San Diego Noir

by Maryelizabeth Hart

  Single Family Home. Approved by Planning Commission. Approved by Coastal Commission.

  Maybe he wanted a divorce. That would be okay with her, she realized. She didn’t think she liked him very much anymore, and she was starting to wonder, how much had she liked him Before? There was something, something she could almost remember, that happened before the accident, that she hadn’t liked. Something about the way he did business.

  Frank, her stepdad, what had he told her?

  “He plays fast and loose, sweetie. That’s my read. Gets in over his head and looks for an easy out.”

  “You can do better,” her mom had said.

  What’s happening here?

  She thought about all this as she dressed for the gym on Monday, fumbling at the laces of her sneakers, which were still hard for her to tie.

  An easy out.

  If they divorced, he wouldn’t get the settlement money. Would he? That money was for her, for her pain and suffering and loss. Loss of ability. Loss of income. Loss of family.

  There were other assets: some money left from the various insurance policies, the Del Mar house.

  If he wanted half of all that, he could have it.

  But how much was left? She didn’t know. There was a financial advisor, who David met with more than she did. He handled their personal bank accounts. Paid the bills. There had been a lot of bills, even with her health insurance.

  Competency. That was the other part.

  “Spare a dollar, so I can get something to eat?”

  There he was, squatting against the telephone pole by her house. He looked worse than ever. Skinnier. Hair tangled into dreadlocks. A crusted sore on his cheek. He smelled worse too.

  She had some quarters, a couple dimes. “Here,” she said.

  “That all you got? Come on, lady.”

  “Sorry, I don’t have any change.”

  He stared at the coins, muttering under his breath. “Lucifer was the most beautiful of God’s angels, radiating light and glory. I’m not deceived by his honeyed words. Jesus watches over me, just like he watches over you.”

  She fumbled with her little teardrop bag, the one she took to the gym. There was money in there, she was pretty sure. Some bills.

  “Here.” She didn’t look at what she gave him. She had more important things to think about.

  After her session with the trainer, she stood outside the gym and called her own lawyer.

  “I want a divorce,” she told him.

  Yes, she was sure. Yes, she knew the financials would be complicated.

  “Give him whatever he wants, except for my house and the, the settlement. He can’t have those.”

  Yes, they could have access to her bank accounts, her financial records. She’d sign anything they needed her to sign. Was there an accountant? There was, she remembered signing papers, but the accountant would be David’s, not hers.

  “If you can rec … recommend one, just hire him,” she said.

  She had a sense, a feeling that she needed to act quickly. Before he did.

  “The other thing is …” What was the other thing? “Competency,” she managed, only stumbling a little on the word. “He’s going to, to chal … challenge my competency.”

  “Great,” her lawyer said with a sigh. “That could make things complicated. You know, I told you that guy was an asshole.”

  “You did?”

  He laughed. “Yeah. Back when you wanted to divorce him the first time.”

  She hadn’t wanted him to come along, that day they all went to celebrate.

  How could she have forgotten that?

  She took an extra long time after the gym, feeding the cats. She walked out onto the pier to look for One Leg, but he wasn’t there. Stopped at the Chinese restaurant on Newport for takeout. By the time she rounded the block to her house, it was dark.

  David would be home by now.

  She decided that the best thing to do was to pretend that she didn’t know what he’d been up to, and to not tell him about her own plans. Wait until her lawyer told her he had “all the ducks in a row,” whatever the ducks might be.

  The light was on in the living room, and she thought she saw movement behind the curtain.

  “Spare some change?”

  Kari flinched, her heart pounding. “You scared me.”

  The bum wasn’t leaning against the telephone pole. Instead, he stood next to it, close to the fence that surrounded her house.

  “I need some money,” he said. “So I can get something to eat.”

  “I gave you some earlier today.”

  “Bitch!” he whispered. “Deceiver … full of fucking lies …”

  What was that in his hand? A knife?

  “I cast you out,” he said. “I reject you.”

  He clutched the knife, the tip a short lunge from her belly.

  She stared at it.

