“Late.” Louise heard the doleful certainty in her own voice. If some modern Mussolini promised to make the buses run on time, he’d get elected in a landslide. And then he’d break his promise, sure as hell. Money was scarce. Fuel was scarcer. Spare parts were damn near extinct, and nobody seemed to be making or buying more.
“You got that right.” The other woman took a pack of cigarettes out of her purse, extracted a cigarette from the pack, and lit it, all without getting wetter than she was already. Louise admired the dexterity as much as she wished she weren’t getting the secondhand smoke.
The cigarette did do one thing, though: it made the bus come. The Hispanic woman had to drop it, only half done, on the sidewalk to board. Serious fines backed up the rules against smoking on public transportation.
Far more bicycles than cars used the streets. Some pedalers wore raincoats that reached down to their ankles. Some-the dumb ones, as far as Louise was concerned-tried to manage umbrellas. Some just said the devil with it and got wet. The bus had to go slowly to keep from mashing them.
Every so often, the driver honked his horn to remind the people on bikes that he was there-and to make them clear out in front of him. He didn’t have much luck with that. The pedalers not only didn’t clear out; they slowed down to piss him off. Some of them flipped the bus the bird.
If Louise had sat behind the big steering wheel, she knew she would have wanted to run over two or three of them to encourage the others to get some sense. The driver clutched the wheel tight enough to make his knuckles whiten, so maybe he was fighting the same temptation.
People got on. People got off. Before the eruption, only the poor rode the bus in L.A. If you could afford a car, you drove one. Who could afford a car now? Hardly anyone, which meant the bus attracted a higher class of passenger than it had once upon a time. I’m on it, for instance, Louise thought, quite without irony.
She got off at the stop closest to her condo. The walk back got her wetter and did nothing to improve her temper. She checked her mailbox. The mail wasn’t there yet. She’d have to come down through the rain again to get it. And what would it be? Bills and ads. What else came these days?
“Mommy!” James Henry squealed when she walked through the door. He ran to her. She was the best thing that had ever happened to him: that was what that run said.
“Was he good?” she asked Marshall.
“Good enough,” James Henry’s half-brother answered. “Listen, Mom, I’ve got to go now that you’re finally back.”
“Not my fault the trip took so long,” Louise said. “The bus was impossible. And those selfish idiots on bikes only made things worse.”
Marshall’s eyes glinted. He’d ridden his bike over here to babysit. Was he one of the people who diddled buses for the fun of it? If he was, Louise didn’t want to hear about it. He did say, “It’ll cost you an extra twenty bucks.” His voice was almost as hard and flat as Colin’s.
“Twenty!” Louise spluttered indignantly.
“You’re late. Late, late, late. And you’re lucky I’m not saying fifty.”
Sharper than a serpent’s tooth. . ran through Louise’s head. But she paid him. Somebody who wasn’t related to her by blood would have squeezed an extra fifty out of her. She couldn’t afford it, but she didn’t want to take James Henry to the unemployment office in the rain, either. You couldn’t win. You couldn’t even come close.
That twenty, of course, came on top of what she’d to pay him to watch James Henry for as long as she’d thought she would be gone. She’d just spent a fair part of her unemployment check. Did Marshall care? Yeah, right!
Out the door and into the rain he went. Louise sighed. She knew she’d call him the next time she had to go to the EDD office. If she could call him. If her phone had power. If the cell towers had powers. Sometimes, these days, even old-fashioned landlines didn’t work, not that she had one.
“Mommy!” James Henry said again. We’re together again at last, he meant.
“Hi, kid,” Louise answered. Her own voice sounded hard and flat in her ears, too.
XIV
Colin sat in an interrogation room with Gabe Sanchez, waiting to grill an armed-robbery suspect named Cedric Curtis. “I was here when the uniformed guys brought him in,” Gabe said. “We got him out of his regular clothes and into the jail suit, y’know?”
“Oh, sure,” Colin answered. Inmates in the San Atanasio City Jail wore orange jumpsuits that made them look like animated carrots.
Sanchez wrinkled his nose. “Dude had the stinkiest feet in the world, man, that’s what. We made him put his shoes back on.”
