Pound for Pound (21 page)

Dan said, “Always an upside, always a down.”

“But it’s also a matter of degree and duration,” Kogon said. “In your case, you might be experiencing a kind of hangover from the medication. It could simply be trauma, physical as well as mental. But I don’t think any of these things are likely in your case—not after the way you left the hospital. Dan, it’s mostly to do with you, not the procedure.”

“So what am I supposed to do, roll over and die of the mopes?”

“From what you and Earl have told me about your family situation, especially that tragic thing about your grandson, and now you learn you have heart disease, you just might need time to grieve and heal,” Kogon advised him. “An extended rest would not be a bad idea if you can afford it.”

“I got the money,” Dan said. “But I never was one to quit.”

“Resting and quitting aren’t the same. And you’ve got to rethink your lifestyle. Your chances of surviving depend on that. Whether or not you change—eat right, get plenty of sleep and reasonable exercise—depends on how much you want to live.” He wrote Dan a prescription for Xanax,
0.5
milligram. “Just make sure you stay in touch—in another week, then a month, then three, and then at least twice a year so we can catch any new obstruction.”

Dan hadn’t mentioned his drinking. “What if I don’t keep in touch?”

Kogon smiled. “It’s your funeral.”

Dan didn’t check back with Kogon. His moods and energy fluctuated radically during the next three months. He hit the pit mentally, but when he took his pulse, his heartbeat wasn’t irregular; its rate kept up with his watch. He hardly ate. He took Xanax six at a time. He got out of bed to urinate and defecate, but he wondered why he bothered to get up at all, wondered what was so bad about sleeping in piss and shit. He’d go three weeks without a shower and a shave. He lost seventeen pounds. He was aware that he was drinking himself to death. He began to wonder why it was taking so long. He had no plan. He kept drinking.

He switched from cheap bourbon to low-down vodka. Alcohol became Dan’s job. Earl continued to work a twelve-hour day, but still split the profits a buck for a buck. Dan sat Earl down.

“You got to stop cuttin me in when I don’t work.”

“I’m just waitin for you to make a comeback.”

Dan sighed. “This ain’t gonna change, Soff.”

Earl said, “You got too much goin for you to buy into that mess.”

Dan shook his head. “Naw, baby, my black thoughts own my candy ass.”

When Dan ran out of tranquilizers, he cleaned up and drove the pickup to Tijuana and bought five hundred pills from three different TJ pharmacies. He also bought Seconal and Nembutal, fifty each, out near the Auditorio, TJ’s boxing arena—fighting at the Auditorio was like going a hundred years into the past.

On the Avenida de la Revolución, at
gringo
prices, he bought two Cuban Romeo y Julieta Churchills in an upscale
tabacalero
that stocked only Cuban leaf. For lunch, across from the Frontón Palace, he ate
camarones al mojo de ajo,
garlic shrimp in butter, and sopped up the thick sauce with freshly baked rolls. He washed lunch down with two bottles of Bohemia, ordered a snifter of Hennessey XO, then took his time smoking half of one of the monster Churchills. He arrived at the end of the long line of
cars waiting to cross the border, half-whacked and still smoking the cigar. By the time Dan worked his way up to the front of the line, the border guard had already used his computer to check with the DMV for any outstanding warrants against him. Dan knew that if his truck was searched, and the pills were found, he’d be in deep shit. He didn’t care. But he went through the border check as easy as pie.

Instead of heading back up 5 North through the city of San Diego and Orange County, Dan immediately exited the freeway in Chula Vista for a bottle of vodka. He took a long pull in the parking lot, and several more in quick succession, then maneuvered back toward the
5.
But he gradually lost any sense of where he was headed until he found himself at the casino at the Pechanga Indian Reservation in Temecula, seventy miles north of the Mexican border. He and Earl and their boys had won four fights out of five at Pechanga, two of them main events. Dan fogged out. He nearly ran into a ditch thinking how little those big wins meant to him now. As dust swirled up and around and through his stalled truck, he realized he was too drunk to drive home. He got a motel room and continued to drink. He flirted with the sleeping pills. He opened the kid-proof plastic orange bottles. He poured them onto the bedspread. He sucked eighteen, maybe twenty into his mouth. They were slippery as snot. He went into the crapper for a glass of water. He saw himself in the mirror, looked at himself closely in the blinking pink light of the motel sign. He spat out the pills, then flushed the rest down the toilet. He stomped on the little orange bottles. He was damned if he’d die like Marilyn Monroe.

