Terminal Island (20 page)

“But you're already with someone.”

“Not exactly. That seems to have collapsed. And Maeve never liked her, anyway. ‘Too snobbish.' ” He smiled without meeting her eyes. He was afraid to look at her. “Maeve likes people who are down-to-earth. Like you.”

He reached for his wineglass, but she laid her palm over it. “Why don't you stop now, Jack.” It was ambiguous what she meant. He let go of the glass.

“I don't really need it, I don't really want it,” he said. “I think I want you.”

“If you're going to make love to me, I don't want it to be the wine.”

“Hey, what about you? You're half lit.” He eyed the bottle, and it was just about gone. “Maybe I'll figure you only like me when you've had a snootful.”

“Oh, let's stop this.” She unbuttoned the remaining buttons at the bottom of the vaguely Indian blouse. When it came open he was astonished to see that she wasn't wearing a brassiere. He wondered if she'd had implants. The brown nipples were like doorbells, and he wanted to ring them both.

“Bedroom,” he said. “But no handcuffs, Sergeant.”

“No, no handcuffs. If you're good.”

Ken Steelyard didn't bother bagging the knife and playing card, not yet. They had become so commonplace, and he already knew there'd be no prints. The card was the jack, the next one in the malicious sequence—assuming the nine would ever turn up—and it was stuck into a hatch-cover table that Dick Lammerlaw had painted with ultra-shiny epoxy. It fit right in with all the hand-me-down and beach-combed furniture that crowded the small apartment. The knife was one of the old man's own steak knives, as if the perp were running out of his own knives, or just growing less interested in being outrageous.

“Think back to the forties,” Steelyard suggested. “How old are you now?”

“Seventy-nine.”

“So you were in town then.”

Dick Lammerlaw had a clubfoot in one of those big black shoes you couldn't miss, so he'd obviously been exempt from the draft.

“Yeah, look, I heard about this business. There's some Jap on the rampage with old grievances.”

“It's December 7, 1941, Dick. Pearl Harbor day for everybody but the first George Bush. What were you up to?”

“I worked at San Pedro Moving and Storage. It's Bekins now, the one off Beacon Street. I was just an assistant, kept the records.”

“What a surprise.”

“We wasn't so responsible back then, I admit, but you can't touch me for what we done. Statue of limitations has ran out, you know.”

“It's ‘statute,' bright boy, and I think you've just had a rude message from somebody who doesn't recognize them. How many of the internees did you rip off?”

A large tabby cat hobbled into the room, spotted Steelyard, and made a wide circuit to get to the sofa where Lammerlaw sat. Something was wrong with the cat, and as it jumped up and settled, Steelyard finally saw what it was. There were six toes on each paw, so it looked like it was wearing catcher's mitts. Seeing the cat gave him a trifle more compassion for Lammerlaw, whose own deformity so far hadn't pushed any sympathy buttons.

“Most of them didn't have no money to store their stuff. They mostly sold their goods for peanuts to all them vultures that drove out there to the island in pickup trucks. Jews and dagos.”

“As opposed to the vultures who helped themselves to the storage. You took off two, three families? Or was it more?”

“Just two. And one never came back. You got to understand, things was different then. It was a big open warehouse, and we stacked things sky high in piles and put a name tag on each pile.”

“Frank Ozaki was the one who came back, right?”

He nodded.

“What did you get out of it?”

He looked around dubiously. “I don't even have none of it no more. There was a stuffed chair, but it give out years ago and went to Goodwill. A Chinesey table my wife took when she left me. There's a big cookpot I still got, one of those big blue enamel ones. It was too big for any meal for one guy and I got sick of it, so it's in the garage with a bunch of old tools and shit in it. He can have it back, all I care.”

“I think it's a little late for that, but you might try putting it out on the porch with a big note on it, ‘Sorry, better luck next war.' He just might not kill your cat.”

The man glanced down protectively at the tabby and let a hand drift to scratch its ears. “What do you mean?”

“He seems to go after the things people love the most. Assuming you care for this beast.”

“Six-pack. Sure. Him and me are brothers in diversity.” He bent and gathered the limp cat onto his lap.

Diversity, Steelyard thought. Dick Lammerlaw was not going to win any quiz shows. Steelyard questioned him a while longer, but he already knew the answers. Frank Ozaki had come for his possessions in 1945, after they'd released the last of the “no no” boys from Tule Lake up north. Sorry, was what he'd been told at San Pedro Storage. But he didn't just walk away. He came back at them for years with angry visits, demands, lawsuits real and threatened. He made the connection to all the layabouts from the American Legion and plagued the legion hall, too.

