by John Shannon
Praise for the novels of John Shannon
“Tough and engaging … Concrete River is my kind of L.A. novel—hard as nails with a soft spot in the middle.”
—Michael Connelly
“Shannon is a fine writer. Make no mistake, this is the real L.A., real people, some of them you cross the street to avoid, looking everywhere but at them. Take a walk with Jack Liffey, a brave and decent man.”
—Kent Anderson, author of Night Dogs
“A fine, interesting read.”
—James Crumley, author of Bordersnakes
“Like Graham Greene—and there are other admirable resemblances—he is an explorer of that shadowy area in which, as spurs to positive action, abstract idealism and personal psychology merge. The author has achieved one of the most stimulating of the form’s uncountable possibilities.” —Sunday Times (London)
“A serious adventure … [that] draws much of its strength from a clear presentation of social and political tensions.” —Times Literary Supplement (London)
“Fast and exciting action.”
—Daily Telegraph (London)
“The best L.A. earthquake scenes ever, the best private-detective-making-love-to-an-old-movie-star moments ever, the most-bearable private-detective-driving-a-beat-up-car scenes ever, the hands-down winner in the long-running ‘Where is the next Raymond Chandler coming from?’ sweepstakes—all these honors belong to … John Shannon.”
—Chicago Tribune
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REMEMBER THE ALIBI
THE POISON SKY
JOHN SHANNON
BERKLEY PRIME CRIME, NEW YORK
If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
THE POISON SKY
A Berkley Prime Crime Book / published by arrangement with the author
PRINTING HISTORY
Berkley Prime Crime mass-market edition / April 2000
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2000 by John Shannon.
This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission. For information address: The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
The Penguin Putnam Inc. World Wide Web site address is
http://www.penguinputnam.com
ISBN: 0-425-17424-7
Berkley Prime Crime Books are published
by The Berkley Publishing Group,
a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
The name BERKLEY PRIME CRIME and the BERKLEY PRIME CRIME design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Putnam Inc.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Bob Coe
Thanks to Robert Stone for the crows on page 189, and to David MacDougall for the lard.
“He would not satirize them as Hogarth or Daumier might, nor would he pity them. He would paint their fury with respect, appreciating its awful, anarchic power and aware that they had it in them to destroy civilization.”
—NATHANAEL WEST
Contents
1
A HEROIC DIMENSION
2
THE HOLY BOY ROAD
3
TOO MUCH BELIEF
4
IF YOU LIVED HERE, YOU’D BE HOME NOW
5
ROOM 101
6
THE PASSIONATE LIFE
7
FULL COMBAT GRAMMAR
8
BEHOLD A PALE HORSE
9
PEOPLE WANT MAGIC
10
THE WARRIOR CLASS
11
CHANGING ONE TIRE AT A TIME
12
STAYING ABSOLUTELY EVEN
13
BLOOD WILL TELL
14
IF A FLAME DOUBTED, IT WOULD GO OUT
15
SEND THE GUNSELS PACKING
16
DEEP INSIDE HIS PROMISE
17
ALL DEATH IS LOCAL
18
PROUD OF HIMSELF
Epilogue
THE RATTLE OF MORTALITY
1
A HEROIC DIMENSION
THE SOURCE OF THE STOP–AND–GO SEEMED TO BE A BIG dead Guernsey bull that lay against the center divider with a flash red Mercedes accordioned up against it like a matador who’d gone a little crazy. Neither looked like they were going to make it to any more bullfights, and he wondered what on earth the animal had been doing on the northbound 405 just short of Mulholland Drive.
He was anxious to get past the jam-up because the woman on the phone that morning had mentioned a missing boy and offered actual, spendable money, which he needed pretty bad. His child support was still touch and go, and Kathy was threatening to cut off his visits for good. It ate at something elemental in you when you failed a daughter.
His old car coughed a couple of times as it fought its way past the bull and then over the crest of the Sepulveda Pass. Down below he could see a thin blue smoke settled around the taller buildings like the fumes off battery acid. G
o Directly to the Valley, he thought—the Big Penalty in a faddish board game of the 1970s called Beverly Hills that had been loosely based on Monopoly. This summer morning, however, he could still make out the hills across the San Fernando Valley at Sylmar, and that made it a very good day in the Valley.
