The Orange Curtain (15 page)

“It sure is. Maybe we can trace all our lipstick commercials and romantic novels back to this medieval heresy.”

“That’s what’s so strange, isn’t it?”

“You read an awful lot, don’t you, Billy?”

“I try to. It’s what I’m good at.”

And then, Jack Liffey wasn’t there any more, just a sensation of Billy’s will to believe. He stared at the small irregular black stone on his desk. It was a nothing, really, found beside a dirt road in the Tustin Hills, just a simulacrum of an idea. He wasn’t even sure any more if he believed in the toadstone. The part of him that could believe in it seemed to have evaporated some time ago along with that first death that he had actually witnessed. In a way it had seemed a relief. The loss of that belief had taken a burden off him.

But now, after talking to Jack Liffey that morning at MediaPros, he no longer wanted not to believe. Perhaps belief was wriggling back to life inside him.

There was an image of the virgin. At the feet was a toadstone, indicating her victory over all evil and uncleanness.

—Murray’s
Handbook to English Counties
(1870)

As he pulled into the lot next to the mall, his eye went by chance away from the mall to a half dozen young Vietnamese men in black who stood with crossed arms guarding a storefront in a strip mall nearby, like Secret Service men waiting for the president to buy his wife some perfume. But this wasn’t a perfume shop, it was the Mekong Star Night Club, with big neon stars on the wall, discreetly back in the dogleg of the strip-mall. The black-clad young men bore a strong resemblance to the
Quan Sats
who had beat him up. He did a u-turn and their eyes followed his car as he drifted past and parked not far from them.

The leader with the pink eye wasn’t there, but two others sauntered in his direction. He headed for Tien’s office and then about-faced as if he’d forgot something at his car and caught them peering into his window. They didn’t know quite how to react as he came back. He got in the face of the nearest.

“Can I help you? I know it doesn’t look like much, but it’s a mean customer. You should see what happened to the other car.”

“You not supposed be here.”

“Are you fucking with me, small man?”

The second one stayed rooted in place but spoke harshly in Vietnamese, probably some curse or threat. Jack Liffey’s temper was right on the knife edge where it climbed whenever he ran into this kind of petty menacing.

“Ooo-tay,” Jack Liffey said. “Other-may ukers-fay an-cay lay-pay is-thay ame-gay, asshole. Catch that last word, did we?”

They turned and walked back toward their friends, and he found his hands wanting to strangle something. “Have a nice day, kids.”

The mall seemed strangely empty of shoppers as he crossed the entrance to get to Tien’s place. He’d expected a bit of hubbub at her office, too, but it was pretty quiet, the receptionist looking askance at his black eye for a moment as if contemplating some awkward fashion choice, and then sending him straight in.

“People shook up, stay home a lot,” Tien Joubert explained. Her eyes were red and wadded balls of Kleenex waited in ranks on her desk; she’d been crying. It seemed a bit out of character. She was wearing an elegant short skirt and a silk blouse with gold and green paramecia on it. “Many people frighten down deep now. Phuong really nice kid, but people see be
nice
no protection here. That the hard part of live in another country. You don’t know what to be scared of. You don’t know how to stay in good side of gods.”

“Those gang boys were out there guarding the night club.”

She nodded. “That they place. Owner pay for protection and time like this, he like to see it.”

“How did Phuong die?”

“She found in hills, like dead guys last week. Most Vietnam people here, this first time they even think of hills. Maybe the kids who ride around in their cars been in hills, but for most older people there only this mall and TV and all the house of family.”

She was distracted and she got up and looked at something in a small inlaid box on a shelf behind him. She came past him on her way back and stopped and touched his shoulder and then kissed his cheek very lightly, like a passing thought of a kiss. “I miss you. I scared and need comfort, too, Jack Liffey.”

A thrill went all the way through him and he grasped her arm reflexively and then made himself let go.

“You still not so sure,” she guessed.

“I’m still not so sure. How was Phuong killed?”

Tien sat down demurely and adjusted her skirt. “They say she was shot with a gun and not molest. All her clothes was okay.”

