“This thing about needing a ride is kind of high school, don’t you think? What did you do before you met me?”
“I didn’t hit houses in Brentwood,” I said. “In most neighborhoods it’s possible to park for an hour without your license-plate number being written down by the gendarmes.”
“Gendarmes,” she said. “Foie gras. Aren’t we je ne sais quoi?”
“Je t’aime,” I said. “I think.”
I heard her swallow. “Mon Dieu. We’ll talk about that later. But just to allow myself to thaw a bit, you should know that I’m not entirely without regard for you either.”
“Me, too,” I said.
“There,” she said. “That’s the Junior I know and . . . well, have regard for.”
“See you then,” I said, suddenly feeling ridiculously happy. I waited for her to hang up in my ear, but she didn’t. She said, “Goodbye.”
Buoyed by this proof of her regard for me, and with all that unexpected time on my hands, I pointed the Toyota west, toward Santa Monica.
23
Open Me First
I’d been to Eaglet’s condominium once before, right after she met Ting Ting, which happened when he brought me some apologetic flowers from Stinky. Stinky needs to apologize frequently. At the time Ting Ting held pride of place as the Filipino houseboy who’d put up with Stinky longest. Eaglet was in Ronnie’s and my motel room when Ting Ting showed up with the flowers, and the attraction between the two was mutual, instant, and Shakespearean in scale. Ting Ting moved into Eaglet’s condo that very night, breaking what passed for Stinky’s heart forever, or at least until Jejomar crossed the blue Pacific and his sails hove into view.
Eaglet’s condo was confirmation, if any was needed, that murder pays better than burglary. She was still a relative neophyte among LA hitters, and she already had a condo I put at a million-nine and rising, only about fourteen blocks from the Pacific, close enough to smell it and wipe salt off the furniture all the time. It was newer than tomorrow, with pale wooden floors and edgy, angular Danish Modern furniture that had all the heart of a Danish cookie. At the time I visited them, there had been a moment, after Ting Ting left the room to make us some tea, that Eaglet let the harmless hippie-dippie, retro-flower-child thing slip a little, on purpose, to give me a glimpse into the eyes of someone I shouldn’t even think about fucking with. I’d given my version of it back to her, and in the course of a speechless half second we met each other all over again.
And now I’d learned that she’d volunteered to take me out. Oh, well, as Louie said, nothing personal.
If Stinky was in Eaglet’s condo—and the fact that the ever-truthful Ting Ting had hung up on me made the odds pretty good that he was—then the only way to talk to him would be face-to-face, since phoning again wasn’t going to get me any further than I’d gotten last time. And anyway, at this point I was thinking far enough ahead to have a plan of sorts, assuming I was still alive after the break-in at Granger’s to put it into motion. I needed Stinky for that plan. In person.
One of the things I liked about Eaglet’s building was that it didn’t have one of those electronic buzzer gates. Standing out there with your back to the curb and the sun going down and a premature streetlight blossoming on your shoulders and the wind whipping the trees around, those things can cut an evening of crime very short indeed. But here, at 3240 Sycamore in Santa Monica, the builder had his priorities straight; he’d skipped the gate and pocketed the expense, and I could walk right in, virtuous as the dawn.
It never ceases to amaze me that people who pay for an eyehole in their door will open up when there’s a thumb covering it. It was Ting Ting, of course; Eaglet would probably have fired directly through the door, and Stinky didn’t get up for doorbells.
“Ting Ting,” I said heartily, pushing past him. “Damn, it’s good to see—”
The rest of the sentence evaporated in a slow exhalation of surprise. The long hallway, which, on my prior visit, had been decorator-illuminated to put maximum shine on the furniture, was in semidarkness, except for several chest-high lights a few paces apart, which turned out to be thick white candles flickering in glass chimneys and mounted on brass stands. More candles gleamed in the part of the living room I could see, where curtains were drawn against the sunset, and the air was positively sticky with the scent of tuberose, gardenias, and ginger flowers. Ting Ting put a hand on my arm, but it was a soft hand, not the hand of death he’d used on me that one night.
