L.A. Rotten (16 page)

The ramshackle house out in Hawthorne is similar in size and upkeep to its predecessor in Inglewood. This street too is a quiet one, and Ivy pulls the Charger all the way up to the garage door at my command. The withdrawals have been coming at me in waves—nausea, chills, sweating, cramping; right now I am freezing and fetal in my sweatshirt.

“What now?” she asks, and reaches across to feel my pale forehead with the back of her hand.

“The body's in there,” I say, gesturing to the structure ahead of us. “We need the toolbox out of the trunk.”

I don't even offer to help carry the milk crate into the garage, so weak am I feeling. At the moment, it's all I can do to lean up against the doorjamb in order to not collapse in a pathetic heap. I feel cramps across my abdomen like repeated assaults with a hot fireplace poker, and I can taste the acidic rot of bile at the base of my esophagus. Ivy comes up behind me and bumps me in the back lightly with the crate to prod me forward. “I feel like we're being watched,” she whispers softly, so that if we are being watched, it won't be heard.

I switch on the overhead light; the ubiquitous fluorescent track bulbs flick on independent of one another, supplying vision to the room. Directly in front of me is a car, an old gray Nissan sedan that takes up the entire near half of the floor space. On the hood of the Nissan is a familiar brown cardboard box. This tells me we're at least in the right place.

I move forward into the garage and around the narrow space between the door and the Nissan's bumper with Ivy at my heels, as if she nervously refuses to be anything but my shadow.

The body is lying facedown, and is female—I can tell that right off from the abundance of silky dark hair that spreads down from the back of her head and onto the bloodstained concrete. It's odd, though; she appears to be lying on something, for her body, big as it is, is pitched up in the middle. It isn't until I crouch down beside the girl that I realize she's pregnant. Or…was pregnant. The amount of blood surrounding the abdominal area tells me she took a bullet through there as well. Behind me, I can hear Ivy also connect the dots.

“Assholes,” she expels into the night, this time not caring if she's heard.

Pebbles of glass are scattered about the feet of the body, and the front passenger window of the Nissan is blasted out. They had her backed against the car, with nowhere to run, when they shot her in the face and belly.

While I am down, I turn the broad girl onto her back, and as she rolls, her still-open good eye connects with Ivy's.

“Oohh,” Ivy sort of moans behind me, repulsed, but I'm already inspecting the bullet holes, probing them with my finger, curious. The holes, one through the eye socket, the other at the top of the abdomen, about three inches above her belly button, look like nine-millimeter entry wounds.

“First thing, we've got to drain the body of the rest of the blood, then we'll saw it apart,” I say. “Going after the bullets is going to be a bitch because she's about eight months along, it looks, and we'll probably end up having to dig one out of the fetus.”

“No.” Ivy says, dropping the milk crate onto the trunk of the Nissan, still unable to pry her eyes from those of the dead girl. “Uh-uh. We're not doing this.”

“We have to.”

“No. This is wrong. This is that line I can't cross. This is like the basement level of hell.”

“These are not the sort of people I can just turn down a job for…the likelihood is that they will kill me over something like this. And there won't be anyone around to clean me up.”

“Tommy, this is fucking evil. I will never forgive myself for taking part in this, and if you continue with it, I know in my heart that I will never forgive you either. So please? Please? Don't do this.”

“Well, what should we do? Just leave her here?”

“Call the police. This one time. Please? Let them go after these bastards.”

I look up at Ivy and then down at the body of the Hispanic girl. In the box on the front of the Nissan is likely a quick five grand, but Ivy will walk if I take it. The sad truth is, if she walks she won't make it four blocks before getting rolled by some hoods out looking for an opportunity like her. Then some can collector will find her two days later beneath some trash bags in an alley with ten varieties of semen inside her. I am frustrated enough by the situation to let her walk, but the better person inside of me stands with the aid of the Nissan, and then grips my head with both hands. She's lucky I feel like shit and can't do this alone. “Okay. Let's get out of here.”

We find a payphone outside a pharmacy and Ivy calls in the address while I sit in the passenger seat with my heart throbbing in my ears and my eyes rolled back into my head. I kid myself that maybe they'll let me live, but all I really want now is to lie down and go to sleep. I think I can better deal with my rapidly collecting problems in the morning.

When we pull up outside my apartment, Ivy asks if she can just drive my car home. Her car keys are on my counter and neither of us is in the mood to retrieve them. I gesture that it is all hers, and climb out. My street is eerily quiet and it's discomforting that there are no police cars standing vigil, their drivers awaiting my return.

