by Rich Leder
And being around dead people was even worse, which was unfortunate because he was a mortuary accountant. Meetings at mortuaries when dead bodies were on display were tough for Mike. He’d lost his lunch in mortuary restrooms more times than he cared to recall.
His mother’s room in Northridge Hospital had a smell he could hardly keep down. It was the aroma of medicine mixed with antibacterial cleaning solutions mixed with old age mixed with institutional food mixed with death. He had to concentrate to keep his stomach in his stomach.
The room was pale blue with white trim. The floor was tiled, white with blue speckles. It was a single room, and his mother was in the mechanical bed. There were trays and screens on metal arms that stretched from the wall out over the bed and rotated and moved and bent and adjusted to whatever position the patient was in.
Linda was flat on her back with just a slight elevation to her head and shoulders, not that she would know it. There were tubes in her arms connected to bags of clear fluid and wires attached to her body running to medical monitoring machines that beeped and buzzed and flashed and printed out numbers and lines of code that were indecipherable to laymen but told doctors and nurses the story of his mother’s heart attack. There was an oxygen mask over her nose and mouth. Her skin had no color, no pink at all. Instead, it was picking up the blue of the walls, making her look dead, though she wasn’t. Her eyes were closed. Her hair was brushed to the side. Her heart was ever so slightly beating, a dying heartbeat, intermittent and faint. She was conscious but drifting in and out of the world.
There was a white bedside dresser with a potted plant on top and two white-framed prints of serene landscapes on the wall just above it. A blue reclining armchair sat in one corner, in case a family member wanted to spend the night. There was a wide window with a sheer blue curtain that had been pulled completely across the glass so that light could bathe the room with midday glow. Non-stop air conditioning made the room—the entire hospital, for that matter—uncomfortably cold.
Dr. Thieman, the cardiologist, was standing with Mike at the end of the bed, talking about the flow of oxygen-rich blood, about how heart attacks were the leading killer of both men and women in the United States, about atherosclerosis, which was the building up of plaque in the arteries over many years.
“Heart failure is a condition in which the heart can’t pump enough blood to meet the body’s needs,” Dr. Thieman was saying, but Mike wasn’t especially hearing him.
Instead, Mike was looking at his mother and thinking about the day his father left for New Orleans. He was ten years old. His brother was seven. They lived in Canoga Park, near the intersection of Saticoy and Farralone, in a small yellow house with a scrubby lawn in the front and an above ground pool in the fenced-in backyard. It was a rental house, one in a long line of Valley rental houses they’d lived in when the boys were young. Mike remembered thinking they were never settled, were always moving, running out of one house in the dead of night and into another.
On the day their dad ditched them, Linda was playing catch with the boys in the front yard, teaching them to throw strikes. She had a good arm. She was petite and pretty with a good figure, brown hair and green eyes that sparkled in the late afternoon sun. She was soft spoken and loving but firm and serious about raising her sons right. She was forty-two at the time. Her husband, Jeff, was a little older.
Mike knew his father should have been the one out there instead of his mother, that it was Jeff’s job to play ball with his boys like he had seen other fathers do, and he was already suspicious that his used-car-salesman dad was a loser.
Beyond his suspicion, Mike didn’t like his father. He couldn’t remember ever liking his father. His father was mean to him and to his mother, though not to Danny. Mike knew it when he was very young and didn’t like it. His father was a flim-flam man. He didn’t know what that meant, flim-flam man, when he was ten, but he’d heard his grandmother, Linda’s mother, call Jeff that to his face one day and never forgot it.
Danny had a connection with Jeff. They looked alike, for one thing—the hair, the shape of the face, the lean and lanky build. But it was more than that. Jeff and Danny seemed to get each other in a way that Linda and Mike did not get Jeff. Mike was on the outside with his mother, who he looked like and acted like and thought like and idolized.
