Crashed jb-1 Page 4

  “Lyle,” Wattles said. “Bite one.”

  “Sorry,” Hacker said.

  “Show the man,” Wattles said.

  “What?” I asked. “What are you showing me?”

  “Rabbits is smart,” Wattles said. “Got great tech, you know? We live in the age of tech, tech’s what keeps the world safe from people like us. Unless we can use tech ourselves, like me. Old cocker like me, tech don’t come natural, but I learned about it ’cause I had to, and there you are, a lot younger than me and sitting on that shitty couch because you don’t know your tech. You shoulda spotted those pinhole cameras in a minute, but no. Walk in big as life with your face showing and everything. Rabbits got himself the best. That was cute, what you did with the foam, but not cute enough ’cause the camera got your face anyway and the video’s stored off-site. So you foam the camera but you can’t wipe the disk or steal the machine. Problem is, we know where he sends it to. So you’re screwed, and you know why?”

  “Tech?” I ventured as Hacker slid aside a picture of some gauzy flowers, a half-hearted stab at Renoir, probably painted in Southern China, to reveal a good-size flatscreen.

  “Tech. Like this screen. Betcha didn’t know it was there.”

  “You win.”

  Wattles made a restrained raspberry sound. “Show him, Lyle.”

  Hacker took a remote off Wattles’s desk and pushed a button. The screen lit up. I was looking at the Stennet bedroom. The picture was bright and crisp. I could see the glitter sparkle on the stirrups.

  “High definition,” Wattles said, reading my mind. “Fuckin’ great tech.”

  “It was humiliating enough to do this without having to watch it, too. I don’t want to see it.”

  “Oh, yes, you do. Watch.”

  The door to the bedroom opened. Someone came through it and crossed the room to the Klee. I felt my jaw drop. Looking behind him as though he’d heard a noise, the someone carefully took the Klee down from the wall. He didn’t look at the painting.

  The someone weighed about 275 pounds and had a mop of blond hair like the Little Dutch Boy. He put the painting under one arm and left the bedroom, thoughtfully closing the door behind him.

  I said, “I know people photograph heavy, but that’s ridiculous.”

  The set blinked off and went black.

  “You got a choice,” Wattles said. “Four days from now, Friday afternoon, when Rabbits and Bunny get home from whatever king-size bed they’re taking their vacation on, they’re going to look where that picture isn’t and then they’re going to check the recorder. If you’re a good boy, they’re gonna see a fat guy steal Bunny’s pre-nup. If you’re not a good boy, I hope you’re not afraid of dogs.” He leaned back, slapped the side of his gut, and let the one-syllable laugh loose again.

  “Who was that?”

  The deepset little eyes regarded me for a moment. Then he shrugged. “Name of Ed Perlstein. Works in Saint Louis mostly.”

  “And he stole the-”

  “And put it back,” Wattles said. “About an hour later.”

  I sat back on the couch and wished I were anywhere else. Working as a short-order cook in Denny’s, for example, up to my knuckles in hot fat. Sorting gravel at minimum wage. “You’ve gone to a lot of trouble.”

  “You’re smart,” Wattles said. “Even if you don’t know tech from artichokes. Janice says so. And I needed to put together something you couldn’t dig your way out of.” He leaned forward and put both elbows on the desk. “See, it’s tricky,” he said with the air of someone who’s accustomed to explaining the obvious. “On the one hand, I need a guy who’s smart. Somebody who can figure out which way to jump without having to read the instructions on the box. On the other hand, he’s gonna get told to do something he’s not gonna want to do. A smart guy, he’ll figure a way to get out of it. So what you just seen, it’s like a cage to keep you in as long as I need you.”

  I looked over at Hacker, who made a gun out of his fingers and dropped the hammer. “So tell me,” I said. “Why do you need smart?”

  “Before we get to that,” Wattles said. “Let’s get something right out on the table. Right in the middle, next to this here low-tech ashtray. I will give you to Rabbits. I will make sure the right burglar is on that hard drive. Shit, I’ll come over for cocktails and watch the dogs eat you.” He flicked a finger at Hacker. “Lyle?”

  “He will,” Hacker said.

  “I will,” Wattles affirmed.

