The Manipulated (Joe Portugal Mysteries) (13 page)

“That’s not how it works on
The Sopranos
. They’re always shoving food in their mouths while they’re talking about who to whack.”

“Must be an East Coast thing. Here, we eat first, talk business after.”

We sat at the table, John Santini with his espresso, me with my cup of tea. I’d eaten too much and kept shifting in my seat the relieve the pressure.

He reached into his jacket pocket, unstoppered a pharmacy vial. “Hold out your hand.” When I did he shook a pill into it.“Take that. Great stuff.”

“What is it?”

“What, you think I’m trying to poison you? If I was going to poison you, why would I spend good money on your lunch?”

“Good point.” I took the pill, washed it down with a sip of tea, one of water.

“So,” he said. “You’re wondering how come we’re sitting here.”

“Yes.”

“I need you to find someone.”

“Who?”

“Alma’s daughter. Name’s Valerie. You remember Alma, right?”

“Your assistant. The one who looks like Mike’s wife.”

“Uh-huh. Been with me thirty-two years.”

“What happened to her daughter?”

“Moved out of her place, didn’t tell anyone.”

“Her place where?”

“Studio City. Apartment building off Laurel Canyon.”

“How old?”

“Twenty-eight.”

“Actress?”

“How’d you know?”

“Wild guess.”

“See? You’re the right guy for this.”

I shifted my weight, realized the pressure in my gut had already lessened. “Great stuff, those pills.”

“I’ll get you some.”

I downed my tea, dumped more water over the bag.“Why me?”

“You’re good at finding people.”

“Based on a sample of one?”

“Two. That rock and roll guy.”

“Want to know a secret?”

“Won’t be a secret anymore.”

“I didn’t really find him.”

“Doesn’t matter. I got a feeling about you.”

“Even if I were good at it, aren’t there people who’d be better?”

“Like who?”

“Like some hired killer. They always find who they’re looking for. Just make it clear to them beforehand, stop short of the gun part.”

“You’re a funny guy.”

“Or a private detective.”

“Tried one. Got nowhere. I need someone who knows the business.”

“The business.”

“The acting business.”

“I’m pretty much on the fringes.”

“That’s not what my research says. The Altair Theater. All that.”

Many years ago. Before I got involved with commercials. “This is the same research that told you about Toby Bonner?”

“Had to get something for my money from the detective.” He reached inside his jacket, came out with a plain white business-size envelope. “This is something to kind of help you along.” He handed it to me.

I turned it over. It was sealed. I flexed it. Felt around the edges of the contents. “A photo?” I said.

“Yeah.”

“You have a photo?”

“Course I have a photo. Don’t open it yet. Wait until you need a little motivation.”

“This from that detective of yours?”

His smile was impossible to read.“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “Now get to work, Joey-boy.”

I found a pay phone and called Alma Rodriguez. She said she was too busy to see me until the next morning.

When I got home I put the envelope on my dresser. Then I opened a drawer and slid it under my socks. I didn’t need to see the photograph inside. Its very existence was enough motivation.

I checked the message machine. Two calls. Both from Mike Lennox, wanting to know what I’d discovered.

Not a thing, Mike. I’ve been too busy on another case. It’s a little more important now. You see, there’s this envelope with a photo in it. No, I haven’t seen it. But I can only imagine it’s Ronnie and me doing something we shouldn’t have.

But, with the rest of the day to kill, I might as well do something to make it look like I was doing what I’d told him I would. There had to be someone whose brain I could pick.

It took a while, but inspiration struck. I got out the phone book and found Channel 6. I played Voice Mail for a minute or two until I got hold of a live person in the newsroom. I asked for Claudia Acuna. A young male voice asked who was calling. I said my name. The voice turned excited when he heard it. But he was sorry to report she wasn’t there. He could try to get her on her cell phone, though, and have her call.

It wasn’t three minutes before the phone rang and she was on the line. “The famous Joe Portugal,” she said.

“That’s me.”

“What can I do for you?”

“It’s what I can do for you that’s important.”

“Which is what?”

“I can help you with the Lennox business.”

A long pause. “Sure, why not. Come by the station tomorrow at two. I’ll show you some things.” She gave me an address on Gower in Hollywood. “See you tomorrow.” She hung up.

