The Chinese Beverly Hills (24 page)

The night had been an emotional sinkhole. Jack Liffey had been out of control, and he knew he’d soon have to pay his dues for it.

Roski forked at a massive breakfast burrito of scrambled eggs, black beans, soft white cheese, chorizo sausage, onion, rice, fried potato, and green chile, all wrapped in an oversized flour tortilla. Jack Liffey couldn’t even look at that gut torpedo. He had coffee and a teacup portion of
machaca
spooned out of a big pot.

“I eat hard when I’m depressed, and I drink.”

All around them, short brown manual laborers, born in rural villages, were grabbing a little food on the way to the tens of thousands of workshops that filled fifty square miles of flatland southeast of downtown L.A., the largest light industrial complex on Earth. Most had refried beans with a beer. He hoped to hell they had bathroom access at work.

“Sorry, Walt. I’m not a father confessor at seven a.m.”

“Not required. I heard last night that my man Piscatelli is off the critical list. He’s what they call guarded.”

“That’s a lot better than critical,” Jack Liffey offered. “In my experience, critical means you’re just about dead.”

“I smell extinction all the time.”

“I smell chili and beans,” Jack Liffey said.

“I can tell you’re not happy, too.”

“Man, I was shot point-blank right over my heart in the L.A. riots and two little girls pushed me in a wheelbarrow to the hospital. I’m charmed.”

“It’s that kind of luck that makes me think you’re somebody I need to know.”

“I understand PTSD, man, but I don’t know what I can give you.”

“Want a bite?” He pointed with his fork at the outspilling burrito.

“Okay, to show trust in your cooties.” He took a forkful of the mess and masticated it thoughtfully. “I think I’ll let irony pass over.”

Roski smiled briefly. “I need your help, Jack. Calling you was a distress flare.”

“Do you want me to find somebody discreet to talk to? My wife has made me quite aware that somebody on the job has to be careful.”

Roski sighed and seemed to untense a little. “Yes, Jack, thank you. I can afford a shrink. But don’t
you
go away. I need an ordinary pal, too.”

“Of course. But pros are better. Friendship makes things hard to deal with.”

“At our age, lots is hard to deal with. I was fifty when the bastards sent me to Iraq for my third tour.”

“No shit.” They sat in silence for a while as several workers went out. “Can I ask one thing?” Jack Liffey said. “Is anybody on your side of the ledger looking seriously at those local bikers for the girl?”

“Those dumbbells? Really?”

“Dumb isn’t always harmless.”

“Thanks, Jack. I will now. The Feds are already looking at that strange South African guy down in San Diego.”

“Why him?”

Roski seemed reluctant to speak. “Please be careful, Jack. I could lose my job big-time over this. The Feds say the girl was probably muling drugs across the border near this guy’s house.”

“Aw, shit.”

*

Zook woke up, found a beer bottle near him with a swig in it and downed it, then made a face. Warm as spit. It seemed like the rain had stopped. He went outside to a bright icy morning, with a line of dark cloud on the western horizon that would be back soon. He washed his face out of a bucket dipped from the stream. The word bracing occurred to him. What the hell did it mean? The damn ice water was just plain horrible.

He used his propane ring to heat coffee instead of shavewater, the cowboy coffee his dad used to make. He’d tossed the grounds straight into a speckled blue enamel pot. While he waited, he started the Studebaker with a
grind-grind-BANG
and ran it for a while as he charged his dead cell phone.

Back in the cabin he had his bitter coffee, then Chocolate Trix moistened with water, very unsatisfying, and another hot dog wrapped in bread. He recharged the iron stove with pine and settled back into the swing chair with the odd book. He’d read the chapter about women three times and was pretty sure he was getting the hang of it. At the end of the chapter, he read it very carefully:

Women are depicted in a quite different way from men—not because the feminine is different from the masculine—but because the “ideal” spectator is always assumed to be male and the image of the woman is designed to flatter him. If you have any doubt that this is so, make the following experiment. Choose from this book an image of a traditional nude. Transform the woman into a man. Then notice the violence which that transformation does. Not to the image, but to the assumptions of a likely viewer.

He paged back to the photographs, picked a hey-come-fuck-me-big-boy nude and tried the experiment. It was too creepy. He tried to imagine a dude lying naked on a sofa, staring out at whoever like that. Straight guys didn’t
do
that.

