No Vowels
I couldn’t give Wally much detail about why I was in the Edgerton Mall because I was pretty sure it could have gotten me—or him, or both of us—killed.
Much earlier that day—just three days before Christmas, as my daughter, Rina, had reminded me in the half-octave-up tone that designated spoken italics—I’d had a wakeup call, literally, from a woman named Trey Annunziato, whose control over an ambitiously brutal San Fernando Valley crime family was increasingly tenuous and who felt I owed her a favor. I disagreed, but I kept my argument to myself, what with discretion being the better part of a possibly violent death—a fate that befell, much more frequently than the statistical norm, those who didn’t do what Trey wanted them to do. Hastily dressed and largely uncombed, I showed up at Trey’s walled-in Chinese fantasy compound down near Northridge at the appointed time. (Trey had once shot someone in the knee for tardiness, which is the kind of thing that sticks in the memory.) A grim thirty minutes later I’d driven back out of the compound with a very bad taste in my mouth.
I had an hour and some change to spare before I was scheduled to show up for the meeting Trey was sending me to at the cumbersomely named Wrightwood Greens Golf and Country Club. So I called Louie the Lost and asked his voice mail whether he could drop whatever he was doing and meet me at the Du-par’s coffee shop in Studio City he and I occasionally frequented. There was nothing special about the place except that it was convenient to both of us and it was where my mentor, Herbie Mott, had taken me after my first professional burglary at the age of seventeen.
Du-par’s had a lot of sentimental value.
As I pulled into the parking lot, my phone rang. Louie.
“Can’t do it,” he said. “I got no wheels. Tell you what. Get me two pieces of cherry pie—no, one cherry and one apple—and come down Ventura a mile, mile and a half to Pete’s Putt-Putt Hut. You know it?”
“Sure,” I said. Pete was a so-so mechanic whose lack of skill was offset by a profound lack of interest in who actually owned the cars he worked on.
Louie said, “Think they got punkin?”
“It’s after Thanksgiving and before Christmas,” I said. “Any coffee shop that doesn’t have pumpkin loses its pie license.”
“You think? Huh. Okay, then. Punkin.”
“Instead of what?”
“Why you gotta confuse everything? Gimme some punkin and one of them other ones.”
“Fine.” I hung up and went in and got what was certain to be the wrong pie.
Sure enough, about six minutes later Louie said, “No apple?”
I opened the back door of my white Toyota and took out a piece of apple.
“Kid’s learning, Pete,” Louie called to a pair of shoes protruding from beneath a car. The shoes contributed a grunt of nonlinguistic agreement. The car Pete was buried under was a black Lincoln Town Car, Louie’s favorite personal ride and also his go-to when someone needed a legitimate-looking limo. I’d driven it myself not so long ago. It brought back some really rotten memories, so I said, “Can we go in the office or something?”
“Sure. You remember the coffee?”
“You didn’t ask for coffee.”
“Do I gotta do everything?” he said. “Okay, but that means the pie’s on you.”
“You have coffee, Pete?” I asked.
“You don’t want to drink it,” the shoes said.
I followed Louie into an office that looked like it had recently been waxed with used motor oil and then buffed with a uniform coat of grease until everything was a restful, if shiny, sort of Confederate grey. Many large glossy calendars with pictures of tires on them had been hung randomly on the walls. “Jesus,” I said as my feet almost slipped out from under me. “Should have brought my ice skates.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. So? What’s the emergency?” Louie swept aside some sparkly Christmas cards, heavily accented with black fingerprints, to make room on Pete’s desk for the pumpkin pie. One of the cards fell over and emitted a few tremulous notes of “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” before lapsing into an embarrassed silence, like the kid in a choir who accidentally sings out on the upbeat.
“So,” I said, “I’ve got to go talk to a guy named Tip Poindexter.”
Louie was sliding his feet experimentally across the grease on the floor. “Tell you what,” he said without looking up. “Here’s my best suggestion. Go get your passport. Go get all your passports. Then go to Pakistan with a lot of plane changes and double-backs and new names along the way. And stay there. Hey, you know anyone looks just like you?”
“No.”
