The Butcher's Granddaughter

by Michael Lion

I said, “Kiss me.”

  I thought she would ask why. She kissed me first, very well, and then asked.

  “Well, the guy driving it is watching us in his rear view mirror.”

  She was silent, but the look on her face asked the obvious question. I answered it.

  “He’s been following us ever since we left the beach. I don’t know why. I wouldn’t worry about it.” The light changed and the Lexus floated around the corner. “He’s going to circle the block and come back in behind me. When he does, give me one more kiss and go into Wacko’s. He’ll think you work there. Walk out the back and go one block over and catch a cab home.” I palmed her a twenty. She shook her head. “Don’t argue with me. Take it.”

  She did, a look of honest concern creasing her face. “Are you sure you’ll be all right? I can help you if you need me to.”

  “If you could I would ask, but you can’t. Seriously, don’t worry. It happens once in a while. If he was going to do something bad he would’ve done it already. And he would’ve brought a partner.” A flash of blue in my rearview mirror. “Don’t look down the street. Kiss me.”

  She bent over and was nervous and made the kiss short. When she started to pull away I put my hand behind her neck and let her know that the kiss wasn’t just for show. When we finally broke she was smiling. A little. I watched her walk down the mirrored corridor and into Wacko’s, let myself remember the previous night, and then pulled back into traffic.

  The car pulled into an empty space about fifty yards behind me, but the guy didn’t go through the motions of getting out and putting change in the meter. He either wanted me to know I was being flagged, or he was a goon whose best skill was soaking up knives and bullets for somebody else. I assumed the latter when he pulled out of the space and came up right behind me at the light. A couple of quick rights in the snarl of downtown traffic and I would have lost him like a loose button, but I wanted to see what he looked like. I also wanted him to waste a lot of his time. I went all the way down to the east end of Melrose, turned right on Vermont, and doubled back on Beverly Boulevard. I took him, glued to my tail, on a trip back along Beverly to Santa Monica, a thirty-minute jaunt that would’ve taken ten on the freeways. I pulled into the parking structure at the Beverly Center, making sure he didn’t lose any I.Q. points trying to stay with me.

  I found a space close to a second-level entrance and parked, forcing him to pull into an off-limits striped area at the end of a row in order to keep up. I pushed through the doors into the light crowd of the mall as he shut off his ignition.

  I was wearing a black leather motorcycle jacket, a black t-shirt, faded baggy jeans, and a pair of Converse hightops that had seen better days. I didn’t exactly blend in with the crowd, but I didn’t stick out like a new dollar bill either. I paused at windows until I caught him out of the corner of my eye, and then headed off like I had a purpose.

  When I stepped into The Gap, he didn’t follow me. There was a stone planter right in front of the place, and he plopped down on it, centered with the front door, and lit up a smoke. People stared at him like he was urinating in the planter. I went in and started grabbing things off of shelves.

  As I stood at the checkout counter I could see his attention beginning to wander. His cigarette sat slowly punking away, forgotten between the fingers of his left hand. Everything with a form even remotely feminine got his full attention as it walked by. I left the store with a couple of new pairs of jeans, two mock turtlenecks, and some sweats to sleep in. I practically tripped over him on my way out and he stood up.

  He had green eyes, a rare color for an Asian. He was also about six-foot-four, a rare size. A deceptive chest, broad but not thick—from the front he looked to be about two-twenty-five, from the side about one-ninety. He had good taste in clothes or was dressed by someone who did. A tan double-breasted suit of lightweight material hung on his frame as if it had been born there. There were comfortable-looking light-olive loafers on his feet, made of brushed suede and not cheap. The silk tones in his tie matched both the shoes and the suit, and it was knotted neatly over the button of a gleaming white tab-collar shirt. If I started running, he looked like he wouldn’t chase me for fear of wrinkling. That was all right. When I lost him he’d think it was bad luck.

