Hot Start

by David Freed

  He asked for my telephone number. I sent it to him.

  MRS. SCHMULOWITZ was in rare form that evening, giving the intensive care nurse a hard time. Days removed from major heart surgery, with her chest sewn back together and tubes everywhere, she was still feisty.

  “What is it with this liquid diet nonsense? Listen, if I don’t start getting some real food around here,” she said, “I’m going full Rambo and, believe me, you don’t want to see that.”

  “Now Mrs. Schmulowitz,” the nurse said, calmly taking her pulse, “you know what Dr. Afridi said.”

  “Dr. Afridi? I hate Dr. Afridi. Look what a mess he’s made of me!”

  “Dr. Afridi saved your life, Mrs. Schmulowitz,” I said. “You don’t hate him. You don’t hate anybody.”

  “OK, you’re right. I don’t hate. All I’m saying is, if Dr. Afridi got hit by a bus, I’d be driving that bus—unless I was driving to the Carnegie Deli to pick up a corned beef sandwich. I’m starving here.”

  The nurse looked up at me and rolled her eyes.

  I leaned down and whispered in Mrs. Schmulowitz’s ear, “Pumpernickel or rye?”

  “Pumpernickel?” she responded loudly. “Who orders corned beef on pumpernickel? Why not ask me if I want it on white bread, with mayo?”

  “OK, rye it is.”

  “No solid food until all her lab work comes back normal,” the nurse said. “Doctor’s orders.”

  We couldn’t wait for her to leave.

  “Now I know how Gandhi felt, all those hunger strikes,” Mrs. Schmulowitz said. “What happened to your schnozzle, bubby?”

  “Some guy hit me.”

  “Did you deserve it?”

  “For once in my life, I didn’t.”

  “How do I look?”

  “You look divine, Mrs. Schmulowitz, as always.”

  She reached up and patted my cheek affectionately, her toothpick arm attached to an IV line, her skin bruised black and blue from too many blood draws. “You don’t have to lie to me, bubby. I know I’m dying.”

  “You’re not dying, Mrs. Schmulowitz. You’re too tough to die.”

  I vowed to bring her a corned beef on rye and promised to return with it first thing in the morning. She blew me a kiss. I waited until she dozed off, then left.

  They say the elderly often know when they’re about to pass on to whatever exists after this life. I hoped Mrs. Schmulowitz was wrong.

  STAN THE postal worker next door wanted to know if he could keep my cat. Permanently.

  “Smart as a whip,” he said when I went over to pick up Kiddiot.

  “Are you sure we’re talking the same cat?”

  The only thing I could conclude was that either Stan was on medication, or the world’s stupidest feline had a split personality of which I was unaware. I muttered something about Kiddiot being as close as I’d ever come to having a son—an intellectually challenged son, but a son nonetheless—and that while I appreciated Stan taking such good care of him while I was away, it was time for us both to be going home. Right then, Kiddiot came rocketing out of Stan’s front door like an orange pelt fired from a howitzer and bolted toward our garage abode.

  “Well,” I said, “looks like that answers that.”

  “How’s your landlady doing?”

  “Hanging in there.”

  “You tell her Stan next door said hello and that I hope she’s feeling better. Mrs. Schmulowitz is OK in my book, even if she is a Democrat.”

  “I’ll pass it along.”

  Upon my return home, I found Kiddiot atop the refrigerator. He was going for the cat cuteness award, looking at me upside down with his paws in the air and purring. He let me pet him for about five seconds before he clawed me, bounded off the fridge, and went racing back out the cat door.

  “Yeah,” I muttered, “I missed you too.”

  The light was blinking on my answering machine—one message. Don’t ask me why I still paid for a landline in the age of mobile communications. I’d given the number to Savannah years before, after we broke up, always hoping she’d call. These days, I kept it out of habit, a tether to the past.

  I pushed “play.”

  THIRTEEN

  While I was causing trouble in Europe, back in Rancho Bonita, animal rights activist and suspected double murderer Dino Birch had found himself an alibi.

