by David Pierce
The doorbell downstairs rang; I peeked out the front window and there was Mr Lowenstein, paper bag in hand. I went down and let him in. He didn't say anything as we trudged upstairs, then he said,
'Got any mayo?' I went to the kitchen and brought him back a jar of Best Foods, a knife and a plate.
'Lunch hour,' he said, taking two thick sandwiches out of the bag. 'Tuna and bean sprout on whole wheat. Want some?'
'No. Want a drink?'
He allowed he might take a beer so I got him a bottle of Corona and a glass. He ate, I sipped. I figured I could wait him out without too much trouble, he had only an hour for lunch, I had what was left of a lifetime. He took a swallow of beer, burped none too delicately, then said,
'Was it you?'
'No.'
'No?'
'No. Whatever it was.'
'I don't see how it could have been, from what Miss Shirley told me about the state you were in, but I still think it was you because if not you, who?'
'Not me,' I said firmly, looking him right in the eye. He spread an incredible amount of mayonnaise on the second sandwich.
'Better than Art's,' he said slyly. I looked innocent.
He sighed. 'Do I or do I not remember a contract in which the party of the second part, you, agreed to tell the party of the first part, me, underline "all" of your activities, nefarious or otherwise?'
'No, sir,' I said firmly. 'Not all, remember? Also, Mr Lowenstein, I don't know what you're talking about.'
He sighed. 'All right, Mr Daniel, all right,' he said, licking a finger. 'I will take it that your motives are pure as the driven snow and that you know what you are doing because if I didn't take it that way this whole mess would be even worse than it already is and God knows it's already bad enough. But please, please, on bended knee I implore, don't tell me some ghost from your dim past just happened to destroy your office the day after I hired you, even the luscious Evonne didn't believe that.'
'Evonne?'
'Miss Shirley to you.' Well, I knew from her employment record her initials were E. B., but Evonne . . .
'Then two days later,' he went on, interrupting ruthlessly the train of thought I'd embarked on which was getting pleasanter by the second, 'a mere two days later, up goes Art's, or down goes Art's would be more like it, or atomized into toothpicks would be even more like it. Don't tell little ol' me they're not connected, connected by much larger you.'
'No need to get personal,' I said. 'Also I plead the Fifth for the same reason I pleaded it – or is it "pled" it – God, I've got to read more, with Evonne, Miss Shirley to me, so as not to incriminate the innocent.'
'Goodness, I figured out that much all by myself,' said the Vice, 'or I wouldn't be here at all and you'd be reading the want-ads. What I want to know is, what next? Does it escalate? Is someone going to blow up the whole darn school?'
'Not a chance,' I said confidently. 'You don't shove a stick of TNT up the ass of the goose that lays the golden egg, do you?'
'Vividly put,' said Mr Lowenstein. 'But only vaguely reassuring.'
'Mr Lowenstein,' I said, 'you got a moment?'
He looked at his watch.
'Yes I have a moment, just about.'
I told him the highlights or maybe lowlights of Benny's estimation of the present scale of drug traffic in and around LA and added a bit of book-learning of my own. I said out of his enrollment of just under 900 students he could expect a quarter to a half of those fifteen years old and up to be using some king of drugs more or less regularly. With the dear, sweet, backward thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds, maybe only one or two in ten. Or three.
'Facts of life as it is being lived in the Valley in 1984, Vice,' I said. 'Someone is pulling a grand, a grand and a half, every week out of your establishment of learning, which is not a fortune by the time it gets split up but it's not greasy kid stuff either. Of course that's nothing compared to what goes on downtown. But our options are limited. There's no way we can remove the source or the sources unless we find a way to remove both greed and the greedy from the world, and better men than me even have tried that. Now we can, temporarily, remove a middleman from the chain, say, for example, hypothetically, just running a name up the flagpole . . . '
'Art,' said Mr Lowenstein, 'there's a name.'
'Why, what an idea!' I said. 'And that may quiet things down for a week or two, but that's all, folks, then word gets around as word does that the man to see is perhaps good old Fred down at your friendly neighborhood car wash.'
