Terminal Island (5 page)

He left some money for the waitress. “Gotta get my girlfriend and split,” he told them.

He gave Maeve an ambiguous kiss on the forehead and took her out with his arm over her shoulder.

“That's supposed to be the steepest street in the whole city of LA.” He'd pulled off Pacific in San Pedro and stopped the VW, looking up Twenty-second Street. It was pretty impressive, with the houses on both sides seeming to cling for dear life. “But I don't believe it. There's a street in Echo Park that gives me the heebie-jeebies. I had a friend over there and every time I visited I went miles out of my way to avoid it. Baxter, that was the name. From the top you couldn't even tell there was a street below you. It was like driving off a cliff.”

She eyed the hill with polite interest. “That would be something on a skateboard.”

“That would be suicide on a skateboard.”

He'd already shown her the Point Fermin lighthouse and the spot out the Palos Verdes peninsula where the beached Greek freighter
Dominator
had sat on the rocks all his youth, rusting away. It was gone now, utterly, another little tweak to his nostalgia gland, which seemed to be acting up.

“How come you never bring me down here much?” Maeve asked. “It's your hometown.”

“I guess there're just too many ghosts for me. I wasn't at my happiest then, hon. I'm amazed you seem to like high school so much.”

“It's not bad, but nobody expects me to play football or run a six-minute mile.”

“Ah, you know my secret.”

“It's not very secret.”

“I'll try not to rant about sports. But I just can't see all that noise and spurious loyalty devoted to moving balls from one place to another.”

“The Aztecs killed the losers in their ball games,” she said, as if trying to establish some sort of moral superiority for modern sports.

“That would be an improvement,” he said. “From my point of view. Look at this.”

A middle-aged woman had pedaled a bicycle right past them, hooked up to a lightweight homemade trailer full of bags and cans and discarded cooking implements, the kind of stuff that all the schizophrenics wheeled around in shopping carts. What had caught his attention were the big wooden tail fins coming out of the bicycle that were alight with spangles and reflectors and dangling fluorescent tassles. The woman stopped at the curb just before the street sloped up steeply and began unpacking the trailer onto the curb, speaking sternly to each item. She was wearing too many clothes, layer on layer.

Maeve took his hand. “It makes you want to do something for her.”

“Yes,” he said. “Like reopen the asylums we shut down on them, or open the community clinics they were promised but we never built.”

“You always think in the big picture. I want to do something for
her.
”

He nodded. “I bet she's built up a pretty grand imaginary world around herself. I'm not sure you could penetrate it to do much, hon. She looks pretty clean, so she's probably got a place to stay somewhere.” He handed Maeve a five. “If you really want to try spooning out the ocean, give her this.”

Maeve took the money, and he could see her plucking up her courage before stepping out to approach the woman. The woman looked quite startled to be addressed. She glared at the money suspiciously, and the two of them talked softly for a while. He watched carefully, but Maeve seemed to be okay. He was actually proud of her willingness to approach someone so obviously around the bend. He did the same on principle now and then, but he had never found it did much good for anyone.

In the end the woman took the money, and Maeve came back a bit chastened.

“How was it?”

“Well.” She paused and took a deep breath. “She's into, like, visitors from other dimensions, and even has a name for where
I
come from, really strange. Bagnidor-grizzle, or something like that. I wonder if it comes from TV.” She took another deep breath and rested her head against his shoulder. “Can't they do anything?”

“Hon, she's out in the fresh air. She's living in whatever world she can make for herself, instead of some miserable institution. I can't even begin to work out the moral ambiguities. Can I borrow your cell?”

He'd forgotten his promise to check in with Steelyard, and he owed it to him to report his belief that the local goths were pretty unlikely perps. A recorded voice at the number Steelyard had given him referred him to another number.

“Steelyard.”

The policeman's voice sounded strangely subdued, as if he'd just gone a dozen rounds with somebody a lot bigger than him. “This is Jack Liffey. You asked me to call, and said maybe we'd swap information.” He told him about the goths, and Steelyard took it all in without comment. “Do you any good?”

