One Last Hit (Joe Portugal Mysteries) Read online

  Squig shrugged. “A lot of guys can’t take your jokes.”

  The best course of action seemed to be to get out of there. I headed for the door.

  “Hey,” Squig said.

  Visions came. A real gun turning up, me shot in the back. Or being pummeled senseless by his friend. I kept going.

  “Hey!” More insistent.

  I stopped, still facing the door. “What?”

  “You forgot your record.”

  “I don’t want—”

  “Record like this, you don’t want to pass it up. Next time it could be gone.”

  I turned to face him. He was holding the LP out.

  “Come on. You want it. I promise, he won’t pull any more shit. Will you?”

  The wacko was rooting through another bargain bin. “Nah,” he said. “I’ll be a good boy.”

  Maybe I’d overreacted. Maybe they were harmless. Just a couple of aging drugged-out hippies.

  I went back, grabbed my album, went to the counter and paid for it. Shoved the change in my pocket and hustled for the door. Went out, back to the industrial park and my audition. I said my three words—”best deal ever”—six or eight times until everyone was satisfied, got in my car, and drove home. I kept checking the rear-view, but I didn’t see anything I shouldn’t have.

  Gina came over that night, made something out of a pack of noodles and the random vegetables in the fridge, got us stuffed. I told her about the record store episode. She shook her head and said, “This town.”

  “That’s deep.”

  “You want philosophy, sleep with Ayn Rand. What’s happening with your electric guitar?”

  “I haven’t had—”

  “Excuses, excuses.”

  “Tomorrow. I promise.”

  “Cross your heart?”

  “Cross my heart. And hope to die.”

  Had I known what reviving my music career was going to lead to, I probably would have left out the last part.

  The next day I got as far as lugging the SG out of the closet, giving it a few swipes with a polishing rag, playing a few chords. I hadn’t picked it up in three or four years, hadn’t played it seriously for several times that. I was surprised how close it was to still being in tune. Or maybe the unamplified sounds were too thin to tell.

  I stuck it back in the case, and instead of returning the case to the closet I left it in the corner of my bedroom, next to the acoustic. Over the next few weeks I opened it a couple more times and checked the guitar over. That was as far as I got. Gina asked me every four or five days if I’d looked for an amplifier. Each time I said something lame. I was waiting for a sale, or something equally insipid. Each time she’d roll her eyes. She rolls her eyes better than anyone else I know.

  Then my birthday came along. Gina took me to Divino, an Italian place in Brentwood, tonier than our usual joints. After we ordered Gina gave me my card. I opened it, said the appropriate things, put it aside. Then she gave me my present. A gift certificate from Guitar Matrix for two hundred dollars.

  I looked up. “What’s this?”

  “What does it look like?”

  “But—”

  “Look, Portugal, it’s pretty clear you’re never going to get off your own ass with this electric guitar thing. I decided you needed a jumpstart.”

  “This is a lot of money.”

  “I’ve got a rich new client.” She’s an interior designer. Most of her clients have money up the ying-yang.

  “But—”

  “No buts. You will use that to buy an amplifier and whatever else you need. By the end of the week. Comprende?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Now put it away and enjoy your meal.”

  I managed to stall all the next day. And the one after, until about two in the afternoon, when I went to Trader Joe’s for peanut butter and apple juice and spent thirty-seven dollars on stuff I’d had no idea I wanted. On the way back KLOS played “Cowgirl in the Sand.” It was still going when I got home. I sat in the truck and listened to all ten minutes and three seconds of it. When it ended I went inside and dug up my gift certificate.

  Guitar Matrix is in Culver City, on Sepulveda Boulevard north of Braddock, between a botanica and a camera repair place. I got a parking spot across the street and sat staring at the front window. Then I got out and dumped a pair of quarters in the meter and went inside.

  The place was wall-to-wall with instruments and amps and everything else you needed to make music. A couple of customers, a couple of salespeople, engaged in earnest discussions. I was the oldest person in the store.

