Deadly Lullaby

by Robert McClure

  Damn, I wanted her to offer her usual “good customer discount” just so I could refuse it.

  “No problem,” I say, and slow to a stop at the red light at the intersection of Chavez Ravine Place and West College. I take my time reaching into my breast pocket to withdraw a roll of cash. Feeling like Donald Trump, I hand it to Maggie. “There’s a little bonus in there for both of you.”

  The change in Maggie’s demeanor is immediate and manifest. She riffles the bills efficiently, pecks my cheek, and brushes her fingers across my balls, which stokes the beginnings of an impressive hard-on. She leans into the backseat to whisper the amount to Ronni.

  Having just finished snorting white powder from the back of her thumb, Ronni presses her finger to her nose while listening to Maggie. She squeals with delight, shouts at the roof, “Babe is numba one!” and thrusts her tiny fist upward.

  Leo

  A day of deep sleep would’ve made me feel half-human. Three fitful hours is all I caught. I felt dazed after waking with a start, my head pounding with a tequila hangover that would drive a less contented alcoholic into rehab, my mental cogs whirring and slipping with thoughts of this morning. Somehow I managed to stumble in and out of the shower, shave without drawing blood, and gulp down a handful of acetaminophen and ibuprofen. Now I’m brushing back my wet hair in the bedroom mirror, thinking how my reflection resembles one of Picasso’s gaunt self-portraits.

  It occurs to me that exercise and nothing but exercise will pull me together.

  After pulling on red running shorts, a plain white T-shirt, and running shoes, I jack MP3 earplugs into my skull, dial up a reggae mix, and walk from my bedroom into the den, both of which are on the lower level of my house. My crib is a three bedroom on Benton Way in Silver Lake that my Aunt Connie, my mother’s sister, left me in her will. Me and Connie got very close after she took me into this home when I was a high school freshman. It was about six years after my father went to prison the first time for smuggling dope, and Carlo Bustamonte, my mother’s lover of long standing, started beating up on me so much that Connie feared he’d ultimately kill me. Carlo was a bullying, loudmouthed prick who worked muscle for Macky in those days, and he moved in on my mother almost as soon as the old man got sent away. At first, Carlo would pick her up or stop by and she’d say, “Oh, Carlo’s just a friend, Leo, just a friend, okay?” but before long she dropped all pretense—at least with me. My mother begged me to never mention Carlo’s name outside our home, claiming the old thug would have Joe Sacci whack her if he found out. If I’d known then how wiseguys’ minds worked, I would’ve known it was Bustamonte who Joe would’ve whacked, not Lorraine, and I would’ve crawled naked across town through shards of broken glass to squeal to Joe about it. It would’ve saved the old man a lot of trouble when he got out of prison.

  Bustamonte was a fuckin’ brute with a self-absorbed attitude about being an ex-Navy SEAL. The only thing I’ll give him is he’s the reason I’m one hell of a street fighter, talking my mother into enrolling me in a martial arts dojo when I was twelve. By the time I was sixteen our backyard sparring went over the top—I mean, hell, he was fucking my mother’s eyes out, this I knew, and I was trying to make him pay. One day he broke two of my ribs, blacked an eye, and contused one of my testicles so bad it swelled up as big as a nectarine. For Connie, this was the final straw. When she picked me up at the hospital she said, “That’s it, goddammit, you’re getting away from that caveman and moving in with me.”

  Connie had just given up her long and successful career as a nude entertainer (i.e., “stripper”), and moved into managing a “gentleman’s club” just outside Beverly Hills. Her husband—the manager of the club where she last “entertained”—had just run off with a younger, blonde version of Connie and she needed my company, craved it. Every bit as wild as Lorraine, but more organized and more loving, she paid more attention to me, cooked for me, washed my clothes, kept a good house, was an infinitely better caregiver, and got me as drunk and high as I wanted to get whenever I wanted to get there. We developed something resembling love for each other, though it wasn’t the kind of love you’d want your kid and his aunt to share. Picture a forty-year-old woman and a sixteen-year-old boy taking bubble baths together, giving each other hot-oil massages, playing with sex toys….Picture—

  Well, you get the picture.

