The Chinese Beverly Hills (21 page)

“May I come in out of the rain, dear?”

This would be a tussle of wills. “Of course, Mr. Muni. Or is it Mr. Swami?”

Fussily, he rattled the umbrella to shake off water and left it upright outside the door as he backed in. “You are Maeve Liffey?”

So they were still even. “Please have a seat, sir. What does one offer a devout Hindu to drink? Or are you Hindu?”

“The East has very broad tents. I am Buddhist, too. And the fourth way. The West is always hair-splitting. Green tea would be fine. Or tea without caffeine, thank you. My cardiologist insists.”

He sat in a lotus position on the floor, his gaze fixed on her failing still life.

“That one’s not working,” she said. She went to the burner and started a kettle.

“But you have a good eye and a talent.”

“I hope so.”

She set out cups and teabags.

“Mickey won’t bother you again.”

“Mickey?”

“That large freckled boy who demanded to see Bunny Walker.”

Maeve wouldn’t give an inch. “Bunny said you
assigned
him to her, as if you were breeding animals.”

“I thought it might help them both. I make mistakes. In the end I do nothing against anyone’s wishes. I promise you.”

“In the end, we’re all dead,” Maeve said.

“Possibly.”

She watched him with her arms crossed, realizing it was an obvious defensive posture. A sign of weakness. This was going to be a duel for Bunny.

His face gradually readjusted into a comforting smile. “What we do in our group we call
work
. Enlightenment comes only with effort. This means bypassing your filters and defenses. Only the ears offer a direct pathway to deeper consciousness. The eyes always judge and filter. We’re trying to evolve.”

“I get it. A few special people get to become advanced beings.” Unless the money for the lessons runs out, she thought.

“Could I see one of the paintings that did work out?”

Maeve went to her stack of canvases, reversed to the wall. She chose a large one, of Bunny, who was in the altogether, of course, but with her face turned away.

She brought it over and turned it toward Swami Muni. Rain had darkened the world outside so it was hard to see.

She sat quietly and drank tea for the next ten minutes as, every minute or so, he broke his study and silence and told her something about herself and her passions and her mother and father that he could not possibly have known.

It was called a cold reading, she knew, practiced by healers and grifters all over the world, but it was still very impressive. In the end she took up a lotus facing him, full of trepidation.

“What is
work
?” Maeve Liffey said.

Zook had been listening to the car crunching up the fire road for some time.

You take yourself off into a serious intellectual retreat, he thought, and suddenly every goof in the city shows up. He’d already had to put up with the Liffey guy. What now? He heard the car stop outside and, sure enough, footsteps approached. The fist on the door indicated it was no casual visitor.

The cop wore a dark blue raid jacket over his copsuit. His acne-scarred face looked especially unpleasant dripping with rain. Sgt. Manny Acevedo—once the Commandos’ best bet for a friend inside the MonPark Police. Manny hated the Chinks, too. He wore a curl-down Pancho Villa moustache that did its best to distract from his tragic complexion.

“Zook, your
klika
got a big problem.”

“Got no gang no more. Just a couple pals. We got our rights.” Zook couldn’t prevent it, he farted loudly.

“Sure,
hombrito
. And that’s what your rights are worth.” Manny pushed in out of the rain and pulled the door behind him. “Gimme a toke, a line. Anything you got.”

“A beer okay?” Zook didn’t trust the Mex cop, certainly not while he was wearing a raid jacket, even if it was just for the rain.

Manny gave him the stink-eye. “Yeah, right. You sure you ain’t got no rails?”

“I’m in philosophical study here,” Zook insisted. He gestured to the books scattered near his hanging chair, and Manny picked up a tented-open copy of a book about the fight to vindicate Joseph McCarthy.

“What the fuck is this?”

“Forget it. You want the beer or not?”

“Sure,
ese
. If you change your mind about offering me a bump, I swear I ain’t on no bitch patrol.” He flopped on the lawn chair, and barked once, startling Zook. “I like you guys. I do. It’d be great if we could take all the
Chinos
down, but it’s turning into an Obama world now. Especial since the department started hiring yellow. Give me a break; I kept L.E. away from your beer bash. We can still trade favors.

