The Concrete River

by John Shannon

  “You working on any interesting ‘cases?’” The white cop gave the word a nasty twist.

  “I'm not a detective. I just find missing kids.”

  “You have to shoot a lot of them?”

  “Only if they cry,” he said.

  The white cop glared, but let it go finally.

  “Probably some drug-head after your petty cash,” Black said.

  “Sure.”

  Quinn dropped the pistol, a bit too hard on the desk so it probably scarred the wood. “Oh, oops there.”

  “You might want to wipe off your prints,” Liffey said. You couldn't let things go indefinitely and end up living with yourself. “You never know where that'll end up.”

  “You looking for trouble from me?”

  Jack Liffey's vision went red. “I'm fifty-two years old, cocksucker,” he said very softly and slowly, “and I know more about trouble than you ever will.”

  They glared at one another until the black cop took his partner's arm and pressed him slowly away. He balled up the multi-part form he'd been writing on and tossed it in the trash. “We'll just skip the burglary report, I think.”

  “The fuck you will. I need it for the insurance.”

  “Try the Santa Monica cops,” Quinn said. “They're real polite.”

  When they were gone he stared at the door for a long time with his heart racing. In Basic, he'd watched three tough black kids on the long slide downhill go for a timid white boy. Liffey knew if he'd helped, they'd just have got him later, and he'd watched the boy's eyes going sleepier and sleepier with fear.

  “You our buddy, Milken, be a buddy and loan us fifty.”

  “I can't afford it.”

  “Oh, he can't afford it. You a racist motherfucker, you know that? You apologize for being a racist motherfucker.”

  “Sure, man, I'm sorry.”

  “Sure man. Don't Sure man me, racist motherfucker.”

  The humiliation had gone on and on. Liffey had seen that none of them would ever recover from the things that had made them. He had waited across the barracks, one hand on a scarred baseball bat by his bed. If they'd come his way, he was determined to take down at least one of them. In the end, you only had the space you inhabited, and you couldn't let anyone take that away or it was gone forever.

  He looked around the dumped manila folders of old records and began kicking it into piles. So he couldn't claim insurance for the door or anything else that was busted. Another small step in the long decline of expectations of his life.

  He froze when he saw the old Xeroxed poster under his foot. Janelle van der Merwe. A young blond girl, skinny, smiling obligingly, helpless looking. Coming home the long shaky way from Nam in 1970, he'd made friends with some locals in a bar in South Africa and stayed with them for a few weeks and one of them named Gysbert had grown up and married and had kids and then had found Liffey's name somehow two decades later and written to beg him to find his daughter who had gone AWOL from her exchange high school in Ohio, last known postcard from Hollywood. Even now, the stringy blond girl in the photograph didn't look much like what he remembered of Gysbert.

  Liffey had made up a lot of copies of the photo, mostly just to say that he'd tried. He informed the police, tacked up posters, and spent an evening on the Strip talking to teenage girls wearing tiny bandeaux where breasts might be some day. He'd amazed himself by finding her inside of a week out in Canyon Country. She'd been a virtual prisoner of a megalomaniac Fundamentalist preacher who enticed runaways off the Strip with a lot of cult mumbo-jumbo and put them to work as unpaid labor sewing fancy bright-colored leather jackets that they sold to the boutiques back down on the Strip, a modern version of the old slave-to-rum-to-slave trade. He'd hired a real private eye to help him break in and snatch the girl and he'd found out the he, Liffey, was tougher and more alert than the rummy ex-cop and did most of it himself.

  Liffey had got a whiff of the thrill of the hunt, and five years later that skill had been his tenuous lifeline out of the collapse of his life.

  He was startled by a hesitant knock on the open outside door. An old Latina in a shawl with a crumpled letter in her hand watched him with Indian eyes and for some reason he knew immediately she was straight up from Mexico and had a hard luck story. His heart sank because he didn't do very well finding kids on the east side. He'd only succeeded once, and now he usually referred missing Latinos to Art Castro, who'd helped him out that time.