On this particular late afternoon at the small yellow house in Canoga Park, Mike and Danny were throwing strikes when the front door opened and Jeff stepped out carrying a single suitcase and smoking a cigarette, looking like James Dean or Johnny Cash, dressed in all black and looking like a badass. He stood on the front step for a moment, dropped the cigarette, rubbed it out, and walked to the Camaro parked in the one-car driveway. He opened the car door, turned to Linda and the boys, and said, “Going for a drive.”
He drove to New Orleans. They never saw him again.
Linda said right away that he was gone for good. And instead of falling apart, she went to night school at Pierce College while working full-time, got her two-year accounting degree, and landed a job in the office at the swank El Caballero Country Club in Tarzana. In five years, she was the head bookkeeper, a job she had held for twenty-three years while raising her boys as a single mom in the San Fernando Valley, putting dinner on the table night after night, doing the laundry, helping with homework, teaching them, by example, with love and patience and kindness, how to work hard, be accurate, honest, and proficient, and to throw strikes. Saint Linda.
She promised never to move her sons again and lived in the small yellow rental house in Canoga Park—with Danny—to this day, the day of her heart attack.
“If the clot becomes large enough,” Dr. Thieman was saying, “it can completely block blood flow through a coronary artery, which is what happened to your mother.”
“Will she live?” Mike said.
“She’s strong,” Dr. Thieman said. “I don’t know if she’s strong enough.”
At that moment, Danny walked into the room. The physical contrast between him and Mike, as always, was sharp. Mike looked dumpy in a blue suit with wing tips. Danny was slick in hip jeans, a smooth satin shirt, and sweet Nikes.
“This is my brother, Danny. This is Dr. Thieman,” Mike said.
“Nice to meet you,” Danny said. “Thanks for taking care of my mother.”
Danny shook Thieman’s hand, and the doctor nodded, acknowledging Dan’s gratitude, which sounded real and perfunctory at the same time. The brothers had not seen each other in six months, since Christmas at the small yellow house, but they did not greet each other at all. No handshake, no hug, no hello. Mike wondered if Thieman sensed the awkwardness between the brothers and decided the doctor could have sensed it if he were in another wing of the hospital.
“We’re watching her around the clock,” Dr. Thieman said. “If you need anything, ask the nurse to find me.”
The machines attached to Linda whirred and buzzed. The air conditioning was an umbrella of white noise. Mike realized the back of his neck was cold, though it could have been his brother who made him feel that way and not the frigid hospital.
“I’ll have another chair brought in,” Thieman said. “I’m assuming you’re both going to stay.
Mike nodded immediately and looked at his brother. Danny hesitated, and Mike could see in his eyes that his brother wasn’t planning on staying; he was going to fade like he always faded. He was unreliable as a human being, selfish and irresponsible. It infuriated Mike. It had always infuriated him.
“Yes, get him a chair,” Mike said.
The brothers gave each other a look that was even colder than the hospital.
“Sure,” Danny said to Thieman.
The cardiologist nodded at both Mike and Danny and left the room.
“Incredible,” Mike said, meaning not Linda but Danny.
“Maybe she wakes up in an hour and lives twenty-five more years,” Danny said.
“Maybe she doesn’t wake up at all,” Mike said, and the thought ran
through him like a nightmare.
Danny didn’t take that conversation any further. He moved to the bed, looked down at his mother and said, “So, what happened?”
“She had a heart attack,” Mike said, moving to the other side of the bed.
Danny made a noise that said, what an asshole. “At work, at the house?”
“She was at her desk at the club, and then she was on the floor, and then she was in an ambulance, and then she was here,” Mike said.
“She looks small and old,” Danny said. “She looks blue.”
“She’s dying,” Mike said.
“Marcy on her way?” Danny said.
“Flying the kids to New Jersey. I couldn’t get her. Left a voicemail for her to call me but didn’t say why. Girls are staying with Marcy’s parents all summer. Marcy comes back in a week.”
“Wish I was in New Jersey,” Danny said, “or somewhere else. I’ll take the remote.”
Mike handed it to his brother and thought, I wish you were somewhere else too.
