The Chinese Beverly Hills

by John Shannon

  “You know, I do, too. He can be very entertaining.”

  This was all inducing him to reassess the man he’d assumed was a plain screw-up. “Does that mean he’s away?”

  “For the day. Can I tell him what this is about?”

  “I usually don’t, but since you’re L.E….” How did he know she was actually law enforcement? Her confident voice? “It’s about the Sheepshead Fire, Sergeant, but I can’t say any more right now.” He gave her his cell number and got off before he could make a bigger ass of himself. Sometimes he could be a sucker for the ambience of things, and the woman sounded like somebody tough as nails whom he’d like a lot. He’d been way too long without a girlfriend. Or even a friend.

  He looked over his list of missing girls and wondered if he should just double underline Sabine Roh and forget the others. All he really had was a mother’s abrupt tears at the sight of an amber rosary. He’d talk to this priest who’d known the girl.

  *

  Jack Liffey wiped his sweaty forehead on the silken sheet, like rumpled cloth of woven silver. His face was next to one of Tien’s tiny, perfectly formed bare feet.

  “You in bad way, I can tell. How long you been needing big fancy boom-boom like this?”

  He smiled to himself. Yeah, she’d learned some new tricks, all right. “I never need a five-dollah short time, Tien.”

  “You say. But life all about short times. Love the one you with.”

  Who’d sung that, he wondered. Those hopeful, horrible olden days. “Do you know about guilt, Tien?”

  “No say that, Jack. You here right now with me. You know my pussy. My mouth know you.” Yes, he thought, and then there was the tongue stud she’d had installed, not a common Asian practice as far as he knew.

  “I feel what I feel.”

  “Don’t you go on-off like radio,” she said.

  And what now for his intentions? Was this just a brief payback for Gloria’s affair? Or should he disrupt everything in his life and move himself into the egregious yacht out there? What a thought. He hated boats, but he did get a kick out of this formidable woman, several kicks. Her utter unselfconsciousness. Her focus on the immediate moment. Infinitely forgiving, wanting to please; her mind bustling, full of plans and backups and backups for backups. Never at rest. The perfect personality in a go-for-broke, dog-eat-dog country.

  He readjusted to lie face to face. “I always worry about tomorrow, Tien. It’s who I am.”

  She shrugged solemnly. “Dig it. Tomorrow we both dead.”

  *

  Somebody knocked lightly and didn’t wait for a reply before opening. Between the fingers of one fist, Bunny was strangling two Corona bottles. “G’day, Maeve. Mea culpa or something. I think I owe you big time.”

  “Why?” As if nothing had happened. Maeve stood at a canvas, dabbing at the back view of a Francis Bacon-esque leg, working from a digital photo of a corpulent model from her life class. Bubbly thigh and cellulite butt—Maeve was doing her best not to find it repulsive. All life was sacred, all bodies.

  “You been good about it, but it was my bad. That was really messed up. I’ll make it up. I’ll be happy to pose for you right now, if you promise no funny stuff.”

  Maeve’s heart started to pitter-patter. Just glancing at Bunny’s luxuriant body, even clothed, turned her on immensely. “Sure, no funny stuff. I’ll do my best to separate desire from art, though I can’t tell a lie—your body is a real glory of nature.”

  Bunny decapped the beers with the church key that hung on a string from the fridge handle. Maeve thought of showing off Gloria’s ostentatious pop-off chop some time, but decided she’d better practice in private.

  “Imagination is fine,” Bunny said. “But be sure to knock on the door before you try to open it.”

  Jeez, was that a tentative invitation?

  “For sure.” Maeve brought out a fresh canvas already stretched and primed. Amazing, she thought. Two months ago she didn’t even know what stretching a canvas was, or gesso, didn’t know the difference between oils and acrylics. “You can undress behind the Japanese screen and come out with a towel.”

  “No, I’m fine.”

  Bunny seemed to toy with a private smile as she tugged off her bulky sweater with that lovely cross-arm maneuver, and Maeve wondered if undressing in her view was a way of Bunny teasing herself with forbidden thoughts.

  “Please get comfortable and think about something neutral. I’d like to have you unconscious of your body. My teacher says too many women have internalized a male eye.”

