King Maybe (13 page)

We glided in silence past a couple of houses, all lit up and containing theoretically happy families, and then Tyrone said, “Hard day, huh?”

“Don't ask.”

“I don't care. I was just being polite.”

I found a nice empty stretch of curb in between streetlights. The sharp, bright tip of the moon peeped over a tree, and wind-borne dust danced in the beams from the headlights. “Tell me what's happening.”

“Truth is?” He sighed again. “Okay. Truth is, I kind of screwed up.”

“How badly?”

“In spirit,” he said. “I screwed up in spirit.”

“This is either a fine distinction or not, depending.”

“You're her dad.”

“And.”

He put down his window and looked out of it. “And this isn't easy to talk about.”

“If you don't talk about it,” I said, “I can't do anything for you. Assuming I'd want to, once I hear what you have to say.” This was greeted by silence. “I was a kid once, you know.”

“Yeah,” he said. “All old guys say that.”

I had turned off the lights, and now I turned them back on. “Up to you.”

“Okay, okay. Just give me a minute.” He put the window up and put it down again halfway. “You don't have to worry about Rina,” he said, slowly enough to have picked the words out of a bowl.

“In what regard?”

“Boy, does
that
sound stiff. In what regard? You could add ‘my good man,' you know. Sound even stiffer.”

“The question stands.”

“In regard to what
you
probably mean when you say ‘a good girl.' No, Jesus, don't
ask
me, you know what I mean.”

I said, “
Boy
, is this awkward.”

“So she's nothing to worry about in that department, she's got a strong will and she's smart and she's decided not to do anything that would limit the choices she can make. That's what she said to me, she's not going to
limit the choices she can make
.”

“Good for her.”

“Yeah, I mean it's not very personal or very romantic, but it's clear, you know? Girl's real clear.”

“So I assume that the context of that conversation . . .” I completely ran out of gas.

“Well, sure. I'm a guy, right?”

“I'd noticed that, and believe me, as her dad I've thought about it many times.”

“And since you made the point that you were young once, then you know what I'm talking about.”

“A minute ago,” I said, “I didn't think this conversation could get any more uncomfortable. I stand corrected.”

“But you do know.”

“I know, if we're going to focus on my own mythical youth, that I wouldn't want Rina dating anybody like me.” A sudden gust of wind hit the car, rocking it slightly, and a ragged bunch of dry leaves skittered across the street. Not only was the heat sticking around, so was the fire season.

“Well, then, you can relax, 'cause I'm not like you. But I am a guy. And . . . um, you also know that just because you can't—you know—get a drink of water someplace, that doesn't mean you're not still thirsty.”

“You
didn't
,” I said.

“No! No, I didn't.”

We sat there as the moon inched its way higher. The wind wasn't bothering the moon any. And then Tyrone said, “But it might have looked like I was going to try.”

I said, “Would it be possible for us to dispense with the conditional tense?”

“Is that like
if
and
might have
?”

“It is.”

“They don't teach us that.”

“They don't teach you shit, if you want my opinion. But that's not the subject.”

“Yeah, okay, okay. So there's this girl named Denise, and Denise, who is not, like, totally unattractive, told this friend of hers who told this friend of mine that she wouldn't mind hooking up with me.”

“As in—”

“Oh, come
on
.”

I said, “
Look
at that moon, would you?”

“Yeah,” Tyrone said. “There it is.”

“You know why you sometimes see it as a crescent?”

“Yes,” Tyrone said. “That's one of the things they do teach us.”

I drew a breath that seemed to include most of the air in the neighborhood. “So, to summarize, there's a sort of
barrier
to the further exploration of one possible aspect of your relationship with Rina, and you're down with that but not fully satisfied on a sort of hormonal level, and this girl named . . . named . . .”

“Denise. Fine looking—”

“I don't care if she's got six legs. This . . . this Denise, who could probably use a little aggressive parenting, sends you a verbal chain letter to inform you that she has an interest in making the beast with two backs—”

“That's
Othello
,” Tyrone observed. “Interesting you should choose
Othello
, with me being—”

“—and you say, what? ‘Good to go'? ‘Ready when you are'?”

“I don't say shit,” Tyrone said. “But I hung around with her a little.”

“Hung around.”

“Like at school. In broad daylight. In public, with about a million people looking.”

“‘In public' where?”

“Outdoors,” he said. “A park once and the mall once. We were always vertical.” He cleared his throat. “But I held her hand.”

“Oh, boy,” I said.

“So naturally, that was when Rina's friend, this little scab on the world's nose—her name's Patty—”

“Patricia,”
I said. “They're going twosies, as my wife said, for a dual birthday party.”

“And that's like a first-class ticket for Patty, who's been trying forever to get close to Rina.”

“Why?”

“Because Rina's tope. Everybody thinks—”

“Wait. Taupe? You mean, like, beige?”

