Crashed

4

“You met Mr. Wattles?” Hacker said.

“Not till now. Though, of course, his reputation precedes him.”

The fat, red-faced little man glanced up at me, saw nothing to hold his attention, and went back to considering the screen of the laptop in front of him. After a long moment, he rasped, “Sit.” Then he hit a couple of keys as though he had a grudge against them.

I sat on something amazingly uncomfortable that someone had disguised as a couch. Hacker stood with his beefy arms crossed, leaning against the door to the outside world, which he’d shut behind us as we came in. On the other side of the door was a reception room with a battered desk in its center. Seated behind the desk to greet us when we came in had been a life-size blow-up doll, the red “o” of her mouth unpleasantly reminiscent of the circle of drywall in front of Huston’s wall safe. She’d had orange hair and inflated fingers like puffy little sausages. There had been something familiar about her, although I number relatively few blow-up dolls among my circle of acquaintances.

The building was your basic 1980s medium-high rise, tall enough to give you a view but not so tall it’d go over sideways in a six-point quake. The windows faced south, toward the hills that divided the Valley from Los Angeles proper, and the address was only a block or so away from the 405 Freeway.

Wattles, Inc. was saving a fortune on office furniture. The desk Wattles sat behind was gray, battered institutional steel that someone had scraped deeply several times as though it were a Mercedes Benz parked on the wrong street. The so-called couch to which Hacker pointed me had probably seen a decade’s worth of faithful service in a Motel 6 before someone hauled it to the curb because it was too big for the dumpster. I could practically stretch out a leg and tap the desk with my toe. You could have carpeted the room with a carhop’s uniform.

And yet, behind Wattles some very fine dark cherry bookshelves stretched from floor to ceiling, and filling them was a whole wall’s worth of California legal statutes, nicely bound and running all the way up to the last quarter of the previous year. The set that belonged to my very expensive lawyer ended with 2005. So I would have known Wattles was doing well here, even if I hadn’t seen the wrought-iron gates with the big canyon house behind them.

“Nice and quiet in here,” I said to Hacker.

“Keep it like that,” Wattles said, abusing a few more keys. “Or go wait outside, with Dora.”

“Dora.”

“The receptionist.”

“Does she get meal breaks?”

“Shut up.”

I shut up. After a couple of minutes, one of the phones that shared Wattles’s desk with the laptop lit up. It didn’t do anything as vulgar as ring; it just blinked a couple of times. Wattles picked it up and put it to his ear.

Then he said, “No.” He listened some more. Then he said, “Fuck you,” and hung up. He had a voice that was created to say, “Fuck you,” the kind of voice Tom Waits probably has when he’s just woken up and he’s got the flu. He went back to the computer.

I counted silently to fifty.

“Well,” I said, standing up, “this has been very interesting.”

“Sit,” Wattles said again.

“There’s a painting in my van-”

“Not no more,” Wattles said. “Long gone.” This time he looked up at me. His eyes were so deepset they looked like raisins someone had pushed into raw dough. “You’re way past fucked,” he said. “You know whose house that was?”

“Somebody named Hus-.”

“You know Rabbits Stennet? You just robbed Rabbits Stennet’s house.” As my stomach dipped all the way to my feet, Wattles pushed his chair back from the desk, leaned back, slapped the side of his gut, and let out a one-syllable bark that I supposed was a laugh.

I nodded. “ ‘Past fucked’ is accurate.”

“It’s worse,” Wattles said. “What you took is part of little Mrs. Stennet’s prenup. It’s her favorite thing in the world.”

“Her pre-”

“I don’t know how much you know Rabbits, but probably not much, right?”

“Right. And not eager to-”

“Well, old Rabbits didn’t used to be exactly a family values kind of guy. Four wives, probably put ’em together and they didn’t last six months. Took over running the hookers for the West Valley mainly so he’d always know where to find them. Used to take them four and five at a time, dress ’em up like Tinker Bell or Snow White. You know, like cartoons? Had a whole basement full of Disney costumes. It was, like, a life style choice. So when he married Bunny …” He broke off, looking up at Hacker. “Isn’t that cute? Rabbits and Bunny.”

“Cuter than hamsters,” Hacker said.

“Yeah, cute.” The phone nearest to Wattles flickered again, but he gave it the finger. “So when he married Bunny and she wanted a prenup, old Rabbits dug in. He figured she’d be gone before breakfast got cold, and he’d be back to the cartoons, and anyway there was no way he was going to open the door for a bunch of divorce lawyers to come through and sniff around in his finances. But on the other hand, Bunny-you seen Bunny?”

“Not in person, but I’ve always had a thing for women named-”

“Bunny’s hot as Palm Springs. You been to Palm Springs?”

“Why ask? You’re not going to let me fin-”

“Hot,” Wattles said. He shook his hand as though flicking hot water from his fingers. “Bunny’s hot. So Rabbits, he looks at Bunny and says, no prenup, no fuckin’ way, but whaddya want? Something you can take if things don’t work out. In your name, all nice and legal, you keep the paper. And she said she wanted a couple of paintings by some European guy, and you just took the best one.”

“That was the best-”

“You know, you talk too much. Me, I like what Sam Goldwyn said. You know what Sam Goldwyn said?”

“He said, Don’t say-”

“He said to a bunch of yes-men, ‘Don’t say yes until I finish talking.’ I like that.”

“It’s hard to know when you’re finished. Sometimes you stop for-”

“I gotta breathe. Tell you what, when I’m finished I’ll say ‘your turn.’ Okay?”

I didn’t reply. Wattles pushed down the lid of the laptop and glared at me. “Okay?”

“You didn’t say ‘your turn’.”

I got an index finger pointed at the bridge of my nose, and Wattles got another pint of blood to the head, if the color of his face was any indication. “Don’t dick around with me. I’m the only thing between you and them dogs. Rabbits gives guys to the dogs sometimes, you know? Don’t answer. So you took the better half of Bunny’s prenup, and she’s going to be pissed. And when Bunny gets pissed, Rabbits loses it. Even after two years, he loses it. I don’t know what she does, but she’s gotta do it good. He’s not ordering Cinderella or the Wicked Queen to get delivered any more, not even once, and he still gets all chesty when somebody even looks at her wrong. Oh, and you don’t know the best part.”

I waited, and Wattles said, “Your turn.”

“What’s the best-”

“Where the video footage from that surveillance camera is stored,” he said.