Deadly Lullaby (20 page)

The sun has just a few minutes' work ahead of it before it sets on another day when I pull into the driveway of my bungalow. Maggie sits ramrod straight on the doorstep of my small front porch with her knees pressed together, hands primly clasped in her lap. She stands when I park behind her black Beemer coupe, slings a little long-strapped purse over her shoulder and does not even try to force a smile. Her apparent mood matches the color of her clothes, all black: strategically ripped jeans, a matching jacket, gold-sequined black tube top, and black spike heels. Her eyes are made up more heavily than usual and spark with anger when they meet mine.

I exit my car and walk to her, hands extended palms up in an apologetic manner.

She says, “An
hour
late, Babe?”

I place my hands on her shoulders and meet resistance when I try to draw her in to me. “I texted you I was going to be late. It was unavoidable, believe me. I had to meet with—”

She whacks my left arm away with the back of her hand. “My
trick
was a slimy
asshole
and you've made me feel cheaper than he did. You made me sit here and wait for you like, like a
street
walker.”

Her “
trick was a slimy asshole”
comment burns my gut more than it should. This is female manipulation, pure and simple, a ploy only a sucker would fall for. The words forming in my head are, “
You are just trying to make me jealous,”
but the words that pour from my mouth are, “Did that fuckin' pervert hurt you? Give me his address, why I will—”

She puts her hands on her hips and leans in to my face: “What do you want me to tell you,
Babe,
that he growled and gnawed on my nipples like a rabid dog 'til they almost bled? That he tried to jam a hot candle up my ass? That he—”

“Enough!” I say, and wheel around to get away from her, my hands clamped over my ears. Somehow I am at the end of the driveway and my mailbox—my next door neighbor's?—is flying through the air from the roundhouse kick I launched it with, letters and advertising flyers trailing behind it like jet exhaust. Thank god my new garbage can is empty, 'cause I grab that motherfucker by the handle and bolo it down the street so hard it is as dented as a fifty-year-old one by the time it bangs against a light pole and comes to rest after rebounding off a parked car.

Amidst all the catcalls and protestations from the neighbors, one in particular stands out:
“¡Cállate de una puta vez!”
somebody yells from down the street.

“Ahh, shut the fuck up yourself, you pencil-dicked
spic
!” I scream in his general direction, spit flying everywhere.

Cuffing the moisture from my mouth, I pace the middle of the street for an undetermined length of time—five seconds, five minutes?—before I make up my mind. “Fine,” I say, partly to myself, mostly to Maggie. “
Fine,
you win.” Working my extra house key from my key ring, I stalk across the yard back to her. I extend the key to her. “Here,
here,
you do not have to work anymore. From now on, just let yourself in. Use it anytime you want, stay with me anytime you want, as long as you want.”

You would think from the shock on her face that the key was a ten-carat diamond engagement ring. She stares at the key, then at me. “Anytime I want.”

“Yes.”

“All night, all the time?”

“If that is your preference, yes.”

Her voice goes soft, her eyes innocent. “Are you sure? I don't want to force you into anything.”

Yeah,
right.

“Yes. I have given it much thought.”

This is not a true statement.

All right,
all right,
I know what you are thinking: Just-released convicts always fall too hard and too fast for the wrong women. But Maggie is no gap-toothed, fat 'n' filthy crack whore. Maggie is a gorgeous, perfectly maintained, five-hundred-dollar-an-hour whore.

There is a difference, goddammit, there just
is.

Maggie throws her arms around my neck. “I'll make this worth it to you,” she says, and mashes a kiss on my mouth. In a blur, we drag each other to the front door locked in an embrace, pausing there just long enough for her to ceremoniously use her key to let us inside. She follows me inside, and before we make it to the living room sofa she spins me around, rips off her jean jacket, smiling, pulls off her tube top, and strips away her jeans as easily as if they were held together by Velcro.

Upon closer inspection, I note they
are
held together by Velcro.

My erection is now so complete my dick fuckin'
aches,
and why wouldn't it? The sight of her finely coiffed blonde bush, her snow-white freckled breasts, her—

“Hey,” I say, “your nipples haven't been gnawed on!”

