The second-floor offices in Titan’s building were accessed via a small door on the left side. We entered a small portico that housed a couple of mailboxes, a wooden staircase with a polished bannister, and a miniscule elevator. A narrow hallway led to a door at the back with a lit exit sign. The floor was black-and-white tile, shiny and clean. The walls were unmarked and painted a soft gray, like the underbelly of a mourning dove. The building looked historical and well-maintained, and the entry smelled of cleaning solvent and tortillas, the latter complements of the taquería. From the names on the mailboxes, it looked like Titan Entertainment shared the top floor of the building with a law firm called Ortega and Escobar, P.C.
If Mom hadn’t been with us, I would have opted for the stairs, but I knew her legs weren’t good with stairs, especially steep ones.The three of us turned toward the elevator. As soon as the doors opened and Lorraine saw the size of the car, she said, “You go with Grandma, Odelia. I’ll take the stairs.”
“I don’t blame her,” Mom said with a shiver. “This thing is the size of a coffin.”
Tiny or not, Mom and I arrived safely in the elevator at the top floor to find Lorraine standing in front of a doorway down the hall. The building was much deeper than it looked from the outside, and the hallway was long, with an emergency exit sign at the end. I hadn’t noticed another staircase, so maybe that went to a fire escape in the back of the building. We joined Lorraine in front of a black lacquered door frame with a frosted glass pane. Stenciled on the glass was Titan Entertainment.
Once the three of us were gathered in front of the door, I tried the handle. The door was locked, but I thought I could hear someone talking inside. I knocked on the door. “Mr. West?”
“Someone’s in there,” Lorraine said, putting her ear to the glass. “I can hear someone talking.” We all remained still while Lorraine went back to listening. “But I only hear one person.”
“Maybe he’s on the phone,” Mom suggested as a well-dressed petite woman with long dark hair and striking dark features came up the stairs. She carried a briefcase and paused in front of the law firm’s door on the other side of the hallway.
I knocked again. “Mr. West?”
“Titan should be in there,” the woman told us as she opened the door to the other office and stepped halfway in. “His car’s parked out back.”
“Thank you,” Mom told her. “We have an appointment, but the door’s locked.”
“He might be in the men’s room,” the woman offered. “I don’t think Titan has had a secretary in a while, so he probably locks up when he runs down the hall.” She pointed down the hall and I spotted two doors, side by side, on Titan’s side of the hallway, across from the exit sign. “Or he might have run down the street to grab a quick bite or something like that.”
“Thank you,” I told her with a smile. “So you know Mr. West well?”
“Well enough,” she told us. “He owns the building.”
“You’ve been very helpful,” I said, still smiling. “We’ll just wait a bit and see if he returns.” If we’d been three men, I doubt she would have been as forthcoming with information.
As soon as the woman was inside the law firm and the door shut securely, I said to Lorraine, “Keep listening while I check the bathrooms.”
I scooted down the hall and gently tapped on the men’s room door. When I got no answer, I opened the door and peeked in. The room was very small, containing a toilet, urinal, and small sink with a mirror above it. Paper towel and soap dispensers hung on the wall next to the sink. Like the rest of the building, it was sparkling clean. I next tried the ladies’ room. It was also empty and the same as the men’s room, except that it contained no urinal and was on the outside wall, on which was a closed window of frosted glass. A small glass jar of potpourri had been left on the window’s ledge. The small room smelled of citrus with slight undertones of savory herbs.
Quickly I made my way back up the hall. “No one in either bathroom.”
“Good,” Mom said, “because I have to pee.”
“You went back at the burger place,” I protested. “And again at my house when we picked up Lorraine.”
“I’m old,” Mom snapped, doing a quick two-step down the hall, “and so is my bladder.”
“Grandma’s a real piece of work, isn’t she?” Lorraine whispered to me with a wink.
Instead of answering, I closed my eyes and took two deep breaths. “Can you still hear someone inside?” I asked her.
