by Dan Vining
Nate was across the street in the shadows. He watched as they took his gun and turned him around to cuff him. Santo was nonstop running his mouth, plea-bargaining. Nate knew what he was saying, could almost read his lips, “I work for Il Cho, call him. I work for Whitey Barnes, call him. He’ll tell you.” Johnny had sense enough not to use Nate’s name in vain. He knew he’d betrayed Nate when he’d sent him to that roof in the TMZ, probably at Whitey’s behest.
Nate wasn’t enjoying this nearly as much as he thought he would. He stepped out into the light to let Santo get a look at him. He didn’t want to rub it in, but he it was always good to let a man know who’d dropped a dime on him. Good advertising: let a CI see what happens to a snitch who gets too big for his britches and starts playing one cop against another. Get it out there on the whatchamacallit, grapevine. But what Santo had done was worse than just playing both sides of the fence, working with Nate and with Whitey, and being used by both. He’d sent Nate to the top of the N Building knowing Nate could die up there. If the squatters had clubbed Nate dead or thrown him off the roof, Santo could have been an accessory to cop murder. But that didn’t happen, no thanks to whoever had come up with the idea of a 3:00 a.m. trip to the Fashion District. So, in terms of the actual justice that often precedes the official kind, Johnny Santo was getting off easy. He’d just have his parole violated and go back to prison for a year or two where’d he get a swinging new orange wardrobe and lots of time to think. And see old friends and plan some heists.
The woman who was Johnny’s date picked now to walk away. Tucker looked across at Nate. Nate shook his head no. He didn’t care, let her go.
The restaurant that was the backdrop for this sad, predictable melodrama was the Casa Vega. It was out in the San Fernando Valley—on Ventura Boulevard, Sherman Oaks—where Nate grew up. Nate watched as a couple of high schoolers came out, laughing too loud, looking like they were on a date. It was already an old, impossible, survivor restaurant when Nate was in high school. Menudo rojo on Thursdays, beer-soaked carpet, sombreros tacked on the walls, catching dust and hiding spiders. Lots of dark corners. The Mexican ladies who were the waitresses—they seemed old to Nate back then but probably wouldn’t now—didn’t check IDs. As long as you ordered the big combo plate and tipped like an adult you could drink all night, margaritas and shots and brown-bottle Bohemia beer. One weeknight, High School Nate had been there with his crew and—though the red air was as dim as a Crow cockpit on a midnight run—he’d seen his father in the shadows with a woman. A woman-not-his wife. In a booth, a little alcove. Bodie was leaning close, laughing at something she’d said that probably wasn’t all that funny. What made it a doubled-down surprise for Boy Nate was that the woman was older than his mother by a good ten years. And not as pretty. It was about then that young Nate started drawing some conclusions about human beings, conclusions that grew harsher as time went by. He didn’t know if Bodie ever saw him that night. He left the other boys behind and got up to take a leak, went out a fire door to the parking lot, and walked home. Or somewhere.
Across the boulevard, they had Santo cuffed. Another Crow had shown up, was hovering, lighting up the scene. Nate decided to split. But then he looked down. Apparently, his feet had other ideas. His feet were taking him across the street. It was a weeknight but early evening, so the street was fully clogged. His feet had to climb up and over the bumpers of the jammed-up, nose-to-tail Feds, four lanes of them. He really hated Feds.
“What the hell were you thinking?” he said to Johnny when he was two feet away. He didn’t say it in a mad way. Nate actually sounded like his feelings had been hurt. A cop with feelings?
“Shit, I don’t know,” Santo said, sadder than sad. Then—meaning Tucker and the other CRO—he said, “Tell them, Cole. Tell them I’m your guy.”
“Well, that’s the problem, Johnny. It looks like you weren’t my guy.”
“No way, man.”
“Whose idea was it?”
“Nobody. What?”
“Who did you talk to after Il Cho told you to set up a meeting with me?”
“Nobody.”
Nate waited.
“Nobody,” Santo said again. But this time it sounded almost like, White-y.
