by Michael Lion
“We’re not exactly dressed for this place,” she said as I pulled the bike into the driveway of the Hyatt Regency Downtown.
“The only thing you have to wear here is money.”
“Gonna be an expensive shower.”
I shrugged. “I’m buying. Relax. It’s just a little precaution.”
“How is this place a precaution?”
“Because bad things happen in cheap hotels,” I said, motioning her through the doors.
I was wearing only the black leather jacket and jeans. In her club-hopping getup, Tanya looked like she was headed for a B-movie audition. But Hollywood was right next door, cash makes no enemies, and the reservationist didn’t even flinch at our appearance. I gave Tanya a key to the room and said I would see her in an hour.
Melrose Avenue was the usual zoo. I dropped into a couple of low-key shops, which on Melrose means neon instead of fireworks, and stocked up on jeans and t-shirts, a couple of miniskirts, a pair of Converse hightops, nylons, tights, and flats. I piled them on my bike and zipped back to the Garment District. I picked up what looked like the same gym bag I had left there, but it was a lot heavier now. Things were coming together.
In the lobby of the hotel, I took a deep breath. Relax. I got the second key from the girl at the front desk and took the elevator to the seventeenth floor.
Tanya was reclined on the bed, wrapped inside one of those white hotel bathrobes that never quite covers enough leg but feels like a warm, friendly animal against you. “I hope we get to keep these,” she said.
“Hopefully, you won’t have to.” I tossed the packages on the bed. “I assumed you were a size three. Hope I didn’t insult you.”
“Right on,” she said, smiling. It was a strange expression on her face. “Hey, you got your bag back.”
I looked stupidly at the light-blue duffel. “Yeah, we’ll talk about that in a minute.”
She held up one of the miniskirts and wrinkled her nose. “Bird, where did you get all the bread for this?”
I sank heavily into a rust-colored, overstuffed wingback chair next to the bed. “I have quite a bit put away here and there. Some of it for situations just like this.”
“What a crappy life.”
“Not really. You just have to be ready.”
“Are you ready? All the time?”
I thought about Li. “Yeah,” I said uneasily.
“I appreciate the effort, but this stuff isn’t exactly my style, you know?” She was looking into the full-length mirror in the corner, holding what I thought was an adorable little sundress in front of her—emphasis on the little. I was getting a side view. The robe had fallen open when she stood up on the bed. She didn’t seem to notice.
“Then they’re perfect,” I said. I picked up the gym bag and threw it in the closet. She watched me out of the corner of her eye. “Get dressed,” I said, getting up and going to the phone, “we’re not done.”
I mumbled a few words to the front desk. Tanya returned from the bathroom in the sundress and a pair of white flats. She needed a little more tan, but other than that she looked every inch the typical Southern California free-spirit heartbreaker. “Are they expecting us?” she said half-jokingly, motioning to the phone I had just hung up.
I nodded.
I prefer barber shops myself, little holes in the wall where the barbers give themselves crew cuts and Playboys are laid out like Saturday Evening Posts and most of their business consists of old Army buddies who don’t even need their hair cut. Paolo, the stylist with the open 2:00 p.m. appointment at the salon on the mezzanine, didn’t look like he was much interested in what was inside the cover of your average Playboy. He wore a pair of black, straight-leg rayon pants that fit loosely until they reached his butt cheeks, the top three buttons open on a silk shirt that would scream if it got any whiter, and two diamond earrings in each ear. He stood behind the chair with his fingertips lightly touching in front of his chest hair and a look of deep concern on his face. He asked me what I wanted.
“I want to look like a Marine,” I said flatly. “A blonde one.”
This seemed to please him. An hour-and-a-half later I looked like a grown-up Johnny Quest.
He went through the same motions with Tanya, and when the question of her future appearance came up, she looked at me. “You’ve had all the answers up to this point,” she said, arching a long, sexy eyebrow.
“Changing the color would be a good start,” I said, shrugging.
“How about red? I’ve heard that, aside from a professed taste for Asian girls, you also have a weakness for redheads.”
