The bunch behind the counter was the usual L.A. minimum-wage mixture of legal and illegal Hispanic immigrants, none of them much over high-school age. They took the orders and punched them up on forbiddingly complicated cash registers. The registers totaled the price, calculated the sales tax, and printed out a receipt that itemized every dreadful thing you'd ordered, three-pak, mine said, meaning three pieces of something that might have begun life as a chicken, biscuit, lg. soft drink. And to the right were the prices, and at the bottom, the total, followed by have a nice day. Fat chance, I thought. Fat, polysaturated chance.
The registers, I mused, might also be feeding data into the console on Birdie's desk.
The manager, an obese, untidy Anglo with skin the color of pancake batter, moved back and forth frantically behind the counter, clapping his hands together like a demented cheerleader to spur on his tropically indolent staff. He wore a chicken costume like the one on the outsize bruiser who was working the curb, and every time he clapped his hands the rubber rooster comb on top of his head quivered. His face was uncovered so we could all see his smile. It was a pretty ghastly smile. The sign on his chest, or, rather, breast, since he was masquerading as a fowl, said Marty.
I was sure that I didn't want to talk to Marty. In addition to the bustling kitchen crew, who didn't have time to talk to anybody, there were three young Hispanic women who took the orders, largely ignoring Marty. I might have spoken to them, but didn't: it was only Thursday, the third day since Mrs. Sorrell had paid the ransom for Aimee, and I couldn't risk starting anything. I had a full day to go.
So I choked down my lg. soft drink and picked at my three-pak and hefted my biscuit, which might have been made out of reconstituted iron filings, and tried to figure out what, if anything, was going on.
At the table across from me a family of four, Vietnamese immigrants from the look and sound of them, were working their way through a meal that at least some of them would surely regret. The mother and father, both of them brown and delicate, stared dolefully at their plates, obviously missing their noodles and their odorous but delicious fish sauce, but the kids tucked in with the gleeful appetites of new Americans. They were, as near as I could tell, a boy and a girl. Both of the children had come back from the counter wearing paper chicken masks that terminated in little yellow beaks just below their noses and paper chicken bibs decorated with printed feathers. I was trying to determine how old they were when I realized that the mother was staring at me. As a rule, Vietnamese don't stare. It's considered impolite. I smiled at her, and saw that the father was staring at me too. I'd been looking too long at their children.
“Beautiful kids,” I said.
The father glanced at the mother and then returned my smile. “How you knowing?” he asked. “Them look like bird.”
“A boy and a girl, right?”
“This one girl,” he said, pulling at the mask on the child nearer to me. A pert little face peeked brownly out at me and then the child reached up a hand made of fragile bird-bones and firmly replaced her mask. “Other one boy,” the father said. He looked happy not to have to eat. “Boy number one.”
“Firstborn?” I asked. The boy, who was gnawing at a wing that could have come off a pterodactyl, was marginally larger.
“Number one,” the father repeated. “Born Vietnam.”
“Where in Vietnam?”
The father grew watchful. For all he knew I was a Vietnam burnout with an Uzi under my shirt. “You been Vietnam?” he asked carefully.
“No,” I said, “but I hear it is very beautiful.”
“Was,” he said, still on guard. “Near Hue.”
“Hue.” I had no idea where that was.
“Farm,” he said. “Cows and chickens. Chickens not like this.” He gestured at his plate.
“No chicken was ever like this,” I said.
“American chicken no good,” said his wife with the air of one who was testing her English. She sat back at the end of the sentence and allowed herself a private smile. She'd talked to an American. She had a story to tell when she got back to the Vietnamese enclave in what used to be Chinatown. It was now one of several Little Saigons. The Chinese had moved to Monterey Park.
“I like it,” the boy said from behind his mask. His English was as unaccented as mine. “Hell, I think it's great.”
“Language,” his father said reprovingly. “Watching language, please.”
“Let me see your face,” I said to the boy. He pulled up his mask and let it rest on his forehead. A lock of straight black hair was captured beneath it. Two dark eyes winked out at me like raisins in a rice pudding. He was about nine.
