A Hard Light

by Wendy Hornsby

  A perfect moment can’t last forever. Here was the proof.

  I said, “I have the offer on the house to take care of by Monday, so I’ll be flying up sometime this weekend. Casey, you can go early with Guido or wait for me.”

  “Okay.” Casey was mollified. Mike was not.

  After dinner Guido and I ran through the tape of Tina’s interview and talked about how the film would be restructured now that Bao Ngo had been included. The process was something like throwing the pieces of several big jigsaw puzzles into one pile and trying to make one coherent picture out of the mess. I had a fair idea what that picture should look like. The problem was finding the right bits and then making them fit.

  Guido worked with me on storyboards, but it wasn’t long before he started nodding off. A long and trying day, good wine, the warm room: He couldn’t stay awake. I helped him make a bed on the sofa in the workroom, turned out the light, and went upstairs.

  Mike was reading in bed. He looked at me over his glasses. “Casey is worried about her dad. Linda still hasn’t heard from him. I told her we saw him, but she’s upset. The Four Seasons doesn’t have him registered.”

  I checked the bedside clock: a little after ten, not too late. I called Arlo Delgado.

  “I don’t think there’s anything to worry about,” I told Arlo. I explained the situation to him. “But is there any way you can find out, at the very least, where Scotty is using his credit cards? Whether he’s alive or dead?”

  “Any particular preference?” Arlo asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “But I won’t say which.”

  Arlo promised to call me as soon as he knew anything.

  I stripped off my sweats and slipped under the covers beside Mike. I snuggled into him, as I always did. He put his arm around me, but there was a hesitation in his touch, a lightness when he held me. I knew he was afraid of what might happen in bed if he let down his guard. He felt guilty for the pain I had been through.

  With my head against his chest, hearing him breathe, I fell asleep.

  Deep in the night the telephone rang.

  I reached out a hand and groped for the receiver, mostly asleep, but still conscious enough to run through the essential list: Casey, Michael, Mom, Dad …

  Mike, with a longer reach and with the conditioning that comes with his job—most murders happen in the middle of the night—found the phone first. He mumbled, “Flint,” and then he listened. With his face still smashed into the pillow, he asked when and where, said, “Thanks. I owe you,” and rolled out of bed.

  I sat up and turned on the light. “Is it Shannon? Did someone find Shannon?”

  “No.” He yawned, scratched his butt with one hand, drew the curtains back with the other, and looked out the window: It was raining. “Go back to sleep.”

  “Who called?”

  “Paula. You know her, sergeant, Hollenbeck Division.”

  “The weightlifter?”

  “Yeah. Paula. She brought in my dad.”

  CHAPTER

  12

  “Hey, Mikey? You remember that place down on Valley Boulevard we used to go? You know the one, open all night. Served the worst damn pastrami, but they was open all night. How many’s the time we ate pastrami for breakfast, huh, son? But damn if I can’t remember the name of the place.”

  Oscar Flint scratched his forehead around the edges of his bandage. The bandage wasn’t big enough to completely cover the cut over his left eyebrow, a clean split made by a flying beer bottle. He looked grizzled and confused and plain worn out. Now and then I saw something in a gesture or the way he canted his head that reminded me of Mike. But years and buckets of alcohol had wiped out most of the resemblance.

  “Mikey used to eat half a big old pastrami for breakfast and save the other half for his lunch. I’d say to him, Little boy, you eat enough of that shit, it’ll make you stink.” Oscar laughed. He wore dirty green work pants and a clean white T-shirt that had come out of Paula’s police station locker. Wadded at Oscar’s feet: an old blue ski jacket, a plaid shirt, and wet sneakers redolent of vomit and barroom floor. He looked at the pile, and something occurred to him that made him grow thoughtful. He turned to Mike. “Why’d you eat so mucha’ that shit pastrami, boy?”

  “After I paid your bail, there wasn’t any grocery money.”

  “Oh, yeah.” Oscar threw back his head to laugh, but he bumped it against the wall hard enough to make him flinch. He felt for a knot, talking all the time. “We had some good times, didn’t we, Mikey?”

