Time Bomb (29 page)

“Because of an occurrence, last summer, about a week after we’d moved in. I ran into him in the garage. I was unpacking boxes and he’d just driven in on his motor scooter. He was carrying a huge armful of books and he dropped them. I helped him pick them up. I noticed a title—something about the origins of the Nazi party. I opened it and saw from the bookplate that it had come from the Holocaust Center—over on Pico, in West L.A. So had the others I picked up. I asked him if he was doing a school paper and he smiled and said no, it was a personal research project. I offered to help him if he needed it, but he just smiled again and said he had everything he needed. I thought it unusual, but I was pleased. That someone his age would take an interest. Most people his age have no idea what happened fifty years ago.”

“What did he and Mrs. Gruenberg used to argue about?”

“Not arguments, in the sense of quarreling. When I said debates, I meant discussions.”

“Loud discussions?”

“Lively discussions, but we couldn’t make out the words—we weren’t listening. Knowing Sophie, though, my assumption would be politics.”

“Any idea what Novato’s political views were?”

“None whatsoever.” Sanders thought for a moment. “Officer, do you suspect a political connection to . . . what happened?”

“No evidence of that either, Rabbi. How was Mrs. Gruenberg affected by Novato’s death?”

“As I said before, I assumed she was upset. But I didn’t see much of her reaction, because she stayed in her unit and didn’t come out much after it happened. In retrospect, I realize that was odd—she used to be out in the yard hanging laundry, or taking her walks around the neighborhood. I only found out about the murder because another policeman—a black man whose name I don’t remember—came by the house and asked me a few questions. About Ike. Did he use drugs? I told him, not to my knowledge. Who did he hang around with? I’d never seen anyone. Then he asked me about Sophie. Did
she
use drugs? Did she buy expensive things that she couldn’t seem to afford? That, I laughed at. But when he—the black detective—told me why he’d come, I stopped laughing. After he left, I went over to Sophie’s unit and knocked on the door. She didn’t answer. I didn’t want to violate her pri-vacy, so I left her alone. I tried the next day, but she still didn’t answer. I started to worry—with an old person, anything can happen—but I decided to wait a while before using my key. Shortly after, I saw her come out, walking toward Rose Avenue. Looking angry. Very grim. I went after her, tried to talk to her, but she just shook her head and kept walking. The next time I saw her was here at the synagogue. She came to the social. Given her state of mind, that surprised me. But she kept to herself, avoiding people. Walking around the room, looking all around, touching the walls, the seats. Almost as if she were seeing it all for the first time.”

“Or the last,” said Milo.

Sanders’s eyes widened. He held the pipe with two hands, as if it had suddenly grown heavy.

“Yes, you’re right,” he said. “That could have been it. Seeing it for the last time. Saying goodbye.”

20

When we got back to the pay lot, the Ford was in easy-exit position. The Filipino attendant stopped traffic on Speedway to let us out. Milo didn’t acknowledge the courtesy.

I said, “Swastikas on cars, hate messages on walls. What do you think?”

He said, “I think the world’s a kind and compassionate place,” and nudged the car through the pedestrian jumble. The pedestrians weren’t feeling cooperative today. Milo cursed as he inched forward, but his heart wasn’t in it.

I said, “‘Remember Kennedy.’ It doesn’t make much sense. Unless it was a warning, not a tribute. As in, remember what happened to Kennedy—we’ll get you too.”

“Who’s warning who?”

I said, “I don’t know,” and grew silent.

He smiled. “Starting to see evil everywhere? Sounds like a peace officer’s perspective.”

“Speaking of peace officers, this Mehan a good cop?”

“Very good.”

“Think he and Smith ever compared notes?”

He gave me a sharp look. “What is this, the Police Review Board?”

“Just wondering.”

“Wondering what? If one arm of the octopus knows what the other’s doing? Usually not. But what if Mehan and Smith did put their heads together. What would they have ended up with?
Double
dead ends.”

I said, “The dope thing might have led them somewhere. Smith was thinking in that direction—the rabbi said he was asking if Gruenberg had been involved in drugs. Not that that seems likely.”

“Why not?”

“Little old dope granny? She sure wasn’t living the life-style.”

