Authors: Peter Robinson
He hadn’t put up a tree this year – there seemed no point – and the few cards he had received stood on the tile mantelpiece – some from old friends in Detroit, one from his brother, Michael, in New York, one from his grandparents in Wales. His maternal grandparents had died when he was very young, before he had a chance to get to know them. When he was a boy, his mother once told him they had been murdered by Stalin after the war, but he hadn’t known what that really meant until much later.
By noon, Arvo felt restless. He drove down to Ocean, found a parking spot without any trouble and walked along the clifftop by the palisades, with his collar turned up and his hands shoved deep in his pockets. The rain and mist felt like cool silk brushing against his face. The Christmas lights strung across Wilshire, where it ended at Ocean, looked eerie, hanging there disembodied, blurred and smudged by the wet grey light.
All the horizons were lost in misty rain. From the top of the cliffs, he could hear the waves as they crashed on the shore below, and could just about make out the sloshing grey mass of the ocean. Gulls swooped in and out of the fog, squawking and squabbling, seemingly oblivious to both the weather and the birth of Christ. Even the traffic on the Coast Highway, way down at the bottom of the sheer cliffs, was quiet today.
A bundle of rags stirred at the base of a palm tree and a grubby hand shot out, accompanied by a mumbled request for money. Arvo gave him a buck. Sometimes he seemed to hand over half his salary to bums. Why, he didn’t know.
As he crossed the road to get back to his car, a police cruiser slowed to a halt beside him. He realized that, apart from the bums, he was the only person on the street. Everyone else was at home with the family eating turkey and watching
It’s a Wonderful Life
or
A Christmas Carol,
and the only places open were video stores and minimarts.
‘What’s your destination, sir?’ asked the young officer on the passenger side.
Arvo flipped his shield. ‘Just walking.’
‘Sorry, sir,’ the officer said. ‘Routine. Merry Christmas.’
His partner nodded and drove off.
‘Merry Christmas,’ Arvo said after the car. He supposed he did look suspicious out there alone with the bums on the street. Bums were vulnerable, like prostitutes. Sometimes people killed them for pleasure, the way people killed boys like John Heimar. The two cops – poor bastards pulling the Christmas Day shift – were only doing their jobs.
Arvo remembered pulling Christmas shifts as a uniform cop in Detroit. Christmas Eve was pretty bad, a lot of domestic violence and shit like that. But some of the real stuff that took longer to build up exploded on Christmas Day, usually in the afternoon.
Nobody who hasn’t done it can ever understand the feeling you get driving to work around dawn, seeing the Christmas lights all lit up on the porches and watching the bedroom lights flick on inside the houses and apartments as you drive by, maybe remembering the anticipation you used to feel when you were a kid, the excitement that this was the day you’d been waiting for, the day you were going to get that mountain bike you’d been longing for all year, or that new Sega Genesis game everyone else at school seemed to have but you. But this year, you aren’t going to be part of it at all.
And that was the
best
part of the day.
So you’d arrive feeling a little nostalgic, maybe, and the early part of the shift you’d be bored to tears, just wishing you were at home with your family like everyone else. By afternoon, though, things started to change. The calls started coming in, and by the time your shift was over you never wanted to work a holiday again.
The first one might be a dangler, been hanging there in the middle of the living room since he woke up and found himself all alone on Christmas Day and accepted at last that there really was no future for him. By the time you get there, his neck is two feet long and his shoes are full of shit.
Because holidays like Christmas are when really bad things happen. On Christmas Day, the husband who has been feeling depressed over being laid off for a couple of months has too much to drink, decides he doesn’t like the tie his wife bought him and shoots his children, his wife and then himself. And who cleans up? The cops and the ambulance guys.
On Christmas Day, the wife who has been holding back her feelings about her husband’s affair ever since she found out about it in November has too many glasses of wine with the turkey, which she spent all morning preparing, and when he says he just
has
to go out for a while after dinner, she feels the edge of the carving knife and looks at his throat.
