The Manipulated (Joe Portugal Mysteries) (4 page)

A big guy in a Kings jersey and Raiders cap stepped out in front of me. I crashed into him, bounced off, tripped over a little kid, hit the ground.

“What the fuck you think you’re doin’?” the guy said.

A fair question. Helping a friend? Or simply running around mindlessly?

The kid was crying. His mother was calling me a son of a bitch.

“Sorry,” I said, to anyone and everyone. I got up, took a step. Didn’t go anywhere. The iron grip on my arm saw to that. “Can you please let the fuck go of my arm?”

“Don’t get smart with me.”

“And watch your language,” the mother contributed.

Jesus H.… Mike was probably halfway to San Pedro.

I bent back one of the guy’s fingers. He yelped, let go, took a step back. Right into the kid and his mother. All three went down in a clump. More wailing. I got moving.

After five or six more sections a stitch in my side slowed me to a walk. I passed one of the TVs they have mounted up high, so you can follow the game in the concession lines, and heard that the Rangers had scored. A massive grumble arose. A wave of disappointed fans erupted into the concourse.

I kept going. Wherever Mike was headed, it had something to do with what he’d seen in the binoculars. The spot was almost directly opposite us. I checked the section numbers, did a calculation, walked a few more yards. Then slipped through one of the entryways.

Nearly everyone was on their way out, except a few diehards staring numbly at the ice. The PA guy was announcing the three stars of the game. I looked across the way, tried to spot our box. Thought I had it, worked out the geometry. Where Mike had been looking should have been right … about …

There. Two sections away.

He was standing in the aisle, a couple of rows up from the ice. He scanned his immediate area, and upward toward the exit. The binoculars were gone. His hands clenched and unclenched. He started up the aisle.

I met him halfway. “Hey,” I said.

He kept going. “Hey.”

“What’s happening?”

He said nothing, continuing toward the exit. When he reached the walkway that circles the lower stands, he stopped, again looking around.

“Tell me what’s going on,” I said.

He surveyed the scene again, then turned to me. His eyes were wide. “Sitting there in the second row,” he said. “It was her.”

I walked with him as he wandered the arena, and when it was virtually empty, in the concourse, and when that was nearly deserted, in a couple of parking lots. I didn’t say anything, other than, “Watch it,” when he was about to step off the curb in front of a car.

Finally he stopped, standing among a slowly clearing mass of vehicles. “You think I’m crazy,” he said.

I shrugged. “What are the chances?”

“It was her.”

“Mike.” I moved closer. “You were a hundred yards away.”

“The binocs are really powerful. It was her.”

I didn’t bother mentioning that somewhere in his mad dash he’d lost those powerful binoculars.

“I mean, her hair was different. But it was her.”

“It was someone who looked like her.”

“How do you know? You’ve never seen her.”

“True enough. But answer me this. If it was her—if she somehow got out of China after four-plus years and has returned to L.A.—why didn’t you know about it?”

“I don’t know. Maybe she lost her memory.”

“You really believe that?”

He turned away, seeming to study the oversized paintings of Shaq and Kobe and another African-American giant that graced the side of a nearby building.

“Mike?”

He took a couple of deep breaths. “Old guy like me shouldn’t be running around like that.”

“Answer the question.”

“I saw her. I know I did.” His attention swung back to me. “Help me find her.”

“If she was here, she’s probably—”

“She was here.”

“
If
she was here, she’s on the freeway by now.”

“I know. I didn’t mean, help me find her here. I meant, help me find out where she is.”

“But—”

“You’re good at that kind of thing. You found Toby Bonner.”

I had, in the version he heard. “Actually, I didn’t.”

“You said—”

“I know what I said.”

“Anyway, it doesn’t matter. You’re good at looking.”

“Mike—”

“Come on, man. Do a friend a favor.”

This, I thought, could lead to nothing but trouble. And trouble wasn’t supposed to be my business.

I looked in his eyes. They reminded me of a basset hound I once knew. “Okay, man,” I said. “I’ll help you look.”

Gina was asleep when I got in, and I had to get up early in the morning to shoot the herpes commercial, so I didn’t get to tell her about the excitement at Staples.

