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A
fter returning to Hollywood it took me a week to get my head right. I was still choked by sadness and the memory of sighting of my dead brother’s twin only days before his death. The
Jimmy
voice was a nonstop monologue in my head.
You’re next, asshole. Keep it up! You’re boozing yourself right into the boneyard like your fucking brother.

But the limo business was picking up and the grind of dealing with the minute-to-minute disruptions and concerns of running a busy dispatch office helped to keep my mind off myself. I’d cut out hard liquor completely after the Roseville funeral. A bottle or two of wine a day and a few vikes seemed to be keeping me mellow and allowed me to get my work done. Portia, on orders from New York, was boss and was watching me like a hawk. I had no interest in another blow up. I needed the job if I was to continue my writing.

Koffman’s publicist’s newest brainstorm of a formal
wedding-looking
invitation to our California clients had worked like magic. The filigreed announcement featured a color photo of
Pearl, our gaudy white flagship limo. The phones were ringing and the company was really taking off. We had movie people and wannabe celebrities coming out of the woodwork, courtesy of Dav-Ko’s publicity and advertising blitz.

Our client roster looked impressive: Famous guys like Mick Jagger, Elton John, Rod Stewart, Ringo Starr, Paul Simon. Lots of the major rock bands too. They all wanted to ride in one of our stretches.

When these guys were in L.A. I drove them all myself on the first run to make sure that the account got off to a good start. But after I’d chauffeured Simon the first time he continued to request me as his driver when his manager phoned in for a car. Paul never talked to me or called me by name when I picked him up and he always raised the glass partition when he was in the car, so my repeated selection as his driver always came as a surprise. It took me a few weeks to realize why: Simon is around five feet tall and I am five foot seven, the shortest driver on the staff.

At the crest of our success wave was my boss. He’d splurged on three more different-colored Town Cars to be “stretched” in Mexico and then shipped north to Hollywood.

Portia and I were barely on speaking terms but her snotty English nitpicky personality and her apparent lust for Frank Tropper were beginning to wear on me. Koffman still
loved
her. He found her “very capable,” and her personality “fabulous.” And there was no question that she’d covered my mistakes and appeared to be doing a good job. More than once in dealing with an angry corporate client, I’d lost my temper and one of them had threatened to cancel their business relationship with us. Double-bookings and no shows at pickups are among the problems that beset a busy limo company, and Portia had a
way of smoothing things over with irate celebrities and bailing us out. Groveling to resurrect an annoyed client was hard for me but schmoozy Portia would do whatever it took to stay on good terms with a customer. They’d find a free bottle of champagne and a rose on the back seat on their next booking. Soon, on orders from Koffman, she began keeping her stuff in an office closet and sleeping over several nights a week on a newly installed pullout couch in the chauffeur’s room.

But then the worm turned when slick Frank Tropper was caught with his forked tongue in the cookie jar. He had become our busiest driver and reported to each assignment augmenting his vested blue suit and bow tie with weird accessories that appeared to have caught on with our customers in Hollywood, where appearance is everything. Tropper’d show up wearing dark motorcycle cop shades and black driving gloves and a black, military-looking cap. He called this his hit man uniform. And, to my annoyance, a couple of the other drivers were now dressing the same way.

Over the last few weeks I’d noticed a number of personal phone messages to Frank—excessive phone messages—from our clients, and I’d brought it to Portia’s attention. Then, with several customers, he had returned the car to the garage very late after the end of a run. Frank always had a ready excuse and Ms. Portia seemed to go along with whatever account he came up with to cover his ass. But I was beginning to smell a problem—the possibility of a drug dealer on my staff.

On this last run Frank had called in to the office at eight p.m. to report the end of the assignment, but it was two hours later and the limo was still not in the garage.

I decided that enough was enough.

The main client in question was currently our biggest cash account: Marv Afferman, a fifty-five-year-old Cheviot Hills millionaire with a knack for keeping a limo on call as
many as eighteen hours a day. Afferman was a player and had a swank house at Trancas Beach and liked to shuttle his women back and forth on summer weekends.

