The first rule of unarmed combat is never be unarmed. Hollywood would have you believe that a body trained in martial arts, ala Bruce Lee, is itself a lethal weapon. Unfortunately, martial arts are rarely, truly effective in stopping an armed assailant beyond the confines of a film studio lot, and only when the cameras are rolling.
Table lamps are a much better bet.
The one on Sissy Barbieri’s end table was made of frosted glass and shaped like an electric guitar, the body of which lit up when turned on. I grabbed it by its neck and swung, connecting with my attacker’s center mass like a batter chasing a fastball. Pieces of lamp flew, along with the knife, as he flopped head first into the coffee table.
“What are you doing?” Sissy screamed. “He’s my boyfriend!”
She pushed past me and knelt beside him, trying frantically to revive him.
“Russell, wake up! Oh, my god, wake up, baby, please!” She looked up at me, seething. “He was only trying to protect me. You didn’t have to hurt him!”
I turned him on his back, checking his carotid pulse, which was strong. Aside from a good-sized cut on his right cheekbone where he impacted the coffee table, I could see no other injuries.
“He’s not moving.”
“Do you have a washcloth?”
“He’s dead! Can’t you see that?”
“He’s not dead, Sissy.”
“Russell, wake up!”
“He’ll wake up when he’s ready. Now, go get a washcloth. Please.”
“What for?”
“For his cheek. Unless you want him bleeding all over your carpet.”
Reluctant to leave his side, Sissy got off her knees, wiping away tears, and made her way to the bathroom.
Russell groaned and held his head.
“What the hell happened?”
“You got a guitar lesson. Let’s get you sitting up. It’ll slow that bleeding.”
I hoisted him off the floor and over to the couch.
Russell looked over at me woozily, head wobbling. “Who are you?”
“I’m looking for the guy who killed your girlfriend’s son. He also kidnapped my girlfriend.”
“Cool.”
Sissy returned with a damp washcloth and sat down beside him. She asked him if he wanted to go to the hospital. He shook his head no.
“Why’d you try to stab me?”
“I thought you were him,” Russell said.
“Who’s that?”
“Chad’s friend,” Sissy said, holding the washcloth to Russell’s cheek, “if that’s what you want to call him.”
As she explained it, Chad’s “friend” had called the day after Chad’s body was found. He told her that he’d done state time with Chad, and that the two of them, along with unnamed others, had become involved in some sort of impromptu business venture that had gone terribly wrong.
“The guy told me the police would be asking questions — who Chad knew, who he hung out with,” Sissy said. “He said the best thing I could do for my own good is to say I didn’t know anything. He said he knew where I lived cuz my son told him. He said he’d be checking up on me to make sure I played it smart and kept my mouth shut.”
“So you go and let some dude you don’t know inside the house?” Russell said to her accusingly, gesturing toward me. “That wasn’t playing it smart, Sissy. That was plain stupid.”
Put off by his remark, she grabbed his right hand and made him hold the washcloth to his cheek himself. “It wasn’t stupid, Russell. I knew it wasn’t the guy.”
“How’d you know I wasn’t the guy?” I said.
Sissy stood and began picking up pieces of the electric guitar lamp, depositing them on the love seat.
“Because you don’t sound like him,” she said.
“What did he sound like?”
“Like he wasn’t from here.”
“He had an accent?”
She nodded.
“What kind of accent?”
“I don’t know. England or somewhere.”
“Could he have been Australian?”
“Maybe. Who knows?”
“Foreigners,” Russell said. “They’re all assholes.”
I asked Sissy if her son had any friends from Australia.
“If he did, he never said nothing to me about it.” She reached over, still on her knees, and gulped down some bourbon. “Not that he told me anything after awhile. My mother told him I was a bad mother. She had him convinced I was the reason for every shitty little thing that went wrong in his life. Who knows? Maybe she was right.”
“You got skills, baby,” Russell said, “but mothering ain’t exactly one of ’em.”
“You go to hell, Russell.”
Sissy got off her knees, stormed down a hallway, and slammed a door behind her.
Russell looked at me like he couldn’t understand why she was upset.
“How’s your head?” I said.
“I’ll live.”
I checked his pupils. He seemed OK.
“Sorry about the knife, man. I saw you through the window and I got scared, that’s all.”
“No worries.” I walked over, snatched his knife off of the floor, and handed it to him, hilt first. “Sorry if I scared you.”
“Picked this bad boy up at the flea market in Pasadena,” Russell said, stashing the blade in his left boot. “I know the guy who sells ’em, if you’re interested.”
“Thanks. I’ll keep it in mind.”
As I walked toward the door, he said, “Listen, you didn’t get this from me. OK?”
What I “didn’t get” from Russell was the name, telephone number and last known address of Jethro Murtha, a convicted armed robber and Chad Lovejoy’s cellmate at the California Institution for Men at Chino. To celebrate the two of them both being paroled, Chad invited Murtha home to his mother’s house in Thousand Oaks, where he introduced Murtha as his best friend. The two ex-cons sat in the backyard that night working on a case of Budweiser and debating the most efficient ways to knock off banks.
“If anybody on this earth knows anything about what happened to Chad up there,” Russell said before I left, “it’s Jethro Murtha. Just watch your ass. He struck me as dangerous.”
“I’ll keep it in mind. Thanks for the help.”
The address he gave me correlated to an apartment tucked above the A-1 Super Fine Discount Golf Shop on Olympic Boulevard, in the densely packed, Mid-Wilshire neighborhood of Los Angeles known as Koreatown. Two open-air flights of stairs adjacent to the shop led from the boulevard to the second floor. I parked at a meter on the street, walked up, and knocked on the door. There was no answer. It was 4:10 P.M. Assuming Murtha still lived there and held down a day job, I figured him to be home shortly after five.
I’d wait.
In the golf shop below, a clerk in beige golf shorts with long dark hair, lively eyes and a name tag in Korean pinned to her fuchsia-colored Callaway golf shirt, tried to sell me a $350 titanium putter, the head of which was only slightly smaller than a land-mine detector.
“The stainless steel head has a thicker face and top line,” she said in an accent that was more Sherman Oaks than Seoul, “so the feel is a lot more solid when you make contact with the ball. It’ll take three strokes off your game, guaranteed.”
I took the club if only to humor her and made a few practice putts while keeping an eye on the street.
“Sole weights at the heel and toe,” she said, “so you can change the head weight however you like. Sweet, right?”
“Very.” I handed her back the putter.
“I’ll make you a great deal. Even throw in a free cover, because if you take care of your putter, it’ll take care of you.” She smiled, her tongue flicking the side of her mouth provocatively.