”
“Like I said, she’s his girlfriend. But I was sitting in Larry Parker’s a couple of hours ago and Sheff comes in and sits down. Says he’s got a new girlfriend. Went on and on about her and how she’s really cool and they like the same things and all that bullshit. You know Sheff, right?”
“No.”
“He’s this guy I kind of have a thing for. And I listen to him ’cause he’s my friend and all. After a while he starts to describe her and I freak. I asked if her name was Naomi. And he said, ‘Yeah, how’d you know?’” She sucked harder on the cigarette and then stamped it out with the toe of her boot. “So I tried to be calm and said, ‘You know she’s got a boyfriend?’ He started to get sort of pissy, like that never stopped him before, you know? Then we sat for a minute without saying anything and then he just got up all of a sudden and headed for the door. I said, ‘Sheff, where you going?’ But I already knew. He had that look that guys get, you know?”
I nodded. I was familiar with it.
“He said he was going to see her. And then he jumped on his bike and took off, with me yelling after him not to go, because it was like, a quarter-to-one.”
I looked at my watch. It was twenty-after-two. “What’s that got to do with it?”
“Tonight’s Wednesday. Jay only does a couple of cars on Wednesdays. It’s the end of his week. He’ll be back at his place in a couple hours. If Sheff’s there with Naomi, I don’t know what he’ll do. Jay loves her—as much as Jay can love anything. And he carries a gun, like, all the time.”
I did some math. If he started at eleven, and did two boosts, he would be home already. I leaned my head against the wall and thought for a minute. Li was staring at her boots. I finally said, “Okay, a lovers’ quarrel. You big friends with this Naomi girl?”
“No.” She said it too quickly and didn’t look at me when she did.
“Well, I’ll go talk some sense into her.”
She looked at me and for the first time the panic seeped in behind her eyes. Her voice cracked. “No, Bird. I want you to protect her.” She reached in a pocket and pulled out a roll of money. “Is this enough?”
I pushed it back at her and made her put it away. “You’re not telling me something. You say you’re not friends or anything with this Naomi girl, but you’re willing to throw a wad at me to protect her. So you’re hiding something. Tell me what it is. If you don’t, I can’t do anything. More than that, I won’t do anything.”
“I’m not her friend,” she said firmly. She stared at her shoes again and her lower lip went thin in an effort to keep it from quivering. “See, Naomi’s real name is Song...” Her voice trailed off and then came back strong. “She’s my sister.”
The rest of her story I caught in a blur as I flew out of The Reading Room and started my motorcycle. It wasn’t much. Song, or Naomi, was Li’s sister, but she had been disowned by very strict Vietnamese parents after she told her dad to take the high hard way, and had moved in with Ballesteros. To her parents, Song no longer existed. It was not the living in sin but the parental defiance that got her exiled. Li was still culturally Asian enough to respect her parents, but that didn’t stop her from keeping tabs on her sister. I got the impression that Song was older than Li. She wasn’t. She had just turned eighteen.
I told Li I would check up on her sister and give her a call if anything went wild, but I didn’t think it would. She thanked me with a hug, and I tore into the late evening traffic.
One thing stuck in my mind like a glass splinter: Ballesteros carried. Love and guns go together like cars and alcohol, so I dropped by my place on the way to Jay’s apartment and picked up my own little security blanket: an Israeli Arms nine-millimeter with no serial numbers. I could have gotten a Saturday Night Special for the cost of a downtown movie, but you buy a gun like that waiting for somebody to make you use it. All I wanted was a showpiece.
Nonetheless, I popped the clip and made sure it was full before I stepped off my bike in the parking lot of Gorky’s Café. A block away I could see a light on in Ballesteros’ fifth-floor apartment.
His place was in the Santa Fe Building, a ten-story gray dinosaur on the northern edge of L.A.’s South Central district. Sixty years earlier it had housed a bank on its ground floor and every business from shyster attorneys to legitimate chiropractors above. The architecture reflected a period when people wanted their banks to look like places where you would put your money—muscular. In the 1960’s it had been condemned and listed for demolition, but developers put a little money into it, turning the office space into studio apartments. They were huge and L.A.-cheap at less than a dollar per square-foot. Three decades of lenient leases and art students from the local campuses have left their mark. Most of the twelve-foot-high walls sport murals or at least some type of original paint job, usually ethnic, often impressive. Ballesteros’ apartment had one, a portrait of its last tenant. Catching my breath on the fifth flight landing and wondering if the mural was still there, I took the gun from my inside jacket pocket and shoved it into the back of my jeans.
The block-and-a-half walk from Gorky’s had given me time to get nervous. I stood outside the door, convincing myself that everything was going to be cool. Jay was probably already home and asleep, having thrown both Song and Sheff out on their cheating asses.