Tropper’s hours and the actual in-and-out time for his Afferman gig weren’t jibing. I’d called him in the car on his cell phone. His quick excuse was that Afferman had overpaid him in cash and he’d gone back to return the excess deposit.

When Tropper returned to the garage in Big Red, our maroon stretch, I was waiting in the driveway. Portia, still making excuses for his behavior, followed me outside.

There was Frank decked out in his cop shades and black driving gloves. Before he could do anything to cover his tracks I ordered him out of the car. While he stood by I checked through the limo and found a deck of plastic baggies and three empty gram vials under Frank’s briefcase on the front seat.

He immediately began shucking and jiving, telling me that he’d found the items on the bar console in the back of the car while cleaning it out. I fired the asshole on the spot.

Portia immediately began yammering at me, trying to come to his defense again, but I refused any explanation.

Standing in the driveway she began hissing at me about integrity and personal trust and compassion and that shit. Then she stormed down the street yelling at me for humiliating her in front of an employee and for overriding her judgment. Now I smelled a cover-up and two slimy brown turds.

Frank whined and squirmed and asked for another chance but I’d been in the limo business long enough to recognize that chauffeurs who sell dope to their clients usually continue the practice. I was sure David Koffman would have done the same thing.

That’s when it came out. Tropper chose to take my night dispatcher down with him. It was the jerk’s way of getting even with her for not saving his ass this last time.

According to Frank, Portia’d been showing more than favoritism at Dav-Ko. He said that of course she knew what he was doing, that their friendship and her attraction to him permitted the skinny English girl to administer oral sex once or twice a week along with steering a lot of the cash work at Dav-Ko his way. Bottom line: Portia was a pole smoker and a coconspirator. Nice.

I’d never liked Tropper but the story didn’t sound like a rope-a-dope. It was too damning not to be true.

I made him turn in his cell phone and his credit card and his sets of limo keys, then wordlessly escorted the jerk down the block to where one of his girlfriends was parked and waiting.

“What are you going to do about Portia?” he asked, getting into the new red Mustang convertible.

“Well,” I said, “I don’t think she should run for mayor.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means mind your own fucking business. You’re lucky I don’t have you arrested. Have a nice day, Frank.”

But now I had a choice: I could inform Koffman of Portia’s foolishness and be rid of her once and for all or I could let the matter slide. I knew my boss. His business principles were unwavering. The sex angle aside, if Koffman found out a driver was dealing drugs and she’d been overlooking the behavior it would mean the axe for her too. All I had to do was say the word and she’d be gone.

When the bony English girl returned around midnight I switched the phones to the answering service and sat her down in the dispatch office. She was still pissy and oozing with self-righteousness.

“What’s this stuff about you and Tropper?” I said.

“The truth is you never liked him. That’s the obvious issue here.”

“He was dealing coke, Portia. You allowed the asshole to endanger our business.”

“That’s absurd. Totally preposterous and unjustified. Frank is a superb employee. And you questioning my integrity is an insult that I will not tolerate. I suggest we contact David in New York. I believe he’ll see my point of view in this matter.”

“Frank tells me that you give a decent blowjob; pretty nice tongue technique and all. That’s an interesting trade-off.”

Miss Britannia looked as if she’d just choked on a thick French fry. “I beg your pardon,” she whispered.

“Look, here’s how I see it: I’ve owed you one for my boozing and throat-cutting stuff. Now we’re even. I’m willing to let it go at that. But, for chrissake, no more driver favoritism and looking the other way on dope deals, and no more flirting with the staff. And I’d cut back on the cocksucking in the office if I were you.”

I held out my hand.

Portia was twitching like crazy and chomping away on her nicotine gum, her eyes on the floor. Finally she looked up and nervously shook my hand. “Thank you for understanding,” she whispered.

“No sweat. We’ve all made our share of dumbshit moves now and then.”

I checked my watch. “Hey, it’s after midnight. How about a drink to seal the deal?”

The bony blond girl with the actress face mustered her first smile of the day. “Thank you,” she said. “Perhaps another time.”

