“I’ve heard those stories too,” said Rowe. “Well, no bother! You were just being a good neighbor.”
Mrs. Furtado went away.
“Quick,” muttered Rowe.
Cici was already plugging in the shears.
Rowe knew the dog would not be hurt, but he couldn’t bear to watch. He stood at the doorway. He knew that in the nearly deserted area, the angry sound of the shears would prick up Laurie Furtado’s ears; indeed, she was on alert, her face squinched in puzzlement, when Rowe and Cici swept past on their way out.
Three minutes later they were striding along Twelfth Street in the sunny morning, talking. Cici’s happiness was complete: she had achieved her goal, and she was grateful to her new friend. Rowe felt sorry for the dog but not at all for Orlando Gold, so it balanced out.
They walked fast for a few blocks.
“Yes,” said Rowe, “you owe the hell out of me for that rectal thing.”
“It was all I could think of at the moment. Listen, you said yesterday you thought maybe I could help you in return. I haven’t forgotten.” She gave him a look that was half arch, half tough.
“Let’s duck in somewhere and I’ll tell you.”
They were in L.A.’s fashion district, where wholesalers used the cheap spaces of run-down warehouses and old mercantile exchanges to sell everything from handbags to jeans to perfume. Rowe had gone running through the area many times.
Cici snorted at the jeans displays: oddly, all the butts of the mannequins faced the street.
“You know why that is,” Cici said scornfully.
“No, but I like the custom.”
“Males own these stores, you know. And guys like to see what they like to see, which is women’s asses. Women want to see jeans from the front, like they’re looking into a mirror.”
“Ah,” said Rowe.
They went into a cafe and sat on high stools and ordered coffees. Cici ordered a bagel too, saying, “I’m hungry, but I’m too jazzed to really eat.” Rowe knew his appetite would return after the memory of Conqueror’s rectal exam had faded.
“You and I,” he began, “we have a friend in common. Amaryllis B. Cubitt.”
Cici smiled quizzically.
He said, “She once helped someone dear to me, and now I have an interest in her.”
“Yes?”
“That big donation your husband’s making will take the mission to a whole new level.”
Cici’s face clouded. Her peach-fuzz suit jacket and the black soft blouse she wore beneath formed a kind of cup, like a cup made of petals, for her breasts. He saw how well-fitted clothes make a woman not just more attractive, but more secure in herself. Yes, that was it. He thought of how Rita looked in those short-sleeved sweaters she liked to wear. He sighed.
“Do you know Amaryllis well?” he asked.
“Not as well as I’d have expected to by now. I mean, she’s like my foster mother-in-law, but…”
“Yeah?”
Cici hesitated. Rowe prompted, “Is she a little hard to get friendly with?”
She nodded to him. “You got it. Actually, that’s an understatement, you know? Hard is the word for her. She’s the Iron Angel, OK, she helps people, but if there’s a soft side to her, I haven’t seen it. It’s like, I do good things, so I have license to be a bitch. Let me tell you, one-on-one, she’s rugged.”
“So you haven’t spent a whole lot of time with her?”
“No, not really. Khani sees her pretty often.” She nibbled her bagel, which had been sliced, toasted, and buttered. Rowe smelled the good hot bread.
He said, “You seemed a little—I don’t know…something—when I mentioned the five million.”
His companion said nothing.
“Do you know if anything unusual is going on with Amaryllis?”
Cici’s gaze sharpened. “Why?”
“I’m concerned there may be some illegal activity surrounding her. Something trying to get at her.”
Cici sighed.
“About the five million,” Rowe said. “Do you know how the fund will be set up—you know, how the money will be controlled?”
“You’re concerned about someone stealing it? Or you want to get in on it?”
“I don’t want to get in on anything. I just want to protect Amaryllis.”
Cici Emberton swirled her coffee, then looked up. “Well, Khani’s been worried about her too.”
“Yeah?”
“Mind you, I don’t wish the woman ill. In no way. I’m not sure I should tell you this, since it isn’t public information yet.”
