by David Pierce
Hear the Wind
Blow, Dear
David M. Pierce
Copyright © 2014, David M. Pierce
For Aneta
I invented many things herein –
including all of the people – but not
Los Angeles or the San Fernando
Valley. It is not known who
invented them.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER ONE
Bitten by a llama.
It wasn't fair.
Things were going to be different. After all, it was a new year – 1985.
I was upwardly mobile. I had just talked my landlady into replacing all the carpets in our apartment. I had a new air-conditioning unit in my office that only made as much noise as Niagara Falls during the spring floods. Yet, undeniably, there I was, being bitten by a llama, a mother llama.
I made a noise of some kind. One might call it a scream. The young girl next to me who was holding the mother llama's smelly baby also made a noise, a sort of choking in the throat, the type of strangled sound unfeeling women make when they are unsuccessfully trying to stifle laughter. I gave her a bitter glance.
'I'm real sorry,' she said. 'Woolly's never bitten anyone before.'
'And I have never been bitten by a woolly before,' I said. 'Maybe between us Woolly and I have broken new frontiers. Perhaps I should get off a telegram to the Guinness Book of Records immediately.' This time the thoughtless adolescent laughed out loud.
'Here, I'll take her,' she said.
'Better late than never,' I said. The girl took Woolly's halter from me and led the animals off toward their stall while I inspected my llama-bitten arm, my pitching arm, too. I must admit that the skin wasn't broken, just gnawed a bit, thank God, because who knows what loathsome diseases llamas carry in their receding gums, elephantiasis is probably the good news, but still, it did hurt.
I stepped outside of the roofed area into the paddock or whatever the yokels call it. It was a typical January day in Southern California, temperature in the middle sixties, breezy, with a chance of rain. I was in the animal enclosure at Wonderland Park, which is an entertainment complex mainly for children about twenty-eight miles north-east of Los Angeles, off the old Interstate 8. The park was approximately one third man-eating animals and two thirds mock Tudor Village. One of its more famous features was a large waterfall, under which, when I'd arrived about a half hour earlier, I'd seen a hapless actor soaked to the skin attempting to get out his lines for some cut-rate commercial, no doubt non-union, they were shooting. Actors – didn't someone once call them poor, benighted heathens? More than likely someone married to one.
I was in the animal enclosure in the first place because of a phone call I'd gotten at the office late that morning from Woolly's keeper, the lady with the perverse sense of humor, as if there were any other kind. She wanted to know if I knew someone called Emile Douglas. I thought for a moment, then admitted I did. Emile Douglas had a run-down orchard and an assortment of goats, sheep and dogs out near Magic Mountain, one of Wonderland Park's rivals, and he spent most of his time talking to God.
'But don't think I'm nuts,' he'd say. 'If I ever hear God talking back, that'll be nuts.' I'd helped him out once and in gratitude he let me use a gulch down by his creek as a shooting range. I suppose I got in some practice out there once every six weeks or so.
It turned out that Woolly's babysitter, name of Olivia Elliot, recent graduate in veterinary medicine from the University of Cal-Davis, knew Emile as well. Wonderland Park, through her, bought the occasional goat from him, she told me. And she had found out from him that I was the type of investigator whose rates were somewhere between reasonable and laughable. And she sort of needed an investigator, she said.
'What do you sort of need investigating?' I asked her over my almost-new red touchdial phone.
'It sounds real silly, I know,' she said, 'but someone's been stealing my sheep.'
'I'd look for the nearest cattle rancher if I was you, marm,' I said. 'You know how they feel about them low-down, grass-eatin', smelly critters.'
She sighed. 'I told you it'd sound silly. Listen. I run one of the animal enclosures at Wonderland Park. I'm responsible for, right now, forty-two Suffolks, six Jacobs, a herd of twenty-three goats, two llamas and a Holstein calf. I should be responsible for forty-seven Suffolks. Forty-two from forty-seven leaves five. Whether you think it's funny or not, I'm missing five sheep.'