  “Mr. Leefee? You speak Spanish, please?” She was damp through.

  “Momentito.”

  He went past her, on his way to get Marlena and bring her up and then realized he had nowhere to bring her. He turned back. “Vamanos, senora, please. Come this way.”

  They waited in the front of the shop like petitioners while Marlena Cruz sent a fax for an old man in suspenders and white shoes.

  “Can you close up and meet us in the Bean?”

  She cocked her head dubiously, then looked at the woman and assented with a small flick of her eyebrows. “Your place up there bad?”

  “It'll do.”

  He led the woman into the coffee shop, stabbing a finger at Dan Margolin with his hand held high. He wasn't quite sure himself what the motion meant, perhaps just an odd gesture to put Margolin off balance and insist he treat this occasion with seriousness.

  “Three coffees, Dan.” To the woman, “Quiere usted coffee? Please.”

  “Thank you very, sir.”

  They sat at the window. He was uneasy, as he always was when he couldn't communicate. It was like being disarmed. Restlessly, he got up and went to the counter. “This the woman who came earlier?” he said softly.

  “Yeah, that's her. What was all the cops up there?”

  “Somebody busted into my place. Must have thought I had some cash.”

  “How'd you like Quinn?”

  “A sweetheart. You know him?”

  “He's a horse's ass. Last year, I had a panhandler in here bugging people. When he wouldn't leave, I called the cops and they sent him. He started roughing up the poor guy and when I objected, the son-of-a-bitch drew down on me. In my own cafe.”

  It made Liffey feel good to hear that someone else had had a run-in with Quinn, like hearing that other people, too, had the disease with the funny name that they just found on your blood test. They got back to the table just as Marlena arrived and Margolin made himself scarce.

  “Thanks,” he said. “You're a princess.”

  She talked to the woman in Spanish and it went on for a long time with various expressions crossing their faces, like cloud shadows on a plain. He was revising his opinion of her as he watched her speak in her own language. What he had taken as peasant timidity was probably only unfamiliarity with English. She seemed more astute in Spanish, almost self-assured. There was also something a little neurotic in her eyes from time to time, and peons were never allowed to be neurotic. He guessed she was a schoolteacher in a small town.

  Finally, Marlena looked at him quizzically. “She wants to know if the mission for Senora Beltran involved sending her away from town.”

  He stared blankly for a moment. “Mission to Neptune, you mean. Are you sure you're translating right? What is this woman's name?”

  Marlena asked her.

  “Maria Elena Schuler. Habito en Hermosillo.”

  “Schuler?” he said.

  “Goodness, Jack. We know Americans named Azizian and Vukovsky.”

  “And Chan. Fair enough. Hang on, I do know a Senora Beltran.” He racked his brain. “Consuela Beltran. It was her son I found a couple years ago. He'd run away looking for his dad, turned up in Modesto.” He could see the woman's face light up. A flock of very loud motorcyles passed outside and the glass window vibrated in pain. On the high back seat of one of the Harleys a woman in a mini-skirt flailed at the driver with her fists, as if she were being kidnapped in a bad biker movie, and he puzzled over the image. He sipped at the coffee, but it was ordinary coffee and terrible.

  �
��Let's do this in order. Is Senora Beltran missing?”

  The two women talked for a while.

  “She's been missing for more than a week. Maria Elena is her mother and they exchange letters every week. The last letter, dated two weeks ago, said that Senora Beltran was coming to see you to get you to help her with a problem.”

  “Tell her she never showed up. And find out more.”

  While they talked, his eye involuntarily followed a young couple who had come in and taken a table against the wall. The girl was astonishingly beautiful with big hair, like some starlet who had wandered down Overland from Sony Columbia, the studio up the road that had been MGM before a corporate pirate had stripped and dismembered it. The boy with her was lame and had a bad scar on his cheek. It was the kind of lack of parity that made you suspicious, looking for the adjustments.

  “The boy is only thirteen and Senora Beltran made no arrangements for anyone to look after him so she is afraid something bad happened. She didn't come back from her job last Tuesday.”

