Romeo's Fight Read online

  “I guess so.”

  “You guess so?”

  “But it was for my band, man.”

  “Oh, thank goodness. For a second there I thought you were crazy and stupid. I didn’t know you were a legitimate businessman.”

  C Dog pressed his thin lips together.

  I said, “So where is the equipment?”

  He closed his eyes.

  “Don’t tell me,” I said.

  “Okay,” he said.

  “Okay what?” I said.

  “Okay I won’t tell you.”

  “Where’s the money?” I said.

  “You said not to tell you.”

  “He took it all?”

  “No, man, I’m not that stupid. Only half.”

  “Half stupid?”

  “No! I only gave him half the money.”

  “Glad that’s cleared up. Where’s the other half?”

  He took a deep breath. “I have about five thou. It’s in a duffel bag under my place.”

  “If my calculations are correct, you spent over two grand of half of fifteen thousand. On what? Equipment?”

  C Dog Weeks took a bit of the bed sheet between his fingers and twisted it.

  “On what, C?” I said.

  “I had a party for the band.”

  “A two thousand dollar party?”

  “Had to rent a place.”

  “Of course,” I said. “You wouldn’t want to waste that money.”

  I stood. This one was going to take some pacing around. For some reason unknown to me, Carter “C Dog” Weeks was something of a project with me. Maybe if Ira was grilling me I’d confess that it had something to do with saving myself, vicariously.

  But Ira wasn’t here.

  “Is there anything you can sell?” I asked. “Your car?”

  “I can’t sell my car!”

  “And your guitar.”

  “Not my guitar, man!”

  “Do you want your legs broken? Your fingers? How will you play guitar then?”

  And then the animation was gone. C Dog seemed to shrink into his pillow. In another moment he had his head in his hands and wept.

  I’m not normally a hair-tousle guy. But C opened up a small suitcase of sympathy inside me, the one I usually keep clasped shut. So I tousled his hair and said, “I’ll see about getting you out of here.”

  In Artra’s office, she said, “Have a look around. It may be the last time you see it.”

  “What?” I said.

  “Closing up shop,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Rent’s going up. We’re not making it. Budget cuts in Sacramento. We just don’t have the cash flow. We’re coming up twenty K short a month, at least.”

  “Don’t you have some donors?”

  “I can’t keep fundraising,” she said. “There’s too much work to do. Homeless population around here is exploding.”

  “Good weather,” I said.

  “Oh, it’s a lot more than that. Now you can smoke pot without fear. There’s been a thirty percent increase in the homeless in the last six months. Most of them teens or early twenties. They call them marijuana migrants. They get here with no money, no prospects, and the idiotic Board of Supervisors is making sure they all go to the black market.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “They put a ten percent levy on medical and recreational marijuana, supposedly to fund building more homeless shelters. But that’s raised the cost of legal pot, so the black market still exists.”

  “Simple economics,” I said.

  “Stupid politicians,” Artra said.

  Artra Murray had not only given her toil and tears to this place, but also most of her own funds. The world increasingly needs more people like Artra. But it keeps giving us more people like Die Scum.

  Her phone lit up.

  “Have to take this,” she said. “Will you take Carter back to the Cove?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Pick up the rubber donut at the front desk.”

  Driving back to the Cove I told C Dog, “If you ever do anything like this again, and I’m not talking cactus, I’m talking loan sharks, I will personally give you a guitar enema, you got that?”

  “Come on, man.”

  “And you will not use that word around me.”

  “What word?”

  “Man. Only men are allowed to use that word, and you are not a man. You’re a mollusk.”

  “A what?”

  “A sea-dwelling snail, an excretion machine, a non-thinking digestive tract. You’re not a man.”

  “Aw, come on ma … dude.”

  “I’ve invested time in you,” I said. “It’s turning out to be a bad investment.”

  C Dog looked out at the ocean on our right. Even the back of his head looked confused.

  He turned back to me. “Everybody ends up thinking I’m nothin’.”

  “You’re alive,” I said. “That’s a start. And now you’ve got a choice. You can stay dumb and soft, like a mollusk, or you can think and work your way back into being a human. Maybe even a man. What’ll it be?”

  C Dog chewed his lip.

  We were coming up to Paradise Cove Road.

  “Choose before I make the turn,” I said.

  “Okay! Yes! I don’t even know what it means, but yeah.”

  “All right then,” I said. “Tomorrow I’ll go talk to the guy.”

  His eyes were misty as he looked at me. “Truman?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You can’t! He won’t.”

  “I can. He will.”

  In Los Angeles we call our strip malls “plazas.” It lends the places more cachet and hearkens back to California history when fat Dons sunned themselves on their ranchos while exploiting cheap indigenous labor.

  And cheap was the look of this particular plaza in Granada Hills. Like so many of its ilk, it did not have a consistent color scheme. Even the word Plaza in the big street sign had blue for the P and the z. The other letters were some kind of off-white.

  Fittingly, the most prominent of the stores had a gaudy pink awning with a giant 99¢ in the middle. Next to it was a chiropractor, a discount cigarettes shop, a coin-operated laundry, and a realty office with the t missing from its sign. A quick look and you’d think it spelled Really. Which is what I was asking myself at just this moment.

