Sailor & Lula (28 page)

Not that it mattered, anyway. Woody was in town to do a job, and tonight he would be staked out across the street from a warehouse on Ivar just off Hollywood Boulevard, a few blocks from the Wild Palms, awaiting the arrival of a shipment of illicit skin. According to the best information available to the various authorities, Crazy Eyes Santos was operating cosmetics factories on the West Coast, using wetbacks to do most of the work. Seizing a delivery of the proportion expected tonight or tomorrow would be a major step in cracking the operation.

Woody decided to have lunch and then come back to the motel and take a nap. He walked past the swimming pool on the way to his car and noticed a beautiful young woman sitting in a lounge chair dedicatedly applying suntan lotion to herself. She had long blond hair, a slender figure and very long legs. She wore an orange, tiger-striped bikini and oversized blue sunglasses, the frames of which were shaped like butterfly wings. The golden retriever had his paws up on the side of the pool in
front of the young woman and was barking excitedly in her direction. A terrifically fat man wearing a pair of lavender Bermuda shorts and nothing else to cover his vast, very pale expanse of skin, came out and jumped into the pool, displacing no small amount of water, most of which splashed on the young woman, disturbing her ministrations.

“Marv, you fat piece of pigshit!” she screamed, jumping up. “Did you have to do that?!”

The golden retriever clambered out of the pool and shook himself furiously right next to her.

“Goddammit!” she said, throwing her plastic bottle of lotion at the dog, somehow missing him by a good six feet. “This is going to be a great fucking time!”

Woody continued to the parking lot, unlocked the government K-car, got in and started it. He decided to drive out to Santa Monica, to the ocean. It might be nice, Woody thought, to buy a sandwich and sit and look at the water for a while.

He'd eaten half of a BLT and was sipping from a can of Canada Dry ginger ale through a straw, when a tall, gaunt-faced man who looked to be in his mid-forties, sat down on the bench next to Woody. The tall man, Woody thought, resembled the actor John Carradine, but a beaten-down, hard-luck version; more the way Carradine looked as the ex-preacher in the movie of
The Grapes of Wrath
. The man's clothes were shabby, worn-out, and he needed a shave, but he held himself erect and gave the appearance of being at ease.

“Do you mind if I speak to you?” the man said.

“No,” said Woody.

The man stared at Woody and examined the gauze bandages. His eyes were black, without light. When he spoke, Woody noticed that several of his teeth were missing.

“You've been injured.”

“Burned,” Woody said.

“I hope you're not too uncomfortable.”

“I'm doing fine, thanks.”

The man turned his face back toward the ocean.

“Waves are the heartbeat of the earth,” he said.

“That's not bad,” said Woody. “I like that.”

“I used to be a poet. A singer, too, in nightclubs. I sang the songs I wrote. But no longer.”

“Why'd you stop?”

“You probably think I'm an alcoholic, or a drug addict, but I'm not. I like to have a martini now and then, of course, and I've sampled drugs, but they're not to blame for my condition, which, as you can see, is less than glamorous. I just lost interest in life, that's what happened. There's nobody to blame, not even myself. I'm not crazy, either. At least I don't think I am. One day the carriage stopped for me and I waved it on.”

“Are you hungry?” Woody asked. “You can have this half of my sandwich, if you like.”

The man took the sandwich from Woody and held it in his lap.

“You're very gracious,” he said. “Are you a religious person?”

“Not really, no.”

“Neither am I, never have been. Organized religion is unseemly.”

“Here, you can have the rest of this, too,” said Woody, handing the man the can of ginger ale.

Woody stood up. “I've got to go.”

“I know, your carriage is here.”

Woody laughed. “I suppose it is.”

“You understand,” said the man, “it's not as if I had no choice.”

“I believe you,” Woody said, watching the man bite into the sandwich.

“Hey, buddy, it's been a long time!”

“Too long, I guess.”

Doug Fakaofo and Romeo hugged each other and smiled.

“I was glad to hear you were comin' out,” said Doug. “What brings you?”

“Business, what else these days, huh? Not that we can't put in some good party time, too, of course,” laughed Romeo.

“That's great, man!”

