The Chinese Beverly Hills

by John Shannon

  “Tien, I know you’re sincere whenever you start saying millions. I’ll come down there early next week, I promise. We’ll talk about cabbages and kings. Right now I’m on the job. A girl’s missing.” He recalled the way Tien’s finger would play with his penis totally without embarrassment, soft as a flower petal. “Cabbages?” she said.

  *

  As he drove, he could smell the tamales cooking and guessed his pal Art Castro’s theory of engine-block cuisine was probably working. He wound uphill toward the vertical wall of the San Gabriel Mountains. Not many cities were caught like this between the ocean and truly alpine peaks. With periodic earthquakes, of course.

  In the turnaround where the pavement ended was a yellow gate made of six-inch welded iron pipe. A four-wheel-drive Jeep Wrangler with official “Exempt” plates was already there, and he parked beside it. Roski must have swapped at the motor pool.

  “Thanks for coming,” Roski told him. “I don’t meet that many guys I want to talk to.”

  They shook hands again.

  “This investigation is probably outside both our comfort zones,” Jack Liffey said. He saw Roski sniffing the Mexican smells emanating from his pickup. “I wasn’t kidding about lunch.”

  He lifted the hood to show two big tamales double-wrapped in foil nestled on the four-banger. Foil-wrapped corn tortillas were draped over the radiator. A plastic tub of salsa sat on the battery, and he had some ginger ale in a cooler and a couple of beers for Roski.

  “I’ve heard of this,” Roski said. “But I thought it was a redneck joke.”

  “My first try.” Jack Liffey put it all in a wicker picnic basket Maeve had given him years ago. “We can eat on the road.”

  “Might as well stop, Jack. I know a place.” At the gate Roski reached up into a steel canister welded to the gate post. To make it impossible to use a bolt cutter on the padlock within. He unlocked the gate and swung it open.

  “I’m in a funny place in my life, Jack. A bad marriage, kids that took sides and still don’t like their old man much, and a belief system that hit the skids some time ago. There’s been little real friendship.”

  Why did he keep running into people like this? He must have a homing beacon for the wounded and forlorn.

  “The only emotion I get now is a kind of loss.”

  A volcanic ash seemed to have deposited itself over the land, Jack Liffey thought—the remains of a burnt civilization, poisoning everything.

  “Relax, man. I brought you beer.”

  Roski drove them through the gate onto a rutted dirt trail and got back out to lock up.

  *

  Bunny had gone off to drama class and Maeve made herself coffee in the main house. She’d stopped going to anything but art, and felt guilty about it, but that’s just the way it was. Her sense of guilt was basically just an internalizing of her father’s wrinkly scowl. Fiercely principled eyes, a face the size of a mountain, his finger always pointing out the rocky upward path—the more difficult one.

  She wondered if she was really in love with Bunny, or just letting her lust drive her. She’d always let passions blast her into orbit. Or was her hesitation just a kind of gradual dialing down of her inner fire, the first step toward “growing up”?

  *

  Roski’s Jeep bounced hard up the fire road. Jack Liffey recognized the thousand-yard stare on Roski’s face, driving with white-knuckled intensity. That stare had been how they described guys on the way home from ’Nam after a horrible tour. Later it became known as PTSD. He wondered if there had been a single big bottom-out for Roski.

  At a crest a rock banged their teeth hard, and then the road smoothed again. The firefighter was driving too hard for the road.

  “Walt! There’s no hurry and you’re fucking hurrying. It’s folly.”

  “Sorry. I’ve got this maniac urge in me.”

  “I can see it.”

  “I should do another tour to burn it off. I did three. Desert Storm for Bush One and Enduring Freedom twice. Toward the end, the danger became a drug. Like your war?”

  Ahead the chaparral had all been burned out by the fire, charred and ugly.

  “Forget war, man. Peace is hard enough.”

  The four-wheeler slowed down, and Jack Liffey eased his hold on the door grip.

  Ahead there was a short bridge across a streambed, just past a ramshackle cabin. An old Studebaker was backed into a parking pad. Jack Liffey recognized the lanky young man out front, who sat on a bright green folding chair reading a book.

