Violent Ward
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‘Are you kidding?’ Betty only came to see me when she wanted money for something.
He pulled a face and ran his hands under the cushions as if he was still trying to find the remote.
I said, ‘Have you been encouraging her?’ Yes, yes, yes, of course. I should have guessed it was Danny who kept sending her around to dun me for money. They both thought I had some kind of bottomless pit replenished daily with bullion.
‘She had to have two root canals done, and she needs clothes and stuff. She doesn’t earn any money working for that aroma therapy work shop.’
‘Look at me. Look at me. If you’re going to go to bat for her, look at me.’
He looked up.
I said, ‘Are you doing her accounts or something? Why doesn’t she get a paying job?’
‘The aroma therapy workshop is a charity. It’s for poor people. No one pays. She wants to help people.’
‘She wants to help people? She works for nothing and I give her money. How does that make her the one who helps people?’
‘She’s really a wonderful person, Dad. I wish you’d make a little more effort to try and understand her.’
‘It’s always my fault. Why doesn’t she make an effort to try and understand me?’
‘She said you’re getting millions from the takeover.’
‘You two live in a dream world. There are no millions and there is no takeover. You can’t buy a law partnership unless you are a member of the California bar. Petrovitch picked up the pieces, that’s all that happened. He simply retained our services, put in a partner, and absorbed nearly a quarter of a million dollars of debt. I told you all that.’
‘She clipped a piece about Zach Petrovitch from the Los Angeles Times Business Section. It said in there that he’d paid a hundred million—’
‘But not for my partnership. I’ve heard all that talk. He picked up a Chapter Eleven recording company with a few big names on the labels and sold it to the Japanese. That all happened nearly three years ago. There’s been a goddamned recession since then.’
‘Petrovitch only buys companies he has plans for.’
‘Is this something they tell you in Philosophy One-oh-one, or did you switch to being a business major?’
‘You can’t keep that kind of pay off secret, Dad,’ he said. ‘Everyone knows.’
‘Don’t give me that shit, Danny. I’m your father, and I’m telling you all we got is a retainer with a small advance so I can pay off a few pressing debts. Who are you going to believe?’
‘You want a beer?’ He got up and went into the kitchen.
‘You haven’t answered the question,’ I called. ‘No. I don’t want a beer, and you’re too young to drink beer.’
‘I thought it was a rhetorical question,’ he called mournfully from the kitchen. I heard him rattling through the cans; I don’t think he’d ever thought of storing food in that icebox, just drink. ‘I’ve got Pepsi and Diet Pepsi; I’ve got Sprite, Dr Pepper, and all kinds of fruit juices.’
‘I don’t want anything to drink. Come back here and listen to me. I’m not a philosophy major; I haven’t got time to sit around talking for hours. I have to work for a living.’
I found a cane-seat chair and inspected it for food remains and parked chewing gum before sitting down. This was just the kind of chaos he’d lived in at home, like someone had thrown a concussion grenade into a Mexican fast-food counter. On the walls there were colored posters about saving the rain forest and protecting the whales. The only valuable item to be seen in the apartment was the zillion-watt amplifier that had made sure his guitar was shaking wax out of ears in Long Beach while he strummed it in Woodland Hills. Near the window there was a small table he used as a desk. There was a pile of philosophy books, an ancient laptop computer with labels stuck all over it, and a paper plate from which bright red sauce had been scraped. There was a brown bag too, the kind of insulated bag take-away counters use for hot food. I looked into it, expecting to find a tamale or a hot dog, but found myself looking at a stainless steel sandwich.
‘What’s this?’ I said.
Danny came out of the kitchen with his can of drink and a package of non-cholesterol chili-flavored potato chips. ‘It’s only a gun,’ he said.
‘Oh, it’s only a gun,’ I said sarcastically, bringing it out to take a closer look at it.
It was a shiny new Browning Model 35 9-mm automatic. I pulled back the action to make sure there were no rounds in the chamber. The action remained open, and from the pristine orange-colored top of the spring I could see it was brand new.
‘And what the hell are you doing with this?’ I took aim at Robyna’s save the whale poster and pulled the trigger a couple of times.
‘Relax, Dad. I loaned a Jordanian guy in my religion class two hundred bucks. He was strapped, and instead of paying me back he gave me the shooter and a stereo.’
‘You were ripped off,’ I said.
