by David Freed
“I always wanted kids,” Savannah said. “Probably too late now.”
“You never said anything about wanting kids when we were together.”
“You just weren’t listening, Logan. Six years, I never heard you say a word about wanting a family.”
I checked my side view mirror again. Nobody on our tail. We were on the 101, heading toward Los Angeles, the Pacific to our right. Savannah was driving. Traffic was light. The Jag was pushing eighty. I leaned my power leather seat back and watched a pod of at least twenty dolphins swimming parallel to the shoreline.
“Arlo didn’t want more kids,” she said. “He said one was enough for him.”
The thought of Savannah having a baby with Arlo Echevarria, or anyone else for that matter, made my stomach cramp. She was right about one thing, though: I was no family man. The instincts just weren’t there. Maybe it was because of how I grew up, the lack of role models, shunted among foster parents after the oncologist told my mother that there was nothing more he could do for her. My father was long gone by then. For years, I’d kept a photo of him in an old cigar box, a Polaroid snapshot of a young, unsmiling soldier on border duty in West Germany that came with the one and only birthday greeting he ever sent me. “Money’s tight,” it said, “times are hard, here’s your stupid birthday card.” I was eight. Not that I’m making excuses for myself. I just didn’t care to be a father. I didn’t know how to be one. And, apparently, given how his own son turned out, neither did Arlo Echevarria.
“You should be grateful you didn’t have a kid with that guy,” I said. “He was an abysmal failure at fatherhood.”
“And I suppose you wouldn’t have been?”
The blood was pulsing in my neck. “What makes you think you’d make such a great mother? All you cared about was your career. Now that the phone’s no longer ringing off the hook, you think it might be fun to go shopping at Gymboree and learn all about potty training? Gimme a break.”
Savannah’s eyes were wet with tears. Once again, I’d gone too far.
“I didn’t mean that,” I said.
“Yes, you did. Every word.”
A stylist needs 1,600 hours of formal training before he or she can legally trim a single head of hair in the state of California, but you don’t need five minutes of instruction to bring another human being into the world. Nobody knows whether they’ll be worth anything as a parent until they’re already on the job, and by then, it’s usually too late. I thought about sharing my observations with Savannah on the subject, but I knew she didn’t want to hear them.
The intimate West Hollywood lounge I remembered as the Wet Spot was no more. It was now a discothèque called Propaganda. Gone were the leather banquettes and piano bar, replaced by a throbbing dance club done up all in red, with mirror disco balls hanging from the ceiling, and Bolshevik-chic posters of Lenin on the walls. The cocktail waitresses wore glossy jackboots and red leather, form-fitting Commie uniforms that showed plenty of thigh. The only element that apparently hadn’t changed, aside from the name over the door, was the clientele. There was still plenty of chest hair and Eurotrash. Techno tunes pounded from the speakers, loud enough that I could feel the bass throbbing in the pit of my throat. Propaganda was mobbed. It wasn’t even happy hour.
“They make a mean apple martini here,” Savannah shouted over the music.
“You’ve been here?”
“Once or twice.” She headed off toward the bar, through throngs of gyrating dancers.
A bouncer dressed like a Soviet infantryman stood guard near the door. I walked over and asked if Gennady Bondarenko was still the owner. He leaned closer and touched his ear like he couldn’t hear me. I repeated myself, only louder.
“You want to see Mr. Bondarenko?”
I nodded. His accent was working-class British. A Sig Sauer pistol rode his right hip in a pancake holster.
“And what, if I may ask, is the purpose of your visit?”
“I’m from Publisher’s Clearing House,” I yelled into his ear. “I’m here to give Mr. Bondarenko his million dollar grand prize. I left the balloons in the van.”
The bouncer leaned his head back and laughed. He had no fillings. He asked me to turn around with my hands on the wall, and gave me a quick pat down. I’d left my revolver in Savannah’s car. Along with the balloons.
“Who shall I say is here to see him?”
“Tell him a friend of Laz.”