  “The job is?”

  The boy with the scar was hissing something, and the girl, who thought she couldn't be heard, said quite distinctly, “My pussy is not for you, so get that straight.” There was a terrible spoiled whicker in her voice and right away he saw one of the adjustments.

  “She was secretary for the Cahuenga Neighborhood Organization. I know them. They elected a slate of Chicanos last year and threw out the old Anglo fuddy-duddys that had ran the town forever.”

  “News first, editorials later,” he said.

  Marlena gave a feral grin that he hadn't seen very often. “Everybody gets the translator they deserve. You should learn the first language of the town you live in.”

  “I'm too old and too dumb. Have the cops been notified?”

  He could see her shake her head, and he pushed on to short-circuit the roundabout process, “Is the ex-husband in the picture, or anyone else living in?”

  There was no one living in, the boy was with an aunt, and the house was undisturbed, not even a suitcase missing. Senora Schuler had no clear idea what the problem was that her daughter was supposed to be bringing to Liffey, but it had something to do with unspecified threats. The daughter respected Liffey because he had been simpatico and he had found the boy Tony pretty quickly.

  “I seem to remember simpatico is one of those troublesome words that doesn't mean quite what you think it does.”

  “It's something like decent.”

  “I remember Senora Beltran and I'd like to help her if I could. She was real simpatico. But Senora Schuler would be better off hiring a guy I know named Art Castro.”

  Marlena explained and the woman shook her head adamantly.

  “She wants you, because her daughter trusted you. And she's got some money.”

  “That always helps.” He considered for a long time. He would be a fish out of water in Cahuenga, though he didn't have a lot on his plate at the moment and a little income never hurt. His eyes swung around as he thought it over, just in time to catch the blonde girl do something strange. She wrenched opened her blouse angrily to her companion, like a flasher. Her back was to the room so he couldn't see if she was wearing a bra, but the boy with the scar went goggle-eyed.

  “Satisfied?” the girl blurted. She clutched the blouse tight as she skedaddled with angry red eyes.

  “Get all the addresses and names, would you? I'll spend a day or two on it and see if it looks like I can do any good.”

  “Thank you very, Mr. Leefee,” she said when it was explained. She unfolded a small piece of paper and handed it to him. Call Liffey. Threats. Slow Growth.

  “I want you to buy me a drink for this,” Marlena Cruz said, and he could see that she meant it.

  *

  He stared mournfully at the plastic card for a long time before inserting it into the Culver Bank ATM. This was the account the court didn't know about, the one he'd sworn to himself was for Maeve's college, and every month the bottom line got smaller. The money was almost half gone now.

  He'd replace what he drew down when someone paid him big, when he got a job, when his ship came in. It was like gambling, and once you started you couldn't stop. All he was doing was paying the rent and buying gas. That didn't make it okay, but it was just another sidestep in the gradual development of portable ethics.

  THREE

  A Toxic Hormone Spill

  “It's Norman French, believe it or not. There used to be an E on the end, but somebody a few generations back dropped it. I've got cousins still spelled with the E.”

  Her name was Eleanor Ong and since he hadn't seen a wedding ring, he'd said she didn't look like an Ong. Actually she looked a bit like a whippet, skinny and nervous and fast, with freckles and a lot of limp dark hair with red and gray highlights. She had an unruly energy about her that he found attractive.

  “It's only been my name again for two years and sometimes I forget to respond. I was Sister Mary Rose for fifteen years.”

  He let that roll past. They sat in a decaying storefront that had been built onto the front of a huge old frame house on Slauson that was now the Catholic Liberation house in southeast L.A. A big flowery sign over a water cooler said: Close all the factories of crime—jails and prisons!

  “That's her desk. We gave them office space when we worked together on the city council election last year. She's been helpful to us, too. They can get offset printing on the cheap.” It was a battered old oak post office desk, like all the others in the big room, including the one where Eleanor Ong sat with one foot on the open bottom drawer. She wore one of those long rayon gypsy skirts and flat leather sandals that strapped around her hairy ankles and reminded him of an aging graduate student.

