The Butcher's Granddaughter

by Michael Lion

  “Yeah,” I went on coolly. “But it’s no big deal. If he didn’t tell you, he won’t tell anyone else. I scared him so bad he won’t get it up again for a year.” All the blood was slowly draining out of Rick’s face. “Look, would you quit worrying?” I said calmly. “This did not reflect on you. I got out clean. Now listen: Waterston hires you to go knothole peeking at his daughter, a job that, one, he could’ve done himself, and two, as a friend, or so you say, he shouldn’t have asked you to do in the first place.”

  “He shouldn’t have?”

  “No, and stop me if I’m wrong on this, a lot of it is assumption. Robert Waterston’s a big deal businessman, and he looks like he’s got at least a thin code of honor. He has to know that peep business is for dicks trying to make rent, not big bad downtown P.I.’s. Asking you to do a job like that would be like asking Picasso if he would paint your house.” I shrugged. “Right?”

  Rick nodded, started playing with a pencil and said, “OK, sure. But let’s say he was scared of something. The Azure Mosaic, say, and what goes on aboard it. Bob Waterston, real estate magnate, high-end art dealer, upstanding citizen and public figure, is not going to hand the possibility that his daughter is dabbling in prostitution to some dink with a South Street address. Those guys talk to the papers over stuff that wouldn’t make the want ads. Unh-unh. Bob came to me because he wanted to keep that possibility under the hat.”

  I understood that Waterston was a friend, but it still sounded a little strange, like there was something Rick wasn’t telling me. I decided not to push it. “Well, anyway, thanks for the work, man. It’s nice to remember what the sun looks like. But I’ve had enough daytime for a good month. You want to get some breakfast before I run away?”

  He shook his head. “No, that’s all right. The fact that Bob saw you still gives me the shakes just a little. Let’s stay out of touch for a while. I’ll call you in a couple of days.”

  I nodded and got up to leave. He stopped me at the door. “You said you were looking for a dead girl? What’s that about?”

  I shut the door and turned around. “Actually, I know where the girl is. I’m looking for who she was.”

  He looked at me with questions in his eyes.

  “She was the first victim in a serial killing. I happen to be the last person seen with the second victim.” I remembered Li weeping in my bed and added, “It’s become a personal thing now.”

  “Sorry, Bird. Was this other victim a friend?”

  “Nah. Just a sister of one of my connections. That’s under the hat, by the way.”

  “What is?”

  I smiled. “Right.” I couldn’t get Li out of my head. “Actually, Rick, you think you could keep a loose ear out for me?”

  “Sure. What am I listening for?”

  “A redhead, super good looking. Either used to go to C.D.M. High or knows somebody who did. No one will’ve seen her in a while.”

  “Gotcha.”

  I was almost out the door when he said, “Hey, Bird.”

  I leaned back in the office. “Yeah?”

  “You getting laid, beautiful?”

  “Not lately.” The image of Li, naked on top of me, erupted across my mind.

  “You need to. Clears the head wonderfully.”

  “Up yours, you horny bull,” I said, and stepped over the secretary’s jaw on my way out the door.

  I couldn’t decide if I was more hungry or tired, so while I thought about it I dropped into a flower shop on P.C.H. and bought a dozen roses for Li. I strapped the box onto my bike and listened to my stomach instead of my brain.

  Edie’s Diner is a theme restaurant across from a huge mall in Newport called Fashion Island. 1950’s music is on the jukebox and they have good burgers, but the waitresses don’t wear roller skates, which really would’ve made the place. I slumped into a booth, dropped a quarter in the jukebox menu on the wall, and plugged in “Lonely Teardrops” and “The Wanderer.” A sweet little Newport Beacher with a deep tan and too much makeup covering it, took my order. She talked through her smile like a ventriloquist’s puppet, and said “My name’s Kiki,” as if it were something to be proud of.

  I said, “Of course it is,” and ordered a cheeseburger with everything, a vanilla Coke, and an ashtray.

