77th Street Requiem

by Wendy Hornsby

  “He was hurt,” Mike said. “But where is he?”

  “We’ll find him.” Rascon was cocky. I raised the Nikon and focused tight on his face. “Seventy-seventh Street is canvassing the neighborhood. So far, no one has come forward with information, but it’s still early. The problem is, there’s so much vacant land here that it’s real possible no one saw or heard anything. This is a favorite dump spot for stolen cars for just that reason.”

  Everything in the car, from fast-food wrappers to stray videotapes, was as I had left it. Almost everything was as I had left it. I turned to Rascon. “The phone was used.”

  He looked over my shoulder. “We’ll put in a request for phone records. See anything else?”

  “I have to think about it,” I said. “What do you know about the car he tried to get me into?”

  “It was reported stolen yesterday in Inglewood.”

  Mike’s pager beeped. He took it off his belt and held it at arm’s length so he could see the readout. “The office,” he said.

  I followed him back across the street and leaned against the doorframe of his car while he called in. He said, “Uh-huh,” three or four times before he hung up.

  “Gloria says we can come over,” he told me. “I don’t think you should be there.”

  “Why?”

  “She filed a countercharge against you for taking things out of her apartment.”

  Bullshit maneuver, I thought, and I must have shown some of the disgust I felt for her. Mike said, “You can help us out by finding a serial number for the camera. I forgot to ask Guido.”

  “I’ll call him.”

  SID arrived to take over the examination of my car. They would probably keep it for weeks, and I needed wheels right away.

  I put my hand through Mike’s arm. “Would you drop me by the car-rental zone at the airport? I have places to go.”

  “No need,” Mike said. “Take mine. I’ll use a city car until you get yours back.”

  “Get my car back?” The thought of ever again getting into that bloody vehicle made me feel queasy. I hoped that somehow the insurance company could be persuaded to total it. I put out my hand and said, “Keys?”

  “Now?”

  “I have things to do, cupcake.”

  He closed his keys into his fist and held them high, out of my reach. “Where are you headed?”

  “To the studio. You said you wanted a serial number.”

  “Make sure that’s where you go.” He dropped the keys onto my palm. “Call me. Every time you move, call me.”

  “Count on it.” I kissed his face.

  “Rendezvous point is the Biltmore. Six o’clock.”

  “Fine. Unless you want to go back to the hotel with me right now.”

  His cheeks glowed.

  “Hold that thought,” I said.

  When I drove away, Mike was flagging down a tow truck.

  At the studio, after a hassle about not having a parking sticker on the car I drove into the lot, I went up to my office and paged Guido.

  “Where can I find an identification number for the camera you lent to Hector?” I asked without preliminaries when he returned the call.

  “Business office keeps an inventory log. Thea gave me a copy. Look in the cabinet behind my desk. My keys are under the cactus plant.”

  I went upstairs and had security let me into the filming studio assigned to us. The room was a large open space with exposed girders under a high ceiling. When we were working, the area was full of noise and people and activity. So much activity that Guido, always our point man, found it difficult to get anything done. Out of self-defense, he had partitioned off a little no-man’s-land for himself using an assemblage of mismatched cupboards and shelves—anything he could commandeer—and planted his cluttered desk in the middle of it.

  The cupboard keys were where he said they would be, under a spiny cactus. I unlocked the cabinet directly behind his desk and swung the tall doors wide.

  There were nudie posters on the insides of the doors. At first I didn’t bother to look at them, wasn’t interested in them, dismissed them as part of the general visual clutter that papered Guido’s work area. My only thought was that I was glad he had the sense to keep them out of plain sight lest they offend some litigious female staffer. My attention was focused on the stacks of papers and bound reports on the shelves—the neat documents Thea bombarded us with, and that we rarely read.

  I rifled the stacks, and on the bottom, of course, I found the equipment log. I was closing the doors when I glanced at the posters and, after a double take, realized what they were. Even then I resisted the truth, wouldn’t let it register. I turned on the desk lamp, opened the doors, and looked again from a remove of about four feet.

