The Butcher's Granddaughter

by Michael Lion

  “That photo was cropped from a larger negative and blown up. You can’t get near that tugboat unless you’re in it up to your ears. This picture was taken from shore with a serious telephoto. Guy got the whole fuckin’ ship. And she wasn’t the only one on deck,” he said, tapping a delicate finger on Ming’s face. “The photographer was paid a lot of money to suppress the rest of the photo and turn in a cropped negative to the L.A. Times. He was paid even more money to give it to yours truly.” He drew another photo from the envelope, laid it reverently in front of me, and said, “I think you can figure out who paid off the press.”

  The picture lying in front of me could have been used in a brochure for any cruise line. All the elements were there: girls with flowing hair wearing neon-colored bikinis and milk chocolate tans and nothing else; sapphire-blue water all around; a deck with a fully equipped bar and neatly stacked fishing tackle; and parading through it all, every conceivable shape and size of well-moneyed gentleman. Most were wearing surf shorts and t-shirts, the kind they see eighteen-year-old surfers in and think that stonewashed cotton somehow makes a beer-gut and desk-ass magically disappear. There were a few wearing suits and ties, and a few more were clad in casual sportswear, polo shirts and such. In all it looked like maybe seventy-five people were standing on the deck.

  Josephine King, the beautiful redhead whose picture was now ashes between us and whose body lay unidentified in the county morgue, was near the top of the photo. She was smiling almost directly into the camera. If you had a jones for redheads and someone showed you the photo, she would be the first place your eye went. I found myself trying to see her breasts in the dark green bikini top she had on, but I couldn’t. She was squished up against a portly, tanned guy in white slacks and a dark blue polo shirt with white buttons at the collar. The hand wrapped around Josephine’s waist had a gold ring on each finger, and the other held a drink and a long, black cigarette. He was balding but his hair had no gray, and he looked about as distinguished as a wealthy Southern Californian can. Josephine’s left hand was resting gently on the man’s broad chest, and the rings I’d seen in the morgue glittered in the sunlight.

  It was safe to assume that the man I was looking at could be made very nervous with that photo. And that was exactly what he was going to be. Nervous.

  I looked up from the photo and said, “Who is he?”

  “Benjamin Parenti. Guys like him are my bread and butter. He’s an entertainment attorney, works downtown. He’s a fuckin’ crud. He—”

  The Rat’s eyes suddenly got huge and he looked past my shoulder. Before I could react my hair was wound up in what felt like a propeller and I was jerked to my feet and pulled up and backwards over the jukebox. Struggling to both flip over and figure out what the hell was going on, the last thing I saw as I disappeared over the machine was a squat Asian guy with a gun so big he could barely get his stumpy little fingers around the grip. He was holding it in The Rat’s face and saying, “Leave or die.” And then I thumped to the ground behind the juke and was dragged down the dark hallway that leads to the toilets. Still clawing at the hands in my hair, I scraped past the men’s room door and through a fire exit and was half-thrown against the brick wall across the alley.

  I heard a crunch as my head and shoulder connected with the brick, and I slumped into a pile of garbage. I sat up slowly, not bothering to get out of the soft, comforting trash, and opened one eye.

  There were two of them. The tall one I had lost on the freeway that morning was standing against the now-shut alley door, smoothing the wrinkles from his suit and brushing strands of my hair from his hands. The shorter one was standing over me. In one hand he had the gun, in the other nothing but fist that looked like a cantaloupe. In keeping with what I’d seen of his personality so far, he spoke in short, accented sentences that required immediate responses.

  “Where is it,” he said. There was no inflection to suggest it was a question. His accent was nasal, possibly Vietnamese.

  I was going to be tough and say, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about I swear to God please don’t hurt me,’ but all I got out was, “I don’t—” and then that fist came crashing across my cheekbone and sent me back into the trash.

