Streets on Fire (3 page)

She cupped a hand over the side of her face when she turned. “Oh, Jackie, I done a stupid thing.”

“Rocky warned me.”

“I was moving some rummage boxes down in the basement of the church and slipped on a rotten old grape down there. My face hit a old blender in the box.”

She opened her palm like a door to show a mouse under the eye the size of a plum. It all seemed too pat. She was too quick at volunteering all the details.

He hugged her and there was something stiff in her response. He wondered if there was trouble at the church. “Who’s minding your shop?”

“Anna. Maeve was supposed to, but she didn’t make it. Remember? Maeve was gonna do Mondays for the summer. But Anna needs the work.”

He didn’t remember any plans like that at all, and he was surprised one of them hadn’t told him. Maeve got on well with Marlena, though she lived most of the time with his ex-wife, Kathy, and her new husband. The shop was Marlena’s Mailboxes-R-Us franchise, which had been directly beneath the office he had once kept in a minimall. His office now was a letter drop at her shop, a retrenchment to get him through a long dry spell in his finances.

They were interrupted for a moment when his dog sidled up and growled for attention. Loco must have spooked her horrible little Chihuahua into a back bedroom. Loco was a scruffy medium-sized, whitish dog with flat yellow eyes, at least half coyote, and generally did his best to shun anything that could be construed as pet behavior. Lately Loco had taken to being more affectionate, so Jack Liffey bent over to hug the dog for a moment. He’d better not pass up any devotion he could get.

“Hey, boy, how’s tricks?”

The dog gave another little growl and then broke free and wandered away.

“Be sure you don’t overdo it. I might get to wanting my slippers fetched.”

Marlena chuckled. Loco glanced back once disdainfully, like a being who’d been marooned on an inferior planet.

Jack Liffey thought about it and decided his own species was best, after all. He stood up and kissed Marlena’s cheek softly. “Um, you tender here?”

“No. Feels good.”

“How about here?”

“Ooooh. Try here, Jackie.” She directed his hand, and before long they were in the bedroom, trying a lot of places.

The driver of the van had a Marine buzz-cut and a white line across the edge of one lip that suggested one of the dueling scars Prussians had once given themselves in order to look fierce and brutish. It sure did the job for him. He was big, too, wide through the shoulders like somebody who had been built to fill up a doorway. When he smiled, though, a lot of the ferocity evaporated to leave an earthy ruggedness, the look of a guy you’d like to see in charge of the Scout troop when the blizzard hit.

The man with the salt-and-pepper beard beside him drummed a little nervous tattoo on the dash. “K, tell me again what in Satan’s crappy name we’re doing here.”

“We’re doing just what I said.”

“Uh-huh, yeah. But, you know, we’re super-de-duper out of place.”

“No kidding.”

It was well after midnight and they waited for some signal, known only to the driver, parked smack in the middle of the black community. A third man crouched in the back of the van with the wood beams and kerosene. “I’ve never done this before,” the bearded man offered.

“Not many people in California have,” the big man with the scar said. “That’s part of the point. After we do it, who would you look for? Would you come looking for us?”

“Nobody’s looking
now
, man.”

“They will. Look, here’s the theory. My uncle used to play bridge using the Chico Marx system. He never consulted with his partner at all, just called out crazy bids—three hearts, one no-trump, five spades, whatever—and he never let on. He said it gave his team an edge. One hundred percent of the other team was confused, but only fifty percent of his team was.”

“You told us all that before, K,” the bearded man said with a hint of annoyance. “Very funny and all, but I mean, really, what are we doing?”

“Okay. Really. I mean, cross my heart, right?
Really
. Sorry I didn’t use little words. Here it is: We’re the Green Berets of the fed-up honest people of this country. We know that multiculturalism as an idea and a social experiment has up and died. It sounded nice, it made some people feel real good inside, but it just didn’t work out. People want to live with their own kind. We’re not nutcases, we’re just facing the facts ahead of the crowd. And, one of the facts we get to face tonight is we got to muddy the waters a bit now because we—that’s
you
, fuckhead—screwed up so big-time.”

“Is this Christian?” the man in back asked.

“We’re about to make a big wood cross. Can you think of anything more Christian than that?”

