Sands and Beadle drove O'Hara to the bank, where he withdrew fifty thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills, then dropped him back at his residence. With the bag of money on the seat between them, Sands steered out the circular driveway and down the street. "That one about pissing out of the tent was great," he said.
Beadle grinned proudly, leaned back in the seat, and laughed.
Along with the rest of the passengers on the flight from Los Angeles, Sands and Beadle waited anxiously at the baggage area. Finally, the suitcase in which Sands had put the fifty thousand dollars made its way onto the conveyor belt. Sands breathed a sigh of relief. He reached down, picked it up, carried it outside.
Sitting in his car in the parking lot, Sands counted out fifteen thousand dollars for the grinning Beadle, who, as he was handed each stack of bills, thumbed them like a bank teller.
"I never thought it could be that easy," Beadle said.
"It's a great life, partner."
After dropping Beadle off at the Plush Pony, Sands drove to an exclusive jewelry store at the Hilton Hotel and purchased a gold necklace for cash. On his way to Monica's apartment, he was careful to maintain the posted speed limit, mindful of the money he was carrying in the trunk. He parked the car in the carport and hurried upstairs with the suitcase. Monica was sitting in front of the television. She was wearing a shortie nightgown.
"Hi, babe," she said.
He opened the suitcase, poured the cash onto the floor in front of her. She stared at the money for a moment, then came to her feet and embraced him.
Sands picked up the phone, dialed a number.
"Who are you calling?"
"Big Bruce," he said to Monica. "You do the blow-off." He handed her the receiver, moved to an extension phone, picked up the receiver as O'Hara answered.
"Mr. O'Hara. This is Barbara Harris of Harris and Goldfarb. You needn't say anything over the phone, sir. I'm calling to let you know that I have received the item you sent and that my client and I are fully satisfied. You will hear nothing of the matter ever again." As she spoke, Sands fastened the gold necklace around her neck.
"Uh...thank you. Thank God this thing could be worked out," O'Hara said.
Monica took Sands's hand, thanked him with her eyes.
"Thank you, Mr. O'Hara," she said. "I'm pleased that the matter was resolved discreetly. Goodbye, sir."
"Yes. Goodbye. And thanks again."
The phone clicked. Sands and Monica set their receivers down quietly. He moved to her. Reaching behind her, he slipped his hands under her panties, pulled her to him. "Thirty-five thousand buckaroos, lady."
They kissed passionately. "I love the necklace."
"What should we buy, hon?" he whispered as their lips parted.
"What I want only costs thirty-five dollars."
"Name it."
"A marriage license," she said.
Their eyes met, and for a moment Monica's face held the precise expression he had imagined during the interminable days and nights he had spent in his prison cell, the totally feminine, submissive, nurturing, loving, trancelike look that had been designed by the forces of nature to bring men to women.
"Let's get married right now," he found himself saying.
"Do you mean that?"
"I've never meant anything more in my life. I love you.
She hugged him desperately. "I don't ever want to be away from you," she said.
TWELVE
Sands drove to City Hall to get a marriage license, then to the Plush Pony to pick up Beadle, the best man. They drove down the Strip to the Church of the Heather Wedding Chapel, a tiny building with a tiny steeple, located in a corner of the gigantic parking lot surrounding the Sands Hotel and Casino.
Inside, standing before a miniature altar which faced empty miniature pews, a tuxedoed hillbilly with a greasy pompadour and liquor on his breath administered brief vows. Sands and Monica kissed.
Outside, Ray Beadle popped the cork on a bottle of champagne he had brought with him, and the three drank from the bottle on the way back to the Plush Pony. There Beadle dragged them to the crowded bar and ordered drinks for the house. He introduced them to the bar regulars, including some ex-cops who remembered Sands. As the night wore on, and as Tex, the purple-lipped cocktail waitress, brought endless rounds of drinks and bottles of champagne to their table, Eddie Sands felt he was back in the real world, for the first time since he'd been released from Terminal Island.
It was six-thirty in the morning.
