Suicide Hill (6 page)

Lloyd stood up. A red wool suit and a new shorter hairdo. He hadn't been close. “Cops have criminal tendencies. You look wonderful, Jan.”

Janice sighed and let her purse drop to the floor. “No, I don't. I'm forty-two, and I'm putting on weight.”

“I'm forty-two and losing weight.”

“So I can see. So much for the amen—”

Lloyd took two steps forward; Janice one. They embraced hands to shoulders, keeping a space between them. Lloyd broke it off first, so the contact wouldn't make him want more. He took a step backward and said, “You know why I'm here.”

Janice pointed to a Louis XIV sofa. “Yes, of course.” When sat down, she took a chair across from him and said, “I what you want, and I'm glad that you want it, but I don't what
I
want. And I may never know. That's as honest an answer as I can give you.”

Lloyd felt threads of their past unraveling. Not knowing whether to press or retreat, he said, “You've made a good life for yourself here. This pad, your business, the life you've set up for the girls.”

“I also have a lover, Lloyd.”

“Yeah, Roger the on-and-off lodger. How's that going?”

Janice laughed. “You're such a riot when you try to act civilized. I read about you in the L.A. papers a couple of weeks ago. Some man you captured in New Orleans.”

“Some man whose capture I fucked up in New Orleans, some man whose arraignment I almost blew in L.A.”

Janice smoothed the hem of her skirt and leaned forward. “I've never heard you admit to making mistakes before. As a cop, I mean.”

Lloyd leaned back. The sofa creaked against his weight and combined with Janice's words to form an accusation. “I never made them before!”

“Don't shout, I wasn't accusing you of anything. What did the man do?”

The creaking grew; for a split second Lloyd thought he could feel the floor start to tremble. “The
man
? He beat a woman to death during a snuff film. Roger ever take out any scumbags like that?”

Janice started to flush at the cheeks; Lloyd grabbed the arms of the sofa to keep from going to her. “Roger doesn't take out scumbags,” she said. “He doesn't break into my apartment or carry a gun or beat up on people. Lloyd, I'm a middle-aged woman. I was in love with your intensity for a long, long time, but I can't handle it anymore. Maybe it isn't a nice thing to say, but Roger is a comfortable, no-fireworks lover for a middle-aged antique broker who put in nineteen years as wife to a hot-dog cop. Lloyd, do you know what I'm saying?”

The perfect softness of the indictment rang in Lloyd's ears. “I've made amends as best I could,” he said, consciously holding his voice at a whisper. “I've tried to admit the things I did wrong with you and the girls.”

Janice's whisper was softer: “And your admissions were excessive and hurt me. You told me things that you shouldn't ever,
ever
tell any woman that you claim to love.”

“I
do
love you, goddammit!”

“I know. And I love you, and even if I stay with Roger and divorce you and marry him, I'll always love you, and Roger will never own me the way you have. But I'm too tired for the kind of love you have to give.”

Lloyd stood up and walked to the door, averting his eyes from Janice and groping for threads of hope. “The girls? Would you consider how they feel about me?”

“If they were younger, yes. But now they're practically grown up, and I can't let them influence me.”

Lloyd turned around and looked at his wife. “You're not yielding on this an inch, are you?”

“I yielded too long and too much.”

“And you still don't know what you want?”

Janice stared at the light blue Persian carpet she had coveted since the day of her wedding. “Yes … I … still don't know.”

“Then I guess I'll just have to outyield you,” Lloyd said.

4

S
he was gone, and she'd taken everything that could be converted into quick cash with her.

Duane Rice walked through the condo he'd shared with Vandy, keeping a running tab on the missing items and the risks he'd taken to earn them. TV console, state-of-the-art stereo system and four rooms' worth of expensive high-tech furniture—gone. Four walk-in closets full of clothes, three for her, one for him—gone. Paintings that Vandy insisted gave the pad class—gone. The down payment and maintenance costs on a flop that he now couldn't live in—adios, motherfucker. Add on the empty carport in back of the building and total it up: two hundred Class A felonies committed in the jurisdictions of the most trigger-happy police departments in the country. Sold down the river by a worthless—

When he couldn't finish the thought, Rice knew that the game wasn't over. He pissed on the living room carpet and kicked the front door off its hinges. Then he went looking for felony number 201 and the means to get back his woman.

