The Nice Guys

by Charles Ardai

  But with one thing and another, he hadn’t done it, and he was starting to wonder if he ever would. Maybe the life he had was the right life for him, like a suit of clothes you wouldn’t see on any magazine covers but that fit you without pinching here or squeezing there. It may not be what you set out to wear, but it’s what you had in your closet.

  Ambition’s a funny thing. When he’d been a kid, practicing on his brother’s guitar up in the attic, he’d thought he’d be Bill Haley when he grew up. Where had that gone? It hadn’t been lack of talent, it had been lack of desire. Well, maybe lack of talent too. But he’d never even had the chance to fail for that reason, since lack of desire had taken him out of the race first.

  Eh. Healy tossed back the last of his ginger ale, got up from the stool he’d been occupying while watching the clock behind the bar, dropped some change beside his glass, and grabbed a handful of peanuts for the road. Who wanted to be Bill Haley anyway. Look how the man wound up, just another drunk with a spit curl and some memories.

  Three PM, school would be out soon, time to go to work.

  * * *

  The girl’s name was Kitten, and maybe that was where the problem started. Who names their little girl Kitten? But this was California and the sixties weren’t so far in the rear-view mirror and every middle school had its share of Kittens and Rainbows and such. This one’s father seemed nothing but sensible and concerned when you sat down across a table from him now, but who knows what he’d been smoking back in ’64 when Kitten was conceived?

  Hell, from what he could smell right now, Healy decided little Kitten wasn’t above a toke or two herself.

  Healy was installed beneath a window, hugging the flagstone side wall of a Ventura County two-story, where he was hidden by the late-afternoon shadow. They were upstairs, Kitten and her swain, in a back bedroom, and the window was open halfway, with just a fluttering curtain to keep bugs out. This meant Healy was not only getting a noseful, he could hear them too, and it was a conversation for the ages.

  “Who’s the man, baby?” came the drawling male voice. “Who?”

  And Kitten answered, “You are, you’re the man, oh yes, you’re the man. You! You!”

  Healy ate a peanut.

  He’d picked up Kitten’s trail as she came down the steps of her school building on Sepulveda, laughing with two other girls about some filmstrip they’d just watched in English class, apparently a super-lame one. They were probably all the same age, but looking at them Healy understood why it was Kitten’s dad who had felt the need to hire him. There’s thirteen and then there’s thirteen. Kitten had a long, lush sweep of chestnut hair, down past her shoulders, cherry-red lips, a face that would turn heads anywhere she went and a look on it that said she knew damn well it would. Precocious, Healy supposed you’d call it, except all kids these days were precocious, and this was something beyond that. Kids like Kitten knew too much and too little all at the same time.

  She picked up her bicycle from a rack of others just like it—tassels on the handlebars, banana seat—and pedaled hard to reach a drive-in restaurant half a mile away. Then she sat and waited for someone to drive in, and it turned out to be a man three times her age in a two-tone convertible.

  Sue Lyon had nothing on our Kitten, except that pair of heart-shaped sunglasses. Which Kitten really didn’t need. Her little tan shorts and lazily gapping crop top did the job just as well, and if they hadn’t, the expression in her eyes and her winsome pout would have. Healy watched from across the street, and when Kitten climbed into the convertible, Healy got in his own car and followed.

  Which is how he’d wound up here, peeping at the window, or more precisely sitting around under the window, waiting for it all to be over.

  “You’re the man,” Kitten squealed, “you’re my foxy-fox!”

  Healy winced.

  “Foxy-fox! Foxy-fox!”

  Okay, he’s your foxy-fox. But tell me, is he the man…?

  “Oh, yes baby! Yes! You’re the man, baby!”

  Well, there you go.

  Healy shelled another peanut. It was impossible not to think back to his own brief flirtation with marriage. If that had lasted, if he and June had had a kid, she might have been about this girl’s age now. And would their kid have turned out any better? Probably not, given her mother’s influence. The last conversation Healy had ever had with June, she’d kicked things off with this doozy of an ice-breaker: “Jack? I’m fucking your dad.”

