During the noisy greetings, Jetsam, standing by the canapé table, turned his back and whispered, “I guess you know that skunkhead is here” into the wired mike strapped to his chest.
Ivana walked uncertainly to the doorway with her most seductive smile, but she didn’t make physical contact until Basil held out his arms and grinned. Then she staggered forward and kissed him on the mouth and said something sotto in Russian.
“And this is the young man I am hear-ink about,” Basil said. His eyes went immediately to Jetsam’s shoes, obviously trying to determine which held the prosthesis.
Jetsam stepped forward with an uneasy smile and said, “Nice to know you, sir.”
“We are friends!” the Russian thundered. “You shall call me Basil. We have much to talk about. Many thing to share. I must hear all, but first I must have vodka!”
Ivana had already poured half a crystal tumbler full of cold vodka, no ice. She smiled saucily when she handed it to him and led him over to the hors d’oeuvres table, and he winked back at her and swallowed half of it down in one gulp.
Hector felt relieved. He wanted desperately to leave and head to the moderately priced local motel he always used on nights like this. In fact, he’d forgotten about the possible appearance of Dr. Maurice until the doorbell chimed again. Then he remembered.
He was shocked to see the former physician. Dr. Maurice was sepulchral, his belly receding to his backbone. In the past year the former physician must have aged ten or more. He had a face full of scraggly hair that he never bothered trimming. The hair on his head was colorless and sparse, drooping over extra-large ears, and a stray nose hair hung down nearly to his upper lip. The lines in his cheeks and brow had turned into deep crevices, but the saturnine eyes told it all. They were filmy and red, darkly rimmed, and had sunk into hollow shadows. The blue of the irises was washed out and ran to a grayish hue, like the rest of him. He was a fading-to-nothing gray man with tiny, jagged, darkened teeth.
He coughed and sniffled for a good twenty seconds before he nodded almost imperceptibly, by way of greeting.
“Dr. Maurice, I presume,” Hector said, trying a little levity to mitigate the shock he knew must be registering on his face, and thinking, Welcome to the wonderful world of chemistry.
Dr. Maurice said, “I want five hundred dollars before I step foot in there.”
“Sure, Doc,” Hector said, reaching into his pocket and peeling five Franklins from the roll that had been allocated to pay for the party. He’d set aside two thousand, and now hoped it would be enough to get him through this night of the iguanas.
The former physician tucked the money into the inside pocket of the threadbare sport coat he wore over a black T-shirt. Then he entered.
Hector led him into the living room where the Russian was stuffing his face with smoked salmon and caviar, and the host announced, “Basil, I have a surprise. This is Dr. Maurice Montaigne, who is known to other guests in this room!”
Basil lumbered forward with a little bow, as though he were meeting the patriarch of Moscow. Ivana staggered toward Dr. Maurice, so drunk she’d made up her mind to get him alone and ask him to look at a suspicious sore on the lip of her vagina. Jetsam froze in place, standing by the canapé table, a crostini halfway to his mouth.
Basil’s thunderous voice was quieted a bit by the august presence of the infamous surgeon, and he said respectfully, “Dear Doctor, I am waiting three years to meet with you. I am full of eagerness to learn about your work.”
Jetsam used that greeting as a chance to turn his back and whisper into the mike, “Maybe I can bluff my way through this. Or maybe not.”
Now Jetsam remembered Flotsam’s admonition to know where the exits were, and to be ready to use anything at hand as a weapon. He saw Dr. Maurice staring at him but saying nothing.
Hector and Basil were looking from the doctor to his putative former patient and back again. Only Ivana was oblivious to the doctor’s reluctance to greet the man whose foot he’d purportedly amputated.
Then Dr. Maurice simply said, “I have never seen you before in my life.”
“Come on, Doc,” Jetsam said, feeling the heat in his face and the chill in his gut. “A year ago. Clínica Maravilla, in T.J. Remember?”
Dr. Maurice looked at Hector and at Basil and said, “I have never seen this man before now.”
“What is happen-ink here?” Basil demanded. “Hector, I do not like this! What is go-ink on here?”
