Fields Where They Lay, page 2
“So,” I said, “I’ve got to go talk to a guy named Tip Poindexter.”
Louie was sliding his feet experimentally across the grease on the floor. “Tell you what,” he said without looking up. “Here’s my best suggestion. Go get your passport. Go get all your passports. Then go to Pakistan with a lot of plane changes and double-backs and new names along the way. And stay there. Hey, you know anyone looks just like you?”
“No.”
“Too bad. You could use a double.” He sat in what I guessed was Pete’s chair, the only one in the room, and swiveled it silently back and forth a couple of times. Pete kept it well oiled, but then I figured Pete’s primary purpose in life was to keep everything well oiled. I put the second piece of pie, the apple, next to the pumpkin. “This is the kind of situation,” Louie said, “a guy who’s like your twin or something, would come in really handy. And you should make yourself the beneficiary on his life insurance. In fact, tell you something: except for the double, I got someone who could arrange all that. She’s a nice girl, too. Disappear you so good you’d be looking for yourself.”
“So Tip Poindexter, despite having a name that would look good on a butterfly, is not actually—”
“It’s a made-up name,” Louie said. “When he first got here from Russia he had a kind of brainy American girlfriend, brainy by his standards anyway. She taught him to play Scrabble to improve his English, and she spelled out tipping point—”
“That’s two words,” I said.
Louie waggled his head from side to side. “He was an immigrant then, so what did he know? Lotta Scrabble points in ‘tipping point.’ She won the game. For all I know, a couple years later he figured out she cheated and had her thrown out of a helicopter, but at the time, when he needed a name with some vowels in it, he came up with Tip Poindexter.”
“What was his original name?”
“With no vowels, who can pronounce it?” Louie said. He pulled out the plastic fork I’d stuck vertically in the pumpkin and dropped it into a wastebasket full of wadded, greasy paper towels. Then he picked up the piece of pumpkin pie, minus the paper plate.
“Russians have vowels,” he said. “They may be short on some stuff, but vowels they’ve got.” Louie took a bite out of the filling and tucked it in his cheek. “He comes from a place near Sochi, you know, where the Russians put on those weird Winter Olympics with all the fake snow, but his name was from some old language, whole alphabet only had a couple of vowels. It was like that TV show where they’re always trying to buy a vowel, except for them the answer was always no. For hundreds of years.”
“Ubykh,” I said. “Last person who spoke it died twenty, twenty-five years ago.”
“Musta been a lonely guy,” he said around a mouthful of pie.
“Thousands of great, vowel-free puns lost forever.”
“From what I know about the place, they probably talked mostly about goats and snow.” He took another bite of filling.
Louie was the closest thing to a friend I had in the crook world, although, since his commodity was information, our relationship stopped a few feet short of full and open. He’d been a getaway driver until a wrong turn after a diamond heist went mildly disastrous and word got out that he could barely find his way out of his own driveway. After sitting around for months like Norma Desmond waiting for the phone to ring with the next job, he packed it in and went into business as a telegraph, with a sideline in unregistered and often souped-up cars as a sort of nod to his past as a driver. What he lacked in his sense of direction he made up in memory; if he’d ever heard something, he remembered it, and he made sure he heard pretty much everything.
He licked one of the craters he’d made in the pumpkin pie and said, “If you’re going to do business with Tip Poindexter, maybe you oughta pay me in advance. Five hundred.”
“After all these years?” I said, reaching for my wallet.
“Long time ago I heard something Irwin Dressler was supposed to have said.”
I stopped counting and listened. Irwin Dressler was in his nineties now but still the King of Shade, the mobster who had done more than any other to shape modern Los Angeles. I said, “Yeah? What?”
“He said, back in the old days when someone who was operating at the B or C level all of a sudden went after someone in the A level, they’d say, ‘Kid’s got a lot of spirit.’”
I said, “That’s the most boring thing you’ve ever told me.”
