The Chinese Beverly Hills

by John Shannon

  THE CHINESE BEVERLY HILLS

  First published in 2014 by

  MP Publishing

  12 Strathallan Crescent, Douglas, Isle of Man IM2 4NR British Isles

  mppublishingusa.com

  Copyright © 2014 by John Shannon

  All rights reserved.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Shannon, John, 1943-

  Chinese Beverly Hills : a Jack Liffey mystery / John Shannon.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1849822442

  Series : Jack Liffey Mysteries

  1. Liffey, Jack (Fictitious character) --Fiction 2. Private investigators --California --Los

  Angeles --Fiction. 3. Chinese Americans --California --Los Angeles --Fiction. 4. Missing

  children --Fiction. 5. Mystery Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3569.H3358 C34 2013

  813.6 --dc23

  eBook ISBN 978-1-84982-292-3

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  A nod and a wink to my nephew, Jim Harrison, il miglior fabbro.

  We are all cripples, every one of us, more or less.

  —Dostoyevsky, Notes from the Underground

  People who are powerless make an open theater of violence.

  —Don DeLillo, Mao II

  ONE

  No Human Being Is Exempt from Panic

  The sliding door of Firehawk-15 walloped open and they were both yanked outward by a gasp of the fire below. The Sheepshead Fire was crowning up into the canopy of ponderosa pines only a few hundred feet beneath their helicopter. Despite all his experience, Tony Piscatelli was shocked that the chopper had filled instantly with pounding heat and the smell of woodsmoke. The firefront in the San Bernardino Mountains east of Pasadena looked a terrifying mile wide as it advanced along the slope.

  They’d been told there were fifty inexperienced volunteers down there, men from the minimum-security Wayside Honor Rancho Jail. The prisoners had mainly been chopping brush for firebreaks on the safe flanks of the fire, but the blaze had unexpectedly turned south and then back over a ridge into unburned fuel, threatening to trap the amateur groundpounders.

  The two Forest Service smokejumpers took hold of each other’s shoulders in the doorway and waited for the jump to find the civvies and lead them to safety over Trophy Saddle. They had their go from Chopper 10, the little control fire chopper above them.

  Their bigger Sikorsky, on loan from L.A. County Fire, hammered into the turbulence and then orbited a burned-over safety zone. The firefighters tested their harnesses and made their final preparations to fast-rope down. A gigantic column of smoke billowed off the firefront, a red glow pulsing deep within the black.

  “Hook up,” Piscatelli shouted over the firestorm, slapping his jumpmate’s shoulder. His stomach clenched up in nausea, as always.

  “Hooked,” Jerry Routt shouted back. They both tugged on the Sky Genie rig to make sure all was tight. They’d been fire service hotshots for fifteen and ten years, respectively, trained at first to work in disciplined groups of twenty men, but now the equation had been reversed. They were the elite of the elite, pulled aside to be smokejumpers because they’d shown they had initiative and daring.

  Piscatelli tossed out a drift streamer, judging the air currents by the blue smoke flare. The firestorm yanked the streamer toward the burn column, and it tumbled end over end as it fell at an angle. Piscatelli touched his throat mike for the pilot. “Get us farther south, away from the firefront, man. Take us to one hundred, but find another LZ. You’ll find a burnover at eight o’clock. Send the burger meat later.”

  Lightning shot blindingly out of the smoke column, and thunder followed like ripping canvas, trailing off into a growl.

  “The LZ! See it?” Piscatelli shouted to the pilot.

  “Negatory,” the pilot called. “Wait! Fer sure. Three hundred and descending. This place is total crazy winds, my doomed heroes. I’m having trouble holding it. Jump with God.”

  “Hold that thought!” Piscatelli shouted. He felt his gut tighten.

  “I gotta piss so bad,” Routt said, but then laughed.

  “Ready to go?”

  “Ready, Teddy.”

  “One hundred feet, pals,” the pilot shouted.

  “Ropes!”

  They hurled their half-inch nylon lines out into the ripping crosswinds. Their body weight would take the ropes pretty much straight down.

  “Three rope turns!”

  “Three turns!”

  They leaned into one another and Piscatelli gave his old reliable friend a shoulder punch.

  “Rock and roll!”

  They rappelled out of the chopper together. Horizons whirled and heaved as they did a controlled slide down toward the blackened LZ.

  *

  Jack Liffey heard the thumping of Gloria’s cane upstairs, louder than absolutely necessary, a bit of a statement. It tracked approximately from bed to bathroom, a pause, back into the bedroom, then whacked the floor a couple of times in mute rage, and abruptly clattered across the room, hurled.

  “Jack!”

  Jack Liffey wanted to take her up a cold beer, but the doctor had insisted she cut back on the self-medication. He tried to think of something else that might cheer her up. With three broken ribs, a rebuilt hip joint, two internal organs taken out—a kidney and a ruptured spleen—and six months’ forced leave from her job at the LAPD, not much qualified as cheer anymore. Not to mention the psychological afterburn of her bitter ordeal in Bakersfield, which had included sustained beatings and rape. She still wouldn’t tell him word one about it, but he knew a lot of it indirectly.

