The Chinese Beverly Hills (26 page)

“He’s a mile wide and I couldn’t get around him. Just when you start thinking he’s intolerable, he does something sweet. He’s a bit off the track, too. Probably Asperger’s.”

“You came here to profile him?”

She made a sour face. “I screwed that up, didn’t I? I hit the big time for a journalist, but I’m still just a farm girl from Iowa. When you get out of control, how can you know if it’s just temporary?”

“Things aren’t necessarily better when they’re more intense,” he offered.

She looked behind quickly to see if any cars were following.

“You’re safe with me, ma’am. Megan? I won’t even ask for your hat.”

“Or the blowjob?”

“My life is complicated enough. And I used up most of my playground bluff on that big guy.”

Twilight was just falling. “I’m glad you don’t have to get hurt to prove some macho point to yourself.”

“Me, too. Where do you want me to take you?”

“Any airport, thank you. Can I call you Jack?”

“Of course. Talk to me. Get the poison out of your system.”

She stared hard at him. “Hardi’s right. How did I blunder into such a saint?”

He shook his head. “You know what really makes a saint? A point of view from so high up that you can’t make out the people down there. That way you can love them all.”

She smiled. “I was such a dope, Jack. I’ve met a lot of men who fake a kind of stony, commanding presence. Gary Cooper, you know. I thought I loathed it all; I resented the servility of emotions they took for granted with me. But Hardi just walked up and blew all my resistance away.”

“Why don’t you try imagining him nude in fancy cowboy boots.”

She stared hard at him. “I take it you’re not available.”

“You may not be able to see it, Megan, but I’m a bigger mess than you are. You prefer San Diego International or LAX?”

*

Ellen hunkered down behind a trash dumpster in the doorway alcove of the Sweet Blanket Beauty Salon that was just across a shiny wet street from the Commando clubhouse. She’d seen Beef go in ten minutes earlier.

Waiting, she felt a pang of regret that her last encounter with Sabby had been a spat. “‘Before we can forgive one another, we have to understand one another,’” Ellen had quoted Emma Goldman to her. And Sabby had gone off on her usual mania: “Not with Nazis, never!”

Ellen heard a
scritch-scritch
coming along the sidewalk. A weak streetlamp lit the drizzle that drifted into her alcove. Thunder rumbled in the mountains.
Scritch. Scritch
.

Eventually a shopping cart nosed into sight, full of trash and hung with plastic bags of cans and bottles. A grizzled black man in bib overalls came into view behind it. He’d almost passed by when he halted and glared straight at her like someone in a nightmare. “Who dat debbil?”

She peered around the wheeled trash bin, the worst possible hiding place to avoid a scavenger.

“
You
wid de almon’ eye dere!”

“I’m nobody. You can have everything in this can, sir.”

“You tempt me into de dark? You for sure de debbil.”

“I’m just a girl, sir.” She dug in her jeans pocket and waved a twenty around the side of the bin. “This is for you.” She scuttled out, set it down, and hurried back. “
Please
.”

“I know your tricks!” he shouted. “Cotch up the next soul, debbil!” From the depths of his cart he dug up a rock about the size of a baseball. He backed off and kicked a straight leg high as if a pitcher’s moves were imprinted in his muscle memory. He fastballed the rock toward her, and she felt it skip hard off the lid of the trash bin. Then the glass door behind her shattered. An earsplitting alarm tore open the night.

*

Beef and Marly Tom and Sailor Boy Sallis had been trading turns at the foosball table. They missed Zook, but he hadn’t been responding to his cell, and they were worried.

“Where you think Zook’s off to?” Tom asked.

“We can kill one evening without the great Zook,” Sailor Boy said.

“I have some 4-1-1,” Tom said reluctantly.

“Go on,” Sailor Boy said. “You’re the only guy here who reads books that ain’t got pictures in them.”

Beef gave a resonant fart sound by flapping his underarm on his hand.

“The slope cunt that’s been following us around and panting like a teacup dog—she went and got herself gone.”

“Who cares?” Beef said.

“Manny told me the cops think somebody had his fun with her and killed her. They’re looking hard at Zooker. We know Zook doesn’t do shit like that so I say we got to prove him innocent.”

“How?”

