by L. A. Morse
He turned and glared at me. The green eyes, at least, still had the same sharpness.
“Yeah. And you’re looking like a fucking prune, Spanner.” So, it seemed, had the tongue. “Christ, don’t you do anything except sit in the sun? I’ve thrown away old boots that had better complexions than yours. It’s going to catch up with you, you know. One of these days you’re going to wake up and you’re not going to have any skin left, just this gooey jelly all over your body.”
“It’s nice to see you too, O’Bee.”
He stopped glaring and smiled. “Sit down, Jake. That’s if you can bear to sit in the shade for a while.”
“I’ll manage.”
“You bring me something to drink?”
“You know you’re not supposed to drink.”
“I know that’s what the doctor says, but what I know is something different. Besides, what’s that bulge I see in your pocket? Either you brought me something or you’ve started to love me.”
I made a face at the old joke, pulled out the half pint, and handed it to him, shaking my head. He unscrewed the bottle and took a swig. He winced as it went down, putting his hand up to his side, then sighed and smiled.
“You sure you should be drinking that?”
“It’s okay, Jake. Really.”
I doubted it, but he took another drink and then put the cap back on.
“You hear about Buchanan?” he said.
“No. What?”
“Dead. Keeled over in his doctor’s waiting room.”
“Shit.”
“He wasn’t even sick. Just there to get a vitamin shot. And Nat Dawson?”
“Who’s that?”
“Ex-cop. Out of Central.”
“Don’t know him.”
“Oh. Nice guy. Decent. Well, he killed himself. Gas. Didn’t find the body for two weeks. You can imagine what it was like after that time, in this hot weather.”
“I’d just as soon not, thanks. You’re sure full of cheerful news.”
“Hell, it could be worse.”
“How?”
“It could be us.”
“That’s true.” I nodded but, seeing the way the whiskey had made red spots on O’Brien’s cheeks, I thought it might well soon be one of us. “You want to get out of here for a while?”
“What, and leave all this stimulating companionship?”
He waved a large hand around the courtyard. At intervals old people were sitting, singly or in pairs, some dozing, some staring blankly, a few reading, none talking. It had the feeling of isolation and suspension of an airport transit lounge in the middle of the night, everyone waiting for his flight to be called, wondering how much longer it would be.
A woman wearing a severe hair-do, a frozen smile, and a turquoise nylon uniform that was almost identical to the outfits used in the motel chain’s coffee shops went around telling everyone what a nice day it was and how they were having such a good time. There was no disagreement. She looked over at us, frowned briefly, and then went into the office.
“She doesn’t seem to approve of you,” I said.
“Ah, the Iron Maiden. She and her husband are the new directors. I like to think maybe I drove the old ones away. Though I’m not sure it was a change for the better. He used to be with a mortuary. Guess they decided there was more money in bodies that were still a little warm. She thinks I’m a troublemaker.”
“She’s right, isn’t she?”
“Oh, hell. All that means is that I wouldn’t let her treat me like an infant or a vegetable. Every time she came over to me with that look that said ‘Isn’t everything wonderful’ or ‘Have you been a good little boy,’ I made an obscene suggestion. I wanted to see if I could crack that goddamn smile of hers.”
“Apparently, you succeeded.”
“Not for a long time. No matter what I said, and I got pretty inventive, she just kept smiling. It was hard, you could see, like she was sucking on a lemon, but she kept it up. She had to. Then I finally got to her.”
“What’d you do?”
“Well, she said one of those goddamn annoying things, like ‘How are we today?’ meaning me, and I said we’d be a hell of a lot better if she did something or other to us. At this point I’m not even sure what particular act it was I proposed, but it must’ve hit a nerve. She looked like she’d been hit with a bucket of ice water. Then she went all red. Then she spit out something, like that I was a disgusting, filthy old man who was nothing but trouble and who should’ve been put down a long time ago like a diseased dog.”
“That was real nice.”
