The Nice Guys

by Charles Ardai

  “Yeah,” Amelia said, turning over and burying her face in the pillow again, “my mother.”

  Healy bent down, hands on his knees, face close to hers. “Would you mind starting from the top…?”

  She rolled over again, the other way. “Why? Doesn’t matter!” She hated how whiny her voice sounded. But it didn’t matter, that was the truth. These two clowns couldn’t protect her, whether they knew the whole story or not. Her mother would grind them up and make sausages out of them. That’s what guys like this were: sausage meat. Why’d she ever thought she could rely on Healy to be anything more?

  “I’m sorry, ‘doesn’t matter’? You just shot at us, I think it matters.” March was pissed. Boo-hoo.

  But, eh, it was clear they weren’t going to leave her alone till she told them something. And right now, with her head hurting and her knee hurting and, god, everything hurting, it was easier to just tell them the truth than to make something up.

  “Okay, okay,” she said. “I made a film. I made a film with Dean, my boyfriend.” She sat up halfway, pulled her dress down when she caught March staring, the fucking pervert. “The idea was that we were going to, you know, like, make this experimental film? Like, an artistic film.”

  “Porno film?” March said, and she sat up the rest of the way.

  “It’s not a porno!” God! She wanted to scream. But she held it in. “Do you even know who my mother is?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Healy said. “We do. We’ve, we’ve actually met your mother, and—”

  “What’d she tell you? That I’m crazy? That I’m just ‘lashing out’…?”

  “Something like that,” Healy acknowledged. “She might have mentioned—”

  Amelia flopped back down on the pillows. “Yeah, well? My mother is a criminal. She’s one of Them.”

  “Who’s ‘Them’?” March asked. “What’s ‘Them’?”

  “One of the insiders,” Amelia said, her voice shaking with frustration. Why was it so hard for people to see the truth and understand it? They didn’t want to. That’s what it boiled down to, they led comfortable bourgeois lives and they just didn’t want to. “One of the capitalist… corporate…suppressors! You know they want us dead, man. We’re just in their crosshairs, you know. We’re just pawns!”

  “Gosh,” said one of the little girls at the foot of the bed, the brown-haired one. She looked like maybe she was ready to be enlightened. The blonde was looking at her more cynically, with her arms crossed, like a little William F. Buckley, Jr.

  Amelia threw herself back petulantly, expecting a pillow behind her, but her head clonked painfully against the wall. “Ow,” she said.

  “Hey,” March said, and he whistled, like the pig he was, and the girls marched out of the bedroom. Like the pawns they were.

  March resumed questioning her, with less patience in his voice this time. “What does this have to do with the birds?”

  And Healy chimed in: “Yeah.”

  “My mom’s supposed to be working for the Justice Department, right?”

  “Sure,” Healy said, “she’s prosecuting the catalytic converter case.”

  “Yeah, only she’s not. She’s not prosecuting it. The automakers, she’s gonna let them walk.”

  “But they have the evidence,” March said.

  “Yes they have evidence!” Amelia shouted. “They have memos proving that Detroit conspired to suppress the converter, proving they would rather poison our air than spend a little bit of money. But my mom, she’s going to say that’s not enough, she’s going to lie, because she’s on the take. Right? Money again, Mammon, that’s her god, that, that…fascist…crony…Bogart…”

  “Okay, okay,” Healy said, patting the air, “just…just back up a little bit.”

  She lay down again. Carefully. Her head couldn’t take another whack.

  Healy looked like he was struggling for words. “Why not just go straight to the police?” he asked finally.

  Amelia couldn’t help laughing. These guys were so blind. “She is the police! She’s the head of the Justice Department!”

  She saw March’s eyes open wider at that.

  “You got a point,” Healy said.

  “Okay,” March said, “or the newspapers…?”

  “They all work together,” Amelia said. “God! You been living under a rock?”

  “Okay,” Healy said. “So then your solution was…you make a porn film?”

