Romeo's Town (Mike Romeo Thrillers Book 6) Read online

  I told him.

  Ira shook his head. “She’s a decent woman with a son in absolute despair. Remember what Gertrude Stein told Hemingway? You are a lost generation. I wonder what she’d make of Clint’s generation.”

  “At least Stein’s lost generation read books,” I said. “Now everything is TikTok and World of Warcraft.”

  “Whatever happened to marbles and mumblety-peg?”

  “I was into Jenga. Which seems appropriate.”

  “Why?”

  “Because everything around us is on the verge of toppling, including civilization. And the people pulling out the blocks are all thumbs.”

  “Our task, then, is to be out there on the battlefield, helping one client and his mother, while we are still counsel of record.”

  “It’s killing her that she can’t see him.”

  “I’ve applied for an emergency order to see our client in the juvenile infirmary. I put Trista Cunningham’s name in as well. Should get an answer later today.”

  “I talked with Gavin McGuane’s parents,” I said.

  “In Simi?”

  “The mother lives there. Mandi McGuane. Big shot real estate agent, and lives like one. She didn’t offer much. I have a feeling she’s withholding a lot.”

  “About what?” Ira said.

  “Her son. He has all the earmarks of the spoiled rich kid. Mandi McGuane got a little testy with me when I mentioned it.”

  “Testy? With you? What a shock.”

  “Shane McGuane got testy, too.”

  “Where did you talk to him?”

  “Tab’s Hot Dogs,” I said.

  “A hot dog place?”

  “A hot dog palace. Very good selection. He was there with three buddies of his, stuntmen types.”

  Ira rubbed the bridge of his nose. “I’m almost afraid to ask.”

  “Shane was not helpful. His stuntmen friends were not sympathetic to my entreaties.”

  “Michael, did you…?”

  I knew what he meant. We’ve had this conversation many times before. “They made the first move.”

  Ira closed his eyes.

  “It didn’t go down to the wire,” I said. “When one of them pulled a knife, I—”

  “Knife!”

  “—picked up a chair and—”

  “Chair?”

  “—then McGuane called them off. He didn’t want the publicity.”

  “A blessing in disguise,” Ira said.

  “So those interviews were not, shall we say, fruitful. I also spent some time staking out the dojo where that guy named San Dae-Ho goes, but he didn’t show up.”

  “Tread carefully, Michael. There is still a chance we will be removed from this case, and that incident will be moot.”

  “I don’t call it moot when somebody comes to my house.”

  “By which you mean, you’re turning this into a personal matter.”

  “I didn’t do the turning,” I said.

  “You’ll recall what the rabbi Jesus said about turning the other cheek.”

  “Jesus didn’t live in Los Angeles.”

  “Useless!”

  That startled me. Ira doesn’t get that tone of voice very often. I know I keep pushing him to that edge.

  “Don’t give up on me, Ira,” I said.

  He took a few breaths, then said, “Back to our client. I cracked through the password on his laptop. Nothing of note. Seems this is a school computer, and he uses it mainly for that purpose. A few games, a few searches a teenage boy might be into.”

  “Such as?”

  “Victoria’s Secret,” Ira said. “It’s what Playboy magazine was back in the 1950s. We’ve made such strides.” He shook his head. “Now about the skull drawing.”

  “Yes?”

  The notebook was on the corner of Ira’s desk. He got it and opened to the picture.

  “It’s that letter D,” Ira said. “The snake coiling around it. Coming out of the mouth. Fangs. I think the D stands for Death, or Dead.”

  I thought about it. “Then the letters in the eye sockets could be somebody’s name.”

  “Or names.”

  I looked at the drawing. T and B. “Two different people?”

  “Michael, what are Clint’s parents’ names?”

  It hit me. “Trista and Brian.”

  The awful implication sat there between us, coiled like the snake in the picture.

  “We need to talk to Clint,” I said.

  “Best if Trista’s not with us. This would not be a good thing for her to find out right now.”

  Ira’s landline rang. He went to his desk and picked up.

  “Ira Rosen….oh, yes Ms. Wynn…” Ira looked at me. “Yes, as a matter of fact, he’s right here. I’ll put him on.”

  He held out the phone. “Deputy D.A. on that knife matter.”

  I took it. “Romeo here.”

  “Hello, Mr. Romeo. My name is Hope Wynn, and I’ll be handling the Sammie Sand preliminary hearing. Is this a good time to talk?”

  “Sure.”

  “My witnesses will be you and Detective Coltrane Smith.”

  “Okay.”

  “According to Detective Smith’s summary report, you are the only one who actually saw Mr. Sand draw the knife.”

  “I saw it in his hand, yes.”

  “And then you followed him into the bookstore and threw a book at him, hitting him in the head.”

  “A nice, big hardback.”

