The Chinese Beverly Hills

THE CHINESE BEVERLY HILLS

First published in 2014 by

MP Publishing

12 Strathallan Crescent, Douglas, Isle of Man IM2 4NR British Isles

mppublishingusa.com

Copyright © 2014 by John Shannon

All rights reserved.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials.

Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Shannon, John, 1943-

Chinese Beverly Hills : a Jack Liffey mystery / John Shannon.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-1849822442

Series : Jack Liffey Mysteries

1. Liffey, Jack (Fictitious character) --Fiction 2. Private investigators --California --Los

Angeles --Fiction. 3. Chinese Americans --California --Los Angeles --Fiction. 4. Missing

children --Fiction. 5. Mystery Fiction. I. Title.

PS3569.H3358 C34 2013

813.6 --dc23

eBook ISBN 978-1-84982-292-3

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A nod and a wink to my nephew, Jim Harrison,
il miglior fabbro
.

We are all cripples, every one of us, more or less.

—Dostoyevsky,
Notes from the Underground

People who are powerless make an open theater of violence.

—Don DeLillo,
Mao II

The sliding door of Firehawk-15 walloped open and they were both yanked outward by a gasp of the fire below. The Sheepshead Fire was crowning up into the canopy of ponderosa pines only a few hundred feet beneath their helicopter. Despite all his experience, Tony Piscatelli was shocked that the chopper had filled instantly with pounding heat and the smell of woodsmoke. The firefront in the San Bernardino Mountains east of Pasadena looked a terrifying mile wide as it advanced along the slope.

They’d been told there were fifty inexperienced volunteers down there, men from the minimum-security Wayside Honor Rancho Jail. The prisoners had mainly been chopping brush for firebreaks on the safe flanks of the fire, but the blaze had unexpectedly turned south and then back over a ridge into unburned fuel, threatening to trap the amateur groundpounders.

The two Forest Service smokejumpers took hold of each other’s shoulders in the doorway and waited for the jump to find the civvies and lead them to safety over Trophy Saddle. They had their go from Chopper 10, the little control fire chopper above them.

Their bigger Sikorsky, on loan from L.A. County Fire, hammered into the turbulence and then orbited a burned-over safety zone. The firefighters tested their harnesses and made their final preparations to fast-rope down. A gigantic column of smoke billowed off the firefront, a red glow pulsing deep within the black.

“Hook up,” Piscatelli shouted over the firestorm, slapping his jumpmate’s shoulder. His stomach clenched up in nausea, as always.

“Hooked,” Jerry Routt shouted back. They both tugged on the Sky Genie rig to make sure all was tight. They’d been fire service hotshots for fifteen and ten years, respectively, trained at first to work in disciplined groups of twenty men, but now the equation had been reversed. They were the elite of the elite, pulled aside to be smokejumpers because they’d shown they had initiative and daring.

Piscatelli tossed out a drift streamer, judging the air currents by the blue smoke flare. The firestorm yanked the streamer toward the burn column, and it tumbled end over end as it fell at an angle. Piscatelli touched his throat mike for the pilot. “Get us farther south, away from the firefront, man. Take us to one hundred, but find another LZ. You’ll find a burnover at eight o’clock. Send the burger meat later.”

Lightning shot blindingly out of the smoke column, and thunder followed like ripping canvas, trailing off into a growl.

“The LZ! See it?” Piscatelli shouted to the pilot.

“Negatory,” the pilot called. “Wait! Fer sure. Three hundred and descending. This place is total crazy winds, my doomed heroes. I’m having trouble holding it. Jump with God.”

“Hold that thought!” Piscatelli shouted. He felt his gut tighten.

“I gotta piss so bad,” Routt said, but then laughed.

“Ready to go?”

“Ready, Teddy.”

“One hundred feet, pals,” the pilot shouted.

“Ropes!”

They hurled their half-inch nylon lines out into the ripping crosswinds. Their body weight would take the ropes pretty much straight down.

“Three rope turns!”

“Three turns!”

They leaned into one another and Piscatelli gave his old reliable friend a shoulder punch.

“Rock and roll!”

They rappelled out of the chopper together. Horizons whirled and heaved as they did a controlled slide down toward the blackened LZ.

*

Jack Liffey heard the thumping of Gloria’s cane upstairs, louder than absolutely necessary, a bit of a statement. It tracked approximately from bed to bathroom, a pause, back into the bedroom, then whacked the floor a couple of times in mute rage, and abruptly clattered across the room, hurled.

“Jack!”

