by David Freed
“He told me he wanted to move out of Los Angeles,” Marvis said. “That teacher who got shot the week before over on the next block was the last straw for him. He told me if he ever had the money, he was gonna buy himself his own island up in Washington or somewhere like that and live on it the rest of his life.” Marvis wiped the wetness from his eyes. “I told him, I says, ‘Fool, you can’t live on no island all by yourself. No man can.’ And you know what he says to me? He says, ‘Marvis, I’d live there with my wife if she’d ever take me back.’”
Savannah’s chin quivered. “Arlo really said that?”
“Every word.”
I rolled my eyes.
He and Echevarria had eaten dinner together the night he died, Marvis said. Chinese food delivered from Johnny Wang’s Golden Dragon Asian Bistro, the same joint on Sherman Way where they ordered in for dinner every week or so. Egg rolls, kung pao beef, twice-cooked pork, pork fried rice. They washed all the MSG down with a pint of Jameson and still had room for fortune cookies. Marvis’s fortune that night had been worth saving, he said. He dug the slip of paper out of his wallet and handed it to Savannah. She read it aloud:
“You will meet a man named Wright. He is often wrong.”
Marvis chuckled. “Wright and wrong. Can you believe that?” Then he began to blubber about how he was probably the last man to have seen Echevarria alive. Soon Savannah was blubbering, too.
I went outside and called Mrs. Schmulowitz to see how she and Kiddiot were doing. A “nice young man” from the insurance company had already been by, she said. He’d informed her that a big check would be mailed to her within two weeks so she could begin rebuilding the garage, Mrs. Schmulowitz said. She’d decided to bake a German chocolate cake in celebration. This brought us to Kiddiot who, she said, was doing more than fine in my absence.
“He got up on the counter and helped himself to a big slice of cake. What kind of crazy meshuggener cat likes German chocolate cake?”
“At least he’s eating.”
I told her I’d be back in Rancho Bonita that afternoon to take him off her hands. No rush, Mrs. Schmulowitz said. She and Kiddiot were getting along fine. She repeated her offer to let me use her sofa, but I’d already inconvenienced her enough, I told her. Mrs. Schmulowitz, however, refused to take no for an answer. She launched into a long dissertation about how her first husband had met a bum on the subway in Brooklyn and insisted that they take him in for a few days until the bum could get on his feet, and how he turned out to be a thief who stole Mrs. Schmulowitz’s silver. There was a beep on my phone. Another call coming in. Mrs. Schmulowitz kept droning on obliviously about how the bum refused to leave after taking one bite of her famous blintzes and my phone kept beeping and Mrs. Schmulowitz kept talking until finally I interjected and told her that I would be happy to finish listening to her story when I saw her in person—“OK, I gotta go, Mrs. Schmulowitz”—and signed off.
Detective Ostrow at Rancho Bonita PD was on the other line, coughing and apologizing for sounding like he was about to hack up a lung. He’d been out surfing that morning before work, he said, when a big roller broke the wrong way and he gulped a bellyful of seawater—a “Neptune cocktail” as he put it.
“Gnarly,” I said.
He asked me if I knew anyone who drove a white Honda or possibly a Toyota of the same color, with tinted windows and a spoiler on the back. A couple of neighbors, he said, had seen a vehicle matching that description cruising the alley behind Mrs. Schmulowitz’s garage an hour or so before the firebombing.
I told him about my various close encounters with the mysterious Honda. And, no, I said, anticipating his next question, I didn’t catch the license plate number.
“Well, whoever he is, we’ll find him eventually,” Ostrow said. “That’s the cool thing about being a cop in a community like Rancho Bonita where the crime rate isn’t through the roof. We actually get to investigate stuff, unlike LAPD. Speaking of which, I called Detective Czarnek. He hasn’t called me back.”
“I’ll yank his chain next time I talk to him, which may or may not be in this millennium.” Ostrow urged me to have a great day. I told him to hang ten.
