Norman Wishert, cops say he was a loan shark
Eladio (cool name!) Amador (even cooler!!!), a mechanic who chopped cars to send to Mexico
“Austin Willie,” real name William Estes, gambler banned from practically every casino in the world
Yoo-Mi Song (Anime says should be Song Yoo-Mi), ran a string of bars in K-town that were getting busted for hooking. Seriously, you-me????? LOL
Manny, real name Manfred, Spoon (not cool name!), no details but “well known to police,” the papers say. Duh. With a name like that, what was he supposed to do? Couldn’t run for office. Vote for Manfred? I don’t think so.
“Austin Willie,” I said the moment she answered. “Think he got that from Willie Nelson?”
“From who?” Anime said.
“I give up,” I said. “The things your generation has been denied.”
“We’ve got computers,” she said. “You guys had like electric frying pans and hammers and stuff.”
“Get me more on Austin Willie. All you can. And one more thing, fast as you can do it. I’ve got someone on my own list who’s using an alias and I need a real name.”
“Better be an unusual name.”
“It’s not that common.” I gave her the name. “Start with IMDb, the Internet Movie Database,” I said. “And I want the mother’s name, too. Maybe a birth certificate.”
“Birth certificates have gotten pretty tough,” she said. “Since 9/11, those things are like twelve layers deep.”
I said, “On 9/11, you were one year old.”
“Everything’s present tense online,” she said. “Happens every day, as far as I’m concerned. Anyway, if I can find a birth town I can probably find a birth announcement and that’ll have the parents’ married name and then I can find a wedding announcement and that’ll have the wife’s maiden name.”
“Jesus,” I said. “Is my money safe?”
“As long as we like you.”
“And you do?”
“Lilli, do we like him?”
I heard Lilli say, “But of course,” in a Dracula accent and Anime said, “You might want to keep your balance under ten thousand.”
“I need all of this soon,” I said. “I don’t want anyone else to get killed.”
Louie struck out.
“All I know is what I already told you,” he said. “The guy who gave it to me isn’t answering the phone, and he only went there once, like anybody would go more than that. So it’s what I said. Bones has a view of Hollywood Forever and he lives in a crappy apartment-house.”
It sounded like a total waste of time until I got there. Hollywood Forever is bordered by Santa Monica Boulevard on the north, Gower on the west, and Van Ness to the east, respectively. To the south it butts right up against Paramount, as Louie had told me, so that left me with only three streets. Santa Monica Boulevard was all businesses, and the other two were a mixture, with a few post-production facilities that had fastened themselves limpet-like to Paramount. The only apartment houses of any description that had a direct view of Rudolf Valentino’s final resting place were clustered together on the east side of Van Ness.
Four buildings, to be precise, lined up like giant bricks, narrow end facing the street. Faded aqua and watermelon and plum over stucco, once probably eye-catching, flat-roofed, two stories, with louvered windows that suggested no air conditioning. Maybe twelve, fourteen units in each. I drove by twice, the heavy late-afternoon traffic allowing me to take my time. It was ideal; I could look practically as long as I wanted without standing out.
No driveways, which probably meant that there was a back entrance. I made a right on Santa Monica and another on the first street to the east, and there it was, a single driveway behind the apartment buildings, but there were four more behind the ones I’d seen, making eight buildings in all, the complex running the full distance between the two streets. Eight buildings times fourteen apartments gave me too high a number to go from one to the other knocking on doors, even using my well-creased issue of Watchtower.
At the far end of the driveway, in a doleful patch of scrub grass and some of those awful flowers that look like big pompoms or the front ends of poodles, a group of Hispanic kids were playing noisily and in Spanish, trying to avoid a big sprinkler pipe standing in the middle of the grass. I parked in someone’s spot, grabbed the paper bag I’d picked up at Doc’s, and got out of the car. I was getting some attention from the kids because, parking being what it was in that area, those spaces were probably defended with violence when necessary.
