“Really,” Ronnie said.
“She’s fourteen. She’s a nerd.”
“That was pure habit,” she said. “What I said just then, that was a reflex. I should slap myself. You got shot at and you’re okay. You just told me you love me.”
“I did.”
“Well, come home,” she said. “Let’s see what we can do with that.”
I confess. I accelerated.
Ting Ting blinked into the light, looking like someone who’d just seen the sun for the first time. The sun was, in fact, sitting on my shoulder from his perspective, low in the sky behind me this early in the morning, and I imagined it had been years since he’d been up at this hour. Stinky rarely went to bed before the paper landed on the lawn.
I said, “Hi.”
He screwed up his eyes at me in obvious pain, and then he stood aside and shielded them with his hand and said, “Come in.” As I passed, he said, “Arm better?”
“Miracle drug,” I said.
He pushed the door closed against the sunlight and looked at his watch. “Yipe,” he said, using the rare singular form. “Eaglet, she sleeping.” He was shirtless and barefoot, wearing loose pajama pants, apparently silk, that had slipped low over his nonexistent hips. He seemed to have a surplus of slenderness, if that’s possible, and his skin was the kind of gold that we of English and Irish heritage can get only at the risk of basal cell carcinoma. All in all, I thought as I followed him down the entry hall, once you got past the fact that he could kill you with a blink, he was a positive variant on the usual run of humanity—compact in an environmentally friendly, essentials-only kind of way, shiny, and graceful. I could see why Stinky wanted him back and Eaglet wanted him here.
The hall had been painted a pale gray to bring out the warmth of the floor, a highly-finished, light-bouncing bamboo. The hallway opened, a few yards down, into a bright living room, obviously full of window, probably looking south to the sea. Eaglet lived in an upper-middle-rank condominium on a palm-lined street in Santa Monica that I figured at a million two if she’d bought it and seven thousand a month if she was renting. Crime in general may not pay, but murder does.
The place was bare in an intentional way; it wasn’t that the people who lived there didn’t have stuff, it was just that they liked space better. In place of the lava lamps and Fillmore West posters Eaglet’s personal style had led me to expect, there were good Japanese woodblock prints, mostly birds and flowers, that were framed in matting of muted colors set inside bamboo frames that picked up the pale hues of the floor. A gorgeous set of cedar tansu, matching Japanese chests from the Meiji era, late nineteenth-century—possibly authentic, but if not, extremely good fakes—were stacked to create a ziggurat effect against the right-hand wall, and on each of the horizontal surfaces rested a dark gray clay vase bearing a single tall stalk of tuberose.
“Smells good,” I said.
Ting Ting wrinkled his nose and waved his hand under it as though the fragrance were too heavy for him. “Eaglet like.” he said.
“You don’t?”
“Have too much in Philippines,” he said, pronouncing it Pilippines, as he led me into the living room. “My home, Palawan, have too much. Smell, smell, smell, everywhere.”
I sat on a low leather couch, one of a matching pair facing each other over a long table, a four-inch-thick slab of teak, probably ripped illegally from one of the remaining Cambodian hardwood forests. On the table was yet another vase, this one celadon-green, with two white lilies in it, and at a precisely casual diagonal was a gaily-colored magazine that turned out to be the latest issue of Guns & Ammo.
“I need to talk to both of you,” I said.
“She sleeping,” Ting Ting said again, but then he lifted his head and looked past me, and his eyes caught fire.
“I’m up,” Eaglet said, coming into the room. She was holding a floor-length floral wrap closed with her hands, and when she let go of the edges to retrieve the ties, I got a long pale flash of thigh and hip. When I raised my eyes from the leg to her face, she was looking directly at me, hard-eyed as a marketer gauging a product’s impact, and for the first time I felt like I was seeing the person who pulled the trigger.
The recognition passed between us, a snappy little electrical arc in the air, and we were, for an instant, not just Eaglet and Junior, but the only pros in the room. Ting Ting was gaping at her almost as fervently as he had the night they met.
