Violent Ward

I moved over to the bar to sneak a look at Ingrid. She was standing with her husband at the end of the red carpet, welcoming guests as they arrived. I studied her through the palm tree fronds, making sure she didn’t see me. She looked as beautiful as ever. Her hair was still very blonde, almost white, but cut shorter now. She had on a long black moiré dress with black embroidery on the bodice and around the hem. With it she wore a gold necklace and a fancy little wrist-watch. I watched her laughing with an eager group of sharp-suited yuppies who were shaking paws with her husband. Seeing her laugh reawakened every terrible pang of losing her. It brought back that night sitting in the Buick when the idea of being married was something I didn’t have to promise. To hear that laugh every day; I would have sold my soul for that. So you can see why I didn’t go across to say hello to them. I didn’t want to be shoulder to shoulder with those jerks when talking with her. It was better to see her from a distance and shuffle through my memories.

‘Hello, Mickey. I thought you might be here,’ chirruped the kind of British accent that sounds like running your fingernails across a blackboard. I turned to see a little British lawyer named Victor Crichton. He was about forty, with the cultivated look that comes with having a company that picks up the tab for everything. His suit was perfect, his face was tanned, and his hair wavy and long enough to hide the tops of his ears.

‘Oh, it’s you,’ I said, in my usual suave and sophisticated way. Vic Crichton’s boss was Sir Jeremy Westbridge, the client who was giving me ulcers. His affairs were in such desperate disarray that I could hardly bear to open my mail in the morning.

‘Did I make you jump, old chap? Awfully sorry.’ He’d caught me off guard; I suppose I looked startled. He gave a big smile and then reached out for the arm of the woman at his side. ‘This is Dorothy, the light of my life, the woman who holds the keys to my confidential files.’ He hiccuped softly. ‘Figuratively speaking.’

I said, ‘That’s okay, Victor. Hi there, Dorothy. I was just thinking.’

‘Wow! Don’t let me interrupt anything like that!’ He winked at the woman he was with and said, ‘Mickey is Sir Jeremy’s attorney on the West Coast.’

‘Pleased to meet you,’ she said. His wife was British too.

‘It sounds good the way you say it, Vic. But we’ve got to talk.’ I was hoping to make him realize the danger he was in. It wasn’t just a matter of business acumen, they were going to be facing charges of fraud and God knows what else.

‘He’s really an Irish stand-up comic,’ Vic explained to the woman, ‘but you have to set a comic to catch a comic in this part of the world. Right, Mickey?’

‘I’ve got to talk to you, Vic,’ I said quietly. ‘Is Sir Jeremy here? We’ve got to do something urgently.’

He made no response to this warning. ‘Always together. Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Lennon and McCartney, Vic Crichton and Sir Jeremy. Partners.’

‘They all broke up,’ I said.

‘I wondered if you’d spot that,’ said Vic. ‘Split up or dead. But not us; not yet, anyway. Look for yourself.’

He waved a hand in the direction of the bar, where I spotted the lean and hungry-looking Sir Jeremy. He was a noticeable figure: very tall, well over six feet, with white hair and a pinched face. He was engaged in earnest conversation with a famous local character called the Reverend Dr Rainbow Stojil, a high-profile do-gooder for vagrants who liked to be seen on TV and at parties like this. I guessed that Stojil was trying to get a donation from him. Stojil was famous for his money-raising activities.

‘Don’t interrupt them,’ advised Vic.

‘Why not?’ I said. ‘We’ve got to have a meeting.’ Vic didn’t reply. He was drunk. I wasn’t really expecting a sensible answer.

Vic and his master were well matched. They were as crooked as you can get without ski masks and sawed-off shotguns. They called themselves property developers. Their cemeteries became golf courses; their golf courses became leisure centers, and leisure centers became shopping malls and offices. They had moved slowly and legally at first but success seemed to affect their brains, because lately they just didn’t care what laws they broke as long as the cash came rolling in.

‘Look,’ I said. ‘The game’s up with all this shit. I know for a fact that an investigation has begun. It’s just a matter of time before Sir Jeremy is arrested. I can’t hold them off forever.’

‘How long can you hold them off, old boy?’

He wasn’t taking me seriously. ‘I don’t know, not long. One, two, three weeks … it’s difficult to say.’

He prodded me in the chest. ‘Make it three weeks, old buddy.’ He laughed.