  “It’s not a porno!” Top of her lungs, to get the message across once and for all.

  “You know, I have neighbors,” March said.

  “I made a statement,” Amelia said. “And yeah, yeah, my statement contained nudity—art—”

  “Porno nudity,” March said.

  “That’s just the commercial element, okay?” she spat back. “Okay? Sid said we had to have that. And the reality was, we were getting our message out there. And, and, it was all in the film: names, and dates, and everything—everything! Everything my mom was doing. And once it was out there, once it was in theaters, there was no way that they could suppress it. There was no way that they could cover it up.”

  “So let me get this straight,” March said. “You made a porno film where the point was the plot?”

  She sighed. She just wasn’t getting through. “What’s your hangup, man?”

  “So, it’s not the sex,” Healy said, “it’s what’s in the story. That’s why the film’s so important to them. They don’t want to use it to embarrass your mom, they want it out of circulation to keep it from embarrassing them. Or worse.”

  All right. At least one of them was getting it.

  “My mom found out,” Amelia said. “She killed Dean and destroyed the film.”

  “Your mom killed Dean?” Healy didn’t sound like he quite believed this. Maybe he wasn’t getting it after all. The older generation could be so dense! Even when they wanted to help. Their brains were like, fixed. Set. Like concrete.

  “Of course,” Amelia said. “She killed Misty, too.”

  “And Sid Shattuck…?” This came from the blonde girl, who was standing in the doorway, her brown-haired friend behind her looking on curiously. The blonde’s arms were still crossed, but she sounded less skeptical than her, her parents here.

  “Yeah,” Amelia said. “Sid, too.”

  “Okay, so it’s like Jack the Ripper, and then your mom,” March said. “Basically.”

  The blonde girl had come back into the room. “So what are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know.” Amelia rolled over, plumped up the pillow under her head. “I’m just really tired, you know?” And she was. God. So tired.

  “All right, okay,” Healy said, standing up, “So, you… we’re just gonna talk about it, think on it, and you get some rest.” He covered her up a bit with her dress, which had slid off her thigh. Such a dad.

  “Yeah,” March said, “just get some rest.”

  34.

  They looked in through the open doorway. Amelia seemed to be sleeping again.

  “What do you think?” Healy asked, keeping his voice low.

  “I like her,” Holly said.

  “I like her dress,” Jessica said.

  “It’s a nice dress,” March agreed. Then he turned to Healy. “But she’s a loon. According to her, her mother is single-handedly going to wipe out all of Western society.” There was that expression again, single-handedly. You couldn’t get away from it.

  “Yeah, however,” Healy said, “there are people trying to kill her, right? Like John-Boy.”

  “Who’s John-Boy?” Holly wanted to know.

  “He’s on The Waltons,” Jessica informed her. It was one of the only shows Jessica’s parents let her watch, probably out of fear that she might turn out like her sister otherwise.

  “No,” Healy said, “different John-Boy.”

  “Well, we think,” said March.

  “We think, yeah. Pretty sure.”

  “You can’t be sure, though,” March said.
The phone rang, and he ran to get it. Wouldn’t want to wake up the sleeping loony bird. Let her get her loony-bird rest.

  He grabbed the phone on the second ring.

  “Mr. March?” The voice was halfway familiar. Then it was all the way familiar, and March smiled—it was Tally. The night was looking up. But…why would she be calling? “I just got a call from Judith. She didn’t explain herself, just said she needed one hundred thousand dollars in cash.”

  “A hundred thousand dollars? Why?”

  “I don’t know,” Tally said. “I think she’s involved in something…shady, maybe?”

  “Well, her daughter certainly seems to think so.”

  “What, Amelia? You found Amelia?”

  “Yes! She fell on our car! We were just talking, and she fell on our car. Anyway, she’s here, you should come over…”

  “She okay? I’ll, I’ll send the family doctor,” Tally said. She sounded so pleased, so relieved. But there was still an edge to her voice. “Mr. March—”

  “Holland, please.”

