A Better Goodbye (8 page)

“No.”

“So why are you bitching?”

“I'm just—”

“Go back to sleep.”

“Can't. I'm already at work.”

“Okay, then I'll go back to sleep.”

Nick was about to hang up when Coyle said, “You don't talk much about fighting. Were you really as good as that story says you were?”

“How would I know?” Nick said. “I haven't read the story yet.”

But he did later that morning, though not from top to bottom. He zeroed in on words or phrases that grabbed his attention, then looked elsewhere when they began to make him uncomfortable. He nodded at the mention of the two fights that had made him a contender, and he scarcely remembered some of the anecdotes that were intended to prove he was flesh and blood. Had he really strutted around Chicago's North Side shouting, “Who's the toughest guy in the neighborhood?” Had the raggedy kids who'd made him their hero really answered, “You are, Nick”?

Rigby had squeezed the essence of Nick's life as a boxer into seven hundred words. Nick couldn't make himself read the last of them, though. It hurt too much to be reminded of the days when he had a chance to be someone special. But there was no holding back the memories. There had been promises of big paychecks, and women had lined up to get in his bed, not girls from down the block or barroom sluts, but the kind you shine your shoes for. And then the good life that was supposed to be his went away in the time it took to send a man to his doom.

Now Nick sat with a hollow feeling in his chest and the sports section in his hands, consumed by thoughts of what might have been. It was as close to self-pity as he allowed himself to come, and he always beat it back with guilt and embarrassment. Alonzo Burgess was dead—no way the toughest guy in the old neighborhood could feel sorry for himself. What kind of joke would that have been? Nick smiled ruefully. He even laughed. There wasn't anything else for him to do until a reason to live came along, and he hadn't had one of those since the night the lights went out in Oakland.

Scott Crandall wondered if the Pink Dot geek had run over old ladies to show up so fast. Okay, geek was harsh, but really, what else could the guy be, fighting Westside traffic all day to deliver smokes and groceries, wine and home pregnancy tests? He might even have been driving one of the original Pink Dot VW Bugs, with the royal blue body, the Pepto-colored dots, and the pink-and-white propeller hat on the roof. Honest to God, a propeller on the ugliest car the sixties ever saw. Scott had heard Pink Dot still had a few of them on the road. Geekmobiles. And he knew there was only one species that could drive them. Geeks.

He handed over three twenties and a ten and told the geek to keep the change. Then he closed the door without waiting for a thank you and carried his two bags of goodies back to the IBM ThinkPad he'd fired up as soon as he had dragged his ass out of bed. He kept his computer on the dining room table, not that there was a dining room in his one-bedroom. It was more like a place to eat if he wasn't standing at the kitchen counter, wolfing down cold pizza or takeout Thai or—talk about inescapable for the man who couldn't cook—something from Pink Dot.

In fact, he planned on having a late breakfast/early lunch/whatever there before he headed to Warner Bros. for a 1
P.M.
casting session. So would it be spaghetti with marinara sauce or the Southwest taco salad? Better go with the salad. The spaghetti felt like it was frozen solid. Good thing it was in the same bag as his Smirnoff vodka and Twix candy bars. That would be everything for the evening if he spent it at home. Well, maybe he'd have a Twix now. Just one. And a cigarette.

Scott was chewing the last bite of his candy bar when he lit up an American Spirit. He swallowed, took a drag and returned his attention to
tailfeathers.com
. With
Daily Variety
and the
Hollywood Reporter
out of the way—took you twenty minutes to get through them and two hours to get over them—it would complete his Internet reading for the day. His only reading of any kind, not that anybody cared.

Tailfeathers was devoted to hookers and johns all over the country who preferred to call themselves providers and hobbyists. There were masseuses in the mix as well, very few of them certified by any board of health, more and more turning tricks the way masseuses never had a decade ago, when a pretty girl could bankroll her education or her lingerie and drug habit with hand jobs. Now they joined escorts under the imagined protection of the euphemism “provider.” Scott supposed that such self-deception came into vogue after the people who ran Tailfeathers prefaced their home page by saying, “This site was created purely and solely for entertainment purposes.” Still, the announcement always made him laugh, because it was partly bullshit and partly the absolute truth. He'd always found pussy entertaining.

