“But you’re telling me the truth.”
Rubbing his shin, he said, “I am.”
“How do I know?”
“You know,” he said, “one reason you’re double-checking me on that . . . well, it’s the same reason Rina believed it so fast, the same reason you picked Othello. Black guys are supposed to be dogs, right?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I think it’s about insecurity. Rina thinks you’re the best thing in her life, and she might be right. And she sees how other girls look at you, and she . . . she doesn’t believe she’s interesting enough to hang on to you. Pretty enough, I don’t know. And another teenage girl, who understands all of that, is playing her like a violin.”
He shrugged, “I guess.”
“So I’m sorry for doubting you. I believe you, Tyrone.”
He sat silent for a moment, and then he said, “I know old people—sorry, adults—don’t take this seriously, but I do really love your daughter. Never loved anyone like I love Rina.”
“Well then,” I said. “We’ve got to fix this.”
“How?
“Honestly, Tyrone?” I said. “I have no idea.”
13
Something Weaselly
I dropped him off at the corner so Kathy wouldn’t just happen to look out the window and see my car, as she does with probability-defying regularity, and then I took off down Vanalden. There wasn’t much point in trying to talk to her or Rina until I had some sort of agenda.
But just to demonstrate that I had my hand in, I pulled over and used my phone to email Kathy, using her preferred vowel-challenged mode: Wnt 2 tlk w/u abt Tyrone. Pleased with having set something into motion, I got halfway to Ventura Boulevard before I mentally slapped my forehead, remembering that I was supposed to have been paid $35,000 for the stamp that day.
Stinky didn’t answer the phone. I left a message with the phone company’s fembot: “Have stamp, clock ticking,” and mused for a second about the fact that no one I knew—well, almost no one I knew, now that Ronnie had gone over to the dark side—recorded personalized voice-mail messages. Maybe it was a crook thing.
I’d no more than pulled back into traffic when the phone rang. I answered it without looking, which is always a mistake. “I saw you,” Kathy said. “Skulking around out there and picking up Tyrone.”
“How did you see me?”
“I just happened to look out the window.”
“You were spying on Tyrone,” I said. “You wanted to see whether he was actually leaving. Talk about skulking.”
“I knew you’d take his side.”
“I haven’t said anything about whose side—”
“Well, you should. Poor kid.”
I said, “Uhhh.”
“You know,” Kathy said, and I could practically hear her knuckles going white as she gripped the phone, “when we were married, it really pissed me off when you assumed you knew in advance how I was going to react to everything. And it still does.”
“The way you said ‘his side’ made it sound like he’d been caught raising money for the American Nazi Party.”
“You heard it like that because it’s what you expected me to think.”
I paused, sorting it out. I said, “Only you and I could disagree about agreeing with each other.”
“It’s a habit we got into. A way to keep talking. There’s something I don’t like about that Patricia. Something weaselly. When Patricia was here a couple of days ago to break the bad news to Rina, I saw a mean little glint of triumph in her eye after Rina hung up on Tyrone.”
“That’s what Tyrone says. He says Rina is really popular and Patricia isn’t, and this is Patricia’s way of worming her way into the circle.”
“Even if I do dislike Patricia and like Tyrone,” Kathy said, “Tyrone has a good reason for trying to make Patricia look bad. Patricia nailed him.”
“Maybe. When he and I were talking, Othello came up, which is kind of interesting, because Othello is all about bringing someone down by making him jealous, when there’s really no cause.”
“I hate when you do that,” she said. “I like to feel like my life—and Rina’s, too—isn’t plagiarized. You know, our lives are new to us when they happen, even if you’ve read them in better versions.”
“Just thought it was interesting.”
“Okay, I’m not being fair. You’re not like most people who go all literary every ten minutes. You actually do things once in a while.”
“I don’t suppose Rina can hear you.”
“I’m out by the pool. She’s in her room with the door closed, wearing her Dr. Dre Beats and looking at hip-hop videos. Probably hoping her father will call.”
“She wouldn’t talk to me about it anyway.”
“No. It’s a girl thing.”
“If you don’t like Patricia,” I said, “why are you up for the twosies party?”
“I had to give Rina something. She’s been crying for days.”
We both stopped talking for a minute or so at the sound of that. It brought us back to what mattered. After I finished sighing, I said, “You’ve done an amazing job with her.”
“She was good material to work with.”
“You’ve never been able to accept a compliment.”
“I haven’t had much practice,” she said. “Listen, are you coming to the party?”
“Sure. But let me think about Patricia a little bit between now and then. What’s her last name?”
“Are you going to do something illegal?”
“Me?” I said.
“Silly question. It’s Gribbin.”
“Spelled like—”
“Like Gribbin. Whoops, I see Rina looking at me through the kitchen window.”
“Tell her that she—” I said, but Kathy was gone, which was just as well, since I had no idea how I would have finished the sentence.
Innocent people can sit in front of a house at night for hours without getting prickles on the back of their neck, but I’m not an innocent person, and I’d been there long enough. In the almost twenty years I’ve been breaking the law for a living, I’ve never been arrested. It would be really stupid to have a run-in with a cop because some citizen saw me through his window too many times and called the law. People are so distrustful these days.
