77th Street Requiem

by Wendy Hornsby

  When Guido turned to me, I asked, “Was I right?”

  “Yes. I hate it.” He folded the Bao Ngo list and stuffed it into his back pocket.

  “Maggie.” Lana reached for me, oblivious to what Guido had said. Oblivious to everything except her immediate program, namely, Arlo. “How will Arlo’s demonstration scan?”

  “On film? It won’t,” I said. “All we can do is show him sitting at the computer. We can’t hit the information on his screen. There are privacy issues the legal department is worried about.”

  It was time right then to say that I did not intend to film Arlo at all. Clearly, Lana’s interest was in Arlo live, and not in the film’s form or structure. The need to keep Lana’s interest piqued, however, overrode good judgment and any sense of fair play on my part.

  Lana was all mushy over Arlo. She took a few steps back, framed him with her hands, the way a director might, and made a show of imagining Arlo on screen. Behind her back, Guido rolled his eyes when she said, “I see Arlo shot full-face. We’ll pan in over the top of the computer and come in close on that wonderful face.”

  “Get the logo on the back of the computer while you’re going in, Lana,” Guido said, nudging me. “We’ll snag us some product-placement money.”

  “I don’t know.” Arlo suddenly had qualms. “Maybe you should put one of those blue dots over my face like the gal that Kennedy kid raped.”

  “Allegedly raped,” Guido corrected.

  “Whatever.” Arlo winked at me. “I don’t want some allegedly irate deadbeat recognizing my handsome mug and coming after me.”

  “Don’t worry, Arlo,” Lana cooed. “I’m sure you know how to take care of yourself.”

  “You bet I do.” He knew he was being handled. I think he wanted to be handled.

  Lana threw an arm around his shoulders. “Then we have a deal?”

  “A deal.”

  We already had a deal, and Lana knew it. Pointedly, she turned to me. “Where does Mr. Delgado fit into your shooting schedule?”

  “We’ll work something out,” I said. “Arlo, my people will call your people.”

  I make the decisions about who and what I shoot and when I do it. Until Lana decided she liked the scent of Arlo, I had never known her to interfere as long as I was on deadline and close to budget. She certainly never stooped to schedule interviews. I thought her input was a cheap move to make a thirty-second TV star out of some poor guy just so she could ease him out of his trousers. I had a sick feeling, as if I were procuring for her.

  I added, “Arlo, when Guido and I get back from Montreal, we’ll call you.”

  Guido jumped as if I had goosed him, but didn’t challenge me.

  “Montreal?” Lana parroted. “What’s in Montreal?”

  “An auction house. A couple of items stolen during a recent home invasion robbery showed up in their inventory. The rightful owner and I sure would like to know how they got there,” I said. “What sort of arrangements can we make with a Canadian affiliate for auxiliary crew and equipment on short notice?” I nudged Guido. “You know how tough it is, taking a crew out of town. Save us having to lug everything with us if we can get what we need near location.”

  “None. No arrangements.” She seemed nonplussed. “That’s Canada. Canadian broadcast law won’t let us have affiliates. I don’t know anybody up there.”

  “Then we’ll have to schlep everything. Guido, who do we need? What do we need?”

  “Union minimum.” He ground his teeth again. “We have to do this?”

  “Depends,” I said, turning to Arlo. “Can you access ships’ manifests?”

  “I’ve never tried it before. What do you want?”

  “I want the name of the ship Bao Ngo arrived on in September of 1975, names of the crew and other passengers, the ship’s cargo manifest. The captain’s log would be nice. What do you think?”

  His chest swelled. He was cocky, boastful, in the way he said, “When do you need it?” as if no problem was too big.

  “I need it now. I don’t want to go to Montreal.”

  “Let me work on it, make a few calls.” He began closing computer files. The meeting was over. “I’ll get back to you, honey.”

  Lana’s face flushed. Anger, frustration, both—I don’t know. Arlo, clearly, was preparing to leave, all business now that he had an assignment.

