The Chinese Beverly Hills (17 page)

A beige Ford Crown Vic pulled up in front, driven by a hefty middle-aged man with a tidy moustache. Nobody on earth drove those lumbering cars but cops and local officials with access to motor pools.

He’d liked most of the firefighters he’d ever met---truly decent people intent on doing good in the world—and he wondered if he’d like this one, too.

“Walt Roski?” He stood and held out his hand to the harried-looking man.

“Jack?”

“Yeah.”

They shook hands in a perfunctory way. Roski seemed preoccupied, but he did look Jack Liffey over in a snoopy way. “Let me be direct,” Roski said.

“Oh, please. I live for it.”

The man nearly smiled. “When I heard you were a private detective, I assumed you were a flake. Just another failed insurance adjuster. Your wife disabused me.”

Jack Liffey was about to say they weren’t married, but why? “Be even more direct. What’s your business?”

The waiter appeared and they both ordered iced tea. Roski brusquely told the waiter not to show his face again after bringing the drinks. Jack Liffey had never heard that before, but he liked it a lot. Over-officious waitstaff were an American affliction.

Several noisy motorcycles took off on a green and upshifted together, loud as a bandsaw. As they passed Roski opened a briefcase.

“This is as direct as I can make it.” He laid out two eight-by-tens, the before and after of an amber-beaded rosary that had clearly been incinerated. “Mrs. Roh went into wails of distress seeing this. This one was found in the Sheepshead fire zone with the remains of a firefighter. He was near the burned remains of a girl. I’d like to know what you know about Sabine Roh, so I don’t have to pad around town tromping all over your moccasin prints.”

“Maeve, I want to thank you for introducing me to a whole new world… whatever you call it.” Bunny was glowing.

Is that what I did? Maeve thought. I thought we were making love.

“That was my first time with a woman, you know.”

“Frighten you?”

“A little, but it’s like sinking into amazing comfort and protection. I’ve been so forlorn all my life. My big brother used to make me… we won’t go into that.”

“It was lust for me.” Maeve swallowed hard. “And more. I was loving you.”

“Wow, Maeve. Let me adjust some.”

“Of course.”

*

Back home, Jack Liffey tiptoed upstairs to look in on Gloria, who seemed to be dead asleep. She was snoring like a trooper, so he descended to the kitchen and set out what he’d need to thaw to make lunch, wondering if that would do anything for the guilt he felt. Then he called his sociologist friend Mike Lewis for some practical insights about dealing with the lunatic fringes of the Tea Party, and about cocaine from Hermosillo, which was where the girl’s out-of-scale map seemed to start.

Unfortunately Mike started out with a lecture about Karl Marx’s book
The Eighteenth Brumaire
and how the rich had been hijacking populist movements for centuries.

“Thanks for the really big picture, Mike. Anything practical?”

“These guys are probably only dangerous on a local level. Of course, you’re the local level.”

“And drugs in Hermosillo?”

“That’s the Beltran Leyva cartel, a small and declining one. Sinaloa’s moving in on them. Poor Mexico. You been asking around a lot about this?”

“I’m on a job.”

“Jack, do me a favor.”

“Sure.”

“However silly it seems to you, go look out your front window this minute.”

With a chill, Jack Liffey carried the cordless with him and pulled a lacy front curtain aside so he could look out at Greenville Street. A weary ice cream vendor with a pushcart. Two kids under the hood of a Chevy.

“Nothing special, Mike.”

“Good. Keep looking.”

*

It had taken Zook a while to collect the discarded beer cans, drag the mattress outside to air it, and put the rest of the cabin back where it belonged.

He’d rehung his wonderful old canvas sling chair from a roof beam near the stove and slid back into what he thought of as his Nietzsche perch. A little side table with a beer and a few joints, where he could sway and drift to his heart’s content, reading the masters and real Thinking Men.

He started with W. Cleon Skousen’s lectures, digging into the world’s secret power structure. Zook skipped forward to his first dog-ear.

FDR’s adviser Harry Hopkins treasonously delivered to the Soviets fifty suitcases of secret plans and half of America’s supply of enriched uranium, and later the Russians built the first Sputnik with plans stolen from the United States…

Skip.

But the U.S. Constitution was never based on the Enlightenment. It was drawn entirely from the Bible.