“You’d never know it to look at him,” Savannah said, as she emerged from Marvis’s house, “but that man is a very sensitive soul. He scheduled a session with me so I could teach him a few tools on grief-coping. Sometimes I think I could use some of those tools myself.” She gazed wistfully at the house next door where Echevarria had lived.
“I can catch a cab to the bus station if you want to stand here all day and reminisce.”
Savannah’s eyes flashed. “Does being so insensitive come to you naturally, Logan, or do you work at it?”
An acrid something surged up from my gut and burned the back of my throat. The taste of shame. Instead of affording my ex-wife a modicum of empathy, as any compassionate human being would’ve done under similar circumstances, I’d reverted to the jilted and jealous ex-husband. I needed to work on my Chi or I was coming back as a snail in the next life for sure.
“I’m sorry for being a jerk, Savannah.”
“I’ve come to expect nothing less. Get in. I’ll drive you to the bus station.”
“Look, I haven’t had anything to eat since breakfast. How about I spring for dinner and we call it even? You can drive me to the bus station after that.”
Savannah turned her head and looked through me with those eyes.
“I don’t understand you,” she said. “I never have.”
TWENTY-THREE
Savannah wanted to eat at the Chinese restaurant that had delivered Echevarria’s last meal. No problem, I said. I wanted to show her how completely unfazed I was by her pining after the man for whom she’d left me. All modesty aside, my performance deserved an Oscar.
Johnny Wang’s Golden Dragon Asian Bistro was sandwiched in a strip mall between a Vietnamese nail salon and a storefront for Madam Magdala, Fortune Teller to Hollywood Stars. A sign hung in the madam’s window that said “Closed,” next to another sign that said, “Walk-ins always welcomed.”
“Why keep regular business hours,” I said as we got out of Savannah’s car, “if you know in advance when your next customer’s coming in?”
Savannah didn’t feel much like talking.
Seating inside Johnny Wang’s was configured like a coach car on a passenger train. Ten booths, five along each wall, bisected by a broad aisle leading to a kitchen in the back. Every booth was empty. An elderly Chinese man who looked like he could be somebody named Johnny Wang was perched on a stool behind the door, reading a Mandarin-language newspaper. He smiled at us as we walked in and gestured.
“Anywhere you like.”
I followed Savannah past an aquarium built into the wall. The glass was fuzzy green with algae. The koi inside had grown too large for the tank. The fish crowded together, barely moving, fan tails swaying anemically in the filthy, bubbling water. I felt bad for them. We took the last booth in the back on the right. I sat facing the door.
An aging waitress with a heavily creased face who looked like she could be somebody named Mrs. Johnny Wang ferried a dented tin teapot with a bamboo handle and two cloisonné cups to our table. She was wearing a white tuxedo shirt, black bow tie with a tuxedo vest, and black trousers.
“You very pretty,” Mrs. Wang said.
“Why, thank you,” I said.
“I mean her.”
“You’re very kind,” Savannah said.
“You like something drink maybe? Beer? Wine?”
“I’m fine with water,” Savannah said.
“Water’s good for me, too—as long as it’s not from the aquarium.”
Mrs. Wang handed us menus. A young Asian man of about twenty with spiked hair and a Van Halen T-shirt emerged from the kitchen and asked her a question in Mandarin. She responded curtly. They began yelling at each other in their native tongue, arguing as if we were not present. Pretty soon Johnny Wang was yelling, too. They were all yelling.<
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“Knock it off!”
They stopped, startled by my outburst.
“The Buddha doesn’t like arguing,” I said. “It’s not conducive to bliss.”
“My grandson, Benjamin, he no like the hard work!” Mrs. Wang complained.
“I go to school full-time!”
“Ooohhh, Mr. Cal Tech. You think you so fancy! School no hard work. School easy! Restaurant, that hard work!” She started yelling at him in Mandarin again.
Benjamin rolled his eyes and pleaded his case to Savannah and me.
“I ask for one lousy day off a week and they have a meltdown. Three years I’m working here. For what—six bucks an hour? All the lo mein I can eat? Dude, I am so over lo mein.”
“You make good tips,” his grandmother countered.
“Good tips? The tips barely pay for my gas! And do you pay me for gas? No!”
