Little Dog Laughed

by Joseph Hansen

  The settlement of Mexican field hands was a mile beyond San Feliz itself. He crossed a canal bridge to a cluster of twenty scaly stucco shacks long ago painted bright pink, yellow, purple. The paint had flaked away in patches. Iron pipes with faucets stuck up out of the ground beside the doors of the shacks. The faucets dripped. Little brown kids played in the puddles, squatting, muddying their diapers—those that wore diapers. Chickens pecked in the dust. Flies buzzed. From the open windows of one shack drifted thin radio music—marimba, accordion, guitars. Somewhere, a goat bleated.

  A fat grandmother sat on a doorstep watching the children, her eyes milky with cataracts. A thin grandmother without teeth leaned in a doorway, bony arms crossed, staring out at the fields. One who might have been her sister sat on a broken kitchen chair under a dusty oleander heavy with pink flowers, and fanned herself with a tattered magazine. In the shade at the side of one shack, a skin-and-bones old man lay on a rusty tube-and-webbing lawn chaise beside a stack of gray, threadbare automobile tires. A cheap cotton blanket covered him to the chest. A Gatorade jar filled with water stood in dry weeds beside the cot. Back of the same house, a very pregnant young woman bent over a green plastic laundry basket, lifted wet clothes from it, pinned them to a sagging wire. Dave stopped the Jaguar, waited for the dust it had raised to settle, then got out of the car. The heat was stunning. He shed his jacket, laid it over the seatback, picked up the book Dan’l had given him the other morning, closed the car door, and went to talk to the girl.

  “My name is Brandstetter,” he said in Spanish, and held the book out. It was a collection of Adam Streeter’s newspaper and magazine pieces, including the one that had got him a Pulitzer Prize three years ago. Streeter’s picture was on the back. “I am an insurance investigator. This man”—he tapped the picture—“was insured by my company. He was killed, no one knows by whom. Shot with a gun. I am trying to trace his actions on that day. Did you ever see him here?”

  She tilted her head at Dave, a child’s red romper suit dripping in her hands. Her brown eyes looked wryly amused. “A famous man who wrote books? What would he be doing in a place like this?” She turned and pinned the romper suit to the clothes wire. “Who would come here who does not have to?”

  “He was a journalist, a reporter,” Dave said, and smiled slightly. “So he must have been looking for a story to write, don’t you think? Are there no stories to write in San Feliz?”

  Her laugh was dry and brief, the look in those large, luminous eyes a little scornful. “There are many stories—but not that would interest people like him, people like you We grow hungry and we eat.” With a soft grunt because of the child large in her belly, she bent to lift another bright garment from the basket. She was barefoot, and her feet were grimy. “We get up in the morning before it is light, and climb into trucks, and go to the field and work until it is dark, and come home tired. And we go to bed. Children are born, and old people die.” She turned from pinning the thin orange blouse to the line, and glanced along the side of the house to where the old man lay, eyes shut, but not asleep. In pain. “And when there are no more crops to gather, we move on. It is”—she sighed and wiped her chubby brown hands on her faded blue wrap-around skirt—“always the same, perhaps uninteresting, even to us. But it is life.” She laid a hand on her swollen belly and smiled down at it—not sentimentally, but thoughtfully. “It is our gift from God.”

  “How soon will your child be born?” Dave asked.

  “Soon.” She scrabbled clothespins out of a rumpled pink plastic sack in a corner of the basket, and dropped them into a pocket of the skirt. “That is the reason I am here, and not out in the fields today. But no—I do not know this writer of books. I never saw him.” Bending again over the green basket, she waved a hand. “You would do better to ask the old women. They have nothing to do but see who comes and goes.”

  “The old see only what is past,” Dave said. “What about the young man who was shot and his body put into the irrigation ditch? That was no ordinary happening. Did you know that boy? Did you know his name?”

  Fear showed in her eyes. She opened them wide for an instant and quickly shook her head. “No, no. I know nothing about that. No one here knew him. He was a stranger.”

  “Somebody fed him,” Dave said, “he slept somewhere.”

  “Sí. But not I.” Her hands moved nervously. “Not my family. We did not know him.”

  “Rafael,” Dave said. “Was that his name? I have it on a slip of paper written by Adam Streeter. I am told by the telephone company that Streeter talked to him down here.”