His eyes were red and puffy. He sniffled. He was wearing dark slacks and a white barong tagalog, the traditional Filipino shirt, but with a mandarin collar and, pinned over his heart, a curled loop of black ribbon.
“Oh,” I said, pulling up short with an almost audible screech of brakes as the situation presented itself to me, “yes, I . . . um, I figured it—he—would be here. I wanted to . . . to pay my respects.”
“You nice man,” Ting Ting said, causing me a pang of guilt, “but I think Mr. Stinky—”
“You know what?” I said. “You don’t work for him anymore, and you don’t have to call him Mr. Stinky. Just plain Stinky would do fine. Anyway, Stinky and I, we’re old friends.”
Ting Ting looked at me, lips pursed, and then shook his head at whatever he’d been thinking. “Is no time for argue,” he said. “Please come in.”
He led me down the hall and into the living room. All the furniture had been pushed to the walls, and the room was ringed with weighty, Mafia-style floral arrangements and more of those big candles. Dead center, so to speak, and up on trestles, was an elaborate casket, the top of which had a decent approximation of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper painted on it, Jesus and his friends frozen mid-bite by the big announcement. The casket’s upper half, where the occupant’s torso and head would be, was open, but only by about eight inches. Ting Ting stopped beside it for a moment as he went in, and I waited behind him, looking down at the opening. “In Pilippines we like it open,” he said, sniffling again, “for say goodbye. But Jejomar, he not looking so good.”
“I imagine not,” I said. “Was he a friend of yours?”
“Why?” Ting Ting asked, wiping his cheeks. “You mean, because I crying? Jejomar, he was Pinoy, a Pilipino boy, poor boy, same as me. Dancer, same as me. Come far away from home, same as me. I don’t meet him, but, you know, he same as my brother.” He swabbed his nose. “So me, I cry for him a little. I think he cry for me, too.”
“I’m sure he would,” I said.
Eaglet came through the door from the kitchen. Her parents may have been the last Asian hippies in California, but she could shed the stony slacker style just as easily as she could shed Peace, Love, and Understanding when the time came to pull the trigger. Tonight she was sporting a very twenty-first-century look in black, and the glance she gave me wasn’t affectionate, but she wasn’t going to push it under these circumstances. “Junior,” she said, with teeth. “What a nice surprise. Are you hungry?”
“No thanks,” I said, too unprepared for the question to actually consider it.
“Me neither,” she said, “but all day long Stinky’s former . . . um, houseboys have been coming by, and they all brought these flowers”—she indicated the big, beribboned floral arrangements—“and they all wanted to eat.”
“In Pilippines,” Ting Ting said, with a tiny edge, “everybody eat at . . . at paglalamay, at . . . at—”
“The vigil,” Eaglet said, surprising me. “I’ve been reading up,” she said. “Boy, do they eat.”
“Eat because we alive,” he said with a bit of bite in it, and Eaglet, who had a spine of solid brass, took the first step back I’d ever seen her take. I reevaluated the pecking order in the relationship.
“Actually,” I said, “I could eat a little something.” I hadn’t had anything since I swiped part of Louie’s pastry at Tom N Toms.
“Right back,” she said, but I followed her into the
kitchen.
“How’s Stinky taking it?” I asked.
“Milking it for all it’s worth.” She lifted the lid from a big, steaming pot on the back of the stove. “Rice and chicken okay?”
“Absolutely. You mean he’s not really all broken up?”
“He feels guilty,” Eaglet said, wielding a serving spoon with admirable precision, “which isn’t quite the same thing, is it? But if you ask me, it’s . . . you know, a chance for a soliloquy. His big scene. Ting Ting was the only one he really loved. And himself, of course. Gravy?”
“Sure. Where’d the casket come from?”
