“And you still don’t know what you want?”
Janice stared at the light blue Persian carpet she had coveted since the day of her wedding. “Yes … I … still don’t know.”
“Then I guess I’ll just have to outyield you,” Lloyd said.
4
She was gone, and she’d taken everything that could be converted into quick cash with her.
Duane Rice walked through the condo he’d shared with Vandy, keeping a running tab on the missing items and the risks he’d taken to earn them. TV console, state-of-the-art stereo system and four rooms’ worth of expensive high-tech furniture—gone. Four walk-in closets full of clothes, three for her, one for him—gone. Paintings that Vandy insisted gave the pad class—gone. The down payment and maintenance costs on a flop that he now couldn’t live in—adios, motherfucker. Add on the empty carport in back of the building and total it up: two hundred Class A felonies committed in the jurisdictions of the most trigger-happy police departments in the country. Sold down the river by a worthless—
When he couldn’t finish the thought, Rice knew that the game wasn’t over. He pissed on the living room carpet and kicked the front door off its hinges. Then he went looking for felony number 201 and the means to get back his woman.
The Pico bus dropped him on Lincoln Avenue, a stone’s throw from Venice Ghosttown and the likelihood of a shitload of customized taco wagons without alarm systems. On Lincoln and Ocean Park he spotted a hardware store and went in and boosted a large chisel, rattail file and pair of pliers. Exiting the store, he smiled and looked at his watch: two hours and ten minutes out of the rock and back on the roll.
Rice waited for dusk at a burrito stand on the edge of Ghosttown, drinking coffee and eyeballing the East Venice spectacle of overage hippies, overage hookers, overage low-riders and underage cops trying to look cool. He watched horny businessmen in company cars prowl for poontang, tried to guess which hooker they’d hit on and wondered why he had to love a woman before he could fuck her; he watched an aged love child with an amplifier strapped to his back strum a guitar for chump change and suck on a short dog of T-bird. The scene filled him with disgust, and when twilight hit, he felt his disgust turn to high-octane fuel and walked into Ghosttown.
Stucco walk-back apartment buildings, white wood frame houses spray-painted with gang graffiti, vacant lots covered with garbage. Emaciated dogs looking for someone to bite. The cars either abandoned jig rigs or welfare wagons in mint condition, but nothing exceptional. Rice walked west toward the beach, grateful that the cold weather had the locals indoors, seeing nothing that Louie Calderon would pay more than five bills for out of friendship. He kept walking, and was almost out of Ghosttown when automotive perfection hit him right between the eyes.
It was a ’54 Chevy convertible, candy-apple sapphire blue with a canary yellow top, smoked windshield and full continental kit. If the interior was cherry and the engine was in good shape, he was home.
Rice walked up to the driver’s-side door and pretended to admire the car while he got out his chisel and pliers. He counted slowly to ten, and when he could feel no suspicion coming down on him, jammed the chisel into the space between the door-lock and chassis and yanked outward. The door snapped open, no alarm went off. Rice saw that the dash was a restored ’54 original and felt underneath it for the ignition wires. Pay dirt! He took his pliers and twisted the two wires together. The engine came to life, and he drove the car away.
Two hours later, with the Chevy safely stashed, Rice walked in the door of Louie Calderon’s auto body shop and tapped Louie on the shoulder. Louie looked up from the tool kit he was digging through and said, “Duane the Brain! When’d you get out?” Rice ignored the oil-covered hand he offered and placed an arm over Louie’s shoulders. “Today.” He looked around and saw two mechanics staring at them. “Let’s go up to your office.”
“Business?”
“Business.”
They walked through the shop and up to the office that adjoined the second story of Louie’s house. When they were seated across the paper-cluttered desk from each other, Rice said, “Now resting in your hot roller garage out by Suicide Hill is a mint ’54 Chevy ragtop. Continental kit, 326 supercharged, full leather tuck and roll, hand-rubbed sapphire blue metal flake paint job. Intact, I’d say it’s worth twelve K. Parts, close to ten. The upholstery is worth at least two.”