  The den windows in the back of my house are floor-to-ceiling and wall-to-wall, and frame the LA skyline about five miles in the distance—an iconic view that contributes over half the value of the place. I’m almost oblivious to it as I start off my daily dozen with the usual set of jumping jacks. My house is old, built in the ’20s, and Connie had it completely renovated the year before she died. She had the pinewood floors stripped of varnish and refinished, but they’re still original. The planks have grown limber, and my heavy footfalls make them creak like crazy, the structure’s support beams shaking and rattling the prints on the walls.

  I start to break a sweat, and the thought occurs to me that my introduction to exercise came from my father, who had his own daily routine that he picked up from his foster father, Frank East. East was a chop-shop artist who, I learned later, was responsible for connecting him to what ultimately became known as the Sacci crime organization. One of the most enduring childhood memories of my father is watching him pound out his daily exercises in our living room, and at the time it made me think of him as invincible. Little did I know that he used his considerable strength to breaks legs and arms, to crush tracheas and snap necks…

  …the thought of which stops me dead in the middle of flying leg lifts.

  Covered in a light sheen of sweat, I rest my head between my legs a few seconds, then jump up and take the eight stairs up to my kitchen in two strides. My mobile data terminal (aka MDT, basically a laptop that docks in the console of my cruiser) rests on the stone countertop against the backsplash, and a heavy feeling hits my stomach as I flip open the top and boot the motherfucker up.

  With Bob Marley’s “Red Red Wine” bouncing in my ears, I check my departmental message center and find no new messages—a good thing.

  Still, I’m anxious.

  Switch applications and scroll through the real-time dispatch entries that went online since I last checked, finding that today’s been a busy day in the LA crime scene, but not an unusual one: Burglary and robbery reports, DUIs, assaults, minor drug busts. A couple shootings worthy of note, one involving a robbery in Japantown and another of unknown motivation in Culver City. Found fugitives from justice, prostitution arrests, missing person reports…

  Zero squeals from West Covina PD.

  As relieved as I’ve ever been about anything, I mix up an herbal urine-detox solution in a glass of pure cranberry juice to flush the pot from my system (a daily routine I adhere to in case I’m hit with a random drug test), and drink it down. I shower again, dress in worn gray jeans and a black V-neck tee, pull on socks and black Doc Martens street boots, holster up, and grab a black sport coat on my way out the door. My unmarked is in my driveway, and first thing I do after climbing inside is to slide my MDT into its dock on the console and check again to see whether Macky’s murder has come to official light.

  So far, so good.

  —

  Yesterday I promised Nico Wang, my contact in the Sacci organization, that today I’d stop by to see him at the Venetian Social Club, flat guaranteed it. Still hungover despite my workout, still shaky, I almost call Nico to tell him I won’t be there today, that I’m feeling a little, uh, out of it—which would’ve been a monumental understatement. But when you’ve never broken a promise to meet a friend like Nico before, you don’t want to draw undue attention to yourself by not meeting him the day you witness your father strangle a notorious hood until his head nearly burst like a rotten eggplant.

  The Venetian Social Club is Joe Sacci’s informal headquarters and is on the northern edge of Koreatown on Western Boulevard. The best way to get there at 4:04 in the afternoon is to
take the Melrose exit off the 101 freeway. Traffic’s not as bad as it usually is this time of day and I’m there in fifteen minutes. A rare curbside space is available in front of the club and I jump on it, get out and walk around the front of the car to the sidewalk, light a cigarette to gather myself. My eyes wander from the sidewalk to the Venetian’s entrance, and it occurs to me for maybe the hundredth time that you’d never know from looking at the outside of this joint that it’s a club or that an Italian owns it. The façade is plain brick, no signage, a Korean beauty shop sits to one side of it, and a Korean buffet restaurant is on the other.

  Just about every business in this ’hood is Korean; none are Italian.

