Night Is the Hunter (4 page)

D
onnally scanned the street as he drove his truck toward the Rojos' apartment just after sunset. He'd decided not to put the family in further jeopardy by trying to speak to them earlier in the day while he, or they, might still be under surveillance by the Muslim Nation.

The dope dealers were back on their corners, wearing hooded sweatshirts and puff jackets against the cold. The streetlights above them had been shot out, leaving them in shadow except when side lit by passing cars.

The day's trash littered the curbs and sidewalks. Malt liquor cans. Beer bottles. Taco Bell and McDonald's wrappers. Pages from
Auto Trader
and the
San Francisco Bay Guardian
.

The door to the corner A&B Market was caged with iron bars and bulletproof glass. Light emerged from a window and chute built into the door for sliding money in and purchases out.

A tricked-out 1980s ragtop Camaro with spinners on its wheels rolled by as Donnally pulled to the curb, the four occupants sitting low and staring over at him. He watched the car stop at the corner just long enough for the front passenger to hand a paper bag to one of the runners. The kid glanced inside, then tossed it to another who carried it toward the open front
door of a duplex unit and passed it to a woman standing in the threshold.

Donnally checked the Velcro retention strap on his shoulder holster under his jacket. He then climbed out of his truck and headed up the driveway toward the concrete and wrought-iron stairs leading to the second floor of the apartment building. Two teenage girls were walking down as he headed up.

One of them stopped next to him on the second-floor landing. “Look at you, Five-Oh.” She laughed. “All undercover and everything.”

They were using 5-0 for police, as their parents had before them, the code having survived two iterations of the television show and a voyage halfway across the Pacific from Hawaii.

Donnally didn't mind them thinking he was still a cop and hoped they'd pass the mistake onto the dealers on the corner. It wasn't as protective as a body armor, but it would do.

“Maybe,” Donnally said, “but I'm just visiting an old family friend. Somebody died.”

The girl's smile faded. “Sorry. I didn't mean nothing.”

Donnally noticed that the two were carrying textbooks and concluded that they'd just been playing a part they'd learned in the neighborhood.

“It's okay.” He pointed at her books. “Good luck in school.” He then headed toward the Rojos' apartment, three doors down.

Donnally knocked, waited, and watched the peephole go dark. Five seconds later, he heard the sound of a chain chinking as it was unhooked and then the click-thunk of a deadbolt sliding.

The elderly woman he'd seen in the window earlier opened the door. She had a wide Indian face and dark skin. He guessed she was Magdalena Rojo, Edgar Sr.'s mother and Junior's grandmother.
She was drying her hands with a dishtowel. Five-year-old twins sat on the couch behind her watching television. They glanced up at him as they would at Junior's parole officer come to do a search for drugs and weapons, with a mix of familiarity and anxiety on their faces, then focused again on the screen.

Magdalena waited for him to speak.

“My name is Harlan Donnally and I wanted—”

“To start a riot?”

She didn't smile.

Donnally shook his head. “I haven't spent much time in San Francisco in the last ten years, so I didn't know about the Muslim Nation moving in here.”

“They haven't moved in here yet, at least into this building, but they will.” She glanced toward the direction from which the Nation members had marched that afternoon. “They've only gotten as far as the next block.”

Magdalena backed away from the threshold and gestured with her free hand toward the interior, inviting him to enter. He stepped inside. She closed the door and pointed at the kids, and then down the hallway. Donnally wondered whether they were Junior's children, her great-grandchildren. Without giving Donnally another look, they turned off the television and walked down the hall and closed the bedroom door behind them.

Magdalena led him to the dining table and they sat down. The surface was still wet from wiping after dinner, and the apartment had the limey smell of corn tortillas mixed with the earthy aroma of pinto beans.

“You wanted?”

Donnally knew that question would be coming from whoever had answered the door, but other than knowing he wouldn't mention
Judge McMullin, he hadn't decided on how he would answer it, until just then.

“I'm trying to understand why I was shot ten years ago when I was a cop.”

Magdalena drew back a little, her body tensed.

“And not because I think your grandson was involved. The guy who shot me is dead.”

“Did you kill him?”

Her words came across less as an accusation and more as an attempt to position herself in relation to him. Was she sitting across from a man who'd taken a life?

“Not because I wanted to. He was coming at me firing. I was caught in a cross fire between Norteños and Sureños over on Mission Street.”

Magdalena's gaze shifted toward the television for a second, then back at Donnally.

“I saw it on the news. You were lying by the curb.”

Donnally nodded.

“I think one was dead in the street and the other was on the sidewalk.” She fell silent and bit her lip. “My grandson knew one of them.”

“The Norteño?”

She nodded. “I don't know how he became involved with them.”

“Yes, you do.”

