Terminal Island (14 page)

“Did it follow him after the war?”

“Oh, yes. During and after. Very much. He was taken away from us and immediately moved to a ‘troublemaker' camp called Tule Lake, way up near the Oregon border. He carried what he did deep inside. All his friends ended up signing the oath, and most of them went off to the war in Italy and became heroes. I'm sure you know about the all-Nisei unit, the 442nd.”

“Yes, ma'am. Did these friends give him problems after the war?”

“It was more himself. I think it was like a sore that wouldn't go away. He kept bringing it up. It cost him several jobs. One in the canneries, then working with a farm co-op growing garbanzo beans up in the hills. He left a print shop and a gas station, he was fired from a nursery. He'd just settle in somewhere, and then he'd pick a fight with one of the war veterans, or one day he'd just start shouting at nothing and walk away from his tools, so I'm told. He was a changed man, I know that. He had been easygoing, but now he was bitter. Eventually he focused all his bitterness on our missing belongings from before the war, even though it wasn't much. They didn't matter to me at all.”

“Tell me about that.”

“Where we lived was all fishermen and cannery workers. We were so isolated across the ferry, it was like a little Eden all our own. We had our own shops and grade schools, our own community center and celebrations and holidays. We'd cross over to San Pedro for big things like to buy a fridge or the latest dresses, and the older kids took the ferry to school.”

There was a burst of yelling in Japanese from a back room. Mrs. Ozaki smiled ruefully. “She's telling you that the new Japanese viceroys of America will be lenient with you if you don't hurt me.”

“Thanks,” Steelyard said. “I'll tell the guys on the Bataan death march.”

Jack Liffey thought the remark was uncalled for, and it didn't seem to be encouraging Mrs. Ozaki any, but he knew to keep his mouth shut.

“Yes, there were atrocities in the war. We can mention Hiroshima, too. I was an American citizen, and I lived three and a half years behind barbed wire in a wood building that could never keep out the terrible dust storms that rose off that dry lake. However, the country has apologized sincerely.”

“I'm sorry, ma'am,” Steelyard offered. “You people deserved better here, whatever happened overseas.”

Their hostess was quiet now for a while, and Ken Steelyard seemed to realize his best stratagem was just to keep his own mouth shut for a while. Jack Liffey was still having trouble connecting this big, short-tempered, outspoken man with the troubled kid with the golf ball in a ghost handkerchief. But there were probably an infinite number of ways of growing up, and they were almost all plausible. The tiny ancient woman now wailed a bit more from deep in the house, but there was no offer to translate this time.

“My husband never owned a boat himself, but he was second mate on a very nice tuna boat and went out all the time. The owner, Mr. Nishimine, was a fair man and always gave Frank a fair share of the catch. Poor Mr. Nishimine was picked up the first day. He turned the boat straight back toward the dock on December seventh, when he heard the news on the radio, and the police were waiting to take him off to prison with all the boatowners. They assumed they were spies. His family had to sell the boat to an Italian family for almost nothing. We were all given two days to clear off of Terminal Island.

“Peddlers came around immediately with their trucks, offering us a dollar for a table, two dollars for a sofa. Most people just sold all their stuff for what they could get, but Frank said he wasn't going to be cheated like that. He had some savings. We took our furniture and dishes and some lovely dolls that his mother had collected and put them in San Pedro Moving and Storage up near Beacon Street.”

“Is that the place that's Bekins now?”

“That's it. Frank paid for six months in advance. It was hard to know how long the war would last. His mom insisted America would come to its senses at any moment and beg for peace. Frank's dad just went very quiet and sad and later he died in Manzanar, in fact, just a few weeks before he would have been released. You know, all through our internment, Frank had made arrangements somehow to make the monthly payments to the storage company.”

“When he got out of the camp after the war, was he bitter?”

“He was different. It took a while for him to find us because after he voted no, he was transferred. He became very self-conscious after the war. He kept focusing on little things, things that seemed to me side issues. He kept thinking other Nisei were staring at him and hating him. He lost jobs, as I said. Our possessions had all disappeared from the storage company and he made a big fuss about that, though I told him I didn't care a bit. Things kept eating at him. It seemed to me most of it was just excuses to be angry, and it was probably this anger that killed him eventually. A blood vessel in his brain broke.”

“I'm sorry. Did you two have any children?”