'Who's your head of security out there?' I asked her.
'Mr Gould,' she said.
'Why don't you go to him?'
'First of all because he broke his leg on the Monster, second of all because he's in the hospital, and third of all if I did he'd probably have a fit and then fire me, if he didn't get me arrested. They've had so many problems here over the years with having stuff stolen, mainly by part-time staff, that now we gotta make good any losses in our departments, or else.'
'OK, I'll take your word for it,' I said. 'By the way, what is the Monster?'
'Are you kidding?' she said. 'It's only the world's second-largest roller coaster. It does two full upside-down circles.'
'Oh,' I said. 'Sounds like my kind of fun.'
'I didn't know what to do,' Olivia said. 'Emile told me one time about you and how you got that property guy off his back so I got your number from him. So what do you think?'
I said, 'Hang on a minute,' switched on Betsy, my Apple II computer, and checked my schedule for the day. Aside from 'Buy olives' and 'Pick up Mom's cleaning', it was blank as a fat girl's dance card.
'Are you open today?'
'Every day, rain or shine,' she said.
'What's it doing today out there?'
'Raining and shining,' she said.
'What's a good time for you?'
'About two,' she said. 'After the feeding.'
Then she told me the best way to get out there, then we had a short but amicable discussion of fees, then I said, 'See you soon,' and hung up. Then I says to myself, pard, time to saddle up an' raise some dust.
It was then about twelve thirty so I put Betsy and all my other valuables including the phone away in the mammoth safe in the washroom at the back, tidied up, then shut up shop.
At that time my office was on the corner of Victory and Orange, in the San Fernando Valley, just over the hill via Laurel Canyon Drive from wonderful West Hollywood, which was then in the process of becoming the world's first legally gay incorporated city, and when I say gay I don't mean festive. My office was one of the little group of six properties in an L-shaped mall; taken in order there was a vacant lot, then me, then the Nus' Vietnamese take-out, then their cousin's video rental, then a Taco-Burger franchise, then the Armenian shoe-repair establishment of Mr Amoyan. It was the big time at last.
After locking up, I strolled the three blocks up Victory to the local Ralph's supermarket, gave a panhandler lounging near the entrance a Canadian quarter, and went in. I didn't see my occasional drinking buddy Bill, who worked there as master butcher, so I rang the bell marked 'Attendant' that hung over one of the meat freezers. After a minute Bill came out carry
ing a stack of plastic-wrapped T-bones which he dealt neatly into a display counter. Then he said to me, 'You rang, sir?'
'I rang,' I said. 'So how's it going?'
He shrugged and wiped his hands off on his long white apron.
'Don't ask me,' he said. 'What's up with you?'
'I'm hot on the job,' I said. 'Listen, Bill, what does a sheep cost, I mean a whole sheep, a carcass, the kind that comes to you frozen and then you cut it up and then I buy expensive pieces of?'
'Jeepers,' said Bill. 'It's got to depend on the grade, the age, where it's from, how many we buy, does it come from one of our own farms and a couple of other details I won't bother to bother you with.'
'Yeah, well, roughly,' I said.
'Well, roughly, I'd expect to pay something like fifty-five dollars for a forty-pound carcass.'
'Say a guy came to the back door and said, "Hey, Bill, I got a nice clean sheep you can have for twenty-five bucks," would you be interested?'
'Are you crazy?' Bill said. 'If it don't got the stamp, Ralph's don't want it. Me neither. To save what, a few bucks? Worse than that, I can think of at least nine fairly common diseases sheep can have and if they've got one of them you don't want to eat it. Not a chance. All right. Some two-bit little backdoor operator in East L A, what does he care how many people he kills, but still . . .' He shook his head so hard his wire-rims almost fell off.
'We drinking tonight?'
