by L. A. Morse
“You what?”
“You heard me.”
“What’s going on here?”
“It’s nothing much. Just a little something that we want to check on.”
“Jake, do I assume that you’re involved with this?”
“Yeah, I—”
O’Bee cut me off. “Shut up, Jake. I’m asking this.”
“Come on, Pop. You know the rules. I can’t do that for you.”
“You’re a goddamn big-deal lieutenant. You can do whatever you want.” He turned to me. “You see, Jake; what’d I tell you? You take a good, decent cop, a guy who’s willing to do a favor every once in a while, without making a federal case out of it, and you take him out of uniform and you give him a desk and you put him into a glass outhouse of an office, and all of a sudden he starts acting like he’s the police fucking commissioner or something. ‘We can’t do that. It’s against the rules,’“ O’Bee said, lowering his voice and wrinkling his large nose. “Shit! Give me an asshole like Anderson any time. At least you know where you stand with him.”
The lieutenant rolled his eyes upward. “I let him go on like this,” he said, “because it’s the only exercise he gets.”
But O’Brien was just hitting his stride. “And am I some asshole who comes in off the street? I’d probably be better off if I were. But I’m only the guy who put braces on his teeth so he could smile like goddamn Robert Redman, and who put him through that fancy-ass college so when he gets in the department he can move up and not walk a beat, like was good enough for his poor old dad.”
“Uh, poor old Dad—”
“Shut up, you ungrateful little punk! And how does he repay his poor old dad, who sacrificed for him?” O’Brien was talking quite loudly by this point. “Why, he forces him to go into a nursing home that makes the Black Hole of Calcutta look like a summer camp, and where his poor old dad gets one bowl of oatmeal a day and has to stay awake all night because if he doesn’t, the rats’ll come out and eat his toes.”
I looked around. All activity in the Squad Room had stopped and everyone was looking toward the office.
“Christ!” The lieutenant got up and leaned out the doorway. “Go back to work, huh?” he said, and shut the door. “You know that’s not true.”
“Of course it’s not.” Now that the audience was gone, O’Bee was speaking normally. “But maybe they don’t know it. You want ‘em talking about how you mistreat your poor old dad?”
“Poor old Dad! Shit! You really are a nasty old man. I’m just glad I’m the result of an affair Mom had with the milkman.”
O’Bee stared at him for a second, and then they both started to laugh. O’Brien laughed so hard he began to cough, a deep ugly sound that shook his body. I hadn’t ever seen O’Brien like that, and it wasn’t pleasant. The lieutenant tried to help his father but was waved off.
When the spell was finally over, O’Bee’s voice was soft and hoarse. “Will you help us out? This is something I want.”
A look that I couldn’t read, something uncharacteristically serious, passed between O’Brien and his son.
The lieutenant sat down behind his desk and began fiddling with some papers. “You’re not going to tell me what this is about, are you?” O’Brien shook his head. The lieutenant looked at me. “You know, my reluctance has nothing to do with the rules. I just don’t want you guys to get into trouble.”
“No trouble, Lieutenant,” I said.
“I mean, you’re not as young as you used to be.”
“Jesus, would you listen to that?” O’Bee said.
“Shut up, Pop, for once, would you? I mean, be careful. Okay?”
“Don’t worry,” I said. It seemed like I’d been saying that a lot lately. Without much effect.
“I do. I will. I don’t want to come in one day and see in the morning reports that my father and his oldest friend have been hauled in for something or other.”
“Ah, here it comes,” O’Bee said. “The first rule of command—when in doubt, cover your ass.”
The lieutenant made a despairing face and then pointed a short, thick finger at me. “Jake, you’re responsible.”
For what? That we wouldn’t make asses of ourselves? It was already too late for that but I nodded agreeably.
The lieutenant looked at me and shook his head. “This is like having a child molester babysit. Shit! Tell me what you want and then get out of here.”
I gave him the information. He said it’d take a couple of hours, and he’d leave the material with O’Brien in the morning.
