Romeo's Hammer Page 4

  “So no theory on why she changed?”

  He didn’t answer right away. He took in a deep breath, let it out audibly. “I have a theory all right. But it’s too late to do anything about it.”

  I waited for him to go on.

  “She had a friend. A close friend from high school. Celia. Red-haired girl who hardly ever smiled. Anyway, Brooklyn used to spend a lot of time with her, slept over at her house and things like that. Celia’s father was a union electrician, worked for the studios. He was always nice to me. The mother seemed a little … strained.”

  “Strained?”

  “Nervous. Anxious. Stressed out. She had four kids pretty close in age. I got the impression she was the one who did all the looking after. And wasn’t too pleased about that.”

  “Mothers have no union,” I said.

  He nodded. “So anyway, this family moves away about a year after this change I’ve been talking about. I asked Brooklyn if she missed Celia, and she shrugged and said, ‘I guess.’ That’s a strange thing to say about your best friend, don’t you think?”

  “I do.”

  “Well, this goes on like this, up through high school. I’m not saying we had bad times together, Brooklyn and me. It’s just that we were never as close. That hurt more than I …”

  He stopped, choked up. Cleared his throat. “About three years ago, I come around a grocery aisle and almost run into Celia’s mom. She’d put on a lot of weight, but I knew her right away. And she knew me. I said hello and she said hello and I asked her about Celia, and she said Celia was managing a Starbucks in Tucson. I asked how her husband, Bernie was his name, how he was doing, and her face tightened up. ‘We got divorced,’ she said. ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’ ‘I’m not,’ she said. Then she said she was in a rush and told me to give her best to Brooklyn and was off like a greyhound chasing a mechanical rabbit. It was strange.”

  “How?”

  “Like she was afraid I was going to ask her another question. I’m not a suspicious person by nature, I like to think the best of everybody, but that knocked me back a couple of steps. It triggered all those feelings that I had when Brooklyn changed. So I went home and did a little digging on the internet. I did a search for Bernie’s name, then changed the search to Bernard. And that’s when I found it.”

  He paused, like he needed to gather strength.

  “He’d died in jail. Got knifed. Or shanked, I guess they call it. Can you guess why?”

  “Pedophile,” I said.

  “How’d you know?”

  “Everything you’ve said to this point. Your theory is that this Bernie molested your daughter.”

  Ray Christie began to cry. I let him. He needed to get it out. He grabbed another tissue and controlled himself after about half a minute.

  “Where are you staying, Mr. Christie?”

  “I’m at a Motel 6 in Van Nuys.”

  “How do I get in touch with you?”

  “I do have a cell phone.” He leaned over so he could pull it out of his pants pocket. He held it up as if to prove he was member of the twenty-first century.

  He gave me the number.

  “Will you help me?” he said.

  “There may not be much to help on,” I said. “Like I said, Brooklyn could be anywhere, and perfectly happy.”

  “I just have a bad feeling. Anything you can do …”

  I thought it over.

  “Maybe a little,” I said. “I’ll have to clear this with my lawyer boss.”

  “Will he let you?”

  “I think I can talk him into it. We’ll have to do a little background check on you.”

  “I understand. I’ll pay you whatever you need.”

  “We can discuss that later,” I said.

  “Then you’ll do it?” he said.

  “I will.”

  “God bless you,” he said.

  My second blessing in less than a week.

  I was on a roll.

  THERE ARE THINGS that happen in L.A. that don’t happen anywhere else.

  Other cities have their vibes. San Francisco is the Roman god Bacchus on a bender. New York sticks out its chin. Chicago has big shoulders, cool jazz, and dead people who vote.

  But Los Angeles is a place that just has more. Of everything. Including causes. Which is why I wasn’t surprised at the light-duty trucks that rolled by my place after Ray Christie left.

  Two guys carrying some rigging followed on foot.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “Rally,” one of the guys said. “Save the earth kind of crap.”

