by J. L. Abramo
The old man poured two shots of twelve-year-old single malt Scotch, handed a glass to his grandson and took a seat in a leather armchair opposite the younger man.
“I’m not happy, Jack, the situation is troublesome and this police detective has only made it worse. The man is a loose cannon. I’ve dodged bullets all my life and I refuse to be brought down by a fucking insect,” the old man swore. “It’s not the three hundred grand, the money is no problem. The problem is that Raft is threatening us and he can’t be trusted. And any payoff, no matter how big, won’t make the problem go away. We need a more predictable solution.”
The old man waited for a response.
“Raft doesn’t know anything about you or about who the woman was,” Jackson said. “The reporter may have been on to something, but the notes he passed to the PI didn’t spell it out and that was all Frank Raft saw. All of the reporter’s research was on his laptop and it’s been destroyed. Raft can’t hurt us without implicating himself, I think he would take the money and run.”
“He is a man without integrity, if it meant saving his own skin he would give you up in a heartbeat and that would lead right to my door.”
“What do we do?” Jackson asked, dreading the answer.
“You will take Raft’s call tomorrow as arranged. Tell him the money will not be available until Monday. Tomorrow evening we will decide what to do about Frank Raft. Finish your drink and go, I’m tired and angry and even you aren’t safe when I get this way.”
“I’m sorry,” Jackson said.
“Sorry will not quite cut it, Jack. Go. Think about it and come back tomorrow night with something more useful than an apology.”
Jackson left the mansion and climbed into his car for the drive home, effectively reminded that his eighty-eight-year-old grandfather was still a man to be feared.
Jimmy was having difficulty reading. He was fighting to keep his eyes open and his mind focused. He closed the Hugo novel and set it down on the bedside table.
After nineteen years in a French prison for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his sister and her child, the convict Jean Valjean was at last released. He soon violated parole and was again a wanted man. Relocating to Monteuil-sur-Mer and taking on a false identity, Valjean came to be known as Monsieur Madeline. His hard work earned him the respect of the townspeople and the former criminal became a successful businessman. In time he was appointed to serve as Mayor of the town. After nearly ten years at Montreuil, an incident on the street threatened to destroy Jean Valjean’s new life and prosperity. A crowd had gathered to watch as the Mayor single-handedly lifted a wagon off the body of a worker who was trapped under the wheel. Madeline displayed remarkable strength and he saved the man’s life. Among the spectators was the police inspector, Javert. The brute physical power of the Mayor aroused suspicions in the inspector and Javert was convinced that Monsieur Madeline was in fact the wanted convict Valjean.
As Pigeon closed the book, he wondered how far Valjean would go to avoid being exposed as the condemned man he had worked so diligently to forever lay to rest.
Jimmy also wondered how far Javert would go to uncover Jean Valjean’s long buried past.
Jimmy looked into the living room to check on the girl and found she hadn’t moved. He realized he would need Ray Boyle’s help; only Boyle could protect Angel Rivas now. Jimmy needed to convince the girl Boyle could be trusted. That he was her only hope of surviving the serious danger Ricardo Diaz had exposed her to.
And Jimmy also knew Ray would never stop until he found whoever was responsible for the shooting death of the young LAPD officer, John Billings.
Detective Boyle would be as relentless as Inspector Javert.
VIRGINIA HILL
Jimmy was awake at dawn Sunday morning. He looked in on the girl. She was still asleep on the couch. He shaved and took a quick shower and then quietly slipped out of the apartment.
Jimmy picked up a coffee and the LA Times and walked down to the Santa Monica pier. He took an empty bench and he gazed out at the bay, mesmerized by the vastness of the ocean. At times like these he wondered why he bothered to get tangled up in the lives of others, knowing he had little or no power to change fate. At times like these he saw human beings as small and insignificant and felt he was no exception. The human animal, like all others, was motivated by self-interest. Survival, power, riches, fame, love. Lenny, Richards, Ricky Diaz, Ray Boyle, Nate Archer, Angel Rivas, Jimmy himself, all with their own agenda, all capable of being hero or villain, victim or savior. For a handful the desire to help others was simply self-interest of another kind, an irresistible need to do good. And for the most part, the altruism went unheralded or was greeted with suspicion. Or, in the case of Jimmy Pigeon’s father, greeted with four bullets to the chest.
