His voice when he ordered me out of the car again struck with a sharp, percussive force. From the opposite side I heard an anxious whine.
I stared straight ahead, said, “Did you wipe your prints from the bottle after you drank it? Or were you too drunk to remember?”
He jammed his left hand inside the door to spring the latch and with his right tried to pull me from my seat by my hair. I screamed at him. The Rott roared and launched across my chest. The struggle and scream were so close to simultaneous that I couldn’t tell which of the two set him off. He hit Claymore just beneath the jaw. Had he possessed a set of teeth he would have ripped out the man’s throat. My arms wrapped around the dog’s chest as Claymore fell back onto the highway. The look on his face was that of a man who thought he was dead. He sat on the asphalt, legs splayed, and grasped at his throat. When he realized he wasn’t going to die, he reached beneath his shoulder for his gun.
The Rott’s bark was a terrifying thing, the sound of breaking bone and splintering wood. I braced my knee against the frame and held onto his neck. Claymore planted his feet and sighted the gun. I wasn’t sure if the barrel pointed at me or the Rott. His partner ordered me to control the dog. I grabbed the animal’s ear and yanked it. I didn’t yell at him. I kept my voice low and soothing. Had I pulled any harder the Rott’s ear would have come off. The pain turned his eyes to me. He’d been completely certain his duty was to tear off the head of the man who’d assaulted me, but when he saw my face a hesitation came into his eyes, and when I saw it I knew I could control him. The fire cop’s partner dropped the sights of her automatic and said, “Don’t shoot the dog. Shoot a dog and every animal rights nut in the county will be on your back.”
Claymore glanced at his partner but mostly his eyes stayed on the dog. “You saw it. The animal bit me. I’m alerting Animal Control. It’s a vicious dog. It has to be destroyed.”
I laughed.
It infuriated him.
“They’re going to gas your dog. You think that’s funny?”
“You claim the dog bit you, people will laugh. He has no teeth. Take a look for yourself. Maybe you can claim you were gummed.”
I pulled the Rott’s upper lip back to reveal the raw gums.
“But the thing’s big as a horse!” The disbelief in his voice vied with anger, as though I’d purposely tricked him.
“You make a complaint about getting bit by a toothless dog, jokes will circulate,” his partner said.
He told her to take the wheel. I shoved the Rott onto the passenger seat. I didn’t see Claymore when I glanced back. I thought he’d already slid into the cruiser until his head popped above the Caddy’s right rear fender, as though he’d knelt to tie his shoe.
“Next time I see you, it will be at the Twin Towers,” he said.
Claymore’s partner didn’t wait for the door to close before she geared the transmission and pedaled the gas. I watched the cruiser until it rounded the far curve. The Twin Towers sounded like something out of a fairy tale, but few imprisoned behind its walls enjoyed a happily-ever-after. They’d sent me there the last time I’d been arrested.
“You could have gotten us both shot, you know that?”
In reply, the Rott lifted his left paw and dug his claws into a spot behind his ear. I gave him a scratch. He slobbered on my arm to show his appreciation. I thought about the reasons why a healthy young dog like the Rott would lose his teeth. Before that afternoon I’d thought he’d been in an accident or suffered from a rare gum disease, but it seemed more likely now that he’d attacked someone, and his teeth had been pulled because the owner didn’t want more blood on his conscience. I couldn’t spit on the sidewalk without risking a parole violation, and I was an easy target for any cop having a bad brain day. The state had pulled my teeth, too, or judged it had. Maybe the Rott and I belonged together.
North of El Matador State Beach a roadside T-shirt and gift shop hung a community notice board on the wall outside the front door. I tacked to the corner a Polaroid snap of the Rott’s portrait, my telephone number penned to the bottom. The dog, watching from the car, gave me a recriminating look. “Just because I’m not taking you to the pound doesn’t mean we get to live happily ever after,” I said, getting behind the wheel. “What if you have an owner looking for you? Sure, we’re having a good time. I don’t want you to think about this as a rejection, understand? But we have to think about other people who might be involved here.” The dog looked like he always did when I spoke, slightly puzzled by the content but happy to hear me talk. “I can’t believe it.” I put the car into gear. “I’m talking to you like you’re my boyfriend.”