“Take care, Pop,” he said as we left. “And Jake, you take care of him. Other than the milkman, he’s the only father I’ve got.”
Outside the station I said, “That’s a good kid.”
“Yeah, he turned out okay, didn’t he?”
“That’s also an interesting technique you have, making yourself so objectionable that people give you what you want, to get rid of you.”
He shrugged. “It works.” He seemed to drift off for a moment, then returned. “Hey! How about that! We’re in business!”
O’Brien clapped his hands and then slapped me on the back, almost sending me sprawling. One more reason for hoping the situation could be resolved quickly: I doubted my body could stand a long association with the lumbering Irishman.
I got O’Brien back to the nursing home and me back to my home. In the last twenty-four hours I’d done more driving than in the two previous months. I was tired.
Since it didn’t look like there was anything I could do until the next day, I smoked myself to the point where the adventures of Al Tracker would seem amusing, if not intelligible. Somewhere between Al wiping out a witches’ coven and being beaten to a bloody pulp by a gang of Oriental men with bamboo sticks, I got a call from Sal. He hadn’t had any luck yet, so he was glad to hear that I had gotten things started. I said I was glad he was glad, but that he shouldn’t count on anything. He said he wasn’t, but that he had confidence in me. Rather than get into what was becoming our usual song and dance, I said goodbye.
Just as Al was about to sink himself into the lubricious body of his client’s wife, I gratefully sank into deep, dark, dreamless sleep.
CHAPTER SEVEN
When I went out to Sunset Grove the next morning, I found O’Brien and the Iron Maiden standing ten feet apart in front of the office, looking like they were waiting for a bus. He was carrying two plastic shopping bags from Safeway and she had on her frozen, surgically implanted smile. Both were trying to pretend the other wasn’t there.
As soon as I got out of the car, she scurried up. “I understand Mr. O’Brien will be staying with you for a few days?”
Huh? I looked at O’Bee.
“Uh, Jake, I thought it might be easier if I stayed with you until we got this taken care of.” He raised his eyebrows and nodded his head encouragingly.
“Sure, okay. Yes,” I said to the woman, “Mr. O’Brien will be staying with me.”
Her expression didn’t change. I couldn’t tell if she was disappointed that I’d gone along with O’Brien’s story, or relieved that he’d be away for a while.
“You be sure that he takes his medicine. We wouldn’t want him to get sick, would we?” she smiled.
“No, we certainly wouldn’t.”
O’Brien got in the car. She bent down to the level of the window. Still smiling, and without unclenching her teeth, she said, “I hope something heavy falls on you.”
Before O’Brien could reply, she executed an abrupt about-face and marched quickly away.
O’Brien smiled benignly at her retreating figure. “She’s probably off to change a catheter. That always cheers her up.” He turned to me. “Hey, Jake! Here we go!”
He slapped me on the leg with a thwack. I winced, certain I had a large red hand-print on ray thigh. I was beginning to feel like the much-battered Al Tracker.
Back at my place, O’Brien looked around, nodding his head. He hadn’t been there for years. “Nice,�
�� he said.
“Nice?”
“Yeah. It’s yours, it doesn’t have orange and purple fire-retarding curtains, and it doesn’t smell of Lysol and mortality. Nice.” He looked at the couch and then looked at it again. “I know it’s been a long time, but does this look like what I think it does?” He indicated the nearly obscene orchid on the center cushion.
“Yeah.”
He grinned, sat down heavily, and wriggled his large rear.
“You want a drink?” I said.
“Nah.”
“No?”
“No. We got work to do. Boy! Do we ever have work!”
He reached in one of the shopping bags and pulled out a thick sheaf of computer paper.
“Shit!”
He nodded and handed it to me. It was all neat and clear. Each line had a license number, a car make, model, and color, and a name and address. It started at AAM 700 and ended with ZAM 796. They were separated by what looked to be something over twenty-two hundred entries.
“Shit.”
