Dangerous Games (9 page)

Jack Liffey was about to sit when the door opened and a tall man in a powder blue cowboy suit peered out. Jack Liffey noticed immediately that something was wrong with his nose, too pink and rather artificial in some way, though not as bad as the silver nose Lee Marvin's ostensible twin had worn in
Cat Ballou.
He tried to imagine how someone could completely lose a nose.

“Come in, sir. Drop down, cool out.”

Jack Liffey followed him inside. There were yellow lateral files everywhere, as if storing a century's worth of bank records, and it was all very tidy. The photo blow-ups on the walls were fairly discreet, mostly award presentations to smiling women and cinematographers at work behind cameras with their subjects off shot.

“Welcome to our little hotbed of tranquility, Mr. …”

“Jack Liffey.” He held out his hand.

“Wingfoot De-vote Peace.” They shook hands.

“That's quite a mouthful,” Jack Liffey said.

“Southerners do tend to overwind the watch. My best friend in primary school was Aloycious Pitston Autolycus Merrick, I don't know what his ma was
thinkin'.
But our manners do get us through the winter.”

“Indeed they do, Mr. Peace.” They sat on opposite sides of an ornate desk. “I'm looking for a young woman who's gone missing from home. She alarmed her mother with her intentions that she would go into the adult film industry.” This was the mildest euphemism he was prepared to offer. “Her name's Luisa Wilson. I just want to talk to her and make sure she's okay and doesn't want to return home. I'm not interested in issues of age or legality. Because she's Native American heritage, I have reason to believe she might have contacted a woman named Little Deer.”

His eyes lit up. “Now there's a woman who was mighty well liked in the business, sir. Real kindly and country-smart, a real lady. Plus truly ornamental, of course.” He got up and went straight to a file cabinet. It screeched a bit as it came open, and Peace winced, as if carefully held territory had been breached. He handed a manila folder to Jack Liffey. “Just have a peek.”

They were mainly eight-by-ten publicity stills, done by a glamour photographer. Little Deer's name was burned onto a blank spot at the bottom of each one. He stopped at one with a big toothy smile that radiated confidence. In quite a few of the prints she wore jet black braids and little else. He wasn't surprised by the near-hallucinatory exaggeration of her body since he figured much of that was surgical, but it was still pretty spectacular. In one photo, wearing a buckskin dress straight out of Paramount's prop department, her hair was unbraided, a glossy black spray that fell well below her waist. But he figured that too could be rigged.

One of the photos was date-stamped, and he worked out that she'd be in her early fifties now. “I take it she's retired?”

“Some time back.” Something dark flitted for an instant behind the man's benevolent demeanor, but maybe it was just Jack Liffey's imagination.

“Was there some sort of trouble about her career?”

“No, sir. Not that I am aware. She made a passel of money and won respect from all, and then she directed features for a time and waved good-bye, holding onto a pot of money.”

Yet that wasn't the whole story, not according to his body English. In a kind of nervous fidget, the man poked around his problematic nose with both hands, as if trying to make sure the glue was holding, but realizing, too, that all the fussing was only drawing attention. Jack Liffey wanted to lean forward and give the too-pink schnozz a tweak to see if it actually was fake.

“Names like this give me a problem,” Jack Liffey confided, studying a photo that showed her in one of those subliminally servile porn poses, body squared up for display. “Tell me—if I meet her, should I call her Little, or Miss Deer?”

Wingfoot Peace chuckled and seemed to rediscover his confidence. The question had been mainly intended to get his mind off his nose. His hands came down to rest on the desk in front of him, and he looked at them as if they were separate willful animals. “Yes, I always wondered if I ran into the guitarist of U-2, if I should call him
The
or Mr. Edge. But I have no right complaining about names, not with my house-of-wonders sockdolager.”

“Perhaps I could meet Miss Deer and find out the proper etiquette.”

“Ah,” the man said nervously. “I'm afraid you just pulled the wrong sow by the ear, Mr. Liffey, so to speak, that is. I can't rightly give out anybody's phone numbers or addresses.”

