Although he was the sole owner of Mr. Wonderful’s, the Venice gymnasium whose motto was We Build the World’s Best Bodies, Gesini had let his own body go to hell. He was fat, grossly so, with gray skin almost the color and nearly the texture of wet plaster. And although he didn’t smoke, he sometimes wheezed and gasped and fought for breath, especially when servicing one of his string of muscular young men — a sexual inclination he had picked up in San Quentin, where, fifteen years before, he had served sixteen months for second-degree manslaughter. The father of four, Solly Gesini no longer bothered much with women, particularly his wife, because he didn’t like the way women looked at him when he took off his clothes.
Gesini was thinking about the call that had come that morning. He thought about it as he drove south on the San Diego Freeway, keeping stubbornly in the fast lane at a dogged forty-five, oblivious to all traffic except the car directly ahead of him.
The call had come at 8:30 from Mr. Simms — or rather, from someone who had said that he was Mr. Simms’s executive assistant. Gesini had been slightly irritated by the voice and its tone, because it had been one of those snotty Hollywood voices, all la-di-da, the kind that says “terrific” a lot and calls you by your first fucking name even if they’re thirty years younger than you. Solly liked to be called Mr. Gesini, by God, at least for the first two minutes.
Nobody that Gesini knew ever called Mr. Simms anything but just that — Mr. Simms — although his first name was Reginald. Gesini wondered what kind of name Reginald Simms was and decided, after some thought, that it was a lucky name because it obviously was neither Jewish nor Italian. Gesini had little ethnic identity and often wished that his own name were something different. Years ago he had settled on Lawrence Parnell because he thought it sounded kind of classy, and sometimes he even covered sheets of paper with it just to see how it looked as a signature.
Gesini knew very little about Reginald Simms other than his name. He knew that Simms had been brought in from back East a little more than a year ago to smooth things over in Pelican Bay. Gesini wasn’t quite sure what smoothing things over actually entailed, but he had a fairly good idea, although he hadn’t pursued it because what went on in Pelican Bay was really none of his business.
Gesini was curious, however, about why Mr. Simms would want to see him. Gesini had no illusions about his own ranking in the scheme of things. On a scale of one to a hundred, Gesini felt that he himself was very small change — four bits probably, sixty cents at best. Gesini always ranked everyone like that. A real success was, to him, a ninety-nine-center. A failure was a nickel-dime guy.
At the sign that read PELICAN BAY — NEXT 3 EXITS Gesini decided to switch lanes. He did it without either signaling or looking into his rearview mirror, and as usual, he was a little surprised by all the frantic horn blowing. The fuckers oughta look where they’re going, Gesini told himself as he swung down the curving ramp that led to Park Avenue.
When it had been founded a little more than ninety years ago, Pelican Bay had been laid out on a stern grid. It was a narrow, oblong coastal city almost totally surrounded on three sides by Los Angeles, which it poked up into like a long, exploring finger. More of its streets ran north and south than east and west, and the city’s founding fathers, not noted for imagination, had numbered all the east-west streets.
The north-south streets, however, had presented something of a problem because they had to be given names. The founders had solved the problem by giving them the names of states. As the town grew it eventually ran out of states and started borrowing the names of other famous thoroughfares. Now there were a Park Avenue; a Peachtree Street; a Downing Street; a Bourbon Street; a Broadway, of course; and for a time even a Kurfürstendam, although in 1917 that name had been changed to Champs-Élysées, which nobody could ever pronounce, and the street was now called Champ Street.
There was no park adorning Park Avenue, which could boast nothing more than a long line of dusty-looking bungalows. Most of the bungalows seemed to have campers parked in their driveways, as though to advertise that their owners liked to get out of Pelican Bay and go somewhere else as often as possible.
Gesini drove along Park Avenue until he came to Fifth Street, which was one of the city’s main thoroughfares. He turned right on Fifth Street and headed toward the ocean. Gesini prided himself on his ability to read a street and determine its level of prosperity. Fifth Street, he decided, was on an economic bummer.
The street was lined largely with small stores which occasionally were interrupted by five- and six-story office buildings all wearing SPACE AVAILABLE signs. Here and there a brassy fast-food chain had set up shop. But mostly the small stores seemed to be marginal businesses: tired junk shops with cute names; a couple of used-paperback bookstores with no customers; four palm readers in one block, which to Gesini meant Gypsies; a hopeless-looking VD clinic flanked by two massage parlors; and bars. Far too many bars.
They oughta at least wash their fucking windows, Gesini thought. Mr. Wonderful’s was located on Lincoln Boulevard in Venice, an unlovely street in an unlovely town. But Gesini kept his place spruced up and freshly painted — not out of civic pride, but because it was good for business. When it came to Venice, Gesini had no civic pride. Besides, he lived in Brentwood.
Pelican Bay seemed to grow a little more prosperous as Gesini neared the ocean. But he still didn’t like the looks of the pedestrians. Too many spics and too many spades, he thought as he pulled into a parking lot and snapped at the black attendant to “Watch the fucking fenders.” He waited until the car was safely parked. Sometimes, when he suspected that an attendant was drunk or doped, or possibly both, Gesini would rent two spaces, park the Oldsmobile himself in the center of them, and take the keys. Gesini trusted few people. Perhaps none.
The building where he was to meet Mr. Simms was called the Ransom Tower, and Gesini remembered that it had been named after one of Pelican Bay’s dead city councilmen. He also remembered that there had been some scandal attached to the construction of the building, but other than a vague impression of civic graft, he could recall no details.
The Ransom Tower was a little more than two years old and exactly fifteen stories high. Built out of steel beams and tinted glass, it suggested, in design, a box of cereal. It was located two blocks from the ocean, and the occupants of its west side could look at that if they wished. Those on the east side had nothing much to look at but the streets of Pelican Bay or, if that palled, Los Angeles.
Gesini found the number of Reginald Simms, Inc., Consultants, on the building directory and took the elevator up to the fifteenth floor, which was actually the fourteenth floor. There was no thirteenth floor. And the top floor, the sixteenth, which was really the fifteenth, was occupied by what Gesini had heard was an exclusive private club, which in Pelican Bay, he decided, meant that they didn’t let any Jews in. Or Italians either, probably. Gesini could understand that.
The first thing Gesini saw when he got off the elevator was a redheaded receptionist, who smiled at him and asked whom it was that he would like to see. When he told her who that was and who he was, she smiled again, Picked up her phone, and said, “Mr. Gesini is here.”
A few moments later, to Gesini’s right, a voice said, “Hel-lo, Solly.”
Gesini turned. He saw a tallish man of about thirty-two with the sleek looks of a male model. The man had a fat mass of carefully styled brown hair, and he wore a three-piece grayish-blue suit with a cream-colored shirt. The shirt was open and tieless, and the man had spread its collar out over the lapels of his jacket. Gesini thought it looked silly.