Blood. The ammonia cleaned up mine.
Now I have something bigger to clean up.
Sarah’s four months pregnant, but she won’t even talk to me.
I have to fix this, but it’s like he’s always watching. Always ready.
Still doing his jail cell workout, right there in the middle of Sarah’s garden.
I guess that’s the beauty of Hank.
I’m going to have to leave the house tonight without Hank following me. I’m meeting an old prison acquaintance of his in Old Towne tonight for a cup of coffee. Benito Scalvo was locked up for over twenty years on a murder-for-hire beef. He’s in my doc too. He and Hank have a long-standing prison hate for each other. I want to talk to Benito about that. Benito has no family to speak of, no prospects. Nothing in the world to do.
He was so glad I looked him up.
The Movie Game
by Dick Lochte
Laguna Niguel
Alfred Hitchcock was definitely some kind of gamesman. Weird, but a gamesman. He had it figured that people came to his films with an attitude, like they were on to his game and daring him to show them some moves they weren’t expecting. So he gave them really twisted stuff. Like Janet Leigh getting all cut up in the shower. Or the old dude with his eyes pecked out in The Birds. Or, later in his career, in Frenzy, when censorship loosened up, the killer breaking the fingers of a naked corpse to get at something she’d been clutching when he strangled her.
But the thing is, he didn’t take the game that seriously. As he once famously said to an actress who told him she was worried about how to play a scene: “Ingrid, it’s only a movie.”
I was slumped behind the wheel of my parked taxi, drowsing over a copy of François Truffaut’s conversations with Hitchcock, taking an easy trip through the great director’s head. It was a slow night. Lots of slow nights in Laguna Niguel, but there wasn’t anything left for me in L.A. and I was living more or less rent-free in my sister and brother-in-law’s converted garage in the Hills, making enough behind the wheel to pop for dinner for them every now and then.
I wasn’t fooling myself. I knew I was just treading water and I’d have to swim for shore sooner or later. But on nights like that, nice and balmy, with nothing pressing, treading seemed preferable to making waves and attracting sharks. Not that sharks don’t find you anyway.
I was in the middle of Hitchcock’s description of “Mary Rose,” a ghost story he’d considered filming, when the box started squawking and, between squawks, Manny, back at the garage, was repeating a familiar name. Mine. J.D. Marquette.
Manny has a cleft palate and his words have a slushy, lispy sound that I won’t try to duplicate in print. “Fare’s at a shopping center on La Paz Road, J.D.,” he said, adding the name of the center and the exact address. “He’ll be in front of Gregory’s. Too smashed to drive home.”
“Good job, Manny,” I said. “I love ferrying drunks.”
I turned off the battery-operated book light, a gift from sis, closed the cover on Hitchcock and Truffaut, and went back to work.
That section of La Paz Road is like Mall Town U.S.A. One shopping center right after the other. By light of day, with their too-new, seamless, pastel-colored plaster coats, the structures resemble not very creative film sets, populated by extra players. Those pastels turn circus sinister at night, especially after the shops have started to shutter and most of the extras have headed home.
A big guy staggering around with his collar open and his tie at half mast and four other males, somewhat more sober, were gathered near the entrance to the center, in front of Gregory’s Sports Grill. The drunk was the only one of them who looked as if he’d ever played a sport other than foosball. He was big enough to have been a linebacker in his younger days, before he gave it up to booze.
“Glad you made it so fast,” a thin guy with glasses said when I got out of the cab. He turned to the ex-linebacker. “Sonny, here’s the cab.”
“Fuck the cab,” the drunk, a.k.a. Sonny, said. “Don’t need no fuckin cab.”
The thin guy gave me Sonny’s address in Monarch Pointe and a pleading look.
I took a step toward the big man. “Come on, sir,” I said, taking his elbow. “Time to go home.”
He jerked back, face flushed, eyes red as Dracula’s. “Don’t you touch me. Who the fuck are you?”
“He’s the cabbie, Sonny,” one of the other guys said. “Gonna drive you home.”
Sonny glared at me for a second, then staggered to the side. “Goin home, myself,” he muttered. “Doan need help from this long-haired prick.”
He did his drunk dance toward the few cars remaining in the parking lot.
The thin guy with glasses ran after him, tried to stop him. Sonny shoved him away, then staggered to a beautiful cream-colored Lexus convertible. He paused, doubled up, and emptied the contents of his stomach over the rear of that lovely vehicle.
Better it than the interior of my cab.
He wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his jacket, then struggled with the car door, got it open, and squeezed behind the wheel.
“Jackass’s gonna kill himself,” one of the men said.
“Or somebody,” I said, as Sonny roared past us, trailing vomit and exhaust.
The thin guy with glasses apologized for wasting my time, gave me two twenties for my trouble. That seemed like a fair enough exchange, even including the long-haired prick comment.
I got back in the taxi, folded the twenties, stuck them in the pocket of my island shirt, and checked in with Manny. “Fare decided to drive himself home.”
“Anybody else there need a cab?”
“Doesn’t look like it.”
“Shit, J.D. We oughta start chargin’ these bastards for cancelations,” Manny lisped.
“Absolutely,” I said. “You got anything else for me?”
“Price of gas, these fuckers should pay.”
“Damn straight,” I said. “You got another run for me?”
“Naw. It’s dead here, J.D.”
“Then I think I’ll call it a night.”
“Wish I could,” Manny said. “The fuckers.”
It wasn’t that late. Especially for somebody who gets up around noon. There were a couple of bars near the ocean that still might offer an hour or two of action, such as it was. Probably wouldn’t take me that long to blow the forty.
There was no traffic along La Paz. Just the darkness broken by my headlights, the occasional streetlight, and the even more occasional traffic light. I thought about Kelly. There’s a scene in Citizen Kane where this old guy played by Everett Sloane tells the reporter that when he was a kid he saw this little girl on a ferry, wearing a white dress and carrying a white parasol. He never met her, but as he says, “Not a month goes by when I don’t think of her.” That was kind of like me and Kelly Raye. Except that we did meet. And we lived together for a while, until I made a mistake and she discovered I wasn’t the kind of uncomplicated, dependable young man she thought I was. Funny thing, I was ready to be that guy. But hell, too little and too late. So she was in L.A. and I was in L.N. And not a day went by when I didn’t think of her.
I was recalling her birthday two years ago, when I’d just flown in from New York and... Christ! A blonde suddenly leaped out of the shadows on the left, hopped the neutral ground, and ran right in front of my goddamned cab.
I jammed my foot on the brakes and the cab skidded to a stop inches from her, my movie book and lamp sliding to the floor. The seat belt was digging into my shoulder. My hands were locked around the steering wheel.