  “He got his dates wrong,” his uncle, Gil Carlisle, said on my machine. “Dino was at a massage parlor that night, right when the police say that couple got shot.”

  A massage parlor. Great.

  “Now before you say anything,” Carlisle said when I called him back, “know this: I believe the kid. He was in Afghanistan, Cordell. He’s got PTSD. He gets things turned around sometimes in his head, dates messed up. I just hired him supposedly the best defense attorney on the West Coast. He’s somewhat skeptical though.”

  “Makes two of us.”

  “Why’re you skeptical?”

  “Gil, people who work in massage parlors are about as credible as those who work at carnivals, or people who worked in the Nixon administration. They’ll say anything for a price.”

  “What’re you saying?”

  “I’m saying that if I was a prosecutor, the first thing I’d be wondering is whether the defendant’s oil millionaire uncle paid them to say whatever he wanted them to say. Your attorney’s probably wondering the same thing.”

  “Now you wait just one damn minute,” Carlisle said. “You got no right accusing me of that, Cordell. I got no dog in this fight. Yes, Dino’s kin. I’m not going to deny that, but I don’t buy off people. I’m a businessman with an impeccable reputation. Above board all the way. You should know that about me by now.”

  What I knew but didn’t say was that Carlisle was used to getting his way no matter what it took.

  I didn’t tell him about the thug I’d shot to death in Prague or my meeting with Emil Sokol. I told him nothing about Roy Hollister having freighted call girls around the world in his jet, or about my local congressman’s apparent penchant for illicit sex. None of it disproved the working theory that his nephew, Dino Birch, remained a prime suspect in two murders.

  “I want you to go to that massage parlor before Dino’s attorney tells the police about this,” Carlisle said. “Get ’em to sign a sworn affidavit to the fact that he was there that night.”

  “You’re paying the attorney, Gil. Your attorney has investigators. That’s their job.”

  “I don’t know them. I don’t trust them. I know you. I trust you. I promise, I’ll never ask you for another thing. Please, Cordell. For my family. For Savannah’s memory.”

  Savannah’s memory. In boxing, they call that hitting below the belt. In Buddhism, it’s called creating agitation and imbalance—roadblocks that must be overcome if one is to find harmony between emotion and reason. At that moment, I wanted nothing more to do with my former father-in-law and Dino Birch and whoever had shot the Hollisters. I wanted to forget what I’d done in Prague. But I knew it could never be that easy. One final obligation. One last attempt at surmounting guilt.

  “This massage parlor,” I said, “what’s the address?”

  He gave it to me.

  “And there’s one more thing,” Carlisle said. “You know who Grant Kessler is?”

  “Former actor. Runs Creatures United down in Los Angeles.”

  “That’s him. Well, you might be interested to know he owns a weekend house in Rancho Bonita, about a mile from the Hollisters’ place. I just found that out.”

  “You’re saying Grant Kessler killed the Hollisters?”

  “I’m not saying that at all. I’m just pointing out the fact that he lives close by.”

  “Duly noted,” I said.

  THE NEON sign in the window said “Oriental Bliss, Hot Oil, Always Open,” but there was nothing blissful about the mini mall where the massage parlor was located on Rancho Bonita’s industrial west end. Across the street from Home Depot and next door to an all-you-can-eat Chinese r
estaurant, Oriental Bliss was the last place I would’ve wanted to get naked and have somebody rub hot oil all over my body. My aversion was only reinforced after I entered.

  The reception area was the size of a jail cell. The walls were decorated with photographs of Hong Kong. Cheesy flute music intended to be soothing wafted from a speaker hanging precariously from the ceiling. There were three white plastic lawn chairs for waiting customers. A middle-aged guy in a Jiffy Lube uniform slumped in the middle chair, looking down at his phone. He glanced up at me, then quickly, uncomfortably, looked back down.

  “Here for a massage?” the woman sitting behind a reception counter asked me.

  “Are you the manager?”

  “Why? Is there a problem?”

  She was high mileage and wore plenty of mascara. The only thing Asian about her was the cheap print sarong into which she’d somehow managed to squeeze. The rest of her, ethnically speaking, appeared to be straight from south of the border.

