Nighttown

by Timothy Hallinan

  Polished floors, very bright lighting, shops everywhere, with some of the clothes pushed toward the cute end of the spectrum: Korean cartoon heroines, animated superheroes, and some sort of Asianized Yogi Bear, offset by clinically clean cookware with a high gleaming-knife ratio, and, everywhere, makeup, with all the operatic fragrance that makeup brings. Not many people visible, but a lot of audible, if echoing, conversation.

  “Got you,” Ronnie said on the phone. “Browse around a little.”

  I looked at things I didn’t want for a couple of minutes, feeling as though time were standing still, until Ronnie said, “Nobody. Not the door you used, not the other door, either. Come on up.”

  Even though it was clear no one was watching me I gave the place one last look out of force of habit, a customer trying to figure out where some shop had moved to, and got onto the escalator, very conscious of not looking back over my shoulder. Two stories above me, in the food court on the top floor, the attractive young woman from McDonald’s looked down at me.

  “Pictures of the kids,” Ronnie said when we sat at the table she’d chosen. In front of her sat a little flying-saucer-looking disk with some colored lights on it. It would blink when the order she’d placed at one of the food stalls was ready. She pushed her phone over to me.

  “Pretty good,” I said, flicking through them. “Couldn’t get the guy outside, huh?”

  “I had no idea he was with them until it was too late. I got the kids coming out, before they passed me, but I couldn’t turn and shoot as they clustered around that guy. By then your friend in the clown makeup was looking at me, anyway.”

  “She was pretty alert.”

  “Good thing she’s so irritable. She gave you a look I thought was going to freeze you to your seat, so while she was distracted I put the lens right on her in burst mode. Maybe ten shots in a couple of seconds. By the time she looked up, I was eating fries. So what’s the story?”

  I pushed the envelope at her. “More than twenty-five K,” I said, “with the same to come. Take it home and put it in the box up the chimney.”

  She was looking at the envelope as though it might contain a pit viper. “What do you have to do?”

  “Same old.”

  “Don’t give me that,” Ronnie said. “You were about to blow her off. Your spine was as stiff as—”

  “It was,” I said, “but that was before I saw the money.”

  The flying saucer began to blink and vibrate. It did everything except play “Melancholy Baby.” I picked it up and said, “Which stand?”

  “Bulgogi House,” she said. “Second from the left, but you know what?” She put her hand on my wrist, international language for stop. “It’ll wait. Who cares if it gets cold? Why so much money?”

  “I’m not a cheap date,” I said. “Stinky told her—”

  “It’s too much. I mean, what could that be a percentage of, the Hope Diamond?”

  “Don’t worry.” It sounded hollow, even to me. “I’m good at this.”

  She looked at me for a long moment, successfully suppressing whatever fondness she might have felt, and then said, “I’ll get the food.” She took the flying saucer, and I watched her go, her shoulders high and tight with anger. This was going to be a difficult discussion for her, which meant it would be rough for me, too.

  But still. We were confronting something that had to be confronted, something impossible to ignore.

  When I’d met her, a year and a half or so earlier, I was being forced—by the crooked cop I’d told Orange Hair about—to investigate the murder of a blackmailer. The blackmailer happened also to be Ronnie’s husband, so naturally she was the prime suspect, although that didn’t keep us, on the erotic level anyway, from eating each other alive at the earliest possible opportunity. As the relationship expanded upward to the higher chakras and turned gradually into love, Ronnie unspooled lie after lie about the most commonplace things: where she came from, how she got to California, what she’d done before we met, not even bothering to avoid contradicting herself. At the same time, my work put her into situations that most people would find stressful, and her responses made it obvious that she possessed the finely honed set of the skills and instincts necessary to live outside the law.

  Despite her inventive dishonesty about facts, emotionally I would have trusted her with my life. I’d even shared with her a secret even my daughter and my former wife didn’t know: my apartment in a Koreatown building, a slum on the outside and polished perfection within. For years it had been my ultimate hidey-hole for the day when a lifetime of transgressions would finally catch up with me, and now Ronnie and I played house in its big rooms with their polished wooden and marble floors. We’d been sitting on one of those floors late on a wine-sodden Christmas Eve two months earlier when she’d finally presented me with her secret: the two-year-old son, Eric, who had been taken from her by his father, a New Jersey mob doctor. He had made it clear that she’d never see the boy again, so naturally I promised that we’d get him back. Men. When will we learn?

  Some crowd somewhere in the world erupted into tinny cheers at a kick or a goal or something in a soccer game on one of the big flat screens that hung over the food court tables. I avoid watching soccer because to me, all the games are the same game: kick the ball and run around and then kick the ball and run around again. As a result, I was looking down at the tabletop, still damp from its last wipe-down, and wondering how to navigate the upcoming conversation with Ronnie when Louie the Lost said, “You were clear all the way.” He pulled out a chair and his nose wrinkled. “Jeez, so this is where all the garlic goes.”

  “Right,” I said. “Like the Italians have never heard of it.”

  He was looking past me, at Ronnie. “What’s she getting?”

  “Whatever she ordered, I guess.”

