The Chinese Beverly Hills (6 page)

“Gloria, it’s me. Your sunbeam.”

Eventually she rolled over. “Very funny. You ain’t no sunbeam, but you know what you are?”

“No.” He felt a chill. No joking, Jack.

“Second sweetest man that ever liked me.”

He could see that she was drunk, very drunk. At least it told him she could get up and down the stairs by herself now. He wanted to check in with her about the missing girl, get her advice, but it wasn’t the time.

“You wanna fuck me near to death, cowboy?”

“The doctor said no exertions for another week.”

“You think too much about doctors. Think about me. I’ll just lie here and you do the exertions, wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am.”

He missed Gloria’s body a lot, but he wasn’t stupid enough to meddle with her drunk.

“You want my asshole, Jackie? My mouth? It’s all free, all one hundred percent Gloria. Okay, except this tit. That’s about ninety percent Good Year. And this toenail…”She was staring at her toe, frowning, trying to recapture a train of thought.

“I could make the Thai pasta we like,” Jack Liffey said. “Or I could thaw a couple of Nachita’s big tamales.”

Gloria looked up and stared at him distractedly for a few moments. “What became of my happiness, Jackie?”

Which happiness was
that
? he thought. “I’ll make love to you gently, later, if you can stay awake.”

“You mean, no more booze for poor Gloria?”

“Yes.”

“I been wasting the best years of my life,” Gloria said.

“On me?”

“I don’t mean that. On the department. On pushing punks around.

On going in doors where I’m not wanted and stopping family fights that ought to go on ‘till some
pendejo
gets stabbed in his sleep. I try hard to stop cruelty every day, but there’s an endless supply. You come into the Rancho with me—” The federal housing project in San Pedro. “—and tell me there’s any end to drugs and beatings and blaming everybody else for it. I’m very far from God right now.”

She seemed to be on the edge of sheer drunk fury. He sat beside her and rested his hand softly against her damp cheek. She closed her eyes and heaved a little.

“Nap,” he said. “I’ll cook something and surprise you.”

“If I could make a whole new world, Jackie, I’d have
you
in it, but I sure as hell wouldn’t have no
me
in it.”

*

Monica Flagg leaned in hard to the binocular eyepieces of her Celestron microscope in the county forensic lab. As with most evidence, you didn’t learn much more with a scope than you did with the naked eye. The charred glob just became a bigger charred glob. She poked it gently with a sterile dental pick to bring another part to bear.

Her poking caused a section of grit to fall away suddenly. “Terry, c’mere! Check this out.”

“On point, homes.”

“I think it’s some kind of bling.” Down at the core of the melted mass, she could just see a single pair of interconnected wire loops, like an ornamental chain for beads.

She slid off her stool to give him room and he leaned in, resting fists on the counter as he got interested. “You’d better call the big Rosk. I bet you got a melted rosary.”

*

Ed Zukovich and Marly Tom kept well away from the crowd that was rubbernecking on Garfield. On the far side of Monterey Park’s main business artery a dozen cops were taping off the mini-mall with its vandalized signage and combing the ground nearby. A cherry picker was going up to the tall sign. There was even a TV truck for a local cable news outfit, Channel 18-Asian T V, swinging up a microwave antenna. Zook was running on dex to keep awake.

“Who’d’a thunk they’d take it so seriously?” Tom said.

“Probably calling it a hate crime.” Zukovich shot him a glare to shut up.

“I got tons of hate.”

At least two-thirds of the gawkers were Chinese, puffy moms with strollers, overdressed businessmen, lots of tidy young men in bright pant and polos looking like escapees from a golf magazine. Plus a few Americans and Mexicans. Zook recalled the days when he’d ridden his banana bike downtown to the hobby shop and seen nothing but Americans.

“Remember the big D-D?” Marly Tom said.

“‘Course. Right there.” Dixie’s Diner, the best burgers in town.

“I met Tiffany there,” Marly Tom said, and then sighed. “I miss her boobies.”

“Dude, there’s little kids here.” You could count on Chink kids speaking good American.

“Who cares?”

There was a stir across the street. A uniformed cop trotted back toward what had to be the bigshot command center—a beige trailer where heavyset men in dark suits were standing around trying to look important. The trotting cop carried a baggie in one hand, and Zook could just make out what was in it. An unburst paintball.

Shit, he thought. Might still be fingerprints. It might even be Beef’s. Their weakest link. Get him in a room with some tough cop clownin’ on him, and in ten minutes they’d all be in county jail.