  I wandered around like a yokel. I recognized some of the brands but had never heard of most. I gawked at an array of effects pedals and rack gear with purposes I hadn’t a clue about. Finally a frizzy-headed kid in a Limp Bizkit T-shirt took pity and asked what I needed. I told him my story. He asked how much I wanted to spend. I told him about the gift certificate. He said he had just the thing and started to tell me about it. I stopped him and said I trusted his judgment.

  He went in the back and came out with a Fender Frontman. It had seven knobs and three jacks, which seemed like plenty. He plugged it in, hooked up a Stratocaster, played a couple of riffs that I’d never be able to duplicate. I told him it would do fine. He said it listed for a hundred and seventy bucks, and they were supposed to sell it for one forty-five, but in honor of my resurrected music career he could knock off another ten. I didn’t know if he was playing me, and I didn’t care.

  He unplugged and asked if I needed a cable, which I did. I also got some picks, a few sets of strings, a new strap, a QuikTune guitar tuner, and ninety-three cents change. I took everything to the truck and got in. I sat there wondering what the hell I thought I was doing. Then I remembered …

  Guitar and Pen

  There was always music at Mark and Ginger’s sanctuary for troubled teenagers, the radio or the record player or the newfangled eight-track someone had picked up somewhere, likely off the back of a truck. We’d listen to Jefferson Airplane and Steppenwolf and the Animals and all the rest. The Beatles, of course. And my favorite, the Who.

  We had a band of our own too. We went through names once a week. Canvas. The Purple Horde. Then one day our keyboard guy, little Lenny Jones, got loaded and went to the zoo. He came back and said he had the perfect name for the band. The Platypuses. Everyone loved it. I said I liked it, but wasn’t platypi the plural of platypus, and they all looked at me like I was crazy.

  From that day on we were the Platypuses. Besides Lenny we had Robbie Wozniak on bass, Frampton Washington on drums, Toby Bonner on vocals and lead guitar, and me on rhythm. Our other singer was a girl named Bonnie Morgenlender. We used to joke that if Bonnie married Toby she’d be Bonnie Bonner.

  I played for two hours that afternoon. There were so many songs to choose from. All the Neil Young and early Beatles, the Airplane, the Kinks, the fabulous oldies by one-hit wonders. And of course the Who. When I was a kid, Pete Townsend was my hero. Because his style was built around chords, and so was mine, such as it was.

  Over the next few months I played at least an hour a day. I surprised the hell out of myself. I was getting damned good—good enough that the idea of being in a band, one people would actually pay to see, crossed the line from fantasy to possibility.

  A quiet morning in May. I lay in bed with “My Generation” running through my head. When it wouldn’t stop I got out the SG, plugged it in, began playing. Singing too, if you can call it that. I kept the volume low, so I wouldn’t disturb the Clement clan next door. I wasn’t concerned about the extended family of wackos on the other side. They’d been waking me up for years with all manner of mysterious noises.

  I played for an hour, then went out to the greenhouse for my rounds. They didn’t take long. The plants, the cacti and other succulents I’d been so crazed about the last several years, had lost much of their appeal. It made me vaguely uneasy. The only passion I’d developed since I grew up—not counting Gina, and who
knew if calling that a passion was appropriate—was losing its hold on me. It was like I didn’t have room for the plants and the music.

  I went in, showered, fed the canaries. Went to make breakfast and turned up nothing but a bag of oranges I’d bought from a wizened woman on a street corner. I needed starch. So I went to Trader Joe’s. I managed to get out with only six unplanned purchases.

  When I got home, company was waiting. They were on the front patio—the Jungle, I sometimes call it, because it’s overrun with plants—on my wicker chairs.

  I considered driving to the police station. But, hell, a man’s house is his castle, right? I cut the engine, got out, started toward the house. What were they going to do, kill me right there in front of little Suzy Clement, who was Big-Wheeling on my front sidewalk?

  Maybe they would. And little Suzy too.

  Too late to consider that. I continued up the walk. Squig was writing in a small book. The linebacker was holding a glass up to the light, like he was trying to spot something swimming around inside. Another glass sat at Squig’s feet. A third waited atop an old milk crate. The glasses were mine, green ones I’d won at the County Fair many years back. They were filled with an orange liquid. I didn’t even want to consider what this all meant. I was sure I’d locked the door when I went to TJ’s.