Lorraine put her ear to the door again and shook her head. I put my fingers to my lips, letting her know to keep quiet. I indicated for Lorraine to back off to the side, away from the door, so her shadow couldn’t be seen. I did the same. “Guess we should go,” I said toward the door. “No sense hanging around here all day.” I motioned for Lorraine to cross in front of the door and start for the stairs. A quick study, she caught my drift and started for the stairs. I followed and together we tried our best to sound like we were leaving. It was a corny trick that shouldn’t work, but it was all we had to work with outside of breaking down the door.
“Come on, Mom,” I said to no one, happy that Mom was taking her usual sweet time in the bathroom, “we’re leaving.”
“Hold your horses,” Lorraine said, doing an excellent impersonation of her grandmother’s voice and crankiness.
After making the best retreating steps we could, I sneaked back to the door and stood against the wall. Lorraine did the same. We stayed that way, still as statues, until the handle turned on the other side and the door was pulled inward a few inches, just enough to permit a round bald pate to pop out like a curious prairie dog. First Titan West looked straight ahead, then he looked toward the stairs, and that’s when he caught sight of us in his peripheral vision. He tried to slam the door shut, but I heaved my 200-plus pounds at it before he could shut and lock it. Lorraine followed. The little man was stronger than I’d imagined possible, and it took the two of us to force it open.
Once we were inside, Titan ran for an inner office, and again we raced to prevent him from slamming that door and locking us out—or I should say Lorraine raced to that door. She sprinted across the room with an agility I’d never had, not even in my younger days. All we wanted was to get inside and have a conversation with this man, but we got carried away and went at him like a seasoned SWAT team. No wonder he ran.
“We just want to talk to you, Titan,” I said as we spilled into that second room together like clowns tumbling out of a cramped tiny car.
Instead of listening or replying, Titan, huffing and puffing, scrambled to his desk, yanked open a drawer, and pulled out a gun.
OMG—a freaking gun! I nearly wet myself. It was a small handgun, but a gun just the same. It also wasn’t the first time a gun had been pulled on me, but, trust me, it’s not something you get blasé about.
I froze in my tracks, except for my right hand, which reached out and grabbed Lorraine by the back waistband of her jeans to keep her from going after Titan. It was clear she hadn’t seen the gun yet. Like a hunting dog retrieving a fresh kill, she was focused on getting to him. When I pulled her up short, she came out of her frenzied state and gasped when she noticed the gun. Seeing that her father had been a cop for a couple of decades, I’m sure it wasn’t the first gun she’d ever seen, but I was pretty sure it was the first time she’d had one pointed directly at her chest.
I pulled harder on the back of Lorraine’s jeans until she started retreating backwards. When she was shoulder to shoulder with me, I took a slight side step forward, putting my body in front of hers. My niece was not going to get shot today unless the bullet went through me first. As for my mother, I could only hope she had the runs from her lunch and would remain in the bathroom, where she’d be safe.
Seeing us stopped, Titan took a deep breath and wiped sweat off his shiny forehead with the back of his free hand. He was dressed in
nice gray slacks and a white knit shirt with a polo player over his heart. The shirt pulled slightly over his round belly and was tucked in, secured by a leather belt. I guessed him to be in his sixties, like Oxman and Shankleman. On his left hand, the one not holding the gun, was a wedding ring. “Who in the hell are you?”
“We just came to talk to you,” I told him, keeping my voice calm. “My name is Odelia Grey. This is my niece Lorraine. I called you yesterday about Boaz Shankleman. Do you remember that, Titan? My mother is a friend of his.”
His eyes seemed to retreat into his fleshy face, red from exertion, as he dug through his memory bank, but the gun never wavered. “Yeah, I remember.” The eyes focused on us again. “So are you here to take me out?”
“Take you out?” Lorraine asked. “You mean like on a date? Ewwwww.” Both Titan and I looked at her like she’d just put a finger in a light socket.
