Romeo's Rules

by James Scott Bell

  A small cheer went up from the denizens of the lower depths. Exactly what I did not want.

  Ham groaned but started to get up. When he got to his knees, I gave him a foot to the back and he hit the deck once more.

  More cheers. Lyle Thebes was jumping up and down. “Kill him! Kill him!”

  “Nobody’s killing anybody,” I said.

  And then an enormous black man, in black jeans and black T-shirt, appeared as if dropped from a helicopter. He was holding a black baton.

  “Stand down!” he said.

  The crowd backed up a little.

  “What goes on here?”

  Thebes pointed at Ham Hands. “He started it! He’s trying to kill us all!”

  Ham Hands disagreed with this assessment, in language loud and profane.

  “Shut up!” Baton said. “Everybody just shut up!”

  They all shut up.

  He looked at me. “What happened here?”

  “Just a minor disagreement about phone service,” I said. “I’m expecting a call.”

  “You can’t tie up the phone. I’m gonna ask you to go back to your room.”

  He slapped the baton into his left palm.

  I was going to take the baton from him. But I decided not to. He had a job to do, and to take away his face in front of everybody would have been bad for his authority.

  “How about we split the difference?” I said. “I won’t tie up the phone, but I’ll stay down here just in case. I don’t want any trouble.”

  Ham Hands was on his feet and breathing hard. “I’m your trouble!”

  “Shut up!” Baton Guy said. “Clear the lobby!”

  There were mumbles and groans and a few choice words. Ham Hands glared at me before turning around. I didn’t think I’d have any more probs with him. He knew he was outclassed.

  But I’d probably sleep with one eye open for a while.

  “You, too,” Baton said to me.

  “Give me a break, okay?”

  “Now,” he said.

  The phone rang.

  “May I?” I said.

  “Back off,” he said. And then he made a mistake. He poked me with the baton.

  The phone rang a second time.

  I snatched the baton out of his hand. I grabbed his thumb with my other hand and controlled all three hundred pounds of him. I stuck the baton point up under his chin.

  The phone rang again.

  His back was to the dispersing crowd. His girth hid what I was doing. I said, “I’ll give this back to you if you just let me take this call. And no one has to know.”

  A fourth ring.

  “Answer me now,” I said.

  “Sure,” he said.

  I stepped back and handed him the baton and answered the phone, keeping my eyes on him.

  “Hello?”

  “Michael?”

  “Hi, Ira.”

  “Where are you? I’ve been frantic. I’ve been—”

  “I’m in town.”

  “Where? Why aren’t you—”

  “It’s better you don’t know.”

  “What?”

  “I’ve been treated rather rudely,” I said. I gave a nod to Baton Guy. He frowned, but did not come at me again. “The rude people will be wanting to find me,” I said. “And they may come calling on you.”

  “You want to explain yourself?”

  “Not over the phone. Just get ready for visitors.”

  “I can do that.”

  “I’ll contact you again and we’ll figure out a way to meet. I just don’t want to be found.”

  “This is going to drive me nuts.”

  “Give me your phone number, Ira.”

  “Michael—”

  “Like now.”

  He gave me his number. I used a memory trick—digits can be turned into pictures—to implant the number in my head.

  “I’ll try to check in from different phones,” I said. “I don’t want you to worry.”

  “Michael, let me help.”

  “Pray some imprecatory psalms,” I said. The imprecatory psalms of King David of Israel were the ones that called out to God to bring painful and lasting destruction on his enemies. I was down with that.

  “Don’t do this. I don’t like the sound in your voice.”

  “Just take care of yourself, Rabbi.”

  “Let’s talk. Meet me somewhere.”

  “Later,” I said. “You’re my huckleberry.”

  Pause. “What does that even mean?”

  I hung up.

  It wouldn’t have been any consolation to Ira, but I didn’t like the sound of my own voice, either. It was the low, resolute, and iron-cast voice of Achilles and he was lusting for the blood of Hector, another name for Mark David Mayne.

  I KNEW, ROUGHLY, the layout of downtown Los Angeles. I walked over to Olive Street and cut right. Up to Fifth, Pershing Square on the right and the Biltmore Hotel on the left. Up the hill on Fifth is where the central branch of the L.A. public library is.

  The building has sort of an ancient Egyptian vibe, with its pyramid-shaped tower and tiled-art sun symbolism. Maybe that was to indicate that here was the repository of all knowledge, ancient to modern. For that reason, I love libraries. Maybe, on some shelf somewhere, is that one book that’s going to unlock it all. Maybe written by somebody who was considered a crackpot at the time.

  If anyone cared to look.

  I asked the info desk where I could get my hands on a computer for a while and she told me there was a room downstairs where I could wait in line and use a terminal for fifteen minutes. She gave me a library map and I followed it like Captain Nemo down to the subterranean level of the library.

  There were a few people in the line in front of me. There were four computer stations on a table at the front of the line.

  I was getting antsy. I can’t stand standing and doing nothing. My mind won’t leave me alone.

  So I looked over the shoulder of the guy in front of me. He was wearing a hoodie with a jacket over it and had his head down in a book.

