by David Pierce
DOWN IN THE
VALLEY
David M Pierce
Down in the Valley copyright © 2014, David M. Pierce
For my folks
Critical praise for David M Pierce and the Vic Daniel series:
"Pierce has an original voice and puts a sweet spin on genre conventions."
-New York Times Book Review on DOWN IN THE VALLEY
"Down in the Valley is a wonderful addition to private eye literature. It's witty, literate, and wise."
-Tony Hillerman
"Madcap storytelling and nutso types whose smart mouths run in overdrive…Pierce is a master of off-center characterizations and the oddball narrative view."
-Publishers Weekly
"If there isn't already a cult following for David M Pierce's V. (for Victor) Daniel novels, there soon will be. Now is your chance; pick up these novels, and read them right away. Impress your friends with your savvy, clairvoyance, and impeccable taste."
-The Drood Review on WRITE ME A LETTER
"Vic is a free spirit, an easygoing chap with a realistically cheery outlook on life…An entertaining, off-beat series."
-Washington Post Book World on ROSES LOVE SUNSHINE
"Full of clever tricks and surreptitious preparations. Just the right book for an upbeat mood."
-Library Journal on ANGELS IN HEAVEN
"The effort of having his tongue planted firmly in his cheek has not kept David M Pierce from crafting a delight in WRITE ME A LETTER."
-Washington Times
"A delightful addition to a wonderful series."
-Baltimore Sun on WRITE ME A LETTER
DOWN IN THE VALLEY
David M. Pierce was born in Montreal, Canada. He lived for some years in London, where, among other things, he wrote songs for the pop group Meal Ticket and acted in a Shakespearian theatre group. He coauthored a musical with fellow Canadian Rick Jones and has written songs with Jeremy Clyde. His other publications include three volumes of verse and a cookery book, written with singer Annie Ross. He has written two other books featuring private investigator Vic Daniel, Roses Love Sunshine and Hear the Wind Blow, Dear, both published by Penguin.
I invented many things herein – including all of the people – but not Los Angeles or the San Fernando Valley. God knows who invented those.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER ONE
Bits and pieces.
Why is nothing ever simple?
Why don't things have a beginning, a middle, then an end like a date with a Catholic girl? Why aren't they neat and uncomplicated like a double shot in a clean glass?
If I was the type to wax lyrical, I'd compare my average week with doing a jigsaw puzzle missing a substantial but unknown number of the border pieces. For instance when I walked in the back door of the Mo Kee Café he didn't even look up but went on slicing Chinese health food with his foot-long chopper.
'Money or else Small Claims Court,' I said, being humorous as he was maybe four foot six standing on a case of soy sauce.
'No money,' he said. Instead he offered me a piece of white radish on the end of his machete. I lifted him up with one hand under his chin and sat him on the work table in a pile of bean sprouts.
'Money,' I said.
'Later,' he said. He carefully dropped the machete so it stuck in the floor an inch from my almost-new white loafer, then shouted something. Two of his co-workers came trotting in from the dining room. What was I going to do, declare war on the whole Yellow Peril again?
I left, shaking my fist at the wily Oriental. He was an ex-Viet-boatperson and still owed me $750 for a job I'd done him. All right, if charm didn't work I'd have to try something else – I could get clever or I could get mean. As I'd already tried getting clever once or twice before in my life without a lot of luck, that left mean.
I drove back to where I worked thinking over the possibilities and was at my desk writing him a nasty letter on Department of Immigration stationery when Timmy went by the front window and peeked in inquiringly. I shook my head, as in get lost. He wobbled his in understanding and went up the line to pester my neighbors.
At that time I had the end unit in a small, L-shaped shopping area at the corner of Victory and Orange, right next to a vacant lot where from time to time in the gentle California evenings I could hear the sounds of bottles breaking and ethnic voices raised in loud dispute about everything and nothing at all. And, recently, during the muggy California afternoons, I had started to hear the nasal voices of schoolkids discussing the important events of the day in dialogue like 'Pass the joint' and 'Don't Jew the end'.
On the other side of my office was the Nus' Vietnamese take-out, next to that a video rental outfit and one more along a Taco-Burger franchise run by the handsome Señora Morales. Finally, next to her around the bend of the L was the Armenian shoe repair establishment of Mr Amoyan. I hoped Timmy wouldn't pester him as I liked the old gent; we used to loll on the wooden bench outside his shop in the late afternoons sometimes watching the high-school girls and the young moms go in and out of Taco-Burger, shaking our grizzled heads sadly at the follies of youth and our own lack of it.
As for Timmy, well, like the San Francisco Giants, he was one of God's less successful ideas.
I met him the first time six weeks earlier when the first real smogs of April were settling on the San Fernando Valley like cheap hairspray on a home permanent. Someone whapped me on the shoulder with a broom handle as I was opening up my office; I turned around ready to kill and found myself looking at someone more than a boy but less than a man, with an innocent, round moon face and vacant blue eyes. He was obviously mentally retarded but from what medical cause I neither knew nor particularly wanted to know.
