Leave It to Me (15 page)

We sat with our whiskies, I on Larry’s only chair, Larry on an ammo crate. He started on his stories again. Some I’d heard before, but I heard them differently that night; I heard them as Muzak in the museum of needs and loss.

He told the story of the time he’d come across a codger sleeping in his hooch, and shot him six times in the head because you never know when Charlie’s dead or just playing dead. We’d warned them; we’d told them to clear out. We’d told them this was big-time pacification. And the story of the old gal fishing in a canal, just a line in the water coming out from under a broad hat, and he’d figured where her head had to be, and he’d let her have it.

You can never be sure, never get careless: that was Larry’s motto. It was also the tragedy of the loco. You kill someone doing what you do all the time, like sleeping, or what you used to do, like fishing, or what you want to do, like beating off—he took out a teenaged boy once—and you can never do it again. Larry could be rolling in proteins, fishing off the shallows, but every time he saw a fisherman the big, round peasant hat bobbed and teased, daring him to line up its center like a bull’s-eye. And if Larry could line up, so could someone else. I learned the lesson Larry was teaching.
Things are out there
. The war Ham had protested wasn’t the war that Larry had fought.

“How about those sleepy pills you offered?”

“I have a better idea,” Larry said. He pulled me up off the chair without the back. “Wanna dance?” He didn’t
ask it as a question. We stumbled around the room in a clumsy foxtrot a couple of times.

“Not tonight,” I said.

He loosened his grip. “Let’s have a kiss then.” He pressed my face into his.

“Not tonight, Larry.”

“Sumbitch!” But he let go of me.

On the Seconal, I got a great deal.

Ham and Larry. Larry and Ham. I spent a lot of time with each of them, because I wanted to. It wasn’t about sex, and it wasn’t about self-discovery as it had been with Frankie. Frankie’d looked exotic, but acted familiar. Ham and Larry were harder for me to read. They were the true exotics, coming of age as they’d done in contrary times. Larry’d napalmed villages; Ham’d impresarioed love-ins. And Bio-Mom? She’d embroiled herself and me in messy mysteries.

Like Ham and Larry, she would be in her fifties now. She must have started out romantic, must have floated into the sixties in a haze of sex, drugs and the sanctity of rebellion. Then the war had snuck up on her as it had on Larry and Ham, an apocalypse segregating hawks from doves, cynics from idealists, setting up areas where women couldn’t follow. Vietnam had plucked a slow, shy kid from a Central Valley farm and provided him paranoia and cheap arms. Peace had coarsened a draft resister to deal maker on the minibudget Bay Area film circuit. We know how our men had reacted. Vietnam had been their central experience—you couldn’t escape their blasted faces on the
streets—they’d coped or they’d been gutted. War had blessed them with terrible clarity.

But what about the women? What about that flower fräulein, Bio-Mom? Should I envy the mother who had put her bad karma behind her in an Indian prison, dumped her bastard child on Hindi-speaking nuns and moved on? She’d done what’d felt good, what’d felt right at the time, and consequences be damned.

For her and Ham as much as for Larry, Vietnam ended on the roof of the U. S. Embassy in Saigon. Scramble into choppers, then pull up the ladders! Teach the Statue of Liberty to catch up to speed!

But what about us, Vietnam’s war-bastards and democracy’s love children? We’re still coping with what they did, what they saw, what they salvaged, what they mangled and dumped on that Saigon rooftop that maniacal afternoon.

I quit my cocktail-waitressing job in midshift the night Fred Pointer came into the club looking as though he’d wandered in from a Mylanta ad.

Fred ordered a glass of house red and shoved an airmail envelope in my face. I didn’t grab the envelope from him. The more nowhere a country, the prettier its stamps: been-everywhere Frankie’d taught me that. The stamps of dingy, deforested, microscopic hills with the Indian postmark on Fred’s envelope weren’t exotic, which meant India saw itself as a world power. That cheered me. I concentrated on the stamps. Saplings sprouted out of the brown hills. I felt the universe was communicating messages of hope to me.

I brought Fred his glass of Cabernet Sauvignon from the bar, and sidled in beside him on the banquette. Beth was tending bar that night. She aimed one of her go-slow-on-the-fraternization frowns at us. “Cheers.” I raised an imaginary glass.

Fred stretched his legs out under the table. The legs were very long. The Gucci loafers stuck way out into the aisle. “Are those Mona Lisas on your socks?” I asked by way of small talk.

Fred peered at his own feet, amazed. He lifted them a foot off the floor. “Aliens have begun a slow takeover of my body,” he said.

“Don’t do this to yourself, Fred.”

“I don’t have to. Jess is doing it for me.”

“Jealousy doesn’t suit you. I’m not giving Ham a hard time about …”

I stopped myself before I said, “Jess.” What happened at Vito’s between them, the circumstances that made me leave Ham on the dance floor and cadge a ride home with Fred that night, whatever mean streak made me even consider punishing Ham and Jess by seducing Fred, those feelings were unworthy of me. I wasn’t a victim and I wouldn’t become a codependent. Jesus, Mama DiMartino used to say, made a cornerstone of the very stone that builders had the dumbness to reject. Matthew 21: 22:
The one who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; and it will crush anyone on whom it falls
. I needed Fred’s help. Which meant I had to stop his world from caving in on him.