It was two a.m. a week or so later. An accident in one of the stretch limos that afternoon, an angry road manager and a
screaming chauffeur, and a few drinks after dinner to level things out had turned a bad day into two pints of Schenley and a badass drunk.

Upstairs in my bedroom, with the house phones patched over to the answering service, I had been phoning sex ads from the
L.A. Weekly
for half an hour. Calling out-call hookers. But because I didn’t have enough cash I’d been turned down, pissed off, and hung up on a half dozen times.

Finally, pretty drunk, and determined to get laid at any price, wearing only my T-shirt, I made my way downstairs.

In the dark office I opened drawers until I located the petty cash box. My plan was to make a loan to myself before I got my check. One of the girls at one of the 800 numbers—who said her name was DeVon—said she was ten minutes away on Fairfax, and if I had two hundred in cash she’d be right over.

My problem was Ms. Portia. I was buzzed enough to forget that she was asleep in the chauffeur’s room on one of her overnighters.

The commotion of me opening and closing the desk drawer then rattling the cash box woke her up. She stood in the dim light from the hall wearing a long, open man’s dress shirt—her giant tits half exposed above the two pole lamps she used for walking.

“I heard a noise. Is everything all right?” she whispered.

“Jesus! I forgot you were here! Sure, everything’s peachy. I’m just in need of a few bucks from the cash box.”

“At two-fifteen in the morning?”

“Exactly. Precisely. At two fifteen a.m. Or twelve seventeen in the afternoon. Or whenever the fuck I want to. I didn’t know I needed your permission?”

“Of course you don’t. I was simply inquiring. I wasn’t asleep anyway. I was reading.”

Brushing passed me she opened the desk drawer, then the cash box, then handed me several fifties that she’d paper-clipped together. “I think that’s three hundred dollars,” she cooed. “I counted it myself this afternoon. Do you need more?”

“Three hundred’s fine.”

“Let me make sure.” She turned on the light.

“Right. Thanks.”

And there she was. Under the fluorescent bulbs I could see she was naked beneath the shirt.

I was staring. Leering. But I didn’t care.

“Please, let me go slip something on,” she whispered, looking away.

“No. I like you the way you are. Just stand there.”

I held up my jug. “How about a nightcap? One drink for the good of the company. It won’t kill you.”

“Actually, I’ve had a bit of wine already…it helps me sleep.”

“C’mon.”

“Very well. But only one.”

I took a hit then passed the bottle to the skinny girl. She downed most of what was left with one gulp.

Screwing Portia on the pull-out bed in the chauffeur’s room was like trying to run backward. Clumsy. Elbows and knees everywhere. And nearly without participation.

Ten minutes after we started, when I couldn’t cum, she sucked me off.

“Well…did you enjoy that?” she asked finally.

I checked my jug. It was empty. “Any liquor in the office?”

“There are two bottles of that inexpensive limo champagne in the fridge. Shall I get one?”

“Get both.”

“I feel quite good. Sex relieves stress, you know.”

“You’re right. So does drinking.”

“Well…I’ll get the champagne.”

“Good idea.”

For the next half hour we lay wordless, sipping fizzy wine, crunched together on the mattress. Two fools connected by the darkness.

T
he next morning I picked up one of our freebie geriatric clients. My dispatch slip read, “J. C. Smart: The Garden of Allah Villas.” Portia had mentioned that Mrs. Smart was eighty-seven years old.

I knew the address on Crescent Heights Boulevard because I’m into Hollywood history and used to drink coffee at Schwab’s drugstore around the corner on Sunset.

The Villas was an elegant retirement community composed of a dozen thirties-vintage single Spanish-style bungalows at the mouth of Laurel Canyon. It had once been Scott Fitzgerald’s old stomping ground.

I was a few minutes early so I parked on Laurel Canyon Boulevard, in front, and read from the new novel by the underground writer Mark SaFranko.

J.C. lived in bungalow #1. The outside of her tiny, white-fenced yard was well manicured, and her small garden was festooned with freshly blooming roses and carnations.