“No, you don’t see. It was great, perfect. It was the first time she ever acknowledged that she really noticed me—had ever noticed any of us, for that matter. I was here, goddammit, I was here!” O’Bee slapped his broad chest with his hand. “I tell you, Jake, it was an absolutely shocking moment. Shocking, as in electrical. We were all in the rec room, all the old wrecks, for some reason—mid-morning cookies or some shit like that—and the place just lit up like a switch had been thrown. Right away, the Iron Maiden realized what she’d done. She looked around and sputtered a bit, and then stormed out. Complete silence for a minute. Then everyone—at least everyone who wasn’t totally stroked out—started clapping, and then laughing, and then—goddammit!—started talking. I don’t know whether you’ve noticed, but no one talks around here. It’s like only the Iron Maiden and the rest of the staff have the power of speech. Which is exactly what they want—no talk, no complaints, no trouble. But they sure talked that morning, like a dam bursting, and I thought, What we have here is the start of a goddamn revolution.”
Talk about a dam bursting. It was good to hear O’Brien full of fight, and he’d even started to look a little better. I guessed we all needed listeners once in a while, and he obviously didn’t have many at Sunset Grove. “And did you have a revolution?”
“Of course not,” O’Bee snorted. “The bastards hold all the cards, always have. Everything was back to normal the next day. Except the Iron Maiden doesn’t talk to me anymore, which is fine with me, the stupid bitch. She doesn’t realize it, but by avoiding me, she shows that she knows I’m here. Even more”—O’Bee turned to me, smiled, and winked—”she wishes that I wasn’t.”
When we reached the car, I could see the woman watching us from the office window. I couldn’t tell if she was smiling. O’Brien opened the door and made a gesture of invitation to her. I don’t know how he did it, but with his bland smile and that innocent wave of his arm, he somehow suggested that if she got in the car, as soon as we were outside the gates, we would perpetrate unspeakable acts upon her scrawny, tense body. The figure at the window whirled and disappeared.
O’Brien chuckled evilly as he sat down, and took another pull at the half pint.
I drove to a Mexican take-out stand I had noticed on the way over to Sunset Grove. I hadn’t eaten for twenty-four hours and realized I was ravenous. O’Brien didn’t want anything, saying he hadn’t had much appetite lately and would just suck on the bottle. I got a couple of soft tacos piled with carnitas and chorizo and covered with a lot of hot sauce. No doubt I’d regret it in a few hours, but so what? At my age most pleasures carried a price, but there were so few of them that I was usually willing to pay it.
We sat at a table next to the stand while I ate and O’Brien drank. He shook his head and muttered predictions of intestinal disaster as he watched me put away the good greasy stuff. It kind of reminded me of the old days, when O’Brien and I would meet for lunch at some little joint downtown. He’d have a few beers and I’d have a few tamales. I also usually wanted a favor of him.
In the past I’d always been able to be straight with O’Brien, never had to dance around. I figured that still held. Besides, my request was so ridiculous, there was no way to work it into any reasonable conversation.
“I need some help,” I said.
“Ah, so your visit wasn’t entirely social.”
“Not entirely, no. But I’ve be
en meaning to—”
“Yeah, yeah, sure,” he cut me off. “You in some kind of trouble?”
“I’m not. I’m trying to help someone out of trouble.”
“I think I’ve heard that before.”
“It’s possible.” Indeed, it’d been one of my standard lines.
“But not for about a hundred years. What the hell are you doing?”
“O’Bee, you’re not going to believe this.”
“After what I just saw you shove in your face, Jake Spanner, I’d believe anything was possible from you. Spill it.”
I did. I gave him a slightly edited version of the situation, sticking primarily to the facts and leaving out my feelings. I also left out Sal’s name, because it didn’t really make any difference to anything; because maybe O’Brien wouldn’t be keen to help an old crook like Sal, no matter what; and because the fewer people that knew, the less chance there was of a leak or a screw-up. That was the way I’d always done things—no names unless absolutely necessary. I’d figured that if a client had wanted publicity, he’d have gone to a newspaper, not a P.I.