  I made another round of the mall, picking up a nice linen suit and two or three cheap, white Italian shirts. When I pulled up short into the food court on the way to the parking lot, the world’s tallest Asian got flustered and lost me. I was bungeeing all the stuff onto my bike when he scuttled out the doors, saw me, and then tried to walk calmly over to his car. He pulled up so close behind me on the way through the parking gate that I could see the pattern on his tie through the windshield. I jumped on the 10 eastbound and let him stay with me. He got a little more confident on the freeway and actually dropped back a car or two. When he did, I got into the fast lane and passed a van that was driving along with its left blinker going, forgotten. The blue Lexus was still two cars back. I stayed in the lane until he pulled even with the van and then quickly but casually slid over two lanes and took the off-ramp for the 110 South to San Pedro. He didn’t know whether to slow down or speed up, and it cost him the chase. I got off the freeway at the next exit and wondered what to do.

  It was three-thirty in the afternoon. I ran around aimlessly for a while and wound up in the hills above Griffith Park. I picked up some Chinese food at a little side-of-the-road place, found a secluded spot with a view of the skyline smog, loaded up on kung pao chicken, and then fell asleep. I slept with dreams both good and bad and woke up neither rested nor tired. He shouldn’t have, but that big Asian bothered me. He was in my dreams, but whenever I saw his face, it was Song’s on top of his six-four frame.

  After I cleaned up the trash and headed out, I instinctively did two things. Instead of my heavy biker gloves, I dropped into a uniform supply house and bought a pair of thin mailman’s gloves. Then I reached into the saddlebags on my bike and grabbed my nine-millimeter and put it under my jacket. It distantly occurred to me that I hadn’t been back to my apartment in three days. I never questioned my actions. I should have.

  An hour later Double F met me behind Larry Parker’s and gave me back the death portrait of the redhead. He looked like he’d been lightly worked over by some of Kingfish’s boys, but none the worse for wear. He actually managed a smile as I said, “What have you got for me?”

  He said four words. “Scream. See The Rat.” And then he ran off.

  So I went.

  Scream is a nightclub on Highland Avenue just south of Hollywood Boulevard. It’s the place to go when you want to see what a people-factory Los Angeles is. You step through sliding glass doors past a couple of bouncers who are not overly concerned with what type of I.D. you show them, and into a lot of nothing except flesh and weird hair and dark corners where a lot can happen, most of it illegal. I knew three things: one, The Rat wouldn’t be here; two, somebody here would know where he was; and three, that somebody would not be difficult to find.

  There are three bars in the place, one per level except for the fourth. I went to the second and stood next to the well with a ten-spot between my fingers. The bartender, a guy of about twenty-two with black hair in a drooping rockabilly wave, long sideburns, and a tiny tattoo of Bugs Bunny just under his right ear, walked down, looked at the bill, looked at me and said, “WhacanIgitchya?”

  “What’s your well whiskey?” I yelled over the bar and the noise.

  “Somethin’ not worth the buck-fifty you pay for it,” he answered, never losing a smile that had probably been the breaking point for much of Scream’s female clientele.

  “Jack and Coke,” I said, responding to the upsell that made a four-dollar drink nine-twenty-five. When he slithered back down the bar with my drink, he glanced at the ten, which had miraculously turned into a fifty, and said, “You Bird?”

  “Yeah.” I sucked half the drink down while he palmed the fifty and looked around like the entire place w
as interested in our conversation.

  “The Rat’s at Al’s Bar down on Third. The drink’s on the house.”

  I wondered what his definition of “on the house” was as the fifty disappeared into his pocket. I sipped the drink and wandered around, trying to decide if there was anything to the fact that Al’s was where they found the redhead. The Rat was strange like that, and he could have wanted to meet there for that reason and no other. I buried my concern beneath images of Del’s warm body on the beach, and the Scream crowd quickly began to sicken me.

  On my way out I bummed a cigarette from a nymphette wearing too much eyeliner and a black cat-suit that would’ve been too tight on a broomstick. She let me light it from the butt of her own and then looked at me like the experience meant something. I left there getting very tired of the city.