'Maybe,' I said. Even if I wasn't, Bill would be. He was a man who liked his beer. Once in a while the time I shopped at Ralph's coincided with the time Bill finished working, that would be about three thirty, and he'd give me a lift in his van to the Corner Bar, which was all of two blocks away, say a three-minute ride if you missed the lights, and he'd always crack open two large tins of Miller from the van's cooler for the drive.
I took my leave of Bill and took off down Victory toward the freeway. While I was waiting for the lights to change at Orange I saw a sign, hand-lettered on cardboard, that read, 'Carlos – the King O' Sheepskins – 30 percent off! First Left!' So instead of continuing the way I was going I took the first left and pulled in to the forecourt of an abandoned gas station where some local entrepreneurs had set up shop. There was an Asian lady selling luggage of all shapes and colors, a hopeful type peddling newly made, wooden framed mirrors with old-style ads etched on them, a market gardener working out of the back of his truck, and a sharp-looking Mexican youth selling white and black fitted sheepskin car-seat covers. Ah ha, I said to myself. Eureka. Sheeps have other assets besides their chops.
Once the Latino got over his not unfounded suspicions that I was either working for the Department of Immigration or the Internal Revenue, which he only did when I revealed to him somewhat shamefacedly what my real interest was, he became helpfulness itself. Generally speaking, he said, you could count on the skin of a standard brand being roughly the same value as the meat. He didn't know what a Jacob was but a Suffolk was white with a black face and black legs. And a Mate was all black with no horns. Was I interested in the shearing process? I wasn't particularly, I told him truthfully. I thanked him, politely declined his offer of a once-in-a-lifetime fifty percent off for two new seat covers for my Nash Metropolitan, all work done on premises, and headed out into the traffic again.
Black sheepskin seat covers for my pink and blue Nash – maybe I'd been too hasty after all.
And maybe not.
CHAPTER TWO
And so it was that by the time I got out to Wonderland Park and Olivia Elliot's animal enclosure and had my first and last encounter with a man-eating Peruvian flea-bag, I wasn't completely ignorant about sheep. I knew at least one useful thing about them, and that was, stealing one was a hard way to make a living. I also knew they were jolly good with roast potatoes and mint sauce. However, what other reasons there might be for stealing sheep aside from hunger were for me to find out. So while Olivia was rubbing her charges down or putting their feed bags on or singing them old Incan lullabies or whatever she was doing, I tried, without much luck, to think up some.
The enclosure was near the park's northern boundary; outside the fenced-in corral there was a path, then a few trees, then a six-foot wooden fence that, as far as I could see, encircled the entire complex. The dolphinarium, the next exhibit along, was off to my left; the film crew making the ad were noisily setting up over there with much unnecessary commotion. Some Girl Friday was drying the poor actor's white suit with a portable hair-dryer, no doubt in preparation for his next soaking.
About then Olivia came back, dusting her hands vigorously. She was a short, plain girl with a tanned face and a Prince Val haircut. She was wearing short shorts, half boots and a yellow T-shirt that said, appropriately, 'Wonderland Park'. I was wearing a blue waterproof windbreaker over a basically purple Hawaiian shirt, size XL.
'Murder on the hands,' Olivia said, giving me a startlingly brilliant smile. 'I keep forgetting to wear gloves.'
'I wouldn't go near those things again without full-length armor,' I said. 'Listen. Does anyone live here, or do you all go home at night?'
'About six of us live in,' she said. 'In a row of little cottages behind the admin building.' She waved vaguely in the direction away from the outer fence.
'Who?'
'Well, me, Betty, she looks after the dolphins, Tim, he looks after the bears, Fran, she's primates, there's the night watchman and his wife Susie who's one of the staff cooks and there's Mr Koven, he's sort of a general handyman and is always here in case something goes wrong with the water supply or there's a power failure or like that. And Mr Gould.'
'Who unfortunately broke his leg on the Monster,' I said. 'I don't suppose there's anywhere a guy could buy a girl a beer around here.'
