Whereupon Judy reached down to her plate, picked up the filet with her bare hand, drew it back like a baseball, and threw it, full force.
All eyes followed the sanguinary missile as it sailed across the dining room and hit Elizabeth Grimble square in the forehead. It hung there for a second, then plopped onto her bread plate.
There was a stunned silence. Judy picked up her chair, sat down, shrugged, sipped her water. Mission accomplished.
The avalanche of laughter was heard up and down Beverly Drive.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
The Lord Laughs at Us All
I left early for Benjamin’s so I could kill two birds with one stone. At Gardner and Hollywood I stopped at St. Paul of Tarsus, rang the bell at the residence. Reverend Jenkins opened the door, invited me in.
As before, I was shown into the library and made comfortable. Reverend Jenkins again looked into the depths of my soul. “How are you, Mr. Henry?” he asked.
I said I was fine, that I had a check for the mission I somehow didn’t feel comfortable giving to his assistant. I finished on an up note, hoping aloud that he had not lost his keys again.
The reverend laughed. “I’ve got my keys, Mr. Henry, it’s my cell phone I’ve lost.”
I laughed and he laughed.
“But it’s funny you mention Mr. Linscomb.”
I tried to look blank.
“Mr. Linscomb quit his position.”
“Really.”
“Out of the blue. Two days ago.”
“He left a note?”
“No. He just cleared out his things and disappeared. I called the parish in Santa Barbara where he’d come from to see if they’d heard from him. Reverend Wells said they’d never heard of him. Ever. Quite extraordinary, really.”
“Maybe you should check the silver.”
“I did.”
“And?”
The reverend shrugged. “I checked and rechecked. Then I realized I didn’t know what was there to begin with.”
I liked Reverend Jenkins a lot. I fished out my donation envelope, handed it to him. “So what’s your cell number?”
He told me. “I go to bed pretty early,” he cautioned. “But if you need an appointment . . .”
I dialed his number.
“Did you just call me, Mr. Henry?”
“Yes, I did.”
I could see he thought I’d lost my marbles in the war. “But—I’m right here.”
I smiled at him. “You think I’m crazy.”
“Are you?” A worried expression played over his face.
“No. But I got lucky with your keys. I thought maybe I’d get lucky with your phone, too.”
“I see,” he said, plainly not seeing.
Then a cell phone rang. Muffled. He looked sharply around the room, then patted himself down, found his phone.
He was delighted. “Aha. My other pocket.” He pulled out the phone, looked at me, nodded happily. “Excuse me a second.” He answered his phone. “Hello?”
It was my turn to wonder.
Serious as a heart attack, not looking at me, the reverend spoke into the phone. “Is that you . . . Mr. Henry?”
Then he turned to me, reading my expression, almost exploding with mirth.
We laughed and laughed.
“It’s the only way to get through life, Mr. Henry. Humor. How the Lord must laugh at us all.”
How indeed.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
A Sack of Beets
Jerry Shunk and his accountant, Lucky Lee Feldman, had just stepped out of Nate ’n Al’s delicatessen when they were hailed by a man in a blue peacoat. All Lucky’s ventures turned gold.
“Jerry Shunk?” said the man.
Lucky turned first. Artie Benjamin’s Sig Sauer P250 allowed the shooter to change the weapon’s configuration at will. Caliber and size. Arnuldo had small hands. He had removed the functional mechanism and changed the weapon from a full size to subcompact. The 9-millimeter projectile hit Feldman right between the eyes and killed him instantly.
It took a second for Arnuldo to realize he’d made a mistake. The dead man was not old enough. He turned to Shunk.
Shunk moaned, his tongue incapable of speech, his hands vaguely waving. Arnuldo straightened his arm, shot Shunk through his right eye, another Moe Greene shot, dropping him like a sack of beets. Then Arnuldo walked to the corner, turned, calmly walked to the Mercedes on Canon Drive.