  The faint grin returned. “Then I’ll think of myself as a sight for a female eye.”

  Maeve just about fainted as the underwire bra came off.

  “The cool air feels good.”

  “Knock knock,” Maeve said weakly.

  *

  “Can I have a Bentley, hon? That horrid narrow entrance scraped the Jag’s fender,” Adrianna complained. “It just barged at me.”

  “How about I get you a driver,” Gustav Reik said. He was home, briefly, in his Fifth Avenue penthouse overlooking Central Park in the Seventies. He owned the top two floors of the Hewitt Building, and kept the lower one as office, probably worth more than his entire hometown of Verdigris, Oklahoma.

  Adrianna was his arm candy, of course, bleach and scalpel and silicone, with the intelligence of an armadillo, but she had an art history degree from one of those SUNYs out in the sticks and could almost hold up her end at a New York cocktail party. He’d bought their way onto the boards of a dozen cultural foundations.

  “Aww, Gusty.”

  A lot of his Southern friends shook their heads in dismay that he’d chosen to live in Jew York, but you didn’t have to be a Jew to love good ballet and opera and art. And good food, which was not to be had below latitude forty. Roughly Washington, D.C.

  He waved his hand toward Adrianna’s portion of the penthouse. “Addy, please turn left. I need to boil a hog for a few minutes.” It was his way of telling her he had confidential business on the telephone.

  She nodded obediently and hurried away.

  He speed-dialed his administrative assistant, Bernadette Crouch. The woman was indispensable to him, as sharp as anyone he’d ever met, and her politics were bang-on libertarian as far as he knew. If only she weren’t so buck ugly, he’d bend her over her desk more often. Why couldn’t we swap brains and bodies, he wondered.

  “Berny, has anybody backed out of the retreat?” He never wasted time on howdies. Manners were for also-rans.

  “Hi there, Gustav. Yes, my cancer biopsy was negative. Thank you very much for asking. Only a few of our stalwart capitalist friends have declined—Mr. X from the aerospace company, Mr. Y from brokerage, and Mr. Z from hedge funds.” They both knew about phone hacking, of course, including the government’s big Echelon, Prism, and Omnivore spy projects. Not to mention the fact that Mother Jones magazine had somehow obtained an audio tape of their last retreat and promulgated it word for word to make a number of tipsy Republican governors sound like Herman Goering.

  “The lawyer from Southern California?”

  “Not a peep from him. Why does that small beer lawyer worry you, Gus? You sent him the biggest pain in the ass in our planetary belt as a guest speaker.”

  “I love all my children, each in his own way, Bern,” he said, but smiled privately. He knew, like Andor, he had an uncontrollable practical joker gene. “Even you. This year is going to be important. We need a billion more to fight the socialist president.”

  “Good for us. I’m always invested in knowing that somebody who deserves it is going to end up crying.”

  “Never us, for sure, kiddo. See you in two weeks.”

  “But you should keep in mind that private wounds often reveal what is damaging on a much larger scale.”

  He frowned as he hung up. Bernadette was always tweaking him, and he had no idea what the hell she was getting at. And her cancer scare, for Chrissake. Had she actually told him about that? He leched
for her on sudden urges, but he couldn’t be expected to care about such a homely woman.

  *

  All roads met in Monterey Park these days. Jack Liffey was back on Garvey Avenue at a little sidewalk table in front of the wonderfully named Bon Mar Ché, and right across the street was The Sweet Blanket, whatever that was, tucked beside what must once have been a Dunkin’ Donuts but was now Wei’s Boba Teas.

  Jack Liffey was still addled by his romp with Tien, but he did his best to calm down as he waited. He’d called home guiltily from her place, with some excuse that sounded lame even to him, and Gloria had completely ignored his fibbing and told him that a firefighter of some rank was urgently looking for him, and given him the number. It had to be about Sabine, of course. Too much at once. But that was the nature of life. The firefighter had picked the Bon Mar Ché.

  A beige Ford Crown Vic pulled up in front, driven by a hefty middle-aged man with a tidy moustache. Nobody on earth drove those lumbering cars but cops and local officials with access to motor pools.

