One Last Hit (Joe Portugal Mysteries)

by Walpow, Nathan

  “We’ll see.” He returned his attention to Tiny and the gun cabinet. I got the hell out of the garage and stood on the bleak driveway, not sure what to do next.

  “Something wrong?” Wanda said.

  “Yes. Something’s very wrong. Your boyfriend is selling guns to your husband so we can go track down whoever—”

  “I don’t get involved in the boys’ business.”

  “It doesn’t bother you that he’s got an arsenal on the premises?”

  She glanced toward the garage. “You’re going to hang out with Woz, you’re gonna have to be a little more broad-minded.”

  “Maybe I’ll have to stop hanging out with Woz.”

  “Suit yourself.” She picked a magazine off the ground. People. Britney Spears on the cover. Like mother, like son.

  I went up on the porch, through the sliding door, found my way to the front. When I made it to the sidewalk I walked east, toward the boulevard.

  I got three blocks before Woz found me. He trolled along behind awhile, then caught up. “Wait.”

  “I think not.”

  “I’m sorry. I should’ve said where we were going.”

  I kept walking. He rolled down the middle of the narrow street.

  “Hey, I said I’m sorry. Just get back in the car, okay?”

  I stopped, turned. “No. Not okay.”

  Across the street, an old woman in a red muumuu stood outside her front door, listening intently. I walked toward the car. Woz slowed to a stop. I stayed far enough away so he couldn’t grab me through the window. I dropped my voice. “You can’t just go running around like cowboys and Indians after these guys.”

  “Someone has to.”

  “You don’t even know who they are.”

  “That’s what I need you for. Detective work.”

  “I’ve given up detecting, except for finding Toby. Why not just let the cops handle it?”

  A baleful stare. “You don’t get it, do you?”

  “Get what?”

  “You take care of your own.”

  “No. The cops take care of my own.”

  “Is that what you did a couple years ago when they thought that friend of yours blew someone away?”

  “It’s not the same thing. I wasn’t going around shooting people.”

  “I thought you’d be man enough to go to bat for your friends.”

  “The old macho bullshit argument.”

  “But if you’re not, I can live with it. Get in the car. I’ll drive you back and that’ll be that.”

  “I doubt it.”

  I looked up. The old woman was chittering into a cell phone. Something about “suspicious strangers.” She edged along her walk, trying to catch Woz’s license number.

  I ran around the front of the car, got in, slammed the door. “Get out of here.”

  He was already getting. We reached Topanga Canyon Boulevard and went south, stopping next at a light just before the 101 on-ramp. “Why me?” I said. “Why not Frampton?”

  “Frampton’s got a family.”

  “I’ve got a family.”

  “Frampton’s got kids. So if anything happened … not that anything’s going to happen.”

  “Right. Because after you drop me at Beverly Center, that’s the end of it. We weren’t going to talk about this anymore, remember?”

  “You’re the one brought it up.”

  Halfway back he reached under the seat and pulled out a gun. “This is the one I got for you.”

  “Very nice. Now put it back.”

  “It’s just a little .22. A girl’s gun. Not a lot of firepower, except if you come up and shoot someone in the head with it. Then it jangles around inside and turns their brains to goop.” He glanced down at it, then looked at me. “I picked it out for you cause I figured it would be easy for you to handle.”

  “It’ll be real easy to handle if I don’t handle it at all. Could you maybe keep your eyes on the road?”

  “Shit. Won’t even handle a girl’s gun.”

  “Are you done?”

  He sighed and regarded me with disgust. “I figured it’d probably be like this.”

  “I’m glad I didn’t disappoint you.”

  He gave me those eyes of his, and I thought I’d gone too far. That we might see some blood spilled right there in the front seat of the Barracuda. But he just shoved the gun back under the seat.

  We reached Beverly Center half an hour later. Before I went to the truck I dropped into California Pizza Kitchen and, ever responsible, used their pay phone to call my machine. There were a bunch of messages from Elaine. A callback for a Sealy Posturepedic spot. She sounded extra pissed. I got hold of her, apologized, rushed to the casting director’s office on Beverly. I made it just in time. They watched me lie down for a while and let me go. I got in the truck and started home. When I got there I had company again.

  My Generation

  I removed my amp and myself from the truck and went up the walk. I stopped just short of the patio and pointed at the faded blue VW microbus out front. “Yours?”

  “Yes,” Deanna said. “Like it?”

  “Uh-huh. Very retro.”

  Like the first time I saw her, she looked good from a distance. Close up, blowing the old cliché, she looked better in the light of day. The red hair came off as more natural and the lines in her face provided character instead of history. She was sitting in one of the wicker chairs with legs crossed at the ankles and an impenetrable expression. Her big toes were painted, the rest weren’t. A multicolored fabric purse dangled from the back of the chair.

  “Come sit,” she said.

  A quick scan showed no orange juice or other sign of illegal entry. I stowed the amp by the door, took the other chair and turned it so I could see her face. “The answer’s still no.”

  “The answer? Oh, you mean about fucking. That’s not why I’m here.”

  “Then why are you?”

  “Aren’t you interested in how I found you?”

