Dr. Knox Page 9

  Sutter laughed. “This guy’s a comedy show. Just like that English dude—Mr. Bean.”

  “Wha…what the fuck!” Troop said again, scuttling sideways into a filing cabinet, and sweeping an old cassette player to the floor. It shattered, and sent a tape and plastic shards across the linoleum.

  Sutter shook his head. “Really, I can’t add to this. He’s leaving me with nothing to do.”

  “Who are the Russians, Mr. Troop,” I said, “and what do they want with the girl?”

  Troop swallowed hard. “I…they…”

  “Sit down,” I said, “before you fall down.”

  He did, and his chest heaved. “I don’t know what Russians—”

  Sutter leaned his hips on the desk and rested one sneakered foot on Troop’s chair, between his legs. Sutter sighed and pushed off slowly, rolling Troop to the far corner, where he stopped with a gentle bump.

  “I get that you’re scared of them,” I said, “and I can see why—they seem like scary guys. But they’re not here now, and we are. Whatever they might do to you is theoretical. What we do is…more concrete.”

  “Who are the Russians?” Sutter said quietly.

  Troop looked down into his soaked lap. “They…they work for Rostov,” Troop said, half swallowing the words.

  “Who’s Rostov?” I asked.

  Sutter stood up straight and rubbed his chin. “Siggy Rostov,” he said. “He runs whores, among other things. Whores, gambling, loan-sharking, the list goes on—but mainly whores. Probably half the girls who work out of here work for Siggy somewhere up the line. That right, Troop?”

  “More than half.”

  “What’s this Rostov want with her?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. It’s not like those guys tell me shit.”

  “When did they come around?”

  Troop wiped his brow. “They’re always around here, but they started asking about her on Friday, middle of the day.”

  “She wasn’t here?”

  “She and the kid went out in the morning. They didn’t come back.”

  “How long had they been staying here?”

  “Since last Tuesday. Paid a week up front.”

  Sutter nodded. “Paid for a week, but didn’t stay a week. She leave anything behind?”

  Troop looked into his crotch again. “I…I don’t think so.”

  “You want to try that again?” Sutter said.

  “I…I found some stuff under the bed.”

  Sutter shook his head. “Going under a bed at this place—you’re braver than you look. Let’s see it.”

  Troop shifted in his seat. He pointed to his desk. “Bottom drawer, on the right—but there was next to nothing.”

  Sutter opened the drawer. He took out a white plastic grocery bag and looked inside. He picked through it and shrugged, then tossed it over the glass wall to me. “See what you make of it.”

  There wasn’t much to see: two pairs of Alex-sized tee shirts, shorts, underpants, and socks, a pair of Alex-sized sandals that looked like leather but were actually plastic, two new toothbrushes, a tube of candy-flavored toothpaste with superheroes on the label, a bottle of chewable multivitamins shaped like funny cavemen, a granola bar, and, at the bottom, a wallet. It was leather, buttery and supple, a softly glowing black on the outside, and inside an arterial red. There was a logo embossed on an inside flap, a leaping horse, and a monogram—HM—in gold Helvetica letters above the credit card slots. Other than the lingering smell of money, it was empty.

  I held it up for Troop to see. “You find it this way?”

  He nodded, and looked at his crotch again. “I told you, next to nothing.”

  Sutter slapped the back of Troop’s head. “Try not to be so full of shit,” he said, smiling.

  “What was in there?” I asked.

  Troop reached into his back pocket. His own wallet was a nylon-and-Velcro affair, like a lumpy gray brick. He peeled it open and took out a thin stack of cards. “Some guy’s business cards—that’s all there was. I figured the chick took the credit cards and cash.”

  Sutter took the cards. “Hoover Mays. No address, just a 213 phone number. Who the fuck is named Hoover?”

  “You planning to do something with the cards?” I asked.

  “Thought maybe I could call the guy, sell his wallet back. Even empty it’s worth something, and I wasn’t gonna tell him it was empty.”

  Sutter slapped his head again. “Douche bag. So this was it—the shopping bag, the wallet—nothing else?”

  Troop rubbed his head. “I swear.”