An
Uh-oh!
expression flies across her face before she drops to her knees and aggressively assaults my belt and pants zipper. Seconds later she is throating me, urgently at first, but gradually becoming more loving, slower, more graceful, more…
reverent
. She keeps it up while I shed my sport coat and shirt, toe off my shoes, and further manages to keep it going while she pulls down my pants and bikini briefs, then frees them from my feet. She is now giving me long fast strokes, the money kind that will soon start my hips bucking involuntarily. To cool the jets propelling me to the stratosphere far too quickly, I say, “Bedroom, baby,
bedroom
…”

The Lorraine question finally arrives when we are in bed basking in the afterglow, the question that became inevitable the instant she gained possession of the key to my house. She lies propped up on an elbow, her lips puffy and her cheeks chaffed from whisker burn, the candlelight flickering off her hair and the left side of her face. She looks into my eyes and says, “How did you and your wife get along?”

I am already lightheaded from the sex and the hint of butterscotch in her hair, from the Chanel No. 5 misted on her neck and shoulders, so this sends me into a full reel. To date we have touched on the subject only briefly, with me explaining that Lorraine disappeared with her lover years ago and has been unheard from since. She never seemed quite satisfied with that explanation, but never pursued it further, and I suspect that others in our circle—probably her madam, who has served many connected guys over the years—may have passed the so-called rumors on to her.

I sit up in bed, moving closer to her, and pull the sheets up to my waist. “There is no short answer to that.”

“Do you mind talking about her?”

“No,” I say, which is not an entirely false statement, and try to form a snapshot of Lorraine in my mind. “She was a unique human specimen, very gorgeous.” I reassure her with a pat on her hip. “No more gorgeous than you, but in a different way—dark hair and eyes, hourglass figure, the classic Sicilian beauty. I am not exaggerating when I say she spent every waking hour making sure she stayed gorgeous. She still considered other women a threat—not only to our marriage, but to the undivided attention she wanted from every other man on earth. Vanity was in her blood, the way her parents taught her a girl should be. They were both off-the-boat Sicilians, her father coming over to New York in the fifties to operate a string of brothels for the Gambinos. She grew up in Howard Beach with the kids of mobsters and grew up tough.” I laugh. “It drove her old man crazy, but she would slice a man with a knife before she would even consider slicing a slab of raw veal—cooking is something she would never do. Her old man did pretty well for himself and sent her to good Catholic schools. Nothing stuck with her except superstition—not the education, just this crazy belief in the supernatural—and she dropped out of high school as soon as she could. Her old man moved out here when she was a teenager to hook up with De Simone, and all she ever wanted to be was gorgeous and charming and a made guy's wife.” I pause. “Not a mother, understand, a wife, and then in name only.” I turn to her. “As soon as she found out she was pregnant with Leo, she told her sister Connie she was going to abort him. Connie told me of Lorraine's plan and I put a halt to it.”

“How did you do that?”

“I think we should leave that one alone.”

She nods and grows silent for a while, imagining the possibilities. “Did you ever tell Leo she wanted to abort him?”

I shake my head. “No, it would only have compounded the problems he and Lorraine already had with each other.”

“She was a bad mother.”

“Not the worst imaginable, but close. I had hoped that having a kid would skin that hard layer away from her, soften her up. Instead he made her worse.” I tell her about the time my son was two, Lorraine off to places unknown, and I found him in his bed, trussed to the headboard at the wrists with neckties. He was nowhere near as distressed as a normal two-year-old should have been, my guess being he had grown accustomed to the routine, but out of necessity he had wet and shit on himself. The only thing he said to me was, “I'm hungry,” and I untied him, cleaned him up, and fed him half a box of
Cap'n Crunch
, the only food in the house. Lorraine finally came home, smelling of aftershave and sex, and when I gave her hell for tying up my son she said, “You're the one who wanted the little bastard;
you
stay home and deal with him.”

I slapped hell out of her and she slapped hell out of me back.

Then we fucked.

