Deadly Lullaby

by Robert McClure

  He speaks without looking at me: “I done talked to cops about that shit this mornin’. I don’t know nothin’ ’bout nobody killin’ that nigga.”

  “Yeah, but see, I do know a lot about it. Late this morning, after you were released from Central, Patrolman Dave Montalban confessed to getting paid in advance to arrest you yesterday in the Galleria, supposedly for shoplifting. He says Patrolman Scott Davenport was similarly prepaid to arrest your buddy Vannak, supposedly for dealing a single blunt on Grand Avenue. An intake officer in Central also confessed this morning to assigning you and Vannak to the same cell as Taquan Oliver. It’s the classic setup, Phan. The only thing I don’t know is who hired you to waste Oliver. So here I am, talking to you. Are you going to tell me who hired you?”

  His smile reveals meth teeth, crooked and blackish. “Fuck you. You don’t know nothin’, nothin’.”

  That’s along the lines of what I thought he’d say. I’m very interested to see how he handles this. “But I know something else you probably don’t. See, your buddy Vannak was found dead in Glassell Park a little while ago. And, man, somebody really fucked him up. Let me show you.” I take my iPhone from my breast pocket and cue the pictures: they’re as bad as Abel said they’d be. Phan’s eyes light up like he’s watching a horror flick when I start the slideshow. “See, Phan, Vannak’s killers used a blowtorch on him. They burned all the hair off his head and face first, just for kicks, before they got serious. Look at his dick, man, ugh—like a Vienna sausage somebody forgot on the grill, huh?”

  I pause the slideshow at the shot of Vannak’s mouth frozen in a horrific scream, his eyes wide open, glassy.

  Phan says nothing, turns his head away from the picture, takes several cleansing breaths, hocks up a loogie and spits it on the floor. He won’t look at me, but I can tell the gears and cogs of his mind are grinding one another to bits.

  Now comes the crucial part of the interrogation, a product of the time I had to kill on the drive over. My immediate reaction was that Khang killed Oliver for revenge, but the more I thought about it, the more I came to believe Khang wouldn’t be stupid enough to hire assassins even remotely connected to the Lazy Boyz. The racial connection would make it too obvious. What sealed it for me was a conversation I had with a friend in G & N just before I got here: E/S Oriental Boyz are currently at war with the OLBs, and if Khang was going to hire an Asian gang, he wouldn’t—shit, couldn’t—hire E/S OBs like Phan and Vannak.

  Sonita’s killer would hire Asians, though, to remove Oliver as a potential witness and throw suspicion Khang’s way. So my hunch is Khang had his Boyz torture Vannak in an effort to find Sonita’s killer. If I’m right, Khang’s a length or two ahead of me, and only Phan can catch me up to him.

  “Phan,” I say to him, “I know who did this to Vannak, and you’re not going to like it when I tell you who it is. I bet you didn’t know when you killed Oliver that he was in jail for killing a young girl, a young Cambodian girl.”

  He looks at me from the corner of his left eye.

  “You know who her uncle is, Phan? Do you?”

  He still doesn’t say anything, but he’s hanging on my every word.

  “Khang Nhou.”

  He snaps his head around, a purely involuntary reaction, and before he jerks his head away from me tears come to his eyes.

  “Yeah,” I say. “I didn’t think you knew that. Whoever hired you to kill Oliver didn’t tell you. Whoever hired you wanted me and the rest of LAPD to think that Oliver offed himself out of guilt for killing the girl. Since Oliver saw who killed her, their motive was also to get rid of a witness. He was at the scene when she died, and we mistook him for the killer. That’s all whoever hired you wanted, and they didn’t care what Khang might do to Vannak or what he might do to you. They probably didn’t even consider what Khang would do. If they thought about Khang at all, they wanted the authorities to think that Khang hired you to kill Oliver. It’s not a bad setup, really, but the problem now is Khang. That man’s fuckin’ crazy. You already knew that, but it’s pretty fucking obvious from what he did to Vannak, right? Khang wants to know who hired you and Vannak, and he’ll stop at nothing to find out.”

