Orange County Noir

by Gary Phillips

  "And you believed him?"

  "Didn't have anything to lose. I got a fair trial, they'd've fried me."

  Sounds at the door interrupted. It was Rae. She came in, put down her purse, looked at the two of its.

  "He knows," Hank said.

  "I thought he might," she replied. "What's he going to do about it?"

  "Ask him."

  "What are you going to do about it?"

  "Nothing." To Hank, "Nothing's different." I stood up. "Thanks for the beer."

  I went home and waited for Sheila to arrive and make everything better.

  I didn't see Hank the next day, or the one after. The one after that, not until 10 at night. There was a bang at the door. I figured it was him. Most people at Leisure World knock politely if they have the gumption to show up unannounced that late.

  I pulled the door open and he rushed past me, with Rae in his wake. They waited until I closed the door, then Hank gestured toward the bedroom.

  "Out," I said. "At a play. With the theater club."

  "He tried to kill me."

  "Who did?"

  "The guy we were talking about the other day. Had someone try and run me over. In the parking lot at Spaghettini's."

  I turned to Rae. "That how you see it?"

  "Asshole came out of nowhere and nearly clipped him."

  "What kind of car?"

  "It was dark. How do I know?"

  "It was a big old Lincoln," Hank said.

  "Deliberate?" I asked.

  "Could've been," Rae said. "Could've not."

  Back to Hank. "Were you loaded?"

  "I had a couple of drinks."

  "Four," Rae said. "You had four."

  "Probably nothing," I said. "A drunk driver. There's a million of 'em out there."

  "What if he sends someone else?" Hank said.

  "He's not going to send someone else. I don't think he sent anyone in the first place. Just lock your doors. I'm sure everything'll be fine."

  "You don't understand."

  "What don't I understand?"

  "It's Tim Swift."

  "What is?"

  "The guy, for Christ's sake. The one who was with Allison. He's running for Senate now. You've seen what a whackjob he's turned into."

  I remembered watching Channel 6. What that reporter looked like after the little "misunderstanding" at the Swift news conference. "Can't argue with that."

  "He can't afford to have me floating around. I'm a loose end."

  Key in the lock. "That's Sheila," I said. "She doesn't need to know about this."

  The door opened. In came Sheila. She took in the three of us. "What's happening?"

  "Hank's got a gas leak. He came to borrow a wrench."

  She didn't believe me and knew she wasn't supposed to. "Did you leave all the windows open to let the gas out?"

  "No," Rae said. "Come on, Dad. We should get back there and make sure the windows are open, before we blow ourselves all to hell." She grabbed his arm and hustled him out of there. The door shut and I locked it and turned around.

  "He forgot his wrench," Sheila said.

  "Damn."

  "You want to tell me about it?"

  "Not sure. Let me sleep on it."

  I woke at first light, with a sick feeling in my gut. Like I'd had too much caffeine without any food to absorb it.

  Something was missing.

  It took me a minute. The crows. That time of morning, they ought to be cawing their damn heads off. But they weren't, and none of the other birds were on duty either.

  I slid out of bed, pulled on some clothes, slipped out the door. It was only a few steps before I rounded the curve and saw Hank's place. There were three cop cars. Two LW security vehicles. Paramedics. A couple of neighbors standing around gawking. Across the street, someone's visiting grandbaby was squalling its fool head off. The kind of thing living at Leisure World was supposed to eliminate.

  Rae was talking to a couple of cops. She spotted me and ran over. "They-"

  "What's going on?" I said, real loud. "What's the matter?" I put my arms around her, whispered, "Act dumb." She stared up at me. "You don't know anything. Got it?"

  Nothing.

  "Rae. I need you to focus. You don't know anything. It's important. One of the cops is coming over. I need you to get it."

  She straightened her spine. "I got it."

  The cop came near. He was young and he had a mustache and he thought he was hot shit. I asked, "What happened, officer? Is Hank all right?"

  "Who are you?"

  "A friend."

  "Well, friend, why don't you just step over there and wait. We'll get to you soon enough."

