Deadly Lullaby (5 page)

I clench my fists and place them on the table before me for support. “I can
not
believe you're stupid enough to bring her up.”

“You are stupid for even suggesting what happened to her was wrong.”

“Gimme the money
now,
or I'll turn in your ass the instant I walk outta here.”

He shakes his head. “Never a good idea to pass money in public, kid.”

“Give it to me.”

“Fine,” he says, and takes the envelope from his breast pocket and tosses it on top of the untouched basket of tortilla chips.

I snatch the envelope, taking some tortilla chips along with it, gauge the thickness and heft of the package and know for a fact the old man's count is light. “There's not fifty fuckin' K in here. Where's the rest?”

“Not with me.”

I stand as straight as I can and my equilibrium slips off the charts. Can't even feel my scalp when I run my fingers through my hair. “Shit,” I say, and list so completely to my left I have to grab the edge of the table with both hands. My stomach churns hot acid up my esophagus. I swallow, burp. “When're you gonna give it to me?”

Dead silence.

The word “Fuck” tumbles from my mouth before I half stumble, half walk away from my father like the building's on fire.

Fathers and sons have spent worse days together. Consider the day the Menendez brothers used a 12-gauge shotgun to blow the top of their old man's head off. Closer to home, consider the day I snapped the neck of my father's German shepherd and he cornered me in the garage and welted me head to toe with a razor strop. Better yet, consider the day I returned to said garage four years later, the day I found my father working under the belly of his '71 Buick Electra and kicked the jack out from under the front bumper, causing that old metal whale to land full force on his chest cavity.

These thoughts mount a full-scale attack on my psyche as I sit impatiently in my Caddy, drumming my fingers on the wheel while stuck in game traffic on North Mission. The red light at Sunset is within view and Dodger Stadium is to the left of that, but I am not headed to the ball game. It is no fun flying solo to a ball game, especially after your son has slighted you.

I mean, c'mon, put yourself in my position: You take out a hood who has threatened to break your son's legs over a lousy gambling debt. Then you agree to pay said son fifty grand to do nothing but keep his damn mouth shut about it. Now, is a simple “Thank you, old man” too much to expect in return?

Fuckin' kids, man,
Christ.

Maybe Leo will ultimately come around and maybe he will not. Either way, for now I resolve to shove thoughts of him to the recesses of my mind. My goal for the rest of the day is to enjoy life and savor sweet freedom, for tomorrow I may well lose one or the other, and to do these things I must shake off the aftereffects of the hit. Killing another human so up close and personal is an intimate act of such tremendous intensity that the only way to recover from it is to perform the only other act that is similarly intimate and intense—the act that creates life rather than destroys it: sex.

A huge Nissan SUV edges out of my line of sight and there, to my right, standing on the corner of Via Las Vegas, are the women I had planned to meet with Leo after the game.

They readily agreed to meet me early—for a price.

The tall, willowy one is named Maggie, a fair-skinned, green-eyed sweetheart who is over thirty, but passes for twenty, and has hair the color jarred honey becomes when the morning sun dances off it. Maggie's so-called madam is an old friend of mine who goes back to my first days as a made guy with the Balboa Family, and had Maggie waiting for me at the Four Seasons the day I returned home from San Quentin. Maggie has since become like a dose of heroin I must mainline on a daily basis.

The short one with raven hair I have never met. She appears to be even younger than Maggie and is supposedly Asian, though her Jackie O sunglasses make her race difficult to confirm. I specifically ordered the Asian for Leo because the wiseguy grapevine has it that he is drawn to women of exotic races.

Maggie is dressed casually in designer jeans, high heels, and a clingy white tank top, and is obviously braless (I told her our first night together that her smallish tits really turn me on, and she hasn't worn a bra in my presence since). The other woman wears a halter top and denim miniskirt. Though she is short, she has comparatively long legs—thighs to her fucking armpits, as the saying goes—which makes me skeptical of her racial origin. Both women are buff and tanned, and their hair and makeup and nails are tastefully done, and they could be easily mistaken for UCLA girls who have just downed flaming margaritas at El Compadre or belted back cum shots at the Frolic Room, and are waiting for their boyfriends Biff and Lake to pick them up for the game.