“You like this better than Vietnamese chicken?” I asked.
“Vietnamese chicken stinks,” he said. “I'm an American. My name is Tony.”
Tony's parents looked at him with loss in their eyes. His mother said something in Vietnamese. Even his sister stared at him, her paper beak turning in his direction.
“Um,” I said, and then the conversation was interrupted by a high-pitched squabble from the counter.
Two boys were fighting. The one parent with them, the mother, tossed out pleading smiles in all directions as the boys threw looping roundhouse punches at each other. At issue, it would seem, was a torn, brightly colored piece of paper. Each of them had approximately half of it in his hand. The smaller of the two fell to the floor in self-defense and clutched his half of the trophy to his stomach. The larger boy administered what looked like a persuasive kick to the smaller one's backside.
“Whoa,” said an adult male's voice, and I saw the big rooster named Marty wade into the fray. “What's the problem here?”
“Willie took my mask,” said the little one, still hunched over. Outraged righteousness rang in his voice.
“Forget it,” Marty said gruffly from under his rubber rooster's comb.
“But it's mme,” the little one said. “Willie is a dork.”
“Ho, ho, ho,” Marty laughed with all the rich and hearty sincerity of a Macy's Santa. “We got lots of them.” He snapped his fingers in the direction of the nearest of the Hispanic girls, and she reached under the counter and came up with what looked like fifty chicken masks.
“Two,” Marty said with a new note of command in his voice. “Two, stupid.” He apparently couldn't be bothered with remembering her name, even though it said Alicia on her name tag.
Blushing in anger, Alicia dropped all but two of the masks under the counter and handed the pair to the big rooster. Then, biting her underlip, she turned to the soft-drink machine and yanked the handle down, filling a cup that no one had ordered. Rooster Marty kept a watchful eye on her as he handed the masks to the two boys, giving each of them an awkward, ham-handed pat on the head. Then he turned his head and looked at me. He'd looked at me before.
“Sorry,” I said to the Vietnamese couple, “I think I've had enough chicken.” I got up and headed for the sidewalk.
Watery sunlight sparkled off leftover Easter decorations in the shops as I walked east, toward Western Boulevard. Western, as its name suggests, used to be the western edge of L.A.; now it's somewhere in the middle. The foot traffic here was made up of the class of Los Angeles residents who don't own cars: bus stops were crowded with stolid, fatalistic-looking Hispanic women going to, or coming home from, domestic jobs, and street crazies mumbled and jabbered their messages to the world, walking as though they were propelled by a system of contradictory and overwound springs. Out-of-work men sat on the low wall surrounding a parking lot, talking and smoking cigarettes. Women and children went in and out of a discount shoe store or stared longingly at the large-screen color television sets in the windows of an appliance-rental center. It was the kind of neighborhood where people rented things. Several children who had either been parked in front of the window by their mothers or had gathered of their own accord gazed gravely at the images on the screen.
This was a neighborhood in its last throes. Above the little run-down
thrift shops and clinicasmedicos and four-story apartments, the new office building next to the Cap'n's loomed like a coppery finger pointing toward the future. The neighborhood in which these people lived and worked and raised children was a tax deduction for incorporated dentists on some business manager's books in Beverly Hills, and somewhere some computer was running a rentals-versus-land-values equation that would eventually bring in the bulldozers and then the architects and steelworkers and concrete pourers, and, penultimately, the interior decorators. Then would come the executives and junior executives in their BMW's and Cherokees, most of them white, and the old brown neighborhood would recede north and south, away from the Boulevard and into the decaying side streets, and finally it would pull up stakes completely and reroot itself somewhere farther east and south, wherever the accountants' equation translated into Let the Neighborhood Go. I preferred this one the way it was, full of noisy, sloppy life spilling onto the sidewalks, quarreling and laughing and spending and dreaming and falling in love and shooting each other on occasion.
