“Let me get this straight,” he said at last. “You went tonight and there was another—”
“And I think she’s dead,” I said. “And remember, I know what a compassionate person you are, so if I keep harping on her probable death, it’s because I think it suggests a risk to you. You, Stinky Tetweil—”
“Shut up,” he said, but he didn’t put much into it.
“Because, you see, that suggests either that you sent both of us and the customer is displeased, or the customer went to another talent agent in case your nominee screwed up and couldn’t find it. In that case, not only will the customer be displeased, but so will the other talent agent, who’s going to assume that I found whatever it was and that we—that’s you and I, in case you’re not following along—have whatever it is and are out looking for a better price. Which is, of course, what the customer will think, too. So they’re probably both displeased, or about to be.”
“Don’t be—” he said, and broke off. “That means you didn’t—” he said, and then the phone rang. It was almost 2:20 a.m. He stood immobile for a moment with his mouth open and then Crisanto sang out, “I get it,” and Stinky gathered vast reserves of breath and bellowed “NOOOO,” loudly and deeply enough to compete with a marine buoy warning ships away from foggy rocks. “Do not—do not—”
“Okay,” Crisanto said. “I do tea.”
“No, no. Turn off the lights in back, all of them. Leave them on in here.”
I said, “You don’t even know where your light switches are?”
“Hurryhurryhurry,” Stinky called out. “You,” he said to me although we were the only two people in the room, “Where did you park?”
“Two blocks—”
“Good, good. Come with me, now.”
As Crisanto scurried to the back of the house, Stinky led me through a kitchen that could have fed a battalion. At the far end was a door. “If anything is ever missing from here,” he said, one hand on the knob, “I will have you killed. Is that clear?” He opened the door to reveal a large pantry, packaged food of every kind lined up obediently on shelves from floor to ceiling.
“You’re safe,” I said. “I don’t eat canned goods.”
The phone stopped ringing.
Stinky said, “Shut up,” but I didn’t think he even knew he’d said it. He pushed aside a huge can of baked beans, and the back wall slid about two feet to the right, just enough to let me in. “I’m serious,” he said, “now or ever. If anything goes missing—”
“Why didn’t you turn off the living room lights?” I asked, but Stinky was using his not-inconsiderable body weight to shove me through the door.
“He would have seen them go off. The light in there comes on when the door closes,” he said, and then I heard someone pounding on the front door.
The last time I’d been with Stinky when he was in danger he had begun to recite the Lord’s Prayer in Tagalog, something he’d learned from Jejomar, but this time he just went so pale that his white nightshirt looked beige by contrast and he said, “Jesus Christ our lord and savior.” He started to slide the door closed, slowed, and said, “There’s a little speaker in there. If it sounds like we’re all getting killed, step on the pedal next to the door and go straight out through the back. If he’s inside, you should be able—”
More banging on the door, real hinge-benders. I was hearing it in stereo, both through the door to the pantry and from the speaker inside the hidden room.
“—to get down the hill without being seen,” Stinky finished. “Now get the rest of the way in there.” A moment later, the door slid closed and a little 20- or 40-watt bulb came on.
I was in Aladdin’s cave if Aladdin had been a twenty-first-century fence specializing in high-end swag who was tight on storage space. The room was only about eight feet long and four wide, but the stuff it contained, piled floor to ceiling, made the living room look like a Salvation Army store, and some of it was small enough to pocket. I was expanding my image of Stinky’s operation when the front door got pounded on again.
“Moment,” Crisanto said. “Coming, coming.”
Whoever it was responded with a kick.
“Hello, hello,” Crisanto said, all delight, and then there was a kind of soft-edged sound that might have been a body hitting a wall, and Crisanto stopped talking.
“Get him,” a man said. It was said quietly but it was the quiet of someone who’s known for a long time that he doesn’t have to speak up to be listened to.
