by John Shannon
The stocky woman follows her two q-tip dogs on leashes laboriously upward, her tennis shoes slipping on the soil. The dogs are more sure-footed. Better this bustling woman than one of my own Skinnies. For sure.
‘Hooo-wee,’ she exclaims with a gasp.
‘Is this your place?’ I ask.
‘Heavens, no. Somebody left these chairs here long ago. This hill is known as “the chairs”. Do you mind if I take the other one?’
I grew up in a polite era. Moms always said, What goes around comes around, Tyrone, it’s lock and stock, nine times true. Be kind.
Moms. She’d actually repeated sayings from Richard Brautigan, too. She was just about the last hippie, bless her soul.
It’s a funny feeling, not being recognized, and it lets me relax a little as I haven’t done in years – but at the same time it annoys me. I’ve come up here to try to get my bearings from the one photo of Moms I can just about put a place to. After the early winter rains, the canyons and slopes facing us are mostly fuzzy green. We’re on the Malibu side of Topanga Canyon, remarkably sparsely populated for being so near the city, maybe five miles west of my own house in Brentwood where Paulita, my long-suffering third wife, will be waiting for me, annoyed. I don’t always tell her my doings. And I have a feeling this is the start of something special today – off on my quest. Why? Who knows?
‘You live nearby?’ I ask the woman. Damn. One Skinny rears up to peer at me out of a crack in a granite outcrop. Shoo-fly, sucker!
‘You can’t see my place.’ She waves vaguely to the left.
The woman takes a really good look at me at last. Ah, shit. Here it comes.
‘Do I know you?’
‘Everybody says I look a lot like the actor Tyrone Bird, but I really don’t.’
‘I don’t know him. Is he on TV?’
‘I think he used to be.’ I do my best to put on my light-skinned everyman face. Slack, uninterested, weary.
My head is starting to weigh a ton, which isn’t a good sign at all. I’ll be seeing a lot of Skinnies soon. I notice a hawk and mockingbird circling and shrieking, straight out over the canyon. The mockingbird is harassing the much bigger hawk, driving it like a biplane in some World War One pic. I suppose confidence and aggression always win out. It’s the hardass way most of the pissant film directors work.
‘Do you know which of those houses down there used to be the Sandstone Retreat?’
That makes her take a closer look at me.
‘You got some interest in it?’
‘Just curious, I heard of it.’ In fact, I saw it once, but from this angle I can’t tell.
‘Sandstone was a wicked place,’ the woman says finally. She tugs the dogs closer to her, as if I might infect them.
‘Sure.’
‘I mean, people got hurt. Oh, them sixties.’
Just point it out, please, I think. I don’t want any rants.
‘What made you ask about Sandstone?’
Be nothing but innocence now, I think. Can I ever relate to ordinary people in some direct way, some honest non-actory way? Read me now, woman. Trust me, trust me.
‘No reason,’ I say innocently.
She wiggles a disapproving finger toward a big ranch house on the near side of the canyon, far below us. There’s nothing special I can see from this far away, but it has a lot of open land around it. It does look like the picture I have.
‘It was a rental before the sex-kooks took it over.’
I can hardly hold my head erect. I should probably go back on the meds for now. I can’t act for a film on the meds, but I think I’m going to be AWOL from the set until I learn something. This new urge has really taken me over.
‘What a time,’ the woman says. ‘It was either jump in a jacuzzi with naked people or jump in a church.’
The official beginning of Jack Liffey’s job had been marked by a fairly rude phone call from a gruff voice that had identified itself simply as Reston, as if he should know the name. ‘Are you free right now, Liffey?’
It was a pretty tricky metaphysical question, but he decided not to take it that way.
‘Sure.’
‘They say you’re damn good at what you do, which is what we need. I like guys who’re good at what they do. So many of them aren’t.’
OK, Jack Liffey thought, I’m supposed to sit still for this shit. That kind of arrogance usually meant good money.
‘Reston, look. I need to know a bit. I don’t do rough stuff, I don’t hurt people, all I do is find missing kids.’
