“Keeping to the schedule is important for Federal Air Marshals,” said the instructor without missing a blink. “The TSA workers, the flight attendants and crew need to know to the minute when you are coming and going in order to maintain the level of security to which we all aspire.”
“I’m sorry—”
“So in the spirit of evaluation,” interrupted the instructor, followed by a spunky cock of the head, “let’s accept that you’re not Air Marshal material and call it a date, okay?”
Gonzo was shaken. But not so bad that she couldn’t put on an air of indifference. She stood in the doorway, nodding as if she had expected as much.
“Okay,” said Gonzo. “I’d like to tell you where to shove your evaluation. But even if I did, you’re probably so uptight you couldn’t find it with a flashlight and a magnifying glass.”
The rest of the candidates broke out in laughter. After all, they were cops and practiced at sizing people up. Gonzo may have been out. But as far as the students were concerned, the instructor would never be in.
Women, Gonzo griped to herself. They could talk until they were hoarse about issues like sexual discrimination. Glass ceilings. Equal rights and equal pay. At the end of day, though, Gonzo couldn’t recall a single woman in the ranks that wasn’t dangerously competitive or flat-out venal to her working sisters. In Gonzo’s not-so-clinical experience, the truth was the truth. Women didn’t help other women. At least not those they considered a threat to their personal power.
So why the hell was Gonzo wrestling with calling Alex? Was it her loyalty to Ben? A man she thought she trusted? Or her fear that Alex might follow through with her threat to make Gonzo’s life at Simi Canyons miserable if she failed to inform on Ben? As she trudged out of the FTS offices, she kept flipping her mobile phone open then closed. Daring herself to dial. She was angry, yes. She was also practical. Travis loved Simi Canyons School. He loved his classmates and sometimes asked his mommy to buy a bigger house so all his friends and teachers could move in with them.
Gonzo slid on a pair of Ray Ban Aviators as she stepped into the sunlight. When she flipped open her cell phone again, she saw the photo saved on the tiny screen as wallpaper. There was her gap-toothed boy, joyously smiling back at the camera. His world was hers and vice versa. And damned if she wouldn’t do everything within her womanly power to protect it.
Still, Gonzo flip-flopped until she was behind the wheel of that Valley Checkered Cab she had been driving for over a month now. The vehicle was, in Gonzo’s eyes, on permanent loan from the LAPD while her Chevy Suburban was technically in the repair shop. “Technically” meant the SUV would be in her garage, resting from the normal wear and tear of commuting to Van Nuys until the motor-pool sergeant caught on that Gonzo was using the cab for her own personal use. Seven miles from El Segundo, Gonzo was northbound on the 405 Freeway and cresting the pass that split the Los Angeles city basin from the San Fernando Valley. This is where the area codes changed, and come summertime, temperatures were always elevated. Gonzo gripped the wheel of the cab with her left hand and scrolled her cell phone’s memory for Alex’s number. With a press of her thumb on the DIAL button, she made a choice that would most certainly screw over her friend, Ben Keller. But what could possibly happen? wondered Gonzo. A little extra marital discord? Maybe a three-month stint in couple’s therapy? She was rationalizing to make herself feel better and she knew it. But this was about her little boy. And Travis was her sun and her moon.
“Hello, Alex? It’s Lydia Gonzalez. How are you today?”
Strange. At that precise, fixed moment in time—while traffic was slowing—and Alex and Gonzo were engaged in full-tilt school chatter—if Gonzo had glanced out the driver’s window a mere thirty degrees to her left, she would have seen Ben, alone and shell-shocked in his car, southbound on the same freeway. Not that she could have noticed. She was traveling forty-five miles per hour while Ben was pushing seventy in the opposite direction. The measure of time was barely more than a blink of the eye. And Ben’s silver Volvo didn’t exactly stick out in the constant flow of L.A. traffic.
But if she had looked—if Gonzo had clocked Ben as they passed each other—would she have altered the tenor of her dialogue? Would she have told?
“Listen, Alex...” said Gonzo, switching conversational gears. “Do you recall our talk? You know, the one where I promised to inform you of Ben’s...”
“I remember,” said Alex.