“Really?” I said to Lorraine. “That’s where your mind went? Even your grandmother would know better.”
She looked puzzled for a nanosecond, then her brain caught up to the situation. “OMG,” she said to Titan in horror, “you think we’re here to kill you?” She pointed from me to herself. “Seriously, do we look like hit men?”
If not for our precarious situation, I’d take Lorraine out for coffee and ply her with stories about Mother, the notorious leader of a gang of hit women, who could pass for anyone’s granny. But that was for another time.
“Titan,” I said instead, “no one has sent us. We really do just want to talk to you about Boaz Shankleman and Cydney Fox.”
“I told you on the phone,” Titan answered, “I have no idea where Bo is. As for Cydney, she can rot in hell.”
“She’s halfway there now,” Lorraine said. I turned in surprise. In seconds Lorraine had gone from thick skulled to the queen of snappy remarks. Mom was right: Lorraine was more like our side of the family.
“And what does that mean?” he asked, still not putting down the gun.
“It means that Cydney Fox is dead,” I told him. “She was found in Shankleman’s house beaten to death, but he’s still missing.”
“Good riddance,” he barked after recovering from his initial shock. “Cyd was nothing but trouble.” For all his bluster, his skin had gone ashen at the mention of Fox being found dead.
“Why would you think Shankleman sent us to kill you?” I asked, wondering in the back of my mind where in the hell Mom was lurking. “We’re just trying to find him to put my mother’s mind at ease. They’re friends at the retirement community, and she’s worried about him.”
“I never said I thought Bo sent you,” Titan snapped, his eyes shifting, alert and wary.
I rewound my brain back a few seconds. “You certainly inferred it,” I told him. “We were talking about Bo, and you asked if we were here to kill you. I’m not sure how else to interpret that.” I paused and waited, but Titan said nothing. “If you weren’t talking about Bo, then who is it you thought sent us to kill you? Could it be the one who killed Cydney Fox? Is it David Oxman?”
“That burnout?” Titan scoffed. “Don’t make me laugh. If not for me and Bo, he’d be living on skid row in downtown LA or dead.”
He started moving away from his desk. He kept the gun on us, forcing us to rotate with him. As he got closer to the doorway to the outside room, we pivoted until we were facing the doorway. For the first time I noticed his office walls were covered with framed posters of old bands, mostly from the ’70s and ’80s, many of which I remembered seeing on his website as available for bookings. Some of the posters were signed. Otherwise the office was pretty basic. There was a very large wooden desk, an oversized leather desk chair, and two visitor chairs. Against the outside wall, set between two small windows, was a leather sofa. On the desk sat an open cardboard document storage box, and next to it, an array of files. An old-fashioned leather-edged desk blotter covered the middle of the desk and matched the half-full pencil cup and business card holder. The office was very tidy and the furnishings of good quality. Like the bands in the posters, the office was a throwback to an earlier time. Only a horizontal file cabinet against one wall and an open laptop on the desk were modern.
As if reading my mind, Titan started to edge back toward the desk, forcing us to rotate again like flowers following the movement of the sun. With his free hand, he closed the laptop and tucked it close to his body. With small jerks of the gun, he indicated for us to reverse our direction again as he edged back to the door.
“You two stay right where you are,” he warned, “unless you want to get shot. I’m leaving now, and if you try to follow me, I’ll shoot you both.” He was trying to play a tough guy, but his roly-poly physique and doughy features weren’t backing him up. If not for the gun, I felt certain that I could easily take him, even without Lorraine.
I put my hands up in the air, as if I was being robbed. I nudged Lorraine and she did the same. Titan edged backwards, the gun still pointed at us, until his backside was halfway out the doorway. He reached for the door handle, then realized he didn’t have a free hand to pull it shut. He rolled his eyes at his own predicament before deciding to just continue backing up.
