Hot Start

by David Freed

  Kiddiot seemed happy to see me, though it’s always hard to tell with him. Normally he’d be hanging out with Mrs. Schmulowitz, enjoying her cooking. But with her still in the hospital, he seemed off his game. He even cuddled in bed with me, purring at my feet—for a couple of minutes anyway. What I remember before drifting off was the rubber cat door flapping in his wake as he left. I’d been asleep less than an hour when my phone buzzed.

  “Yeah, hello?”

  “Am I not pretty? Do I not have a fine ass?”

  That sultry voice. That Czech accent. She sounded stoned. I was suddenly very awake.

  “You’re very pretty, Nina.” I said.

  “Did you even look at my ass? Other men do, you know. All the time. At the mall. At the gas station. They compliment my ass. They tell me it is smoking hot. Do you know how to say ‘smoking hot ass’ where I come from?”

  “No.”

  She muttered something in Czech.

  “Why are you calling me, Nina?”

  “Why don’t you want to sleep with me?”

  “I don’t need any more complications in my life right now.”

  “Are you gay?”

  “With my taste in clothes and personal grooming habits? I doubt they’d have me.”

  “You have a wife, yes?”

  “No.”

  “You can tell me, Logan. It’s OK. Many of my clients are married, like a certain congressman who represents the good, law-abiding people of Rancho Bonita.”

  “Is this why you’re calling me at”—I checked my watch— “two in the morning? To ask me personal questions?”

  “First, you have to tell me you like my ass.”

  “OK, I like it.”

  “Good. Because it likes you. A lot.”

  “Thanks for sharing. So why are you calling me?”

  She said she’d spoken with her friend, the call girl, who’d snapped that incriminating airborne sex party photo with Congressman Pierce Walton and Roy Hollister. The friend was willing to speak to me in confidence about what she knew of the murders, Nina said, but only if I agreed in advance to two conditions.

  The first condition was that our meeting would take place at a location of her choosing.

  The second was that I would have to be naked.

  I laughed. “Your friend must have a scar fetish without even realizing it.”

  “This is not funny, Logan. She needs to know you are not wearing one of those . . . listening devices under your clothes.”

  “A wire, you mean?”

  “A wire, yes. She is afraid.”

  “Of Emil Sokol?”

  “This you must ask her yourself. All I can say is, if you knew what she knows, you would be very afraid too.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  Nina’s fellow call girl had found anonymity and refuge in Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley, that sprawling megalopolis of strip malls and used car lots, of ostentatious wealth and abject poverty, where nearly all of America’s porn movies are shot and where one is ever reminded of that famous Gertrude Stein quote, “There’s no there there.”

  With Nina functioning as intermediary, her friend arranged to rendezvous with me at 0500 in the parking lot of the Sportsmen’s Lodge, a tired, low-slung motel and restaurant on Ventura Boulevard in Studio City. The place had once been a popular hangout for Hollywood A-listers including Clark Gable and Humphrey Bogart. It was where John Wayne taught his kids to fish, back when the lodge featured its own stocked trout ponds, before Los Angeles grew up around it. It was where presidential candidate Robert Kennedy spent the night in 1968 before being assassinated the next day across town at the Ambassador Hotel. It took me more than two hours to drive there from Rancho Bonita.

  Nina had said that her friend would be driving a silver Jeep Grand Cherokee with tinted windows. I saw no vehicle with that description in the lot. I parked in a dark corner, as far from the lobby of the lodge as I could get, and waited, hoping I hadn’t driven all that way for nothing. I figured at a minimum I could get a little shut-eye, but that wasn’t to be. The Jeep nosed into the lot approximately six minutes later and stopped, facing in the opposite direction of my truck, our doors a meter apart. Down came the driver’s window, revealing a woman with spiked platinum hair, a pierced right eyebrow, and merciless blue eyes. She was a lean, hard-looking twenty-nine by my estimate, attractive in a whips-and-chains kind of way.

  “The clothes. Take off,” Nina’s friend said, glancing around nervously. Her accent was like Nina’s, only thicker.

