The Straight Man - Roger L Simon

by Roger L. Simon

  It was almost five o'clock when I reached the Beverly Hills Hotel, and on an impulse I took a quick left up Benedict Canyon to the address Emily Ptak had left me. She lived in a gated mock-Tudor estate at the end of West Wanda and I parked right in front of it. I was about to press the intercom button when I noticed Genevieve playing in the front yard. I called to her and the little girl ran over, followed immediately by a nervous English nanny, whose concern was only mollified somewhat when she realized the girl knew me. I never got inside the gate, but I did find out that Emily had gone overnight to Ojai. The Cosmic Aid Foundation, I thought, and continued on to the Albergo Picasso.

  Koontz was conferring with a couple of other detectives by a squad car in front of the hotel when I got there. One of them, a dark, skinny Chicano with a beaked Mayan nose, I took to be Estrada. Some comics I recognized from the Fun Zone were standing in a cluster a few feet away, watching and commenting like some weird Greek chorus of the entertainment-industry unemployed. I could almost hear their wisecracks about dead Romanians when I walked up to Koontz.

  "How're you doin', Art?"

  He pretended to ignore me, going over a dot matrix printout with the other detectives. I waited for them to leave before I addressed the inspector.

  "What happened to Nastase?"

  "Wine, is there any reason I should cooperate with you?"

  He scowled at me, but I smiled back at him. This wasn't a time to get hostile. "I might help solve the crime."

  "You might and you might not. You might actually create more problems than you solve. I understand you visited here last night, masquerading as the owner of some leather store.

  Pretty sleazy work you do."

  "Is lying a crime, Koontz?"

  "I don't know. Ask your psychiatrist."

  He looked at me with a sarcastic, knowing smirk. I did my best to ignore it and get back to business.

  "How'd Nastase go'?"

  "You are persistent, aren't you?"

  "It's a racial characteristic." V

  He took a deep breath. "All right. Look, your friend Nastase was found dead way in the back of the Tujunga Wash with a thirty-eight slug through his temple. The way he was hidden under the brush, I don't think whoever did it banked on his being found for a while. Who could've known some jerkoff William Morris agents get their rocks off up there three mornings a week playing war games with blank guns'?"

  "You still think it's drug-related?"

  "Think? We know. You won't find this in the papers tomorrow, but we found an entire laboratory in the basement of Nastase's house this afternoon."

  "Oh, yeah? Where's that?"

  "LeMoyne Street in Echo Park."

  "Thanks. You're a sweetheart."

  "Put it down to sympathy for the victims of international terrorism. But remember, it'll only happen once. And you owe me."

  "Absolutely."

  He turned away and pushed through a group of comics into the hotel.

  "How many Romanians does it take to change a light bulb?" one of them asked me.

  "Not funny," I said and got into my car. I was already late for my private detective class at the Learning League. School was held on the second-floor office level of a rundown stucco mini-mall in East Hollywood. The first floor was occupied by a Laundromat, a real estate office, and a liquor store. I resisted stopping at the liquor store for another lottery ticket and climbed the stairs to the second floor. The room was mostly filled when I entered and the class was already in progress. I shuffled around to the back and took a seat as if I belonged there. Chantal Barrault gave me a curious look from across the room and I smiled back at her, then directed my attention to the teacher. He was a short dark guy in his thirties with a mustache, wearing baggy pants and an olive warm-up jacket with epaulets and sleeves that zipped off. More trendiness. He had written his name, Peter Roman, on the blackboard with the number of his investigator's license. At the moment, since this was a California adult education class, he was going around the room asking the students what they did and why they wanted to take the class. The first three guys were television writers for Simon & Simon and were interested in background for their series.

  The next woman was a widow who liked to take courses. Then the next four-two guys and two women-were also television writers, this time for Remington Steele. They were looking for a story. The man next to them was a mystery writer. He was looking for authenticity for his books. There was no question: we were definitely in Los Angeles.

