by Miles Corwin
I lingered for a moment by Nicole’s front gate. She lived in one of the original homes, a white clapboard beach bungalow with faded green trim and a weathered front porch made of rough-hewn redwood. Out front was a small dock with a rowboat tied to a post. Feathery cattails banked the fence that encircled the property. The tufts of star jasmine on the patio filled the air with an intensely sweet fragrance.
When Nicole peered through the blinds and saw me on the patio, she opened the front door. I could barely see her face because the living room was so dark; only the ruby studs in her ears were clearly visible, and they flickered like flames against her olive skin.
“How about a cruise?” I asked, jerking my chin toward the boat. “When I used to patrol this area, I always wanted to ride in the canals.”
“Sure,” Nicole said, walking to the edge of the dock. She wore black leather pants and a red 1940s jacket, cinched at the waist, with large black buttons.
We climbed in and I rowed down a canal, under an arched Venetian-style wooden bridge. I winced slightly because my shoulders were still sore from surfing.
“Sorry I don’t have a motorboat for you,” she said, a mocking gleam in her eyes.
“I think I can handle it. I went surfing a few days ago. First time in a long time. I’m out of shape.”
“A surfing cop?” she said. “Two diametrically opposed cultures.”
I set the oars in their hooks, leaned back, and watched the boat glide under another bridge. A soft, salty breeze blew from the sea, and the only sounds I could hear were the occasional quack of a duck and the tinkle of wind chimes. The faded blue sky was soon daubed with gold and tangerine, the rippled water reflecting the sunset. I closed my eyes for a moment, feeling the tension beginning to ease a bit from my knotted up neck and shoulders.
“You know why the sunsets are so great in L.A.?” she asked.
“The smog.”
“Right. It’s interesting when you examine Southern California landscape paintings from seventy-five years ago and compare them to more current works. The sunsets in the older paintings were more subdued than the sunsets in the current ones. That’s because as the smog worsened and the chemicals coalesced on the horizons, landscape artists began replicating those colorful, sulfuric sunsets.”
“Art imitating smog?”
Nicole laughed. “Something like that.”
I resumed rowing and said, “It’s amazing they haven’t paved this area over, like so much of L.A.”
“Where do you live?”
“In a loft downtown.”
“Oh, the forbidding Downtownistan. I’ve lived in L.A. fifteen years and I don’t think I’ve been downtown more than a couple of times. Let’s go to your ‘hood for dinner. Give me the downtown tour. Maybe L.A. will finally make sense to me.”
When I opened the Saturn’s passenger door, she said, “A station wagon in a hybrid world. I haven’t been in one of these since I was in the fourth grade.”
I returned to the Santa Monica Freeway, drove back downtown, and parked at Union Station. We walked to Olvera Street, a faux Mexican mercado lined with nineteenth-century brick and adobe buildings and filled with stalls where merchants hawked sombreros, serapes, leather wallets, small guitars, and other cheesy souvenirs. She followed me to a stall filled with the statues of Aztec warriors. A few feet away, a small section of the street was laid out in a zigzag pattern of brick and stone.
I tapped my foot on the pattern and said, “This is why L.A.’s such a mess.” I led her to La Golondrina, housed in a two-story brick building built in the mid-1800s, the first Mexican restaurant in L.A. We sat in a street-side patio and watched the German and Japanese tourists shuffle by. The waitress brought us the beer, corn tortillas, and nopales salad I had ordered.
I gazed intently at her, dazzled by how the flecks of green in her dark eyes glittered under the lights.
She waved both palms in front of my face and laughed. “Didn’t your mother ever tell you it’s not polite to stare.”
“She warned me about everything else—at least fifty times. I think that was the only admonition she ever forgot.”
I filled my tortilla with the nopales. When she gazed at it skeptically, I said, “Nopales is cactus. They marinate it and slice it up. It’s the chopped liver of Mexico.”
She laughed, covering her mouth with her napkin.
Since she said she couldn’t figure out the city, I decided to give her my why-L.A.-is-so-fucked-up-rap. I told her how the zigzag pattern I just showed her is where a section of the zanja madre—the mother ditch—brought water to the first settlers from the L.A. River about a half mile away; and the river is why the city was established here; but the river was eventually paved over to control the flooding and now is just a cement channel with a thin trickle of water most of the year. I told her how you could have an office on the top floor of a downtown office building and not even see a patch of water no matter what direction you looked; how the architect who designed the new cathedral downtown said the grand cathedrals in Europe were all built beside rivers and the best equivalent he could come up with in L.A. was the traffic-choked 101 Freeway; how the city has no real reason for existing because downtown is landlocked, the harbor more than twenty miles to the south and the ocean fifteen miles to the west.
We finished the nopales, and as we walked back to my car, I said, “My dad worked downtown for thirty-five years. He used to take me with him sometimes in the summer and show me the different buildings. When I was a kid, I thought about being an architect.”
“But you ended up as a homicide detective. Isn’t that a depressing gig?”
“Whenever I get called out on a case, I think about a quote from Ecclesiastics that I still remember from Hebrew school: It is better to go to a house of mourning than to go to a house of feasting, for death is the destiny of every man; the living should take this to heart.”
