The Nice Guys

by Charles Ardai

  Healy burst out of the woods. “Holly?” He saw her then, saw the man on the ground, saw the man’s tangled, broken limbs, heard Holly crying.

  “A car hit him,” Holly called, her voice ragged. “We need an ambulance!”

  Healy jogged to her side. “Go see if you can flag somebody down.” He looked at the gunman, who was looking back up at him. The man’s eyes were open. Healy watched him blink, watched him breathe. “He’s in a bad way.”

  Holly stared, the way a kid might stare at roadkill, which of course was exactly what this was. She was horrified, fascinated, repelled. “Go,” he said.

  She took off down the road.

  Healy waited till she was out of sight beyond the curve, then crouched beside the fallen man.

  A wheezing breath. “You…”

  “Yeah, me.”

  The gunman somehow managed to laugh. He coughed, and the spittle that flew from his mouth was flecked with red. “You ever,” the man said, his voice barely more than a whisper, “hear of John-Boy?”

  Healy shook his head, no.

  “By now…he’s heard of you.” The man’s eyes held his, pain warring with satisfaction in them. “They’re flying him in,” he wheezed. “Now he’s going to kill that private cop, and his whole fucking family.” Another laugh shook the man’s broken chest. “And then he’s going to come for you. You ain’t got long to live.”

  “Well, buddy,” Healy said, folding a handkerchief he’d taken from his jacket pocket, “none of us do.”

  He reached down with the handkerchief in his hand, took hold of the man’s neck.

  Now, Jackson Healy’s grip might not have won him an arm-wrestling contest with this boy’s partner, up by the hot tub, but he’d spent summers picking avocados, and oranges, and lemons, and in all the years since he hadn’t exactly become soft. And a man’s trachea isn’t much stronger than an avocado. It doesn’t take all that much force to collapse it, no, not even with a lovely layer of blue paint covering it.

  Healy squeezed and wrenched and watched the light go out of the man’s eyes.

  * * *

  Holly ran back, arms and legs flying. You haven’t seen anyone out of breath until you’ve seen a thirteen-year-old girl, heartbroken and terrified, gasping in the middle of a highway in the middle of the night. “Healy!” she shouted, when she’d gulped enough air in her to manage it. “There’s no one here!”

  Then her gaze fell to the man on the macadam, saw that he wasn’t moving anymore.

  Healy said, “He didn’t make it.”

  Holly stared at him, a question in her young eyes, which maybe didn’t look quite so young anymore.

  She didn’t ask it.

  Behind her, the busted Camaro raced around the curve and skidded to a halt. March climbed out of it and Holly ran to him, fell into his arms, was enveloped in a hug. She was still a little girl, she was; maybe not for much longer, but right now, that’s exactly what she was.

  “Are you okay?” March asked.

  “Yeah.”

  Over his daughter’s shoulder, March exchanged a glance with Healy. In the air they both heard sirens. They were far away. They were getting closer.

  “And that’ll be the cops,” Healy said.

  26.

  The red-and-blue flashers were still going, casting their glow over the scene, but the sirens thankfully had been silenced. The cops at work were pretty much silent as well, bagging the body, wheeling it in through the rear doors of the ambulance, cleaning the blood off the pavement as best they could once their photographer and the forensics guys had gotten what they needed. Everyone kept their heads down. Nobody recognized March. He’d been out too long at this point.

  The lowly patrolman who’d been assigned to babysitting duty looked apologetic, but he had his instructions.

  “Look,” March said, lighting his last Camel, “you already got our statements, can I go see my daughter now?”

  “Sir, I was told to keep you here so I’m keeping you here. Just following orders.”

  March was losing patience. “You know who else was just following orders? Hitler.”

  Healy looked at him, almost said something, then decided it wasn’t worth it.

  March threw up his hands, kicked at the ground with one toe. You had to show some backbone at times like this, not just stand there and take it. He didn’t understand how Healy could look so relaxed, so calm, like a stubbled Buddha, like there was nothing he’d rather be doing than waiting to be questioned again. Some tough guy.

