Point Doom (6 page)

EIGHT

A
t 9:20
P.M.
I was done for the day. A thirteen-hour shift. The headache that had started five years ago in the East Bronx when I killed those people had never gone away, except when I was drunk. Today it was little more than a dull thump. Livable. I had five hundred dollars in cash in my pocket and had sold one more car, a two-year-old Camry, and made a total of three thousand five hundred for my first three days in the car business.

With mom’s Honda parked and locked up safely around the corner, I was on my way across the darkened car lot to get in my demo Corolla, when Fernando stepped out of the shadows and into my path.

“Ho kaye, chithead,” he snarled, “now we gonna zee whaz wha.”

Fernando outweighed me by sixty or seventy pounds and was three inches taller. He gave me a two-handed push in the chest. I was knocked off balance, but regained myself. Before I could straighten up fully, he landed a nice flush right to my jaw and I fell back against the Corolla.

But, to Fernando’s surprise, rather than go down or cover up, I straightened myself and stood there smiling. Then I lifted my hands and was ready to go. What fat boy didn’t realize was that I like to fight and that long ago in New York City I discovered that I have the adrenal system for it. I’m like a boxer in the ring. When the juice begins to flow I can be hit, but the pain is minimal, not unlike a guy in a ten-round bout at the Olympic Auditorium. I simply ignore what hurts.

“C’mon, you potbellied cocksucker, try that again,” I said, still smiling, waving him toward me.

Fernando made his next move, a wide right. I easily stepped back and it missed me by a couple of inches. After that I got in a series of three strong palm thrusts to the face followed by a nice kick. My foot found its mark and Fernando grabbed his crotch.

In some cases—in the past, in my private-detective days—I have taken pleasure in hurting people, but I didn’t want to scuff up Fernando too much or break his nose or knock out any teeth, so I decided to take my time.

My best punch as a boxer is my left hook. I landed two of them, a few seconds apart, flush on his cheek. Fatboy reeled on his heels and went down. I could have kicked him nicely in the face but I decided instead to step back and wait to see if he had any spit left in him.

Ten yards away, Max, with a thick key ring in his hand, had walked outside and was just locking up the showroom. He could hear us scuffling.

“Guys,” Max yelled, walking toward us, “that’s it! Knock it the fuck off!”

Fernando got to his feet and straightened his shirt. I was pleased to see that I hadn’t made him bleed. That would come later, if he still wanted more.

“We juss talkin, boss, iz all we beeng doin,” fat boy said cheerily, still trying to catch his breath.

I pointed a finger at Fernando. “Your Latino salesman thinks I skated him, boss,” I said. “He says that he wants to kick my ass. And, well, I’d sort of enjoy hurting him a little more, so if you don’t mind, we can settle this after you leave.”

“Shut up, Fiorella,” Max snarled.

“Then tell fat fuck here to back off before I get angry and really do some damage.”

“I said, shut up, Fiorella, if you want to keep your job!”

Then I turned back to Fernando. “Okay, moron,” I said, pointing a finger, “how ’bout me scattering a few of your teeth in the driveway? You up for that?”

Max put his hand on my chest. I let him push me back. I had no interest in losing my job over a brawl.

“I said, that’s it!” Max bellowed.

FIVE MINUTES LATER
the deal was settled. Max ordered me to give Fernando two hundred and fifty bucks out of my salesman’s cash spiff on the 4Runner. A settlement.

I refused. “No goddam way,” I said. “I made that money fair and square. House rules. No goddam way!”

Then Max tried another angle. He decided that Fernando would get the first deal of the day the next morning if the up was in our area. I was okay with that.

IT WAS MONDAY
night, too late to go to an AA meeting. My energy was flowing now. I’d had a short fight and I had five hundred bucks in my pocket for the first time in a year, since before I got sober.

I decided to buy myself dinner and drove my demo Corolla to the Broken Drum parking lot two blocks away on Wilshire Boulevard. The Drum is a steak house with an attached bar. When I was in high school it had been our hangout after a day’s classes or the Saturday night coed dances and basketball games. In those days the bartender was a guy named Sonny. He’d serve almost anyone provided there was a twenty-dollar bill in front of them on the bar.

Inside, the place was the same as it had been more than twenty years before—new paint, but that was all. It was dark with a lighted fireplace at the center of the main dining room. The bar area had pretty waitresses, fewer tables, and another newer fireplace. I decided to sit there.

