The Orange Curtain Page 9

  He pointed at the curb and she shrugged and said, “I not stay. I just introduce you and go shop. Fashion Island got good Neiman-Marcus.”

  In the elevator, she pushed the button for the next to top floor.

  “Are you a member of the Industrial League?” he asked.

  “You kidding, huh? You in Fortune 500, they ask you be member. You run Joe’s Laundry and Dry Cleaning, you get polite note to go down street to Chamber of Commerce. I on advisory board from Little Saigon—that about like advisory board from kindergarten. It mean nothing, but I never say no, member of anything. It good to make friends.”

  The office was on the side of the building that would have the view. She rapped once on a wood and frosted glass door that must have been rescued from some Victorian building. Gold-bordered black letters on the glass said only ILOC, like a discreet private club, which in a way it was, he supposed.

  Inside there was an unattended lobby with antique furniture and big then-and-now aerial photos of the county. Off to the right he could see into an empty conference room with a rosewood table and high-back padded chairs. All the other doors but one were closed. The open office had a young man with long blond hair, who craned his neck back to see the visitors and then stood.

  “Hi, Ms. Joubert. I haven’t seen you in a while.”

  A young woman in slacks came out of the same office. She wore round wire-rims like John Lennon, which made her look studious and mannish. “Mrs. Joubert.”

  Tien Joubert took their hands and introduced Jack Liffey without naming either of them. “I want you take good care of this guy a while, he big special guy. He got important questions.”

  He felt himself blushing a little as she left. The blushing made his eye ache and immediately he told them he’d been mugged to get it over with. They didn’t seem very surprised.

  “I’m Dick Bormann, but no relation,” the young man told him jauntily. “My dad did not hide out in the Argentine jungles after World War Two.”

  The young man had a way of standing slightly sideways and watching you at an angle, as if preparing to bolt.

  “Neither did Martin,” Jack Liffey said. “I’m sure he had a nice suite in a hotel. Perón helped relocate thousands of Nazis.”

  “You’re a historian, too.”

  “Just an amateur.”

  “I’m Debbie Miller. We’re grad students, working here part time. The director is out this week. He spends most of his time in Washington and Sacramento.” She plucked at short dark hair, and tapped a foot nervously.

  “You two work with Phuong Minh?”

  “Sure,” Dick Bormann said. “Come see.”

  The blond young man sidled away to lead Jack Liffey into the conference room, which was even bigger than he’d guessed, while the young woman hung back and then banged around in the office outside as if hiding the drinks from her parents. The outside wall of the conference room was a good thirty feet long, all glass, and had a staggering view of the ocean. Several container ships were crossing the horizon stacked with their colored shipping boxes, and he could just make out the southern end of Catalina in the mists.

  “You can see Catalina over the nearby mall called Fascist Island where Mrs. Joubert always goes, and that’s a great shot of the Pacific, isn’t it?”

  Jack Liffey almost said, I thought it was Lake Michigan, but let it go. He was beckoned to the side of the room, where there was a posed photo in a redwood forest, a half dozen young people kneeling in front and another half dozen older people in back. “This was our staff at a retreat last year. Phuong’s there.”

  She was right in the middle, with a wan decorous smile, holding a large ceremonial gavel in both arms.

  “This isn’t Bohemian Grove, is it?” he asked as Debbie Miller came in to join them.

  “The very place. The private playground of the ruling class, where the Rockefellers play ping-pong with the Kissingers and then tell them which country to invade.” He chuckled and spread his arms wide. “You’ve stumbled into it, Mr. Liffey. Isn’t it amazing? This is the private meeting room of the inner sanctum of the ruling class, at least the local fraction of it that deigns to visit go-go Orange County, and right this minute it’s all run by us, two grad students.”

  A 737 came over, still fairly low and rising steeply, from John Wayne Airport behind the building.

  “Not run exactly,” the young woman corrected primly. “The board meets here four times a year and the director carries out their wishes. All we do is their research and odd jobs.”

