The Concrete River (22 page)

He felt a wave of affection toward the large rump in the tight black skirt that was bent over in front of him, but he refrained from patting it as he went past.

“I didn't try to put nothing away, just get it up.”

“Thanks. This is above and beyond the call.”

“You ever find out what happened to that woman?”

For just an instant he wondered whether someone had set her to asking. This is what it meant to cross the line, he thought: there was no longer any trust, no longer peace. He took off the shoulder holster, then he hunted around and found the
Oxford Companion to English Literature
and put the .45 inside.

“I think it had to do with gambling and guys with Italian names. I'll never be able to touch them.”

“They did this mess, too?”

“Probably.”

“And your ankles?”

It took him only an instant. “Nah. That was clumsiness. I've always had weak ankles.” Don't beat it to death, he thought. Just let it lie. He figured he ought to get a rag off the mop cart and make a show of helping, so he hobbled to the door.

“You're not going to do nothing?”

“I can't fight Al Capone.”

From the landing he saw the car pull up below. It was one of the Cahuenga cop cars with the beige stripe, the designer police straight out of the barrio.

Even foreshortened down there he recognized Zuniga and Millan as they got out. Lt. Zuniga looked up and saw him. The big cop raised a hand overhead and made a little arcing stab motion that seemed to be telling him to stay put.

“Marlena, I think I've got guests.”

She planted the string mop in the pail and looked over the railing.

“They're cops,” he said.

“Catch me later,
querido
. I gotta sort the mail.” She kissed his cheek and her voice got husky. “I wanna rub a part of you against Brown Betty.”

That gave him a little charge, but he didn't have time to think about it. Lt. Zuniga came up first, eyeing Marlena suspiciously as he passed. Sgt. Millan was puffing badly after only the first flight, halted on the landing with his face going florid.

They went in and Lt. Zuniga didn't seem surprised.

“Things are bit messy just now,” Jack Liffey said. He thought of asking why they had left their jurisdiction, but they would tell him, or they wouldn't.

“I hear a couple guys from Vegas did this.” Zuniga prowled around, poking at the piles of papers and folders. “It's a definite rumor,” he added. “You've come to be a real rock in our shoe on this Beltran matter.”

The brown eyes rested on him thoughtfully. Sgt. Millan came in at last and sat in the stiff chair, trying to catch his breath. Jack Liffey wondered if Cahuenga P.D. required a physical for requalifying. Millan would never make it.

“You got those uh-oh eyes,” Zuniga said.

“It's just my normal sense of remorse at life.”

“I hear you shot up their car pretty good. It's amazing how much of this stuff is just plain dis getting out of hand. They come in and disrespect you and you got to go over and dis them back. Life is getting to be like the McCoys and the Whatevers.”

“Don't tell me you're gonna bust me for assassinating a couple of radial tires?”

Lt. Zuniga shrugged. “Nobody ever signed a complaint. A secretary at a mortgage broker gave a pretty good description of you, though.”

“I did it, sure. It was a .38 I took off one of the kids, and I just blew my cool. Afterward I threw it in the river. You're right, those guys got in my face, and then I had to get in theirs. It was stupid, but luckily that was the end of it. It's their turn to come after me, and they haven't.”

Lt. Zuniga just stared. Sgt. Millan finally caught his breath and came up straight in the chair. “What a line of shit. We know you were at the dairy. And we know you're the one that capped that cowboy asshole.”

“What?”

“Nice try, not bad,” Millan said. “Surprise is a little more open mouth, though, more eyebrows, loosen up your hands. You been watchin’ too much Clint Eastwood, with all that
under
play.” Millan sat back and cocked his head. “You ever see the one, he takes over a whole fuckin’ Montana town, jumps their women, makes ‘em come across with new clothes, then makes ‘em paint the whole place red, the whole town? Never cracks a smile. That's what I call chutzpah.”

“
High Plains Drifter
,” Jack Liffey said. He wasn't sure Millan would pass the IQ test on the re-up, either.

“Sure, whatever.” Sgt. Millan seemed to catch a look from his partner and wound down.