The Mercedes started up first time, every time. He drove quietly up to Santa Monica Boulevard, made a left turn. In fifteen minutes he’d hit the 405. Then he’d head north. Seven miles later he’d transfer to the 101. Then he’d let the fine German engine have its way. Next stop Big Sur.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Hammerfall
For many years, for ten years, working with Mr. Benjamin had been good. Until Mrs. Benjamin had become Judy. From that moment it was inevitable that he would climb the stairs with a new mission in mind.
Benjamin barely looked up from his desk. “Where you been? Fucking Bill Robertson. Doesn’t want to pay for the camera he ruined. I think you’re going to have to pay him a visit. Over on Varna. Asshole.”
At this point Arnuldo would usually ask how much pressure to exert and where to exert it. But this time the Filipino said nothing. Just looked at him calmly.
“We gotta pay Robertson a visit. Got that?”
Arnuldo nodded. Oh, I got that. “Got it. Boss.” Boss. This asshole, who treated Judy so rudely, so faithlessly, was BOSS.
Benjamin looked over another piece of paper, then sharply up at Arnuldo. “Something wrong today? Don’t seem like yourself.”
“I’m not sure what you mean, Mr. B.”
Benjamin had always liked Arnuldo referring to him as Mr. B. It showed that not only was he the boss but he was respected and liked at the same time. And why wouldn’t he be liked and respected? He paid the little brown son of a bitch twenty-five hundred a week straight under the table. That was ten grand a month. A hundred and twenty a year.
Artie Benjamin was a fair and generous man. More than fair, magnanimous. One day, maybe he would get over to Manila like he’d always said he would and check it out. Why not? Manila was an international city. And Arnuldo had told him an amazing fact. Well, maybe it was a fact. Filipino women grew no hair on their legs. They didn’t need to shave. They didn’t have that fucked-up American stubble.
And even the American women—at least they weren’t Europeans with hair everywhere.
That woman in Paris. She didn’t have a thatch, which was bad enough, she had a goddam mop. And more hair under her arms than he did. Fur on her back. Neanderthal. That wasn’t right. Thank God for that shitty French wine. It had given him a forward momentum nothing could stop.
Manila. Why not, really? Maybe he could set up a franchise sort of idea. The Fellatio Academy was up and running. He was going to make a goddam fortune. But, hey, what about The Manila Fellatio Academy? Had a ring to it. The Paris Fellatio Academy. Not that they needed an academy over there. But the title might stiffen a cock or two in Dubuque. Or Idaho Falls.
He emerged from his thoughts to see Arnuldo playing with that gun. The gun was adjustable or something, you could switch this and that. “How do you like that gun, Arnuldo?”
“I like it just fine, Mr. Benjamin.”
There was something wrong. Maybe it was time to lay down a little law. “I don’t know what your problem is, Arnuldo, but what the fuck, here?”
Arnuldo shrugged.
The son of a bitch shrugged. Shrugged!
“What the hell, Arnuldo? You got a problem with the chow I provide around here? Your rooms? Or the car you drive, or what? What is it?”
“Fuck you, Mr. Benjamin.”
The sound of Arnuldo’s voice was flat and cold and Benjamin suddenly realized Arnuldo was not playing with the gun. The hand that held the weapon was wrapped in a plastic fruit bag from Ralphs. Benjamin’s throat went suddenly dry. He held up a mediating h
and. “W-w-wait a second.”
“Good-bye, Mr. Benjamin.”
Arnuldo pulled the trigger. Sig Sauer quality. Smooth and even pull. He felt the solid, metallic click of hammerfall and the bilateral impact of the report on his eardrums.
It was a Moe Greene shot, through Mr. B’s right eye. A hole in one. Through the blue haze, Arnuldo saw brains all over the place.
Arnuldo’s cell phone rang. That would be Judy. From the steak house. Of course he was ready.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
Like a Bowling Pin
In order to aid riffraff suppression, there was no neighborhood parking in Beverly Hills after 6:00 P.M. without permit. But I was only going to be there long enough to give Benjamin his latest money back. I left my flashers on, went up to the house, and rang.
I heard the four-note chime from deep in the house and waited. A composer I had known defined melody as the departure from and the return to home. The four notes of a doorbell were supposedly the second simplest example of that hypothesis.
