Deadly Lullaby

by Robert McClure

  “Are you sure? I do not mind just staying there with you while you—”

  “I’m sure. Just stay in the comfort of your home. I’ll be fine.”

  He pauses a few seconds. “Okay, as you wish,” he eventually says, sounding disappointed. “Go to sleep, rest easy.”

  After hanging up, I feel guilty that I didn’t arrange my medication schedule so I could stay awake long enough to visit with my father. Running the last three days through my mind is like watching an old black-and-white movie sped up to ten times its normal speed—the camera angles slanted, the soundtrack often earsplitting and a jumble of noise, at other times dead silent. Not unlike my father’s and my life together, in fact. Maybe some quiet time together would help us both decompress and sort it all out. But we’ll have time for all that tomorrow, or maybe the next day, and the guilt soon fades away along with my consciousness…

  …This dream of Khang ultimately comes to me. I’m strangely omniscient and know beyond doubt his call this afternoon was a ruse to lull me into inaction. A ninjalike assassin is now in my room, standing over me gripping a big knife—the one used to slice open Vannak’s throat—and he’s slowly moving in on me and I’m paralyzed, unable to prevent him from cutting me, when I wake with a start in the dead of night with a, “No, don’t!”

  There’s a presence in the room, a rustling, and there, in the corner, streaked by street light cutting through the window blinds, is the old man, sitting in a chair. His feet are firmly planted on the floor, ready to spring, and his right hand rests on the bulge under his jacket. “Relax, kid,” he says. “It is me, your father.”

  Babe and Leo

  “What is wrong with my son, huh? Having a bad dream?”

  “Yeah, about Khang sending somebody to whack my ass.”

  “Which is one reason I am here. You all right?”

  “It’s my ribs. They squealed like hell when I jumped up.”

  “Let me get your nurse, a nice little black girl—who, by the way, really digs you. She told me when I got here you can have pain relief whenever you want it.”

  “No, that would zonk me out again. I’ll be okay for a while. I’ll incline the bed and talk.”

  “Go back to sleep, if you want.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “It is your call….Hey, want a shot of tequila with a beer back?”

  “You snuck in beer and tequila?!”

  “Why not? Alcohol is the oldest form of pain relief known to man. Wait just a sec. I put the Corona on ice in the sink and have glasses already set up….Here is yours…and here is mine. Hold mine while I pull this chair next to the bed before we toast….All right, my son, here is to sucking wind.”

  “I’ll damn well drink to that….Ahh, nice, very nice. You got both my favorite brands.”

  “When you are in the hospital, the smallest things from the outside bring you the greatest comfort.”

  “You know, I remember you telling me something like that when I got my tonsils taken out. You brought me Cokes and mint chocolate-chip ice cream from Bennett’s.”

  “The pricks would not allow you Coke, and the hospital ice cream sucked. All they had was vanilla.”

  “I thought you walked on water for doing that. Just before you showed up with the Coke and ice cream, I had just hung up from talking to Lorraine. She screamed at me to just make do with what the hospital had, she wouldn’t even…”

  “Visit you, yeah, I know….Your mother was, well, your mother.”

  “I can’t believe I mentioned her na—”

  “No, do not apologize. Lorraine is a subject we should talk about.”

  “…”

  “Leo, don’t look at me like that. Listen: I—I am sorry about your mother. I am….C’mon, kid, we should either clear the air once and for all or resolve to never speak of her again. Don’t just sit there like a deaf-mute. Which way are you leaning?”

  “I already know what happened.”

  “You may think you do, but—”

  “Connie told me before she died, all right? She said just before you got out of prison, Lorraine got gassed on booze and pills and spilled the fact that she and Bustamonte were going to whack you, all right? She said she tipped you off about it, all right? What they tried to do to you after, what you did to them, I have no fuckin’ desire to hear about. I have a vivid enough imagination to fill in the goddamn blanks.”

  “Connie never told me she told you about that.”

  “She died that night.”

  “I see. You have to believe me, Leo, I had no choice, it was—”

  “Self-defense, yeah, yeah, and I never held it against you. I held it against both you idiots for being so damn dysfunctional. Hell, a normal woman finds a lover and asks for a divorce. A normal man finds out his wife’s out to kill him and he calls the cops. But my parents? No, no, not my goombah parents. My parents had to live out a script they patched together from The Postman Always Rings Twice and Prizzi’s Honor.”

  “That is pretty good.”

  “I’m not tryin’ to be funny. The situation was fucked up beyond recognition. Do you have any idea what that did to me?”