  “Okay,” she said. “But here’s some food.” She slowly lifted her hand, the one holding the bag of Chinese takeout. “If you’re hungry. It’s good. You can have it.” She held it out to him.

  For a moment, they both stood there, frozen, him with the knife, her with the bag.

  She heard the front door of her house creak open, a sliver of light spill out. Was that David?

  Suddenly, the bum started to sob. “I’m sorry,” she made out. “I’m sorry. I listened to the Shining One. He said you were a fallen Host. He said he’d give me gold. But he lied again. He always lies. I asked for food, and you fed me.”

  The sliver of light vanished. The door had closed. David must have seen her, seen her and the bum. But he stayed inside.

  What’s happening here?

  An easy out.

  She wasn’t sure she was thinking it through, exactly. It was more like the thought just came to her.

  “I know how that is,” she whispered back. “Cause the Shining One, he lives with me. Right inside that house.”

  The bum nodded, his head bouncing up and down, like he wasn’t in control of it. “Yes. Yes, he does. He speaks to me. He told me lies about you.”

  “I want to get him out of there,” she said. “But it’s hard to make him leave.”

  He nodded again, and even in the dark she could see the change that had come over his face. He’d been like one of the cats she fed. Now he was more like a dog on the beach, and she’d just thrown him a bone.

  “If you cast him out, he can’t lie to you anymore,” she said.

  One way or another, she was through feeding that bum.

  MOVING BLACK OBJECTS

  BY CAMERON PIERCE HUGHES

  Mission Beach

  May 2007

  FIRST PROTOCOL: FIND OUT WHERE THEY ARE

  Moses Johnson takes his job way too personally. He knows it, his colleagues know it. It’s why his wife of twelve years divorced him four years ago, though it was mostly a peaceful divorce and they’re better friends than they were a couple and he’s a good dad. See, people who go into Moses’s line of work go through steps. First they do it because they need the work. Then they start taking it seriously as if it’s their patriotic duty, and before you know it, it becomes, “Asshole, you owe me the money.” Moses skipped the second step and embraced the third step—by his sixth month. He cultivates looking imposing. Black suits (always black), blood-red tie, and shoes so shined that they could probably blind someone. He doesn’t wear sunglasses, even when the temperature is at its highest and the sun at its brightest. He was hit in the face with shrapnel on a classified op somewhere overseas which makes his left eye droop. It makes him scarier when he’s after a deadbeat. A deadbeat know he’s screwed if he sees Moses coming toward him with the attaché case he always, always has with him and that look in his eye like when Michael Jordan has his sights set on the basket and there ain’t nothing in this world that’s going to stop him. When looking for someone, you become your mark, you eat where he eats, you talk to who he would, you order his drink and eat the same food. It’s the reason Moses
is so good at this, he can think like a deadbeat. He’s close friends with his ex and he spoils his daughter, who was born with spina bifida and is in a wheelchair, rotten and visits with her every chance he gets. You can see him racing her in her chair all over the boardwalk most afternoons. It’s his military special ops background. Be All You Can Be extended to all parts of his life.

  He’s been working for The Guys downtown for twenty-one years. He’s forty-four.

  The current deadbeat he’s looking for owes tens of thousands of dollars. He’s an Internet pornographer named Theodore “Teddy” Bear.

  “Teddy’s a piece of work,” George Leedom, his boss, had told him three weeks ago.

  Leedom is a legend, been around for decades, completely hairless with less of a tan than Casper the Ghost. When out of earshot, and making sure he’s not even in the same neighborhood, his underlings call him the Greasy Old Bastard because he always gets his money no matter what and his skin has a peculiar sheen to it. His voice sounds like Darth Vader, if the Sith Lord smoked three packs a day. He sees Moses as his successor and always sends him on the tough jobs, except east of the 5, because Moses’s skin is a few shades too dark in places like Santee (Klantee) and Lakeside (Whiteside).

