His buttocks were suddenly stinging like they were on fire.
Johnny Seiffert screamed in agony.
A man leaned down and spoke directly into his left ear.
“If you know what’s good for you you’ll shut the fuck up, you little shit!”
A baseball bat was laid on the bed, business end next to Johnny Seiffert’s face.
“If he opens his mouth give him the water treatment again,” a sniff, a new thought, “oh, and give him another whack!”
Chapter 47
“How does a two bit attorney who doesn’t even have his own office get to live in a big house in Beverly Hills, Vincent?” Loretta O’Connell asked coquettishly as her quietly spoken, leanly built — like a middleweight only a week or two out of the gym — lover unlocked the door and stepped aside to allow her to enter ahead of him.
They had gone down to Santa Monica for lunch at Casa del Mar — nothing substantial, just soft drinks and coffees — and walked awhile along Ocean Front View beneath palm trees that rustled like Loretta’s expensive lingerie.
She had not asked him why he had been so insistent that she not be at home around noon that day. He had made no move to explain. Instead, he had behaved towards her as he always had on their previous ‘dates’ right up until he fucked her senseless, like a perfect gentleman. They had not got to the ‘fucking senseless’ stage yet today, but Loretta was tingling with anticipation. It occurred to her that today might be different in some way but the fucking was a given, sooner or later. He had had no questions for her today, always before he had only pressed her as far as she wanted to go and made no attempt to put words into her mouth. But today there had been no questions at all; only small talk and grown up flirting as if they were two normal people who just wanted to enjoy each other’s company.
And fuck each other senseless, obviously.
“This place belongs to a client,” the man explained as he followed Loretta into the broad reception lobby.
Her heels rang brightly on the parquet floor. She paused, looked around.
“This place is like a palace.”
The man smiled.
“Hey,” he guffawed, following her eye as she swung around to take in the high ceiling, the stucco, the great hanging, shimmering chandelier above their heads, “why not? We live in a town in which the city fathers designed City Hall to be a bigger, grander version of the ancient Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world.”
Loretta had swooned the first time he had told her a thing like that.
“The what?” She asked like the dumb broad she never was.
“Seriously,” Vincent Meredith grinned. “The architects who designed City Hall scaled up the layout of the Tomb of Mausolus built over two thousand years ago in a place called Bodrum in present-day Turkey. Mausolus was a local ruler in the Persian Empire. He was married to his sister, Artemisia but in those days brothers and sisters often got married. But I kid you not, the guys who designed City Hall in downtown LA in the twenties just scaled up the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus as it was before it was destroyed by an earthquake in the fifteenth century. Hubris, or what?”
Loretta viewed her companion with mock impatience.
“How do you know this stuff, Vincent?”
“I hear stuff. I never forget stuff,” the man shrugged. “The more you know the more interesting the world becomes. Well, that’s the way I look at it.”
Loretta knew Vincent Meredith was too good to be true.
Three weeks and three days ago she had come out of a bar on Santa Monica Boulevard where she had been drinking Mojitos with a girlfriend — they had both been bitching about their husbands — and discovered that the ignition of her convertible was dead. Vincent had happened by a couple of minutes later, offered to ‘look under the hood’, got oil and grease on his hands and persuaded the engine to fire up. They had got to talking while he ‘worked’. He was an attorney who got his kicks putting old cars and pickups back together and cruising, and he had spotted a genuine ‘damsel in distress’ a hundred yards away. She had introduced herself.
‘Call me,’ he had suggested, handing her his card.
A week later he had been getting down and dirty under her hood giving her the kind of service she had been aching for most of her life. Even the knowledge that Vincent had to have an angle — most likely an angle on Reggie — had given her only a fleeting pause for thought. She had been looking for a way out of her marriage practically from the start, preferably with alimony and her share of the house on Mulholland Drive; now she had found, or been found by, it did not really matter, an attorney who was giving her the sort of attention money simply could not buy. Everybody had their own angle, that was life and she was not about to hold that against Vincent unless or until he sold her out.
He was always going to sell her out, of course.
And sooner rather than later even though she suspected he was going to feel bad about it.
“I’m sorry,” Vincent said.
“Yeah, sure!” But Loretta was neither as angry nor as dismayed as she pretended.
“I lied,” the man admitted.
Loretta would have been disappointed if a good looking man like Vincent Meredith had not lied to get into her knickers.
“About what?”
“I wasn’t just passing by that day on Santa Monica Boulevard.”
“Yeah, well I figured that!”
“I think you did,” he agreed wanly.
“I still didn’t know what I was involved with then,” Vincent went on. “I still believed Reggie was just a dirty cop. Everybody knew that already, that was no big deal. I was just looking for an angle I could use to spring my client, Sam Brenckmann. The guy your husband put in the frame for accessory to murder one back in December. But then I started following the money trail. First it led back to San Francisco, and then back here to City Hall,” he shrugged apologetically, “and pretty well every place in the Valley.”
Loretta’s frown deepened as she crossed her arms across her ample breasts.
“You never asked me a single question about Reggie?”
“I didn’t have to. You told me about what a shit he was. Where he hangs out and when. The people I know filled in the gaps and got into his bank accounts.”
“I don’t understand,” she protested.
“The bastard will try to drag you into his shit,” Vincent stated with a bluntness that rocked Loretta back on her heels. Normally, at this stage of a sting he was fighting to keep the elation from blowing the top of his head off. Today he felt like a tool, the worst kind of shyster snake oil salesman. “You and anybody else he can bring down with him.”
Loretta swallowed hard, very dry-mouthed.
She was trapped; there was no way out.
“I always knew he was a dirty cop,” she hissed. “Of course I knew. All cops are dirty in the Valley, everybody knows that! I didn’t want to know any more. I never asked and he never said. The deal was his ‘friends’ didn’t come to the house and they didn’t bother me but he never kept that side of the deal. Even when I told him if he ever laid a finger on me again I’d cut his dick off!”
“Maybe we ought to sit down,” the man offered. “So that we can talk this thing through.”
“What’s to talk about?”
They had begun to circle each other beneath the looming crystal chandelier like cats afraid of each other’s claws. There were mirrors on two walls flanked by coat stands and small tables, one with a telephone on it, another with a tall ceramic vase that seemed odd without a spray of freshly cut flowers spilling from it. The man and the woman flicked glances at their doppelgangers reflected in the tall mirrors; both simultaneously struck by the strangeness of this scene.