*

Jack Liffey never failed to get a kick out of the giant brown doughnut. It was a good twenty feet in diameter and crested the little drive-up building at Vernon and 11th like the beacon of some high-fat religion stuck in the heart of the black west side.

“Hi, Josette, Ivan in?”

She looked up from a flat tray of sugary crullers. Ivan Monk had bought the doughnut shop with his Merchant Marine savings to tided him over during slack times in the private eye business. Jack Liffey wished he had something similar as fallback. Josette Williams, Ivan Monk’s only full-time employee, looked a lot thinner than he remembered, and a bit abstracted.

“Jack. He workin’ in back. You gettin’ any?”

“Regular as clockwork. He came back and leaned on the counter to take a good look at her. “What’s the matter, Job?”

She winced. “I been had a pretty bad time, thank you for axing. I got to using the Big Bad Boy for a time, but I went cold. They got me on the methadone.”

“I thought crack was the thing now.”

“You out in left field. H is back for sure, but not for this girl. I know it be end up losing me my Jimmy.”

“I’m glad you’re clean. If Mar and I can help you any, let me know.”

“Thank you kindly, Jack. Maybe you could take Jimmy to the basketball some time.”

Ivan was down a corridor behind a swing door in an inner office. He was on the telephone and beckoned Jack Liffey in. Ivan was the size of a pro linebacker and always looked like he wanted to tear your arm off, but he had a sweet side. You just had to be around long enough for it to show itself.

He had a sheaf of papers he was studying on his desk. “I want you to change that same stuff on page fifty-five, too. I’m not like that. You see, down ten lines, it say, ‘You just a no-good yellow motherfuckin’ dog.’ That’s
lame
, man.” He made about a dozen faces, as if an idea was working its way painfully down a constricted pipe. “Okay, then, you get back to
me
, Gary.”

He put the phone down.

“Hey, Jack. What it is? Guy there is writing up my life. Him and me working on a screenplay about bein’ a detective in South LA and I got to make sure he get it right.”

“Is that what kept you from taking the Amilcar Davis case?”

He shook his head. “I wouldn’t go near that one. Nothing but grief in it. I say to myself, give it to that Jack Liffey guy. He
likes
grief.”

“Gee, thanks, Ive. I’ll do
you
a favor sometime. What is it worries you about the case?”

“Lemme think. Nazis on Harleys. A white girlfriend from Simi Valley. A dad who thinks he invented civil rights. A mom who likes Joseph Stalin. And Claremont, a place with nothing but uptight white people locked down in Victorian houses. A salt-and-pepper couple gone missing, two months stale. Cops who aren’t gonna like a guy looks like me showing up in Wonderbread City asking questions. Would you like some more reasons? Trust me, it’s not going anywhere. It’s easy money, if that old dude will pay up, but I don’t need the bread right now, not for marking time and upping my blood pressure. And I sure don’t need the aggravation of putting my face around in
Claremont
.”

“So, you’re pretty sure it’s hopeless, even for Mr. Wonderbread?”

“You right, and you know you right.” He made that series of faces again. Maybe it was his way of changing his mind. “You
might
find out something out there in Snow Whiteville I couldn’t. I been wrong before—once.”

“Thanks for the referral.”

“You done the same for me a couple times.”

“And happy to. By the way, you know what’s going down over to the east a bit from here? I saw the cops had a lot of barricades up on Vernon.”

Ivan Monk stared at him as if he’d just asked how to spell his own name. “I wondered what you were doing over here today. You didn’t read the paper this morning, I bet.”

“Uh-uh.”

“A couple not-so-bright cops roughed up Ab-Ib yesterday. Some folks took it in they mind to get a little payback and burn out the police substation on Vernon. It’s just a little bitty storefront and will not be mourned, but I have it on good repute that a couple other places burned yesterday, too, and it’s summer heat so a lot of bangers got nothing better to do these days but get busy.”

“Ab-Ib some kind of sports star?”

Ivan Monk didn’t deign to answer. He knew Jack Liffey didn’t take to sports much, but there were things you just knew if you lived in a town.

“I think I’d better start on the Claremont end of things.”

