Crooked Little Vein: A Novel

  “Okay,” I said. “Not as bad as I expected. I’m just wondering where they’ll be keeping the book.”

  “Frank Islip’s office. His personal safe. I’ve seen it. He keeps his good stuff there. Likes to show people things.”

  “Why are you being so helpful all of a sudden?”

  “Because I’m not the bad guy here.” He looked at Trix. “I’m not a bad guy. I do what I have to in order to remain in a position to help people.”

  “Bullshit.”

  Brom prickled. “Do you know why I became a lawyer? Do you? Because I wanted a say in the shape of society. If I have to join the Pirates—”

  “The what?”

  “That’s what they call themselves. The Pirates of the Pacific. A bunch of them were in Skull and Bones at Yale—”

  “Oh my God,” yelped Trix. “I’ve heard of them. I think three or four presidents have been in Skull and Bones. All kinds of weird political conspiracy stuff, you know?” She turned to me. “Skull and Bones was implicated in the opium trade, and they’re considered racist and proslavery, Mike. A bunch of Yale’s residential colleges are named after slave owners. We’re gonna walk into this party and find three or four pretty black kids waiting to get raped.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Why are you suddenly being cooperative, Brom?”

  “If you do something to disempower the Pirates,” said Brom, “then by default the younger generation, like me, gains more power in town. I’ll give you all the help you need.”

  I smiled at Brom. “You fucking maggot.”

  “Hold on,” said Trix. “Give me a second here.”

  She looked at Brom. He withered a little under her intent gaze. And then she looked across at me.

  “Why aren’t we just calling the cops, Mike? I mean, yes, I know, powerful people, political clout, friends in high places, I get all that. But why aren’t we just feeding Brom to the cops and letting them get the story out of him?”

  Brom cleared his throat. “These people run L.A.’s legal—”

  “I said I get that, Brom. I’m saying that even the cops can’t ignore a confession from a legal player like you. Why don’t we feed him to the cops, Mike?”

  I pulled out another cigarette. I’d been using an expensive-looking modern-art sculpture thing as an ashtray. “Can’t do it, Trix.”

  “Because of what Brom says?”

  “Because we’d lose the book. We can call the cops once we’re in there. We do it now and that book’ll disappear into some secure location we’ll never find. And I want this ended.”

  “Mike, that’s really dangerous. And I don’t mean for us. They’re going to have sex on kids. If we get there late, if we can’t get to a phone, if the cops don’t listen…something awful’s going to happen to them.”

  “I know. The only thing in our favor is that they’re not going to be expecting anyone to break into a very secret, very private party. There’ll be security, but it won’t be heavy, because heavy security draws attention of its own. And the last thing they want is attention.”

  “Mike, I don’t think the book matters anymore.”

  “It does. It does to me. I want out of this, and the book gets me out. I’m starting to look back with nostalgia at the middle-aged ostrich fuckers, Trix. Help me out with this and you never have to see me again.”

  “What makes you think I never want to see you again?”

  “Giving me shit about the case and sleeping with the white slaver here were clues. I’m a detective.”

  “Mike…” Trix sighed and leaned over in her chair until her head was touching her legs. “Mike, I told you and told you. This is how I choose to live. It doesn’t affect us at all.”

  “It affects me. And you already think I’m a monster for wanting to hand over the book.”

  She studied me, tiredly. “I don’t care anymore. I just want to be done with this. You’re exhausting me. This is exhausting me.”

  “Yeah.” I flicked ash onto the rich carpet, quite deliberately. “Now, Brom. I’m going to uncuff you, and you’re going to draw me a little map of the offices we’re attending. And then you’re going to tell me how the entrance procedure works. Trix, you want to start getting ready. Time’s ticking away.”

