On the Nickel (14 page)

For a lot less than that sometimes, Maeve thought, but it wasn't something she particularly wanted to talk about. ‘How are you tied up? Is there any way to get loose?'

‘I don't think so,' he said. ‘My arms are handcuffed around a big cast-iron sewer pipe that goes up from the floor about ten feet. It looks like it's been here for a hundred years.' She heard a rattle. ‘It's pretty strong.'

‘Don't knock yourself out. Did they take your wallet?'

‘Yeah.'

She began to worry about her folks back home. Her mom in particular, but she remembered that she also had a university notice in the wallet, just an acknowledgement that they'd received her application, and she thought it had Gloria's address on it, so she thought of her helpless dad opening the door to the psychos and cringed. Why hadn't she purged the damn city wallet?

‘Maeve?'

‘Yes, Conor.'

‘I think I want to sing something for you if you don't mind. Singing it aloud helps me remember. I've been writing new songs. I don't know what it'll be like
a capella.
'

‘Did you think I'd say no?'

‘Well, I'm still tentative enough to think it's an imposition to make somebody listen to me.'

‘Go for it. I was supposed to save you, you know, and I seem to have failed miserably, so the least I can do is listen to you.'

She heard him laugh once, then he tried to beat out a slow rhythm on the floor.

‘It's blues,' he called. ‘I got the tune in my head.'

‘Go on, dude. I'm here.'

There were six verses like that. Wow, she thought, that was real white-boy blues, rich-boy blues. ‘That was good,' she said.

‘Come on, Maeve. You can be critical.'

‘Well … I think I need to hear the music to get the feel of it.'

‘Yeah, but there's something you don't like in the song, isn't there?'

‘It starts to get pretty bitter, doesn't it? I don't know if blues is like that. It's usually more sad and resigned. You got some pretty strong up-front anger going.'

There was a moment that dragged on a while, in which he wasn't responding, and Maeve worried she'd offended him.

‘You know, I wonder why I get so angry,' he said. ‘My parents are wonderful, progressive people. I went to a good school. I didn't lack a thing I needed. What is it? I
was
angry. Is it adolescence? Is it all just make-believe?'

Maeve could feel a stir of cold air and the floor was starting to get chillier, as if a number of windows were open or broken to the winter air outside. ‘There's plenty of real things in the world to be angry about. Stupid wars and homeless people right here, and women getting beat up.'

‘Thanks for that, Maeve. But there's some kind of feverish personal anger I'm working out, isn't there? I think I'm so unused to anger – I have trouble dealing with it. I've listened to blues all my life. Real blues are redemptive – I read that somewhere – and I have this feeling my blues are just plain howling at the sky.'

‘Don't be so dismissive of yourself, Conor. Maybe you'll find a positive energy in your anger. Your folks were always dreaming of a better world, weren't they? To do that you've got to have another source of energy. You don't seem to me cynical at all.'

‘Wow, I could fall in love with you.'

‘Not right now, please. We need to get out of here.'

‘Practical to the end. You're the best, Maeve.'

‘And don't give up hope. I know a damn good cop who's definitely looking for us right this minute,' she said.

She tried two other flophouses, probably only for hoodoo reasons, before she went into the most likely one all the way up at the corner, the Fortnum, where Gloria finally managed to galvanize a startling-looking albino behind a wire screen into acknowledging the boy's photo, though he didn't react to Maeve's picture, and he gave her a room number and thumbed up a dank stairway.

No one answered at the number, and the next two room doors were standing open strangely, like rat cages with the rats having fled some terrible fate. She glanced into the barren rooms with unsheeted beds, a three-legged chair. The place definitely wasn't the Biltmore.

A tiny dapper old man with a tonsure of grey hair opened a nearby door at her footstep. ‘Good evening. Before you speak, madam, I must perform a minute adjustment to my hearing aid.'

‘Go for it.'

He extracted a tiny device from his ear and fussed with what looked like a miniature hatpin for a moment before re-inserting it.

‘Forgive me, I was napping,' he said. ‘A greater and greater necessity, I find. I have so little juice of energy left. And, to be honest, the memory is not so good.'

Gloria showed him her badge and the faxed photo of Conor and then the one of Maeve.