  “Don’t slow down. I know that kid.”

  “Me, too. I talked to him once about fire regulations. The place got a bit rowdy from time to time.”

  “How far to where you’re taking me?”

  “Maybe half a mile. Who was he to you?”

  He took the rickety bridge slowly with a creek boiling downhill beneath it. Beyond, maimed stubs of brush poked up through the burned land. The smell was unforgettable—wood smoke, car ashtray, cat pee, and a physical scratchiness in the back of the throat. Time had run out here.

  “Jack? The guy?”

  “You heard about the fuss at the keg party?”

  “Film at eleven. Were you at that mess?”

  “The kid back there was one of the organizers. I bet the cops know exactly who he is.”

  “Who knows?” Roski said. “Police intelligence. While I see many hoofprints going in, I see few coming out.”

  Jack Liffey knew it as an old military putdown, and it was nice to see it was still around.

  “If you want to talk to him, I’ll show you how to get into the fire road.”

  Roski yanked the wheel rightward to take the Wrangler up a side trail that was unbearably steep, and then hammered over a rise and surged out onto a broad graveled wash and finally stopped. A central meander in the wash carried runoff water, silver as molten metal. A work area in the wash looked like an amateur gold mine, with slanted sieve boxes and yellow tape tied to traffic cones, cordoning off an area the size of half a tennis court. The wash was lined with the scorched trunks of sycamores and alders.

  “How many years to grow back?” Jack Liffey said.

  “Too damn many.”

  They got out and walked solemnly toward the police tape.

  “We’re figuring that’s her head end,” Roski said, pointing at the upslope portion of the taped area. “We don’t think she died in the fire. Our guy reported seeing a bullet wound. Her forehead.”

  He told Jack Liffey about the handcuffs, though he knew he shouldn’t. It was a hold-back evidence point.

  “You’re pretty sure it’s her?”

  “I’m not sure the sun will rise tomorrow, Jack, but I’ll call you when the DNA is in.”

  “Thanks.”

  Somewhere down in the city behind them an emergency siren spooled up, and the sound seemed to scoot up the dry wash past them.

  “I’d like a beer.”

  They returned to the truck and Jack Liffey broke out the engine-block barbecue. Roski unwrapped his foil and munched away dully as if he’d lost his sense of taste. He talked half-heartedly about the way a chaparral plant community recovered after a fire.

  “The plants are phoenixes, bless them. Ceanothus, sage, and fireweed can’t even germinate without a flash of heat. And when we go overboard suppressing fires, other plants elbow in. Chamise and toyon, the things that mark overgrazed land. Ecologists always say they hate the interlopers that don’t belong. But, you know, I always figure even sewer rats have to live.”

  Jack Liffey barely heard. His feelings were in an uproar, wondering what he was going to say to Gloria.

  “I hate firebugs with a passion,” Roski said abruptly, with real emotion for once. “They kill my colleagues. Even losing a structure is an unforgivable kind of failure.”

  Jack Liffey glanced at him.

  “I took a degree in philosophy, you know, but there was no specialty in the study of failure.”

  *

  The blue-haired
girl was sitting on the old glide on Jack Liffey’s front porch as he drove up. All he could see was the hair, but if it wasn’t Ellen/Rosa the big oddsmaker upstairs had gone berserk.

  Coming back down the hill with Roski, he’d seen a kerosene lamp glowing inside the cabin. True to his word, Roski had shown Jack Liffey another gate entry two blocks east, where a broken padlock under the metal shield was twisted around to seem locked but wasn’t. I’ll be back, he thought.

  “Hi, Mr. Man,” Ellen said. “I tracked down your house.” Jack Liffey sat gently at the far end of the glide. “Call me Jack, if you would. Do you prefer Rosa or Ellen?”

  “That’s a deeply epistemological question. Since we’re not in a revolutionary situation now, everything should be normalized. According to Lenin. So I’m just Ellen at the moment and I can go ahead and vote for useless reformists.”

