The Straight Man - Roger L Simon

by Roger L. Simon

  Two minutes later I was wondering what all the effort was about. The only thing Nestron distributed was stationery, and the closest it got to the pharmaceutical business was the paper for prescriptions.

  I got back in my car feeling dizzy and unfocused. I knew there were things I should do, leads I should follow up, but I couldn't concentrate on them. It suddenly occurred to me it was time for my regular appointment with Nathanson, the one he had canceled. I decided to go there anyway. The sky became darker and darker as I headed west toward Santa Monica. By the time I was descending into the canyon, it seemed like it was practically night, although, on my watch, it was only a minute past two. Had it been scheduled, I was just one minute late for my appointment. But as I approached Nathanson's house, it was clear someone had replaced me. A dark, bearded man was crossing from his car, a ten-year-old Mercedes, to the psychiatrist's office. I parked right behind him and jumped out. As if driven by unconscious forces, I rushed past him and into the door. Nathanson looked up, startled, from his desk as I entered.

  "What, Moses?"

  "I know this isn't my appointment."

  "Yes, you didn't reschedule."

  "I want to know why you canceled it."

  "Another client had an emergency."

  He turned toward the door where the dark, bearded man was standing with a baffled expression. "It's all right," the man said in an extremely deferential voice. "I'1l go."

  "No," said Nathanson, "that won't be necessary."

  "I also have to know what you were doing in Koreatown."

  Nathanson hesitated. "Give us a couple of minutes," he said to his other patient.

  "Yes, of course, Doctor." He exited, shutting the door carefully behind him.

  "Sit down, Moses."

  "No, I'll stand." I glanced over at his desk. The matches had vanished from atop the book from the Board of Medical Examiners.

  "Your eyes are crystallized. The woman. How are things with the woman?"

  "Bad."

  "I thought so. Tell me about it."

  "What? Tell me about what you were doing down there with that reverend."

  "Center yourself in the here and now. What is going on with you at this very moment?"

  "Don't give me that psychobabble! What the fuck is going on?" I stood over him, looking down at his chair as if I were ready to shake it.

  "I can't tell you. And if I could, I wouldn't."

  "Why not?"

  "Because I'm the wrong place to hear it."

  "What?"

  "You have to figure this out for yourself. No more gurus, Moses."

  "I don't want a guru. I want the truth!"

  "If you want the truth, you're going to have to see what's around you. Start focusing on the present. Concentrate on your breathing."

  "Is that all you have to say to me?"

  "At the moment, yes."

  I stared at him for a second. "I'm finished with therapy and do you know what else? I'm going to see you get arrested!"

  "Good. Now you're taking control."

  I walked out, slamming the door in his face. I continued right past the other patient in the used Mercedes and into my car, turning on the motor and roaring out of there. I was halfway to Koreatown before I knew where I was going. But when I did, the cobwebs were gone from my brain. All my senses were heightened and my body was alert. It was as if I had just spent a year in the dark and I was finally coming out into the daylight.

  I pulled up across from the New Inchon and went in. It was the middle of the afternoon, the dead hour for restaurants, but there were still some men at the bar knocking down the well drinks. I slipped in next to two of them and ordered a shot of Glenlivet.

  "You know, it's not just the labor costs," I said to them before the bartender even came back with my drink. The two men looked at each other, naturally confused about what this gringo was saying. "I mean the quality's not bad. But nobody's going to tell me that Gold Star and Samsung are better than Sony and Hitachi, at least not yet. So there's got to be some reason Korea's the next wave, the next industrial power. And you know what it is? Faith. Plain old-fashioned faith." The bartender poured out my scotch and passed it in my direction.

  "Thanks, Joe .... You know what I mean?" I said to the guys.

  "Yes, yes. Sort of." The one nearest me, a bulbous fellow in a red tie, smiled in embarrassment.

  "What it is," I continued, "is that Korea combines Oriental patience with Christian steadfastness. Now, you tell me one other culture with that combination."

  They looked at each other as if to say where did this guy get off the boat. Only they were the ones off the boat and I was the hometown boy.

