by Daniel Pyne
—Daniel 11:27. The two kings, with their hearts bent on evil, will sit at the same table and lie to each other, but to no avail, because an end will still come at the appointed time—
—tick tick—
—and Lovely pivots and plants and throws himself toward the front door, letting gravity carry him just that much faster through the gap, shouldering it open wide, stumbling out onto the gravel driveway, falling, curling, covering, hands over and behind his head, because—
—tick tick DING.
The flash of fire beats the first thundering concussion to Lovely by a fraction of a second. It doesn’t seem likely that there could be anything louder; a dust of window glass spews, pulverized, a hot wind lifts and skids him pinwheeling farther out across the yard, thrown clear, while, inside, debris and the hellfire leap toward shattering beakers of chemicals and spilling vats of rocket test fuel, igniting all of it, everything, and causing the barn to explode in a hurricane of wood and metal and glass, and the pyrotechnics of secret fuels and molten metals cyclone around Lovely like mad Chinese fireworks.
Time stops. He can hear his heartbeat. He can hear his father’s Sunday school scripture: Zephaniah 3:8. The whole world will be consumed by the fire of my jealous anger. He can hear the high-hat cymbal at the Fall-Out switch and scuff and Lily’s high, clear voice singing the opening stanza of “C’est Si Bon,” and it’s in whatever key that fierce ringing in Lovely’s ears is in, and, yes, he’s still breathing, still intact, he’s been here before, always in the wake of some dreadful nonsense in which he played the fool’s role—Dresden, Berlin, Shandong, Damascus, Seoul, Tehran—watching the drift of civilization’s crimson embers and impossible indigo spitfires from the smoldering rubble, and Lovely sits up in mustard weed and the smoke sifting stillness of the Arroyo Seco, brushing cinders off his shredded suit, dazed.
Lucky, as he’s been told many times, to be alive.
9
“COPS GOT their man.”
“I guess.”
“That’s what matters to them.”
“Is it?”
“From where I sit. Always.”
Four a.m. The Fall-Out has emptied except for Lovely and Lily Himes at the bar. Chairs upside down on tables like ramparts or troops in surrender, the sweet smell of whatever mopped the floor; Lily is still ashen from her overnight in the women’s jail; eyes smoky, cheeks drawn.
He loves being with her at the end of the night after she’s sung. There’s something immutable in her that augurs a better day. Tonight, though, she’s flinty and adrift, and Lovely’s got bandages on his face and neck, cuts and nicks, both eyes blue-bruised and hollowed out.
“Meaning what?” Lovely wonders aloud. But he knows what she means. She’s not happy about what he’s done to her nephew, but he’d do it again in a heartbeat.
“Cops got their man,” Lily says again, stubborn, her refrain heavy with judgment. The difference between them is sometimes simply unbridgeable.
“They’ll think so, sure,” Lovely says, just as stubborn. “Paez is convinced the poor cosmic preacher was a jealous lover. DeSpain and the Feds think he was a commie spy.”
Lovely hadn’t cared to hang around the smoldering lab for the cops and FBI to arrive and get into the usual jurisdictional snitfit. He’d gimped his way sorely back up to his Morris and watched the first fire responders come wailing down the dirt road and then he slowly drove away, without headlights, skirting Aerojet’s security fence to where the fire road opened out onto a local blacktop, and from there made his way back to the city. And Lily Himes.
He takes a sip of his cocktail. He doesn’t know what she’s mixed for him, but it soothes his throat, raw from soot and fear. A late bus rambles past on Central, rattling the fixtures. “So everybody’s pretty pleased with themselves.”
“Including,” she says acidly, “you.”
Lovely decides to go all in. His ears continue to ring from the blast. Frustration rises like bile. “Your nephew is a deadbeat punk.”
“Is that what we’re talking about?”
“I don’t know. You tell me.”
“He’s family.”
“That’s what Cyrus keeps saying. What kind of family lets you take the rap for him?”
She has no answer.
“It didn’t please me to do it,” Lovely offers.