  The other guy laughed.

  The first guy took a folded piece of paper out of his back pocket and handed it to me.

  “Keep it,” he said. “But don’t litter with it.”

  I unfolded the paper. It was a flyer:

  Save Our Beaches!

  Vote for Allison Ursula Serret for County Supervisor!

  Allison is the only candidate who will stand against the further erosion of our precious beaches!

  Tonight, come rally for the Earth and hear Allison Ursual Serret and Dr. Gary Pasfield in conversation.

  Free Nachos!

  On the flyer were photographs of Serret and this guy Pasfield. They were smiling like car salesmen during November clearance.

  I CALLED IRA on the whitelisted phone he’d prepped for me. No data storage. No incoming numbers but what I allow. No GPS. Routed through a system in Israel.

  “I got a job,” I said.

  “Slinging hash?” Ira said.

  “What’s wrong with slinging hash?”

  “Did I say anything was wrong with it? Quite the contrary, it will keep you out of trouble. But somehow I don’t think that’s the job.”

  “I’m helping someone find his missing daughter.”

  Pause. “And this man is paying you?”

  “A fair exchange for services rendered.”

  “What do you know about finding missing persons?”

  “Remember Joey Feint?”

  “Ah, the phantom detective you were apprenticed to.”

  “I retained all his valuable information,” I said. “And I did some pretty good work up in San Francisco for you and Samuel Johnson.”

  “Granted. But bones were broken.”

  “You can’t make an omelet if you don’t crack some eggs.”

  “You are not licensed to do this kind of work.”

  I said, “You can figure something out.”

  “Oh, can I?”

  “You always do. Like, if he’s your client. That’ll work.”

  “Who is he?”

  “His name is Ray Christie. He’s the father of that woman on the beach. Remember?”

  “She’s gone missing?”

  “Apparently,” I said.

  “Why are you doing this, Michael?”

  “I need to make some money.”

  “What’s the real reason?”

  He knows me too well. “It’s about time I became a productive citizen,” I said.

  “Now that’s the best news—”

  “I may be needing your services,” I said. “You know, all that computer stuff you’re so good at.”

  “I am not signing off on this until—”

  “Start with the girl. Her name is Brooklyn Christie. C-H-R-I-S-T-I-E. Get everything you can on her.”

  “Oh, just everything? Listen—”

  “Have I told you lately that I love you?”

  “Write me a sonnet,” Ira said.

  “I shall compare thee to a summer’s sunburn,” I said. “Good-bye, Ira.”

  “Wait.”

  “What?”

  “Michael, that guy you met on the street, who knew you from back east. Jason Pratt?”

  “What about him?”

  “He’s trying to smoke you out again,” Ira said.

  A while back Jason Pratt spotted me in downtown L.A. He was a bully from my prep school days. He knew me as Michael Chamberlain, and that
the New Haven cops wanted to talk to me about a dead man. The dead man happened to be somebody mixed up with the shooting deaths of my parents. Yes, he was dead. And yes, I had done it.

  Pratt found me and wanted money to keep the story to himself. I responded in my usual gentle manner, by pushing him up against a wall and threatening him.

  It didn’t work. He became the source of an internet story that asked if I was hiding out in L.A. Michael Chamberlain had become a mystery, the somewhat pudgy young man who had disappeared, just fallen off the map, a year or so after his parents died. Every now and then, some crime show or blog would bring up my old name.

  But I’d changed. My body. My name. I’d managed to keep off the grid.

  Until Jason Pratt recognized my face.

  “There’s another story, this one out of a New Haven news site,” Ira said. “How you’ve been sighted in Los Angeles.”

  Feeling hollow inside, I said, “That’s not enough.”

  “It describes you. Says you have changed. The one thing it doesn’t have is your current name.”

  “Pratt never found out what it is,” I said.

  “That doesn’t mean he won’t,” Ira said.

  “He wants money.”

  “You can’t give it to him.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know,” I said.

