Debbie Doesn't Do It Anymore (9780385538398)

by Mosley, Walter

  Richard leaned back, closing his left eye completely.

  Lana hiccuped again.

  “Hello? Anybody home?”

  The voice came from the front of the house. It was male and sounded familiar but I couldn’t place it right off.

  “Back here!” I shouted, giving up on the murder I wanted so badly to commit.

  Just before Lieutenant Mendelson walked into the kitchen I placed my gun hand into the purse while still holding on to it, because I didn’t know if Richard was armed or what he might do if he had the chance to grab me.

  “This is Perry Mendelson, Dick,” I said. “He’s the detective investigating Theon’s death.”

  Richard’s big broken face showed a great deal of relief. He knew from the look in my eye that he was very close to the terminus of his life. A few seconds earlier I was going to kill him and claim self-defense—now … I wasn’t.

  “Theon’s really dead?” the thug asked.

  “Yes, he is,” Perry said, his senses filled with the unnamed danger that had just passed.

  “Murdered?”

  “It looks like an accident. I just came by to ask Mrs. Pinkney some questions about the woman he was with. Were you a friend of his, Mr.…?”

  “Ness. Richard Ness. I’m a … I was an associate of Mr. Pinkney.”

  “What kind of business did you do together?”

  “Movie production …” Ness said, looking at me. “… that and financial advice.”

  “Would you happen to recognize this woman?” Perry took a photograph from the side pocket of his gray suit jacket.

  “You really are a cop?” Richard said.

  I noticed that the tension went out of the big man’s burly, lime green shoulders.

  “Policeman,” Perry said correcting the term. “Lieutenant Mendelson. Do you recognize this woman?”

  Richard took the photograph between two blunt fingers and examined it.

  “I better go put on some clothes,” Lana said.

  Lana was unobtrusive sitting there, almost invisible. She had a prepubescent boy’s body, with small breasts and a shaved pubis. When she darted out of the room Perry averted his eyes from an innate sense of propriety. Richard didn’t look because he didn’t care.

  “No, Lieutenant,” he said. “I’ve never seen this young woman before. Looks like jailbait.”

  “And you, Mrs. Pinkney?” Perry said as he retrieved the photograph and held it up for me. “Do you remember your husband talking about this young woman? Or maybe you even met her at some point?”

  Jolie was lying on a slab in the picture. Her black hair was pulled back to show her face.

  I had seen her looking worse.

  “No, I haven’t,” I said. “Would you stay and have a cup of coffee with Lana and me?”

  The question was carefully phrased. I wanted Perry to know that he was welcome while Richard was not. He caught the drift and turned his gaze on the leg breaker, loan shark, hustler, thief, and coward.

  “Well, I guess I better be goin’,” Richard mumbled. “You have my condolences, Debbie. You know, usually when I’m told that people who owe me money are dead I take it with a grain of salt.”

  There was a moment of absolute silence in that vast blue suburban kitchen. Then Richard nodded and walked swiftly from the room.

  I followed, blue bag in hand, going all the way to the front door (which, I realized, the police must have left unlocked the night before) and watched the man who nearly died at the foot of my breakfast table get into his vintage purple Impala and drive off.

  “Was he giving you trouble?” Perry asked at my back.

  “No,” I said, “not at all. Dick thinks that because he’s so big and ugly that people are supposed to be scared of him, but not me.”

  I stood there looking out at the blue, blue July morning, Perry Mendelson behind me, peering over my shoulder.

  “You cut your hair.”

  “I had to do something.”

  I felt him holding back from touching my shoulder; I was sure of it. I wanted that touch. How long had it been since I yearned for a man’s hand on me?

  I turned to him and said, “Let’s go get that coffee.”

  When we got back to the dining nook, Lana was there wearing her faded blue jeans and a pale violet T-shirt from my dresser drawer. When she saw Perry with me she got up and set another place at the table.

  “You don’t have to bother,” Perry told her.

  “Oh, that’s okay,” she said, displaying that crooked smile. “There’s lots of room and food.”

  “Just coffee for me … black.”

  Lana’s expression was mild and yet overflowing with feeling. Men filled two roles in her life: predators and fathers. Perry, at least momentarily, had taken up the daddy position in her quivering heart.

  “We’d really like to get a line on this girl,” Perry said when we settled across from each other. “She has a family somewhere, people who care about her.”

  “Didn’t your people find her purse or anything?” I asked. “Wasn’t there something in her pockets?”

  “Forty-seven dollars and some makeup.”

  Poor Jolie. She didn’t even have a pay-as-you-go cell phone. Girls like her slept in a different bed each week and washed out their panties by hand every night. Friends came and went one at a time, each one promising something and delivering somewhat less.

  Theon had obviously offered her a career in adult films. Depending on how they met he might have asked me to help her out. He wouldn’t necessarily have known that I’d already met the child.

  Three weeks earlier my sometime producer, John Toland, had sent me to a hip-hop party at a music producer’s home in Laurel Canyon. When I walked through the open front door I found myself in an audience of about thirty people. Everyone was black except for little naked white Jolie on her knees giving up-and-comer Fat Phil Harmonik a very energetic blow job.