‘That’s the deal. Let’s meet for lunch; I know a great place we can discuss this.’ He gave an address, and the rest of his name and title: Meier Reston; Associate Producer for Monogram. Jack Liffey bet he knew the intimate place Reston was taking him to – the sort of ‘secret’ place everybody in town always knew.
The usual handover spot for the drugs was about as public as you could get in L.A., at the northern edge of the immense Costco parking lot and directly across busy Century Boulevard from Hollywood Park Racetrack. Despite its evocative name, Hollywood Park and its Cary Grant Clubhouse were actually in the largely black city of Inglewood, at least forty minutes south of Hollywood, though only three quick minutes from LAX, which was probably what the Colombians had in mind, since LAX still landed private jets as well as commercial ones.
Harper parked the Caddy Escalade two slots away from the spot the beaners had marked out themselves two years ago.
Marcus Stone sighed. ‘You got some kind of Louisiana hoodoo says coming here for a look so early will help?’ Stone was his senior by almost forty years and sometimes the old man would put on these airs that dissed you a little. He’d supposedly taught some shit at a crappy little junior college once, but as far as Harper was concerned he was just another old school banger who needed foot-soldiers, though he rather liked the old man.
Harper eyed the weird marking fifty feet away. The Colombians had painted on the asphalt a heart with shepherd’s staffs on both sides. The windows of the Escalade were down and the parking lot smelled like it had been scrubbed down with piss.
‘I’ma tell you got a bad feeling about this, too,’ Harper said.
‘It’s always wartime with big money in the picture. But I want to keep my spirits up.’
‘I can get the Rollin’ Seventies here, Stoney, all strapped out as you want. Even AKs and shit.’
The Rollin’ Seventies Hoover Crips were Harper’s old street gang, the owners of the ’hood where they’d both grown up south of Slauson, and only a few miles east.
‘Too many street bangers get trigger-crazy,’ Stoney said. ‘Can you get four or five of the best?’
‘Done. Where you want them to deploy?’
Stoney made a face as Harper used the military word, but the old guy could stuff it, Harper thought. He’d done his two tours in the damn Eye-raq, and he knew war and death and all that kind of shit up front and for real.
‘Not too close. These vatos would notice. They’re not stupid, Harp. Let your homies know that a lot of these vatos look like brothers. Colombia’s a funny place down there, with lots of blacks. So we don’t have any misunderstandings.’
‘Yeah, I’ll be picking these fuckers up at the plane, like before. Their chief is a crazy peckerwood, looks Mex on a good day, and the rest of them are Spanish niggers.’
‘We’ll work it out. You “deploy” your homies. Why is it you think you-’n’-me both got bad feelings this time? They been cool so far.’
‘The big guy is spooky, Stoney. He’s always talking angry gods and shit. You can’t never trust gods.’
Sure enough, Reston brought Jack Liffey through the crowded front room of Joe Jost’s tavern in Long Beach, crunching on peanut shells, into the quieter pool room in back. They decided on a far corner, a bit smelly, too near the free-range men’s urinal. Reston ordered two beers and two specials – Polish sausage and sauerkraut wrapped in rye bread. Jack Liffey acted impressed. It cost him nothing to pretend he had
n’t been here twenty times before. As usual, he didn’t touch the beer.
Reston seemed to be struck reticent, staring at his sandwich that was slowly unwrapping itself like a time-lapse flower opening up.
‘So, what is an associate producer anyway?’ Jack Liffey asked.
The man tore himself away from some inner concern that was needling him. ‘The old joke is it’s the only guy who’ll associate with the producer.’ He didn’t even pretend to laugh. ‘There’ll actually be four of us up on the credits, but I’m the guy who does the big worrying. I bring in the paper bags of dirty money from unmentionable sources and I bury the bodies.’
‘You got a dead body?’
‘No no no. Manner of speaking, Jackie. I got a young superstar who’s absconded that I need found. Everybody’s sitting around on rotting money while he’s gone.’
‘I prefer Jack.’
‘Sure, sure. You heard of Tyrone Bird?’
He had, of course – an ingratiating African-American actor who’d started fast in stand-up comedy, then some popular sitcom on TV, hip-hop music, and he’d finally made it sideways into really big budget movies. ‘I think so, but help me out. I don’t get exposed to a lot of pop culture.’