  Teddy was your average kid at USD in the late ’90s pursuing a career in computers and getting his hands on all the porn he could, really kinky and filthy shit. It wasn’t long before he put his passions together and he was a multimillionaire by twentyfour. File-sharing by the early twenty-first century was a godsend for him. He created a powerful search engine to find streaming videos of filth and it wasn’t long before advertisers were lining up and he became the King of Filth on the Internet. Then he sold the software for millions and went back to his passion of making and distributing porn to stream on the Internet. Now it’s come to light that he has been cheating the guys who run the city for quite some time. It’s not like he couldn’t afford to pay what he owes and still be richer than God, he’s just greedy.

  “We don’t know who’s protecting him, and every time we think we have him, he slips away. I need you to get him,” Leedom rasped.

  So Moses has been following him around San Diego and every time he thinks he has him, the guy suddenly gets in a car or lost in a crowd. It’s gotten perversely funny for Moses, every other time he gets close, a sleek black car stops to let Teddy in. These cars are so featureless that Moses has started calling them Moving Black Objects, slang from his days in the military. The dude even changes where he lives frequently. Moses figures he has something serious going on in San Diego, because most cheats would be out of the country by now if they knew they were in trouble. He tracks him to Mission Beach, where he’s been seeing him for the past few days, always slightly out of reach. A buddy of his once said that the only mission to be found there was getting laid, pounding beers, catching a wave, and maybe riding the roller coaster.

  It’s Moses’s first break. He’s lived in San Diego all his life, and was born and grew up in Mission Beach. He still lives there now in a two-bedroom condo by the bay that would cost a fortune, your soul, and your first-born child today, but was a steal back in the late ’60s. His eight-year-old daughter Summer lives with him there every June and every other weekend. He knows the best place to get a burger, the best place for Mexican, the best coffee of all blends. Hell, he even knows a great little Greek café called Kojak’s that plays Creedence Clearwater Revival on the juke box. He knows that the best place to get fish-and-chips is at this little joint by the harbor where he keeps the small tuna fishing boat he inherited from his dad who was in that line of work for over thirty years. He knows every single lifeguard by name and has dated most of the daughters of the aging owners of the small convenience stores and restaurants that have been around forever. He knows the ecosystem of the neighborhood, that the best dirt comes from the storekeepers, the bartenders, the guys in the restaurant kitchens, the security at the Sound Wave, a popular club that has live bands at night. He knows that the carnies at the fair games at Belmont Park see and hear everything. They all make the wheels turn in Mission Beach, not the landlords and rich people who rarely even come down here. This is where he eats. Where he sleeps. His comfort. His solace. His home. It’s easy as pie to use that ecosystem to find Teddy’s latest featureless white condo and safehouse, and that’s where he is now, looking for clues.

  He’s been doing this a long time and knows how to search. He’s not inside the condo because breaking in could get him arrested, but it’s fair play if Teddy’s trash is on the sidewalk ready to get picked up. Of course, Teddy has slipped the noose again and isn’t there, but after some disgusting digging that only makes Moses angrier at Teddy, he finds a scrap of paper that says, Go see Legacy.

  SECOND PROTOCOL: TRACK WHAT THEY DO

  Brandon “Legacy” Penter is that kid every big city has who you just hate. Tall and athletic with spiky brown hair with blond tips and an I-just-got-away-with-something grin. He’s the son of a former San Diego lawyer turned judge, his mother a real estate mogul, his brother a councilman, and his uncle is CIA. Legacy is a junior at USD where his entire family went and is part of a snooty frat. Legacy is so dumb that he wouldn’t be able to find a seashell on the beach he lives twenty feet from. Daddy has to pay off the right people so he can pull off Gentleman’s Cs. If San Diego has royalty, the Penters are it, living in their mansion at the top of the very exclusive Soledad Mountain in La Jolla.

  Moses goes to Mission Boulevard, the heart of Mission Beach.