Novak pulled the G-car to the curb in front of Haynes's home. Haynes shuffled out the front door with a steaming cup of coffee in each hand. Novak unlocked the door from the inside, shoved it open. Haynes handed a cup of coffee to Novak, climbed in. Novak pulled away from the curb.
In a few minutes they were out of the residential area and headed out of town.
Novak sipped his coffee, felt its warmth spread to his insides.
Red Haynes blew on his coffee. "With Bruno dead, we're no closer to making a case on Parisi than we were a year ago," he said.
Novak nodded. "You're right."
"And after what happened to him we'll probably never be able to convince anyone to testify against Parisi."
"We'll find someone," Novak said.
Haynes muttered something, blew on his coffee a couple of times, took a sip.
Novak steered onto open highway. The trip to Los Angeles took about four and a half hours. A mile or so south of the Los Angeles Coliseum, Novak steered onto an off-ramp to Central Avenue, a wide street extending through the Watts area, L.A.'s black ghetto. They cruised slowly along the avenue past run-down pool halls, shine parlors, liquor stores, storefront churches, and boarded-up establishments of all kinds. As they passed groups of people lingering on the sidewalks, they sensed hostile looks.
Haynes pointed across the street to a car lot with six or seven passenger cars on it, most of them several years old. "There it is," he said. The faded wooden sign read "Mel's Used Cars and Rental Service." There was a small house trailer in the middle of the lot.
Novak made a U-turn and pulled to the curb in front of the place. They climbed out of the G-car, approached the trailer. The door was open. Inside, sitting at a card table reading a newspaper, was a bald, bespectacled black man who looked to be about Novak's age. He wore a faded black suit, white shirt, and bow tie. They stepped inside the trailer. The black man set the newspaper down.
Novak reached into his suit jacket for his badge.
"You don't have to show me no badge," the man said.
"Is this Mel's Rental Service?"
The man nodded. "That's right. And I be Mel."
Novak stepped to the card table, showed a card on which he had noted the license number of the car he had seen leaving the Stardust parking lot. "We'd like to find out who rented the car that bears this license plate," he said as the man eyed the card.
"Like to help you out, but all the leasing records done burned up in a fire."
Haynes and Novak looked at each other.
"So you don't know who you've leased cars to?" Haynes said.
"Not until all the records get restored."
"When will that be?"
"Might take years. Fire is a terrible thing."
Novak glanced about the office. There was not a scrap of furniture in the room.
"How long have you been out?" Novak said.
"Outta what?"
"Out of the joint."
"How can you tell I done been in the joint?"
"Same way you could tell we're cops, I guess."
Novak turned, walked out of the trailer. Haynes followed. They moved toward the G-car.
"You gonna just walk away?" Haynes said.
"Yes."
"I say we go back in there and turn that monkey upside down."
Novak unlocked the driver's door. "He's just a body paid to sit by the phone. They wouldn't leave him there if he knew anything."
They climbed in the G-car. Novak st
arted the engine.
"A license number used to be a good clue," Haynes said.
"Time's are changing."
"For the worse."
The trip to Terminal Island Federal Prison took less than a half hour, straight down the freeway to its end. There, in the prison administration building, Novak and Haynes went through the usual routine of showing identification, signing various logs and forms. Finally, a young khaki-uniformed prison guard showed them down a well-waxed hallway to a door marked "Assistant Warden." He opened the door. A man with short, thick arms and a fireplug torso stood up from a cluttered desk and introduced himself as Ralph Dandridge. Novak noticed that the collar on his short-sleeved white shirt was frayed.
Dandridge offered seats.
Novak sat down in a chair in front of a barred window. Below, on a diamond which was part of the prison recreational yard, men dressed in blue denim played softball. "We're looking for someone who we believe may have been released from here recently," he said. "We're trying to put a name with a face."
"What else can you tell me?"
"I know what the guy looks like. He might be a confidence type. That's about it."
"When do you think he was released?"
"Within the last couple of weeks. Just a guess."