I only glanced through it quickly, but none of the licenses seemed to be designated as belonging to armed robbers, associates of kidnappers, or short psychopaths with funny voices.
“Shit.”
O’Brien laughed. “What’d you expect? A three-by-five card?”
“I didn’t really think about it. If I had, I guess this is what I would’ve expected. Still... Shit.”
O’Bee and I divided the list and sat on opposite sides of the kitchen table, crossing out anything that didn’t fit the vague requirements of new, big, and dark. Because the line had to be drawn somewhere, I arbitrarily decided to eliminate any car older than two years.
We hadn’t gone very far before we realized that we had no idea what kind of cars belonged to names like Cordoba, Cutlass, Cougar, and a whole lot of other European cities, offensive weapons, and predatory animals. Almost no models were still around from the days when we’d been consumers, and it gave us a sort of uneasy feeling. This was the kind of thing that took you by surprise:, you went along, thinking you were keeping up pretty well, when suddenly something happened and you discovered you had lost touch with whole huge areas of experience, that without being aware it had happened, you found you were standing in the middle of an alien landscape.
O’Brien offered to call his sixteen-year-old grandson, but I didn’t want to involve the lieutenant any further, even indirectly. Using newspapers and magazines I had lying around, we managed to connect images with most of the names, at least enough to see how things went. If the name was something young, cute, or cuddly, it was small; something vicious was fast; and if the name felt heavy, the car probably was as well.
It took us about three hours to eliminate two-thirds of the list. Not nearly enough. Another arbitrary decision and another forty-five minutes, and we had it down to cars in the vicinity of L.A. To do so didn’t strike me as unreasonable. More to the point, reasonable or not, there didn’t seem to be much choice. The problem was that we were still left with around two hundred possibilities, spread between San Bernadino and Oxnard, Newport, and Newhall. That was still way too many, but I couldn’t see any way to narrow it further.
“Shit,” I said for about the twentieth time, as I flipped through the list. “If time wasn’t a factor, we could do it.”
“But it is.”
“Yeah. We need help.”
“You’re not thinking about asking the lieutenant again?”
“No. I think we pushed our welcome about to the limit, don’t you?”
“Just about. Poor old Dad might be good for a bit of computer time, but running a check on two hundred citizens is a whole other thing. Especially since you don’t want to tell him why.”
“Exactly.”
“So what are you thinking?”
“Hell, I don’t know. What about your place? Anybody there who could lend a hand?”
“You kidding? Most of ‘em can’t raise a hand, much less lend one. Besides, their serum porcelain levels are too high.”
“Their what?”
“Nursing-home joke. They’re all crocks.”
“Oh.”
We fell silent, trying to think of people who could help us, trying to recall who was still alive and who was living in a trailer in Florida. Then we both looked up at the same time and simultaneously said, “The Tar Pits.”
“Of course!” O’Brien said. “It was too obvious.”
“You think they’ll go along?”
“Hell, I’d be surprised if they didn’t. I heard that last month they rented two buses and went down to that nude beach.”
“You’re kidding. To observe?”
“What do you think? To participate.”
“Jesus! That’s a staggering thought.”
“Isn’t it? Imagine all those wrinkles exposed in one place at one time. Like a convention of raisin producers.”
“Christ, what a crew. Our thing’ll probably seem too tame for them.”
O’Brien and I set about sorting the possibilities by area, so they could be checked out as efficiently as possible, assuming our anticipated help came through. It turned out that there were two hundred and eleven vehicles. My only hope was that a lot of them would be eliminated as soon as they were seen, because either the color was not dark enough or the owner was obviously inappropriate.
As we were working, O’Brien said, “You know this is a really thin operation.”
“I know.”
“Based on a lot of dubious assumptions.”
“Isn’t it, though?”
“It surely is.” O’Bee starting counting them off on his fingers. “That the partial license we’re working with was correct to begin with.”
“Yep.”
“That neither the car nor the plate was stolen.”
