period.
“Will do,” Louie said. “I think girls are a good idea in that neighborhood, whaddya think?”
“I agree, but I wish you’d stop calling them girls.”
“What’re we, on PBS? Haven’t got anything yet on the guys you asked me about. Nobody seems to have heard of Monty Carlo, and I can’t find anyone who’s heard from Ruben Ghorbani in a couple, three years.”
“Maybe he’s dead.”
“Uh-uh. Somebody would know. There’da been parties. People would have bought gift ribbon, shot off fireworks.”
“Well, keep looking. I’ll come by later today and give you a wad of cash.”
“I can front you for a couple days.”
I was touched. Among crooks, this is the next thing to a proposal. “I’ll get it to you today, but thanks.”
“Yeah, yeah. Burt the Gut, he’s retired now, but I got his address and talked to him, and he’ll be looking for you in, say, forty-five.” He gave me the address, which almost made me whistle. Burt the Gut had matriculated from the Valley to Hancock Park, home of some of Los Angeles’s very best houses, and he was on Hudson, my very own personal favorite street. In my infrequent mental fast-forwards to my Golden Years, shouldI reach them, I’m spending them in a 1932 Moorish castle of about 5500 square feet on Hudson. I break into it every now and then just to make sure the owners are taking care of it.
Burt the Gut lived half a block from my castle, not bad for a guy who started out running a small betting parlor, turning two competing mobs against each other so he could do business among the falling bodies in the war zone, expanded into the numbers game, and then went into the kind of high-interest, short-term money-lending that no one but the very biggest and most prestigious banks can do legally. Burt, as Herbie once explained to me, had three rules: interest would compound daily, collateral would be worth triple the loan, and pain would be inflicted upon the careless and the tardy. And when pain was the mode
du jour
, Burt turned to Ruben Ghorbani, a man who apparently felt about hurting people the way Ronnie felt about chocolate, although from what I’d heard about him, she controlled her craving better than he did.
I coasted past my castle, noted with distaste the new color of the trim, a sort of Postal Service bad-meat green, and pulled into Burt’s curving, sun-dappled driveway. Judging from the eye-ringing emerald hue of the lawn, the grass had never endured a dry minute since it was planted, about forty-five minutes ago. There are two schools of thought associated with good lawns: the British approach, which says you simply plant it and roll it for several centuries, and the Los Angeles nouveau-riche view, which says you just put in a new one whenever the old one gets a little ratty.
Burt’s place was a hulking, broad-shouldered white Mediterranean with a red-tile roof and a front door twelve feet high. The woman in gray sweats who opened the door was a premature victim of plastic surgery; she looked to be in her early thirties, but she already had plump pillows of what might havebeen blancmange floating above her cheekbones and chin to reshape her face, and her eyes had that wind-tunnel pull at the outer corners that said
facelift
in every language on earth. Her hair had been bleached to fiberglass. Confronted in a mirror with the face she’d had at twenty, she probably would have burst into tears.
“You’re that guy,” she said. “Ten-thirty.”
“I am,” I said, but she had already turned her back and was heading for a curving stairway. Without looking back, she pointed to her left, toward an arch, and said, “It’s in there” rather than “
He’s
in there,” and did the stairs two at a time, her body young and lithe and individual, a terrible contrast with the mass-produced, department-store face.
In there
was the living room, vast and vaulted, with a stone floor and a beam ceiling. It was stuffed with bulging, overdressed
“Will do,” Louie said. “I think girls are a good idea in that neighborhood, whaddya think?”
“I agree, but I wish you’d stop calling them girls.”
“What’re we, on PBS? Haven’t got anything yet on the guys you asked me about. Nobody seems to have heard of Monty Carlo, and I can’t find anyone who’s heard from Ruben Ghorbani in a couple, three years.”
“Maybe he’s dead.”
“Uh-uh. Somebody would know. There’da been parties. People would have bought gift ribbon, shot off fireworks.”
“Well, keep looking. I’ll come by later today and give you a wad of cash.”
“I can front you for a couple days.”
I was touched. Among crooks, this is the next thing to a proposal. “I’ll get it to you today, but thanks.”
“Yeah, yeah. Burt the Gut, he’s retired now, but I got his address and talked to him, and he’ll be looking for you in, say, forty-five.” He gave me the address, which almost made me whistle. Burt the Gut had matriculated from the Valley to Hancock Park, home of some of Los Angeles’s very best houses, and he was on Hudson, my very own personal favorite street. In my infrequent mental fast-forwards to my Golden Years, shouldI reach them, I’m spending them in a 1932 Moorish castle of about 5500 square feet on Hudson. I break into it every now and then just to make sure the owners are taking care of it.
Burt the Gut lived half a block from my castle, not bad for a guy who started out running a small betting parlor, turning two competing mobs against each other so he could do business among the falling bodies in the war zone, expanded into the numbers game, and then went into the kind of high-interest, short-term money-lending that no one but the very biggest and most prestigious banks can do legally. Burt, as Herbie once explained to me, had three rules: interest would compound daily, collateral would be worth triple the loan, and pain would be inflicted upon the careless and the tardy. And when pain was the mode
du jour
, Burt turned to Ruben Ghorbani, a man who apparently felt about hurting people the way Ronnie felt about chocolate, although from what I’d heard about him, she controlled her craving better than he did.
I coasted past my castle, noted with distaste the new color of the trim, a sort of Postal Service bad-meat green, and pulled into Burt’s curving, sun-dappled driveway. Judging from the eye-ringing emerald hue of the lawn, the grass had never endured a dry minute since it was planted, about forty-five minutes ago. There are two schools of thought associated with good lawns: the British approach, which says you simply plant it and roll it for several centuries, and the Los Angeles nouveau-riche view, which says you just put in a new one whenever the old one gets a little ratty.
Burt’s place was a hulking, broad-shouldered white Mediterranean with a red-tile roof and a front door twelve feet high. The woman in gray sweats who opened the door was a premature victim of plastic surgery; she looked to be in her early thirties, but she already had plump pillows of what might havebeen blancmange floating above her cheekbones and chin to reshape her face, and her eyes had that wind-tunnel pull at the outer corners that said
facelift
in every language on earth. Her hair had been bleached to fiberglass. Confronted in a mirror with the face she’d had at twenty, she probably would have burst into tears.
“You’re that guy,” she said. “Ten-thirty.”
“I am,” I said, but she had already turned her back and was heading for a curving stairway. Without looking back, she pointed to her left, toward an arch, and said, “It’s in there” rather than “
He’s
in there,” and did the stairs two at a time, her body young and lithe and individual, a terrible contrast with the mass-produced, department-store face.
In there
was the living room, vast and vaulted, with a stone floor and a beam ceiling. It was stuffed with bulging, overdressed
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