by Avery Duff
Gia: “Let’s make the girl a mysterious Bulgarian. Those cheekbones, gorgeous women.”
Robert started over: “Okay, so try this. Let’s say a gorgeous Bulgarian girl ropes in Carlos. Or the Bulgarians use her to rope in Carlos. One way or another, he gets in front of these Bulgarians, who set up two sophisticated-looking investments—on paper anyway. Big-man Carlos, maybe a little stoned—in love, for sure—swallows the hook. The girl, she sticks around, milks the Carlos cash cow till he runs dry, then she splits. You’re Carlos, and you lost all your money, and you screwed over your brother and his kid. What does that make you? El Débil, the weakling your father always said you were. So you’re drinking brandy, smoking dope, worried sick because it’s all your fault. No wonder the guy had a heart attack.”
“Bleak,” Erik said.
Like a Dickens novel, but Robert liked the feel of that scenario.
Gia stood, asked Erik. “You staying for dinner?”
“I could probably work it in,” Erik said. “I’m thinking . . . steak?”
Erik took off to Brentwood Fine Meats to buy fine meats, as he put it, while Gia found a little study time sandwiched between interruptions. Robert walked Delfina down to Teo’s parked truck for clean clothes. The books Evelyn had left for Delfina sat in the mailbox: Wonder and one of the Princess books. The watch that Evelyn had taken instead of her fee was in the mailbox, too.
Evelyn had a soft spot. Who knew? That watch meant another $8,000 or so went into Teo and Delfina’s kitty.
Robert showed Delfina her new books.
“From the lady you met at the hospital. Do you like them?”
She hugged the books to herself. “Oh, yes, I read them when we lived at the Mission, but I never had my own copy.”
“Let’s call Evelyn tomorrow and thank her, okay?”
Jumping up and down, she said, “Yes, yes! Okay!”
Once he unlocked the truck and lifted Delfina inside, she looked through her things. Fully aware that he wasn’t close to answering her question—Why do they want to hurt my daddy?—he checked Teo’s padlocked drawer for whatever it might yield.
“When will Daddy wake up?” she asked from behind him.
She sat on her bed, looking at him. He knelt in front of her, at a momentary loss for words.
“I don’t know exactly. Doctor Wan said in two more days they’d think about waking him up. Maybe it will be longer, though.”
“How much longer?”
“Well, if I said I knew, I wouldn’t be telling the truth, and I don’t want to do that.”
“Okay,” she said. “I hope it’s not much longer, Robert.”
He took her hand and said, “I hope so, too, Delfina. Do you know your daddy’s lock combination?”
“Mine’s one-two-three. Guess what his is?”
“Mmm . . . three-two-one?”
She clapped her hands.
“Think he’d mind if I looked in his drawer?”
“No. He told me he trusted you a lot. A whole lot,” she added.
“Well,” he said. That was all he could come up with.
Inside the drawer, he found $300 cash. An album of family pictures, too: all of them some combination of Teo, Delfina, and her mom, a short blonde woman with fire in her eyes. To him, the album was a journal of descent. From a rental home with a yard to an apartment to a smaller one. Booze, more booze, and drugs in evidence, loaded friends, heavy eyelids, a larger tat count, and gang signs.
Other loose photographs floated in the drawer. Sifting them, he found an eleven-by-fourteen-inch black-and-white photograph, worn around the edges but a quality high-contrast shot of a boxing ring; the aftermath of a match.
Night of the Ramos, he decided. The shot Teo never got around to showing me.
Downtown at the Olympic, it would’ve been 1960. The night Vincent Famosa won the $300 that started him down the road to his first piece of real estate. For years, he had brandished this photograph at the dinner table to remind his sons who was king of the roost.
Robert recalled Teo’s version of Vincent’s tirades: How many trustees you two boys see at this table? Only one trustee here I can see!
In the photo, TV lights still blazed on the fight’s aftermath. Assorted people milled about the ring. The loser, slumped; the winner, arms raised; two guys who’d just risked their lives for a W.
