The Concrete River (2 page)

Just before he ducked into the Coffee Bean, a black BMW pulled out of the minimall lot and accelerated away. He noticed it because it was a special order Motorsport model with blacked windows and all the gewgaws. He didn't have enough energy yet to resent the owner.

"The usual," he said.

Dan Margolin looked up from the sports page, his gray pony tail bobbing. “Morning, Lif. Which usual is that? Lox on a bagel?”

“You do and I'll tear your kidneys out and eat them.”

Margolin said something else, but he was already behind the paper, reading that L.A. might get some goofy looking Dutchman named Ter Braak to head a new opera society that the
Times’
owners’ wives’ had been demanding for a year or two. As a phenomenon, opera had about the same interest for him as tooth decay.

Margolin brought his Americanized espresso, strong enough to leave a satisfying sludge in the cup. “How ’bout those Raiders?”

“Is this football season?”

“All winter.”

“Is it winter? My wife always said she hated a place where the leaves stayed the same and the air changed colors.”

“Rain means winter, Lif. At least in L.A.” The toaster popped and Dan Margolin hurried off.

Margolin had been a Marine up in I Corps near Quang Tri. Liffey didn't see how anyone who had been around a war had any time for professional sports—all that noise and spurious loyalty, to no purpose. Of course, his own war had been mostly locked up inside an air-conditioned trailer in Thailand watching a scope and monitoring headphones to see where B-52s were going, the middle class war.

“Hey, I almost forgot. You got a visitor. She was real insistent. I wouldn't be surprised she's still sitting on your stoop up there.”

“
Stoop
?”

“I think she's right off the boat from Mexico. She didn't speak much English.”

Jack Liffey folded the paper over, drank enough coffee so he could see the sludge, and stepped out the door. Craning his neck in the rain, he could see the landing that ran past the upstairs doors. No one was sitting on his non-existent stoop, but he could see that his office door was standing ajar and a chill took his spine. He should probably have sent the cops, but he was stubborn that way.

Jack Liffey ducked into Mailboxes-R-Us. “I need the toy.”

“You don't look so good.”

“I don't need a lecture.”

She went to her storeroom and took down a box that said Red Pencils, then gave him the ugly little .32.

“You be careful,
querido
.”

“If I'm not back in half an hour, send for the cavalry.”

There was a terrible stillness on the landing, an eerie sense of entering a dream world where luck would end up mattering a whole lot more than any skills he had. He approached the window with his hand on the comforting gun in his pocket. All he could see inside was the little waiting space with its two steel chairs and magazines and the partition with its poster of the Alps from a previous tenant. It all looked okay.

The door had been kicked open, the cheap aluminum frame torn jagged by the deadbolt tongue, and it stood open about a foot. The inner office door was open too, but that was never locked. He sidled in and kept moving slowly toward the inner door.

He took out the .32, his mind not working quite right, and he fought himself into focus. There was enough light through the venetian blinds in back to see quickly that no one was there. It was amazing how fast the fear went away, he thought, as he surveyed the wreckage. It looked more like it had been done to make a point than to search.

“Aw, shit,” he said. The goldfish his daughter had given him, last visitation, was dead in a damp patch on the floor. He went back down and got his toast and sat. For over a year now he had been trying to live in the present, without much in the way of hopes or dreams, trying to ignore not only his own sour past, but all the gratuitous rot and corruption that built up in the city around him. There was one problem with living too much in the present, though. When you did get incoming, it tended to be in really big calibers.

“Call the cops for me, Dan.”

The black cop had been a lot friendlier than the white one, but he had gone quiet a while back, poking at the rubble on the floor. His name tag said Black, but Jack Liffey decided it was not something he wanted to be witty about. He had seen them both around town, but hadn't ever run into them.

“You got a gun in here, big guy?” the belligerent white cop asked.

“In that blue book.” He'd hollowed out an
Oxford Comp-anion to English Literature
and set it with some other books on the theory that no one in his right mind would ever pick it up.

The cop frowned as he took out the big gray .45 as if he'd finally found the real problem here.

“I assume you got a permit.”

