A Better Goodbye (14 page)

“Okay, I can appreciate that. But I'm a people person. I like to find out what makes them tick before I invite them into my world. You were a boxer, right? A good one, I heard.”

“For a while.”

“Yeah, I heard about that, too.”

Nick didn't say anything.

“I wonder if I ever saw you fight,” Scott said. “I used to cabaret in Vegas a lot.”

“Never fought there. Just trained.”

“Too bad. The fights were totally cool for getting the night started. Women loved them. Ever notice that? All that shit going on in the ring, blood and sweat, broken noses, broken ribs, and you could practically smell the bitches in heat. I'm not talking about skanks either, pal. This was big-league pussy.”

Scott was savoring the memory when the waitress came with his food. Nick wondered how much longer he could make himself sit across from this shithead.

Scott took a bite of his Reuben and licked the Russian dressing off his fingers lasciviously. While he was chewing, he said, “Ever do any security work?”

“Like bounce at a club?” Nick said.

“Along those lines, uh-huh.”

“A couple times, when I was a kid. But not after I turned pro, no. I tried to do all my fighting in the ring. Didn't always work out that way, but—”

Scott took a slug of cream soda. “Yeah, I read how you clocked that fucker that tried to rob you.”

“He didn't give me a choice.” Nick could feel the same tension he had felt then creeping back into his face, jaw clenching, eyes narrowing.

It was obvious that Scott noticed. He hadn't taken another bite of his sandwich. “I got this job I think you could handle,” he said.

Nick nodded.

Scott leaned across the table and said, dropping his voice down low, “Some girls that work for me need looking after.”

“Let me guess: they're not Girl Scouts.”

“See, what I got is a therapeutic massage salon,” Scott said. “It's a sideline for me, but I enjoy the business, you know, making people happy.”

“Horny guys,” Nick said.

“When you get down to it, yeah. But it's not like they're rolling into a strip mall, doughnut shop on one side, dry cleaners on the other with autographed movie-star pictures all over the walls. The place I got is very classy, an apartment in Westwood. And the clientele is very classy too. Lots of names you might recognize. So everything's real discreet, just like you working for me would be. With me so far?”

“Yeah,” Nick said. “You're a pimp.”

“No,” Scott said, breaking out his smile again, “but I play one on TV.”

“That's where I've seen you,” Nick said. “On TV. Scott Crandall, huh? I couldn't put your name with your face.”

“Don't tell me that. The last thing an actor wants to be is anonymous.”

“But if he's running a string of girls—”

“Then anonymity is everything. Just don't go thinking I'm the Happy Hooker. I'm strictly a businessman who deals in pleasure for his fellow man, and the girls that work for me aren't hookers per se. A couple of them are actually certified massage therapists. The others just say they are. It's a good rubdown for everybody who pays, and what happens behind closed doors is up to the girl and the client.”

“And if the clients get out of hand, that's where I'd come in,” Nick said.

“Right,” Scott said. “But you can't get too heavy, no Wild West shit, at least most of the time.”

“You mean I'd get one day a week to go nuts?”

“Not even. Just special occasions.”

“I didn't know there was a holiday for people who liked getting their asses kicked.”

“There isn't. But there's a couple guys running around town, robbing massage girls, raping them. Real animals.”

“You don't need me, you need the cops.”

“Yeah, but the girls break out in a rash when it's anything to do with the law. These motherfuckers would have to disembowel one of them before they'd call the cops.”

“So they come knocking, it's open season on their asses.”

“You got a gun, Nick?”

“No.”

“Just your fists, huh?”

“I can always pick up something hard and hit 'em on the head.”

Scott nodded approvingly. “A master of improvisation.”

“I'm not anything until you tell me what the job pays,” Nick said.

He watched Scott pretend to do the math in his head, as if he didn't know exactly how little he thought he could get away with offering. Nick, meanwhile, was trying to balance his instinctive distrust of this asshole with his need for money.

“Five hundred bucks a week,” Scott said. “Cash.”

“Monday through Friday?”

“Plus half days on Saturday. Never on Sunday, though.”

“Those Saturdays ought to be worth an extra fifty.”

Scott grinned. “What are you, the fucking Teamsters?”

“Hey, I had to ask.”

“Ask me something else,” Scott said.

Nick wanted to ask if this fading pretty boy had any idea how far down the ladder guarding a bunch of hand whores was from throwing bags at LAX. But what he said was this: “When do I start?”

Not even noon and the old man was deep in the Courvoisier. A half-empty bottle sat on the wobbly wooden coffee table in front of him. He was staring into the distance from his base of operations on a floral sofa covered with the plastic his late wife had insisted on. When his son walked through the front door, he acknowledged his arrival with a fart. Only then did the old man cast his yellow eyes on DuPree's look of disgust and grunt in satisfaction.

“Better go easy on the rice and beans,” DuPree said.

“Man's gotta eat.”

“Then eat something else when you know I'm stopping by.”

“Stop by more often and I will.”

The old man had him there. DuPree was a stranger in the house where he grew up. When he visited he did so reluctantly and without an ounce of guilt. If there had been a guilty moment in his life, DuPree had long ago forgotten it. He was only there out of obligation, as if putting up with the old man for a few minutes were no different from throwing pocket change in a beggar's cup. He made no secret of his feelings either: As soon as he arrived, he was ready to leave.

“Got to take care of business,” he said. “I don't grab the money when it's there, someone else will.”

“Business, huh?” The old man sipped his Courvoisier. “Don't wind up with your ass back in jail.”

“What you mean by that?”

“Shit, boy . . . ”

The old man didn't need to say more. It was as if those eyes of his, the color of infection, could look into the soul that DuPree himself knew was diseased.