  He waited with sage-like patience for me to pull myself from the stinking garbage, not helping, not hindering. I finally sat back up with my head between my knees, distantly thought about how pitiful I had to look, and tried to focus on his face. My vision blurred, then focused, then doubled and then tripled, and so I looked back between my knees to keep from throwing up.

  He grabbed my hair and jerked my head up, snapping it against the wall so I could have a headache while we talked. “Where is it?” he demanded again.

  Whatever it was he wanted, two things were obvious—I didn’t have it, and I would therefore suffer further bodily harm because I could not produce it. I drooled a little between my legs and fell back on plan A. “I swear, man, I swear to God I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. You want the picture? Jesus, I think I dropped it when your goon tried to pull me through the jukebox.” My speech slurred thickly through blood and saliva.

  He turned his head, which attached directly to his shoulders with no hint of a neck, and spoke in staccato Asian dialect to his blank-faced sidekick. He let go of my hair and I let my head fall back between my knees. I heard the alley door open and shut. “You guys work for Cynthia, don’t you?” I managed, slurring ‘Cynthia’ into something like ‘Sniff.’

  He put a paw under my chin and propped my head back up. He was looming over me and smiling. His breath smelled like strong coffee and fish, and he spoke through teeth that would never again be white. He shook his head. “Do not think,” he said. “Speak.”

  I could hold my head up on my own now and my vision was only full of bright spots that flashed on and off. I couldn’t feel the barrel in my back, so I knew my gun had been lost in the scuffle. I started to sweat. “What should I talk about?” I asked slowly.

  He slowly brought the muzzle of his cannon up and pressed it to my chest. “Talk about death. Now where is it?”

  “The photo? Didn’t your—”

  No fist this time. He raised the barrel to my throat and leaned on it until my wind cut off. He clenched his stained and stinking teeth and said, “The locket. Where is the locket?”

  Then his head exploded.

  Chapter 12

  Tanya Parker stood on the bottom step of the cement stairs that came down from Al’s alley door. For a split second she stared dazedly at the slumped figure in front of me. I quit gaping at the remains of his head and watched her as she snapped out of it. I started to get up and go to her, but she stopped me with, “I’m all right, Bird. I’m all right.”

  She was calm. Not ice-cold by any stretch, but not freaking out either. I wiped a hand across my forehead and stared at it and then my shirt. Both were bathed in blood. I said, “Give me that,” and took my piece from her. “Where’s the other one?”

  She nodded back over her shoulder at the door. “He’s in the men’s room, wondering if I’m really gonna blow his cock off if he opens the door.” She looked at me and I noticed pain in her eyes. It was probably the first time I’d ever seen it there. “You’re in deep shit, Bird. Li’s dead.”

  My stomach started crawling around inside me, and I felt the sudden dampness of tears around my eyes. “Wait a minute,” I started, “what do you mean, I’m in trouble?”

  “They found her under your bed. She’d been there for two days.” We were both struggling with ourselves, battling not to show each other the emotion that was so obvious. She finally looked at her feet and said, “I think I have what they want.”

  I nodded stupidly like I knew what that meant. Still hazy from the beating, I stepped back to the nearly headless body lying in the trash. I had a hunch.

  From behind me Tanya said, “What the hell are you doing?”

  I took a deep breath and bent over him. I reached in his shirt and tore it open
to the waist, the buttons clattering around me on the pavement. My knees started to go and I could suddenly feel my heart in my head. I stepped back to Tanya and took hold of her arm. I could hear voices just beyond the door behind her. It started to open as I said, “C’mon. Let’s go.”

  And we ran.

  It was one-thirty in the morning, and a light mist was slowly turning into rain. Tanya and I were huddled beneath the steps of a backalley fire escape off of Pico and Robertson, my bike leaning against the handrail, steam wafting off the heads as moisture spit and fizzled on them. We hadn’t said a word to each other in over an hour.

