King Maybe (6 page)

“No, no,” Stinky said. “Dead end. That way leads to the country-club gate. It'll be closed by now. Have to go right.”

“Got it.”

“And turn the lights on,” I said. “This is like having the Goodyear blimp over us with a big arrow pointing down and flashing the words ‘Here they are.'”

“It's
so
easy to criticize.” She flipped the lights on and made the turn.

Instantly, headlights went on behind us.

Stinky said, “There's someone
back
there.”

“This is the first night I've ever driven this thing,” Ronnie said. “Does it have any punch?”

Normally the car has a big fat Detroit gas gulper, wedged into it by Louie the Lost, but Louie's engine developed a cracked block, so the original Toyota putt-putt was back in place. I said, “Not so's you'd notice.”

“Well, let's find out.” She jammed her foot down, and the car gave a little gargle and leaped forward, accelerating by a good five miles per hour. She slapped the dashboard. “That's
it
?”

“You have to talk to it.” I looked back, past Stinky, at the dazzle of light behind us.

“What do you say?”

“It's too embarrassing.” The lights behind us doubled in brightness and grew closer.

“Does it have a name?” Ronnie said. She was bouncing backward and forward to urge the car on, as though she were rowing it.

“That's what's embarrassing,” I said. A nice-looking house crept by on the left, at a rate of speed that gave me time to appreciate it. I reached back and snatched the gun from Stinky's hand. “Are you sure this thing isn't loaded?”

“Well,
I
didn't load it.”

Ronnie said, “Pookie? FooFoo?”

“Get down,” I told Stinky, and the moment he ducked, I pulled the trigger.

Both my ears turned inside out, Ronnie screamed, and the back window exploded into a million diamonds. And then the horn of the car behind us began to blare and the car slowly drifted left, bounced right, swerved left again, and jumped the curb. Then it came to a stop.

“What a shot,” I said, although I hadn't actually been aiming.

“Oh, my God,” Stinky said. “I could have saved Jejomar.”

Ronnie said, “Uh-oh.”

I said to her, “It
felt
too easy, didn't it?”

Half a block in front of us, a black Porsche pulled away from the curb and immediately telegraphed its intentions by weaving back and forth at about eight miles an hour.

“Shoot him, Junior,” Stinky said, a bit imperiously.

Ronnie didn't have to brake much to stay back. She started weaving in opposition to the car in front of us: it went left, we went right. “Slow is good,” she said. “This car is aces with slow.”

“How far to a turnoff, Stinky?”

“I don't know,” he said.

“You
live
here.”

“I don't get out much.”

The car in front of us was slowing even more. We were going about five miles an hour, and it kept weaving back and forth.

“I am behind people like this
all the time
,” Ronnie said between her teeth. “Why don't you do what the nice man said, Junior? Shoot the fucker.”

“Fine,” I said. “Weave left. That way I can get a good shot at the driver's side.”

“Left, Pookie,” she said to the car, and we swerved. It was a slow swerve, but it was a swerve.

The back window of the Porsche was tinted, and I couldn't make out the driver's silhouette, but a driver usually likes to be close to the steering wheel, so I aimed at where I thought it would be, closed one eye, sighted, drew a deep breath, and pulled the trigger.

“You were close,” I said to Stinky. “It was
almost
not loaded.”

“You mean, that's it? There aren't any extra ones stuck in there anywhere?”

“Not a one. I could throw it at them.”

“Uh-oh,” Ronnie said again, and then for a third time, “Uh-oh.”

I said, “Two?”

“Two,” she said. “The one in front of us and two behind us.”

Stinky said, “Oh, my God.
Bats.
”

I looked back to see two guys who were as wide as they were tall and had those big, sloping shoulder muscles that seem to begin at the ears and make the head look really, really little trotting toward us, holding the biggest baseball bats I'd ever seen. I said to Ronnie, “What's in front—” and canceled the rest of the question because the Porsche was in a very wide swerve to the right, all the way to the curb, and then it pulled left until it was perpendicular to us and stopped, blocking the road.

The door opened, and a much slighter guy got out, no hurry, all the time in the world. He was slender and kind of classical-musician-looking, dressed all in black and smoking a cigarette. He had an elegant swoop of steel-gray hair that picked up the moonlight nicely, and over his shoulder was yet another bat. He paused, found the bright center of the headlights, stepped into it, and, swear to God, riffed his swoop of gray hair with the fingers of his free hand. He was
posing
.

“That's
him
,” Stinky said, his voice breaking on the pronoun. “That's the Slugger.”

I said, “I'm surprised he didn't bring his mirror.”

Ronnie said. “Where's reverse?”

“Two down.”

She slammed it into reverse and floored it. I'd like to say we shot backward, but it was more demure than that. We rolled backward at a dignified, favorite-auntie speed, gradually picking up velocity, and then Ronnie cut the wheel sharply left and we all heard and felt a loud thump followed a hoarse scream, and as the other guy's bat landed on the trunk with malice aforethought, she said, “Engine in back?”