“A girl who's back East teaching at Rutgers. Joy—she was the older and she teaches social history and has her own lovely family now with a Chinese man. And Joe. Joe—somehow he always went against his father's wishes. I guess it's what boys do. Anyway, American boys do. Frank never really said anything directly, but he certainly disapproved when Joe enlisted for Vietnam.”

“Which service?” Jack Liffey interjected, though Ken Steelyard turned his head fractionally and frowned hard at him.

“He went into the army and eventually the Green Berets. The Special Forces. He had a hard time, too, after the war—they called it post-traumatic stress—but not as hard as his father.”

“What does Joe do now?” Steelyard asked.

“He's a contractor, a builder. I think it's his way of making up for breaking a lot of things in Vietnam. He's turned out to be a very good man, very quiet, but he's already in his fifties and I just wish he'd hurry and get married.” She smiled lightly. “All Japanese mothers wish that.”

“Does he have a woman friend?” Jack Liffey asked.

Steelyard turned and glared at him, then rubbed his nose hard. It took a moment for Jack Liffey to remember his orders.

“I have to check something in the car,” Jack Liffey apologized and let himself out into the cool afternoon.

Outside, he realized he couldn't wait in the car because it was locked and he didn't have the keys. He drifted to a rail fence at the side of the driveway and sat on the top rail. To the east, he could see down into the outer harbor, where a handful of smaller container ships waited for a berth in the gray, dead water. A sleek, many-windowed sightseeing boat threaded between them, and he almost fancied he could hear the bullhorn voice pointing out the sights.

Much closer to home, he let his eyes run along the driveway at his feet, an old-style drive of two strips of concrete set at the width of a car axle. It led to a detached garage in back that appeared to have been converted into a bungalow. The big sliding wood door was still there, but a curtained window had been let into it, making the door look permanently sealed. There was a well-worn path from a gate at the alley leading to a side door of the garage, where a plastic bag of trash waited for pickup.

He got up and wandered slowly back to the curtained windows of the garage, but he couldn't see in and learned nothing more. He guessed it could be the grandmother's, but something told him it wasn't. There was a
kanji
written tidily on the door—he had no idea what it meant—and a small clay pot beside the single step with a wilted brown stalk. For some reason the little bungalow gave him a chill; it felt like the dead still center of the world. Just being close to it made his cheeks seem to vibrate slightly with foreboding.

He figured he wouldn't tell Steelyard about the bungalow if he didn't notice it himself.

They were sitting on a bench above the concrete banks of the LA River, snacking on
pupusas
—round Central American bread stuffed with cheese and meat—from a tiny storefront restaurant nearby. Gloria Ramirez insisted they slather a spicy coleslaw over their snacks and wash them down with three more exotic soft drinks, this time grapefruit, mandarin, and tamarind.

“This is great,” Maeve said. “I've seen signs for
pupusas
for years, even down in Redondo near where my mom lives, but I've never tried one.”

“I have to admit a lot of Latino food beats the pants off my culinary legacy,” the policewoman said. “You can eat just so much fry bread and jerked venison. You know where we are now?”

The girls shook their heads. They had just had the cook's tour through much of East LA, motoring in the purple RAV-4 past Belmont High, where Gloria told them she had had her first kiss. She was too young to have direct memories of what had been called the Blowouts of 1968, when the students walked out of Belmont and several other Latino schools and took to the streets to protest the inferior education they felt they were getting.

She also showed them where the antiwar moratorium had marched down Whittier Boulevard in 1970 and where sheriff's deputies had killed Ruben Salazar, a
Los Angeles Times
reporter, and two kids. There was a small park there now, called Salazar Park. And down on Olympic they'd walked through Estrada Courts, an endless barracks of two-story public housing, with gigantic dazzling murals on the ends of all the buildings. Maeve especially remembered Che Guevara pointing a finger straight at her and announcing, “We are NOT a minority!!”

Maeve glanced around. Other than a rather nice antique-looking bridge with old-style streetlights crossing the river, it was not a very inspiring place to sit. A trickle of water ran down the middle of the riverbed, feeding some clumpy weeds that had broken through the concrete. There were industrial buildings on the far bank and a bit of puffy-lettered Spanish graffiti here and there.

