Dangerous Games (14 page)

A few minutes after they set off, Maeve stumbled badly. He was only a few feet away, but he held back and let her catch her balance unaided. After a moment of patting her side to make sure everything was still attached, she glanced at her father. “Thanks for not running for a telephone booth to put your Superman suit on.”

“It's been my observation that you're pretty good at taking care of yourself.”

“Look at this,” Gloria said. She had stopped beside a whole colony of sparse bushes covered with delicate pink cupped flowers the size of dimes.

“That's mallow,” Jack Liffey said. “It's native. There's a much more orange variety up in the Sierras. Not many plants flower this late in the year except rabbit brush and stuff most people would call weeds.”

“How do you know this?”

“Maeve and I used to take field guides on hikes and learn the native plants, but I still don't know garden stuff. I can't tell a zinnia from an iris. You ask me any of these, though.”

“Okay,
that
one.”

He grinned. “It's called a big green bush with oval leaves. Sorry, ask me when it's in flower. My memory's not what it used to be.”

Maeve bent over and looked closely. “Monkey flower, Dad. And what's that beautiful vine with the red leaves?”

They shared a knowing smile, but Gloria had already moved toward the vine that was growing thickly on the bank of the dried up stream. She was just about to pluck one of the leaves when Jack Liffey snatched her hand away. “Whoa, hon. Your Paiute senses are failing you. That's poison oak. Leaves in three, let it be.”

“If I ever had any Paiute senses, they were beaten out of me,” she said angrily.

“Sorry,” he said.

She looked at him for a moment curiously and then visibly decided to ratchet down her inflamed sensibilities. She took his arm when he offered. “Next time I'll wear moccasins and turquoise and woo-woo if you like.”

His heart soared with the easing of her pissed-off state, even the lame joke, and he took her roughened hand where it was clutching his bicep. “We're almost there.”

The problem was that the waterfall was largely a bust. In the late fall, the stream was so feeble that water barely dribbled over the mossy fifty-foot cliff to send only a trickle into the pool. Still, the pool at the bottom was full and inviting, maybe three feet deep. “If we had suits we could at least soak,” he said.

“It's going to be a while before I'm in a bathing suit, Dad,” Maeve reminded him.

“Yeah, sorry. I guess even one of those ruffled Victorian bathing costumes wouldn't do the trick.”

“Victorian bathing machines would be better. You know about them?”

“Never heard of ‘em.” He had, but he knew she loved it when she got to explain something to him.

“We did turn-of-the-century customs in my class on Time and Culture. All the popular beaches in Victorian England had these weird bathing machines. They were little wheeled cabins that were closed on all the shore sides. The women got inside and sat on a bench attached to the wall and changed into their bathing costumes. Then horses backed the bathing machines out into the water so that the women could dabble their feet and stay completely unseen. The ayatollahs would have loved them.”

“Why wear anything at all if you're that hidden?”

Gloria squeezed his hand once as prelude to extricating her fingers. “There's no end to the silly stuff men expect us to do so they don't have to control their own emotions.”

“I understand completely,” he said. “Gloria, you could put on a chador so all I could see is those lovely brown eyes and you'd still drive me nuts.”

That earned him a soft punch on the shoulder.

Maeve turned to face them both. Putting on her most earnest look, she stopped dead, arms akimbo. “How come you two are mad at each other? It's like the ghost at the feast.”

He waited a few moments, but it didn't seem Gloria was going to say anything. “I was a bad boy,” Jack Liffey said. “I've been trying unsuccessfully to negotiate the terms of my surrender ever since. I lied to Gloria.”

Maeve's expression took on that panicky look she had sometimes, when life started moving too fast for her. “About
what?
I hope this isn't another one of your world-historic failures at keeping your pants zipped.”

He smiled tightly for an instant. “No, hon, and I think you exaggerate that problem a little. Anyway, Gloria is who I want and I'm not on the prowl.”

“Well, sometimes the problem is that there's a woman who is.” She looked at him pointedly. “What about the Dragon Lady?”

He knew who she meant and wondered if the warmth in his cheeks meant he was blushing. “Hon, there are times I'd prefer not to look at my life in comic terms.” He'd been looking for a missing Vietnamese girl at the time, and her employer had come after him hard.

Jack Liffey and Gloria Ramirez now stared at one another, each waiting for the other to blink. He didn't want to tell Maeve that he'd found the boy who'd shot her, but Gloria was giving him no help. “I withheld some information that I thought would put Gloria in an uncomfortable position as a sworn officer of the law. We'll tell you about it a little later, if you can trust us until then.”

