Or Bust
Michael Wiley
“You know the old story about the Midwestern beauty queen who goes to Hollywood thinking she’ll be a star? Hollywood chews her up, and then she’s a truck stop waitress with a grease-stained dress and tear-stained cheeks?”
“An oldie if not a goodie,” Sam Kelson said.
“That’s not Ginny. Hollywood tries to chew her up, Ginny breaks Hollywood’s nose.”
“She break yours?”
The man in Kelson’s client chair was bandaged from the bridge of his nose to his nostrils. The undersides of his eyes were black and blue. “Broke it and stole my money—right after I told her I loved her. Broke my heart too.”
“Sorry,” Kelson said. “What do you want me to do?”
The man sucked a long breath. “I want my money back. And my reputation.”
His card lay on Kelson’s desk. It identified him as Stu Peterson, Cage Fight Trainer and Promoter. Below his contact information, he’d reprinted a description of him from FIGHT! Magazine—“Nastiest Bastard in Chicago.”
“How much did she steal?”
“Eleven thousand. She says it’s winnings. I say it’s fees and expenses.”
“She any good?”
“You see this?” Peterson meant his bandaged nose. “I used to fight some myself when I was young. I still got the speed. No one takes me by surprise. Ginny surprised me.”
“She just popped you one, grabbed your cash roll, and ran?”
“More or less.”
“I don’t know how I can help you.”
“Your wife said you’re a little punch-drunk and you take jobs others won’t.”
“My ex.” Nancy, who practiced jujitsu and had broken a few noses herself, was a children’s dentist but picked up after-hours work from fighters who needed their incisors fixed. “She called me punch-drunk?”
“She said you got shot in the head.”
“True.”
“She said it changed you.”
“True again.”
“She said you’re muddled.”
“I think straight enough. I just talk too much. Too many synapses firing—or too few. If a thought crosses my mind, it rolls off my tongue. The doctors call it disinhibition.”
“That must make it hard to get jobs. I just want you to go out there and make things right.”
“Get the money back?”
“Talk sense into Ginny. Get the money and tell her I want her to come home. I love her, but since she ran off, I’ve lost four more fighters. In this business no one stays with a loser. Nancy said you’re the man for the job.”
When Peterson had called, Kelson was surprised Nancy recommended him. She was tough—on herself and on him. He wanted to savor this kindness, but he distrusted the man who sat across from him. “No guarantees.”
Before flying into LAX, Kelson set up an appointment with Ginny Tommel’s talent agent, Abe Childress. Childress’s Westwood office window looked down at Memorial Park, where Merv Griffin, Rodney Dangerfield, and Marilyn Monroe were buried.
“It’s a reminder,” the agent said now, gazing at the window. “Here today, gone tomorrow. Make the most of it. Seize the moment. All that crap.” In profile, his nose—bandaged in white—could’ve been the twin brother to Stu Peterson’s, though it clashed disturbingly with his California tan.
Across the desk from him, Ginny Tommel sat in a plush chair next to Kelson. She said, “Abe keeps me grounded with that kind of talk.” She wore a pink pantsuit. Her legs ended in a pair of pink high-heeled pumps.
“It’s hard to picture you breaking heads with those things,” Kelson said.
Her agent laughed and touched his nose. “She got me with an elbow strike.”
“But you still took her as a client.”
“What’s a little horseplay? Ginny came in for an audition. In the course of a friendly conversation, I put my hand on her—being a friendly guy—and I happened to be admiring her firmness, you understand—her muscles. Then, bam!”—he slapped his desktop with a fleshy palm—“Blood was dripping off my chin. Another guy might’ve been turned off. Me? I mopped up the blood with a wad of tissue and called a showrunner I know. I told him, ‘I have a dynamo. A real, honest-to-God dynamo. You hire this one, you’ll never know what hit you.’ End of the week, they signed her for three guest spots this season. They’re talking a regular role next year. What do you think of that?”
“I think you’re a jackass,” Kelson said.
The agent’s grin dropped. “I’ve been called worse but usually not at a first meeting—and not by someone asking for help.”