I killed the rest of the afternoon and early evening staring at the TV, with only occasional trips to visit the envelope in my sock drawer to break up the monotony. It stayed sealed. Around eight I took a couple of Dramamine. I wasn’t worried about motion sickness. I wasn’t going anywhere. But they made dandy sleeping pills.

There was a tiny lot by the Santini Imports loading dock. One spot was marked for visitors. I claimed it and got out of the truck. Vito was running a forklift, unloading a truck full of cartons. Whatever was in them was
MADE IN CHINA
. He saw me and grunted. Santini must have given him the word that I was okay. I returned the grunt, climbed the stairs to the loading dock, let him let me in the interior door. “She’s up on Three,” he said.

I found myself in the same corridor I’d been in the other day. I went up the stairs, took them all the way to the top. There were boxes everywhere. Boxes in piles, boxes on pallets, boxes on top of boxes. At the far end a freight elevator ground to a halt, and a skinny guy in the de rigueur shapeless pants pulled off a hand truck overloaded with still more boxes.

I spotted Alma when she walked over to talk to the guy from the elevator. She wore a thin white garment like a lab coat. She pointed to another hand truck, this one piled with the kind of cardboard cartons you keep papers and records in. The guy went after it. Alma stopped him just before he got back on the elevator with it, made a couple of marks on the clipboard she was carrying, let the guy go. The elevator clattered back to life and was gone.

I watched all this, trying to decide if, were I all the way across Staples Center, I could have mistaken her for Donna Lennox. Never having seen Donna in the flesh, I couldn’t be sure. And what was the point? Mike clearly had made the error. Whether it seemed reasonable to me didn’t matter.

Alma saw me, motioned me over, led me to one of the corners, to an office of sorts. There were glass walls, seven or eight feet high, broken by a doorless entryway. She unbuttoned her lab coat and sat behind an old metal desk that nearly filled the partitioned area. Her chair came from the same litter as the one downstairs in Santini’s office. I had my choice of a folding metal one and a battered wooden barstool. I went for metal.

There were dozens of pieces of paper taped to the glass walls, and a half dozen nails in the plaster one, all but one with clipboards dangling. Some of the papers were curled and yellowed. Some of the tape was antique, shiny on one side with gum that had turned a glorious golden brown on the other.

Alma told me to hang on, flicked on a desk lamp, checked the clipboard she’d been carrying. She flipped over the top page and ran her finger down the one behind. Then she hung it on the vacant nail, turned off the lamp, looked at me. “Before anything else, I want to tell you that this isn’t my idea.”

“Okay.”

“Just ‘okay’?”

“What else am I supposed to say? I’m not even sure what it is that isn’t your idea. Looking for your daughter? Having me do it?”

“The first. You getting involved, what do I care? I don’t know you from Adam.”

“Okay.”

“Don’t say that again, all right?”

“Okay.”

She looked at me, cracked a smile. “Funny guy.”

“I try.”

“I’ve spent half the morning looking for a box of records that disappeared. Got me a little irritable.”

“Find it?”

“Yeah. Buried under about a hundred cartons of stuffed animals.”

“What kind?”

“Lions and tigers, mostly.”

“No bears?”

The phone on the desk rang. She picked it up, said, “Yeah,” listened. Whoever was on the other end was loud. I couldn’t make out what they were saying, but I got the rhythm. Someone was unhappy.“Tell him to shove it,”Alma said. She put her hand over the mouthpiece. “Goddamned Armenians.” Back into the phone: “He’ll have his bobbleheads this afternoon. I promise. Yeah. Same to you.” She put her finger down to break the connection, hit three numbers. “Vito. Get the bobbleheads out, okay? Know what, better deliver them yourself. Make sure you get a certified check.”

She hung up, pulled down another clipboard, turned on the lamp again, checked the paper over. I watched her eyes. She wasn’t really looking at it. She was stalling. Deciding.

She hung it back up, doused the lamp, said, “Her name’s Valerie.”

“That much I know.”

“What else do you know?”

“That she’s an actress, and that she moved out of her apartment in Studio City and didn’t tell anyone.”

“And?”

“That’s it.”

