Harbor Nocturne (12 page)

Fortunately for 6-X-72, Charlie happened to be out and about, checking on new eateries, and was not far from the dirtbag hotel in question. They only had to wait ten minutes before the rangy, unkempt detective, who always wore sport coats and skinny pants that spoke of the 1970s at its worst—and the most outrageously ugly neckties on the entire LAPD—sauntered in, sucking his teeth as usual, ready to offer an expert opinion on just about anything. Sophie thought the color and pattern on this particular tie reminded her of decaying meat crawling with blowflies.

Sophie led Charlie inside the little hotel room and said to Ace and Sadie, “I want you to tell Detective Gilford exactly what you’ve told us. He’s gonna decide what we should do about this.”

Charlie remained with the couple, and Sophie went back out into the hallway, where she said to Marius, “Partner, somehow I don’t think a bouquet’s gonna be enough to settle this one. And I’ll just hate it something awful if Charlie fails us here and we gotta take Sadie for medical treatment, and then haul Ace to jail for choking her out. I don’t wanna occupy the same car space with either of them. They say everyone finally gets the face they deserve, and these two prove it. Which reminds me, did you see Barbra Streisand before her recent lift?”

“When it come to, how we say, the kiss-off artist, there is nobody better than Charlie Gilford,” the Romanian said reassuringly. “Keep up the faith, Sophie.”

Ten minutes passed, but they could still hear muffled conversation inside the room, with Sadie’s voice only briefly rising in anger. Then the door opened and Charlie Gilford sauntered out with the couple still inside. The cops could see that the formerly warring tweakers now had an arm around each other’s waist and were cooing softly.

Charlie sucked his teeth a couple of times and asked Marius and Sophie, “Do you know why they don’t do regular sex?”

Sophie answered sotto, “Yeah, because they’re a couple of degenerate skanks and her bug rug is probably crawling with crabs.”

“See,” Charlie said, shaking his head sadly, “that’s why you bluesuits need a detective at the scene when a situation calls for subtle diplomacy as well as super sleuthing. For your information, the reason they don’t do regular sex is because he recently got himself a Prince Albert.”

“What is a Prince Albert?” Marius asked.

Charlie said, “Don’t they teach you people nothing these days? Man, this is fucking Hollywood! A Prince Albert is a bolt through the pecker. He showed it to me. Wanna see it?”

“I think I can live without that part of a more complete Hollywood education,” Sophie Branson said. “I’ll pass.”

“I shall pass also,” Marius Tatarescu said, looking even queasier.

Just then, Ace and Sadie came to the open doorway. They still had an arm around each other, and her head was on his shoulder.

“Remember what I told you,” Compassionate Charlie Gilford said to the cuddling couple. “When the going gets tough, you gotta step back and recall the songs of your youth. You’re a musician, Ace. It should be easy for you.”

Ace nodded, turned his face to Sadie, and sang in a raspy tenor,
“
‘They say we’re young and we don’t know, we won’t find out until we grow!’”

She sang back at him in a quivery soprano, “‘Well, I don’t know if all that’s true, ’cause you got me and, baby, I got youuuuu!’”

And then they sang together, “‘Babe! I got you, babe! I got you, babe!’” With Sadie grinning toothlessly at the man she loved for now.

Charlie Gilford turned to Sophie and Marius and said, “No medical treatment needed. She’s all right. And there’s been no crime here. It’s all code four. You can go back out and clear.”

As a farewell to Ace and Sadie, Charlie extended his arms, palms up, in a theatrical gesture and said to them, “You live in the land of dreams. This is Hollywood. Don’t ever let the music stop playing.”

“Bye-bye, Detective Gilford!” Ace called, beaming. Then he whispered to Sadie and they sang to him in unison, “‘And the beat goes on! The beat goes onnnnn!’”

“Sonny and Cher would be proud!” Compassionate Charlie Gilford responded with a flourish, before descending the reeking staircase.

When Sophie and Marius were back in their shop and had cleared for calls, Sophie said, “Marius, are you in the mood for pizza?”

“I am always in the mood,” he said. “Why do you ask?”

“Because I think we just iced the Hollywood Love Story Award. We caught one that
nobody’s
gonna beat.”

