Nighttown Read online

  With my light off, the world on the other side of the windowpanes had the wavy, somewhat watery appearance that’s the hallmark of old cylinder glass from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, a process developed to create a sheet of glass big enough for larger windows. It was blown in the form of a long tube that was slit down one side and opened while still pliable and then put into an extremely hot furnace where it melted and flattened into a smooth but slightly rippled sheet. This was obviously the glass that came with the house, not a later replacement. When I got closer, though, I saw that I had been right in thinking that it had once been covered: The edges of the panes were a remarkably ugly brown where years’ worth of dust particles and cooking oil had adhered to the sticky imprint of the tape that once held the heavy paper in place.

  Okay, I decided, at some point the cook had simply cracked open the window to provide an escape route for the heat and the odors of cooking. It was a small kitchen, and perhaps she’d been instructed to keep the door to the dining room closed to spare the house’s inhabitants the smells of cabbage or cruciferous vegetables, the smoke of broiling meat. I can’t say the explanation made me completely happy, but I allowed it, combined with the money in hand and the money yet to come, to keep me from going straight out through the front door and across Koreatown to the apartment I shared with my girlfriend of more than a year now, Ronnie Bigelow. Ronnie and I needed the money. We were planning an operation to kidnap her two-year-old son from his father, a New Jersey mob doctor, and it was an expensive proposition.

  The house chose that moment to creak, and I said to it silently, the hell with you. I’m in, and I’ll finish up and get out again. Twenty-five thousand bucks can muffle a lot of creaks.

  The door at the far end of the kitchen opened, as expected, into a cramped servant’s bedroom with bare floors—concrete, not wood—and only one narrow window, placed so high by the room’s designers that it suggested they’d been afraid someone might escape through it. The room was empty except for a single bed, bare but for a thin, graying mattress and a couple of misshapen pillows. Sheets, none too clean, were neatly folded at the foot of the bed. The closet contained nothing but a tangle of coat hangers and a sharp smell of mouse urine, and when I checked the bathroom I found the barest of minimums: a sink, a claustrophobic shower, and a toilet containing water that would probably give me nightmares for weeks. The bathroom had neither a window nor a vent, which seemed like the cruelest economy of all.

  Keeping the uncovered window in mind, I turned off the penlight as I moved through the kitchen, opening drawers and cupboards until I came upon a cupboard that was jammed solid with brown paper supermarket bags, undoubtedly to replace the ones masking the windows as they aged and tore. This had all the symptoms, I thought, of a full-blown mania. I closed everything and headed back into the dining room, staying close to the wall. I was most of the way to the hallway, when I was brought up short once again by the carpeting, or, rather, the lack of it. The dining room should have been carpeted. Since the windows in here were covered, I flicked on the light and played it around the room, and on the bare floor was a sparse huddle of junk: a Formica table on aluminum legs, three banged-up folding director’s chairs. Total value, maybe eighty-five bucks. Just to confirm my budding suspicion, I crossed the hall and took a look at the living room.

  More rubbish furniture on the bare floor, and now I also saw the rectangles on the walls, slightly darker than the wallpaper, the ghosts of paintings that had hung there for decades. The only framed art pieces remaining in the room were a couple of gauzy sepia photographs, one on each side of the fireplace, at about eye level. They did not call out to me to take a closer look. Even the bookcases had apparently been ransacked, creating spaces on the shelves, the books on either side tilting left and right, looking depressed at having been left behind in the methodical disappearance of items of value.

  So, unlike the window glass, unlike the house itself, the carpets, furnishings, and decorations had departed, to be replaced with crap—modern, cheap, and even a little battered. Much of it looked like the rag ends of yard sales, which is to say that it was not just used, but hard used. Some items might have sat outside in bad weather. And yet the house had never been rented out, as far as I knew, and the Hortons had never gone broke. The place was going to be razed presumably because the lot was worth more without the house on top of it, and none of the living Horton cousins wanted to live in it.

  The missing carpets and the vanished furniture, with its bargain-basement replacements, suggested an appalling little playlet. Rich old woman immobilized upstairs. Downstairs, slow-motion, wholesale theft: sell a piece here, sell a piece there, and there, replace it with crap, knowing the next time Miss Daisy would come down the stairs and into these rooms, she’d be carried through them feet first. One immobilized woman, dependent on others for everything, a woman who had been born into a world where servants were seen as faithful retainers, practically “members of the family.” Living in service, dying in service, drawing satisfaction from their positions close to the rich and the near-rich, loving the family’s children like their own, taking pride in being part of a great house.

  Had that ever been true? Couldn’t have been. At the very least, I supposed, it had been a notion that reassured the rich that the people who moved through the rooms while the family slept were unlikely to murder them in their beds. Despite that awful, airless little bedroom, that dire bathroom.

