A Better Goodbye (12 page)

If Cecil hadn't felt so bad for Nick, he would have told Delzell that was what he deserved for being such a greedy prick. The kid came first, though. Cecil wanted him to take some time off, maybe find a girl and a beach and forget he was a fighter for a while. But Delzell wanted him back in the ring right away to start rebuilding his reputation, and once again Delzell got his way.

Nick swore he saw black lights in his next fight, the lights he had always heard about from other men who had been hit on the chin just so. Everybody else talked about how the lights transported them to a mall or a car wash. What Nick saw in those lights when he got nailed was Alonzo Burgess, and this time Alonzo Burgess had no eyes. It was then that Nick discovered what he thought was the truth about himself, the truth that wouldn't become evident to anybody else until he had been dismantled by an opponent who should have been there for the taking. Nick's nose went first, hammered onto his right cheek, but it was the cuts he remembered most, under and over both eyes, blinding him with his own blood. His tongue got sliced up too—more blood, choking him, making him think he'd puke. But he willed himself to stay upright for all eight rounds, accepting the punishment as if it were his due, never forgetting that it still wasn't as bad as what he had delivered.

It looked like there were tears in Cecil's eyes afterward, but he had the strength to keep them from falling. He put a hand on Nick's blood-smeared shoulder while a doctor patched him up for the trip to the hospital. “Don't do this no more,” Cecil said.

Nick nodded. Somewhere in the background Delzell was shouting, “What? What the fuck are you telling this piece of shit?”

Cecil was still looking at Nick when he told Delzell, very softly, “One more word, muthafucka, I'm a send you to the hospital with him.”

Nick and Cecil heard the door slam behind Delzell. Out in the hall it sounded like something had been knocked over. Before Nick could say anything to Cecil, the doctor told them it was time to go.

They were back on the sidewalk outside the Pantry now, nothing much of consequence having been said while they tucked into their steaks. Cecil had paid—he'd always been good that way—but when Nick saw him reach for his wallet again, he said, “Oh no, man, don't. I'm not looking for a handout.”

“Ain't offering you one,” Cecil said, and pulled out a scrap of paper. “Here. My neighbor asked me to give you this.”

Nick took it and read a name and phone number written in an elegant male hand.

“Got nice handwriting, your neighbor.”

“From autographs, most likely. Played for the Dodgers before your time. Onus DuPree.”

“It says Scott Crandall here.”

“On account of my neighbor's passing the message along for him. DuPree there said the man read the story in the paper. Might have some work for you.”

The look in Nick's eyes turned suspicious. “What kind of work?”

“You gonna have to find that out on your own.”

“I don't know,” Nick said.

“Shit,” Cecil said. “Someone throw me a rope when I'm drownin', you think I splash around askin' a bunch of damn questions?”

Nick wanted to argue the point, but Cecil silenced him with the look he used between rounds, the look that said the bullshit was over.

“Just make sure you call that fella Crandall, hear?”

Nick started to say thanks, but Cecil cut him short with a mumbled “uh-huh” and headed for the parking lot on the other side of ninth Street. He'd never been much for goodbyes, and when Nick called out his name and hurried to catch up with him, it was obvious he didn't appreciate it.

“Now what?”

“Make sure his wife gets this,” Nick said. “For their kids.”

Cecil couldn't hide his surprise when he saw what Nick had tucked in his hand: a hundred dollar bill.

“Thought you didn't have no money.”

“I don't now. But if there really is a job in that number you gave me, maybe I can get back to sending a little something every month.”

“He'll still be dead.”

“Yeah,” Nick said. “But I got to do something.”

The desk looked as big as a playground to Jenny, although a playground was a pretty weird thing to think of in a lawyer's office. It was walnut, polished until it gleamed, and there wasn't anything on it except a telephone, a pewter pen set, and a notepad. She'd read somewhere that a clean desk went hand in hand with power, but she'd never understood the concept until now.

Truman J. Beiser, Esquire, sat behind the desk with his elbows propped on the arms of a large carved wooden chair, his fingers making a steeple in front of his expressionless face. He was bald on top, but his gray hair was long enough on the sides to be swept back into a ponytail. Sometimes he nodded, most of the time he stared at Jenny. He spoke only when she paused to wonder if she was making any sense. It was a pretty complicated story she was trying to tell the man she hoped would save her from getting her ass sued off.

“Go on,” Beiser told her at every lull, his voice as blank as his face, and she would resume the story that had begun eight months earlier on a narrow street in Los Feliz. She and another driver had tried to squeeze past each other, and failed. Suddenly her first good car, a used 1998 Celica that she had bought with massage money, bore a creased fender that looked a lot worse than the nicks its doors had picked up in parking lots. It was, she supposed, the price she paid for being late for dinner at Farfalla with a couple of girls from work she really wasn't all that crazy about. At least the guy she had traded paint with was cute, and he seemed nice when he looked at the damage to his car and said it wasn't worth yelling about. They exchanged information—his name was Craig, he was a mortgage broker—and he promised not to get in touch unless there was a problem with the repair. When he didn't call, Jenny assumed everything was fine, although she wouldn't have minded going out with him.

Then she'd had a second accident just before Christmas. Totally her fault. In stop-and-go traffic on the 405—when wasn't the traffic there stop and go?—she had been digging around in her purse for a phone number when she should have been paying attention to the car in front of her. She plowed into it, of course. Nobody got hurt, but what was it with her driving lately?