‘Look, Vic, either we sit down and talk and make a plan that I can offer to them—’

‘Or what?’ he said threateningly.

I took a deep breath. ‘Or you can get yourselves a new lawyer.’

He blinked. ‘Now, now, Mickey. Calm down.’

‘I mean it. You find yourself a new boy. Some guy who likes fighting the feds and the whole slew of people you’ve crossed. A trial lawyer.’

‘If that’s the way you feel, old boy,’ he said and touched me on the shoulder in that confident way that trainers pat a rottweiler.

Maybe he thought I was going to retract, but he was wrong. With that decision made, I already felt a lot better. ‘I’ll get all the papers and everything together. You tell me who to pass it to. How long are you staying in town?’

‘Not long.’ He held up his champagne and inspected it as if for the Food and Drug Administration. ‘We’ve come to hold hands with Petrovitch about a joint company we’re forming in Peru. Then I’m off for a dodgy little argument with some bankers in Nassau and back to London for Friday. Around the world in eight hotel beds: it’s all go, isn’t it, Dot?’

‘What about Sir Jeremy?’

‘Good question, old man. Let’s just say he has a date with Destiny. He’s modeling extra-large shrouds for Old Nick.’ He held out a hand to the wall to steady himself. Any minute now he was going to fall over.

‘What do you mean?’ I said, watching his attempt to regain equilibrium.

‘Don’t overdo it, old sport.’ He put his arm around my shoulder and leaned his head close to whisper. ‘You don’t have to play the innocent with me. I’m the next one to go.’

‘Go where?’

‘You are the one arranging it, aren’t you?’ His amiable mood was changing to irritation, as is the way with drunks when they become incoherent. ‘You buggers are being paid to fix it.’ He closed his eyes as if concentrating his thoughts. His lips moved but the promised words never came.

‘I think we’re boring your wife, Victor,’ I said, in response to the flamboyant way she was patting her open mouth with her little white hand.

‘Victor always gets drunk,’ she said philosophically. She didn’t look so sober herself. She’d drained her champagne and experimentally pushed the empty glass into a palm tree and left it balanced miraculously between the fronds.

Victor didn’t deny his condition. ‘Banjaxed, bombed, bug-eyed, and bingoed,’ he said without slurring his words. ‘Wonderful town, lavish hospitality, and vintage champagne. Very rare nowadays …’ He drawled to a stop like a clockwork toy that needed rewinding.

‘Better if you don’t drive,’ I advised him. At least he didn’t call it Tinseltown, the way some of them did.

‘Dot will drive,’ said Vic. ‘She’s wonderful in the driving seat, aren’t you, Dotty? Unless we can find a motel, that is.’ He slapped her rear gently, and she bared her teeth in an angry smile. He finished his champagne. ‘I think I need another drink, a real drink this time.’

‘You’ve had enough, Vic. We’ve got to go,’ she said.

She took him by the arm, and he allowed himself to be guided away. ‘When you’ve got to go, you’ve got to go. Right, Mickey, my old lovely?’

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘See you around, Victor. ’Bye, Dot.’ He turned and, with one hand on her buttocks, shepherded her toward the bar. I wondered if he knew that Petrovitch had put a partner into my law business. If not, this didn’t seem to be the right time to discuss it. Victor waved a splay-fingered hand in the air. He didn’t look back. He seemed to know I’d be watching him go and calculating how much I was going to lose in fees next year. Oh, well, I hate crooks. I should never have become a lawyer.

The reception line was still going, but people were no longer coming through the door. This was a celebration for employees and associates, and these guests didn’t come late to a Petrovitch bash if they knew what was good for them. I decided to get a closer look at Peter the Great, whom someone seemed so keen to murder, and inched my way across the room to where the bright lights and TV cameras had been arranged just in case Petrovitch deigned to step over and tell the hushed American public the secret of making untold millions of dollars while still looking young and beautiful enough to run for President. He was dressed in a dark blue silk tuxedo with a frilly blue shirt, floppy bow tie, and patent shoes with gold buckles. He had a loose gold bracelet and lots of gold rings and a thin gold watch on a thin gold bracelet: more jewelry than his wife, in fact. He was tall and well-built and didn’t look as if he’d need the help of Goldie or any of his muscle men to look after himself. His face was bronzed and clear, almost like the skin of a young woman, and his eyes were blue and active, moving as if he was expecting physical attack. Maybe Goldie had told him about the bomb in the phone.