  "I guess this is one of those times no one really wants to be a detective," Roman joked nervously.

  Everybody looked relieved when they got around to Chantal and she said she was a stand-up comic who was "actually interested for real" in a career as a private investigator.

  When they came around to me, I gave a fictitious name and said I was a process server who wanted to move up. Roman smiled in commiseration—someone was lower than he was—and began the class. I immediately did what I usually did in school—go to sleep. I remember vaguely hearing something about methods of obtaining information (public records, surveillance, pretext) and something about thinking like an investigator, whatever that was, and then it was break time. Roman had given the class an assignment—to locate the best vantage point for an auto surveillance of the mini-mall cleaners—and they were all running around the second-floor balcony with pencils and Xeroxed maps of the neighborhood. I thought it was all a load of nonsense. In reality, there were so many variables in a situation like that, there never could be one right answer. But Chantal was taking it very seriously. She was standing by the balcony rail, clutching her pencil and staring intently at the traffic patterns on Sunset Boulevard.

  "Interested in some practical experience?" I said, walking up to her.

  She didn't appear to hear me.

  "The best car for surveillance is a van with a lot of windows. That way you can get up and walk around. Also, carry a goody bag with a cheap camera you're not afraid to toss over your shoulder, a pair of binoculars, Thomas's Street Guide, a few quick and dirty disguises, a flashlight, and an empty coffee can for peeing if you're a man. I don't know what you're going to do. Hold it in, I suppose. Also never do a rolling surveillance in a car with front end damage. It's a dead giveaway."

  "What're you talking about?"

  "I'm offering you a job, Chantal. If you want to be a private investigator, you can start tonight. Of course, you'll have to miss the second half of the class."

  "Are you serious? . . . You are serious. Well, I, uh, let's go."

  Two minutes later we were out on the street.

  "Where's your car?" I asked.

  "I don't have one."

  "You don't have a car? In Los Angeles?"

  "Listen, mon ami, you try making it as a stand-up comic in this town and see how long you keep your car."

  "You haven't tried being a private detective yet .... All right, what the hell, we'll rent you one. Right now we've got a cushy client."

  I opened the doors of the BMW. She got in on the passenger side.

  "Look," she explained as we drove off, "I've done a lot of things in my life. You've just caught me at a bad time. But I hope you know what you're doing, because I don't like being a charity case. Even in my worst moments I've never done that. I didn't even take a penny of alimony from my ex-husband even though he could've afforded plenty."

  "Who was he?"

  "A psychiatrist."

  I groaned.

  "What's the matter? You have a problem with psychiatrists?"

  "No, no. I'm just, uh, surrounded .... Okay, here's my proposition. For this case I'll pay you twelve dollars an hour plus expenses. Sometimes you'll be working with me. Sometimes alone. But any time there's shit work, it'll be for you to do."

  "I don't go out for coffee. I promised myself whatever I did I'd rather be a bag woman than—"

  "I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about grunt research. Going to the library, that kind of thing. Did you tell them at th
e Fun Zone that you were quitting stand-up?"

  "What for? Why close off options? You never know. There could've been a scout from the Letterman show and—"

  "Great. That's what I like to hear. Now, listen . . ." I told her what I knew about the Ptak case, or most of it, about Emily and Otis and Nastase and Bannister. About Koontz and the suspected drug ring, even about the William Morris agents in Tujunga.

  "So tonight," I concluded, "I'm going to have a look around Nastase's place. I want you to go down to the Fun Zone and see what you can find out. Maybe go over to the Albergo Picasso, too. They know me now, but you're just a nosy comic looking around like the rest of them. I'll meet you back at the club around midnight."

  When I was done, she looked at me for what they used to call a long minute. "Why do you trust me with all this?" she said.

  "Shouldn't I?"

  "Well, yeah, sure, but"— she shrugged—"you don't exactly know me."