I ordered a steak with a potato and a salad. The waitress was named Betty. In her forties. Tall and attractive with big, full lips. Red red lips. Very friendly. “Anything from the bar?” she asked smiling. “Gin and tonics are three twenty-five before ten o’clock.”

“I just started a new job down the street at the car dealer,” I said. “So I’m celebrating. I made my first sale today. I made two sales today, in fact.”

“Hey,” Betty chirped, “good for you. Very cool.”

“But just give me a tonic water—no gin,” I said. “Put a slice of lemon or lime in it too. Okay?”

“You know,” Betty said, writing the order down on her pad, a bit distracted, “I bought my car there. Last year. The guy’s name was Woody. Do you know Woody?”

“Sure, he’s a friend,” I said. “He’s the reason I’m selling cars. Woody got me the job.”

“They come in here a lot. The heavyset guy from Argentina. Arnoldo. He comes in with that other guy from the service department. Buckie, I think.”

“You mean Fernando,” I said.

“Yeah, Fernando. He’s nice. He’s okay.”

“Tell them to cook my steak medium rare, please? That’s how I like it.”

A couple of minutes later Betty set a salad down in front of me, along with my tonic water.

I started on the salad and was halfway through it when I took a sip of the tonic water. It tasted funny. A moment later I realized there was gin in it. It was my first sip of anything that contained booze since I’d quit drinking. My head immediately started pounding.

Just then Betty with the red lipstick was walking by, taking another order. “Everything okay?” she said, smiling. “How’s your salad?”

“Jesus,” I said. “There’s fucking gin in my drink!”

“You ordered a gin and tonic, didn’t you?”

“No! Tonic—no gin! I’m allergic to alcohol. Jesus!”

“Oh God, I’m soo-o sorry!” Betty said. “I’ll take it back.” Then she patted me on the arm, scooped up my glass, and walked off, shaking her head.

The taste of the stuff had made my brain crazy and it began chattering:
Hey, have the fucking drink. Just one. Fix your headache! Jesus, what’s wrong with one drink? You already had a sip. Quit being a pussy. Enjoy yourself.

I dropped a twenty on the table, then got up. I was terrified. One drink and I’d be back where I was before, where my madness had taken me—back to hell.

Once outside in my demo car, still freaked that I’d had a sip of gin and would now be back out of control—that the obsession to get drunk would come back—I punched in Southbay Bill’s number on my cell phone.

No answer. I dialed again. When the call went to voice mail, I hung up.

Then I punched in Bob Anderson’s number. The mean-ass old guy had fired me as his sponsee nine months before because I failed to show up for one of our appointments about discussing the AA Third Step.

I was desperate and I didn’t care. I had to talk to someone who knew me and knew what to do. I was sure Bob could help and tell me how to handle the feelings.

When Bob answered I knew by his voice that I’d woken him up. “Hello, this is Bob,” he wheezed.

“Bob, it’s JD.”

“Hey, buddy, how are ya? It’s late. What’s up?”

“I had a fucking drink! That’s how I am. I’m crazy.”

“Hey, my friend,” he croaked, “that’s what we alkies do. We drink. So, tell me what happened.”

“I ordered dinner at this restaurant in Santa Monica, and a plain tonic water with lime. The waitress brought me a gin and tonic by mistake.”

“And you drank it?”

“No. I took a sip and swallowed it but I didn’t drink the rest.”

“That ain’t no slip, JD. You didn’t order the G&T to get drunk, did you?”

“Hell no!”

“Just get to a meeting. You’ll be fine.”

“Are you sure?”

“Call me in the morning, JD. It’ll all be okay.”

Then Bob hung up.

THE HOOKERS NEAR
Rose Avenue are mostly black because that area of Venice is near Ghost Town, where all the crack and meth dealers operate.

The girl I stopped to pick up was on the short side. She had beefy thighs with a close-cropped afro, big knockers, and fake gold hoop earrings. She looked to be an ethnic mix of black and something else. Asian—maybe Chinese.

I lowered the power window on the passenger side of the Corolla and she leaned in. “Hi babe, half and half is fifty,” she whispered.

“Get in,” I said. “You get a hundred more if you’ll lick my asshole first.”

“Uu-huh, you a spender. I likes spenders. Deal. My name’s Dawn. What’s yours, honey?”

“I’m JD. And I’m in love already.”

ON MY WAY
back through Santa Monica toward Malibu, an hour later, I swung off Lincoln onto Colorado Boulevard, then turned onto Ninth Street. I was feeling okay again after talking with Anderson, and the sex with chubby Dawn had been the tie-breaker.