“I’ll make a note of how bad you feel.” Lily looks away, evidently not quite ready to let go of her anger with him yet. “So what’d you get, Rylan? All these windmills you keep fighting. Besides more scars?”
“I got you out of a tangle,” he says. “Everything else is vapor trails.”
Slowly she turns her violet eyes back to him. He never tires of looking at her.
“What I have is puzzle pieces that don’t fit,” Lovely says. “Lost wives and rocket scientists. Babies, blackmail, and broken friendships. And a body out in the desert.”
“That part is old news.”
“Is it?”
“Yes. And maybe they’re not pieces. Maybe they’re notes. And you’re just trying to find a key to play them in.”
Lovely studies her. “That’s kind of poetic, Lily.”
“Nah,” she tells him diffidently, “it’s just bebop.”
“Just,” he repeats, putting the spin on it, “like you and me? ‘Just’ friends?”
“I want a hot shower.” Lily sighs. “I gotta wash a whole layer of new indignity off of me and try to forget the last couple of days.” But the venom is gone. She adds, searching his eyes for something, “If you’da told me you had a wife, I probably never would have given you a second glance. And we never would have got together.”
“And you wouldn’t have had to break my heart.”
Lily seems unconvinced. “This world broke your heart, baby. If we didn’t live in it—”
“—I know. I know.”
In what crazy construct can love be called a crime?
It’s possible they will get through this. It’s probable they will not. Life takes weird turns, Lovely knows and, as long as you’re alive to live it, sky’s the limit.
Many men he’s known didn’t get that chance.
—
NEXT DAY, noon, there’s an empty wheelchair where the Korean War vet had previously bivouacked with his knock-knock jokes, and Lovely makes another journey down the long VA hospital corridor toward Buddy’s room.
The blind friend is not in situ, as Lovely’s Operation Ajax point man, Chet Nelson, was fond of expounding after draining several dirty martinis in the Baghdad embassy bar. Chet was a Princeton egghead, president of the college rug society: an idea man, especially when the ideas edged toward regime change in the Middle East. Shocked, of course, when SAVAK decided to round up and execute alleged traitors afterward.
Nobody here, in other words. Room spotless. Camera gone.
Lovely goes to the desk, moves the chair, opens the drawer Buddy didn’t want him snooping in and finds an impressive tumble of crazily framed square-format photographs that Buddy has taken of, it looks like, anything and everything, in focus and out, Los Angeles through a random lens. Blind man with a camera. But repeatedly the aperture found Isla, somehow. Her headless torso furry in the foreground, her shoulder edging into frame, half a face, the top of her head, an arm and a hip, the side of her head, with one clear eye staring out at Lovely, as if she knew he’d someday see them.
And nested among these pictures is a small reel-to-reel tape recorder spooled up and waiting to teach a sightless veteran his LEARN FRENCH EASY lessons, one through ten.
Fuck.
The trouble with mysteries is always their solution.
“Somebody in here?”
Buddy is in the doorway. Lovely freezes for some reason, and doesn’t respond.
“Lovely?”
Can he know? Buddy comes in, confide
nt, step step stop, the Rolleiflex jangling against his chest from a strap looped around his neck. “I smell you.” Committing to his silence, Lovely dodges away like a silent movie boxer, dancing around his old friend, matching his footsteps to Buddy’s.
“Just because I can’t see you doesn’t mean I can’t tell you’re—”
There’s a clatter of metal and wood when Buddy collides with the desk chair that Lovely moved out of the way to get to the drawer. Buddy wasn’t expecting it. But now he’s sure that someone is in his room.
“What do you want?”
Lovely slowly tries to back out of the room. He doesn’t want to have this conversation. He can’t.
“Rylan?” Buddy twists and lunges and flails at air, almost stumbling into the bed.
And Lovely is out. Out in the corridor, up on his toes, trying not to make a sound, moving, already halfway down the hallway, a coward’s momentum taking him back the way he came—always back the way he came—
“LOVELY!”
