‘Tell her I’ll maybe look at her dentist bills. I’ll pay something toward them.’
‘Hey, that’s great, Dad.’
‘I don’t want you getting together with her and rewriting the accounts, trying to bill me for a Chanel suit or something.’
‘What do you mean?’ Danny said.
‘You know what I mean. Do you think I’ve forgotten you using the graphics program on my office IBM to do that CIA letterhead that scared the bejesus out of old Mr Southgate?’
‘He deserved it. I should have gotten an A in his English class. Everyone said so.’
‘Well, I had to calm him down and stop him from writing to his senator. You promised you’d be sensible in future, so leave it between Betty and her dentist, will you?’
‘She wouldn’t gyp you, Dad.’ He gently eased the gun out of my hand and put it back in the bag and put the bag in a drawer.
‘Well, I’ve known her longer than you have, and I say she might.’ I got up. ‘Leave her address and phone number on my answering machine. Maybe this afternoon?’ He knew where to get hold of her, I was certain of that.
He nodded and came with me to the door. ‘Is our Sunday brunch still on?’ he asked.
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘The Beverly Hilton at noon. I’ll get a reservation.’ I gave him a hug; he was a good kid. ‘You can always come and use your room again,’ I told him. ‘I wouldn’t want rent or anything. I rattle around all alone in that house.’
‘We tried it twice, Dad.’ He bent down to open the door: three deadbolt locks they now had! What kind of neighborhood is that? ‘Could you let me have fifty until the weekend?’
I peeled off a fifty for him. ‘Don’t change to being a business major,’ I said. ‘You’re doing just great in philosophy.’
Before I drove away from Danny’s place I opened the trunk of my Caddie. Hell! There should have been a case of booze there. One of the commissars in Petrovitchgrad had left a message asking me to get some wacky brand of tequila. It was for the welcome party. She was organizing the refreshments, and this poison was apparently Petrovitch’s favorite drink. Miss Huth had worked her way through the yellow pages and found out a Mexican liquor store on Broadway was the only place that stocked it. They were supposed to have sent it around for the janitor to put into my trunk. I should never have trusted her with my Visa card number. Maybe it was a rip-off by the liquor store, or maybe it was the janitor. He was an unreliable bastard. Why hadn’t she double-checked it?
I looked at the empty trunk like the booze would suddenly appear there but it didn’t. The trunk of my lovely old gas-guzzling Caddie convertible remained empty, so there was no alternative to driving back to the office to pick it up. When I got there I swung into the entrance and down the ramp into the basement. Can you imagine it? Ratface was still there, talking with the janitor. What did they find to talk about all that time? I saw a vacant parking place nearer to the elevator than the lousy place they’d assigned to me. Ratface had parked his little car alongside it. It was a Honda Accord: a bumper sticker on it said MY OTHER CAR IS A FIRE ENGINE.
As I pressed the call button for the elevator, the janitor said, ‘If you’re going up for the tequila, I’ve got it right here for you, Mr Murphy. They delivered it this afternoon.’ He kicked the carton at his feet.
‘I figured you would have loaded it into my trunk,’ I said. The residents all paid the guy an extra ten a month in the hope that he would be helpful. Some of them gave him more than that. He made a fortune from us.
‘Ah, my back is playing up again, Mr Murphy,’ he said. ‘My doctor says I should be real careful about lifting and that kind of work.’ He said this slowly and carefully while both of them watched me struggling under the weight of a dozen bottles of tequila. That Mexican hooch was heavy; what do they put into that poison?
I cleared space for it in the trunk and then stood up and got my breath. ‘Maybe you should get a job with the Fire Department,’ I said. ‘You could take it easy there.’ Ratface glared at me. I lifted the crate, put it into my trunk, pulled the lid down, and watched it close automatically. I loved that old Caddie; it was a part of me. The trouble was, the old lady really was dripping oil and leaving a pool of it everywhere I stopped, and the way things were at present I didn’t have time enough to take her to the service station.
‘And that’s a parking place for the disabled,’ called Ratface.
I pretended not to hear him.
2
That was some bash, that party for Petrovitch. The little girl who organized it for Petrovitch Enterprises International was a professional party fixer. I didn’t know there were such jobs, even in Los Angeles. She’d rented the Snake Pit for the whole evening, and that takes money. Alternating with the Portable PCs, who had an album at number three that week, there was a band playing all that corny Hawaiian music. The waitresses were dressed in grass skirts, leis, and flesh-colored bras, and one wall was almost covered with orchids flown in from Hawaii. There were dozens of miniature palm trees standing in huge decorative faience pots. The ceiling was obscured by hundreds of colored balloons; from each one dangled a silver or gold cord, the end supporting an orchid bloom, to make a shimmering ceiling of orchids just above head height.
The place was packed. I had trouble parking my Caddie. I can’t get the old battle wagon into the spaces they paint for lousy little imported compacts. So I left it in a slot marked RESERVED FOR SECURITY and wrote Mr Petrovitch on a slip of paper that I propped behind the windshield. I didn’t want my new boss screaming for his fix of special-brand tequila and me blamed for his deprivation. I heaved it out of the car, put the crate on my shoulder, and staggered across the underground parking garage to where the entrance was located. It was so crowded there were guests talking and drinking and dancing right out there on the concrete. They were waltzing around on the red carpet and through the crushed flowers that had been strewn around, and I had to push my way past them to get inside the place. I gave the crate of tequila to the bar man, got a Powers whisky with soda and ice, and started to circulate. The last thing they needed was more booze. Most of them seemed tanked up to the gills. I was frightened to strike a match in case the air exploded.
‘Mickey Murphy! I saw you were on the guest list.’
The deep, lazy voice came booming from a corpulent individual named Goldie Arnez. He’d been watching two video monitors from cameras trained on the lobby to show the guests as they arrived.
‘What are we tuned to, Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous?’
‘That’s about it,’ he said, taking his eyes from the screen to scrutinize me carefully.
When I first met Goldie he was slim – a movie stuntman, can you imagine? We used to work out together at Gold’s Gym, when there was only one Gold’s Gym and it was on Second Street in Santa Monica. That was where Goldie had acquired his nickname. The stuntwork dwindled as he wrestled with the scales, and the last time I met him he was a 250-pound bail bondsman with a reputation for playing rough with the fugitives he brought in. Now he looked like he’d gone to seed: where he used to have muscles, he had flab, and there were dark rings under his eyes. Maybe I wouldn’t have recognized him, except for that full head of brown wavy hair. He still had his hair – or was it a rug? In this light I couldn’t decide. ‘What are you doing nowadays, Goldie?’
‘You don’t know?’
‘No, I don’t know. Would I be asking you if I knew already?’
‘That’s my Mickey,’ he said. ‘You say good morning to the guy, and you get maimed in a riot.’
‘Cut it out, Goldie.’
‘I’m muscle for Mr Petrovitch.’
‘You’re