  “You will,” I said. “I’m persuaded.”

  “Good.” Wattles got up. It didn’t make him much taller. He twisted his shoulders a couple of times, reached behind to massage his lower back, and went, “Uuhhhhhh.” Then he put both hands on his belly and followed it to the window. By the time he got there, he was panting. He looked down at the street. “Nice day,” he said.

  “It was,” I said. “Tell me what you need me to do.”

  “Me?” Wattles said. “I don’t need nothing. I’m a broker, not a principal. You’re gonna be working for Trey.”

  I suddenly remembered my parents’ old TV. When you turned it off, the picture shrunk to a bright little dot before the screen went black. I felt my life do that. “No,” I said hopelessly. “Not Trey.”

  “You know Trey?”

  “I know Trey the same way I know the herpes virus. I’ve never laid eyes on it, but I’ve seen what it does.”

  “You’re a lucky boy,” Wattles said. “Here’s your chance to see it up close.”

  6

  Not Fred

  A zillion years ago, the San Fernando Valley basin held a warm saltwater sea. It’s easy to imagine it as you crest the hill on the 405, and the Valley spreads itself below you. Squint a little, and you can see the ghosts of plesiosaurs swimming languidly through the smog, looking for the nearest McDonald’s.

  Then, a little less than a zillion years ago, the sea dried up. A bunch of history happened in other places, but not here. Eventually, some people crossed over from Asia, pronounced themselves Native Americans, and headed for California like everybody else. Then there was a wave of people who spoke Spanish and stole the land from the Native Americans, and they were followed, in the 1910s, by Anglos who invented new kinds of legal documents to steal the land from the Spanish speakers. They parceled the Valley out into millions of acres of orange groves and tomato farms, and the air was perfumed with oranges. Then the movies came, looking for the same things they always looked for: cheap land and sunlight. Warner Brothers and Universal set up shop over the Cahuenga Pass from Hollywood and started cranking out dreams for people who’d never smelled an orange blossom. With the studios came the production crews, makeup people, extras, directors, and even a few stars. Finally, the rich old guys who already owned most of downtown made it a clean sweep by buying the Valley, too. They knocked down the orange groves and plowed the tomatoes under and gave the world Instant Suburb. The stucco capital of the world.

  Today, Spanish has returned: The Valley is overwhelmingly Hispanic across broad swathes of the flats, but white affluence clings to the hills south of Ventura. The water’s long gone, but there’s a new sea, at least metaphorically, a sea of bad money with several new species of beasts swimming through it. Lots of drug running, lots of chem labs cooking up the psychosis du jour, a few highly visible, emphatically for-profit religions. And, of course, the Valley is the epicenter of the American pornography industry, generating billions in phantom, untaxed dollars yearly. If you could get it all in one place and spread it around evenly, the bad money would cover the entire floor of the Valley, roughly hip-deep.

  And Trey, whom I was being taken to see, was in the middle of that. All of it. A third-generation hood and the heir to the Valley’s most diversified crime family. A finger in every poisonous pot. Maybe thirty, thirty-five, reputedly Stanford-educated, notoriously reclusive and famously icy, Trey was rumored to have paid for the emphatically fatal shooting of the family’s previous top dog, Deuce, in a Korean nightclub on Western Aven
ue, where Deuce had an affectionate commercial relationship with a couple of hostesses. The shooter was so enthusiastic that he put more than thirty holes in Deuce and divided another couple dozen between the hostesses.

  Deuce had been Trey’s father.

  “Left on Vanowen,” Hacker said. He opened his cell phone and began pushing buttons.

  I made the turn, past what has become a normal Valley strip mall: dry cleaner, Mexican restaurant, Korean restaurant, liquor store, massage parlor, check cashing outlet. Then there were pepper trees on either side of the road, old ones, trailing long green streamers to the ground.

  The diamonds were hot in my pocket. Thanks to the shaving foam over the camera’s lens I was ninety percent certain Wattles and Hacker had no idea I had them, and even if I were wrong, what was my choice? I wasn’t about to say hi to the dogs again and put them back.

  “Hacker,” Hacker said into the phone. Then he said, “Okay,” and folded the phone.

