Terri kept thinking about the look on the face of that trainee, Chuck from Philly. Whatever it was he’d seen had clearly shattered him. She’d give the guy a month, tops, followed by twice as long on the Blue Dot. She kept returning to the riddle behind the expression. What had he seen? Her fascination was the fulcrum so many horror films should have used but seldom did: never show the scare. She imagined it would have to be something involving a child. She herself had witnessed some deep horrors on the job, accidents, burns, suicides, crooks crushed or impaled in the act of wrongdoing, shutins left to decompose or get eaten by their own starving pets. But nothing had ever stuck with her the way just a half-dozen child abuse cases had, images so circuit-trippingly terrible that they registered as comedy, several times actually eliciting belly laughs from her and other responding officers, although they lingered in eternal afterimages.
She slumped on the couch, drained, counting backward from twenty to will herself up and into bed. The rain came down harder now, lashing the windows, again leaving her with the impression that she’d crawled into an uninhabited culvert somewhere for the night. Terri involuntarily thought of the old house, the house she’d put so much of herself into and was now exiled from forever. She’d never set foot inside that house again.
She couldn’t bear the thought that every year, little by little, her memories of the house in South Pasadena were slipping away. Of course, the entire house was still there, in her old shades, which now sat uncharged in a box in the rafters of her aunt’s garage, getting frozen every winter. Maybe her aunt could ship the box back. Terri could take them to a service, get the footage scrubbed of Gabriella, so she could just look at the house again. But how could she ever bear to look at it again?
Pulling up the coverlet, she thought about falling asleep in that house while it was raining. She remembered listening to the drizzly aftermath of a storm from the back bedroom. There’d been an acoustic depth to the unlit enclosure behind the house, an unexpected complexity of sounds. She’d laid perfectly still, concentrating on the nearby rhythms of dripping eaves, beats and pats on the roofs, further gurgles from new furrows in regions normally thought of as flat, droplets falling from leaf to leaf, rendering one uniform region—the blank canvas of a dark backyard—in sudden, unexpected, exploded view. In her apartment now, there was only the rain, flat and unwavering.
On Thursday morning, Bottlecap was forty-five minutes late.
“Good,” Zack whispered when they finally saw him speed-walk toward the car, parked in a shaded red zone downtown. The kid read their faces before he got the door open.
“Wait. Let me explain.”
“He’s got two open warrants,” she said to Zack, as if it were still just the two of them in the car together. “And don’t get me started on that thing he did last summer. I’ve got a busy afternoon, so I vote we take him in now.”
“Last summer?” Bottlecap said, eyes wide, his mouth a tight little circle.
“Yeah, last summer, Tonto,” Zack said, winging it, seeing over Bottlecap’s head only two warrants for who-gives-a-shit assaults, both against gang members. “You really think we don’t know what you did?”
“Look, I had to get Johnny down here! That takes time,” he whined.
“Who the hell is ‘Johnny’?”
“Sanjiv. He owes me money. So I had to like, call someone and then have that someone call someone. But he’ll show. Just, he’s going to be in like a mask and shades, so you’ll need me to point him out.” It took Terri a moment to remember the name, Sanjiv Goswami, the kid who’d allegedly seen the shooter.
“When,” she said.
“Soon. Maybe … an hour.”
“How far away?”
“Four blocks from here.”
“You know we’re going to be watching your every move, right?”
“I know that.”
“And if you screw this up, if you try to run, if you deviate in any way, we’re going to sick a SWAT team on you,” she said. “I mean that literally. We will literally use precious city resources to apprehend you with a specialized paramilitary platoon of two five-man units. For that thing you did last summer.”
Bottlecap nodded with ridiculous eagerness, suddenly the best kid in the class.
“So go.” She watched him scurry out and across the street, tagging him for real-time surveillance.
“Why are these guys so suspiciously susceptible to bullshit?” she asked.
“Christ, I’m sick of negotiating with losers. Tricking losers for loser intel on loser corpses,” Zack said. “Why couldn’t a hot naked celebrity have stabbed another hot naked celebrity?”