  March aimed a finger at the cop and was about to let loose with a proper tirade when the most beautiful woman he’d seen all night walked briskly over. She was wearing a tailored yellow blazer over a cream blouse and delicious café au lait skin. She also wore a clipped, professional expression. She nodded to the cop: “Officer.” Then she turned to Healy and March. He let his finger drop.

  “You’re Mr. March, I think? And you are…” She gave Healy a closer look, and a smile cracked through her professional veneer. “Hey, I know you. You’re the, uh, guy, the diner guy, right? From last year?”

  March gave a double take, stared from the woman to Healy and back again. You might generously have described Healy’s expression as a smile, but March knew a wince when he saw one.

  “Yeah,” Healy said, less Buddha-like now. He seemed embarrassed about the whole thing. But what was the whole thing?

  The woman nodded. “My name is Tally. If you’ll follow me, my boss would like a word.” She extended one arm toward an unmarked car idling by the side of the road. Tinted windows, government issue. “Please.”

  They followed her.

  March said, sidelong to Healy: “I’m sorry, the ‘diner guy’?”

  “I’ll tell you later,” Healy said. March kept staring at him. “Don’t worry about it.”

  They reached the car. Tally knocked on the rear door, and the tinted window rolled down. Behind it, sitting in the back seat, was a blonde woman, middle-aged but still pretty damn sexy, dressed in a severe ecru business suit that only made her sexier. At the moment she looked tense, like she had things on her mind other than boning a one-armed private investigator, so March kept his private thoughts to himself, put on a serious expression of his own, or the nearest thing he had.

  The woman spoke stiffly, through narrowed lips, as though the necessity for even one sentence of small talk pained her. “How do you do?”

  March glanced around at the scene. “About this good, most of the time.”

  “My name is Judith Kuttner,” the woman said. “I work for the Department of Justice.”

  She let that sink in for a beat, and it sank, but it didn’t hit bottom. So? March hadn’t figured she was from the Department of Agriculture. He shrugged. “Okay, well, that explains…basically nothing.”

  The woman’s eyes slid shut for a moment, and March thought she seemed to be struggling to maintain her composure. She apparently won the struggle, since when she opened them again, the no-nonsense look was back.

  “I’m Amelia’s mother,” she said.

  WORD OF THE DAY

  SNAFU sna-fu, noun:

  A state of confusion or chaos characterized by errors and problems; military acronym, originating 1941:

  Situation Normal All Fouled [alt.: Fucked] Up.

  27.

  In the outer office, Tally was entertaining Holly with card tricks, or trying to. Holly wasn’t your average thirteen-year-old and Tally’s attempts were landing on barren soil.

  “Holly? Are you still frowning? What’s in my hand?” She made a five of clubs appear out of thin air. “Ah?”

  Holly said, “I know how you do that.”

  She had her work cut out for her, March knew. But then so did her boss, if she was going to bring them up to speed on a case that just got murkier and more confusing the more they looked at it.

  Kuttner was sitting behind an impressively large wooden desk in her inner office, with an American flag standing beside it and leather-b
ound volumes of legal rulings or something like that arranged on a wooden bookshelf against the back wall. All of which added up to her being someone pretty high up in the organization. They didn’t issue desks and flags like that to just anyone.

  “First of all, I want to say thank you,” Kuttner began, her voice still showing a good deal of emotional strain, but not quite as frosty as it had been at the crime scene. “We’ve been watching all the interviews, and it sounds like you might have saved my daughter’s life.”

  “That was mostly Holly,” Healy said. “His daughter.”

  March shrugged. “It’s genetics.”

  Seeming to feel she had to make a gesture of some sort, Kuttner pointed to a glass bowl on the corner of her desk. “Would you like a mint?”

  March glanced at Healy, saw the man nod, and grabbed a sloppy handful.

  And that was all in the way of social niceties this woman was capable of. She got down to business. “I need your help. But the situation is very serious, very delicate. I need to know if I can trust you.”

