The Nice Guys

by Charles Ardai

  Healy grabbed a fistful of hair without even looking, bounced the man’s face off the glass coffee table in front of him. The glass spiderwebbed from the impact.

  “Listen, dickweed, that little girl is a minor. Where do you get off showing her stuff like this anyway?”

  “He’s not showing it to me,” Holly protested.

  “He isn’t?” Healy looked over at the guy, who was now cradling a bloody nose.

  “No,” Holly said, and nodded to the woman next to her. “She put it on.”

  Healy looked over at her. What was she, all of nineteen? Twenty? “Yeah, well, she shouldn’t be watching stuff like this either.”

  “Watching it?” the woman said. “Man, I’m in it.”

  Healy stepped out of the path of the projector beam, took a closer look as the image landed on the wall again, large as life. Ah. Well, there you go. He just hadn’t recognized her with her mouth full.

  “Right.” He turned back to Holly. “Look, go home. Your dad told you to go home, go home.”

  She was staring daggers at him as he made his way out of the room.

  Composing herself, feigning nonchalance, she turned back to the blonde beside her. “Men,” she said, and her new friend nodded in total agreement.

  “Hey, by the way,” Holly said, “I’m supposed to meet someone here. Do you by any chance know a girl named Amelia?”

  The blonde thought about it. “She in the business?”

  “I think she did a film with Sid Shattuck,” Holly said.

  The blonde shook her head. “Don’t know her. But if she’s a friend of yours, tell her to stay away from Sid. He’s gross.” She leaned in conspiratorially. “He told me this one chick was his sister, right? Then a few days later, I walk in on them and they’re all, doing anal and stuff!”

  Holly favored her with a superior smile. “Don’t say ‘and stuff,’ ” she said. “Just say ‘They were doing anal.’ ”

  * * *

  Now it was Healy’s turn to go from bar to bar, looking for March. He didn’t find him. At one bar he might have, if he’d been looking up rather than down as the mermaids behind the glass swam past and a man in boxer shorts and a wifebeater with a cast on one arm swam after them, in hot pursuit.

  But Healy was looking down at that moment, staring at the cow-shaped slip of paper he’d retrieved from the storage room, trying to make sense of Amelia’s cryptic notes. Flt D—Flight D? Burbank Airport? Was she flying somewhere at 10:30PM? What day?

  He pocketed it again and looked up, but it was too late, March was gone. Healy asked the bartender if he knew where Sid Shattuck was.

  “The guy who owns the place? Haven’t seen him.”

  “How about a girl named Amelia, about so tall, dark hair—”

  “Jesus, is everyone looking for that chick? I already told your friend, no, I don’t know her.”

  “My friend—was he a guy with a blue face…?”

  The bartender looked like he’d finally lost his patience. “No, guy with a cast on his arm. His face was the usual color. Now, are you drinking anything or just keeping me from serving other guests?”

  Healy gave him a tight smile, nodded his thanks, moved on.

  * * *

  Outside, on the deck—one of Shattuck’s many decks—March was doing his best to wring out his sopping undershirt and wondering whether the water might have damaged his cast. It hadn’t been worth it. The mermaids hadn’t known anything.

  At least the weather was nice and the view was spectacular, a clear night sky twinkling away above them and the vast bowl of the L.A. cityscape twinkling away below. Immediately beneath the waist-high railing surrounding the pool was a steep grassy hill leading down to a patch of woods and then the fence at the edge of the property. March leaned against the railing and lit one of the cigarettes he’d left on a lounge chair before going for his swim. His clothes were still there, and what was more remarkable, so was his gun in its holster. Sometimes your faith in your fellow man got rewarded.

  Now, how was he going to get that holster on single-handed? Literally single-handed. He’d never thought about that expression before, but he thought about it now. Why do people with two perfectly good hands say they’re doing something single-handed when they’re not?

  He pondered this for a bit, felt his brain clicking along nicely, not so fuzzy anymore. The night air was sobering him up. That was something, anyway.