  He headed up the stairs, noisily enough to alert her that he was on the way. She was facing away from him on the bed, wearing only a skimpy peignoir, or whatever the hell it was called. He was tempted to caress her, but she hadn’t let him touch her in the six weeks she’d been back.

  “I’m here,” he said.

  “Why? Why would you want to be anywhere near me?”

  No jokes, he told himself. “Because I care, and you could use some caring.” God, what an idiot I sound, he thought. Hold tight. She’s going to give you a blast, but she needs you to stay calm as ice.

  “You must be insane, Jack. Who could care about a worthless mess?”

  “You’re one of the worthiest human beings I know. Can I get you something?”

  “Like what? A plastic bowling trophy?”

  “It’s up to you, sweet.”

  “I am not sweet, and why is it up to me? Why is it always up to me? Can’t you ever get your fucking mind around what you need?”

  “I guess I need to look into that.” Hold on, hold on—he braced himself against her big metaphorical thumb that was pressing against the metaphorical bruise he carried around from so many previous failures. She had an unerring instinct for taking advantage of advantage. A sharp cop.

  Wounded dark eyes came around to him, and he tried desperately to appear kindly and patient; she burst into a fit of weeping. He rested his hand on her shoulder softly. Sh
e let him. After she collapsed onto the bed, she let him hold her, spooning her. But not for long.

  “Go away now, Jack. I don’t want to turn you permanently against me.”

  “There’s no chance of that.”

  “Stop it. Go away.”

  “I’m right downstairs.” Just hurl your cane again.

  He headed down the creaky staircase in the old frame house in East L.A. He wished he could kill the two malicious, dimwitted cops who’d abused her, but she already had. They’d wanted payback for showing them up in their own town, doing their ostensible jobs like any real pro would, and probably costing them their last chance for promotion.

  Downstairs he could hear the inconsolable sobbing, so unlike her iron strength that it broke his heart. He turned on the TV to drown out the sound. Dinner was still two hours away, nothing else to do. A chastened and worried Loco tottered in to visit, sensitive to the aura of grief that permeated the house. The dog avoided Gloria now. It was a half-coyote with its own problems, in remission from bone cancer after surgery and chemotherapy—procedures that Jack Liffey hadn’t yet found a way to pay off. The dog had been altered by its ordeal; he was more affectionate now, at least when he felt like it, his eyes losing some of their wild yellow opaqueness. He settled heavily on Jack Liffey’s feet.

  An image finally coalesced after the old TV’s slow warmup. Smoky and disoriented shots of a mountain wildfire from a news helicopter.

  “…More than a hundred thousand acres have been burned as of two o’clock, but only two structures have been destroyed and no lives lost. Tom, can you hear me? Tom? I’m sorry, we’re having trouble with voice contact with Chopper 11. More than a thousand firefighters are battling the Sheepshead Fire now, including personnel from the Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and county and city fire departments. And fifty volunteers from the Wayside Honor Rancho, who are threatened by the fire’s detour over San Dimas Pass.”

  The young, square-jawed announcer appeared harassed, at loose ends, pushing around papers in front of him as unobtrusively as he could.

  “The National Weather Service says smoke from the fire has already spread across Nevada and Utah. California has only received about one-third as much moisture as normal this year, and average temperatures have been almost ten degrees above normal.”

  “Patrick… am I on?”

  “Tom, are you with us? I think Tom is back. Any word on the rescue team?”

  “Nothing here. We’re heading for Beaver Flat, where the volunteers are reported to be headed. Their two buses were incinerated on the fire road about half an hour ago, but expert smokejumpers are dropping to their rescue. You can go to the fire command center in Riverside for direct information.”

  Jack Liffey dialed down the sound, and when he realized Gloria had stopped weeping, he muted it completely. Forest fires didn’t grab his attention that much, much like police chases on T V. They were just part of the ecology of disaster in Southern California: earthquakes, mudslides, and shooting sprees. TV always showed the same images, the same details, the same ironies and tragedies.

  All as meaningless as a bad toss of the dice. Unless, of course, the fire ever threatened his daughter Maeve, who was living in a fire zone far to the west in Topanga.

  *

  It had been a difficult hour for Maeve Liffey. Bunny had finally agreed to undress and pose for her on the broken-down sofa, and between quick sketch lines and brush strokes, Maeve had been sorely tempted to fly across the room and cover her ample body with kisses. But somehow she’d kept to professional conduct so as not to upset the complex relationship among the four UCLA coeds who lived in the rambling rented house in Topanga canyon not far above Malibu.

  “Thanks so much, Bunny.”

  “You need a better space heater. Jesus, Maeve. Are you sure you can survive out here?”

  “I’m okay. I’ll look into a better heater if you’ll pose some more.”

  Bunny didn’t commit. She wrapped her bathrobe tight around herself and trotted the fifty feet back to the main house. A few weeks earlier Maeve had moved out to the old garage, cleared out a generation of trash and turned it into her studio and bedroom, freeing her room in the main house for a fourth student to cut down their rent. There was no kitchen or bathroom out here, but she didn’t mind sharing the ones in the house and she could use the extra space for painting, an obsession that had overtaken her not long after starting her first classes at UCLA. She’d had no idea she had any artistic talent at all, but even with her tendency to self-doubt, she could see how good her work was rapidly getting. On the canvas, the dynamics of Bunny’s body were right there to see. The possibility of a sudden nudge or shift, an eruption of movement—even a good cuddle.

