Dangerous Games (19 page)

The man was sipping a milky beverage that looked more like medicine than a cocktail and baring his face to the sun. Jack Liffey came along the rough toward him, trying to make enough noise in the high grass so he didn't startle the man.

“Hello, Dan. I'm Jack Liffey, remember me.”

“I know who you are. If
you
remember, I was impressed enough with you to try to hire you once.”

“Can I come over?” He still stood in the rough.

The man shrugged with one shoulder, a gesture of great physical economy. Jack Liffey boosted himself over the low retaining wall and sat opposite him in an expensive-looking patio chair made of wood and vinyl straps. “Your old employee, Trevor Pennycooke, is back in town. I'm looking for him.”

“Feel that wind,” he said. “It reminds me of all winds I've ever felt. I'm just primary process now.”

“I don't know what that means,” Jack Liffey said.

“You'll have to ask my
roshi.”

“You're into Zen?”

“Is that so surprising?”

“Yes.”

“Zen is practical as shit. Doctor's orders, learn about dealing with pain and shit.”

G. Dan Hunt let himself drift for a while, basking.

“You know where I might find Terror Pennycooke?” Jack Liffey asked.

Hunt bided his time. Then he said, “A guy named Levine. He used to work for me, too, and I think Trevor would hook up with him if he's back in town.”

“Levine have a first name?”

“Not that I ever knew.” Jack Liffey waited patiently. Unless there was more, the trip would have been a waste. He had no need to pay his last respects to G. Dan.

“Levine had a place up on Malibu crest near Fernwood. Someone in the neighborhood might have found Trevor a bit noticeable if he's staying with Levine.”

“I guess that helps,” Jack Liffey said.

“It doesn't matter to me whether it helps or not,” G. Dan told him. Then he stood up, breathed a couple of times and started making some strange slow motion exercises in the air, probably
tai chi.

“What's that called?” Jack Liffey asked.

“It's called Ride the motherfucker till the wheels come off.”

Dear Diary,

Now that I have linked my fate with love I feel different. Trev had some business & he asked me to wait in a little park. I watched kids playing like I was way off the earth above them but I was attached too. Then I got to watching a Mexican man with two little girls on his knees. He talked very serious & then the girls laughed so he laughed & one of them hugged him. God I could of been one of those girls but I never had a man be so nice.

EIGHTEEN

A Little Off Balance and Having to Think Hard

When Jack Liffey got home from the store, he found Maeve's Toyota parked in front. Kathy must have relented and let her venture out into the wilds of East L.A. after all. Or else she'd come on her own. It wasn't unknown for Maeve to violate a parental ban. She'd obviously heard his VW approach—everyone within miles could hear the air-cooled engine—and she came out to greet him. In an instant, he herded her officiously back inside, away from any random events the street might toss her way.

“Three more days of Santa Anas,” she predicted. She hugged him. He held on a second longer than she did, but giving Oskar a wide berth. “I predict major wildfires up in the hills.”

“Let's hope not. Want a Coke?”

“Diet.”

He got them both Diet Cokes and watched her tap softly on the top of the can with a fingernail before opening it—she believed it cut back on the potential for geysering fizz. He wasn't convinced.

“The wind really worries me,” she said. “I was thinking of some people I know up in the hills. I hope they cleared their brush.” They both knew that he had once lived with a fading movie star in the commanding heights of the Hollywood Hills smack in the middle of a critical fire zone. But she had been dead for several years now, her house leveled by the big Burbank earthquake. It was probably just another empty lot these days. It wasn't really prime real estate any more since the jumped-up music execs and overnight rock stars and drug dealers had moved in. After the quake, he'd never even been tempted to drive past the place on Avenida Bluebird. Nostalgia was no game to play with yourself, he thought, even if places and people had once meant a lot to you.

“You're pretty close to Gloria,” he suggested. “Do you know what's eating her? I don't think it's just the Santa Anas.”

“Have you ever considered that you might have a wounded-bird syndrome, Dad?” she asked.

He sighed. “Gloria seemed a lot stronger than me.”

“You're overreacting. Gloria's going to be fine. It's really just a matter of semiotics.”

He laughed. “Lord, I don't think I want you to explain that. I'm not imagining her pain, hon. She's stewing on something, and I just can't seem to help.”

They both stopped talking as a noisy VW bug just like his rasped past the house. “Reminds me of an old Warners Cartoon,” Jack Liffey said. “I better not look close, I might be in there.”

“No, you're in here for sure.” She leaned far over to kiss his cheek and set down her can, then noticed what she had set it on. Moving the Diet Coke, she plucked the sheet of paper off the counter and began to read aloud: “There was trouble in Texas and Texas was independent away from Mexico in 1836. US wanted Manifesto Destiny still and wanted all land. California too.”