I stopped my account before Sal’s final phone call and looked at O’Brien.
He shook his head. “You’re right. It is hard to believe. It’s fucking incredible, is what it is. Like I said, what the hell are you doing? Don’t you think you’re a little old for stuff like this?”
“Yeah, I think so, but I’m in it anyway.”
“So I see. What do you want me to do? It looks like you’re doing a pretty good job on your own, getting slugged and losing three-quarters of a million bucks. Shit!”
“Well, you see, we’ve got a partial license number.”
“Ah, the light dawns. Might this have something to do with the lieutenant?”
I smiled. Innocently.
The lieutenant was O’Brien’s youngest kid, a fast-rising star in the police department. He never referred to him by name, only by title, as though he found it amazing that any offspring of his could be so contrary as to become one of those cops who wear suits. Actually, I knew he was proud as anything of kid’s success, and enjoyed a pretty good relationship with him.
“You haven’t changed at all, have you, Jake Spanner? Shit! Forty years ago you were doing the same thing, always getting me to give you department information so you could get yourself or some sleazy client out of a jam. Always coming to O’Brien to save your bacon.”
I shrugged but didn’t say anything. I knew him well enough to know that the growling and the bitching meant he’d already decided to help. If he wasn’t interested he would’ve said so straight out, and that would’ve been that. It had been the same way forty years ago.
“And now you want to take advantage of the fact that I happen to have a slight connection with a member of the force? To play upon whatever possible affection said member might have for me, so that he will violate policy and thereby jeopardize his standing in, and his future with, the department? All in the name of some dubious family tradition that says the O’Briens are duty-bound through eternity to pull Jake Spanner’s fucking fat out of the fire?” He looked a little surprised that he’d had the wind to get all that out.
I shrugged again. “And?” I said.
“What?”
“There must be something more.”
He glared. “There is.” He took a deep breath. “And you expect me to do all this because you were such a hot-shit big spender that you gave me a whole half pint of whiskey? Is that what you think?”
“Something like that.”
“Well, let me tell you, Jake Spanner, that I may be old, and slow, and sick, and stupid, but I can’t be bought that cheap. No fucking way. If I am going to sacrifice my dignity and make a disgusting play on the emotions and risk the lieutenant’s career, I expect to get at least another bottle out of it.”
I sighed. “Okay.”
“And something a little better this time.” He held the nearly empty bottle at arm’s length and squinted at the label “What the hell kind of name is ‘Levy’s Select’ for Irish whiskey?”
“It’s the liquor store’s house brand. Does it make any difference?”
“Only if you’re drinking it. The next bottle’s got to be better—at least the house brand of an Irish liquor store. Levy’s Select! Jesus Christ!”
“Okay. You got it.”
“And...”
“And? There’s more?”
“Yeah, one more thing.” Suddenly he was completely serious. “I assume you’re going to try to find the guys that hit you.”
“Right.”
“I want to help you.”
I looked at O’Brien. His green eyes were no longer flashing; they were pleading. What the hell was happening? Was there some kind of virus around that was making every old coot go crazy?
“Okay,” I said.
O’Brien grinned and slapped his hands. “Let’s go see the lieutenant, that brown-nosed little puppy.”
We got up. On the way to the car, O’Brien threw a heavy arm around my shoulders. “Just like the old days, huh? O’Brien and Spanner on the case.”
I disengaged myself from him. I was having enough trouble carrying my own body around today without adding a fat Irish drunk.
“Spanner and O’Brien,’“ I said. “Remember who’s buying the whiskey.”
* * *
At the station it took us a while to get in to see the lieutenant. The guy at the desk took one look at us—O’Brien in a faded flannel shirt that didn’t quite close over the bottom of his pink belly, me in another dapper mid-fifties get-up—and decided we were just another pair of geezers with nothing better to do but make nuisances of ourselves. He was right, of course, but that didn’t change the fact that the lieutenant might, possibly, still want to see us. He seemed incapable of understanding a word we said, like either he was deaf or we were mute. At first he tried to jolly us out of the station, then he offered us fifty cents to buy a bottle of plonk, then he tried to ignore us, then he threatened to throw us in the can. For being pains in the ass, I supposed.