“If you don’t know by now that you can trust my discretion, I’ll just point out that you owe me big-time, Cici.”
She smiled into her coffee. “Yeah, I know.”
“Does it have to do with Khani’s gift?”
“He came home last night and said Amaryllis told him to call off the gift. Just call off the five million!” Cici smacked her palms.
“Really,” said Rowe.
“I know, I know,” said Cici. “Khani asked her what’s wrong, and she wouldn’t say. He says are you sick? Do you need a doctor? Did some doctor tell you you have cancer? Is that why? You ain’t gonna leave us now, are you? He was quite upset. She wouldn’t say anything. He says, is there trouble? She wouldn’t say. Next he asks her if she needs the police, and that got a reaction out of her. No way, she says. He’s got private security, you know, so he offers that to her. But she says no.”
Rowe asked, “What does Khani think is going on?”
“He told me he got the feeling she was ashamed of something. And afraid of something too.”
Chapter 26 – The Lady Shoots Up
George called me Monday afternoon and told me to meet him in my derelict persona that night.
“It’s time to meet the Whale. Ten o’clock.”
“Yeah?”
“I let them know I might want to deal drugs for them, and I just got word he wants to see me. He wants to meet you too, my heroin-addicted girlfriend.”
“Why would he want you to deal drugs for him?”
“He thinks my skin color can help his organization. So our objective tonight is to make friends with that human cesspool. This time, make yourself look a little cleaner, like we’re living under a nonleaking roof.”
“OK.”
We managed to talk about different things, then I asked, “How’s your other investigation going?”
“Interestingly, it’s beginning to dovetail with this one.”
“Really?”
“I’m finding out that L.A.’s a smaller town than I thought.”
_____
Gina helped me suit up; I knew I’d need her for that if I ever returned to the ABC in my bum disguise. Yvonne had, at my request, left some tubes of latex and scrapings from her bruise wheels, saying, “Sure, you guys can re-create this. It’ll take you longer, and it won’t look as good, but you’ll achieve your basic effect if you don’t get too ambitious. I mean, everybody takes a course in makeup in acting school, right?”
“I did.”
“Wear long sleeves next time so you won’t have to do your arms, those are hard. Plus, intravenous drug users, if that’s what you’re going for—they wear a lot of long sleeves anyway, so you’ll be consistent.”
Chino had said it was OK for me to keep the pregnancy vest for a while, so I was good there.
I made sure to lighten my face a bit, and I omitted the dirt. I filed the chew marks off my nails.
George and I rendezvoused at MacArthur Park and bused it from there. I almost laughed to see him wearing an extremely wrinkled but clean white shirt, and a striped silk tie, warped from improper cleaning. He seemed much less loser-esque, having cleaned himself up, combing his wig and washing his hands. The wig was still fairly oily and excellent, but the reddish curls now swept back farther from his face, making his lips over the buck teeth appear more protruding than ever. He looked like he could actually hold down a job.
We
got off the last bus and headed down Compton on foot. “You’re waddling very well this evening,” George complimented me.
We passed beneath a billboard for Megaton Pictures, the studio making The Canary Syndrome. It was a funny name for a small, upstart studio, I thought. But in Hollywood, it’s go big or go home, you know?
He said, “I learned something interesting today about the Keever family.”
“Yeah?”
“They had a daughter.”
I knew it, I just knew it! “Where is she?” I asked.
“She died shortly before her father quit being a judge. She was fifteen. I checked her birth certificate too, she was definitely their daughter.”
I took that in. “How did you find that out?”
“I looked up Bruce Keever’s interment information because it wasn’t in the death notice. I wondered if there was any significance to that. Found that there’s a family plot at Forest Lawn. The first grave is occupied by Deborah Keever, died 1965. Bruce Keever was brought down here and buried next to her.”
“So her birth year was—”
“Nineteen-fifty.”
The year Diane Keever left the studio system. “Yeah,” I said slowly. “Of course.”