  He smoked his cig down, pitched the glowing butt over the railing, watched it fall. Then went to get dressed.

  “Hey,” a woman’s voice called as he laboriously twisted and pulled his way into the holster strap. She was wearing a beaded and fringed bikini top and a full-on Indian headdress, though under the outfit she looked like a California girl through and through.

  “Hey,” March said. “Want to help me out with this?”

  She came over, helped him buckle the thing on, got him into his white leather jacket. “You always packing?”

  “Sure,” he said, picking up the drink he’d left by the pool, “I’m a cowboy. And you…?”

  “Pocahontas,” she said, coyly.

  “What do you do?”

  Another coy smile. “I do a little acting.”

  “Me, too,” March said. “Go like this.” He made a gun with his thumb and forefinger.

  “Okay,” the girl said.

  “Now shoot me.”

  “Huh?”

  “Shoot me shoot me shoot me,” March said. “Fucking shoot me.”

  The girl went bang bang with her finger and March fell back, one hand to his chest. “Ah! Got me!” He laughed. “Pretty good.”

  She did it again. Bang!

  “Oh! Ah!” March reeled toward the railing, smiling. He felt the wood against his hip, reached out for it with his hand, felt nothing under his palm but air, and then he was tipping backward, his feet were coming up, and holy fucking shit, he was going over.

  He hit the ground hard, the steep grassy hill, and tumbled ass over teakettle all the way down, smashing against rocks and roots and turning full flips in midair. He was so startled he didn’t even try to hug his broken arm to his torso, or his unbroken arm for that matter, or tuck his head. He just bounced like a rag doll until gravity pitched him up against the trunk of a tree with an impact that drove all the air out of his chest. He was wheezing, trying to fill his lungs.

  Up at the railing, the girl in the Indian war bonnet clapped merrily. “Woo! That was great!” Then she walked off to find someone else to talk to.

  23.

  Miraculously, March didn’t seem to have broken anything else—not even the glass he’d been holding when he went over, though the drink in it had vanished somewhere along the way. He set it down on the grass, felt his body to make sure all vital parts were present and accounted for. They were—but his holster was empty.

  “Shit!” he shouted. “Shit! My gun—”

  He went down on all fours, pawing the grass, searching for his missing firearm.

  Behind a nearby tree, a flicker of movement startled him. A woman in a canary-yellow dress peeked out from behind a branch. “Jesus,” he said, “you scared me.”

  The woman didn’t say anything. She had brown hair, was about so high—

  March squinted. “Do I know you?”

  She looked frightened.

  “I’m not here to hurt you,” he said, getting to his feet again, palms extended placatingly. “I’m just looking for my gun.”

  She bolted, racing away from him through the trees as fast as she could go.

  Had that been…?

  He took a few steps in her direction, hit something with his foot, bent down. His gun. “I got it!” he shouted, but she was long gone.

  He checked the gun for damage—as well as he could in the darkness—and slid it into his holster. Then he sat back against the nearest tree, cracked out a battered cigarette from his jacket pocket, and lit it.

  Something at the edge of his vision caught his eye, something rev
ealed in the flickering flame. He turned to get a better look.

  A dead body stared back at him—or would have stared if it hadn’t been missing half its face. What should’ve been a staring eye, albeit a dead one, was a bloody exit wound, the remnants of a gunshot to the back of the head. It looked like raw steak. March felt bile coming up his throat.

  The guy had on a frilly tuxedo shirt. He had a little spade beard, like a college professor. And half his head was blown away.

  March found himself hyperventilating.

  Why? Why did these things happen to him?

  Why couldn’t Healy have found the dead body instead?

  Speaking of the devil—

  From the balcony he’d pitched headfirst off, he heard a familiar voice calling his name. “March? March?”

  Healy, god bless him, it was Healy. But he sounded so very far away.

  March tried to muster the strength to call back to him. “Hhh…”

  That was all that came out. He tried again: “Hhhh….”

  He felt like Costello in an old Abbott and Costello movie, trying to tell Abbott he’d just seen a ghost, or Boris Karloff or whatever. “Hhh…Hee…Heeeallly!”