  More peanuts. Kitten reappeared a few minutes later outside the house, wheeling her bicycle down to the road. Healy watched her climb on and pedal off. From inside the house came the sound of a shower turning on. He really didn’t want to wait for the guy to finish his ablutions (noun, the washing of one’s body, esp. ritually), so Healy strolled over to the front door, reached into his jacket pocket, pulled out the pair of brass knuckles he had stashed there, and slipped them on over his fingers. They were a comforting weight in his hand. He used them to knock on the door.

  A pause, then footsteps approached the other side of the door. Healy heard the peephole cover slide back, put a genial smile on his face, lowered the hand he’d knocked with so it was out of sight.

  The door swung open partway. The man stood there in a red silk bathrobe, loosely belted and open to his navel. Up close he looked even older.

  “So you’re the man, huh?” Healy said.

  The man’s face scrunched up. “What?”

  Healy drew his arm back, let go with a right cross that shattered the man’s jaw.

  4.

  On the way home, knucks wiped and put away again, Healy stopped at a stretch of pavement off Mulholland Drive. He was late, nearly twenty minutes late, but the new client he’d arranged to meet hadn’t given up on him. She was sitting in the driver’s seat of her red VW convertible, waiting as Healy walked over.

  She had hair about as long and dark and attractive as Kitten’s, and was roughly as beautiful, but where Kitten clearly had not a care in her thirteen-year-old head, this woman had a decade’s more acquaintance with life and seemed deeply anxious. Which of course made sense when you heard her story.

  “I think there’s two of them,” she said, and she handed a slip of paper out the window to him. It was pink and shaped like a cow, with a few lines scrawled on it in ballpoint. “I just got the name and description for one. They’ve been talking to all my friends, asking where I live. Mr. Healy—I’m scared.”

  While Healy studied the slip, the girl got an envelope from the handbag on the seat beside her. She handed it to him.

  “You’ll take care of them?” she asked.

  Healy took the envelope. “Consider it done.”

  “Thank you,” she said, and he could hear the relief in her voice. “Honestly, I feel better already. You…you make me feel safe.”

  Healy smiled, thought about the whole private investigator thing. Maybe. Someday. “That’s my job,” he said, trying it on for size, and turned away, thumbing open the envelope as he went. He paused, counting the money. Turned back. “Um…you’re short.”

  “Excuse me…? I’m what?”

  He held up the envelope. “You’re seven bucks short.”

  “Oh,” the girl said.

  “Yeah.”

  She started fishing in her purse. “I’m sorry…here, hang on…”

  Because he wasn’t a fucking altruist, that’s why.

  WORD OF THE DAY

  Consanguinity con-san-gwin-i-ty, noun: The state of being consanguineous; a close connection or relation; kinship.

  5.

  Morning found Holland March asleep, still fully dressed from the night before, in his blue serge suit, silk tie, patterned shirt. He was submerged to the neck in lukewarm water in his bathtub. It had been properly warm when he’d gotten in, a few hours after midnight, but had cooled since. He had been out drinking and had come home alone.

  He woke to the sound of his daughter’s voice coming through the loudspeaker of his telephone answ
ering machine, a new device he’d hooked up just the week before, which eliminated the need for the answering service he’d used until then. That was fifteen dollars a month he could stop spending. Holly was saying something over the recording of his voice, which was reciting, “You have reached March Investigations. This machine records messages. Wait for the tone, and speak clearly.” There was a beep. Then a pause. Then Holly started in again.

  “This is your daughter speaking,” she said. “Thursday, as you may remember, is my birthday. Please give accordingly—”

  March put one hand on each side of the tub and heaved himself up. He glanced at his fingers—pruney. Very, very pruney. And what was that on his palm? He looked more closely. Written across his right hand in permanent marker, the handwriting unfamiliar but feminine:

  You will never be happy

  “—also, I hope you didn’t forget you’re supposed to be working today. Because, you know. Bills.”

