“My job is to find out.”
“I could run away from you,” I said.
“Please don’t do that,” she said.
“You have a credential?”
She nodded, looked at the ground.
“That’s okay,” I said. “I don’t really care. I just want you to stop following me.”
“It’s a free country,” she said.
“It used to be,” I said.
She frowned.
“Okay,” I said. “You can follow me for a while. Then I’ll arrange for you to lose me. But at least you’ll have given it some effort.”
“Thanks,” she said.
And when the next train pulled in we got on together.
We chatted all the way into Hollywood. She was single, never married, moved to Los Angeles with a Master’s Degree in Criminology from the University of Cincinnati. I told her I was a philosophy major in college but dropped out. She asked me why, and I said I couldn’t solve the problem of evil.
“Yeah,” she said. “Evil sucks.”
I asked her about Cincinnati and told her I liked their chili, five-way style. She said she loved it, too, and ate way too much.
When we hit the Vine Street station I told her, “I’m going to lose you now. I’m sorry for any inconvenience.”
“You’ve been very pleasant,” she said.
“For the first time in a long time,” I said.
She didn’t bother getting off the train.
I HAD TWO of the hundreds from Cameron Lette’s bag with me. I needed more transport than my feet and what Los Angeles amusingly called its subway system.
I walked to a Target and found the sporting goods section. There were several bikes for sale hanging from a rack. I chose a Schwinn cruiser. Then I picked out a cable with combination lock and a simple bike pump.
Ten minutes later I was out on the street with seventeen dollars and twelve cents in my pocket, and riding a bike.
Now all I had to do was not get hit by a car.
I RODE OVER to the Trader Joe’s on Sunset. I looked around for Dennis Bork but didn’t see him. Maybe he was in the back. I did see the same petite woman who’d helped me before. She was putting bags of romaine in the display case. She had gloves on.
“Hi,” I said.
She turned to me, smiling, but when she saw who I was the smile dropped.
“What do you want?”
“Dennis around?”
“You haven’t heard?”
I shook my head.
“He’s … What did you get him involved in?”
“Listen to me, I only talked to him. About Yance.”
“You knew Yance?”
“I’m the one who found him.”
She put her hand on her chest.
“I wanted to help Dennis,” I said.
“Too late for that,” she said.
“Can you at least tell me where he lived?”
IT WAS A light brown apartment building about a mile away. Built after the war and hanging on for dear life after several earthquakes over the years. The cracks had been plastered over a number of times, like a rich widow from Beverly Hills.
It had a stoop and four cement stairs leading up to the door. I heard the voices of some kids around the corner. It looked like a school or community center up there, a place for fenced-in play. That was the way of the world now, play gets fenced in. To keep the bad guys out.
I was about to go up the stairs when the door opened and a black kid of about eight or nine came out and down the stairs and turned in front of me, heading toward the corner.
“Hey,” I said, “you live here?”
He hesitated, turned back to me, and calculated. He was built like a little palm tree, with stout legs and bushy hair.
So I said, “I knew Dennis, the guy who died.” I said it in a way to make me sound sympathetic, which was only partially a ruse. I felt as bad about Dennis Bork as a normal person would who’d had a conversation with a guy who ended up dead a couple of days later.
“You his friend?” the boy said, taking one tentative step toward me.
I said, “I talked to him at the store he worked at. I wanted to talk to him again, but then he died.”
The boy nodded.
“Could I ask you something?” I said.
The boy shrugged.
“Did you see anything going on around his apartment? Activity?”
“You mean like people?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Like people.”
“Nah. He was kind of alone a lot.”
“You ever talk to him?” I said, being careful not to move in too close. Keeping the tone light.
He shrugged. “One time.”
“Think you could tell me about it? It’s important.”
He shrugged again. “I was just ridin’ my bike and he was comin’ up the sidewalk and he said hi to me, and he didn’t do that.”
“Didn’t do what?”
“Say hi and stuff.
“Anything else?”
“He waited for me while I was ridin’. When I got back and got off my bike he said, What’s your name, and I said Emil, and he said his name was Dennis and he was an actor.”
“An actor?”
“Yeah.”
“Was that all?”
Emil thought about it. “He was sort of crying.”
“Sort of?”
“His eyes were all watery. I kind of didn’t want to talk to him.”
“Did you talk to him?”
“A little.”
“You were being polite?”
“I guess.”
“That’s a good thing to be,” I said. “Did he say anything you remember?”
Emil thought about it. “Maybe like somethin’ about him sayin’ he wished he was a kid like me again.”
I nodded.
“What happened to your hand?” Emil said.
“There was a guy who wasn’t so polite,” I said.
“He cut you?”
“Can you tell me anything more about Dennis?”
“He’s dead, is all. We got people dyin’ all over.”
“All over?”
“Mr. Jenks died. He was in two-oh-two. He was a hundred, though.”
“Yeah?”
“Used to talk to me about a guy who flew a plane to France.”
“Was the guy’s name Lindbergh?”
