On the Nickel (4 page)

‘Boss,' Thibodeaux said from the far end of the bench. The blood had congealed over his cut and no longer ran down his arm. ‘When can I use Diane?' The small man seemed to mean his switchblade.

Jesus Christ.
Anybody who'd name a knife should be dropped by parachute into Turkey wearing a big sign saying how much he hates Mohammed. Just on general principles – to keep the gene pool uncluttered.

It was the golden-haired McCall that Vartabedian had hired, and he wasn't sure why the man kept this little loose cannon around. ‘No, Rice, not now. Maybe later.'

Rice Thibodeaux snicked the clasp with a sigh, and then flipped the blade back into its housing with one of those great show-off flourishes that with a little bad luck would one day see him slicing off his own ear.

‘Baby, I only put you in da linen closet ‘cause we full up wit wheezers las' PM. There a room now. A guy passed last night, pray his soul be save. You wanna sleep where some guy pass? Wasn't no blood.' The man's odd pink eyes went wide.

‘People die everywhere. I don't believe in ghosts.' He wasn't sure the man remembered. ‘Carl Roosevelt sent me.' As far as Conor could tell the hotel was nearly empty so all this talk about lack of space was a genuine mystery.

‘You done tol' me. Carl he pretty bad impair, baby. Don't take nothin' for granite roun' here. You don' wanna lean on jus' every swingin' dick on The Nickel says he kin help.' Dusty Phillips was the only albino human being that Conor had ever seen in person, though he had always revered Johnny Winter and Piano Red. He thought Dusty was probably an African-American, but it was hard to tell. He tried not to stare at the pink blinking eyes, or the tightly curled bleachy hair on the old man.

‘And git yo'self out of the Fort as quick as you can. Ain' fit for a nice clean boy like you, whatever your reason.'

The manager sat in a cage with a good view of the four dilapidated and unoccupied sofas in the lobby and the TV that was murmuring away on some good-morning show.

‘You've been good to me, sir. San Diego thanks you.'

‘San D.? You know Harborside?'

‘I know where it is, but it's not my territory. Mostly Latino, isn't it?'

‘Now I guess. Not back in the day. People still talk about Alonzo Horton blow into town and buy him a big chunk of the place for $260?'

‘I might've heard that.'

‘I can't really decide who you is, boy. Whether you a curveball coming off a lefty.' Dusty cocked his head, as if judging Conor on some invisible scale. ‘Hell, OK, I don't care.' The albino handed him an old-fashioned skeleton key on a paddle that said C-20.

‘I'm not sure who I am either,' Conor said. ‘But I pay.'

‘They's two black plastic bags inside the do'. Take what you want, it all dead man stuff. Toss ‘em in the hall when you done.'

Coming out of the master bedroom, they'd caught Maeve on the phone to somebody she obviously didn't want them to know about because she'd hung up immediately. ‘Gottagobye. Good morning, Dad. Glor.'

‘You've got the most transparent guilty look in North America,' Gloria said.

SPANK HER AND THROW HER OUT, Jack Liffey wrote and showed it to Maeve instead of Gloria.

‘Dad! I'm almost of age. You can't be spanking me unless you get me to Saudi Arabia first.'

Gloria tipped the pad back with one finger to read it and laughed. ‘I'm not in a spanking or a cooking mood here, but I'll set out some tortillas and leftovers, and there's the usual cereals. In your honor, hon, we actually bought some Pop-Tarts.'

It was the one junk food that Maeve seemed to have brought with her from her childhood.

Jack Liffey pointed to WHO CALLED on his master list.

‘Nothing important, Dad,' Maeve said. ‘You gotta get over thinking I'm always up to something.'

It took him a while to scribble WHEN DID THE POPE STOP WEARING A DRESS.

‘Hon,' Gloria said to Maeve. ‘Whatever you're doing, what's the worst thing that could happen? Just tell us that.'

‘I could fail completely and feel like an idiot, I suppose.'