A uniformed cop brought in Cedric Curtis. He was twenty-two now, and looked as if he might have been a linebacker in high school. His head was shaved. He wore a goatee, and had a nasty scar on one cheek. He hadn’t bothered with a mask when he knocked over the Circle K, which was a big reason he was here now.
“We are filming this interview.” Colin pointed up to a surveillance camera in one corner of the interrogation room. “Do you understand that, Mr. Curtis?”
“I hear ya,” the suspect answered indifferently.
“Do you understand?” Gabe growled. He was playing bad cop today. “You gotta answer yes or no. Not like you don’t know that. Not like you’ve never been here before. So, do you?”
Curtis looked as if he was thinking about a smartass comeback. Whatever he saw in Gabe’s face, and in Colin’s, made him change his mind. “I understand,” he admitted in grudging tones.
“Okay. Now we’re getting somewhere.” Colin went through the Miranda warnings against self-incrimination. He could have been shaken awake at three in the morning and delivered them perfectly, the way a priest treated so rudely would have come out with a flawless Hail Mary and Our Father. “Do you understand that, too?”
Cedric Curtis nodded. “Yeah.”
“Okay,” Colin said. “Do you want to talk with us? Do you want an attorney present before you do?”
“I’ll talk with you. Why not? Fuck, you got me, don’t you?” Curtis said.
Maybe it’ll be easy for a change. That’d be nice, Colin thought. Aloud, he said, “Are you confessing you robbed the convenience store and threatened Mr. Leghari with a pistol?”
“The raghead guy in there? Yeah, I done that.” Curtis nodded. “Weren’t no bullets in the gun, though.”
Maybe that was true and maybe it wasn’t. If it was, the kid had a few loose screws, or more than a few. An awful lot of convenience-store clerks packed heat of their own, commonly in a drawer under the register. Either Cedric had got the drop on Ahmed Leghari or he was one lucky fellow. Well, either way this did look like an easy one. “Would you care to tell us why you knocked over the Circle K, Mr. Curtis?” Colin asked.
By the way Curtis looked at him, he was the dummy. “On account of I didn’t have no money,” he said.
Thank you, Willie Sutton ran through Colin’s mind. He didn’t bring it out. Cedric Curtis wouldn’t know Willie Sutton from a hole in the ground. He did say, “Plenty of ways to get money where you don’t end up talking with us.”
“Like what?” Curtis was openly scornful.
“They call them jobs,” Gabe Sanchez said dryly. Colin shot him a warning glance. Even that might be skating close to the edge. You never could tell what a gung-ho defense attorney could build from a crack like that. Look at the racist cop disrespecting my client! he’d thunder.
But Curtis wasn’t offended. He threw back his head and guffawed. “Jobs? For me? You gotta be jivin’, man. Ain’t no jobs for me. Ain’t no jobs for nobody like me. Weren’t no jobs for nobody like me even before that fuckin’ thing blew up. Only got worse since. So I can deal rock-an’ you’ll bust me. Or I can do this shit-an’ you’ll bust me.”
“You don’t look like you’ve missed a lot of meals,” Gabe said, which was true enough.
“I got two kids to feed. I got an old lady, too,” Curtis replied. Whether she was his children’s mother, he did
n’t say. “Like I told you, gotta get Benjamins some kinda way, law or no law.”
A gung-ho lawyer could make something out of that, too, especially with things the way they were nowadays. Plenty of potential jurors might be out of work themselves. Even ones who weren’t would have cousins or brothers-in-law who were. In tough times, they might not want to come down hard on a guy who stuck a gun-an unloaded gun, the lawyer would insist-in a scared clerk’s face so he could feed his little children.
Well, that wasn’t Colin’s worry, or not very much of it. He had the arrest. Now he had a confession to go with it. The DA would carry the ball from here.
In the meantime, he nailed things down as tight as he could. He asked Cedric Curtis to describe the crime. Curtis did, with almost as much detail as the Circle K surveillance camera showed. Whatever a defense lawyer did, he wouldn’t be able to claim his client hadn’t done it.
When Curtis finished, Gabe said, “Odds are you’ll do some time. That’ll keep you fed, anyway, even if prison rations aren’t anything to write home about.”