Louie opened the refrigerator next to his desk and pulled out a can of Coors. He popped the top and said, “You’re crazy. With your record, you have got to be the primo auto theft suspect in L.A. County. You bought your way out of what? A hundred counts? That kind of shit only happens once. Next time, they fuck you for the ones they got you on and the ones you got away with. How’d you get in my garage?”
Rice cracked his knuckles. “I cut a hole in the door with a chisel and unlocked it from the inside. Nobody saw me, and I covered up the hole with some wood I found. And I’m not planning on making a career of it. I just did it for a quick stake.”
“Nice sled, huh?”
“Primo. If you weren’t a Mexican, I’d call it a bonaroo taco wagon.”
Louie laughed. “All Chicanos with ambition are honorary Anglos. How much you want?”
“Two grand and a couple of favors.”
“What kind of favors?”
“When I was at fire camp, I heard you had a message service. You know, twenty-four-hour, bootleg number, tap-proof. That true?”
“Es la verdad. Two hundred scoots a month, but be cool who you give the number to, I don’t want no shitbirds giving me grief at four in the morning. What else you want? Let me guess … Let’s see … A car!”
“How’d you guess? I don’t care what it looks like, all I want is something with legit registration that runs. Deal?”
Louie walked to the back wall and lifted up a framed Playboy centerfold, then twirled the dial of the safe and opened it. He pulled out two bank packets and tossed them to Rice. “Deal. The car is ugly, but it runs. Remember this number: 628-1192. Got it?”
Rice said, “Got it,” and stuck the money in his pocket. “I also heard you were dealing guns.”
Louie’s eyes became cold brown slits. “You wanta tell me who told you that?”
“Sure. A guy at the County. Big blond guy on the Quentin chain.”
“Randy Simpson, fat-mouthed motherfucker. Yeah, I’ve been trying to deal guns, but I can’t find no shooters who want my product. I bought these big, heavy-ass army .45 automatics from this strung-out quartermaster lieutenant. He threw in these tranquilizer dart guns, too. A bullshit deal. The shooters want the lightweight Italian pieces, and nobody wants the dart guns. I gave my son one of the dart jobs, took the firing pin out so he couldn’t hurt himself. Why? You going cowboy, Duane-o?”
Rice shook his head. “I don’t know. I heard about a deal, but it might not float. I’ll have to check it out.”
“What are you gonna do for a living?”
“I … I don’t know. Work on making a few scores, then work on Vandy’s career. She split, but I—”
Rice stopped when he saw Louie’s face cloud over. He shook his head to blot out the sound of Vandy’s “But Duane wouldn’t want me to,” then said, “What is it? Don’t hold back on me.”
Louie drained his beer in one gulp. “I was going to tell you, I was just waiting for the right time. A friend of mine saw Vandy, sometime last week. She was walking out of this outcall service place on the Strip, you know, by the All-American Burger. He said at first he didn’t recognize her with all this makeup on, but then he was sure. I’m sorry, man.”
Rice stood up. Louie saw the look in his eyes and said, “Maybe it don’t mean that.”
“It means I have to find her,” Rice said. “Go get me my car.”
Duane Rice drove his “new” ’69 Pontiac to the east end of the Sunset Strip, hugging the right-hand lane in order to check out the hookers clustered by bus benches, searching for Vandy’s aristocratic features wasted by makeup and dope.
Every face he saw burned itself into his brain, where it was superimposed against a reflex image of Gordon Meyers and preppy Anne Atwater Vanderlinden. But none of the faces was her, and when he saw three solid blocks of massage parlors, fuck pads and outcall services looming in front of him, he gnawed his lips until he tasted blood.
Rice parked in the Ail-American Burger lot and walked slowly west on the south side of Sunset. All the streetwalkers now were black, so he kept his eyes glued to the shabby storefronts and their flashing neon signs. He passed Wet Teenagers Outcall and Soul Sisters Mud Wrestling; New Yokohama Oriental Massage and the 4-H Club—“Hot, Handsome, Horny and Hung.” After a block, the obscenities blurred together so that he couldn’t read individual names, and he stared at front doors waiting for her to come out.
