“Thanks, Jessica,” I said unsympathetically. “I should have worn a T-shirt that said Detective.”
“I saved your life,” she said, scrubbing her hands vigorously. “This nice man would have killed you.”
“What about the little girl?” I asked the Mountain.
“Gone too.”
“Well, heck,” I said, editing my language unnecessarily for Jessica's benefit. “So what do we do now?”
The Mountain rubbed the back of his neck with the awful-smelling rag and screwed up his eyes. Then he pursed his lips and blew out noisily. He seemed to be undergoing some kind of crisis of conscience. “I guess I break the rules,” he said at last. “I guess I take you to his squat.”
“What's a squat?” Jessica whispered as we walked single file, the Mountain in the lead, down a dark block of Vista. Vista of what? I wondered. The only thing I could see was a tract house and a chain-link fence. “Where a runaway lives,” I said.
“How romantic,” she said. “Isn't there anywhere to lie down?”
“Two houses down,” the Mountain said. “Across the street.”
The house two down and across the street had burned down, some time back, from the look of it. Blackened timbers poked up at irregular angles in the fine mist. The front porch was untouched, but behind it something that had once been a house sagged, black and fractional. The remaining walls of the house were no higher than my shoulder, and the roof would have been something to look at the stars through, if there had been any stars. A little kid's bright plastic pedal car sat forlornly in the middle of the rectangular brown patch that should have been the lawn. A tiny sneaker lay next to it, dead-center in a coiled dog-chain with the collar still attached, as though the dog, deprived of its child, had wasted away into nothing. The entire doleful panorama was surrounded by the ubiquitous chain link, and a sharp smell of charred wood filled the air.
“He lives there?” Jessica said, disbelief coloring her voice.
“In the garage,” the Mountain said. “In the back. It didn't burn.”
The fence was eight feet high, topped by a long, lethal, lizardy spiral of razor-wire. “How do we get in?” I asked.
“Yow,” the Mountain said. “You get in. I won't fit.”
“You have an inferiority complex about your weight,” Jessica informed him. “You're a very attractive man, actually.”
“Honey,” the Mountain said, “you have a sweet mouth. At times,” he added after a moment's thought.
He parted some oleanders, poisonous and probably hallucinogenic if you could figure out how to use them; they're related to laurel, which was what the oracle at Delphi chewed before uttering her holy nonsense. From what I'd read of her advice, she was pretty stoned.
“Under there,” the Mountain said.
I squinted into the dark. Hidden from view by the oleanders was a little hole that led under the fence, like the holes dogs dig to escape. Maybe it had been the dog that belonged to the little kid. Jessica could get through it. The Guitar Player, with his twenty-inch waist, could get through it. The Mountain certainly couldn't. For that matter, I wasn't sure I could.
“You're joking,” I said.
“Oh, come on,” Jessica said in her steeliest tone. “You're not going to quit now.”
“You're not, are you?” said the Mountain. I might have imagined the menace in his voice, but it wasn't a theory I wanted to test.
“Of course not,” I said immediately. “An involuntary ejaculation, devoid of meaning.”
“I know about those,” Jessica said.
“Well,” I said, getting down on my hands and knees, “that's nothing to brag about.”
Feeling fat and middle-aged, I started to wiggle under the fence. The smell of wet dirt was thick and heavy in my nostrils. Then the chain link grazed the back of my scalp, and I ducked. The taste of wet dirt made my nose superfluous. “Pfui,” I said, feeling like Nero Wolfe. Jessica laughed. I found myself on the other side of the fence, looking out at them. “Come on,” I said, looking at her. “If you're so smart, let's see you do it.”
Well, of course, she did. “Piece of cake,” she said, standing up and brushing herself off.
“Back there,” the Mountain said, pointing. “Give him money. He'll tell you anything for money.” He turned away and lumbered back up the street. Halfway up, he began to sing “Melancholy Baby.”
“He's such a cutie,” Jessica said as we skirted the remains of the blackened house. “I don't think all fat guys are unattractive.”
