by Jason Ridler
“No,” Alicia said. “Please stay.” She turned to the grave crew and spoke low in their mother tongue. “Gentlemen, I apologize for the delay, but I am and old lady and every step is a hard one, especially in a place I don’t wish to visit too soon.” They laughed. The old gal was charming as ever.
Her cane tapped the coffin. “Hello, Edgar. About time you gave up, you old crow.” She perked an eyebrow at me. “Is it true? He actually—”
“—Slipped on a bar of soap in the shower.” I crossed my heart. “Scout’s honor.” Not that I’d ever set foot in the Scouts. By the time I was old enough to join, I’d been with the Electric Magic Circus for four years and would have had badges in knife throwing, fire eating, and playing doctor with a bearded lady.
Her face rumpled. “Landed on his head?”
“On the edge of the grand Belgian tub in Vance Manor. Might as well have been hit with an anvil.”
“You don’t sound despondent, James.”
“There is no one path through grief, Alicia, though we meet at the same destination.”
Her lips pursed. “The Lost Passage of Virgil? Well, I’m almost impressed, coming from a commoner.”
I chuckled. “I have a great local library.”
She voided the breath from her nose so curtly I half-expected the grass to blacken at her sandaled feet. “I am already tired of you, James. I will take what’s my due. You will bear witness, and we will all walk away thinking this was a wonderful time.” Her rictus made Father Creedy grunt.
“No,” I said. “You won’t.”
“Spare me the empty heroics. They fit you worse than this ridiculous outfit.”
“Not heroics, Alicia. Just facts. Go ahead. Take your due. If you can.” I cupped my hands in front of my balls. “I’ll wait.”
She grimaced, tapped her cane once, and a shudder ran through the desiccated grass.
I coughed. “Did you pass gas? I thought people of your uncommon heritage were classier than that.”
She sneered. “So, Edgar wasn’t bragging. He managed to train a stray from the common heap to resist being charmed.”
“By magic, anyway,” I said. “Now, if you want to grab dinner and try buttering me up with kind words and stories, I might be moved.” My smiled dropped. “But even you don’t have the goods to make me move.”
She sighed as Father Creedy and the two grave diggers stiffened and their eyes went white. Alicia spoke in the tongue of ancient Macedon, and all three men walked with determination to the casket. They rattled and shook and tried to crack open Edgar’s coffin.
“That’s a hell of a racket for a sanctuary,” I said.
Alicia shushed me. “Unless you wish to join him.”
“Not at all,” I said, hands still across my balls. “It’s just that there’s a four o’clock funeral and the procession is heading toward us. And Edgar’s locks and chains are charmed to be stronger than a cooler in a casino. He knew you’d be coming, Alicia. Because once Edgar’s in the hole, covered in sacred ground, even you don’t have the mojo to rip out his skull.”
Creedy’s hand clasped my throat, cutting off my soliloquy.
“Silence, dilettante,” Alicia said, cane across her shoulder, about to slug my head into left field. As the marionette formerly known as Father Creedy lifted me off the ground, I pointed to the distance. In a cul de sac, a procession of limos were circling the parking area.
My knees hit grass, adding another stain to my already tortured suit, and I sucked in air. The rattling of chains stopped. All three marionettes went on standby. The handle of the cane caught my chin and dragged up until I stood. She stared me down. The black shades had fallen down her nose, and there were the wild black eyes of Alicia Price, one of the most dangerous sorcerers still living on the Coast. “You were always a pretender in our world, James. Low trash brought into the Louvre because Edgar had a sense of humor. But I must admit a grudging sense of pride that you tendered your master this well. And that you could resist my charms.”
Her backhanded compliment didn’t register, but one word did.
Master.
My short-and-curlies bristled at the word. “He’s not my master. Not anymore. I quit of my own volition. I’m just doing a dead man a favor. My life is mine, all mine, and no one else’s.”
“Of course it is, dearie.” She laughed, then lifted my chin higher. “I heard about your new occupation. Rooting through trash, solving tiny problems for tiny people. It would be adorable if you weren’t so pathetic.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“And I know Edgar left you nothing. Which is exactly how he found you. A pure piece of American nothing.”