  “Who would her boss be? I'd like to get permission to look through the desk.”

  She screwed up her face. It was the first time he'd seen her slow down. “I guess the whole committee. She's the only paid staff, though they've got a chairperson. I'll call for you and see what I can do. I hope you don't mind if I smoke.”

  “What if I did?”

  “You could always sit in the no-smoking section.”

  She pointed to the street. A young man in a Pendleton shirt came out of a back room while she was lighting up. He whispered to her, showing a handful of papers. All the Catholic Liberation kids he'd ever met were earnest and intense and very clean. They still believed deeply in good and evil, so that even being witty about it was seen as a bit of a sin.

  “If he goes near the shelter again, have them call the police.”

  For some time, a banging noise outside had been working at his attention. The rain had stopped and two squat men were chopping sheet metal pieces off an old Ford Galaxie from the 1960s that was parked in front of a boarded-up trophy manufacturer. The operation seemed pointless.

  “Make sure they know we don't let husbands carry on like that. And send them a copy of the restraining order, in case somebody needs to see it.”

  The young man nodded portentously and went back inside.

  “It'll probably take me a while to get in touch with enough members of the committee. You could give me a ring or come back this afternoon. Other than that, I can't really give you permission to go through her things, even with her mother's okay.”

  “That's fine. You could tell me more about Mrs. Beltran. Anything you know.”

  “Where'd you go to high school?” she asked out of the blue.

  “It wasn't a Catholic school. San Pedro.”

  “I knew a guy, the name was something like Liffey. I think what reminds me's not the name, it's that alert air you've got, you know, taciturn but fierce, polite to women and small children but hell on wheels when you run into other raptors.”

  “You've got an edge on you yourself.”

  “You try being a virgin for seventeen years. That'll give you an edge that salutes.”

  She stared straight at him, as if daring him to take it as flirtation. He laughed instead. “About Mrs.
Beltran.”

  She banged the cigarette on a glass saucer. “She should be a real success story. She has a mind like… I don't know. Maybe she's a genius, maybe just shrewd. If she'd been born a man she'd be teaching in some college as the star Latino scholar or, if she'd lost her ethics somewhere along the way, she'd be arbitraging GM.”

  “Her husband couldn't handle it. She had spirit, and she wouldn't shut up when she knew she was right. After he took off, she went to school and got a B.A. at City in History. Her specialty was twentieth century California, we used to talk about Carey McWilliams. She's working on her doctorate at L.A. State in sociology.”

  He was beginning to feel very uncomfortable about himself. He'd met Consuela Beltran twice and hadn't seen very much of that. He'd seen a small brown overweight woman, a bit nervous, who looked a lot like a million other Latinas with a dozen kids at home. Articulate and quick, but not to take special note. How the hell did you avoid that snap stupid racism? And still get on with living? Your liberal grandmother could pretend she wasn't worried when she ran into a half dozen young blacks in bandannas on a dark street. They might all be Rhodes scholars, but she'd be insane to count on it.

  “She can see right through most pretense. It's what makes her good in the neighborhood organization. She can sort out the hidden agendas and who needs a few extra strokes of praise and who needs to feel in charge and all that.”

  “Were there fights in the organization?”

  “Like any living organization. There were plenty of mixed motives to go around. Some people have to dominate. Some people just like to hear themselves talk. Putting up with that malarkey is the curse of democracy. Have you ever been in a grass-roots organization?”

  “Does the Army count?”

  She laughed. “Not unless your platoon voted on what you did next.”

  “That's a thought.” He liked the laugh and he wondered how he would handle long hairy legs. He'd never been with a woman who didn't shave.

  “She was up against a group that called itself Cahuenga Slow Growth. Basically they were dead white males, the businessmen who'd run the town for generations. Backed up by a lot of retired Anglo working people who haven't fled to Orange County. Slow Growth really meant Enforce the Zoning so we don't have all these Mexicans and Central Americans doubling up in our houses and crowding us out.