“Uh-huh.” She was following Bottlecap’s progression around the corner.
“With a sharpened Oscar statue.”
“Yuh-huh.”
“Instead, we got the worst of both worlds.”
“What worlds?”
“Take that vice team, last night. Carlos and whatserface.”
“Trinh.”
“Yeah. So, okay, they’re not dealing with any glamour killings. Fine. But at least they’re down there in the real shit. If you’re going to deal with scum then, you know, do it. Get dirty. Don’t waste time with bums like this Farrukh guy.”
“Yup. Scums not bums,” she said, seeing that Bottlecap had slowed to a leisurely strut as soon as he’d cleared the corner. Did the kid really not understand that she was watching him?
“And then fucknuts like Babylon Johnson get Stacy Santos?” Zack continued. “Where’s the cosmic justice?”
“Probably a lot of pressure on Babs right about now. Think about that.”
“What pressure? You and I know who did it.”
“We do?”
“Yeah. Farrukh killed her.”
She whistled a high note. “Postmortem homicide. I’d never considered that angle.”
“I’m serious. Some other Farrukh out there got tired of collecting cans, hiked out to a nice neighborhood and cut this girl’s throat for kicks.”
“Open and shut.”
“This isn’t a goddamn joke. These guys are laughing at us, watching all of us spin our wheels.” He motioned toward two barefoot Indian men speed-walking down the sidewalk, a rigid stretcher hoisted across both sets of shoulders and piled high with food cartons.
“I don’t think any taco wallas are laughing at us.”
“You’re not even listening to me.”
“Yeah,” she said, not listening, always slightly entranced by these worker-ants of the city, ceaselessly performing the repetitive, anonymous functions of food transport.
The taco wallas had evolved from the dabbawallas, men who’d once delivered lunch throughout the offices of urban India. After the war, the system had reorganized itself in the new world with a fierce tenacity, offering two things Americans could not offer themselves; a tireless work ethic and superhuman punctuality. The taco walla system was vital to the new economy, hundreds of thousands of home or workstation employees being situated far from restaurants or food truck corridors. But where the walla profession had once served as the first shallow step toward upward mobility, it was now only a means for barebones survival. A glut of labor had boiled all the profession’s innovations and offerings down to one crucial variable: price. It was one more race to the bottom.
Lacking costumes, these men were known by their wares, cylindrical metal containers for home-cooked meals and the increasingly frequent box lunches from caterers. It was a network entirely outside the networks, using color-coded tins for routing, so that the meals could slip from courier to courier, regardless of literacy, never slowing the supply chain. The only other system that could approach the cruel efficiency of the taco wallas was automated, the amazing-that-it-actually-works glove-box packet-switching network of cars. “The awful freight of the world”: where had she heard this phrase?
“We’re probably gonna be cooped up in this car all day.”
“No one’s keeping you in this car,” she said. �
��Let’s walk a beat around the block. Maybe you’ll come across an Oscar stabbing.”
They exited into the sun. She trailed Zack as he instinctually followed Bottlecap’s path across the street, even as she kept the kid’s whereabouts active, seeing the pictogram pulse in the distance, visible through buildings. Approaching the curb, she saw with amusement that Zack faced a route choice. To their right was a convenience store, pitting his strong love of snacks against his deep-seated need to do everything clockwise.
They walked north, away from the store. Halfway down the block, they passed a pair of uniformed street cops she didn’t recognize. The officers had stopped two adolescent kids, both black and both seemingly bored. One kid’s T-shirt showed Arnold Schwarzenegger as the Terminator, with new wave glasses and a short, punky haircut, the words below this image reading COP KILLER. The second kid was taller, his shirt reading HIGH ON HATE. The street cops seemed more amused than anything else, pointing from one shirt to the other, presumably alerting any of their coworkers who might be watching. As they passed, Terri heard the bigger kid say, “It’s a restaurant, asshole,” with a surprisingly deep voice. She wondered who else was watching this disrespect unfold in real time. She thought of the stores down by the bus station that sold cop piñatas.
