77th Street Requiem

by Wendy Hornsby

  What happened Saturday night left him either afraid to touch me or loathe to touch me. I couldn’t read him, and he wouldn’t talk about it. This I knew, as I stood there, feeling alone only a few feet away from him: If he didn’t start talking about what was on his mind pretty soon, then we wouldn’t have anything left to talk about.

  Mike slipped the mouse, trap and all, into a manila evidence envelope. He sealed the top with red tape and carried the package over to us.

  “Souvenir, Jacobs.” Mike handed the envelope to Henry, acknowledging me with a wink.

  “Thanks, Flint.” Henry took it. Seemed quite happy to have it, in fact. Henry is a notorious prankster. I was certain he would pass on this little gift to some unsuspecting soul.

  Mike gripped my shoulder; real detectives don’t smooch in front of the boys, but I expected a more familiar greeting. He said, “Hello.”

  I was tempted to put my hand on his ass while everyone was still watching him. Just to do it. Instead I said, “Hello.”

  “I’ll get my coat,” he said, sounding formal, the way one talks to strangers. “Be right with you.”

  I watched him cross the big room to the coatrack, knew the contours of the shoulders inside the starched shirt when he raised his arms, knew the flex of the gabardine-covered thighs when he walked. Knew his body almost as well as I knew my own. Knew his body, but could not get inside the mind.

  Tall, white-haired at forty-eight, Mike still has the hard, sinewy body of a marathon runner. He’s handsome the way Bogart was, with the map of a full life etched on his face. You look at him and you know he’ll be either a good time or a very, very bad time. Depending.

  Mike has a bit of a swagger that is part of his charm. The swagger comes from pride, and the pride, until recent notorious events in the City of Angels, came largely from his job with LAPD’s elite Robbery-Homicide Detective Division.

  “The best job in the world,” he would say when I first met him. But during his last couple of years on the job, when anyone asked where he worked, Mike clammed up to avoid the inevitable browbeating. Not a healthy state of being for a prideful man.

  Mike signed out with his partner, an old-timer named Cecil Renfrew, and I said good-bye to Henry.

  On the way to the elevator, Mike slipped into his suit coat and then patted himself to make sure all the essentials were in place: police photo ID on his lapel; money clip in his front pocket with a handful of keys; on his belt his polished shield, pager, cuffs, extra ammo clip, and 9mm automatic. Maybe I got into the habit of patting him on the ass because the rest of him is usually so cluttered.

  “Beef dips at Philippe’s sound okay?” he asked, pushing the down button. “Not fine cuisine”—pronounced coozeen—“but the service is quick and it’s just a few blocks over.”

  I said, “Anything is fine, as long as you’re with me.”

  Alone in the elevator with Mike, I put my arm around his back, brushed my lips across his sleeve. He pulled me into a strong embrace and buried his face in my hair. It was a nice moment that lasted only long enough for the elevator to descend one floor.

  Six women officers in maternity uniforms got in at the second floor and rode with us all the way down to the garage. From their conversation I got the impression that they had come from a medical benefits meeting. Mike was unusually quiet and tense around them, not a single comment about the perils of working in the fertility zone or the smell of dill pickles in the air. I put my hand through his, but he wouldn’t look at me.

  In the underground garage, we got into his ancient city-issue car and pulled out onto San Pedro Street, headed north through the dusk. Mike still seemed deep in thought, shrouded behind this wall he sometimes drops when something is on his mind.

  At the first red light, he pulled himself back to the surface. He turned to me. “Tell me what your dad said.”

  “My San Francisco neighbor called him. Remember Jerry, the real estate guy? Someone contacted him and wants to buy my house.”

  “No lie?” The light changed and Mike drove ahead across the freeway overpass, the last of rush hour flowing like a river of light below us. “How much are they offering?”

  “We didn’t get into that yet. Dad told Jerry that if he had a serious buyer he should go see my Uncle Max and draw up a formal offer.”

  “Could be bullshit,” Mike said.

  “Could be. I called Lyle and he told me that he had seen some people taking pictures last week. Two men in dark suits. Corporate types.”

  The corner of Mike’s mouth drew up in a smirk. “Lyle forget to tell you about them?”

  “What’s to tell?”

  Lyle was my former housemate. Casey and I acquired him the evening the Loma Prieta earthquake turned his home behind ours in the Marina District of San Francisco into a rubble-filled lot. Our offer of shelter until Lyle rebuilt evolved into something more permanent, something more like family. Lyle, Casey, and I got used to looking out for each other.

  When Casey and I moved south to be with Mike, I had to rent out the house to make ends meet. I never had time to worry about where Lyle would go. We found tenants for the house, oceanography graduate students who sprouted a new variety of kelp in the master bathroom tub. And Lyle moved in with my mom and dad in Berkeley to help out with the heavier domestic chores. The arrangement worked well until the grad students’ grant ran out. My house had been vacant since the end of the winter quarter, and the financial drain was ruinous.

  Mike parked in a red zone in front of Philippe’s, hung the transmitter of his police radio over the rearview mirror so that he wouldn’t be ticketed. His city parking pass, he called it.

  “Can you take Friday afternoon off?” I leaned in close to him as I got out of the car. “I’m thinking we could fly up to San Francisco, check out the house, and see if there’s anything to this offer. Then we’ll have the whole weekend. We could go to Chinatown to watch the big New Year parade. It’s a good party. We’d have fun.”

  “That’s a big trip for a weekend.” He wrapped his arm around me. “Are you up to it?”

  “Sure. Maybe the kids will come with us. We’re due for a family outing.”

  “Might be too soon for you.” He gave me a sidelong appraisal. “Can’t Uncle Max fax the documents to you?”

  “I feel like getting out of town.”

