“What brings you here tonight?”
“Oh, I only come in when I run out of drugs.”
Well, that was frank.
“I like crack,” I ventured.
“Me too. You don’t happen to—”
“No. Wish I did.” I laughed world-wearily.
“I like to rock it myself. When I have the means.”
“Uh, yeah, me too.” Whatever the hell that meant. “I like heroin too,” I added.
“For going to sleep I like pills.”
“Like what?”
“Ox.”
“Uh…”
“You know. Downers. Oxycotton.” Pearl hugged herself. “Mm.”
“Oh, you mean OxyContin?”
“Whatever. You know, I don’t usually talk to white girls.”
I smiled. “Well, we’re all in it together, you know?”
“Mm.”
“So do you know the folks here, like the guards and stuff?”
“Not the guards so much. But Amaryllis, I know her from forever.”
“Oh, yeah?”
Pearl recalled one of the old jazz clubs on Central Avenue, now defunct. “We all liked to go listen of a Friday night, Saturday night. People seemed to have more time in those days. Amaryllis always made friends. She was older than my crowd, but I did see her there, listening to Squire B. Jones, Gloria Rivers, artists like that would come through.”
“She’s made a lot of her life in this neighborhood, hasn’t she?” I suggested.
“She’s done a lot more than people know.”
“Good stuff or bad stuff?”
“Well, good, to my way of thinking.”
“Like what?”
Pearl tucked her chin and lowered her voice. “Like she helped a lot of girls. When they got in trouble, you know what I’m saying?”
“In trouble, like…?”
She stared pointedly at my pregnant belly.
“Oh, you mean she helped them get abortions.” I offered the bottle again.
“Thank you.” She drank. “Mmm. I mean she did it herself. Long time ago she did that. People in the old hood called her Nursey. She was a real nurse, went around in a white cap? She did abortions on the side, because of course it was illegal then. She’d do for all kinds of people, you’d be surprised. ‘Nursey, I’m in trouble,’ they’d say.”
“How do you know?”
“Because she gave me one! Then she kicked my ass for being so stupid. And she said, ‘You only get one. No more ever.’ That was her rule. I straightened out for a while. There’s others that did better. And worse.”
She looked at me. Somewhere in her fucked-up depths, there still existed a weak glow of wisdom.
I laid down. Through that whole evening at the ABC, so many emotions coursed through me: the excitement of sneaking around, the fear of getting found out, the utter satisfaction of acting my way through every difficulty. I felt the way I’d felt when, in an insanely tough improvisation clinic in acting school, I’d drawn the short straw of Amanda Wingfield (the delusional mother in The Glass Menagerie) transplanted to a kibbutz on the outskirts of Tel Aviv. I mean really.
I knew nothing of Jewishness, let alone Tel Avivian culture, so I just plunged in and made Amanda get all spiritual in a generically middle-aged way. It worked. Seeing the faces of my classmates and teacher—well, not exactly seeing them, you don’t make eye contact out of your frame, but you’re damn well aware of their vibe.
I remember warbling, “One does wonder how the creator knew—how he knew—that a simple desert plant like this, this cactus—would come to symbolize hope! For so many!”
Feeling their credulity, my heart soared. It’s working! They’re buying it! I learned that you can fling total bullshit out there, but if you do it with every nerve in your body, they will buy it.
That’s the magic of acting.
And that’s how I felt that night at the ABC Mission.
Chapter 17 – George and Rita in Pursuit
In the morning I followed Amaryllis’s voice to the cafeteria. Boldly, I strode through the food line. I’d slept carefully and avoided all but minimal washing, so my makeup was still good.
Actually, to say I slept is a slight overstatement. When the supervisor turned out the lights, I listened to the shifting and turning and cot-hinge-creaking, then I started to question what the hell I was doing. I did that for a long time; I’m so good at it. Then I thought about Gramma Gladys and told myself to shape up, for Christ’s sake, then I thought about Petey and sent him happy vibes. It felt appropriate to say a silent Our Father, so I did that. I’m sure I drifted off a few times, but those women snored like locomotives.