  She was dressed like she had just come from a club: heavy makeup that she looked better without, a black bustier studded with little silver pyramids, and retro1970’s blue jeans that started well below her navel, snugged her hips, and outlined her legs before ending in two flares over a pair of black suede platforms with gothic Venetian heels. Over all that she wore a black vinyl raincoat which she pulled over her knees as she crouched under the fire escape.

  We were both staring straight ahead. I began to take the nine-millimeter apart and clean it. It gave me something to do, something to focus my mind from its wild careen through the last four days. I kept glancing sidelong at Tanya, trying to come to terms with what she had done. I wondered if she was doing the same. She had stepped into that alley and simply reacted—the guy’s gun in my throat, my face swollen and bleeding, and she protected me, without forethought, without emotion. Completely pragmatic. That’s the hallmark of a person who bears watching. Careful watching.

  I pursed my lips and stared at the barrel as if it had some imperfection I’d just discovered. “When did you come in?” I said, still staring at the gun.

  “I was sitting at the bar when you got there,” she said loosely. Her demeanor was hard and nonchalant at the same time. We were both scared to death and trying to hide it. “Some loser was trying to pick up on me and I let him. You walked right past me. When the money went across the table to that freak you were talking to, I figured you hadn’t started a new life. Which reminds me.” She reached underneath the vinyl coat and produced the negative of the spread Rat had sold me. “This was on the floor by your gun. Important?”

  I snatched it from her hand and, for the first time, we looked at each other. Neither of us was going to swoon. I said, “Probably,” and started laying gun parts in front of me.

  We were silent for a bit. I finished cleaning the pieces, stared at them for a minute, then got up suddenly and dropped the barrel and the clip into a dumpster next to us. The slide and the stock I strolled out to the street and dropped into a sewer grate. When I sat back down she said, “What’d you do that for?”

  “Never carry a weapon after you’ve used it. You killed a guy back there. And people he’s connected with are going to find us. Which, by the way, is not our biggest problem right now.”

  “What is?”

  “You.”

  “Be real,” she came back, “I saved your life.”

  “Right. And don’t think for a minute that only bothers me a little bit.” I put my head back against the wall and took out a cigarette.

  “Got one of those for me?” she asked.

  I jerked one out and handed it to her. I popped my lighter, lit my own, and handed the lighter to her. We sat smoking and not looking at each other. I took my jacket off and then my blood-smeared t-shirt. I threw the t-shirt under the dumpster and put my jacket back on.

  “Look,” I said finally, “we don’t like each other, and that’s fine. I think you’re a bitch, and you think I’m a coward, and that’s fine, too. But I was involved in something that I thought I’d dropped in the hands of the cops and left behind, and now it’s come back and almost killed me. The more I think about it, the more confusing it gets. And, as much as I maybe hate your guts, I’m sorry you’re involved now. But know this, Tanya, I swear to God I haven’t done anything to provoke what happened in that alley.”

  She sat there and let it wash over her. I couldn’t tell if any of it affected her. She was a stone.

  For the millionth time I mentally backtracked over the last few days, and for the millionth time came up empty. I had brokered some information and that had been it. Why were people after me? And Tanya? Of all people, why did she drop in? She was just a club girl with a figure and an attitude, avoiding trouble like water around rocks, and here she was, crouched next to somebody she hated, like a cold and hungry rat forced to share space with an old alley cat. None of it made any sense.

  “What were you involved in?” she asked, breaking the silence and beating me to the interrogation all at once.

  I snapped my head up and ignored her question. “You said you had what they’re looking for. What is it?”

  She looked at me coldly for a second, deciding if surrendering this little bit of control represented a weakness on her part. My face told her it didn’t. She rummaged around in her raincoat some more and produced a now-soggy envelope. From it she pulled a gold necklace with a charm. She slowly handed it to me. I held it up in a shaft of streetlamp light and let it spin around.

  I had seen one just like it four days earlier, hanging from the neck of a stupid, pissed off little Vietnamese girl.