He smiled at the boy's photo. ‘Yes, I think this is the boy. He and his guitar reside in that room there. He's a good boy and very healthy. Good health has become so important. Are you healthy, Detective?'

‘I can't complain.'

‘You know, there is something I'm supposed to remember about this boy. I took a nap and that interferes. My memory is so terrible. He is gone away for a time, I think. I was supposed to call a meeting.'

She showed him Maeve's picture again.

He tried hard to recognize her. ‘I may have seen them together somewhere, I'm not sure. I haven't been polite. Please come inside, Officer …?' His rising intonation appealed for her name.

‘Ramirez. Thank you. Sergeant Ramirez.' She was in no hurry, and it was such a treat to interview someone who was polite, and mildly helpful at that. What was this sweet sane man doing on Skid Row? She could see what seemed to be a real oil painting of some romanticized cottage on the wall over his shoulder and a small bookcase jammed with foreign-looking hardback books. ‘I will make some tea, madam, and you may join me or not, as you wish.'

‘They said in the academy I shouldn't. A suspect could slip me a knockout drug and escape, you see.'

‘Woe is me. So many rules.
Nu,
so I'm a suspect?'

‘A manner of speaking, sir. No, you're not.'

‘My name is Samuel Greengelb. For forty years I was a diamond-cutter for the commercial jewelers who come and go like shooting stars in the Jewelry District over on Hill Street. You'd think with all that wealth passing through my fingers, some of it would have stuck, but no. A wife and three children I raised, first in Boyle Heights, then in MacArthur Park.' He sighed. ‘Almost all have become nogoodniks and want nothing to do with a useless old man. It's beyond sorrow. Many years ago I decided to leave Ruthie the house and stay here until I found a good place. Hah. You know, about this boy. Something is bothering me.'

He fussed with the teapot and a box of loose tea leaves. In his fussing, he knocked a note off the shelf, which fell to the floor. Probably just an old shopping list. He kept many of them. Greengelb set the kettle on an electric ring and ground the kettle hard against the device for some reason. ‘Detective, now is the time in your life to plan for the future and save your money. Poverty is not a puzzle, I assure you. And it's not an accident. It's a simple consequence of bad decisions.'

‘Thank you. I'll revisit my retirement plans. But the police have pretty good benefits.'

‘Good, good. My children tell me I could always go to live on Mars if I want, but I hear the space program doesn't take too many old Jews.'

She laughed.

Just as the kettle began to whistle, there was an angry pounding at the door. Greengelb looked like he might know who it was, and he picked up an aluminum baseball bat, but then he glanced at her and took on a secret air of mischief. ‘Let me work on the tea,' he said, ‘and you can see to the
putz
who's banging on my door.'

‘I'm here to make you happy tonight, Yid!' a voice called through the door.

She yanked it open to see a short furious man wearing a gray hoodie. His eyes went wide when he saw her, and he backed a half step. ‘Whoa, this is fucked up!'

‘You want to make somebody happy?' she snapped. ‘That would be a real fucking challenge, little man.'

‘Not
you.
I'm a messenger. My boss says the offer is fifty grand now. Take or leave tonight. All the Jew gentlemen get the same deal. You create your own luck, the man says, and that's real straight, cupcakes – it's great good luck that their own stubbornness has created. Gravity to you.' He swept back the hood and doffed a nonexistent cap at Gloria. ‘Good evening, miss.'

‘Hold it right there. I mean hold it, dickhead.' She badged him – some days it gave her such great pleasure to use the power of her badge thrusting out of its own well-worn black leather wallet. Then she offered him Conor's photo. ‘Have you seen this boy? Be very careful.'

He barely looked. ‘Nah. I'm not very observant.'

‘You're not very observant. Then do it because you're scared, little man. What's your name?'

‘Friedrich Nietzsche.'

‘Let's see some I.D., Nietzsche.
Now.'

Instantly the strange little man pounded away along the hallway, a miraculously fast take-off like a dash-runner, and then he almost reflected himself down the stairwell. What a quick little fucker, she thought. Her choices right then had been to shoot him, for no particular reason, or be badly outrun and humiliated, or let him go.

‘I bet you know who that was,' Gloria said, still staring at the space at the top of the stairwell that the man had just vacated.