“Doesn’t he blow your mind?” Eaglet said, retreating back to the 1960s. “He’s so cherry it hurts.”
Ting Ting said, “Cherry?”
“Perfect, it means you’re perfect,” Eaglet said. “Do you want coffee, Junior?”
“I always want coffee.”
“Jammin’,” Eaglet said. “Honey, would you—”
“Sure, sure,” Ting Ting said. To me, he said, “You no sugar, right?”
“Right. And thanks.”
When Ting Ting was in the kitchen, Eaglet leaned toward me and said, in a pleasant tone, “If you fuck this up, I’ll come after you, and don’t think I won’t. I love him all the way to the center of his clean little bones.”
“I wish you every happiness.”
“He is soooo cherry. It’s like he was created an hour ago.” She sat on the facing couch, not giving me any skin this time, and said, “Anything before he comes back?”
“Yes. When did you do your last hit?”
She raised an eyebrow. “That’s kind of personal.”
“Humor me.”
“In Solvang,” she said. “The day Louie called me to come down and sit in front of your house. That’s why I was late. Who’s on watch now?”
“Debbie again, and nice of you to ask. Who was the target?”
“Are you wearing a wire?”
“Don’t be silly.”
“Well, if I had hit someone,” she said, rolling her eyes, “which, of course, I haven’t, it would have been an accountant who was on the run after poking holes in a union pension fund.”
She watched me as I looked at it from every angle I could think of and failed to find a connection. “Have you turned anything down in the past eight or nine days?”
“I’m just starting out,” she said. “I’m like a starlet, just a kid from the sticks, not a top-liner like Debbie. My phone doesn’t ring all that much.”
I looked around the expensive room. “That’s not exactly an answer.”
“No,” she snapped. “No other offers.”
“Do you hear much scuttlebutt?”
She shook her head and the beads braided into it—it was beads that day—rattled. The sound brought to mind a stick being dragged over a bleached-white rib cage, not a cheerful association. “I’m not on the party line yet,” she said. “Debbie’s the girl you want for that.”
“She won’t talk to me about it.”
“Then she’s smarter than I am. Anything else before Sunshine comes in?”
“Do you really love him, or is this just for fun?”
She looked into my eyes for at least ten seconds before she said, “I’d eat him alive if I could, just to have him with me all the time.”
“Do you know, or have you heard of, a guy named Bones?”
The name Bones produced a blink. “A zombie, right?”
I said, “That’s a fair description.”
“Black suit, white socks. Weirdest eyes ever. I met him once, at a party Debbie took me to.” She extended a tapering hand and used the tip of her index finger to push the magazine a couple of degrees closer to parallel with the table’s edge, but she wasn’t focused on it. Her eyes were on a spot on the table about halfway between the magazine and me. “He’s not like anybody back home in Mill Valley, that’s for sure. He’s got cold air around him all the time. Shaking hands with him was like reaching into the refrigerator. I won’t lie to you, he spooked me. What about him?”
“Nothing. I ran into him glancingly last night. Just trying to see how he fits in. Do you know where h
e lives?”
“I don’t want to know where he lives. Fits into what?”
It was my turn to look at one thing and think about something else. I looked at Eaglet, which was easy enough to do, and tried to figure out, as complicated as things had gotten since Bones showed up, whether there was any way she could be involved in the whirlpool around Wattles’s chain. What I finally said was, “Something I’m working on.”
She sat back, arms crossed. “Good to swap info like this. A free and frank discussion.”
“I’m not swapping info. I’m asking you about something that’s already killed two people and almost killed four more last night, with no sign of stopping there. I’m in the process of trying to eliminate you from the list of suspects.”
She said, with her eyes hooded, “Do tell.” We regarded each other like a couple of dogs trying to decide whether to bare our teeth or wag our tails, and Ting Ting bustled in with a tray. He’d put on a short-sleeved shirt.
“Have only instant,” he said. “Herbal for you, Sweetie.”
She picked up the cup, and all the tension went out of her face. She looked like a teenager. “Smells almost as good as you,” she said.
