“Yeah.” I was looking out the window. “I, uh, when I knew her she was a kid. Maybe seventeen. Maybe eighteen. She was so little she looked thirteen, fourteen. I saw her last night for the first time in eight or nine years. I mean, she took a shot at me, but that was the gun’s fault.”
“You have a forgiving nature.”
“She said she was sorry. She had the hiccups.”
“That can be murder, no joke intended, when you got a gun in your hand. Not as bad as sneezing but a lot worse than a yawn. Yawn can be kind of cool, you’re pointing a rig at someone and you yawn. They gotta figure they’re fooling with the iceman. You want me to keep talking or you want to give me the details?”
I gave him the details.
“I wish I hadn’t heard that,” he said. He lifted the edge of his plate, dropped it, and pushed it to the center of the table. “Now I’ve eaten all this crap and I don’t even want the pie.”
“She wanted to stay in touch with me,” I said. Louie just waited. “And now she’s dead. So I’ve got to talk to Itsy.”
Louie picked up a fork and used it to squash flat a little Matterhorn of mashed potatoes. When he was finished, he said, “Well, I can tell you where she is but I can’t make her talk to you.”
“How did she feel about Lumia?”
“Probably felt the same about her as she would about your prostate gland. Itsy saves the battery acid for guys but she’s a bear, even with chicks.”
“I’ll have to risk it.”
“Okay.” He elbowed the plate farther away and reached into his pocket, coming out with his wallet, which had both a little pad and a miniature pen sort of built into it. For all I knew, if you unfolded it a certain way you’d find an oxygen mask and a map of Atlantis. He’d bought it from some efficiency guru during one of his occasional attempts at getting organized, a campaign that always ended with him jamming into his car everything that didn’t have what the guru called “a natural home” in the house he and Alice shared. The junk sat there for weeks, until he either put it all back in the house or sold the car. “Oh-two-oh-three,” he said aloud as he wrote the numbers.
I said, “You didn’t have to look that up?”
“Why would I?” He tore off the page but I put up a hand.
“From what you say about her, I need her address, too. I have a feeling a phone call won’t open the door.”
“Okay.” He started writing again. “It’s the one with the drawbridge.”
“The drawbridge? Wait, you know her address?”
“Sort of a drawbridge,” Louie said, tearing off the page and handing it to me. “I know lots of things.”
And he did. When he was a kid, Louie’s ambition was to be a getaway driver. He’d seen all the movies: three cranked-up crooks toting bags of cash jamming themselves into the waiting car, sweating buckets and yelling Go-go-go, while the cool-headed guy at the wheel checks his mirror, gives a full, if ironic, signal, raises an eyebrow, blows a smoke ring, and pulls into traffic, postponing the screeching tires and the daredevil maneuvers for a block or two, until they’re out of sight. Maybe flicking cigarette ash out of the wind wing (these were old movies) and saying, “Calm down, boys, enjoy the ride,” before delivering the loot and the gang safely to the hideout. When they get out of the car, they all say, “Thanks, Swifty.”
But there was a problem. Louie had the speed and the wheel skills and the right kind of snap-brim hat, and he was aces with up and down, but he couldn’t tell north from south even with a compass in his lap. A getaway driver with no sense of direction is going to earn nicknames a lot more pungent than “Swifty.” After a jewelry job that was supposed to terminate seamlessly with a quick dip across the border into Tijuana instead ended up stuck motionless in traffic in pre-rap Compton, the word went out. It went out so often that it generated its own acronym, ABL, as in the phrase, “I need a driver, ABL,” meaning not only “able,” as in competent, but also as in Anyone But Louie.
His dream shattered, Louie retired his collection of miniature getaway cars and expensive racing tires, and considered his future. He’d always been affable and easy to talk to. He had a trusting and trustworthy face. People liked him, even people he’d driven.
People told him things.
Information, as we are ceaselessly informed, is money, and nowhere is information more directly linked to money (and survival and, occasionally, revenge) than in what I’m tempted to refer to as the shadowy world of outlaw life, although, of course, I won’t. So Louie set himself up as a telegraph, an informational intersection. Like Fagin with his network of street kids, Louie developed hundreds of low-paid sources who were experts on the various facets of what I’m not even remotely tempted to call the vast, malign jewel of crime. With lines set up and info in hand, he opened his shop and made it available both for cash and on a quid pro quo basis. The enterprise was so successful that Louie, an enthusiastic Italian cook, named one of his most Mediterranean dishes “squid pro quo.” He bought a house. He began accumulating automobiles with multiple license plates that he made available at a price for one-time use, a profitable sideline that let him get rid of some of those old racing tires.
Much better than getting sworn at from the backseat.
He also enriched graduate students by hiring them out, at a hefty markup, for custom research, a service I took advantage of on a regular basis. I’d already asked for information about the family and the house, but now I said, “I think I need more on the old guy. Can you put your gnomes on him? Anything they can find.”
“He’s been dead a long time,” Louie said. “Pie?”
“Sure, whatever kind you want.”
“Rhubarb.”