For a moment Jack Liffey thought the whole nose business would start up again, but the man subsided.

“You can understand how some of our clients and members might come to be harassed by the general public. Or worse. Ever since Rebecca Schaeffer got herself killed by that stalker, even the DMV won't give out addresses. I don't mean to turn you down cold-footed, sir, and what I can and will do for you is accept a letter from your hands and send it on to Little Deer. If the Lord's willing and the clothesline don't fall, she'll see her way to getting in touch back. More'n that I cannot do.”

Jack Liffey wondered what the clothesline might have to do with it, but Peace's offer was probably as much as he was going to get. “If she's that hard to reach, maybe the girl I'm looking for won't have found her either.”

“Adult entertainment is a small community, Mr. Liffey. If she tried hard and batted her eyes some, there's folks might not be as discreet as present company.”

Wingfoot Peace made a Xerox of Luisa's photograph, in case she showed up, and Jack Liffey left him the dubious business card with a note on the back to please call him. He didn't put a lot of faith in any of it.

“Come the 26th of July, Mr. Liffey, wet or dry, always sow your turnips. And along in September they'll be five or six inches round and good to eat raw. That's what Harry Truman always said.”

He wasn't quite sure whether there was some veiled message embedded in the Trumanism. “Harry S Truman, with no period because the S didn't stand for anything,” Jack Liffey offered. “Everybody's forgotten that these days, even our major newspapers.”

“Indeed, sir. Maybe it's best forgot. Harry was always a close chewer and a tight spitter.”

If he didn't get out of there fast, he'd be suspecting oblique messages in every item of Peace's peculiar phraseology.

He snapped the Panasonic onto a monopod to help steady it and planted it on the sidewalk across Fifth Street from the three blue plastic port-a-potties the mission had put up for the homeless. Kenyon Styles was at the end of the block, looking out for cops who might drift onto the scene in the full daylight. He seemed to note something and sauntered over.

“There's a patrol car, but it'll move off. They're just giving the winos around the corner the once-over.”

Rod Whipple relaxed and leaned against the wall.

“You really grew up in Jersey?” Kenyon asked.

“After Chicago. Bradley Beach.”

“No shit. You don't have much of an accent. Do you know the Oxeye dance hall?”

Rod Whipple had practically lived there in high school—rather Radoslaw Wojak had, when his widowed father had shipped him off to live with an aunt on the Jersey Shore. He'd had his first drink out of a paper bag behind the big brick monstrosity at the beach, heard legends of Springsteen doing a surprise performance there one night before it shut for good in the late 1980s, even spent a half hour in the parking lot with his hand in Mary Lou Nowak's pants not getting any more then wet pussy before she passed out from drink. The Oxeye.

“Never heard of it.” Since then, he had spent most of his life trying to get back to Chicago, or at least as far away as geographically possible from the Oxeye.

“I heard Springsteen play there. That great ‘Born to Run' set.”

“Oh, bullshit. That's just a story for the rubes.”

“Have it your way.” Kenyon Styles wandered back to the corner.

How did he end up making a disreputable video on the nickel in L.A—Fifth Street, one of the sorriest skid rows in the world? He'd come west with an armload of reels to show, real underground quality stuff with East Village actors like Dino Hurt and Eddie Marcantonio, but all it had got him was entry to expensive extension classes on directing and editing. AFI never answered, and the universities wouldn't touch him because he'd dropped out of CUNY with bad grades. Extension was about as effective a career path, he knew, as running a Xerox machine at Universal.

But he knew they could make a fortune with this stupid idea of Kenyon's, and his share of the fortune would finance the film that was working itself out in his head, a sensitive portrait of a screenwriter so lost in Hollywood hell that he sells his soul to the Devil, who happens to look just like————. Any name he could entice into doing a cameo.

He heard Kenyon's characteristic two-finger whistle and powered up by instinct. The Beanpole clapped once and pointed at a group of shabbily dressed winos smoking in a group across Fifth. They waved to the camera and entered the three port-a-potties. He caught them clearly in the daylight and stayed wide, leading a little to the right of frame to leave room for what was coming.