Blushing all the way to his bare forearms, Ting Ting said, “She like to smell me.”
“I think you smell pretty good myself,” I said.
Eaglet said, “He’s taken,” and laughed, but there was a lot of gravel in the laugh.
The coffee was strong enough to dissolve the cup, and I swallowed twice and felt my pupils expand. “You guys need to think about Stinky.”
Eaglet said, “Fuck him,” and Ting Ting gave her a quick, startled glance.
“He tried to kill me a few weeks ago,” I said, and hearing the words stopped me in my tracks. “Ting Ting,” I said. “Did you meet the person he hired?”
Ting Ting looked from me to Eaglet and back again, and a dusky flush bloomed on his cheekbones. Eaglet gave him a tiny nod, and he said, “Did.”
“Who was it?”
“Girl,” he said shyly. He swallowed. “Name Debbie.”
I sat there as Eaglet began to laugh, a much merrier laugh than the last one. It sounded innocent, young, and carefree.
“She likes you, our little Debbie does,” she said. She wiped her eyes. “Missed you twice, didn’t she?”
I smiled back at her, but all I could think of was what she’d said about Bones: He’s got cold air around him all the time, and it made me wonder whether Ting Ting hadn’t been better off with Stinky. People who kill people for a living, no matter how well they imitate humanity, are different from people who don’t.
“When he goes after you, Stinky’s not going to send someone soft-hearted,” I said, and a surge of malice made me add, “He’s going to send someone like you.”
She shrugged it off. “Probably more experienced but with less talent.”
“Well, here’s the issue. When one person gets shot at, sometimes other people get killed.”
Ting Ting said, “I talk to Mr. Stinky. I feeling bad already.”
“No,” Eaglet said.
“I said I talk to Mr. Stinky,” Ting Ting said, with some muscle in his tone. “You are not telling me no.”
I said, “I’d do it on the phone if I were you.”
The look I got from Ting Ting made me remember his left foot. “Mr. Stinky not going to hurt me. Mr. Stinky love me.”
I said, calmingly, “He’s pretty upset.”
“Maybe,” Eaglet said to me, her eyes narrow, “you’re the one he wants to kill.”
“Too,” I said. “He wants to kill me, too.”
“You wrong,” Ting Ting said. “You both wrong. Everything okay. Mr. Stinky, Mr. Stinky want me to be happy.”
“Fine,” I said. “But on the phone, okay?”
I’d been operating on an assumption, something I try not to do. In my one and only straight job, selling overpriced shoes in a shop that catered to teens—a job I’d quit right after I met Herbie—my boss had asked me why I’d done something, and I’d said, “Well, I assumed—” And he had pointed a tutorial finger toward the ceiling and said, “Assume makes an ass of U and me,” with the tamped-down certainty of someone reciting a mantra or explaining why he put his faith in one idiot candidate instead of another. In non-straight life, I’d learned a variant on my boss’s credo: assumptions cannot only make an ass of you and me; they can also make either or both of us dead.
So even though I was already back on the Valley side of the hill when I made up my mind to try to verify my assumption, I decided to take the trip anyway. It required the long, curving drive through Malibu Canyon, but I figured I’d use the time to organize my thoughts. When that failed, I pulled out the phone, in flagrant violation of the vehicular laws of Southern California, and did some checking in.
“We’re just sitting here,” Anime said. Her mouth was full. “We both skipped today. Lilli is taking aspirin like it’s popcorn.”
“Am not,” Lilli said in the background.
“So many people get shot,” Anime said. “Hold on.” I listened to her chew for a moment and then heard a gulp that sounded like a sinkhole opening. “We’re already at almost a hundred, and that’s just the day before yesterday, but a lot of them are the kinds you told us to skip.”
“I should have told you,” I said. After all, Wattles had said at Bitsy’s that the victim had been shot three days earlier. “Go back between five and seven days ago.”
“Lilli will get on it when she’s not popping pills. Hey, we looked at your friend’s computer?”
“Is that a question?”