  I always like to see what people are reading.

  His book had pictures in it. Black and white stills from old movies. The one I saw was Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity.

  “Good flick,” I said.

  The guy turned around. He was white, under twenty, more than fifteen.

  He said, “Huh?” and looked a little nervous.

  “I saw the picture,” I said. “In your book.”

  He looked back at the book. “Oh,” he said. “Yeah.”

  “You into film noir?” I said.

  “Into what?”

  “Film noir.”

  He shook his head.

  “Refers to a genre of film, mostly post World War II,” I said. “Black and white, usually an urban setting, crime, femme fatales, private eyes.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Bogart. Robert Mitchum.”

  The kid said nothing.

  “Crime doesn’t pay. Moral universe.”

  He looked more nervous.

  “So why you reading that book?” I said.

  “I just want to stand in line,” he said.

  And there it was. Man in the twenty-first century. Standing in line. And that’s all he wanted. Maybe all he’d ever hope for.

  It took me twenty minutes to get my hands on a computer. By that time I was ready to punch one out. Instead I went to Google—ah Google, the sea and the land of all now, and no one swims or surfs without thee!—and typed in the address of the building I’d seen and the words pizza and Los Angeles. The top hit gave me an establishment called Manetti’s Pizza.

  This was a perfect score. I clicked to Google Maps and found out where it was. About three miles from where I stood.

  Since I had thirteen minutes left on my session, I went to Wikipedia and looked up Jimmy Short Hairs.

  Giacomo “Jimmy Short Hairs” Mancini (born March 21, 1961) is a former soldier of the Gambino crime family. His
testimony as a government witness helped bring down two highly placed crime bosses, or “dons.”

  First thing I noticed was no date of death. So I did a Google News search for both Jimmy Short Hairs and Giacomo Mancini.

  Nothing recent.

  His death was either unreported or undiscovered.

  Next, I searched for Yance Perry in Google News. The top hit was from the Los Angeles Times.

  Death of Actor Ruled a Suicide

  Los Angeles police investigators and the Los Angeles County Coroner have ruled the death of former soap opera star Yance Perry a suicide.

  LAPD spokesperson Sandra Brown said investigators determined the 51-year-old Perry, whose real name was Phillip Cranston, hanged himself.

  “We have ruled out foul play,” Brown said.

  The verdict did not sit well with some of Perry’s closest friends. Victor Less, a video director who worked with Perry on a recent project, told reporters there was no way Perry killed himself.

  “He was optimistic about our film,” Less said. “We were going to have dinner a few days from now.”

  Perry’s former partner, Dennis Bork, with whom Perry had a five-year relationship, was also skeptical of the finding.

  “That doesn’t sound at all like Yance,” Bork said. “He was one of the bravest people I ever met.”

  A private memorial service for Yance Perry is scheduled for 3 p.m. Sunday at Our Lady of the Valley in Canoga Park.

  I did not know you, Yance Perry, but I kind of believe your friends.

  There was some scratch paper and yellow pencils on the table. I wrote down the names of Perry’s friends and the name of the church.

  OUTSIDE IT WAS one of those hazy sunny days in Los Angeles, the kind with just enough gauze over the light that you think you might be in a half-waking dream, which is what pretty much describes this city.

  I hoofed it over to Broadway and headed north, across the freeway and past Cesar Chavez, into Chinatown. I strolled past a market, a flower store, a restaurant, and stopped at a little novelty shop. I went in the front door, which had one of those old-fashioned bells.

  There was an old man sweeping in front of a counter. I said hello to him in Chinese. Part of my basic dialogue sentences from a year studying the language. He seemed pleased with that, and said good morning back.

  In Chinese I said I needed work.

  “No work,” he said in accented English.

  “One job,” I said. “One job for twenty dollars and a hat and some sunglasses.” I pointed to a twirl rack of discount shades by the counter.

  The old man looked me over more carefully, pursed his lips. “One work?” he said.

  “Whatever you got,” I said.

  “Come.” He motioned for me to follow him through thick curtains into a back room that looked like the place where the bull in the china shop practiced. Boxes on the floor, hardly enough room to move around. Parts of machinery, for what purpose I had no idea, leaned against one wall. Strings of squashed Chinese lanterns hung from shelving the way sausages hang in a butcher’s window. The shelving itself was the galvanized steel variety, mostly empty.

  “Heavy box,” the man said. “On shelf. All.”

  I nodded.

  “Whole floor, clean.” He handed me his broom.

  No problem. This wasn’t Hercules and the Augean stables, after all.

  The old man went back to his store and I got started. As I worked, I did think of old Hercules. Queen Hera, in one of those moves the gods make out of pique, had made Hercules insane, during which time he murdered his own wife and children.

  Nice. When he came out of it, he was sentenced to hard labor, for a king named Eurystheus. Got assigned twelve labors that no mortal could possibly perform. But Hercules got help from a couple of sympathetic Olympians, Hermes and Athena. And that’s what saved him and turned him into the greatest hero in the Greek pantheon.

  These myths all had a point, and the point of this is that any one of us can go insane, if the gods—or fate, or chance—deem it so. And in the throes of it, we’ll do stupid, even deadly things.

