The Butcher's Granddaughter (3 page)

Jay was standing in the middle of the apartment, his hands hanging limply at his sides. The gun was all but dropping to the floor from his fingers.

“I’ll be around,” I said.

He didn’t speak except to mumble, “Loved her.” Then he dropped the .45’s hammer and tossed it on the bed. I nodded, shut the door, and trudged down the stairs.

I thought I would have to chase her down, but she was waiting for me outside the old building’s thick double doors. She stepped out from behind a scrolled column next to the sidewalk and opened up on me with her fists. They felt like rabbit’s feet thumping softly against my chest. She was still crying a little, and when I got hold of her wrists her mouth took up where her hands left off.

“Fucker, fucker, fucker! Who the fuck do you think you are! Do you know who I am?”

She struggled, the gold pendant around her neck getting tangled in her hair. I glanced up and down the block, too aware that I was a white boy manhandling a screaming woman who would look black from ten yards away. Before she could continue the screeching, I dragged her back inside the doors and all but threw her against the stairs. She continued turning the air blue with English words sprinkled liberally into broken Vietnamese phrases whose meanings could not have been compliments. I almost yelled at her to shut up, then simply pulled the gun out instead and she went dead silent in mid-shout. Sighing disgustedly, I paced back and forth in front of her. “Think for a minute,” I said to her. “Use your fucking brain for just a second. Five minutes ago you were an inch from getting your head removed and I pulled you out. I’d be pissed, too, if someone busted in and made me spill my guts to a lover, particularly a lover holding a gun. But before I beat the shit out of him I’d want to know a few things.” I took a deep breath and stared at her the way a teacher stares at an indolent student. “Don’t you?”

She was still so furious that droplets of sweat were pilling on her forehead, but she started to think. She didn’t get very far.

“What the hell would I wanna ask you, you fuckin’ dickhead? I could’ve handled it. He wasn’t gonna dust me. He loved me.”

“Right,” I said. “Nobody ever got killed by someone who loved them.” I was getting tired of guiding her through this. “So you got out with your life, now what? Know a comfortable wino you can curl up against?”

She threw her nose in the air. “I got lotsa places to go.”

“Yeah? Name two.”

She didn’t say anything.

“If it hasn’t occurred to you yet, and I don’t think it has, I know a little more about you than you suspect. And one of the things I know is that you’ve got no place to go. That’s why you screwed Sheff in your own bed. What the hell were you thinking, cheating on a guy like Ballesteros?”

“I’ll make out all right.” She was tough, I had to give her that. Stupid, but tough.

“Lady, you’re doing a stellar job already,” I clipped. “But this’ll make it a little bit easier.” I took a matchbook out of my pocket and wrote Li’s phone number inside it. She looked at it, obviously didn’t recognize it. “Your sister, Li, sent me because she thought you might be out here screwing up. I guess she was right.”

Song whispered her sister’s name and stared vacantly at the matchbook as I talked.

“She claims not to care about you, but she’s shoveling it. She cared enough to chase me all the way out to The Reading Room. If you call her, she’ll come get you. She’s got her own place. You won’t have to deal with your parents.”

The mention of her parents seemed to mellow her, and I got her to walk with me to Gorky’s. I knew I wasn’t going to get any gratitude, and knew even deeper that I didn’t deserve any, so I started my bike and left Song standing on the corner of Eighth and San Pedro. When I circled back around toward my apartment, she was on the phone across the street. Through the scratched and graffitied acrylic windows of the booth I could see her smile in what seemed like relief.

I’m glad I got to see her smile at least once.

The air was that greasy cool you only feel late at night in the city, and the last of the vampires were peeling themselves off the streets as I flashed past the numbered blocks along Olympic Boulevard. It was four-thirty in the blessed a.m. The first trickle of traffic, which would become a fuming, honking deluge in forty-five minutes, was beginning to fill the pay-parking lots that decorated every corner with asphalt. I turned off on a side street deep in the Garment District and wandered the motorcycle into its space next to my bedroom window. I ran the chain through both wheels and snapped the lock home. My back creaked as I stood up, discussing bed with me.

Yeah, I thought, stretching, it’s been a long night.

And people owe me. Oh, do people owe me.

