The Concrete River (13 page)

An unmarked cop car was parked in front of the boy's court. He wondered if the detectives had been sent to arrest the car vandals, but he doubted the Cowboy worked that way.

He stopped up the street and let the boys off. They'd seen the police, too, and they evaporated into the afternoon without a trace. Lieutenant Zuniga stood behind a screen door at the cottage next door to the Beltrans'. He had been talking to someone inside, but now he caught sight of the white Concord. The policeman pointed straight at him.

Jack Liffey got out and waited where he was. He wouldn't make it easy. The policeman lumbered down the walk and across the street like a tug heading for the next freighter. He stopped a few feet away as if sizing up where to moor.

“Is this where you pull my coat down and start punching my kidneys?”

To Liffey's surprise, the big policeman smiled, a tiny smile, almost against his will.

“Let's go for a walk.”

Liffey was astonished, but he didn't show it. He followed along the sidewalk and ducked away from a pointy yucca that went for his eyes.

“You seem like an okay guy, I guess. As far as that goes.”

“My mom thought so.”

They went quiet as they passed a heavyset woman tending three small children on her lawn, and Liffey realized the two of them strolling down the Cahuenga back street must have stood out like zebras in a supermarket. One child dropped a toy and started wailing. Far away there was a squeal of brakes and then a crash, but Lt. Zuniga didn't seem to notice.

“In a world of very bad things, okay guys can get hurt, whatever their moms think of them.”

Jack Liffey felt a little shock along his spine. This wasn't a lovers' stroll after all. He wondered if the man had spoken to the Culver City police.

“You been in the Big Nam, I believe. Served your country.”

“Something like that.”

“You like your tour?”

“It had its moments.”

“You weren't in combat, though, were you?”

“Only by accident a couple times.”

“You know, more Hispanics died in the front lines than anybody. Per proportion and all.”

“I heard something like that.” They passed a little evangelical church with its name hand-lettered sloppily on a signboard. A building-fund thermometer was in the front, the red stuck down toward the bottom and fading. It didn't look like they were going to make it.

“Do you like the neighborhood?”

“Sure, it's great.”

“They are lots of good ethical people living here who don't have a goddam clue about what really goes on in this town. They get up in the morning and get all the kids off to school and drive away in their fifteen-year-old junkers to their jobs in some bucket shop owned by some asshole from Brentwood. They work hard and mind their own business and when they come home the TV is always on to the noisy sitcoms from Argentina on the Spanish cable and they shop at the swap meet on Atlantic and never take a paper clip that doesn't belong to them. They
are
good people.”

“I wouldn't know about that.”

“I know about it very much. I grew up here, when Hispanics still had to sit in back and the school counselors put us all in auto body shop.”

“You sound bitter.”

“It gives you a certain perspective on good and evil.”

“I see.”

“No, you don't. You don't see shit.” The policeman stopped in front of a weedy lot with a charred foundation. Something had burned down and never been rebuilt.

“Have it your way.”

He nodded at the foundation. “Twenty years ago the L.A. SWAT team chased some Brown Berets into this house and shot them out. Didn't even have jurisdiction here, said it was hot pursuit or something. On the local TV live, just like the SLA. The place was so shot up it sat here empty for years until some crackheads torched it by accident.”

Jack Liffey was getting tired of veiled threats, if that was what they were. “Do all these object lessons have some kind of point?”

The policeman seemed to be chewing his cud. “I take it you've worked out that Senora Beltran discovered some things she wasn't supposed to know.”

“The thought occurred to me.”

“I hope you don't take this wrong. Do you believe that it's possible to know things and not be compromised?”

“Sure, why not?”

“I think I know what she discovered, but it doesn't do me any good at all and it wouldn't do you any good.”

“Ah.”

For the first time he noticed there was a derelict air raid siren on the block. A brown metal canister stuck up on a pole with the paint peeling off. It must have been twenty years since any of them had been tested, forlorn sentinels for a mad war that had never come. He remembered the Friday ten a.m. tests and then the surprise school drop drills, ducking your head between your knees and covering with your arms. He didn't think it had affected him much, but how could you tell? Maybe down deep.