GREAT STUFF
LAPD Detective Gary Schuler was a comedian. No kidding. He was a stand-up comic. He spent off-duty evenings polishing his routines at open mic nights at comedy clubs around Los Angeles, including Sal’s, Ha Ha, Flappers, Echoes Under Sunset, Improv, Dangerfield’s, and a dozen more. He was a comic at any club, café, or coffee shop that would give him a stage, twenty minutes, and a microphone on a night he wasn’t working. His goal was to retire from the police force one day soon, get on the late night talk show circuit, go on a cross-country tour, and see his name in bright lights. A role on a network sitcom wouldn’t be bad either. His own sitcom would be even better.
He was forty-eight years old and had worked out of the Devonshire Community Police Station on Etiwanda Avenue before moving to an empty office at an LAPD towing lot, where he investigated the weirdest crimes in the Valley. Detectives from all seven Valley Bureau Patrol Divisions as well as the Traffic Division called Gary whenever the crime in question was too bizarre for them. He liked these cases, Gary said, because they provided him with material for his act—in the sense that these cases were his act.
Gary would take the stage—“Ladies and gentlemen, give it up for ‘Detective’ Gary Shuler”—and tell the audience about a crazy crime he was investigating that he thought was hysterical. (Like many of his LAPD colleagues, the comedy club folks didn’t believe Gary was an actual detective either.) The problem was that Gary had been working these wacko crimes for too long, and his sense of humor had become as twisted as the cases themselves, and he was alone in thinking they were funny. He often laughed his way though the set—and was often the only one laughing.
So when the Traffic Division got a call about a white poodle being tossed out the back window of a speeding Lexus in heavy freeway traffic, their first thought was Gary Schuler. Gary’s first thought was Excuse me, waiter, I’ll have the poodle paillard, a thought that made him chuckle. He wrote the joke down in his pocket pad with a note that read: this is the one I’ve been waiting for.
The dog had been scooped up with a shovel, deposited in a black garbage bag, and delivered to Gary’s tow-lot office. Gary opened the bag and examined the dead dog. Remarkably, it was not a flattened, bloody mess. Instead, it had been hit by a car going eighty and shot like a cannonball forty feet in the air to the side of the freeway. Its neck and back and bones were all broken, but this was no poodle pancake. The tag was still around its neck. It said Chachi on the front. An address was engraved on the back.
The woman who’d contacted the police was driving the other way on the 101 and didn’t get the Lexus license number. No one else on the freeway even bothered calling it in. Either they thought Tarantino must be shooting a movie or they thought I don’t like poodles anyway. The result was the same: the only place for Gary to start his investigation was Dr. Donald Greenburg’s house on Escalon Drive in Encino.
Gary parked his jet-black, two-door, 1965 Chevy Impala SS on the street, grabbed the garbage bag from the trunk, and started up the walk toward the front door. It was a hilly Encino neighborhood of large LA ranch homes landscaped to within an inch of their lives—lush, manicured, edged, and mown and blown by Mexicans driving red pickups towing flatbed carts jammed with lawn care gear and pesticides. The houses were close together, but the landscaping ensured total privacy from the neighbors. It was the ideal place to be wealthy and weird. Great stuff for the act, he thought.
Gary held the garbage bag in one hand and rang the doorbell with the other. No one answered, but there was a luxury Mercedes coupe in the driveway next to an Enterprise rental car, so he rang again. He was about to ring a third time when Dr. Greenburg opened the door.
It was just after five on the first day of summer, so the sun was still in the sky, though leaning toward the horizon. The temperature had dropped all the way to one hundred three. Gary could feel the air conditioning blasting out of the Greenburg ranch. A portico shaded the entrance patio, so he didn’t have to squint to see that Greenburg had white powder all over his nostrils. The dentist was wearing a hip Hawaiian shirt and board shorts. He looked incongruously cool, a fifty-six-year-old, hawk-like human wearing palm trees. His eyes were red and wired. Hilarious, Gary thought.
“Dr. Donald Greenburg?” Gary said, showing Greenburg the badge clipped to his belt.
“Yes,” Greenburg said, eyes darting back and forth between the garbage bag and the badge.
“Detective Gary Shuler. I’m guessing your wife was baking sugar cookies and you couldn’t believe how good they smelled.”
