by John Shannon
Jack Liffey remembered that as a ten-year-old, he had usually managed to cajole Steelyard into some form of play that got him to forget his wounding home life for the moment. He had been beaten at home, now and then, but that hadn’t been the worst. His stepdad just didn’t like him very much. Jack Liffey could see that it was exactly what the stepfather had demanded of poor Kennie Steelyard that he seemed to have become in the end, but at what cost?
“I don’t know what to tell you, Ken. Doesn’t the department have somebody you could talk to?”
In fact what he kept seeing was the two of them, maybe ten years old, avoiding the long recess, hiding out in the bushes. They had invented a game, wrapping golf balls in white hankies and tying off the neck with rubber bands to make big-headed ghosts. He no longer had the faintest reminiscence of what they’d done with their golf ball ghost puppets in those bushes.
Steelyard glared at him. “It gets out you’re seeing a fucking shrink, nobody trusts you again.”
“You know, I hate to have to say it, but this is exactly what’s making the world such a tough place for you—all these goddamn rules that seem to go along with this oaf mentality you cops are always exuding.”
Steelyard quickly turned to stare at him, and Jack Liffey glimpsed something almost pensive behind the sudden anger. “What are you fucking getting at?”
“Most of the time you clam up hard, raise your steel armor, like Clint Eastwood on his worst day. When’s the last time you let down and unwrapped a little and let something work on your inner spirit? I’m not being religious, dammit. I just mean some basic humanity inside you.”
Steelyard looked away, but the anger had left his voice. “I’m not sure I get you. You know I try to watch TV at night to relax, and even the cop shows, they just turn into a big pot of rage for me.”
“Kill the TV. Read a book, man. I can give you some books that may make you feel human. Let your mind out of that macho trap. Maybe that’s what the toy trains were for, some sort of escape.”
Jack Liffey was not a fan of psychotherapy, and this was about as far as he would go.
The man didn’t look over but he squeezed Jack Liffey’s shoulder, so hard it hurt. “Read, huh? I’ll give it some thought.”
Then Steelyard sighed and turned his cell phone back on. It immediately buzzed angrily at him.
“Eee-yuck!” Maeve had swiped a couple of her mom’s nose strips, and they had just peeled them off their noses after the requisite wait. Now they were grossing out on what had been sucked out of their nose pores. The morning light through the window made the little worms of extracted blackheads all too evident.
“Boogerocious!”
They peered carefully at the strips, turning them this way and that in the light, and then discarded the evidence and changed tack to try to decide where to go exploring for the day. There was a lot of the city Ornetta had never seen, but it was the Hollywood stuff that seemed to attract her most, Grauman’s Chinese and the boulevard itself and the inevitable Hollywood sign, though she seemed to feel a bit sheepish about it, as if she knew in her heart that there were cultural landmarks more deserving. Maeve had her little Echo, full of gas, and the day was before them, so they could go just about anywhere except San Pedro, following her promise to her dad. Then Maeve had a brainstorm.
“How’d you like to meet a real Native American woman?”
Ornetta looked curious in all the right ways, so Maeve explained the plan. “We’ll do Hollywood first and then meet my friend for lunch. She’s really super.”
“Okay,” Ornetta said. “You go, girl.”
Her grandfather seemed perfectly agreeable to a mini expedition as long as they stayed well away from San Pedro, of course, or any other areas that might be genuinely dangerous for two young ladies alone. Maeve promised to keep in touch by cell phone, and they started preparing for their outing. They loaded a Styrofoam cooler with four diet Pepsis and two Fuji apples. Maeve knew she had her Thomas map book in the car, and a a box of Gummi Bears. Ornetta brought a little throwaway cardboard camera from the Costco. They were getting more and more psyched.
Maeve called Gloria Ramirez, who told her she could move her day around to take the afternoon off. They agreed to meet for a late lunch in a big marketplace called El Mercado in East LA, not far from her house in Boyle Heights. Maeve was thrilled because she had rarely set foot in East LA and she’d just finished a semester of Spanish. Now maybe she could put it to use.
