What Waits for You

by Joseph Schneider

  It was a good question, and Jarsdel considered it thoughtfully. “LA’s a big city. He gets around a lot, which suggests he’s not so crazy that he can’t drive or take public transportation. But there’s also some suggestion that he’s delusional—I’m not saying he doesn’t know the difference between right and wrong, but that he may not care, or he may believe he has a condition that exempts him from moral law. Ever heard of Richard Trenton Chase?”

  “No, who’s he?”

  “The ‘Vampire of Sacramento,’ so he kind of ties in to what you’re saying. Suffered from a kaleidoscope of schizophrenic delusions and believed he had to kill people to stay alive.”

  “Like what?”

  Jarsdel shrugged. “Incomprehensible stew. UFOs, Nazis, all the usual suspects. And he’s similar to our guy in that he left heaps of physical evidence. But unlike our guy, he got caught fairly quickly. The Creeper’s more organized. And he invariably picks houses he knows he can hide in for a while.”

  “How does he know that before he goes in? Does he look at blueprints at the public records office or something?”

  “I asked myself the same question, but no, that would leave a trail. My theory’s that he’s a burglar. And he cases old houses, those likely to have basements and attics and crawl spaces, and makes the decision whether to stay after he breaks in—scopes it out from the inside, basically. If it doesn’t conform to his needs, he just steals what he wants and leaves.”

  “Ah,” said Varma, “so by that reasoning, many of his crimes are reported as simple burglaries, and not as Creeper attacks.”

  “Correct.”

  Varma shuddered. “And all those people, they have no idea how close they came to the full experience.”

  “Correct also.”

  “Doesn’t it bother you? Being a garbage man?”

  “I’m sorry—what?”

  “Coming along after the fact to deal with the bodies. Cataloging the mess and managing all the emotional fallout. It’s more like garbage cleanup than law enforcement. Doesn’t that bother you? That you’re not really there to enforce the laws as your job description suggests, but—I don’t know—more…maintain the laws? Keep them relatively functional, but only after the fact?”

  “You’re not the first person who’s made that comparison.”

  “I know, but still…it’s like having a drafty old mansion, and there’s always something leaking, but the only reason you know it’s leaking is there’s a big puddle on the ground. Only then do you know to clean it up. I mean, when’s the last time you actually got to put a firm stop to something bad, to save a life or stop someone from getting hurt or robbed? Put a stop to something bad before it could finish its course?”

  Jarsdel considered Varma’s question. He answered honestly. “Never.”

  “Never,” she repeated, looking both disappointed and unsurprised.

  “That big case you were impressed by, the one you asked me about. I only saved myself. There was nothing satisfying or noble about it. I just didn’t want to die. And I didn’t stop anything big, anything beyond myself. Damage had already been done.”

  “So you were on the cleanup crew on that one, too.”

  “No. I was part of the mess.”

  Varma bowed her head. “That’s a huge thing to share with me,” she said. “I’m grateful, and I admire your candor.” She lifted her gaze and looked at him closely. “I hope you have the opportunity someday. To stop someone truly evil, to save someone. I think that would be the most incredible, fulfilling thing.”

  Jarsdel didn’t comment, and Varma’s gaze wandered to the bandages on his left hand. “What happened?”

  “Oh. It’s fine.” Jarsdel made a lame gesture to show the fingers were in good working order, but the stitches pinched. He must have made a face, because Varma’s expression grew concerned.

  “Looks painful.”

  “Nah, not really.” Then, before he could stop himself, he added, “Someone glued a razor blade to the door handle on my car.”

  Varma’s eyes widened. “Wait, really?”

  “Yup. Hazards of the job, I guess.”

  “Oh my God. Where’d it happen?”

  “Right there in the parking lot at Hollywood Station.”

  “But there’s cameras!”

  “Ah.” Jarsdel gave his head a rueful shake. “Out of order.”

  “Unbelievable. Do you know who did it?”

  “I’ve got a pretty good idea, yeah.”

