Deadly Lullaby

by Robert McClure

  Joe casually interlaces his stubby little fingers and rests his elbows on the table, his chin about six inches above the tabletop. Ignoring Donsky’s statement, Joe says to my son, “Out of respect for your father, me and Viktor have decided to give you the opportunity to explain why you fucked up our operation tonight.”

  “There’s a bias underlying that statement I resent.”

  “Leo,” I say.

  “Respectfully so,” he says, shrugging and sipping water. The left side of his face is red and swollen, cut and scratched. He picks up a towel and dabs at a cut on his cheek, inspects the bloody spot and says to Viktor, “Sorry about Bulgin.”

  “You sorry?” Viktor says.

  Andrei says, “Shit,” and spits on the carpet.

  I say, “Tell them why you were there, kid,” my thought being, and fast.

  My son looks at me, at Donsky, at Fecarotta, then at Joe, shrugs his hands and says, “This young Cambodian girl named Sonita Khemra was murdered the night before last, in MacArthur Park. You, Joe, knew her as Sunny.”

  Joe squints as if he could not have heard that right. “Sunny.”

  “Yeah, the Cambodian prostitute you were banging almost every night this past week or so. She’s dead.”

  “How did you know I—Sunny’s dead?” Joe says, turning to Fecarotta.

  Leo says, “You might want to have somebody take Fecarotta’s gun.”

  Turning red, Fecarotta says, “Nobody’s gettin’ my—”

  “When I want your suggestion,” Joe says to my son, “I’ll ask.” To Fecarotta he says, “Michael, you can keep your gun, but don’t say—no, don’t even think—that nobody can take it from you. I can get it anytime I want it.”

  “Sure, Joe, sure,” Fecarotta says, wiping his mouth.

  “All right,” Joe says, turning to my son. “Prove to me the Sunny you’re talkin’ about is the same Sunny I know.”

  “If I had my iPhone, I’d show you crime-scene pictures”—a nod at Andrei—“but he has it.”

  Joe holds up his left hand and snaps his finger, opens his hand.

  Andrei looks at Viktor, who nods.

  Andrei removes the phone from his hip pocket, hands the M16 to Remy, and thumbs the phone’s screen for a few seconds. He looks at my son. “This Abel person try to call you many time,” he says, shrugging in a Too bad gesture, with my son going, “Oh fuck,” as Andrei thumbs the screen some more. Finally Andrei says to my son, “I disable GPS earlier, you fuck. Now I disable out-dial function and email.” He tosses the phone like a Frisbee to Leo…

  …who catches it one-handed above his head.

  Now it’s my son’s turn to work his thumbs on the screen, after which he hands the phone to Chief, who leans across the table to hand it to Joe.

  “Hit Slideshow at the bottom,” Leo says.

  Which Joe does, showing no emotion as the pictures glide before his eyes.

  My eyes are fully on Donsky now as he fiddles with his Glock 40.

  I lean back and place my left ankle on top of my right knee.

  “It’s her,” Joe finally says.

  Leo says, “Her death was reported in the Times the day before yesterday.”

  “I hate the Times,” Joe says, still examining the pictures, “and never touch it.” He looks up, at Donsky. “You’re supposed to tell me when there’s an article in there that could interest me.”

  Donsky shrugs. “A story about a dead prostitute? How was I to know it was her?”

  Joe nods and shrugs.

  Leo says, “It was a short article in the back of Metro but her picture was prominent,” thinks a second before continuing, “There was another article about her in the paper today, with the same picture. Well, it wasn’t directly about her. It was about the guy we caught who was at the scene just after she died, about him committing suicide in his jail cell.”

  “Suicide,” Joe says, “in his jail cell,” looking at Donsky again.

  “I, uh, missed that one, too.”

  “Right,” Joe says. “Can happen to fuckin’ anybody, if they try hard enough.”

  “The investigation of her murder was assigned to me,” Leo says, “because all the homicide dicks at Rampart were called out to work a murder on Beverly, two people barbecued in their car. I heard through official channels that the barbecue-ees were Levitch and Latzo.”

  “Viktor,” Joe says, “I told you a public hit like that would fuck us somehow.”

  “Who say it fuck us?” Viktor says, holding out his hand in a questioning manner.

  “The bottom line, guys,” Leo says, “is that after turning over a lot of rocks, today I learned that Sonita is the one who told you about Khang’s delivery tonight.”

