The Butcher's Granddaughter Read online

  Chapter 3

  Denise Waterston’s house is the kind of ugly only a lot of money can buy. Except for the windows, all of which are plain plate glass, the entire exterior of the place is tan stucco. In structure it looks like a castle that has been exposed to centuries of brutal sandstorms and only retains the essential shape of battlements and courtyard walls. Each of the three stories has a narrow patio that runs its entire length, jutting beyond the one above it like a three-tiered cake. It was an architect’s mescaline dream.

  A flight of cement stairs next to the house joins the Corona del Mar Beach parking lot below to the street above, bordered by an eight-foot chain-link fence that runs the perimeter of the property. I wandered up the stairs to the street and walked into the driveway. No cars. The garage had no exterior lock, but there was a green-illuminated keypad next to it. The front door was an arsenal of Schlage deadbolts.

  As I stood above the stairs and debated what to do next, a light came on in a window next to the fence. The blinds were down but I could see movement through the slits. The fence rattled at the merest touch, so I jogged back down to the almost-empty parking lot, jumped the fence where it wasn’t quite so close to the house, and waded back up through ice-plants, hoping the prints wouldn’t be too noticeable the next day.

  I could just see underneath the bottom-most leaf of the blinds and was presented with a half-nude Denise. She was braless and obviously on the way to the shower. Rick had not been far off—she was a paralyzing blue-eyed blonde in a land where you get numb to blue-eyed blondes. Watching her undress, I started to rethink my position on Asian women.

  I crunched down in a bush and waited on my haunches while she took a shower. The crushed ice-plants were just beginning to ooze through my high-tops when the sound of water stopped. I slowly resumed my position when I heard the bedsprings creak.

  She was lying on the bed, wearing a man’s flannel pajamas that I assumed were the boyfriend’s, what with the way she hugged them around her and bunched them up to her face. I knew what she was doing—I had a girlfriend once that liked to sleep in my shirts because they smelled like me. This girl looked like love the way a Marine looks like tough.

  She finished feeling up the pajamas, pulled the comforter up over her legs, and closed her eyes with a smile. With her clothes off she could have been twenty-six; tucked under the covers with that smile, she looked all of eight. I was starting to feel like a child molester.

  I got sick of spying and was just about to turn away when she twisted over the bed and pulled something from between the mattresses.

  A diary. Bingo.

  I was back in L.A. by a quarter-to-one. I changed my shoes and put Detective Cazares’ three hundred, which I had left on the nightstand, in my wallet. I deposited it at an auto-teller on the way to Sunset and Western, where I would find Jay Ballesteros. I hoped he was getting drunk. No one deserved to more.

  On the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Western Avenue is a warehouse called the Stardust Ballroom, and it houses a different club every night. Mondays it’s Mr. J’s Hollywood; Tuesdays a neo-nostalgia disco-fest called 1970’s; Wednesdays are trip-hop nights; and Thursdays at ten-thirty it turns into a vampire nest called Helter Skelter. There’s a line to get in the place until it closes, and the only legitimate color is black. Mascara is the makeup of choice for both male and female, and some of them actually wear capes and whiteface.

  I parked my motorcycle next to a line of Harleys in front of the entrance and said hello to Carlos Esposito.

  Carlos is the doorman and head bouncer of the Stardust Ballroom. He’s essentially a killing machine. Tall and wiry, I’ve seen him throw entire gangs through the front doors of the Ballroom ever since I started coming to clubs in the city. He’s thirty-four years old, studies an obscure form of martial arts called budo, and doesn’t drink, smoke, or do drugs. Budo, he informed me once, is the art of killing your opponent with one blow, before they can even react. I made it a point to be his friend.

  “Eh, Bird,” he called as I walked up and casually cut in front of a line that ran down the side of the building for a full block. “Been a while.”

  “Been busy,” I said, shaking his hand.

  He nodded down the line, “Me, too.”

  “I’m looking for Ballesteros. He been in tonight?”

  He looked up from an ID that a girl with black hair and nail polish had handed him. “He went in about two hours ago,” he said, waving her past. “He was already drunk when he got here. I heard about him and that Asian bitch. Hope she rots.”

