Flesh And Blood

I stuck with them on their rapid march to the parking lot, was two minutes behind the Volvo as it left the airport.

Back on the 405 freeway. North. Return to L.A.

This time Dugger took the Wilshire west exit and drove into Brentwood, and I assumed he’d be heading for his L.A. office – soon to be the exclusive headquarters for his alleged consulting group.

But once again he proved me wrong, passing the black-and-white office building and continuing into Santa Monica. Back to the Ocean Front high-rise? Then why hadn’t he switched to the 10 west? No, he was swinging a quick right onto Nineteenth Street.

I turned too, in time to see him hook another right.

Nosing into an alley that fed into a parking lot behind several storefronts. Stationing the Volvo in an empty slot behind a rear door.

Red, white, and green sign: BROOKLYN PIZZA GUYS. Plastic pie above the lettering.

I stopped, backed up to the mouth of the alley, the Seville’s grille barely extending past a drive-up dry cleaners, just close enough to see the white car.

Dugger stepped out of the Volvo, looked at his watch yet again. Black Suit was more relaxed than he’d been at the airport, swinging his legs out with unexpected grace, looking up at the sky, stretching, yawning. Still chewing like mad.

Dugger made for the door to the restaurant, but Black Suit just stood there, and Dugger stopped.

The thickset man squeezed his eyes into slits. Scratched his head. Buttoned his suit jacket and rolled his neck. Working out kinks after the cross-country flight. But other than this gesture showing no signs of discomfort. No anxiety, either, on his broad, brown mask of a face. Mr. Tough Guy.

He said something to Dugger, who returned to the car and produced a white tissue. Black Suit extricated his gum, wrapped it in the paper, placed the paper in his pocket. Then he nodded, waited as Dugger held open Brooklyn Pizza Guys’ back door and passed through with an imperial air.

Gourmet lunch for a goombah? The guy had Brooklyn all over him.

The way she was hog-tied and head-shot tells me this was all business.

Central casting goombah. I was willing to bet the pizza joint sported checked tablecloths and straw-wrapped Chianti bottles hanging from the ceiling. Sometimes people defy stereotypes. Mostly, they lack imagination.

Goombah traveling first-class with expensive luggage.

High-priced specialist. A guy who lived well when a well-heeled client was paying the bills.

I drove up the alley, exited at Twentieth Street, drove to the drugstore where Dugger had bought goodies for the church-school kids, and bought a cheap camera. The wonders of technology – for a few bucks you could get one with a zoom.

Then back to Nineteenth, where I parked on the street and returned on foot to Brooklyn Pizza Guys’ alley entrance. Stationed myself behind a Dumpster and hoped no one would spot me. I was lucky. The neighboring businesses were a hearing aid store and an employment agency, and neither seemed to be meriting any rear-entrance traffic. But the Dumpster reeked of rotten produce, and it was thirty-three smelly minutes before Dugger and Black Suit reemerged.

The restaurant’s air conditioner chugged away, more than loud enough to cover the sound of my click click click.

Nice, clear medium shot of the two of them, side by side.

Close-up of Dugger, biting his lip.

Then one of Black Suit’s impassive face and flat, dark eyes.

I kept the camera going as they made their way back to the Volvo, filling the roll with side- and rearviews. Caught them walking in step. No amiability. All business.

Dugger backed the Volvo diagonally across the alley and aimed it west. I gave him a two-minute lead before starting my own engine.

CHAPTER 25

DUGGER DROVE ALL the way to Ocean Avenue. Bringing a hit man home? That surprised me.

But instead of turning left toward the high-rise, he made a right and swung into the left-turn lane. Only a truck between us now, but the height of the cab kept me safely out of view as we sped down toward PCH.

I switched to the right lane, got close enough to see Dugger behind the wheel, sitting straight, head not moving. Black Suit turned from side to side. Catching an eyeful of the mansions lining Santa Monica’s Gold Coast, the white-clapboard palace William Randolph Hearst had built for Marion Davies, now a crumbling mass of planks, generous expanses of beach parking lot that afforded a clear view of the Pacific, churning and silver under a charcoal cloud bank. Gulls flecked the clouds with avian static. A few wet-suited surfers had paddled out yards from the tide line, despite breakers that degraded to a dribble.

The ocean is never anything but beautiful.

Black Suit taking it all in.

Sightseeing.

Dugger stared straight ahead and put on speed.

He sped through the Palisades and into Malibu, past the latest slide zone and Caltrans’s feeble attempt to battle nature with concrete barriers and sandbags and pink, gritty fiberglass slopes as genuine as Caltrans promises. A few more wet winters and the coastline would look like Disneyland. Black Suit’s head had stopped swiveling – fixed on the ocean. Easy choice: The land side was shopping centers and pizza joints and schlock shops not much different from what he’d encounter in Brooklyn.

I followed the Volvo through Carbon Beach, La Costa, past the private road that led to the Colony, the emerald hills of Pepperdine University, where the commercial clutter gives way to brown mountains, black gorges, orange poppies, and more than a hint of what Malibu must have been like when the Chumash Indians roamed.

Latigo Beach, the Cove Colony, Escondido. No suspense: I knew exactly where Dugger was headed and was ready well before his left-turn signal flashed and he pulled into the center turn lane.

He stopped a quarter mile before the Paradise Cove intersection and Ramirez Canyon. A towering plastic sign advertised the Sand Dollar Restaurant and the trailer park that bordered the restaurant’s private beach.

Malibu’s estate zone. A half mile broken by a handful of gates, each handcrafted and unique and flanked by old trees and hedges, too-perfect beds of flowers, closed-circuit TV cameras, No Trespassing warnings.

Prime of the prime: the few multiacre Malibu properties blessed with sheltered coves and sandy beach and views of the shipping cha

The gate that held Dugger’s interest was a tangle of burnished copper tentacles shadowed by the palms and pines I remembered, as well as gigantic rubber trees and schefflera and sagos and birds-of-paradise blazing flamelike in the afternoon sun. He must have had a remote-control unit, because before he completed the turn across PCH the octopus arms swung open and he sailed through. I had my cheapie camera ready and hustled for shots of the Volvo’s rear end as it vanished into green.

Click click click.

The gates closed. I was going no farther.

But Dugger had a busy day lined up.

Chauffering Black Suit to Daddy’s place. The pleasure dome conceptual light-years from the little cell in Newport that Dugger had once called home. For all his rumpled guy pretense – attempts to distance himself from his father and what his father represented – when things got rough Junior returned with the volition of a homing pigeon.

Walking in step with a cold-faced man in a black suit.

Business. Tying up loose ends.

Who was next?

I returned to Santa Monica, found a MotoPhoto with a FREE DUPLICATES! ba