The composer had choked to death on a ham sandwich. What was important was that no one was coming to the door. I checked my watch. I was right on time.
I rang again, waited. Then I noticed the front door was slightly ajar. I pushed and it opened up.
Normal subdued evening lights were on, but I stepped into dead silence. “Hello? Hel-lo?”
No echo, no nothing. “Mr. Benjamin? Mr. Benjamin?”
I started getting that feeling I get. Its onset is so subtle I don’t know where it begins. All of a sudden I have it and my skin is crawling.
I walked quietly into the living room. Again, nothing. And nothing in the dining room. In the distance I heard the wail of a siren. Some sucker going down.
“Mr. Benjamin,” I called strongly. Nothing.
Then I went up the stairs and caught a whiff. Nitrocellulose and nitroglycerin. Gunpowder.
I walked to his office. The smell was strong. I flipped on the lights.
That blue-gray haze in the air. Benjamin in his chair. But his right eye was an oozing hole and his brains had been blown out. There was money all over his desk. Suddenly I realized that the siren was close.
Then many sirens and the screech of brakes. And here I was, at the scene of the crime, standing in someone’s brains, set up like a bowling pin. Time to get truckin’.
Downstairs, people burst in. I tossed Arnuldo’s ten thousand into the mix on Artie’s desk. I wasn’t going to be the rat in this trap. I took three sticky steps past Benjamin to the window, pushed it open. There was a tree, but too far to reach. There was a drainpipe. It was that or nothing. I went down hand over hand, leaving footprints on the wall, dropped into the bushes.
I headed for the back of the property. All homes in the neighborhood bordered an alley. No riffraff trash cans out by the front curb. I heard the hubbub from the house and saw lights flashing around, but it was quiet where I was. I went over the back wall into some thorny ferns.
I waited. Silence. I’d have to call Rojas.
I stepped out of the ferns, tried to stroll like a millionaire. Three steps later I saw a glint of light in a moving shadow and the lights went out.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
Peedner Remembers
Lieutenant Lew Peedner had known this day was coming. And now here it was. Dick Henry arrested. But the joy he had anticipated at the arrest had not materialized. Instead, a deep, gray depression. From the roots of his hair down through his fingernails.
The memories of the night in question had never left him. A night that had truncated his future, left him limping and damaged, forever shackled to the past.
He and Henry had been partners. It had been a good fit. Their skills and liabilities offset one another. The cowboy and the accountant. The sword and the pen. Shortcut Man and Bo Peep. Dick broke all the rules and Lew could enumerate Dick’s offenses, chapter, subchapter, and verse. And file the reports that got them promotions, put their actions into lawful perspective.
Over time, the arc of Dick’s behavior had swung wider and wider, and Lew had responded with genuine creative authorship. He knew it couldn’t last, shouldn’t last, that trouble was coming. But he couldn’t break it off. Their lives had grown together. He had been to Dick and Georgette’s wedding, Dick and Georgette had come to his and Marilyn’s. He warned Dick, in explicit terms, this was a new world, but Dick didn’t get it. The administrative ground had changed beneath their boots, but the fool hadn’t seen it.
The soju, sweet potato cousin of vodka, was flowing in Koreatown that payday Friday night when the call came in. A little girl, Soon Cha Kim, eight, had gone missing.
He and Dick, working out of Wilshire Station, had rolled over. The parents were frantic, the language barrier formidable. They ran a little video shop at Olympic and Western. They worked fourteen hours a day. Usually sixteen. Sometimes eighteen.
The family lived in a three-story brick walk-up on the south side of Twelfth Street half a block east of Western. The girl’s instructions were to come home promptly after school, lock the door, and admit no one. But someone had been admitted. Her parents found the door unlocked, the apartment undisturbed.
None of the neighbors had seen anything.
Nobody had come in or out since the girl came home from school?
Nobody.
Nobody?
Nobody. Well, the usual villains. The mailman. Domino’s. Regular visitors.
And there was that man with the bag.
Dick’s ears pricked up. Man with a bag?