  The men in the room were mostly leering while the women sneered uncomfortably. I waited until the job was finished before taking Jolie by the hand and leading her around until we found a bathroom with a lock on the door.

  I could tell by her eyes that she was only partly aware of where she was and what she was doing, so I laid her in the bathtub and turned on the cold water of the overhead shower. She was so high that it took five seconds or so for the chill to take effect. When she started shivering I held her in place for a few seconds more and then pulled her from the tub.

  “Help me, miss,” she said as I was drying her off.

  “Do you know where you are?”

  “No.”

  “Did somebody bring you here?”

  “They must have but I don’t remember.”

  Someone banged on the door.

  “She’s throwing up!” I yelled.

  Then I took out my cell phone and hit a special code.

  “Hello, beauty,” he said on the second ring.

  “I need help.”

  “Give me the address and I’ll be there as soon as I swap out this passenger.”

  Forty-five minutes later I had the half-conscious child wrapped in a bathrobe. We were sneaking as best we could through the back of the house. From there we made it to a small gateway and down to the canyon road.

  Short, dark, and unmistakably South American, the Brazilian Leonidas Asimante stood next to a black Lincoln Town Car waiting for us.

  Once we were driving away I told him that I needed to take the girl (I had yet to learn her name) someplace where she could sober up.

  “I have a client who keeps a house at the beach in Malibu,” the flawless English–speaking driver said. “I look after it for him when he’s out of town. You two can stay the night if you want.”

  I sat up with Jolie until the distant ocean glinted orange. She vomited bile and cried, thanked me over and over, told me her life story, and then fell so soundly asleep that she seemed dead, more so than in the photograph that Lieutenant Mendelson was showing me.

&nbs
p; In the afternoon Leonidas came with clothes I had him buy. We dressed her and drove her to a rooming house I knew of down around Venice Beach.

  “I have no idea who she is,” I said, answering Perry Mendelson’s query.

  A look of concern creased the policeman’s already doubtful visage.

  Lana put a cup of black coffee down in front of the detective.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Excuse me,” Lana said as she climbed over my lap to sit on the other side.

  “It’s just that I find it hard to believe,” Perry said, “that a woman would have no idea how to at least find out what her husband is up to.”

  “You want Theon’s cell phone?” I asked. “He never finished high school and didn’t even know how to spell the word computer. But maybe there’s a phone book in there somewhere.”

  “That won’t help me if I don’t know a name.”

  “You could just call every name until somebody doesn’t answer,” Lana offered.

  “We don’t have that kind of manpower,” Perry said, taking her seriously. “I mean if this was a murder or something, but right now the worst is that it’s an underage runaway that died.”

  “If she was underage like you say,” I offered, “and she died having sex with a mature man like my husband … you could construe that as some kind of homicide.”

  “Yeah. Maybe second-degree manslaughter, I guess. But the chief of police and the city prosecutor wouldn’t want to use public funds in that manner. You weren’t here and so there’s no living perpetrator.”

  “Can I be straight with you, Perry?” I asked.

  “Sure.”

  “Do you recognize me?”

  “Um … no. Not personally.”

  “Did some of the other cops last night make jokes?”

  “Uh …”

  “It’s okay. I’m not shy. I take off my clothes in front of a camera and fuck for a living. That’s the kind of business we’re in—me and Lana … and Theon too, when he was alive. We’ve all met thousands of girls like the one from last night. With most of them I’m more likely to remember if their ass stank than their names.

  “A dozen girls like that flutter around me every single day. To tell you the truth, Theon might not have known her name. And even if he did it wouldn’t have been a real name. Nobody gives their real name—no, no, no.”

  He picked up on the reference to Fats Waller with a Lana-like smile and glanced down at his hands.

  “You listen to Waller?” His words told more than they asked.

  “My father loved old-time jazz. I used to sit on his lap and listen with him.”

  Our eyes met and I saw that he was experiencing hunger that was unfamiliar to him. He felt a connection with me and that made him uncomfortable.

  “You like being a policeman?” I asked to relieve his tension and to explore it at the same time.

  “I used to.”

  “Not anymore?”

  “I still do the work,” he said. “I think it’s important but I care too much. A cop can’t really care. We come across a dozen tragedies every day.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “You do?”

  “With me it’s even worse. I have to pretend to care and I don’t give a shit.”

  “I better be going,” he said.

  He stood up.

  I nodded.

  He turned.

  I wanted to say something: the kind of words that held out hope for a next meeting.

  He walked the distance to the kitchen doorway and I remained silent, telling myself that it wasn’t the time and he wasn’t the man.

  “Deb!” Lana yelped maybe three minutes after Perry had gone. “We have to get to work. It’s a ten-o’clock call.”

  “I thought you quit the business?”

  “Uh … um … But Linda expects us.”

  “I thought you were breaking up with Linda?”

  “I am but … but this is our job.”

  The bewildered look on her childlike face was perfect. Decisions and actions didn’t have anything to do with each other in her mental life. She was a kid, from Ohio I think, who was still looking for the magic door that led to a place where things fit together because you wanted them to.