“Jack, you're two cards behind. Can you come to Ellery Drive?”

“I'm five minutes away.” He remembered that that was Steelyard's mother's address, on the very flank of the hills and not far from Averill Park, real middle-class territory. He wondered if Steelyard still lived there. “I'll be there.” He himself had grown up only a few blocks closer to the water, as the crow flies, but then his family had moved farther down on the working-class flats, into another world.

“Whoever the fuck this guy is,” Steelyard told him, “he's hit Dan and me both now. Hard.”

Five

Come Home to Roost

They drove up just as three technicians in white smocks, and laden with bags and boxes, bustled out of the house and headed down the grass toward a big panel van that said CRIME SCENE UNIT in letters so big it looked like they were trying to sell it. Jack Liffey wondered, not for the first time, how it would feel to see something like that parked in your driveway. It would certainly perk up all your neighbors.

“Should I wait out here?” Maeve asked.

“Don't tell me you're not curious.”

She made a face. “I may be, but the last time I got caught up in one of your cases, mom grounded me for twenty-to-life.”

“Mea culpa. That was a mess. But this one shouldn't come home to roost.”

It was what she wanted to do anyway, so she followed him up the lawn toward the big Norman-style house with its parabolic front window, thick stucco walls, and steeply pitched roof—waiting forlornly eighty years or so for the Norman snowstorms to reach San Pedro. It really belonged in Beverly Hills, he thought, with all the other rich men's fantasies, although this was almost into the local hills, where San Pedro's doctors and lawyers retreated at night if they didn't actually drive into the hills. The heavy wood door stood open, but he knocked and shouted hello as precautions.

Eventually a stocky Latina with a police badge on a chain around her neck showed up.

“I'm Jack Liffey. Ken asked me to come over.”

She nodded. “I'm Detective Ramirez, his partner. He's in the basement.”

He introduced Maeve, and they all walked inside on a noisy paper runner on the floor, and then down steep stairs. It was one of the few houses he'd ever seen in LA with a full basement, obviously built well before the dread of earthquakes had set in. Maeve hung back a bit, but he figured her pluck would catch up with her before long.

A faint smell gathered as they came down, like an electrical circuit overheating, and then they emerged into a tiny universe laid out before them at waist level. It looked like a model of something from the 1880s, with dusty western one-street towns, picturesque buttes, wooden trestles, and even a tiny herd of cattle. A fair-size city ran right up against the far wall, and all of it was lashed together by model railroad tracks.

The real situation, however, seemed to be on the far side of the room, where Steelyard stood at the rim of his tiny universe, glaring down at its other half, which apparently had suffered a nuclear strike. Enough remained to suggest what had been houses and the tangled wreckage of taller buildings. Every single structure was crushed, right up to some arbitrary dividing line through the middle of the room, but it was clearly not meant to be that way.

Jack Liffey looked at the room's owner.

Steelyard nodded glumly. “Twelve years of work.” Something looked a little funny about his eyes, and he kept rubbing his shoulder, as if he'd wrenched it. “All from scratch. Even the rolling stock. No kits. No fucking kits.”

That seemed to matter to him. “Why does the destruction stop in the middle?” Jack Liffey asked.

“It was an idea. That half of the layout is nineteenth-century and steam. The part over here was modern, diesel-electric. It's all HO scale and you could still run from one century to the other. It was just an idea,” he concluded glumly.

“Why do you think the old stuff was spared?”

His eyes came up, reddened, flattened from within like the eyes of a big wounded dog. “Do you think I have a fucking clue?” He went straight up the steps, and the policewoman watched him go, then turned to Jack Liffey.

“Please pardon him. This was his baby.”

“No kidding.”

“I mean it was
really
important to him. Somebody figured out how to make him hurt. There was no sign of forced entry, and the alarms were all bypassed, we don't know how. Oh, there's a chair missing, too. He used it as his Engineer Bill chair over there. Nothing special, just a beat-up old ladderback that he's had for years.”

“Was there one of those Japanese playing cards?”

She nodded. “The five of whatever little girls call those suits. I think you haven't even heard about the four yet, Mr. Liffey.”