Lammerlaw hadn't been the clerk on duty the day Frank Ozaki signed the goods in, so he told him he didn't know a thing. Must have been this other guy—these ten other guys, all long gone by 1945. Patriots, guys who went off to the war, unlike some.

“You dumb bunny, you think Ozaki couldn't look in your window and see his own stuff in your living room?”

“What's he going to do? Some Jap? Nobody'd listen to him no matter what he did. Judges just sent him packing, there was no proof.”

“Well, his son isn't going away, either. He's declared another world war against you bright boys.”

Fear entered Lammerlaw's eyes, and he clutched the docile cat to his chest with both arms. “You got to protect me.”

“I don't know about you, but I'll do my best to protect the cat.”

He was spooned up against her brown nakedness in the rumpled bed, and he could tell by her breathing that she was awake.

“Glor.”

“Um-hmm.”

“You're not upset?”

“Let's not talk about it right now, Jack. Okay?”

“It was okay, wasn't it?”

She wriggled around to face him, and just feeling so much of her flopping against him started arousing him again.

“Men always think it's something about the sex. It was splendid, okay? You were very considerate. I have plenty of problems, apart from you, to occupy me.”

“I understand. If I can help with any of it, I want to.”

Her hand came out and rested softly against his cheek. “That's sweet of you, but I might just break your back with my problems. I just don't come easy. I'm a cop twenty-four hours a day. I'm an orphan. My plumbing is stripped out like an old house. One of these breasts, this one”—she pointed to the left one—“is completely rebuilt.
And
I'm an Indian, and I just plain don't have a clue how to be who I am.”

Dec 23

I fear he may not be a worthy enemy after all. This is regrettable. I wish I could wrench the great warriors of the 17th century back from wherever they have gone, Lord Katsushige or Samurai Doken or Kazuma, and test myself against one of them. I cannot imagine such lack of discipline: his first act after studying the
Hagakure
is to weaken himself with sex, and with a policewoman at that. He should know it is time to grit his teeth and prepare. I gave him fair warning. I only hope he still has hidden places within his heart that contain the right material. Otherwise I have chosen the wrong bird. And when a hawk has chosen his bird, he has no eyes for any other birds that flock around. He dives straight and true.

Seventeen

Innocence

As he brewed the coffee and put in the toast he could hear the shower running and eventually she came out wearing nothing but one of his dress shirts, a getup he'd always found profoundly sexy. Her hair was wrapped up in a frayed blue towel dug off the bottom of his pile.

“Maeve stocks us with frozen waffles, English muffins, Pop-Tarts, and a few other overprocessed breakfast foods, so I can do better than toast and coffee.”

“Uh-uh. Toast. Strong coffee with a little honey. That's it.”

“Your wish is my command.”

“Really? Go out and wash and wax my RAV-4.”

He chuckled. “If you'll stay in that shirt all day, I will.” He loved the way it rode peekaboo above her hips as she sat. He gave her a cup of coffee, and some honey in a little plastic bottle shaped like a bear.

“I've got to go in and help Ken this afternoon. I already feel guilty as sin being on half time.”

“I hope you don't feel guilty about this?”

“You mean sleeping with you? Not a chance.”

She stirred around the parts of the
Times
on the table, selecting the California section, which used to be called the Metro.

“It's always interesting to see which part someone goes for,” he said.

“Yeah, I realize most of the cop business is in here. But you'll never guess what I like it for.” She flipped it open, causing the shirt-tail to ride up even higher, and he had to busy himself with another cup of coffee to keep from getting aroused.

“Not the editorials?” he said dubiously.

“The letters. I love to read all those forlorn voices coming out of the ether—angry, pained, hurt voices. They're always going on passionately about things the rest of us forget or just take for granted. It's like all the dark corners of the city talking back.”

“Or like the old guy downtown broadcasting his warnings about flying saucers into an upside-down ketchup bottle.”

She shrugged. “You've got to respect the human voice.”

“How come you're a cop?” He sipped his coffee with appreciation. The darkest dark roast possible, like beans rescued from a factory fire, but not before the factory itself was a dead loss.

“How come anybody's anything? No, that deserves an answer. I was having a hard time when I was a teen, and it was a cop who dragged me out of it. It seemed to me—in theory, anyway—that cops were there to help. I know there's a lot the other way.”

He got another piece of toast and sat facing her.

“I'll bet you reach for the sports section first,” she challenged.

He laughed. “Say that again when you know me better.”

This was always one of the best parts, he thought. Getting to know someone new, unaware yet of all their foibles and tales, what they liked in life, what they liked in bed, all the sunny promise of a summer romance. On the other hand, it might be nice if he could settle on one person and not have to go through this periodically. But it wasn't like he hadn't tried.

“Mr. Emmett Rebkovsky of Venice wants us all to know that digital TV is going to be the savior of capitalism,” she said, summing up one letter.