When I stepped into apartment 5E, I was only one-third right. He was already home.
I listened at the door, cracked open about an inch. There were none of the usual habitation sounds—water running, footsteps, muffled voices. I silently pushed it open far enough to fold around inside, ready to call out a tentative, “Jay?”
His name froze in my throat.
The short walls of the portico hid me from most of the room, but I could see Jay, sitting in a faux-antique wingback armchair. He was leaned forward with his elbows on his thighs, staring at the floor in total silence, barely breathing. His hands were crossed limply between his knees, one of them holding a cigarette, and his head was slung so far down between his shoulders that it looked to be growing directly out of his chest. The only clothing he had on that wasn’t black was a pair of torn and bleached Levi’s with both knees blown out and a faded drawing of a long-stemmed rose on the left thigh. Aside from that, he wore a black turtleneck underneath a leather motorcycle jacket, which had bunched up when he leaned over, giving his back a deformed, grotesque look.
He either hadn’t heard me come in or simply didn’t acknowledge me. To a stranger, he would have looked like any twenty-year-old kid who’d just gotten off the late shift and was having a cigarette before going to bed. They would not know what I knew: he was damned smart and, unfortunately, knew it. That made him arrogant, which he didn’t like, but couldn’t help. He was extremely driven, and I knew from experience that being around him could be mentally and emotionally draining. Now, sitting perfectly still, he was coldly masking a mind that was moving like an open freeway, careening and twisting but only converging on three subjects. The first was his girlfriend, Naomi or Song or whatever, sitting across from him in their bed, naked, her eyes wide and making no effort to hide fear. The second was the guy sitting next to her in roughly the same position, just as frightened and looking it. This would be Sheff. The last, and which was probably giving him the most trouble, was the .45 automatic that he was holding in his right hand.
When Song saw me peek around the corner of the entryway, the fear in her eyes subsided for a second but returned when I put my finger to my lips and didn’t seem to want to do anything.
I didn’t. If Song could have read my mind right then she would have screamed—I could not have cared less about her. I just wanted to go back down the stairs, let what was clearly about to happen, happen, and make whatever I could off the homicide squad for what I had seen. Instead, I stood at the door, just inside the portico, thinking.
Jay was obviously not aware of how much time had gone by. When a two-inch ash from his cigarette broke off onto the toes of his black Converse high-tops, it was the only movement the room had seen in some time. But to him it probably seemed just seconds since he had casually crossed the room, sat down, and pulled out the gun.
In contrast, Song was in a raw panic. Her eyes darted between the gun and the side of Jay’s face like they were watching a tennis match. She was looking for a twitch, a blink, anything to give some sign that she was still looking at a human being. I could tell it wasn’t going to happen. Jay looked like a parody of Rodin’s “Thinker,” in whose hands some joker had placed a cigarette and a gun.
I played it over in my head, picturing her on the downside of an orgasm, Jay walking in and flicking on the light, she being slow to turn around and realize who was standing in the corner with a face that had all the animation of an egg. I imagined the pleasure draining from her features and being replaced by the pure fear that was evident now in every crease of her face.
Her hands were white-knuckled around the lip of the sheet that she had failed to completely cover herself with. Her small, tan breasts rested innocently between her arms. I’d never had the pleasure of seeing Li naked, but it was obvious that she and Song were sisters.
I thought about that and popped a match lit with my fingernail. It sounded like a jet engine starting up.
Jay was the first to move, but Song was the first to open her mouth. As Jay raised his head, she asked in a voice so locked with fear it creaked, “Who are you?”
I ignored her at first because, although I didn’t feel like I was in any real danger, I also wasn’t totally sure what Jay would do—and a .45 makes an exit wound a nine-year-old could crawl through. I was standing there holding the lit match without lighting my cigarette, breathing slowly, when Jay went ahead and answered for me.
“Bird. What the fuck are you doing here?”
Getting the important things out of the way first, I said, “You gonna use that cannon on me?”
He shook is head and re-adjusted it between his shoulders. He said “No,” to the floor. I didn’t ask if he was going to use it on anybody else.
Song chose that moment to assume, wrongly, that my arrival somehow broke the tension or even affected the situation. She suddenly shuffled across the bed to get her shirt. Without looking up, Jay raised the gun, leveled it at Song and cocked the hammer, which cracked like a high-tension wire in the cold silence of the room. She froze, looking at me like I had forgotten to do something important. I deliberately lit my cigarette and inhaled and exhaled reflectively, all without looking at her.
“This is a little weird, Bird,” Jay said to the floor, “you showing up right now. You can sit down if you want. You been standing there a while.” He waved the cigarette at the foot of the bed.
Not wanting to have to move around any bullets if Song continued to exercise her I.Q., I said, “I’ll stand, thanks. I’m here because I was asked to be. I’m not going to tell you by who because...well...just because.”
