by Hart Hanson
I drove past a jumbled old slide at the Palisades, continuing past Sunset Boulevard, then turned inland at Topanga Canyon—where surfers bobbed in the ocean across from a nursery / art / outdoor furniture store emblazoned SUPPORT OUR TROOPS!—and wound my way up, up, up to the old funky Topanga village center that hippies and musicians have loved since the sixties (and outlaw surfers before them), left on Old Topanga Canyon Road, past the flaky Inn of the Seventh Ray, smelling yucca and white sage, buckwheat on the hillsides, gnarly coast oaks, tang of pigweed (all the stuff I’d miss if I were driving the air-conditioned Mercedes), taking the scenic route to Bismarck Avila’s Calabasas mansion to report for my first day of overcompensated indentured servitude. It was so pleasant I figured my petulant plan to make Avila uncomfortable in the New Yorker was foiled, but as the old Chrysler and I climbed inland, the effects of Saturday’s ungodly Santa Anas lingered in the red-rock canyon. I felt beads of sweat form on my backbone and ribs.
Calabasas is where lots of actors and athletes and rapper types live: big houses in gated communities on expansive acreages surrounded by the picturesque Santa Monica Mountains. It’s not exactly lush back there, tucked among the scrubby hills between the ocean and the huge San Fernando Valley suburbs, but there’s room to spread out if you’ve got enough money to import fountains and pools and palm trees. A couple of miles past the Calabasas Highlands, I made an abrupt right onto an unmarked, unpaved private road, drove another quarter mile, and stopped at Bismarck Avila’s gates. They looked like what you’d get if you carved Mount Olympus out of wood instead of marble. When I got out of the New Yorker to buzz in, I thunked the pillars with my knuckles.
They were made of poured concrete but painted to look like wooden versions of marble columns.
(Fake upon false upon bogus.)
A female voice thrummed over the intercom. She told me to drive up to the house. Her voice sounded sexy but exasperated.
I wanted to say to her, Hey, I’m not nuts about this myself, but for all I knew, Bismarck Avila had blackmailed her into answering his doorbell. The gates swung open to reveal what appeared to be an estate on Kauai—monstrous leafy plants and peacocks, coconut palms, orchids, and ferns.
The mansion itself (I estimated twelve to fifteen thousand square feet) looked like it had been designed by a dotty British admiral for the governor of Kentucky. White, stately, eccentric, and rambling, with a castle-looking turret on one side and a steampunk-looking copper-topped observatory on the other, with everything jammed between doing its best to reconcile the whack. I couldn’t decide if it was awesome or awful, but what it wasn’t was subtle. Poking out from the turret side of the house was what had to be the largest private skateboard ramp in Southern California (meaning the world), four stories high, vertical at the top. Made me queasy to look at. On the other side of the driveway, a man-made pond. Was it possible Avila hadn’t heard that California was holding a drought? More likely, droughts simply didn’t exist in his income bracket.
In the middle of the lakelet, there was a desert island, size of a tennis court, two palm trees, a yellow hammock slung between them, a tiki hut containing a daybed for desert island shenanigans, a treasure chest half buried within arm’s reach of the hammock (had to be a cooler). On the driveway side of the pond, there was a small dock and, moored to the dock, a diminutive pirate-ship galleon, hardly bigger than a Boston Whaler, complete with poop deck and sails, a fiberglass pelican wearing a bandanna and eye patch, and a Jolly Roger flag and a topless mermaid figurehead.
I eased the New Yorker behind a colorless Ford Crown Victoria; unmarked law enforcement with a bar of lights hidden in the windshield and a gigantic whip antenna, which I figured for county since Calabasas is one of the dozens of smaller municipalities that contract the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department to handle local law enforcement. Bismarck Avila himself stood in front of an eight-car garage, dressed in leprechaun-green basketball shorts and SpongeBob SquarePants T-shirt, speaking to a tall, lean, balding man in his early forties wearing a well-cared-for but dated suit like he’d bought it at the same outlet mall where he got his tortoiseshell aviator glasses, a lanyard around his neck, brandishing a document in an officious manner.