Jetsam tried an affable smile. “Doc, you look like you might be doing a little too much of that crack you smoked down there at the clinic. Remember when we talked about how the T.J. crack was better than—”
“I have never seen this man,” Dr. Maurice interrupted. “And now I’m leaving here and driving home with my fee. Don’t try to stop me.”
“Hector!” Basil bellowed again. “What is this about?”
“He’s confused. Look at him,” Jetsam said to Hector, who stood frozen, a cigarette dangling from his lips, his eyes moving from one man to the other in utter bewilderment.
Dr. Maurice grew white around the corners of his mouth, and spittle formed on his lips. His sunken eyes opened wide when he glared at Jetsam and shouted, “Confused? Confused? I’m not confused! I know who you are, Judas!” Then he turned to Hector and said, “I know who this is!”
“Who?” Hector said.
Dr. Maurice said, “He’s a treacherous, sneaky paid informant for the California Medical Board!” He turned again to Jetsam and said, “Haven’t you people persecuted me enough? I have no license to practice, and I can’t make a living! Isn’t that enough? What do you want from me, a pound of flesh?” He picked up a knife from the canapé table and said, “Here, take it! Take my flesh, but leave me alone! All I want is to live out my life without you people hounding me! Hounding me!”
Ivana screamed when Dr. Maurice raised the knife overhead, but Hector grabbed the frail upraised arm, taking the knife away and saying, “Calm yourself, Doc! Calm yourself!”
“All I’ve ever tried to do is help people by giving them what they want from me!” Dr. Maurice cried out. Then he screamed at Jetsam, “Judas!” And began weeping.
“Are you trying to run a game on me?” Hector said to Jetsam. “Something’s sideways here!”
“Well, yeah, bro,” Jetsam said. “The doc’s all sketched out from smoking crack. He’s totally thrashed and in, like, the final stage of addiction. He don’t know his ass from the sushi pile over there. He’s the thing that’s sideways.”
“But I know you, Judas!” Dr. Maurice sobbed as Hector led him to the door.
Then Hector turned to Jetsam and said, “You stay right here till we find out what’s going on!”
Hector Cozzo wasn’t aware that the moment Dr. Maurice had parked his rusted junkyard Pontiac and shuffled up to the entryway, Sergeant Hawthorne of the Hollywood vice unit had realized who this new guest was. And he’d set in motion an emergency escape plan for Jetsam by using the tactical frequency to request a patrol unit from West Valley Division, code 2.
After having ordered his peg-leg guest to remain where he was until he could get to the bottom of things, Hector took Dr. Maurice out to the front porch to calm him down. It was there that he encountered pandemonium.
“Stop!” a voice yelled, scaring the living crap out of both Hector and Dr. Maurice. “Stop, or we’ll shoot!”
Hector was about to throw up his hands and plead for his life when he saw a tall man with a suntan like the peg-leg guy’s running along the sidewalk, where he was overtaken right in front of Hector’s house by a uniformed police officer with a flashlight in one hand and a gun in the other.
The cop yelled, “Down! Get down on your knees, hands on your head, or I’ll blow you away!”
That did it. Basil bellowed something in Russian and came running outside, followed by Ivana, who grabbed her purse but didn’t bother with her massage accoutrements. They both raced toward Basil’s limo, where the dozing driver had been jarred out of his sn
ooze by all the commotion.
The uniformed cop’s partner ran onto the scene in front of the house and handcuffed the tall blond guy. Then he turned to Hector and Dr. Maurice and said, “Did you see him throw a gun anywhere?”
“No!” Hector said. “We just heard you guys and came out to see what’s what, is all. We didn’t see nothing.”
“I want to go home!” Dr. Maurice wailed to Hector Cozzo.
“Where’s the gun?” the cop demanded of his handcuffed “prisoner,” now proned out on his belly.
But the prisoner responded, “I want my mouthpiece, copper!”
The doorway was filled again. Jetsam pushed past Hector and Dr. Maurice, saying, “I’m outta here, bro. This fucking party sucked!”
He fled from the residence in all the confusion just as everyone else had done, even though Hector yelled weakly, “Hey, man, you stay here, goddamnit! We gotta talk! Who the fuck are you?”
