Tough Luck L.A., page 10
I stood up from the window sill and started tiptoeing toward the door. The goon made a loud grunt, probably as he entered her, and then he must have seen me. He yelled, “What the hell?” in a low, guttural voice. Helen screamed shrilly and sat up. He started to pull his pants up. “Wait a minute!”
I beat it toward the door, but before I could reach it, one of them threw something toward me that hit the door and shattered it in my face. I put my hand on the door knob, but I must have broken my stride to wipe the glass splinters off of my face because the goon hit me with a flying tackle that banged my head forward into the plaster wall by the door jamb and knocked me down onto the floor. I used my feet and kicked backwards with all I had. I hit something hard and the leg grip loosened and I was able to get back onto my feet. But so was George, squatted down and facing me with his shoulders jutted up high and both arms extended, poised and ready just like some stagy wrestler coming out of his corner in the Friday night matches broadcast live from the Olympic Auditorium. Only this guy wasn’t doing it for fun. He looked like he was going to pounce on me any second, and I was afraid to take my eyes off his face and try another run for it. I had Bradford Bobby’s letter scrunched up in a ball in the palm of my hand. The goon was sober this time and plenty mad. His lips were turned under and pulled in and his cheeks puffed out with the pressure of his held breath. He checked his fly to see if it was up, but didn’t take his eyes off me for a second.
“What ya want here?” He moved a little to the left. I moved to the right. We were making a circle.
“I just had to check something.”
He screamed at me with all he had. “Snoopin’!” Helen stood up and smoothed her dress out. She looked frightened, which made me all the more scared. This guy looked like he was definitely going to kill me, had to kill me. “What you snoopin’ around?”
I didn’t dare answer him.
“You deaf? Ain’t you got no ears?”
We were still circling. He reached out and hacked my shoulder with the side of his hand. I was numb all the way down my arm for a second, but then the feeling came back. Just a love pat and he hadn’t even connected. He continued talking at me, spitting the words out in a jumble I could hardly understand. “You know what trouble you got me in, huh? Huh? You comin’ over to Herbert’s house. Now the cops wanna talk ta him. What’d ya do that for?”
I shrugged my shoulders.
“Nobody didn’t do nothin’ to you. What’s the chip on the shoulder? Snoopin’ around. I oughta bust your head.”
Helen interceded. “George, if you hurt him and he goes to Irving, you know what’s gonna happen.”
“You think he’s gonna listen to him?”
“How the hell do you know? Remember neither of us is supposed to be here.”
George glanced at her, frowning as he strained his patience. “I know that.” He looked back at me. “I also gotta do my job.”
I tried to put Bobby’s letter into my pocket. George jumped me and knocked me back down onto the floor, stuck a forearm down over my throat and dug in as he pulled apart my fist. Then he leaned on the forearm, crushing my wind out and using my neck for leverage as he pushed off against it and stood up, uncrumbling the little ball of paper and squinting as he read. I started to stand up and didn’t see his foot coming as he kicked me hard in the stomach. That sent me backward and knocked my wind out for a few seconds. I started to get up again and he let me this time. He was reading the letter over again. He nodded his head as though he’d just thought of something, then he walked over to me and stood about two inches from my face. He had to look up at me in order to place his face in front of mine. His face was worn out. Large crow’s feet around the raised scar tissue of the eyes. Bands of wrinkles down his neck. His short hairstyle was too neat. It could have been a good hairpiece.
“Now you’re gonna go over and give this poor man trouble, aren’t ya? Huh? Ya gotta go bother somebody else ’cause ya got some cockamamie theory. You don’t know what the fuck you’re even doin’! He put one hand under my chin, the other over the top of my head, and squeezed it a little, just enough to make my brains feel like a pimple. “All I gotta do is turn it a little left or right—break your fuckin’ neck.” He turned it just a tad either way. “Bust it,” he smiled.
Helen said, “George.”
Bless her heart.