Skip.

The secret world order began to use the Communists, a regimented breed of Pavlovian men whose minds could be triggered into immediate action by signals from their masters.

He was getting bored, but he lit his first joint.

Rich Nazi-capitalist families of the New World Order like the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds have used the Council on Foreign Relations and loony left-wing forces for years—from Ho Chi Minh to the American Civil Rights Movement—to serve their own power.

It didn’t quite gel for him. Not pointed and clear, like Nietzsche. He set the book down and drifted off into his favorite daydream. He was riding across the plains on a powerful horse, carrying a Remington lever-action rifle. Once in a while he’d make a dip into a suburb to shoot a snotty traitor holding a wine glass on his patio, then gallop away.

*

The department’s Serology/DNA lab had moved into the new Forensic Science Center at Cal State – LA. Still the blood lab had kept to its peculiar tradition: six days a week, if you sent in a sample, it would go into the boundless hopper. But on Tuesdays, if you had something genuinely urgent and were willing to wait in line, you’d get your results that day. A few days at most.

The PCR version of the DNA test—you’d have it in three days. The odds of a mismatch were still one in many million, perfectly good to steer an investigation, even if it couldn’t convict O.J. Simpson.

Roski waited forty-five minutes among disgruntled L.A. detectives. Amazing how many of them were overweight. He dropped off his bone fragment, then phoned Jack Liffey again.

“Jack, you were a real sport to fill me in. Investigators get used to a whole wall of jive, as I’m sure you know.”

“Yeah, I fell in love with you, too, Walt.”

“I’d like to reciprocate with a little show-and-tell to keep you on my side. Do you want to see the spot where I’m pretty sure your girl died? I have to go there anyway.”

“Jesus, this is a strange life. Of course I do.”

“Meet me in an hour at the top end of Serrano Place against the mountains. It’s between Sierra Madre and Altadena. A big yellow fire gate. You won’t miss it.”

“Since we’re best pals now, I’ll bring lunch.”

*

Before he could get out the door with his lunch package, the phone rang and rang. Jack Liffey hesitated but went back and grabbed it before it could disturb Gloria.

“Jackie, this no good for me. My heart go pit-pat too much. I forget I like everything about you, even you old man wrinkles. All you boy dogs so lucky. You wham-bam and run away and don’t care about us girl dogs.”

It wasn’t strictly true. His own heart was pitter-pattering a bit, too. A cop in Orange County had once told him if he was crazy enough to sleep with the dragon lady, he’d better count his body parts going out the door.

“You’re a wonderful kidder, Tien.”

“You come back right now I do something that make you die and go to heaven. Heaven got me, naturally.”

He smiled. “I’d probably prefer the jokes in the other place. I’m on my way now to talk to a man who knows something about Sabine.”

“Sabine can wait. She wait forever now, in fact. I still warm for you, warm outside and wet inside. Jackie, I never feel this before. I mean it. I going crazy. Don’t hurt me.”

How much to believe? Tien Joubert was as hard as a stainless-steel nail, and she could curdle your blood with a moment’s shift of tone, but maybe she was having her own version of a late-life crisis. He’d never worked out her age, but she had to be pushing sixty, maybe from the other side.

“Tien.” He glanced guiltily at the staircase to where Gloria slept, and then nudged an inner door shut. “Don’t push so hard. Everybody’s afraid of so much need.”

“You no like my big boat? It can be your boat, we get crew and sail to Hawaii, Acapulco, make love all the day. Get airplane, too. Buy whole island someplace. I got hundreds millions now, no kidding. You talk to my accountant. I need a good man to go the rest of life. Time drip away, Jackie. I been working too hard to enjoy.”

He tried to imagine himself as Tien’s kept man, dressed like an ad in
GQ
, worth many millions—some of which he could give to Maeve, of course—and he tried to imagine what various people would think of him fixed up like that. He enjoyed the presumed outrage of his ex-wife, for instance, but Maeve was something else. And his feelings toward Gloria were a mess. He’d loved her intensely for years, leaning steeply into the hurricane of her resistance.

“Tien, I know you’re sincere whenever you start saying millions. I’ll come down there early next week, I promise. We’ll talk about cabbages and kings. Right now I’m on the job. A girl’s missing.” He recalled the way Tien’s finger would play with his penis totally without embarrassment, soft as a flower petal. “Cabbages?” she said.