Prickles went down his spine as he tried to remember if there was anything in the essay that would suggest its author was her assailant. He didn't think so.

“What's this?”

“A boy I'm trying to tutor,” he said.

“Another wounded bird. You were always trying so hard with Rogelio, but it didn't take. It's too bad, he had a good heart.” Rogelio was the nephew of another woman he had lived with. Maeve was right. He'd tried hard to get the boy into computers, or into anything with a future, but Rogelio just had little interest in applying himself.

“Where'd you find this kid?”

“He lives a few blocks away,” he tried out. But it wasn't adequate, and he knew it.

“This needs a lot of work, doesn't it?” she said. She wasn't making fun of the boy; her interest was quite earnest. “Aside from the mistakes, every sentence has a big black line under it, like a death notice.”

He had no idea what she meant, but it sounded interesting, and he wondered if she wasn't gradually getting smarter than her old man. He'd always resisted having her IQ tested, on the presumption that if it was even a little low, or just average, she'd be devastated, and if it was really high, she'd get smug and full of herself. He liked her best not knowing, a little off balance and having to work at life. Just the way we should all feel about ourselves, he thought.

She looked up at him innocently. “How'd you pick him out?”

And there it was, he thought, the big ethical question staring him in the face once again. To lie or not to lie? The convenient omission, the shaded truth, the polite fabrication that would save someone else's pain. “His name is Thumb,” he said. “His nickname, that is. He's got a double-jointed thumb, like mine.” He showed her the bend. “His real name is Tino Estrada, and he's trying hard to get his GED so he can go to art school. He's a pretty fair graffiti artist.”

He paused there, watching her, overcome with love for her innate kindness and her so-vulnerable beauty, all her genetic him-ness, too, traits that she would never escape. He wondered if anyone, anywhere, ever, got to embark on the life of perfect integrity you always planned for yourself.

A troop of schoolkids walked past outside the house, full of slurred jokes and laughter, roughhousing, sounding quite natural in their gossip and chatter and challenge. Thinking about them, Jack Liffey no longer knew where to draw the line.

“About a week ago I went to his hideout—a garage behind his house—to kill him.”

That got her attention, and he could see her figure it all out in a flash. “Oh, Dad. You're still making yourself my protector and avenger, aren't you, like one of our ape ancestors?”

“It's what I do, hon,” he said. “I'm a father. What do you expect? Gloria's none too happy with me, either, since it makes complications with the cops who're looking for this kid. You tell me. I went to shoot him, but I lost my resolve. What should I do with him? You tell me, and I'll do it.”

She buried her face against his shoulder. “Dad, you're not being fair. You've got to let me be angry at you for a little while. At least thirty seconds.”

He chuckled softly, but couldn't find much relief in it. “Hit me a bit if it helps. Mention your sainted mom.”

“I'm not even sure I have a right to an opinion. You
are
the dad, and you do it pretty well. You know, deep down I have this terrible feeling that you can see inside me, that you know everything—past, present, and future, and all my feelings. I'm in awe sometimes. Despite all that, I
really
don't want you fighting my battles for me. It robs me of something I need.”

“I'll give you the .45 and you can kill him.”

“Be serious,” she scolded. “Can I meet him?”

“Oh, Jesus.”

“What does that mean?”

“Roughly it means, Oh Jesus. I don't think it's a good idea right now, hon.”

“We're connected by tragedy. Who has more of a claim to check out this guy than me?”

“I don't think being shot by accident by a guy, or even half-accident, gives you any claims over his person. He's just a kid with a big chip on his shoulder, crappy friends, a lousy family, and damn little future, plus a tiny bit of artistic talent. You're a very bright girl from the other side of the tracks with the gold spoon and everything else.”

“Oh, right.”

“What's it going to prove if you meet Thumb?”

“Maybe he'll be able to tell me something he can't tell you.”

* * *

“James Dressier, banker—my ass. It's Jack, isn't it?”

“Best I could do on short notice. Nice to talk to you, too, Art. You know a guy named Levine who only uses the one name?”

“Does he pitch for the Dodgers?”

“I sincerely doubt it. But he hangs out with that Jamaican charmer Terror Pennycooke.”

It had taken him two tries to get through. Art Castro's receptionists had orders to obstruct and, possibly for good measure, annoy Jack Liffey in any way possible. This time, Jack Liffey had insisted on an urgent callback about a bounced check at Westside Bank.

“Matter of fact, I know Levine. Big guy, bald. I don't know where the hell the name came from. He looks about as Jewish as the emperor of the Manchus.”

“People don't
look
Jewish, Art, or at least a lot of them don't.”

“Yeah, yeah, Paul Newman in
Exodus.
It's okay, Jack, I look Latino. Glor looks Latino. You look wasted and tired.”