“Going now,” Crisanto said, and then he said, “Eeeeek.” Another soft-edged sound, followed by a sharp one that might have been something falling off the wall. “Why are the lights on?” the soft voice said. I ended that line with a question mark, but it wasn’t an interrogative, it was a demand.
“I cleaning?” Crisanto said, and I noticed he was allowing his English skills to regress. “Every night, I—look, look, vacuum cleaner. See?”
“Get him,” said Soft Voice, “and then get the hell out of here.”
“Get and get,” Crisanto said. “Moment.”
My cell phone purred. Ronnie. I accepted the call and said, very softly, “I’m okay but I can’t talk.”
She said, “Do you need help?”
My heart ran an extra lap. Not many people ask you that question when you’re obviously in danger. “No. Call you later.” She hung up.
I listened to nothing for a couple of minutes, long enough to wonder whether Stinky was getting dressed, had gotten his throat cut, or had slipped out the back. Then I heard him, but it was a Stinky I didn’t know, a querulous supplicant with a tone of voice that seemed to be wringing its hands. Grandeur was an indispensable and, I was willing to bet, hard-earned part of Stinky’s personality, and hearing him now was oddly uncomfortable, like coming on someone who prizes himself on his looks but hasn’t had time to put in his teeth.
Stinky said, “Yes, but” a couple of times and then, “I don’t know.” At that point they must have moved away from the microphone in the entry hall because I didn’t hear anything until Stinky said, more distantly, “No, he didn’t, not when he was supposed—” and I was pretty sure I had just become the topic of discussion. I could no longer hear Soft Voice. “Because that’s how he is,” Stinky said. “He’s a pain in the ass.” Soft Voice must have responded because Stinky said, “No, it’s not only that. He’s careful. He doesn’t think it’s smart to tell people when and where he’ll—” And then, “Right, right, of course. I’ll get hold of him.”
This time Soft Voice must have had a lot to say because it was a full minute, a unit of time that goes remarkably slowly when, on the one hand, you have nothing to read and, on the other, when you’re wondering whether you’re about to die. The silence was long enough to tell me that Soft Voice meant business.
When Stinky spoke this time, he surprised me. He said, “No. Out of the question. Not even for you.” Then he said, “Because that’s how it works. I won’t give him your name and I won’t give you his. It’s okay, Crisanto, go somewhere else, we’re just talking.”
Stinky inspired loyalty although I’d long wondered why. Maybe I was hearing it now.
“Whatever you want to do, you’ll do,” Stinky said. “I won’t pretend it won’t hurt my business. On the other hand, who’s better than I am? Who keeps you more secure? This is—”
The other man must have interrupted, because I didn’t hear anything except some sibilants for thirty or forty seconds, and then Stinky, sounding a little shaky, said, “You know what? Fuck it. And fuck you, too.” And a moment later I heard the front door slam, hard enough to shake the wall of my little room.
I became aware that I had put something in my pocket while I wasn’t looking, so to speak, so I fished out a beautiful necklace, maybe eighteenth-century Chinese, a fluid alternation of pearls and perfect spheres of imperial jade—that breathless, first-day-of-s
pring green that Thai jewel dyers have been trying to forge for decades—in a long strand that met in a heavy, hand-fashioned gold clasp: museum stuff. I slapped the back of my hand, tried to figure out where I’d taken it from, and then I put it into an open mahogany box that I was willing to bet played music. At that moment, the door slid open.
Stinky’s eyes went at once to the box, and then he shook his head and said, “Good decision, bad memory. It was over there.”
I said, “I haven’t had much practice putting things back. Feels awkward and clunky. Like writing left-handed.”
He backed up a couple of steps. Sweat was beaded at his hairline. “Do I have to ask Crisanto to search you?”
“I was just coveting it. Up close. Why didn’t you give me to him?”
“He didn’t ask nicely. Come on out of there, I don’t want to have to keep watching your hands. I want you to sleep here tonight.”
“Can’t.”
“Surely,” he said with a crimped little smile, obviously fighting to keep his tone neutral, “surely you can call her.”
“Sure, I could, but that’s not the issue.”
