Nightlife: A Novel Read online

  “When you’re a young guy, just starting out, you have to consider the possibility that the people who were here before you were born aren’t all dumb.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You should look around and say, ‘What are people already doing that works? What are people not doing, even though it’s an obvious thing to do? And why aren’t they?’ ”

  Steve Rao glared at him again, then resumed walking. “A lot of people are doing this. People have sold protection for a hundred years.”

  “Street gangs. They shake down a few Korean grocery stores, a couple of small liquor stores. They ask for just enough so the payoff is cheaper than buying a new front window. The game lasts a few months, until all the gang boys are in jail for something else or dead. Grown-ups don’t do this in L.A. And they don’t use off-duty cops for bodyguards.”

  “Why are you saying this shit?” Steve was quickly beginning to feel the heat around his neck cooking into anger. “It’s all shit! Half the rock stars in town have hired cops with them wherever they go.”

  “I’m telling you this because I want to do you a big favor,” said Hugo Poole. “That works great for musicians. Cops have to carry guns off-duty, so nobody has to make any guesses.”

  “That’s right,” said Steve Rao. “So don’t even think about trying to get out of this. I might as well be made out of steel. Anybody opens up anywhere near me, my cops will drill his ass for him. They got my back. Nobody can do anything to me.”

  “That’s probably true,” said Hugo Poole. “But what can you do to anybody else?”

  “Anything,” said Steve Rao, but he sounded uncertain.

  Hugo Poole said, “Off-duty cops will keep people from killing you if they can, just like they do for rock stars. But they won’t let even the biggest rock stars grease somebody else.”

  “We have an understanding.”

  “They understand you better than you understand them.”

  “They’re mine. I bought them.”

  “You’re paying cops money to stay a few feet from you. They can see you make deals, they can hear what you say. When they’ve seen and heard enough, they’re going to arrest you and all of the people who do business with you.”

  “You’re full of shit.”

  “Steve, these guys know the system. They know that if they get in trouble, you won’t be able to do them any good. The only people who can help them are other cops.” He paused. “You aren’t going to collect any money from anybody, Steve, because you can’t hurt anybody in front of two cops. You just put yourself out of business.”

  “Hugo, I always heard you were supposed to be the smartest man in L.A. But this is pitiful,” said Steve Rao. He took a small semiautomatic pistol from his jacket. He didn’t point it at Hugo, just shifted it to his belt. “I want your ten grand tomorrow by five, and then once a month. Be on time.”

  “Ask me how I knew they were cops.”

  “All right. How did you know?”

  “They’re wearing microphones,” said Hugo Poole. “See you, Steve.” Hugo Poole walked down the concrete riverbed, away from Steve Rao.

  “You don’t walk away from me,” said Steve Rao. “You wait until I walk away from you.” His voice sounded strained and thin, as though his throat were dry.

  Hugo Poole walked on, his pace the same smart stride he always used on the street that kept his head up and his eyes on the world in front of him and let him scan the sights beside him. He had decided that it would be best not to return to the street by the same path he had used to come down here, so he walked on for what he judged to be an extra two blocks before he came to the next ramp built for the flood maintenance people. At the top of the path he had to climb an eight-foot chain-link fence, something he hated to do, but since his suit was beyond repair, he supposed he could hardly ruin it twice.

  He swung himself over, dropped to the ground, then walked back up to Radford. Just as he was coming out of the dimly lighted, quiet street toward Ventura Boulevard, he heard the distant pops of four shots in rapid succession, then seven more. They seemed to echo from the direction of the river. As he walked along, he considered the eleven shots. Eleven was a bad number for Steve Rao. The magazines for pistols like Steve Rao’s held no more than ten in a single stack.

