Eleven-six-eighty-six was a cramped single-decker the color of spoiled Dijon mustard. Casement windows, framed in aluminum, bravely faced the streets without the benefit of plywood to shield them from the thunder. The lawn was relatively green, and two hardy hibiscus plants framed the front door, their flowers cocked upward with wide, orange-lipsticked mouths, gobbling the gathering dusk as though straining it for sunlight. Compared to the other houses on the street, 11686 looked almost inhabited. I could understand the mailman's mistake.
Saturday afternoon was waning as I approached the front door. It wasn't daylight-saving time yet. The sun was most of the way down, and Alice was parked bravely in front. The remaining light was richly fertilized with airplane exhaust. A jumbo jet ripped through the clouds overhead as I knocked, laying down a footprint of noise so loud that it wiped out the sound of my knuckles on the wood. Either no one answered, or else I couldn't hear them. I chose the former and tried the knob. It turned easily, and the door swung open.
The first thing that came to mind—prompted, perhaps, by Birdie's shelter—was the neutron bomb, the miraculous technological advance that eliminates everything living and leaves only objects behind. The living room was cramped and dingy and linoleum-floored, and still furnished. The smell of urine hovered above the floor like a cloud of flies. A brown couch, frozen in the act of exploding, shed cotton stuffing and steel springs. Over it, a standing lamp swayed at a drunken angle. A coffee table with three unbroken legs sagged in front of the couch, and a false fireplace, jammed full of wadded-up newspaper, made a shallow dent in one wall.
My foot hit a ball of crumpled newsprint, sending it skittering across the floor. There was a closed door at the other end of the living room, and I thought I heard something move on the other side of it before another jet plowed through the turbulent air above the roof.
My heart was pounding, but this time, for once, I had a gun.
It felt heavy and cold and reassuring in my hand. It felt as reassuring as the remote control for a couch potato's TV set. If something dangerous was on the other side of the door, maybe I could change the channel.
Crumpled newspaper was an old trick. It was the hoodlum's burglar alarm. Stepped on in the dark, a crumpled newspaper could be the difference between dying and staying alive.
Even though my boots had soft crepe soles, I eased them off. I turned them around with my toes and left them facing the door with the precision of a character in a cartoon who thought he might need to jump into them for a sudden exit. Then, my footsteps cushioned by thick white athletic socks, I headed for the door.
There was no more sound from the other side. Not a shuffle, not a breath. I hefted the gun, took a few deep breaths, and tried the knob. It turned easily.
There was no one there, I told myself while I counted slowly to fifty. And if I were wrong, if there were someone there, it wasn't anyone I wanted. It just didn't make sense.
While I reasoned, I checked the gun to make sure that the bright coppery hollow-points were in position, ready to eviscerate anyone on the wrong end of the barrel.
They were. Good. At least I didn't have to make the piercing clicking sound that announces an automatic being snapped into killing position.
And then another jet roared overhead, and I lifted my right leg and kicked the door open.
It didn't open very far. It hit something and bounced back toward me, and someone moaned into the noise of the receding jet, and I kicked the door again and this time somebody yelled, the sound carrying over the whoosh of the plane, and whoever it was fell backward heavily, and the door went past him and slammed against the wall.
I had the gun pointed at his forehead even as I caught the flash of someone else moving away from us, and it took all my strength to overpower the impulse to pull the trigger. On its back in front of me was something that might once have been a person, as a person is defined by the state, which is to say a human being with clothes that belong to him, paper with his name on it, and someplace to go whenever what's happening is finished. The one who had flashed down the hallway had been smaller.
“Tell her to come back,” I said, the gun up in marksman's position and aimed at the bridge of his nose. He looked up at me. He couldn't have been more than eighteen, and his face was very dirty.
Flat on his back, he waved his hands in front of his face as though the hands could deflect bullets. “No one,” he said, “there's no one.”
“Get her out here,” I said. “Do it or you're dead.” I gave the gun a little up-and-down wiggle for emphasis.