D
an woke up at four
a.m.,
his heart banging off his rib cage. He didn’t know where he was. He called the front desk, and when the operator told him he was at the El Paraíso Motel in Temecula, he remembered all his wrong turns and felt brain-dead.

The pink sign of the Paradise Motel blinked on and off. Dan heard the sound of a fist against flesh and bone from down the hall. A woman began to shriek. “Don’t spit on me there, don’t spit on me there!”

Dan took a hit from the glass full of vodka next to his bed. As he fell back shuddering into the tangled bedclothes, the plan hit him fully formed—simple and crisp. Dan felt his forehead for fever. His hand was hot, but his head was cool. Sometimes madness brings a sudden clarity of vision and purpose. He had a perfect plan.

No one would ever know, especially Earl. It was important that Earl never know.

Dan slept fitfully and was fully awake when the sun came up at six. He took a shower, checked out of the motel, and went to a coffee shop for a big breakfast, his first food since lunch in TJ. He slipped vodka into his
orange juice to slow down the tremor in his right hand. At seven-thirty, he used his cell phone to call his lawyer’s office. He left a message with the answering service for Robert Plunkett to meet with him at ten
a.m.
concerning an emergency.

He arrived at Plunkett’s office,
i
Wilshire, at nine forty-five.

Dan filled Plunkett in on his heart condition, exaggerating as he went along. He then instructed Plunkett to draw up the necessary documents to transfer all of his property to Earl—Dan’s share of the business, his house, his two apartment buildings in Westwood, the gym and everything in it, his vehicles and personal effects, his life-insurance policies, and his savings and checking accounts.

Bobby Plunkett had known Dan from their days together at St. Jude’s in San Pedro. He knew more was going on than Dan admitted to, but he couldn’t figure out what. Plunkett, known as Bobby P to his criminal clients, cleaned his glasses with a linen handkerchief and picked at a patch of flaky skin on his bald head. He folded the handkerchief and returned it to the breast pocket of his three-piece gray flannel suit.

Plunkett said, “You don’t look your usual pink self, but are you positive your condition is so critical that you need to do this thing right now?”

Dan lied, but it was also the truth. “I live from day to day.”

“Jesus, Danny, I had no idea.”

“How long for the paperwork?” Dan asked.

“Is a week okay?”

“Sooner. Get on it full-time, and have a check ready for me to sign to cover everything I owe you. But remember, Earl is not to know anything about this until I die, or if for some reason you don’t hear from me in three years.”

“Why wouldn’t I hear from you?”

“Just set it up so it clicks into place three years from today, regardless. That way, it’ll be a done deal and Earl won’t be able to back out.”

Bobby P said, “In three years, you could change your mind.”

Dan said, “I’m doin it this way just in case. Heart patients can check
out anywhere and anytime. I’m thinkin of goin to Ireland. What if I end up buried in the Ould Sod somewhere, and nobody here would know for ten years?”

Plunkett said, “I’m sure they’d notify the American authorities over there.”

Dan hated doing it, but he lied again. “I didn’t tell you. Because my mother and father were born in Ireland, I went ahead and got Irish citizenship and a mick passport.”

Bobby P said, “I was thinking of doing that, too. Let me know what it’s like over there.”

“Roight,” said Dan, sounding like his father. “How many days’ll this take?”

“Give me five, maybe four, but I doubt four.” Plunkett scratched his bald head again. “What if something happens to Earl before it happens to you?”

Dan said, “Leave half to Earl’s wife, and the other half to the American Cancer Society, in memory of Brigid.”

Bobby P smiled wanly at his stricken friend of so many years. He, too, could talk in the old way. “So what’ll you be afther leavin me?”

Dan answered, this time sounding like Brigid, “What Oy’ll be leavin ya is for good.”

Plunkett had his own tremor. He reached into the credenza behind his desk and brought out two glasses and a bottle of Booker’s eight-year-old
126.5
proof. “Sure and doesn’t Mrs. Plunkett’s little boy Bobby feel like pissin the day away?”

