by Arlette Lees
“What the…?”
“I’m saving you from yourself, Harry. You’re beginning to look like William Howard Taft.”
“Then maybe I’ll run for president.”
“You can’t even run to the mailbox.”
Kenny snickers.
“You’re a wicked woman,” says Harry, unable to suppress a smile. “A wicked, wicked woman.” She walks behind his chair and playfully musses his hair.
Harry and Kenny push away from the table as Kay washes and dries the last of the dishes. Harry thumps into his broken-down easy chair and picks up The Saturday Evening Post. Kenny goes to the front window and looks into the fading daylight. Kay comes up behind him.
“I wish you wouldn’t worry so much, Kenny. When Georgie saw the rain coming he probably went home to be with his family.”
“Mom, you don’t understand. He was right behind me. When I turned around he was gone. All he talked about was the sleepover. His family’s been eating cold beans from the can, and he knew you were making pork chops.”
“I’m sure he’ll tell you all about it on Monday.”
“That Allen kid could use a few extra pounds,” says Harry.
“You could give him a few of yours, dear.”
“Very funny. Besides, I’m not so sure I want him sleeping on our sheets and don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about.”
“It’s not a crime to be poor, Harry.”
He raises his arms in a helpless gesture. “Don’t come down on me. I didn’t make him that way.”
“You’re talking about my best friend,” says Kenny.
“Which puzzles me no end,” says Harry, shaking his head.
“Can’t we change the subject to something pleasant?” says Kay.
“Sure.” Harry closes his magazine and rubs his growling stomach. “Everybody at work is talking about the Mulholland Dam collapse of ’28. Destroyed the whole town of Castaic. Every living thing. Now, there’s a history lesson I bet they don’t teach you in school.”
“Is that going to happen to us?” says Kenny, turning from the window.
“Of course not,” says Kay. “Even if the levy gives it could never be that bad.”
“Yup, the whole town gone,” says Harry. “Every baby in its crib. Every chicken and mule.”
“Must you go on like that in front of the boy? You’ll give him nightmares.”
“Over six hundred people died in that flood,” he continues, undeterred. “They never even counted the wetbacks camped below the dam, so it’s probably closer to two thousand.”
“Thanks for cheering us up, Harry,” says Kay. “I don’t know what we’d do without you. Get into your pajamas Kenny and we’ll read a while.”
CHAPTER 4
I walk down the sidewalk past the magazine stand at the end of the day, mist blowing between the buildings like spray flung from a wave. The pink and purple neon from the theater ripples in the gutter like finger paint.
“Officer Dunning!” Tom Kelly pays the vendor for his hot dog and walks my way. He’s outgoing and good-natured with an handsome, honest face beneath his chauffeur’s cap.
“Yes, Tom. How you doing?”
“Fine, sir. My dad’s moving on in years, so he’s turned the business over to me. We’ve gone from one cab to three in under a year.”
“That’s great, Tom. Congratulations.”
Tom reaches in his pocket and hands me a matchbook. “Look under the cover,” he says. I flip it open and see a license plate number scribbled in pencil.
“Someone giving you trouble?” I ask.
“No, sir. This is about your daughter.”
“My daugh…”
“Miss Angel,” he says.
My tongue won’t move and Tom keeps talking. “A man in this fancy yellow car tried to…well…he tried to kidnap her. I couldn’t believe it was really happening. I swear, if I hadn’t been driving by, I don’t know what would have happened.”
“Kidnap her? Are you sure?” I say, putting the matchbook in my pocket.
“He came out of the Leprechaun Lounge and grabbed her. When I pulled up he was trying to force her into his car.”
“Is she alright?”
“Roughed up a bit, but she wouldn’t let me call you. I hope I’m doing the right thing by going against her wishes.” The button. Her cold hands. Things were beginning to make sense.
“Thank you, Tom. Are you alright?”
“Sure, I’m fine, sir.”
“What time did this happen?”
“Just after noon. She was coming from the bookstore, minding her own business.”
That would have been before I came home to check on the Barkers.
“What did this guy look like?”
“An evil movie star.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“The handsome guy you think is a hero, then half way through the movie you know he’s the one who did it, who did the murder.”
“Okay, I think I get it. I’ll run the plate by the Chief and see who the car belongs to.” Tom stands there like he has more to say. “Anything else?” I ask.
Tom clears his throat. “Do you think Angel would like to go to the movies with me sometime? It’s right across the street and I’d have her home early?”
I look at my watch.
“Can we talk another time, Tom? I have to run.”
I ride the elevator to the second floor, a tightness in my chest making it hard to breathe.
Your daughter, he’d said. She’s not my daughter, she’s my…. My what? Tom held a mirror to my face that I’m afraid to look into. I can think of a million reasons I want Angel and a million reasons she’d be better off with someone else…someone like Tom Kelly…sober…honest… a young man going places in this world.
Angel sits in the easy chair reading. She smiles when I walk in the door, her hair a golden tangle in the circle of lamplight.