“I know about jail food,” Curtis said. “There’s enough of it, no matter how shitty it is.” No, he hadn’t worried about getting caught.
“Okay,” Gabe said. “So you’ll have three squares and a cot for a while. But what about your kids? What about your girlfriend? Who’s gonna take care of them while you’re in the pokey?”
Cedric Curtis looked astonished, as if that had never occurred to him. Probably never did, Colin thought sadly. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t seen reactions like that way too many times before. One of the things that made criminals what they were was an inability to look ahead. Everything that happened after they did what they did came as a complete surprise to them. Even after they got busted, did time, got out, and pulled another one, they were amazed all over again when they quickly turned into two-time losers.
“Aw, fuck,” Curtis said softly. Maybe he could learn after all. But what lesson would he draw from this? Don’t knock over convenience stores? Or Don’t get caught after you knock over a convenience store? Colin couldn’t be sure. He knew what how he’d guess, and didn’t like it.
Well, Cedric wouldn’t be his problem for a while. The uniformed cop came back and took the robber away. “Nothing left of this one but the paperwork,” Gabe said.
“Yeah.” Colin wished he sounded-and were-happier.
“Lighten up,” Gabe told him. “He will do time. If he’d lifted canned goods, unh-unh. But no jury’s gonna buy that he stuck a gun in a guy’s face just so he could buy groceries for his brats. I mean, juries are dumb, but not that dumb.”
“You hope. We hope,” Colin said.
“Honest to God, they aren’t,” Gabe insisted. “Me, I’m going outside to celebrate with a cigarette.” He grinned wryly. “Way to party down, huh?”
“If you say so.” Colin went back to his desk. He stolidly started working on Cedric Curtis’ file. The more you did now, the less you had to do later. But he hadn’t got far when his phone rang. He picked it up. “Ferguson. . Say what?. . Are you sure?. . Aw-fudge. . Okay, what’s the address?. . Right. I’ll get there soon as I can. ’Bye.” He slammed the phone down.
Gabe Sanchez was just coming back from his nicotine fix when Colin stood up. His face must have been all over thunderclouds, because Gabe blurted, “Jesus! What hit the fan now? Your family okay?”
“Huh? Yeah, they’re fine,” Colin answered. “But there’s a little old lady dead over on 139th Street, and the cop who found her says it sure looks like the Strangler got her. I’m on my way there now. Wanna ride along?”
“Shit, I’m dying to,” Gabe answered. But he walked out to the parking lot with Colin. Colin had known he would. They wasted a couple of minutes filling out the required forms for getting a car: like a lot of Southern California towns, San Atanasio had really tightened up as gas got scarce and expensive. But no one would say boo to this trip, not when Colin scribbled South Bay Strangler on the line labeled Reason for utilization of automotive vehicle.
The sun shone as brightly as it ever did since the eruption. The sky tried to be blue, but didn’t quite seem to remember how. It was somewhere in the high sixties. Seattle summer? It could have been worse. It had been last week, and no doubt it would be again before too long.
North on Hesperus to Braxton Bragg. East on Braxton Bragg to Sword Beach. Left onto Sword Beach, then a right at the next light and onto 139th. The corner there had a liquor store and a seafood restaurant that charged too much for some of the most mediocre dinners Colin had ever regretted ordering.
Once you turned the corner and headed up 139th, you fell back in time. Most of the houses on the little street had gone up not long after the war to give the kids of the Baby Boom bedrooms of their own. Some were even older: they looked like adobe even if they were stucco, and had roofs of Spanish (well, Spanish-style) tiles. They’d been moved here when the Harbor Freeway pushed through to San Pedro at the start of the Sixties.
Back then, San Atanasio had been white and Japanese. Oh, a few Mexican-Americans, but from families that had been in the States for generations. (Colin’s secretary, Josie Linares, came from a family like that.) Now there were whites and blacks and Mexicans and Salvadorans (the Cubans in San Atanasio mostly lived farther south and east) and Koreans and Vietnamese (the Japanese had moved south to Torrance and Palos Verdes when the blacks started coming in) and. . everything under the sun.
