Deadly Lullaby (7 page)

“Gentlemen,” I say, showing them my palm, “if you are looking for a headhunter to recruit my son on your behalf, you are talking to the wrong man. Me and him are not getting along. As proof of this fact, consider I offered him a gorgeous Asian whore if he would spend the afternoon with me today at Dodger Stadium and he turned me down.”

“Jesus Christ,” Joe says after taking a deep drink, “Leo must hate your fuckin' guts. I'd spend the afternoon with the director of the FBI for a piece of gorgeous Asian tail.”

“This I believe you would do,” Donsky says, grinning. “I've never met anybody who likes oriental pussy more than you. You still bangin' that tight little Cambodian Michael told me about?”

Joe smiles, nods. “Seein' her again this evening, as a matter of fact.”

“Again? Damn, she's proved herself valuable in more ways than one.”

“She has indeed,” Joe says with a wink.

Locker-room talk dominates Joe's conversations these days. His wife of many years died over five years ago, and the sexual peccadilloes he has developed since then would make a porn star blush. Now he is making some crude point about his latest young Cambodian whore, and I interrupt. “Joe,” I say, “you called me down here because you said something had come up, implying you needed to talk to me about business. If said business was about my son, I cannot help you and we have nothing else to talk about.”

Donsky says, “Can you at least talk to him for us?”

“Anything else, Joe?” I say.

“Yeah,” Joe says, sighing as he sits between me and Donsky in a cushy leather chair against the wall, “there
are
other things.” A man who has never given a damn about drawing attention to the fact he is short, he scoots all the way back in the big chair and his feet barely brush the carpet when he crosses his legs at the ankles. Joe takes a deck of Marlboro reds from his breast pocket, bumps one out and leans forward to offer me a smoke.

I accept it.

He lights me up, lights one for himself, and leans back, snapping the lighter shut.

The smoke burns my throat and slams my brain, making me light-headed.

Donsky and Joe exchange glances again, with Joe taking another sip of bourbon. A twist of his neck, a straightening of his tie, and Joe says to me, “There's some cleanup you might have to do on this Macky thing.”

“Not tonight, I hope.”

“No, tomorrow—
maybe.
A couple messy issues have surfaced, maybe three. We just talked to Tarasov before you got here, and he agreed to clean up one of the aisles tonight. The mess in aisle three at the moment is Levitch.”

He is referring to “Al” Levitch, birth name unknown to me, Macky's androgynous and otherwise psychotic niece.

“Levitch, Jesus, she is mental.”

“Yeah, she's hit the fuckin' ceiling over Macky's
disappearance.
”

“No surprise there.”

“No, no surprise, at least not to me. Viktor likes her for some reason, and thought he'd be able to turn her to our side. But I just talked to him and he said she wouldn't listen to the cover story we cooked up.”

“The Cambodian thing?”

“Yeah,” Joe says, “the Cambodian thing.”

Like any effective lie, the cover story Joe and Viktor are circulating among Macky's old crew has a kernel of truth to it: About a month ago, Macky started snuggling up to a Cambodian cartel when its local representative suggested to him that he take them on as a partner in his retail heroin trade, one that took Macky years to cultivate and spreads from LA throughout the Inland Empire. The Cambodian cartel has a direct supply line from the poppy fields of Southeast Asia to LA, no middlemen, and the move would allow Macky to undercut all the competition. This would upset the delicate balance of power shared by the Baja and Sinaloa cartels, the major wholesalers in California that have established profitable relations with retailers like Joe, Viktor, and Macky. Macky was actually in the process of working out a deal with the Cambodians, but a believable scenario is that he would change his mind and the Cambodians would retaliate by whacking him, or that the fuckers would simply double-cross him. Aside from general cover, Joe and Viktor plan to use this story to enlist the few soldiers of Macky's who remain so they will fight in this imminent war against the Cambodians.

I say to Joe, “The story sounded solid to me.”

“The rest of Macky's muscle will probably buy it, but Levitch won't. Last night Macky told her you and Leo were meeting him at the warehouse this morning. She thinks she's put two and two together.”

I eye him over the rim of my mug. “This makes me uncomfortable.”

