The Orange Curtain Read online

  “People shook up, stay home a lot,” Tien Joubert explained. Her eyes were red and wadded balls of Kleenex waited in ranks on her desk; she’d been crying. It seemed a bit out of character. She was wearing an elegant short skirt and a silk blouse with gold and green paramecia on it. “Many people frighten down deep now. Phuong really nice kid, but people see be nice no protection here. That the hard part of live in another country. You don’t know what to be scared of. You don’t know how to stay in good side of gods.”

  “Those gang boys were out there guarding the night club.”

  She nodded. “That they place. Owner pay for protection and time like this, he like to see it.”

  “How did Phuong die?”

  “She found in hills, like dead guys last week. Most Vietnam people here, this first time they even think of hills. Maybe the kids who ride around in their cars been in hills, but for most older people there only this mall and TV and all the house of family.”

  She was distracted and she got up and looked at something in a small inlaid box on a shelf behind him. She came past him on her way back and stopped and touched his shoulder and then kissed his cheek very lightly, like a passing thought of a kiss. “I miss you. I scared and need comfort, too, Jack Liffey.”

  A thrill went all the way through him and he grasped her arm reflexively and then made himself let go.

  “You still not so sure,” she guessed.

  “I’m still not so sure. How was Phuong killed?”

  Tien sat down demurely and adjusted her skirt. “They say she was shot with a gun and not molest. All her clothes was okay.”

  She shook her head and a tear trickled down her cheek. She could shift moods faster than he could keep up. “What kind of place eat up children like this? You think it wouldn’t be so hard for us, don’t you, huh? We all been in wartime and we see many friend and family die in war, but maybe that what make it so bad. We come ten thousand mile. We finally think we okay here and no more surprise dying, all finish, and we relax and learn new business and raise our family and learn to become American, and, boom, it all come back with no warn. This new American life more fragile than we think, and now we know it never never never gonna be okay. We kidding ourself. War is real state of world, not peace. She was such good kid, gonna be somebody.”

  A scrape of real grief had entered her voice, and he couldn’t help himself. He went around the desk and she jumped up and he held her, pressing her small body hard against him. Her head only came to his chest, and he felt her shudder and sob against him. Her small arms went around him and hugged hard and she seemed to fit perfectly against him. He tried to imagine what the Vietnamese community had been through the last two or three decades, and he couldn’t get his mind around it. There should be a limit to the flexibility the world demanded of people.

  “Can we eat now?” he suggested after a while, when she was just starting to turn the hug into something else. “I think it would be a good idea to get out of here and do something.”

  “Okay, you. You go on and off like radio.”

  “So do you, Tien. Only you change stations a lot, too.”

  She tilted her head to think about it. “You right. I FM, AM, long wave, TV, boom. That how I keep going, keep head out of water, keep up business, help friends. Keep on move. Pho ’92 a good restaurant.”

  “Have they got bun bo xao?”

  “Course. Let me fix my face.”

  It was a dish of sauteed beef and noodles and it was the one Vietnamese dish he knew that had little or none of the nuoc mam fermented fish paste that was definitely an acquired taste. She turned away from him at the desk to pat something onto her cheeks in a little hand mirror.

  “Is Mr. Minh too distraught to talk today?”

  “You bet.”

  “Maybe I’ll leave him a note. Sympathy.” He found himself talking telegraphically, like an unwitting caricature of her speech pattern, and he forced himself to stop it. It was probably a reflection of how commanding her presence was. Whatever else she meant to him, he liked being around her energy and her total focus, probably the way Loco perked up whenever his master came into the room, and if Jack Liffey had a tail he figured he’d probably be wagging it now, too. “I have to tell him I didn’t get very far, I’m afraid, but I’ll give Lt. Vo what I know before I quit.”

  She whirled around in the chair. “You not quit.”

  “It’s a police matter now, Tien. It’s not a lost kid any more. The cops don’t want amateurs getting in the way in a murder investigation. It’s not just an ordinary murder investigation either. It looks like a serial killer.”

