The Setup Man (15 page)

I wait.

Four sneakers appear at the top of the ramp—new Jordans, red with white lace covers. They stop for a minute, then start pussyfooting down.

“Hey!” I yell again. “I have something for you.”

I square up and throw a fastball through the windshield of the Ford. The garage explodes with noise—first the glass, then the ruckus of the truck’s alarm.

Through the wired-glass window in the stairwell door, I watch my pursuers come down the ramp. Squinting at the noise, they stand dumbfounded before the Ford. One guy puts his hands to his ears. The other retreats back up the ramp halfway to the next level. They shout into each other’s ears. One of them must have realized that security guards—real security guards—would be arriving soon, because now they start shedding their fake uniforms. One is down to his wifebeater and the other bare-chested when I decide I have seen enough. I make my way upstairs.

“And how would you like to take care of the room charges, Mr. Washington?”

The woman at the desk is a blue-eyed blonde with skin so fair you can see the veins in her temples, the kind of girl you might injure by staring too hard.

“I’m going to be using points,” I explain. “It’s a company account—Sushi Makasu.”

It has become clear that Johnny Adcock is unlikely to get any sleep tonight, at least as long as he still has Frankie Herrera’s phone. Luckily, he has friends with loyalty points. When Marcus opened his restaurant, I put in a hundred G’s on the condition that I be allowed to use his name in a pinch. He said it was a raw deal but he knew it was worth more to me than a lifetime of free rail drinks. I maintain that I have been a responsible identity thief.

The blonde keeps looking up from the keyboard as she types, smiling nervously. I doubt she recognizes me as a ballplayer.
Why would I be booking a room on my own dime when the rest of the team is upstairs asleep?

Well, not exactly my dime, but still.

“Okay, Mr. Washington, I have a suite for you on the twelfth floor.”

She slides the little envelope containing the keycard across the counter. Then she takes a business card from the drawer, turns it over, and writes something with a blue ballpoint pen.

“And here is my personal number if you have any trouble.”

“Trouble?”

Her eyes flash, and she mouths, “Call me.”

This is almost how it would be if we owned this hotel. No need to whisper, but the same idea.

I take the card, remind myself that what I need right now is a good night’s sleep.

“Is there anything else I can help you with tonight, Mr. Washington?”

“Actually, there is one thing. While I was parking my car, I saw a red Ford pickup that looked like it had been vandalized.” I pat my pockets absently, as though searching for my parking ticket. “It was level P4, I think. You might want to send someone down there.”

“My goodness. Yes, of course …”

She looks genuinely concerned, as surprised as the guard boy who responded to my call.
This is an actual problem
, she must be thinking.
Normally this shift is all champagne and blow jobs in the twelfth-floor suite
.…

I look at her card in the elevator. Her name is Brita, like the water filter. I think about Natsumi’s observation that there are a million different reasons to change your name, none of which have to do with escaping. This girl’s name conveys freshness, purpose, and hygiene. I am impressed. If the hotel job doesn’t work out, this Brita may have a future in advertising.

First thing in the morning I call Bil, the clubhouse manager, and tell him something came up at home and I will get my own ride to the stadium.

“One of those mornings, Johnny?”

I hear him wink through the phone. Perhaps because he lives with his mother (or more likely because he’s a ringer for George on
Seinfeld
), Bil’s sex life is a completely vicarious experience. It’s not hard to imagine clubhouse managers living out their baseball fantasies through the guys on the team, but Bil is doing more than that.

“What’s that, Bil? I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

“Come on,” he says, “I know you got some lady up there with big knockers, and you just pulled out, right before I called, and your rod is still wet—”

“I called you, Bil.”

“Am I wrong about the girl?”

I turn and watch Brita, in the nude, cut a Belgian waffle into squares along the ridges. Her breasts are lovely, but they’re small. So, technically, Bil is wrong.

“Just tell Skip I’ll be there in time.”

“Sure you will, Adcock.”

“Bil?”

“Yeah, fine. I’ll tell him.”

I hang up and then thumb out a message to Bethany:
Would you call these big knockers?
I raise the phone like I’m looking for a better signal and surreptitiously snap a photo of my grazing guest. I hit Send.

