Harbor Nocturne (6 page)

Dinko said, “She can’t be Mexican.”

“Yes, she can,” Hector said. “Recently arrived from Guanajuato. Before you arrived I spent an hour talking to her and to the proprietor of this joint. She speaks English pretty good. I bought her.”

“Whadda you mean you bought her?”

“I bought her dance contract, which wasn’t binding in the first place, so it didn’t cost much. I offered her a job dancing in a Hollywood nightclub owned by some criss-cross dudes I know, where she’ll make ten times what she makes here. They’re always looking for new talent, and I’m kind of a talent scout, among other things.”

“What’s criss-cross mean?” Dinko asked.

“You know,” Hector said, “the kind of guys that cross themselves like this.” And he made the sign of the cross, touching his forehead, heart, right shoulder, and left shoulder, instead of moving his hand left to right, as the Roman Catholics did it.

“You mean Eastern rite,” Dinko said. “So your employers are Russian or maybe Armenian or . . .”

“Could be Serbs,” Hector said, winking at the mention of the ancient enemy of the Croatians.

Dinko figured Hector Cozzo had to be working for Russians. Everyone knew that Hollywood was full of them, and they were into all sorts of crime and owned most of the nightclubs. But he couldn’t stop staring at the ravishing girl. She had small breasts, but they were perky and they were real.

“She’s so young,” he said. “And she can’t dance worth a shit, but who cares?”

“My sentiments exactly,” Hector agreed. “She’ll make tips beyond her dreams when she gets to Hollywood, with those bucks-up Armenians, Russians, and Georgians. All those rich old ex-commies jist love the club I’m gonna put her in. I’m letting her finish a couple sets here, and then off we go to Hollywood to let my employers see what I bought for them. She can easy get a Franklin for a special lap dance up there.”

“She’s just a kid,” Dinko said. “She looks kinda . . . lost.”

“Now I’m trying hard not to roll my eyes, dawg,” Hector said. “She’s a fucking Mexican whore!”

Hector’s cell rang. He pulled it from his pocket, looked at the number, and said, “Gotta take this, Dinko.” He got up and walked to the front door and out to the street, while Dinko stayed and watched the girl shuffle through a dance, her smile frozen, seeming vulnerable and forlorn.

When Hector returned, he seemed tense. “A Harbor City homie I been waiting for ain’t gonna show up. The dumb motherfucker got stopped for running a red light, and the cops found a gun in his car. Stupid fucking silverbacks—I hate doing business with them.”

“I thought you were down here because of the girl,” Dinko said, pointing to the stage.

“She’s part of it. I also had to set something up with somebody I got involved with in a weak moment.”

Now Dinko’s curiosity made him want to grab Hector by the front of his stupid pimp shirt and make him talk. He said, “Hector, what the fuck’re you doing messing with Crips and Bloods? Whadda they got to do with your new life in Hollywood and all those dudes that cross themselves backwards?”

Hector signaled to a waitress for two more beers. He thought for a long moment before speaking, then said, “Did you hear about the robbery last year where a posse did a takeover of the security guards at the container storage facility down the road? The one where they pistol-whipped and taped up the guards, then brought a stolen tractor in and jist hooked up to the chassis under a huge container and drove off with a can full of imported goods?”

“Yeah,” Dinko said, “I think it was booze in the can they stole, wasn’t it? All the longshoremen on the docks figure they fucked up and got the wrong chassis. The can on the chassis next to it was full of flat-screen TVs.”

Hector said, “They probably had a bought-off trucker tell them, ‘It’s in row ten, space thirty-nine,’ only that would be way too hard for a nigger to handle since they ain’t got the brains of a dead squid. But they’re willing to go in like a wolf pack with Tec-9s if somebody on the inside sets up a deal for them. They can bring it when it comes to blue steel and muscle.”

Hector stopped talking and looked at his drink. Dinko nodded to encourage his classmate to continue, but Hector thought better of it and said, “Look, Dinko, I’m glad I ran into an old friend here. I need you to help me out. I need you to take that Mexican chick to an address in Hollywood and wait for her. She’ll only be there for a half hour, to meet the boss. Then I need you to take her home to East Wilmington, where she’s staying at for now.” He pulled two hundred-dollar bills from a money clip and put them on the table with a business card from a nightclub on Hollywood Boulevard. He wrote his cell number on the card.