Steelyard peered down into the trash barrel with a dispassionate frown. Jack Liffey had already had a good look. The last three koi from the pool in back had been thrown in on top of a gummy mass of shredded paper that reeked of ammonia and other bathroom chemicals.
“You guys got about five seconds to evolve into something that loves breathing Drāno,” Steelyard offered the fish softly.
Actually, the fish were well beyond evolution—as Jack Liffey knew from his peek—motionless, mouths and gills distended, good and dead. The card, held to the side of the trash barrel, said To defeat the man. Declan was across the room in his desk chair, rubbing the raw spots where the duct tape had been stripped off and cursing a blue streak, mostly against the Japs, who he was sure were behind the attack, collectively, having waited for it since Hiroshima. Slopes, dinks, and gooks were words of hate that Jack Liffey had ignored often enough in the service, but obviously, his father moved in circles that had whole lobes of the brain set aside for even more original racial epithets.
“Skibby yellowshitters!”
“Bucktoothed little cocksuckers!”
“Chow Ming Mongoloids!”
“Mustard monkeys!”
“Charlie fuckin’ Chans.”
He seemed at last to be running down. “You know how many years I worked on that book?”
Steelyard sat on the sofa and opened a notebook, showing very little evident sympathy. “About as many as I worked on my layout,” he pointed out.
“You can’t equate a major breakthrough in historical scholarship with a stupid toy train!”
Diplomatic as always, Jack Liffey thought.
“What was this scholarly masterpiece called?”
“The History of the White Race. It was more than seven hundred pages long and had more footnotes than the Britannica.”
“You didn’t keep a copy?”
“He got that, too. All the while, your dumbshit colleague sat in his car in front eating doughnuts and never noticed the slant-eyed monkey attacking from the back.”
Jack Liffey refrained from reminding his father that he’d warned him several times about moving his valuables out of the house. Given the title he’d just heard, he could pretty much guess what it contained. No loss there. All those footnotes would merely have cited like-minded screeds written by the nutcases holed up in redoubts in northern San Diego County and Idaho.
“We’re not baby-sitters, Mr. Liffey. We had a car here watching over you. If the officer hadn’t come over to check on you, you’d still be tied up.”
“An hour too fucking late!”
“Sounds like you should have accepted your son’s offer to get away for a while.”
Declan glared at Jack Liffey for the first time. “I don’t get paid by the hour to argue.”
Jack Liffey wasn’t quite sure what that was supposed to mean, but he left it alone. “You’re still welcome to go to my place, Dad. You’d have it all to yourself. I’m staying at a friend’s.”
“What’s the point? What’s he going to do to me now? Steal my skivvies?”
Jack Liffey shrugged. “It’s just an offer.”
“Let’s go over the perp’s actions again,” Steelyard suggested. “I want to make sure I’ve got it all down.”
Declan Liffey had calmed down enough to give him a step-by-step account of his ordeal. For the first time, the old man allowed himself to veer away from a single-minded focus on the rape of his manuscript, and mentioned the intruder emptying the cabinet that had been against the northern
wall and lugging it away with him. Steelyard perked up a bit and pried out of him a detailed description of the piece of furniture: banged-up mahogany veneer, a rounded front that was called waterfall by antiques buffs, metal handles shaped like Chinese letters.
“The letters mean anything?”
“How should I know? Probably Fuck you, round-eyes. It belonged to my dad. My wife never liked it.”
Steelyard fussed around a while longer, but he excused himself when a couple of people from crime scene showed up in their superclean jumpsuits and plastic booties to look for evidence. One of them, unfortunately, was an Asian technician, and Declan glared at her ferociously.
As they walked back to the car, Steelyard seemed lost in thought.