  3

  Hugo Poole parked in front of the Hundred Proof Bar and slipped a twenty-dollar bill to the bouncer outside the door in exchange for protecting his car from the tow trucks. The frightening late-night clientele of the Hundred Proof would keep the hot-wire artists away. As he walked along Sheldrake Avenue toward the Empire Theater he looked respectable but tired, like the bartender of an intermittently violent nightclub. He wanted to get this suit off. He would get a shower, put on a clean shirt and a new suit, and feel right again. Hugo Poole never wore a tie, because during his formative years he had watched a fight in which a man had been choked out with his Windsor knot.

  He walked under the big, ornate marquee that announced EMPIRE THEATER CLOSED FOR RENOVATION. He stepped into the alcove across the terrazzo inlay of 1920s bathing beauties and stopped beside the ticket booth in front. He stared up and down Sheldrake Avenue. Hugo Poole did not simply glance: he took his time, his eyes narrowed to impart sharpness and definition to distant shapes. When he decided he had outlasted any possible duckers-behind-corners or walkers-the-other-way, he took a full turn and stopped with his back against the door to be absolutely sure he had not been followed. He had not. Hugo Poole unlocked the door to the movie theater, opened it, slipped inside, closed it, and tugged it once to be sure it had locked behind him.

  He turned. The dim pink glow of the light inside the candy display case let him see the gilded plaster-cast sconces and the ancient painted murals of women who seemed half nymph and half movie star getting out of long antique limousines. Behind them, aimed upward in the sky, were beams from big spotlights. He heard a noise and turned to the carpeted stairway across the lobby that led up toward the balcony.

  “Evening, Hugo.” Otto Collins and Mike Garcia came into the lobby from upstairs. They had been waking up the building, doing the evening walk-around, turning on lights and unlocking the inner doors.

  “Hello, guys,” Hugo Poole said. He was not about to forget that the easiest way for somebody to kill him was to pay these two to do it here in the theater, but he had already studied them and acquitted them for tonight. Every night he looked at them for signs that they were going to betray him.

  Hugo Poole was not watching for nervous twitches and smiling, sweaty upper lips. These were men. They worked for Hugo Poole, and they could be expected to behave with a certain amount of self-possession. What he was looking for was the opposite: excessive self-control. He had seen it come upon serious men when they were contemplating risky behavior. He knew that on the day when he was going to die Mike and Otto would grow cold and distant.

  Hugo Poole knew that he was reputed to be a deep thinker, and it was a useful myth to cultivate. He was only premeditative, but to many people that made him seem clairvoyant. He made his way upstairs to the carpeted upper hallway, past the door marked PROJECTION ROOM, opened a wooden door that seemed to be a part of the paneled wall, and went inside.

  Hugo walked to his desk and sat down, then glanced at his watch. It had taken him forty-five minutes to get back here from the Valley, and he judged that to be enough time. He consulted the telephone book on the corner of his desk, picked up his telephone, and called the police precinct station in North Hollywood.

  He said, “This is G. David Hunter. I’m an attorney under retainer for Steven Rao, R-A-O. He hasn’t shown up where he was expected this evening. Could you please check to see whether he has been taken into custody tonight?” He listened for a moment, then said, “Shot dead? You did say ‘dead’? I’m shocked. When did this happen?” He listened for a few more seconds, then said, “Thank you. No doubt you’ll be hearing from me in the future. The body? I’m not sure. Let me talk to the family. I’ll have to get bac
k to you. Good night.”

  He sat back, stared at the wall, and thought about this evening. He supposed he might have to anticipate some sort of retaliation from the two cops who’d had to shoot Steve Rao. They were certainly smart enough to know why Rao had turned on them. Hugo would have to postpone a few of the schemes he had been prospering on—removing small numbers of items from cargo containers at the harbor and replacing them with stones to keep the weights constant, having women pose as hookers so Otto and Mike could be the vice squad who burst in to confiscate wallets—and substitute a few that seemed a bit less flagrant.

  He searched his memory for ideas that were safer. He had recently seen a television program in which a crowd of middle-class people stood in line carrying old possessions so that a team of antique dealers could appraise them. He had noticed that some not particularly prepossessing articles were assigned very high prices.