  "I've got to trust someone. Besides, I have a great instinct for these things. I discovered my ex-wife was cheating on me in only four years. "

  Chantal grinned as we pulled up at the rent-a-car office. We got out and I put a Datsun on my credit card for her and headed off for Echo Park. The odd thing was, by the time I crossed Western, I was starting to feel like I was missing her.

  That changed to a feeling of unease the moment I drove onto LeMoyne Street. To begin with, I used to live in the Echo Park area and it always made me uncomfortable to return to old neighborhoods. I made a note to ask Nathanson about that. But more disturbing than the neighborhood was the street itself. It was poorly lit and sparsely populated, winding up erratically along an eroded ridge of smog-damaged eucalyptus and deteriorated twenties bungalows to die out in a concrete retaining wall whose faded mural of Quetzalcoatl was stained brown from a storm drain and webbed with cracks.

  I parked near this wall and walked down half a block to an off-white bungalow surrounded with pampas grass. Some leftover yellow barricade tape with LAPD on the gate and on the front door identified it as Nastase's. No one appeared to be around. The lab squad had probably come and gone already, doing their number in their fire-retardant jump suits as they carried out the acetone and ether that was used to lace the coke. I hoped they had gotten it all, because one false step with that stuff could mean bye-bye to this street and a couple of adjoining canyons.

  I checked the neighboring houses. One of them was abandoned and the other was about a hundred and fifty feet farther down the hill behind a row of spiny century plants. Then I walked around the back of Nastase's place, my feet crunching more loudly than I intended on the dead eucalyptus pods. The side of the house was boarded up and the rear had a small porch and a useless backyard that sloped off at a forty-degree angle into the gully below. The porch screens were ripped and the screen door hung loosely from a hinge. Where the earth had slipped away into the gully, I could see the foundations decomposing. This flimsy structure was a far cry from the block fortresses one had come to identify with cocaine laboratories, but then who knew? It was certainly isolated enough.

  I climbed up on a crate and looked into the room next to the kitchen. It was a laundry made over into a laboratory, all right, and a pretty crude one at that. There were still some white plastic buckets hanging around, the kind you buy in any hardware store and which are often used to wash the coke paste. I could smell the odor of hydrochloric acid, the wash chemical, coming from the sink. In the opposite corner, by an old washer and dryer, were stacks of cardboard boxes that must not have had any evidentiary use because they were left behind by the police. The bottom four had the words "Holy Bible—Made in USA" printed on the side. I wanted a better look, so I reached up farther and found a break in the outer sash of the window, pulling it toward me while pushing on the jamb. The upper half of the window went crashing into the room, a couple of panes of glass shattering on the cement floor. I was about to hoist myself in when a piece of brick came flying past my head, rebounding off the broken screen.

  "Hey, smart dog, what you doin' here?"

  I looked around slowly to see a pair of Korean punkers in baggy suits and dark glasses staring at me. The one who spoke was fat and wore his hair orange and long. "You been tryin' to fuck with the Reverend, smart dog?" I didn't have a chance to answer before he continued, "Anybody fuckin' with the Reverend gotta deal with the Chu's Brothers." He and his partner started advancing on me. "We call ourselves the Chu's Brothers 'cause you get to choose between us."

  Orange hair laughed at his own joke. Then he stopped five feet in front of me, right alongside his blue-haired partner. Simultaneously they pulled out a chain and a pair of nunchako sticks. "So choose."

  I thought of what the teachers at Simon's hapkido studio could do with those sticks and it didn't take me long to decide. I jumped as high and hard as I could between them. But the Chu's Brothers were one step ahead of me. They had already chosen.

  8

  The first person I saw when I came to was Chantal.

  "Is this lesson one?" she asked. "Or were you just standing me up? I was waiting in front of the Fun Zone for an hour and a half. Thank God, you've got a good excuse."

  I would've slammed her if I could've moved.

  "Just be still and do what I say. I used to work in an emergency room."