I smiled. “I’d be happy to waive my retainer if you’d like me to help you hunt for your lost sense of decency.”
The cane jabbed my sternum hard enough to shut my yap. “You’re a hack, James Brimstone. I’m glad to know you’ll die in obscurity, a failed heir to a grand magician.” She tapped the cane again. There was the same “whoosh” of power, and the three men stood by me, eyes back to normal as they watched me fall on my ass. She turned her back on me and strutted off through the headstones. “Next time we meet, it will take more than sacred ground to stop me from sending you into Oblivion.”
I rubbed my chin. The coffin’s padlocks at eye level were black as a dead witch’s heart.
The grave hands spoke in worried Spanish.
“Whoa, man,” Chip said, all pretense of Irishness gone, rubbing his right wrist. “Whoa, man, I think I just had a déjà vu or something.”
“Probably sunstroke, Chip. Might as well scram. I’ll drop off your cut next time I’m at the diner.”
Chip thanked me, reminded me of his need for a rec letter, and started stripping out of his priest uniform even as he walked away. Actors, heads, and freaks might as well come from the same tribe.
Chip out of sight, I nodded to the grave crew. They lowered the casket into the hole, filled and packed it hard enough that it would take the act of an Elder God to drag that casket from the ground.
To the world, Edgar Vance was dead.
Just as Edgar wanted it to be.
I waited, relieved and terrified that he’d be watching, ready to give me notes and correct my awful failures and mistakes. But Edgar wasn’t under the LA sun. He wasn’t in the ground. And if he stuck to his promise, in exchange for this sting, I would never, ever see him again. The price of freedom from his backhand, his temper, his abuse, his nightmare tutelage, was this last lie. I’d done my part. I was free.
When they were done patting the earth over that mannequin-filled coffin, I said Ciao and headed for the parking lot.
Lilith, my electric-blue Dodge Dart Sedan, my pride and joy for a decade, had carted me through thick and thin. An ex-girlfriend had named her Lilith because I apparently enjoyed that car more than her company.
When I saw her, my heart sank.
Lilith had been punched in the face.
Two cracks in the windshield looked like an orgy of swastikas drawn by speed freaks with a switchblade. A parting gift from Alicia Price.
I slinked into the front seat, closed the door, and rolled down the window. The ghostly aroma of old Chesterfields made my lungs hunger for something I’d quit, so I hit the ignition and revved her up.
“Don’t worry,” I said to Lilith, “I’ll get you fixed up good as new, just as soon as I get a case . . . to pay off this funeral . . . and rent . . . and . . .” I took one look in the rearview mirror at my powder blue tuxedo, stained brown, green and wet. “And it looks like this one’s a keeper.”
I stuck my head out the window, drove onto the main drag, and headed home, afternoon air running through my hair and cooling off my mind. My smile grew.
After all, things could always be worse.
Thirty minutes later, I drove down Alameda St. and proved myself right. Queen Bee was waiting for me outside the Thump & Grind Burlesque Club, dressed up like a debutante stepping out at fif
ty-five, mighty arms crossed across her moderate bosom, every ounce of her looking like well-manicured trouble.
She scowled at the state of Lilith, then one fingernail curled her intent.
We were having a landlord/tenant meeting in the parking lot, it seemed. That gave me hope. A public space meant she wouldn’t kill me.
CHAPTER 3
“LATE, BRIMSTONE.”
Bee’s accent is what we call a Mid-Atlantic, a phony regional cadence that American actors and actresses affected to sound like an affluent and well-read Yankee from Connecticut that had gone to boarding school in Oxford. It was meant to convey authority, but it reminded me of Vaudeville barkers who joined the Electric Magic Circus. Both had the timber of immediacy, but nine out of ten folks used it with all the authenticity of a three-dollar bill.
Bee was not one of them.
I closed Lilith’s door and kept my head low in deference to the woman who controlled my living affairs. “Now, Bee, you know I had a funeral to arrange.”
“Then why are you dressed like some longhair kid about to lose his innocence in the back of his daddy’s Ford?”
