The Orange Curtain (17 page)

“I’ll bet there’s some details that make your story different.”

“You mean, like, before bad guys come, I and my friend Ly play tennis every day at Cirque Sportif in Saigon. Then we put back on silk
ao dai
and go drink tea on verandah of Continental Palace Hotel and walk through flower market on Nguyen Hue on way home? That stuff some detail, but not instructive at all. Or peasant boys from National Liberation Front ride truck into Saigon, smash in my door and steal my beautiful picture of the dragon who marry the fairy spirit and begin the Vietnamese people way back in the before time? That not instructive either. Come with me.”

She walked down the hall and he had little choice if he wanted to keep talking to her. He saw what Vo meant about Tien getting her way. Before he realized that he’d just followed her into a large bathroom, she had stripped off the exercise leotard and turned to make sure he got a good look as she stepped gracefully into a large standup Japanese-style bathtub that was steaming away.

“You can join or sit there, it okay.”

He sat on a little bench with scrolled ends that reminded him somehow of Napoleon.

“Ooooh. Feel good
all over
.”

“So what sort of detail would be instructive?” he asked.

Her face took on a funny expression. “I leaving Saigon on Huey chopper and I put ten kilo heroin in suitcase and I take heroin to Paris and build whole commercial life on money I make. That instructive. It not true, but it instructive.”

He wasn’t so sure it was untrue, from the quick and confident way it had come to mind. It would explain a lot.

“I wouldn’t really blame you,” he offered. “It was a rough time. And you were on your own.”

“You bet. You want get in? Hot water super-duper on the soft parts of you.”

“No thanks.”

“You report now.”

He told her about visiting the divinity student, and how what the young man had told him meant he had to make another visit to Billy Gudger to find out if he’d given Phuong a ride home, but she didn’t really seem all that interested. She told him she had talked to Minh Trac that afternoon and she had money from him for the work Jack Liffey had already completed, plus the first day’s wages from her.

She got out of the tub, and stood there naked and dripping on the tiles. Her body was remarkably well toned for a woman who was probably in her late 40s, and there was something fascinating about a woman who had no shame at all about her body. He wondered if it was Buddhism.

“Now we make love very nice,” she said.

“I don’t think so.”

“You like me better if I wiggle my eye at you, say, ‘Ooh, Meeester Leeefeeee, you soooo strong?’”

He laughed, and she sat right next to him on the antique bench. Before he knew it, she was fiddling with the top button of his shirt and he tried to stop her, but not very hard.

“I was warned about you,” he said.

“Who said?”

“Lt. Vo said you always get what you want.”

“He absolutely goddam right.”

When he dropped off the freeway at National Boulevard in Culver City, he saw a fire flaring up in the darkness ahead. He slowed as he approached, and he could hear sirens in the distance but none of the fire trucks were there yet and it didn’t look like they were going to be able do much good anyway. A small bungalow was already engulfed and a score of people stood around hurling things into the fire from piles of possessions that appeared to have been moved out of the house earlier. He saw a ladder-back chair silhouetted clearly as it sailed into the blaze, carton after carton of assorted goods, an armload of shirts on hangars. One hefty woman charged the fire with a floor lamp like a lance and hurled it in through a window that was too bright to look at.

A tricycle sailed high but missed and bounced back off the front wall, and to the side he noticed a young man expertly shagging paperback books into the conflagration with a baseball bat. It was remarkable, he thought, how he’d lost much of his curiosity about a scene like this. Only a few years earlier
the reason
for all this odd behavior would have piqued his interest. But was it reason, he thought, as explanation that interested him, or reason as motive, or reason as cause, or just reason as an ordered, sane way of thinking about the world? None of it tugged at him any longer. Safety was what counted, and he drove on.

He had repeatedly showered Tien’s smell off him, but Marlena still fussed and complained and accused, and for the first time since they had begun living together, she was absolutely right, but he had to fight her and resist and demur just exactly as he always had, despite the guilt and dejection that soured his self-opinion, or she would know for sure. A drink would have been wonderful, he thought, as she followed him from room to room, tugging at his clothes and patting him down as if a foreign pair of panties might fall out of one of his pockets.

