Everything but the Squeal (8 page)

“Okay,” I said, “she doesn't know her. Let her go.”

One of his eyebrows arched upward. “Oh, don't worry,” he said. “I'm going to let her go. Paul.”

The fat man stood up and moved behind him. “May I be of service, my dear?” he asked in a courtly fashion.

“Hold her tongue,” the hardcase said.

“A pleasure,” Paul said. He reached two greasy fingers down and took the tip of Junko's tongue between them. A knife materialized in his other hand and came to rest where the hardcase's blade had been a moment before. Junko moaned.

“You and me,” the hardcase said, stepping away from her. “Back to the pinballs.”

“I don't play pinballs,” I said, looking at the fat man's knife against Junko's tongue.

“You're not going to play,” he said. “I am.”

It didn't sound good, but there wasn't any alternative. Junko hadn't swallowed in half a minute.

“He's a cop,” Muhammad said from behind me.

“Yeah,” the hardcase said, “and I'm Cary Grant, you dumb immigrant. After you, jerkoff.”

“You do anything to her,” I said to the fat man, “and I'll come back for you.”

“Careful,” the hardcase said. “You might make his hand shake.” The fat man let loose an explosive chuckle, and one of Junko's hands flew up in a gesture of pure desperation. I headed for the pinballs.

“Against the wall,” the hardcase said, “facing me. Right between the machines.”

I backed up until I felt a cold wall behind me and a pinball machine touching either hip. Even the most optimistic real-estate salesman couldn't have called it anything but a dead end. Cold sweat trickled its way down my sides.

“Hands behind your back,” he said, glancing toward the big window that fronted onto Hollywood Boulevard. I followed his gaze and saw his point. From the street, anyone curious or stupid enough to look in would see the fat man's leather-clad back, between them and Junko, Muhammad polishing glasses, the ice-cream pimp and his lady enjoying their Cokes, and a couple of old friends having a chat between the pinball machines. I put my hands behind my back, feeling the rough texture of the stucco.

He lowered the hand with the knife in it. “Hope you hang left,” he said. Then, very quickly, he stuck me through my jeans with the tip of the knife, just to the right of my fly. I felt a pinpoint of pain and my legs turned to water. “Move and you'll leave with her tongue in your pocket,” he said. “Let's try a little lower.” He stuck me again twice, jabbing the knife in and pulling it out so fast I could barely see it move.

“Three's the charm,” he said, grinning lopsidedly at me. His teeth were rotted and brown; too much cocaine leaches away the calcium. I wished briefly that I were his dental hygienist, going after his tartar with a jackhammer. He must have seen something in my face, because he said, “But four's for fun,” and he stuck me again, deeper this time. I had to fight to remain standing.

“What you're going to do now,” he said, “you're going to go away. And you're not going to come back.
Are
you?” He gave me another little jab, in the hip this time.

“No,” I said. “I'm gone.”

He backed away, folding the knife and slipping it into his pocket. “Then get the fuck out of here, chickenshit,” he said. He thought better of it. “No,” he said, smiling with the half of his mouth that moved, “hold on.”

With a little grunt, he dug deeper into the pockets of his jeans and came out with something that looked like an aqualung for a skin diver from Lilliput, a flat black tanklike affair with a nozzle at the end of it. The whole thing couldn't have been more than five inches long. Well, the anopheles mosquito is even smaller than that.

He did something to the end and a needlelike blue flame flicked its tongue at me. He brought it up under my nose.

“Ever do any welding?” he asked. He was having fun.

“No.” The heat of the flame pricked against my upper lip.

“You ever want to, this'll do the job.” He held it a little closer to my face, and I let out an involuntary moan.

“Knock it off,” advised the fat man. “Or else hold it lower. People can see.”

“Skin melts,” the knife pimp said. “Next time you're back, we'll melt some. Understand?”

I nodded.

He gave me the half-grin again and lowered the flame. “Scram, pussy,” he said.

I passed him as widely as possible, feeling like the Guitar Player being tossed out of the Oki-Burger. When I passed the fat man, he nodded at me, and I said, “You can put the knife away.” I sounded shaky even to me.

“When you're all the way out,” he said.

