Dr. Knox (9 page)

“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?”

“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.”

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 them 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.”

The older guy laughed and consulted his file. “And speak of the devil: it's Aunt Lydia. Another one with a past—guess the doc likes his help scuffed up. Got kicked to the curb after ten years at Palms-Pacific for running your mouth about your betters, and wound up emptying bedpans at the lockup. Ouch. Maybe not the best judgment, ratting out that lush, huh? Maybe good to think twice about who you're fucking with.” He smiled wider and looked at me. Lydia's mouth opened and closed. I put a hand on her arm and stepped around her.

“You're looking for me.” I said.

“At last,” he said. “The
jefe
of this toilet.” He cleared his throat and made a show of leafing through his file and reading from it as if from a prayer book. “Adam Knox, M.D. Born and raised in Lakeville, Connecticut, graduated from the Colebrook School—is that like finishing school or something? Went to fancy university in Providence, Rhode Island, played soccer for 'em till you screwed up your knee, went premed, then med school, then blah, blah, blah. Nothing much exciting till you start volunteering for Doctors Transglobal Rescue. Saw some of the armpits of the planet with that outfit, yeah? Busted up your marriage along the way—probably for the best, considering.”

I forced a smile and interrupted. “Am I supposed to be freaked out that you can use Google and work a printer?”

He chuckled. “Be fair, doc—that wasn't all public-records shit. Your boy's juvie file, for instance—that took a little effort.”

“I've known these people awhile. Your recital isn't news.”

“Not to you, but maybe to your patients. And how well do these folks know you? For instance, do they know how you almost got yourself killed over on the dark continent?”

I glanced around the waiting room. The man with the splinter and the woman with the fracture looked scared. The woman with the earache was gone.

“You're upsetting my patients. If you keep interfering with our business—”

“This a business?” The shark grin widened. “Anyway, we're just talking. And don't these folks have a right to know how you got dragged outta the Central African Republic, shot up and bloody and in disgrace? Shouldn't they know about”—he looked at his file again—“Marie-Josée Lisle?”

He mangled the pronunciation and I corrected him. “Jo
say.
It's pronounced Jo
say.
”

“Whatever—she was your nurse, right?
Was.
Dangerous thing, working for you. Surely these folks have a right to know that.” He grinned some more. Lucho squared his shoulders, and the two young
soldados
stiffened and took a step toward him. I looked at Lucho and shook my head.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“Just a guy who wants information, doc. The more you provide, the more good you do for you and yours.”

“Unless you people leave now, I'm going to call someone.”

He laughed. “
Calling someone
doesn't work for you—my phone book's got a bigger dick than yours. For instance, even though little rat-turd clinics like this are barely regulated in this town, I bet I could find some people to come down and look around. Audit your controlled substances, maybe, or go over your Medi-Cal claims, or check out your wiring for code violations—that kind of shit. Maybe they wouldn't find anything, but maybe they'd shut you down for a week while they dug around.”

I looked at Lucho. “Would you take these folks into the exam rooms?” He nodded and beckoned to the remaining patients, who all but ran to follow.

“What do you want?” I said.

“I told you—information. You had two people in last Friday afternoon—a woman with a boy. I want to know where they are.”

I squinted at him and shook my head. “You're kidding, right?”

He shook his head. “Right. I drive all the way down to this fucking sewer 'cause I'm a big kidder, doc. I bring these ass kickers with me 'cause I'm kidding.”

“You never heard of doctor-patient confidentiality? We don't discuss our patients—full-stop.”

“I'm not asking what they came here for—I could care less. In fact, I could care less about the girl. I just want the kid.”

I looked at Lydia, who was pale and stony-faced. “Call
911
, please.”

The shark put up his hands. “Doc, you don't want to go that way—I promise you—not with us. Remember my phone book? You bring cops in on this, who do you think has the credibility—you or us? I guarantee, it'll be us.”

“Who's
us
?”

He shook his head again. “You want time to think on it—take some time. But not too much.”

“Who are you?”

He reached into his pants pocket and took out a business card. There was a phone number on it and nothing else. “We lost something. We want it back. Save everybody heartache, doc—call the number.” Then he turned and walked out the door. The two younger crew cuts waited until he was on the street; then they followed.

Lydia sputtered. “What the—”

“Check on Alex,” I said, and ran to the window. The crew cuts were climbing into a black Suburban. The engine was already running, and when the doors shut, it pulled from the curb in a squealing U-turn. I found a pen in my scrubs, and as the SUV rolled past, I scrawled the plate number on the back of the shark's card.