  “Jeez,” Louie said, “don’t go out on a limb or nothing.”

  “It will be pork or beef, it will be spicy, it will be accompanied by pickled cabbage.”

  “Shoulda eaten at McDonald’s.” He looked around the place. “Lotta Koreans.”

  “That’s why they call it—”

  “So what did she want? How much did she give you?”

  “Ten thousand,” I said. Louie was a friend, maybe my best friend, but the twenty-first-century code of thievery, unlike Robin Hood’s, says that you steal from whoever and keep it to yourself. “I need to know whatever you can find out about a house. It was built back at the beginning of the twentieth century and it’s called Horton—”

  “You don’t want me,” he said. “You want Architectural Digest.”

  “Get someone. You had some smart UCLA kids a couple of years back—”

  “Still got ’em,” he said. “’Course, they’re different kids now.”

  “How much an hour?”

  “Same as before. Seventy-five.”

  “How much of it do they keep?” I asked.

  Louie smiled. He had a cherub’s smile. “How much in the envelope?”

  “I want all there is about the house, including descriptions, pictures, floor plans, applications for architectural changes, and absolutely everything about the guy who built it, named Horton, I suppose. And I’m especially looking for anything hinky in the family, any crimes, murders, misdemeanors, divorces, in-law problems, addictions, black-sheep kids, property fights, sudden windfalls, challenged wills, whatever. Anything that seems even vaguely interesting. Anything that says conflict or—”

  “You’re gonna need a lot of kids,” Louie said.

  “Get me the best ones you can, the ones who work fast,” I said. “Envelope or no envelope, money’s tight.”

  “Right,” Louie said. “I forgot.” He knew what Ronnie and I were going through. As a telegraph, someone whose job was to acquire and sell information about who and what and when in the criminal world, Louie had already put us in
touch with Francie DuBois, the disappearance specialist who was working out the very expensive kidnapping and subsequent total and untraceable disappearance of Ronnie’s child. Now he looked up, apparently surprised, and then stood, a crook with manners.

  “You forgot what?” Ronnie said. She was carrying a huge tray, stacked with plates, which Louie gallantly took from her, glancing uncertainly at the food they contained. “Hey,” he said, his eyebrows going up. “Spare ribs.”

  “What did Louie forget?” Ronnie said. Louie had left after eating most of the ribs and apologizing for it a couple of times while he swiped the tip of a finger through the remaining sauce.

  “Forget?” I said. “How would I know? He’s the one who forgot—”

  “What you were talking about, Junior. You do remember what you were talking about.”

  I said, “Ronnie.” I took a long breath, a delaying tactic while I tried to find a different response, but none came. “We need the money. There’s no point in discussing it.”

  She said, “There’s nothing that can’t be discussed.”

  “I keep hearing that.”

  She leaned forward with her elbows on the table and cupped her face in her hands. It was such an abject pose that I reached across and circled one of her wrists with my fingers, and we sat there like that for a minute. I could feel the glances of people at other tables.

  Into her hands, she said, “I’m so sorry.”

  “Why? Because you want your son back? Is it your fault his asshole father keeps the kid behind stone walls? Is it your fault he’s got gunmen the way some people have Dobermans? What are we supposed to do? Walk away? We knew when we started to talk to Francie that it was going to run into some bucks. None of this is news.”

  “I didn’t like that woman with the plastic hair,” she said. “I don’t like how much money she’s offering.”

  “Neither do I,” I said. “But I’m going to learn everything I can about her and those kids between now and the time I go into that house, and Louie’s got his honor students pulling as much history as they can find.”

  “I don’t know.” She rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands. “How are you even going to figure out who she is? I mean, she was Miss Halloween.”

  “Through the three kids she had with her,” I said.

  “And how are you going to learn anything about the kids?”

  “I think I’ve got exactly the person,” I said.

  She withdrew her wrist and sat back, eyeing me with an attitude it was hard to mistake as admiration. “You always do that,” she said. “Men do, in general. The harder something is likely to be, the more confident you act. If you were a woman, you’d be laying the whole thing out, asking for ideas, looking for something you might not think of by yourself. But no, not men. You assume you’re carrying around everything you’ll ever need. No wonder we go to war all the time.”

  “It doesn’t help me to say things out loud,” I said, knowing how irritated I sounded. “It helps me to think about it and then go do whatever it is.”

  “And look at you,” she said. “You haven’t gotten killed yet. I suppose that’s a kind of success.”

  “Relax. It’s an old house. No one lives there, no one has lived there for months. I’ve even got a key. I mean, what could go wrong?”

  6

  Positional Good

  “Whoops,” said the person behind me.

  It felt like my back was ten feet wide and had a target painted on it. I said, “That is so unreassuring.”

  “It’s this gun. Goes off if you breathe on it.”

  “Then why don’t you take your finger off—”

  The person behind me said, “Hic,” and a bullet whirred past my ear.

  “Listen,” I said, “Take your goddamn finger off—”

  The person behind me hiccupped again, but this time without a potentially lethal aftermath.

  “I’m going to hold my breath,” the person behind me said. “That doesn’t mean I’m not here. Don’t move, don’t turn around.”