We arrived at the mission’s front gate.
He peered into my skag face with concern.
I said, “George, something’s dawning on me, and I—I need to think. I might have something, but I still don’t understand how it fits into—”
A deep, melodious voice called, “Hey, hey, James!” and a man came to the gate. When he flung it open, it rattled like Satan’s teeth.
“Come on, DeeDee,” George said. “This here’s Denny.”
“Hi.”
There was an air of expectancy about the mission that night. Everybody seemed quieter—waiting for something.
Denny ushered us, in true French-courtier fashion, to a room upstairs to wait for Dale the Whale. The room was the one George and I had been interrupted breaking into: the second of the two with fortified locks, the first having been the strange room that was empty except for the gun safes.
Wichita met us at the door with a smile for George and a sudden look of disgust for me, like a medieval fishwife finding a rotten carp among the trout.
“I’ll get him,” Denny said. Wichita waited with us silently. This room was in the back of the school, overlooking the dark, ruined playing fields. I thought about the feral dog pack and wondered where they were tonight.
All the windows were open. The Los Angeles night air whispered in, flavored with traffic noise and the random shout. The windows were the pull-in kind, along the whole length of the room, just like at schools all over America, just like at Rutherford B. Hayes Junior High back in Wisconsin. This had been a science room—there were lab tables with sinks and gas valves, a ceramic eye wash fountain, and a periodic chart way above the blackboard. A side door led to what must have been shared teachers’ offices between this classroom and the next. I could almost smell the spilled acetic acid and hear the clink of the pipettes. I liked science.
This was definitely a hideout now, streety grunge with Cheetos wrappers and old newspapers in the corners, as if the wind had blown them there. Someone had dragged in a tattered black leather sofa and a few motley chairs. A half-acre-wide coffee table had been made from a mahogany dining room table, its legs amputated above the knee.
There were two gun safes in this room too.
I sensed something, and turned from the windows. As Dale the Whale Vargas glided into the room, the air before him seemed to compress in concentric waves, as water would before a massive sea creature.
“Hello. Hello,” he said in a soft voice, like a priest’s.
The Whale was fastidiously groomed—clean-shaven, perfect manicure.
“Hello, I’m James,” said George, extending his hand. But the Whale wouldn’t shake it. He didn’t explain, just ignored it with a smile.
You don’t shake hands with a deity.
The Whale cruised the room lazily, pausing before each of us. I didn’t expect him to acknowledge me, but he did. “Hello, ma’am. How are you this evening?”
“That’s DeeDee,” said George.
“Hello,” I mumbled.
Vargas’s movements were deliberate and fluid, and I saw his way—by being so soft, his viciousness, when it came, bit more horrifyingly still.
Wichita and Denny remained standing. The straight butt of a pistol stuck out of Wichita’s waistband, the bulge of it crammed into her pants. Over his SECURITY T-shirt, Denny wore a loose sport shirt that flapped around his middle, so I couldn’t tell if he was armed.
The Whale was a sizer, all right. Maybe three hundred pounds, and only five-foot-four or so, about my height. Even his knees were fat, straining the fabric of his Dockers-type pants. I foresaw diabetes in his future. He wore a thick silver chain around his neck that looked like an anchor chain. I realized it was probably platinum. Matching baby-anchor bracelet.
He’d splashed on some kind of minty aftershave, but when he passed me, I detected an undercurrent of perspiration, and I swear to God, his very sweat smelled mean.
Behind Vargas, three more men came in, all dressed in the gray security guard T-shirts. They were wearing their jewelry tonight, typical ghetto bling, the pavé diamonds spelling out nicknames: SPUD, JAKE3, RUMY. It looked fake but was probably real. I wondered which level of vice president they’d attained. One was black, one Latino, one white, or whitish, anyway. I saw the flat meanness of the street in their faces, with an undercurrent of fear of their boss—little strain lines around their eyes. Their eyes wanted to see something happen.