When he saw that guilty-looking men were the only ones entering and leaving, he started to see red and walked to a curbside bus bench and braced his hands against it in an isometric press. With his eyes closed, he forced himself to think. Finally he remembered the snapshot of Vandy he’d carried through jail. He reached for his wallet and pulled it from its plastic holder, then turned around and again confronted the flashing beacons. Nuclear Nookie Outcall; Wet and Woolly Massage; Satan’s House of Sin. This time the words didn’t blur. He pulled out a handful of Louie Calderon’s twenties and walked through the nearest door. A bored black man behind a desk looked up as he entered and said, “Yeah?”
Rice held the photo of Vandy and a double saw under the man’s nose. “Have you seen this woman?”
The man put down his copy of the Watchtower, grabbed the twenty and looked at the snapshot. “No, too good-lookin’ for this jive place. If you want to pork this kinda chick, I can fix you up with a cut-rate version gives mean head.”
Rice breathed out slowly; the red trapdoor behind his eyes eased shut. “No thanks, I want her. Got any ideas?”
The man stuck the twenty in his shirt pocket. “I don’t know what places got what quality pussy, but I know this jive place ain’t got nothin’ but woof-woofs. You just keep walkin’ and whippin’ out that green, maybe you find her.”
Rice took the man’s advice and walked east. He showed the snapshot to every doorman and bouncer at every sex joint on the row, handing out over three hundred dollars, getting nothing but negative head shakes and a consensus that Vandy was too foxy to be doing either Strip outcall or street hooking. After four straight hours of breathing nothing but sleaze, he got coffee at the All-American Burger and sat down at an outside table to think.
He came up with facts that he trusted. Louie and his friends were solid; if one of them saw Vandy out here in whore makeup, it was probably true—without him to look after her she was a stone self-destructor. None of the massage and outcall slimebags he’d talked to had I.D.’d her—and it was to their financial advantage to do so. Louie’s friend had seen her sometime last week, probably right after she visited him and cleaned out the pad. It all felt right.
Rice looked at his watch: 3:30, the whores thinning out as the traffic on Sunset dwindled. The only hookers still working were black, and unlikely to have info on Vandy—she avoided all jigs like the plague. Draining his coffee, he stood up and started for the car. Then he saw an incredible redhead walk over to the curb and stick out her thumb.
Rice moved fast, running to his car and pulling up in front of the girl, cutting off a slow-trawling Mercedes. The redhead looked in the passenger window distastefully, then back at the status car. Rice yelled, “A c-note for ten minutes,” and the girl hesitated, then opened the door and got in. Rice handed her a wad of twenties as the driver of the Mercedes accelerated and flipped them the bird.
The redhead stuffed the money into her purse and poked a finger at the tufts of foam sticking out of the seat. “This car sucks. Can we go to a motel or something?”
Rice turned around the corner, then pulled over to the curb and flicked on the dashboard light. “I don’t want to get laid, I just had a feeling you could help me find this woman.” He handed her the photo of Vandy and watched as she examined it, then shook her head.
“No, never. Your chick?”
“That’s right.”
“She a working girl?”
Rice swallowed a wave of anger. “Yeah. I’ve heard she’s been doing outcall around here, but nobody recognizes her, and I believe them.”
The redhead scrutinized the snapshot, then said, “She’s real cute. Too classy for most of the places around here.”
“What do you mean, ‘most’?”
“Well, there’s this high-line place a couple of blocks from here, off the Strip. They run only really foxy chicks, to these movies and rock big shots. I worked out of there for a week or so, then I quit. Too much of a drug scene. I’m into health food.”
Rice felt his skin prickle. “What’s the name of the place?”
“Silver Foxes. No ‘outcall,’ just ‘Silver Foxes.’”
“What’s the address?”
“Gardner, just off the Strip. Lavender building, you can’t miss it. But they only send chicks out on referrals, you know, it’s real exclusive.”
“Phone number?”
The girl hesitated. Rice dug in his pocket for more money, then handed it to her. “Tell me, goddammit.”
She grabbed the door handle. “You won’t tell where you got it?”
“No.”
“658-4371.” The girl darted out of the car. Rice watched her counting her money as she walked back to the Strip.