  Varma leaned closer. “Who?”

  “Can’t prove it, so it doesn’t really matter.”

  Varma thought for a moment. “Oh. Does this have anything to do with that thing a little while back? With the arm-wrestling table? What’s his name…”

  Jarsdel shrugged. “Possible.”

  “I’m so sorry. What a horrible, stupid, juvenile thing.” Suddenly, Varma brightened. “Hey. What are you doing right now?”

  “Just work.”

  “I mean do you have any plans?”

  “Korean barbecue, wine, slack-key guitar, sleep. Nothing too exciting. Why?”

  “How’d you feel about going on a little field trip with me? There’s something I’d like to show you.”

  “Where?”

  “It’s a surprise.”

  Jarsdel wanted to go. He looked back at his desk, where the Lauterbach book had been before Sponholz borrowed it. In its place was his bulging folder of reports.

  “I really think you’ll like it,” said Varma.

  “Is it far?”

  “You know where Watts Towers is?”

  “Sure. I’ve seen them, though. My dads took me when I was a kid.”

  “Not so much the towers exactly,” said Varma. “But what they accomplished. Because that’s the next phase.”

  He looked his phone. Half past three. That time of day, it would take them an hour to get there. He glanced again at the reports.

  “I guess if we caravan,” he said. “I gotta wrap all this up by tomorrow morning.”

  “Excellent.” Varma stood. “Hopefully you see now that I hadn’t forgotten.”

  “Forgotten what?”

  “I said I was gonna get in touch, remember? That day we ran into each other at the restaurant.”

  “You did?” said Jarsdel. “Forgot that part.”

  Varma flashed him a look—part amusement and part something else. Jarsdel couldn’t say for sure what it was, and it was gone quickly, but in the moment it had been there he’d found it intoxicating.

  “No, you didn’t,” she said.

  * * *

  Where does the water flow?

  You can tell a lot about a city by asking that question, Jarsdel thought.

  Los Angeles is a desert, with most of the water feeding its lawns, gardens, and swimming pools the legacy of shady dealings and outright theft. Owens Valley—once the “American Switzerland”—was bled dry, its lake emptied, its farmers left destitute. It was vampirism at a civic scale; Los Angeles slurped at the aqueducts, swelling, growing fat, while Owens Valley shriveled into a barely hospitable wasteland, becoming the very desert LA was pretending not to be. The larceny didn’t go entirely unpunished, however. The now-dry lake bed—an ancient volcanic deposit of selenium and arsenic—became airborne, dusting the entire Southland with toxic particulate matter for the better part of a century. Efforts to restore the valley saw some success, and it had only recently lost its dubious position as the single worst source of dust pollution in the entire country.

  Flush with its victory in the water wars, Los Angeles celebrated the life-giving bounty with a management decision of shocking, even aggressive stupidity. Instead of conserving the resource and using only what was needed, planners went out of their way to spend the water as irresponsibly as possible. What was even stranger, their hubris paid off,
creating a cultural icon as inseparable from the city as red carpets, searchlights, and the Hollywood sign. Whether it had been a kind of mad genius or simply stopped-clock syndrome, the scheme worked—at least from a publicity perspective.

  Palm trees.

  Tens of thousands of them. Now a ubiquitous sight anywhere in LA, before 1930 there were hardly any of the towering Mexican fan palms lining modern Wilshire Boulevard. The whole thing was a way of selling the city to the tourist trade, pitching it as an exotic Mediterranean paradise. Never mind that palm trees aren’t really trees at all, more like stalks of hard grass, and that they don’t clean the air or provide any fruit or shade. And never mind that in return for their lack of utility, palms demand more water than most actual trees. Style wasn’t bound by the constraints of propriety or logic. The city would have its useless, giant alien sticks, each a proud middle finger to the ruined Owens Valley. It was fitting that they grew higher in Los Angeles than they ever had in the wild.

  So where does the water flow?

