Wildcase - [Rail Black 02]

by Neil Russell

  Vintage Jake. That’s why I like him . . . and also why I stay away from the movie business.

  “And you don’t believe this FBI chick, Huston, was bullshitting you?”

  “I’ve thought about it, and the answer is no. To a Fed, seppuku comes easier than sharing, and she was as cool as an academy handbook. Not even a hint why she and a small army were picking sand out of their teeth in Victorville. But when it came to Chuck and Lucille, even her hair twitched. She was going to have to report something, and she didn’t have a starting place.”

  “That’s why you caught the Upside-Your-Head Express. And it wasn’t a subordinate who got carried away. That was her call all the way.”

  I didn’t know whether that added to or detracted from my opinion of SAC Huston, but while I was thinking about it, Marisol reappeared on the beach, her matador pants wet to the knees. She smiled, waved and headed toward the house. A couple of minutes later, I heard a shower come on.

  Jake refilled our glasses. “So Maywood and the chief decided they had no choice but to call in the cavalry. You.”

  I nodded. “Even so, I had to pull it out of Yale.”

  “Cops,” said Jake. “Sometimes they’re so busy being clever, they miss the butler with the candlestick. But don’t give them any marks for coming clean. They knew that once you found out Chuck and Lucille were dead, you’d get involved. It’s what you do—help friends. What brought them out of the closet was that they couldn’t take the chance you’d stumble around and knock over the good crystal . . . or maybe use that media empire of yours to make noise. So they tried buying you off by letting you see a little of the crime scene, then told you nothing.”

  “The cop half-Monty.”

  “Probably less. Think about it.”

  When it hit me, I was irritated. My only excuse was that no matter how many violent deaths you’ve seen—and my list is unpleasantly long—unless you deal with man’s inhumanity every day, it takes time for the shock to dissipate and the narrowing of focus to subside. The Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders could have been holding auditions in another part of the Brando house—or on the other side of Lucille’s train car—and I might not have noticed.

  “By the time you got the tour, every piece of paper, every check stub, probably even the cars were gone, am I right?”

  “Goddamn it.”

  “Not your fault,” Jake said, but it didn’t help.

  “They couldn’t have known I’d call Manarca. And I was on a clean phone, so somebody had him tapped.”

  Jake wasn’t even mildly surprised. “Probably for being comped a Snickers. It’s one of my biggest hard-ons. Internal affairs has a budget, so they have to make cases. Doesn’t matter if they’ve got a department full of choirboys. There’s no glory in shoving it up the ass of some patrolman, and if you mess with the brass, you end up working the men’s room at LAX. So they’re always on detectives. Especially the creative thinkers. I ever retire, I’m gonna work pro bono just representing gold shields against IA.”

  He drained his glass. “I appreciate the opportunity to see Malibu by moonlight, but I think it’s a long shot slicing up your friend had anything to do with Chuck and Lucille.”

  “Long shot, I’ll give you. But cops don’t usually set out to kill one of their own.”

  Jake stared at me, hard. “Really? Those the rules in Rail World? Give me a break. Whatever Manarca’s into, gold-plated asses are probably on the line. When you wandered in, it gave them an opportunity to do some spring cleaning. But it was either a hurry-up job, so they missed, or a very skillful cutter.”

  “The implication being it was a message.”

  “There’s an old saying: You hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras. Got doubts? Ask the guy who got sliced.”

  I intended to.

  Jake took the yellow chopper and went home. But first, he called a security team to meet him in Santa Monica and escort him the rest of the way. He lives in one of those gray stone, faux-embassy palaces on Sunset that tour guides make their living pointing out. It has a fancy architectural pedigree and is filled with priceless Western art, but the only thing that matters to the gawkers is that some half-famous starlet once chased a lover down to the wrought-iron gates and emptied a .38 into him.

  The joke at the time was that all you needed to know about who was in the right was that the victim was a producer. Jake got a jury to agree and ended up with the house as his fee. But as Richie Catcavage once observed, “It’s always bittersweet for Jake when an asshole dies. The air’s a little fresher, but it kills off a whole line of billing.”

  Jake said he’d move into his pool house for a few days because it was easier to lock down, and he could come and go through the back. That was definitely going to cut into his sex life because even rich, powerful and with one of the best plastic surgeons in LA, he freely admits that driving a date up that long driveway increases his batting average several hundred points.

  He also said he didn’t think Chuck and Lucille’s investments were anything but conventional, but he’d take a closer look. And he’d call a former federal prosecutor he knew and see if he could rustle up a profile on SAC Huston. Something that might indicate what she was working on.

  I knew that wasn’t going to bear fruit, but I didn’t tell him. I had a different plan. I also needed to go back to the Brandos with a clear head and fresh eyes.

  The Metaxa hadn’t settled comfortably, and I suddenly realized I hadn’t had eaten since Denny’s. As I was sorting through a stack of menus next to the kitchen phone, Marisol came up behind me.

  “I heard Jake leave. I hope it wasn’t something I said.”

