by Daniel Pyne
Lovely grabs Lamoureux’s arm to keep him from getting any separation, “You killed Isla to shut her up.”
“Rylan,” DeSpain warns, “that’s enough.” He starts to tug Lovely away, but Lovely still has Lamoureux’s arm in his grasp, so they all spin to an awkward halt.
“And killed Drummond, when he got all bent out of shape.” Lovely’s face is so close to Lamoureux’s that they nearly touch foreheads. A whisper: “And you just missed with me.”
“You’re a pointless little man. A speck of dust in the vastness of known space.”
“Yeah, so you keep telling me. Thanks.”
It should be finished, the Man of the Year should walk away because Lovely has nothing but empty threats, but Lamoureux can’t seem to stop himself now. “And even if your theory was true, what can you do about it, Mr. Lovely? We’re in the Age of Science. Big men, big ideas. The rules don’t apply to us.”
DeSpain looks troubled. As if this is too much for him. “Sir, can we just—let’s—”
Lamoureux’s face goes ugly; surface calm stripped bare, his corrupted soul revealed. “You, my friend, your ‘wife’ . . . any number of pretty trifles I may suffer and cast in my considerable wake . . . just don’t matter. Sorry.”
Lovely knows better, but jumps at him anyway, takes a wild swing and, uncharacteristically, misses. All the Feds react. A scuffle ensues, no blows landed, but eventually DeSpain finds purchase on Lovely’s shoulder and shoves him sideways against a display case, holding him there while Lamoureux backs away, smug, sneering, “I want to press charges. I want him arrested.”
Lovely struggles to get back into the fray, but DeSpain stands his ground. “Let it go,” he says to Lamoureux. “You, too, Lovely, let it go. You heard the man. We don’t factor in this equation, we never have. It’s about bigger weapons and better death. All we can do is duck and cover and pray.”
Lovely sags, relents. They watch Lamoureux go out a side door into Exposition Park, his retinue momentarily losing track of him.
The door gapes and stays open on an air-piston closing mechanism. The formal gardens of Exposition Park line a stone sidewalk in the shadow of the building. Sculpted trees sway in a warm breeze. Lovely sees that Lamoureux has stopped to light a cigarette, and flicks the match away. The piston sighs and the door slowly begins to close on him, squinting up into another glorious day.
There is a pop like a firecracker.
His head twists, jerks, spasms.
A small-caliber bullet punches through Lamoureux’s temple and exits in a puff of red mist just behind his ear, and he drops clumsy, like a stringless marionette.
Judy stands over him, numb, sobbing, with the smoking gun.
The crowd inside reacts and cowers, but Lovely and DeSpain rush outside by instinct or training, it no longer matters; Lovely strips the gun from the crying girl and takes her in his arms while DeSpain tends to his rocket man.
“I put you on a train.”
“Track goes both ways,” Judy says emptily.
DeSpain, ear to Lamoureux’s gaping lips, just murmurs, “Holy cow.” Dead.
Lovely raises his hand and—bangbangbangbang bang—empties the .22 revolver into the sky, causing anyone in the museum who might have been thinking of coming out the door to scramble again for cover and make their muffled calls for help.
“What the hell are you doing?!”
“Buying us ten seconds,” Lovely says, and two of them tick by while the former spooks trade weary looks. “She won’t get a fair shake, Ed. You know she won’t.”
Sirens wail, approaching. Footfall of cops coming through the garden, and voices from inside:
“Agent DeSpain! Status?”
DeSpain shakes his head, “Aw, Rylan, for the love of—”
Lovely counts down their margin. “. . . five, four, three . . .”
“You gonna always want your stories to have a happy ending now?”
Lovely shrugs. “Can’t have a Cold War if the whole world is ice.” He offers DeSpain the girl’s gun, grip first, and the Fed takes it.
DeSpain’s man, inside, calls again, “DeSpain?!”
“All clear,” DeSpain shouts back. He considers the trifling mortal coil of what was once the Man of the Year and, to Lovely, wry as only an ex-spook can be, “Gee, I wonder who killed him.”