  “March?” Healy was up by the pool, and he ran over to the railing now, peered over into the darkness.

  March got to his feet somehow. “Healy! Come on! Come down here!” He didn’t like the pleading note in his voice, but sometimes you just couldn’t worry about such things, and this was definitely one of those times.

  Healy looked down at him. “What the fuck are you doing down there?”

  “Get down here!”

  Healy took a more careful route, climbing over the railing where the lawn was walkable, and slowly walking it. When he got to the tree, March jabbed an arm toward its roots, which were lost in shadow.

  “What?” Healy wanted to know.

  March just pointed again, and Healy took a closer look. “Fuck…”

  “I’m going to be sick now,” March said.

  Healy went over to the body. “Who the fuck is that?” He clearly didn’t much want to do it, but there was no alternative. He pawed through the dead man’s jacket, coming up at last with his wallet. A Master Charge card told him who the fuck it was.

  “That’s Sid Shattuck,” he said.

  March squeezed his eyes shut. “Don’t tell me that. Oh no. Shit.” He pounded a fist against his leg. Which, you know, hurt. He made a mental note not to do that again.

  “What’s going on here?” Healy said. “Everyone who worked on this Amelia flick…the boyfriend, and Misty, now Sid…they’re all dead.”

  “Before we go solving the crime of the century,” March said, “let’s deal with the fucking rotting corpse!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We’ve got to get rid of him,” March said.

  “Why?”

  “I lost my gun, there was a girl, she can place me—”

  “Right,” Healy said. Looked around. His eyes settled on the fence. “I’ve got a plan. You throw up, then we’ll get rid of the body.”

  March went to a tree and threw up.

  * * *

  Upstairs, Holly was wandering the corridors of Sid Shattuck’s mansion, poking her nose in here and there. She’d already seen some things she knew her friends would never believe, and she was looking forward to regaling them, but what she hadn’t seen any sign of was Amelia. She also hadn’t seen any sign of her dad, thank goodness, or of Healy since the projection room, but how long could her luck hold out?

  She squeezed past a woman who was saying, “I know, right?” to a man who was weighing her breasts on the palms of his hands, and made her way down the hallway outside. One more wing of the house and then she’d have been everywhere—

  A figure loomed up before her, a woman who gave the impression of being twice Holly’s height, and only some of that was due to her impressive platform shoes. When she spoke, it was in a posh British accent that reminded Holly of her mom. If this amazon’s height hadn’t been enough to intimidate her by itself, that would’ve sealed the deal.

  “Hey,” the amazon said.

  “Uh, hi.”

  “Are you the one who’s been asking about Amelia?” the amazon said.

  “I, uh, may have said something,” Holly said.

  “What do you want with her?”

  What would dad say, what would dad say—

  “She’s my sister,” Holly said, “see, and yeah…I need to warn her. These two freaky guys were coming around, they were all like, ‘Where is she, where is she?’ It scared me, kind of.” She swallowed hard. Playing scared wasn’t so awfully difficult right at this moment.

  The amazon scrutinized her and appeared to reach a decision. “You seem like a decent kid. I’ll take you to her.”

  Holly gave a nervous nod and an uncertain smile, and followed the amazon toward the front door.

  * * *

  Healy had pulled the short straw and was carrying Sid Shattuck by the shoulders, one hand lodged in each of his armpits. The ruined head lolled against him, leaving bloodstains on his shirt. March had Shattuck’s knees in his hands and was standing between them, walking backward. He was urging Healy to go faster.

  “What I can’t figure out,” Healy said, “is how you saw him, from all the way up there.”

  “Come on, just go,” March said.

  “You didn’t fall down the fucking hill, did you?”

  March just grunted, kept moving toward the fence.

  “Did you fall down the hill? Are you fucking drunk?”

  “I had two, three drinks, tops.”

  “Yeah, that’s why you can’t walk straight.”