  I caught the faint aroma of tangerines, which seemed perfect for her and turned. She was barefoot, and her hair was still damp, and somewhere she’d dug up a pair of gold-monogrammed, white silk pajamas that would have been loose on Charles Barkley. Apparently, D. D. hadn’t missed any dessert carts. She’d rolled up the sleeves and cuffs and double-wrapped a red terry-cloth bathrobe belt around her waist to keep everything in place, but there was still way too much fabric and way too little girl.

  “Very Michelin Man, don’t you think?” she said, turning to model.

  “You look dazzling. Hungry?”

  “What are my choices?”

  “At this hour, pizza or pizza.”

  “Garlic ... but only if you’re going to eat it too.”

  “You’re on. How about some chopped tomatoes?”

  “Excellent. There’s a fair-sized wine collection downstairs. I’ll see if I can come up with just the right rojo.”

  She trotted off in a wave of rustling silk, and I picked up the phone. I was actually a little surprised to find a dial tone. Malibu has a Johnnie’s, which, for my money, is the best pizza in LA, but as soon as the guy answered, he had attitude. “This the Shoulders place?” he snarled.

  “There a problem?”

  “About four hundred and seventy bucks worth. You’re off service.”

  “Mr. Shoulders is dead.”

  “Yeah, I heard. So’s his address “

  I’m not a Luddite, but don’t get me started on caller ID. But it was either principle or my growling stomach. “You take American Express?”

  * * * *

  “At sixty bucks a slice, you better keep eating.”

  Marisol had her mouth full and a tiny piece of tomato on her chin. She looked terrific. She raised a glass of Bosconia Gran Reserve. “To Johnnie’s,” she said. “May their ovens last a thousand years.”

  We clicked glasses and sipped. I took a napkin and wiped away the tomato, then bent forward and kissed her forehead, then her lips. It was like putting a match to gasoline.

  Only one other time in my life had this happened. And I thought that when I buried her, I’d buried it as well. I knew we’d both felt electricity at the CAA reception, but this was beyond attraction. This was explosive and, in a way I can’t describe, painful. I wanted her like no woman I had wanted since my wife’s death,
and I felt her body shudder all the way down. I’m not so sure mine didn’t do the same.

  I don’t know where her wineglass went, but we suddenly became such a part of one another that if she had been stuck with a pin, I would have jumped. I was so much bigger than she was that I completely enveloped her, and somewhere in the back of my mind I worried that she might be too fragile. But if that were the case, she gave no indication.

  She unwound the folds she had put into D. D. Shoulders’s sleep attire, and her torrid Mediterranean skin came against mine. I realized that somehow I had also gotten undressed, and now she drove her mouth against mine so hard I tasted blood. She arched her back violently, thrusting her pelvis against my stomach. I felt her wetness...then her hand...guiding me into her.

  And then, suddenly, I felt a burning in my eyes. The kind men aren’t supposed to feel. And I pushed her away. I hadn’t thought about it; it just happened. I saw the shock on her face and looked away. I stood up. I don’t know who was more surprised, but I do remember how cold the air suddenly got.

  “Why?” she choked out.

  I didn’t have an answer. In truth, I did, but there weren’t words for it. At least none that would have made any sense. But I couldn’t continue. I wasn’t ready for this kind of intensity, this kind of loss of control. And if I let myself go . . . gave in to the moment... it would change everything. And I would lose her. As certainly as I had lost Sanrevelle. Differently, perhaps, but just as absolutely. This was not a moment of passion that ends with a romp and a cigarette. This was the emotional edge. Where peril lived, and the abyss awaited. And like a wary tightrope walker, I had made the fatal mistake: I had looked down.

  I heard her get up and go downstairs. I dressed and was looking out the window when she came back up, wearing her wet matador pants and jacket and carrying the rest of her outfit, including her shoes. I turned around, but I didn’t recognize her. Her face had changed.

  “In my country, a lady does not do what I have just done. It was wrong, and now I have paid for it. I should thank you for being so much stronger. Please do not see me out. I couldn’t bear any more shame.”

  And then she was gone. I turned back to the window. A pair of pelicans cruised low across the sand, then turned and headed out to sea. As they disappeared into the darkness, I heard a car start. It sounded like a BMW, and the driver was having difficulty getting it into gear.

  * * * *

  8

  Two Latins and a Tango

  DECEMBER 16, 1944

  SOUTH CHINA SEA

  FIFTY-EIGHT MILES SOUTHWEST OF HONG KONG

  Ensign Fabian Cañada let the neck strap catch his binoculars and continued scanning the darkening horizon without them. He’d always had better night vision than anybody he knew, which had served him well hunting coyotes in the San Gabriels and later, as a rookie patrolman, walking a beat in downtown LA. But even superior eyesight couldn’t see something that wasn’t there.

  For twenty-three hours, the Casablanca-class aircraft carrier, USS Resurrection Bay, had been making lazy, twenty-mile loops at dead slow off the Chinese coast, and there was still no sign of the pair of seventeen-foot speedboats, four sailors and eight Marines they had put in the water just after sundown the previous day. Now, as last light again faded, and the massive flattop became invisible against the moonless sky, they had no choice but to run dark yet another night in the event a Japanese patrol entered the area. Or worse, the landing party had been captured and compromised.