They notice me as I turn right onto Via Las Vegas, and both smile and wave as I park by the curb across the street from them.

Maggie says, “Babe!” and trots over. She leans into my open window, throws her arms around my neck, gives me a wet kiss, then noogies my nose with hers. “Oh, Babe,” she says, “I've missed you sooo
much,
” and gazes into my eyes in a way you would describe as “longingly.”

This show of affection may or may not be heartfelt.

One obvious reason for my uncertainty is that she is a working girl and will say and do what needs to be said and done in order to keep living in the manner in which she has become accustomed.

And I would be fine with this.

The thing is, I am beginning to suspect she truly digs me above and beyond our business relationship—is falling in love with me, if you will (or thinks she is)—and is chasing the universal dream of all hookers, the one of landing a financially secure man to rescue her from the carnal drudgeries of her life. It is the subtle things she says and does: the way she expresses concern over my high-calorie diet (we eat one meal together almost every day, usually at landmark joints that serve burgers and steaks, ethnic); the starry-eyed way she stares at me after we have screwed, all flushed and giggly, seemingly surprised at her euphoric postcoital state; and the chatty text messages she sends me 24/7.

Could be, too, I freely admit, that my conceit has overwhelmed my common sense and I have fallen for the oldest act in the world. Maggie is a part-time acting student, after all (or claims to be), and her madam said she specializes in providing the service known as the “GFE,” or “Girlfriend Experience,” meaning she is an expert at pretending she genuinely loves her john.

If she truly desires to elevate our so-called affair beyond business sex, I will be concerned. She is a rare catch and would make a fine companion, at least for a while. My concern is how the life I live would ultimately impact the one I would share with her. The one wife I took got caught up in my world and turned against me. A whore never has.

My curiosity over her true feelings was one reason I did not cancel the supposed Asian I had originally planned for Leo.

The women walk to the other side of the car.

Maggie tells me to sit tight and opens the back door for her friend, slams it shut after her. When Maggie slides into the front passenger seat, the leather seat welcomes her superior ass with a teasing rustle and a soft
phoosh
as she settles in.

“This is Ronni, without an
E,
” Maggie says to me.

I flash her a smile through the rearview. “I am Babe, Ronni,
with
an
E.
Pleasure to meet you,”

Ronni reaches from the backseat to pat my shoulder. “Hi ya, Babe. What's shakin', hunk?”

My gaze hardens. “Hey, you sound like a Jersey girl. You are supposed to be Asian.”

“Maaan, you
dinky dau
or what?” Ronni nudges her Gucci sunglasses down to reveal her eyes. “I'm a hundred percent Asian. Mom's Vietnamese and my old man was a Nip.”

I nod approval.

She smiles, nods back with a wink, and fingers her shades back in place.

Maggie flips down the vanity mirror behind the visor to touch up her lipstick. “Where are we picking up your son?”

Here goes: “There is not going to be my son now. Now it is just us three.”

She halts the lipstick midstroke and slowly turns her head to me. “Just us three,” she says, nothing in her voice.

I knew she would be jealous. I
knew
it.

“Yeah,” I say. “He just called to say he had an emergency to tend to. I did not want to ruin Ronni's plans on such short notice”—a shrug—“so…”

“You didn't even
know
Ronni until a minute ago.” She throws the lipstick into the open purse in her lap, shuts it with a brisk
snap,
and glares straight ahead. “How could you
possibly
be concerned about her plans?”

“I figured she was a friend of yours, and a friend of yours is a friend of mine, right?”