  The place I was looking for was up on the second level, where they had a suite of offices. Yes, here was a hub of high-end businesses. A travel agency with a couple of faded pictures of river cruises taped to the window. A luggage importer. A sound system repair shop.

  And TruSports Memorabilia.

  The door was locked. It was glass and inside I could see a dismal outer area with one glass case. Inside the case were some cards, presumably baseball, to make the place look legit.

  I tapped on the glass.

  A second later a guy who was round and brown, with a black beard and balding head, wearing what had to be a XXX T-shirt with a Philadelphia Eagles logo, came from the back.

  “Appointment only,” he shouted.

  “Can I make an appointment for one minute from now?” I said.

  “You have to call.”

  “I’m calling,” I said. “Through the door.”

  He shook his head.

  “It’s about the money,” I said.

  He shrugged.

  I said, “Tell Truman if he wants his money he needs to talk to me.”

  The guy paused. His forehead wrinkled. Then he reached in his pocket and pulled out some keys. He unlocked the door, opened it a crack.

  “We don’t do business unless you make appointment.” He had a slight accent from the Middle-Eastern stew of languages.

  “Ah, you think I’m an undercover cop,” I said.

  “Why would I think that?” he said.

  “Because you have that look about you.”

  “Look?”

  “Let’s just say you’re not going on the cover of Boys’ Li
fe.” I put my shoulder to the door and knocked him back. I stepped inside, closed the door. After a second of being stunned, the guy came at me with a roundhouse right. I caught his fist in my hand and bent his arm back toward his shoulder. Then I had him down on his knees.

  He said a bad word.

  A guy who looked similar to the fellow on the ground––only in a less rounded shape––appeared from the back. Had to be brothers.

  “Hey,” the new guy said. “What is this?”

  “You Truman?” I said.

  He went back from whence he came. I kept holding his twin on the floor. It was what you would call an embarrassing situation.

  The other guy came back pointing a revolver at me.

  “You don’t want to do that,” I said. “I’m not here to rob you. And you don’t want the cops asking you questions about blood on your floor and all that.”

  “Let him up,” the guy with the gun said.

  “I’m assuming you are Truman,” I said. “You’re the one I want to talk to.”

  “Let him up.”

  “If you promise to play nice,” I said.

  In answer, the guy took a step closer to me with the gun.

  I released my grip and stepped back.

  “Why don’t you get out while you can still walk?” the gun guy said.

  “Do you have a Mo Vaughn rookie card?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “He was my favorite player as a kid. Just wondered if you had one.”

  The first guy was on his feet now, breathing fast and heavy.

  “I am going to give you one chance to say what you want,” the guy with the gun said. “And then you are going to get out.”

  “You want your money, don’t you?”

  “You did not borrow from us,” he said.

  “I represent somebody who did. I’m here for friendly negotiations, nothing else. So why don’t you put the iron away and we sit down and talk about this, since it benefits both of us.”

  “Shoot him,” the other guy said. “Or let me have some of him.”

  “I believe you mean a piece of him,” I said.

  Gun Guy said, “Who you come for?”

  “Weeks,” I said.

  “That guy?” he said with thinly-veiled disgust. “Never should have given him a thing.”

  “But now you’re doing the old shark dance with him,” I said. “You’re scaring the poor kid.”

  “Poor kid! Thinks he’s a player.”

  “He’s trying to get his life together. I know he owes you money, so let’s figure out a way for you to get some of it.”

  “Some of it? How about the whole thing?”

  He still held the gun on me.

  “Let me take him apart,” the gunless guy said.

  “You did not do so good the first time,” Gun Guy said. “All right, come into my office. Milo, you wait out here.”

  Milo did not look like he wanted to wait. As I walked past him I said, “Will you look for that Mo Vaughn rookie card for me?”

  He told me where he wanted to shove the card.

  “Not the best place to display it,” I said.

  The inner office was cramped and messy, with open boxes all around, shelves stuffed with other boxes of various sizes, and the dull white paint job of a state insane asylum. There was a desk with papers all over it and one open KFC box with the remains of a drumstick bone in it.

  “Nice filing system,” I said.

  The guy put his gun in the right-hand drawer of the desk and sat. He didn’t offer me a chair. There was no chair to be offered.

  “You’re Truman?” I said.

  “Where is my money?” he said.

  “Well, first we have to decide on the settlement amount.”

  “The amount is twenty. As of today. Anything else?”

  “That’s not much of a negotiation,” I said.

  “We do not negotiate. How fast do I get my money?”

  “How about five thousand tomorrow?” I said. “Then you forgive the rest of the loan.”

  Truman snorted. He laced his fingers behind his head, leaned back in his chair. The chair squeaked.

  I said, “And also you find me that Mo Vaughn rookie card and I’ll pay you double market value for it. Then we call the whole thing square.”

  “You are a crazy man. What do you think I am running here?”

  “An illegal loan operation,” I said.