I know what executing a warrant looks like and I was pretty sure Bismarck Avila didn’t need his driver for that, so I sat happily in my car, reading Patton Oswalt’s Twitter feed on my phone, until Avila whistled and waved me over. I sighed, exited the New Yorker, and approached, adjusting my Oasis Limo Services ball cap to hide the unsightly bald patch and stitches on the top of my head.
“Who’s this, now?” the cop asked.
“My driver,” Avila said.
“Your what?”
The lanyard he wore around his neck identified him as Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Detective Willeniec, A.
“His driver!” I bellowed, as though Willeniec, A., was deaf.
(Way to go, Skellig! First thing, let’s create an adversary out of law enforcement!)
“You drive him?”
By which he meant, Shouldn’t he be driving you?
“That’s what driver means. The one who drives. I am the driver. I think of it more as an avocation than a vocation, if you get my drift.”
“What’s your name?”
“My driver listed in your warrant?” Avila asked.
“Shush, now. I’m talking to your status symbol here,” Willeniec, A., said, turning his back on Avila.
Maybe being a mansion-owning skateboard rocker had allowed Avila to forget what kind of world still exists for darker-hued people beyond the walls of the faux-Hawaiian protectorate over which he currently reigned. Willeniec, A., must have been a harsh reminder, because Avila blinked in surprise before adopting his best poker face.
Willeniec snapped his fingers at me. Asshole move.
“Identification.”
Willeniec, A., struck me as one of those bitter guys who runs marathons to compensate for the fact that he’s going bald, maybe suffers pecker problems, and is not destined to rise any higher in his chosen career. Angry. Tough. A bully. Manhood issues. Woman problems.
I handed over my driver’s license.
Willeniec flipped to page two in his brand-new notebook. He licked his pen and took his time copying my name and details, his entire attitude and body language indicating, I can hold you here all day as long as I keep scribbling in my little book.
Avila decided to confide in me.
“Man’s looking for barrels.”
“Makes sense.”
“Makes sense how?”
“I read on Breitbart that barrels are behind a new crime wave. Prostitution, drugs, murder for hire, terrorism. Barrels are taking over the underworld.”
“You got a very irritating demeanor for a driver,” Willeniec said without looking up. “When I enter your name into the system, am I going to find any warrants, unpaid parking tickets, summonses, anything like that?”
I’d like to take a moment to share with you one of my experience-honed theories of life. To wit: AFEO. Which is an acronym for Assholes Find Each Other. By which I mean, well, exactly that. Assholes are drawn to each other like models and musicians or feet and stink. When two assholes meet, it usually gets strangulatory.
AFEO manifests as road rage, bar fights, parking lot conflicts, disturbing the peace, aggravated assault. Murder. When two deplorable human beings come together, like phosphorus and water, they are certain to combust upon each other.
The lanyard noted that Sheriff’s Detective Willeniec, A., worked way the hell on the other side of Los Angeles County, down in Whittier. Malibu / Lost Hills is the local sheriff’s station that serves Calabasas.
Willieniec, A., was a long way from home.
“Are you drunk, on drugs, or otherwise impaired, Mr. Skellig?”
“Not currently. You here all by yourself, Detective Willeniec?”
Willeniec shot me a filthy look: he didn’t like me saying his name out loud, even with due respect to his rank and profession.
“Why? You think I need backup?”
Strike two for Michael Skellig. We stood in awkward silence long enough for me to notice that Avila’s hand was wrapped in gauze.
Like he’d barked his knuckles punching somebody.
“Barrels!” Avila said to me again, like the warrant read unicorns, probably thinking how all white people are crazy. “The fuck?”
A woman stepped out on one of the balconies: African American, early twenties, dressed in flowy white, about as beautiful as beauty comes.
“Warrant says he can search my house and all the outbuildings.”
