Terminal Island (15 page)

“Do you think the guys are the bees and the girls are the birds?” Jack Liffey asked. “The saying never made much sense to me.”

“I think it's just supposed to suggest nature and all that.”

“It's the
all that
that causes so much trouble. Have you been dating anyone since Fariborz went back to Iran? I haven't asked in a while.”

“We just hang out, my friends and I. No sex now.”

“Ummm,” was all he could think to say. It was peaceful there in the glider, so he let things stay quiet for a while. South-Central was itself unusually quiet, with only a bit of traffic noise from Vermont, two blocks away, and some happy-kid sounds from small boys playing with a Nerf football up the block. The supertall palm trees on the street were clocking back and forth at the top in a gusty breeze. They all leaned permanently eastward, away from the sea.

“This guy who's been causing all the trouble,” he started, “the guy with the Kitty cards. He's made a mess of Rebecca's place. He sprayed red paint on everything. The whole interior and just about all her expensive possessions. She's pretty upset.” Wait for it, he thought, here it comes, as Maeve watched him. “We talked a little, and I kind of sense I might not be asked back.”

“Fine,” Maeve said nonchalantly.

He knew Maeve had always had something against Rebecca, but he had no idea it was this strong. “Easy for you to say.”

“Yes, easy for me. She's never been good for you, Dad. She wasn't. She's a snob and a manipulator, and she would have dumped you like a big bag of doorknobs in a minute for some rich bigwig.”

That appraisal unsettled him a bit. It was amazing how much antipathy Maeve had built up without him realizing it. “You shouldn't be saying this, you know. If Becky and I get back together, you'll be embarrassed.”

“No, I won't. I feel what I feel, Dad. You deserve a lot better than that conceited skinny witch.”

“Anyway, I needed to warn you not to go back to Larchmont for now. I'll be staying in Culver City again.”

“That's fine with me, but how? Where's your car?”

“I left it down in San Pedro when I rode up to Beck's with the cops. I'll need a ride.”

She smiled, but at the same time there was a nearly transparent suggestion of the shifting of some hidden gearbox. She wasn't skillful enough to hide it from him yet, and for that he was thankful.

“Gloria is going back to San Pedro real soon, to go to work. I'll bet you can catch a ride with her.”

There was merit in the idea, he saw that. He would just as soon keep Maeve away from the harbor, as far out of things as possible, but something else was afoot in her teenage brain. “Have you got some reason for not giving me a ride?”

“Dad! Check it out. Gloria Ramirez is a wonderful woman. I think you'd really like … talking to her. Did you know she's actually a Paiute Indian?”

He started laughing, and the hilarity almost got the better of him, ballooning up into the empty space that so much tension had left behind. His daughter the matchmaker.

“It's a bit soon, don't you think?”

“Keep it in mind.”

He didn't want to talk about it anymore—the laughter hurt his lungs. He sniffed the air. “You're wearing a new perfume.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Reminds me of the sixties. Is it musk?”

“Patchouli oil.”

“They're hard to tell apart.”

“Not really, but it seems to attract more mosquitoes than men.”

“Good; keep it up.” He let her swing the glider a few times in silence. He was happy he felt at peace with Maeve. There were probably a lot of fathers and sixteen-year-old daughters who weren't even on speaking terms. “Hon, I know you want to visit your grandfather, but I'd like you to stay out of San Pedro for a couple more days. I think this will all clear up pretty soon.”

“Have they caught the guy?”

“They're pretty sure who he is, and it's just a matter of time now. You know, as badly as he's damaged property, he's never really hurt anybody. I know it sounds like a cliché, but I think it might be a cry for help.”

“You're not going to try to find him by yourself, are you? To help him out?”

He could hear the disquiet in her voice and sense her disapproval, and it was all he could do to formulate a lie in front of her, but he found that he still knew how. “No, no.”

Dec 20 Later

The answers you need to collect always lie where you are least at home. Misgivings surround me now, and they must not. I have only done my duty, I know that. I learn a little of my adversary and I begin to respect him. He shows filial piety. It comes into conflict with my filial piety. So difficult in both our cases.