“Yeah, let’s hope it’s not his,” Marly Tom said, reading his mind. “What about the weekend kegger?”

“I’m on top of it. It’ll be at the power lines.”

“Good,” Marly Tom said. “You look all dexed, Z.”

“Hush. I’ll talk to Mr. Hoity-Toity Seth. His Tea Party’s bringing somebody into town to talk to their dinner party. We’ll see if he’s too good to come talk to the beer brigade.”

“We’re as good as anybody. This is a democracy.”

“This is a white Christian republic, man. Don’t forget it. We’re gonna get our constitution back.”

“Course.”

“Gotta go home. I think I’m gonna come down hard.”

“Better living through chemistry.”

“Morning, Jackie. In your pink I hope. You find out good stuff for me?”

It was Tien Joubert’s unmistakable tonal lilt on the phone. Ingratiating on the surface, but pushy under it.

“Tien, I’ve been at this job one full day. I’ve talked to her parents. I’ve seen the girl’s room. Give me a break.” He was still a bit ratty from dealing with Gloria’s meltdown the night before.

“You know me. I pay for it, I get report in person. Friday you come see me, like old time. Seven at night. My relax time.” As usual, nothing fazed Tien. You could insult her to her face and she would find a way to comment on your shoes.

“It’s not old time, dear. It’s new time. We’ve all got telephones. I’ll call you Friday.”

“No, no. How I trust you, I don’t see your handsome face? I don’t trust no voice. I pay double gas. This definite part of deal.”

Jack Liffey had been wondering why Tien Joubert had decided to pay for a search for such a distant relative, and pay very well, but he figured he was finding out. Her endless automatic and probably meaningless need to try to possess whatever she saw—including himself.

He’d found out that despite all Mr. Quan Roh’s degrees and languages, the poor man was running a mini-mart in a seedy area of Rosemead, the next town over, running it by himself eighty hours a week, including the dangerous night shifts. And he had no ownership share in the place.

“Tien, what’s your relationship to this family again? My mind is going soft.”

She laughed. “Jackie, your mind soft as big slab German steel. My born name Roh Tien, before Mr. Frenchman
fils de salope
René Joubert come along, and very short time he stay. You come see me Friday seven. You stay short or long.”

He needed the money badly, and he could always sidestep her wiles. And it would get him out of Gloria’s sour orbit for a bit, he thought. Far in the back of his mind, he recalled how much he had once enjoyed romping in a huge satiny bed with Tien Joubert and her utterly guiltless Asian sexuality.

“You was always sweet for a
gweilo
,” was her signoff.

He laughed. “You were okay, too, for a slope.”

*

“G’day all,” Maeve said as she strode confidently into the big house’s kitchen, trying hard to radiate good cheer. Axel, the only “all” there, had been dating an Aussie geology major named Barry Mackenzie for weeks, and “G’day” had become the greeting of the house, along with “chunder” for vomit, and “chook” (how weird!) for chicken. Everybody loved new idioms.

Right now her psyche was in so much upheaval about Bunny’s rebuff that all she had was superficial cheer. She was relieved Bunny wasn’t there.

“What’s your run-and-tell, Axel?”

Axel looked really downcast. “Oh, cuss. Barry’s decided that we should see other people for a while. You know what that means.”

Maeve poured out some granola and skim milk. She’d learned recently to call it skim, a word that nobody who’d grown up in Southern California ever used, but the stores had started to use it.

“He seemed a really nice guy. Are you sure it’s over?”

“I don’t know.”

“I hope it works out.” Deep inside, she didn’t really mean it.
Schadenfreude
was at work, and after her encounter with Bunny, Maeve hoped everybody in the universe was miserable.

Axel was hoarding their
L.A. Times
under her elbow.

“Can I see the inside stuff ?” Maeve asked.

“Oh, sorry. Here.” She pushed some of it over as Maeve sat.

“Seen Bunny yet?” Maeve asked lightly.

“I think she’s on a funny track.”

“Funny haha or funny peculiar?”

“What the hell is that?”

“Something my dad says—I think it’s from prehistoric TV.”

“Well, she was funny peculiar. She barged in this morning like Cleopatra on speed and snapped ‘Hold my calls’ like some Rockefeller. She grabbed one of your Pop-Tarts and ran on out without even toasting it.”