  Arlo is a big flirt, but I never knew him to be easy. I thought that it was entirely possible, considering Lana’s obvious behavior, that Arlo was relieved to have a graceful out. Now that poor Lana wasn’t going to get what she wanted that afternoon, I had a feeling that she would somehow extract payment from me.

  While Arlo packed up his equipment, I used the phone on the conference table to call Fergie. I told her to check out airline schedules and the availability of a bare-bones film crew. She groaned, but promised to get right on it.

  When I hung up, I caught Lana watching me. Her tone was cold when she asked, “Is there a budget line for this trip?”

  “I’ll work it out with the location auditor. We’ll find a way to shuffle funds from one pocket to another.”

  She said, “Uh-huh,” without much expression, and then gave her attention back to Arlo, giving him one more shot before releasing him. Lana and Arlo were still together in the conference room when Guido and I excused ourselves.

  Guido punched the elevator button. “Montreal? You serious?”

  “Let’s see what Arlo turns up, first. If we go with the Bao Ngo angle, I want to interview the owner of a Montreal gallery. He accepted several pieces of lovely Asian sculpture, subject to appraisal and verification of provenance. I want to know whom he talked to; the pieces all came out of Khanh’s house. He spotted them on an Interpol list, and Interpol traced provenance to Khanh.”

  “It’s February.” Guido held the elevator door for me. “You have any idea what the weather is like in Montreal in February?”

  “Cold, Guido,” I said. “It’s cold in Montreal.”

  It was almost five o’clock when I sat down at my desk to return calls.

  The kids—my daughter, Casey, and Mike’s twenty-year-old son, Michael—informed me that they were going out for pizza and then Michael was taking Casey to his college library to help her with a research project. They said they would be home by ten. Neither of them had heard from Mike.

  When I called Parker Center downtown, the Police Administration Building where Robbery-Homicide Division is quartered, I was told that Mike was in the field. That could mean a lot of things: He had forgotten to sign out, the guy who answered the phone had no clue, Mike was investigating his current case, or he was up at the police academy bar having a few with the boys and his colleague didn’t want to snitch him off.

  I paged Mike, punched in four-four, our code for Hi. If he could call me, he would. In the meantime, there were a few chores I wanted to get through before I went home for the night. I was about halfway through the list, maybe half an hour later, when Mike called.

  He asked, “How are you?” Not the usual formula greeting, but a question fraught with concern: How are you?

  “I’m ready for this day to be over,” I said. “But I’m okay.”

  “Want me to come and get you?”

  “No need. I’m a little tired, but I’m fine. The kids are going out, Mom has been out with a friend all day. So, if no one’s at home, I’ll wait around here a while longer and let traffic clear before I get back on the freeway.”

  “Your mom is out? What happened to chicken soup and pillows under your feet?”

  “Mom isn’t much of a fusser, Mike, and I’m not very good about being fussed over. She gave me two full days’ worth of chicken soup. The oatmeal this morning was her grand finale. Now she’s at the arboretum with a friend, checking out drought-resistant plants.”

  “If you’re feeling up to it, I may have a break in the Pedro case for you. I’m waiting on the mother of one of the witnesses to come in: Can’t question the kid until the mother sho
ws up.” I heard him shuffle papers. “The mom is going to try to get off work a little early.”

  “Going to try?” I said. “Her kid is in Parker Center because she was involved with a murder and Mom is going to try to get there?”

  “I caught a bad one this time, Maggie.” His tone was heavy, dragged down by too much reality; Mike was in all ways ready to retire. “My last case, and it sure as hell isn’t the way I want to go out. I keep asking myself, what’s it all been about? Twenty-five years I spend trying to get bad guys off the streets so the kids can grow up safe. And what does it come down to? We aren’t safe from the kids.”

  “You really are down, aren’t you? Why don’t you have the mother come in early tomorrow and you and I go home and have a quiet evening?”