  Italians didn’t play a big role in populating LA, never settled in any one section with enough numbers to establish their own neighborhood. In the early ’50s, John Benedict “The Pope” Balboa, Joe Sacci’s predecessor twice removed, moved here from Jersey where he grew up in Ducktown, the Little Italy of Atlantic City. He was homesick and tried to establish this part of town as the Little Italy of LA, buying the building that ultimately became the Venetian and several others farther south on Wilshire. The Pope was an old-school don, an evil motherfucker the East Coast newspapers dubbed the “Jersey Antichrist,” but in the ’60s he developed a soft spot in his heart for Koreans when they started pouring into the neighborhood. At first he hired a few to work for him in menial positions, and he admired how hard they worked and how they bowed and scraped to him, especially the women. His businesses at this end of town eventually went to shit from Italian management, and he ended up leasing practically all his properties to Koreans. The cultural revolution the Pope therefore helped effect turned out to be the Koreans’, and this part of LA is now known as Koreatown.

  While I walk to the club entrance, my thoughts spin in the direction of Nico Wang, a guy you cannot fully understand without first learning the Pope’s history. Nico’s an Italorean who runs Sacci’s loan shark operation and oversees his real estate interests. He’s known in his circle as the Pope’s bastard grandson, his Sicilian birth father having hooked up with an illegitimate daughter the Pope sired with a Korean lounge singer. Nico’s shown me pictures of Mama and Grandma, and he always rightly describes them as belle ragazze, loosely translated from Italian as gorgeous babes. Once, I asked him how he’d describe them in Korean and he said, “Damn if I know.”

  Me and Nico got to know each other when the old man went to prison the first time, Nico helping his mom deliver groceries to our house on a weekly basis, courtesy of Joe Sacci. We found common ground in the fact that neither of us had a father—Nico’s was dead (murdered just before Nico was born) and mine might as well have been. Our mothers eventually got into a catfight of some sort—not an unusual occurrence for Lorraine Crucci—and grocery duty fell to another woman much closer to the edge of the Sacci herd than Dottie Wang.

  We reunited over a year ago when, not knowing it was Nico, I saw his car weaving across three lanes of traffic and stopped him for suspicion of driving under the influence—suspicion, shit, Stevie Wonder could see how flat blasted Nico was. When I discovered it was Nico behind the wheel, I basically said to him, Man, today’s your lucky fucking day, and saw to it that he got home safe, and free of all charges. The next day a messenger brought me an envelope stuffed with C-notes, and one thing led to another, then another.

  And now, just this morning, yet another…

  Nico’s the only person in sight when I crash through the Venetian’s cramped foyer directly into the bar area, which is wood paneled and plainly appointed in the manner of every neighborhood beer joint I’ve ever been in. The bar is to the right; in front of the bar are five Formica-topped kitchen tables with wobbly chrome legs and mismatched chairs that make up what a person of low standards would refer to as the dining area. The room’s only distinguishing feature hangs high on its far wall: a large, framed poster that depicts J. Edgar Hoover snarling at the camera from behind the sights of a tommy gun, FREEZE YOU DIRTY RAT! scrawled at the bottom in blood-red letters.

  The old Seeburg jukebox in the corner is playing Clapton’s cover of “I Shot the Sheriff.”

  Nico’s perched on his usual barstool in the middle of the long leg of the L-shaped bar top, talking on his cellphone and nursing a tall screwdriver. His Korean blood was twice diluted, once by the Pope and again by his Sicilian father, and his face doesn’t reveal significant evidence of his Asian genes.

  Hell, Nico’s face never reveals significant evidence of anything.

  The bartender walks from the door behind the bar, an old guy named Sam who’s been here forever. Word is that Sam worked the streets years ago but lost his nerve and asked for other duties. I ask him for a Corona and he nods and says, “One of the usual for my man Crooch,” and reaches into the cooler, pops the top, and slides it my way.

  “You okay, Sam?” I say as I sit on the stool next to Nico. “You look jumpy.”

  “What?” he says, cuffs sweat from his thin mustache, and turns to straighten a towering stack of highball glasses that are already skyscraper straight.

  Nico’s mumbling into the phone about somebody who skipped their payment yesterday, and my experienced guess is he’ll ask me to pay the guy a courtesy call when he hangs up.

  My first sip of beer hits the spot so squarely the bottle stays suctioned to my lips ’til it’s half gone. This beer and the painkillers I gulped earlier have gangbanged my hangover numb, and I’m starting to feel pretty good.

