The Nice Guys

by Charles Ardai

  “You okay?” March said.

  “March! Gun! Gun!”

  Give the man credit—he sized the situation up at a glance. Professional killer outside, still firing, partner on the ground, empty gun in his hands, fumbling for a fresh magazine he didn’t even know if he still had. March didn’t hesitate, he threw his handgun in Healy’s direction.

  It flew over Healy’s shoulder and out the shattered window.

  “Fuck!” Healy shouted.

  “Shit!” was March’s opinion.

  And from outside John-Boy chimed in with an opinion of his own, in the form of a fusillade from the Sterling.

  March whipped the cookie jar off the kitchen counter and dropped to the floor beside Healy. He upended it between them, spilling a shitload of assorted random bullets on the floor, along with a tiny snub-nosed revolver, a crazy little thing he’d taken off a hooker years ago. It was, unfortunately, not loaded. Healy grabbed a handful of bullets and tried to jam them into the chambers.

  Then, in the far-off distance, they heard the sounds of sirens.

  Well, all right. Finally. It had only taken a thousand rounds before the LAPD had woken up.

  The machine gun fire ceased. Sticking his head up over the windowsill, Healy saw John-Boy toss the Sterling in his car, slam the trunk shut, and jump behind the wheel. Healy fired twice—all he could, he’d only found two bullets that fit—and both shots hit home, but they only starred the windshield glass. John-Boy didn’t even look perturbed. He just calmly pulled out and drove off, his red taillights vanishing down the road.

  The silence that followed—broken only by the rising and falling wail of the approaching sirens—was blissful.

  “He’s gone,” March said, and he ran for Holly’s bedroom. “He’s gone!”

  Holly was there, and Jessica, awake now and sitting miserably in an armchair, cradling her head in her hands. And Amelia…?

  Where was Amelia?

  Holly pointed toward the bedroom window.

  * * *

  Amelia was in the woods. Still barefoot, frightened as hell, chilly in that little yellow dress, arms wrapped around her own chest for warmth or maybe just reassurance. She stumbled from tree to tree, keeping the gunfire behind her.

  The highway. She’d make for the highway. Someone would stop, someone would have to. And then she’d get away. Lie low. Give a fake name, she’d done it before, she could do it again. She’d been Harriet once, and Francie, and Faith, and oh, god, so many other names. She’d worked off the books packing boxes in a warehouse and cleaning floors in an illegal rehab clinic. She’d hooked, too, but fuck it, who hadn’t. She’d gotten by, was the point. She’d survived. She’d do it again.

  At some point, she realized the gunfire had ended, or maybe she’d just made it far enough that she could no longer hear it. No, it must’ve stopped. That was one thing about gunshots, you could hear them a long, long way off.

  Well, good. Maybe Healy had gotten lucky and taken that prick out. She could hope.

  But even if he had, her mother would send another. And another. Unless she took her down first. Which—

  It was still possible. The bitch didn’t know it, but it was still possible, and more than possible. It was going to happen. Yes, it was. She just had to stay alive long enough and she’d get to enjoy seeing it happen, seeing her mother’s face on the nightly news, seeing Walter fucking Cronkite read the headline over a clip of her mommy being led away in handcuffs. God, that would feel so good.

  Amelia stepped out from between two trees when she heard—finally—a car coming along the road. Not racing or anything, just driving, and that was good because it meant the driver would see her and have time to react and stop. And the car would stop. She was a pretty, young girl in a little yellow dress, bruised and bloody and barefoot, what kind of asshole wouldn’t stop for her?

  She held her arms up, waved them over her head, and the car slowed. She couldn’t see anything beyond the bright, bright headlights, but the point was, the car was stopping. Even if it was a creep, even if it was some asshole who’d make her blow him in return for taking her out of the state, that was okay, she’d do it. Just as long as he got her to safety, right?

  She ran up to the door, and the driver leaned over toward her and cranked down the passenger-side window.

  “Please, I need to get out of here,” she began, and then John-Boy shot her in the chest.

