by Hal Ackerman
“Ah, the famous Angie Stein,” said Richard. He had a resonant voice, a winter tan, and a cordial handshake.
Matt placed his arm around Angie’s shoulders to include her in the group. “Uncle Richard just came in from Hawaii. Have you ever been to the north side at Waimeia? The surf is amazing.”
“My dad took us sewer surfing in New York sometimes.”
Richard was the only one who immediately got her sense of humor. He bent into the pose you’d take in the enclosed space. “Of course you’d have to slalom around the rats and the garbage.”
She scrutinized for telltale whispers of body language between Richard and Lila. Matt’s demeanor had elevated at Angie’s arrival. “You guys don’t really need me, right? There’s something downtown I really want Angie to see. Would that be okay?”
“Do I not remember correctly that you and I had plans, Matthew?” The severity of his uncle’s response surprised Angie. She could see it surprised Matthew too.
“I’m not into all that business stuff.”
“It’s the business stuff that keeps you well provided,” Richard reminded him.
“I know.”
“Learn to be respectful, Matt.”
“He likes to be called Matthew now,” Lila couldn’t help informing him.
“Matthew,” Richard corrected, without taking his eyes from the boy. They did not bore into him, though it was easy to imagine that they could have if turned up a notch. They didn’t have to. Matthew knew what his duty was and rose to it.
“Sorry,” he said, and with a nod to Angie indicated this took precedence over their plans.
“Okay,” Richard said, and gave his nephew an affectionate headlock.
It touched Angie to witness a sincere apology made and accepted. No one abashed. No one victorious. Matt asked if Angie could join them.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” said Richard with a serious straight face and just a tiny wink to Angie. “I’ll see you in three months. Give my regards to your mother. Now you two go have a good time. But first—” His voice was like a burlesque hook that whirled Matthew around. “Clean up that patio. I don’t want to see cans of turpentine, and tools and whatnot strewn around. This is somebody’s home, not a museum.”
Matthew obediently set to the task. Angie lingered a moment and asked Lila if there was any word from her dad, trying to make the question encompass an apology. Lila jumped at the chance to accept. “You know how hopeless your dad is with technology. You have your cell with you. As soon as I hear from him I’ll call you. And you do the same.”
Angie was uncharacteristically quiet as she and Matthew gathered up the bones from the patio. The skull was placed in a box and all stowed in the trunk of Matthew’s car. He opened the passenger door for her. She allowed it.
“What’s the deal with Lila and your uncle Richard?”
“He’s a trustee for my father’s estate. He handles her finances.”
“Mmm hmmm.”
“What does mmm hmmm mean?”
“Gay men don’t see hetero sparks.”
“If you can be nice for five seconds I have something I think you’ll really want to see.” When he got in she was sitting with her hands in her lap and finishing the five count.
“I meant five seconds in my presence.”
“You really are testing my limits.”
He reached around behind to the backseat, where from amid some diving paraphernalia and an old school surfboard, he pulled up a manila file folder. He handed her a faded, vintage newspaper clipping containing a black and white photo of a pretty young girl in a sequined one-piece bathing suit, twirling twin batons.
She handed it back to him with attitude. “What? You want me to dress like that?”
“Read the caption.” He pushed the clipping back at her.
“Local Lass Lucy Lester Twirls Twin Batons. Nice alliteration.”
“Has anybody ever mentioned that it’s hard to be nice to you?”
Angie was struck by how sincerely he meant that. He handed her a second clipping from the folder. In this photo, the same girl was twirling fiery batons standing on the back of an elephant.
Gone was all her disinterest. “Matt! She’s riding a circus elephant. Did you see that?”
“Gee, no, I probably gave you that picture just by chance.”
She squooshed his cheeks. “Sarcasm doesn’t work on your pretty surfer face.”
“You might be interested in reading this wedding announcement.” He handed her the final document from the folder and watched her mouth drop as she read the notice for the nuptials of Lucy Lester, circus performer, dancer, avant-gardist, to Jesse James Bancroft, oil speculator, financial speculator, real estate speculator.