“But I got a favor to ask you, Doug. I got some people with me and I want to leave 'em here while I take care of something. It shouldn't take long, maybe only a couple of hours. We're just in off the road and they'll prob'ly sleep for a while anyway.”

“Hey, you know it's no problem. They'll be safe here. Bring 'em into the house.”

“Thanks, man. I knew I could count on you.”

“Any time.”

Romeo had spoken to Lily Fakaofo, Doug's wife, from a pay phone in El Centro. Doug was out at the time, but Lily had told Romeo they'd be happy to see him. The Fakaofos lived in Hacienda Heights, a largely Samoan-American section of Los Angeles. The Samoan community was a tight one, distrustful of mainstream America; they kept mostly to themselves. Not even the police knew much about the people there, and Romeo figured it would be a perfect place to stash Estrellita and Duane while he and Perdita delivered the shipment to Reggie in Hollywood.

Doug “Big Brown” Fakaofo had been in the Marines with Romeo, and they'd kept in touch. The Fakaofos were heavy reefer users and they greatly appreciated the kilos Romeo sent them via UPS from Texas on their birthdays and at Christmastime. Both Doug and Lily were large individuals, Doug going about two-eighty and Lily a nifty two-ten or so. Lily's brother, Tutu Nukuono, whom Romeo had met only once, weighed well over three hundred pounds. Tutu had worked as a plumber with Doug until a few months before, when he beat a cop to death with
a chain during a brawl in the parking lot of the Moonlight Lagoon, a local bar that catered mainly to Pacific islanders. Tutu was now serving a life sentence without possibility of parole at Folsom.

“I sure was sorry to hear about your brother, Lily,” Romeo said. “He's a good kid.”

Lily shrugged. “He shoulda known better than to stomp a uniform. Him and a bunch of his biker buddies got carried away wailin' on some Devil's Dragons, I guess it was, who'd strayed into the neighborhood.”

“White boys lookin' for strange-colored pussy,” said Doug. “They got into it with Tutu's gang, the cops come, one of the blues tangled with Tutu, and that was it. Only reason he didn't get the gas was there weren't no way they could prove premeditation.”

“Well, I know Folsom ain't no picnic,” said Romeo.

Doug nodded. “Yeah, but Tutu already got himself some friends inside. Anybody can handle it, he will. Let's go get your people.”

Lily told Romeo she'd feed Duane and Estrellita, then lock them in the back bedroom, the one Tutu had used. Doug volunteered to ride shotgun for Romeo in the truck; Perdita would follow them in the Cherokee and they'd all drive back together to Hacienda Heights.

“She's some tough, sexy-lookin' lady, that Perdita,” Dough said to Romeo as they headed off to deliver the goods.

Romeo grinned. “Think she's a keeper, do ya?”

Doug laughed. “Guess I could keep her occupied for a hour or few, I concentrated hard enough,” he said.

“Never doubted you for a minute, Big Brown. Perdita Durango's somethin' all right. Picked her up at a fruitshake stand in New Orleans. The creature's got a mind of her own, though, you know?”

“Just have to be sure she don't stay awake longer'n you do, she's angry about somethin'. Some women you need to watch like that. Lily's on my side all the way, always has been.”

“You're a lucky fellow, Doug. Stay that way.”

“Tryin' to. What you plan to do with those kids?”

“It's a good question. Think we've squeezed just about all the use out of 'em. They've seen too much to cut loose. I'll deal with that pretty quick, soon as this is finished.”

Romeo kept checking in the sideview for Perdita. She stayed right
behind them all the way. When Romeo brought the truck to a stop in front of the warehouse on Ivar, Perdita drove the Cherokee past it and parked a half-block up the street. Doug and Romeo got out and Romeo walked over and knocked on the side door of the building.

“
Hola, primo!
You made it okay, I see,” said Reggie, after opening the door. “Come on in.”

“I have a friend with me. This is Doug Fakaofo. You remember I told you about him, Reggie. ‘Big Brown.' He was with me in Beirut.”

“Of course,” Reggie said, shaking hands with Doug. “Come in.”

As soon as the door closed, Woody Dumas got out of the K-car and motioned with his right arm to the men on the roof of the building next to the warehouse. At that moment, a dozen vehicles, carrying both federal and local law enforcement personnel, converged on the street, entering from either end. Two men used a battering ram on the door, which easily gave way, and most of the rest of them, led by Woody Dumas, ran in single file.

