The Concrete River

by John Shannon

  The Latino cop noticed them in the doorway, and his curiosity quotient shot up. Senora Schuler followed the detective's gaze and recognized the newcomers. She spoke rapidly to her companion and the Latino cop overheard. He detached himself and crossed the room like a tugboat steaming slowly upchannel. Liffey noticed a woven leather holster clipped over his waist, something he'd seen on Mexican plainclothes cops in Baja.

  “Hello, Miss Ong.” His eyes sought out Jack Liffey, steel gray and very serene eyes. “What's your interest here?” He hadn't actually crossed the border into rudeness, but his passport was ready.

  “Mrs. Schuler hired me to try to find her daughter.”

  “Private detective?”

  Liffey shook his head. “No. Usually I just find missing kids. My name is Jack Liffey. I found Tony two years ago, and they remembered me.”

  “Did you find anything this time?”

  “I just started this morning. You should see this.” He handed over the note. He could hear Eleanor Ong breathing nearby and he liked it.

  “I'm glad you offered without any prompting. I've heard about the note.” His eyes scanned it over and over, as if it might yield up a new meaning eventually.

  “I think someone else knows about the note. My office was torn to pieces last night. It might be connected, might not.”

  “You let us do the detecting, okay?”

  “Just offering.”

  The note went into the plainclothes cop's shirt pocket and the gray eyes found him again.

  “How do you like slumming over here?” The tone was still neutral, quizzical, like a man who spent his life prodding everything around himself, absent-mindedly tweaking free nerve ends to see which would squeak.

  “You don't know enough about me to say that. I've been cooperative, Lieutenant…”

  “Zuniga. It is lieutenant. Lt. Nestor Zuniga.” His expression broke slightly, and a fist pressed softly into Jack Liffey's shoulder. It was impossible to tell whether the gesture was friendly or prelude to something else. “Don't get rattled so easy, Mr. Liffey. Most of us in Cahuenga don't like the big Mercedeses that come down out of Brentwood every once in a while to see what a barrio looks like. And most of us in the department don't like amateurs prowling around.”

  Liffey came very near saying something intentionally insulting, like, Maybe all those guys from Brentwood are looking for their TVs. “Do you mind if I ask why you think Senora Beltran was murdered?”

  Lt. Zuniga's eyes narrowed. “How would you know that, now?”

  “Nobody sends homicide detectives to an accidental death. Even in the barrio.” Generally anger just made things hard to see and he was trying very hard not to get angry.

  “You and me are gonna get along, I can see it. That's my partner over there. His name is Sgt. Blanchard Millan. Why don't you go ask him?” It was almost a dare.

  Jack Liffey walked straight across the room to where Sgt. Millan was writing on a small metal clipboard. He wrote fast in stiff childish block letters. Liffey squatted next to the boy.

  “Hi, Tony. Remember me?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Nice tattoo. Did I ever show you mine?” The boy's right shoulder showed the usual blurry homemade blue tattoo, like a ballpoint note left in the rain. It looked like it said C60L.

  “No, Mr. Liffey.” He was polite, despite his better instincts. “You got a real tattoo?”

  Senora Beltran noticed Liffey now and spoke at him rapidly in Spanish. It seemed impolite to interrupt for a translation. The cop stopped writing and watched, breathing heavily through his mouth. It made him look stupid, but Jack Liffey doubted it. Very few idiots made sergeant.

  “I'll show you later.”

  “Slow down,” Sgt. Millan said. “Who's this guy?”

  Tony Beltran explained, and annoyance crept into the cop's face.

  “Your lieutenant sent me over here to ask why you suspect foul play.”

  “Oh, did he?” He glanced across the small room, but Lt. Zuniga had taken Eleanor Ong out onto the porch and was speaking to her with real intensity, as if reopening a family quarrel. The sun had come out and shone magically through her softly billowing skirt.

  “You don't want me to bother Mrs. Schuler with it, do you?”