‘You’re always so suspicious,’ he said mildly. ‘A gun like that costs about five hundred bucks. I can pawn it for three hundred.’
‘How do you know it’s not been used in a stickup or a murder?’
‘His father had just bought it for him; it was still in the wrappings. So was the stereo.’
‘His father bought it? What kind of dope is his father?’
‘Don’t keep doing that, Dad. It’s not good for the mechanism.’
‘What do you know about guns?’ I said and pulled out the magazine and snapped it back into place a couple more times just to show him I wasn’t taking orders from him. ‘You’re talking to a marine, remember. Have you ever fired this gun?’
‘No, I haven’t.’
‘Budd Byron was in the office today asking me how he could buy a gun. This whole town is gun crazy these days.’
‘What does he want a gun for?’
‘Budd? I don’t know.’ I looked at the gun. It was factory-new. ‘In the original wrappings, you say? In the box? Then this is part of a stolen consignment.’
‘It’s not stolen. I just told you I got it from a guy I know at college. He does Comparative Religion with me. Next week he’ll probably want to buy it all back. He’s like that. He’s an Arab; he’s a distant relative of Kashoggi the billionaire.’
‘Do you know something? I’m still looking for some Arab in this town who is not a relative of Kashoggi. My mailman mentioned that he is Kashoggi’s cousin. The guy in the cleaners confided that he is Kashoggi’s nephew. They’re all just one big happy family.’
The TV was still muttering away: the ads are always louder than the programs. ‘You’re in a crumby mood today, Dad. Did something bad happen to you?’
‘Something bad? Have you suddenly gone deaf or something? Your mother dropped by to throw herself out of my office window.’
‘That was just a cry for help. You know that.’ He ate some chips, crunching them loudly in his teeth; then, leaning his head far back, he closed his eyes and held a cold can of low-cal cranberry juice cocktail to his forehead.
He wouldn’t hear a word against Betty. Sometimes I wondered if he understood that she walked out on me – walked out on us, rather. Yet how could I remind him of that? I said, ‘Will you find out where your mother is crashing these days? If she keeps pulling these jumping-off-the-ledge routines, she’ll get herself committed.’
He came awake, snapped the top off his cranberry juice, and took a deep gulp. He wiped his lips on the back of his hand and said, ‘Yah, okay, Dad. I’ll do what I can.’
‘Tell her I’ll maybe look at her dentist bills. I’ll pay something toward them.’
‘Hey, that’s great, Dad.’
‘I don’t want you getting together with her and rewriting the accounts, trying to bill me for a Chanel suit or something.’
‘What do you mean?’ Danny said.
‘You know what I mean. Do you think I’ve forgotten you using the graphics program on my office IBM to do that CIA letterhead that scared the bejesus out of old Mr Southgate?’
‘He deserved it. I should have gotten an A in his English class. Everyone said so.’
‘Well, I had to calm him down and stop him from writing to his senator. You promised you’d be sensible in future, so leave it between Betty and her dentist, will you?’
‘She wouldn’t gyp you, Dad.’ He gently eased the gun out of my hand and put it back in the bag and put the bag in a drawer.
‘Well, I’ve known her longer than you have, and I say she might.’ I got up. ‘Leave her address and phone number on my answering machine. Maybe this afternoon?’ He knew where to get hold of her, I was certain of that.
He nodded and came with me to the door. ‘Is our Sunday brunch still on?’ he asked.
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘The Beverly Hilton at noon. I’ll get a reservation.’ I gave him a hug; he was a good kid. ‘You can always come and use your room again,’ I told him. ‘I wouldn’t want rent or anything. I rattle around all alone in that house.’
‘We tried it twice, Dad.’ He bent down to open the door: three deadbolt locks they now had! What kind of neighborhood is that? ‘Could you let me have fifty until the weekend?’
I peeled off a fifty for him. ‘Don’t change to being a business major,’ I said. ‘You’re doing just great in philosophy.’
Before I drove away from Danny’s place I opened the trunk of my Caddie. Hell! There should have been a case of booze there. One of the commissars in Petrovitchgrad had left a message asking me to get some wacky brand of tequila. It was for the welcome party. She was organizing the refreshments, and this poison was apparently Petrovitch’s favorite drink. Miss Huth had worked her way through the yellow pages and found out a Mexican liquor store on Broadway was the only place that stocked it. They were supposed to have sent it around for the janitor to put into my trunk. I should never have trusted her with my Visa card number. Maybe it was a rip-off by the liquor store, or maybe it was the janitor. He was an unreliable bastard. Why hadn’t she double-checked it?
