Dangerous Games (8 page)

The baby started to wail, and Chris tested the diaper, then offered a bottle. That did the trick.

“I've learned to type one-handed.” He sat and demonstrated at the keyboard of what must have been his primary computer. It was amazing, the blur of his right hand, while the left cradled and fed the baby. “Multitasking,” he said. “I can even tuck a phone in my ear at the same time. I hear you're shacked up with a cop out in East Los. How's that working out?”

“It's interesting. At our age, we've both had enough disappointments in life that we're still a bit cautious.”

“You mean she's about to kick you out.”

Jack Liffey laughed. “I wouldn't say that. Our relationship is just teething.” He thought of mentioning Maeve's drive-by shooting, but he just didn't want to go into it. “I like Gloria a lot. Trusting takes time.”

“You never went all that long in between women, my man.”

“Maybe that was my problem. What about you? At the time, I didn't bet an awful lot on you and Babs hanging in there.”

“These little guys make a big difference.” The boy with the trucks was now making airplane swooping sounds. “But they're worth every worry line. They make you look at life fresh.”

He didn't want to get sidetracked into the glories of fatherhood. He had Maeve, and she would do fine. “I have a favor to ask.”

“Of course. You never show up unexpectedly to play handball.”

Jack Liffey pulled up an old ladderback chair. “I went to a sporting goods store one time looking for a handball, and, you know, the guy there said they stopped carrying them because they were the number one theft item. Isn't that a great concept? Eventually they'll eliminate the number two and number three, and then the store will have nothing worth stealing at all, and maybe all sports will die.”

“I forgot you were an anti-fan.”

“It's not important.” Jack Liffey handed him the flyer—explaining who he was looking for. “I visited that first talent agency on the list, and already I want to run myself through a sheepdip full of disinfectant. Can you hack into their databases and look for her name for me, or anyone else who sounds like an American Indian and signed up in the last two weeks?”

“Child's play. I'll check out some other sources, too, and call you this evening.”

“Thanks, Chris.” Jack Liffey squatted down by the little boy and picked up a plastic airplane he hadn't noticed. It was a P-40, with very slight indentations in the gray plastic to suggest the toothy Flying Tiger grin. If there had been a decal, it was long gone. It was strange how seductively beautiful the old prop warplanes could be. “This is great.”

“From my own youth.”

“The last time we were on the same side as the Chinese.”

“Yeah, but they make all our consumer products now. We don't dare piss them off. We'd have to start over at the Stone Age.”

Jack Liffey flew the fighter around a bit and tried out his own thut-thut-thut. Little Vance Johnson won the dogfight with brute force, crashing a dump truck into him.

“I hear you did good today,” Keith hollered over the windrush in the Miata as he drove her over Topanga and down to the Malibu beach house. “You're a quick learner.”

She was back in comfortable clothes, jeans, and an old pearl-snap cowboy shirt she liked, with her B-4 bag in her new room. She saw no reason to shout back to him, especially as he wasn't asking anything much, and she just felt like settling in with the flow of everything, him, the drive, the job. She loved the yellow chaparral along the road, broken up by sumacs, tree tobacco, a few coast oaks—multimillion dollar homes set way up on their own roads.

She stared at one of those homes for a moment, and though sums of money in the tens of millions didn't mean very much to her, she decided that, put together, all the homes she'd ever known in Owens wouldn't trade for one fancy six-car garage like the ones they were passing.

Ten million here and ten million there and, pretty soon, you're talking real money. She grinned. One of the girls had said that at break.

“I got the beach house from surplus inventory of this company I used to work with, picking up failed savings and loans. It didn't cost me a penny, and, technically, it's invisible to the tax people. Life is all about deals, kid. You gotta get unblinkered about stuff.”

He seemed too young to be talking like that, but they came down a hill and turned onto the coast highway. It was a really breathtaking moment for an inland girl, the water blue as a robin's egg, choppy with a handful of sailboats as the sun was about to go into red couds, and the breakers rolling up and crashing right against the edge of the road. Seeing the Pacific always made her feel an outsider but more so like when it was getting dark, like the other night at the party.