His best defense was to stare back at sixty-two years of wasted promise. Onus DuPree Sr. had been the greatest high school athlete L.A. ever saw, the Dodgers' center fielder before he was twenty, and now look at him sliding his hand inside those sorry-assed sweats and scratching his nuts.

DuPree knew the old motherfucker still cursed Bob Gibson for breaking his shoulder blade with a fastball in '62—wasn't any damn accident either, not like his knee the next year, the one that surgery never fixed. He could talk for hours about Gibson and never once mention all the boozing he'd done, reefer he'd smoked, pussy he'd chased. Big a mess as Onus Sr. was, it was a wonder he had lasted nine seasons. Only a truly great athlete could have done it. Even DuPree had to admit that.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” he said. “Let's back this up, start all over.”

“You think it'll get better?” the old man said.

“Can't get worse.”

“Better not.”

The old man chuckled, something rattling in his chest until it came loose and he spit it into a handkerchief that looked like it had never seen a washing machine. He examined what he had coughed up with a lab tech's lack of emotion before he looked back at DuPree.

“Why you here anyway?”

“On my way to El Monte.”

“Shit, all they got there is tacos and stolen cars.”

“Dogs, too.”

The old man eyed him curiously. “What you want with dogs?”

“A pet.”

“Goddamn, boy, you never liked no dog when you was coming up. Beg like a bitch for one, and then I'd have to take care of the motherfucker. How many times that happen? And what about that little shit, he barked so much, you put his damn eye out?”

“Fuck you talking about?” DuPree said. “That was an accident.”

“You was the meanest child I ever saw,” the old man said.

DuPree knew it was true. His mother had known it too, right from the jump. There'd been nights when he lay in bed listening to her telling the old man their only child was all the way wrong, that the innocence in him rotted when he took his first breath. The old man didn't want to hear it, but once his Ruthie was gone, killed on the freeway, and they both were running free, father and son, nothing could hold back the truth. Didn't matter that DuPree was a football star with a full ride to USC and all that shit. He was still hurting people in fights, hurting them bad, and robbing them when the alumni couldn't get him money fast enough. When he was finally arrested, it cost him his scholarship and fourteen months at Terminal Island. Now, a dozen years later, it was the only thing the old man judged him by. That and what his wife whispered from her grave.

“What fool gonna give you a dog?” the old man said.

“I'm on my way to find out,” DuPree said.

“Then it ain't for certain.”

“Damn right it is. I got a friend set it up.”

“You got a friend thinks you fit for a dog? A motherfucker that dumb, you should be askin' him for money.”

“You didn't have such a nasty mouth, I might bring him around.”

“Shit.”

“All right then,” DuPree said. “Let me just thank you. It's what I came for, anyway.”

“Thank me for what?” the old man said.

“Passing along that phone number. The one you gave your neighbor.”

The old man brightened for the first time. “Oh yeah. Givens. Good fella. Stops by for a drink when he's in from Vegas.”

“Works with fighters, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Anybody I ever heard of?”

“Geronimo Byrd. John-John Causion. Too Sweet Jimmy Gonzales.”

DuPree shook his head. “No champions, huh?”

“No, I guess not.” The light disappeared from the old man's face.

“Don't look so sad, you still a winner.” DuPree dipped into the left front pocket of slacks softer than the inside of a woman's thigh and pulled out a portion of the money he had taken from the dealer he'd robbed. “Here, to help you keep it together.”

He held the bills out to the old man. After a moment of internal debate, the old man took them, then did his best to make a sizzling sound and dropped them on the floor.

“Too hot to handle,” he said.

“Well, goddamn,” DuPree said, doing everything in his power to suppress the urge to yank the old man off the sofa and choke the yellow out of his eyes.

As soon as the old man saw that, he burst into laughter, coughing and spilling the last of his Courvoisier onto the sleeve of a ragged white cardigan already splotched with stains. “Got your ass, didn't I?” he cackled.

And he had, without witnesses, which meant DuPree could laugh too, cutting loose the way he never did on the street. When he regained control of himself, it was for just long enough to say, “You old motherfucker,” as if it were a benediction.

He checked his cell for messages, erasing the latest one from Scott, figuring he knew what the white boy wanted. He'd be saying they should get together for a drink, or maybe hit 4Play, where they served lap dances instead of alcohol. It had been too long since they hung out—that's how Scottie was probably seeing it. He was one hanging-out motherfucker. But as it neared midnight, DuPree needed him like he needed the clap.

He wasn't sure he'd ever been this far east, getting off the 10 on Rosemead Boulevard and heading into a neighborhood he was certain wouldn't open its arms for a brother in a Beemer. It was heavy Latino around here, from the bars and burrito shacks to the names on the storefront businesses. He didn't need daylight to know what the houses and apartments looked like, the paint on their stucco bleached by the sun, the front lawns as worn and tired as the blue collars that hung in the closets inside. The way L.A. was going, the whole city would look like this pretty soon, a Gonzalez on every mailbox and La Eme or Los Norteños calling the shots.

DuPree wouldn't have come here if Artie Franco hadn't made some calls to cool out everything in advance. Artie had that way about him. The only time DuPree had ever seen him get ugly was after Slape pumped two rounds into the wall of the last bank they'd taken down. Slape said it was to get everybody's attention. And Artie said yeah, the cops included. DuPree had thought Artie was going to shoot Slape right there. But now the two of them were asshole buddies as far as wanting to do an armored car next, and DuPree was the holdout, arguing that there had to be a better way to make a big score. Slape accused him of being unprofessional, but Artie was still trying to make nice. That was why he stepped up when DuPree said he was thinking about getting a dog. Artie knew just the place.