“Yeah, it’s like somebody says they’re sorry, so you don’t hurt them.”
“That’s nice.”
I thought about the justice system. I thought about how nice it wasn’t.
She fell asleep soon after that. I stood up and looked at her. If the word angelic means anything, it meant Kylie’s face.
I’d never thought about having kids until Jacqueline. When I did, the idea of it seemed inevitable. The most natural thing in the world. A way to get complete, myself and the rest of the world.
I’d spent a long time living out the big hole my dad’s death left in me. Jacqueline was the first person I ever met who could fill it. And then she died, too.
For a while I thought that was it—I’d never get back to humanity again.
Looking at Kylie, I had a glimmer that there was something alive in me still. A good thing. And I wanted it to last. I didn’t want it to go away.
I tucked her in and went looking for Sister Mary. I found her in the office and filled her in on what Kylie had told me about Avisha and James and the colors and the ocean. Did it make any sense?
“No,” she said. “But I’ll chew on it.”
“Chew well.”
“It’s what I live for.”
49
FATHER BOB WAS enjoying a cigar on the front step of his trailer, which is next to the one they let me use. I saw the red tip of the stogie glowing in the dark. I sat next to him and he offered me one and I said not tonight.
“Winston Churchill almost single-handedly saved Western civilization,” Father Bob said. “Do you think he could have done that without smoking ten cigars a day?”
“Gee, I don’t know.”
“A good cigar always helps. Relaxes and focuses the mind. Cuts through the clutter. You once told me you took a lot of philosophy in college.”
“Yeah.”
“So the great questions must interest you.”
I snorted. “You want to know what I found out about philosophy? I’ll tell you. I took a class in epistemology from an associate prof, a young guy working on his doctorate. He liked to hold class outside so he could smoke. He’d put a coffin nail in his mouth as he talked, and he’d light a match, and he’d keep talking and he’d hold the match out there as he followed whatever tangent he was on, until the match burned down to his fingers. Then he’d shake and drop the match, keep talking, light another match. None of us ever heard what he was saying—we’d all just be watching each new match, watching for the moment when it’d burn him. And that is about all the good philosophy will do you.”
Father Bob shook his head. “What about theology then?”
“Same difference,” I said.
“Not so,” he said. “With theology you have a basis for moral knowledge. Philosophy without God leads only to narcissism.”
“If I didn’t love myself so much I’d probably agree with you.”
He puffed his cigar, then said, “Let’s not get derailed tonight. I’m sincere. I only have McNitt to talk to about these things, and you know what that can lead to. Constipation.”
“So what does that make me? A laxative?”
“An inquirer. A seeker of truth.”
“I don’t know what I am. Maybe I’m just an atheist and we should leave it at that.”
“No. The one thing you’re not is an atheist.”
“How do you know?”
“Because you’re rational. Atheists aren’t rational.”
“How’s that?”
Father Bob waved his cigar in the air, like a professor with a pointer. “In order to be an atheist—one who claims to know that God does not exist—you’d have to be in possession of all the knowledge in the universe. Have to know every single fact and factoid throughout the cosmos, since God’s existence, if true, would be a fact. But since you don’t know every fact in the universe and don’t even know how much you don’t know, you can’t possibly claim to know there is no God. You’d have to be God to know there wasn’t a God. And then, in an ironic twist, you would have defeated yourself by being God. Isn’t this wild?”
“That sounds just a little too convenient.”
“Can you defeat the logic? Can you disprove the existence of God?”
I thought about that one for a second, my brain doing flips. “If I recall my philosophy, you can’t prove the nonexistence of anything.”
“Case closed. You can’t be a dogmatic atheist.”
“You can be a strong agnostic, though.”
“Oh, you don’t want to be an agnostic.”
“Why not?”
“Because some night you’ll wake up and find a flaming question mark on your front lawn.”
I winced.
Father Bob said, “You want to make more bad jokes, or shall we keep talking?”
“Not tonight,” I said. “Tonight I am one with my doubts.”
And I was. Living right here in a religious community was odd enough for me. The way the world worked didn’t make sense. Not the way any God worth knowing would have set it up. Good people dying and bad people living. Kids without mothers. Not the way I would have done it.
But maybe that’s the point. Not being God is one thing I specialize in.
And then you get people like Father Bob and Sister Mary, who are in this world and just doing what they do, bringing good to people in spite of all the chaos.
That question mark. It was on fire all right.
50
THURSDAY MORNING I parked at Universal City and took the Red Line downtown. Los Angeles has a subway now, but it’s not like New York’s or Chicago’s. The city is too spread out. You usually can’t take the train and walk to where you want to go.
The geniuses who deal with rapid transit in this city always get it wrong. Always. When they had a chance to do what Ray Bradbury suggested, crisscrossing monorails, they chose instead to dig holes. Down in the holes the ticket machines don’t always work. When the weather is moist they won’t take the bills. And don’t talk to me about the buses that hack and wheeze across the asphalt arteries of our fair city. I’d rather be riding in a chicken poacher’s truck on a dirt road up to Machu Picchu.