Cops and Feds swarm the scene from inside and outside, a flood of law and order. DeSpain slips the .22 in his pocket and holds up his badge for the LAPD blues. “FBI, officers. Establish a perimeter, Fig to Vermont. The shooter is still at large.”
Lovely hustles the girl away; gets lost in the chaos as reporters and rubberneckers press down the paths and out through the doors, causing the cops to be way too occupied with crowd control to be attendant to anyone casually moving away from the scene.
Refrain of flashbulbs and the dull roar of breaking news.
—
THE FOREST LAWN FUNERAL for Isla had been small and quiet, fanned by dry, hot desert wind that whirled and danced across the Griffith Park hills.
Buddy, in a folding chair, sat central, edge of the grave, restless. Surrounded by a few friends. Did he know that Lovely was in attendance? Lovely doubts it, seated now, here, days later, cooled by a fan in Isla’s courtyard apartment, just a couple crow-flies miles away from where she’s buried. He’s listening to a Chico Hamilton LP that Lily gave to him for his birthday. He’s drinking scotch. The diary is on the side table, within reach.
Last entry. June 10. Write the things which thou hast seen, and the things which are, and the things which shall be hereafter . . .
At the bottom of the page, skewed and rushed, like an afterthought, she’s scribbled the phone number for Leong’s Fresh Fruit and Produce.
All the furniture’s been rearranged.
Buddy has been back to Forest Lawn every day, sweating so much it fogs his Ray-Bans; Lovely has followed the cab that takes him there, knows when he arrives and how long he stays. It won’t be difficult for Lily to collect him today.
Lovely waits in the cool gloom of Isla’s flat until a car horn honks. He pushes himself up from the chair and walks out into the slanting sunshine, letting the screen door close softly so as not to announce himself.
A convertible Cadillac has parked beyond the archway. Miss Lily Himes is at the wheel, summer dress, floppy black hat and sequined sunglasses, Buddy just climbing out, with his white cane probing for obstacles.
He senses Lovely. “How many steps?”
“Five.”
Buddy swings his stick, finds the stairs, and comes up into the courtyard, counting. Lovely meets him there and offers an arm, so close that he can smell on Buddy’s breath the tinned mints Lily must have offered him on the way over.
“How’s your French coming?”
“Okay, spit it out, Ry. Don’t be a jerk.”
“Was it gonna be Paris or just some protectorate like Algiers? Isla had a ticket and a passport and ten thousand bucks.”
Something moves, eclipsed behind the screen door opposite. Lovely can just make out the gentle slopes of the actress, as if behind a stage scrim, watching them. Her fingers touch the screen door and bloom small pools of pink.
“You never broke up with her, Buddy.”
They’re at the open door to Isla’s apartment. Lovely goes in first, and the door swings out all the way like an open arm, beckoning, but Buddy hesitates on the threshold, “I told you, she did to me what she did to you. Plus, I’m damaged goods. There was no future for us.”
While Lovely draws back farther into the shadows, Buddy stays at the doorway, head cocked to one side. Listening to the click of the tonearm on the spent record’s gutter.
“You’re lying,” Lovely says finally. “The baby was yours.”
Buddy snaps, “You know what, you surrendered whatever high ground you think you had
seven years ago! You ran away, Rylan! You ran away and left her here, lonely, instead of staying and fighting for her.” Buddy steps into the apartment, not even bothering to use his cane, and—WHACK—immediately collides with a chair he clearly doesn’t expect to be there; he reels back, startled, and topples the floor lamp behind him, and it goes crashing down.
“I didn’t run, Buddy, I left. And this apartment was all set up for a blind man until I moved it around about an hour ago.”
Buddy is quiet. He doesn’t move; not so much afraid, it seems, as unmoored. Lovely can still see in his face that undersized sixteen-year-old Lovely taught to use a clutch, the ten-year-old who stole candies from Grand Junction’s only Five and Dime, and then, so racked by guilt he got sick and couldn’t sleep, brought them back untouched and confessed his crime.
“I got out of your way. So you could have what I had lost.”
Buddy’s head goes back and forth slowly. “But you wouldn’t divorce her. She thought that meant something.”