“Mar, please. You can’t chain me up in the house. I’m out hunting missing kids.”

“But I’m
afraid
and you don’t
care
that I’m afraid,” she wailed.

“What can I do about your fears? Tell me.”

Then she was weeping and before long she was better again, poking in the fridge to find some food for them to eat and making him feel even guiltier. There had always been an adjustment period every time their paths diverged and then ran back together, but it had been getting longer. And the downward spiral of his own ethics wasn’t helping.

While she was cooking, he called Art Castro at home. “Hello there, Arturo. How’s the family?”

“They’re up in Fresno at my mother-in-law’s for a week. She’s got some niece doing her
quinceañera
, you know, the 15-year-old coming-out thing.”

“Uh-huh. I think I must have missed mine.”

“Boys got a different thing. Don’t you Irish do anything?”

“I don’t think anybody outside South Boston keeps any of that Old Country stuff alive. Except potatoes. My old man had to have potatoes in some form at every meal.”

“Funny, isn’t it? Potatoes is a new world plant but you could live the rest of your life in Mexico and not see one.”

“I couldn’t. I have too much trouble with the language.”

“Yeah, you got to see to that, man. You just got to check the demographics to see you’re living in the far north part of Mexico. They’re reclaiming the place little by little with their feet.”

“Good luck to them. We seem to have screwed it up for them pretty good. Did you find out anything about Marvin Resnik?”

“A blowhard of the first water. But he’s harmless, and yeah, he never leaves that house. But never. They had a mudslide and flood in the big
el niño
storm season couple years ago and when the fire department cleared people out, he held them off with a shotgun and they finally made him sign a waiver to stay put. Hope that’s what you wanted to hear.”

“I was just eliminating him as a suspect, as the cops say.”

“Suspect? Man, you sound like a real detective.”

“I scare myself sometimes. Thanks, Art.”

The old man with a big paunch framed by fluorescent orange suspenders stopped his push-mower and mopped his brow next door. Probably hurrying to get his grass taken care of before the rain struck. Dark clouds were creeping their way, and a whiff of moisture was on the southerly wind. Jack Liffey stepped up to the picket fence alongside the driveway. “Excuse me, could you tell me if Billy Gudger lives here?”

“If that shop doesn’t fix my power mower soon, I’m going to nuke them. He lives in that place in back. You a bill collector?”

“Would you expect that with Billy?”

“It’s none of my beeswax, mister.”

He went back to mowing and Jack Liffey found the cottage at the end of the driveway. It had probably once been a detached garage but had been rebuilt into a stand-alone apartment. At MediaPros they’d told him Billy Gudger had called in sick again, and he finally wheedled the home address out of the gangly writer. The old black VW that Mark Glassford had described was parked at the curb out front, in the shadow of a tall neon Palm Reader sign that almost overhung the street.

He knocked at the cottage door and waited. The place was so small you could tell any occupant would either come in ten seconds or not at all. A little brass plaque right under the peephole said,
This room not to be occupied by more then 110 persons. Fullerton F.D
. Somebody’s idea of a joke, but it didn’t seem the kind of humor that would emanate from the Billy Gudger he remembered. The curtain was open a crack and after a minute, he peered in. It was hard to tell for certain in the murk, but the single room was so small that anybody in there would have to be hiding in a corner of the bathroom where the door was open, or under the single bed.

Back in front he rang the bell on the big house. He could hear the ringing inside, a sort of hapless hollow plea that echoed through the house as if it would never be honored. There were no answering movements. One window beside the door had gauze curtains. Shielding his eyes, he could see a big old console television that was turned off, and what looked like a cake tray sitting on top of it. The tray was empty.