  “No need to be snappish,” Ira said.

  “I was being snarky.”

  “So sorry.”

  “Now who’s snappish?” I said.

  “Michael, if you––”

  “If somebody wants to try to find me, there’s nothing I can do about it. Until he does.”

  “What does that mean?” Ira said.

  “I think you know,” I said.

  “I hope I don’t,” Ira said. “Maybe it’s time to go back to New Haven and face the music. It was self-defense.”

  “I don’t have any desire to do that, Ira. I just want to be left alone.”

  “That didn’t work for Garbo,” Ira said.

  “She was prettier than I am,” I said. “Thanks for the info.”

  I SPENT THE next hour putting together an investigation plan. Where to start, who to talk to, what resources I’d need. As the great philosopher Yogi Berra once said, “You’ve got to be careful if you don’t know where you’re going, ’cause you might not get there.”

  When twilight rolled around, it was time to eat. And by the aroma in the air the place to eat was the rally at the beach. I walked down into a crowd gathering where sand met restaurant parking lot. There was a stage on the asphalt, all decked out in red, white and blue bunting. A couple of news vans were on hand. Since it was election season in L.A. there were signs all around with the smiling face of one Allison Ursula Serret, candidate for the County Board of Supervisors. She’d be giving a speech, as would this guy Dr. Gary Pasfield, professor of integrative ecology at UCLA.

  I wondered what integrative ecology meant. Maybe that a cactus has the right to grow in the same box as a chrysanthemum.

  I’m all for that.

  The signs also promised a Special Surprise Guest!

  To top it all off, free pinwheels were being passed out to the kiddies by volunteers who were only a few years removed from being kiddies themselves.

  The free nachos looked about as edible as the pinwheels. So I bought an L.A. street dog from a guy with a grill trailer. L.A. street dogs are wrapped in bacon and topped with onions and one grilled poblano chili pepper. It’s so good you don’t care what your heart has to say about it. There are things worth fighting for and things worth living for, and an L.A. street dog is one of those things. The foolish rulers of Los Angeles have tried to make them illegal. But that’s like trying to make the sun illegal.

  If Allison Ursula Serret would come out in favor of legalizing street dogs and put that at the top of her agenda, she might just be worth voting for.

  A rock band started playing onstage. They weren’t bad, a foursome from that netherworld between obscurity and stardom, trying to find ways to get discovered in this age of digital downloads and YouTube virals. To break through you have be really, really good or have something really, really bad happen, like a meteor hitting the stage during a set. That would then be uploaded for the world to see and your name is made. You might be dead, but you’ll be famous, and a lot of people these days seem willing to make that trade.

  I wondered if my friend C Dog ever thought like that. In fact, I wondered if he ever thought at all. Or was he part of the trend, the wave of the thoughtless? Thinking takes work. You have to be taught how to do that work. But the professional educators have pretty much given up on that idea. They no longer believe that truth conquers all things, because there is no truth, only bodily fluids churning randomly around in a Darwinian jungle.

  I finished the last, luscious bite of my street dog and took a walk in the throng. I was thinking there was an off chance I’d spot Brooklyn. Sometimes you just have to give the off chance an opportunity. Especially at the beginning of things.

  No Brooklyn.

  But plenty of beach types, curiosity seekers, political junkies wearing T-shirts with VOTE on the front, kids, and a security contingent strategically placed and looking like they all came from the same sale at Sunglass Hut.

  I got back to my original vantage point as the lead singer for the rock group strangled the microphone and said, “Everybody doin’ all right?”

  The crowed shouted that they were.

  “All riggghhhtt! Remember, we’re Squealing Angst and we have some CDs for y’all. We’ll be hangin’ out, so come see us. But now we get to what we’re here for, right?”

  “Riiigghhht!”

  The singer turned to his drummer and appeared to be asking what they were there for. Then he turned back to the mike and said, “All y’all are gonna love this. Y’all seen The Formulator, right?”