“Holy Mother of God,” he said, rolling onto his stomach. “Mother of God, protect me.”
There was a flurry of motion to my left, and a small figure darted through the door, looking down at the one on the floor. “You son of a bitch,” the small figure said to me. It was wearing two green plastic trashbags, sweat pants, and a brave hat that said dodger blue above its brim. “You leave him alone.” The one on the floor moaned.
“Move and I'll shoot you,” I said, just for insurance. I looked at the two of them. Probably they were part of the new community on this abandoned block, human hermit crabs who had hoped to shrug the deserted homes onto their backs as protection against a rolling tide of social indifference. “Put your arms over your head,” I said to her. She seemed the more dangerous of the two, if only because of her fierce determination to protect him. She looked at the gun and then down at him, and raised her hands.
“Whatever you want,” she said, “we haven't got it. Except if you want us to move, we'll move.”
“I don't want you to move,” I said. “I don't really want much of anything. It's just that you scared me.” I held the gun up, away from both of them, and gave it a little shake. Then I tucked it into my pants. She crouched down next to him, still distrustful. The smell of fear and failure rolled off the two of them.
I held up my empty hands and gave them a hearty politician's smile. “I don't suppose,” I said, sitting down on the floor, “that either of you got twenty thousand dollars in the mail recently.”
When everyone had finished laughing, I gave them each ten bucks and they told me what time the mailman came and gave me a remarkably accurate description of the person who'd checked the mailbox for the last couple of days. We shook hands all around and I got back into Alice and drove home. At home I could drink Singha until the image of Junko floated away. At home I could finish making friends with Woofers. And at home I could finally tuck myself away into the warm dark until the start of business hours on Monday, until the time I could twist thumbscrews through the nails of Birdie Skinker.
24 - Making Birdie Sing
T he kid who carried the envelope to Birdie was skinny, eager, and as fraudulent as a campaign slogan. I'd found him jingling a fat tin can half-full of change up and down the sidewalks of Sunset, inspiring guilt in the patrons of the expensive shops just east of Tower Records and west of Mrs. Brussels', demanding donations to send nonexistent children to a nonexistent camp. It was the usual social scenario: the right money in the wrong place. When I'd offered him twenty bucks to carry an envelope to an address half a block away, his face had lit up like a Borscht Belt comic being booked into Caesar's Palace.
“Twenty bucks?” he'd said. Then, squinting with the ready suspicion of the deeply dishonest, he'd added, “I only gotta deliver one?”
“For now.” I waved another twenty in front of him, and his eyes followed it like a lizard homing in on a mosquito. “There's a parking lot behind this building,” I said. “Come back and tell me how he reacted, and you'll get this too.” I palmed the twenty and made it disappear for effect and then materialized a ten in my other hand. “Come back in five minutes, and you'll also get this.” It had taken me hours with the Houdini Handbook to learn to do that when I was a kid, and I'd finally found a use for it.
His eyes widened and he stared at my hands. Then he nodded, folded the first twenty four times, tucked it into the tin can, and sped away.
; I put all the money back into my pocket. It wasn't that I didn't trust him. Well, yes, it was that I didn't trust him. Maybe I was souring on teenagers. The parking lot I'd chosen was on two levels, the upper a good twenty feet above the lower, offering a fine view of a smog- and cloud-socked Los Angeles. Far to the west was the dismal, squall-soaked gray line of the Pacific, bad weather all the way to Japan.
I'd parked Alice on the edge of the upper lot, and now I climbed the hill through the new spring growth, chanting Iranian-style wishes of death to the foxtails and puncher-weeds that were penetrating my socks and gouging my ankles. By the time I reached the top, I was equipped to carry a balanced biosphere of bothersome plant life to a newborn volcanic island. I climbed into Alice and started yanking the sharp little seeds out of my socks, keeping my head low and my eye on the parking lot below.
He was back in four minutes and twenty-two seconds, just enough time to have cut a fevered deal. He was smart enough to have told Birdie to wait before making an appearance, but not smart enough to avoid forfeiting the extra thirty bucks. After a minute, which the kid spent searching frantically for me, Birdie rounded the corner.