  “What ever happened to foreplay?”

  “You think I kid. I am not. Do it.”

  I stepped out, shielded by her SUV from the occasional car cruising past on the boulevard and stripped down to my boxers.

  “All of it,” she said.

  “I’m not wearing a wire.”

  “Three seconds I give you. Then I go. One . . . two . . .”

  I’ve been asked or ordered to participate in many unusual activities over the span of a long and varied career, many of them classified. This was definitely a first.

  Down came the skivvies.

  Her eyes drifted southward. If she was impressed, she didn’t show it.

  She ordered me to hold up my hands—I assumed to check for any recording devices planted in my armpits—then made me turn around, so she could scrutinize my rear end for what I assumed was the same reason.

  “OK, you can put clothes on now.”

  I dressed quickly, opened her passenger door, and got in. She was gulping Stolichnaya from the bottle.

  “You like?” she said, offering me a drink.

  “No, thanks.”

  “You don’t get toasted?”

  “I used to on life. Then I built up a tolerance.”

  She tilted her head back and laughed. Her teeth reminded me of whitewashed fence pickets. In her tongue was a silver stud.

  “What’s your name?”

  “No names,” she said.

  Out on the boulevard, a car backfired. She jumped.

  “You don’t have to be nervous. It’s OK. I’ve got your back.”

  Her eyes moved constantly, scanning the sparse, early morning traffic. “Nina said you are good guy.”

  “Not always.”

  “You are cop?”

  “No.”

  “FBI?”

  “No.”

  “Show me your driver’s license.”

  I showed her.

  She sucked down some vodka and told me her name was Simona.

  “Nice to meet you, Simona.”

  “OK,” she said, “now I tell you.”

  Most people are poor storytellers. Like my friend Warren, the geezer in the camper I’d met out on the freeway, they veer toward the verbose, losing their way amid tangents and the compulsion to provide extraneous detail, convinced that the minutiae of their lives must be of inherent interest to others. They don’t know how to edit. Nina’s friend was that way— until she got to the payoff.

  She went to great lengths to describe the city of her birth, Karlovy Vary, where the bubbling hot springs are thought to cure anything from indigestion to brain tumors. She told me about her uncle, a sheet-metal worker who molested her beginning when she was eight. She told me how she was raped in high school by her art teacher, how her modeling career in London ultimately went nowhere, and how, in desperation, she began turning tricks on the streets of Prague before Emil Sokol found her.

  “Emil saved me from that life,” Simona said.

  Sokol bought her clothes from exclusive boutiques, moved her in with three of his other “ladies” in a spacious, rent-free apartment overlooking the river, and paid her 1.3 million korunas a month—the equivalent of about $5,000. In exchange, two or three times a week, she serviced the affluent and sometimes famous men Sokol arranged for her to meet. One of those men, she said, was Congressman Pierce Walton.

  They’d met two years earlier, she said, when Walton was on a congressional fact-finding tour of Eastern Europe. Wh
at facts Walton was trying to find, Simona didn’t know. She was delivered via limousine to his four-star hotel in Warsaw, did to and for him what he requested, and left two hours later with $2,000 in her Louis Vuitton knockoff handbag. This was repeated less than six months later when she was flown by private jet to Brussels, where Walton was attending a Foreign Affairs Council meeting. Within weeks, she said, she was jetting back and forth across the Atlantic in Roy Hollister’s Citation for clandestine sleepovers with Walton at the Hay Adams, Four Seasons, and other swank hotels in the Washington, DC, area.

  “At first, it was OK,” she said. “But then he started to like it rough. Then it got too rough.”

  After one particularly brutal session, bruised and bleeding, Simona found herself in a hospital emergency room in Georgetown. The doctors were suspicious of her injuries. A harmless dust-up with a boyfriend, she told them. She later protested to Sokol, but he would hear none of it, threatening to beat her himself and toss her back out on the streets if she as much as breathed the congressman’s name to anyone. And so she continued to see Walton on a regular basis, sometimes in Europe, sometimes in the Washington area, even as the beatings worsened. In the process, she became close to Roy Hollister.