“That include Gilligan’s Island?” I asked.
“What’s that?” Avila asked, which served me right, making a TV reference to a guy his age. I pointed at the desert island paradise in the pond.
“That’s Nina’s island,” Avila said, waving his hand toward the beautiful woman on the balcony. “Don’t know about no Gilligan.”
“He find any barrels?” I asked Avila, giving Willeniec, A., a taste of his own medicine: talking like he wasn’t there.
“Fuck no,” Avila said. “Why’d I have barrels?”
“Back in the day, mobsters used to stuff guys in barrels,” I said. “Top it off with concrete, weld the lid on, drop ’em in the river.”
“Mobsters!” Avila said, disgusted. “Yeah. That’s me.”
The beautiful young woman on the balcony, Nina, laughed like a cool breeze. No wonder Avila built her a whole private island paradise.
Willeniec stopped writing in his notebook and handed back my license.
“You should take that warrant,” I told Avila, indicating the envelope sticking out of Willeniec’s suit pocket.
“Why I want that shit?”
“Because that shit is your shit,” I said.
Avila jumped at the chance to go alpha and extended his hand. Willeniec ignored him.
“You got a lawyer?” I asked Avila.
“Chrissakes,” Willeniec said, disgusted, like I was betraying the Aryan Brotherhood of White Assholes.
“I got twenty lawyers.” Avila indicated his estate and holdings dramatically with his bandaged hand. “They just didn’t get here yet.”
“I’m not required to wait for your lawyer. Anyways, all twenty of your lawyers will tell you I have the right to search the house and the outbuildings,” Willeniec said.
“Which you did and which you found nothing!”
“This warrant also lists a number of other addresses I have the right to search, including your storage unit. That’s where I’m heading now.”
“Ain’t no barrels there neither.”
I snatched the warrant from Willeniec’s pocket, startling him.
“Legally, Mr. Avila is entitled to a copy of the warrant.”
Willeniec nodded and smiled before he turned and headed toward his car. He did everything but pretend his finger was a gun and shoot me in the heart.
I handed Avila the warrant, and the two of us watched Willeniec drive off in his ghost car.
Avila spat, visibly calmed himself down, and asked, “What do I call you?”
“What do you want me to call you?”
“Mr. Avila.”
“Call me Skellig. I’ll add the ‘Mister’ in my head.”
“You should go on over to the storage unit, Biz,” Nina said from the balcony. “Make sure Deputy Dog don’t plant nothing. Take your driver there for a white witness.”
Nina had noticed me! Not only that but she caught my eye, which was thrilling.
“He says call him Mickey,” Avila said, looking at me sideways, seeing if it pissed me off.
“Why’m I gonna call your driver any damn thing?” she asked, disappearing back into the house.
Avila jerked his chin at my beautiful vintage 1954 New Yorker limousine. “The fuck is that?”
“She’s a classic,” I said. “A nineteen fif—”
“We’ll take my Navigator,” he said. “It’s got comfort. Classic is just another way to say old and broke down. Next time, you bring that Mercedes.”
Avila had me dead to rights. Proof positive that being kind of a dick doesn’t make you a total fool.
I set the address of Avila’s storage unit into the Navigator’s GPS. Avila sat himself in the backseat, passenger side, staring out the window and muttering complaints into his smartphone to what I guessed were lawyers, telling the same story two or three times, saying he was a victim of racist cop harassment.
I heard Avila suggest that some jealous rivals might be sending in anonymous tips that he was keeping guns or drugs or dead bodies in barrels, flicking his eyes up at me on that last.
“If they suspected dead bodies, they’d have sent SWAT,” I said when Avila got off the phone, “not one lousy sheriff’s detective.”
“You a lawyer?”
“No.”
“Then you stay outta lawyering and I’ll tell my lawyers to stay outta driving.”
“You blackmail your lawyers into working for you?”
“What?”
“Hippocrates would call you a mix of yellow bile and blood, which gives you a choleric-sanguine temperament.”