  "Not all Koreans are Christians," said the bulbous one. "Some are Buddhist, some are Confucian."

  "Same difference. Look, tell you what I mean. Who are your biggest evangelists in Koreatown today? You know, the top dogs."

  "Dr. Chung," said bulbous.

  "Dr. Wu," chimed in his buddy.

  "Chung? He's the one with the Mercedes stretch limo, isn't he?"

  "No, that's Wu," said bulbous.

  "Yeah, right. He's the one with that church over on . . ."

  "Dr. Wu's church is not here. It is in Seoul."

  "Yes, but he has the office building on Eighth and Crenshaw," said the buddy.

  "That's just my point. A businessman. He knows the Lord wants us all to prosper. Right? Your health." I downed my scotch and exited.

  Five minutes later I was in front of the Hankyu Investment Center on Eighth and Crenshaw. I walked past a realty, a brokerage firm, and a coffee shop called The 38th Parallel into the lobby and found the building index by the elevator. There was no listing for a Dr. Wu or a Reverend Wu or indeed for a religious organization of any sort. But my eye did stop on one particular name: the VIP Leasing Corporation. It was the same Bahamian outfit that owned Carl Bannister's tony Malibu property and it happened to be the penthouse suite.

  I got into the elevator by myself and pressed "P." It was eleven floors up and I was going along pretty well until we got to five and the elevator stopped. The doors opened and the Chu's Brothers got in.

  "Hey, smart dog," said the verbal Chu. "How are you this afternoon?" He took out a .38 and pointed it at me.

  "Getting worse by the moment."

  "We gonna change directions. See what's happening in the basement."

  "Yeah, I hear that's where they embalmed Sid Vicious."

  "You like punk music, smart dog. Good." He pressed the emergency button, stopping the elevator.

  "Particularly religious punk music. It's inspirational."

  "Yeah. In tongues." He said the last word long and hard as his brother grabbed my neck in a choker and pulled me back against the wall. The verbal Chu laughed softly and pressed "B." We were going down.

  The basement was a series of corridors leading toward a boiler room. The Chu's pushed me all the way in the back to a laundry and shoved me inside, shutting the door behind us.

  "Well, Brother Chu, we gonna kill him here and carry him out? Or carry him out and then kill him?"

  "Kill me here," I said. "Then dump me in Joshua Tree National Monument. That's a great place. In the sixties they burned somebody alive there. In a hearse."

  "Flaming hearse . . . wow," said the verbal Chu.

  "Of course, there are other possibilities. There's the cactus under the Hollywood sign. An actress committed suicide that way, stripped naked. And then the PCH. Back in the thirties, a German director named Murnau went flying off a cliff there in his car while his boyfriend was sucking his cock."

  "I like that," said the silent Chu, opening his mouth for the first time.

  "And wait a minute .... How about the bushes in Elysian Park? That's where Angelo Buono—you know, the Hillside Strangler—used to drag women to rape and kill them. And what about the immortal Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker?"

  "Yeah, heavy metal Satanism!" said the verbal Chu.

  "Whips and chains. Can you dig
it? There are so many possibilities in this world. Like you could garrote a guy with a spike or. . .check this." I picked up one of the towels from the top of the washer. "Even a common household item can be great for torture. The Chinese used water, right? And the Shah of Iran, I hear his boys used to wrap ordinary electric wire around the balls of his prisoners and give 'em a jolt. Let 'em know who was really boss. Great, huh? How about this?" I dangled the towel at arm's length by my side.

  "The white flag. They say a bull will only charge at red but. . . what about a bully?" I jiggled the towel again. The verbal Chu looked over at it and I rushed him, sending him sprawling and the gun flying behind the dryer. I dove on him, pushing off his sunglasses and sticking my fingers in his eyes the way I had been taught in my Tae Kwan Do course. Then I rolled over and kicked his brother in the face with the back of my heel. It was all about fighting dirty. Before they knew what had happened, I was crawling across the floor and grabbing the gun barrel, which was sticking out from under the bottom of the machine. I jumped to my feet, training it on them, feeling my hand shaking and face flushed with blood. I hated violence. It always made me want to throw up.

