by Jason Ridler
And nothing made sense. It was a mess. Jagged pieces. One biker. Peaceniks with grenades. Strange kids with skateboards. Big men who vanished. A rise in violence against soldiers and veterans. Blaming the longhairs. But the trail seemed to go to bikers. This was strange. Just like the Black Lotus in my pocket.
“James,” Alan said again, and his voice was strong. “Cactus mentioned you were a private investigator.”
I smiled. “He did?”
“Well,” Alan grinned. “He said you were just starting out.”
That was code for “stunk up the joint” when it came to my skills, at least compared to a guy who held tracking as a sacred art and was among the most feared members of the Counter Intelligence Corps. “That was kind of him.”
“This was a senseless act, and if those who are responsible are left to roam, we’ll never get justice.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a checkbook and a black pen with a gold circle around the body. It was engraved with the initials AJC. He wrote as he spoke. “I’d like to hire you on retainer. I want you to find the man who did this. And I want to give you all the resources you’ll need.”
He tore off the check, handed it to me.
I let it hang.
That check was a link in a chain to the rich, the mighty, the powerful. The people I didn’t serve. The people whom Edgar wined and dined and plotted with, the power brokers and senior operators of avarice who made the conditions for a rotting underclass whom they played like pawns and worse.
Alan was not a bad guy at all. Everything I’d seen or heard seemed to say the opposite. But he was man of wealth and influence and had likely been trained at prep school and elite Ivy League trust-fund vacation schools to view a little guy from Oakland like me as a tool, a servant, a serf without land and a slave without chains.
I tried not to hate Alan. But Veronica’s eyes were hungry for me to take the check. To be beholden.
I raised both my hands. “Thanks, Alan. I appreciate it. But I’m afraid I’ve already been hired for this case.” I reached into my inside pocket and took out one of the five business cards Starla had made me when she wasn’t on stage at the Thump & Grind Burlesque Club, which housed my office and apartment. She wrote out the details in an art-deco style:
ODD JOB SQUAD DETECTIVE AGENCY: NO CASE TOO WEIRD.
J. Brimstone, Founder and Lead Investigator.
Alan pocketed the check and took the card. I hated to make him feel small in front of his wife for the second time that day, but I needed to let these two leaders of today and tomorrow know I wasn’t their toy. “I’d like to enlist your aid in my investigation. You know the veteran scene. These old soldiers trust you. All the places you canvassed makes you the right man to ask questions. About anything strange. About anything out of the ordinary.”
“Like hippies assaulting our veterans?” Veronica said, voice as smooth as aged brandy.
“That’s one angle I’m trying to square,” I said. “But we don’t know what happened. And I plan to find out.”
“You mean hunting through the longhairs?” Veronica said with the same tone of condescension.
“Why?” I asked. “Do you have enemies among the peaceniks?”
She smirked. “More like occult dropouts than drugged-out communist sympathizers. Right, Alan?”
Alan held my card in his lap. “I hardly see how this is relevant.”
“It is now,” I said. “Alan?”
“Veronica is just being jealous.”
“Ha!” Her arms crossed with practiced power. She daggered one heel down and twisted it in a way I liked. “Of what? A runaway suburban nobody?”
“Just because Lorraine wasn’t from our circles didn’t make her a nobody,” Alan said with the soft strength of a man trying to control an anger that made him uncomfortable.
“I believe she goes by ‘Rain’ now,” Veronica said to me. “Be on the lookout for a dirty blonde who puts out and fears soap.”
“That’s enough!” Alan slammed his first into his dead leg. “She has nothing to do with this.”
“Than what does she have to do with?” I said. “Alan, if she is any way connected to what happened today—”
He shook his head, then relaxed his fist before looking up at me. “Veronica? Can you give us a minute?”
“To discuss that wench? Happy to be absent,” she said, and made sure her heels hit the ground hard with each step she took toward an ambulance.
“As bad as that was,” Alan said, “it would have been worse if she stayed.”
“A little pain now, a lot less pain later? I know that math, Alan. Now, about Rain?”