  “There were rope burns on her wrists, but no ropes when we found her.”

  “How long had she been dead?”

  “Ten days, couple weeks. We don't know the cause of death yet, but there were no major wounds.”

  “Isn't it odd she wasn't found sooner?”

  The cop said nothing and Liffey felt a small hand on his shoulder. “Grandma wants you to find out who killed my mother.”

  “I can't do that, Tony. It's for the police.”

  “Damn straight, senor,” the cop said. It was the worst pronunciation of the word senor he'd ever heard and must have been intentional.

  “Thanks for the information, sergeant. I won't be in your way.” He rested a hand on Tony's forearm, felt the stringy muscle. It reminded him of his daughter's arm, which reminded him of innocence, which made him feel bad as it always did. “Show me where you work out.”

  They went out a side door, where a shed off the side of the house covered a home-made weight bench. The boy had a rusted set of barbells and several cans of concrete with pipe handles. When he was sure no one was looking, he put his arms around the boy and the boy wept inconsolably. They had had most of a day together driving back down 99. He'd taken him to Castle Air Base outside Modesto and talked to him about the B-29 and the Phantom and the other planes, and they'd eaten tacos in a dive in Delano. Then he'd told him about Cesar Chavez, who was barely a recognizable name to the boy. He had liked Tony and thought him far too smart for the tattoo and the gangbanging and all of that, but that was none of his business. Adults almost never changed kids.

  “Your mom was a wonderful woman, a very smart woman.”

  That redoubled the tears, but eventually the boy ran down and they sat side by side on the weight bench. Jack Liffey rolled up his sleeve.

  “What does Good Conduct mean, man?”

  “It was a Viet Nam thing. It was supposed to keep me out of trouble.” He shrugged. “I'm still here, so part of it worked. What's C60L?”

  “That's the Cahuenga 60th Street Locos.”

  “You into the heavy stuff?”

  “No, man. We're just taggers, you know? You see our tags on all the buildings along 60 and 61.”

  “I'll look for them. Do you have a nickname?”

  “I'm T-Bell.”

  “Okay, T-Bell. Have your grandmother call me in a few days, when the cops are all gone.”

  “Are you gonna help us?”

  “It may not be necessary.”

  Just then one of the men leaned out the door and hissed for Tony. “Vamos, Tonito.”

  FIVE

  You're Fucked We're Your Future

  “Would you mind driving me up to Pico -Rivera? The Northrup plant.” The wind plastered her skirt against slim legs, and he would have driven her to the moon, or tried. He leaned across to open the door.

  “I take it you're not looking for a job as a machinist.”

  It was a thin smile. “We picket every Friday. That's where they make the Stealth bomber. Do you know how much they could have done for this country with the money they're wasting—even the last few planes—now that they know there's no point making them at all?”

  “Two hospitals in every garage,” he said. He headed south for Florence instead of going back to Gage. It was good to give this side of town the once over.

  She wasn't sure how to take him. “You probably don't approve. You were in Viet Nam, weren't you?”

  A red light caught him in front of a labor mosca and he grimaced. Scores of squat brown Central Americans were swarming a stake truck, shouting and waving and begging for work, and two mean-looking gringos in the truck bed shouted back at them and pushed them away from the sides. Three others tried to flag down a pickup heading out
of the do-it-yourself store. It would refute something basic in you, he thought, to have to stand there day after day selling yourself like that. He was thankful when the light changed, though he had to cram on the brake to miss a city bus coming through late.

  “Shit. Sorry.” It took him a moment to control the flash of rage. Why did he have this terrible temper? “The point isn't really the cost, is it? I don't like war much more than the next guy, if it can be helped. I just don't see the point of empty gestures.”

  “What do you mean?” She wriggled around to take off the angora sweater and reveal a strange ruffled blouse. He hadn't seen a sweater like that since the days of poodle skirts. He recalled the little clip chains girls wore in high school to hold the sweater over their shoulders like a cape.

