I dropped them off in the causeway and headed east, picked up an old lady coming out of the 99-cent store on Pico with a big, see-through umbrella that she tried to shake out before getting in the car. She wanted me to wait for her in the Vons parking lot while she gathered the week’s groceries. I tried to explain that it would be expensive to keep me on the clock, but she pleaded—“I can never figure out this damn phone!” Of course, while she shopped, the guilt kicked in and I turned the meter off. Then I took her home and had to shlep the bags upstairs to her apartment. The TV was already on when she opened the door.
“It keeps me company,” she said.
Back in the car, I called my sister Maya—technically my cousin, Herschel’s daughter.
I said, “You wanna grab lunch?”
“I’m in chambers, waiting on a judge.”
“You’ll never guess where I just came from.”
“Where?”
“Daddy’s retirement home.”
“It’s a bit late for that.”
“Not funny. I saw Charles Elkaim.”
“Oh good, he called! How’d it go?”
“Not great, he’s near the end.” I told her the story—pancreatic cancer, visitor Hawley, the big promises, and Elkaim’s jittery request.
“That’s so sad, Adam. That poor man—still holding on all these years later? Awful.”
I said, “I don’t know, the whole thing just seems…a little futile to me. I mean, what does he hope to get out of all this?”
“Closure, obviously.”
“Maya—you think there’s even a chance Emil was innocent?”
“Welllll…he definitely sold weed when we were kids.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because we saw him do it.”
“I never saw shit.”
“You’re too young to remember.”
“Like maybe once he met someone at the bleachers or something.”
“Not something—he was a dealer, Adam.”
“Maybe. But that doesn’t mean he was a murderer.”
“No, but dealers deal with crooks. And when you deal with crooks, bad stuff happens.”
“But the guy Emil supposedly killed, Durazo, was he a real crook?”
“I don’t know. I think they said he was a gangbanger, 18th Street or White Fence or I-don’t-know-what. What does Mr. Elkaim want you to do exactly?”
“He’s paying me a grand to shake Hawley down, see what’s up.”
“Adam,” she said, suddenly measured, as if addressing judge and jury. “First of all, you’re not shaking anybody down. Don’t do something stupid and lose your one shot at getting licensed.”
“Yeah? Maybe you should have thought about that before you gave Elkaim my number.”
“Second of all, I don’t know how much I like the idea of you taking a terminally ill man’s money.”
“I know, I don’t like that either. And I don’t want to get tangled up in this but—”
“This is Daddy’s dearest friend we’re talking about—you cannot jump ship.”
“I know that.”
“And he’s dying. Please don’t screw this up, Adam. It’s a simple assignment. You talk to this Hawley, you relay whatever information he gives you, you humor Mr. Elkaim—he’s practically our family.”
“There’s that word again.”
“What word.”
“Family. People only ever seem to use it when they want me to do shit I don’t want to do.”
“And third.”
“What.”