“Veronica hates her because . . . well, it’s hard to say without sounding stupid.”
“From what you both shared, I suppose Rain didn’t join you all at the cotillions.”
He smirked. “I hate it, James. The arrogance. The snobbery. The elitism. That’s why I liked Lorraine.”
I stifled a reaction I often have with the rich—gagging when I hear of their adventures slumming with their societal “inferiors.” But Alan wasn’t my enemy, not today.
“Rain’s a local girl?”
“From Modesto.” Hardly bragging rights, but, if I was being fair, Alan would be an incredible catch for someone trying to escape the long shadows of a desert town. “She was living in Long Beach, where her friends lived. I met her at an anti-war rally.”
“Ah,” I said. “And she took to a man in uniform.”
“No,” he said, rubbing the knuckles of his right fist in his left hand. “I took to the beautiful peace-and-love gal with dirty-blond hair. Sweetest person I’d ever met.” I had no image of comparison beyond a panorama of braless ladies in headbands. My own “aesthetic” was wider than Playboy, Marilyn, and Ann-Margaret. Being a road kid with the Electric Magic Circus, where one sees beauty so wild and different that pin-up girls are but one variation on a theme, I had no single vision of beauty. But damn, it was hard to wipe the standard of Veronica from my mind, which made me think this Lorraine was a natural beauty, a desert rose Alan saw and had to pluck.
“So, how did you screw it up?”
He blinked. “What makes you think I screwed it up?”
“Relax, Al. You’re among your own tribe. We always screw it up.”
He smiled. “It’s more like what I wouldn’t screw up.” The smile twitched. “I’m a modern guy, and I loved Rain, but she had a far more . . . open view of love and marriage than I did back then.”
“Love of the free variety?”
He sighed. “It was both ways. I don’t want you to think it wasn’t both ways. But the idea of another man having her, even if I could have someone else . . . this sounds hopelessly old-fashioned, but I only wanted her. Sounds young and stupid, doesn’t it?”
Damn. I was actually starting to like this rich bastard. “She stayed in the Land of Golden Copulations and you signed up?”
His jaw clenched. “Before I got my draft notice. And married Veronica before I shipped out. Her family, the Weathers?” The name hung to allow me time to fill in the blank, but I played ignorant, though I damn well knew the Candy Barons of the West Coast. “They’re longtime friends of my family. We’d known each other since childhood and there was always the assumption . . . Well, we were seen as a good fit. I shipped off a week later.”
Old story, going to war to avoid the pain of love. Alan really was an old soul. And Veronica seemed so hard and prudish that she was the warped mirror image of Rain: controlled, not free; hard, not soft; austere, not easy. And today shook her up hard. “The folks who were here today? The protestors of many colors? Were these Rain’s people?”
“They might be. They seemed, I don’t know, stranger? Everything in the city seems stranger since I got back.”
“Couldn’t agree more.”
We chatted more about Rain’s appearance. Her one identifying mark: a missing canine tooth in the right side of her mouth. “But it made her even prettier.”
I grinned. “You still have a soft spot, huh?”
“For our first true love, don’t we all?”
Izzy came to my mind like a hot blast of jungle air, my beautiful Filipina who had killed more fascists by the time she could legally drink than most American GIs, and who had kicked away my proposal as the childish whim of the young of heart before vanishing into America. “Veronica’s not a fan?”
“Of anything,” he chortled. “I’m being rude. Veronica has every right to her feelings.”
“So, you didn’t invite Rain here? She didn’t know you were going to be here?”
“I haven’t had any contact with her since I . . . came back. Besides, her group wasn’t radical. Except about sex, and, well, skateboarding.” He started laughing. “Can you believe that? What’s next, a gang of kids on mopeds? Armed with sticks?”
I logged the detail in the honeycombs of my mind, filed under “skateboards,” a category with nothing else in it, and carried on. “This group have a name?”