As I got near the people thronging around him, the thin elderly man at his side said, ‘And this is Mr Murphy of the law partnership downtown.’

‘Mickey!’ said Petrovitch. ‘It’s a long time.’ He extended his hand and gave me a firm pumping shake while grabbing my elbow in his other hand. It was another of those Hollywood handshakes, and with it he gave me a Hollywood smile and that very very sincere Hollywood stare too. I wonder if he did it the same way in New York. ‘How are tricks, buddy?’

‘What a memory you’ve got,’ I said.

‘You fighting the taxi driver, to make him take me to the hotel? How could I forget?’ Another big smile. ‘You drank me under the table. It doesn’t happen often.’ The thin elderly sidekick smiled too, both men operated by the same machinery.

‘Just hold it like that!’ It was a photographer crouching down low to sight up one of those shots that make tycoons look statuesque.

‘It’s okay,’ Petrovitch told me, indicating the photographer. ‘He’s one of our people.’ With that comforting reassurance, he grabbed my hand again and held it still so it didn’t blur, while turning his head away from me to give the camera a big smile. A flash captured this contrived moment for history.

‘Murphy,’ I heard the elderly man tell the photographer. ‘Mickey: business associate and old Marine Corps friend.’ The photographer wrote it down.

The thin elderly man smiled, and a gentle pressure upon the small of my back propelled me out of the shot as another business associate and old friend of Mr Petrovitch was given the handshake and smile treatment.

With the benediction still ringing in my ears, I shuffled off through the crush. I saw Goldie standing guard just a few paces away. He met my eyes and grinned. That guy really earned his salary, judging by the matter-of-fact way he defused bombs. Wondering how often such things happened to them, I went to the bar and got another whisky. ‘Old Marine Corps friend.’ What was that guy talking about? I looked around. This wasn’t really a party, it was a press call with drinks and music. Petrovitch had the clean-cut film-star image and the rags-to-riches story that America loves. Tonight he was showing once again that he knew exactly how to turn a few thousand dollars’ worth of tax-deductible entertaining into a message to his stockholders that sent his prices soaring when the rest of the market was struggling to keep afloat.

‘Did you get your press kit?’ A pretty girl in a striped leotard tried to hand me a bulky packet while her companion offered me a pink-colored flute of champagne.

I declined both. ‘I’m drinking,’ I said, holding my whisky aloft.

‘Everyone has to have champagne,’ said the girl, pushing the glass into my free hand. ‘It’s to toast Mr Petrovitch’s health and prosperity.’

‘Oh, in that case …’ I said. I took it, held it up, and poured it into a pot where miniature palms were growing.

The girls gulped, smiled, and moved on. Dealing with folks who don’t want to drink to the health and prosperity of Mr Petrovitch had not been part of the training schedule.

‘I saw you do that, Mickey.’

I looked up; it was Ingrid Petrovitch, née Ibsen, standing on the rostrum behind me. She looked ravishingly beautiful, just the way she’d been in my fevered high school dreams. She gave me a jokey scowl and waved a finger, the way she’d done back in those long-ago days when I’d pulled up at night in my father’s car and suggested we climb into the back seat.

‘Hello, Ingrid,’ I said. It sounded dumb and I felt stupid, the way some people do feel when confronted by someone they love too much. I’d always been a klutz like that when I was with her: I never did figure out why.

‘Hello, Mickey,’ she said, very softly. ‘It’s lovely to think that some things never change.’ She turned away and kept moving to where a line had formed to get a smile from her husband.

‘Ingrid …’

She stopped. ‘Yes, Mickey?’

‘It’s good to see you again.’

She smiled sweetly and moved on. I guess she was telling me I’d had my chance with her and blew it. And that was long ago. It was nice of her not to say it.

3

I drove back from the Petrovitch bash with a lot of worries on my mind. The Ventura Freeway, U.S. 101, runs west to Woodland Hills but it doesn’t run far enough or fast enough, because when you get there you might as well never have left the city.

When we first went to live in Woodland Hills it was a village. Betty loved it. It was country-style living, she said, a great place to bring up children. A village, did I say? Now it’s got all your user-unfriendly banks, plastic fast food, international high-rise hotels with atriums and shopping malls with floors made from Italian marble, indoor palm trees, and fountains with colored lights, not to mention vagrants sleeping out-doors in cardboard boxes.