  “Did Phuong work with you?”

  “The past tense? Has something happened to her?”

  “Her father’s worried. She hasn’t been home for a while. When did you last see her?”

  “Oh, gosh…maybe ten days. I was beginning to wonder. Would you like some coffee?”

  “Sure.”

  They got him a mug of mediocre coffee and took him back to their own office where they sat at desks that had been positioned in the four corners of the room. They swiveled their chairs around to face the middle, like a bunch of sophomores in the library discussing Kierkegaard, he thought, if kids still did that. There was a strange smell in the room that he couldn’t identify. Barnyard came to mind.

  “What did Phuong do here?”

  “The same thing we do really,” Debbie Miller said. “We’ve been working on nothing but the airport issue for months. The Industrial League feels very strongly,” she added in a pompous singsong voice, as she held up a slick tri-fold with a faraway airport on the cover, “that it is imperative for the future of international trade and the expansion of the job base to develop El Toro as a regional airport.”

  “And you don’t?”

  “There’s arguments on both sides,” Dick Bormann said. “In fact, Phuong was informally our ‘deep-six’ editor. She was in charge of the inconvenient facts that we were supposed to find some way to answer or hide.”

  The young man stood and reached across, past Jack Liffey, to what must have been Phuong’s desk and picked off the top a little metal file box with flowers on it and opened it up. His eyebrows went up as he read the first card. “‘A house loses approximately 1.33 percent of its value for every decibel of additional airplane noise.’ Try that on your homeowner out there, or this: ‘The value of a house increases approximately 3.4 percent for every quarter mile it is farther from the flight path.’”

  He plucked out another card. “‘Seventy-nine percent of the businesses in south county oppose the airport.’ Needless to say,” he added, “these aren’t companies traded on the big board. This is Tammy’s Needlepoint Supplies and George’s Surfboard Wax.”

  He became aware of a very faint scrabbling sound, like rats in the wainscoting that the two researchers were doing their best to ignore.

  “Do you think Phuong could have made any enemies doing this research?”

  “Only if the people affected actually mind losing their life savings. Seriously—people are pretty pissed off, but not at us. Heavens, we’re just lackeys.”

  “We did get threats, Dick.” Debbie Miller volunteered. “You just don’t take them seriously. I took the very first one on the phone. Some gruff guy said he was in the Mission Viejo Homeowners association and he’d blow us to kingdom come, one by one, if we didn’t drop the stupid airport idea. Obviously he wasn’t an official representative.”

  Dick Bormann chuckled. “I just can’t believe a goofball is that dangerous.”

  “We got more from the same guy, we’ve all had them. Phuong had one, too, and it shook her up. He guessed she was Asian, maybe she gave her name, and he used some racial epithet.”

  “Have you ever had picketers? Slashed tires?”

  “Naw,” the young man said. “Not many people even know we exist. If there’s a real focus for all the hatred, it’s Ron Kitsos. He’s the guy who owns Air Forty-Niner, you know, the Happy Gold Bird. He’s fanatical about wanting the airport. He’d love to make El Toro a regional hub.”

  �
�Who’s publicly opposed?”

  “A lot of people. Debbie?”

  She made a few faces. It seemed to help her think. “Probably the best known is Sam C. Treat. He used to be a pilot for Forty-Niner and before that he used to fly for the Marines out of El Toro. He loves to go to public meetings and tick off the big three no-nos against the airport.”

  “Which are?”

  “I can never remember. Dick probably can.”

  His eyes swung back to Dick Bormann, who put the filing box back gingerly, as if he couldn’t stand to have it near him a minute longer. “Well, first you’ve got to understand that planes can’t take off to the west because that would put them in direct conflict with the landing approach to the existing airport, so all the plans are to have them take off only toward the east. Treat loves to point out that you can make a military pilot do anything, take off blindfolded or standing on his head in the cockpit, but civil pilots just will not take risks, it’s a moral obligation. And he says the east takeoff at El Toro violates three basic safety rules of aviation. One, the runway is uphill. Pretty steep, I think, as those things go. Two, it’s with the prevailing wind instead of into it. Three, it’s more or less right into a mountain range. An F/A-18C with full afterburner can pull a hard bank to avoid the mountain, that’s one thing, but imagine a 747 scraping its underbelly on the live oaks every time it takes off.”