“Me and Maggie just met,” Ronni says from the back, rummaging inside a purse that seems half the size she is, “but I can already tell we're gonna hit it off.” She looks up. “I can tell the same thing about you, too, Babe.” She tilts down her glasses, winks at me again in the rearview. “So, you know, all the pieces fit. I'm cool with a threesome.”

“I
bet
you are,” Maggie says.

Ronni's expression is confused, pained, when she looks up to address Maggie. “What's
that
supposed to mean? I'm a prostitute, for cryin' out loud.”

“Something bothering you?” I say to Maggie, trying with limited success to keep my voice smug-free.

She turns her gaze out her window, and my thought is the window will frost over if she does not avert her eyes from it soon. “You took me by surprise, that's all.”

I pull away from the curb, make a careful U-turn, wait for traffic to clear for my right turn on Mission, and head toward Little Tokyo.

We roll for a while, listening to radio music, before I say, “Now that you have had time to let it sink in, you as cool with a threesome as Ronni is?”

She takes a deep breath, exhales, and finally looks at me. “
If
I do it—and I'm not saying I will—but
if
I do, we'll have to set boundaries,
rules.
”

Ronni is back to rummaging through her purse yet again but looks up to say, “Boundaries? Rules?”

“Yes, boundaries and rules,” Maggie says.

I say, “What kind of boundaries and rules you have in mind?” I have been curious about this very thing myself, having never participated in a threesome before. My lack of experience in this regard is the other reason I did not cancel Leo's date; having just pulled eight years in prison and all, I felt entitled.

Ronni addresses Maggie. “Oh, now I know what you mean. Like, whether I go down on you or you go down on me?” She shrugs. “I dunno, what are you into? I can go either way.”

Oh man,
I think.

“
God,
Ronni,” Maggie says.

“What?”

Maggie crosses her arms in a huff and works her mouth while the wheels grind inside her head. Something finally seems to occur to her. Smiling meanly, she flares her eyes at me then addresses Ronni. “You can do anything to me you want, but you can't lay a finger on Babe unless I say so.
I
have to approve anything you do to him,
in
advance.” Back to me with a look of triumph: “What do you think about
that
?”

I know she wants me to be jealous, but for the life of me cannot see why I should be. “Hey, doll, like I said, this has always been about you.” I reach for her hand.

She smacks it away. “Yeah, yeah,” she says, and turns her head to the backseat. “Ronni, you good with that plan?”

Ronni smiles. “Fine with me, lover,” she says, and begins to unscrew the top from a silver vial.

Maggie turns to me. “And the price is the same for each of us,” she warns, “
no
discounts, not today.”

Damn, I wanted her to offer her usual “good customer discount” just so I could refuse it.

“No problem,” I say, and slow to a stop at the red light at the intersection of Chavez Ravine Place and West College. I take my time reaching into my breast pocket to withdraw a roll of cash. Feeling like Donald Trump, I hand it to Maggie. “There's a little bonus in there for both of you.”

The change in Maggie's demeanor is immediate and manifest. She riffles the bills efficiently, pecks my cheek, and brushes her fingers across my balls, which stokes the beginnings of an impressive hard-on. She leans into the backseat to whisper the amount to Ronni.

Having just finished snorting white powder from the back of her thumb, Ronni presses her finger to her nose while listening to Maggie. She squeals with delight, shouts at the roof, “Babe is numba
one!
” and thrusts her tiny fist upward.

A day of deep sleep would've made me feel half-human. Three fitful hours is all I caught. I felt dazed after waking with a start, my head pounding with a tequila hangover that would drive a less contented alcoholic into rehab, my mental cogs whirring and slipping with thoughts of this morning. Somehow I managed to stumble in and out of the shower, shave without drawing blood, and gulp down a handful of acetaminophen and ibuprofen. Now I'm brushing back my wet hair in the bedroom mirror, thinking how my reflection resembles one of Picasso's gaunt self-portraits.

It occurs to me that exercise and nothing but exercise will pull me together.