Muhammad was assiduously stacking cups and saucers as I passed the counter. Neon was blinking on up and down the Boulevard. When I reached the door the fat man stepped to one side and Junko sagged forward, all the way to the table.

“Listen, you guys,” I said with the little bravado I could muster, “I'll see you.”

The hardcase snickered. “Come back,” he said. “We'll have a tongue sandwich.” He got a laugh.

I'd been sitting in Alice for at least five minutes, bleeding through my jeans and waiting for my legs to stop shaking, before I heard again what he'd said to Junko when she'd started to answer my question about Aimee. It hadn't been “Sshh,” as in “Be quiet.” It had been “Tssss,” as in a cigarette being put out in a bucket of water. Or a cigar in someone's navel.

7 - The Red Dog

I 
was half-drunk and more than halfway to disorderly when Hammond and his friend walked into the Red Dog. I'd gone straight to the bathroom, tugged down my pants, and looked at the punctures, little purple-black slits that were already ringed with an angry red. Then I'd scrubbed the blood off my jeans with water and handfuls of paper towels and emerged into the bar looking like someone who couldn't hit the urinal even if the wind were right. I felt spent, incontinent, inadequate, and stupid.

I'd taken most of it out on Peppi, the aggressively lesbian barmaid, hassling her nastily about the quality of the whiskey she was foisting on me. I'd spent the rest of it on scorn for the burned-out cops in the bar who were trying to attain a level of intoxication at which they could shake off the fear and frustration of the day and kid themselves into thinking they were having a good time. Cop groupies, a scary bunch as a whole, were trying to help. I scorned them too. They didn't seem to notice. Scratchy sixties rock-and-roll screeched from the speakers. The Red Dog was a cop bar, and no compact discs were allowed.

Hammond, as usual, was heard before he was seen. I'd run out of scorn and I was gazing morosely at my drink, trying to remember why ice floated, when the patented Hammond Sonic Boom cut through the Buckinghams singing “Kind of a Drag.” “Peppi,” he bellowed, “upgrade that asshole and bring us a couple more. It's on him.” He pulled out the chair opposite me and sat down, smiling around the room at no one in particular. “Jerks,” he said through the smile. “No one above lieutenant. Sit down, Max.”

The man who sat down was a slender little dandy with fine sandy-blond hair, blue eyes, a harpist's spidery hands, an air of permanent melancholy, a very good suit, and an impossibly long, droopy nose. He looked everywhere but at me as he sat, and he dusted the chair before he sank into it. More than anyone else, he reminded me of Leslie Howard as Ashley Wilkes in
Gone
with
the
Wind
. He had the same air of overbred aristocratic uselessness. “Max Bruner,” Hammond said, looking for Peppi. “Simeon Grist.”

Peppi pulled my drink off the table with ill-concealed displeasure and put a new one down in front of me before serving doubles to Hammond and Bruner. When she plunked down Bruner's drink he pushed it toward Hammond with one hand and took Peppi's sleeve with the other. It looked casual except that it was so fast. He hadn't looked at either of them.

“Soda,” he said quietly. “No ice.” She strode back to the bar in her seven-league boots and her incongruous black mesh stockings. Peppi made black mesh look like chicken wire.

“Simeon here wants to know about the kids,” Hammond said, putting the top half of his drink into the past tense. He burped and looked at Bruner expectantly.

Bruner turned flat blue eyes to me. “What's his interest?” he asked softly. So softly, in fact, that I wasn't sure I'd heard him right until Hammond said, “Interest? What do you mean, what's his interest? For Chrissakes, Max, he saw the kid with the belly-button.” Bruner continued to gaze at him. “Which, by the way,” Hammond said, “was earlier. Earlier than the broken neck, I mean. Scar was maybe a week old.”

“He's not a cop,” Bruner said without looking at me. His long thin nose drooped and twitched as he talked. I couldn't take my eyes off it. Hammond cleared his throat explosively and I realized I was staring. Peppi materialized and put a glass of plain bubbly soda in front of Bruner.

“I'm looking for a little girl,” I said. When Bruner figured out that I was through, he took a metallic-foil packet out of the pocket of his immaculately tailored jacket, peeled it back to free a couple of Maalox tablets, and chewed them like they were potato chips.

“That's what I said,” he said in the same quiet voice. “You're not a cop.”