“You got to know there’s a push on about a missing girl—Sabine Roh’s the name,” Acevedo said. “What kind of knucklehead name is that? A arson fireman thinks she’s dead as a doorbob. They even dug up a bullet. So if any a you guys got a dirty piece, ditch it.”

Ed Zukovich brought him a lukewarm Coors. All the ice in the cooler had melted a day ago. “Tell me, Sergeant Manny. What you want for any 4-1-1 from me?”

“Money ain’t dick to me. I’m just stepping up to help
la raza
. Your fishbelly-colored
raza
, too. Maybe next week I ask a favor. Right now, a little weed or blow, please.”

Zukovich knew he would have to give the dead girl some thought. First the Liffey guy and now the cop. Who knew how a perpetual straggler like Captain Beef would hold up with questions like this.

*

Rain ran in sheets down the awningless window of the church office. Just as he remembered, the man’s office in St. Thomas Aquinas was painted an institutional vomit green. Father Soong was still strange-looking in his big white robe, like a man poking his head out of a tent.

There was a photo of Soong on the sideboard behind him, with a cop clutching either arm. Jack Liffey pointed at it.

“Antiwar demonstration?”

The priest smiled mildly. “Something like that. How I wished I’d been in Baltimore when the Berrigans poured their own blood into the draft files. I was stuck in a tiny mission church on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota. A complex moral problem. The Lakota, like most Native Americans, are extremely patriotic. Their sons were almost all on active duty. I was their pastor. So I kept my mouth shut about Vietnam.”

Something thrummed in the walls of the office, maybe just an excess of reverence. It was time. “I’m sorry to tell you this, sir. I’ve learned that Sabine Roh is almost certainly dead. She was shot and then left in the path of the Sheepshead Fire.”

The man’s features sagged, as if aging a year or two before Jack Liffey’s eyes. His fingers pressed into both of his eyes.

“I just told the parents. If they’re your parish, you might want to go over.”

“I don’t know how much comfort I have to offer. Sorry, that’s my own vanity speaking. I liked Sabby a lot. I don’t like her father very much. He has several advanced degrees in feeling sorry for himself. His daughter needed him badly, and he was lost in himself. Did he sit sideways, not looking at you?”

Jack Liffey nodded.

“What a prick—to use the ecclesiastical term. Thank you for coming to tell me, Mr. Liffey. I’d better go over there.”

As Jack Liffey left, he looked back to see the small man staring down dejectedly at the Tibetan prayer wheel on his desk. Confusion everywhere.

*

Maeve stared guardedly at the CD that had been left pointedly on her coffee table. She was a little shell-shocked by her conversation with Swami Muni. The man had been humorous, self-effacing, soft-spoken and surprisingly unmystical.

Every time she’d expected him to veer off into mysticism, he’d talked about particle physics or neuroscience.

She felt a bit floaty, as if the guy had left a powerful intoxicant on the air. He’d also left the CD—Lesson One of
Work
, of course.
The ears are the direct path to the yearnings of the unconscious.
She wondered what her dad would say about it all. No, she knew.

Another light rap on her door—certainly Bunny this time.

“Hi, Bunny.”

“Were you just entertaining who I think I think?”

Maeve made a face. “I can see why he interested you.” In a different tone: “He told me the Mickey guy won’t bother us anymore.”

“Great.” Bunny’s eye went directly to the CD imprinted with a distinctive hypnotic spiral. “You’re going to try
work
?”

“Shouldn’t I?”

“Wow on wheels, Maevie. You seem so grounded. But then, you are ready to jump at anything you feel sometimes.”

“My dad once said you only regret the things you don’t do.”

“Oh, I can think of some things I
did
do…”

Maeve took Bunny’s hand. It was deliciously plump, warm and damp. “Bunny, we’re both really young. Let’s not have regrets yet.
Mi mosca muerta
.”

“I worry when you hide in Spanish.”

“It’s ‘my dead fly’ literally, but it means my sweet innocent.”

“Innocent, huh? Be careful of that man, M. But I won’t prejudice you.”

*

On the car seat beside him Jack Liffey had a bag of sandwiches, and a couple of readable books that were carefully chosen to fly in sideways at a self-taught libertarian, sandbag his thinking a little.