“We know the Cowboy was a scumbag,” Lt. Zuniga said. “Probably killed Mrs. Beltran, probably would of got away with it. And that dope-dealer's Beemer deserves whatever wrecking it gets, no trouble there. What hurts us is the way you made so much
disarray
. Christ on a crutch, how you had the stomach for it. The human body is the temple of the spirit, you know. Looks like you cut the Cowboy's head open with a pair of pinking shears.”

“What?” Jack Liffey felt a chill.

“That was better,” Sgt. Millan put in, then subsided when the lieutenant glared at him.

“What'd you think, we're too stupid to get you if you cut him open and retrieve your bullets? That just disses
us
, you know? We got the best case-clear record on major crimes in the east county. Besides you forgot the slug in the two-by-four in the wall, hardly hit him. Must have gone right through the fleshy part of the neck. Marks on it are real clear.”

Jack Liffey said nothing. Had Butera actually dug the spent bullets out of his partner's head? It was a gruesome angle he hadn't figured at all.

“You're under arrest for murder, Mr. Liffey.”

His mind ran a mile a minute while they were explaining his rights and handcuffing him and poking around the office. He hadn't been so clever after all.

“My piece is in that big blue book,” he said. “You'll want to check that. And the overalls with all the blood on them are in my car.”

A hand closed on his upper arm, harder than necessary. “Don't be a wise guy. It's not worth it. We want permission to look around your house.”

“Only if you'll cut me loose right away if you don't find anything.”

“I guess we get a warrant.”

*

There was no comfortable way to sit in the car with his hands cuffed behind him. He pulled his wrists off center and watched neutrally out the window.

“El-tee, you see that episode of
Cops
last night?” Sgt. Millan asked. Lt. Zuniga was driving. “The one they stop the guy and he stands there, grabs his Johnson like some colored rapper and gets in their face. They bleep a whole fifteen seconds of his mouth. Somewhere in Kansas, I think.”

“Nah. I don't watch it any more.”

They came to a stop behind a clot of cars filling a residential street. Lt. Zuniga honked once. Something was going on in front of a house.

“There's like this cutaway. Another car arrives or something and when they're back, the guy's gone through a whole attitude adjustment, he's real pleasant to everybody, only he's got blood on his lip.” He laughed. “Man, I'd like to see the stuff they cut out.”

“You got to know they edit the shit out of it.”

“Yeah, the people hit the cops, but the cops never hit the people.”

Lt. Zuniga honked harder and craned his neck. Finally the oncoming lane cleared so he could pull around. Then he slammed on the brakes. Between stopped cars, Jack Liffey could see a Jeep Cherokee with its doors open up on the lawn, a big guy with a hacksaw engaged in cutting the station wagon in two. He was already through the roof and making headway on the rocker panel under the rear door. The hacksaw made a terrible noise.

“What the hell…?”

Lt. Zuniga got out and called to the hacksaw man. “Hey, partner, you got the paper on that car?”

The guy looked up, his eyes inflamed. “Who the fuck wants to know?”

“Police,” Lt. Zuniga said mildly.

“I paid
cash
this useless sonabitch,
cash
up front, and three times it stops in the fuckin’ middle of the freeway, jams up the brakes, turns on all the alarms and horns and leaves me there with my thumb up my ass and people pointing at me, and the dealership won't do nothing, say they can't find nothing wrong—”

“Go right ahead, sir. It's your property.
The rest of you move out!
”

He climbed back in the car.

“Out of our jurisdiction anyway.”

The hacksaw noise started in again. Zuniga gave a little squirt of his siren as he drove past, but nobody seemed to be clearing away.

At last Jack Liffey's mind settled enough to look at his situation calmly. He was lucky they'd found the third bullet. Nothing had changed, really. All he had to do was make sure Al Butera knew the cops had it, and that he still wasn't off the hook, despite all his unpleasant surgery.

“You think the world's getting worse?” Sgt. Millan said. “Stuff like that, I dunno. Everybody's angry, everybody's got a
grievance
they can't put their finger on. I mean, hell, I got a house and two cars and a boat and
I
feel that way. It's like some
disease
of anger settled over us, coast to coast.”

