Beautiful, Naked & Dead (Moses McGuire) (6 page)

CHAPTER 5

S
omewhere on the other side of the worst headache known to man I could hear the distant thunder of a leaf blower. I peeked out through puffed eyelids and saw crystals hanging in the window. This was not my home. This was not a home I had ever been in before. My mind felt thick, like I had pickled more than a few brain cells. I was clearly not up to the task of figuring out where I was. Above me, a brass and oak ceiling-fan spun in lazy circles. Piper leaned down into my field of vision. She was wearing an oversized Raiders tee-shirt. “Don’t look so nervous, it’s me.” Apparently we were in her brass bed. This scrap of information cleared nothing up for me.

“How did I get here?” I asked, my voice sounded like a distant growl.

“You said you wouldn’t survive unless I let you fuck me… I’m joking, Mo. Relax, your chastity is intact. I drove your useless ass home. Helped you stumble into my bed.” I let my neck muscles go, my head sinking backinto the pillow. My temples throbbed and my mouth felt like I had spent the night chewing on an old running shoe.

Piper traced the scabbing tattoo of Kelly on my shoulder. “That’s going to be hard for us real girls to compete with.”

“Not a lot of real girls lining up to compete with anyone for me. Maybe you hadn’t noticed.”

“Christ, Moses, there were girls all over you last night, or were you too lost to notice.”

“Ohhh… Did I get a dance from Ronnie?” Blurred memories flitted in and out of focus.

“No, she tried but you shocked us all and declined. We may have to change your name to Saint Moses.”

“That’s good.” She was gently stroking my hair while the world slipped away.

When I awoke again, Piper was standing by the side of the bed, she had on a short Catholic schoolgirl’s skirt, knee high white socks and saddle shoes. Her cleavage spilled out of a Wonderbra as she leaned over. In her hands, a glass of O.J. and a bottle of aspirin. “Come on big guy, I need to get to the club, and you need to go home and shower ‘cause you be stinkin’,” she said with a laugh.

“How come you look so good and I feel so bad.”

“Maybe it’s youth, or maybe I didn’t try to drink the bar dry. Now take your aspirin like a good little Moses, and let’s roll.” I did as I was told, nothing I ever drank tasted as good as that O.J. Sitting up, my brain seemed to slop around in my skull. I was naked, my pants and shirt were folded and sitting by the side of the bed. Piper let out a laugh. “Don’t worry, I had my eyes closed when I undressed you.” I cocked an eyebrow. “Ok, I might have peeked, but fair is fair, I mean you’ve see all of me. Now I’ve seen all of your scar-tracked fine self. Now get dressed, or I’m going to be late,” she said tossing my clothes to me. In a show of false modesty she turned her back as I dressed.

At the club, I retrieved my Norton and drove home with Marilyn tucked under my jacket. Back at my crib, Angel had lived up to her name, I had half expected to find the place trashed, but no. She had eviscerated a stuffed bunny but had left my furniture alone. We walked down to a taco stand where I had a bowl of menudo, Mexico’s sure fire hangover medicine. Walking home I felt like a new man. And the first thing the new man wanted to do was vomit.

It had been nine days since I found Kelly. Nine days blurred with booze. Nine days of stuffing my feelings down into a tight little lockbox in my stomach. I poured myself a scotch, but when I rose the tumbler to my lips I saw Kelly’s face.
“Mo?… I really need your help… They want… She um… My sister… well…you can’t hide…”
She whispered to me, her eyes afraid. I set the tumbler down. What kind of a limp dick punk was I? Some bastard had raped and killed my friend because I’d been too fucking busy to check on her. And all I’d done since was to try and drink Scotland dry and hang my head like a broke neck weasel. I hated the face that looked back at me in the mirror, I was sick and tired of being sick and tired.

I was down to only two options, gather my balls up and finally kill myself or find the freaks who had killed Kelly and make them pay. The numbness in my soul shifted, replaced by a building rage. An eye for a fucking eye, a tooth for a tooth.

The rage felt clean and simple, blowing the cobwebs from my mind. Someone must be made to pay the price for the ride Kelly had to take. If the cops couldn’t find them, I would.

