SEVEN

A Little Hotbed of Tranquility

The rear fender of the bicycle had fins hacked off an old Cadillac, bullet taillights and all, and they were lashed on crudely with wire and sticking out diagonally. The little trailer platform behind rode low between what looked like blue plastic hot wheels, and on the trailer stood the object that his eye had lit upon before all the rest—a brightly painted five- foot tall Virgin of Guadalupe, complete with her full body golden aura. The old Latino in charge was pedaling his mistress hard up the slight incline. It seemed a lot of weight to be hauling around, physically and metaphysically.

“Buenas días, Virgen,” Jack Liffey offered out his car window as the statue’s fixed eyes passed fleetingly over him. There were probably far more appropriate salutations, but he hadn’t learned them yet.

A radio hung off the handlebars playing loud rancheras, some sad complaint about lost love, the Latino equivalent of country and western.

He could practically have walked to the police substation from home, but he wanted to go on to the Valley to make another stab at finding Little Deer. He was there because Sgt. Padilla had left him a phone message that morning to come in and look at some mug shots.

Padilla himself wasn’t visible as Jack Liffey entered, but a younger uniformed officer stood at a table dropping an assortment of items into plastic baggies and storing them in a carton—a watch, lidless mustard jar, a hearing aid, a glass globe with a snowman in it. He gave the snowglobe a good joggle to watch it snow before storing it away.

“Is Sgt. Padilla around?” Jack Liffey asked.

The officer nodded over his shoulder. He had taken the snowglobe back out of its baggie and was shaking it again. Undoubtedly, he had never seen Citizen Kane.

“Liffey! Back here.”

Padilla was in a barren interrogation room, tidying up what looked like several pages out of a family photo album. The sleeves were stiff and opaque brown with cut-out windows that showed only faces, presumably to cover any captions and conceal names.

“Have a seat. I’ll be ready for you in a minute. How are you and our Gloria getting along?”

Now that he was publicly living with a cop, Jack Liffey recognized that maybe they all thought of him as part of the extended cop family. Perhaps it would be appropriate to be a trifle friendlier to all lawmen than he usually was, but in this particular case he was still having trouble figuring out the man’s attitude. Anyway, he knew Gloria’s and his relationship was their own business.

“Just great,” he answered.

“No you’re not. Nobody gets along great with Ramirez.”

He remembered the way he’d put it to Chris Johnson the day before and decided to try it again. “Our relationship is teething. We’ll be okay.”

The cop brought his eyes up to look at him without moving his head. “Suit yourself. How’s your Spanish? I hear you’re doing a course at City.”

Jack Liffey was a little disturbed to be under so much observation. It was as if the entire LAPD and their loved ones made up a small gossipy town. “Mi espagnol es muy shitty. Can you believe I wasted my time taking Latin in high school? So now I can talk to very old priests and pharmacists.”

Sgt. Padilla scowled. “Why the hell did you do that?”

“All the college prep kids did back then. I don’t know, it was a survival of the old classical education days, Greek and Latin, or maybe we were afraid to go into the Spanish classes and compete with all those native speakers.” Racism might have had a bit to do with it too, he thought, but he wasn’t about to mention that.

“You’d have found out a lot of those kids named Sanchez didn’t speak Spanish so good. They could talk about going to el churcho in their carro, but that was about it. Some of these ckolos get a real shock when they do down to TJ and get laughed at.”

“Es una lingua hermosa,” Jack Liffey said diplomatically. “I’m only doing three hours a week, so it’s slow. I guess I know just enough to get myself in trouble.”

“Well, here’s a phrase for you. Estirar la pata. Literally, it means stretch the paw. It’s about the same as saying kick the bucket. That’s where you’re gonna end up if you’re not careful with these guys.”

He tossed three sleeves across the table, each with about a dozen mug shots.

“I eliminated a lot of unlikely bangers, guys who live in Compton or Riverside. But these fit your description.”

Jack Liffey saw him immediately, on the first sheet, but didn’t let on. Padilla had obviously chosen all the ones with unusual mustaches, droopy Pancho Villas, pointy imperials, bushy shrubs hanging over the lip, mustaches with goatees, and several other T-mustaches like his man.

