by Dan Vining
There was a faint sound, a whoosh-whoosh. He got up, fast.
Wallace came out onto the porch, down the steps, and out onto the little strip of lawn, with a gun in his hand. He raised it and fired eight reckless rounds in the general direction of the hovering Crow. He knew who it was.
Chapter Thirteen
The morning broke eternal, over on that other shore.
Razor was a stack of shoulder and back and legs and arms, the whole mess just lying there on the cement with that lobster claw coming out one side, palm up, as if waiting for a tip. There was no face or even a head—at least not that you could see—because he’d gone headfirst off the Avenue Twenty-Six Bridge over the Pasadena Freeway and the concrete-lined river beside it, the Arroyo Seco. The Arroyo Seco was a seasonal river, the only kind LA had now. Seco meant dry.
Ninety-nine.
It was the ninety-ninth body Nate had stood over. The last few days, the numbers were rolling up faster than the digits on the gas pumps of yesteryear. Today felt like the day he might break a hundred. He looked up. The Avenue Twenty-Six Bridge wasn’t that high, not more than forty or fifty feet, which meant it wasn’t on anybody’s Top Ten List of preferred SoCal suicide spots. You’d do better going off any of the hotels downtown or the middle O in the Hollywood Sign, if you were up that way anyway and had a little flair. Who would kill himself going headfirst off a bridge this low? Nobody. Except maybe a USC diver who’d just found out he hadn’t made the Olympics.
Whitey was up on the bridge, leaning over the railing like a fisher-person. Nate half expected him to spit.
He looked back down at the nasty pile of flesh and bone. The smell was starting to get to him. “I’m thinking maybe there’s a bullet in there somewhere,” he said. Il Cho was next to him. They hadn’t yet assigned a cop to replace Juan Carlos on the gang squad, so Cho was working back-to-back shifts. He looked it.
The trickle of water that was the mighty Arroyo Seco was twenty feet away from where Nate and Cho were standing. You could just step across it. Nate had set down his Crow a respectful distance away from the bridge and the body. No-Name stood at parade rest next to the bird, actual parade rest, feet apart, his hands clasped behind his back. A few other cops were on scene, another helo in addition to the one overhead pulling scan-and-record duty. Nate was hoping the coronette he saw from time to time would draw the body haul-off, the one who’d left him the teasing love note at the kimchi joint. Suzanne. He could hope all he wanted, but the ladies from the coroner’s office didn’t seem to be in much of a hurry to join the party. Or maybe they were elsewhere, working their asses off on a busy morning, bagging up the overnights. The day before yesterday, Nate had made a point of avoiding them, arriving on scene after they’d done their thing and split. Now he was stalling, wishing they’d show.
“His wife said he was depressed,” Il Cho said.
It made Nate laugh. “No way,” he said. “This guy was in his sixties, maybe seventies. A man that age knows who he is, good or bad. He wasn’t suicidal. The suicidal don’t know who they are anymore, they just know who they were or who they meant to be. I saw this one up close, on the job, with a gun in his good hand. I looked him in the eye. He knew who he was and he was just fine with it.”
“I guess,” Cho said. “Ostensibly.”
“Besides, somebody who works with a gun doesn’t jump off a low bridge when he wants to kill himself. What, he was out of bullets? It’d be like a carpenter using his shoe to pound a nail.”
“So you think somebody shot him and then threw him off.”
“I do. But you know me, I always think the worst of people.”
“The Incas, covering their tracks?”
“That wouldn’t be the most interesting answer but that’s probably it.”
Il Cho didn’t say anything. He was bone-tired and it was only an hour into his shift. He sighed, loud enough for everybody except Razor to hear him. “But you don’t think that’s what happened,” Cho said next. “So who did it? Zap Wallace, the Twenties? They tracked us tracking Razor?”
“I think that’s what we’re supposed to think. It makes a lot of sense. But, then again, maybe Derrick Wallace is a changed man. You know me, I always think the best of people.”
Cho looked up at the blank, dry sky. “Where are the coronettes?”