“That’s all I gotta do?” Dinko said. “Take her and bring her back, no problems?”

“No problems. That’s all you gotta do. I need you to help me, brother. This other thing with the silverbacks . . .” He stopped and shook his head, the bravado gone, making him look more like the goofy high school kid Dinko remembered.

“Man, you’re not the violent type,” Dinko said. “If you’re fucking with the Bloods or Crips you might end up in the harbor, caught in somebody’s gill net with crabs eating your face.”

“I can finesse this,” Hector said. “I jist gotta go talk to a dude. Will you do the job for me?”

Dinko certainly could use the two hundred dollars, but it wasn’t the money that made him scoop the bills off the table. He wanted this job because he’d seen the girl.

“Thank you, dawg,” Hector said, producing another business card. “I gotta run back to the dressing room now and tell her what’s going on. Gimme your digits.”

“What’s her name?” Dinko asked, using Hector’s pen to write his cell number on one of Hector’s business cards, under where it said, “Hector Cozzo, Facilitator and Entrepreneur.”

“Lita Medina,” Hector said, standing up. “You won’t have no problem with her.”

“No worries,” Dinko said. “I’m locked on.”

Dinko felt his excitement grow as he sat alone at the table and watched the dark corridor leading to the dressing room. A few minutes passed before Hector emerged, rushing toward the front door with a thumbs-up for Dinko. Then Dinko saw the silly fucker blow him a kiss before he breezed out with a very serious expression on his goofy face.

After another ten minutes, she came from the darkness at the back of the bar and approached Dinko’s table. She struck him as incredibly demure and, well, respectable. She looked even younger with her stage makeup replaced by only a little eye shadow and lip gloss. He stood, and she held out her hand. It was a delicate hand, but her fingers were long and her nails had recently been done with French tips. When he shook her hand, it felt cool and dry; his own felt hot and moist. Her lustrous dark hair, a shade lighter than Hector’s, was swept back to one side of her face and fell to her breasts. He remembered how those breasts had looked when she was onstage. Now she was wearing a long-sleeved red shirt, blue jeans, and inexpensive flat shoes—dressed more for a trip to the
mercado,
he thought, than to a meeting in a Hollywood nightclub.

She nodded politely and included her matronymic name when she introduced herself, saying in heavily accented English, “I am Lita Medina Flores. I am very happy to meet with you, señor.”

“I’m Dinko Babich,” he said. “Just call me Dinko.”

“Deenko” was how she said it, smiling slightly, revealing a tiny chip at the corner of a front tooth that made her look even younger. Then, apologizing for showing amusement at his name, she said, “Is name I never hear before this. Is good name. Very nice.”

“It’s Croatian,” he said. “You know, the country that used to be in Yugoslavia?”

“I know,” she said. “We learn about the Europa countries at my school in Guanajuato.”

“Would you like to go now?” he asked.

“Please,” she said. “I am very happy to go from this place.”

“I don’t blame you,” he said, and he held his hand out, palm up, beckoning her to precede him to the door.

The summer sun, now barely resisting the ocean dive off the coast, was still bright enough that she put on drugstore sunglasses and stood beside the Jeep while he unlocked the passenger door for her. He waited until she was seated and then closed the door, running around to the driver’s side. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been so courtly with a woman, and this one wasn’t even a woman yet. She was a kid. And a freaking Mexican!

She held a small hand-woven purse on her lap and looked straight ahead while Dinko headed for the Harbor Freeway. He figured she would not speak at all except to answer questions.

As they were driving west on Pacific Highway, Dinko spotted a new red Mercedes SL parked just off the intersection with Bayview Avenue, facing north. The smog-laden twilight made it impossible to see more than the back of the driver’s head, but what really piqued Dinko’s interest was the big Asian in a dark suit, white shirt, and necktie standing on the curb, bending down and leaning in the passenger window to talk to the driver. There weren’t many Asians in business suits around those streets, and there sure as hell weren’t many new SLs. Then Dinko saw that the driver was smoking a cigarette, and he almost turned the car around and went back to be sure that it was Hector.

Dinko figured he was getting two Franklins to be with a chick he’d
pay
two Franklins to be with, so maybe he should mind his own business. It probably wasn’t Hector, anyway. Maybe, but maybe not. Hector Cozzo
never
would’ve had the balls to be directly doing business with silverback street gangs, Dinko thought, not back in the day, and not now. He wished he could’ve seen if the driver was a mullethead.

