by Craig Nova
“For instance?” Farrell said.
“Roadkill, something like that.”
“Or something that died in the brush. Deer are always dying in the hills.”
“Sometimes it’s roadkill,” said Catherine.
“Yeah,” said Gerry. “But they don’t leave a deer in the road.”
“What happens?” said Ann.
“Someone drags it to the side of the road or pushes it into the brush,” said Catherine. “You have to report it to the cops and all of that.”
“Not always,” said Gerry. “Not always. Sometimes they just leave it there.”
“What do you think?” said Catherine to Farrell.
“Maybe someone drags a deer to the side of the road and sticks it in a bush because they don’t want any trouble. As you say. Better to hide it.”
“Maybe the birds show you where it is,” said Catherine. “You can see them circling, can’t you?”
“You could watch for the birds if you were trying to find the deer,” said Gerry.
“But you know, sometimes they just drive over it until it’s flat. Like a smear,” said Catherine.
“There’s a phrase for that,” said Farrell.
“Yeah?” said Catherine. “Like what?”
“A s-s-sail cat,” said Farrell.
“A sail cat?” said Catherine. “A sail cat?”
The kids laughed and Rose Marie did, too.
“Well,” said Catherine. “It will never be the same. If I ever get out of here and see one of those . . . sail cats.”
“I’ll keep an eye out for birds,” Farrell said. “When they are looking for something, they seem to spiral around, like water going down the drain.”
“Yeah,” said Catherine. “Like little bits of ash. In the water.” She went on looking at him. “Are you looking for something?”
Those eyes lingered on his face and he felt it almost like a slight breeze. Farrell thought of the sky along Mulholland. He hadn’t seen any birds but he would be careful later, this afternoon or tomorrow.
“No lies,” she said.
He nodded.
“Sure I’m looking for something. Isn’t everyone?” Farrell said.
Catherine kept her eyes on him.
“What about your stutter?” she said.
“I do some exercises,” he said. “Sometimes it seems like a little man is there. I can’t shut him up.”
“We’ve all got some problems here. And they aren’t sometimes.” Catherine said. She pursed her lips as she thought.
“People come in here all the time and they think they know about our problems. They don’t. Not until you are in the spot I’m in. They can go fuck themselves,” Gerry said.
Outside in the hall a man polished the floor with a machine that had a large, circular brush, and it made a little whisper as he moved it back and forth.
Farrell took the postcard out of his pocket, the picture side held to the kids. The bear’s face was turned to the camera, the expression utterly blank, as though it was peering from some other world.
“What’s that?” said Gerry.
“Let me see it,” said Catherine.
She took it with a slight, haunting tug.
“Good looking bear,” she said.
“Where is it postmarked?” said Gerry.
“Alaska,” said Catherine.
“I’d like to ask you about it,” said Farrell.
“What do I know about bears?” Catherine said.
“It’s not the bear,” said Farrell.
“Or what do I know about Alaska,” said Catherine. “Lot of trees and fish and caribou, right?”
“I guess,” said Farrell. “But look at the message.”
Catherine flipped the card over, glanced at the loopy script, then held it up for the others. They passed it around, as in some kind of parlor game, and then it came back to Catherine.
“What do you think?” said Farrell.
“Phony,” Catherine said. “Too many smiley faces and hearts. No one uses both. And this T-ster thing. No one says that. It’s so ten years ago. You know what I mean?”
“Yeah,” said Farrell.
“So, it’s just phony.”
Farrell put out his hand.
“Thanks,” he said.
“Sure,” said Catherine. She handed it back. “No girl writes like that. This Mary Jones. Is there really someone called Mary Jones? Name sounds funny, too.”
Farrell put the card back in his pocket. For a moment the scent of the shoulder of Mulholland came back, the glitter of the torn foil packets, the sad, shrunken condoms, and the cigarette butts with lipstick on them.
“You want to hear what actors we like?” said Ann.
“I like Matt Briely, Sandra Gottfried, Billy Nash, and that new one, that French girl, Michelle Mercredi,” said Catherine.
“Yeah,” said Ann. “And Terry Peregrine.”
Farrell looked out the window at the clutter in the parking lot.
“What’s on your mind?” said Catherine. “What are you going to do if you find something . . .”
“Maybe I’ll come back to tell you about it,” Farrell said.
“Sure. But don’t wait too long,” she said.
Farrell turned to her.
Catherine crumbled her juice box and threw it in the trash.
“All we want is honesty,” said Gerry. “We aren’t just fucking with you for fun or making you feel guilty because you aren’t going to die.”
“I’m going to die,” Farrell said.
“Not so fast as us, I don’t think,” said Catherine.
“You never know,” Farrell said.
“Well, you better work fast,” said Catherine. “If you want our advice.”
Farrell thought he could smell the chemotherapy on her breath. He looked out the window. Clutter of new buildings, a crane like a prehistoric bird, that toxic California sky, and all of it combined into a physical hint, like the landscape of a dream, that things just couldn’t continue. But who was changing, him or the world?
“Maybe it’s time to call it a day,” said Rose Marie.
