Hardboiled Crime Four-Pack

by Jack Bunker

  This doesn’t surprise me. Little Ethiopia used to be a Russian community until about a decade ago when the Ruskies migrated north to eastern West Hollywood to avoid ethnic diversity.

  “This bar have a name?” I ask.

  “The Odessa Club.”

  TEN

  I open the door slowly. It takes a few seconds for my eyes to adjust to the dim light but I can make out a roomful of shadowy figures, most of them built like Bulgarian weightlifters. From the door a blade of midday sun cuts to the back of the room, hitting Vlad the Impaler like a spotlight. A thin string of sauerkraut dangles from his mustache as he glances up from a plate of pirogies to watch me walk in. He looks like he weighs north of three hundred pounds, so the small fortune he must have spent on the custom tailoring of his Italian silk suit is pretty much wasted. But it makes me conscious of my own suit—sixteen years old, cheap, worn, and wrinkled. I’m in running shoes. No tie. The Odessa Social Club is filled with slack-jawed, beer-bellied Slavic gangsters, and they’re all dressed better than I am.

  Between the cops and the Feds, they’ve tried to nail Vlad Bakatin for murder, racketeering, smuggling, prostitution, gambling, weapons, and knee surgery without a license. He’s been charged twelve times, tried three, never convicted. They should have clocked him on a no-smoking violation. The place reeks of tobacco.

  I scan the rundown restaurant, size up the dozen or so men who sit drinking, smoking, and playing cards, then head toward the back, toward the capo’s table. Of course, I don’t get there. Big Ugly Guy and Bigger Ugly Guy stand up from opposite sides of the room and close ranks like two steel doors slamming shut. The Great Wall of Russia between me and the boss. They left their butts in their ashtrays, but smoke still curls from their noses.

  Big Ugly Guy speaks. “This is private club.”

  “I’m just looking for Gary Cogswell. Name’s Brown. Nob Brown.”

  I can see Bakatin’s curiosity stir like a sleeping dog opening one eye. I hand Big Ugly Guy a business card and am somewhat surprised when he actually glances at it. I wouldn’t have guessed he could read.

  “Mr. Cogswell don’t like unannounced visitors.” He rips my card and lets the pieces fall to the floor.

  “Nobody does,” I say. “But we all get ’em every once in a while.”

  “He don’t.”

  “I’ll tell you what. Why don’t you let me ask him? If he doesn’t want to see me, I’ll go.”

  Bakatin blurts out a single laugh then goes back to his pirogies.

  Bigger Ugly Guy clenches his fists, waiting to spring if the smaller tank makes the first move. I tense, thinking there’s a chance these galoots are going to mash me to a pulp. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea.

  “Let him come.” The quiet order cracks the tension like a sledgehammer. I peer past Big Ugly Guy and lock eyes with The Impaler. I break into a sweat.

  Big Ugly Guy glares at me, but we both know he’s not going to do anything. Bigger Ugly Guy reaches out and pushes my arms up to frisk me. I stand as if crucified, waiting for the minor humiliation to end. The Ugly Twins separate and I walk through the mountain pass.

  “I’m sorry to bother you, Mr. Bakatin…sir. I’m looking for Gary Cogswell.”

  Bakatin’s thick brows rise like a drawbridge. “What for you want Cogsvell?” He looks into my eyes, and I feel like he can see everything there is to know about me.

  “Remember Lana Strain? The singer?”

  “Maybe.”

  “She was murdered in 1995.”

  “You don’t look like no cop.”

  “I’m not. I’m just barely a writer.”

  “I don’t like reporters.”

  I can feel excitement in the room, as if the alpha wolf is about to throw a scrap into the hungry pack.

  “I’m not a reporter. I don’t do news, just human interest. For magazines.”

  “What that got to do with Cogsvell?”

  “I’m doing a story on Lana’s murder. In his old job he handled her estate. I thought maybe he’d be willing to talk to me about her. It’s no big secret he works for you now, but my story has nothing to do with that.”

  I’ve been trying to ignore the sauerkraut that still clings for dear life to Bakatin’s mustache, but the effort proves too nerve-racking. “You’ve got a thing,” I say. I indicate the mirror-image spot on my own face.