  It wasn’t a book Squig was writing in. It was a TV Guide. He looked up. “What’s a four-letter word for wiseguy?”

  “Wahl,” I said.

  “Wall?” He fingered my stucco.

  “Wahl. W-A-H-L. Ken Wahl, he was in the show. Mind telling me what the two of you are doing here?”

  Painstakingly, using a pen, he wrote in the name. “Thanks,” he said, and stuck the pen in the pocket of his denim jacket. He picked up his juice, sipped it, said, “You don’t know who I am, do you?”

  “You’re some character I met in a record store who’s stalking me.”

  “I was at Mark and Ginger’s.”

  I shook my head. “I would remember if there was a kid with a name like Squig there.”

  Columbo-like, he clapped his hand to his head. “Right. That’s why you’re not remembering.” To the other guy: “That’s why he’s not remembering.” But the other guy was more interested in the daddy long-legs clambering up the wall.

  “What’s why I’m not remembering?” I said.

  “My name. I wasn’t Squig then. I was Lenny. Lenny Jones.”

  I’m a Boy

  It was 1968, the summer after the Summer of Love. I was fifteen and always finding new ways to get into trouble. My father was in San Quentin. My mother hadn’t the foggiest idea what to do with me. One day everything came to a head. I think it had something to do with leaving my shoes on the dining room table, but maybe that’s just a story I made up to impress some girl and grew to believe.

  While my mother was at the market I found a laundry bag, shoved some stuff in, grabbed my precious SG and my little amp. I left a note saying I’d call soon. I toted everything up to Culver Boulevard, caught a bus to La Cienega, transferred to a northbound, took it to the end of the line at Santa Monica Boulevard. I schlepped up the steep hill to Sunset. I was breathing hard by the time I got there. Even then I was in lousy shape.

  I crossed to the north side, stopped, looked both ways. Walked west, toward Gazzari’s and the Whisky. Went into Ben Frank’s, one of my favorite places on earth. I ordered a burger and a Coke and wondered what to do next.

  A man slid into the other side of the booth. He had long thick dark hair, a five o’clock shadow, a leather jacket. “What’s happening?” he said.

  I figured he was a shark, preying on lost little boys and girls on the big bad Sunset Strip. Before long he’d have me selling hash and getting buggered. But when he offered to pay for my lunch and take me somewhere to crash, I went with him anyway. Because this was the real world, not my Beaver Cleaver neighborhood. I wanted to experience it. I thought I could handle the trouble when it came.

  So I got in his shiny Sunbeam convertible and let him drive me up to a weird compound up above Sunset. Five buildings, lots of strange nooks and crannies and corridors, one big room with a high ceiling and stained-glass windows. There were a couple of dozen other teenagers around, boys and girls, black and white and everything in between. He showed me to a big bedroom with half a dozen cots, told me the one in the corner was free, said pot was okay but nothing stronger, and disappeared.

  I had it all wrong. This guy—Mark Gray was his name—had spotted me at Ben Frank’s just like he’d spotted dozens of starry-eyed kids before me, and knew if he didn’t grab me someone vile would. Just like had happened to him a dozen years before up in San Francisco.

  He was able to provide for us because his old lady Ginger had inherited a million dollars. They bought a deserted monastery and turned it into a place for kids to stay when living at home became too hard. For as long as they needed it. Some were there a year, two, three. Some as little as a week.

  When September came Mark and Ginger got me enrolled in Hollywood High. Then my mother died, and four months after I’d left I moved back to Culver City.

  Four months of heaven. Because I was in the Platypuses. My first and best band. With, among others, a shrimp of a kid named Lenny Jones.

  I was ready to believe him. I was willing to accept that some cosmic force had gotten me back to my guitar right before I ran into a guy from the best band I’d ever been in. Then I remembered that he and the other guy on my front patio, the creepy one still staring at the wall, were drinking orange juice out of glasses they’d gotten from my kitchen.