On holidays like Christmas, people get together, drink too much and kill one another. Or they get depressed all alone and they kill themselves. Either way, it makes a busy time for the emergency services. You want a good argument against the family, Arvo thought, then you should spend a Christmas Eve in the police station or in the emergency ward of your local hospital.
Arvo had no sooner got home than the phone rang. His chest tightened when he heard Nyreen’s voice. ‘Merry Christmas, honey,’ she said. ‘How did you like the present?’
‘It’s fine,’ said Arvo. ‘You made it yourself?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Look, I’m sorry I didn’t send you—’
‘Hey, it’s okay. No problem. The pleasure’s in the giving, right? Arvo, I’m not stupid. I realize I’ve hurt you and you’re probably still pissed at me and all, but you know I still care a lot about you. I hope we can be friends?’
‘I don’t know if that’s possible, Nyreen.’
‘Well, okay, maybe not right now. I understand that. Maybe it’ll take time. But what I’m saying, honey, is don’t cut me out of your life completely. Things just didn’t work out for you and me, but I still love you, you know. Okay?’
‘I don’t know. I need some time.’
‘Are you okay?’
‘Sure. I’m fine.’
‘Are you enjoying Christmas?’
‘Yeah. Look, I’ve got to go. You know Mike Glover? He and his wife invited me over for dinner.’ He had been invited, but he wasn’t going. The last thing he wanted on Christmas Day was someone else’s family being solicitous about his well-being.
‘Great. Have a good time. And give Mike and Rosie my love. Oh, and before I forget, Arvo, I’ve got some real good news.’
‘What’s that?’
‘I’m pregnant. Isn’t it a
rush?
Vern is absolutely
thrilled
. So am I, of course. Aren’t you just a teeny-weeny bit happy for me?’
‘Sure I’m happy for you, Nyreen. I wish you all the best. Gotta run now.’
Arvo hung up with a lump in his throat. Pregnant. Now
there
was a surprise. When he and Nyreen had discussed children, she had made it quite clear that she didn’t want any, not for a few years at least. Arvo had gone along with her, though he had wanted to start a family sooner. She said she needed time to pursue her career in public relations, which she had now given up to go live with Vern in Palo Alto and blow glass. Life. Go figure.
Now, all of a sudden, she was pregnant and just thrilled to pieces about it. Well, that little bit of news had just shunted Nyreen at least another million miles away from Arvo. Now she was having Vern’s child, she was less his problem than she had ever been. At least that was his view. Somehow, he had a feeling that she would see things differently. She always did. Maybe she’d want him to be godfather. And that would probably be after she’d claimed half the house.
Arvo realized he was hungry. So okay, he told himself, getting up and stretching, the hell with Nyreen. Stop feeling sorry for yourself and get Christmas on the road.
In the four years after his parents’ death, Arvo had got into the habit of spending Christmas alone. In fact, now he thought about it, he and Nyreen had only been together for one Christmas.
As he had spent two of his three Christmases in Los Angeles alone, so far, returning to the familiar ritual for his fourth gave him a degree of comfort. He wasn’t a Christian, and the drop or two of Jewish blood he had inherited from his mother’s side hadn’t galvanized him into any sort of Judaic interests or beliefs, but the season nevertheless had a certain something; it demanded some sort of recognition, if only a brief genuflection in the general direction of the twin gods, Mammon and Glutton. It was also a time that tended to encourage introspection.
First he went to the fridge and took out the smoked salmon and selection of imported cheeses, cold cuts and pâtés he had bought a couple of days ago at the farmers’ market on Fairfax – some Caerphilly, to remind him of his Welsh roots, old Cheddar and cambozola because he liked them.
Then there was that Welsh delicacy, a can of laver bread, made from seaweed and absolutely delicious with a couple of rashers of Canadian bacon. Finally, he would nibble on a couple of the Welsh cakes his Granny Hughes had sent him, as she did every Christmas, without fail. If he were still hungry at supper time, there was a microwavable turkey dinner in the freezer.