They say this is a early-go-to-bed town, so who are all these guys doing the Freeway 101 assignment in the small hours? Newly waxed Porsches, dented Mazdas, Chevy pickups, stretch Caddies with dark glass and TV antennas – who are these guys? Tell me. That journey home took me the best part of an hour, crawling along in a pox of red lights. I tuned in to the news on the car radio. It was a litany of violence: a decomposing corpse found in a closet in Newport Beach, a liquor store stickup in Koreatown, a drive-by killing in Ramparts, and if that wasn’t enough you could join the crowds in Westwood flocking to see a movie about a cannibalistic serial killer. That’s show business?

As I got near my house I saw blue-colored flashes illuminating the trees. Uh-huh? There were two black-and-whites parked on my frontage. One of them still had the beacon revolving and its doors open.

I drove up and parked on my ramp. As I stopped and lowered the window, a young nervous cop came at me out of the darkness waving a handgun. ‘Are you the resident here?’ He was a thin kid – straight out of the Police Academy, unless I’m very much mistaken – growing a straggly mustache to make himself look old enough to buy a beer without flashing ID.

‘You got it, kid. You want to point that thing away from me?’

‘Mr Murphy?’ He looked up as the second car started up and pulled away.

‘That’s right.’ As I said it, another cop arrived panting from somewhere behind my house. He was a plump old fellow with his pistol in his hand. He was oriental-looking. You don’t get many oriental cops, do you? Hispanics, yes; black guys, even; but how many Asian cops do you see?

‘What’s going on?’ I asked. I went to the door and got out my keys.

‘There was a prowler,’ said the plump one. ‘A neighbor called it in. Saw someone in your yard. Do you want to go inside and see if he got entry?’

‘Confucius say, Cop with gun go first,’ I told him.

Before anyone could go anywhere there was the sound of a nearby door catch, and the prowler light illuminated the doorstep of my next-door neighbor, Henry Klopstock. He’d come out to watch. He was some kind of English teacher at UCLA. His wife liked to call him Professor Klopstock. ‘Is everything okay, Mr Murphy?’ He was leaning across the orange trees, the flashing lights illuminating his lined face and five-o’clock shadow and his slicked-down hair. When my son was dating the Klopstock daughter he was all smiles and Hello, Mickey. Then they split up – you know the way kids are – and suddenly he’s giving me the ‘Mr Murphy’ syntax.

‘Sure it is. Didn’t you hear the sirens? I always have a police escort now I’m running for mayor.’

‘Okay, okay. Sorry I asked,’ he said. I saw him exchange rolling eye glances with the Asian cop. So why ask dumb questions, right?

I went up the path and unlocked my front door and waited while the fat one stepped past me into the entry. Rex, my terrier, suddenly awoke and came scampering from the kitchen to growl at both of us.

‘It’s me, Rex,’ I said.

Rex crouched very low, crawled around, and watched resentfully. The cop looked at me, looked at Rex, and then stepped over him to jab the kitchen door with his nightstick. It moved just a little, but his second jab made the door open all the way. ‘Mind my paintwork, buddy,’ I said. ‘Try a little tenderness, like the song says.’

There was no one there, just the little safety lights that switch on automatically when it gets dark. He went from room to room, all through the house. I followed him. It wasn’t really a search and he didn’t do it like in the movies; he wasn’t agile enough. He knew there was no one there, and he was determined to make me feel bad about making him do it. He just plodded around, puffing, sighing, and tapping the furniture with his baton. He wound up inspecting the stuff I’ve got decorating all the walls. Broadway posters and signed eight-by-ten glossies of the stars. My dad left me his collection, and I added to it. It goes back to Show Boat. Forgive me, Dad; it goes back to Rose Marie. It’s the greatest. My dad got signed photos of everyone from Cole Porter to Ethel Merman.

The cop inspected these pictures and posters without enthusiasm. ‘Seems like your intruder didn’t get in.’ He said it like he was consoling me.

‘Is that your professional opinion?’ I said.

Having studied the titles of my books, the level of my whisky, the corn flakes supply, and the big colored photo of Danny that’s on the breakfast counter, he turned to me, gave a grin, and hitched both thumbs into his gun belt. ‘That’s right. You can rest your head on your pillow tonight and enjoy untroubled sleep.’

‘You must be the poet who writes for the fortune cookies,’ I said.

He smiled. ‘Just tickets.’