“He got it off Amazon,” she said. “Stinky has a Prime membership, naturally, so the shipping was free, if you can imagine that. Almost thirteen hundred bucks even without the shipping. He wanted to save a thousand, get one that was all wood, but Ting Ting said no, the one in there, with the cafeteria or whatever it is on it, that was the Catholic one, and I guess that carried the day.”
“You guess?”
“I tuned out.” She put the dish on a tray and laid down a white napkin, a fork, and a big spoon plumb-straight beside the dish.
“Why’d you tune out?”
“Honestly? I didn’t know the guy, he was nothing to me when he was alive, and now that he’s dead, he’s a pain in the ass. I mean, I gotta have the houseboy, whatever his name was, here in the condo in that big overdecorated egg carton, all my furniture is useless, these guys and their florists are streaming through all day, the place smells like Hawaii, and then there’s Stinky, and you know what? An hour of Stinky is like a week of regular people.” She put the tray on a little square table, some kind of blond wood, and pulled out a matching chair. “Eat up, it’s pretty good.”
“He’s here, right? Stinky, I mean. Staying here.” I spooned some chicken and the vinegary gravy over the rice. Smelled great.
“Is he ever. He’s all over the place. He can be too close to you when he’s in the other room.”
“This is really good,” I said. I skipped the chair and ate standing at the table.
“I’ve been learning. That’s Ting Ting’s mother’s recipe, although the chicken here, he says, isn’t as good as in the Philippines, because there you, like, say hi to it and they kill it in front of you or something. You know, you can’t be in my line of work if somebody wringing a chicken’s neck gives you the wussies, but I’ll still take a nice neat package wrapped in plastic.”
“So where is he? Stinky?”
“Oh, who knows. Shaving his legs, maybe.”
“I do not shave my legs,” Stinky said, billowing into the room. Stinky’s waist was in the high fifties, and in the loose black barong tagalog he was wearing, he looked like the mourning blimp you’d hire for a celebrity funeral. “More in your line,” he said, with a precisely calibrated tincture of distaste, “than mine, I should think.”
“I’m Chinese and Vietnamese,” Eaglet said, “and probably the least hairy person you’ve ever known. Compared to me, you’re one of those primate species we watch through the bars as they groom each other. You know, eating nits.”
“Through the bars indeed,” Stinky said. “Do you mind if this gentleman and I beg a moment free of your company?”
I said, “Now, now, children.”
“He’s yours,” Eaglet said to me. “Try not to return him in one piece.”
She pushed past Stinky, into the living room.
“I’m sure she’s a competent little death mechanic,” he said, turning to make sure she kept going. “She’s certainly soulless enough. And she shows a certain organizational flair. The plan for the burial is entirely hers. The elevator here goes right down to the garage, and she’s rented a van so about nine thirty this evening we’ll be able to take . . . ahhh, Jejomar—” He stopped for a moment, blinking rapidly, and I fought the impulse to pat his arm. He probably would have slapped my hand away. “Take him up to a place she knows in the Angeles Forest, wherever that is, which is apparently an absolute garden of murder victims. The casket—” He peered at me, still blinking, but more slowly. “Do you like the casket?”
“Aces,” I said. “For a casket, I mean.”
“Wop overkill,” he said, “but it soothed Ting Ting’s soul. He apparently feels that the design of the box is a kind of tip to the angels: Open me first.” He heaved an immense sigh. “So by about midnight, Jejomar should be six feet down, under The Last Supper, waiting for the trumpet, or the harp, or the barbershop quartet, or whatever the fuck it’ll turn out to be.” He looked at the floor with what seemed to be total concentration. “How’s Miss Most Wanted, the Bauble Queen?”
“We’ve taken a little time-out,” I said, “but we’re seeing each other tonight.”
“Well, check your pockets when it’s over. Although I don’t even know why I say that. She’s got just what you need.”
I finished the chicken and went to the pot for more. “Really. And what’s that?”
“You have modest but solid instincts, a good eye, and a certain skill level. She has imagination.”
“I don’t have imagination?”
“No more than a lead pencil.”
“That’s harsh.”