Maeve crunched the first bite of granola, and she could feel some of her humanity seeping back. She shouldn’t fob off a friend, especially one languishing in her own dumps. “It might be my fault, Ax.”

Axel looked up as Maeve fell silent. She waved a section of the paper around ineffectually, trying to fold it in half. “Like?”

Maeve sighed. “I sort of made a pass at her last night and she flipped out.”

“I didn’t know you were into oh-six.”

“I like boys and girls. I thought I’d made it clear to Bunny before, but she went ham. Said she was tired of me being a pest.” It felt good to get it off her chest.

“Aw, Maeve. Give yourself a break. Nobody could not like you, you’ve got the biggest heart in the city. Though I’m not into the other stuff.”

“Thanks, Ax. Everybody hurts. I just found out my dad and his woman are in trouble. And then Bunny shook me up. But don’t worry about me. You’ve got big things on your mind, too.”

“Don’t be hangdog. An Ozzie dumped me drongo, as he’d say. But here we are—we’ve got a view of the hills to die for, college a half hour away, and we can eat whatever food we want with no mom. Mac and cheese forever. Think of the starving kids in China.”

“South Central.”

“Sure, Miss Bigheart.” Axel reached out to press on her hand on the table, and abruptly she and Maeve both wept.

*

Megan Saxton did her best with the lukewarm shower in the Bide-a-Wee Motel in a very forlorn Morena, California, near the Mexican border. She stepped out and all of a sudden she was sitting on the sink, holding her bare wet feet high up off the tiles. A tan spider the size of a ginger snap ran in big circles on the bathroom floor. It looped across the tiles, a little blob of energy wound up to demonstrate some obscure scientific principle. Horror suffused her: the meaty legs, the
idea
of hair on the body, a blur of speed.

Not unlike the hideous Afrikaner himself. In an hour they were scheduled for the second installment of the interview, on assignment from
The New Yorker
. When the floor seemed spider-free, she hopped out of the bathroom to stand on the bed and wrap her hair in a towel. Moods padded up and attacked without warning. She missed Manhattan and the twenty-four-hour buzz of life.

Things were so much more primitive out here. Vi-oh-lence. Just phonemes, she told herself. Outside, a car door slammed. She walked gingerly to the window and parted the curtain a few inches. The windshield of a Humvee reflected back the sun, and the overbearing man himself stepped out. She had meant to drive to his place in her rental, but he had unaccountably come for her. Abruptly she whirled around, panicky eyes darting for any signs of the spider. There was nothing.

She punished her hair quickly with the towel, discarded it with her hair half wet, then tugged on a t-shirt and a pair of sweat pants. She felt her nipples erecting against the cotton in the morning chill and went back for an overshirt, more modesty than warmth. Then she went outside to head him off before he could invade her private space.

“Morning, dollie! I’m back from teaching the fat cats in the east the meaning of life.”

“I was coming over to continue our interview later.”

“We got up early because of a mountain lion,” he said with his feral grin. “The local people are full of him. He is responsible for the death of livestock from Jacumba to El Centro, and pet kittens and cows and the odd drunk Mexican. Yesterday he ate a Buick, tomorrow he eats San Diego. He’s probably a couple hungry coyotes, but as long as it ain’t a Communist, I say, ‘Eat your fucking fill, Simba.’”

He carried a strange-looking rifle with a fat extra barrel underneath, and he nodded toward a couple of Latino men in camo jackets, kneeling to look at the remains of what seemed to be a small dog in the motel parking lot.

“I’m telling you, it’s a good thing we got those castor beans. Super Hardi, he couldn’t track a bloody zebra on Commissioner Street.”

He hadn’t looked directly at her, as she’d noticed before, but there was no one else he could be talking to. Odd man.

“Castor beans?” she asked.

“You like scouts? Castor beans got spots, but who cares?” He laughed confidently. His Chicano trackers stood and looked around.

“Is that a dead dog?” she asked.

“It ain’t a live one, ma’an.” He flexed his arm for no discernible reason, repulsive with muscle. “If the coyote’s a Communist, I’m going to fuck him up.”

“That’s not very funny,” she said.

His eyes came close to seeing her but couldn’t quite make it. What’s his problem? She expected reflexive menace, but found amusement. “I am
very
funny, duckie. I am whatever I say I am. I am the Charlie Chaplin of this desert valley.” He chuckled. “‘Course, I am also the stain on my new country’s honor. Write that down.”