  He had also noticed that in almost every case, the more scarred and damaged an item was, the more likely the experts were to revere it. He had become fascinated by the way the antique dealers talked. No matter what obsolete and arcane castoff the expert was appraising, he could always talk about “the collectors” of that very item.

  There was no doubt in Hugo Poole’s mind that there were ways to make money from his discovery. How could he not make money off people who were willing to haul a five-hundred-pound sideboard to a television studio and then stand in line for hours to have some guy with a fake accent look at it?

  There was a rap on the door. Hugo Poole automatically crouched low and moved to the left, where the steel filing cabinets full of books and papers would stop a bullet. He eyed the Colt Commander .45 that he kept duct-taped to the back of the cabinet against his day of doom. It was just possible that Steve Rao’s untimely death was not being taken well by somebody. Hugo Poole waited a moment, but nobody kicked in the door.

  “Who is it?” he called.

  “Just me. Otto.”

  “Come in.”

  Otto said, “There’s a call for you on the house phone down there, Hugo. It’s a woman who says she’s your aunt.”

  Hugo squinted at Otto for a second, then stood up and hurried past him to the stairwell. It was unusual for anyone to call in on the Empire Theater’s telephone number, and during the daytime there was usually nobody here to answer it. When Hugo, Otto, and Mike were here, they were usually asleep.

  He went to the small office off the lobby near the candy counter and picked up the telephone. “Hugo Poole here.” He listened. “Hi, Aunt Ellen. How are you? What? Dennis? Oh, my God.” He closed his eyes and listened for a few seconds. Then he rubbed his forehead. “I’m so sorry, Aunt Ellen. I never imagined that anything like this could happen to Dennis.”

  4

  Joe Pitt looked up at the chandelier. There were a few hundred tear-shaped crystal pieces like diamond earrings hanging above him, the light that came off them bright white with glints of rainbows. It was like heaven up there.

  He looked down again at the green felt surface of the table, gathered his cards, and glanced at them. It was not heaven down here. Three of clubs, six of diamonds, four of spades, ten of diamonds, nine of hearts.

  Joe Pitt watched his four opponents pick up their cards. Jerry Whang’s tell was that he always blinked once when he picked up a really good hand. It was as though he were closing the shutters of his mind, because when he opened his eyes again, he revealed nothing more. There was the blink.

  Stella Korb picked up her cards and looked sick. She’d had a Botox injection today to deaden the muscles under her facial skin, but it didn’t change her eyes. The new guy that Pitt thought of as the Kid, who had the repulsive habit of wearing a baseball cap indoors, retained the same dumb look after seeing his cards.

  Delores Harkness squeezed her cards open with her thumb, closed them again to look around, then thumbed them open once more to be sure she had seen what she had seen.

  She opened with a single twenty-five-dollar chip, patiently trying to keep all of the others in as long as she could before she started murdering the last optimists. She succeeded, each of them tossing in a chip until it came to Joe Pitt. He set his cards down. “Have a good evening, everyone. I’m out.”

  Billy the dealer swept Pitt’s cards away. “See you, Joe.” Pitt stepped off, heading past the crowds of gamblers toward the front door of the card club. He walked outside, sniffed the night air, looked around himself, and listened. Just beyond the far side of the parking lot he could see headlights flashing past on the freeway and he could hear the constant swish of tires on the pavement. For once he had managed to lose all of the money he had allowed himself for the evening and not go to the cashier’s window with a credit card. He supposed that was a kind of half victory, like getting into a crash and having the car still run well enough to get him home. Then why didn’t he feel better?

  He stared at the aisle of the big parking lot where he had left his car and sensed that something was not right. His right hand moved reflexively to pat his left side once, a gesture that was so habitual that most observers would have missed it. He was still permitted to carry his pistol in a shoulder rig under his sport coat: for the rest of his life there would be the chance that someone who had gotten to know him during his twenty years as an investigator for the D.A.’s office would finally get around to killing him.

  He opened his coat and stepped forward, away from the lighted front of the casino. Joe Pitt had a willingness to pay attention to vague sensations, and when he sensed that something was threatening he went toward it.