  She glanced around her, pale, searching the empty, sleepy settlement for a sign of anyone listening. Crows cawed in the distance. The goat bleated again. A child cried. The grandmother with the magazine had dropped it. She slept, chin on bony chest. “Sí, Rafael,” the young woman whispered. “Why did they kill him? Why did he try to hide here?”

  “From the death squad of El Coronel?”

  “From the immigration,” she said. “They do not want refugees from Los Inocentes in this country.”

  “But did you hear that it was El Coronel’s commandos who shot him?”

  She shrugged impatiently. “It is talk, nothing more.”

  “Were the people he stayed with”—Dave pushed his hair back, and his hand came away damp—“from Los Inocentes also?” The glare was harsh. He narrowed his eyes and looked around at the lonely buildings. “Where can I find them?”

  “They are no longer here.” Her motions, pinning up the clothes, had become quick, jerky. “They departed that night. Immigration thinks they are all communists. Please, señor, I must finish with these clothes. I must lie down, for the sake of my baby.” She glanced at the motionless old man again. “I must take my father his medication.”

  “Why is he not in a hospital?” Dave said.

  “They can do nothing. He is dying. He asked to die at home.” Her laugh was joyless. “This is the only home he has.”

  “Will you name the baby for him?” Dave said.

  “Sí,” she said, and smiled. “Victorio.”

  “That is a fine name,” Dave said, and went back to the car. He tossed the book inside, but before he got in after it, he looked at the frayed wires that hung limply from thin poles in a crooked row behind the shacks. Power lines. No one had a telephone out here. He tossed the jacket into the rear seat, sat behind the Jaguar’s leather-wrapped wheel, slammed the door, started the engine. The air from the dashboard jets blew on his sweat-soaked shirt. He swung the heavy car around and, careful to avoid children and chickens, headed back toward the bridge of rusty-bolted beams and planks across the irrigation ditch. There, on a pole beside the bridge, a helmet-shaped blue transparent plastic covering housed a telephone. He stopped the car, reached into the back for his jacket and the reading glasses tucked into it, got out of the car, and stepped to read the number on the pay phone above its rows of steely pushbuttons. This was the pay phone Ray had told him about this morning. Adam Streeter had rung this number not once but three times in the two days before his death. Dave put the glasses into his shirt pocket and stood on the bank looking down at the tall reeds growing in the murky water. Shadows lurked under the bridge, where Porfirio had brought his soap and towel that ugly night to have a bath.

  Dave started to turn back to the Jaguar and the wheels of a car rattled the planks of the bridge, and he looked that way. A brown and white cruiser came across the bridge. Its roof held a silvery siren housing and a row of blinker lights white, red, amber. A buggy-whip antenna waved at the rear of the car. A gold star was painted on the front door, along with the words County Sheriffs Dept. A hand waved to him from the window on the driver’s side. Dave stood and waited until the car braked beside him, its bumper against his bumper. The driver had a square red middle-aged face and wore a flat-brimmed hat with four dents molded into the crown. He turned off the cruiser’s engine, pushed the door handle, swung the door open, and climbed out. A young man sat on the pas
senger side, wearing suntans like his partner’s, same sort of hat, badge, gun, sunglasses. He stared ahead, indifferent. The older man’s smile didn’t mean anything.

  “Looks like you’re lost,” he said. “Away out of your bailiwick. I mean—we don’t get cars like that down here in redneck country.” His bloodshot blue eyes looked Dave up and down. “We don’t get people like you.” His gaze flickered away to the cluster of sad, gaily painted shacks. “Specially not out here. You’re the wrong color. And you weren’t born speaking Spanish. You want to explain your business here?”

  Dave showed his license. “I’m on a case for Banner Life. The death of Adam Streeter. At the marina in Los Angeles, a few nights back. He was shot in the head at close range. He was a journalist, working on a story about Los Inocentes. I’m wondering if there was a connection between his death and that of a young man from Los Inocentes shot the same way down here that same night. You solved that case yet?”

  “Nope.” The deputy watched Dave carefully, spoke carefully. “But that was a family fight. He was holed up with a man and wife from Los Inocentes—brother and sister-in-law, maybe. Nobody knew much about them. But they sure as hell got out of here fast when it happened. And we can’t locate them. Not so far. Probably never will. Probably home by now.”