  March heard the phone go click. Then another beep and the whirr of the cassette tape advancing.

  His temples throbbed.

  Work.

  Yeah.

  He started unbuttoning his sopping shirt.

  * * *

  Gas lines were good for one thing: they gave you time to catch up on the news. On the radio of his beat-up Mercedes convertible, some lady reporter was at the L.A. Auto Show, interviewing an industry rep named Bergen Paulsen who clearly just wanted to bullshit with her about the new makes and models they’d be showing off at the big opening night event, but she wanted to be Woodward and Bernstein rolled into one, peppering him with questions about emissions and smog control and yadda yadda yadda. Meanwhile, the newspaper March had grabbed on his way out the door was reporting on the progress of those killer bees that were supposedly coming up from South America to end life as we knew it. Those fucking bees had supposedly been coming for years now, newspapers had been scaring people about them since Nixon was in office, and had they ever shown up, even one of them? At least the smog you could see out there.

  March looked at the smog.

  Yep, it was hanging over the city like a white quilt that had spent too many years on a smoker’s bed. You looked at the air and pictured it going into your lungs and it was enough to make you sick. At least he couldn’t smell it anymore, not since that dickhole he’d been tailing last summer clocked him in the back of the head with a board studded with rusty nails. Was it the rust that did it, or just the concussion? The docs didn’t know. Would his sense of smell return someday? Maybe. In the meantime, smog didn’t stink, and neither did the gasoline everyone was lined up to buy, but you know what? He couldn’t smell roses either, and his wife was dead. So.

  March reached under the front seat, retrieved a battery-operated electric razor, Holly’s gift to him last Christmas, and clicked it on. Went to work on his stubble, let the noise of the motor drown out the honking of the cars around him as they inched angrily toward the pumps. Somewhere up front, near the head of the line, two drivers had gotten out of their cars and were shouting at each other. Fists were getting waved in faces. You might think, with an energy crisis going on, people would save their energy. Maybe even band together or something. Help their fellow man. But, no. People were still mean, and petty, and unforgiving. And a good thing, too, as far as March was concerned, because if that ever changed he’d be out of a job.

  As it was, nearly half his business had gone away, the result of California implementing no-fault divorce. No longer did you need pictures of your hubby screwing his secretary, or your wife schtupping the milkman, or you know, vice versa, before a judge would let you call it quits. And just like that, half the private cops in California were out of work. Probably leading to more than a few divorces, which were simpler now, so, there you go, silver lining. But the point was, if you wanted to make a living as a private eye these days, you had to hustle for it. Which was why March had become such a frequent visitor at the place where he’d met Lily Glenn, the Leisure World retirement park, where his buddy Rudy ran security. Rudy was happy to fund his losing bets on every nag that ran at Santa Anita with the ten percent March kicked back to him any time one of the residents hired him to find a missing spouse or whatnot. It was easy work. Most of the time the missing spouse could be found resting in an urn on the mantelpiece, his demise having conveniently been forgotten by his loving wife of fifty-seven years.

  And maybe Mrs. Glenn’s sighting of her beloved niece, writing at a desk in her house several days after she died in a car crash, fell into this category. People saw what they wanted to see, especially when they were on four or five prescriptions and peered at the world through bifocals. It would be easy enough for March to generate a report saying he’d looked into it, conducted a thorough investigation, and, no, Misty really was gone, so sorry. Mrs. Glenn would have a good cry and get over it, and her fee would pay for Rudy’s latest flight of fancy at the track, the laundry bills for March’s blue suit, and maybe even a birthday present for Holly. A good day’s work all around.

  But.

  But—sometimes people weren’t just seeing things, even old people, even nearsighted old people. And the fact was, that license plate number she’d dutifully written down? It was a real number, registered to a real car, and what were the odds she could pull something like that out of her wrinkly ass?

  Which left March with a goddamn quandary. Namely was he going to track down this Amelia Francine Kuttner and her mystery car and ask what she’d been doing in the deceased’s house? Or was he going to say fuck it and go back to sleep, in a proper bed this time, either his own or, preferably, one belonging to a woman of the female persuasion?