  Chapter 51

  After some extended foraging through that stupidly huge house that probably took me into another time zone, I found Brom’s liquor cabinet. A walk-in liquor cabinet. In there, cobwebby, was a whiskey that was old enough to be Trix’s mother. I poured myself three fingers and sat down alone with Brom’s map. It wasn’t bad. Too detailed to be a complete fabrication. It was a new building, he’d said, barely two years old, and gave a pretty good description of the environs. Good enough for me to figure out a remarkably stupid stunt, anyway.

  Two elevators served the offices. He’d marked the positions he’d noticed security agents in, the last two times he’d attended the place. The bullpen area was cleared as party space. Islip’s office was fairly distant from it. There’d be a sequence of locked doors to defeat, of course, but one thing you’re taught as an investigator is how to, well, commit crimes. I’d taken a couple of things from the kitchen that, with some judicious bending and twisting, would serve as tools for breaking and entering.

  The last few days had either made me a better detective or a better criminal.

  Getting to the elevators. Using the elevator without detection. Getting to Islip’s office without detection. I wasn’t overly worried about the safe. I knew where it was, and there’s no such thing as an uncrackable safe. I was worried about getting out. If I had to hurt someone to get up there, I’d have less than fifteen minutes before the flags went up. And despite what I’d said to Trix, I knew that calling the cops wouldn’t do a goddamn thing unless I got very creative.

  The whiskey was shivering in the glass. My hand was shaking. I polished off the last of it and placed the glass upside down on the nearest table.

  Chapter 52

  The ride into Beverly Hills was dark and hot. The black handheld in my jacket pocket jabbed into my chest for most of the way there. I cradled the unloaded Ruger in my hands, thinking furiously. Running every possible move and outcome in my head. My heart was hammering, and my nerves jangled with stress. I found myself grinding my teeth, and forced myself still. I wanted a cigarette. I wanted a cigarette and, stupidly, pemmican. I read all the James Bond books as a kid, and, in one of them, Bond prepares for an infiltration by holing up someplace until night, smoking cigarettes, and eating wedges of pemmican. I wanted cigarettes and pemmican and to be James Bond. Instead, I was sweating myself to death in the trunk of a lawyer’s car en route to Beverly Hills.

  Brom finally popped the trunk. I sat up sharply. We were in an underground carport, dark and cool. Like a good boy, Brom had parked far away from the elevators, several whitewashed concrete stanchions obscuring us from whoever might be over there.

  I pulled the ammunition from my jacket pocket and began to reload the Ruger. “How many?” I whispered.

  “Just one, by the elevator. There’s a restroom around the corner from that.”

  “Good. Brom, when all hell breaks loose, and it will—you grab Trix and you get the hell out of there. That’s all you have to do. Is that clear?”

  Cogs worked in Brom’s brain. “You’re going to let me get away?”

  “Get Trix out of there and no one needs to know you were ever involved. And I’m sorry about the crack on the head and all, but I was kind of pissed.”

  Brom stuck out his hand. “So we’re even?”

  My face must’ve changed significantly, because he instantly went pale. “No, Brom, we’re not even. I am simply choosing not to care about you. And if you don’t get Trix somewhere safe, you don’t get to live until the end of the week. Are we clear on that?”

  He stuck his hand in his pocket.

  I clambered out of the car. Trix waited beside it, very quiet.

  “Just stick to the sidelines,” I said to her, “and get the f
uck out of Dodge when it all goes off. I’ll get your money to you in a couple of days.”

  “I don’t want the money,” she said.

  “So what do you want?”

  She didn’t say anything.

  I looked around. It was just us in the carport.

  “Okay,” I said. “Let’s do something really goddamn stupid.”

  Chapter 53

  I moved around the carport, taking cover where I could, as Trix and Brom walked directly to the elevators—two of them, side by side, with an alcove beside the far one—talking loudly, as I’d asked. The uniformed security agent wasn’t young, but looked beefy. He was deferential to Brom and Trix, which was good. There are two kinds of security—the kind who thinks he works for the security firm, and the kind who thinks he works for the firm’s clients. The first kind are tough and alert, because they work for the reputation of the firm. The second kind concentrates on appearance to keep the client pleased. This guy was definitely the second kind, which meant I had a chance.