And who was keeping score?
A bearded man in a Red Sox baseball cap walked up to the bench and asked Jimmy if he could spare some change.
“Thank you, brother,” the man said when Jimmy dropped a dollar bill into the battered paper cup.
Thank you, thought Pigeon as the man walked off after rescuing Jimmy from the overwhelming vastness of the ocean and the Devil’s playground.
Pigeon dove head first into the Times instead.
If Jimmy knew one thing for sure, he knew he was not equipped to be the scorekeeper.
Angel awoke to find herself on a couch. Which couch? Disoriented. For the third morning in as many days waking in a strange place, struggling to recall where she was and who she was with, who she could trust.
Her instinct was to run, run again, but she knew she had lost the strength, the will, to keep running. She was not sure who she could trust, but she was certain she needed to trust someone. If for no better reason than convenience, Angel Rivas decided she would trust her fate to Jimmy. So, when she found the apartment empty, instead of tormenting about where Pigeon had run off to or who he might return with, she simply sat and waited.
A small piece in the Times neatly summed up where the investigation into the deaths of Lenny Archer, Ed Richards, Bob Tully, Ricardo Diaz, Officer Billings and Carlos Valdez was heading. Diaz and Valdez were looking to inherit full credit for Archer and Richards, the timely demise of Diaz would earn Frank Raft a commendation, Billings and Valdez cancelled each other out and it was all about drugs.
Jimmy uttered an audible no fucking way and closed the newspaper. He couldn’t identify the two voices on the tape recording of Lenny’s final moments, but he felt damned sure that it wasn’t a pair of Hispanic drug dealers. The two men who killed Archer weren’t talking the talk. Jimmy left the pier and started home. He understood he would have to be extremely careful with the girl, bring her out slowly and unthreateningly or she would bolt before revealing what she knew or thought she knew about the murder of Lenny Archer. He would need to get Nate Archer past her defenses and then somehow convince the girl that meeting Detective Ray Boyle was her best bet. But first he had to find out what kind of shape Angel Rivas was in after a night on his sofa and see about dealing with her demands.
As Jimmy climbed the stairs to his apartment he could only hope the girl hadn’t run already.
It was a balmy Sunday morning at the small cemetery in Sherman Oaks where LA County Sheriff’s Department Detective Bob Tully was being laid to rest in the presence of family members, friends and a fairly large contingent of the LASD. Tully’s widow and teenage son stood near the coffin as Commander Jefferson hailed Robert Tully as a hero slain in the line of duty. Kevin Tully tried to concentrate on the praise being heaped upon his father, but his thoughts kept drifting to the championship baseball game he missed the day before; a game his school could not win without him.
Detective Frank Raft glanced at his wristwatch, mentally counting the hours he would need to wait before giving Jackson Masters the afternoon phone call which would confirm his early and comfortably financed retirement from law enforcement. He looked up to find Tully’s wife staring into his eyes, her own damp eyes filled wit
h questions. He forced a consoling nod and quickly looked away as Jefferson was replaced at the gravesite by the pastor of the Sherman Oaks Catholic Church. Raft listened as the priest assured the congregation that Robert Tully had been taken by God to a better place.
Raft gazed out at the dark cloud over Los Angeles in the near distance and could find no argument.