“Shut up,” he told her. Then he said, “You’re hot, though. I can’t do that. There could be somebody watchin’ your tail.” He let go of me and stamped his foot. “I don’t know what to do with ’im!”
He turned his back on me and Helen looked at me and motioned toward the door. I ran for it and, this time, he wasn’t coming after me. I flew down the stairs and from above, echoing down the stairwell, his voice hit my back, booming, “Run! That’s right—run! Little fuck!”
27
I didn’t feel safe sitting there, so I started the car and drove down to Sunset. I turned onto a side street and pulled over to think. So Bradford Bobby was hooked up with Herbert in the porno business. Stranger things had happened. I remembered Bobby’s black eye. Also, the scratches up around his temple could have been from a woman’s long fingernails. And Vicky’s physical description fit him to a T. The only problem was that nothing else did. The boy king as a smut peddler’s errand boy? It just didn’t hold water. Could there have been something personal? Maybe this was how Bradford got his jollies—on the S and M express.
I thought of taking my suspicions to the police and telling them about finding Bobby’s letter. But I didn’t want to do that. My credibility with them was long gone. I couldn’t imagine that they’d feel like listening to much of anything I had to say. I didn’t know what to do, so the best step for the time being was to put Brad on the back burner and let him stay there for a while until I could figure things out. I decided to sleep on it, then make up my mind in the morning.
I still wanted to take a look around Vicky’s apartment. Like the last time, I drove beyond the center court and parked on the other side of the street. It was a little after eight. There was nobody outside. The old lady had probably fixed her dinner and she was either on the phone or warming up her chair by the TV. I walked around the block and came back around through the alley. The lights were on in the old woman’s house as I crept around the path to Vicky’s back door. I jimmied the latch on her back window, opened it, then reached in and opened the back door for myself and went in.
It was pitch black. I felt like Vicky was bouncing off of all the walls, flying at me from every angle. She came up to me, just inches away, then stopped. I was afraid to reach out and see if she was there. I shook my head, bent down, and got my hands on a flashlight she kept down in the bottom kitchen drawer. A hoop of soft light lapped the wall above the stove, jerking up and down. No one was there.
I walked into the dining room and sat down. It had been less than three days since I’d last seen her. It seemed like three years. I was consciously trying to remember things: what we had done, funny or endearing things she’d said. I tried to picture her and couldn’t. The image was blocked up, her memory was already slipping away from me. And that frightened me, made me feel like a dumb, soulless, callous creature. I took her torn photo out of my pocket and shined the flash on it. I stared at the picture, and still I wasn’t satisfied.
After a while, I went into her bedroom. I pointed the flash toward the bed. The blankets were turned back and there were a couple of large darkened blots across the middle of the bottom sheet. The top sheet and afghan were gone; they had probably been taken into the lab. Scattered spots of dried blood showed on the wall over the headboard. The bright yellow pillow covers were patchy with brown. I looked through her drawers. I turned the whole place inside out down to the bottom of the sugar bowl. Nothing. I put everything back in place, returned to the bedroom, and forced myself to lie down on that bed. In the dark. It was then, with my eyes closed, that I really saw her—alive and hopeful, worried but radiant on the day that we met. So young. And it was then that I wept.
28
“Get up, you. Get up!”
Something thick and hard was poking me in the ribs. I opened my eyes and looked up under the brim of a ten-gallon Stetson into a little face that was old, very old, and tanned and shriveled, with deep, sunken eyes and a big knobbed and veiny nose jutting out over a wide mouth of toothless gums that sucked hard to bring in their breath. I had fallen asleep on Vicky’s bed and a little old man had turned on her bedside lamp. He was leaning over me with the end of a splintered little pine cane and he had choked up on his grip like he was ready to bunt, except he kept hammering away at me like I was one big stubborn nail.
“Get up, you!”
I grabbed the end of the cane and pushed it away, sat up, and stared at this relic. He backed up a few feet, still pointing the cane at me and did the schoolboy’s pencil trick as his palsied hand shook hard at the stick, making it look like rubber.