I had two leads to chase down, one was the Armenians. I still had the skinny one’s driver’s license, his address was in Glendale. The other was the word “sister”. She had never talked about having any family, but it wasn’t the kind of word she would use for any of the club girls.

I rode back to Silverlake, maybe Lowrie had missed something. Pulling off the crime scene tape, I let myself in. The bloodstains had all darkened to a deep brown. A line of ants climbed up the wall over her bed. I went through her dresser but found nothing. She had an antique dressing table with a round mirror. In her jewelry box, I found a tarnished little girl’s charm bracelet amongst the cheap costume pieces, rhinestones and paste worn to attract diamonds and gold. I picked up the charm bracelet, feeling the little shoe, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Scottie dog. I was sure they all meant something, each had a memory if only Kelly were there to decode them for me.

I let myself in the back door of the club. The cleaning crew was busy vacuuming. Kelly’s locker was almost bare, a cute furry sweater she wore when the air-conditioning froze her out and a small makeup bag. Slipped into the lining of the bag was a postcard from the Cock’s Roost, one of Nevada’s many legal hot pillow joints. The postcard had a cartoon picture of a rooster surrounded by big-titted hens in lingerie. On the back was a Nevada postmark. It was addressed by hand in flowing purple cursive. The note read, “Kelly, all is swell, peachy in fact. I’m making mucho ducats, and if you don’t expect much from the guys you don’t get disappointed. For the first time in my life I feel that I am in control of my fate. I hope all is well with you… Write me! Cass.” It wasn’t much but it was all I had. My search turned up nothing else of any use.

Back at the crib I cranked up a little Black Market Clash, I needed the edge. Four calls to different area codes in Nevada finally delivered a number for the Cock’s Roost. A woman with a thick sultry voice answered the phone, “Cock’s Roost, how can we pleasure you?”

“Yes, I’m looking for Cass?”

After a brief pause she said, “We have no one by that name here, but if you want to stop by I’m sure we can find you a pleasing substitute.” I told her I would and jotted down the address, not that I knew what the hell good it would do me.

“An old Jew, a Black guy and a cop come into a bar. ‘What’ll you boys have?’ says the barman. ‘Goys?’ says the old Jew, ‘Goys? I didn’t survive two years in the death camp to have to listen to this crap.’ And he stomps out.” Bob the bookie and I were sitting in his booth at Bordner’s, a local low-life watering hole. “Now the black guy looks the bartender up and down real slow. ‘You call the Amazon a creek?’ he says, ‘You call King Kong a monkey? No? Then don’t call a man a boy.’ And he walks out. So, the cop, he walks up.”

“What color was he?” I asked.

“Who?”

“The cop?”

“It don’t matter.”

“Well you got a Jew and a Black guy, so what color was the cop?”

“Blue, ok? Blue, like all of them bastards. Now can I go on?”

“Go ahead,” who was I to stop him. “I just wondered.”

“Ok, ok so the Jew, no the cop, yeah ok, so the cop steps behind the bar and shoots the bartender in the knee and then arrests him for resisting. Moral of the story, don’t call a man a boy, unless you’re sure he doesn’t have a badge.” Bob looked at me, waiting for a laugh that wouldn’t be coming any time soon.

“You make that up?” I said.

“Sure, this morning while I was in the crapper. Get it?”

“I got it. I think the cop was probably White.”

“Who the fuck cares what color the cop was, it’s not the point.” Bob was a fur covered fireplug of a man. He kept his moon shaped face clean-shaven all the way down his neck but through his open collar a tee-shirt of chest hair showed. We had been friends since we hooked up in Juvie. I was twelve at the time, he was two years older than me, but even then I had size on him. The Mexicans were all crewed up as were the Black kids, that left Bob and me to fend for ourselves. We covered each other’s asses in there, but when we got out we drifted back to our separate worlds. He had the good fortune of being born Italian. He had never been made, but that didn’t stop him from being a good earner for the LA family. And when he was busted in the eighties he did his jolt like a man and never rolled on anyone. That earned him a new Cadillac and a permanent place on the team.