He was almost to the freeway and still considering a U-turn to satisfy his curiosity when he remembered Cozzo’s other nickname from back in school: Hector the prevaricator. They always said you could pour a quart of Sodium Pentothol in his soup and still not get Hector to tell the truth. Some things never changed.

When they were heading north on the Harbor Freeway in moderate Los Angeles traffic, which would be deemed horrendous in most other U.S. cities, Dinko said to Lita Medina, “How long have you been here from Mexico?”

“Three month,” she said, facing straight ahead.

“Do you like it here?”

“Is very nice,” she said.

“Do you get homesick?”

She said, “I am sorry. I do not know what . . .”

“Do you get sad and feel lonesome when you think of your home?”

She thought it over. “My home?”

“Yes,” he said. “Do you have a mother and father and sisters and brothers?”

“I have my mother and two brothers,” she said. “My brothers are very young and my mother does not possess good health. She has the diabetes and a weak heart and is very ’spensive to get her medicine. I must make money here and send to them.”

“How old’re you, Lita?” he asked abruptly. “Tell me the truth.”

She faced him with a look of apprehension, opened her purse, and said, “I am twenty-two. I have Social Security and driver license. I can prove for you how old I am and—”

He held up a hand and said, “Relax, I’m not a cop. I just don’t think you’re twenty-two years old, no matter what your phony ID says. But don’t worry, I won’t tell nobody.”

After another long silence she looked down at her purse and said, “I am age nineteen years and four months.”

“I thought so,” he said. “You’re just a kid. A child.”

“I am no child,” she said.

He said, “I felt like I wasn’t a child either when I was nineteen, but now that I’m a man, I know better.”

“I am no child,” she said more firmly, and this time she looked at him. “I quit the school and I work for my family almost four years in Guanajuato. I do the work what I must do. I am no child, Dinko.”

He looked at her and thought he saw her eyes moisten. He decided not to press her further. He punched the CD button and played some soft rock while they rode in silence.

Smoggy darkness had fallen by the time they were close to the Hollywood nightclub, and the boulevard traffic was worse than Dinko remembered. He hated coming up to the city at any time, but weekend nights were beyond awful. The ceaseless headlights were unbearable, and sometimes it could take thirty minutes to travel a mile and a half in the bumper-locked madness. An hour of this could make him long for San Pedro, even with the Mexicans turning it into a barrio slum. There was a saying among the generations of Croatians and Italians of San Pedro: “Go ahead and leave, but sooner or later, everyone comes back to Fish Town.”

After he parked in the only space he could find, nearly two blocks from the nightclub, he got out and walked with her to the door of the building. It was a typical east Hollywood commercial setup, having had several identities and business uses over the years, before becoming a nightclub. The lighted sign saying “Club Samara” was surprisingly subtle, and Dinko figured that must have something to do with zoning restrictions rather than good taste. He didn’t equate Russian and Armenian hoodlums with good taste.

When they got to the door she said, “Please, Dinko, wait for me at the car. I will not be in there for very much time.”

He nodded and let her go in alone. He found himself thinking about Hector. He felt like calling him and asking what the hell he was doing parked by Pacific Highway with some dressed-up Asian, but there was always a slim chance that it had not been Hector’s SL. Yet he knew in his gut that the SL must belong to Hector the selector.

Dinko stood on the sidewalk looking at the endless lines of headlights on the boulevard. At times like this he wished he had a cigarette, but he hadn’t smoked one in four years. He smoked weed occasionally, but never cigarettes, not since his father had died from lung cancer, a terrible death that had made Dinko swear to his mother that he’d never smoke a cigarette again. Being her only child, Dinko was all she had left, and she never stopped reminding him of that.

One of these days he was going to get out of the comfortable Babich family home on the hill west of Gaffey, where Croatians and Italians didn’t have to be surrounded by beaners, but he couldn’t seem to hold on to enough money for a start. The biweekly poker games with other longshoremen were sucking him dry, and he didn’t really enjoy gambling. After ten minutes of loitering on the sidewalk inhaling exhaust fumes, Dinko said, “Fuck it,” and he entered Club Samara.