“Oh, shut up,” I whispered, recalling that one of the points of the exercise had been to scare her. She was less scared than I was.
Scraggly junipers lined the driveway on the left. To the right, ghost-ridden and black, was the skeleton of the house. The driveway was washing away from neglect, and I had turned my ankle twice by the time the garage rose in silhouette in front of us. Like the house, it was sagging. Unlike the house, it was intact. It was a two-car garage with a large single door. High in the door, two filthy panes of glass flickered in a jumpy fashion. Candles, I guessed, or maybe a kerosene lantern. Putting my finger to my lips to make sure that Jessica wasn't going to start a chat, I bent down, seized the handle in the center of the door, and yanked up.
The door shuddered, groaned metallically, and then jerked itself upward, almost carrying me with it. “Ouch,” I said, looking down at my scraped knuckle.
Inside the garage something scurried. It resolved itself into Donnie, traveling backward like a crab until his back hit a corner. “What the fuck” he said.
“You,” I said, pointing at him. I spoiled some of the impact of the gesture by sucking on my knuckle. “Not a word until I say so. Where's the little girl?”
He sat crouched in the corner, rubbing his left forearm with his right hand. Closer up, his skin was sallow and no cleaner than it absolutely needed to be. There were half-moons of dirt beneath his fingernails. The nails on his right hand were longer than those on his left, and for the first time I realized that maybe he actually did play the guitar. After a moment he said, “Am I supposed to talk now?”
“I asked you a question, didn't I?”
He nodded.
“So talk.”
“She got a trick,” he said. “Some fat citizen in a Buick. He honked at us before we got off Santa Monica.” His left eye had a minuscule twitch that made him look nervous and furtive.
“What's she going to do to him?” Jessica asked in a fascinated tone.
“I don't know,” he said, noticing her for the first time. “Give him a blow-job, I suppose.”
“Is that what the citizens usually want?” I said, closing the door behind us. With the door closed, the candles calmed down, and Donnie's multiple shadows gradually overlapped into one. It was a very skinny shadow.
“The easy ones,” he said resentfully.
“Will he pay her?” Jessica asked.
“What are you, from Mars?” Donnie said. “Why do you think she does it, to keep her mouth in practice?”
“How much?” I said, for Jessica's benefit.
“Twenty, twenty-five. Maybe, if he's really stupid, fifty.” He shifted his eyes from her to me. “You're the cop,” he said accusingly.
“No, Donnie, I'm not a cop. I'm a private detective.”
“Big difference,” he said. But he sat up a little straighter. “How do you know my name?”
“Twenty?” Jessica said. Jessica spent twenty on gym shorts.
“It doesn't matter how I know your name,” I said. “As long as you're straight with me, you've got no problem.”
“Straight about what?”
“About her.” I crossed the garage and held out the picture of Aimee. He ducked back as though he thought I was going to hit him, and then he slowly took the picture from my hand. He looked at it and then back at me, and something very much like a cash register clanged in his brain. His eyes slotted. “Never seen her,” he said.
“How about a hundred dollars?�
�� I said.
“How about five?” he said.
“Okay,” I said. “Five dollars.”
“Hold it,” he said, standing up. “You said a hundred.”
“And you bargained me down to five,” I said. “Sit.”
He sat. “Two hundred,” he said sullenly.
“Fine,” I said.
He looked startled and slightly regretful, as though he wished he'd asked for more. “Let me see the bread.”
I took a couple of hundred-dollar bills out of my pocket and waved them around. The garage was lighted by only two candles, but they were bright enough for Donnie to register the denomination of the bills. He'd had practice seeing money in the dark. I handed them to Jessica, who looked vaguely alarmed. “She'll hold it,” I said, “until we're through.”
“Her name is Aimee,” he said grudgingly, “but she calls herself Dorothy. Most of us call her Dottie.”
“Good start,” I said.
He gestured at Jessica. “Who's she?”
“You don't need to worry about that. She's obviously not a cop.”
“She could make a fortune on the Boulevard,” he said speculatively, every inch the young pimp in training.
