Little Dog Laughed (14 page)

Dave started to turn back to the Jaguar and the wheels of a car rattled the planks of the bridge, and he looked that way. A brown and white cruiser came across the bridge. Its roof held a silvery siren housing and a row of blinker lights white, red, amber. A buggy-whip antenna waved at the rear of the car. A gold star was painted on the front door, along with the words
County Sheriffs Dept
. A hand waved to him from the window on the driver’s side. Dave stood and waited until the car braked beside him, its bumper against his bumper. The driver had a square red middle-aged face and wore a flat-brimmed hat with four dents molded into the crown. He turned off the cruiser’s engine, pushed the door handle, swung the door open, and climbed out. A young man sat on the passenger side, wearing suntans like his partner’s, same sort of hat, badge, gun, sunglasses. He stared ahead, indifferent. The older man’s smile didn’t mean anything.

“Looks like you’re lost,” he said. “Away out of your bailiwick. I mean—we don’t get cars like that down here in redneck country.” His bloodshot blue eyes looked Dave up and down. “We don’t get people like you.” His gaze flickered away to the cluster of sad, gaily painted shacks. “Specially not out here. You’re the wrong color. And you weren’t born speaking Spanish. You want to explain your business here?”

Dave showed his license. “I’m on a case for Banner Life. The death of Adam Streeter. At the marina in Los Angeles, a few nights back. He was shot in the head at close range. He was a journalist, working on a story about Los Inocentes. I’m wondering if there was a connection between his death and that of a young man from Los Inocentes shot the same way down here that same night. You solved that case yet?”

“Nope.” The deputy watched Dave carefully, spoke carefully. “But that was a family fight. He was holed up with a man and wife from Los Inocentes—brother and sister-in-law, maybe. Nobody knew much about them. But they sure as hell got out of here fast when it happened. And we can’t locate them. Not so far. Probably never will. Probably home by now.”

“Who says it was a family fight?” Dave asked.

The man shrugged. “Educated guess. Nobody here knew any of them. Who else was there to fight with? It’s relatives do most of the killing in this world—not strangers.” Sweat darkened the sides of his starchily creased shirt. He took off his hat, mopped a bald head with a handkerchief, pushed the handkerchief back into his hip pocket. “Isn’t it farfetched to connect a murder up in L.A. to one way down here? Writing about Los Inocentes? Isn’t everybody, these days?”

“I think he drove down here to get information from the boy.” Dave got the book from the car, showed the deputy Streeter’s picture. “You didn’t see him in this vicinity? Low-slung black sports car?” Dave jerked his head at the telephone. “He had this phone number. He’d completed calls to it three times.”

“I never saw him.” The deputy passed the book back.

“There’s more.” The jacket of the book was wet from the deputy’s hand. “A witness I talked to saw troops in combat fatigues and berets late that night near the house of Streeter’s assistant. So, when a witness turns up who says troops of that description came to this place and shot this young man, Rafael, and dumped him in the canal, it—” Dave looked into the deputy’s red, dumbfounded face. “You didn’t hear about that? No one said anything to you about El Coronel’s men coming and executing that boy? Right here where we’re standing?”

“Oh, bullshit.” The deputy blustered, but he was faking. He looked sick. “That El Coronel stuff is a marijuana pipe dream. These are ignorant people, Mr. Bannerman, no schooling, primitive, childish. They tell stories like that to scare themselves.” He laughed. He stopped laughing. “How did you know his name? What was it—Rafael?”

“It was written beside this telephone number on Streeter’s scratch pad. This witness told a friend of mine that he was right here under this bridge, taking a bath, when El Coronel’s death squad brought the kid in a Cherokee, gagged and bound, shot him, and dumped him in the canal. He saw the whole thing.”

“Come on!” The youngster in the car showed some life at last. He scrambled out, and came around the car in long strides, scowling. “Why didn’t he tell me, then? I was here in this patrol car ten minutes after the thing happened, and nobody saw nothing. They was all inside, asleep, the way they told it. Who was this witness? Where do I find him?”

“Nineteen twenty-two City View, Boyle Heights,” Dave said. “He didn’t speak up because he hasn’t any green card. He was afraid you’d turn him over to Immigration and he’d be deported. But he had to tell somebody. He’d seen my friend down here, a television reporter, asking questions, and he took a Greyhound up to L.A. and contacted him. El Coronel and his hired guns are sure as hell real enough to him.”

