by Michael Lion
I bought a second to think. “So what? I talk to cute girls all the time.”
“So do I. But maybe I’m thinkin’ some funny things. Seems to me you have a certain weakness for that Oriental stuff. Maybe she’s your girlfriend. Maybe— ”
“Maybe you’re drunk,” I said. “All right, sure, I was down there. But this is the first I’ve heard of a body.” I fell back on the bed and considered things, talking to the ceiling. “But, like I said, I saw some stuff last night that’s pretty serious to me—maybe not to you, but you’re asking. And, if you already canvassed all the way to some lady at a bus stop, then you’re being fairly thorough.”
“I said it was serious.”
I looked around my apartment. It was a basement, but it was over twelve hundred square feet—a single huge room with ground level windows all the way around the tops of the twelve-foot high walls. My bed, the only furniture besides the chair that Caz was crushing, sat in the middle of the bare wood floor. It made me think about rent. “OK,” I started. “Beginning-to-end action is going to cost a round hundred. Any weapons involved, another fifty. I’ll throw the apartment number in for ten. Names and addresses of everyone involved, another hundred. Anything else I’ll have to think about.”
She had been through it before. She made a show of reaching the snitch fund out of her bra and put three hundreds on the table. “This better be good, Bird. You drain the bank.”
I told her everything except that I was carrying a gun. I also left out that Song and Li were sisters, but said they were friends. She wanted to know where The Reading Room was for some reason. I told her. When I got to Jay, she asked, “What kind of piece did he have?”
“A Smith .45. Your basic artillery—blued finish, walnut handle. Personally, I’ve never seen him use it, but I guess he’s pretty good.”
“Legal?”
“Yeah. He finessed a license to carry through his recovery agency, which is a tough thing to do. The piece is registered with the Sheriff.”
“Know what he used in it?”
“As a matter of fact, yeah. Only reason I remember is because they’re so wicked: hot loads that would go in a much heavier weapon. Cop-killers. Never understood why he would use them.”
Caz shook her head. “Fuckin’ things’ll punch a hole in a bank vault. And they’re too easy to get.” She paused for a long minute. “So we got Li Nguyen and Song Ti Nguyen, no relation. We got a repo man, Jay Ballesteros, carries legal with illegal caps. And John Sheffield, called Sheff. Addresses on all of ’em.”
I reached out for the money and she slapped my wrist. “Hold up there, sweet thing. There’s an extra forty bucks in there we haven’t discussed yet.”
I moved over to the coffee, sipped and waited.
“How about tellin’ me where all these folks would be about, say, now.”
I thought for a minute. “Jay is probably asleep at his place. Today’s his day off. He’ll get up about ten tonight and go to a club, probably Helter Skelter out at the end of Sunset. He’ll stay ’til it closes. On Sunday night he’ll do the same thing, but only ’til maybe eleven. Then he’ll go to work.
“Sheff will be at the Pantages in...” I looked at the clock. “He’s there now. Works on the ticket phones. He lives with his parents, so I don’t know what he’ll be doing later. He’s not as much of a vampire as the rest of us.” Caz’s pen-hand paused over her notebook while I went on about Sheff.
“Li will be at her place in Santa Monica. She starts work about six.”
“What’s she do?”
“Barback at the Islander Café on Wishire. She’ll be there ’til four tomorrow morning. She’s tiny and beautiful. She’d be just your type if she was a rude dyke. Can I go back to sleep now?”
“No. And she might be my type anyway. Where’s this Song girl?”
“Dunno. Like I said, I’d never seen her before last night. I gave her Li’s number because she didn’t have it on her. When I gave it to her she looked at it like it was one of the Dead Sea Scrolls. When I left she was in the phone booth across from Gorky’s. I can only assume that’s who she was calling. She wasn’t the brainiest thing I’ve ever run into.”
Caz pursed her lips, looked at her note pad, shut it, and stood up. “That’s pretty good, Birdy. Work schedules and everything.”