“A1,” I said, “I've had enough today without the Scarlet Pimpernel here. What's with the gorgeous suit, anyway? Working undercover at Bijan?”

Hammond threw back a pound of peanuts. “Shut up, Simeon,” he said, “and, Max, if you don't mind my saying so, you shouldn't get all twisted. With your stomach you got to be careful. I'm telling you, he's okay. Simeon helped me out when they sent me to records.”

“Is that so?” Bruner said neutrally.

“Max has been in records too,” Hammond confided. “He was taken off the street for trying to put a pimp's finger into the fan belt of his squad car.”

I thought about engines. “The fan belt?” I asked. “Didn't the fan get in the way?”

Bruner sat back, distancing himself from the conversation. “Yes,” he said. “It did.”

“If it hadn't, he might not have wound up in records,” Hammond said. “By the time they found the asshole's fingertip they'd developed a bad case of witnesses. And then the eleven-year-old veal chop on the pimp's string decided to side with the pimp.”

“Why’d she do that?” I asked.

“He,” Bruner said.

A pall descended on the table. “Oh,” I said. Bruner took a sip of soda, his eyes on the middle distance. I found myself warming to him. “Why a finger?” I asked, just to fill the silence.

“He'd done something with it I couldn't condone,” Bruner said softly. Hammond's big heavy shoe caught me on the shin, telling me to change the subject. “Max got out of records,” Hammond said, “but the doilies in charge wouldn't put him back on the street. Gave him a desk job in the underage vice task force.”

“She's thirteen,” I said. “From Kansas City. Gone about six weeks. Showed up briefly at the Oki-Burger.” Bruner's blue eyes ignited briefly like a gas flame and then subsided. “She isn't there anymore.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I've been sitting there for the last week.”

“How’d you like it?” he asked.

“I preferred it to rectal cancer,” I said, “but just barely.”

He nodded about a sixteenth of an inch, the biggest reaction I'd provoked yet. “Is she pretty?”

I gave him one of the yearbook pictures. He looked at it and sighed. He sighed periodically. It added to his air of melancholy. “Too pretty,” he said. “Haven't seen her, though.”

“You girls drinking or just talking?” Peppi said, laying a gnarled hand on Hammond's shoulder. “They’s people who'd like this table, you know?”

Hammond guiltily drained his drink and half of Bruner's. I had raised my glass to my lips when I caught Bruner's stare. He was looking up at Peppi, and his face was absolutely expressionless. She tried not to look as though she knew she was being stared at, but gave up after a beat and turned to face him.

“Peppi,” he said in the same hushed voice. “Go away. Don't come back until we call you.”

Two spots of color appeared on Peppi's cheeks. “What's with your friend, Hammond?” she asked, trying for a light touch. “Didn't he get lunch?”

Bruner reached over, lifted Peppi's hand from Hammond's shoulder, and let it drop. “Look at me, Peppi,” Bruner said. She did.

“Are you tuned in?” She nodded. “Good,” Bruner said. “Bring Lieutenant Hammond and his friend another drink and then leave us alone until one of us calls you over. If none of us calls you over, Peppi, stay the fuck behind the bar. If you don't, we're going to strain you through those stockings and use you to make chicken stock.”

Peppi nodded slowly. “What I need,” she said, “guys with balls you couldn't get through a basketball hoop.” Bruner gave her a gentlemanly smile. “Drinks coming up?” he said.

“On the way.” She pivoted and marched to the bar, her legs muscular and bunched in the mesh stockings.

“Caliban in the net,” I said to myself.

“Ah,” Bruner said, ” That's a brave god and bears celestial liquor. I will kneel to him.’ ” He raised his soda to his lips. “Or, in this case, her,” he added.

“ ‘Him’ will do,” Hammond said. He was not noted for his sensitivity toward those who belonged to minority sexual genres.

“ The liquor is not earthly,’ ” I quoted back at Bruner. I took a swallow. “In fact, it's demonic.”

“Poor Caliban,” Bruner sighed. “Running away from a stern father figure and falling into the clutches of a couple of drunks. It happens all the time.”

“What are you guys talking about?” Hammond demanded.

“Who are the monsters?” Bruner asked. “The parents who make the kid run away, the ones who prey on the kid, or the thing the kid becomes?”