'Satisfaction guaranteed or your dirt back,' said Mr Lowenstein. 'I saw that sign on one of them once.'
'Me, too,' I said. 'So, taking it as read that we can't clean up the world, where does that leave us?'
'We clean up what we can clean up, obviously.' He finished off his beer. 'Good stuff. But can we even do that is what I'm starting to wonder.'
'It's been done before,' I said.
'By you?'
'Well, not exactly by me,' I had to admit. 'But I know the theory.'
'You know the theory,' he said. 'God almighty.' He shook his head. 'It's heartbreaking when a school hits the skids. It happened to me once before, in Inglewood, I was head of the so-called science department, suddenly it all fell apart. Kids were joining gangs instead of teams, average attendance went down to nothing, we had eight armed security guards on duty at all times and they couldn't do anything, no one could do anything, the good students left and the good teachers left . . . ah, hell, I feel sick about the whole thing.'
'I don't,' I said. 'I think we can clean it up and keep the lid on pretty much, but it will take action. Have you got the power to lower the boom when you have to?'
'Like what?'
'Like bust ass, kick kids out, replace teachers, maybe close up for a few days.'
'With cause,' he said.
'Oh, you'll have that,' I said. 'You'll have plenty of that.'
'Oh?' He perked up a bit and raised his eyebrows at me.
The doorbell rang.
'Expecting anyone?' I asked him.
'Yes,' he said morosely. 'With you around, the bomb disposal squad.'
I went to the window and looked out. There in the yard, strutting and fretting in his peacock finery, was Lieutenant Conyers.
'Close,' I said. 'It's the fuzz.'
'Well, isn't that sauce for the gander,' said the vice-principal of St Stephen's.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Someone once told me that movie sets, especially Western sets, are all built only nine tenths life size so as to make the hero appear more masterful; what Lieutenant Conyers needed was a world about seven tenths life size. Mr Lowenstein joined me at the window and looked down into the yard.
'Him?'
'Him.'
'What do we do?'
'We go downstairs, we say goodbye, you leave, and if you're parked close you walk away and come back for your car when he's not watching. Then I see what he wants.'
'Sheesh,' said Mr Lowenstein. 'Just like in the movies.'
We exited left; I pocketed his check on the way out. It wouldn't be terribly clever to let little Big Eyes get a look at a draft for $750 made out to me and drawn on a St Stephen's High School account. St Stephen's High School, you will remember, is just across the street from Art's, where not only the burgers are char-broiled.
We could hear through Feeb's door that she was watching one of the midday soaps, a harmless enough pastime, I suppose, if you like taking your downers electronically.
I opened the front door and said 'So long' to the Vice. He said 'So long' back and strode off down the street.
'Who was that?' the lieutenant asked casually.
'Old school friend. Go on up.'
I followed him up the stairs, which gave me plenty of time to admire his two-tone, basket-weave shoes. In the apartment, I took the dirty dishes from the table out to the kitchen while he looked around with great interest, as if he'd never seen a furnished apartment before. When I came back he was perusing
a photograph on the end table next to the TV; it had been taken one long-ago summer when me and my brother were kids, we were sitting on the grass in front of a tourist cabin on Lake Kiwana, in northern Minnesota. My mother and father, arms around each other, both in shorts, stood behind us. Tony was proudly holding up the world's smallest fish.
'And where does the time go, answer me that,' said the lieutenant, shaking his head dolefully.
'You got me there, pal,' I said, shaking mine just as dolefully. 'Sit down, make yourself comfortable. That chair there by the window should be small enough if you don't lean back.'
He gave me a look, sat on the arm of the leatherette sofa, took out his yellow notebook, flipped through it until he found the page he wanted, then sighed deeply, making a sort of whistling noise. Then he flexed his foot a couple of times, straightened his already straight slim-line chocolate-brown tie, favored me with another of his aimless whistling noises. I heard a car start up from outside the house and hoped it was Teach making his getaway.
