The Chinese Beverly Hills (5 page)

There was a special animus affixed to this spot, since it used be their holy Dixie’s Diner. They lined up like an execution squad, aiming the paintball rifles upward—a Tippman Custom 98, an Extreme Rage ER3, and a BT Omega. Marly Tom had reloaded the paintball shells with permanent oil paint.

A few cars were passing but nobody stopped to gawk.

“For white men with big dicks!” Beef shouted.

The pressure tanks of their guns were fully charged and they fired again and again until the bottom placard was unreadable.

“Up!”

They hit Prestigious Learning Center, then Café Happy and they were working on Da Zhen Asian Travel when they heard a siren, and discretion ruled. A few random shots disfigured the top signs.

“Out comes the Beef-phone!”

Beef always documented their mayhem with his cellphone camera. He shot two snaps and followed it up with a haw-haw bray.

As they trotted back to the car, they noticed a shadow up the side road, watching them.

“Hey, what’s he want, looking at us?”

“Chrissakes, Beef, go ask him.”

Instead Beef launched a quick series of shots and the shadow took off.

Not a pro, but at least somebody smart enough not to barbecue himself, he thought. The torcher had used the most common timer of all: a cigarette shoved into a book of matches. Walt Roski of the county’s Fire Investigation Unit bent down to point out the shiny ash flakes to his team of half a dozen recruits in white work suits.

He explained that the immediate fuel load had been bulked up with newspapers as his finger traced lines of accelerant sear, probably charcoal lighter. The student team had been on the scene for half an hour studying the presumed heel of the fire in Sheepshead Canyon, and two of them were documenting everything with big digital cameras.

His cell phone called him away from the scene—the voice of he who must be obeyed—and Roski left the recruits to pound in posts and string off meter squares like an archeological dig. He was annoyed, but he knew a fed smokejumper had died the day before and another badly burned, and he was sure the call had to do with that.

He charted his course carefully along the fire roads. The main burn was flaring due east again, still only sixty percent contained, with the open end of the firebox above Monrovia six or seven miles away. He was perfectly safe here, but all the landmarks were altered and the burnout still smoldered in spots.

It saddened him to see big charred-off trees. A house could be rebuilt in a year, chaparral grew back in a season or two, but ponderosas and firs took a generation. Finally he came upon a half-dozen glum-looking men standing around—clearly desk jockeys, wearing ill-fitting firecoats over their J.C. Penney suits. A motionless bright yellow Jet Ranger rested nearby, a federal chopper, not county. The Shiny Shoes had dropped in from the sky.

“Gentlemen, Walt Roski. County Arson.” He shook hands all around, not remembering a single name, except Kenya from a handsome black guy. He never did remember names unless he wrote them down. Bad trait for an investigator, but he was getting old and several varieties of rage from a bad divorce and other life calamities had burned through him, leaving his own ecosystem pretty charred.

A short man with Forest Service patches on his coat stalked toward him, an aging gamecock. You could feel the political buoyancy, an ass-kisser who’d risen through the bureaucracy like a turd in a toilet. He’d taken off his tie, but he still wore black wingtips that had no business up here.

“Gene Rockfelder, Region 5, Vallejo.” He didn’t offer Roski his hand. “Walter, they say you’re very good. We’d like you to turn your attention over here.”

“Nothing else on my plate just now,” Roski replied tightly. The man using his first name already made him clench his teeth.

Roski followed him on foot in silence for over a minute. What he saw on the gravel wash was immediately self-evident and pained him deeply. The fire shelter had been knifed open to get a body out. The area should have been a safe zone. It was heavily graveled, and had probably been relatively clear of brush. But he saw that the gully heading down would have made quite a chimney.

“What we need you to look at is a breach in the shelter. We think something ignited inside. The man should have known better. He had more than fifty jumps.”

“How many jumps you got?” Nothing was as infuriating as an office-bound cocksucker dissing a real firefighter.

The short man turned and stared hard at him. “Say what?”

“Thank you for your assistance, sir. I’ll check the scene out.”

Roski squatted down and studied what he could see of the tent floor, without touching anything. He’d seen a burned-out fire shelter only once before, but not as peeled back as this, and this was the new-generation design. He wondered if it might have an undiscovered flaw. With a ballpoint pen, he lifted a little flap of fabric. Yes, the inner foil and PVC appeared to have burned away before the outer Kevlar and foil.