He smiled. “A friend of mine says that capitalism is the exploitation of man by man, while socialism is just the opposite.”

The word caught her attention. “Heavens, are you a socialist, Jack?”

“I probably was once. Right after the war, when I was in Vietnam Vets against the War. Socialism hasn't had a very good track record, has it?”

“When I was researching my heritage I met some AIM guys at LA State. You know, the American Indian Movement. They said they were socialists, but they couldn't tell me what they meant.”

He shrugged. “I suppose they just want the world to be a bit fairer, you know? But I'd like to get there with a lot less of the disruption. Probably skip the killing altogether. Are you still working on your heritage?”

She set the paper down. “For a time I thought all I needed was pigtails and a lot of turquoise jewelry, but I came to see that there were holes in me where I didn't even know I had places.”

“You may not be able to get it all back,” he suggested, “especially if you never really had it to begin with. I'm supposed to be Irish, but I'll be damned if I'll play at it. A green derby and hanging out in bars, bragging and singing. The hell with that. We're all really mongrels, you know. It's our glory.”

She laid her hand on his on the table. “Yeah, alley dogs. Sniffing each other up and down.”

“Anytime.”

Ornetta hadn't been too sure about Maeve's proposed high-intensity project, described so breathlessly, but had come along in the end. After a string of insistent phone calls, they had picked up Maeve's grandfather and driven him to the Watts Towers in the morning, those strange and wonderful two-hundred-foot-tall artifacts of an era of outsider art, broken crockery stuck into concrete loops and buttresses like some mad daydream of a cathedral. In fact, they had been built between the twenties and the fifties by an Italian immigrant who had hardly spoken English, but they were deeply embedded in black LA now and had an African American art center alongside them, where the three of them had just walked through a show of two series of historical prints by the black artist Jacob Lawrence.

The first series—the human figures all colorful and bold, like construction paper cutouts—traced the migration of blacks out of the South, from dead-end sharecropping after slavery to industrial jobs in Chicago and Detroit. The other illustrated the life of the abolitionist John Brown.

Declan hadn't said much as they strolled along the prints, reading tags, but he'd been game to go along wherever Maeve insisted he go. Ornetta could see that the old man's watery eyes were often fixed on Maeve, this new granddaughter he hadn't even known he had. Ornetta did her best not to identify the old man in her imagination with all the vicious, screeching, hate-spitting racists she'd ever heard about, if only for Maeve's sake, and Uncle Jack's. But her blood sister was going to owe her big time for this.

Now they were sitting in the outside patio of Stevie's on the Strip at the top of Crenshaw, picking at their fried fish lunches. According to Bancroft, it was one of the best soul food places in LA, and it was clean and open, less likely that way to freak out an old white guy unused to crossing the barriers.

A big flat-nosed dog, stretched to the end of his chain, was squatting and glaring at their table, as if well aware that they didn't belong there. Ornetta imagined a lot of the things that Maeve's grandfather wasn't saying out loud padding up on them, too, to stand glowering at them just like the dog. But this reminded her too much of that angry dog pack she and Maeve had once faced to save Maeve's dad, and she couldn't take the tension anymore. She'd eaten about all of the fish she wanted, anyway.

“I'd like to check out a Caribbean music place up the street,” Ornetta announced. “I want to see if they've got Soca and Sai Sai. I'll be back.”

“Don't get lost,” Maeve said.

“I won't. This my town.” But it wasn't, and Ornetta knew it perfectly well. She didn't even know if there was a record store up the street. She just had to get away for a while from the brooding tension of Maeve's reclamation project.

Maeve noticed that her grandfather mostly picked the thick batter off the fish. The fish itself was white and light and cooked just about perfect. “You don't like the batter?”

“I love it, but it's bad for my heart.” He peered down at what looked like batter-fried acorns on his plate. “I'm not too keen on this stuff, though.”

“I think that's okra. It's a lot better this way than boiled, believe me.” Genesee made it a lot, and it wasn't the flavor that bothered Maeve so much as the texture, carrying a very high slime quotient.

“What do you think of Ornetta?” Maeve insisted.

“She's a nice girl. Clever with the stories. I'm not really a hater, honey.”

“You use some bad words about people.”

He made a face. Luckily there was enough traffic noise on Jefferson that it was unlikely they'd be overheard, except by the dog still staring at them.

“Those words—they may not carry all the weight you think.”

“They seem pretty heavy to me.”

He looked intently at her, some mask of civility seeming to melt away. “I did everything you wanted, Maeve. I've been polite to the little colored girl, I've been to all these nigger places without complaint. You can't ask me to change what I believe inside.”

Maeve sat back in her chair, as if struck. “So all day you've been hating being with Ornetta?”