“That’s it!” Emil smiled. “How come you know about it?”
“I read,” I said.
“You do that a lot?”
“Not as much as I’d like.”
“I read Harry Potter,” Emil said. “All of ’em.”
“It’s good that you read, and that you’re polite,” I said. “Don’t ever change those things, okay?”
Emil nodded.
“Did the police talk to you?” I said.
Emil shook his head.
“Just one more thing,” I said. “Do you know how Dennis died?”
Emil put his hand on his throat and said, “Hangin’.”
COINCIDENCE, EINSTEIN ONCE said, is God’s way of remaining anonymous. I didn’t know if God was involved in the hanging death of a poor TJ’s employee, but his mode of demise was a little too close to that of his lover.
It could have been a copycat job, but statistically that was way down the list of probabilities, somewhere on the order of Paris Hilton playing Lady Macbeth on Broadway.
It bothered me all the way back to my hovel.
The time had come to up my game. There were too many moving parts, and a lot of the parts seemed about to come my way.
I left my new bike by my old bed and walked to the Highland subway station for a trip back to my old stomping grounds.
CERBERUS THE GUARDIAN of Hades was still outside the shelter, and she shouted that the devil was coming out of my eyes. Then she screamed at me not to look at her.
I happily complied.
I buzzed. A voice answered and I said I was here to see Lyle
Thebes.
The voice, a woman’s, said, “We don’t allow visitors.”
“Allie?” I said.
“Who is this?”
“This is your old pal Phil, the guy who got the boot.”
Pause. “What are you doing here?”
“I need to talk to Thebes. Could you at least tell him I’m out here?”
Pause. “I’m not supposed to relay messages.”
“I don’t want you to do anything that would get you in trouble, Allie.” Even though that’s exactly what I was asking.
Pause. “Wait outside the gate,” she said.
This I did. Cerberus kept telling me to get my satanic self out of there. I tried to look as angelic as I could. Not easy for me to do.
Finally, Allie came out of the front doors and to the street where I was waiting.
“Hey, Allie,” I said. “You look well.”
She didn’t, she looked worried.
“I’m not supposed to tell any of this. But Lyle goes on Saturday nights to a church. I wrote the address. Here.”
She gave me a piece of folded pink paper. I put it in my pocket.
“Thank you,” I said.
A weak smile came to her face. “I hope you find what you’re looking for.” And I knew she meant a lot more than Lyle Thebes.
I walked over to Broadway and Clifton’s Cafeteria. The food is not Wolfgang Puck. In fact, it’s barely above hockey puck. But it’s warm and cheap. I scooped out a bowl of mac and cheese, a slice of meatloaf, some peas. I paid the lady and took a table upstairs where it was less crowded and I could sit away from people.
Sitting away from people seemed to be my lot in life now. Staying away from as many as possible because any one of them could have designs on doing things to me I would prefer not be done.
You’d like to be able to reason with people but people are becoming less reasonable. That’s the spirit of the age. It’s the decline. It’s the return to the jungle, the bog. In Sumeria and India and China and Greece they were asking questions, the big ones, the why are we here? questions. They got together in togas and tunics, their sandals and silk shoes, and they walked around trying to figure this all out, talking, reasoning.
And after five thousand years we’ve become a sound bite talk show of a culture, where insult and emotion are the currencies of persuasion. And outside our walls, in the rest of the world, the bomb and the bullet are the means of exchange.
Our experiment in thought has gone monstrously wrong, so leave me alone to eat my meatloaf and peas. That’s about all a man can ask for now.
After my meal I went to the library and stayed until closing. I managed to get a computer terminal for an hour from a kind librarian. I did one-handed keyboarding, looking for any news of the killing of a man and woman in East Los Angeles, in a commercial building.
Nothing.
I turned my attention to Mark David Mayne, and there was of course a ton of material on him. Laudatory stories in business publications. Scathing accounts of his ruthlessness by bloggers of the environmental and social-justice stripe. One alleged ex-lover had set up an anonymous blog dedicated to getting out the “truth” about Mayne’s treatment of women. The site did not appear to generate much traffic.
My brain needed a shower. I went to the philosophy shelves and browsed. Found old William James there, holding up the J shelf. Pragmatism, A Pluralistic Universe, Meaning of Truth. What I took down was The Varieties of Religious Experience. I’d skimmed it once, when I was thirteen. My dad had a leather-bound, gilt-edged edition of it in his library. So I took the good Harvard professor over to a soft chair and read for a couple of hours.
AS THE SUN set over L.A., I hiked to 6th and San Pedro, to a storefront with a hand-painted sign posted out front. The Central City Community Church of the Good Shepherd. Outside was a group of about six men, of various ages, smoking. Collectively they looked like denizens of the street. One of them, an older man with a scraggly beard and what looked like a Lakers jacket from 1973, nodded at me and said, “Welcome, brother.”
I nodded back, not wanting to break the fraternal order of the evening.
