Streets on Fire (7 page)

“Aha, Dada.” He was back, bare-chested now. Jack Liffey was relieved there were no nipple-rings. “That’s its birthplace in Zurich—I did a pilgrimage.”

“I’ve always had a soft spot for avant-gardes, but not a very big one,” Jack Liffey said.

The young man shrugged. “Without them, you’d still be square dancing and listening to cowboys yodeling.”

“Fair enough. Were you double-dating when Amilcar had his run-in with the bikers in Fontana?”

“Oh, yes. I think the whole incident has been overblown though. These Bone Losers are just local morons. They didn’t like seeing me and Jeff together any more than Ami and Sherry.”

“What actually happened?”

“Some insults from one of the guys sitting on a Harley with swastikas all over his arms, but they didn’t reckon on a thin black guy with a black belt. Ami got in his face and goaded him into swinging and then flattened him with one punch. The cops came and separated everybody and there was a lot of we’ll-meet-you-later-in-some-dark-alley swaggering. I hear one of the bikers had connections to the Fourth Reich Skinheads. Now
those
are guys that make your average biker look like a genius. If brains were shoes, they’d be naked all the way to their knees.”

“Pogo,” Jack Liffey said. The second reference to Pogo in two days.

“Actually, I think it was his pal Howland Owl. You know, when these Fourth Reich foreskinheads decided to go after prominent blacks in LA they sent bomb threats.” He laughed. “These guys were so out of touch, the only blacks they could think of were Rodney King and some forgotten rap singer. Imagine. Threatening to bomb poor Rodney King. These guys didn’t have a clue. I don’t think the Bone Losers even know where Claremont is.”

“So you don’t think they had a hand in the disappearance?”

“Nah. Life is never that obvious. I’d put my money on leprechauns first.”

“What is your theory?”

That slowed him right down. “How’s your water doing?”

“It’s doing fine.”

“Let’s stand on the balcony. This place is an oven.” They trooped outside. A half-dozen people were lying inert in the pool below or lying on chaises alongside it. Nothing in the world seemed to be moving in the oppressive air. “Okay, don’t overdo this. The weekend before they disappeared, he and Sher went home to South Central. He came back pretty pissed off.”

“How did his parents feel about Sherry?”

“Oh, man, they loved her, they had no trouble at all with inter-racial stuff. They’re saints, I mean it. You must have met his dad, a sharecropper’s kid who changed his life through the movement, a pal of John Lewis and Bob Moses. He left SNCC when Stokely started his Black Power stuff and refused to work with whites. Ami’s old man was the kind of guy makes you wonder whether there really is any need for irony in the world. He’s holy.”

Something was still unsaid. “So?”

“Amilcar came back pretty upset Sunday night. All he told me was, there’s some folks worse than the Nazis.”

“Do you think it was Umoja? Reverse racism?”

He shrugged. “I didn’t know his old homies. He’d sure run into something.”

“Did he have anything to do with drugs?”

David Phelps turned and glared at him. “Man, you’ve got the wrong idea. Everybody’s got
something
to do with drugs, but if you think he was the big mule for the Crips out here in Claremont, you’re crazy. He didn’t touch anything beyond a little weed, like everybody else.”

“I had to ask.”

“He was more political than drugged up. Do you know who his namesake was?”

“Amilcar Cabral? The African revolutionary. Probably his mom’s idea.”

“Uh-huh. From Guinea-Bissau. Luckily Cabral died young so he didn’t have to see his name tarnished by later events. Look just inside the door, it’s a poster Ami gave me.”

Jack Liffey stepped back into the blast of heat, and on a stub wall dividing the living room from a dining area there was a poster of a young African in guerrilla getup, with the legend:

TELL NO LIES. CLAIM NO EASY VICTORIES
!

—
AMILCAR CABRAL

“I don’t know what happened, Jackie. I can’t imagine somebody driving out here from LA to get Ami and Sherry, but something did happen in LA that weekend. That’s all I know.”

“Thanks for your help.”

He gave the young man his card. Thankfully, he still had a few of the old ones from before Marlena had printed them up with the big eyeball on them.

“If you do find him, man, give him a big kiss for me. But no tongue.”