“Not on your life,” said Catherine. “I’ve got something to say. To him.”
“Okay,” Farrell said.
One of the kids sucked at the last of the juice in a box, and the sound was like the last pool of water going down a drain.
“I’ve got one hope. If someone promises me something now, they will keep the promise when I’m dead. That’s it,” said Catherine.
“So, what’s the promise?” Farrell said.
“I want you to promise that when the time comes, when you find what you’re looking for, I want you to think of me. And do . . . the right thing. Do you promise?”
The crane outside began a slow, sluggish movement, like some unstoppable thing.
“Yes,” Farrell said.
“Yes, what?” she said.
“That I’ll keep my promise.”
“To whom?” she said.
“To you,” Farrell said.
“No,” she said. “To all of us.”
There it was, that long, cool, and oddly moral reach from the dead to the living.
Farrell nodded, and she nodded back.
Then she started laughing.
“Just kidding,” she said.
“No, you aren’t,” Farrell said.
She looked right at him.
She started crying, the tears on her face like rain on a window.
“Good luck,” she said.
“Thanks,” Farrell said. “You, too.”
“Oh, I’m beyond luck.”
They stood and shook Farrell’s hand, which the kids liked. A lot of people wouldn’t touch them because they thought cancer was contagious.
Outside, Rose Marie and Farrell got in her car and sat there for a while and faced the hospital’s mismatched architecture, the dust from the new parking lot, and the guard in the booth. The guard’s movement was mechanical, which Farrell felt as
oppressive, as though this was an outpost for disease.
“I should have warned you,” said Rose Marie.
Farrell’s hands shook.
“How do you warn someone about them . . . ?”
“That’s the problem,” she said.
“Sure,” Farrell said. “They are the only honest people in town.”
She nodded.
“Well,” she said. “There’s me.”
That smile.
“Thanks,” she said. “They liked it. I can tell.”
Rose Marie turned out of the parking lot and drove east, toward Sunset and Laurel Canyon.
Rose Marie parked in front of her house and sat with the attitude of being unsure just where she had been. She pulled on the brake with a slow consideration, and then looked at Farrell for a long time, and in that glance, he detected a promise she was making, too.
“Luck,” he said. “It’s never there when you need it . . .”
“Yeah,” said Rose Marie. “I hope you aren’t depending on luck.”
She swallowed.
“Maybe there’s more than luck involved,” Farrell said.
“What’s that?” she said.
“There’s me,” he said.
Rose Marie went into her house with that swaying of her hips, that upright carriage, and Farrell stood in the drive while she walked away.
In his kitchen, he began to put the postcard on the refrigerator with the trout magnet, but he held it for a moment to see the smiley faces, the hearts, the loopy script. Then he sat at the table in the booth by the window, where the paper was opened to that picture of Karicek, the man who had been arrested. Farrell ran his fingers over the face, the nose, the bones in the cheeks, and the eyebrows.
Of course, he knew that going to the police was dangerous, but he guessed it was time. Time to be careful, though. Charm, cunning, and patience.
9
FARRELL THOUGHT HE WOULD SEARCH a little more to the west on Mulholland, but even though the fog was burning off, he hesitated. Yes, the air was clearing, but time was growing short. He wondered if taking a chance would give him a sense of clarity, if only because it concentrated what he had to think about.
The cop was almost like a relative. Shirushi had arrested Farrell when he was young and they had improbably stayed in touch. Making her a kind of cousin, or something. She was Japanese American, restrained, but precise, although she had a sense of humor and liked to crack a joke by raising a brow. Oh? she liked to suggest, do you think I buy that? Shirushi wasn’t much older than Farrell, and they met for a meal or drinks a couple of times a year.
At seventeen, Farrell had stolen a motorcycle every Friday night and had thrown it in the Los Angeles River every Sunday. The Los Angeles River is not much more than a large cement trench, and since he dropped the motorcycles in the same spot, he had made a pile of motorcycles. Shirushi had dark eyes and a brooding presence, as though she was always working out an integral equation. She had been standing next to the pile of motorcycles on a Sunday evening when Farrell put the last one over the edge of the embankment at the top of the LA River. That had been a long time ago, and Shirushi, with her short hair, cut so that it was just beneath her ears, was now a detective. After she had arrested Farrell, she had arranged things so that he had only done a month in the California Youth Authority camp in Malibu during August so he could still get to Berkeley as a freshman in the fall. Farrell had to wear boots with lead in the soles when he was in Malibu, since this guaranteed he would not try to escape. Not unless he wanted to do it in bare feet through that landscape.
He called Shirushi from his kitchen. The bright colors of the Paris Métro map left him thinking, If I could only get there.
“Why, Farrell, it’s been awhile. How are you doing?” said Shirushi when she answered her phone.
“Fine, fine,” he said.
“Uh-oh,” she said. He could almost see that raised brow.
“What’s wrong?” he said.
“Your voice,” she said. “You sound like the first time I arrested you. You remember those motorcycles?”
“How could I forget?” he said.
“Is that a compliment or a plea?” she said.
“A compliment,” he said. “I’d like, you know, to say I trust you.”
