City of Strangers (7 page)

He asked for the headmistress by name—Mrs. Plumkill—and told the girl at the desk that the woman knew him. The headmistress must have recognized his name because she came straight out. She wore round wire-rims and looked as thin and severe as ever, as if she really belonged in a porn film wearing a black leather SS coat and nothing else.

“Mr. Liffey, please come in.”

Her office had a lot of dark paneling and an overworked baroque desk.

“Do you remember me from three years ago? I was looking for Lee Borowsky. Actually, I found her.”

The woman nodded. “And in so doing you caused Taunton's good name not a whit of embarrassment whatsoever. I thank you.”

“If I had, I guess I'd've been frog-marched out of here by two big guys with tattoos about now.”

She laughed, and he remembered that about her. A ready laugh that belied the severe look. “Something like that. You never come to see us in the good times, Jack. You just come by when there's trouble. Only one of our girls has gone missing recently, so I assume that's the occasion for this visit.”

“Becky Auslander. I'm afraid so.”

“We had police at the time, two jurisdictions. We had FBI, and we had a big detective agency from downtown.”

Rosewood, Jack Liffey thought. Maybe Art Castro was completely out of the loop now. “Now what you get is me,” he said. “Life is a steady decline of expectations.”

She laughed again. “I don't see it that way. The FBI man couldn't have said something witty to save his life.”

“They breed them like that on a farm down in Alabama. It's the way Hoover liked them. When he wasn't wearing black bras. And it's why they didn't figure out 9-11. I'm working for the girl's father, if you want to call him.”

“I think I can trust you. I'll do more than I did for the others. I'll summon her best friend and let you talk to her in my office. Is that to your liking?”

“It's to my utter delight.”

She smiled as she walked past him, resting her hand for a moment on his shoulder. “It's
Miss
Plumkill, by the way, Mr. Liffey. Not Mrs.”

He sat stunned. She had actually flirted with him. An image of Aneliese de Villiers flashed past in his mind. Was there something about finding yourself attracted anew to a woman and perking up about it that suddenly made you emit a haze of pheromones to attract other women? He didn't quite think Miss Plumkill was his type, but the hand on his shoulder unsettled all his preconceptions and pushed things around, like thick ice breaking up under great pressure on an arctic sea.

Miss Plumkill came back in, another light touch on his shoulder, inflaming the spot that was already asimmer. “The girl's name is Tiffany Caution. I know it sounds like the heroine of one of those sixties spy movies, but her father is very big in building tract housing. You've heard of Caution Contractors?”

It was the biggest developer in the city, with a finger in every major scandal—the collapse of the Red Line tunnel, the overpriced high school built over a toxic dump. “I sure have, but I never knew it was a proper noun.”

“Be careful of her. I'll be in the next room.”

“Uh-oh.”

“She's a man-eater. I predict she won't last out her senior year if she finds any rich prospects that are edible.”

“Thanks for the warning, but I'm poor as a churchmouse.” He might have added that she could probably do pretty well in the man-eating department herself.

“I think Tiffany would chew on just about any man to stay in practice.” While they waited, she asked him about the earlier job, Lee Borowsky, who had never made it back to Taunton, and he gave her a potted summary of the case, minus the torrid affair he had had with her mother, a faded movie star. That part had left him shaken for a long time, ruminating over the power of celebrity to alter your perceptions and corrupt your purposes. For the first time, he realized that his relationship with the wonderfully ordinary Marlena Cruz might have been something of a rebound from all that.

The door opened, and a young woman came in. She had the Taunton woolly gray pleated skirt and a blue blazer over a white blouse. The plain-looking girl had long blond hair and fierce direct eyes, and somehow he sensed a lot of pent-up sorrows, rages, and despairs. “Mr. Jack Liffey, this is Rebecca's friend, Tiffany Caution.” The girl gave him a limp hand that caressed his palm lightly in secret. “I'll leave you two to talk.”

The headmistress closed the door softly, and her shadow soon disappeared from the frosted glass. “I'm working for Becky's father,” he said. “I seem to be just about his last chance to find Rebecca.”

He sat in the desk chair but rolled it away from the over-ornate desk, into the open to make himself less imposing, and gestured for the girl to sit in the other chair. She made sure a lot of thigh showed as she sat, and then spread her knees, daring him to look up her skirt. He could go several ways with this, he thought. This girl was real trouble.

“Could you tell me about Becky?”

“Beck has really big tits, genuine honkers.”

“That'll be a help.” And instantly regretted showing any response at all. “Did she have any hobbies?” He regretted his follow-up question, too.