  “Fuck,” Viktor says, rubbing the underside of his jaw.

  Leo says to Joe, “You paid her for the information, right?”

  “How’d you find that out?”

  “I’d rather not say. It was an informant who’s long gone by now anyway.”

  Joe sits thinking, twiddling his thumbs, eventually says, “If you knew what was goin’ down, why the fuck didn’t you call me instead of—”

  “I didn’t know it was you involved with Sonita until your crew showed at the scene and started shooting up the joint. Two nights ago, Sonita was supposed to meet you, right?”

  Joe nods.

  “Well, all I knew at the time was she was supposed to meet somebody, and this somebody’s driver was to pick her up in MacArthur Park. She forgot her cellphone before she left for the meet, which I got my hands on. From her phone I got a list of all the phone numbers that called her. The mystery driver’s number was easy to pick out for a lot of reasons, so we served subpoenas for the number’s call data on all the cell providers in town. MetroPCS responded that the number was to a disposable, so I called all the numbers made from that phone. Bottom line is I found out from my old man that the number belonged to Fecarotta, that he was the mystery driver.”

  I say, “He found that out when he called me blind tonight—you know, not knowing he was calling me—seconds before your guys showed up over on Fifty-Third. Fecarotta called me the day before last when we were all at the Little Tokyo Hotel.”

  “I remember that,” Joe says.

  “Before he called the old man,” Leo says, “Fecarotta also called a pizza joint.”

  “Yeah, to get us a couple carryout pies from North End Original,” Joe says, nodding. “That I do remember.”

  “So what, I called the girl?” Fecarotta says, sneering and shrugging. “Joe told me to.”

  “Nobody’s accusing you of anything, Michael,” Joe says.

  “That’s right,” Donsky says. “Michael just picked up the whore for Joe.”

  “Don’t call her a whore again,” Joe says, jabbing a finger at Donsky and adding, “Have some respect for the dead.”

  “No,” Leo says, “I wouldn’t be too quick to accuse Fecarotta of anything. The guy we picked up at the murder scene, the one who”—he makes quotation marks in the air—“ ‘committed suicide’ in jail, gave us a description that fits Fecarotta generally, but the description wouldn’t convict him in court even if it was perfect. The guy obviously can’t testify.” He looks to his left at Donsky. “Right?”

  “What’s your point?” Donsky says.

  “I’ll return to you,” Leo says, “when I leave Fecarotta.” To Fecarotta he says, “To prove your innocence once and for all, take off that leather and show us your arms.” To Joe he says, “Sonita was strangled, and struggled for her life against her attacker’s overwhelming strength. We scraped flesh from under her fingernails, so, to put two and two together, or not, once and for all…”

  “Michael?” Joe says.

  Fecarotta looks at Donsky, says, “Man, you gotta help me. You said you’d help me if Joe ever found—”

  “This kangaroo court’s over,” Donsky says, leaning forward, putting his palms flat on the table to push himself up.

  “Sit down,” Joe says, “and put
your heat on the table. You don’t need it, for self-defense or otherwise. My rule is that my guys never get hurt at sit-downs. You know that.”

  “Promise?”

  “What, you want me to fuckin’ pinky swear?”

  Donsky sighs hard and tosses his pistol on the table, sits.

  Joe says, “Now, Michael, take your jacket off.”

  Sweating, Fecarotta says, “And I have to do that just because this pig says—”

  “You killed Sunny,” Joe says. “Why?”

  He wipes his mouth. “Hey, Joe, I didn’t do nothin’ like that.”

  “Then take off your fuckin’ jacket.”

  He looks at Donsky, his eyes pleading for help.

  No one is looking at me, so I ease up the hem of my left pants leg with my right hand.

  Joe says to Fecarotta, “You told me Sunny didn’t show in the park that night.”

  “She didn’t, Joe. I’m not—”

  “You said you called and called and she didn’t answer.”

  “I did. Crucci said she forgot her phone so how could she’ve—”

  “You only called her once after ten o’clock,” my son says. To Joe he says, “Sonita’s phone and the call list I got for Fecarotta’s phone prove it beyond doubt.”

  “Show me that list,” Joe says.