  Sutter looked at me. I shrugged, and he looked at Troop. “Here’s your deal,” Sutter said. “You talk about our visit with no one—including and especially Siggy Rostov and his monkeys—and we do the same, okay? You tell no one how you spilled your guts to us, and we tell no one, and everyone sleeps soundly at night. Am I transmitting clear?”

  Troop nodded. “It’s clear.”

  “Okay, then,” Sutter said, and he pocketed Hoover May’s calling cards, leapt to the top of Troop’s desk, and vaulted the glass again with no more effort than a leaf in the wind.

  CHAPTER 13

  “So—your girl is probably a working girl,” Sutter said. We were in my apartment, above the clinic, and he was tilted back in one of my kitchen chairs, drinking a Stella, his sneakers on a windowsill.

  “How do you get there?”

  “It’s a short walk. Probably ninety-nine percent of the women Siggy Rostov knows are hookers—and a hundred percent of the eastern European women. Then there’s the fact that he’s sent his boys out hunting for her, which I’m pretty sure isn’t so they can tell her about the sweepstakes she just won. If he’s gone to that trouble, it’s asset recovery.”

  “And she’s the asset—his property?”

  Sutter nodded. “Siggy’s a slaver, with a pipeline of product from eastern Europe into L.A. He used to get his girls from traffickers, but then he figured out there was bigger profit in vertical integration, so he cut out the middlemen and put his own people in place up and down the line, from the recruiters and wranglers to transpo. Most of the girls go into his brothels; the youngest, prettiest ones he sets up in apartments he has around town. In theory, they’re working to pay off their passage. In fact, nothing ever gets paid off, and they work for him till they can’t anymore.”

  I took a deep breath. “What a fucking pig.”

  Sutter drank some Stella. “Siggy in a nutshell.”

  “How do you know this guy?”

  “He wanted to hire me once upon a time, not long after I got back to town.”

  “To do what?”

  “Security, executive protection, that kind of thing. He was expanding at the time, bumping up against a Cambodian crew in Long Beach, and the Mexicans just about everywhere else, and he was nervous. He was right to be—that war got muy caliente for a while.”

  “You passed?”

  He nodded. “Not enough soap and water in the world to get over working for a guy like Siggy. Plus, I never had trouble finding gigs.”

  I twisted the cap off my own bottle and drank some beer. Cold spread into my chest. I flipped the cap across the room, where it bounced and spun on the counter and finally landed in the kitchen sink.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” I said. “Say Elena’s a hooker, that she’s an illegal, on the run from this Rostov—where does Alex fit in? He speaks English better than she does, with no accent, he’s got these expensive clothes, he’s well fed, and besides the peanut allergy he’s in good health. Elena may be fresh off the boat, but Alex isn’t.”

  “Sounds like he’s been here in the golden West for a while. And not hanging out at places like the Harney.”

  “So where has he been hanging out? And what about those two guys on my security cameras—los soldados?”

  Sutter nodded and drank more beer. “They do look like a couple of grunts, and definitely not out of Siggy’s kennel.”

  “What do they want with her?”<
br />
  “Maybe it’s not her they want.”

  I sighed and picked up the white plastic bag we’d taken from Troop. I took out the wallet.

  “Hoover Mays,” I said. “His wallet is expensive.”

  Sutter laughed. “And he has the greatest name ever.”

  “If you can afford a wallet like that, maybe you can afford expensive French clothes for your kids.”

  “You think he’s the boy’s father?”

  I shook my head. “I have no clue.”

  Sutter tipped his chair back to level. He turned to look at me. “So fire up your laptop, brother. Let’s drink more beer and gather some data.”

  We went to the living room and I turned on the Mac. While it cranked, Sutter wandered around, shaking his head. “Maybe curtains,” he muttered. “I could fix you up.”

  “Here’s Google,” I said.

  As it turned out, there was plenty about Hoover Mays online—much of it on various social networking sites, supplied by Mays’s current wife, his ex-wife, his children, and Mays himself. It wasn’t hard to find, and it wasn’t hard to assemble from it a sketch of Hoover Mays’s life.

