140
Ben walks back to his place Dennis Cain is out front waiting for him.
“Uhhh, what the fuck, Dennis?”
In front of my apartment? Where I live? (Where my wife sleeps and my children play with their toys?)
“It’s time for your monthly contribution to the Dennis Cain Promotion Campaign,” Dennis says.
Ben already knows this.
“But you don’t want to be seen with me,” Dennis says. “Most of my snitches like to meet on neutral ground, but every once in a while I like to show up in their native habitat so they don’t get to feeling too secure.”
“Let’s go inside,” Ben says.
They go inside.
“You want anything?” Ben asks.
“You got Diet Coke?”
“No.”
“Then I don’t want anything.”
Dennis sits down on the sofa. “So what have you got for me? And before you answer, don’t even start with a grow house or a van full of dope.”
Ben looks at him-that’s exactly where he was going to start.
“I know who you are and I know what you’ve been doing,” Dennis says. “You grow top-grade hydro and you’ve been giving me your own factory seconds. I look like the outlet mall to you, bunkie? You pull off the freeway and sell Dennis a shirt with one sleeve longer than the other?”
“I have a lead on some high-grade-”
“You read the papers, watch the news?”
“Sure.”
“Then you should know I’m a rock star,” Dennis says, “and I don’t want any green M amp;Ms in my dressing room. My last hit on the Baja Cartel went platinum, and the last thing I need is any more boo. I get any more marijuana I’ll have to lay it off on eBay.”
Ben is stretched out between the rock and the hard place and he has nowhere else to go.
Dennis likes the situation.
Arrogant Ben Leonard has his head caught in a vise, and Filipo Sanchez is never going to be in a position where he can testify about making a payoff to a certain federal agent.
Someone El Norte gave the nod to Filipo’s assassination and is forming a new partnership with the Berrajanos. If it’s true, the Sanchez-Lauters are in big trouble. Not only are the American partners changing sides, but Filipo was the last male in the royal line-there’s no one to head up the family.
Dennis wonders if Filipo’s guts spelled anything as they spilled out of him.
Narco Sesame Street.
Today is brought to you by the letter “F.”
Fuck you, Filipo. And fuck you, Ben Leonard.
“So what do you want?” Ben asks.
“We’ve been over this,” Dennis says. “Arrests of human beings. Growers-better yet, buyers-wholesalers, preferably. It’s time for you to name names, Benny boy.”
“That’s not going to happen,” Ben says.
“Look,” Dennis answers, “I pulled you out of the shit, I can drop you right back in. It takes one phone call, and I can have an assistant make it. ‘You want Ben Leonard? Take his ass. He isn’t producing anymore.’”
“Nice.”
“You want ‘nice,’ get into another business,” Dennis says. “Sell teddy bears, Candygrams. Puppies, kittens, they’re ‘nice.’ I’m in the arrest business-and you’re in that business with me.”
You’re going to name names, you’re going to wear a wire, you’re going to help make cases, Dennis tells him.
“You want me to keep the heat off you,” Dennis concludes, “you’d better wake up every morning asking yourself the following question: What can I do today to make Dennis happy?”
141
Dennis ain’t gonna be happy.
Because Ben isn’t going to name names.
He comes from a family for which the McCarthy hearings were living history. Discussed around the dinner table as if they were in that day’s news. And the worst of his parents’ scorn was reserved for those witnesses who named names.
They’re worse than the freaking Mafia in that regard, Stan and Diane, with their leftie omerta, and Stan still refuses to watch On the Waterfront because Kazan named names.
You were blacklisted back in the day, and do the math, Stan and Diane were infants; it was a badge of honor. You were one of the Hollywood Ten, you were a hero, I’m telling you John Gotti is going to name names before Ben does.
He doesn’t know the solution to Cain’s demand, he just knows what he’s not going to do.
He also knows that he’s caught between the grinding wheels of two machines-the Orange County machine and the federal machine.
Big Government and Bigger Government.
It’s enough, Ben thinks, to make a Republican out of you.
142
O goes to the library.
First she has to find it, and is pleasantly surprised to discover that they keep the thing right downtown and she’s walked past it, like, five hundred and fifty-seven thousand times.
She could get on her computer at home, but Paqu is on the warpath, in “high dudgeon” O heard that phrase in a movie and always liked it, even though she doesn’t know what a dudgeon is and Chon isn’t around to enlighten her and not talking to her, which usually comes as an intense relief to O, except this time Paqu isn’t talking to her while coming around every five seconds to glare at her, and she also suspects that Paqu has implanted spyware on her laptop in the completely justified paranoia that O uses her credit card to access online porn.
The last thing she wants is Paqu tripping over the words “Paul Patterson” on her computer and going bat-shit crazier.
So O goes to the library.
To do what most people who go to the library do-use the computers.
She seriously doubts that her Paul Patterson will be on Facebook but gives it a try anyway, only to find there are a few zillion Paul Pattersons on Facebook. Then she Googles Paul Patterson, only to get a few hundred zillion hits. She thinks of narrowing the search to
Paul Patterson+404 Father
But doubts that the search engine has her piquant sense of humor. So she hits
Paul Patterson+Laguna Beach
And there are some, but none who meet the demographic of her potential daddy, so she tries
Paul Patterson+Dana Point
No luck.
She decides to go literally in the other direction with
Paul Patterson+Newport Beach.