‘I'm not sure of the name. It's something French or Cajun. Thoreau, maybe, but I know who he works for, and that's a lot more important.' He poured out tea for both of them and told her about the plans for turning the old single-room-occupancy hotel into pricey lofts, and the three old-time residents who had tenure there and were trying to stay put, the bitter-enders of a much bigger crew who had had leases from the previous owner.

‘You're the leader of this group,' she said.

‘We all are.'

He studied the depth of color in the teapot and then poured their tea. ‘The boy, I'm sure there's something.'

He gave a half-smile, but there was no humor in it. ‘I do my best to keep things light these days and be a good neighbor to all. Like your friend, that boy. A place is only blessed if it has good neighbors. Conor is the boy's name, I remember. But there's more …'

M
aeve was beginning to feel seriously uncomfortable on the concrete floor, an ache so widespread and deep in her hip that she knew it was in the boy's, too. She could imagine him twisting this way and that, as well, to the limits of his handcuffs hunting for marginally more bearable positions. And the cubicles were getting colder and darker. In a few minutes she would no longer be able to read the
Seek Ye The Lord
that someone had spray-painted on the wall with a big-mouth enraged devil beneath. To admit the truth to herself, the devil frightened her a little, suggesting a mind she never wanted to confront. She wondered if the small man had painted it. ‘Ow!' she cried out involuntarily, twisting one time two many.

‘I can't get comfortable, either,' he called. ‘It goes on and on. It's like a song that's stuck in the wrong key.'

‘No, it's not
like
anything,' she said irritably. There was a hair in her mouth, too, and she couldn't pluck it out because her hands were impossibly far away. She could only move it around with her tongue and sputter at it ineffectually. ‘It
is
being tied up on a hard floor and it hurts. Do you have any idea why they grabbed us?'

‘I know they're hassling the old guys in that hotel. I think they want them to move out so they can rebuild. Maybe they thought we would be leverage against the old guys.'

Abruptly Maeve became aware of a scampering along the nearest wall, and two fingers of ice clamped against her neck. She flopped her head over quickly to look but no matter how intensely she stared, she could see only confused shadows at the foot of the cubicle – perhaps a mouse, a feral cat, something worse? What could be worse? A pit bull that would eat her face off?

‘There's an animal in here! I hate it all!'

‘Can you see it?' he called.

‘No. But I heard something slinky. I know I sound girlish, but it's just so abhorrent. I need some other sound. Would you talk, please? Sing if you want.'

‘It's better if we both sing. Do you know any folk songs?'

‘Oh, God. I can't sing worth a damn. The only song I know is “Jeremiah was a bullfrog.”'

‘It's actually called “Joy to the World,”' Conor explained. ‘Hoyt Axton wrote the nonsense verse just so he could demonstrate a tune he liked.'

‘Spare me the musicology. That damn animal just skrittered again.'

‘OK,' he said. ‘Let's go …'

‘Jeremiah was a bullfrog,
He was a good friend of mine'.

Maeve took a deep breath and joined in.

‘I never understood a single word he said
But I helped him drink his wine.
He always had some mighty fine wine'.

Jack Liffey heard the phone ring and debated answering it. How could he? But some fate drove him to lift the receiver.

‘Is that Jack? This is Art Castro. Whack the phone a few times so I know.'

He hit the receiver on the plastic arm of his wheelchair. If only he had one of those talking machines.

‘OK, listen up, man. You might as well know your daughter's been playing Nancy Drew, keeping the bench warm for you. Now, don't go ballistic, I only got a rumor and I hear she's basically OK. But the minute Gloria gets home you tell her this scuttlebutt. I hear that girl has upset a couple of low-lifes down on The Nickel.'

‘Ack! Ack!'

‘Be cool, Jack. Gloria can handle it in two seconds flat.' He told him the address. ‘You write that down and tell Gloria to go there when she comes in.' But before Castro could finish speaking, Jack Liffey was pounding the phone against everything nearby as hard as he could until it came apart and no longer seemed to be working.

He willed his legs to move, but that only made his arms hurt with displaced energy. Everything had gone red around him. Maeve! NO! The feeling of wrists so fragile you could snap them like a carrot! He knew she had a sassy mouth that could piss off any hooligan in ten words flat.

He wheeled to his study and got out his Ballester-Molina, an Argentine copy of the military .45 auto that he'd bought years ago, and tucked it into his waist, then plucked his car keys off the tiny desk. The car hadn't budged in weeks.