  “You sound like an opponent.”

  The two of them looked at each other and something private was unsaid. “Everybody’s got a point. John Wayne Airport has only 500 acres and one runway. It’ll be up to its capacity in five years. I’m glad it’s not going to be my decision.”

  “What is that smell?” he asked finally, when he was satisfied that it wasn’t coming from one of them.

  The young woman grinned. “I’ll show you.”

  In a moment she came back in with a large wire cage that held two hamsters, like fat golden mice. “We’re not supposed to have them here, but you won’t snitch on us, will you?”

  “Heaven forbid.”

  She set the cage down on the unused desk, where it seemed to belong.

  “That one’s Basil. And this is Stuart.” She giggled.

  “Stuart Ross is the league’s director,” Dick Bormann explained.

  “If I had an animal named for my last boss, it would have to be a snake,” Jack Liffey said. “I guess there has to be one hamster wheel at the heart of every big enterprise,”

  He tried to get more information out of them about Phuong, but neither of them seemed to know much about her at all, except that she was Vietnamese and very polite and very smart. It was like wearing a big mustache to rob a bank. Nobody ever noticed anything but the mustache.

  He was waiting for the elevator in the hall when Debbie Miller slipped out to talk to him.

  “Dick doesn’t like to make trouble for people, but you’d better see this.”

  She handed him a feature article cut out of a newspaper. There was an inch of yellowed tape on the top as if it had been stuck up on a wall. A photo of a stocky man in a wheelchair was shaking his fist at the sky.

  M.V. Residents

  Found Anti-Airport

  Citizen Panel

  “I think it’s the guy who calls. He’s probably harmless.”

  “Thanks. I’ll be discreet.”

  He settled onto a big ugly concrete stanchion by the curb, the kind of thing government buildings had started putting out to keep suicide trucks loaded with fertilizer and diesel oil from crashing into lobbies. There was probably some branch fed office in the building. The article told of the founding of an emergency committee of homeowners from south county cities like Lake Forest, Mission Viejo, El Toro, and Irvine to stop the airport. They were quoting the wheelchair-bound Marvin B. Resnick because he was quotable and colorful, not necessarily because he had any official position in the group.

  “If they won’t listen to our grievances, we ought to get us some SAMS and blast the first airliner to lift off that runway right out of the sky!”

  Nice, Marvin, he thought. That kind of talk ought to get you a long way in an upscale suburban neighborhood organization.

  The moment she picked him up he’d noticed she was even more bubbly than he remembered, and as she parked next to his forlorn old Concord at the Little Saigon mall, she plucked at his sleeve.

  “Wait. Before you go ’way, tell me one thing ’bout me you like.”

  “Is this a trick?”

  She shook her head, but something was cooking, he could tell.

  “I like almost everything about you. The only thing I don’t like is a square inch just below the elbow. I don’t like that.”

  She frowned and looked at her elbow, then decided he was kidding. “You joking. Say ‘everything’ is same as say nothing. You got to say one thing, two thing.”

  “Okay, I like your energy…your candor, and your happiness. That’s three things. And you’re very beautiful.”

  She beamed. “You got right answer.” And she handed him a small white cardboard box like an award. He had a vision of her going down on one knee and springing a diamond engagement ring on him. He hesitated, but took the box and opened it to find an expensive-looking gold tie clasp with a pale jade stone. He hadn’t worn a tie since the layoffs, and he hadn’t worn a tieclasp on a tie since junior dances in high school. He didn’t know they still made them.

  “It’s beautiful, Tien. Very. Is it jade?” He met her eyes and they were gorgeous, the dark surrounded by pure white. The affection in them was quite flattering and he felt her presence buoying him up.