*

The children huddled up close on the rec room sofa and he hugged one with each arm, immensely grateful that God had blessed him at his age. He had married late, choosing decent, quiet, loving and acquiescent Kelly Wade, almost twenty years younger than he was. She had borne him the decent family he knew he needed to ride out a lot of bad memories of Vietnam and two bad marriages. The commercial was still on so he opened his mouth and bellowed out:

In the eyes of a ranger,

The unsuspected stranger

Had better know the truth of wrong from right,

‘Cause the eyes of a ranger are upon you,

Anything you do, he’s gonna see.

When you’re in Texas, look behind you…

The kids perked up and joined in.

‘Cause that’s where the ranger’s gonna be.

“Cool, Daddy.”

And there they were, Cordell Walker and his loyal pal Jimmy Trivette, walking into a laundromat for some reason. It was a rerun but he couldn’t remember the plot. Somehow he’d gone into lecture mode and he couldn’t stop himself. “See how good they work together when they’re decent and Christian? It doesn’t matter they’re different races. One to one, it’s like that. An African American and a normal American can be partners and respect each other. It’s only in groups people start whining and go bad.”

“Uh-huh, daddy,” Ginny said, but her eyes were on the set, where Chuck Norris was high-kicking an evil-looking Latino in the face.

“Perry.” His wife stood in the doorway, and his irritation flashed for a moment.

“What is it? You know this is my favorite show.”

“I’m sorry, dear. There’s a phone.”

He picked up the cordless on the end table.

“Yeah?”

“K?”

“Uh-huh.” He went very still inside, the TV flashing right out of existence, as still as he had gone on long-range reconnaissance patrols thirty years earlier, at the point of balance, ready to
move
.

“The guy’s hired somebody, a detective.”

“Is he heading our way?”

“We don’t know yet.”

“Thanks. Keep me posted.” He hung up and set the phone down thoughtfully.

“I’m really sorry, dear. He sounded insistent.”

“It’s okay,” he said.

“I mean, you know I wouldn’t cut in on—”

“It’s
okay
, Kelly,
okay
.”

“Daddy, he’s
hurting
the Mescan.”

“The Mexican must deserve it,” he said absently. “Walker only hurts bad guys.”

“Listen to this! It’s da bomb!”

Mary Beth squatted cross-legged on the other side of the old pink 45rpm record player with its fat spindle. The Leary home on the suburban edge of Claremont had central air, so at least they were comfortable hanging out in Mary Beth’s bedroom.

On the turntable was “Mony Mony” by Tommy James and The Shondelles. Mary Beth had been slamming through a stack of her dad’s R&B 45s like “Silhouettes” and “96 Tears,” playing about thirty seconds of each one before getting bored and whacking down another one.

That restlessness made Maeve nervous too. It seemed to suggest that the girl had never felt comfortable in her life, had never let herself settle into a rhythm. Unease was woven into the whole fabric of her life, Maeve thought. She looked around. Her cousin had collected a number of things willy-nilly, just because she could afford them, without knowing or caring enough about any of them. There were rows of ignored dolls in national dress, bags of POGs, an elaborate Victorian dollhouse, even a trunk of Archie comic books—another hand-me-down from a father who had inherited the Chevy dealership in town from his own father.

Mary Beth’s dad, too, seemed to spend his time on restless, barren projects, staring at his computer, moving his money around from investment to investment, or exercising in a half-hearted way with the expensive equipment in the back yard. Mary Beth’s mother lolled on a chaise by the pool reading romance novels.

Out the full-length window, Tom Leary now held a set of light-looking barbells over his head, pumping away at great showoff speed for about thirty seconds. Then he stopped to rub his pot belly.

“I like this song,” Maeve said.

“Yeah.”

But it was gone, wrenched away to make room for “In the Still of the Night,” by the Five Satins.

Maeve was beginning to wonder if she’d made a bad mistake.
Three days
, she’d told her dad.
Come get me Saturday
. Of course, it might have been worse. She might have been forced to listen to Mary Beth’s new CDs. The girl’s tastes seemed to run to Top 40 bubblegum like ’N Sync, while Smashing Pumpkins was about as mainstream as Maeve’s listening ever got.

But then she got lucky. “I read a Nancy Drew the other day,” she offered casually.