“If the Levine boys are waiting, don't say a word.”

She didn't know who the Levine boys were, but it didn't matter. She wouldn't be inclined to say much to anybody. Soon they came to a row of beach houses right up against the road, only the garages visible, the houses trapped between asphalt and surf. A Porsche was parked diagonally in front of their garage, and two lanky men with no hair at all glared at the Miata as they approached. One of the men looked Asian but tall for an Oriental. Keith did a funny whoop-whoop with the accelerator and came to a stop as the men sauntered over.

“Hey,
thong miao,
” the Asian guy said.

“Fuck you, too,” Keith said evenly.

“You better be stone cool, you welching cunt,” the other one said.

Luisa had never heard a man called a cunt before. It seemed weird. The Asian man pulled back a cowboy vest to show that he had a big black automatic pistol in his waist. Looking at the pistol made Luisa feel sleepy.

“I can get plenty of guns, dipshit,” Keith said.

“If this place had deer,” the other said languidly, looking over the beach houses, “they'd put out a cocaine saltlick.”

“We get deer off the hills. I got your money right here.” He tossed them a fat roll of bills held by a rubber band and waited while they flipped through it.

“You're my absolute picture of a big time operator, Tweak,” Keith said, “just the cat's hairball. Next time leave the muscle home, or you can do business with my whole crew of angry spades.”

“Next time, be on time, jerkoff. Levine waits for no man.” They got into their Porsche, started it noisily and zipped away without looking back into traffic, causing a pickup truck on the highway to fishtail and honk.

He took her inside and told her to hang out or fix herself some food or whatever, while he did some work in the back of the house. There was a deck over the water that was just stupendous, and she opened the rolling glass window and went out to watch the waves for a long time. They made her feel good, as if in time they might just wear away everything she didn't like about the world. The rising and falling roar was immensely soothing. The sun finally went down into a line of cloud over the water, with lights coming on in a few tall buildings down along the curved coastline, probably Santa Monica.

After a while, he opened the sliding door to say he had to go out, and he'd be gone until late. When it got too cold to stay outside looking at the lights, she came in and watched a huge flat screen TV for a while. But there was nothing on she liked, and the videos lying around were all porn and chop-socki, which didn't interest her, so she went into her nest and went back to reading.

She was asleep on the white leather sofa when he came back. He was on something, his eyes flitting around restlessly, but he took her hand and hauled her back to a huge bed in the back room. She undressed and let him do what he wanted to her because that was the way it worked, and she may as well not have been there while he bonked away. Just before he came, he broke a little glass tube under his nose and sniffed something and cried out. Then he rolled off and sighed.

“Kid, wake me up with your mouth at nine.” And then he was snoring like a cartoon.

Dear Diary,

It's so hard to have a love affair with one of these hell-bent types. I had such longings & hopes for this man & me but he did me wrong almost at once. I slept & wanted to be taken off to some magical place where everybody was nice but even in my dream the men were mean & asked for things from me all the time. They would make fun of me when I got lost in this big city & I didnt know the words they used. I think Keith was one of them.

My crime was I didn't wake Keith up early enough for him, as he said to, & he was very mad & as punishment he tore my book in two that I was reading & threw both halfs off the porch onto the sand. It didn't matter that I had set out a bowl & the cereal for him & made coffee. He wasnt nice to me one minute until he needed me to get in the car. My heart is cracked & I feel so dejected & alone again. Help me, Diary.

SEVEN

A Little Hotbed of Tranquility

The rear fender of the bicycle had fins hacked off an old Cadillac, bullet taillights and all, and they were lashed on crudely with wire and sticking out diagonally. The little trailer platform behind rode low between what looked like blue plastic hot wheels, and on the trailer stood the object that his eye had lit upon before all the rest—a brightly painted five- foot tall Virgin of Guadalupe, complete with her full body golden aura. The old Latino in charge was pedaling his mistress hard up the slight incline. It seemed a lot of weight to be hauling around, physically and metaphysically.