  Al’s Bar changed my mood for the better. Al’s is best described as the place where everybody who’s too cool to hang out where all the cool people in L.A. hang out, hang out. It’s a little dive on Third Street that’s part biker bar and part beatnik coffeehouse, with just enough fuck-you humor thrown in to give the joint some character and keep everybody from taking themselves too seriously. It’s in an old two-story building with the second floor torn out, so staircases lead to doorways and windows that empty out into space above the bar. There are usually people sitting in them with one leg thrown over the sill or the jamb, a beer or a glass of cheap port in their hand, since that’s all the bar serves. On Tuesdays there’s a summer camp-ish performance art thing called “No Talent Night”—it’s open-mike and draws all kinds, from worthless alternative beat poets to full productions involving members of the audience that are better than some of the trash you see at the Shubert and the Pantages. One memorable evening, the lead singer from a band called Fifty Bucks won first prize for simply stepping up on stage, dropping his pants, and sticking a suppository up his works.

  I ambled in and got a draft at the bar. Then I found my connection, sitting at a small table next to the jukebox.

  Howard “The Rat” Tasselbaum is twenty-five years old, looks and acts fourteen, and has the nickname for several reasons, not the least of which is his narrow, weak featured face. No one knows where he lives, including me, so the running joke is that he lives underground. But there’s no one on the street who knows more dirt than he does about important figures in Los Angeles—how to get to them, when to see them, what drugs they like, if they cheat on their wives—and not just a few major players, either. In fact, he tends not to waste his time with big deals like the mayor or the chief of police or any number of movie stars. The stuff he gets is on the behind-the-scenes folks, the lawyers and agents and investors who create the legends and govern the careers that make L.A. the place to be.

  I leaned my chair back on its hind legs until I was comfortably settled against the side of the jukebox, picked up my beer in one hand, and with the other reached inside my jacket and put the picture of the dead redhead in front of him. His only response was to look blankly at me, his deep-set brown eyes cowering beneath eyebrows that met over the bridge of his nose.

  Then he lit a match and set fire to the picture, placing it gently in the ashtray and watching it until the whole thing was a frail cinder that had stopped smoking. I didn’t stop him. I didn’t say anything. We sipped our beers.

  He finally said, “This is gonna cost you.”

  “I know, Rat. We’re in the same business. Don’t tell me what I know. Tell me what I don’t know.” I stole one of his cigarettes from the pack he had sitting on the table. The cellophane wrapper was still on them and stuffed into it was a matchbook from Scream. They were unfiltered Camels, and the smoke was heavy in my lungs.

  “Five hundred. Cash. No favors. No trade.”

  He was either nervous or scared and that made me nervous. The Rat was generally a little jittery, but his nerves were on end. I said, “Give me two hundred bones’ worth and we’ll see if I need or want more than that.”

  He lit a cigarette. His hands were vibrating. “Oh, you’ll want it,” he croaked. “You’ll want more than you can afford, old buddy.”

  I laid two C-notes on the table and his hand flashed out and stuffed them in a pocket almost before I let go of them. I said, “OK, impress me.”

  He waved to the bartender and ordered another beer. After it came and he had a few sips he said, “Her name is Josephine Michelle King and there is absolutely no record that she ever existed. I’ll tell you some of what I know, and that’ll be the limit of the hundreds you blew me.”

  I nodded. He lit another cigarette, chaining. I told him those filterless things would kill him, and he gave me the finger. Then he said, “She’s eighteen years old, or would’ve been, I guess. She was born in Seattle and drifted down the coast to the city about four years ago. Came through San Francisco, stayed a bit in Fresno for fuck knows what reason, then landed in L.A. She gave the hello to an ad in the Times that probably asked specifically for redheads with some kind of talent.”

  I shut my eyes tight against the image of her in that drawer, the splinter deep in her brain. I said, “Like fucking.”

  He shrugged. “Actually, probably massage or something like that. Anyway, the ad was placed by an escort service-slash-whorehouse in North Hollywood. The gooks can’t get enough white pussy, you know, and she was probably makin’ a grand a day by—”

  “Wait a minute. The place was Asian-owned?”