He held up the hand with the pie in it. “And later, when the B-level guy showed up with a couple hundred bullets in him, they’d add a clause on. ‘Kid had a lot of spirit,’ they’d say, ‘but not much judgment.’”
“So what are you suggesting?”
“Well, if you’re gonna pass on Pakistan or the girl I got who can make you disappear, I’d suggest that Trey, with the personnel problems she’s been having lately, is a kiss under the mistletoe compared to Tip Poindexter. If you’re gonna piss anyone off, I’d pick Trey. Just don’t show up for the meeting.”
“So what does he do?”
“You got your Christmas shopping done?”
“No,” I said. “I do it all on Christmas Eve.”
Louie sat almost upright. My Christmas shopping habits seemed to engage him more than my imminent death. “What? You kidding me?”
“Give me a reason,” I said, “even a bad one, for me to kid you about Christmas shopping.”
“Junior.” He swiveled from side to side in the chair, apparently organizing his thoughts. “I seen you diagram a burglary. You drive home like you got the Shadow tailing you two cars back. I ask you, you think it’s gonna rain, you check your phone. This is not, like actors always say, consistent with your character.”
“I have issues,” I said.
“With Christmas.”
“Look,” I said, feeling my face heat up, “shrinks spend half their time prying out their patients’ issues with their mothers. If I have a—a few—issues with Christmas, well, there we are. It’s my problem, not yours, okay? Are we still friends?”
“Sheesh,” he said.
“So, yes, I do my Christmas shopping on Christmas Eve. And?”
“And you might want to change that,” he said. “Get it done early, like before you meet Tip. Wrap it, too. Write the cards. Get them all ready and then give them to someone to hand out for you, just in case. Tip is, ummm . . .” He finished eating the pumpkin off the pie crust and tossed the crust in among the oil-sodden paper towels. “You know,” he said, “to me, punkin pie is the taste of the holidays. The smell is pine but the taste—”
“Tell it to Hallmark. What about Tip? I mean, what does he do?”
“Well, now he’s a big-time money guy. Backs housing developments, fancy hotels, apartment complexes. Got a shopping mall, even. And since money needs a little muscle from time to time, he supplies that, too. Few years back he cleared all the houses in a straight line about four miles long to make room for one of those toll roads, all on the force of his personality. I mean, people sold in a hurry. But when he first got here, he was an importer.”
“Importing what?”
“Girls from Eastern Europe. Fly them into Mexico, pay coyotes to walk them over the border, and I’m talking in groups of thirty, forty at a time. Haul them from Arizona to Los Angeles, make his mark on them—”
“His mark.”
“Well, first it was three knife cuts in a row way high on the outside of the arm, just above where a short-sleeve blouse would end. Like a sergeant’s chevron, you know, but straight, not those upside-down Vs. Three lines, parallel, just deep enough to scar. Anywhere they went for the rest of their lives, he could get someone to make them roll up their sleeves, and hey there: identification. Then later he got himself a dog, and some asshole dog doctor told him about the chip, you know? The chip they put in so the dog can be identified anywhere? So he started putting those in, paid the vet extra to handle it, and told the girls that they were like transmitters, right? Said he had a gizmo he could turn on any time and see where everybody was.”
I said, “This is a hell of a Christmas story.”
“You wanted to know who he is, well, this is who he is. And the girls, they got trafficked off to massage parlors, cat houses, outcall operations, traveling house trailers—like the Good Humor Man, but with, you know. All over the country. Hundreds and hundreds of them. He owned part of the businesses, he got part of the girls’ cut. The only recession-proof industry, money coming out of his ears. And then, after eight, nine years, he hooked up with some of the other Russky mafiosos who got on one of Putin’s wrong sides and had to haul ass out of the mother country, and they put him into other businesses. Legit businesses, even. Now he hosts fund-raisers for political candidates and plays golf and polo and gets his picture in the Times and is married to something you’d have to look at five or six times to appreciate fully.”
“Get up,” I said.
