Hot Shot (22 page)

“Hey, Jack.”

He turned around and grinned. “K-man. So how do you like this boot camp?”

“It's great.”

“Told you. It's just like a hotel.”

I handed him the disk. “What brings you down here?”

“I had a dinner thing on the Promenade with another one of Kitty's clients. She's got some doozies.” He shook his head.

“You're doing another book?”

“I don't know yet. This was more a meet-and-greet.”

“What's it about?”

“I could tell ya, but then I'd have to kill ya.” He laughed. “But forget that. I told you I had a surprise for you. The cops called me this afternoon. Your buddy Sloan turned up.”

“Alive?”

Danziger looked nonplussed. “Of course alive. What made you…”

“Nothing, nothing. So what happened? The police picked her up?”

“No, they found her car in a lot at LAX and did a trace of the airline schedules. She'd flown up to San Francisco with some rich john. Get this: From what the cop told me, she'd met the dude while she was staying in your suite at the Hillshire. He was staying at the hotel for business and going on to San Francisco. Some import/export guy based in Central America. He'd paid her fare to SFO and tucked her into a room at the Mark Hopkins. She's coming back tonight for a little chat with the BHPD.” He clapped his hands. “The last piece of the puzzle comes together, eh? And we got our book and your computer back.”

“She had the manuscript on her? And the computer?”

“They didn't say that. But who else would have done it?”

“No one, I guess.”

Neither of us said anything for a minute.

“Well. Anyway. I've got one of my assistants lining up the photo permissions. Wish there was someone we could tap to write a forword, but I don't see it happening on this one.”

“Well, I wouldn't ask Betty Bradford Mann,” I mumbled.

“You're funny,” Danziger said absently, but he wasn't really listening. He walked back toward the window. “Big old moon tonight, huh?”

“Big old moon.”

He stuck one paw into his pocket. It disappeared in folds of silk. Change jingled.

“So are you happy with the way it turned out?”

“That's for you to say, Jack.”

“Sure, but are you?”

“It's what you want.”

“It sounds like there's a
but
at the end of that sentence, Sport.”

I stared out the window at his big old moon. Danziger was looking at me strangely. “I just can't figure out what's so hot in this that someone would try to steal it,” I said.

“Nothing. But they don't know that.” He shrugged. “These tabloid characters, they didn't know what we had. That's why they wanted to get their hands on it. They were the ones who played up how hot it was, and they finally started to believe their own bullshit. Self-fulfilling prophecy.” He laughed again. “What are we supposed to do? Correct 'em?”

Behind him, far away, a plane took off over the Pacific: two blinking red lights and one white.

*   *   *

I couldn't sleep. I played Minesweeper, sent an E-mail to Jeff Brenner, and watched TV. At one-thirty, I was too tired to sleep.

The black hole was still out there. Now that I didn't have the pressure of the deadline, it was all I could think about. So what if it wasn't done? So what if it wasn't complete?

Jocelyn Cricket whispered in my ear again:
Good isn't the point. Done is.

Jocelyn was right. Good sold a couple thousand copies, brought a trickle of people into the theater, made a few critics happy, and got the back of the hand from the rest of the world. And good—as in honor and virtue—didn't matter, either. Once, the world had revered astronauts and artists, inventors and innovators. Then the Zeitgeist had some fundamental shift, and we were looking up to athletes and actors. Even that seemed like a long time ago now.

Today we were in a new world where fame itself was its own commodity: fame without achievement, be it grand or base. Fame its ownself. Jocelyn and Kitty repped it, Jack Danziger marketed it, and the whole nation bought it. Dick Mann and Felina Lopez and Vernon Ash and even Leo Lazarnick—all of them were tissue-thin, personae with neither style nor substance, just names that had been whirled in the pop-culture blender and served up like an eight-dollar protein shake at Smooth Moo.

And when
Mann's Woman
was published, one more name would be added to that list: mine.

If I wasn't so tired, if my back wasn't in spasm, I might have cared. Instead, it just seemed like cheap philosophy.