“No,
tope
. T-O-P-E. Like tight and dope, put together. Okay, okay, for you,
cool
, remember cool?”

“We're talking about
Rina
?”

“Top of the ticket. Dudes want to hang with her, sisters want to be her bra.”

“Tyrone.”

He gave me the first grin of the evening. “Like
bro
,” he said, “but for the other half. You know, like tight with her.”

“She never talks about this.”

“If she did, she wouldn't be tope.”

“So Patty, or Patricia, saw you and . . . uh, Denise, holding hands, and she used that as a way to make friends with Rina.”

“To get tighter,” Tyrone said. “They were already on hey-there, nod-in-the-hall terms. But then Patty goes and gets all weepy and says, ‘Oh, I hate to tell you this, but— No, never mind, I can't,' and Rina's like ‘What what
whaat
?' And finally Patty breaks down and gives her the news. Kleenex everywhere.”

“How do you know it went like that?”

“Because Rina told me. ‘God bless Patty,' she says, or something like that, ‘I practically had to torture her to get her to tell me,' and I'm seeing old Patty just beauty-queening it up in a corner, probably rubbing her legs together like a cricket.”

“You saw her?”

“No, that's a figure of speech. Rina told me over the phone, but Patty was in the room. Rina said so.”

“What did you say.”

“What
could
I say?” Tyrone asked. “I denied it.”

“You lied?”

He looked at me as though I'd begun speaking in tongues. “
Course
I lied. What would
you
have done?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Right.”

“So I denied it, but, see, Patty had
brought someone with her
, another marginal girl, who had seen it or said she did, and she told Rina, Patty did, to break it to me, like, one witness at a time, so she could see whether I'd lie.” He looked up at the moon for a moment. “And I did. I said I hadn't done it, and this other girl pipes up and says
she
saw me, too.” He lifted his right foot and kicked himself in the left shin with his heel. A tree branch, leaves intact, tumbleweeded across the street.

“But you're telling
me
the truth.”

Rubbing his shin, he said, “I am.”

“How do I know?”

“You know,” he said, “one reason you're double-checking me on that . . . well, it's the same reason Rina believed it so fast, the same reason you picked
Othello
. Black guys are supposed to be dogs, right?”

“I don't think so,” I said. “I think it's about insecurity. Rina thinks you're the best thing in her life, and she might be right. And she sees how other girls look at you, and she . . . she doesn't believe she's interesting enough to hang on to you. Pretty enough, I don't know. And another teenage girl, who understands all of that, is playing her like a violin.”

He shrugged, “I guess.”

“So I'm sorry for doubting you. I believe you, Tyrone.”

He sat silent for a moment, and then he said, “I know old people—sorry, adults—don't take this seriously, but I do really love your daughter. Never loved anyone like I love Rina.”

“Well then,” I said. “We've got to fix this.”

“How?

“Honestly, Tyrone?” I said. “I have no idea.”

13

Something Weaselly

I dropped him off at the corner so Kathy wouldn't just happen to look out the window and see my car, as she does with probability-defying regularity, and then I took off down Vanalden. There wasn't much point in trying to talk to her or Rina until I had some sort of agenda.

But just to demonstrate that I had my hand in, I pulled over and used my phone to email Kathy, using her preferred vowel-challenged mode:
Wnt 2 tlk w/u abt Tyrone.
Pleased with having set
something
into motion, I got halfway to Ventura Boulevard before I mentally slapped my forehead, remembering that I was supposed to have been paid $35,000 for the stamp that day.

Stinky didn't answer the phone. I left a message with the phone company's fembot: “Have stamp, clock ticking,” and mused for a second about the fact that no one I knew—well,
almost
no one I knew, now that Ronnie had gone over to the dark side—recorded personalized voice-mail messages. Maybe it was a crook thing.

I'd no more than pulled back into traffic when the phone rang. I answered it without looking, which is always a mistake. “I saw you,” Kathy said. “Skulking around out there and picking up Tyrone.”

“How did you see me?”

“I just happened to look out the window.”

“You were spying on Tyrone,” I said. “You wanted to see whether he was actually leaving. Talk about
skulking
.”

“I knew you'd take his side.”

“I haven't said anything about whose side—”

“Well, you should. Poor kid.”

I said, “Uhhh.”

“You know,” Kathy said, and I could practically hear her knuckles going white as she gripped the phone, “when we were married, it really pissed me off when you assumed you knew in advance how I was going to react to everything. And it still does.”

“The way you said ‘his side' made it sound like he'd been caught raising money for the American Nazi Party.”

“You heard it like that because it's what you expected me to think.”

I paused, sorting it out. I said, “Only you and I could disagree about agreeing with each other.”