  “She’s not that bad. Just a little confused, I think. Thanks.”

  “No problem. No trouble tonight, babe. ’Kay?”

  He yelled to the ticket girl that I was good to go, and I stepped down a short black hallway. My eyes took a minute to adjust.

  Helter Skelter is clinical depression in a box. Past a bunch of two-bit cocktail tables, the dance floor looms, packed to the point that it looks like a vibrating black brick. Above it, there’s a mock balcony with tattered cheesecloth curtains soaked by ultraviolet blacklight. The cloth’s misty purple is the only color in the room aside from a red light in the bathroom that spills weakly onto the black carpet.

  I accidentally kicked a kid sitting up against the wall on my way to the bar. His only reaction was to slowly topple over on the floor, unconscious. I stepped up and ordered a beer. Tanya Parker was standing next to me, hoping I wouldn’t notice her.

  Tanya is the kind of vampire I respect. I don’t have a choice. She’s twenty-two years old and extremely attractive with black, bobbed hair, an athletic figure that’s just shy of curvy, and a degree in molecular biology from USC. She also hates me like an addict hates a broken needle. She was wearing black-and-white horizontally striped thigh-high stockings with a black mini-skirt, a black bra, and a black leather motorcycle jacket that only had thirty or forty zippers. I tapped her on the shoulder and when she turned around she already had the sneer on her face.

  “What do you want, Bird?”

  “Have you seen Jay?”

  We were practically yelling at each other over the music. Neither of us wanted to get close enough to the other to speak in an ear. I didn’t care. Nothing looks so pathetic as two people in a club trying to have a conversation with the sides of each others’ heads. She pointed over to the dance floor. Through the smoke, I could just make out Jay at the edge of the crowd, clearly drunk and dancing like an idiot—with nobody. She tossed back a shot of something pale and turned her back. I no longer existed.

  I moved through the mass to the dance floor and pulled Jay out of the crowd like a broken picket. He looked at me like he didn’t recognize me. I leaned over and yelled, “You wanna make a hundred bucks?”

  He nodded and pointed to the bar. When we got there and he had another drink in front of him, he said, “Is Naomi...I mean, Song...is she OK?” He wasn’t quite slurring his words. When I put a hand on the small of his back to steady him against the bar, I could feel the butt of the .45 through his jacket.

  “Yeah she’s fine. How are you doing?”

  He shrugged a long shrug and sucked at the beer. “You know where she is?” he asked pathetically.

  “No, but even if I did, I wouldn’t tell you unless she asked me to. You know that.”

  He nodded. “Yeah, yeah. Contrary to popular belief, I was in love with her.”

  “Sorry about the way it went down, man. I—”

  He waved that away with the beer. “Nah, forget it. I can’t say I was glad you were there, but...” He shrugged again. “There is one thing I wanna know, though. How’d you know what was going on in that apartment?”

  I gave him the look that I give everyone who asks me questions like that. I know because it pays to know. Period.

  “Right,” he said. “You and your fuckin’ information. Speaking of which, what do I know that’s worth a hundred bucks?”

  “Not what you know, man. What you have. I need to rent your tools.”


  “My locksmithing tools? Repo stuff?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What for?”

  “So I can pick my ass, man.” I finished the beer. “I need to get through some locks.”

  His eyebrows went up at that one and I thought he was going to ask why again. Instead he said, “You still got the touch, man? You need me to come along?”

  I shook my head and ordered another beer. “I can’t tell you much, but suffice to say, what I’m doing is more than a little illegal.”

  “Chop-shop stuff?”

  “Unh-unh. I’m just getting some information for a friend.”

  That puzzled him. “By boosting cars?” I shrugged and he nodded. “Right. You can’t tell me. When do you need them?”

  “Tomorrow night. Friday. I’ll come by your place about ten, ten-thirty. You’ll have them back by Sunday afternoon.”

  “Don’t worry about it, man. When do I see the hundy?”

  I reached into my pocket and pulled out a single hundred-dollar bill. “Right now.”