There was some silence. It’s amazing how long you can linger over simple decisions. For me it was: stay or go? For Ballesteros: kill her or not? For Song: Sit there and wait, or move and die?
Jay finally asked, “You scared, Bird?”
“No.” I wasn’t lying.
“I am, man.”
That surprised everybody. “What are you scared of?” I asked, studying the end of my cigarette.
“I’m scared I’m gonna do something really stupid, you know? I mean, I got a problem, and...” His words trailed off to a whisper and he twitched the gun at the bed.
He was talking about Song like she wasn’t even in the room, which scared her back into the tennis game between his face and the gun. He hadn’t even mentioned Sheff, but hadn’t shot him either, so I figured he was safe.
“I’ve been sitting here trying to decide whether to kill her or not,” he continued. “But, like, not as if she was a person—like she was a problem. I mean, you know me, man. I got a problem, I get it out of the way.” He grew quiet for a moment, then gazed emptily between his shoes and said, “You think killing her is the best thing?”
Song’s facial expression was split between the relief she felt because he was at least talking now, and the realization that she was essentially sitting on her deathbed. The academic tone of the conversation Jay and I were having could not be helping any, either.
Jay was still looking at the floor. From his voice I could tell his mind was calm, and he was in control. He was figuring all of this out as best he knew how. He was being careful, and therefore, slow. He didn’t seem to be aware of the anxiety this was causing. I took a relatively minor chance and said, “Sheff, get dressed.”
Sheff looked at me like I had told him to cut off his left foot. I moved my chin enough to indicate the door behind me. He moved so slowly at first that I thought he was going to pass out. Jay didn’t even lift his head. Once Sheff got the message that he wasn’t going to get shot, he dressed so fast he wound up with his shirt on backwards and inside-out. He paused outside the door and said, “I owe you...big.”
“That’s right,” I said under my breath. “You do.”
His shoes whispered down the stairs and when the click of the big entrance door closing echoed up the stairwell, I decided to play it out.
“You know,” I said casually, “you could kill her.”
Song shot her eyes at me and let out a high squeak. Jay raised his head and waited for me to go on, like I had made the decision for him and he was waiting for me to tell him what to do next.
“Think about it. Nobody knows who she is. Just another eighteen-year-old in the big city. She’s a Jane Doe. Got no home but this one, and her name’s not on the lease, right? She may split the rent, but there’s no record of that. You ace her, toss the body a couple blocks away in a liquor store dumpster, and she might as well have died in another country. No I.D., nothing. Beauty and the unknown beast.”
Song started sniveling, very quietly and very high.
“After all,” I continued, “you’re trying to say something with that gun, now, aren’t you? Something to Naomi here?”
He looked puzzled. “Yeah, I guess so.”
“You think Naomi has anything to say to you?”
He hadn’t thought of that one. He didn’t move or speak.
I turned to her. “Do you, Naomi?”
She didn’t know whether to talk or not. Her mouth moved for a minute, but when nothing came out she shut it.
“Look honey,” I said, “Jay’s not the fuckup here. He’s not gonna go first.”
At that Song started crying, but I couldn’t decide if it was fear or grief or both. I waited a second and then said, “Talk, Naomi.”
She shook her head as her body racked with sobs.
“Talk!” I yelled. I crossed the twenty feet to the bed in three strides and grabbed her shoulder, squeezing hard. Jay watched intently but otherwise didn’t move. “You’re going to start with ‘I’m sorry,’” I said firmly. “And then you’re going to tell him more. You know what I mean,” I said, pulling her over to me and whispering, “Song.”
Her eyes got wide, and then the apology flooded out of her. It was insincere, but it was exactly what Jay needed to hear.
“I’m sorry,” she coughed, “but this is the first night, Jay. The only night, I swear to God. Maybe I’m not ready.” She thought about that one. “I’m for sure not ready for this. You’re too much for me. Too intense. You’re wonderful, Jay. But I wanted something else.”
“What?” I said.
“To get out.”
“Why?”
She looked up at me with those eyes like Li’s. They didn’t have the same effect. “Tell him,” I said flatly. She still looked blankly at me. “Tell him why!” I yelled, and wrapped a hand around her neck and stood her up at the end of the bed like a rag doll. The sheet fell away and for a split second there was complete silence, Song’s sudden, brutal nakedness filling the room and freezing us both with her sheer vulnerability.
Then she screamed and Jay stood up, his .45 swinging in a hard arc. Almost in tandem I pulled my own piece and pushed the muzzle into Song’s soft neck just as Jay settled his aim, rock steady, at my chest.
“Stop it, Bird. I swear to God I’ll kill you.” This was delivered in a tone of voice he might have used to order a sandwich.