  Stupid could be anything, from road rage to getting drunk, during which time you do that one thing you’ll regret.

  Then comes the punishment, the consequences. Like I was living out now. This was not the life I would have chosen. If I could have put in the deciding vote, I’d be playing center field for the Red Sox, finishing up a Hall of Fame career now, still hitting around .300 with forty dingers and over a hundred RBIs—

  So you take your shirt off and hang it on a nail, you forget the past and the future, you do what the stoics taught, you take the moment and you concentrate on what’s in front of you and you think I’m not dead yet and there is going to be a next moment and when it comes you’ll live it as honestly as you can.

  As I was shelving the boxes and getting my inner Hercules on, I heard a voice in the main store sounding like he was arguing with the old man. A moment later a thin, black-haired thirty-something whipped through the curtains.

  “You can go now,” he said.

  The old man came in behind him.

  “What’s the problem?” I said.

  “We don’t know you.” He spoke without the hint of accent.

  “Is that your father?” I said.

  “Grandfather, he shouldn’t have let you in here.”

  “But he did,” I said. “We made a deal. I’m halfway—”

  “Forget it,” the guy with the black hair said.

  “No,” I said. “A deal is a deal. I’m going to finish the work and get what’s coming to me.”

  Pause. The guy said, “What did he promise you?”

  “Twenty bucks, a hat, and some sunglasses,” I said.

  “It all right,” the grandfather said.

  The guy said, “You can have ten dollars for what you’ve done, but you have to go.”

  “That wasn’t the deal,” I said. “I’m going to finish the job.”

  “I can call the police.”

  “They’ll be very happy about that,” I said. “When they hear me and your grandpop here, and piece it all together, they’ll be ecstatic you called them off the street.”

  “Who are you? Where do you come from?”

  “You can call me Herc. I’m from the Olympus trailer park. I can finish the job and I’ll be on my way.”

  He paused, then went back through the curtains. I finished and washed up in the little rusty bathroom at the back of the place. Put my shirt back on and went out to the front of the store.

  The old man and his grandson looked at my work and seemed pleased. The old man fished a double sawbuck out of his own pocket and gave it to me.

  Under the grandson’s watchful eye I selected a pair of blue-tint sunglass, and a Dodger hat. Then, looking at the knacks and knicks under the glass counter, I said, “Could you throw in a pedometer?’

  “What?” the grandson said. “You want more?”

  “For a job well done.”

  “You pay for it,” he said.

  “For good community relations.”

  He shook his head.

  To keep me from breaking your arm? I didn’t say it. Thought about it, though, then reasoned my way out. These were shop owners, honest as far as I could tell, and they’d done me a favor.

  So I paid twelve bucks for the pedometer.

  Then I was out in my L.A. disguise, blending in like any other six-foot-four former cage fighter among a Chinese population. I walked down College Street, past the Chinatown Gold Line station of the Metro system, and came to the corner with, lo and behold, a little place known as Manetti’s Pizza. It was in a shack that could have been built in the forties and maybe was here when there was a road and not much else.

  The other surroundings were industrial-commercial. A perfect place to put a warehouse among other warehouses.

  I imagined myself back in the car. We would have been driving north, because that’s the direction I was facing when I saw the number
of Manetti’s. I closed my eyes and remembered my calculations.

  The rate of speed we were going I estimated at around thirty miles per hour. And two minutes of that.

  That would make the place where I’d had my talk with the Asian lady about a mile away, on the right hand side of the street.

  My normal stride is a yardstick.

  That’s one thousand, seven hundred and sixty steps per mile.

  I took the pedometer out of the package and set it, clipped it to my pants, and started walking.

  IT WAS NOT what you’d call a pleasant walk along a briny beach. This was where the city fathers had determined would be the dull, squat buildings and the fleets of trucks that brought in and took out the makings of modern commerce.

  What someone could do with land like this if he had money and building permits and a friendly zoning board.

  Someone like a Mark David Mayne.

  Half a mile from my stopping point I started looking at the lay of the land, places where someone might watch, unnoticed.

  Within a quarter mile I was feeling good enough to take on whoever I found.

  And then I was there. Or what I presumed was there. A two story building that took up most of one corner. Windowless. Surely a commercial building, but one that could have virtually anything inside. Including offices. And places for a meet and greet and Tase.

  And one more thing—an entry with a driveway and a rolling steel, drop-down door.

  The building to the right of this was a restaurant supply. There was no building to the left. Just a cross street and beyond that what looked like a fenced in auto-body yard.

  I’d have to have a little faith in my location, because I didn’t have anything else.

  Now came the hard part, the waiting.

  Which could be a massive waste of time or my one chance to figure out who these people were.

  There was one other problem. This wasn’t exactly a pedestrian thoroughfare. A big guy in a Dodgers hat and shades would eventually invite some comment if anyone cared to look. Especially from the building I was watching.

  So I kept walking, keeping my gaze directly ahead of me and slightly down. That’s New York style, designed not to draw second looks. My path took me across the next street, so the building I wanted to watch was now behind and cross-corner from me.