A Hard Light

by Wendy Hornsby

  “Just for tonight?” Mike asked.

  A sort of longing passed across Tam’s face.

  “We’ll play that by ear,” I said. There were three storms backed up across the Pacific, each waiting its turn to slam onto the coast. Most good hotels give the studio a corporate rate. Though cost wasn’t a big factor—Lana’s production office probably spent more for designer water in a day than the room would cost—I wondered if we could get a break on a weekly rate for a room.

  Mike said, “The Intercontinental Hotel is right there by Metro Center. If the subway isn’t flooded, you can take the Red Line back downtown. No need to be out on the street.”

  I picked up one of Tam’s duffels again. “Let’s get you dry.”

  Mike saw us off on the subway before he headed back to Parker Center in his car.

  The hotel desk clerk glanced at Tam, but was a paragon of courtesy. May have been his training, or the Gold Card I handed him along with my business card. He gave me a city view room at the discounted corporate rate, and let me put a daily limit on the amount of room service and laundry that could be charged. There was no hint that Tam in his saturated, unlined windbreaker was in any way out of place. But, after all, this was L.A., the megalopolis perched at the edge of a desert. Who has raincoats?

  When I opened the door to the room we were assigned, Tam smiled very wide and for once with no hint of sarcasm. I had the sense as he walked in that he felt as if he had come home after a long absence.

  All of his possessions were soaked. I called room service and the valet while Tam showered. Twenty minutes later, when he came back into the sitting room, wrapped in the enormous terry robe the hotel provided, the table was set for his lunch and his clothes were out being laundered.

  Tam sat down to hot lobster bisque, rare roast beef sliced so thin you could almost see through it, and Caesar salad, double anchovies. I gave him some time to eat, filling space with idle conversation. When he was finished with his meal, he leaned back in his chair and caressed his concave belly.

  He said, “Thank you for being a good Samaritan.”

  “Your cousin Khanh would do the same for any member of my family in distress. The only favor I ask from you in return is that you call Khanh and tell her that you’re all right.”

  “I will,” he said, but his tone lacked conviction.

  “Yesterday, after we spoke, I went back down to your camp to talk to you.” I poured myself a second cup of coffee and settled into a deep velvet chair. “But you were gone. And so was your camp.”

  “Vandals.” His thin lips curled with disgust. “Delinquents. They think because we have no homes that we don’t have bank accounts. They think we have our little bits of money hidden away somewhere. They go looking for anything they can steal so they can put another needle up their arms. It is endless harassment when you have no door to lock.”

  “Kids tore apart your camp while you were eating lunch?”

  He dismissed the incident with a disdainful shrug. “I am fortunate I was not there at the time, or they would have torn me apart as well.”

  “How awful,” I said, though I thought he was lying. Wouldn’t thieves have carried off the duffel bags that were now safely resting on the closet floor? Wouldn’t they at least have flung anything they didn’t want in an arc too wide for Tam to have gathered it all up so quickly that there was nothing for me and Guido to see? Tam’s story didn’t hold water.

  I said, “When you called, you said you had something to tell me.”

  “You have done me such a favor, and now I feel embarrassed. After thinking things through, I am certain it was nothing.”

  “Why don’t you tell me anyway?”

  “I thought for a while that I was being followed.”

  “Followed by whom?”

  “FBI, CIA, Immigration: They all look the same.”

  “Are you a wanted man?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Who would want to follow you?”

  He waved away the question, smiling as if he had been frivolous to have brought up the notion in the first place. “I am certain that I was wrong. The power of suggestion planting strange ideas: I imagine how it must have been for Khanh when Bao forced his way into her house. I think how surprised she would be to see him after so many years, and then I think how very frightened she must have been when it was her old friend and colleague who was treating her in such a manner. How confusing that is, you see?”

  “Yes, I do see.”

  “Also I think, what reason could Bao have had to do this thing? And then it occurs to me that whatever reason he has to assault Khanh, he also has to assault me.”