'Are you totally insane?' she said. 'One drink here and you are out. We can get a Coke through there.' She pointed at a refreshment stand just visible through the trees.
'Lead the way.'
As we were walking along the path towards the stand, which I could see by then was called Ye Cat 'n' Fiddle, I asked her when the thefts had started.
'Gee, I know when I first noticed for sure,' she said, kicking a pebble a mile. 'I sort of noticed I hadn't seen Muffy for a while but it didn't really sink in that she wasn't there until I couldn't find Fat Ass one day.'
'Fat Ass?' I said, raising my brows. 'Really, Olivia, you shock me.'
'I'll bet,' she said, grinning up at me from under her heavy bangs.
'Do all the animals have names?' I kicked at a pine cone and just missed it.
'Oh, some of them,' she said. 'I named Fat Ass after Mr Gould.'
'And when was this?'
'Two days ago,' she said. 'As for when it started, I can't be sure but it can't be more than a couple of weeks.'
'One more thing of vital importance,' I said. 'What's a Jacob?'
'White,' she said. 'With dark brown spots. Sometimes they have four horns.'
'Better them than me,' I said.
We got to the stand and perched ourselves on a couple of stools at one end. A pretty girl in a more or less, mostly less, Elizabethan outfit complete with lace cap who Olivia called Piggy took our orders for two Cokes, got them, served them with a mock curtsey, then went back to puzzling over some cards that looked like stock sheets. A minute later I heard her mutter a couple of words that certainly weren't in Shakespeare.
We sipped our Cokes in silence for a while, then Olivia turned to me and asked, 'Now what, Mr Daniel? Any thoughts on the subject?'
I was watching a family that was strolling, or rather, waddling by – overweight mother in shorts and flip-flops, beer-bellied father in shorts and undershirt, fat child in shorts and obviously new yellow 'Wonderland Park' T-shirt a size too small, all three of them eating from large boxes of candy-covered popcorn.
'My thoughts are that a family that stuffs itself together gets fat together,' I said. 'About the sheep. On the way here I talked to Bill the master butcher and Carlos the sheepskin king. From what t
hey told me I don't think anyone is stealing your sheep for the money.'
'Me neither,' Olivia said. 'I just have a feeling it isn't that easy.'
'You say there's no drinking here, at all?'
'Uh uh,' she said. 'We go into town.'
'You also said there are no bored, part-time workers living in, like college kids, because bored college kids and drinking can often, if not usually, lead to excruciatingly funny behavior like filling up convertibles with water, throwing people off balconies into swimming pools, panty raids, and who knows, hiding sheep in someone's clothes cupboard.'
'No way,' Olivia said, slurping the last of her Coke. I gave her a friendly slurp right back.
'Where that leaves us I don't quite know. Let me think for a minute.'
'Be my guest,' she said.
'How about during the day?' I said after a bit. From the distance I could hear screams as the Monster passed by.
'How?' she asked.
'How should I know,' I said. 'In a truck?'
'No way,' she said. 'I'm here all day and every day. I have to let some of the animals out every hour for the kids to play with and I have to watch them every second so they don't get hurt.'
'The kids?'
'The animals,' she said. 'Who cares about the kids?'
I paid Piggy for the Cokes and we headed back to the sheep pens.
'I'm going to have a look around,' I told her. 'After I do so outside, can you drive everyone out so I can have a look around inside?'
'Why not?' she said. She took a look at her watch. 'Oops. Feeding time.'
'Who gets fed?'
'Elmer,' she said.
'Elmer who?'
'Elmer, my calf,' she said proudly. 'Three weeks old today.'
'Oh, darn,' I said. 'And I forgot to get a card.' She grinned again and went off to give Elmer his bottle.
I looked around. The ground was mostly hard-packed dirt with the occasional scattering of fresh straw; all I could see was hundreds of hoofprints. A few spectators who were hanging over the wooden three-railed fence watched me with interest, especially when I got down on my hands and knees.