“It's a habit we got into. A way to keep talking. There's something I don't like about that Patricia. Something weaselly. When Patricia was here a couple of days ago to break the bad news to Rina, I saw a mean little glint of triumph in her eye after Rina hung up on Tyrone.”

“That's what Tyrone says. He says Rina is really popular and Patricia isn't, and this is Patricia's way of worming her way into the circle.”

“Even if I do dislike Patricia and like Tyrone,” Kathy said, “Tyrone has a good reason for trying to make Patricia look bad. Patricia nailed him.”

“Maybe. When he and I were talking,
Othello
came up, which is kind of interesting, because
Othello
is all about bringing someone down by making him jealous, when there's really no cause.”

“I hate when you do that,” she said. “I like to feel like my life—and Rina's, too—isn't plagiarized. You know, our lives are new to
us
when they happen, even if you've read them in better versions.”

“Just thought it was interesting.”

“Okay, I'm not being fair. You're not like most people who go all literary every ten minutes. You actually
do
things once in a while.”

“I don't suppose Rina can hear you.”

“I'm out by the pool. She's in her room with the door closed, wearing her Dr. Dre Beats and looking at hip-hop videos. Probably hoping her father will call.”

“She wouldn't talk to me about it anyway.”

“No. It's a girl thing.”

“If you don't like Patricia,” I said, “why are you up for the twosies party?”

“I had to give Rina
something
. She's been crying for days.”

We both stopped talking for a minute or so at the sound of that. It brought us back to what mattered. After I finished sighing, I said, “You've done an amazing job with her.”

“She was good material to work with.”

“You've never been able to accept a compliment.”

“I haven't had much practice,” she said. “Listen, are you coming to the party?”

“Sure. But let me think about Patricia a little bit between now and then. What's her last name?”

“Are you going to do something illegal?”

“Me?” I said.

“Silly question. It's Gribbin.”

“Spelled like—”

“Like
Gribbin
. Whoops, I see Rina looking at me through the kitchen window.”

“Tell her that she—” I said, but Kathy was gone, which was just as well, since I had no idea how I would have finished the sentence.

Innocent people can sit in front of a house at night for hours without getting prickles on the back of their neck, but I'm not an innocent person, and I'd been there long enough. In the almost twenty years I've been breaking the law for a living, I've never been arrested. It would be really stupid to have a run-in with a cop because some citizen saw me through his window too many times and called the law. People are so distrustful these days.

So I rolled down to Ventura, made a right, toward Hollywood, and turned over in my mind the question of whether I was really ready to set in motion the only plan I had, which was to persuade a young girl to commit a criminal act. It seemed to be something a decent person would hesitate about, and I was proud of myself for hesitating. When I felt I'd hesitated enough, I turned right onto one of the north-south streets, pulled over to yet another curb, and dialed.

“I thought you'd lost my number,” Anime Wong said.

“Actually,” I said, “I'm having a kind of moral crisis, and I was hoping you could help me with it.”

“This is the Moral Crisis Hotline,” Anime said. “Lilli says hey.”

“Hey, Lilli.” I heard a young girl's voice, prematurely dry, in the background. While Anime greeted whatever the world threw at her as though it were the first sunrise ever, Lilli had dry, as well as world-weary, down cold.

“You guys still working?” I said.

“Of
course
not,” Anime said. “You told us to stop.”

Anime and Lilli, both fourteen, worked for, or perhaps
with
, an elaborately tattooed cyber crook named Monty Carlo, breaking through the computer shields that surround the substantial funds that states create when they assume ownership of the contents of abandoned safe-deposit boxes. Once through the firewalls, the three of them helped themselves to an amount of money that they determined, through an algorithm Monty worked out, could be plausibly attributed to a rounding error or a normal short-term fluctuation. Of course, a sum that represents a rounding error to a state is a fortune to a teenager, and Lilli and Anime intended to go to a top-line East Coast college together, probably holding hands, and emerge with advanced degrees and zero student debt, having paid their way in stolen cash.

“Fine,” I said. “Glad to hear it. I'll call someone else.”

“I was just bagging on you,” Anime said. “We're still crooks. Whaddaya got?”

“I need to know about a kid,” I said. “Patricia Gribbin. Lives in Tarzana or Reseda, around there.”

With the almost infinite weariness of the computer geek adrift in a world of idiots, Anime said, “Have you looked at Facebook?”

“No. I'd need to friend her to read her stuff, right? Did I say that right?
Friend
, like a verb?”

“Yes, and we were impressed. Depends on her privacy settings.”

“In any case, I think it would be a bad idea to friend her.”

“You could snoop her through a ghost account.”

“Anime,” I said, “I still don't know how to play an MP3 file.”

Lilli muttered something in the background, and Anime said, “Lilli wants to know, do you mean her any harm?”

