The Concrete River (3 page)

“Tell her she never showed up. And find out more.”

While they talked, his eye involuntarily followed a young couple who had come in and taken a table against the wall. The girl was astonishingly beautiful with big hair, like some starlet who had wandered down Overland from Sony Columbia, the studio up the road that had been MGM before a corporate pirate had stripped and dismembered it. The boy with her was lame and had a bad scar on his cheek. It was the kind of lack of parity that made you suspicious, looking for the adjustments.

“The boy is only thirteen and Senora Beltran made no arrangements for anyone to look after him so she is afraid something bad happened. She didn't come back from her job last Tuesday.”

“The job is?”

The boy with the scar was hissing something, and the girl, who thought she couldn't be heard, said quite distinctly, “My pussy is not for you, so get that straight.” There was a terrible spoiled whicker in her voice and right away he saw one of the adjustments.

“She was secretary for the Cahuenga Neighborhood Organization. I know them. They elected a slate of Chicanos last year and threw out the old Anglo fuddy-duddys that had ran the town forever.”

“News first, editorials later,” he said.

Marlena gave a feral grin that he hadn't seen very often. “Everybody gets the translator they deserve. You should learn the first language of the town you live in.”

“I'm too old and too dumb. Have the cops been notified?”

He could see her shake her head, and he pushed on to short-circuit the roundabout process, “Is the ex-husband in the picture, or anyone else living in?”

There was no one living in, the boy was with an aunt, and the house was undisturbed, not even a suitcase missing. Senora Schuler had no clear idea what the problem was that her daughter was supposed to be bringing to Liffey, but it had something to do with unspecified threats. The daughter respected Liffey because he had been
simpatico
and he had found the boy Tony pretty quickly.

“I seem to remember
simpatico
is one of those troublesome words that doesn't mean quite what you think it does.”

“It's something like
decent
.”

“I remember Senora Beltran and I'd like to help her if I could. She was real simpatico. But Senora Schuler would be better off hiring a guy I know named Art Castro.”

Marlena explained and the woman shook her head adamantly.

“She wants you, because her daughter trusted you. And she's got some money.”

“That always helps.” He considered for a long time. He would be a fish out of water in Cahuenga, though he didn't have a lot on his plate at the moment and a little income never hurt. His eyes swung around as he thought it over, just in time to catch the blonde girl do something strange. She wrenched opened her blouse angrily to her companion, like a flasher. Her back was to the room so he couldn't see if she was wearing a bra, but the boy with the scar went goggle-eyed.

“Satisfied?” the girl blurted. She clutched the blouse tight as she skedaddled with angry red eyes.

“Get all the addresses and names, would you? I'll spend a day or two on it and see if it looks like I can do any good.”

“Thank you very, Mr. Leefee,” she said when it was explained. She unfolded a small piece of paper and handed it to him.
Call Liffey. Threats. Slow Growth.

“I want you to buy me a drink for this,” Marlena Cruz said, and he could see that she meant it.

*

He stared mournfully at the plastic card for a long time before inserting it into the Culver Bank ATM. This was the account the court didn't know about, the one he'd sworn to himself was for Maeve's college, and every month the bottom line got smaller. The money was almost half gone now.

He'd replace what he drew down when someone paid him big, when he got a job, when his ship came in. It was like gambling, and once you started you couldn't stop. All he was doing was paying the rent and buying gas. That didn't make it okay, but it was just another sidestep in the gradual development of portable ethics.

“It's Norman French, believe it or not. There used to be an E on the end, but somebody a few generations back dropped it. I've got cousins still spelled with the E.”

Her name was Eleanor Ong and since he hadn't seen a wedding ring, he'd said she didn't look like an Ong. Actually she looked a bit like a whippet, skinny and nervous and fast, with freckles and a lot of limp dark hair with red and gray highlights. She had an unruly energy about her that he found attractive.

“It's only been my name again for two years and sometimes I forget to respond. I was Sister Mary Rose for fifteen years.”