The words came out sharper than Donnally intended, but she didn't strike back. She just lowered her head and sighed.

“Why did you stay here after your son was killed?”

She looked up again. “For the same reason my ancestors buried their relatives on the family's
ranchito
in Mexico. You can't escape
your history. It makes no sense to try. It just breaks you apart in your heart.”

Donnally felt his hands clench under the table. Without knowing it, Magdalena had touched not only on the central preoccupation of his life, but also on the pressing problem that was fixed at the back of his mind even as he was talking with her: whether his father had begun a descent toward a day when he would have no memory at all, and therefore no way to place himself in the world. But at least in his father's case it might be a good thing as it might obliterate the break that divided his heart since his days in Vietnam.

“And I'm trying to understand my history,” Donnally said. “I think the war between the Norteños and Sureños that was set off by the murder of your son led in one way or another to what happened on Mission Street.”

Magdalena stared at him, again biting her lower lip, then she said, “My son was killed twenty years ago and you were shot, what? Eight, nine years ago?”

“Ten.”

It was clear to him that Magdalena was thinking in terms of a chain of events and wondering whether the length of it could be followed back to the beginning.

Donnally, on the other hand, was thinking of roots or branches that radiated from a common trunk.

“Have you looked at the file about my son's murder?”

Donnally nodded. “But there are some things I didn't understand.” He pointed toward the window overlooking the street and the low table below it. “The diagram showed there was a couch in front of that window on the night Edgar was killed.”

She glanced at the one along the wall to the left. “A different one.”

Donnally didn't ask why it was replaced, but wondered whether it had been too bloody to clean.

“So he had to make some effort to get close to the window?”

“Not really.” Magdalena spread her hands two feet apart. “There was a space between the couch and the wall, so we could look to see who was pressing the buzzer downstairs.”

She pointed down toward the front of the building.

“There used to be a sliding gate across the driveway and a door to let people in, but the speaker was always broken.” She anticipated his next question. “But no one had buzzed before the shooting.”

“What made him walk over there?”

“A phone call. My grandson was so upset and confused, even to this day he doesn't know what really happened during the call, just that his father hung up and walked to the window right afterwards.”

Donnally had read about the telephone call in the police report and the inability of the police to discover who'd made it. He'd only asked the question about why her son had gone to the window in order to find out whether she'd learned something new over the years or was now prepared to add something that hadn't been contained in the file.

“You should talk to Israel Dominguez,” Magdalena said. “He knows. But maybe he wants to take the name of the caller to his grave.”

“Were you convinced that he shot—”

“There was no doubt it was him. The witnesses came to me, each of them, and swore it was him on their mothers' lives.” She pointed at the couch. “Sitting right over there.”

“Did they say why Dominguez did it?”

She shook her head.

“What about the D.A.'s theory that it wasn't just a prank gone wrong or a personal vendetta, but a contract killing of a Norteño by a Sureño?”

Magdalena sighed. “I wouldn't know about that. My son's friends knew not to bring their gang talk into this house.”

If she didn't know, Donnally thought, it was nothing but willful blindness. Just like his father's about his own life. Except Magdalena's evasions, unlike his father's, didn't blossom into anger in his chest, only into sadness. She was living in the same place where, and trapped in the same moment when, her son was killed, but only acknowledging to herself half the truth about him and his life and therefore the reasons for his murder.

“How did you feel about Dominguez getting the death penalty?”

She hardened her voice, but it lacked a bitter edge. “He hasn't yet.”

“I think you know that's not what I'm asking.”

She looked down at the dishtowel in her hands, then back up. “That was for others to decide. We're little people. We were just barely up from the fields in Salinas, and back then we were here illegally. We went along and testified to what they told us to.” Her eyes went vague. “And what they call justice was done.”

“Do you think so now?”

Magdalena paused a few moments and fingered the cross hanging from a chain around her neck. Finally, with her voice devolving into a sigh, she said, “He's a mother's son. There's nothing more I can say.”

B
uddy Cochran smiled when he looked up from his pastrami sandwich and spotted Donnally heading toward his center-line booth in the crowded Canter's Deli in Hollywood.

“Hey, kiddo. What brings you back down to Wonderland?”

Buddy held up his greasy fingers to display his reason for not shaking hands, then wiped his mouth with his napkin and pointed at the opposite bench.

Donnally slid in.

“This about your old man?”

“How'd you guess?”

“I guessed because if you hadn't shown up pretty soon, I would've called you myself.”

A waitress walked toward the table with her order pad in one hand and a small plate of sliced kosher pickles in the other. Donnally ordered a coffee. Buddy told her to also bring Donnally a corned beef on rye and slid his check toward her so she could add them to his tab.

Donnally thought of waving it off, but he didn't want to deny the aging actor the pleasure he received from generosity.

