Deadly Lullaby

by Robert McClure

  Maybe there’s a self-help manual on the subject (Dysfunctional Family Relationships for Dummies?), but, really, how do you deal with your father after you find out he whacked your mother?

  And after he finds out you found him out?

  Times like this make me wish I hadn’t ditched psychotherapy.

  As nervous as a feral cat, I glance over at the old man, who opens the restaurant door for me and says, “Brings back memories, doesn’t it, kid?”

  Uh, yeah.

  Inside, he enchants the hostess, a cute, young Latina. Flat overwhelms her with his smile and a whispered comment that has her giggling and hanging on his arm like a paid escort. She clutches his hand and leads him through the crowd to a booth in the southwest corner, and I roll along behind them like the third wheel he’s reduced me to, wondering if she’d keep his hand tucked against her breast like that if she knew it had the residue of death on it.

  We get to our booth, and as if he’s read my mind, the old man says, “I’m going to hit the men’s and wash up.”

  I slide into the booth, my back to the wall, the crowded main dining room spread out before me, check out the assortment of piñatas that dangle from the ceiling and the murals painted on the walls. This décor’s been in place here since I was a kid, and it’s making me feel weird, small and naïve, transported back in time.

  A Chicano waiter appears and takes my order for a pitcher of beer and four tequila shots, nods when I tell him to come back when my father does.

  The old man returns sooner than I thought he would and pauses at the head of the booth. “I would like to sit where you are, with my back to the wall. Since it looks like I’ll be doing most of the talking, it will give us more privacy.”

  I let loose an exaggerated sigh and slide from the booth, stand and nudge past him to climb into the opposite seat.

  My sense is that his request to have his back to the wall has less to do with a desire for privacy than it is a defensive tactic, a product of his institutionalization. Ex-cons are notoriously paranoid, having learned to be hypervigilant for signs of threat in stir. Very rational behavior when you’re in constant danger of catching a shank in your back, and impossible to modify in a week.

  The waiter sets mugs of beer, tequila shots, tortilla chips, and three little clay pots of salsa before us. The old man places his usual order, a steak burrito with all the fixings, then crosses his arms on the table. You can’t help but notice how fucking huge his hands and forearms are. Bigger than mine since he’s had so much weight-throwing time on the prison yard, but there’s not much else different about us. We’re big men, both square-jawed Italians with deep-set black eyes, jet-black hair, and full lips. We resemble each other so completely my Aunt Connie, my mother’s sister, used to say we were the result of a mad obstetrical experiment, test-tube twins born twenty-four years apart.

  The old man finishes ordering and I flip down a shot of tequila and chase it with beer. “This is all I’m having,” I say to the waiter when he turns to me, “so keep ’em comin’.”

  “Yes, sir,” the waiter says with a goofy grin, and leaves.

  The old man sips beer. “No appetite?”

  “I haven’t had anything to eat in over twelve hours and it may be another twelve before I even think about it.”

  He frowns. “Was it that bad?”

  “Compared to what, for Christ sake, a chainsaw massacre?”

  He’s silent a few seconds. “I am sorry. I really am.”

  This gives me pause as I inhale a second shot.

  Arriba abajo, senor.

  This one doesn’t burn my throat as much as the first one and is beginning to warm the capillaries in my fingers and toes.

  I slap the glass on the table, slide it against the other one. “For the life of me,” I say, “I can’t remember those words ever coming from your mouth.”

  “It was easier than I thought it would be.”

  “I’ve got to hand it to you, it’s not a bad icebreaker. Now what, you plan to ask me for an introduction to the chief of police so you can strangle him to death?”

  “Know anybody with a lot of scratch who wants him dead?”

  With a shake of the head, I burn the third shot.

  I’m getting smashed in a hurry, and this could be a good thing to do or a very bad thing to do.

  Savoring the warmth, I run the cuff of my shirt across my mouth. “Old man, don’t you feel anything?”