  He’d liked most of the firefighters he’d ever met---truly decent people intent on doing good in the world—and he wondered if he’d like this one, too.

  “Walt Roski?” He stood and held out his hand to the harried-looking man.

  “Jack?”

  “Yeah.”

  They shook hands in a perfunctory way. Roski seemed preoccupied, but he did look Jack Liffey over in a snoopy way. “Let me be direct,” Roski said.

  “Oh, please. I live for it.”

  The man nearly smiled. “When I heard you were a private detective, I assumed you were a flake. Just another failed insurance adjuster. Your wife disabused me.”

  Jack Liffey was about to say they weren’t married, but why? “Be even more direct. What’s your business?”

  The waiter appeared and they both ordered iced tea. Roski brusquely told the waiter not to show his face again after bringing the drinks. Jack Liffey had never heard that before, but he liked it a lot. Over-officious waitstaff were an American affliction.

  Several noisy motorcycles took off on a green and upshifted together, loud as a bandsaw. As they passed Roski opened a briefcase.

  “This is as direct as I can make it.” He laid out two eight-by-tens, the before and after of an amber-beaded rosary that had clearly been incinerated. “Mrs. Roh went into wails of distress seeing this. This one was found in the Sheepshead fire zone with the remains of a firefighter. He was near the burned remains of a girl. I’d like to know what you know about Sabine Roh, so I don’t have to pad around town tromping all over your moccasin prints.”

  TEN

  The Eighteenth Brumaire

  “Maeve, I want to thank you for introducing me to a whole new world… whatever you call it.” Bunny was glowing.

  Is that what I did? Maeve thought. I thought we were making love.

  “That was my first time with a woman, you know.”

  “Frighten you?”

  “A little, but it’s like sinking into amazing comfort and protection. I’ve been so forlorn all my life. My big brother used to make me… we won’t go into that.”

  “It was lust for me.” Maeve swallowed hard. “And more. I was loving you.”

  “Wow, Maeve. Let me adjust some.”

  “Of course.”

  *

  Back home, Jack Liffey tiptoed upstairs to look in on Gloria, who seemed to be dead asleep. She was snoring like a trooper, so he descended to the kitchen and set out what he’d need to thaw to make lunch, wondering if that would do anything for the guilt he felt. Then he called his sociologist friend Mike Lewis for some practical insights about dealing with the lunatic fringes of the Tea Party, and about cocaine from Hermosillo, which was where the girl’s out-of-scale map seemed to start.

  Unfortunately Mike started out with a lecture about Karl Marx’s book The Eighteenth Brumaire and how the rich had been hijacking populist movements for centuries.

  “Thanks for the really big picture, Mike. Anything practical?”

  “These guys are probably only dangerous on a local level. Of course, you’re the local level.”

  “And drugs in Hermosillo?”

  “That’s the Beltran Leyva cartel, a small and declining one. Sinaloa’s moving in on them. Poor Mexico. You been asking around a lot about this?”

  “I’m on a job.”

  “Jack, do me a favor.”

  “Sure.”

  “However silly it seems to you, go look out your front window this minute.”

  With a chill, Jack Liffey carried the cordless with him and pulled a lacy front curtain aside so he could look out at Greenville Street. A weary ice cream vendor with a pushcart. Two kids under the hood of a Chevy.

  “Nothing special, Mike.”

  “Good. Keep looking.”

  *

  It had taken Zook a while to collect the discarded beer cans, drag the mattress outside to air it, and put the rest of the cabin back where it belonged.

  He’d rehung his wonderful old canvas sling chair from a roof beam near the stove and slid back into what he thought of as his Nietzsche perch. A little side table with a beer and a few joints, where he could sway and drift to his heart’s content, reading the masters and real Thinking Men.

  He started with W. Cleon Skousen’s lectures, digging into the world’s secret power structure. Zook skipped forward to his first dog-ear.

  FDR’s adviser Harry Hopkins treasonously delivered to the Soviets fifty suitcases of secret plans and half of America’s supply of enriched uranium, and later the Russians built the first Sputnik with plans stolen from the United States…

  Skip.

  But the U.S. Constitution was never based on the Enlightenment. It was drawn entirely from the Bible.