‘If you succeed, will somebody dynamite the house?' It wasn't an empty joke. Maeve's bedroom in her mother's house had been dynamited two months earlier by an aging disaffected surfer whom Maeve had inadvertently poked with the sharp stick of her curiosity, trying as usual to help.

She tore open the foil packet and dropped two frosted raspberry Pop-Tarts into the vintage Toastmaster, and pressed the deco handle down. ‘How did you know I love this flavor?'

‘Somebody's definitely changing the subject here. You promise that there's no risk at all of catastrophe in what you're up to?'

‘Oh, no. Of course not.'

SHE HAS NO NOTION OF RISK. Jack Liffey showed this to Gloria.

‘Oh, I know.' Gloria rested her hand tenderly on his shoulder in the wheelchair for a moment. ‘Not everything blows up, Jack. Damn few things, in my experience. Possibly she'll get lucky this time and just fall out of a tree. Let's all calm down and have breakfast.'

Conor peered briefly into the big black trash bags but the old-man clothing and possessions looked so filthy and unpleasant that he twisted the bag necks and swung them both out into the hallway. His needs were few, in any case, and a dying old man would have little of interest to him. He needed a bed, some food, a place out of the cold and some time to think things over. Some time to write songs.

He looked around. He had the bed he needed, a metal frame single bed with what looked like fresh institutional sheets and a prickly horse blanket, tucked with military tightness. There was a washbasin with only one tap and some serious rust stains. He'd already seen the tiny cookroom for the whole floor three doors along the hallway, with a beat-up microwave, a double electric hotplate and an old round-top fridge. A cockroach appeared to peek over the rim of the basin at him but insects had never bothered him.

There was one wood chair tucked under a desk the size of a big handkerchief, parked in front of a window that looked out on a brick wall. An angle of old pipe was screwed into one corner of the room and had five wire hangers depended from it. Nothing about the room struck him as unacceptable or offensive. Just another place. The asceticism actually appealed to him.

He extracted his current notebook from his duffle.

After breakfast Jack Liffey wanted to visit a little with Loco, who had been a steadfast pal for more than a decade. The aging yellow half-coyote mutt had seemingly made a full recovery from Osteosarcoma, or doggie bone cancer, after an expensive surgery and a lot of chemo that had involved some fantastically expensive drug containing platinum. But they couldn't promise how long the remission would hold. The vets gave you near meaningless percentages. They were even more offhand about that than the doctors specializing in human cancer.

Jack Liffey had had to sell off his old condo in Culver City to put a big chunk of his only capital into the save-Loco fund. The rest was ardently earmarked for Maeve's college scholarship, if she ever made up her mind where to go. Or to go at all.

Once again he recognized all of a sudden how life threw curves at the handicapped. The hastily built plywood ramp into the backyard had broken its back somehow the night before, and though there were only three steps down, maybe two-and-a-half feet, it was as definitive a barrier for him as a 100-foot cliff. Loco wasn't in any hurry to give up lying on the grass in a lozenge of the weak sun, especially since Jack Liffey couldn't call him with more than a rapping on the frame of the screen porch, which the dog was choosing perversely to ignore.

Eventually Gloria noticed it all and came out to stand beside him. ‘Loco, shame on you, get up here!' she shouted. ‘Loco! Move your ass
now
!'

His muzzle rolled in their direction languidly, and he staggered to his feet, as if much put-upon.

Jack Liffey rubbed his head against Gloria as thanks. ‘Ak.'

He refused to think about having the ramp rebuilt. If the doctors were right, he would damn well beat this thing by pure will power long before he would become another Ironside, and a mute one at that. He couldn't let anything permanently deny him his own body, for Chrissake. Loco approached across the browning crabgrass in a painful toddle and boosted himself up the broken ramp to growl once at the dead legs and then change his mind and rub against them a little. Jack Liffey warmed with affection, reaching down to pet the dog's wiry shoulder hair.