“You two stay right here,” he ordered. “You follow me and I’ll shoot you both, I swear.” Titan didn’t seem the violent type, so I felt there was only a fifty-fifty chance that he’d make good on that promise, but I wasn’t about to gamble with my life or Lorraine’s. And I’ve learned that even nonviolent people might shoot a gun under duress.
What happened next happened so fast it took me a moment to realize what went down. Just as Titan lowered his gun to turn and flee, he yelped in pain, dropping the gun to the floor. I ran over and kicked the weapon out of his reach and shoved him, knocking him against the doorjamb. He slid to the floor, yelping again. The door to the office suite was still open. Quickly, I crossed the room, closing and locking it just in case someone from the other office heard anything, and also to slow Titan down should he manage to get to his feet. Titan turned slightly on his side and clutched his right buttock with his right hand. The laptop was still in his left hand. It was then I noticed Mom standing off to the side holding her knife like one of the Jets from West Side Story.
Still inside Titan’s office, Lorraine’s legs buckled and her butt hit the floor with a muffled thud, her bravado of a few seconds ago melted away like ice.
I didn’t want to be the type of person who sneered I told you so, but I couldn’t help myself. “You’re the one who insisted on coming with us,” I told Lorraine as I grabbed the laptop from Titan and indicated for him to get to his feet. “But since you’re here, now would be a great time to pull up your big girl panties.”
As Titan slowly found his legs and stood up, I turned to Mom. “And you—put that damn thing away before you really hurt someone!”
Mom sniffed at me. “Just let me wash the blood off first.” A small kitchenette was built into the side wall, along with a tiny sink, microwave, and compact fridge. A folding door was half opened across the front of it. Mom pushed the door wider and turned on the faucet.
Blood! For the love of…
“And bring some towels for Titan,” I snapped at her as he limped into the inner office. “Who knows how deep you got him.”
“Aw, it’s only a flesh wound,” Mom said. “He’ll live.”
I knew that and Mom knew that, but I wasn’t sure Titan did. Whimpering like a little girl who’d lost her balloon, he was standing by his desk, half bent forward, his left hand gripping the edge, his right hand still clutching his right butt cheek. I put the laptop back on the desk and bent to examine the damage. There was a small tear in his pants and some blood, but not much. It didn’t look like Mom’s knife had gone very deep.
“It was just a poke,” I told him. Mom came in with some towels, one of them wet. I took them from her and dabbed at the spot with the wet towel first.
Titan yelped again. “Should I drop my pants?” he asked.
“You do,” I warned him, “and I’ll set my mother on you again.” Not only did he not drop his pants, but he stopped whining. Dabbing at the wound again, I noticed very little blood. “It looks like the bleeding is stopping already, but you might want to wash it with some antibacterial soap and dress it after we leave.” I handed him the dry towels. “Here, put these down on your chair and take a seat. We have some questions for you.”
“No,” Mom said, stepping forward to stop him from moving. “Make him stay bent over like that. If he’s uncomfortable, maybe he’ll talk more and not dawdle about it. And kick his feet apart like they do on TV.”
I looked at Titan, still slightly bent forward, both hands on his desk. He did look like he was bent over the hood of a car after police found dope in his vehicle. Mom had a point, although I did not kick his feet apart.
“Where did you pick her up?” Titan snapped. “Guantanamo?”
I glanced over at my mother and said under my breath, “Sometimes I wonder.”
Once again my I-told-you-so side came out. “If you had simply answered our questions,” I told Titan, “this never would have happened.”
“Well, you have my attention now,” he barked. “So get on with it, then get the hell out of here.” He lifted one hand off the desk to point at my deceptively frail-looking septuagenarian mother. “Just keep her away from me. She’s a menace.”
Mom stepped forward. “Me? You’re the fool with the gun.” Lorraine had taken a place on the love seat and was watching intently, as if she was in the orchestra section of the Ahmanson Theatre.
“We’re trying to find Boaz Shankleman,” I said to Titan.
Rhythm & Clues Page 11