“I talk too much,” Kelson said.
“I caught that. What exactly does this Stu Peterson want from my client?”
Kelson turned to Ginny Tommel. “Peterson says you ripped him off.”
She rolled her eyes. “Stu’s a weasel. He owes me my prize money.” She pulled up an attachment on her phone, showed it to Kelson, then opened three more attachments. Even at a glance, they showed that Peterson had failed to fork over what he owed her. “He takes money from all the girls,” she said. “Then he tells us he loves us, puts his weasel paws on us, and says we can earn our money on our backs.”
“Why does anyone work with him?” Kelson asked.
“If you’re a Chicago fighter, Stu’s the man to see if you want good matches. With his connections, he’s got us in a chokehold. Sign with him or go to the showers.”
“So you broke his nose.”
“And grabbed what I could. He still owes me. You can take that message back to the weasel. He owes me.” She leaned in to Kelson to make the point.
He backed away. “He says his other fighters are leaving him. You’ve hurt his reputation—and his feelings.”
“Stu has no feelings. You know what he did to me and my boyfriend Dirk? He thought Dirk was taking the fight out of me, so he Photoshopped a picture of me and Ricky Torpedo and posted it on the internet.”
“Ricky Torpedo?”
“After Stu posted the fake, Dirk packed up his surfboards and moved out here.”
“Dirk the Chicago Surfer?”
“He’s Swedish.”
“Because why wouldn’t he be?”
“Have you seen Zuma Beach Blues? Dirk does the tube ride. As soon as we work out our differences, we’re getting married.”
“Congratulations.”
“You can see why I broke Stu’s nose.”
“You let him off easy. I’ll tell him he owes you the rest of your money.”
Despite her profession, her smile had all of its teeth.
Abe Childress clapped his hands. “I love happy endings.”
Kelson went back to his room at the Westwood Hotel, talking to himself. He explained his loathing for men like Stu Peterson, who lied to him and exploited the weak or, in Ginny Tommel’s case, the very, very strong. He practiced the conversation he would try to have with Nancy about his failure to satisfy a customer she’d sent him. He praised himself for getting through a meeting with Ginny Tommel with his nose intact.
Then he streamed YouTube videos of her fights on his laptop. Using a technique that involved bashing her opponents repeatedly in the middle of the face, she easily won the first two matches. In the third, when a skinny fighter with blond pigtails smacked her ear with a round kick, Kelson yelled, “No.” The skinny fighter tripped Ginny and dove on top of her, pummeling her from her ribs to her throat. Kelson yelled, “No, no, no, no.”
A guest in the next room pounded on the wall.
“I’m overinvested,” Kelson yelled at the wall.
Then he called Peterson in Chicago and said, “She thinks you’re a weasel.”
“What the hell?”
Kelson explained that he’d met with Ginny Tommel, who’d convinced him that Peterson ripped her off, not the other way around.
When Peterson said Kelson had his head up his ass if he was listening to Ginny, Kelson said he wouldn’t be able to listen to anyone with his head up his ass. When Peterson started naming the martial arts moves he would use to beat him down, Kelson hung up.
The red-eye flights from Los Angeles were booked solid, so he bought a ticket for the next afternoon, then left the hotel and walked back toward Abe Childress’s talent agency. An alley between Childress’s building and a granite-and-glass office tower led him into the Memorial Park Cemetery. He searched for Marilyn Monroe’s gravestone but came instead to Rodney Dangerfield’s, inscribed with his name and the words “There goes the neighborhood.”
“Joker,” Kelson said, and he wandered down a path to where a gray-haired woman was staring at Farrah Fawcett’s marker. He asked the woman, “Is it better to laugh or cry?”
She said, “I don’t see why we can’t do both.”
The next morning, Kelson flipped on the TV news as he packed. The traffic reporter said traffic was bad and would get worse. The meteorologist warned of a growing danger of wildfires. Then the anchor returned to a developing story. The police had identified a gunshot victim, discovered shortly after sunrise in the canyons above Malibu, as surfer Dirk Karlsson. They’d charged his girlfriend, cage fighter and actress Ginny Tommel, with the killing. More details would follow.