  Thirty-six-inch by fourteen-inch color stills taken off a videotape, retouched in soft peach-tone pastels, mounted on display board, and laminated: me in the bathtub, my abdomen arched back at the moment of ecstasy, and me, a full frontal shot, rising out of the water with bubbles like silver lace sliding down my breasts and thighs. Mike had been expunged from the scene. I was so stunned that the posters existed that I couldn’t think what to do about it. Guido?

  The telephone on his desk rang and I picked it up.

  “Maggie!” It was Guido. “The reports you want probably aren’t upstairs. Don’t bother looking. I’ll be right there.”

  “Too late. I’ve seen them.”

  “Oh, shit,” like a sob. “No.”

  “Can you explain this?”

  “No.”

  “Try, Guido.”

  “I took the wrong tape out of your bedroom the other night. The box said Anthony Louis, but …”

  My chest was tight and my ears rang. I had to sit down. That damn tape should have been locked up. So Guido had watched me and Mike fuck—no big deal. How many of us would turn off a tape of our friends going at it? But for him to have made prints with such care, and mounted them, was another matter altogether.

  I managed to say, “Why?”

  “Oh, God. Why?” He cleared his throat. “It’s not what you think, kid. I shouldn’t have watched the tape, but I was curious, you know? Fascinated even. It’s a pretty tape. I was going to slip it back into your room, but I thought Mike would like to have some stills, some wallet-size even. Christmas card pictures. Wallpaper.”

  I had been staring at the posters. It was a shock at first to see myself in the raw, in full color. But I had to admit that Guido had done a nice job, with a loving attention to detail. I asked him, “When were you planning to give them to Mike?”

  “Christmas?”

  “I have to think about this for a while, Guido. We’ve been friends for a long time. Has something changed?”

  “No.” He laughed softly. “I’m normal; I always wanted to see you naked.”

  “Who else has seen them?”

  “Oh God,” he repeated.

  “The boys on the crew?”

  “No. Only Thea. I caught her in my office looking at them.”

  “Was she alone?”

  “No. She was giving a tour to that old cop she always has in tow.”

  “Ridgeway?”

  “Yes.”

  “She was giving him a tour of your cupboards?”

  “Yeah. She said she was showing him what she does, showing him what happens to her reports.”

  Now I felt truly sick—poor Mike if Ridgeway talked to all the old-timers. I didn’t bother with good-bye, I just dropped the telephone. I snatched my pictures off the doors, sandwiched them facedown inside the big logbook, and fled to the sanctuary of my own office.

  I locked the posters away in my bottom drawer. My first priority was getting out of the building, taking the posters away. So I flipped open the log and scanned the index with so much impatience that I probably only added time to the task.

  Every piece of equipment we were using was listed and tracked from shoot to shoot. I found the line for the camera that Guido had signed out to Hector. The en
try did not make sense. I turned a few more pages, trying to find an explanation for what had to be an error. According to the log, Hector returned the camera on Thursday. A good trick, since he died on Sunday. Someone probably got the numbers screwed up or checked the wrong box, I thought.

  In other circumstances, I would have called Guido for clarification. I settled on Thea as the second-best solution. Her home number wasn’t in my Rolodex. Since it was Sunday and there was no one in personnel, I set Tom in security to the task of finding her.

  I dialed Mike’s pager and then, steamed and confused, too restless to concentrate, I paced my office floor—pacing is a family trait.

  I started with Guido. What was I going to do about Guido and how were we ever going to get back to the old status quo? I had known him for a long, long time, and this poster gaffe, squirrelly as it was, wasn’t the first problem we had bumbled through. Wouldn’t be the last, either, I was sure. In a day or two, everything would settle down and we’d go back to insulting each other and loving each other and working together, as usual. That thought brought me full circle to Ridgeway.

  You call an old friend you haven’t seen for twenty years, and what’s the second thing you say after, “How have you been?”