There was another whistle, and he heard the big SUV's engine roar as it headed their way. All of a sudden the giant beast hove into view, and its fat bumper sent the first shitter flying back against the brick building, then the second popped straight up and crumpled, before being dragged into the third one to give it a glancing blow that sent it spinning away. The SUV yanked back off the curb and sped away, and Rod let the zoom drift in slowly on the wreckage. The first wino now appeared out his sprung door and waved gamely, blood streaming down his forehead. The third one appeared, too, flapping open his door and crawling a few feet with what might have been a fractured leg. But there was no stir from the collapsed crapper number two.

Rod started to worry, imagining himself standing before a hanging judge who was glowering down at him and bellowing something about voluntary manslaughter. He zoomed farther in on the mangled and dragged outhouse, where there was still no motion.

The first wino went to tug at the crazily crushed door and finally got it open. He reached inside and helped a dazed man climb out. This man, with long tangled dreadlocks, sank down onto the sidewalk. Bleeding from his chin, he looked up and grinned to show off a total lack of teeth. Whooping like a coyote, he accepted a high-five from his friend.

It was extraordinary. Maeve had never seen a bird just die like that. She was on her knees on her mom's window seat, looking out, and the sleek raven had abruptly fallen out of the big ash tree like a stuffed specimen. It was the tree that made so much mess, little winged seeds choking the lawn, the one that Bradley, her mom's new husband, wanted to have cut down. The bird hit the sparse lawn, and then beat one wing toward her as if tossing something—as if making one last desperate hurl of some precious keepsake to those who would carry on. Then it just froze.

Its legs were stiffly side by side now, like pictures of Cock Robin. She supposed hunters saw birds die a lot, but she was thinking that for all the billions of them you saw in the air, you almost never saw them lying dead. Where did they go? she wondered. Maybe predators got them within minutes. She wondered if the raven had died of natural causes, and then she smiled to herself, speculating about a tiny ostomy bag under one wing that might have prolonged its life a few months.

Oskar, under her own bag, immediately gave his scoffing opinion in the form of a wet Bronx raspberry that she felt against her side as much as heard. It was an embarrassment over which she had no control.

The seven-year-old twins, her exasperating little half brothers, Bradley's kids who her mother occasionally forced her to babysit, had already begun poking fun at her uncontrollable farting and the liquidy shitting noises, and she was trying to work up a pose of casual indifference about the damn bag. Then her eyes went wide and she felt the clammy damp against her thigh.

She tried to ignore it. It seemed disrespectful to the poor raven, to the great mystery of life itself, to spring a leak while she was still contemplating the bird's mortality. Her dad had told her that he got cold sweats sometimes thinking about his own death—the thought now taking on a reality for her that it never used to have.

She couldn't pretend to ignore the chill on her thigh any longer. She mustn't have fastened the clip properly. She swore softly at Oskar and headed for the bathroom before things could get any worse. The instant she locked the door behind her, she tugged her loose jeans down and felt her thigh, but there was no dampness. She lifted the shirt and the bag showed no evidence of a leak. Puzzled, she hoisted and wriggled the jeans back into place and then she began to laugh.

Amazing what tricks the mind will play on itself, anticipating the worst. She could feel right away that she had a whole pocket full of quarters, and it was only a metal chill she'd felt through the cloth of the pocket.

Dear Diary,

I am really sure now that this job is not for me. The typing makes me nervous tho I am pretty good at it & switching back to clicking things on the screen confuses me. And little did I realize that it would make me bashful to think a man is looking at me in this little round eye on top of the screen. Oh really I just dont like stringing men along & pretending their not on a timer yet when they are already. The other girls are nice & helpful to me but I just keep imagining dancing in the forest in a white robe & my buckskin coat with an eagle feather. I felt so good those days with Tuu-ee the deer watching before Bobby & Jo ran off together & left me.