  “Who says it was a family fight?” Dave asked.

  The man shrugged. “Educated guess. Nobody here knew any of them. Who else was there to fight with? It’s relatives do most of the killing in this world—not strangers.” Sweat darkened the sides of his starchily creased shirt. He took off his hat, mopped a bald head with a handkerchief, pushed the handkerchief back into his hip pocket. “Isn’t it farfetched to connect a murder up in L.A. to one way down here? Writing about Los Inocentes? Isn’t everybody, these days?”

  “I think he drove down here to get information from the boy.” Dave got the book from the car, showed the deputy Streeter’s picture. “You didn’t see him in this vicinity? Low-slung black sports car?” Dave jerked his head at the telephone. “He had this phone number. He’d completed calls to it three times.”

  “I never saw him.” The deputy passed the book back.

  “There’s more.” The jacket of the book was wet from the deputy’s hand. “A witness I talked to saw troops in combat fatigues and berets late that night near the house of Streeter’s assistant. So, when a witness turns up who says troops of that description came to this place and shot this young man, Rafael, and dumped him in the canal, it—” Dave looked into the deputy’s red, dumbfounded face. “You didn’t hear about that? No one said anything to you about El Coronel’s men coming and executing that boy? Right here where we’re standing?”

  “Oh, bullshit.” The deputy blustered, but he was faking. He looked sick. “That El Coronel stuff is a marijuana pipe dream. These are ignorant people, Mr. Bannerman, no schooling, primitive, childish. They tell stories like that to scare themselves.” He laughed. He stopped laughing. “How did you know his name? What was it—Rafael?”

  “It was written beside this telephone number on Streeter’s scratch pad. This witness told a friend of mine that he was right here under this bridge, taking a bath, when El Coronel’s death squad brought the kid in a Cherokee, gagged and bound, shot him, and dumped him in the canal. He saw the whole thing.”

  “Come on!” The youngster in the car showed some life at last. He scrambled out, and came around the car in long strides, scowling. “Why didn’t he tell me, then? I was here in this patrol car ten minutes after the thing happened, and nobody saw nothing. They was all inside, asleep, the way they told it. Who was this witness? Where do I find him?”

  “Nineteen twenty-two City View, Boyle Heights,” Dave said. “He didn’t speak up because he hasn’t any green card. He was afraid you’d turn him over to Immigration and he’d be deported. But he had to tell somebody. He’d seen my friend down here, a television reporter, asking questions, and he took a Greyhound up to L.A. and contacted him. El Coronel and his hired guns are sure as hell real enough to him.”

  The older deputy made a face. “Who is this witness?”

  “This TV reporter that tall black kid?” asked the young deputy. “Channel Three, L.A.? He sure can get in the way of police investigation. Give a jig a little education, and right away he starts walking all over everybody.”

  “Redneck country, did you say?” Dave asked the older man.

  He swelled up. “Just give me this witness’s name.”

  “He calls himself Porfirio,” Dave said.

  “That old drunk?” The boy deputy laughed and wagged his head. “Shit—you believe him? His brain is pickled in Coors, man. Passes out in the street. We didn’t pick him up and take him to jail, the trucks would run over him.”

  “You say he was taking a bath?” the older deputy asked. “Hell—Porfirio hasn’t taken a bath in ten years. Get downwind of him next time, you’ll see.” He turned for the car, plunked himself solidly inside, slammed the door. “You don’t want to believe everything you hear, Mr. Bannerman.” He started the car’s rattly engine. “Not when it’s Mexicans talking.” He scraped the gears. “And Porfirio does have a green card.” The deputy poked his head out the window and twisted it on its thick neck so he could pilot the car backward across the thumping planks of the bridge. “He must have the first one they ever printed. Porfirio?” He laughed as if it was the funniest thing he’d heard in a long time.