I looked at the empty trunk like the booze would suddenly appear there but it didn’t. The trunk of my lovely old gas-guzzling Caddie convertible remained empty, so there was no alternative to driving back to the office to pick it up. When I got there I swung into the entrance and down the ramp into the basement. Can you imagine it? Ratface was still there, talking with the janitor. What did they find to talk about all that time? I saw a vacant parking place nearer to the elevator than the lousy place they’d assigned to me. Ratface had parked his little car alongside it. It was a Honda Accord: a bumper sticker on it said MY OTHER CAR IS A FIRE ENGINE.
As I pressed the call button for the elevator, the janitor said, ‘If you’re going up for the tequila, I’ve got it right here for you, Mr Murphy. They delivered it this afternoon.’ He kicked the carton at his feet.
‘I figured you would have loaded it into my trunk,’ I said. The residents all paid the guy an extra ten a month in the hope that he would be helpful. Some of them gave him more than that. He made a fortune from us.
‘Ah, my back is playing up again, Mr Murphy,’ he said. ‘My doctor says I should be real careful about lifting and that kind of work.’ He said this slowly and carefully while both of them watched me struggling under the weight of a dozen bottles of tequila. That Mexican hooch was heavy; what do they put into that poison?
I cleared space for it in the trunk and then stood up and got my breath. ‘Maybe you should get a job with the Fire Department,’ I said. ‘You could take it easy there.’ Ratface glared at me. I lifted the crate, put it into my trunk, pulled the lid down, and watched it close automatically. I loved that old Caddie; it was a part of me. The trouble was, the old lady really was dripping oil and leaving a pool of it everywhere I stopped, and the way things were at present I didn’t have time enough to take her to the service station.
‘And that’s a parking place for the disabled,’ called Ratface.
I pretended not to hear him.
2
That was some bash, that party for Petrovitch. The little girl who organized it for Petrovitch Enterprises International was a professional party fixer. I didn’t know there were such jobs, even in Los Angeles. She’d rented the Snake Pit for the whole evening, and that takes money. Alternating with the Portable PCs, who had an album at number three that week, there was a band playing all that corny Hawaiian music. The waitresses were dressed in grass skirts, leis, and flesh-colored bras, and one wall was almost covered with orchids flown in from Hawaii. There were dozens of miniature palm trees standing in huge decorative faience pots. The ceiling was obscured by hundreds of colored balloons; from each one dangled a silver or gold cord, the end supporting an orchid bloom, to make a shimmering ceiling of orchids just above head height.
The place was packed. I had trouble parking my Caddie. I can’t get the old battle wagon into the spaces they paint for lousy little imported compacts. So I left it in a slot marked RESERVED FOR SECURITY and wrote Mr Petrovitch on a slip of paper that I propped behind the windshield. I didn’t want my new boss screaming for his fix of special-brand tequila and me blamed for his deprivation. I heaved it out of the car, put the crate on my shoulder, and staggered across the underground parking garage to where the entrance was located. It was so crowded there were guests talking and drinking and dancing right out there on the concrete. They were waltzing around on the red carpet and through the crushed flowers that had been strewn around, and I had to push my way past them to get inside the place. I gave the crate of tequila to the bar man, got a Powers whisky with soda and ice, and started to circulate. The last thing they needed was more booze. Most of them seemed tanked up to the gills. I was frightened to strike a match in case the air exploded.
‘Mickey Murphy! I saw you were on the guest list.’
The deep, lazy voice came booming from a corpulent individual named Goldie Arnez. He’d been watching two video monitors from cameras trained on the lobby to show the guests as they arrived.
‘What are we tuned to, Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous?’
‘That’s about it,’ he said, taking his eyes from the screen to scrutinize me carefully.
When I first met Goldie he was slim – a movie stuntman, can you imagine? We used to work out together at Gold’s Gym, when there was only one Gold’s Gym and it was on Second Street in Santa Monica. That was where Goldie had acquired his nickname. The stuntwork dwindled as he wrestled with the scales, and the last time I met him he was a 250-pound bail bondsman with a reputation for playing rough with the fugitives he brought in. Now he looked like he’d gone to seed: where he used to have muscles, he had flab, and there were dark rings under his eyes. Maybe I wouldn’t have recognized him, except for that full head of brown wavy hair. He still had his hair – or was it a rug? In this light I couldn’t decide. ‘What are you doing nowadays, Goldie?’