The game, which had involved a lot of pushing and falling down, plus some crying, frittered to an end as I approached. Ten brown eyes watched me come, their owners ranging in age from five to ten or eleven. They backed up and sidled a little closer together as I neared them.
“Hey,” I said.
No one said a word, and in a couple of faces I could practically see the words Never talk to strangers zip through their heads, probably in Spanish.
“Habla Inglés?” I asked.
One of them, a bigger girl, said, “No,” and the quicker-witted ones laughed, since the word is the same in both languages.
“I’m looking for a friend,” I said. One of the little ones began to pick his nose with total concentration, but the others just looked at me. “Un amigo de, uh, me,” I said, pointing to myself. “Un hombre.”
Now a couple of the kids were snickering, and I mean openly, not politely behind their hands.
“Es, uhhh, big,” I said, holding my hand higher than my own head. “Y muy, oh, boy, thin.” I mimed a very narrow person, my hands close together.
“Flaco,” one kid said helpfully, and another said, more or less in English, “Eskinny.”
“Yes,” I said, “Si. Eskinny, I mean flaco. Y, uh, vestido?” I tugged at my shirt as I said the word, and two kids nodded. “Es, es, uh, negro.” No one said anything, but a couple of the kids’ eyes went watchful.
“Looks, um, like this,” I said, having failed to find the translation, and I raised my shoulders almost to my ears. “And, uh, y ojos azul. Azules?”
The littlest kid, the one who’d been picking his nose, said, “El monstro,” and a girl promptly kicked him in the thigh, and he started to cry. One of the other kids gave me big honest eyes, pumped full of childish innocence, and said, “No, mister. Nobody like that here.”
I said, “Fine, sorry to bother you,” and the girl who’d spoken first said, in unaccented English, “No problem,” and I turned to go back to my car, seeing out of the corner of my eye one of the boys race off toward the buildings on the left. I gave him about fifteen seconds to get where he was going and then turned and charged after him, the paper bag in my hand making a chittering sound, like a maraca. The kids saw me coming and emitted a unison scream so high it probably would have brought rain if it had been cloudy, but by the time it trailed off into a babble of high voices and two languages, I was around the corner and I saw the boy on the second story, standing in front of a door and looking down at me with huge eyes.
I waved him away from the door he’d just knocked on, taking the stairs three at a time, and as I hit the walkway that ran in front of the second-floor doors, the one he’d been standing in front of opened inward, and I dove at it, the boy scurrying backward and bumping his back hard against the iron railing. The door, closing again now, hit me on the shoulder, but I shoved my way through and saw Bones backing away from me, the shoulders bunched even higher, looking even tighter, his hands slapping at his pockets. I was reaching for the Glock when I heard what he was saying.
“Please don’t hit me, don’t hit me, don’t hit me, please don’t—” He ran out of pockets and his legs bumped the edge of the couch behind him. He stopped, his lips still saying the words although he’d run out of voice, his hands swinging like pendulums at his sides.
I yanked the door closed, just missing the boy’s nose. Bones jumped at the sound, the eyes with their strange blue whites wide, wide open. He said a
gain, “Don’t hit me.” He licked his lips and looked all around the room, as though he’d never seen it before.
I said, “I’m not going to hit you, Bones.” Pushing the cheap locking button in the center of the doorknob and throwing the chain, I leaned against the door, fighting for breath.
“I know you,” Bones said. There was a greasy sheen to his face, and from the smell of him it was clear he hadn’t showered in many days. “I saw you.”
“Last night, right?”
His eyes slid past me to the wall and scanned it for information, and his lips formed a few voiceless syllables before he said, “With Wattles.” He squinted into the past and added, “Girl.”
“Yeah, Wattles, girl. Sit down, sit down.”