The older deputy made a face. “Who is this witness?”

“This TV reporter that tall black kid?” asked the young deputy. “Channel Three, L.A.? He sure can get in the way of police investigation. Give a jig a little education, and right away he starts walking all over everybody.”

“Redneck country, did you say?” Dave asked the older man.

He swelled up. “Just give me this witness’s name.”

“He calls himself Porfirio,” Dave said.

“That old drunk?” The boy deputy laughed and wagged his head. “Shit—you believe him? His brain is pickled in Coors, man. Passes out in the street. We didn’t pick him up and take him to jail, the trucks would run over him.”

“You say he was taking a bath?” the older deputy asked. “Hell—Porfirio hasn’t taken a bath in ten years. Get downwind of him next time, you’ll see.” He turned for the car, plunked himself solidly inside, slammed the door. “You don’t want to believe everything you hear, Mr. Bannerman.” He started the car’s rattly engine. “Not when it’s Mexicans talking.” He scraped the gears. “And Porfirio does have a green card.” The deputy poked his head out the window and twisted it on its thick neck so he could pilot the car backward across the thumping planks of the bridge. “He must have the first one they ever printed. Porfirio?” He laughed as if it was the funniest thing he’d heard in a long time.

C
ITY VIEW WAS A
street of little frame houses along a low ridge. Dave hadn’t been in this part of L.A. for thirty years, maybe longer, and he was shocked. He remembered it as poor but neat. Jews had lived here then. A generation of Jewish kids had grown up on these look-alike streets with their pinched look-alike houses. He knew some of those kids—Abe Greenglass, his lawyer, was one. They’d prospered and were living out their old age in handsome west side apartments or ranch houses on broad lawns in Van Nuys and Sherman Oaks. They remembered poverty, or thought they did. They didn’t. Boyle Heights had gone from ghetto to barrio. Now there was poverty—not the kind anyone would romanticize from the comfort of wealthy suburbs. Real poverty.

The houses needed paint. Roofing had weathered through to the tar and the tar was faded gray by rain, sun, wind. Chimneys had lost bricks in earthquakes or from the simple shifting of the land under skimpy foundations. TV aerials had toppled. Broken windowpanes were mended with stained cardboard. Once grass had grown in the grudging front yards—now they were bare yellow hardpan. Old auto chassis on wheels stripped of tires gathered grime in short, steep driveways. Cars in not much better shape rusted at the curbs, their dusty windows glaring red in the sunset light. The porch of number nineteen twenty-two had pulled away some from the house and looked ready to slide downhill.

Dave stood for a moment at the foot of the cracked cement steps and looked along the street both ways. A pair of men, one squat, one tall, stood at a far corner. Cowboy boots, crimp-brimmed straw hats. But no Cherokee, Blazer, Bronco with black glass and a pintle mount on the roof was anywhere in sight. Dave climbed the steps to a cracked cement footpath, went up the footpath, and halted to test the wooden front porch steps gingerly with a foot. They hung at an odd angle, askew, like a stroke victim’s mouth, but they didn’t creak or wobble, and he climbed them. The gap between the front wall of the house and the porch where it had pulled away and showed rusty spikes was maybe nine inches, maybe a foot. He reached across and used knuckles on the frame of a torn screen door. The solid door inside it stood open. Radio or television talk came out. In Spanish. The door was loose, and gave a satisfying rattle. He was heard.

A woman came, small, her brown skin webbed with wrinkles, hair pulled tightly back and knotted, eyes black as basalt. She studied him, head turned a little aside, distrustful. He told her who he was, lying again about Banner Life, and said in Spanish that it was urgent that he talk to Porfirio. The young black to whom Porfirio had spoken about events in San Feliz was a mutual friend. The woman narrowed her eyes and said nothing. Dave said, “It is now known in San Feliz that Porfirio told the young black man the facts about an evil thing that happened there the other night.”

“There is no one of that name here,” the woman said, and shook her head, her mouth a firm line of denial. But something made her look over her shoulder. There was no light in the house behind her, but Dave wondered if he didn’t see someone there, a boy or a small man, framed in a doorway. The woman began to swing the front door closed. “You have made a mistake. You have come to the wrong house.”

Dave said loudly, “He could be in grave danger. I gave this address to the San Feliz sheriff. I think he may have warned El Coronel. His death squad could come here at any moment to kill Porfirio.”