“We looked at your friend’s computer, period. It’s like it’s still in the store even though it’s four years old. Almost nothing on it. He uses Internet Explorer, if you can believe that, but the browsing history is almost empty. There’s an email account that needs a password, and that seems to be the only place he ever went.”
“Probably what he used to send you the Viagra ads.”
“Gee, you really think so?” she said, and I could almost hear her eyes rolling. “We never even thought of that. And Windows history is mostly Hearts and Spider Solitaire.”
I thought back to those moments I’d spent on Wattles’s lumpy couch, waiting to learn my fate, and got just a touch angry at the idea he’d let me sit there sweating while he was putting a red eight on a black nine.
“Here’s some good news,” Anime continued. “Monty is feeling better and your friend Doc says he’s got your rainbows, whatever that means.”
I heard Lilli say, “Omigod, look at this one,” and I hung up so Anime could get a look at whatever atrocity had just streamed into that fourteen-year-old girl’s bedroom. Ahh, technology.
The Malibu tunnel was coming up, a black hole for cellular reception, so I dropped the phone into my lap and coasted through, and when I came out on the other side, there was a sheriff’s big black-and-white tucked partway into the chaparral, just waiting to bust a ticket on someone. If I had DiGaudio with me, I thought, he’d force me to pull over so he could chew out the cop. If you’re looking to ticket cell phone users, why do it at the end of a tunnel?
The thought of DiGaudio brought an unexpected twinge. There are people, whether you like them or not, whom you have to credit for being absolutely and exclusively who they seem to be. If DiGaudio were in a coloring book, he’d require only one crayon, LAPD blue. He wasn’t a crook, he wasn’t a thug, he wasn’t even much of a bully, in spite of my long-held conviction that most cops were bullies in high school. DiGaudio was a cop who cared about the job, a cop who’d become a cop for the right reasons.
I never would have believed it, but I was going to miss him.
“Your friend is doing nicely,” Doc said, without bothering with hello. “Your rainbows are here, the full hundred. You owe me seventeen hundred bucks.”
I said, “Whoa.”
“If you’d wanted something more current, Roofies or something, I could have gotten you an Indian kno
ckoff. But with Tuinal, the Indian knockoff is all there is these days, and they’re using it to get all those discounts back.”
“I suppose that’s a kind of justice.”
“Monty, or whatever his real name is, will be ready to go home day after tomorrow.”
“So the girls said. He discussed calculus with you yet?”
“He’s stronger on integral than he is on differential.”
“Boy, I noticed that myself,” I said. “I had to bite my tongue to keep from laughing.”
“Seventeen hundred,” Doc said. “And another four hundred for the blood, and I’ll be totaling up the rest of the charges later today.” There was a red car in my rear-view mirror, and in spite of my conviction that no one would ever use a red car to tail anyone, I pulled over and let him pass. Just as I was about to pull back on, I saw the cherry lights, and I waited for the sheriff to pass me, too. You don’t break the law in a red car, either.
When I was moving again, I said, “Doc, with a clientele that’s pretty much all crooks, does anyone ever stiff you?”
The silence stretched out until I said, “Well, it’s a good thing the girls have the money,” and hung up.
Louie didn’t say hello either. Instead, he said, “How’d you get our girl so pissed off?”
“I presume you mean Eaglet.” The road was straightening out, and I’d twice caught a glimpse, between the hills, of the flat blue sheet of the Pacific. “I told her and Ting Ting that they were going to have to talk to Stinky.”
“Well, she’s not going to show up today, that’s how pissed off she is.”
I passed the Sheriff as he took that slow, six-testicle John Wayne walk all cops use, pacing off the distance from his black-and-white to the driver’s door on the red car, like he was on his way to the OK Corral. “Have you got someone else?”
“Yeah, but he’ll be a little while getting there. Debbie will stay for a couple extra hours until he makes it. Try not to get any more people mad at you, these folks don’t grow on trees. You know, if it wasn’t for Ronnie, I think old Debbie would make a move on you.”
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