He closed his eyes, searching, then muttered. “Tumbledown. They had a ratty crashpad in Dogtown on the border of Santa Monica and Venice Beach called Tumbledown. They always rode along the Boardwalk, picking up pot and trying to recruit people to the cause.”
“What cause was that?”
The approaching sound of Veronica’s tip-taps tickled my spine.
“None that I saw or knew,” he said. “Beside getting their founder laid.” Veronica closed in as Alan added, “Blond asshole called Sonny Ray.”
“Alan, Foster sent the car,” Veronica said, placing her hands on the handles of his wheelchair. He didn’t turn to look at her.
A black limo pulled into the still-chaotic Legion Hall parking lot and took the space that had last held the ambulance that carted away Cactus. A hulking fellow emerged from the driver’s side, walked around the car, and opened a back door with tick-tock precision, then moved toward us. Framed like a linebacker, it was clear he was security, driver, and a spare pair of arms for his disabled patron. “Are you ready to go, Mr. Carruthers?” he said without a trace of urgency.
“Give us a moment, Dexter,” Veronica said. Like a dutiful dog that knows it will get a snack or smack if it doesn’t follow doctrine, Dexter turned around and waited by the car like a Beefeater guarding the Tower of London.
“We can’t thank you enough, James,” Veronica said, enjoying the chew of my name on her lip. “I’m sure Alan will help with your investigation, but we have another engagement.”
I didn’t exactly ignore her, but it was obvious my attention was solely on her husband. “Please, see what you can gather from the vets and their families, Alan. Call me as soon as you have anything that seems out of the ordinary, no matter how insignificant.” I considered the Black Lotus in my pocket. “Even the smallest thing can mean everything.”
“You got it,” Alan said. “Be safe.”
Veronica pushed his chair toward the limo. “Take care,” she said, letting her eyes linger on mine.
Dexter hoisted Alan out of his wheelchair like a ventriloquist lifting his dummy into a trunk, legs hanging limp as wet noodles, and gently deposited him in the back seat. Veronica rounded the back of the car and looked at me, lips pursed, then breathlessly open as she mouthed, “Call me.”
The Carruthers pulled away from the mess of the massacre and I realized I was now working pro bono to find the shithooks who’d brutalized good men for no good reason . . . and my only clues were a sex gang in Dogtown and the Black Lotus in my pocket.
It was time to hit the Boardwalk, so I turned to the lot where I’d parked Lilith before the madness began, hoping the tear in my tush wasn’t fatal . . . when my guts sank beneath the last dungeon of hell.
Lilith was gone.
6
I SAT AT THE BACK OF THE 108 MARINA DEL REY BUS, heading south, my butt wound itching as I played with the little green ring on my right index finger, a throwaway piece of flash from my carny days that always felt good when things went bad. The afternoon ride was filled with a mix of people and smells. Old black women heading to choir practice, discussing Psalms and smelling of sweet perfume. Farther down the aisle, a handful of Mexican construction workers clutched the reins overhead and shared the sweat of a hard day’s labor with the rest of us while they spoke in Spanish about their sons’ soccer games and if they were going to a union meeting. Hands hardened to thick leather gripped the handrails and held lunch pails that had held large meals for rough work under the sun. Near the middle of the bus, a couple of black teens were whispering to each other about whatever secret adventures were on for the day.
The public transit system of Los Angeles has long been the envy of no one. Or at least no one who has ever taken bus, rail, or street car, but that had nothing to do with the people who needed it. It was another way to make reaching the next economic rung difficult. When your daily commute for a ten-hour job was two hours each way, trying to make your life better was like running uphill on quicksand. L.A. was car country. A car was more than transportation, it was possibility with chrome trim.
And a car was something I did not currently have. Because someone had stolen Lilith.
Someone who would have to pay. Just not now.
She was gone, but perhaps recoverable. I tried not to think too much about Lilith. I needed to concentrate on finding who on this astral plane would target a bunch of veterans, or, maybe, a specific veteran.
“Ladera Heights,” said the driver, a red-faced Scandinavian with thin lips and deep pit stains. The bus stopped. The choir ladies on my left stood and headed toward the side door.