I almost took it, I did. It was close. “Red would be just fine by me,” I said casually.
She smiled.
When we got back to the room, I sat her down on the edge of the bed and grabbed the duffel bag. The seven-hundred dollars I had placed in it earlier had become two guns: a small, chrome, .32 caliber automatic for her, and a .45 long-slide for me. I made the mistake of assuming that this girl, this woman, who had killed a man with a single head shot twenty-four hours earlier, had merely been amped-up and lucky. I showed her where the serial numbers had been filed off, explained why, and said if we got stopped by cops or anything to toss the piece into bushes or under a car. Then I started to show her how to use it.
“Like this,” I said, as if I were showing a three-year-old how to finger-paint. She watched me load the magazine with a dull smile on her face.
“This is the magazine,” I went on, “it goes in the butt—”
She casually reached over and took the two pieces, slammed the magazine home, dropped the slide and jacked one up the pipe. With metronomic rhythm she popped the magazine and loaded another round, replaced it with confidence, slid the chamber open to check the round, clicked on the safety and handed it back to me. All with the same dull smile on her face.
“Cute,” I said.
“C’mon, Bird. I’m from downtown L.A.”
“Yes you are,” I said, handing her back the little gun. “Now, how about we go visit our new enemy?”
The two people who stepped through the Hyatt’s revolving front doors that afternoon would not have reminded anyone of the people that had gone in three hours earlier. Once we got away from the obviousness of the hotel, we would look like any Southern California college couple, well on our way to expendable incomes and two or three laser-printed genetic copies of ourselves. We were young and beautiful and didn’t care who knew it.
And now, getting on my motorcycle in the parking structure of the Hyatt Regency Downtown, we looked as if you handed us a gun we would try to make a phone call with it.
We were perfect.
Chapter 13
The Sterling Plaza is a grotesque lump of white stucco perched on the corner of Wilshire and Beverly Boulevards, tyrannizing that block of prime Los Angeles real estate like a nervous and impotent dictator. Its narrow, darkly tinted windows stare blankly from a trimless, bone colored facade at the gaping capitalist mouth of Rodeo Drive. Behind it, one block down Beverly, is the backbone of L.A.’s banking industry—buildings that stand like older, tougher brothers about to pick a fight on behalf of a paler, more delicate sibling. The Sterling Plaza itself is a brand new construction, built in the faux 1930’s Art Deco styling of L.A.’s City Hall. The effect they wanted was to have the place blend in with the older surrounding buildings. The effect they got was suffused indignity, like a stuccoed cathedral.
It only had one occupant. The seventh, and top, floor was leased by one Benjamin Parenti, Esquire. I was about to ruin his day.
I parked my bike in front of the fluted concrete entrance and told Tanya to wait in the lobby. There was a fire exit in the back with an alarm trigger. I said, “If anyone even remotely suspicious comes in or fucks with the bike, leave through that door and I’ll find you later.” I got on the elevator and pressed the brass button with the scrolled number seven on it. Before the doors shut I said, “Especially if they’re Asian.” Her eyes went col
d and she nodded.
The elevator peaked out and silently settled to a stop, but the doors didn’t open. I waited. A minute went by. My fingers were lightly touching the red alarm button when a melodic female voice with a distant hardness in it came through a speaker I couldn’t see.
“You have reached the office of Benjamin Parenti. May I help you?”
“Yeah. You can open the doors.”
“If you will please give me your name, sir, I will check his appointment book.” She spoke in succinct tones, the hardness less disguised now.
“I’m not in his little black book,” I said without thinking. I took a deep breath. “It’s very important that I see him.” I didn’t like the idea of being in an elevator controlled by a secretary.
“If you don’t have an appointment, sir, I would be more than happy to set one for you. Mr. Parenti is a very busy man.”