“Why?” Porfirio said this. He thrust the woman aside. The door swung back and banged a wall. He pushed the screen door open and glared with those strange pale blue eyes at Dave. His clothes were ragged, his gray hair uncombed, white stubble on his chin. “Why did you tell them this address?”

“On the chance that they would contact El Coronel—and they did make an urgent telephone call from Ed’s Oasis only a few minutes after I talked to them. If El Coronel’s death squad killed young Rafael, I believe they will come here.”

“You made me bait in a trap,” Porfirio said. He looked sick. “I should never have told. I knew that. But honor would not let me keep silent.” He grabbed Dave’s sleeve with hands that trembled. “And now I will die.” His breath reeked of beer. Tears leaked down the dirty furrows of his face. “How could you do such a thing to me? Have I ever harmed you? We are strangers.”

“Get your clothes,” Dave said. “I will take you away from here. If they come, they will not find you. All I need is to know who they are for myself.” He turned the bony little man and gave him a light push. “Quickly, now. Waste no time.” The woman stood back watching, face impassive, lumpy body tense, hands clenched. Dave stepped into the house. It smelled of supper cooking—chilis, onions, pinto beans. Fine, dark, rich smells. His mouth watered. He hadn’t eaten all day. He took the woman’s hand, folded a fifty-dollar bill into it, and said, “I will send Porfirio away and come back. Should these gringos come, tell them you expect Porfirio at any moment. Keep them waiting until I return.”

She looked at the bill, at the street, and gave him a tight, frightened nod. “But you must return,
señor
. If you do not return, they will kill me for lying to them. That is the way of death squads.”

“I’ll be back.” Dave read his watch. The hour alarmed him. “Porfirio,” he shouted into the darkness of the house. “Stop wasting time. We must get out of here.”

The little man appeared carrying a cardboard carton.

When they walked into the coldly lighted, brick-walled Trailways station at eighteen past six, a voice from loudspeakers was caroming around, scrambling the names of towns the next bus out would stop at. This was the final boarding call. The side doors stood open, and a few stragglers were lined up there, weary-looking women, mostly, Latinas, Asians, poor whites with babies, toddlers, bundles. While Dave waited at the counter for a brisk young black woman to fix up Porfirio’s ticket, he looked around for a squat man and a tall man in straw hats and cowboy boots. No sign of them. He urged Porfirio across the cigarette-stubbed floor and out into the chugging rumble of the waiting bus. The little man stood as if stunned at the foot of the bus steps until the glum young driver pulled from his hand the ticket Dave had put there. Dave helped Porfirio up into the bus, wanting a look at the other passengers. But the aisle was too busy. He handed Porfirio his carton of clothes, and tucked money into the pocket of his sweaty red-cotton-plaid shirt.

“Guadalupe, right? Your sister’s house. Rosa Ramirez, number seven-oh-two Arenoso? Good. Now, stay there, Porfirio. Don’t see anyone. People talk, and talk travels. Don’t show your face until you hear from me that it’s safe.”

Porfirio nodded dumbly. Had he heard?

“Can you put it on a postcard?” the driver said to Dave.

“Will it ever be safe?” Porfirio said.

“When El Coronel is in jail,” Dave said.

“
Sí
.” Porfirio laughed bleakly. “Tomorrow, yes?”

“Come on, dad, move it,” the driver told Dave.

Dave moved it. He waited, leaning against the wall, smoking, eyes searching the dark tinted windows of the bus, wondering who would be traveling with Porfirio. Dave stayed until the luggage was stored in the compartments under the bus and the doors were slammed down, until the driver climbed up and settled himself at the wheel, the passenger doors wheezed shut, the brakes of the bus hissed on being released, and the bus moved with a roar and gusts of smoky exhaust toward the street. Dave made out Porfirio’s face at the window. The odd blue eyes watched him, full of dread and resignation.

“He will be all right,” Dave told the woman. They sat at a kitchen table where accumulated bottles of hot sauce, jars and cans of jalapeños, containers of spices, bunches of onions, garlic, dried peppers left just enough room for two to put plates and eat. “If you do not tell them where he has gone, and I do not tell them, they will not find him.”

“This sister of his”—the woman cautiously peeled cornhusks from around a fat tamale she had made herself—“is my sister also. She has a knife blade for a tongue. She has no use for those who drink. She is one of these born-again Christians. She will make life miserable for him.”