Harbor Nocturne (9 page)

“Do not worry about it. I shall help you.” Then she added, “How you lost the foot?”

He thought of Hollywood Nate then and wished he had Nate’s acting chops. He decided to follow Sergeant Hawthorne’s advice to stay mostly evasive and noncommittal until there was the right time to be specific and provocative, and to let the questioner pull the information out of him.

Then he heard himself fuck it up completely by saying, “I got the amputation in Tijuana.” And he thought, Aw shit! I blew it.

She said, “I have curiousness about how you hurt the foot, Kelly.” The Tijuana reference had apparently caused no spark of recognition.

Jetsam swung his legs over the side of the table and sat there for a moment while she washed her hands in a little sink. He thought, Be evasive! “I, uh, well, uh, sorta had an accident with a chain saw. I was, like, pruning a tree and I dropped the saw and I fell on it and somehow the motor kept going and it almost cut my foot clean off, and well . . .”

After drying her hands, Ivana looked at him and said, “You was cutting a tree in Mexico?”

“Well, not exactly,” Jetsam said, “I was . . . well, I got such poor work done on me at an ER in Burbank that I had to have the amputation a week later.”

Now she was looking him in the eyes. “But why in Tijuana?”

“Cheaper,” he said quickly.

“Very strange,” she said. “You did not fear the work down there?”

“No, look at it,” he said. “Beautiful work, right? I got a recommendation from a doctor here in L.A. He used to, like, work in a clinic there. In fact, he drove down to T.J. and did the job on me.”

Now there was no doubt that Ivana was interested. She said, “May I take photo of it?”

“What for?”

“I know a client who has much interest in such things. What do they call the clinic you go to?”

“Clínica Maravilla,” Jetsam said.

“And who is the doctor that do the work?”

“Dr. Maurice Montaigne,” Jetsam said. “I found him through a guy I worked with.”

“What kind of work you do, Kelly?” she asked casually.

“This and that,” he said, trying a mysterious smile.

“You are interesting person, Kelly,” she said. “Is okay if I take photo or two?”

“My stump only. Not my face.”

“Why? You are wanted man? You are, how you say, fugitive?” She asked with a grin.

“Not exactly.” He smiled back at her. “Okay, snap away. Are these for your scrapbook? Your first massage of a guy with one foot?”

“Is not for
my
scrapbook, dah-link,” she said, opening the small closet again and taking down her cell phone.

She took photos of Jetsam’s stump. When she was finished, she smiled mischievously and said, “You like to take a photo of me sometime?”

“Can I pose you the way I want to?” he said.

“Absolutely,” she said. “I give you massage and you can do more than take photo if you wish.”

“For the same price?”

She laughed and said, “Oh, no, dah-link. Now we talk about very special massage from Ivana. No, no, not same price.”

“Do we do the special massage here?” he asked.

“Sure, here,” she said. “Or in hotel. Or in your house if your wife do not mind. Maybe she like my massage too?”

“I ain’t married,” he said. “Not anymore. Anyways, can I have your phone number? I might be ready for this a lot sooner than you think.”

“Wonderful, dah-link!” She went back to the closet to get a business card from her purse.

It was cheaply done, with no embossing. It said, “Massage by Ivana.” She wrote a phone number on it.

“Would you like a shower?” she asked.

He saw exactly how his clothes were hung and thought about taking a shower to see if she would go through his wallet, but then he figured that this group of players might be savvy enough to pull credit card and DMV information and somehow trace him back to the LAPD, so he said, “Naw, that lotion ain’t the greasy kind.”

She watched with interest as he attached the supportive braces and the prosthesis, and when he was finished and had pulled on his chinos, she said, “You feel good now, yes?”

“Very good,” he said. “But tell me, Ivana, why the photo op of my stump? Are you interested in specialty surgeries, or what?”

“I am not,” she said, “but I got special client. He is very much interested. Maybe he is knowing the same doctor that you know.”

“Maybe,” Jetsam said. “I hear the doc did a lotta work around Hollywood, but I don’t think he’s in practice these days.”

She did not look surprised. “No? Why not?”

“I hear he’s zombied out most of the time.”

“What is this meaning?”

“All smoked out. A crackhead.”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “The drugs. Yes.”

Jetsam knew he was taking a big risk that might scare her, but he couldn’t stop himself from asking, “Is your special client looking for a doctor like that? Or is he an amputee too?”

“He is just special client that sometime need outcall massage, like maybe I shall also do for you very soon. So, do you like what I do today? It was okay?”