“One drink, laddy-buck, then it’s on to the clock with ya,” said Dan. The deception sickened him, but he didn’t want his old friend to suspect that this would be their last drink together. Each sip of Booker’s made Dan wince, but not Plunkett.

Dan stopped at a liquor store. He bought another bottle of vodka, and a copy of
Autovender,
a magazine offering nearly five hundred pages of
photographs of privately owned cars for sale. He drove to Hancock Park. He sat at a table overlooking the pond.

Dan leafed through the magazine. He was looking for an original owner wanting to sell a twenty-year-old car that had a hundred thousand or so miles on it. He wouldn’t need it for long, but he would need it for sure. A Cadillac Seville, or maybe a Mercedes 300 diesel.
Autovender
offered a dozen choices, all under thirty-five hundred dollars. A Mercedes diesel seemed best, a workhorse car that could take him anywhere he wanted to go. Dan got on his cell phone and called to make appointments with the closest three. He withdrew forty hundred-dollar bills from the bank, and placed thirty of them in an envelope under the driver’s seat of the pickup. He put the other ten C-notes in his wallet for his trip. Should he have to negotiate a price, cash spoke to all persuasions.

The first three cars were in poor shape. Dan telephoned three more numbers. He left his name and number on the answering machines of the first two, along with the message that he was calling about the cars advertised in
Autovender.
He was in the process of leaving the same message on the third answering machine when what sounded like an elderly lady picked up the phone.

“Hello, Toussaint residence.”

Dan gave his name and explained that he was interested in the car she had for sale. She answered his questions about the condition of the car, and they agreed to meet in an hour and a half, after Mrs. Toussaint asked for Dan’s land-line phone number and address. That way she could check him out in the phone book.

“Can’t be too cautious these days.”

Dan said, “I understand.”

Right on the dot, Dan rounded a curve in the 4400 block of Palma Road, and saw a tomato green
1979 300
D parked in front of a stucco house. A red and white “For Sale” sign was in the front window of the car. An old woman with thinning blue hair stood cleaning the car with a long-handled red duster.

Dan introduced himself to Mrs. Toussaint, an eighty-year-old who shook Dan’s hand firmly.

She said, “This was my late husband, Maurice’s, pride and joy, bought it new.” She indicated two boxes on the backseat. “Records go back to day one. Maurice worked at the old main post office across from Union Station, don’t you know. He and I were the only ones who ever drove this old heap. Now my eyes are shot. I guess you’ll want to chisel me on the price.”

“Not necessarily,” Dan said. The exterior and the leather interior of the car were in excellent condition. Tan sheepskin seat covers protected the front seats. “You’re asking twenty-six hundred. That’s on the high end for a diesel this old, but it’s fair enough if the car’s in good shape.”

The old lady snorted. “Mercedes diesels’re the best cars ever made, so why wouldn’t this one be? It’s got only ninety-some thousand miles on it.”

“I see it’s got good tires.”

“They’re a month old, so’re the brakes and battery.”

Dan’s quick check under the hood confirmed his favorable first impression. He asked for and received permission to take the car on a test drive. But only after he left his wallet with Mrs. Toussaint. Her mamma didn’t make no foolish babies.

Dan quickly got down the hill and onto the Arroyo Seco Parkway. The car checked out to be exactly what he wanted. He’d been gone eight minutes by the time he returned the car.

Mrs. Toussaint said, “You took longer than you said.”

“I apologize, and I’ll buy the car.”

“Well, all right.”

The transaction took two more minutes. Dan handed over the money, and she handed him the signed pink form.

Mrs. Toussaint squinted at him and said, “Now you drive carefully, hear? You got a good car. Don’t wreck it!”

Dan dropped the car off for a lube and oil change that same afternoon. He had a complete tune-up, including filters, glow plugs, belts and hoses, new wiper blades, and new shocks. He added freon to the AC, also had new head- and taillights installed. Since he didn’t plan to register the car in his name, he didn’t want some cop pulling him over because of a blown taillight.

The Mercedes was set to go the day before Plunkett called to tell Dan to come in and sign the documents.

When Dan got back from Plunkett’s office, Earl was looking under the tarp that covered the shot-up Cadillac. He’d loved that car almost as much as Dan. Watching his partner waste away was killing Earl.
How do I tell a grown man what to do when I might be doin the same thing he is?