“Well, look at you. You’re a pretty good burglar, and you’ve got a corner on the market of crooks who are also private eyes. If you had any vision, you could be making a fortune.”
I said, “You sound like Irwin Dressler.”
Stinky doesn’t surprise easily, but both eyebrows went up. “I sound like Dressler?”
Irwin Dressler, the world’s oldest living still-dangerous gangster, had pretty well headed the mob in Southern California for more than five decades, making things work when the elected government couldn’t and scraping off the cream here and there for his efforts, and the mention of his name even now inspired a lot of respect—usually accompanied by a surge of dread—among informed crooks. I’d had dealings with him twice and, to my surprise, survived. He’d even smiled at me a couple of times, and I had moments in which I could actually believe he’d experience a twinge of regret before ordering my death. “That’s what he says,” I said. “He thinks I should franchise.”
“That’s not what he said,” Stinky countered severely. “Surely he said you had a franchise.”
“Right, sorry, that’s what he said.”
“And your little mystery playmate has the brains to help you work up a business plan. Look how fast she came up with that blather about the bangles. Look at the way she got us out of the clutches of the Slugger and his orangutans. On the fly, with no time to think at all, she out-strategized both of us. And I’m smart.”
“I’m not exactly used furniture myself.”
“Let’s not go over things we’ve already covered. Actually, you should be pleased, shouldn’t you? Here I am, extending myself, going out of my way to offer you advice, when you know perfectly well that I don’t care what you do.”
Sometimes the word insufferable just falls short. “Thanks.”
“That’s settled, then. Why are you here?”
“You were going to give me a bunch of money yesterday.”
He said, “Mmmmm.”
“Mmmmm?”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“Give me a vowel. Yes or no?”
He said, “Do you have the stamp?”
“I do.”
“May I see it?”
“Sure.” I backed away from him—Stinky’s got fast hands—and fished it out of my pocket, sealed in a little baggie.
“Give it to me.”
“Money.”
“A closer look, then.”
I clutched both sides of the baggie tightly enough to turn my knuckles white and said, “Grab it, and it’ll tear. I’ll make sure of it.”
“Barbarian,” Stinky said mildly. He brought his eyes within a few inches of the
stamp and then nodded. “How much did we say?”
“We didn’t say anything. I said fifty, you said forty-five, and I reluctantly agreed. With fifteen more due when the threat from the Slugger has been eliminated.”
“Forty,” he said.
“Stinky,” I said, “you cease to interest me.” I replaced the stamp in my pocket and turned to leave.
“Do you have another buyer?” he said, inadvertently presenting me with a bargaining chip.
I turned back to him. “I do.”
He widened his eyes as much as the Botox would allow. “All the business we’ve done together. All the good times we’ve had, the laughs we’ve shared. Don’t they mean anything to you?”
I said, “Not a whit.”
“Who’s the buyer?”
“Turnaround Dave.”
He looked like he’d smelled something that didn’t belong in a kitchen. “You’re slumming.”
“I don’t know about you,” I said, “but lately I’ve noticed that when I spend money, I rarely think about where I got it.”
“Dave wouldn’t know what to do with that stamp.”
“Not really my problem, is it? I mean, once he pays me, it’s not like I’ll actually give a shit.”
“Philistine,” he said. “Football fan.”
I said, “Forty-five. Now.”
“Can’t,” he said. “I can do the forty. Madame Butterfly out there is charging me five to bury Jejomar.”
I looked at him long enough that anyone else with a guilty conscience would have looked away, and then I nodded and let him think I’d fallen for it. “Fine,” I said. “I believe you. Get the money.” It’s important to allow people small victories, especially when they know a lot of shooters.
“Right back,” he said, and I used the time alone to call Louie.
“Still got the limo?” I asked.
“I only got it back around noon.” Louie sounded aggrieved.
“Sorry. Feels longer. I’m going to need it tonight. Does it still have those hand-painted plates on it?”
“Like I said, I only got it back—”
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