He kept on talking to Padilla aimlessly while he looked the photos over, as if scrutinizing closely. “Did you choose to work in this division?”

“I grew up in San Antonio, but I like this part of L.A. It’s got history. You know, the White Fence gang has been here since 1920?”

“You didn’t have gangs in Texas?”

“Oh, sure, but it wasn’t the same. L.A. is the gang capital of the universe, and we’re exporting to every country in Latin America now. The blacks are colonizing Kansas and Ohio with little sets of Bloods and Crips, and Mara Salvatrucha controls El Salvador.”

“It’s drugs.”

“Sure it is. But you tell me the secret to stopping drugs.”

“Jobs would help.” He tried to push the sleeve up against the photo a bit to see if there was a name or address associated with the photo, but the stiff cardboard wouldn’t budge. “I’ve narrowed it to five. Can you arrange a lineup so I could see them in person?”

“Point them out.”

He choose all the T-mustaches, and one that was almost the same with a blunt imperial. Padilla put Post-its on the photos he pointed to.

“I’ll see what I can do. We’ll have to do it over at Hollenbeck. They have a lineup room with a one-way.”

“Thanks.”

“How’s your kid doing?”

“She’ll make it. She’s tough, but she has to wear a shit-bag on her side for a while, and no one her age is going to like that.”

“Beats estirar la pata, man.”

“You said it.”

He realized he hadn’t heard from Chris Johnson for some reason, so he stopped to call from a pay phone at a gas station on the edge of Boyle Heights. Functioning pay phones were getting harder and harder to find, but he couldn’t really afford a cell.

“Dude, is that really a pay phone?”

“Sure.”

“Hold on.”

Jack Liffey heard a little symphony of electronic sounds, and then the noise broke off abruptly as his three quarters chimed down into the coin return slot.

“I don’t think I want to know how you did that.”

“You don’t. I left a message a while ago on your home machine. It took me longer than I thought because one of those nude model outfits actually turns their computers off most of the time. You can’t beat that for a firewall. I’m afraid there’s no record on your kid or anybody like her in the last two weeks, I’m sorry.”

A huge high SUV, with tire wells like bomb shelters, pulled alongside the phone and throbbed away as the driver gave him the evil eye. Probably waiting for a drug call.

“Could you do another hunt? Don’t tax yourself, but there was a porn star a few years back called Little Deer. I think she was a Sioux.”

“Yeah, a real beauty. She did some high quality stuff at the tail end of that era when they still shot on film.”

“You heard of her?”

“You probably don’t even know who Bettie Page is, do you?”

“Nope, but Betty Boop and I used to hang out.”

The driver in the tall SUV looked at his watch ostentatiously, gave Jack Liffey the finger, and then abruptly gusted away.

“Tsk, tsk. A guy in your position should keep up on the popular culture.”

“That’s why I’ve got people like you and Mike Lewis to keep me briefed. I can concentrate on Derrida and Baudrillard instead of P. Diddy.”

“Okay, okay. You want an address for Little Deer, if she’s still in town?”

“That’s the idea.”

“Consider it done. Hey, Jack. What’s the only mammal in all creation that can’t jump, can’t ever lift itself off the surface of the earth?”

“A roadkill possum.”

“Very funny. The elephant. I saw it in one of the kids’ books. They just don’t have the muscle to boost all that weight.”

“Bye, Chris.”

He brought the Miata to a screeching stop in front of the Lovey-Dove building at about 10:30 and reached across her to push the door open. “Don’t get too used to this job, kid. You’re destined for bigger things. If you ever feel the need to strap up and tuck a nice ladysize piece in that little purse, protect yourself, let me know.” Now Keith seemed to be being nice to her again.

“No thanks.”

“Never know what creeps hang around this biz. Here.” He stuck a yellow Dilaudid tablet in her hand. “Takes the edge off and gets you happied up for work. See you this evening. Don’t believe everything those cunts in there tell you. Half of them are going downhill fast.”