“
Buenas días, Virgen,
” Jack Liffey offered out his car window as the statue's fixed eyes passed fleetingly over him. There were probably far more appropriate salutations, but he hadn't learned them yet.

A radio hung off the handlebars playing loud
rancheras,
some sad complaint about lost love, the Latino equivalent of country and western.

He could practically have walked to the police substation from home, but he wanted to go on to the Valley to make another stab at finding Little Deer. He was there because Sgt. Padilla had left him a phone message that morning to come in and look at some mug shots.

Padilla himself wasn't visible as Jack Liffey entered, but a younger uniformed officer stood at a table dropping an assortment of items into plastic baggies and storing them in a carton—a watch, lidless mustard jar, a hearing aid, a glass globe with a snowman in it. He gave the snowglobe a good joggle to watch it snow before storing it away.

“Is Sgt. Padilla around?” Jack Liffey asked.

The officer nodded over his shoulder. He had taken the snowglobe back out of its baggie and was shaking it again. Undoubtedly, he had never seen
Citizen Kane.

“Liffey! Back here.”

Padilla was in a barren interrogation room, tidying up what looked like several pages out of a family photo album. The sleeves were stiff and opaque brown with cut-out windows that showed only faces, presumably to cover any captions and conceal names.

“Have a seat. I'll be ready for you in a minute. How are you and our Gloria getting along?”

Now that he was publicly living with a cop, Jack Liffey recognized that maybe they all thought of him as part of the extended cop family. Perhaps it would be appropriate to be a trifle friendlier to all lawmen than he usually was, but in this particular case he was still having trouble figuring out the man's attitude. Anyway, he knew Gloria's and his relationship was their own business.

“Just great,” he answered.

“No you're not. Nobody gets along great with Ramirez.”

He remembered the way he'd put it to Chris Johnson the day before and decided to try it again. “Our relationship is teething. We'll be okay.”

The cop brought his eyes up to look at him without moving his head. “Suit yourself. How's your Spanish? I hear you're doing a course at City.”

Jack Liffey was a little disturbed to be under so much observation. It was as if the entire LAPD and their loved ones made up a small gossipy town. “Mi espagnol es
muy
shitty. Can you believe I wasted my time taking Latin in high school? So now I can talk to very old priests and pharmacists.”

Sgt. Padilla scowled. “Why the hell did you do that?”

“All the college prep kids did back then. I don't know, it was a survival of the old classical education days, Greek and Latin, or maybe we were afraid to go into the Spanish classes and compete with all those native speakers.” Racism might have had a bit to do with it too, he thought, but he wasn't about to mention that.

“You'd have found out a lot of those kids named Sanchez didn't speak Spanish so good. They could talk about going to
el churcho
in their
carro,
but that was about it. Some of these
ckolos
get a real shock when they do down to TJ and get laughed at.”

“Es una lingua hermosa,”
Jack Liffey said diplomatically. “I'm only doing three hours a week, so it's slow. I guess I know just enough to get myself in trouble.”

“Well, here's a phrase for you.
Estirar la pata.
Literally, it means stretch the paw. It's about the same as saying kick the bucket. That's where you're gonna end up if you're not careful with these guys.”

He tossed three sleeves across the table, each with about a dozen mug shots.

“I eliminated a lot of unlikely bangers, guys who live in Compton or Riverside. But these fit your description.”

Jack Liffey saw him immediately, on the first sheet, but didn't let on. Padilla had obviously chosen all the ones with unusual mustaches, droopy Pancho Villas, pointy imperials, bushy shrubs hanging over the lip, mustaches with goatees, and several other T-mustaches like his man.

He kept on talking to Padilla aimlessly while he looked the photos over, as if scrutinizing closely. “Did you choose to work in this division?”