I looked around the elevator. It was burnished with walnut panels held in place by immaculate brass brackets, and was bigger than some apartments I’d had. I sighed and said, “Mr. Parenti is going to be a very sorry man if this elevator stays shut. And I’m getting tired of arguing with the wall. Why don’t we try it face to face before one of us catches claustrophobia?”
No answer. The doors slid open with a mechanical sigh.
The elevator emptied directly into the front office. No door with pebbled glass and stenciled name. No gold plaque announcing His Eminence. Just a secretary who I imagined was usually smiling when those doors split. She wasn’t now.
I stepped across twenty feet of pile carpet thick enough to lose change in and caught the name, Larena Vaccotti, printed neatly on a rectangle of brass. That seemed to be the metal of choice in the décor—it went with the secretary’s attitude of being the first line of defense for an attorney with an elite and secretive clientele.
The woman behind the voice lived up to all the exotic suggestions of her name. Brown hair dropped freely below her shoulders in a single chestnut wave. Her forehead was high and smooth, and the hair terminated in a gentle widow’s peak that was slightly right of center. She wore enough makeup to stress eyes that were huge brown almonds, soften chiseled cheekbones, and put her lips on stage. From her hairline to the dress that started just below a hint of cleavage, her skin was the color of honey on a graham cracker. A beautiful woman who knew it and used it.
The rest of her was ensconced behind a fortress of a desk, three slabs of black acrylic set at right angles and polished so that fingerprints showed up in the right light. Little secretary knick-knacks were all over it—a word processor, phone, fax, and very little correspondence. Her nails didn’t suggest that she did a lot of work on the word processor. She was well taken care of by an employer who didn’t feel the need to overburden her with work. Entertainment law is like that—ninety-percent of the time you’re a seven-hundred-dollar-an-hour babysitter. A beautiful secretary gives you something to do in the afternoons.
She started in as soon as the doors swished aside. “I’m terribly sorry Mister—”
“Don’t call me Mister,” I said, cutting her off. “I don’t have time to be fucking around up here, so why don’t you just buzz me into Mr. Parenti’s office so we can talk, and you and I can part friends.” I smiled.
“Why, you rude ass,” she said toughly, laying a hand on the phone. “I’m going to call the police and have you—”
“Yeah, that’s a good idea. In fact, why don’t you have Detective Sergeant Luzana Cazares come down here with a tape recorder, and we can all go in and see Ben together.” I leaned over the desk until I was practically curled up in her lap. “And he can tell all four of us why his girlfriend is down at City and County with no name and no life.”
Her face washed out slightly and her hand slipped from the phone, but she stayed tough. “Mr. Parenti is not to be disturbed. He specific—”
“Go in there,” I said through my teeth, “and tell him that his girlfriend is dead, or I will. Either way, the man’s going to get disturbed.”
The beautiful lips went backstage as she set her mouth in a grim line and pushed away from the desk. She strutted over to a pair of heavy double doors with a buzzer lock on them and knocked quietly, then stepped inside. The rest of her didn’t disappoint what I had seen already.
She came out first, followed by him. In the forty feet between me and the door, he passed her up with a little shuffle and said, “What is the meaning of this?” in his best lawyer tone.
He looked like he was going to try to bump me around, so I splayed a hand on his vest and said carefully, “Trust me. You don’t want to have this conversation out here.”
He blinked, but his face didn’t get any softer. He looked at his secretary. Looked at me. Looked back at his secretary. She looked at me and shrugged. That apparently decided it.
I shut the office door behind me and was ushered into a chair. I flung a leg over one black leather arm and waited for him to sit down.
The office was huge and immaculate. There was a wet bar on one wall with crystal everything, all the bottles arranged by size on two glass shelves. The rest of the walls were covered in the obligatory books that lawyers seem to require but never look like they’ve opened. Facing me was a window with a view of the western skyline. Something bothered me about the place, but I pushed it aside as the jitters.
He settled behind a desk that was an inch-thick pane of glass resting on a wrought iron framework that looked like a piece of modern art. Everything on it, which wasn’t much, had the hard, contemporary lines of Scandinavian design. There were two files about a quarter-inch thick on one corner, a thick book on another, and a black leather blotter, lamp, penholder, and word processor that matched Larena’s. His briefcase sat neatly next to one of the desk legs, like a heeling dog.