*

As he drove, he could smell the tamales cooking and guessed his pal Art Castro’s theory of engine-block cuisine was probably working. He wound uphill toward the vertical wall of the San Gabriel Mountains. Not many cities were caught like this between the ocean and truly alpine peaks. With periodic earthquakes, of course.

In the turnaround where the pavement ended was a yellow gate made of six-inch welded iron pipe. A four-wheel-drive Jeep Wrangler with official “Exempt” plates was already there, and he parked beside it. Roski must have swapped at the motor pool.

“Thanks for coming,” Roski told him. “I don’t meet that many guys I want to talk to.”

They shook hands again.

“This investigation is probably outside both our comfort zones,” Jack Liffey said. He saw Roski sniffing the Mexican smells emanating from his pickup. “I wasn’t kidding about lunch.”

He lifted the hood to show two big tamales double-wrapped in foil nestled on the four-banger. Foil-wrapped corn tortillas were draped over the radiator. A plastic tub of salsa sat on the battery, and he had some ginger ale in a cooler and a couple of beers for Roski.

“I’ve heard of this,” Roski said. “But I thought it was a redneck joke.”

“My first try.” Jack Liffey put it all in a wicker picnic basket Maeve had given him years ago. “We can eat on the road.”

“Might as well stop, Jack. I know a place.” At the gate Roski reached up into a steel canister welded to the gate post. To make it impossible to use a bolt cutter on the padlock within. He unlocked the gate and swung it open.

“I’m in a funny place in my life, Jack. A bad marriage, kids that took sides and still don’t like their old man much, and a belief system that hit the skids some time ago. There’s been little real friendship.”

Why did he keep running into people like this? He must have a homing beacon for the wounded and forlorn.

“The only emotion I get now is a kind of loss.”

A volcanic ash seemed to have deposited itself over the land, Jack Liffey thought—the remains of a burnt civilization, poisoning everything.

“Relax, man. I brought you beer.”

Roski drove them through the gate onto a rutted dirt trail and got back out to lock up.

*

Bunny had gone off to drama class and Maeve made herself coffee in the main house. She’d stopped going to anything but art, and felt guilty about it, but that’s just the way it was. Her sense of guilt was basically just an internalizing of her father’s wrinkly scowl. Fiercely principled eyes, a face the size of a mountain, his finger always pointing out the rocky upward path—the more difficult one.

She wondered if she was really in love with Bunny, or just letting her lust drive her. She’d always let passions blast her into orbit. Or was her hesitation just a kind of gradual dialing down of her inner fire, the first step toward “growing up”?

*

Roski’s Jeep bounced hard up the fire road. Jack Liffey recognized the thousand-yard stare on Roski’s face, driving with white-knuckled intensity. That stare had been how they described guys on the way home from ’Nam after a horrible tour. Later it became known as PTSD. He wondered if there had been a single big bottom-out for Roski.

At a crest a rock banged their teeth hard, and then the road smoothed again. The firefighter was driving too hard for the road.

“Walt! There’s no hurry and you’re fucking hurrying. It’s folly.”

“Sorry. I’ve got this maniac urge in me.”

“I can see it.”

“I should do another tour to burn it off. I did three. Desert Storm for Bush One and Enduring Freedom twice. Toward the end, the danger became a drug. Like your war?”

Ahead the chaparral had all been burned out by the fire, charred and ugly.

“Forget war, man. Peace is hard enough.”

The four-wheeler slowed down, and Jack Liffey eased his hold on the door grip.

Ahead there was a short bridge across a streambed, just past a ramshackle cabin. An old Studebaker was backed into a parking pad. Jack Liffey recognized the lanky young man out front, who sat on a bright green folding chair reading a book.

“Don’t slow down. I know that kid.”

“Me, too. I talked to him once about fire regulations. The place got a bit rowdy from time to time.”

“How far to where you’re taking me?”

“Maybe half a mile. Who was he to you?”

He took the rickety bridge slowly with a creek boiling downhill beneath it. Beyond, maimed stubs of brush poked up through the burned land. The smell was unforgettable—wood smoke, car ashtray, cat pee, and a physical scratchiness in the back of the throat. Time had run out here.