Los Angeles Noir (7 page)
“Had to,” Athena Powers said.
“So you work for that Vegas pig—Paco Santiago?”
“Yeah, Paco bought a little piece of my time. My Bloomingdale’s bill is a bitch.”
“So, you and Paco …?”
“That’s right. He’s like you—a pussy freak. It didn’t take long for him to realize I was irresistible. But this butter deal is big. And when Ernie stole his shit, Paco sent me down here to kill him.”
“So now you stiffin’ him?”
“I’m afraid this cowgirl has outgrown little Paco.”
“Paco is not a forgiving guy,” Cravitz said.
“Believe me, I didn’t plan this. I just came down here to do my job: kill Bennita and that dickhead Ernie, grab the smack, and haul back to Vegas for my payday. I didn’t figure on falling in love with you,” Athena Powers said.
Those deep brown eyes that once seemed so warm, so welcoming, now seemed aflame, cruel.
“Where did the Flo Boyz come in?”
“Just stupid kids,” Athena Powers said. “I laid out a couple of lines of butter, promised them a cut of the profits, and
voilà
, instant killers. Anyway, they were already pissed off with your boy Calzone. When Paco called and told me that he had word from his L.A.P.D. snitches that a broke-down cop named Calzone might be on to me, I realized he had to be stopped. I didn’t have a clue how to find him. That’s where you came in. The Boyz followed you right to his hideaway.” She looked at her watch. “Oh where does the time go? I’ve got to catch my jet.”
“I’m gonna let the girl go,” Cravitz said, and got up. He untied Bennita Bangs and tore off the duct tape.
“Such a gentleman. I wish I didn’t have to kill you both.”
“Bennita too?”
“I could have used her. She’s the prettiest mule on the West Coast. I tried to talk her into double-crossing Ernest, told her we could split the spoils—it was a lie, of course—but she betrayed me … and what did she get for her troubles? Tell him, baby.”
“After she killed Ernie, she beat me with that ugly gun,” Bennita Bangs said, shuddering at the memory.
“And all for this junk?” Cravitz asked, lifting one of the yellow bricks.
“Dope is power. Love will only take you so far,” Athena Powers smiled. Esmeralda sparkled in her steady hand. As she stepped forward, Cravitz burst the brick of butter in his bony hands and dashed its contents into her eyes. She cried out and pulled the trigger.
Esmeralda did not fire.
Cravitz cracked her stiffly across the jaw. Athena Powers dropped like a stone, through the clouds of golden dust.
“Baby, can’t you save me?” Athena said to Cravitz thirty minutes later as two uniforms led her out to the police van.
“Fresh outta love, boo,” Cravitz answered.
Athena kissed him tenderly on the lips. “You’ll never get me outta your mind.”
“
Simone
,” Cravitz said.
“How can you do this to me?”
“It’s a gift,” Cravitz said.
That night Cravitz’s dreams were restless reenactments of the murder scene. He imagined his old friend sleeping peacefully on the bed, Esmeralda nearby, Athena working the murdering minds of the Flo Boyz like marionettes, easing them fretfully through the night. His vow of a good deed had failed.
The following morning, before Yippie’s funeral, Cravitz drove to St. Benedict’s. There was one penitent there, an old woman bending over her rosary before the altar in a frayed frock and shawl. A tattered handbag sat on the pew beside her. The pair prayed in silence. Cravitz ruefully promised St.
Benedict that on his next birthday he’d do better with his good deed.
When he was finished, Cravitz stole quietly near where the old woman kneeled and dropped a $100 bill atop her ragged purse. On his way out, he scribbled the name
Ramon Calzone
onto a Central Detection envelope. In it he placed a tithe of five $1,000 bills and slid it into the collection box.
T
hey caught up with Russell Chen as he drove home from work, running his Lexus off the frontage road by the gravel pits of Irwindale. There were four of them, wearing reflective sunglasses and trucker caps pulled low, and for one terrified moment Chen though they meant to jack the car, kill him, and throw his body on the gray mountains of slag.