Rain hammered on his windshield. He paused below the cabin because a cop car was parked next to the Studebaker. Jack Liffey waited discreetly for half an hour, but nobody budged, so he drove on past to take another look at the death site Roski had showed him.

He opened an umbrella and stepped out to investigate. The gravel wash was running half width with rainwater now. It would soon be full, and probably obliterate the crime scene entirely, but the ground told him very little except there’d been more digging. He’d watched Gloria work a crime scene once and been astonished by what she’d noticed. A square inch of tennis shoe imprint had got a killer caught.

Jack Liffey stooped at something shiny, but it was just a pebble. Life never tossed you a super clue unless you were a super sleuth. In his experience, the only way to make a case was to stir the pot so hard that whoever you were looking for jumped out at you in a fury.

He wondered why he was putting so much effort into Ed Zukovich. Maybe it was because the young man was trying poignantly hard to find his way in a world that was beyond his resources. Jack Liffey was always a sucker for that.

When he drove back down the hill, the cop car was still at the cabin, so he drove home.

*

“Gus, it’s the admiral’s gofer on the line.” Andor Reik meant the admiral’s adjutant, a good friend of their family from back in the John Birch days.

“No names,” Gustav said into the phone, and pressed a switch under his desk that automatically locked the double-glazed office doors on the business level of his building. The button also turned on a very expensive Chinese-made electronic jammer that killed every wireless signal within a hundred meters.

“Boy, howdy, this is for you,” the gravelly voice said. “No hair and no horns left behind. The Navy is going to board your Sierra Leone ship before it gets to Iran. Some spook told them it was full of nuclear centrifuges.”

“And when they find out it’s only fracking and oil drilling gear?”

“It’s still in violation of the trade ban, pard. I know your company is very, very patriotic about that.”

What the hell was more patriotic than making giant profits off the towel-heads, for God’s sake?

“We can’t control what Nigerians and Syrians do with the tools we sell them. You hear me, spooks? And while you’re at it, kiss your own fucking asses goodbye, because I can make sure you’re stuck testing the temperature of the ice in Antarctica for the rest of your lives.”

“Don’t worry, my end is secure,” the adjutant said. “Goodbye for now.”

“Gus, it’s me.” Andor came back on startlingly from Omaha. How secure was it now?

“Yeah?”

“Don’t be jumpy, bro.”

Gustav hung up and switched to a new call.

“Ad, you shouldn’t have been on that line. Forget it. You’ve got some work. First, get rid of the California chucklehead, that lawyer. Into the wastebasket of history.”

“Can’t our supposed friends stop the Navy searching our boat?”

“Hush now. The devil’s runnin’ up.” He cut Andor off and leaned back in his Recaro desk chair, which had been rescued from a crashed Ferrari.

He considered his options. If the Navy was already steaming toward the
Kroo Sky
entering the Persian Gulf, it would be almost impossible to prevent a search. And the name Reik was plastered all over the oil equipment. But a lot of really big boys owed him.

Okay, let’s see who feels froggy about this, he thought, as he punched a key that dialed straight into the Pentagon.

*

Late the next morning, Jack Liffey drove through the fire gate again carrying his picnic hamper with cold beer, ginger ale, two fresh meatball sandwiches, and the same books. He parked on the pad alongside the seasonal wash that was hard at work now. A big stream boiled angrily down its ravine, maybe two feet below the rim.

He wondered if the stream had ever flooded its banks—but the cabin was an antique and had obviously survived a century of winter storms.

Zukovich opened up after a knock, displaying a scowl. He was bare-chested in the cabin heat of the potbelly stove.

“Sorry to disturb your study, Zook. I brought beer and sandwiches and more books.” He displayed the hamper.

“Are you fucking serious? You’re way too spooky, dude. I don’t want you here.”

“Not as spooky as the cops. A big pal of yours?”

“He’d like to be. You didn’t tell me the slope girl had been shot.”

“Can I come in out of the rain, Zook?”

He still blocked the door. “You’re suddenly an expert on what I want to read?”

“I did a lot of self-education myself. We’re more alike than you know.”

Disgusted, Zukovich threw open the door. “Bring the beer anyway. If it’s cold.”