“I grew up in San Antonio, but I like this part of L.A. It's got history. You know, the White Fence gang has been here since 1920?”

“You didn't have gangs in Texas?”

“Oh, sure, but it wasn't the same. L.A. is the gang capital of the universe, and we're exporting to every country in Latin America now. The blacks are colonizing Kansas and Ohio with little sets of Bloods and Crips, and Mara Salvatrucha controls El Salvador.”

“It's drugs.”

“Sure it is. But you tell me the secret to stopping drugs.”

“Jobs would help.” He tried to push the sleeve up against the photo a bit to see if there was a name or address associated with the photo, but the stiff cardboard wouldn't budge. “I've narrowed it to five. Can you arrange a lineup so I could see them in person?”

“Point them out.”

He choose all the T-mustaches, and one that was almost the same with a blunt imperial. Padilla put Post-its on the photos he pointed to.

“I'll see what I can do. We'll have to do it over at Hollenbeck. They have a lineup room with a one-way.”

“Thanks.”

“How's your kid doing?”

“She'll make it. She's tough, but she has to wear a shit-bag on her side for a while, and no one her age is going to like that.”

“Beats
estirar la pata,
man.”

“You said it.”

He realized he hadn't heard from Chris Johnson for some reason, so he stopped to call from a pay phone at a gas station on the edge of Boyle Heights. Functioning pay phones were getting harder and harder to find, but he couldn't really afford a cell.

“Dude, is that really a pay phone?”

“Sure.”

“Hold on.”

Jack Liffey heard a little symphony of electronic sounds, and then the noise broke off abruptly as his three quarters chimed down into the coin return slot.

“I don't think I want to know how you did that.”

“You don't. I left a message a while ago on your home machine. It took me longer than I thought because one of those nude model outfits actually turns their computers off most of the time. You can't beat that for a firewall. I'm afraid there's no record on your kid or anybody like her in the last two weeks, I'm sorry.”

A huge high SUV, with tire wells like bomb shelters, pulled alongside the phone and throbbed away as the driver gave him the evil eye. Probably waiting for a drug call.

“Could you do another hunt? Don't tax yourself, but there was a porn star a few years back called Little Deer. I think she was a Sioux.”

“Yeah, a real beauty. She did some high quality stuff at the tail end of that era when they still shot on film.”

“You heard of her?”

“You probably don't even know who Bettie Page is, do you?”

“Nope, but Betty Boop and I used to hang out.”

The driver in the tall SUV looked at his watch ostentatiously, gave Jack Liffey the finger, and then abruptly gusted away.

“Tsk, tsk. A guy in your position should keep up on the popular culture.”

“That's why I've got people like you and Mike Lewis to keep me briefed. I can concentrate on Derrida and Baudrillard instead of P. Diddy.”

“Okay, okay. You want an address for Little Deer, if she's still in town?”

“That's the idea.”

“Consider it done. Hey, Jack. What's the only mammal in all creation that can't jump, can't ever lift itself off the surface of the earth?”

“A roadkill possum.”

“Very funny. The elephant. I saw it in one of the kids' books. They just don't have the muscle to boost all that weight.”

“Bye, Chris.”

He brought the Miata to a screeching stop in front of the Lovey-Dove building at about 10:30 and reached across her to push the door open. “Don't get too used to this job, kid. You're destined for bigger things. If you ever feel the need to strap up and tuck a nice ladysize piece in that little purse, protect yourself, let me know.” Now Keith seemed to be being nice to her again.

“No thanks.”

“Never know what creeps hang around this biz. Here.” He stuck a yellow Dilaudid tablet in her hand. “Takes the edge off and gets you happied up for work. See you this evening. Don't believe everything those cunts in there tell you. Half of them are going downhill fast.”