I sucked at the cigarette. “What I’m paid for.”
“Well, lock your door from now on. You never know when some fat dyke is gonna invite herself in.”
“Knock next time,” I said. As she got to the door I put a couple of things together and said, “Hey, Sarge?”
She paused with her hand around the knob. “Yeah?”
“I’m kind of protective of Li. How about you tell me what’s got Robbery/Homicide’s panties in a twist?” I paused for a second, then added, “’Cause if Sheffield’s the corpse we’re talking about, I’ve got a pretty good idea who made him that way.” I quietly wondered if Jay could have done it. There was no question he had it in him, but I ran over some timetables in my head and decided there was no way. If Sheff was only a couple blocks away when he got hit, then Jay was still in the apartment with me and Song when it happened.
Caz didn’t turn around as she said, “It’s not this Sheffield guy. It was some hooker. Maybe I’ll go talk to Mr. Sheffield about his sexual practices.”
“Well, enjoy.”
She nodded. “Anyway, looks like she just stepped out last night and got herself mugged. If you hear anything, I know you’ll be around to sell it.”
“Yeah,” I said to Caz’s back as she stepped out and shut the door loudly behind her.
As I wound back down into sleep, I went over the previous night in my head. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had fucked up somehow and couldn’t do anything about it now.
An hour later I was working on the maddeningly tiny hooks on the back of Li’s bra when the phone rang and woke me up. I fumbled the receiver to my ear, expecting to hear Caz’s shriek calling me on the bullshit about Song and Li’s friendship. Instead, Rick Cane’s plain-wrap voice danced happily over the phone. He only sounded that way when he wanted something for nothing. “Hey, Bird. Looked outside at the land of the living yet?”
“I’ve been trying to avoid it since eleven-thirty,” I started. “But assholes keep calling me.”
“I apologize. I must’ve interrupted yet another fruitless dream about Li.” He laughed.
I coughed loudly in his ear and said, “Up yours. What’s going on down along the cleaner coast?”
“Well, I ran into something that might require your personal touch. It’s nice out. Take a ride down P.C.H. I’ll buy you dinner at Cano’s. Be there at six and dress well.” He hung up.
I sat in the pillows for a while, wondering why people wouldn’t leave me alone. I hadn’t shaken the apprehension that something had gone terribly wrong in that apartment the night before. I went over the conversations in my head but couldn’t see anything except a vague nervousness just below the surface.
I decided it was just Caz’s usual caginess getting to me. I shook it off, set my alarm for three-thirty, and drifted back to Li.
Newport Beach is one county, five cities, and a whole world south of Los Angeles. It is, along with West Hollywood and La Jolla, one of the places that fuels the clichés about Southern California. It’s always seventy-three degrees, people wear shorts and bikinis until the middle of February, and all the houses are color-coordinated with the cars in their driveways. If you go far enough down Newport Boulevard, there’s actually a special street lane you can only drive in if you have a special sticker, which you have to be special enough to live there to get.
I’d made Huntington Beach, just north of Newport and usually a zoo, about thirty minutes ahead of schedule. I slowed it down, appreciating the sun dappling the green-gray water, listening to the seagulls squawk, and generally taking my time getting to the restaurant. By the time I arrived, the ocean breeze had completely cleared my memory of the previous
night.
Valets never seem to know how to ride motorcycles, so I parked the bike in the Newport Ski Company’s lot and walked the block to Cano’s. It’s a pompous restaurant that juts out over Balboa Peninsula like a crooked tooth. Rick was hunched at a table next to a huge bay window over the water, watching a pelican glide along its rippled surface.
Richard Chutney Cane is a private detective with a modest office on Redhill Boulevard. As far as I know, no one is aware of his homosexuality but me and a couple of Cane’s friends. We met when he made a pass at me in a joint on Newport Boulevard called Bubbles. I made my sexual preference clear with a fistfight in the parking lot that ended up with both of us in a laughing fit. You can’t have many friends and do what I do, but if I had to list the few I have, Rick would be in the top spot.