The windowless room was making me claustrophobic again. I picked up my shop-and-fuck and went down the hall to the lounge, where I sat down in Sid McKay's chair and looked out over the lights of the city. No one was around; our rum-and-Coke glasses were still sitting there, each with a lime slice at the bottom like a drowned mouse.

An embryo of an idea began to grow in my mind.

The drink …

… Sid McKay …

… something Sid had said …

… reminded me of something Felina once said …

… which might be important.

Might
be, I reminded myself. But Felina had given me one clue that had gone right over my head, a clue that might be worth following up. It might add up to nothing, but it was worth a few phone calls in the morning.

I sat in the lounge for an hour, wondering where I'd go when I checked out in the morning, wondering where I'd live. Brenner would let me stay for a while, I was sure, but what next? And what next for Claudia and me?

After a while, I padded back to my room, switched off the light, and climbed into bed. It was a quarter to three by now, and my body craved sleep, but the two halves of my brain were clicking now, and the sprig of thought just wouldn't stop growing, working in my head like sand in an oyster.

16

G
UEST
S
ERVICES SENT UP
the L.A. phone directories—both White and Yellow Pages—along with my morning coffee. Why do people waste so much money on J-school, I wondered, when ninety percent of a reporter's job is just talking on the phone?

There were more listings than I'd thought, most of them in downtown L.A. Nothing to do but take them in alphabetical order.

The man who answered the phone at the first number spoke only Spanish. The second couldn't help me. Neither could the third, or the fourth, or the fifth.

The sixth number was answered by a woman. Young, too, from the sound of her.

“This is Marga Garza.”

“Hi, Ms. Garza. I was looking for—”

“We're not open,” she interrupted. “I'm just the book-keeper. If you want to place an order, call back after ten, okay?”

“Maybe you can help me. I'm looking for Eduardo Lopez.”

“Lopez?” she said, sounding puzzled.

“Right. He'd be in his sixties or seventies. I was thinking there might be someone there who knew him—”

“
Knew
him?” She paused. “He just got here a few minutes ago. You want to talk to him? Hang on.”

She put her hand over the receiver and yelled at someone to get Eduardo.

I hung up.

I still didn't know what the black hole at the middle of Felina's story was, but I had one last chance to find out.

*   *   *

Leaving St. Liz was easy. I didn't even bother to check out; I just picked up my laptop, put my floppies inside, and left.

Once I was through the lobby and out the front door, it was a two-block walk up Twenty-third Street to Wilshire and the bus shelter. I was safe, I kept telling myself. If Brooks Levin was still interested in me, he would have already found out where I was staying.

What he
wouldn't
be expecting was that I would leave my hidey-hole and take a city bus.

Waiting for the eastbound RTD, I sighed. Once, I would have called Claudia for a ride and asked her to tag along. If my lead panned out, we might even have gone for lunch afterward: sushi in Little Tokyo, brisket at the Pantry …

The bus pulled up, cutting my reverie short.

I was on my own this time.

*   *   *

I left the bus at Rossmore and walked the few blocks over to Danziger's place. Not a soul was on the streets of Hancock Park. A Southtec car came by, slowing down as it passed me. Angelenos might be fanatical about walking when it comes to treadmills, but on the streets of L.A., pedestrians are automatically suspicious characters.

Elise opened the kitchen door. Behind her, a broomstick had been laid across two chairs. It was hung with freshly made pasta, drying like laundry on a clothesline.

“Hey, you,” she said, wiping her floury hands on her apron. “Jack's not here. Were you supposed to meet him?”

“Nah. Just came to pick up my car.”

“It's still in the garage. In
my
space, I might add. Hey, why don't you stay and eat lunch with me? I'm making pasta
puttanesca.
”

“What's that?”

“Tomato sauce with olives and anchovies. The literal translation is ‘whore's spaghetti.'” She grinned. “It tastes better than it sounds.”

“Sounds tempting, but I've got to run.”

Backing out of the garage, I grinned.

Whore's spaghetti. Just what I'd been working on for the last few weeks.