“Put that down,” I told him.
I should have known better than to put a dare on an old soldier. He sucked at the air in a rapid succession of angry gasps and came at me like a flurry of Rough Riders stampeding San Juan Hill, throttling and jabbing at me with that damn cane like it was twenty bayonets. Finally, somehow I wrestled it out of his hands, and the next thing I knew I had it right over my knee. I was about to break it in two.
“You wait a goddarn minute there, you,” he screamed, waving his hands helplessly.
For some reason I stopped and just looked at him.
“You’re gonna break my cane.”
“That’s the idea.”
“What am I gonna do then?”
“Well, then I guess you could throw it at me.”
“I’m an old man. I can’t walk nowhere without my cane.”
“You mean you use it for walking?”
“Don’t you go gettin’ smart. Now, what are you doin’ in my granddaughter’s apartment?”
“Granddaughter?”
“That’s right, granddaughter.” He opened up his wallet, flipped through his plasticene card case, and pointed to an old childhood picture of Vicky I’d never seen before. Then, with that same bony finger, he pointed toward his chest. He repeated this gesture, saying, “Granddaughter, grandfather—get it?”
“I get it. So, what is it that you’re doing here—Mister Swall, is it?”
This got him so mad he couldn’t talk until he reached into the front pocket of his dirty gray herringbone sportcoat and drew out a half-pint of a cheap bourbon I’d never heard of. He unbuttoned his collar and pulled down the shiny, silver-mounted hunk of turquoise on his Western string tie; then he put his eyes and lips on that bottle and chugged it down like so much water. He smacked his lips, squeezed both his eyes shut, then opened them on me this time. He looked me up and down and screwed the top on the bottle and put it back into the front pocket of his coat. I noticed that the manufacturer’s label was still attached to the outside of the lower left sleeve.
“What’d you say your name was?” he asked me.
“I didn’t.”
He took out the bottle again and gave it another try.
“Can I have a sip of that?” I asked him.
“No, you may not.” He squeezed his eyes shut again, sucked it in, then gave me another up and down look frowning and knitting his gray brows as he studied me, trying to make sense out of what I was. He tilted his hat up on his head. What I could see of it was bald and brown and shiny. He rocked on his heels and wiped his hand on his dark baggy slacks. The slacks were held up by a thin belt that had been hand-notched about a half-foot around from where the last hole was supposed to be. The hard leather belt end stuck out from the side of his waist. His pant cuffs were stained with dried dirt and grime and covered most of the shoes except for the rounded tips—they were a dusty dull black material that gave off the slight sheen of imitation leather.
He stowed the juice in the crook of his armpit and slapped his hands together, bringing off a loud popping sound that made him smile as he nodded toward me. “Okeedokee now.” He pointed at himself. “This here’s Vicky’s Grandpa Hal. Now, I don’t want no more nonsense outa ya. Where’s my Victoria?”
He obviously didn’t know, didn’t see the telltale spots of blood. He honestly thought that Vicky was around somewhere. I wasn’t about to blurt it right out and tell him. “Uh, she’s out.”
“That little girl.” He slapped his knee and wheezed out a round of chuckles. Then he took another long chug on the bottle and set it down on the nightstand. His face got serious. He started hobbling around by the foot of the bed, back and forth, pacing. “I don’t like it,” he said. “I just don’t like it. If I told her once, I told her a thousand times: a young woman’s got to watch herself with the men.”
“Hold on. This isn’t what you think it is.”
He looked at me with hope in his eyes. “You mean, you and she, you aren’t shacked up together?”
“No.”
“I’m relieved,” he sighed. Then he went on excitedly, “When she was little, she used to make me so happy!”
“That’s nice.”