Tariki
suggests reliance on the strength and compassion of the Buddha.
Jiriki
suggests self-reliance. No one has ever reconciled this question. I wonder if the detective and I shall meet and if it will be on the field of arms?

“I want to thank you for looking after the girls. Maeve's a compulsive hugger, but that was a really sincere one she gave you. I can tell she likes you.”

“They're both great,” Gloria Ramirez said. “Your daughter's a real treat, and Ornetta's something else, really a once-in-a-lifetime girl. I think I regret more and more missing out on that. I love kids.”

“You never had kids?”

Her face clouded as she drove the purple RAV-4, and he wondered if he shouldn't have asked. “I had a number of miscarriages,” she said eventually. “And now the plumbing's been removed. I didn't really tell Ken how far it all went.”

“I'm sorry. Steelyard must be a handful as a partner.”

She said nothing, and he realized there were always multiple layers of loyalty at work in any police department. “He's my T.O. But I don't think he has the presence of mind these days to peek around the corner of his own problems to see if I might have any. I'm only saying this because I know you're an old friend of his. He's always talked very fondly of you. You wouldn't think he ever had any other friends at all in school.”

“He talked about me, even before these past few days?”

“Yes.”

“I'll be damned. We knew each other in grade school, but I thought it kind of ended there. I was no good at sports, and that's terribly important at that age, and Ken … well, I swear you'd never know it's the same guy now. He lived in a kind of fragile fantasy world to protect himself. Family stuff. Stepdad, disapproval at home, etc., etc.”

It made him feel funny that Ken Steelyard had reminisced about him so much when he'd barely thought of Steelyard for decades. She fell silent, and he reflected on loss and how so many people seemed unable to deal with it. He wondered if he'd always cut his own losses too easily, just let himself walk away. Even losing Rebecca wasn't bothering him that much—though nothing was certain, and it might hit him much harder if it really came home to him that it was a permanent break. He'd certainly taken the earlier split with Marlena hard.

“I think you're straining your nurture genes on Steelyard,” he said.

She laughed softly. “I doubt if he even notices.”

“You're a Native American.” Maeve's clumsy matchmaking couldn't help but interest him a little and he looked at the woman with a different eye. She was in her midforties, with glossy black hair and piercing black eyes, a little stout, but she looked fit—maybe the city required that cops exercise. He imagined there wouldn't be much give if he were to press a forefinger into her taut flank. The thought almost made him do it, and he couldn't help picturing a startled reaction, maybe even drawing down on him with some snub-nosed pistol whisked off her thigh.

She shrugged with one shoulder. “I was adopted and raised thinking I was a Latina. You can't really ever get it all back, but lately I've become interested in who I might have been. My mom was from Lone Pine, but her family was northern Paiute, probably from up near Carson City.”

“Native Americans are the only really innocent people in the country.”

She made a face. “Indians did some pretty nasty stuff to one another, Jack. You're not really thinking guilt or innocence is inherited, are you?”

“No. But that doesn't mean atonement for what happened is excluded.”

“Like affirmative action, you mean?”

“You know, some of the cops I've met—it would take affirmative action to get them into the human race.”

She laughed to herself for a moment, but whatever it was, it tailed off quickly.

They were coming down the Harbor Freeway, through the smelly areas around the refineries and sloughs and sewage settling ponds of Carson and Wilmington.

“Indians are in worse shape than blacks, you know,” she said. “I've been to two powwows, watching them carefully, and, given all the money in the world and a complete ban on alcohol, I still don't know what you could do to make things right. Everybody enjoyed the dancing—they were probably doing steps that were thousands of years old—and I suppose for some of those folks, at least for one evening, they were out from under the big, smothering weight of the white culture. But you can't dance the Rain Dance the rest of your life. And you sure can't hunt buffalo anymore.”

“In my experience,” Jack Liffey said, and then he realized with horror that he was about to quote Rebecca Plumkill. He paused, but went ahead anyway, “a lot of the big problems just don't have solutions. People do what they can, and you've got to honor that.”