  Now hit him with a lie. “Your problem, Phan, is that Vannak died before he told Khang’s boys anything. The coroner told me this morning that he died of a heart attack before they cut his throat. The throat slash is what they call postmortem, meaning the Boyz inflicted it out of frustration when Vannak died before he talked. So now Khang’s going to find you, and do to you what he did to Vannak. Do you see this?”

  He works his mouth, shakes his head. He clears his throat, says in a croaky voice, “I don’t see nothin’.”

  “What you should see is I can help you, if you help me. I know Khang well, so tell me who hired you and I’ll hand them to Khang. Then he’ll leave you alone.”

  “Shit, I could tell Khang that if I want—” He snaps his head away from me. “But nobody hired me to do nothin’, cop. Fuck you!”

  Uh-huh. “No, fuck you, Phan. Something else you’re getting ready to find out is I’m not here to make a court case. I’ve got a personal stake in finding out who killed that girl, and my superiors don’t even know I’m here. I’m into the same shit Khang is, and I’ll torture you if that’s what it takes to get you to talk.”

  Now his expression is one that says, Come on, motherfucker, try me.

  Damn, whoever hired him to kill Oliver must have instilled the fear of God in him—at least as much fear as he holds for Khang. Phan’s not going to respond to ordinary interrogation techniques. He might not respond to extraordinary ones; if he does, whatever he tells me will be useless in court. At this point I don’t care. I’ll use whatever he tells me to catch the killer and then hash up evidence later to support a conviction.

  I say, “I respect you, Phan. You’re tough. So, I’m not going to humiliate you by cutting you or beating on you. Instead, I’m going to give you an honorable way out. If you don’t talk, I’ll kill you clean. I’ll shoot you.”

  His eye muscles jerk involuntarily—otherwise, no reaction.

  “You don’t believe me. You’re used to dealing with cops who actually hear you when you assert your right to remain silent, who actually follow the rules. In this case, as far as I’m concerned, there are no rules.”

  He flushes; he breathes heavier.

  “Okay, Phan, have it your way.” Sighing, heaving myself off the couch to stand before him so he can see every move I make, I remove the .38 Chief’s Special snub nose from my waistband—the weapon I took from Latzo two days ago. I take dead aim at his head, cock the hammer, then at the last instant fire a round into the cushion by his leg.

  The concussion fills the room, stuffing and dust erupt, bits and pieces of it cascading on Phan’s head like yellow snow. “Muddafuck,” he says, his eyes saucers.

  “Fuckin’ loud, wasn’t it? Now, watch this, Phan,” I say, and flick open the cylinder, dump the five shells in my hand, and replace the one I dotted on the primer with a felt-tip marker. I give the cylinder a twirl, palm it shut, put the barrel to his forehead and cock the hammer.

  Another flinch.

  “We’re going to play a game, Phan. This pistol holds five thirty-eight-caliber bullets—hollow points, dumdums, rounds that will take off most of your head. Now it’s loaded with only one. The game is I ask you a question, you give me an answer. The first time you don’t give me an answer, you have a one-in-five chance of getting your head blown apart. The next time, one-in-four, and so on and so forth. Do the math in your head, if you’re capable. If you’re lucky, you’ll live to give me four nonresponses. Then you’re guaranteed to be dead. Do you understand the game?”

  Sweat pops on his brow, no other response.

  I pull the trigger.

  “Fuck!” His body jerks; his eyes bug.

  I chuckle. “Didn’t expect that, did you, Phan? See, the rules of the game require you to answer any question I ask you, no matter how trivial. Don’t
worry, I won’t fuck with you like that again.” I cock the hammer. “Here’s a real question: Who hired you and Vannak to kill Taquan Oliver?”

  He clamps his eyes shut, his face reddens, he presses his lips together so hard the blood drains from them.

  No response.

  I pull the trigger.

  “Aieee.” Snot flies from his nose. Piss darkens the front of his cargo shorts. He weeps.

  I cock the hammer.

  “Two down, Phan. You’ve got balls, man, not to mention luck. The last guy I played this game with lost after question number two. And, man, it was a real fuckin’ mess….Now, let’s go for number three: Who hired you and Vannak to kill Taquan Oliver?”