  “I wish I could.” He cleared his throat. “I shouldn’t have let you talk me out of putting in for vacation time this week. If I had, one of the other guys would have caught this one and I’d still be working the cemetery scam. You know, the cemetery owner who dug up old graves and resold them? It’s a weird case, but there’s no homicide involved. All that our guys have to do is watch the forensic anthropologists dig through the bone pile and give updates to the press.”

  “You don’t have to ask my permission to take vacation time,” I said.

  “What’s the point of me staying home if you go in to work?”

  I said, “There was a time, not so long ago, when you’d sing Hank Williams songs to me when I called you.”

  “I don’t feel like singing. If the mother shows up, I’m going to spend half the night questioning a fourteen-year-old girl about her part in the torture of a little guy who was only looking for a piece of teenage ass.”

  “Mike?”

  “Don’t go PC on me. We’re not talking about deflowering a virgin. This kid already has two assault charges in her file, and a baby to take care of.”

  “She’s a child, Mike.”

  “She’s a whore who got an early career start. I don’t have any soft spot for her because she’s only fourteen. She’s been gang-banging half her life. Pedro sure as hell isn’t her first victim. I only hope the judge gets some message from her record and lets us try her as an adult.”

  I had nothing to say.

  “You don’t know how it is out there, Maggie.”

  “Sure I do.”

  It was his turn to fall silent.

  I said, “I called because no one will be home all evening.”

  “I’m sorry, there’s no way I can get off. If you don’t want to be alone, maybe Guido …”

  “You miss the point. No one’s home, Mike. It’s a rare opportunity. If you ever wanted to walk around the house in your boxers and scratch, now’s the time.”

  “Scratch, huh?”

  “As in, relax.”

  I heard him tapping the end of his pencil on his desk, tapping out a thinking rhythm. I gave him time to work through whatever was on his mind. He said, “If you feel up to driving downtown, we can go have dinner as long as it’s somewhere close. I’m on the pager.”

  “I’m leaving now.”

  Fergie put her head in the door. “Your dad’s on line two.”

  I promised Mike I would see him within the hour and said good-bye. Then I switched to the second call.

  “Dad?” I said. “You okay?”

  “I’m fine.” He sounded okay.

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  “It’s the damnedest thing, sweetheart,” he said. “I had a call this afternoon from your San Francisco neighbor, Jerry, the real estate guy.”

  “Is he okay?”

  “He’s fine. He thinks he’s hot on a commission.” Dad drew it out to build suspense.

  “And?”

  “Maggie, someone wants to make an offer to buy your San Francisco house.”

  CHAPTER

  3

  At the end of every work day, when the commuters have vacated downtown L.A. office buildings, a second shift—winos and junkies and the ambulatory insane—slips out from the shadows with their bottles in brown paper bags and their bedrolls on their backs to claim Civic Center lawns and sidewalks as their rightful domain.

  I arrived downtown during the transition, when dark-suited city workers and the homeless shared the sidewalks in nearly equal numbers. In another hour, most of the suits would be gone and the neighborhood would begin its nightly, underworld carnival.

  I left the car in a lot in Little Tokyo and walked across First Street to Parker Center, the LAPD’s big blue administration building. The Glass House, inmates call it. There is no fondness attached to the sobriquet, and no special respect or fear.

  Parker Center is falling down. Twenty years of deferred maintenance, a trio of fair-sized earthquakes and no budget for cosmetic repairs, as well as general overuse, have rendered the onetime showplace an embarrassment to civic pride. Maybe it’s a good symbol for the city’s general state of affairs; no effort is spent anymore to keep up appearances in the face of too much reality.

  A recent commission decided that the facility was beyond fixing and should be demolished. In the meantime, cops make do, dodging falling ceiling tiles and broken flooring, ignoring gaping holes in the plaster, trying to patch into the information age with an antique electrical system and insufficient telephone lines.

  I walked toward the main entrance past families waiting for loved ones to get processed out of jail. They lounged on the scruffy grass out front or sat on the memorial to fallen officers, some of them picnicking on fast food brought over from the mall underneath the Civic Center across the street. The air all around held the heavy perfume of burning marijuana.