  “—I’ve got a bad feeling about this. Judith’s call, I mean. I don’t know what’s going on. Would you…would you be willing to carry the money for me?”

  * * *

  “I wish I knew who to believe on this one,” Healy was saying, and March thought the answer to that was pretty obvious. You believed the beautiful lady who was about to trust you with one hundred thousand dollars. They were walking along the concrete stretch from the street to Kuttner’s office building, having left March’s convertible by the curb.

  “Well, the kid’s a write-off, I’ll tell you that much,” March opined. He lifted a telephone handset hanging beside the front door and pressed the intercom button. “We’re downstairs.”

  “Maybe they’re both telling the truth,” Healy said.

  March hung up the phone. “She’s coming down.” He turned to Healy, whose last cryptic comment had just sunk in. “What you do mean, they’re both telling the truth? What does that mean?”

  Healy thought a bit. “I got a friend, right? Secret Service. Worked the Nixon detail. You know, this is after they threw him out of office?”

  March nodded. It looked like this could be a long story. He fished a hip flask out of his pocket, took a slug. Offered one to Healy, but come on, of course not.

  “Anyway, Nixon’s driving around one day, around San Clemente, just him and a few agents…”

  “Yeah,” March said, brushing a finger across his teeth and straightening his tie. Tally was a classy lady. Needed to make a good impression.

  “And they come across this car accident, right? This guy pinned under a car.” Healy paused like he was remembering it, this scene he never saw. “Anyway. Nixon gets out, runs over to check on the guy. You know, leans down. And Nixon says to him, ‘You’re gonna be okay, son. You’re gonna be all right.’ ”

  Healy looked up at March, who’d planted a new cigarette between his lips. “And right then…the guy dies.”

  He seemed to be waiting for March to say something.

  “I don’t get it,” March said, lighting his Camel.

  “Think about it from that guy’s point of view,” Healy said, “okay? The guy who died. He’s lying there on the ground, staring up at the sky, near death, and then former president Richard Nixon appears before him and tells him he’s gonna be fine. Now, did he think that’s normal? Right? That, before they die, everybody sees Nixon?”

  “You’re expecting an angel and you get Nixon,” March said.

  “Exactly. Right.”

  “Okay,” March said.

  “The same situation,” Healy said, “just a vastly different point of view.”

  “So, there’s two ways to look at something,” March said. Did Healy not notice the exasperation in his voice? Because it was there.

  “Yeah,” Healy said.

  “That’s the point of the story?”

  “Yeah,” Healy said.

  “Just say that,” March said.

  “What?”

  “Well, you just lead me on this epic fucking journey with this story, and ten minutes later the point is that there’s two ways to look at something, just…you can just say that.”

  Healy stared at him. “You didn’t like that story?”

  It was The Stare. And March was not currently drunk, hence capable of fear. Healy wouldn’t break his other arm over something like this, would he?

  March took a long drag on his cigarette.

  “That would be awful,” he said, and let Healy think he meant the business about Nixon.

  “Wouldn’t it, right?”

  “Yeah,” March said.

  At that moment Tally came out through the front door. She was wearing a white blazer over an orange shirt and all March could think, looking at it, was that it looked like a sunset over a white sand beach. Could he tell her that or would that just seem weird? At least unprofessional. Probably both, unprofessional and weird. But man, this chick was something else.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Oh, thank god,” Tally said. She came over carrying a small metal suitcase. “One hundred thousand dollars. Packed it myself.”

  She looked at the two of them, seemed undecided for a second, then handed over the suitcase and a slip of paper with an address on it—to Healy. Huh. Well, Healy was bigger. Good for carrying things. And maybe she wanted March’s hands free for, like, a handshake, or a hug or something.

  Wait, she was saying something. “—not common that you find such nice people in the world. Thank you.” She almost seemed to be tearing up, she was so grateful. Yeah, a hug. But with Healy there…it just felt awkward.