“I’d be careful about that,” she said.
“How about a late lunch? Spur of the moment. The usual place. My treat. In an hour,” Farrell said.
“Short on time, too,” she said. “Well, well.”
Shirushi liked Fuyuko’s, a sushi restaurant in Santa Monica. It had a view of the Pacific, and if you met in the afternoon, as now, the Pacific appeared as a platinum sheet. Shirushi was tall, had slight freckles over her nose, and now that she was a detective, she sometimes wore silk dresses, which clung to her with a gleaming liquefaction. But only when she was in the mood. Often she wore jeans and a T-shirt, which is what she wore today.
Now, she sat with her back to the door and her face to the ocean.
She took his hand with that cool, but still friendly, touch.
“I have a favor to ask,” he said.
“All right,” she said. “But let’s, ah, define the rules of the game.”
“Just a favor,” he said.
“Well, we can talk as friends, in a purely personal way. Or you can talk to me as a cop. So?”
“A little of both,” he said.
She ordered sushi, salmon, crab, octopus, and a glass of beer, and she made a little bench from the paper wrapping that the chopsticks came in. A little piece of origami. She had taught Farrell to do this in the past, and now he made a little bench, too. It was a small thing, but he hoped it was a way to establish an old friendship, or at least a common pool of experience.
“Sometimes you can’t see things clearly,” she said. “For instance, you know why I’m sitting with my back to the door?”
“No,” he said.
“In the days of the samurai, a host always sat with his back to the door, since if an assassin came in, the host, with his back to the door, would die first.”
“I don’t think we have to worry about that,” he said.
She raised an eyebrow.
“And do you know why samurai swords don’t have a blood gutter? The blood gutter makes a slight hush when the sword is being swung, and if you are sneaking up behind someone and swinging the sword you want it quiet.”
“You aren’t your usual cheerful self,” he said.
“You aren’t either,” she said. “Your voice on the phone was an illustration of Shirushi’s First Law. Sooner or later you will find the thing you are afraid of.”
The sushi had the taste of the ocean, and the wasabi burned. She kept her eyes on Farrell.
“So, what are you working on?” she said.
“Are we still talking as friends or as my friend the detective?” said Farrell.
Her eyes, for the moment, were set on the piece of salmon on sushi rice. She dipped it in the sauce with wasabi, perfectly lifted it to her mouth, and ate it with the ability of someone who knows how pleasure should be drawn out.
“More friend than cop,” she said. “But, if I were you, I’d be careful.”
The wasabi made his eyes water.
“Why don’t you give up sex crimes?” he said. “After all, you can take your pick now, can’t you?”
“Yes,” she said. “But with sex crimes sooner or later someone always gets killed.”
She pushed her hair behind one ear, her black eyes, not like coal but like the depths of a well, made her expression so attractive as to exert a kind of gravity.
“All right,” she said. “Enough foreplay. Before we get to the favor, you have to do something for me.”
“What’s that?”
She smiled, just brushed her fingers over his hand. An artery throbbed in her neck, with a slight, almost invisible pulse. She shifted on her seat.
“How much do you contribute to the Santa Monica Police Benevolent Soc
iety, or to, say, Tommy Black, you know, the guy who runs supervised detention, when he needs financial help? A house he wants to buy, having his kids’ teeth fixed, something like that? You know, so that when you call him, he can give you a detail or something.”
“Now, you wouldn’t want me to be indiscreet,” he said.
She stared at him as though she had the key to a hotel room in her handbag. He wondered where she kept her sidearm. And if flirting was a part of her being a very good cop.
She raised an eyebrow. Then she took a piece of tuna, dipped it, and put it into her mouth. He took a bite, too, keeping his eyes on the small, almost invisible artery.
“I help out,” he said. “I’ve helped Tommy. A donation helps.”
She shrugged. “The thing about cops,” she said. “Is that we aren’t as stupid as you think.”
“Does Tommy Black tell you about me? When I ask him for help? Is he making me into a rat who pays him? A confidential informant, who gives him money?”
“You wouldn’t want me to be indiscreet, would you?” she said. She took another bite, then a drink of the cold beer to go with the sushi. “What’s the favor?”
“There’s a man, Karicek . . .” said Farrell.
“I know who you mean,” said Shirushi.
“Can you check his DNA profile against someone?”
“That’s privileged information,” she said.
“I’m asking a favor,” he said.
“You may think I don’t know what you do,” she said. “But you have to understand that the best thing is not to get involved in a pissing match with a skunk.”
“Who’s the skunk?” he said.
“Could be me,” she said. “Could be people who keep secrets. Could be all kinds of people. Some more dangerous than others.”
He looked down at the sushi boat, at once cute and oddly bizarre.
“The studio lawyers, who have irregular connections, production company lawyers, the people who work with them, the investigators. The newspapers. TV. Web gossip sites. Here’s the way it is. It can be a real mess. And, there you are, exposed, and people get curious.”
“I understand,” he said.
“So, I might let you get away with the occasional . . . irregular resolution of something. But these things can blow up. And you might end up holding a bag. A very big bag.”