“Best I could afford, under the duress of circumstance.”
“The plight of the cheap bastard again?”
Behind Bee, the Thump & Grind Review appeared a giant square bunker of sin, decked out in circus colors and a thousand blinking lights that created the art deco outline of two ample burlesque dancers bumping their grinds alone and with each other. Or at least that would be the scene once the sun dropped and provided a canvas of darkness. “Thanks, Bee.” I walked on as if exchanging pleasantries with a neighbor.
She sidestepped until she blocked my way and poked my chest, and I realized just how much residual pain Alicia and her marionettes had delivered. “OW!”
“You know the deal, Brimstone. Rent for space. No rent. No space. I’m not running some communist charity center.”
My dirty fingers massaged knots in my chest. “God, Bee, I just buried a friend today. Any chance for a respite on account of grief?”
She laughed, hard and sharp. “You want mercy, Brimstone, find a church. You said weekly payments would be forthcoming for the office and cot.”
“I did.”
“That was four weeks ago, without a single payment—”
“How about complimentary bouncer services for tonight?”
She snickered. “You look about as threatening as a deserter from the Salvation Army.”
“How about tomorrow?”
“How about you pay me.”
Down the trash filled gutters of Alameda, a thin shadow walked toward us, then turned hard to the right, heading towards the back entrance of the Thump & Grind. I watched it from the periphery of my vision, with dead-set eyes on Bee. I sighed. “You’re right, Bee. Tonight is fair. Let me just scrounge what I can from my couch.”
She crossed her arms and tilted her head, one pink heel stabbing the concrete. “Two dollars.”
“You went in without my permission?”
“My house, my rules. You need real money, and it ain’t there. Unless you got collateral?”
The shadowy finger reached the edge of the building, then vanished.
Shoot.
I angled around her, an angel’s hair of distance between my neck and her reach. I tossed Lilith’s keys in the air and Bee caught them like a bullet. “Of course I do. I just need to talk to my new client.”
“Client?”
“Just you wait here with Lilith a minute.” I pivoted on my heels like a dancing fool, just to be out of her reach. “I will be back before you can blink.”
“Good luck, Brimstone,” she said as I ran toward some stranger and prayed to God that it was, in fact, a client. More than likely it was more trouble. Maybe Alicia Price, back to take my brain, or one of her henchmen, or any number of freaked-out kids on a bad trip, wandering away from the strip and into Huntington Park. I just hoped they weren’t black, for their own sake. The worst of LA was on display lately. Since the Watts Riots five years ago, the segregation lines of Alemeda Street and Slauson Avenue were defended angrily by the residents of this mostly white working class ‘hood. I’d found myself in two fights in the last two months, pulling some hicks or freaked out white trash off a black kid who had done nothing wrong. Each time, the victim ran, not knowing if I was friend or foe, and good God I couldn’t blame him. Didn’t we fight a war against Arian shithooks? Sometimes this country’s love of self-delusion and double-standards was enough to make me spit
Whoever it was, they were heading for my office door. I hustled faster, hoping Lilith wouldn’t be sold for parts before I was done, each step making me wish I could tear off this blue nightmare suit and have Levis or chinos or anything else on that didn’t stink of grave dirt and desperation.
I turned the corner. Two dancers, Lace and Magenta, were in their street clothes, hair long and straight down their backs, beautiful without the lashes and curls, each hugging books to their bosom.
“You’re not listening. I’m telling you, the Vietnam War isn’t meant to end. It’s just meant to distract us,” Magenta said, tapping her cigarette ash. “Keep us glued to the TV screen so we don’t see that the fix is in.”
Lace laughed, then pushed her auburn locks behind one ear. “You think everything is a conspiracy, Genta. What’s next, the Pyramids were built by aliens?”
“Don’t laugh! There’s a great book on it—Hey, James.”
I tipped an imaginary hat, then looked around. The stranger who was buying me time was nowhere. “Ladies, did you see somebody back here?”
“You’re the detective,” Lace said, cocking her head to the side. “You tell us.”
I smiled. “Thin, possibly ninety pounds of fast-moving darkness, hood on despite the burning sun. The kind of hustle you find with the desperate and the damned.”
