On the Nickel Read online

  ‘Did he have a girlfriend?’

  ‘F. said Conor was getting buggy with her, too. Francine Matkinov. She’s big time in women’s beach volleyball,’ he added, almost apologetically.

  ‘Did they break up?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ll find out, if you want. But it looked like he was cutting himself off from all his friends. I mean, like, on purpose. He used to be really tight with Mr Peters, the Social Studies teacher, and in the hall I heard Con tell the guy to go fuck himself.’

  ‘Where do you think he’d run away to?’ Maeve asked.

  ‘There’s only two places to go – aren’t there? New York and L.A. Maybe Frisco.’

  ‘Anything make you think it might be L.A.?’

  ‘His dad wrote a bunch of books about L.A.’ The boy was starting to punctuate his words with a terrible sound, like a cough from deep in his chest. The guy named Turtle was either crying or bumping coke and it seemed a little early for that.

  She’d read some of Mike Lewis’s books about L.A. They were really interesting, but hard to read sometimes with jargon. ‘Thanks, Turtle. If you hear anything at all, would you call me?’ She gave him Gloria’s number and her own cell.

  ‘Sure. I love the guy to death, honest. The band means the world to me. If you find him, I bet you’ll like him, too. He always made me feel super alive. Even if he went and killed himself in one universe, I know he’s still alive in the next universe over.’

  She didn’t want to ask about that, and the voice was getting worse, breaking up somehow. ‘Stay in touch, Turtle. I mean it.’

  The connection cut off.

  With her twelve-hour straight, three-day-on, four-off schedule – the normal LAPD shift for now – Gloria got to lie in on odd mornings that Jack Liffey could never keep straight, and she snuggled against him now in her silky silver gown. It was very arousing, at least theoretically – he was having a bit of trouble in that department. Sensation and command more or less trailed off at the equator, but right now he’d trade the whole southern hemisphere for having his voice back.

  You had no idea how much you relied on quick replies, or on inflection, modulation and nuance, until you lost voice itself. Irony in particular was important to him, and underlining words or putting quotes on a written phrase just didn’t cut it – though he and Maeve had joked for years about the unintended irony in ‘fresh’ fish on menus and signs saying that everyone is ‘welcome.’

  Gloria had always had excess body heat, at least to his touch, and he had to toss back some of the covers to stay next to her. He studied her sleeping face, so much calmer than when she was awake, so much more at peace, lacking that habitual ferocious suspicion. He wished there was some way he could give her this kind of relaxation in her waking life, but he’d been around enough to know that people at their age rarely changed the basic baggage very much. She was always so tense and tormented, and yet, as she insisted and he believed implicitly, talking to a recognized shrink about anything at all would be the beginning of the end of one’s career in the police department.

  Not that he was doing so well himself, right now, he thought. At least two doctors had pronounced his handicaps ‘psycho-physiologic’ phenomena. A fancier word for what they had once called psychosomatic.

  But it all felt very real to him and very non-psycho-anything. More like a deliberate revolt of part of his body – as if something else had taken up residence inside him, grabbed the controls, and was forcing him to live in a much smaller portion of the old hulk. It was a fucking annoyance, whatever it was called.

  He sensed the initiation of Gloria’s commotion of waking and backed away slightly to allow her to thrash a bit. The first step would be one of her sleep-talking jags. Though it would be too rapid and too angry, or just too plain incoherent, for him to follow.

  ‘Never don’t you you! I’m not – dubba-dubba-dubba,’ or whatever. She lashed over on to her stomach, and he set a hand gently against her shoulder, trying to calm her.

  ‘What’s that?!’ She thrust herself upward in a powerful push-up, her eyes coming open, as feral as a prodded wildcat. He couldn’t help watching her large breasts droop and sway within the silvery gown.

  ‘Ak-ak!’ He tried desperately to tell her that everything was OK, as he had so often. All he could do was move closer and hold her to comfort her, and her dream-manager chose that moment to thrust him away hard. She sat up.

  ‘Giant heads are talking,’ she said. She was only half back. He moved close again, and she sucked in a few deep breaths and seemed to calm as he held her hard. But there was a post-nightmare gravity now that he’d never been able to do much about.

  ‘Bad dreams,’ she said sluggishly. ‘Half-breed. Oh, man, evil pearls strung on my confusion.’