'Well, Lieutenant, if you need me for anything, I'll be in the kitchen washing up,' I said finally.
'We found those guys,' he said.
'What guys?' As if I didn't know.
'Those guys,' he said. 'Those guys that were mean to you. At least we think we did. They tried to knock over another bar last night, no, I tell a lie, it was the night before.' He consulted his notebook again. 'You ever heard of the Elbow Room, 11873 San Vicente?'
'No.'
'Me neither. I'm not a drinking man myself, really, I mean I take a drop from time to time but I have to watch it, too much alcohol seems to do something peculiar to my metabolism. How about you?' He smiled at me in a friendly and disarming way.
'I confess I take a drop from time to time too, Lieutenant,' I said. 'Usually with Mother at Christmas.' He nodded politely. 'One sherry.'
'You see, I have had a busy schedule this weekend, Mr Daniel,' he leaned forward to tell me. 'Not for me the suburban pleasures of barbecues and cocktails on the patio, nor the joys of camping in our great outdoors or even a quiet Sunday reading the papers and watching sports, my loving children sprawled at my feet squabbling over the funny pages . . . '
That'll be the day, I thought.
'So! After our chat at the hospital, and may I say on behalf of the entire West Valley Police Department we are delighted to see you up and about?'
'You may,' I said. 'You may also get on with it.'
'Why oh why are you always so aggressive, Mr Daniel?' he said in a hurt tone.
'Gee, I dunno,' I said. 'Maybe you bring out the beast in me.'
He looked at me reproachfully.
'Get on with it, yes. After our chat I took the time to look up the descriptions you gave to Officer Lyam O'Ryan, I believe it was, of those two juves who tried to shake down the Oasis. Imagine my surprise and delight when, the following morning, bright and early, I saw on my cluttered desk those same descriptions again, almost word for word. And on an arrest sheet, too.'
I could imagine, all right. What I didn't want to imagine was the trouble I was in if it really was the same two juves. It went something like this: say it was the same two. One of them, the white kid, I'd positively identified as being outside my office Saturday morning as I never thought there was a hope in hell the law would ever catch up with him. Sure as God made death and taxes he'd turn out to have been in bed that morning, with twenty members of his immediate family and a couple of visiting Mormons to swear to it, and where did that leave me? With my foot in my mouth is where. Arson is taken moderately seriously these days, let alone when there's an accompanying fatality; remove the kid as a suspect and that midget clothes-horse, or in his case, Shetland pony, would want a few answers. I wouldn't give them. Before I could say 'I wuz framed' he'd be knee-deep in my tapes and disks and unfortunately they weren't on self-destruct like the ones in whatever that boring series was called.
On the other hand, if it was the same two and I said it wasn't, they might well get off on the attempted robbery charge of the Oasis and they would certainly get off on the charge of assaulting me because if the chap who almost had his scrotum sawn off couldn't recognize the guy trying to do it, who could? A fine mess I'd gotten myself into this time, as Tricia Nixon used to say. It seemed my only hope was maybe it wasn't the same two fun-lovers after all or that Lieutenant Conyers would suddenly have a petit-mal seizure and keel over on my sofa.
'Quite a rare case,' they'd say at the autopsy. 'He died from being too short.'
'So who collared them?' I asked before the pause between him talking and me answering got any longer; long pauses are considered by policemen, Customs agents, tax inspectors and others of their know-it-all ilk like shrinks or proctologists to be highly suspicious, and in my case at least, rightly so.
'They ran right into, and bounced off of, six Albanians who work at the yogurt factory . . .' and here he consulted his notebook again, 'at 11871 San Vicente.'
'I didn't know there was a yogurt factory at 11871 San Vicente,' I said.
'Oh, yes,' he said. 'They also make sour cream, ice cream, yogurt ice cream and buttermilk.'
'Fancy that,' I said. 'I worked on a farm once that used to make buttermilk. It was awful. Watery.'
'Fancy that,' he said.
'Anyway, what a break, eh?' I said, trying to sound enthusiastic. 'Let me ask you this – did you get a report from the fire marshal's office yet, like maybe with a set of prints on a piece of the bottle?'