“Jack, please. I haven't.”

“It was presumably the same perpetrator or perpetrators who sank the Petricich fishing boat last night, right at its dock. It was a wooden vessel, and the police divers said somebody just went down into the engine room and shot a big shotgun hole clean through the hull. It probably took half an hour to go down, plenty of time to get out. The perp stuck the four to the boat's dockside locker with some kind of Special Forces throwing knife.”

“And the five?”

“It was over there by the train controls, pinned to that little park lawn with Ken's own X-Acto knife. Crime Scene has both the card and the knife now.”

“What did it say on the card?”

“The battle is engaged.”

“Ah.”

She scowled into a coffee cup. “Could I get you some coffee? This has gone cold.”

“No, thanks. But suit yourself.”

She trudged up the stairs as Maeve bent over to inspect the wreckage, her hands behind her back as if avoiding leaving fingerprints. “Some of it was crushed downward,” she said, “like with a big mallet, and some of it was swiped off like with a baseball bat.”

“We probably won't be able to outdo the cops in the clue game, hon, but that's all right. You can keep looking.” He studied the devastation himself. It disturbed him somewhere deep inside—it was like seeing the effects of a terribly unequal barroom brawl, some defenseless midgets collapsed against a bar with shiners and torn shirts.

“Isn't it a bit odd, a grown-up man putting so much time into model trains?” Maeve suggested softly.

“He had a really troubled childhood. I knew him in school. And he has a job that's probably always threatening to spin out of control on him. I'd guess he found one corner of life where he felt he had effortless control of things. Or so he thought. That may be partly why it's hitting him so hard.”

Detective Ramirez came back down the steep concrete staircase with a fresh cup of coffee and a can of 7UP that she handed to Maeve.

“Thanks.”

He could tell Maeve didn't want the sugary soft drink, but she took it politely. Recently she'd been drinking mainly those peculiar herbal iced teas. She was trying to keep her weight down. If her waist stayed small and her breasts got any bigger, boys would be following her around with their tongues hanging out. He remembered being that age.

“Detective Steelyard is resting.”

“We went to school together. I think I can handle the name Ken.”

“In that case, I'm Gloria. Were you close to Ken in high school?”

“No. We were very close in grade school and a bit in junior high. Then his family started … going to hell, and he went away for a while by himself. Did he ever tell you about Fresno?”

She shook her head, no.

“We just never really picked it up again when he came back, I guess. I feel a bit bad about it. I'm stunned he turned out to be a cop, if you want to know the truth.”

“He was a bad boy?”

“Not at all. He just didn't seem to have … what would you call it? Maybe a sense of authority. But that was then. He's changed.”

“He's tough, he works at it, but he's a little more fragile than he thinks, like a lot of cops,” was all she would admit to.

“Aren't we all. When I called, I told him that the goth angle looks like a dead end. I don't see how they would connect to this train business anyway.”

Gloria Ramirez was looking over the devastation thoughtfully. “There's one pattern Ken didn't want to see.”

She waited, but he could see she was going to tell him, whether he encouraged her or not.

“The cards have come in sets. I think the first card in each set marks a kind of warning shot. The Petricich kid was tied up—that's where we found the two of whatever it is, call it spades. That's the warning. Then Ken's boxcar was trashed with a flash-bang, the three of spades, another warning shot. The next two were second cards. They sink the Petricich fishing boat on the second Petricich card, and they do
this
to Ken on his second card. It might be just a coincidence that the sets overlapped; I don't know. In the Petricich case, it looks like the real target was the father. What do you know about Ken's father?”

“Long gone. He abandoned Ken's mom when Ken was about thirteen, after slapping her around a lot. I don't remember much about him except he seemed cranky and old. I mean, older than the other baby boom dads. I'm sure he's dead by now.”

“Can you think of anything special that happened in high school? You and Ken and Dan Petricich were all there together.”

“The football team beat Banning once.” He almost laughed, amazed that he remembered that, but he shrugged instead. “It was before the antiwar era, so I can't think of any demonstrations. That stuff came after us. High school was all so personal, full of the usual dreadfulness of adolescence. I assume we each had a share of the horrors, but it's a pretty solitary time and everybody thinks he's going through it alone. You hardly notice anybody else's troubles.”