“Right about here was Yang-na. An old boyfriend brought me here once. That's the Indian village that the first Spanish expedition ran into in 1769. The day the Spaniards entered the village they named the place El Rio de Nuestra Señora de Los Angeles de Porciúnculá.” She smiled, as if at a private thought. “The omens were working overtime. The day the Spaniards arrived, they were greeted by a big earthquake. It was LA, after all. Father Crespi, who was the scribe of the expedition, said it lasted about half as long as an ‘Ave Maria.' His own primitive Richter scale.”

Maeve smiled back. “You sound just like my dad. What happened to the boyfriend?”

She shrugged. “Remember I told you I had a gay boyfriend?” Both girls nodded, trying to encourage her. “He teaches history at Occidental now. When we were still dating, we used to spend every weekend on little expeditions to the historic spots he found. He brought along history books and guidebooks and old maps while I dragged along my criminology texts, which he sneered at.”

For an instant, Maeve tried to imagine fixing Gloria up with her father. She had no faith that Rebecca Plumkill was going to last. But her dad was hard to figure out that way. It was hard to know what attracted men in general, and he'd had some of the strangest girlfriends imaginable. It couldn't be just the sex. There were simply things about men's tastes you'd never figure out.

Ornetta slurped at her mandarino. “Have you got any more Indian stories?”

Two dogs played happily in the river bottom, nipping at one another and dancing around.

Ornetta finally goaded her into recounting a tale one of her aunts had told her late at night in a house trailer in one of the Paiute minireservations in the Owens Valley. It was a tale about cannibal giants in armor that the warriors could not defeat. The women of the tribe finally beat them by catching them in a rock-slide. “You can still see the red stain beside the highway where the armor rusted away,” Gloria concluded. “That's it, kids. There's no moral.”

“Well, maybe—You shouldn't eat people,” Maeve suggested.

“Women know,” Ornetta countered authoritatively. “That's the moral. You got you a cannibal, go ask the women what to do.”

Gloria Ramirez laughed. The policewoman glanced upward, as if noticing the sinking of the sun, and took a cell phone out of her shirt pocket and fiddled with it. It rang instantly, and her face went stiff as she listened. “Sorry, Cap. The battery must have died. I just put a new one in.” She winked at the girls and listened for a while, her manner going stonier and stonier.

She rang off and looked at them. “Good thing we were well out of the way today. I'm to take you back to your grandfather's, and both of you stay there for now.” She glanced at Maeve. “Your father's girlfriend has had some trouble. She's not hurt, but they want you to stay away from her house.”

Dec 20 Late

I know they are coming now. I must accept this the way a true warrior greets “it is now.”

Twelve

Where Maeve Comes From

“I guess it's a Commie plot,” Steelyard said drily.

Despite all the red, nobody seemed to think this was funny.

“Or maybe they thought it was a fire station.”

The two detectives from Hollywood Division had already made it clear they were not particularly happy to hand over a case in their area to Steelyard, but the chunky cop in the rumpled brown suit finally took Steelyard aside to fill him in. Jack Liffey was made to wait at the front door of Rebecca Plumkill's bungalow beyond a strip of yellow crime scene tape, where he could still see just about all he needed to see.

Someone had set up an air compressor in the middle of the living room and spray-painted everything, in all directions, a clanging fire engine red. Everything. The rough plastered walls themselves, the oak wainscoting below, the beamed ceiling, the pure wool Berber carpet and the big Oriental rug atop it, her Kandinsky and Goya, her family portraits, other framed red squares that he could no longer identify, the Stickley mission furniture, including the glove-soft leather, a low table full of coffee table books, and a little Giacometti bronze figure on a pedestal. The intruder had even thought to open all the doors of the sideboard so he could paint entire sets of china and crystal, too, as well as the mirror backing.

It was all quite strange and horrifying. The room was so thoroughly evened out into a single color that it suggested one of those museum exhibits meant to focus your attention on the one uncolored item that it was all about. Unfortunately, the only nonred object to be seen was the abandoned air compressor in dull silver, along with a dozen open cans of Sherwin-Williams paint labeled “Red of Reds.”

At the moment the only other things in the room not painted red were the police themselves and a runner of brown paper to the door that they had obviously ordered put down. And, of course, the obligatory playing card, the ten of Kitties this time, which was pinned with a Buck knife to what had been a particularly nice Frank Lloyd Wright redwood and stained glass floor lamp near the door. Jack Liffey leaned in to stare at the card, trying to read the message, but then a commotion approached him along the paper runner and he had to pull back.