How Ben began looking for a church and ended up in a bar was beyond any rational explanation. It simply was.
“Another?” asked the bartender.
Ben gestured. And a fresh Cadillac margarita was assembled, shaken, and poured over a six-inch tall tumbler full of ice.
“On the tab?” asked the bartender.
Ben nodded, made no eye contact, all the time keeping his gaze fixed on the drink.
After the handcuffs had been removed and the police vacated his Burbank office building, it was barely past noon. The day was still young. But what to do? Ben couldn’t imagine returning to work. Josie had been excused, and understandably, Ben’s ability to concentrate on anything more complicated than putting one foot in front of the other was all but shattered. When he had climbed in behind the wheel of his car, he started shaking so violently that he feared operating the vehicle would lead to certain catastrophe.
So Ben decided to walk off his case of the shakes. It was on the walk down 2nd Avenue that he happened upon a neighborhood house of worship. An Episcopal church. Ben assumed the doors would be open. And inside he might find a man of God. Someone kind and wise. With a good ear and welcome advice. Yet there was something uncomfortable about entering a strange sanctuary no matter how inviting the unlocked door might seem. This is when Ben remembered The Calvary Christ Church of Santa Monica. Oh Lord, how he and Sara loved the room the moment they stepped through the sanctuary doors. It was a living antique from old California, styled in oil-rubbed floors made from heavy, foot-wide planks. The twenty rows of pews were a deep brownish red, quarter-sawn oak polished clean of human fingerprints. And the ceiling was open beamed, carved to appear like the hull of Noah’s Ark.
In five month’s time, Ben and Sara had been married at Calvary Christ Church before God and some fifty of their closest friends and family. Though the church was a non-denominational Christian church, young Ben and Sara were still required to attend some premarital counseling with the Old Sage of a minister they had asked to perform the ceremony. As confessed agnostics, the couple entered the three two-hour sessions with equal amounts of mirth and cynicism. But somewhere within the course of saying “I do,” Sara’s quick and unplanned pregnancy, and the births of twin baby girls, both Ben and Sara were drawn back to the same Calvary Christ Church and the same Old Sage pastor with his soft words and plainspoken morality. The twins were baptized in the very same sanctuary where their parents had promised to love and cherish each other through whatever unkindness life could possibly invent. These slights of nature were the sort that went unimagined by young couples experiencing love and success and the early joys that come with two beautiful babies.
Though Ben had clearly endured, and over time, conveniently learned places he could stuff or hide his pain, he hadn’t forgotten. Nor had he, in the purely therapeutic sense, actually moved on. As Ben set his car on a heading for Santa Monica and the old Calvary Christ Church, he came to wonder what to call the life he had led since his family’s destruction. A second chapter? A non-Catholic kind of purgatory? A lie?
Suddenly, only one hope existed within Ben. It was the hope of finding his way back to the old church and for just a moment or two, sitting silently in one of those perfect pews. Once there, he would pray and he would listen for answers from either that Old Sage...or God.
Instead, the only answers Ben had found were from either the bartender or at the bottom of another glass of lime, triple sec, and Jose Cuervo Gold.
Ben had spent nearly an hour driving around the Santa Monica n
eighborhood in search of the old church. Certain that he had remembered the location, he turned a corner and found a three-storied apartment building lathered in pinkish stucco. From there, Ben drove in a series of right turns, block after block, in an ever-increasing circle in hope of stumbling upon the familiar steeple. He eventually found himself parked in front of a different address, yet equally well known to him.
The Sham Rock.
The restaurant/bar—Ben’s former pride and joy—had been painted over and reupholstered to clearly reflect some Irish-American’s fantasy of the modern Dublin sports bar. What wasn’t slathered clover green or tan or white, or tuck-and-rolled in cream or red Naugahyde, was worn and dinged from the older days of Prague ’88. And the walls, once hand-aged to perfection and adorned with magnificent old bullfighting prints, were mounted with either flat-panel or projection TV screens. In the odd spaces in between were placards advertising the virtues of mixing Guinness with everything—from golfing to hurling to salmon-fishing to Gaelic football.