“Nobody's got a permit. It's registered.” A gazillion detective novels to the contrary, L.A. County did not issue permits to carry concealed weapons.

“Let's see it.”

Jack Liffey nodded at litter on the floor where all his files had been turned out. “Help yourself.”

The cop ignored him and turned the pistol over in his hand like an interesting rodent. “What is it?”

Liffey toyed with saying
It's a gun
, but thought he'd better not. “It's a Ballester-Molina, an Argentine copy of the army issue. I thought I was getting a good deal until I found out none of the parts are interchangeable except the magazines.”

The cop looked up at him thoughtfully. The blue name tag said Quinn. “You get a lot of raw deals, do you?”

“Just my share.”

“Too bad about the goldfish,” the black cop said.

It sounded like he meant it, but he'd be damned if he'd acknowledge it the way the white cop was turning out.

“You working on any interesting ‘cases?’” The white cop gave the word a nasty twist.

“I'm not a detective. I just find missing kids.”

“You have to shoot a lot of them?”

“Only if they cry,” he said.

The white cop glared, but let it go finally.

“Probably some drug-head after your petty cash,” Black said.

“Sure.”

Quinn dropped the pistol, a bit too hard on the desk so it probably scarred the wood. “Oh, oops there.”

“You might want to wipe off your prints,” Liffey said. You couldn't let things go indefinitely and end up living with yourself. “You never know where that'll end up.”

“You looking for trouble from me?”

Jack Liffey's vision went red. “I'm fifty-two years old, cocksucker,” he said very softly and slowly, “and I know more about trouble than you ever will.”

They glared at one another until the black cop took his partner's arm and pressed him slowly away. He balled up the multi-part form he'd been writing on and tossed it in the trash. “We'll just skip the burglary report, I think.”

“The fuck you will. I need it for the insurance.”

“Try the Santa Monica cops,” Quinn said. “They're real
polite
.”

When they were gone he stared at the door for a long time with his heart racing. In Basic, he'd watched three tough black kids on the long slide downhill go for a timid white boy. Liffey knew if he'd helped, they'd just have got him later, and he'd watched the boy's eyes going sleepier and sleepier with fear.

“You our buddy, Milken, be a buddy and loan us fifty.”

“I can't afford it.”

“Oh, he can't
afford
it. You a racist motherfucker, you know that? You apologize for being a racist motherfucker.”

“Sure, man, I'm sorry.”

“
Sure man
. Don't
Sure man
me, racist motherfucker.”

The humiliation had gone on and on. Liffey had seen that none of them would ever recover from the things that had made them. He had waited across the barracks, one hand on a scarred baseball bat by his bed. If they'd come his way, he was determined to take down at least one of them. In the end, you only had the space you inhabited, and you couldn't let anyone take that away or it was gone forever.

He looked around the dumped manila folders of old records and began kicking it into piles. So he couldn't claim insurance for the door or anything else that was busted. Another small step in the long decline of expectations of his life.

He froze when he saw the old Xeroxed poster under his foot. Janelle van der Merwe. A young blond girl, skinny, smiling obligingly, helpless looking. Coming home the long shaky way from Nam in 1970, he'd made friends with some locals in a bar in South Africa and stayed with them for a few weeks and one of them named Gysbert had grown up and married and had kids and then had found Liffey's name somehow two decades later and written to beg him to find his daughter who had gone AWOL from her exchange high school in Ohio, last known postcard from Hollywood. Even now, the stringy blond girl in the photograph didn't look much like what he remembered of Gysbert.

Liffey had made up a lot of copies of the photo, mostly just to say that he'd tried. He informed the police, tacked up posters, and spent an evening on the Strip talking to teenage girls wearing tiny bandeaux where breasts might be some day. He'd amazed himself by finding her inside of a week out in Canyon Country. She'd been a virtual prisoner of a megalomaniac Fundamentalist preacher who enticed runaways off the Strip with a lot of cult mumbo-jumbo and put them to work as unpaid labor sewing fancy bright-colored leather jackets that they sold to the boutiques back down on the Strip, a modern version of the old slave-to-rum-to-slave trade. He'd hired a real private eye to help him break in and snatch the girl and he'd found out the he, Liffey, was tougher and more alert than the rummy ex-cop and did most of it himself.

