by John Shannon
“Thanks. Did I tell you Maeve and I had a talk yesterday?”
He picked up a slice of toast rather than let it go to waste. Eat it to save it, his mother had always said—a Depression baby to the core—but Gloria scoffed at that. Throw it away to save it, for Chrissake. I eat what I want.
“I didn’t know Maeve came.”
“We had another truth time, but your clever daughter got more out of me than she revealed about herself.”
He’d have to talk to Maeve and find out what she’d learned.
“Maeve says she’s still caught between cocks and cunts. And I told her she better make up her mind.” She sighed. “I think her painting craze is sabotaging her college work.”
“I was afraid of that.”
“You can’t save everything on earth, Jackie.”
“My daughter is first in line.” He was resting his hand on Gloria’s knee on top of the covers, as innocent a touch as he could manage.
She gently moved his hand away. “Sorry. I can’t handle being touched yet.”
“Anything else you want for breakfast?”
“A Walt fucking Disney true-life, all-happy world.” He couldn’t help thinking of the Mike Fink keelboat at Disneyland. In 1997 it had capsized and dumped fifty terrified tourists into brackish water, leading to the whole ride being torn out. Disney true-life worlds had their problems, too.
*
Captain Walt Roski rang the doorbell with dread. He carried a briefcase containing an eight-by-ten photograph of the charred remains of a rosary, plus a similar photo off Google of what the amber rosary probably looked like before the firestorm. This was the part of the job everybody loathed.
A Chinese woman opened the door a few inches and peered at him.
“Mrs. Roh? I’m the man who called. Walter Roski, from the county fire department. Can I speak to you or your husband for a few moments?”
There were six girls from the San Gabriel Valley who’d gone missing at about the right time, and Sabine Roh was the fourth on his list. Reported missing three days after the Sheepshead Fire broke out.
The woman let him into the house with a worried expression. “You come about Sabine?”
“I need to ask you some questions,” he said carefully. No show-and-tell until you pump them dry. It was the rule of thumb, hard as it sometimes was.
She led him apprehensively to a sofa in the living room. A middle-aged man sat across the room, his side turned stubbornly to the guest. He seemed angry.
“Mr. Roh can’t talk now. Working in head. He not being impolite. Can I get you some tea?”
“No, please. Could you confirm for me the day you came to feel your daughter was missing?”
“Feel?”
“Please. Tell me how sure you were when you reported it. She never stayed over at other homes without telling you?”
The woman took a deep breath and confirmed the date—Sheepshead plus three—and no, Sabine was a very considerate daughter. She never stayed late, even an hour, without calling home. He ran down his notebook, asking all his prepared questions. There were no obvious hits until he asked one of the standards that almost never got a response—if anybody had contacted them on their daughter’s behalf.
“My cousin in Orange County very rich woman, sir. She worry and she send a man to help look for Sabine.” The woman rose and retrieved a business card from a sideboard.
Jack Liffey
I Find Missing Children
And then a fax and a regular telephone number. Lord, who used faxes? So twentieth-century. No e-mail address. Roski guessed he was a useless old duffer, one of those window-peepers who had trained up on divorce work. He probably still took photos with a film camera.
He copied down the information and ran through the rest of his questions with no more alerts. The man across the room hadn’t stirred but was obviously listening to the conversation.
“I want to show you two photographs, Mrs. Roh. They don’t show a person or anything like that. But I want to know if either of these photos means anything to you.”
He laid out the before-and-after photos, and the tense woman immediately threw back her head like a wounded animal and let out a wail of pain.
I’ll take that as a yes, Roski thought sadly
She crumpled into her chair, hiding her face with her hands, and the inert husband finally levered himself erect with a cane. He hobbled toward the photos. Roski slid them around on the coffee table for him.