  The Russian capo stares in disbelief for a moment. It seems as if everyone in the club is holding his breath. I know I am. Then Bakatin bursts out with something in Russian that sounds like “Hooey!” and breaks into an uncontrollable laugh. Everyone else in the club laughs, too. I have no idea what he said, but I smile along. He wipes the cabbage off his face and calls out, “Leon! Bring da man a dople.”

  The bartender jumps into action at the espresso machine.

  “You know what’s a dople?” The Russian accent makes the Italian sound Yiddish, but I’m not about to correct his pronunciation.

  “Italian, isn’t it? Double espresso?”

  “Da. It’s a habit I was gave by my Italian comrades in New York. You know why I order you a dople?”

  “No.”

  “To remind you, you got two yáytsa.”

  “That’s one I don’t know.”

  “It’s Russian for those two what you got between your legs. It’s your yáytsa what you don’t want to wake up one morning, find stuffed in your mouth, capeesh?”

  He turns his hand and moves it back and forth as if cupping some testicles. He reminds me of Captain Queeg on the stand, except the balls he’s rolling are mine.

  “I mean no disrespect, Mr. Bakatin. I just thought maybe Cogswell might be here.”

  “Let us pretend, for sake of entertainment, I am the sort of zadneetza what had a need for such a person as your friend Mr. Cogsvell. What for would I be telling you?”

  Leon arrives and places an espresso on the table in front of me. The word “neurotoxin” crosses my mind.

  “Look, I’m not here to make trouble for anybody, especially me. I was just hoping he could answer a few questions, that’s all. The murder is twenty years old, he’s not a suspect, so it’s not like he’s got anything to hide.”

  “Everybody got something to hide.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Of course you do.” He says it like a threat, like he could find out with a car battery and two alligator clips before he even finishes his dople. “And if you think Vlad beliefs you really are after writing old, cold story, you are bigger fool than what you look.”

  Bakatin’s laser eyes burn into mine. I sense that he expects me to start shaking or maybe twitching. While nothing along those lines is outside of the realm of possibility, I manage to resist the urge.

  Then he smiles again, like he’s just kidding. “You maybe have card?”

  I look woefully at the scraps on the floor. “Not anymore.”

  The Impaler laughs again. “Cheap ublyoooduk only carry one card!” The others howl at this heady demonstration of wit. “Not to worry, Mister ‘barely a writer.’ We will tell Comrade Cogsvell you was come to visit.”

  Somehow I don’t find this reassuring. “Thanks. And thanks for the dople.”

  He says nothing, so I stand and start toward the door.

  “And Mr. Nob Brown,” he says.

  I stop and turn back, praying that my trembling legs don’t give out on me.

  “No worry about no card. If Cogsvell want to talk, we will find you. At that we are very good.”

  ELEVEN

  Melody’s on the deck with her laptop when I get home.

  “How’d it go?” she asks.

  “He wasn’t there, but I met his boss.”

  She looks stunned. “Vlad the Impaler?”

  “Yep. He bought me an espresso. A dople.” Then, in my best Bakatin impression, “You know what’s a dople?” I come off sounding like Boris Badinoff.

  “Lemme guess. A synonym for attempted suicide?” She sets her laptop down and stands, putting her han
ds on her hips to twist back and forth.

  “I was just trying to find Cogswell.”

  “And you risked your life to do that because…” She motions with her hand as if trying to lure a puppy out from under the bed.

  “I didn’t risk my life; I was just looking for the guy and Bakatin happened to be there.”

  “I don’t suppose you used an alias.”

  I can tell she’s thinking I pissed off the Russian mob and bought her a ticket to Collateral Damageville.

  “I asked Bakatin to tell Cogswell I wanted to talk to him about Lana Strain, that’s all. It’s not like I’m writing about anything Bakatin’s involved in.”

  “You asked The Impaler to be your errand boy?” Those are her literal words, but her tone of voice makes them sound like It would have been smarter to drive a four-inch machine screw through your eye.

  I shrug, nod, and shuffle my feet.

  “And you told him you wanted to talk to one of his thugs about a murder?” It’s a different question, but the same tone of voice.