EIGHT

Little Deer

The viewing room at Hollenbeck was shabbier than the one he'd been in over on the Westside, but so was everything else on the Eastside that depended on public funds. Looking for a runaway kid once, he'd had a quick tour of all-Latino Roosevelt High near Gloria's house, and by the time he got to the graffiti'd bathroom with the toilet-stall doors ripped off, he'd decided that a suburban white PTA would have lynched any administrator who allowed this to happen to their kids' school. But the alienation of children was such an intractable problem, he thought—showing up as graffiti, random vandalism, litter, and good old daily hostility. Poke it down here, and it popped up there.

“Stand by, Liffey, it's the usual,” Sgt. Padilla said. “When they march in, the suspects won't be able to see you through the one-way here.”

For some reason the back bench of the viewing bleachers was filled with a half dozen cheerleaders in tiny purple skirts, chewing gum and giggling. They looked junior high age, all Latinas except one girl who looked Chinese, and he did his best not to look up their microskirts.

“Are they here to root for their favorite suspect?” Jack Liffey asked.

Padilla barely smiled. “They're here for the next show. You can put up with it, right?”

“Hell, yes.”

“Come right up to the glass and get a good look.”

Jack Liffey came down front, and Padilla looked him over like an unusual species of rodent, not necessarily repellent, but not something you wanted around. “You didn't by any chance connect yourself to the Maravillas, did you? I mean, so the gangbangers would think so.”

“Huh?”

Padilla shrugged. “I suppose not. You see, the Maras are evergreen on the street.”

“Could you say some of that in English?”

“They don't pay street tax to the Eme so the O.G.s have declared them open season. No special reward. It's just okay to hit them any time you want.”

He got some of that: The Eme was the Mexican Mafia, at least the Southern California form of it, and O.G.s were Old Gangsters—the seniors and leaders. “Christ on a crutch. Did I make some gang sign accidentally?”

“Relax, it's not like a Cub Scout salute. You got to go out of your way. Let's look at the bangers.” He hit a button on an old squawk box on the wall beside a torn grille. “Dori, send in the heavy boys. No butt-pinching on the way.”

“Dean, how dare you! I'm too wore out for such jokes.”

“We happen to know you like those tight teenie butts, that's all.”

There was only a feedback squall, making Padilla wince and switch it off. Six young Latinos sloped in and faced front under the big numbers as if they were familiar with the drill. Most did their best to put on a stony face. They all wore some variation of the uniform: baggy Chinos and checkered wool shirts or plain white T-shirts, and all had either the odd T-mustache or a mustache plus some form of lower-lip beard. It was the second one, and Jack Liffey recognized him once again, just as he had in the photograph. He was muscular, a little shorter than the others, impassive, closed off from his surroundings as if living completely in his head.

“See anyone?”

“I don't know.” Jack Liffey settled on another one with a T-mustache. “Could you have number five come forward a little?”

The sergeant switched over the intercom and ordered number five to take two steps forward and then turn to show his profile. The boy flashed a hand sign with splayed fingers as he came forward, probably his gang sign.

“I didn't say show us your brains,
Chato
,” Padilla bawled.

One of the other youths broke up and had to bite his lips as Number five glared back at him.

“Nah. Sorry. Too tall.” Jack Liffey had the definite sense that Padilla was watching him with much more interest than the boys.

“He was in a car, how can you tell how tall he was?”

“Tall people broadcast it.”

“Let's try the short one then. Number five, step back. Number two.” The shooter took a breath and came forward without making a fuss. “
Cabrón
,” Padilla announced, “I want you to look straight at the mirror and challenge me. Say, ‘Where you from?'”

The boy mumbled a little, looking straight ahead.

“You can do better than that.”

“Where are you from?” the boy said, leaving too much space between the words as if he were translating from some other language.

“Doesn't sound like him,” Jack Liffey said.

“You sure?” Padilla seemed to know something.

“I had a good look at the guy. He's not there.”

Padilla went on a bit longer, calling boys forward, but Jack Liffey shook his head and shrugged them all off.