Nate squatted beside the mass of blood and bone and polyester. He cocked his head sideways, trying to see under the shoulder blades. “Who called it in?” he asked. He looked across the concrete wash. No neighbors, no houses or apartment blocks, no scrub brush, just the graffitied backsides of industrial buildings. This section of the Arroyo Seco was too grim even for the shadow-dwellers.
“Johnny Santo.”
Nate stood. “Santo’s my guy. Why didn’t he call me?”
“He talks to everybody,” Cho said.
“That hurts,” Nate said, though it didn’t hurt at all.
www
“Ostensibly,” Nate said out loud.
“Sir?” No-Name said.
They were bulldozing their way down the crowded noontime sidewalk on South Spring Street, a couple blocks over from Pershing Square, headed south. Nate didn’t know where or what for. Truth be told, he was just walking. He couldn’t get the snapshot of the bloody pile of human meat out of his head. Ostensibly, he was looking for Razor’s woman. Il Cho had said the wife worked in a downtown rag shop, silk-screening T-shirts. She was the one who said he’d been depressed.
“You wonder where we’re going,” Nate said over his shoulder.
“No, sir…”
“Of course you do.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Ostensibly, we’re looking for a widow,” Nate said. “Ostensibly.”
No-Name knew not to say another word.
Like a car crash, a white-haired boy, five or six, ran out of nowhere and banged into Nate, throwing his arms around one of Nate’s legs. White-haired. Nate’s grandmother—a long, long time ago—sometimes used the word towhead when she was telling a story about the old days, in Nebraska. He didn’t remember if it was a racial/ethnic slur or what. She was a nice old lady, probably wouldn’t think of speaking ill of the flaxen-haired.
Nate looked down at the kid hugging his thigh, the boy’s blond head right next to his service pistol in its tactical holster. No-Name was about to fling the boy to the concrete and possibly shoot him.
“Hey, buddy,” Nate said to the top of the lad’s head. “What’s your name?” No-Name backed off.
A young man, twenties—apparently the boy’s dad—caught up to the boy, apologizing. Father and son, they were skin and bones.
“It’s all right,” Nate said. “What’s your name, boy?”
Now the boy looked up. But didn’t open his mouth.
“He’s stopped talking,” the skinny father said, and put a period on it. He pulled him off of Nate, muttered another apology, and stepped away, went to another man in the crowd on the sidewalk, a man in his early forties who might have been the boy’s grandfather. The menfolk were wearing threadbare bib overalls, as if they’d stepped out of a diorama over at the Natural History Museum. Or The Wizard of Oz.
Nate watched the men and the little boy as they flowed south with the crowd. At the next corner, Fifth Street, a woman in a cottony dress came out of a Goodwill Store that once had been a big bank, a backpack over her shoulder. The boy went to her. To his mother.
www
The day had burned down to nothing. An hour and a half away from dawn when it would start up all over again, Nate stood at the window in his bedroom, watching the traffic slither through the pass below.
“It’s four in the morning. Where in the hell are they all going?” he said.
The coronette was in the bed, naked, uncovered. She was tall, even out of her work boots, flat on her back. Tall and tan. She was lying there feeling power
ful and safe and wonderfully wide awake.
“Home,” she said.
“Home from where?”
“Bars and Twelve-Step meetings.”
Nate was naked, too. He turned away from the glass and found his boxer shorts on the floor, pulled them on.
“You want me to go?” the coronette said. Her name was Suzanne.
“No,” Nate said.
“I’m done with you,” she said.
He came away from the window and got in bed beside her again. “No,” he said. “Stay.” He leaned back on the pillow.
She rolled over on top of him, straddling him, and stared at his face, comically close. “You actually mean it,” she said, looking deep into his eyes. “What’s happened to you?”
“Nothing,” Nate said and put his hand on her upper leg, where it curved toward her back.
