A Little Too Much Read online

  The Jack Liffey Series by John Shannon

  THE CONCRETE RIVER

  THE CRACKED EARTH

  THE POISON SKY

  THE ORANGE CURTAIN

  STREETS ON FIRE

  CITY OF STRANGERS

  TERMINAL ISLAND

  DANGEROUS GAMES

  THE DARK STREETS

  THE DEVILS OF BAKERSFIELD

  PALOS VERDES BLUE

  ON THE NICKEL *

  A LITTLE TOO MUCH *

  * available from Severn House

  A LITTLE TOO MUCH

  A Jack Liffey Mystery

  John Shannon

  This first world edition published 2010

  in Great Britain and in 2011 in the USA by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  9–15 High Street, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM1 1DF.

  Trade paperback edition first published

  in Great Britain and the USA 2011 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD.

  Copyright © 2010 by John Shannon.

  All rights reserved.

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Shannon, John, 1943–

  A little too much. – (A Jack Liffey mystery)

  1. Liffey, Jack (Fictitious character)–Fiction.

  2. Private investigators–California–Los Angeles–Fiction. 3. African American actors–Mental health– Fiction. 4. Missing persons–Investigation–Fiction. 5. Detective and mystery stories.

  I. Title II. Series

  813.5'4-dc22

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-6991-3 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-323-6 (trade paper)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  All Severn House titles are printed on acid-free paper.

  Severn House Publishers support The Forest Stewardship Council [FSC], the leading international forest certification organisation. All our titles that are printed on Greenpeace-approved FSC-certified paper carry the FSC logo.

  Typeset by Palimpsest Book Production Ltd.,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland.

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by the

  MPG Books Group, Bodmin. Cornwall.

  For Alex and Becky, new friends are sometimes the best.

  Acknowledgments

  I want to thank Dr Leanna Wolfe, for sharing some of her large store of knowledge of human sexuality and its varieties and of the defunct Sandstone Retreat in Topanga.

  I also want to acknowledge, of course, Gay Talese and his book Thy Neighbor’s Wife that featured the Sandstone Retreat prominently, and Alex Comfort’s 1973 More Joy of Sex which did the same – until later editions of the book eliminated all mention of the retreat. I also want to acknowledge the video ‘Sandstone’ from 1975 by Bunny and Jonathan Dana.

  In addition, I relied upon innumerable newspaper and magazine articles about Sandstone by Andrew Blankstein, Mark Dery, Jeff Booth and many others.

  Topanga, a rustic mountain canyon between Santa Monica and Malibu, where I now live, started out as a refuge for artists, writers, musicians and exiles from the Hollywood Blacklist (including Woody Guthrie and Will Geer), full of owner-built cabins and houses made of found lumber – sort of a ruder rural version of Greenwich Village. But, like the Village, the lawyers and dentists moved in later and eventually changed the character of everything they touched, helping make an earnest seven year long sexual experiment like Sandstone no longer tenable. And despite Sandstone’s claims at the time, I remain skeptical of the healing powers of polysexuality.

  In the heartland of wealth and liberation, you always hear the same question: What are you doing after the orgy? What do you do when everything is available – sex, flowers, the stereotypes of life and death?

  – Jean Baudrillard, America

  Contents

  Prologue

  The Damaged Ecology

  One

  Salt of the Earth

  Two

  The Cord is Cut

  Three

  A Failed Experiment

  Four

  A Place to Hold All the Failings

  Five

  De Whole Troof

  Six

  Death by Minimum Wage

  Seven

  Melanie’s Son

  Eight

  The Deal

  Nine

  Immortal is Way too Long

  Ten

  The Day of Creation

  Eleven

  Stupidity For Dummies

  Twelve

  Our Rise-Up-Angry

  Thirteen

  While the Sierra Madre is Still a Virgin

  Fourteen

  Life is Sugar, for True

  Fifteen

  Too Much Going Bad at Once

  Sixteen

  A Beet on Fire

  Seventeen

  I Can’t go on I’ll go on

  Eighteen

  Luck Pays Its Dues

  Nineteen

  Hellfire

  Epilogue

  You Can’t Fix Everything

  PROLOGUE

  The Damaged Ecology

  Jhon Orteguaza tugged on the conical white knit cap as soon as he parked the Range Rover. He’d found the cap amongst his mother’s meager belongings after she’d died of TB a month earlier in Hospital San Juan de Dios in Baranquilla, Colombia.

