January Justice (40 page)

“Been a long time?”

“Twenty-three years, since I met Fanny. Can you believe it? My palms are sweating back here.”

“Want me to turn around?”

“No. Now that I’m so scared about it, I need to get this done. I’m not going to mope around all by myself while Fanny’s got that guy. It’s a matter of self-respect.”

“You’ll be fine. Just smile and ask questions and listen. Women love it when you listen.”

“Ain’t that the truth. I probably wouldn’t be in this situation if I’d listened more to Fanny.”

I pulled to the curb in front of the Quiet Woman in Corona del Mar and got out under the sign of the medieval woman with her head cut off. I opened the door for Sid. I was wearing the black suit I usually wore like a uniform when I drove the stretch. In a new holster underneath the jacket, I also wore the M11 Simon had procured for me after my release from jail.

I said, “You have my number on your cell?”

“I’ll call you when I’m ready. Unless, hey, you want to go in and have a drink with me?”

“If that’s what you want. But what about that self-respect?”

“You’re right. Yeah, you’re right. I gotta do this on my own.”

“You’ll be fine, Sid.”

He took a step toward the door, then turned back. “I won’t talk about the business, and I won’t let them know I have money. I’m not interested in gold diggers.”

“Makes perfect sense. Just be yourself. And remember to listen.”

“Listen.” He nodded. “Here goes.”

He walked to the door and pulled it open. Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” spilled out onto the sidewalk. I watched Sid until the door swung closed, then I got behind the wheel, made an illegal U-turn, and drove the limo south along the Pacific Coast Highway to the Crystal Cove Promenade parking lot. I swung around to face the ocean and killed the engine.

The sun was already down, but there was a pale pink afterglow to the west. I saw a few white lights twinkling offshore, probably commercial fishing boats or container ships steaming south to San Diego and Mexico, or up to Long Beach or LA Harbor.

I went over everything again, item by item, all the facts and guesses I had considered the night before. My thoughts circled around the dead bomber up in Silverado Canyon, trying to figure out if he had been the one who murdered Haley. There wasn’t enough information, so I considered Olivia for a while, Olivia in her bed at my place, hoping I would come to her. I thought about that and the fact that she was one of the more desirable women I had ever met. And then I considered the strange fact that while I did find her desirable, I did not desire her. I wondered how that worked and decided it was probably too complicated to understand. Maybe it meant I would never desire any woman again. Maybe I was one of those people for whom love comes only once. Or maybe it was the fact that Olivia was lying about who she was and what she wanted. It seemed pretty obvious she intended to use me for her own purposes. I didn’t mind protecting her from Medallion and his partner, but I didn’t much like the idea of going to prison for her, if that was what she had in mind.

I kept thinking about Olivia’s tearful reaction when I had called her mother a murderer and a monster. I had begun to wonder if maybe Olivia’s reason for getting hired as Doña Elena’s personal assistant was simply to make contact with her mother. After all, the usual avenues for contacting Alejandra Delarosa would be closed to Olivia. She couldn’t expect help from the police. She couldn’t take out an advertisement. She couldn’t even hire someone like me without the risk that her mother would be turned in to the authorities. How would you look for someone under those conditions? Where would you begin?

I supposed it made some kind of sense to start with Doña Elena, because she was the last person known to have seen Olivia’s mother. But Olivia couldn’t very well expect Doña Elena to help. So maybe Olivia had adopted her alias and gotten herself hired as Doña Elena’s personal assistant simply to be nearby in case Delarosa was still interested in Doña Elena. Maybe Olivia was hoping her mother would see her at Doña Elena’s side. Maybe she was just that desperate to find a mother who had hidden herself far too well.

But although I wanted to believe the best about Olivia, there was still the fact that Medallion and his partner had tried to beat something out of her. Although I had given Olivia several chances to come clean about that, she had refused to do it. She was obviously hiding something more than just her identity, something a couple of very bad guys wanted. Whatever that thing was, if it was innocent, why wouldn’t Olivia tell me about it?