So I rolled down to Ventura, made a right, toward Hollywood, and turned over in my mind the question of whether I was really ready to set in motion the only plan I had, which was to persuade a young girl to commit a criminal act. It seemed to be something a decent person would hesitate about, and I was proud of myself for hesitating. When I felt I’d hesitated enough, I turned right onto one of the north-south streets, pulled over to yet another curb, and dialed.
“I thought you’d lost my number,” Anime Wong said.
“Actually,” I said, “I’m having a kind of moral crisis, and I was hoping you could help me with it.”
“This is the Moral Crisis Hotline,” Anime said. “Lilli says hey.”
“Hey, Lilli.” I heard a young girl’s voice, prematurely dry, in the background. While Anime greeted whatever the world threw at her as though it were the first sunrise ever, Lilli had dry, as well as world-weary, down cold.
“You guys still working?” I said.
“Of course not,” Anime said. “You told us to stop.”
Anime and Lilli, both fourteen, worked for, or perhaps with, an elaborately tattooed cyber crook named Monty Carlo, breaking through the computer shields that surround the substantial funds that states create when they assume ownership of the contents of abandoned safe-deposit boxes. Once through the firewalls, the three of them helped themselves to an amount of money that they determined, through an algorithm Monty worked out, could be plausibly attributed to a rounding error or a normal short-term fluctuation. Of course, a sum
that represents a rounding error to a state is a fortune to a teenager, and Lilli and Anime intended to go to a top-line East Coast college together, probably holding hands, and emerge with advanced degrees and zero student debt, having paid their way in stolen cash.
“Fine,” I said. “Glad to hear it. I’ll call someone else.”
“I was just bagging on you,” Anime said. “We’re still crooks. Whaddaya got?”
“I need to know about a kid,” I said. “Patricia Gribbin. Lives in Tarzana or Reseda, around there.”
With the almost infinite weariness of the computer geek adrift in a world of idiots, Anime said, “Have you looked at Facebook?”
“No. I’d need to friend her to read her stuff, right? Did I say that right? Friend, like a verb?”
“Yes, and we were impressed. Depends on her privacy settings.”
“In any case, I think it would be a bad idea to friend her.”
“You could snoop her through a ghost account.”
“Anime,” I said, “I still don’t know how to play an MP3 file.”
Lilli muttered something in the background, and Anime said, “Lilli wants to know, do you mean her any harm?”
Well, did I? “No. I just need to get the basics. Where she lives, how old she is, what she’s interested in—you know, the kind of stuff that would tell me who the hell she is. Whatever you can get. And tell Lilli that Patricia Gribbin may be messing around with my daughter, and I need to know whether she can be trusted.”
Anime said, carefully, “When you say ‘messing around’ . . .”
“I mean maliciously.”
“So not like a girlfriend. Not a girlfriend the way Lilli and I are. You know, romantically.”
“No. She seems to be trying to make my daughter unhappy. She’s messing with Rina’s private life.”
“Private life,” Anime said. “What a droll concept. Isn’t that droll, Lilli?” Lilli seemed to be agreeing that it was droll.
“So will you?”
“Sure. I’ll get back to you in a little bit. How are you?”
“Same as always.”
“You were kind of off, last couple of times we talked.”
“Thanks for noticing.”
“Well,” she said. “We were worried about you.” Lilli said something, and Anime said reprovingly to her, “You were too.” To me she said, “Lilli always has to seem tough.”
There were lights on in Ronnie’s apartment, although the blinds were down. The pale blue ghost-glow of my watch told me it was about ten to nine.
The apartment house where she—and, until recently, I—lived was constructed in the 1940s and consequently was both attractive and well built, although it featured that odd bricklaying technique that forces out little pillows of excess cement between the bricks, thoughtfully making a wall easier to climb. The building, only two stories tall, was shaped like a squared-off U on three sides of a nicely tended garden, which had been planted long enough ago that ivy had used the protruding cement as handholds to scale the wall. Looking up at the ivy, I thought again of Ronnie bravely driving the stolen Jag through the Slugger’s gate, and my conscience, which doesn’t get out as often as it should, gave me a belated little squeeze.
I knocked on the door and stepped back so I wouldn’t seem to be crowding her when she opened it. It was a nice touch, I thought, sensitive yet still manly, but it was wasted, because the door remained closed.
I knocked again, a bit more briskly this time, and stepped back yet again. Prepared my most spontaneous smile.
Nothing. Well, her lights were on a timer, so they’d still be on if she were in Timbuktu. So leave a note. No point in driving all the way over here and not even leaving a note. Although part of me was relieved not to have to go through the conversation, I still wanted credit for making the effort. I was most of the way to the car to get a Post-it from the dash compartment when my phone rang.
“I’m not here,” Ronnie said.
“You do know that’s an impossibility. Wherever you are, you’re there, so you can’t possibly say, ‘I’m not here.’”
“Fine. Then I’m not there.”
“Where?”
“Wherever you are. And it’ll probably be quite a while before I am wherever you are.”
“Can’t we talk about this?”
“We just did.” But she didn’t hang up.