The Iron Angel herself slapped a whopping ladle of oatmeal into my bowl, saying, “You need extra, ma’am, being expecting. Get you some milk to go on this, OK? And you eat it all. Good Sunday to you.”
I dared flick my eyes directly into hers.
She didn’t know me.
I found a seat and ate heartily. George was at breakfast too. About half of the guys had slunk off at dawn, but I still had to really look to pick him out of the multitude of human wrecks there. We avoided each other.
I finished quickly and kept my eye on Amaryllis. When she left the serving line, I got up to follow her. However, with a hellish shriek, the toothless pillhead from last night collapsed into some kind of convulsive state right in front of me.
Pearl’s eyes locked on to mine as she writhed on the floor, then they rolled back. I knelt to her. Her head started ramming rhythmically into the tiles, so I balled up a cleaning rag a volunteer had left on the table and put it under her head. I heard someone shout for help.
I thought I should put something between her teeth, which I seemed to remember you’re supposed to do, but her jaws were clenched tight.
I held her hand as it tried to flutter off her arm, and said, “It’s OK, it’s OK,” over and over. In a few minutes, a volunteer and Wichita came up and took over.
Wichita flipped open a walkie-talkie. “We got one down in the cafeteria.” Pause. “I dunno, old.” Pause. “I dunno, maybe a OD.” She shut the device, lowered herself, hands on knees, and studied the woman with silent interest.
The guests of any shelter have medical troubles like you wouldn’t believe. TB, hepatitis, open sores, asthma, diabetes, cancer, schizophrenia. I’d known all this going in, and tried to keep away from germs, but you never know. Last night I’d felt that sharing the vodka with Pearl had been OK because alcohol kills germs.
A volunteer showed up with some first-aid skills, so I took off, but Amaryllis was gone. George too. Volunteers were moving everybody toward chapel, in the gym.
I hurried to Amaryllis’s office, thinking maybe she’d stop there before going on to chapel.
The office was unlocked and unoccupied. For the hell of it I tried the desk drawer that had been locked last night, and somehow I was not surprised when it rolled open. The fat brown envelope was gone.
I glanced out the window and saw Amaryllis, the envelope wedged beneath her arm, walking to a car in the narrow front parking area. A volunteer flagged her down, perhaps to talk about the medical situation unfolding in the cafeteria. Amaryllis stopped and listened, leaning against the car, a plum-colored Taurus with a clouded-over back window.
I dashed into the corridor, almost colliding with George.
“She’s leaving with the envelope!” I said excitedly. “Let’s go!”
“I don’t have a car!”
“Mine’s on the next block!”
“You brought your car down here?”
“It’s in a driveway down the first side street.” I pointed. “Meet me there.”
We separated, dashing for different exits. I had not simply Left My Car On The Street, but had approached a Latina grandma with penciled-in eyebrows sitting on her porch and paid her five dollars for the privilege of parking it in her driveway overnight. Which was no guarantee of safety, but a thief would have to be scraping pretty
low to bother with my liver-spotted Honda anyway.
We arrived panting at the car at the same moment. Rapidly, George said, “I respect you as a woman and as a driver, but give me the keys.”
I tossed them to him and got in to ride shotgun.
It was lucky the volunteer had kept Amaryllis talking for a minute, because she’d just peeled out onto Compton when we came up. An ambulance zoomed the other way toward the mission.
“Looks like that rear windshield got busted out,” George remarked, “then replaced but they did a bad job.”
“It’ll make her easier to keep in sight,” I observed.
“More important, it cuts down on her rear view.”
Amaryllis headed north on Compton, then turned left on Vernon.
“Gotta stay well back, but I gotta make every light she does,” my companion grunted. I settled in for the ride.
It’s funny how you’ll be rolling along through the butt-ugly utilitarianness of South Central, when you’ll just see this gout of red bougainvillea spilling breathtakingly over a fence. Talk about gated communities, there’s a hell of a lot of fences in South Central.