  “Rigghht!”

  “You know what I’m talkin’ ’bout! Yeah, here he is, right here! Come on now, let’s give it up for m’man Korey Halliwell!”

  And there he was, bounding up onstage, one of Hollywood’s royals, star of the Formulator movie franchise, black hair and blue eyes, former underwear model, womanizer, and recovering heroin addict. He was getting screams from the ladies and verbal high-fives from the guys.

  Korey Halliwell grabbed the mike. “How y’all doin’?”

  “Good!”

  “Cool!”

  “I love you, Korey!”

  Halliwell said, “As Cliff Mack would say, we gonna do some damage!”

  Everybody cheered. Cliff Mack was the name of the hero in the Formulator movies. We gonna do some damage was his catchphrase.

  “We’re here tonight to make some love,” he said. “To make some love to the ocean, the sky, the stars, the earth, and maybe”—he paused and added with deep-throated resonance—“each other!”

  More cheers, especially from the ladies.

  “Earth is the only home we got, right?” Halliwell said. “So what am I lookin’ at? A Skittles bag, man. Right there.”

  He pointed at the ground just below the stage.

  “Love me some Skittles, but come on, yo! You know what that bag represents? It’s guys like Harrison Delimat!”

  A cacophony of boos erupted into the air. Harrison Delimat was Allison Ursula Serret’s opponent in the Supervisor race.

  “He’s one of ’em,” Korey Halliwell said. “One of the users and abusers. A raper of land, yo. And why do we let them do it? Because nobody speaks truth to power. You know what we need to do to the power?”

  An actor’s pause for effect.

  “We gotta do some damage!”

  The crowed gave up howls and cheers and maybe even a baying-at-the-moon or two.

  “So I’m gonna open up my fat wallet for Allison Ursula Serret. You gotta do the same. We gotta take back the earth. Let it start here, right here in Paradise Cove. Let this be the wave that breaks across the whole country!”

  Moon. Baying at. />
  Korey Halliwell threw a kiss to the crowd and sauntered off the stage. He was immediately surrounded by three large men who whisked him into a waiting Town Car. Even before the next speaker got to the mike The Formulator was gone.

  Then the rock band singer introduced Dr. Gary Pasfield.

  A few people golf-clapped.

  Pasfield was medium height, trim, bald on top with close-cropped silver hair on the side of his pate. He wore wire-rim glasses, jeans and a plaid flannel shirt.

  “Hello, everyone,” he said. “We all know why we’re here.”

  Some joker shouted, “Food!”

  “No, no, my friends. We are here because we can no longer be observers in the grandstand of life. When it comes to our precious Earth, we all need to get in the game. We are standing on the precipice!”

  And mixing metaphors.

  “We are letting others, those in power, change our world by gas emissions, imprisoning fresh water behind dams, letting the sea behind me rise with the melting of the ice caps. We no longer have a choice. We either do something or our world dies.”

  Some applause, some hoots, some howls, and at least one drunken epithet from a beefy and bearded man a few feet away from me. “Let’s hunt some dolphins,” the brute added.

  Pasfield continued. “We must change things now, while we have a chance. And the one who can lead that change for us here in our beloved Southern California is a woman I once had as a student, but now count as a friend. Ladies and gentlemen, let’s hear it for the next member of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, Allison Ursula Serret!”

  Cheers and music pumping from the stage speakers. Allison Ursula Serret walked onstage, waving. She had broad shoulders and short brown hair. She wore a baggy white sweater, black pants, and flip-flops. She knew how to dress for the beach crowd. But put her in a dark uniform and take away the politician’s smile, she’d look at right at home driving a Brink’s truck.

  She squeezed the mike. “Thank you all so much!”

  Cheers.

  “Sir?”

  I turned around. It was a reporter. I guessed it was a reporter because of the hand mike in her hand with the big 5 on it and a camera guy behind her. The camera guy hit me with a light.