by Daniel Pyne
“Gotcha.”
A third man, the angry Buick driver Lovely remembers from the traffic snafu out in the street earlier, has crept in the back door and struck with a crushing sap smack that sends Lovely stunned, staggering and sprawling into the living room, where he crashes into a lamp, then the wall, finds his balance, and drops into a defensive boxer’s crouch, lashing out as Mr. Buick comes stalking in after him.
“Hey, look what the cat drug—”
Lovely flattens Buick’s nose with two hard jabs, blood sprays—the man’s a bleeder—then pivots and wheels a stiff roundabout right into the ribs of one of the big mooks rushing in to help his friend.
His fist goes deep into extra flesh, his target doubles over, wheezing: “Hey hey hey hey!”
Lovely tucks in, feinting, punching. At four o’clock, with bravado, comes, “Big mistake, buddy—” and again Lovely pivots to tag the remaining big man under his left eye—but this one’s got a badge out, he’s flashing it as he staggers back—and now Buick is upright again and snotting blood, his wavering .38 pointed into Lovely’s face.
“FBI! FBI! Get on the floor!”
Whereupon the wheezing big man wraps Lovely in a bear hug and they both go crashing to the carpet.
“Criminy. Who the hell-o are you?”
Steel cuffs cut into Lovely’s wrists. The names sort out quickly: Agent Buddiger, with the new shiner, flops Lovely onto his back as Agent Johnson, more fat than muscle, finds his wind and straightens painfully to hand Agent Kapnik—of the Buick—a crusty handkerchief from an inside pocket. Kapnik has to think for a moment before committing to shove it against his already swelling nose.
The three Feds stare down at Lovely. Breathing hard.
“What is he doing here?” Kapnik asks his crew, evidently just to establish that he’s in charge. “What are you doing here?”
He drops Isla’s envelope of cash onto Lovely’s chest.
“Yours? Where’s the rest, huh?”
Kapnik toes Lovely in the ribs with his wingtip, but his heart’s not in it. Buddiger roots out Lovely’s wallet and holds up the California State PI license for all to see.
“Snooper. Snooping?” Kapnik seems to be the only one allowed to talk.
“Why do the Feds need to come tidy up a murder scene, I wonder?” Lovely says aloud. “Or run a moving pick for some dandy in a Hudson Commodore?”
Stronger than he looks, Buddiger hauls Lovely up by the shirt, frog-walks him back, and pins him against the wall as if to study him.
“Snooper,” Kapnik cracks, the airways in his nose all swollen up now, and bleeding only a mucous thread. “He’s a wise guy. Are you a wise guy?”
“Me?” Lovely shakes his head. “No. I’m dumb as dirt. I mean, look at the company I’m keeping.”
Which prompts Johnson to haul off and hit Lovely as hard as he can. Which, when Lovely will think back on it later, was pretty fucking hard for such a soft man.
4
“WHAT WERE YOU DOING in her apartment?”
“She was my wife.”
“You broke in.”
“I lost my key.”
For a couple hours Lovely has been handcuffed to the single chair in an FBI interrogation room in the U.S. Courthouse building downtown, the requisite harsh overhead light, sketchy air circulation, no other furniture, and all three Feds still present, with Kapnik still in charge.
Lovely contemplates Kapnik dispassionately. “You want to get some ice or raw steak for that beak, I’ll wait.”
Kapnik slaps him, openhanded, and nearly knocks Lovely out of the chair, but it rocks back in place.
This has been, Lovely decides, a very long, strange day.
“Don’t play dumb with us. We know the score, ’kay? Blackmail, the rocket-fuel formula. We’ve had your wife under surveillance for the past two weeks. We recorded her ransom demand, we watched her pick up the first payment—”
“And you didn’t see who killed her?” Lovely moves his jaw gingerly, grimaces, his skin burning numb. “You guys are unbelievable.” And stupid, he realizes, in assuming that Lovely knows what they’re talking about, which is likely classified, but oh, well.
“Maybe you were in on it, with her. Maybe you’re a Red, too?” Kapnik circles him. “Maybe you killed her to shut her up. And take the plans and the dough for yourself.”