As I was crossing Broadway, headed up Ninth, another car, what looked like a black four-door Beemer, almost sideswiped my Corolla demo. The other driver hadn’t even paused for the stop sign and might have clipped me if I hadn’t jerked my wheel the other way. L.A. has crazy drivers.

My plan, now that I had a nicer ride, was to leave Mom’s Honda parked on Ninth Street until my day off on Wednesday, then drive her into town with me to pick up her beast and return it to her garage. The goddamn People’s Republic of Santa Monica is well known for its brutal alternate-side street-cleaning tickets, so if you are parked on the wrong curb on street-cleaning day, you’re screwed. The ticket is seventy-nine bucks. So I wanted to be sure the Honda was parked legally and okay.

As I drove down the block I saw flames thirty yards away. A car was on fire.

NINE

W
hen I got closer to the flames, I could see that it was Mom’s red Honda, my car. The hood and roof were ablaze.

I parked a safe distance away, got out, then approached the Honda. There was an acrid smell. Several solid streams of flame covered the hood and roof and the front bumper was burning too. Apparently, some jerk had squirted lighter fluid or something similar on the beast, then lit it up—some kind of idiot-style, high school prank.

The rear section of the Honda had only one strip of flame on it, so my first thought was to get my gun. I’m a guy who has been charged with felony drunk driving and I know that, in California, I will instantly go back to the slam if I’m caught with an unregistered piece.

I opened Mom’s trunk, grabbed the gun, tucked it into the back of my pants, then pulled out a couple of grimy car towels I stored there to dry the Honda off after I’d washed it.

I threw the towels on the car’s trunk and roof. Half a minute later some of the flames were extinguished.

Who the hell would want to torch my fucking car? Why? Maybe it was that fat prick Fernando, carrying a grudge and still PO’d after I’d got that big sale. If it was Fernando, he’d find out very soon that he’d been screwing with the wrong guy. I’d really clean his clock this time. No one else came to mind except the crazy vengeful bitch in the Porsche in Malibu. Could it have been her? Was that possible? Then I remembered: She’d seen me at the stoplight on the Coast Highway but she’d been at least twenty-five yards away and too far from my car to have read my license plate. I dismissed the idea.

IT WASN’T YET
midnight and one or two lights began to come on from the houses along the street. A door opened and a guy in a bathrobe walked out on his carport. He stood with his hands on his hips, watching the flames on my car. Then he called to me: “What’s going on?”

“My car’s on fire, for chrissakes,” I yelled back. “Don’t just stand there with your dick in your hand, get some water or something! Have you got a hose?”

“Right,” he said, acting semi-dazed from TV, like my car on fire was a goddamn reality show. Then he cinched his bathrobe closed and walked to the corner of his house and began to unravel his garden hose.

The driver’s-side window of Mom’s car had been bashed in and the door was ajar. I flopped open one of my towels from the roof and, using it to protect my hand, pulled the door all the way open. Then I stood on the rocker panel and threw the other towel over the flames on the roof.

Half of the fire was smothered, but the grille section and the hood were still burning and there were intense flames coming from inside the engine compartment—smoke was beginning to billow out from under the hood.

The homeowner with the hose was behind me. “Hey, step back,” he yelled. “I’ll spray it down. Just get back!”

I stepped up onto the curb and stood next to him. He was blasting the hood and the grille with water just as we heard a loud popping sound and the engine compartment burst into flames.

“Hey, that’s not good,” Bathrobe yelled.

“You’re right,” I said. “C’mon, we’d better back off.”

We were twenty feet away when Mom’s car exploded. The blast and flames immediately ignited the car in front of the Honda—a Chrysler minivan. In seconds it was blazing, too, with its alarm howling.

HALF AN HOUR
later, while the cops and firemen were mopping up, one of the blues who had already taken my driver’s license and other ID was filling out a report. “Okay,” he said, walking up to me with his cop notebook open, “tell me exactly what happened here?”

“I don’t know,” I shot back. “I was walking to my car and I saw it burning. I guess somebody torched it. Maybe it was a prank or something.”

“A prank?” Blue barked. “Destroying private property and endangering the lives of the residents on this block is no prank, sir. It’s arson. We’re lucky someone wasn’t killed.”

“Whatever,” I said, “call it what you want.”

“Did you see anyone? Did you observe anyone leaving the area?”

