On the Nickel (5 page)

‘Wow, I really hit a nerve.'

‘Sorry. I'm not really going off on you, Maevie. What would you do if your doc told you you had only six minutes to live?'

‘Did
yours
?' She sat up straight.

‘No no no. Death is just present to me these days,' he said. ‘I mean, think about six minutes.'

‘Well, I know about six
months
,' Maeve said, getting angry and self-righteous. ‘I met a boy with active AIDS and Carposi's, and the drugs aren't working, and that's what they say he's got –
maybe
six months. To be a friend, I go see him when I can and try to help him through it. He's like a kicked puppy, and all these jerks keep telling him there's something comforting not far off. I'm trying to learn what hospice people know so I can help the comfort along. Be good for me, too, I'm sure.'

‘Well, bless you, hon. That's better than I did when my nephew kicked last month. I couldn't face it. Let's not talk about that. It's well past the
Dia de Los Muertos.
What is it you want for Jack? You wouldn't be here otherwise.'

‘Don't be mean, Art,' Maeve said.

‘Or not. What's worse in life, the stuff you done, or the stuff that ain't done?'

‘I can't help you, Art. Really. Do you know Dad's friend Mike Lewis?'

He settled back, apparently giving up the idea of getting any wisdom out of her. ‘I've heard of him. The writer.'

‘His son Conor is a runaway, maybe up here from San Diego. He's into rock music, so I thought Hollywood.'

‘Smart guess.'

‘Don't be sarcastic. Here's copies of all I know about Conor. I want to keep the case warm for Dad, if you could find out anything at all.'

‘I can't remember if I owe Jack one or vice-versa – but it would be a little lame, me claiming overdues on him right now, wouldn't it? I'll look into it for you. And, Maeve, I'm sorry if I've been rough-and-ready.' He sighed. ‘I had a bad week. One of these days I'll get me into a booze-haze and nobody will be able to reach me.'

Maeve stood up and took his hand again. ‘Dad always speaks great of you.'

He shook his head. ‘Your papi is a real
mensch.
And, yeah, I know what that word means.'

‘Y
ou ever remember your dreams, Rice?' McCall asked. Thibodeaux cranked his neck around to stare at his partner across the tall buckets and the padded console of the big black RAM-3500 as if McCall were some nutcase in the funny farm.

‘What the fuck for?'

‘So you can get a look at what's inside you, man. Just last night I was back in my home town in Carey, Ohio, but I was lost in a neighborhood with golden domes and fancy monuments much more interesting than they ever was in that one-Edsel town. All there is is a pilgrimage place for mackerel-snappers, but it's just a big ugly church with a lot of crutches in the basement. In my dream, the town was full of stuff like Baghdad – minarets and shit. I guess it's hard to get past Eye-raq.'

‘Fuck Iraq.'

‘Well, yeah, sure. But you went there for Blackwood, and you had real hotel rooms and good food with all the knobs on.'

‘At least I didn't have to do no jumping jacks in the morning and salute no assholes.'

‘You kill anybody?'

He glared again. ‘That's how you know you're all grown-up, guy. Second gas-o-line convoy I went out on, I lit up a old Buick full of pop in his man-jammies and mommie and the kiddies in back. They got too close to our tailend truck so I cook off the M-60 and put a death blossom in that ol' Buick, and they're all swerving into a hooch. We couldn't stop but they could of been hajis, easy.'

‘Course.'

‘You know, shit. It was so boring over there, mostly I slept, except when I had to ride shotgun on the convoys or cure cancer.'

McCall laughed. ‘I preferred Fort Living Room and Camp Couch. It wasn't really jumping jacks for us, not after basic. We saw some shit too, all of it messed up bad. Here's the Fortnum. What a fuckin' dump.'

The place was brick, the side walls scarred regularly between the floors by earthquake plates, which were common enough in old downtown. It was seven stories tall and obviously on the downswing of its life story. The front door was chickenwire glass in a wood frame, and one big lobby window in front had been covered by plywood that was starting to delaminate. Red spray paint on the plywood window pretty much announced it as completely outside the system – neither a mission-type shelter nor an SRO – just a true flophouse:

‘Luckily we both got all kinds of good sense, Rice. Let's gear up and move out.'

‘I want to be the hard guy.'

McCall could see him fingering the knife in his pocket.

‘You
are
the hard guy, shitbag. But keep it dialed down.'

Maeve had found a disturbing international postcard in the basket with her mail that morning, from an old boyfriend – in fact, from Beto, the next-door neighbor who'd been hiding out in Mexico ever since he'd attracted her like a butterfly-to-a-flame, had her pounded into his gang and then got her pregnant. Gloria had half hidden the card inside a PennySaver, as if unable to overcome her scruples about ditching it completely, but obviously hoping Maeve would miss it.