“She wasn't much of a wife, either,” I say to Maggie, “except in bed. She wasn't near as good at sex as you”—a smile—“but was consumed by it, craved it all day, every day. Wild sex defined her and our entire marriage.” I tell Maggie about the time two cops caught us fucking on a hillside in Griffith Park lake, and the time we were getting it on in the men's restroom outside the Polo Room at the Beverly Hills Hotel and she caused such a ruckus by screaming and moaning and slapping the side of the stall that the manager called the cops
and
EMS. We had even crazier sexcapades, but I decide against telling Maggie any more, more for my sake than hers. Instead I tell her about Lorraine's excessive alcohol and drug use, which I could not get her to control no matter how hard I tried; and the affairs, mine and Lorraine's, real and imagined, that were just as defining of our marriage as the sex and the drugs and the booze, as were the out-and-out brawls we had when one of us suspected the other of having them. “There were nights we had each been with someone else, and we would come home and something would tip one or the other off to it—at least once, she still had the cum of another man inside her, Jesus—and we would fight like demons, just tear the place up, then we would fuck like demons. It was insane….Lorraine simply could not live without sex, could not bear to go without it, not even for an evening—no matter who she had it with. If you asked me what her epitaph should be, it would be something like that.”

“Something in your voice tells me you still loved her.”

“Loved her? Well, insane over her is maybe a better way to put it.”

“Do you miss her?”

I think about that. “Yes,” I finally say. “I do.”

Maggie puts her arm across my torso and snuggles her head into the crook of my shoulder, apparently satisfied with my answer, because she asks no more questions. This is good, I think, good that our conversation about Lorraine did not have to end with a lie.

Two hours ago, as I sat in my cruiser around the corner from the vacant gas station, I started to get a guilty conscience for feeling so damned good. Some of it had to do with the money my father gave me, money as bloody as any that ever exchanged hands. It was still hard cash, shit, and I put a lid on my guilt after realizing it would be the rare bird indeed who wouldn't fly at least a little high after scoring it. What I couldn't shake was the reason for the rest of my conflicted mood: the old man himself. The only substantive subjects we discussed had to do with the continuing cover-up of Macky's murder and other forms of obstruction of justice, and I was completely at ease talking to him about all of it. He sucked me right into his world, and there's no denying I was as comfortable inhabiting it as he was. My only consolation was that he might have actually told me the truth when he claimed to be going straight. If he was clinging to his old ways, to preserve what little integrity I have left, I'd resolve to avoid him like the Ebola virus. And I probably couldn't pull it off; I'm starting to get comfortable around him, which was yet another source of guilt.

In an effort to ease my conscience, I jumped back in the Khemra case by driving over to Khang's Brentwood home—a real spread, more like a compound, that backed up to the ash-colored mountains of the Westridge-Canyonback Park. The property was protected by a high stucco wall, and the maroon wrought-iron entrance gate was emblazoned with the initials KN in oversized, gold script letters. The long and winding driveway was checkerboarded in shiny gray and maroon pavers, and disappeared into a lush jungle of foliage and trees before it led me to the main house—which was a Spanish Colonial Revival with a maroon tile roof, gray stucco walls, arches, towers, the works. The oval driveway was accented with a fountain so fucking big it could've been transplanted from a public square in Seville, and it was shooting a
fleur-de-lis
pattern of water into the air. Khang's houseman was every bit as cooperative as Khang promised he'd be. He assured me that neither Monique nor Sonita had been there for at least two weeks; he was servile and seemed borderline-challenged developmentally, and I doubted he had the capacity to lie. He let me look around all I wanted and showed me to Sonita's room, left me alone while I tossed it. I found nothing of use there—including no computer, the houseman saying that Sonita had a laptop that disappeared when she did. I questioned the houseman and he told me nothing new, and looked at me like I'd accused his mother of riding the bench in a five-dollar whorehouse when I asked him if Khang made any part of his living illegally.

Driving back into town, I called Abel and he didn't answer. I left him a voicemail summarizing my conversation with Khang and promising to have the day's contact reports in his email by tomorrow morning. I told him I was beat, having been on the case since last night, and that I was going to take the night off unless something came up that couldn't wait until tomorrow morning.

Now the heavy scent of a coming rain thickens the air on my way home on the 10, and makes my head even fuzzier than it would be otherwise. I wasn't sandbagging Abel when I told him I'm beat, and the lingering thought begins to form in my head that I should drive home and crash for the night. I'm craving company, though, of the female variety, having struck out with two women the last two days, Joyce and Eleanor—Jesus, an average of one a day. To prowl effectively, I'll have to buck up.