That had to be Vincent strutting his stuff among them—dapper, café au lait, his fedora perched on his head just so, his jacket buttoned against his trim frame. Vincent stood next to the beat-up fighter with his head down. He had to be the Cubano-Mexican—Vincent’s Ramos—who’d just lost on the judges’ scorecards. That was the fighter who’d given Vincent the prefight tip—that he’d die before going down against the Mexican Ramos.
Cool photo, he was thinking. Newspaper quality.
Looking on the back, he expected to see a stamp from the Los Angeles Times or the Herald Examiner, but it was blank.
Also in the drawer—several small photos of Vincent and Zara, with serrated edges like the Polaroids in his own family album. A little washed out over time, with rounded boulders in the background.
Vincent sat on a fallen tree—maybe a sawed-down log—scowling at the camera. Back straight, arms crossed, his sharp-looking Stacy Adams shoes shined. Like that log’s his throne and he’s the one sitting in judgment of the world. Zara stood over to his left in shorts and hiking boots, a bandanna around her neck, hands resting on her canted hips. Looking at Vincent—glaring at him, maybe? Could be he was reading too much between the lines, but it looked like les bon temps weren’t rolling just then for this Crescent City couple.
“Robert,” Delfina asked, “is it okay if we go see Daddy before dinner?”
“That’s a good idea,” he said.
As she ran inside for her Hello Kitty pack, he locked the cube. A car approached the house. Robert didn’t recognize it. Then it stopped. The driver’s side front window rolled down. A hand held out a paper bag. The engine revved. Robert peered inside at the driver—Reyes.
“Five grand plus, for the you-know-what,” Reyes said. The hashish. “Best to Conchita. Brentwood, estoy nervioso. I’m outta here.” Then Reyes took off, and just like that, Robert had dropped another $5,000 in his clients’ kitty.
Robert waited outside Teo’s hospital room while Delfina shared private thoughts with her father. According to the nurses, nothing had changed with Teo’s situation. Watching through the window, he saw Delfina talking to Teo like he could hear every word, and he tried not to let his heart break in front of her.
Ten minutes later, she joined him and took his hand.
“I told him I’d go to the chapel to say a prayer for Mommy. Is that okay?”
“I think the chapel is on the—”
“Gia takes me there. She prays, too.”
Still holding his hand, she took him to the fourth-floor chapel. Near the front, they found a pew and slid into it.
In front of them, a stained-glass Jesus Christ hung from the cross, his feet nailed to its vertical beam, his hands nailed to the crossbeam. Above his head, the letters INRI. An acronym, if he remembered right, for Jesus the Nazarene, King of the Jews. A simple, backlit glass tableau, but the point was made: Jesus Christ suffered on the cross and died for our sins.
Delfina asked, “Aren’t you going to pray?”
“I was getting ready to,” he said, leaning onto the pew in front of them.
Lying to a child in church—you’re off to a bad start.
Praying now, he put in a few good words for his father, hoping that schizophrenic Garrett Worth would find some kind of peace. He asked that his mother—living with his uncle—wouldn’t upset the family applecart any more than she had already, and that his first cousin, Rosalind, once his best friend, would reach out to him one day.
And Delfina, he prayed. What a wonderful little girl she is, with her limited wants. Just to be with her father. To know he’s safe from harm, safe from the streets. Is there
any reason that’s too much for her from this world? I hope not—I pray not, so please, God, forget all the other stuff I prayed about. Just that one thing for her. Let her be with her father, and let his brain be normal after he wakes up. That would be great. Actually, that would be a miracle. Amen.
Opening his eyes, he sat back in the pew. Delfina held that dark river rock while she prayed. The same rock he’d seen her with at Gia’s. In this light, he noticed the rock had been altered.
“Amen,” she said, and saw what he was looking at. “My rock, do you want to hold it?”
“Sure,” he said.
He’d been right. Something, a stamping machine or a laser, had punched or carved all the way through the middle of it. Far from being a work of art or an artifact, it looked mass produced. Holding it up to the light, he squinted through the cored-out part. Still, the image eluded him.
