by John Shannon
They talked a while longer, covering the background. Their son had maintained his contacts in the local community and he’d come home every summer. He’d been an A-minus student, studying American history with his eye on Stanford Law, or Berkeley’s Boalt Hall. The girlfriend’s parents had been sweet kindly people up in Simi Valley, a little uneasy that their daughter had a black boyfriend.
“Can I ask an uncomfortable question?” Jack Liffey said, as he was winding down.
“If you can’t, you’re not much of a detective.”
He smiled. “Touché. You both seem pretty old to be the parents of a twenty-year-old.”
The little girl perked up.
“Amilcar was adopted, Mr. Liffey,” Genesee Thigpen said. “As was his older sister, Ornetta’s mother. We put off children because of our political work and then I found out it was too late for me. Also, since we seem to be sharing, we’re married but I kept my family name on political principle. I didn’t leave the Party until after Poland, and I was well known under the name Thigpen. Why did I wait so long to leave? I don’t know: inertia? Hope? I got tired of the road to socialism always turning out to be lined with Russian tanks. Oh, yes—Bancroft never joined. He was always too independent-minded and skeptical. And that’s all of our skeletons.”
“I can’t think of anyone I’d rather share skeletons with,” Jack Liffey said. “Ornetta, please come sit on the porch and tell me the rest of your story about the rhinestone animals.”
She skipped out the door as he said good-bye to the elders, and then he got to hear a remarkably peculiar and inventive tale about imaginary animals fighting back against oppressive human masters who expected them to do chores they hated. He kept thinking of his fourteen-year-old daughter, Maeve, and how she would like this bright little girl.
*
As he walked down to the car, he heard sirens in the distance, several of them. They sounded more like fire trucks than police cars or ambulances. There must have been quite a fire somewhere, but he couldn’t see any smoke against the bright cloudless sky. Maybe it was just the mounting heat that made him think of fire. He waved back to the little girl, who gave an oddly foreign-looking wave in reply, holding her arm straight out and closing her fingers against her palm.
He wished he’d left the car window down. Baking heat tumbled out the door when he opened it and he swung it a few times to whiff some fresh air inside. He couldn’t roll down the far-side windows because the whole right side of the car had been crushed in a partial rollover and where the windows had been was now plastic and duct tape. One of these days he’d get the money to fix it up or replace the whole car, but the truth was he’d got used to it that way. My God, he thought, working out the dates, the old AMC oncord had been like that almost two years. There was a security in letting it go to seed. It was such a ghastly junker that no one in his right mind would try to steal it.
On his way home along Slauson, sunlight seemed to bleach every corner of the universe to a painful brilliance. Just at Crenshaw, he saw a black man in a spiffy polo shirt standing alongside the road juggling what looked like hand tools. He slowed the car to check it out and saw the tools pass behind the man’s back one by one and then heave up into the air: a big roofing hammer, a battery-powered drill that he gave a whiz every time it hit his hand, an awkward carpenter’s square and a small chain saw. He could tell by the angry buzz in the air that the chainsaw was actually operating. Worth two points: He and Maeve had a running contest of pointing out LA oddities to each other.
A car honked behind and he drove on. When life became too strange, it made you uneasy; he yearned for a world that he could ignore more often. So much raggedness made him feel old and tired.
*
“Young lady.”
Maeve Liffey didn’t like the sound of that as she turned back in the living room, carrying the old manual camera that she and Dru had been using to learn about f-stops and shutter speeds. The tone surprised her. Brad wasn’t a complete jerk-off, and he didn’t usually try to discipline her. He had only been married to her mother for nine months, and he was still a bit uneasy in his stepdad role.
“Yes, Brad.” He didn’t really like being called Brad, but he could hardly insist on Dad.
“The back gate was open and the twins could have got out.” The twins were his three-year old boys, Bert and Bart; she sometimes figured he remarried only to get free babysitting.
“I’m sorry. It must have been my friend Dru, when she left. I asked her to shut it.”
“That’s as it may be, but I made a special point of asking you.”