Kiki, the waitress I was closest to, scowled as she hurried past our table with a tray of margaritas.
Get the slob to buy expensive cocktails or get back to your station
. I flashed Kiki inscrutability.

“Remember that night at Vito’s?” Fred asked.

“The night of the beginning of your misery?”

“Remember what I said that night?”

“You said a lot of things. We both did. We spilled our guts, we philosophized about black holes and peripheries—”

He stopped me. “About gumshoeing.”

I didn’t remember.

“Facts are facts.” He tapped the edge of the table with the envelope. “Accuracy doesn’t mean shit. You have to ask the right questions.”

“And you’ve asked them?” I held my hand out for the envelope. I had a right to know.

“Cops and hacks ask, What does it mean, where’s the payoff?”

“And what does the smart-ass PI ask?”

“Fred Pointer’s smart, not smart-ass. Fred doesn’t solve mysteries; he unsolves them. Every fucking case is a moral quest.”

I snatched the envelope—
a thing
, as Larry’d say—from Fred. Larry’s vision was like a plague, and I’d caught it. We were both
thing-dodgers
now. We’d be lost without
things
.

The sender of this
thing
had used a manual typewriter. The individual letters in the words didn’t quite line up right. Some keys had been hit harder than others. The
F
for “Fred” and the
V
for “Vulture” for instance, were darker than the
P
and the
o
in “Pointer.” The only manual typewriters I’d ever seen were on reruns of sitcoms Mama’d watched. It wasn’t about detection and deduction. I was taking my own advice to Fred from that Vito’s night, and working the peripheries. The center’s a sinkhole.

In the envelope was more dirt the Bombay investigator had dug up and euphemistically titled:
Report of Continuing Investigation
.

Subsequent to the unauthorized examination of the orphanage files, a thorough search was conducted into court
documents of Jaipur, Rajasthan State, India, of the period 1968 through 1977, specifically into those documents that pertained to the adjudication of criminal cases involving Caucasian tourists of the female sex. A further narrowing of this category was made in terms of location of crime. Only two apprehended Caucasian females were found to have been convicted of, or indicted for, unlawful activities in Ranipur, Laxmipur and Panagad villages. These villages are situated within a morning’s bus ride from Devigaon, that site to which reference was made by Hari,
chowkidar
.

Speculation has no place in this report. Nevertheless, it should be borne in mind that a top-level inquiry is presently being mounted by the opposition party in the
Lok Sabha
house of the Indian Parliament regarding the death in prison last month of the Eurasian male felon against whom the said Caucasian female had deposed in court and which deposition had led to the conviction and the sentencing of the deceased.

“I’m sorry to bring lousy news,” Fred mumbled.

I said, “I didn’t know him, Fred. I don’t have a right to be upset.”

Bio-Dad had no liens on my heart. The strangler’s palms caressed my throat, fingers tightened and twisted. Dry coughs and cries escaped.

“How did he die? Does your man in Bombay say anything about what he died of?”

Fred buried his head in his hands. “I don’t know.”

“He was
my
father, Fred. I’m not mourning him. He didn’t earn the right to be mourned.”

True despair has halogen wattage. Fred’s face could have lit up Doomsday. “The two Caucasian females in the report? One of them’s someone I know.”

A redhead in a sequined vintage prom dress veered wide of Fred’s Guccis on her way to the restroom. The redhead had perfected the Marilyn Monroe hip swivel. I watched her vanish into the men’s room.

“What! You know my mother?”

“There’s a fifty-fifty chance that I know your mother.”

“Okay. Who is she?”

“Devi—or whatever your name is—you’re just an upstate girl who got in over her head. And you’re dragging us all into it …” He let it drop. Then, just as suddenly after clearing his throat, he became all business. I sat primly, all client.

“Your mother could be Jess DuPree of this city, currently doing million-dollar-plus business as CEO of a hot author-escorting agency. I showed Jess a copy of a courtroom transcript Rajeev sent, and she said, ‘Sweetdick, go fuck the Golden Gate, will you?’ ”

In the nightmare I could ease only with Loco Larry’s barbiturates, Jess’s ghost stole my lithe, living body, then coaxed it to dive off the bridge and drown itself. In life, I
was
the ghost; I’d already haunted a whole village.

Deforested hills can be replanted. Vision is will. I quit the club job before my shift was over so I could focus on Getting Jess.

The next morning I worked on Ham. He invited me on a two-day location shoot somewhere in the redwoods. Up there in the Sierras, I sprung my politically correct scheme on him; once Berkeley, always Berkeley. “It must be the mountains, but it’s just dawned on me. I’m taking work away from aliens. You don’t have to speak English to wait tables at the club.”

He closed his eyes, inhaled the wholesome woodsy smells, and went through a list of people with businesses other than restaurants and nightclubs who owed him big. Jess DuPree wasn’t on that list. I pushed my case as a safe driver with
mucho
charm and
muy mucho
personality. Jess’s agency, I reminded him, was always looking for drivers at short notice.

“But what do you know about escorting authors?”

“They’re writers, not authors, Ham! They’re meat puppets with autographing pens. Escorting’s a simple pickup and delivery system.”

“Don’t tell Jess you’re planning to model yourself on the UPS lady.”

Ham called Jess on his cell phone. I was hired before I got back to the city.