  The reception officer signed me in on my press credential and let me go upstairs without an escort. I wasn’t stopped again until I reached the door of the third-floor Robbery-Homicide Division bull pen where Mike worked.

  At the door, a dozen or so onlookers were kept out, as I was, by a working four-person news crew: cameraman, soundman, gaffer, and an on-camera face with a battery pack spoiling the line of his custom-tailored jacket. A lavaliere mike served as his tie clip.

  I knew the face, a veteran city reporter named Henry Jacobs who worked for the same network that signed my paychecks. That made us colleagues, I suppose.

  Inside the bull pen, Mike Flint was seated at his desk with eight or ten veteran detectives perched around him, all of them in shirtsleeves and all of them grinning. From my vantage point in the doorway, the focus of attention seemed to be Mike Flint’s polished black shoes.

  Henry Jacobs faced the camera and read his notes in a deep, Dragnet-imitation voice. “The thief struck by night, brazenly breaking into the very heart of police headquarters looking for loot. Night after night, his nocturnal crime wave taunted our fair city’s elite Robbery-Homicide detective division. In the end, it was the perpetrator’s greed that foiled him.

  “Hoping to catch the criminal at his game, veteran Detective Mike Flint set a trap, and the wrongdoer fell for the bait. Caught in the very act of pilfering a piece of fine, aged cheddar, the suspect put up a brief struggle before he met his violent end. Had he survived, his legal defense might have been, ‘Entrapment.’”

  I could see in the cameraman’s monitor a very dead mouse with his neck pinned under an old-fashioned spring trap that Mike had set in his bottom desk drawer.

  “A motto for would-be thieves to keep in mind,” Henry intoned. “Live by the cheese. Die by the cheese.”

  Everyone in the room laughed. When the gaffer lowered his lights and the cameraman stopped his tape, there were handshakes all around. Henry passed his battery pack and lavaliere mike to the soundman, and the crew decamped. As I backed out of the way to let them through the door, I caught Henry’s eye. He gave a little jump as if startled to see me.

  “Maggie MacGowen,” he said.

  “Henry.” I offered my hand. “Slow news day?”

  “That’s an understatement.” He leaned in closer, as if he hoped to buy something illicit fr
om me. “You working on a story?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t do the news anymore. I’m only here to have dinner with the executioner over there.”

  Henry glanced in at Mike, who was still surrounded by detectives and staffers trying to get a look at the mouse.

  “Flint, huh? Guess I heard about you two.” Henry suddenly had a gleam in his eye, an old reporter’s is-there-a-story-here gleam.

  “Police press office call you with the dead mouse tip?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “We’ve been hanging around here all afternoon, hoping to get some new developments on this cemetery scandal in time for the five o’clock. But it’s a no go. I think Flint took pity on me. When I asked the team for an update, Flint said the only story breaking was the mouse, but I could have an exclusive. If we get nothing on the cemetery by six, I think we’re going to run the mouse tape.”

  “Can you get me a copy?” I asked. I had a growing archive of Mike Flint clips culled from prime-time news. I planned to run all of it at his retirement party in May.

  “No problem,” Henry said, giving my hand a squeeze. “I wouldn’t mind if you passed any little insider tidbits my way. You know, home team advantage.”

  “Count on it, Henry. You know Mike isn’t on the cemetery case anymore?”

  “He told me. He has some juvenile thing going down.” Henry scowled. “I hate juvenile cases. Can’t use names, can’t use photos, all the charges will be sealed, and no one will give me a quote. Does me no good.”

  Something, maybe the tone of Henry’s voice, made Mike look our way just then. When Mike met my eyes, he blushed, seemed embarrassed; so unlike Mike. He dropped his gaze from mine. Ordinarily, I would have walked straight to him, but the look on his face chilled me. The night before, when I rolled up against him in bed and put my arm around him, as I had hundreds of nights before, instead of turning toward me, he had turned away and pretended to be asleep.