  Healy turned and headed toward the car and March started going with him—but then he turned back, for a private sidebar, as the lawyers called it. “I’m sorry about him,” March said. “He just…wanted to come along, I don’t know why. But—I’ll, I’ll call you.” He made a sign of a telephone with his hand by his ear. “You know, when we make the—the drop.”

  Tally looked…what? He couldn’t put his finger on what that expression meant. He was going to say relieved. Or, like, turned on. Yes, he’d definitely have to call her. Just needed to find her number. But how hard could that be? He was a detective, right?

  “Thank you,” Tally said again, and he could tell she really meant it.

  * * *

  “You nervous at all?” March asked.

  “Me? No.” Healy was sitting beside him, staring calmly ahead as the night unrolled before them. The highway was practically empty. They could’ve been rocketing across the desert, or the surface of the moon. “I’ve got insurance,” Healy told him, and he tugged up his right pants leg to reveal a reinforced leather holster with a handgun tucked away inside it. “This baby right here.”

  “That an ankle gun?”

  “That is an ankle gun, yes.”

  “Pretty sweet,” March said, thinking, I ought to get me one of those.

  “Uh-huh,” Healy said.

  March drove on. He wondered what, exactly, they were driving into. Tally had seemed frightened, and he didn’t think she’d be an easy person to frighten. Was her boss a criminal, like Amelia had said? Would Tally know it if she was? And not even like your garden-variety criminal, taking bribes or something, but an actual honest-to-god murderer, several times over. It was hard to swallow, the head of the Justice Department, having her own daughter’s friends killed. But, you know, so was Kent State—hard to swallow. And so was JFK. And Bobby, and King, and J. Edgar Hoover and Vietnam and Watergate, and the list went on. This was the US of A, not some tin-pot Third-World shithole where the cops and the government secretly rounded up their own citizens and had them shot, but then again, sometimes it fucking was.

  And now he was sounding like Amelia.

  March blinked a few times. It had been a long fucking night. He shook his head, hard, to clear it, but it didn’t work. His eyelids felt like curtains. “I’m falling asleep at the wheel here, man,” he said.
“I’m gonna need you to drive. I’m gonna pull over up here.”

  Healy looked at him like he was the biggest fucking idiot in the world. “You don’t have to pull over,” he said. “Car can drive itself.”

  “What?”

  “Just take your hands off the wheel, man.”

  What the fuck was he talking about? But the man looked so confident, so certain. So calm. Did he know something March didn’t? It wasn’t like he wanted to crash. Hell, he didn’t even have his seat belt on. Okay, then. March lifted his hands off the steering wheel.

  They didn’t crash.

  Not only that, the ride felt smoother and more comfortable than ever. He wasn’t touching the steering wheel, but it was turning all the same, making minor adjustments to the left and right, like an invisible hand was turning it.

  So March lifted his foot off the gas pedal.

  And damned if that didn’t work the same way. It went down on its own, speeding the car up, without him having to do a thing.

  “Hm.” March dropped his hands into his lap. This was pretty great. “I didn’t know it could do that.” He used his free hands to take out a cigarette and light it, all while the car drove itself.

  “Where you been, man?” Healy said. “Every car can do this.”

  “Yeah, March, where the fuck have you been, man?” came a voice from the back seat, accompanied by a loud buzzing noise, and when March turned his head to look, he saw this giant fucking honeybee sitting right behind him, like six feet tall, antennas waving, mandibles clicking, compound eyes gleaming.

  “Idiot,” the bee said. “You didn’t know that?” It raised a cigarette to its own mouth.

  “You fly everywhere,” March said. “You don’t even drive. What do you know?”

  “He’s got a point there, Bumble,” Healy said over his shoulder.

  “Yeah, whatever,” the bee said. “I used to fly all the time, but now the smog is just disgusting, man, this pollution is out of control. All the bees are riding around in cars these days…”

  “Yeah,” Healy said, “you better wake up, man.”