Liffey had got a whiff of the thrill of the hunt, and five years later that skill had been his tenuous lifeline out of the collapse of his life.

He was startled by a hesitant knock on the open outside door. An old Latina in a shawl with a crumpled letter in her hand watched him with Indian eyes and for some reason he knew immediately she was straight up from Mexico and had a hard luck story. His heart sank because he didn't do very well finding kids on the east side. He'd only succeeded once, and now he usually referred missing Latinos to Art Castro, who'd helped him out that time.

“Mr. Leefee? You speak Spanish, please?” She was damp through.

“
Momentito
.”

He went past her, on his way to get Marlena and bring her up and then realized he had nowhere to bring her. He turned back. “
Vamanos, senora
, please. Come this way.”

They waited in the front of the shop like petitioners while Marlena Cruz sent a fax for an old man in suspenders and white shoes.

“Can you close up and meet us in the Bean?”

She cocked her head dubiously, then looked at the woman and assented with a small flick of her eyebrows. “Your place up there bad?”

“It'll do.”

He led the woman into the coffee shop, stabbing a finger at Dan Margolin with his hand held high. He wasn't quite sure himself what the motion meant, perhaps just an odd gesture to put Margolin off balance and insist he treat this occasion with seriousness.

“Three coffees, Dan.” To the woman, “
Quiere usted
coffee? Please.”

“Thank you very, sir.”

They sat at the window. He was uneasy, as he always was when he couldn't communicate. It was like being disarmed. Restlessly, he got up and went to the counter. “This the woman who came earlier?” he said softly.

“Yeah, that's her. What was all the cops up there?”

“Somebody busted into my place. Must have thought I had some cash.”

“How'd you like Quinn?”

“A sweetheart. You know him?”

“He's a horse's ass. Last year, I had a panhandler in here bugging people. When he wouldn't leave, I called the cops and they sent
him
. He started roughing up the poor guy and when I objected, the son-of-a-bitch drew down on me. In my own cafe.”

It made Liffey feel good to hear that someone else had had a run-in with Quinn, like hearing that other people, too, had the disease with the funny name that they just found on your blood test. They got back to the table just as Marlena arrived and Margolin made himself scarce.

“Thanks,” he said. “You're a princess.”

She talked to the woman in Spanish and it went on for a long time with various expressions crossing their faces, like cloud shadows on a plain. He was revising his opinion of her as he watched her speak in her own language. What he had taken as peasant timidity was probably only unfamiliarity with English. She seemed more astute in Spanish, almost self-assured. There was also something a little neurotic in her eyes from time to time, and peons were never allowed to be neurotic. He guessed she was a schoolteacher in a small town.

Finally, Marlena looked at him quizzically. “She wants to know if the mission for Senora Beltran involved sending her away from town.”

He stared blankly for a moment. “Mission to Neptune, you mean. Are you sure you're translating right? What is this woman's name?”

Marlena asked her.

“Maria Elena Schuler.
Habito en Hermosillo
.”

“Schuler?” he said.

“Goodness, Jack. We know Americans named Azizian and Vukovsky.”

“And Chan. Fair enough. Hang on, I do know a Senora Beltran.” He racked his brain. “Consuela Beltran. It was her son I found a couple years ago. He'd run away looking for his dad, turned up in Modesto.” He could see the woman's face light up. A flock of very loud motorcyles passed outside and the glass window vibrated in pain. On the high back seat of one of the Harleys a woman in a mini-skirt flailed at the driver with her fists, as if she were being kidnapped in a bad biker movie, and he puzzled over the image. He sipped at the coffee, but it was ordinary coffee and terrible.

“Let's do this in order. Is Senora Beltran missing?”

The two women talked for a while.

“She's been missing for more than a week. Maria Elena is her mother and they exchange letters every week. The last letter, dated two weeks ago, said that Senora Beltran was coming to see you to get you to help her with a problem.”