She picked it up gingerly. At first Maeve had thought Beto would mean nothing to her at all, but in fact his clumsy card had troubled her deeply. I'll BE BACK SOON had been written in painstaking child's capitals (he was almost thirty). QUERIDA. WELL SEE IF OUR EYES ARE OPEN WHEN YOUR 18. ¿STIL LOVE ME? B.

She'd thrust it immediately into the wet garbage. It didn't bear thinking about. Beto didn't even know about her pregnancy and the abortion. Enough of that. His whole universe had been fading out of her life for some time, but apparently not fast enough.

Maeve gassed up at an ARCO and headed for Hollywood on the off chance that she might recognize Conor Lewis' face amongst the scores of sad-sack runaways and rock wannabes who hung out at the fairly predictable places. Plummer Park, the Guitar Center, Gower Gulch – which was now a mildly slummy mini-mall with a cowboy theme, but back in the day, the day of the silents according to her dad, a place where hundreds of real cowboys from Wyoming and Texas had hung out in spectacular desperation, trying for jobs as extras and stunt men. The gulch had a Starbucks now, a sushi bar and a doughnut shop, and was often wall-to-wall with freaks, as was the supermarket two miles west at Sunset and Fuller that everybody called the Rock'n'Roll Ralphs, where the street kids hung out and shoplifted twenty-four hours a day, which would be her next stop.

The drive to Hollywood was a lot different than she was used to, starting out now in East L.A. instead of her mom's place in Redondo in the south. She stayed on the road that was named Cesar Chavez Avenue at the east end, formerly Brooklyn Avenue, but became Sunset Boulevard once it passed the Harbor Freeway. She seemed to have inherited her dad's luck with oddities as the first thing she saw at the Soto Street intersection, still on Chavez, was a tall nude man in the middle of the intersection clasping a wooden lance to challenge cars to a joust, first north–south, then wheeling around as the lights changed to east–west. His other lance was pretty flaccid, and his eyes looked droopy, too. Meth tweaker, she guessed, or angel dust. So sad – the cops were obviously on their way.
OK, Dad, I'll remember this one for you. A peewee league Don Quixote.

Sunset Boulevard passed in sequence through precincts of China, Central America, Korea, Thailand and possibly a bit of Armenia, though she didn't know for certain that the signs on several shops in a row – with letters looking like rows of humpy chairs – were in the Armenian alphabet or the Thai.

Somewhere near here, up on Hollywood Boulevard, there was a small Thai eatery that her dad used to bring her to, and the cheerful owner had always greeted them with a big toothy grin and an offer of some appetizer or dish for free, returning some old favor because of something her dad had done for him. She couldn't even remember why he had stopped bringing her – maybe the place had gone out of business. So much about her dad was starting to seem lost, or tragic, or just enfeebled. Even without his new problems (such a euphemism!), he was beginning to have an old-man way about him, the way he woke up so stiff and full of mucous, and the way he sat forward attentively to people he might once have scorned, with his hands on his knees. Most of her friends had parents in their forties, still pretty vigorous, but hers had started late.

She'd always thought she and her dad had a bond that was stronger than other fathers and daughters, something that would endure forever, but most of it resided a beat or two back in her memory now, and she wondered, very much against her will, if she was drifting away from him and would eventually end up forsaking his comforts, despite all his shrewdness and kindness and compassion. What an awful thought – an absolutely insupportable thought, she decided. She focused hard on her drive down Sunset to keep from bursting into tears.
OK,
she told herself,
some of this emotion is from that damn Beto postcard, sneaking up on me. Get it together, girl.

She pulled to the curb on a red zone on Sunset and killed the engine to spy on Gower Gulch. A girl with green hair, wearing a blanket like a cape that kept flapping open to reveal that she wore no clothes at all, was striding along in the wake of a basketball-tall hippie in fringed buckskin. They didn't speak a word to each other as they crossed Sunset right in front of her and headed for the Starbucks in the Gulch, like fur-trader and squaw. If you could speak of a bright-green-haired squaw. A handful of other kids sat around on low walls, accepting and then discarding leaflets that were being distributed dutifully by a wino with a heavy canvas bag over his neck. Nothing here, she thought after a careful examination.

The Rock'n'Roll Ralphs a little farther along drew her inside, but was little better, with only a handful of what might be runaways who were watched over by eagle-eyed security men. Then down to Pink's, the hotdog place on La Brea, then the kid-shelters on Vine, the McDonald's and Jack in the Boxes in the area, the warren of streets above Yucca that led up Ivar Hill to a nest of fleabag apartments. Few kids were out and about. It had been the dumbest of ideas, she chided herself, to come here in the light of day. She should have known. Most of the town's freaks and dopers and Goths vanished like roaches into the baseboards by the light of day, awaiting the sulky urban night to prowl.