“You can't see me. I'm tanned and terrific.”

“Glad to hear it.”

“So, would you know how I could get in touch with Levine? It's important to me.”

“I happen to know he's in Cedars-Sinai. Somebody jammed his accelerator cable with a fishing weight, but whether it was a friend or enemy, you've got me.”

“Thanks, Art. You keep saying I owe you a favor, but you never call.”

“I'll make you come see arena football with me.”

“What is it?”

“They shrank it, put it in a hockey rink—made it sort of a pinball game.”

“People actually
pay
to watch that?”

He heard a laugh at the other end. “Watch out with the hard boys, Jack.”

Kenyon Styles lay on his single bed, spasm-coughing sputum and a little blood into doubled-up wads of Kleenex that Rod Whipple kept handing him, one after another. Rod felt a bit guilty because he'd been wishing Ken ill ever since the avalanche incident. Then, like a genie out of his subconscious, the big Jamaican had materialized to impose his bizarre torment. In the end, they had shown the Jamaican their rough cut, still in progress, in the makeshift edit bay, and all had agreed that Trevor Pennycooke was now the line producer of
Dangerous Games II,
and some unspecified girlfriend would be cut in as narrator and host.

“We're not really going to give this guy a share, are we?”

Kenyon tried to answer but could emit only a croaking, which set off another paroxysm of coughing. Several empty ginger beer bottles were still scattered in the corner. He'd probably never be able to look at one again. Rod even decided he might never again eat anything flavored with ginger, though it had taken only half of one of the bottles to subdue him. The Jamaican had found out quickly that Kenyon was the one to focus on.

Kenyon tried again to answer but settled for rolling his head back and forth in a broad no. “Rather … burn … tape … not give … him … anything.”

Kenyon started coughing again. He had stubbornly held out through two bottles, and now was paying the price.

Rod's real worry was that Kenyon Styles—despite his present protestations of defiance—had bought into the Jamaican's proposal for a grand climax to the show. Never one to turn down any repellently outrageous new idea, Kenyon was too reckless to be trusted. History had already demonstrated this. Both the snowboarders had ended up in the hospital and, as far as he knew, were still there.

Rod retreated deep inside himself to calculate his chances. He knew he was in way over his head. They both knew this whole production had been Kenyon's idea from the first, and it worried him now that Kenyon, too, seemed to be in over his head.

The cough syrup he had fetched for Kenyon appeared to sooth his throat, and now he calmed gradually and closed his eyes, like a junkie finally sailing on a fresh shot.

“We're not really going to start a Malibu wildfire, are we?”

It wasn't hard to guess where Terror had got the idea: The fire scare had been all over the news for a week, ever since the Santa Anas had arrived. Six years of drought had already desiccated the hillside brush down to its lowest moisture content ever. There had already been a handful of small roadside fires, but just one spark in the wrong place, one prankster, one malicious arsonist—the local news anchors bleated on and on.

On one news special, they had brought up graphic overlays, one after another, to map the dozen Malibu wildfires of the last twenty years. These showed that fire had, little-by-little, completed a paint-by-numbers map of the entire coast, pretty much burning every square inch of land at one time or another. Almost always, it began inland at the 101 freeway ten miles across the Santa Monica Mountains, from there burning up and over to roar down the Malibu flank right to the Pacific Coast Highway and often through the beachfront homes themselves.

“It's high concept. But if that island nigger is stupid enough to let us film him starting the fire, his black ass is ours.”

Cedars-Sinai had been founded as two much smaller clinics, both, in fact, in Boyle Heights not far from Jack Liffey's new home. This had been early in the twentieth century, when that upland area east of downtown had been the Jewish center of L.A. But, by the fifties, both hospitals had moved west—like the Jewish community itself. Then in the 1970s they merged into one gigantic new edifice on the near edge of Beverly Hills, specializing in heart care, cancer, and chronic diseases of the rich.

It wasn't visiting hours when he got there, but Jack Liffey never cared much about details like that. He kept a nondescript smock and a clipboard in his trunk, and he'd found you could go just about anywhere with those as props. He got right up to the patient area on the seventh floor with “insurance examiner” and “just a few questions.” The floor nurse indicated the room and strutted away.

Obviously, Levine had money because it was a private room. It was shaped like a trapezoid for some reason, with the narrow end terminating in a slatted window to the world outside. He tried to find a name on the door or some chart left lying around, just to confirm he had the right place, but hospitals were becoming careful about things like that because of federal privacy regulations.

Levine was indeed a big man and bald as a stone, now half asleep. Both his legs were encased in casts and held aloft by a counter-weighted apparatus. A TV depended from the ceiling but the sound was off.

“Levine.”

The big man fluttered his eyes.

“It's your mom.”