He figured that was his cue for a tip, so he pulled out his wallet and gave her his thirty dollars, which left him with exactly two dollars of his own money. He tried a devil-may-care grin and said, “Have a burger on me, babe.”

Her smile told him that she was satisfied with the fee and the tip. In fact, she said coyly, “Maybe next time
you
shall become my little hamburger. Maybe Ivana shall eat you up!”

“Yum yum,” Jetsam said.

Before he was quite out the door, Ivana startled Jetsam by asking, “May I have your phone number too, dah-link?”

“Why would you want my phone number?” He stalled, trying to remember the vice unit’s cold phone number Sergeant Hawthorne had given him. “What if my girlfriend answers?”

“Then I say I got wrong number,” Ivana said

He was pretty sure he had the number right before he gave it to her, saying, “I can’t imagine why you need it.”

Ivana flashed her sexiest smile and said, “Maybe we offer summer special that you must hear about. Maybe we give coupons, dah-link!”

Flotsam was visibly relieved to see his partner leave the massage parlor and cross the boulevard at the intersection. Sergeant Hawthorne got on the tac frequency and told the cover team to stand by.

When Jetsam got to the vice car, parked north of the boulevard, he climbed into the backseat, and both Flotsam and Sergeant Hawthorne turned and waited in anticipation.

Jetsam enjoyed creating suspense, but finally he said, “I got my foot in the door.”

“Fuck the jokes, dude!” Flotsam said. “Come on, give it up!”

“Can’t I enjoy a Zen moment?” Jetsam asked.

By then, Sergeant Hawthorne just wanted to see the last of the surfer cops forever, and he was half-hoping that nothing of value had come from the massage parlor and he could jettison his whole experiment.

Then Jetsam said excitedly, “This Ukrainian chick has these big overzealous casabas. Bro, her mammaries are mammoth. And she got these paws that could turn your muscles into risotto. She’s fucking brutal!”

The young vice sergeant sighed audibly. “I’m glad you had a good time, but what the hell happened, if anything?”

“Well, first thing was, the chick at the counter looked at me like I was a turd on a stick, till I showed her my foot,” Jetsam said. “And by the way, you didn’t give me enough bank, Sarge. The massage cost me the Franklin and the Grant. And then I tipped her thirty bucks of my own. I ain’t got enough left for a refried bean burrito at Taco Bell.”

“Why did you have to tip her, dude?” Flotsam asked, and there was that leer again.

Sergeant Hawthorne was getting very close to telling these two dipshits that this was a goddamn police mission and not a rager on the beach at Malibu.

But before he had a chance to pull rank, Jetsam finally said, “I think it worked! She took a picture of my stump. Four pictures, in fact. And she claims she got a client that’s interested in special surgeries. And she got her game face on when I mentioned that I got mine done in T.J. And I, like, sorta hinted that I know the quack doctor who’s a crackhead now, and I got her phone number if you wanna design my next move.” Jetsam took a breath and added, “I done good in there.”

Neither Sergeant Hawthorne nor Flotsam spoke for a long moment. Then the vice sergeant said, with renewed respect, “Let me get the cover team in on this, and then start from the very beginning and tell me every single word that was spoken in there.”

“And not the Reader’s Digest version,” Flotsam said. “I gotta hear it all.”

“I’m hungry,” Jetsam said. “I either need my thirty bucks or you gotta feed me, Sarge.”

“I’m very happy to buy,” Sergeant Hawthorne said sincerely. “Will IHOP do?”

“Why not?” Jetsam said. “I love savory dishes that can clog your arteries so your heart only beats about three times all day. And one more thing: the chick wanted my phone number. I gave her your setup number, so you might get a call for Kelly. That’s the name I gave her. Whadda you suppose it’s all about?”

“I don’t know for sure,” Sergeant Hawthorne said. “Just when I was thinking this was the dumbest idea I’ve ever had, it’s starting to look promising. If she does call for Kelly, I may need your UC services ASAP, so I’ll need to know where you are, on duty and off duty, for the next few weeks. I’ll keep both your watch commander and Sergeant Murillo informed.”

After the cover team drove up and parked behind them, the vice sergeant got out of the car to tell them that they’d meet at the vice office in one hour for a debriefing, after he fed his surfer cops.

Alone in the car with his partner, Flotsam said, “So the masseuse was a real gamer, huh, dude? The kind that could make you flame out and crash after an hour of frolic and horseplay?”

