The Manipulated (Joe Portugal Mysteries) (7 page)

“He’s probably doing something with his asshole son. Or the freaks from Venice. He’s evidently a pillar of their community.”

“Ask him anyway.”

“Okay.”

We went to bed. In due course, we woke up. Gina headed for the Design Center. I wandered around the house all morning. I played both my guitars, the SG and the acoustic. My playing sucked more than usual. Eventually I gravitated to my refuge by the TV. The Bond marathon was up to
Goldfinger
. It was the big climax, where Bond and Oddjob struggle in the Fort Knox vault,and the counter on the nuclear device counts down. Bond electrocutes Oddjob, stops the timer at 007. The world is saved again.

When the movie was over I found the number Burns had given me for John Santini. I stood over the phone with it for several minutes. Finally I dialed.

A gruff male voice answered. “Santini Imports.” I told him my name and what I wanted.

“Hang on.” He came back on the line in a minute.“Three o’clock.”

“I don’t really need to see him. I can just talk to him on the phone.”

“Mr. Santini doesn’t like doing business on the phone.”

“It’s not exactly business.”

“Is three good or not?”

“It’s good.”

“Here’s the address. Write it down.”

I did.

“Don’t be late,” the man said, and hung up.

I sat down to return to my Bondfest, but they were running
Moonraker
again. I didn’t get the scheduling, but then I didn’t get a lot about the entertainment industry. Like how a twenty-six-year-old shit like Dennis Lennox got to where he was. I flipped channels for a while, came to the Channel 6 noontime news, put down the clicker. Kobe Bryant’s rape case, Michael Jackson’s freak show antics, young Americans getting blown up in Iraq. A two-year-old had been killed in gang crossfire in South-Central. Only they weren’t calling it South-Central anymore. Now it was South Los Angeles, like changing the name was going to take away the bad taste.

There was good news too. A profitable Christmas shopping season was projected. Whoopee.

Claudia Acuna came on to tell us more about the new cosmetic surgery. This segment concentrated on buttocks implants for women and pectoral ones for men. I tried to decide if Claudia Acuna’s breasts were real.

At two I got in the truck, paged through the Thomas Guide, figured out where I was going. I reached the address southeast of downtown early and lucked into a spot around the corner. It was a part of the city that resembles other cities more than most of L.A. does. Warehouses and wholesale houses, establishments with signs in languages I couldn’t read. Vans and pickups double-parked, people pushing metal carts small and large, others standing in doorways smoking cigarettes, staring out at infinity.

I negotiated the corner and continued to Santini Imports. It was a three-story building. The top one had two windows; the next one down, a row of them. There was vague movement behind a couple. The ground floor’s dingy concrete wall was unbroken except for a sign that said the loading dock was in the back and a door that looked like it could keep out Godzilla. Next to it was a buzzer. I hit it. Someone said something that could have been a request for me to identify myself. I said who I was and that I had an appointment with Mr. Santini. No reply. I waited. The door opened. The guy who opened up was roughly my age. That was all we had in common. He was tall and muscular and was wearing a stained undershirt and work pants that were somewhere between green and brown. “Yo,” he said. The voice I’d heard on the phone.

“Hi. I have—”

“I know. Come on.”

I walked in. He slammed the door behind me, checked that it was locked. The interior was lit by a few dull overhead fixtures. It was gray and damp and depressing. I followed him to and up a staircase. The second floor hall was marginally brighter. The walls were studded with office doors straight out of a Bogart movie. Battered wood with frosted glass windows. Remnants of gold lettering decorated a few of them. As we passed one on the left, I heard someone say,“Tell that son of a bitch …” but I never found out what the SOB was going to be told because we kept going. We stopped at the last door on the right.

“In here,” said my escort, knocking.

“Yeah?” said a voice inside.

“The Portugal guy.”

“Send him.”

