by Rex Burns
“Are they a satanic cult?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. I haven’t heard that they are, so I put them in our occult section.” Teeth glimmered again. “Prices are marked on the covers. And club members get a twenty-percent markdown.”
The Pony Club was a place for homosexuals to see and be seen. The clients were mostly men, many young Hispanics. In the dimly lit room with its rough wood siding and barnlike decor, a few tables collected small groups of women. They held hands and rubbed each other’s backs while they talked aggressively against the clatter of male voices. Some of the men eyed me suspiciously. Others rogueishly. I put my foot on the rail and waited for the bartender to work his way down the crowd. The sign indicating restrooms had an additional sign underneath: “One at a Time.” Near the cash register, glittering in the faintly blue fluorescence of bar light, the trophy of a cowboy riding a bucking horse bore a hand-inked card: “World’s Best Bare Back Rider Award.” Along the bar, collection glasses with various wads of bills solicited for the AIDS Assistance Fund.
“Help you, sir?”
The youthful bartender, like most of the other males, wore a mustache and tight jeans.
“Has Dwayne Vengley been in lately?”
He hesitated, then asked a trifle too loud, “Are you a policeman?”
The men sidling up on each side quickly moved away. “No. He’s a friend of mine.”
“Oh.” Suspicion narrowed the bartender’s eyes. If I wasn’t a cop, I was an older fag looking for his young lover who had probably gone on to someone else. Either way, I was trouble. “I really haven’t seen him in a long time. At least a month. You might ask a bartender on another shift …” He raised shaped eyebrows. “Want to order a drink?”
“Maybe next time.”
I stepped out into the quiet street with a feeling of relief. Willy Davis might have been comfortable with his homosexuality. But the restless hunger I saw in the eyes and gestures of those in the Pony Club depressed me. Like any singles bar, homo or hetero, the smiles were too wide, the laughter too strident, the saucy hints too desperate.
CHAPTER 26
THE DEPRESSION STAYED with me back across the bridge and down the Strand. Deepened, perhaps, by my worry about Karen. When I reached home, I dialed her number, counting the rings until Chuck answered.
“No, we haven’t heard a thing, Jack. A detective called and gave us his private number in case we needed it. He thought your idea of hiring a private detective was a good one. In fact, he gave us a couple names and I’ll call first thing in the morning. Do you have anything new?”
“Nothing. I talked to a detective up there—Lewis. He said the police would provide drive-bys, but that’s about all they could do.”
“Yeah. He told us.” Chuck’s voice pulled away from the telephone and then came back. “Karen’s more angry than upset now. But of course we’re both worried.”
“You’d be foolish not to worry.”
“Yes. Karen wants to know if you reached Rebecca.”
“I did. She’s well and happy. I think if they went after anyone, it would be you first—you’re closer.”
“All right; I’ll keep that in mind. Karen’s here—she wants to say hello.”
She and I spent a few moments trying to talk each other into feeling better. Her message was clear: she wanted me to know they were holding up. It was the kind of quiet courage I’d seen in a lot of service families. They were the ones who faced directly the nation’s eruptions of war, terrorism, or other “military options”; and they also bore the accidents and deaths claimed by the dangerous practice of rehearsing for war. I suppose a lot of nonmilitary families have the same courage, but I can only speak for what I know. And I knew, too, that Karen was her mother’s daughter.
The call came about an hour later. I’d finished a shower and was listening to the ten o’clock news while puttering around, checking the commissary for the groceries and household items I’d have to restock soon.
“Mr. Jack Steele?”
The voice was unfamiliar. But as soon as I heard it, I knew.
“Yes.”
“This is Dwayne Vengley. I understand you’re looking for me.”
“Where can we meet?”
“I haven’t said that we could, yet. What is it you want to talk about?”
“Dori Wilcox, to start with. Why it would be good if you convinced her to come home.”
“Me? Dori’s a big girl, Mr. Steele. She can do what she wants to.”