But Timmy was harmless; he could talk, sort of, and all he wanted was to sweep the front of my office for me. He had a shopping cart borrowed from the local Ralph's supermarket full of assorted cleaning junk, newspapers, bottles, old rags, some toys, the usual precious collection of those who have nothing.
So he swept my stoop, with great care, and I gave him a buck. A few days later I got him a real job. I had a visit one afternoon from a Mr Christo Papanikolas who was getting fed up with being ripped off. He and various other members of his clan ran the busy Arrow Liquor Mart two blocks up Lankershim Boulevard and he'd been hit three weekends in a row. After he left I was mulling over the standard ways of dealing with a problem like Mr Papanikolas' – dogs, alarm systems, selling out and buying a mink ranch – when along ambled Timmy.
Light bulb flashed, and now Timmy spends his evenings sitting on a chair atop the freezer at the back of the Arrow Liquor Mart with what looks like a one-handed cannon on his lap but is really a nautical flare pistol, $40 from any merchant chandler, no license required. Mr Papanikolas, now a friend for life, informs me there's been no hint of trouble since Timmy started riding shotgun except
for the time he pointed the thing at an ancient bag-lady picking up her weekend bottle of port and shouted at her, 'Move an' you die, bitch.'
Aunt Fat'ma baked me some of her special halvah, which was terrible. Nephew Yuri asked me to help him with his English homework. I asked Mr Papanikolas to please pay his bill promptly – two cases of Christian Brothers brandy, twelve quart bottles of Canada Dry ginger ale, and a large jar of imitation pepperoni Hot-Stix. He did. To each his own.
So now we're up to date, everything's right with the world except what isn't, and I'm at a second-hand desk in a third-hand office trying to outwit a half-pint Oriental cabbage-chopper. Do not get me wrong, I'm not prejudiced, only against people who owe me money. And Germans. And male Japanese. And girls who smoke cigars.
The phone rang.
I looked at it with mild surprise, then picked it up. It was a lady, or at least a female, with a voice like corn syrup on a short stack of buttermilk pancakes.
'Mister V. Daniel?'
'That's right,' I said. 'V. (for Victor) Daniel.'
'Victor Daniel, will you be in your office at one o'clock today?'
'If you can give me a good reason why.'
'Mr Lowenstein, vice-principal of St Stephen's High School, would like a word with you.'
'That'll do nicely,' I said, and hung up. I wondered what Mr Lowenstein, vice-principal of St Stephen's, which was an academy of lower learning about five minutes' drive west of me, wanted. Maybe just to check out my Hawaiian shirt collection, which was not without a certain small fame in those parts. Luckily there are a lot of huge Hawaiians in the world.
I had an hour to wait til I found out so I switched on Betsy, an Apple II computer with most of the important trimmings except a matrix printer, and my letter to Santa about that had long been in the mail. You might care to know that Davy Crockett's rifle was also named Betsy. I loved Betsy. I had loved many times before in my life – two cars, a tree house, a lefty genuine cowhide first-baseman's mitt, a lady, somehow, but I loved Betsy madly. The only problem was it had taken me years to learn how to work the fool thing and I was still making mistakes of an embarrassingly elementary nature like forgetting to take the lens cap off, but who's perfect?
I was involved in a bizarre game some freak had programmed; it had to do with a mythical Asian town of which the game-player was the satrap or khan or whatever you call it and you had to decide how much grain to plant. I was getting on to it, though. I punched in 'Plant 200 kilos'.
'Thank you, oh Wise One,' the computer said.
I was just about to enter 'Kill 2.00 peasants' when someone came in the front door in such a hurry he not only forgot to knock, he forgot to leave his baseball bat outside. I didn't know whether he was after me or Betsy but I'd fight to the death for either one. Luckily, although he was the same color, Hank Aaron he wasn't, and he missed us both by a mile. I pulled the bat away from him with one hand and gave him a crisp backhand across the chops with the other, then delivered a short but sweet tap on one of his knees with the old hickory and that took care of that.
'Haven't seen you for a while, Mick,' I said. 'How're things by you?'
'Terrible, fuck-face, thanks to you,' Mick said. 'Now I got a broken leg, too.'
'Also, you're not swinging properly,' I said. 'I think you got your weight too far forward.'
He limped to the door, went out, was about to slam it, thought better of it, and contented himself with expectorating sloppily on the sidewalk. Good, that took care of him for another month or two. A while back I'd helped a pal do a repo on Mick, only in this case it wasn't merely his car or his furniture, it was his whole house plus contents. He was nine months behind on the payments on a $75,000 mobile home and was also trying to sell it with full title so I took him pool playing one night and let him hustle me for a few bucks while my pal moved a rig into the park, hoisted up the mobile home and took her away. Being of a suspicious nature, Mick suspected me and used to drop around once in a while when he was on uppers and make some half-hearted attempt to decapitate me.
Where was I? Oh yes. I entered 'Liquidate 200 peasants'.
'Done, Merciful One,' the computer said.