“I’ll check in on your wife and kids every once in a while,” Nate said, turning to leave. He meant it and Johnny Santo knew it.
Santo tried to stop him. “I maybe got something for you, Cole, something big, coming from the Incas and maybe the Twenties, too,” he said.
Nate wasn’t lured. But he only made it a few feet before he stopped and came back. “Whatever it is, don’t tell it to Whitey,” he said. “I’m serious. He’ll kill you.”
www
It felt almost like a date, not that there were flickering candlelight and wine and long lingering looks. No-Name was itchy, bouncing around in his chair, not sure what this was about, wondering if he was getting fired, not having a clue how the adult world worked. He’d ordered spaghetti—the cheapest thing on the menu—after Nate had said he was picking up the check. Actually, what Nate had said was that the restaurant didn’t let cops pay, but No-Name knew that wasn’t the truth.
“You were good. On that roof in the TMZ,” Nate said.
“It was intense,” the kid said.
“What’s your name?” Nate said.
“Blake. Blake Rockett,” the other said. “Two Ts.”
“Your name is Rockett? For real?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Sweet.”
The kid looked down at his untouched spaghetti. Nate could tell he—Blake Rockett—was taking a second to appreciate what had just happened with his pilot, his CRO. Maybe he was already thinking ahead to telling someone about it—a girlfriend, or even his mother.
“Do you ever watch war movies, Rockett?” Nate said.
“Yes, sir.”
“Anytime in a war movie they have a guy, a soldier or a sailor or an airman, take out a picture of his girl back home, the guy dies in the next scene. It’s like a given. Did you ever notice that?”
“No, sir.”
“Don’t be that guy,” Nate said.
Rockett nodded, taking it to heart but not understanding what he meant.
“What’s your favorite band?” Nate asked.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Wild Oak Drive rose and curved, and curved and rose until it ran out of houses, and it was just dusty pavement and scrub brush, stunted oaks and dried-out undergrass, what the firefighters nowadays called “fuel.” Wild Oak Drive felt like a road to nowhere. It was in the middle of the city but didn’t look like it. It wasn’t all that late, but there was no one around, except for Ava behind the wheel. She was not herself. Or maybe this was who she really was. She was hurting, bruised, and not just from the crash in the garage. Over the last few days, things had gone from confusing to outright bad. Funny, but she was missing Cali. They’d snatched Cali, whoever they were. Ava was alone, noticeably alone, feeling more alone than she’d felt in a while. Loneliness usually wasn’t a problem with her, but tonight it was. It had overtaken her, like a big rogue wave.
She had Edward Chang on the line. “You’re sure about this?” she said. For now he was all she had in the way of company, which was just plain pathetic.
“Darris Laines. DL. One Thousand One Wild Oak Drive,” Chang said, never sounding more Chinese, laying it on thick tonight for some reason. Maybe he thought it made him sound more authoritative. Maybe he was getting ready to raise his price. “Can’t miss it. Twelve dollars. Keep on going.” Yep. It used to be ten.
Tonight Chang was just a disembodied voice, no picture on the dash talk-screen. “How come I can’t see your handsome, probably Asian face tonight?” Ava said. “I’m just getting a blankie on my screen.”
“Technical glitch,” Chang said. A second later, a blurry screenshot appeared on the dashboard screen,
Chang frozen at his console with a puzzled look on his face, a pic out of the memory bank. It buzzed, pixilated, disappeared, returned.
“Is that your mom in the background?” Ava said. “I always wondered.”
“Keep going. Almost there.”
A canine something-or-other—a dog or a coyote or a mix of the two—ran across the road right in front of the Hudson. Ava hit the brakes, skidded to one side on the sandy pavement. The canine hit the brakes too, looked her right in the eye across the hood, then trotted on. Peaceful coexistence.
“Keep going,” Chang said. “Go more.”
Ava didn’t go more. She stopped the car. “There’s nothing out here, Changster,” Ava said. “Tumbling tumbleweeds.”
“Around the next curve it straightens out.”
“How do you know exactly where I am? Are you tracking me?”