  The chain pattern was a basic cut, but the charm was exceptionally unique: three Chinese characters running vertically, not simply stamped out of gold but etched in relief from a single small block of metal. I recognized it immediately, and fear tightened my guts once again. In the spaces between the strokes of the symbols was an intricate pattern of lace, also etched in relief, and filled in with black lacquer. The back of the charm was polished to a high glow. I popped the miniscule latch on the piece’s right side and opened it. Inside was a tiny black-and-white photo. It was meaningless. All it showed was a headstone in some Asian cemetery. The characters on the stone were Chinese, and none matched that of the pendant. It was undoubtedly some relative of Song and Li’s. Ancestor worship.

  I cupped my hands over my ears and tried to keep old images from getting in my head. Inside I laughed a deep, sorry laugh. It kept me from screaming out loud. The rain dripped off the fire escape and into my collar. I scooted over a couple of inches and let myself be cold and wet. It was several minutes before I realized Tanya was saying something.

  “... underneath your bed. I couldn’t fucking believe it. You got another cigarette?” she asked. There had been a trace of timidity in her at first. It was rapidly diminishing.

  Stumbling out of my own head, I dug out the smokes and gave them to her. She lit two and handed me one. “I don’t think she suffered,” she said, more to herself than to me, almost like a Catechism.

  I wondered if Tanya had been thinking about the same things I was—where she’d met Li, what they had talked about. Memories are like that. Yesterday, I would have struggled to remember what Li had said that first rainy night in Gorky’s Cafe, that simple hello. Now she was so close I could even remember her inflection, her trouble pronouncing long vowels.

  I sighed. Tanya stared. I hadn’t heard most of what she’d been saying the past few minutes. “Under my fucking bed. Christ,” I muttered.

  “She was staring at me,” Tanya continued in her prayer-level voice. “You know...when I looked underneath. One hole, right in the middle of her forehead.” I noticed that part of the moisture on her face was tears. Tanya’s emotion made my mind fuzz up even worse, and I forced myself to clarity. “I suppose this is an obvious question,” I said, “but what were you doing in my apartment?” It didn’t come out as gently as I’d wanted.

  “Trying to figure out what this meant.” She said it like she wanted to put ‘asshole’ at the end. She again produced the envelope that held the pendant and handed me a small slip of paper. It looked like it had come off a pad of yellow sticky notes. It said:

  Tanya,

  Find Bird. He’ll know about my parents. Show him the pendant.

  Li

  It was written hurriedly, scrawled
across the paper. “So she knew,” I said, whispering.

  “Knew what?”

  I held the piece of yellow paper between three fingers and flicked at it nervously. “Knew she was being followed, knew they were coming.”

  “Knew who was coming?”

  “This piece of paper is from next to my bed. I keep a little pad there for messages. She wrote this while she was still at my place.” Tanya gave me a disapproving look. “It wasn’t what you think,” I said disgustedly.

  “It never is.”

  I sat and glared. She ignored it. “C’mon, Bird. That paper could’ve come from her own kitchen. There are millions of those things in every room in every house in the world.”

  I held it up to the streetlight. “Not with the phone number of a certain private dick I know on it.”

  She scooted closer and I showed her Rick Cane’s office number, clearly embossed from the page that had been above it. It was the last number I’d written on the pad. She shrugged. “So now what?”

  “So I don’t know. I know we’re in trouble.”

  “Why do you keep saying ‘we’?” she said fiercely.

  I was wondering when the denial would set in. I had been fighting it off myself for a while. As calmly as I could, I said, “Wednesday night, last Wednesday night, that is, Li scrounged me up down at the Reading Room. She was scared and trying not to look it. She asked me to help her fix a little problem that her sister was having. I did.”

  “What a saint.”

  I ignored that. The more I talked it out, the more serious our situation got. “I thought she was scared for her sister, but now it’s pretty obvious she was scared about a whole lot more. Her sister had been living under an assumed name for quite a while, and it was apparently news to the world that she even had a sister.”

  Tanya nodded as if she agreed. I assumed that meant she was in the dark on that subject as well.