On the Nickel (15 page)

‘That's your dream? Leaving your mark on a bunch of half-assed old buildings?'

‘Where's your name gonna be, ma'am? In tiny print on a brass plaque at the Police Academy up in Elysian Park?'

‘Those are the cops killed on duty. Are you threatening me?'

‘Jesus, no, ma'am. As God sees my soul, no. Look. They say that's the great town of illusions out there. But that was long ago, the Forties, maybe. That time is over. I just want to save what I can of the best stuff they built back then. My intentions are good.'

He had to relight his cigar and Gloria waited.

‘I swear to god, man, if those two dickheads work for you and they hurt anyone I'll fuck you up. I'll fuck you up good. I just want you to know that. By tomorrow, I'll know everything there is to know.'

He seemed to pause again to give it all some thought. ‘You don't really know how important I am in this town, do you, Sergeant? Look me up, ask about me. It's a cultural fact. I got the mayor and your own chief on speed dial.' He tapped a gold contraption that looked vaguely like a telephone and puffed hard. The reek in the room was awful.

‘I could get you fired tomorrow,' he said. ‘Or at least transferred to a job you wouldn't like very much out in the desert.'

The short man with the crazy eyes had worked himself around to the side of Jack Liffey while golden curls approached from the front. They had no weapons threatening him, and there was never a moment that justified shooting one of them. All he could do was pound a bit and wave the pistol around. It was hopeless. Again he willed his legs to move so he could rise but got only a twinge in his jaw from gritting his teeth.

The little guy was fast as a snake, and surprisingly strong, and he ripped the pistol out of Jack Liffey's hand.

‘Well, Mr Special-de-dee, who the fuck are you now?'

They found the little pouch of business cards and had fun trying different pronunciations of his name and sarcastic renditions of his listed occupation:
I Find Missing Children.

‘If that girl or boy are yours, we ain't gonna hurt them none so don't give yourself a hernia, old man,' the curly one said. ‘The kids are just leverage to get some old geezers to move out. But you, nobody cares about you. Hold on to your balls.'

The curly one kicked the chair over, and Jack Liffey went down hard and banged his head on the cement forecourt so his vision went pink. The little one had a switchblade out now and was waving it in figure-eights in front of his eyes.

‘Ack!'

The knife-man made an odd sound, maybe mimicking his own helpless cry. ‘We don't even got to cut his tongue out. Some fuckin' child-finder. Find this, wheelie!' And he swung a hard kick at Jack Liffey's thigh on the ground. He wore steel-toed cowboy boots and the pointy tip hurt like hell. Then the two tormentors took turns kicking and shoving him around with their feet until he ended in the damp gutter. He used his arms to protect his face from the blows, but they kicked his elbows and forearms away. Most of it was just desultory punishment, without much object, but the little one hauled off with a blow to his head and he probably passed out for a few moments.

‘This is no fun, Stevie. Let me cut him up.'

‘You should see yourself, old man. You really bleed easy. Give us all a break and just expire. On the average, you're nearer dead than not. No, don't cut him! Jesus, Rice, it'll be raining cops. Let's put him back in his chair and roll him down into the heart of The Nickel. Nature will take its course.'

They boosted him into the wheelchair, only half conscious, and had fun giving big pushes and then riding along, boosted on to the back, as the chair bumped over rubbish and cracked asphalt.

Eventually they kicked the chair over again, and his cheek lay in something soggy, a stink of decay and piss that announced another gutter, and not a gutter in Beverly Hills. The power of smell, Jack Liffey thought, retreating into his own head. People lived deeply in smells, auras of this and that, long habits of cosmetics and foods and spices that they shored up around themselves. These smells were Other.

His tormentors seemed to depart. From where he lay, eyes clamped shut, he could hear the wet noises of men hawking and spitting all around the compass, confiding things to one another, then conspiratorial murmurs like the visiting room of a psych ward. Far away somewhere there was traffic noise. When he opened an eye, all he could see was brick buildings with grilled-up windows across the street, a hurricane fence enclosing an empty lot, and, nearer, heaps of wet trash that he was not used to seeing in a street.