  Her body crumpled to the ground.

  John-Boy smiled and drove off.

  WORD OF THE DAY

  Entropy en-tro-py, noun:

  A state of disorder or degradation, toward which all matter and energy in the universe tends.

  36.

  They were on a bench outside the courthouse, not far from where they’d watched the protest group hold their die-in on the City Hall steps. It was a beautiful day.

  March was scratching under the edge of his cast, not because his arm itched, just fucking because. He was looking down at his hands. Healy, sitting next to him, was staring straight ahead. By Healy’s side was a newspaper, discarded. Amelia’s death hadn’t made the front page. Not with the multiple killings at the Burbank Airport Western to cover—that was national news. Richard “Rocco” Sicorio fell fifteen stories to the ground-floor parking lot, although investigators also reported finding multiple gunshot wounds to his torso, any one of which could have been the cause of death…

  Amelia was on page four.

  Healy had closed the paper and set it face down. He and March had said everything there was to say to each other, two or three times at least, and now they were just sitting there, waiting.

  Perry eventually came out of the building and they got up off the bench to join him.

  Perry was their lawyer.

  “She had her fucking daughter killed, Perry,” March said, “please tell me they’re at least gonna question her.”

  Perry showed what he thought of that idea with a single curl of his lip. “They haven’t, and they’re not going to.”

  “Because…?” Healy said.

  “Because she’s the head of the Justice Department.” Perry wheeled on them both, stopped walking. He had a point to make. “Oh, and by the way? You’re welcome. You’re out, free. On your own recognizance. You get to walk. There should be like a statue of me in your fucking house.”

  March was lighting a cigarette and trying hard not to care. About any of it.

  “I’m sorry, guys,” Perry said. “You’re going to lose this one. All right? Your word against hers, no evidence, you lose.” He shook his head at them both. “You better seriously think about changing your story.”

  * * *

  Holly was standing by the open rear door of a taxi. She gave them a little wave as they came down the steps to her.

  March waved back half-heartedly.

  The ride back to the March homestead was bumper-to-bumper, giving them all plenty of time to think things through.

  In the front seat beside the driver, Holly looked out the windshield and tried to imagine what her mother would’ve said at a time like this. It wasn’t hard. She’d loved dad, loved him more the less he deserved it, loved him when he’d fucked around on her and when he’d stayed out late and come home barely able to stand. She would’ve said, in her beautiful, beautiful, polished and plummy Belvedere accent, “Fuck them, Holl. Fuck them. Stand up to them and tell them they’re fucking wrong.” She was a believer in absolutes. And one of her absolutes was Holland March.

  Holly looked out at the birds winging in a flock through the sky and practiced not crying.

  Healy was looking at the birds, too, and thinking maybe being a private eye wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Strangely—paradoxically, you might even say, if you had a good calendar to tell you what the word meant—people didn’t hate a knee-breaker the way they hated a detective. Breaking someone’s knees, or arm, or jaw, was a good, honest profession, and by and large the people you did it to knew why it was being done, and they accep
ted it. They knew they owed money. They knew Kitten was underage. They knew it, and they took their punishment. But the people a private eye went after—those people fought back, and they fought dirty. Now, maybe that was all the more reason to go into the business of putting them away. Wasn’t it better to stand up to the powerful than to beat down little people who didn’t expect any better? And Healy was prepared to say that, yes, it was. But like that day at the diner, did he have to be the one to do it? Just this once, couldn’t someone else stand up and take the bullet in the arm?

  And March was watching the birds, too. He’d struggled out of his jacket and balled it up under his head and meant to try to sleep some, but sleep just wasn’t coming—all the start-and-stop of L.A. traffic. And with sleep out of the question, he’d started thinking about why he’d gone into this line of work in the first place, not meaning the private work, but when he’d joined the force. He’d been an idealist, right? At one point? He could hardly remember. But yeah, at one point he must’ve been. And then had come the hard lessons at the hands of older cops, the grifts and grafts, the corners cut and compromises made. And it’s not like the seeds hadn’t landed on fertile ground in Holland March’s case. Oh, he’d been ready, and in no time at all he’d had his eyes closed and his hand out like a good boy. Thin blue line, fuck, it was a thick blue line in L.A. and getting thicker every day. And yet—

  And yet.