Dinko Babich had decided to take Lita Medina for a late lunch in San Pedro before the dreaded meeting at his mother’s house. First he wanted to sit with her and talk more, and look at her, and try to think what he was going to do to help her. What
could
he do? Then he thought he could do what Croatians always do with a guest. He could feed her, that’s what. He bought some sandwiches and a bottle of screw-top wine from the Italian deli and drove to Point Fermin Park.

They sat on the grass for two hours, she talking about her life in Mexico, glossing over the last few years spent working at the awful cantina in Guanajuato.

When it came to those years she said, “I do not wish to say to you how I live when I work at that place. It was very bad.”

“You don’t have to talk about that,” Dinko said. “Not to me. Not ever.” He wondered at his choice of the word “ever.” Wasn’t this the last time he’d ever see her?

“I am ashame,” she said.

“Don’t talk about it, don’t think about it,” he said. “You done what you had to do in the crummy world you were born into.”

She said, “We wait one year for my father to come home, but he never come. He went with the coyotes to cross the border for work and we never hear nothing more.”

“What month was it when he made the crossing?”

“Agosto.”

“That’s a dangerous time,” Dinko said. “A lotta migrants die of heat stroke.”

“Me, I cross at Easter time,” she said. “There was rain, but was okay. I pray to Santa María. The coyote is not a bad man, but I have to pay to him much of my money I save from the cantina.”

“And you ended up dancing where I found you.”

“Jes,” she said, and he smiled at her pronunciation.

“It’s not
jes,
” he said. “It’s
yes
. Y-y-yes.”

“Y-y-yes,” she said, and they both laughed.

When it was his turn, he talked about working on the docks and living in Pedro all his life, so close to the big ocean.

Then Lita heard what she thought was a woman shrieking in terror. “What is that?” she cried.

Dinko laughed and said, “It’s just a South Shores peacock. They’re protected and feral. Nobody owns them. They’ll walk up to your car and look at their reflection on the side of it and start pecking the hell out of your paint job. One musta wandered down here to the cliffs.”

Lita turned and watched the colorful bird strutting across the lawn in the direction of the sidewalk, where a child had thrown cracker crumbs on the grass.

She laughed and said to him, “San Pedro is a beautiful place to live, Dinko.”

“You think so?”

“Jes—I mean, yes. Very beautiful.”

He peered out at the ocean. “Maybe you’re right. When I see it through someone else’s eyes.” Then he looked at her and said, “Somebody else’s lovely eyes.”

She lowered her gaze and said, “You are lucky man to be in this place. I wish I do not have to go away to Hollywood. But I must. Is only way for me.”

Time had never passed faster for Dinko Babich than it did that afternoon, as they looked out at the calm Pacific and at Catalina Island, which always seemed so deceptively close when the weather was clear. It felt as though Santa Catalina were a haven, a prize, something out there virtually within reach, but so far beyond them. They sat silently, content to gaze at the horizon with youthful daydreams, forgetting the threats from the real world around them.

When Dinko realized it was time to leave, he came to an inescapable understanding of his dilemma. He had a young girl with him who was a virtual stranger, with all she owned in the world in the back of his Jeep. And he was suspended from his job as a longshoreman with his checking account running dry, and his Croatian mother was going to crap a crucifix when he walked into the house with Lita. And yet . . . every time he looked into her upward-tilted, heavily lashed amber eyes, his heart started dancing and he couldn’t focus on the hazardous burden he’d voluntarily shouldered. If he could be logical for a few minutes, he could think again that she was just a Mexican whore. And yet he could not be logical, not when looking directly at her, and listening to the soft lilt of her accented English.

As the end of their second hour together grew near he said, “Lita, we gotta go and face my mother.”

* * *

Brigita Babich seemed confused, more than anything else, when Dinko entered the house at twilight and said, “Mom, this is Lita Medina. She’s a friend who needs a place to stay tonight. I told her we’d help her.”

The three-bedroom, three-and-a-half-bathroom home on the hill west of Gaffey was comfortable and solid, as befitting a crane operator like Jan Babich, who’d made a handsome living during his thirty-five years on the docks prior to his untimely death at the age of fifty-nine. The house had a red tile roof and white stucco walls, and had been worth nearly a hundred thousand more during the housing boom than it was now. There was a large family room where Dinko and his late father had played pool and video games. Although the living room’s overstuffed furniture was getting old, it had been costly in its day and was still comfortable and solid, like the house itself.