  “No no no no no. You got to help. These cop, a lost thing they will never find. You know the saying? You got to keep looking for bad guy that did this.”

  “I’m afraid Orange County is going to be in the big leagues of the media circus for a while. Tom Brokaw is going to be standing in front of whatever landmarks you’ve got, Disneyland maybe, on the national news and dozens of L.A. TV reporters and lookie-loos from Riverside will be trampling over the place where they found the bodies and guys just out of the funny farm will be confessing they did it because God told them to and flying saucers are going to make a special appearance overhead and down in the Latino community people are going to be finding the face of the killer in the scorch patterns on tortillas. The cops would kill me for jumping into all that, because they know my face already.”

  She shook her head, and he could see nothing was going to budge her. “You not want money? I got money. You quit Mr. Minh, I hire you twice as much. This free country to look and ask question.”

  They argued off and on all the way through lunch, interrupted by servers and comments about pretty dresses that Tien noticed suddenly on other women and songs she recognized on the P.A., until she wore him down and he finally agreed to spend another day or two running down the one lead he still had, Mark Glassford. The money didn’t hurt, either. With it, he could get all the way out of arrears on his child support and see Maeve all he wanted.

  As he was walking her back to her office, she said, “You my employee now. I want report this evening.”

  His whole body tingled with the thought. “I’ll call it in.”

  “Phone at home broke, you come,” she said quickly, and he laughed for a long time.

  The first ominous sign was the fact that Lt. Vo didn’t call him into his office, but into what Jack Liffey recognized immediately as a felony interview room. A bare wood table, a videotape camera on a cheap tripod, pointed right at him and humming, and beside Vo was the second ominous sign, a hefty man with a round face and a buzz cut who looked like a Marine drill sergeant. This man wore a rumpled grey suit with a soup stain on it. Vo introduced him as Commander Something-or-other Margin, the head of the sheriff department’s Sagebrush Shooter team.

  “We prefer to call it the Serial Killer Team,” he said icily. “Tell us about your black eye, Liffey.”

  “That’s one of the things I came about.” He described the ambush in the parking lot and the leader of the gang, the man with the pink eye and one long tuft of cheek hair. Margin turned and glared at Lt. Vo, as if he were part of the gang.

  “Don’t tell me you’ve got a lot of thugs here who look like that,” Margin insisted.

  “That’s Thang Le. He sometimes calls himself Uncle Ho.”

  “Uncle Ho?”

  “He has no politics at all. It’s just guaranteed to enrage every elder in the community. His gang is called Quan Sat, short for body count. They’re into extortion and home invasions for jewelry and cash stuffed under the mattresses but I can’t prove it. No one will testify.”

  “Could they have killed this girl?” Margin demanded. “Or could they be doing a copycat to conceal some other business.”

  “I doubt it, either way.” Frank Vo looked at Jack Liffey. “But it sounds like Quan Sat think you suspect them.”

  “How do you prove a negative? I told them I didn’t.” Actually, it sounded like Margin
suspected Frank Vo, but there was no point pissing either of them off by pointing it out.

  “What do you know, Liffey?”

  He told them everything he knew about the Quan Sats and about the Industrial League and their mystery caller, offering his threats relating to the airport, and about visiting Tien Joubert, and he repeated his encounter with the younger kids with the checks cut into their hair. He told them, in fact, everything he knew about Orange County except MediaPros. It didn’t seem fair to turn Margin and the Serial Killer Team loose on Mark Glassford just because the young man had offered Phuong a kind word on the videotape. And poor skittish Billy Gudger. If Margin as much as glared at him, he’d go into permanent earth orbit. He would talk to Glassford and if the young man was the least bit suspicious, he’d tell it straight to Lt. Vo. Margin, on the other hand, could kiss his ass, the way he was turning out.

  The questioning went on and on to no purpose, raking over the same ground. He knew better than to ask if he was a suspect. Everybody was a suspect to cops like Margin, and up to a point it was understandable. Almost everybody the man talked to, day in and day out, lied to him, probably even his own family. You just had to lie to a hard-ass like him.