“Too bad. You could use a double.” He sat in what I guessed was Pete’s chair, the only one in the room, and swiveled it silently back and forth a couple of times. Pete kept it well oiled, but then I figured Pete’s primary purpose in life was to keep everything well oiled. I put the second piece of pie, the apple, next to the pumpkin. “This is the kind of situation,” Louie said, “a guy who’s like your twin or something, would come in really handy. And you should make yourself the beneficiary on his life insurance. In fact, tell you something: except for the double, I got someone who could arrange all that. She’s a nice girl, too. Disappear you so good you’d be looking for yourself.”
“So Tip Poindexter, despite having a name that would look good on a butterfly, is not actually—”
“It’s a made-up name,” Louie said. “When he first got here from Russia he had a kind of brainy American girlfriend, brainy by his standards anyway. She taught him to play Scrabble to improve his English, and she spelled out tipping point—”
“That’s two words,” I said.
Louie waggled his head from side to side. “He was an immigrant then, so what did he know? Lotta Scrabble points in ‘tipping point.’ She won the game. For all I know, a couple years later he figured out she cheated and had her thrown out of a helicopter, but at the time, when he needed a name with some vowels in it, he came up with Tip Poindexter.”
“What was his original name?”
“With no vowels, who can pronounce it?” Louie said. He pulled out the plastic fork I’d stuck vertically in the pumpkin and dropped it into a wastebasket full of wadded, greasy paper towels. Then he picked up the piece of pumpkin pie, minus the paper plate.
“Russians have vowels,” he said. “They may be short on some stuff, but vowels they’ve got.” Louie took a bite out of the filling and tucked it in his cheek. “He comes from a place near Sochi, you know, where the Russians put on those weird Winter Olympics with all the fake snow, but his name was from some old language, whole alphabet only had a couple of vowels. It was like that TV show where they’re always trying to buy a vowel, except for them the answer was always no. For hundreds of years.”
“Ubykh,” I said. “Last person who spoke it died twenty, twenty-five years ago.”
“Musta been a lonely guy,” he said around a mouthful of pie.
“Thousands of great, vowel-free puns lost forever.”
“From what I know about the place, they probably talked mostly about goats and snow.” He took another bite of filling.
Louie was the closest thing to a friend I had in the crook world, although, since his commodity was information, our relationship stopped a few feet short of full and open. He’d been a getaway driver until a wrong turn after a diamond heist went mildly disastrous and word got out that he could barely find his way out of his own driveway. After sitting around for months like Norma Desmond waiting for the phone to ring with the next job, he packed it in and went into business as a telegraph, with a sideline in unregistered and often souped-up cars as a sort of nod to his past as a driver. What he lacked in his sense of direction he made up in memory; if he’d ever heard something, he remembered it, and he made sure he heard pretty much everything.
He licked one of the craters he’d made in the pumpkin pie and said, “If you’re going to do business with Tip Poindexter, maybe you oughta pay me in advance. Five hundred.”
“After all these years?” I said, reaching for my wallet.
“Long time ago I heard something Irwin Dressler was supposed to have said.”
I stopped counting and listened. Irwin Dressler was in his nineties now but still the King of Shade, the mobster who had done more than any other to shape modern Los Angeles. I said, “Yeah? What?”
“He said, back in the old days when someone who was operating at the B or C level all of a sudden went after someone in the A level, they’d say, ‘Kid’s got a lot of spirit.’”
I said, “That’s the most boring thing you’ve ever told me.”
He held up the hand with the pie in it. “And later, when the B-level guy showed up with a couple hundred bullets in him, they’d add a clause on. ‘Kid had a lot of spirit,’ they’d say, ‘but not much judgment.’”
“So what are you suggesting?”
“Well, if you’re gonna pass on Pakistan or the girl I got who can make you disappear, I’d suggest that Trey, with the personnel problems she’s been having lately, is a kiss under the mistletoe compared to Tip Poindexter. If you’re gonna piss anyone off, I’d pick Trey. Just don’t show up for the meeting.”
“So what does he do?”
“You got your Christmas shopping done?”
“No,” I said. “I do it all on Christmas Eve.”
Louie sat almost upright. My Christmas shopping habits seemed to engage him more than my imminent death. “What? You kidding me?”
“Give me a reason,” I said, “even a bad one, for me to kid you about Christmas shopping.”
“Junior.” He swiveled from side to side in the chair, apparently organizing his thoughts. “I seen you diagram a burglary. You drive home like you got the Shadow tailing you two cars back. I ask you, you think it’s gonna rain, you check your phone. This is not, like actors always say, consistent with your character.”