“No, thanks,” Jessica said at once.
He shrugged. “Up to you,” he said.
I squatted down in front of him. “Listen, Donnie,” I said. “You're going to tell me everything you know about her. If I find out later that anything you told me wasn't true, I'm going to sic the cops on you. After I break your nose and sit on your guitar. Are we clear?”
“Hey,” he said, the picture of affronted innocence, “whatever you say.”
I looked around the garage. It had been spray-painted black, and over the black, designs and graffiti had been sprayed freehand. One large graffito said fuck the citizens (but not unless you have to). Another one said home is where the check is mailed from. The ceiling was hazy with cobwebs and the air was sharp with the smell of mice.
The filthy, cracked concrete slab that served as a floor was largely bare, except for a cardboard box on which the candles guttered in motel ashtrays, a sleeping bag, and a rumpled heap of blankets. Donnie's imitation Stratocaster leaned upright in a corner. A plastic trash bag held a few items of girls' clothing and, on top of them, a small hair dryer.
“Tell me about Aimee,” I said. Jessica sat on the sleeping bag, and I folded one of the blankets under me.
“Like what? What do you want to know?”
“Everything. Where'd you meet her? Where is she?”
“Can I smoke?”
“You can shoot speed for all I care.”
“Got any?” He looked eager.
“Have a cigarette.”
He lit up with a disappointed air. “I met her on the street,” he said. “She'd hitched a ride with some truck driver.”
“And?”
“And this faggot named Willie picked her up in the street and steered her to the Oki-Burger. You've seen Willie, he was there tonight. Real big and real black. Very popular with bankers.”
“Skip Willie.”
“You said to tell you everything.”
“Everything about Aimee.”
“Okay, okay. So Willie parked her in the Oki-Burger and I picked her up.” He grinned at me, one male to another.
“You picked her up.”
“Well, she needed somebody. She didn't know enough not to cross on the red.”
“What did she tell you?”
“A whole bunch of shit at first, about how rich her father was and what a porker he was. Told me her name was Dorothy Gale. Well, come on, you know? I've seen The Wizard of Oz. We always watched it at Christmas when I was . . . when I was . . .“He faltered.
“When you were home,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said, glad to get past it. “Christmas TV dinner. Eat your crappy turkey and watch little Judy sing her heart out. What a dope. All she wanted to do was get away from home, and then all she wanted to do was get back. The only thing I liked—you know?—is when she opens the door of the house and it all turns to color. That's it.”
“Merry Christmas,” Jessica said.
“And a Happy Easter to you, too, sweetie,” Donnie said. “I like the monkeys too. So anyways, Aimee didn't know anything. I had to show her which way was west.”
“And you taught her how to hook,” I said.
“Oh, skip it. What do you think she's going to do, be a chemist? She didn't want to, at first. Thought she was going to be a movie star. So I bought her a couple of burgers and then, the third time, I told her that it was on her. Well, she didn't have any money. Tough, I said. How do you think I get it? So I put her on the curb and took her wrist and stuck her thumb out, and a car stopped just like that. The guy wanted us both, so that made it easier for her. She had company, right?”
“Right,” I said. “Company.” Jessica shifted uneasily on her blanket but didn't say anything.
“So after that we were tight. Asshole only gave us twenty each. She cried for half an hour before I got her calmed down. Still, she never wanted to do it. Only when we didn't have anything, not a nickel. You can't even buy gum with a nickel.” He took a drag from his cigarette.
“This is how long after she arrived?” I asked.
“Week, maybe ten days. But it was obvious that she wasn't sitting on no golden ass. Acted like she invented her tail and it was a military secret from the rest of the world. Nobody could buy a piece of it unless she was actually starving. And she could never learn to get the money first.”
“That's important,” I said.
“Bet your buns. Half the time some citizen in a Mercedes will pull in behind some supermarket or somewhere and let you do your job on him, and then when it's time to pay he pushes you out of the car and drives off, and there you are, on your ass on the asphalt. She had this problem asking for money. Very genteel chick. So after a while I gave up and taught her how to live in the mall.”