“Have they found Lulu?” she asks, looking up from her book.
“Not yet. The boys are still looking.”
“I hate to think of her out there in this weather,” she says, setting her book on the lamp table.
“Me too. At least she has the raccoon coat.” I glance at the book. “Gone with the Wind. How is it?”
“It’s great, but when I started reading to Albie, he got the giggles and went to play with Bo.”
“Read him James Oliver Curwood. He writes adventure stories.”
“I’m still furious with that teacher at Orchard School, the one who wouldn’t let Albie enroll. I know why and so do you.”
“I’d forget it. Father Doyle has him on the waiting list at St. Finnbar’s. He’s a smart kid. He’ll get a good education.”
Angel laughs. “You told me you hated Catholic School.”
“I did, but I’m the only guy in the department who can conjugate Latin verbs.”
“Sounds terribly romantic.”
Most evenings we sit by the window and look out at the lights. Tonight the curtains are closed. I wait for her to tell me what happened today, but she doesn’t and I don’t press.
“Albie is crazy about Bo,” she says. “You know that Lulu will want him back.”
“I know.” I pour two B and B’s, put one on the lamp table and take the chair across from hers. “You know you can tell me anything, don’t you Angel?”
She looks at me a long moment before she speaks.
“You’ve always been there for me, Jack. I’ve never doubted that.”
* * * *
Night. Rain swirls beyond the window and Cookie’s migraine hits like a hammer. Rain surfs past the window and the neon sign beneath the window swings in the wind. When the pain beco
mes unbearable she goes for her elixir.
“This should do the trick,” Dr. McBane told her when he handed her the bottle of golden liquid. “We’ve tried all the conventional remedies and nothing has helped, but you must understand, if anyone asks, it didn’t come from me.”
One evening she and Joe were having dinner in Chinatown when they saw McBane exit the back door of Li Dock Qwan’s apothecary. He hurried to his car with a small bundle in his hand, head down, hat pulled low.
“It’s no secret anymore,” said Joe.
“I didn’t see a thing,” said Cookie, stubbornly.
“It’s illegal or he wouldn’t have to sneak around like that.”
“Eat your egg roll and mind your own business.”
Now Cookie wishes she’d gone with Joe. She couldn’t blame him for being angry, the way she’s kept him dangling. Maybe, it was time to say ‘yes’ before Ginger Everly moved in on her territory. She saw the way the librarian looked at him when he checked out books, even when Cookie was standing there big as life.
Pushing aside the veils that drape her canopy bed, Cookie slips under the covers and swallows two thimbles of elixir. It’s sweet with the bitter under-taste of burned tangerines. She’s been warned not to exceed the recommended dosage, but there have been times the pain makes it hard to think straight.
She barely has time to tuck into her pillow before she sinks into somnolent darkness, the whisper of blood in her ears like the gentle rush of the sea. Down, down, down into the black abyss. As her mortal eyes close, her inner eye opens like the lens of a camera and a dreamscape comes into focus:
Cookie finds herself standing across the highway from Orchard School, the one-room schoolhouse. For the moment, her headache is relegated to another dimension of time and space. The teacher watches the children scatter after class lets out. It’s not her old friend, Nellie Brown, but a new scrubbed-faced young teacher with a cameo broach at her throat. She waltzes in circles, holding a black lunch box like a dancing partner. Her maidenly bun loosens and her hair flies free. Wind balloons her long dark skirt revealing a red, silk petticoat. A car with a broken tailpipe sparks along the pavement sending the children laughing and shrieking into the orchard next to the playground. The teacher…
There’s a deafening crash and Cookie’s eyes pop open as the clock strikes three. She stares into the darkness of her bedroom, her headache returning with a roar. Something dreadful has happened on the street outside and being ripped from sleep so suddenly has set her heart thumping erratically. She places a nitroglycerine pill under her tongue, spilling a few tablets on the bedspread.
A pickup truck and a black Hudson have collided at the intersection. It’s a chaotic scene of blowing rain, twisted metal and shattered glass. A man stumbles from the Hudson and collapses at the curb. The other driver is slumped over the steering wheel. Cookie makes her way to the living room phone and calls for an ambulance.
The pain in her head is blinding. She stumbles back to the bedroom and empties her bottle of elixir. There wasn’t much left anyway, was there? Only one step to the bed and she doesn’t make it. Her knees buckle and she strikes her head on the nightstand on the way to the floor.
CHAPTER 5
The sound of a chainsaw dominates Joe’s dream. He stands in a redwood forest with trees toppling around him. A big one with a trunk the size of a caboose comes right at him. He yelps and wakes with a jolt, rain tapping the windowpane, a car revving its engine in the road outside the house.
The luminous dial on the clock reads 2:00 A.M. He pulls the blankets over his head. Rev, rev, rev. Grind, grind, grind. No doubt some idiot heading home from the bar has bottomed out in the ditch. Pumpkin climbs on his pillow and begins grooming. Scratch, chew, rev, grind. For heaven’s sake, can’t a decent person get any rest around here?