I end up sleeping through the night and the entirety of the next day, rousing only once, briefly, to read an expected text message that says simply, “Ur dead, homie.” I briefly wonder who owns the garage that the Hawthorne PD is currently tearing apart, and how much trouble that person is in, but there is nothing to be done at the moment, so I lay my head back down and return to my slumber.

When I wake again, it is early morning, and I feel better than I have in some time, maybe years. The soreness in my joints has receded and the overwhelming sensation of nausea is gone. For the moment, I am good. But when I go to walk to the 7-Eleven up the block for a black coffee, at the door to my apartment building I find myself hesitating in a way that I haven't done since the earliest days of A. Guy's letters.
It's a little early for gangsters
, I attempt to reassure myself. The cops haven't returned either, though, and it's right about now that I miss their presence. Life's funny that way.

I skip the coffee and drive Ivy's Tercel to the Trauma-Gone office. The little sedan is still just as cluttered as ever, its coat-hanger-assisted trunk banging along with my rough driving. I can't help but wonder if the mess is something psychological—as if she's building a cocoon out of her familiar possessions. Also, her transmission is slowly biting the dust and I can hear the gears grind from within her engine every time the little car struggles to accelerate. Of course, if she doesn't clean the inside of her car, why would I expect her to remember to change the fluids?

Harold, typing, looks up when I walk in. “Tom, no jobs call in over one week! You cause great head pain. How we stay in business with no work?”

“We've had lots of weeks where we don't get calls.”

“But this different—I feel in my gut! You curse us. I take on task to save my business, print up brochures.” With that, he grandly strikes the keyboard and the printer whirs to life. I walk over and take one up, reading it over. It is titled, “Trauma-Gone. ‘Your friend in biohazard remediation.' ” The unfolded brochures, printed on a glossy card stock, are full of such informational nuggets as “How Do I Know When I Need Biohazard Cleanup?” and “Why I Should Choose Trauma-Gone.” Incredulous, I set the brochure back in with the growing stack of its familiars. “Harold, who are you going to send these to?”

“Not send, deliver. We deliver. Until we have work again. Every morning. Be here at 10 a.m. and take stack; go door-to-door, business-to-business.”

“Who's going to fold them?”

“You and me. Right now.” He takes the entire stack from the printer, sets it in front of me, and folds his hands, expectant.

“I can't. I've got shit to do today.”

“No, no, Tom. I go on limb for you. You work for me.” He means it.

“You're right, you're right,” I admit, pulling up a chair. “I'm grateful, really. At some point, though, I have to go see my parole officer.”

“Has he gone out on limb like me? I think no.”

I don't have the heart to tell Harold that Officer Caruzzi, in his own blackmailing sort of way, has actually gone out on a much narrower limb for me, and so, for the next four hours, I resort to folding as many brochures as Harold cares to print.

Finally, with my hands nicked and sore, Harold stands and admires the tremendous stack we have produced. “Good, good,” he admits. “Ten a.m. tomorrow, we start to deliver. Today, I go home. Finish what you can, then lock up.” With that, he turns to leave. “Oh, and Tom, you look much more strong. Keep up.” I nod in appreciation, but as soon as he is out the door, I push the remaining brochures away and move around the desk to the computer.

I pull up the limited file I've compiled of A. Guy's notes, and the photos from his Offramp Inn jobs, clicking on them one by one, scanning the now-familiar images for anything I might have missed. The happy faces all seem obtuse now, plainly obvious, and I'm annoyed with Andy for his lack of subtlety. “If you're this dumb with your crime scenes, what else have you left for me to find?” Reading through the notes carefully, line by line, it's the note regarding the robbery of the liquor store that I keep returning to. What is it about that liquor store? I print the notes and pictures for Duane, forgetting that the machine is still filled with glossy card stock.

It's after six and I am just locking up when my phone rings. I don't recognize the number, but answer it anyway. “You're not reneging on our arrangement, are you, Tom?” Caruzzi asks.

“No, in fact, I just printed all the stuff up. I was going to drop it by you tomorrow.”

“What's wrong with now?”

“I've got a crime scene. It could take all night.”

“Duty calls. Too bad—there's a meeting tonight. Guess we'll have to wait. Bring the stuff by my apartment tomorrow then, say, dinnertime. Got a pen handy?”

“I'll remember.”

“Fifteen seventy-one Fallbrook. Woodland Hills. Apartment H.”

“Easy enough.”

“And, Tom, don't fuck this up. I've been doing a lot of thinking—we need this…I need this. Being a goddamn parole officer can't be my legacy. I can't leave this earth without taking a few last swings, you know?”

“I'll be there.”