“No. But I did see a car going around the corner at the other end of the block. He didn’t stop for the stop sign. It looked like he was in a hurry.”

Blue looked at me. “He? You said, ‘he.’ ”

“I’m not sure. I didn’t see who was driving. I just assume it was a he. It was a dark four-door. Maybe blue. A Beemer, I think.”

“Was the vehicle a newer car or was it older?”

“I don’t know. Newer, I guess. It was shiny.”

He held up my driver’s license and Social Security card. “I already checked this out,” he said. “Apparently, you’re driving on a restricted operator’s permit. You had a DUI.”

“So what?” I said. “My car was torched. What’s a restricted license got to do with a goddamn burning car?”

“Calm down, sir. I’m trying to determine the circumstances, what led up to the fire. Have you been drinking tonight, sir?”

“That’s none of your business. I wasn’t driving so that’s got nothing to do with anything. But no, I wasn’t drinking! I don’t drink.”

Blue sneered. “I think we have a problem here, Mr. Fiorella. In the trunk of your car we discovered a shopping bag containing five empty pint vodka bottles. Can you explain that?”

“They were in the trunk, officer,” I snarled. “They’re garbage. Undumped garbage.”

Blue moved to the front seat of his cruiser, then returned with his plastic Breathalyzer unit.

He was stone-faced. “I suspect you of driving while intoxicated. I am now instructing you to blow into this unit.”

I wanted to punch blue hard in the face. I wanted to watch blood run down from his nose into his cop mustache. I wanted to hurt blue badly. Instead, I stuffed the idea. “I said I wasn’t driving.”

“Blow into the machine, Mr. Fiorella. I won’t ask you again.”

When I was done blowing, Blue looked at the digital readout on the gauge. “You are legally sober,” he said in an even tone.

“No shit.”

“Sir, it’s Monday night. Not exactly a workday, as per your vehicle license driving restrictions. You were on your way to your car, I assume, to drive it, or were just getting out after driving it, in possible noncompliance with those restrictions. There are gaps in the account of what you’re telling me. I think you’re leaving out information here—omitting relevant facts. I recommend that you get your story of the incident in order.”

“I just told you what happened. Do your job, for chrissake! Find out who torched my car!”

Blue sneered. “I don’t believe what you’re telling me and I find your attitude to be unnecessarily belligerent. I think you somehow caused the fire yourself and are trying to shift the blame.”

“I don’t give a shit what you believe, lawman. I told you what happened.”

“We seem to be having a communication problem. I can have more backup here in five minutes. Do you want this situation to deteriorate further?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Good. Now empty your pockets and place the items on the hood of my vehicle.”

“Do you think I’d break my own window when I’m holding the car keys in my hand? Wake up, for chrissake!”

“Last warning: Calm down! Let me investigate the circumstances of the incident or I’ll cuff you right here.”

“How about this: Go talk to the neighbors and see if someone saw what happened. That’s your job, not hassling me!”

“I’m instructing you again: empty your pockets!”

“Jesus Christ,” I said, pointing down the block, hoping like hell the asshole wouldn’t frisk me and find the gun. “I work there at the Toyota dealer. On the corner. I was at my job.”

Blue looked down the block and saw Sherman Toyota’s big sign. “I see,” he said. “So, for the third and final time, remove the items from your pockets and place them on the hood of my vehicle.”

I reached into my pants and pulled out all my stuff, tossing it on to the cop car’s hood: my wallet, my cigarettes, my lighter, a few Nicorets, a dozen generic Sherman Toyota business cards that Max had passed out to all the new salespeople on Saturday, and the wad of cash that was left over from my hundred-and-fifty-dollar hooker.

“Here ya go,” I said, handing Blue one of the Toyota business cards, attempting to distract him and back up my story. “This is where I work.”

“Is that everything?” he asked.

“You just saw me empty my pockets. That’s it.”

Fortunately Blue didn’t toss me. Instead, he looked at the business card, then put it back on the hood of his patrol car.

“Okay,” I said, hoping to Christ the frisking part was over, “now, how about finding out who did this?”

“Insurance card?” he said. “I need to see proof of automobile insurance.”

“Look,” I said, “my car was on fire. I can’t get into it.”

Blue smiled. “The interior of the vehicle was not burned, sir. The flames are out. Go get the insurance card, Mr. Fiorella.”

“I don’t have an insurance card,” I said.

“Not good,” Blue said. “That
is
a problem.”