“I am Ivana,” she said with a heavy accent. “And I shall help you.”
She shook hands with an impressive grip. Though she was carrying a few more pounds than suited his taste, he thought she was very hot in a farmer’s daughter sort of way.
“I hear that you need some massage of the thigh. Am I correct?”
“Yeah,” Jetsam said. “My goddamn leg’s acting up. Where should I put my clothes?”
She opened a small closet and took out two wooden coat hangers, saying, “Here, dah-link, let me help you.”
After he unbuttoned his shirt, she pulled it off, noting, “You have very fine muscle tone, yes?”
“I try to stay in shape by surfing, fake foot and all,” he said. “So, like, how much will this cost?”
“Is depending what you want and for how long,” Ivana answered, with only a trace of impishness in her smile.
“I just want you to, like, work on my thigh and make the cramp go away. And maybe a little up on top by my shoulders. When my stump makes this happen, I get tension around my shoulders and neck.”
“Yes, I understand, dah-link,” Ivana said. “Can you please remove the shoes and trousers now.”
Jetsam sat on the little straight-backed chair next to a table holding the lotions, powders, and towels she used in her work.
Ivana watched carefully when his supportive braces came off, and she looked interested in the prosthesis itself. It seemed evident that she was starting to believe that he only wanted a legitimate massage.
She said, “I think that I can help you in maybe thirty-minute, deep-muscle massage. One fifty is the fee. Okay?”
That stopped him for a moment. A hundred and fifty without the tip? “Okay,” he said, figuring he could tip her with his own meager funds and get it reimbursed by the vice sergeant later.
He stripped down to his red briefs and said, “I guess I can leave these on?”
She smiled bigger. “Of course, dah-link. On, off. What gives you comfort is what we wish for. But first you must pay Ivana for her work. Sometimes people who are not honest get the massage and do not pay.”
“Of course,” he said, taking the front money he’d been given and counting it out on the little table.
“Very good, dah-link.” She picked up the money and slipped it into her purse, on the top shelf of the closet.
With his prosthesis and braces on the chair, Jetsam hopped over to the massage table and, before lying down, took a close look at the large white towel covering it. The towel looked freshly laundered, with no disgusting evidence of DNA that he could see. He climbed onto the table and stretched out, facedown.
“What is your name, dah-link?” she asked.
“Call me Kelly,” he said, in honor of the surfing champion Kelly Slater.
She placed a pillow under his head and said, “Kelly, you may turn the face this way or the other way, as you wish.”
“Okay,” he said. “The pain is mostly on the inside of my thigh.”
“I shall find it and make it go away, dah-link,” Ivana said, and she started.
“This is, like, way nerve-racking and boring at the same time,” Flotsam told Sergeant Hawthorne as they sat in the vice car half a block from the front entrance of Shanghai Massage. Flotsam had the sergeant’s binoculars in his lap and would look through them every two minutes or so, but there’d been no sign of his partner.
“It’s a very busy business,” Sergeant Hawthorne said. “He probably had to wait quite a while.”
“I don’t think I could go for this job,” Flotsam said. “Cooling my jets all the time, waiting for something to happen. I was never a fisherman for the same reason. I ain’t patient. I like to go out and make things happen.”
“Then working patrol here in Hollywood is the job for you,” the sergeant said.
“Yeah,” Flotsam agreed. “Hollywood’s the kinda place where the world’s loony tunes gather, but that keeps it from getting boring. I mean, like, the fruit loops can only stand around so long at Ralphs market talking to the radishes before they gotta hit the streets and act out. Know what I mean?”
“I do.” Sergeant Hawthorne closed his eyes and leaned his head back on the Volvo’s headrest, wishing Flotsam would shut up.
“I’m sure if my li’l pard got in trouble in there, he’d throw a fucking chair through that plate-glass window, wouldn’t he?”
“That’s what I told him to do,” Sergeant Hawthorne said drowsily. “You heard me say it.”
“Yeah, I gotta throttle back,” Flotsam said. “My li’l pard’s probably just enjoying the shit outta his body rub.”
