The Poison Sky (25 page)

A boy poked at the animal with a stick and one of the cops waved him back. As Jack Liffey walked past, he heard the boy ask the cop, “Is there anything on Mars to kill?”

He drove up the 5 to Burbank, attending to his finely tuned sense of dread, which seemed to be firing again. This time he didn't suspect a cop following him, but something spookier and more malignant that waited out there in the smog. The last time he'd had this feeling, L.A. had been hit by a seven-plus earthquake and someone he loved had died. He didn't believe in the supernatural, but he did believe there was a faint possibility that his unconscious could tune in to signs the rest of him ignored. Dogs that whined a little too often, people on edge from too many positive ions in the air, a sky just the wrong shade of orange, the birth of just one more religion than some cosmic register could tolerate. He looked around cautiously for signs, but nothing suggested itself. Maybe it was just the dead elk. Somebody had gone to a lot of trouble to move it two hundred miles from the nearest elk reserve in the Owens Valley.

The big black BMW was outside the GreenWorld office when he parked just where he'd waited with Faye the night before. If the car hadn't been jet-black it would have disappeared completely into the smog. He had an hour or so to kill before quitting time, but he didn't want to take any chances on Mr. Reclaim taking off early. The plastic over the right side of his car was beginning to get smoky and translucent for some reason, but the smog was so bad that the view wasn't that much better out the windshield. Someone was in the guard shack, just a shape moving in a window, but there was no way to tell who it was. He could barely make out the louvered condensing tower in the center of the compound, the steam boiling off it seeming to bleach out the smog in the vicinity. Once in a while a glow up in the orange air gave away the location of the flare stack.

Moods swam at him out of the smog. At dead times like this he couldn't help drifting into thoughts about his life, the failed marriage, joblessness, missed chances, a daughter he could never do enough for, places he'd never been, and books he'd never read. Sometimes it seemed that everything he had done since leaving high school had just happened to him; he'd fallen into things without willing any of them. They had nothing to do with who he was at root, with the person he had been at eighteen.

Stay long enough in this mood and you'd look at the trash collector, or the security guard, or the guy in the pickup who fills the newspaper vending machines and say to yourself,
I
could do that, why not? I could be happy in that life. He knew he'd reached the age where the way you'd always looked at yourself and justified things didn't work any longer, and you had to step back and find a new place to look from.

To fight off the funk, he tried to bring to mind a situation in which he had been an utterly absurd butt of the fates. The day he'd reached out to secure Maeve onto the Redondo Pier and tumbled off himself, thirty feet into the Pacific below, with Maeve's scream following him all the way down, or the belt sander that had ripped out of his hands and taken off across Kathy's dresser to wreck ten feet of hardwood floor before ripping its own plug out of the wall. He chuckled for a long time. The absurdity of the picture was important, he thought, not just the defeat. It was as if he had to make himself small and comic to sneak up on the gods, and then one day he might be able to look over their shoulder and see what they saw. It was the only way he knew that he might find out what it was all about.

He shrugged off his rumination and worked at an old crossword puzzle until he got hung up and angry about a compound derived from ammonia that could have been
amine
or
imine
or
imane
or even
emine.
Just after five
P.M.,
the main body of paper-pushers left the Green-World office all at once. Clock-watchers, he thought, and he didn't blame them one bit. By half-past, the ass-kissers and supervisors started coming out, too, and then, after the BMW had sat there all by itself for about fifteen minutes, the boss himself made his appearance. Mr.
Reclaim.
He wore a dark suit and even a fedora, like someone who'd wandered out of a film noir.

Jack Liffey followed him easily to Studio City and then up into the hills above the Valley. Near the crest the Beemer slowed and then pulled off abruptly and disappeared down a steep drive that seemed to pass under a roadside parking pad. He caught a glimpse of the swing door coming down and saw that the pad was the roof of a garage. It was also an entry walk that led alongside a row of potted foliage to the windowless cedar wall of a hillside stilt house that probably had a hell of a view out the other side. Jack Liffey went on another quarter mile before he found a spot where he could park on the narrow road.