Then he saw the real root of the problem: an immense cattle truck was stove in and sideways across three lanes, delaying the Big Penalty for all the northbound traffic. As he inched up to the truck, there was a terrible bellowing and a sudden ripple of the latticed metal siding.
Sometimes you just had to look away. Instead of thinking about the suffering animal inside, he entertained a fantasy of himself as Philip Marlowe in a sweat-stained homburg, driving his ’38 Dodge over this very spot on the old Sepulveda Highway to answer a summons from some rich old man who spent his afternoons in a greenhouse behind a broad smooth lawn. He’d be asked to hunt down a wayward daughter, or take care of her gambling debts, and the butler would give him a check for a retainer. Jack Liffey had only had a client like that once. Usually his clients lived in stucco boxes, welshed on his fees, and the lawns ran to crabgrass.
Before long the traffic picked up and he barreled down to Victory and off into Van Nuys. The house was easy to find on a small cross street improbably named Sultanate Avenue. It was the damnedest-looking tract house he’d seen in a long time. The scalloped eaves of a gable extended across the stucco face of the house and then dipped some more, so it blocked half the entry alcove, just at waist level. It forced you to sashay to one side coming up the walk and a fridge would have had to go in the back door. There was simply no limit to the ludicrous things they had built in the early sixties.
A washing machine was running somewhere inside. Since it was ten in the morning he didn’t expect a man, but a man answered. He was mid-fortyish, wore a black polo neck, and had tidy swept-back graying hair. A pipe was clenched in his teeth like an icon of fifties conventionality, and he carried a large paperback book.
“Mardesich?” Jack Liffey inquired.
The man frowned and rescued the pipe from his teeth but didn’t seem inclined to answer.
“I’m Jack Liffey.”
“Faye,” the man hollered over his shoulder. “This whole situation is absolutely too reductive for me.” He reverted to a kind of musing drawl, as if speaking to the pipe in his fist. “The boy … I just can’t bear irreversible actions. Oh, come in, come in. I’m sure that’s closer to the form of discourse you expected.”
“On most of the inhabited planets,” Jack Liffey said softly as the man walked away.
It took him a moment to figure out what he was looking at in the room, and then he still wasn’t sure. He’d grown used to swimming against a certain current of the unusual in his life, but just now he was having a little trouble touching bottom. There were big white Xs marked out on the carpet with tape of some kind, and scattered randomly through the rest of the room there were two coat trees, a metal Christmas tree stand, an upended milk crate, two wastebaskets, an upright vacuum, and a chest-high stack of books. It reminded him of a classroom he’d been in once where a naval historian had tried to mark out the Battle of Jutland. The man with the pipe had sidestepped away through the markers on a languid broken field run. There was also a heavy exhalation of Lysol in the air, as if someone had just made a stab at covering over something worse.
In a moment a heavyset woman hove into sight from a different direction.
“Mrs. Mardesich?”
She nodded gravely and waved the notebook she was carrying. “You Jack Liffey?”
“Uh-huh.”
She glanced back thoughtfully the way the man had gone and then seemed to make a decision. “Let’s go to Emily’s. I’ll buy you a cup of coffee. Can you drive?”
He felt like saying he’d been driving since he was sixteen, but he let it lie.
“C’mon. The world all makes sense, I promise.” She put a confident hand on his shoulder and squeezed in a mannish way, like a football coach reassuring the new placekicker. “Call me Faye. This place must seem bughouse looking down from the outside.”
“I try not to look down on people,” he said.
“Well said, Jack. Can I call you Jack?”
“Oh, hell yes.” He decided to go with the flow.
She laughed and gave him a one-arm hug. Out front, she squinted a bit at his beat-up ’79 Concord as the passenger door fought against her tugs. “I see we’re flush with success,” she said.
“My Rolls is in the shop.”
“Don’t worry; if I’d wanted a big Beverly Hills detective, I’d have called one.”
Jack Liffey wasn’t even sure there were such things as big Beverly Hills detectives. He wasn’t even a detective in any strict sense. He had blundered into his calling as a finder of missing children after his aerospace job had evaporated at the end of the 1980s. Finding missing kids didn’t pay all that well, as callings go, but it was a genuine service to the world and it was better than frying hamburgers.
“Someone recommended you highly.”
“Who’s that?”
“I’d rather not say right yet.”