“She says she’s staying in the Temple because you’re going to join her and the baby there. That you’ve left Satanism.”
“Well, there you are. What more to talk about?”
“About why you will tell her that you haven’t left the Kabbal. About why you will tell her to come home.”
“Care to amplify on that?”
“When we meet.”
The line was silent. Then, “All right—neutral ground. You know the Coronado Ferry?”
“Yes.”
“Catch the eleven-thirty. I’ll meet you at the landing on the San Diego side.”
The new San Diego-Coronado ferry was a mere ghost of the large boats that used to link the island with lower downtown. It was now against the law for an operator to run car ferries—the bridge had to be paid for. But plenty of foot passengers used the new one. Most were tourists or workers who could walk to their offices or grab easy public transportation from quayside. It left San Diego on the hour, Coronado on the half hour. A new park-like shopping mall of small shops and restaurants had replaced the light industry and junk waterfront that had been. Somewhere around the gift shop where I bought my ticket, I had labored all one summer rebuilding a ’39 Ford into a version of a sports car. The finished product had been pretty bad. I learned a lot—mostly that I shouldn’t have tried. But the car ran well enough to get me up to Stanford, through the school year, and into an oak tree one slightly fuzzy afternoon on a fast run back from Rizzotti’s Beer Garden. But the landmarks that would give me the exact location of that summer’s labor were gone, for better or worse, like a lot of other things.
I joined a crowd of tired tourists queuing up on the ill-lit pier. They wore an assortment of T-shirts with neon messages and they lugged drooping, fussy children onto the ferry, which looked like a modified tug. With a shudder of engines and a thrash of foam, it started back across the black water.
I found a breezy seat at the bow. In high school one summer, I’d spent a lot of time this way on the old ferry. At four-thirty every morning, I’d cross to pick up the San Diego Union and run it around the island to the route carriers. Even the cold, late-night air and low-tide smell were familiar. Musty, rank. Almost stagnant salt water mixing with drying algae and seaweed. The smell also brought back nights spent drinking beer and telling jokes with Tom and the rest. And staring across the harbor at those lights to see an occasional boat glide past or the silhouette of a porpoise fin cruising just offshore.
Tommy. And Roger—now dead of cancer, rest his soul. He had been a fine young man and I was sure he’d turned into a fine grown man as well. I regretted not having kept in touch with him. Those were the memories that, after the frittering away of all the other things that seemed to fill the days, made up an individual’s history and past and home. The kind of past that no one would ever know except those I shared it with. No others could share it. My children had their own memories, and to them mine were just words. I remembered my mother telling me about her trips to Point Loma with her mother, before World War II. They drove out on Fridays in a new ’36 Chevy to search the horizon for the black smudge of coal smoke that told them the fleet was coming back to port. In telling me, she had tried to include the detail that her young girl’s eyes had seen: the pale yellow cactus flowers that sprinkled the dry gullies running down the ridge’s spine. The tears stung from her eyes as they faced the icy sea wind. The excitement of knowing Daddy—my grandfather—would be home soon. And the warmth of standing next to Momma i
n her heavy coat as they stared. But even her detailed re-creation of it couldn’t bring it alive for me. My reliving of my own memories for my girls would never bring them alive for them. The real life—the only life those events had—was in the actual living of them. And that living was trapped forever in each single, atomistic memory. And god damn anyone who, out of their own selfishness and arrogance, corrupted the lives of other human beings and embedded their memories not with joy but with horror. Especially children.
The ferry gave a honk and reversed engines as it drew under the high wharf of Harbor Street. At the navy pier, a missile ship was moored. A sludge barge pumped its bowels clean, and the glow of its open hatches showed the white clutter of shipboard life. The only people were the shadows of the watch at the dark quarterdeck; most of the crew would be on liberty while the ship was serviced. Across the way, the berth for the cruise boat was empty. The brightly lit dining and dancing vessel was somewhere down the harbor on its nightly tour. Searching the almost empty wharf, I held back to let the eager passengers step from the bobbing rail to the float and clatter up the gangplank to the wharf above. Then I joined the final stragglers.