“I’m sorry. Really. I’ll double-check from now on.”
“They might have wandered away and been hurt. I’m afraid I’m going to have to ground you for the rest of the week.”
Blood rushed to her face. She could feel it, but she tried to establish control, the way her dad had shown her. Three… two… one… reconsider. “Could we wait and talk about it when Mom comes back? I think this is threatening to get out of proportion.”
“Young lady, are you questioning me?”
“Am I a serf in this house now?” It just burst out of her unbidden. “Have I no right to speak up for myself?”
He was stewing. She could see emotions seething right behind his face, and his hands were trembly. It could probably have gone either way. She felt a terrible fear rise in her, as if she had torn something that could not be undone, but she didn’t see where there had been any choice.
“I’m sorry,” she said quickly. “I know you worry about your boys.”
But it was too late. His arm came out of left field, an astonishing act, like an object suddenly levitating in front of her. Her cheek stung and her head snapped back. Already tears were prickling behind her eyes.
“Go to your room!” He looked frightened, too, but he did not know how to step back across the brink.
Eat shit and die, she thought. You’ll never ever be my dad. She had never been hit before, not once. And she had a dire premonition that her mother would take his side in this, even though she wouldn’t really be comfortable with it.
When the king is unjust, she remembered reading somewhere, it affects the whole kingdom.
*
A box fan was roaring away, exhausting the hot air out his front door and his girlfriend’s nephew Rogelio was dangled over the fender of a 1972 Chevelle SS in the drive, muttering at his friend Solomon and at the big carburetor.
“Trouble?”
“Man, don’t never use a four-barrel. You know? Hey, Jack.”
Rogelio had a dependent hangdog manner that made it hard not to tease him, but Jack Liffey liked him a lot. The young man was kind to a fault; Jack knew he’d had the decency to turn down the mild sexual experimentation Maeve had offered him a year ago. Maeve was a precocious almost fifteen, in her words.
“I always prefer a supercharger for an AMC car,” Jack Liffey said.
Solomon cackled a little and held out a palm for a greeting slap. Jack Liffey obliged.
“Where do you get high octane for that thing?” Jack Liffey asked.
“Every time you get gas, you got to buy these cans of booster to high it up. That’s not the problem here, though.”
“Mar in?”
“Yeah.” As if just remembering something, Rogelio tried to straighten up and banged his head on the raised hood. “Ooh, hurt. When you see her, don’t get too disturbed. She fell down moving boxes or something at church and hit her face. She got a bad shiner.”
“Were you with her?”
“Naw, Catholic’s still good enough for me.”
“Thanks.”
Marlena had taken to going to a big fundamentalist temple in Hawthorne called the Church of the Open Barn Door. It didn’t make him very happy, but it seemed to soothe something needy in her. He found her hanging laundry on the lines out back over the scruffy lawn, and the tight black skirt stretched over her ample rump set his libido thrumming right away.
Sh
e cupped a hand over the side of her face when she turned. “Oh, Jackie, I done a stupid thing.”
“Rocky warned me.”
“I was moving some rummage boxes down in the basement of the church and slipped on a rotten old grape down there. My face hit a old blender in the box.”
She opened her palm like a door to show a mouse under the eye the size of a plum. It all seemed too pat. She was too quick at volunteering all the details.
He hugged her and there was something stiff in her response. He wondered if there was trouble at the church. “Who’s minding your shop?”
“Anna. Maeve was supposed to, but she didn’t make it. Remember? Maeve was gonna do Mondays for the summer. But Anna needs the work.”
He didn’t remember any plans like that at all, and he was surprised one of them hadn’t told him. Maeve got on well with Marlena, though she lived most of the time with his ex-wife, Kathy, and her new husband. The shop was Marlena’s Mailboxes-R-Us franchise, which had been directly beneath the office he had once kept in a minimall. His office now was a letter drop at her shop, a retrenchment to get him through a long dry spell in his finances.