“That’s upside down,” she said. She turned it around in his hand.
“I’m not very smart,” he said, smiling at her.
Holding it up again, he saw what could be the outline of a bushy tree. Impossible to tell what variety, given the lack of workmanship.
Delfina took back her rock. “It’s from when Daddy drove us to the desert. We were looking for Jesus. Want me to tell you about it?” she asked.
“Please,” he said.
Warming up to the story, she said, “Okay. Daddy had a car, and he took me with him. Not our truck, we didn’t have it yet, but he borrowed a car from somebody. One of his bad friends, I think, and so we drove in the dark, and I tried to sleep. Finally, I did, and when I woke up, I saw all the spaceships, and I got sick to my stomach.”
Spaceships?
“Daddy said it was because I ate something bad from a food truck on San Pedro.”
“But your daddy drove you to the desert?”
She nodded. “And on the way, he bought me a milkshake, and then we drove around most of the day looking for him.”
Robert almost hated to ask: “Looking for Jesus?”
“Yes, I told you. And we drove around, but we never found him. So Daddy went to the ranger place to ask and went inside and left me in the car. And when he came back, he was upset Jesus wasn’t there. So I went to sleep again.”
“How long ago was this?”
“A long time ago. Two years, I think. It was really hot.”
What kind of bullshit trip did Teo take his seven-year-old on? Was he drunk, stoned, crazy? Driving a car? Dragging his daughter to some desert to look for Jesus.
“He ate a big hamburger at McDonald’s. I wanted animal crackers, but they didn’t sell them anymore, so I had a milkshake again. Then Daddy drove around and found a drugstore that sold them and bought me animal crackers, and I didn’t throw up again after I ate them.”
“I like animal crackers, too,” he said.
“And pigs in a blanket,” she reminded him.
“Them the most,” he said.
“And once it was dark up there, we were lost for a long time, but finally he found this motel he wanted to find, and we drove through the gates, and Daddy went inside.”
“The office?” he asked.
“Yes, and there was a pretty swimming pool—I saw it from the car—but I think it cost too much money to stay there, so we left.”
Then he remembered why she was telling the story. The rock.
“Did you find your rock somewhere in the desert?”
“Waaaiiit,” she said. “And theeennn . . . we went to a place where they had lots and lots of rocks. In baskets, and there were all kinds of them. They had gold, too, but not really gold, Daddy said, but Daddy was looking for the special rock. It wasn’t there. So he picked out this one and gave it to me. Just for me.”
“A rock your daddy gave you,” he said. “I understand why you like it so much.”
They started up the aisle, but she wasn’t finished.
“Daddy told me to hold my rock and close my eyes. So I did. And then for me to think about how I want things to be. Think about how good things are going to be.” She looked up at him then. “So that’s what I do sometimes with my rock.”
Just when he’d pegged Teo as a deranged prick, the man found animal crackers for Delfina and told her something magical like that.
“Daddy didn’t smell bad,” she said. “The smell from when he drinks. That was after we drove back to where we lived then.”
“Back to Los Angeles,” he said.
“Yes, back to LA,” she said. “The end.” Of the story, she meant.
So for Teo, it was back to LA and back into the bottle. Inconsistent parents. That’s how Teo described his and Bee’s parenting style.
Hard to argue with that, Robert thought, as they walked out of the chapel together.
After the door swung shut, Penko raised his head in the next-to-last row, where he’d pretended to pray.
CHAPTER 24
At dinner, Robert juiced Gia’s outside heat lamp. Erik set a sizzling platter of steaks on the wooden table, right in front of Delfina. Gia poured the adults glasses of wine; then they held hands and blessed the food.
After Erik served the steaks, Delfina asked, “Mr. Jacobson, what’s the most steak you ever ate in your whole life?”
“At one time?” Erik said.
“Yes.”
“At one time, let’s see, I was three years old, but I was real big for three.”
“How big?”
“Real big, and I ate one hundred pounds of steak for dinner, and I still wanted more.”
Delfina started laughing.
“May I have yours?” Erik asked, pretending to reach for hers.
