The Concrete River

by John Shannon

  “Tell me about your curiosity.”

  “All I got out of her was it had to do with the Samson building. Everybody knows the L.A. powers that be were once talking about making the place a music center and shopping mall, but I'm sure they dumped that idea long ago. It never made much sense, seven miles from downtown. It'd be like putting the New York opera in Jersey City.”

  “She never told you anything more?”

  He was silent for a moment. “That was right before she disappeared.”

  “Did your visitors say anything?”

  He shook his head. “I don't know anything else.”

  “But what do you think?”

  “I think I'm glad I don't know anything else. I don't think you're big enough to handle it, either.”

  “Handle what? You must have a guess.”

  He just shook his head again. Liffey could get no more, and as Gallegos bused the cups into a plastic tub and walked away, one thing was clear. Gallegos and Beltran had been lovers, and the man knew something that was scaring him to death. He was still working himself down through the fear.

  *

  Back home, he did not know whether he was happy or unhappy and he thought about the pleasures of a good jolt of unblended scotch, which would have done either way. In an earlier lifetime. There were nine pages of long distance telephone calls from the opera society and he sat down at the kitchen table with a pencil and started making marks. He came up with forty-seven calls to New York, thiry to San Francisco, twenty-two to Houston, a scattering through the Midwest, a dozen to Amsterdam, eleven to London and eleven to Las Vegas. He looked at the call times and noticed that the Vegas ones were all late at night and figured somebody in the society worked late to talk to his bookie. Most of the cities were logical for opera lovers to call, but… Houston. Why Houston? Of course there were probably a lot of guys who dressed like the Cowboy in Houston.

  There were only two different numbers in Houston and he jotted them down. In the morning he would try them or have Chris Johnson find out who they were.

  The doorbell rang and gave him a chill. He pictured the Cowboy waiting on the step carrying some medieval torture device under his arm. He didn't have a peephole, but he was damned if he'd let them spook him and he swung the door hard and almost dragged her in. Marlena Cruz stood there in a tweed coat, which she opened sheepishly to show a sheer black nightie that barely got to her hips. Her large dark nipples showed clearly in the porchlight. She looked great.

  “God, I didn't know how much I missed it, Jack. Am I welcome?”

  “Is a bear Catholic? Does the Pope shit in the woods?”

  NINE

  Doing a Good Job on the Parts Only God Could See

  He woke for the second time jangled by a hustle-bustle dream. Marlena had awakened him the first time dressing in the dark. He'd offered her coffee but she told him to stay put. Sleepy and tender, he remembered kissing her musky thigh as she tugged into her nylons.

  Now gray light leaked in and he had the feeling there were a whole lot of better places to wake up, if he could only find them. The condo with its white plaster walls and aluminum windows had about as much personality as a rental car. He heard the newspaper hit his front door.

  He made coffee, read the paper with his feet up and allowed himself to waste fifteen minutes doing the crossword. He was sure Mike Lewis wouldn't be up much before eight.

  He took Venice Boulevard and then turned up Alvarado to avoid the freeway and came into Pasadena from the back side. Lewis rented a decaying old craftsman on the slopes of the Arroyo with his Irish wife Siobhann. She had some job with the city government which was the reason they'd be up as early as eight. Most of white collar L.A. started on Hollywood hours, which meant nine-thirty or later, but the bureaucrats still gave a nod to their working class constituents.

  Siobhann was just climbing into her rusty little Saab when he drove up, all feisty talkative ninety-eight pounds of her.

  “Is that Jack? For sure it is. What are you doing here so early?”

  “Hi, S. Do you mean what am I doing here so early, or what am I doing here so early? Is himself awake?”

  She nodded. “You left a wonderful sweet on his plate. He was up half the night poring over your papers. You know how he loves going down a burrow of crooked politics like a ferret and coming up with the rotten meat in his teeth.”

  “I think you're mixing metaphors.”

  “Verbal extravagance is in the genes. Come for dinner some day, Jack. We miss you since we moved out here.”

