Free Fall

CHAPTER 4

I let myself out through the little gate, walked back to my car, and drove two blocks to a 7-Eleven where I used their pay phone to call a friend of mine who works in the credit department of Bank of America. I gave her Mark Thurman's name, social security number, and account numbers from both his Visa and MasterCard. I told her that I wanted to know if the charge totals for the month exceeded two thousand dollars and, if they did, how many separate purchases exceeded five hundred dollars and where and when they had been made. I also told her that I wanted to know if Thurman had applied for or received any additional credit cards during the past year. She asked me who the hell did I think I was, calling up out of the blue and asking for all of that? I told her that I was the guy who was going to take her to see Sting at the Greek Theater, then take her to dinner at Chinois on Main afterwards. She asked if tomorrow was okay, or did I want the information later tonight? She called me Chickie when she said it.

I drove back to the 405, then went south, back across the floor of the valley, then through the Sepulveda Pass and into the basin, heading toward Venice and Rusty Swetaggen's place. I left the freeway at Wilshire and 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 Newsweek, when I walked in. It was twenty-six minutes past two, but the place was still crowded with the lunch-hour rush. The real estate salespeople and the architects were vying for bar space with a lot of businessmen sporting bow ties and very short hair. The real estate people were getting the best of it. More practice, I guess. I pushed in beside Rusty and said, "I can't believe a guy with your money hangs around the job. I had your bucks, I'd be on the beach in Maui."

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 Reserved sign. People were waiting by the maitre d', but Rusty had saved the booth.

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."

I finished the Falstaff and took out my wallet. Rusty covered my hand with his. "Forget it."

I said, "Come on, Rusty."

Rusty's hand squeezed. "No." The squeeze got harder and Rusty's jagged teeth showed and suddenly the pumpkin head looked like a jack-o'-lantern from hell and you could see what had kept Rusty Swetaggen alive and safe for twenty-four years in a black-and-white. It was there for only a second and then it was gone, and he gently pushed my wallet toward me. "You don't owe me anything, Elvis. I'm glad to help you, and I will always help you in any way I can. You know that." There was something in his voice and his eyes and the way he held his hand that said that my not paying was profoundly important, as profound as anything had been or ever would be in his life.

I put the wallet away and stood. "Okay, Rusty. Sure."

He looked apologetic. "I've got a couple more calls to make, and I'm waiting to hear from a guy. You want tact."

"Sure."

"You hungry? We got a pretty good halibut today." Like nothing would make him happier than to feed me, to give to me.

"I'll see you around, Rusty. Thanks."

One hour and forty minutes later I parked in a McDonald's lot about three-quarters of a mile from LAX and walked across the street to Cody's Saloon. Mid-afternoon was late for lunch and early for quitting time, but a dozen men were lining the bar and sipping cold beer out of plain glasses. There weren't any female real estate agents and none of the guys at the bar looked like architects, but you never know. Maybe they were politically incorrect and wanted to keep it a secret. There was a big sign on the roof of a neon cowgirl riding a bucking horse. The cowgirl looked sort of like a cheerleader from Dallas. Maybe she was politically incorrect, too.

A young guy with a lot of muscles was behind the bar, talking with a couple of women in skimpy cheerleader outfits who were hanging around at the waitress station. A red-haired woman in an even skimpier outfit danced without enthusiasm in a chicken-wire cage behind the bar. Neither the bartender nor the waitresses were looking at the dancer, and neither were most of the guys lining the bar. Guess it's tough to get motivated with the chicken wire. They were playing Dwight Yoakam.

I went to a little table across from the dancer's cage and one of the waitresses came over with her little pad. I ordered another Falstaff. When you've got a forty-dollar retainer, the sky's the limit.

When she came back with it, I said, "What time do things pick up?" I gave her the nice smile. The Kevin Costner.

She smiled back and I saw her eyes flick to my hands. Nope. No wedding ring. I made the smile wider. She said, "Mostly after dinner. We get a lot of cops in here and they don't get off until later."

I nodded. "You know an officer named Mark Thurman?"

She tried to remember. "What's he look like?"

"Big. Like a jock. He probably comes around with a guy named Floyd Riggens. They work together."

Now she remembered and her face grew hard. "I know Floyd." Floyd must be a real pip all the way around.

I grinned like it was an old joke. "That Floyd is something, isn't he?"

"Uh-huh." She wasn't seeing much humor in it.

"What time do they usually get here?"

"I don't know. Maybe eight. Something like that." Like she was getting tired of talking about it. Maybe even pissed. Floyd must be something, all right. "Look, I've got to get back to work."

"Sure."

She went back to the bar and I sipped the beer and pretty soon I ordered another. There didn't seem to be a lot to do until eight o'clock, so sipping Falstaff seemed like a good way to pass the time.

Dwight Yoakam stopped and Hank Williams, Jr., came on and pretty soon the day-shift waitresses left and the night shift cranked up the Garth Brooks and the Kentucky Headhunters. The night-shift dancers were younger and moved better in the cage, but maybe that was because of the music. Or maybe it just seemed that way because of the Falstaff. Maybe if you drank enough Falstaff your personal time scale would grind to a stop and everyone around you would move faster and faster until they looked like a Chip 'n Dale cartoon running at fast forward and you looked like a still picture frozen in time. Maybe they would continue to age but you would stay young and pretty soon they'd be dead and you'd have the last laugh. That Falstaff is something, isn't it? Maybe I was just drunk. Occupational hazard.

By seven o'clock the crowd had grown and I didn't want to be there if Riggens or Thurman walked in early, so I paid for the beer, went back to the McDonald's, and bought a couple of cheeseburgers to eat in the car.

At fourteen minutes after eight, Mark Thurman's blue Ford Mustang turned into Cody's parking lot. There were three other people in the car. A brown-haired woman was sitting in the front passenger seat beside Thurman. Riggens and an overweight blonde were shoehorned into the back. The overweight blonde was loud and laughing and pulling at Riggens's pants as they got out of the car. The brown-haired woman was tall and slender and looked like a thirty-six C. They walked across the parking lot, Riggens and the blonde together, Thurman and the brunette together, and then the four of them went into the bar.

I sat in my car for a long time after they disappeared, smelling the McDonald's and tasting the beer and watching the neon cowgirl blink. My head hurt and I was tired from all the sitting, but I wasn't anxious to get home. Getting home meant going to bed and sleep wouldn't come easy tonight. Tomorrow I would have to speak with Jennifer Sheridan and tell her what I had found.

Sleep never comes easy when you're going to break someone's heart.