“Except rhubarb. I took a bunch of good first editions out of the place last night. They were the right vintage for him to have bought them when he was in London, but it just doesn’t fit in with who I thought he was. And one of them was signed by Arthur Conan Doyle. Personally, I mean.”
Louie said, “Signed to the guy?”
“That’s it. Thanks for the inspiration or something. So I obviously don’t know enough about him. Maybe there’s something somewhere about where some of the money came from. Maybe there’s something I don’t know about his wife.”
Louie flagged a waitress, who gave him the universal two minutes signal. He said, “There’s gotta be a million things you don’t know, but why you going back so far?”
“I’ll take peach, if they’ve got it,” I said. “You know, everything about this says old. The money that built that awful house is nineteenth century, the books I took last night are nineteenth century, the doll that contained whatever I was supposed to take was nineteenth century. The family was born, so to speak, in the nineteenth century, when he changed his name. The whole thing feels to me like the kind of tangle—I mean two of us were sent, presumably by different people, to steal the same thing. So as I said, it feels like a tangle that’s had lots of time to turn into a snarl, to tie multiple people into a complicated knot.”
“Why now?” Louie said. “If this goes all the way back, like, to the middle ages, what suddenly kicked it into action?”
“It’s because Miss Daisy is finally gone. Because they’re going to knock down that house,” I said. “It has to be that. Whatever these people want, Miss Daisy had to be out of the way. Whatever they want, they think it’s in the house.”
“Okay,” he said with a shrug. “It’ll run you maybe another twenty-five hundred and expenses, whatever they might be. Parking or something.”
I said, “Do you think of the past as being darker or lighter than now?”
He did me the courtesy of thinking about it for a moment. “Darker. Not just ’cause of gaslight and no TV or Internet. A lot of people, they see old times as all silver forks and curtsies and yes, my lady, but, you know, it was Jack the Ripper and kids walking the street, too. What about
you?”
“I don’t know. I’m not sure people aren’t darker now.”
“Aahh, listen to you. You know what it is? Back then people could keep all their bad shit in a bag. Today it’s all over our living rooms every night. You got some guy keeping a fourteen-year-old chained in a storage container for a bunch of years and we all know about it. Thing is, back then they all didn’t know about it.”
The waitress, who was standing over us, pad in hand, said, “In a storage container?”
“Don’t worry about it,” Louie said. “It was in Omaha, one of those places.” To me he said, “You said peach, right?”
11
Unresolved Hostility
“Are you about ready?” I said into the phone.
“Packed up. Packed for you, too.”
“What did you pack for me?” I was standing in front of the restaurant, pretending I wasn’t cold. Louie went by in one of his cars and waved at me. Louie is the kind of guy who waves from cars to people he knows, even when he’s just said goodbye to them.
Ronnie said, “Why? Don’t you think I’m qualified? Two pairs of jeans, the obligatory thirty T-shirts, two nice shirts—”
“Which nice shirts?”
“The shadow knows,” she said with an old radio-mystery delivery. Ronnie loved radio shows from the 1930s and ’40s. She had complete mp3 collections of My Favorite Husband—Lucille Ball’s show before she moved to TV—The Shadow, Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar, Mr. Moto, and a bunch of others. She liked the acting, completely on the surface and devoid of subtext, as though it all took place before the invention of the subconscious, and the way people started their sentences with “Say . . .”, a once-ubiquitous linguistic tic that seems to have been exclusively American and is now a verbal fossil. “And, let’s see,” she said, “a couple of sweaters and your awful Dodgers jacket.”
At the mention of the jacket, I did a little involuntary shiver. The sunlight was gone, stopped in its tracks by the sliding clouds that can close the sky like a giant window shade in February and March. “Do me a favor,” I said. “Get me a jacket that doesn’t have a great big word written on it. If someone’s going to describe me, they should at least have to work at it. And then, if you’re finished, do me another favor and get out of there.”
“Where to?”
I said, “Where would you like to go?” There had been no prediction of rain, but after last night’s showers while I was in Horton House, the meteorologists may have been the only people who didn’t know it was coming. A trillion dollars to predict the weather, and they give us percentages. No wonder nobody trusts the government.
“The Ritz-Carlton.” she said. “But since that’s kind of a stretch, maybe a Travelodge?”
“How about Minnie’s Mouse House?”
“Oh, my God,” she said. “Who says you can’t revisit the past?”
“The best way to hide,” I said, “is to be somewhere no one in his right mind would expect—”
“I’d hoped we’d gotten past that. Anyway, I thought you’d used up all those places.”
“I’ve got dozens of them. And it’s right over in Burbank, close to Disney in spite of a bunch of lawsuits over the name, so it’s sort of on the edge between the Valley and LA proper, which is where all this stuff seems to be happening.”
“Should I call and make a reservation?”
“No need to confuse them,” I said. “I doubt they’ve ever had one.”
“What about room service?”
I said, “What about room service?”
“Silly me. Well, gee. It’ll be like being young and stupid again. Or maybe just stupid.”
A wind kicked up, a rain wind, and I turned up my collar. Unlike Ronnie, I hadn’t remembered a jacket. I was not liking the day very much.