“It's a
Toyota
,” I said. “The engine is in the fucking ashtray.”

“In the Porsche, you idiot.”

The bat shattered the left backseat window, and the car filled with flying glass and Stinky's shriek.

“In the back,” I said. “I think.”

“Okay. Put on your seat belts.”

I said, “Oh, for Christ's—” And Ronnie dumped the car into neutral, raced the engine to the red line, and threw it into gear.

We jumped forward with a squealing-tire abandon that was a new element in my relationship with the car, and Ronnie leaned on the horn, one long, pulsating bleat of desperation to wake up the neighbors. The slight figure of the Slugger jumped elegantly out of the way, and Ronnie twisted the wheel left, hopping the curb on the driver's side and, still gathering momentum, clipped the front end of the Porsche at a sharp angle, knocking it cattywampus, and then we were around it and hurtling downhill.

“Directions!”
Ronnie shouted.

I said, “Go right, then just head downhill.”

She tore her eyes from the rearview mirror. “Watch behind us.”

I looked back. We hung a gentle curve and then made the right, and even looking backward as I was, in my peripheral vision I could see the Valley opening itself welcomingly below us, glittering a relieved
Hello there.
Ronnie had brought the car's speed down to something like the limit, and she said, “Anything?”

“Not unless he doesn't have his headlights on.”

“Okay,” she said. “Then he's probably not coming.”

“Why not?”

“Either I knocked the front wheel cockeyed or I pushed the fender into it so tightly it'll cut into the tire and blow it the first couple of yards he drives. That's why I clipped him at that angle. I probably screwed up Pookie's passenger side—”

“She's not named Pookie.”

“—but I wanted to make sure I hit his wheel just right.” She turned to me. “So where are we going? Or do you want to drive?”

“No, really,” I said. “Wouldn't hear of it. You're doing fine.”

6

The Great Unspanked Baby of the World

“People
live
like this?” Stinky was squinting against the light. The Du-par's on Ventura, just a block from Laurel Canyon, has been uncomfortably bright inside all night long for about forty years, with the shadowless, concentrated glare of twenty-four-hour coffee shops everywhere. I've always figured the candlepower was meant to discourage dopers and draw cops, who convene from the night like moths. In fact, four uniformed motorcycle cops, their leather creaking as they shifted in their seats, were the only other customers in the place. Stinky glanced at them, dismissed them, and pouted at his plate. “Where in the world are we?”

“Studio City.”

“On a
deeper
level,” Stinky said, making a point of not rolling his eyes. “What kind of place
is
this?” He prodded the coconut cream pie I'd ordered him. “Is this supposed to be food?”

“People who leave their houses occasionally,” I said, “have
places
. They might not be great places, they might not earn three stars from the
Guide Michelin
, but they have several things going for them. We're used to them, they stay in the same location, and we have memories set in them.”

Stinky prodded his plate. “Gluten,” he said, in the tone I'd been saving to say “knot of writhing centipedes,” and then touched the tip of his fat little index finger to his tongue.
“Sugar.”

“It's pie,” Ronnie said, poking a hole in the top crust of a piece of apple and then licking the back of the fork. One of the things that recommends Ronnie to me is that she loves to eat. She may have lied to me about literally everything else in her life, but her love of food is genuine. I don't trust people who don't like to eat, which is not exactly the same thing as saying I trusted Ronnie. She said, “What
do
you eat anyway?”

“Lean protein in small quantities,” Stinky said. “Cruciferous vegetables. Seeds and nuts.”

I said, “You're still going to die.”

Stinky said, “Do you know how this stuff
accumulates
in the gut, how it turns to putrefactive acids, how long it takes you to
excrete
it?”

“Not my topic.” My pie was peach and had more sugar in it than Hershey, Pennsylvania. “I figure I can either die having eaten pie or die without having eaten pie, and as existential choices go, that one's a snap. It requires even less energy than figuring out who to vote against.”

“You have memories about this place?” Ronnie asked with her mouth full.

“This was where I received the Gospel According to Herbie,” I said. “He brought me here the night we met, and we came back regularly, whenever he had the urge to pass along a lifetime of learning. Du-par's was the soda fountain of knowledge, so to speak.”

“Herbie Mott,” Stinky said, having sniffed his water and put it down. “Great burglar.”

“There should be a Burglary Hall of Fame,” I said. “Posthumous, of course, no need to make it any easier for the cops than it already is.” I nodded in the direction of the four uniformed officers in the booth, busily turning my tax dollars into burgers and fries. One of them, who had been staring at Ronnie, held my gaze in the biologically approved male-primate fashion. I smiled to indicate submission. “Herbie would be the first inductee.”

“The pathological need of Americans to give each other awards,” Stinky said. “It's pathetic. It infantilizes us in the eyes of the world.”