“You can’t miss it. It’s all lit up. Darris Laines.” Actually, what he said was It’s all rit up.
Ava set out again, steered around a blind curve. Wild Oak Drive straightened out, leveled off, and ended at a cul-de-sac, just as he had said.
And there it was.
“What the hell?” she said.
Uplighted, as if ready for its close-up, Mr. DeMille, was a one-tenth-scale copy of Griffith Observatory. It was a house, a big house, a mini-mansion if not a full mansion. And behind it and above it—a half mile away, on the downside of Mount Hollywood—was the real Griffith Observatory. It was like some kind of depth-of-field demonstration. Or an acid trip.
What sort of person wants to live in an optical illusion?
“DL. Darris Laines. Twelve dollars,” Edward Chang said.
“How did I not know about this?” Ava said.
“You don’t know everything. Twelve dollars.”
“Check’s in the mail, Chang,” Ava said and punched his lights out.
The motor courtyard out in front of the house was empty, no sign of the Bentley with the DL plates. Off to one side, separate, was a four-bay two-story garage. The garage doors were down. Lights were on upstairs over the garages. Was it the gunsel driver’s apartment? The mansion itself looked dead, deserted, even with all the dramatic lighting. It was perfect, if a fake, copycat thing can be perfect. It had the big dome in the middle with wings jutting out on either side of it, each with a smaller dome atop the end. All the domes were clad with copper. The structure itself was of poured concrete, painted white. On either side of the twelve-foot-tall front doors were five skinny windows, blacked out. It looked like a fortress, a castle. A museum. A mausoleum. A gift shop for the real deal?
Ava got out, closing the door of the Hud with her hip. Right about then—as if welcoming her—a micro-dust storm blew through, literally adding some atmosphere to the scene. She turned her head as if she’d been slapped and flipped up the hood of her catsuit and set off for the house. No neighbors, no human sounds in the night. The setting wasn’t helping her mood.
“Down at the end of Lonely Street…” she sang softly.
But maybe Cali was in there. What had the skinny gunsel said? You’ll be safe at the castle. She stopped short of the first circle of floodlight in front of the house. The closer she got, the bigger the scale of the crazy. She slipped along the front of the four-car garage. The windows in the garage door were six feet up. She could jump up and try to see if the Bentley was home but she decided it might seem undignified, if anyone was looking.
“You only have one opportunity to make a first impression,” she said, using her mother’s voice.
She thought of doing some recon, get the lay of the land—go off into the brush, circle the place to see if she could spot Cali inside—but then she looked down at her inappropriate-for-reconnaissance footwear and walked straight toward the tall, tarnished, copper one-tenth-scale front doors. Sometimes you just ring the bell. She rang the bell.
A pair of surveillance cams positioned high to the right and left opened their eyes and the entryway lights brightened. Unless it was all on autopilot, someone was home. She pictured the wily gunsel/driver looking out the video peephole and shrugging his skinny shoulders, cracking his neck, and adjusting the gat tucked under his armpit.
“This is not exactly my best angle,” she said to the cameras.
“You’re beautiful,” a disembodied voice said, immediately. “If you were any hotter, you’d set fire to my sagebrush.” It wasn’t the gunsel, that was for sure. This disembodied voice was professional-strength, a trained voice, a voice of authority. A SAG voice, or at least IATSE.
Ava was already thinking, Is that…? when the two doors opened inward and there was Dallas Raines. “Darris Laines” was Dallas Raines. He was wearing a suit and tie. And cowboy boots. At midnight.
“That’s right, it’s me,” he said. And for punctuation, right there in the doorway, he showed off his golf swing, minus a club, the most famous of his various signature moves. His younger fans, which probably included Ava, had no way of knowing he’d swiped the move from another television star who’d gone off the air forty years ago.
He was a TV weatherman. Through week after week and year after year of mostly utterly predictable SoCal weather, there he was, first on Channel 7, then on Channel 9, and then on Channel 2. When the television news converted to targeted zone broadcasting, he became his own channel, Dallas Raines and The Weather System. Somehow, he was on the air—live?—every time you looked for him. Days and night, seven days a week, year-round, Christmas Day, Yom Kippur. Most people had assumed he’d long ago been digitized and automated. “Look up!” was his signature sign-off; that and one of the best smiles in Hollywood, which was saying something. His gimmick was he meant it.