His chair jolted, and a voice demanded, ‘Leggo, you fucker!'

A tennis shoe was on his neck all at once, and he couldn't turn his head to see who was speaking. He felt the wheelchair ripped away from him, inch by inch.

‘Ak-Ak!' The chair! It was his last connection to a life that was still under some kind of control. It had his notebooks, a water bottle, several felt pens, and a snack bag of potato chips.

‘Man, ain't this
cold
!' a voice exulted, already diminishing, and his newly sensitive ear detected the grindy bearings of his wheelchair, with no weight on the wheels, receding.

‘Worth a Benjamin, I bet!'

Hell,
Jack Liffey thought, not sure whether he was cursing or describing where he'd been deposited. Not so long ago there'd been something like a wall of affection surrounding and protecting him – Gloria, Maeve, friends, a house that he'd been able to maneuver around, a safe back yard, a dog, neighbors who knew him or at least knew about him and would come to his aid. But now he was alone in the dark somewhere, vulnerable and overwhelmed, without strategies. A small helplessness sinking into the void. Are you still home in there, Mr Jack Liffey? Honest to God, I don't know. There's so little left of who I was. There was one positive point, and he clung hard to it; he actually believed the claim that they wouldn't hurt Maeve and Conor. They had no cause to.

The docs insisted his disabilities were all psychosomatic – actually they'd used some fancy new word to that effect – but he tried his damnedest now to lever himself up under his own power. Maybe he'd just forgotten how. He did feel a bit of buzz in his legs, but he couldn't budge them. Even his arms seemed to have lost much of their strength.
It's just panic, self. Calm down.

He thought of Loco for some reason, and the semi-crippled wreck that his poor dog had become. Or was he getting himself and the dog mixed up? Tears of self-pity pooled on his upward cheek, then dripped off the bridge of his nose. Loco, this is me, Jack. Sell your condo, sell your favorite pet-bed and buy me out of this situation,
please,
he thought. He could tell he wasn't thinking very clearly.

‘Ma'am, could I have a word?' Gloria called through the tall chainlink at Catholic Liberation House. Sitting on a folding chair on the strangely idyllic lawn in front of the facility, a powerful-looking black woman was apparently guarding the place, but also imbibing from a small bottle she seemed to think was hidden in a paper bag.

‘What up?' Her tone told Gloria that the woman resented this interruption of her righteous sundowner.

‘I just want to know if you've taken in a new girl recently, about eighteen.' She held Maeve's photo up to the fence.

‘A girl alone? We only take mothers and families, Officer.'

Officer. Some day she'd learn all the clues that made it that obvious to the rest of the world. Gloria was about to insist that the woman come over and take a good look at the photo anyway. Half your leads on the job came through pure doggedness, against all reason and inertia, but her energy was flagging badly after the twelve-hour shift that had started at 6 a.m. and now the dozens of random inquiries she'd made at shelters and SROs and foundations across the whole west side of The Nickel. She wasn't as indefatigable as she'd once been, she realized. She wondered if she was losing her edge. It was a bad sign for a cop, one reason so many cops retired early.

‘Forget it, ma'am.' Gloria saw the woman go alert, the brown bag do a vanishing act in the grass, and then she heard the front door come open. Sensitive radar, the woman had.

‘Is there a problem?' a soft-spoken voice called out the door.

A thin woman with graying red hair came slowly out of the backlight, and down along the walk, approaching Gloria. She seemed tense, not in a mannered way, maybe just a rabbity kind of energy that Gloria had noticed before in a number of women who'd worked their way up in charge of institutions – orphanages, shelters, schools – always a little more to handle than they'd bargained for. Or maybe it was simpler than that, she thought. Maybe that nervy alertness was just a mark of the ones who lasted, people with a strong sense of responsibility.

‘I'm Sergeant Ramirez, LAPD Have you seen this girl in the last few days?'

She saw recognition immediately in the woman's green eyes, probably before she realized she was broadcasting it. She had a mobile freckled face with a kind of tenderness in the aging eye wrinkles.

‘I'm Sister Mary Rose. I'm in charge here. May I ask you, Sergeant, why you're looking for this girl?'