The only thing that hadn’t changed was the bar top. Though not nearly as lustrously preserved as when Ben was operating behind it, the bar remained its original wooden self. Deep-grained with a rolled edge, a comfortable perch for a man to rest arms weary from lifting too many pints.
“Yeah, I remember that church,” said the bartender, who was nearly too thin and tall for description. Ben guessed his waist size to be somewhere short of twenty-eight. A hard fit to find for a man six-foot-six.
“Like somewhere around 24th Street and Broadway, right?” he continued. “Yeah, yeah. All white on the outside, kinda woody inside? Cavalry something?”
“Calvary,” corrected Ben. “Calvary Christ Church.”
“Think they moved someplace closer to Venice,” said the bartender. “Yeah, yeah. Bulldozed it and put up, like, an apartment building, right?”
“How long?”
“Dunno. Maybe eight, nine years ago. More?”
“So awhile ago,” said Ben, not that it mattered much anymore. The church was gone forever.
“By more, I meant Cadillac? You’re looking low.”
“Go Rob.”
“Name’s Bob,” said the bartender. “No worries, though. Rob, Bob, Blob, Slob. All of ’em work for me.”
It was nearly three in the afternoon. Both the bar and restaurant were empty but for Ben and Bob, who was already mixing the liquor. The lunch rush—or whatever passed for a lunch rush at that odd location—had long since passed. Not a single afternoon alcoholic was in sight.
Bob seemed damned glad to have somebody to talk to. Ben wasn’t so sure that he himself was. But he still tried.
“How’s business?”
“Between you, me, and the rats the Health Department don’t know about?” said Bob. “Pretty damn crappy.”
“Your place?”
“Ten bucks an hour. That’s my real name. You can call me that, too.”
“Been open how long? Three, four months?”
“A year. Just took down the grand opening sign last week when they figured all the local Irish were already in on the joke.”
“Good joke. Funny.”
“Tell me about it. Before it was The Sham Rock, it was this black-satin club called Therapy. Velvet Rope. Bouncers at the door. But two weeks in. Forget it. Went bust-ola.”
Bob shook Ben’s cocktail and poured.
“Before that,” continued Bob. “Was a place called Curtains. You can guess what that décor was like. Lemme see. Before that it was some kinda Russian nightclub. Forget the frickin’ name, but they had this kinda kitschy house band I will never forget. Khazak Pop. Real hottie behind the mic, too. She looked Russian but I ran into her one day at Whole Foods and found out she was just Polish. Think her name was Carolina.”
“You must live close.”
“My whole life. Three blocks east, one block south. I walk to work.”
“Four-block commute. Sounds like an L.A. fantasy.”
“Lemme see. Before it was a Russian joint, I get a little fogged in. Think it was... yeah, yeah... fancy fine dining, Wolfgang-Puck-wannabe-sushi kinda blah, blah. Never even came in for a drink. That’s when double-bar whammies cost fourteen bucks... before they cost fourteen bucks, know what I’m sayin’?”
Ben remembered well. When he began his bar business, he fought to keep the basic urban double-shot mixer at seven dollars. It was the local Johnny Walker rep who convinced Ben that unless he charged ridiculous prices on his call drinks, there would always be an open stool at his establishment. Bargain prices would attract only drunks and tourists. That and the top-shelf liquor reps wouldn’t sell him their most posh bottles unless Ben charged well into the double digits.
The Johnny Walker rep was right. The more Ben edged up his prices, the deeper the crowds grew, with everyone running tabs or tossing hundred-dollar bills across the bar. So much cash flowed through his till that Ben thought it was wiser to buy a safe and install it in his Culver City home.
Whoops, thought Ben. Brain fart.
An error in foresight that eventually cost his wife and daughters their precious lives. Not that Ben could have actually foreseen the oncoming tragedy. Still, nothing prevented him from assigning himself more blame. The alcohol, in fact, promoted negative thinking. The effects of which had already lassoed Ben. The liquor was beginning to retool his gray matter—exactly what Ben had in mind.
“Only time I can remember this address drawing any kind of a crowd?” recounted Bob. “Back when it was a joint called Prague ’88.”