They were interrupted for a moment when his dog sidled up and growled for attention. Loco must have spooked her horrible little Chihuahua into a back bedroom. Loco was a scruffy medium-sized, whitish dog with flat yellow eyes, at least half coyote, and generally did his best to shun anything that could be construed as pet behavior. Lately Loco had taken to being more affectionate, so Jack Liffey bent over to hug the dog for a moment. He’d better not pass up any devotion he could get.
“Hey, boy, how’s tricks?”
The dog gave another little growl and then broke free and wandered away.
“Be sure you don’t overdo it. I might get to wanting my slippers fetched.”
Marlena chuckled. Loco glanced back once disdainfully, like a being who’d been marooned on an inferior planet.
Jack Liffey thought about it and decided his own species was best, after all. He stood up and kissed Marlena’s cheek softly. “Um, you tender here?”
“No. Feels good.”
“How about here?”
“Ooooh. Try here, Jackie.” She directed his hand, and before long they were in the bedroom, trying a lot of places.
TWO
It’s Not Our Way
The driver of the van had a Marine buzz-cut and a white line across the edge of one lip that suggested one of the dueling scars Prussians had once given themselves in order to look fierce and brutish. It sure did the job for him. He was big, too, wide through the shoulders like somebody who had been built to fill up a doorway. When he smiled, though, a lot of the ferocity evaporated to leave an earthy ruggedness, the look of a guy you’d like to see in charge of the Scout troop when the blizzard hit.
The man with the salt-and-pepper beard beside him drummed a little nervous tattoo on the dash. “K, tell me again what in Satan’s crappy name we’re doing here.”
“We’re doing just what I said.”
“Uh-huh, yeah. But, you know, we’re super-de-duper out of place.”
“No kidding.”
It was well after midnight and they waited for some signal, known only to the driver, parked smack in the middle of the black community. A third man crouched in the back of the van with the wood beams and kerosene. “I’ve never done this before,” the bearded man offered.
“Not many people in California have,” the big man with the scar said. “That’s part of the point. After we do it, who would you look for? Would you come looking for us?”
“Nobody’s looking now, man.”
“They will. Look, here’s the theory. My uncle used to play bridge using the Chico Marx system. He never consulted with his partner at all, just called out crazy bids—three hearts, one no-trump, five spades, whatever—and he never let on. He said it gave his team an edge. One hundred percent of the other team was confused, but only fifty percent of his team was.”
“You told us all that before, K,” the bearded man said with a hint of annoyance. “Very funny and all, but I mean, really, what are we doing?”
“Okay. Really. I mean, cross my heart, right? Really. Sorry I didn’t use little words. Here it is: We’re the Green Berets of the fed-up honest people of this country. We know that multiculturalism as an idea and a social experiment has up and died. It sounded nice, it made some people feel real good inside, but it just didn’t work out. People want to live with their own kind. We’re not nutcases, we’re just facing the facts ahead of the crowd. And, one of the facts we get to face tonight is we got to muddy the waters a bit now because we—that’s you, fuckhead—screwed up so big-time.”
“Is this Christian?” the man in back asked.
“We’re about to make a big wood cross. Can you think of anything more Christian than that?”
*
Jack Liffey never failed to get a kick out of the giant brown doughnut. It was a good twenty feet in diameter and crested the little drive-up building at Vernon and 11th like the beacon of some high-fat religion stuck in the heart of the black west side.
“Hi, Josette, Ivan in?”
She looked up from a flat tray of sugary crullers. Ivan Monk had bought the doughnut shop with his Merchant Marine savings to tided him over during slack times in the private eye business. Jack Liffey wished he had something similar as fallback. Josette Williams, Ivan Monk’s only full-time employee, looked a lot thinner than he remembered, and a bit abstracted.
“Jack. He workin’ in back. You gettin’ any?”
“Regular as clockwork. He came back and leaned on the counter to take a good look at her. “What’s the matter, Job?”
She winced. “I been had a pretty bad time, thank you for axing. I got to using the Big Bad Boy for a time, but I went cold. They got me on the methadone.”