Jetsam said, “Bro, remember that time you and me were off duty in that pricey club on the Strip? The one where the decibel level could curdle breast milk?”

“Yeah,” Flotsam said. “What about it?”

“Remember the waitress you called Miss Elegantly Elevated Eyebrows? The one with the fiendish smile that scared you?”

“Yeah,” Flotsam said. “That babe put me in a devilish state of mind.”

“Well, bro,” Jetsam said, “compared to Ivana, that scallywag on the Strip was Little Miss Sunshine. I think my spooky masseuse must spend her days watching cage fights.”

“I’m falling in love!” Flotsam said. “Are Ukrainian chicks like Russians? Can you mail-order them too?”

SEVEN

T
he news on
the following Friday morning was horrific. Dinko Babich hadn’t gotten much sleep after smoking some middling grow that he’d bought the night before from a fellow longshoreman he’d spotted on Beacon Street. His grandfather had loved to talk about the days when that was the toughest street in Los Angeles. Legend had it that once upon a time, seamen had actually been shanghaied from saloons there. Now there were no bars on Beacon Street, and nearby Sixth Street was showing signs of urban renewal. There was a modern courthouse, and lofts were being refurbished—the ubiquitous symbol of a comeback.

The grow hadn’t been the powerhouse pot Dinko was looking for, and it had left him with some twitch and jitters. When he had managed to fall asleep, it had been a fitful sleep. He was aware that he’d dreamed of Lita Medina, but he wasn’t sure what the dreams were about. At 10:00
a.m
., when he got out of bed with a blinding headache, he cursed the weed, and the murky dreams, and himself for giving a second thought to what happened to some Mexican whore.

His mother had also slept late, and she was still in her robe, frying ham and eggs, when he entered the kitchen. Brigita Babich looked at her only child and shook her head sadly. She hoped it was a booze hangover and not from marijuana, which had gotten him suspended at work and caused her so much worry.

His mother was large-boned, and tall like Dinko, not fat like her cousin Tina. Whenever she dressed up for church or bingo, she still teased her hair the way she had back in high school in the ’60s. Today her auburn hair was tousled, and the roots had grown out very gray. Dinko thought that the attractive young woman who’d won his father’s heart was mostly gone. After her husband’s death, Brigita Babich had aged very quickly.

“Eggs, honey?” she asked, and Dinko shook his head and poured a mug of coffee before sitting at the kitchen table and looking at the
Los Angeles Times
.

Dinko thought how almost every Croatian in Pedro, and probably every Italian, complained about how they missed the
San Pedro News-Pilot,
but in these hard times, with San Pedro turning Hispanic and seedy, the local newspaper could not survive. He wondered if any part of the insular, unchanging Fish Town of yore could possibly survive.

Since it was only local news, meaning San Pedro news, that ever interested his mother, he asked her, “Anything happen worth reading about?”

She turned away from the stove and said, “My God, yes! Wait till you read about what they found yesterday in the container yard on Pacific Highway. I saw it on the TV news last night before I went to bed. It’s awful. Just awful.”

Dinko opened the newspaper to the terrible story of security guards finding a container containing thirteen dead Asians, all young women except for one older man. They had been dead for several days, and the odor of decomposing bodies inside the ovenlike steel container was what had alerted the security guards.

A spokesman at the container yard speculated that they had died from carbon monoxide poisoning. In the container they found small chemical toilets and five-gallon buckets full of human waste, as well as bags of clothing and blankets alongside the corpses. Ventilation holes had been drilled through the bottom of the container, along with a small trapdoor, but the container had been stacked in such a way that the trapdoor was blocked and the air holes were partially closed off. Still, someone had made the stupid decision to light a camping stove, and that had proved fatal.

It was estimated that the journey across the Pacific from a likely port of embarkation used by human traffickers would’ve taken about fourteen days. The number on the container did not square with the numbers on the manifest of the cargo ship that had delivered the container, but the ship was now back out at sea, in international waters. Of course, a spokesperson from Immigration and Customs Enforcement ended his terse statement with the inevitable but hardly reassuring promise: “An investigation is ongoing.”

After he’d finished reading the story, fleeting images passed through the mind of Dinko Babich, such as last week’s sighting of someone he thought was Hector Cozzo with a well-dressed Asian. And he recalled Hector’s search for “new talent,” and remembered Hector’s stupid story about involvement with a street gang that robbed containers full of goods from storage yards. Were they lies or only half lies? Had a container holding very special “goods” worried Hector and his Asian friend?