  Jesus, where did that come from? he thought. It was almost poetry but it would take him too long to write out a query. He grabbed his pre-figured pad from the night table and pointed to the big question mark.

  She shook her head and let things settle. ‘Yeah, bad dream. Could be Paiute. From my old Tia Eduviges. I think I said “evil pearls.” Hell, maybe it’s from that knucklehead Harmony who works the phones at Harbor and does Tarot cards and covers herself with costume jewelry.’

  ‘Ak-ak.’

  ‘Yeah, I agree. But don’t give yourself a hernia, Jack. I’m coming around. You look a little peaked.’

  YOU WERE TORMENTED. LOUD.

  She nodded deliberately. ‘I can usually tell. What time is it? Seven? On the loud nights I wake up feeling it’s about time to go to bed.’ She shook her head like a dog throwing off water. ‘You gotta stop worrying non-stop about me, Jackie. I’ll be OK. Think of yourself a little these days.’

  He nodded, but there was not a thing he could think of to do about himself. Drugs did nothing, and talk therapy was out of the question, from the therapists he knew.

  ‘Well, let’s get up and see if Maeve has launched some new crusade against evil.’

  Jack Liffey wondered if life would ever offer him an hour’s peace with Gloria. He wished it with all his heart.

  Moses Vartabedian waited by the hump bridge in the Japanese garden that somebody had once lovingly built in the space behind the Japanese Community Center and then let decay to ruin. Vagaries of funding, he thought. It was only a five-minute walk from his office at the top of the Golden West building on Broadway, and he figured this site had just about the least probability of being bugged or cop-visited of any location in the whole downtown area, though it was only two blocks from the new central police station. The vegetation had overgrown, two broken bricks and a short length of rotting 2-by-4 had been abandoned in the burbling stream, and he’d bet no one had visited to meditate here in years. It was one of several Japanese gardens in the downtown area, all in hideaways in Little Tokyo, and it was easily the least patronized because they made you go through a very inauspicious building lobby, announce what you wanted to see, endure the incredulous stare of the Latino rent-a-guard at the desk, and then take the elevator down to the basement to get out to the sunken garden.

  Moses Vartabedian leaned against the tall cement retaining wall that separated the garden from the alley up at street level and lit a cigar. He was a man with a problem and, like many men of his occupation, he had a number of resourceful types on call to deal with problems. The local alternative paper had called him a slumlord, and he resented that deeply. He thought of himself as a man who provided a valuable service to the city – he took virtually uninhabitable rundown hotels and long-abandoned office buildings, with swaybacked and rat-infested floors, and with the help of his architect partner Eddie Wolverton, he fixed them up to decent residences for the arty middle class. The homeless had their own shelters and SROs – which weren’t palatial but they kept the poor out of the weather and the room doors could be locked. And they all accepted the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority’s certificates. He tried never to cross swords with the HSA when they wanted or needed a building, but once in a while
it happened.

  The door from the elevator opened abruptly and Steve McCall pushed into the garden. The man was the size of a small island off the coast, wearing an Ignore Previous Hat baseball cap pulled down over long gold ringlets that made him look like a chubby General Custer. He was followed discreetly by his partner, the much shorter but more volatile Rice Thibodeaux, his eyes almost always as wild as a small prey-animal startled by a predator.

  Vartabedian wondered, not for the first time, about the fates that had brought the two of them together with him, but whenever he needed a potentially profitable building cleared of its recalcitrant last few tenants, Custer and Psycho were the go-to guys, and he made sure they could not be tracked back to him.

  ‘Hey, Mose!’ McCall called. ‘Why don’t you take over this here place and fix up the shitty garden? And fire that Spic at the desk. I’m tired of watching him roll his eyes at me like I’m nuts to wanna see a Japanese garden.’

  The other one, Rice Thibodeaux, didn’t greet Vartabedian. Instead he brought out a switchblade, for no apparent reason, popped it open startlingly as he walked behind McCall and then stopped beside the hump bridge and cut a three-inch-long swipe straight down his forearm. He waited, letting the blood run down his arm to drip off the webs of his fingers on to the clay path. ‘Say the word,’ Thibodueax announced. ‘Anyone is history.’