“Don't worry. She won't be around long enough to cause any problems. Tarasov said she doesn't suspect his role in this. She still trusts him and today, tonight at the latest, he'll get her in position for his guys to take care of her.”

“All right,” I say, “Levitch is accounted for. I will address whatever problems remain for the usual fee.”

Joe sips his drink and pauses to swallow and form his words. “The thing is,” he says, “all this shit about paying you a fee for this, a fee for that, is a pain in the ass.” He leans back to study me. “Me and Donsky here are gonna make one more run at you. Why don't you reconsider and stick with us full-time?” He leans forward, excited, his eyes glassy and faraway. “I've been down awhile, I know, but I'm comin' back. Donsky's been a big help, talking me into merging with Tarasov and takin' out Macky. You take Tarasov's muscle and his suppliers and add 'em to Macky's territory, we're gonna kick the Cambodians back overseas along with everyone else. I'm gonna rule this town again, Babe. Just like in the seventies and eighties, you hear? I'm gonna rule again. Join me, join us. You can play a key role.”

Joe's speech has revved up Donsky, and he is practically bouncing up and down in his seat like he has a case of diarrhea. He talks fast in that
r
-less Brooklyn accent of his: “The Feds wounded Joe's organization bad when you were away, Babe. They still didn't hit him as hard as the other families in the US, which are as good as fuckin' dead now. Since Joe brought me on board, we've caught up with the Feds' technology and learned how to counter their surveillance tactics.” He looks around the room, waving his hand grandly. “The walls of this room, for instance, are lined with jamming devices and totally bug-proof. Same thing with our houses, and when we go out in public—to eat, for instance—we carry briefcases with jammers in them. And we all use disposable cellphones, never one loaded with more than fifty minutes airtime. The biggest reason we're set for a comeback is that federal law enforcement dollars are allocated cyclically, depending on the direction the political winds blow. Right now federal dollars are focused on counterterrorism and border patrol, and it takes bigger bucks than they got budgeted to come after us. Bottom line is we're at the lowest ebb of federal intervention into organized crime that we've seen in goddamn decades. The state and locals have always been easy to buy off, so now's the time to strike, man,
now.
But we need more men to strike effectively. Tarasov's guys will help, as will the few guys from Macky's crew who'll be left after we purge the loyalists.” He smiles like an insurance salesman poised to go for the close. “Bottom line is we need you, Babe. Let us make you an offer you can't refuse.”

I ignore Donsky, address Joe. “Joe, my mind is made up. I appreciate the financial opportunity you gave me to pad my nest egg by taking out Macky.” Not that he had any choice, shit; I am the only one who could get close enough to the hump to take him out. “And if the money is good enough, I will keep my promise to clean up whatever collateral mess results from the hit. But that is it. We have talked about it, Joe, and my decision is final. I am retiring after the Macky mess is cleaned up.” Now I look him in the eye and pause for maximum effect, ready to trump his ass with my ace in the hole: “Eight years of prison have earned me that right.”

He pouts, and a pout is the biggest challenge he can mount to my statement. My last eight-year hitch was for a manslaughter beef that should have been a life sentence, or worse, for murder one. It was over a contract Joe gave me for the life of one Martin Brewer. Brewer was a gay legislative aide to the California state senator who chaired the Select Committee on Organized Crime, and was extorting the good senator with the fact Joe had enlisted him on his payroll. I would have skated scot-free but for one alleged witness, a real flamer who Brewer jilted the week before I wasted him. The flamer claimed to have seen me talking to Brewer in the parking lot of a gay bar on the night in question (no comment—none, mind you,
none
—on how I allegedly lured Brewer to the honeymoon suite of the Chateau Marmont Hotel later that night), then followed us to the hotel parking lot and watched us walk in a side door together. Brewer's shrill boyfriend was not the most reliable witness and his identification of me was shaky, but it was fairly indisputable that Brewer windmilled onto the parking lot pavement twenty-two minutes later. My dream-team lawyers advised me that the case was purely circumstantial, and gave me a better than even-money shot at walking. Being the gunners they were bred to be, they wanted me to roll the dice. I went along at first, but balked on the courthouse steps. I mean, hell, though the wit blew the photo lineup, he picked me out of the live one. We had the usual so-called alibi cooked up and ready to serve, but the jury could well have disbelieved it and punched me a ticket for the stainless steel ride at the Q. The plea deal my dream team struck was, literally, much easier to live with: eight years, no parole.