  ‘What’s that ugly old thing?’ Amari Santander said, chuckling.

  That was a big mistake. Orteguaza stared so hard and so long at the dark-haired beauty in the car that she started to get truly frightened. Red bloomed on one cheek as if he’d struck her. Perhaps he had.

  ‘Do you believe sex and violence are linked?’ he demanded.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Stay here now. When I come back, I will either coge you or kill you. You can choose.’

  He stepped out into the dank alley. Orteguaza figured that the traditional cap of an Arhuaca holy man would get a rise out of the santero whose advertisement he’d also found in his mother’s single cardboard carton of possessions – the sad gleaning of a lifetime.

  Inside the shrine, which was really just a garage off the alley, the grizzled little man squatted in front of a bonfire on the cement floor. Orteguaza sat down cross-legged facing him across the fire. When the santero looked up, he shouted and swept the cap off Orteguaza’s head like a bad idea.

  A night of grave mistakes. Oh, little man.

  ‘Them mountain mamos is stupid fuckers,’ the priest said in an ugly Spanish that swallowed the middle of every word – so very Caribbean. Mamos just meant priests but it meant a lot more if you were Arhuaca. ‘You an Indio, son?’

  ‘You knew my mother, pendejo. She was Drunvala, a full-blood Arhuaca,’ he said. He had scheduled a session because he half believed in the powers, just as he was half Indio, but he wondered if he was going to let this little faker live.

  Drunvala Orteguaza’s people had been one of the three famous tribes holding fast to the old soul in the inaccessible Santa Marta Mountains of coastal north Colombia. They had expelled the Capuchin missionaries plus the Spanish teachers and others sent by the state. In 1990, they had sent their one fluent Spanish-speaker down from the high mountains to demand that a BBC crew at work nearby follow him back up to document their mamos’ warning to the entire world about the ecology that had become so fatally damaged that their regular ministrations might no longer be able to repair it. Remarkably, the BBC crew had agreed, and they climbed the mountain to make The Elder Brothers’ Warning, a ninety-minute documentary.

>   ‘Them mountain beliefs is shit. Forget the sierras. Your mother’s true Orisha was Oshun, the goddess of love and passion.’

  Orteguaza was mildly embarrassed that his sense of his own Indio people existed in his mind only back in the mists, images built up from the crudest daily journalism in gutter papers that called them primitivos plus a little of the BBC film that he had seen, yet the tribe lived only seventy kilometers away. His mother had migrated down to Barranquilla on the lowland coast two years before he was conceived, where she’d worked as a domestic for rich supermarket owners and car dealers. She had gradually taken up many of the local servant beliefs of Caribbean Santeria, dancing herself to exhaustion at night in a stewed-together worship of African gods, their equivalents in syncretist Catholic saints and fading memories of her own Arhuaca yearnings toward mother-earth.

  Jhon had been her only child, an accident of religious intoxication from dancing too near a tall, handsome Colombian wrestler. The boy grew up headstrong in Barranquilla and was repeatedly thrown out of the city schools. Eventually he’d grown himself up on the port-town streets, and like so many of the urban self-taught, this handsome and short-tempered half Indio had been left to believe everything and nothing.

  He’d eventually fought his way to jefe of a cocaine distribution gang that was now richer than most Swiss banks and used low-flying airplanes, home made submarines, and go-fast cigarette boats, plus a hundred other smuggling ruses to transport the priceless powder into North America. Inevitably, he came to owe allegiance to the powerful Medellin cartel.

  Orteguaza ruled the cuates and thugs of his klika with a rough hand, and they followed their Gran Jhon and his occasional religious eruptions without question.