Under the big red hand out front, it said,
Palmistry, Bibliomancy, Tarot. Genuine Rom wisdom. Se habla Espagnol
. It didn’t say anything about invisibility or out-of-body travel, but it was possible Sonya Gudger had her own car and they had both gone off somewhere in it. He looked for the gardener, but he had abandoned his mower and gone inside. Jack Liffey went back and knocked once more, and then decided to kill some time and come back later.

His breathing finally began to slow down. Billy Gudger stood with his back to the front door, frightened all of a sudden by the weight of the pistol in his hand. It was heavier than it should have been, as if each time he used it, it grew in mass by sucking in the souls that it set loose. He could imagine the swap occurring—the bullet zinging out and the soul compacting down and swooshing back to hurl itself down the barrel and then snug into the vacated space in the clip. It was just physics. Equal and opposite reaction. Conservation of momentum.

He had watched Jack Liffey walk up the driveway, talk briefly to Ed Jamgochian, then knock at his own door in back. The man had even bent to read the brass Sanskrit plaque. But when he saw Jack Liffey bend again to peer in the window, his hair had stood on end and a piece of ice settled against his spine. If he did the same at the service porch of the big house, there would be trouble. Billy Gudger had got her as far as the service porch last night, but then he had no idea what was next. There was no way he could get her great bulk into his car by himself.

He kept wanting to go find his mother and ask her advice on what to do next, but of course that wasn’t possible any more. Something had happened to her. His mind had trouble fixing on what it was. He looked at the old brocade sofa and saw the reddish brown stain on it and realized he would have to do something about that, too. There was way too much to do in this room and he’d been immobilized most of the night by having to deal with other rooms, clearing out of the fridge all of the food that could spoil and moving clothes out of the bedroom.

The car started up out front and he risked peeking at the window to see the old white AMC Concord drive off.

A
s for that styled a toadstone: this is properly a tooth of the fish called Lupus Marinus, as hath been made evident to the Royal Society.

—John Wilkins,
An Essay Toward a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language
(1668)

Live oaks and big-leaf sycamores hung overhead and a deep channel with a trickle of a stream in it bordered first the right and then the left side of the narrow road. Old frame houses and rock cabins crouched in the canyon just off the road, offering one or two places to park in little coves carved out of the hillside. It reminded him a lot of Topanga Canyon on the other side of L.A. where the aging hippies went to play country gentry. Perhaps this was where the Orange Curtain sheltered its own aging hippies.

Dark clouds gathered and it looked like they were in for a sprinkle. People up here would probably be closer to things like that, he guessed, probably even apprehensive about a cloudburst that could turn Silverado Creek into a raging torrent. He imagined they lost a cabin or two to flood every decade or so, not to mention fire. It was the risk you took playing hayseed, and he was sure most of them felt it was worth it. He had the car window open, and even over the engine noise he could hear the birds and he could smell the woodsy air.

The address Mike had given him was a rock cottage up about thirty steep steps from the road. There was a long screened porch and a chimney that was issuing smoke. He had to park a quarter mile farther on at a turnout and walk back. The one alcove near the cabin, pressed back into a stone retaining wall, had been fully occupied by a 1958 Buick that was fantastically rusted but looked like it might still run.

He was puffing a bit by the time he reached the top of the stone steps and he rapped on an old wood screen door.

“You a goddam reporter?” crackled out of the interior in a dry snarl.

“No.”

“Who the hell sent you?”

“Mike Lewis suggested I come see you.” Maybe this wasn’t such a good time-waster, after all.

There were a couple of indecipherable scrapes and a few other noises in the gloom, and then the screen came open and a tall wizened old man glared at him. He was as pale and wrinkled as a white prune and he held an unlighted cigarette that was so wrinkled itself that it looked like he’d been holding onto it all day.

“You’d better climb on in.”

“My name is Jack Liffey.”

The old man didn’t offer his hand. “I guess you know I’m Philip Marlowe.”

“That’s what Mike said. I didn’t know you really existed.”

“Mike was the first one with the gumption to figure it out. I guess he was doing some article on the roots of pulp writing and he found my ad in a phone book from the ’40s and thought the name was probably a coincidence. But he came to find me. Come on this way.”