  “Spare me the high and mighty attitude. I spent the last eight years in prison on a manslaughter beef that you and everybody else knows should have been life or the needle for murder one. Yet you accepted how much money from me while I was away—thirty, forty grand, all in hard cash? Forget what I doled out before that for college tuition, your cars, clothes, everything else. You knew beyond doubt where all that coin came from. Why do you complain now about how I earn my money?”

  I lean in to him and respond in a low hiss. “Because the way you earned it today can land my ass in prison.”

  “Never happen.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, really.”

  I lean back. “Somehow I’m having a hard time buying that prediction from a man who’s spent a third of his life behind bars.”

  He actually chuckles. “Now, there’s the mouthy little bastard I remember. Hard to believe I have missed your insults these many years, but I have, I really have.”

  His smile fades away, then returns just as gradually. He copes with my stone-cold stare by leaning back to take in the entire room—the crowd behind me, the walls, the ceiling, seemingly everything. The seconds tick by like hours. “This is nice,” he finally says. “Being here with you, having a conversation. Like old times.”

  “That’s the worst thing you could say.”

  “Hey, we had our moments in this place. We had your birthday parties here.”

  “Your goin’ away party is the one I remember.”

  Which went down when I was eight, and was hardly what you’d call a party. He brought me here to give me a little heads-up that he’d be going away for a while.

  On business.

  A long while, as it turned out: nine years.

  At the time I idolized my father the way eight-year-olds do, and it flat broke my heart to think I would only be able to see him once, maybe twice a month. I threw an out-and-out tantrum that ended with me throwing a plate of food at him. After he went away, mostly due to my whacked-out mother, our relationship slid straight downhill. We saw each other once a month for a while.

  Then once every two or three months.

  Twice a year.

  Our best years lost, I was seventeen the first time he was released, the day after I played the last football game of my career.

  My mother disappeared barely a month later.

  He killed her. This, this I know.

  And he knows I know this.

  A month or two after that, I was coming out of Botach Tactical store on Broadway, a boxed-up set of night-vision goggles in my hand (don’t ask me why I bought them), and ran smack into him. At first he looked at me like I was serving him with an arrest warrant, though I wasn’t a cop yet, and we regarded each other in awkward silence for a brief few seconds.

  “Hey, how you doin’?” he eventually said.

  I turned on my heels and walked away.

  He called over the years, and sent money, but I would never agree to see him face-to-face until today, when I had little choice.

  Now he says, “That time I broke the news to you about prison was a real bitch, yeah. A rare occasion, so why not forget it? Try to think positive for a change, give me a hand. It is difficult enough as it is trying to reconnect with you after eight years.”

  What?

  After a comment like that, all I can do is shake my head. Finally I say, “Old man, if there was a way you could reconnect with me, you missed it by a million fuckin’ miles.”

  This gives him pause.

  He reaches across the table
for my fourth tequila shot, holds it up to the light, inspects it, drinks slowly, savoring every drop. “Ahh, Patrón, made from pure agave, premium stuff,” he says, and dabs his mouth with a napkin. He sighs. “You know, exactly one week and one day ago I had my chow in the sour innards of a prison mess hall with a bunch of smelly losers. Guards marched me there and told me where to sit, what to eat, and when to leave. Now, just look around.”

  No reason to look around, having already scoped out the main dining room behind me. The Giants are in town and Dodger Stadium is about three miles down the street, just beyond where Cesar Chavez turns into Sunset. The restaurant’s buzzin’ with pregame energy and the people wearing Dodgers caps and jerseys are hustling out the door to get a jump on game traffic.

  He says, “You don’t have to look because you’ve never been deprived of this. But me? It flips me out.” He gazes wistfully over my left shoulder. “The women are chattering and flashing cleavage and leg. The men, they are all speaking in normal tones and dressed in clean clothes. Nobody stinks or acts afraid. Nobody hocks and spits. Nobody farts….This is paradise.” He leans forward. “And I don’t want it to end, especially—”

  “So seven days into paradise you whack a notorious hood and arrange to have a cop witness it. You keep that MO going, old man, you better not get too accustomed to nice tits and good food.”