Said plea deal would have been immensely better—probably reduced to probation—if I had acquiesced to the prosecutors' demand to squeal on Joe as the contractor of Brewer's murder.

As a matter of principle, this I would not do.

Joe knows this.

Joe broods like a spoiled child while he sips bourbon, then clears his throat as if to release the words that have stuck there. “Okay,
all right,
” he says, “give me a quote on takin' out two guys, both more or less at the same time….”

Leo called almost two hours ago and told me about his run-in with Levitch. I had just polished off a Kobe burger at Medusa Lounge, a club in Silver Lake on Beverly Boulevard. An exotic place, the Medusa's interior is modeled after a medieval castle, elaborately constructed with arched ceilings, fat stone pillars, and stone flooring, wrought-iron chandeliers bathing the place in low light. Like so many other personal landmarks I have frequented since gaining my freedom, the Medusa sparks memories of better times and occupies a special place in my heart—a place so special it took me a week to finally make my way here.

Leo was at Hollywood Park when he called, no doubt losing the money I gave him earlier. I strolled the club while talking to him on my cell, admiring the Medusa's over-the-top décor: gargoyles crouched on columns, stuffed owls, statues of cherubs that displayed their little limp dicks, an oversized chandelier above the bar—all old movie props personally selected by Billy Wilder's set designer, the man who opened the joint in the mid-'50s. The place opened then as the
Lowenbrau Keller,
and
Lowenbrau Keller
was still its name when I met Lorraine here in 1980 and proposed marriage to her here a month later. At that time it was the kind of place where you expected to fall for a lusty broad in a little red dress with raven hair and luscious tits who seduces you in a Marlboro-and-martini voice, and it still is.

Though early evening when Leo called, the lights were low and jazz music recorded by Nicholas Cole oozed from the overhead speaker, a smooth song backed up by soft xylophone chords. Soft xylophone chords always calm me, even when having a terse conversation with my emotionally callous son.

“You need to drop off the money you owe me at my house,” he said, “as soon as possible. There's somebody I know who wants you dead.”

A track announcer practically drowned out Leo's voice while making a call to the post, so I waited a beat or two. “Many people have foolishly announced their intent to effect my demise over the years. Who is the latest fool to do so?”

“This psychotic lesbian named Levitch,” he said. He gave me a quick summary of what went down at the Venetian, emphasizing that Macky had told her we were stopping by this morning and she and a punk named Latzo spotted my car in the warehouse parking lot. “She's Macky's niece and accused you of killing him. She came at me with a knife and I had to neutralize her.”

“Tuning up a woman, Jesus. Did I not teach you better than that?”

He said nothing.

I cleared my throat. “Anyway…Levitch and Latzo, no reason to worry about either of them.”

Again he said nothing, at least at first, as if absorbing the underlying meaning of my statement. “I'm not worried,” he finally said. “I'm just keeping you up-to-date, like you asked.”

“Good, good…So, uh, where do you want to meet?” I said. “I have the cash for you, and a new disposable phone. We should change out the phones every day or so.”

“Just leave it in my mailbox with the cash.”

“Your mailbox at home? That is not secure.”

“It's on me. Do it.”

“Why not meet me here at the Medusa? Your mother and me met here and—”

“Just drop off the fuckin' cash. I really need it.”

He hung up.

Christ, I should not have mentioned his mother, I thought at the time, but this place causes me to obsess over her.

At that point I was in the lounge area. Though put off by Leo, I nonetheless managed to be pleasant to the young woman tending bar—a wholesome-looking green-eyed brunette with a warm smile—and sat on a stool. “Stoli martini, very dry and up, with a twist,” I said to her, and she winked and expertly set to work on one.

My cellphone rang.

Joe calling.

“Yes?”

“I've sent you three fuckin' text messages.”

“Oh, uh, text messages, yeah. Sorry, but I forget to check for text messages. Hardly anybody used text messaging when I went away last time. What did your text messages say?”

“To call me, damn it.”

“Why not just call me to begin with?”