  Her ringtone cried out the hook from Melissa Etheridge’s “I Want to Come Over.” She had only the cell, like everyone else in her generation. The day of the landline was just about over.

  “Hi, kid.”

  “Hello,” Maeve said to the strange greeting. It was a woman, but an odd voice, brash and accented, Asian maybe.

  “This Maeve Liffey? Daughter of Jack?”

  “That’s me.” Already she was suspicious. Who would be calling her dad on her number?

  “Hey, Tien Joubert here. You remember me from many years, girl? My English still crap, but it don’t mean I’m stupid, I been to Sorbonne. Speak five language. I run whopping big import business now. Your dad miss a good thing.”

  Maeve knew who she was now. The woman had hired her father ten years earlier to find a missing girl in Orange County, but she’d also relentlessly seduced him at a vulnerable time in his life and helped destroy his relationship with a previous live-in. Maeve’s protective instincts toward Gloria rose automatically.

  “I remember you. You grabbed onto my dad at a bad time.”

  “I worth hundred million bucks, girl. I don’t need no broke-down roundeye man. I got plenty men knocking day and night. I need help to find girl, and Jack’s phone number no good. Somebody at the number say go chase my tail.”

  Maeve guessed she meant the phone number from his old condo in Culver City, which he hadn’t used in at least eight years. She debated saying go chase your tail, but she knew her father was desperate for business, as always. Finding missing children had been his specialty since the aerospace business collapsed and no one needed technical writers anymore. He always said it paid better than delivering pizzas, just. “Give me your number and I’ll have him call you.” It was as far as she was willing to go, and she might let that promise lapse, too, after careful consideration of the particular broke-down roundeye man in question.

  The woman gave her a number with the 714 Orange County area code.

  “This missing girl isn’t you, is it?” Maeve asked.

  The woman laughed with a self-assured abandon that gave Maeve just a hint of what had attracted her father.

  *

  Routt struggled to control his animal terror—his inner lizard brain still had an instinctual fear of fire. Orange flame billowed over the ridge to the right. The roar was almost deafening, but the head of the fire was temporarily halted along the ridgeline while it sent its scouts spilling south to outflank them. It was hard sometimes not to read a cunning and malevolent will into a blaze.

  At that moment Routt stumbled, astonishing himself. He never stumbled—never. He still held the California high school record in the 180 low hurdles.

  He glanced down and froze in horror. What had tripped him was a girl’s body, lying prone just inside the wash. There was an obvious gunshot wound in her forehead. Recent. She was small and young and Asian.

  “Tony! Over here! Before it’s too late.”

  “Jer, go-go!”

  “No kidding! Gotta see this!”

  Reluctantly, Piscatelli took a few steps back. He reacted to the body, but he was too disciplined to take the time to talk it over. “Okay, she’s gone. Let’s get out of here.”

  “This is a murder.”

 
“We know where she is. Let’s get to a safe zone.”

  Routt saw that the girl’s right hand was clasped. He reached down and plucked a necklace from her stiff fingers, tucked it quickly into his pocket.

  “J.R., now!”

  Buds of fire bloomed over the ridge, blinding holes in the world too bright to look at. The whole ridgeline writhed with fire at once.

  “Situation!” Piscatelli shouted.

  Routt felt the gusts of overpowering wind sweeping toward the fire and knew the beast was declaring itself a firestorm. How hot did they get? He tried to recall. Maybe 1,600 degrees. Hot enough to ignite asphalt roads. He sighted a gravel wash to the left. It was below the trail by thirty feet, good for a possible flameover, though bad for chimney effect from below. But you only had what you had.

  “Left,” Routt shouted.

  “Drop packs!” Piscatelli shouted over the roar.

  That was it. Piscatelli was no pussy. Routt took a millisecond to glance at the clawing fists of fire coming straight for them. Their hundred-pound packs contained backfire torches and fuses and would be deadly in a flameover. Drop, indeed. Routt spun and hurled his pack as far as he could. They wouldn’t even be able to get to the safe zone.

  “Shake and bake! Now!”

  He heard Piscatelli go on his radio, asking for an emergency bucket drop right on top of them.

  Routt ran the extra yards to the wash and yanked the shelter packet out of his stomach pouch, tugged the red rings to pop it open. It unfolded, agonizingly slowly, and he flipped the head of the foil shelter away from the fire. The fame was in a personal rage at him, growling. He’d never seen anything like it. He yelled “Gone shelter!” to Piscatelli as he clambered inside the low foil sandwich of a tent, and once on his belly inside he folded out the floor panels underneath him. He’d never been quite this frightened, and it took him down a peg in his own estimation. But training stayed with him like instinct. He slipped his forearms inside the hold-downs and bucked his butt around to thrust the sides of the shelter away from his body to get air space. Head low, breathe low. Don’t panic. It’s always better inside.