“That would be smart. Take care of bidness far far away from the land of the bad boys.”

“This isn’t going to turn into another ’92, is it?”

Ivan Monk shrugged. “Who can say? I doubt it. But I’m thinking of getting out the plywood say
BLACK OWNED
.”

“Uh-oh.”

*

Lieutenant Calderón had agreed to meet him at the police impound yard up on Foothill, but Jack Liffey was an hour early and he settled for driving around the shady streets of Claremont to look the town over. He had been out here on a Sunday drive once in the 1960s to visit some ill-defined relative of his father’s, but the downtown was unrecognizable now. What he remembered as a couple of coffee shops, a little variety store named Bob’s or something like that, and a family supermarket was now a couple dozen square blocks of pasta bistros, jazz clubs, coffee bars, and chichi boutiques.

How had the world come to this? There were no more people in Claremont now, or in the six little colleges that clustered there. There must just be a lot more money about, he decided. He remembered finding an old
Life
Magazine from the 1950s under his dresser a few years back and thumbing through it idly to see glossy display ads for a can of peas, a ballpoint pen and
DEMAND CONCRETE HIGHWAYS—THEY LAST
. We weren’t really a consumer society yet, he had concluded, startled by the commonplace nature of what was being offered. This deep need for all material goodies must have sneaked up on the country while he was busy over in Vietnam.

The first campus he ran into, Pomona College, was just a block east of the village shops. It was a daydream of a social class that was utterly beyond his ken, all Corinthian pillars, ivy, long arcades and big green quads. Five more private colleges inhabited the north and east sides of the town, sharing a big library and other facilities in the middle. The Oxford of California they liked to call it. He’d bet nobody had ever called Oxford the Claremont of England.

It was summer and there weren’t many kids around. Still, something was going on out on a big grassy no-man’s-land that seemed to separate a couple of the colleges. Yellow crime scene tape from tree to post to tree cordoned off the middle of the quad where there was a complicated machine the size of a Greyhound bus, bristling with big cams and gears and belts. Maybe thirty young people stood outside the tape, well back from the machine. Jack Liffey parked and ambled closer across the springy crabgrass.

The leader seemed to be a man who was older and hairier than the rest, wearing a sheepskin vest and standing in front of a portable console of buttons and knobs. There was a video camera on a tripod and everyone else seemed to have a still camera.

“Flag up!” someone cried, and sure enough a girl on the far side of the quad raised a red flag.

“Fire in the hole!” somebody else called, which gave Jack Liffey a real chill; it was the traditional warning for blasting. In his limited experience—a few days caught up in Tet in Saigon—it meant a grenade or C-4 going down into a basement.

“Roll tape,” the hairy man called out, “Phase two self-immolation.” He stabbed at a button on his console and all eyes were on the machine. Belts ground up, wheels spun, a mirrored ball sent sun sparkles everywhere and, he wasn’t quite sure, but he thought he heard a deep groaning emanate from the machine.

“There it goes there it goes!” somebody called excitedly as a puff of dark smoke spurted out the side. A big cogwheel spun up into the air, a double-jointed mechanical arm reached out and then flung off its own forearm, and a section of the machine began to bob insanely, like a pigeon strutting along a windowsill.

Cameras ticked and flashed all around him as the near half of the framework tilted and then collapsed on itself.

“All
right
!”

A titter of laughter and then applause spread through the group. The older man pushed another button. “Cut! Okay, let’s put it back together.” He had a pronounced Eastern European accent.

A few young people offered him handslaps and then they stepped over the tape to flood toward the hapless machine. Jack Liffey directed his steps toward a young woman in a yellow tank top who seemed to be in charge of the video camera.

“Art project?” he asked.

“Uh-huh. We can only test it in small bites until the big performance in September.”

“You like destruction?”

She shrugged. “It’s a job. Most of them are volunteers but I’m paid for the summer. Harvat can get big corporate grants for anything he wants. Like Christo.”

Christo was the man who wrapped buildings and mountains and had littered the Tejon Pass north of L. A. with several hundred giant blue umbrellas a few years back. There didn’t seem any point mentioning people downtown who were going hungry, and he didn’t really suppose any more people would be fed if the avant-garde gave up their art happenings.