“Glad you guys are getting along,” Hammond said, feeling left out.

“The pimps are the worst,” I said, giving vent to my newest grudge.

“They get my vote,” Hammond said.

“They're the easiest ones to hit,” Bruner said, sipping again at his soda. “Who's going to file a complaint because you smacked some pimp? Nobody cares, or if they do, they'd just as soon hand you a bouquet. But who are the pimps? Half the time they're just the kids who were lucky enough to get old enough to get managerial. Being this kind of cop is like raising wolves. You try to protect the young ones from the old ones, and then when the young ones get old, you try to protect the new young ones from the ones you tried to save in the first place. There are times when you just want to let them eat each other.”

“Wolves don't kill their young,” I said.

“Sorry,” Bruner said, sighing again. “It was a metaphor.”

“What's a metaphor?” Hammond said.

“It's like an allegory,” Bruner said as Peppi, acting huffy, put fresh drinks on the table.

“And what's an allegory?” Hammond asked stubbornly. He looked like a man who needed his blood pressure taken.

“A dangerous amphibian,” Bruner said. “Like Caliban.”

“Jesus,” Hammond said, putting his glass down sharply. “Thanks for inviting me to the class reunion. I think I'll find someone who speaks English.” He got up and went to the jukebox, parting the sea of dancers before him like a shark in a school of cod.

“Anyway,” Bruner said, watching him go, “the pimps just fill the vacuum we've created. It's classic capitalism.”

At the jukebox, Hammond fished around in his pockets and pulled out the roll of quarters that he usually saved for wrapping his fist around, opened it, and fed coins into the slot. He punched some buttons. When the machine didn't respond quickly enough, he kicked it.

“What do you mean, they fill the vacuum? Surely they help to create the vacuum in the first place.”

Bruner shrugged his elegantly clad shoulders. “There are always going to be immature men who want immature sex partners,” he said. “Whether they're straight or gay, they're not able to handle another adult. They need someone they can dominate, someone who's physically smaller, someone who makes them feel powerful for a change. Child prostitution is an international trade, like coffee or oil. But we make it worse here. We contribute to the vacuum.”

“How?” I finished my drink and looked for Peppi. Hammond's invariable first choice, the Iron Butterfly's “Inna-Gadda-da-Vida,” pumped through the loudspeakers.

“We're so very progressive,” Bruner said. “Child labor? Unconstitutional. Cruel and unusual punishment. There's no legal work a kid can do without his or her parents' permission. So for a kid who's run away, what's left? Illegal work. And of all the illegal ways for a kid to make a living, none pays better than hustling.” He picked up his soda water and sipped it distastefully, then chewed two more Maalox tab- lets. He had little flecks of yellow foam at the corners of his lips.

“They can't work at McDonald's,” he continued. “They can't even sell their blood. So they wind up with their thumbs out on Santa Monica or Sunset, trying to make enough money to buy some anesthetic.”

“Are most of them abused?” I asked, thinking of the knots of muscle at the corners of Daddy Sorrell’s jaws.

“You mean sexually? Physically? It depends on what you mean by being abused. They almost all come from strict homes. Spare-the-rod-and-spoil-the-child stuff. This will hurt me more than it does you. Their parents say they love them, and they express their love by whaling the tar out of the kid every time the kid does something that isn't covered by the Ten Commandments. When we talk to them, they deny that they ever beat the kid. Just disciplined him for his own good. ‘We spanked him, but we didn't
beat
him.’ ”

Hammond returned and sat down. He looked around the room. “Sure an exciting bunch of people,” he said.

“You spank someone with your hands,” Bruner said. “You beat someone with an object. Lamp cord, coat hanger, wooden spoon. Baseball bat.”

I pushed the little picture of Aimee across at Bruner. “Aimee Sorrell,” I said. “From Kansas City. Will you have your guys keep their eyes open?”

Bruner looked at the photo and chewed at the inside of his mouth. “Sure,” he said, “but you want my guess? If she hasn't showed up at the Oki-Burger, the place she landed first, she's either left L.A. or she's dead.”

“What do you know about this?” I handed him the Polaroid.

He studied it for a moment and then looked up at me, his eyes wearier than Ashley Wilkes's ever had been.

“I think she's dead,” he said.