The Straight Man - Roger L Simon (7 page)

"You still think it's drug-related?"

"Think? We know. You won't find this in the
papers tomorrow, but we found an entire laboratory in the basement of
Nastase's house this afternoon."

"Oh, yeah? Where's that?"

"LeMoyne Street in Echo Park."

"Thanks. You're a sweetheart."

"Put it down to sympathy for the victims of
international terrorism. But remember, it'll only happen once. And
you owe me."

"Absolutely."

He turned away and pushed through a group of comics
into the hotel.

"
How many Romanians does it take to change a
light bulb?" one of them asked me.

"Not funny," I said and got into my car. I
was already late for my private detective class at the Learning
League. School was held on the second-floor office level of a rundown
stucco mini-mall in East Hollywood. The first floor was occupied by a
Laundromat, a real estate office, and a liquor store. I resisted
stopping at the liquor store for another lottery ticket and climbed
the stairs to the second floor. The room was mostly filled when I
entered and the class was already in progress. I shuffled around to
the back and took a seat as if I belonged there. Chantal Barrault
gave me a curious look from across the room and I smiled back at her,
then directed my attention to the teacher. He was a short dark guy in
his thirties with a mustache, wearing baggy pants and an olive
warm-up jacket with epaulets and sleeves that zipped off. More
trendiness. He had written his name, Peter Roman, on the blackboard
with the number of his investigator's license. At the moment, since
this was a California adult education class, he was going around the
room asking the students what they did and why they wanted to take
the class. The first three guys were television writers for Simon &
Simon and were interested in background for their series.

The next woman was a widow who liked to take courses.
Then the next four-two guys and two women-were also television
writers, this time for Remington Steele. They were looking for a
story. The man next to them was a mystery writer. He was looking for
authenticity for his books. There was no question: we were definitely
in Los Angeles.

"I guess this is one of those times no one
really wants to be a detective," Roman joked nervously.

Everybody looked relieved when they got around to
Chantal and she said she was a stand-up comic who was "actually
interested for real" in a career as a private investigator.

When they came around to me, I gave a fictitious name
and said I was a process server who wanted to move up. Roman smiled
in commiseration—someone was lower than he was—and began the
class. I immediately did what I usually did in school—go to sleep.
I remember vaguely hearing something about methods of obtaining
information (public records, surveillance, pretext) and something
about thinking like an investigator, whatever that was, and then it
was break time. Roman had given the class an assignment—to locate
the best vantage point for an auto surveillance of the mini-mall
cleaners—and they were all running around the second-floor balcony
with pencils and Xeroxed maps of the neighborhood. I thought it was
all a load of nonsense. In reality, there were so many variables in a
situation like that, there never could be one right answer. But
Chantal was taking it very seriously. She was standing by the balcony
rail, clutching her pencil and staring intently at the traffic
patterns on Sunset Boulevard.

"Interested in some practical experience?"
I said, walking up to her.

She didn't appear to hear me.

"The best car for surveillance is a van with a
lot of windows. That way you can get up and walk around. Also, carry
a goody bag with a cheap camera you're not afraid to toss over your
shoulder, a pair of binoculars, Thomas's Street Guide, a few quick
and dirty disguises, a flashlight, and an empty coffee can for peeing
if you're a man. I don't know what you're going to do. Hold it in, I
suppose. Also never do a rolling surveillance in a car with front end
damage. It's a dead giveaway."

"What're you talking about?"

"I'm offering you a job, Chantal. If you want to
be a private investigator, you can start tonight. Of course, you'll
have to miss the second half of the class."

"Are you serious? . . . You are serious. Well,
I, uh, let's go."

Two minutes later we were out on the street.

"Where's your car?" I asked.

"I don't have one."

"You don't have a car? In Los Angeles?"

"Listen,
mon ami
,
you try making it as a stand-up comic in this town and see how long
you keep your car."

"
You haven't tried being a private detective yet
.... All right, what the hell, we'll rent you one. Right now we've
got a cushy client."

I opened the doors of the BMW. She got in on the
passenger side.

"Look," she explained as we drove off,
"I've done a lot of things in my life. You've just caught me at
a bad time. But I hope you know what you're doing, because I don't
like being a charity case. Even in my worst moments I've never done
that. I didn't even take a penny of alimony from my ex-husband even
though he could've afforded plenty."

"Who was he?"

"
A psychiatrist."

I groaned.

"What's the matter? You have a problem with
psychiatrists?"

"No, no. I'm just, uh, surrounded .... Okay,
here's my proposition. For this case I'll pay you twelve dollars an
hour plus expenses. Sometimes you'll be working with me. Sometimes
alone. But any time there's shit work, it'll be for you to do."

"I don't go out for coffee. I promised myself
whatever I did I'd rather be a bag woman than—"

"
I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about
grunt research. Going to the library, that kind of thing. Did you
tell them at the Fun Zone that you were quitting stand-up?"

"
What for? Why close off options? You never
know. There could've been a scout from the Letterman show and—"

"Great. That's what I like to hear. Now, listen
. . ." I told her what I knew about the Ptak case, or most of
it, about Emily and Otis and Nastase and Bannister. About Koontz and
the suspected drug ring, even about the William Morris agents in
Tujunga.

"So tonight," I concluded, "I'm going
to have a look around Nastase's place. I want you to go down to the
Fun Zone and see what you can find out. Maybe go over to the Albergo
Picasso, too. They know me now, but you're just a nosy comic looking
around like the rest of them. I'll meet you back at the club around
midnight."

When I was done, she looked at me for what they used
to call a long minute. "Why do you trust me with all this?"
she said.

"
Shouldn't I?"