His exasperated breath riffled across the phone. “Nico called to say Leo got in a fight at the Venetian.”

“Yeah, Leo told me about that.”

“Did he tell you the lesbian accused him of helping our friend along on his trip?”

“Yes, and he said he kicked her ass for it. I told him I had nothing to do with it and that was that. No worries.”

“If you're sure,” Joe finally said after pausing. “Oh, yeah, you need to call Tarasov.”

“What does he want?”

“Tonight's cleanup we talked about earlier.”

“Ah, I will call him,” I said, and mouthed a silent
Thank you
to the bartender when she handed me the martini. “What about the other messes we talked about earlier?”

“Call me tomorrow at noon sharp,” he said.

“Will do….Hey, uh, you want to stop by the Medusa and have a drink with me?”

“I'm happy to say I have a better alternative. In a couple hours Michael is picking up the little Cambodian doll he told me about.”

His new whore again, Jesus. “You have time to stop by for a drink or two?”

“No, I need all my strength to keep up with the young stuff, and have to rest up. Maybe we can have a drink tomorrow.” He hung up without further comment.

Damn, I could not even lure Joe Sacci out to play with me.

I sipped my martini as I dialed Tarasov, telling the bartender, “Hey, thanks again. This martini is very good. In fact, it is perfect.”

Working to keep up with the crowd, she smiled large as she started mixing what appeared to be a margarita. In a Southwestern accent, she said, “When you want another, sweetie, just ask for Sheila. That's me.”

“Well, Sheila, when you want something, just ask for Babe. That's me.”

“Babe,” she said, “as in Ruth?”

I nod.

“Cool name.”

Tarasov interrupted our conversation by answering my call, saying he had little time to talk. He was in the middle of so-called telephone negotiations with Levitch, a ruse that would soon lead to her reunion with her dear uncle.

“Stay where you now are,” Tarasov said. “At the bar Medusa on Beverly close to Dillon, yes?”

I did not bother to ask how he knew this. He is as protective of me as a lioness is of her cubs, eternally indebted to me for saving his life when we were at San Quentin. So Joe, no doubt, had already informed him of my whereabouts and of the guys he placed outside the Medusa to watch my rear.

I hung up from Tarasov after agreeing to stay put until he called me back again.

Tarasov told me to wait an hour and now it has been almost two.

No worries.

Me and Sheila really hit it off. Not in a romantic way, understand, but we talked and laughed without putting much effort or show into it, and she kept the martini assembly line rolling. During her busy periods I chatted with other patrons. Just idle chitchat as far as they were concerned, but intriguing conversation to me. A medical-device sales manager, a paralegal for a tax lawyer, two young studs in flashy suits who smugly claimed to have had a “kick-ass day” without saying whose ass they kicked or to what end—all so-called “ordinary” people who I would bet a million bucks had not murdered anyone their entire lives.

Sheila's shift ended about thirty minutes ago. Appreciative of the over-the-top tip I gave her, she invited me out to her car to share a joint—“Primo turbo, Babe, that'll give you a bump for the rest of the night. You cool with it?”

Yeah, I was cool with it.

I am primarily a drinking man who will occasionally accept the offer of recreational drugs—especially so soon after getting released from prison—but I would rather not get as shit-faced as I am now. Tends to lighten the trigger on my emotions and makes me prone to morose bouts of sentimentality and overly critical introspection.

At the bar now, I recall my son's words at La Parrilla:
You're a fuckin' killer, man.

Up from my barstool I go, martini in hand, already fed up with overly critical introspection and primed for morose sentimentality.

What occurs to me as I move through the evening crowd is that serving prison time is a form of suspended animation. The worst thing about prison is not the sadistically cramped conditions, the homicidal maniacs you must constantly guard against, the mind-numbing daily routine, or even the bad food. No, the worst thing about prison is the way the authorities keep you isolated from the Outside World. Their purpose is to effect your social demise through temporal and sensory deprivation, to socially maroon you, to disconnect you from the free-flowing rhythms and melodies of time that allow you to boogie through your day in the Free World. To survive without losing touch with the reality of freedom, I therefore fantasized every moment I could, put myself in a different time and place. The time I transported myself to most often was the '80s, my heyday, and one of the places I thought about most often was here, the Medusa.