She glanced over at him, maybe actually seeing him for the first time. “I think I can see where Maeve comes from.”

Thirteen

Awaken from Dreams

He had to try four stores before he found one, a Rite-Aid along Gaffey, that sold playing cards, ordinary Bicycles in a single slightly soiled box that looked like it had been picked up and fingered dubiously many times. They had a cheap little penknife in a blister package, too. Jack Liffey took his purchases back down to Twenty-first with him and parked two doors up from the house, where he stripped the cellophane to break into the deck. He may as well start with the deuce, he thought. It had the most writing space, too. He had to fight his ballpoint to get it to work on the slick surface, but finally he managed to print:

Let's talk.

Back at 8.

No hassle, no cops.

He carried the scribbled-upon deuce of spades to the converted garage behind the Ozaki bungalow and pinned it to the door beside the
kanji
with a jab of the cheap penknife. He had to admit it gave him a small twinge of amusement. It was a message that Joe, if it was Joe, was certainly going to recognize. But he had no way of knowing whether he'd come back at eight to face a sawed-off shotgun, or an exotic killing knife with finger loops, or just an empty cottage. He had an intuition that it was worth a try to get through to the man, whose acts of destruction had so far been directed entirely toward material things. Of course, it was possible that the occupant of the converted garage was an innocent student from the community college or an itinerant seaman and he would have some red-faced explaining to do. But he doubted it.

Gloria found him hard at work, implausibly, at the one state-of-the-art desktop computer they set aside for detectives. It had Internet access on a T-1 line and its own printer, all on a rolling cart in the corner of the common room they called the Playpen. But woe to him who actually moved it. There was a sign-up sheet full of priority codes, and a column for comments that were largely rude expletives. Steelyard rarely used the computer, and the way he hammered now was a bit too rough, like a boxer asked to stuff envelopes.

“Downloading porn is against department policy,” she suggested as she entered the Playpen.

“I never understood looking at pictures of pussies,” Steelyard said. “Licking a computer screen doesn't do a damn thing for me. I think we got this Kitty card perp narrowed down, but the guy is damn cagey. He uses one of those commercial postbox houses that's got a regular street address and no box numbers so it sounds like a residence. And he's never slipped up once, all the official glop he's had to fill out in the last five years as a contractor. We'll need a court order to open up their books, but I got me an intuition it'll be a waste of time. I bet he's got another layer or two of security. Anybody this guarded's got something to hide, that's for sure. Take a look at the military record the army sent me.”

She sat on the edge of a table and opened a stiff FedEx envelope that contained a very thin file of Xerox copies. She saw a black-and-white photograph of a young, scowling Japanese American, date-stamped April 12, 1968. There was a copy of an index card with the name—Joseph Soto Ozaki, date of birth in 1949, his height and weight, 5-10 and 145. A slip of paper listed his date of induction into the Army—April 10, 1968—and his assignment to basic training at Fort Ord. In the corner of the card was written
census
and
B-57.
There was nothing else, no description of any further training, no record of service of any kind, not even a separation order. One large pink Post-it signed with a scrawl said,
Sorry, folks. I've never seen anything like this. Mice got to his records, I guess. No DD214.

“Mice, huh,” she said.

“Spook
mice; count on it. One of the knives he used was a K-bar, a Special Forces thing. This guy was probably trained for the Berets and then plucked out for other stuff.”

“What's this
census
and
B-57
?”

“I called a guy uptown who knows stuff like that, and he was astonished that slipped through. They're euphemisms. When these guys used the word
census
back then, it was a verb, and what they meant was fingering some population group, killing everybody in the group, and then counting the bodies. ‘Census the village elders in District II-A.' It was a funny time, Vietnam.”

“ ‘Funny'?”

“Not funny ha-ha, funny peculiar. The B-57 was a designation that was supposedly for guys stuck into an administrative unit of the Special Forces. It was actually for guys yanked off the army books completely for special ops under CIA control. Basically, that means Operation Phoenix.”