What there wasn’t was a lot of money. Not in this part of town. The cars that sat in driveways and on the street-and, here and there, on lawns-looked as if they’d been sitting a long time even before the supervolcano did its number on gas prices. A couple of them were up on blocks. The rust they showed argued they’d been on blocks quite a while, too.
A black-and-white with its light bar flashing was parked in front of 1214 West 139th. A heavyset black woman and a skinnier Hispanic woman, both getting close to middle age, descended on Colin as he got out. “Did that lousy son of a bitch do for old Mrs. Mandelbaum?” the black woman demanded fiercely.
“I don’t know yet, ma’am,” Colin said. “I got here from the station as fast as I could when the call came in. That was ten minutes ago, fifteen tops.”
“They ever catch that bastard, they oughta hang him up by the nuts,” the Hispanic woman said.
Privately, Colin agreed with her. He wouldn’t say so publicly. Gabe Sanchez would: “That sounds goddamn good to me.”
“How come you ain’t caught him?” the African-American woman asked. “You shoulda done it a long time ago, you wanna know what I think.”
Colin agreed with her there, too. All he could say, though, was “We’re doing our best, believe me. And now I need to see what we’ve got here.”
He started up the driveway to the house. The lawn was green. That meant less than it would have before the supervolcano blew. No more brown, neglected lawns in L.A. these days, not with all the rain that came down. But it was also neatly mowed and edged. Well kept-up: that was the phrase.
Just about all the South Bay Strangler’s victims who lived in houses had kept them up well. For a split second, Colin wondered if that meant anything. Then he saw a guy in a blue sweatshirt-a Filipino, was his first guess-standing on the front porch, and forgot about that. “Who are you? What are you doing there?” he barked.
“My name is Oscar Flores, sir.” Filipino, sure enough: name, looks, and accent all told the same story. “I had not seen Mrs. Mandelbaum for several days, so I flagged down the police car when it came by. The officers, they had to break down the front door”-which stood open behind him-“and they told me not to go in after them. But I am afraid there is no good news inside the house.”
Colin was afraid of the same thing. The sick-sweet odor welling out through the door might have been stronger, but there was no mistaking it. Something in there had died a while ago, and he could make a good guess about what it was.
“Maybe it’s natural causes.” Gabe Sanchez grabbed
for whatever straws he could find.
“Nah.” Grimly, Colin shook his head. “They wouldn’t’ve called for us if it was natural. They just would’ve sent for the meat wagon, and that would’ve been that.” Gabe’s heavy-featured face fell. Colin had got one step ahead of him.
Into the house, with another warning to Mr. Flores not to follow. Colin didn’t know what he expected. Overstuffed Victorian furniture, probably. That was the kind of stuff you figured a little old lady would have.
What he saw instead was Fifties or Sixties modern: almost as outdated, but in a very different way. Sharp angles. Plastic. A low chair that looked as if no little old lady who wasn’t also a gymnast would ever be able to escape it. An abstract clock on the wall.
“Meet George Jetson,” Gabe muttered, which wasn’t far wrong. Colin was reminded of the spidery building in the middle of LAX that had been planned as the control tower but ended up as a restaurant that didn’t do much business because it was so hard to get to. That pieces of concrete started falling off it a few years before the eruption didn’t help, either.
One of the uniformed cops came back into the living room. She looked green around the gills. Who would blame her? That smell was stronger in here. And she’d just been with what caused it. She managed a nod. “Lieutenant. Sergeant. She’s. . back here.” A gulp punctuated the short sentence.
“Thanks, Jodie,” Colin said, as gently as he could.
The hallway between the living room and the bedroom had dozens of pictures on the wall: Mrs. Mandelbaum and her children and grandchildren and maybe great-grandchildren. There were even a couple of old black-and-whites showing somebody who’d likely been Mr. Mandelbaum.
In the bedroom lay the old woman’s earthly remains. Near them stood the other officer from the black-and-white, a strapping ex-Marine named Albert. Strapping ex-Marine or not, he looked greener than Jodie had. He managed the pale ghost of a smile, almost as if he were the sun outside. “Sorry to bring you out for another one, Lieutenant. If it is, I mean.”
Supervolcano: All Fall Down s-2 Page 24