  “Number one. Real Asia jade, not the dark jadeite you get lots here.”

  “I shouldn’t accept this, but I know it would be insulting not to. Please don’t get me anything else, though.”

  “‘Anything else’ mean I see you again?”

  He smiled. She was quick. “I have to go home now. I’ll come back tomorrow to look for Phuong some more. Could we meet for lunch?”

  “You bet. You call.”

  After she’d baroomed off happily in the Mercedes, he found the note on his windshield, the scrawled message aimed inward once again: Go home, fuck you, dead dead dead. Spelled right this time, but the punctuation needed work.

  He carried the big plastic bag into his room and set it on a corner of the red desk and then pushed aside all the French books to make a clear area. First he took out the blister-wrap card with the track on it. He tore open the plastic bubble and took out one length of railway track, with its little brown ties attached, and threw the rest away. Then he broke into the big orange box labeled Rivarossi. The chatty clerk had kept trying to tell him about the Italian company, reputedly Mafia owned, that it was not nearly as good as the German and Swiss ones, but Billy Gudger just wanted to get his find out of Hobby City and get it home.

  He set the vintage railroad boxcar on the track and sat back to study it. It was an HO scale model, about the size of a desk stapler and mostly yellow. P.T. Barnum Circus, it said across the top, and the side had a mustachioed face surrounded by a lot of elaborate tracery, plus animals and circus scenes. The clerk was right. The model boxcar wasn’t all that well built and the decoration was just printed onto a card that was glued to the plastic, but it didn’t matter at all. It would do fine.

  He would just have to find a way to get his mother to stumble on it so he could study her reactions.

  A ring which seemed set with a dull, darke stone a little swelling out, like what we call (tho’ untruly) a toadstone.

  —John Evelyn, Diary (1645)

  At that moment, a line of Orange County Sheriff’s auxiliaries and deputy cadets still in training, plus a few volunteers from the Eagle Scouts and the nearest Neighborhood Watch association in the Tustin Hills, were pacing slowly across the grassy hillside five yards apart looking for clues in the Sagebrush Killer investigation. They had all been warned to wear sturdy boots against snakebite, and they weren’t far at all from where the two victims
of the Sagebrush Killer had been found, in fact only one gully away. They’d been at it for several hours and mostly weren’t taking it very seriously. After all, there were a lot of other cases to clear and no one had any idea that there would be a third body so close by.

  NINE

  To Be Good You’ve Got to Succeed

  “Hey, Jack! Man, you look bad.”

  Marlena’s nephew Rogelio was sitting in the living room with his feet up, gesturing with a Budweiser. Two young Latinos Jack Liffey had never met sat opposite with their own beers, and they were curious about his shiner, too. The TV was going but ignored, a Mexican soccer game.

  “This is Paco and that’s Solomon. This is Jack, Marlena’s boyfriend.”

  “Hey.”

  “Ce mal, esse?”

  “What happened to you, man?”

  “About six guys happened to me all at once. A lot of the parts you can’t see hurt, too.”

  “No shit, man. You need some help?” One of them was already stirring, as if to roll up his sleeves and fight.

  “It’ll be taken care of. Thanks. Mar in?” A beer would be good, he thought. It would also help him bond with the boys, but he’d sworn off and he meant to stay off.

  “She’s doing laundry, I think.”

  “I’d better touch home base.”

  “Take it easy, man.”

  Marlena was in the little cramped laundry room, folding underwear out of a wicker basket on top of the dryer. She gave a squeal when she saw his eye and crushed him against her, bubbling and cooing. “Jackie, Jackie, you look so damaged!”

  “Don’t squeeze too tight. I’m sore a lot of other places, too.”

  “Oh, Jackie.”

  Actually he was enjoying the respite from her corrosive jealousy. And he was trying not to enjoy the irony that the respite came just as she should have been cranking it up. He hoped none of Tien’s perfume had stayed on him.