CHAPTER TWO
Just after one fifteen a man who I presumed was Mr Lowenstein peered in the front window briefly. I peered back at him. Then he knocked and came in. I switched off Betsy and stood to meet him. He was about six foot two but I could still eat a bowl of soup off his head without reaching up, being a tidy six foot seven and a quarter last time I looked.
'Mr Lowenstein?'
'Correct. Mr Daniel?'
'Correct.'
We shook hands without making a big thing of it. He sat heavily in the chair on the far side of the desk and reached for a crumpled pack of Winston Lites.
'It destroys me not being able to puff away in school,' he said. 'I fully realize it is good for me but it is also murdering me. Funny. It used to be the teachers who smoked but now we're not supposed to so all the wretched children are sneaking fags and we're sucking peppermint-flavored sugar.' He lit his smoke with an old-fashioned Zippo.
'Never had the habit,' I said, watching him inhale so deeply it almost made his toes curl. Mr Lowenstein was a handsome man in his early fifties with harassed gray hair parted in the middle, solidly built but not overweight, wearing slacks and a contrasting gabardine jacket with a yellow hanky in the pocket. I was wearing tan slacks and a gorgeous short-sleeved shirt from Oahu featuring tropical drinks and palm trees.
'Please don't think me impolite but may I put a question or two to you first?' he asked.
'Shoot,' I said.
'You are indeed a properly licensed investigator for this city?'
'For this whole wonderful state,' I said. 'Renewable by the licensing board every year if I've been a good boy.'
'How long have you held your license?'
'Six years here and before that, four years back East. In Illinois.'
'I see,' said Mr Lowenstein, nodding. 'And do you have anyone in authority who might vouch for you?'
'I have a bank manager,' I said. 'He could vouch I pay my bills. And I have a brother who is a Louie in the LAPD. He could vouch something although I'm not sure what, brothers being what they are.'
Mr Lowenstein looked at me. I looked at him. Then he looked at the computer.
'Must be very helpful in your line of work,' he said.
'Yours, too,' I said. 'I know my brother finds them of great assistance. All in all, they are quite the coming thing.'
'Um,' said Mr Lowenstein. He sighed and stubbed his cigarette out in an ashtray I had that was shaped like a piano, in fact it came from Del's Piano Bar down on Independence where I was wont to pass the occasional idle hour.
'Very well,' he said, making up his mind. 'Here it is, sir. I'm sorry to say we have a good deal of trouble at present at my school and we seem to be completely unequipped to handle it. The use of drugs has become so widespread the pupils are almost taking them openly. I know some of the older boys are selling them on school property. And a young boy in one of my classes was stabbed last week, in the parking lot.'
'Dear me,' I said, as some sort of reaction seemed to be called for.
'Dear me is right,' he said. 'Mr Daniel, I do not care what those degenerate pea-brains do when they are off the school grounds, although I suppose I really do, they can inject battery acid straight into their soft adolescent brain cells if they so desire and some of them likely are already doing so, but I am affronted when they do it almost before my very eyes, understand me? When they return from lunch coked to the gills, or whatever the expression these days is, or when they come back from the gym looking like the living dead or giggling insanely at my mild witticisms. And I would very much like it stopped before it goes any further, understand me?'
I said I understood him.
'Excuse me for getting worked up about it,' he said, lighting up again. 'But I suppose I am worked up about it and getting more worked up every day.'
I said I understood that too. He gave me a small smile, then looked at his watch.
'Chemistry at two o'clock,' he said. 'I actually enjoy teaching those morons. Strange.'
'Unbelievable.'
'So what do you think about it all, Mr Daniel? Any ideas?'
'I think we better talk again when we've got more time,' I said. 'Then I could have a look around, then we could talk some more.'
'After school today?'
I said I couldn't make it.
'Ten tomorrow at the school?'
I said I'd be there.
'Fine.' He got up to go. I got up too.
'Eh, please don't misunderstand me but it might be best if you came looking sort of, how shall I put it, nondescript?'
'I'll try,' I said. I saw him to the door; he smiled again briefly and left. I smiled briefly at his back and went to sit down again. Nice guy, for a teacher.
I dumped his stubs out of the ashtray into the wastepaper basket, turned the computer on, put in a clean disk, coded it and entered 'St Stephen's, 14 May 1984.' Then I punched in Mr Lowenstein's name, looked up the school telephone number and entered that, and then, as I couldn't think of anything else, I switched disks again and slaughtered some more peasants, an occupation I can highly recommend.
A few minutes later, Mrs Morales' cute daughter went by and gave me a wave. I gave her one right back, another occupation I can highly recommend.
At five minutes past four I ran a check on my appointments for the rest of the day – Valley Bowl and Mrs Lucy Seburn – then started packing up for the night, everything of value going into a monster of a safe that took up most of the floor space in the bathroom at the back.
My car was parked right in front where I could keep an eye on it during the day although it was only a clown car, a beat-up pink and blue Nash Metropolitan. Definitely not one of my automobile heart-throbs: a 38 Chevy coupé, duff gray with a rumble seat, and a 53 dark green Hudson Hornet with a necker's knob on the steering wheel. Was I hot stuff in those days. Wonder what happened? But I must admit the Nash was starting to grow on me.