The local detectives grunted and snarled as they ducked the tape and bustled past him on their way out, none too ready to cede even an inch to anyone. Finally Steelyard wandered over.

“Your dog a sort of ugly little shepherd?”

“Half coyote, actually. He isn't painted red, is he?”

“No. He's drugged, out in the backyard. Your girlfriend is in the bedroom, pretty shook up.”

“She put a lot of money and time into fixing this place up,” Jack Liffey said.

“The bad news is it's not water-base paint. It's old-fashioned permanent enamel. God knows where he got it, it violates the air pollution laws these days. The Hollywood Division already checked on the compressor and it was stolen last night from Abbey Rents. We know there won't be any fingerprints.”

“What's the good news?”

“Nobody's hurt. You think this is your message number two?”

“You're the one said he hits you where it hurts most. Mind if I read it?”

Steelyard gave half a beckon, and Jack Liffey ducked in under the tape to read the tiny scrawl on the card:
Hast thou found me, O nemesis?

“Sounds like he's choosing you out. Is that biblical?”

“Who knows? At least he didn't go for Maeve.”

“Your daughter is safe with my partner right now.”

“Ken, let's assume for the moment it's a Japanese American with a grievance about the internment. No, let's go farther and assume it's Joe Ozaki. We know he's a contractor, so he can handle a paint compressor, and we know he had Special Forces training. So he's getting revenge for his poor, embittered father. But why me? Why a woman friend of mine?”

Steelyard shrugged with his eyebrows. “You took an interest in him. Maybe this just says, Back off. Or maybe it means, Grab your sword and come get me. This guy does not seem to mind sending indirect messages through family and friends. Remember, he started with Dan Petricich's son and then he sank Dan's boat, and if this makes any sense at all, it's got to be the granddad he really wanted to hurt. Though I found out today the old man still holds title to the boat. I wouldn't burn out a tube trying to figure this guy out, though. All that displaced anger might just be a sign of somebody who gets signals from the satellites if he doesn't wear his tinfoil hat.”

“I don't think so. I'd better talk to Becky.”

“I think you're learning that law enforcement is not much as a spectator sport.”

He walked down the short hall with trepidation. In the bedroom, she lay flat on her back with her eyes closed, her lips very thin and her fists clenched at her sides. Even catatonic with rage, she was lovely in the tight business suit with the jacket off and the ruffled blouse open one button too far. He closed the door softly. At least the bedroom wasn't painted red.

Jack Liffey sat gently on the mattress and lay his hand on her forearm and saw her eyes snap open, a little panicky, as if she might have been far off somewhere on an anger doze.

“Beck, I'm terribly sorry. If anything I did caused this. … I don't know what to say.”

She rolled her head a little to look him in the eyes, and he saw once again just how ice green her eyes were. “Jack.” She didn't reach out to hold him.

“I won't lie to you,” he said. “The playing card out there means this was the guy I've been looking for. He seems to try to wreck what people care about most.”

“You didn't have to take this case, did you?”

He shook his head. So it would be a question of blame, he thought.

“I think you'd better go away right now.”

He felt a great weight fall through him and hit bottom with a sickening impact.

“Could I help clean things up?”

“I don't think so, not right now. You live in a weird world, Jack. You're some kind of freelance crusader. … But I can't see you've got any belief system to go along with it.”

“I try to save lost kids. That's a kind of belief.”

“I know that. I just don't want to know it right now. And I'm not sure I want to be part of it.”

He nodded, the guilt orbiting around him like one of those relentless police helicopters. “I'll take Loco home for a while. We can talk later.”

“Thank you, Jack. I'd like you to do that.”

He kissed her forehead, aching to hold her, but she didn't respond, and he made no further attempt to touch her.

Out in the backyard, Loco was stirring a little where he lay, but still looked pretty woozy. When Jack Liffey held him, he almost seemed to perk up, but just for a moment. “We're going home, pal. Sorry you'll lose the running space.” It occurred to him that of all the victims, the dog might well be the only one able to identify his assailant, not by sight—since the guy always seemed to wear his full-body ninja jumpsuit—but by smell.