“I got a list of child molesters and weenie-waggers in town. We gotta find if any of these guys did the deed.”

They heard a ruckus outside, a man yelling, and they cocked their ears. After a silence, glass shattered and a burglar alarm went off nearby. Beef sprinted straight out the clubhouse door before anybody else could move.

*

Ellen dodged and danced, confronting the fierce black man who’d decided to block her into the alcove. He countered every feint, his arms wagging.

“Oh, debbil, I got you in lockdown!”

“I’m not the devil, you idiot!”

She heard a door slap open across the street and the nightmare went into overdrive as Captain Beef himself emerged into the street.

She darted past the shopping cart and the man ripped off the do-rag covering her blue hair.

“Debbil!” he yelled.

“Stop there, Chinkie!” a baritone voice shouted.

She knew her town as well as anyone, and ran hard to the right, then darted into the East Pacific Bank parking lot and made for a far retaining wall. If she could get into the back streets, she knew every alley and hedge. She heard shouts and steps behind her, and the baritone seemed to be gaining.

She struggled over the wall and leaped down into a gated alleyway that opened on three apartment buildings with parking underneath. She ran for the electric gate at the side, but no one was entering. Voices cried out behind her.

The only possibility now was a constricted passage between two stucco buildings that she hadn’t used since she was twelve. She made for it now.

“We got you, bitch!”

“Give up and we won’t dance a party on your butt!”

She threw herself into the gap, so tight that she had to turn her head sideways and shove her body along, foot by foot, scraping dimples off the stucco. Claustrophobia sent a warning straight to some inner animal. If she freaked now, she thought, the fire department would have to demolish the buildings to drag her dead body out.

A shadow filled the slot behind her, a voice purring, “We could shoot you now, rice girl. But we get you coming out.”

She pushed and pushed but wasn’t even a quarter of the way through the slot. When the shadow behind disappeared and the taunts died away, she thought of reversing course. They’d never expect her to go back. The decision was helped along by gathering panic.

It seemed harder heading back, but she thrust with all her might, pressing her hands against the stucco.

“Dude, can you see her?”

“It’s dark. Maybe she’s stuck.”

“Let’s just shoot in there to make sure.”

What on earth had got her trapped in this place, of all places? Following Comrade Sabby on her absurd crusade against these jackasses, of course. In the real universe, these jackasses didn’t even count as compost.

She tried to calm herself by not thinking at all as she shoved herself along foot by foot. Then she tumbled out into cool air, gasping at what seemed a whole lot more oxygen. No pursuers were visible. She backed into shadows and then sprinted toward the electric gate as headlights approached.

It was a Hong Kong–style restaurant on the roof of a Chinese mall. The linen-table ballroom was half a football field long and deafening with the persistent rain, plus Chinese families yakking and laughing.

Jack Liffey and Walt Roski had been hit by a furious downpour just as they arrived between the curly-haired guard lions outside, clutching newspapers over their heads.

“So many worlds,” Jack Liffey said at full volume as they were seated. “A few miles from here you can eat
pupusas
and hear nothing but Salvadoran Spanish.”

“
Sí
,” Roski said gloomily. “What I notice is that these worlds don’t mix much at street level. When I visited New York, it was different. Those kids who jump onto the subways to break dance for money, they were always Black, Puerto Rican, and Italian, one of each.”

“Maybe it’s cars that keep us apart.”

“Maybe people just don’t like each other very much,” Roski said.

It appeared that the owner himself was approaching to serve the only white guys. He offered a menu the size of the Guttenberg Bible.

Roski ordered vegetables with elm and yellow fungus.

“Vegetarian?” Jack Liffey asked.

“My cardiologist told me it’s heads-up time.”

The man bowed away. “You said something was up.”

“Edgar Hoovers are in town in force. The handcuffs I found, you know. Kidnapping is an FBI matter.”

Jack Liffey thought of the set of handcuffs he’d seen dangling from a woman’s ankle. He’d dropped poor, befuddled Megan Saxton at LAX earlier.

“I’ve worked with the suits before, and sometimes it’s hard to believe they’re human beings. Black fabric, shiny shoes, grim faces. Fixed ideas and a mean cunning.”