Reston looked at him like he was a Martian. ‘OK, Jack, what you need to know is that the real irony of this whole perishing decade is that the only two actors capable of opening a movie, as the Trades say, and then selling it in Iowa and Tajikistan are both spooks – Will Smith and Tyrone Bird. No more Nicholson and Pitt, forget it. And we’re two generations past Jimmy Stewart and Hank Fonda. Bird may be fucked up deep inside, the way the tabloids are always hinting, but up there on screen he smiles and makes your fucking aunt and uncle in Nebraska feel like good non-racist Americans. They see Ty, and they can pretend they voted for Obama.’
Jack Liffey thought for just a millisecond about his dad voting for Obama. Inconceivable. Declan was probably still writing in Strom Thurmond’s name. ‘Can I ask what movie you’re making?’
‘Our director Joe Lucius has a bug up his ass. You probably never heard of it, but there’s this damn book by a guy named Chester Himes called If He Hollers Let Him Go. Of course we can never call it that. Studio wants it to be Getting Over.’
Jack Liffey let out a slow breath. It was like being told they were making Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. No sane Hollywood studio would try it. He couldn’t help saying it. ‘Yeah, I know the book. What were you people thinking? It’s the angriest book about the black American experience that’s ever been written.’
Reston nodded ruefully. ‘It was Ty’s idea first, and Joe insisted. You know Joe may have made Vampires from Mars once but he’s top of the A-list now. And his dad worked assistant on Salt of the Earth, and didn’t give a shit about the blacklist – they got money from some drugstore chain. Monogram’s got Joe Lucius under contract for two more action movies, and he insisted this little sidetrack is Academy Award material. A little prestige along the way never hurts.’
‘Have you actually read the book, or only the plot summary?’
Reston’s eyes narrowed. ‘You want this job or not, Jackie? What we desire is Tyrone Bird back on the set and one hundred per cent cooperative. We’re losing – well, lots of gelt every day. We don’t want anybody in the press sniffing after Ty’s blood. That’s the whole truth, so help me God.’
A little of this bonanza of studio money would sure help out with his finances, Jack Liffey thought. ‘You know I mainly find missing children. He’s not a kid any more, but I’ll do my best. You have to tell me what you know about him taking off on you, all of it.’
TWO
The Cord is Cut
They’d put him with the director Joe Lucius so he could get the whole story about Tyrone Bird, whatever that meant. It was one of those ridiculously opulent location trailers reserved for the big boys, and Lucius clearly didn’t want him there. He was concentrating on a woman who was exercising on a ski-machine in black underwear and nothing else. Some notoriously expensive single-malt Scotch called Glen Garioch was on offer all around, but Jack Liffey demurred for his own reasons.
‘They say you’re good friends with Bird,’ Jack Liffey said.
The leprechaun-like man scowled. ‘Nobody’s good friends in Hollywood, boss. My family knew his mom.’ The man caught a glimpse of his own face in one of the mirrors scattered all over the trailer. ‘Unaccommodated man,’ he commented with a scowl.
‘Why are you so eager to make If He Hollers?’ Jack Liffey asked, trying to turn the focus around. ‘It sounds like your dad.’
That got his attention. A lot of emotions passed over his face then. ‘I don’t know why I’d tell personal shit to some over-the-hill shamus.’
‘Nobody says shamus, man. It makes you an old joke.’
‘Must be a bit drunk. They sent you here because I’m the only one on the set with the guts to tell you Ty is a fucking schizophrenic. He has amazing eyes, and I can usually tell when the bastard is using his schizo eyes. The camera goes crazy for them. What was your name?’
‘Jack.’
‘Jack, OK. And you’re Jack who doesn’t drink. Good on you. Ty is high functioning when he stays on his meds, and that’s good enough for me. Happy now?’
‘Not especially. But it helps excuse the rudeness. I actually like your work, and your dad’s.’
The director thought about that for a moment, taking a deliberate breath. Then his eye went back to the woman, skiing and skiing, her buttocks reciprocating in semi-transparent black panties. ‘It’s really not rudeness, on some level.’ He held up his shotglass. ‘On such a day …’ He downed it all at once.