“No.” Lovely thinks. “Or maybe it did.” He didn’t want the conversation to take this turn. “I’m stubborn. And I have feelings. I’m sorry.” He lets a silence pass. “But the blackmail.”
“What about it?”
“Isla’s mind didn’t work that way. If she thought Lamoureux had hurt a girl she would have gone right to the police.”
“And the cops would have done nothing,” Buddy says, bitterly.
“Probably not,” Lovely concedes. “But the blackmail . . . that was your idea. Soup to nuts.” As Hal would say.
Buddy just lets this go unchallenged. He uses his cane now, weaves with caution into the room, finds the sofa, sits. Lovely lifts the diary off the side table and puts it into Buddy’s hands. This may be the hardest thing he will ever have to do.
“Isla’s diary.”
Pause. “I can’t read it. Why—”
Lovely talks over him. “I thought it might give me a clue to what happened, you know . . . with me and her. It was just the year past but, like you say, we were still married and she never pushed for the divorce and I guess some part of me hoped, sure, that meant something. But no. No, sir, it’s all major key, as Lily likes to say: upbeat, happy, eyes forward. On you,” Lovely adds, sadly. “It’s all on you.” And he flashes on the last time they were all together. Isla’s hand reaching out . . . to Buddy Dale’s face.
A face that now, here, in her apartment, has tears slick streaming down it. “We had no m-m-money, and a family on the way. Look at me! The broken man! I made one bad decision, okay, but I didn’t—”
“—you did.”
“Don’t. Hey, d-don’t, don’t say that.”
“Her blood’s on your hands. And I’m guessing you have the missing ten grand, so don’t kid yourself.” Lovely stares at the hunched shoulders of his oldest friend. His voice goes distant, cold. “Lamoureux balked. Isla got scared. She was calling me because now you had become part of the problem.”
He puts his hat on, tilts it against the bloody, dying sun streaming through the window.
Buddy shudders in the room’s deepening shadows, fingers unsettled on the journal’s pebbled cover. “You here to pass judgment on me?”
“No. I came to say goodbye to my wife,” Lovely confesses. “The cops have some questions, though.”
Detective Henry Paez has taken a position on the flagstone, respectfully hanging back, but peering in, curious, from outside in the Diablo Bonita courtyard. A couple LAPD patrol cops are just joining him, coming up the steps, gun belts squeaking.
Lily should be waiting in her car.
Lovely says, “Ready?”
LOSERTOWN
JUNE 1987
1
ASSISTANT U.S. ATTORNEY GIL KIRBY. Something about him: casual, even rumpled, you’d never have made him for a lawyer, much less a federal prosecutor. Which is how he liked it. Guarded eyes, widow’s peak, a swimmer’s shoulders, the promise of a fair shake. Old-school.
“I come out of the private sector,” he was telling the younger woman sitting next to him. Kirby was mid-career, mid-discourse, middle of an active operation.
“One of those hushed top-floor firms with dark wood and Berber carpets and fit men who still get their shirts starched and wrapped in paper, and the few women who pretend they can tolerate working with them. You know—litigating over enormous piles of money for rich suckholes who already have enormous piles of money, so what’s the point? Moving wealth between two parties who already have more than they know what to do with. When I went into the law it was because I wanted to do good for society, my country, for the victims of crimes. I was glad to get out.”
I had no choice, he added, rueful, to himself.
Beside him, big hair, faultless posture, cast cold porcelain pale in the muted light thrown from an IBM workstation screen: the delicate, almost-ingénue Sabrina Colter. Redolent of Chanel and hairspray, she’d been described to Kirby by Jack Djafar in Justice as somebody’s kid sister crossed with a poisonous snake, but just now she was lovely and seemed harmless. Rapt, demure, attentive to him, as if Kirby were teaching an undergraduate seminar. And Kirby wondered idly, per Jack, if she was really a virgin.
“You know that old party game, Telephone? Where a message gets all garbled as it’s passed from kid to kid?” Kirby cracked his chronically stiff neck and shifted in his chair. “That’s what we’re doing, here, in the federal system. Telephone. Played by desperate souls just trying to save their sorry asses.” He shrugged. “We call ’em wobblies. And they’re, like, 99.999 percent of the confidential informants we spawn. So a good half the job is trying to figure out if the snitch sitting across from me’s got his message so garbled up somebody blameless’s gonna get hurt.”