“Good.” He doesn't hang up right away, and so finally I do, awkward. I lied about the crime scene but he doesn't need to know that. The truth is, after folding several hundred brochures, I just don't feel like dealing with his bullshit tonight.

Besides, I have the pressing urge to go visit a certain liquor store.

I head over to Daddy Long Legs, where I find my Charger in the parking lot. “Sorry,” Ivy says, grinning sheepishly, when I walk in. “I worked the day shift, but I was gonna stop by tonight and see you.”

“No problem, except I think I need a tetanus shot after driving your car around.”

“Just some penicillin,” she laughs, and then sobers up. “The other night was kind of nuts.”

“You done hanging out with me then?”

“Nice try, buster. Have you heard from the gangbangers?”

“We're not going to talk about that. But I have something I want to check out. What time you off?”

“As soon as the next girl, Traci, gets here. She's always late.” Just then, a harried brunette girl wearing a yellow bikini and strappy wedge heels clumps her way into the bar. “Traci, right on cue,” Ivy chirps.

“Sorry—major drama,” Traci explains, continuing on her way into the bathroom.

“Let's go,” Ivy says, throwing on a sundress over her bikini. “She'll figure it out.”

“You look healthier,” Ivy decides as we inch along in residual traffic on the 2 freeway heading west toward Santa Monica. I turn up the radio and lean back on the headrest, sunglasses on. There's no point in actually saying it, but I'd rather have the heroin.

The 2 dead-ends into Santa Monica Boulevard and we take side streets until we are less than a block off Pico when Ivy points out a Gelson's market on our right. “That's gotta be the one that bag came from! There's only like ten Gelson's, period!”

“Yeah, and they usually choose tonier neighborhoods,” I grumble, looking around at the suburban sprawl. “Pico and Stewart, here we are,” I announce when we reach the intersection.

“Thank you, Captain Obvious.” Ivy smirks and gestures up at the light blue and gold street signs, bathed in illumination from the light poles overhead. I flick her in the tit and she winces.

“Just find me the goddamn liquor store.”

“There.” Ivy points again, at a gray facade next to a burger joint. “American Liquor.” I pull the steering wheel and the Charger glides up into the narrow strip of pockmarked asphalt that constitutes their parking lot.

American Liquor has the classic faux-glitzy appearance of every small-time liquor store ever, with its oversized, malfunctioning neon logo and mess of beer ads polluting all available window space. “Hold up a sec,” I tell Ivy as she starts to exit the car. I pull the note from the folder and start to scan it over.

“Read it out loud,” Ivy commands.

“ ‘Me again,' ” I read, and then decide to skim through it, regardless of what Ivy wants. “ ‘I think you are like one of those mice'…boring, boring, boring…‘Some days, I'm just a guy who enjoys killing people more than he enjoys making them laugh'…bullshit, bullshit, bullshit…‘There is a liquor store on the corner of Pico and Stewart in Santa Monica. It is a shitty little place and the heeb who works there needs a good scare. I want you to rob it'…hmm hmm hmm…‘eight p.m. Wednesday. American Liquor.' ”

“What's a heeb?” Ivy asks when I finish.

“All that, and ‘What's a heeb?' is the only question you have? Jesus. A ‘heeb' is an insulting name for a Jew. Though I think it can also be spelled
h-e-b-e
.”

“So, do you think this guy is a Nazi or something?”

“I think Indiana Jones killed off all the Nazis, smarty.”

“I meant like a new Nazi…a skinhead.”

“I don't know. But we need to find out why he chose this place.” I glance at my watch. “It's coming up toward 8 o'clock now. Let's have a look inside.”

The inside of American Liquor is just as cliché as the outside, with its rows of industrial metal shelving stocked full of chips, candy, and other convenience sundries, while all the hard liquor is stacked in tall wooden cabinets behind the counter. A fit, olive-skinned Middle Easterner in expensive jeans gives us a wave as we enter, but does not get off his cell phone, which he jabbers Arabic into as he paces the length of the counter. The place screams “America” in its very un-Americanness. We head to the back of the store, where logoed coolers chill beer in assortments, and I can see from the large oval mirrors mounted at the corners of the store that the Arab has taken a particular interest in Ivy. Suddenly territorial, I throw my arm around her, and she, oblivious, moves into it, pleased. “Do you think the clerk is A. Guy?” she asks.

“Why?”

“Well, he's not Jewish, and don't Middle Eastern people not like Jews?”

“Your logic astounds me sometimes.”

“If someone doesn't bring up the possibilities, then how are we going to solve this thing?”

“He's too short. A. Guy was about an inch taller than me. And before you feel the need to ask, no, I don't think he was wearing stilts.”

“I wasn't going to say that.”

“Lies.”