Amaryllis turned out to be an aggressive driver. She beat lights like a NASCAR wannabe and jumped lanes at the slightest impediment. Shockingly, she leaned on her horn when a delivery van slowed down to get safely around a bicyclist.
“Jeez!” I exclaimed.
George laughed, his fake teeth glinting in the morning sunshine. There we were, a pair of scuzzes motoring along in my weather-beaten old Honda. At one point when we did stop for a light behind Amaryllis, a nicely dressed couple idling next to us looked over, then pursed their mouths in disgust.
I smiled widely and gave them a wave, and they snapped their eyes forward.
“I can’t wait to take a hot shower,” George said.
“At least you’re not wearing latex,” I said. “If I don’t get this stuff off of me soon, my skin’s gonna rot.” I rolled down the window to breathe the fresh morning air.
“It’s funny about you,” he said, looking at me sidelong.
“What’s funny?”
“You’re beautiful no matter what.”
“Shut up and drive.”
Amaryllis turned onto the 110 north and we all cruised through the city in easy traffic. “Ideally,” George said, “we’d have a couple of cars and take turns being the near car. Three or four’s even better. But we’ve got pretty good cover now, with the traffic. If she exits quickly we could miss her, though.”
We followed her through the tunnels and the long single-file lane to the 5 north, and on northward from there.
The I-5 up from L.A. is broad, bright, and hot. Through the San Fernando Valley the pocked pavement had been repaired with mustardy-looking patch material. I rolled up my window and flipped on the air-conditioning.
The parched mountains and dust devils make for a moonscape near where Route 14 comes in. This is Koyaanisqatsi country, where giant power-line towers march down the canyons, part of the mammoth transmission corridor that electrifies Los Angeles.
I wondered how Petey was doing in Wisconsin, with its soft fields and woods.
As the highway opened out into longer and longer straightaways, George allowed Amaryllis’s car to become a speck in the distance.
He said, “Two of her so-called guards are the pair that chased me out of the hood where you and Kip Cubitt were shot.”
“Really?”
“Yes, the white gal and that tall black dude with the dreads.”
“Is his name Denny? Deep voice? He had his hair under his cap when I saw him.”
“Deep voice, yeah. I didn’t get his name. He had a brown leather wristband?”
“That’s him,” I said. “I’m starting to think Amaryllis’s story about Dale Vargas being the big villain is bullshit. She’s inside her own crime ring, George! She’s got to be. I mean, she might have some connection with this guy, but—”
“You gotta wonder who’s the real Whale. What the hell’s this money about? I don’t think she’s on her way to invest in mutual funds.”
“Yeah,” I said, suddenly reluctant. Because I still wanted to believe in her.
We entered the Grapevine, that towering pass you must climb to get to the Central Valley. Millions of years of geology fly by as the road cuts through layer after layer of canted-up rock. The Honda’s engine strained; better-powered cars chugged past us. “Come on, baby,” George urged. I flicked off the AC to take that load off the engine. The air here was cooler than back in Burbank.
We passed a car on fire in the breakdown lane of southbound, its engine burnt out on the task of making the miles-long grade. A cop stood at a safe distance with the morose family, watching the flames.
“I can still see her,” I said.
“Where the hell’s she going?”
“We’re eating up the miles, all right.”
I’m always struck by seeing actual tumbleweeds once you get to the valley, yes, there they are, beach-ball-like plants skeletonized by the wind, pulled from their roots to bump and skitter until they huddle against barbed-wire cow fences. Ravens, vultures, and hawks soar on the thermals rising from the valley floor.
The threatening mood ebbs as you roll deeper into the Central Valley. Multicolored oleander flourishes in the freeway median. Prehistoric-looking pump jacks suck up the last of the oil from beneath fields that have been cultivated around them. Onion fields, almond groves, grape fields, and it seems the world has gone forever flat.