Less than a mile from the cemetery, Peter Quince sat in front of his computer monitor in the front room of his bungalow looking at photographs from the copied files of the late journalist Edward Richards. Individual photos of two young women, juxtaposed side by side, the resemblance of one to the other unmistakable. On the left a brunette, a lady who may have been considered a bombshell during the period in which her clothing dated her. Early to middle 1940’s. On the right a very attractive woman with lighter hair but clearly similar facial characteristics, smartly dressed in contemporary attire. In the background, behind each of the two women, the entrance to a large home, more a mansion. To Peter Quince, obviously the same home in both photographs. Typed below the photo on the left, the name Virginia Hill; typed below the photograph on the right, a date, June 2, 1994. Earlier that month. And below those two notations, a recommendation to see page seventy-three, Homes of the Hollywood Stars, History and Mystery.
Peter had spent a good deal of time the previous day, if somewhat guiltily, browsing through Richards’ computer files. He opened files having titles which inspired his interest or curiosity and read an assortment of interviews of movie personalities, film reviews, historical anecdotes and classic Hollywood biographies. He found the material well written and fascinating. But this page, the photos, seemed out of place. The title of the file was Virginia Hill/Granddaughter? and Quince found it in a folder titled Charlie Chan in Fiction and Film. It appeared to the school teacher that Richards was in the process of writing a new book. The folder contained various documents concerning the Charlie Chan novels and the history of the movies featuring the Oriental sleuth and the three actors who shared the role in film. What Peter couldn’t grasp was what Virginia Hill had to do with the Chan project. Quince knew who Virginia Hill had been; in fact he’d seen Virginia Hill portrayed by Annette Bening on cable TV several weeks earlier in a film, opposite Warren Beatty.
Peter knew Richards’ files should be turned over to the police, should have been the moment he had learned of the writer’s death. Quince wondered how Kevin Tully’s dad had come by the laptop. He had made up his mind to bring the disc to Tully’s partner, Frank Raft, and he kept procrastinating because he was enjoying the subject matter immensely. Looking at the two women on his monitor, Peter considered taking the disc directly to Raft and once again he put it off. Instead, he prepared for a trip to the USC library to learn more about Virginia Hill and to search for a copy of Richards’ Homes of the Hollywood Stars and check out page seventy-three. Quince removed the disc from the CD drive, returned it to the jewel case, locked it in the top drawer of his desk, grabbed a notepad and pencil and drove out to the University of Southern California.
When Jimmy walked into his apartment he found the girl sitting on the sofa, hands clasped in her lap like a school kid on a bench in the principal’s office. She is just a kid, he thought, and as vulnerable as a doe in the crosshairs.
“Waiting long?” Jimmy asked.
“There’s no food here,” Angel said.
“I don’t cook much. There’s a café up the street does a decent breakfast. My treat.”
“I need you to pick up my things from my mother.”
“I will. Let’s dine first and chat.”
“I told you I’m not going to talk until I get my things.”
“I know what you told me. I’ll try to change your mind over potatoes and eggs. You’ve got nothing to lose but your appetite.”
“Okay, sure.”
“I want to invite someone to join us.”
“No cops,” Angel said.
“If I wanted to give you up to the police they would have showed up while you slept. I want you to meet Nathan Archer. His brother was my partner, whose death you claim to know something about.”
“Invite his whole family,” Angel said, jumping up from the sofa. “You can all watch me eat, but I’m not talking.”
Jimmy phoned Nate Archer and told him where to meet them and then led Angel Rivas out to the street and over to Meg’s Café.
After receiving Jimmy’s call, Nate phoned his wife. He gave her the phone number of the café and Jimmy’s home phone number. He promised to call if he found himself somewhere else.
“Don’t begin having that baby without me,” he said.
“Wouldn’t think of it,” his wife assured him.
Nate ended the call, left his brother’s apartment and went to join Jimmy and the girl.