“First,” I said, keeping my voice from shaking, “you need to hear this. Second, you’ll take us both down.” I could feel my jacket collar sticking to my neck. But if he would protect her from me, he wasn’t going to kill her anymore. I slowly pulled the gun away from her neck, staring him down. “Tell him, Song. Tell him why you want out.”
At the use of her real name, Jay didn’t say anything. He just stood there, waiting. Later on, that would bother me.
But Song blew it all—told Jay about her parents, who he thought were dead, about the lie of her whole life. “You were part of it, Jay. Part of the lie. I thought that I loved you but I was wrong. When I slept with Sheff, I guess that pretty much showed me how I felt. I needed out.”
“Then get out,” he said. It wasn’t hateful. There simply wasn’t anything left to say. The problem was solved. He wanted it to leave.
I had put my gun away as she spilled her guts. I waited by the door until she got dressed and went past me with her head down and scuttled down the stairs. If she hadn’t been Li’s sister, I would have had to fight the urge to kill her myself.
Jay was standing in the middle of the apartment, his hands hanging limply at his sides. The gun was all but dropping to the floor from his fingers.
“I’ll be around,” I said.
He didn’t speak except to mumble, “Loved her.” Then he dropped the .45’s hammer and tossed it on the bed. I nodded, shut the door, and trudged down the stairs.
I thought I would have to chase her down, but she was waiting for me outside the old building’s thick double doors. She stepped out from behind a scrolled column next to the sidewalk and opened up on me with her fists. They felt like rabbit’s feet thumping softly against my chest. She was still crying a little, and when I got hold of her wrists her mouth took up where her hands left off.
“Fucker, fucker, fucker! Who the fuck do you think you are! Do you know who I am?”
She struggled, the gold pendant around her neck getting tangled in her hair. I glanced up and down the block, too aware that I was a white boy manhandling a screaming woman who would look black from ten yards away. Before she could continue the screeching, I dragged her back inside the doors and all but threw her against the stairs. She continued turning the air blue with English words sprinkled liberally into broken Vietnamese phrases whose meanings could not have been compliments. I almost yelled at her to shut up, then simply pulled the gun out instead and she went dead silent in mid-shout. Sighing disgustedly, I paced back and forth in front of her. “Think for a minute,” I said to her. “Use your fucking brain for just a second. Five minutes ago you were an inch from getting your head removed and I pulled you out. I’d be pissed, too, if someone busted in and made me spill my guts to a lover, particularly a lover holding a gun. But before I beat the shit out of him I’d want to know a few things.” I took a deep breath and stared at her the way a teacher stares at an indolent student. “Don’t you?”
She was still so furious that droplets of sweat were pilling on her forehead, but she started to think. She didn’t get very far.
“What the hell would I wanna ask you, you fuckin’ dickhead? I could’ve handled it. He wasn’t gonna dust me. He loved me.”
“Right,” I said. “Nobody ever got killed by someone who loved them.” I was getting tired of guiding her through this. “So you got out with your life, now what? Know a comfortable wino you can curl up against?”
She threw her nose in the air. “I got lotsa places to go.”
“Yeah? Name two.”
She didn’t say anything.
“If it hasn’t occurred to you yet, and I don’t think it has, I know a little more about you than you suspect. And one of the things I know is that you’ve got no place to go. That’s why you screwed Sheff in your own bed. What the hell were you thinking, cheating on a guy like Ballesteros?”
“I’ll make out all right.” She was tough, I had to give her that. Stupid, but tough.
“Lady, you’re doing a stellar job already,” I clipped. “But this’ll make it a little bit easier.” I took a matchbook out of my pocket and wrote Li’s phone number inside it. She looked at it, obviously didn’t recognize it. “Your sister, Li, sent me because she thought you might be out here screwing up. I guess she was right.”
Song whispered her sister’s name and stared vacantly at the matchbook as I talked.
“She claims not to care about you, but she’s shoveling it. She cared enough to chase me all the way out to The Reading Room. If you call her, she’ll come get you. She’s got her own place. You won’t have to deal with your parents.”
The mention of her parents seemed to mellow her, and I got her to walk with me to Gorky’s. I knew I wasn’t going to get any gratitude, and knew even deeper that I didn’t deserve any, so I started my bike and left Song standing on the corner of Eighth and San Pedro. When I circled back around toward my apartment, she was on the phone across the street. Through the scratched and graffitied acrylic windows of the booth I could see her smile in what seemed like relief.
I’m glad I got to see her smile at least once.
The air was that greasy cool you only feel late at night in the city, and the last of the vampires were peeling themselves off the streets as I flashed past the numbered blocks along Olympic Boulevard. It was four-thirty in the blessed a.m. The first trickle of traffic, which would become a fuming, honking deluge in forty-five minutes, was beginning to fill the pay-parking lots that decorated every corner with asphalt. I turned off on a side street deep in the Garment District and wandered the motorcycle into its space next to my bedroom window. I ran the chain through both wheels and snapped the lock home. My back creaked as I stood up, discussing bed with me.