Again she went after a clipboard, like she was going to do the deciding act again. This time it never made it off its nail. She brought her hand back, lay it and the other one on the desk, palms down, like it was going to levitate and she was trying to keep it from doing so.

I said, “Why don’t you want anyone looking for her?”

“What good would it do?”

“You’d know where she is. What she’s up to.”

“You think I care?”

“I don’t know. Do you?”

“Not a whole lot.”

“Are you estranged?”

“Big word.”

“But you know what it means.”

She nodded. “Yeah. We are.”

“How come?”

“Some things she did. Some things Mario and I did.”

“What kind of things?”

“She’ll take care of herself. She always has.”

I got up, picked one of the clipboards off the wall. Looked it over. Some kind of form. It had been xeroxed crookedly, so the last column was cut off toward the bottom of the page. The first third or so was filled in. Dates, numbers, names of customers. A Post-it note was stuck on, with a red arrow pointing at an amount, with three exclamation points after the arrow.

“What are you doing?” Alma said.

“Deciding.” I hung the clipboard back up. The Post-it came off and fluttered to the floor. I started after it.

“Leave it,” she said. “Bastards are never going to pay anyway. What were you deciding?”

“If I want to pursue this thing. See, what’s weird to me is, if you and your husband are so blasé about finding Valerie, why does Santini give a shit?”

“You’ll have to ask him.”

“I think you know.”

“You calling me a liar?”

“I could wrap it up in a pretty package, but basically, yeah, I am.”

She was silent. Her eyes went to one of the clipboards.

“Please,” I said. “We’ve exhausted that routine.”

A couple more seconds of quiet. Then, “Sit down. You’re making me nervous.”

I sat.

“I find out you tell anyone this, I swear to God, I’ll come after you and knock the shit out of you.”

“Duly noted.”

“Valerie’s his daughter,” she said.

“I thought so,” I said. “So you and he …”

“No. Nothing like that. Not on my side, anyway. There was a girl working here.”

“A girl.”

“Don’t give me any of your politically correct bullshit. She was barely seventeen.”

“Santini got her pregnant.”

“Yes.”

“Did his wife know?”

“No. Far as she knew, Patty had a boyfriend that knocked her up and ran off.”

“So, jumping ahead here, Patty gave birth to a baby girl, who you and Mario raised as your own.”

“Yes.”

“Because you couldn’t have kids of your own.”

“Wrong, Mr. Smart Guy. We have two other children.”

“You estranged from them too?”

I expected, at the least, a dirty look. Instead I got a sad smile. “Look, here’s the thing. John cares about Valerie, even if I don’t. No reason for me, no matter what’s up with her and me, to keep anyone from finding her.”

How to phrase this? “How familiar are you with his other business ventures?”

“You mean, do I know he’s, what do they call it, an organized-crime figure? Of course I do. Though if it wasn’t for me, he wouldn’t be half as organized. Wait. That might give you the wrong idea. This place is strictly on the up-and-up.”

“You’re sure of that.”

“I do the books. I’m sure.”

“He tried to give me the impression he’s kept his hands clean lately.”

She nodded. “This is pretty much it now. That other stuff, it’s all in the past. Just like your father.”

“He told you about that?”

“There’s not a whole lot that goes on with him that I don’t know about. Tell me something. Your father. He probably says he’s following the straight and narrow.”

“Not just says. He does.”

“You’re sure of that.”

Was I? He was still in contact with some of his old cronies. Like Sonny Patronella, who’d followed me around that time. And Heinie Silverberg, at least until he kicked the bucket. If that one last score beckoned, would he be able to …

“Yes,” I said. “I’m sure.”

“Yeah, well, I’m sure too.” She stood. The interview was over.

I got to Channel 6 just before two. The source of the young male voice I’d spoken to on the phone was pleased as punch to see me. He was thin, dressed all in black, and strikingly handsome, with jet black hair and innocent blue eyes. He told me Claudia’d gotten stuck in a meeting, but would be free in a few minutes. Would I like some coffee? Tea? Mineral water? I said I was fine, and sat down to read about heart disease in a weeks-old
U.S. News and World Report
. But he wouldn’t leave me alone. Was I
sure
I didn’t want a refreshment? To shut him up I asked for some water. Then he went down the list of waters. I said anything’s fine, he came back with an Evian, opened the bottle, poured, hovered.