  "All right, fuckheads, who're you working for?"

  Both Chu's stared at me dazedly, blood dripping from the nose and mouth of one and from the eyes of the other.

  "C'mon, guys, you don't want to suck lead from this baby." I held the .38 closer for their edification. The Chu's still did not react. I kicked the nearest one, the silent partner, in the face again, catching him right across the cheek-bone. His head snapped back and I heard a crack.

  "Reverend Wu," he said. "We're workin' for Reverend Wu."

  "That's more like it. What did he want you to do?"

  More silence.

  "What is this'? The last rerun of I've Got a Secret?" I started to raise my foot again.

  "We don't know. We don't know," the silent partner gasped. The verbal Chu had been reduced to nothing but unintelligible moans, rolling on his back and clutching his eyes in pain like a punk Oedipus. "We never met him."

  "You never met the guy you're working for?"

  "We take orders from his helpers."

  "What orders?"

  "Anything they want. They give us a clothing allowance. You know, for Melrose."

  "Clothes," I said. "Jesus." I stared down at them. Two Korean punks beaten to a pulp. For the first time, I was seeing the Chu's in clear light without their dark glasses, even if it was only the green fluorescents of the laundry room. At the most, they were fifteen, maybe sixteen years old—depressing, vicious little creeps, like bit players in a Twisted Sister video.

  "Don't turn us in, mister, please," said the silent brother.

  "My uncle'll kill us .... Right, Douglas?"

  He looked over at his brother, but Douglas was too sick to respond. He spat a tooth out on the floor.

  I shoved the gun under my jacket and left. It wasn't until I was riding up the elevator again that I noticed the sleeve was spattered with blood. My best jacket, I thought. Christ. And then I smiled as I rubbed the blood in so it blended with the multicolored weave of the Italian wool. I was just like the rest of them: another clothes horse.

  I adjusted my tie and stepped out at the penthouse, emerging in the foyer of VIP Leasing. It was the kind of all-purpose office reception area that could have been anywhere in America and, by now, anywhere in the world—avocado green shag carpet, ersatz walnut paneling, and mock Renaissance brass table lamps. The receptionist was hunched over a high-tech telephone installation, pushing buttons and trying to look busy.

  "Hello, I'm Phil Bettelheim. I'd like to see Dr. Wu if you don't mind." I took out one of my handy-dandy little business cards and handed it to her.

  "Does he know you?"

  "I don't believe he does. I'm with the INS—the Immigration and Naturalization Service." I said it slowly so she got it. "One of your employees, a—I pretended to glance at ascrawled address—"Douglas Chu of Laveta Terrace, has recently become a winner in the new California Lottery."

  "He has"?" Her eyes widened.

  "Fortunately or unfortunately; You see, a couple of weeks ago, when a certain Jorge Esperanza won the grand prize, the Roswell Baking Company of Torrance was considerably inconvenienced when it was determined that Esperanza was an illegal alien, resulting in an investigation of their company that sent roughly eighty percent of their employees back to Mexico and Guatemala. Now, I'm sure-"

  I would've continued, but by now the receptionist was on the phone, jabbering away urgently in rapid-fire Korean. In somewhere around thirty seconds, Dr. Wu's personal secretary, a carefully coiffed woman in a silky Hong Kong—style slit skirt and long vermilion fingernails, arrived in the foyer to escort me to his office. Not that I could've gotten lost. The heavy bronze doors with the marble handles at the end of the corridor were a dead giveaway.

  Wu himself was about five feet tall and sat behind a desk about twice as wide. He reminded me of pictures I had seen of Deng Xiaoping at state receptions, his feet dangling about six inches above the floor. He wasn't as smart as Deng, but he wasn't bad, and the minute he saw me, he signaled for his secretary to get out, as well as one of his "helpers," a snakelike individual wearing a white turtleneck and an ankh who had been leaning against the bookshelf trying not to pick his teeth.