  “Oh, excuse me. I’m carrying a dead body and I have his schvantz in my face, I’m sorry I’m not Bakishnirov—”

  “You can’t even say ‘Baryshnikov.’ ” They were at the fence, and Healy laid down his end of the load, leaving March holding Shattuck’s legs up in the air by himself. “You did, didn’t you? You fell down the fucking hill. You get drunk, you lose your gun, you take a header off the balcony, and now you’re gonna tell me it’s like a, a hallowed, time-honored detective ploy, right?”

  “It was very slippery up there, okay? I was in the pool, I—”

  “You were in the pool?”

  March dropped Sid’s legs. “Yeah.”

  “Why?”

  “I had to question the mermaids. What were you doing while I was working?”

  Healy was speechless. Couldn’t think of a goddamn thing to say.

  “Thank you,” March said.

  “Let’s get rid of this guy,” Healy muttered.

  When they had Shattuck aloft again, they carried him right up to the fence at the edge of his property. Over the side he’d go, and then he’d be someone else’s problem. With any luck, he’d lie undetected under a tree for a good long time. Hell, maybe the neighbors were out of town; maybe they never came to this remote corner of their property; maybe he’d never be found.

  With any luck.

  On the count of three, they pushed him up and over the top. Waited to hear him land with a thud on the other side.

  He landed—but not with a thud. Instead, they heard the sound of smashing glass and splintering wood and shattering plates and tumbling cutlery. And screams—lots of screams.

  Peeking over the fence, they saw Shattuck lying sprawled on the wreckage of a long dinner table, with one, two, three, four, five, six people seated around it in fancy dinner wear. Well, not seated. Not anymore. And was that…a bride?

  Healy and March pulled their heads back to their side of the fence and fucking ran for it.

  * * *

  “Hop in back, sweetie,” the amazon said, and opened the door to a stretch limo idling in the driveway.

  Holly wasn’t sure this was the best idea. Why would Amelia be in a limousine? But she didn’t know what else to do. So she climbed in. “This one says she’s Amelia’s sister,” the amazon said to someone inside. Then the d
oor shut behind Holly with a click.

  Her eyes took a moment to adjust, but even before they did, she knew she was in trouble. There was only one person in the car with her, and it wasn’t Amelia. It was a man, not a woman. And as he leaned forward, she saw that his face was stained a vivid shade of blue.

  24.

  The blue-faced man clapped his hands together and giggled in a way that was deeply disturbing. “Is that a fact? Her sister,” he said softly. “Good times.”

  “I…there’s someone out, looking for me,” Holly said.

  “Really,” the man said.

  She fumbled with the door, trying to get it open. He leaned over, pushed her hands away. “Hey, hey, don’t touch that.” He waved a long index finger in her face. “You just sit back and get comfortable. We’re gonna have a little talk. Sis.”

  * * *

  If she had been able to open the door again, she might have glimpsed her father at last, and Healy too, since they were both walking as swiftly as they could along a second-floor landing toward the stairs to the driveway. Before they reached the stairs, Healy got waylaid by the blonde from the projection room who wanted to know why he hadn’t stayed to watch the rest of her movie. March didn’t stop. He needed to be out of there, somewhere far away, far from dead bodies and grassy hills and crazy people. Healy would catch up. Or if not, he could take care of himself. He wasn’t the one with a broken arm.

  March raced down the stairs, looked around for the valet, spotted him, then felt around in his pockets for the parking chit. Oh, please. Don’t let it be back on the hill…

  He found it, dug it out.

  Healy, meanwhile, had dislodged himself from the conversation with the blonde and was hastening to catch up. In his haste, he shoulder-checked a guy in a crimson three-piece suit coming the other way. “Sorry,” he said, barely noticing the other man. But the other man noticed him.

  “Hey,” the man said—and then his face hardened. He reached behind him, to the small of his back.

  That was when Healy recognized him: the older guy, from his apartment—the black guy with the horn-rimmed glasses, though he wasn’t wearing them now, the one who’d escaped just ahead of Healy’s shotgun blast. The one working with Blue Face.