Say what you will about Bethany—she’s no chump. She knows what I do on the road. Her only condition is that I tell her everything when I get home. It is like filing an expense report. Photos like this one are my receipts.

“Are you working today?” I ask Brita.

“No,” she says, “are you?”

After she fell asleep last night, I checked her wallet. Real name Brittany Wells, twenty-two years old, resident of Granada Hills. Wears corrective lenses.

“I have to go to a funeral,” I say. “You want to come? I need a date.”

“For a funeral?”

“That’s right. Want to go?”

She takes a small piece of waffle, puts it in her mouth, and chews it thoroughly.

“I would love to be your date,” she says, “but I have nothing to wear. I can’t go to a funeral in my uniform. People look at you strange when you’re wearing a uniform.”

“Tell me about it,” I say. “How about when the stores open I buy you a dress?”

My phone shivers.
Not bad
, Bethany has replied,
but not knockers. Maybe before her kids sucked the life out of them?

“Do you have kids?” I ask Brita.

She smiles. “That’s a funny thing to ask.”

“Do you?”

“Why? Do you want to give me some?”

“I want to give you a dress.”

“Do you have something against kids? You’re supposed to be a teacher.”

“Who told you that?”

“You did, last night.”

“Oh, right. No, I have nothing against kids. I actually have a daughter—” I am about to say
She’s not that much younger than you
, but I stop. Has it come to that? Not yet. But it will soon.

“To answer your question, yes, I have a baby boy. His name is Dustin, and before you guilt me for spending the night with you, I’ll have you know that he’s staying with his grandma this week.”

“I would never give you grief. Not for that.”

She looks at me suspiciously. She wants to believe me, I can see it in her eyes, but she can’t understand why I’m not going to criticize her parenting.

“Lucky kid,” I say. “Does he like baseball?”

She grins. “He’s just a baby!”

“Well. Tell him to think about pitching. Relief pitching. Lots of money in that, I hear.”

She rolls her eyes and says, “Sure, sure,” like I just gave her a tip on a penny stock, but here’s the thing: She will remember this conversation. She will remember the time she was working at the Bonaventure Hotel and spent the night with a man who didn’t cut her down when she told him about her son. He bought her a dress, maybe, and gave her this crazy idea about Dustin and baseball. It doesn’t take much, folks: a drop of human kindness, the acknowledgment that we are people, unique and imperfect. In an inhospitable world, sometimes that is all it takes.

The funeral for Javier “Bam Bam” Rodriguez is exactly what you’d expect to honor a slugger turned porn king. The air smells of rum, roses, and Drakkar Noir. The walls of the Catholic church in Van Nuys are covered in a mosaic of gold-tinted mirrored tiles, like a shrine to Our Lady of the Disco. The pews hold a mix of Bam Bam’s family and associates, and it is hard to tell the two groups apart. I cannot rest my eyes without tumbling over half a dozen bulging, surgically enhanced chests. These people are like another species:
Homo pectoralis
, a rare creature capable of performing 350 push-ups while nursing twins.

Brita sees someone she knows, and her friend’s planar physique suggests she is either an adolescent
H. pectoralis
or a good old-fashioned
Homo sapiens
. My date excuses herself, leaving me with Bam Bam’s widow. I barely recognize her. Mrs. Bam Bam has lifted, peeled, and dermabrasioned her face to an eerie high gloss—think Rip Hamilton, the basketball player, in his see-through plastic mask, plus permanent makeup. As she greets me I consider the maintenance it must involve, the hours with the rotary buffer, wax on, wax off, wax on, wax off.…

“Thanks for comeen, Johnny,” she says. “This would have men a lot to Javier.”

“It’s lucky we were in town. I am truly sorry for your loss.”

Mrs. Rodriguez raises one overplucked brow as far as Botox will allow. “He was no a good man, my husban’, but I love heem anyway.”

“We all did,” I say. I want to add that she’s right, that he was not a good man, but this is one of those moments when the truth does not need to be underlined. Mrs. Bam Bam nods serenely, and I realize Bam Bam had a good woman, too, however grotesque. Probably better than he deserved.

