Bad Love (16 page)

I put it back and looked up and down the street. A boy of around ten zoomed by on rollerblade skates. A few seconds later, a red truck came speeding down from Foothill and for an instant I thought it was Roddy Rodriguez’s. But as it passed, I saw that it was lighter in shade than his and a decade newer. A blond woman sat in the driver’s seat. A big yellow dog rode in the bed, tongue out, watchful.

I returned to the Seville and waited for another twenty-five minutes, but no one showed up. I tried to recall the name of Rodriguez’s masonry company and finally did — R and R.

Driving back to Foothill Boulevard, I headed east until I spotted a phone booth at an Arco station. The directory had been yanked off the chain, so I called information and asked for R and R’s address and phone number. The operator ignored me and switched over to the automated message, leaving me only the number. I called it. No one answered. I tried information a second time and got a street address — right on Foothill, about ten blocks east.

The place was a gray-topped lot, forty or fifty feet behind a shabby brown building. Surrounded by barbed link, it had a green clapboard beer bar on one side, a pawnshop on the other.

The property was empty except for a few brick fragments and some paper litter. The brown building looked to have once been a double garage. Two sets of old-fashioned hinge doors took up most of the front. Above them, ornate yellow letters shouted
R AND R MASONRY: CEMENT, CINDER, AND CUSTOM BRICK.
Below that:
RETAINING WALLS OUR SPECIALTY,
followed by an overlapping R’s logo meant to evoke Rolls-Royce fantasies.

I parked and got out. No signs of life. The padlock on the gate was the size of a baseball.

I went over to the pawnshop. The door was locked and a sign above a red button said,
PRESS AND WAIT.
I obeyed and the door buzzed but didn’t open. I leaned in close to the window. A man stood behind a nipple-high counter, shielded by a Plexiglas window.

He ignored me.

I buzzed again.

He made a stabbing motion and the door gave.

I walked past cases filled with cameras, cheap guitars, cassette decks and boomboxes, pocket knives and fishing rods.

The man was managing to examine a watch and check me over at the same time.

He was sixty or so, with slicked, dyed-black hair and a pumpkin-colored bottle tan. His face was long and baggy.

I cleared my throat.

He said, “Yeah?” through the plastic and kept looking at the watch, turning it over with nicotined fingers and working his lips as if preparing to spit. The window was scratched and cloudy and outfitted with a ticket-taker remote speaker that he hadn’t switched on. The store had soft, wooden floors and stank of WD-40, sulfur matches, and body odor. A sign over the gun display said
NO LOONIES.

“I’m looking for Roddy Rodriguez next door,” I said. “Have some work for him to do on a retaining wall.”

He put the watch down and picked up another.

“Excuse me,” I said.

“Got something to buy or sell?”

“No, I was just wondering if you knew when Rodriguez was—”

He turned his back on me and walked away. Through the Plexiglas I saw an old desk full of papers and other timepieces. A semiautomatic pistol served as a paperweight. He scratched his butt and held the watch up to a fluorescent bulb.

I left and walked over to the bar two doors down. The green board was rubbed to raw timber in spots and the front door was unmarked. A sun-shaped neon sign said,
SUNNY’S SUN VALLEY.
A single window below it was filled with a Budweiser sign.

I walked in, expecting darkness, billiard clicks, and a cowboy jukebox. Instead, I got bright lights, ZZ Top going on about a Mexican whore, and a nearly empty room not much larger than my kitchen.

No pool table — no tables of any kind. Just a long, pressed-wood bar with a black vinyl bumper and matching stools, some of them patched with duct tape. Up against the facing wall were a cigarette machine and a pocket comb dispenser. The floor was grubby concrete.

The man working the bar was thirtyish, fair, balding, stubbled. He wore tinted eyeglasses and one of his ears was double pierced, hosting a tiny gold stud and a white metal hoop. He had on a soiled white apron over a black T-shirt, and his chest was flabby. His arms were soft looking, too, white and tattooed. He wasn’t doing much when I came in, and he continued along those lines. Two men sat at the bar, far from each other. More tattoos. They didn’t move either. It looked like a poster for National Brain Death Week.