  "Sit down," he said, not taking his eyes off me. I sank into a soft leather armchair that lowered me down to near his level. "You're not the INS. You don't look like them, you don't dress like them, and your eyes are too intelligent. What do you want?"

  "I want to know why you killed Mike Ptak."

  He didn't flinch a centimeter. "You're the second person to ask me that this week. I don't kill people. I'm far too rich for that."

  "That sounds good, Doctor. But it doesn't jibe with my experience and I'm sure it doesn't jibe with yours. When it's not a member of their own family, people usually kill to advance or protect a position. My assumption is you killed Ptak—or more likely had him killed—to protect a position."

  "What was that?"

  I took a flyer. "About twenty-five million in aid funds."

  "That's a lot of money."

  "Yes, it is."

  "And then you had to get rid of a Romanian bellhop named Vasile Nastase, who, because of his religious devotion, you were able to manipulate to your own ends."

  "Because of his devotion?" He shook his head. "What is your name? You are a private investigator, no doubt." I told him. "Well, Mr. Wine, let me explain some of the simple facts of life to you. When you are doing God's work, you have nothing to fear from a Mr. Ptak or from anybody else. The New Evangelical Church of the Eastern Gate is an entirely nonprofit religious organization headquartered in Seoul, Korea. According to the laws of that country and of this one—the separation of church and state admired by every schoolchild—no one is entitled to examine our books or to inspect our accounts unless they can show evidence of a felony, like mail fraud. That can take years. Indeed, it usually does." He half smiled.

  "And VIP Leasing?"

  "A small real estate holding company. A church is entitled to hold real estate, is it not? Compared to the Vatican, we are but a dot in the universe."

  "I find it interesting that the real estate you're holding was the Malibu residence of a Dr. Carl Bannister, whose recent murder was connected to the other two deaths."

  "Interesting, yes. But hardly conclusive. And I understand there has been an arrest in that regard. Now, Mr. Wine, you must excuse me. If you think I had something directly to do with these deaths, you must prove it for yourself. But I assure you, you are wasting your time." He stood up and bowed to me. "And if you do insist on carrying on these investigations, it will be at your peril. Not because of these alleged crimes, but because every organization has things to hide. It is the nature of human society. Your culture is filled with corruption. So is mine. So is the Russian and so, no doubt, are the Chinese, the Italian, and the Greek. You may think it is good to root it out, b
ut many lives depend upon these structures, whole systems. The person who tries to purify the world must bear the consequences of his idealism."

  "I appreciate your analysis of history, but, uh, one thing is troubling me, Doctor: the IRS. Don't they figure into this somehow? I seem to recall the Reverend Moon had some problems with them."

  "That fool." Wu frowned. "My daughter married at that absurd mass wedding of his."

  I grinned. "You mean that publicity stunt when he married a thousand Moonies simultaneously?" I glanced at the framed portrait of a young Korean girl on the bookshelf behind him. It was about a ten-year-old picture and the girl seemed around fourteen, but she was oddly familiar.

  "Exhibitionists like that deserve whatever fate they get," Wu continued. "But as for the IRS, they are no problem. You simply list your expenses and your program services on their Form Nine-ninety."

  "Program services?"

  "Education, promotion, and aid."

  "All mixed in one?"

  "Peculiar, isn't it? But in any case, Mr. Wine, it's irrelevant. For the greedy there are many better ways to hide money."

  "You mean like cash in the mail? I hear you get tons of that, particularly after a natural disaster like the Mexican earthquake. And I imagine those small checks aren't hard to convert, either. I mean it'd be hell to cross-check, wouldn't it? Lying on our income tax about charitable donations is practically a national sport."

  The Reverend half smiled again. Maybe this is what they meant about the Mysterious East. It wasn't all that mysterious.

  "So what do you do with all that cash? It's kind of tricky, walking into a bank with a suitcase of, say, ten million and offering it all at once to the lady in new accounts."

  The smile disappeared from his face.

  "I suppose you'd have to do what any self-respecting drug dealer does," I went on. "Open a business and slowly filter the money in. But you couldn't do that all at once. You'd need someplace to keep the cash while you were waiting to put it there."