“Maybe pigs will fly. Maybe the moon is made of cheese. Maybe the H-bomb is something we all just dreamed, a mass hallucination we’ll wake up from tomorrow and the world’ll be safe again—well, except for mustard gas and incendiaries—and little kids will have a future—maybe—and Ike and Khrushchev will pop a couple Eastside Old Taps and have a good hard laugh about it.
“I’m a Red? Sweet Jesus. Where is that coming from, Agent Kapnik? What are you—”
“—Local Fuze Project 602. Heard of it?”
Lovely hasn’t. But he goes with the flow, like a true Angeleno, another lie in a long day of lies and half-truths and ever more discouraging developments: “Yeah.” Something clicks, old skills shake the rust off and his tarnished intuition tells him that Kapnik has said too much. “Only now I think it’s called Feasibility Study 567,” Lovely riffs, but not entirely improvising, now, “and if you don’t know that, anything else I tell you is gonna be way above your pay grade, and next thing we know you’ll be sitting here in the hot chair answering one of those prickly ‘are you now or have you ever been a member of’ questions that’s ruined more careers than it’s unmasked communists.”
Kapnik stares at Lovely with a worried look: Who is this guy?
The interrogation room door swings open and a crew-cut ex-Marine strides in, expensive two-vent suit and Buddy Holly glasses, and a natural prepossession that Agent Kapnik can only dream of ever having: “What’s going on here, gents?”
Kapnik and the others have straightened up; clearly this is somebody they answer to.
Lovely can’t resist. “Kappy here was just asking me about 567, that top-secret rocket program at—”
The senior agent says, “Shut up.”
“Sir, this man was apprehen—”
“This man is a former OSS and CIA clandestine operative, Agent,” the senior agent cuts Kapnik off, “and frankly you do not have the security clearance to be asking him for the time of day. Get out.”
All the junior agents hesitate.
“Out! Go!”
Closest to the door, Kapnik does, quick. As his accomplice mooks try to slip past, the senior agent glares at Johnson and smacks Buddiger on the top of the head like he’s a misbehaving fifth grader. He uncuffs Lovely from the chair as the men shuffle out. The door clicks but doesn’t quite shut.
“You go ape on my man’s nose?”
“He tried to break my fist with his face.”
“Five sixty-seven. That’s rich.”
“I think it was French underground code for a hooker in Reims who had some unique, highly desirable breathing techniques.”
The agent extends his hand. “Ed DeSpain. I ran Berlin Bureau while you were off, where, Operation Paperclip? Goosing Kraut V-2 rocket engineers away from the Russkies?”
Lovely grips the big mitt, wary: “. . . DeSpain. I remember that name. They say you went through the embassy typing pool like a racehorse put out to stud.”
DeSpain laughs. “Yeah, well, one of ’em put a bit in my mouth, threw a saddle on me, and rode me home. We’ve got five half-heinie kids and I have to pretend to like schnitzel.”
“Was it Brunhilde?”
“You don’t know shit about Fuze 602, do you?”
“I could make an educated guess.”
“God, no. Don’t.”
DeSpain turns, gestures, holds the door open for Lovely, and out in the corridor they brush right past the chagrined junior agents still waiting like whipped dogs, backs to the wall
.
“So this is about stolen formulas?”
DeSpain ignores him, talking, overlapping: “Rumor is you went off-grid in Tehran, right before Operation Ajax, Lovely.”
Lovely knows he should hold his tongue, but doesn’t care anymore. “Yeah. Overthrowing a democratically elected government in Iran didn’t seem American to me, somehow.” But he goes right back. “Look, Ed, my wife—”
“Persia. The whole goddamn of Arabia,” DeSpain shrugs, dismissive, still ignoring Lovely’s tack. “Bunch of Bedouin horndogs in perpetual search of a stag party. They’re no match for us. Ten years from now it’ll be a division of Standard Oil and the ragheads’ll be fat and rich as Texas wildcatters and nobody’ll give a camel’s butt about it.”
“Or we’ll all be reduced to bones and ash.”
“You one of those nuclear negative Nellies now?”