  "Certainly, officer." I put my hands on Rae's upper arms. Squeezed. "You going to be all right?"

  A tiny nod. "Uh-huh."

  "Okay, good. You need anything, you know you can count on Sheila and me."

  "Sir ..."

  "Right. Over with the others." I stepped away and began to concoct some useless information to share with the police.

  Someone had managed to get past the guard gate and jimmied Hank's lock and shot him twice. He'd evidently used a silencer, because Rae, sound asleep in her room, didn't find him until some time later.

  It wasn't going to be long before the police figured out who Hank was. I figured I had a couple of hours head start.

  Rae showed up a little after 9. "Last cop just left."

  "Good."

  "We have to get the son of a bitch."

  "And we will."

  Sheila poured her coffee and we sat at the little table in the kitchen. When Sheila's back was turned Rae gave me a look. "She knows everything," I said.

  "I'm very sorry," Sheila said.

  "Thank you," Rae said.

  "And now I'm going to leave you two to ... to do whatever you're going to do."

  Once she was out the door Rae said, "First, you need to know this. Allison. She stole him from my mom. So I hated her. She deserved what she got. But Dad didn't kill her. She was dead when he got there."

  "Swift killed her?"

  "Yes."

  ?" "WhY•

  "Dad never knew. But Swift had been drinking. Maybe it was an accident. Or maybe she was going to declare her love to the whole world, and Swift couldn't have that."

  "Then why did Hank stand trial?"

  She took a deep breath. Looked away. "Blackmail."

  I thought about it. Took a few seconds before things fell into place. "He was willing to shut up for a big chunk of cash. But without a presumed murderer, the cops would've dug deeper. They would have found out it was Swift."

  She turned back to me. "Swift says to him, yeah, I'll give you the money, but you have to let the cops think you did it. Then I'll make sure you get off. Which I guess he could do. He had people in his pocket. And while the heat was on Dad, he covered his tracks."

  "Swift could have double-crossed him. Let him stand trial, not interfere, and get him convicted."

  "If he had, Dad would've told the real story."

  "Who'd have believed him?"

  "He had a picture."

  "He just happened to have a camera with him?"

  "He was done with her. He was going to divorce her and get back with my mom. He was going to take a picture of them together, and then he was going to use it to get a divorce, and if she complained he was going to let everyone see Swift fucking around. Which Allison didn't want, because she'd gone and fallen in love with the asshole."

  "But he didn't get back with your mother."

  "It didn't work out."

  She slumped in her seat and stared at me with eyes half open. "You don't seem surprised."

  "About your dad blackmailing that shit Swift? I'm not. Not really."

  "How come?"

  "You're not going to like it."

  "Tell me."

  I stood up. Went and leaned on the kitchen counter. "I thought he'd done it. Gotten away with murder. Up until you told me different a couple of minut
es ago. So if I was ready to think him a murderer, then what's a little blackmail?"

  "You thought he did it, but you palled around with him anyway?"

  What was I supposed to say? That I still figured I'd killed my son, and I felt some kind of weird kinship with someone who'd killed his wife? She didn't need to hear that. "I liked him. I got past his past."

  Did she believe me? Maybe she did. It didn't really matter.

  "So now what do we do?" she asked.

  "What happened to the picture?"

  "He sent it to Swift after he got off and got the money. The negative too."

  "How honorable."

  "That's the kind of guy Dad was."

  "That's the kind of guy I am too. But ..."

  "But what?"

  "But self-preservation. If you're dealing with straight shooters, you shoot straight. If you're dealing with scum ..."

  "You think he kept a copy?"

  "I would have."

  "Then let's go look."

  There was nothing in the bedrooms. Nothing in the living room. We moved into the kitchen. "There a junk drawer?" I asked.

  She pointed. "Top one on the right."

  It looked promising. All sorts of crap. Take-out menus, pieces of string, toaster instructions. Little bits of plastic that had broken off things. Random tools, including a utility knife. Which I discovered when the blade sliced my pinkie open. I jerked my hand out and wailed and bled all over the counter.