It’s all about the money and local politics. Train holes bring money, and so does roadwork. However you slice it, cars continue to be the lifeblood of L.A. travel, only that bloodstream clots six, seven times a day in what is laughingly called commuter traffic.
On the Red Line, the Tom Bradley/Civic Center station is one of the more convenient stops. It spits you out into historic downtown. The two courthouses, criminal and civil, are close to where they once were when L.A. was growing up. Back when Earl Rogers became the greatest trial lawyer of his day. A handsome, theatrical, sartorially resplendent mouthpiece who performed legal miracles in the criminal courts. Until drink brought him down.
Clarence Darrow once tried a case here. Then Darrow was indicted for jury tampering and got Rogers to defend him. Darrow was acquitted.
Here, Errol Flynn was tried for statutory rape and acquitted. Mitchum for smoking weed, convicted. Famous divorces have been played out on this stage. And, of course, there was the Manson family, the Hillside Strangler, and the Night Stalker.
And O. J., Robert Blake, and Phil Spector.
And me. Once.
The L.A. County Superior Court is across from the Music Center and just up the street from the Disney Concert Hall, the one designed by Frank Gehry. The Disney is a mass of metallic swoops that has been variously described as a modern architectural marvel and an acid trip in the land of aluminum foil.
It seems like a perfect metaphor for the city itself. Weird and chaotic, but with plenty of nice moments inside.
I went to the court clerk’s office and I filed a TRO—a temporary restraining order—to stop the Lindbrook from evicting the lawful tenant of room 414, my six-year-old client.
The papers would be served later that day.
I knew the saliva would hit the fan then.
I just wasn’t ready for how h
ard.
51
WHEN I EMERGED from the lower intestine of Los Angeles at Universal City, I saw I had a message from Sister Mary. I called back.
“I talked to Kylie some more, about the color party,” she said.
“And?”
“She talked about throwing colors, like you’d throw dirt, and a big fire. It triggered something in me, so I did a little surfing. I think she may have meant Holi.”
“Holy what?”
“Holi. H-O-L-I. It’s a Hindu festival. The festival of colors. Usually happens in March. They have celebrations in L.A. With bonfires, people throwing powdered colors. Sounds the same.”
“And there was one at the beach?”
“Yep. I pulled up a story from the Times. Last year they had one near Leo Carrillo. About a hundred and fifty people.”
“You are good.”
She said nothing, but the nothing sounded like someone smiling.
“How about we take Kylie for a ride?” I said.
52
LEO CARRILLO STATE Beach is a one-and-a-half-mile stretch of sand on the “wrong side of the pier” section of Malibu. It’s the wrong side because real people can get to it. Even though the law says the coastline belongs to the public, the Malibuers to the south like to discourage just anyone from walking in front of their homes. So access is, well, made a little more difficult by way of fences and locks.
But not here at this state beach, named for an old character actor who played a Mexican sidekick in an old TV Western series called The Cisco Kid. You could do a lot if you were on TV in the 1950s. Even get a beach named after you. This is the land of dreams.
We turned right off of Kanan Dume Road and drove up Pacific Coast Highway. Took it slow. I wanted Kylie to see if anything looked familiar. She peered out the window like a good soldier. Concentrating.
We passed Zuma Beach with its lifeguard towers and parking lot. Green hills and housing tracts to the right. The ocean on our left was whitecapped with the wind.
I remembered a time when I was a kid and went to a beach in Florida with my mom and dad. Dad showed me how to make a sand castle. We formed this semicircle wall, then made a moat and dug a little hole in front so the water from the waves would go inside the wall.
“Always dig a good, deep hole,” Dad said. “So the water passes through and the wall stays up.”
I thought that was very cool. Like we were in control of the forces of nature. Like we were showing the ocean who was boss.
As a final touch, Dad showed me how to drip watery sand from my fingertips, forming little pointed turrets on top of the wall.
That was very cool, too. An artistic touch.
It was the last time I went to the beach with my dad. The last time I made a sand castle, too.
We drove past County Line, where a knot of surfers looked for waves. It was a good day for riding. Nice breaks. I was half watching a guy catch one when Kylie suddenly said, “There!”
She pointed to a mobile home park on the right. I slowed, then turned into the gravel drive and headed in. There was a kiosk off to the side, empty, so I kept on going.
The mobile homes were in rows, eclectic in style and color schemes. Some looked newly painted, others weather worn. I drove halfway up the road parallel to PCH and pulled over next to some rocks.
We got out and looked at the ocean. Kylie giggled and jumped up and down. She held my hand.
Sister Mary said, “How can anyone look at this and not believe in God?”
“God is beautiful,” Kylie said.
Sister Mary smiled at me.
A voice said, “Help you?”
I turned around to face a security guard, a kid maybe twenty-five trying hard to look forty.
“How you doing?” I said.
“What can I do for you?” He had a high, whiny voice. One that could be very annoying in very little time.
“We’re looking for a tenant here,” I said. “Someone this girl and her mom stayed with about a year ago. Were you here then?”
“You have the name?”