He turned and looked behind him, which required him to twist his entire torso and seemed to hurt. Then, very gently, he lowered himself onto the couch. He moved as carefully as a glass figurine that had suddenly come to life and found itself on a very high, very narrow shelf above a stone floor. He bent his knees to lower himself and spread his fingers wide on the cushions, and this time I did bring the Glock out, thinking he might be digging for a gun, but all he did was push his hands carefully into the couch and use them to take most of his weight as he eased his long body into a sitting position. When he was all the way down he sighed as though he’d crossed a chasm on a tightrope and rested his hands in his lap.
“You don’t remember me from last night?” I said.
He said, “You?” He looked at the gun in my hand and pulled his head back as though he’d just registered it.
“Who sent you?”
He leaned against the cushions behind him and closed his eyes. “I missed.”
“Not by much.”
He brought his hands up in front of him, and I watched them tremble. “My hands shook. I’da got you but my hands shook.”
“Really,” I said. “Just out of curiosity, what happens if I haul off and hit you?”
“My bones break.” The eyes were moving beneath the closed lids, as though he were reading something written on them.
“Why’s that?”
“Disease,” he said. “Osteogenesis imperfecta. Means my bones break easy. I can break an arm lifting something that’s too heavy.”
“Never heard of it. What about gun recoil?”
“Have to be careful.” He opened his eyes and blinked slowly. “Shoot two-handed, small caliber.”
“Still. Why do something that could break your wrist?”
“Growing up,” he said. “When kids know your bones break, they break them. Nasty little fuckers, kids.”
“So you carried a gun?”
“I got a knife in fourth grade. No gun until high school.” His eyes went to the ceiling and stayed there, as though he were expecting it to clear away any moment and let the sun shine in.
While he was occupied, or whatever he was, I looked around the apartment, which had been efficiently darkened by tinfoil taped over the windows. Basically two rooms: out front, the hybrid space common to so many cheap apartments in which the living room is separated from the clutter and smells of the kitchen only by a chest-high counter that—voila!—becomes a dining room with the addition of a couple of stools, in this case stools with pillows plumped onto the seats; and, in the back, a bedroom, a dim slice of which was visible through the door in front of me, a bathroom certainly attached to it.
The floors were very thickly, even spongily, carpeted, and other than the carpet nothing at all was underfoot: nothing to trip over, nothing to slip on. Over and above Bones’s body odor, the place smelled of old socks with a high, raggedy note of fried fat. The temperature was in the high eighties, the air completely still.
“So you don’t like kids,” I said. There were two cheap overstuffed armchairs, no hard edges, against the wall behind me, and I pulled one up to the table in front of the couch and sat. The table was wood, and bubble-wrap, perhaps two inches thick, had been taped all the way around its edges. I rattled the bag a little and put it on the table, and his eyes snapped to it.
“No. Little shits, all of them.”
“Interesting effect,” I said, indicating the bubble-wrap. He was still looking at the bag, and when he pulled his eyes off it, I could almost hear the sound of a suction cup being pulled free. He glanced at the bubble-wrap and shook his head a very little, as though he wanted to clear it. When his chin moved to either side, his shoulders went with it and his eyes ricocheted around the apartment. His pupils, surrounded by the indigo whites and the ale-brown irises, were pinholes.
I said, “What are you looking for?”
“Oh,” he said, and he ducked his head in a gesture that I could only read as shyness. “Nobody ever comes over.” He looked doubtfully at the tinfoiled windows behind me. “The place looks different when somebody else is seeing it.”
Whatever I’d expected, this wasn’t it, and before I could stop myself, I’d said automatically, “I think it’s nice.”
Something odd happened to Bones’s mouth: the corners pulled outward, as though he was going bare his teeth, but then it went back to normal. It might have been meant as a smile. He said, focused again on the bag, “Thank you.”
“Really,” I said helplessly, locked in my mother’s polite mode. “I like it. Carpeting’s great.”
“I can fall down,” he said, “without breaking anything.”