  He nodded, slid it off the table into his jacket and said, “I’ll be there.” He gave me an odd look. “On second thought, I do need ’em back by Sunday.”

  I smiled. “Hey man, trust me.” I waved the bartender over and gave him fifty more bucks from Rick’s fund. “Anything else this guy drinks is on me. If he doesn’t eat up the whole fifty, you keep whatever’s left.” I turned to Jay and said, “Get drunk and forget about her.”

  His face fell. “You saw her, man. You try to forget that.”

  I said, “She’s already forgotten about you, man,” and folded through the crowd.

  I shook hands with Carlos on the way out and jumped on the bike. The air was almost fresh.

  I needed sleep. It was going to be a full weekend.

  My alarm woke me up at nine-thirty Friday night. I put some coffee on, took a shower, and chewed on an unlit cigarette as I read a copy of the Orange County Register. Cynthia Ming and the N.B.P.D. were tromping all over the front page. One article, a masterpiece of muckraking and secondhand sleaze, gave a short profile. Cynthia’s father had been a Chinese gang lord known by the rather theatrical title of Dazhai the Butcher; the Dazhai moniker his daughter now carried as a middle name. Her mother’s history was a little foggier—some sources claimed she was an immigrant seamstress, others that she was an Irish hooker. The Register seemed to prefer the latter suggestion. Cynthia had apparently become a madam after her husband and three children had burned to death in a car crash several years earlier. There was yet another less-than-subtle hint by the Register that the crash had been some kind of mob hit. Next to the article was a photo of the good woman, obviously taken fairly recently and from fairly far away with a big lens, standing on the deck of her yacht. Just below her feet, the words Azure Mosaic were painted in sapphire-blue letters bordered in gold across the hull. For all the scrutiny she was under, she looked about as disturbed as a blank envelope.

  I was thumbing through the paper, thinking that at least Cynthia had picked a pretty name for a boat, when the phone rang. It was Li.

  “Hi, Bird. What’re you doin’?”

  “Reading the paper. I just woke up.”

  “Tough night Wednesday, yeah?”

  “Yeah. Did Song tell you what happened?”

  “Most of it. I couldn’t get her to talk at first. She was pissed that I hadn’t kept in touch, ya know? But after I got her back to the apartment and stuff, she started to mellow out a little. I got the rest of it this morning.”

  I finished the coffee and got to the South County section of the paper. “So she’s staying with you?”

  “I guess so. I can’t really control her. I’m sure she’ll stick around long enough to get a little dough out of me and then she’ll split again. Or maybe not.”

  “You seen the Sheff since that night?” I asked, looking for a match.

  “Actually, no. I guess what happened with Song kind of freaked him out, and he dropped out of sight for a while. Song can have that effect on people.” She paused the conversation long enough to yell at someone in Chinese, then said, “But I’m sure he’s around. I’ll be at Canter’s tonight. I might see him there.”

  I had chewed the filter so long that the cigarette was worthless so I dug out another and lit it. “How is Song’s head about all this?” I asked. Another blast of Chinese came through the receiver. Li ignored it.

  “She’s forgotten him, I guess. Guys are just things to her. There’ll be another one around to take her abuse, I’m sure. What’re you up to tonight?”

  “Business. I’m getting hold of some information for a friend down south.”

  “Mexico?”

  I laughed a little at that. “Not that far south, Li. Just down in Orange County.” I glanced down at the open newspaper and the name Waterston caught my eye. Robert Waterston. I almost didn’t give it a second look; Denise’s dad is a prominent Newport businessman, and I was sure his name was in the paper a lot. But not in the police blotter.

  I started reading. I was about three lines down the report when Li said, “Bird? You still there?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I coughed.

  “I don’t exactly know how to go about this, but...do I owe you anything?”

  “For what?”

  “For watching over Song?”

  “I didn’t really do anything, Li.”

  “That’s not what she said.”

  I let that one hang in the air for a minute. “I don’t want any money, Li, if that’s what you mean. I might need to know something some day and you might know it. We’ll call it even then.”