  The santero surreptitiously tossed powder into the small bonfire on the garage floor, and it erupted into orange flame.

  ‘You have done something wrong to someone,’ the santero stated, in what suggested an oracular voice.

  ‘Chingada,’ Orteguaza said dismissively. ‘Doing someone wrong is universal. Tell me something real.’

  ‘Is a minefield outside, yes. Give me my coca now.’

  That had been the price of the consultation. ‘The talk isn’t over yet, padrito. I need to know about my next biznis.’ He used the English word, or something near it. ‘Señor Stone has been straight with me up to now, maybe. But I have a strong inner feeling of betrayal. Give me some of that magnesium powder or whatever it is you use to dupe the fools.’

  The santero tried to stare him down to reestablish his authority. Orteguaza grabbed the man’s wrist hard and wrenched his hand down into the bonfire.

  ‘¡Caballero, po’ ’avor! Aiiiii!’

  He let go and the santero’s other hand went into a small leather pouch and offered a palmful of silver powder.

  Orteguaza took it and tossed it all into the flames, which blazed up like a brushfire sweeping through something very dry. He watched the shape of the flames with intense concentration and saw something unpleasant there.

  ‘And what does that sign say to you, little man?’ Orteguaza demanded.

  ‘My Orishas do not always see the future as unmistakably as the stupid star-chart in El Heraldo,’ he said with dignity. He was rubbing his singed fingers hard against his thigh.

  ‘Then what good are you?’ Jhon Orteguaza declared. He pressed his 9mm Glock against the forehead of the santero and pulled the trigger. The man shrieked like a bird as he fell over backwards.

  ‘You see now whose gods are strongest, pendejo? What stupidness. Never insult a man’s mother.’

  He collected his precious mamo’s hat and the tiny leather bag of magic powder and looked back at the flickering fire. Maybe this love-and-sex goddess Oshun could still tell him what to do about the troublesome woman in the car outside, and, most important, about Señor Stone in El Norte.

  ONE

  Salt of the Earth

  It was probably the strangest job that had ever swept Jack Liffey into its orbit, and that was saying a lot. There must have been quite a few malign planets sliding into conjunction or whatever during that week. He didn’t believe in that crap, of course, but several of the participants in this drama did. His worries had begun in earnest just after his wife (his live-in womanfriend, to be accurate, though he had begged her many times to marry him) had taken herself off for a while with a lover, his daughter had just about got herself killed by L.A. SWAT as she was so characteristically trying to rescue a crazy armed kid at UCLA, and a Colombian drug-runner’s gang had dropped out of the blue and were running wild in town, shooting, bombing and maiming so outrageously that they pushed the sexual scandals of a TV preacher right off the news. May we all live in interesting times, a friend had saluted him – that old Chinese curse again.

  They say life-changing drama generally begins Jesuitically, which is to say, it sneaks aboard your life in an extremely elaborate and dishonest manner. All this had started for him with an innocent visit to the ramshackle house his daughter had just rented with some classmates, not too far from her new college, UCLA.

  ‘Man in the house!’

  Jack Liffey burst into a grin. He hadn’t heard that cry for forty years, not since the dorms at Long Beach State. He’d walked up the dirt drive past three cars, all girls’ cars on various forms of evidence that a good detective would notice, including a bobble-prism hung from the mirror and a box of Kleenex on the front seat.

  ‘Bunny, put something on! I think it’s Maeve’s dad!’

  ‘It is,’ he said mildly. ‘An evil old man trying to cop a quick peek.’

  The blonde in the wraparound green housecoat grinned back at him and then flashed him her breasts. They looked large and firm and quite remarkable.

  ‘Oh, Jesus, don’t!’ He shielded his eyes. ‘The spirit is willing, but the heart is weak.’

  ‘Why don’t you wait in the kitchen, Mr Liffey? In fact, why don’t you call ahead?’