The bouncer typed a text message on his iPhone. Two brunettes in hip-huggers and spandex tops strutted past us to go have a smoke outside. One of them smiled at me. I smiled back despite my better self.
The bouncer’s phone beeped. He read the response to his text message. Then he yelled in my ear. “Straight back, up the stairs. There’s a door marked, ‘Private.’ Off you go.”
I nodded my thanks and started working my way through the club. The dance floor was packed with young women and stylishly unshaven young men all trying desperately to look their sexy best, gyrating and toasting each other with shouts of, “Za vas!”—“To you!”—when “Staying Alive” by the Bee Gees began playing and everybody started cheering wildly like they’d all just won the lotto. A gym rat with too much gel in his hair started to rock out and backed straight into me.
“Watch the fuck where you’re going, gramps,” he said.
We both knew he was in the wrong. We both knew he was trying to impress the young lady he was dancing with. We both knew that the situation would quickly escalate were I to let it.
“My mistake,” I said with a smile and kept walking.
I couldn’t decide if it was the Buddha’s influence or me mellowing with age. Either way, I had to admit, it felt kind of good, not forcing the issue.
I reached the stairway the bouncer directed me to. I looked back for Savannah but couldn’t see her through the crowd. I climbed the stairs and walked down a short hallway to a door marked, “Private.” I knocked.
“You are the one who is friend of Laz?” The voice on the other side of the door was Russian, female, older.
“We used to work together,” I said, “for the same company.”
“You have photo ID?”
I got out my driver’s license and slid it under the door. A few seconds went by, then the door bolt turned, followed by a second lock. A hand slid the security chain from its track. The door opened a crack, revealing a thick, low-slung, middle-aged woman in a pink velour warm-up suit. Her hair was the color of carrot juice. She was puffing on a Virginia Slim.
“I am Anya,” she said, handing me back my license, “sister of Laz.”
“Cordell Logan. I’m a friend of Laz. I’m looking for Gennady Bondarenko. Is he around?”
“Gennady is my husband.” She glanced furtively behind me to make sure no one else was coming up the stairs, then gestured. “You will please to come in.”
Anya Bondarenko locked the door behind me and slid the safety chain back in place. Inside the office was an executive desk made of burl wood with a matching filing cabinet, a freestanding bank safe, and a foldout couch. A sixty-one-inch plasma television hung from the far wall. A big, square-jawed twenty-year-old in camouflage fatigue pants and a sky-blue UCLA T-shirt lounged on the couch, nursing a Heineken and watching Jerry Springer. He had close-cropped hair the color of night and three days’ worth of facial stubble black enough to be blue.
“This is Marko. My nephew. He is here to visit from Omsk.”
The kid didn’t respond, transfixed as he was by the TV.
“His English is no good,” Anya said, eyeing me through a tobacco haze. “You look familiar to me.”
“I used to come in once in awhile. Years ago.”
“Would you care for cocktail?”
“Alas, those days are behind me.”
“Too bad for you.” She inhaled what was left of her cigarette, blew the smoke out her nose, and dropped the butt into a Diet Pepsi can, which hissed, then poured three fingers of Absolut into a crystal tumbler.
“So,” she said, “I call Laz, but he has heard nothing.”
“Nothing about what?”
She looked at me like I was a slow learner. “Laz. I call him. ‘Have you heard from Gennady?’ He tells me no. He says, ‘I will make calls.’ This is yesterday. Now, you come. So, you tell me, where is my husband?”
I explained that her brother Laz and I hadn’t spoken in a few years. My visit and Gennady’s apparent disappearance, I said, were mere coincidence.
Anya Bondarenko slumped into the chair behind the desk and looked down at her glass mournfully. “I thought my brother sends you. Now I am thinking my husband has left me for another woman.”
“You don’t know where he is?”
“I have not seen Gennady for five days.” She lit another Virginia Slim, drawing the smoke deep into her lungs. “You have business with him?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“You work for government?”
“Used to.”
She shrugged. “What is it you do now, your job?”
I gave her my business card.
She squinted at it through the smoke. “Cordell Logan, CFI. What is this, CFI? You are on TV?”