After pulling on red running shorts, a plain white T-shirt, and running shoes, I jack MP3 earplugs into my skull, dial up a reggae mix, and walk from my bedroom into the den, both of which are on the lower level of my house. My crib is a three bedroom on Benton Way in Silver Lake that my Aunt Connie, my mother's sister, left me in her will. Me and Connie got very close after she took me into this home when I was a high school freshman. It was about six years after my father went to prison the first time for smuggling dope, and Carlo Bustamonte, my mother's lover of long standing, started beating up on me so much that Connie feared he'd ultimately kill me. Carlo was a bullying, loudmouthed prick who worked muscle for Macky in those days, and he moved in on my mother almost as soon as the old man got sent away. At first, Carlo would pick her up or stop by and she'd say, “Oh, Carlo's just a friend, Leo, just a
friend,
okay?” but before long she dropped all pretense—at least with me. My mother begged me to never mention Carlo's name outside our home, claiming the old thug would have Joe Sacci whack her if he found out. If I'd known then how wiseguys' minds worked, I would've known it was Bustamonte who Joe would've whacked, not Lorraine, and I would've crawled naked across town through shards of broken glass to squeal to Joe about it. It would've saved the old man a lot of trouble when he got out of prison.

Bustamonte was a fuckin' brute with a self-absorbed attitude about being an ex-Navy SEAL. The only thing I'll give him is he's the reason I'm one hell of a street fighter, talking my mother into enrolling me in a martial arts dojo when I was twelve. By the time I was sixteen our backyard sparring went over the top—I mean, hell, he was fucking my mother's eyes out, this I knew, and I was trying to make him pay. One day he broke two of my ribs, blacked an eye, and contused one of my testicles so bad it swelled up as big as a nectarine. For Connie, this was the final straw. When she picked me up at the hospital she said, “That's it, goddammit, you're getting away from that caveman and moving in with me.”

Connie had just given up her long and successful career as a nude entertainer (i.e., “stripper”), and moved into managing a “gentleman's club” just outside Beverly Hills. Her husband—the manager of the club where she last “entertained”—had just run off with a younger, blonde version of Connie and she needed my company, craved it. Every bit as wild as Lorraine, but more organized and more loving, she paid more attention to me, cooked for me, washed my clothes, kept a good house, was an infinitely better caregiver, and got me as drunk and high as I wanted to get whenever I wanted to get there. We developed something resembling love for each other, though it wasn't the kind of love you'd want your kid and his aunt to share. Picture a forty-year-old woman and a sixteen-year-old boy taking bubble baths together, giving each other hot-oil massages, playing with sex toys….Picture—

Well, you get the picture.

The den windows in the back of my house are floor-to-ceiling and wall-to-wall, and frame the LA skyline about five miles in the distance—an iconic view that contributes over half the value of the place. I'm almost oblivious to it as I start off my daily dozen with the usual set of jumping jacks. My house is old, built in the '20s, and Connie had it completely renovated the year before she died. She had the pinewood floors stripped of varnish and refinished, but they're still original. The planks have grown limber, and my heavy footfalls make them creak like crazy, the structure's support beams shaking and rattling the prints on the walls.

I start to break a sweat, and the thought occurs to me that my introduction to exercise came from my father, who had his own daily routine that he picked up from his foster father, Frank East. East was a chop-shop artist who, I learned later, was responsible for connecting him to what ultimately became known as the Sacci crime organization. One of the most enduring childhood memories of my father is watching him pound out his daily exercises in our living room, and at the time it made me think of him as invincible. Little did I know that he used his considerable strength to breaks legs and arms, to crush tracheas and snap necks…

…the thought of which stops me dead in the middle of flying leg lifts.

Covered in a light sheen of sweat, I rest my head between my legs a few seconds, then jump up and take the eight stairs up to my kitchen in two strides. My mobile data terminal (aka MDT, basically a laptop that docks in the console of my cruiser) rests on the stone countertop against the backsplash, and a heavy feeling hits my stomach as I flip open the top and boot the motherfucker up.