Chapter 2

Detective Sergeant Luzana Cazares, Caz to her friends, is a huge Mexican lesbian with gin blossoms on her cheeks, a racist streak a mile wide, and poor taste in sports jackets. I was dreaming about her.

Normally, I would have been dreaming about Li. But at that particular hour, eleven-thirty Thursday morning, Caz was sitting in my head. The reason she was there, screwing up my dreams, was because at that particular hour she was also standing over me, about to wake me up. I could smell her.

“C’mon, Bird...c’mon, sleepy head.” She was lightly slapping the back of my head and doing her best to sound like my mother. Just to get her to stop, I rolled off my face and sat up. “Oh, you’re up.” She sounded genuinely surprised. She moved her solid bulk into the kitchen alcove and poured two cups of coffee. That made me blink. She’d been here a while.

“Tie one on last night, Bird?”

“You could say that,” I said through a cheek-stretching yawn. I glanced at the clock and said, “Christ, Sarge. You know what time it is?”

“You ask me that every time I drop in. It’s almost lunch time. Civilized people’ve been at work for four hours.”

“Remind me to drop in at your place during my lunch break sometime. I’d like to meet that cute little redheaded girlfriend of yours. I bet she looks great in a nightie.”

“Doesn’t wear a nightie,” she said flatly. “In fact, she doesn’t wear much of anything. It’s what makes the relationship work.” She thumped a cup down on the night table. The aroma tried to clear my head but couldn’t quite get past my sinuses. I took a mouthful and spit it back in the mug.

“You made this? On purpose?” I coughed.

She shrugged and sipped. “It’s your coffee, Bird. Got it from the cupboard. Good as the joe at the department.”

“No wonder you guys are beating people up,” I jabbed, then quickly apologized. She didn’t say anything.

I slid out of bed and ambled over to the sink. I dumped the junk in my mug as well as the pot she’d made down the disposal. I pulled the grinder down and started over. I was opening the freezer for the fresh stuff when she called from behind me, “You got anything here I’d like?”

She was studying my CD collection, bent over and squinting like an ape with gastritis. “Yeah, lowest left corner.” Caz was a classical fan. “But nothing too serious,” I warned. “It’s too early in the damn morning.”

By the time the coffee was done I had a t-shirt and jeans on, and Handel’s King Solomon was greeting the Queen of Sheba. I dumped cream in the coffee until it was the color of Li’s skin, turned down the stereo, and poured myself back into bed. “Good call on the music,” I said.

Caz
nodded. “It’s information time, Bird.”

“I figured.”

“We got a body in an alley last night on Eighth and Los Angeles. I understand you were there.”

“I try to do my killing away from home.” I sipped the coffee. Much better.

“Not funny.” She unbuttoned the top button of her K-Mart blouse and made my only chair squeak a lot while she got comfortable. “What were you doing down there?”

“I didn’t say I was down there. How about you just tell me what you want, I’ll tell you what I know, you get the fuck out and let me get back to sleep?”

She shrugged and unloaded the dump truck. “Tell me what Song Ti Nguyen was doing in the Santa Fe Building this morning at about three-thirty.”

I said, “Cheating on her boyfriend,” and took another sip of coffee.

“That’s it?”

“You asked, I answered. The door’s over there.”

“I
could
take you in and make you talk for free.”

“No you couldn’t,” I said offhandedly. I put the coffee on the table and hunted for a cigarette. After I got it lit, I said, “Sure, babe, there’s more that you might want to know. Maybe I heard something, maybe I didn’t. You know how I operate.”

“Look, Bird. I usually come to you ’cause I don’t have to beat information out of you, and once in a while you actually know something important. But this time,” she said, “I got ya.”

Caz
is a careful cop. That was the first time I had heard a threat from her and it scared me, because she doesn’t just shoot off her mouth. “Bring it,” I said flatly.

“Four boys from Vice were takin’ their dinner in the front window of Gorky’s this morning. And lo and behold, who comes strolling down the walk with a choice piece of Chink ass, but the Bird himself. I traced it back to an old nigger chick waiting for the bus who saw a guy looks a lot like you throw that very same piece of ass back into the Santa Fe Building not ten minutes earlier.” She didn’t smile, sipped her coffee. “Four cops and a witness, man. We got you at the scene. You’re in it.”