  He leans forward again and places his elbows on the table. “You seem to forget the cop I had at the scene happens to be my son.”

  “No, I haven’t forgot that, not yet. I’m only on my third tequila.”

  I gesture to our server for another round.

  Wincing with that Goddamn you look of his, he leans even farther in to me. “There is absolutely no way I could pass on this Macky thing; the money was too good. And, I repeat, we won’t get caught.”

  “You can’t be sure of that.”

  He shakes his head and lowers his voice even more. “Nobody will ever be able to prove Macky and the bodyguards are dead. Some guys are on the way now to pick up the bodies and incinerate them and—”

  Jesus.

  I halt him with a show of my palm. “I could’ve lived happily for a hundred more years without knowing that.”

  “Yeah, you say that now, but you’ll be happy you heard it when you wake up in the middle of the night, sweatin’ your ass off with worry. If you want the money I offered, shut up and listen to what I have to say. It’s for your own good, and mine.”

  I redirect the stone-cold stare at him, griiiit my teeth.

  He doesn’t flinch. “News of Macky’s ‘disappearance’ will leak out fast, but his crowd ain’t the kind to file a missing-person report. Cops will catch wind of it sooner or later, but do you guys ever get bent out of shape when a bad guy disappears? I mean, why complain when somebody disposes of your trash for you, right? Cops won’t pursue any lead that somebody doesn’t shove in their faces, and nobody will do that.”

  Not that I’d ever admit it to him, but he’s right. There are a slew of cold cases frozen solid in the Missing and Unidentified Persons Unit that involve dead hoods and their associates. Some LAPD detectives call them “society cleanses,” others call them “brass verdicts,” and they have all been written off as victims of professional hits.

  This, this I know. My mother and her lover are two of them.

  I check my watch. “So the condition attached to the money you haven’t given me yet is that I not worry?”

  “Worry all you want, just do not panic. Do not get antsy and say something to somebody you will regret.” He removes a cheap cellphone from his breast pocket. “This is disposable, and it has the number of my disposable programmed into it. Call me if anything arises I should know about—anything.” He jabs a finger at me. “We clear on all that?”

  I stare at his finger like it’s the turgid dick of a mangy dog. Delivered in that fashion, there’s no way I’ll answer his question.

  He. Has. No. Right.

  He’s pissed that I don’t answer him, his lips pressed together in a thin line, and he starts working his mouth, as if chewing up the words that would blow this lunch to smithereens.

  Silence hangs over the table like a storm cloud, the atmosphere growing charged with it.

  A new waiter announces his arrival, merrily slides the old man’s steak burrito platter before him, then shrinks away when he notices that our eyes are exchanging lightning bolts. Our primary waiter makes his follow-up appearance to dole out more beer and four fresh tequila shots, and I give him a curt “Nope” when he again asks whether I want anything to eat.

  I hammer down a shot. It neither cures my headache nor moistens my dry mouth, and causes even more sweat to cascade down my brow.

  He finally draws a heavy sigh. “I admit I misjudged you. I really did not think you would take this as hard as you have. You beat hell out of so many kids when you were young I lost count, and the only reason two of them lived was because your buddies pulled you off. And the other shit you got into, Christ.” A shake of his head. “And Macky, who would have thought you gave a damn about him, of all people?”

  “This isn’t about Macky. It’s about you. It’s about me. It’s about you putting me in this position. I’m a cop. Jesus.” I snatch another shot but halt it halfway to my mouth, stare at it, burp, and decide against it—for now.

  “This is another thing. I never pictured you as a cop, at least not a cop without an ulterior motive.”

  My primary ulterior motive in becoming a cop was to spite him, which I’m sure he’s figured out by now. He just doesn’t know the rest of it, and wouldn’t understand if I explained.