  You won’t find brown lawns in Beverly Hills or Hancock Park or Benedict Canyon. What you will find are lots and lots of hundred-foot palms. You’ll find fountains, too. The Mulholland Memorial Fountain at the corner of Los Feliz Boulevard and Riverside has been appearing as a backdrop in wedding photographs since 1940. It’s a five-tiered art-deco gem and, with a 50,000-gallon capacity, celebrates the greatest American water thief with fitting brazenness.

  But Watts is different. Watts is in South LA, a flat, arid slice of the basin crammed with postwar tract homes, fast-food restaurants, and liquor stores. At their peak, there’d been more than seven hundred liquor stores in South LA, or about ten per square mile, and it took neighborhood activist groups like Community Coalition to reduce their number to a tolerable level. It was hard enough growing up in the ghetto without the environment itself setting you up to fail. It’s not just that there weren’t a lot of pretty water fountains; there also weren’t a whole lot of libraries, coffee shops, or safe public parks.

  If you get off the Harbor Freeway at Wilmington and follow it from there to 112th, crossing the train tracks, then onto Willowbrook, and finally onto 107th, you’d never guess you were about to see one of the most unusual works of art anywhere in the world. Cobbled together from concrete and rebar, castoff squares of tile, shards of pottery, glass, mirrors, and seashells, Watts Towers emerges above the skyline like an alien castle. Seventeen conical, Gaudiesque spires shooting up from a grotto of archways and sculptures and reef-like alcoves. In the sunlight, the scavenged ornaments embedded in its bands and loops glitter like jewels.

  The story of the towers was one of Tully’s favorites. They’d been built by one man, Simon Rodia, an illiterate Italian cement finisher. He’d begun the project in middle-age and worked on it for more than thirty years. And he’d done it without blueprints, without power tools or scaffolds, without a single bolt or welded joint or even a nail.

  Unfortunately, he’d also done it without permits or an inspection from the Los Angeles Building and Safety Department. This became a problem when Rodia mysteriously abandoned the property, handing the deed to a neighbor and boarding a northbound bus, never to return. The city wanted the towers torn down, but fierce community resistance forced a compromise. If the towers could pass a load test, they could stay. The chief of Building and Safety attached a winch to the tallest tower and yanked on it with 10,000 pounds of force. Rodia’s creation didn’t so much as tremble.

  Since then, the towers had survived mostly unmolested, weathering six big earthquakes and two major incidents of civil unrest. And despite being located in one of the city’s most disadvantaged neighborhoods, not a single carved initial or zigzag of spray paint mars their otherworldly beauty.

  As miserable as the traffic was, Jarsdel was pleased he’d only been two minutes shy of correctly estimating the travel time. He liked being good at that sort of thing. And he also had an audiobook of Diogenes the Cynic—Sayings and Anecdotes to keep him company.

  Varma was already out of her car and pressed against the perimeter fence by the time Jarsdel found a parking spot. She didn’t look away from the towers even as he approached. Still, she knew he was there and spoke to him when he took his place beside her.

  “Probably seen them a hundred times. And each time there’s something new.” Varma turned to him then, her expression shy, cautious. “What do you notice?”

  “About the towers? I told you, my dads brought me here when I was a kid. And back then this neighborhood was a lot more dangerous.”

  “Were you frightened?”

  “Of what?”

  “Gangs. I don’t know. Anyone who might not appreciate a white boy from the suburbs treating Watts like a tourist attraction?”

  Jarsdel thought that over. “Not frightened, I guess. Just a little on edge, because I could tell this was kind of a different world. And there was a guy right over there, shouting.” Jarsdel pointed to the plot of grass and trees adjacent to the towers. “Just shouting as loud as he could at everything.”

  “What year was it?”

  “I don’t know for sure. 1992, maybe ’93.”

  “Rough time for South-Central.”

  Jarsdel didn’t correct her, but no one called it that anymore. The words “South-Central” had earned such a stigma that the city discontinued the use of the term in the early 2000s.