He was wearing a white linen suit and t-shirt. They were pressed. His face was not. He looked like he’d been up for three days.
“Christ, Rick, you look like shit,” I said, taking a seat and getting comfortable. The maitre d’ bee-lined to our table.
“Mr. Cane.”
“Hello, Thomas,” he sighed. He no longer possessed the voice I heard on the phone. “A bottle of Pinot Noir.”
Thomas disappeared into the kitchen and I said, “At least you’re dressed well.”
“Not a word, asshole. Not a word.”
I smiled. “What’s the bad news?”
“You always do get right to it.”
“I already told you how you look. That was the small talk.”
“Right.”
The wine came and Thomas made a three-act production out of pulling the cork. Rick tasted it and said it was fine. When the maitre d’ was out of earshot, he leaned over and said, “I feel like we should have applauded.”
There was nothing to say to that, so I let him get some wine down. Then he opened up. “Have you been reading all the bad press Cynthia Ming has been getting lately?”
“Nah. There’s enough news going on between Olympic Boulevard and 123rd Street to keep me behind for months. Who’s Cynthia Ming?”
“She lives in that condo of a yacht down there in dock thirty-nine.” He pointed out the window. The mammoth ship sat two hundred yards down from the restaurant on the opposite shore of the peninsula. It had two decks and made the commercial trawlers docked on either side of it look like water-wings. “It leaves that slip every three nights at nine-thirty, is back by the following afternoon, and everybody knows what goes on below decks once she passes the three-mile limit. Unless you’re invited specifically by Cynthia, it costs one thousand dollars to step on the gangplank.
“Every six months, it leaves here and sails to Hawaii, where it docks in Honolulu Harbor and starts the same process. In and out, day after day.
“Miss Ming is worth about eighty-million, give or take, and she is about the shrewdest combination of raw beauty and vindictive brains I’ve ever had the displeasure of knowing.”
“What goes on?” I asked. “Gambling?”
“Some, but that’s legal three miles out. Child prostitution isn’t, no matter how far out you go. Everyone has known for years how she makes her money. Jesus Christ, she runs advertisements for girls in Los Angeles, Stockholm, Berlin, Tokyo, Singapore, and Hong Kong. A complex network of what she calls ‘recruiters’ are employed to get information on the girls so that they can be blackmailed once they’re hired. When that little piece of real estate sets sail, it’s so full of nine- to seventeen-year-old girls it might as well be a can of tuna.”
I finished my first glass of wine and started another. Rick was on his third. “So where does this put you, and why do you need me?” I asked.
“The Newport Beach cops have decided to clamp down on Lady Ming and put her away. She’s been in business for almost fifteen years, so why they chose now, I don’t know. One of the screws they’re driving into her is the press. As soon as the story broke in the local papers, you had parents of beautiful young Newport Beachers screaming for blood, convinced their little thing was next. Couple that with the general tendency of teen-age girls to disappear on Friday and Saturday nights, and you have a lot of peep-business for the local detectives.”
“Don’t tell me you’ve been taking peek-a-boo jobs.”
“One,” he said seriously. “An old friend of mine. He—”
Our waiter materialized and introduced himself. I told Rick to order for both of us because I had been making decisions all day and couldn’t cope. Two crab salads and two lobster tails. That was fine with me—he was buying.
The wine was gone and Rick waved down Thomas for another bottle. I’d had two glasses of the previous Pinot and Rick had sponged the rest. For all of that, he looked like he’d had a cup of coffee. When the second bottle came and the second cork-show was over, he continued where he had left off.
“As I said, I’m working for an old friend of mine, and yes, I am watching his daughter. I told him right out of the gate I was sure that Denise—that’s her name—was not involved with Our Lady of Perpetual Flesh. He said to do it for him anyway, and I did.