  He had built his reputation by solving murders, and he had done it by moving toward whatever didn’t feel right. Offices closed on weekends, but every day on the calendar the killer was a killer, and Joe Pitt was working his way toward him. Any suspect who had not understood it that way had found himself at a severe disadvantage. It wasn’t some theoretical entity called the State of California that was after him; it was Joe Pitt.

  He selected a row of cars three spaces to the left of his car, and began to walk up the aisle. It took a moment before he saw the heads in the car parked beside his. As he walked his angle changed, and he could see more: there was a male driver in front, and a second man sitting in the back seat. Maybe it was a rich guy with a chauffeur, and maybe it was an easy way of putting two shooters into position to fire at him.

  Joe Pitt stopped beside a car, pretended to unlock it, then went low, as though he had gotten into the driver’s seat. He stayed low and scurried along the spaces between parked cars until he was beside the car where the two men waited. He stood up slightly behind the passenger, with his gun in his hand close to the open window.

  The passenger looked at him. “Hello, Joe.”

  Joe Pitt’s hand tightened on the gun. “Hello, Hugo.”

  “You know my friend Otto?”

  “Of course. How are you, Otto? Congratulations on your early release.”

  “Thanks,” said Otto. “It’s nice to be out. And yourself?”

  “I’m fine, thanks. What’s up, Hugo?”

  Hugo Poole looked up at him. “I need to talk to you. If you feel safer doing it inside the casino, I’ll send Otto in to arrange for a private space.”

  “I’m not afraid of you. I’m just not interested.” He put his gun away.

  “It’s worth money to you.”

  “I have money, thanks,” said Joe Pitt.

  “You have a weakness for women and a gambling problem, and nobody’s got enough money for those. Three different guys have come to me in the past year or so to sell me that information. I only paid the first one, but I remembered it. We don’t have time to bullshit each other. Tonight when I found out I needed you I knew where you would be.”

  “The gambling isn’t a problem. It’s the losing. What do you think you need me for?”

  “Will you get in so we can talk? You’re safe with us.” Hugo Poole pushed open the door and then slid to the other side. Joe Pitt hesitated, then got in besi
de him. Otto Collins drove the car up the aisle and out to the street.

  Pitt said, “I know that a few times when I needed information, you arranged for somebody to miraculously turn up to give it to me. I got the solution to something that was puzzling me, and you got—whatever it was that you got. That may have made me forget to add your name to a list of menaces to the public welfare. But life isn’t the same now.”

  “You’re the same, I’m the same. What’s different?”

  “I’m retired from the district attorney’s office. I’m out. I can’t affect the outcome of some investigation. Whatever it is that you want, I’m not in the position to give it to you.”

  “You’re a private detective now. You’re getting famous.”

  “Everybody’s got to do something. But I don’t do anything for money that can send me to jail.”

  “I assumed that. You wouldn’t last long enough to get to the front of the chow line. If it were anything illegal, I wouldn’t waste your time with it,” said Hugo Poole.

  “So what do you want?”

  “Yesterday my cousin Dennis got shot to death in Portland.”

  “What for? Was he working for you?”

  “No. He’s never worked for me. I haven’t even seen him in about four or five years.”

  “So what was he into?”

  Hugo Poole frowned. “Nothing. Dennis wasn’t into anything. He was a computer salesman.”

  Pitt’s face was expressionless.

  “Dennis was a straight businessman. He had a store up in Portland and a warehouse, and he sold computer stuff wholesale and over the Internet. He was good at it. He made money. I want to know what gets a guy like that killed.”

  “That’s what you want? You want me to find out what happened?”

  Hugo Poole held up his hands. “I can’t just leave this to a bunch of shitkicker cops in Oregon. I need somebody on this who knows what’s what.”

  “Portland isn’t a small town, Hugo. They have homicide detectives who can handle an investigation,” said Pitt. “And I don’t think an outsider has much chance of finding anything they won’t. It’s their city.”