  I listened to his voice as he spoke to Brom and Trix, marking him and his plus-one off on his clipboard. Phlegmy, slow. He thumbed the radio on his shoulder, letting security upstairs know the pair were coming up. He walked them to the elevator, saw them into it, and turned around.

  As the doors were closing, Brom and Trix must’ve seen me jab my thumb and forefinger into the security guy’s throat from behind, and then drive the butt of the gun into the back of his head. He almost shrugged off the first blow, gagging as I killed his voice. The fourth took him down.

  I almost popped a rib dragging the bastard around the corner into the toilets. I gagged him with a wad of toilet paper and his own tie and cuffed him around the toilet before locking the stall from the inside. Coughing some spit down into my throat, I reached around and thumbed his radio.

  “Need the john. Ate something bad. Clipboard’s by the elevators—come down and cover me for ten minutes. Gonna sign off, this hurts like hell.” I switched the radio off before anyone could answer, and climbed out of the top of the stall with the clipboard.

  Outside, I propped the clipboard on the corner, so whoever came down had to turn their back on the elevator and walk away from it to retrieve it. I dashed to the alcove and waited.

  Two minutes crept by. Just as I was sure I’d fucked it up, the elevator pinged, and a skinny security man came down. He looked around for the clipboard. Spotted it. Walked toward it. I very silently moved to the elevator. He bent down to pick the clipboard up. I reached a hand inside and above the elevator door. Found what I hoped for, and smacked it to the right with my finger. Slid in and punched the door-close button, pressed against the left side of the elevator.

  Above the door was a security camera that trained down on the inside of the elevator car. Smacking it to the right meant that it could only see the right half of the car. I stayed on the left, where the control panel was, and punched in 32.

  There was blood on the butt of the Ruger. I rubbed it off on my pants leg. And then looked down. Suddenly I’d become cavalier about blood. I did not enjoy this about myself. Taking a deep breath, I tried to remember who I was before this whole thing started. I came back to myself, a little bit.

  The elevator pinged at 32. I stepped out carefully into darkness. The rest of the building was, of course, empty.

  Brom’s map was in my head. I was below everything he’d detailed for me, and I looked up, measuring the relative position of everything above me.

  It was a new building. And Brom’s powers of description had given me the idea. New office buildings tend to prize flexibility. So what they do is build the framework and hang the walls from the framework, using adhesive wainscot to fix them to the floor. It allows the owners to change the structure of their office design. There have been stories of people in high-risk jobs coming to work in the morning to discover that their little office is entirely missing—workmen have come in the night to take out the walls and change the workplace design.

  Plasterboard and plastic. Paneled ceilings. Stuff that breaks and cuts.

  I broke a couple of locks and moved around until I found some desks and chairs. The clock was running in my head. My unconscious guy with the phantom shits would be given ten minutes, if I was lucky. And if the bastard didn’t wake up first. I didn’t have a lot of time, and past history made it disgustingly clear that I had no luck at all. Working as quietly as I could without wasting time, I stacked chairs up on a desk for a makeshift ladder, and got under the ceiling. It was a gridwork of metal strips with plastic panels. The panels were just laid on. I pushed one up. There was a space, maybe a couple of feet, between this ceiling and the underside of the next floor up. Trunks of wires ran here and there. The dust would’ve choked a regiment. I prayed to anything that might be paying attention that the metal frame held my weight, and lifted myself up.

  I spidered myself over the plastic panels, keeping hands, knees, and feet on the metal struts. Everything creaked and groaned a little, but held. Good. I moved along the space like the world’s most retarded crab, trying to keep the map straight in my head. Eventually, I picked my spot, and turned myself around so my back was supported by the metal. From my jacket, I took the sharpest knife I could find in Brom’s kitchen. It had taken a good thirty minutes, late in the afternoon, picking through all his shiny, pricey kitchen equipment, most of which had never been used. He only bought the best stuff, beautiful selections of samurai-quality handmade carbon-blade cutting tools. I’d taken this one to a fine edge on a ceramic whetstone he’d left out on display without ever touching, and tested it on various of his possessions. There was even a half-inch gully in his marble countertop.