“I am sorry about this,” she said. “I know how much you love your place—”
“Our place.”
“Our place. And I, well, I—”
“It’s not your fault,” I said. “I knew I shouldn’t have taken this job.”
“But I’m the reason you took—”
“I’m sorry to interrupt, but blame that asshole in New Jersey, blame the clowns who guard him and the baby, blame the hoods who pay him. All you did was have a son with someone who turned out to be a double-scoop of shit.”
“Fine,” she said, and then she cleared her throat and changed the subject. It had taken her more than a year to confide in me, and even now that we were taking first steps to do something about it, she could only talk about it for so long. “Okay, Minnie’s Mouse House it is.”
“Get something to eat somewhere, first. She doesn’t change the cheese in the traps very often.”
“You have stayed there, though, right?”
“No,” I said, “but it’s been on my list for a long time. Listen, leave soon, okay?”
My phone had rung twice since I’d left the apartment. Both times the screen read unknown, and the caller left no message, but it wasn’t hard to guess who it was, although I hadn’t given her my number. It upped the urgency quotient.
Louie’s pie place wasn’t far from one of my storage units, one I liked because there was no need to check in—you just slipped a card into a slot beside the gate, waited until it groaned its way open, and drove straight to your unit. I had come to get one of my guns, but the layout of the place reminded me of something else, and that gave me an idea. I took the automatic out of the lightly oiled cloth in which I wrap it, slipped in a clip and grabbed another, replaced the books that covered the weapons in the cardboard box, relocked the unit, went to the car, and called someone who essentially lived in a storage unit.
“What?” Anime Wong said on the other end of the phone, in the aggrieved tone of one trapped in a world gone wildly and irrevocably wrong in a manner that points directly and solely at her, an attitude only teenagers can muster. Fortunately, most of them outgrow it, although it’s always amazed me that more of them aren’t murdered before they do. Still, Anime was usually sunnier than that.
“Gee,” I said, “What a greeting. Was it something I did?”
“It’s you, isn’t it?” she said. “You only call when you want something.”
“That’s not fair,” I said. “I’m just checking in, you know, seeing how you are and stuff.”
“That’s pathetic,” she said. “I’ve gotten Trader Joe’s valentines more sincere than that.”
“Why so sour? Oh, never mind. How come you picked up? I usually get kicked to voicemail and I have to wait until you’ve got a break between classes.”
I’d known Anime and Lilli, her life partner, if you can have one of those when you’re in your mid-teens, for a while now. They worked with an adult hacker named Monty Carlo at a high-profit, low-risk cyber dodge that skimmed loose money off the funds states set up to hold the proceeds from abandoned safe deposit boxes and bank accounts. Their office was an intensely wired double-garage size storage space in a facility much like this one, which I think the three of them owned. Monty was a career criminal, but Anime and Lilli were funding minutely planned and very expensive higher educations up to, and including, doctoral degrees in computer science. They planned to change their last names when they turned eighteen so they would be called one after the other to receive their diplomas and could go up holding hands.
“We’re not going to school these days,” she said. “We’re protesting.” She wrung the word out as though it were saturated with vinegar.
“What?”
“Food,” she said. “And it’s really Lilli, and I don’t want to talk about it. Why did you call?”
“Well, you know, I was thinking about both of—”
“You already tried that.”
“Okay,” I said, and I told her why I’d called.
“Give me an hour,” she said. “I’ll get the stuff.
In fact, we’ve already got it. Bring cash to pay me back. Do you think you can put it together yourself?”
I said, “Um.”
“Right. I’ll do it.”
“I’m not sure it’s safe for you.”
“Make it safe,” she said. “Isn’t that one of the things you do, protect people? So protect me.”
“Got it,” I said. “You sure you know how to put it together?”
“I was the one who set it up here. We’ve even got backup equipment. I just need to pick out the right ones from the backup stuff and test it all. And later I’ll need to buy new ones, which is why I need your money.”
“Okay. At the, uh, office, right?”
“Sure. My parents still think I’m at school.”
I said, “I keep forgetting you’ve got parents.”
I needed the hour anyway, because I had to contact someone else, see whether she had an opening in her schedule, and then, if she did, swing by to pick her up.
When I called, Ting Ting answered the phone, eager as always to learn which friend was on the other end of the line. For someone who had once beaten me up so decisively it made a doctor inhale sharply when he saw me—not a reassuring reaction—Ting Ting was as blithe as a daffodil. He regarded the entire world with goodwill and trust; he was the kind of guy who once, in my company, chased down a kid who had dropped a quarter on the sidewalk. He’d only beaten me up because I’d pissed Stinky off, and Stinky called Ting Ting—then the houseboy of the month—to usher me out. I had resisted being ushered. It’s especially demoralizing to be beaten to a pulp by someone who keeps apologizing in between kicks to your head.
“Hey, Ting Ting,” I said. “How are you?”
“I play marimba,” he said. “Drive Eaglet crazy.”
“Good. It’ll help her keep her edge. I worry about her, getting all soft and happy. Why marimba?”
“We make a band,” he said. “Three pinoy and me. Playing at Pilipino nightclub.”
Nighttown Page 10
