On the Nickel

by John Shannon

  ‘I can’t get comfortable, either,’ he called. ‘It goes on and on. It’s like a song that’s stuck in the wrong key.’

  ‘No, it’s not like anything,’ she said irritably. There was a hair in her mouth, too, and she couldn’t pluck it out because her hands were impossibly far away. She could only move it around with her tongue and sputter at it ineffectually. ‘It is being tied up on a hard floor and it hurts. Do you have any idea why they grabbed us?’

  ‘I know they’re hassling the old guys in that hotel. I think they want them to move out so they can rebuild. Maybe they thought we would be leverage against the old guys.’

  Abruptly Maeve became aware of a scampering along the nearest wall, and two fingers of ice clamped against her neck. She flopped her head over quickly to look but no matter how intensely she stared, she could see only confused shadows at the foot of the cubicle – perhaps a mouse, a feral cat, something worse? What could be worse? A pit bull that would eat her face off?

  ‘There’s an animal in here! I hate it all!’

  ‘Can you see it?’ he called.

  ‘No. But I heard something slinky. I know I sound girlish, but it’s just so abhorrent. I need some other sound. Would you talk, please? Sing if you want.’

  ‘It’s better if we both sing. Do you know any folk songs?’

  ‘Oh, God. I can’t sing worth a damn. The only song I know is “Jeremiah was a bullfrog.”’

  ‘It’s actually called “Joy to the World,”’ Conor explained. ‘Hoyt Axton wrote the nonsense verse just so he could demonstrate a tune he liked.’

  ‘Spare me the musicology. That damn animal just skrittered again.’

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Let’s go …’

  ‘Jeremiah was a bullfrog,

  He was a good friend of mine’.

  Maeve took a deep breath and joined in.

  ‘I never understood a single word he said

  But I helped him drink his wine.

  He always had some mighty fine wine’.

  Jack Liffey heard the phone ring and debated answering it. How could he? But some fate drove him to lift the receiver.

  ‘Is that Jack? This is Art Castro. Whack the phone a few times so I know.’

  He hit the receiver on the plastic arm of his wheelchair. If only he had one of those talking machines.

  ‘OK, listen up, man. You might as well know your daughter’s been playing Nancy Drew, keeping the bench warm for you. Now, don’t go ballistic, I only got a rumor and I hear she’s basically OK. But the minute Gloria gets home you tell her this scuttlebutt. I hear that girl has upset a couple of low-lifes down on The Nickel.’

  ‘Ack! Ack!’

  ‘Be cool, Jack. Gloria can handle it in two seconds flat.’ He told him the address. ‘You write that down and tell Gloria to go there when she comes in.’ But before Castro could finish speaking, Jack Liffey was pounding the phone against everything nearby as hard as he could until it came apart and no longer seemed to be working.

  He willed his legs to move, but that only made his arms hurt with displaced energy. Everything had gone red around him. Maeve! NO! The feeling of wrists so fragile you could snap them like a carrot! He knew she had a sassy mouth that could piss off any hooligan in ten words flat.

  He wheeled to his study and got out his Ballester-Molina, an Argentine copy of the military .45 auto that he’d bought years ago, and tucked it into his waist, then plucked his car keys off the tiny desk. The car hadn’t budged in weeks.

  He left the front door open behind him, and there was a painful drop where the makeshift ramp off the porch had slipped a bit, but he got to the old pickup across the lawn without tipping over. He had chosen an amazing lull in the busy life of Greenwood Avenue, and no one was there at all to help him mount the car.

  First he opened the tailgate then tipped himself out on the driveway. From the ground, he folded up the wheelchair and hurled it into the bed. No way to close the tail now. He found he couldn’t even crawl and had to arm-drag himself to the driver door. This was going to be tough! The keyhole was immeasurably far above him.

  Gathering a little hand purchase on the metal and leaning, he finally boosted himself up enough to insert the key and open the door. Thank God his arms were strong and still worked fine. The steering wheel was a wonderful grab-bar to get his dead weight inside. He adjusted his legs into a normal driving position, still in such a panic about Maeve that only now did he realize there were foot pedals that had to be worked.