The Pico bus dropped him on Lincoln Avenue, a stone's throw from Venice Ghosttown and the likelihood of a shitload of customized taco wagons without alarm systems. On Lincoln and Ocean Park he spotted a hardware store and went in and boosted a large chisel, rattail file and pair of pliers. Exiting the store, he smiled and looked at his watch: two hours and ten minutes out of the rock and back on the roll.

Rice waited for dusk at a burrito stand on the edge of Ghosttown, drinking coffee and eyeballing the East Venice spectacle of overage hippies, overage hookers, overage low-riders and underage cops trying to look cool. He watched horny businessmen in company cars prowl for poontang, tried to guess which hooker they'd hit on and wondered why he had to love a woman before he could fuck her; he watched an aged love child with an amplifier strapped to his back strum a guitar for chump change and suck on a short dog of T-bird. The scene filled him with disgust, and when twilight hit, he felt his disgust turn to high-octane fuel and walked into Ghosttown.

Stucco walk-back apartment buildings, white wood frame houses spray-painted with gang graffiti, vacant lots covered with garbage. Emaciated dogs looking for someone to bite. The cars either abandoned jig rigs or welfare wagons in mint condition, but nothing exceptional. Rice walked west toward the beach, grateful that the cold weather had the locals indoors, seeing nothing that Louie Calderon would pay more than five bills for out of friendship. He kept walking, and was almost out of Ghosttown when automotive perfection hit him right between the eyes.

It was a '54 Chevy convertible, candy-apple sapphire blue with a canary yellow top, smoked windshield and full continental kit. If the interior was cherry and the engine was in good shape, he was home.

Rice walked up to the driver's-side door and pretended to admire the car while he got out his chisel and pliers. He counted slowly to ten, and when he could feel no suspicion coming down on him, jammed the chisel into the space between the door-lock and chassis and yanked outward. The door snapped open, no alarm went off. Rice saw that the dash was a restored '54 original and felt underneath it for the ignition wires. Pay dirt! He took his pliers and twisted the two wires together. The engine came to life, and he drove the car away.

Two hours later, with the Chevy safely stashed, Rice walked in the door of Louie Calderon's auto body shop and tapped Louie on the shoulder. Louie looked up from the tool kit he was digging through and said, “Duane the Brain! When'd you get out?” Rice ignored the oil-covered hand he offered and placed an arm over Louie's shoulders. “Today.” He looked around and saw two mechanics staring at them. “Let's go up to your office.”

“Business?”

“Business.”

They walked through the shop and up to the office that adjoined the second story of Louie's house. When they were seated across the paper-cluttered desk from each other, Rice said, “Now resting in your hot roller garage out by Suicide Hill is a mint '54 Chevy ragtop. Continental kit, 326 supercharged, full leather tuck and roll, hand-rubbed sapphire blue metal flake paint job. Intact, I'd say it's worth twelve K. Parts, close to ten. The
upholstery
is worth at least two.”

Louie opened the refrigerator next to his desk and pulled out a can of Coors. He popped the top and said, “You're crazy. With your record, you have got to be the primo auto theft suspect in L.A. County. You bought your way out of what? A hundred counts? That kind of shit only happens once. Next time, they fuck you for the ones they got you on
and
the ones you got away with. How'd you get in my garage?”

Rice cracked his knuckles. “I cut a hole in the door with a chisel and unlocked it from the inside. Nobody saw me, and I covered up the hole with some wood I found. And I'm not planning on making a career of it. I just did it for a quick stake.”

“Nice sled, huh?”

“Primo. If you weren't a Mexican, I'd call it a bonaroo taco wagon.”

Louie laughed. “All Chicanos with ambition are honorary Anglos. How much you want?”

“Two grand and a couple of favors.”

“What kind of favors?”

“When I was at fire camp, I heard you had a message service. You know, twenty-four-hour, bootleg number, tap-proof. That true?”

“
Es la verdad.
Two hundred scoots a month, but be cool who you give the number to, I don't want no shitbirds giving me grief at four in the morning. What else you want? Let me guess … Let's see … A car!”