I took a stool between the men and ordered a beer.

“Draft or bottle?”

“Draft.”

The bartender took a long time to fill a mug, and as I waited I snuck glances at my companions. Both wore billed caps, T-shirts, jeans, and work shoes. One was skinny, the other muscular. Their hands were dirty. They smoked and drank and had tired faces.

My beer came and I took a swallow. Not much head and not great, but not as bad as I’d expected.

“Any idea when Roddy’ll be back?” I said.

“Who?” said the bartender.

“Rodriguez — the masonry guy next door. He’s supposed to be doing a retaining wall for me and he didn’t show up.”

He shrugged.

“Place is closed,” I said.

No answer.

“Great,” I said. “Guy’s got my goddamned deposit.”

The bartender began soaking glasses in a gray plastic tub.

I drank some more.

ZZ gave way to a disc jockey’s voice, hawking car insurance for people with bad driving records. Then a series of commercials for ambulance-chasing lawyers polluted the air some more.

“When’s the last time you’ve seen him around?” I said.

The bartender turned around. “Who?”

“Rodriguez.”

Shrug.

“Has his place been closed for a while?”

Another shrug. He returned to soaking.

“Great,” I said.

He looked over his shoulder. “He never comes in here, I got nothing to do with him, okay?”

“Not much of a drinker?”

Shrug.

“Fucking asshole,” said the man on my right.

The skinny one. Sallow and pimpled, barely above drinking age. His cigarette was dead in the ashtray. One of his index fingers played with the ashes.

I said, “Who? Rodriguez?”

He gave a depressed nod. “Fucking greaser don’t pay.”

“You worked for him?”

“Fucking A, digging his fucking ditches. Then the roach coach comes by for lunch and I wanna advance so’s to get a burrito. He says sorry, amigo, not till payday. So I’m adios, amigo, man.”

He shook his head, still pained by the rejection.

“Asshole,” he said, and returned to his beer.

“So he shafted you, too,” I said.

“Fucking A, man.”

“Any idea where I can find him?”

“Maybe Mexico, man.”

“Mexico?”

“Yeah, all a them beaners got second homes there, got they extra wives and they little taco-tico kids, send all they money there.”

I heard a metallic click to the left, looked over, and saw the muscular man light up a cigarette. Late twenties or early thirties, two-day growth of heavy beard, thick, black Fu Manchu mustache. His cap was black and said
CAT.
He blew smoke toward the bar.

I said, “You know Rodriguez, too?”

He gave a long, slow headshake and held out his mug.

The bartender filled it, then extended his own hand. The mustachioed man jostled the pack until a cigarette slid forward. The bartender took it, nodded, and lit up.

Guns ’n Roses came on the radio.

The bartender looked at my half-empty mug. “Anything else?”

I shook my head, put money down on the bar, and left.

“Asshole,” said the skinny man, raising his voice to be heard over the music.

I drove back to the Rodriguez house. Still dark and empty. A woman across the street was holding a broom, and she began looking at me suspiciously.

I called over: “Any idea when they’ll be back?”

She went inside her house. I drove away and got back on the freeway, exiting on Sunset and heading north on Beverly Glen. I realized my error just as I completed the turn, but continued on to my house anyway, pulling up in front of the carport. Looking over my shoulder with paranoid fervor, I decided it was safe to get out of the car.

I walked around my property, looking, remembering. Though it made no sense, the house already looked sad.

You know how places get when they’re empty . . .

I took a quick look at the pond. The fish were still there. They swam up to greet me and I obliged with food.

“See you guys,” I said, and left, wondering how many would survive.

I made it to Benedict a few minutes later.

The black van and the unmarked were gone. Two of the three garage doors were open and I saw Robin inside, wearing work clothes and goggles, standing behind her lathe.

She saw me coming and turned off the machine. A gold BMW coupe was parked in the third garage. The rest of the space was a near duplicate of the Venice shop.

“Looks like you’re all set up,” I said.

She pushed her goggles up on her forehead. “This isn’t too bad, actually, as long as I leave the door open for ventilation. How come you’re back so soon?”

“No one home.”

“Flake out on you?”