With Bob Marley's “
Red Red Wine”
bouncing in my ears, I check my departmental message center and find no new messages—a good thing.

Still, I'm anxious.

Switch applications and scroll through the real-time dispatch entries that went online since I last checked, finding that today's been a busy day in the LA crime scene, but not an unusual one: Burglary and robbery reports, DUIs, assaults, minor drug busts. A couple shootings worthy of note, one involving a robbery in Japantown and another of unknown motivation in Culver City. Found fugitives from justice, prostitution arrests, missing person reports…

Zero squeals from West Covina PD.

As relieved as I've ever been about anything, I mix up an herbal urine-detox solution in a glass of pure cranberry juice to flush the pot from my system (a daily routine I adhere to in case I'm hit with a random drug test), and drink it down. I shower again, dress in worn gray jeans and a black V-neck tee, pull on socks and black Doc Martens street boots, holster up, and grab a black sport coat on my way out the door. My unmarked is in my driveway, and first thing I do after climbing inside is to slide my MDT into its dock on the console and check again to see whether Macky's murder has come to official light.

So far, so good.

Yesterday I promised Nico Wang, my contact in the Sacci organization, that today I'd stop by to see him at the Venetian Social Club, flat guaranteed it. Still hungover despite my workout, still shaky, I almost call Nico to tell him I won't be there today, that I'm feeling a little, uh, out of it—which would've been a monumental understatement. But when you've never broken a promise to meet a friend like Nico before, you don't want to draw undue attention to yourself by not meeting him the day you witness your father strangle a notorious hood until his head nearly burst like a rotten eggplant.

The Venetian Social Club is Joe Sacci's informal headquarters and is on the northern edge of Koreatown on Western Boulevard. The best way to get there at 4:04 in the afternoon is to take the Melrose exit off the 101 freeway. Traffic's not as bad as it usually is this time of day and I'm there in fifteen minutes. A rare curbside space is available in front of the club and I jump on it, get out and walk around the front of the car to the sidewalk, light a cigarette to gather myself. My eyes wander from the sidewalk to the Venetian's entrance, and it occurs to me for maybe the hundredth time that you'd never know from looking at the outside of this joint that it's a club or that an Italian owns it. The façade is plain brick, no signage, a Korean beauty shop sits to one side of it, and a Korean buffet restaurant is on the other.

Just about every business in this 'hood is Korean; none are Italian.

Italians didn't play a big role in populating LA, never settled in any one section with enough numbers to establish their own neighborhood. In the early '50s, John Benedict “The Pope” Balboa, Joe Sacci's predecessor twice removed, moved here from Jersey where he grew up in Ducktown, the Little Italy of Atlantic City. He was homesick and tried to establish this part of town as the Little Italy of LA, buying the building that ultimately became the Venetian and several others farther south on Wilshire. The Pope was an old-school don, an evil motherfucker the East Coast newspapers dubbed the “Jersey Antichrist,” but in the '60s he developed a soft spot in his heart for Koreans when they started pouring into the neighborhood. At first he hired a few to work for him in menial positions, and he admired how hard they worked and how they bowed and scraped to him, especially the women. His businesses at this end of town eventually went to shit from Italian management, and he ended up leasing practically all his properties to Koreans. The cultural revolution the Pope therefore helped effect turned out to be the Koreans', and this part of LA is now known as Koreatown.

While I walk to the club entrance, my thoughts spin in the direction of Nico Wang, a guy you cannot fully understand without first learning the Pope's history. Nico's an Italorean who runs Sacci's loan shark operation and oversees his real estate interests. He's known in his circle as the Pope's bastard grandson, his Sicilian birth father having hooked up with an illegitimate daughter the Pope sired with a Korean lounge singer. Nico's shown me pictures of Mama and Grandma, and he always rightly describes them as
belle ragazze,
loosely translated from Italian as
gorgeous babes.
Once, I asked him how he'd describe them in Korean and he said, “Damn if I know.”