When she opened the letter from the DMV, she discovered she wasn't the only one asking that question. The litany of sins it contained had led her to Beiser's desk. She hadn't filed paperwork for her first accident, prompting the DMV to suspend her license. But she hadn't found out about the suspension until the paperwork for her second accident began making its way through proper channels. And now the other driver—male, middle-aged, and uptight in the way that only the Bible-thumping religious could be—was making loud noises about a lawsuit.

“He straight up called me a little tramp,” Jenny said.

“For driving with a suspended license,” Beiser said, without enough inflection to make it a question.

“Yes. Do you believe that? He made it sound like I was naked.” Jenny looked for a flicker of reaction, found none, and decided to play it safe. “I wasn't, by the way.”

“Best to keep emotions out of this, Ms. Yee,” the attorney said.

“I know. I mean I understand what you're saying. What I'm trying to find out is if you can help me. My friend said you're really good.”

“I've only lost one case.” For the first time, Beiser sounded like his engine ran on something besides soymilk.

“She told me that, too,” Jenny said.

Maria, Jenny's best friend in massage, had recommended Beiser without telling her whether he was one of her clients. All she said was that he had saved her ass when she'd gotten in trouble with the DMV, but Jenny suspected the connection between them went beyond lawyer-client. Maria ran a place in a Chinatown high-rise that catered to professionals from downtown, mostly lawyers and stockbrokers. Beiser's office, on Wilshire near La Brea, wasn't so far away that he couldn't slip down there during lunch. On the outside, he didn't appear to be Maria's type—she was a magnet for freaks—but who knew what went on behind closed doors? And what did Jenny care, especially now? She had a more important question to ask.

“This is going to cost a lot of money, isn't it?”

“I'm afraid so,” Beiser said.

“Can you give me an idea how much?”

“Off the top of my head, I'd say your DMV fine will run in the neighborhood of three thousand dollars.”

“Even when they never notified me by mail?”

“They notify everybody by mail, Ms. Yee.”

“But I never got it.”

“Which is your problem, not theirs.”

The unfairness of life washed over Jenny like acid rain. She could feel herself starting to pout, and she didn't like it. But she liked what was happening with the DMV even less.

“Look at the bright side,” Beiser said. “You'll have your license back, and you'll have taken a major step toward avoiding a lawsuit.”

“I just hope a cop doesn't stop me when I'm driving home,” she said, trying to laugh.

“Should be an incentive to drive safely,” he said, without a glimmer of a smile. “But before you go, there's one other subject we should discuss. My fee.”

“Oh, right,” Jenny said. “That.”

“It will run between three and four thousand dollars.” He waited for Jenny to say something, but she had lost the power of speech. “Does that sound like an amount you're capable of handling?”

Another ten or fifteen seconds passed before Jenny could offer up a tiny yes.

“Good,” Beiser said, letting just enough enthusiasm creep into his voice to prove that he liked money. “I'll need a small retainer, say a thousand dollars, and once your check clears, I'll get to work.”

Jenny told him she would write a check and put it in the mail as soon as she got home. It was a perfect time for him to suggest that they could take money out of the equation and trade his services for hers. To her relief, he didn't. There was enough shady stuff in her life already, and now there would have to be more. She was already picturing how empty her safe-deposit boxes were going to look. She only knew one way to fill them back up in a hurry.

Asian girls were always in demand, even the snotty princesses who didn't want to get all the way naked, acted like they were afraid to touch guys and, when they did, accused clients of making them break a nail. Guys put up with it, Jenny supposed, because they wanted something different from what they were getting at home, and since most of them were white, it didn't take a genius to figure out the rest. So Jenny, driving west on Wilshire with her suspended license and wishing she could just read Robert Lowell's poetry now that her Vietnam paper was finished, knew she wouldn't have a problem finding a job. Where the job was would be the problem, because everywhere she had worked was a place she never wanted to see again.

Her journey through the netherworld of massage had begun in East Hollywood, in an apartment that was worse than the neighborhood, as hard as that was to believe. The girls thought they were too hot to change the sheets, and her boss was a cokehead who never bathed and slapped his wife around when she was seven months pregnant. Two weeks and Jenny was out of there. She was gone even faster from her next stop, a flea-infested apartment on Laurel Canyon run by a Russian couple who just grunted when the masseuses complained about bites all over their feet, ankles, legs, and asses. Then it was Woodland Hills, where she met Rosie and ate mushrooms while a big orange cat named George sniffed the 'shroom dust off the floor and ricocheted around the room like a furry pinball.

When she and Rosie stopped laughing, they went to work for a black woman who had set up shop in the North Hollywood condo where she lived with her husband and daughter. Jenny and Rosie passed themselves off as Japanese sisters, and even though they kept it to hand jobs, they were making two thousand dollars each, sometimes more, for a four-day week, in by eleven, out by five. And that was on a dead-end street so creepy that clients were always saying they didn't want to park their Porsches there. But the worst thing about the condo was when they had clients at the same time and one of them had to use the little girl's bedroom. It was pink and lacy and Jenny noticed how it unnerved some guys, probably because it reminded them of the children they had at home. The ones it excited, she jerked off as quickly as possible.