  I said, “I don’t like chatty people, either.”

  Hacker grunted.

  The sun was maybe twenty degrees above the horizon now, and the trees cast long shadows across Vanowen. Made me think about what the Valley had once been like.

  “Right on Hadley,” Hacker said. “It’s a couple more streets.”

  “So,” I said, “you’re not working for Wattles. You’re working for Trey.”

  “Yeah?” Hacker said.

  “Trey’s got a problem and hires you to find somebody to fix it. You go to Wattles for help. Wattles asks Janice, who says I’m smart, and Wattles sets me up.”

  “Think that’s how it happened?”

  “You tell me.”

  He chewed on it for a second. “More or less.”

  “And what do you get out of this? Trey paying you?”

  “Not much.”

  “This is like what? A good deed?”

  “What’s a cop’s job?” Hacker asked.

  “Gee, I don’t know. To ensure a good third act?”

  “To cut down on crime, smartass, or most kinds of crime, anyway. Some kinds of crime, crime that don’t make headlines and don’t hurt too much and gets committed by generous suspects who deal in cash of small to moderate denominations, we can leave alone. It’s like a fringe benefit, you know?”

  “I’ve never heard the specs detailed so succinctly before.”

  “So what I’m doing right now,” Hacker said, “I’m cutting down on crime.”

  “You want to explain how?”

  “Nah. I’ll let Trey do that.”

  The house was a fantasy out of Pearl S. Buck. Sprawling over maybe 10,000 square feet, it was set back from the road and shielded from vulgar curiosity by a used-brick wall, half-covered in ivy, that was at least ten feet tall. Eleven, if you counted the wrought-iron spikes bristling on top. Before laying eyes on the house, I had to stop at a gate the mysterious color of copper patina, and which may actually have been copper patina. A little iron door next to the gate opened, and a guy came out. His face and neck were thin but his suit was bulked up in a way that suggested a layer of bullet-proofing. He looked first at me and then at Hacker, containing his enthusiasm nicely. Hacker rolled down his window and said, “Lollipop,” and the guy nodded and went back through his little door.

  A moment later, the gates opened inward.

  I said, “Lollipop? What a sweet name.”

  “Code word,” Hacker said. “Changes every few hours. I got it when I phoned.”

  The drive, which was surfaced in tan gravel, wound its way through a man-made landscape of hills, ponds, willows, little Asian gazebos, and the occasional Chinese bridge. The whole thing looked like it had been copied off a dinner plate, but it was pretty in a finicky, over-managed way.

  I said to Hacker, “Do I get a fortune cookie?”

  “You just behave. Trey doesn’t fuck around, and remember, I brought you here. You get anybody in the house upset, you’re gonna have Wattles and me after you, too.”

  “Holy Moly.” I stopped the van where Hacker told me to, to the left of the house where it wouldn’t intrude on the view of Imperial China from the front windows, and we hiked back to the front door, which was standing open. The doorframe was entirely filled by a very wide gentleman of Hispanic ancestry wearing black from head to toe. The width was the product of years on the weight bench, years that had bulked his shoulders and chest and built muscles at the sides of his neck. It wasn’t Gold’s Gym bulk, either; it was California Prison System bulk. His shirt was one of those ’60s-inspired mutants without a collar, and the gold chain around his neck was probably heavy enough to tow a car. His expression said he could eat me for breakfast without a knife and fork.

  “Living room,” he said. Then he backed away in front of us, doing the whole hallway in reverse as we came in. He never looked behind himself, and he never blinked: just kept his eyes fixed on mine.

  I said to Hacker, “Can I say anything about this?”

  “No.”

  At long last, the living room yawned to our left, two steps down into a sea of beige half the size of an Olympic swimming pool. A white grand piano had staked out the far rear corner, maybe fifty feet from us, and various pieces of precious and semiprecious furniture had flung themselves casually around the room. There was nothing as common as an arrangement. It looked like they might change positions on their own after everyone went to bed. There was a lot of white wood, and most of the upholstery was the soft yellow of Danish butter.

  “Wait in the conversation area,” the Man in Black Without a Collar said.