“Alex, most likely Smith
was
just fishing—working with what he had, which in this case was close to zero. But the way things have turned, you can’t eliminate anyone. All the money to be made—it’s loony tunes out there. We’re getting old ladies packing their supp-hose with the stuff; people cuddling sweet little babies, the buntings crammed full of white powder; cripples using false limbs. And Gruenberg’s profile doesn’t contradict a dope granny—she had radical political views, which means she might not have been so reluctant to buck the establishment. She keeps to herself, doesn’t like company, and has Novato bunking in with her—some kid out of nowhere, with no ID, no past, and she’s got him living in the same unit with her. A black kid. Even for Venice, that’s strange—you saw how the other oldsters thought so. Then, just a few days after he’s snuffed, she’s gone. Maybe he was a commie too—that was the connection between them. Maybe the two of them had some political thing going. Hell, maybe that’s where the dough went.”

“Cash for the cause?”

“You want to speculate, I’ll speculate.”

I thought about it as he wrestled with the steering wheel and finally got back on Pacific. “Milo, if Gruenberg was involved in the dope scene, she could have made someone mad, and run out of fear. Or maybe the people she was afraid of got to her first. What if she’d ended up with a cash-flow or a dope-flow problem, and the break-in at her place was someone looking to collect?”

“Maybe,” he said. “But the other thing you’ve got to consider is that junkies
are
prime opportunists. The posters could have tipped them off that she was gone; her place was vacant, a perfect target. The bottom line is, all of this is just head-tripping—we don’t know shit.”

A block later I said, “Could Holly have been involved with them—Gruenberg and Novato’s cabal?”

“
Cabal?
An old lady, a bag boy, and a retarded kid who isn’t on anyone’s subversive list? Not much of a cabal.”

“She wasn’t retarded—”

“Okay, just stupid. Same difference.”

“I didn’t say it was a competent cabal. Two of them are dead and one’s missing. But maybe Holly’s shooting at Massengil was politically motivated.”

“If it was Massengil she was shooting at.”

“If.”

Milo came to a short stop at Washington Boulevard.

“Too weird, Alex. Got a headache.” He drove into a self-serve gas station with a mini-mart at the back of the lot. I waited in the Ford as he purchased a packet of aspirin. Before he returned to the car, he went to the pay phone and stayed there for a while, popping tablets, feeding quarters and talking, the receiver tucked up under his chin. Making two calls.

When he came back, he said, “Mehan’s out of town, two weeks’ vacation, no one knows where any of his files are, they’ll get back to me.”

“Who was the second call to?”

He looked at me. “What a
sleuth
! I tried the Holocaust Center, wanted to leave a message for someone I know there. Got a tape, they’re closed Sundays.”

“That’s right,” I said. “They know you. You helped them trace that Nazi scientist—the one the army protected.”

“Good old Werner Kaltenblud, president of the Poison Gas Club. Bastard’s still alive in Syria, living like royalty, unrepentant. I’ve got a more recent connection to the Center. Last year someone painted swastikas on the side of the museum building they’re putting up. Not my usual thing, but they called me because of Kaltenblud. Then it hit the news and the brass took over. ATD.”

“Frisk?”

“No. The asshole who preceded him, but same old story: TV crews and politicos making speeches—Gordon Latch, in fact.”

“How about Massengil?”

“Nope. Not his district.”

“Maybe not his area of interest, either.”

“Could be. It was a real circus, Alex. ATD playing
I Spy,
asking lots of clever questions, filing lots of paper, but they never bothered to surveill. Next week there were broken windows and an arson fire in one of the trailers out back in the construction site. We never found out who did any of it. So much for my credibility. But maybe I’ve still got enough good-will residue for them to think back and try to remember something about this Novato kid. Something more than his library card.”

He turned left on Washington, driving parallel with the Marina. A different kind of crowd here. White slacks and deep tans and aggressive little foreign ears. The boulevard was lined with new construction—mostly low-rise designer office buildings festooned with reminders of an architectural heritage that had never existed, and nautical theme restaurants draped with
BRUNCH
! and
HAPPY HOUR
! banners.

“Pretty, huh?” said Milo. “The good life reigns.”