  "I know. I know. You used to do everything." I groaned, but I did as she said, rolling gingerly over onto my side so she could see which and how many of my ribs were cracked. My guess was about a hundred. If this was how I felt after duking it out with a couple of Korean pogo freaks, one thing was certain—I'd never be Rambo.

  "You'll be all right," she said. "Come on. We'd better get you out of here."

  I started struggling to my feet. "How'd you—?"

  "You said you'd be at Nastase's and it's three A.M. You think I'd let my partner rot in some canyon to be eaten by the coyotes?"

  "Your partner? Aren't we being a little hasty here?"

  "Well, you know. It's a manner of speaking."

  "Une facon de parler."

  "Where'd you learn that?"

  "High school. But don't test me."

  "I think that's very nice. You know a little French."

  "Oh, fuck you."

  We . . . or rather I stumbled up to the top of the ridge and followed Chantal uncomplainingly to the Datsun. It was parked about fifty yards from Nastase's place and I glanced over at the house. All was silent. The Chu's Brothers seemed to have gone, but in my present condition I didn't have a strong inclination to find out for sure.

  "These Korean punks," said Chantal as we drove off down the hill. "What were they after?"

  "I don't know," I said. Right then I had visions of them yanking the Blaupunkt out of the dash of my BMW. It would've been the fourth one. But what the hell? I was making my own small contribution to stabilizing the price of car radios. "Maybe it was some free coke gear, but the police already got most of that. The way they laid into me, Angel Dust looked more their thing anyway . .. unless they were traveling Bible salesmen."

  "I thought I was supposed to be the comedian."

  "No joke. There were four cartons of Bibles sitting in the corner of the lab."

  "That's pretty strange for a drug dealer."

  "Yeah. And on top of that they were laying on some bullshit about some reverend."

  "You know something else strange—Nastase went to Trieste every three months."

  "On a bellhop's salary? How'd you find that out?"

  "The elevator operator at the Albergo Picasso. He's a Greek. They go fishing together every Sunday off Cabrillo Beach."

  "Cood luck," I said. "The fish down there are dead before you catch 'em." Then I clutched my side. The pain transmitters around my rib cage were suddenly making a frontal assault on my nervous system.

  "Here," said Chantal, reaching into her purse for a tightly rolled joint. "This should help."

  "Thanks," I said.

  I tried to suck on it, but the pain was so severe,
my lungs weren't letting anything in. I didn't start to feel better until we got to emergency at Queen of Angels, where they gave me a couple of Percodans, X-rayed me, and taped my sides. The X ray showed one broken rib and a mass of bruises. The cause of accident was listed as "fall." By then the Percodans were working pretty well.

  I woke up late the next morning to the sound of someone unlocking my apartment. I jumped out of bed, immediately wrenching the right side of my body with an unbelievable pain, grabbed a robe, and went into the living area. Chantal was heading into the kitchen with a bag of groceries.

  "Good morning," she said, pulling out a carton of eggs, cheese, croissants, and coffee. "Do you like omelet gruyére at la Mere Poulard?"

  "A la Mere Who? Sure .... You didn't have to do this, you know. It doesn't come with the job description."

  "No problem." She broke some eggs into a bowl and began beating them with a whisk. "By the way, this twelve dollars an hour you're paying me, when does it begin and end?"

  "We'll have to talk about that." She poured the eggs deftly into a sizzling pan, swirling it back and forth the way I had seen Julia Child do it on television. "You're very good at this. You know, no woman's really made me breakfast since my ex-wife joined a consciousness-raising group in 1971. Usually they suggest we go out to Duke's or something." I looked at her. She was wearing tight-fitting jeans and a white T-shirt that said VIVE LE QUEBEC LIBRE on the back. "The first Mr. Chantal, the shrink, was pretty lucky. What happened to him, anyway?"

  "I wasn't ready to settle down, but he was. I didn't have the courage to tell him, so I started fooling around with other guys. Soon . . ." She shrugged and slid the omelet onto a plate. Then she added a couple of croissants and carried them out to me at the dining table. "You work out of your home?"