  “No problem,” I said. “I’d just like to speak with the manager.”

  The receptionist looked at me dubiously. “And you are . . . ?”

  “A friend of a friend.”

  Tottering awkwardly on platform heels, she got up and unlocked a side door marked “Private,” using a key attached to a pink scrunchie she kept around her wrist.

  “Wait here,” she said and disappeared inside.

  The Jiffy Lube guy exhaled and shifted anxiously in his chair, still staring at his phone.

  “How ’bout those Dodgers?” I said.

  He pretended like I wasn’t there.

  The door opened. The receptionist reemerged. She told the Jiffy Lube guy that “Chantelle” would be ready to see him shortly and told me to come on back. I followed her down a hallway with stained beige carpet flanked by other doors. One of the doors was open, revealing a tiny room barely big enough to accommodate a massage table and a rickety, freestanding plastic shelf overloaded with bottles of oil and lotion. A shiny silver dome about the size of half an orange, obscuring a hidden video camera, was mounted on the ceiling. Behind one of the closed doors, I heard muffled, carnal-like moaning.

  “Somebody must really be getting into that massage,” I said.

  “Puerco,” the receptionist muttered under her breath— Mexican Spanish for pig—loud enough for me to hear.

  At the end of the hall was yet another door, partially open. This one was also marked, “Private.” The receptionist knocked and walked in ahead of me.

  “This is the guy,” I heard her say.

  A thin young Asian man in gray sweatpants and a UCLA T-shirt was lounging on a brown Naugahyde couch with his fingers interlocked behind his head, watching Jeopardy! on a flat-screen television. He wore a stringy Fu Manchu mustache.

  “Who is Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones?” he said without looking over at either of us.

  “Did you hear me?” the receptionist asked him, annoyed.

  “Her album, ‘Come On Over,’ sold more copies than any other female artist of the nineties,” Alex Trebek said on TV.

  “Who was Britney Spears,” the Asian guy said.

  I reached over and turned off the television.

  “What the hell, dude?” he said.

  “Not Britney Spears,” I said, correcting him. “Shania Twain sang ‘Come On Over.’ You the owner of this fine establishment?”

  “The manager.”

  “How long have you worked here?”

  “Couple years. What’s this about?”

  “I need to talk to you about Dino Birch.”

  “Who’s Dino Birch?”

  “A customer of yours, supposedly.”

  Fu Manchu looked me up and down. “You ain’t flashing tin. You ain’t no detective, which means I ain’t gotta tell you jack.”

  He gave the receptionist a condemning look. “You should’ve never brought him back here, Gloria.”

  “I thought he was a cop,” Gloria the receptionist said.

  “You’re right,” I said. “I’m not a cop. Nothing says you have to talk to me. And nothing says after I walk out of here that I have to go to the Rancho Bonita PD and tell them I have firsthand knowledge that your employees are getting paid for sex. You’ll be out of business by morning.”

  “You got nothing,” he said, smirking.

  “Fine.” I smiled and turned to go. “Have it your way, cowboy.”

  “Give him what he wants, boss,” Gloria said nervously.

  “Shut up.” Fu Manchu sat up. “What’s this dude’s name?”

  “Birch,” I said. “Dino Birch.”

  He thought about it for a second. “He’s the guy, the one they arrested for offing those people in their pool down in The Knolls.”

  “One and the same.”

  The manager jerked his head—Gloria’s signal to leave. She did so, shutting the office door behind her.

  “Yeah, he’s been in a few times,” the manager said. “Always asks for the same girl, pays cash, don’t make no trouble. I don’t know what more I can tell you.”

  “He says he was here the night of the murders.”

  “Yeah, well, I wouldn’t know nothing about that. If he paid by credit card, maybe. But like I said, the dude pays cash. Comes in, gets a nice straight massage. He wants to tip her for something extra on the side, that’s strictly between him and the girl.”

  “Don’t give me that. You take your cut. And your rooms are wired for sound and video in case something goes wrong— a customer gets kinky or violent—or so you can grind him for bigger bucks while you threaten to share the tape with his wife or the cops.”