  His face is beet red, clenched tighter than a bare-knuckler’s fist. His lips tremble. Blood pours from the corner of his mouth in such volume that you have to figure he’s bitten off a chunk of his tongue.

  No response.

  “Is that your final answer?”

  I pull the trigger.

  He sobs, chokes, collapses on his side, his head going thunk on the arm of the couch. His bowels release in a succession of wet farts.

  God, the smell…

  I grab his hair and pull him upright, put the pistol to his temple. “Congratulations, Phan! You’ve gone where no man has gone before! No matter what happens during the next round, you can be proud. When you’re gone, I’m gonna tell your Boyz how brave you were. They’ll have T-shirts made in your honor with your picture on it. Won’t that be cool, man, huh? Now, your chances are fifty-fifty, Phan. Do you want to go for broke?”

  I cock the hammer, and his body responds by making clicking and snapping sounds from the tremors, like muscle and tendon separating from bone. Jesus, he might be having a seizure.

  “All right, Phan, here goes, pal. My money’s on you. I’m betting these are the last words you’ll ever hear: Who hired you and Vannak to kill Taquan Oliver?”

  He upchucks bloody puke, coughs, gasps, weeps, chants Vietnamese gibberish that sounds like a prayer.

  “C’mon, Phan, you got an even money chance now. Who hired you?”

  His eyes roll back in his head, and before I pull the trigger he rolls forward off the couch and onto the floor, out cold.

  Fuck.

  I remove the cuffs and leave his ass where it lies.

  Babe

  While waiting for confirmation of the wire transactions, I cannot help but study the picture on Ovando’s desk, a family picture. The picture is a spontaneous playground shot, and must have been taken some time ago, because Ovando appears in it without a mustache. He has two kids, the youngest one having the slanted eyes and flat face of a mongoloid, and an okay-looking blonde wife. Ovando is hugging the retarded kid close, beaming, apparently as proud of him as he is of his normal kid, a handsome lad not quite in his teens.

  Ovando is staring up at me, hard, his trembling hands folded over the keyboard, face pale and damp, eyes teary. “That’s my family,” he says, his voice cracking. “I stole the money for little José there”—gesturing at the mongoloid—“to provide for his special needs. Do you understand that?”

  This makes me feel lower than rat shit in a sewer drain. All I can say is, “Everything’s going to be fine, Errol.”

  This has no effect on him.

  “José can’t make it without me,” he croaks. “None of them can. I’m their sole provider.”

  Jesus. “Soon as Carmelita confirms everything,” I say, “you are going to be okay. No worries.”

  These statements do not seem as untrue to me as they were minutes before.

  Ovando gulps from the highball glass on the desk and coughs. “¡Dios mío! If only you weren’t lying to me, I would be so happy,” he says and hangs his head, tears plopping on the keyboard like the first drops of a spring rain. “For my kids,” he says. “They so need me, especially little José.” The tears flowing, he returns to mumbling his Act of Contrition.

  This pleading is really getting to me, and I begin to think of a way I can let him go free without me getting whacked in the process. There is only one way this will work, and it totally depends on Ovando’s trustworthiness. This is my last job, ever, and I decide to trust him for the sake of his family, for the sake of his retarded kid.

  “All right, Errol,” I say. “Listen. I am not bullshitting you, all right?”

  He looks up at me, hope gleaming through the tears in his eyes.

  “Errol, If you promise to leave the country and never—”

  My stream of thought is interrupted when I glance down and see a picture at my feet I have yet to notice, a picture Chief must have knocked off when he dragged Ovando across the desk. The picture is of Ovando dressed in a suit. Posed with another man in an identical suit, a man identical to Ovando in every respect—identical, that is, except for the mustache. The other man is clean-shaven. I reach down for the framed picture, study it, and compare the clean-shaven guy to the guy in the family picture. Displaying it to Ovando, pointing at the guy without the mustache, I say, “You have a twin brother.”

  He turns his head away, clears his throat.

  “And the wife, the kids, they are his kids, not yours.”

  Caught like a bad fucking cold, he flushes scarlet.

  Jesus, the depths to which mooks will stoop to save their pitiful lives never cease to disgust me.

