The Cracked Earth (14 page)

“You've got to have that head looked at.”

“Lucky I didn't get hit somewhere vulnerable.” He struggled to the wall where Maeve's little man must have waited. Weeds were crushed down, but he was no Indian tracker. Out in a clump of weed he saw a flash of color and picked his way across to it. He plucked the crushed bright paper up by a corner, smoothed it a little, and then stuck it into his pocket.

When he got back Maeve was playing grown-up, talking to Lori Bright in that stiff dispassionate voice that she thought adults all used. He collected the gun wrapped in her sweater and they helped him back to his car. Miraculously no one from the mortuary office had been summoned to shoo them off the grass or have them arrested.

“Jack, I can't let you go like this. I know a doctor who'll look at your head right away. Fifteen minutes.”

He put Maeve in the car and then asked Lori Bright quietly about her own daughter. She said the man on the phone had promised to release the girl in the morning, and she could only trust them.

The instant he sat in the Concord, he nearly passed out when someone started sawing into the side of his skull and she got her way about the doctor. She moved the car off the grass for him and then drove them all to a clinic in a nondescript building without a nameplate right on the border of Beverly Hills and West Hollywood.

“This is where the studios used to take their starlets for D-and-Cs.”

Information he'd rather not have had bandied before Maeve, but she probably knew about things like that already. If she didn't, she would soon enough. “Annie, hey, do you know what's a DNC?”

It turned out to be the kind of clinic where the corridors had carpets and nearly first-rate original prints on the walls and the examining rooms played Mozart very, very softly. They X-rayed his head and gave him painkillers and told him to call back if he started hearing voices.

He didn't hear any voices, but it hurt like a bastard when he moved his head, and when he shut his eyes just for a moment on the way to the car, he woke up on Lori's sofa.

L
ORI
and Maeve were playing cards on a small Greene and Greene table, under a hanging stained-glass-and-redwood lamp that could only have been designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. They sat hunched forward on Mission ottomans, for all the world like sorority sisters. Maeve giggled and the picture made him nervous for some reason, as if he'd sold his daughter into white slavery.

Lori Bright said something mirthful and that whiskey voice reinforced whatever dark fears he felt, like the richest Scotch flowing over warm rocks. Surely Maeve would sense too many cigarettes, too much drink, too many men coming up the backstairs.

He heard the snapping of cards for a few moments and then Lori Bright's voice poured richly through the room again: “Are you sure I can't play a jack on that?”

“No, the rules change every four turns. That's the way the game works.”

“I think you're making this up to keep me in my place.”

“Ladies, what time is it?”

“Another country heard from.” Lori Bright looked over at him genially.

Maeve ran across to him. “Daddy, are you okay?”

“Sure, honey. I think we'd better get home.”

“Mrs. Bright's made up beds for us here. The doctor said you had to rest.” Very softly, she added, “She's really nice,” as if validating his choice in girlfriends.

Oh dear, oh dear, he thought.

Lori Bright stood. “I'll get us all some camomile tea.” And she drifted out of the room. Jack Liffey felt like the subject of a prearrangement, left alone with Maeve for the imparting of some deep secret.

“Is she a movie star?” Maeve asked breathlessly. “This house is brutally cool.”

“What makes you think she's a movie star?”

“I saw a picture of her in another room with a man I think was Jack Nicholson.”

“She was in movies in the 1960s and 1970s. She had a small part in
Teacher's Pet
with Nicholson.” He rubbed his forehead. And how did he know that? Oh, Daddy, have you been reading up on her credits? Renting her old movies? Oh, Daddy, what's happening to you?

“I think she likes you, Daddy.”

Maeve's starstruck twitter was like a footnote to his own darker lunacy, and it was too late to shield her from the whole shadowy fugue.

“Punkin, I'd like to ask you not to tell Mommy about this.”

“Why? She always says she'd be happy if you're seeing someone.”

“I'd like to stay friends with your mommy and I just have a feeling this would interfere. Just for now. Please.”

“Sure.”

And probably not tell Marlena, for good measure.

He could turn his own daughter into a liar for him. The first sidestep into this new world of portable ethics. No, not the first.

Mike had warned him that fame would bite him on the ass. And Art Castro had told him more than once that Trouble was what you got when you let your dick lead you around. But this was way beyond those warnings, deep into some kind of darkness that only came over you when you violated a thing at the core of who you were.

Lori Bright came back in with a tray of tea, smiling like Lady Bountiful, but it wasn't tea he was starting to want. Then he saw the glitter in her eyes and realized it wasn't tea she'd had on the way.

“W
ANT
to do a line?”