“Why?”
“Because it’s my turn to sit is why.”
“Jeez,” Louie said, picking up the piece of apple pie. “I’m older than you.” But he got up.
“Much better,” I said. The chair had one haunch higher than the other so I was at a slight angle off the vertical, but with my knees feeling so weak it was hard to care.
“Why’s he want you?” Louie was using his fingers to peel the top crust off the pie.
“I don’t know. Trey said he needed an expert.”
“Like I said, get your shopping done. You got a will?” He dropped the triangle of crust, which he’d managed to remove intact, into the trash. “On a diet,” he volunteered. “Promised Alice I’d look out for my carbohydrates.” Louie had a big, round Mediterranean face, the kind of face that it was easy to envision peering down into a jumbo bowl of pasta or singing opera, perhaps at the same time, and slightly curly, almost pretty, hair that he’d fought with for years until he finally just grew enough of it to pull it into a tight ponytail. I’d gotten to know that face very well, and looking at it now, I had a pang at the thought that if Tip Poindexter killed me, I’d never see it again.
“Would you miss me if I got killed?” I asked.
“Sure I would,” he said. “So would Rina. So would Ronnie. Even Kathy.” Rina, as I’ve said, was my daughter, Ronnie my relatively new and impermeably mysterious girlfriend, and Kathy was my ex, Rina’s mom.
“That’s not many people,” I said.
“Yeah?” he said, taking a bite out of the apple filling. “Well, listen, I’ll send extra flowers.”
3
The Fried Egg Effect
Around noon I’d obeyed Trey’s command by driving up into the expensive hills south of Ventura Boulevard. I was following a street with a new name—not the name it had when I was growing up a few miles away—winding between ostentatious new houses and the occasional gated community, the products of the rampant gentrification that’s making so much of the San Fernando Valley—hell, California in general—so much shinier and so much worse.
Say what you will about the past, it’s rarely an improvement to bulldoze it wholesale. Even in Los Angeles, if you go back far enough, you’ll encounter two or three periods when people briefly displayed good taste, and some of those structures should be preserved, if only for variety. Neighborhoods like the one I was driving through—all the houses architectural second cousins, built right next to each other only a month or two apart—always make me think of a very white, very new, very unconvincing set of false teeth.
The problem is that there isn’t enough of California to accommodate all the people who want to live here. There seems to be literally no limit to what people will pay for their idea of the right house in their idea of the right place, and that means there’s almost nowhere that’s safe from developers. Los Angeles has oil under it, but the real oil here has always been land, and that was never as true as it is today. Poor communities get bulldozed to make room for middle-class communities, middle-class communities get bulldozed to make room for upper-class communities, and upper-class communities get bulldozed to make room for rich communities. And the bulldozers sweep the poor into uglier and more remote areas.
The Wrightwood Greens Golf and Country Club to which I’d been summoned was one of the Valley’s shiny new gathering places for people whose money was recently acquired and whose manners hadn’t yet been sanded down into the smooth indifference that marks multiple generations of wealth. This concept of golf as aspiration is traditional in Los Angeles because golf clubs were actually the first LA status symbol. Stung by the East Coast’s indifference to their financial success, in 1919 some of the newly crowned kings of the orange groves (that were even then being plowed under at an alarming rate) decided to prove that they, too, were high-class folks. They did it by kick-starting the Wilshire Country Club with an ostentatious Spanish-style clubhouse, a golf course that opened a year later, and of course by building a fence to keep out all those people who were simply not good enough to be admitted.
And whom did the excluded include? Primarily Jews.
Jews were not in short supply in early Los Angeles, nor were they without clout. In 1920, setting some sort of record for construction and landscaping, the Hillcrest Country Club opened across the street from Fox Studios, but the term “open” applied to Jews only. Thus, people who did business together on a daily basis were essentially prohibited from playing golf together. The rivalry was immediate, deep, and one-sided: Wilshire was as boring as a dietician’s shopping list while Hillcrest, probably benefiting from a statistically improbable number of comedians and writers, was the liveliest place in town. The Monday morning jokes that circulated through the studios were all cracked originally at Hillcrest. Adding insult to injury, oil was discovered on Hillcrest’s land, and all the members shared in the profits.
