by Avery Duff
That day on the roof, he didn’t focus on yoga. It was the calf scar from her lasered-off tattoo and the Saddle Peak Lodge that had him going. In the wrong direction, it turned out.
Sonya must have troubled Alison. Her lawyer, soon to be her boyfriend, knew where Sonya lived. If he talked to Sonya again, he could stumble onto Alison’s alias or her Kundalini skill set. Skills so advanced, he might learn, that Alison could manipulate her breathing and heart rate enough to pass out. And Robert knowing either of those pieces of her puzzle? That would call into doubt her whole story about Jack’s sexual assault.
Lawsuit-ending doubt.
Did Sonya ever come on to Alison like she’d told him? He didn’t think so anymore. Sonya had been eyeing him just now like he was the last tiramisu on a dessert cart. Besides, whether or not Sonya dug girls didn’t matter to Alison. But her story about Sonya coming on to her? That mattered to her because Sonya’s come-on explained Alison’s dropping Sonya’s yoga class—even after Alison told him the classes were a lifesaver and a source of spiritual well-being after Jack attacked her.
And Alison’s story mattered, too, because her easygoing persona mattered. What was it she told him outside Sonya’s that day he’d shown up? She had reservations about suing Jack. I just want to have my life back. And that afternoon on their roof deck when he’d pressed her about the scar? Let’s never talk about that lawsuit again.
A simple woman with simple needs. That was Alison’s mask, her pose, and it was a good one, too—as long as he stopped thinking about her past and about their past together.
Nice try, Tattoo Girl, he was thinking. Jesus, is she slick, or what?
He didn’t remember driving home, but that’s what he must’ve done because next thing he knew, he was in the condo kitchen. His back to the ocean, Alison’s handgun on the kitchen counter beside his computer. This time, he knew the weapon was loaded because he made sure of it.
Tarzana, he was thinking. A town out in the Valley, west of Encino.
He remembered Alison’s joke, early on, about a made-up TV show, Storage Wars Tarzana. The town where her belongings were still stored. Maybe she slipped up and told him the truth about living there before moving to Topanga. Made sense. It was the second day they’d met at the bookstore, still casual. If he’d never learned her alias, it would never matter if he knew she’d lived in Tarzana.
But now he did know her alias, so he gave it a shot. Placed his hands on the keyboard and typed Maxine Ellison into his Plaintiffs and Defendants program, searching Tarzana for lawsuits. This search came back robust: three cases involved Maxine Ellison, Plaintiff. Each one was for less than $10,000, and each was dismissed before an answer was ever filed by the defendant. Dismissed by agreement of the parties with prejudice, he noticed. That meant she couldn’t sue that party again on the same set of facts.
Each defendant had something else in common: each was a professional corporation, a PC, but none of the defendants were MDs. That meant she had most likely sued three different lawyers.
Based on what he knew now, she’d been shaking down Tarzana lawyers. Who knows? Shaking down lawyers all over the San Fernando Valley. Maxine Ellison, a serial shakedown artist.
Staring at the screen, his anger built until he stood up. Thinking, You scamming little tattooed bitch. All along, you were banging Jack Pierce’s brains out. I can’t believe I fell for—
A human shadow moved across the kitchen wall. Robert grabbed the gun. A fist pounded on the slider, and he whirled to the sound.
Reyes peered in from the deck, his hands raised once he saw the piece in Robert’s hand. “Ay, pendejo. Soy yo, Roberto.”
Robert lowered the pistol. Together, they finally managed to muscle open the patio door, and Reyes came inside. Eyeing that firearm, Reyes said, “Good idea, you carrying. Hear there’s a bad element down at the beach.”
“Been having a few problems,” Robert said.
“No shit?” Reyes said, noticing the fingerprint powder scattered everywhere. “Why I’m here.” Reyes pulled out his iPhone, opened his photos file. “Mira esto, chico, his name’s Stanley Tifton. Señor Lark Man.”
