The Concrete River (11 page)

“This is the one you want.” He offered a sheet of paper from his breast pocket. “The rest of the faxes were about buying costumes for Egyptian slave girls or scheduling performers or escrow papers for some guy who was buying his house on company time.”

Liffey flattened out the paper on the work bench. It was outgoing to some vice president of the National Tobacco Company in Raleigh.

Dave, you're misinterpreting the thrust of our proposal. We would see that you buy the building for the figure you mentioned, outright. It's a sale-leaseback-buyback. It's a listed building, official county landmark, so the Title applies and you get tax credits for what you pay us, for preservation of historic landmarks. Ask your bean counters. You could extend that easily enough to much of your Western operations, but that's up to you. We would lease it back year by year and then at the end of twenty-five years buy it back out of bonds with a balloon payment. You're out nothing at all really and you can leverage the tax breaks so the feds and the state end up paying at both ends. And you get the corporate image massage, your name up in marble in the lobby and on the programs. How long would it take to absorb the up-front cost with the tax credits? You get paid back twice over, at the worst. Have your people think it over. Don.

Jack Liffey read it three times. “Let me get this straight. A tobacco company back east buys an opera house in L.A. and puts its name on it. Because the building is a landmark, they can count their cost as some sort of charitable contribution to the people of the nation and take it off their taxes.”

“Bravo,” Chris Johnson said. “In addition to which, the city spends twenty-five years of lease fees paying them back the money they already wrote off their taxes, and then the city pays them again in a lump sum with bonds our grandchildren pay for.”

“Is this legal?”

“Legal-schmegal. The real corruption is always the stuff that's built-in. It's all a bit academic, though, if there's no opera house.” He squatted down to sight along the timber on the back of the sofa. “Warped beyond hope.”

“Tell you what,” Jack Liffey said, fascinated by the naked audacity of the deal. “My Concord is a genuine landmark, not made any more. You give me a thousand bucks for it, and I'll bet you get a great big tax break for preserving Americana. I'll lease it back for ten bucks a month and then my grandchildren will pay you millions, millions. Sounds good to me.”

“But there's no opera house, Jack. It's just a rumor.”

“What seems to matter is that someone believes it.” Peel the onion, he thought. “But, really, do cigarette companies kill to keep their tax breaks? There's something else in all this.”

“You and I will never know for sure much of anything where big money is concerned. At least that's the conventional wisdom, the legend of our time. It's probably not true. The rich are probably even stupider and more confused than we are.”

“Speak for yourself. They couldn't be more confused than I am. All I've got going for me is pig-headedness.”

“Help me turn this over.”

They lifted the sofa carcass and set it upside down. Johnson began stripping the muslin off the bottom.

“I'd like to look through the other faxes.”

“I didn't print them. Okay, I'm tired of the sofa.” He took Liffey back into the house and fired up one of the terminals.

Jack Liffey paged down the screen through fax after fax for the next forty-five minutes. As Johnson had suggested, they didn't twang his curiosity much. Incoming were ticket orders, wheedling scheduling queries from visiting sopranos, memos requesting more details about costumes and business purchases, contentious demands by someone named Witold Mochnacki for small changes in a musical score, sketches of hyper-modern scenery for some new opera, and one request for escrow papers. Outgoing there were lease orders for thirty British police uniforms, an order to Germany for an HO scale toy train, pages of music, one lyric sheet, sketches of the same hyper-modern scenery with heavy black lines suggesting changes, and one set of escrow papers.

And then he found it, so short it stood out like a zebra in Pershing Square.
We'd best tell the N that we shall better any offer Houston makes for T
. It was a month old. The recipient was in New York, but the name was illegible. The sender was W.O. in the opera society here, and the syntax was British.

Could “the N” be anything but the Netherlands? And T was Ter Braak. Houston again. Guys who dressed like cowboys came from Houston. Had they been in a bidding war for the impresario? Did opera societies bump each other off to get new bankable stars?

“Do you think somebody would kill to see an opera?” Liffey said.

“Only if he really wanted to,” Johnson said.

He got a woman on the phone who spoke only Spanish. It wasn't Senora Schuler, and it took her a long time to comprehend his pronunciation of “Tony,
por favor
.”