At a telephone pole across from a corner gas station, I met somebody doing the same thing I was, only he’d lost instead of found. Four days earlier, a forty-two-year-old woman had walked out the front door of a home she shared with her husband and two children and never returned. The woman was smiling in the photograph copied to the notice, and except for her eyes, she looked like a typical suburban housewife: carefully coifed, neatly dressed, and content with life. Her eyes looked sealed beneath a thin sheet of wax.
“My wife,” the man said, lowering his staple gun.
“Wish I’d seen her,” I said.
His hair was neatly brushed back from his forehead. A Ralph Lauren dress shirt hung sharply from his wide shoulders with nary a wrinkle to mar the crisp look of the fabric. His face looked like he’d died and been left to bloat in the sun. “I put the first notices up two days ago, but people come along and staple their things on top of her.”
He eyed the Polaroid snap dangling from my fingers.
“I wouldn’t do that, I wouldn’t paste over a missing person.”
The man tried to smile, like he meant no offense. “The police didn’t even start looking until forty-eight hours after she’d disappeared. Then the fire hit, and …” He drove the final staple into the telephone pole. His free hand gently brushed the face of the photo posted to the pole. “She’s on medication, you know? Prozac. The police think she’s having an episode, that she’ll walk right back in the front door without even knowing she’s been gone.”
“They’re right ninety-nine percent of the time.”
“It’s the other one percent I worry about.” He crooked his head to look again at the Rott’s snapshot. “No teeth, you say?”
“Like a baby.”
“Nice-looking dog, though. Good luck to you.”
He took his first step toward the next posting place, another telephone pole a hundred yards down the highway.
I said, “I hope you find your wife, sir.”
He gave me a little wave with the back of his hand. I tacked the snapshot below the flyer of his missing wife and drove on.
The woman sitting at the window table of Malibu’s Surf Coffee Shop watched carefully as I walked past the line of counter stools by the entrance, as though measuring me against her idea of the typical tabloid photographer. I didn’t look like a hyena, at least not at first glance, and this confused her, because I was approaching the table as though I expected to talk to her. That meant I was the woman she’d spoken to over the phone, the paparazza from Scandal Times, the hyena in human form. Her size surprised me. She looked like an adolescent, and I thought perspective might be playing tricks with me, but she didn’t get any bigger the closer I moved. The man who sat across the table from her had been a man of imposing size and strength in his prime, but that prime had peaked thirty years earlier. He still looked strong enough to break my arm in three places, if not fast enough to catch it. He’d known who I was the moment I stepped out of the Cadillac. His hand slid across the table and left a hundred-dollar portrait of Franklin beside the menu.
“Let’s make this meeting short and sweet. This bill is yours, right now, you confirm the story you told the newspaper was a lie.”
“I don’t lie for money,” I said.
“That’s not what I heard.”
“Man your age, I’m surprised you he
ar much of anything.”
Anger flushed a vestige of freckles to his skin. I was accustomed to being insulted. He wasn’t. I caught the look of something familiar in his glare, and it didn’t take more than a second to place it.
“What were you, LAPD?”
“Interesting you can recognize an officer of the law out of uniform and retired ten years. Only two types of people can do that. Other cops and criminals.” He pushed the Franklin closer to the table edge. “You don’t look like a cop to me.”
“You want to fight, I can give you the names of a couple bars down the highway. I’m here to see if I can be of any help to someone who told me over the phone she was Angela Doubleday’s niece. You don’t think I’m qualified, ask me to leave.”
“Sit down, please.” Arlanda Cortes slid to the inside to give me room. Her smile was too brittle to be welcoming, but at least she tried. She probably felt more dread than pleasure in meeting me, considering she sought to discover whether I had told the truth to Scandal Times or was just another tabloid scumbag. The old man pulled the portrait of Franklin from the table and stuffed it into the front pocket of his checked shirt. I sat.