  Later in the day it would’ve been a toss-up. But it was early still and bars wouldn’t be open for a while yet, and women wouldn’t show up in them for a while longer, and he’d taken Lily Glenn’s money, not that that meant much, but it meant something, maybe. And damn it, he was curious now. What was this Amelia doing in a dead porn star’s house?

  He pulled up at last to the Arco station at the end of the line, and made a decision he’d live to regret.

  * * *

  The tag number had led to an address (thank you, Officer Mulroney), a dive in West Hollywood, up a flight of stairs from a doughnut shop that insisted on spelling its wares “DONUT,” which March fucking hated. The spelling, not the doughnuts. The doughnuts were fine, he ate a couple and called it breakfast, then climbed to the landing.

  He looked left and right before kneeling in front of Amelia’s door and eyeballing the lock to see if it was the simple sort he could pick. It turned out to be the even simpler sort he could open just by turning the knob. Inside, anything that could ever have been stolen clearly already had been. The place was picked clean. A mattress on the floor had no sheet on it, no blanket, no pillow. Even so, March was briefly tempted. But he moved on.

  The bathroom had one lonely toothbrush lying on the rim of the sink. The kitchen was empty except for a rusty fridge humming in one corner. He checked the freezer compartment, because you never knew, people had been known to keep valuables in their ice cube trays, but this chick didn’t. She did have an untouched pint of Baskin-Robbins rum raisin, which March would’ve taken a crack at but, no spoon.

  That was it, three rooms, no furniture to speak of. The closet was bare. Nothing taped to the walls. He was on his way out the door when something occurred to him and he went back to the mattress and lifted it by one corner.

  At first he thought the little rectangle adhering to the underside was a label, but it slipped off, came fluttering down, landed on the floor like a fall leaf. A business card.

  March picked it up.

  THE EROTIC CONNECTION, it said in cheerful bubble letters, shiny with foil stamping. And written in ballpoint ink on the back, Tue 6pm.

  6.

  Now as it happened, March knew a thing or two about the Erotic Connection.

  Back when he’d been on the force, fresh faced and in his twenties, he’d done a to
ur on the stretch of Santa Monica that was home to the Pink Pussycat. Alice Schiller ran the place, and lest you think less of Holland March for stopping in for a beverage and some cheering conversation at the end of a long shift, you’ve got to remember, everyone in Hollywood used to go there at one time or another. Fucking Sinatra went there. This wasn’t some two-bit clip joint. It was at least a four- or five-bit clip joint, and Alice ran it as den mother and seductress and CEO and yenta combined. She kept the booze flowing and the girls on their game. Even brought Lenny Bruce’s mom in to teach classes—painted right on the wall of the building it said in huge letters

  THE PINK PUSSYCAT

  COLLEGE OF STRIPTEASE

  OL 4 - 0280

  and if a girl dialed that number, she was in for a better education than she’d get at Scripps or Mount St. Mary’s.

  Now, when a girl had gone through the program, she was expected to put her newfound skills and knowledge to work on Alice’s behalf—unless, of course, she met a husband at the club, that was another story, then Alice would pop a bottle of champagne and all the girls would celebrate her good fortune. But you weren’t supposed to just pick up and carry yourself to another nightclub a few blocks away, and you certainly weren’t supposed to take three of the other girls with you when you did.

  Which is what Betty Bramden had done, when a boyfriend of hers decided to open the Blue Bird Club, a less classy version of the same concept. Less 1940s, more 1960s; less burlesque, more Summer of Love. But it was the Pink Pussycat all over again in all the ways that counted, and Alice was having none of it. She hadn’t been pouring for her various police friends on the arm all this time for nothing, and she let it be known that she was very concerned about the new element the Blue Bird was bringing into the neighborhood, bad characters, the kind that’d get into fights in the parking lot after last call, and were those needles she’d seen thrown in the gutter out front?