  “He’s not a thug,” I say defensively. “He’s a lawyer.”

  “What a relief.” The tone is getting repetitive.

  An hour later, I glide up the driveway of the geodesic dome house that guitar legend Billy Kidd and his daughter Ginger Strain share with Lana’s ghost.

  My nerves are still jangling from my little coffee klatch with Vlad as I climb up the redwood stairs to the second-story deck and ring the front bell. Ginger answers the door and invites me in. The gloom of the murder didn’t weigh on me the first time I was here, but it grows geometrically as Ginger leads me downstairs toward the bedroom where Lana was shot.

  At the end of the hall she waves me into the master where Billy Kidd reclines on his king-size bed. The Dotted Babe hangs beside him, floor to ceiling, powerful and dramatic. No sign of bloodstains. I wonder what it took to clean them off. My eye sweeps the baseboard, drawn by the morbid prospect of seeing a speck of blood that might have somehow evaded decades of Central American cleaning ladies. I don’t see any.

  “Daddy, this is Nob Brown, the writer I told you about.” And to me, “I told him how much I enjoyed talking to you.”

  This surprises me.

  Billy doesn’t acknowledge my presence. He just stares through cheap drugstore readers at the ridges that run down his cracked nails.

  “How have I offended thee, O Lord,” he intones in his famous Kentucky-fried baritone, “to be burdened with such mis’able nails and a godless daughter?”

  God doesn’t answer right away, but I’m guessing he’ll speak through Billy in tongues the next time they’re both in church.

  Now fifty-five, the aging “bad boy” looks strangely androgynous in a once-elegant mauve satin robe covered with faded embroidered roses. His feet are shod in violet polyester-fur slippers with a spray of lavender feathers around the ankles. His long gray hair is pulled straight back in a severe ponytail banded by a black leather strap with an Indian nickel snap closure. By the looks of it, a retired cock ring.

  Ginger sits on a stool by the bed where she must have been giving her father a manicure when I’d rung the bell. The sight of this living, if fallen, legend—whose guitar riffs still grab me, who once lived with the sexiest woman on earth, who let a groupie give him a blow job onstage at the Fillmore without missing a beat—elevates my mood.

  Billy lounges like a king, surrounded by his Bible, his antique aqua-blue Princess rotary phone whose nightlight dial still glows after forty-some years, his box of Ultra Soft Kleenex, his See’s assorted chocolates, his current issues of Rolling Stone, Billboard, Sports Illustrated, and Pentecostal Evangel, and his miniature poodle.

  “I’m not godless, Daddy, I just can’t see thinking about children right now.” That voice again. Just like her mother.

  Ginger applies some Dry Kwik to the metallic gold enamel on her father’s nails. Both of his hands show the tail ends of intricate dragon tattoos that peek out from the flowing sleeves of his housecoat.

  “I want to see grandkids before I croak.”

  “Hang out in the park on Sundays. You’ll see lots of grandkids.”

  The graying legend turns his steel-blue eyes to me. The whites are shot through with a crazing of arteries from years of drug abuse. He looks at least ten years older than he is, just the opposite of his father-in-law.

  “You got any young’ns?” he asks.

  “No,” I say, thinking about Holly. We’d been trying to have kids when I left the force. We’d been trying for three years with no luck and no explanation. It didn’t sink our relationship, but it wore the hull pretty thin.

  The dog gets up and wanders across the bed to sniff at Billy’s nails.

  “Hosni, you get away,” Ginger chides. “Don’t you remember last time when we had to use nail polish remover on your nose? That wasn’t fun now, was it?”

  I almost expect Hosni to reply, but instead he trots back to his spot by Billy’s pillow and lies down again.

  Lana’s presence pervades the air, a poltergeist searching for her long-gone parietal lobe. I wonder how Ginger can sit in this room. I wonder how Billy can sleep here.

  “You listen up, pumpkin,” says Billy. “You’re one hot little chicklet, just like your mama, may she be jammin’ with the Lord. You should use them assets to get some hot dog to slip a ring on ’at finger of yours and knock you up before you get too old to go forth and multiply. I wants to see you fill your God-given purpose on this earth and be happy before you die and go to Hell.”