‘For the police charity concert?’ I said. ‘Who are you having this year—’

‘Yah, Miss Demeanor Washington and Felonious Monk,’ he interrupted me. ‘That’s getting to be a tired old joke, Mr Murphy.’

I knew he was just trying to make me feel bad about having him go inside first. But what is a cop paid to do anyway? Don’t get me wrong; I like cops but not at the fold of a tough day, right? And not when they are doing a Lennie Bernstein with their nightstick.

‘Just you living in the house, Mr Murphy?’

‘You got it.’

‘Big place for just one person.’

‘No, it’s just the right size. Listen, wise guy, I’ve put this mansion on the market four times in a row with three different real estate dummies in different-colored blazers. Three times it went into escrow, and three times the deal fell apart. What else would you like to know?’

‘Nothing,’ said the cop. ‘You explicated it just fine.’ I followed him outside. Explicated: what kind of a word is that?

We were standing out front smelling the orange trees, and I was remembering that if I roust these guys too much they might Breathalyze me, so I was taken suddenly good-natured: smiling and saying good night and thank you, and without any kind of warning there comes a noise and a scuffle as some dumb jerk of a burglar jumps out of my best bougainvillea and runs down the side alley.

It was damned dark. The plump cop didn’t hesitate for a second. He was off after him and moving with amazing speed for his age and weight and leg length. I couldn’t see a thing in the darkness but I followed on as best I could, clearly hearing the clattering sounds of their feet and then the loud and fierce creak of my back fence as first the perpetrator and then the cop vaulted over it into my neighbor’s yard. Behind me, I heard the scratchy sounds of voices on the police radio: the second cop was calling for backup. Then he changed his mind and said they were okay. What did he know? He was in the car with the heater on.

The fugitive was scrambling across the backyards to the street on the other side of the block. I knew the scam. Some other perp would be arriving there in a car to pick him up. The newspapers kept saying it had become a popular modus operandi for these suburban break-in artists. The papers said the cops should be countering it with random patrols and better intelligence work. Those newspaper guys know everything, right? Sometimes I wonder why these guys and gals writing in the newspaper don’t take over the whole world and make it faultless like them.

Bam! Now I heard the noise of someone blundering into my neighbor’s elaborate barbecue setup. Crash, crunch, and clatter; there go the grills and irons, the gas bottle thumps to the ground, and finally the tin trays are making a noise like a collapsing xylophone.

‘Owwwww … errrrrr!’

I stood there hoping it marked the perpetrator’s downfall, but the cry had the tenor trill of the plump cop. ‘Watch out!’ I shouted as loud as I could shout, but I was too late. Even before I reached the fence there was an almighty splash and another cry of anguish with a lot of shouting and gurgling.

The other cop, the young thin one, came rushing over to me with his gun drawn. He looked at the fence. ‘What happened?’

‘Sounds like your partner went into my neighbor’s pool.’

‘Holy cow,’ he said quietly and glared at me. ‘You son of a bitch, you let him do that?’

‘Don’t look at me,’ I said. ‘It’s a pool, not a booby trap. We didn’t dig it out in secret and cover it with leaves and twigs.’

‘Are you all right, Steve?’ he called into the darkness. I could hear his partner wading through the water.

There was the sound of a man climbing onto dry land. ‘The bastard got away.’ The half-drowned voice was low and breathless as he came back along the alley and opened my neighbor’s side gate. Shoes slapped water; he was wringing it from his shirt. More water flooded off him as he squeezed his pants and continued cursing. He came very close to me, as if he was going to get violent: he smelled strongly of the pool chemicals that cut the algae back.

‘You’d better come in and dry off,’ I said. My neighbor was nowhere to be seen and all his lights were out. Professor Klopstock certainly knew when to make himself scarce.

‘Why don’t you drop dead?’ he replied. You’d think they would have been mad at my neighbor, but the wet one was acting like I’d switched off the pool lights and lured him on.

‘We’ll get back to the precinct house,’ the dry one said. ‘We’re off duty in thirty minutes.’

‘Suit yourself,’ I said. Now that we were standing in the dim antiprowler light from my porch, I saw how wet he was. Up to his waist he was soaked, but his shoulders were only partly wet. He must have gone in at the shallow end, where all the toys and the inflated yellow alligator are floating, and recovered his balance before going under.

‘I should book you, smart-ass,’ said the wet one.