He shook his head. “Believe it or not I don't like feeling my heart pounding like a jackhammer.”

“That's not the organ I was thinking of going to work on.” She snuffled the powder off a hand mirror with the kind of red mini-straw that they put in bar drinks. “And you could do with a little pounding down here.”

She wiped her nose against his penis, which gave his penis a cool rush, but then she subsided into thoughtfulness and sank back into the gray satin. His penis went to ice and began to swell as if it had a mind of its own and he was getting more and more nervous knowing Maeve was in a guest bed down the hall, sleeping in a borrowed nightie made of French silk.

“What a sweet kid she is. The way every emotion shows on her face, even the little guile she can muster.”

“I think we were all like that.”

“Innocence. It's just sitting there as we grow up. It's like a big rock in the front yard and all the urgencies and the other stuff pile up around it like silt and the top of the rock gets smaller and smaller and then it's buried. Just gone.”

“I'm not sure it's innocence you should be mourning. I believe in the benefit of understanding how things work. I bet there's mature kinds of integrity, too.”

She grinned and perked up. “Your innocence still sticks out of the silt a bit. Let's see what we can do with it. Ever been tied up? Feeling helpless is a real rush.”

As usual she wouldn't accede to anyone else's wishes, and it was about a half hour later, his wrists and ankles tied to the corners of the bed by the kinds of padded restraints they used in hospitals, and he was beginning to regret just about everything in his life, and Lori Bright had just said, “I like to
give
hurt a little, too.” And then the wall cracked all of a sudden with a sound like a gunshot and the bed heaved and rolled.

“
Do
it,
do
it,” Lori Bright called furiously to the moving earth with a druggy fire in her eyes, as if mass destruction would validate some deep need in her.

“Daddy!” Maeve cried in the hall.

J
UST ANOTHER AFTERSHOCK, BUT IT HAD BROUGHT WHAT WAS
left of his code of honor down in ruins. Maeve had cried out from the other side of the bedroom door, but even in her panicky Daddy-calling, she knew enough not to open Pandora's door, and he'd had to leave the day-saving to Lori Bright, who had gathered herself back from somewhere far away, her eyes unglazing, then moistening and softening. She had tugged on a bathrobe and slipped out to comfort Maeve as he lay there like a trussed roast.

And whatever it was clutching at him, breathing heavy in his ears, it was still there promising the erotic brass ring on the merry-go-round.

A few years back, when he'd finally given up the drink and drugs, he'd sworn a mighty oath that control was the one thing he'd never lose again. Never get smug, he thought. You could always be blindsided by what you didn't understand. Celebrity, and tales of the Polo Lounge, and familiar faces huge on movie screens, and all that erotic catnip, and the spooky grappling with a woman who had something dark and something soft and something needy warring inside her, like a child inside a woman inside a child.

There was no high road to be found that night.

• • •

S
OMEWHERE
deep in the night, Lori woke him from a woozy slumber and handed him her cell phone.

“Liffey?” a voice said darkly. The voice seemed familiar.

“Who is this?”

“This is Lieutenant Malamud.” There was a long pause and a heavy breath. If he'd been more awake, he might have said something about the breathing. “You can look for the girl. It's your job, we understand that, but stay away from G. Dan Hunt. That's something else, and I assure you he has nothing to do with the girl.”

Jack Liffey cleared his throat, but it didn't do anything for the horrible throbbing in his head. “Malamud, I wish I knew your edge in this thing.”

“No, you don't.”

He looked at the phone for a moment after it went dead, then handed it back to Lori Bright. “Cops. They've got it all their own way and that makes them think they're smart.”

He wondered who'd told the cops he was looking for Hunt. Could it have been Art Castro? Or did they know something about the Jamaican?

She wet the tip of her finger and touched it to his penis, but there was nothing doing there.

B
Y
morning, his headache was letting up and Maeve and Lori both made fun of the giant black eye that was claiming the left side of his face. Maeve jabbered away about Spanish Revival architecture as they reclaimed the car and he drove her home. He was so relieved that Maeve's purity and cheer seemed to have survived that his spirits soared with gratitude. He drove past toppled chimneys and retaining walls and a few blown-out picture windows. L.A. had both riots and earthquakes, he thought irreverently, and the only real difference was that, after the riots, more poor people ended up with good TVs.

“I forgot to get her autograph!”

“Don't worry, punkin. I'll get it for you.”

“She's your girlfriend, isn't she?”

Oh-oh. “I'm not sure you'd put it just that way.” For one thing, Lori Bright was a bit old to be called a girl.

“You didn't sleep in that blue room beside mine.”