  So he was fifty-three years of age, born in Santa Barbara, to an old California family—which, I’d learned since moving here, could mean that they came with the Spanish or arrived last week. In the case of the Mays clan, it was the gold rush that drew them, real estate that made them money, and three successive generations of morons that pissed most of it away. Hoover seemed to be their last, best hope of getting some back.

  He’d graduated from USC with a degree in marketing, attended B-school at Anderson, worked as a staffer for a Republican congressman from Santa Barbara for a couple of terms, and then became a lobbyist in D.C., first for mining interests and then for the firearms industry. He’d married in the eighties, had a son and a daughter soon thereafter, divorced when Clinton came in, and hit the mother lode in 1999, with a conversion to Catholicism and a second marriage to the daughter of a Brazilian beverage magnate.

  Hoover returned to L.A. at the turn of the century, to look after his new father-in-law’s California real estate, take positions on the boards of several cultural institutions, and have another couple of kids with his much younger new wife.

  Sutter stood behind me as I clicked through pictures. “He married plenty of money,” Sutter said. “But none of his kids look anything like Alex. And—Christ—check out the older kids. They could double for Barbie and Ken.”

  “Thinner versions of Hoover, with more hair.”

  I stood, and stretched my arms over my head. “I see nothing to connect Hoover to Elena, or to Alex, or to Rostov, for that matter. And your theory about Rostov and Elena is still just a theory. And besides all that, I still have no fucking idea where Elena is.”

  Sutter laughed and went to the fridge. I heard the cap come off another beer. “Welcome to the wonderful world of intelligence, brother—of which, by the way, you have none.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Not that kind of intelligence. I mean intel—as in a story—a tale that connects the dots and makes the data make sense. Without the story, the dots are just dots.”

  I joined him in another beer. “Like symptoms but no diagnosis.”

  “Dots,” he repeated, and drank from the bottle. “I’m thinking you need to let Lydia call Family Services.”

  I shook my head. “The hell I do. Elena left him with us because she saw that we’d take care of him, and he’s waiting for her. I’ll be damned if I’m turning him over to the fucking DMV. What I need is to talk to some people. Hoover Mays, maybe, or Siggy Rostov.”

  Sutter almost spit his beer. He coughed, took a deep breath, and looked me in the eye. “I can’t be too clear on this point: the very last thing you want to do is talk to Siggy Rostov. About anything. At all. ’Cause chances are it would be the very last conversation you had. And why the fuck would you want to do it, anyway?”

  “You said it yourself—I’ve got nothing but data points. I figure if I talk to Rostov some of them might make sense.”

  “Not if your brains are all over his carpet. Did they not cover that in med school?”

  “So what would you do?”

  Sutter looked at his watch. “Me? I’m meeting somebody in a while, up on the roof of the Standard—a red-haired girl from Calgary, who got herself a part in a cop show pilot and wants to celebrate. That’s the only plan I’ve got.”

  “What would you do?” I said again.

  He shrugged. “Hoover Mays looks approachable. Guy’s got his whole life story—including his fucking calendar—up on Facebook, so he shouldn’t be hard to find. And there’re plenty of pictures of him online. You could show his pasty mug to the kid and see what he makes of it. Then of course there are those soldiers of yours—on your security cameras.”

  “What about them? I have no idea who they are.”

  “No idea now, but they’ll be back. I guarantee it.”

  CHAPTER 14

  They came back on Monday, which started early and messy.

  Eduardo was there at 6:00 a.m., before I’d made it all the way downstairs. He was a day laborer, with abraded hands, a broken left wrist, and a right knee cut so badly that a flap of skin hung down over the head of his tibia and laid the patella bare. It looked like the unripe flesh of some exotic fruit, and Eduardo’s hands, wrapped in newspaper, were like bloody fish. Eduardo himself looked like he’d been touring an abattoir. As he skirted the edges of shock, he explained in fluent English that he’d bounced from the back of an overcrowded contractor’s pickup truck as it rode over a corner curb doing about forty.

  “He didn’t stop when I fell off, even though all the guys were yelling,” Eduardo said, gasping. “He didn’t even slow down.”