  Skip.

  The secret world order began to use the Communists, a regimented breed of Pavlovian men whose minds could be triggered into immediate action by signals from their masters.

  He was getting bored, but he lit his first joint.

  Rich Nazi-capitalist families of the New World Order like the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds have used the Council on Foreign Relations and loony left-wing forces for years—from Ho Chi Minh to the American Civil Rights Movement—to serve their own power.

  It didn’t quite gel for him. Not pointed and clear, like Nietzsche. He set the book down and drifted off into his favorite daydream. He was riding across the plains on a powerful horse, carrying a Remington lever-action rifle. Once in a while he’d make a dip into a suburb to shoot a snotty traitor holding a wine glass on his patio, then gallop away.

  *

  The department’s Serology/DNA lab had moved into the new Forensic Science Center at Cal State – LA. Still the blood lab had kept to its peculiar tradition: six days a week, if you sent in a sample, it would go into the boundless hopper. But on Tuesdays, if you had something genuinely urgent and were willing to wait in line, you’d get your results that day. A few days at most.

  The PCR version of the DNA test—you’d have it in three days. The odds of a mismatch were still one in many million, perfectly good to steer an investigation, even if it couldn’t convict O.J. Simpson.

  Roski waited forty-five minutes among disgruntled L.A. detectives. Amazing how many of them were overweight. He dropped off his bone fragment, then phoned Jack Liffey again.

  “Jack, you were a real sport to fill me in. Investigators get used to a whole wall of jive, as I’m sure you know.”

  “Yeah, I fell in love with you, too, Walt.”

  “I’d like to reciprocate with a little show-and-tell to keep you on my side. Do you want to see the spot where I’m pretty sure your girl died? I have to go there anyway.”

  “Jesus, this is a strange life. Of course I do.”

  “Meet me in an hour at the top end of Serrano Place against the mountains. It’s between Sierra Madre and Altadena. A big yellow fire gate. You won’t miss it.”

  “Since we’re best pals now, I’ll bring lunch.�
��

  *

  Before he could get out the door with his lunch package, the phone rang and rang. Jack Liffey hesitated but went back and grabbed it before it could disturb Gloria.

  “Jackie, this no good for me. My heart go pit-pat too much. I forget I like everything about you, even you old man wrinkles. All you boy dogs so lucky. You wham-bam and run away and don’t care about us girl dogs.”

  It wasn’t strictly true. His own heart was pitter-pattering a bit, too. A cop in Orange County had once told him if he was crazy enough to sleep with the dragon lady, he’d better count his body parts going out the door.

  “You’re a wonderful kidder, Tien.”

  “You come back right now I do something that make you die and go to heaven. Heaven got me, naturally.”

  He smiled. “I’d probably prefer the jokes in the other place. I’m on my way now to talk to a man who knows something about Sabine.”

  “Sabine can wait. She wait forever now, in fact. I still warm for you, warm outside and wet inside. Jackie, I never feel this before. I mean it. I going crazy. Don’t hurt me.”

  How much to believe? Tien Joubert was as hard as a stainless-steel nail, and she could curdle your blood with a moment’s shift of tone, but maybe she was having her own version of a late-life crisis. He’d never worked out her age, but she had to be pushing sixty, maybe from the other side.

  “Tien.” He glanced guiltily at the staircase to where Gloria slept, and then nudged an inner door shut. “Don’t push so hard. Everybody’s afraid of so much need.”

  “You no like my big boat? It can be your boat, we get crew and sail to Hawaii, Acapulco, make love all the day. Get airplane, too. Buy whole island someplace. I got hundreds millions now, no kidding. You talk to my accountant. I need a good man to go the rest of life. Time drip away, Jackie. I been working too hard to enjoy.”

  He tried to imagine himself as Tien’s kept man, dressed like an ad in GQ, worth many millions—some of which he could give to Maeve, of course—and he tried to imagine what various people would think of him fixed up like that. He enjoyed the presumed outrage of his ex-wife, for instance, but Maeve was something else. And his feelings toward Gloria were a mess. He’d loved her intensely for years, leaning steeply into the hurricane of her resistance.