  “No,” he said, snapping his hands back in front of him. “We do open business, all right? We don’t hide the ball, all right? This guy, this Weeks, he comes in and he wants money, and he tells us how he is going to pay us back. And then he does not. Meth head.”

  “You know this how?”

  Truman shrugged.

  “Look at it this way, then. A goodwill gesture for someone struggling with an addiction. And also, I won’t make any trouble for you.”

  “You make trouble for me?” He shook his head. “You do not know who you are talking to.”

  “Truman,” I said. “Who was a fine president, by the way.”

  “I am done talking.” He opened the drawer and pulled out the gun again. He held it off to the side. That was the extent of his goodwill gesture.

  “You really think you can operate like this?” I said. “What does that say about the state of the world today?”

  “Get out.”

  “You think you can threaten with a gun? And hurt people you lend money to? You think these are Al Capone days?”

  “Who?”

  “Did you even go to school?”

  He raised the gun. “Don’t come back. I don’t even want to see your shadow.”

  “This has been just about the worst negotiation I have ever been involved in,” I said. “There was one time I tried to talk some Girl Scouts into a discount on cookies, and they wouldn’t budge. You are exactly like those Girl Scouts.”

  I waited until his expression changed. I think he was trying to figure out if I was dangerous or mentally unstable. I like it when people think that way about me.

  Something came at me from the side.

  Most people don’t know you can practice peripheral vision. I used to do that, walking down the streets of New Haven, looking into windows without turning my head. Comes in handy at times like this. For it was Milo giving me the bum’s rush.

  With a simple back step I let physics do most of the work. Milo threw his right but it whizzed past my chin. I stuck my leg out and pushed his back. He face-planted into the carpet.

  “Cut it, Milo!” Truman said.

  Milo groaned.

  “Get out,” Truman said to me.

  “You’re not going to shoot,” I said. “You’re a businessman.”

  He half smiled. I hate half smiles. Commit one way or the other.

  “You tell Weeks he has five days to come up with fifteen,” Truman said. “Then we will talk about the rest. Now get out or I will risk the blood.”

  “I’ll make an appointment next time,” I said.

  Rabbi Ira Rosen, Attorney-at-Law, former Mossad agent, lives in a modest home in the Los Feliz district of L.A. He’s my only friend in the world. We’d met in Nashville, on the street, when a few young punks sought to rob this middle-aged man in a wheelchair. Ira could have broken every one of their bones, but did not, his morality holding him back.

  I did not have such hesitations. When the dust cleared he read me something of a religious riot act. He’s been trying to save my soul ever since. He tries to ply me with tea. As usual I refused it, got a bottle of water from the refrigerator, and returned to Ira’s office, which is also his living room.

  “Man is a ruined experiment,” I said, taking a chair.

  “Why so cheery today?” Ira said. His soft gray hair was full under his familiar yarmulke. And while his girth is not as slim as it once was, his head and hands were every bit as sharp as when he used them to kill terrorists.

  “I find certain people rude,” I said.

  “Oh n
o,” Ira said, which is something he says a lot in my presence.

  “No blood,” I said.

  “I’m not entirely sure I want to hear about it,” Ira said.

  “My friend at the beach, C Dog?”

  “The would-be rock star.”

  “He got in some trouble with a loan shark, and I went to him to try to negotiate a deal.”

  “Now I’m sure I don’t want to hear about it,” Ira said.

  “Then let’s talk about torsos,” I said.

  He raised his eyebrows.

  “What do you know about the Hollywood Hunk murder?”

  “Oh my, there’s a memory flogger,” Ira said. “I happen to know a good deal about it.”

  “Fill me in.”

  “Well, let’s see. As I recall it was a young, good-looking actor who was surgically bisected and gutted, like that Black Dahlia case back in the forties. Also, his head was removed and placed on a rock some yards away from the body. Up near the Hollywood sign. There was a pornographic actor who was a suspect, but was ultimately cleared. And I believe a veterinarian was questioned, too.”

  “Your mind is like a steel trap,” I said.

  “Clean living, my friend. Now what’s this about?”

  “I met up with an old fighting colleague at a party.”

  “Party?”

  “At Zane Donahue’s,” I said.

  Ira shook his head.

  “It’s all right,” I said. “I owe him a favor. Anyway, this guy, Archie Jennison wanted to talk to me and he told me he thinks this vet did it. He found photographs that were supposedly taken by the vet, showing the actor. And then he tells me that the vet was his father.”

  Ira folded his hands on his stomach. His pondering position. “All this sounds rather incredible. What’s he going to do with the photos?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “They were stolen.”

  “And I suppose he wants you to try to find them.”

  I shook my head. “He has other problems. Involving drugs and a girlfriend and dealers.”

  “Then I’m glad you’re not getting involved.”

  “Me, too,” I said. “That’s why I gave him your card.”

  “Michael!”

  “Just in case,” I said. “I don’t think anything will come of it. He’s got a drinking problem and who knows how reliable his brain is?”

  Ira looked at his watch. “I’ve got to make a couple of phone calls. Why don’t you go for a walk?”