  Nico’s Daily Racing Form whispers to me from the bar top, Leo, Leeeo….

  Still talking on the phone, Nico recognizes the hunger in my eyes and reluctantly nods for me to help myself. Nico hates it when people cadge his bets; with me, he tolerates it. There’s a nice adrenaline surge at the thought of taking his picks with me to Hollywood Park tonight to invest a little of the dough the old man gave me today. Then there’s the counterthought…

  …which Nico interrupts by finally clicking off the phone and scribbling on his legal pad, probably writing down a name, an address or two, an amount. His next move should be to rip the note from the pad and slide it to me across the battle-scarred bar top. This he does without giving me as much as a sidelong glance. “Hey, Crooch, twist this hump’s balls, uh? He’s got a two-week miss workin’ that’ll turn into three Monday.”

  This week I’d planned to tell Nico I was quitting, but this morning I promised the old man I’d wait before announcing it. I seriously doubt I’ll lift a finger to collect from this guy and hate to lead Nico on. In light of everything, though, I react to Nico’s order the way I always do. “Where’s he employed?”

  Nico sips his screwdriver, lights a Salem cigarette, and clasps his hands before him as if in prayer. “He’s a car salesman that schleps for North Hollywood BMW.” His lips break into something you might call a smirk—which, for Nico, is tantamount to a belly laugh. “When he’s not spikin’ our smack and bangin’ our whores.” Nico gives me a little more contact information about the guy, then studies me from head to toe like he’s sizing me up for a new suit. He stares at the usual lineup of liquor bottles behind the bar, taking slow sips of his drink, and turning to me finally says, “Tell me the truth, Crooch. You doin’ okay?”

  I drain my beer. “Why the hell would you ask me that?”

  He shrugs his hands, his shoulders, stares at the liquor bottles again. “The reasons for my concern are too numerous and complex for me to fully express at this time.” He turns to me again. “At least some of it, though, has to do with Al Levitch.”

  Al Levitch would be Macky’s chief of collections, a person I’ve had some unfortunate dealings with lately. “What does Levitch have to do with me?”

  “She was in here earlier.”

  “Al never comes in here.”

  Yeah, that’s right—she, Al being short for Allesandra. Al is, shall we say, somewhat sexually confused, though all outward indications are she’s lesbian.

  After a pause to take a sip of his screwdriver,
he looks me in the eye, serious as a heart attack. “Well, my friend, she was in here today, lookin’ for you. She didn’t say what she wanted, but it had to be the markers you have with Macky. I’m hearin’ Macky and Al’ve been breakin’ a lot of wind over those markers, and pretty soon they might break a lot more than wind. You catch my drift? You understand what I’m sayin’ here?”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it.”

  “You better do it quick. Al was bitchin’ about you like crazy on the phone.”

  “Who was she talking to?”

  “She did not confide that in me.”

  “What did she say?”

  “I paid her no attention ’til your name came up at the end, when in the span of five seconds she called you everything but a white man. What the hell else could she have been carpin’ about if not the markers?”

  If he only knew.

  “In fact,” Nico continues, drinking as if to steel himself for what he’s about to say next, “when she got off his cell, she asked when you were comin’ in next.”

  “You tell her I was gonna be here today?”

  He glares at Sam, who’s suddenly busy at the other end of the bar, wiping away imaginary dust and moisture from the bar top. Tugging at his cheesy bow tie, beads of sweat trundling down his bald pate and reflecting light from the fluorescent fixture above him, he says, “Sorry, Crooch.” He reaches into the cooler and slides me another Corona across the bar. “This one’s on the house.”

  “Sam, they’re all on the fuckin’ house.”

  “Sam didn’t know what Al wanted with you,” Nico says. “He was just tryin’ to be helpful.” He brings his drink to his lips and talks under his breath. “Dumb dick.”

  I push away from the bar. “Is she coming here?”

  “Sit tight,” Nico says, putting his hand on my shoulder to ease me back into my seat. “You gotta man up on this one. Tell you what. I’m thinkin’ I’ll loan you the money myself, vig free. When she gets here, tell her you’ll—”