“What's that?”

“No shit? You haven't heard of it? It was a CIA program to assassinate just about every teacher, doctor, and village official in what they called ‘enemy areas' of South Vietnam, every goddamn civilian who might be of any use to the Viet Cong—the ‘infrastructure,' as they called it, as if these guys were just a bunch of bridges and roads. The CIA put in requisitions for the nastiest Navy SEALS and Berets and Recon Marines and added some psychopaths of their own. We don't talk about Phoenix a lot these days, but it's pretty much public record that they assassinated about forty thousand civilians.

“Some of these Phoenix guys may be okay back in the world now, sitting happily in a bank or something, but some of them are real scary. I knew a guy once, he spent the war lying in rice paddies breathing trough a straw, his M-16 wrapped in plastic and the barrel taped over. He rose up from time to time and, if some poor medic or village elder was ambling along the path, he shot him. Last I heard this guy was caught up in a lot of S & M out in Wyoming someplace, getting himself bundled up in Saran Wrap and stabbed with burning cigarettes. I can't even guess what shit like that does to your psyche.”

“Ken, at the risk of sounding fatuous, I just can't comprehend stuff like this. Maybe it's because I can't imagine a woman doing any of it.”

“I can. My wife would have lain years in a pool of snakes and spiders for one clean chance to gut-shoot me. I'm not trying to make some kind of political statement here, Glor. War is dirty, and we were as dirty as anybody. I just want you to know who we might be up against and how this guy gets into houses that have state-of-the-art alarm systems. Nothing is safe from a guy like this.”

“There must be another way to go, to find him.”

He made one last ham-fisted stab at downloading something and then seemed to give up. “Yeah, I suppose we could stand at Twelfth and Gaffey and stop every Jap who goes into Vons for a loaf of bread. I don't know. He's a licensed contractor, but according to the building permits people, he's had nothing going for months. I already asked for a trace on his mom's phone. I'm not putting a car in front of the house. He laughed at the one we had at Declan Liffey's. We get nowhere underestimating this guy, believe me. Pretend he can make himself invisible and walk through walls.”

“What about his Kitty card number nine? I hear we think it's out there somewhere.”

“Nobody's reported it. My guess is it's a pal of the other guys, and he's so scared right now he's driving real fast toward Penobscot, Maine.”

“Jack Liffey knows something more than he's letting on. Maybe about Ozaki.”

That got Steelyard's attention, and he swiveled in the chair to face her. “What? Is he after Ozaki on his own?”

“If I knew, I'd tell you,” she said. “What do you know about Jack?”

He sighed. “When we were kids, and I was in a bad way, he gave me the benefit of the doubt and nobody else did. That's worth a lot in my book.”

“What else? In general.”

“He was a brain, but he never seemed to use it for anything in school. I'd guess he did just enough work in the sixth grade to squeak by. I'm pretty sure he didn't have girlfriends then.” He puffed out a breath. “It's a pretty restricted world, Glor, the sixth grade. What else can I say? Neither of us liked kickball or dodgeball. We made up games. We hung out down at the harbor sometimes. We caught crawdads in the park. He said my mom was nice when everybody else was secretly calling her a roundheels because she was divorced and dated guys.”

“He told me you didn't have much contact after grade school.”

The vice detectives Cole and Buchan looked in the door to the Playpen all of a sudden. “Hi, kids,” Cole said. “Oh, nice bra, Sarge.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Gloria Ramirez shot back.

“I watch the ads, see how the straps go and shit, you can never be too observant in the police biz. It shows under your blouse there, a Maidenform cross-your-heart. Women with the big boobs have to go for the real substantial bras.”

“Eat this.” She raised her middle finger, and they laughed and walked on. She wondered how they'd have reacted if she'd told them two-thirds of her left breast was a saline bag after the tumor came out, but she'd be damned if she'd tell them anything.

“They're just assholes, Glor.”

She shrugged them off. “Jack told me you two lost contact.”