This late on a weeknight, Harbor Drive was almost empty. A few cars sat with lights on in front of the neon of Anthony’s Fish Grotto waiting to pick up diners. Across the divided street, empty parking meters formed rows of iron pickets. A few cars swung from Harbor up Broadway toward the center of town. The crowd from the ferry dispersed, hurrying for cars or the last trolley that waited a few more moments and then pulled away. With their disappearance, the darkness seemed heavier. The restless water around the pilings made a faint sucking sound as the tide ran in. My ears and eyes strained to catch any movement as I stood by the empty gangplank and waited. It was a good place for an ambush.
Finally, a tall figure stepped from behind an ill-lit cluster of oleander and palm trees. It walked slowly toward me.
“Mr. Steele?”
“Dwayne Vengley?”
Neither of us offered to shake hands. Instead, we studied each other for a long moment. Vengley was an inch or so taller than I. His pale-blond hair curled down his nape and in front of his ears. His rounded chin thrust aggressively beneath a straight nose and he stared at me with eyes set deep under a prominent ledge of eyebrows.
“This way.”
He jerked his head in command. I followed him back toward the darkness that pooled around the foot of the navy pier. Vengley found a concrete bench and sat. Beyond him, toward the end of the pier, the lights of the missile ship lifted above the sharp crease of its bow. Except for the shrubbery, the area was empty of places for people to hide. It was a broad stretch of wooden dock that ran between the cutter and the towering flanks of a dark troop ship moored at the next pier. I could make out her name glimmering in the dark: the Daniel I. Sultan. One of my uncles had sailed on her to Europe in World War II; I had spent forty-five glorious days on her, crossing to Okinawa from this very port. God only knew what generation of cockroaches sailed aboard her now.
“Well?” Vengley’s voice was a soft drawl.
“All I wanted was to find Dorcas.”
“And you found her, right?”
“Among other things.”
The young man’s body leaned forward. “What’s that mean?”
“Why did you kill Shelley?”
“That’s a stupid question, Mr. Steele. Are you a stupid man?”
“And why threaten my daughter?”
After a long moment, a smile tightened Vengley’s lips. “I don’t know about any threats. Still, if it was my daughter, I’d be very, very worried. In fact, I’d feel grateful that someone cared enough to warn me.”
“Funny me. I’m not. I’m just curious to know what you’re hiding. And ornery enough to get pissed when somebody threatens me or mine.”
“What do you mean, ‘what we’re hiding’?”
“You overreacted, Vengley. When I was looking for Dorcas. The question is why. The answer is you’re hiding something.”
He was silent a moment. “Look, Steele, I don’t know what in the hell you’re talking about. You said you had something to tell me that would convince me to send Dori home. So tell me.”
“That’s the price for me to quit digging. And for me not to go to the police with what I know now. That, and no more threats against my daughters.”
“Let me get this straight: I tell Dori to go home, you back off. That it?”
“That and no more threats.”
Vengley stood and dusted off the seat of his pants. “You think I’ve got something to be afraid of if you don’t back off?”
“Somebody killed Shelley Aguirre. Somebody killed David Gates. Somebody talked Jerry Hawley into killing himself.”
The shape stared my way through the dimness. “That’s what you believe.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I’ll think this over, Mr. Steele.” He glanced down the dock. “Now you better hurry or you’ll miss the last ferry back.”
The ferry was almost empty. Only a few stragglers like myself rode back to Coronado at this hour. I watched the city lights pull away and wondered if that little charade had accomplished anything.
Vengley was a handsome youth, and those deep-set eyes under a tall forehead gave his gaze a charismatic intensity. I could understand Dorcas’s fascination with him, if she only looked at the surface. Or if she believed she was saving his soul. And he seemed used to giving commands, expecting obedience. He would be the kind of personality that could sway weaker ones, the kind they might even be attracted to in order to share his strength. But beneath all the arrogant self-consciousness had been a faint tremor of concern.