The grandmother swore something angry and foreign under her breath and marched into the kitchen.
“You must be the delivery driver,” I said.
“Until I graduate,” Benjamin said, “then I’m outta here.”
I asked him if the name Arlo Echevarria rang a bell. It didn’t.
“He lived on Williston Drive,” I said. “You used to deliver there.”
Benjamin thought for a second. “5442. Dude got shot a couple months back.”
“That’s him.”
The kid was pleased with himself. “I can’t remember names, but street numbers, I got a head for those. That dude, man, I was there, like, an hour before he got killed, too. Could’ve been me, ya know? Like that guy OJ cut up. Goldberg, or whatever his name was.”
“Always better to be lucky than good,” I said.
“Was he a friend of yours or something, the dude on Williston?”
“He was my husband,” Savannah said evenly.
“Shit. Really?”
She nodded.
Benjamin cleared his throat and dug his hands into his pockets. “I’m really sorry.”
“It’s OK.”
Detectives questioned him about his whereabouts that night, Benjamin said, but quickly ruled him out as a suspect in Echevarria’s murder. As the fatal shots were being fired, he was more than two miles away in Grenada Hills, delivering Szechwan scallops and orange peel shrimp to a lesbian music producer and her “like, totally hot” sixteen-year-old lover.
“I wished I could’ve helped the cops out,” Benjamin said. “I mean, he always tipped pretty good, your husband, you know? But I didn’t have anything to tell them. I didn’t see anything weird or anything like that. Dude seemed normal. I gave him the food, he paid with cash. Just like always.”
“What was his mood like?” Savannah wanted to know.
“His mood? OK, I guess. I don’t really know.” He fidgeted, running his hand back and forth across his mouth. “I didn’t really know him, you know? I’m just the delivery guy. He was always real nice to me, though, your husband. Seemed like a nice dude.”
Savannah smiled, however painfully, letting the kid know she appreciated his kindness.
Benjamin studied the fish swimming in the aquarium. “Nothing bad ever happened around here when I was a kid, except for maybe the ’quake back in ’94, but I barely remember that. Now, people get killed all the time. My math teacher, Mr. Ortiz, he got shot over on Elmira Avenue, like a block away from your husband’s house. 5442. I used to deliver there, too. A math teacher. Can you believe that?”
“It’s a violent world,” I said.
Eastbound traffic on Sherman Way was backed up a mile. A car accident? Malfunctioning stoplight? What did it matter? It was Los Angeles. Savannah said she was happy to drive me north to Rancho Bonita instead of south, to the Greyhound station downtown, but I declined.
She turned sharply down a residential street. Houses whizzed by. Block after block, all the same. It would be easy to get lost in such neighborhoods, the same way I’d gotten lost looking for Echevarria’s house without benefit of the Jaguar’s GPS. I wondered how many aerospace and automobile workers over the years—when there were still such industries in the San Fernando Valley—had inadvertently turned down the wrong streets and into the wrong driveways after stopping off for a few beers on their way home, while their wives waited to cuss them out for being late for supper yet again.
Some synapse in my brain suddenly sparked, a rare instant of complete lucidity. I could feel my heart surging to regain rhythm.
“Shit.”
Savannah looked over at me. “What?”
I called directory assistance and got the number for the Chinese restaurant where we’d just eaten. The old man answered the phone.
“Johnny Wang.”
“Is Benjamin there?”
“Who?”
“Your grandson.”
“Who?”
“Your delivery driver.”
“You want delivery? Okey-doke. What you like?”
“I need to speak with Benjamin.”
“You like broccoli beef?”
“I . . . would . . . like . . . to . . . talk . . . to . . . Benjamin.”
“Oh. You want talk to Benjamin?”
“Yes. Benjamin.”
Johnny Wang cupped his hand over the phone and yelled something in Mandarin. I could hear Mrs. Wang yelling something back. Then Johnny Wang was back.
“Benjamin, he coming now.”
Savannah was frowning, trying to watch the road and me.
“What is it, Logan?”
“Hello?” Benjamin sounded out of breath.