Mr. Roh froze in place, glaring at the photographs, and then he seemed to wilt. “This country is very punishing, sir,” he said bitterly, in lovely American English, with a bit of a French accent. “In Vietnam, my wife and I were Roman Catholics. We were also ethnic Chinese. By those facts, we were enemies of the communist state twice over. We managed to leave in 1984, and our daughter was conceived in a refugee camp in Malaysia. Sabine idolized the women who taught her here, the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word.
“Our daughter was determined to become a nun, with a political mind. I have no idea what romantic novel she got that idea from. Perhaps Graham Greene or Robert Stone. She never wavered from her mission.” The man paused for reflection. “I think Sabine didn’t understand that fate always has other plans.”
*
Mint tea was a new departure, Jack Liffey thought. With Tien Joubert, it was usually either strong French coffee or Chinese green tea. Maybe she had a Moroccan boyfriend. They sat out on the dock in Huntington Harbour beside her ostentatious yacht. It looked like an ordinary yacht on steroids.
“Report Number Two, please. This gotta be about Sabine.”
“The boss requires. The hireling complies.”
“No snark, please.”
His eyes were drawn to the next dock west, where somebody was mooring a long slim cigarette boat, one of those oceangoing rockets with several muscle-car engines that could churn out a thousand horsepower or more. He knew Southern California marine yards built several hundred of them every year and about twenty of them were used for legitimate offshore racing. The rest were busy running drugs up the coast at a hundred miles an hour on moonless nights.
“So, where she at?” Tien asked.
She was wearing a loose robe that, with every breeze, rustled open a little near the upper danger zone, and he was doing his best not to torment himself with his memories. He already knew exactly and intimately what was being offered, and it was a hell of a ride. It wasn’t like he was getting his ashes hauled at home, as his pal Art Castro would have said.
“Patience was never your long suit, Tien. I talked to the girl’s parents, her priest, her friends and political allies. Did you know she was in a radical group?”
Tien went absolutely still. “More, please.”
“Maybe not as we knew radical groups. They were a mix of Chinese and Latino kids. Their focus was getting high school kids to fight racism. Their main enemy in town was a bunch of biker assholes who called themselves the Commandos. Both groups are pretty much extinct, but there’s still bad blood.”
“You say this word ‘Latinos,’ Jackie. You mean Mexicans?”
“There’re a lot of countries to the south, Tien, and a hell of a lot of Spanish-speakers were born right here. Can you tell the difference between Taiwanese and Hong Kongese and mainlanders?”
“In one-half second. And tong yan, too. That mean overseas Han, like me. Singapore or Vietnam or Indonesia. Absolute, we all hear it.”
Somehow the robe had crept up toward her southern danger zone. “I believe you. Let’s say Mexican Americans. But there’s another problem I found out about.” He told her about the fact that the girl might have tried to bring drugs across the border to earn some money for her family.
For some reason it didn’t seem to worry her. “You go find out about all that. You real good at that. What car you drive now, Jackie?”
It came flying in from left field, the way she liked, but the implication he knew well. Everything was A-list brand names. A c
ar without a rich pedigree was just rust in waiting. “Why, for heaven’s sake?”
“I forget how much I really like you, Jackie. I can take care of you good, get you nice Porsche Targa, Tullio shoe, Armani Black Label suit. I learn a fancy new trick in bed, too.”
“Jesus, I don’t think I’d live through that.” He didn’t want to tell her he drove a third-hand Toyota pickup that was twenty years old and full of dents.
“Peekie-boo,” she said with a coy smile, opening her gown to show him one small upright breast, little more aged than ten years earlier, with its tiny brown nipple. He remembered the feel of it under his fingers.
He put up a hand to block the sight. “I’m living with someone I love, Tien.”
“Pish.” She shrugged but closed the gown. “I got good family, all got education, you know it. I dating big handsome triathlon man, thirty years old, all muscles. I like his American smell, too, like you, though Mummy always say it’s like spoil butter. But he no good really. I know he want money. You always hate money. I never understand, but it make me feel safe. Make me trust you.”