  “Ah, fuck it,” he said, watching the birds wheeling through the sky. “Maybe they’re right. Maybe the goddamn birds can’t breathe.”

  Beside him, Healy was nodding.

  “Amelia…Misty…Dean…Shattuck,” Healy said, “all dead. The rest of us just get to choke.”

  Holly sighed deeply. “I need a drink,” she said.

  37.

  While Healy paid off the cabbie, Holly and her father got out and stared at the wreckage of their house. Rented house, it was true. But still the second home they’d lost in the course of one year. Would a flood be next? A plague of locusts? Maybe they’d get whipped up in a tornado like in that old movie and wind up in the land of Oz, dancing around with the Lollipop Guild.

  “I always hated that palm tree,” Holly said, staring at it as it lay, placidly, with its trunk sprawled across the roof.

  “Never trusted it,” March said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Go inside and get your stuff,” he told her. “We’ll go stay in a hotel or something.”

  “Okay.” Holly headed off, ducked under the yellow tape that said CRIME SCENE DO NOT CROSS over and over.

  “We’ll get room service,” March called.

  Behind him, he heard the sound of a car pulling in and thought maybe the cab had come back, maybe they’d left something in the back seat. But turning around he saw it was a two-tone Oldsmobile, a clunker whose undercarriage was dragging against the pavement and whose driver was in similar condition. Before he saw her face, March saw her support hose emerge, and then the giant batik handbag, which landed in the driveway by her feet.

  With a groan, Lily Glenn dragged herself out of the seat and hobbled over to where the two men were standing. She peered at March through her thick, round lenses.

  “Mister March,” she said, and she did not sound pleased.

  “Mrs. Glenn,” March said.

  “I need to talk to you,” she intoned.

  “What a, what a wonderful surprise,” March said, with what he thought must be the worst fake smile he’d ever mustered.

  Mrs. Glenn peered past him at the fallen tree, the shattered windows. “That your house…?”

  “We’re remodeling,” March said. “Listen, this isn’t a great time—”

  “It is a great time,” she insisted. She walked over to Healy. “He is supposed to be looking for my niece.”

  Healy stared at March. “Is he really.”

  March pretended he hadn’t heard.

  “I thought he quit,” Healy said.

  “Oh, he did,” Mrs. Glenn said, “he tried. But I insisted he continue. Because I saw her.” Her voice rose. “But nobody believes me. Why will nobody believe me?”

  Behind her, March was making gestures—a finger rotating beside his ear like a pencil sharpener, a finger across his throat.

  “I’m sure I don’t know, ma’am,” Healy said.

  “I saw her,” Mrs. Glenn said, “in her house, through the front window, as clear as day. Writing something, at a desk. She was wearing a blue pinstripe jacket.”

  “I’ve seen that jacket, sure,” Healy said.

  March stopped gesturing. “What do you mean you saw that jacket?”

  “In Shattuck’s place, this storage room, with a bunch of other clothes.”

  “That jacket was in Sid Shattuck’s place?”

  “Yeah,” Healy said, “the whole suit. It was bagged up, had Misty’s name on it and the name of the movie.”

  March’s eyes lit up. It was the illumination of a circuit suddenly closing. You could almost literally see the lightbulb go on.

  “It’s wardrobe for the film,” he said. “It’s wardrobe for the film!”

  So? Healy wasn’t sure why that was such an exciting bit of news. So it was wardrobe for the film. So what? It meant the old lady hadn’t been imagining things when she described what she saw her niece wearing, but what it meant beyond that Healy couldn’t grasp.

  But March clearly had something in mind. “Holy fucking shit,” he said.

  “Oh!” Mrs. Glenn exclaimed, and wagged an outraged finger in his face.