I was used to stuff like that, and knew if you were patient, if you spoke real slow so they could see your lips move, they sometimes figured out that you weren’t speaking a foreign language, that maybe even, all appearances to the contrary, you had something to say. O’Brien, though, acted like he’d run into the police version of the Iron Maiden. He seemed to bristle and swell up like a blowfish. Started roaring and cursing, prophesying a future for the guy which included everything from an impacted bowel to writing parking tickets in Watts. Just as I thought we were in fact going to end up in jail after all, somebody came along who recognized O’Brien.
He whispered something to the desk man, who looked at us, pissed off, and said, “Well, why didn’t you say so?”
O’Bee’s head reared back, his eyes opening in amazement, so wide that white showed all around the green iris. I quickly said that we had, six or eight times, but the guy just shook his head and looked disgusted.
As we were led back to the offices, a Mexican kid with long greasy hair, a torn shirt, and a mouse over one eye, who had seen the whole exchange said with some admiration, “Nice going, guys. Look, would you tell somebody back there I been waiting two hours?”
I heard the desk guy say, “Oh, shut up!” just before the swinging doors closed behind us.
“Jesus!” O’Bee said. “That son of a bitch is so dumb, he couldn’t find his ass with both hands at high noon.”
It had been a long time since I’d been in a police station, but nothing had changed. A few new machines, computer terminals and so on, but that’s all. There were the same paper coffee cups all over, the same half-eaten sandwiches, the same stacks of forms and memos and directives that had filled up O’Brien’s old station house downtown. Also the same scent of pettiness, violence, sordidness, futility, and the knowledge of the people who worked there that no matter how much muck they cleared away, there was always more. The five thousand watts of fluor
escent lights didn’t so much brighten the place as put the dinginess in bold relief.
The lieutenant was waiting for us in the Squad Room. I’d known him almost since he was born, had even been kind of an honorary uncle to him when he was young, but it had been quite a while since I’d seen him. He didn’t look anything like his father. He was much shorter, tighter, more compact, with dark straight hair and a thick mustache that was new to me. If he’d had an eye-patch, he would’ve looked a little like the guy that used to advertise those shirts. Only his green eyes were the same as O’Brien’s, and they looked pretty happy to see his old man.
“Hey, Pop! Jake. What are you fellas doing down here?”
O’Brien looked up and down with a scowl. “Well, if it isn’t His Fucking Holiness, the lieutenant. What do you do in here, shit silver dollars, that they won’t let anyone in to see you?”
“Oh, shit, that wasn’t you out there, was it?”
He looked at me. I smiled and nodded.
“Christ, Pop! We heard you all the way back here. We thought the goddamn place was under siege.” He looked at me. “He used to listen to you. Couldn’t you have tightened his leash or something?”
“Hell, I thought he was doing pretty well.”
The lieutenant shook his head, grinning. “Incorrigible. A couple of senile delinquents. Come on.”
We followed him into the glass cubicle that was his office. He turned and laughed. “Don’t take it personally, you know. Anderson, the officer at the desk, is supposed to get rid of all the obvious nut cases.”
“Oh, thanks. That’s much better,” O’Bee said.
The lieutenant laughed again. “No. You see, Anderson thinks everyone is crazy. Last week he kept a city councilman waiting half an hour.”
“Well, that makes sense. Anyone on city council has to be mad as a hatter.”
“There’s a beat-up Mexican kid out there,” I said, “who’s been waiting two hours to see somebody.”
“Oh yeah? Anderson! Shit!” The lieutenant picked up the phone, said a few words, then hung up. “Thanks, Jake. Now, what are you boys doing?”
O’Brien looked at me, then at his kid. “We want you to run a partial license.”