“Is this Tony?”

“Yeah.”

“This is Jack Liffey. Don't you ever go to school?”

“Abuela says I can stay off another day.”

“Did you find out anything about that car?”

“My homies seen it, man. Just like you said, all blacked out. They seen it a lot in front of a place on Heliotrope. Around four o'clock when men get off and get a couple beers.”

“What's the name of the place?”

“I don't know. I gotta show you.”

“Describe it.”

“I gotta show you.”

He guessed the boy had his own agenda working. Maybe he wanted to see what would happen when Liffey caught up with them, or he just wanted to ride around in a detective's car. All Chicano kids wanted to be seen in a beat-up ’79 Concord.

“Will you be home if I come by at three-thirty?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“If you see the car, stay away from it.”

“Sure. We see you, Mr. Liffey.”

We
? he wondered. He looked around Johnson's computer room, all the beige on beige machines, heard techno music looping softly on a CD in another room, heard Johnson whistling to himself, and picked up the coffee cup that said
Total Quality Management means jobs
. The moment seemed so clean and exact. What did that mean? Was he about to experience something momentous? Or was there just a pocket of brain cells dedicated to alertness that was misfiring randomly?

“Got any death rayguns?” he called out.

Johnson peered in with a soldering iron in his hand.

“I could probably rig a laser to burn through someone, but you'd have to shoot him first to get him to stand still.”

“That's too bad. I have a feeling I'm going to need an edge.”

*

He called the answering machine he'd got going again from the mess in his office and got three messages.

“Jack, I was hoping I didn't have to make this call. You're two payments behind now. It'll break Maeve's heart if I cut you off completely, but my lawyer says I can't let you see her at all until you catch up. I'm sorry. You know how lawyers are.”

Blame the lawyer. It was like Kathy to find some roundabout way of softening the rough edges, not altogether a bad trait. It just left you punching air once in a while. Not for the first time, he thought of his marriage as a hat that had blown off while he was looking out over a canyon. He'd made a grab for it at the time, but then it was just gone, dwindling out of sight, leaving a bit of hat feel round his forehead but even that fading fast. It was the kind of thing that could still make you feel guilty about being broke, though.

“Jack, Mike. I think you might consider Houston, the city of no one's dreams. You know, the home of the Houston Ship Channel—the world's longest flammable body of water. There's some damn strange stuff I found about money passing that way. I'm still working on it.”

Houston again. Opera societies didn't wage war. It was just too crazy.

“This is Arturo Castro, Jr. Call me when you're free.”

Art
uro
. He called, but Castro was out. Liffey wondered if he'd found out anything more about the cowboy and his pal. He'd like any margin he could get.

*

The Southern California Opera Society was up in the Bradbury Building where they did all the advertising shoots with the slim models in weird dresses posed arrogantly in front of the wrought iron elevator cages. There was a light well down the middle of the building, surrounded by open walks and gingerbread railings on every floor, like something from New Orleans, but a lot of the decorative wall tiles had fallen out and been replaced with plain tiles. The marble floor was worn and scarred, too.

Inside the opera society's glass doors, however, all was well. Pastels, Berber carpet, a hypermodern reception desk and a hypermodern receptionist with spiked blond hair and a big blue ice diamond.

“I must have turned left at Vegas,” he said.

“Huh?”

“Nothing. I'm here to see Richard Cheuse. Did I pronounce it right?”

“Rhymes with juice. Who can I say you are?”

“Jack Liffey. Rhymes with spiffy.”

She closed one eye, as if trying to decide if he was making fun of her.

“It's okay. I'm Irish. We sing ballads instead of opera.”

She fiddled with her intercom. “Dick, I've got a Mr. Spiffy to see you.”

A balding little man came from somewhere in the interior. “Mr. Spiffy, did you call me earlier?”

Liffey nodded. He didn't bother correcting him.

“Come.”

The top of the man's head was iridescent under the hall lights, like an oil slick, but the rest of him was a West Hollywood entrepreneur, a suit in one of those Armani beiges and shoes that even Jack Liffey could tell were worth any three pairs of his own. He walked with a stiff little roll as if his muscles were ready for anything.