She got out, and he switched his attention away instantly, speed-dialing a cell call as he drove out of the lot. She'd always been sensitive to the way a man behaved in those moments when he left her. She wanted her boyfriends to look back once, wave, acknowledge her somehow. But with all Keith's other deficiencies, this tiny offense hardly mattered.

It was an old stucco house with blacked-out windows right next to a mini-mall that contained a dry cleaners, a tattoo parlor, and a doughnut shop. She had a few dollars and thought of going over for coffee and a doughnut in peace and quiet, but she remembered there was free coffee inside. Then she thought of just walking off, taking a bus as far as her money would carry her, and looking for work again. Her dreams about Keith had been rudely disspelled, as she had told her diary that morning. But she didn't even have a change of clothes, which were all back at his beach house.

Funny how much easier it usually was just to go along with guys, she thought. She wondered if she ran into some guy about to shoot her in the head if she'd just smile and let him do it. Time to be a grownup, Taboots honey, and take a little charge of your life.

The plastic plaque on the door said
Lovey-Dove: Authorized Access Only.
She stepped in and immediately heard the sound of the keyboards and a soft-voiced cursing from the back. She turned left towards the kitchen. One of the girls, a light-skinned black girl, overweight and over made-up, was refilling a coffee mug that had a cross on it with little rays coming out and said
In Case of Rapture, Catch this Cup.

“Hi,” Luisa said.

“You sure got yo'self banker's hours, hon.”

She shrugged. “I got no car. Keith's in charge. For now.”

“You best get that transmogrified soon as you can. First he be turning you out for Jap business fairs and a little throw-in fucking and then he'sa want you on the danger games thing. Don't be doing that, if you know what's good fo you. I gotta get back.”

“Thanks.” The woman left and Luisa sniffed the pot, stale and without chicory, so she gave up on the coffee. She hid the Dilaudid tab in the cupboard behind a big bottle of generic aspirin. Then she found her black skimpies from yesterday in the changing room, but it took a lot of staring at them before she decided to put them on.

It was a nondescript office building in Northridge, and the hand-lettered sign on the door might have been an allusion to the big earthquake of 1994. But then again it might not:
If this room's a-rockin', don't come knockin'.

There was an official nameplate, too, like something cut out with a woodburner kit by a kid, that said
Adult Entertainment Coalition
and
Emergency Committee for Free Speech.
Jack Liffey knocked once and went straight in. Here there was a receptionist, with more blond hair than a Swedish circus and a scoop-cut frilly blouse that hinted at breasts bigger than his head. She had a few piercings, but mostly in the normal places—ears and the side of a nostril—at least as far as he could see. He thought involuntarily of other places he'd found studs and rings and bars.
What you don't see can't hurt you,
he decided,
as long as you keep not seeing it.
Thank God Gloria stayed with the earlobes.

He decided to go for broke. “My name is Jack Liffey. I'm a detective.” He showed her the phony badge and wallet he'd got through the mail from the World Wisdom College of East Orange, New Jersey. “I'd like to speak to whoever's in charge.”

“That'd be Mr. Wingfoot Peace. Could I inform him of the nature of your business?”

“Not unless you're clairvoyant.”

She wrinkled up her brow but seemed to decide to let it remain a mystery. She depressed an old-fashioned intercom lever. “Mr. Peace, I believe there's a detective here to see you.”

There was a grunt and a grudged burst of static. A tiny voice seemed to say; “Don't tip over the outhouse.”

“He means, wait a sec,” she explained. She winked. “He might have been asleep just a wee. He's got to put his nose on.”

She didn't explain this, and he didn't ask. “Have you been working here long?”

“About a month. They promised I can move on to the Vegas office where they run the awards show.”

“I saw a picture of that award the other day. What do they call it?”

“The Eros. It's got a little boy with a little pee-pee on him.”

“But all in good taste.”

“I should think so.” She winked again. She'd do fine in Vegas, he thought, a city where subtlety was not highly valued. She had a kind of radiance, though, that made up for a lot, and she seemed quite content with who she was.