“She going all the way to San Francisco?” George checked the gas hopefully. I knew how much he enjoyed that town.
But no, Amaryllis exited to a county road south of Bakersfield and headed east.
There was no traffic at this point, so we either had to follow her openly or let her go. “Hell with it,” said George, “I really don’t think she’s aware of us.” He stayed back maybe half a mile.
The purple Taurus kicked up a plume of dust and set off down a farm road. In the distance I saw a two-story house on the right.
“This dust is great cover,” George said.
Amaryllis turned in at the farmhouse. A light blue sedan, an old one, was parked in the yard.
“Memorize what’s on the mailbox,” said George. “We’ll just cruise by.”
“Seventeen Thistle Route. No name. She making a drug buy, you figure?”
“Maybe.”
I looked back at the house. Surely it was once quite nice, a little Victorian with gingerbread; now its angles lacked squareness.
This was a countryside of small farms and ranches—at least small by California standards, perhaps a couple of hundred acres apiece. Agribusiness hadn’t taken over everything. Some of the fields lay fallow, others grew knee-high greenery, I guessed spinach or peppers.
George stopped the car on a rise and we got out to view the house from a distance. To our surprise, the Taurus was already on its way back to the county road.
“That was quick,” I said.
“It was a money drop,” said George. “I don’t think she was on that property for thirty seconds.”
“Shall we try to catch up to her?”
“No, she’s done whatever business it was.”
Godforsaken was the word that popped into my mind when we looked at that house, sitting next to the dirt road that cut indifferently through the land. The pretty, tended green fields that lay in the distance made the house, surrounded by its dry patch, look all the lonelier.
By the time we went through the Grapevine again, all that remained of the burned car, the family, and the trooper, was a fire scar on the pavement and some white dust. Misfortune gets cleared away quickly in these parts.
Chapter 18 – A Lucky Path; Dangerous Money
I called Aunt Sheila and Aunt Toots early the next morning, missing my boy. Toots answered.
“How’s Petey?” I asked.
“Fine,” she said in a guarded tone, which was more or less her usual voice.
“You’re so good to take him in for a while.”
“The law after you?”
I paused. “Of a kind.”
“Well, you just stick it to ’em, kid.”
I could have said, Yes, I robbed three banks last week, and a minute ago I shot a G-man, so I can’t talk long, and she would have said, Well, you skedaddle, then. You can always hide out here, you know.
Total family loyalty, coupled with a healthy strain of incuriosity.
“OK,” I said. “May I talk to him, please?”
Not bothering to muffle the phone against her bosom, she hollered, “Petey! C’mere!”
He grunted into the phone.
“Honey, how are you?”
“Lousy. They beat me.”
“Honey!”
Toots grabbed the phone back. “Goddamn it, Sheila told him to say that. Here, kid, tell her what’s really bugging you.”
Petey said, “They took my ScoreLad.”
Toots cackled and grabbed the phone. “That thing’s a brain-rotting piece of shit!”
“Toots, can you try to tone down the swearing just a little? For Pete’s sake?”
“We gave him a potholder weaving kit instead.” She laughed. “Now he can do something productive with his time indoors! Hah!”
“I see.”
“I hate it!” Petey cried from her side.
“Here, put your head by mine,” said Toots.
I said, “Petey, honey, just give it a try, OK? Hey, what did you do this morning?”
“Ate ham. I drove the tractor! We went outside and did stuff.” Toots told me, “Ham and eggs and hash browns, the real kind. Manly food, the kind we eat every day! Ha! Yeah, he pretended to let Sheila drive the tractor, but it was really Petey doing all the driving, right, boy?”
“Right!” he shouted ecstatically.
That was life with Shelia and Toots.
George called later to tell me he’d spent half of last night looking up stuff online. “Then this morning I went downtown and did some digging in records and the library.”
“But Bakersfield isn’t in Los Angeles County, is it?”
The Rita Farmer Mystery series Box Set Page 45