“Yes,” she said, and held out her plate for him.
“No, no, that’s yours, sweetheart,” Erik said. “You know, I’m used to my little boys, and they’re not neeeearly as sweet as you.”
Sometimes Robert found it difficult to reconcile this gentle man, now cutting Delfina’s steak for her, with the hard-ass cop he’d gotten to know. Then again, by his own admission, Erik had mellowed out quite a bit since leaving the force.
Erik and Gia began talking about one of her criminal law cases. The facts: A homeowner set up a shotgun inside a vacant home, its trigger tied to a trip wire to deal with regular intruders. The legal question: Was using what could be deadly force against a trespass to property an excessive use of force and, therefore, an intentional civil tort of battery?
Robert kept up his end, best he could, but unanswered questions kept banging around his mind, tugging at him.
Why did someone decide to run down Teo behind Sonny’s Gyros?
Someone getting back at Carlos? A jealous husband or boyfriend of the girl? Carlos loved Vegas—what about gambling debts? None of that made sense. Carlos was dead—why kill his dead-broke brother? What about the guys downtown who’d threatened Delfina after Teo broke up that drug deal? Too remote—a year or two ago. What about the barflies who’d sued over Teo’s assaults? Again, years ago, and they’d been paid off by the trust. Any chance it was an accident? No skid marks, and the angle of impact ruled out accident. According to Erik, the Santa Monica cops agreed.
“Even if it was intentional,” Erik had said, “so what? Teo’s rolling around LA, living in a truck. A former Mission resident, his wife’s MIA. There’s no irate next-door neighbor, no insurance-policy beneficiary. Where do the cops even start? That boardwalk beef with those ass clowns? They’ve been questioned about it and released.”
What about that “Argonaut” notice Delfina happened to see? That tugged at Robert, too.
Why did Carlos pay for any notice at all? He wasn’t flush with cash anymore. A first-class letter to Teo’s last-known address—Union Rescue Mission, Skid Row, California. Legally, that would’ve been sufficient notice from the trust to Teo.
And given his monumental screwup, why file a final return with the court anyway? Even though the trust called for him to do it, the court hadn’t been monitoring the trust. Why not do nothing? Maybe it
all blows over. Your brother’s not on your back about money anymore. Sell your swag, bank that money, and start work again as a CPA—even Evelyn Levine said you knew your stuff. The more he thought about it, the more his frustration grew.
At least his efforts for Teo—he hoped—and for Delfina, weren’t all for nothing. Reyes’ $5,000 cash would wind up in Carlos’ floor safe. Must’ve missed it first time I looked, Evelyn, wink, wink. Carlos’ swag would bring in even more now that Evelyn had waived taking any legal fees and had returned the watch. Pretty big of her, given her own circumstances.
How then to use the trust’s cash—call it $35,000—once he had it in hand? Some lawyers would pay it to themselves and burn through it looking for the trust’s assets. Totally legitimate and ethical, but Robert felt sure the assets were vapor and preferred to save any recovery for his clients.
Reporting to probate court under each scenario, he guessed, would go something like this:
Report #1: “Your Honor, I looked for the millions of dollars in assets. Unfortunately, my client ran out of money to pay my fees and investigators, and I had to call off the search.”
Report #2: “Your Honor, I didn’t believe I’d find the missing millions, so I didn’t look anymore. Guess what—I saved the trust thirty-five thousand dollars!”
He decided to run it by Evelyn, but his inclination was to go with door number two.
Across the table, Erik was teaching Delfina and Gia the Thai words for steak and wine and coffee: sateek and wiiine and gaffee, kidding around about how easy it was to learn Thai.
Just another SoCal barbeque on its surface. Watching Delfina, he felt fulfillment as well as dread, as he returned to the only question that mattered to her: Why do they want to hurt my daddy?
His answer came back, still the same: I don’t know.
That night, while Gia read Wonder to Delfina, Robert rolled a recliner into the backyard and lay down. Wanting to put the case behind him, gazing into the shrouded moon, he tried to turn off his mind.