  After that, Mike said an occasional “Uh-huh” or “Sure, Dad” as his father rambled on. He was courteous to his father, but he wasn’t listening.

  “Glad you got here so fast this time, Mike.” Sgt. Paula unlocked the cuff from around Oscar’s right wrist, the restraint that kept him on the bench. She spoke to Mike as if Oscar couldn’t hear. “Lately when Oscar has a few he gets pretty aggressive. Pretty destructive. You and I go back a long way, Mike. Last thing I want to do is throw your old man in the tank. But it’s a challenge anymore to contain him when he gets like this. I thought you had him in rehab.”

  “He skipped.” Mike took off his Christmas-present coat and wrapped it around Oscar’s hunched shoulders. “This last place I had him in was the end of the line. They won’t take him back in the condition he’s in. No facility can hold him when he gets thirsty, and he doesn’t show any sign he’s giving up the juice anytime soon.”

  “That’s tough, Mike. Really tough. Can’t blame a place for giving him the boot when he’s drunk. I can’t handle him.” Paula owned the women’s regional record for the clean and jerk. If she couldn’t hold him.… “You have my sympathy.”

  Mike gripped her muscular shoulder. “Thanks for calling me, Paula. I appreciate your keeping this one off the books.”

  “No problem.” Paula slipped a business card into Mike’s shirt pocket. “I told the bar owner you’d cover the damages. You can call him tomorrow.”

  “He’s not pressing charges, then?”

  “Not this time.” She shrugged. “But next time?”

  Mike took Oscar by the arm and guided him to his feet. Oscar seemed confused. “Where we going, Mikey?”

  “Home to sleep it off.”

  “Oh.” Oscar thought that over.

  Paula aimed a finger at Oscar’s bundle of fouled clothes. “Burn them?”

  “Burn them,” Mike answered.

  “So, Mikey.” We were walking out the back of the police station. Oscar padded on bare feet.

  “Yeah, Dad?”

  “You remember that place we used to go to down on Valley Boulevard? Worst shit pastrami I ever ate, but they’re open all night. You want a bite, son?”

  “Not tonight, Dad.”

  When we got home, the mantel clock said five. Mike cleaned up Oscar while I made a bed on the living room sofa. The sun was just coming up when we tucked him in. We closed the curtains, but nothing, certainly not the pale gray light of that drizzly dawn, would have wakened him.

  Mike stood looking down at Oscar, a confusion of feeling in the expression on his face; something like looking down on a sleeping child who has kept you awake all night.

  “We’ll call around again,” I said. “I’m sure we can find a bed in a rehab somewhere.”

  “He looks so old, my dear old Dad.” Mike pulled the blanket up over Oscar’s shoulder. “When I was a kid, I used to get hold of the Sears catalogue and cry my eyes out. I’d see all the pretty people in there and think, boy, that’s what normal looks like. I’d pick out the man and the woman I wanted for my parents and fill out the order form for them. If I’d ever had a stamp, I would have mailed it in. Pretty stupid, huh?”

  “If I’d known you when I was about fourteen, I would have sent you my mom and dad. Gladly.”

  He smiled. “I would have taken them.”

  “For all of his shortcomings, Oscar raised one hell of a fine kid.” I took Mike’s hand. “You know he loves you beyond all things.”
/>   “Yeah. Except for his booze.” There was no self-pity in his attitude. Mike had grown up in the real world where seeing things as they are was the means to survival. And he was a magnificent survivor. He squeezed my hand. “Thanks for coming with me.”

  “Thanks for asking me.” I kissed his cheek. “How about some coffee?”

  We went into the kitchen and found Guido, looking pale and exhausted, sitting at the table with half a pot of coffee in front of him.

  “Can’t sleep?” I put my hand against the pot. It was still warm enough. I took two more mugs out of the cupboard. “You feeling okay, Guido?”

  “I heard you leave.” Guido pulled his old flannel robe tighter around him. His face was backlit by the light over the stove so I couldn’t see his expression. I knew him well enough that I didn’t need to. He dropped his chin an inch, turned his head slightly to his left as his shoulders came up. The two or three times I’ve seen Guido cry, and maybe half-a-dozen other times when he came close, Guido held exactly that posture. I know Guido: He was worried. “Maggie?”