He had come to find out something—there was no reason for him to get in touch with me otherwise. The young man seemed intelligent. Bright enough, anyway, to know that if I had any real evidence concerning the dead, I wouldn’t offer to step away. Something I was doing was worrying him enough to make him threaten, and then meet with me.
By the time the boat docked, the cluster of harborside shops had closed for the night. Their display windows glowed white in the increasingly misty air. A giggling man and woman sprinted past me down the dock for the last ferry to San Diego. I turned toward the small, unlit parking lot and my car. My shoes scuffed in the gravel and echoed against the closed walls. In the distance, a car raced its engine and squealed a stretch of rubber on the pavement. Then the island was quiet. As I bent to unlock the door, a darting movement reflected in the window.
Turning, I bent low to guard against whatever it was.
Two men, masked by stockings pulled down to twist their features, lunged for me. One swung a short pipe before him. The other, a step or two back, circled to get behind me. The pipe chopped toward my head and I caught the metal bar on my crossed forearms. Its thudding blow numbed my hands but I twisted hard against the grip of the man’s thumb. Behind me, the other man rushed in to wrap an arm around my neck and pull back. He tried to pull me down and I wrenched the pipe out of the clutching hands and jabbed backwards with it. It jammed solidly against something that mashed and jerked and grunted a curse. The arm dropped from my throat and, spinning, I snapped a side kick at the first man’s knee. It hit and drove him far enough away so I could get my car at my back. The two hesitated, then they dove forward. One came high, the other low. I parried one set of snagging fingers with the pipe. The other tangled in my legs and twisted, pulling me over despite my elbow thudding repeatedly at the back of the man’s head. A stunning, glare-splintering blow caught me somewhere on the side of my skull and I felt myself going down. Another fist dug into my ribs. Elbows flailing, I tried to hit what I could, but the sting of gravel and dirt mashed against my face and a heavy shoe caught my stomach, emptying my lungs and doubling me as much in pain as self-defense.
I tried to get to my feet but another fist clubbed the back of my neck and jarred my spine with numb tingles.
“You fucker!” Another kick. “You want to poke
around? You want to stick your goddamned nose where it don’t belong?” The questions were punctuated with kicks. “You keep the hell away—you want your goddamned kids to live, you keep the hell out of our fucking business!” A final kick aimed at my head. It bounced off my hunched shoulder, and the sound of feet ran into silence. I heard the slam of doors and a moment later the yelp of tires as a car made a sharp turn for the bridge.
I lay still to let my body tell me if anything were broken. Nothing seemed to be. But I’d have to move to know for sure. Gingerly, I crawled from under the side of the car. Using the fender, I levered myself to my feet. The twinge of bruised flesh snagged in my back and I felt the burning throb of scrapes on my arm and cheek. But it was my ribs that worried me. Every breath brought a stitch of pain that could be a bad bruise or, worse, a break.
Clumsily, I lowered myself behind the wheel and slowly drove toward the main gate at the North Island air base.
The corpsman joked about drunken sailors getting rolled. Holding up a wet sheet of X-ray film, he pinned it against the glow of the viewing light for the doctor to study in the morning. Watching from the examining table, I asked what he saw.
“I’m not a radiologist, but I don’t see any obvious breaks, sir. I’ll tape you up. Either way, you ought to be taped up. A doctor’ll look at the X-rays tomorrow morning. You can call the main desk and they’ll tell you if anything’s broken.”
The pain of breathing had lessened considerably. I didn’t think there was a break either. The corpsman washed out the scrapes and bandaged what needed bandaging, then he started rummaging for pills.
“What’d the other guy look like?”
“Not as bad. There were two.”
“Well, Colonel, you’re lucky. At least they didn’t use knives. Or razors. We see our share of that every Saturday night.”
He handed me a small bottle of white pills that I recognized as the navy’s cure-all: APCs. “If you have persistent headaches or blurry vision, or if you notice infection, see a doctor as soon as possible.”