“Did you notice the date of the wedding?”
“Oh, my God. Matthew! A week after the land deal. How did you get this?”
“And one more.” This is the one that staggered her. A tall, dashing Spaniard with the aura of a poetic matador held a beautiful young circus performer aloft in his arms. The caption read: ELEPHANT GIRL AND BARCELONIAN MATADOR TO WED. Angie was in a state of religious ecstasy. “I knew that they were lovers! How did you get this!”
“Friends of my dad are big wheels at the paper.”
“You didn’t tell me.”
“You never ask me anything.”
“Of course I do.”
“No … you have this way of being that anything you don’t know is probably not worth knowing.”
“You expect me to ask if any of your dad’s old friends are big wheels at the LA Times who can get pictures of Lucy Lester’s wedding?”
“Okay, that was a little specific. But how about, ‘Hey Matt, I could use your help’?”
“Okay,” she said quietly.
He started the car.
“May I ask where I’m being abducted to?”
He swatted her gently in the nose with a folded copy of the LA Times. The article he had circled in Magic Marker was about a ceremony today for the groundbreaking of the new Bancroft Performance Arts Center, hosted by Lucy Bancroft. Angie was not as impressed. “So their granddaughter is dedicating an arts center,” she said. “How does that help us solve a murder?”
“Okay, that tone of voice you just used? That’s the one I’m talking about.”
***
From their vantage point amid the lunchtime crowd at Pershing Square, Angie and Matthew shielded their eyes to get a good view across the plaza to the elevated podium. Yet another politician from an endless array of self-congratulatory speakers praised the bounteous philanthropy of the Bancroft Foundation for its latest contribution to the cultural life of the city. The Bancroft Performance Arts Center was lauded as a multimillion-dollar performance complex replete with two concert halls, museums of art and photography, dance rehearsal studios, and subsidized housing for six hundred young artists.
Angie had passed her point of tolerance six speeches ago. She had figured out the whole sordid mess on the way down: J. J. Bancroft bought a piece of land from Sunny Cataluna, drilled for oil, didn’t find any; so he forged a new land deed that took all Sunny’s property and killed the man to cover up his thievery. Now she chafed at the hypocrisy that thieves were being celebrated as benefactors because they gave back a few crumbs from the whole loaf they had stolen.
Matt had to laugh at her. “You know who you sound exactly like?”
“Don’t even say it.”
“But you do. Exactly.”
She pointed a menacing finger at him. “Not even in jest!”
He said her father’s name anyway.
This mayor’s voice was as bland and uninflected as his face. He fawned over the Bancroft Foundation’s previous municipal benefactions: The Bancroft Public Library, The Lucy Bancroft Children’s Hospital, The Eye and Ear Center. To make the final introduction to Lucy Bancroft, he called to the podium the Abused Children and Orphans Chorale to do their a cappella rendition of “You Are the Wind Beneath My Wings
.” Given its potentially nauseating sentimentality, the piece was done with some hustle and grit, and got a big ovation. Buoyed by the response, His Honor attempted to ad lib, and described the orphans and battered children as Lucy’s favorite charity.
Before he could get the next five words out, Lucy Bancroft herself strode out onto the podium. Until that moment, Angie and Matt were probably the only two people in the crowd who had presumed that the advertised and lauded Lucy Bancroft was the granddaughter of J. J, rather than who she was, the baton-twirling, elephant riding Lucy Lester herself, now aged ninety-three, not the daughter or probably granddaughter of J. J. Bancroft, but his wife of seventy-five years. She was a jolt of heat lightning, all four feet eleven of her, wearing a black dress and two-inch heels, somewhat stiffened by age and weather, but the fire was still there. She came up to the mayor’s sternum. “Not a charity,” she scolded. “Charity is one-sided. I get more from them than they do from me.”
“Favorite cause, then,” he quickly backtracked.
“These children aren’t a cause, they’re children. My husband and I could not have our own. So we have taken on all the children.”