“Afternoon,” I said.
“Afternoon,” they responded with varying levels of enthusiasm, each one looking like respect incarnate, but wary of a kind remark from a scruffy-looking white man. I could not blame them. They descended the steps. My thoughts ascended.
Cactus had enemies, of course. He was security at a casino. He’d pissed off more than one member of our platoon with, well, being in command, even if he suffered in the mountains and basins with us. Most of the WWII fellows could have enemies, too, because being a soldier didn’t mean you were a hero. But the highest value target for a hit was Alan Carruthers, a Vietnam volunteer and millionaire heir. And yet, the assault was so wild and unfocused you’d think it had been planned for three months by the Gang Who Couldn’t Shoot Straight.
“I have the toll!”
His voice was rich with the street, cigarette damage, and screaming for your life. The grace of the black women was soon replaced by a gray nightmare. At the front of the bus stood a dirty white dude, six feet straight up, hair and beard wild and battleship gray, wearing a once-brown poncho aged to the color of burnt tobacco. He placed each of his coins in the box, muttering as they clinked. I couldn’t help but think of Charon and the River Styx as the gray eminence of the gutter turned to the back of the bus . . . and the stink of him rose to full volume. Dried urine, old and sharp, flecks of feces for good measure, and the deeper moist tang of someone whose open sores were leaking onto their clothes.
Knees were pulled in and faces averted as he walked to the back of the bus.
He gazed from side to side as if to part the commuters, Moses of the Metro, leading no one out of bondage but looking like he’d been wandering the streets since the Spanish called it home.
Working with carnies, you learn how to treat people different than in civilized society. I had heard every possible stripe of racist, sexist, degrading, and debilitating venom come out of the mouths of people who looked far better than this lost soul. While training me to be a stick—the “local” who would challenge the pros—for Hercules and the other circus wrestlers, Dr. Fuji once told me that kindness must always be your first attempt, since “everyone is fighting secret battles.” Edgar’s approach was a tad different: “All people are tools or fools unless proven otherwise.” Me? I needed cause to be a shithook.
Thus, the partition of disgusted faces along both sides of the bus di
dn’t really register with me. I’d smelled worse, seen filthier, and didn’t judge this lost soul whose story I couldn’t know. But as he strutted closer, I felt antsy.
I closed my mouth and rolled my tongue. The flavor of this sad man was hard to pin down . . . magic? If so, it was the barest of morsels, far less than Cactus as he walked between this world and the next.
The man grumbled, grunted, and swayed. Bushy eyebrows twitched. Then he sniffed me.
His wrinkled lids rolled with eyes hidden, until a cracked and black iris was revealed to me and, so it seemed, to me alone.
“You . . .” the voice echoed as if from a rusty sewer drain.
“Me?” I said. “Hey, old timer, happy to give my seat.” I stood.
“You taste of chaos.”
I sat back down. “Uh, groovy. I prefer Beat poetry, man, but whatever floats your boat.”
A dark-haired Latino kid in a tri-color T-shirt and brown cords so worn they’d likely been bought by his grandpa pointed and whispered. “That’s Weasel. He’s always giving sermons on the bus. You know him?”
I shook my head.
“I know you,” Weasel said, low and jagged. “They said you’d come.”
“Afraid I don’t know this ‘they’ of yours,” I said. “I’m a freelancer.”
Weasel shook his fists. “Gods from the cosmos above said a man would come who tasted of chaos, of death and plague and misery, who would walk across the lines of the past and the future and herald the coming Armageddon which will set this world ablaze! And in the maelstrom, as civilization falls, as buildings crumble and snuff out the living, there will be a new age for the strong, as everywhere others will be bound in chains, a period of rapine abuse and slavery that will erase our world like a head wound and in its graveyard a new Babylon of blood and thunder, of rape and mutation, of sundering of all we hold dear, an age of barbarism heralded by the coming of the man with the Black Lotus!”
The barest flicker of recognition caught Weasel’s attention.