“I told you who he is!” Dr. Maurice screamed in Hector’s face, his breath smelling like a dead rat. “He’s a paid informer sent by the California Medical Board to torment me! They won’t be satisfied until I hang myself, just like my former colleague Dr. Cepeda!” And then, without realizing it, he actually got part of it right when he said, “You fool! Can’t you see? This is a sting! It’s been set up by the medical board to entrap me into revealing damaging information so they can send me to federal prison! You fool! You fool!”
The limo carrying Basil and Ivana was driving away into the night, and Dr. Maurice’s putative patient had run across the street and disappeared into the darkness. Hector Cozzo was left alone on the porch with a psychotic crack addict who was quaking in terror from the noisy police drama taking place on the street in front of them. Hector stood helplessly, trying to figure out what had just happened to him, and how the fuck he could ever explain this Bedlam meets Encino to Markov?
When the handcuffed man was being led away by the police, Hector heard him yell, “If I hadn’t dropped my roscoe, you never woulda taken me alive, copper!”
“I want to go home!” Dr. Maurice wailed again.
Hector found it all incomprehensible. He kept wondering how he had come to this, finally deciding it was Hollywood. The insanity of Hollywood will eventually overwhelm you, he thought, and you’ll submit to nutty schemes like the one with Basil and this quack.
Hector gave the former doctor a shove in the direction of the street and said, “Get the fuck outta my sight, termite teeth.”
* * *
Sergeant Hawthorne drove silently back to Hollywood Station, contemplating how he would cover this aborted mission in his report to the captain, but it was hard to think with his passengers babbling excitedly about the evening adventure.
“Dude!” Flotsam said, “When we saw that zombie heading for the front door, we knew he had to be either an extra from Walking Dead or Dr. Maurice. And the sarge here, he comes up with an idea to turn it all into a fire drill to get you outta there with no hassle.”
“The guy had a nose hair seven inches long and a mouth full of licorice bites!” Jetsam said. “I was fascinated.”
The vice sergeant felt exhausted, demoralized, wiped out. He said listlessly to Jetsam, “Actually, I already had that escape option cleared with the West Valley watch commander, if needed. I didn’t want Hector Cozzo to find out you’re a cop, in case there might be future possibilities with this operation.” He added, “But there won’t be. My big idea has turned into—”
“I don’t know, Sarge,” Jetsam offered by way of consolation. “I think I convinced Cozzo and Ivana that the doc’s brain has liquefied. And I made that offer to work with Hector for free as an assistant, didn’t I? Maybe he’ll call me.”
Sergeant Hawthorne said dejectedly, “Pimps don’t have interns. Hector Cozzo will hire you as an assistant when Ivana joins the Little Sisters of the Poor.”
“I stuck to the script,” Jetsam pointed out, fishing for compliments. “Considering I found myself in a degenerate version of Circus Maximus, with a real heavy freak-and-mutant act on the program.”
“You were slammin’, dude!” Flotsam said. “Hollywood Nate, with his SAG card and all, couldn’t have done no better. We got in the van, and listened. I loved the way you go, ‘He’s confused, look at him’ when Frankenstein’s stepdad is all acting out and screaming like Saturday night in the drunk tank.”
“Did you hear the way I delivered my lines?” Jetsam said. “I tried to stay way George Clooney cool.”
“You were totally cool, dude,” Flotsam assured him. “Red carpet all the way!”
Jetsam was all smiles from Flotsam’s accolades and from the 80 proof vodka he’d sampled, and he said to his partner, “You ain’t no slouch neither, bro. I could hear you from inside the house when you yelled out stuff to the West Valley coppers. Where’d you come up with that retro dialogue about your mouthpiece and your roscoe? Was that, like, method acting or something?”
Flotsam said, “Hollywood Nate got me watching Turner Classic Movies. Those lines came from Edward G. Robinson. Or was it James Cagney? You know, bro, the next time we do this, we should demand an A-list Winnebago for our dressing room.”