  “What is that reason?”

  “We deserted him. We left our country without him.”

  “You think Bao wants revenge?”

  Tam shook his head. “He wants his share. Khanh and I were able to take a few items with us. Nothing of immense value. But the value is not the point. Whatever we had, a portion rightfully belonged to Bao.”

  I said, “You filched some things from the museum.”

  “Why not? After all the risks we took, should we leave behind everything precious for the Communists?” He grew quietly fierce. “I made great sacrifices for my country. Was I not due some reward?”

  “I’m sure you were.” I told him what Arlo had learned about Bao Ngo’s cargo of forged artifacts. His reaction was very similar to Khanh’s.

  “Bao would know the difference between a genuine piece and a fake, Miss MacGowen,” he said. “He would know better than anyone. You see, as curator of the museum, Bao regularly sent items from the collection to Paris for restoration. In the process, he would order a duplicate to be made. Now and then, the original would be sold and the duplicate would be placed on exhibit, and no one would be the wiser.”

  “No one except who? You and Bao and Khanh?”

  He bowed. “Our government salaries were very small and our family obligations were very large. A little amendment was necessary to survive.”

  “What would have happened to you if you’d been caught?” I asked.

  “Caught by whom? The president, Mr. Thieu, had an official salary of no more than six hundred dollars every month. How do you imagine he lived so well? How do you imagine he continues to live so comfortably in exile? Surely not on savings taken from his government check.”

  “As I recall, Thieu left the country with a suitcase full of gold.”

  “Do you think that is all he had set aside for a rainy day?” Tam glanced at the window, at the sheet of water pouring down the glass. “The small amount that Khanh and I took was nothing in comparison. Nothing.”

  I got up and walked over to the window. The outline of the Citicorp Plaza high-rise across Seventh Street was visible only as a block of deep gray studded here and there with lights from office windows. The sky was as dark as night.

  Tam yawned and I thought I should leave him so that he could get some rest. I had more questions for him, but he wasn’t going anywhere until the rain stopped.

  I wrote my home number on the pad beside the telephone. “Call me later.”

  He promised that he would, though I had not trusted much of anything Tam had told me so far.

  “Get some rest,” was the last thing I said as I walked out the door.

  CHAPTER

  10

  Pedro Alvaro’s sister and brother-in-law lived in Little Salvador, a neighborhood west of downtown, near MacArthur Park.

  Arlo located their address for me on a recent booking slip: Pedro had a fender bender just after Christmas. When he blew 1.2 on a field Breathalyzer, driving his sister’s without a license, the cops at the scene hooked him up and took him in.

  Pedro spent a night in jail sobering up, entered a guilty plea at an early morning walk through court, and drew sixty days, which would mean about fifteen days of actual time inside. The judge, for all the best reasons, I’m sure, gave Pedro a sentence deferment so that he could take care of some person
al business. Pedro promised to show up at the jail on March 1. Only, he didn’t live long enough.

  I wondered if the judge would ever know that his kindness had cost Pedro his life.

  I took the subway to MacArthur Park and came up on Sixth Street, across from Langer’s Deli. The deli seemed nearly deserted—the lunch hour was long over, dinner was still hours away—but the lights were on and I could see people moving around inside. It looked like a haven, the windows glowing golden and warm against the darkness of the day. As I walked away, I kept checking back to make sure that my path to the deli was clear. MacArthur Park, rain or shine, isn’t a neighborhood anyone should be walking around in alone.

  The streets were essentially deserted; a few souls shrouded in makeshift coverings now and then dashed past, every one of them in an obvious rush to find shelter. Rain beat a steady tattoo on my umbrella, but the downpour was lighter than it had been all day. In the sky, there were patches of white among the black clouds, a promise of clearing.