By now the mayor just wanted to get off stage with one of his testicles still attached. “So, these children, then, are your favorite …” He waited desperately for her to supply the right word.
“Human beings.”
“Let’s hear it for Lucy Bancroft’s favorite human beings!”
“Oh, hush,” she said, making only the barest attempt to play if off as a jest. She held on to the railing, but not for support. To Angie’s eyes, she was supplying support. Tightening welds. Compacting mass. Electricity crackled through her extended arms. Her white hair flowed out behind her. It hadn’t yielded up all of its young girl’s wildness. She was Eva Peron played by Helen Hayes. There was no one in the crowd whose life she had not touched, and in touching, improved.
Her voice carried undiminished to the back of the throng. “My dear departed friend Diane Arbus loved to photograph freaks because she said they had already suffered their life’s trauma and had nothing to hide. My children stand with their scars bared. The world has said to them, ‘Look how I can hurt you.’ They have stuck out their chins and said, ‘See how we have survived.’”
Lucy smiled down at the people in the crowd as if they were all close friends. “Valentine’s Day is the Commodore’s and my seventy-fifth wedding anniversary.”
“Jesus,” Angie marveled. “Doesn’t anyone die in this town?” She realized an instant later to whom she had said this, and threw her hands up at what an idiot she was.
Lucy indicated the Rolls-Royce touring car that was idling alongside the podium. “A friend of ours is making a little party for us tomorrow night and we’re going to be up dancing all night. The Commodore is resting up. After all, he’s three months older than I am.”
Someone yelled out of the crowd, “Save a slow dance for me, Lucy!”
She bantered back, “Your heart couldn’t stand it.”
After the roar of laughter, she left them with heartfelt sentiments. “My husband and I have seen a century of change in Los Angeles, from a sleepy little pueblo to the center of the universe. All art, all culture, all social phenomena start here, flow east and cover the nation. Los Angeles has become the repository of the soul of America. A generation from today, this place where we are now standing will be a mere suburb to the Los Angeles of the future. As someone from my era used to say, ‘You ain’t seen nuthin’ yet.’”
Angie yanked on Matt’s arm. “We’ve got to get down to her and ask if she knew Sunny Cataluna.” She eeled her way through the crowd toward the podium. Matt did his best to follow her, apologizing to people he bumped, while Angie seemed oblivious to any obstacles, flowing around them like water. Rock star applause erupted as Lucy descended the platform, eschewing the mayor’s offer of a supporting arm. Angie’s timing could not have been more perfect, her horizontal axis intersecting precisely with Lucy’s vertical. They met at the bottom of the platform.
“Hello, child. What can I do for you?”
Angie was tongue-tied at suddenly being inches from her newfound idol.
Lucy’s staff were gently herding her to the car. She was drawn to the intense look of longing in Angie’s eyes. “Was there something else?”
Matthew came up right behind Angie. “Ask her!” he prodded.
“How do people find the love of their life and stay married forever?”
“Not that!”
In the last moment before Lucy was ensconced beside her husband, Matthew pushed himself up to the car window and asked in a clear, strong voice, “Mrs. Bancroft, does the name Ascunsion Cataluna mean anything to you?”
A new voice entered the scene. It sounded like oil scalding raw flesh and came from the thin-lipped, praying-mantis-bodied man who leaned forward in the backseat. He was in naval officer’s uniform from the Teddy Roosevelt era, white with epaulets and decorations, topped with an admiral’s hat.
“Find out who that boy is,” the Commodore ordered an unseen obedient. He rapped the ornate handle of his cane against the window. “Lucy,” he beckoned.
Angie barely noticed him. Her eyes had sprouted rhizomes into the bared soul of Lucy Bancroft, whose lips formed the shape of the word she had not spoken in seventy-five years.
“Sunny.”