The muscular man turned the knob, pushed the door open, waited until I went in, retreated. The office I was in kept up the Bogie look. One wall was lined with filing cabinets that had been around since the Hoover administration. There was a black leather couch, cracked and sagging, the kind you usually find in the waiting room at your mechanic’s. A bare yellow bulb burned overhead; the light it provided was lost in what came in through the windows. The wall opposite the filing cabinets had a calendar that featured a coquettish young woman clad in very short shorts and a strategically placed newspaper. Next to it were a bunch of framed photos. I recognized Sam Yorty in one, Duke Snider in another, Warren Beatty in a third. All three were doing the staged handshake thing with a man who was a younger and thinner version of the one who came out from behind a worn wood desk to greet me. He was my father’s age and a couple of inches shorter than me. He had glasses with the thickest black frames I’d ever seen. He wore a navy cardigan over a white shirt and a cleaner version of the pants the guy who brought me up there was wearing.

“John Santini,” he said. He took my hand, held it with a strong grip. With his opposite hand he clapped me on the shoulder, and held that one there too.“So,” he said.“Here you are.”

“Yes.”

A broad smile revealed an even set of teeth. “You were looking at the pictures.”

“You know a lot of people.”

“You live long enough, it happens.” He let go of me, gestured toward the couch. “Sit.” He went to the Yorty photo. “This was back in, what was it, ’66? Testimonial dinner for Pony Petrelli.” He dragged an ancient wood-and-leather chair from behind his desk, positioned it and himself in front of me. “Poor old Pony. A week after that, they found lung cancer. He was dead in a month.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Could’ve expected it, the way he smoked. Like a fucking chimney. Pardon my French.”

“Pardoned.”

“Hey. Excuse me. You want something to drink?”

“I’m fine.”

“One thing my wife Gloria taught me, God rest her soul. Always offer your guests something to drink.”

“It’s a wife thing. Mine taught me that too.”

“How long?”

“Less than a year.”

“You held out a while, huh? I mean, no offense, but you’re no spring chicken.”

“Waited till the right woman came along.”

“Me and Gloria, we were together forty … ah, you don’t want to hear that. So. I hear I can help you out somehow. What do you need?”

“It’s about your season tickets to Staples Center.”

“You need tickets?”

I smiled and shook my head. “This is about a game that already happened. Last Sunday night. The thing is … well, this is going to sound stupid.”

“Kid.”

Before I was no spring chicken. Now I was a kid. “Uh-huh?”

“Don’t ever say anything you’re gonna say’s gonna sound stupid. Puts you at a disadvantage. You got something stupid to say, be proud of it.”

I smiled. I liked this guy. Kind of like my father, but without the familial baggage. “Good advice. I’ll try to remember.”

“Good. Go ahead.”

“This friend of mine … his wife disappeared four years and some ago on a trip to China. She’s never been found. Sunday night, we were at Staples together, and he was looking though his binoculars, and he happened to see someone he was convinced was his wife.”

“Guy needs to let go.”

“I agree. But I’ve gotten involved in a couple of things in the last couple of years that made him think I could find this woman, and either it would be his wife or it wouldn’t, but at least he’d know. So I pulled a couple of strings and found out—”

“That they’re my tickets, where she was sitting.”

“That’s it.”

“And you want to know who was using them that night.”

“I know, it’s—”

He gave me a look. Don’t be ashamed of your stupidity. I shut my yap.

“You’re a good friend,” he said.

I shrugged.

“And kind of a good detective too.”

“I suppose.”

John Santini was watching me, and again I was reminded of my father, and how when he inspects me I feel like a teenager.

“My assistant,” he said.

“I don’t get you.”

“My assistant, her name’s Alma Rodriguez. It was her I gave the tickets to. I mean usually they go to customers, you know, that’s mostly what they’re for, but her brother was in town from New York. Big Rangers fan, so I gave her the tickets for her and her husband and him and his wife.”

“I see. Any way I could—”

“Sure. She’s up on the third floor. Fucking place is a mess up there, we got a crew cleaning up, she’s making sure they do the job right. I’ll get her down here.” He got up, picked up the phone, punched three keys. “It’s me. Come on down a minute. I got someone I need you to meet.” He hung up. “On her way.”

“I really appreciate this, Mr.—”

“John.”

“John. I really do appreciate it.”

He waved my thanks away. “Nothing. It’s nothing. Hmm. Portugal. Hey, you wouldn’t happen to be related to Harold Portugal, would you?”