  The ashtray came first. I lit up and stared through the window at the traffic, the last of those rushing to work, earning their fun and sun. Monday morning, and I was doing what Monday mornings were made for—not wanting to face it. I molded the ash on the cigarette against the side of the ashtray until it was a perfect tapered point. That made one less thing that looked crooked.

  I wanted something to be wrong, and I wanted it to be obvious. Kiki swished by me on the way to coffee another table. I watched her fuss with place settings and water other tables as I wondered absently what it was I was looking for. What bothered me most was that it felt as if I’d already seen it—something under the surface, a break in the rhythm. I went over everything on that night in Jay’s apartment. Something was wrong, and it was wrong the way a good facelift is wrong—you’re not really sure until you see the little white scars behind the ears.

  I grabbed a napkin and asked Kiki on her way back with the coffee if she had a pen I could borrow. She said, “Sure,” with one of those waitress smiles that always leave you thinking about missed opportunity. I doubled the napkin over and wrote “Red” across the top in capital letters. I flipped it over and wrote “Song.” Then I put the pen to my lips and pursed them like I was doing something. They were still like that when Kiki brought the burger. I let it sit there.

  Underneath “Red” I put “expensive jewelry” and then “prostitute” with a question mark. I wrote the same thing under “Song,” minus the prostitute suggestion. I wrote “16-19 yrs. old” under both names. I wrote “female.” I wrote “attractive,” and decided I was grasping. I kept going back to the word “prostitute?” under “Red.” Then I went to the phone and called an old friend.

  “USC Medical Center.”

  “Hello, Gene. How’s lunch?”

  There was a pause and then, “Oh, hey, great. What do you want now?”

  “I was just wondering if that little Latino was making good on our deal.”

  “Yep. Every day at 12:30 on the button. I’m busy, man. What’d you call for?”

  “I wanted to know if our redheaded Jane Doe had been identified.”

  “Nope. Detective Cazares has brought in several possibles, but nobody’s confirmed. Why, you got something?”

  “Nah. Just checking in. Thanks.” I paused a second and then said, “Actually, there is one more thing.” I waited for him to get suspicious. He didn’t. “Was there any evidence of previous serious injury? And I’m talking about bad things like scars from knife slashes, or broken bones, particularly in the face?”

  I heard papers rustling and knew he was looking at the report. “Unh-unh. She was flawless.”

  The way he said “flawless” clicked something. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean she didn’t have anything out of the ordinary on her or in her. No drugs, or at least no trace of recent abuse, and that includes alcohol; no significant scars, internal or external.” He shuffled papers for a minute. “Wait a sec. She’s had an abortion. Probably very early in the first trimester. No heavy scarring.”

  “She have heavy calluses on her feet?”

  “Not that I remember. You working a prostitute angle?”

  “Maybe. I’m doing some things down in Orange County that might tie in, that’s all.” I thought for a second. I didn’t want to ask any questions that would pique Gene’s interest any more than was necessary. “Where was she found again?” I asked offhandedly, as if I’d merely forgotten this insignificant detail, when in fact I’d never known it.

  “It says here she was found, uh...last Wednesday night behind a bar on 3rd Avenue called Al’s.”

  “Thanks Gene. I’ll try not to bother you anymore.”

  He said, “Sure,”
and hung up. I went back to the booth and crossed “prostitute?” off my napkin list. There was no way a downtown girl could get along in that line of work without it leaving its violent footprints on her somewhere.

  I forced myself to quit thinking about it. I stuffed the list in my pocket, finished the burger in about three bites, and paid the bill. Kiki made sure I had a mint and a toothpick before I left. By the time I got out to my motorcycle I had decided I would rest, not think about it anymore, see Li, give her the flowers, and maybe let her take advantage of me again.

  I stripped off my jacket and set it on the seat while I lit a cigarette. The sun was getting high and drawing out the beach people—the sidewalk bustled along with kids on skateboards, surfers with their wetsuits stripped to their waists, and middleaged women shopping while their husbands played golf at the Newport Beach Country Club across the highway. Two girls in bikinis caught my attention, and I watched attentively as they waltzed past me, gossiping about some friend of theirs named Cyndi, and what she’d done with various guys.

