was much younger than her, in his mid-twenties. Tall, skinny, long dark hair. Cute, but he could stand to wash his hair more often, if you ask me. Blue jeans and cowboy boots, that’s all he ever wore. He played bass in a country-western group, I think, but I could be wrong about that.”
“Ray Ballo.” I write his name down on my pad. “What’d she say about him?”
“Hell,” she says, “I don’t know. It was just girl talk. He was a gentleman. He brought her flowers one time, I remember that. That meant something to her. Made him special. And she liked his brown eyes, she said, oh, and the way he treated her in bed. Very slow. Very formal.”
“She talked about how he was in bed?”
“We’re best friends, remember?”
After I say goodbye to Lola, I cruise the neighborhood a while. Van Nuys is in the exact middle of nowhere. It always has been. When I was a kid in the olden days, if you lived in LA, you prayed that your parents wouldn’t move to Van Nuys. It was a guaranteed death sentence. Death by boredom. But that was then. Now, three million more people have moved in, and there are hardly any houses or apartments for rent. It’s close enough to downtown that it doesn’t matter. They’ll gladly crawl along on the freeway, they’ll live large chunks of their lives in their cars if they have to. And they don’t care how ticky-tacky or ugly it is, they’re just looking for that one-bedroom that doesn’t cost them more than their college degree. Welcome to Van Nuys.
Chapter 3
I STOP ALONG Sherman Way and grab a cheeseburger at a retro coffee shop called Dinah’s. When you push through the glass doors, the first thing you notice is how clean and perfect everything is. Frank Sinatra is crooning on the jukebox, the polished linoleum floor is all black-and-white squares, and there’s a slavish exactitude to the leatherette booths, all of which make me think this place isn’t as ancient as it would seem; in fact, it probably opened just last Tuesday. The waitress wears tight blue designer jeans and running shoes. Her thick black hair is tied up in a ponytail. She looks Vietnamese or Thai. She might be twenty years old; she might also be twelve. She talks very fast and offers only the briefest of smiles as she takes my order. Coffee, cheeseburger, fries, no problem. Then she’s gone. I glance around at the other clientele, then pull out my cell phone and call my old buddy, Omar Villasenor.
Omar dropped out of the Police Academy last week, which made me sad at first because I pulled a lot of strings to help get him in there. He said he wanted to make something of his life. I could understand that. His teenage years growing up in Boyle Heights weren’t much to crow about. He could have easily landed in prison, but luck intervened. Omar says it was me who intervened, that I saved him from the cops at the Hollenbeck Station, that they would have happily nailed him to the wall forever on whatever phony-baloney charge they could find. Some of that’s true, I guess; the Hollenbeck boys had a certain reputation. But that was a long time ago, and now he’s like my younger brother. When he joined the academy, I was so excited, I went out to Crosshairs in Torrance and bought him a pistol. A Glock just like my own, except his is a fifth-generation and mine is from the Pleistocene. Of course, when he quit, the first thing he wanted to do was give it back, said he didn’t deserve it, but I wouldn’t hear of it. Keep it, I told him. I know you; you’ll need it someday. So it’s a mutual admiration society we’ve got going—my age and occasional wisdom, his brute strength and native intuition. Plus the gun.
The phone rings four times. “You awake?” I say when he finally answers.
“Are you kidding me? I’ve been up for hours, man,” he says, though the slow, meandering way this comes out of his mouth makes me doubt it.
“Good. Glad to hear it. I’ve got a new case, Omar. Now that school’s out, I thought you might be interested.”
“School’s definitely out, yeah,” he says. “I wasn’t too good standing at attention and taking orders.”
“You know something, amigo, my father used to say there are only two kinds of people in the world: the ones who need a paycheck and those who want to be their own boss. If you’re one kind, you can’t be the other. That’s just how it is.”
“I guess,” Omar says. He doesn’t seem all that sorry with his decision. It is what it is. “So now I know.”
The coffee arrives, along with two tiny plastic complimentary containers of half-and-half. I put them aside, drink it black. I tell Omar I haven’t gotten paid yet, but not to worry. I give him the limited information I have about my meeting with Pincus Bleistiff, about the other two musicians who are no-shows, then move on to my brief tour of Risa Barsky’s ransacked apartment.
“Sounds like an ex-boyfriend,” is Omar’s first comment. “She’s lucky she wasn’t home when he knocked on the door.”
“Yeah, only now she’s missing in action and we’ve gotta find her.”
“Hey, where I come from, that’s guaranteed employment,” he says.
“I’m glad you care about this stuff, Omar.”
“I care. I care plenty, man.”
Neither one of us talks for a while. Then Omar clears his throat. “I bet she’s crashing with one of her girlfriends somewhere,” he says. “Either that or her current guy. At the end of the day, it’s all about protection.”
“Okay,” I say, “I’ll buy that. But that’s not going to last. Sooner or later, she either has to make peace with her intruder or disappear altogether. And the rent is coming due for that apartment. She’s in a bind, wherever she is.”
I drop Ray Ballo’s name as someone Omar might want to check into. That the next-door neighbor said he played bass in a country band. That he was maybe thirty years old, tall, dark, good-looking. I leave out the part about how sweet and formal he was in bed.
My cheeseburger and fries land in front of me. There’s also a sprig of parsley and a thin pathetic trio of orange slices curled along the side. Is this how they decorated food back in the fifties? Really? I tilt my neck at the waitress. I nod, I smile appreciatively.
“Anything else?” she asks. Another quick smile. Omar’s yammering in my ear. Long ago I recognized that a man, especially this man, just can’t do two things at once—not with one behind—not unless he’s half-assed, as my cousin Shelly would say. Anyway, before I can open my mouth, she’s gone, and whatever Omar said vanished into one of the dark alleys of my mind.
“Today’s Tuesday,” I say. “Why don’t you see if you can turn up Ray Ballo by Thursday afternoon. That enough time?”
“Sure, sure,” Omar says. “It’s not that big a town. There are only—what—five hundred clubs in Los Angeles that would hire a country western band on any night. And that’s assuming, of course, they aren’t on tour.”
“You’re funny,” I say. “But I bet you find him anyway.”
“I’ll do what I can, amigo. Give me a call Thursday. But not until after three, okay? I have to take Lourdes to her doctor. She doesn’t drive yet.”
“Will do.”
I finish my cheeseburger. The fries have grown cold and don’t sit too well in my stomach. I end up leaving most of them on the plate, along with the three limp orange slices. The truth is, I shouldn’t eat that kind of grease at my age. Not if I want to live forever, and who doesn’t?
When I get home, Loretta is playing some kind of strange card game with Carmen at the kitchen table. Carmen is losing, or maybe she’s just pretending to lose. “You are so lucky, chica,” she says, shaking her head as she folds the cards and adds up numbers on a yellow legal pad. “Beginner’s luck. Ay, Dios mío!” Loretta is giggling. “What’s the score now?” she wants to know. “Tell me the score!”
In the solitude of my office with the door closed, I commune with Enrique Avila’s