  “Sorry,” March said, then took hold of her arm and started marching her back to her car. “Mrs. Glenn, I need you to take us to Misty’s house, I need you to show us exactly what you saw.”

  * * *

  They drove up a steep hill to a little place with white walls and a red door, raised over a garage it shared with the house next door. Wrought-iron railings out front, bay window, some planters on the wall. It wasn’t a mansion, that was for sure. Most of the profits from her films had gone to Shattuck, clearly. But it was a decent place to live, in a decent neighborhood. March wondered how many of Misty’s neighbors had known how she paid her mortgage.

  “There—there,” Mrs. Glenn said, pointing, “that’s the window. I was coming around that corner, and I saw her, through that window, writing on her desk against the far wall.”

  They all got out, filed up the stairs and into the house, March first, then Healy, then Holly, and finally, slowly, Mrs. Glenn. One by one they all spotted the same thing. Mrs. Glenn was the one to put it into words.

  “But—no—it was here, the desk was here!”

  She was standing by a bare wall.

  “No desk there now,” Healy said.

  “Well…I don’t know what to say…”

  “Dad, what are you doing?” Holly was staring at her father’s backside as he crawled around on all fours, poking at what looked like a bulky wooden coffee table in the middle of the room. Actually, it didn’t look quite like a coffee table—it was too high and blocky and it had a strange seam down the middle, almost like a dining room table that you could expand by pulling it open and inserting extra leaves. But it didn’t quite look like that either.

  “Give me a second,” March said, grunting, pressing with his fingertips against the base of the unit. Finally he found something, a latch, and pulled it. The two halves of the unit slid apart at the seam, and from underneath a piece of equipment rose into view.

  It was a film projector.

  “World’s worst detective, huh?” He stared at Holly, who had her arms crossed again. Her favorite pose. But she was going to have to eat her words.

  “You did see your niece, Mrs. Glenn,” March said exultantly. “You saw her on that wall, at a desk, in a pinstripe suit.”

  “So, what she saw through the window,” Healy said, slowly, remembering his own recent encounter with a projection system that threw the image of a beautiful woman, large as life, on the wall of a room, “was a movie.”

&n
bsp; “Not a movie,” March said. “The movie. The movie!”

  “But the film burned up,” Healy said.

  “Well, how did she see it two days after it supposedly burned up? And the wardrobe matches perfectly?”

  “So Amelia had a second print?” Healy said. “She had a copy?”

  “Wouldn’t you?” March said.

  Holly spoke up. “And she gave that copy to Misty. So after Misty dies…she comes here to get it…checks the film against that wall…”

  “Lily sees it through that window,” March said, pointing.

  “…and Lily starts knocking on the glass, so Amelia splits. And takes the film.”

  “And goes…where?” Healy said—but then realized he knew the answer. “The Western Hotel. To meet the businessmen. Didn’t you say that Rocco guy was a—”

  “Distributor,” March said, and he threw his hands up. “Distributors! She was screening it for the distributors! It’s out there, the film exists, now we just have to find it.”

  Holly, meanwhile, was poking around the movie projector. There was no film threaded on it, no film anywhere inside the cabinet it came out of. But she did find a slip of paper.

  “Hey, look,” she said, and read aloud: “ ‘Opening night, nine PM.’ Signed, Chet.”

  “Fucking Chet,” March said.

  “The protestor guy?” Healy said.

  “Give me that shit,” March said, and took the slip from Holly. He read it over again. “She was planning something with Chet. ‘Opening night.’ What’s opening around now that they would care about…?”

  “The L.A. Auto Show,” Holly said. “It’s today, right? It’s been all over the radio.”

  “Yeah,” Healy said. “Big party, mucky-mucks, loads of press. If you wanted to get a story out there…”

  “And fucking Chet’s a projectionalist,” March said.

  “Please!” Mrs. Glenn was standing there, on the verge of tears. “Please, stop talking. I’ve been listening to everything you’ve said—does this mean, does this mean…that my niece is dead?”