“I’ve seen too many people hurt by money. Not the lack of it, though that happens, too—but mostly from having a whole lot and wanting more. What I liked about you was that you were never crazy about grabbing money for its own sake. You liked the business of making deals, bargaining and doing favors, and money just seemed to flow to you.”
“Deal is best thing, sure. All real business is complicated deal. I give you nice car, you give me name of important man to know. You give commission on one thousand bale of cotton and I give American green card. We’re all cat in clover.”
“Are you really happy in America, Tien?”
That knocked her back a little, as he’d hoped. It took her some thought. “I love everything America, Jackie. If I start over again, I go to a very good doctor right away and get round eyes, big falling tits, the whole American cookie. To me small means defeat and weakness, like 1975. I want to be big and powerful like you.”
“Don’t you know how powerful your money makes you? I’ve checked. You could buy one of the medium-sized states. You could eat anyone you want for lunch.” An unfortunate phrase, he realized.
“I want to eat your big membership, Jackie. That the begin of my new trick. You gonna love it.”
*
Zook was still fuming. He’d been bitch-slapped by Seth—the fucking lawyer—and told he’d made the grown-ups change plans for their own dinner. The kiddies should stay home and eat their peas. And, by the way, think about clearing out of the storefront clubhouse.
“What possessed you to hand that guy a grenade launcher?”
“He asked.” Now that Zook thought about it, it didn’t make a lot of sense, but it had seemed like a great idea at the time. Have a lark, impress some prospective members, and scare the Chinks in the bargain. Harmless flash-bangs. Glorified firecrackers. Where was the hurt?
But this pole-up-the-ass cocksucker had just warned him that the police were looking for him. Somebody had ratted him out, probably Seth himself.
“Get yourself lost for a while, loser.”
Zook couldn’t carry what he needed on his Harley, so he backed the half-restored 1953 Studebaker Commander out of the garage where his dad had left it decades ago. Zook had lost interest in further work on the car, it was so damned uncomfortable lying underneath and getting grease in his face. The 230-cubic-inch V-8 still ran okay—a pathetic hundred and twenty horsepower—but it was from sixty years ago. The brakes were for shit, but he could always stop with the handbrake or the transmission.
Get yourself lost for a while, loser.
The acid words still made bile rise. They always thought they were better than working people. Tea Party Seth was no better than those white-wine liberals in their Rockports.
He packed a week’s worth of clothing, some beer, some finger food, and a handful of books into the Studebaker and headed north for the foothills. Way back in the day, his father had acquired an old cabin cheap from a college fraternity that had been caught hazing pledges and given the choice of leaving campus or giving up its party cabin. In his teens, he and his dad stayed at the place from time to time, but mostly it had rotted away until, in their heyday, the Commandos fixed it up and brought it back as a party house.
Zook stopped at the end of the asphalt and unlocked the yellow gate to the Serrano Fire Road. Only three cars at a time, the fire marshal had warned him, or they’d have their gatekey confiscated. Still, at party time you could get an awful lot of people into, and onto, three cars—clinging to the hood and roof, howling and yelling the last mile up the dirt road to the cabin.
He noticed fingers of seared chaparral above the firebreak and worried that the cabin might have burned out. Nobody’d been up here since summer. It would break his heart. Not just the parties—he’d first read Nietzsche here. It was his sacred place to mull life over deep.
Coming around the last bend, he was relieved to see that the cabin was whole, though immediately he went on alert. A steady issue of smoke rolled off the stovepipe chimney. Two chopped Harleys and a bad-boy tricycle squeezed into the parking pad next to the stream. He got his back up. This was his, dammit.
Zook pulled just off the fire trail. He could tell that the metal music coming from the house covered any noise he could make, so he walked straight up to a window where the curtains were open. One of his kerosene lamps was flickering on the table and somebody had dragged an old party mattress into the main room.
A naked young girl, maybe thirteen, was kneeling on the mattress giving a reluctant blowjob to a man wearing nothing but a jean jacket, both his hands pressed to the back of her head. Tears were rivering down her cheeks. A fat man in denim with droopy eyes and a ponytail watched and encouraged. The fourth figure in the room, a blowsy-looking woman wearing nothing but an unzipped racedriver jacket, sat against the wall and seemed to be masturbating.