“Not CSI,” I said, correcting her. “CFI. It means I’m a certified flight instructor.”
“You are pilot?”
“According to the FAA.”
“What is FAA?”
“The sorriest excuse for a bureaucracy on this or any other planet. Listen, Mrs. Bondarenko, if you see your husband, tell him I need to speak with him. It’s important.”
“If I see him,” said, “the first thing I will do is give him the back of my hand for scaring me this way. Then I will tell him.”
“Spasiba.”
“Puzhalsta.”
She walked me to the door.
“Dasvidaniya, Marko.”
Anya Bondarenko’s nephew fired a chilly glance over his shoulder at me, conveying his displeasure at my interrupting his TV-watching. I understood his annoyance. That Jerry Springer is quality entertainment.
Savannah was sipping an apple martini at the bar. The same gym rat who’d backed into me on the dance floor was putting the moves on her. She was doing her best to ignore him, but he would not be ignored.
“One drink. It’s not like I’m asking you to blow me or something.” He was leaning into her, shirt unbuttoned, giving his pheromone musk a chance to work its seductive magic.
“Having fun?” I said as I walked over to her.
“Thank God,” Savannah yelled at me over the music. “Where’ve you been?”
“Playing Kojak.”
The trip was a bust, I told her. The man I’d come to see wasn’t in.
“So what do you want to do?” she said.
“Go back to your place and regroup.”
“She’s with you?” the gym rat said, like he couldn’t believe it.
“For the moment, anyway,” I said.
Savannah shot me a disdainful look as I followed her out.
The gym rat grabbed my arm. “The chick’s into me, man. I can feel it. If she’s really not with you, why don’t you just be cool and step off.” His cologne smelled like something a wolverine might excrete in the middle of mating season.
“Trust me, my friend,” I said, “on your best day, you couldn’t handle it.” I tried to go around him, but he wouldn’t let me.
“Dude, nobody walks away from me. We’re talking here.” He was suddenly in my face, shaking out his arms, like we were about to go three rounds. His glowering eyes and cold, Mike Tyson-like smile were meant to convey the potential for unbridled mayhem. I noticed he was wearing braces on his teeth. Difficult to sell the stone cold-killer persona when your mouth looks like Radio Shack.
“Nice grillwork,” I said, unable to hold back. “What kind of reception do you get with those bad boys?”
“You come in here and make jokes about me? Dude, you got no fucking idea who you’re dealing with.”
“Oh, I think I have a pretty good idea, actually. Have a nice day.”
I tried to go around him once more. He grabbed my shoulder and turned me toward him, looping a sloppy roundhouse punch that I slipped easily. I rotated left and fired a shovel hook to his left ear that sent him crashing back into the bar, knocking another guy and his date off their stools like they were bowling pins. The pulsing techno music suddenly stopped. The gym rat was out cold on the floor.
The bouncer came sprinting over. “Everybody cool it!”
Savannah was incensed. “We’re here twenty minutes and you get in a fist fight?”
“The term ‘fight’ conveys fighting. This was more self-defense.”
She didn’t buy it. Neither did the two people I’d knocked from their barstools.
The guy wore glasses and a rayon aloha shirt with little woody wagons on it. A CPA’s version of Sunset Boulevard chic.
“What is your fucking problem, buddy?” he wailed at me, struggling to help his woman off the floor.
His date was a powerfully built woman with stringy brown hair who outweighed him by a good fifty pounds. In her right hand was a nine-millimeter pistol, which she pointed in my face. In her left hand was a six-pointed gold star that said, “Deputy Sheriff, Los Angeles County.”
“Turn around,” she said, her lower lip bleeding, “and put your filthy hands on your head.”
Compared to military MREs, dining at the West Hollywood jail is haute cuisine. My fellow inmates and I enjoyed well-seasoned, perfectly breaded fish sticks for supper and scrambled eggs for breakfast with Tater Tots cooked just right. Even my amiable cell mates, the outlaw bikers Bad Dawg and his brother, Mad Dawg, both agreed that when it came to in-custody meals, West Hollywood rated four stars.