He strolled back, with glimpses here and there out over the Valley through the allotted spacing between the blank street sides of the houses. The road had risen only a few hundred feet, but he was above the smog, and there it was like a thick brown fur covering the land below, hiding all the features and ribs and scars except where a few tall buildings poked up through it. The sunset off in the west was going to be spectacular, banded in a dozen hot colors. There were no people anywhere in this hillside world, and here and there a dog barked as he walked past, but he didn't see any of the dogs either. Finally he saw a man straining upward with a fat brush to paint a high concrete wall, but as he approached and the man didn't move, he realized it was only a
trompe l'oeil,
a statue someone had stuck in his front yard as a joke.

“Missed a spot,” Jack Liffey said softly as he passed.

He approached Mr. Reclaim's house cautiously. There was a pretty good gap to the next one and enough foliage on the hill to let him scramble down the slope a ways unseen. Then, if he went over a low fence into a neighbor's flower garden, he saw he'd have a bit of a view of the front of Mr. Reclaim's house. He climbed down the slope and then over the fence, but what he hadn't noticed was that the neighbors were out on their patio drinking martinis and enjoying the view of the smog, so he settled quietly onto the dirt between rows of dahlias and waited.

“You can take the race baiting?” The woman's voice was dry and raspy in her throat and she seemed annoyed, as if she wanted to be somewhere else.

“It's of its era. And there's not that much of it. Even Graham Greene had a bit of it, too, back then. Hell, are you going to throw out
Huck Finn
because of the N-word?”

“You can't say it, can you? If I were just a little lighter-skinned, could you say it?”

“That's not fair to me, Marjorie.”

“Poor misunderstood man.”

Jack Liffey found a comfortable spot to rest his weight on his hand and settled in for a bit of a wait. He could see some of Mr. Reclaim's narrow deck, and the light spilling out over the deck shifted and pulsed from time to time to indicate something was going on within.

“I was going to tell you about the little game Chandler had with his editor. That was over a forbidden word, too.”

“Oh, go ahead. I'm all right about it, really, I'm just tired.”

“In those stories that he wrote for the pulps, he was always trying to slip in a little something about pederasts, but every time he did, the editor would yank it out.”

Jack Liffey could hear the clink of ice and liquid pouring in the gathering gloom.

“It was a pretty Puritan time, after all. He'd sneak in a child molester as a minor character and
out
it would come. Just one reference to a perky little bottom in passing, zip, eagle eye would spot it and blue-pencil it. He'd write about a character who liked to watch young boys playing football, and yank, out he would come. Finally he had an inspiration and he made Marlowe call one of the hoodlums a ‘gunsel' and the editor let it pass. Chandler and his pals had a real yuk about it in private but they never gloated publicly.”

An odd whoop-whoop siren complained far below and they fell silent for a moment as they listened.

“So?” the woman's voice asked finally.

“If you look in the dictionary, you'll see that the dictionary folks define ‘gunsel,' in their piquant way, as a boy who's kept for immoral purposes. Ironically, of course, Chandler was so popular that his little joke ended up making gunsel into a synonym for gunman.”

The woman laughed for a moment, a laugh with a nasty cold edge. Jack Liffey listened to them for a while longer, wondering idly about their relationship, homeowner and date? Houseguest and wife? As the sky darkened up, a man's voice hailed them from the house and they went inside. He sat quietly for a while longer, smelling the flowers and earth, plus a hint of mildew and wild sage.

A little spur of hillside stuck out in a crumbly cliff and when he felt it was safe he risked edging out there, clinging to a tall sumac bush, until he had a view into a slice of Mr. Reclaim's living room. Something flashed by the window, as if thrown, but it happened too fast for him to make it out, perhaps a small pillow or a book. Then a lithe blonde in a black bra and panties ran past and bent to pick the object up. It startled him and then made him uneasy, and he looked around to see if somebody might catch him peeping. By the time he glanced back, the blonde was gone.