  I wondered what time it was, whether Li would be at work yet. I glanced behind me at the sign that blinked the time and temperature at the Corona Del Mar Savings and Loan. It was 73 degrees at...

  I don’t know how long I stood there next to my bike, frozen, staring at the sign. Maybe five minutes, the huge capital letters above the clock, “CDM”, careening around the snippet of gossipy conversation about Cyndi...Cyndi...Cynthia. The wheels churned in my head like heavy diesel pistons, slowly pulling huge blocks out of a loosely tumbled pile and into neat, well-lit, orderly structures. I didn’t notice people starting to stare until I broke back into the restaurant and placed a call to the Robbery/Homicide Division of the Los Angeles Police Department. Kiki watched with interested eyes as I spoke breathlessly into the phone.

  “Caz, those murders aren’t serial,” I said quickly. “They’re professional hits.” I paused a long time before adding, “And I think I know who’s ordering them.”

  Chapter 9

  “Why here?”

  “Because no one here’ll recognize you—or me.”

  Detective Cazares and I were standing on a fire escape landing three stories above a backalley coffee joint in Pasadena called the EBar. The door behind us was padlocked from the outside, the room inside deserted and forlorn, dust and peeling paint mixed with spider webs in the corners. I squinted through the cloudy pane of glass in the door, then turned around and surveyed the street below.

  Fifty feet to the right of the fire escape, the E-Bar’s alley stops short in three stories of dead end. Fifty feet to the left another alley intersects it in a “T” that butts up against a huge commercial building. Anyone walking in or out could be seen through the grating of the fire escape. I liked that. I was getting jittery.

  Secondhand tables and chairs are scattered in the dead end of the alley, occupied by the wide range of customers regular to any hip coffee house. Everyone from blue-suited businessmen to folksingers to avant-garde artists sporting green-and-orange hair are sitting, sipping, and talking all day long.

  It was almost eleven o’clock in the morning and I was stretched thin. I hadn’t slept since lying down with Li over twenty-four hours earlier, and I had a headache that felt like someone was jamming a screwdriver into my right eye. It had come on as I began to consider the ramifications of what I’d stumbled upon, and now I couldn’t decide which hurt worse, my stomach or my head. I lit my third cigarette of the day, tossed back a handful of aspirin, and sipped a triple shot of straight espresso. Caz had a regular coffee and when I lit up, she used my match to get one of her skinny cigarettes going. She didn’t push me. I didn’t look like I could be rushed.

  Caz was understandably concerned. She’d let me have it over the phone that she thought I was crazy, but I let her think that and told her to meet me if she wanted to know about the two dead women in the morgue. Even at that, it took about twenty minutes of convincing. And a promise to buy the coffee.

  I took a deep drag on the cigarette and started talking, the smoke roughing my voice. “Remember when you broke in on Thursday and woke me up? The redhead was the reason.”

  She nodded.

  “Well, I told you that Li Nguyen and Song Ti Nguyen were friends. That was a lie. They’re sisters. I withheld that information because it didn’t seem important at the time, and I wanted to protect Li from any involvement. I can see now that might have been very stupid.”

  “Why?”

  “Because if I had told you the truth, you would’ve made a beeline for Song and gotten her involved. Asked questions. Given her attention.”

  Caz made her eyes narrow and shrugged. “Yeah? So what?”

  “So, the kind of attention that maybe professional killers don’t want. They might never have gotten to Song if I’d told you she was Li’s sister. That’s part of what tipped me off about the killings not being some maniac, but the work of a professional.”

  Caz was taking the steaming coffee in great gulps, as if her mouth were made of asbestos. “You keep saying ‘they.’ Who might ‘they’ be?”

  I shook my head slowly. “That’s a problem. I don’t know. At least not exactly.” I finished the espresso and set the cup on the guardrail. “After I met Song, she struck me as someone who might do anything to make a buck, and probably had. But she didn’t have the look or attitude of someone who’d lived on the streets, without parents, for a long time. She was too stupid. Somebody was taking care of her, or at least keeping an eye on her, but I didn’t know who it was. At first I thought it was Jay, but now I don’t think that anymore.”