  “My daughter would adore you. What are you studying?”

  “History.” She snorted. “Around here it’s all Tory history. Conventional thought, if you prefer. My dad wants me to study something practical like engineering, of course.”

  “May I ask why you’re sitting on my porch?”

  “You seem to be my only chance of finding out about Sabby.” The girl still seemed to have a struggle over trust. “She’s my better self. Please don’t make fun of me.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it, Ellen. If she’s better than you, she’s a goddess.”

  “Yeah, sure. Have you found out anything?”

  “Not yet. Do you really want the truth?”

  “Wow, you go deep fast. I generally feel like a moral weakling.”

  “The arson people think a girl died in that fire, possibly an Asian girl. It may not mean a thing. I’ll let you know right after I tell her parents. Right now I’ll tell you about the keg party if you’ll tell me what you know about the guy they call Zook.”

  “For sure, Mr. Jack.”

  “I’m sure you heard about the speaker who went nuts and fired stun grenades into the neighborhood.”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “Zook was at the center of it, and there’s too many coincidences. I want to talk to him.”

  She almost smiled. “You picked the right girl. Zook was mine to watch for months when the Orange Berets were worthy opponents of the Commandos. He’s almost comically intense about his beliefs. Ed Zukovich is his name. He went to junior college and thinks of himself as the big intellectual of Fascism for Dummies.

  “He works off and on at dead-end jobs like fixing motorcycles, but he doesn’t have to. His dad was a realtor and made a killing from all the Taiwanese and Hong Kongese moving into town. The old bastard hated his customers, but their money was green.”

  “You have a bright future in investigation.”

  “Just about the last job I want, old man. No offense.”

  “I have to make dinner, Ellen, but I promise I’ll call you when I hear about Sabine. Cross my heart.” He marked out a cross over his heart. “Does anybody still do that?”

  She smiled but didn’t answer.

  ELEVEN

  Beware of Straighteners

  He’d used up the last of the frozen tamales on Roski, so he scrounged together a chicken penne he knew Gloria loved and hit it with extra chile and mint. When she glanced up woozily from bed and refused to hobble downstairs, he brought her a plate of dinner and a beer. Then he sat in the kitchen alone forking bits of the concoction out of the pot. Way too spicy for him. He knew he was dragging around his guilt like a giant wooden cross.

  Gloria’s cane suddenly rapped away, and he sighed and went up. She was sitting up in bed with the beer, the food still untouched on the floor.

  “Can I get you something else?” he asked. “We have some of that ramen.”

  She shook her head absently and finished off the beer. Gloria was up to about ten bottles a day, but he’d decided not to nag. It wouldn’t have done any good anyway. You couldn’t tell her a damn thing she didn’t want to hear.

  “I want to talk a little.”

  “Of course.” He put on his mental football helmet.

  There was a bit of irrelevant hemming and hawing and talk of her discomfort lying on her side.

  “You didn’t call me up here to talk about your ribcage,” he said.

  She fell silent. An intermittent metallic banging started up outside, probably kids hammering on a dented fender, the ambiance of East L.A. “You should know Maeve and I had a frank talk, and I told her all about Sonny up in Bakersfield. She disapproved mightily, of course. I know you figured it out long ago. Your sixth sense was vibrating before I even left.”

  “Pretty much.” His heart had already plummeted all the way to the floor and bounced, and he feared this was preface to saying she was leaving him for Sonny. Oh, no. Please, no.

  “No, Jack, I ain’t going up there to join no Sonny disaster. That’s over.”

  She had read his mind, or his face, and the disavowal filled him with so much relief he didn’t take in the next thing she said.

  “Sorry, Glor. I had a senior moment there. What did you say?”

  She glowered briefly. “I’ll put it another way. I know you’re sitting on a whole world of pissed off. I went and had my fun with another guy. I hurt you in the cojones. And now I’m less than half of myself and won’t put out at all. You run around making food and caring for a crotchety bitch day and night. You’re a good man, Jack, and I know I don’t deserve you.”

  “Shakespeare said if we got what we deserved we’d all be whipped.”