“Is this advice or a threat?”

“Time changes things,” the policeman said heavily. “Bad things go on and sometimes it's best if people get away with them. Then it's just fate or bad luck. You don't have to blame anyone, you don't have to answer why. The town has changed a lot and I had nothing to do with it. It'll go on changing and there's nothing we can do about it. Leave it alone.”

Jack Liffey figured he already had enough people mad at him. “Well, then, I guess I better leave it alone.”

*

The early evening had an edge to it. He realized he couldn't go home or to his office. The Cowboy would get him either place sooner or later. It made him feel restless and angry, like wanting to hit someone. He parked six blocks from the Catholic Liberation house, up an alley in the deep shadows. The rear of the stucco bungalow where he parked had most of its windows broken and plywood over the back door, probably a crack house. They weren't all good hard-working citizens in Cahuenga. What had been a plank fence at the alley had fallen in and lay flat. He noticed flickering light in one of the windows only five feet away and couldn't resist.

Inside, a candle was guttering on a saucer, and the walls were fantastically covered with graffiti. A boy no more than sixteen was on his knees administering a syringe under the tongue of a girl with long stringy dirty hair. Where it wouldn't show, Jack Liffey thought. He shuddered and turned away just as the girl made a sound, like a cry of pleasure. He had a loathing of needles, something purely psychological about foreign objects penetrating his body, and he knew, no matter how low he sank, he would never be a drug addict, not if it had to be injected.

The Liberation youth in the Pendleton shirt was in the front room, moistening a mountain of envelopes ten at a time. He looked up at Jack Liffey resentfully, like a child suspecting a sibling of getting special privileges.

“I thought the Catholic Church had banks of eager women to do that,” Jack Liffey said.

“This is the peewee league. She's praying in the Quiet Room.” He nodded at the hall.

He found a door off the hall that said
The Quiet Room
, and decided that, all in all, the place was just a little too literal-minded for him. He knocked very softly twice and then went in. A few banks of folding chairs faced an altar with a small Jesus-laden crucifix where Eleanor Ong knelt with her arms dangling at her sides. She wore jeans that seemed to be painted on her hips and a navy blue leotard that made her look like an exercise video. He wished she'd go back to the gypsy skirts.

She made a shush gesture softly and returned to her praying, so he sat in the back row. There was very little to do besides look at the glistening stretchy fabric across her back and wonder how hard it would be to get off. He thought of Marlena, and once again wondered at how making love to one woman could make him want to touch another, and he didn't feel bad about it at all. He felt tenderness toward them both. It was also odd how just looking at a woman was such a physical pleasure, not even contemplating sex, just looking. That was something women would never understand.

For a moment his mind had drifted so much in the quiet that his consciousness went blank and he wondered with a jolt where he was. Maybe that was what meditation did to you. The room seemed more Quaker than Catholic. To be Catholic, he figured there ought to be incense, gold ornament, mumbo-jumbo.

“Amen,” she said suddenly, and stood up. “Hi, Jack. You look upset today.”

That worried him. “Do you really think there's some big consciousness up there listening to you?”

“You
are
angry.”

“No, it's a question.”

She shrugged. “I'm not sure. It'd be a hell of a thing to guess wrong, wouldn't it?”

He chuckled. “You know what Voltaire said on his deathbed, when they asked him if he was ready,
now
, to renounce the devil and all his works?”

She shook her head.

“‘This is a helluva time to be making new enemies.’”

It was her turn to smile. Even a tiny smile lit her up like a lighthouse.

“I think it's time we went to dinner,” he said.

She considered for a moment. It's not the impossible dream. I'll tell Jonathan.”

“Be careful. He's already mooning around.”

“He's very vulnerable right now. He left his family and dropped out of college and he's only been with us a few months.”

“Why'd he do that?”

She hesitated. “At the beginning of his junior year his dad gave him a Lucien Picard watch, some gold thing that cost thousands.”

“I can see how that would bust him up.”