“Huh,” Kelson said.
Ninety minutes later, after inching down the 405 and across I-10 onto the Pacific Coast Highway, Kelson cut his Hertz up Latigo Canyon Road. He drove for a mile past scrub trees and gated driveways in the dry, crumbling hills and dead-ended at a police barricade.
He pulled to the shoulder and got out.
A uniformed cop by the barricade yelled, “Get back in the car and turn around.”
Kelson crossed the pavement and flashed an ID. “I work for your suspect’s former trainer,” he said. “Or I did until I quit.”
“Uh-huh. What you want?”
“To talk to the lead detective.”
The cop spoke into a radio. “Detective Martine? There’s a guy out here says he knows Tommel.”
Detective Martine came to the barricade. “Who are you?” she asked. She had sun-bleached hair and movie-white teeth.
Kelson flashed his ID again and handed her a business card.
“This says Chicago. You’re out of bounds. What do you know about Ginny Tommel?”
“Dangerous.”
“We know that much.”
“I mean in a good way. Knows how to throw a punch. But I don’t see her shooting anyone—no need.”
“Who says anyone got shot?”
“The morning news. The reporter called Dirk Karlsson a gunshot victim.”
“Amateurs. Karlsson was beaten to death—like, beaten so you couldn’t identify him except for the tattoos.”
“Oh,” Kelson said.
“Tell me about Ginny Tommel.”
“Was his nose broken?” he asked.
“What nose?”
“Ouch.”
“To say the least. What can you tell me?”
“She wouldn’t kill him,” Kelson said. “She came out here to be with him. They were going to get married.”
“Which is why he took out a restraining order?”
“He did?”
The detective sighed. “And also why we have reports of them fighting at Neptune’s Net last night?”
“Argue-fighting or fight-fighting?”
“All I know is it involved calamari.”
“I talked with her yesterday. She wouldn’t hurt him.”
The detective laughed. “Have you watched videos of her matches? Tell me what you know about her.”
“I supposed it’s mostly a sense . . .”
“A sense? Is this how you do investigations in Chicago?”
“To tell the truth, I don’t get a lot of work.”
She eyed him. “You aren’t quite all there, are you?”
“I’m a good judge of people. I have a feeling you’ve got it wrong about Ginny Tommel.”
“Give me a reason I should care about your feeling?” she said.
“Because you jumped at Ginny Tommel without looking first. I have a problem with talking too much, and I know the trouble that comes from impulsive behavior. In my case, it’s who I am. What’s your excuse? Dirk and Ginny fought over some squid and had a rocky history, but did you ask why the history was rocky? After you found him, how fast did you arrest her? Did you ask who else could’ve killed him?”
She blinked twice. “I go where the evidence takes me. A woman who gets off on breaking faces plus a lovers’ quarrel plus a boyfriend with a broken face equals an arrest. You have a problem with the math?”
“Just with how you write it out.”
“Maybe you should get in your car and leave,” she said.
“Told you,” the uniformed cop said.
Kelson drove back into LA and parked by Abe Childress’s talent agency. When he walked into the office, Childress said, “As of eight a.m. today, I ended my professional relationship with Ginny Tommel.”
“That was quick.”
“Hollywood is quick. Double-knot your Nikes.”
“You think she did it?” Kelson said.
“You kidding?” Childress touched his bandaged nose. “The doc says he needs to reconstruct my septum. She’s a killer. I respect that as long as she isn’t really a killer.”
“What do you know about her boyfriend?”
“Aside from he’s dead? He was a wannabe. Came in here with a DVD his friends shot—thought he deserved leading roles because he rode a surfboard in someone’s low-budget remake of Beach Blanket Bingo.”
“He came in here? Did you know him before you took Ginny Tommel as a client?”
“Sure, he introduced her to me. He thought having a hot girlfriend would make me take another look at the DVD. It made me take a look at his girlfriend. Ginny was trouble—I knew that when we met. The only question was, good trouble or bad trouble? This town can turn sane people on their heads. Bring in a girl like Ginny and you get either a dead boyfriend or a superstar. I was betting on a superstar, but I didn’t throw a lot at the bet.”