All of this passed fleetingly. He felt a sudden stab of anxiety and didn’t hear his mother say, “Two eggs or three?”

Hector Cozzo was surprised when he awakened to find two cell-phone messages, one from an Asian masseuse at Shanghai Massage. He listened to the singsong voice he had come to hate, even though he wasn’t sure which buckethead bitch it was. He lit a cigarette and saw there were also three calls from Mr. Kim, the hulking Korean who was a kind of assistant to the big boss, Mr. Markov. He was always calling to yap about something that Hector had nothing to do with. He’d check in with Kim later in the day and tell him his cell had died and he’d forgotten to recharge it.

He looked at the clock on the lamp table beside his bed and saw that it was only 9:45. That pissed him off. He hadn’t gotten to bed until 4:00
a.m
., and he liked to sleep at least seven hours.

When he returned the call to Shanghai Massage, the Asian masseuse called Suki said, “Hector, Ivana need to talk with you.”

The phone was given to the Ukrainian masseuse and he heard Ivana say, “Hector, I got to see you. I am here at work because we got the cleanup to do for good clients. They are booking three rooms for all afternoon.”

“Yeah, that’s fine,” Hector said sleepily. “I’m glad business is booming, but why do I gotta hear about it now?”

Ivana said, “I think you got to know about trouble with a girl.”

“What trouble?” he said. “Which girl?”

“Not something for the telephone talking, Hector,” Ivana said. “Can you come in one hour?”

“Shit!” he said, taking a closer look at the clock. “Make it two hours.”

“Okay,” Ivana said. “Two hours. Big trouble, Hector.”

Always trouble, he thought. Bitches were nothing but trouble. He didn’t mind the risk involved in collecting from the massage parlor and from Club Samara, money that would never be reported to the IRS. But he also had to check and recheck the massage parlor’s records to make sure that the bogus set of documents prepared for the IRS was okay and that the set of records for Mr. Kim was accurate to the dollar.

He didn’t even mind the risk of pissing off some thugs from nearby Little Armenia who thought that the massage parlor would be better served by local “handlers” than by some “little guinea,” which is what they called him to his face. These were foreign-born Armenians and their sons who’d come to Los Angeles after the breakup of the Soviet Union. Many families had headed to the suburb of Glendale, others to Little Armenia, so close to Hollywood. The older ones were veterans of terrible times under the Soviets that had hardened them, and their offspring were just as ruthless. The “AP” graffiti tagged on the sides of buildings in Little Armenia warned all whose turf this was. This territory belonged to Armenian Power.

Hector often wondered if it was karma or Carmine that had sent him to Mr. Markov. The Mambellis owned significant property in San Pedro and, of course, lived “up on the hill” west of Gaffey where other wealthy Italians lived, and not down in the flatlands among the growing population of Latinos. Carmine Mambelli’s grandfather had part ownership in a Pedro bank, and everyone knew he’d been involved in bookmaking back when bookmaking was big business, before the 1980s, when betting went electronic.

It was Carmine who had found his former schoolmate sitting on the patio outside Utro’s Cafe, beneath the awning that boldly proclaimed, “Home of the Proudest People on the Coast.”

Carmine had looked at Hector that day and said, “This is a longshoremen’s hangout, dude. Are you looking for waterfront work? Will wonders never cease?”

At first, Hector had bristled, but nothing he’d been doing had brought him much bank and he really was between jobs, so he told his old schoolmate the truth: “Yeah, I need a job, Carmine. And they ain’t easy to come by.”

Carmine, wearing Italian shoes that were worth more than Hector’s entire wardrobe, studied him and said, “I got a little job for you if you wanna do it. There’s a guy in Hollywood that used to make transactions at the bank when my grandfather was still running it. I think him and my grandpa did some outside deals together. I’d like you to run a package up to him today. It’s paperwork from the bank that he needs this afternoon. You still got a car?”

“Of course I got a car.” Hector did not tell Carmine that it was a ten-year-old Hyundai with dented fenders and a body rusted through from being parked in the driveway of the Cozzo home during San Pedro’s winter dampness.

Carmine said, “You can save me a drive to Hollywood. Here, take your mom and dad to Sorrento’s for a pizza tonight.” He gave Hector two hundred-dollar bills. Hector then walked with Carmine to his 7 Series Beemer and was handed a large cardboard box sealed with masking tape.

“Give this to Mr. Markov personally,” Carmine instructed, giving Hector a note bearing the address of an east Hollywood bar called Rasputin’s Retreat.