“You mean, like making
quilts
? Mostly she liked buying lingerie, putting on makeup, and fucking boys. On the whole, fucking was probably top on the charts.”

The girl had slipped into the past tense, but it might not have meant anything. Her expression was still deadpan, daring him to rise to the sexual bait. “Miss Caution, I've never forced a young woman to return to her parents if she didn't want to go home. You don't have to protect her from a deprogrammer here, if she's off doing something she believes in, or even if she's just living with some guy she fell in love with. I'll leave her alone. But the world can still be tough on a young woman, no matter how invulnerable she thinks she is, and I need to find out for her father if she's okay.”

“Did ol' Plumkisser come on to you just now? I'll bet she did, didn't she? You got a nice bulge there, and she needs it bad.” She tugged her skirt up even more. “Wouldn't you rather know what a tight young pussy is like?”

The air conditioner came on with a whine, and a puff of air out of the overhead vent stirred papers on the desk. It was like an evil spirit passing through the room.

“What sports did Rebecca like?” he tried doggedly, mostly to buy time. He hadn't worked out how to deal with this girl. Growing up in the 1950s, he'd never heard a girl talk remotely like this, but more recently he'd heard plenty of gutter mouth from girls while hunting runaways. In his experience, those who had grown up privileged were often the worst.

His persistence now seemed to catch her attention at last. “We used to go surfing and in-line skating over in Venice, until Beck realized you only meet dodos that way. They may look good in tight shorts, but they'll end up driving a truck or working for somebody else. Guys with money don't hang out at the beach. Poor Fari didn't know what hit him when she zeroed her sights. She showed him a few tricks until she had him whimpering for more.”

“Until he got religion.”

“Stupid camel jockeys. He gave up really good head for a lot of moonwash and banging his forehead on a carpet. Beck was just getting to think she had a meal ticket. Was she mad when he turned oh-so pure on her—really furious. She even went to his crib and talked to his dad, played sweet sixteen, but no luck.”

Jack Liffey couldn't quite put his finger on her attitude. He was trying hard to keep his eyes on her face.

“I think it was the first time Beck had ever been rejected, and she was really zoned about it.”

With her eyes firmly on him, the girl undid a button of her blouse, then slid her hand slowly inside and started apparently massaging one of her nipples. It aroused and enraged him at the same time. He didn't believe in physical punishment, but this one needed a spanking.

“Do you know what rotting meat smells like?” he asked, out of the blue.

Her hand withdrew and her eyes wrinkled up a little.

“That sweet horrible smell that makes everyone want to throw up. Like decay and garbage and fermenting old fruit in the gutter, with maggots crawling over it.” He let the anger show in his voice. “That's what happens to you inside when you start disrespecting yourself. Your flesh starts to turn rancid. Your bones go soft and won't hold up your weight. Your muscles lose their force. It all starts to smell like rot, and nobody with any integrity, nobody with a good nose, wants to be anywhere near you.” He went on like that for a while, just a big stick to knock her off balance, until she tried to interrupt with some smart comment.

“Just sit still!”
he snapped. “Your act would make any decent human being sick to his stomach, the way you punish yourself in public, but I know better than that. I know it's only a snivel. There's a scared little girl in there trying to shock the world because she thinks nobody likes her. Her parents don't give a damn, they're busy with their own life, and no boy has ever wanted her for anything but sex. They take her out to get into her pants on the first date, and then they walk away and brag behind her back about what a lay she was and never call her again, and even the girls won't have anything to do with her anymore; they turn up their nose or ignore her.”

At first she'd gone stony-faced and tried to brazen it out. It took a while, but he saw self-pity creeping over her as she listened and his rap started to frighten her. It was just a cold reading, a fortuneteller's trick, but it was amazing how you could take control of someone else's self-image and shift it bodily, just by suggesting forcefully enough a new way of looking at themselves. And since everything was pretty much true of everybody, all you really needed to make it all work was your own strength of character.

In another minute or two, she was sobbing uncontrollably. It had been touch and go, of course. She might have cried rape on him or clung to her pain, or run out of the room, but it had been worth a try. Jack Liffey didn't like to give up on anybody that young.

“Tiffany, can you tell me
anything
about Becky you didn't tell the police?”

She nodded, just faintly. “I'm sorry I was so awful, Mr. Liffey.” She tugged the skirt back down and sat primly. She was having a hard time talking, but finally got herself partway back. “I really don't want to be like that. What can I do? Beck was my only friend. I'm such a mess.”