  “I can see marching somewhere to seize a building, or sitting down in front of a train, doing something. I can even see it when there's a chance of swinging public opinion, like kids burning their draft cards in 1964. I can't see going week after week when nothing happens.”

  “You don't believe in moral witness, then?”

  He didn't really want to argue. There was never any point arguing about ideas. “I'm sure you're not hurting anybody. It's just not for me. Tell me about Lt. Zuniga. You guys looked like old friends.”

  She watched him a moment before shifting her conversational gears, as if deciding whether she wanted to follow him down his path. “We had a run-in over the gravedigger's strike three years ago. When the contract came up, the new cardinal got it in his head to bust the union, or at least he stonewalled like that's what he was doing. He brought in strikebreakers and insisted on a wage cut. It's not like the diocese is broke, but you can always get manual labor cheaper if you haven't got a conscience. Look at that labor market we just saw. Do you know what they pay day labor?”

  “Fifty a day.”

  “And some of the contractors cheat them on that.” He could see there were a lot of things that worked her up.

  “Lt. Zuniga,” he said gently.

  “We had mass picketing at Saint Teresa's and they got an injunction against it. The lieutenant enforced the injunction.”

  “How?”

  “He was clever. He arrested me, and no matter how many times I said it was okay, the men were too gallant to let me stay in jail. They stopped the sitdown. I'm still ashamed that my presence may have hurt the strike.”

  “Outside of being cunning, is he honest?”

  “I really don't think I would have any way of knowing. You know, I don't even think it would help me to know. At Catholic Liberation we try to deal with the world on the up and up. You approach people in a straightforward way and they usually have to respond that way, too. Even if they don't, you've behaved correctly.”

  “It's a nice idea but I kind of prefer getting results, I think,” he said. “Philosophically speaking, and as a systematic canon. Here's your friends.”

  There were eight of them marching a small loop outside the main gate, older women, a few twenty-something men. Make War no More. Stealth Steals from the Poor. B-2 Be Sorry. He realized suddenly that the plant was built on the site where the old Ford factory had been. Little by little L.A. had lost all its auto plants, and all its steel, rubber and aluminum. Only the aircraft industry was left and he knew this plant was slated to go, too, in a couple of years.

  He stopped in a bus zone, just near enough to hear the picketers singing a hymn, and he could see he had upset her a bit. “I'm sorry if I annoyed you. Something is riding me.”

  “It's okay. I don't have to limit myself to chatting with the converted.”

  “Could I take you to dinner?” he blurted.

  “Not tonight. Perhaps soon.”

  “Does that mean no?”

  She shook her head deliberately.

  “How did you know I was in Viet Nam?”

  “I heard you talking to Tony and showing your tattoo. What does it say?”

  He rolled up his sleeve. “You can't complain about that.”

  She sighed. “Good Conduct. I don't really understand it, but it doesn't seem so bad. Call me.”

  “Would you still be willing to have dinner with me if it'd said Death Before Dishonor?”

  “No.”

  *

  On the way across town, the radio news told him Joost Ter Braak, the Dutch opera impresario, had agreed at last to come to L.A. A garbage strike was starting in the morning. A chemical spill had forced the evacuation of most of El Monte. Two big-rigs had overturned in the East L.A. interchange, tying up four freeways. The usual slow motion urban apocalypse. There was nothing about Senora Beltran's body drifting down the L.A. River. Perhaps it hadn't inconvenienced enough people, he thought.

  The temperature needle rode just below the H, not dangerous yet, something they couldn't get quite right about the thermostat that was still okay as long as he added fluid every other day. Chrysler dealers cringed when they saw the old AMC Concord coming, an orphan nobody wanted to fix.