What Robert saw: a fuzzed photo. A middle-aged man, tanned, about the size he remembered from tangling with him. Standing at a convenience-store checkout counter, a purple Larks carton in front of him. Looking closer at the grainy photo of a video, he didn’t see any marks on the man’s face, but it was Stanley Tifton, he knew now.
“Where was it taken?”
“Day and Night Liquor, Beer, Cigarettes, and Wine,” Reyes said.
“That’s a real name?”
“Sí. On Beethoven. Paid ’em a hundred; they let me take a shot of their tape. So that’s the other five hundred plus the one makes six hundred more I got you down for.”
“Stanley. When was he there?”
“Today, jefe. Three and a half, four hours ago.”
Before the break-in, Robert thought. No marks yet appeared on Stanley’s face.
“Sounds about right,” he told Reyes, who grabbed a beer from the refrigerator.
Robert started to make a call. “Lemme see if Jacobson knows anything about—”
“Hang up, chico, got us some straight junkie-to-junkie dope.”
Reyes swigged his beer, told him one of the Chinese clerks at Day and Night knew Stanley from Narcóticos Anónimos, a meeting over in Ocean Park. The Asian sayin’ Stanley dropped by the store, bought cartons of those hard-to-find Larks, and usually stuck around to shoot the breeze, talk himself up.
“So, it’s not anonymous?” Robert asked.
“Once I paid my boy that hundred, todo es posible.”
Turned out, Stanley called himself a private eye for a long time, but all he was, was a smack-talking junkie. “Guy was in and out of the joint, but somewhere along the line he got popped for burglary plus some kinda aggro assault. Finally got clean this last go-round but still sells nickels and dimes of marimba, X, poppers. Pero no narcóticos is what homey tells me.”
“No heroin. Just reefer and amyl nitrites?”
“Sí.”
Amyls. There it was again. Another unprovable link between the man who attacked him and Jack Pierce.
The Asian clerk, it turned out, didn’t much like Stanley. “Stanley, he was always tellin’ my boy, Wang Chung, without sayin’ it out loud, ‘I’m better’n you.’ Made like he knew big people, people who kept him out of jail back when he was using regular.”
Big people. Big-time-lawyer people. Jack Pierce again.
“Got Stanley’s address right here,” Reyes said, “if you want to check . . .”
Reyes looked around. That loaded handgun was jammed in Robert’s waist, and he was already headed for the stairs.
Blueberries had spilled off the kitchen counter, rolled past the heroin ziplock onto a buckling, checkerboard floor. The refrigerator door was open. So was Stanley’s mouth, his body lying in front of his fridge, his breathing shallow.
Robert and Reyes stood over him. The front door had been open, so they let themselves in after spotting his splayed bare feet through his torn-screen slammer.
“Day and Night dude thought he was clean, chico.”
“Not clean enough,” Robert said, peering closely at the ziplock. Kneeling, he caught those welts he put on Stanley’s face and upper arms. No doubt about it. Stanley was his attacker, and Stanley was still alive.
Using a plastic picnic fork on the counter, Reyes pulled open the ziplock, took a closer look at the junk. “Chiva, Roberto, but not no Mexican brown shit.”
“¿No? ¿Es buena?”
“Sí, es prima. Inside the refrigerator, mira,” Reyes said, pointing.
Looking in at Stanley’s wrapped hundreds, Robert counted them. Looked to him like twenty grand. Jack Pierce’s blood money to Stanley.
Reyes reached for a stack of bills. Robert stopped him. “Don’t touch it, hermano.”
“C’mon, dude, este pendejo tried ending you.”
“Ca
n’t do it, Reyes,” he said, talking as he went over to Stanley’s landline and called 911.
“Aw, man. Why not grab his stacks, let his spirit move on to a better place?”
“No es posible.”
“¿Por qué?”
Because I need bread crumbs, Robert was thinking.
Reyes’s lowrider was parked a long city block away from Stanley’s house. In the passenger seat, Robert was on his cell phone. On the other end, Erik was giving him his take on the situation from Stanley’s kitchen.