The thought of BMW's made me stop walking. Children were expensive merchandise. People didn't pick up expensive merchandise in dumped, primered Plymouths from the mid-sixties. The place to be was Cap'n Cluckbucket's parking lot. I went the long way around the block and retrieved Alice. Then I changed my shirt, put on my Jerry Lewis glasses, black horn-rims with white adhesive tape over the nose, combed my hair forward, and drove Alice into the Cap'n's lot.
With a tray of chicken so oily that Saudi Arabia would have gone to war for the mineral rights and yet another lg. soft drink, I sat and watched the traffic go in and out of the Cap'n's lot. There was a system, of sorts. After the rooster on the curb waved them in, cars went either into a parking slot or into the drive-through lane. Once in a while a kid would get out of a car in the drive-through lane and go into the bathroom, but he or she always came back in due time, so I figured the cars to watch were the fancy ones whose occupants went into the restaurant.
I was there an hour, which was as long as I dared to stay. I saw only four expensive cars the whole time I was there. A Cadillac convertible with a male in it who arrived solo, ate solo, and left solo; a big Jeep Cherokee with a family of six who left without ordering because the place was too busy and they didn't want to wait in line; a Maserati driven by a man who had a little boy in tow and who left twenty minutes later with him still in tow; and a Buick Reatta containing a man and a little girl of twelve. When the man came out alone, I sat up so jerkily that I spilled part of the drink into my lap, adding to the already plentiful scars and stains of the day, but a moment later the little girl came running out of the rest room and climbed into the Buick and the two of them drove away. With a lump in my stomach that was compounded equally of disappointment and indigestible chicken, I headed into the rush-hour traffic and pointed Alice toward Topanga. The sun, as I drove west, glared through the clouds like a luminescent bottle of milk.
I wanted to call the Sorrells when I got home, but I couldn't. Daddy would be there. I wanted to call Hammond and ask whether they'd found Marco, but I couldn't. It might have endangered Aimee. I wanted to find out where Mrs. Brussels lived and break into her house, but I couldn't, for the same reason. In all, there wasn't a hell of a lot I could do.
So I called Roxanne. She was chilly and distant, nursing the grit of her grudge from Easter into a fine pearl of resentment. I called my parents to apologize, and my mother hung up on me, telling me they were watching something on television. I knew they never watched television.
For want of anything better to do, I put Elvis Costello on the stereo and built a fire in the woodburner, congratulating myself on having had the foresight to buy beer on the way home, and thought about dinner. Then the lump in my stomach reasserted itself and I stopped thinking about dinner and thought about beer instead.
Elvis Costello was singing about watching the detectives, and I was on my fourth Singha and wishing I still smoked, when someone knocked on the door. By the time I got up, Roxanne had opened it with her key and was standing there, all soft and milky and looking, as always, like she'd just sent herself out to be dry-cleaned. Her fine auburn hair hung down her back, fastened at the top by what seemed to be a red plastic clothespin. She'd ruined yet another pair of pants by pouring bleach directly into the washing machine instead of into the bleach dispenser. Roxanne is a fool for bleach.
“I'm a creep,” she said without a prelude, “but you are too.”
“I've never denied that I was a creep,” I said, delighted to see her. “But I have a certain jenesaisquoi.”
“Oh, God,” she said, mimicking a swoon, “I go all buttery when you speak French. Is there any more beer?”
“Does the pope wear suspenders?” I asked.
She uncapped one for me and one for her, and I finished mine while she did it, and rolled the empty under the old mahogany sideboard. Roxanne curled up on the couch with her head on my lap and breathed into the front of my jeans. It felt warm and damp and healthy. Two beers later, she said, “Let's do something awful.”
We went to bed and did something awful. When we'd caught our breath, we fell asleep.
I was once again in the watching place above the stairs, the place Aurora had told me about, looking down through the slats in the banister. Without knowing why, I knew that everyone else in the house was asleep. The front door opened, and Aimee-the-pig came in. She climbed the stairs just a little more slowly than was natural, sobbing inside the pink plastic costume.