When they shoved him into a Lincoln with tinted windows, his sphincter almost let go with relief. Then fear throbbed anew as he considered the endgame. The bleakness of his situation mirrored the landscape: industrial parks rising like toadstools from the desecrated earth. In the rearview mirror, Chen watched his computer chip factory shrink to a snowball panorama, then disappear.
“The captured pigeon trembles with fright,” the man in the front passenger seat said in Chinese. He craned his head and laughed uproariously to see Chen squashed between two thugs wearing cheap ties and wool-blend jackets. One of the thugs held a gun to his ribs.
The laughing man was the boss. For weeks his people had shadowed Chen, watching him kiss his wife and children goodbye each morning, clocking his drive to work. Children were good, they liked that and took note. In the evening they watched it all in reverse as Chen’s car left the parking slot that read,
Reserved for CEO
. The gang had their mole inside too, a low-level employee who kept to himself, ate Hunan takeout each day from the same strip-mall restaurant on Garvey, and gave his fortune cookie away because he already knew the score. The mole had sketched out the factory layout, marking the doors and the alarm system and explaining how many seconds they’d have to disable it. They had the map with them now, singed brown where ash from the mole’s cigarette had fallen as he drew.
Yes, the boss had been patient. And thorough. He knew all about the garden apartment in Arcadia where Chen stashed his mistress and their newborn son. But he’d been surprised to discover the brothel that Chen visited each Friday noon, tucked inside a tract home in South San Gabriel where the scorched lawn fought a losing battle against the sun and polyester lace curtains stayed permanently drawn. He’d dispatched a man to pay the fee and climb the stairs to the rooms where a sad-eyed Mainland teen sat behind every door, brushing her hair and gargling with an industrial bottle of mouthwash she kept next to her Hong Kong magazines, baby wipes, K-Y jelly, and condoms.
An hour later, Mr. Chen would emerge, looking pensive and smoking a cigarette.
Greedy, greedy, the boss said, shaking his head.
On Friday afternoon, he handed out ties, jackets, and machine guns, and the gang, now camouflaged in business attire, set off with military precision. There were fourteen men and four cars in all—one to retrieve Chen, two for the factory, and one for the special errand.
Pulling up to the discreet sign that said only
RIC Corporation
, the men swarmed the entrances, overpowering the $9-per-hour guards and disabling the alarms, which were right where the mole had said. After taking everybody’s cell phones, they herded the workers into a room.
They ignored the offers of purses and wallets. They were after the silicon chips, a negotiable tender akin to diamonds, gold bullion, heroin, C4, and enriched uranium. Lacking serial numbers, chips were untraceable and no law prohibited their flow across borders. Best of all, twenty million dollars’ worth fit neatly into a slim briefcase, with room left over for a passport, airline tickets, and a paperback novel. You could stroll right through security and onto a plane. Within sixteen hours, they’d disappear into the gray market that flourished in the backstreets of Hong Kong’s hi-tech district. Silicon Alley, they called it. Eighteen more hours and the chips would circle the globe, coming to rest in Zurich and Johannesburg and even boomeranging back to California’s Silicon Valley.
Except in this case, the chips weren’t in the locked metal cage where the mole had sworn they’d be. They relayed the news to the boss, who cursed but didn’t despair. This, too, was a contingency he’d planned for. In the black town car inching through rush-hour traffic along Interstate 10, the boss applied the screws to Chen.
“In your office, there is a safe built into the wall,” he said, watching Chen the way a butcher assesses a slab of meat. “We need the combination.”
For emphasis, cold metal nudged further into his ribs.
Chen pressed against his other captor, who shifted and gave off a garlicky body odor. How was it that garlic could savor food so divinely, yet be such an abomination when released through human pores, Chen wondered, as he considered their demands. He was amazed he could hold both thoughts at the same time. What a supple organ the brain was. He hoped he would not lose control of his bowels.