He left the front door open behind him, and there was a painful drop where the makeshift ramp off the porch had slipped a bit, but he got to the old pickup across the lawn without tipping over. He had chosen an amazing lull in the busy life of Greenwood Avenue, and no one was there at all to help him mount the car.

First he opened the tailgate then tipped himself out on the driveway. From the ground, he folded up the wheelchair and hurled it into the bed. No way to close the tail now. He found he couldn't even crawl and had to arm-drag himself to the driver door. This was going to be tough! The keyhole was immeasurably far above him.

Gathering a little hand purchase on the metal and leaning, he finally boosted himself up enough to insert the key and open the door. Thank God his arms were strong and still worked fine. The steering wheel was a wonderful grab-bar to get his dead weight inside. He adjusted his legs into a normal driving position, still in such a panic about Maeve that only now did he realize there were foot pedals that had to be worked.

His eye caught on the sturdy black cane that Gloria, in a fit of hopefulness, had bought him and then left in the truck. Pressing the rubber-tipped cane on to the accelerator pedal, he started the truck without trouble. This was going to work – astounding! – but it would demand whole new feats of co-ordination. Luckily, Chris Johnson, from whom he'd inherited the wreck, had for some reason bought a 1991 with automatic transmission. A clutch pedal would have been a real stretch.

Shift into drive and then a panicky switch of the cane to the brake pedal as the truck lunged a foot. If he'd had a third hand, he could have used the handbrake, but this was going to be all cane and steering wheel. He attempted to steer with his teeth for a moment, but rejected the idea. Luckily it was late evening, long past rush hour, and there was no traffic as he rolled out slowly on to Greenwood and turned south one-handed. Going south on Greenwood would take him to a T-intersection at Fourth and a very cautious right turn would take him straight west into The Nickel and the address Arturo had given him.

He hardly noticed the deco triumphal arches on both sides of the old Fourth Street bridge over the L.A. River as he wove slowly and unsteadily toward his goal, having a little trouble keeping the cane from slipping off the accelerator.

So far, so good. He was calming down enough to wonder what came next. The address Art had told him, burned into his memory, was in the Toy District just north of the sorriest part of The Nickel, and it turned out to mark a big steel roll-up door on a dead dark street. The door next to it was marked Hsun's Toys.

He parked at an angle and managed to liberate his wheelchair from the back, expand it and climb inside so he felt normalized again – at least back to a recent kind of normality.

He banged hard on the roll-up door with his pistol. He'd have fired away at a lock if one had been visible.

When no-one came, he wrote GIVE ME MY DAUGHTER NOW! on one of his pads to have ready. He could feel his heart pounding away in his chest.

He banged again and again, as hard as he could, if only to let Maeve know someone was here. Of course, he didn't know for sure she was there. He was about to give up and think about a plan B when there was a
thunk
and the roll-up door trundled up about six feet.

He was facing two men, one tall and bulky, with long gold ringlets like the old photos of the foppish General Custer, and the other shorter, with spooky eyes like someone waiting for a long-distance bus that would take him back into a war zone.

Jack Liffey flashed his notepad at them, and pointed his big square pistol for reinforcement.

The smaller one just laughed. ‘Don't know about you, Stevie, but I feel lucky. I don't think life works out for this funny guy.'

Gloria finally shook herself out of the reverie that had held her in this old man's apartment for so long – over the last half-hour mostly yammering to him about herself and him worrying about his memory. She wasn't sure why she liked Samuel Greengelb so much, but it didn't happen to her often and she did. Maybe it was the kindly grandfatherly manner – with all the times she'd been fostered out, she'd never had anyone even close to the role of kindly grandfather – or maybe it was the sadness of his failing faculties. Finally she offered her regrets to Greengelb and left.

He had told her Moses Vartabedian's name, and it was no problem to call in and get his office address and maybe a bit more from the research people as long as you knew the voice code. It turned out that Vartabedian's main office was in a beautifully restored art deco mini-skyscraper a few miles west on Wilshire, on the seventh and top floor above a former grand movie palace with the unlikely name of The Glamorous Algerian that had now become a venue for big-name baby-boomer music events. The old blue tile marquee announced upcoming dates for Joni Mitchell and Ry Cooder and Airborne Toxic Event, which she certainly hoped was a music group. After a quick inspection of the building, she bypassed the main entrance and went inside an unlocked staircase door on the west side that she guessed would take her somehow to the tower.