Jack Liffey wanted to take her up a cold beer, but the doctor had insisted she cut back on the self-medication. He tried to think of something else that might cheer her up. With three broken ribs, a rebuilt hip joint, two internal organs taken out—a kidney and a ruptured spleen—and six months’ forced leave from her job at the LAPD, not much qualified as cheer anymore. Not to mention the psychological afterburn of her bitter ordeal in Bakersfield, which had included sustained beatings and rape. She still wouldn’t tell him word one about it, but he knew a lot of it indirectly.

He headed up the stairs, noisily enough to alert her that he was on the way. She was facing away from him on the bed, wearing only a skimpy
peignoir
, or whatever the hell it was called. He was tempted to caress her, but she hadn’t let him touch her in the six weeks she’d been back.

“I’m here,” he said.

“Why? Why would you want to be anywhere near me?”

No jokes, he told himself. “Because I care, and you could use some caring.” God, what an idiot I sound, he thought. Hold tight. She’s going to give you a blast, but she needs you to stay calm as ice.

“You must be insane, Jack. Who could care about a worthless mess?”

“You’re one of the worthiest human beings I know. Can I get you something?”

“Like what? A plastic bowling trophy?”

“It’s up to you, sweet.”

“I am not sweet, and why is it up to me? Why is it
always
up to me? Can’t you ever get your fucking mind around what
you
need?”

“I guess I need to look into that.” Hold on, hold on—he braced himself against her big metaphorical thumb that was pressing against the metaphorical bruise he carried around from so many previous failures. She had an unerring instinct for taking advantage of advantage. A sharp cop.

Wounded dark eyes came around to him, and he tried desperately to appear kindly and patient; she burst into a fit of weeping. He rested his hand on her shoulder softly. She let him. After she collapsed onto the bed, she let him hold her, spooning her. But not for long.

“Go away now, Jack. I don’t want to turn you permanently against me.”

“There’s no chance of that.”

“Stop it. Go away.”

“I’m right downstairs.” Just hurl your cane again.

He headed down the creaky staircase in the old frame house in East L.A. He wished he could kill the two malicious, dimwitted cops who’d abused her, but she already had. They’d wanted payback for showing them up in their own town, doing their ostensible jobs like any real pro would, and probably costing them their last chance for promotion.

Downstairs he could hear the inconsolable sobbing, so unlike her iron strength that it broke his heart. He turned on the TV to drown out the sound. Dinner was still two hours away, nothing else to do. A chastened and worried Loco tottered in to visit, sensitive to the aura of grief that permeated the house. The dog avoided Gloria now. It was a half-coyote with its own problems, in remission from bone cancer after surgery and chemotherapy—procedures that Jack Liffey hadn’t yet found a way to pay off. The dog had been altered by its ordeal; he was more affectionate now, at least when he felt like it, his eyes losing some of their wild yellow opaqueness. He settled heavily on Jack Liffey’s feet.

An image finally coalesced after the old TV’s slow warmup. Smoky and disoriented shots of a mountain wildfire from a news helicopter.

“…More than a hundred thousand acres have been burned as of two o’clock, but only two structures have been destroyed and no lives lost. Tom, can you hear me? Tom? I’m sorry, we’re having trouble with voice contact with Chopper 11. More than a thousand firefighters are battling the Sheepshead Fire now, including personnel from the Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and county and city fire departments. And fifty volunteers from the Wayside Honor Rancho, who are threatened by the fire’s detour over San Dimas Pass.”

The young, square-jawed announcer appeared harassed, at loose ends, pushing around papers in front of him as unobtrusively as he could.

“The National Weather Service says smoke from the fire has already spread across Nevada and Utah. California has only received about one-third as much moisture as normal this year, and average temperatures have been almost ten degrees above normal.”

“Patrick… am I on?”

“Tom, are you with us? I think Tom is back. Any word on the rescue team?”

“Nothing here. We’re heading for Beaver Flat, where the volunteers are reported to be headed. Their two buses were incinerated on the fire road about half an hour ago, but expert smokejumpers are dropping to their rescue. You can go to the fire command center in Riverside for direct information.”

Jack Liffey dialed down the sound, and when he realized Gloria had stopped weeping, he muted it completely. Forest fires didn’t grab his attention that much, much like police chases on T V. They were just part of the ecology of disaster in Southern California: earthquakes, mudslides, and shooting sprees. TV always showed the same images, the same details, the same ironies and tragedies.

All as meaningless as a bad toss of the dice. Unless, of course, the fire ever threatened his daughter Maeve, who was living in a fire zone far to the west in Topanga.