I knocked on the door.

No answer.

I knocked again. Maybe J.C.’d had a heart attack and was floating facedown in her tub, the old girl’s aluminum walker tipped over on the bathroom floor.

Then the door swung open and there she was, dressed to the nines and fully made-up and holding a big, expensive-looking red leather handbag. “You’re late,” she barked.

“Our pickup time is for nine o’clock,” I said. “It’s nine o’clock.”

She was grinning. “I beg to differ. It’s nine-oh-two Greenwich meantime. You might possibly consider resetting your watch.”

“You’re Mrs. Smart, right?”

“You may call me J.C.”

“Well, good morning, ma’am.”

“My proper name is Joyce Childers Smart. I’m a retired English lit teacher and not a bank president. So the diminutive J.C. will do just fine. And you are?”

“Bruno Dante.”

My reply seemed to lighten my client’s expression. “Dante,” she smiled, “as in
La Divina Comedia?

“The same,” I said.

“Ah, the
Comedia.
How appropriate given your propensity for tardiness and embarrassing justifications. Tell me, Mr. Bruno Dante, have you read your namesake’s work?”

“Yeah, I have, but it’s been years,” I said.

“And…”

“Well, it’s okay. Not my favorite piece of literature, but interesting, I guess.”

“Interesting? And not your favorite tidbit of writing from the Middle Ages?
The Divine Comedy
. Really?”

“The car’s in front. Shall we go?”

“Are you, by chance, related to a writer named Jonathan Dante?”

“He was my father.”

J.C. was beaming. “Well, well, well. My husband and I knew Johnny. He was a fine writer. As I recall he died and then all of his books were republished a few years later. He got quite famous.”

“That’s right.”

Mrs. Smart extended her hand and I shook it. “How nice to meet you,” she said. “Nothing replaces good breeding.”

Then my new client leaned past me and glanced at the black stretch limo parked at the curb. “You want to take me—in that?”

“Sure. First-class transportation. You deserve the best, right?”

“Mr. Dante, son of Jonathan Dante, I did not just win second prize in one of those lurid televised game shows. I’m a rich old lady and not a crack dealer. I do not hold with glitz and ostentation. Please tell me, does your firm have other, smaller cars?”

I thought about it for a second. “Only my own car. My Pontiac,” I said. “It’s twelve years old. But it is a four-door.”

“What color is this Pontiac?”

“Color? Light brown. Beige, I guess.”

“That’ll do for next time. I now intend to open an account with your company. I’ll provide my credit card information and whatever else you require.”

“Sorry, I thought you knew. You ride free of charge. Our deal is to drive seniors in the neighborhood to and from their doctor’s appointments at no charge.”

“I pay my own way. I always have.”

“Hey, no problem. You’re the customer.”

“Precisely,” she nodded. “Now wait here a moment. I’ll have to get Tahuti.”

“Tuhootee?”

“T-A-H-U-T-I. My cat. We go everywhere together.”

J.C. closed the door in my face then stepped back inside her bungalow.

Half a minute later she was back, beaming, holding in her arms the fattest monster black cat I had ever seen. “Bruno Dante, meet Tahuti.”

The beast opened its heavy eyes, glanced at me, then closed them again. “We can go now,” J.C. whispered.

On the street I opened the rear limo door for my passenger and her beast. J.C. shuffled toward me up the sidewalk then waved me off. “I’m not an oil sheik nor am I with the State Department, Mr. Dante,” she said. “Tahuti and I ride in the front seat.”

“Whatever you say,” I said back, knowing when I was licked.

After I got in behind the wheel I was about to start the car when J.C., now done situating Tahuti on her lap, leaned toward me. “And Mr. Dante, one more thing,” she chimed, eyeing me coldly in my chauffeur’s cap.

“What would that be?” I said, fearing the worst.

“Please, no cheap thrills.”