  Certainly Ridgeway’s problems—drinking, gambling, women—cast a shadow over relations between Ridgeway and his old LAPD colleagues. But time bridges old rifts, and the fact that anyone makes the effort to look you up makes you shovel aside the old garbage, at least initially. You had been close once, and that’s what you first remember. So this is what you say: “Let’s get together.” My place or yours, maybe some favorite old haunt. And if you agree to a meeting with a terrier like Hector, even if you’re only filling airspace when you say it, he would make a firm date. Because Hector always meant what he said. “Come on over, old buddy. Let’s go for a run. Barbecue some steaks. Talk about the old days.”

  And the old days were Roy Frady days.

  I paged Mike again, adding a three, as in code three, come with lights and sirens.

  I was scrolling through Hector’s files when Mike finally called.

  “I’m at Gloria’s,” he said. “What’s up?”

  “Who answered the phone at our house yesterday?”

  “Yesterday? What time?”

  “Around nine.”

  I gave him time to mull the question. He said, “No one. Michael and I were both out of the house by seven-thirty.”

  “There was a woman in our house.”

  “You probably dialed the wrong number.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Still.” His tone was dismissive and he went right into the next piece of news. “Gloria finally admits she was at Hector’s on Sunday. Says she saw the camera but she didn’t pick it up. She says we should ask the people who came over as she was leaving. She describes them as a dumpy woman and a tall, good-looking older man.”

  “Ridgeway,” I said. “And Thea.”

  “Ridgeway’s a possibility. Who’s Thea?”

  “Our bean counter. I’m sure you’ve met her; big, frumpy gal with wild hair.”

  “I think I have. Wild hair?”

  “Very,” I said. I thought back to the day I had walked Ridgeway down to the Eighty-ninth Street shoot, remembered Thea’s unrequited enthusiasm over him. I asked, “Did they arrive together?”

  “No. The woman knocked just when Gloria was leaving, had some papers for Hector. The man arrived a few minutes later, got out of the elevator just before Gloria got in. She saw him ring Hector’s bell, then the elevator doors closed and she went down. She didn’t actually see him go inside.”

  “Ask her if she saw that man at Hector’s funeral,” I said. “Ridgeway was there.”

  “I’ll ask. Do you have any pictures?”

  “Probably. The lab sent up a couple of rolls I haven’t had time to go through yet.” I found the packets among the accumulation in my In basket and went through them. There were several shots with the ever-present Thea in the background. And one of Ridgeway at the Eighty-ninth Street shoot. I told Mike, “I have pictures, but they aren’t very good. Guido must have them both on video.”

  “Will you call him?” Mike asked.

  I said, “No. Be easier if you page him yourself.”

  “Stay put there awhile,” he said. “I’ll be by to pick up those pictures.” He gave me the number at Gloria’s, and I hung up without mentioning Guido’s artwork.

  When I was looking through my basket for the photographs, I found a tape sent down from the film archives of some of the old news footage of Sara Jane Moore I had ordered the afternoon before. I had forgotten about her until Mrs. Perlmutter’s friend Judge Gates brought her up. I was curious about her, as I was about anyone who knew the SLA.

  While I waited for Mike, I put the first tape in the player and let it run as background noise—the building was too quiet. Looking up now and then to watch Sara Jane, I worked on a calendar, laying the week’s sequence of events just the way I would lay out storyboards for filming. And around this thin frame I wrapped a lot of supposition.

  I glanced up to see Sara Jane Moore standing next to Randolph Hearst, Patty’s father, at a news conference. He was tall and elegant, and she, in contrast, was a sad, frumpy, overweight woman who seemed both bewildered and just tickled to death to be where she was, on-screen with Mr. Hearst.

  Sara Jane, on the fringes of the radical community, an FBI informant, had been hired to help the Hearst family distribute food to the poor as part of the SLA’s ransom demands: PIN, People in Need, a $2 million rip-off.