“Why don't you begin by talking to Miss Plumkill. Start simple, then work up to what's really bothering you. She has a heart and a great sense of humor. You'd like her if you gave her a chance.” He was not about to volunteer his own services as camp counselor. She was just too volatile, and too willing to run up the sexual pirate flag.

“Really?”

“I'll tell her you want to make a fresh start. You'll be a lot happier, I promise.”

“Thanks, Mr. Liffey. I'll give it a try.”

He had no idea whether this was just an act, a whim that would burn off with the moment. “About Becky …”

“Uh-huh. I do know something I never told. Beck told me that she had some way to get even with the Iranian boys. This was right about when they all disappeared. I didn't want any part of it, so she didn't tell me what it was, but she looked like the cat that ate the canary or whatever.”

“Leave aside the boys for the moment. Was Becky the sort of girl to run away from home?”

“Oh, sure. She hated her parents. She said her dad drove her crazy constantly trying to explain her own head to her. Just imagine how awful that is. You can't even squeak without being analyzed to death. I think she ran away a lot of times.”

They talked some more in relative calm, but the troubled Tiffany didn't know anything more about Rebecca Auslander that helped him much. Then he went out and spoke to the headmistress, who was stunned when he told her Tiffany Caution seemed to want to come around and reenter the human race.

“I should hire you on a consulting basis for our problem girls.”

“No, thanks. It's far too terrifying.”

The headmistress insisted on getting his phone number, anyway. She electrified the space around them with her eyes, but there was already far too much erotic catnip on the air.

He fled the school.

In the
Times
that morning, sandwiched between the relentless department-store ads of women with come-hither eyes showing off push-up bras, there was a small report on page 17 about a truck bound from Mexico to L.A. that had been hijacked and driven out into rural Riverside County, somewhere near Lake Elsinore, where it had been looted of its contents. A Mexican national driving the truck had been killed execution-style. The truck and trailer had then been shot up with automatic weapons and torched. The Riverside sheriff's department suggested that it was an unusually brutal attack for a hijacking and looked more like something the Arellanos or one of the other Baja drug cartels would offer as an object lesson.

What had caught his eye was the fact that the truck was owned by a Los Angeles manufacturer of decorative stone surfacing called LA ROX. Jack Liffey telephoned, but a chastened-sounding Farshad Bayat wouldn't talk about the hijacking on the phone. He agreed to meet him at home late in the afternoon.

A half hour later, Jack Liffey was only a few blocks from his condo, idling at a light, when he noticed two grizzled old men in antiquated military uniforms with tin hats and puttees leading a string of mules up Jefferson, like sourdoughs planning to dig for gold in the Ross-Dress-for-Less parking lot. The old men looked pretty happy about things, and waved now and then at the traffic. One of them carried a bugle which he brought to his lips now and then and blatted.

Each mule wore a blue saddle blanket fringed with gold, and the last two carried big professionally printed signs on their backs that waggled hypnotically with the stolid mule shamble. The first said,
Bring Back Muleskinners.
And the second said,
The U.S. Army Has Never Lost a War in Which Mules Were Used.

Jack Liffey mused for a moment about the claim, something he had never really considered, of course. It occurred to him that the United States had never really won a war in which jets were used, either. Depending on how you scored Korea. Iraq wasn't a war, it was a cruel turkey shoot against a hopeless underequipped army. One of the mules dumped on the sidewalk just as the light changed and the mule behind it sidestepped the pile with great delicacy.

He drove on, giving the procession a little wave. Things had been grainy and unpleasant for a long time, the boundaries blurring wherever he looked—but now he saw that it was all distinct; it was all simple; it was all funny. He was headed up to West Hollywood to talk to Dicky Auslander, MFCC, PhD, and that was the funniest part of all.

“Come on in, Jack.”

“Sure, Dicky.
Dicky …
I'm getting to like the name.”

Jack Liffey wasn't sure but he thought Auslander frowned a little at that, walking ahead of him. He followed him into the interview room and sat on the sofa as Auslander scribbled something on a yellow pad. The man had finally moved the plant a foot from the sofa, leaving the patient more headroom. Through the wall there was an irregular dull bapping sound, like a fist into a catcher's mitt, over and over. “What's going on?”

“My partner does marriage counseling, and sometimes he encourages them to use pugil sticks.”

“Those big rubber Q-tips that people hit each other with?”

“That's the thing.”

“Seems pretty childish for old married couples.”