  He grimaced. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t have a cell. I’m afraid I’m the last Luddite.’ He padded gamely toward the messy kitchen. Once again he noticed that girls living together were less tidy than boys.

  ‘I’m Axel,’ she said. ‘It’s short for Alex.’

  Not very short, he thought. ‘Pleased to meet you. I’m Jack. Please wrap up tight.’

  Like so many of the older Topanga cabins he had visited over the years in his job as a missing-child finder, this one had long passed its peak, with the yellow and green kitchen tile peeking from under piled-up dishes that were nicked and stained, and the linoleum on the floor no longer mimicking wood very successfully. He sat down obediently at a built-in table. Three flat boxes that said Rocco’s Pizza were pushed against the wall, reeking of grease.

  Sad, he thought, looking at the cracked sash window and other signs of neglect. So obviously a rental. No one had loved this bungalow intimately for many years.

  Not wanting to do things the usual way, of course, Maeve had rejected living in the UCLA dorms and had found two girlfriends right off the bat to share with. They’d hunted down a place that was a thirty minute drive from campus, along Sunset and then down Pacific Coast Highway. Topanga Canyon had been a famous hippie and artist retreat, but much of it had slowly surrendered to the invading battalions of those with real money.

  A very tall athletic-looking redhead wearing a dark complexion and very little else but a towel sat opposite him, staring fiercely. ‘Maeve, you didn’t say your dad was so dreamy!’ she shouted. ‘In an old and rugged sort of way.’

  ‘Next time I’ll call, I promise,’ he said.

  ‘My name is Bunny Walker. I’m drama. “Time rushes toward us with its hospital tray of infinitely varied narcotics, even while it is preparing us for its inevitably fatal operation.”’

  ‘You’ve got a while before you have to worry about the big sleep,’ he offered. She might have been a junior, twenty at most, and pleasantly large and overweight. The flaming red hair looked real. ‘Was that O’Neill?’ he asked.

  ‘Tenn
essee Williams,’ she said. ‘I played the older woman in The Rose Tattoo at the Raging Stage last year. I’m big, so I can get away with it. A woman of appetites, soiled, desperate for one last love.’

  She batted her eyelashes and luckily Maeve arrived abruptly to rescue him. ‘Hi, Dad.’ She hustled Bunny out of the room. ‘Beat it, beautiful. Get dressed. This one is all mine.’

  Maeve came back and hugged her father more reticently than he was used to. He supposed that was just part of the long slow separation of the lander module from the main spacecraft. All parents knew the pain. ‘Tea? I only have ginger and green. How’s Gloria?’

  ‘I’ll try ginger. Thanks. Gloria’s fine. I’m sorry to bust in on you, hon, but I seem to have a job up here.’

  ‘In Topanga?’ She began fussing in a cabinet.

  ‘Well, isn’t that where I am? I’m a bit disoriented by your roommates prancing around in the altogether.’

  Her tone was slightly distant. ‘You know, Dad, I think I can imagine back in your day, and what it was like for you. All that sexual repression. Maybe I just listened too much to you and Mom. But that’s all just a joke for us now. At college, they have coed dorms. Nobody outside Kansas worries much about sex or nudity any more.’

  His daughter had had an affair with a gangbanger in East L.A. and got pregnant, agonized for a while and then had an abortion, then she’d had a tumultuous affair with an ultra-smart high school girl who’d eventually pushed her away – so he guessed she had a perfect right to a blasé attitude, if not a complete renunciation of sex. But he knew she was more sensitive than she wanted to let on. He knew, in fact, with great pride, that she was a far better human being in many ways than he was.

  Not everybody recognizes me. I guess I should accept that, but it makes me feel so vain. I mean, how deep in a cave do you have to live not to recognize a guy who’s had three Oscar nominations, and has his face on billboards and buses all over town? And just to jog the memory a bit, I’m pretty clearly African-American.

  ‘Coming up, son,’ she cries.

  I sit on one of the two sun-scoured white plastic chairs that I discovered on this bald knob, trying to make sense of the complicated hillside vista of overlapping canyons and spurs below.