“Sorry about your loss,” I said.
“We don’t know for sure, yet.” Her voice had a little crack running through the center of it, caused by grief and exhaustion, I thought at first, but when she spoke again I heard it in the fiber of the voice itself, like an oboe with a split bell. “I mean, it looks bad because they found some remains in her house, and she’s missing, but they haven’t—”
“Told us much of anything,” the old cop said. “You want to listen to what this woman has to say, then we should do just that. Listen.”
“What he’s trying to say is I’m an ex-con, you shouldn’t tell me anything the cops say about the investigation.” I stared at him head-on. I wasn’t ashamed. “Maybe you checked.”
“I checked. Charged with first-degree murder, assault with a deadly weapon, unlawful possession of explosives, what else?”
“Double parking. They wanted to execute me for that one.”
Nobody laughed.
The old cop said, “All those counts, convicted only on manslaughter, you must’ve had a good lawyer.”
“I should have walked on all charges. I wasn’t innocent but, after what the so-called victims did to me no jury should have convicted.”
The waitress stopped at the table and whipped an order pad from the front pocket of her smock. Nobody ordered food. It wasn’t that kind of a meeting. She jotted down two diet Cokes and a coffee. Then I remembered the dog in the car and said, “Can I get a pound of raw hamburger and three eggs to go?”
“Sorry hon, you have to order from the menu.” Her answer was rote. She wasn’t unsympathetic, just business-like.
“I got a hungry dog in the car, problem with his mouth, only eats raw hamburger and eggs. I’ll pay whatever you think’s fair.”
She said she’d see what she could do.
I didn’t wait to be asked. I told my story. The old cop scrutinized my face while I spoke, and I was aware the niece watched me carefully from the side. He asked me to tell the story again. I began to tell it the same way. He said he didn’t want to hear that part and moved me forward in the narrative and then back again, claiming every now and then that his memory wasn’t so clear, he thought I’d said something different the first time. He tried to take the story apart at the time line and then at the suspect descriptions, but the story was seamless. He couldn’t pry loose any part of it. The waitress returned with our drinks and a pie-shaped container used for takeout. People will often do for dogs what they won’t for human beings. I asked them to excuse me for a moment and went out to the parking lot to feed the Rott.
The waitress had supplemented the egg and hamburger mix with chunks of white bread, something I hadn’t thought of doing. The Rott wasn’t much of a gourmet, but the few seconds it took him to bolt the container’s contents told me he approved of the waitress’s cooking.
“That’s a good-looking dog.”
I recognized by the crack in the voice it was Arlanda before I turned. Even with four inches of curb at her heels, the top of her head barely reached eye level. I doubt she weighed more than a hundred pounds, and a good part of that was in her eyes and waist-length black hair.
“Hungry, too,” I said.
“What’s his name?”
“Baby.” It was what I called him. I didn’t want her to think I wouldn’t bother to name the dog I traveled with.
“That’s a big baby. How come he eats only hamburger?”
“No teeth.”
Her eyes couldn’t conceal a stutter of uncertainty. Why would a beautiful animal like the Rott have no teeth? What had I done to him?
“He’s a stray,” I said. “He followed me to my car the day of the fire. I put up notices this morning. Maybe somebody’s looking for him.”
The Rott lay on the asphalt, the container between his paws, and chewed on it like a bone. Didn’t matter he had no teeth. Instinct.
“Mind if I pet him?”
“It’s up to him. But I don’t think he’s the type to say no.”
She knelt on the pavement at the dog’s side and quickly found a spot behind his ear he liked scratched. “I bet my two boys would love to meet you. Not many Rottweilers where I live.”
“Where’s that?”
“Little border town called Douglas.”
“In Arizona,” I said.
“Been there?”
“Just close enough to see it on the map.”
Her hair swayed like a curtain when she shook her head.
“L.A. sure is different.”
“Different is what it does best.”