  “I don’t know who told you that. We run a clean business.”

  “A clean business. And if you expect me to believe that . . .”

  He looked away and ran the back of his hand over his mouth. “OK, what do you want?”

  “Would you be willing to sign an affidavit to the effect that Birch was here that night?”

  “Jesus, I just told you. How can I sign anything if I don’t know whether he was or he wasn’t?”

  “You have digital security cameras. Rewind them.”

  Fu Manchu stared up at me. “Are you serious?”

  “As serious as a subpoena.”

  He sighed and got off the couch and strode to the computer sitting on his desk. He asked me the date of the Hollister murders. I told him and he typed it in. The computer screen suddenly split into the high resolution color images of four massage rooms as seen through ceiling-mounted cameras, with the date and a running digital time stamp under each image. I stood over his shoulder and watched more than 120 minutes of recorded video at four times normal speed.

  The Hollisters had been shot around 0100 hours. Fu Manchu showed me security footage recorded between shortly before midnight and a few minutes after 0200. In some of the rooms, there’d be no activity for long stretches, while in others, depending apparently on the popularity of the individual masseuse, the action was nonstop. All of the customers were male. Most were there for rubdowns, about half of which concluded with masturbatory “happy” endings. A few men were serviced orally. Only one engaged in intercourse with his masseuse—a brief, mechanical encounter that, watched at high speed, reminded me of one of those old, Charlie Chaplin silent movies. The scene would’ve been comical had it not been so pathetic. If Birch was among the clientele, I didn’t recognize him.

  “You told me he’s been in a few times,” I said, “and that he always sees the same girl.”

  “Most repeats have a regular they like to work with.”

  “I’d like to talk to her.”

  “You just told me he’s not on the tape. You see for yourself. He wasn’t here that night.”

  “Regardless, I’d like to talk to her.”

  He took off his glasses. “If I give you her name,” he said, rubbing his eyes, “will you go away?”

  “Little would please me more.”

  THE GIRL said she was from Merced in California’s
Central Valley. She claimed to be twenty-one. She looked more like seventeen, an Asian with porcelain skin and long hair, dyed blonde and parted down the middle. I couldn’t tell if she was one of the girls on the security footage.

  Yes, she said, she remembered Birch: He never asked her for anything other than a deep tissue massage and always tipped her well afterward. No, she said, she couldn’t remember the last time he’d been in. She was certain, however, it hadn’t been on the night of the murders.

  “How do you know that?”

  She curled her hair nervously around one finger, her large dark eyes avoiding mine, and spoke with Fu Manchu in what sounded like Laotian. He put his Nikes up on his desk and answered the question for her.

  “Because she has other customers who pay to be with her all night. Sometimes she works at my house.”

  “Birch ever pay you to stay with her at your house?”

  “No.”

  The girl said something in Laotian. The manager responded to her curtly.

  “What did she say?”

  “She wants no trouble.”

  “Tell her if she tells me the truth, there won’t be any.”

  They exchanged a few words before both falling silent.

  “She don’t know nothing,” the manager said. “You want a massage, or something? On the house. All you gotta do is leave after and never come back.”

  I was hungry, but not for a rubdown or whatever came with it. I left.

  The all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet next door was shuttered for the night. I drove a couple of miles down the street to a halfway decent barbecue joint called Skeeter’s. The pungent aroma of barbecue demanded that I order pork ribs, but I could feel my arteries clogging merely thinking about them. A smoked turkey sandwich and a side salad with oil and vinegar would have to do.

  “Might as well go vegan at that rate, chief,” said the teenager with the dreadlocks and the Skeeter’s T-shirt, manning the counter.

  “The only way I’d go vegan is if meat grew on trees.”

  Even slathered in Skeeter’s not-so-secret secret sauce (catsup, honey, Tabasco), the turkey tasted like cardboard. I sat alone at a sticky wooden table, the floor purposely awash in sawdust, and scarfed down the sandwich anyway while adhering to military training: Eat as much as you can right now because you never know when you might eat again. My phone vibrated in my pocket as I was finishing. The screen said, “Alicia.” I licked my fingers clean.