  His eye caught on the sturdy black cane that Gloria, in a fit of hopefulness, had bought him and then left in the truck. Pressing the rubber-tipped cane on to the accelerator pedal, he started the truck without trouble. This was going to work – astounding! – but it would demand whole new feats of co-ordination. Luckily, Chris Johnson, from whom he’d inherited the wreck, had for some reason bought a 1991 with automatic transmission. A clutch pedal would have been a real stretch.

  Shift into drive and then a panicky switch of the cane to the brake pedal as the truck lunged a foot. If he’d had a third hand, he could have used the handbrake, but this was going to be all cane and steering wheel. He attempted to steer with his teeth for a moment, but rejected the idea. Luckily it was late evening, long past rush hour, and there was no traffic as he rolled out slowly on to Greenwood and turned south one-handed. Going south on Greenwood would take him to a T-intersection at Fourth and a very cautious right turn would take him straight west into The Nickel and the address Arturo had given him.

  He hardly noticed the deco triumphal arches on both sides of the old Fourth Street bridge over the L.A. River as he wove slowly and unsteadily toward his goal, having a little trouble keeping the cane from slipping off the accelerator.

  So far, so good. He was calming down enough to wonder what came next. The address Art had told him, burned into his memory, was in the Toy District just north of the sorriest part of The Nickel, and it turned out to mark a big steel roll-up door on a dead dark street. The door next to it was marked Hsun’s Toys.

  He parked at an angle and managed to liberate his wheelchair from the back, expand it and climb inside so he felt normalized again – at least back to a recent kind of normality.

  He banged hard on the roll-up door with his pistol. He’d have fired away at a lock if one had been visible.

  When no-one came, he wrote GIVE ME MY DAUGHTER NOW! on one of his pads to have ready. He could feel his heart pounding away in his chest.

  He banged again and again, as hard as he could, if only to let Maeve know someone was here. Of course, he didn’t know for sure she was there. He was about to give up and think about a plan B when there was a thunk and the roll-up door trundled up about six feet.

  He was facing two men, one tall and bulky, with long gold ringlets like the old photos of the foppish General Custer, and the other shorter, with spooky eyes like someone waiting for a long-distance bus that would take him back into a war zone.

  Jack Liffey flashed his notepad at them, and pointed his big square pistol for reinforcement.

  The smaller one just laughed. ‘Don’t know about you, Stevie, but I feel lucky. I don’t think life works out for this funny guy.’

  Gloria finally shook herself out of the reverie that had held her in this old man’s apartment for so long – over the last half-hour mostly yammering to him about herself and him worrying about his memory. She wasn’t sure why she liked Samuel Greengelb so much, but it didn’t happen to her often and she did. Maybe it was the kindly grandfatherly manner – with all the times she’d been fostered out, she’d never had anyone even close to the role of kindly grandfather – or maybe it was the sadness of his failing faculties. Finally she offered her regrets to Greengelb and left.

  He had told her Moses Vartabedian’s name, and it was no problem to call in and get his office address and maybe a bit more from the research people as long as you knew the voice code. It turned out that Vartabedian’s main office was in a beautifully restored art deco mini
-skyscraper a few miles west on Wilshire, on the seventh and top floor above a former grand movie palace with the unlikely name of The Glamorous Algerian that had now become a venue for big-name baby-boomer music events. The old blue tile marquee announced upcoming dates for Joni Mitchell and Ry Cooder and Airborne Toxic Event, which she certainly hoped was a music group. After a quick inspection of the building, she bypassed the main entrance and went inside an unlocked staircase door on the west side that she guessed would take her somehow to the tower.

  Restored rosewood wainscoting lined the stairwell up one floor to a small elevator lobby where the fancy wood gave way to equally fancy marble, but she ignored the elevators and found a stairwell door and decided to hoof it the rest of the way up, partly for her health but mostly for the element of surprise.