“What’s that? French?”
“You like to dominate others; you enjoy playing and winning games; you want people to admire you.”
“You an astrologist?”
“No.”
“Then stay out of astrologizing and I’ll tell my astrologist to stay out of driving.”
I ignored the GPS lady’s voice, skipped the 101 highway on-ramp, and dropped south to the old Mulholland Highway and headed west again. If you squint your eyes there, you can pretend you’re in the hills above the San Fernando Valley of the 1960s, smelling of orange trees, winding along between eucalyptus groves, steep pastures dotted by horses, a few private roads and driveways lined by palm trees, weekend sanctuaries for the rich and famous wannabe ranchers, or at least those who hadn’t yet graduated to vineyards farther north in the Santa Ynez Valley.
I jigged right on Las Virgenes Canyon, through some more open grassland to the Stone Creek subdivision, mostly condos, left on Agoura Road at the McDonald’s (man, those fries smell good), through the entrance to Virgenes Self Storage, set up like a bunch of small adobe suburban garages with tile roofing and (God help us) fake chimneys.
“You take the scenic route hoping I’d fire you?” Avila asked, laughing. “Teach me my lesson?”
I had to hand it to Avila; when he laughed you felt an authentic urge to join in. That’s charisma.
Avila let himself out of the Navigator and slouched over toward where Willeniec stood in front of a unit, looking for a handle, the blank door defying him. I sat back in the Navigator’s air-conditioned comfort until ten steps later Avila turned around and gave me a look like I was eight years old: Come on!
I sighed and exited into Valley heat blasting up at me in tarry waves from the black asphalt. I felt it through the soles of my shoes. My stitches throbbed.
“You can open it or I’ll get the manager to open it. Your choice.”
Avila eye-fucked Willeniec, then entered seven digits into his phone. The garage door rolled up on tracks. There weren’t any corpse-stuffed barrels in the storage unit, but there were eight life-size statues. Angels. I should say the statues were human life–size given my vague understanding that angels are supposed to be taller than human beings. I laughed at the sight of those angels staring out at us from the shadowed storage unit like we’d caught them grabbing a smoke outside the pearly gates.
“The fuck?” said Willeniec.
“They were around the pool,” Avila said. “Nina hates ’em but said don’t throw out angels for
bad luck.”
I wondered if Nina knew about all of Avila’s other women. Groupies, escorts, models, semiprofessionals. What was their deal? Maybe, being Avila’s girlfriend and not his wife, Nina felt she had no leverage, had to look the other way, clear off the angels and build herself an island until the day he decided to marry her.
Willeniec circulated among the angels, frustration written on his vindictive marathoner’s face. The floor upon which the angels stood was dusty, but the area where they weren’t had been swept clean recently, marked only by a series of crescent-shaped scuffs. On the tracks for the garage door, I noticed a ding, and then, slightly lower, a smear of blood and skin.
I looked at the gauze on Avila’s knuckles.
Uh-huh.
Willeniec didn’t notice any of that; he was rapping on the angels with his knuckles (their bellies, their faces, the bases, their smooth, white wings), getting nothing but a solid tock-tock.
“That everything?” Avila asked.
“I’ll find them,” Willeniec said, pushing his finger, not into Bismarck Avila’s chest, but into mine. Whatever Willeniec thought I was to Avila, it wasn’t a mere driver.
In order to truly ensure that I fucked myself all the way to Baja and back, I handed Willeniec, A., my business card.
“Oasis is a full-service limo company,” I said, “providing personalized group shuttle service to and from LAX, Bob Hope, and Long Beach Airports, wine country, Santa Barbara, Palm Springs, Palm Desert, San Diego, Los Olivos, Montecito, Ojai, and Vegas. Discretion guaranteed.”
I hit discretion hard in a way that suggested he had no idea how full-service and discreet. I still don’t know why I doubled down like that and have no choice but to acknowledge my own aforementioned AFEO rule and the fact that it takes two to tango.
Willeniec took the card.