*

Gloria woke up with a jolt, her heart racing. She’d felt a big squirt of adrenaline spew into the organs in her back. She thought she’d even heard the
splut
. Whatever—she was instantly jittery and enraged.

Last night, very late, Jack had come in and showered, which was always a morning thing for him, not before bed.

She was pretty sure he was tapping ass. Of course she’d told him to do it, but that was a long way from him actually doing it. Jack! Against her will, she pictured his dick pumping in and out of an anonymous girl (young, thin, beautiful) and it tormented her.

Okay, woman, you’re not a basket case yet. Think about getting out of bed, dressing, walking around a bit, maybe even forcing the stairs and preparing yourself to get back on the job. But the pain won out for the moment. Why
did
Jack stay with her? That was the mystery. She cursed him and ordered him around and still expected him to be a perfect partner. Nobody deserves the shit I serve up, she thought.

She tried to stand without the cane, felt an electric shock in her hip and sat back into the bed. It’s only pain, woman. Weakness is not allowed in your household. She wanted so bad to get outside herself—this terrible hard shell she kept around her.

Jack was right. I need to talk to Paula if she’s available. Maybe even Maeve. I do love that girl. Jack’s indomitable issue. A very tenacious young woman with a strange aura of misdirected holiness all around her. Sort of like Jack.

*

After leaving breakfast with Roski, Jack Liffey realized City Terrace was almost halfway to Zook’s cabin, so he turned north to the mountains. Zook and his dummies were connected to Sabine in some way. Or was it the noisy South African?

The rain started up again, but much of the night had been dry so the fire road might not be too sloppy. Driving up San Gabriel Boulevard, he noticed a full-sized animated gorilla outside a mattress store waving his arm at the traffic. Nothing special for L.A., except this gorilla’s arm was on fire. The fur on the left arm had almost burned away to a wire armature, and a Chinese shopkeeper was on the sidewalk tossing a cup of water ineffectually at the fire. A faded sign in the shop window said,
I’m the Gorilla Your Dreams
.

And then he was past. He knew life never really seemed to settle into the rational.

The yellow gate was still unlocked, and he navigated the ruts and mud pools carefully. The fact that his pickup had high clearance helped, and he tried to keep one tire on the grassy shoulder.

The damn cop car was there again, this time blocking most of the road with the cop inside, so Jack Liffey noted the license number as he squeezed past and went on to the crime scene. He snoozed for a while in the pickup, trying to make up for a short and bad night.

He woke to a coyote yipping greetings from nearby. A blue heron glided in and settled into a big puddle to watch him warily. They stared at each other for what seemed an eon.

“Nothing to see here, dude, move along,” Jack Liffey said.

When he figured enough time had passed, he turned the truck around and headed downhill. The cop was gone.

Zook opened the plank door right away. “Jeez, man. A guy comes up here for some thinking time and the place turns into a bus station.”

“I’ll take coffee. Tell me about your cop friend.”

The young man seemed uneasy at the question but nodded him in.

“He’s a jerk that thinks he’s got a beef on me so he can wind me up anytime he wants. Like I give a fuck. I been in the graybar hotel. It’s all fine.” He handed Jack Liffey a speckled tin cup of coffee, probably the worst coffee Jack Liffey had ever tried to sip in his life.

“Why does he want to be in with you?”

Zook shrugged. “Because I’m cool. He probably thinks I’ll be his fucking CI.”

CI meant confidential informant. Jack Liffey saw the
Ways of Seeing
book propped open by the kid’s reading chair.

“Did you like the book?”

Zook seemed to consider. “It blew me tight. I thought I had stuff all figured out, but… crap. Up to now it’s just a party mix of all the jail philosophers.”

“Who’s that?”

“You know them. We’re all just selfish cockroaches, looking out for number one. Kill the goody-two-shoes.
Oooh
, here’s an idea. Ooh, here’s another idea. It’s the Tweety Bird philosophy of life. Jail shit is degrading to a thinking man.”

“Nice description.”

“I never thought of women like this guy does. It’s weird. Who is this damn guy?”

“An art critic from England. But a special one. Try the last essay, too—it’s about how advertising turns your head around.”