Every veteran crane operator in San Pedro might’ve had a house as substantial as the Babich home, but to Lita Medina it was a grand mansion, easily the finest house she had ever entered in her life.

Lita said to Brigita Babich, “I am very honor to meet with you, señora. I am sorry to be a problem.”

“Yes, nice to meet you, too,” Brigita Babich said, without offering her hand. Then: “Sit down for a moment and relax while I have a private chat with my son.”

Lita Medina waited uncomfortably in the living room while Brigita led her only child into the master bedroom, where she closed the door and said, “Dinko, what the hell is this all about?”

“She’s a girl I met through Hector Cozzo, and she has nowhere to go tonight.”

“Hector Cozzo?” she said. “That boy was no good when
times
were good. He’s a bum who always got in trouble. What were you doing with Hector?”

“He was never bad,” Dinko said. “He was just a little hustler and still is. I ran into him and did him a favor. He’s kind of an . . . agent. Still so lame he calls himself Hector the selector, and he saw this girl and got her a job in Hollywood. But it’s not working out so good.”

“A job doing what?”

“She’s a dancer.”

“A dancer? What kind of dancer?”

“In a nightclub. And she’s also a cocktail waitress.”

“Boy, are you crazy?” his mother said. “What’s got into you?”

“She’s basically a good girl,” Dinko said. “A lost girl. She’s trying to make enough money to send to her sick mother and little brothers in Mexico.”

“Dinko, that’s what they all say, the kind of girls that dance in Hollywood nightclubs.”

“You don’t know nothing about Hollywood nightclubs,” Dinko said.

“I know about the kind of young girls who would work in them,” Brigita said. “And how old is she, sixteen?”

“She’s nineteen plus.”

“So she says. She looks like a child.”

“She’s nineteen years and four months old. She’s an adult.”

“And you’re thirty-one going on seventeen. Behaving like you’re still in high school! Are you having sex with her?”

“No! I barely know her. This is the second time I’ve ever even been with her. Why can’t she sleep in the spare bedroom? It hadn’t been used in . . . I don’t know how long, till Tina and Goran used it.”

“I haven’t changed the sheets yet.”

“She won’t care. She’s desperate and in trouble.”

Brigita Babich took her son by the shoulders and said, “What kinda trouble? And you better tell me the truth.”

Dinko said, “She got a job at this nightclub, thanks to Hector. And a girl that dances there has disappeared, and . . . well, she may be okay, but maybe not. The trouble is, Lita saw the guy who took her away. And the guy’s sort of a . . . bad guy.”

Brigita Babich retreated two steps in disbelief and then came back to just inches away from Dinko and said, “That’s perfect. So you bring her here, where we can all get murdered in our sleep?”

“It’s not like that,” he said. “We’ll probably find out tomorrow that the girl’s fine, and I’ll drive Lita back to her place in Hollywood.”

“No!” Brigita said. “I don’t like this. I won’t have it. And aren’t you the one that’s always complaining about Mexicans taking over Pedro? You change your tune when it comes to a beautiful young one like her, don’t you?”

It was then that he played his trump card. He used the only word that could possibly move his mother to relent. He said, “Mom, she’s a good Catholic girl in trouble. What could I do?”

Brigita paused and looked away, bobbing her head angrily because he’d stooped to using her religion to persuade her. She said, “If she’s afraid of gangsters, she should call the police.”

Dinko said, “She’s not exactly in this country legally. And she just needs a place to stay for one night. What would Jesus do?”

“Don’t you Jesus me, Dinko Babich!” his mother said. “You, who never go to Mass on holy days and only go on Sunday when I drag you. Don’t you talk Jesus to me!”

“I go to the Saturday vigil Mass lots of times that you don’t know about.”

“You lie too easy,” she said.

Dinko lied again: “Lita asked me if we have a church near here. She wants to go to Mary Star of the Sea tomorrow and light a candle for the missing dancer and pray for her safe return. That’s the kind of girl Lita is.”

After a long pause, Brigita Babich said, “You have
always
been a con man! So all right, strip the sheets from the spare room and put them in the washer. Nobody’s gonna sleep on soiled sheets in
my
house.” Then she opened the door and walked down the hallway to the living room.