  “I will.”

  It was an old two-cycle Saab, odd as a cockroach, and it farted away down the twisting street, sun through the big live oaks dot-dashing off the rusting chrome. Siobhann and Kathleen, his second-generation Irish ex-wife, were still friends. Unlike most divorces they hadn't really found they had to choose up their friends.

  Lewis looked bleary, sitting at the formica kitchen table with the paper, a store-bought powdered sugar doughnut and a huge mug of coffee.

  “Morning,” Jack Liffey said.

  “If it is and I doubt it.”

  Something perky, maybe Mozart, was playing softly in the other room.

  “I thought you'd get a kick out of those papers.”

  “Man, even if you specialize in turning over flat rocks, those are some damned entertaining memos. Can I keep them for a while?” He took out a stick of cinnamon gum and offered, the only grownup Jack Liffey had ever known who chewed gum.

  “I wouldn't say no to some coffee.”

  “Help yourself, and then follow me.”

  They regrouped in the living room, which had little piles of papers scattered around with label cards like mangan and slow growth on the stacks. The furniture was all late thrift store, and the only thing they'd put up on the walls was an old poster for the IRA hunger strikers. Lewis was probably the only human being on earth who had once lived in Northern Ireland by choice. He said he'd found it fascinating.

  “There's a lot of stuff here that's no use to you but I can do a great article on the Cahuenga election and the aftermath.”

  “Can you tell where it came from?”

  “More than one source. There's rather a lot from an old commission on the rubber factory. You know, traditionally, if you want something done in this city you set up a commission of businessmen. I think some of it's from the election committee and some from the group that Ms. Beltran's people were opposing. Some weird stuff is from a source I haven't identified. It's a lot of memos in a self-conscious kind of code. `The shipment of wood is overdue at the rodeo'--things like that. It's been culled down before you got it, probably to some common theme, but I can't identify it.”

  Liffey idly peered at a pile labeled string bass. “Was there anything to kill for?”

  “Hell, people in this town will kill you for your pocket change. There's some material that's damned odd, I'll tell you that for free. Look at this.”

  He handed Liffey a memo from someone named Robert Forrest at the County Redevelopment Agency. A green Post-it, probably Lewis', marked a passage half way through.

  Arneson and Villalobos insisted that our plans for the "opera house" are still too premature for us to initiate an approach to the brown parties.

  “Interesting,” Jack Liffey said neutrally.

  “What the hell are those quotation marks doing?”

  “There are people who don't know about irony. How many times have you seen ‘fresh fish’ on a menu?” Liffey made the marks in the air with his fingers, like a quieter Victor Borge.

  “These here quotes are working overtime. And who are the brown parties? Look here.”

  He folded out a big architectural drawing. It appeared to be a floor plan of a portion of the rubber factory, redesigned. The inset at the bottom where the information would have been was blacked out. “It doesn't look much like an opera house to me. This might be a little stage, but they haven't left much room for the flies and wings. And look at all the open space. I
t's the world's largest theater lobby.”

  “I don't know, Mike. This is like practicing archaeology on a single pot. Maybe this is a stage of construction, or it's meant for a department store in the same complex. It's too easy to find mystery.”

  “That's the fun of it. Give me some more time with the stuff. I'm an alchemist.” He made a European gesture, kissing the clasped tips of his fingers in appreciation. “I am not without resources myself.”

  “Don't become the man who knew too much. There's a couple of nasty characters kicking around.” He described the Cowboy and his pal.

  “This just gets better and better.”

  On the way down through the arroyo, Jack Liffey was forced to stop behind three cars and a little backhoe that blocked the road. A rivulet of water meandered down the asphalt and under the car just ahead of him, where it turned abruptly and trickled off the pavement out of sight. As he watched, the flow quickened until it was a dark sheet creeping under his own car.