Or, of course, about anything else. It was getting easier by the day to believe I’d imagined the scene at Dennis Lennox’s place.

The commercial shoot was way up I-5, off the Grapevine in a meadow only yards from land scalded during the big fires in October. It consisted of shots of three women and three men, individually at the beginning before they knew about Lidovec, in couples after they’d made the wonderful discovery. There was a pretty young white couple, a pretty young black couple, and an older pair, to cover the audience who’d gotten herpes back in the free love days.

My fake wife was named Roberta Salkind. I’d worked with her before. She was one of those people who join each new human-potential movement, convinced they’ve finally found the thing that will turn their lives around. Her latest discovery was something called Ambiance. As far as I could tell it wasn’t any different from est or Lifespring or Scientology or any of the others. It was led, she told me, by a man named Ike Sunemori, and to hear her tell it he was God’s gift to the human race. I got this picture of a bald old general in my head, and after that I took her even less seriously. Finally I got fed up and asked, if Ambiance was turning her life around like she said, why was she shooting a commercial for herpes medicine? Which really didn’t make much sense, but it shut her up long enough for me to escape. I wandered over to the two younger actors and listened to them dissect the Lakers.

It was nearly bedtime when I recounted Mike’s sighting to Gina.

“Not this again,” she said. “It’s different.”

“How?”

I was sure it was, but when I considered the two situations, they sounded a lot alike. Toby Bonner hadn’t been seen in years. Neither had Donna Lennox, though in her case the number of years was far fewer. Nobody knew if Toby was even alive. Same with Donna. Toby’d supposedly been sighted around L.A. As of approximately twenty-four hours ago, so had Donna.

“And you never found Toby,” Gina said. She was the only one who knew this. I’d admitted it to Mike outside Staples, but I doubted he’d remember it, the state he was in. And if he did I could just say he misunderstood me. As far as everyone else who cared was concerned, I’d seen Toby’s remains.

“What harm can it do to look? I’ll just poke around a little, satisfy Mike that he was wrong, be done with it.”

She adjusted one of the pillows propping her up in bed. “You’ll call Burns, no doubt.” Alberta Burns was a police detective I’d known since the first of my friends was murdered. She’d just left the force, after getting shot by a gangbanger made her reevaluate her life. But she still had contacts.

“I hadn’t thought about exactly what I was going to do, but yes, that would be an excellent place to start.”

“And you’ll ask her to find out who has those seats.”

“How come you’re coming up with all the ideas here? It sounds like you’re more into this hunting-down-the-missing stuff than I am.”

“Just helping my little hubby.”

I went in and brushed my teeth, came to bed, picked up the Jefferson Airplane biography I’d slowly been working my way through.

Gina looked over at me. “What’s going on with Ronnie?”she said.

Things whirled around in my guts. Finally I managed,“What do you mean?”

“I haven’t seen her in a while.”

My intestines ground to a halt. “She’s in Hawaii. Didn’t you know?”

“I thought that was next week.”

“It got moved up. I haven’t seen her since the party.”

“How was that, anyway? You never said anything.”

My perfect chance, right? If ever I was going to spill, this was the time, yes?

Evidently not.“It was okay. You know, one of those Hollywood things. I spent most of my time on the lawn getting loaded with Mike.”

“Think there’s any hope?”

“Hope?”

“You know. You. Me. Ronnie.”

Have I mentioned that Gina’s bisexual? This particular
ménage
had come up several times before. “Sometimes I think you’re serious about you-me-Ronnie.”

She took my hand. “You know I’m not. But if I were unattached, I’d be all over her like flies on honey.”

“That’s flies on shit. Honey is bees.”

“Whatever. Wouldn’t you? Oh, right. You think you’re her father figure. That nasty incest taboo. Has she ever actually said that? That she sees you as the father she never had?”

“No.”

“It’s probably just a fantasy of yours.”

Last chance, Portugal. Speak now, or forever hold your peace.

I put down my book. And turned off the light.“I’m going to sleep,” I said.