He drove a couple of blocks, turned off on a street that dead-ended a block later. Small houses, in varying stages of gentrification. Cars lining the street, no people. He parked in front of a hydrant, left the motor running, got out, and opened the trunk.

He came back carrying a shotgun. Clamped it to the dashboard, barrel-up, and pulled the car out onto the street.

I said, “Where to?”

“Somewhere not so pretty.”

He got back on Washington, took it to the Marina Freeway, switched to the 405, wrestled with the airport jam for a while, and got off on Imperial Highway heading east. Bordering the off-ramp were the broad gray lots of shipping terminals, import-export companies, and customs brokers, and a four-story self-storage facility that looked like the box an office building would come in. A red light halted us at the intersection of La Cienega and Imperial, and we waited it out, staring at the colossal truncated bulk of the unfinished Century Freeway: hundred-foot concrete dinosaur legs supporting a six-lane slab that ended in mid-air and was fringed with curling steel veins—a messy amputation.

The green arrow appeared and Milo turned. The terrain deteriorated rudely to a block of scabrous one-story buildings on a dry-dust lot. A pool hall, a liquor store, and a bar advertising “nude table dancers,” all plywood-boarded and choked with graffiti. Even sin couldn’t flourish here.

But a block later there were signs of revitalization. Weekly-rate motels, auto shops, car dealerships, wig stores, and rundown apartments. Several beautifully kept churches, a couple of shopping centers. The sprawling campus of Southwestern College. And for color, the Golden Arches and its rainbow-hued clones—modular fast-food setups so clean and unscarred they might have been dropped into the neighborhood just minutes before by some clumsy Franchise Stork.

Milo said, “Taking the scenic route.”

I said, “Long time since I’ve been down here.”

“Didn’t know you’d ever been down here. Most folks of the fair-pigment persuasion never find the opportunity.”

“Grad school,” I said. “First year. I was a research assistant on a Head Start program trying to increase the reading skills of ghetto kids. I took an interest in one of the children—a very bright little boy named Eric. I visited him a couple of times at home—I can still picture the place. He lived on Budlong, near 103rd. Nice-looking building, not at all what I expected for the area. Widowed mother, the father had been shot in Vietnam. Grandma helping out—place was neat as a pin. Lots of pressure from both Mom and Grandma for Eric to get A’s, become a doctor or a lawyer.”

“How old was he?”

“Five.”

Milo whistled. “Long ways to med school.”

“Fortunately he had the brains for it.”

“What happened to him?”

“I followed him for a couple of years—phone calls, Christmas cards. He was still getting A’s. And starting to develop bad stomachaches. I was going up to San Francisco for my internship. Referred the mother to a good pediatrician and a community mental health center. After that, we just kind of lost touch. He’d be college age by now. Amazing. I have no idea what happened to him. Guess that makes me your typical superficial do-gooder, huh?”

Milo didn’t say anything. I noticed he was driving faster than usual. Two hands on the wheel. As we zipped eastward, the business establishments grew smaller, sadder, rattier, and I noticed a certain consistency to their distribution: check-cashing outlets, rib joints, nail palaces, liquor stores. Lots of liquor stores. Thin dark men lounged against filthy stucco walls, holding paper bags, smoking, staring off into space. A few women in shorts and rollers sashayed by and caught whistles. But for the most part the streets were deserted—that much South Central and Beverly Hills had in common. A quarter mile farther, even the liquor stores couldn’t make it. Plywood storefronts became as common as glass. Movie theaters converted to churches converted to garbage dumps. Vacant lots. Impromptu auto graveyards. Entire blocks of dead buildings shadowing the occasional ragpicker or stray child. More young men, glutted with time, starved of hope. Not a white face in sight.

Milo turned left on Broadway, drove until 108th, and made a right. We passed an enormous, windowless brown brick fortress.

“Southeast Division,” he said. “But we’re not meeting him there.”

He drove for another few miles, through silent residential blocks of tiny, characterless bungalows. Ocher and pink and turquoise texture-coat competed with the angry black-and-Dayglo tangle of gang scrawl. Dirt lawns were surrounded by sheets of chain link. Undernourished dogs scrounged through the trash that lined the curbs. A quick turn took us to 111th. Another led us into a cracked-asphalt alley lined with an alternating band of garage doors and more chain link.