Pain Killers (25 page)

“We do all the big Jews!”
the old lady yelled again.

Mendel snatched the yarmulke back, slapped the lid on the box and the box back behind the counter. He rolled his eyes to show what he had to put up with and yelled back at her.

“They were big twenty years ago, Mama.”

I smiled at her, just to do something with my face. What I was thinking was,
If I were Tina, where would I go?
It all depended on whether she thought she was being chased.

My Chasidization was painless. When he found a coat, Solly held it up, extended his arm and bowed his head. Same with the pants and tzitzit. Miraculously, everything fit.

Solly wrapped the clothes I’d worn into the store with brown paper from a roll overhead, like a butcher. He tied the paper with string and checked on his mother, who was still muttering. “She doesn’t get it. Today, if you’re not making a jockstrap for Stephen Spielberg’s godson, you’re nothing.” He smiled sourly. “They don’t want to buy suits from Mendel and Mendel. Fine. But you know what they
do
buy? Hugo Boss. You know Hugo Boss?”

“Above my pay grade.”

“Good. Hugo Boss designed the SS uniforms. Famous for their slim fit. And guess who did the sewing? That’s right. In the morning, a Gypsy or a Jew might sew the epaulettes on the shoulders. That night, the Gestapo pig who drags him out in the snow and kicks him to death might be wearing it. Hugo Boss. I went to the
Shoah
premiere. Half the
macher
s in the theater had their
tuchis
es in Nazi suits.”

When he handed me the bundle, his face had an appraising expression. I wondered, for a nervous second, if he was actually undercover himself. Maybe the Russian mob was moving in on Chasidic haberdasheries. Maybe it was a front, like the medical supply stores in West Hollywood, with their windows full of dusty prosthetic limbs. When the vodka dons took over, suddenly you could buy a fake leg on every corner.

Solly pulled the stub of a pencil from his shirt pocket and made some calculations on the back of a paper bag. He talked without looking up. “Mister, I don’t know what kinda trouble you’re in. But from the way you’re
schvitz
in’ over there, it’s nothing good. Tell you what I’ll do,” he said, “I’ll give you the Full Jew—the coat, hat, pants, yarmulke, tallith—for eighteen hundred dollars.”

“Fourteen hundred.”

“Fifteen,” he said, “and I‘ll throw in
payot
s. You need some sidelocks.”

His mother got up off her chair, the same height standing as sitting, and waddled back through the store. She disappeared through a door from which floated the scent of brisket. Sense memory! My own grandmother secretly made bacon at three in the morning and ate it alone.

I pulled twelve hundred-dollar bills out of my wallet, followed by a fistful of fives and ones that I slowly unfolded on the counter.

“Thirteen eighty-five,” I said. “Unless you want to follow me and check for quarters under my cushions.”

I’d stashed the rest of Myron’s wad in my socks in the changing room, so it looked like my wallet was empty. But Solly was sharp. He indicated the limo outside. “In that thing maybe it’s worth it.”

“You think I’m paying for the limo? Chasid,
please
!”

Thieving was not, in general, my MO. But the wallet came with the coat.

Solly scooped up the bills fast. “Mazel tov. Wear it in good health!”

Transaction done, I put the string-tied bundle back on the counter. “Do me a favor,” I asked on impulse, fishing Goldman’s card out of my sock. “Send this stuff back to the address on here.”

“You want to explain?”

“Not really. Except it’s the right thing to do.”

“The right thing? In that case I’ll do it,” he said, “just for the novelty.”

I found two more hundreds in my pocket. “This is for FedEx. Keep what’s left.”

“Next-day morning or next-day afternoon?” Mendel stepped away from the counter and pulled a battered metal lockbox from a shelf of yarmulke boxes.

“Afternoon’s fine.”

I figured it would take Goldman—or whatever his real name was—a little while to get home.

“Big Jews,” Mendel mumbled, locking the money in the box. Anybody that lax about stashing cash had to be connected. “All day
mit
the big Jews. Twenty years ago, maybe, they were big Jews. Now, not so much.”