Me and Nico got to know each other when the old man went to prison the first time, Nico helping his mom deliver groceries to our house on a weekly basis, courtesy of Joe Sacci. We found common ground in the fact that neither of us had a father—Nico's was dead (murdered just before Nico was born) and mine might as well have been. Our mothers eventually got into a catfight of some sort—not an unusual occurrence for Lorraine Crucci—and grocery duty fell to another woman much closer to the edge of the Sacci herd than Dottie Wang.

We reunited over a year ago when, not knowing it was Nico, I saw his car weaving across three lanes of traffic and stopped him for suspicion of driving under the influence—
suspicion,
shit, Stevie Wonder could see how flat blasted Nico was. When I discovered it was Nico behind the wheel, I basically said to him, Man, today's your lucky fucking day, and saw to it that he got home safe, and free of all charges. The next day a messenger brought me an envelope stuffed with C-notes, and one thing led to another, then another.

And now, just this morning, yet another…

Nico's the only person in sight when I crash through the Venetian's cramped foyer directly into the bar area, which is wood paneled and plainly appointed in the manner of every neighborhood beer joint I've ever been in. The bar is to the right; in front of the bar are five Formica-topped kitchen tables with wobbly chrome legs and mismatched chairs that make up what a person of low standards would refer to as the dining area. The room's only distinguishing feature hangs high on its far wall: a large, framed poster that depicts J. Edgar Hoover snarling at the camera from behind the sights of a tommy gun,
FREEZE YOU DIRTY RAT!
scrawled at the bottom in blood-red letters.

The old Seeburg jukebox in the corner is playing Clapton's cover of “
I Shot the Sheriff.”

Nico's perched on his usual barstool in the middle of the long leg of the L-shaped bar top, talking on his cellphone and nursing a tall screwdriver. His Korean blood was twice diluted, once by the Pope and again by his Sicilian father, and his face doesn't reveal significant evidence of his Asian genes.

Hell, Nico's face never reveals significant evidence of anything.

The bartender walks from the door behind the bar, an old guy named Sam who's been here forever. Word is that Sam worked the streets years ago but lost his nerve and asked for other duties. I ask him for a Corona and he nods and says, “One of the usual for my man Crooch,” and reaches into the cooler, pops the top, and slides it my way.

“You okay, Sam?” I say as I sit on the stool next to Nico. “You look jumpy.”

“What?” he says, cuffs sweat from his thin mustache, and turns to straighten a towering stack of highball glasses that are already skyscraper straight.

Nico's mumbling into the phone about somebody who skipped their payment yesterday, and my experienced guess is he'll ask me to pay the guy a courtesy call when he hangs up.

My first sip of beer hits the spot so squarely the bottle stays suctioned to my lips 'til it's half gone. This beer and the painkillers I gulped earlier have gangbanged my hangover numb, and I'm starting to feel pretty good.

Nico's
Daily Racing Form
whispers to me from the bar top,
Leo, Leeeo
….

Still talking on the phone, Nico recognizes the hunger in my eyes and reluctantly nods for me to help myself. Nico hates it when people cadge his bets; with me, he tolerates it. There's a nice adrenaline surge at the thought of taking his picks with me to Hollywood Park tonight to invest a little of the dough the old man gave me today. Then there's the counterthought…

…which Nico interrupts by finally clicking off the phone and scribbling on his legal pad, probably writing down a name, an address or two, an amount. His next move should be to rip the note from the pad and slide it to me across the battle-scarred bar top. This he does without giving me as much as a sidelong glance. “Hey, Crooch, twist this hump's balls, uh? He's got a two-week miss workin' that'll turn into three Monday.”

This week I'd planned to tell Nico I was quitting, but this morning I promised the old man I'd wait before announcing it. I seriously doubt I'll lift a finger to collect from this guy and hate to lead Nico on. In light of everything, though, I react to Nico's order the way I always do. “Where's he employed?”