I went inside to a lobby where another group of street people were standing around, some smiling, some hugging, some handing out coffee from behind a plain folding table with an urn and Styrofoam cups on it. I got a few looks and smiles of my own, but no hugs. Not yet, anyway.
From further inside, through open inner doors, I heard someone singing. It was a woman’s voice, at least I think it was, and she was really belting it out. “It” was unidentifiable, but there was definitely music to go with the enthusiasm of the voice, which was sort of a mix of Billie Holliday and Scooby Doo.
And then I recognized the music. It was “Say My Name.” The words had never sounded like this before.
“Welcome to Karaoke.”
I turned and looked down at a woman who came up to my navel. She had straight brown hair and a friendly smile. She seemed around thirty or so but had worry lines on her forehead that looked like they got a regular workout.
“I thought this was a church,” I said.
“Oh it is!” she said. Her voice was squeaky in a happy squirrel kind of way. “We have Karaoke every Tuesday. Your first time?”
“Yes. I’m looking—”
“Here!” She handed me a small, folded document. It had a red heart on the front, not the Valentine kind, but the real looking kind, with thorns around it. A title read, God’s Love Letter to Earth.
“Thank you,” I said. “Do you know—”
“God is going to heal your hand,” she said.
“Excuse me?”
She nodded at my left hand. “The Holy Spirit just told me God is going to heal your hand.”
“Well,” I said, “thank it for me.”
“Oh no,” she said. “The Holy Spirit is a he, not an it. He is the power of God in us.”
I put the tract in my back pocket. “You’re very nice,” I said. “Do you know Lyle Thebes?”
She shook her head.
“I’ll go look for him,” I said.
“God loves you,” she said.
I went inside to a hot, packed room. There were a lot of people on folding chairs and many standing along the walls. In front of the chairs stood a woman with sprigs of steel-wool hair shooting from her head, holding a microphone and belting out the song that Beyoncé would not recognize.
But everyone was being supportive. They clapped and cheered and moved with whatever discernible rhythm was coming from the speakers, or perhaps from inside their own heads.
I scanned the faces along the wall looking for Lyle Thebes. Did not see him. Saw every other kind of person you can imagine. An open facility in Skid Row invites the largest cross-section of humanity known to man. And no matter what you look like, everyone is equal.
I made my way to the right, walking through a fog of sweat and stink, and took a place on the other side of the church.
Still no sign of Lyle.
A few people looked at me, including one guy whose defining feature was eyebrows. They were black and full and winged out on the sides. It looked like his face had handles. But his eyes were fixated on me. He was staring like I was some sort of intruder and he was going to go right out and tell the cops to come in and arrest me.
So I moved around to the other side of the church and looked at the other sets of chairs. Happily, the woman had come to the end of the song and there was loud applause followed by blessed quiet.
Then a Hispanic man with a tight ponytail and broad shoulders, wearing a vest made out of black leather over a white silk shirt, took the microphone from the woman and said into it, “Let’s hear it for Mary O!”
The place erupted in applause and the woman with the steel-wool hair blew kisses.
The crowd started shouting for someone named Pastor Raul to sing. The Hispanic man with a ponytail smiled widely. It was obvious he was the aforementioned pastor. I figured he was in charge of the whole thin
g. They all wanted him to do “American Pie.” The way they were calling for it made it seem like his signature song. And it looked like he was going to sing it. I just hoped it wasn’t the long version.
But as soon as he started to sing it was clear he had serious pipes. And a depth of soul you could hear in his voice.
The guy with the eyebrows, all the way on the other side, was leaning and looking at me still.
AND THEN I spotted Lyle. He was getting into the song. Most in the house were standing. Lyle was, too.
I slid into the row and made my way over to him.
Good old boys were drinking whiskey and rye when I tapped Lyle on the shoulder.
“What are you doing here?” Lyle said.
“Can I talk to you outside?”
“Now?”
“I didn’t come here to sing.”
“How about after this song?” Lyle said.
“Too long,” I said. “It’s important.”
Lyle shrugged and we slipped out of the row and went back through the doors into the lobby. We went outside to San Pedro Street.
“What is up?” he said.
“I see you’ve got both your eyes.”
“Oh, him? They made him leave.”
“Good idea. I want something from you.”
He brightened. “Yeah?”
“Can you get me into Staples? The luxury-box floor? Tomorrow night?”
He whistled. I hadn’t heard anybody whistle in a long time.
“That’s a tough one,” he said.
“If it was easy, I would’ve done it myself.”
I noticed somebody else coming out of the church. The guy with the eyebrows. He looked up and down the street until he locked eyes on me.
Lyle reached into his back pocket and produced a short, stubby pencil and a small, spiral-wired notebook.
“This is going to cost some money,” Lyle said.
“I figured. I’ll give you five bucks.”
“Five bucks!”
“Start negotiating.”
“Come on, man! We’re talking two large, at least.”
“Highway robbery.”
“I got overhead to cover!”
I buried my face in my hand and tried not to laugh.
“Okay, one G,” Lyle said. “But an extra yard for expenses.”
Romeo's Rules Page 18