‘I take it that’s one of your meds.’
He smiled. ‘Dad was a red, I’m a drunk. Maybe it’s the same thing in the film world, functionally. Send them all back to Russia. Or rehab.
‘Don’t give yourself too much credit,’ Jack Liffey said, trying and failing to suppress his annoyance. ‘Your father never worked again after Salt of the Earth.’
‘Not quite true, Jack. He did TV under another name, mostly that tiresome Robin Hood.1’
‘Please tell me what you can about Ty,’ Jack Liffey said.
‘His mom cleaned our kitchen. Later, Ty and I were friends when he was a stand-up comic stealing Haldol so he could get over. You know, it’s almost random when the damn disease hits you. He was maybe twenty-two. Before that, he was antsy, like most comics, but the one thing that seemed to calm him down was photographs. He kept a pocketful of photos of his mom that he’d spread out on a table and stare at like a poker addict looking at his hole cards. She was a real hippie – a caw-casion, you know? Beautiful chick. One photo was even nude and she had huge tits, taken at some commune. Ty would study the pics and become quite peaceful like somebody’d just hit him with a big Thorazine dart.
‘He has a face to die for, you know that. Men, women – you just can’t take your eyes off him. The cheekbones, the skin like milk chocolate. When he’s on screen, it’s like a cobra next to a baby. He just kills anybody he works with, like Steve McQueen fussing with his hat or tugging at his ear.’
The woman stopped skiing and dried herself with a towel.
‘Do you know why Ty left the set?’
‘I’m just a movie director, so I deal with the outward aspect of things, Mr Detective. I don’t know very much about Ty’s inner resources. I’d guess they’re pretty thin.’ The director waggled his eyebrows in some Groucho-like gesture so odd that it gave Jack Liffey a chill. Intelligent but cold-hearted, he thought. Narcissistic.
‘I’m not his keeper, boss. But I’ll tell you one more thing, and then I want you out of my space because I got other plans. I had Tyrone back to my house the day before we started shooting this film. We had a drink, which he doesn’t usually do, and then he froze me where I sat with those black eyes. I thought a truck had hit me.
‘He said to me, “I’m not really under control, sir. In order to act in this movie, I have to go off
my meds. I’m getting scared about it. Help me get over.”’
He waited a beat or two. ‘I never helped him, boss. OK? What was I supposed to do? Tell me.’
Then the woman came and wrapped her arms around Joe Lucius, cooing, and Jack Liffey left.
Jhon Orteguaza walked to the doorway of the makeshift Santeria shrine, jumped overhead for the broken rope and yanked the roll-up garage door down so it slammed shut. He was almost unmoved by the killing he’d just seen … or was it committed? The only clarity was in absolutes, and not always then. Life was like that.
The bitch hadn’t fled and was waiting stiffly for him in the Range Rover, though she looked frightened, and one side of her face was still red as a beet. How could anyone be that stupid to hang around?
‘What’s your decision?’ he asked as he tore open the door. He really wanted to be alone to figure things out. What had just happened and what did it prefigure about Señor Stone?
‘You’re serious?’ she asked.
‘Don’t push.’
‘You know you can fuck me any way you want, querido. I’m your girlfriend, and I take every drug you want. I’m your slave.’
‘Then what good are you?’ Orteguaza reached inside his jacket for the Glock. Oddly, the metal was warm.
* * *
‘I mean, look at that,’ Maeve said with awe, nodding to the remarkable view. ‘I’ve never been to Italy, of course, but Axel says it looks just like Tuscany.’
The girls had a flat sandstone patio off the back of their house, with a nearly unobstructed view across the canyon to rugged hills, dotted with houses and stands of trees. One diagonal fire road ran as discreetly as it could up through the hillside. The patio came equipped with three plastic chairs and a cheap plastic table, where two teacups were giving up their last wisps of steam.
‘This part of Topanga is called Fernwood,’ Maeve said. She repeated some local lore she’d just heard about the TV show Fernwood Tonight, but Jack Liffey wasn’t really listening. He knew he should leave the girls alone.