“Any way to speed up the FBI on those lists of the ‘no no’ boys?” Jack Liffey suggested. “It sure looks like a disgruntled Asian.”
“Disgruntled,” Steelyard repeated, rolling the word around in his mouth, as if testing several of the flavors it gave off.
“Very disgruntled then,” Jack Liffey amplified. “Peeved, I-rate. Who knows? There’s sure as hell a grudge here, and I’m the only one still on this guy’s radar, as far as we know.”
“The feebs really love it when you call them up and say they’re dragging their feet on something you asked them to do. You ever had a lot of luck jamming up the feds?”
“As a matter of fact, I’ve met good feds, just like I’ve met good local cops. There’re exceptions to every rule.”
Steelyard laughed a little, as if he’d softened up some overnight. Maybe it was just getting back on the job after all the soul-searching out on Terminal Island. “I’ll call the junior G-men. And you, take a lesson and get what you value out of reach.”
“There’s only one thing I value that much and she’s at an undisclosed location.”
“I hope you’re right, Jack. I worry about this guy. This is not the usual dirtbag from the shallow end of the gene pool. He plans, he comes in under surveillance, he knows what to do to hurt his targets, and then, once in a while, he leaves really skeery things behind like that Special Forces kill knife. He may not have hurt anybody’s person yet, but he’s had a free run. I have a feeling he might go nuclear the first time he’s thwarted.”
“Look!” Ornetta had placed her tennis shoe into Humphrey Bogart’s shoe impression in the concrete square in the forecourt of Grauman’s Chinese, which Maeve noticed was apparently now called Mann’s Chinese. As Maeve knew perfectly well, everything in LA ate up its own past every few years, as if what it had once been didn’t matter a bit. Ornetta’s shoe fit perfectly.
“Wow, he had small feet,” Maeve said.
“I guess he was a little guy.” She looked around dubiously. They had parked behind Musso & Frank’s and walked several blocks to get here.
Hollywood Boulevard was just about the tackiest possible place in LA, but Maeve hadn’t wanted to warn Ornetta in advance. Mostly the shops along the boulevard sold T-shirts with pictures of movie stars or little plastic reproductions of things such as movie cameras and skulls and little toilets for use as ashtrays, and also S & M paraphernalia such as spiky collars and whips and black bras with the nipples cut out. In fact, a lot of the local people striding up and down the boulevard seemed to be wearing the stuff.
Except for the gawky camera-laden families from Kansas, who were mostly down by the Chinese Theater at the west end, the boulevard was full of hard-core druggies and bikers and runaways with utterly lost looks in their eyes—a hundred wannabe punk musicians looking for one another. One guy, who was shirtless in the chill of December, bustled past with an angry frown and big half-dollar-size rings in both his nipples. A young woman in leathers lounged sleepy-eyed against a wall, so emaciated Maeve wondered if she would survive the day.
“There’s something really wrong going on,” Ornetta said. “This place gives me the creeps.”
“These kids didn’t grow up here. If all you’re fed, day after day, is sick dreams about becoming famous, and your parents hate you, what chance do you have?”
“This isn’t about movies,” Ornetta complained. “Almost nothing here is about movies.”
“No—but it’s full of people whose minds were messed over by the movies.”
“Can we go to that other place?”
“El Mercado; sure.”
“I know about bad places,” Ornetta said, “but I think there’s a lot more evil deep in the soul here.”
“My dad told me somebody once said if you strip all the false tinsel off Hollywood, underneath you’ll find the real tinsel.”
A stocky man with a fringed deerskin shirt and a tattoo on his forehead that said Metal or Death was striding toward them with the impotent malevolence of a large predator trapped in a zoo. Ornetta wasn’t in any mood to laugh at the joke. “Let’s book.”
As it happened, there was a faxed list of names from the FBI waiting on Ken Steelyard’s desk. The list was several pages of names of the Japanese Americans who had declined to make patriotic affirmations in 1942. A clerk-trainee had already painstakingly compared the list to Jack Liffey’s roster of the Terminal Island residents and winnowed it down to thirty-one names.