The prodding grew more insistent. Oxygen ebbed out of the car, making his chest tighten. Was this what a heart attack felt like? If he died, they’d never get the combination. It would be a fitting trick from a god he’d stopped believing in five minutes ago. No. He wouldn’t tell them. He’d be ruined, his family turned out. This was his biggest order yet, twenty million dollars’ worth of chips with a bonus for early delivery, and he was days away from completion. He’d gambled everything, even borrowed money from loan sharks to hire more workers. How could success be snatched from him now? Chen would rather die. If he sacrificed himself, his wife could take over. At least his children’s future would be assured—all of them. He had amended his will last month to reflect the birth of a male heir. His mistress Yashi hadn’t believed it until he’d shown her the papers. Chen had even left a generous gift for Mieux Mieux at the brothel.
The butt of a gun came down against his temple so hard he felt his brains slosh inside his skull. His head throbbed and something splashed off his brow. He stuck out his tongue and tasted warm salty liquid. Red tears, he thought. I am crying red tears. He raised a hand to probe the wound, but someone grabbed his arm and pinned it to his side. Other hands tugged at his tie and he felt a ripple as it slid loose. Now his hands were shoved together and the tie, still warm from the heat of his body, was looped around his wrists and tightened.
His wife had given him that tie. It was silk. Some Italian designer whose name he couldn’t pronounce. Now it bound their love together, he thought. What he would do to save his family.
“The combination,” the boss repeated.
Again Chen shook his head, bracing for further blows. He hoped he’d pass out if they hit him again. He knew his life hung by a filament not much thicker than the fiber optics that wrapped his beloved and lucrative circuits.
“Open your eyes,” a voice ordered.
Chen did and beheld a photo of himself, his wife, and the two girls, at a park near their home in San Marino. Chic and perfectly coiffed even on the weekend, Leila wore a quilted pink warm-up suit and clapped her hands as the children rocked on a seesaw. Chen stood off to the side in blue jeans, a white polo shirt, and tasseled loafers, talking into a cell phone. He remembered that day. An unseasonably warm Sunday in February. They’d eaten dim sum at a new place on Valley Boulevard and then, bellies full and relaxed, had given in to the girls’ pleas and taken them to the park.
“We have people inside your house,” the boss said, his voice the sibilant hiss of a snake that Chen had been told lurked in the arroyo, with diamonds on its back and rattles that sang as it struck.
At these words, Chen’s vision constricted to a pinhole, seeing only his children, their fragile limbs, their trusting eyes. He thought of the evil that lay camouflaged, coiled in wait in this hot dry land so unlike the humidity of home. He and Leila had made a safe place for their family in this New World, though Leila had never stopped pining for the southern province of her youth. They had sheltered their children in ways their own lives had not been, growing up under the lamentable excesses of the Cultural Revolution. Chen himself had been guilty of an excess of zeal, but that was all in the past. The American gold rush was on, and so he had emigrated and found a little door when the big one was closed and built up his business and used his skills. It meant long trips to Asia to search out the best price for raw materials, and he missed his family terribly, but such was the sacrifice one made. And after all, hadn’t he met Yashi there, and banished his loneliness in her arms, and brought her back and set her up in Arcadia as his mistress? He’d even bought her a townhouse on Huntington Drive. He hadn’t expected her to be so hot-tempered, his Yashi, with her flashing eyes and ebony hair rippling like a curtain. Yashi with her greedy red mouth fastening upon him, fingertips fluttering like tiny moths against his skin.
The boss gave a buzz-saw laugh. He punched some numbers into a cell phone and gave an order. Then he put the phone on speaker.
“Russell.”
His wife’s quavering voice filled the car.
“They promise that if you do what they say, they won’t …”
her voice choked.
“The children …”
she said hoarsely.
“They’ve got the children.”
There was a scuffling as the phone changed hands.
“Say something to your father,” a male voice demanded.
Then a wet whimper.
“Daddy?”
said six-year-old Pearl.
And when he heard that voice, usually so bossy, now reduced to a high whine of fear, something broke inside of Chen, and he slumped in his seat.