'Shore did,' he said happily. 'Got it yesterday, those guys are really on the ball over there. But alas fingerprints rarely survive temperatures above the boiling point, although freezing temperatures help preserve them, did you know that?'
I said I didn't but it wasn't really the point anyway, was it, as the kid hadn't touched anything in my deep freezer as far as I knew and anyway I didn't have a deep freezer.
'We do,' said the lieutenant. 'It's out on the back porch, empty. My wife uses it to store paint.'
'Fancy that,' I said.
There was a pause. Then I said, 'Anyone else from the Oasis identify the kid yet?'
He shook his head.
'I imagine you'd like me to have a look at him, right?'
'Right.'
'Well, let's go,' I said. 'I'd hate to keep the little bastards waiting.' I got up stiffly from the armchair and straightened my leg gingerly. The lieutenant looked on sympathetically.
'I burnt myself once setting off a roman candle,' he said. 'Boy, did it hurt. My parents made me watch the next firecracker night from my room.' I knew where I'd like to insert and set off a Roman candle and I could guarantee him it would hurt a lot more.
'Coming?' I said.
'No hurry,' he said, looking vaguely embarrassed for some reason. I sat down again with the first faint glimmering that mayhap Fate was going to spare me yet again as it had with Feeb. Still, I wondered what was coming next with the same fascination you open a letter from your wife's divorce lawyer.
'That your truck I saw?' he asked. 'In the driveway?'
'Rental,' I said. 'Helping a pal move.'
'Your school pal?'
'Nah,' I said. 'A work pal.'
'Your school pal,' he said. 'Where did you say he was a pal from?'
'School,' I said. 'Back East.' Tricky little beggar. I thought he was just fishing but he was still a tricky little beggar.
'Does he have a car?'
'Everyone's got a car, Louie,' I said. 'You know that, you're a detective.'
'My son doesn't,' he said. 'I took it away from him. You know what he did?'
'Before or after you took it away from him?'
'Before, before,' he said. 'The reason why.'
'I give up,' I said.
'He forgot to empty the ashtray.'
'Ah, well,' I said, 'can't have that.'
'He didn't empty the ashtray and there were two roaches in it.' He gave me a broad smile. Or anyway a smile as broad as he could give with a mouth the size of a snake's gu
ess what. 'Know what was in the roaches?'
'I give up,' I said. 'Grass?'
'Grass with little white specks,' he said.
'I can guess what the little white specks were,' I said.
'A policeman's lot is not a happy one,' he recited.
'Look,' I said. 'I don't want to sound unsympathetic but I've got a few problems of my own so can we go if we're going?'
'We're not,' he said. 'I made it all up.'
I positively gaped. 'All of it? The Elbow Room, the six Albanians?'
'No, just the IDs,' he said. 'No one could make up six Albanian yogurt makers. It was two blacks they caught.'
'Why? Why bother?'
'The generation gap, that's the rub. Chucking molotov cocktails about, well, OK, for your race riots and politicals, but it's out of date, you take my point, it has an old-fashioned feel to it, almost an innocence.'
'Like the St Valentine's Day massacre,' I said. 'Old-fashioned, innocent. From a bygone era like high button shoes and heart-shaped boxes of chocolates.'
'Exactly.' He sighed deeply, as if pining for a better, gentler world. 'So I conjectured that perhaps it wasn't the younger generation that made a bonfire out of your office after all, which got me wondering who it was, which got me thinking it was probably something you were presently involved with and that I might be able to find out about. All this of course only if you started getting jumpy about identifying the kid.'
'Luckily I'm a truthful and genuinely helpful citizen,' I said.
'Yeah,' he said. He looked at a watch the size of a lady's discus, then got to his feet. 'Well, I can't sit around here all day chatting with you, pleasant though it's been, would you believe I got another fire to go to? A shoe store down on Cranston and I don't like the look of that one either. A neighbor saw a lot of action out back the night before the fire. Stock going in, stock coming out.'