  “You’re not going to be looking over our shoulder as we investigate this case, are you, Liffey?”

  “What do you mean?”

  He sat forward and his brows furrowed. “Are the words I used too big? Which one is difficult for you? Shoulder? Investigate? Are—you—still—on—this—case?”

  “My job was trying to find the girl. She’s found, no thanks to me, so that job is over. I’m not working for Mr. Minh any more, as soon as I tell him.”

  It was almost the truth. He just hoped Margin didn’t notice that it wasn’t a direct answer to the question.

  “Go home, Liffey,” Margin said. He turned to Vo. “You tell Minh that this guy is off the case.”

  There was an odd pattern of quick raps at the door and it came open. Another cop in a jarhead haircut and gray suit looked in. It was as if they had cloned Margin, then slimmed him down a little and let the extra flesh sag. Margin went to the door and the two hard-asses talked in soft voices. He and Vo sat patiently, like petitioners with a hopeless case.

  “I’ve got to go,” Margin said to the airspace over their heads. “You finish up here.”

  When the door shut, Jack Liffey and Lt. Frank Vo looked at one another. “Nice guy,” Jack Liffey said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Don’t say a word. I realize you have to live here.”

  “This interview is concluded,” Vo said aloud and he spoke the date and time and his name. He stood up, turned off the camera and popped the tape cassette.

  “What didn’t you tell Margin?” he asked.

  Jack Liffey thought about it a moment. “Mrs. Joubert re-hired me and asked me to keep my hand in for a day or two. I need the money. I’m going to talk to a young man Phuong acted with for an hour in an industrial video. This was at a place called MediaPros in Garden Grove. I have no reason to think it means anything at all, and I didn’t want to turn Godzilla loose on the poor guy. I’ll tell you all about it, whatever I find. Is that satisfactory?”

  “It is my duty to warn you about interfering with police business and withholding evidence.”

  “I can tiptoe. Look how nice I was to Margin.”

  A smile stole over Frank Vo’s features and then evaporated, leaving little trace of its touch-and-go landing. “I should warn you about Tien Joubert, too.”

  “Really? What?”

  This took some thought. “She’s a very strong woman. She gets what she wants by hook or by crook. If she doesn’t, she eats you up.”

  “Is this a veiled way of telling me not to get close to her?”

  “It depends what ‘close’ means to you.”

  “Not to sleep with her?”

  He smiled then and shook his head. “If you do such a crazy thing, count your body parts afterward.”

  “It was because I recognized her,” the young man said. He still looked like a Doublemint Twin, with tidy khaki trousers and a knit shirt with a little polo player on it. “And I wanted to say hi.”

  Jack Liffey had taken a flier that Mark Glassford would be home in his apartment on the edge of Garden Grove. It was in one of a pair of rather seedy two-story buildings with catwalks past all the doors. The buildings faced each other across a pool that was in the process of being retiled, and it was all guarded by a huge decaying tiki god out in front.

  “Recognized her from what?”

  “A meeting the Industrial League had at my parents’ house. My dad is P.R. for Forty-Niner Airline.”

  That was certainly a coincidence, Jack Liffey thought. Glassford’s apartment was almost barren, except for a lot of worn Danish furniture from the ’50s that probably belonged to the building and some bricks and boards making up a low bookcase. There was no stereo, not even a TV.

  “Can I get you some tea? I can’t offer you anything stronger; I don’t drink alcohol.”

  “Neither do I.”

  “Do you have trouble with it,” the young man asked, “or is it religious?”

  “Neither, really. Just a decision.”

  Mark Glassford went into a shabby kitchen, still in sight of the living room, and put a teapot on. “The meeting was at my dad’s house a month or so ago,” he called.

  “What was the meeting about?”

  “I wasn’t really in on it. I gather the opponents of the El Toro airport had just formed an emergency action committee and the League had to decide how to respond.” He smiled as he turned the burner on. “Informally, the opposition called its group the Malcolm X Committee. You know, by any means necessary.”