Dandridge nodded. He turned, grabbed a thick three-ringed notebook from a shelf behind his desk. He handed it to Novak. "This has a mug shot and identifiers on every inmate released during the last three months." Novak turned pages. In the center of each page was a photo of a sad-looking man. Page after page of sociopaths, deviates, freaks, killers, all of whom, dressed in anything other than prison denim, would be indistinguishable in a crowd. After turning fifty pages or so, Novak found the man he had seen leaving Tony Parisi's room at the Stardust. The name printed on the top of the page was Sands, Edward L. "This is the guy," he said.
Dandridge left his seat, came around the desk to see. "Eddie Sands," he said. "Las Vegas police detective. Or was. He was released on parole August twenty-ninth."
"What can you tell me about him?" Novak said.
"When he first came in we put him in protective custody because he was an ex-cop," Dandridge said. He moved to a metal filing cabinet and pulled open a drawer. "But he asked to be let out on the yard right away. I couldn't believe it." He pulled out a file, carried it back to his desk, and sat down.
"What happened?" Novak said.
"Strangely enough, there were no problems," Dandridge said, opening the file folder. "Even though he was an ex-copper, nobody on the yard so much as gave him a dirty look."
Red Haynes cracked his bony knuckles. "You saying the man had some horsepower behind him?"
Dandridge nodded. He leaned back in his chair. "Instead of making him eat dick, the other prisoners kept out of his way right from the beginning. They showed respect like they do to the heavies. This was right from the get-go."
"Did he hang around with anyone in particular?" Haynes said.
"The man was a loner. Or at least he was while he was in here. But when he needed something he went to the guineas-the Mafia assholes. I've got quite a few of 'em here. This Sands had access. In fact, they even assigned him a slave."
"A slave?" Novak said. "A gofer. Somebody to carry messages, run errands for him. That kind of shit. His name is Lopez, Pepper Lopez. He's a doper."
"We'd like to talk to him," Novak said.
"Lopez was released on parole a couple of days before Sands. He served five years."
"Who visited Sands while he was in here?" Novak said.
Dandridge flipped pages in the file again. He stopped. "A woman named Monica Brown visited him almost every other week...and he received a lot of letters from her." He picked up a pen and wrote on a note pad. He tore off the sheet and handed it to Novak. It read: "Monica Brown. 37654 Tropicana Lane, Las Vegas."
"What's Sands been up to?" Dandridge said.
"Believe it or not, that's what we're trying to figure out," Novak said.
Dandridge closed the file folder. "Nothing would surprise me. His parole release came earlier than it should have. It looked like a fix. Don't quote me on that."
THIRTEEN
Novak and Haynes stopped at Utro's Cafe in San Pedro for a quick lunch of hamburgers and beer, then headed north on the Harbor Freeway. Because Novak had once been stationed at the FBI's Los Angeles field office, he found his way easily to the San Diego Freeway and then the Santa Monica Freeway.
A half hour or so later, Novak steered off onto Santa Monica Boulevard, a street that was an odd mixture of old office buildings, yuppie establishments – health-food, sporting-goods, and frozen-yogurt stores-and faddish restaurants that he knew were mostly second-rate and overpriced. A block or two west of the freeway he pulled into the parking lot of a convenience store. Inside, he purchased a box of confectioner's sugar. At a pharmacy across the street he purchased, from a skeptical pharmacist, a small empty glass vial. He jogged across the busy boulevard back to the G-car and got in behind the wheel. He opened the box of sugar and filled the vial with the white substance, then snapped the plastic cap on the vial and shoved it into his jacket pocket. He tossed the box of sugar into a trashcan a few feet away.
"What was that all about?" Haynes said.
"Insurance papers."
"No one could ever accuse you of not being prepared," Haynes said.
Novak started the engine, headed west toward the ocean. He could smell the salt air, and at the end of the busy street he could see the opening to the Santa Monica Pier.