  Captain Hackin hadn’t sugar-coated it. “I don’t give a shit if you see somebody flashing our call sign or hear your mother yelling Lou Gehrig’s shoe size, until we can see again, you don’t answer a goddamn thing. Got it? We’re so far up the devil’s ass, King Kong couldn’t reach us with a fistfuck.”

  So it looked like for the next several hours, the only chance a returning boat had of finding home was by colliding with it. But despite the danger, Hackin had reaffirmed that they would hold their position until 0730, a full half hour past sunrise. Then, boats or no boats, they would have to haul ass. With no destroyer escort and their Hellcats and Corsairs tied down tight, they were a tiger without claws, and they had already pressed their luck to the extreme.

  Casablanca-class carriers or CVEs weren’t designed to be tip-of-the-spear strike vessels to begin with. Sardonically referred to as “Combustible, Vulnerable and Expendable,” they were hastily built, lightly armored and undergunned. They might have been called warships, but they weren’t much more than a five-hundred-foot runway strapped to the Staten Island Ferry.

  When the Bay wasn’t shuttling men and machines to forward bases or running shakedown cruises for new personnel, her job was to lie an hour’s flight time off the main fleet and replenish the attack carriers with aircraft and pilots lost in battle. This trip, she also carried 850 hollow-eyed Marines who had seen the horrors of Tarawa and Guadalcanal and would soon be called upon to make their next blood donation on a sprit of volcanic rock most of them would have been hard-pressed to spell... Iwo Jima.

  As a result of her ever-changing missions, everything about the Bay was transitory—and crowded. Paint peeled, homesick graffiti covered the walls of the heads, and, from engine room to flight deck, a thick cobweb of hammocks draped her superstructure. With few recreation choices, gambling ran rampant, and you were likely to encounter men shooting craps or a session of High, Low, Jack and the Game anywhere there was space to squat. The spit-and-polish navy of recruiting posters was half a globe and a hundred thousand lifetimes away. This was what world war looked like three gut-grinding years in.

  It wasn’t much better for the officers. Fabian had grown weary of rotating a smelly bunk with two other ensigns, so he now slept most nights on one of the starboard artillery batteries. The guns’ steel shielding deflected all but the strongest winds, and the ocean brushing the hull forty feet below drowned out the endless sounds of sixteen hundred sweaty, uncomfortable men jammed into too small a space. His reward for braving the occasional downpour was a modicum of privacy and a few private hours under a canopy of a billion South Pacific stars.

  A yeoman with afresh pair of eyes arrived on the bridge to relieve him, and Fabian stepped into the pilothouse. Blackout screens covered the outside glass, and the skin of the duty officers and enlisted personnel took on a jaundiced hue under the dim, yellow lights. Fabian lit a Chesterfield and inhaled deeply.

  From across the room, a voice called out. “Hey, Cañada, I need you to win a bet for me.” It was Commander Bennett, the ship’s executive officer. “I say the LAPD doesn’t give a shit if a guy can’t find his ass with both hands, they hire pretty boys like you ‘cause the movie bosses don’t want their million-dollar stars busted by horse-faces. Am I right? “

  “That’s part of it,” Fabian shot back. “We also gotta service actresses who need their itch scratched. That’s why they issue us two sets of cuffs—one regular, one mink.”

  Guys laughed, and a magazine came flying in his direction.

  “Hey, Fabe, take a look at this, will ya?” Lt. Luca La-Paglia, late of the Bronx, was hunched over the chart table. Despite having enlisted all the way back in 1941, Pags was still struggling to master basic navigation. In his defense, he’d been an aviator until shattering a vertebra during a hard landing at Guam, but as far as the surface navy was concerned, a pilot couldn’t find his dick unless you painted an arrow on his chest. Pags had people’s respect for pulling strings to get sea duty rather than fly a desk at Pearl, but it was a running joke that if you were hungry, you didn’t try to follow him to chow.

  “What is it?”

  Pags was looking at a well-worn book filled with columns of numbers. “The tide tables don’t match the position computation. I think somebody fucked up.”

  At that, Bennett yelled out, “Hey, Flyboy, careful you don’t drop a nut doin’ math. Some of them figures go all the way up to three digits.”

  Pags ignored him, “See what I mean, Fabe. The only way you get this f
ix is if you’re readin’ across the wrong line.”

  Fabian ran his finger along the page Pags was indicating, then did a quick mental check. “Christ, it looks like some tired motherfucker started with the wrong basis, so everything afterward was off.”

  The other officers hurried to the table, their earlier levity replaced by looks of concern. After a moment, Bennett put his finger on two sets of initials penciled next to the solution. “And some other tired motherfucker just okayed it.”

  Pags looked at his fellow officers. “You know what this means.”

  “Yeah,” said Bennett, “somebody’s gonna get court-martialed.“