  A car honked in annoyance. A workman in a silver hardhat waved his arm dismissively and the backhoe readjusted its position. Then things began to happen fast. The water gushed suddenly, like a tap turned on. Three workmen scrambled away from the backhoe with a look of panic and Liffey felt a rumble in the ground. A big scallop of the road broke away and disappeared from sight with a loud gulp that freed a plume of clear clean water. The backhoe began to lean, the driver abandoned ship as someone shouted, and the backhoe, too, vanished over the side with another big bite of the road. He noticed he was holding his breath and he made himself exhale.

  There were no cars behind him and he backed away fast, followed immediately by a black Camaro. The last thing he saw was a big orange VW bus with a camper top begin to teeter. He pulled off into a driveway and the Camaro roared past in reverse. When he got headed the right way, he stopped and got out to look down below. Dirt and big lozenges of asphalt had filled up a back yard, covering half of a swimming pool as the stream of water played over a two-story frame house. The backhoe had landed upside down through the garage, and a bewildered-looking woman with a broom was staring up the hill at the VW that lay on its side, caught on some snag half way down. It didn't look like anyone had been hurt yet, but the day was young.

  He stopped at a doughnut shop as the memory of Lewis' powdered sugar doughnut stirred in him and pointed to a plain cake doughnut. The Asian counterman gave it to him in a piece of tissue. A stringy white woman and black man sat at a corner table arguing softly. They were unkempt and looked as if they'd slept in a field. One of the latest ploys for panhandling spare change was to act as unofficial doorman to a doughnut shop.

  Liffey sat in a red plastic chair fixed to the floor and wondered why he was chasing down this scandal. Nothing he did would bring back Consuela Beltran. He was a child-finder not a detective, and he felt awkward and exposed, the way he had come to feel all of a sudden during Tet, knowing that he was utterly vulnerable and a bullet already in flight probably had his name on it. It was a way you felt when you no longer believed in your special place in the universe, or your fine-tuned instinct, and all you had left was luck. The kind of luck that could plunge over a cliff in the blink of an eye and end up nose-first through a garage.

  Why was he pressing his luck? He inventoried where his pistols were at that moment—the Dreyse was back with Marlena and the Ballester-Molina was in his bedside table—and he wished he had one of them in the glove compartment. Somebody had killed Consuela Beltran and somebody else had delivered a packet of dangerous research to him, and two men had threatened his life if he used the research. He was over the flush of anger that had launched him on the crusade, and he had trouble coming up with something else. Pride was in there somewhere, he guessed, and a pigheaded kind of indignation. And maybe he was doing it for the boy.

  He wanted to see the faxes from the opera society. Liffey tossed out the last third of the stale doughnut, and the homeless man leapt up to hold the door for him, but he was too late and didn't get anything for his efforts.

  Chris Johnson was pottering in his garage-workshop where he was rebuilding an old sofa. The fabric was stripped off to reveal a crude-looking wood frame and a flimsy spring platform. It had started as Dot's hobby, but now it was his.

  “With the cloth off it looks like a drowned cat,” Jack Liffey said, regretting the simile immediately. Or a drowned woman.

  “Even the good ones are marginal. This should have been hardwood, but it's cheap pine.”

  “Are they all as bad?”

  “Pretty much. Only the Amish cared enough to do a good job on the parts only God could see. But they never made stuffed furniture.”

  “That's probably what happens to you when you give up fucking. Discomfort becomes a kind of esthetic.”

  Johnson smiled evenly. “Every discomfort makes you stronger. You should sit in a jail cell for a while. Everything that doesn't break you, concentrates your energy.”

  “Sorry, I forgot you were a jail-bird. I'll leave you all that manly conceit, thanks.”

  “This is the one you want.” He offered a sheet of paper from his breast pocket. “The rest of the faxes were about buying costumes for Egyptian slave girls or scheduling performers or escrow papers for some guy who was buying his house on company time.”

  Liffey flattened out the paper on the work bench. It was outgoing to some vice president of the National Tobacco Company in Raleigh.