“Oh, shit.”

“Every once in a while it’s good to rub against something different.”

Zukovich walked a strange circuit in the room.

“We did this awful thing in the can,” he said. “This was the real deal—California Men’s Colony up at Obispo. We’d sit around and talk about our old ladies and what they was doing right that minute. It was all imagination and hate. Guys would get off saying, ‘She’s got five guys dicking every hole right now, including her ears.’ We’d talk about how our old ladies always went for richer guys, or bigger guys, or stronger guys. Why do dudes diss their women like that?”

“You tell me.”

He thought about it. “I guess they were all losers and didn’t have no choice for a good woman. It’s all a matter of the right personnel.”

“Maybe it’s a matter of what you value.”

The map led Jack Liffey to an isolated ranch house in the scrubland east of San Diego, probably a half mile from the border. No cars were around, so he guessed Hardi Boaz was out on patrol or whatever he called it. There was a large desert tortoise at one side of the building in a pen that contained a waterhole and a little sun shelter, all enclosed by an ankle-high chain-link fence.

Jack Liffey wanted a glimpse into the house. He parked up the road and walked back. As he approached, the big tortoise headed toward him, swimming hard along the packed dirt, its legs making small scritching sounds in the quiet. He’d assumed these animals were stolid and even-tempered, but Jack Liffey was certain this tortoise was laboring toward him with murder in its heart.

The only uncurtained window was near the tortoise pen, and he peeked in just as the shell clanged into the wire fencing a yard away. Jack Liffey glanced down. The collision repeated itself over and over as if some gene had gone murderous in the tortoise. The hatred, or whatever it was, was awesome.

Inside, a man’s living room, with mounted animal heads filling one wall. African animals mostly, so he knew he had the right house. Curly horns, straight horns. But his eye went to a trophy that sent a chill right through him. An orange beret hung on one of the trophies, and on another a straw farmworker hat. Trophies of human kills? What else could you think?

He heard a car in the distance and realized how exposed he was. Shit! Jack Liffey leapt the chain-link and hurried behind the tortoise’s low shelter. The beast wheeled about and came toward him relentlessly, a very slow homing torpedo. Behind the shelter, Jack Liffey felt incredibly foolish.

A big Humvee parked in front and Hardi Boaz got out in full bush regalia, accompanied by a handsome, late-thirtyish woman wearing a button-down shirt. Something about her suggested New York and academia.

“I don’t care,” she snapped in a croak.

Jack Liffey watched them through his tortoise shelter without quite deciphering what was going on, as Hardi Boaz came around and slipped his arm up inside her loose shirt.

“Yeah, I want,” she said.

“Can I hurt you?”

“Just a little.”

Jack Liffey felt the tickle of a cough. Just then the sharp forward edge of the tortoise shell drove hard into the meat of his shoulder. He had to stifle a gasp of pain.

The animal butted into him over and over, its legs scratching away on the dirt like a mechanical toy. He could imagine the homicidal little eyes, and he wanted to pick the animal up and hurl it with all his might. Pain pulsed in his shoulder.

“Do it all,” the woman bleated.

“
Dankie, liefling
.”

They went into the house and Jack Liffey rolled away from his tormentor, grabbing his wounded shoulder. The tortoise was already lumbering around to come at him again when he lifted one side of the beast with both hands. It must have weighed fifty pounds. Up in the air, two legs, neck, and tail worked at a steady cadence, fat metronomes. He flopped the tortoise onto its back, where it went on rocking as its legs worked against nothing.

Softly Jack Liffey said, “Fuck you, too.”

*

Maeve sat scissoring her legs nervously off the cliff edge outside her studio. She was replaying the talk with the swami in her head. Human evolution or Looney Tune? He’d been all flattery… but, of course, flattery worked.

Weekend motorcyclists snarled along the roads below, Harleys and their Japanese copies. Heavyset bearded guys who fixed plumbing and installed kitchen cabinets during the week but on Sunday played Huns terrorizing the villagers.

Bunny peeked around the building at her. “You went to see the guy, didn’t you?” She sidled out carefully and sat down beside Maeve, nudging up against her butt. “I’m not as worded-up as you, honey. I’m an actress. Mostly I say other people’s words.”