  “Why not?” she intoned. Caz listened offhandedly, even disarmingly, when someone was spilling their guts. She let you go ahead and think you could slip by. But once the whole story was out you realized that very little got past her.

  “A couple of reasons,” I said, staring into my empty espresso cup. “I’ll tell you in a minute. Don’t let me get ahead of myself.” I went down the staircase and drew some regular coffee from the cafe. When I got back, she was unabashedly staring down into the v-necked t-shirt of an overdeveloped brunette at a table right below us. I said, “You’re sick. She could be your daughter.”

  “It would make me wonder where my husband had been,” she said. “Get to it.”

  “All right. I told you I was down at the Reading Room and Li came up and asked me to bail her sister out of a lover’s jam, which I did.”

  “Right.”

  “Li told me that Song was using the name Naomi—she didn’t give me a last name, so I don’t know if she was using one or not. But I used that knowledge to scare her into apologizing to Jay for screwing him over. When I used her real name, her reaction was way too extreme. She blew everything. And, when I said her name—I don’t know. It wasn’t surprise in her eyes that I saw...it was...recognition, I guess is the word. Realization. She looked at me like I was part of some plan or something.”

  “You realize that this isn’t making a damn bit of sense,” Caz said, lighting a fresh cigarette.

  “It will,” I answered. “Bear with me. How much do you know about Cynthia Ming?”

  “Enough. She runs an escort service that borders on child prostitution off of some ship down the coast. The Newport boys are up to their noses in it. Why?”

  “Because I think she’s the one ordering the hits.”

  Caz was quiet for a minute. The cigarette sat on her lips, unpuffed. Then her eyes narrowed and she said, “All right. Go.”

  I took a deep breath and tore into it. “The redhead you found was dropped behind Al’s Bar on 3rd Avenue. To say the least, Al’s does not attract a crowd that’s overly-burdened with cash. Red was, but where’d she get it? This girl had none of the regular signs of having been a prostitute—no scarring, no evidence of brutality, nothing. Except,” I paused a little, “for an abortion. She was seventeen if she was a day, and not much older on the outside. She was wearing a huge diamond and an ornate class ring when you found he
r. That fact in itself led you to a logical conclusion: a psycho did her. Who would kill someone and not take a rock the size of a doorknob? All of that put you and the boys downtown onto a prearranged trail.”

  “Whoa, whoa. Waddaya mean ‘prearranged?’ You telling me that the killers in this Hitman Theory of yours intentionally planted that stuff?”

  “No. Actually, the rings probably belong to the girl, and one of them does for sure, but I’ll get to that. One way or another, she had no business being where she was when she got killed. Suddenly, you guys are looking for a redhead who goes to Corona Del Mar High, or maybe has a boyfriend that does. That’s who you were supposed to be looking for, because it makes sense. But a lot of other things don’t.

  “First, you find a pricey looking chick in a neighborhood miles from where she’d normally be. Second, she’s still wearing what anyone would assume is an engagement ring and a class ring. Third, she’s a knockout. Fourth, she’s been pampered. And yet, you hear nothing and can find no one who seems to be missing a beautiful, engaged, cared for woman. Now, aside from a wealthy husband who wants a quickie divorce, what’s the only party you can think of who wouldn’t come out and claim a murder victim fitting the above description?”

  Caz blinked. “A call girl ring.”

  “That’s right, honey. Now, think back. Where was Song found?”

  Caz rubbed her chin and the side of her face with her palm. “Oh, yeah. Back of the Greyhound Bus Station. In the dumpster...no, behind the dumpster.” I was about to open my mouth and lead her a little further along when she said, “Which, by the way, blows a hole in your location-of-the-body-thing. Seems to me that part of town is exactly where that cute little ass liked to play.”

  “True,” I said. “But what was the last thing I did before I left her? Do you remember?”

  “Gave her the sister’s phone number...in...Santa Monica.” Her voice trailed off weakly and then suddenly came back strong. “Aw, but that’s mighty thin, Bird.”