Romeo's Hammer

by James Scott Bell

  “How did that poison get inside you, Brooklyn?”

  It was as if I’d slapped her. She reeled back in her chair. “Stop it. Don’t ask me that.”

  “You had a lot of nasty stuff in your stomach.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “I don’t want to see it happen to you again.”

  “It won’t.”

  “How can you—”

  “Please stop.”

  We sat in silence for a long time. I kept watching for our pelican friend. But he’d moved on.

  The waitress brought our food. Brooklyn’s oatmeal came with little serving dishes of raisins, walnuts, and brown sugar. She poured the contents of each into the bowl and stirred it with her spoon. She then took up a healthy spoonful and blissfully savored it.

  I kept the conversation light as we ate. We talked about how she got her name—her grandfather was a fan of the Dodgers when they played at Ebbets Field—and where she grew up (Montclair, New Jersey) and what her favorite movies were (Lord of the Rings and Shrek). But when I probed about her coming out to L.A., she clammed.

  And turned things back on me, wanting to know where I grew up and where I went to college.

  I deflected. Only Ira knows my story and I’m keeping it that way.

  She asked if I did any fighting. People ask me that all the time. Must be my charm. I told her I did a little cage fighting once but got smart and quit.

  We were about finished when a man the size of Samoa rumbled to our table. He was definitely Pacific Islander, wearing a Talofa shirt of ocean blue which was the male attire at Kahuna’s.

  The giant gave me the stink eye.

  “Kalolo!” Brooklyn said.

  He looked at her. “You okay?”

  She nodded. “Kalolo, this is Mike.”

  I put my hand out. He ignored it.

  His arms were like sewer pipes. His left forearm had a tat, in roughly the same place I had mine. Only his was a bared-teeth bulldog wearing a Smokey Bear hat with the United States Marine Corps emblem on it. Underneath were the letters USMC.

  “Uncle Sam’s Misguided Children,” I said.

  “You ex?” Kalolo said.

  I shook my head.

  “Then it’s not funny,” he said. He looked at Brooklyn. “I’ll be at the bar.”

  She nodded.

  Samoa stomped away.

  “Charming,” I said.

  “He’s a good man,” Brooklyn said.

  “Is he why you think everything’s all right?”

  “Thank you for helping me,” she said. “I’m going to be okay now.”

  It sounded like she believed it. Which is usually how abuse victims end up back in the hospital—or the morgue.

  “I wish you’d let me keep in touch,” I said.

  “Thank you for breakfast,” she said. She got up and held out her hand. I took it. “And for being such a nice guy.”

  I paid the bill in cash. As I walked out, I saw Brooklyn seated at the bar talking to Kalolo. He was pointing his finger at her. She was shaking her head.

  FOUR DAYS LATER, a Tuesday, it was time for my regularly scheduled meet-up with Ira Rosen.

  Ira is a rabbi, lawyer, and former Mossad agent who looks like your favorite uncle. Acts and sounds like him, too, unless you try to hurt someone he knows. He’s a paraplegic, the result of a firefight in Beirut. His head, though, is the most impressive part of him. What’s inside it, I mean.

  “You haven’t exactly been the model of communication,” Ira said, pouring me some of his tea concoction. I usually associate tea drinking with flowered hats and white gloves. Ira Rosen has tried to disabuse me of that notion.

  We were seated in the living room of his Los Feliz home. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves dominated the décor. Books on law and philosophy and religion mingled with great works of literature and history and military science. Ira was a university on wheels and a man of spiritual serenity. He’d taken me in when I first got to L.A. I’d managed to attract a Dumpster-load of trouble since then, but Ira apparently accepts that as part of the hazardous duty of being my friend and sometime employer.

  “Nothing going on,” I said. “The beach is so dull.”

  Ira studied my face. He can read me like a racing form. “Oh?”

  “Like the other day,” I said. “I’m running along the beach like I always do, and a naked woman stumbles toward me.”

  “Ha, ha,” Ira said.

  “She’d been poisoned.”

  “Better and better.”

  “I called Artra, and we got her to the hospital.”

  “Wait a minute. You’re serious?”

  I took a sip of tea. Winced.

  “Michael, talk to me.”

  “The tea is delightful,” I said, putting the cup on the table so I wouldn’t have to touch it again.

  “Michael …”

  “The young lady is all right,” I said. “Though she refuses to tell me how it happened.”

  Ira shook his head. “Dullsville at the beach, eh?”

  “Totally,” I said. “Except for a little scuffle.”

  Ira clacked his tea cup on the saucer, like a judge banging a gavel. “Don’t tell me.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “No, tell me.”

  “It wasn’t really much,” I said. “Guy was using foul language in the presence of a little boy and his grandmother.”

  “And you did what?”

  “Tried to reason with him.”

  “Oh no.”

  “He was not the reasonable type.”

  “Did it get physical?”

  “Define physical.”

  “Maybe I’ll just show you.”

  “I didn’t want to get into it,” I said. “Really. But the guy wouldn’t stop.”

  “So you did what?”

  “Slowed him down.”

  “How?”

  “With a love tap.”