  Gloria was gasping a little when the top of the stairs gave out on a tiny foyer and she pushed the glass door open to what said V and L Enterprises and offered another tiny lobby. A gorgeous young receptionist with very large breasts was hunt-and-pecking something on a state-of-the-art Mac, all HD screen, apparently copying from a handwritten document that she was craning her neck at. The woman looked up, startled, and for some reason started typing really fast and blindly with two fingers until Gloria said, ‘Cool it, honey. I’m not from the job agency.’

  ‘Wow, you read my mind,’ the woman said. ‘I bet you can tell I can’t really type. My skills just don’t run in that track.’

  Gloria didn’t want to enquire what the skill track might actually be. ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell, hon. Is Mr V in?’

  ‘I ain’t supposed to say.’

  ‘That’s terrific,’ Gloria said. She resisted badging her, for some reason. There were two unmarked inner doors, one on either side of the reception desk. ‘Don’t say a word. Just point at the door. We’ll give each other a break here.’

  Sheepishly, the woman gritted her teeth and then nodded once at the door on her left, as if the quick nod didn’t constitute ‘pointing.’

  Gloria gave the woman an OK circle with her fingers, for what that was worth, and went straight in.

  Startling herself with the astounding full-wall view in the dark, she stalled for a moment in the doorway. It was a large office with a breathtaking panorama of the billion-light spectacle that stretched west along Wilshire toward the ocean fifteen miles away. Off to the right there was even a ghostly floating Hollywood sign in the invisible hills, a view that always contained a sense of tragedy for her, for no real reason she knew except for all the crap and abuse that the name had always represented.

  At the desk in front of her was a paunchy dark-skinned man, his head cocked back as he puffed contentedly at a cigar, and who quickly ripped his feet off the fancy granite desk that looked like a mountain boulder that had been miraculously sawn in half.

  ‘Jesus, who are you?’ he burst out.

  Once again she enjoyed the tacit pleasure of showing her badge. It established such an immediate relationship of power, which she loved to use on big men.

  ‘Sergeant Ramirez, LAPD,’ she said. She let him settle a bit. ‘I want you to tell me about your boys McCall and Theroux or Thibodeaux or whatever. Don’t pause to think about it. Just tell me.’

  Funny things happened behind his eyes for a few moments, but he finally made his decision. ‘Never heard of them, Sergeant.’

  ‘Bad guess. I know they work for you, clearing buildings.’

  ‘Those names mean nothing to me. As God is my witness. Or maybe the mayor.’

  She noticed some music going fairly softly in the office, a kind of bleating bebop jazz that she knew Jack would’ve liked.

  ‘You like that stuff?’ She nodded toward his hi-tech mini-stereo.

  He seemed puzzled for a moment. ‘The music?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I usually like what’s new, on principle. But this is such a mediocre time in history. The best you can do is rehabilitate what used to be great. That’s my vocation. What’s eating you, Sergeant?’

  ‘Almost everything. Call it off, whatever game you’re running. I’m sure you’re one of those slumlords who’s driving off the tenants so you can rebuild. Call it off and I’ll give you a Get Out of Jail Free card.’

  He puffed hard to keep his cigar going, which annoyed Gloria no end. ‘You look really worked up about something, Sergeant. Honest, you should calm down. I promise you I’m well known as a benefactor of the city. I renovate landmarks, I save them. This fantastic Algerian from 1927 was about to be knocked down for an insipid Korean mini-mall. You know, a piece of crap where they sell doughnuts and acrylic fingernails. I saved this place. Everyone says it’s glorious now. Come on, Sergeant, look out that window. What do you see?’

  He pressed something that turned off the room lights and nodded to the vast spark-dotted black velvet nightscape, with the otherworldly HOLLYWOOD floating above it all. Involuntarily she glanced for a moment. You never accepted the terms a suspect offered.

  ‘That’s my city,’ he said. ‘Everything is accelerating, and you have to make a few compromises to keep what’s valuable.’

  ‘That’s your dream? Leaving your mark on a bunch of half-assed old buildings?’