Even before the next intersection, they could smell the toilet tent. In Central Division alone, the city had built a dozen latrine shelters; sprawling, squalid enclosures under cheery sea-green-and-white-striped canopies, with separate-sex bathroom, washing, and bathing areas. She’d entered one only once, chasing a kid who’d set an animal control van on fire. The stench had hit her as something physical, like chemical warfare. The skyscrapers had hundreds upon hundreds of bathrooms, but it was nearly impossible to monitor or control which gang used those facilities as rewards or punishments. Although it was really the city that was being punished. The last mayor had even set up a toilet tent in City Hall park.
Turning the corner, the stench hit full-force. A young woman walked toward them, holding her long black hair over her nose, like an air filter. Terri took in the lengthy lines of men—women and girls being on the far side—some refugees, some homegrown homeless. The paved half lot next to the tent had become parking for every manner of human-powered conveyance. Three-wheelers, pedal cabs, Bodaboda bikes; all types of personal transport were represented. Or were they? She’d heard of human rickshaws operating in the maw of Watts, sinewy, desperate men essentially offering long-distance piggy-back rides in the street.
At least none of these people had to worry about toilet spies. All LAPD-facility toilets compiled personal health info from the leavings of their users, tallying gut flora and precancerous cell counts and blood anomalies. The information was pull and not push—revealed to officers only when asked for—but it was still unnerving. Bathrooms at LAPD workstations were among the cleanest in the city. No one ever used them.
“Hey, if you don’t want to chance it, here’s your chance,” she said. “No smart toilets in the TP teepee.”
They’d arrived back at the Oxxo, the same convenience store she’d seen from the car. Even at the far end of the block, the stench, or the sense-memory of the stench, slightly turned her stomach.
“All that walking, I deserve a treat,” Zack said. “Want anything?”
She shook her head as he continued into the store. Peering in the window, she saw all the sales notices were written in an odd and oddly popular font, with each letter composed of cartoon bones.
“Detective Pastuszka?”
She turned, ready to deliver another lecture on Proper Etiquette For Approaching A Cop, realizing instead that she faced Chandrika Chavan, the public representative of the Refugee Advocate Of Los Angeles. Chavan was around her age, plump but pretty, if one could somehow ignore the fat red scar that ran up the left side of her throat. The scar seemed perfectly positioned over an artery. On her sari, one large metal button read RECOGNIZE.
“Yes?” Terri had never spoken with Chavan, but the lady’s reputation loomed large.
“Detective, I’d like to know what you’re doing about the murder of Farrukh Jhadav.”
Her accent was unreadable. There were cops who claimed to be able to place older refugees within three sentences: Bengali, Gujrati, Punjabi, which group were mumblers, which group would give attitude, and who would come off as emotionally unreadable. But of course there were so many other variables to consider: who was Hindu, Muslim, Christian, or Sikh; who’d come from Mumbai, or Delhi, or the crushing sprawl of Uttar Pradesh; who was a former mogul, or middle-class, or semi-literate, or street flotsam; who belonged to what caste, and who still obeyed the phantom gravity of the castes; who had pollinated what convoluted political beefs from the doomed country, and which of those beefs were state-level, and which were national. The matrix of permutations was vast. Somewhere deep in PanOpt was a world-class learning program, complete with glossaries, charts, overlays, and dialect guides. She didn’t know a single cop who’d ever bothered to check it out.
“Now, you know I can’t comment on an ongoing investigation. So why even ask?”
“I’m asking because we’re very concerned that a thorough investigation be conducted. Do you know how many refugees were murdered in Los Angeles last year?”
Terri sighed, calculating that it was easier to see her way through this conversation than to dismiss it. “Not off the top of my head.”
“Three hundred and eighty-eight. Do you know how many cases were solved?”
“Again, not off the top of my head.”
“Twenty-two. These are people with families, communities …”
“Tell me something I don’t know, lady.”