Hillcrest and Wilshire are pushing a hundred years old at this point, and they’ve settled into the landscape as though they’d been part of Creation. But Wrightwood, as perhaps befitted a club created for the Valley’s new and shiny one, two, and three percent, still looked like an unhealed incision, cut into the land only three or four rains ago. The grass was a blinding nitrogen-overdose green and most of the trees leaned on stakes to keep them upright. The asphalt on the drives was as black and smooth as a velvet glove. But regardless of all its nouveau sheen, its fancy twelve-foot gates symbolized to those who entered that they’d been accepted into an elite that rejected most of their friends.
If I’d been in any danger of forgetting Poindexter’s name, it would have been engraved in my memory by the time I set eyes on him. I had to give it to the guard at the gate, to the valet who hesitated in apparent revulsion before climbing into my little white Toyota, and to the guardian of the misleadingly named Welcome Desk, a woman whose hair was pulled back so tightly it looked like she was advertising her pain threshold. She passed me to a psychotically self-effacing maître d’ who kept rubbing his palms together like someone who’d just shaken hands with Typhoid Mary.
I followed him into a long, airy room, the glass southern wall of which reluctantly admitted the grey, common-looking light of a cloudy December day. The room was set with round tables topped by brilliantly white cloth. In the center of each table was a precarious-looking circular arrangement of silver and blue Christmas tree ornaments threaded with tiny blue and white lights. In the room’s far north corner, an enormous red sack bled elegantly wrapped packages across the wheat-colored carpet.
The time was just a couple of minutes after noon, and most of the tables were empty. At the table farthest from both the entry hall and the window, right in front of Santa’s bag, sat a slender, fine-boned man with a high forehead fringed by dead-looking, oddly flossy blond hair, like an over-styled child’s doll might have after her thirtieth perm. He pushed his chair back and rose, his pale eyes on me the moment I entered the room behind the hand-wringing maître d’.
The man to whom Trey Annunziato had recommended me was about my height, an inch or so over six feet, slender as a lost hope, not so much wearing as draped in a navy blazer that I estimated at $2,500 at first glance and $3,000 at second, and a pair of camel’s-hair slacks so perfect I couldn’t force myself to look at them. Gleaming on his left wrist was a discreetly slender circlet of gold, a carefully calibrated understatement of wealth. He epitomized the kind of guy Louie the Lost once described as “shit with a logo.”
“How kind of you to come,” he said, extending a hand just far enough to make me bend at the waist to shake it across the table. The words had only a hint of an accent, just that sense of being verbally on tiptoe you sometimes hear in people who are speaking a language they learned late in life. “Tip Poindexter.”
He pronounced the p’s of the preposterous name independently, two little pops that sounded like automatic gunfire a long way off. “Junior Bender,” I said, letting go of a very cold hand as fast as I could. “Hap-py to meet you,” I said, releasing my own little barrage of popped p’s.
For a moment he looked straight through me, and then he nodded. “Yes, I was told you were a merry soul,” he said, his smile baring a row of teeth big enough for clearing land. “And you weren’t misrepresented.” There was just a hint of roll on the r sounds. “Please. Sit.”
I sat.
Up close, he wasn’t so much slender as gaunt. His bone structure was as clearly defined as it would have been in an X-ray—high Asiatic cheekbones, a sharply squared jaw, and a receding chin that robbed his face of some of the authority it gained from the pale, steady eyes, which were the color of dirty ice. Most of the people I’d come across who were that thin lived primarily on rage, and I saw nothing in front of me to suggest that rage wasn’t a good working thesis. “I assume you’re going to join me for lunch,” he said. He tugged down at the crease in his slacks as he resumed his seat.