“Ow! Goddamn, you’re killing me!” Jetsam cried, and Ivana, who had finished working on his thigh and was digging into his neck and shoulders, said, “Do not be baby, dah-link. What I do is good for whole body.”
She was for sure the strongest woman Jetsam had ever encountered at close range. “You ever considered pro wrestling?” he asked.
“I was discus thrower back in Ukraine,” she said. “Not good enough for Olympics, but not so bad, maybe.”
When she was finished she slapped him on the ass and said, “So, dah-link, how you feel now?”
“I hope I can get up,” he said.
“Do not worry about it. I shall help you.” Then she added, “How you lost the foot?”
He thought of Hollywood Nate then and wished he had Nate’s acting chops. He decided to follow Sergeant Hawthorne’s advice to stay mostly evasive and noncommittal until there was the right time to be specific and provocative, and to let the questioner pull the information out of him.
Then he heard himself fuck it up completely by saying, “I got the amputation in Tijuana.” And he thought, Aw shit! I blew it.
She said, “I have curiousness about how you hurt the foot, Kelly.” The Tijuana reference had apparently caused no spark of recognition.
Jetsam swung his legs over the side of the table and sat there for a moment while she washed her hands in a little sink. He thought, Be evasive! “I, uh, well, uh, sorta had an accident with a chain saw. I was, like, pruning a tree and I dropped the saw and I fell on it and somehow the motor kept going and it almost cut my foot clean off, and well . . .”
After drying her hands, Ivana looked at him and said, “You was cutting a tree in Mexico?”
“Well, not exactly,” Jetsam said, “I was . . . well, I got such poor work done on me at an ER in Burbank that I had to have the amputation a week later.”
Now she was looking him in the eyes. “But why in Tijuana?”
“Cheaper,” he said quickly.
“Very strange,” she said. “You did not fear the work down there?”
“No, look at it,” he said. “Beautiful work, right? I got a recommendation from a doctor here in L.A. He used to, like, work in a clinic there. In fact, he drove down to T.J. and did the job on me.”
Now there was no doubt that Ivana was interested. She said, “May I take photo of it?”
“What for?”
“I know a client who has much interest in such things. What do they call the clinic you go to?”
“Clínica Maravilla,” Jetsam said.
“And who is the doctor that do the work?”
“Dr. Maurice Montaigne,” Jetsam said. “I found him through a guy I worked with.”
“What kind of work you do, Kelly?” she asked casually.
“This and that,” he said, trying a mysterious smile.
“You are interesting person, Kelly,” she said. “Is okay if I take photo or two?”
“My stump only. Not my face.”
“Why? You are wanted man? You are, how you say, fugitive?” She asked with a grin.
“Not exactly.” He smiled back at her. “Okay, snap away. Are these for your scrapbook? Your first massage of a guy with one foot?”
“Is not for my scrapbook, dah-link,” she said, opening the small closet again and taking down her cell phone.
She took photos of Jetsam’s stump. When
she was finished, she smiled mischievously and said, “You like to take a photo of me sometime?”
“Can I pose you the way I want to?” he said.
“Absolutely,” she said. “I give you massage and you can do more than take photo if you wish.”
“For the same price?”
She laughed and said, “Oh, no, dah-link. Now we talk about very special massage from Ivana. No, no, not same price.”
“Do we do the special massage here?” he asked.
“Sure, here,” she said. “Or in hotel. Or in your house if your wife do not mind. Maybe she like my massage too?”
“I ain’t married,” he said. “Not anymore. Anyways, can I have your phone number? I might be ready for this a lot sooner than you think.”
“Wonderful, dah-link!” She went back to the closet to get a business card from her purse.
It was cheaply done, with no embossing. It said, “Massage by Ivana.” She wrote a phone number on it.
“Would you like a shower?” she asked.
He saw exactly how his clothes were hung and thought about taking a shower to see if she would go through his wallet, but then he figured that this group of players might be savvy enough to pull credit card and DMV information and somehow trace him back to the LAPD, so he said, “Naw, that lotion ain’t the greasy kind.”