“Avisha is all we know. You have anyone named Avisha here?”
“I can’t give you that information, sir. If you don’t know anyone, you’ll have to leave.”
“Well that’s just it, son.” I love calling security guards son. “We do know someone here—we just don’t know the whole name or exactly where she is. And that’s where you and your training come in.”
He just looked at me, then at Sister Mary, then back at me.
“Let me put it to you this way,” I said. “I’m an attorney and I represent this girl and her mother. They were invited guests of Avisha’s and we need to get some information from her about that period of time.”
“Your name is . . . ?”
“Tyler Buchanan.”
The guard took out a pad and pen and wrote. “And the name of the mother?”
“Reatta.”
“Is that first or last?”
“First.”
“Last name?”
“That’s actually the information we’re looking for,” I said.
“You don’t know the last name?”
“No.”
“Doesn’t the girl know?”
“It’s complicated,” I said. “So do you want to ask Avisha if she’ll talk with us? I’m sure she’ll want to.”
“I’m sorry, I can’t do that. This is private property.”
“Just give her the message, how about that? If you want we’ll wait down at the office.”
The guard shook his head. “I’ll have to ask you to leave, sir.”
“Well, thank you for asking,” I said. “Now, can you tell her we’re here?”
“Sir, I’m asking for the last time.”
I shook my head. The guard flipped his official Captain America super-security-guard pad closed and walked with purpose toward the front of the property.
A crunch of footsteps behind me. It was an old guy in a denim jacket with floral designs stitched into it. He wore two braids, Native American style, woven from his gray hair and tied off with paisley fabric. He had on wraparound shades and a cowboy hat. He was either Willie Nelson’s evil twin or the great grandson of Sitting Bull.
“Been a long time since I seen a nun,” he said.
Sister Mary smiled. “Sort of like spotting a great pied hornbill, isn’t it?”
Mr. Braids paused, then bent over and looked at Kylie. “Well, hi there, honey,” he said.
Kylie hid behind my leg.
“Don’t you remember your old pal Fly?” he said.
Fly?
“Heard you mention Avisha,” he said, as if having the name Fly was the most natural thing in the world. “That’d have to be the little girl who was here about a year ago. Kelly, wasn’t it?”
Kylie’s head pushed against my hamstring.
“You folks come on up to my place,” Fly said. “Petey there, the security guy, he insists that you be seeing somebody. Well that somebody’d be me. Fly Charles. Maybe I can help you out.”
53
FLY’S MOBILE HOME was paneled with faux pine and held old venetian blinds, a well used sofa, TV, and glass-topped coffee table with a Domino’s pizza box and two empty Corona bottles. On the wall over the sofa was a glass-encased electric bass. And next to that, framed, a gold record.
“Musician?” I said.
Fly grunted.
I went to the gold record for a closer look. “Detritus and the Electric Yaks?”
Fly grunted again.
Sister Mary said, “Oh wow! My dad had your album!”
“Thank you,” Fly said.
“I guess I never heard it,” I said. “Sorry.”
Fly shook his head. “The second one didn’t do so hot. Then we broke up. Old story.”
“Were you Detritus?”
“Not then. Now maybe.”
“You played bass?”
“Still do, man.”
“Like Flea?”
&n
bsp; “Don’t even say that name!” Fly erupted. “He stole that name! He took it from me, just like he took my style!”
“Flea took your style?”
“He was a punk kid, and I mean punk in the worst way, out of Fairfax High, when he came to me for a lesson, and I was messing around and slapping my bass, and the next thing you know . . .” His voice trailed off in disgust.
“Red Hot Chili Peppers,” I said.
“Don’t say that name either!”
“But the Electric Yaks,” I said, “you still had that album.”
“One song on that album. That was it! They called us a one-hit wonder, and once that happens, man, you can’t ever get back. You want a beer or something?”
“No thanks,” I said. “Sister Mary, you want a beer or something?”
She made a face at me.
“So how’s Kelly doin’?” Fly said. “Come on out, honey. You don’t have to be afraid of ol’ Fly.”
Kylie stayed close to me. I said, “Kylie is her name. Kylie. You knew her mother?”
“Oh yeah, sure.”
“And Avisha?”
“Yeah.”
“I’d like to talk to her,” I said. “Can you tell me where I can find her?”
“She’s in number 27, just down a couple. So where’s the mother? What was her name—Reanne, something like that?”
“Something like that.”
“Uh-huh. How’s she doing?”
I put my hand around Kylie’s shoulder. “She’s dead.”
Fly took off his sunglasses, which aged his face about ten years. His gray eyes were tired, his skin sallow. It was the Keith Richards look, the kind that could make Botox nervous. “Bummer,” he said.
“How well did you know Reatta?” I said.
“Reatta. That’s it. Yeah.”
“How well?”
“How well did you know her?”
“She was a client of mine,” I said. “I was her lawyer.”
“She had a lawyer?”
“It’s not like a rash,” I said.
“Most of the time,” Sister Mary said.
Fly said, “Maybe I should to talk to you, outside the hearing of . . .” He glanced at Kylie.
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