Grumbling under his breath he shoves his bare feet into rubber boots and slips a raincoat over his pajamas. As he picks up his flashlight and heads for the stairs, Pumpkin curls into a fluffy knot on his pillow. He grabs his fishing hat on the way out the door and squishes through the wet grass. He walks across the narrow, unpaved lane and jerks the car door open.
“For god’s sake, turn the engine off before you strip the gears.” Between his frustration with Cookie and having his sleep disrupted, he’s in an uncharacteristically ornery mood. An unseen hand switches off the engine. “Now, turn off the lights or you’ll drain the battery.” The lights go off. “What’s wrong with you? Are you an imbecile?”
“No Senor.” A shapely leg in a high heeled shoe emerges from the car. A shapely body follows the shapely leg. The young lady’s not very tall, but she has more treacherous curves than the rollercoaster on the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk. Her curly black hair is stacked high on her head, her earrings glittering like chandeliers from a fancy hotel. She straightens her dress, a racy pink number, snug at the waist and hips, then flaring to the knee in a series of flouncy ruffles. “I am so sorry to bother you, Senor. I am an excellent driver, but these little foreign cars have a mind of their own, no?”
“No…I mean…yes, yes of course.” Instead of chewing her out he’s telling her it’s no trouble, no trouble at all, that foreign cars are certainly more stubborn than domestic models.
“I am Chita Montoya.” To his surprise, she’s alert and quite sober.
“Joe Crisalli,” he says.
“Please to meet you, Cho.”
He bends over and sees a guitar, a pair of silver candlesticks, a gun case and a jewelry box in the back seat.
“What’s all this stuff?” he says.
“I’m just move today to Santa Paulina and I’m no so sure where I got off track. I think maybe map upside down. I’ve come teach at Top Hat School of Dance. Is famous. You’ve heard of it, no?”
“I’m afraid not. I go to the senior dances at the church with…you know… the single dances.” He was about to say, with Cookie, but some invisible force stopped him.
“Single dances? I can no believe a handsome man like you is no married.”
“I was for many years, but she passed away,” he says.
“Can I use your phone to call a cab? I can have a tow truck out here in the morning.”
One tire hangs over the ditch and Joe could easily pull her car onto the road with his pickup, but… “All right, come inside before the rain ruins your dress”
“You are muy simpatico, Senor.” She grabs her purse and trots after him to the house.
Three cups of hot chocolate later and they’re still waiting for the cab. Chita is pleasant company, vivacious and talkative, but Joe is running out of small talk. There’s only so much one can say about baking bread and frosting cupcakes.
“You have a lovely house,” she says. “Is muy bonita.”
“Would you like the guided tour?” He hadn’t planned to show her the house but she’d somehow weaseled it out of him.
“Oh, si. Someday I will have a house of my own, but first I must work very hard.” Walking past the fireplace in the living room, Chita sees a blue and white Chinese urn on the mantelpiece.
“A ginger jar, no?”
“My wife’s ashes. I would have scattered them, but the time was never right.”
“When did she pass, Cho?”
“Six or seven years back. It’s been awhile.”
“No wonder you no married. What woman wants to share husband with ashes of dead wife?”
“I’d never thought of it that way.”
“Besides, is dark inside jar. Scatter ashes into the light.”
“I’ll think it over.”
“No more thinking. Chust time to do.”
The stairs to the second floor are narrow and steep. Chita turns an ankle and stumbles against him and Joe feels body heat radiating off her skin. The way she looks at him fills him with un
ease. Her perfume is dark and intoxicating, like the kind of flowers that open after midnight. Joe is a bit short of breath as they continue up the stairs.
“This is my room,” he says. “I like solid furniture, no frills and no nicknacks.” She fusses over Pumpkin and they move on to the guestroom with its patch quilt, rocking chair and hooked rug.
“Is big house for one person, no? You could get roommate, make extra money.”
“I don’t think so.” They continue down the hall. He’d intended to go back downstairs, but Chita steps inside his wife’s old room and snaps on the overhead light.
“Your wife had her own room?”
“She wasn’t well. My snoring bothered her.”
The furniture is white French provincial, Mildred’s portrait above the bed revealing an average-looking woman with a high opinion of herself. Her clothes are still in the closet, perfume bottles and a monogrammed silver comb and brush on the vanity. Chita picks up the brush. “M,” she says. “M for Montoya.”
“I don’t think so. Her name was Mildred.” He takes the brush from her hand and returns it to its proper place. “Let’s go down,” he says. “It’s too warm up here.” Chita reaches out and takes his hand. A little quiver runs up his arm. Car lights sweep across the window. A car horn sounds. “Good lord,” he says, reclaiming his hand. “He’ll wake up the whole neighborhood.”
“My cab. I go now.”
At the front door Chita thanks him for his hospitality, then takes a business card from her purse and scribbles something on the reverse side. “Is for complimentary dance lesson. Tomorrow night. Eight o’clock. You soon be tango like Rudolph Valentino.”