turned west to San Vicente Boulevard in Brentwood. It would've been faster to stay on the 405, but San Vicente was nicer, with interesting shops and elegant cafes and palatial homes that somehow seemed attainable, as if the people within them got there by working hard, and were still the type of folks who would give you a smile if you passed them on the sidewalk. Sort of like the Cleavers or the Ricardos.
Bike paths bordered the east- and westbound lanes, and an expansive center island with a row of mature coral trees divided the traffic. Bicyclists and joggers and power walkers flock to San Vicente for its pleasant surroundings and two-mile straightaway from Brentwood to the ocean. Even at midday, the bike paths were crowded and runners pounded along the center island. A man who might've been Pakistani ran with a dust mask, and a red-haired woman with a Rottweiler stopped to let the dog piddle on a coral tree. The woman kept her legs pumping as she waited for the dog. Both of them looked impatient.
Brentwood became Santa Monica and the nice homes became nice apartment buildings, and pretty soon you could smell the ocean and pretty soon after that you could see it. Santa Monica has rent control, and many of the apartment buildings had little signs fastened to their walls that said PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF SANTA MONICA. Protest by the apartment owners.
San Vicente ended at Ocean, which runs along a sixty-foot bluff separating Santa Monica proper from the sand and the water and Pacific Coast Highway. Most of the joggers turned back at Ocean, but most of the riders turned left to continue on the bike paths that run along the top of the bluff. I turned with the riders. The top of the bluff sports green lawns and roses and a comfortable parklike setting. There are benches, and some of the time you can sit and watch the ocean and the volleyball games down below on the beach. The rest of the time the benches are used by the thousands of homeless who flock to Santa Monica because of its mild climate. Santa Monica encourages this. The People's Republic.
A block and a half up from the Venice boardwalk I aced out a flower delivery van for a parking spot, fed the meter, and walked two blocks inland to Rusty Swetaggen's place between a real estate office and an architectural firm where they specialized in building houses on unbuildable building sites. You could eat at Rusty's during the day, and people did, but mostly they went there to drink. The real estate salespeople were all politically correct women who believed in Liz Claiborne and the architects were all young guys in their thirties who dressed in black and wore little round spectacles. Everyone was thin and everyone looked good. That's the way it is in Venice. Rusty Swetaggen is a short, wide guy with a body like a bulldog and a head like a pumpkin. If you didn't know that he owned the place, you'd think he was there to rob it. Venice is like that, too.
Six years ago, Rusty and Emma's fifteen-year-old daughter, Katy, took up with a guy from the Bay Area who introduced her to the joys of professional loop production and crack-inspired public sex performance. Katy ran away and Rusty asked me to help. I found her in the basement of a three-bedroom house in the San Francisco hills, sucking on a crack bong to kill the pain of the beating that her Bay Area hero had just given her because she wasn't quite enthusiastic enough in the multiple-partner sex she'd just been forced to have in front of a Hitachi 3000 Super-Pro video camera. I got Katy and all copies of the fourteen sex loops she'd made in the previous three days. None of her performances had as yet been distributed. I destroyed the tapes and brought Katy to a halfway house I know in Hollywood.
After eight months of hard family therapy, Katy moved back home, returned to high school, and began to put her life on track. She met a guy named Kevin in a support group during her second year of college, and fourteen months later they were married. That was seven months ago, and now she was finishing a business degree at Cal State, Long Beach. Rusty Swetaggen cried for a week after I brought her back, said he'd never be able to repay me, and refused to let me or anyone who was with me pay for a drink or for anything else that he might provide. I stopped going to Rusty's because all the free drinks were embarrassing.
Rusty was sitting at the bar, reading a copy of
Rusty squinted at the kid who worked the bar and said, 'It's a cash business, Hound Dog. You don't watch'm, they'll rob you blind.'
The kid showed Rusty his middle finger without looking up. 'I don't have to steal it. I'm going to own it one day.' The kid's name was Kevin. Rusty's son-in-law.
Rusty shook his head and looked back at me. 'The day I get any respect around here I'll drop dead and be buried.'
I said, 'Eat the food around here and it'll happen sooner rather than later.'
Rusty Swetaggen laughed so hard that an architect looked over and frowned.
Kevin said, 'You want a Falstaff, Elvis?'
'Sure.'
Rusty told him to bring it to the table and led me to an empty window booth where someone had put a little
After Kevin had brought the beer, I said, 'You get anything on my guy?'
Rusty hunkered over the table. 'This guy I talked to, he says the people from the Seventy-seventh like to hang at a bar called Cody's over by LAX. It's a shitkicker place. They got dancers in little chicken-wire cages. They got secretaries go in to get picked up. Like that.'
'Is Thurman a regular?'
'He didn't give it to me as a fact, but a REACT unit is a tight unit, sort of like SWAT or Metro. They do everything together, and that's where they've been hanging.'
'You got the address?'
He told me and I wrote it down.
'Your guy know if Thurman is mixed up in anything dirty?'
Rusty looked pained, like he was letting me down. 'I couldn't push it, Hound Dog. Maybe I could've gotten more, but you want Mr. Tact. The rest is going to take a couple days.'
'Thanks, Rusty. That's enough for now.'