"Well, yeah, sure, but"— she
shrugged—"you don't exactly know me."

"I've got to trust someone. Besides, I have a
great instinct for these things. I discovered my ex-wife was cheating
on me in only four years. "

Chantal grinned as we pulled up at the rent-a-car
office. We got out and I put a Datsun on my credit card for her and
headed off for Echo Park. The odd thing was, by the time I crossed
Western, I was starting to feel like I was missing her.

That changed to a feeling of unease the moment I
drove onto LeMoyne Street. To begin with, I used to live in the Echo
Park area and it always made me uncomfortable to return to old
neighborhoods. I made a note to ask Nathanson about that. But more
disturbing than the neighborhood was the street itself. It was poorly
lit and sparsely populated, winding up erratically along an eroded
ridge of smog-damaged eucalyptus and deteriorated twenties bungalows
to die out in a concrete retaining wall whose faded mural of
Quetzalcoatl was stained brown from a storm drain and webbed with
cracks.

I parked near this wall and walked down half a block
to an off-white bungalow surrounded with pampas grass. Some leftover
yellow barricade tape with LAPD on the gate and on the front door
identified it as Nastase's. No one appeared to be around. The lab
squad had probably come and gone already, doing their number in their
fire-retardant jump suits as they carried out the acetone and ether
that was used to lace the coke. I hoped they had gotten it all,
because one false step with that stuff could mean bye-bye to this
street and a couple of adjoining canyons.

I checked the neighboring houses. One of them was
abandoned and the other was about a hundred and fifty feet farther
down the hill behind a row of spiny century plants. Then I walked
around the back of Nastase's place, my feet crunching more loudly
than I intended on the dead eucalyptus pods. The side of the house
was boarded up and the rear had a small porch and a useless backyard
that sloped off at a forty-degree angle into the gully below. The
porch screens were ripped and the screen door hung loosely from a
hinge. Where the earth had slipped away into the gully, I could see
the foundations decomposing. This flimsy structure was a far cry from
the block fortresses one had come to identify with cocaine
laboratories, but then who knew? It was certainly isolated enough.

I climbed up on a crate and looked into the room next
to the kitchen. It was a laundry made over into a laboratory, all
right, and a pretty crude one at that. There were still some white
plastic buckets hanging around, the kind you buy in any hardware
store and which are often used to wash the coke paste. I could smell
the odor of hydrochloric acid, the wash chemical, coming from the
sink. In the opposite corner, by an old washer and dryer, were stacks
of cardboard boxes that must not have had any evidentiary use because
they were left behind by the police. The bottom four had the words
"Holy Bible—Made in USA" printed on the side. I wanted a
better look, so I reached up farther and found a break in the outer
sash of the window, pulling it toward me while pushing on the jamb.
The upper half of the window went crashing into the room, a couple of
panes of glass shattering on the cement floor. I was about to hoist
myself in when a piece of brick came flying past my head, rebounding
off the broken screen.

"Hey, smart dog, what you doin' here?"

I looked around slowly to see a pair of Korean
punkers in baggy suits and dark glasses staring at me. The one who
spoke was fat and wore his hair orange and long. "You been
tryin' to fuck with the Reverend, smart dog?" I didn't have a
chance to answer before he continued, "Anybody fuckin' with the
Reverend gotta deal with the Chu's Brothers." He and his partner
started advancing on me. "We call ourselves the Chu's Brothers
'cause you get to choose between us."

Orange hair laughed at his own joke. Then he stopped
five feet in front of me, right alongside his blue-haired partner.
Simultaneously they pulled out a chain and a pair of nunchako sticks.
"So choose."

I thought of what the teachers at Simon's hapkido
studio could do with those sticks and it didn't take me long to
decide. I jumped as high and hard as I could between them. But the
Chu's Brothers were one step ahead of me. They had already chosen.

8

The first person I saw when I came to was Chantal.

"Is this lesson one?" she asked. "Or
were you just standing me up? I was waiting in front of the Fun Zone
for an hour and a half. Thank God, you've got a good excuse."

I would've slammed her if I could've moved.

"
Just be still and do what I say. I used to work
in an emergency room."

"I know. I know. You used to do everything."
I groaned, but I did as she said, rolling gingerly over onto my side
so she could see which and how many of my ribs were cracked. My guess
was about a hundred. If this was how I felt after duking it out with
a couple of Korean pogo freaks, one thing was certain—I'd never be
Rambo.

"You'll be all right," she said. "Come
on. We'd better get you out of here."

I started struggling to my feet. "How'd you—?"

"You said you'd be at Nastase's and it's three
A.M. You think I'd let my partner rot in some canyon to be eaten by
the coyotes?"

"
Your partner? Aren't we being a little hasty
here?"

"Well, you know. It's a manner of speaking."

"
Une facon de parler
."

"Where'd you learn that?"

"High school. But don't test me."

"I think that's very nice. You know a little
French."

"Oh, fuck you."

We . . . or rather I stumbled up to the top of the
ridge and followed Chantal uncomplainingly to the Datsun. It was
parked about fifty yards from Nastase's place and I glanced over at
the house. All was silent. The Chu's Brothers seemed to have gone,
but in my present condition I didn't have a strong inclination to
find out for sure.

"These Korean punks," said Chantal as we
drove off down the hill. "What were they after?"

"
I don't know," I said. Right then I had
visions of them yanking the Blaupunkt out of the dash of my BMW. It
would've been the fourth one. But what the hell? I was making my own
small contribution to stabilizing the price of car radios. "Maybe
it was some free coke gear, but the police already got most of that.
The way they laid into me, Angel Dust looked more their thing anyway
. .. unless they were traveling Bible salesmen."