When he had set up his tray, he popped the cork on a bottle of Schramsberg Californian ‘champagne’ and poured himself a glass. Then he went over to his CD collection and put on Richard Burton reading Dylan Thomas’s ‘A Child’s Christmas in Wales.’
By the time he had got through the third glass of champagne and most of the smoked salmon, his mind began drifting. He thought first, as he always did at Christmas, of his parents and the family Christmases in Detroit, all the houses in the street decked with coloured lights, the presents under the tree, turkey with sage-and-onion stuffing and cranberry sauce, shovelling the piles of snow from the driveway. Well, maybe
that
wasn’t such a romantic image.
He thought of his grandfather in Amlwch, how at eighty-five he still got around with the help of a knobbly walking-stick and never missed a lunchtime session at the pub, and how his wife, at eighty-two, would bawl him out if he was late back.
He thought about Maria down in San Diego with her family. The thought of her brought back the memory of her perfume, of her warm breast against his arm, and it made him feel horny.
Then he thought of Nyreen and how last year, only a couple of weeks after they had got married, they had gone to the Christmas boat parade down in Marina del Rey.
Bundled up in a green wool sweater against the cool evening, Nyreen had clung onto his arm and jumped up and down like a child, pointing at the procession of boats bobbing by with their illuminated reindeers, angels and fake blue-lit icicles hanging from their bows. Arvo had thought it was tacky, but he was happy to see her so excited and alive. He remembered how passionately they had made love that night. Now she was pregnant in Palo Alto, living with Vern.
By the time Arvo was on his fourth glass of bubbly and his second Welsh cake, Richard Burton was bringing the story to a close. When it was over, Arvo wasn’t sure whether the tears that came to his eyes stemmed from nostalgia for his father’s homeland or from drunken self-pity. He rubbed them away with the backs of his hands and finished the bottle.
In the evening, he watched a double bill of two of his favourite sci-fi videos:
Them!
and
The Creeping Flesh
. He stumbled to bed sometime around midnight without having got around to the frozen turkey.
It wasn’t until eight o’clock the next morning that his beeper went off, shocking him out of a chaotic dream about a giant ant with Nyreen’s face trying to explain to him how ants procreated. He woke into a real jackhammer of a headache. When he dialled the unfamiliar number and spoke his name into the receiver, his voice was hoarse with dehydration.
‘Arvo, it’s Joe. Joe Westinghouse. Sorry if this seems to be getting to be a habit, but it looks like there’s been another one.’
Still fuzzy from sleep and alcohol, Arvo mumbled, ‘Another what?’
‘Another murder.’
Well what was so odd about that? Arvo thought numbly. Day after Christmas in LA. Any day in LA. Bound to be plenty of other murders. And Joe did work Robbery-Homicide.
‘Maybe you’d like to come and have a look?’ Joe suggested. ‘I think this one will interest you.’
‘Just a minute,’ Arvo croaked, reaching for the pencil and paper he always kept on his bedside table. ‘Give me the address. I’ll be there as soon as I can.’
23
At eight-thirty in the morning the day after Christmas, there was plenty of traffic on the San Diego Freeway as the shoppers headed for the post-Christmas sales at the huge malls out in the Valley. Arvo turned off at Sunset and drove with the top of his convertible open. He needed a little air to blow a few of the cobwebs out of his brain.
No matter how many times he had passed through Bel Air and Beverly Hills, he had never ceased to marvel at the incredibly opulent bad taste that juxtaposed Elizabethan stately homes with Spanish haciendas, fairy-tale castles and French chateaux, all tucked away at the end of long driveways behind walls and elaborate metal gates, all surrounded by immaculately kept lawns. Well, you never did stop marvelling, did you, if you were from Detroit? It made Grosse Point look like the projects.
Still, there was something morbidly fascinating about it all, the way there often is with such overt bad taste. To gild the lily, some of the large houses were strung with gaudy displays of Christmas lights, and there were even a couple of oversized Christmas trees among the topiary, hung with tinsel and baubles. Probably imported from Norway or somewhere.