Yeah, I thought, stretching, it’s been a long night.
And people owe me. Oh, do people owe me.
Chapter 2
Detective Sergeant Luzana Cazares, Caz to her friends, is a huge Mexican lesbian with gin blossoms on her cheeks, a racist streak a mile wide, and poor taste in sports jackets. I was dreaming about her.
Normally, I would have been dreaming about Li. But at that particular hour, eleven-thirty Thursday morning, Caz was sitting in my head. The reason she was there, screwing up my dreams, was because at that particular hour she was also standing over me, about to wake me up. I could smell her.
“C’mon, Bird...c’mon, sleepy head.” She was lightly slapping the back of my head and doing her best to sound like my mother. Just to get her to stop, I rolled off my face and sat up. “Oh, you’re up.” She sounded genuinely surprised. She moved her solid bulk into the kitchen alcove and poured two cups of coffee. That made me blink. She’d been here a while.
“Tie one on last night, Bird?”
“You could say that,” I said through a cheek-stretching yawn. I glanced at the clock and said, “Christ, Sarge. You know what time it is?”
“You ask me that every time I drop in. It’s almost lunch time. Civilized people’ve been at work for four hours.”
“Remind me to drop in at your place during my lunch break sometime. I’d like to meet that cute little redheaded girlfriend of yours. I bet she looks great in a nightie.”
“Doesn’t wear a nightie,” she said flatly. “In fact, she doesn’t wear much of anything. It’s what makes the relationship work.” She thumped a cup down on the night table. The aroma tried to clear my head but couldn’t quite get past my sinuses. I took a mouthful and spit it back in the mug.
“You made this? On purpose?” I coughed.
She shrugged and sipped. “It’s your coffee, Bird. Got it from the cupboard. Good as the joe at the department.”
“No wonder you guys are beating people up,” I jabbed, then quickly apologized. She didn’t say anything.
I slid out of bed and ambled over to the sink. I dumped the junk in my mug as well as the pot she’d made down the disposal. I pulled the grinder down and started over. I was opening the freezer for the fresh stuff when she called from behind me, “You got anything here I’d like?”
She was studying my CD collection, bent over and squinting like an ape with gastritis. “Yeah, lowest left corner.” Caz was a classical fan. “But nothing too serious,” I warned. “It’s too early in the damn morning.”
By the time the coffee was done I had a t-shirt and jeans on, and Handel’s King Solomon was greeting the Queen of Sheba. I dumped cream in the coffee until it was the color of Li’s skin, turned down the stereo, and poured myself back into bed. “Good call on the music,” I said.
Caz nodded. “It’s information time, Bird.”
“I figured.”
“We got a body in an alley last night on Eighth and Los Angeles. I understand you were there.”
“I try to do my killing away from home.” I sipped the coffee. Much better.
“Not funny.” She unbuttoned the top button of her K-Mart blouse and made my only chair squeak a lot while she got comfortable. “What were you doing down there?”
“I didn’t say I was down there. How about you just tell me what you want, I’ll tell you what I know, you get the fuck out and let me get back to sleep?”
She shrugged and unloaded the dump truck. “Tell me what Song Ti Nguyen was doing in the Santa Fe Building this morning at about three-thirty.”
I said, “Cheating on her boyfriend,” and took another sip of coffee.
“That’s it?”
“You asked, I answered. The door’s over there.”
“I could take you in and make you talk for free.”
“No you couldn’t,” I said offhandedly. I put the coffee on the table and hunted for a cigarette. After I got it lit, I said, “Sure, babe, there’s more that you might want to know. Maybe I heard something, maybe I didn’t. You know how I operate.”
“Look, Bird. I usually come to you ’cause I don’t have to beat information out of you, and once in a while you actually know something important. But this time,” she said, “I got ya.”
Caz is a careful cop. That was the first time I had heard a threat from her and it scared me, because she doesn’t just shoot off her mouth. “Bring it,” I said flatly.
“Four boys from Vice were takin’ their dinner in the front window of Gorky’s this morning. And lo and behold, who comes strolling down the walk with a choice piece of Chink ass, but the Bird himself. I traced it back to an old nigger chick waiting for the bus who saw a guy looks a lot like you throw that very same piece of ass back into the Santa Fe Building not ten minutes earlier.” She didn’t smile, sipped her coffee. “Four cops and a witness, man. We got you at the scene. You’re in it.”
I bought a second to think. “So what? I talk to cute girls all the time.”