“How'd you guess? I don't care what it looks like, all I want is something with legit registration that runs. Deal?”

Louie walked to the back wall and lifted up a framed
Playboy
centerfold, then twirled the dial of the safe and opened it. He pulled out two bank packets and tossed them to Rice. “Deal. The car is ugly, but it runs. Remember this number: 628-1192. Got it?”

Rice said, “Got it,” and stuck the money in his pocket. “I also heard you were dealing guns.”

Louie's eyes became cold brown slits. “You wanta tell me who told you that?”

“Sure. A guy at the County. Big blond guy on the Quentin chain.”

“Randy Simpson, fat-mouthed motherfucker. Yeah, I've been trying to deal guns, but I can't find no shooters who want my product. I bought these big, heavy-ass army .45 automatics from this strung-out quartermaster lieutenant. He threw in these tranquilizer dart guns, too. A bullshit deal. The shooters want the lightweight Italian pieces, and
nobody
wants the dart guns. I gave my son one of the dart jobs, took the firing pin out so he couldn't hurt himself. Why? You going cowboy, Duane-o?”

Rice shook his head. “I don't know. I heard about a deal, but it might not float. I'll have to check it out.”

“What
are
you gonna do for a living?”

“I … I don't know. Work on making a few scores, then work on Vandy's career. She split, but I—”

Rice stopped when he saw Louie's face cloud over. He shook his head to blot out the sound of Vandy's “But Duane wouldn't want me to,” then said, “What is it? Don't hold back on me.”

Louie drained his beer in one gulp. “I was going to tell you, I was just waiting for the right time. A friend of mine saw Vandy, sometime last week. She was walking out of this outcall service place on the Strip, you know, by the All-American Burger. He said at first he didn't recognize her with all this makeup on, but then he was sure. I'm sorry, man.”

Rice stood up. Louie saw the look in his eyes and said, “Maybe it don't mean that.”

“It means I have to find her,” Rice said. “Go get me my car.”

Duane Rice drove his “new” '69 Pontiac to the east end of the Sunset Strip, hugging the right-hand lane in order to check out the hookers clustered by bus benches, searching for Vandy's aristocratic features wasted by makeup and dope. Every face he saw burned itself into his brain, where it was superimposed against a reflex image of Gordon Meyers and preppy Anne Atwater Vanderlinden. But none of the faces was
her
, and when he saw three solid blocks of massage parlors, fuck pads and outcall services looming in front of him, he gnawed his lips until he tasted blood.

Rice parked in the Ail-American Burger lot and walked slowly west on the south side of Sunset. All the streetwalkers now were black, so he kept his eyes glued to the shabby storefronts and their flashing neon signs. He passed Wet Teenagers Outcall and Soul Sisters Mud Wrestling; New Yokohama Oriental Massage and the 4-H Club—“Hot, Handsome, Horny and Hung.” After a block, the obscenities blurred together so that he couldn't read individual names, and he stared at front doors waiting for
her
to come out.

When he saw that guilty-looking men were the only ones entering and leaving, he started to see red and walked to a curbside bus bench and braced his hands against it in an isometric press. With his eyes closed, he forced himself to think. Finally he remembered the snapshot of Vandy he'd carried through jail. He reached for his wallet and pulled it from its plastic holder, then turned around and again confronted the flashing beacons. Nuclear Nookie Outcall; Wet and Woolly Massage; Satan's House of Sin. This time the words didn't blur. He pulled out a handful of Louie Calderon's twenties and walked through the nearest door. A bored black man behind a desk looked up as he entered and said, “Yeah?”

Rice held the photo of Vandy and a double saw under the man's nose. “Have you seen this woman?”

The man put down his copy of the
Watchtower
, grabbed the twenty and looked at the snapshot. “No, too good-lookin' for this jive place. If you want to pork this kinda chick, I can fix you up with a cut-rate version gives mean head.”

Rice breathed out slowly; the red trapdoor behind his eyes eased shut. “No thanks, I want
her.
Got any ideas?”

The man stuck the twenty in his shirt pocket. “I don't know what places got what quality pussy, but I know this jive place ain't got nothin' but woof-woofs. You just keep walkin' and whippin' out that green, maybe you find her.”