After the waitress turned away, Buddy said, “Either your father has reached a new level of genius, or he's gone completely . . .”
Buddy looked down as though trying to duck the implications of the word that usually completed the phrase. “I mean . . .”

“Bonkers.”

Buddy shrugged. “Yeah, that word will do just fine.”

“Aren't you Buddy Cochran?” The middle-aged female voice cut into their conversation like a cleaver. Buddy's face stiffened as he stared across the table at Donnally, then he painted on a smile and looked up.

“Yes, I am.”

“I knew it—I knew it—I knew it.” Her voice soared to a squeal and her face flushed. “I just loved you in
Shooting the Dawn
.”

The woman reached out with a take-out menu and a pen. Buddy signed on the front and handed it back. She touched it to her lips and held it against her chest, then thanked him and scurried toward the exit where her husband stood with his hand poised to push open the door, his face stiff and his jaws tight.

Donnally had often seen that expression on men whose wives had gone schoolgirl in the presence of Buddy. The husbands found themselves competing with the ghost of a square-jawed movie icon who lived on behind the sagging cheeks and between the overgrown ears and below the balding head of Buddy Cochran. They usually stared at Buddy with their fists clenched at their sides, straitjacketed by the knowledge that taking a swing at him now would be a form of elder abuse.

Donnally also knew, and was offended by the fact, that it sometimes was the husbands, not the wives, who stopped at his table. Men who'd fought in Korea or in Vietnam, who idolized actors like George C. Scott and John Wayne, who wore VFW or USS
Hornet
caps, and who confused Buddy the man with the roles he played early in his career. They sometimes even saluted
him as though the uniforms he'd worn in the movies hadn't been just costumes and as though he'd once been their superior officer.

“Jesus Christ,” Buddy said as he watched the woman follow her husband out of the restaurant. “I've gotten two Academy Awards since then and three other nominations, but all people remember is that damn thirty-five-year-old war movie.”

Donnally wasn't going to say it, but Buddy had kept himself at the receiving end of those reminders by choosing to lunch every day at Canter's.

Same time. Same booth. In the sight line of every customer, even those who only got as far as the bakery and deli counters at the front.

Buddy's eyes went vacant for a moment, then he pursed his lips and shook his head.

“Sorry.” He looked back at Donnally. “I shouldn't feel so ungrateful. If it weren't for that thing, your father would've wasted his life making commercials for Ivory soap”—he glanced around the restaurant—“and I'd be here faking a Yiddish accent and taking orders for knishes and chopped liver.”

The waitress walked up with Donnally's coffee. She smiled first at Buddy, then at Donnally as she set it down.

“You got the sexy smile,” Buddy said, after she walked away. “I got the one the girls reserve for old men. But I'm not really complaining. I am an old man and I think I'm finally coming to prefer to be treated like one.”

“Unlike my father.”

“For the first time in his life he's begun to rage against the dying of the light. Until about six months ago he seemed oblivious to the idea of his own death.” Buddy grinned. “Maybe that's because he's always referred to as The Immortal Don Harlan.”

His grin faded and he looked away, seemingly lost in thought or memory. Finally, he said, “There's an odd thing about getting old. It goes back to something I learned the first time I did my own car chase scene. You're racing toward something fixed, a climb or a turn, then all of a sudden there's this paralyzing moment when everything seems to be rising up or racing toward you.” He looked back at Donnally. “The truth is I think he's coming to see he can't escape what now feels like the dark night of oblivion coming right at him.”

“What makes you think that's it? I can't imagine him inviting you over for a beer to discuss his mortality.”

“You're right. He wouldn't. It's more that he's showing the signs.” Buddy paused in thought for a moment, then said, “He's always been an ambitious guy, in a hurry, but now he seems desperate. And I've seen enough people facing the end of their careers who've acted the same way.”

Buddy took a sip of his iced tea. “Has he told you about the movie we just wrapped?”

Donnally shook his head. “He said he wanted it to be a surprise.”

“And you haven't gotten over the surprise of the last one yet.”

Don Harlan's previous film was a remake of all his Vietnam War movies from the early 1980s through the late 1990s. But this time no longer from the perspective of the American soldiers who he'd always portrayed as berserk
Deer Hunter
and
Apocalypse Now
monsters, but from the point of view of the kinds of villagers who'd set up the ambush by the North Vietnamese soldiers who killed Donnally's older brother. It had been an artistic success, but a commercial failure, playing first to a few near-empty art theaters, then at fund-raisers for wounded Afghanistan and Iraq War veterans.

“I'm afraid he's the one who hasn't gotten over it,” Donnally said. “He went into a tailspin of depression, not because it didn't make any money, but because he'd spent his life hiding from the truth, then acknowledged it and put it out there where it could never be hidden from again. He only came out of the fog trailing behind it when a producer came to him with a bag of money to make something new.”