Woody saw Reginald San Pedro Sula, dressed in a blue denim leisure suit and wearing a Los Angeles Dodgers baseball cap, fire two rounds from a .45 automatic; the first into the forehead of Romeo Dolorosa, the second into the left temple of Doug Fakaofo, killing each of them instantly.

“Federal agents!” Woody shouted, as the men surrounded the shooter.

Reggie dropped the gun and raised his hands. He started to smile, but before he could complete it several men grabbed him and threw him to the ground, causing his head to bang against the concrete floor. Woody knelt by the men who had been shot, verifying that they were dead. The forehead wound in the smaller of the two looked large enough for a decent-sized sewer rat to crawl through. The man's mouth was open and Woody could not help but be impressed by his extraordinarily large, perfectly formed teeth that even in death radiated a powerful white light.

Lily Fakaofo was up late, sitting at the kitchen table reading the newspaper, listening to the 24-hour news station on the radio, smoking a cigarette and working her way through the second box of Nilla Wafers she'd eaten since Doug, Romeo, and Perdita had left two and a half hours before. Estrellita and Duane were asleep in Tutu's room.

“From Harare, Zimbabwe, comes this story,” said the radio. “The Zimbabwe Football Association banned four players for life yesterday for publicly urinating on the field at a Harare soccer stadium. Association chairman Nelson Chirwa said the organization was appalled by the behavior last Sunday of the four players of the southern Tongogara team. ‘It is a public indecency for a player to openly urinate on the football pitch,' Chirwa said. ‘We all know that it is all superstition and that the belief in juju that almost all the clubs have taken to believe in is strongly deplored by the association.' He said the four were advised to urinate on the field by witch doctors, who said it would ensure a victory. It didn't. Tongogara lost, two to nothing.”

Lily laughed and took a puff on her Bel-Air Menthol Slim. Doug had told her that he thought Romeo Dolorosa was mixed up with some kind of voodoo cult down in Mexico or Texas, but she didn't want to know about it. There was enough real mysterious shit going down in the world, Lily thought, without getting sucked into that phony black magic crap. Take this strange business in Russia she was reading about.

A forty-two-year-old French-Armenian multimillionaire art dealer, who was also a well-known poet, had disappeared in Moscow five months ago. He'd been having a meeting with three Soviet business associates in his hotel room near Red Square when he received a telephone call. He spoke briefly to the caller, hung up, and told his associates to wait there, that he had to go out but would return within the hour. They saw him get into a black Zhiguli limousine and speed away, and that's the last anyone had seen or heard of him, including his family in Paris.

Police, KGB agents, and the Soviet government, specifically the Visual Arts Department of the Cultural Affairs Ministry, with whom he'd had
dealings for several years, were pursuing the case. Speculation was that with the restructuring of the Soviet society and increasing entrepreneurial climate, the art dealer had engaged in unlawful export of Russian Orthodox icons and other art items in league with the various crime organizations operating throughout the Soviet Union. Authorities in Moscow were paying particularly close attention to the case because of their feeling that it could lead to the exposure of a homegrown Mafia.

According to an official in the Department of Cultural Affairs, this art dealer was a clever man who spoke several languages fluently, had a wide variety of friends in many countries, was very confident and thought there was nothing he couldn't handle. He had made his millions in a very short period of time, a decade or so, having started out with next to nothing in a small Paris gallery. His family were convinced that he had no dealings with gangsters.

Those involved in the investigation theorized that the art dealer had become enmeshed in a power struggle among the seven major Moscow Mafia families, and found himself in a situation he could not handle; or, that he had simply been double-crossed and disposed of. Another rumor circulating in Armenia and Paris held that he had been selling artworks to the Soviet government itself, that a number of the items were revealed to be forgeries, and he had been killed by the KGB, who dumped his body in a forest outside Moscow. This version maintained that the body had been discovered five days after his disappearance, and the family was fostering the pretense that they had heard nothing from or about him in an effort not to discredit the gallery or his reputation. It was, therefore, a mystery that might never be solved.