All of a sudden, the red blob of a laser pointer was orbiting an irregular object on the shelter floor. “Right there, Walter.” The light circled a mangled lump, like something rescued from the seabed.

“Don’t do that,” Roski said irritably.

“What?”

“You heard me. I know my job. It’s amazing for a rube like me who’s way out in the counties, but true.”

“Nothing intended, Walter.”

Roski stood back up in a true rage, not sure what was eating him really, but unable to stop. “Report me for insolence, Tiny Tim. I love getting flak.”

“You must be on edge today. I’ll let this go.”

“You’re just a buzzing noise in my head. Go away.”

“Weeping Jesus.”

“But first, have your Fed pals yellow tape this area before they square-dance all over it. I’ll be back soon. Right now I’m staring a torcher square in the eye down at the heel of the fire. If you know what ‘heel’ means.”

“Enjoy your short, unhappy tenure, cuz.”

*

“We don’t go to live in Ming-huong, no way,” Mrs. Qui Roh told him with animation. “Sorry—that’s Vietnamese for Chinatown. Chinatown all crammed full and mostly old Kuomintang people from 1950. You know, Chiang Kai-shek people. Monterey Park good for all Asians. We got one cousin live here before we come from camp in Galang Island—1987. We was boat people from Vietnam many years. Oh, that horrible camp, mister.” She shook her head as if trying to clear it of all memories. “Bad soldiers. Beat men and take girls. We not speak of it no more.”

Her husband, Mr. Quan Roh, sat in a low, stiff chair in the corner of the room, turned half away from the discussion as if frozen in a kind of disdain for the world he was trapped in. Roh’s bustling and portly wife had been left to answer Jack Liffey’s questions alone with her broken English. The house in the low hills overlooking Monterey Park was an amalgam of Asia and America, soft sofas and low black lacquer tables, big Chinese jars and IKEA bookcases.

“I really only need to know about your daughter,” Jack Liffey said gently, sipping at a delicate, handleless cup of tea. “I hear Sabine is a very smart girl. Is she named after someone in the family?” He was very careful to use the present tense.

The woman waved both hands at him in horror. “No, no, Mr. Liff. Chinese people not do that. That big insult. Everybody got own name. Some people even got style name for later in life after the milk name wear out.”

“What a great idea,” Jack Liffey said. “I’m getting tired of Jack. Could you tell me about Sabine?”

“I got it all. Friends. Photos. High school diploma. Acceptance letter to Williams. But I tell you anything you want, too.” He took the fat manila envelope that she stabbed at him.

Williams. Just about the top of the heap these days. Even Maeve hadn’t had an acceptance there, though she could have gone to Harvard, Stanford, Amherst, or several others if she’d had a rich uncle. “I’m sorry I have to ask this: Would anyone in town here be angry at Sabine?”

Mr. Roh stirred himself for the first time since barely acknowledging Jack Liffey’s presence twenty minutes earlier. “
Thong miao
,” he blurted out, glancing over fiercely. He appeared to smile, fleetingly, then subsided and turned away again.

Jack Liffey pretty much knew what the expression meant, from deep in his Vietnam memory box. He looked at Mrs. Roh, and she appeared embarrassed. “It’s bad word, Mr. Liff,” she said.

“Roughly?”

She smiled a little, not as easily embarrassed as all that. Tien had told him that the Chinese, unlike the obsessively polite Japanese, had no difficulty at all being rude when they felt like it.

“It Vietnamese slang for bad white guy.”

He caught Mr. Roh smiling privately. “I’m not sensitive, Mrs. Roh. Why do you think
thong miao
are Sabine’s enemy?”

“They hate us all,” she said matter-of-factly. “They say we take their town away. They say we buy everything, we buy all the good house. They think we all rich and we stuck up. You need to talk to somebody about the big fight here in 1970 and 1980 time. They still angry.”

“I will.” He turned. “
Mr
. Roh, you okay with that same-same?
Thong miaos
numbah ten?” Jack Liffey figured that the Saigon street slang might be a grievous insult to the man, a former college professor, and he wanted to see his reaction.

The man bit his lower lip and didn’t budge.

“I’ll find your daughter,” he said finally to Mrs. Roh.