She gave me a quizzical look.
“Everyone knows they’re not guaranteed tomorrow, but we all get so wrapped up in the daily drivel it’s easy to forget it,” I said. “But when you see a body out on the pavement, with the blood dripping into the gutter, well, that has a way of bringing it home to you. I feel sorry for people who are so insulated from death.”
“So when a body is—”
“I’d rather talk about L.A. history.”
“I’d rather eat.”
“What kind of food do you want?”
“Don’t cops know the best spots? How about a cop place?”
“Okay. But there’s no turning back.”
I drove south, through a canyon of office towers, to the edge of downtown, hung a left, past a string of fashion district sweatshops and warehouses—the walls covered with savage graffiti, the tops bristling with razor wire—and stopped in front of a vacant lot overgrown with wild fennel, the breeze scented with the smell of licorice. A lunch wagon was parked across the lot, next to a liquor store, its windows opaque with soot.
“You wanted Mexican and you wanted a cop hangout,” I said. “This is both. It’s a roach coach, but they make the best tacos in the city.”
“I’ve been wined and dined at the finest restaurants in Santa Monica and West Hollywood,” she said, surveying the gritty landscape. “But none of them has the ambiance to compare to this place.”
I bought two cans of Tecate from the liquor store, slipped them into brown paper bags, and handed her one. We walked to the lunch wagon and waited behind a dozen Hispanic people in line. Ranchera music blared from inside the lunch wagon, and the smell of sizzling beef and cilantro filled the air. I had to kick several mangy dogs that tried to sniff Nicole’s pants. A woman behind the grill cranked out freshly made corn tortillas with a small hand roller.
When we reached the front of the line, I ordered, in Spanish, four tacos. I slipped in some cilantro and a few sliced radishes and sprinkled on peppery salsa thick with chopped chilies. We returned to my car and munched on the tacos, leaning against the trunk and
hunched forward so the juice did not spill on our pants. We washed the tacos down with slugs of beer. I asked her if she liked the first taco I gave her. She nodded, her mouth full. I told her it was a sesos—cow brain—taco. She took a long, theatrical pull of her beer.
I drove over to 4th and Main and parked in a lot. We walked past a menacing-looking wino, shouting and swearing at a shopping cart, and into a restaurant located on the ground floor of a turn-of-the-century building that was once a cigar store, but had recently been renovated. We sat in the bar, ordered beers. I glanced at Nicole and watched her move her head to the sound of the jazz quartet, her eyes half-closed, her tongue peeking through her lips. I realized that tonight, for the first time in a long while, I didn’t have a lingering headache, a knot in the pit of my stomach, a tightness in my chest.
She asked me about growing up in L.A., and then told me she was born and raised in Detroit, but moved to Venice to attend grad school at UCLA.
“Both parents Lebanese?” I asked.
She shook her head. “My mom’s French.”
“Both parents Jewish?” she asked in a challenging tone.
“Very.”
“You don’t seem too religious.”
“I’m not. I’m Jewish culturally, I guess you’d say. The thing that ties me to Judaism, more than anything else, is the Holocaust. That, unfortunately, kind of shaped my Jewish identity. So I don’t go to synagogue much and my relationship to God is pretty tenuous. The Holocaust made a lot of Jews skeptics. I figure, if there was a God, what good was He?”
“You sound like a Jewish agnostic.”
“I wouldn’t say that. There’s some symbolism in the Kabala that suggests that God, like the Jews themselves, is in exile. That captures where I’m at. How about you?”
“A Lebanese-French atheist. You ever been to the Middle East?”
“Yeah—Israel.”
“What do you think about what the Israeli army did to Lebanon in ‘06?”
“Let’s discuss it another time. That’s a topic that could ruin our evening.” I decided not to tell her about my army patrols on the Lebanese border. “Any priors?”
She laughed. “One. He was another grad student. But the marriage didn’t last long. You?”
“One. Five years. Then she walked. But I always thought we’d eventually get back together.”
“Why’d she walk?”
“Irreconcilable differences, as they say in divorce court.”
“So was there another woman who alientated your affection, as they also say in divorce court?”
“Yeah, but it’s more complicated than that.”
“It usually is.”
“Let’s blow this place. You ready to go home?”
“I’d like to see your building. Finish off the architectural tour.”
I downed the rest of my beer in a few long gulps, stalling for time. I knew that, because of department regulations, I shouldn’t have asked her out; when she said no, I knew I shouldn’t have pressed her; and now, I knew I shouldn’t take her back to my place. A date was just an LAPD rules infraction; an affair would be something more. But I had a buzz from the beer, and she was looking damn good.
I pulled out of the lot, parked behind my building, walked around to the front, and punched my code in the keypad. We walked through the lobby, with its stamped tin ceiling, and entered the elevator, paneled in burnished mahogany. We rode to the top floor in silence. When we were inside the loft, Nicole stopped, and looked around. “I like the space. But you’re not much of a decorator. I’d call it Monk Modern. We need to get you some art on the walls.”