Once a week or so, he would scan the L.A. escort reviews on Tailfeathers to make sure his girls weren't in there. He'd given them specific instructions not to draw attention to themselves that way. Vice cops probably spent more time reading Tailfeathers than the perverts did. Worse, the guys who wrote the reviews—assuming it wasn't the girls doing it themselves to drum up business—couldn't resist exaggerating golden showers, rim jobs, and ass banging. Back when he didn't care about reviews, Scott had checked one of his girls on Tailfeathers and saw that a guy had created a friend for her: “Sometimes one girl would fuck the other with a vibrator while simultaneously fucking me.” The girl in question was a psych major from UCLA—killer body, desperately broke—who had shown up a virgin, so naive that Scott had to have a redheaded porno washout teach her how to jerk a guy off. When the virgin quit three weeks later, the other girls still hadn't seen her naked, much less getting creative carnally.

No time for Scott to read reviews today, though. No time to use the links on the reviews to check out the competition, either. He still hadn't taken a look at the scenes for his audition, and he wanted to do that before lunch. But the one thing he couldn't ignore was the discussion board. The board in L.A. was Tailfeathers' liveliest and busiest, hobbyists and providers exchanging sometimes surprisingly insightful notes on everything from STDs to falling in love on the job. Clients were warned when cops started busting massage operations, girls coming from out of town could line up business, and the rip-off bitches got outed.

Scott scrolled down the page, seeing the same names he saw on posts every time he checked Tailfeathers, not noticing anything out of the ordinary until he reached the bottom: “Providers Beware: Real Criminals Resume Rampage, LE Wants to Help.” LE was shorthand for law enforcement. Everything else spelled trouble. “Shit,” Scott said, clicking on the post with no more enthusiasm that he would have had for walking on hot coals.

The poster was a guy who called himself Concernedcitizen, a know-it-all douchebag who really did know a hell of a lot. Scott skipped the part where Concernedcitizen complained about having been called a grandstander for his previous warnings to providers. Nor did Scott want to waste his eyesight reading when Concernedcitizen got all liberal and sensitive, writing, “I'm sorry the men in question are African-American, but I have a moral obligation to report the reality as it has been reported to me.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Scott said. Then he arrived at the heart of the matter. These assholes had spent the last year raping and robbing massage girls all over the city, bouncing from the Westside to Los Feliz to the Valley, striking twice in a month, then crawling back under a rock until you damn near forgot about them. It wasn't the kind of story the straight media was going to pay attention to—Christ, they didn't have the time or space to chronicle all the murders in L.A.'s ghettos. So this unholy tag team came and went at will, and now they were back at it, having turned a two-girl operation on Beverly near CBS into a nightmare.

Concernedcitizen was on the case. “These predators may be responsible for as many as ten attacks,” he wrote. Some of the victims apparently had gone to him instead of the police because he was a lawyer who would counsel them, not sell them out. But he made it sound like the cops sided with the girls this time: “While LE is our opponent on the issue of prostitution, LE is with us in deeming these two criminals far more dangerous than the hanky-panky of the providers. Should a well-dressed African-American gentleman show up at your door saying he works for a bank, he may have an accomplice waiting out of sight. Please do not let him in. Even call LE if he bangs on the door.”

Scott skimmed the responses to Concernedcitizen's post—lots of outrage and indignation from other hobbyists, nothing from any girls. But he knew that in the provider community the drums were already beating. Hookers and hand whores read Tailfeathers devoutly, pissing about clients whose reviews made them sound like sluts and moaning about girls who claimed they were twenty-two when they wouldn't see thirty-five again. He'd heard that providers had their own website too, talking shop and rating both clients and bosses, but he'd never taken the trouble to track it down. That was more bitching than he could handle.