I gave him my name and reminded him that Savannah and I had been in a few minutes earlier.
“You said something about your math teacher, Mr. Ortiz, getting shot a couple weeks ago. What was Mr. Ortiz’s address again?”
“Why do you want to know that?”
“All I need is the address, Ben.”
“I’m not gonna get in trouble, am I?”
“Only if you don’t give me the address.”
There was a long pause. Then Benjamin said, “Elmira Avenue, 5442.”
“How old was Mr. Ortiz?”
“I dunno. Pretty up there. Like, fifty. Why?”
I thanked him and hung up.
Savannah braked at a four-way stop. A man with a mestizo’s leathery face and wishbone legs, who was probably younger than he looked, wheeled an ice cream pushcart across the intersection. He was wearing a white straw cowboy hat and silver rodeo belt buckle as big as a pie plate. I punched the address into the Jaguar’s GPS:
Elmira Avenue paralleled Williston Drive.
One block over.
Jesus.
“A math teacher gets shot at 5442 Elmira Avenue. Less than a week later, Echevarria gets shot at 5442 Williston. The exact same address. One street away.”
“It’s a violent world, Logan. You said it yourself.”
“What if the math teacher was a screw-up?”
“What’re you talking about?”
“It’s dark, the houses in that neighborhood all look the same. The shooter’s after Arlo, but he confuses one street for another. Ends up at 5442 Elmira—only he thinks it’s 5442 Williston. Same address, one block over. I made the same mistake. The teacher’s the same approximate age as Arlo. Both Latino. Bang, bang, bang. The shooter splits, then realizes later, ‘I killed the wrong guy.’ He lays low for a few days, goes back to the right address when the heat’s off and takes out Arlo.”
“If there was any truth to your theory, I’m sure the police would’ve looked into it by now.”
“We’re not dealing with Scotland Yard here, Savannah. It’s the LAPD.”
I probably should’ve called Czarnek. But given his burgeoning case load and what a disaster Marvis Woodley’s tip about the junkie with the squirt gun had turned out to be, I doubted he would ever talk to me again.
I told Savannah to turn around.
“Don’t tell me what to do.”
“I’m asking. Please turn around. Elmira
Avenue. Maybe somebody there saw something.”
“I thought you were in such a big hurry to get to the bus station,” Savannah said.
“There’s always the next bus,” I said.
But for the black steel security grates covering the windows and front door, the retired teacher’s house looked like Arlo Echevarria’s. Same uninspired architecture. Same blighted lawn. Only the paint scheme was different: Green Bay Packers green with gold trim.
“Mr. Ortiz must’ve been a cheesehead,” I said.
“What’s a cheesehead?”
“How in the hell did I ever stay married to somebody for so long who knows absolutely nothing about football?”
“The sex,” Savannah said.
No arguments there. I tried the doorbell. Broken. I knocked. No answer. No sound or sign of life inside. There were sooty smudges around the knob and up and down the frame. Fingerprint powder.
Savannah followed me around back.
A kidney-shaped swimming pool drained of water took up most of the tiny backyard. There was a six-foot privacy fence of redwood slats, many of which were rotted and falling down. Through the gaps in the fence, across the alley and the street beyond, I could see the front of Echevarria’s house. It looked tranquil, undisturbed.
Not so where Mr. Ortiz had died. The back door had been booted off its hinges, the jam splintered. Someone had tried to secure the opening after the fact by slapping up a thin sheet of plywood where the door had been, then tacking it into place with a few roofing nails. I peeled back the plywood and peeked inside:
The back door led into the kitchen. The unplugged refrigerator was standing open, its shelves overgrown with moldy, unrecognizable lumps of fetid food and swarming with flies. A jumble of filthy cooking pots was heaped atop a harvest gold electric range. More dirty pans and dishes were piled in the sink. A rusty swath of dried blood trailed out from the green Astroturf covering the kitchen floor into the living room. From the way the blood had pooled at the base of the sink, it appeared as if Mr. Ortiz had been shot there, then dragged into the living room, or crawled.
“What do you see?” Savannah said.