  “We’re fine, Guido.” I went behind him and wrapped my arms around him, patted his flat chest. “Mike’s dad had a little problem we needed to take care of. We brought him home and he’s sleeping in the living room.”

  He put his hands over mine. “I thought, maybe, complications or something. Leaving in the middle of the night like that.” He didn’t finish the sentence.

  Mike glanced at me, a question in his frown. I knew what he was asking, so I shook my head. I hadn’t told Guido about Saturday night.

  As if reading the silence in the room, Guido said, “Liam Farrington told me. He bribed a nurse at Cedars to get the scoop.”

  I pulled away from him. “Who else has Liam told?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It’s nobody’s business,” I said.

  Mike drew a deep breath that ended in a yawn. The hard light made him seem years older than he had just the night before. He looked at me. “How soon can you pack a bag, Maggie? Let’s get the kids and get in the car. Let’s go now. We can be in San Francisco by lunchtime.”

  “What about Shannon?” I asked. “What about your case?”

  “Fuck it. What are they going to do if I drop the ball? Fire me?”

  CHAPTER

  13

  We couldn’t leave town Thursday morning. Instead, we went about business as usual: Michael had a chem lab quiz, Casey had a ballet workshop, Mike had a solid lead on Shannon, I made contact with a man who had arrived on the same boat as Bao. And Oscar was sleeping it off in the living room.

  Thursday was one of Michael’s early days, leaving Casey to take the city bus to school. Guido offered to drive her, but she declined; several of her best friends took the same bus and they had things to talk about.

  Mike boxed up everything in the house that contained alcohol—a couple of bottles of beer, three bottles of wine, some cooking sherry, half a bottle of mouthwash, some aftershave, and the vanilla extract—and locked it all up in the back of his car. Before he kissed me good-bye, he said, “I’ll call around for a new place for Dad. But it might take a while.”

  “There’s no hurry,” I said.

  “You’d be amazed how much of a hurry you can be in once he gets his hands on some booze. And he will. There’s nothing to keep him from walking over to the store.” Mike’s face was set in grim lines. “I’ll ask around, call Social Services. Maybe the VA has forgotten what happened last time they had him and they’ll take him back.”

  “You do that, and I’ll call the bar and see what the owner wants.”

  “Thanks.” Mike tried to smile. “That’d be a big help.”

  When we backed out of the driveway, headed in opposite directions, the sky was black and threatening, but there was still no rain.

  Guido and I drove out to Westminster, a bedroom city on the western edge of Orange County. We left the freeway at Bolsa, the exit marked Little Saigon.

  Arlo had found a recent address for Mr. Ralph Yuen, a refugee who had shared a cabin with Bao Ngo on the cargo ship Manatee on the trip from Saigon to Long Beach.

  Mr. Yuen had traveled on diplomatic credentials. I expected to find him living in one of the better tract house developments, one of the thousands of cookie-cutter stucco palaces that spread out from the freeway as far as the eye could see. But our Thomas Guide took us into a leftover zone, an undeveloped triangle defined by the freeway, a cemetery, and the Navy Weapons Depot railroad.

  “Used to be nice down here,” Guido said, looking for street names as he drove. “We used to drive to the beach down this way. The whole area was farms and fields back then. Lima beans and strawberries.”

  I looked out at featureless cracked-stucco houses with broken-down cars pulled up onto hard-packed front yards, a stretch of curbless, potholed asphalt that was a long way from being new. Then I looked at Guido. “You’re not that old, Guido.”

  “No, really. That’s what this all was. Just farms and farmhouses.”

  I checked the map. “I think you passed the street. We have to go back two blocks.”

  “No problem.” Guido braked and started into a U-turn. There was a blast of horns and tires squealing. A white car swerved off onto the muddy shoulder to keep from hitting us broadside.

  “Oh Jeez,” Guido muttered. “I didn’t even see him. Where’d he come from?”

  The other car was okay. The driver may have been swearing, he should have been rattled. But he kept going, pushed the accelerator when he bumped off the shoulder back onto the road. A near miss, but a miss.

  Guido finished his U-turn. I asked, “You okay?”