“And the other half?” Colter asked as if interested, but was simply measuring him, as it turned out.
Kirby offered a melancholy grin. “The other half is three-card monte,” he said, “and paperwork.”
—
SAME TIME, western edge of Old Town, a shabby fugitive who called himself Tigger scampered bandy-legged and lickety-split, fast as he could, face flushed vermillion, arms pumping, running, his dusty, side-worn Jack Purcells running, spitting roof gravel, running zigzag to the edge of an apartment building rooftop, thirty feet up.
Where he leapt off.
Surrendered to gravity.
Arms gyrating wildly as if they could somehow slow his descent.
Down.
He landed hard in a dumpster below, cushioned by the cardboard and trash. The garbage leaked a heavy heat, the funky stench of rotting fruit and meat made Tigger’s eyes water. He struggled to untangle himself, about to climb out, when—
—“Incoming!”
A violent impact rocked the bin, and Tigger’s world got tossed. He went ass over elbow as DEA agent Hazel Fish, an unguided missile (here specifically, and in the course of life, generally), came hurtling down into the steel container from the roof above, the force of his arrival caroming the plucky fugitive into a grimy sidewall of the dumpster, hands clutching for the rim, desperate to keep himself from slipping into a sinkhole of black plastic garbage bags. And before Tigger could pull himself over the lip and get away, Fish bushwhacked him, shoulder to ribs, their combined shifting weight causing the dumpster to crash over on its side, where they spilled out into an alley and, quick as a calf roper, Fish had the fugitive handcuffed and flopped on his belly for the regulation pat down and reading of rights.
“Olé!”
Flashing lights jittered onto them from an arriving squad car. A Baggie of drugs got liberated from the back pocket of Tigger’s jeans.
“Wuh-oh,” quipped Fish, smug, bone-dry.
—
“WE CALL IT a ‘rolling bust,’” Kirby explained. It was Colter’s first day. She’d come with a prodigy’s résumé, White House pedigree, and the bri
ght burnish of unexpected appointment; good Methodist upbringing, an undergraduate degree from Bob Jones University, and a juris doctorate from Trinity Law.
She seemed so green Kirby had rightly assumed that she’d never even prosecuted a criminal case.
Virgin on two counts.
The lights of Jack Murphy Stadium threw a sallow glowing halo behind the modest skyscrapers of America’s Finest City, all cottoned in the sifting coastal gloaming and suggesting something magical to the north, but it was only the Padres and their small ball, breaking hearts and grounding into double plays.
Another night in paradise.
“Pop a street fiend for possession,” said Kirby, staying on point, “remind him of the serious nature of his crime, flip him on the friend who gave him the gak, then go get that guy and flip him. And so on, and so on. Local and federal personnel. We do these interjurisdictional operations from time to time.”
“Working your way up the food chain.”
“Working our way up the food chain, yes, ma’am, fast as we can, all in one night, so as to prevent the alleged perpetrators from warning their colleagues in the drug distribution business that the jig is up.”
Colter nodded expressionlessly.
Into the empty boxes of the boilerplate federal search warrant flickering on his monitor screen Kirby typed a rooftop rabbit’s given name (just a moment before called in from a radio car), followed by the name of the arresting officer (H. Fish) and the authorization justification: “Found holding suspected schedule II controlled substance” . . . Paperwork was always a grind.
Colter issued one of those soft, barely audible noises that, in Kirby’s experience, only very young women made: halfway between a sigh and a purr.
“Am I boring you?”
She claimed no.
—
AND THEN:
Some low-rent Chula Vista motel with a view of nothing.
El Perro Rojo.
It screamed of fluid exchanges and late-night misbehavior; if there were a Zagat’s Guide to Victimless Crime, this place would have earned a perfect thirty. Lurid fluorescent signage softened by sea mist scrawled its nonsense in the night. A circling chopper’s high beam slicked the pink door of an end unit with a bleach-white indictment.