Steelyard had brought Jack Liffey back to the office with him, but he wouldn’t let him see the list for some reason. Looking it over with a cursory eye, he was finally defeated by all the Japanese syllables. “I guess we got a new penal code here: BPWO.”
“What’s that?”
“Being Pissed off While Oriental.”
“Has anyone told you the word Oriental is relatively offensive these days?”
“Relative to what?”
“Let’s say it’s somewhere between Asian and gook.”
“So my partner says, bless her PC heart.”
“Why don’t we see if anybody on this short list is in the current phone book?”
“I never would have thought of that.”
Maeve and Ornetta had just fled south from the hovering menace of Hollywood Boulevard, and Maeve was now driving east across LA on Beverly, one of her dad’s many shortcuts she was trying to fix in her memory. She figured his knowledge of LA lore and LA inside info might be her only tangible patrimony, but she didn’t really mind. Beverly was a broad avenue that stayed mainly residential until you got near downtown. With half her mind, she noticed how nice some of the old houses were and realized that Rebecca’s ritzy school was around here somewhere.
A skinny old man with big wooden wings on his bicycle was pedaling hard ahead of them, leaning into it to tow a homemade fine-mesh chicken-wire trailer chock-full of what looked like old eyeglasses. As she passed she could see that that was exactly what he was transporting. Could he be taking them to a swap meet? One point to me, Dad, she thought.
They left the big houses behind and now were passing shops with hand-lettered Spanish signs and then Korean minimalls as they neared downtown. Where the street split, she decided to go up Silverlake and then take Sunset across downtown. It would keep her north of the worst traffic, and then become the renamed Cesar Chavez Avenue, which seemed fitting for a grand entrance to East LA.
They passed north of downtown LA, right between the abandoned Terminal Annex, which had once been the central post office, and the beautiful arcaded bulk of Union Station. Her father had brought her here several times to drink in the history of the last of America’s great train stations, a mix of mission and Art Deco style filled with colorful tile and wrought iron and all that sad ambience of would-be movie stars lugging suitcase up the long, tiled halls on their first arrival into the town of dreams.
Maeve was beginning to worry about which street El Mercado was on. She was pretty sure it wasn’t Chavez, which she knew had been called Brooklyn Avenue until recently, from the days when the whole area of Boyle Heights had been Jewish. She thought El Mercado was on First, but wasn’t sure and decided it was best to continue on Chavez until she got deep into East LA and then she could circle back on First. If she didn’t apo
logize for it, Ornetta might not even notice she was circling around lamely.
Dec 20 AM
He’s coming. I know it. This hunter of children, of men. I feel I must prepare in new ways. He and the policeman were on my island today. They sat and looked back to where your fishing village used to thrive, and they talked for a long time. I sense him drawing the bow against me.
Until now my actions have been simple justice. But I feel a change. His challenge is stirring up the will to hurt.
Eleven
Women Know
“Hamasaki.”
Steelyard read aloud as Jack Liffey flipped several pages of the phone book and let his finger run down the names, making no effort to correct the man’s pronunciation, Ham-a-SAK-i, which probably should have been something like Ha-MAS-uh-ki, if not Ha-MAS’ki. Americans made only occasional stabs at linguistic accuracy, and in this case it would have been little more than pedantry. The town itself had become San PEE-dro so long ago, and so enduringly, that even the Latinos who lived in it had given up.
“Nope.”
“Ozaki, Frank. Frank—there’s a great Nip name.”
Jack Liffey frowned but said nothing about the epithet. “Bingo,” he said, his finger stopping halfway down the page. “On Twenty-first Street in the four hundreds. That must be just off Pacific. Not Frank, but Mary. Could be related.”
“I don’t know what’s got into me having you around today,” Steelyard said, “but Gloria’s taken herself off, so how would you like to come with me, for old times?”