Ava said, before she thought to stop herself, “How old are you?”
“Sixty-nine,” he said, without apology. “I was twenty-three when I came to this market.” He smiled that smile. This close, it was powerful.
“Do you have a Bentley with DL plates?” Ava said.
“No, I don’t,” he said. “But would you like to come in for a cocktail?”
“It’s kinda late,” Ava said. It was nine o’clock.
“There you go!” he said, as if she’d answered Yes! He slipped his arm around her waist and—like the trophied ballroom dancer he also was—perfectly turned her toward the interior of the house. But before they made it inside, another robust gust of dry wind blew in. Dr. Raines—he was fully credentialed in his field—let go of Ava and strode out onto the motor courtyard. Fists on his hips, he glared up at the night, as if the dust devil had been a personal affront.
www
So then Ava wasn’t as lonely, or at least wasn’t thinking it about anymore.
She waited at Chrisssy’s door. It opened. Chrisssy had been asleep. It was just after midnight.
“Oh, hey,” Chrisssy said.
“Those are endearing,” Ava said, meaning Chrisssy’s flannel pajamas, sky blue with puffy white clouds. But where were the bunny slippers?
Ava came on in. She turned on a table lamp on one of the crème-colored end tables.
“What’s up?” Chrisssy said.
“You can do computer stuff, right?”
Chrisssy nodded. “I guess,” she said.
“I need you to find an address for a guy, the guy I usually use to find an address.”
“OK?” Chrisssy said.
“Ten dollar,” Ava said, imitating Edward Chang’s sketchy accent.
“What?”
“Come on, wake up, honey,” Ava said. “If you want to be a PI, don’t go to bed so much. To sleep, anyway. Edward Chang. Local. He might be Chinese, but I’ve always had my doubts. There’s a good chance he lives over a Chinese restaurant. In Chinatown. With his mother.”
Chrisssy sat at the mirrored desk and fired up her computer. A large screen on the wall in front of her came to life. Chrisssy yawned and sta
rted tapping on the keys as the keyboard lit up under her fingertips.
Ava started, “He sent me to a house up in the hills where ‘Darris Lanes’ was supposed to live. In short, he sent me—on purpose?—to the wrong guy’s house. What I asked for was fairly simple: the address of a ‘DL’ with an old Bentley. And he sends me to Dallas Raines’s house. Do you know who Dallas Raines is?”
“It’s a who?” Chrisssy said, still typing. “It sounds like it would be a what. It rains a lot in Dallas, in Texas generally.”
Ava was feeling around on the face of a small TV on a credenza in the dining room area. “How do you turn this on? It’s like a hundred years old, right?”
“The remote,” Chrisssy said. “Buttons. It’s not that old.”
Ava found the control stick on the divan. She pointed it at the TV and clicked it on and started scrolling through the channel index. Chrisssy was already writing on a pad of paper with a pen, a pen that had a plastic daisy on the end where the eraser should have been.
“There!” Ava said. On the little TV, Dallas Raines stood in front of map of SoCal. “Do you think he broadcasts from his house? All night? He’d have to. He’s always on.”
“There isn’t ever any weather here,” Chrisssy said. “Haven’t you noticed?”
“He said it could rain tomorrow. Told me that personally.”
“Could. Like a one-percent chance.”
“Still and all…”
Chrisssy handed Ava the paper. “It’s not Chinatown,” she said.
“Forget it,” Ava said. She still had her eyes on Dr. Raines. “Watch this,” Ava said. “This is how he always ends it.”
“Look up!” Dallas Raines said and smiled that smile.
“How old is he?” Chrisssy said.
Ava turned away from the TV on the credenza, dug into her pocket, and pulled out her stack of mad money. She fanned off two hundred-dollar bills, which she put on the glass console table. Chrissy looked as if she was going to cry.