‘You don’t know?’
‘No, I don’t know. Would I be asking you if I knew already?’
‘That’s my Mickey,’ he said. ‘You say good morning to the guy, and you get maimed in a riot.’
‘Cut it out, Goldie.’
‘I’m muscle for Mr Petrovitch.’
‘You’re what?’
‘Don’t be that way. You might need a buddy who can put in a good word with the man at the top.’
‘Muscle?’ I could see it wasn’t all flab; the bulge under his armpit had square edges.
‘I run a team of twenty.’
‘Does Petrovitch need twenty bodyguards?’
‘I’m not a bodyguard. I have guys to do the day-to-day work. I’m head of security for Petrovitch Enterprises International. I’m responsible for the vice presidents and everything in the continental U.S. It’s a big job.’ He gave me one of his business cards.
I looked at it and put it in my pocket. ‘Is that why you’re drinking Pepsi?’
‘Mr Petrovitch cracks down on drinking by staff on duty. He’ll tell you that.’
‘I might find that a little difficult to adjust to,’ I said.
‘Not after Mr Petrovitch has talked to you, you won’t.’ Goldie took a sip of his cola and looked me over. ‘It’s the cost. When he takes over a company he strips all the surplus fat from it and makes it into a lean and trim earnings machine.’ Goldie looked at me as he said it with relish. It sounded like something he’d read in a prospectus, and I didn’t like it. And what kind of lean and trim earnings machine was Goldie?
‘You want to lend me your phone, Goldie?’ I said, eyeing the cellular clipped to his belt. ‘I need to get hold of my partner in Phoenix. I’ll call collect.’
‘Haven’t you got a phone in your car?’ said Goldie.
‘Are you crazy? I drive a beautiful ’fifty-nine Caddie with the original interior and paintwork. I don’t want some guy drilling holes in her and bolting phones and batteries into the bodywork.’
‘There’s a phone upstairs,’ said Goldie. ‘Come with me, or you won’t get past my security guys.’
Goldie led the way to a messy little office with a fax machine and word processors and a bulletin board displaying half a dozen bounced checks, a buy-one-get-one-free coupon from Pizza Hut, and a signed photo of Arnold Schwarzenegger. He lingered out in the hallway for a moment. I thought he was being discreet and allowing me a little privacy, but I should have known better. He came right in.
‘Make your call and let’s get out of here.’ He seemed to disapprove of my looking around the place, but that was just my natural curiosity.
I sat down behind the desk, picked up the phone, and was about to start hitting the buttons when I noticed there was an extra wire coming from the phone and going into a hole freshly drilled in the desktop, a hole marked by a trace of sawdust. ‘Goldie,’ I said, ‘you got a scrambler on this phone or something? What’s this wiring deal? Are you bugging someone’s calls?’
‘Don’t hit that button!’ he barked, showing an alarm in sharp contrast to his previous doleful demeanor. ‘Stay where you are. Put the phone down on the desk and let me come round there.’ He grabbed me by the shoulder as I got to my feet. Then he grabbed the scissors from the desk and cut all wires leading to the phone.
‘What is it?’
‘Jesus!’ said Goldie, talking to himself as if he’d not heard me. ‘The bastards!’
‘Is it a bomb?’
‘You bet it is,’ said Goldie. He followed the wires that went through the desk and kneeled down on the floor under it. I crouched down to see it too. He tapped a brown paper package that had been fixed to the underside of the desk. ‘See that? There’s enough plastic there to blow us both into hamburger,’ said Goldie. Carefully he stripped the sticky tape from the woodwork and revealed the detonators. It looked as if he had done such things before. ‘Maybe it was set to make a circuit when triggered by the buttons, or maybe it was one of those tricky ones that detonate with an incoming call.’
‘What’s it all about, Goldie?’
‘Say an extra prayer when you go to mass tomorrow morning,’ said Goldie. He was still under the desk fiddling with the bomb. ‘Go back downstairs and circulate. I can deal with this.’
‘Are you sure you don’t want the bomb squad?’
His glowering face appeared above the desktop. ‘Not a word about this to anyone, Mickey. If a story like this got into the papers, the shares would take a beating and I’d pay for it with my job.’