“Well, the presents she used to save up ta buy me—durn but if she weren’t the cutest grandchild a man could ever want. Mister, I love that little girl. Where the hell is she? If she forgot I was gonna be there. Hell, we got places to be! We do gotta be there sometime tomorra, only she don’t think that,” he sighed happily, sucking his gums and shaking his head. “I know she don’t believe a damn thing I say. I can’t blame her. You wouldn’t know it to look at me, but I was once worth ten million dollars. Ten million—mostly ticker tape. Think she believes it? Better think again. Been a prospector—gold and silver—owned fifty mines. All nothin’. Oil—had that, but I sold it ’fore it hit. Know what I mean?”
I nodded along with him.
“Here.” He drew a picture in the air with a shaky hand. “See, here’s the shelf a shale. The first load, thousands a gallons—that’s up here. Now, down below that we got two million barrels, somethin’ like that. But ya gotta dig under the shelf. Under it.”
He was beaming at my rapt attention and decided to reward me by handing over the bottle. I took a good pull on it, then he gave a laugh that turned into a hacking cough. He took a stiff handkerchief out of his pants, spit into it, studied the phlegm, then folded it up and stuck it back into his pocket. I handed him back the bottle.
He said, “Thank ye,” took a drink, shook his head, and smiled with thin, closed lips. “All’s I can tell ya’s we’re gonna have plenty a money. We’re gonna be rich! That’s right. Victoria thinks I’m tellin’ a big joke.” He leaned close. “Tell me confidential—she think I was comin’? No, wait, first, what’s your connection with Victoria?”
“Vicky and I were very close friends.”
“ ‘Were’—that’s a way a puttin’ it,” he laughed and hacked. “I see what ya mean. But then why were ya here?”
“I was just—she told me to wait for her.”
“You wouldn’t be that tutor she’s talkin’ about?
I wasn’t sure what Vicky ever told her grandfather about her education or the lack of it, so I just agreed. Since, in a way, it was true I used to work with her on her basic language skills, maybe that gave her an idea when she discussed herself with her grandfather—although I had never heard of any grandfather. I was sure she probably loved this kindly old drunk, at least at one time. She had probably been ashamed of him too. She always felt ashamed when she discussed her family with me. Or at least that’s what I thought. She had this distorted notion of my background because a couple of people in my “family” had been horse doctors. To Vicky, that was awesome. Me from a long line of potato farmers and veterinarians.
“How’s Victoria doin’ in school?”
“Just fine.”
“She goin’ ta gradiate soon?
“I suppose.”
“Think she should go on any higher after that?”
“I don’t know.”
“I guess it’s up to her. Anyhow, that girl always does what she wants. I believe a person should do what they wants. ’Specially a person that needs to. That’s my philosophy. Victoria ever mention me?”
“Sure. It’s just that I forgot.”
“I didn’t know who you was either, but I sure am glad ta meet ya.”
We shook hands.
“Mister Swall, so where were you and Vicky supposed to meet?”
“She tell you?”
“No, she didn’t exactly say.”
“That’s my girl,” he said proudly. I had put the old man’s cane down on the bed. He leaned down and snatched it, then checked it over carefully and sighted it down the middle like a pool shark does choosing a cue. Satisfied, he stuck it on the floor and leaned forward on it with both hands. “If she didn’t tell ya, how am I gonna … ” He fumbled for a name.
“Ben, Ben Crandel.”
“See, I didn’t even know your name. Just how do I know you’re who ya say ya are?”
“Oh, come on, Mister Swall.”
“Sonny, lookee here, now if Victoria didn’t tell ya, she musta had her reasons, don’t ya think? Anyhow, don’t let it hurt your feelin’s none. I’m the one should be feelin’ hurtlike. My very own granddaughter weren’t there ta meet me. Can you imagine?” He smiled as he said this. It didn’t phase him. He was quite amused by it all. “I can just see her, ya know, sittin’ by the phone, thinkin’ like: ‘Why that old bag a this and that. Tellin’ me this an’ that ’bout the family fortune. He must be drinkin’ enough to swim in. Ha! Don’t know night from day. I’m not gonna waste my weekend waitin’ for that no good so and so grandpa who’s never growed up in all his Lord knows how many years.’ ”
