“What?”
“Does it take two hands to handle your whopper?”
“You start all conversations this way?”
“You’re here for the casting, right?
“I’m a lawyer.”
“No shit. You look a little like Studley Do-Right. Guy had a helluva wad.”
“I’ve got some questions about Charlie Ziegler.”
“You got a subpoena?”
“Nope.”
“So why should I talk to you?”
“Why wouldn’t you? Do you have something to hide?”
“Doesn’t everyone?” Gifford rasped a smoker’s laugh and squinted at me through eyes the color of snot. “C’mon, Studley. You got ten minutes, not a second more, unless I find you fabulously entertaining.”
We walked up a set of steel stairs to his office, a cluttered rat’s nest just off a catwalk, overlooking the production set. He offered me lukewarm coffee and a chair with torn, upholstered arms. I took the chair, declined the coffee, and asked why Ziegler came to see him yesterday.
“None of your business, Stud-bug.” He drummed his manicured fingernails on his desk. On the wall were a pair of movie posters.
“The way I hear it, Ziegler screwed you on the sale of the business,” I said.
“Old news.”
“Stole your girlfriend and married her.”
“Lola? His loss, not mine. Monogamy is overrated, don’t you think?”
“Not compared to celibacy.”
“Touche,” he said, waving an index finger like a saber.
“Then yesterday, you and Ziegler are seen eating steaks and hugging.”
“Charlie’s going through some changes, okay? Trust me, it has nothing to do with your case.”
“Ziegler expressing remorse for his past, is that it?”
I was just repeating what Castiel had said yesterday. Ziegler, too, had used the word the night I ate sushi at his house.
“Any law against being sorry for the shit you did?” Gifford asked.
“If the shit includes murder,” I said, “that’s pretty much against the law.”
“Ziegler’s a prick. But he’s not a killer. If you must know, yesterday he apologized for screwing me over. He’s sorry, sorry, sorry.”
Ziegler apologized to Gifford, and to Amy at their jailhouse visit. He was on an apology tour. I tried another angle.
“A few days before Perlow was shot,” I said, “my client came around and asked you some questions.”
“Lovely woman-but so filled with anger.”
“You lied to her. You said Krista wasn’t at the party, but I have a witness who places her there.”
“I told your client I saw Ziegler with three or four girls, and Krista wasn’t one of them. That’s as far as I went.”
“You chose your words carefully.”
“As I do my lovers.” His smile showed me two rows of ultra-white crowns.
“Tell me who Krista was with,” I ordered.
“Why should I?”
I bounded out of my chair, grabbed the collar of his safari jacket, and jerked him to his feet. “Because I’ll toss you through the wall and off that catwalk.”
“You wouldn’t.”
I lifted him off his feet. “You better hope you land on silicone tits instead of a concrete floor.”
“Why not spank me instead?”
I wheeled him into the wall so hard, the poster of
It occurred to me that he was enjoying this.
“Spanky, spanky, spanky!” he said.
“I don’t spank. I punch.”
I wrapped my hand around his throat. “What’d you see that night at Ziegler’s?”
A croaking sound came from Gifford’s throat and his eyes bulged.
“Tell me!” I said, loosening my grip just a bit.
“A man asked for some ludes. Krista was with him, half-zonked already.”
“Who was he?”
“I gave him a handful of pills, and he carried her to the Fuck Palace.”
“Who? Give me a name.”
“He’s scary. Scarier than you.”
I grabbed a handful of mousse-slicked hair and yanked him away from the wall. Headlocked his skull with my right arm, then pasted my big left mitt over his mouth and nose, pinching his nostrils shut. I waited until he started bucking. “Who was he! Who took Krista to the Fuck Palace?”
His cheeks were turning crimson. Then I let go with my left hand and let him suck in a breath.
“More,” he begged me. “More, sir.”
“I don’t have time for this shit.” I propped him up with my left arm and threw a short, right hook into his gut. Solid, but not a pile driver calculated to make him expel his breakfast onto my shoes.
His knees buckled and he dropped to all fours. He looked up with dancing eyes, a horse awaiting a rider. “The man …” He gasped. “The man with Krista was Alex Castiel.”
63 Playing Hooky
Granny was frying a big-mouthed, pink hog snapper, head and all, in her largest cast-iron pan. Kip was in the kitchen, grating cabbage for cole slaw.
“What’s with the sunburn, kiddo? Did you play hooky today?”
“You used to cut school to work in a bar.”
“Who told you that?”
“I’m standing on the Fifth Amendment,” Granny said, flipping the fat fish with a spatula. “Snapper was running off the reef, so we took the dinghy out.”
“Kip, until we get past your disciplinary hearing, you can’t cut school,” I said.
“We’re past it, Uncle Jake.”
My look shot him a question, and Kip explained. The Commodore had called him into the office. The esteemed State Attorney and distinguished alumnus Alejandro Castiel had placed a call. Vouched for Kip. Charges dismissed.
“That really pisses me off,” I said.
“Why, Uncle Jake? We won.”
“I don’t want to owe Castiel any favors.”
“Why not?”
“Because I have to do something really shitty to him.”
This time,
“I have to destroy him.”