“So do I. But maybe I’m thinkin’ some funny things. Seems to me you have a certain weakness for that Oriental stuff. Maybe she’s your girlfriend. Maybe— ”
“Maybe you’re drunk,” I said. “All right, sure, I was down there. But this is the first I’ve heard of a body.” I fell back on the bed and considered things, talking to the ceiling. “But, like I said, I saw some stuff last night that’s pretty serious to me—maybe not to you, but you’re asking. And, if you already canvassed all the way to some lady at a bus stop, then you’re being fairly thorough.”
“I said it was serious.”
I looked around my apartment. It was a basement, but it was over twelve hundred square feet—a single huge room with ground level windows all the way around the tops of the twelve-foot high walls. My bed, the only furniture besides the chair that Caz was crushing, sat in the middle of the bare wood floor. It made me think about rent. “OK,” I started. “Beginning-to-end action is going to cost a round hundred. Any weapons involved, another fifty. I’ll throw the apartment number in for ten. Names and addresses of everyone involved, another hundred. Anything else I’ll have to think about.”
She had been through it before. She made a show of reaching the snitch fund out of her bra and put three hundreds on the table. “This better be good, Bird. You drain the bank.”
I told her everything except that I was carrying a gun. I also left out that Song and Li were sisters, but said they were friends. She wanted to know where The Reading Room was for some reason. I told her. When I got to Jay, she asked, “What kind of piece did he have?”
“A Smith .45. Your basic artillery—blued finish, walnut handle. Personally, I’ve never seen him use it, but I guess he’s pretty good.”
“Legal?”
“Yeah. He finessed a license to carry through his recovery agency, which is a tough thing to do. The piece is registered with the Sheriff.”
“Know what he used in it?”
“As a matter of fact, yeah. Only reason I remember is because they’re so wicked: hot loads that would go in a much heavier weapon. Cop-killers. Never understood why he would use them.”
Caz shook her head. “Fuckin’ things’ll punch a hole in a bank vault. And they’re too easy to get.” She paused for a long minute. “So we got Li Nguyen and Song Ti Nguyen, no relation. We got a repo man, Jay Ballesteros, carries legal with illegal caps. And John Sheffield, called Sheff. Addresses on all of ’em.”
I reached out for the money and she slapped my wrist. “Hold up there, sweet thing. There’s an extra forty bucks in there we haven’t discussed yet.”
I moved over to the coffee, sipped and waited.
“How about tellin’ me where all these folks would be about, say, now.”
I thought for a minute. “Jay is probably asleep at his place. Today’s his day off. He’ll get up about ten tonight and go to a club, probably Helter Skelter out at the end of Sunset. He’ll stay ’til it closes. On Sunday night he’ll do the same thing, but only ’til maybe eleven. Then he’ll go to work.
“Sheff will be at the Pantages in...” I looked at the clock. “He’s there now. Works on the ticket phones. He lives with his parents, so I don’t know what he’ll be doing later. He’s not as much of a vampire as the rest of us.” Caz’s pen-hand paused over her notebook while I went on about Sheff.
“Li will be at her place in Santa Monica. She starts work about six.”
“What’s she do?”
“Barback at the Islander Café on Wishire. She’ll be there ’til four tomorrow morning. She’s tiny and beautiful. She’d be just your type if she was a rude dyke. Can I go back to sleep now?”
“No. And she might be my type anyway. Where’s this Song girl?”
“Dunno. Like I said, I’d never seen her before last night. I gave her Li’s number because she didn’t have it on her. When I gave it to her she looked at it like it was one of the Dead Sea Scrolls. When I left she was in the phone booth across from Gorky’s. I can only assume that’s who she was calling. She wasn’t the brainiest thing I’ve ever run into.”
Caz pursed her lips, looked at her note pad, shut it, and stood up. “That’s pretty good, Birdy. Work schedules and everything.”
I sucked at the cigarette. “What I’m paid for.”
“Well, lock your door from now on. You never know when some fat dyke is gonna invite herself in.”
“Knock next time,” I said. As she got to the door I put a couple of things together and said, “Hey, Sarge?”
She paused with her hand around the knob. “Yeah?”
“I’m kind of protective of Li. How about you tell me what’s got Robbery/Homicide’s panties in a twist?” I paused for a second, then added, “’Cause if Sheffield’s the corpse we’re talking about, I’ve got a pretty good idea who made him that way.” I quietly wondered if Jay could have done it. There was no question he had it in him, but I ran over some timetables in my head and decided there was no way. If Sheff was only a couple blocks away when he got hit, then Jay was still in the apartment with me and Song when it happened.
Caz didn’t turn around as she said, “It’s not this Sheffield guy. It was some hooker. Maybe I’ll go talk to Mr. Sheffield about his sexual practices.”
“Well, enjoy.”