  Healy said, “I’m kind of getting the idea that, you know, you might not have much choice.”

  “Well, all the same, I need to know. My job can be very public sometimes. My office’s role in certain high-profile cases means I have to be careful about who I associate with.”

  “Hey,” Healy said, snapping his fingers, “that’s where I know you from! The TV. You’re prosecuting that, that car company thing.”

  Kuttner nodded, looking only slightly more comfortable than Healy had when Tally had remembered him from the diner. “The lawsuit for the catalytic converter, yes. Litigating against the auto companies to address air pollution. That’s half my day. The other half I spend on pornography.”

  March lit up. He didn’t know fuck-all about catalytic whatevers, but this was in his wheelhouse. “Oh yeah? What kind? Like which films? What’s your favorite?”

  Healy shook his head, muttered to him, “No, no—anti, um,” he laughed uncomfortably, glancing in Kuttner’s direction, where she sat sporting a humorless expression, “anti porn.”

  “Right,” March said. He nodded and tried to look like that’s what he’d meant all along.

  “Like a crusader,” Healy said.

  March nodded some more. “Should I be writing this down?”

  Healy said, “Yeah, write it down.” March grabbed a pen from a set on the desk, found a scrap of paper.

  “The Vegas Mob is trying to spread its porn operation to Hollywood Boulevard,” Kuttner said, and March made a noise with his tongue that he hoped sounded disapproving. “And I’m doing everything I can to stop it.”

  “Thank you,” March said, nodding earnestly. His pen moved, and he mouthed the words as he wrote them: “Porn…is…bad…”

  Healy jumped in. “Wait, something I don’t understand. Your daughter, she did a film with Sid Shattuck—”

  “She didn’t do a film, Mr. Healy, she wrote and co-produced a film, and her friend directed it. That’s not quite the same thing.”

  “As what, fucking on camera? No, I suppose it isn’t. All the same,” Healy said, throwing Kuttner’s words back at her, “if her mom’s this anti-porn crusader…I just wonder, why would she do that, when she knows that’s just gonna be extremely professionally embarrassing to you?”

  Kuttner sighed. “Because she wanted it to. She wanted to embarrass me. She lashes out. We have a difficult relationship.”

  March nodded, sympathetically this time. His arsenal of nods was getting a real workout tonight: earnest, sympathetic. “Mothers and daughters, it’s tough.”

  Kuttner just stared at him.

  “All right,” Healy prompted, “so there’s this film out there.”

  “No,” Kuttner said, “there’s no film anymore. There was a fire. This friend of Amelia’s I mentioned—”

  “Dean,” Healy said, and Kuttner looked surprised. “Yeah,” Healy explained, “we went to his house—well, what’s left of his house.”

  “He was apparently editing the film when the fire started,” she said. “All the footage burned. Everything.”

  “Yeah,” Healy said. “And Dean with it.”

  “Mrs. Kuttner?” March leaned toward her. “Why do you think everyone involved with this film is dying?”

  “I have no idea, Mr. March. I wish I did. I only know that Amelia’s in danger.”

  “Why don’t you put her in protective custody?” Healy asked. “I mean, after tonight she’s probably very scared, she might want to be at home…”

  “She doesn’t trust me,” Kuttner said. A painful admission, apparently. “She thinks of me as the government, and she doesn’t trust the government. She thinks I’m behind all of this. Somewhere she’s out there, and she won’t call home because she thinks her mother is going to have her killed.” Jesus, was she tearing up? This tough broad?

  Healy dug his handkerchief out of his jacket pocket. “Here, want to use that?” They all looked at it, the blood-stains glaring under the office fluorescents.

  “No, thank you.” Kuttner reached into her desk drawer and took out a checkbook. She opened it on her lap, uncapped a pen. “I want to hire you both. Please: find her. Protect her.”

  March sat back in his chair. Now they were getting somewhere, and it was somewhere he liked. “Okay,” he said, “you can hire us, but we’re not cheap. This is very intensive work, and for something like this I’d say…”

  Kuttner had already started to write out the check.