  “It’s still in my cruiser.” He shrugs. “But it says what it says. I wouldn’t lie about something you could disprove. I’ll pull it up from my iPhone if Andrei will enable the—”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Joe says to Leo. To Fecarotta he says, “You said you called her and called her that night and you didn’t. You lied to me. Why’d you kill Sunny? Tell me why, Michael. Nobody’ll hurt you. I just want to know the truth so I can wind this thing up and go home.”

  “You might as well admit it,” my son says to Fecarotta. “A simple DNA test will tell us whether the flesh under her fingernails is yours.”

  Donsky says to the table, “Has everybody forgot Crucci’s a fuckin’ cop?”

  Fecarotta points at my son. “That fucker’s gonna run me in.”

  As patient as Solomon, Joe says, “Michael, tell me what you did.”

  Fecarotta looks around the room before answering Joe. “I’d been runnin’ her back and forth to you for, what, a week, two weeks? All I wanted from her was some head, all right? A simple blow-n-go. And the little cunt said no—all right?—and I got pissed and she told me to fuck off and called me a fuckhead and laughed at me and jumped out of the car when I slapped her, and I went after her. I lost control, that’s all, Joe. Okay? I’m sorry, but I’m just tellin’ you the truth. I won’t lie to you no more. She was just a fuckin’ whore, man, God, a gook one at that. You don’t expect me to take that shit from a—”

  “I told you to not call Sunny a whore!”

  Fecarotta points at Donsky. “No, you told him not to—”

  “You killed my little oriental doll,” Joe says. “You’re fired, understand?”

  “Ah, Joe,” Fecarotta whines, “don’t fire me for that. I got nowhere else to—”

  Joe reaches back underneath his sport coat and brings out a chrome snub-nosed revolver, a .38 Special, thumb-cocks the trigger, extends his arm at Fecarotta, and bam! shoots him in the gut.

  A weird look on his face, Fecarotta clutches his stomach, looking at the blood leaking between his fingers and saying, “Oomph” before he bends over moaning in agony and bam! Joe puts a round through the top of his head.

  Donsky, his face as gray as a day-old corpse, cranes his head to his left and downward, trying to see how Fecarotta is making out on the floor. He sticks his head up and says to Joe, “You said your guys never get hurt at sit-downs.”

  Bits of splatter dot the right side of Joe’s face. Oblivious to them, he says, “He wasn’t one of my guys no more. I fired his ass. Now, you want to admit your role in this or you want me to fire you, too?”

  Donsky stares at Joe.

  Joe says to Leo, “You said something to Donsky about a suicide at the jail, a suspect who was a witness to what Michael did.”

  My son gulps water from the bottle, his eyes wide, and tilts and lifts his head in an effort to get a look at Fecarotta himself. He swallows, catches his breath, and says to Joe, “It wasn’t a suicide. Two Asian gangbangers did him and rigged it as a swinger. Whoever hired them had to have contacts in the sheriff’s department who could place them in the cell.” He nudges his head at Donsky. “Donsky told me once he had contacts over there.”

  “He does,” Joe says, “excellent ones,” and turns to Donsky. “You’ve been cultivatin’ those gook fucks at war with Khang. The, uh, what, E/S somethin’ or other—Oriental Men?”

  “Oriental Boyz,” Leo says. “E/S Oriental Boyz. Today Khang got hold of one of the guys Donsky hired and tortured him to death. My hunch is he squealed on Donsky before he croaked, and the reason Khang was ready for your crew at the stash house is he had Donsky followed. Shit, that Cherokee with a load of Asians in it showed up at the gate minutes after you guys did.”

  His eyes mere slits now, Remy points at Donsky and says, “I tell you Cherokee follow us.”

  “You did not,” Donsky says. “I told you that it—”

  “Donsky?” Joe says.

  Donsky shows Joe his palms. “Mikey’s got—er, had—this problem, all right, Joe? With women, a problem with women. Now I told you he was a little off when you hired him, right? I warned you.”

  “You didn’t say he’d kill my little Oriental doll, shit.”

  “I didn’t even know her then, Joe. How could I tell you he was gonna kill her?”

  Joe’s face is red. “You could’ve fuckin’ told me when he did!”

  Donsky lunges forward for his pistol and I whip the jungle knife from my ankle and drive the point of the blade clean through the back of his hand and into the tabletop, securing his hand firmly within inches of the Glock.

  “Aaaayyaahhhh!” he screams at the ceiling, rising off the table as far as possible, vainly trying to free his hand when blam! Andrei shoots him in the chest.