When she was asleep, snoring into the pillow, he got out of bed and went to the radio room. He stood over the table against the wall, his gear. In the half-dark, the transmitter looked like a futuristic city, the uncovered tubes like glass office towers. He flipped up the toggle to ON and the VU meter lit up, warm, literally incandescent. While the vacuum tubes shook themselves awake, he stepped to the tall record rack and sorted through the LPs and found what he was looking for and sat down at the board. The mic was open, but he didn’t say anything. The needle on the VU meter quivered anyway, alive, anticipatory, picking up the sound of his breathing. Or maybe it was her snoring in the other bedroom. He’d wanted some comforting human noise in the house; now he had it.
He slid the record out of its sleeve, blew off the dust that wasn’t there, put it on the turntable, and gave it a spin it didn’t need. He set down the tone arm, side one, track one. He cut the mic and leaned back in his chair.
And thus it was that Leonard Cohen and his Suzanne—leaning out for love, wearing rags and feathers from Salvation Army counters—joined the two of them there in house and whoever else might be tuned in. If anyone was.
Chapter Fourteen
“Señor Passarelli!” the woman said again, much louder than the first time.
A big man walked across the lobby of a rundown downtown hotel, across the brown linoleum that hadn’t seen a shine in twenty years. The tall front windows were uncovered but so dirty that there wasn’t much light coming through, just a splash of it on the floor. Yellowish light. Not golden. There was a world of difference between dull yellow and golden, the man was thinking, and the light in Los Angeles was yellow. Not golden. No matter what they said.
It was hot and the hotel lobby wasn’t air-conditioned, only the rooms upstairs. The big man was wearing a dark brown suit with a matching vest and a tie that probably should have been on display in a museum somewhere. It was knotted in a half Windsor up under his Adam’s apple. When he knew he had to head out to Los Angeles, he got his one suit out of the closet and bought three crisp white shirts from the local men’s shop to wear with it. He wore the suit on the airplane and had worn it every day since he’d arrived, and he was going to wear it every day for as long as he had to be here. It still smelled like mothballs but less so each day. Hot as it was, he hadn’t loosened his tie as he walked around downtown, even when he was on the full sun side of the street. He didn’t think it would be right and he didn’t change his mind when he saw everyone else on the sidewalks dressed as they were dressed, some wearing next to nothing, looking as if they were headed to a party.
“Señor Passarelli!” She came out from behind the front desk. She was a Latina, a señora.
He kept walking, ignoring her. He was still thinking about yellow versus golden. He had a favorite movie that was about gold, looking for gold, men looking for gold down Mexico way. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Humphrey Bogart was in it and a “gnawed old bone” of a codger played by Walter Huston. It had been his father’s favorite movie, and the two of them watched it so many times it became his favorite movie, too, probably for the same reasons it was his father’s favorite, for what it said about the actual nature of things, about what really mattered. What was true and not what a man merely wished were true. Now that he thought about it, the movie was one of the few things his father had passed on to him. Not that his dad didn’t love him, not that he wasn’t generous. It was just that his father all his life had been dirt-poor and diminished—even in stature—because of it. But the two of them would sit with bowls of home-popped popcorn and watch this movie about gold, about looking for it and against all odds finding it. (Holding onto it was another matter.) In one scene, the men were sitting around a potbellied stove in a beatdown hotel in Mexico—even more beatdown than this one—talking about gold, how come it was worth twenty bucks an ounce, which wasn’t a joke amount of money then. Howard, the old man, who knew what the younger men had no way of knowing yet, answered by telling them that only one man in a thousand ever found gold, and so one man’s find represented not only his toil but that of the 999 other men who looked for it and never found it. Gold. Though you might as well substitute “peace of mind” or the steadfast love and devotion of a good woman.
Just as he reached the elevator, the insistent señora caught up with him, touching his arm.
“What?” he said, making it sound like a curse.
“Señor Passarelli.”
“What?” He pulled a white handkerchief out of his breast pocket and dabbed at his sweaty forehead.
“Do you speak Spanish?” she said.
“No. Why would you ask me that?”
“Because you said you were a Spaniard,” she said. “When you checked in.”
The elevator doors opened. He stepped in. “I’m Italian,” the big man said. “I never said I was a Spaniard.”