What a zoo, Zook thought. He knew the Thinking Man had to protect children whenever he could, but these animals could be the Gypsy Jokers, meth heads who’d kill you rather than walk around you. He manned up gradually and retrieved his Walther PPK from the glove compartment.
Okay, Nietzsche, he thought. We’ll see who I am. Pussy or man of action. He pulled the plank front door open, and the woman in the corner looked up and screeched. Zook lifted his Redwing boot and stepped on the buttons on the boom box. The silence was a relief.
“Who the fuck are you?” Ponytail said. The voice was both wired and slurred.
“If I wasn’t so classy, I’d shoot you all,” Zook said. He let them see his pistol but didn’t aim it. “I own this cabin.”
“Ah, shit. It’s the Zook.” That was the bare-assed man. He reached down and hauled up a pair of used-up jeans. “So where you been?”
“Attending to patriotic business.” He didn’t recognize the man, but might have met him on a ride.
“Let’s get a look at that piece you got.”
“Never you mind. It works.”
The little girl wrapped her arms tight around where her breasts were just developing. “I live in Santa Monica, on 1019 Ashland,” she gasped.
“Don’t be saying that!” the big woman demanded.
“Picked her up hitching?” Zook asked.
“Came to us and said she was real hot to trot,” the woman said. “But she ain’t.”
“Would you folks take the party down the hill? I’ve got a group coming in.” He wanted to find some way to help the girl, but there were limits to what even a stand-up guy could do. It was all a matter of odds. It would be a weird universe indeed if these folks weren’t armed, too.
“Dig it,” the man on the mattress said. “That PPK is just a little popper, Zook. If you want some heavy stuff, come see me. Tony Two in BP.”
Baldwin Park, an even rattier working-class outlier ten miles east. “How do you friends know my name?” Zook asked.
“Every swingin’ dick in the valley knows the
Commandos.”
That was gratifying. The partiers gathered their clothes and belongings.
“Why don’t you leave the girl here, sort of like rent,” Zook said without any emphasis. “I could see having some fun myself.” The girl tugged on a t-shirt and shorts.
“We’ll take good care of her.”
That felt to be as far as the Thinking Man could push things. They pushed the girl out the door ahead of them.
“Watch your ass, man. I hear every cop in the valley is after you for that kegger.” Zook stood beside the doorway, the pistol limp in his hand.
Ponytail yanked the girl onto the bench seat of the trike. “Sit the fuck down or I’ll give you a flying lesson off yonder cliff.”
Zook bit his lip, the pistol’s unused force shaming him a little. Welcome to the big bad world, girl, he thought.
Before starting up, the trike man said, “Take it all quick, Zook. Ain’t no second chances.”
Zook’s inertia burned inside him. He needed to do some deep thinking.
*
The mother’s despairing wail had been unendurable, and Roski heard it even as he walked away from the Rohs’ house. He’d had to tell them about the body that had been seen in the fire zone, and then ask them to agree to DNA cheek swabs as soon as he could send out a lab crew.
Bump up, Rosk. Firefighters said that to one another—bump up—after the death of a pal. Toughen up and try to move on. Nobody ever said it to a civilian.
He checked his notes and was about to dismiss contacting this ludicrous “private detective” when he reminded himself that you never knew where the break might come from.
The phone number gave him a throaty woman’s voice.
“I’m trying to reach Jack Liffey,” he said.
“What’s he done now?”
“Can I just leave him a message? This is Captain Walter Roski, from the L.A. County Fire Department, Arson.”
“Captain,” she broke in before he could go on. “This is L.A.P.D. Sergeant Gloria Ramirez, Harbor Division. I live with Jack. I hope he hasn’t torched a nuns’ home.”
Her voice was so self-possessed that Roski laughed. “No, Sergeant. That’s pretty well excluded. But I need to talk to him.”