It turned out my passenger was also a speed-talker. While I drove I learned that she was an avid reader, that she’d gobbled up every mystery series of novels ever written. Every one. Her unoccupied garage space behind the Villas contained, at her count, thirty-five thousand books. J.C. still read four books a
week and had once spent time as a fiction editor at DeMoore Brothers in downtown L.A. Her poetry and short fiction had been published in anthologies and literary journals and she’d been married to a screenwriter named Arthur Smart who had cashed in years before on the ninth fairway at Riviera golf course. Art once worked at MGM Studios as a contract writer with Jonathan Dante. His big hit was the fifties musical film
A Crowd of Stars,
and as a writer/producer-partner he’d made a fortune from his percentage of the gross and willed the whole bundle to J.C.

My customer went on. She once sat between Charlie Chaplin and Greta Garbo while dining at the Brown Derby with her husband and William Saroyan, after Saroyan had been awarded but declined the Pulitzer Prize. She and Basil Rathbone had been intimate pals. The last blast of spontaneous unsolicited information aimed at me was the strangest: I learned that, for the last thirty years, in her spare time, J. C. Smart had become an expert tarot card reader. Ba-boom.

My customer’s doctor’s appointment was in Santa Monica, half an hour away. Tahuti purred loudly during the whole ride.

The ritzy building had gold-rimmed double-glass doors and a new bright green awning that reached to the street. I parked in front in the handicapped zone.

I got out to help her but before I could hurry around the car J.C. had opened her own door. She and the cat were on the sidewalk.

“I’ll be back in half an hour. No more,” she said. “Where will you be?”

“Right here,” I said. “Waiting.”

J.C. handed me her credit card. “Will this do to open an account with your firm?”

“That’ll be just fine,” I said back.

Twenty minutes later I’d called in J.C.’s information and was waiting, reading the movie reviews in the
L.A. Times,
when my passenger door popped open. She tossed her purse on the seat, then she and Tahuti got in. After situating the cat on her lap she turned to me. “Shall we go?” she said.

“Where to? Back to your bungalow?”

“No, actually. I’ve got a special errand,” she beamed, ten thousand facial wrinkles appearing, then flattening out. “I’m meeting my granddaughter. We’re off to Neiman Marcus in Beverly Hills. Do you know where it is?”

“Ten-four,” I said.

“Tell me, Mr. Dante, what does the recitation of those numbers signify, if anything?”

“Sorry. That’s two-way radio jargon. It means, ‘Okay, I heard you loud and clear.’”

“May I suggest that we continue our conversations absent trucker shorthand?”

“Sure.”

“Thank you.”

I shifted into “D” and began pulling the big stretch out into traffic. “So,” I said, breaking a clumsy silence, making small talk, “how did it go at the doctor’s? Is everything okay?”

J.C. snickered. “Well, I’m dying, Bruno, if you must know. That’s how it went. May I call you Bruno?”

“Sure. But c’mon, you look fine.”

“I am fine. But I have a vertebral-basilar aneurysm. Apparently it’s inoperable and could rupture at any time.”

“You’re smiling?”

“It amuses me because I received that diagnosed eleven years ago and I’m still very much here. Doctors are fools: Pompous, overeducated, self-important, boring, pedantic frauds. I’ve had better luck reading my horoscope in the
Times.”

And then my customer sighed deeply, stroked her fat kitty, and turned toward me. She quoted a guy I knew and admired from my wasted days at college.

“Do you know that one, Mr. Dante?” she asked.

“Believe it or not, I do,” I said. “Tennyson, right?”

“You may go to the head of the class, young man. No homework for you tonight. By the way, I want the side entrance to Neiman’s, please.”

Reaching over, J.C. pulled a magazine out of her purse then held it up. A thick copy of the fashion magazine
Ooh La La.
On the cover was a glossy photograph of a beautiful, tall girl with long black hair in a low-cut white dress. Two huge dogs were sitting at her feet.

“That’s her, my granddaughter,” J.C. said. “I’m meeting
her.”

“That’s your granddaughter?”

“Marcella. Marcella Maria Sorache. I call her by her given name but everyone else, including her mother, my status-obsessed daughter Constance, uses her nickname, Che-Che.
I find it absurd and insulting. The name makes the child sound like a stripper.”