  Pedro’s sister lived in a 1920s-era, mission-style stucco fourplex; two units up, two down. A rank of buildings of the same style lined the block: arched doorways, narrow windows, a flat tarpaper roof fronted by a low parapet that was crowned with a single row of red clay tiles to suggest the Spanish origins of the builder’s intentions. The tiny patch of front yard at number 114, no more than four feet wide, had been cemented over a long time ago. Weeds grew through the cracks.

  I walked up a dark, narrow stairway and knocked on the door to my right.

  “Momento, por favor.” I heard a female voice call from inside amid the racket of clattering pans and water pouring. “Esperate.”

  I glanced at the notes I had taken during my last phone conversation with Arlo, made sure of the name he had given me before I called out, “Mrs. Ruiz?”

  She must have dropped a pan on a bare floor. There was some muttering, and then the door was opened. She looked at me with huge brown eyes, looked me up and down. I tried not to be as obvious as she was as I studied her. She was short and round, sturdy Indio stock with beautiful mocha skin and hair that was as long and straight as a horse’s tail. According to the coroner, Pedro had been five-three. He would have towered over his older sister.

  I said, “Meixia Ruiz?”

  “Si?” She was wary about me. Even though the door chain was on, when I said her name she closed the open space a few more inches.

  “May I talk with you about Pedro Alvaro?”

  “Pedro.” Tears rose between her heavy lids. “You are police?”

  “No.” I handed her my card. “I just want to talk to you.”

  Mrs. Ruiz’s big eyes grew impossibly wide. I heard a quick intake of breath. And then she said, with barely subdued excitement, “You America’s Most Wanted? You want to find those killers?”

  “Something like that.” Close enough. She slipped the door chain and let me in, so I didn’t bother to refine the explanation of my presence.

  Her living room was surprisingly spacious. There had been a time, before the last world war, when this was a fairly good address. Before the freeways, an earlier version of yuppies had commuted to downtown from here: Young lawyers, actors on their way up, mid-level government workers had started their families in apartments like this one.

  Carved detail work over the three doors that led to other rooms was nearly obliterated by perhaps seventy years’ accumulation of paint. But I could still see the potential. If the house could be moved to a better neighborhood.

  The roof leaked. The clatter and water I’d heard through the closed door had been Mrs. Ruiz emptying one of the galvanized buckets she had set under any of the four or five ceiling drips. The old flat roof above just could not contain the hundred-year storm.

  All the time we talked, the steady plink of leaky ceiling punctuated our conversation. The room was cold and damp and smelled of mildew. We had been in a long drought; there must have been other, older sources of water leakage than the rain.

  When I complimented Mrs. Ruiz on her English, she told me that she took English as a Second Language classes at Belmont High School during the evenings after working all day cleaning houses. I found out right away that I couldn’t use slang if I wanted to be understood, but we got along well otherwise.

  “Pedro was the youngest of my brothers,” she said. “We are ten in our family. Five older, from my father and my mother, and five younger from my father and his second wife after my mother died. Pedro was a little spoiled because he was the baby.”

  “What did the police tell you about the way he died?”

  “Oh!” She clutched the neck of her starched blouse. “It was terrible. Those girls said they wanted to be friends with Pedro. But all they wanted was his money. He would give it to them. Why did they have to kill him?”

  “Where did Pedro get his money? He had at least two hundred dollars on him.”

  “He was a gardener. He worked for some big company. After work and on weekends, he mowed lawns for some people. Mostly apartment houses. Pedro worked hard and he saved his money like crazy. In Mexico, he has a wife and children. He sent them money every week. And still, he saved to have enough for them to come north.”

  “For a man who was saving to bring his family north, he was very generous with his money. He bought beer and paid bus fare for those girls.”

  “The policeman told me he did that.” Mrs. Ruiz got up from the sofa to check the water level of her buckets. “Pedro was a little lonely. He has a room in a house over there by the Coliseum. Every night after work, he goes there alone and he thinks about his wife and his children. I don’t know what he was doing with those girls. But men, you know, they can’t be alone very much or they get themselves into trouble. He should never have left his wife in Guadalajara. I try to tell him, but he says he knows how to take care of himself.”