  “The conversation area?” I asked, but Hacker had already grabbed my arm and was hauling me toward a grouping that included two eight-foot couches, a chaise fit for an odalisque, and a low coffee-table of bleached, distressed wood. I detoured left to look more closely at a very large, very skillful, and commensurately terrible oil portrait that hung between two windows. In front of a steamy, bleached-out landscape that could have been Renaissance Italy was a man with a romantically cleft chin, an impossibly perfect flop of Byronic hair, and eyelashes as long as palm fronds. He wore what looked like a silk shirt, dramatically white and just a little blousy, and a gold wristwatch that probably weighed two pounds, but his primary accessory was a heart-attack blond, all eyes and cheekbones, with the kind of bone structure that had undoubtedly made the painter start moving lights around and wishing for more talent. The woman wore a period gown, maybe 17th century, with seed pearls sewn all over the front of it. Her golden hair hung in Botticelli ropes over her shoulders, almost to her lap.

  “Please,” someone said. “Have a seat.”

  I turned to see the maiden in the painting-this time in the flesh, but wearing contemporary clothes-gracefully enter the room. She wore the 21st century as decoratively as she’d worn the 17th. The heavy blond hair was looped up and held in place by a couple of thick pins of deep green jade, and old jade, at that. She wore the kind of distressed jeans they distress by rubbing money on them and a T-shirt that said HELLO, RUST BELT! in what looked like real rust and probably cost $300. Around her slender neck was a crimson dog collar in patent leather. It fastened with a gold buckle, and gold tags dangled from it. She was barefoot. In her hand was a bottle of white wine, cold enough to sweat.

  “Chardonnay, Mr. Bender?” Then she gave Hacker a bigger smile than he deserved and said, “Hello, Lyle. One for you, or do you want Scotch?”

  I said I’d like the Chardonnay, and Hacker opted for Scotch. The Man in Black Without a Collar came in carrying a tray on which were three glasses and a bottle of Scotch. He carried it as though he wished it was an Oldsmobile or something else that would justify all that upper-body work.

  “I’m Trey Annunziato,” the blond woman said, holding out her free hand. I shook it, and she settled onto the chaise with one bare foot tucked beneath her, and patiently waited for me to finish looking at her. Up close, she was the kind of thin that’s just a little more than intentional, the kind of thin that speaks to
a life of boneless skinless chicken breasts, salad with dressing on the side, sashimi rather than sushi, and personal control issues. The bones of her face, perfect as they were, could have used a little softening, and the ball joints on the outside of her wrists were as prominent as marbles implanted beneath the skin. The eyes were chocolate brown, an odd contrast with the pale hair, and the whites had a faint bluish cast, like skim milk. She held up the hand with the bottle in it, and The Man in Black Without a Collar took it. “Would you do the pouring, Eduardo?” she asked. Her tone was sweet enough, but I noticed she didn’t feel any need to look over at him.

  Eduardo poured.

  “Well, haven’t we put you through a lot?” Trey Annunziato said. “It’s just been one crook after another, hasn’t it? Not Lyle, here, of course. We all know he’s true to the badge.”

  “I’m used to crooks,” I said.

  “Well, of course. I mean, being one, and all. But still, most of us prefer to choose our company, and you’ve been hauled from place to place, I’m afraid.” There was something studied about the way she moved and talked, accentuated by the semi-British construction of her sentences, even though she avoided the dread mid-Atlantic vowel syndrome. “Please, Eduardo.” She held up a hand and he put a glass into it, very carefully, and then condescended to serve the mortals in the room. I took my glass and hung onto it, and Hacker buried his nose in the Scotch. His sigh when he lowered the glass could have blown out a window.

  “So nice to see a man enjoying himself,” Trey Annunziato said. Then she said to me, “How in the world did you get so nicked up?”

  “I was swinging on a chandelier to escape some dogs, and the chain broke.”

  “Oh, well,” she said. “Ask a silly question.” A moment earlier, I had glanced back at the large awful painting, and her eyes flicked over to it. “What do you think of the picture?”

  “I like the original better.”

  I got the kind of smile Pollyanna might have offered a passing butterfly, all innocent delight. “How gallant.” It came out “gallahnt,” “And what about him?” She inclined her head toward the man in the white shirt.