He yearned for the days, right after Maeve had broken a couple of promises to him, when he could pull rank. But whatever credit you gained that way inevitably trickled away faster than you could make good use of it.

She reached out and took Gloria's hand and then his hand and put them together petulantly until they clasped reluctantly. Maeve was still part child, in willful denial of the world of separation and divorce, of conflicting interests, loss, defeat, and general human breakdown. “Give each other a kiss now.”

They pecked, and Maeve sighed. “I guess that's the best I'm going to get. Please don't scare me, guys. I've had too much change already. I like you too much.” She put an arm around Gloria and clung.

Apparently, there was a Santa Ana brewing up. A gritty blast of wind erupted down the trail and made them all turn away and cover their eyes, breaking the tension.

“‘Whirl is king, having driven out Zeus,'” Jack Liffey said softly. “Unfortunately.”

“One of the Greeks?” Maeve asked.

“Aristophanes, I think. We'll do our best to stay together, hon. That's all I can promise.”

“I need a tall bush to hide behind,” Maeve said in an abrupt change of tone, clutching her side. “And something to dig with.”

Gloria hadn't spoken in some time, and her silence had been swelling in his psyche like a lit fuse.

“Sit over there a moment,” Gloria said. “Jack and I'll dig you a pit against the cliff.”

The ordinary considerate words felt to him like a fever breaking.

Dear Diary,

Lord, this happy Jamaican is built like a big truck & really he really sees me & talks to me. When I'm in bed tonight I hope he comes to me. Black skin dont make no nevermind to me at all. Its so funny we play dominos & just insult each other so much & it makes me so happy to be insult by him Im still laughing. Up here makes down there seem so far away. I feel like a princess in a castle.

THIRTEEN

A Strong Faith System

The wind was so powerful, gusting out of the northeast, that it was hard to keep the tall RAV-4 in lane. They were on an exclusive stretch of the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, with overpriced beach getaways on stilts lining the ocean side of the road, shoulder-to-shoulder like a long irregular fence.

“You folks mind if I double-park here a minute?” He pulled off the road, blocking a gray two-car garage door on a nondescript modern house Its only notable feature was a sunburst doodad lamp on the clapboards that really belonged on a sixties apartment building inland.

“The Coastal Commission hired me to make sure there's still beach access.” In theory, all of the beach—seaward of the mean high tide—was public, but when celebrities built their beach houses elbow to elbow along the water, cutting off access, they'd pledged to keep open a few stairways. Little by little, of course, the access stairways had been walled off or actually built over, in order to keep out the riff-raff.

“You're kidding,” Gloria said.

“I'm kidding. But I have information that your Luisa might have stayed here, even might be here now.”

“I see.”

“Dad's on the case,” Maeve said. “Was that the whole reason for this trip?”

“Of course not, hon. But you know how I like to double up my errands.” He actually did. It gave him a primitive kind of satisfaction, this temporal economy. “I knew you wouldn't mind. You guys wait in the car in case some zealous traffic cop shows up to give us a ticket. I'll just pop in and see what's up.”

A wooden staircase led down from the shoulder of the road right next to the address that Chris Johnson had unearthed for him. He walked past the house door and continued down to a deck that was still well above the sand. It was chest high, but he boosted himself up and climbed the railing to wait in a corner of the deck against the cedar clapboard wall of the house. Nobody bothered closing curtains here, and there was a young man in a bathrobe sitting cross-legged in the living room talking into a cordless phone. He looked unhappy and kept pressing his hand against his crotch as if easing a pain.

The wind whistled and moaned around the house and down the staircase, but he could still make out the louder moments of the phone conversation.

“… You think I can't imagine it? Somebody kicks sand in your face and you go home and karate the mirror for days … I will come there and use the damn blade if you don't get my money. Today.”

The young man stabbed the off button hard. Then he cut a line of coke on a big white ceramic tile beside him and snorted it up with a thin red straw. Jack Liffey saw no evidence of Luisa, but she could have been in back or downstairs.

He slid off the deck and went up the steps to the main door and rang the bell. He heard an awful rendition of the opening bars of
Here Comes the Sun.
He waited a reasonable time and then rapped pretty hard.

“Gas company!” Why not? he thought. “We show a methane buildup here. There's a danger of explosion!”

As far as he knew, there was no methane problem around here, but who in L.A. could afford to ignore a warning like that? A whole row of shops across from Farmer's Market, not far from the big CBS studio, had gone up in an awesome fireball in 1985—putting an abrupt end to plans to continue the main subway line down Wilshire Boulevard to the west. He'd just read that the entire expensive Playa Vista development had been built over a giant rubber membrane pierced by tall vent pipes to exhaust the gas buildup. But, methane or not, the young man was ignoring him. He heard a door close somewhere in the house, then a grinding noise, and he started to head back to the deck for a peek.