I flipped on the CD player and skipped past “So What” to the second cut—the bouncy, bluesy “Freddie Freeloader.” I grabbed beers from the refrigerator, and joined her on the sofa.
“The CD collection,” she said. “The window to the soul. What’s playing on the box? I like the sound?”
“It’s a Miles Davis album. I play it over and over. Whatever mood I’m in, there’s a cut on it for me.”
“And what kind of mood are you in now?” she asked, sipping her beer, but keeping her eyes on me.
“I used to be in a ‘So What’ mood. Tonight I’m in a ‘Freddie Freeloader’ kind of mood.”
“This a very old CD?”
“The album was recorded before we were born.”
“What’s the name?”
“Kind of Blue.”
“Good title for a cop like you.”
She closed her eyes and listened to the interplay between horns, piano, and drums. She opened her eyes when she heard the next cut. “What’s the name of this one?”
“Let me tell you a story about it. When I was a boot, my training officer and I were talking about music. He was an old salt who liked Tony Bennett and people like that. I figured he could relate to Miles. So I told him about this cut, “Blue in Green,” and how much I liked it. He told me that’s because it was the story of a young cop like me who didn’t know shit, only the words were twisted around. He said they should have called it, “Green in Blue.”
“So you’re really into jazz.”
“No. I’m really into ‘Kind of Blue.’ Most jazz today is too crazy for me. Space music. I like the straight-ahead sound. Not much of that around today.”
She walked over to the window and pointed to the crumbling St. Vibiana’s Cathedral, the cream-colored cupola catching the moonlight. “Pretty,” she said.
I walked up behind her, clasped my hands around her waist, and kissed her neck. She sighed and turned around. We kissed, standing by the window, for several minutes. She pulled away, looked into my eyes for a moment, then took my hand and led me across the room to the bed. She pulled my shirt over my head, kissing my neck, licking my nipples, running her forefinger along the jagged shrapnel wound beneath my ribs.
“I’ll bet there’s a story to explain the scar.”
“Actually a short one. About a hundredth of a second.” I lightly touched her cheek and said, “I’m not really ready for this tonight. I don’t have any protection here.”
She walked across the room, opened her purse, and tossed me a Trojan like she was flipping a Frisbee, the metal packet sweeping across the loft in a long, slow ellipsis. I stood there, frozen, as the Trojan seemed to hang in the air forever. Finally, I reached up and snatched it.
When she walked back to me, I began to unbutton her jacket, but she turned around and flicked off the lights. Then she kicked off her shoes, slipped off her leather pants, tossed her jacket on a chair, and unhooked and dropped her bra on the floor. It was dark, but she was back-lit by a faint nimbus of moonlight shining through the window, and I could see her silhouette: slender, high-breasted, her metal navel pierce shimmering when she turned toward me. After she slipped her arms around my back and kissed me again, I guided her down to the bed, but she resisted.
“I want you to do something for me,” she whispered.
“Yeah.”
“Hurt me.”
I took a step back. “I’m not into that.”
“No big thing.”
“It is to me.”
She ran her finger down my chest. “I want you to.”
“No.”
She reached back and slapped me across the face.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” I shouted.
“I told you what I want.”
I shook my head.
Then she slapped me again, so hard that blood began to bead at the corner of my mouth.
My face burned. I grabbed her shoulder so hard that she fell to her knees. Her eyes were shiny with a wild look of abandon and defiance. She leaned over, licked the blood off my lips, and kissed me, probing deeply with her tongue.
I pinned her wrists to the corners and held her legs down with my knees.
“I want you to—”
“Shut the fuck up.”
She wriggled her legs free and wrapped them around my waist. As she pulled me toward her, I could see the reddish ou
tline of my palm print on her shoulder.
The bedspread and sheets were twisted on the floor. The mattress was half off the box springs. She wiped my brow with her fingertips, daubed the moisture on her lips and kissed me. “I like that voodoo that you do,” she said, crawling out of bed and dressing.
“What’s going on?”
“Having some work done at the gallery early tomorrow morning. Got to get back.”
I wearily climbed to my feet, feeling hungover, dressed, and drove her home. She rested her head on my shoulder and dozed. At her door she kissed me and said, “I had a swell time.”
“So did I. But what’s up with this?” I said, swatting the air.
“You’re a little numb for my taste.”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“I do.”
“If that’s what you need.”
She shut the door and called out as I walked to my car, “Maybe it’s what you need.”
CHAPTER 17
I drove home thinking about the night. I didn’t know if it was the violence or the intensity, but Nicole had tapped into some part me that drew me to her. I didn’t know why, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. I just knew I wanted to see her again.
When I was at my desk in the squad room, I called her and left my home, work, and cell numbers on her answering machine. As I hung up, Ortiz pulled a chair over and sat down. “Let me lay out the facts as I see them.” He pointed to his watch and said, “You’re ninety minutes late for work. I called you three times last night, and you didn’t answer your phone. And when I check out your demeanor and body language right now, I notice that you’re not wound as tight as usual. Now I’m a detective. So putting all these leads together I come to one conclusion: You ignored my advice, went out with that broad last night, and nailed her. Am I right?”