Mr. Roh snapped his head around and stared like a death’s head at Jack Liffey.

“How many languages do you speak, sir?” the man demanded.

“I try hard, but it’s very difficult for my weak brain.”

“I speak eleven languages, including Ancient Greek and Latin, Mr. Liffey. I have five university degrees. I was dean of Russian and French Literature at the Faculty of Letters, Saigon University. I think I can still speak all those languages, though my best is still Vietnamese. And my second is Mandarin.”

So, the G.I. slang had indeed insulted him. “Sir, you have me beat,” Jack Liffey said. “I said that to get a reaction. I don’t like being ignored.”

Mr. Roh smiled a little. “I apologize.”

“Sir, may I visit your daughter’s bedroom? I’m not a linguist, but I know how to look for missing children. I realize it isn’t comfortable to allow this, but it’s helped me before.”

The Rohs exchanged glances.

“You may do so, Mr. Liffey,” the father said. “My wife will show you to our daughter’s room. Please do not be disrespectful as you look it over. And please keep us informed.”

“I’ll keep your daughter in my heart.”

*

“What was the very first song you ever bought, and on what media?” Maeve said, realizing immediately she should have said “medium.” But who cared? The sensibility of the world now didn’t care about rules; the sensibility of now was more about transgression.

Maeve was sitting on the edge of Bunny’s bed, a little shaken by the talk with Gloria and feeling very needy, though Bunny was clearly glancing out of the corner of her eye at the laptop screen on her small desk. Maeve tried to ignore Bunny’s hints of preoccupation.

Greenwood Avenue had been the last vestige of a stable home in her life. She needed it stay stable.

“‘Losing my Religion,’ by REM,” Bunny said. “A CD.”

“I had it on vinyl. God, we’re getting old. I remember when Jennifer Lopez was married to Ojani Noa.”

They both burst out laughing, and Maeve felt a wave of love for Bunny. “Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman!”

Bunny’s eyes went to the computer screen again, but Maeve tried not to notice.

“Time is so cruel,” Maeve said. She was sinking into a kind of forever coziness with the so-comfortable Bunny, projecting it far into the future.

“Maeve, I don’t know how to say this and stay mellow. I got work and you can be a real pest sometimes.”

A jolt of electricity went up and down Maeve’s whole body. Nobody had ever said anything like that to her before. “Oh, damn—I’m sorry.”

“I just don’t need you hanging out in my room all the time. I like you a lot, but I got other things in life.”

“Sorry, sorry, sorry. I’m gone.” Maeve jumped up.

Bunny looked regretful, but she didn’t say anything to take it back.

“I won’t bug you any more, I promise.” Maeve hurried across the house, past a startled Axel drinking beer alone in the kitchen, and back to her outlying studio in the old garage. She bolted the door and threw herself facedown on her single mattress and wept.

*

Jack Liffey got home with two full grocery bags and plans to prepare something nice to eat, his major goal for the day. He had a whole notebook full of observations about the Chinese girl’s bedroom, but the notes—Catholic missal, too-cute dolls, Girl Scout stuff, modest clothing, a few Chinese knick-knacks, a big stack of pamphlets from a group called the Orange Berets—had pretty much been blown away by the alarm bells at the end.

He’d been patting the underside of her desk drawers, a pointless exercise that never yielded anything useful except in old noir films. This time the devil blinked. A small aqua blue baggie had been taped there with Mylar, and beside it a hand-drawn map that appeared to be a walking trail across the border east of San Diego. There was a scrawl of Spanish on it:
esto es la chica Chuey
. This is the girl, Jesus. He’d tapped a smidgeon of the powder onto his gum, grimaced, and then tucked the baggie into an old copy of
Finnegan’s Wake
. A book God himself would never pick up. He’d pocketed the map.

“Glor, I’m home! I’ve got the makings for drunkard’s pasta.”

There was no reply. He sighed, set the bags on the cracked yellow and green tile of the kitchen counter and headed up the staircase. It might help, he thought, to drive up to Bakersfield and shoot a few people in the head, especially her lover Sonny Theroux. Nah, it wouldn’t help; but it would make him feel better.

She was face down on the bed, but he didn’t think she was asleep. If only she would go see some pro to work on her psyche, but she insisted that would be the end of her career at the LAPD. Already she was on long leave and might never climb back onto the hamster wheel for promotion.