“Jack!”

It was Gloria, sounding urgent. He hurried up the stairs to see the house's swing-up garage door wedged partially open against the RAV-4. Maeve was still in the car, her eyes the size of saucers. Gloria pointed toward Santa Monica, but there was nothing much to see.

“A young man in sweats and a big revolver rolled out underneath and took off running down the road. I didn't think I had reason to shoot him.”

“You didn't.”

“He looked like the hounds of hell were after him. He actually got up enough speed to jump in the back of a gardener's pickup truck, a white Toyota. He rapped with the pistol on the window of the cab and that seemed to keep the driver going. I could only get the initial 4J off the plate. There can't be more than a hundred thousand Latino gardeners with Toyota pickups.”

“Jesus. It's like when you turn on the light switch and the same second an earthquake levels the house. That's one spooked kid.”

“What did you do down there?”

“Nothing to cause that. I'm going inside for a look around. If that offends your official sensibility, you can wait here.”

“Since the garage is open, it's not technically a 459. Just trespass, and even that wouldn't stick if you don't do any damage.”

“I'll tread softly.”

But she did follow him in, ducking under the springs at the side of the door. Some kind of big square SUV was under a tarp; beside it was a little red Miata with the top down. The door into the house was shut but not locked, and he called a couple of times, and then Gloria obliged him by yelling out “L.A.P.D.!” They entered a stainless steel and granite kitchen like something out of a design magazine, but cluttered with old pizza boxes and KFC buckets. There was also a baggie of white powder that he saw Gloria eyeing, though there wasn't a damn thing she could do about it since she wasn't in the house legally.

“This is a drugged-up kid camping out in somebody else's house,” he said.

“Maybe.”

The living room had a lot of white leather furniture and a few bad paintings. He made his way down a hallway to a bedroom with a mattress on the floor. There was a cardboard box with what looked like women's underwear and jeans and blouses. A copy of
Wuthering Heights
was tented open on the floor, with a stack of Harlequin romances beside it.

“I know one thing,” Jack Liffey said. “Our guy wasn't reading this.” Then he noticed a small rounded stone in the corner and pocketed it. It strengthened his belief that Luisa Wilson had indeed been here.

“Now it's a felony,” she said.

“I thought it had to be over $5,000 to be a felony.”

“Grand theft is down to $400 now, but if you take anything at
all
you qualify for a 459, burglary.”

“Door was open.”

“Let's not be lawyers.”

“Oh, let's not—not being a lawyer is my life's ambition. I think this is Luisa's stuff. I'll come back some other time.”

“It must be nice not to have to follow the law.”

“I'll tell the guys in Rampart that,” he said. Rampart had been the worst police scandal to hit L.A. since the 1930s—from planting evidence right up to shooting inconvenient witnesses—and you only had to whisper the name of the division to make any L.A. cop wince.

“Okay, okay.”

* * *

There are different things in Mexico from here in the United States like language and food that are not the same and houses. There was trouble in Texas and US wanted to grab a big part of land. California to. Mexicans fought hard and kill at the Alamo. Then Mr. Santa Anna got butt-kick. And Rio Grande is the border. Here Tijuana is the border. Texas is the home of President Bush.

The page was illuminated like a parody of a medieval manuscript, the text surrounded by colored pencil drawings of cacti and eagles carrying snakes in their beaks and a couple Virgins of Guadalupe with their golden radiance.

Jack Liffey read the paragraph a second time while Thumb Estrada guzzled a Pepsi across the kitchen table. The essay was bad, but not as bad as he'd feared. There were actual sentences, and even some facts, or near facts, hidden in the garble.

“I don't know why you think you can't write. You can put a perfectly good sentence together. It needs work, but that's not the end of the world.”

The boy studiously avoided his eyes. Jack Liffey wrote a big 1 in the corner of the essay and circled it. He intended to take his reluctant pupil through as many drafts as the boy would tolerate.

“Read your first sentence,” Jack Liffey said, and slid the paper across. “Just to refresh your memory.”

Thumb deigned to look down after a rebellious glare. Moving his lips slightly, he read the sentence to himself.

“I've got two questions for you. What does it have to do with the Mexican-American War? And who do you know in this whole wide world who doesn't know what your saying? You don't really need to say things that everybody knows. In Mexico, they speak Spanish. Mexico has different customs. Mexicans eat tacos. Mexican towns are colorful.
Ay que!
”

The boy looked up at him, with a flat puzzled expression.