“Alliteration makes me dizzy, sorry.”
“Existential shit don’t float my boat. Sorry.”
The local bureau office is almost deserted, doors locked, windows dark. They edge past a night-shift man worrying a chrome canister floor-waxing machine.
“Guy in the Hudson today,” Lovely presses, stubborn, “where does he fit into this?”
“You were never cut out for the spook life, Lovely. You know why? You asked too many questions. I heard the stories. Collected them, connected them. You’re a legend. Russia, Saigon, Shanghai, Prague. Iraq and Iran. Always trying to find sense in what is, truth be told, a senseless world.”
“I’m lousy with mysteries,” Lovely allows.
DeSpain lets this pass.
“I just wanted to do the right thing,” Lovely adds, subdued. He’s uncomfortable with this Fed’s selective trip down memory lane.
“As if there is such a thing.”
“Eventually I’ll want my hat back.”
DeSpain’s office has a big picture of Ike, and an American flag in the corner. He takes command of his desk chair and offers Lovely one of the two unremarkable armchairs facing it.
“My wife, Isla, thought ‘pinko’ was an eye condition. You’re barking up the wrong tree.”
Eyebrows lifted in mock surprise, DeSpain chuckles, “Wife? Ry, Ry, Ry, Ry. Cards on the table, Rylan: Yours was not the picture of connubial bliss.”
“Communist? I think I would know.”
DeSpain merely grunts.
“Okay. Supposing you’re right,” Lovely says. “Was she killed because of something she knew, something she had, or something she did?”
Nothing stirs, for a moment. They just trade practiced poker bluffs. “Sit.”
Lovely doesn’t. “Hat?”
“Coffee? Cola? Johnnie Walker Red?”
“It’s late.” Lovely waits.
DeSpain sighs. “That ten grand you found was ours. Extortion bait. Marked. There’s another ten still missing. Last week she booked a flight to Europe. It’s not a pretty picture for your wife, if that’s what she still is, or was—not a pretty picture for your Isla, that’s all I can say. Let it go at that. Much as I’d love to tell you the rest, I can’t. Okay? I can’t.”
“Do you know who killed her?”
DeSpain wags his finger: no, no. “What we’re gonna do, okay, is leave her murder to the cops, and the rest to the shadows. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. You know the drill.”
“Yeah, I guess I do. But, see, I’m not getting paid anymore to swallow the bullshit.” He turns to go.
“Oh, and Lovely?” DeSpain allows him time to stop and look back. “Her diary? Nothing in there but personal stuff, so. We left it where you hid it. Along with your hat.”
—
“HE QUOTED THE WIZARD OF OZ?”
Back in her apartment, Lovely can’t find anything he’s come into Isla’s bedroom to get and show Paez. “Gun box isn’t under the bed anymore. Her passport’s gone.” He stands for a moment, motionless, frustrated, trying to connect the young women he knew with this older young woman he doesn’t, then turns out the light and goes back down the hallway into the living room where, in darkness cut by a spill of kitchen light, Paez waits, shoulders square, hands stuffed in his pockets. “They’ve cleaned up.”
“Federales.” Paez says it skeptically.
“That’s right.”
“Big Red Scare cover-up.”
Lovely doesn’t have patience for the sardonic Paez patter just now. “You don’t believe anything I’ve told you.”
“I believe Feds might have roughed you up. You prolly deserved it. And I believe your wife coulda been a commie and you can’t see it because you never got over her. Either way? Does not concern me.”
Lovely is no longer sure why he called the cop. After DeSpain cut him loose from the federal realm, he felt a need to tell someone what had happened to him, sure, a knee-jerk reaction to any off-book government encounter by someone who’d been on the other side of the equation more than he wanted to remember. But Paez lives in a black-and-white world. Good guys, bad guys. No room for equivocation.
Lovely lived there once. In another life.
Now he’s caught in an eddy of uncertainty.
His past flickers, a raw jumble. He shoves it back into the shadows and, irritated with himself and with Paez, shakes his head like it might clear something up, and walks in the kitchen for the light.
“You still owe me that signed statement,” Paez throws after him, but without much enthusiasm.