Mary Beth just lit up. She bounced and boiled with enthusiasm. “Yo, Maeve, you’re gonna just
expire
when you see this!” She skittered across the room on her hands and knees like a startled spider and pulled open the doors of a walk-in closet to show off a free-standing bookcase. “I got Trixie Belden, the whole set!” she exclaimed. “And The Three Investigators. But this is best.” She pointed to the two bottom shelves. Maeve crawled over with her and plucked
The Secret of the Old Clock
off the shelf.

“While I’s done sowed all mah wild oats, I still sows a little rye now and den,” Maeve read aloud.

“Can you believe this?” It was good to find something Mary Beth actually cared about, and she figured she’d better appear more knowledgeable than she was if she wanted to use Nancy Drew as a lever.

“In the fifties they censored out the guns and the liquor and even the
coffee
,” Mary Beth said. “Look!” She flipped madly through another book to find a favorite passage.

“Have you ever thought you might want to be Nancy Drew?” Maeve essayed cautiously.

“I don’t think I’m brave enough, but maybe I could be her best friend Bess.”

“Oh, really?”

*

Coming back in on I-10, the 10, as people in LA said, the traffic slowed maddeningly into a snarl about El Monte, and eventually a line of fizzing flares funneled everyone into the far left lane. A gigantic sparrow the size of an elephant, evidently meant as a movie prop or some kind of advertising display, had got stuck under an overpass on its flatbed truck, the top of the bird’s papier-mâché head shredding a bit against the bridge. Several men stood around arguing and tugging on ropes, trying to extricate the bird. A family had piled out of a wrecked station wagon off to the side, and several kids were screaming at one another or bawling.

It was hotter than he ever remembered the city getting this time of year, and he had half a mind to take advantage of the stop-and-go to lean across the front seat and rip the plastic off the passenger side windows. It was only August, and the worst wasn’t usually until September.

Maybe the thing on the flatbed was meant to be a wren, he thought, as he inched up to it. It was hard to tell. He didn’t know very many birds once he’d exhausted the obvious ones like seagulls and owls.

As he’d left Claremont, he’d stopped at a Chevron station to call Bancroft Davis and ask him to arrange a meeting with Umoja, and he’d rung up a pal named Mike Lewis who lived in Pasadena. Mike had been home and willing to receive guests, allegedly hard at work on his next book. Mike was a social historian who’d been lionized after his first big book on LA, even got a MacArthur grant, but the next book had gone after the boosters and developers and they’d come back at him mercilessly, even yanking a university job he coveted.

Mike’s house was a pretty little bungalow overlooking the Arroyo Seco. Across the street, a crew of workmen with a small crane were excavating what appeared to be a statue of the Virgin buried in the yard. The beat-up old Buick was gone from Mike’s drive, in its place was a workaday new Toyota Celica. Jack Liffey could see he hadn’t gone extravagant with his three hundred grand from the MacArthur, but Mike had never cared much for machines or other possessions. As if to prove the point, he was visible in the kitchen window hammering hunt-and-peck at an old upright L.C. Smith typewriter, the sleeves of some loose white gown flapping away like mad.

“It’s me, Mike,” Jack Liffey called through the open window. “I’ll let myself in if there’s no dog.”

Mike Lewis beckoned. There was no dog, but in the front room there was a really stunning blonde in a white Arab djellaba that matched Mike’s. She sat cross-legged in front of a portable light table that was glowing up at her.

“Hi,” he said. “Mike waved me in.”

“That’s okay. I’m decent.”

Mike had slipped in under the civic radar to teach urban studies part time at an assortment of small art colleges. He’d collected quite an arty following among his students.

“You can say that again.”

She smiled. “I’m China Cho.” There was only the faintest suggestion of Asian features in her face. “Mike’s my teacher.”

“Jack Liffey. I guessed that.” He’d guessed a bit more. Mike had been married four times, and in fact they’d met because Mike’s wife number four had been a friend of Jack’s wife one. Mike always had a woman around somewhere. All colleges were steeped in hormones, and art schools were probably at the top of the charts in that department.

China Cho was arranging big two-by-two slides from a Rolleiflex or Hasselblad, so big that he could make them out pretty well standing above the lightboard. They showed bare breasts with ornate tattoos. Some were dragons, butterflies and flowers, one was a whole seascape of Japanesy waves, and another was with a helix of barbed wire. One breast with a painful-looking nipple ring seemed to be inscribed in Arabic, round and round.