  “…we couldn’t do it for less than five thousand dollars,” March said.

  Her pen hung above the checkbook.

  He nodded. Determinedly.

  She looked down into her lap, at what she’d already written there, out of sight of the detectives. To: March Investigations, Amount: Ten Thous

  “Okay,” she said. She ripped out the check, tore it in half and then in half again, started writing out another.

  March threw a wink in Healy’s direction. Stick with me, professor. I can teach you a lesson or two myself.

  When it was dry, Kuttner handed over the five-thousand-dollar check. March pocketed it, then looked back over his shoulder at the outer office. Holly was sitting quietly, Tally across from her, smiling broadly. God, that smile.

  March reached toward a business card holder on Kuttner’s desk, picked out one of her cards. “Can I take this?”

  “Fine,” Kuttner said. She sounded eager to have them out of her office.

  “Does, uh, Tally have one?” March asked, casually. Or anyway he’d meant it to sound casual. “Should we have hers as well? Just in case you’re not, uh, around? You know, if we need to get in touch with somebody…?”

  Kuttner’s glare could’ve cut glass.

  “That’s okay,” March said, “I’ll just ask her.”

  “Mrs. Kuttner,” Healy said, “one thing we could use, actually, is a photo of your daughter. I see you have one there—” He nodded toward a metal frame with a snapshot of Amelia.

  Kuttner snatched it up, handed it over.

  “Just find her, Mr. Healy.”

  28.

  Holly was asleep now. It seemed like all of L.A. was, except for Holland March and Jackson Healy. March was sitting on the diving board of the swimming pool behind his house, a bottle of whiskey beside him, staring down into the concrete depths of the pool, which he’d never bothered to fill. Not with water, anyway. There was a nice layer of cigarette butts down there, and it was growing. Los Angeles, home of the world’s biggest ashtray.

  Fuck it, it was a rental. They were only here until they could rebuild the old place. He’d tried explaining this to Healy when the guy started riding his ass for all the butts in the pool. “My house burned down,” he said. “Just like that place we drove to. Whoof. Like Chet said. It actually sounded like that when it happened. Whoof.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Yeah.” March took another pull of the whiskey. Wiped the neck of the bottle, held it out to Healy, but the
bastard turned it down again.

  “What the hell? Do I have bad breath or something?”

  “Nah,” Healy said, “I just have this allergy to alcohol.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, I break out in handcuffs.”

  “Funny,” March said, but he put the bottle back down, didn’t push it. It’s not like he’d never felt the impulse to quit himself. He’d never given in to it, but it’s not like he’d never had the impulse.

  “Hey,” Healy said, “you know, something’s actually bugging me. Kuttner’s prosecuting this car case, right? And the two guys who were coming after Amelia, they were from around Detroit. The guy up at the hot tub told me he’d go back to Michigan. And the dead guy? I took a look in his wallet before Holly came back. His name was Gilbert Dufresne, from Livonia, Michigan.”

  “So?”

  “So the car companies would certainly have a reason to want to see Kuttner brought down. They’d love to get their hands on that film, use it to blackmail her.”

  “Okay.”

  “But what I don’t get is why they’d want Amelia dead. You’d think they’d love her, if she was out to embarrass her mother. Enemy of my enemy, right?”

  “Sure,” March said. He hadn’t been listening.

  “Plus,” Healy said, “I found this in Shattuck’s office.” He took the cow-shaped slip of paper out of his pocket. It was crumpled and water-stained from his adventure at the hot tub, but it was still readable:

  28-10 Burbank Apt

  West, Flt D, 10:30pm

  March leaned forward precariously to peer at it. “What is that, a pig?”

  “No,” Healy said, “it’s a pink cow.”

  “Oh, a cow.”

  “When Amelia gave me your address,” Healy said, “she gave it to me on a piece of paper like this, handwriting like that. So I’m thinking Amelia wrote that too, and that might mean she was planning to fly somewhere. Flight D, Burbank Airport.”