A couple of men were out back, working on our remodel. They had a radio going, a Spanish station, playing mariachi music. It was way too loud, but if that was the price I had to pay for a smidgen of progress, I was more than willing.

The first contractor we hired overcharged us, used miserable materials, and caused a gas leak that brought out the fire department. Then he threatened to sue us for non-payment. When we finally got r id of him—Gina knew someone at City Hall who put on pressure—we found another guy. Sweetest man in the world, came highly recommended, seemed to understand our concerns. For two weeks everything was perfect. Then people stopped showing up, and for the last two months it had been a constant game of will-they-won’t-they. We were considering firing the new guy too. But what guarantee did we have that anyone else would be better?

I endured the music until a quarter to ten, when I left for the library. I ran into Theta on the way out. She said Ronnie’d called, and they’d decided to extend the Hawaii shoot a couple of days. She’d be back on Friday.

When I reached the library I took a chair and sat staring at a computer screen. I’d been dragged kicking and screaming into the information age, finally making the grudging admission that using the Internet didn’t mean I was giving up all that was good and true about my life.

That didn’t mean I had to enjoy it.

I clicked and typed and found the Staples Center site. Went to the seating chart, printed it out, marked where the Lennox Productions box was and approximately where Mike thought he’d seen his long-lost wife. Then I got a page of contact information.

Next I went after Donna. Found a couple of references to her disappearance. Nothing I didn’t know. They mentioned DL Tea. I clicked my way to its website.

I drink tea because I don’t like the taste of coffee. Most of the time, whatever bags they happen to have at Trader Joe’s. I’d never visited the big wide wonderful world of loose tea. So the DL site was a revelation. I went to the Darjeelings because that was what was in my current TJ’s bags. They had fifteen of them. They compared them to apricot, cinnamon, and muscatel. They talked about the scent and the briskness and the fullness.

There were other black teas, and green, and white. But I went next to the oolongs. It was an oolong, Mike had said, that Donna was after when she vanished. Oolongs, I discovered, were partially fermented. Sure to come in handy if I ever went on
Jeopardy!

There were eight of them, four from Taiwan, three from mainland China, one Darjeeling oolong just to confuse me. I moved in on the mainland ones. Each had a Chinese name and an English one. Ti Kuan Yin, for instance, was Iron Goddess of Mercy. Was one of these the one Donna’d been after on the trip she never came back from?

I printed the oolong page and wandered some more. There were pages about tea history, preparation, equipment. I went back to the home page and spotted a link I hadn’t noticed. Donna Lennox. Our Founder.
Click
. Donna was a brunet, her hair to her shoulders, her eyes very dark. She was smiling like she had a secret, standing in front of a rack of copper-colored tins. The photo didn’t look like a portrait. The focus was soft, like it was a snapshot that should have ended up in a shoebox in Mike’s closet.

The text underneath didn’t address her disappearance. It was written so, if you didn’t know what had happened, you’d get the feeling she wasn’t around anymore. But you wouldn’t be sure.

I’d promised to help out at the Kawamura Conservatory, repotting plants that had outgrown their pots. This killed the rest of the morning, and I made it kill the afternoon too. Later Gina and I went to Red Moon for Vietnamese. When we got home Mike was on the machine. I didn’t have anything to tell him about what I’d found out or what I was going to do. But I did have a question. I called him and we worked over the seating chart and pinpointed the exact location he’d “seen” Donna. He said I was a good guy.

I hung up. Something was bothering me. That web page from the tea shop. If it had been a handsome studio portrait of Donna Lennox, I don’t think it would have come up. But that snapshot, taken in an unguarded moment, with Donna doing what she loved, expecting to go on doing it for who knew how many more years …

I’d picked up a copy of
National Geographic
because there was an article about plant life in Madagascar, a significant element in a couple of my murder escapades. Leafing through, I’d come across a piece on cosmology, replete with theories about the universe and how it started and how it would end. It said there might be an infinite number of universes, each varying from the next by one little event or condition …

Maybe there was one where Donna’s trip to China had gone exactly as planned. And maybe if I messed with the one I was in, somehow I’d screw up that other one and make things worse there.