It took him less than ten minutes to find the lavender apartment building. It stood just south of Sunset in the glow of a streetlamp, a plain Spanish-style four-flat with no lights burning.
Rice parked and walked across the lawn to the cement porch. Four doors were recessed in the entranceway, illuminated only by mailbox lights. He squinted and saw that three of the apartments belonged to individuals, while the last box was embossed with a raised metal insignia of a fox in a mink coat winking seductively. There was a buzzer beneath the words “Silver Foxes.” Rice pressed it three times and heard its echo. No lights went on and no sounds of movement answered the buzzing. He reached into the mailbox and found it empty, then stood back on the lawn so he could eyeball the whole building. Still nothing but darkness and silence.
Rice drove to a pay phone and dialed 658-4371. A recorded woman’s voice answered: “Hi, this is Silver Foxes, foxes of every persuasion for every occasion. If you’re already registered with us, leave your code number and let us know what you want; we’ll get back to you soon. If you’re a new friend, let us know who you know, and give us their code numbers and your phone number. We’ll get in touch soon.”
There was an interval of soft disco music, then a beep. Rice slammed down the receiver and drove back to outcall row.
Only the dregs of the hookers were still out, garishly made-up junkies who stepped into the street and lifted their skirts as cars passed by. Rice sat at a table inside the All-American Burger and drank coffee while he scanned women on both sides of Sunset. Every face he glimpsed looked ravaged; every body bloated or emaciated. Toward dawn, the neon lights on the outcall offices and massage parlors started going off. When street-sweeping machines pushed the few remaining hookers back onto the sidewalk, he took it as his cue to leave and check out business.
Rice drove across Laurel Canyon, coming down into the Valley just as full daylight hit. When he reached Ventura Boulevard, he recalled verbatim the facts he’d heard through the ventilator shaft: “Kling and Valley View, pink apartment house”; “Christine something, Studio City, house on the corner of Hildebrand and Gage.” Truth, half-truth or bullshit?
At Hildebrand and Gage he got his first validation. The mailbox of the northeast corner house was tagged with the name “Christine Confrey.” That fact gave him a feeling of destiny that built up harder and harder as he drove west to Encino. When he got to Kling and Valley View and saw a faded pink apartment house on the corner, with an out-of-place Cadillac parked in front, the feeli
ng exploded. Rice kept it at a low roar by calculating odds: five to one that the info was correct, making the heists possible.
Checking the mailboxes of the six-unit building, he saw that only one single woman lived there—Sally Issler in #2. He found a door designated 2 on the ground-floor street side, with a high hedge fronting the apartment’s large picture window. Rice squatted behind the hedge, waiting for the owner of the Caddy to cut the odds down to zero.
He waited an hour and a half before a door opened and two voices, one male, one female, gave him pay dirt:
“My wife gets back tomorrow. No overnighters for a while.”
“Matinees? You know, like the song—‘Afternoon Delight’?”
The man laughed. “We can hit Hot Tub Fever during your lunch hour.”
“Sounds good, but I read in Cosmo that those hot tub places all have herpes germs in the water.”
“Don’t believe everything you read. Call me at the bank?”
“Yeah.”
Rice heard sounds of kissing, followed by a door slamming. He counted to ten, then stood up and peered around the hedge. The Cadillac was just taking off. He ran for his car and pursued it.
It led him to a Bank of America branch on Woodman and Ventura. Rice sized up the man who got out. Tall, broad-hipped, sunken-chested. A wimp whose sex appeal was his money.
The man walked up to the front doors. Rice followed from a safe distance, passing him as he stepped inside. When the manager locked the doors behind him, Rice counted to ten, then peered through the plate-glass window and smiled.
The manager was alone inside the bank, and the surveillance cameras were fixed-focused at the floor. The tellers stations were visible from the street only if a passerby was willing to stand on his tiptoes and crane his neck.
Rice watched the manager walk directly to the teller area and take a key from his pocket, then open drawers and transfer cash to his briefcase, leaving pieces of paper in the money’s place—probably doctored tally slips. The odds zoomed to perfection. Rice ran to his car, then drove to a pay phone and called Louie Calderon at his message drop number.