  Rae hauled me into the bathroom. She put pressure on and washed the finger and poured hydrogen peroxide over it. After a few minutes the flow turned to an ooze. She went into the medicine cabinet for bandages.

  "Just like mine," I said. "Pills for everything."

  She bandaged me up. Stared at my hand. Then at the medicine cabinet. Tried to retreat from the reality in which her father had been murdered. "I guess we won't be needing these anymore," she said, grabbing a bunch of the prescription bottles and tossing them at the wastebasket. But she took too many. One fell to the floor. Another into the sink. As she bent for the one on the floor my eyes went to the one in the sink. Which didn't have pills in it.

  I grabbed it and struggled with the childproof cap until Rae saw what was up and snatched it from my hand. She flipped it open and poured the contents into my palm.

  A key. A safe-deposit key.

  "Where did he do his banking?" I said.

  We tore open a box of canceled checks and I practiced his signature. My cut finger made it harder. But I didn't think it had to be really close. Who's going to expect one geezer was trying to get into another's box? Especially when the first geezer looks a lot like the photo on the second's driver's license? Which we grabbed before we headed for the bank.

  I was right about the lack of scrutiny. The kid manning the safe-deposit station barely looked at the license or the signature. Two minutes later I was sitting in a little room, alone with the box.

  I pulled out some thin gloves I'd found under the kitchen sink. Sooner or later they'd figure out someone had gotten into Hank's box a couple of hours after he left the planet. I didn t want them to know it was me. Good thing I watched CSI.

  The photo was in an envelope under everything else. A much younger Tim Swift standing next to a bed on which a body lay. You could see the face.

  Perfect.

  I had Rae make the delivery. The man at its destination would remember me, and I'd be in Seal Beach for a while. Sooner or later he'd run into me, and questions might be asked. I didn't need them. But he hadn't seen Rae before. And I was certain she'd be leaving town soon.

  But I watched from across the street. When she knocked on the door, Chuck answered. He had a package of CornNuts in his hand.

  She asked him something and he shook his head. So she said something else and handed him the envelope with the photo. She spoke again. He nodded. She left.

  When she was back in the car she said, "Daddy'll be home in a bit."

  "Then our work is done."

  I'm guessing some of the Elliot people wanted to let it out immediately. Cooler heads prevailed, and it broke just in time for the evening news cycle. By 8 that night Tim Swift was in custody.

  He was out the next morning. His campaign spokesman got on TV and whined about photo manipulation and smear campaigns. The local news people and the cable networks went bananas. Implication and innuendo filled the air. A former staffer came forward and said she'd had an affair with Swift six years back. The TV people all went hysterical.

  By late that evening the Swift for Senate campaign had been suspended.

  There was no service for Hank. We never saw Rae again, at least not in the flesh. I did spot her a few weeks later on TV, the day Tim Swift gave up his House seat. A reporter asked her how she felt about it and Rae gave him a look that would curdle milk.

  Two months later we sold the place at Leisure World. Rented an apartment a lot closer to the water. The sea air is good for its, and so are the younger folks in the building. One couple has a boy of ten or eleven. In the right kind of light, at the right time of day, he reminds me of Jody. And that, I've been pleased to discover, makes me feel just fine.

  hen I moved into Levi's apartment in the converted motel on Placentia Avenue, the blue neon "i" of the Placenta Arms sign was burned out. I worried it was an omen, a feng shui gaffe. It made me think too damn much of placenta, birthing, that whole entire mess not a good thing when the sight of blood makes you faint. I've grown used to most things, and I figured I'd grow used to the sign, if I didn't leave Levi or go crazy first. But I hadn't grown used to it, and I was still here. It was going on three months and my feeling of foreboding had only increased.

  The Arms, a chipping aqua U-shaped construction, was clean enough, but Levi's apartment above the fray on the second story, right-hand corner, was growing smaller and duller by the day. So was Westside Costa Mesa, once idyllic cattle grazing land, then an agricultural haven. Now, about the only things that grew wildly were the illegal immigrant population, low-income housing, and Latino gangs. So different from where I was from. If I spoke the language it might be different, or if I was brunette. But I was blond, the only gringa in our apartment complex.