Birdie looked like a man ready to explode. His blue Philippine shirt provided a vivid contrast to his bright red face. Clenched fists hung like deadweights at the ends of the forearms he'd borrowed from Bluto, and the veins on his forehead were thicker than the transatlantic cable. He glanced frantically around the parking lot, but he didn't look up. People never look up. You'd think they'd learn. After exhausting the limited possibilities of right and left, he grabbed the kid by his shoulders and shook him like a terrier shakes a rat. I could hear the change in the kid's can rattling all the way up the hill.
But it was no go. The kid didn't know where I was, and Birdie had nothing but the kid. After a few additional shakes, more out of sheer frustration than because he thought they'd get him anywhere, Birdie let go of the kid's shoulders and stepped back, the ridiculous shelf of hair that was usually glued across his forehead drooping almost to his chin. The moment Birdie released him, the kid was gone. He jingled around the corner and onto the street, already sniffing out the next sucker.
Birdie stood alone in the parking lot, shoulders slumped, watching the kid's sneakers twinkle as they carried him around the corner. He wiped his face with a forearm as furry as a sheepskin seat cover, and then his legs buckled. He collapsed clumsily onto the asphalt of the parking lot, dead center in a space stenciled compact. Well, if there was anything Birdie was, it was compact.
Like a pauper in a Rilke poem, he buried his face in his hands, but I wasn't in danger of developing any sympathetic worry wrinkles. I just sat in Alice, feeling remote and Olympian and godlike, and watched him cry. I would have felt more godlike if I hadn't been pulling foxtails out of my socks. After a good fifteen minutes, during which several people parked their cars, got out, and walked past him without giving him a glance, Birdie hauled himself upright and headed for the sidewalk. His feet were dragging so heavily that they should have left gouges in the asphalt. It was only nine-thirty, and if I had my way, Birdie had a long day ahead of him.
After two false starts I got Alice running and drove two blocks east to Ben Frank's, Sunset Boulevard's eternal coffee shop, to eat their version of breakfast—some acidic coffee, a glass of orange juice, and a liberal portion of curled lip from a waitress who took it personally when I didn't order a five-course meal topped off with baked Alaska. Other people were scarfing down two-pound slices of ham and half a dozen brutalized eggs. I forced myself to sip slowly at my coffee until practically everybody else was finished, partly to annoy my waitress, and partly to let Birdie work up a good lather. That was the absolute least that the little shit had coming to him.
There was a phone booth just outside of Ben Frank's. I dialed the number and waited.
“Brussels' Sprouts,” Birdie snapped.
“Listen,” I said, striving for an intensity of regret that would have put the Mock Turtle to shame, “I'm sorry about the picture.”
“What? What?” he asked a bit wildly.
“She's much better-looking than that. I should have fixed her ribbons. God, she hates having her ribbons messed up. Of course, that's not news to you.”
“Who are you?” he asked. “Oh, God. Where are you? Is she all right?”
I looked down at my watch. Barely ten-fifteen. “How do you like it?” I could barely restrain myself from taking a bite out of the mouthpiece.
He paused. “How do I like what?” He sounded simultaneously frantic and careful.
“Getting the picture for a change, you dreadful little half-pint. Instead of sending it.”
“I don't know what you're talking about,” he said slowly. He wasn't about to rise to anything as trivial as an insult.
“Well, cutie,” I said, “aren't we cautious? Is someone there?”
“No. What do you want? How much? Damn you, is she alive?”
“Ah-ah,” I said, “not so fast. Let's consider the implications.”
It took him a few seconds to gather his bravado. “What implications?” he asked. “You've got my dog, that's all.”
“Please. Don't insult my intelligence, it makes me nervous. I've got a lot more than your dog. What about the cigar?”
He didn't say anything, but I could hear him breathing. It sounded like a blacksmith's bellows.
“And where did we take the picture?” I said, mimicking Mrs. Brussels' imitation of a third-grade teacher.