How could he give these people what they wanted? How could he not? Even if his family was saved, all would be lost. He knew his wife—she expected a certain standard of living. A big house. Country club membership. Fancy cars. Ivy League schools for the children. The education they had missed out on, because of the situation at home. Then he heard his daughter’s gasp again, and he knew there was only one solution.
He told them.
The boss turned in his seat and his lips parted in a ghastly smile. Then he made a new call and repeated the sequence of numbers into the phone. In the chip factory, with its modest gray carpet, black lacquer furniture, and framed invoices for ever larger orders, Chen knew that someone was giddily twirling the dial.
He closed his eyes again. Soon they’d have what they wanted and they’d let him go and his family would be safe. He could always start over. What did it matter, balanced against their well-being? These were white-collar criminals. They didn’t like leaving behind bodies, messes.
With a sudden jerk, the car wheeled off the freeway and sped north along Rosemead Boulevard. Up they went, past Bahooka’s, the faux-Polynesian restaurant with the shellacked swordfish on the walls and the sticky red-syrup sauces. He had taken Yashi there, a place few Chinese immigrants were likely to go. Unlike San Marino, which was more than half Chinese now and a village when it came to gossip. They hit the 210 freeway and drove west.
Chen felt a spike of fear. “But you promised,” he said.
“Shut up,” the boss grunted.
“Where are you taking me?” he gasped some time later, as the car swung off the freeway and wound up Angeles Crest Highway into the San Gabriel Mountains. This was where criminals dumped bodies. He read the
Los Angeles Times
enough to know that. It had always given him a broody comfort to know he lived in a hushed and leafy suburb with the lowest crime rate and highest school test scores in all California. He led an orderly, honest life. He took precautions, paid for armed guards, assiduously wooed the big companies like Intel and Pentium. And each time he opened the
Wall Street Journal
and read another headline that said,
Chip Demand Continues to Outpace Supply
, his heart swelled with pride and satisfaction at how he provided for his family. At Yashi, now the mother of his son. A prickle of unease filled him then, something he’d have struggled to put into words in a calm setting, much less now. He recalled Yashi throwing plates, demanding that he divorce his wife. Young passionate Yashi. She’d been acting strange lately, and he’d put it down to the new baby. Cooped up by herself all day in the townhouse. Really, he would have to mollify her with a gift. He thought of his favorite jeweler in the San Gabriel Village Square on Valley and Del Mar, the heart of suburban Chinese immigration. The tiny proprietor, Overseas Chinese from Burma, with his wizened face and appraising eyes. A bracelet of imperial jade, perhaps to mark the birth of a son.
It was dusk when they pushed him out of the car on the mountain road, hands still lassoed together by his designer tie. They pulled his shoes off and hurled them down a ravine, startling some unseen animal that crashed through the undergrowth and was gone.
“We’re sorry, uncle, we need time to get away,” one of the underlings said. Chen sensed a curious undertow to the honorific and wondered if they regretted their mistreatment of him, now that he had given them what they wanted.
Yes, he thought, almost approvingly. They couldn’t have him sounding the alarm too soon. They were smart, meticulous people. They thought of everything.
From the side of the road, he watched the car pull forward, then turn and head back down. It slowed as it drew near him, mute and penitent in the gloaming, his wrists tied before him, hands curved into a begging bowl.
“In the name of God, at least untie me!” he shouted. “I’m no threat to you anymore!”
The car stopped. “He wants us to untie his hands,” came a lazy voice from inside the car.
A pause then, as though the matter was under consideration.
“Stop toying with him and do as he asks,” said the boss, sounding weary. “She was very insistent.”
The first bullet shot through his knotted tie, shredding it into charred fibers that soared upward, then drifted down to the pine-needled ground long after Mr. Chen himself had slumped to rest. Two more slugs tore into his chest. A fourth caught him on the temple. He was long gone by then, dreaming of Mieux Mieux from the brothel, sad forlorn bird from his home province of Fujian, and the tricks he had taught her.