  I pulled a folding chair onto the balcony and lit a handrolled cigarette, the only tobacco I could afford these days. In the Arms' courtyard just below sat a square swimming pool that had seen better days. Sorry little children with loser parents-why else would they be living at the Placenta Arms?-splashed in its murky depths. Even the mourning doves inhabiting the adjacent kumquat tree seemed weary of the pool, but then Southern California was mired in a ubiquitous drought and the pool must've been better than nothing, I suppose. Although you can make yourself believe pretty much anything if your life depends on it.

  At night, after a drink or two, as you watched the lights beneath the water, all blue and tropical, it was easy to trick yourself into thinking you were at some lush Orange County resort and were one of the beautiful people. The reverie never lasted long, though, because one drunk resident or another would start singing off-key-Barry Manilow, Aerosmith, pop Latino-reminding you that you were not in posh Newport Beach, the next city over, or in Laguna Beach, just down the coast, but in lovely Costa Misery. My sister Leonora, a nurse, left home back east to work for a plastic surgeon-the perks included discounted enhancements-and I followed when I quit my teaching job, all because of Levi.

  Levi was sixteen when we met, seventeen when we started spending time together-backstage, on the football field, in cars. I was Levi's drama teacher, thirty-three years old, but young-looking for my age. My friends called him jailbait, this sleek pretty boy with sea-foam green eyes and abs to die for. I lusted after the kid, but when my soon-to-be-ex husband caught us in my car in the parking lot outside Bob's Big Boy and threatened to have me fired, I decided I needed my job teaching more than I needed Levi, resigned, and moved here. I saw what happened to other teachers who crossed the line, who forgot they were teachers and not teenagers.

/>   A year later, when Levi turned eighteen, he quit school and found me. He was of age, but still too young for me. I was still living with Leonora and her three dogs, substitute teaching in Costa Misery, along bus routes. The trip cross-country had killed my beater and I let my driver's license expire. The better school districts never seemed to have an opening and I didn't want a full-time gig at just any school. Levi had already rented the furnished apartment at the Arms and I planned on spending just a few days, thinking this would help to get him out of my system. But he guilt-tripped me into moving in, said he wouldn't even be out here if not for me.

  "Mimi, the guy's a loser," Leonora said. "You can do better." But I was addicted to Levi's body, his skin that felt like silk, and tired of being one of Leonora's pack.

  My stomach growled. I lit another cigarette and looked at my watch. Five o'clock. Levi would be home soon. I went inside to throw something together for dinner.

  Levi worked as a handyman. Ten bucks an hour, sometimes more. Not what he thought he was worth, but it paid the rent, bought the beer. He told me stories about the rich people's houses where he spent his days-brushing the walls of a nursery with designer paint or retiling a hot tub. He described how, at one home, the outdoor pool connected with the interior of the house through a manmade cave with faux boulders you had to swim through. So Orange County.

  Another client owned two houses side by side-one of them they lived in and the other one was the kids' playhouse. Playhouse! Homeless people lined up at church soup kitchens and lived in parks and alleys around the town. Life was indeed unfair. And I was a little envious. Some people in Orange County had too much, while others had so damn little.

  On the west side, everyone-the Latinos, the workingclass heroes, even the dogs-was, for the most part, lackluster. There were artists who added color, I suppose, but every day I read the police files in the Daily Pilot, and so much of the crime in coastal Orange County happened right around where I lived. Here were the factories, auto shops, taquerias, and la- vanderias, and so many of us were scraping by, but on the east side that bordered Newport Beach, that's where the real money was, that's where the Orange County life that I had imagined and fantasized about resided. I'd been to Disneyland but never got why they called it the Happiest Place on Earth, not with all those screaming children and tourists with blue-white legs and lunky cameras strangling their necks. But a house on the east side, now that would make for a happy day, every day.