  “Shut up, Jack. This is my turn. I know you deserve some payback.” She stalled and seemed to be fuming, maybe at herself. “Hand me the food. I’m hungry.”

  He set the wood tray on her knees. She forked pasta in fast, like a hungry bear attacking a pile of meat. She stopped long enough to enjoy a chew.

  “You finally got it spicy enough.”

  The mound of pasta was half gone by the time she slowed down and finally looked up from the plate. He’d been so happy to see her enjoying something at last that he’d just sat back and watched. There might have been a tear in the corner of her eye. A glisten, anyway.

  “Jack, there’s nobody alive doesn’t want payback sometimes for being hurt. You ain’t Jesus H. Christ, whatever Maeve thinks. I want you to go find some filly out there who doesn’t want to keep you and have some man-fun with her. My holdback ain’t about you, honey. I don’t know why it is, but I just can’t get my pussy wet for nothing right now.”

  Jesus Christ, he thought. What kind of god of irony was running things?

  “Please go look for a temporary slice, Jack. I know it’d take pressure off me.”

  Or not, he thought. It was the perfect opportunity to tell her about Tien, of course. But—absolutely not. Oh, no no. She was far more honest and earnest than he was, maybe too much for her own good. Cowardice was sometimes a virtue.

  “Gloria, I’ll think about that, but right now we have to get you feeling better. How about I find you a therapist you can talk to in deepest, darkest secret? We’ll pay off the books, and the department doesn’t have to know.”

  She stopped eating again and looked up. Her eyes were pained and frighteningly sad. “Did I ever say I love you?”

  Actually, no, she hadn’t. “Sure.” He felt his own eyes burning with tenderness and shame.

  *

  Maeve was in her nightie, staring contentedly out her picture window to take in the morning view across the canyon. The sun was well above the rugged hill line but just below the dark cloud that would snuff it out soon. The world seemed weirdly bright, though striped with ribbons of fog. More winter rain.

  It was an awesome view: the mountain chaparral broken up by firebreaks, even a drift of smoke from a chimney. She wondered why she was so uninterested in landscapes. They could be lovely, even dramatic. Cezanne, Turner, Sisley, the Hudson River painters. But she liked focusing on a body, with all its blemishes. She wondered if her attraction to the body was too priva
te and too obvious.

  There was a rap at the door that she recognized—a hesitance along with an upbeat hello. Everything inside Maeve started to glow. “Come in.”

  Bunny peered in wearing a worn chenille bathrobe, which made Maeve’s heart beat harder.

  “Morning, Maevie. Can I come in?”

  “You’re a wonderful sight in the morning.”

  “Don’t joke on me.”

  “Oh, wow, I’m not.” Maeve was about to say more, but held her tongue because something was up.

  “I had a bad night.”

  “Drop the dime. I can do coffee out here now.” She discarded the dregs and put a new filter in the Melitta.

  “Thanks. Nights can be scary.”

  “You mean your dreams, or something else?”

  For some time now, from obvious self-interest, Maeve had been making a minor science of how women responded to jokes, hints, and overtures of lesbianism. Bunny was confounding her.

  “All my life, flying in dreams has terrified me—falling, I guess. Last night, somebody gave me this big inner tube with a… like a membrane across it. A giant diaphragm.” She laughed uncomfortably. “I just had to lay forward on it and it floated away. Then I surfed along, ten feet up. I couldn’t wait to tell you and show you how to do it, too.”

  “And that bothers you why?”

  “This new thing is scary, Maeve. I’ll bet I’ve been a hidden L-word all the time.”

  “Maybe it just means you like me and I like you and together we can fly. Imagine no barriers, as John Lennon said.”

  Maeve poured the last of the steaming water and left it to drip as she walked back to Bunny.

  “Let’s fly.”

  *

  As Roski had promised, the hidden padlock on the firegate was unlocked. It made Jack Liffey wonder how many of life’s barriers were implied rather than actual. Maybe the lock on every tenth bank vault had been out of commission for years. All those unobtainable women had actually wanted you.