  “You? What do you think it did to me? It haunts me to this day. I do not care what you say, your imagination is not vivid enough to picture what went down. It was fucking horrible, and I reacted the way in which I am fully capable, worse even. But it was not what I wanted. I wanted to get home from prison, fall into your mother’s arms, and live happily ever after. But instead she came at me with a fucking stun gun and Bustamonte jumped out of the—”

  “Enough.”

  “All right, all right, fuck.”

  “Old man, I’ve come to prefer your initial idea: let’s resolve to never talk about her again.”

  “I want to say just one final thing: I miss her. I wish she was here.”

  “What? I guess that makes one of us.”

  “Leo, do not talk about your deceased mother that way. It is disrespectful.”

  “Disresp—? God, this situation is so fucked up. Okay, you had your final say on her. Not a single further word—got it?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I got it…Hey, you want another shot of tequila?”

  “Do I ever.”

  “Give me your glass, here, just what the doctor ordered….Heh heh, I might have gone a little heavy on the pour there, kid.”

  “No, that’s just about the right dose for me at this point.”

  “What do we drink to now?”

  “I don’t know. How about to me keeping my job? Though doing that would be expressing something more like a fucking wish than a toast.”

  “We will drink to it anyway. Here is to you keeping your job.”

  “Cheers, old man.”

  “Ahh…Jesus, kid, I cannot believe you drank all that in two gulps. Now, if your vocal cords still function, tell me what your lawyer told you.”

  “Well, uh, ahem, yeah, I, uh, laid the story on him me and you cooked up last night on the way to the hospital—the same story I’ve been giving everybody, right?”

  “And?”

  “He thinks he can save my job, but chances are good I’ll get busted back to uniform. And they’ll put a formal reprimand in my jacket that’ll practically guarantee no future promotions.”

  “Damn, Leo, I feel responsible.”

  “We already talked about that. I made the decisions and I’ll live with them.”

  “But you might have to go back to uniform.”

  “No, if that’s the best they offer, I’ll probably tell my lawyer to try to strike a deal where I just resign with no reprimand. Or I’ll just roll the dice with the Board of Rights at a hearing. I doubt I could do uniform again, not after rolling the streets as a detective. It would bore and embarrass me to tears. Besides, the money I make even as a detective sucks. There are other things I can do that pay better.”

  “Yes, you are a great investigator and can rumble with the best around. Look, let me try to help you. You need to be i
n so-called corporate security.”

  “So-called corporate security?”

  “An old federal-prison buddy is now a high-ranking officer in a weapon-manufacturing company based in San Diego. They have an office and plant in Indy, too. He has offered me a job anytime I want it, one he describes as ‘high-level.’ The job description is otherwise a little vague, sure, but nothing like I used to do. It will be a walk in the park, like taking candy from a baby, like shooting ducks in a—”

  “You’re worrying me, old man.”

  “No need to worry. With your experience and talent, you can do it.”

  “I’ll think about it, but I don’t want to pull a job out from under you.”

  “No need to worry about that, either. If he has only one job to hand out, it is yours. I have all the money I reasonably need, and only view the job as something to keep me from rusting out. If he has two jobs to offer, then he has two.”

  “The way you said that makes me—are you saying me and you would work at this company together?”

  “I did not say that.”

  “No, you didn’t say it, you sneaky old man.”

  “What?”

  “You know what I mean. Hell, though, after the last three days, anything’s possible. Let’s forget about it for now and have a couple more drinks. Maybe we can talk about it tomorrow.”

  “Over steak burritos.”

  “At La Parrilla, sure, that sounds good.”

  “At which time I will pay you the rest of the money I owe you.”

  “Hey, yeah, I almost forgot about that.”

  “Tomorrow you will be flush, my son, guaranteed. Then, well, uh, after we eat, you want to hit the Dodgers-Mets game with me?”

  “Christ, old man, this is like the third, fourth time this week you’ve asked me to go to a ball game with you. Now you throw it at me when I’m drugged and drunk.”

  “I know, I know. The thing is, see, now I have little doubt what your answer will be.”

  To Nat Sobel

  Acknowledgments

  For some reason, I wanted to write a father-son story and what I came up with was “My Son,” a short story published in the kick-ass ezine ThugLit. The story caught the eye of uber-agent Nat Sobel and he contacted me, said he was a fan (the mere thought of this compliment still blows my mind) and offered representation. No one in human history has accepted an offer any faster. Nat wanted me to write a book and we settled on doing one based on “My Son.” The father-son story I’ve now come up with is Deadly Lullaby, a work that never would have happened without Nat coaching me through many drafts and never accepting a single sentence he didn’t consider to be the best I could form. I owe this man an eternal debt of gratitude; as I do Nat’s partner Judith Weber, who jumped in the game at crunch time and helped me make crucial decisions that made the book so much leaner and meaner. I often tell Nat and Judith they are the best agents in the world, because they keep proving it, time and time again.