“Another detective in training.” He tried to make light of it. “I'm fifty-two, Hon. I'm allowed to sleep where I want.”

“Don't worry. I know you don't want Mom to know about Lori right now.”

In a slightly better world, he would have said: Hon, I was wrong to ask you to keep your mom in the dark. I don't want you ever to lie. You can tell her whatever you like. But it wasn't a slightly better world, and she'd already seemed to reconcile herself so easily to the accommodation.

“Coo-uhl.” The word had several syllables, and she smiled happily. “We'll let it stay a secret liaison.”

He wondered if she'd started reading the Victorians, or if the expression was just from some cheap romance with a torn bodice on the cover.

He had to slow to a crawl to weave between cars that were double-parked all over the street, and they both looked at a big vacant lot where a score of Latino families were still setting up camp in makeshift tents of black plastic and cardboard to escape the aftershocks of the aftershock. Squat brown women carried buckets of water and the children lugged cardboard boxes of belongings. In this part of midtown they were mostly Central Americans.

“They come up here for a better life and all we offer is spiteful laws, the lousiest jobs, and earthquakes.”

“Mommy says half her fourth grade is Guatemalan kids this year.”

“Do you have any in your class?”

She shook her head. “My best friend is Armenian,” she said proudly. “Eremy. She's really smart and she eats this funny pizza with, like, a spicy meat paste on it.”

“Lahmajune,” he said dryly.

She was startled. “How did you know?”

“I know a lot, punkin. I know the value of pi to nine places. I know how to find runaway girls. I know that the Cretaceous comes
after
the Jurassic. But I don't know the first thing about the human heart.”

“Huh?”

“H
ELLO,
Bobo. It's Slack Jack.”

“Not
the
Slack Jack.”

“The very.”

Beau Creighton had been his best friend in basic and then at the army's E-tech school, a southern boy from a Birmingham steelworker family who'd gone straight from the University of Alabama into Peace Corps training to learn how to build wells in African villages. He'd trained for three months at a disused summer camp in Louisiana, learning an obscure Bantu language with three tongue-wrenching clicks in it, and playing peace songs on his twelve-string guitar for his new friends every evening. A few hours before the plane could take off for London, Nairobi, and its final stop in Gaborone, Botswana, the army had drafted him. He was still playing the twelve-string at Bragg, sitting disconsolately on a bunk, when Jack Liffey walked in and asked if he could tune it down and play “The Bells of Rhymney.” Beau Creighton had looked up with red eyes, and Jack Liffey had taken a bet with himself that in the next ten seconds this tall, skinny Fucking New Guy filling out their intake was either going to weep or laugh hysterically.

“I will never surrender of my own free will,” Detective Sergeant Bobo Creighton called into the phone in a peculiar emotionless staccato. It had been on a poster over their bunk, part of the Soldier's Creed, and they had made endless jokes about it. To this day Jack Liffey did not know how Bobo had gone from redneck to peacenik to soldier-technician to cop, but he was the only friend he had in the police force, even if it was Denver. “I don't see you much no more, boy.”

They chatted for a while, but they both knew Jack Liffey wanted something.

“They got a new system here, Bobo. Ever since some creep got the address of a starlet from the DMV and then stalked her home and killed her, you want a name or address from Motor Vehicles, you got to be somebody with access. You've got to know the code for the day.”

“I heard about that, pardner. Rebecca Schaeffer it was, from the sitcoms. My girls were crazy about her.”

“How ‘bout you call up some cop liaison number and get that code of the day for me. You know I'm no stalker.”

There was a long pause. “What do you
do
these days, Jack?”

“I find runaway kids. Honestly, Bobo. We're on the same side.”

“Where you at now?”

Jack Liffey gave him his number.

“If you don't hear from me in twenty minutes, I got a bad case of second thoughts.”

But he heard in ten, and got what he needed.

“H
I
, this is Sergeant Flor in Rampart Division,” Jack Liffey said over the phone. He was wobbling in and out of a nasty José Jimenez accent. “Couple things I wan' choo ta do for me.”

“What's the password?” The clerk had a throaty voice, but dead bored, like a hooker asking if you wanted to go around again.

“Oh, yeah. I got the word here somewhere. I writ it down. Here we go: evening notion.”

“Go ahead.”

“Tell me what you can about California 2MDD576.”

He heard the computer keys clacking away at the other end.

“That's a tan Oldsmobile registered to a Danny Firestack.” She gave him an address in Saugus. That was Canyon Country all right.

“And what have you got registered to Tyrone Pennycooke?”