Well,
did
I? “No. I just need to get the basics. Where she lives, how old she is, what she's interested in—you know, the kind of stuff that would tell me who the hell she is. Whatever you can get. And tell Lilli that Patricia Gribbin may be messing around with my daughter, and I need to know whether she can be trusted.”

Anime said, carefully, “When you say ‘messing around' . . .”

“I mean maliciously.”

“So not like a girlfriend. Not a girlfriend the way Lilli and I are. You know, romantically.”

“No. She seems to be trying to make my daughter unhappy. She's messing with Rina's private life.”

“Private life,” Anime said. “What a droll concept. Isn't that droll, Lilli?” Lilli seemed to be agreeing that it was droll.

“So will you?”

“Sure. I'll get back to you in a little bit. How are you?”

“Same as always.”

“You were kind of
off
, last couple of times we talked.”

“Thanks for noticing.”

“Well,” she said. “We were worried about you.” Lilli said something, and Anime said reprovingly to her, “You were
too
.” To me she said, “Lilli always has to seem tough.”

There were lights
on in Ronnie's apartment, although the blinds were down. The pale blue ghost-glow of my watch told me it was about ten to nine.

The apartment house where she—and, until recently, I—lived was constructed in the 1940s and consequently was both attractive and well built, although it featured that odd bricklaying technique that forces out little pillows of excess cement between the bricks, thoughtfully making a wall easier to climb. The building, only two stories tall, was shaped like a squared-off U on three sides of a nicely tended garden, which had been planted long enough ago that ivy had used the protruding cement as handholds to scale the wall. Looking up at the ivy, I thought again of Ronnie bravely driving the stolen Jag through the Slugger's gate, and my conscience, which doesn't get out as often as it should, gave me a belated little squeeze.

I knocked on the door and stepped back so I wouldn't seem to be crowding her when she opened it. It was a nice touch, I thought, sensitive yet still manly, but it was wasted, because the door remained closed.

I knocked again, a bit more briskly this time, and stepped back yet again. Prepared my most spontaneous smile.

Nothing. Well, her lights were on a timer, so they'd still be on if she were in Timbuktu. So leave a note. No point in driving all the way over here and not even leaving a note. Although part of me was relieved not to have to go through the conversation, I still wanted credit for making the effort. I was most of the way to the car to get a Post-it from the dash compartment when my phone rang.

“I'm not here,” Ronnie said.

“You do know that's an impossibility. Wherever you are, you're there, so you can't possibly say, ‘I'm not here.'”

“Fine. Then I'm not there.”

“Where?”

“Wherever you are. And it'll probably be quite a while before I
am
wherever you are.”

“Can't we talk about this?”

“We just did.” But she didn't hang up.

“I finally realized something, an hour or two ago,” I said. “You're the only person I know whom I trust emotionally.”

“Do I win a candy bar?”

I rested my hand on the hood of the dented Toyota. Warm as the night was, it was still warmer. “I thought it might matter.”

“I'm sure it does, to you,” she said. “And it probably will to me, when I've given it some time. And I'm not trying to go all
Fatal Attraction
on you here, but you're making it totally about you, which is a very masculine approach to life.”

“What does that mean? I'm saying I
trust
you. Emotionally, I mean.”

“Well, even setting aside the partial disclaimer at the end, it's still all about how
you
feel, isn't it? If you give this more than a moment's thought, Junior, smart as you are, you'll come up with another explanation of this situation.”

One occurred to me, and I said, “Oh.”

“There we are,” Ronnie said. “One possible reason for the fact that you don't know very much about me on a factual level.”

“
You
don't trust
me
,” I said.

“See?” she said. “Other people are as real as you are. Surprised?”

I had nowhere
else to go, so I went to my secret home, Apartment 302 at the Wedgwood, in Koreatown. The Wedgwood is one of the “China” apartment buildings, so called not because they were an LA rip on Chinese architecture but because they'd been named, back in the late twenties, in honor of three makers of fine china: Wedgwood, Royal Doulton, and Lenox. Today, random neon-sign failures had turned them into the
wed wood
, the
royal doult
, and the
nox
.

The China apartments were among the most deceptive addresses in a highly deceptive town. They'd been left behind like a trio of abandoned outposts as the town's money moved west toward the sea in the 1930s and had gone precipitously downhill. About fifteen years ago, an anonymous Korean syndicate had bought the buildings for cash under the table and furtively fine-tuned them for the kind of people whose lifestyle dictated secret luxury, people who would benefit from living in a palace with a dump wrapped around it. Now, despite exteriors so distressed they looked like the Bates Motel in drag, the interiors had been meticulously restored to their original burnished Art Deco glory: high ceilings, polished hardwood floors, double-wide doors everywhere. As an added attraction, the three huge underground garages had been knocked into one, so that someone could dip down the driveway of the Wedgwood and conveniently emerge, a moment later, from beneath the Royal Doulton, around the corner and out of sight.