“I finally realized something, an hour or two ago,” I said. “You’re the only person I know whom I trust emotionally.”
“Do I win a candy bar?”
I rested my hand on the hood of the dented Toyota. Warm as the night was, it was still warmer. “I thought it might matter.”
“I’m sure it does, to you,” she said. “And it probably will to me, when I’ve given it some time. And I’m not trying to go all Fatal Attraction on you here, but you’re making it totally about you, which is a very masculine approach to life.”
“What does that mean? I’m saying I trust you. Emotionally, I mean.”
“Well, even setting aside the partial disclaimer at the end, it’s still all about how you feel, isn’t it? If you give this more than a moment’s thought, Junior, smart as you are, you’ll come up with another explanation of this situation.”
One occurred to me, and I said, “Oh.”
“There we are,” Ronnie said. “One possible reason for the fact that you don’t know very much about me on a factual level.”
“You don’t trust me,” I said.
“See?” she said. “Other people are as real as you are. Surprised?”
I had nowhere else to go, so I went to my secret home, Apartment 302 at the Wedgwood, in Koreatown. The Wedgwood is one of the “China” apartment buildings, so called not because they were an LA rip on Chinese architecture but because they’d been named, back in the late twenties, in honor of three makers of fine china: Wedgwood, Royal Doulton, and Lenox. Today, random neon-sign failures had turned them into the wed wood, the royal doult, and the nox.
The China apartments were among the most deceptive addresses in a highly deceptive town. They’d been left behind like a trio of abandoned outposts as the town’s money moved west toward the sea in the 1930s and had gone precipitously downhill. About fifteen years ago, an anonymous Korean syndicate had bought the buildings for cash under the table and furtively fine-tuned them for the kind of people whose lifestyle dictated secret luxury, people who would benefit from living in a palace with a dump wrapped around it. Now, despite exteriors so distressed they looked like the Bates Motel in drag, the interiors had been meticulously restored to their original burnished Art Deco glory: high ceilings, polished hardwood floors, double-wide doors everywhere. As an added attraction, the three huge underground garages had been knocked into one, so that someone could dip down the driveway of the Wedgwood and conveniently emerge, a moment later, from beneath the Royal Doulton, around the corner and out of sight.
Someone, in short, like me.
I was sitting in the library in my apartment, surrounded by twenty years’ worth of books. I was waiting for the calming effect that’s usually exerted by rows of books seen spines-out, especially when they’ve been alphabetized by author and arranged by topic: fiction here, biography there, science (mostly cosmology) over there, art—heavy on Flemish and Renaissance painting—running along the top, close to heaven, where the visual arts belong—and, in an especially solid-looking block on the right, three high-density shelves of nonfiction.
Books, despite the fact that they can be so messy and even incendiary between the covers, are reassuring in bulk, especially when they’ve been massaged into the kinds of categories that are so conspicuous by their absence in life. Properly presented, everything they contain—the spilled blood, the envy, the plagiarism, the striving and failure and betrayal and disappointment and bad ideas and heartbreak—are combed out, like burrs
from a horse’s mane. The very sight of the regimented, unrebellious rows somehow puts the world into past tense. The safe tense. The best piece of advice I ever heard about how to get through things was Alfred Hitchcock’s. When someone asked him how he kept his calm when he was confronted with production crises, difficult actors, uncooperative weather, rising costs, and the light-blocking, soul-sucking bulk of producers, he said, “I try to live my life as though it happened three years ago.”
I knew all that. I knew about Hitchcock and the books and the calming influence, the broadening of one’s worldview, that those things were supposed to provide.
But.
Ice tinkles differently when there’s alcohol in the glass, and I had a little marimba in my hand, a couple of inches of good scotch and three nice clear cubes in heavy crystal. The books and the scotch had so far failed to muffle the world and dull its edges, to cushion me in bubble wrap and get me to the point where everything that hurt right now, everything that had begun to go wrong when the wind started to blow, would seem like a memory. I’d screwed it up with Ronnie. I was allowing Jake Whelan to shuck me. I was an absentee father and an unsatisfactory ex-husband. My daughter was crying. Everybody I knew wanted to kill me.
But I couldn’t see why. It seemed so evident, so obvious to me that I was the hero of my story that I had trouble understanding why other people didn’t see it that way.
Oh, yeah. It’s their story, too. Other people are as real as you are, Ronnie had said. It’s one of God’s best jokes: to give you a perspective, even visually, that suggests you’re the center of the universe and then to rub your nose in the fact that you’re clinging for dear life to the far edge.
I drained the scotch, rattled the cubes, and poured more. Getting drunk was no solution, but it had its own misleadingly hearty appeal. A sort of burrowing sensation in my stomach reminded me that I hadn’t put anything into it since those two or three sips of coffee at Jake’s. I thought about getting a steak out of the freezer. I thought about not getting a steak out of the freezer. I thought about getting up and going into the living room to look at the nighttime skyline of downtown Los Angeles. I thought about calling a taxidermist and having myself stuffed, right there in my reading chair. The management’s Korean maids could dust me when they came in to dust the books.
King Maybe Page 14