He let that roll past. They sat in a decaying storefront that had been built onto the front of a huge old frame house on Slauson that was now the Catholic Liberation house in southeast L.A. A big flowery sign over a water cooler said:
Close all the factories of crime—jails and prisons!

“That's her desk. We gave them office space when we worked together on the city council election last year. She's been helpful to us, too. They can get offset printing on the cheap.” It was a battered old oak post office desk, like all the others in the big room, including the one where Eleanor Ong sat with one foot on the open bottom drawer. She wore one of those long rayon gypsy skirts and flat leather sandals that strapped around her hairy ankles and reminded him of an aging graduate student.

“Who would her boss be? I'd like to get permission to look through the desk.”

She screwed up her face. It was the first time he'd seen her slow down. “I guess the whole committee. She's the only paid staff, though they've got a chairperson. I'll call for you and see what I can do. I hope you don't mind if I smoke.”

“What if I did?”

“You could always sit in the no-smoking section.”

She pointed to the street. A young man in a Pendleton shirt came out of a back room while she was lighting up. He whispered to her, showing a handful of papers. All the Catholic Liberation kids he'd ever met were earnest and intense and very clean. They still believed deeply in good and evil, so that even being witty about it was seen as a bit of a sin.

“If he goes near the shelter again, have them call the police.”

For some time, a banging noise outside had been working at his attention. The rain had stopped and two squat men were chopping sheet metal pieces off an old Ford Galaxie from the 1960s that was parked in front of a boarded-up trophy manufacturer. The operation seemed pointless.

“Make sure they know we don't let husbands carry on like that. And send them a copy of the restraining order, in case somebody needs to see it.”

The young man nodded portentously and went back inside.

“It'll probably take me a while to get in touch with enough members of the committee. You could give me a ring or come back this afternoon. Other than that, I can't really give you permission to go through her things, even with her mother's okay.”

“That's fine. You could tell me more about Mrs. Beltran. Anything you know.”

“Where'd you go to high school?” she asked out of the blue.

“It wasn't a Catholic school. San Pedro.”

“I knew a guy, the name was something like Liffey. I think what reminds me's not the name, it's that alert air you've got, you know, taciturn but fierce, polite to women and small children but hell on wheels when you run into other raptors.”

“You've got an edge on you yourself.”

“You try being a virgin for seventeen years. That'll give you an edge that salutes.”

She stared straight at him, as if daring him to take it as flirtation. He laughed instead. “About Mrs. Beltran.”

She banged the cigarette on a glass saucer. “She should be a real success story. She has a mind like… I don't know. Maybe she's a genius, maybe just shrewd. If she'd been born a man she'd be teaching in some college as the star Latino scholar or, if she'd lost her ethics somewhere along the way, she'd be arbitraging GM.”

“Her husband couldn't handle it. She had spirit, and she wouldn't shut up when she knew she was right. After he took off, she went to school and got a B.A. at City in History. Her specialty was twentieth century California, we used to talk about Carey McWilliams. She's working on her doctorate at L.A. State in sociology.”

He was beginning to feel very uncomfortable about himself. He'd met Consuela Beltran twice and hadn't seen very much of that. He'd seen a small brown overweight woman, a bit nervous, who looked a lot like a million other Latinas with a dozen kids at home. Articulate and quick, but not to take special note. How the hell did you avoid that snap stupid racism? And still get on with living? Your liberal grandmother could pretend she wasn't worried when she ran into a half dozen young blacks in bandannas on a dark street. They might all be Rhodes scholars, but she'd be insane to count on it.

“She can see right through most pretense. It's what makes her good in the neighborhood organization. She can sort out the hidden agendas and who needs a few extra strokes of praise and who needs to feel in charge and all that.”

“Were there fights in the organization?”

“Like any living organization. There were plenty of mixed motives to go around. Some people have to dominate. Some people just like to hear themselves talk. Putting up with that malarkey is the curse of democracy. Have you ever been in a grass-roots organization?”

“Does the Army count?”

She laughed. “Not unless your platoon voted on what you did next.”