  Vartabedian needed to keep his spirits up, and the way to do that right then was not to acknowledge to himself the weirdness of these characters in his employ.

  ‘Be cool, guys. Forget this place. I do not want it. Sit with me on the bench. I have a job. You want to do something about that cut, man.’

  ‘What cut?’ Thibodeaux said.

  Around them downtown went on honking and making the noises of its tires over a loose manhole cover and boiling off the other white noise that permeated the Japanese garden like a fog of unease. The derelict garden had obviously been designed at one time to bring peace, but it was losing the battle – maybe that’s why they’d given up tending it, Vartabedian thought.

  McCall sat down, but Thibodeaux never would. The short man stood in front of them, dripping blood on to the path as if it were of no consequence. ‘Mexicans,’ Thibodeuax said, for no apparent purpose. ‘They either work on their cars or piss against walls.’

  ‘Forget that,’ Vartabedian said. ‘I’ve taken an option on the Fortnum Hotel over on San Julian, by Sixth, but there’s a half-dozen tenants still residing on SRO chits, and I’ve got to get them out in order to rebuild.’

  ‘Do we get to fuck them up?’ Thibodeaux asked quickly.

  ‘Jesus, man, no. It makes things too complicated. Listen to McCall. Just convince them it’s better for all of us if they move out voluntarily. A little tiny threat is OK, but that’s it. I’ll pay them twice the vacate costs, and I’ll even find them other hotels nearby. Good ones, and if I have to, I’ll subsidize the SRO rent that they have to pay in the new place.’

  ‘This is just like the last job at the Globe,’ McCall said. ‘No sweateroo, V. We huff and we puff and we tell them the wolf is at the door. But the wolf is not you; you’re just the wolf’s friend, or maybe not at all.’

  ‘Stephen, I am the friend of the tenants. You’re a genius. No violence, please, gents. I mean that.’ Vartabedian gave them each a wad of twenties – a thousand dollars for what McCall had called their green-’em-up money.

  Vartabedian knew that the building could be cleared out expeditiously with a little discretion – he’d done it a dozen times. The elevators became unusable. The heating system failed. The water became unreliable. Toilets overflowed with human shit. Everyone knew they lived in some relationship to bad luck, whatever they chose to call it, and it didn’t take much to remind them of that fact. He always offered a painless and perfectly reasonable alternative.

  A fire truck siren went off nearby and Vartabedian thought of his beaten-down old man in Erciş, in eastern Turkey, all five-foot-one of him, and wondered if anybody had ever offered him a painless and reasonable alternative. He doubted anyone ever had. The elder Hagop Vartabedian had insisted that his family had lived right there on Lake Van for 3,000 years, within sight of Mount Ararat, where he told his kids that he had once found a chip of the Ark. But nothing could be painless and reasonable in eastern Turkey, not for a Christian infidel, hated by all the Turks, part of the tiny remnant population of Armenians after the genocide, hiding out now amongst the Kurds.

  The old man had played at staying invisible most of his life, evaporating before insults, until he’d finally had too much and abandoned his fifty generations in Erciş and taken his family to Fresno, California, to work amongst the second-rate grapes of his cousin Aram.

  ‘Boss,’ Thibodeaux said from the far end of the bench. The blood had congealed over his cut and no longer ran down his arm. ‘When can I use Diane?’ The small man seemed to mean his switchblade.

  Jesus Christ. Anybody who’d name a knife should be dropped by parachute into Turkey wearing a big sign saying how much he hates Mohammed. Just on general principles – to keep the gene pool uncluttered.

  It was the golden-haired McCall that Vartabedian had hired, and he wasn’t sure why the man kept this little loose cannon around. ‘No, Rice, not now. Maybe later.’

  Rice Thibodeaux snicked the clasp with a sigh, and then flipped the blade back into its housing with one of those great show-off flourishes that with a little bad luck would one day see him slicing off his own ear.

  ‘Baby, I only put you in da linen closet ‘cause we full up wit wheezers las’ PM. There a room now. A guy passed last night, pray his soul be save. You wanna sleep where some guy pass? Wasn’t no blood.’ The man’s odd pink eyes went wide.

  ‘People die everywhere. I don’t believe in ghosts.’ He wasn’t sure the man remembered. ‘Carl Roosevelt sent me.’ As far as Conor could tell the hotel was nearly empty so all this talk about lack of space was a genuine mystery.