“We've been infantilized in the eyes of the world for a long time,” I said. “Back in the 1920s, after we came out of World War I in a single piece, the painter John Sloan— Do you know that Herbie left me a Sloan painting?”

Stinky put his elbow on his pie, glanced down at it, and left it there. He rubbed his nose with his free hand, the sure sign that his heartbeat had just increased—I'll kill the person who tells him about it—and said, “You have a Sloan?”

“I do.”

He rubbed his nose again. “Have you thought about selling it?”

“Of course not. Anyway, after the war ended, with us largely protected by oceans, Sloan referred to America as ‘the great unspanked baby of the world.'”

“Very apt, I'm sure,” Stinky said. “You have a Sloan?”

“Who retained you to get the stamp?” I said.

“Surely you jest,” Stinky said. Ronnie batted his arm away from his pie, pulled the plate over to her, and began to eat around the elbow dent. “You have the stamp, and you think I'll tell you who the buyer is?”

“Lookie here.” I took the stamp out of my pocket and brought it within half an inch of the coffee in my cup. I wiggled it back and forth, feeling the heat of the coffee on my fingers. “What do you think?”

“You wouldn't,” Stinky said, his eyes on the stamp. “You have an aesthetic sense, however rudimentary.”

“Yes, I do. But I confine it to things that are valuable on
purpose
. It doesn't extend to accidents.”

“I can't tell you who—”

“One,” I said, lowering the stamp toward the coffee. “Two.”

“I hate to be pushy,” Ronnie said, wagging her fork at him, “but just to sidestep the melodrama and move things along—and not attract any more attention from
les gendarmes—
look at it this way. It took less than ninety minutes after the Slugger almost caught Junior here for him to show up at your house. So what that suggests to me—and, I'm assuming, to Junior—is that he didn't have to work his way through a long list of alternatives, a random selection of acquaintances. The people who are normally closest to collectors—and to junkies, too, since it's sort of the same thing—are dealers. Ergo, the person who asked you to steal the stamp might well be the person who sold the stamp to the Slugger in the first place, and the Slugger figured that out, and somewhere in the course of being beaten into pâté de foie gras, the dealer spoke your name. Something along those lines, Junior?” She gave me a bright smile and put her fork in her mouth.

Stinky was giving her that look again, the sort of silent
eeeek
he'd unleashed on her in the car, and I felt something like it on my own face, so I just smiled and said, “That's exactly where I was going.”

“You don't even have to tell us his name,” Ronnie said as I sat there wondering which act of the play I'd missed. “Just call him and see if he's there.”

“It's late,” Stinky said.

She patted his hand comfortingly, and he snatched it away. “If you get him, tell him what happened tonight and suggest he go to Colorado or someplace. He'll be grateful.” She felt the cop's gaze, returned it, turned her palms up and indicated Stinky and me, and then shrugged, as though to say,
What can I do?

Stinky pulled an antique cell phone, complete with a hinge, out of his pocket, angled it away from us so we couldn't see the dial pad, and punched a bunch of buttons. His eyes wandered the room, hopscotched over the cops, and came back to the surface of our table. Probably unaware that he was doing it, he pressed the balls of his thumbs to some piecrust crumbs on the table, then licked them off. He looked up at Ronnie and then at me, and Ronnie said, “No answer?”

“He should be there,” Stinky said.

“He probably is,” Ronnie said, “but in no shape to take calls.”

Stinky said again, “He should be there,” and I realized he hadn't heard Ronnie. His forehead was shiny with sweat. He closed his eyes like someone fighting seasickness, and then, without opening them again, he put the phone on the table and snapped it closed. The hand he rested on it was trembling.

“It's probably nothing,” I said, and at that moment there was a burst of electrified chatter, several people talking at once, coming from the table with the cops at it. The two on the ends of the banquette, including the one who had been lofting pheromone flares in Ronnie's direction, scrambled to their feet, and the other two slid out. One made writing motions on the air, which I interpreted as
On the tab, we'll be back
, and they all pushed their way through the door.

Ronnie said, “It's probably something,” and sirens wailed into life in the street, accompanied by blinking red lights, and then they were gone. “Does your guy live near here?”

“I still don't know where
here
is,” Stinky said. “I don't drive, and when you're in the backseat of a limo, knowing where you are is the driver's job.”

“Okay,” I said. “What street does he live on? Even in a limo, you have to give the driver an address.”

He hesitated.

“Stinky,” I said, “I doubt he's in any shape to make a deal with me.”

Stinky closed his eyes. After a moment, without opening them, he said, “Sunnyslope.”

Twelve or fourteen silent minutes later, we turned off of Sunnyslope to head back down to Ventura, each of us carrying the vivid memory of a roomy, sturdy-looking Spanish house, all its doors wide open, afire with the red lights of half a dozen LAPD cherry tops.