The way he said this reminded me of Zell.
There’s
a Jew who must have been big twenty years ago. From his brown-bag arithmetic shtick, I had a hunch Solly Mendel did not input names and addresses in a BlackBerry. Sure enough, I reached behind the counter while his back was turned and pulled out a black and white speckled composition book marked CUSTOMERS. Even with my limited technical expertise, I knew they had not yet found a way to scrub names out of people’s address books from afar. In that way, if no other, pencil and paper were still superior to the Internet. I quickly flipped to the back. Found the Z page. Coughed to cover the sound of ripping it out and slipped the book back under the counter.

Solly slammed the metal box back on the shelf and made his way toward me, unsmiling. Maybe he had secret cameras. But then—wouldn’t he have been holding something? Like a phone? Or a gun?

When Mendel son of Mendel was a foot away, I braced myself. Only he didn’t hit me or shoot me. He opened his arms and gave me a brisket-smelling hug. “To quote the rabbi of Lunt, ‘It is a good thing to help a man in trouble, a bad thing to have him move in.’”

“Did he really say that?”

“Those old Talmud jockeys were blunt.”

I caught my reflection in the mirror and felt a prickle of sweat. Who was I kidding? Solly’s eyes met mine as he stepped around the counter and held the shop door open.

“‘The first shekel I give is to make you feel welcome, the last is so you never come back.’”

“The rabbi of Lunt?” I asked.

“No, that’s me,” he said, and shut the door in my face.

The driver listened when I gave him Zell’s address, then hit the ignition and jerked the limo onto Fairfax in front of a bus with a giant Bruce Willis painted on the side, cuddling a monster rocket launcher that seemed to sprout from between his legs against a background of red, white and blue. Sometimes it seemed too bad that America wasn’t born with a bigger penis, so it wouldn’t have to keep waggling the junk it had all over the planet.

“You see Solly?” Jack the driver asked.

“I did,” I said. “Why didn’t you come in?”

Jack made a clicking sound with his tongue to convey his disgust and resignation. “Solly makes a good yarmulke, but he’s a schmuck.”

After this unbidden assessment, he began to bite his nails feverishly. At the first red light, he twisted around in the driver’s seat like a bearded owl.

“I just started with the company. You
are
Goldman, right?”

“Right. That’s me,” I said, and then blurted, “I’m looking for my wife. My ex-wife.”

The driver met my eyes and held them for a second. Now he understood. What man didn’t? He untwisted his owl neck and faced forward again, meeting my gaze in the rearview. “Is complicated. Life.”

“So I’ve heard,” I said, meeting his soulful Russian gaze until the light changed and the car behind him hit the horn.

We didn’t say another word until he dropped me off in Brentwood, on Carmelita Drive. I closed my eyes and tried to send out psychic SOSs the entire ride.
Tina, pick up.

I gave him $500 cash to park and wait.

Zell’s housekeeper buzzed me in after no more than five minutes of crackly back-and-forth on the intercom. I said I had an appointment. She said he was running late. I said he told me to. She said she wasn’t sure I should. I made sure to smile into the security camera, and finally she opened the gate.

I thought I heard giggling as I walked up the drive. A car cruised by behind me. A Crown Vic. Universally recognizable undercover cop car. Maybe this wasn’t even the right house. The housekeeper opened the front door. I was surprised that she was white. Maybe Russian. Kind of drifty on her feet. She paddled off with a vague gesture toward a corridor off to the right.

I hiked through the living room, which was vast enough to make me feel lonely and featured a white fur, sunken conversation pit that might have been airlifted intact from 1970 and not used since.

The housekeeper’s giggling echoed from somewhere in the house. Either the acoustics were skewed or I was. The living room opened onto a gently sloping hallway flanked by glass walls and a view of the tropical splendor on both sides. Zell had hired topiary wizards to trim his hedges into Hebrew letters and naked nymphs, as though he planned on throwing a party for swinging Kabbalah scholars or rabbis who liked the ladies.

I didn’t know what I was looking for—or where I was going to eat my next meal. What I did know was that the man who hired me collected bent celebrity pix, had a foot in born-again porn, and harbored the dream of starting an all-prison reality network. Premiering—if the showbiz, law enforcement and penitentiary stars aligned—with the official on-screen arrest of Josef Mengele. But something in my gut told me there was more. And whatever secret was buried in the bowels of San Quentin had drawn me here, to the Brentwood McMansion of Harry Zell, I hoped against hope that Tina would show up. She had a history of surprise appearances—but nothing to surpass her sudden, naked, near-stroke-inducing presence in the Quentin love nest the night before.