  In Mission Beach, every foot of space counts and is bitterly fought for and protected. Five surf shops, four bars, a handful of restaurants, a resort hotel, a Turkish-style coffee house, and a small amusement park named Belmont Park with the last wooden roller coaster in California are packed in tight here, wedged in and amongst the beachside homes. At North Jetty Road, the southwestern cap of Mission Beach, there is a well-known localsonly spot where Moses surfs with a group of middle-aged professionals called the Gentleman’s Hour; at the north end is the Catamaran Hotel, a ritzy vacation spot with suites costing up to eight hundred bucks a night and worth every penny. Compared to its sisters Pacific Beach and Ocean Beach, Mission Beach is a baby in age and much smaller than both.

  Pacific Beach is losing to gentrification and crime spurred by alcohol, and Ocean Beach tries way too hard to be funky and pretend it’s still 1975. Hanging on to a true beach-town feel amid the commercialism of the age is no easy task for those who live there, but Mission Beach keeps it real. Fourteen streets and forty-six walkways cross Mission Boulevard, emptying out onto the brown mud banks of the bay on the east and the sand of the Pacific Ocean on the west. Delicious views of blue sky peek out from between the rows of homes; clouds pass slowly overhead. Here, boxy stucco houses with neatly manicured lawns sit next to fading wooden shacks whose gardens sprawl on their small front yards like they don’t have a care in the world. Towels sway lazily on clotheslines; wet suits hang over balcony rails to dry; surfboards lie piled on porches and on top of cars and in garages, still wet and slippery from morning sessions. Paint has peeled, façades dulled, and cars rusted, but this only adds to the funk of the place. Neighbors gather on the sidewalk to talk about the weather. For a city where the sun shines three hundred days a year, its citizens are obsessed with the weather and act betrayed and more than a little scared when it’s cloudy or, God forbid, raining. Moses doesn’t judge, he’s had his share of weather conversations.

  Several people can be seen walking their dogs. People nod and wave at each other from the windows of cars. Surfers wax and hose their boards, talking story about the mythical perfect wave, and the height and ferocity of the wave gets bigger the more they drink. Shop owners linger outside storefronts, smoking and chatting and watching the street traffic. Restaurants don’t dare have dress codes (No shirts, no shoes? You can come in!) and more often than not have outdoor seating. Beach-front condos have every variety of life. You can see what looks like an MTV beach party on one patio, next t
o a group of retirees drinking red wine while enjoying their golden years, and a happy middle-aged gay couple holding hands as they absorb the sunset.

  Houses face the streets and walkways, few blocked from view by trees or hedges, which gives the area a casual and friendly look. A puppy eager to please. Street performers like jugglers or reggae bands do their thing on the boardwalk. The whoosh! of the Giant Dipper roller coaster can be heard every few minutes and Moses remembers the huge block party thrown when it was reopened in 1990. If you didn’t know the locals, very few appeared to have a care in the world; for Moses, it’s everything a beach town should be and the fact that scum like Teddy and Legacy infect it makes him sick.

  Legacy lives with some other trust-fund California kids in a nice stucco house and when Moses gets there, he finds the guy washing down his obnoxious yellow humvee with Creed blasting on the stereo. The awful, crime-against-humanity music only worsens Moses’s month.

  “Hey, Legacy. You and I need to have a Come to Jesus meeting. You free?” Moses turns off the stereo; Legacy is lucky he doesn’t hurl it into the ocean.

  Before Legacy can run into the house and lock the door, Moses has him by the neck. Moses is a big guy, 6'2” and 220 pounds, who was an all-state quarterback at Mission Bay High, and worst of all, he’s black, which, like, terrifies entitled assholes like Legacy. He has him backed up to his car with nowhere to run.

  “C’mon, man! I didn’t do anything? Why you aggro?” Legacy whines. Moses doesn’t know what aggro means, but he’s guessing something like upset. Moses is fairly upset.

  “Theodore Bear. You know him.”

  “I don’t know anyone by that name!” Legacy tries to get by, but Moses pushes him back against the car.

  “Legacy? I can smell bullshit from the next county.”

  “I’m gonna call my dad!” Legacy screeches. It’s a good threat. Moses’s career is stalled because he pissed off Legacy’s dad by hassling him back when he was a powerful downtown lawyer and partner at the prestigious Burke, Spitz, and Culver law firm.