Commonwealth (6 page)

“I'll check around back,” Lomer said and walked off whistling through the narrow side yard, shining his flashlight in the windows while Fix waited. There were no stars above Los Angeles, or they were there but the city threw out too much light to see
them. Fix had his eye on the slim quarter moon when he saw a bright light coming through the dark house. Lomer switched on the porch light and opened the front door. “The back was open,” he said.

“The back door was open,” Fix said.

“What?” Franny asked. She put down her magazine and pulled the blanket up to his shoulders. He'd been right about the blanket. Patsy had brought him one.

“I was asleep.”

“It's the Benadryl. It keeps you from itching later on.”

He was trying to put it all together—this room, this day, his daughter, Los Angeles, the house just off Olympic. “The back door was open and the front door was locked. You would've stopped to think about that, wouldn't you?”

“Dad, tell me what house we're talking about? Your house now? The Santa Monica house?”

Fix shook his head. “The house we went to the night Lomer was shot.”

“I thought he got shot at a service station,” she said. That's what her mother had told them, and if it was forty years ago, more than that, she still remembered it. Her mother had been fighting with Caroline. Whenever Caroline stayed out past curfew or said something really horrible to Bert or gave Franny enough of a slap to make her nose bleed, she took the opportunity to remind their mother that had Beverly been a decent wife and stayed with their father then none of this would have happened. If Beverly had stayed married to Fix then Caroline would have been a model citizen; her good behavior had been entirely within their mother's grasp and she'd blown it by choosing to run off with Bert Cousins, so no one should be blaming Caroline for how her life was turning out. It was old news. By the point at which they'd come to this particular fight
they'd been living in Virginia for longer than either girl had lived in Los Angeles, but the story of her alternative existence was Caroline's trump card and she brought it out for every occasion. Franny remembered the time the three of them were in the car coming home from school, she and Caroline both in the plaid uniform skirts and white perma-press blouses of Sacred Heart. She couldn't remember what Caroline had done that had started the fight, or why this fight seemed more serious than the others. But something that was said had made their mother tell them about Lomer.

“That's right,” her father said to her. “He was shot at the Gulf station on Olympic.”

Franny leaned over in her chair and put her hand on her father's forehead. His hair, which had been gray for as long as she could remember, had grown back a luminous white brush after the last round of chemo. Everyone talked about her father's hair. She swept it back with her palm. “I really want to know what you're talking about,” she said, her voice low even though no one was listening. No one in that room was thinking about them at all.

Fix, who had never been big on sharing, suddenly wanted to explain it to her. He wanted Franny to understand. “The house was so small we knew it wasn't going to take any time to find them. There were three doors off the hall—two bedrooms, one bathroom. These places were all put together the same way. They were in the first bedroom. It was a father, a mother, four kids. They were on the bed together in the dark. We flicked on the overhead lights and there they were, all sitting up straight, even the littlest one. It was the father who'd been beaten. That's not one you see a lot. Usually it's the woman who's taken the hit but this guy looked like someone had just scraped him up off the freeway, his lip had sliced open on his teeth, one of his eyes was already shut, his nose was everywhere. I can see his face as clear as I see you. It's crazy
how much of that house and those people I remember—their feet were bare, and all of them had their feet up on the bed. We started asking them questions and we got nothing, no response at all. The father was looking at me with his one eye and I was wondering how he was even upright. There was blood on his neck that was coming out of both of his ears. I would have thought the beating had popped his eardrums if it weren't for the fact that no one on that bed seemed like they heard us. Lomer radioed in for an ambulance and backup. I kept talking to them and finally the oldest girl, maybe she was ten, tells me they don't speak English. The mother and father don't speak English but the kids do. There were three girls and a boy. The boy was maybe seven or eight. I said, ‘The person who did this, where did he go?' And then they all turned mute again, the girl was staring straight ahead just like her parents until the little one, who was five or something like that, not so much bigger than Caroline was then, looked at the closet plain as day. She didn't turn her head but she was very clear. The guy was in the closet. The older girl grabbed her wrist and squeezed the hell out of it but Lomer and I turned around and Lomer opened the closet door, and there he was, smashed into the clothes. It was a small closet, the kind people used to have, and everything they've got in the world was in there, including this guy. He understood the situation. He wasn't going to make it past us. He had blood on his shirt and his hand was cracked up from beating the poor son of a bitch on the bed. I don't think he spoke any more English than the one he'd come over to bust up. He'd stuck his gun in the pocket of a dress in the closet. Maybe he figured nobody would find it and he could come back and pick it up later. Right about that time the backup came in and then the ambulance. There were no Miranda rights back then, no calling in a guy who spoke Spanish. The family on the bed, they're all shaking now and the kids were
crying, like it was fine when he was in the closet and they didn't have to look at him but now that he's standing in the bedroom again they were all stirred up. His name was Mercado. We found that out later. He had a regular job beating Mexicans who'd borrowed money to be smuggled into the country and hadn't made enough yet to pay off the debt. Nobody who had any money or any way to get their hands on money screwed these guys over. They beat people in front of their families, in front of their neighbors. That was the wake-up call, and if the money still didn't come a week or two later they'd swing by and shoot you in the head. Everybody knew it.”

