San Diego Noir

juvenile snakes.

“Look at this thing,” he said. He reached into the pocket of his aloha shirt and pulled out a huge black scorpion. “They don’t sting.”

Vic Malic had enormous hands but that scorpion stretched from his thumb tip to the nail on his little finger. It looked like it could drill that stinger a half inch into you anytime it wanted. In his other hand was a clear plastic bag filled with crickets. They were white with dust of some kind. They hopped around as crickets do.

“Scorpion food?” I asked.

“Yeah. And they dust them with vitamins for thirty cents.”

He looked down at the creature then slid it back into his shirt pocket. “That son of a bitch Sal is stalking Farrel. That was the third time I’ve seen him. He shows up everywhere she goes.”

“Tell her to come fill out a report. We can’t do anything until she does that.”

“Doesn’t trust cops.”

“She seemed proud of her dad.”

“I’m only telling you what she told me. Sal loaned her ten grand because she totaled her car with no insurance, and her baby had to have chemotherapy. Darling little baby. I saw it. Just darling but with cancer.”

“That is a shame.”

“Yeah, and he was all charm at first, Sal was. She kind of liked him. Started paying with favors, you know, but the way he had it figured was he’d get anything he wanted for two years and she’d still owe him half. Plus he likes it rough and he hit her. Then he said he’s got friends. He can introduce her to them, you know—they’d really like her. He’s a Jersey wise guy, all connected up. Says he is. You heard him. He said he wants what’s his and what he paid for.”

I know who the mobbed-up locals are here in America’s Finest City. Sal wasn’t one of them. We’ve had our wise guys for decades, mostly connected to the L.A. outfits. There’s a restaurant they go to. You get to know who they are. I wondered if Sal was just a visiting relative, getting some R&R in Southern California. Or maybe a new guy they brought in. Or if he was a made guy trying to muscle into new territory. If that was true there would be some kind of trouble.

I watched the scorpion wriggle around in the shirt pocket. The pocket had a hula girl and it looked like the pincers were growing out of her head.

“I’m gonna get that eight grand for her,” said Vic.

“Where?”

“I got a start with the book sales.”

Vic has been hand-selling copies of Fall to Your Life!, which he wrote and published himself. It’s about how “the Robbie Brownlaw event” seven years ago at the Las Palmas Hotel changed his life for the better. He does pretty well with it, mostly to tourists. I see him sometimes, down by the Star of India, or Horton Plaza, or there at the Amtrak station, looming over his little table with copies of the book and a change box. He wears his old Vic Primeval wrestling costume of faux animal skins—not fur, but the skins sewed together into a kind of bodysuit. It’s terrifically ugly but the customers are drawn to it. To attract buyers, he also sets up an aging poster of me falling through the sky. He used to charge five bucks a copy for the book but a year ago it went up to ten. Once a month he still gives me a cut from each sale, which is twenty-five percent. I accept the money because it makes Vic feel virtuous, then turn it over to the downtown food pantry and ASPCA and various charities.

I did some quick calcs based on what Vic paid me in royalties for July—traditionally his best month due to tourists. My take was five hundred dollars, which meant that Vic pocketed fifteen hundred plus change for himself.

“It’ll take you at least six months to get eight grand,” I said. “Plus winter is coming on and you’ve got your own expenses to pay.”

Vic brooded.

“Do you have any money saved up, Vic?”

“I can get the money.”

“So she can give it to him? Don’t give her anything. Have her file a complaint with us if he’s such a badass. She can get a restraining order. You don’t know her and you don’t know him. Stay away, Vic. That’s the best advice you’ll get on this.”

“What do you mean?”

“What about this doesn’t scream setup?”

“A setup? Why set up a guy who doesn’t have any money? She hasn’t asked me for one nickel. She’s the real thing, Robbie. That little baby. I don’t have a world class brain, but my heart always sees true. Farrel passes the Vic Malic heart test.”

“The best thing you can do is have her file a complaint.”

“She won’t. I already told her to. She said the cops can’t do anything until they catch him doing something. What she’s afraid is, it’s gonna be too late when that happens.”

Which is often true.

“But Robbie, what if you tell her? Coming from you, it would mean a lot more than from me.”

The San Diego mob guys own and frequent a downtown restaurant called Napoli. It’s an unflashy two-story brick affair not far at all from police headquarters. They have controlling interests in a couple of much swankier eateries here, but they do their hanging out at Napoli.

“Hey, it’s Robbie Brownlaw,” said Dom, the owner.

“Dom, I need a word.”