“I have issues,” I said.
“With Christmas.”
“Look,” I said, feeling my face heat up, “shrinks spend half their time prying out their patients’ issues with their mothers. If I have a—a few—issues with Christmas, well, there we are. It’s my problem, not yours, okay? Are we still friends?”
“Sheesh,” he said.
“So, yes, I do my Christmas shopping on Christmas Eve. And?”
“And you might want to change that,” he said. “Get it done early, like before you meet Tip. Wrap it, too. Write the cards. Get them all ready and then give them to someone to hand out for you, just in case. Tip is, ummm . . .” He finished eating the pumpkin off the pie crust and tossed the crust in among the oil-sodden paper towels. “You know,” he said, “to me, punkin pie is the taste of the holidays. The smell is pine but the taste—”
“Tell it to Hallmark. What about Tip? I mean, what does he do?”
“Well, now he’s a big-time money guy. Backs housing developments, fancy hotels, apartment complexes. Got a shopping mall, even. And since money needs a little muscle from time to time, he supplies that, too. Few years back he cleared all the houses in a straight line about four miles long to make room for one of those toll roads, all on the force of his personality. I mean, people sold in a hurry. But when he first got here, he was an importer.”
“Importing what?”
“Girls from Eastern Europe. Fly them into Mexico, pay coyotes to walk them over the border, and I’m talking in groups of thirty, forty at a time. Haul them from Arizona to Los Angeles, make his mark on them—”
“His mark.”
“Well, first it was three knife cuts in a row way high on the outside of the arm, just above where a short-sleeve blouse would end. Like a sergeant’s chevron, you know, but straight, not those upside-down Vs. Three lines, parallel, just deep enough to scar. Anywhere they went for the rest of their lives, he could get someone to make them roll up their sleeves, and hey there: identification. Then later he got himself a dog, and some asshole dog doctor told him about the chip, you know? The chip they put in so the dog can be identified anywhere? So he started putting those in, paid the vet extra to handle it, and told the girls that they were like transmitters, right? Said he had a gizmo he could turn on any time and see where everybody was.”
I said, “This is a hell of a Christmas story.”
“You wanted to know who he is, well, this is who he is. And the girls, they got trafficked off to massage parlors, cat houses, outcall operations, traveling house trailers—like the Good Humor Man, but with, you know. All over the country. Hundreds and hundreds of them. He owned part of the businesses, he got part of the girls’ cut. The only recession-proof industry, money coming out of his ears. And then, after eight, nine years, he hooked up with some of the other Russky mafiosos who got on one of Putin’s wrong sides and had to haul ass out of the mother country, and they put him into other businesses. Legit businesses, even. Now he hosts fund-raisers for political candidates and plays golf and polo and gets his picture in the Times and is married to something you’d have to look at five or six times to appreciate fully.”
“Get up,” I said.
“Why?”
“Because it’s my turn to sit is why.”
“Jeez,” Louie said, picking up the piece of apple pie. “I’m older than you.” But he got up.
“Much better,” I said. The chair had one haunch higher than the other so I was at a slight angle off the vertical, but with my knees feeling so weak it was hard to care.
“Why’s he want you?” Louie was using his fingers to peel the top crust off the pie.
“I don’t know. Trey said he needed an expert.”
“Like I said, get your shopping done. You got a will?” He dropped the triangle of crust, which he’d managed to remove intact, into the trash. “On a diet,” he volunteered. “Promised Alice I’d look out for my carbohydrates.” Louie had a big, round Mediterranean face, the kind of face that it was easy to envision peering down into a jumbo bowl of pasta or singing opera, perhaps at the same time, and slightly curly, almost pretty, hair that he’d fought with for years until he finally just grew enough of it to pull it into a tight ponytail. I’d gotten to know that face very well, and looking at it now, I had a pang at the thought that if Tip Poindexter killed me, I’d never see it again.
“Would you miss me if I got killed?” I asked.
“Sure I would,” he said. “So would Rina. So would Ronnie. Even Kathy.” Rina, as I’ve said, was my daughter, Ronnie my relatively new and impermeably mysterious girlfriend, and Kathy was my ex, Rina’s mom.
“That’s not many people,” I said.
“Yeah?” he said, taking a bite out of the apple filling. “Well, listen, I’ll send extra flowers.”