She shook her head and a tear trickled down her cheek. She could shift moods faster than he could keep up. “What kind of place eat up children like this? You think it wouldn’t be so hard for us, don’t you, huh? We all been in wartime and we see many friend and family die in war, but maybe that what make it so bad. We come ten thousand mile. We finally think we okay here and no more surprise dying, all finish, and we relax and learn new business and raise our family and learn to become American, and, boom, it all come back with no warn. This new American life more fragile than we think, and now we know it never never never gonna be okay. We kidding ourself. War is real state of world, not peace. She was
such
good kid, gonna
be
somebody.”

A scrape of real grief had entered her voice, and he couldn’t help himself. He went around the desk and she jumped up and he held her, pressing her small body hard against him. Her head only came to his chest, and he felt her shudder and sob against him. Her small arms went around him and hugged hard and she seemed to fit perfectly against him. He tried to imagine what the Vietnamese community had been through the last two or three decades, and he couldn’t get his mind around it. There should be a limit to the flexibility the world demanded of people.

“Can we eat now?” he suggested after a while, when she was just starting to turn the hug into something else. “I think it would be a good idea to get out of here and do something.”

“Okay, you. You go on and off like radio.”

“So do you, Tien. Only you change stations a lot, too.”

She tilted her head to think about it. “You right. I FM, AM, long wave, TV,
boom
. That how I keep going, keep head out of water, keep up business, help friends. Keep on move.
Pho ’92
a good restaurant.”

“Have they got
bun bo xao
?”

“Course. Let me fix my face.”

It was a dish of sauteed beef and noodles and it was the one Vietnamese dish he knew that had little or none of the
nuoc mam
fermented fish paste that was definitely an acquired taste. She turned away from him at the desk to pat something onto her cheeks in a little hand mirror.

“Is Mr. Minh too distraught to talk today?”

“You bet.”

“Maybe I’ll leave him a note. Sympathy.” He found himself talking telegraphically, like an unwitting caricature of her speech pattern, and he forced himself to stop it. It was probably a reflection of how commanding her presence was. Whatever else she meant to him, he liked being around her energy and her total focus, probably the way Loco perked up whenever his master came into the room, and if Jack Liffey had a tail he figured he’d probably be wagging it now, too. “I have to tell him I didn’t get very far, I’m afraid, but I’ll give Lt. Vo what I know before I quit.”

She whirled around in the chair. “You not quit.”

“It’s a police matter now, Tien. It’s not a lost kid any more. The cops don’t want amateurs getting in the way in a murder investigation. It’s not just an ordinary murder investigation either. It looks like a serial killer.”

“No no no no no. You got to help. These cop, a lost thing they will never find. You know the saying? You got to keep looking for bad guy that did this.”

“I’m afraid Orange County is going to be in the big leagues of the media circus for a while. Tom Brokaw is going to be standing in front of whatever landmarks you’ve got, Disneyland maybe, on the national news and dozens of L.A. TV reporters and lookie-loos from Riverside will be trampling over the place where they found the bodies and guys just out of the funny farm will be confessing they did it because God told them to and flying saucers are going to make a special appearance overhead and down in the Latino community people are going to be finding the face of the killer in the scorch patterns on tortillas. The cops would kill me for jumping into all that, because they know my face already.”

She shook her head, and he could see nothing was going to budge her. “You not want money? I got money. You quit Mr. Minh, I hire you twice as much. This free country to look and ask question.”

They argued off and on all the way through lunch, interrupted by servers and comments about pretty dresses that Tien noticed suddenly on other women and songs she recognized on the P.A., until she wore him down and he finally agreed to spend another day or two running down the one lead he still had, Mark Glassford. The money didn’t hurt, either. With it, he could get all the way out of arrears on his child support and see Maeve all he wanted.

As he was walking her back to her office, she said, “You my employee now. I want report this evening.”

His whole body tingled with the thought. “I’ll call it in.”

“Phone at home broke, you come,” she said quickly, and he laughed for a long time.

The first ominous sign was the fact that Lt. Vo didn’t call him into his office, but into what Jack Liffey recognized immediately as a felony interview room. A bare wood table, a videotape camera on a cheap tripod, pointed right at him and humming, and beside Vo was the second ominous sign, a hefty man with a round face and a buzz cut who looked like a Marine drill sergeant. This man wore a rumpled grey suit with a soup stain on it. Vo introduced him as Commander Something-or-other Margin, the head of the sheriff department’s Sagebrush Shooter team.