“I thought crack was the thing now.”
“You out in left field. H is back for sure, but not for this girl. I know it be end up losing me my Jimmy.”
“I’m glad you’re clean. If Mar and I can help you any, let me know.”
“Thank you kindly, Jack. Maybe you could take Jimmy to the basketball some time.”
Ivan was down a corridor behind a swing door in an inner office. He was on the telephone and beckoned Jack Liffey in. Ivan was the size of a pro linebacker and always looked like he wanted to tear your arm off, but he had a sweet side. You just had to be around long enough for it to show itself.
He had a sheaf of papers he was studying on his desk. “I want you to change that same stuff on page fifty-five, too. I’m not like that. You see, down ten lines, it say, ‘You just a no-good yellow motherfuckin’ dog.’ That’s lame, man.” He made about a dozen faces, as if an idea was working its way painfully down a constricted pipe. “Okay, then, you get back to me, Gary.”
He put the phone down.
“Hey, Jack. What it is? Guy there is writing up my life. Him and me working on a screenplay about bein’ a detective in South LA and I got to make sure he get it right.”
“Is that what kept you from taking the Amilcar Davis case?”
He shook his head. “I wouldn’t go near that one. Nothing but grief in it. I say to myself, give it to that Jack Liffey guy. He likes grief.”
“Gee, thanks, Ive. I’ll do you a favor sometime. What is it worries you about the case?”
“Lemme think. Nazis on Harleys. A white girlfriend from Simi Valley. A dad who thinks he invented civil rights. A mom who likes Joseph Stalin. And Claremont, a place with nothing but uptight white people locked down in Victorian houses. A salt-and-pepper couple gone missing, two months stale. Cops who aren’t gonna like a guy looks like me showing up in Wonderbread City asking questions. Would you like some more reasons? Trust me, it’s not going anywhere. It’s easy money, if that old dude will pay up, but I don’t need the bread right now, not for marking time and upping my blood pressure. And I sure don’t need the aggravation of putting my face around in Claremont.”
“So, you’re pretty sure it’s hopeless, even for Mr. Wonderbread?”
“You right, and you know you right.” He made that series of faces again. Maybe it was his way of changing his mind. “You might find out something out there in Snow Whiteville I couldn’t. I been wrong before—once.”
“Thanks for the referral.”
“You done the same for me a couple times.”
“And happy to. By the way, you know what’s going down over to the east a bit from here? I saw the cops had a lot of barricades up on Vernon.”
Ivan Monk stared at him as if he’d just asked how to spell his own name. “I wondered what you were doing over here today. You didn’t read the paper this morning, I bet.”
“Uh-uh.”
“A couple not-so-bright cops roughed up Ab-Ib yesterday. Some folks took it in they mind to get a little payback and burn out the police substation on Vernon. It’s just a little bitty storefront and will not be mourned, but I have it on good repute that a couple other places burned yesterday, too, and it’s summer heat so a lot of bangers got nothing better to do these days but get busy.”
“Ab-Ib some kind of sports star?”
Ivan Monk didn’t deign to answer. He knew Jack Liffey didn’t take to sports much, but there were things you just knew if you lived in a town.
“I think I’d better start on the Claremont end of things.”
“That would be smart. Take care of bidness far far away from the land of the bad boys.”
“This isn’t going to turn into another ’92, is it?”
Ivan Monk shrugged. “Who can say? I doubt it. But I’m thinking of getting out the plywood say BLACK OWNED.”
“Uh-oh.”
*
Lieutenant Calderón had agreed to meet him at the police impound yard up on Foothill, but Jack Liffey was an hour early and he settled for driving around the shady streets of Claremont to look the town over. He had been out here on a Sunday drive once in the 1960s to visit some ill-defined relative of his father’s, but the downtown was unrecognizable now. What he remembered as a couple of coffee shops, a little variety store named Bob’s or something like that, and a family supermarket was now a couple dozen square blocks of pasta bistros, jazz clubs, coffee bars, and chichi boutiques.