That took even less time. “ 'Ninety-three Ford Explorer, green.” An address in Windsor Hills, not far from him. Windsor Hills was an island of county land in the hills north of Inglewood, some of the choicest black middle-class homes in the United States.

“Now, Liffey, Jack. What does he drive?”

“Nineteen seventy-nine AMC Concord, white.”

“What idiot would drive
that
?”
He hung up.

H
E
swung over Slauson to have a peek at Windsor Hills. Most of the houses north of Slauson were 1950s and later, those split-level ranch numbers with scalloped eaves and big decorative birdhouses over the garage. But Ridge Glen was older, Tudor and Norman and Spanish places, probably built where they'd torn down the 1932 Olympic village. He parked a half block from the big beige bungalow where a green Explorer sat in the drive. A “For Sale” gallows was planted on the lawn, with a little plastic leaflet box that said
TAKE ONE.
He sauntered up the block past the house, took a leaflet, checked out the Explorer, and continued on.

The green-black-red bumper sticker said
IRIE
across it, which he figured was some kind of dread talk. He read the leaflet as he strolled: the house had four bedrooms, two and a half baths, a den, a remodeled kitchen, and it gave good curb appeal: $209,000. About half what it would be worth a few miles northwest in a white area, curb appeal or no.

He wondered whether Terror Pennycooke was the seller or just a tenant. There was a broad shady porch with a big glide on it like something out of Bedford Falls. At the corner he touched the rough bark of a liquidambar tree like tagging home and turned back.

Two African-American boys about ten came out of nowhere carrying model airplanes. They made rat-a-tat noises and swooped the planes at one another. It was like stumbling into a photo negative of his own childhood. His best friend Kenny Orcot had flown a control-line Stuka against his Spitfire with its balky .049 gas engine, but Kenny's mom had moved away when she divorced. It had been the only divorce in the whole neighborhood. What a strange aberrant moment in American history the fifties had been, he thought, a blink of white middle-class daydream caught fast between the Nazis and crack cocaine.

He didn't see anyone else and he got into the Concord and headed north, wondering if the name Ridge Glen wasn't an oxymoron.

J
ACK
Liffey took a shortcut up Veteran and stopped for a minute to watch the Crockery Man at work. He was up on his scaffold, a squat Mediterranean-looking man covering his house from ground to roofline with colorful fragments of plates and saucers and cups set into plaster. He'd pretty much finished the lower half, but it would take years of neighborhood protests and injunctions for him to finish the rest. Buckets on pulleys waited on the front lawn full of more building material. He waved, but the man didn't see him.

He and Maeve had awarded it the first point in their contest of L.A. oddities.

T
HE
receptionist was on her knees trying to scoop runaway Skittles off the plum carpeting.

“Remember me?”

She looked up, scowling, then seemed to remember him. “I must look totally geeked out.” She stood and showed him a handful of the candies. “I switched from M&M's when they put in those awful blue ones. You want Brucie?”

“Sure.”

“Watch your step.”

She tapped a key on her keyboard. “Bruce, that cop guy was here before wants some face time.”

“Thanks, Bambi.”

The receptionist went down on her knees again and crawled toward him. It was disconcerting, like being prayed to.

“A whole bunch of red ones. Jeez.”

Bruce Parfit opened the double door and hung in it with a distracted air. “You catch us in a serious crunch mode, mate. Perhaps another time.”

“I know who burned up Dae Kim's.”

The man's manner changed instantly. The long ponytail bobbed, then he seemed to notice his receptionist grubbing under the desk and shrugged helplessly before beckoning Jack Liffey inside.

“Last time we had a little chin wag it nearly lost us our best filmmaker.”

“It was you they were after, not me.”

Bruce Parfit led him along the corridor past a homemade banner that said,
YOU ARE IN A MAZE OF TWISTY LITTLE PASSAGES, ALL ALIKE.
A young man stood along the wall straining at something in his hands. As they passed, Jack Liffey could see that his index fingers were deep into an old-fashioned straw finger trap. He hadn't seen one of those in years.

A woman in a work shirt and overalls stood at a whiteboard in a small bay off the hall writing up numbers in fluorescent colors. She noticed them passing. “Bruce, I tell you, you just can't comb a hairy ball smooth.”

“We'll still give it a go, Joanie.”

Bruce Parfit sealed them into his big corner office, cutting off the fast beat of techno-dance music from somewhere. Out the floor-to-ceiling window, the digital display on the big billboard was still counting up smoking deaths.

“So…”

“I'm going to take your side,” Jack Liffey said. “I'm not sure why. Monogram may have a legitimate grievance, I don't know about that, but they got me pissed off. Wasn't it Chairman Mao who said my enemy's enemy is my friend?”