“We prefer to call it the Serial Killer Team,” he said icily. “Tell us about your black eye, Liffey.”

“That’s one of the things I came about.” He described the ambush in the parking lot and the leader of the gang, the man with the pink eye and one long tuft of cheek hair. Margin turned and glared at Lt. Vo, as if he were part of the gang.

“Don’t tell me you’ve got a lot of thugs here who look like that,” Margin insisted.

“That’s Thang Le. He sometimes calls himself Uncle Ho.”

“Uncle Ho?”

“He has no politics at all. It’s just guaranteed to enrage every elder in the community. His gang is called
Quan Sat
, short for body count. They’re into extortion and home invasions for jewelry and cash stuffed under the mattresses but I can’t prove it. No one will testify.”

“Could they have killed this girl?” Margin demanded. “Or could they be doing a copycat to conceal some other business.”

“I doubt it, either way.” Frank Vo looked at Jack Liffey. “But it sounds like
Quan Sat
think you suspect them.”

“How do you prove a negative? I told them I didn’t.” Actually, it sounded like Margin suspected Frank Vo, but there was no point pissing either of them off by pointing it out.

“What do you know, Liffey?”

He told them everything he knew about the
Quan Sats
and about the Industrial League and their mystery caller, offering his threats relating to the airport, and about visiting Tien Joubert, and he repeated his encounter with the younger kids with the checks cut into their hair. He told them, in fact, everything he knew about Orange County except MediaPros. It didn’t seem fair to turn Margin and the Serial Killer Team loose on Mark Glassford just because the young man had offered Phuong a kind word on the videotape. And poor skittish Billy Gudger. If Margin as much as glared at him, he’d go into permanent earth orbit. He would talk to Glassford and if the young man was the least bit suspicious, he’d tell it straight to Lt. Vo. Margin, on the other hand, could kiss his ass, the way he was turning out.

The questioning went on and on to no purpose, raking over the same ground. He knew better than to ask if he was a suspect. Everybody was a suspect to cops like Margin, and up to a point it was understandable. Almost everybody the man talked to, day in and day out, lied to him, probably even his own family. You just had to lie to a hard-ass like him.

“You’re not going to be looking over our shoulder as we investigate this case, are you, Liffey?”

“What do you mean?”

He sat forward and his brows furrowed. “Are the words I used too big? Which one is difficult for you?
Shoulder? Investigate
? Are—you—still—on—this—case?”

“My job was trying to find the girl. She’s found, no thanks to me, so that job is over. I’m not working for Mr. Minh any more, as soon as I tell him.”

It was almost the truth. He just hoped Margin didn’t notice that it wasn’t a direct answer to the question.

“Go home, Liffey,” Margin said. He turned to Vo. “You tell Minh that this guy is off the case.”

There was an odd pattern of quick raps at the door and it came open. Another cop in a jarhead haircut and gray suit looked in. It was as if they had cloned Margin, then slimmed him down a little and let the extra flesh sag. Margin went to the door and the two hard-asses talked in soft voices. He and Vo sat patiently, like petitioners with a hopeless case.

“I’ve got to go,” Margin said to the airspace over their heads. “You finish up here.”

When the door shut, Jack Liffey and Lt. Frank Vo looked at one another. “Nice guy,” Jack Liffey said.

“Uh-huh.”

“Don’t say a word. I realize you have to live here.”

“This interview is concluded,” Vo said aloud and he spoke the date and time and his name. He stood up, turned off the camera and popped the tape cassette.

“What didn’t you tell Margin?” he asked.

Jack Liffey thought about it a moment. “Mrs. Joubert re-hired me and asked me to keep my hand in for a day or two. I need the money. I’m going to talk to a young man Phuong acted with for an hour in an industrial video. This was at a place called MediaPros in Garden Grove. I have
no
reason to think it means anything at all, and I didn’t want to turn Godzilla loose on the poor guy. I’ll tell you all about it, whatever I find. Is that satisfactory?”