  “You broke into my house,” I said.

  Without diverting his attention from the bug, the scary guy broke into a grin. Not the funhouse one. It made him look not quite so terrifying. “It wasn’t much. I could’ve done it in my sleep.”

  “It wasn’t a compliment.”

  “You know, you ought to get some better locks on that door. Anybody could—”

  “Wait. I didn’t have any orange juice. I had oranges, but I didn’t have any orange juice.” I was having trouble with my thought processes. I had to verbalize everything.

  “We squeezed it,” Squig said.

  “Right. You squeezed it. In my kitchen. What were you doing in my kitchen? What were you doing in my house?”

  He head-gestured to the other one. “He had to take a leak. So he saw the oranges sitting in the kitchen, and we found the squeezer and squeezed juice. Hope you weren’t saving the oranges for something. And don’t worry, we washed the squeezer.” He picked the third glass off the milk crate. “Here, this is yours.”

  “Will you stop with the orange juice already?”

  “Okay, man, don’t get all trippy on me.”

  I looked him over. If he was Lenny Jones, he’d put on weight since back in the day. Who hadn’t? I tried to recall the Lenny I’d known, tried to overlay that face on the one in front of me. It didn’t work. “How do I know you’re really him?”

  “Hey, I’m not anyone anybody would want to make believe they were.” He put down “my” glass of OJ. “I mean, it’s not like I’m gonna walk into some fancy restaurant and say, hey, I’m Squig Jones, and they’re all gonna treat me like a king.”

  “If you’re really him, tell me—” I searched for something one of the kids in the band would know. “Tell me what we used to call Bonnie Morgenlender.”

  The other guy quit monitoring the creepy-crawly long enough to swap looks with Squig. Neither said anything.

  “I thought so. You guys are so full of shit. Now get off my—”

  “Course I remember,” Squig said. “The one with the—” He held his hands out palms up and bobbed them up and down, like he was trying to guess the weight of a couple of cantaloupes.

  “Yeah,” I said. “That’s the one.”

  “Course I remember what we used to call her. We called her Bumptious Bonnie Boobs.”

  Bonnie Morgenlender was one of my two best friends at Mark and Ginger’s.
She was a year older than me by the calendar, several emotionally. She would give me pep talks when I was feeling down because Toby could play guitar ten times better than I could. I would play cheerleader when she was bummed because her parents were such assholes and she thought she could never go home. It was weird for me having a girl as a friend. But somehow it worked out. Though every once in a while she would smoke too much dope and start hanging on me and telling me I looked like Jean-Paul Belmondo. I didn’t know who he was, but I got the feeling she thought he was sexy.

  Bonnie had giant breasts. Our bass player Robbie started calling her Bonnie Boobs. Our drummer Frampton, a fat black kid, added the Bumptious because she could be loud and pushy when she wanted to.

  Of course, we only called her Bumptious Bonnie Boobs behind her back. I felt kind of bad when I said it, because we were such good friends, but that didn’t stop me. I was a teenager. What did I know about appropriate behavior?

  Wait a minute. Our bass player Robbie …

  I looked the thuggy one over. Squinted. Closed my eyes, opened them, squinted some more. “Robbie Wozniak?”

  He tossed me a look like he was disappointed in me. “It’s about time.” Then it was back to the daddy long-legs.

  Lenny Jones. Robbie Wozniak.

  Not that IDing them made me feel a whole lot better about them tracking me down and helping themselves to my produce. “Why didn’t you tell me who you were that day at the record store?”

  “Woz wasn’t ready,” Squig said.

  “What the hell does that—Jesus. It wasn’t a coincidence running into me there, was it?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Not exactly?”

  “Okay, we were following you.”

  “What in God’s name for?”

  “We wanted to check you out. Catch your vibe.”

  “Experience my aura?”

  “Nah, we didn’t … oh, I get it. That was a joke.”

  “None of this is a joke. Stalking people is not a joke.” There were too many questions. I grabbed the first one that surfaced. “How’d you find me in the first place?”