  “Tell Linda I couldn’t make it today,” I said.

  “She’s gonna be mad.”

  “My husband died last night, honey. He was electrocuted in the bathtub where he was fucking an obviously underage girl. The police are questioning me. Richard Ness is on my ass. And in the meanwhile I have to bury Theon. You tell Linda that, and then, if she gets mad, you tell her to bring her skinny ass and her razor blade over here.”

  “O-okay, Deb. Don’t be mad at me. I wasn’t really thinking is all. Do you need a ride somewhere?”

  “Back to my car?”

  “It was parked on the street and so I gave Linda your keys. She said she’d have someone drop it off in the afternoon.”

  “That’s okay then. I’ll take Theon’s Hummer.”

  “Do you want me to stay and help you?”

  I could have said yes but that would have torn Lana apart. She had to go back to Linda and the set. She had to do what she was told because that was how she had survived all these years.

  “No, baby,” I said.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “What every girl does when she needs to think.”

  “Hairdresser?”

  I smiled and she did too.

  Half an hour after Lana had gone I went out to the driveway to ignite Theon’s bright yellow Hummer. It was the largest model ever made and even a tall person needed the extra step to climb up into the driver’s seat.

  I grabbed onto the door handle and was about to pull myself up when he spoke.

  “Hey, Deb.”

  I should have known that Richard wasn’t the kind of dog to let a bone go so easily.

  The pistol was in the house so I was on my own against the huge bundle of woman-hating violence. The fact that he was a coward only made him more dangerous.

  “Hey, Dick.”

  “I don’t like people callin’ me that.”

  “That’s okay, Dick. I don’t like you.” My heart was thundering and there was too much blood in my brain to make room for the underlying fear.

  “I’m gonna kick your ass, bitch.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “No? Why not?”

  “Two reasons,” I said as if from the middle of a dead calm somewhere far out at sea. “First, if you take one more step I will holler bloody murder and you better believe every one of these housewives around here will call nine-one-one. Two—and you have to listen closely to this one, Dick—two is that if you don’t kill me, I will get that gun and blow you away … today, tomorrow, sooner or later. So if you kill me you’ll never get what Theon owed, and if you don’t it won’t matter.”

  His fists clenched and I took in a deep breath—ready to scream.

  I was counting on the fact that Theon always said that Richard was an intelligent man in spite of his looks.

  His hands unclenched and he took in a deep breath.

  “He owes me seventy-two grand.”

  “Can you prove it?”

  “He signed my book.”

  “You got it on you?”

  “I could just take your key and drive your Humvee outta here.”

  “Then I’d call the cops and you can play Grand Theft Auto with the other fools in jail.”

  It was a dangerous game but Richard was forcing it. He wasn’t the kind of guy who gave away anything—no real loan shark is. They always move straight ahead; that’s why they called them sharks.

  “I’ll call you,” he said.

  “And we’ll meet someplace public,” I added. “Not here. If I see your ass here again I’ll put a cap in it.”

  I should have gone back in the house and had some tea after Richard left for the second time. My body chemistry was way off and I needed to calm down. But th
e adrenaline in my blood wouldn’t let me even try to relax.

  On La Brea just south of Wilshire I tried to change lanes without putting on the blinker and smacked into a navy blue Saab. I pulled to the curb and waited. The young black man driving the Saab jerked his car up behind mine and leaped out. He walked around, assessing the damage to his car in a herky-jerky manner that would have been funny if I didn’t know what had just happened.

  I climbed over to the passenger’s side and emerged slowly, perusing the damage to his car and mine.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he shouted.

  There was good reason for his rage. My car barely had a scratch while his was pretty torn up. Theon had an ornamental pipe running along the side of his car. This garish accessory gouged a deep gash along the side of the Swedish-made car.

  A young Asian girl, who was at least seven months pregnant, got out of the Saab. She waddled up next to the lanky driver, willing him, it seemed, to calm down.

  “I was in the wrong,” I said. “I’m very sorry.”

  “It was your fault!” he hollered.

  “That’s what she said, Willie,” the girl murmured.

  “Stay out of this, Tai.”

  “We should trade insurance numbers,” I suggested.

  Tai was staring at my face.

  “What the hell are you gonna do about my car?” he replied.

  “We can wait for the police to come if you want,” I said calmly. I didn’t want the police there. I never much liked being around cops.

  “Willie,” Tai said.

  His eyes were bulging and a tremor was going through his thin frame.

  “Willie,” pregnant Tai said, some fear now in her voice.

  I wondered if I should be afraid, if Willie was about to lose his mind and kill me right there on La Brea.

  Then the young man fell to his knees.

  “Help me,” Tai cried. She went down too, grabbing Willie by his left arm.

  “What’s wrong with him?” I asked.

  “Seizures,” she said. “He has them sometimes when he gets upset.”

  I suspected that Tai was not from the United States, though she certainly spoke English well enough. Maybe she was from some ex–English colony somewhere. I say this because any good Angeleno would know that I could take the knowledge of his condition and use it against him in traffic court.