  “Hell,” he says, and smiles. “When you were a kid, I always thought odds were good we would be cellmates someday.”

  Fuck you, is what I think.

  I don’t say it out loud because his statement’s so true.

  I was a childhood terror who drove my parents crazy, particularly my mother, since she was the one stuck with raising me until I was sixteen, when I decided to live with my Aunt Connie (which is another story altogether). My mother hated me, this I know.

  Once, when I was about twelve, a gaggle of her friends were coming over to get loose, and for fun I planted a cassette recorder under the living room sofa before I hit the streets. Played it back later that night, and in the midst of their drunk and stoned gossip about who was fucking who and what assholes men were, a slurry-voiced woman asked my mother, “Hey, Lorraine, what’s the latest on Rosemary’s Baby?” As if that’s how her friends referred to me all the time, my mother replied, “I told the little fucker he had to go to bed without dinner for a week after he got caught dropping soda bottles on cars off that highway overpass—then what’s he do? He comes home with a canned ham he boosted from Albertsons. I tell you, that devil’s spawn is beyond salvation.”

  The old man says now, “I was shocked when I heard you had applied to be a cop.” He shakes his head in wonder. “Did you know a background investigator actually interviewed me? She said you put my name on the application.”

  I shrug, saying nothing. The fact of the matter is I was going to write on the academy application he was dead, but a cop I knew said I’d never get away with it.

  He tilts his head, thinking back. “This woman visits me at the Q, reading questions from a checklist. The one that made a big impression on me was ‘Please comment upon your son’s suitability for the position of peace officer.’ Christ, I almost gagged. I told her I didn’t know you anymore, that we had disowned each other. The truth, as far as it went. The whole truth and nothing but would have hosed you.” A shrug. “I figured, what the hell. If the kid wants to be a cop, it is his life; let him ruin it.”

  “I bet you also figured, old man, that there’d be a day when you could corrupt me to your advantage.”

  “No, you are wrong. That thought never crossed my mind until I heard you were working for Sacci’s crew. Then I figured you would not give a shit what went down with Macky so long as you got cut in
on the action.”

  Slowly shaking my head, I look away to think before addressing him again. “Now it’s you who’s wrong. I do give a shit. I was a mean kid, I’ll give you that, and hadn’t improved much before I joined the force. But I don’t see that as being my fault. The uniform, the badge…” I have to look away again for a couple seconds to think of the right way to phrase my thoughts. “I don’t expect you to understand this, but being a cop made me feel good about myself, like I was one of the good guys. It filled a hole you and—” I almost bring my mother into this but I can’t—I won’t—and pause yet again to weigh my words. “Face it, the way I was raised made dysfunction seem normal, made wrong seem right. I got to the point where I wanted to be normal, to do right.

  “And I’ve been a good cop—a great one when I was in uniform. Considering the brass knows you’re my father, I’d raise too many eyebrows if I didn’t kick ass and take names, especially the first five years or so out of the academy. And the stuff I do for Sacci hasn’t changed any of this.” The thought of working for Sacci throws me off a beat, concerns me, before I stuff it in the back of my mind and continue. “Joe’s crew is something I got pulled into because I needed money, bad. There’s a big difference between collecting shylock payments to make ends meet and sanctioning murder.”

  His face, his eyes, reveal nothing before he says, “I always heard compulsive gamblers get all gushy and reflective when they are free of their debts.”

  “Fuck you,” I say, out loud this time.

  “I am not judging,” he says, “but I would feel guilty if I failed to bring up what I perceive to be a problem you are having.”

  “You? Pointing out my problems?”

  He holds up a palm. “Forget me for the moment. All I am saying is you should address your gambling problem before it dooms you.”

  “Gambling problem. Jesus.” I rub the back of my neck. “Old man, one drunk night at Macky’s roulette wheel with a wild woman I’d just met doesn’t add up to a gambling problem. If you can’t see the biggest problem I have at the moment, look in the mirror.”

  This doesn’t sit well with him.

  The truth hurts.