  He wasn’t listening to me. “Why don’t I fly up tomorrow morning, take a look at the offer with your dad and Max? I can be home by this time tomorrow.”

  “I’m fine,” I said, hearing the edge in my voice. We hadn’t moved away from the car. “I am certainly strong enough to read a legal document.”

  Mike shook his head all the time I talked. When I paused, he said, “It’s not about reading the papers, it’s about the wear and tear. Two days ago you passed out walking up the stairs.”

  “Three days ago I was in the emergency room. But today, I worked all day and I’m perfectly fine. I need to be busy.”

  “Give yourself some time. It’s too soon for a big trip.”

  I pulled away from him. “There’s a remote possibility I may go to Montreal tomorrow. If I do go, I can be home late Thursday, and we can fly up to San Francisco on Friday afternoon.”

  “Maggie,” was as far as he got before he couldn’t say anything more.

  His look of deep anguish made me feel sad, and made me feel inadequate all over again. I wrapped my arms around him. “I’m sorry, Mike.”

  “Sorry for what?” He stood rigid.

  “I’m sorry about the way things turned out.” I pressed my face against his hard chest and smelled his skin through his crisp shirt. “And I’m okay now. But I don’t know if you are. Sooner or later, you have to talk to me, Mike.”

  A panhandler rose from his squat in a nearby doorway, sidled toward us, changed his mind, moved on. Mike didn’t seem to notice. He began to pat my back, as he does when he’s upset, and stood there silent for a long moment. I waited until he figured out what he wanted to say. Or not sa
y. After a while he took a deep breath.

  “When Michael got serious with his girlfriend,” Mike said, his voice thick, “I started getting used to the idea that I could be a grandfather in the not-too-distant future. It was a real nice notion, the thought of having a baby in the house again. Then suddenly, out of nowhere, it’s me who’s going to be the father. Me. Old Mike Flint. I’m ready to retire, and you and me are going to have a baby. The reality of it hardly sinks in, and then the baby is gone. Poof. Just gone.”

  “A little more than poof,” I said.

  “I can’t get the picture of what might have been out of my mind.” His voice wavered. “I liked the picture a whole lot, Maggie.”

  I started to pat his back. I was sad, too. But more for Mike than for myself.

  “I tried to get the lieutenant to take me off the Pedro case today,” he said. “I don’t have the stomach for it. I listen to these little assholes, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen years old. They talk about how far they’ll go to get a little money for drinking and toking and screwing around, and all the time their babies are crawling around on the police station floor.

  “I look at them, and the babies are so damn cute. But no one watches after them the right way. They’re nothing but raw material for the next generation of criminals. Another ten years, I’ll be hooking them up and bringing them in, just like I brought in their moms and dads.”

  “You won’t be around in ten years to hook up anybody.”

  “It’s just, I get so pissed.” What he didn’t say was, why did they get to have babies when we didn’t? “What a waste.”

  I said, “I love you.”

  “I know.” He chuckled deep in his throat, a self-deprecating tone. “Can’t for the life of me figure out why.”

  “Because you always take me to the nicest places. Are we going to eat, or what?”

  “Yeah. We’re going to eat.” He squared his shoulders, adjusting himself as if he had just dropped a heavy load. “I’ll put in for a vacation day Friday. We’ll have a good time this weekend.”

  “Good.” I reached up and kissed the underside of his jaw, felt the twelve-hour beard against my lips. “Lyle says he’ll move back into the house until we figure out what to do with it. Just so it won’t look abandoned.”

  “Best thing would be to sell,” Mike said. And said it not for the first time. “Let’s hope this offer is legit.”

  As we walked down the block toward the restaurant, I mumbled something about the bad real estate market and that we would be lucky if the offer was big enough to cover the mortgage, much less the sales fees. Mike didn’t seem concerned.

  The hills of San Francisco around my house are so steep that you can’t always see what’s down the other side until you’re over the crest and headed into, well, whatever is down there. That’s how I felt that Tuesday evening—rapidly approaching a blind descent.

  The house was after all just a house. And an expensive liability. No question about my attachment to it: The house had sheltered Casey and me through the two Big Ones, the divorce and the earthquake, in that order. Still, it was just a damn house.

  Okay, this is the truth: As much as I loved Mike, I always knew that if things didn’t work out between us, I could always go home. Selling my home required a leap of faith in our shared future similar to heading downhill blind.

  Philippe’s is a city landmark, a turn-of-the-century sandwich shop about halfway between Olvera Street and Union Station just north of L.A.’s Civic Center. There’s nothing elegant about the place—long tables and sawdust on the floor, an eighty-cent cup of coffee served with the original hot beef dip on a French roll—but it is a constant in the sea of urban change.

  I found two window seats at the far end of the narrow dining room while Mike ordered from the counter. Experience taught him to have the food wrapped to go, just in case. He had no more than sat down and added milk to his coffee, when his pager buzzed.

  “Wouldn’t you know?” he muttered. He had to put on reading glasses to see the two-line readout. “It’s the office. The mother is in. I gotta go.”

  I’m not a crier and I’m not clingy, but I felt like being both as soon as that damn pager beeped. I didn’t know where the sudden flood of emotion came from, and that upset me even more than the surge of tears I had to fight down. While Mike gathered everything together, preparing to leave, I walked over to the counter to grab a handful of napkins we didn’t need just to have a few seconds to myself, to get a grip.

  Mike waited for me at the door. I tucked the napkins into the top of his sandwich bag. “No wonder you have mice in the office, always taking meals at your desk.”

  “I’ll be home as soon as I can, Maggie.” He took my arm and we walked out.

  Buy A Hard Light Now!

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  copyright © 1995 by Wendy Hornsby

  cover design by Kathleen Lynch

  978-1-4532-2928-6

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