  “He got into trouble when he drank.”

  “Si. Indio estúpido. He has one beer, then he has six more. Or twelve more. He can’t stop. The first one makes him think about his family, the second one makes him forget.”

  “Forgetting? Do you think that’s why he went home with those girls. They were very young, you know. Just children.”

  “Children here.” She tapped her head. Then she grabbed one ample breast. “But not children here. The policeman says they were not innocent, those girls.”

  “Which policeman did you talk to?”

  “Big guy.” She stretched one arm as high as she could to show me how tall he was. “Uno taco de ojo.”

  Taco for the eye, she said; eye candy. Handsome. LAPD prides itself on the hard bodies of its boys and girls in midnight blue. I assumed she was talking about some sweet young thing in uniform. But she went to her purse and pulled out a business card and handed it to me.

  “Mike Flint?” I said, loud enough to startle her when I saw the name on the card. “You think he’s cute?”

  She grinned and preened. “He is so nice. Muy guapo.”

  I gave her back the card. Taco de ojo, indeed. Charm sometimes works magic on the eye.

  I said, “What arrangements have you made for Pedro?”

  “The coroner, he said we can have Pedro on Saturday. We want to take him home to Guadalajara, but there is not enough money. The priest at our church will say a special mass Friday night and ask for help, but he said we will be lucky to get enough money to bury Pedro in a cemetery here.”

  She swept a hand through her long ponytail. “I watch the news on Galavision and I hear about those men who own the cemeteries. They take all your money for a piece of ground, then they dig up the grave when it is still fresh and they sell it again to someone else. I do not want that for Pedro.”

  “Those men have been arrested,” I said.

  She raised her hands to show that I had missed the point. “I want to bury Pedro next to his mother in Guadalajara where no one will disturb him.”

  “I hope you find a way to do that,” I said. I asked her if she would talk to me again
on camera.

  Mrs. Ruiz looked around her living room as if deciding whether it was sufficiently presentable, and then she asked, “Do you pay money?”

  “No, we don’t. But a contribution might be made to the church.”

  She smiled at that, and agreed to talk with me any time I cared to come by. When we said good-bye, I folded a bill into her palm, hoping she wouldn’t be offended.

  When I came out of the Ruiz house, there was only a light drizzle falling. The streets were still inundated, but they were quickly draining. There were larger, brighter patches in the sky than I had seen all day, a faint promise of clearing. I decided to take a chance that maybe He had decided against the forty-day flood this time, and pulled out the address list Arlo had left on my e-mail.

  I had a couple of choices. One of the Customs agents who signed the documents allowing Bao Ngo to bring his load of fakes into the country lived in Simi Valley. From a phone in the subway, I called the number listed. An old man’s voice invited me to leave a message on his answering machine. I gave my name and office number, and wrote myself a note to try him again in the evening.

  Next I called Khanh and told her machine that Minh Tam was safely resting in a downtown hotel and that I hoped he would call her.

  I rode the train back downtown, came up at Flower Street and caught a Dash bus back to Parker Center. With luck, Mike would be finished for the day and we could go home before it started to rain heavily again.

  Mike was sequestered in an interview with another of his baby murderers, a gang-banger nicknamed Pen. I remembered Tina mentioning how Pen had helped Shannon hold Pedro so that a kid named Snoop could use him like a punching bag. I wanted to hear Pen’s version and appealed to Cecil to get me inside. My camera was downstairs in the van and Cecil thought there wasn’t time to get it before Mike had finished with the kid, but he would ask about that, too.

  The lieutenant came out to the hall from his office cubicle and gave me the word. “Mike’s on a roll,” he said. “You go in there and make a fuss setting up cameras and Mike could lose his edge. It’s okay if you want to listen in, but that’s it.” End of discussion.