“Yep.”
“That the right car is one of the ones we’ve decided to focus on.”
“Right.”
“That we’ll be able to figure out which is the one we want.”
“Right.”
“That if we find the right guy, he’ll still have the money.”
“Yeah.”
“And that if he does, we’ll be able to get it back.” O’Brien was onto his sixth finger. “That’s more than a handful of assumptions, Jake Spanner.”
I nodded. I’d been aware of all that stuff, but laid out like that, it certainly did look, as O’Brien said, thin.
“O’Bee, you play bridge?”
“No. Crib.”
“Well, in bridge sometimes you end up with tough contracts that’ll be set unless the cards lay one particular way. However unlikely that might be, that’s your only chance, so you play based on the assumption that the cards do, in fact, lay just that way. If you get lucky, you win. If not, well, you were going to lose anyway, and you at least gave yourself the possibility of success. This looks like the same kind of deal. All we’ve got are two faint, fuzzy lines, and all we can do is see if they’ll intersect somewhere.”
O’Brien eloquently raised his eyebrows.
I sighed and nodded. “Damn right.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Tar Pits was a two-story apartment house built around a large patio and swimming pool. While hardly luxurious, it had been well constructed and was kept in good condition, attractive, comfortable. It was a co-op for people over sixty, kind of a geriatric version of a swinging singles building, though perhaps a little less sedate than that.
The place was cooperative in much more than the legal sense. The people there helped one another out, contributed their energies and particular abilities—legal, medical, organizational, culinary, whatever—to the common good. The goal was self-sufficiency, and as a group, having lots of different skills and backgrounds to draw on, they managed pretty well. At least they didn’t need a retirement village social director to plan a jolly afternoon of pottery-making or to remind them how much fun they were having. The group was there if someone wanted it, but avoidable if someone
didn’t. It was called the Tar Pits because, as the residents said, it was full of fossils.
O’Brien and I each knew a couple of people who lived there, and over the years we’d met a lot more. If I hated to go to Sunset Grove because it gave me the creeps, the Tar Pits was always full of surprises. I’d go there and find that half a dozen people were planning a trek in the Himalayas. Or that after thirty-five years of marriage each, the Callahans and the Schultzes had decided to switch partners for a while. Or that Mrs. Pitman had moved in with Mr. Andrews, Mrs. Jenkins, and Miss Tucker to form some bizarre kind of ménage à quatre, and that Mr. Andrews strutted around like a rooster and was known as the Sultan. It all seemed to work out well for those involved, but I gathered that some of these arrangements were profoundly upsetting for the children, who found both their parents and their own children living what they considered to be, at best, highly unconventional lives.
Basically, though, these relationships merely reflected certain realities: that there was a need for companionship; that there were three times as many old women as old men; that pensions could be lost if an old widow became a new wife; that propriety somehow didn’t seem so important, once you realized there might not be a tomorrow; that a person tended to regret what he didn’t do, not what he did do. Yeah, when you got to your sixties, you usually had a good grip on reality, if nothing else.
Or some of us did. Others of us still played cops and robbers. Shit.
“Well, look who’s here!” a voice said as we walked onto the patio.
“Our own Sam Spade!” a second voice said.
“And the fuzz. Oh, oh!” said a third.
“Jesus! The fruit salad,” O’Brien said.
The voices belonged to three guys sitting under an umbrella advertising Cinzano. I had known them from way back, from one of the studios. They had been in make-up, costumes, and set design, and had been together since the days when their pleasure had been a crime. More than a couple of times I had gotten them—individually and collectively—out of some ugly little messes. Though forty years together had made them look like triplets—all neat, pink, plump, and seeming to be fifteen years younger than they were—one tended to be outgoing, always ready for action. Another complained a lot. And the third was quiet, often nervous in a protective kind of way. Obviously, everyone had always called them Itchy, Bitchy, and Twitchy. I wasn’t sure if they’d been given the names because they fit, or if they’d grown to fit their names.