“We're all pretty childish, given a sufficiently charitable perspective, Jack. Wouldn't you like a few minutes go at your ex? Some people can burrow down into it, get out their hostilities and use the anger to help them do some of the growing up they never managed.”

“If that's the game, I'll just go back to making model airplanes.”

“Would you really?” Auslander asked as he sat.

“No, Dicky, I really wouldn't. I liked the smell of the glue, though.” Never give a psychologist an inch, even in jest, he thought. “What would you say if I reported that some people describe your daughter as a ruthless social climber?”

That stopped the man for a moment, and the bapping next door seemed to redouble as somebody cried out angrily in pain. Auslander pursed his lips and seemed to try to blow through his mouth while the lips were closed. “I thought I suggested you start by looking for the Iranian boys.”

“You shrink the heads, I find the kids. I won't tell you what's childish behavior, and you don't tell me how to do my job.”

He nodded glumly.

“I'll find your daughter, Dicky, if you really want her found. It's what I do.”

“Why wouldn't I?”

“I don't know. Nobody seems to have liked her very much, and some say she didn't like you very much.”

He sighed and real pain flitted across his features. “Her younger sister is the sweetest girl you can imagine. Sometimes they just turn out a certain way and there's nothing you did, and not a damn thing you can do to change it. Rebecca is a handful, but she's still my daughter and I love her. Just the way you love Maeve.”

Maybe not
just,
Jack Liffey demurred in his head. “When she was young, did you go on family vacations?”

“Some.”

“Where?”

Auslander seemed to think it over, like a burglar holding back his alibi. “The Russian River when she was very young, before it became a hundred percent gay. Then Roatan in Honduras—that's a fancy resort island off the east coast. Ensenada a couple of times when she was a teen. She seemed to like Ensenada—I think because she met a boy at the University of Baja there. I sent a guy to look for her down there, but he got nowhere.”

“Does she speak Spanish?”

“She took it in school. Probably not very well.” He looked a bit sheepish. “There's a reason I wasn't very serious about looking in Mexico, Jack. Rebecca has a nasty racist streak. I don't know where it came from. Neither my wife nor I ever disparaged minorities in front of her. I suppose it's classism as much as racism. She seems to scorn any group that has a high percentage of poor people—blacks, Central Americans, Mexicans. You only had to see the disdain on her face when she looked at somebody a bit ragged. And she kept using words like ‘beaner' and ‘greaseball.' Since it was mostly the well-off who'd fled Iran, she didn't mind them so much as a minority.”

“And they're Aryans who seem to own a lot of Rolexes.”

“There's that.”

Bap-bap-
whap.
There was a sudden explosion of cursing behind the wall, and Jack Liffey smiled to himself. Nothing like growing up fast.

“Have you found out anything?”

“Just things to think about. There's no point in me getting your hopes up.”

“How about your own life? You look a little less tense than the last time I saw you.”

That was disconcerting. If somebody like Dicky Auslander could read him that easily, he really
did
need help. And there had been nothing more than a vague expression of interest from a woman—two women—to brighten up his horizon. “I guess it's just getting my teeth into a job. It always perks me up.”

“Not a new woman?”

“Nope.”

“Let's return to our little metaphor of life, all right?”

“You know what I'd like
not
to do, Dicky? I'd like
not
to do that again.”

“Come on, indulge my metaphor. I'm the author of the detective story of your life. And you've got this burning sensation in your soul, something that you've just got to complain about.”

“If you want to be accurate, that detective-story thing isn't a metaphor, Dicky. It's a paradigm.”

“You're the one who took English lit. Are you still pissed off at me for writing a story that leaves you so unhappy? I mean, because I took away so many things that you thought you could rely on?”

Jack Liffey glared a moment and then decided the only way out of this nightmare was to humor the man. “I wouldn't be opposed to having all the normal stuff in life fall
into
my lap instead of
out
of it, yeah, sure. Home, wife, job, money. And I don't like feeling I'm stuck outside the amusement park without a ticket, looking in over the hedge while everybody else is having fun on the Matter-horn ride. But I reckon that's just the human condition.”

“Not necessarily. I think you have a tendency to romanticize being an outsider.”

It was lucky there was nothing within reach to throw, Jack Liffey thought. It was no wonder this guy's daughter's soul had gotten all twisted up.

“It's an ordinary human tendency to romanticize what we seem to be stuck with, even the bad stuff, so we can value it and live with it. Let's put it in terms you can buy into. Dostoyevsky romanticized his pain. Twain romanticized his cynicism. Hemingway romanticized his penis. Romanticizing only gets in the way if you need to be really grounded in reality.”