He looked around at Jack Liffey, as if just remembering he was there. “Citizen like this, looks calm on the surface but he's a mass of raw nerves. Ain't you?”

“You guys get your hair cut by the Marines down in Pendleton?”

Sgt. Millan glared, then laughed suddenly. “See what I mean? It's off the high side.”

For a moment Jack Liffey wondered if Millan was right. It seemed a sure bet that the world was in decline, but maybe the sense of decay was just an illusion, no different from all those fine hopes of the 1950s that things were getting better and better all the time, just motoring smoothly up the on-ramp of History. Some things got better and some got worse and it was a kind of megalomania to think there was an overall pattern. All you had was your way of judging each thing. You couldn't let go of that.

They interrogated him for hours in a barren little room and he stuck to the story he and Eleanor had come up with. She'd fallen into the channel one night, and he had hurt himself dragging her out. Beyond that, he'd never been to the dairy and he hadn't seen the cowboy and his pal after shooting up their car. It wasn't too hard as long as he resisted the urge to embellish or give them a little lip. Curiously, things had become disconnected in his head and made it all easier. He had come to feel that the core of the crime was digging the bullets out of the cowboy's head, and since he hadn't done that, he could work up a little indignation at his innocence.

They insisted on driving him across town and making him walk through the dairy, apparently working on some theory from Police Science 101 about criminals confessing when they had to confront the scene of their crime. Then he was forced to watch as they turned his apartment upside down. There was nothing illegal there, but he hated watching them put their hands on everything. They turned the sofa upside down and prodded into it with what looked like knitting needles. They popped open the air conditioner that he'd never used. Took the grill off the bathroom vent fan. Unrolled all his socks and fondled his underwear. It felt like a massive violation.

Everything was left in a mess, and finally they threatened him again, half-heartedly, and drove off. He'd never actually been booked. It had all been a con to scare him.

It didn't even make him angry, his thoughts were so dulled and ponderous. Passion had gone out of him. Would it leak back in through Eleanor? That's probably what she meant to him, a kind of access to whatever it was he had lost somewhere. He longed to see her.

But now he had to let Squinty Butera know that the cops had the third bullet. How? He remembered the note from his office door, with the letter S or maybe a snake and a phone number. It seemed like weeks ago, but it had only been three days. He went through the mess of his condo looking for the note, took over an hour making the mess worse, then trooped back to his office and dug methodically down through Marlena's tidying. He found it at last, a yellow Post-it stuck to an unpaid phone bill that must have been near the phone when he called, another mark of letting himself get distracted. He went to a phone booth outside a 7-Eleven.

“Yeah?” said a voice darkly, after eight rings. It wasn't Butera. A truck rumbled past and he waited for the noise to fade down.

“This is a message for the guy with the squint.”

“Nobody like that here.”

“Look, we're way past that. This is as straightforward as it's gonna get. The third one went into the wall and the police have it. The deal stands. Bye-bye now.” He had no taste for trading threats so he hung up. He waited, staring at his trembling hand on the receiver. He wondered how long he was going to have to watch his back.

A battered Crown Victoria with Sonora plates was backed up on the lawn between the courts, all its doors open, and the whole neighborhood was helping empty out House B. There was a pyramid of cartons behind the car, and the big furniture was at the curb. Two men were lashing the kitchen table into a pickup and an old woman clutched an armful of dresses and scurried away as if someone might ask for them back.

Everything in Jack Liffey's life seemed to be mounded up haphazardly—the contents of his office, his condo, and now the last will and testament of Consuela Beltran. Senora Schuler stood over the cartons, selecting items to jigsaw into the crowded rear seat, a small brown determined woman building something to last. There was no reason, he thought, that an Indian woman packing a horse and travois for a cross-country migration should appear any more courageous or dignified.

Tony and his friends lounged by a Chevy that had been chopped and lowered into a platinum teardrop. Two older boys sat inside the car, and Tony's homemade bar bells stuck out of the trunk.

“T-Bell,” Jack Liffey called.

“Hey, Mr. Liffey.” The boy sauntered across the grass.

“Where you going?”

“Mexico,” he said glumly. “Grandma taking me to her place in Hermosillo.”