  “Standard procedure seems to be looking up my address in the phone book and finding it in the Thomas Guide.”

  “But I had to get your name first. You didn’t tell me that.”

  “Do I care about this?”

  “I got it from Charley at Paoletti’s. I was counting on you going over there after I told you about it.” She smiled. It was almost attractive. “And here I am.”

  “Yes. Here you are. Any word from Mott?”

  “No.”

  Giggling came from next door. I looked over, saw Suzy Clement watching a squirrel that twittered at her from their birch tree. Her mom came out, spotted the squirrel, said something about rabies. Nice people, the Clements, but overprotective.

  I turned back to Deanna. “You know what? Life’s too short, forgive the cliché, and I don’t want to sit around playing games. Why are you here?”

  She head-gestured in the general direction of the front door. “Nice amp.”

  “Is it?” Something was wrong with what she’d said. “I didn’t think it was anything special.”

  “Just making conversation.”

  I had it. Women I knew wouldn’t say “amp.” They’d say “amplifier,” if they had occasion to mention one at all. Like Gina had when she got me the gift certificate. And once I had that …

  “Sit there,” I said. I got up, unlocked the door, dumped the amp inside, grabbed Toby’s first solo album, took it out with me. Looked at the back, at the picture of the band. Then at Deanna. Back and forth, back and forth.

  “It’s me,” she said.

  The chick drummer, Dee Knox. It was Deanna.

  And so what?

  “So you were in a band with him,” I said.

  “Just like you were.”

  “Charley told you.”

  She nodded. “I’m looking for Toby too.”

  I tried to gauge if she was telling the truth. Tried to decide if I cared. “Why?” I said. “Don’t tell me you ran into Spencer Sommers and you’re mounting a
reunion tour too.”

  “I haven’t seen Spencer in ten years. Why I’m looking for Toby’s a little hard to explain. And it doesn’t matter right now. What matters is I have an idea where he might be.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t really know where it is. I just know what it is.”

  “Go away.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I told you, no games. Get the hell out of here.”

  “I wasn’t trying to pull your chain. I was just saying—”

  “I’m going inside.”

  I slammed the door behind me, tossed the record album on the couch, went into the bathroom to wash my hands. I dried them longer than I had to, staring at the mirror, wondering what someone who hadn’t seen me in a long time would think of my face.

  I returned to the living room and was only a little surprised when I kept going and flung the front door open. Deanna was still in the chair, sitting peacefully, her head bobbing to some unknown tune. When she saw me she smiled. She didn’t wait for an invitation. She just got up and, without a word, squeezed past me into the house and made for the couch.

  I sat at the other end. “Talk,” I said.

  “Mott was there the night Toby was at Paoletti’s.”

  “And you weren’t?”

  “No. It was supposed to be some drummer from Japan playing that night. Mott loves that kind of stuff. He spent some time in Japan. That’s where he got the name. It’s really Matt, but it came out Mott there and he took to it. I hate that kind of music, so I stayed home. When he came home afterwards and told me Toby had shown up I felt like killing him.”

  “He knows you knew Toby?”

  “Of course he does.”

  “Then why didn’t he call you?”

  “He was stoned, as usual. He said he just didn’t think of it.” She looked straight at me. “How old are you?”

  “Forty-nine. Why?”

  “I’m fifty-two. Two-thirds of the way through my life, probably. I’ve started to think about things.”

  I didn’t have to ask what kind of things.

  “Those days as a musician,” she said. “They were the best time of my life.” She cocked her head, watched me, expecting a comment. When none came she went on. “Toby and I were the best of friends when I was in his band. I was the only girl he wasn’t interested in screwing, and the same the other way around. You ever have women friends like that?”

  Sure I did. Gina, before things changed. And in my acting days, there were lots of female friends, though deep down I probably wanted to ravage them all. “Yes.”

  “Then you know what I’m talking about. You don’t want to mess things up by letting sex get involved. But one day Toby had a little too much to smoke and he made a move on me. I turned him down. Things were never the same between us after that. And things were never the same for him in general. He started spending more and more time by himself, and getting into heavier drugs.”

  “You can’t think that one little turndown caused his heroin addiction.”

  “Maybe it contributed. Maybe I should have fucked him, and everything would have been fine, and I could have, I don’t know, saved him from himself. Maybe we would have ended up a nice suburban couple with two kids and a dog.”

  I thought of Frampton. I wondered if he had a dog. I thought of Bonnie, who did have one. How I wished I’d slept with her that night. But it was different. She still would have left Mark and Ginger’s, and I still would have lost her for thirty-odd years.

  “When I found out Toby was alive—”

  “You’re sure he is? If Mott was so loaded it could have been Vanilla Ice up there.”

  “I had the same thought. But Charley said it was Toby too. That’s good enough for me.”

  “Go on.”

  “When I heard Toby was alive—and remember, I’ve been in this thoughtful phase, questioning my life, getting misty about the old days, all sorts of crap like that—I suddenly got the idea that I needed to find him. To talk to him.”

  “What would it accomplish?”