  I said, “The best thing is to stand on your head and drink a glass of water. I’ll hold the gun if you—”

  “Hic,” said the person behind me. “Don’t think I’m not dangerous just because I’ve got hiccups.”

  “No,” I said. “The scariest part of the movie is always when the killer gets hiccups. Makes my hair stand on end every time.”

  “You’re making that up.”

  “And you call yourself a crook,” I said.

  “I’m the one with the gun. You’re the one with his hands in the air. Hey, put your hands in the air.”

  “Death and hiccups,” I said, putting my hands in the air. “They’ve gone together for centuries. That’s why the deadliest man in the old West was called Wild Bill Hiccup.”

  “Was not. It was Hic-Hickock.”

  I said, “A common mistake, but one that I, as a working criminal, would be ashamed to make.”

  “Wait a minute, wait a minute. How am I supposed to drink water while I’m standing on my head? You’re making fun of—”

  “Not at all. Just do it, you’ll see. Look, I’ll even go get the water. Hell, I’ll hold the gun.”

  “You stay right there. No, don’t turn around.” She, because it certainly was a she, hiccupped again.

  “At least you haven’t got your finger on the trigger.”

  “I can put it back a lot faster than you can turn and jump me. Don’t talk. I’m holding my breath and counting to ten.”

  “Signal if you get stuck.”

  “Be quiet.”

  I was quiet. After what must have been a very slow count, she said, “How’d—hic—you know I was here?”

  “I smelled that fucking baby powder in the hall. Had to be something that came down from Miss Daisy’s room. I figured, the doll.”

  “Not bad,” she said.

  “Not good enough to know you were here the whole time I was.”

  “This is true.”

  “In the basement.”

  “Sure, why not? Oh, right you didn’t go down there. Afraid of the big spidies? The ratsy-watsies?”

  I said, “Can I turn around?”

  “I’m still—hic—thinking about that.”

  “Look, we’re obviously in the same situation. My neck itches.”

  “Well, don’t scratch it. What situation?”

  “Neither of us has it. Both of us have, essentially, failed.”

  There was a pause. “What do you mean, failed? I have the doll, that’s what you smelled, right?”

  I said nothing, and a few seconds later, I heard, “Okay, neither of us has what?”

  “I don’t know, and neither do you. Or if you think you know, maybe you could share it with me.”

  “So you don’t know what it is and you think I don’t know, but you’re certain I don’t have it? Hic.”

  “The only reason for you to stay here when I came in was to see if I got it. You could have left a hundred times while I was banging around upstairs and the house was creaking—”

  “Boy, doesn’t it?” she said.

  “So by a process of really low-grade reasoning, that means you don’t have it, either. Even though you’ve got the doll, since I could smell the damn thing. You’d have been out of here. So what about—”

  “I’m thinking. How do I know you don’t have it?”

  “Because I was looking for the damn doll, same as you. Let’s make a deal. If I can teach you to stop your hiccups, we’ll go sit on those awful chairs in the dining room and talk. You can keep your gun on me.”

  “Wow,” she said. “What a generous offer. I can keep my—hic.”

  “Up to you,” I said.

  “Nobody can cure my hiccups. I get them whenever I’m nervous, not that I’m nervous now. My whol
e life. My last year of high school, all I did was dream about the prom. I was going to dance with the guy I liked if I had to ask him myself. Oh, forget this, you don’t want to hear it.”

  “You’re the one holding the gun. You can talk about whatever you want.”

  “So he finally came over and asked me, after I’d like stared at him like an owl for like an hour, and I hiccupped through the whole song. Everything I’d wanted to say to him all year, it had a hiccup in the middle of it. When the song ended, he patted me on the shoulder. Like a puppy. He never spoke to me again.”

  “He was probably a jerk. Most of us were.”

  “He’s a mortgage broker now, so, yeah. Anyway, sure, you’ve got a deal. You cure my hiccups and we’ll go sit and talk. And you promise me that I can pat your pockets and wherever else I want to pat without you trying to get my gun.”

  “I wouldn’t touch that gun if I was wearing full-body armor.”

  “So what’s the big secret?”

  “Okay. First, just breathe normally.”

  “Don’t get funny or anything. I can breathe and shoot you at the same time.”

  “Breathe evenly and slowly, a little more deeply than usual. And pay attention to the place where your hiccups start, down like in the middle of your chest. And then, just before you hiccup, say, ‘Now.’”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Try it.”

  She let a couple of more hiccups sneak by, and each time I said, “Missed it. You’ve got to concentrate.” And then, after a silence so long my back began to itch, she said, “Well, hell, let’s go sit down.”

  “It was obviously not the doll,” she said. “It took me two minutes to find out that none of them, even in top shape, is worth that much.”

  I said, “How much?”

  She shook her head, which is what I’d have done if she asked me the question. She was still holding the gun, although at this point it was just a cautionary totem. We were sitting on opposite sides of the crappy Formica table with the doll, which she hadn’t yet let me touch, lying on its back between us, its wide, dusty eyes fixed on the ceiling as though it was hoping that a boy doll might rappel its way down, paying out line like a spider, to rescue her.