  ‘You done tol’ me. Carl he pretty bad impair, baby. Don’t take nothin’ for granite roun’ here. You don’ wanna lean on jus’ every swingin’ dick on The Nickel says he kin help.’ Dusty Phillips was the only albino human being that Conor had ever seen in person, though he had always revered Johnny Winter and Piano Red. He thought Dusty was probably an African-American, but it was hard to tell. He tried not to stare at the pink blinking eyes, or the tightly curled bleachy hair on the old man.

  ‘And git yo’self out of the Fort as quick as you can. Ain’ fit for a nice clean boy like you, whatever your reason.’

  The manager sat in a cage with a good view of the four dilapidated and unoccupied sofas in the lobby and the TV that was murmuring away on some good-morning show.

  ‘You’ve been good to me, sir. San Diego thanks you.’

  ‘San D.? You know Harborside?’

  ‘I know where it is, but it’s not my territory. Mostly Latino, isn’t it?’

  ‘Now I guess. Not back in the day. People still talk about Alonzo Horton blow into town and buy him a big chunk of the place for $260?’

  ‘I might’ve heard that.’

  ‘I can’t really decide who you is, boy. Whether you a curveball coming off a lefty.’ Dusty cocked his head, as if judging Conor on some invisible scale. ‘Hell, OK, I don’t care.’ The albino handed him an old-fashioned skeleton key on a paddle that said C-20.

  ‘I’m not sure who I am either,’ Conor said. ‘But I pay.’

  ‘They’s two black plastic bags inside the do’. Take what you want, it all dead man stuff. Toss ‘em in the hall when you done.’

  Coming out of the master bedroom, they’d caught Maeve on the phone to somebody she obviously didn’t want them to know about because she’d hung up immediately. ‘Gottagobye. Good morning, Dad. Glor.’

  ‘You’ve got the most transparent guilty look in North America,’ Gloria said.

  SPANK HER AND THROW HER OUT, Jack Liffey wrote and showed it to Maeve instead of Gloria.

  ‘Dad! I’m almost of age
. You can’t be spanking me unless you get me to Saudi Arabia first.’

  Gloria tipped the pad back with one finger to read it and laughed. ‘I’m not in a spanking or a cooking mood here, but I’ll set out some tortillas and leftovers, and there’s the usual cereals. In your honor, hon, we actually bought some Pop-Tarts.’

  It was the one junk food that Maeve seemed to have brought with her from her childhood.

  Jack Liffey pointed to WHO CALLED on his master list.

  ‘Nothing important, Dad,’ Maeve said. ‘You gotta get over thinking I’m always up to something.’

  It took him a while to scribble WHEN DID THE POPE STOP WEARING A DRESS.

  ‘Hon,’ Gloria said to Maeve. ‘Whatever you’re doing, what’s the worst thing that could happen? Just tell us that.’

  ‘I could fail completely and feel like an idiot, I suppose.’

  ‘If you succeed, will somebody dynamite the house?’ It wasn’t an empty joke. Maeve’s bedroom in her mother’s house had been dynamited two months earlier by an aging disaffected surfer whom Maeve had inadvertently poked with the sharp stick of her curiosity, trying as usual to help.

  She tore open the foil packet and dropped two frosted raspberry Pop-Tarts into the vintage Toastmaster, and pressed the deco handle down. ‘How did you know I love this flavor?’

  ‘Somebody’s definitely changing the subject here. You promise that there’s no risk at all of catastrophe in what you’re up to?’

  ‘Oh, no. Of course not.’

  SHE HAS NO NOTION OF RISK. Jack Liffey showed this to Gloria.

  ‘Oh, I know.’ Gloria rested her hand tenderly on his shoulder in the wheelchair for a moment. ‘Not everything blows up, Jack. Damn few things, in my experience. Possibly she’ll get lucky this time and just fall out of a tree. Let’s all calm down and have breakfast.’

  Conor peered briefly into the big black trash bags but the old-man clothing and possessions looked so filthy and unpleasant that he twisted the bag necks and swung them both out into the hallway. His needs were few, in any case, and a dying old man would have little of interest to him. He needed a bed, some food, a place out of the cold and some time to think things over. Some time to write songs.