  “I don’t know. I just feel it’s something I have to do. Maybe it won’t accomplish anything. Maybe I’ll feel my life is complete and I can die happy.”

  “Why didn’t you just tell me you knew him the other night at Da Capo?”

  “I thought you might be a narc.”

  “Not you too.”

  “Other people do?”

  “A couple more in the last week alone.”

  “You have the look.”

  “What look?”

  “The narc look. But I went to Paoletti’s the next day and asked Charley about you and he thought you were legit. Which brings us up to looking you up in the Thomas Guide.”

  “And to your suspicions about where he is.”

  “Yes.”

  “Which would be?”

  “Toby had a kind of secret hideaway. It was out in the desert, near Palm Springs. He wouldn’t tell anyone exactly where. Wouldn’t even mention it to most people.”

  “He took you there.”

  That stopped her. “How’d you know that?”

  “He took me too.”

  “That son of a bitch. He told me I was the first. He talked about you all the time, and not once did he mention that. That son of a—”

  “Toby talked about me all the time?”

  “I got sick of hearing your name.”

  “What did he say?”

  “That he missed you, for one thing, though being a man he had to say it in a roundabout way.”

  “Did he tell you how he and Bonnie went away and never contacted any of us again?”

  “He felt awful about that. But he felt worse that they weren’t allowed to take the rest of you with them. He was afraid to face you. Bonnie was too, from what he said. Can we—”

  “And after she lost her voice and their group went to hell and he was recording an album with you and Spencer, he still couldn’t drop by, send us a letter, even call us on the telephone?”

  “He was damaged by then. I’m not saying that’s an excuse, but it’s a reason.”

  “Damaged by drugs?”

  “By drugs, by the music business … can we get back on the subject?”

  “Yeah, sure, whatever.”

  “You know where his hideaway is? Because that’s where I think he is.”

  “No. All I remember is you get off I-10, head toward the mountains, and it’s up there somewhere. That encompasses, what, a jillion square miles? Plus we were smoking the whole way out there.”

  “Us too. Damn it. I really think that’s where he is.”

  “He shlepped in from there to make a midnight appearance at Paoletti’s?”

  “I drove seven hundred miles to get to Woodstock.”

  “That’s a lousy analogy.”

  “It was a lousy objection.” She looked like she wanted to say more.

  “What?” I said.

  “This is going to sound stupid …”

  “I’ve heard a lot that sounded stupid in the last few days.”

  “I know it sounds like cosmic bullshit, but I feel like there’s some fate thing going on here. Why did I run into you that night, when we both wanted to find Toby?”

  “You ran into me because I was looking for Mott in a place I knew he hangs out at, and since you’re his significant other it stands to reason it’s a place you might hang out at too.”

  “You think that’s all it is?”

  “Of course that’s all it is.”

  I didn’t believe that, not entirely, and that scared me. I don’t waste time on things I haven’t seen evidence of. Area 51 aliens, energy pyramids, a supreme being, maybe they exist and maybe they don’t. If someone shows me proof I’ll believe it, and until then, I don’t really give a rat’s ass.

  So what was scary was that I was giving at least a little credence to what Deanna was saying. That fate threw the two of us together. That there was something beyond sheer chance going on.

&nb
sp; But I wasn’t ready to admit it.

  “Let’s play what-if,” I said.

  “Go ahead.”

  “What if I said, fine, the gods have made our paths cross and we’re destined to find Toby—leaving aside, for the moment, the question of what we do if we do find him—then how would we begin?”

  “We’d put our heads together and see what we remember about the place. Maybe we could get some synergy going and together we might be able to remember how to get there. So you’re in?”

  “When did I say that?”

  “You didn’t say you were out.”

  The Jeopardy! theme played in my head. I had thirty seconds to come up with an answer. I knew that wasn’t right, that I had as much time as I needed. But the answer I came up with in thirty minutes, thirty hours, thirty years wasn’t going to be any better than the one I chose after thirty seconds.

  I didn’t know why I was on the fence. What she’d said was right. That synergy business. Two heads are better than one. In unity there is strength. There were probably other proverbs I was missing.

  Maybe I was just suspicious of this other person dropping into my lap, trying to accomplish the same thing I was. It was too cosmic for me.

  When I opened my mouth I wasn’t sure what was going to come out. Once I heard it, I was satisfied it was the right thing. “I’m in,” I said.

  Boris the Spider

  “I thought you were going catatonic on me,” Deanna said.

  “I’ll save that for later, when we’re out in the desert dying of thirst. So what do we do now?”

  “We talk about our trips with Toby. One of us says something, it sparks something in the other—”

  “And after a few minutes one of us goes, ‘Holy shit! I remember where it is. Not only that, but I have an auto club map in my closet with the route laid out in blue highlighter.”

  She laughed. “Why blue?”

  “You don’t like blue? It can be yellow, if you want. Or pink. I think those are the main highlighter colors.”

  “Let’s get started.”

  “Right now?” I said.

  “‘There’s no time like the right time—’“

  “‘—and baby, the right time is now.’ Blues Project, ’66.”

  “‘67, I think.”

  “Whichever it is,” I said, “now is not the right time.”