“Talked to the Culver City narcotics,” Erik was saying. “They didn’t think Tifton was selling the real deal anymore. But they plan to hang out here, see who shows up to buy smack, who calls his landline.”
“No cell phone?” Robert asked.
“If Stanley had one, we can’t find it,” Erik said.
Cops had seen Stanley’s ziplock and cash and had drawn the natural conclusion: Stanley was a serious dealer who OD’d on his own product. Robert didn’t quite buy it as he watched paramedics load Stanley into an ambulance with Erik not far behind.
“So, he’s definitely still alive?” Robert asked.
Erik must have figured Robert was scoping him because he said, “Where you at, dickhead?”
“Up the road.”
Erik spotted the lowrider. “With Reyes? You kidding, right?”
“From what I’ve seen, he’d make a fine police officer.”
“Tell Yacobson, no, a primo detective,” Reyes corrected.
“Detective? Fuck you both,” Erik said, but Robert could see him laughing.
“What’s next?” Robert asked.
“Docs’ll jolt him with Narcan at the hospital. If he comes to, he’ll be one miserable criminal, but he’s our boy. You marked him good like you said, face and arms.”
“And once he comes to, you’ll what?”
“If he comes to and he feels like it, and if you two homeys don’t feed me any more shit? He doesn’t ask for a lawyer, I’ll ask him who put him up to it. Any way you can help me with motive?”
Robert gave it some thought. “Safe to say, somebody out there hates my guts.”
“Helpful,” Erik said. “You sign that last report?”
“No, but I’ll bring it by tomorrow.”
“Family’s splitting for SeaWorld, all of us, at twelve hundred hours, so don’t slip up.”
Not long after winding up that call, Reyes and Robert crossed Lincoln Boulevard, rumbling west from Culver City into Venice.
“¿A dónde ahora, mi abogado?”
“Brentwood,” Robert said.
“Uh-uh, not in this ride, chico. You gonna be rollin’ solo over in Brentwood . . .”
CHAPTER 44
A golf ball landed near Gia. It was a Titleist. She was cutting roses in her front yard’s rose bed. Not far away, Jack was working on his short game. He walked over, leaned his gap wedge against one of her bushes.
“If I could secure you access to that alley, back of your house? We build a garage back there and your house value doubles overnight.”
“How does that work?”
“Sue your neighbors on either side for access.”
“For what?” she asked.
“Eating? Breathing?” he said.
He put his arms around her, held her from behind. “You all right? You haven’t said much since the courthouse.”
“Where did you go after that?” she asked.
“Had to see an old friend. He slipped up, started using again. I should dump him but we go back—so far back I can’t pull the trigger.”
“Oh,” she said, kneeling to hand-spade the ground. When she made that move, he had to let her go.
Looking down at her: “Thought he was going to take a swing at me, didn’t you?”
“Who?” she asked, making him work for it.
“In the courthouse. Worth. Beautiful, wasn’t it?”
She said, “Guess that was pretty sweet.”
“Hey, I get it. I can’t expect you to get off on it like I do.” He grabbed his wedge and went back to his practice balls.
“Just that I knew him day one,” she said. “We were both in the trenches, working together.”
“Hadn’t looked at it that way,” he said. “You two were kinda tight.”
“Once you get to know him,” she said, “he’s an amazing guy. I’m not a lawyer or anything, but—”
“You could have been. You’re a killer, baby.”
She smiled but was spading the ground harder than was called for. “What I mean is, I thought he was the best lawyer in the firm.” She waited till she saw his body stiffen. Saw him look up from his shot. “Besides you. But he’s an interesting . . . no . . . what’s the right word . . . an amazing guy once you get to know him.”
“Heard you say that already. How so?” he asked.
“All I mean is, coming from up in the boonies, winding up in LA, killing it until everything got messed up. Well, you know.”
“I do know,” he laughed. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m beginning to think you two were more than friends.” She didn’t answer, so he asked, “What I mean is, did you have sex with the guy?”
She stood and approached him, fresh-cut roses gathered in her arms. He chipped a ball near his hat.