“LAPD, you get powdered eggs,” Bad said.
“That’s cruel and unusual punishment, right there, Dawg,” Mad said.
“No, Dawg. Cruel and unusual are them mystery meat sandwiches LAPD feeds you for lunch.”
For habitual recidivists who looked like charter members of the ZZ Top fan club, the Dawg brothers could not have been more hospitable. That I’d been booked into their cell on suspicion of assaulting a peace officer only upped my personal stock as far as they were concerned.
I asked them what they were in for. Their tag-team explanation took nearly an hour to tell, a rambling tale about an abusive father and a drug-addled mother, dirt-bag running buddies, cheating women, evil cops, crooked attorneys, corrupt judges, and how never to rob a Wells Fargo bank located across the street from an FBI field office.
“Especially on FBI payday,” Bad added.
“Good to know,” I said.
We spent the night debating why Johnny Cash always wore black and dozed on stainless-steel cots under fluorescent lights, while some guy two cells down kept screaming that Dick Cheney was trying to kill him. Shortly after breakfast, one of our jailers appeared and informed me that I was to be released forthwith without bail. The Dawgs called me a lucky sumbitch and told me to keep in touch. I promised them I wouldn’t.
The jailer escorted me to the booking cage just inside the rear door of the sheriff ’s station where I signed for my belt, cell phone, keys and wallet. I was made to count my money to make sure it equaled the amount I’d been booked in with, and then escorted to the station’s main entrance.
Savannah was waiting for me in the lobby. She was with Detective Czarnek.
“I called him,” Savannah said, “like you asked.”
I thanked them both for coming.
“You lucked out,” Czarnek said, chewing nicotine gum. “My captain and the under-sheriff played basketball together in high school. Got him to drop your case as a favor. That lounge lizard you decked? He had a warrant outstanding out of Long Beach. Failure to appear on a moving violation. Long as we make that go away, he never saw you.”
“And the deputy who took a tumble, she’s cool with that?”
“Aside from you fucking up her love life. The
guy she was out with didn’t know she was a cop.”
“What did he think she was—a Romanian weightlifter?”
Czarnek grinned. “Tell you what, I certainly wouldn’t mess with that chick. She could kick my ass in a heartbeat.”
“You guys are awful,” Savannah said.
We walked out of the sheriff ’s station and onto San Vicente Boulevard. The morning air felt heavy and smelled of rain. A rare treat in Los Angeles. Czarnek’s plain-wrap Crown Vic was parked in a red zone at the curb. He’d looped the microphone cord of his police radio over the rearview mirror to let the meter maid know the car belonged to a detective, but either the meter maid didn’t see it or didn’t care. A parking ticket was wedged under the left wiper blade.
“Fuck.”
Czarnek snatched the ticket off the windshield and stuffed it in his sport coat. He was wearing a different coat than when I saw him last. This one was brown.
I asked him why he was so willing to help me get out of jail.
“Quid pro quo,” Czarnek said. “I need you to take a ride with me.” He got in his car and cranked the ignition.
I told Savannah I was sorry for my behavior the night before. She made a remark about me not being a very good Buddhist. I agreed.
A city bus roared past, racing to make the light at Santa Monica Boulevard. The slipstream mussed her hair a little. I reached out impulsively and tamed a wild strand. She didn’t stop me.
Czarnek lowered the passenger window and said, “Take your time. What the hell. I got nothing else to do.”
Savannah was looking at me. She was too beautiful and I was a damn fool for feeling what I was feeling at that moment. I told her to go home and lock her doors. I’d be there when I could.
She said, “Is that a promise or a threat?”
I smiled.
We turned at the light and drove east on Santa Monica Boulevard. It started raining. Big, greasy drops smeared the windshield, just enough to leave a blurry film whenever Czarnek worked his wipers.
“That’s the problem with Los Angeles,” Czarnek said. “Either it rains too much or not enough.”
“LA can be accused of many things,” I said, “but moderation is not one of them.”