  If I was reading the ground floor correctly, Miss Daisy had, for at least her last few years, lived upstairs from a skeleton crew of thieves who cashed in one Horton possession after another, possibly even working their way up the stairs and into the unoccupied rooms on the second floor as Miss Daisy’s world grew smaller until, at last, she’d been sentenced to spend the rest of her days in bed, the cradle waiting at the bad end of life, being turned and baby-powdered and, one hoped, comforted occasionally, while pieces of her life walked out the front door. She might have been an awful old rag—her reputation when she was younger, and the cold, closed nature of her house suggested that the solitude in which she lived had been well earned—but it was hard to imagine that she, or anyone, deserved that.

  If the original things in these rooms had been the kind of quality appropriate to the house and the Hortons’ place in society, there had probably been more than a couple hundred thousand bucks’ worth on the first floor alone. And who knew what the pictures had been? Even if the people who sold the items had no sense of what they were worth, they’d still be thirty, forty thousand to the good.

  And that thought stopped me with one foot on the bottom stair. If all those fine things had been stolen and sold, why in the world would the thing I was after still be here?

  2

  Happy Meal

  Five days earlier, when I’d gotten caught up in the events that ultimately took me to Horton House, I hadn’t actually been told what I was after.

  I only knew two things about it. First, I was dead certain that it wasn’t what my client said it was. What she sent me to find was a doll, which she described just before she gave me the key and the twenty-five thou. It was French, she’d said, with a hand-painted porcelain face. From about 1860, give or take. A girl of ten or eleven with blonde hair, wearing a yellow dress and a cloak with lace and ribbons. In so-so shape.

  She must have seen the doubt in my face, because she added, “Pretty little thing, though.”

  I’d smiled and nodded as though it made sense. The object she described sounded to me like a Jumeau bébé, an antique child’s doll. The company Maison Jumeau opened for business in Paris in the 1840s as one of Europe’s most exclusive dollmakers. It started out with “fashion dolls” that depicted young women dressed in the height of style, but in the 1860s it segued into dolls for, and depicting, children. Rich children. Many of them were quite beautiful in a fussy, slightly vapid, and over-precious way, but the most I’d ever seen offered fo
r one at auction was about thirty K—less than the fee she was offering me to steal the one she described. And the doll that brought that price was in absolutely mint shape, miraculously in its original box.

  So the second thing I knew was that what I was being sent to get was inside the doll.

  I’d almost said no right then, despite the threats she mixed in with the payment. The too-large sum of money was only one of the problems. The other was that she was a new client. New clients make me nervous.

  Until five days ago, I’d never met, seen, or heard of the person who sent me into Horton House, nor did I know her name. I met her in response to a call from my primary fence, Stinky Tetweiler. After thirty or forty seconds of painfully stilted small talk—Stinky has no interest in other human beings but his shrink advises him to behave as though does—he told me I was going to meet someone in a McDonald’s on Western Avenue. I was to wear a yellow shirt and be reading a book.

  I said, “Why would I do that? I don’t even like yellow.”

  “A job, obviously,” he said. “A profitable job.”

  “Who is it?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “So,” I said, “you’re arranging for me to meet someone you don’t know, which probably means you also don’t know what kind of a job he has in mind.”

  Stinky said, “She.”

  I said, “No.”

  “If you’re worried about security, the person who called me to set this up is someone I trust completely.”

  “So that’s a minimum of three people who are already involved. Tell you what. You meet her.”

  “All you have to do is listen,” he said. “She’ll give you twenty-five hundred just to talk, whether you decide to move forward or not.”

  “How much are you getting for calling me?”

  A pause. Stinky really, really hates to talk about money. “The same,” he said.

  “I want all of it.”

  “Why would I—”

  “The person who set this up, you said, is someone you trust completely. You don’t trust anyone completely, so how that translates to me is that it’s someone you need to keep happy. I’m helping you keep him or her happy.”

  A pause. “But all of it?”

  “All of twenty-five hundred,” I said. “We both know you cut it in half because you always do. You told me she paid you twenty-five hundred, but you wouldn’t scratch your own back for twenty-five hundred, so let’s say she paid you five. I want twenty-five hundred. I think I’m being nice.”

  “Doesn’t have to be you.” If I’d been there, I’d have seen Stinky take a swipe at his infinitesimal nose, the bit that’s left to him after a lifetime of enthusiastic plastic surgery. Rubbing his nose is Stinky’s tell, and I’ll kill the person who breaks the news to him. He said, “I can give this to someone else.”

  “Do it.”

  The pause was so long I thought he might have hung up. Then he said, “Have I ever told you that you’re unbearable?”

  “Yes, thanks. So. Twenty-five hundred from you before I go, and the same from her, in cash when we meet, and I’m not committed to anything. When do I go?”

  “Tomorrow. Noon.”

  “I’ll be right over,” I said. “Small bills, okay?”

  Of all the big cities I know none is more visually improved by the arrival of night than Los Angeles. Anyone making a top ten list of the world’s ugliest urban stretches would be hard-pressed to include fewer than half a dozen of LA’s tens of thousands of eyesores, all of which look better when the sun has made its nightly exit.