  “You of all people should know that family doesn’t always mean happiness.”

  “What about the ‘Hell’ part?”

  “I’m not getting born again, so forget about it.” She turns to me. “Ever since he went Pentecostal, he’s been on me about getting born again, like the first time wasn’t bad enough.”

  “Sweet Jesus of Nazareth, please forgive my baby sinner.”

  Ginger sighs. “Mr. Brown came all the way up here to ask you about Mama, not to listen to your sermons.”

  The aging rocker takes a deep breath, as if girding for the moment he’s been hoping to avoid. “All right. Let’s get it over with.”

  “Let’s start with Lana’s death. After all these years, you must have a theory about who killed her.”

  “No fuckin’ idea. Maybe the Asshole from the song.”

  “Do you know who he was?”

  “A lot of folks think he was supposed to be me.”

  “Oh, Daddy,” Ginger chides. “Don’t be ridiculous. He called that night.”

  “On the phone?” It’s a stupid question, but the shock stunned my brain. The police tried to find him, but they couldn’t even verify that he existed.

  “He talked to Mama.” She blows on her father’s nails. “Almost a year before she died.”

  Billy picks up the story. “We was in the livin’ room, talkin’ about some new licks when Lana grabbed a call and just kind of froze on up. Sweet Jesus, she looked like she seed Armageddon its own self, pop-eyed as a wild hog with rabies. He said somethin’, and she said fuck you and hung up.”

  “How did you know it was the asshole?”

  “She told us,” Ginger says.

  “I ’bout ripped Lana’s head off, God rest her soul.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “He weren’t just callin’ outa the blue. She knew the fucker.”

  “Did she tell you that?”

  “Didn’t have to.” Billy looks me right in the eye, and his expression hardens like fast drying cement. “She never wrote no song ’bout nobody she ain’t fucked at least once.”

  TWELVE

  By the time I leave, Billy has taken a shine to me. Don’t ask me why. He’s famous for impulsive infatuations, but they’re usually for new cults or causes. Today’s craze is me. For whatever reason, he has convinced himself that I’m the only writer he can trust. He vows to help me with my story in any way he can and, when I’m finished, to let me be his
official “autobiographer,” a word he mistakes for ghostwriter. I take his promises with a grain of salt. In my experience, rock stars tend to treat promises like groupies: easy to make and quickly forgotten.

  On my way home, I swing by the Iliad on Cahuenga, one of the few extant used bookstores in the Valley, to check for any Lana Strain biographies I don’t already have. I don’t find any. But my eye falls on a book called Born to Use by Vern Senzimmer. The name rings a bell. I pull it off the shelf and read the back cover. It’s a self-published autobiography by a guy from some grunge band called Sticky White. That’s where I know the name from. I don’t remember their music, but I do remember rumors that Lana was sleeping with some guy from that band behind Billy’s back. According to the barely literate blurb, Senzimmer was the love of Lana’s life. I read the first few pages. The self-indulgent style aspires to stream of consciousness but reads more like a trickle. I spring for the fifty cents to buy the thing anyway.

  When I finally get home, the sight of the shredded sofa on the street reminds me that I have to call Sanitation in the morning. I check the mail. Still no probate records from the county, but there’s a kill fee for a Hustler piece they rejected three months ago. Three hundred simoleons. It won’t cover what I’m supposed to pay Holly by the end of today, but it’ll pay my water and power this month. I walk into the house, wondering if I’ll still be living here this time next month. There’s one message on my voice mail. I punch the one key to play it, praying it’s not Jerry.

  “Nob, it’s Ginger. I need to talk to you. Can you meet me tomorrow at Solley’s Deli around three?”

  She sounds upset. I wonder what happened in the hour since I left her. I call back to find out and get her voice mail. I RSVP that I’ll see her at Solley’s.

  There’s some day-old coffee left in the pot, so I pour it into an ice cube tray and stick it in the freezer. I can use the cubes to chill some iced coffee tomorrow. It’s an old trick I learned from Holly to keep iced coffee from getting watered down. She apparently learned it from my mother, who never bothered to teach it to me. Ma can be sexist that way.