Ray Boyle sat at his desk at Parker Center. Ray had been sitting there for nearly two hours, since eight that Sunday morning, trying not to think about the unbelievably fucked-up inter-law enforcement agency investigation which he had in no uncertain terms been exiled from by ringmaster Tanner. Boyle was scheduled to be on duty until three and couldn’t think of a single place where he would not rather be with the possible exception of a front-row-center seat at a Cher concert. He was beating his fingers on a wooden cigar box that once held Cubans and now held an assortment of Sanford No. 2 pencils and stick pens trying to approximate an inspired Keith Moon drum solo from an ancient Who eight-track tape he and Sharon had listened to on the player in his 1975 Plymouth Fury on Mulholland Drive while swapping saliva and dreams of happily-ever-after before economic considerations forced him to become a cop during the day while studying Law at night until he became just a cop and then a homicide detective. Sharon Boyle grew tired of competing with murder victims for his attention and she left him with his corpses, No. 2 pencils and Scotch.
Ray was drumming and waiting; waiting for the word and the word was the law. He was waiting for the other shoe to drop; the shoe that would kick the Archer, Richards, Tully, Diaz case onto the endless list of solved homicides and off the endless list of open cases. The wait wasn’t long. The coup-de-grace arrived minutes later in the guise of a short inter-office memo informing all participating investigators that a joint LAPD, SMPD, LASD Press Release was being sent out on the wire early afternoon to announce the successful resolution to the inquiry into the deaths of a Santa Monica private investigator, a journalist, a Sheriff’s Department detective and an LAPD patrolman and boast about the deaths of the pair of drug dealers responsible.
Not a fucking thing, Boyle answered the little voice in his head that whispered the name John Billings and asked what can you do?
“Not a fucking thing,” he said, this time aloud.
“You talking to me?” asked crime scene investigator Carl Harriman as he walked up to Boyle’s desk.
“Unfortunately not,” Ray said. “What do you know?”
“I know the tooth imbedded in Detective Tully’s shoe once belonged to Leonard Archer and I also know the blue gravel was picked up after the tooth,” Harriman said. “What do you know?”
“I know it doesn’t fucking matter.”
“It might.”
“Oh?”
“I mean, if I were you I’d be wondering where the fish tank was.”
“No. If you were me you would have been bounced off the case by Captain Tanner. If you were me you would have already read this memo from the brass telling it like it is. If you were me you would have nothing to say to John Billing’s mother at his wake tonight except he was in the wrong place at the worst fucking time. If you were me you would be itching to get your hands on a bottle of Dewar’s,” Boyle said. “But you’re not me, you haven’t been kicked off the case and you haven’t seen the memo yet so I guess if you were really curious you could do a little looking around.”
“And if you were me, where would you begin?” asked Harriman.
“I’d begin at the Tully home and then check out the journalist’s place; kind of unofficially.
”
“I’ll see what I can do,” said Harriman.
“Thanks,” said Boyle. “I’ll be here until three.”
As promised, Angel Rivas was both hungry and resolute. Jimmy and Nathan sat opposite the girl in a booth at the window of Meg’s Café watching as Angel attacked a large plate of scrambled eggs smothered in pinto beans and green chili, Meg’s gallant effort to satisfy the girl’s ardent request for huevos rancheros. Angel took a short breather and looked up at the two private investigators.
“You look like over-the-hill Hardy Boys,” she said, “and you’re wasting time. At least one of you could be on his way to my mother’s house.”
The two men glanced at each other; Angel smiled and went back to her plate.
“I’d say she’s made up her mind,” Nathan offered.
“I’ll go,” Jimmy said. “Bring her back to my place when she’s done and I’ll meet you there as soon as I can.”
Meg stopped Jimmy on his way out.
“So,” she asked, “where did you find the princess and the stoic?”
“That’s Nathan Archer,” Jimmy said. “But don’t spread it around.”
“I can see the resemblance,” Meg said. “And the girl?”
“She’s right in the middle of this recent crime wave somehow, says she can shed some light on Lenny’s death and she’s making the rules. Put the meal on my tab, I have to run an errand for the kid.”
“Sure. Anything I can do to help? Engage her in girl talk?”
“I’ll try this first,” said Jimmy. “But I might need your help with her later.”
“Just say the word.”
“Thanks,” Jimmy said.
Pigeon walked out of the café. Meg watched him move down Third Street and then she strolled over to the table where Angel ate and Nate seemed lost in thought.