  My sincere appreciation also goes out to Dana Isaacson, my editor at Penguin Random House, who acquired Deadly Lullaby and used his keen editorial eye to pin-and-hum it to maximum effect. A fiction writer can’t go far in this biz without an editor who believes in his work enough to fight for him. In this sense Dana is the bare-knuckle champ of the world. The production and marketing folks at PRH followed Dana’s lead and have done a marvelous job rolling out the book. Thank you all.

  I must also thank Sobel Weber’s star administrator Adia Wright, whose professionalism and kindness eased so many of my concerns and brightened many more of my days. My good friend Gerald Tyrell deserves mention, who was there with me at the very beginning and has stayed there along with his lovely wife, Betsy. Also there with me at the beginning are my friends at Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope Virtual Studios (where I first started to cut my writer’s chops), especially Sue O’Neill. The Honorable Fred Cowan, more friend than boss, gave me the flexibility to write this book and cheered me on when others might have insisted upon more work. Lisa Crockett, the sister I never had, and Mark Wilson, my brother by another mother, both cheered me on too, and more than once towed me from the writing mud when I got stuck.

  Two of my three biggest fans are my astounding children, Courtney and Nick. They both sacrificed a lot to have their father give up a profitable law practice to chase a living writing crime fiction. They know this, but you wouldn’t think they did to talk to them. Their support is unwavering and eternal.

  The causal chain that ultimately led to Deadly Lullaby really begins some years ago when my biggest fan, my beautiful wife, lover, and friend, Kathie, sat me down, looked me dead in the eye as only she can do and told me—no, ordered me—to quit practicing law and spend all my work time learning to write crime fiction. All Kathie had to base this grand decision on were my earliest scratchings, words strung together on paper you’d be hard pressed to call stories. Crazy. Especially coming from a woman who normally thinks so rationally and analytically. Since that day, Kathie’s support and belief in me has never wavered, and though she’s tolerated my return to a part-time lawyer job, she won’t hear of me practicing law full-time. Kathie, I will love you ’til my bones turn to dust.

  A few notes on setting, research, characters. While I’m a proud native of Louisville, I love Los Angeles and the grand role it’s played in crime fiction. Most of the places depicted in the book actually exist. Some don’t—the Venetian Social Club comes to mind, as does Macky McLeod’s warehouse in West Covina and Khang Nhou’s Brentwood mansion—and are products of my imagination that I invented out of convenience. Real or not, I always tried to stay true to the spirit of Los Angeles and the surrounding region. Along these lines, my depiction of the interrogation room at Rampart Division was based on Richard Ross’s inspirational description of those at LAPD Robbery-Homicide Division in his fine work Architecture of Authority (Aperture Press, 2007), from which I could not help but borrow liberally, considering the situation in which I’d placed Leo. Also, I adopted the news article depicting Taquan Oliver’s supposed suicide from an article I found on the website of the LA CBS affiliate, Channel 2, dated March 4, 2011, from which I also borrowed liberally for the sake of authenticity. Many of the observations I have Babe Crucci make about his time in prison I took directly from the insightful article “Time and the Prison Experience,” authored by Azrini Wahidin of University of Central England in Birmingham and published at Sociological Research Online on March 31, 2006. Also very helpful in shaping Babe’s professional attitude was Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman’s scholarly work On Killing, The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (Little, Brown and Company, 1995). Any mistakes in these adaptations are mine and mine alone, and should not reflect on the quality of the original sources. Finally, all characters appearing in this work are fictitious, products of what my editor Dana Isaacson describes as my “twisted” mind. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is therefore purely coincidental.

  PHOTO: KATHLEEN MCMAHON/DERBY CITY PHOTOGRAPHY

  ROBERT MCCLURE has a B.S. in Criminology from Murray State University and a law degree from the University of Louisville. He is now an attorney and crime-fiction writer who lives and works in Louisville, Kentucky. His story “My Son” appeared in Best American Mystery Stories 2009, and he has had other works published in MudRock Stories & Tales, Hardboiled, ThugLit, and Plots with Guns. His “Harlan’s Salvation,” published in the ’04 summer edition of MudRock, placed in the Other Distinguished Stories category of Best American Mystery Stories 2005.

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  Robert McClure, Deadly Lullaby