“Okay,
latas,
beat it. All of you, out.”

The cop turned on Jack Liffey again. “You're not running some game on me, are you, Liffey?”

“What would that be?”

“I think it's called Get My Own Revenge.”

He shrugged. “My daughter's doing a lot better today, and I've calmed down. The guy wasn't there.”

“Sure, sure. Just don't let me find one of those kids beat to a pulp some night and your knuckles all scraped up. I'll remember.”

“You got it. Thanks for trying.”

Jack Liffey slipped away as fast as he could—as Padilla was dealing with the cheerleaders—and he hurried down the musty yellow corridor past tired propaganda posters about fighting crime and stopping graffiti. It was as ugly and dispiriting a space as any in creation, and he almost sprinted to his VW in the Official Police Business lot. He started up and pulled out to wait in the alley behind the station as a black-and-white accelerated out past him in a big hurry, then turned on its siren briefly as it sped onto the next street. Two of the boys came out and got into a beat-up Hyundai, not an especially common car in Boyle Heights. Another came out and strutted away angrily. Finally, his guy stepped out the back door of the station. He sauntered across the lot, still lost in his own head, and unlocked a big American-style bicycle that was chained to a substantial pepper tree in the parkway of Chicago Street.

Jack Liffey let the car drift along the alley and then turned to follow up a residential street as his guy pedaled hard, and he stayed a block or so back. The bicycle was going fast enough so it didn't feel terribly unnatural to drive so slowly. It was a balloon-tire, coaster-brake Schwinn, just like his first bike back in San Pedro. He didn't know they were still around—probably a retro fad.

He had to brake the car for a moment as three boys ran a small ice cream pushcart fast out of an alleyway. Behind them, an old Latino in baggy whites, probably a recent immigrant, was just zipping up after wetting down a bush when he noticed his cart was missing. The boys were already digging into the chest and hurling Eskimo pies and Fudgesicles into yards left and right. A wisp of dry ice vapors trailed out of the cart's open hatch, like some ghostly emanation.

Jack Liffey had no time to deal with popsicle theft. He kept his eye on the bicycle pulling ahead and accelerated past the scene. In a few moments, he was only a block behind it again. There was one worrisome period when he had to idle, double parked, as his quarry parked and popped into a mini-mart that had an Aztec warrior painted on the front wall. He came back out rapping a pack of cigarettes and headed on.

There was another nervous moment after a red light caught him at Chavez with the bicycle dwindling north ahead of him. This was the business heart of Boyle Heights, once known as Brooklyn Avenue, and the streets were busy enough here that it would have been easy to lose the kid. But he wasn't far back when he saw the bike turn up an alley. This was a problem, since the alleyway was only a car wide and his old VW would sound like a taxiing 747 in the space. Jack Liffey waited at the alley entrance, the road surface as cracked and weedy as a mud flat, assuming the boy was almost home.

Fortunately, he was right. The kid stopped and leaned over to open a gate in a low wooden fence and then yanked the front wheel into the air and dexterously pedaled unicycle-style through the gate and into the yard. The gate shut behind him, but Jack Liffey could see one side of the big swing-open windows on the detached garage open momentarily.

He drove up the alley as quietly as he could. What he saw of the old clapboard garage was covered with muralwork and fancy graffiti. It sat behind a small cottage, the back yard full of bougainvillea and geraniums and a pile of used lumber. I've got you, you bastard, Jack Liffey thought.

He paused in the alley when a graffito came into view that he felt he could translate:

Siempre quise ser alguien

Ahorra soy yo.

It wasn't that hard even though the writer had misspelled a word and left off all the proper accents.
I always wanted to be somebody: Now I'm me.

Jack Liffey drove on around the block and down the street in front to get the address. Sleep tight, fuckhead. Stay yourself a while longer.

She was taking a break in the old kitchen, sitting at the Formica table with a cup of coffee that she'd finally broken down and poured, listening to a girl named Debbie, who came from Beatty, Nevada, maybe one hundred miles by fast untraveled and unpatrolled two-lane highway from where she'd grown up in the Lone Pine Rez.