***
In the immediate wake of the Commodore’s directive to “find out who that boy is,” a quick crackling consultation over walkie-talkies among the Commodore’s security people revealed no threatening act had been witnessed by any of them that would warrant hot pursuit. Recent unfortunate events were no doubt a factor, where charges of excessive force had arisen out of their overzealous efforts at crowd control. Ms. Lucy’s propensity for changing the lives of random street urchins was well known to them, and the consensus was that this was another of those instances. Accordingly, the order was assigned a Priority Level 2 (Pay some attention to it, but don’t go out of your way). Not quite as trivial as a Level 1 (Don’t interrupt your gin game) but miles away from a serious Level 5 (Succeed at all costs).
The young man had bolted from the scene, not to avoid pursuit, but because he himself was in pursuit of the fleeing young girl who had until moments before been under the thrall of Lucy Bancroft. The agents took a few desultory shots with long lenses of the boy fading more deeply into the crowd until he became indistinguishable, and then lost sight and interest in him.
Had the search been in earnest, the couple would have been found in Matt’s Mercedes at the exit of the underground parking lot, where Angie was in a state of creative ecstasy, her mind churning oily smoke like an outboard motor.
“Did you see her face? She was in love with him! I was completely wrong about everything. Bancroft didn’t kill Sunny for land, he killed him for Lucy. I bet he was a poet. He read Garcia Lorca to her and played ‘La Malagueña’ on the guitar.”
“Which way do you want me to turn?” Matt interjected. “Cars behind us are getting horny.”
“Horny?”
“Honky.”
“The Commodore? What kind of uniform was that? Spanish American War? He saw her in the circus, saw her twirling her baton under the lights, flames twirling all around her, colored lights flashing off her costume. He had to have her. He challenged Sunny to a duel.”
“Please. Right or left?”
“Sunny was a lover, not a fighter. Their duel was a metaphor of the twentieth century. Effete, chivalrous old Europe, against Gold Rush America, anything goes, win at all costs. Bancroft fought dirty and killed him. I know that’s how it happened!”
“Okay, I’m turning left.” He did, taking them west, away from downtown.
Her chin dropped to her chest, her eyes closed, her teeth clenched. She drummed the dashboard, then the inside of her thighs. She dug her thumbs into her cheekbones, encircled her forehead with her bridged fingers, until the idea came.
“Okay, here’s what we do.”
She twisted her body around and reached over the seatback to retrieve the skull that was ensconced in a shoebox on the back seat where it had been placed that morning in obedient submission to Richard’s directive. Angie had been a little irked about his assumed territoriality at the time, but now she was pleased to have the object with them.
“You know those people who make dioramas at the Natural History Museum? They make the faces of those prehistoric people seem so completely real. We bring them our skull. We have them put a face to it. The face of Sunny Cataluna. We bring it to the Bancrofts’ anniversary party. We shove the thing into the Commodore’s face. If he flinches we know he killed him.”
“If he flinches? You shove a decapitated head in front of him, he’ll have a heart attack.”
“Which will absolutely prove that we’re right. That he stole that land and that became the basis for his entire financial empire. We can bring down the whole corrupt system. Punish the wicked. Redistribute the wealth. Why are you smiling at me like I’m an idiot child? I’m asking for your help. Are any of your father’s old friends forensic paleontologists?”
“No,” Matt said.
“Do you know of any such people?”
“No,” Matt said.
“Do you know where their anniversary party is?”
“No.”
She slumped back into a concave parenthesis of defeat that she maintained for the next several right and left turns.
Matt drove decisively, impervious to her mood, a response to which she was unaccustomed. She glanced out her window and saw a neighborhood that was unknown to her—old, quasi-industrial/residential.
“Where are we?”
“You said you wanted to see a forensic paleontologist.”
“You said you didn’t know any.”
“I said I didn’t know any yet.”
***
The interior of the Natural History Museum was old and musty and exciting. The dioramas had always been Angie’s favorite. She would become absorbed into the depictions of domestic life, imagining herself living in that world, thinking how she would cope, how people would see her, the simple things she could show them (with her knowledge of the future) would make them smack their heads and call her a goddess.