“It seems a little overwhelming. I just got in last night.”
“Give yourself ten years, you’ll get used to it.”
“I’ll cope a little better after a good sleep.” She glanced over to the hotel next door. “Thank goodness all I have to do is crawl up the stairs and I’m in bed.”
The motel next to the coffee shop was one of those California structures that slapped together elements of the ranch house and hacienda so haphazardly it succeeded in representing the worst of both styles. The motel wasn’t a dive but clung to the wrong side of the Pacific Coast Highway. People with money stayed elsewhere. I expected more glamorous digs for the niece of a movie star. Arlanda’s long, burgundy nails scratched the Rott’s chest. His leg kicked by reflex. A full stomach and a scratch. Happiness should be so simple.
“I believe you. What you said in there, I mean. About the fire.”
“It’s what happened.”
“The detective we talked to, the arson investigator, he didn’t describe it the way you did.”
“I know. He wants to think I did it.”
“Ben doesn’t like him very much.”
“That’s his name? Ben? He doesn’t like me very much either.”
The woman laughed and even her laugh had a crack in it, as endearing as a crooked smile. “That’s just Ben. He’s a tough guy.”
“Family?”
“Friend of the family. A good friend.”
I opened the passenger door. The Rott jumped into the front seat, expecting to go for another ride. I told him to stay. He looked betrayed when I backed toward the restaurant.
The hand the old cop stretched across the table when I returned was twice the size of mine and spotted with age above the knuckles. “Ben Turner,” he said. “Worked out of the Malibu station before they moved everything out to Calabasas. That makes me an old-timer in the LASD. Angela Doubleday was my goddaughter.”
I shook his hand, said, “Did Claymore tell you I was a suspect in the arson investigation?”
“Didn’t have to. He said you were on the hill when the fire started, trying to get Angela’s photograph, and that you lied about what you saw. That alone stamped suspect on your forehead.”
“Either of the men I described—the shooter or the guy w
ith the gray hair—sound like somebody Ms. Doubleday knew?”
“No, but that doesn’t mean anything.”
“Why not?”
Arlanda glanced at Ben. His head dipped slightly and he blinked. He wasn’t talking, but he wasn’t silencing her either, not yet.
“We don’t know that much about her life,” Arlanda confessed.
I must have looked surprised, hearing that from the woman’s niece and godfather. “I heard she was a recluse,” I said.
“The last time I saw Aunt Angela was, what, eight years ago? Just after Aurelio was born. He’s my oldest. Armando’s six. She never even met him. She just seemed to lose interest. Locked herself away in that big old house with a couple of servants and that was it. She wouldn’t even return Ben’s phone calls.”
I expected Ben to contribute to the story but he pulled out his wallet and signaled the waitress. “I want to thank you for your help. You did us a favor coming out here and I want to apologize for being so aggressive with you at the start.”
“Most ex-cons don’t make reliable witnesses,” I said.
“You do. I’d like you to sit with a sketch artist, see if we can’t get a likeness on paper of these two men you say you saw.”
I told him I’d be willing to do that, even though he wasn’t yet willing to concede that I’d seen anybody, only that I claimed to. He said he’d need a day or two to line things up. He’d been retired too long and didn’t know who sketched anymore.
“I do,” I said. “Walk by a couple every day. Come out to Venice Beach tomorrow, we’ll pick one.”
The Rott may not have been the brightest animal in the kingdom, but he was sincere in his desire to please, if only because I fed him, and his eagerness improved his performance as a running partner the second morning we ventured onto the boardwalk. He still paused to sniff the spots that called to him with one irresistible scent or another, but he better understood how far he could lag behind without losing me, and I tried not to demand behavior that went contrary to his nature. We didn’t encounter any serious obstacles to our morning run until we started up the stairs to my apartment, when the door to the unit just below mine swung open to a young suit knotting a striped yellow tie. His right hand deftly tugged the knot tight and his left tossed up one forefinger to attract my attention, as though the tie alone wasn’t enough to stop me.
Burning Garbo Page 4