  “Yeah. I guess. Sorry. You?”

  “I’m fine. This is your street.”

  He turned up a street that dead-ended at the tracks. “What was the number?”

  The address Arlo gave us took us to the last house on the block, an old two-story wood-frame with faded, peeling paint that stood alone among vacant lots. Brown weeds grew through the torn mesh of a pair of screens discarded on what had once been a front lawn.

  The yard sloped down to a gully, an irrigation runoff ditch lined with concrete. At the edge of that long gray gash, filled with roiling brown water by yesterday’s rain, a few scrubby live oak and eucalyptus trees managed to survive, giving a little green relief to the dismal beige landscape.

  Beyond the gully, the railroad tracks and more undeveloped land. Attached to the Cyclone fence on the far side was a sign: Choice Industrial Site, and an 800 number to call.

  “Like I said,” Guido gloated as he parked at the side of the street. “Old farmhouses.”

  I heard chickens when I got out of the van. I reached for the 35mm camera I keep in my bag and snapped off a few frames of the house and the yard against the deep gray of the clouds. The scene was spooky enough for Halloween.

  Guido gave me an optimistic smile when a voice responded to my knock on the front door. He said, “Let the games begin.”

  Heavy footsteps inside, then a mammoth shape behind the dirty screen, a woman well over six feet tall. Even her blue-black hair, a huge, kinky, Medusa-like tangle, gave her volume. Her calico muumuu was worn threadbare over her unrestricted mounds of breasts and belly. I was disappointed. My guess, she was Samoan. Not that it mattered, except that she definitely was not Vietnamese.

  In a deep voice, the woman demanded, “What you want? You Child Protection?”

  “No,” I said, slipping my card into the crack between the door and the jamb. “We’re hoping to find a Mr. Ralph Yuen.”

  With her doughy arms crossed over her wide chest, she wasn’t giving an inch. “You don’t say what you want. You from his job?”

  “No,” I said. The woman was nosy, that’s all. Why we wanted Yuen was none of her business. “Where can I find Mr. Yuen?”

  “Around back.” She extended a thick thumb toward a patched side gate. “Don’t let the chickens out.”

  “Thanks.” I grinned at Guido as we went d
own the front steps. “Every day, something new, boys and girls.”

  Guido shooed chickens away so that I could close the gate after us. The latch was a loop of wire that hooked over a bent nail hammered into the side of a two-car garage.

  The backyard was better tended than the front. There were trellised winter squash, and navel oranges hanging ripe from well-trimmed trees, a manicured lawn. Along the back fence, grape and berry vines, pruned for winter, were just beginning to show some green.

  “Nice hooch,” Guido said, indicating the garage. “Not quite up to code, though.”

  I hesitated before knocking on the door. If this was Ralph Yuen’s home, it was quite a come-down for a man who had come over on diplomatic credentials.

  “What are you thinking?” Guido asked.

  I shook my head. “We’ve come this far. Let’s see this story out.”

  When Guido knocked on the door, the old paint left white chalk on his knuckles.

  The door was opened by a small, thin woman with a beautiful face and hair long enough to sit on. She glanced shyly at Guido, who gawked, and then looked straight at me.

  “Yes?”

  “We’re looking for Ralph Yuen,” I said. “Does he live here?”

  The woman bowed slightly, then backed into the gloom beyond the door. Almost immediately, a man appeared, holding a sleeping baby against his shoulder. He smiled, but he was cautious. “You have come to see me?”

  “I am Maggie MacGowen, and this is Guido Patrini.” I gave him my card and he gave us the usual wide-eyed going over. “We want to speak with you about your trip over from Vietnam. About a man named Bao Ngo.”

  “So long ago.” Yuen frowned, patted the baby’s back when the child began to stir. “What could I have to tell you?”

  “That’s what we’re here to find out.”

  “Please, come in.” Gently swaying and patting the baby all the way, he led us into the relative warmth of the garage. As he passed the woman, he said something to her in Vietnamese. She nodded and moved soundlessly, gracefully, into the corner set aside as the kitchen. At the stationary tub that was the kitchen sink, she filled a kettle and put it on the two-burner stove.