  “You’re going to get yourself arrested, you know. And good old Ira is not going to come around with bail.”

  “He deserved it,” I said.

  “What, exactly?”

  “I kinked his windpipe.”

  “That could have killed him.”

  I stood. “It didn’t.”

  “Was the little boy watching?”

  “What?”

  “The little boy you mentioned. Did he see that?”

  “I don’t know. I guess so.”

  “Did you think about what that might do to him?”

  “No.”

  “Then who was being unreasonable?”

  I hate the way Ira can nail me. But I wasn’t in a mood to be nailed.

  “Maybe it’s time he learned,” I said. “Maybe it was the best thing that could have happened to him.”

  “To see you fight a guy and hurt him like that?”

  “Exactly that. Best that he knows what the world is like.”

  “And to act like you?”

  “Sure.”

  “Your inner Achilles,” Ira said. “I thought you didn’t trust him.”

  “So I was wrong.” I made a grand motion toward the books surrounding us. “What’s the big lesson of history, Ira? It’s all about power, dominance. You fight and win, or you don’t fight and lose. Rage keeps us alive. Civility is overrated.”

  “You don’t believe that, Michael.”

  “And why don’t you stop telling me what I believe?”

  “There’s an old story,” Ira said.

  “With you there always is,” I said.

  “Shut up and listen.”

  “Is that any way for a rabbi to talk?”

  “When dealing with a smarty-pants, a hot iron is called for.”

  “Continue,” I said.

  “There was a boy walking along a beach one day. On the sand were starfish, as far as the eye could see. They’d been washed up and were now baking in the sun. He saw an old man pick up one of the starfish and hurl it back into the sea. Then he did it again. The boy appr
oached and said, to the man, ‘Why are you bothering to do that, sir? There are too many. What you are doing will make no difference.’ The old man smiled, picked up another starfish, and returned it to the ocean. ‘It makes a difference to that one,’ he said.”

  “That’s sweet,” I said. “And doomed to failure.”

  “If we all thought that—”

  “The world’s full of cockroaches, not starfish. If we have the chance to smash one, we do it. We put off the inevitable a little while.”

  I stood.

  “Come on, finish your tea,” Ira said. “Let’s talk of—”

  “And no more watered-down leaves, Ira. I don’t ever want to drink tea again, yours or anybody else’s.”

  “Take a breath.”

  “I will,” I said. “Outside.”

  Achilles and I left by the front door.

  I KEPT WALKING till I hit Vermont. Headed over to the Argo, a used bookstore. Bookstores always calm me down.

  I told myself that was the only reason I was going inside.

  But I knew I was full of it.

  There was another reason.

  Her name was Sophie.

  Ever since I’d bought some books a while back, she’d make an occasional appearance in my thoughts. As if to taunt me with a dream of normalcy.

  A dream I don’t have very often.

  She was there, behind the counter. Tall, athletic form, with long hair the color of red oak leaves in autumn. Intelligent eyes behind black-framed glasses.

  She was jotting something in a journal of some kind. She didn’t see me as I walked up.

  “Any first edition Rabelais?” I said.

  She looked up. Smiled. “Well, hello. Haven’t seen you for a while.”

  She’d noticed.

  “I moved,” I said. “But I miss the old neighborhood.”

  Maybe more than I wanted to admit.

  “Can I help you find anything?” she said.

  A place of peace, a spirit of repose, a way not to hurt people. I’ll take one of those, Sophie. Thanks.

  “No first edition Rabelais?” I said.

  “We’re fresh out,” she said. “But I expect a whole shipment next week.”

  “Put one aside for me,” I said.

  A customer came to the counter with a stack of books, so I went browsing. In the literature section I found a paperback of Moby-Dick with the Rockwell Kent illustrations. My father had a hardback edition of same, which haunted me as a kid. The etching of Ahab on deck, with his peg leg and long coat, the wind at his face, his beady eyes looking out over his sharp nose at the cold sea where the white whale lived.

  He looked like a man trapped inside himself, driven by demons he couldn’t suppress.

  Even then, as a boy in a blubbery body always getting picked on, I thought I understood Ahab.

  But also Ishmael.

  I took the used copy of Moby-Dick to one of the sofas the Argo provides for its customers and opened to chapter one again. Call me Ishmael, he says. Then he talks about finding himself pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet. And it’s everything he can do to keep himself from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off.

  When he’s like that, he goes to sea. It’s his substitute for pistol and ball.

  What was my substitute?

  I dipped into it a little more. I re-read my favorite chapter, The Lee Shore, dedicated to the helmsman, Bulkington. It ends, Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing––straight up, leaps thy apotheosis!

  That did it. I put the book back on the shelf and walked out to the counter.

  Sophie had just finished with a customer.

  “Find anything?” she asked.

  “My apotheosis.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Sorry. I was reading Moby-Dick. I meant lunch.”

  She cocked her head.

  “Would you consider having lunch with me?” I said.

  “Wow,” she said “I’m …”

  “Flummoxed?”

  “Not the word I was looking for, but yes.”

  “It was worth a shot,” I said.

  “It was. So yes.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay.”

  What a conversationalist I had become. I should have a talk show.