Parenti appeared thinner in the charcoal three-piece than he had in the photo with Josephine, but was still a stocky fellow who looked like he could shake off a good punch. The lack of gray in his thinning hair didn’t have the sheen of a dye job, and the tan shaved five years off his looks, putting him somewhere in his mid-forties, looking thirty-eight. His face was fleshy, with thick lips and jowls, bushy eyebrows and small, sad eyes. Take away the tan, the suit, and the gold on his digits, and you’d have a middle-aged garbage man in the Bronx.
He pushed his thick fingers into the glass edge of his desk and said, “Now, who do I make you go tell that Ben Parenti throws the little ones back?”
I dusted the comment off and said, “I know someone you know. And I have something you want.”
He smiled like he’d been here before. “Give it your best shot.”
I reached into my shirt and pulled out a business envelope. “Never make the mistake of buying someone and thinking they’ll stay bought, Mr. Parenti. I live with those people. They stay bought until the market price goes up.” I slapped the envelope in front of him. “As a lawyer, I thought you would know that.”
He stared at it without touching it.
“Go ahead. Open it.”
He slowly pulled out the print of himself on the yacht and held it in front of his face. Then he grunted and made a funny motion under the desk blotter. When he lowered the photo he had gone ashen under his tan and was pointing a small .22 automatic at my face. The hand he held it with shook a little.
“A gun,” I said matter-of-factly. I leaned forward and reached behind me. “Look, I’ve got one, too. Which one do you think’ll make a bigger hole?” I held the .45 loosely, not pointed in any specific direction.
His eyes shifted back and forth between the two pieces. I helped him make up his mind.
“Guns are nasty things. I don’t like to use them myself, but that doesn’t mean I don’t know how. Which way do you want to settle it?”
He sighed heavily, put the little shooter back in some drawer I couldn’t see, and put his face in his hands over the photo. “Where did you get this?” he mumbled through his fingers.
“Again, unimportant. Suffice to say, it
wasn’t cheap. Suffice also to say, that I have the only negative copy, so don’t worry about that right now. Worry about telling me about Josephine.”
“Josephine who?”
“King. Josephine King. Your fucking girlfriend.”
“I’ve never heard that name before. And my fiancée’s name is Ione.”
I flashed on the initials, “I.J.,” that Gene had said were inscribed on the ring she wore next to the engagement piece. For some reason, I chose the direct approach. “Mr. Parenti, I’ve had two goons from somebody’s heavy squad following me for two days, maybe more. Last night they wanted to kill me and almost did. I want to know why everybody’s after the one guy who doesn’t know what’s going on.”
“I’m not after you,” he said uselessly. It was an odd thing to say.
“No, but the circumstances that brought us together mean that you’re involved. Maybe, like me, you don’t exactly know how. Or why.” There was a pause, during which I noticed the wet bar again. “You need a drink? I do.”
He waved a hand. I got up and poured us both scotches, put water in mine, left his straight. He shot it down.
“The way I see it is this,” I said, getting comfortable again. The scotch was very old and very good. “We can help each other and we can hurt each other. What I’m after I’ll get somewhere else if not here. It’s kind of up to you. But don’t take that photograph as anything other than a threat. That’s exactly what it is. All I want is information. If I get it, I’m gone. If not, that picture goes to some major and embarrassingly thorough newspapers.” His eyes flicked around the room as if someone was going to jump out from behind a book and kill me. “You can start from the beginning.”
He sighed again, deciding to give me a little line. “Alright. I started seeing Cynthia’s girls about three years ago. Eventually I worked my way through most of the girls, and then one day last year I met Ione. I honestly didn’t know that wasn’t her name. She told me it was Ione Jinn. I know the girls don’t use their real names, but I didn’t care.” He paused meaningfully. “I think I was in love as soon as I saw her.”