“See?” I was desperate. “Umm, form follows function and all that. So, not to change the subject, you don’t like kids, but the kids outside, they—”
“Los Niños,” he said. The smile, if that was what it had been, was gone. “I pay them. They like money.”
“So if you hate kids so much, why did you shoot at the adults first, last night?”
“Bigger,” he said. “Easier to hit. And I figured you had the guns. Thought I could put you down and come in close to get the kids.” He must have seen something in my eyes because he gave a rigid little shrug and said, “Hey. You asked.”
I had to look away. I was examining the rest of the room, bubble-wrap taped to every corner, waiting for my heartbeat to slow. He swallowed loudly enough for me to hear him, and I realized I had picked up the gun in my lap.
As long as I was holding it, I let the barrel drift toward him. When I met his gaze he closed his eyes.
“Was it Wattles who sent you?”
Now he crossed his arms. With his eyes squeezed shut, he said, “Please don’t hit me. Don’t shoot me.”
“Why would Wattles send you?”
Nothing.
“Did Wattles send you?”
He ducked his head, giving me a look at hair that looked like fat could be squeezed from it. “I can’t tell you.”
Putting the gun back in my lap, I picked up the bag and shook it. The rattling sound opened his eyes.
“Wattles,” I said, but I might as well not have been there. As far as he was concerned, the bag was floating in mid-air all by itself. I opened it and pulled out the white plastic container.
His jaw dropped. He leaned forward with a grunt, spine rigid, and said, “That’s ‘bows.”
“Rainbows it is,” I said. I gave the container a quick little up-and-down for the sound effect.
“A whole jar?” he said in the voice of someone who has just recognized the Virgin Mary in a piece of toast.
“Yeah. Hundred of them.”
“I’ve never—” He wiped his chin with the back of his hand, his eyes not leaving the container. “I’ve never seen a whole jar before.”
“Wattles,” I said.
“Rainbows,” he said.
I fumbled with the adult-proof cap while Bones fidgeted. By the time I had it off, only to confront an internal seal of that odd aluminum foil that’s elastic enough to push to the bottom of the bottle without its breaking, he was muttering. I used my teeth on the foil like I always do, and shook some into the palm of my hand: at a glance, a dozen. “How many of these have you taken at once?”
“Twelve?” he said, looking at my hand.
I dropped three on the table and handed him the rest. He was swallowing by the time I said, “Water?”
He swallowed again, as though one of the gelcaps had stuck in his throat, emitted a sort of kack sound to clear it, swallowed again, and released a tremendous sigh. Then he sat back, and said, “Wattles.”
“Why did he send you?” I asked again.
Bones had closed his eyes again, very, very slowly, and I had the feeling he was preparing himself for the gradual change in climate, the very beginning of the capsules’ effect sliding in, like a cooling trend, beneath the heat and chatter in his mind. I was about to ask again when he said, “Wanted them dead.”
“Why?”
His eyes opened halfway and went to the pill container. “Scared. Thought someone would …”
“Would.”
“… would come up the chain. Kill him.”
“Who? Who would come up the chain?”
“Up the chain,” he said. “People who were pissed about the hit.”
“Me, too? He wanted me dead?”
He did that tortuous head-shake, the shoulders moving with it, and I realized that at some point in his past, his upper vertebrae had been fused. “Didn’t know you’d be there.”
“Who else does he want dead?”
He pressed his lips together like a child with a secret he won’t tell.
“Tell me, or I’m leaving. With all the rainbows.”
He looked at the three capsules on the table, orange on one end, blue on the other, a dirty purple where they overlapped in the middle. I had to admit they were kind of pretty, although I doubted they looked as good to me as they did to Bones. I pushed them toward him, and he tossed them back like jelly beans and dry-swallowed them.
“Kill everybody,” he said. “Everybody in the chain.”
“But not me?”
He shook his head again. “He didn’t say you. He said he was—” He closed his eyes. “Disappointed in you. That’s why he came back. ’Cause you didn’t fix it.”
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