‘Whatever you say.’ I decided to leave my call to Phoenix for some other time and went back to the party for another drink. I could see why Goldie was so jumpy about publicity. The media crowd was well in evidence. Some of them I recognized, including two local TV announcers: the guy with the neat mustachio who does the morning show and the little girl with the elaborate hairdo who stands in for the weatherman on the local segment of the network news. They were standing near their cameras, paper napkins tucked into their collars like ruffs and their faces caked with makeup.
The one I was looking around for was Mrs Petrovitch. When I knew her we were both at Alhambra High, struggling with high school mathematics and preparing for college. High school friends are special, right? More special than any other kind of friends. In those days she was Ingrid Ibsen. I was in love with her. Half the other kids were in love with her too, but I dated her on account of the way she lived near me and I could always walk her home, and her dad knew my dad and did his accounts.
She lived only a block from me on Grenada. We used to walk down Main Street together, get a Coke and fries, and I’d think of something I had to buy in the five-and-dime just to make it last longer.
In my last year Ingrid was the lead in the senior play and I had a tap dance solo in the all-school production of The Music Man. I remember that final night: I danced real well. It was my last day of high school. It was a clear night with lots of stars and a big moon so you could see the San Gabriel Mountains. Dad let me have the new Buick. We were parked outside her house. I’d got my scholarship and a place at USC. I told her that as soon as I graduated I was going to come back and marry her. She laughed and said, ‘Don’t promise’ and put her finger on my lips. I always remembered the way she said that: ‘Don’t promise.’
Ingrid spent only one semester at college. She was smarter than I was at most subjects, and she could have got a B.A. easily, but her folks packed up and went to live in Chicago and she went with them. I never did get the full story, but the night she told me she was going, we walked around the neighborhood and I didn’t go home to bed until it was getting light. Then I had a fight with my folks, and the following day I stormed off and joined the Marine Corps. Kidlike, I figured I’d have to go to ’Nam eventually and it was better to get it over with. Now I’ve learned to put the bad ones at the bottom of the pile and hope they never show up. It was a crazy move because I was looking forward to going to college and almost never had arguments with my folks. And anyway, what does joining the service do to solve anything? It just gives you a million new and terrible problems to add to your old ones.
The next I heard of Ingrid was when her photo was in the paper. Budd Byron, who’d known us both at Alhambra, sent me an article that had been clipped from some small-town paper. It was a photo of Ingrid getting married. That was her first husband, some jerk from the sticks, long before she got hitched to Zachary Petrovitch. It said they’d met at a country dancing class. I ask you! I kept the clipping in my billfold for months. They were going to Cape Cod for their honeymoon, it said. Can you imagine anything more corny? Every time I looked at that picture it made me feel sorry for myself.
Soon after I met Betty, I ceremonially burned that clipping. As the ashes curled over and shimmered in the flames I felt liberated. The next day I went down to Saturn and Sun, the alternative medicine pharmacy where Betty worked, and asked her to marry me. As a futile exercise in self-punishment it sure beat joining the Marine Corps.
Then in the eighties I heard about Ingrid again when she upped and married Petrovitch. I knew the Petrovitch family by name; I’d even met Zach Petrovitch a few times. His father had made money from Honda dealerships in the Northwest, getting into them when they were giving them away, a time when everyone was saying the Japanese can maybe make cheap transistor radios, and motor bikes even, but cars?
The first time I met Petrovitch Junior he was with his father, who was guest of honor at an Irish orphanage’s charity dinner in New York. I guess that was before he knew Ingrid. At the end of the evening a few of us, including Zach, cut away to a bar in the Village. The music was great, and we all sank a lot of Irish whiskey. Petrovitch passed out in the toilet and we had a lot of trouble getting him back to the Stanhope, where he was staying. Cabs are leery of stopping for a group of men carrying a ‘corpse,’ and the ones that do stop, argue. I got into a fist fight with a cabbie from County Cork; it wasn’t serious, just an amiable bout with an overweight driver who wanted to stretch his legs. When I told him we were coming from the Irish orphanage benefit, he took us to the hotel and wouldn’t accept the fare money. The crazy thing was that when Petrovitch recovered someone told him I’d strong-armed the cabbie to take him that night. I suppose Petrovitch felt he owed me something. I never did explain it to him.