  “Roy was like father to me,” she said. “Sometimes, in his plane, he would let me sit up front with him. He would tell me how bad he felt for me, how I remind him of a little bird with broken wing.”

  It was during one of their cockpit chats, when the jet was at altitude and on autopilot, that Hollister let slip a damning revelation: the connection between Congressman Walton and Emil Sokol wasn’t just about sex, Hollister claimed. The two were involved together in the sale of military jet fighters.

  According to Simona, Sokol was a silent partner in Praha Aeronautika, a Czech-based aircraft manufacturer. The company wanted foreign buyers for its J-266 Blesk, a light, multirole combat jet and trainer that Praha officials billed as a less expensive alternative to those built by US defense contractors. NATO was one such prospective buyer. With Pierce Walton sitting on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Sokol and Praha had an influential advocate. Even a modest production run of a few jets, Sokol knew, could earn him a fortune. Which was why he was happy to pick up the tab for Walton’s carnal adventures.

  “What you’re telling me, is Sokol was basically buying Congressman Walton’s vote.”

  Simona nodded, watching cars pass by. “I told him I knew.”

  “You told Walton you knew?”

  Another nod. “He knew the only way I could know this is if Roy tell me. He gets very angry. Calls Roy bad names. Slaps me around. Says he will kill me with his hands if I tell anybody. I tell him I must go outside for smoke. I get taxi and I just . . . run.”

  Her hand was trembling. I reached down and held it.

  “You’re very brave to share all this with me.”

  She stared out the window, unwilling to meet my eyes. Walton, she said, had come looking for her and confronted Nina, demanding to know where she was.

  “Nina loves me. We are like sisters. She is afraid of him too. But she told him to go to hell. He hit her too.”

  I told her about the photograph I’d seen, the one she’d taken of Nina and the two other women servicing Walton and Hollister at 30,000 feet. She asked me if Nina had shared it with me. I told her simply that a friend had shown me the photo.

  “Your friend, he’s a cop?”

  “Not a cop. He owns a little corner market in Rancho Bonita.”

  “Kang,” she said quietly.

  That Nina knew Kang didn’t come as a surprise. Kang seemed to know virtually everyone in Rancho Bonita. Most people trusted him implicitly—I always assumed it was because of his face; Kang’s default expression was no expression. He was a guy who could keep secrets.

  “Kang wouldn’t tell me how the picture came to be in his floor safe,” I said. “Maybe you can.”

  Simona smiled sadly. She’d entrusted Nina with a copy of the photo as an insurance policy—something, she said, to give to the police if her dead body turned up in a field somewhere. Nina was all too familiar with Walton’s capacity for violence and feared what would happen if he came across the picture in her house, so she’d apparently turned it over to Kang.

  The upper edge of the sun’s corona was cresting the eastern horizon, glowing gold and red through the opaque smog belt. Another swell day in the City of Angels. Simona looked into my eyes pleadingly.

  “Help me,” she said.

  “How?” I said.

  “Protect me. Let me stay with you.”

  “Simona, we just met ten minutes ago. You don’t even know who I am.”

  “Nina says you are a good man. A strong man. I will wash for you, cook for you. You will see.”

  I could have told her about getting shot at two nights earlier, and how it was all I could do of late to protect myself, but that would have only fueled her paranoia. What I said instead was, “I don’t think that’s going to work.”

  She offered to demonstrate right then and there what I stood to gain by letting her move in with me and reached for my zipper. I intercepted her hand.

  “Let me give you some advice,” I said, “wherever it is you’re currently living, don’t go back there. Find some place where you don’t know anybody and nobody knows you and hunker down for a few weeks. Ditch your cell phone. Pay for everything with cash.” I reached into my belt and offered her my revolver, butt-first. “And keep this handy. You can give it back after things cool off.”

  “What is this? No, please.” She pushed it away like I was trying to hand her a live grenade.