Restored rosewood wainscoting lined the stairwell up one floor to a small elevator lobby where the fancy wood gave way to equally fancy marble, but she ignored the elevators and found a stairwell door and decided to hoof it the rest of the way up, partly for her health but mostly for the element of surprise.

Gloria was gasping a little when the top of the stairs gave out on a tiny foyer and she pushed the glass door open to what said V and L Enterprises and offered another tiny lobby. A gorgeous young receptionist with very large breasts was hunt-and-pecking something on a state-of-the-art Mac, all HD screen, apparently copying from a handwritten document that she was craning her neck at. The woman looked up, startled, and for some reason started typing really fast and blindly with two fingers until Gloria said, ‘Cool it, honey. I'm not from the job agency.'

‘Wow, you read my mind,' the woman said. ‘I bet you can tell I can't really type. My skills just don't run in that track.'

Gloria didn't want to enquire what the skill track might actually be. ‘Don't ask, don't tell, hon. Is Mr V in?'

‘I ain't supposed to say.'

‘That's terrific,' Gloria said. She resisted badging her, for some reason. There were two unmarked inner doors, one on either side of the reception desk. ‘Don't say a word. Just point at the door. We'll give each other a break here.'

Sheepishly, the woman gritted her teeth and then nodded once at the door on her left, as if the quick nod didn't constitute ‘pointing.'

Gloria gave the woman an OK circle with her fingers, for what that was worth, and went straight in.

Startling herself with the astounding full-wall view in the dark, she stalled for a moment in the doorway. It was a large office with a breathtaking panorama of the billion-light spectacle that stretched west along Wilshire toward the ocean fifteen miles away. Off to the right there was even a ghostly floating Hollywood sign in the invisible hills, a view that always contained a sense of tragedy for her, for no real reason she knew except for all the crap and abuse that the name had always represented.

At the desk in front of her was a paunchy dark-skinned man, his head cocked back as he puffed contentedly at a cigar, and who quickly ripped his feet off the fancy granite desk that looked like a mountain boulder that had been miraculously sawn in half.

‘Jesus, who are you?' he burst out.

Once again she enjoyed the tacit pleasure of showing her badge. It established such an immediate relationship of power, which she loved to use on big men.

‘Sergeant Ramirez, LAPD,' she said. She let him settle a bit. ‘I want you to tell me about your boys McCall and Theroux or Thibodeaux or whatever. Don't pause to think about it. Just tell me.'

Funny things happened behind his eyes for a few moments, but he finally made his decision. ‘Never heard of them, Sergeant.'

‘Bad guess. I know they work for you, clearing buildings.'

‘Those names mean nothing to me. As God is my witness. Or maybe the mayor.'

She noticed some music going fairly softly in the office, a kind of bleating bebop jazz that she knew Jack would've liked.

‘You like that stuff?' She nodded toward his hi-tech mini-stereo.

He seemed puzzled for a moment. ‘The music?'

‘Yeah.'

‘I usually like what's new, on principle. But this is such a mediocre time in history. The best you can do is rehabilitate what used to be great. That's my vocation. What's eating you, Sergeant?'

‘Almost everything. Call it off, whatever game you're running. I'm sure you're one of those slumlords who's driving off the tenants so you can rebuild. Call it off and I'll give you a Get Out of Jail Free card.'

He puffed hard to keep his cigar going, which annoyed Gloria no end. ‘You look really worked up about something, Sergeant. Honest, you should calm down. I promise you I'm well known as a benefactor of the city. I renovate landmarks, I save them. This fantastic Algerian from 1927 was about to be knocked down for an insipid Korean mini-mall. You know, a piece of crap where they sell doughnuts and acrylic fingernails. I saved this place. Everyone says it's glorious now. Come on, Sergeant, look out that window. What do you see?'

He pressed something that turned off the room lights and nodded to the vast spark-dotted black velvet nightscape, with the otherworldly HOLLYWOOD floating above it all. Involuntarily she glanced for a moment. You never accepted the terms a suspect offered.

‘That's
my
city,' he said. ‘Everything is accelerating, and you have to make a few compromises to keep what's valuable.'