Music always energizes me, so I jack MP3 earphones in my skull and lose all sense of space and time in Keith Jacobson's saxophone. Keith's sax works its magic on me through his slow and melodic “
Song for Alannah”
and has me in a passable mood halfway into his peppier “
Get Up”
when I pull into my driveway. I have a beer that I pop open in the kitchen and finish in the shower, and have another one that starts in my recliner in the living room. I'm wearing nothing but briefs, and have an ice pack on my eye. The shower, the beer, the ice pack, all have my body relaxed and on the mend. My head is another story. The murky shadows of the people who impacted my life over the last two days haunt the recesses of my mind: my father, Macky, Levitch and Latzo, Oliver, Abel, Terry Lee Lefler, Khang…Jesus, what a full two days, insane days full of twists and turns. After two days like these, it's impossible to make sense of my life in one sitting, so I just quit trying and close my eyes and fall into oblivion….

…I snap awake, and a glance at my watch tells me it's 1820 hours, which leaves plenty of time to get dressed and hit the watering hole I've selected to warm up for the evening—The Back Stop Bar. While the hour-long nap helped, it didn't come close to bringing me back all the way. My body needs a bump, a big one, and I walk into my bedroom and remove a stainless-steel vial of coke taped underneath a dresser drawer. The hunger's been building for a day now, and my body needs this, my head needs this. Chuckling while telling myself this is medicinal, not recreational, I hoover a loving spoonful in each nostril, feeling the initial burn, then the numbing sensation, closing my eyes as the cool fingers massage the folds of my brain. Quality stuff, confirming the old saw that cops always have the best dope.

After dressing in jeans, a formfitting black silk shirt, black sport coat, and black ankle boots, I figure a couple hits of weed and a go-cup of tequila and OJ will send me on the magic carpet over to the Stop in complete style.

I'm right.

For years, Back Stop Bar on Sunset was a cop dive, until the late '90s, when the patrol officer at the hub of the Rampart scandal, Carlos Guerrero, testified that he and his boyz regularly gathered there to distribute payoffs and scheme frame-ups and evidence scams. The feds had Guerrero's ass nailed to the wall for plenty of crimes, so he cut a plea deal in exchange for testimony. The scandal blew wide open when he sang, and at least half of the seventy or so cops he implicated were regulars at the Back Stop Bar. Since then, cops have avoided the place like it was a leper colony—afraid, I guess, that corruption is a contagion that lingers on bar tops and toilet seats.

The Stop being one of my regular hangouts, earlier I tinkered with the idea of bringing the old man by tonight and relating all of its seedy history to him over drinks and burgers. It's the kind of dark gossip he appreciates and would give us something to talk about, something to further thaw the freeze that has locked us up for years. The Stop is just too public a place to hang out with him at this point, though, and I decided to not push my luck with Abel any further than I have to.

I walk through the Back Stop's door to see Sal the bartender busy at work. Sal's a furry little wop with Coke-bottle-bottom glasses and a freaky obsession with Hawaiian shirts, and when he sees me he says, “Detective Crucci!” as if welcoming a celebrity of great note. He sets me up with my usual Corona and shot of
Patrón
and wanders back to the other end of the bar, resuming his conversation with a trio of women. After I have a sip or two of each beverage, Sal returns and leans in to me, rocks his head toward the women and talks so low you'd think he was passing on a state secret. “See those chicks checkin' out your act, my brother? I
know
'em, man, and they're notorious badge bunnies; they especially dig detectives, and I've been talkin' you up.” He winks. “My money says you can have the pick of the litter.”

“Thanks,” I say as I nod and smile at the women, hoisting my tequila to them in a silent toast and receive smiles and blushes in return. They're girls, really, all in their early twenties with that honky-tonk woman magnetism about them that never fails to attract me in a dive bar, especially when I'm buzzed. The dive-bar piece of the equation is in place and I have a nice buzz going, so everything's signaling
Go.
I start my stroll down the bar, say to Sal, “Thanks, Sal, set them up with whatever they're drinking,” and check out the girls, trying to identify the neediest of the lot.