“Nice shot,” she said. “You gonna win today?”
“C’mon, just tell me. You sleep with him or what?”
“We promised each other, didn’t we? This time, no more games.”
“That’s our deal and that’s why it’s going to work.”
“So, yes,” she said, “I did. I slept with him one time at the Bel-Air. In Suite 207. I was so mad at you, knew how much you hated him. It was just to get back at you and I’m really sorry.”
Jack didn’t speak. Savoring her lie about Robert and moving closer to Jack, Gia asked, “We can get past it, though, can’t we?”
He let his club fall to the ground, took her by the shoulders, and looked into her eyes. “After all my women you put up with? All those stupid, mindless times and you forgave me? I had that coming. Whatever you did, anything you did, I had it coming for a long time.”
He started to hug her but her armful of roses let her say, “Ow. Don’t.”
She walked up the stairs onto her shaded front porch and set the roses in a bucket of water. In the shadows, he couldn’t see the tears streaming down her cheeks. Tears from knowing one certain thing in this life: Jack Pierce would never forgive her for sleeping with Robert Worth—not if he cared one bit about her.
Sitting down on her stairs, she trimmed lower leaves from the stems and wiped her tears away. “We’re a real good team, you and me,” she told him.
“The best,” he said, walking over. “We took them down, didn’t we? All of them.” He sat down and began to rub her feet.
“Sure did. Like with Leslie,” she said.
“Leslie? How so?” he asked.
“Don’t you remember?” she asked, pulling more roses from the bucket, trimming them.
“I remember everything. It’s on me to remember everything, but I’m not sure what you mean saying, Like with Leslie.”
She said, “I was so sure she’d want a dollar share, but she went for keeping her job, keeping her benefits. Just like you said. She actually cried when I gave her my Healey.”
“C’mon, I made a living reading juries. I met her that one time with you, but she was easy. Acts like a dim bulb but isn’t, low self-esteem, she’d do anything in the world you asked her to do.”
“And she did. Just like you said.” Repeating the phrase.
He stood up. “Tomorrow,” he said, “once you get your share, promise me you’ll pay off your mortgage.”
“What about money? I mean, money for us to live on?”
“Look, my share of the settlement hurt, I’m not gonna lie, but I have a few irons in the fire, so don’t worry about money. We’re good. How about grilled lobster tonight? I’ll stop by Santa Monica Seafood.�
��
“Yum,” she said.
“See you tonight, babe.”
“Sure,” she said. “Tonight.”
She watched him walk down to the street, put his golf bag in the trunk of his rental car, and drive away. Once he did, she opened her left hand, squeezing a rose stem so tight that blood oozed through her fingers. She held that hand under her bucket’s cold water, reached in her pocket with the other hand. She found her car key, chirped her Prius rental on the street. Then Gia stood up.
Everything about Leslie, she was thinking, was just like Jack said.
CHAPTER 45
Philip was wearing a kimono when Robert spotted him standing by his pool. Rocking heel to toe in Puma slaps, Philip was grooving to pool-speaker Sinatra, who was giving it up via “One for My Baby.”
Robert had taken the side-yard walkway to the unlocked back gate. Philip didn’t see him till Robert had already passed the pool house and was close by.
“Mr. Fanelli?”
“Robert,” he said, “I’ll be damned. I planned to call you next week but here you are.”
Call me? “I need your help. I have no right to ask, I know that, but I’m asking anyway.”
Robert hovered somewhere over angry and desperate. Philip pulled a remote from his kimono, pointed it at the pool house, and lowered Sinatra’s voice.
“Had you called ahead, I might have invited you over. Since you didn’t, go ahead and explain why you’re trespassing.”
“Because,” Robert said, “I think Jack tried to have me killed.”
“What? Are you sure?” Philip said, alarmed by the news.
“No, I’m not. But I know it. It doesn’t make sense, though. Nothing makes sense to me.”
“Have you talked to the police?”
“Yes and no,” Robert said. “I can’t talk to them about Jack’s motives without—”