“Yeah, we did. Junior high upsets everybody's applecart. I don't know about your school, but mine was total hell. From a secure little world with one teacher in the same room all day, we were all of a sudden running from class to class in a big, confusing world, and running alongside what we'd call gangbangers these days, terrified of stepping on the spit-shined shoes of some
pachuco
in the halls. Jack and I weren't in the same homeroom or the same classes. Then I ran away for a while, and I got put back a year. I don't blame him for moving on. I didn't try very hard to stay in touch either.”

“I blame him,” Gloria said. “He should have watched over you or at least looked you up.”

“He had his own problems by then. Don't be such a demanding…” Steelyard seemed to get a sudden idea, and she never learned what noun he was about to use. “Or have you got a crush on the guy?”

“I've got a crush on his daughter, that's for sure. I don't think he knows what a total sweetie she is.”

“He knows. Believe me. But let's forget all this personal guff. What makes you think Liffey has a direct line on Ozaki?”

“Nothing specific. But I felt it, I'm sure.”

“I don't like it. If it really is Ozaki, Jack's not equipped to front the guy, believe me.”

Dan Petricich was asleep, which was noisily apparent from time to time as his rattling snore seemed to shiver the little house. The
Sanja P.
wasn't ready to go out again yet, but his wife told Jack Liffey that he was keeping his sleep cycles tuned to night work. Marin was entertaining Jack Liffey at the dining-room table, steeping a pot of tea that waited on an old round Coca-Cola tray. “You were two years ahead of me. I remember you a little. My friend Cheryl said she always wanted to get into your pants, she was such a hot one.” She chuckled.

He remembered Cheryl, all right. “No kidding? I sure wish I'd known. I thought all the cute blondes were unattainable, private property of the Knights.”

“You bought all that crud about the Knights? They weren't so great just because they were big jocks. A lot of us liked the smart guys 'cause we knew they were going to be something in life.”

“You'd have bet wrong on me. How's your son?”

“He seems to have gotten over that trouble up on the hill, and he's back with his buddies. I don't know why they all have to dress like Zorro.”

“I wouldn't worry. Some of them are okay, even into good books and poetry. I think they might be like our beatniks.”

She frowned.

“What did you think of the kids who tried to be beats back in high school?”

“I didn't know any, I don't think. You want to know, God's truth, who I liked? I used to get wet just passing Per Houlberg in the halls. God, he was handsome and sweet.”

“He was that exchange student?”

“From Århus, Denmark. To this day I remember every one of the twenty words he ever said to me.”

“There're always way too many could-have-beens, Marin. I think you've got a good son, and I've got a good daughter, and that makes up for a lot of the backseat groping we never got to do with the people we thought we might have liked.”

She smiled skeptically. “I suppose so. I could always use a little groping. Dan sleeps the wrong hours.”

If it was an invitation, he wasn't even going to acknowledge it. Someone once told him that the best seducers of women were the guys who were the best listeners. But did women have some sort of radar for a guy like him who was at loose ends? “I really came to talk to Dan's dad, Mare.”

“I think Ante's in the workshop. I'll look. But you keep in mind that groping thing.”

He smiled emptily, feeling like a fool, as she sashayed out. He'd had almost the same feeling, for just an instant, from Gloria Ramirez. It was just a glance that implied she might be interested, but it filled him with a lot of complex feelings he didn't need. It was by no means certain that Rebecca was a dead issue, and he continued to harbor a lot of fondness for that high-humored sexy headmistress he'd been with for six months now, even if Maeve had never taken a shine to her.

A big freighter hooted out in the channel, reminding him how close the house was to the water. It was a tonic sound that took him straight back to his youth. The sound had once been second nature to him, like a train whistle, he supposed, to somebody from a midwestern railroad town. It summoned up the tar and rot smell of the harbor, the gentle lift and roll of ships at anchor. But, more especially, it suggested to him that other horn, the deep
beeee-oop
of the foghorns early in the morning, walking downhill to school into the damp of a fog so thick that your feet disappeared first, then your legs, until you were swallowed whole by the silent wet hush in which you heard only the occasional shooshing of tires.