“You're awake!” Patsy said, making Franny jump. Patsy took down the smallest bag, the antiemetic, which was already empty. The others still had a way to go. “Did you get some rest?”

“I got some rest,” Fix said, but he looked exhausted, whether from the chemo or the story or both. Franny wondered if Patsy didn't see it but then maybe he didn't look so different from anyone else in the room.

Patsy yawned at the mention of sleep, covered her mouth with a small gloved hand. “One day I'm just gonna stretch out in one of those chairs. I'm gonna pull the blanket up over my head and go to sleep. People do that, you know, the light bothers their eyes. Who'll know that it's me under a blanket?”

“I wouldn't tell,” Fix said and shut his eyes.

“Are you thirsty?” Patsy patted the blanket on top of his knee. “I could get you some water, or there's soda if you want it. Do you want a Coke?”

Franny was just about to tell her they were fine but Fix nodded. “Water. Water would be good.”

Patsy looked at her. “You?”

Franny shook her head.

Patsy went off to get his water and Fix waited, opening his eyes so that he could watch her go.

“So then what happened?” Franny said. This was the deal of taking her father to chemo when none of the doctors spoke in terms of a cure: this was the time she had, these were all the stories she was going to get. It was why she and Caroline took turns flying out to Los Angeles, because they'd never been with him for very long. It was to give Marjorie a break because it was Marjorie who did all the work, but more than anything it was to have a chance at the stories he was going to take with him. She would call Caroline tonight after their father had gone to sleep and tell her about Lomer.

“The house filled up with people—cops, the ambulance guys working. Lomer found an envelope in the trash and he drew some mice on the back for the littlest girl. It was clear she was in serious trouble with her parents and Lomer felt bad for her. The father went to the hospital in the ambulance, the mother and the kids, my God, we probably left them in the house for somebody else to finish off, I don't even know. It must have been two years before I thought about them again. We took the guy Mercado back to the station and booked him. When we were done it was nearly one in the morning and all we wanted was coffee. The coffee at the station was unfit. That was Lomer's word—‘
unfit
.' I used to find myself thinking that if they'd troubled themselves to get decent coffee then Lomer would have had a cup at the station, but those are the kind of thoughts that make you crazy. We went to a gas station over on Olympic. Not close but close enough. The guy who owned the place spent real money on his coffee and he taught all the kids who worked for him the importance of dumping it out and making a fresh pot. People would drive an extra couple of blocks to buy their gas from a guy who had good coffee. It wasn't like it is
today where there's nobody to fill up your tank but you can get a goddamn cappuccino. A coffee pot in a gas station, especially if the coffee was good, that was full-on innovation. The guy made the coffee and the cops came around and sat in the parking lot drinking the coffee, and then more people would come because they felt safer because of the cops. It was a little ecosystem based on coffee, so that's where we went. I was driving. The guy who drives drives all night, and the guy who isn't driving gets the coffee, so Lomer went in. I have to think he didn't see what was going on. He was eight, ten feet in the door before he was shot. And I didn't see what was going on because I was writing in the log. I heard the shot and I looked up and Lomer was gone. What I saw was the kid behind the cash register raising up his hands, palms out, and then this guy Mercado turned around and shot him too.”