Where had this come from? “As a matter of fact, he’s my father.”

“You’re Harold the Horse’s kid?”

“Sure am.”

“How the hell is he?”

“He’s fine. How—”

A knock at the door.

“Alma? Come on in.”

The door swung open. A dark-haired woman stood there. I found myself on my feet.

It wasn’t her.

There was some resemblance, general size and shape, hair color, something about the contours of the face. But Alma Rodriguez’s eyes were closer together than Donna’s. And she was at least five years older than Donna would be, and her face was much harder.

But across an arena through a pair of binoculars, with everyone on their feet and jumping around at the end of a game, when you’re still pining for the woman you lost four years ago? I supposed someone could make that mistake.

I walked forward, shook her hand. “Ms. Rodriguez.”

“Mrs. It was good enough when Mario and I got married, it’s good enough now.”

“Thank you for coming down. I …” I didn’t know what to say. I turned to John Santini for help.

“The other night, at Staples,” he said, “this friend of his thought he recognized you. There’s more than that, but you probably don’t care.”

“If you say so, John.”

“You done with her, Joe? ’Cause she’s got a lot to do, and with her down here the idiots upstairs are probably goofing off.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m done.” I turned back to her. “Thanks for … well, just thanks. From me, and from my friend.”

“You’re welcome.” She left the room, flicking the light switch off on her way out. The useless overhead bulb went dark.

I returned to the couch, sat, got up again.“I shouldn’t take up any more of your time.”

“Wasn’t her.”

“No. But I see how my friend could have made the mistake. She looks kind of like his wife.”

“Glad I could help.”

“So I’ll be getting out of your—”

“And you can help me sometime.”

“I don’t know how, but, yeah, if I can ever do you a favor …”

“That’s the way of the world, isn’t it?”

“I suppose.” His world, maybe.

“Good. I’ll call Vito. He’ll let you out.”

Vito? A name you don’t hear too often. Unless you’re watching a gangster movie.

And speaking of gangsters … “How do you know my father?”

He smiled, like we were sharing a secret. “Long time ago, we were business associates.”

“How long ago?”

“Jeez, let me think. Early, mid-sixties, I guess.”

“Business associates, huh?”

“Well, yeah. I’m taking from the look on your face that you know what kind of business your old man was in back in those days.”

“I do.”

“Well, me too.”

“Back in those days.”

“Yeah. Back in those days.”

He seemed to be daring me to push it. Idiot that I am, I did. “What about these days?”

He took off those bulky glasses, squinted through them at the window, went to his desk and jerked a tissue from its box. Rubbing the glasses without looking at them, he said,“I’m a legitimate businessman.”

“No one says they’re a legitimate businessman unless they’re something else.”

“You’re a pretty brave little shit, aren’t you?”

Sanity kicked in. I pictured myself at the bottom of the Los Angeles River, wearing a pair of concrete overshoes. Given the average depth of the L.A. River, I’d be more likely to die of sunstroke than to drown, but still …

“Look,” I said. “This conversation is going somewhere it doesn’t need to. If I’ve said anything to offend you, I apologize.”

He took a step toward me. I flinched. Then we were back like we’d been when I first came in, right hands clasped, his left on my shoulder. “Nothing to worry about, kid.”

“That’s good.”

“Course it is.”

The door opened. There stood Vito. Santini hadn’t called him, had he?

“Say hello to your old man for me,” Santini said.“Tell him to give me a call sometime. Tell him I’ll treat him to lunch at Phil’s. He’ll know.”

“I’ll do that.”

I’d been maneuvered into the hall. The door closed and Santini was gone. I followed Vito down the hall, down the stairs, to the front door. He opened it.

“I didn’t hear him call you,” I said.

“No,” Vito said. “You didn’t.” He gestured with his chin. Outside. I took his suggestion.

That night. I sat on the bed. Tried to remember Mike’s number. Couldn’t. Looked it up. Dialed.

“Hello?”

“It’s Joe.”

“Hey. How you doin’?”

“Good. You?”

“You know.” So far, a typical guy conversation.

But not for long.

“Find anything out?” he said. “As a matter of fact, I did.”

“You found out who has those tickets?”

“Better than that.”