Where the boulevard ended at the ocean, Novak turned left and steered along a section of commercialized coastline burdened with liquor stores, ten-seater bars, and plateaus of apartment houses which, like monuments to generations of greedy builders, effectively blocked one another's ocean view. South of the Santa Monica Pier, Novak drove down an incline leading to the beachfront. He parked.
Novak and Haynes climbed out of the sedan and made their way along a trash-strewn bicycle path past a building which Novak remembered from his time in L.A. as a halfway house for drug addicts. The beach itself was crowded with bathers of all ages.
A hundred yards or so down the strand, Novak spotted a pair of young policemen sitting at a table in front of a small fast-food stand facing the water. The young officers, one white and the other oriental, were dressed in the beach-beat uniform of short pants, tennis shoes, T-shirts, and baseball caps bearing police emblems. Novak showed his badge. "We're looking for a hype named Pepper Lopez," Novak said.
"We know him," the oriental cop said. He hoisted a small bag of french fries and poured some into his mouth. He pointed in the direction of the run-down fast-food and souvenir shops near the pier. Sandwiched among the dying establishments was a bar with a flaking wooden sign above its door. The Mermaid. The cop swallowed. "He hangs out there with all the other dopers. What's he wanted for?"
"We just want to talk to him," Novak said.
"Have you ever met him?"
Novak shook his head.
"He's been around. If you want something from him, you'll need a hook."
"Any suggestions?"
"He's always arrestable," the other cop said. He pointed to his forearm. "Tracks."
"What's it like in there?" Haynes said.
"A toilet. Ex-cons, hypes, muscle freaks. If you're going to take him out, you'll need backup."
The beach cops finished their last few bites of lunch as they followed Novak and Haynes along the strand to the Mermaid. Novak stepped through the front door into the semi-dark and was hit with an odor combining beer-soaked wooden flooring, marijuana smoke, and armpits. The cops aimed flashlights at an eighteen-seater bar filled with men and women who looked as if they just stepped off a prison bus.
Lopez was sitting near the rear door.
"Don't shine that light in my face, pig," said a drunken woman with a beehive hairdo. She wore a halter top and had a large tattoo of what looked like a spider on her left shoulder.
Ca
utiously, Novak moved down the bar toward Pepper Lopez. Haynes followed. The police officers beamed the flashlights here and there. As Novak reached Lopez, he flipped out his badge. "Let's go outside and talk, Pepper," Novak said.
"What for?"
"Let's go outside."
"You don't have to go nowhere, Pep," said a bearded, long-haired man sitting near him.
"He didn't do nawwtheeng," said a Mexican man with a Fu Manchu mustache.
A muscle-bound black man stood up slowly from the bar. Deliberately, he moved in front of Haynes. He leaned forward until they were nose to nose. "Why don't you mothafuckas get yo asses outta here and leave us the fuck alone?" he said.
Haynes punched him squarely on the nose. Others at the bar jumped up. The cops swung nightsticks. People fell down, shouted. Glass broke. Lopez pushed off the bar stool and ran for the back door, and Novak tackled him. He dragged Lopez to his feet, snapped handcuffs on his wrists.
Haynes backpedaled past him, connecting with rifle-like jabs as the black man, bleeding but game, stalked him in a wrestler's stance. "Come on, spook, you wanna fight?" he jeered. "C'mon, spook." The oriental cop swung his nightstick and struck the black man on top of his head. The black man dropped, unconscious.
Holding Lopez by the collar, Novak dragged him past the others and backed out the front door.
Outside, a police car squealed to a stop. Two officers with nightsticks hurried out and huddled quickly with the beach cops.
"Thanks," Novak said, and gave a wave. The beach cops waved back. Novak and Haynes moved away with Lopez as the cops, nightsticks at port arms, rushed back into the bar.
In the distance, there was the sound of a siren.
Red Haynes made his way slowly through the stop-and-go traffic of downtown Santa Monica. Novak sat in the backseat with Pepper Lopez, who had to lean forward because his hands were handcuffed behind his back. "What are you arresting me for?" Lopez said.
"You have tracks. That's a violation of your federal parole."
"You didn't even look at my arms before you arrested me.
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