“Your grandpa musta did business with Russians,” Hector said after looking at the name of the bar.

“He did business with everybody that needed a banker.” Carmine passed Hector a business card that simply said, “Carmine Mambelli” with his cell number. He added, “Remember, only to Mr. Markov. You got a problem, you phone me, okay?”

The rush-hour traffic was even more miserable than usual that day, and it took Hector nearly two hours to get to east Sunset Boulevard. Rasputin’s Retreat was one of those tricked-up ethnic bars Hector hated. The main barroom was dark, and the walls were decorated with garish frames containing small lighted prints of charging Cossacks on horseback, the onion domes of St. Basil’s, matryoshka nesting dolls, and Fabergé eggs. A samovar took up too much space at the end of the service bar, and the sound system played balalaika music. It looked to Hector like a place where the old Russians might come to drink, but he couldn’t imagine the younger ones falling for the kitsch. It was such a small joint that he didn’t see how it could pay the rent even on this eastern section of Sunset Boulevard.

Hector had left the box in the car and entered Rasputin’s Retreat empty-handed; now he asked the bartender if Mr. Markov was around. The bartender nodded toward the corridor leading to the small kitchen and the restrooms. Hector walked back there and found a door marked “Office” and knocked.

A male voice said in slightly accented English, “Come in. The door is unlocked.”

Hector entered, and for the first time encountered Mr. Markov. He was in his seventies and sturdily built for his age, but with remarkably feminine hands and manicured nails, making Hector think the old dude had a bit of swish in his tail. His comical Young Elvis hairstyle was dyed black, and that day he was wearing an ivory blazer over a violet sport shirt open at the throat. His face looked spit-shined from a fresh chemical peel, and he wore O.J. shoes, but Hector figured them for Bruno Magli knockoffs. He thought that Markov’s English was better than any he’d heard in Pedro from the immigrant Italian friends of his grandfather’s.

Markov looked warily at Hector and said, “You do not have something for me from Carmine?”

“Yes, Mr. Markov,” Hector said. “I thought I should leave it in my car till I made sure you were here.”

Markov smiled. “That is good thinking. Very good. Please go to your car and retrieve it for me.”

When Hector returned with the heavy carton, he assumed he’d be thanked and dismissed, but Markov said, “Carmine tells me that you are between jobs and could use employment. He said that he has known you all his life.”

Hector nodded. “We went to Catholic school together. Clear through high school almost.”

Markov said, “I might be able to offer you some temporary employment and see how you do. Are you interested?”

“Yes, sir!” Hector said.

“I do not hire hoodlums,” Markov said. “Do you have a police record?”

“Well, I had an arrest for having somebody else’s credit card,” Hector said, “and I got busted when I made a mistake and wrote a NSF check, and then there was some trouble for possession of coke, but it was jist a few grams. Because I was driving and had a minor wreck, I done sixty days on that one, but it’s the only time I ever served. I’m thirty-two years old now. I outgrew all that childish crap.”

Markov smiled slightly and asked, “Why are you being truthful? Do I look like the kind of man who would verify what you tell me? The kind of man who would demand honesty in any dealings I have with my employees?”

“You sure do, Mr. Markov,” Hector said.

Sometimes he thought that fate had led him to Markov, and other times he wondered how much juice his old friend Carmine had with his new employer. But whether it was karma or Carmine, within a few months he had a great job and a sweetheart deal, paying very modest rent on a three-bedroom house in Encino subleased to him by Markov.

He’d always doubted that Markov was the man’s true name, and he’d never known where Markov lived or with whom. He did not believe that Markov was really Russian, because he’d heard him pause and stammer with uncertainty when he spoke the language briefly to the bartender that first day. Based on his childhood experience with a few Serbian families in Pedro, Hector guessed that Mr. Markov might be a Serb. He often thought that if he only had to do collections and report to Markov, it would’ve been a dream job.

But it was not a dream job, because mostly he had to collect for, and report to, the big scary Korean who wore those Valentino and Hugo Boss tailored suits. He called himself Mr. William Kim, but Hector knew that half the goddamn population of Koreatown called themselves Kim. When Hector had complained to Kim about the nasty little conversation he’d had with two Armenian thugs who’d waited for him outside the rear door of Shanghai Massage—a conversation about who should be doing the collections at any massage parlor in Little Armenia—Kim had just dismissed it with a wide grin that revealed a gold tooth in his grille.