  12

  CITY VIEW WAS A street of little frame houses along a low ridge. Dave hadn’t been in this part of L.A. for thirty years, maybe longer, and he was shocked. He remembered it as poor but neat. Jews had lived here then. A generation of Jewish kids had grown up on these look-alike streets with their pinched look-alike houses. He knew some of those kids—Abe Greenglass, his lawyer, was one. They’d prospered and were living out their old age in handsome west side apartments or ranch houses on broad lawns in Van Nuys and Sherman Oaks. They remembered poverty, or thought they did. They didn’t. Boyle Heights had gone from ghetto to barrio. Now there was poverty—not the kind anyone would romanticize from the comfort of wealthy suburbs. Real poverty.

  The houses needed paint. Roofing had weathered through to the tar and the tar was faded gray by rain, sun, wind. Chimneys had lost bricks in earthquakes or from the simple shifting of the land under skimpy foundations. TV aerials had toppled. Broken windowpanes were mended with stained cardboard. Once grass had grown in the grudging front yards—now they were bare yellow hardpan. Old auto chassis on wheels stripped of tires gathered grime in short, steep driveways. Cars in not much better shape rusted at the curbs, their dusty windows glaring red in the sunset light. The porch of number nineteen twenty-two had pulled away some from the house and looked ready to slide downhill.

  Dave stood for a moment at the foot of the cracked cement steps and looked along the street both ways. A pair of men, one squat, one tall, stood at a far corner. Cowboy boots, crimp-brimmed straw hats. But no Cherokee, Blazer, Bronco with black glass and a pintle mount on the roof was anywhere in sight. Dave climbed the steps to a cracked cement footpath, went up the footpath, and halted to test the wooden front porch steps gingerly with a foot. They hung at an odd angle, askew, like a stroke victim’s mouth, but they didn’t creak or wobble, and he climbed them. The gap between the front wall of the house and the porch where it had pulled away and showed rusty spikes was maybe nine inches, maybe a foot. He reached across and used knuckles on the frame of a torn screen door. The solid door inside it stood open. Radio or television talk came out. In Spanish. The door was loose, and gave a satisfying rattle. He was heard.

  A woman came, small, her brown skin webbed with wrinkles, hair pulled tightly back and knotted, eyes black as basalt. She studied him, head turned a little aside, distrustful. He told her who he was, lying again about Banner Life, and said in Spanish that it was urgent that he talk to Porfirio. The young black to whom Porfirio had spoken about events in San Feliz was a mutual friend. The woman narrowed her eyes and said noth
ing. Dave said, “It is now known in San Feliz that Porfirio told the young black man the facts about an evil thing that happened there the other night.”

  “There is no one of that name here,” the woman said, and shook her head, her mouth a firm line of denial. But something made her look over her shoulder. There was no light in the house behind her, but Dave wondered if he didn’t see someone there, a boy or a small man, framed in a doorway. The woman began to swing the front door closed. “You have made a mistake. You have come to the wrong house.”

  Dave said loudly, “He could be in grave danger. I gave this address to the San Feliz sheriff. I think he may have warned El Coronel. His death squad could come here at any moment to kill Porfirio.”

  “Why?” Porfirio said this. He thrust the woman aside. The door swung back and banged a wall. He pushed the screen door open and glared with those strange pale blue eyes at Dave. His clothes were ragged, his gray hair uncombed, white stubble on his chin. “Why did you tell them this address?”

  “On the chance that they would contact El Coronel—and they did make an urgent telephone call from Ed’s Oasis only a few minutes after I talked to them. If El Coronel’s death squad killed young Rafael, I believe they will come here.”

  “You made me bait in a trap,” Porfirio said. He looked sick. “I should never have told. I knew that. But honor would not let me keep silent.” He grabbed Dave’s sleeve with hands that trembled. “And now I will die.” His breath reeked of beer. Tears leaked down the dirty furrows of his face. “How could you do such a thing to me? Have I ever harmed you? We are strangers.”

  “Get your clothes,” Dave said. “I will take you away from here. If they come, they will not find you. All I need is to know who they are for myself.” He turned the bony little man and gave him a light push. “Quickly, now. Waste no time.” The woman stood back watching, face impassive, lumpy body tense, hands clenched. Dave stepped into the house. It smelled of supper cooking—chilis, onions, pinto beans. Fine, dark, rich smells. His mouth watered. He hadn’t eaten all day. He took the woman’s hand, folded a fifty-dollar bill into it, and said, “I will send Porfirio away and come back. Should these gringos come, tell them you expect Porfirio at any moment. Keep them waiting until I return.”