  I put it into the underside of the floor. It did not exactly cut like butter. I wriggled under the pommel of the blade and put both hands into it, pushing upward, terrified the extra force would put me back through the ceiling and on to the floor.

  The blade punched through. I started sawing, as fast as I dared. This stunt was both clever and staggeringly stupid. There were fair odds that someone was up there watching the end of the knife bobbing up and down like the fin of a drunken shark.

  Within a couple of minutes—and, at that point, it was two minutes too long—I’d sawed a flap in the upstairs floor. Scoring a diagonal between the end of both cuts, I squirmed back to the corner and pushed. It was stiff. Without the scoreline, it would have groaned. But it folded along the score, and cracked. Audibly cracked. I grabbed the edge of the floor, cutting my palm, and pulled myself up in panic.

  No one there. Music leaked in from beyond the closed east door of Islip’s outer office. The west door led to his inner office. The music must’ve masked the sound of the flooring cracking. I almost cried at the thought that I’d finally had a bit of luck.

  Pulling myself out of the crawlspace felt like dragging myself free of quicksand. I went straight to the west door and checked it for alarms. It was clean. I pulled out the other things I’d lifted from Brom’s house and quickly jimmied the old-fashioned lock on the door. It clicked open.

  Islip’s office looked like an old English drawing room, with silky wallpaper, ornate gilt-framed oil paintings of military men on horseback, and antique high-backed armchairs. On the wall behind the desk was a big oil portrait of a pirate with a beard you could lose a dog in pouring boiling oil on what I presumed were seagoing taxmen. I lifted it off the wall to reveal the safe.

  And, of course, it was the picture that was alarmed.

  Chapter 54

  I invented five new swearwords in six seconds.

  Dashing to the door, I jabbed the jimmy into the lock, immobilizing it. A chair went under the door handle. I ran back to the safe. It was electronic. Brom had told me it was an old-style dial-tumbler design. I went down and peered at the numeric keypad at an angle. The most-used keys pick up more dirt than the others. But this damn thing was new. In my pocket, I had some talc lifted from Brom’s kitchen that I’d wrapped in a square of kitchen paper. I unwrapp
ed it and blew a little over the keypad, and then blew lightly at the keypad itself. One, five, six, and eight looked like they’d attracted more powder than the others, which meant they were slightly stickier, which meant they’d been used more. I hoped.

  Someone banged on the door.

  I started tapping in variations on 1568. It took me five or six goes before I noticed the little LED display on the face of the safe.

  ALARM-LOCK.

  The damn thing immobilized when the alarm went off.

  With the alarm still beeping away, the element of surprise had kind of faded away a while back.

  So I took out the Ruger and shot the safe.

  The pow was deafening in the enclosed space. The windows wobbled in their frames. The safe spat out a shower of sparks, the LED going dead. I’d put the big bullet right where I assumed the locking mechanism to be, and the door resentfully eased open by about an inch. I put Brom’s kitchen knife in the gap and started levering with all the strength I had left.

  There was a crunching, the blade snapped off, and the door came away. I pulled the door back as far as I could, and looked inside, heart in my mouth.

  The book was in there.

  It had to be the book. It was ancient. Big, with gray leather covers, mold greening the corners.

  The banging on the door turned to thumping. Someone was throwing their body against it.

  I took the book out gingerly, and laid it on the desk. The second it touched the surface, my head started swimming, like I’d taken a heavy toke off a strong joint. I shook it off and opened the book. The front cover touched the desk surface and it happened again. I felt my eyes widen and my head kind of lurch to attention, going light.

  I took out my phone, found the number I wanted, and hit redial.

  “It’s McGill,” I said. “I’m sure you know where I am. I have what you want. Send in the cavalry. And that’s now, not in five minutes’ time.”