The glass hall fed into a hushed bedroom, done floor-to-ceiling in an almost disturbingly soothing powder blue. Powder-blue carpet, powder-blue walls and powder-blue ceiling combined to create the illusion of stepping into a waterless ocean. I was already feeling seasick when I saw something move on the powder-blue bed. I tiptoed closer and threw back the blanket. There was Dinah. My flightmate from seat 9-B. She hadn’t mentioned that, after her beef-head husband, she’d traded up for Harry Zell. She’d also traded in the beige pantsuit for—what else?—a powder-blue silk robe with some kind of fur collar dyed the same shade. Her blue eyes were open but by now they were just decoration. There was no blood. But her tongue protruded alarmingly. It looked like some viscous, tide-pool amphibian had crawled halfway into her mouth and given up. Below that, things got less attractive. Strangling generally crushed the hyoid, but this went beyond strangling. What had been Dinah’s throat was now wide as a thigh, purpling over her massively shattered hyoid bone and ruptured esophagus. Strangling was puppy love compared to the damage I was staring at.

I urged the blanket further south and gagged. Mrs. Zell’s head had been twisted the wrong way round. She faced the same direction as her own buttocks, staring up at me over the top of her intact scapula and spine. She might have been a doll some very strong, very sadistic child who’d seen
The Exorcist
had decided to play with, then gotten bored with and mutilated.

I heard a flush in the bathroom and jumped. The door opened. Out walked Tina, like we’d been married twenty years and she’d just put down a magazine to go pee. “Hi, hon,” she said, as if we’d planned a picnic.

“Tina!”
My voice couldn’t find a register.

Not for the first time in our relationship, I had to combat the impulse to simultaneously slap her face and plaster it with kisses. My joy was so deep, I cupped my mouth with both hands in the manner of speechless game show winners. All I could say was, “Tina, Tina, Tina,” until some semblance of cognitive function returned and I could patch together a sentence. “Baby, what are you…I mean, I can’t believe…you’re
here
!”

She stepped into my arms and kissed me, then touched my rank beard and lifted my hat off. “Love the look. But you picked a strange time to go fundamentalist.”

“I thought it might be a good disguise. But look at you….”

For the occasion, she was dressed in a pinstriped business suit, with plastic baggies on both feet. Nobody else could make foot-baggies so alluring.

“Tina Tina Tina…,”
I began to babble again. Her name was
me
. Amazing how desire could roil up at the most inappropriate moments.
Especially
at inappropriate moments. I’d almost forgotten the screaming cranial pain, my constant companion since the last time Tina and I had crossed paths. I had to will myself to do more than gawk and babble, to salvage enough rubble from my crumbling psyche to assemble a question, something beyond “How?” or “Why?”

My words, when I was able to form them, came out like butchered haiku translated from some dyslexic Croatian subdialect. “I wanted…Last thing…That white-shit moon…Doll hands…What happened in the minivan?”

“Baby, this is the wrong time to lose your shit,” Tina said. She slapped me across the face and I slapped her back. After that we were both more relaxed.

“My shit has been found,” I told her. “So, did you talk to the rev?”

“What are you talking about?”

We both glanced at Mrs. Zell, then back at each other.

“I’m talking about telling the rev, right before I left, that if he talked to you, to let you know I was going to try and check out Zell’s place.”

Tina rolled her eyes. “I didn’t need to talk to the reverend. After you told me the shit Zell pulled to get you to work, I figured the prick might not pay. So then I figured if I put in a visit to his place, he’d get that I wasn’t the don’t-have-to-pay type.”

“The what?”

By now the blue room had begun to spin. Choppy seas. My vision clouded and I felt such sudden, quivery affection for my ex-wife I wondered if I was having a stroke. I grabbed her and kissed her again, unable to resist the taste of her. I breathed in the scent that gathered in the damp in the back of her neck…. I could have eaten her skin.

Tina sighed like she wanted this but needed that, then pushed me off. “For God’s sake, Manny, have some respect for the fucking dead.”