“Now look at the second sentence you've got. It's not perfect, but it's where the essay really starts. I want you to take this first try home and rewrite it tonight. Throw out the first sentence. Start with the second. And this time I want you to include at least two dates, two names, and two battles. And I like your art, but you might want to leave it off since you're going to rewrite this over and over until you get it right. Okay?”

The boy frowned but folded the paper and put it into his pocket. “You liked the pictures?”

“I think you've got real talent, but even at art school you're going to have to know how to write.”

“Tomorrow, I gotta meet Beto for my GED study.”

“Okay, come Tuesday. Is that enough time for you?”

He thought about it but finally nodded and finished off his Pepsi. Jack Liffey asked about his family, but Thumb was still all too aware that the man sitting there was the
gabacho
whose daughter he'd shot. He answered in monosyllables.

“Okay, see you then.” Jack Liffey followed him out to the front yard where his bicycle was lashed to the ash tree with a fat chain that would have stopped the Queen Mary in its tracks. Thumb Estrada looked at the old VW Bug parked on the street.

“You got a kill switch in that, man?”

“Who would steal a 1962 Beetle?”

“Man, lots a guys want them vee-dubs, make sand bugs and shit. Even a
ruca
can hot-wire that thing.”

“What's a
ruca
?

“A girl. I get you a kill switch.” This was a good sign, Jack Liffey thought. Like a cat offering its kill at the back door, but then he felt a bit patronizing for the thought. Until he remembered that Thumb had shot his daughter.

“Thanks. I'll pay you to install it, if you can.”

“Course I can, man.”

“Carne asada
under the stars, good buddy” Levine said. He was stoking up a stone barbecue built into a rock extension of the deck, squirting on masses of lighter fuel in a perfect example of the fire-lighting technique Luisa's relatives had called Paleface Napalm. “Gourmet hog heaven, that's what we got.”

“Amens,” Terror Pennycooke finally said. “You i-sire some fine ganja?” He held another of those giant dirigible-shaped cigarettes out toward Luisa, who shook her head. One small hit of that stuff was more than enough. She turned her attention to the hilly coastal chaparral, different from the inland chaparral that she knew so well. It was lit now by discreet floodlights surrounding the house. Out away from the house, she had already seen a coyote, two jackrabbits, several snakes and lizards, a family of quail, and a young deer. Neither of the men had noticed any of the wildlife, so far as she knew.

The taller and wispier plants were bobbing oceanward in the irregular warm wind, and it was definitely a Santa Ana, warming the air and letting them stay outside after dark in shirtsleeves in the early winter. She was a little worried about sparks from the barbecue, since there was far too much dry brush near the patio, but the fire seemed to be well contained.

“Dat man deah is a saps,” Terror Pennycooke said softly, as he took a lingering hit on his joint. “No pay him no mind.”

“How come you're in L.A.?” Luisa asked. “It must be a long way from home.”

“Tings dred inna J now,” he said. “No money, no life. Ai man, I-an-I a-forward hier. Is a good lan' to prize de livin' god for a time. Some ob de Rastas say dis hier is Babylon, for true, just like Englun, but dey is no ting of slavery left hier if you stan' tall. Make any church you wan', prize you own god.”

“You're lucky your people still have a god,” she said. “My people's gods were all killed or something. A long time ago.”

“Haile Selasie, him live forever. Him say, love the fist open,” he said, and he rested his hand gently on her shoulder for a moment. “The people of color in de world got to be of one blackheart, you no seeit?”

“My people were slaves, too,” Luisa said proudly. “In Owens, they made them work on white farms and if they ran away to the mountains, they sent the sheriffs and the army to bring them back in chains. I was told the only real way they had to fight back was burning down barns in the middle of the night. That happened a lot.”

Terror Pennycooke chuckled. “Blood fire fe dem, dawta. De weapon ob de weak is dred. De likkle kitty sneak behind and bite you arse when you no seeit.”

“Who wants pork and who wants beef?” Levine called.

Terror Pennycooke's face took on a savage scorn. “Pork no be ital.
Dat ting!
Pigs is scavengers ob de land.”

“All the more for me, Ter. I put on a couple of yams for you, see how much I think of you.”

“Ah, cool runnings, man.”

“Can I try the yam?” Luisa asked.

He grinned and dangled an arm loosely across her shoulder. “You bonafide, dawta.”

“We're losing momentum, man. I can feel it. It's getting like the same old stuff we had in Games I. Mailbox baseball, guys jumping off roofs, guys eating snails and lizards—we'll never beat out the old one like that. We need some
ideas
—we gotta be
stone
outrageous.”