“Wait,” Franny said. “Mercado? The guy from the house?”

Fix nodded. “That's what I saw. The gas station was just like all gas stations were back then—like a fish tank with a bright light on top—so I got a very clear look: Latino, twenty-five, five seven, white shirt, blue pants, some blood on the shirt. I'd been looking at this guy for the past two hours. He'd been sitting at my desk. I knew him, he knew me. He looked out the window and saw me there. He fired one more shot but he must have been rattled because the bullet didn't even hit the car. All it did was punch out the glass in the front of the station. Mercado ran out the door and went around the back. I heard a car but I didn't see it. I went in the station and Lomer was on the floor.” Fix stopped there, thought for a minute. “Well,” he said finally.

“What?”

Fix shook his head. “He was dead.”

“What about the other guy, the service-station guy?”

“He made it maybe an hour, long enough to get him into surgery.
He died in surgery. He was a high school kid, summer job. All he had to do was make the coffee and keep the gas station open.”

Patsy came back with two Styrofoam cups of water, each with a bent-neck straw. “You never think you want any until you see it. That's the way it goes around here.”

Franny thanked her and took the cups. Patsy was right, she wanted the water.

“But that's crazy,” Franny said to her father, though she remembered that this was part of the story her mother had told them in the car, that her father had gone crazy after his partner was shot, that he hadn't been able to identify the man who killed Lomer. “How did Mercado get out of the police station? How did he know where you were?”

“It was a quirk of the brain, or at least that's how they explained it to me later. Too much had happened and somehow I mixed up the slides, exchanged one suspect for another. But to this day I'll tell you: I saw what I saw. This was my partner dead. I didn't know how it happened but the guy was standing under a light maybe fifteen feet in front of me. We looked straight at one another, just like you're looking at me. When the cops came to the scene I described him to the letter. Hell, I gave them his name. But Jorge Mercado was in a holding cell in Rampart. He'd been there all night.”

“And the guy who killed Lomer?” Franny said.

“Turns out I never saw him.”

“So they never found the person who did it?”

Fix bent down the neck of the straw and drank. It was hard for him to drink because of the strictures in his esophagus. The water went down in quarter teaspoons. “No,” he said finally, “they found him. They put it together.”

“But you identified another man.”

“I identified another man to the police. I didn't identify another
man to a jury. They found someone who'd seen a car driving crazy near the gas station. They made it a point to find the driver and then they made it a point to find the gun he'd thrown out the window of the car. You shoot a kid in a gas station and the police department will make a sincere effort to find you. You shoot a cop in a gas station, that's a different story.”

“But they didn't have a witness,” Franny said.

“I was the witness.”

“But you just said you didn't see the guy.”

Fix held up a single finger between them. “To this day I haven't seen him. Even when I was sitting across from him in court. It never straightened out. The psychiatrist said when I saw the guy I'd remember him, and when I didn't remember him the psychiatrist said it might come back over time, that I might just wake up one day and it would all be there.” He shrugged. “That didn't happen.”

“So how were you a witness?”

“They told me who the guy was and I said yes, that's him.” Fix gave his daughter a tired smile. “Don't worry about it. He was the right guy. What you've got to remember is that he saw me too. He looked out of the fish tank just before he tried to shoot me. He knew who I was. He killed Lomer and he killed the kid and he knew I was the guy who saw him do it.” Fix shook his head. “I wish I could remember that kid's name. At the funeral home his mother told me he was a serious swimmer. ‘Very promising' is what she said. Half the things in this life I wish I could remember and the other half I wish I could forget.”