“I guess I missed that lit class that covered Hemingway's penis.”

“You know there's still a lot of gender socialization that goes on. It might stem from something vaguely like Jung's collective unconscious. Maybe some deep survivals of what we had to learn to reproduce the species. Whatever. You can think of it as sex-linked hormones working their magic on the chemical processes in the brain. But girls and boys really do develop in different ways.”

“No shit. Let me write that down.”

“
Something
impels girls to be nurturers. They practice it all the time by engaging with their dolls, with their pets, with one another—overengaging, really. You can see them cooing and petting all the time. If that practice never matures, if it freezes at some immature level, it leads to a kind of gross sentimentality. They grow up clinging to things furiously. They gasp and weep at news of faraway car wrecks that hurt people they never knew. They become immobilized by emotion. They can't make transitions. The trait is frozen way beyond a useful sympathy, it becomes a
need.
”

Dicky Auslander uncrossed his legs and recrossed them the opposite way. His hands fiddled with a pen in a way that suggested he had once been a heavy smoker. Jack Liffey figured he was thinking out loud, just working out some article he was working on for
Psychology for Idiots.

“On the other side, boys are the guardians of the tribe, the warriors. Why? I don't know. We're thousands of years past the need for all that, but it's still there. So instead of engaging, boys stand off a ways, on guard. They develop a critical distance. I'll bet you used to sit in the front row of the science-fiction movie, making fun of all the bad science and implausibility. The wiseguy is a kind of practice for being a warrior. Look at the African-American boys practicing their dozens game on their street corners, developing their social confidence. And if most of us boys think we've got to learn to be warriors for the race, you've got it even worse, Mr. Detective. You're the guy I send out there in the hard rain to find those in trouble—even my own daughter.”

“You're getting your ‘yous' mixed up there. You're either God or you're Dicky with the missing daughter.” But you couldn't divert the man once he got up a head of steam.

“And I just might be sending you out ill-equipped on your mission. A boy's critical distance can fail to mature, too, leaving you stuck in this outsider persona. You end up thinking you're Camus or somebody. You feel you can never really belong anywhere. You've got your nose pushed right up against a big, cold window that's going to shut you out forever. Other people go inside and let their hair down and laugh in the dance hall. Not you.”

“You go to a lot of dance halls?”

“Unfortunately, the only trustworthy knowledge of the world comes from direct contact. So the more you're stuck with this picture of yourself as a romantic outsider, the more you're doomed to work on secondhand information, to be untouchable, insulated from real life.”

“I'll point that out the next time somebody takes a shot at me.” He'd been shot twice on his last big job, saved from death only by brute good luck. One bullet had left him with two cracked ribs, and another had accomplished what the ER people called a through-and-through at the left shoulder that had left him with an arm he couldn't lift above the horizontal. He also had a metal plate in his head from another job. All in all, he didn't feel very untouchable.

“This isn't literal. It's about your psyche and what goes on inside there.”

“Fine, Dicky. But you know the profound truth I've noticed about men and women? I've noticed women absolutely never rob liquor stores. I think they're probably just more evolved than we are.”

There was one hard
bap-bap-bap
next door, and then a terrible shriek and a dying moan.

“Fifty-five minutes must be up,” Jack Liffey said.

Auslander looked a little concerned at the sound of the last blow. “Think it over. Maybe we can go back together and rewrite a chapter or two of your career—you've got a few years left. Maybe we can write a happy ending—get you feeling like you belong here with the rest of us. Most of the things in life don't really torment us per se, Jack—it's just the way we end up thinking about them that torments us.”

“Wait'll you get yourself a messy divorce or two, Dicky. I find you can really look hard at the way you
think
about something like that and, what the hell, there's a reality in there that actually hurts.”

“Same time, three days.”

“You doing sex with Trev?”

Eremy had to shout over the noisy Triumph TR3 engine. Sixteen and a half, and she had her license, plus access to a really righteous car. Maeve was envious.

“Good grief, no!” Maeve called back.

“You haven't touched his penis yet?”

“
No.
We just kiss, and a little tongue. A couple times I let him touch my breast, but only over the bra.”

Eremy grinned and shifted down, roaring, then stopped for the red light. Her brother Petros had taught her how to drive the restored sports car, double-clutching and matching revs by rolling her foot from brake to gas, and she loved it all, though it was really still his car. “I let Jarrod do it on my stomach. Not inside. It wasn't much fun, but then he did me with his finger. Haven't you let anybody do that?”