  “That sounds ominous.”

  “Tempers are high down there. There’s a lot of rich people involved on both sides and rich people are used to getting their way. It seems to be the defining characteristic of their worldview, actually.”

  It sounded like the young man did not consider himself one of them, for some reason. “Do you know anything more about the committee?”

  “The umbrella group is called the South County Coalition for Responsible Development. A lot of the upscale cities around El Toro contribute and send reps. I think they officially call their emergency group SOS, for Save Our Skies.”

  He came back in and sat, and they could both relax. Jack Liffey had always hated shouting from room to room. It reminded him too much of forced heartiness, a family trait he’d long struggled against.

  “I may want to speak to your father about them,” Jack Liffey said.

  “You’d best not arrange it through me,” the young man said equably. “We’re a little estranged, dad and me.”

  “Why is that?”

  “I entered a seminary. I want to be a Methodist minister. I’ll bet you didn’t know there are 37 divinity schools in Orange County. Anyway, my dad doesn’t approve. It’s not on the success track. The MBA, the big house, the boat.”

  “I suppose it isn’t.” This news didn’t absolutely rule out suspicion of the young man, of course, but it sure banked it down.

  He talked about his decision for a while, how for a number of years he’d experienced a growing revulsion toward the expensive toys all his friends in Newport had chased after, and how he had shed them all, little by little. “It’s amazing how dumping the TV calms you down. No more clamoring news, getting at you. You can retune yourself to other rhythms, instead of all that keeping up.” He smiled. “I got rid of my fancy word processor, too. Then I gave away an old typewriter I had, and then my ballpoint pens. For a while I wrote with a fountain pen. It slows your hand and makes you think about the sensuousness of the words, and then I even dropped that. I use a dip pen, hard to find these days. I like words, and you get to think word by word.”

  “I hear chiseling into stone can make you think serif by serif.” He tried to keep it good-natured because he actually admired the boy’s abstemiousness.

&
nbsp; The boy smiled amiably.

  “What were you doing acting in a video?”

  “They came to school and solicited volunteers. The program was to teach high school students about the dangers of the resurgent TB bacillus, and I always volunteer for things now. Give blood, serve meals at the missions up in L.A.”

  The teapot started shrieking and Jack Liffey accompanied him into the kitchen. His new-found virtue apparently didn’t include tidiness. The sink and counter were full of dirty dishes.

  “What did you talk to Phuong about?”

  “I just said hello and asked if she remembered me. I offered her a ride when we were done, but she already had one, so we talked a little about the noisy band we’d been listening to. We didn’t really have anything else in common. I found out right away she’s heavily into all the material things I’m turning away from.”

  “Do you know who her ride was?”

  “She said one of the crew had offered and he lived near her. If you’ve been there, you’ve probably seen him. That rather sad, introverted boy, I think he’s the production assistant.”

  That perked Jack Liffey up, all right. Mark Glassford poured himself a cup of hot water and put a teabag in.

  “You sure you won’t?” the young man asked, raising the mug, and Jack Liffey shook his head.

  He held the mug in both hands as if enjoying the warmth that came through the ceramic.

  “Did you see them leave together?”

  “Not literally. But I noticed her walking toward his old VW. Really old, black with a cloth sunroof. It was 1962, I think.” He smiled. “I remember a few things from my materialist period. Could you please tell me now what this is about?”

  “Phuong was murdered, possibly even that night.”

  Hot tea spewed across the floor as the mug shattered. The young man put both of his hands to his eyes and leaned back against the sink, as he gave a strangled little cry. “Oh, my God.”

  Jack liffey shook hot tea off his shoe, but kept his eyes on the young man, who seemed to be repeating some silent prayer. Finally he opened his eyes. “I’m sorry, sir. It’s like time stops when you hear something like that. And then I was looking inward at myself and trying to figure out what I was feeling about it. I’ve become very self-conscious since entering religious studies. Do you think that sort of narcissism is wicked?”