“She seems okay to me,” Kelson said.
“I’ve seen this before.”
“A cage fighter killing her Swedish surfer boyfriend?”
“No new songs, just variations on old tunes.”
Kelson drove back to his hotel and rode the elevator up from the lobby. When the elevator car jolted to a stop at his floor, he said, “Story of my life.” When a maid, wheeling a cart down the corridor, asked if he needed an extra towel, he said, “It’ll take more than that.” When he let himself into his room, he said, “Yah!”
Stu Peterson sat in the armchair by the bed. His red hair was slicked back, and he’d stripped the bandage off his broken nose. “Where’s the money?” he said.
“Who let you out of the zoo?”
“Huh?”
“Why are you here?”
“I told you—to get my money. I let Ginny get away with this, all my fighters leave.”
“All the women you haven’t paid?”
“I pay them when they earn it.”
“I’ve heard about that too. Busted bones and stitches aren’t enough?”
The man grinned. “I teach my fighters to fight dirty. Stick opponents in the eyes. Tear off an ear. Exploit weakness. That philosophy has made me the man I am.”
“Or whatever species you belong to.”
“I’ve done okay for myself.”
“Until one of your fighters broke your nose.”
“I taught her that move. If fighters can’t breathe, they can’t punch.”
“There’s nothing I can do for you. I won’t try to get money you owe her. Even if I would, how could I get it with her in jail?”
“Break into her apartment. Do the stuff you guys do.”
“You guys?”
“If it was as easy as kicking in a door and grabbing the cash, I’d do it myself. I hired you for your skills. Search her apartment. Dig into her computer. If she put the money in a bank, get it out. Should be easier with her locked up.”
“You need a different guy.”
“I don’t like people who leave me hanging. You could say I don’t play well with them.”
“I didn’t want the job to begin with.”
Peterson’s lips hardened against his teeth. “I’ve watched your ex-wife sparring. She’s no Ginny, but she has talent. Still, I could teach her a thing or two that would keep her out of her dentist scrubs for a month.”
“You’re threatening Nancy?”
“Take it how you like. I could have some fun with her on the mat.”
So Kelson charged the little man. He didn’t mean to—he just did.
Peterson remained in the armchair as Kelson neared. Then he was no longer in the chair. Then his foot swung through the air and clocked Kelson on the side of the head. Then he was on top of Kelson, putting him in a choke hold, and Kelson’s vision was narrowing.
When Kelson woke, with a headache and wrenched neck, Peterson was gone. A sheet of paper, torn from the pad by the room phone, lay on his chest. The note on it said Get my $11K. Kelson rasped one word from his raw throat. “Weasel.”
After he stretched the pain from his neck, he called the Malibu Sheriff’s Station and asked to talk with Detective Martine. He told her, “I have another suspect for you.”
“What makes you think I care what you have?” she said. “Anyway it’s too late.”
“Did Ginny Tommel confess?”
“Almost as bad. She assaulted the intake officer who was patting her down for contraband. He’s in surgery right now. Battery against a peace officer is three years.”
“She can’t help herself.”
“Just what I’m thinking. Too bad Dirk Karlsson didn’t work that out.”
“Ginny’s trainer, Stu Peterson, flew out here after I told him I wouldn’t go after her. He’s a nasty little fellow, and if he can’t hit a target, he’s happy with collateral damage. You should look into him.”
“No, you should go back to Chicago. Or stay and see the sights, but get out of my way.”
When Kelson started to argue, the detective hung up. He paced his room, making his case anyway. Peterson’s life was falling apart just as Ginny Tommel was breaking through. Peterson blamed her for his troubles. He’d victimized her in the past and seemed obsessed with controlling her. When Kelson told him he was quitting the job over the phone, he’d flown to LA. Short of killing Ginny herself, he could do nothing that would hurt her more than killing Dirk Karlsson. He had the physical tools to beat a man to death. He had motive, means, and—
Kelson’s phone rang. Caller ID showed Detective Martine’s number. He answered, “Have you come to your senses?”