  Varma gestured at the area around them. “So even though this was—back then, at least—one of the most dangerous places you could go around here, your parents took you?”

  “They love art. And on some level, I think, they thought it was impossible—or at least unlikely—that we’d come to any harm here. In the vicinity of the towers.”

  “They were right,” Varma said immediately. “They were absolutely right, and I’m proposing to take that idea and expand it. See how far it can go.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “You see the beauty in front of you. This extraordinary thing, brought into being by the love of a single person. New Zealand’s ambassador a while back, when he toured the country, he had one day to spend in Los Angeles. He could’ve done anything he wanted, but he came here. Not to Universal Studios or the Beverly Hills Hotel, but here.”

  “Okay,” said Jarsdel. “Still don’t think I get it.”

  “Turn around and you’ll see.”

  Jarsdel did. He saw tidy, single-story homes, their windows laced with bars.

  Varma pointed at them. “Look at those houses. Orange, baby blue, green. That one there’s got flowers painted on it—see? Big mural of roses and—I’m not sure what those are, daffodils or something, but look at the way it spills over onto the garage. And there, see that hummingbird painted on the eave? And if you look more closely, you’ll see even the walls in front of the houses are covered with mosaic artwork. And that bench—a public bench, but did you ever see anything like it? And it’s all put together, it all tells a story. Palm tree, a wading duck, some kind of elemental creature or angel or something, lotus blossoms. It’s a unified work of art. The whole block took on this mantle. They saw what Simon Rodia had done and decided that in their own way they’d keep it going.”

  Jarsdel looked at her. Her smile was distant, as if she were envisioning a possible future.

  “If the last few months have shown us anything,” she said, “it’s that ugliness is catching. But see? Right here, you can see it. So is beauty.” Varma turned to meet his gaze. “I had to slow down the crime first, give us some room to breathe. But only so we could move forward with what’s next. All of my work is based on this street right here. It’s what got me going, and it’s what keeps me going during the rough patches.”

  “You’re interested in the healing, transformative power of beauty?”

  “Exactly.”

  “And how does that fit in with designing security systems for missile silos?”

/>   Varma’s lip twitched. “I think that’s a cheap shot. I have to pay bills like everyone else. And wouldn’t you rather have those kinds of places secure?”

  Jarsdel considered. “Maybe a little cheap. Apologies.”

  Varma took his hand. Her skin was warm, her palm moist with sweat. He caught that tropical scent again—plumeria, he decided. It made you think of fronded beach bars and cool hotel rooms. “I want you on my side,” she said.

  “I am on your side.”

  “I’ve been getting threats, you know.”

  Jarsdel frowned. “No, I didn’t know. From whom?”

  “They’re anonymous, of course. Two postcards from Death Valley saying ‘Wish you were here.’ Other things, too. Little notes and stuff.”

  “Bring ’em over to the station.”

  “I threw them away. Didn’t want them in my apartment.”

  “Oh. Next time please don’t. Save all that kind of stuff. I’m happy to hold on to it for you if you don’t want it.”

  Varma squeezed his hand and he turned to her, leaning close. She matched the movement, standing on her toes, wrapping her free hand around the back of his neck. Their lips met, and she curled her fingers in his hair, pressing her body against his as they kissed. Her boldness excited Jardel, but she soon broke away, her cheeks flushed.

  “My goodness,” she said, wiping the corner of her mouth with a finger. “Got me all smudged up.”

  “Sorry,” said Jarsdel, leaning in again.

  Varma took a small step back and held up her hand. She smiled, but her eyes were serious. “We’re getting ahead of ourselves.”

  “How do you mean? Gavin’s not watching. Although I’m sure he’d love to have me drummed up on some obscure officer conduct charge.”

  Varma held his gaze a moment longer, then looked down at her feet. “We have to wait a little. Before we can do anything serious. It’s a really crucial time for me, and I can’t have any distractions. Oh God, I realize how awful that sounds, but that’s not what I mean. Just for a few weeks.”