Gloria mussed Jack Liffey's hair in turn. ‘You are, sir, the soul of this house, and I will tend you in whatever form I have to. Including a crate in my closet.'

He laughed silently at the dark humor, and she rested her hand on his head as he rested his on the dog, as sensual a physical experience as he'd had in quite some time.

Gloria went off to work apologetically and left him with Loco.
Dude,
Jack Liffey thought,
whatever you might believe, I think I'm in love with living. How about you give me the best you've got. They say I'm a T-9 or something like that, but that's mechanistic shit. And you don't care about that, anyway. You don't care that I have to stuff a new plastic tube up my dick every two days. You're a goddam Carboplatin miracle – and to prove it the condo's gone, my only refuge in dire trouble – so it's you and me once again. If Gloria throws us out, we're just fucking doomed. No more take-out meals from El Tepeyac, no more comfortable house on Greenwood. We get to live in my old pickup truck on some backwater street, like so many of those sad destitute divorcees out there.

Stay with me, pal, even if it comes to that. I stayed with you through your troubles. I think all I have to do to walk and talk again is find my cape and save the world from tyranny. OK, I'm kidding, you know that. What I'd really like to know is how on earth you recognize that my legs are such a dubious part of me at the moment, appendages to be snarled at. It might help me figure it all out if you could just tell me that, laddie.

Maeve figured Conor would probably end up in old Hollywood – that's where all the music hopefuls converged like locusts, ending up living or just crashing somewhere within eyesight of the vertical cylinder of the thirteen-story Capitol Records building, which had allegedly been built in 1954 to resemble a stack of 45-RPM records with the pinnacle on the roof as the needle. According to legend the shape had been suggested by Nat King Cole. It had been the first round high-rise in the world.

Maeve was one of the few people in L.A., other than her father, who knew that the blinking red light atop the pinnacle spelled out H-O-L-L-Y-W-O-O-D in Morse Code. She'd read it somewhere trustworthy and passed it on as part of her long-running contest with her dad to trump one another's L.A. oddities – a competition that was pretty much suspended for the moment.

She also knew that her dad's old friend Art Castro, along with the whole Rosewood Detective Agency he worked for, now had a primo office right on Hollywood Boulevard. The agency had been forced out of the magnificent old Bradbury building downtown during a recent upgrading and, ironically, had moved to an even cooler location, though they probably didn't know it. The six-story Pacific Security Bank building on Hollywood Boulevard near Ivar had been the model for the mythical ‘Cahuenga Building,' home office of Philip Marlowe – call GL(enview) 7537. Amazingly, Castro was on the sixth floor just where Marlowe had supposedly inhabited his ratty office, but Castro's room number was off a bit, 644 instead of 615. And Castro would never be half as cool as Humphrey Bogart, hiding the Four Roses in the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet.

She'd had a bit of trouble parking since everything around here was metered or forbidden now, though the graying secretary smiled tightly, recognizing her, buzzed and let her go on into Castro's office right away.

‘Maeve, it's all good. How's Jacky doing?'

He stood up. The room was pretty small and she wondered about his status within Rosewood. Her father had always said the man had gone up and down in the huge detective company like a yoyo, but that he always held some mysterious hold over old Leonard R., the founder's nephew, and apparently couldn't be fired.

When she stepped closer, he leaned over the desk to take her small hand between both of his, one of which was weirdly much colder than the other.

‘He's not so great. Can I call you Art?'

‘Course, kid. Sit down.' There was only one possibility, a lopsided divan that looked like it had come right off the set of a movie about Napoleon. Somewhere she'd heard that ski-jump-like sofa called a fainting couch. She either had to lounge sideways like the Naked Maja or prop her back against the wall. She chose the wall.

‘Dad's still having trouble with his legs and his voice, but the doctors say it's only a matter of time.'

Castro sighed. ‘That little nugget of wisdom from their profession always makes me want to say, “Up yours sideways, docs.” Excuse my French. Time is not a goddam limitless Artesian well. We all know it can conk out pretty fast.'