“She’s a very beautiful woman.”

J.C. snorted. “My daughter Constance’s second husband is a Milanese ne’er-do-well named Gianluca. He inherited a good deal of money, but thank God, also excellent genes. Against my protests the child was raised in Italy and schooled in New York and Switzerland.”

“Sounds like she could have done worse.”

“Bruno, kindly do not annoy me. I’m an old lady and I don’t want to burst a blood vessel and breathe my last in this ridiculous automobile.”

Outside Neiman’s side entrance were half a dozen photographers, milling around, waiting for someone—a celebrity or a movie star—to leave. J.C. eyed the group. “Nuts,” she whispered, “I might have expected this. They’re here for Marcella.”

“They are? Are you sure?”

“Clearly you don’t read tabloid newspapers or watch enough television, Bruno.”

“I guess you’re right,” I said. “Help me out.”

“My granddaughter is a model. That should’ve become obvious.”

I smiled at J.C. “Believe it or not I somehow put that together on my own.”

“What you may not yet have
put together
is that Marcella is the spokesperson for a cosmetic line called La Natura. Her face appears on television commercials twenty times a day.

“Oh.”

“And the child just divorced her drug addict husband, Todd. Todd Adamson.”

“The guy everybody calls Terrible Todd? The rock singer?”

“Now you’re current. Apparently, in the last few months, they’ve become quite the tabloid couple.”

“Hey, well now I know. Che-Che and the guitar player everybody calls Terrible Todd. Ooo-eee.”

“I’m pleased to have spared you the
thrill
of reading
Snitch
magazine.”

“Hey, maybe I’ll buy one just for fun.”

J.C. glanced down at the two books on the seat next to me. One novel was by Mark SaFranko and the other by Tony O’Neill. “So, you’re a reader too?”

“I am, believe it or not.”

“Who are these writers? I’m not familiar with either of them.”

“I guess you could say that O’Neill and SaFranko are part of a new wave of fiction writers. I like their stuff.”

“Are you also following in your father’s footsteps? Are you a writer as well?”

“Yes, I am.”

“I shouldn’t be surprised. If James Patterson can have a bestseller I presume that any day now some homeschooled lackwit with fifth-grade credentials will win a Pulitzer and become the new John Steinbeck.”

“I wasn’t homeschooled, J.C.”

“I wasn’t referring to you.”

“That’s good to know.”

“It appears that I will need your help, Bruno. A small favor.”

“Sure,” I said. “Whatever.”

“I’d like you to go inside and tell Marcella that I’m waiting for her here in the car and that there are photographers everywhere as well. Will you do that?”

“Sure. Do you know where she is?”

“I did mention that La Natura is a cosmetic line. Where then would you suppose that the spokesperson for a line of makeup, making a personal appearance, would be in Neiman Marcus?”

Once again I felt my pee-pee being slapped. “At the makeup counter?” I said.

“Bravo, Bruno!”

There was Che-Che surrounded by women and fans and a cable TV camera crew. She was six feet tall and ridiculously beautiful. I made it past the crowd then whispered to her that her grandmother was waiting in the limo at the side entrance and that there were guys with cameras there too. Che-Che smiled and nodded and said she’d be out in a few minutes.

As she left the building I was standing by the rear door of the limo waiting to open it. After signing an autograph or two, when she started to cross the sidewalk, one of the photographers—a guy a foot taller than me wearing an L.A. Lakers cap—jumped in front of her and began clicking. I sidestepped the guy, then body-blocked him in an effort to clear Che-Che’s path. He got even by elbowing me in the stomach. Hard. Then the jerk was right in her face again, snapping away.

I wasn’t hurt but I was mad. It had been a couple of years since I’d clouted anyone and this guy was twice my size and must have assumed he could bully me. Eddie Bunker, the writer, once told me the secret to brawling: Always get in the first punch. This putz had it coming. Eddie would have been proud. A nice surprise left hook to the cheek, à la Bernard Hopkins.