The floor, of course, is spotless here. Newly mopped. He senses Paez come close behind him, no doubt curious what Lovely might be seeing that he can’t.
“There was a blood skid near that back door. Like she was killed somewhere else and carried in.”
“Tell me something I don’t know, that you can prove,” Paez yawns, “or I’m going home.”
Lovely can’t prove anything. The breakfast table has been searched by the Feds and slightly disarrayed. Toaster. Typewriter. Blank sheets of carbon paper. The wastebasket underneath is empty now.
And there’s his hat.
“You remember a murder, last year, young lady named Sarah Blohm?” Lovely hits the lever on the unplugged toaster and the diary pops out.
“Vaguely.” Paez is wearing smugness like a cardigan and Lovely realizes that the cop knows something Lovely doesn’t, can’t wait to tell it but waits nevertheless, drawing it out, almost bursting with anticipation of the imminent, triumphant spill. It’s annoying.
“Last year, summer,” Lovely continues, but Paez keeps talking.
“Look, much as I hate to admit it, Rylan, you’ve had this pegged from square one: It ain’t about Reds or Feds, cuz get this—”
Clipping the cop off midsentence, Lovely repeats, “Last summer. Disappeared, they found her body out near Barstow—well, Isla kept clippings.” He opens the diary. The yellowing news stories he saw inside have been removed. Faint furry trace of where the tape was. Shit.
“The coroner says she was pregnant.” Paez rushes it, undermining its intended impact, but in case there was any doubt, doubles back: “Your wife, I mean.”
It takes half a second for the words to land. Lovely looks up, truly surprised. And numb: “What?”
“Yeah. Bun in the oven. Twelve weeks.”
Pregnant.
An abrupt silence driven by that hollow pock pock pock of the clock on the stove. Lovely stares at Paez, not really seeing him. He can’t find words.
Pregnant.
The copper puffs up, grand, all Hercule Poirot. “From where I sit, this murder’s about dents in a bed. And dollars to doughnuts, we find the man who made ’em, we’ll find our killer.” He waits again. “Baby was blood type O.” And then, pointedly: “What’s yours?”
Lovely surfaces, annoyed now, “You already know that, Henry, or you’d have run me in.”
“Honest,
I don’t.” Once more the cop waits.
“AB positive,” Lovely says finally. “And I know from high school bio you can’t get to O from there.”
Paez, with the mirthless grin: “Yeah. What a shame.”
—
WILSHIRE BOULEVARD MIDCITY gleams with the slick-silver light of night traffic. Lily’s song lingers, stubborn, like a brushfire, smoldering sparks pinwheeling out hopeful into the darkness just when you think it’s gone for good.
He sits on the bed, in his room in the Normandie Hotel. Thin trails of headlights limn the ceiling molding, ghost the curved plaster cornices, and bleed down on him. He’s frowning, again, again having split open and begun to read Isla’s diary.
She always recorded with diligence for the first couple weeks of a new year, then quickly devolved to shorter entries, then mere notes to complement the mosaic of scraps and keepsakes, after which the gaps would begin to appear, days, weeks, months. October, November were typical loss leaders, she once told him; December always saw a surge. She would laugh about it on New Year’s Eve; curl up with Cold Duck and review her past year’s cryptic record, sharing parts of it out loud, if she had company. A ritual. At midnight, she’d burn the diary and begin again fresh, new blank journal, on the new year’s first day.
January 1. A twice-folded napkin from the Brown Derby, smudged with crimson lipstick. A quote from Tennyson, printed with an eyebrow pencil: Hope smiles from the threshold of the year to come, whispering, “It will be happier.” A matchbook from the Roosevelt Hotel. Fragments of a party favor popper, its rainbow tissue confetti threads gutted. Four tiny snapshots from a photo booth. Isla and Buddy. She sits on his lap; they’re not smiling, not mugging; all their expressions blank, the same. Happy New Year.
To say that Lovely’s monthly room is Spartan implies that he has had a hand in its disposition; in truth, the only sign of occupancy is a suitcase in the corner and the dormant stick of a water-starved potted orchid on the dresser.