Before she could stop him, a leafletter had tucked some wordy flyer under her wiper.

FREE DESPAIR TEST.

Wow, just what she needed.

Beyond Despair is human growth,
she read through the windshield. Beyond bad pain maybe, she thought, but not despair. The only thing she'd ever found beyond despair was more despair.

All streams of life flow onward side by side until a time comes when one of the wise and loving ones who have chosen to stay behind to help others crosses into your immediate zone to help guide your evolution on to a higher plane.

Oh, yeah, she knew these folks: the Theodelphian Elect, who had bought a huge old hospital in the middle of Hollywood and painted it yellow and attracted lost kids from all over the country with the promise of solving all the problems of adolescence and loneliness and then some, with a little abracadabra. But she didn't think any of this was Conor's kind of vulnerability.

Remarkable that such a highly evolved elect would choose homeless alcoholics as their paid apostles. She wondered if the Theodelphians paid in small bottles of Thunderbird or Night Train.

Answer Honestly. (You only have your soul to lose.)

1. Do I feel empty and lost sometimes? Yes. Never. (Circle.)

She opened the door enough to reach around and grab the quiz off her windshield, and then she violated her principles by crumpling it and littering the gutter with it. She couldn't get the loathe-some thing away from herself far enough and fast enough.

There wasn't anyone at the desk. The albino was probably dozing in back, as long as you didn't ring the little desk-bell to disturb his sleep, or maybe he'd fled after seeing Rice's switchblade. The elevator had an
Out of Order
sign, starving out anyone who couldn't hobble down the staircase to the little store up the road.
We're going to save them the trouble of all that,
McCall thought.

They went up the urinacious and unlit stairwell, Rice making a slight face. McCall knew there were only three tenants left to worry about now, all old-timers Vartabedian had inherited when he'd bought the Fortnum, the only three who clung to long-term leases as if the hotel were somewhere over in Santa Monica with a nice view of the ocean, or maybe about to rebound from years of skunk-time. The last three could probably be chased out in a week, but the old farts had banded together and talked to the Joe-goody Tim Voorhis about a pro bono suit – a high-profile lefty lawyer who loved getting his picture in the paper. That had to be discouraged toot-sweet.

Door 322 looked like it had been painted every week for years to cover the graffiti most of the others displayed. McCall gestured and Thibodeaux hammered his fist on the wood, as if trying to squash a bug.

‘Look alive, Greengelb! Talk to us.'

Eventually the door came open two inches on a new chain that looked like it would hold the
Queen Mary.

‘You can tell Vartabedian to fuck his own ass,' the short man said.

‘That's not very nice, sir.'

‘And fix the elevator or we'll have the city on him.'

‘Mr Vartabedian wants to pay you far more than it's worth to move into a nicer place out on the Westside,' McCall said reasonably. ‘We'll find you a big comfortable apartment. I swear it'll be near a deli and a synagogue.'

‘What do you know from delis,
putz
? Mr Moses can go take a flying leap into his tax deductions.'

‘You're a genius, man,' McCall said. ‘Don't you know the really big guys always win? I mean,
always.
Why don't you let him buy you out while you still got the first-class offers? You get twice what the city requires.'

‘What happens meantime, with me and my friends? Mysterious fires? Stairs collapse? Serial killers in the lobby?'

‘Sudden death is always a bitty inch away, Hebe,' Thibodeaux put in.

‘Ahh! I heard that! I will go on with my arrangements in the law, and you can go on with your arrangement with Mr Strongarm here. We'll see who got the moxie.'

‘Do you remember your dreams?' McCall asked mildly.

‘I want you to know this is the United States of America, under law.'

He was still in a good mood. ‘Dreams interest me, Mr Greengelb. Especially the bad ones we all have. The way people fight off their coward self with some kind of show-off stuff. They shout into the darkness. They still try to run when they're stuck in the glue.'

‘Go away. Enough of the
mishigas.
'

‘Then I can't help you a bit with your dreams, friend.'

‘Contact Tim Voorhis,
gonif
.'

‘He's just another goat-fucking lawyer, man. V. got him in the bag, too.'

The door slammed and Thibodeaux looked at McCall as if for permission to pound again or break it down.

‘He's doomed and he knows it. Let's hunt up that albino, see if he's run off yet.'

It was only an eight-block jaunt to the park but the nuisance of oddity had found Jack Liffey nevertheless, as he stared out the side window of the rented van, strapped this way and that against sudden momentums. Gloria, at the wheel, had undoubtedly missed it entirely and he had no way to call her attention to it, in any case.

A woman wearing only a white bra and panties and an old flying-nun nurse cap carried a gigantic mock-up of a syringe under her arm and stepped quickly from street tree to tree (mostly stunted Chinese elms) pretending to inject them with the blunt needle, then giving each tree a genuine pat of condolence.