I watched the lights out on the ocean, and thought and thought, but in the end I just didn’t have enough information. Instead, I had two choices, neither of which had much appeal. I could hang around and watch while Olivia kept doing whatever it was she was doing and very possibly got herself killed. Or I could go back to the plan I’d had before. Tell her I knew her real identity and hope she reacted by admitting the real reason for her actions, whatever that might be.

The first strategy was probably the smartest, since the second required me to give up the only strategic advantage I seemed to have at the moment—knowing a little more about Olivia than she realized. But what if Olivia was innocent, and I let her get herself killed while the two of us played this game of cat and mouse? After Haley, I didn’t think I would survive that. Instead, it seemed I was probably going to give up the one thing I had going for me and let Olivia know I was onto her. Then at least there was a chance she’d tell me what she was really up against, and I could use that information to protect her.

I sighed, laid my head back against the seat, crossed my arms over my chest, and shut my eyes. I slept fitfully, fading in and out of consciousness. I dreamed of trailers teetering on cliff tops and Haley walking in midair and the deathly stench of millions of bloated fish floating on the ocean from horizon to horizon. The sunset’s afterglow was long gone when my cell phone’s ringtone roused me from the nightmare. It was Sid Gold calling for his pickup.

Sid was waiting on the sidewalk when I pulled up to the curb. He was alone. I started to get out to open the door for him, but he waved me away and got into the back on his own. I merged into the PCH traffic, heading toward El Nido.

“So,” he said, slurring the “s” a little bit. “That was a disaster.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I go in, and there’s no room at the bar and only one high top available, so I sit there and I order a manhattan, and I’m drinking it and looking around, watching all the action. There’s some pros in there, if you want my opinion, wearing nothing but shirts and calling them dresses, but I saw a couple of girls who looked like they were maybe normal people from the neighborhood. So I call the waitress over and tell her I want to buy their next round. Which they seem to appreciate, giving me nice smiles and all, but I can’t tell if they want me to come over, you know? I mean, it’s been a real long time, Malcolm. I can’t remember all the signals. So I’m sitting there, trying to decide, and I guess I waited too long, because they stopped looking my way, and then it was kind of like they were avoiding eye contact. So I order another manhattan, and I’m drinking it alone and feeling pretty stupid, and who should come up to the table but Morty Stern, you know, the agent? Represents Tom Selleck and Julia Dreyfus? And he’s all ‘What are you doing here alone?’ And ‘Hey, everybody, you know who this is?’

“So Morty sort of shouts my filmography to the whole room—he’s drunk see—and he’s rattling off all my pictures, and suddenly I notice those two girls are watching me again, only this time they get up and come over to my table and they thank me for the drinks, the drinks I bought them what, half an hour earlier? Naturally I know what’s on their mind, but at this point I don’t care. I just don’t want to sit there like a wallflower anymore, so I pretend I like Morty just fine, which I do not, and I pretend I don’t know what these women want, which I do, and I order another round for everyone. And after that I start to kind of forget about these people’s motivation, and there’s another round, and I don’t know, but I think maybe another round after that, and this one girl, she’s maybe thirty and frankly pretty hot, she’s rubbing up against me accidentally on purpose and talking about how much she admires my work, and I’m actually starting to think maybe we’re connecting on some kind of level. And then she puts her face right there in front of mine, I mean right there, and she looks deep into my eyes, and I’m thinking this is a very soulful moment, and she says to me, with these luscious pouty lips, she says, ‘Could you introduce me to Brad Pitt?’ So I say ‘Excuse me,’ and I go to the men’s room and call you.”

“I’m sorry, Sid.”

“Well, hey, at least I tried.”

“That’s right.”

“Yeah, at least I got that out of my system. Now I know what I’ve been missing, and it’s not much, let me tell you. So, change the subject. Seen any good films lately?”