“Did you just break into Ginny Tommel’s apartment?”
“Why would I—”
“You have a hard time with limits?”
“Was anyone hurt?”
“Aside from the doorman’s broken ribs?”
“Did he describe an assailant who looked like me?”
“Not quite, but—”
“Stu Peterson. Little red-haired guy with a couple of black eyes and a banged-up nose.”
“Who is this guy?”
“I told you.”
“Yeah, but I wasn’t listening.”
Kelson told her again. This time, she listened.
“You Chicago people are a bunch of thugs,” she said. “Any idea where we can find him?”
“Depends on if he found the eleven thousand. If he did, you can snag him at LAX.”
“And if he didn’t?”
“He’ll go after others connected to Ginny.”
“Who would that be?”
Kelson considered the question. “Ah, hell,” he said.
Kelson ran from the hotel to his car, drove to the building where Abe Childress operated his agency, and jumped out at the curb.
He burst into the agency reception area, then crept to Childress’s door, preparing for a back fist, an elbow strike, or more likely something animalistic—a rabbit punch or a tiger claw. He rounded into the office.
Peterson held Childress in an anaconda choke on the floor. The agent’s face was the color of a plum. If he wasn’t already dead, he was seconds away, but Peterson tightened his arms as if he meant to squeeze his head off.
Kelson stopped. “Why?”
Peterson raised his eyes to him. “You’re next.” He stiffened his grip.
Kelson kicked at him.
So Peterson released the agent and sprang to his feet, lithe and treacherous. He danced around like he was limbering up for a first round, poking jabs at the air between him and Kelson. “C’mon,” he said. “C’mon.”
“A weasel on steroids,” Kelson said, and backed away.
Peterson came after him.
Kelson aimed a punch at his nose—opening his own midsection.
Peterson ducked, drove his head into Kelson’s belly, shot his hands around Kelson’s legs, and took him to the floor. Then Peterson had him where he’d had him at the hotel, but this time he eased his grip enough for Kelson to gasp, then tightened before Kelson could suck a breath, taking pleasure in the pain he inflicted.
“Why?” Kelson rasped.
“Because”—Peterson tightened his grip—“I can. Because”—he eased—“I like to. Because”—he tightened as if he meant to break Kelson’s neck—“Ginny broke my heart.” He wrenched Kelson’s head clockwise.
Then Kelson heard a sound like cracking wood, and, as if Peterson had changed his mind, his arms loosened from Kelson’s neck.
Kelson’s head fell to the floor, and the pain as it struck was the sweetest he’d ever felt. He stared up at the ceiling as if he might identify a constellation or watch shooting stars.
Abe Childress loomed over him, the tan returning to his face. He held the desk chair he’d used to clonk Peterson. Three minutes earlier, the agent was a few weak heartbeats from the cemetery he spent his free time contemplating. Now he looked cheerful.
Kelson asked, “How did you . . . ?”
Childress grinned. “If you can’t bounce back from a little roughhousing in Hollywood, you’ll never be a star.”
By the time Detective Martine arrived at the agency office, a paramedic had put a neck brace on Kelson, Kelson had taken it off, and another paramedic had put it back on. Now Abe Childress eyed Detective Martine’s sun-bleached hair and glinting teeth as if envisioning roles for her.
She pulled him aside and questioned him.
Then she questioned Kelson.
Before a couple of uniformed cops hauled Peterson away, she tried to question him too. He lunged at her as if he would bite, and she slapped him on the side of the head.
“Wow,” Abe Childress said. When she glared at him, he said, “Give that look to a camera, and I can make you a million bucks.”
“Huh?” she said.
He grinned, his teeth as white as hers. “Picture this. After you release Ginny Tommel—with cameras rolling—we get the two of you on a show. Cop partners. Or bad guy, good guy. I know a showrunner who knows a showrunner. How do you like sheepdogs? Audiences really dig—”
Kelson listened and then he was grinning too. This sounded like a show he would watch.
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