As Ben politely nodded over his drink, Bob’s wispy goatee, possibly the only hair on the man’s body, reformed around a wide, memory-stuffed grin.
“Actually, got truly laid for the first time there. After I met some banker slut. I was seventeen.”
“Seventeen?” asked Ben.
“Okay. Sixteen. I was tall for my age and was already losing my hair. Only upside was, with the right pair of glasses? I looked like twenty-five. Never got ID'd. And you think I told her? Hell no. She was drunk and I had such a boner in my pants. She took me right into the ladies’ restroom and like wham, man. My cherry was so fuckin’ popped.”
“Things you never knew,” said Ben, amused.
“Like I saw that, comin’, right?”
Bob shook his head, not really believing his own memory. The grin, seemingly unshakable from his face.
“Well, here’s to your first time.”
Ben raised his glass in a toast, then gulped back a good twenty-five percent of his cocktail, hoping to temporarily purge himself of all his mental data. He would have preferred not discussing his former restaurant.
Bob changed the subject for him.
“What happened?” Bob was pointing to his own right knuckles, hairless and unscraped.
The skin on Ben’s right hand had clotted into a scabby mess, looking like that of a mechanic who had lost an argument with a radiator fan.
“Suppose I should say something clichéd,” said Ben. “Like, ‘You should see the other guy.’”
“Would only be clichéd if it were true.”
Ben sucked back the rest of his margarita and pushed his empty glass forward.
“Go Bob.”
“Seriously.”
“Go Bob.” Now, Ben raised his empty glass and shook the ice in it from side to side.
“Nope. You’re already over the limit.”
“Unsafe to drive,” said Ben, laughing, tickled by his newfound inebriation.
“Seriously, dude.”
“I’ll call a cab.”
“Just slow down, tell me a few stories, then maybe I’ll uncork a bottle.”
“How’s this?” negotiated Ben, hearing a wee slur in his voice. “I’ll tell you all about the other guy if you keep the bar open.”
“Then you’ll take a cab.”
“Course I’ll take a cab. Wouldn’t be safe if I didn’t take a cab.”
“Safety first,” quipped Bob without a clue.
/> “My middle name,” joked Ben.
“Cadillac?”
“Go Bob.”
Like a mother worrying over her preadolescent son, Alex stared over Ben as he slept. It was almost 6:00 A.M. Daylight was just beginning to overtake the dark and filter through the shutters. And despite the early hour, Alex was already showered and dressed with her makeup expertly applied for the day. She had been unable to return to sleep after being disturbed at nearly two in morning by Ben’s ruckus in the kitchen. She lay in bed for some time, awake, at first planning to feign sleep if Ben proved brave enough to enter their bed. But while she rolled to the side and gathered under the covers, she found herself listening to a constant clatter from the kitchen. If she could hear it, she worried, so would one of her girls. Then came the charred odor of burning raisin toast.
Damn it.
And even more to the point.
Damn him!
Alex found Ben downstairs, passed out on the sofa she had rearranged to fit underneath the big kitchen window. He was splayed across it, shirt half-exposing his stomach, pants unbuckled, with one shoe on and the other who knows where? He also stunk of booze. Her initial instinct was to leave him there. Her second instinct was to remove the water pitcher from the refrigerator and tilt the entire half gallon onto his lying face. That would surely cause a reaction. Though since she couldn’t gauge exactly what kind, or how violent his response, she chose to save their inevitable altercation until after Ben had sobered up—even if meant he would be at the nadir of his imminent hangover.
Always thinking of the girls first, and not caring for any of the young trio to discover Ben in his inebriated state, Alex decided to gently wake Ben and encourage him to quietly sleep it off upstairs.
“Ben?” she said quietly. “Ben? Come on. Let’s get you to bed.”
When neither nudging nor shaking him proved successful, Alex resorted to a trick she had seen her mother use on her oft drunken father. She placed one hand over his mouth and used the other to pinch his nose. This created an involuntary breathing spasm. Ben’s eyes popped open wide as saucers and his lungs gasped for air as if he had been held under water for thirty seconds, not for the measly four Alex had applied gentle pressure.
The Safety Expert Page 27