She got out, and he switched his attention away instantly, speed-dialing a cell call as he drove out of the lot. She’d always been sensitive to the way a man behaved in those moments when he left her. She wanted her boyfriends to look back once, wave, acknowledge her somehow. But with all Keith’s other deficiencies, this tiny offense hardly mattered.

It was an old stucco house with blacked-out windows right next to a mini-mall that contained a dry cleaners, a tattoo parlor, and a doughnut shop. She had a few dollars and thought of going over for coffee and a doughnut in peace and quiet, but she remembered there was free coffee inside. Then she thought of just walking off, taking a bus as far as her money would carry her, and looking for work again. Her dreams about Keith had been rudely disspelled, as she had told her diary that morning. But she didn’t even have a change of clothes, which were all back at his beach house.

Funny how much easier it usually was just to go along with guys, she thought. She wondered if she ran into some guy about to shoot her in the head if she’d just smile and let him do it. Time to be a grownup, Taboots honey, and take a little charge of your life.

The plastic plaque on the door said Lovey-Dove: Authorized Access Only. She stepped in and immediately heard the sound of the keyboards and a soft-voiced cursing from the back. She turned left towards the kitchen. One of the girls, a light-skinned black girl, overweight and over made-up, was refilling a coffee mug that had a cross on it with little rays coming out and said In Case of Rapture, Catch this Cup.

“Hi,” Luisa said.

“You sure got yo’self banker’s hours, hon.”

She shrugged. “I got no car. Keith’s in charge. For now.”

“You best get that transmogrified soon as you can. First he be turning you out for Jap business fairs and a little throw-in fucking and then he’sa want you on the danger games thing. Don’t be doing that, if you know what’s good fo you. I gotta get back.”

“Thanks.” The woman left and Luisa sniffed the pot, stale and without chicory, so she gave up on the coffee. She hid the Dilaudid tab in the cupboard behind a big bottle of generic aspirin. Then she found her black skimpies from yesterday in the changing room, but it took a lot of staring at them before she decided to put them on.

It was a nondescript office building in Northridge, and the hand-lettered sign on the door might have been an allusion to the big earthquake of 1994. But then again it might not: If this room’s a-rockin’, don’t come knockin’.

There was an official nameplate, too, like something cut out with a woodburner kit by a kid, that said Adult Entertainment Coalition and Emergency Committee for Free Speech. Jack Liffey knocked once and went straight in. Here there was a receptionist, with more blond hair than a Swedish circus and a scoop-cut frilly blouse that hinted at breasts bigger than his head. She had a few piercings, but mostly in the normal places—ears and the side of a nostril—at least as far as he could see. He thought involuntarily of other places he’d found studs and rings and bars. What you don’t see can’t hurt you, he decided, as long as you keep not seeing it. Thank God Gloria stayed with the earlobes.

He decided to go for broke. “My name is Jack Liffey. I’m a detective.” He showed her the phony badge and wallet he’d got through the mail from the World Wisdom College of East Orange, New Jersey. “I’d like to speak to whoever’s in charge.”

“That’d be Mr. Wingfoot Peace. Could I inform him of the nature of your business?”

“Not unless you’re clairvoyant.”

She wrinkled up her brow but seemed to decide to let it remain a mystery. She depressed an old-fashioned intercom lever. “Mr. Peace, I believe there’s a detective here to see you.”

There was a grunt and a grudged burst of static. A tiny voice seemed to say; “Don’t tip over the outhouse.”

“He means, wait a sec,” she explained. She winked. “He might have been asleep just a wee. He’s got to put his nose on.”

She didn’t explain this, and he didn’t ask. “Have you been working here long?”

“About a month. They promised I can move on to the Vegas office where they run the awards show.”

“I saw a picture of that award the other day. What do they call it?”

“The Eros. It’s got a little boy with a little pee-pee on him.”

“But all in good taste.”

“I should think so.” She winked again. She’d do fine in Vegas, he thought, a city where subtlety was not highly valued. She had a kind of radiance, though, that made up for a lot, and she seemed quite content with who she was.

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.