“It looks like they’re gone for a while.”

“Moved out?”

“Must be the week for it.”

“How could you tell?”

“Two days’ mail in the box and her husband’s business was padlocked.”

“Considerate of her to let you know.”

“Etiquette isn’t her strong suit. She wasn’t thrilled about my evaluation in the first place, though I thought we were making progress. She probably took the girls out of state — maybe Hawaii. When I spoke to her yesterday she made a crack about a Honolulu vacation. Or Mexico. Her husband may have family there. . . . I’d better call the judge.”

“We set up an office for you in one of the bedrooms,” she said, leaning over and pecking my cheek. “Gave you the one with the best view, plus there’s a Hockney on the wall — two guys showering.” She smiled. “Poor Milo — he was a little embarrassed about it — started muttering about the “atmosphere.’ Almost apologizing. After all he did to help us. I sat him down and we had a good talk.”

“About what?”

“Stuff — the meaning of life. I told him you could handle the
atmosphere
.”

“What he say to that?”

“Just grunted and rubbed his face the way he does. Then I made coffee and told him if he ever learned to play an instrument I’d build one for him.”

“Safe offer,” I said.

“Maybe not. When we were talking, it came up that he used to play the accordion when he was a kid. And he sings — have you ever heard him?”

“No.”

“Well, he sang for me this afternoon. After some prodding. Did an old Irish folk song — and guess what? He’s got a really nice voice.”

“Basso profundo?”

“
Tenor
, of all things. He used to be in the church choir when he was a little boy.”

I smiled. “That’s a little hard to picture.”

“There’s probably a lot about him you don’t know.”

“Probably,” I said. “Each year I get in touch with more of my ignorance. . . . Speaking of grunts, where’s our guest?”

“Sleeping in the service porch. I tried keeping him here while I worked, but he kept charging the machines — he was ready to take on the bandsaw when I got him out of here and locked him in.”

“Tough love, huh? Did he do his little strangulation routine?”

“Oh, sure,” she said. She put her hand around her throat and made a gagging sound. “I yelled at him to be quiet and he stopped.”

“Poor guy. He probably thought you were going to be his salvation.”

She grinned. “I may be sultry and sensual, but I ain’t easy.”

I let the dog loose, gave him time to pee outside, and took him into my new office. A chrome-and-glass-topped desk was pushed up against one wall. My papers and books were piled neatly on a black velour couch. The view was fantastic, but after a few minutes I stopped noticing it.

I phoned superior court, got Steve Huff in his chambers, and told him about Evelyn Rodriguez’s no-show.

“Maybe she just forgot,” he said. “Denial, avoidance, whatever.”

“I think there’s a good chance she’s gone, Steve.” I described Roddy Rodriguez’s locked yard.

“Sounds like it,” he said. “There goes another one.”

“Can’t say that I blame her. When I saw her two days ago, she really opened up about the girls’ problems. They’re having plenty of them. And Donald wrote me a letter — no remorse, just tooting his own horn as a good dad.”

“Wrote you a
letter
?”

“His lawyer’s been calling me, too.”

“Any intimidation?”

I hesitated. “No, just nagging.”

“Too bad. No law against that . . . no, can’t say that I blame her either, Alex — off the record. Do you want to wait and try again, or just write up your report now — document all the crap she told you?”

“What’s the difference?”

“The difference is how quickly you want to get paid versus how much lead time you want to give her, if she
has
hightailed it. Once you put it in writing and I receive it, I’m obligated to send it over to Bucklear. Even with reasonable delays he gets it in a couple of weeks or so, then
he
files paper and gets warrants out on her.”

“A murderer gets warrants on a grandmother taking her grandkids out of town? Do we file that under “I for irony’ or “N for nuts’?”

“Do I take that to mean you’ll wait?”

“How much lead time can I give her?”

“A reasonable period. Consistent with typical medical-psychological practice.”

“Meaning??”

“Meaning what shrinks normally do. Three, four, even five weeks wouldn’t chafe any hides — you guys are notorious for being sloppy about your paperwork. You might even stretch it to six or seven — but you never heard that from me. In fact, we never had this talk, did we?”