“Phones on vibrate, people,” said the Whale, still moving. “This place is a pigsty. Crud in the corners. Did your mothers develop you individuals this way? Looks like a meth shack.”
The vice presidents scurried to clean it up, a five-minute flurry involving brooms and a garbage bag produced from somewhere.
Vargas turned to George. “OK, so what have you got for me? I can give you fifteen minutes. Go ahead and sit, people, sit, sit.”
George took a chair at a right angle to the sofa, which he must have perceived to be the power throne. The sofa looked greasy. The Whale remained standing.
“I need clean heroin for DeeDee,” said George, “and—and if the only way I can get it is to sell a little bit for you, then OK.”
“Why not get it from somewhere else?”
George hesitated. “I understand you’ve got a never-before system.”
The Whale laughed.
George’s body language was great—a little round-shouldered, yet with head high, trying to break out with some confidence.
I hung at the edges.
“Is she the main reason?” The Whale made a soft gesture in my direction.
“She’s the only reason.”
“Isn’t money another, naturally? Honestly, now.”
“Maybe so.”
I rasped nastily, “He’ll be dealing full time before you know it.” George gave me a deadly look, as planned.
The Whale laughed. “Ambition! He admits it. Nothing wrong with a little healthy greed as well, time to time.”
George just smiled fleetingly.
“Where do you come from, Jim?” George was taller than him, but lighter by many pounds. Then the Whale said, “Jimmer,” and seemed to like how that sounded. The nickname was a definite ranking thing. “Jimmer,” he repeated. “You kind of came out of the blue.”
“Does it matter?” George said.
“What else you do?”
“Got some honest work now, construction.”
“What are you going to do if you don’t like it?”
“Go back to busting warehouses, I guess.”
Vargas laughed again. “What you steal?”
“Electronics, you know. Get a guy to resell the TVs.”
The Whale said, “Everybody wants to work with us, but we don’t take just anybody. You’ve been almos
t vetted.”
George looked like he was about to say, “I’m honored,” but changed his mind because of that almost.
The Whale didn’t sit, just kept slowly moving through the pools of light around the room, cast by a few mangled lamps. He was keeping his overhead low, that’s for sure.
His face was childlike, and he wore a little smile. Button nose, his cheeks packed tight with meat, like that kid with the funny voice who did all those sneaker commercials. Pale skin, his hair Hitler-straight and combed slick. He was dressed like a yuppie on casual Friday.
Like the Whale, I kept moving, acting shifty and weak. I tried to skirt the brightest of the light. I went over to look at a bulletin board with that wild-hair picture of Albert Einstein thumbtacked to it.
A couple of the others took seats, finally, but nobody sat on the sofa, except Wichita perched herself on its broad arm. She watched the Whale adoringly, and at one point when he passed her, he reached out to touch her brittle-looking hair. Yeah, I see.
The sofa seemed massive and alive.
I had the sense something was going to give.
“I have to say, your ideas intrigue me,” said George.
“I’m the guy to be with?” Vargas sounded very assimilated—I caught a tiny bit of barrio inflection, that was all.
“Seems like you’re taking out some of the competition. What I hear.”
“Oh, no, no,” said the Whale, troubled. “Competition, that’s not my thing.” He paused and put up one foot on the coffee table and leaned on his knee, town-meeting style. “Let me ask you. What made America great? Not competition. What was it?”
“The cotton gin?”
“No.”
“Unions!” declared George firmly.
“Hell, no,” still in his baby-blanket voice. “Guess again.”
“Surround sound?”
“No! Cooperation is what made America great. Not competition. Competition never did anything for anybody. Have you ever read a book?”
George looked at him attentively.
“Did you read about the railroads? The railroad companies were starting to compete, making their own size tracks, so that only their own trains could run on them. They tried to shut each other out that way. But then somebody said, hey, if we all make the same size track, we can all run anywhere! Everybody made more money, and that’s what made America great. You try to think creative. I plow my profits back in. I’m gonna write a book.”
The Rita Farmer Mystery series Box Set Page 53