The lights inside were full on, and moving shadows continued to spill out onto the deck. Then Mr. Reclaim marched into view, whirled around to point back at someone and shout angrily, his face red as a fire engine, before trotting back the way he came. That wasn't the odd part. The odd part was that though he was still wearing the fedora, he wore nothing else but boxer shorts with big hearts on them and black knee-high socks with black oxfords. Just before he disappeared from view he did a little high-knee running in place, like an Olympic long jumper limbering up.

Jack Liffey was tempted to edge out another few feet, but one glance at the tile roofs far below dissuaded him. Movement caught the corner of his eye and brought his attention back to the house. This time a dark-haired woman in a short blue-black slip strutted haughtily into view and whirled to bend forward until she touched the floor with both hands. Her buttocks waggled once, thrust up into the air provocatively, and Mr. Reclaim sauntered up behind her and pushed his hips against her for a moment. Then he bent forward, too, bobbed his head a couple of times, and she hiked a football to him. Mr. Reclaim backed two steps and passed the football out of sight in a perfect spiral. They both took off after the ball and Jack Liffey worked his way back through the garden with a big grin on his face. He imagined himself at the front door:
Hi, I'm a pollster doing research on assholes.

He rang and rang and heard the two-note chime somewhere in the house. Finally a porch light came on and the door opened on a heavy-duty chain. The fedora was off and a lime-green smoking jacket was on.

“I think you know me,” Jack Liffey said. “I'm the guy your two gorillas have been beating up. We need to talk.”

It shouldn't have worked but it did. The man stared impassively for a long time and then turned and barked into the room, “Go bake some cookies, girls.”

“Aw, Nick.”

“Now.”

He slipped the chain and ushered Jack Liffey in with a dismissive flourish of one hand. This level of the house was one big room with a silvery-blue wall-to-wall carpet, and it was furnished with the most garish rococo gold-on-white furniture he had ever seen, though at the moment the furniture was mostly pushed to the side walls. The football was not in evidence, nor any spare articles of clothing.

He spoke again, and his voice was so soft and so out of key with what he said that Jack Liffey wasn't quite sure he heard it right. “You got to be the dumbest fucking shit the face of the earth,” Mr. Reclaim said. “Coming here.”

“Nick!” a wail skirled up from an open stairwell that led down to the lower level. “There's nothing but lousy beer in your icebox.”

“Shut the fuck up!”

“Interesting word, ‘icebox,' ” Jack Liffey said.

Mr. Reclaim kneaded the back of his neck with one hand, just a fidget. His round face was red and he still seemed a bit winded.

“I'm a small businessman,” he said. “Not a big-businessman. Do you know the difference?”

He seemed almost reflective, but then his black eyes found Jack Liffey with a flat cold gaze, like a hunter trying to select the very best weapon for the kill.

“It means you pay for everything, guy. Every mother's son's got a hand out. It means the big-business guys go to the bank in a fuckin' road train of limos, get waved up to the first-class dock, and borrow big money, and they got a partner for the duration. I go to the bank in my little car, sneak in the back door to get some chump change, and I got a shylock ready to fuck me over for the vig.”

Little
car? Jack Liffey thought. What was big in his world, a battleship?

Mr. Reclaim kicked a straight chair away from the wall, but the gesture was spoiled when it fell over and he had to stoop to pick it up. The chair had a satin patterned seat and the frame was carved and curlicued white wood with gold leaf worked into the recesses. He sat and pointed to an identical chair. “Help yourself. I got to fucking sit down here, I been moving furniture.”

Jack Liffey moved a second chair away from the wall and sat facing the man across an expanse of carpet. He felt like an emissary from one clan of the Borgias to another.

“Nick, you ought to hear what Ginny just said about you!” The voice from down below choked off as if someone had clapped a hand over a mouth. The man glared in the general direction for a moment. “Kids. They all just go hairy ass apeshit these days.”

“Nick what?” Jack Liffey asked.

He wasn't even hesitant. “Giarre. G-I-A-R-R-E. That's JAR-ay, okay, not fuckin' GEE-arr-ay. Get it right. Half the fuckin' wops in this country don't even know to pronounce their own names. So, what are you gonna hold me up for? Get to the point.”