“V and V?”
“Vodka and Valium.”
“You serve that here, do you?”
“We aim to please.”
A hooker by the name of Rosa came in and sat next to me. She’d known Holiday last year, knew Holiday and I had a thing going and that Holiday had never really been a hooker. Rosa was a cute little gal, twenty-three, petite, wearing the sort of cleavage-rich dress that attracts business. I didn’t complain. Rosa had been in and out of the Green Room a dozen times in the past year, working on a mortgage and car payments.
“I caught your act on the six-o’clock,” she said, then turned to O’Roarke. “Caipirinha with cachaca, Patrick.”
“Patrick,” I said to O’Roarke. “You two are on a first-name basis. That’s good. I still call you O’Roarke.”
“Unlike you, she’s a great customer. That is to say, she pays for her drinks—or someone does. On the other hand, you’ve still got a bunch of those goddamn free-drink coupons. I gave you too many of ’em last year. How about you don’t chase her off before she pays for her drink?”
“I’ve never chased Rosa away. That was Holiday, and it was last year, long time ago.”
To make his day as complete as mine, I thumbed a free-drink coupon out of my shirt pocket and slid it across the bar to him. “Got hers covered, barkeep.”
Rosa smiled. “Hey, thanks. These things cost like six bucks, which is a real rip-off.”
“De nada.”
O’Roarke gave me a cool look, then went off to whip up her drink. I turned to give Rosa the once-over. She looked terrific—the dress was sapphire blue with a plunge that ended an inch below nicely shaped breasts. Her hair was straight, black, all the way to the middle of her back. Holiday told me she got twelve hundred a night or five grand a week and was highly selective.
“How’s tricks?” I asked.
“Wow, that’s old. Bet you heard it sometime around nineteen eighteen, toward the end of the first world war.”
“Ouch. Sorry.”
“No problem. I’ve heard ’em all, every hooker joke ever told and then some.”
“Occupational hazard?”
“You got it.” O’Roarke set her drink in front of her.
“I could tell you proprietary IRS jokes,” I said. “Punch line on a few of them is when someone slits their wrists.”
“Dark, Mort. Very dark. But thanks for the drink.”
We nursed our drinks for a while—Rosa in a Victoria’s Secret dress, keeping an eye out for business opportunities—me in jeans and a polyester shirt from Target. When eleven o’clock rolled around, there was Mortimer Angel in a telephoto shot, being put in the back of Day’s cruiser, Day leaning back against the car while Ginger Haley’s voice-over explained that the “heads guy” from last year, same guy who got Senator Reinhart’s hand in a FedEx package, had been placed in custody after finding the body of bad-boy rapper Jo-X hanging in a garage belonging to the daughter of a Reno police detective by the name of Russell Fairchild.
Uh-oh.
Photos of Danya and Shanna appeared and the voice-over kept up a steady beat. Fairchild would be beside himself. Even at this late hour, the RPD squad room would be a termites’ nest of activity. Phones would be ringing.
Speaking of phones, mine lit up and played “Monster Mash” by Bobby “Boris” Pickett, a ringtone I’d put on the phone right before leaving home, hoping for an occasion just like this. I let it play for a while, until Rosa stared at me and said, “You’re either seventy years old or twelve.”
I swiped the phone. “Yo.”
“Jesus Christ, Angel. You still ain’t heard from Danya? She hasn’t called or nothin’?” Fairchild was bordering on frantic. On TV, a reporter was in front of Jo-X’s Las Vegas mansion, a place worth five or six million bucks, one of the larger houses on the Las Lomas Golf Course with a view of the par-five fourteenth green.
“Nope.”
“Sonofabitch.”
He hung up.
“‘Yo’ and ‘nope,’” Rosa said, looking at me as she stirred her Caipirinha with a tiny red straw.
“It’s all about pithy conversation, Sweetheart. Communicate swiftly, waste no effort, get on with life.”
She smiled. “Pithy.”
“Try it.”
“You, me, a room upstairs?”
“Jeez, I thought you were selective.”
“I am. So . . . upstairs?”
“Only if it’s free and Holiday okays it.”
“Well . . . that didn’t work. Screw your pithy.”
Two ten a.m., Monday morning. I eased down Elmcrest in the Toyota, checking cars parked on the street—anything with a view of the house. Six possibles, five if cops don’t use Zapinos for stakeouts. Russ hadn’t called, so maybe he’d come through and cleared them out. The nearest streetlight was two hundred feet away, too dark to see much. Not much I could do except stroll back and hit the interior of the cars with a penlight. If I came across a nest of cops, I would say I was looking for my girlfriend. If that didn’t work, Russ would have to bail me out. Pretty good test of our new arrangement, if it came to that.
No cops, so I trotted up the driveway in dark clothing and into the backyard. The garage door was closed, yellow crime scene tape glowing eerily in the night. Same for the back door of the house. But all I wanted was the drainpipe, which wasn’t going to be removed in the recommended Home Depot fashion.
Wearing gloves, I grabbed the sonofabitch. It was forty years old, thin sheet metal. I yanked it off the wall, all eight feet of it, stomped it in the middle, folded it, hustled it out to my car, tossed it in the backseat, got in, and took off. No dark sedans swung out behind me with lights and siren, no helicopters, no SWAT team.
Good enough.
Tomorrow there would be an all-points bulletin, a BOLO, for a missing drainpipe.
Back home, I emptied the pipe—everything was still there—then I mashed the pipe flat, folded it into a two-foot wad of scrap covered by scaly bile-green paint, drove it across town to