Greenburg cocked his head to the side like a dog that has no fucking idea what you’re saying, then suddenly straightened up and wiped his nose. “Yes. I mean good, or, you know, I mean—”
“I’m afraid I have bad news for you today, Dr. Greenburg.”
Again, the cocked head. “Bad news?”
“Very bad. And I think you might already know what it is.”
“I do?”
“May I come in? It’s a hundred degrees, and I can only imagine what’s germinating inside this bag.”
Greenburg swallowed, rubbed his nose, and licked his teeth with his tongue. He couldn’t stop staring at the garbage bag.
“Today would be good, Dr. Greenburg,” Gary said.
Greenburg moved aside, and Gary went into the house. It was an open floor plan. To the left was the kitchen, to the right was a hallway to the bedrooms, and straight ahead was the large living room/dining room combo. The interior design channeled Dr. Seuss—walls and floors and rugs and lamps and curtains and cabinets and tables and chairs and great big fat sofas with cushions stuffed to bursting and all of it in shocking bright blues and reds and greens and yellows. Gary expected the Cat in the Hat to run around a corner, followed by Thing 1 and Thing 2.
The entire back wall of the house was French doors (each one painted a different eye-popping color) that opened onto the pool, where Carol was doing yoga in a multi-colored polka dot leotard that made her look a hell of lot like the leopard from Put Me In The Zoo, if that hopeful Seuss cat had undergone an unimaginable amount of plastic surgery. Gary stopped to take in the house and the yoga woman. He was speechless but thinking, Conan, here I come.
“My wife is the decorator. Obviously,” Greenburg said. “My office is down the hall.”
Gary followed Greenburg a few doors down the hallway and into the dentist’s home office, possibly the only room in the house that didn’t look like the Lorax lived in it. There were floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, a flat-screen television, a leather sofa, a desk and credenza, a leather lounge chair, a few floor lamps, and a coffee table upon which was a small mirror with a tall pile of cocaine and several heavy lines laid out.
Gary looked at the coke and then looked at Greenburg and thought the dentist had been so distracted by the black garbage bag that he’d forgotten he was in the middle of snorting half of Columbia before his doorbell rang.
Greenburg looked at Gary and then at the cocaine
and then at Gary. “I’m having a terrible day,” he said.
“I can see that,” Gary said.
“Are you going to call the police?”
“I am the police.”
“Right. Detective Schuler. Are you going to arrest me now?”
Gary wasn’t interested in the cocaine. He was sympathetic to addictions of all kinds. For years, he couldn’t quit Oreos no matter how hard he tried. “Studies show lab rats get more addicted to Oreos than cocaine,” he said, “so, no. Now I’m going to show you what’s in the bag.”
Gary opened the bag and held it so that Greenburg could see its contents. The dentist’s face fell three full inches (while it was falling, his tongue took the time to lick his teeth), his shoulders sagged, and the light in his coked-out eyes went dim.
“I thought you’d want to say good-bye, bury him in the yard or something, instead of him being incinerated at the dump,” Gary said.
Greenburg nodded and was quiet and then said, “My wife thinks the maid left the door open and the dog ran away.”
“Doesn’t sound good for the maid.”
“We fired her.”
Gary closed the bag, tied the top in a knot, handed it to Greenburg, and made notes in his pocket pad, investigating the case and writing his new act at the same time.
“The call came in from a Camry going south on the 101, a woman named Christine Bender,” Gary said. “Ms. Bender said she saw your dog get tossed out the back window of a silver Lexus heading north.”
“Did she get the license?”
“She was going too fast. She saw the Lexus and the dog fly out the window and that’s it.”
“So you don’t know whose car it is.”
“No. But I know more than you think. Your address is on the back of Chachi’s nametag, so I looked you up before I rang your bell. I know your date of birth and Social Security Number. I know you’re a dentist. I know your office is in the City National Bank building at the corner of Sepulveda and Ventura. I know you’re married to Carol Wilson Greenburg and that she does yoga and maybe some plastic surgery?”