  There has never been a blueprint for Los Angeles, which is one reason so many people here salivate at the term planned community. LA was built in any old order out of anything that happened to be at hand and in any old style (although there are a few nice buildings left over from the ’20s and ’30s), and absolutely no money-saving shortcuts were overlooked. The city was built, most of it, with the short term in view: a developer simply bought a big hunk of cheap land, cleared away the barley or spinach or citrus, built a few soda-cracker buildings with boulevard frontage, bribed the city to put a couple more streets along his property’s boundaries, named the streets after his wife and daughters, folded up his money, and left town. Take a bunch of these and put them together and you’ve got Los Angeles.

  The block on Western that housed the McDonald’s where I was to receive my second $2,500 was awful even in comparison with the blocks on either side: two-story buildings as devoid of ornamentation as shoe boxes, made from thinly layered plaster, all covered by a coat of dirt-colored paint that must have been enormously inexpensive, since hundreds and hundreds of gallons of the stuff had instilled the street with a staggering chromatic monotony. Plumped down in the middle of it all, on the east side of Western Avenue, ugly in its corporate, cash-for-calories way, was McDonald’s.

  I’d forgotten about the yellow shirt until I was halfway there, so I had to make a quick detour into one of Koreatown’s less fancy malls. In the first little store I visited I saw a T-shirt in the eye-itching yellow of a suspect urine sample. It said Ballet dancers do it on their toes in a sort of free-hand, tee-hee font across the chest. The T-shirt got me some attention in the restaurant which, like most McDonald’s, was firmly in baseball cap territory.

  It was 10:30 on a cold, cloudy February morning when I got there, ninety minutes early, but even at that hour the place was in overflow mode. I stood watching my food cool in front of the station with the drink machines and the packaged condiments, dodging ketchup junkies, until a booth for four opened up at the front, where I could see everyone who came and went. I slid in, facing Western Avenue across a small asphalt parking lot, and checked the time on my phone. Then I pushed the food toward the empty seats opposite me and opened an enormous paperback, one of a set containing the razor-sharp mystery novels of Margaret Millar, a woman who was remarkably tough on members of her own gender and wrote like a heavily armed avenging angel. The book was big enough to spot from the street.

  The average height of the restaurant’s patrons that day was roughly three feet, eight inches, and it didn’t take me long to lose all interest. So I wasn’t paying attention when a harried-looking mom towing three over-caffeinated kids staked claim to the booth behind me. I heard a few minutes of desultory, full-mouth chatter that inevitably turned into a squabble over the toys in the Happy Meals; one of the boys got Fashionista Barbie and the girl had a Hot Wheels car, a clear violation of the traditional natural order of childhood. Harried Mom slapped a palm down on the table with a noise like a pistol shot and said, “That’s enough. Go out and wait with Eddie.”

  “I don’t wanna go wait with—”

  “Donald,” Harried Mom said in a tone you could have used to sand a banister, “do I give a shit?”

  “I’m Danny,” Donald said, and I closed the book to give the conversation one hundred percent of my attention.

  “You’re whoever I say you are. Get your prepubescent butt out there and wait with Eddie. I’ll be out when I’m out. And Dorothy, or whatever your name is, give him that fucking car. Now.”

  Dorothy, if that was her name, said, “You shouldn’t use words like—” and Harried Mom cleared her throat with enough menace to empty the restaurant.

  “ThenIwantBarbie,” Dorothy said very quickly. Mom said, “Do you know how to get home?”

  “No.”

  “Well, you’ll be working that out in about three minutes if you don’t give him that car and get out there with Eddie.”

  “Sheesh,” said a kid whose voice I hadn’t heard yet but who had a keen sense of injustice.

  Mom said, “You, too, John Doe. You think you’re special?”

  Then there was a sound-effects track of soprano grumbling and kids getting up with much resentful shoe-scuffing, and a minute later the three of them were on the other side of the window, grievanc
e visible in every inch of their bodies, standing around a man in the parking lot who had his back to me and wore his hair in an Afro like a mid-size mushroom cloud.

  “He’s not gonna turn around,” said Harried Mom, sliding into the other side of my booth. “You might as well look at me.”

  I looked at her. She was plump and heavily made up, wearing bright green plastic-framed dark glasses from the 1950s that angled up into sharp points like a little set of facial elbows, enough lipstick for three women, and more rouge than a marionette. Her round face, its features oddly sharp in such plump terrain, was framed by the worst wig I’d ever seen, a bright orange parody of the whole notion of hair. And, in fact, it wasn’t hair; it was a Union Carbide plastic product called Dynel that can be extruded in extremely fine strands, maybe three or four times the diameter of a human hair and that takes dye very well. The new product met its market, and boom! the Dynel wig industry was born. The advantages—that it was cheap and could be thrown into the dishwasher—were offset by the facts that it was hot on the head and it looked a lot like plastic. Still, it worked for department store mannequins designed to be seen from a distance, Japanese cosplay enthusiasts, Halloween costumes, and ironic transvestites.