She nodded. “Anyway, looks like she just stepped out last night and got herself mugged. If you hear anything, I know you’ll be around to sell it.”
“Yeah,” I said to Caz’s back as she stepped out and shut the door loudly behind her.
As I wound back down into sleep, I went over the previous night in my head. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had fucked up somehow and couldn’t do anything about it now.
An hour later I was working on the maddeningly tiny hooks on the back of Li’s bra when the phone rang and woke me up. I fumbled the receiver to my ear, expecting to hear Caz’s shriek calling me on the bullshit about Song and Li’s friendship. Instead, Rick Cane’s plain-wrap voice danced happily over the phone. He only sounded that way when he wanted something for nothing. “Hey, Bird. Looked outside at the land of the living yet?”
“I’ve been trying to avoid it since eleven-thirty,” I started. “But assholes keep calling me.”
“I apologize. I must’ve interrupted yet another fruitless dream about Li.” He laughed.
I coughed loudly in his ear and said, “Up yours. What’s going on down along the cleaner coast?”
“Well, I ran into something that might require your personal touch. It’s nice out. Take a ride down P.C.H. I’ll buy you dinner at Cano’s. Be there at six and dress well.” He hung up.
I sat in the pillows for a while, wondering why people wouldn’t leave me alone. I hadn’t shaken the apprehension that something had gone terribly wrong in that apartment the night before. I went over the conversations in my head but couldn’t see anything except a vague nervousness just below the surface.
I decided it was just Caz’s usual caginess getting to me. I shook it off, set my alarm for three-thirty, and drifted back to Li.
Newport Beach is one county, five cities, and a whole world south of Los Angeles. It is, along with West Hollywood and La Jolla, one of the places that fuels the clichés about Southern California. It’s always seventy-three degrees, people wear shorts and bikinis until the middle of February, and all the houses are color-coordinated with the cars in their driveways. If you go far enough down Newport Boulevard, there’s actually a special street lane you can only drive in if you have a special sticker, which you have to be special enough to live there to get.
I’d made Huntington Beach, just north of Newport and usually a zoo, about thirty minutes ahead of schedule. I slowed it down, appreciating the sun dappling the green-gray water, listening to the seagulls squawk, and generally taking my time getting to the restaurant. By the time I arrived, the ocean breeze had completely cleared my memory of the previous night.
Valets never seem to know how to ride motorcycles, so I parked the bike in the Newport Ski Company’s lot and walked the block to Cano’s. It’s a pompous restaurant that juts out over Balboa Peninsula like a crooked tooth. Rick was hunched at a table next to a huge bay window over the water, watching a pelican glide along its rippled surface.
Richard Chutney Cane is a private detective with a modest office on Redhill Boulevard. As far as I know, no one is aware of his homosexuality but me and a couple of Cane’s friends. We met when he made a pass at me in a joint on Newport Boulevard called Bubbles. I made my sexual preference clear with a fistfight in the parking lot that ended up with both of us in a laughing fit. You can’t have many friends and do what I do, but if I had to list the few I have, Rick would be in the top spot.
He was wearing a white linen suit and t-shirt. They were pressed. His face was not. He looked like he’d been up for three days.
“Christ, Rick, you look like shit,” I said, taking a seat and getting comfortable. The maitre d’ bee-lined to our table.
“Mr. Cane.”
“Hello, Thomas,” he sighed. He no longer possessed the voice I heard on the phone. “A bottle of Pinot Noir.”
Thomas disappeared into the kitchen and I said, “At least you’re dressed well.”
“Not a word, asshole. Not a word.”
I smiled. “What’s the bad news?”
“You always do get right to it.”
“I already told you how you look. That was the small talk.”
“Right.”
The wine came and Thomas made a three-act production out of pulling the cork. Rick tasted it and said it was fine. When the maitre d’ was out of earshot, he leaned over and said, “I feel like we should have applauded.”
There was nothing to say to that, so I let him get some wine down. Then he opened up. “Have you been reading all the bad press Cynthia Ming has been getting lately?”
“Nah. There’s enough news going on between Olympic Boulevard and 123rd Street to keep me behind for months. Who’s Cynthia Ming?”
“She lives in that condo of a yacht down there in dock thirty-nine.” He pointed out the window. The mammoth ship sat two hundred yards down from the restaurant on the opposite shore of the peninsula. It had two decks and made the commercial trawlers docked on either side of it look like water-wings. “It leaves that slip every three nights at nine-thirty, is back by the following afternoon, and everybody knows what goes on below decks once she passes the three-mile limit. Unless you’re invited specifically by Cynthia, it costs one thousand dollars to step on the gangplank.
“Every six months, it leaves here and sails to Hawaii, where it docks in Honolulu Harbor and starts the same process. In and out, day after day.