—
THE POSITION FOR PAEZ is wholly pragmatic: motive, opportunity, suicidal suspect, case cleared, move on. Even before Lovely has finished telling him what he knows, and suspects, Paez is shaking his head, lips pursed like a scolding schoolmarm. “So, what? You suggesting Buddy killed her?”
Lovely insists he’s not, but he knows he needs to tread lightly because it could easily take that turn.
“Then what? Cuz I’m pretty busy here.” Paez indicates a cooling cup of coffee and a well-thumbed Look magazine with Grace Kelly on the cover, threatening to unbutton her shirt.
“The murder weapon was Buddy’s gun.”
Paez isn’t really listening. “They want a new motto for the Police Academy.”
“Army issue. The M1917 revolver.”
Having scrawled some ideas on a pad of paper, Paez offers one up: “How about ‘We Serve to Protect’?” Then, admitting, “I kinda stole that one from Joe Dorobeck. But his goes the other way around.”
“Henry—”
“What with all the monkey business on your face, a better detective might be more curious about where you were last night when Drummond blew himself and that barn to kingdom come.”
“Are you gonna just—”
“Criminy, Ry, there must’ve been a million of those M1917s issued during the war.”
“With a nick on the handle? From this fast-draw thing Buddy used to practice on deck en route to Algiers? I didn’t mention it before because I knew you’d take it and run the wrong way.”
“Insulting me is really working for you.”
“How did Buddy’s gun get into Drummond’s hand?”
If, Paez mumbles, it is Buddy’s gun.
Lovely is undeterred. “You got two strange guys, college pals, one who made up a religion, one who likes the religious one to pimp him young altar girls to be pummeled like a speed bag. What if Isla knew that Drummond had set rocket man up with the Blohm girl? That kind of scandal would pretty much put an end to the Cosmic Church gravy train, and the rocket scientist’s recreation. And what if that’s what the blackmail was about?”
“Luckily, here in the LAPD, we use what’s called evidence to solve cases.”
“It’s gotta add up for me, Henry. All of it.”
“It adds up,” Paez points out. He lifts the magazine and uncovers Hostess Twinkies. “You just don’t like what the sum says about your girl. Everything doesn’t connect all neat that way, it’s more like a swirl.”
“You’re right. And in that swirl some things circle back and crash together. I don’t buy that a guy who beats up a woman like Judy has never done it before. I don’t buy that Isla had intimate relations with Drummond, or Lamoureux. Not her style. Neither was stealing secrets and selling them to communists. It’s all just correlation without causation, and we’re talking about Caltech eggheads who assume cops and Feds are dopes.”
Paez starts to unwrap a Twinkie. “Did I tell you Drummond was blood type O? Same as Isla’s baby?”
Lovely is getting fed up. “Sure, him and sixty percent of the world’s population. But, hey, it fits with your story, right, so—”
“—it fits the FACTS. It fits the facts.” He stuffs the industrial snack cake in his mouth and the white goo squeezes from the corners of his lips. “You hadn’t seen her in seven years. A lot can change. Look at you.”
“I’m the same. It’s the world that’s tilted.”
Licking his fingers, Paez says, “Oh. Uh-huh. And, what, you, you’re the guy’s gonna level it up?”
Lovely, resolved and determined: “Yeah.”
—
FACTS.
Shukri al-Quwatli didn’t want the Trans-Arabian pipeline going through his country. Fourteen months later, he was no longer king of Syria. The public verdict? Spontaneous coup by an unhappy population.
And Bechtel, and the British, and their plucky Americans, like Lovely, who did all the shitty things that didn’t get recorded in the factual record, packed up and hustled back to Berlin where the clarity of the red menace was a comfort.
There are facts, and there are facts.
Fact: The weekday double feature at the Egyptian offers Hell and High Water and The Glenn Miller Story for seventy-five cents. Fact: A gauzy magic hour light, as they say in the movie business, teasing real summer slants down flaxen through the walkway palms, Radio KLON twittering low on public address speakers as a cigarette girl in a flouncy dress works the milling courtyard crowd. Fact: Foundation and dark nylons can’t quite mask the telltale scrapes and contusions of her unfortunate ride up the Mulholland Highway. “Cigarettes? Free Winston samples. Cigarettes?”