“He gave him the exact same watch for high school graduation.”

Jack Liffey wondered what it would feel like to have a watch worth more than $29.95. And he wondered if he'd have dropped out of Long Beach State if his father had given him the same Timex two years running, the one with the little window that showed the date. He didn't say any of this because he saw being a wiseass would probably upset Eleanor Ong and he didn't want her to cancel the dinner date.

She came back in a minute, with a pink sweater over the breathtaking leotard and a fringed leather shoulder bag. She certainly hadn't spent her life studying high fashion.

“You get to start fresh with me,” he said. “Since you dropped the sister business, you can be Lenore, or Nora, or Ellie, or Lena. Take your pick.”

“I think I'll stick with Eleanor for now. It's a poor thing but mine own.”

“Actually,” he said gently, “it's an ill-favored thing, but mine own.”

“Really?”

“I have a very good memory. Is there a back door to the house? I'll explain later, but it would be a very good idea to go out the back.”

She studied him for a moment. “You're serious.”

“Oh, yeah.”

She led him through the kitchen to an all-glass room that was full of sealed paper bags that looked like they contained second-hand clothing. The room was probably intolerable in summer. They shifted a dozen bags to get at the door, and she had to try out several keys on her giant plastic fob before finding the right one. He looked over her shoulder to read the fob:
Our Lady of the Plastic Rose
. He wondered where
that
came from.

He touched her back briefly going out the door and it felt great, lots of muscle tone. The alley was dark and something scurried away, driving her back against him for a second and that felt good, too. She hadn't recoiled from the touch.

“I knew a guy from New York,” he said. “Wouldn't walk under palm trees any more after I told him they had rats in them. I guess he was afraid of them jumping down into his hair or maybe just a sort of rain of rat droppings.”

“Is that true?”

“Sure. When I was a kid a lot of the palms along Paseo Del Mar had metal bands around to keep the rats from climbing. But, hell, rats have to live, too. The ecologists don't think of that a lot. Just the nice animals, like rabbits and dolphins.”

“Rats bite children in the projects,” she said.

“If they're as tough as Tony Beltran, good luck to the rats.”

She was silent for a moment as they walked, splashing a little where water still stood in the alley. “What do you think will happen to him?”

“I think he's a pretty good kid, but a lot could go wrong. Every kid out there has a dozen pieces of heavy artillery aimed at him. I can see ten places in my youth where I could have gone bad. Anybody with spirit could. The temptation to steal something you really wanted, a few friends going out drinking and driving, a fight where I could have hurt somebody bad. Of course, there was the time things really did go wrong.”

“What was that?”

“I'm still trying to work it out.”

“Were you married?”

“Yeah. I've got a daughter named Maeve, she's nine. She's sweet. Looks a little like you. If I start thinking about all the things that could happen to her, I get sick to my stomach.”

“People adapt, even to the bad things if you raise them right.”

“Spoken like a nun.”

She was silent for a time. “It wasn't all coddling. I've had my adapting, too, Mr. Liffey.”

“Mr. Liffey's my dad. I'm Jack.”

They were getting close to the car. “Wait here.” He didn't want her glancing into the crack house, but when he got to the car he noticed that the candle was out.

He caught her in the headlights and she looked like a blinded deer. He felt a desperate tenderness toward her, toward Maeve, toward Tony and his friends, toward everyone caught out in the rain of ratshit.

*

“Why did we go out the back?” she asked after the Thai waiter padded softly away.

“A couple guys have a feud with me. They know my car by now.”

“Does it have something to do with Connie's death?”

“I wish I knew. All I know is they pissed me off and then I pissed them off and they're not going to be kidding around any more.”

“Why did you?”

“It's a long story.”

“We have all night.”

He tried to read that comment, but couldn't. Perhaps she just meant all evening. There was a lot of red in the room, from paper lanterns and posters of Bangkok and big red menus and the glow made her skin look absolutely magnificent. “I can stay polite only so long under pressure. It's like an itch. You know, bad manners can be a kind of freedom sometimes.”