She watched with interest as he attached the supportive braces and the prosthesis, and when he was finished and had pulled on his chinos, she said, “You feel good now, yes?”
“Very good,” he said. “But tell me, Ivana, why the photo op of my stump? Are you interested in specialty surgeries, or what?”
“I am not,” she said, “but I got special client. He is very much interested. Maybe he is knowing the same doctor that you know.”
“Maybe,” Jetsam said. “I hear the doc did a lotta work around Hollywood, but I don’t think he’s in practice these days.”
She did not look surprised. “No? Why not?”
“I hear he’s zombied out most of the time.”
“What is this meaning?”
“All smoked out. A crackhead.”
“Oh, yes,” she said. “The drugs. Yes.”
Jetsam knew he was taking a big risk that might scare her, but he couldn’t stop himself from asking, “Is your special client looking for a doctor like that? Or is he an amputee too?”
“He is just special client that sometime need outcall massage, like maybe I shall also do for you very soon. So, do you like what I do today? It was okay?”
He figured that was his cue for a tip, so he pulled out his wallet and gave her his thirty dollars, which left him with exactly two dollars of his own money. He tried a devil-may-care grin and said, “Have a burger on me, babe.”
Her smile told him that she was satisfied with the fee and the tip. In fact, she said coyly, “Maybe next time you shall become my little hamburger. Maybe Ivana shall eat you up!”
“Yum yum,” Jetsam said.
Before he was quite out the door, Ivana startled Jetsam by asking, “May I have your phone number too, dah-link?”
“Why would you want my phone number?” He stalled, trying to remember the vice unit’s cold phone number Sergeant Hawthorne had given him. “What if my girlfriend answers?”
“Then I say I got wrong number,” Ivana said
He was pretty sure he had the number right before he gave it to her, saying, “I can’t imagine why you need it.”
Ivana flashed her sexiest smile and said, “Maybe we offer summer special that you must hear about. Maybe we give coupons, dah-link!”
Flotsam was visibly relieved to see his partner leave the massage parlor and cross the boulevard at the intersection. Sergeant Hawthorne got on the tac frequency and told the cover team to stand by.
When Jetsam got to the vice car, parked north of the boulevard, he climbed into the backseat, and both Flotsam and Sergeant Hawthorne turned and waited in anticipation.
Jetsam enjoyed creating suspense, but finally he said, “I got my foot in the door.”
“Fuck the jokes, dude!” Flotsam said. “Come on, give it up!”
“Can’t I enjoy a Zen moment?” Jetsam asked.
By then, Sergeant Hawthorne just wanted to see the last of the surfer cops forever, and he was half-hoping that nothing of value had come from the massage parlor and he could jettison his whole experiment.
Then Jetsam said excitedly, “This Ukrainian chick has these big overzealous casabas. Bro, her mammaries are mammoth. And she got these paws that could turn your muscles into risotto. She’s fucking brutal!”
The young vice sergeant sighed audibly. “I’m glad you had a good time, but what the hell happened, if anything?”
“Well, first thing was, the chick at the counter looked at me like I was a turd on a stick, till I showed her my foot,” Jetsam said. “And by the way, you didn’t give me enough bank, Sarge. The massage cost me the Franklin and the Grant. And then I tipped her thirty bucks of my own. I ain’t got enough left for a refried bean burrito at Taco Bell.”
“Why did you have to tip her, dude?” Flotsam asked, and there was that leer again.
Sergeant Hawthorne was getting very close to telling these two dipshits that this was a goddamn police mission and not a rager on the beach at Malibu.
But before he had a chance to pull rank, Jetsam finally said, “I think it worked! She took a picture of my stump. Four pictures, in fact. And she claims she got a client that’s interested in special surgeries. And she got her game face on when I mentioned that I got mine done in T.J. And I, like, sorta hinted that I know the quack doctor who’s a crackhead now, and I got her phone number if you wanna design my next move.” Jetsam took a breath and added, “I done good in there.”
Neither Sergeant Hawthorne nor Flotsam spoke for a long moment. Then the vice sergeant said, with renewed respect, “Let me get the cover team in on this, and then start from the very beginning and tell me every single word that was spoken in there.”