So many things have changed since the '80s:

Cellphones, for instance. The first cellphone I ever touched was as big as a brick. Now they are little handheld computers more powerful than the PCs that once took up a corner of a room, and they connect you to the internet whenever and wherever you want. And everyone uses the damn things to send text messages, shit, not to mention emails.

Checking out the crowd here, I see many other things that have not changed: The same little black dresses prancing and posing here and there, all filled to bursting with young breasts heaped on top of long legs and spiked heels. There are also the same young studs trying their damnedest to get their hands on what's inside the little black dresses.

The culture here, though, has changed: There are many more blacks and Asians, Latinos, and the current male uniform is vastly different; the '80s code for men was
dressy hip
, high-end suits and sport coats with open collars. Now what you see are tattered designer jeans and untucked dress shirts. And, perhaps most notably in my mind, the music is different—still some contemporary jazz, sure, but also a lot of hip hop and rap, both of which being totally out of my musical wheelhouse.

I am thinking I should go to the Hermosa Strip tomorrow and buy some shirts and tattered jeans when the music changes to a classic jazz tune from the '80s, Spyro Gyra's “
Morning Dance,”
which a few minutes ago I paid the DJ to play. Moved by it, I am drawn, like a salmon migrating upstream to its ancestral spawning ground, through the river of people to the little alcove where I met Lorraine. It is a romantic little niche set off from the rest of the club by the obligatory strings of beads, with a cushy couch, a low table, flickering candles. The niche is pretty much the same, though there were ashtrays on the tables back then, before passage of no-smoking ordinances, and a film of cigarette smoke always blued the air.

Dreamy from drink and ganja, I lean against the stone archway and sip my martini and think back, conjuring up her image. Before long I actually see her there, Lorraine, lounging on a love seat, the exact spot she occupied the night we met. She appears as she did before our relationship went psycho, which happened pretty much the instant we said “I do,” in that campy wedding chapel in Vegas. She was dark and gorgeous in a brick-shithouse way, huge black eyes and full lips that formed the kind of smile that let you know she was fast and available but only at a premium price. She sat with a mutual acquaintance when I first approached her, a woman I had had a passing sexual relationship with. Lorraine smiled her smile at our friend then turned it on me.
“Parla del diavolo,”
she said, Italian for “
Speak of the devil.”

My Italian had faded over time but I knew the proverb well enough to finish it in English: “And he shall appear,” I said.

Our friend moved out of our way, winking at us both, and Lorraine patted the spot on the love seat next to her. “Well, well, the one and only Babe Crucci. Sit down and buy me a drink, tell me some secrets.”

I signaled the waitress for two drinks and sat. “Be careful now. I may lie to you.”

“So I hear.”

“What else have you heard?”

She snuggled close, a sinister glint in her eyes. “If I tell you, you promise not to kill me?”

I promised I would not kill her.

Damn it, as high-strung and demanding and unfaithful as she was, I loved her. Wanted to give her the world and live the rest of my life with her, to die a natural death with her at my side. And one slip on my winding road of crime, just one wrong maneuver, fucked it all up: my one, my only, not to mention my
last
foray into the drug business went south when Border Patrol nabbed me in a dune buggy at the Mexican border with twenty-three keys of smack in the hold, a gold mine that would have put me and Lorraine and little Leo on easy street for years.

What we received was far different: nine years of prison.

She knew it was a risk. Knew I was a wiseguy, was taken with that aspect of me and signed on to the program from the start. Knew the benefits of the Life had this corresponding burden we both might one day have to bear, and she accepted it as part of the deal. And she was the one to break the contract when, in my absence, she started carrying on with this hood named Carlo Bustamonte.

Which is something I might have allowed her, if she had dumped the bastard when I got out.

But when I got out of prison it got worse, much worse.

God, it could not have gotten any worse.

Why did you do it, Lorraine? Why? See what you made me do to you?

You're a fuckin' killer, man.

Something ignites inside me. This vision of her lingers, and I have this irrational desire to talk to her, to ask her,
Why?

My disposable phone chirps, the one I use for communicating with Tarasov. I return my gaze to the couch for a final look at Lorraine.