“Tell me you brought me some cabbage,” Bob said. “We’re pals and all but cheezus I can’t keep covering for you.” I slid an envelope across the bar. I had $600 donated by the Armenians, cash I had meant to give to Kelly. Bob flicked the envelope open and closed. That was all it took for him to count it.

“Couple of grand light, aren’t you?”

“It’s a start. I need you to take me to the Pope.” You never knew who was listening so we always call Don Gallico the Pope, his lieutenants we called the cardinals.

“No, you don’t,” Bob said with as much steel as his pudgy face could muster.

“Yes, I do.”

“He doesn’t have a real soft spot in his heart for you. Not since you ankled it out on him.”

“Old news.” I said. Years back the head of the LA family offered me a job in collections as a way to get out from under some cash I owed them. I tried, really, but it just wasn’t me. “He said he understood.”

“He says all kinds of stuff. You hurt his pride. It was like you were saying you were better than him.”

“I’ll take my chances. Come on, Bobby, it’s a short drive and ‘a hello how are you’.”

“Forget about it. Ain’t going to happen.”

“I’ll tell him you sent me.”

“You wouldn’t.”

“I need this.”

In public we may have called the old man The Pope, but to his face we called him Sir. He’d been the head of the LA family going back to the day. In all those years the man had never seen a single night in the cage. In part this was because he never let the business actually touch his hands, also he insisted that the LA family stay clear of drugs, but the main reason for his lack of jail time was that if anyone even thought about ratting him out, they wound up as so many body parts floating in the LA river. He was old when I was a kid, but walking into the restaurant I wasn’t prepared for what fourteen years had wreaked on his body. His once large frame had collapsed in on itself. His skin hung grey and loose like a cheap suit after a two week run. His silver hair had gone to near transparent white and fringed his shiny cue-ball of a skull. Cigars had taken his larynx so that when he spoke he had to press a finger against a small voice prosthesis in his throat.

“How you doing, sir?” I asked, sitting down across from him.

“I speak out of a tube in my throat, I shit in a bag and my dick only gets hard when I pop six Viagra. How the hell you think I’m doing? You come here to bust my chops you little cock sucker?”

“No, sir. I meant no disrespect.”

“Hell you didn’t. Look at you, you’re a walking disrespect. Manny don’t pay you enough to buy a suit? Or even a razor?”

“I, um…”

“Johnny,” his metallic voice squawked to the waiter. “Get the kid a slice with prosciutto and peppers.” Refusing to eat in front of The Pope was a sin, one he never let you commit. “I can’t take good food any more. Not that it would matter, I got no more taste buds see? Do yourself a favor kid and die young. This growing old is the craps.”

We were sitting in Figueroa’s, a small Italian restaurant and bakery in the Los Feliz area. His crew looked more like a V.F.W. meeting than a mob. Fifty would have been a youngster with this group. Not that their age made them any less dangerous. Most of these guys had more bodies to their count than I had bad debts. Bob had gone in first, cleared my way and then faded back onto the street. He had no desire to be around if it went sideways between me and the old man.

“I need to ask you a question,” I said, my eyes darting around the room.

“So ask. Don’t worry, I have this place swept daily.”

“I know Uncle Manny kicks you a piece off the top, not that it’s any of my business.”

“Did that little towel head send you to me?”

“No, he doesn’t even know I’m here. Problem is I may have to jam up two Armenian punks, caught them running a protection racket on my girls.”

“Inside the club?”

“Yeah.”

“Cock-sucking sons of bitches.”

“I don’t want to step on any toes. But you know I can’t let it pass.”

“These Armenian pricks have some balls, huh? If it was ten years ago, I’d just take them off the count and call it a day. New York wants us to make peace. They’re trying to strike a deal with the Russians. This is the golden age of mergers, huh kid?”

“I’ve heard they have a mob set up out of Glendale.”

“Fuck that. A few crews at best. But they’re growing balls fast. Gas station tax scams, credit cards, cloned cells, some loan sharking. They keep it in their neighborhoods and out of the press. I had a little boundary dispute with them. These Russian bastards don’t scare easy I’ll tell you that. I put three of their pawns in the grinder before I even had their attention. Now this crap in my territory. If it’s sanctioned, bodies got to drop. Let a man shit on your lawn, he’ll be screwing your wife by nightfall.”