“Think about it, will you? You might have the key to this and not know you know it.”

“I'll try. Did you find out anything about the ink stamp?”

She nodded. “It says ‘no no.' Two distinct ‘no's, not a single word like the English no-no, you know, for a taboo. We had an expert on
hanko
look it over and he didn't recognize it. He said it was odd, though it might just be a nickname. Most
hankos
are used as a kind of signature. We faxed it to the Tokyo police and asked for their input.”

“The symbol isn't part of the card?”

“No; we bought a couple sets to look them over. Anyway, it's in a different place on each card. He's definitely stamping the cards. He means it to be the kind of clue that drives you nuts. I really hate these puzzle cases. You've got some geek out there who feels compelled to outthink you, and, of course, he's got all the advantages. All the aces, if you like. To be literal, I'm worried about the ace. It's got to be something big.”

“Let's hope you get him long before that. He hasn't really hurt anyone yet.”

“Jack!” Steelyard's voice skirled down the open stairwell and seemed to ricochet a few times around the concrete-walled room. “Get up here!” It was so peremptory that he glanced at the woman, but she only shrugged.

“Hold the fort,” Jack Liffey suggested as he climbed up out of Tinytown.

Maeve was a little embarrassed to be left there alone with the policewoman and didn't know quite what to say. “What do you think of all this?” Maeve asked, which allowed enough latitude so that almost any answer would do.

“The toy trains, or the destruction?” Gloria Ramirez replied.

“I guess I meant the trains. It's just not a girl thing.”

The woman looked around the room. She wore a severe navy blue suit that was at odds with her lovely rich skin and thick jet black hair that she had tied back. “You and I would probably have a lot more sympathy if it were a collection of heirloom quilts. It sure meant a lot to him.”

“I guess a lot of work went into it,” Maeve conceded.

“I think he said once his dad started it, but that doesn't seem likely, does it?”

The conversation kept threatening to wind down to nothing, but Maeve sensed the woman looking at her with sidelong glances, maybe just out-of-ordinary curiosity.

“I don't think I've ever talked to a policewoman one-on-one,” Maeve offered. “Oops, can you say ‘policewoman'? It's not ‘police person'?”

“ ‘Officer.' ” She smiled. “In my case, ‘detective.' That's gender-neutral. Is your family still together?”

“That's a funny question,” Maeve said.

“It's just that it's so rare these days. Let me guess: you live weekdays with your mother and weekends with your father.”

“Something like that. That must be police training, to look for stuff like that.”

“I think it's female training. Ken would always prefer to avoid asking about family if he could get away with it.” She set down her coffee cup and leaned against the edge of the huge train layout, looking across a trestle and a low mesa at Maeve, still watching with something that struck Maeve as beyond normal interest.

“You're not drinking your 7UP.”

“I usually stick to diet. The chemicals will kill you in the end, but you'll have a nice, skinny corpse.”

“I wish I had the motivation to take better care of my body.” Just as Maeve thought, the conversation was spiraling down toward stasis when suddenly, the woman's expression registered discovery. “Something's been teasing my memory. Aren't you that girl who saved her dad in the riots a couple years ago?”

Maeve felt herself blushing. “You have a good memory.”

“It was in the papers a lot. And I remember the papers saying your father was a detective.”

“Dad always says he just hunts for missing children; he's not a detective. He's sensitive about that for some reason.”

The woman looked upward, as if she could see through the ceiling to the two men upstairs. “They take a lot of care and feeding, don't they?”

Maeve grinned. “Why do you think they need so much tending?”

“I don't know. But some of us have got to have the homely virtues, or the whole world will end up a pissing contest. Pardon me. I'm not really antimale. Some of my ex-boyfriends haven't been so bad.”

“My dad isn't so bad, either.” She wasn't sure she wanted to tell this woman any more about her dad. It felt like disloyalty.

“Detective Ramirez, if your boyfriends weren't so bad, how come they're ex?”