  “How about lunch on Thursday?” she said.

  Feeling like the schoolboy I had once been, I said, “Shall I pick you up?”

  “Why don’t we meet? Do you know Hammett’s? On Hyperion?”

  “I’ll find it,” I said.

  “Noon?”

  “Perfect,” I said. And it was.

  For that moment at least.

  WHEN I GOT back to my mobile home there was a Ford pickup jutting out of my driveway. We don’t have much space here in the Cove. Spinoza takes up three quarters of the space. So I had to park him crossways behind the pickup. This did not make me happy.

  As soon as I walked through my little gate, I saw a man sitting on the deck chair on my porch.

  He stood up. He was in his fifties, portly, wore a short-sleeve shirt untucked over khaki trousers. His arms were hairy and tan. He looked like a man who worked with his hands.

  “Your truck is in my driveway,” I said.

  “Are you Mike?” His voice was strained. But it was his eyes that got me. Pleading.

  “This is my place,” I said.

  “May I talk with you for a moment?”

  “What about?”

  “Brooklyn,” he said.

  “What about Brooklyn?”

  “She’s my daughter,” he said. “She’s missing.”

  “Come inside,” I said.

  He sat on the same sofa where I had put Brooklyn’s inert body five days earlier. I asked if he wanted anything to drink and he said no. I pulled up a chair and sat across from him.

  “You’re the one who saved her life?” he said.

  “I happened to be in the right place at the right time. My friend, a doctor, drove her to the hospital.”

  “Someone tried to kill her,” he said.

  “Do you know that for sure?”

  “Not for sure, but I know it just the same.”

  “Brooklyn didn’t tell me your name.”

  “Ray. Ray Christie.”

  I nodded. “Can I ask how you happened to find me?”

  “Brooklyn called me. Let’s see, on Friday. She told me what happened, told me about you finding her. That you lived in Paradise Cove. I told the fellow at the gate I was looking for you, that the girl you found on the beach was my daughter. He questioned me, made me describe her, show my I.D., which is his job, I guess.”

  “Mine too,” I said. “Can I see your I.D., please?”

  “Yeah, yeah.” He took his wallet from his back pocket and got out his license, handed it to me.

  “You’re from Prescott?” I said.

  “That’s right,” he said.

  “What do you do there?”

  “I have a drywall business.”

  I gave him back the license.

  I said, “What time did she call you on Friday?”

  “Afternoon. It was strange.”

  “Strange how?”

  “We hadn’t talked in five years.”

  He paused, took a deep breath. Looked at the floor and shook his head a little.

  “I was so glad to hear from her,” Ray Christie said. “I lost my wife, you see and …” His eyes were reddening. I got up and went to the bathroom and got a box of Kleenex. I came back and put the box on the coffee table and sat back down, waiting for him to continue.

  He took a tissue and dabbed at his eyes. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be like this.”

  “No worries,” I said.

  He took in a long breath. “She wanted to reconcile, I’m sure of it. But then she said she had to go and would call me back. She never did.”

  “Did you try calling her?”
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  “I don’t have her number.”

  “It should be on your phone’s log. You have it?”

  “I have a land line at home. That’s how she called me.”

  “When did you get to L.A.?”

  “Yesterday. I went to the police, but I know they just stick these things in the system and nothing happens. That’s when I thought of coming to you, Mr. Romeo.”

  “Why was that?” I said.

  “Brooklyn spoke highly of you. That you protected her from a policeman. That you were some sort of investigator?”

  “I do my investigations for a lawyer, when he has a client.”

  “I just thought I’d take a shot.”

  I said, “Have you considered that she might not want to be found?”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Maybe she ran off with someone. Maybe she decided to go to Vegas. Maybe she changed her mind on a moment’s notice about seeing you.”

  He shook his head hard. “No. No way. That wasn’t in her voice.”

  “I’m talking about what’s in her head,” I said.

  Ray Christie let out a sigh that was almost like he’d been punched in the gut. “Isn’t there any way you can help me?”

  “Technically, no,” I said.

  “I can pay you,” he said. Desperation in his voice.

  And suddenly I thought of starfish.

  “Tell me more about Brooklyn,” I said.

  RAY CHRISTIE’S EYES got a far-off look. “When she was little, we were close. After her mother died ... You know how hard that is?”

  I nodded. When your parents are murdered, you kind of get to know how hard it is.

  “Kelly, my wife, she was the one who knew what was going on, what to do with a girl. I always did what she said. When she died, I had to try to learn all that on the fly. I grew up in a family of three boys. I knew nothing about raising a daughter. I still don’t, I guess.”

  He took another Kleenex.

  “My sister-in-law tried to help me, but she lives in St. Louis and most of the time it was over the phone. I felt helpless. Then Brooklyn started to change.”

  “In what way?”

  “Her whole demeanor. As I think back on it, it was like it happened overnight. One day she was the daughter I had known all those years, and the next she was a different person. She didn’t laugh as much. She got more serious. Quieter. I figured she was going through whatever high school kids go through. I even tried to talk to her about it all, but she just denied that anything was different. But it was. I could feel it as much as a breeze in the trees.”