  I pushed up the security grate and led him inside. He was lucky as far as nerve damage went, but there was a lot of blood, a lot of glass and grit to pick from the wounds, and a lot of slow, fine work with forceps and needles. Despite the local anesthetic, there was also a lot of yelling.

  When Eduardo hobbled out at eight-forty-five, in a spare pair of scrubs, splinted, sutured, bandaged, and with prescriptions for antibiotics and pain meds, my fingers were sore, my eyes stung, and my waiting room was overflowing. Fractures, contusions, burns, abscesses of the arms, legs, and buttocks, poisonings, overdoses, chest pains, pneumonias, toothaches, dog bites, cat bites, and human bites—and that was just the first wave. It was a full house—a moaning, muttering, sometimes screaming circus—and not atypical for a Monday. Something to do with demand pent up over the weekend, and maybe the full moon on Saturday night.

  Lucho and Neena, one of our part-time physician’s assistants, were in the waiting room, in triage mode: assessing, prioritizing, and, for the most urgent cases, arranging transport to ERs at County-USC or Good Samaritan. Lydia and Katy, another part-timer, were in exam rooms, and so was I, except when one of them needed help, in which case I ran around. I ran a lot that day.

  But we found a rhythm in the chaos—a jazzy, bantering, urgent beat. Lucho kept the background music going, and kept the coffee coming too, and every now and then there was a doughnut or an apple or half of a chicken burrito to eat. I looked up and it was ten, then noon, then 4:00 p.m. The faces and the ailments, like the hours, went by in a blur.

  A few times I caught a glimpse of Alex standing in the doorway of the file room, where Lydia had installed him for the day with picture books and crayons and drawing paper. His eyes were huge and locked on me. I caught Lydia looking at me too sometimes. Her gaze was dour, and I was pretty sure I knew what she was thinking. I was grateful that there was little time to talk.

  By 6:00 p.m. we’d gotten through the worst of it. There was a guy from a loading dock around the corner with a long wooden splinter in his leg, a twenty-something woman with what looked like a fractured ring finger, and a fortyish woman with an earache, but besides them, the waiting room was empty. And then los soldados came in.

  I heard the
m before I saw them.

  “You’re not Knox,” a gravelly voice said from the waiting room. “No, you gotta be…Luis Ortega, known as Lucho. Resides in unnatural sin with one Arthur Silva at 1531½ North Hobart, in East Hollywood. Graduated Franklin High School, signed on with the army afterward, served a couple of tours in and around beautiful Fallujah with Operation Iraqi Shit Storm. No complaints heard from those quarters—so I guess nobody asked and nobody told, eh? Came back to L.A. and attended Dupree Technical Institute, whatever the fuck that is, for certificates as a medical assistant and a medical office manager. Which makes you—what—qualified to run a fax machine? No criminal record as a big boy, but juvie is another story. There we got assault beefs, a B&E, a GTA, a weapons collar, and all classified as gang-related. But only one conviction, on Assault Two, and for that you got off with probation and your record expunged if you kept your nose clean, which I guess you did. All of that means your auntie Lydia sprang for a decent lawyer, huh?”

  “Who are you,” Lucho said, “and what the fuck do you want?” I had never heard so much anger in his voice, or so much menace.

  “It’s not you I want, hero, it’s your boss.”

  I came down the hall. Alex was in the file room. His eyes were wide and frightened. I put my finger to my lips, then pointed to the desk at the back of the room. He nodded and disappeared behind the swivel chair, and then Lydia pushed past me, on into the waiting room. I followed.

  There were three of them. I recognized the two twenty-somethings from the security video: they wore khakis and polos today, and in person looked blockier and more angry. The third man was bigger and older, in his fifties, with white hair cut high and tight on a blocky head, skin like sunburned vinyl, and shiny scar tissue on his thick neck. His smile was large, hungry, and confident, like a shark’s when it’s about to feed. He was the guy in charge, and his large, scarred hands held a file folder.

  Lydia, red-faced, brandished her cell phone like a can of Mace. “You want us to think you are cops or something? I’ll call the real cops in a second, you don’t get the hell out of here.”