  Up ahead dark smoke plumed straight up a hundred feet and then sheared off inland, and helicopters circled and circled the pillar like fearful votives checking to see if the gods were accepting the offering. The street was blocked by a big ladder truck that was just setting up and he had to detour around the burning “Swap Meet,” quotes included, that had once been a block of main street shops but had had the in-between walls knocked through. The windows had been painted over and the signs were for things he didn't recognize: alfombras, mimados, tejados, maderaje.

  People massed on the side street where a large gorilla bobbed and bowed at the waist beside the door. As he watched, a tongue of flame blew out the glass door and licked into the gorilla's synthetic brown hair. He slowed to a crawl to watch the whole animal flame up like dry brush and within seconds the metal armature showed through, still bobbing away welcomingly. An air horn bleated once behind to chase him on so a pumper could get through.

  He felt the childish excitement of fire—treading so near danger and extinction, or was it just the transformation of the ordinary into spectacle? No one gave enough credit to the simple fear of boredom as a motivator. He'd once tracked down a runaway girl to a party flat in the Valley where kids were shoving needles and carpet tacks and even roofing nails through their ears and navels and nipples. He knew a fair amount about disappointment, but he wondered how anyone ever got that bored.

  It was late afternoon when he got off the freeway on La Cienega. He passed an old apartment building that had caught his eye long ago. It had been abandoned, boarded up, then had had the boards ripped off and street kids had been living in it for months, covering it with graffiti. The most prominent sign, over the entrance, said You're Fucked We're Your Future.

  Maybe so, he thought.

  *

  Marlena's UPS note was taped to his office door, but she had gone home so he went in and hunted in the debris for his phone. It wasn't that hard for a detective. He went to the wall outlet, picked up the cord and yanked on it until the phone emerged from the litter, trailing its handset.

  “It's not really UPS. I just used their notepad, queridoa. A messenger brought a package.”

  “Will you come open up and get it for me?”

  “I brought it home with me. You can get it when you come and have a drink.”

  “I see. You sure there's a package?”

  “It's about the size of a stack of screenplays. I see a lot of them.”

  A chill went up his back.

  “I want you to take the package out into the middle of your back yard and leave it there.”

  “What do you—?”

  “Just do it for me, and then come back in the house, okay? I'll be there in ten minutes.”

  “Okay, Jack.”

  *

  First he lobbed an old brick onto it from about fifty feet away, and when nothing happened he looked it over more closely, without touching it. Marlena Cruz waited behind a flimsy garden shed that probably wouldn't have helped much, clutching
a small hairless dog that was mewling away like a rodent. It was a brown manila package with his name on it and no return address, about eight inches thick. He got some rope and duct tape out of his car and taped the rope thoroughly to one end of the package. Then he taped the other end to a fence post and, beginning to feel foolish, he stood at the far end of the yard and yanked the package open. The brown paper tore noisily and a wad of papers spilled onto the lawn.

  So much for sapper training.

  “I'm glad it wasn't an admirer sending you a porcelain chotchke,” she said.

  “So am I,” he said. “For sure.”

  He carried the papers indoors and set them on the rickety Danish modern coffee table, the only surface not already covered by her own chotchkes, porcelain dogs, wood and plaster dogs, aluminum dogs, large flocked floor-sitting dogs from Tijuana and small blown glass dogs from the county fair. The top quarter of the stack of documents was a single edge-bound booklet and the rest was loose papers.

  “Aren't you going to look?”

  “Not just now.”

  “I'll never figure you out,” she sighed.

  “Who brought the package?”

  “A kid on a bike. Maybe twelve years old.”

  “Somebody from the neighborhood? Would you recognize him?”

  “Probably. He had one of those funny bicycles kids have with the high handlebars, and he had a wicker basket on it. You don't see that so much.”

  “Keep your eye out for him.”

  She brought him a scotch with ice, stood behind him and began to massage his neck and shoulders. He had never told her he didn't drink; it involved too much explanation. He set the glass in front of himself and stared at the ice cubes bobbing to the surface.