“And not the Reader’s Digest version,” Flotsam said. “I gotta hear it all.”
“I’m hungry,” Jetsam said. “I either need my thirty bucks or you gotta feed me, Sarge.”
“I’m very happy to buy,” Sergeant Hawthorne said sincerely. “Will IHOP do?”
“Why not?” Jetsam said. “I love savory dishes that can clog your arteries so your heart only beats about three times all day. And one more thing: the chick wanted my phone number. I gave her your setup number, so you might get a call for Kelly. That’s the name I gave her. Whadda you suppose it’s all about?”
“I don’t know for sure,” Sergeant Hawthorne said. “Just when I was thinking this was the dumbest idea I’ve ever had, it’s starting to look promising. If she does call for Kelly, I may need your UC services ASAP, so I’ll need to know where you are, on duty and off duty, for the next few weeks. I’ll keep both your watch commander and Sergeant Murillo informed.”
After the cover team drove up and parked behind them, the vice sergeant got out of the car to tell them that they’d meet at the vice office in one hour for a debriefing, after he fed his surfer cops.
Alone in the car with his partner, Flotsam said, “So the masseuse was a real gamer, huh, dude? The kind that could make you flame out and crash after an hour of frolic and horseplay?”
Jetsam said, “Bro, remember that time you and me were off duty in that pricey club on the Strip? The one where the decibel level could curdle breast milk?”
“Yeah,” Flotsam said. “What about it?”
“Remember the waitress you called Miss Elegantly Elevated Eyebrows? The one with the fiendish smile that scared you?”
“Yeah,” Flotsam said. “That babe put me in a devilish state of mind.”
“Well, bro,” Jetsam said, “compared to Ivana, that scallywag on the Strip was Little Miss Sunshine. I think my spooky masseuse must spend her days watching cage fights.”
“I’m falling in love!” Flotsam said. “Are Ukrainian chicks
like Russians? Can you mail-order them too?”
SEVEN
The news on the following Friday morning was horrific. Dinko Babich hadn’t gotten much sleep after smoking some middling grow that he’d bought the night before from a fellow longshoreman he’d spotted on Beacon Street. His grandfather had loved to talk about the days when that was the toughest street in Los Angeles. Legend had it that once upon a time, seamen had actually been shanghaied from saloons there. Now there were no bars on Beacon Street, and nearby Sixth Street was showing signs of urban renewal. There was a modern courthouse, and lofts were being refurbished—the ubiquitous symbol of a comeback.
The grow hadn’t been the powerhouse pot Dinko was looking for, and it had left him with some twitch and jitters. When he had managed to fall asleep, it had been a fitful sleep. He was aware that he’d dreamed of Lita Medina, but he wasn’t sure what the dreams were about. At 10:00 a.m., when he got out of bed with a blinding headache, he cursed the weed, and the murky dreams, and himself for giving a second thought to what happened to some Mexican whore.
His mother had also slept late, and she was still in her robe, frying ham and eggs, when he entered the kitchen. Brigita Babich looked at her only child and shook her head sadly. She hoped it was a booze hangover and not from marijuana, which had gotten him suspended at work and caused her so much worry.
His mother was large-boned, and tall like Dinko, not fat like her cousin Tina. Whenever she dressed up for church or bingo, she still teased her hair the way she had back in high school in the ’60s. Today her auburn hair was tousled, and the roots had grown out very gray. Dinko thought that the attractive young woman who’d won his father’s heart was mostly gone. After her husband’s death, Brigita Babich had aged very quickly.
“Eggs, honey?” she asked, and Dinko shook his head and poured a mug of coffee before sitting at the kitchen table and looking at the Los Angeles Times.
Dinko thought how almost every Croatian in Pedro, and probably every Italian, complained about how they missed the San Pedro News-Pilot, but in these hard times, with San Pedro turning Hispanic and seedy, the local newspaper could not survive. He wondered if any part of the insular, unchanging Fish Town of yore could possibly survive.
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