Jack Liffey sipped the dishwater tea. “Please explain.”

Roski grimaced. “The Bureau’s decided that eco-terrorists set the Sheepshead Fire. That’s their flavor of the month. Earth First! It doesn’t matter that it doesn’t make a bit of sense. I tell them the fire killed a Lefty girl. They say maybe she was setting it. With
handcuffs
on? They wind them up in D.C. and plant an idea. The mouth just moves on and on.” He slapped his thumb against his fingers. “But the ears don’t work.”

“Piquant,” Jack Liffey said. “You seem to be taking this personally.”

Roski made a crumpled-up face like a fist in a sock puppet.

“My wife used to watch Fox News all day, and buy these strange publications they push. I come home and want to unwind and she tells me somebody is flooding us with Masonic symbols on our cereal boxes. Jesus, the judge gave her the kids. They’re going to end up wearing tinfoil hats.”

“I’m sorry, man.”

“Oh, they’re smart kids—but what happens when they realize their mom is a flake?”

The waiter brought their meals.

“You want me to find out where your wife went?” Jack Liffey asked.

“Would you do that for me?”

“It’s what I do,” Jack Liffey said.

“You know, this case is up to us now. Nobody else gives a damn. The girl was a Chinese radical, so fuck her.”

*

Paula Green saw the two men coming out between the curly-haired stone lions with the rain still battering hard. They paused at the edge of the canopy, shook hands, and spoke briefly. One was Jack Liffey. The other man she didn’t know. Hard to follow somebody by herself in a messy storm, but she figured she’d try anyway.

The men went different directions and she had to choose. I must stand out like a unicorn in church, she thought. The large African American woman scurried across the roof in Chinese Beverly Hills.

*

Near the bar, two bearded guys about Jack Liffey’s age had just jumped to their feet from easy chairs. They wore pricey polo shirts and were so tipsy they messed up a complex ’Nam-era shake-tug-and-hammer. They followed that with shoulder bumps like football players in heat.

Jack Liffey moved as far away as he could, carrying his Coke to the far side of the Tap Room of the Pasadena Langham, once the legendary Huntington Hotel. Tien had demanded he meet her here. Nobody else he knew could even afford the drinks.

“Oh, I don’t know—your
left
!”

The bearded guys began stationary marching.

“But I been tol

Eskimo puss

Is mighty cold.

Your
left
!”

They seemed to run out of steam and settled again, and the worried-looking bartender relaxed.

The scene dredged back a memory he’d as soon have stayed wherever it had been stuffed.

Don’t… you… smile, Liffey! I’ll unscrew your head and shit down your neck!

Drill Sergeant Harrison in basic. Fuck you sideways, Sergeant. Bullying is just bullying, and it’s not funny. Something was stirring up his psyche. Tien?

He watched gas flames lick over ceramic logs. No, it wasn’t just Tien. For some time now he’d been avoiding something profoundly disheartening inside him. Maybe just drifting toward the final acts of his life, not sure he wanted to play out the remainder the way things had been going.

Whoa. Tien strode in, glorious in a black silk slit-up-the-side
ao dai
. He’d never seen her wear one.

One of the drunks stood up. “Boom-boom time! You make ficky-fick?”

Jack Liffey got to his feet angrily, but Tien calmly presented the drunks her middle finger and strode past. Still, he continued toward them. She tried to stop him halfway, unsuccessfully. The honorable life required a little venom in the blood.

“
In
coming,” the sitting polo shirt declared.

Jack Liffey arrived at their small coffee table with second thoughts about his rage. He’d almost driven his knee into the one who’d insulted Tien.

“Stand down, pal,” Jack Liffey ordered.

“A fucking new guy checks in!”

“You can insult me all you want, but that was not acceptable.”

The standee was so drunk he lost his balance and sat on his own. “Got it, the slope’s your wet spot.
Didi mau
.”

Incountry, you’d only said
fuck off
to dogs or Vietnamese, and only if you were an asshole.

The calmer one slapped the other backhand in the chest. “Sir, he doesn’t mean anything. He lost a friend yesterday. We were just boots, three-stripers. All is respect. What were you?”

“Never mind what I was.” Jack Liffey walked back toward Tien, who had found his lonely Coke by the fireplace.