Chavan had prepared for this, raising one finger in the universal gesture of lecturing. “Okay. Let me tell you a little about Farrukh. He got out of Kolkata two days before the war, made it onto an IACA boat convoy, wound up in Malaysia, then Darwin, finally ending up in the Santiago aid camp for six years. Six years with no word from his family, no home, no job. Eventually he meets his brother and three nieces, gets his gold card, tries to find work. But of course there aren’t jobs for forty million extra people in South America, and there are jobs in Mexico. So the five of them set out on foot to Toluca. That’s a three thousand-mile walk.”
“Yeah, how’d they get across the Panama canal? Doggy paddle?” Terri resisted the urge to point out that Farrukh had seen more of the world than she had.
“No, they sold one of the daughters for passage. The next-oldest died before they reached their campsite. He lived and worked there for eight years, mowing lawns, each year making a little less than the last because Guatemalans and Hondurans can work cheaper. Did you know Farrukh had a master’s degree in civil engineering?”
“Izzat a fact.”
“Eventually they get priced out, his brother dies of strep, Farrukh goes north with the last daughter. He got into LA four months ago.”
For a moment, Terri seriously considered letting slip that Farrukh also shot a gangbanger and pushed his body off a bridge. Instead, she said, “Despite what you may or may not think about the investigative abilities of the LAPD, let me assure you that I am doing everything possible to locate and then apprehend the killer or killers of Farrukh Jhadav.”
“Really. Because …”
“Yeah, really. I take this case as seriously as any other on my plate.”
“… because it would be a shame if someone were to get ahold of the comments you made at Angel’s Knoll yesterday. Something about ‘next time, don’t blow up your country.’”
“That would be a real shame,” Terri said, taking a half step into Chavan’s airspace. “Seeing as how it’d be a felony violation of state anti-wiretapping statutes.”
“It would be interesting to see what would happen if they ever tried to enforce that law. Look, I’m not trying to threaten anything …”
“Damn straight you’re not.”
“I want to offer my services.” Chavan held out a cream-
colored business card. “If there’s any way my office can help, just give us a call.”
Terri took this and decided not to say anything else, tucking it into a jacket pocket and turning abruptly, walking the twenty feet back to where Zack stood with his large soda, having watched the encounter go down with his mouth slightly open. He waited until Chavan had walked off, back toward the toilet tent.
“What the hell did she want?”
“What do you think? She knows we’re on the case and wants to know why it hasn’t been solved yet.”
“Why? Just because I stopped in here for a drink?”
“Yeah. That’s why.”
“Huh.” They watched Chavan stride off, one shoulder of her sari flapping in the toilet-tent stench. “Maybe she killed Farrukh,” Zack added.
They continued back to the car.
“Pssht,” he said. “‘R-A-L-A.’ They don’t even have the human … dignity to stick a plural in there. ‘Advocate.’ Like they’re the one and only.”
“Right.” She felt strangely drained.
“And does RALA do squat for Turkish refugees?”
“In LA? All three of them?”
“You know what I mean.”
An hour and a half later, Bottlecap finally called.
“I’m here in Pershing Square, near the …”
“I know,” she said. “I can see you, remember? Also, that’s a lot farther than four blocks.”
“Yeah, well, I had to call my boy Sup, on account of …”
“I don’t care. No one cares. Is Sanjiv there?”
“Yeah, he’s here. So, he’s wearing this kind of brown jacket with …”
“Tag him. Jesus. Just blip a tag on his head and flip it to me. We’ll do the rest.”
“Yeah, yeah. Okay, yeah …”
The car pulled out, Zack jolting up from a nap. At the park, they circled a few times, seeing Sanjiv Goswami in dark shades and a dust mask. She’d come up with a contingency act to get them close without raising suspicions, but on the second pass around the park, Sanjiv moved to cross the street at the same moment they passed, walking right up to the car without knowing what he was doing. All they had to do was slow down and pop the side door, Zack lunging out and grabbing the kid like it was a political kidnapping in some third-world country.
Exploded View Page 9