Chapter 4
A half hour later, we were on our second shaker of pretty good rum sours, consumed with a decent bowl of bridge mix, which even had the small malted milk balls in it, a 40-gallon sack of which, Johnson informed me, he had purchased at Costco and kept in his spare freezer somewhere below us in a combination basement and game room. We had exchanged more than a few war stories and were now sufficiently lubricated for the reason of my visit to be discussed.
“I think I’ll just get right to it,” Johnson said, looking at me. “I’m not going to ask Angela not to listen to all this, or get into a big thing about who you are, or why Angela wants you in the picture. I’m just going to tell you that a guy I know over in Ramparts Division says it was Lenny Poon who killed David.”
“Well, that’s something he definitely shouldn’t ought a have done,” I said. “And what the hell kind of name is Lenny Poon?”
“Yeh, well, the thing is, Lenny Poon isn’t his real name. His real name is Leonid Pontraskaya.”
“Good God,” I said. “The Russian drug dealer.”
“Yes. But most people know him as the politically powerful former cold war era KGB asshole now turned Ambassador of good will.”
“He’s a low-life puke who floods the ghetto with H.”
“Ah. You know of him?”
“I got a neighbor,” I said, “who does a little small time dealing who mentioned him to me once. But the real question is, why would a heavyweight like Lenny Poon shoot David? I’m assuming he didn’t personally do it, but rather one of his crew for some reason or other.”
“Yeh. My man told me the store camera caught the whole thing. They got a full-face of the guy who pulled the trigger, but they don’t know his true identity. All they know is that he’s a new guy who’s only been in the area for a few months. Goes by the street name of Nose.”
“Because he’s a coke addict?” I asked.
“No. On account of he has a huge schnoz. Some kind of deformity. His nose is about five times that of normal.”
“Let me guess. Nobody can find Nose.”
“That’s right.”
“Johnson?” Angela said. “Why didn’t you tell me this before? This doesn’t sound like just a liquor store robbery gone wrong. And the police have a tape of my son being murdered? Why wasn’t I allowed to see it?”
“Aw, Angela,” Johnson said, “you don’t wanna see that. You should be taking it easy.”
“No,” Angela said. “Because it’s not going to be easy. It’s going to be hard. Very hard from here on out. I lost a child by miscarriage three years ago, and I lost a husband recently to a heart attack, and now I’ve lost my only son to a cheap-ass murdering snake. So hard is what I have, and I’ve accepted that. Hard it is and hard it shall be.”
The room took on a bit of afternoon gloom, perhaps because the window faced east, or perhaps partly due to a scattering of clouds blown in from the Pacific, or maybe because life itself had been diminished an additional fraction by the evil we were immersed in.
“So where is Lenny Poon,” I said.
“Well, that’s the hell of it,” Johnson said. “He lives right down the street from Angela. About five blocks north of Sunset. In an actual castle that was brought over here stone by stone by some shipping guy in the Twenties.”
Angela looked about the room, her eyes seeing nothing, her vision obscured by the raging flames of some internal hellfire. “The man who killed my son ... is my neighbor? And he lives in a castle just up the street?” This was stated flatly, as though she had just enough breath left in her body to form the words and nothing more.
Johnson heaved a big sigh, and seemed to shrink a few inches further into his overstuffed chair. He looked at me with anger, and yet in his eyes I detected an uncertainty, as though he’d willingly crossed a bridge he now knew he shouldn’t have.
“It’s okay, Johnson” I said.
“I struggled about giving you the information,” Johnson said. “I--”
“--you’re a good cop,” I said.
“Used to be,” he said. “I’m retired. I’m nothing now. Just an old fat guy on a pension, waiting for the Medicare to kick in. If this keeps up, I’ll be forced into a motor home and a continual purgatory of traveling from one casino to another.”
“No. You’ll always be a cop. And I can tell you were a mean bastard. I’m glad we never met before. I would have had to blow us both up.”
“McDougal, I think you should let the police handle this thing. I’ve still got some contacts, and I think I can keep the pressure up.”
“I’m not stopping the police,” I said. “But if I find the killer first ... ” My words hung in the air. “Look, Johnson,” I said. “Billy saved my life in Cambodia. He asked me to intervene. What else can I do?”
“You can quit living in the jungle and let the powers that be handle it.”
“I am the power,” I said. “Not to mention the glory.” I stood up and looked at them both. “I’ve got to be going now. I won’t be contacting either one of you again. Don’t get up. I’ll let myself out.”
“That’s it?” Johnson said.
“That’s it.”
“Hey!” Angela yelled. “You said I could go with you.”
“I lied. You stay here with Johnson. Maybe the two of you can say a prayer to the Virgin for me.” I was halfway out the front door when Johnson called out.
“McDougal, what would you say if I told you I’m sick and tired of being retired,” he said.
I should have kept right on going out that door. But every now and then I go soft in the head. Of course, I always regret it later, but nobody can be completely heartless every minute of every day, though God knew I tried. I knew what Johnson was asking of me. He was asking for the privilege of serving under my command, possibly even dying under it, covered in glory, reserving for other old timers the obscene fate of dying alone from the grotesque, bloated inefficiency of natural causes.
“Can your dog still fight?”
“Hell yes!”
“Does your dog have a name?”
“Heinz.”
“Then pack your bag and put a leash on Heinz and let’s go.”
“I’m going too,” Angela said, speech slurred, rising a bit unsteadily to her feet. “I’m going with you so I can cut Lenny Poon’s head off with the Bowie knife.”
I thought about this, but only for a second before nodding my head in assent. Hey, why not? Life is meant to be lived. Angela’s soul had died along with her son. Perhaps cutting Lenny Poon’s head off would be just the thing to effect some sort of temporal resurrection within her. It wasn’t for me to say one way or the other. I am but something made of dust, and to dust I would soon be returning. Not to discount the stuff. Not by any means. There’s a lot more dust in the universe than anything else. So I waited for them to join me, and inside of ten minutes we were crammed into the roadster, Angela beside me and Johnson and the dog crushed into the back, on our way down the hill to a fate assuredly not reserved for those who were currently traversing the slower, safer, narrower route to High Heaven.
Retribution Page 4