“The mall?” I wasn't sure I'd heard him right.
“You know, the Centrum, over on Beverly.”
“I know it.”
“Well, it's perfect.” He stubbed out his cigarette on the floor and looked at Jessica. “How about you give me one of the hundreds now?” he asked. “Since we been speaking of money, I mean.”
“Give it to him,” I said. She did, and he folded it into one-sixteenth squares and tucked it into his black leather rock-star jeans.
“The mall,” he continued. “You know, it's heated and it's dry. And you move around from one store to another, hoping nobody looks at you too long. When they do, you move on. When it's time for everything to close, you roll under one of the rest benches and hope no guard finds you. If one does, you hope you can blow him and he'll leave you alone.”
“And you usually can?”
“Sure. I mean, what are they? Bunch of rent-a-cops. For them, a blow-job is a passport to paradise.”
“Tell me about the mall,” I said.
“Well, for Queen Aimee it was the only place, what with her figuring her ass cost more per square inch than real estate at Malibu. They've got movies there, right? So that means it's open until midnight or later, and it means that the lower floors are pretty much empty after ten o'clock. So, like I said, you sleep under a bench until a guard finds you, and if you can't blow him you try to get into an elevator.”
“An elevator,” Jessica said.
“Sure. You can jam it between floors. So you bring an umbrella into a mall elevator and push the button for the top floor. Then, halfway between three and four or whatever, Aimee or somebody would shove the point of the umbrella in between the doors. Period. End of ride. The elevator sticks wherever you are, and we all go to sleep. Nice, clean, heated. Sometimes we'd spray something on the walls to make it ours.”
“And this is what Aimee did?” I asked.
“Until she got her cop,” he said.
I felt something that was doing a good imitation of fear roll over me. “Her cop
?”
“Not a real cop, dummy. A rent-a-cop. Worked at the mall, at Robinson's. Little skinny guy with about as much life in him as a ham sandwich, but he was real horny. Guy would have fucked the crack of dawn if he could've reached it in time. Little guys are like that, you know?”
“Did he have a name?” I asked.
Donnie squinted. “Warner. Looked like a rope with clothes on. Like I said, though, horny.”
“So Aimee met him,” I prompted.
“Yeah, he wanted to throw us out. He found her and me under the bench outside Robinson's, I mean we figured we had it made for the night. Movies were out and everything. Usually, if you can stay put until the movies are out, no problem. We'd even started to cuddle. Her and me loved to cuddle.” He put up a hand. “Hey, you know,” he said, “I'm no fag. I go with guys because it's usually guys who want me, but I loved Aimee. She was even more than family. I mean, even when she wouldn't trick, I helped her out.”
“I'm sure you did,” I said as gently as possible.
“Well, let's just keep things straight,” he said with a little of his old bravado. “I ain't no faggot.”
“Anyway,” I said, “Warner didn't want you. He wanted her.”
“Warner loves little girls. He just couldn't believe that Aimee was willing to do him. He looked so surprised while it was going on. I kept expecting him to pinch himself.”
“You know Warner's last name?”
“That is his last name. He's the kind of guy always gets called by their last name. Probably his mother called him Warner. His first name,” Donnie said, anticipating my question, “is Wayne. Wayne Warner. Is that lame or what?”
“Is he still working at Robinson's?”
”Naw.” Donnie loosed a short, ugly laugh. “He got canned.”
“Why?”
“Because of Aimee.”
“What happened?”
“I'm getting to it. So that night, he wants to throw us out, but Aimee does him instead. She didn't want to, but she did. Right in the middle of Robinson's, in the Spanish Mediterranean living room. Big asshole couch with wooden feet. Real nice room. Better than the Sleep-Eze motel. That's where we stayed when we had the bread. They don't hassle you, or at least not much. Lot of coke dealers too. You know, they move in for a couple of nights, set up shop, and then move to another motel. Not the best neighbors, though.”
Everything but the Squeal Page 11