  “Simona, this is the best I can do. You’re going to have to protect yourself. I can’t do it for you.”

  “He beat me. I want him in jail.”

  “What evidence do you have?”

  “. . . Evidence?” She looked past me, chewing a fingernail.

  “There’s a reason why sitting congressmen aren’t arrested every day, Simona. You need proof of wrongdoing. Witnesses. Sworn statements.”

  “But he beat me. Many times.”

  “I understand that, but you need witnesses. Do you have any?”

  She slumped in her seat, her chin on her chest, defeated.

  “Look,” I said, “I don’t doubt Walton did what you say he did. But what I think doesn’t matter. It’s what the police think. It’s what the prosecutors think. And no prosecutors are going to touch the case unless you deliver it to them tied up with a pretty bow on it. Walton is a ranking member of Congress. You’re a . . .”

  My words cut her. I could see that.

  “I’m just trying to be realistic here,” I said.

  “Nina said you would help me.”

  “I’m trying to. Take the gun, Simona. You can give it back to me later. Chances are you won’t need it, but I’ll feel a lot better knowing you can defend yourself if you have to.”

  “Get out of my car.”

  “Simona . . .”

  “I said get out!” She cranked the Jeep’s ignition and refused to look at me.

  “You take care of yourself.”

  I got out and watched her rocket from the parking lot, onto Ventura Boulevard, heading west. I’m not saying it was among my more brilliant moves, offering to arm a distraught prostitute, but it was the best one I could come up with at the moment. How much of an actual threat, if any, Pierce Walton posed was anyone’s guess.

  WHEN I was in the military, lack of sleep came with the job. Whether it was planting a 500-pound bomb while dodging antiaircraft fire or clearing a houseful of insurgents, I could stay up thirty-six hours and still always be counted on to hit the target. Those days were long gone. I desperately needed some sack time before driving back to Rancho Bonita.

  I dozed in my truck in the parking lot of the Sportsmen’s Lodge. Nobody disturbed me. An hour or so later, my phone awakened me. Buzz was calling.

  “You’ll never guess who called me at home last night, screaming his ass off, all
drunk, demanding to know who the hell this Cordell Logan is?”

  I yawned and rubbed my eyes. “Survey says Congressman Pierce Walton.”

  “You ain’t kidding, Pierce Walton,” Buzz said. “He threatened to go public with all the dirt he says he’s got on the president if the president doesn’t back off. I’m telling you, the dude is off the hook.”

  “What kind of dirt?”

  “Beats me. I didn’t exactly get down in the weeds with him on it. Hell, it’s Washington. There’s dirt everywhere.”

  I filled him in on what Simona had told me about Walton’s alleged influence peddling involving Emil Sokol and Praha Aeronautika. Buzz said he wanted me to make another run at Walton and be more adamant this time.

  “You gotta get him to quit, Logan, before this whole thing blows up.”

  After what Simona had told me of the congressman’s alleged habit of beating up prostitutes, I was eager to take another crack at him. I didn’t bother filling him in about having nearly gotten shot in my bed. In Buzz’s world, the only tales worth telling when it comes to gunfire are those that involve the actual spilling of blood. I suggested he have his staff go back through the Congressional Record to see how Walton voted on any defense-related appropriations bills in which Praha Aeronautika and Sokol might’ve profited.

  “If you can nail down that financial connection—a notorious European crime boss linked to a sitting US congressman,” I said, “I guarantee you, Walton will exit stage left as fast as his wingtips will carry him.”

  “That’s an outstanding idea.” Buzz sounded more enthusiastic than I’d heard him in a long time. “Forget every awful thing I ever said about you, Logan. I’ll let you know what I find out.”

  I went back to sleep. Tried to, anyway. I couldn’t unplug my mind from the ugly image of a duly elected citizen-statesman like Pierce Walton tap dancing on the periphery of a double murder, cavorting with European pimps, and using call girls as punching bags. What would the Founding Fathers have thought? With all due respect to the Buddha, I wanted to hurt Walton. I wanted to drive my fist through those big, bleached teeth of his.