Sergeant Hawthorne felt a fierce headache coming on, coupled with an incipient death wish for his two jabbering companions. In a feeble effort to momentarily escape, he tried blocking out the inane chatter by tripping down memory lane, back to his life’s best days at UCLA. Back when his biggest worry was getting tickets to football and basketball games, and trying to date a busty classmate. Back in those halcyon days when he used to argue with his acerbic and cynical older sister about his impractical academic choices, using retorts like “There’re plenty of things I can do to improve my life from the study of Philosophical Analysis of Contemporary Moral Issues!”
What would she say if she could see him right now? Feeling like an utter burnout at age twenty-eight, after his half-baked scheme involving apotemnophilia had blown up like a Taliban IED. A scheme that the Watch 5 sergeant had told him to his face was bizarre and harebrained and would never work. At last, here he was, exhausted, with two surfer goons he hoped he’d never see again.
He could almost hear his sister say to him, “So, our brainstorm du jour blew up in our face, did it? Thad, honey, you’ve always had the intensity and drive of a Vincent van Gogh. But I’m afraid your life’s self-portrait will look like it was painted by Cheeta the chimp.”
TWELVE
Dinko awoke early the next morning. He showered and shaved and dressed up better than he ever had when he was accompanying his mother to Mass. Lita wore her best dress, a creamy white one with long sleeves and an empire waist, and flats, her only shoes, besides sneakers, that weren’t for use on a stage while straddling a pole. Even Brigita Babich went a little dressier than usual in a summer pastel, cut just below the knee but allowing room for an expanding middle.
“My, don’t you look beautiful, Lita!” Brigita said. “And look at my handsome son, all spruced up for a change.”
“Thanks, Mom,” Dinko said. “You look very beautiful, too.”
“Now you’ve gone too far,” Brigita said. “Let’s go to Mass.”
She had found Dinko and Lita watching television when she’d returned from bingo the night before, but there’d been something different about them, a certain look when their eyes met. She correctly suspected that this new friendship had turned into something more for them while she’d been trying to catch bingo numbers on all four corners of her card.
They attended the 9:00 Mass in English at Mary Star of the Sea, a church with a diverse parish that also offered Sunday Masses in Croatian, Italian, and Spanish. Brigita was interested to see if Lita and Dinko would go to Holy Communion. She wondered if they felt they were in a state of grace or not. She assumed that Dinko would go to Communion regardless, because despite her most strenuous efforts, he’d never been a devout Catholic like she and his father had been. She figured that Dinko would take Communion just for show even i
f he’d committed every mortal sin up to murder, without even bothering about confession and absolution.
When it was time for Communion, Brigita got up and walked down the aisle toward the altar, but both Dinko and Lita remained in the pew. Brigita thought that was evidence that they’d been intimate, and that Lita needed to confess to a priest before accepting Holy Communion. Brigita liked that. It meant that the girl respected the rules of the Church even if she’d broken a law of God.
That made Brigita wonder how many times this child had broken other laws of God, coming from who knew what kind of life in Mexico, and then as a dancer in a Hollywood nightclub. Still, Lita hadn’t been disrespectful and taken Holy Communion while not in a state of grace, and that had to be counted in her favor. Brigita was already fond of this girl and liked the positive effect she was having on Dinko, but where would it lead? He’d known her for only a few days. It was very worrisome.
Upon returning home, Brigita said, “You two can change and feed Ollie while I squeeze some orange juice and get brunch started.”
Lita said, “Please can I help? My mother, she like to cook also. She can make very good chipotle roasting beef, when she got the money for the beef. And she like to make arroz con leche for finish. You know the one?”
“I do,” Brigita said. “Rice and condensed milk, either warm or cold, with cinnamon on top. We used to order that when we’d go for Mexican food at Ports O’ Call. Remember, Dinko?”
“I remember,” he said, but really he didn’t. He found himself not wanting to remember anything that had happened before the last few days. Before Lita, that was another life, all of it. He was beginning anew.
“I’ll buy some chipotle chilies next time I go to the market,” Brigita said. Then: “When was the last time you saw your mother, Lita?”
“When I have to come here,” she said. “It is three months when I leave Guanajuato, and I ride the bus to Tijuana for one week and meet the coyote, and then I cross with ten other people.”
“With that big suitcase?” Dinko asked.
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