  The bullet whizzed within a foot of my head, shit.

  Donsky slumps on the table after recoiling, looking at me, horrified, the lights in his eyes slowly fading. I yank the knife from his hand, waving bye-bye to him as he rolls off the other side to the floor.

  Everyone looks at Andrei, who appears defensive at this moment. Gun smoke curling about his face, he says, “I kill him for Bulgin.” Puzzled, maybe a little doubtful over what he just did, he looks at my son. “Donsky responsible for Bulgin, no?”

  “Yes,” Tarasov says to the room, “let us speak of Bulgin now.”

  —

  We resolve the Bulgin mess in a snap, Remy confirming that Bulgin was prepared to shoot my son from the truck, probably thinking Leo was taking Chief into custody. Viktor says to the table, “Was fault of Donsky and Fecarotta. Big Son just self-defend hisself,” and shrugs. “Bulgin a soldier. He die well.” To Andrei and Remy he says, “Big Son in total clear,” swipes his hands in front of him like a baseball umpire giving the Safe! signal and says, “Decision final.”

  No one disagrees.

  A wave of relief gushes from everyone, and finally someone other than me becomes concerned over Leo’s and Chief’s physical condition.

  Joe studies them a few beats and says, “I know a doctor in Covina who lost his license over a pill-mill operation he got busted for. He’ll treat you guys on the sly. He’s built a gunshot clinic in his basement, x-ray machine and everyth—”

  My son’s head is buried in his cellphone, and he scrolls through messages, blinking his eyes and shaking his head in dismay. He tosses the phone on the table as if its contents are now too hot to handle. He sighs large, says, “Thanks, but no thanks. I’m gonna have to think of a good story that’ll legitimately put me in the hospital.”

  I say, “If I were you, I would claim I got amnesia from the vehicular collision at the intersection.”

  “Yeah,” Jo
e says, his eyes narrowing, “a case of total amnesia would be the healthiest thing that could fuckin’ happen to you.”

  My son gives Joe a hard stare, clearly unappreciative of the threat underlying this statement. “I might run with something like that, but you guys are going to have to forget some things, too.” He looks around the room and addresses everyone. “And if you want to know what’s good for you, all of you who talked to Fecarotta this week on their phones will dump them as soon as we leave here tonight. And I hope they’re all disposable and not registered in any of your names. My supervisor has the same list of calls Fecarotta made and received, and will check them out the same way I did.”

  Less hostile to my son now, in a softer tone, Joe says to him, “Everybody’s got burners, yeah. Thanks for the heads-up.”

  Chief says to the room, “Fuck doctors. I’m hurtin’ a little bit but I’ll be okay after I’m properly anesthetized.” A smile. “With, like, a fifth of Jack.”

  Andrei shrugs, says, “I got heroin in car. That fix you good.”

  Chief likes this, as does my son, who grimaces as he shifts in his seat, saying, “Heroin, yeah, now would be the time to give heroin a whirl.”

  “Uh, maybe you should just drink some tequila,” I say to him, and he looks at me as if I am speaking Greek.

  Chief says in the general direction of Joe and Viktor, “What’re we gonna do about these bodies? Hey, look, I’m runnin’ a special on body disposal this week. For just a thousand bucks I’ll—”

  My son whacks Chief’s shoulder with the back of his right hand. “I’ll pay you double that, pal. There’s something very specific I want to do with the bodies.”

  “What?” Joe, Viktor, and Chief say in rough unison.

  My son addresses Joe and Viktor. “Something that just might prevent further bloodshed between you guys and Khang, that’s what. From the number of your men I saw go down tonight, you fuckers don’t have enough muscle left to tangle with him.”

  Leo

  Abel calls me in my hospital room midafternoon. Earlier, while still in an emergency-room bed, I talked face-to-face with two detectives out of Central. My story was I was tooling down Pacific, on the way to the Pueblo Del Rio housing project to follow up on my interrogation of Vann Phan, heard intense weapons fire from the vicinity of Fifty-Third, and observed a Suburban fleeing the scene from the alley. The passengers opened fire on me when I initiated pursuit, I said, and everything went down so fast I panicked and neglected to call for assistance. Last thing I remember was getting slammed in the side while passing through a traffic light on Santa Fe. Next thing I remember was regaining consciousness on the side lawn of Cal Med Center on South Grand, pulling myself up and navigating through the fog of my mind to the emergency-room entrance.