Delivery dude, I guess.
What kind of bag?
You saw him, too, said one neighbor to another. Like a big duffel bag. Green. Green canvas.
Maybe, I dunno. I didn’t see nothin’. I guess he coulda been carryin’ somethin’.
What was in the bag? asked Dick.
Look. Maybe it wasn’t a bag. But it was a green canvas something. It looked kinda heavy when he left.
When he left? What made you think it was heavy?
Dude leaned to one side when he carried it.
Dick looked at Peedner, made the inductive leap. “Sounds like Elton Reese.”
“Elton Reese is in CSP Sacramento.”
“Maybe he isn’t.”
He wasn’t.
They’d released him from ad seg CSP twenty-two days earlier. Notes formalized his good behavior and indicated he’d accepted Jesus as his personal savior.
Reese had a long sheet. The usual adolescent beefs, truancy, petty theft, possession, under the influence. But mixed in were disturbing crimes. Setting dogs and cats on fire. And then, with adulthood, and other serious crimes, he’d graduated to the torture of human beings. Children. He had a particular m.o. He’d carry off his young victims, bound and gagged, in bags, in boxes, in sacks. He’d been caught only once. That’s why he’s been sent to CSP Sacramento. Three missing kids had been credited to his informal account.
The only positive element noted in Reese’s entire life was winning a fifth-grade piano competition.
Lew and Dick called in Eddie Wilkins and Bob Herbert to finish taking the report.
Dick put the pedal to the metal. Using lights but no siren, they sped down Western, turned right on Venice, right on South Manhattan Place.
At one time South Manhattan Place must have been the place to live. Huge old Craftsman homes, eight, nine, ten bedrooms. Built in the time when families were families, not mom and dad, 2.2 brats, and a parakeet.
But now, fifty years of diminishing returns had transformed these old houses into slovenly, sagging eyesores, reroofed forty times, orange showing through green showing through black, divided up into dingy warrens.
Harold Crownes, Reese’s uncle, had owned the third house on the left.
They knocked, but there was no response. Dick kicked the door in, met Crownes coming toward the door.
“What the fu——?” spluttered the old man. Then Dick had him by the throat, off his feet, against the greasy panel
ing.
“Where’s Elton?”
Crownes, hanging, spread his hands, shook his head a little bit.
“Where’s fucking Elton?” Dick shouted, veins on his neck and forehead in sharp relief.
“Set the man down so he can talk, Dick.”
Dick dropped him. “Where the fuck is Elton?”
“Dunno where he at.”
Then, from somewhere upstairs, they heard a long, thin scream.
Dick hit Crownes with a straight overhand right and smashed his face.
They raced up the stairs, and Lew was at Dick’s heels till he slipped. By the time he got to the third floor he’d heard four shots.
The four shots that had ruined his life.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
The Unfairness of Life
Walt Faulkner did not expect to be fired. But after six days as the new night manager of Ruth’s Chris Steak House on Beverly Drive, he did have a bad feeling when Roger Hanberry, district supervisor, requested to meet with him a couple of days after the debacle. Still, how bad could things be?
Plenty bad.
Not only was one customer, Elizabeth Grimble, suing for battery and humiliation but the food fight that followed had been the only known food fight in Ruth’s Chris history. And possibly one of the more expensive food fights since the days of Nero.
Seventy-nine-dollar steaks had flown around the room like UFOs at Roswell. Followed by chicken, ribs, assorted seafood, and bread. Flatware, stemware, and furniture had been pulverized, and in the panic that ensued the majority of customers had fled, though stampeded would be a better word. The great majority did not pay their bills. Eighty-three customers had claimed injury. Three hundred and thirteen had called to complain of ruined clothing, though the restaurant seated only 170 guests. Sixty-two complete sets of silverware had wandered into the street all by themselves, never to be seen again, and another thirty-nine sets had pieces missing. The carpet and subcarpeting were ruined and would have to be replaced from wall to wall. Some fixtures in the restrooms had been destroyed. Corporate attorneys predicted total losses approaching $700,000.
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