  She was obviously calling from work, and the background voice shrilled over the phone again in Chinese that didn’t sound friendly. “I gotta go, Bird. But I don’t want to be in hock to you. Even-steven. How much?”

  I got to the third paragraph of the blotter and almost swallowed my cigarette. “Listen, I have to go, too. I don’t know how long this shit’ll take tonight, but I’ll probably grind something at Canter’s tonight when I’m through. See ya.” I hung up.

  The blotter went through a couple of cat-burglaries, silverware and stuff, and then the subtitle “Peeping Tom?” was followed by speculation on the source of the freeway I had stomped through the ice-plants the night before:

  Police responded to a call at 2850 Shore Drive at 11:32 p.m. to investigate a possible peeping-tom. The caller told police at the scene that he heard his fence rattle at approximately 11:00 p.m. He stepped out onto a patio to investigate, saw nothing, and went back inside. He said he heard it again twenty minutes later. This time he walked around the outside of the house and discovered a path had been tramped through the shrubbery. The caller’s daughter told police she had heard something outside her bedroom window at approximately the same time, but could not be sure. No one was seen approaching or leaving the scene. Police have no suspects.

  Terrific. The Newport cops were like trained dogs. They would be doing drive-bys all night long, and I didn’t have a choice. It had to be tonight. As long as they didn’t go so far as to actually walk the property, I figured I would be all right.

  I looked at my watch. Ten o’clock, straight up. Denise and the boyfriend would be copping feels on the beach, and by the time I got back to Corona del Mar, they would be shooting pool at the Shark Club. According to Rick, they usually stayed there until it closed at three in the morning.

  But Papa Waterston would make it sweaty. He met with a group of widowers every Friday night at the Five Crowns, a ritzy British restaurant on Pacific Coast Highway. They sat in the bar and smoked cigars and told dirty jokes. He was always home precisely at one. If I made the beach by midnight, that only gave me an hour to get things done. I would have to give myself a bigger safety margin than that. Going down alone if a bored cop decided to pull up to 2850 Shore Drive and have a doughnut was not a tempting situation.

  I stared at the newspaper and lit another cigarette.

  Denise and her beau
in Costa Mesa. The dad in south Corona. All three of them less than ten minutes from home.

  And all three of them wondering where the hell their cars were.

  I dropped by Jay’s place and woke him up. He wasn’t happy.

  “Jesus Christ, Bird. I got a forty-dollar hangover.”

  “Good. You forget about Song?”

  He winced with pain, fell back on the bed and went, “Song who?”

  “Right. Listen, man, I’m on a limited time schedule, here, so...” I held my hands up pleadingly.

  “Everything you’ll need is in that denim bag over there. Make sure they all come back in one piece. You break it, you bought it, and most of that stuff ain’t cheap.”

  I picked up the bag. “One question.”

  “What?”

  “How do you get around an alarm when the boost is in a valet lot?”

  He yawned again. “Valet’s usually turn them off. If not, you’re fucked. Just leave it.”

  “Go back to sleep,” I said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  As soon as I hit the Newport Beach city limit, it started to rain. Not the futile rain you get downtown that tries to wash the grime from the buildings and the people and the air, but a clean, healthy, loud rain—the kind that can only be powered by the immediacy of the ocean. Best of all, it meant no one on the street to screw things up. I tucked the denim tool kit into my leather jacket and pulled onto Marguerite Street, a quiet little side road full of big, expensive, comfortable beach houses and a trusting populace—there’s only one streetlight on the whole block. I parked as far from it as I could and strolled back out onto P.C.H. The Five Crowns was four blocks down.

  The rain was warm, but it was coming down in a solid sheet. The few people that were on the street were rushing under gas station canopies or into the lobby of the nearest restaurant. I kicked into a jog as I passed the parking lot across from the Crowns. There was a small hut in the corner of the lot, designed to be a miniature version of the restaurant. The two valets were huddled over a small table inside. Their door was right next to the sidewalk, and I glanced in long enough to see them playing cards. I followed the sidewalk off the main highway and onto a side street that was a Xerox of Marguerite and formed one border of the lot.