I bought a second to think. “So what? I talk to cute girls all the time.”

“So do I. But maybe I’m thinkin’ some funny things. Seems to me you have a certain weakness for that Oriental stuff. Maybe she’s your girlfriend. Maybe— ”

“Maybe you’re drunk,” I said. “All right, sure, I was down there. But this is the first I’ve heard of a body.” I fell back on the bed and considered things, talking to the ceiling. “But, like I said, I saw some stuff last night that’s pretty serious to me—maybe not to you, but you’re asking. And, if you already canvassed all the way to some lady at a bus stop, then you’re being fairly thorough.”

“I said it was serious.”

I looked around my apartment. It was a basement, but it was over twelve hundred square feet—a single huge room with ground level windows all the way around the tops of the twelve-foot high walls. My bed, the only furniture besides the chair that Caz was crushing, sat in the middle of the bare wood floor. It made me think about rent. “OK,” I started. “Beginning-to-end action is going to cost a round hundred. Any weapons involved, another fifty. I’ll throw the apartment number in for ten. Names and addresses of everyone involved, another hundred. Anything else I’ll have to think about.”

She had been through it before. She made a show of reaching the snitch fund out of her bra and put three hundreds on the table. “This better be good, Bird. You drain the bank.”

I told her everything except that I was carrying a gun. I also left out that Song and Li were sisters, but said they were friends. She wanted to know where The Reading Room was for some reason. I told her. When I got to Jay, she asked, “What kind of piece did he have?”

“A Smith .45. Your basic artillery—blued finish, walnut handle. Personally, I’ve never seen him use it, but I guess he’s pretty good.”

“Legal?”

“Yeah. He finessed a license to carry through his recovery agency, which is a tough thing to do. The piece is registered with the Sheriff.”

“Know what he used in it?”

“As a matter of fact, yeah. Only reason I remember is because they’re so wicked: hot loads that would go in a much heavier weapon. Cop-killers. Never understood why he would use them.”

Caz
shook her head. “Fuckin’ things’ll punch a hole in a bank vault. And they’re too easy to get.” She paused for a long minute. “So we got Li Nguyen and Song Ti Nguyen, no relation. We got a repo man, Jay Ballesteros, carries legal with illegal caps. And John Sheffield, called Sheff. Addresses on all of ’em.”

I reached out for the money and she slapped my wrist. “Hold up there, sweet thing. There’s an extra forty bucks in there we haven’t discussed yet.”

I moved over to the coffee, sipped and waited.

“How about tellin’ me where all these folks would be about, say, now.”

I thought for a minute. “Jay is probably asleep at his place. Today’s his day off. He’ll get up about ten tonight and go to a club, probably Helter Skelter out at the end of Sunset. He’ll stay ’til it closes. On Sunday night he’ll do the same thing, but only ’til maybe eleven. Then he’ll go to work.

“Sheff will be at the Pantages in...” I looked at the clock. “He’s there now. Works on the ticket phones. He lives with his parents, so I don’t know what he’ll be doing later. He’s not as much of a vampire as the rest of us.” Caz’s pen-hand paused over her notebook while I went on about Sheff.

“Li will be at her place in Santa Monica. She starts work about six.”

“What’s she do?”

“Barback at the Islander Café on Wishire. She’ll be there ’til four tomorrow morning. She’s tiny and beautiful. She’d be just your type if she was a rude dyke. Can I go back to sleep now?”

“No. And she might be my type anyway. Where’s this Song girl?”

“Dunno. Like I said, I’d never seen her before last night. I gave her Li’s number because she didn’t have it on her. When I gave it to her she looked at it like it was one of the Dead Sea Scrolls. When I left she was in the phone booth across from Gorky’s. I can only assume that’s who she was calling. She wasn’t the brainiest thing I’ve ever run into.”

Caz
pursed her lips, looked at her note pad, shut it, and stood up. “That’s pretty good, Birdy. Work schedules and everything.”

I sucked at the cigarette. “What I’m paid for.”

“Well, lock your door from now on. You never know when some fat dyke is gonna invite herself in.”

“Knock next time,” I said. As she got to the door I put a couple of things together and said, “Hey, Sarge?”

She paused with her hand around the knob. “Yeah?”