“That's a thought.” He liked the laugh and he wondered how he would handle long hairy legs. He'd never been with a woman who didn't shave.

“She was up against a group that called itself Cahuenga Slow Growth. Basically they were dead white males, the businessmen who'd run the town for generations. Backed up by a lot of retired Anglo working people who haven't fled to Orange County. Slow Growth really meant Enforce the Zoning so we don't have all these Mexicans and Central Americans doubling up in our houses and crowding us out.

“Nobody likes seeing two or three poor families crammed into a small house, but until this society provides something better for immigrants we can't just throw them out on the street. Can you imagine the struggle, raising a family on minimum wage plus a few extra bucks selling oranges on the on-ramp? You don't rent a big condo in Brentwood on that. Besides, the Slow Growth people were all the children of Okies who doubled up in the houses here in the thirties, they just don't remember.”

“You sound like you might have been one of them once.”

She shook her head. “I grew up in Inglewood. Of course, before it was black. I come from probably three generations of middle class lawyers.”

“How could an Anglo group hope to win here?”

“Their literature was full of code words like
blight
and
unsightly
. It didn't say Beaners once.”

“That's not enough.”

“No, it's not enough.” She slowed down again, and made a face as if she was about to have family secrets dragged out of her. “You'll find a fair number of established Mexican-Americans who don't like the newer undocumented, too. It's an attitude that's changing, but it's there. You know, last one on the ark shut the door.”

“Was the campaign bitter?”

“When isn't a threat to someone's power? It didn't seem to get personalized, because there was no one spokesperson for the Neighborhooders.”

He unfolded the note Senora Schuler had given him and showed it to her.
Call Liffey. Threats. Slow growth.

“Is that her handwriting?”

She turned the yellow post-it over a few times, walked quickly to the desk she'd identified as Consuela Beltran's and picked up a pad of yellow post-its. They were the same size but of course that didn't prove anything.

“Can I see it?” he asked.

She brought it back and set the blank pad in front of him. He took a pencil out of a marmalade jar on her desk, whittled it down with his Swiss Army knife until he could break out a half inch of lead and then ran the flat of the lead lightly over the pad. The faint impression might have been the same as the note, but that didn't prove much either.

“You really are a detective.”

“I saw it in Dick Tracy.”

“It doesn't make any sense. The election's been over almost a year, and `threats' just isn't their style. Did she call you?”

“Not that I know of, but my machine's been known to go out.”

“It's very strange.”

The banging outside changed pitch. They seemed to have started in on the car with a bigger hammer. A timer went off deep in the house.

“I've got to go downtown to our soup kitchen now, my turn to serve, but give me a ring this afternoon.”

“Do you mind if I ask you why you dropped out?”

“Dropped out?”

“Secularized? However it's put.”

“I'm not sure we know each other well enough.”

“That could be arranged.”

She laughed. “I was pregnant by a priest. He stayed a priest, the jerk, got himself transferred to Albuquerque. There's a place they send nuns, but I wasn't having any. Call me later about the desk.”

“My pleasure.”

Outside the humidity hit him. L.A. was so rarely humid that it was always a shock. The two car-wreckers seemed to be reducing the sheet metal of the Ford to breadboard-sized pieces. He noticed that Slauson crossed the L.A. River just down a long block and he walked that way out of curiosity, wondering if it was filled with styrofoam cups, too. He passed a fairly new mini-mall with Mi Playa Tortas y Mariscos, a Fotografia and the inevitable donut shop. Further on was a nurses' and bus drivers' uniform supply and a dead movie house, with a lobby card for
Coal Miner's Daughter
. All the buildings had indecipherable graffiti in that angular city scrawl.

The water ran high and fast between concrete banks, foaming on the bridge supports. It was about three times wider than Ballona Creek. There were no cups, no flotsam at all, perhaps it had been scoured into the bay already. Bright floats on ropes dangled from the bridge, to grab onto if you fell in. Every year like clockwork during high water a few people lost their footing and were chased downstream from bridge to bridge by firetrucks and TV crews. Some managed to grab ropes they were thrown and some drowned.