He caught enough shit every day from his own girls. There were seven of them now—the number seemed to go up or down every few weeks—and he knew they were primed to freak out at the bad news Concernedcitizen had passed along. At times like this, rampant fear was as much a part of the business as eye shadow.

When Scott had set up his first operation three years before, there had been a little accountant-looking dude who would take masseuses up on their offer of a shower and come out of the bathroom waving a gun and demanding all their money. The next year it had been a carpenter who preyed on skinny blondes, trussing them up, throwing them in the back of his van, and driving out to Palmdale to go animal on them. The carpenter wound up killing himself, although there was still talk that one of his victims' boyfriends had pulled the trigger. As for the accountant, who knew? He had vanished into the ether that seemed to consume most of the crazies who declared open season on girls who, when you got right down to it, were all but defenseless.

Not that the girls didn't try to do something. Scott knew that some of them hugged first-time clients coming through the door, thinking they could feel hidden weapons. There were probably also girls who carried Mace or even a small pistol—if wide-load pro football players could pack, why not hundred-and-five-pound hand-job artists? But Scott didn't want to think about a gun in the hands of some of the women he'd employed. Too many of them were so scary stupid that they'd wind up shooting the wrong person, and the wrong person might be him.

Scott's first impulse with the latest maniacs to descend on the business had been to call them the Love 'Em and Leave 'Em Bandits, but his girls didn't laugh, they just became more skittish than ever. Now it was clear that the only way he'd be able to stop them from getting any crazier was to hire security. He'd done it before, but that didn't mean he liked it or anything he had heard about it. There were stories of off-duty LAPD providing muscle for a girlfriend in the business, but that could have been bullshit. What your average massage operation got for security was several cuts below the knuckle draggers who worked as rent-a-cops at shopping malls and car shows. The best Scott had come across were an apartment manager's kid brother, a recovering car salesman with a speech impediment, and a guy in one of his acting classes who wanted to be a professional wrestler.

His head swimming at having to choose from a pool of morons, Scott lit another smoke off his old one, flipped open his cell, and dialed. One ring later, he heard the voice he was counting on to reassure him that things would be cool.

“What?”

DuPree never turned off the attitude for a second. Sometimes Scott was tempted to call him Junior just to annoy him, but even on the telephone, the motherfucker was intimidating. One word and Scott could picture him, elegant and dangerous at the same time, shaved head, high cheekbones, ropy muscles, and a stare that could shrivel your balls to the size of raisins. Scott was sure he'd done time.

“Where you at, yo?” Scott couldn't help himself. He lapsed into black-speak every time he talked to the guy.

“Having my morning latte, checking out the foreigners.” DuPree started most days at the Coffee Bean at Sunset Plaza, Eurotrash central. “You going to waste my time with questions you know the answer to, or you going to tell me why you're calling?”

“You know me too well, man.”

“So?”

“So you hear anything about a couple brothers robbing trick pads? Raping the girls?”

“Brothers?” DuPree was keeping his voice down, making sure nobody could overhear his business. “As in African-American males?”

“Yeah, that's right.”

“And you sure that's what they are? Brothers, I mean.”

“Well, it's what they're saying on the Internet.”

Scott tried to sound cool. It should have been easy; he was an actor, after all. But DuPree was the shit, and sometimes Scott couldn't get around that.

“They?” DuPree asked. “They who?”

“Some lawyer. That's what he says he is, anyway. On Tailfeathers. You know, the website. Said he'd heard from some girls that these motherfuckers—”

“The brothers.”

“Yeah. They're out there running around, menace to society and all that shit.”

“Okay. Okay. It's clearing up for me now. You make these assumptions, and then you come to me because I'm what, your connection to the thug life?”

“Look, man, I'm not dissing you.” Scott hated to backpedal. It happened every time they talked about something serious, and DuPree never broke a sweat. “I'm just trying to see which way the wind is blowing, that's all.”

“I didn't even know it was blowing. You want something specific, you better call up the”—DuPree's voice dropped to a sinister mocking whisper—“Bloods and Crips, ask 'em yourself, 'cause I got nothing to do with them. You hear what I'm saying?”