  “Asian mob owned.” He twitched, glancing around the bar. Then he suddenly frosted over. “Jesus Christ,” he said, almost to himself, “I can’t believe I’m sitting here with you, talking this shit.” He looked into my eyes and I saw that his initial nervousness had turned to outright fear. “Jesus, Bird, do you know what those guys do? To people like you and me? To fucking informers?”

  “We’re not informers. And what, have you been talking to the cops or something?”

  He shook his head wildly. “No. I’m not like you, man. I have my loyalties.”

  “Then what are you worrying about?”

  “Man, when Double F dug me up and told me what you were after, I didn’t think it was any big deal. And then the fuckin’ Chinks turn up in this whole thing...”

  It was like listening to a conspiracy theorist on late night T.V. “So now it’s the Triad? So what? They’re fuckin’ everywhere.”

  “I know. And then I think about this bitch coming down through San Francisco, and then she just happens to get involved with a place owned by those goons? I don’t know, man. Sounds like she was connected before she ever got to L.A.”

  I leered at him and reached in my pocket for more money. He waved it away. “It’s not the money, man. Look, people who talk about the Triad get fucked up. Bad. Remember Denny Rohr?”

  I shook my head.

  “Yeah, sure you do. He used to push hot credit cards out of Beverly Hills. Anyway, a little group of Koreans trying to make a name for themselves started strong-arming him. So Denny told a couple of customers about what was happening, you know, so they wouldn’t buy from the wrong people. You know how they found him?”

  “I can guess. With his tongue cut out and shoved up his ass.”

  “Yeah. In his apartment, laying next to his sister, who was in the same state. I like my tongue, Bird. I like it where it is.”

  We were at a stalemate. After a silent minute, I said, “There has to be a price. You can’t bring me this far and then freeze up. What is it?”

  While he thought about it I ordered him another drink. Before it came he said, “All right, it’s going to cost you a thousand dollars.”

  “I don’t have that on me.”

  “I’m not done,” he said. He’d gotten cold again. “Before you see what I got, you understand something. If they get to me, I’m giving you up. Completely. I’ll use everything. They’ll kill you and everyone you even remotely care about.”

  “You’re overreacting, Rat. This isn’t about their business.” I tumbled it over in my head. He coul
dn’t possibly give me anything that would put him or me that squarely in harm’s way. And even if he could, I’d have to use it first. I could always decide not to. I called his bluff and played off his greed. “Keep the two bills,” I said, dropping my chair forward like I was getting ready to leave. “Josephine Michelle King. Got it. I’ll find her myself. For a grand, you can forget it.”

  He let me stand all the way up before he said, “You ever hear of a yacht called the Azure Mosaic?”

  I tried not to let it get me, but he saw it. It was in my face. I went ahead and sat back down.

  “That’s what I thought. A thousand dollars. You go down.”

  My throat had gone dry. “I’ll get it to you.”

  “Tonight.”

  I nodded. I couldn’t talk anymore.

  The Rat lit another cigarette and enjoyed having me by the short hairs for a minute. There was still fear in his eyes. “So Josephine gets a bit of a reputation at this little place, and before you know it she’s on the Azure Mosaic doin’ the nasty for some serious sugar. After a while, like in any business, she builds up a clientele. Now, it’s pretty obvious she cashed in her chips. Know who killed her?”

  I shook my head. I was sipping my beer, trying to get my throat to untwist.

  “Give me what you’ve got on you. I’ll consider it a down payment.”

  I threw four more wadded-up hundreds at him. He didn’t suck them up in his tight little fist like he had the first two. He tugged at the corners and played with them for a minute, like he was trying to figure if what he was doing was worth it. He finally pocketed them, eyeing me as he did, and then pulled an envelope from somewhere beneath the table; large, yellow, reinforced with cardboard. “You ever seen this picture before?” he asked, and drew a color eight-by-ten print from the envelope.

  I looked at it, recognized it immediately. It was the frontpage photo of Cynthia Dahzai Ming standing on the deck of her yacht. “You could’ve gotten this at the newsstand, Rat. What do I get for the G?” My voice was back, but my throat was still tight with anticipation and nerves.