Emily’s was a busy coffee shop with garish blue-and-red plastic seats and a permanent aroma of chicken fat. He really only liked the darkest French roast he could get, but he let her order him a coffee and declined anything else. For herself, she ordered a Spanish omelette and Emily’s West Virginia muffins with red-eye gravy.
She had addressed the airy diminutive waitress as Tinker Bell, and he couldn’t figure out whether it was an endearment or an insult. Faye Mardesich seemed the kind of woman who would make up pet names for lots of things and make them stick.
“Our household must look pretty dysfunctional to you.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
She stopped playing with the little stand-up plastic ad for strawberry waffles. “Milo lost his job at Lockheed five years ago. He was internally famous as the guy who’d designed the struts on the front landing gear of the L-1011. They were revolutionary and saved Lockheed a lot of money. All he knew in life was mechanical engineering. He went to the headhunters and the agencies and I helped him send out over two hundred resumes. Mostly they didn’t even have the courtesy to reply. He got a couple of temp jobs with the old subcontractors he knew, but nobody’s hiring aerospace full-time, not around here. When it became pretty clear that the job blight wasn’t temporary, he started taking it hard. It affected all of us. He’d been making the high seventies and now he felt like a bum. He drank and didn’t come back some nights. He started yelling at Jimmy and he’d never even raised his voice to the boy before. Mostly he just withdrew. That was up to about a year ago, but, you know …” She considered a moment. “I think I preferred then, with all the melancholy introspection.”
She ran down and he decided to let her go at her own pace. His eyes strayed to a haggard-looking woman who was making her way from table to table. She wore a green bandanna over her hair and carried a bundle in her arms. She seemed to be showing a card at each booth and he guessed it said something like I Am Deaf Please Help.
“I think I get the back story,” Jack Liffey said finally, to save her the trouble. “I was a tiny morsel of the peace dividend myself. But why did you prefer the period with the melancholy introspection?”
She decided to carry on not answering for a while but it didn’t make her uncomfortable. She was one of those people who always seem to be at ease with themselves, even when they fidget. It made him think she’d had a happy childhood in a big family.
Tinker Bell brought the food, curtsying as some kind of private joke, and Faye Mardesich tucked in hard. He sipped at the atrocious coffee that tasted like they’d melted plastic toys in the pot. Once she’d taken the edge off her prodigious hunger, she slowed down and waved a fork in the air as if beating time.
“Okay, I’m over the hump here. Milo’s gone into a manic phase and it’s like living with a Martian. He’s teaching himself French critical the
ory.” She laughed scornfully and shook her head. “He talks about structural change and reading texts and, oh yeah, ruptures in the historical process. I keep wondering if somebody makes trusses for history.
She chuckled at her own joke. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m not rejecting the intellect. It just doesn’t make any sense in his life. It all started after he got a job as a night security guard, which seemed to put him out of kilter with the rest of the world. He’s an engineer at heart, for God’s sake, not a critical theorist. He loved engineering.” She toyed with another shovelful of the omelette but seemed to have lost interest.
“He used to talk with real enthusiasm about how much he liked being challenged to take some practical device and make it work and bringing all his knowledge of science and materials and leverage to bear on the problem and conquering it. And now he’s reading French philosophers in his guard shack and writing essays on the autonomy of the critic and sending them out over the Internet. I’m all in favor of people trying to reinvent themselves, but this is a pathology.”
She torqued herself around to scratch her back the way a man would, and the effort yanked open her blouse for a moment to show a black lace bra just barely containing an ample breast. She laughed at herself and buttoned up in a matter-of-fact way.
“I am a mess. I haven’t even talked about Jimmy yet. Milo is just the context for the problem—” She waggled her eyebrows for an instant. “I’m beginning to sound like Milo. Let’s set the problematic here,” she said with a derisive flex of her lips. “Our son’s run away from home. Jimmy is seventeen and I can’t blame him for getting fed up, but he’s not really seventeen, if you know what I mean. He’s, maybe, twelve. He’s so sweet it’s eerie, he’s unfailingly polite and helpful. He doesn’t have a mean or rebellious bone in his body. Jimmy’s just a big vulnerable kindly kid, trying to hang on to his merit badges, and anybody with an ounce of hurt in him out there can make a meal of the boy.”
“When did he go?”
“Two weeks ago.”
“You reported him missing?”