Lace gave me a golf clap. “Bravo. Look out, Hollywood, a new private dick is in town.”
Tension eased from the neck muscles I hadn’t noticed were flexed. Alicia Price would have used these two to rip out my ribs, if she was here. “Where’d our shadow go?”
Magenta took a drag, pointed at the rear service door, a battleship gray stain on the back of baked red bricks. “She’s a slip of a thing, some scrawny runaway who probably dreams of being the next Raquel Welsh.”
“Or maybe your first client, Sherlock,” Lace said.
Bidding the two adieu, I strode to the back door.
Inside, the hi-fi at the front of the Thump & Grind was blasting loud enough that I could hear Merle Haggard singing about a prisoner wanting one last song before he sat on old Sparky. The cooking crew had already started the deep friars bubbling, and the sticky air was dusted with the powdery aroma of facial make up and artificial flowers that made the lady’s dressing room springtime fresh all year long.
The shadow sat on the floor, back to my office door, hugging knees no bigger than a mackintosh. The door closed behind me and my Night Eyes snapped on quicker than a hiccup. In the dark of the hall, I saw her.
Rail-thin designer jeans, new sandals with manicured toes. No wafting stink of sleeping in filthy shacks or groovy quarters. No Indian beads or headband. Just the faux-floral bouquet of ladies’ shampoo. This was no wayward Merry Prankster abandoned by her guru, needing to be deprogrammed from life on the commune. The hood was so low I couldn’t make out her face, a well-worn jersey from someone three-times her size, the kind Midwest kids wear to college football games. So she wasn’t local. Nor was whoever had either accompanied or dragged her to LA.
“Ma’am?”
She didn’t dart down the hall, which is just as well. Bee always wiped the floors to collect the loose change people drop as they were handing over their wages for a private dance. She’d skid herself into a coma.
“Ma’am? Can I help you?”
She gripped herself tighter, then a voice sang out that was honey and broken glass. “I’m looking for a place.”
There�
�s a difference between walking slow, and walking safe. I walked on my heels, approaching her until I tapped that invisible line created by our old ape ancestors to demarcate a safe distance to run. She shivered, and I stepped back, slid my body down the opposite side of the wall so that I was eye level with the darkness of her hood. “Well, this is certainly a place.”
She unclenched the grip she had on her thin, tanned wrist. Tremors caused her fingers to dance as she reached into the kangaroo pocket of her sweatshirt. My ape brain screamed to get distance, but if she’d come armed and dangerous, at least I’d go out demonstrating I truly could do Edgar’s greatest feat: catching a bullet. She drew her hand back into the darkness of the corridor. Something rumpled, like hastily made Christmas gift, sat in her lap.
She held the crumpled newspaper before her like a shield. The LA Free Press shook as if she were hit with polio. Her voice was soft and scared. “Is this the Odd Job Squad?”
Behind her was the door to my office, a plain brown number with no identifying marks to let you know the former janitor’s closet and shower was the headquarters for LA’s new detective, the fresh smell of ammonia provided for free.
A padlock clutched the knob. Thanks, Bee.
I needed a shower, a shave, a shine, a shit and a better set of clothes . . . but that required a client.
“Indeed it is.” I sat with my legs crossed and on the floor. She shuddered a little at the closeness of my wingtips, but didn’t recoil. Good. Bad trips are hard to deal with, and for all I knew she was a Laguna princess who’d taken some Grateful Dead acid and was convinced red ants were in her bloodstream, or that her mouth was made of silver and she could only drink mercury. “I take it you need a hand?”
She gripped herself and the paper. “The police won’t believe me.”
Well, that was a bit of good luck. LA’s finest had never been friends of mine, and among my few policies was not dealing with cases that brought them out of their Crown Vicks or doughnut shops. “That’s just fine by me. Do you have a name?”
“Nico.” The name fell from the darkness just as soft as flower petals. Given her accent, I bet her real name was Betsy or Amy or Linda, probably Minneapolis by way of Chicago, the “oh” sound having softened some in her transition to LA, where accents are either dead or ridiculous.