  ‘Where’s your name gonna be, ma’am? In tiny print on a brass plaque at the Police Academy up in Elysian Park?’

  ‘Those are the cops killed on duty. Are you threatening me?’

  ‘Jesus, no, ma’am. As God sees my soul, no. Look. They say that’s the great town of illusions out there. But that was long ago, the Forties, maybe. That time is over. I just want to save what I can of the best stuff they built back then. My intentions are good.’

  He had to relight his cigar and Gloria waited.

  ‘I swear to god, man, if those two dickheads work for you and they hurt anyone I’ll fuck you up. I’ll fuck you up good. I just want you to know that. By tomorrow, I’ll know everything there is to know.’

  He seemed to pause again to give it all some thought. ‘You don’t really know how important I am in this town, do you, Sergeant? Look me up, ask about me. It’s a cultural fact. I got the mayor and your own chief on speed dial.’ He tapped a gold contraption that looked vaguely like a telephone and puffed hard. The reek in the room was awful.

  ‘I could get you fired tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Or at least transferred to a job you wouldn’t like very much out in the desert.’

  The short man with the crazy eyes had worked himself around to the side of Jack Liffey while golden curls approached from the front. They had no weapons threatening him, and there was never a moment that justified shooting one of them. All he could do was pound a bit and wave the pistol around. It was hopeless. Again he willed his legs to move so he could rise but got only a twinge in his jaw from gritting his teeth.

  The little guy was fast as a snake, and surprisingly strong, and he ripped the pistol out of Jack Liffey’s hand.

  ‘Well, Mr Special-de-dee, who the fuck are you now?’

  They found the little pouch of business cards and had fun trying different pronunciations of his name and sarcastic renditions of his listed occupation: I Find Missing Children.

  ‘If that girl or boy are yours, we ain’t gonna hurt them none so don’t give yourself a hernia, old man,’ the curly one said. ‘The kids are just leverage to get some old geezers to move out. But you, nobody cares about you. Hold on to your balls.’

  The curly one kicked the chair over, and Jack Liffey went down hard and banged his head on the cement forecourt so his vision went pink. The little one had a switchblade out now and was waving it in figure-eights in front of his eyes.

  ‘Ack!’

  The knife-man made an odd sound, maybe mimicking his own helpless cry. ‘We don’t even got to cut his tongue out. Some fuckin’ child-finder. Find this, wheelie!’ And he swung a hard kick at Jack Liffey’s thigh on the ground. He wore steel-toed cowboy boots and the pointy tip hurt like hell. Then the two tormentors took turns kicking and shoving him around with their feet until he e
nded in the damp gutter. He used his arms to protect his face from the blows, but they kicked his elbows and forearms away. Most of it was just desultory punishment, without much object, but the little one hauled off with a blow to his head and he probably passed out for a few moments.

  ‘This is no fun, Stevie. Let me cut him up.’

  ‘You should see yourself, old man. You really bleed easy. Give us all a break and just expire. On the average, you’re nearer dead than not. No, don’t cut him! Jesus, Rice, it’ll be raining cops. Let’s put him back in his chair and roll him down into the heart of The Nickel. Nature will take its course.’

  They boosted him into the wheelchair, only half conscious, and had fun giving big pushes and then riding along, boosted on to the back, as the chair bumped over rubbish and cracked asphalt.

  Eventually they kicked the chair over again, and his cheek lay in something soggy, a stink of decay and piss that announced another gutter, and not a gutter in Beverly Hills. The power of smell, Jack Liffey thought, retreating into his own head. People lived deeply in smells, auras of this and that, long habits of cosmetics and foods and spices that they shored up around themselves. These smells were Other.

  His tormentors seemed to depart. From where he lay, eyes clamped shut, he could hear the wet noises of men hawking and spitting all around the compass, confiding things to one another, then conspiratorial murmurs like the visiting room of a psych ward. Far away somewhere there was traffic noise. When he opened an eye, all he could see was brick buildings with grilled-up windows across the street, a hurricane fence enclosing an empty lot, and, nearer, heaps of wet trash that he was not used to seeing in a street.