When she passed me, making soft snuffling noises, I got up and followed. I seemed to be enormously heavy, and it took all I had to lift my legs, like I was trying to run through water. Aimee went into her room, her back to me, and stood at the foot of a little white bed decorated with frolicking pigs. Without turning around, she shed the obscene little skirt, with the hole in the back for the curlicue tail, and then the polka-dot blouse. The air in the room began to hum and I felt the hair on my arms bristle. I tried to say something, but all that came out was a croak. She didn't hear it. As I stood there, wanting to run away but unable to make my legs work, she reached up and popped off the snaps that fastened the pig head to the pig body and then she pulled the head off and shook her yellow hair free and turned slowly around to face me, and the air hummed more frantically, like a thousand imprisoned hummingbirds, and I saw her tear-streaked face, and it wasn't Aimee at all.
I sat up in the darkness, grabbing a fistful of blanket in each hand. Roxanne moaned and threw an arm across her face. Moonlight poured in through the window. I knew what was happening in Cap'n Cluckbucket's.
III
Hot Water
22
The Root of "Secretary"
It's like every other fast-food restaurant in the world,” I said into the phone. “They come in with kids and they go out with kids. But at Cap'n Cluckbucket's they're not always the same kids.”
I could hear traffic wheezing and hooting on the other end of the line while the Mountain thought. A motorbike snarled by with a long, tearing fart. Then he grunted. “How?”
It was after ten on Friday morning. Roxanne was long gone, off to an aerobics class where she was purchasing a perfect stomach on the installment plan. She'd left a pot full of perfect coffee.
I took a grateful hit off my third cup. “Who notices the kids with an adult in a restaurant?” I asked. “And if they're worried that someone might, there are those chicken masks. I saw two males go in and out, and when one of them left, the kid with him was masked. How do I know that she was the kid he arrived with? They were the same size, but that's all I could testify to. Hell, the one family I talked to, I could barely tell the difference between a boy and a girl.”
“I know the place,” the Mountain said. He didn't sound very surprised, but then, I'd never seen him act surprised. “Good chicken,” he added.
I put a hand to my throat to block the upward progress of the lump I'd ingested on the previous day. The Mountain could have digested Disne
y World without so much as a burp around Mickey's ears. “Mountain,” I said, “there are six of them, that I know of. Six Cap'n Cluckbucket's, maybe more, all dispensing children over the counter, so to speak, without a license. How many kids is that?”
“Hold it,” the Mountain said. He put his hand over the mouthpiece and barked something at someone, and I suddenly felt a surge of paranoia wash over me. Suppose I was wrong? Suppose the cops were okay and the Mountain wasn't? Suppose I was talking to someone with a line to Aimee's kidnapper? After all, he was perfectly placed to nab little kids off the streets and stick their parents up for ransom. Worst of all, the kids trusted him. And why wouldn't they? I had.
“And?” he said, coming back on the line. Now it sounded as though his mouth were full.
“And nothing,” I said, backtracking. “Just steer your kids away from Cap'n Cluckbucket's.” I drew a series of interconnected boxes on my pad-a symbol, Eleanor always said, of spiritual imprisonment-and wished I hadn't made the call.
“Hey,” he said, “I can't even get them to leave the Oki-Burger. And I can't keep the ones I want to stay. Little girl yesterday, I had her parents all set up to come by, and when they showed up, she was long gone.”
“Yeah,” I said, “well, that's the breaks.”
“You okay?” he asked. “You sound kind of funny.”
“Me?” I was perspiring. “I'm swell.”
“You still think you'll need help?”
“If I do, I’ll call.”
“Do that.” He yelled at somebody and then hung up.
I had the jitters. Trying to calm my doubts, I poured another cup of Roxanne's coffee and promptly poured it down the sink. What I didn't need was the jitters.
That day, Friday, was the fourth day of Aimee's ransom period, the day she was supposed to come home safe and sound. I'd resigned myself to a day of inactivity, maybe two days: Mrs. Sorrell might give it an extra twenty-four hours before calling for help. For want of anything else todo,I turned on the computer and began to enter notes on the case. Sometimes the act of typing out my thoughts clarified them. Sometimes I just wound up with a bunch of useless high-tech typing.
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