“My house,” he said after a moment. “You broke into my house. You took it in the basement.”
“I took it in obedience school,” I said.
Some clown on a Harley roared by, but it didn't matter: Birdie wasn't talking. The silence on the other end of the line lasted so long that I thought the line had gone dead. “Remember obedience school?” I asked. “The cigars in the belly buttons? Tsssss?”
“Oh, heavens,” he said at last. He said it very faintly.
“I don't think heaven's on your itinerary. Even if it is, we have to talk first.”
He swallowed twice. I heard him lick his lips. Then he said, “Skip it.” He hung up.
The man needed a little more time. I walked up the block and loitered skillfully in front of Mrs. Brussels' building for a few minutes. A lady with unattractive identical twin girls went in. Forty-five seconds later she came back out, hauling them behind her. Her face was white with anger. Birdie must have scorched her to the roots of her hair.
Well and good. I strolled back down to Ben Frank's and ordered another orange juice from the same waitress. I'd tipped her before, so she brought the juice with a cheerful good-morning grimace that would have frightened a pumpkin. She even asked if I'd like a cup of coffee on the house. I declined more hastily than was strictly polite. The place was full of out-of-work actors and screenwriters wishfully discussing deal memos. Many of them wore long knit scarves carelessly knotted around their necks. When I'd drained the juice I went back to the booth and dialed him again.
“Brussels'—” he began.
“Hey, Birdie,” I interrupted. “Do you want Woofers back?”
“Not enough to talk to you,” he said. But he didn't hang up.
“Give me thirty seconds,” I said. “You can count out loud if you like. Let's see if I can't come up with some things you might want. In fact, I'll count for you. One, obedience school. Two, ransom letters. Three, twenty thousand dollars. Four, Kansas City. Five, cigar burns. And, six, how about no cops or FBI?”
“FBI?” he said.
“As in using the mail to commit a crime. Remember that?”
“I never did.” He didn't sound very sure of himself.
“You mailed the note and the cassette. Nice cassette, by the way. Terrific fidelity. Leonard Bernstein quality. Burn-stein,” I added. “That's a pun.”
“Fuck you,” he said weakly.
“Only if you'll print my picture in the Actors' Directory.” He drew in his breath with a sharp hiss. “
Birdie,” I said, “I've got it all.”
“I still don't know what you're talking about,” he said with an edge of desperation.
“Think about it,” I said. “It'll come to you.” I hung up the phone.
In Ben Frank's, the maîtresse d’, a spidery young woman with deep-black-dyed hair and fingernails she could have pruned fruit trees with, dug two talons into my arm as I walked past her and said, “Table, sir?”
“Just the bathroom.”
“Sorry,” she said with virtuous satisfaction. “Rest rooms are for customers only.”
“I'm a customer. Ask Martha.” Martha was the waitress I'd come to think of as mine.
Martha cut no ice with her. She gave me something that would have been a smile if it had happened an inch or two lower. As it was, it flared her nostrils. “I'm afraid you'll have to order something.”
“Okay,” I said. “I order you to remove your hand from my arm. I'm full up on your poisonous coffee, and I'm either going to unload it in the men's room or right here. Want to bet a buck I can't hit the counter?”
She pulled her hand back and gave me a reptilian blink. There weren't any rules to cover this. “I'll make a deal,” I said. “I use the bathroom and you drink the coffee. My kidneys will be eternally grateful.” I put a dollar into her hand for the coffee and threaded my way through the genteel unemployed of Hollywood to the men's room.
“Yeah?” Birdie said into the phone five minutes later. He'd given up on playing secretary.
“To pick up where we left off,” I said, ‘let's try the Mann Act. Let's try interstate transport of minors for immoral purposes. Let's try Cap'n Cluckbucket’s.”
“Ahhh,” he said. “I knew it. Sooner or later, I knew it. It was such a dumb idea.”
“Whose idea was it?”
“My dog,” he said, mustering his strength. The little creep was tough. “Let's talk about my dog.”
Everything but the Squeal Page 25