“I hate that effing desert,” Debbie said. “I really do. It dries your skin like a furnace, and it's full of crotchety old farts who never give a soft word to nobody. My pa used to say, all the Okies who came out west and couldn't make it on the Coast bounced back to the desert.”

Debbie was in her forties and would have been good looking but her mouth seemed to have caved in as if her jawbones had been extracted and new ones substituted, two sizes too small. When she opened her mouth, Luisa could see that her teeth were yellow and crooked. For break, she had thrown on an immense T-shirt with stylized flames and a slogan that said:
My old man went to hell and all he got me was this damn T-shirt.

“That's not my case,” Luisa said. “My people been there forever. I heard grandma say they used to send the sheriffs up into the hills to drag us down in chains and make us work on the white ranches.”

“Aw, that's awful. We had us Injuns in Beatty, too, but they seemed to me even meaner than the whites.”

“Maybe they had a reason.”

“I'm not criticizing, Lou. I just like people to be gentle and kind.” She sipped at a glass of something bright red like Kool-Aid. “I had a guy this morning kept talking about my package. Wanted to see my
package.”
She laughed. “I thought I ought to stick a big bow in my undies, see what he said.”

“Most of these guys are so sad,” Luisa said. “I mean they're kind of like those high school boys who get rowdy and pull your hair when they really want to just say they
like
you. It's so stupid. What do they get out of watching me play with a vibrator?”

“I don't know, hon. For a lot of guys, I think they just like to be reminded there's sex someplace in the universe. And maybe the more stupid we look, the better for them.”

The front door slammed and they fell silent, wondering if it was Joe, the fat man who ran the adult magazine and video store down the block and came in once an hour to make sure everybody was behaving.

“Hey, girls. Crapping out on my time, I see?” It wasn't Joe. It was Keith, and Luisa could see he was really fucked up. She could read him now by his eyes, and his eyes were all over the place, squirrelly and going flat.

“This is our break time,” Debbie said.

“Did I ask you?” He grabbed Debbie's hair and yanked her head back. “Did I ask you?”

“I don't work for you, man.” Her voice squeaked a little over the pain.

“You still better respect me, bitch. Are you really from hell?” he said, noticing the T-shirt.

“You think you're a cop?”

“I asked you a question, bitch.”

“Stop it, Keith,” Luisa demanded.

Without looking, he backhanded her, and his hardened hand knocked her off the chair to the floor. She thought about biting a chunk out of his leg, right through the fancy slacks, but remembered the wonderful advice her grandfather had given her once—Never kick a bear unless you can kill it.

“Are you from hell, bitch?” he repeated.

“Yeah, you bet.”

“You bet what? Say it, say I'm from hell.”

“I'm from hell.”

“I can't
hear
you, bitch.”

“I'm from goddamn hell,
sir.”

He let go of her hair with a showy flourish. “See how easy that was? Now the only thing left between us is respect.”

“Sure thing.”

He helped Luisa up. “I got another job for you. You're destined for better than this shit-hole. Put this on.” He took a minuscule knit bathing suit out of the pocket of his jacket. She could see that it wouldn't cover much. “Are you smart?” he asked her.

“Why?”

“
I
ask, you answer. You're always reading books. You got to be smart enough to memorize.” Debbie was glaring at him, sipping at her red drink, as if very near hurling it at him.

“I guess so.”

He handed her a four-by-five card solid with printed text. It seemed to be about a video game called
Robo-Tanks Invade.

“Just so it's not Danger Games,” Debbie said, and Luisa remembered she'd been warned about that.

“You want some more, Miss Hell?” He held a finger an inch from her eye.

“No, sir.”

“You're graduating today to spokesmodel,” Keith told Louisa. “You get to stand around looking sexy in front of a big TV screen and talk whatever shit, while a bunch of businessmen and fifteen-year-old boys try to get a look at your tits. How hard is that? Just memorize that shit. Let's go.”

“What about this job?”