“I started following her around last Wednesday night. She’s got a gorgeous boyfriend that she’s with every moment she’s not at home. They do your basic teenage things: movies, fast-food dinners, love-making sessions at Corona Del Mar. Everything was fairly boring until this past Monday night.
“At nine-o’clock straight up she kissed her dad goodbye and hopped into her boyfriend’s car, just like she’d done for the past five consecutive nights. I get settled in for another night of awkward teen sex, when they go to— ”
“Dock thirty-nine,” I interrupted.
He let out a long breath and nodded.
“Aahhh, there’s all kinds of things that could mean, man.” I shook my head dismissively and finished another glass of wine. It was getting easier to drink at a geometric rate.
“Naturally, I wasn’t convinced that she was up to anything at all. But she pranced onto that boat with her boyfriend as if they went there all the time—people saying hello and shaking hands with them on the gangplank like they were running for mayor. They made the same trip last night.”
“Really.”
“Yes! And it’s not as if she isn’t the type; she really is a striking young thing.”
“Is this what’s made you look like...” I motioned my hand toward him.
“I’ve had maybe eight hours of sleep, total, since that Monday night. I went to her father and asked him where she said she was going. He explained to me that she spends the night at her boyfriend’s parent’s house every week or so all spring and summer long. I’ve touched all of the friends that I know she has, but they either clam up or flat-out don’t know. They know about the ship, but they have no idea what Denise does on it.”
The food came. It was delicious, naturally. Rick had never taken me anywhere that I’d had a crappy meal. After the residue of the crab salads were taken away, it was my turn. “So you want me to see what connections I can get down here by the sea?”
“No. I don’t think you can find anything from the street that I haven’t found already.”
“Remember pal, you’re old. Nobody my age is going to spill to you, particularly not about one of their friends. You’d be surprised at what I can dig out of people in the middle of the night.”
“I’m not that old, Bird. But you’re probably right. Regardless, I don’t want you wasting time on the street. I want you to get close to Denise. Get the information out of her. Or her boyfriend.”
I thought about it. From what Rick said, she was essentially untouchable. A boyfriend or a dad always around, and apparent connections with some major organized crime. “All right,” I said finally, “what are you offering?”
“First, from this point on, you ask no more questions. Very few people know that I know you. That’s part of the reason I asked you down here.”
“Hired me.”
“Whatever. The deal is this: I pay you base rate for one of my asso
ciates, two hundred a day. In addition, I’ll give you access to a small expense fund, to be used specifically to gather information. How you do that is up to you. I won’t ask how you got it, and you won’t ask me any questions regarding the case.”
“So, for two bills a day, if the shit starts to fly, I go down alone.”
He nodded over the wine. “It protects you, me, and the client. No questions. If you don’t get anything, I’ll pay you for two days and we’ll call it even.”
The lobster arrived and after the first bite I told him I would do it.
As the valets brought his car, I said, “I’ll get in touch with you in a couple of days. Go home and get some sleep.”
“That’s exactly where I’m headed.”
He got in, shut the door, and rolled down the window. “By the way, lover, if you do manage to get close to her in person, behave yourself. Her legs would shatter a wife’s hopes at thirty yards.”
I laughed and wondered what the rest of her looked like.
It was almost dark when I climbed onto my bike and pulled onto the Pacific Coast Highway, choked with expensive cars and battered old beach-mobiles full of surfers. I wandered in between the lanes until they unclogged around Seal Beach, then flew past the campfires and through the industrial district of Long Beach, wondering how much of the five hundred dollars Rick had given me for “expenses” I would have to use.
By the time I got back to my apartment, the vampires were out in full strength, platoons of them cruising Hollywood Boulevard. I took a shower, changed into all black, and jumped onto the 405 South.
By eleven o’clock, I was back in Corona del Mar. Denise was home.
And I knew where the first hundred bucks of that expense fund was going.