  Dave, you're misinterpreting the thrust of our proposal. We would see that you buy the building for the figure you mentioned, outright. It's a sale-leaseback-buyback. It's a listed building, official county landmark, so the Title applies and you get tax credits for what you pay us, for preservation of historic landmarks. Ask your bean counters. You could extend that easily enough to much of your Western operations, but that's up to you. We would lease it back year by year and then at the end of twenty-five years buy it back out of bonds with a balloon payment. You're out nothing at all really and you can leverage the tax breaks so the feds and the state end up paying at both ends. And you get the corporate image massage, your name up in marble in the lobby and on the programs. How long would it take to absorb the up-front cost with the tax credits? You get paid back twice over, at the worst. Have your people think it over. Don.

  Jack Liffey read it three times. “Let me get this straight. A tobacco company back east buys an opera house in L.A. and puts its name on it. Because the building is a landmark, they can count their cost as some sort of charitable contribution to the people of the nation and take it off their taxes.”

  “Bravo,” Chris Johnson said. “In addition to which, the city spends twenty-five years of lease fees paying them back the money they already wrote off their taxes, and then the city pays them again in a lump sum with bonds our grandchildren pay for.”

  “Is this legal?”

  “Legal-schmegal. The real corruption is always the stuff that's built-in. It's all a bit academic, though, if there's no opera house.” He squatted down to sight along the timber on the back of the sofa. “Warped beyond hope.”

  “Tell you what,” Jack Liffey said, fascinated by the naked audacity of the deal. “My Concord is a genuine landmark, not made any more. You give me a thousand bucks for it, and I'll bet you get a great big tax break for preserving Americana. I'll lease it back for ten bucks a month and then my grandchildren will pay you millions, millions. Sounds good to me.”

  “But there's no opera house, Jack. It's just a rumor.”

  “What seems to matter is that someone believes it.” Peel the onion, he thought. “But, really, do cigarette companies kill to keep their tax breaks? There's something else in all this.”

  “You and I will never know for sure much of anything where big money is concerned. At least that's the conventional wisdom, the legend of our time. It's probably not true. The rich are probably even stupider and more confused than we are.”

  “Speak for yourself. They couldn't be more confused than I am. All I've got going fo
r me is pig-headedness.”

  “Help me turn this over.”

  They lifted the sofa carcass and set it upside down. Johnson began stripping the muslin off the bottom.

  “I'd like to look through the other faxes.”

  “I didn't print them. Okay, I'm tired of the sofa.” He took Liffey back into the house and fired up one of the terminals.

  Jack Liffey paged down the screen through fax after fax for the next forty-five minutes. As Johnson had suggested, they didn't twang his curiosity much. Incoming were ticket orders, wheedling scheduling queries from visiting sopranos, memos requesting more details about costumes and business purchases, contentious demands by someone named Witold Mochnacki for small changes in a musical score, sketches of hyper-modern scenery for some new opera, and one request for escrow papers. Outgoing there were lease orders for thirty British police uniforms, an order to Germany for an HO scale toy train, pages of music, one lyric sheet, sketches of the same hyper-modern scenery with heavy black lines suggesting changes, and one set of escrow papers.

  And then he found it, so short it stood out like a zebra in Pershing Square. We'd best tell the N that we shall better any offer Houston makes for T. It was a month old. The recipient was in New York, but the name was illegible. The sender was W.O. in the opera society here, and the syntax was British.

  Could “the N” be anything but the Netherlands? And T was Ter Braak. Houston again. Guys who dressed like cowboys came from Houston. Had they been in a bidding war for the impresario? Did opera societies bump each other off to get new bankable stars?

  “Do you think somebody would kill to see an opera?” Liffey said.

  “Only if he really wanted to,” Johnson said.

  TEN

  The Twentieth Century is Winding Down

  He got a woman on the phone who spoke only Spanish. It wasn't Senora Schuler, and it took her a long time to comprehend his pronunciation of “Tony, por favor.”

  “Is this Tony?”