He grimaced. “Look, I know there are individuals that're different. She's nice. Bill Cosby is probably a nice guy. Everybody knows that. The coloreds are still what they are. My life's work has been sticking up for the white man, and a Jap wrecked that now, and I haven't got time to do it all again.” The fierce look flickered and softened. “I just wanted to have a granddaughter. Is that too much? I want to do what I have to so we can be friends.”

“I'm not sure that's possible,” Maeve said, trying to be brutally honest.

“Maeve, I am very pleased I met you and found you. But you know we are probably going to disagree, always, about a lot of things. Just like me and your father. Don't shut me out like he did. Can't we find a way to spend some time together?”

She thought about it. He was such a sad old man. “You've got to watch the words you use. And you've got to respect Ornetta.”

He watched her intently, as if waiting for another shoe to drop.

“She's, like, my sister. We made a pact, we're blood sisters, and she helped me save Dad. You know, she gets straight A's at a very good school.”

“She's a clever girl. Anybody can see that.”

Maeve felt her suspicions gather. “People say trained seals are
clever.
Is that what you mean?”

“Ornetta is smart. Much smarter than most of her people.”

Maeve nodded and wondered if she was about to push too far. “Do you think you can try to act respectful of other people who aren't like you, even when it's
not
a favor to me?”

He answered with just a hint of sarcasm. “The thought police now. Maeve, you really shouldn't ask people to change their insides and their private thoughts. I'm going to do my best to be respectful on the outside. And I will think about anything you ask me to think about. That's where we're going to leave it for now. Okay?”

She considered for a moment, wondering if he would ever budge farther than that. His presence made her uneasy now. “All right, Granddad.”

He stood up, leaving most of his food. “Now let's go find Ornetta and make sure she's safe.”

This time, just to take a new tack, Jack Liffey entered the little bungalow ten minutes early and sat down on an easy chair that creaked under him, trying to make himself as comfortable as he could. He would not play any mind games this trip if he could help it, standing at parade rest or mad-dogging the other man's stare or flapping his arms like a chicken. The house was dark and very cold, and from what he could see, Ozaki wasn't anywhere in evidence.

Jack Liffey looked around at what little there was to see but got no new clues. The vinous wallpaper seemed to have come from another generation, the furniture from the Salvation Army.

As he was trying to make out a grim standard-issue motel print on the sidewall, maybe a mill on a stream, he heard an almost soundless
tunk,
like a small stone that had stood on end precariously for aeons and finally had just worn out and fallen over. Joe Ozaki stood in front of him, materializing from nowhere Jack Liffey could make sense of. He was in his full black regalia and at parade rest.

“Have you read the book?”

“You going to give me a pop quiz on the Bushi? I'm not playing your game, Joe. I'm not. Be still and listen to me.”

There was a slight stir, as if the man were about to depart—how?—but in the end he remained in place.

“You were part of Phoenix, weren't you? Or assigned to the long-range-reconnaissance patrols? Or PRU or ICEX, I knew those acronyms. We invented a lot of words for killing back then. Euphemisms. Dismantling the infrastructure. Neutralizing cadres. Reconnaissance by fire. Free fire zones. Zap. Smoke. Waste. Buckle. H & I. Frag. KIA. KBA. Bust a cap. Even ‘go double veteran.' You ever do that?” It meant raping and then killing a Vietnamese woman, but he doubted that fell anywhere within Joe Ozaki's code of conduct. His digs elicited no reaction.

“ ‘Extreme prejudice,' that was a nice one. You knew better, though. You knew you were plain killing people, not ‘lighting them up.' And now you're doing your best to invent a whole narrative to help make sense of what this country turned you into. I feel for you, Joe, but I'm not going to play these games with you. But even if I'm not going to do it your way, I'm your friend, not your enemy, and I'm going to tell you why. You need to know this, so don't just flit away on me like the Green Hornet.”

The motionless man seemed to be taking it in. Jack Liffey shivered a little in the cold, and he noticed that he could hear the susurrus of city traffic far better than he should have. He wondered if his senses were somehow being heightened by these encounters. The whole business was far more elemental than he was used to. Certainly his adrenaline was pumping. He was breathing, not well, but just managing, since it was still a near thing relying on a single lung. He imagined a nice sharp K-bar in a sheath on the man's back.

“How could you even pretend I'm a worthy opponent? You've got the discipline and all the skills. All I ever did back in ‘Nam was sit and watch radar screens and argue about
Notes from Underground
or
Wuthering Heights
every night with guys just like me. In a blink, you could kill me with a butter knife, you could probably kill me six ways with a marshmallow. I know real samurai aren't supposed to have friends, but you listen to me. You've made the whole city pay attention to you, now pay attention to me.