The office was dim, almost dark. “Light crushes things,” he offered. “I like the quiet and I like the cool.” His eyes wouldn't stay in one place. They roved, as if hunting out the danger that lurked somewhere.

“You wanted to talk to me about what?”

On the phone Liffey had said it was about some remaining real estate investments in Cahuenga. He didn't have much leverage, but Senora Beltran's sheaf of papers had given him that much.

“A woman was murdered in Cahuenga.” Jack Liffey sat in an uncomfortable violet sling chair. “Perhaps you read about it.”

“I don't really keep up with current events in that part of town.”

“She was in an organization that was opposed to the opera society buying up Samson Rubber.”

“That's ancient history. The building is a marvelous piece of vernacular architecture, but hardly suitable for an opera house.” There was a soft thumping sound in the wall, probably just the emanations of an old high-rise, but Cheuse's eyes snapped fiercely to the spot on the wall where the sound might have spawned.

“She also came into possession of a lot of papers from your files.”

“Ah.” He didn't go on, but the wall had lost its fascination.

“Do I make you jumpy, Mr. Cheuse?”

He shook his head, and Liffey had an inspiration. “What was your MOS?”

The searchlight of his eyes passed back to Liffey. “I was a Ranger, Third Special Forces Group”—he offered a fleeting chilly smile—“a fighting soldier from the sky.
Air
borne. I had
enthusiasm
for the mission, I got
with
the program.” His fingers drummed the desk. “You know what I remember most, I remember walking through a village, all the kids lined up, going huh-lo, huh-lo, very soft and spooky, like doves.”

“I remember being scared.”

“Oh, yes, and
that
.”

“I'm just an E-4 tech, but this woman and her son meant something to me. Do you have any idea what's going on in Cahuenga? And why you donated so much money to Slow Growth?”

It had been his biggest card and it didn't seem to be working. Cheuse rocked back comfortably. “I presume it was because we would have benefited. Slow Growth wanted an arts complex east of the river. Your friend was probably associated with the people who prefer slums to art. There are days when I do, too. But if I could make it a sequoia grove, I would prefer that to anything.”

“You like trees.”

“Don't you? Trees don't talk. I can never get enough quiet. You know, that fear—it wasn't just an extension of things you'd felt before. It was something so big and pure it was new, like stumbling onto love for the first time.”

“I bet you haven't talked like that since the first weeks you got back.”

“No. I wasn't a forest vet, but I could have been. I was on that path for a few days, hid out in a tent in Kings Canyon up by the Middle Fork, but it was too much melodrama. The great weapon against even that sort of pain is a sense of absurdity.”

Liffey could hear, faintly, the crash of garbage cans in an alley, and then the beeping as a truck backed up. The sounds were distant, like listening to model railroad versions of real things. Perhaps that was what created the unreality of the whole interview.

“I don't want to disturb your equanimity,” Liffey said. “I only have one more question. Why did you drop the plans for the opera house?”

He wasn't sure but it looked like disquiet in the man's eyes before they smoothed with calculation again, the surface of a pond ruffled as a rock passed through.

“The building wasn't suitable, and it was a county cultural monument so redoing it would have been too much bureaucratic trouble.”

“It wasn't too much trouble for an expensive architectural firm to draw up plans. And a whole raft of bean counters were busy calculating the tax breaks.”

The surface rippled again, and the spreading tremor of suspense passed out to the walls before dissipating as an extra flutter of ambient heat in the room.

“Mr. Liffey.” He did seem to know the right name, after all. The words snapped all of a sudden like a twig in two hands. “You don't know enough to constitute a threat to anyone. You'd better go now.”

*

Dark clouds were building up again to the north, but the sky was still sunny. For some reason there seemed to be a convocation of old Chevys along Slauson and he had to park a block from the Catholic Liberation house. It wasn't his day. His eye was drawn to a weedy lot by three skinny dogs nosing at something, and when he looked closer he saw it was the carcass of a fourth dog. The skin shifted and flexed where the dogs tore gingerly at the tissue, as if trying to avoid certain parts. It was not something you could watch. He didn't know dogs lacked the elementary civility to avoid eating their own kind. They were as bad as people after all.