  Cut to the food distribution center in Oakland, and Sara Jane is crying, perplexed by all the activity when delivery trucks begin off-loading food into the arms of a greedy crowd. Then she is swallowed up as the distribution turns into a riot. Hams and turkeys fly through the air like missiles, $2 million worth of edible missiles. Cadillacs draw up to the warehouse and fill their trunks with groceries. Pinkerton guards hired to keep order fill their own cars with groceries. An embarrassing fiasco for all, devastating to Sara Jane.

  The next indexed footage shows Moore being wrestled to the ground after taking a shot at President Ford in the middle of a San Francisco crowd. Motivated by chagrin, Kellenberger had said, that the FBI had brought in Patty without her. I thought of the line from the barroom song, “More to be pitied than scorned,” and turned off the tape.

  I called Tom in security.

  “I found the number you wanted,” he said. “You need the address, too?”

  I told him I did, and he gave me a number and an address in Culver City for Thea. Before I could call her, I had to steel myself a little; I was embarrassed she had seen me in a very private way. A way I would never have willingly shared with Thea because she would have been too keenly interested. My face felt hot, but I dialed.

  Thea’s voice seemed thick when she answered, as if she had a cold, or had been weeping.

  “I need you to interpret an equipment log entry for me,” I said.

  “Did I do something wrong?”

  “It isn’t a matter of right or wrong. I think someone just checked the wrong box.”

  “I’m sorry.” She began to snotter and I was afraid she was going to cry.

  “Do you have a fax?” I asked. “I would like for you to look at the entry.”

  But she had no fax and her car wasn’t running, and there was no way for her to get to the studio.

  I found her response odd, because Thea was usually too eager to do little favors, too needy of random praise to miss an opportunity. I started the Sara Jane Moore tape again and watched the woman lumber across the screen toward Randolph Hearst with a sad, expectant smile on her doughy face. She reminded me of Bowser when he’s hoping for a head scratch. She reminded me of Thea.

  I said, “Maybe you can just solve this one for me over the telephone. I’m trying to track a company camera that Hector Melendez had at his house. When you were there Sunday, did he mention it to you, or did
you see him put it away maybe?”

  “Sunday night?” Her answer came fast. “No.”

  I said, “I’ll think of something,” and hung up.

  What I had thought of was going down to the Culver City address to see what had made her suddenly so unhelpful. When Mike walked in, I explained why, and he drove us in his valetudinarious city car.

  Thea’s building was two doors in from busy Venice Boulevard, a sixties-era green stucco two-story in a long row of similar sixties-era buildings—apartments for swinging singles, thirty years ago. The swimming pool that had once doubtless been the centerpiece of the tenants’ social life had long ago been drained and fenced off, posted against vandals and trespassers. Thea lived on the second floor, with a view over the empty pool.

  When Mike knocked, I saw the living room drapes sway to the side. I knew that Thea would be surprised to see me, and was afraid she would be flustered to incoherence by Mike. He had to knock a second time and call her name before she decided to open the door, and then it was only a crack.

  “Maggie?” Thea peeked out. “Officer Flint?”

  “I thought, Why should Thea come all the way out to the studio when it’s my problem?” I said. “We were in the neighborhood and took a chance you would be in.”

  She hesitated before she said, “It’s Sunday.”

  “I know, but I couldn’t wait until tomorrow. No one knows this stuff better than you do.” I held up the log. “Do you mind taking a look? It’ll really help out.”

  She was nonplussed. Thea, being Thea, couldn’t say no to being indispensable. She let us inside.

  The apartment was decorated with television memorabilia, some of it kitschy, a lot of it pricey; Thea was a fan. Surrounded by Brady Bunch posters and Partridge Family franchised junk—from lunch boxes to LPs—she looked like a big kid. She had dressed in a gauzy skirt and an oversize T-shirt, and her wild hair was pulled back into a froth of a ponytail, heightening the youthful illusion.

  Mike sniffed the air, crossed the room on the pretext of looking at something on a shelf next to the hall door. “Nice place.”

  “Have a seat,” Thea said, guiding him toward the sofa. “Can I get you something?”