  I grab his collar and pull his face to mine. “You scum, using a retarded kid as a ruse to gain my sympathy. You should be a-shamed.”

  “Ahh, fuck you,” he says. “I’m not gonna beg any—”

  He jerks his eyes to my cellphone when it vibrates.

  I palm his face and shove him roughly away.

  Snarling at him, I flip the phone open: an exclamation-pointed dollar sign from Carmelita.

  I say to Ovando, “You ought’a be glad the Alvarez transfers cleared. If they had not, I would have Chief—”

  Another vibration: a text from my Cayman guy, a smiley face.

  A smiley face?

  “My fee cleared, Errol,” I say, place my cellphone in my back pocket and step behind him, withdraw the .22 revolver from my belt, one fitted with a suppressor, a cheapo Savage that Chief picked up for me on the black market.

  I had to dump the Kel-Tec I used on Jimmy Coyle yesterday—a real pity.

  I take dead aim at the back of his head. “We are leaving now, Errol, you asshole. Goodbye.”

  To my surprise, he whips around in his chair, his face twisted in anger and grief. “I’m not gonna let you off that easy. You’re gonna have to look me in the eye, you sonofabitch you, you fuckin’ cocksucker you, you mother—”

  “You are not making this hard on me, Errol.”

  The recoil is practically imperceptible, the sound practically inaudible, a mere whisper of death.

  “Damn,” Chief says, mopping his forehead with a hanky, “that guy knows how to make an exit.”

  I lower the pistol, feeling nothing for Ovando, feeling nothing but relief for myself: my retirement has now officially started. Smiling, I think now all I have to do is help Chief load the corpse into the van in back, climb inside and—

  My cellphone vibrates again.

  Sighing, I withdraw it from my breast pocket, check the display.

  From Carmelita: Three exclamation points on the display screen—a warning.

  Trouble outside.

  Babe

  Carmelita speaks to me through her phone in a panicked whisper: “One of Ovando’s cuates just parked outside in a moving van. He is walking to the door, man, the fucking door.”

  Shit.

  “Get rid of him.”

  “How?”

  “Give me a minute to think,” I say, reeling from a spasm of electricity that just arced between my eyes. Recovering quickly because there is no other choice but to, I hustle out of Ovando’s office and say to Chief, “Carmelita is on the phone. We, uh, have an issue,” stop, turn to him and say, “One of Ovando’s friends just got here.”

  �
��Babe.” He looks as if he has been stricken by a diarrhea cramp.

  Using both hands to pat down the air in front of me, I say, “Relax. While I talk to her, you get Ovando rolled up in the carpet and clean up any blood. The spic is out front, so I’ll have Carmelita distract him while we load Ovando in the van and split.”

  This seems to ease his mind and he sets to work, moving fast.

  In the lobby, I take cleansing breaths and count to five before saying to Carmelita, “Do not panic. Do you know this man?”

  She breathes audibly. “Yes. Pablo. Errol says he grew up with him. He comes by once in a while.”

  “Thanks for telling me that in advance, Jesus.”

  “He always comes after hours, never at this time, never.”

  I rub my lower jaw, then massage the back of my neck. “All right, look, you have to get out of your car and approach him. Tell him Ovando is gone for the day.”

  The doorknob on the front door jiggles; this is followed by a knock. The blinds on the door are pulled down, but a shadow dances underneath the sides and corners.

  Christ.

  “No!” she says. “Mr. Alvarez said my job was to warn you, ese, if danger appeared outside. That is all I agreed to do. Pablo may learn what has happened and hurt me. He is a very bad man and always carries a gun. Errol likes to brag about how tough Pablo is, his cholo. I confirmed it on the computer. He has a record, and is wanted in Canada for murder.”

  “Did you tell Alvarez this? He told me Ovando had no associates to be concerned about.”

  “…”

  Goddamn. “All right, forget it. I will deal with Alvarez. Just listen and listen close, you have to help. Just get out of your car, walk up to him, and—”

  Another knock, sharper this time, more urgent. Then a voice. “Errol, man, we’re here, Holmes, open up! Let’s get to it!”

  We are here?

  “No!” she says. “Errol must have told him to meet him. If I tell him he is not here, he will want me to let him inside to wait.”