Jack Liffey had come straight here with Steelyard so had no transportation of his own. He had to wait in front with Loco while the policeman did his job in the house. At last the crime scene unit showed up in their panel truck. It was the same team he'd seen before. The Asian woman nodded to him in recognition as they lugged their equipment past him.

Ken Steelyard ducked out eventually, carrying his silver-backed notebook, like a hospital chart. Jack Liffey watched him walk away from the house with that slight, unconscious swagger all cops had. It was a walk that said, You might have to explain yourself to me someday, but I will never have to explain myself to you.

“I'll take you to your car.”

“Are they finding anything in there?”

He shook his head, and it didn't seem likely he was going to share any more information. “What was the card at my dad's house?”

“I can't remember. Here.” Steelyard handed him the metal notebook and he flipped it to a tidy page near the front. It was a hand-drawn grid:

“The nine seems to be outstanding.”

“Appears to be. There must be a reason he skipped a number.”

Jack Liffey bridled a bit at the ID
Liffey mistress.
But the entry
My layout, old half, leveled,
written by Steelyard about his own tragedy, seemed so utterly dispassionate that it took his breath away.

“Probably a first shot at someone new, since all the second shots seem to be in.”

“Another crony of Ante Petricich and your dad would be a pretty good guess,” Steelyard said. “Maybe some old pal who's heard what's going on and is too scared to call us.”

“You notice that what the guy writes on the second shots seems to be working out as a complete thought? Except for mine.”

“Let's not speculate too much, Jack. I wouldn't give him more credit for method than your ordinary psychopath. The next one might say, Tomorrow is the first day of the rest of your life.” He snatched his notebook back before Jack Liffey could befoul it any more with his eyes.

“I'd like to see Maeve, if you could drop me. She can take me back to my car. It's not much out of your way, just off the freeway at Gage.”

“I'm not running a taxi service.”

“As a friend.”

Ken Steelyard seemed about to say something, but subsided as he belted in and started the big car.

“We've got something else now,” Jack Liffey said.

“What's that?”

“A witness. He's not a bloodhound, but his nose is a lot better than ours.”

Steelyard's eyes flickered across to the groggy dog. “Right, right. When he wakes up, let's take him to see Joe Ozaki.” He nodded thoughtfully. “To make it stick we'll need something like a lineup, a smellup. I'll get a couple of Jap cops to volunteer.” He reached over and ruffled Loco's neck. “Of course, he might have been darted from long range and not smelled the perp coming. We didn't find any half-chewed T-bones.”

“Could it wait until tomorrow? He's out of it, and I've had enough excitement for one day.” Jack Liffey had been noticing how short of breath he was. Emotion exhausted him as thoroughly as exertion. It was still a month before the promised date to discuss reinflating the lung. He was experiencing the first throes of depression, too, no matter how hard he tried not to think of Rebecca's voice. Back to his own dismal condo.

“I think the address his mother gave us is just a letter drop, anyway,” Steelyard said. “I'll try to track him down through the building department, if he really is a contractor.”

“It looks like he can paint,” Jack Liffey said.

Just before Steelyard got on the Harbor Freeway, they saw a barefoot man on the embankment wearing a full deerskin tied over his shoulders, the antlers and head dangling behind like a hood. He was selling geraniums that appeared to be wrapped in something like opened condoms. He must have plucked the flowers from some nearby yard. The freeway access lights were on, and there was a long line of cars waiting to get on, but there did not seem to be any rush to buy the geraniums.

They were playing Parcheesi in the living room when Steelyard dropped him off without stopping. Maeve and Ornetta were partnered off against Bancroft Davis and the policewoman. Or maybe they were four separate players. He didn't know if you partnered up in Parcheesi or not. It had been a long time. Loco was still groggy, and Jack Liffey set him down gently in the backyard.

Gloria Ramirez took him aside and said she already had a pretty good idea of what had happened at Rebecca's from a cell call, but she hadn't told the girls. Jack Liffey took Maeve out onto the front porch, and they settled onto an old glider and swung lightly. Maeve could tell something was up.

“I hope this isn't about the birds and the bees, Dad.”

He smiled for a moment. She'd walked in on him once with Marlena in what used to be called a compromising position, and later she had joked with him about a whole health science class at her high school devoted to oral sex, presumably to let him know that she hadn't been shocked. But he could tell she had been.