Buddy looked away, seeming to gaze past Donnally toward the take-out counters. His face had flushed a little by the time his eyes returned to Donnally's. He looked to Donnally like a little boy trying to keep a secret.

“What?” Donnally asked, then glanced over his shoulder. He didn't recognize anyone in the booths behind him or placing orders and no fans were approaching. He thought back on what he had just told Buddy. “You have something to do with financing the new picture?”

Buddy rocked his head side to side. “Let's just say that some of us old-timers got together. We all have more money than we can ever spend and it only seems to serve to corrupt our children and grandchildren.”

His granddaughter's drunken nights in New York clubs and screaming episodes with her parents were subjects of multimillion-hit Internet videos, and her tours through rehab were reported on afternoon entertainment news programs like box scores. Buddy had long since stopped giving interviews to the entertainment press because all the reporters wanted to talk about were her escapades.

And the last thing the girl needed was more money or the promise of it as an inheritance.

“We hoped . . . maybe . . .” Buddy ended the sentence with a shrug.

“How did you know he needed the lifeline?”

“He stopped talking to us. Wouldn't return our calls. We thought he was embarrassed because of what happened with his last movie, so we got somebody to front for us.” Buddy half smiled. “If it happened to another director, he'd have appreciated the irony that some of the people he hired to act in the film were also investors. And we didn't realize going in that he'd have a lot of trouble finishing it.”

Buddy looked down at his unfinished sandwich and pushed the plate away.

“He kept forgetting things, like what we'd shot the previous day, script changes, sometimes even who was playing what part.”

Buddy fell silent, then he nodded as though he'd just gotten an insight into what had been going on.

“Looking back, I think some of it was structural. He was trying to tell the same story from four different points of view, like
Rashomon
and
The Outrage
. Except he was using different actors for each substory, and that made it hugely complicated. Four different guys playing different versions of what seemed like the same role.”

Donnally thought of the DVD his mother's doctor had viewed showing the scenes of four men turning away and walking through the same door.

“Hell, none of us knows what the real truth of the tale is. It was like getting to the end of a mystery novel and discovering that somebody ripped out the last chapter.”

“What's the movie about?”

Buddy shook his head. “Can't say. We all signed confidentiality agreements, even the caterers and prop guys and the uniforms who guarded the set.”

“How about just a hint?”

Buddy raised his palms toward Donnally. “No can do.”

Donnally looped back to his father's symptoms. “But not all of his problems had to do with the structure of the filming.”

Buddy rocked his head side to side again, then spread his hands on the table.

“What do I know?”

“Enough so you were thinking about calling me.”

Buddy held his nose. “He started to smell bad toward the end of filming. Body odor like an Amazonian stevedore in a Humphrey Bogart flick. That was the first thing we noticed that made us think the problem might be him and not the nature of the work.” He tapped the Formica tabletop as though he was annoyed at a negligent child. “Everyone has time for a shower.”

Buddy squinted at Donnally. “You haven't seen him since you came down?”

Donnally shook his head. “I wanted to get an idea of what to look for before I went up to the house. My mother's gerontologist hinted at a few things, but she doesn't know him like you do.”

“I'm not a shrink, so don't look to me for a diagnosis. All I know is what I saw, not what it means. I'm not an expert in . . . in . . .”

Buddy's voice trailed off and he glanced away.

Donnally didn't force him to say the word
Alzheimer's
.

“And there was something else. He'd talk on and on, real excited and animated, about
Shooting the Dawn
and some of his older films. First I thought he was trying to make comparisons
in order to give the actors guidance about what he wanted. Then I thought he was trying to use them as models to teach some lessons to the assistant director who was helping him. A smart young guy. A couple of years out of USC film school. Seemed really in tune with your father. I think he saw all this too.”

Buddy shook his head, returning himself to the train of thought he had interrupted.

“But then it hit me. The old movies seemed more real to him than the scenes he was getting ready to shoot.” He held his hand up close to his nose for few seconds. “I mean right there in his face.”

After reading material Janie had given him, Donnally knew without Buddy saying it that short-term memory loss was one of the most common symptoms of Alzheimer's and was the way it often first showed itself. It was also the one most often ignored or excused merely as old age by friends and family. It was the oldest memories that seemed to the victim to be the most real and alive, but even those might be confused or conflated.

“Other times he would drift away in his own world, like a son . . . som . . .”

Buddy closed his eyes and held his arms out in front of him like a sleepwalker. He opened them again. “Like in the silent movies. I can't remember how to say it.”

“Somnambulist?”

“Yeah, that's it. Somnambulist. Sometimes it was like we were talking to a zombie.”