“Miss Ming is worth about eighty-million, give or take, and she is about the shrewdest combination of raw beauty and vindictive brains I’ve ever had the displeasure of knowing.”
“What goes on?” I asked. “Gambling?”
“Some, but that’s legal three miles out. Child prostitution isn’t, no matter how far out you go. Everyone has known for years how she makes her money. Jesus Christ, she runs advertisements for girls in Los Angeles, Stockholm, Berlin, Tokyo, Singapore, and Hong Kong. A complex network of what she calls ‘recruiters’ are employed to get information on the girls so that they can be blackmailed once they’re hired. When that little piece of real estate sets sail, it’s so full of nine- to seventeen-year-old girls it might as well be a can of tuna.”
I finished my first glass of wine and started another. Rick was on his third. “So where does this put you, and why do you need me?” I asked.
“The Newport Beach cops have decided to clamp down on Lady Ming and put her away. She’s been in business for almost fifteen years, so why they chose now, I don’t know. One of the screws they’re driving into her is the press. As soon as the story broke in the local papers, you had parents of beautiful young Newport Beachers screaming for blood, convinced their little thing was next. Couple that with the general tendency of teen-age girls to disappear on Friday and Saturday nights, and you have a lot of peep-business for the local detectives.”
“Don’t tell me you’ve been taking peek-a-boo jobs.”
“One,” he said seriously. “An old friend of mine. He—”
Our waiter materialized and introduced himself. I told Rick to order for both of us because I had been making decisions all day and couldn’t cope. Two crab salads and two lobster tails. That was fine with me—he was buying.
The wine was gone and Rick waved down Thomas for another bottle. I’d had two glasses of the previous Pinot and Rick had sponged the rest. For all of that, he looked like he’d had a cup of coffee. When the second bottle came and the second cork-show was over, he continued where he had left off.
“As I said, I’m working for an old friend of mine, and yes, I am watching his daughter. I told him right out of the gate I was sure that Denise—that’s her name—was not involved with Our Lady of Perpetual Flesh. He said to do it for him anyway, and I did.
“I started following her around last Wednesday night. She’s got a gorgeous boyfriend that she’s with every moment she’s not at home. They do your basic teenage things: movies, fast-food dinners, love-making sessions at Corona Del Mar. Everything was fairly boring until this past Monday night.
“At nine-o’clock straight up she kissed her dad goodbye and hopped into her boyfriend’s car, just like she’d done for the past five consecutive nights. I get settled in for another night of awkward teen sex, when they go to— ”
“Dock thirty-nine,” I interrupted.
He let out a long breath and nodded.
“Aahhh, there’s all kinds of things that could mean, man.” I shook my head dismissively and finished another glass of wine. It was getting easier to drink at a geometric rate.
“Naturally, I wasn’t convinced that she was up to anything at all. But she pranced onto that boat with her boyfriend as if they went there all the time—people saying hello and shaking hands with them on the gangplank like they were running for mayor. They made the same trip last night.”
“Really.”
“Yes! And it’s not as if she isn’t the type; she really is a striking young thing.”
“Is this what’s made you look like...” I motioned my hand toward him.
“I’ve had maybe eight hours of sleep, total, since that Monday night. I went to her father and asked him where she said she was going. He explained to me that she spends the night at her boyfriend’s parent’s house every week or so all spring and summer long. I’ve touched all of the friends that I know she has, but they either clam up or flat-out don’t know. They know about the ship, but they have no idea what Denise does on it.”
The food came. It was delicious, naturally. Rick had never taken me anywhere that I’d had a crappy meal. After the residue of the crab salads were taken away, it was my turn. “So you want me to see what connections I can get down here by the sea?”
“No. I don’t think you can find anything from the street that I haven’t found already.”
“Remember pal, you’re old. Nobody my age is going to spill to you, particularly not about one of their friends. You’d be surprised at what I can dig out of people in the middle of the night.”
“I’m not that old, Bird. But you’re probably right. Regardless, I don’t want you wasting time on the street. I want you to get close to Denise. Get the information out of her. Or her boyfriend.”
I thought about it. From what Rick said, she was essentially untouchable. A boyfriend or a dad always around, and apparent connections with some major organized crime. “All right,” I said finally, “what are you offering?”
“First, from this point on, you ask no more questions. Very few people know that I know you. That’s part of the reason I asked you down here.”
“Hired me.”
“Whatever. The deal is this: I pay you base rate for one of my associates, two hundred a day. In addition, I’ll give you access to a small expense fund, to be used specifically to gather information. How you do that is up to you. I won’t ask how you got it, and you won’t ask me any questions regarding the case.”
“So, for two bills a day, if the shit starts to fly, I go down alone.”
He nodded over the wine. “It protects you, me, and the client. No questions. If you don’t get anything, I’ll pay you for two days and we’ll call it even.”