Just as the doors were closing, she jumped into the box with him. As his hand reached out for the controls, she beat him to it and pushed the button for the tenth floor where his room was. He breathed out through his nose and stared ahead, stared at the framed Certificate of Assurance of Safety & Dependability, which he noticed was dated November 11, 2004.
Up they went. “The Chinese own many of the buildings downtown now,” she began. She was a rather small Latina. Until the last few years, most people assumed she was Mexican, though she was Colombian. “Of course they built these new electric cars that are so popular, the Chinese. El Chino, we say en Español. I have nothing against them. They say that they have the largest factories in the world in China although unfortunately they pay their laborers much less than what is paid in other countries, even countries such as Korea.”
The brown-suited man looked up at the numbers. The two blinked on.
“I would estimate that they, the Chinese, now own half of the buildings you see when you go for your walks each day. At least a third. Certainly a good number of the hotels, including the Otani. Possibly half of the hotels.”
At six, the big man said, “Why in heaven’s name are you telling me this, woman?”
“This hotel has been bought. By the Chinese. Not the government, a Chinese man.”
“Un hombre chino,” the big man said dryly.
“No one likes change,” the Latina said. Her name was Valeria.
The elevator stopped and the doors opened immediately, as if the lift couldn’t wait to shed its passengers. The big man got out, turned to the right, walked. The carpet was frayed. Green. The hallway was long and dim. The light from outside was minimal—a painted-out double-hung window at each end of the hallway—and the hotel management was too mingy to turn on the overheads in the daytime, even though electricity cost next to nothing now. He walked fast.
She kept up. They passed by twelve doors. “We were owned by wealthy Mexican nationals. I never met them, the owners.”
They reached his door, the third room from the end. He turned to face her, standing close enough to poke her in the eye, though he wasn’t the kind of man to hit a woman. “What do the Chine
se want from me?” he said, one word at a time.
“They require advance payment for weekly guests who have no credit card,” she said. “They are lacking in trust, unlike the Mexicans. Or myself.”
He unbuckled his belt and undid the top button of his brown suit pants. The woman took a step back. He unzipped his trousers and parted the tail of his white shirt to reveal a canvas wallet attached to a band circling his waist like a girdle, what was known as “The Wary Traveler’s Friend.” He unzipped it horizontally and removed a sheaf of bills. He took hold of her right arm and pulled her closer and lifted her arm and flattened out her right hand. From the deck he dealt into her palm fourteen bills of various denominations.
“That’s for two more weeks, though I can’t imagine being here that long,” he said and, leaving his pants unfastened. He unlocked his door and went into his room without looking back.
“God bless you,” she said as the door closed.
He stood in the middle of the room for a moment, loosened his tie and pulled it off and threw it on the bed as he walked to the window air conditioner. He’d left the AC running three hours ago but now it was turned off. Somebody had been in his room. He looked around to see if anything had been disturbed, if anything was missing. Everything looked all right. Maybe the unit had auto-shutoff. Maybe it knew when there was no one in the room anymore—although it didn’t come back on until he turned the knob, cranked it up to HI.
He took off his suit coat and unbuttoned the vest as he hung the coat in the shallow closet. He had a gun tucked into the back of his pants, a little “pimp gun,” a .25 chromed semi-auto Colt with pearl grips that had been his grandmother’s. He dug it out of his waistband, rubbed the small of his back where it had dented the flesh, and threw it on the bed next to the tie.
He checked under the mattress. His other gun was where he’d left it.
Of course his name wasn’t Passarelli. But Passarelli was a real person, alive somewhere, if he was still alive. He had been thinking about ol’ Passarelli ever since he had heard his name called out in the lobby. They hadn’t been friends, exactly, he and Nico Passarelli, whom the other boys called “Pass.” Where he’d grown up, boys played sandlot baseball. It was in northern Georgia, so the scrappy field they’d laid out actually was a sandlot, dotted with sandspurs that kept anyone from playing barefoot. The big man was outsized even when he was ten or eleven, always the biggest kid, but Passarelli was the next biggest kid in the group. Neither of them was very good at ball, except when it came to smashing one into the trees every fourth or fifth time at bat. Passarelli always made fun of him because he was poor and his glove had a hole in it.