“I don’t know how long he’ll be out there.”
“I’ll take my chances.”
“It’s not you I’m worried about, you idiot,” Stinky said, “it’s me. You never, ever let a client think they own your business, not even for a moment, because if you do, he will. Sooner or later, he will. The man who was just here would drive a tank through a kindergarten to get to a quarter if he thought he could get away free and clear. But I lied to him anyway because my business rules say my clients don’t meet my specialists, not any more than a specialist, like you, is allowed to meet him. He’s furious that I wouldn’t give you to him, but we’ve done enough business that he’s going to be okay with it until something says otherwise. You strolling down my driveway would be rubbing his nose in it, and he will not let that pass.”
“He won’t see me.”
He had backed all the way to the kitchen by then. “Come out of there.”
“Have Crisanto turn off all the lights, and I mean all of them.”
“You don’t give me orders in my own—”
“Fine,” I said, coming into the kitchen and blinking against the light. “Let him spot me through the windows.”
Stinky blinked and called out, “Crisanto.”
“Itsy Winkle,” he said after a long and wearying argument. “Lumia was represented by Itsy Winkle.” We were sitting in the dark living room, me surrounded by pillows on the plump, fussy couch and him in the nineteenth-century partner’s chair positioned directly between me and the French cylinder desk. Guarding the goods, which I found insulting. He had a leg crossed, revealing that he wore socks beneath thongs. “But you didn’t hear it from me.”
“I thought Itsy went away for keeps, for that thing with the giant black pearls seven, eight years ago. She beat the shit out of the woman who owned—”
“What a pleasure to know something you don’t. There was a second confession years later. It absolved her.”
“Must have cost her a fortune.”
“It did. Do you remember the Armor-Rite job? Spring before last?”
“The nine million, right? The driver and the guard were attacked outside a business where they were doing a pickup, a dry cleaner or something, by pit bulls—”
“Staffordshire terriers,” Stinky said. “Pedigrees and everything. They lifted their little doggy pinkies when they drank tea.” Reminded, he reached over to an exquisite, almost translucent, teapot, and filled his cup, ignoring mine. Stinky had being Stinky down cold. “Several witnesses saw the dogs drag their owner, a young woman, down the sidewalk on her stomach, screaming, and rip into the Armor-Rite guys. In the meantime, someone helped himself to most of a Friday bank pick-up, climbed into a car idling in traffic beside the truck, and drove off. No one even glanced at him, with all that reality TV action on the sidewalk. Woman got bitten, too, when she tried to pull the dogs off.”
“And she wasn’t arrested, right?”
“Questioned, of course, but no. She had no record, clean as the driven snow is commonly and incorrectly supposed to be. She’d been raising the dogs for five years, she was even certified by the dog racial purity people, whoever they might be—”
“American Kennel Club.”
“If you say so.” He sighed at the sheer banality of the idea and picked at some lint on his gown. “Itsy had been sent up for stealing the pearls, and clubbing half to death the nice lady who owned them, a full year before the young woman began to raise the dogs. Entered them in shows and everything. Patience is a virtue, perseverance furthers, all that rot. Unbeknownst, et cetera, she’d been Itsy’s girlfriend, the dog lady had, for a few years, when she was seventeen or eighteen, but that was definitely off the record. Then, about a month after the Armor-Rite robbery, someone from Pacoima stepped forward and turned himself in for the job with the pearls that Itsy had done. At his wife’s insistence. The little woman said he’d been gone that night and that he—” he squinted up toward the ceiling—“Pedro, I suppose, had shown her the pearls when he got home. Described them perfectly.”
I said, “Pedro.”
“One of those names.” Despite his fondness for Filipino folk dancers, Stinky occasionally displayed the snow-white trust fund child’s not-uncommon lack of interest in the lives of people in traditionally lower-economic minority groups. “Maybe Juan? An immigrant, I believe. He even produced one of the pearls, a perfect match for the set, which brought together some of the biggest black pearls ever on the market. The pearl was persuasive, since the necklace had never been recovered. It was probably the least valuable stone in the haul. Said he’d given the others to a representative of el Eme, the Mexican mafia—”
“I know who el Eme is.”