She saw no reason to withhold. ‘She's my daughter. Stepdaughter, and I think she's hunting for a boy who's gone missing around here somewhere. She should have been home long ago, and she didn't go to school today. I'm afraid she may have got mixed up with some of the toughs that hang out down here.'

Gloria could see the woman study her with an unusual curiosity, even a little amusement, as if Gloria had just grown a second nose, and she knew something was going on between them that she wasn't aware of. The thin woman took out a key on a chain around her neck and unlocked the gate.

‘Come in, Sergeant. Yes, I've seen your daughter. I was pretty sure I recognized her. I won't keep you in suspense – a long time ago, almost ten years now, I knew Jack, too.'

‘Knew?' Gloria felt herself stiffen. Only police training had kept her from coming to an abrupt halt and bellowing: KNEW?!

‘Please have some coffee with me, Sergeant. Please. I am not a problem. Maeve is probably on her way home right now.'

She hadn't used Maeve's name. Reluctantly Gloria followed her in through the nondescript entry, past several militant posters in the hall, all featuring women of color looking competent and composed, and into what looked like a cramped staff room with cubby-hole mailboxes and a small fridge and coffee-brewer.

‘Yes, a
long
time ago, Jack and I were intimate, Sergeant. I'm sorry. Is that a word that anyone uses any longer?' The nun explained that she'd left a convent back then, only a year before she'd met Jack, and she'd been running a different shelter and art center in south L.A., in the town of Cahuenga. She'd had almost no experience of men up to then, and Jack Liffey had shown up one day, a knight errant looking for the missing mother of a Latino boy, and he'd just bowled her right over, as she put it. She hadn't been prepared at all for how his attentions would ‘sweep her off her feet.' Gloria noticed the old-fashioned turns of phrase in her speech, as if she'd slept soundly through a couple of decades.

The nun sighed and shook her head at her own tale. Jack Liffey's slam-bang life had turned out to be much too overwhelming for her, and after a particularly rough experience, she'd found she needed her old sense of vocation back, but maybe in reality, she'd needed the security of the large safe family that she'd left behind in the cloister. She confessed that there was probably a tendency for all that convent security and earnestness to infantilize the nuns a little.

Holy orders rarely took anyone back, on any terms, after they'd laicized, she explained, but her order, like most of them these days, was quite desperate for warm bodies and had been willing to make an exception. In many of the nuns' retirement homes, she said sadly, the women – unlike old priests – had been pretty much abandoned by the Mother Church. The declining eighty-year-old nuns were now left to tend the ninety- and ninety-five-year-olds. It should have been a terrible scandal but nobody took notice.

She fussed ineffectually with a coffee filter as if her mind were elsewhere.

‘I'd actually prefer a beer,' Gloria said.

‘I'm afraid we don't allow alcohol here … except for that inexpensive port you undoubtedly noticed Kenisha Duncan drinking. She thinks I don't know about it, of course. We could borrow it from her, but I have a feeling sweet port wouldn't suit you.'

‘Uh, no. How long would you say you and Jack were intimate?'

‘Really not long at all. A few weeks. Just long enough so we were both almost killed by some terrible hooligans who came after him. I had compound fractures in both my legs. We were thrown about thirty feet straight down a storm drain. Unfortunately it was raining in the hills that day, and the whole pipe soon flooded. I've never been so physically frightened in all my life.'
²

Gloria wondered if there was another kind of frightened that mattered.
Be generous,
she thought. ‘Jack's life does tend to attract trouble. I've learned that, too. It's lucky my job leaves me used to it.' Gloria thought of telling her about Jack's condition now, but for some reason she held back, put off, or annoyed (jealous?) by this competent middle-class white woman. She hadn't realized that she had this jealousy in her. Even when she'd been with her first big love, her police mentor Ken Steelyard, his flirtations with others hadn't bothered her too much – though he'd never been much of a ladies' man.

‘I'll bet Maeve's grown up to be quite a bright girl,' the nun said.

Nice shift of topic, Gloria thought. ‘Sometimes too clever for her own good.'

‘I suppose. Why don't you call her?' She nodded toward a telephone in the corner.