*   *   *

I skirted the edge of Koreatown and drove through MacArthur Park. Once one of the most beautiful parks in the city, it was now an open-air, twenty-four-hour drug supermarket.
Someone left my crack out in the rain …

From MacArthur Park it was a locked-door drive through the dangerous Pico-Union neighborhood, a quick sprint under the 110, and then I was on Sixth Street, headed into downtown L.A.

In the Eighties, the city had built some glitzy loft-condos down here, trying to lure rich yuppies back to the heart of the city, but the effort had failed and many of the lofts sat empty. All the Jacuzzis and industrial-gray carpeting in the world can't make up for junkies bobbing and weaving on your stoop.

Past the skyscrapers and the glass box office towers was the real downtown, a seedy district of fruit and flower warehouses, flophouse hotels, and bars where a toothpaste-sized glass of Schlitz was still a quarter. I passed one street lined with people sleeping in refrigerator boxes. In the winter, there were illegal bonfires, homeless families cuddling next to dogs for warmth, people stabbing one another to death over a blanket or a bag of aluminum cans. The address I was looking for was near Fifth and San Pedro, just down from the Double Nickel, an area so tough they hadn't even tried to redevelop it. I parked in a bull-dozed lot that had been turned into a U-Park and pushed a five-dollar bill through a slot in a lockbox.

Walking down San Pedro, I missed it the first time. On my second pass-by, I found a small storefront with dirty windows, hidden by heavy metal gates. Faded white letters on the door spelled out the legend
LUZ DEL MUNDO
•
FINE CIGARS
•
SINCE
1911 •
TOTALAMENTE A MANO
.

*   *   *

It was Sid McKay's rum-and-Coke that had given me the clue. Rum-and-Coke. Cuba Libre.

Because she'd lived in Puesta del Sol, I had assumed that Felina was Mexican herself. But she had told me at the Gallo Rojo that her father was a cigar roller. They made cigars in Mexico, too, of course, but Felina smoked Cubans. And there were only a few places in the city where a Cuban cigar roller could find work.

The door was locked. Damn. I tried the knob again, and this time the door buzzed and swung open.

Luz del Mundo could have been an ancient dry cleaners, with its high sloping counter and old-fashioned cash register. What hit me first, though, was the smell: cedar, damp earth, and the intoxicating odor of rich tobacco. The aroma was divine, as basic and satisfying as freshly baked bread. And under it all was another smell: musty air and history and the sweat of a hundred anonymous artisans. Overhead, a ceiling fan made lazy circles. A fat woman with a black bun and cakey lipstick sat at a high stool behind the counter, giving me the fish-eye.

I'd been to a few events at the “cigar bars” in Beverly Hills and had been turned off by their pretension and self-importance. Industry types spent thousands of dollars for the privilege of smoking their stogies there and renting a few cubic feet of air to store them in. But what nauseated me the most was the members, who seemed to think a twenty-five-dollar cigar transformed them from overpaid numbnuts into bad-boy rebels.

Those places sold status. Luz del Mundo sold cigars.

“Buenas dias,”
I said to the woman behind the counter.

“Buenas tardes.”

She didn't take her dark eyes off me for a second. Something told me that (a) she didn't speak English and (b) she didn't like me too much. Asking for Eduardo would have been stupid. At the least, I would have gotten a
“No comprende.”
More likely, I'd be out on my ass.

While I planned my next move, I examined the open boxes of cigars on display. They were formal and elegant.
LUZ DEL MUNDO
, they said in crimson letters. On the lids was an old-fashioned logo: a rising yellow sun and, in silhouette, a red rooster.

A red rooster.

El Gallo Rojo.

I was born in the Year of the Rooster … It's always an important year.

I fingered a couple of the cigars. They were dark and roughly finished, with a rich loamy smell that managed to combine new leather with antiquated dignity. Gold and red cigar bands duplicated the rooster/sun image from the boxes. There were four different sizes, all with bird names. The small panatelas were Gorriónes—sparrows—and the robustos, Halcónes—falcons. Then there were some strange triangular cigars, small at the tip and wide at the base. Torpedos, I remembered, from my trip to the Beverly Hills cigar bar. These were called Pavónes. Of course; peacocks.