“I don’t go to the movies much.”

“No? But you drive for people in the business. That’s funny. You drive for people like me and Haley Lane, but you’re not a movie fan. Pretty perfect, actually. Now that I think about it. Very interesting.”

“I’m glad you think so.”

“I do think it’s interesting, and I should know. I’m up to my eyeballs in boredom, Malcolm. You know how I spend my days? I sit around reading boring treatments, that’s how. People send us these yawners, these homages to monotony, and they expect to get a picture made.”

“This is why I don’t watch movies. Mostly they just put me to sleep.”

“Yeah, well, don’t quote me, but lately I’ve been feeling the same. It’s hard to find a script worth filming. Give you an example. Just this morning my assistant brings me this script somebody sent us. It’s about money laundering, okay? Money laundering. People love pictures about stealing money or spending money or losing money. They do not want to watch a film about making fake investments, which is basically what money laundering is.”

“Making fake investments. Is that really all there is to it?”

“Sure. Say you have a pile of dough, which you stole from somebody’s granny or whoever, and everybody knows you have no excuse to be holding so much money, so what do you do? You have to find a reason for the money, right? Something that makes sense out of you getting rich all of a sudden. So you get yourself a little coin-operated Laundromat, just to mention the example in this boring screenplay I read. Seriously, most of the scenes take place in a Laundromat. Guy must be an accountant writing on the side.”

I said, “I must be missing something. What does a Laundromat have to do with money laundering?”

“Oh. Well, say you take in five hundred dollars a week legitimately. You add some of your ill-gotten gains, pay taxes on five thousand, and keep thirty-five hundred. Then you spend that any way you want. Who’s going to argue? The cops would have to sit there for a month and count the quarters.”

As I turned off the PCH, getting close to El Nido, an idea came to me, something I hadn’t considered before.

I said, “How about selling something over the Internet? Something like a book? You could just invent orders and pay yourself, and nobody would ever know, right.”

“I guess that could work. But it’s even more boring than the Laundromat.”

I wasn’t so sure.

As I turned into the driveway at El Nido and waited for the gates to part and admit us, I pondered the way you can look at something for so long, you start to think you’re seeing it the only way it can be seen. Then one little idea comes along that shifts your point of view just slightly, and suddenly everything you thought you knew for sure becomes a question, or else everything you didn’t understand before is crystal clear.

I dropped Sid at the mansion, drove over to the garage, parked the Mercedes, and walked across the grounds to the guesthouse. When I entered, Simon, Teru, and Olivia were sitting at the small table in the kitchen, playing cards.

Simon looked up at me with a startled expression. “Oh, I say, you don’t mean Mr. Gold has already returned?”

“Afraid so. I just dropped him at the big house.”

He put down his cards and rose to his feet to look down at Olivia and Teru. “Miss Soto and Mr. Fujimoto, thank you for a lovely evening. My apologies for this hasty departure, but duty calls.” Seconds later he was out the door.

Teru said, “A likely excuse. He was just tired of losing.”

I saw that most of the chips on the table were in front of Olivia. I said, “Looks like Simon isn’t the only loser.”

“Malcolm,” said Teru, “sitting across the table from me is a poker-playing machine disguised as a woman. Do not ever try to bluff her or read her mind. It isn’t possible.”

“Yes,” I said, “I’ve come to the same conclusion.”

Olivia glanced up at me and then back down at her cards.

I went into the bedroom and changed out of the suit into a polo shirt and a pair of khaki cargo shorts. When I returned to the kitchen, Teru was gone and Olivia was washing some plates and glasses at the sink.

I said, “You already ate?”

“Simon brought over some lamb and asparagus and a Caesar salad.”

“Sounds good.” I opened a can of chili, poured it in a bowl, and put the bowl in the microwave. While it heated, I got a Heineken out of the refrigerator. “Want one of these?”

“No, thank you.”