The service is heavy on testimony. After a few well-worn prayers, half a dozen brothers and uncles step to the mike to deliver their eulogies. They talk about how Bam Bam started shaving when he was ten years old. How he lost his virginity at eleven. Got his girlfriend pregnant at thirteen. A young woman who says she worked for Bam Bam yanks down her tube top and shakes her hard, shiny breasts at the congregation. “He paid for these!” she says. A few people laugh, but it makes me uncomfortable. I wonder when it became fashionable to embarrass the deceased at a funeral. I suppose laughter can help ease the pressure of grieving, but I don’t see a lot of tension as I look around the room. These people seem awfully loose to me. It makes sense: who but the pathologically loose could be counted on to perform sex acts under television lights?

I am scanning the pews, thinking I am alone in my discomfort, when I see a familiar face: a young Latino dressed in a dark suit, black dress shirt, and an ivory tie. He looks so different from the last time I saw him that it takes me a minute to realize who he is: Luck’s new pimp, the firecracker whiz. The left side of his face looks odd, until I realize he is wearing makeup—foundation—to cover the bruises I gave him.

After the service, I follow him to the restroom. He goes into
a stall and comes out a minute later, rubbing his nose with one finger, like a chipmunk with a toothbrush.

“Hey there,” I say. “Remember me?”

He looks up quick, sees me leaning against the hand dryer.

“I thought we was good,” he says behind wild eyes.

“We are. I just have a couple more questions.”

He winces and wiggles his shoulders, as though shaking something off his back. “Questions? I just came up here to pay respects to my man, then I got to get back to the South Bay, you know what I’m saying?”

“Bam Bam and I were teammates. What’s your connection?”

The guy pinches his nose like he is holding it in place, like it might run off his face. “Same shit,” he says. “Teammates.”

“I want to talk about Alejandra Sol,” I say.

He smiles. “I knew it. All right, homes, I didn’t come here to do business, but we can talk—”

“She’s dead.”

“Wait—who’s dead?”

I pull out my phone and show him the photo from Bethany.

The kid crosses himself but displays no emotion. “Who did it?”

“You tell me.”

“I ain’t heard from her in like a week.” He looks at his feet. He’s almost wistful. “You told your friend yet? Homeboy is going to be messed up. He fucking loved that ho.”

“There was someone else in the car with her. A married man and a father. You see where I’m going with this?”

“Look, I don’t know shit about shit. The boss needed a girl up north, and Ana had to go—” He winces at the slip. “I mean Alejandra.”

“Which is it?”

“Same thing, man. Alejandra Sol is, like, a flavor. You ask for Alejandra, and you get a girl like her. Maybe not the girl
in the picture, but she looks similar. Dark hair, dark eyes, all that. Nice big tits.”

On the one hand, this is excellent news. It seems to explain why the dead girl had so many names. On the other hand, it sucks. It suggests that Luck’s girl may have been just one of dozens of girls calling themselves Alejandra Sol. Something tells me that tracking them all down would be a fool’s errand, like catching bees with a butterfly net. If I want to get to the bottom of this case, I’m going to have to aim higher.

Before I know what I’m doing, I grab the pimpito by the collar and cut his legs out with a swipe of my foot. He drops to his knees, and I smash his face against the front of the sink, then raise it up so he can see me.

“Who’s your boss?” I say.

“Didn’t I tell you to forget it? You don’t want to know.”

“Tell me his name.”

“I never met the motherfucker!”

“Why should I believe you?”

He spits a wad of blood and phlegm onto the cold tile floor. “Because it’s the truth. I told you about the girls—what more do you want from me? That’s all I know!”

I want to bash him again, but I suspect he’s not lying. If he has half a brain in his head, he can see that fate is working against him. Twice now he has run into me for no reason but bad luck.

“Fine,” I say. “Stand up.”

And just as I am starting to feel good about what I’ve done, this little bit of mercy I’ve extended to an undeserving soul, my reward arrives in the form of two hombres so thick around the neck that their ties reach only halfway down their chests. They see the blood on the sink and the state of the pimpito’s face. It doesn’t take a GED to figure out what’s going on.

The next thing I know, I’ve taken a punch in the gut. My
breath escapes with a sickening groan. I double over. Then I notice their footwear: two pairs of new Jordans, red with white lace covers.