We cruise the aisles but find nothing revealing other than a bag of Flamin' Hot Cheetos, which Ivy insists I buy her. I'm tempted to ask the clerk if he's the only one who works there, but he never ceases his phone conversation throughout our transaction, and so we leave, having learned nothing more than A. Guy's inability to correctly apply racial slurs.

“Well, that was a waste of time,” I say when we hit the parking lot.

“Speak for yourself,” Ivy says, and tears into the chips. “I'm fucking starving.”

“You're always starving.”

“What if,” Ivy says, talking with her mouth full, “A. Guy lives around here and these are his regular stores?”

“That's maybe a good thought,” I admit, looking around the mostly commercial intersection. On one corner there's the boxy tan silhouette of an office building, on another, the flat black expanse of a parking lot leads up to a recessed CVS pharmacy, and on the corner directly across from American Liquor is a comedy club.

“Giggle-o Joe's,” I read off the white lit-up signage above the building, which is prefaced by an active covered patio. “ ‘Some days, I like killing people more than I like making them laugh…' ” I murmur, then aloud: “Let's take a walk.”

Ivy senses that I'm onto something and leaves her Cheetos on the roof of a nearby lowrider.

We cross the busy intersection with Ivy sucking the red off her fingertips, and this causes a fat man in a minivan to hoot out his window. Ivy gives him the finger, and this delights him even more. All the while, I'm looking between the smoking patio and the liquor store. The seats out there would have a perfect view of anyone coming and going from American Liquor, and a man in a ski mask toting a water pistol and cartoon money sack would be especially hard to miss.
Funny, even
.

“What's this about?” Ivy asks, catching up to my quick stride in her heels.

“Something in his letter…A. Guy said a thing about making people laugh.”

“You think he's a comedian?”

“I think we're going to find out.”

The front entrance for Giggle-o Joe's is patrolled by a large white man in a suit who checks my ID, and though Ivy doesn't have hers, he lets us both in anyway, taking twenty dollars off me for the cover. “And there's a two-drink minimum. For each of you,” he adds imposingly as he holds the door open.

“Two cherry Cokes, coming right up,” Ivy teases as we walk in.

The place is nice, nicer than any of the bars I usually frequent anyway, and decently full for a weeknight. Mood lighting comes from little glass-housed candles on tables, and a large overhead spotlight is aimed at the lone microphone. On stage, a young black man is doing his impression of a white guy coming over to his apartment for the first time, which the audience is eating up. “Sit at any open table,” a passing waitress with a full tray advises us in a stage whisper.

Instead, we move out toward the patio, which is fenced off from the sidewalk by a four-foot gate. It has its own bar against the back wall, and a large, live-feed television is broadcasting the comedian to the smoking set. Inside, at the booths, it is couples and foursomes taking in the show. Out here, it is male-dominated, mostly indiscernible loners scribbling in notebooks or silently rehearsing bits, but there are a few larger tables where the seasoned pros have collected, laughing it up among themselves. Ivy gets the looks of course, but no one will say a word to her. We slide up to the wooden bar and pop down on stools to wait for the bartender. Dressed in a red tuxedo vest and matching bow tie, she turns from the TV screen and smiles, caught off guard. “Sorry, I love this bit LaReese does—it cracks me up every time.”

“He perform here often?”

“Most of our comics are house guys…after midnight, though, we switch to open mic.”

“This might be a bit of a long shot, but does a guy named Andy by chance perform here?”

“Andy Sample?”

“Sure.”

“Aww, you just missed him. He was on before LaReese. He killed tonight.”

“Is he still around?”

“Yeah. I just saw him, like a minute ago.” She calls out to a bespectacled bald guy at one of the larger tables, “Vince! Where's Andy?”

“He just left,” Vince calls back. “Not thirty seconds ago. I saw him go out the front in a hurry.”

“What can you tell me about Andy?” I ask Vince directly.

“You a talent agent?”

“No, just a really big fan.”

“He's decent,” Vince admits, “but he's a total loner. Sits by himself, doesn't like small talk, doesn't socialize.”

“What does he look like?”

“I thought you were a fan.”

“We've only heard his podcast,” Ivy covers.

“Andy has a podcast? I thought he hated those things.”

“You were saying?”

“Oh…I dunno. He's built a little taller than you…also, he's a ginger.”

“A what?” I ask.

“A redhead…you know,
South Park
…a ginger.”

“Oh, right.”

“He's just kind of a private guy is all. He hangs around here all the time, but doesn't talk much. The longest conversation I ever had with him was a couple weeks ago he bet me that someone was gonna rob 'Merican Liquor across the street. Easiest twenty bucks I ever made.”