“—who had set up the job. The man who came for the pearls, he said, had black hands tattooed all over his chest. Apparently, removing his shirt was equivalent to showing his ID. As it turned out, a notorious el Eme what-would-you-call-it, a functionary, with identical tattoos had been killed in prison about six months before Pedro’s wife’s conscience began to bother her. So, you see, they’d thought of everything. He had the story, he had his wife saying he’d been gone the night of the robbery, he had the tattoos all over the thug’s chest, he had the pearl. Left over, of course, from Itsy’s haul. By comparison, the prosecutors who put Itsy away had a weak case, which they won only by continually pushing witnesses to say things about her criminal past that the judge told the jury to disregard.”
“And Pedro’s wife?”
“Waiting for him in their new house in Hidden Hills, bought with the money stolen from Armor-Rite.”
“So when Itsy got out, she set herself up as a contractor.”
“She’d done a little of it before, dabbled in it, but yes, she started to specialize. In girls, and not just burglars, either. Plausibles,” he said, meaning con artists, “even hitgirls. It’s like a little franchise.”
“Hitwomen,” I said reflexively.
“Oh, who cares?” Stinky said. “She is, was, whatever, the fence and the contractor for that young lady with the absurd name.”
“Lumia,” I said. “So somebody, and you don’t think it was the guy who was just here, went to Itsy and hired Lumia—”
“So it would seem.”
“Do you know how to reach her?”
“Itsy? My recommendation would do you no good, my boy. She loathes me.”
“Still.”
“I’m disinclined,” he said. “If you didn’t please her, and you wouldn’t, she’d be on my doormat, kicking and shouting as you just did. She can be impressively unpleasant. So, no.”
“Final answer?”
Stinky yawned and looked at a gold watch thin enough to be transparent, probably a tuxedo watch from the 1930s.<
br />
“What time is it?”
“A little before four.” He looked up at me, and he said, “If you don’t find that thing, whatever it is, he is going to come after you. And me. Maybe you should just return the money.”
“Not an option,” I said, getting up. “Sleep tight.”
8
Infinite Black Nothing
The car that had taken Lumia away after I heard the shot had turned right onto Pico. My car had been parked a long block away from Horton House, pointing south, which meant that I’d dropped south to Venice Boulevard instead of up to Pico and taken it west for a bit before angling up to the freeway to get to Encino and Stinky. It had been gnawing at me the whole two hours-plus I’d been at Stinky’s that I hadn’t at least cruised Pico for a mile or two, just out of concern. They’d been long gone by the time I finally left Horton House, but who knew? There might have been some signs somewhere. There might even still be, I thought as I drove back down into the Koreatown area.
Were there ever.
I got off the freeway at Alexandria and went up to Pico. Horton House was about a mile to my left, but I turned right, figuring if they were going to do anything they’d get a little farther from the scene of the crime first. I’d barely gone another half-mile when I saw the red lights ahead and then the cops in the street and the sawhorse barriers they’d put up to give them both of Pico’s eastbound lanes. A blinking arrow sign on the pavement transformed the suggestion to merge left into an imperative, and about twenty or thirty yards from the obvious center of the action up ahead, a cop directed me into the oncoming lane, which had been blocked off in the other direction a couple hundred yards down. Normally it would have been a terrible snarl, but at four-thirty on a weeknight, I would barely have had to slow if it weren’t for the rubberneckers. LA is a city obsessed with automobiles, a place where live car chases, covered by multiple helicopter cameramen, bump international affairs off the TV news. Los Angeles drivers reserve their right to gawk at traffic accidents with all the energy that some people in Texas put into defending their right to wear a gun in church. So I had lots of time to see what I didn’t want to see, and it didn’t even look suspicious when I slowed.
Nighttown Page 7