As if anticipating his approach, she pivots abruptly and recognizes Lovely after a fleeting frown.
“How much for the whole tray?” he asks her.
Judy’s eyes struggle to keep what Lovely can tell is just a managed despair at bay. “Tell me he’s dead. Tell me he tried it again, and the cops caught him and shot him dead.”
“I can’t.”
Traffic spawning on Hollywood Boulevard, silverfish slipping past one another.
A trio of teenagers want to try the Winstons. The boys with their hair waxed high, the girl with lips the color of fresh viscera. Judy asks them if they’re all eighteen, knows they’re not, but gives them a promotional short pack each. “It’s good for your complexion,” she tells the girl. “Four out of five doctors agree.”
Facts.
“What do you want?” she says, fragile, to Lovely after the teens saunter away.
“How much for the tray?”
“I don’t want your charity. You can’t save me. You were too late, you still are.”
“I know that,” Lovely admits.
“I came out here for the Rose Bowl,” she says. “Michigan State. Boo-rah.”
“You beat Cal.”
“Did we? I never made it to the game.” She shifts the tray and the straps leave soft furrows in her shoulders. “This would have been my sophomore year. But I was mostly there to get my MRS, to be honest. Came out of an East Lansing winter and it was so blue-sky beautiful here, I stayed. I just . . . stayed.” She seems to lose herself in this thought for a moment. “You ever been to Michigan?”
Lovely allows that he has not. Western Colorado. Berlin, Warsaw, Inchon, South Korea. He says he knows what cold can be, anyway.
“I thought I’d meet Mr. Right, and boom. Astrophysicist. How about them apples? And I met him at church. At church. How could that turn out so wrong?”
She has answered his question about Lamoureux before he could ask it. Lovely says, “Under the sun, under the sky. You were an altar girl. At the Church of the Cosmic Evolution.” He would have been astonished if it had been any other explanation. But still, what difference does it make?
Judy nods, fights back tears. “I want to
hire you to kill him.”
Lovely says no.
Raw: “Please?”
“Not my area,” he says, uncomfortable, because it might have been. “I’m sorry. How much for the whole tray?”
She presses him, “I’ve got over five hundred dollars in savings.”
“You don’t want to go down that road,” Lovely tells her, and means it. “It’s a dead end. There’s nothing there for you.”
Judy nods again, in the empty way of a broken person who doesn’t agree but won’t argue, looks out at all the people filing into the theater. Expectant faces. Ready to be transported out of this sorry world and into a better one. Ready for a good show.
“They have no idea,” she says, downcast.
“No,” Lovely agrees. “How much for the tray?” he asks one last time.
Judy looks crossed-up and frowns, “Well, the Winstons are a free promotion. The others, I don’t even know. I’d have to . . .” She stares at the tray, then at Lovely. “Why?”
“You’re going home,” he says.
—
THE FIRST SET at the reopened Fall-Out is probably just settling in, Lovely muses: a packed house of angel city hepcats, a reenergized Lily stepping up to the microphone to open with the band’s new signature, a hard bebop Cab Callawoy call-and-response:
Who’s got fission?
(We got fission!)
Who’s transmutin’?
(Gamma rootin’ tootin’—)
Talkin’ ’bout the nuclear blues . . .
He wishes he were there to see it, and not standing in Judy’s bachelorette studio, watching her pack, and all his usual recriminations swirling like the Catalina eddy, bleak, gray, indefatigable, cycling through the same wretched human crimes and calamities over and over again.
The inescapable limbo of the Southern California Bight.
Judy’s been boarding downtown in a gloomy Victorian tower doomed for demolition, halfway up Bunker Hill, rendering the Angel’s Flight funicular pointless, so they walked up the long run of concrete steps from Hill Street, where Lovely has parked his car near Grand Central Market.