  “Mr. Romeo, I hope we can get through your testimony without difficulty.”

  Ira was frowning at me, as if he knew exactly what the D.D.A. was saying.

  “Just lead me through it, counselor,” I said.

  “Now about the part where you slammed Mr. Sand’s head on the floor.”

  “The first time?”

  Pause, as if she was reviewing the report. “Yes, it seems it was three times. Would you mind explaining that to me?”

  “The perp was not cooperative. He was cursing like a stevedore—”

  “A what?”

  “Guy who loads and unloads ships at the dock.”

  “Go on.”

  “And there were kids in the store, so I grabbed his hair and gave his head a little floor wax.”

  “A little?”

  “The first time. The second time, because he wasn’t shutting up, I was less gentle.”

  “And the third?”

  “For emphasis.”

  Ira rubbed his eyes.

  “This is going to be a problem,” said Hope Wynn.

  “For who?”

  “Both of us. It’s not going to sound good to the judge and it could taint the rest of your testimony.”

  “So what do you propose?”

  “I propose that you think back and see if there was any other reason you might have had for injuring the man you had subdued.”

  “Injuring?” I said. “I think I knocked some sense into him.”

  Ira glared.

  “Mr. Romeo, please—”

  “I was mad, I’ll admit it. I don’t like men with knives attacking people or spewing garbage in front of little kids.”

  “But you’re okay with kids watching you slam his head on the floor?”

  “Excuse me, is this a cross-examination?”

  “You bet it is. This is what the defense counsel is going to be asking you. I want to see how we can bring it up first, before the defense. Dull the impact for the judge.”

  “Those were my reasons,” I said. “I don’t have any more to add.”

  Pause.

  Hope Wynn said, “We are not adversaries, Mr. Romeo.”

  “Good,” I said.

  Ira glowered.

  To escape Ira’s ire, which is the engine behind his glower, and to cool down from feeling like a dancing monkey on the D.A.’s string, I took a walk around the old neighborhood. I headed for the row of businesses where the Argo Bookstore had once been. It was there I first met Sophie, in another time and place. The coffee house
that was on the corner was boarded up and a big FOR LEASE sign stapled to the wood.

  Yes, I’m sure there are just a ton of small businesses hankering to open up a new brick-and-mortar floor space right now, what with the—

  —timing is everything. Turning the corner I ran smack into a street crowd.

  In LA, you can’t tell your protests without a program. There’s the peaceful protest, the mostly peaceful protest, the riot, and the rampage.

  Your peaceful protest obeys the law and makes speeches at places like City Hall and MacArthur Park.

  Your mostly peaceful protest is a euphemism. It’s what the news media calls a mob that breaks out into a riot or rampage, but they don’t want the folks at home to get worked up over it.

  Your riot is a physical fight between sides. One side might have started as a peaceful protest, while another side decides to break up that peace by busting some heads, causing the formerly peaceful side to respond in kind or run away like antelope from a pack of ravenous hyenas.

  Your rampage is a mob that burns buildings and cars, and bloodies innocent bystanders, in an effort to create a more just society.

  I didn’t have a program with me, so I asked a young woman wearing a pink headband, “What’s this about?”

  “The city’s trying to break up a camp!” she said. “Those are people! They’re self-sufficient!”

  I raised an eyebrow.

  “Join us!” she said, waving at me to follow.

  “No thanks,” I said, adding, “Keep it peaceful. God bless the First Amendment.”

  She looked at me with a mixture of scorn and confusion. Maybe the words God and First Amendment threw her. And then, in an exhibition of today’s civil discourse, she raised her middle finger at me and walked on, shouting some slogan or other.

  I kept walking and saw on a side street what’s called “the police presence.” There were several black-and-whites, and officers in riot gear. They were about thirty yards from the passing crowd, and doing what they’ve been told to do, which is stand down.

  The protestors shouted various epithets at them and made more finger gestures.

  Just before I went on my eye caught the movement of a thin reed. It was a guy, actually, very skinny and wearing a Jesse James bandana over his grill. He had a bottle of water in his hand. This he threw at the police officers with as much heat as he could muster. Which wasn’t much in the physical sense of things. His arms were thin and smooth, his delivery delicate. If he even knew how to grip a football he probably couldn’t have heaved it more than fifteen yards.

  The bottle thudded on the street in front of the cops. That’s when I knew it was rock solid, the water probably mostly frozen.

  No harm done.

  But then he reached into his backpack and pulled another bottle out, and made ready to throw again. When his arm went back I grabbed it. My fingers went all the way around his wrist.

  “Hey!” Water Bottle Boy shouted.

  I removed the bottle from his hand.

  “Don’t do that,” I said.

  He started spewing a load of trash, comparing me to a bodily orifice, telling me what I should do to myself, and so on.

  I popped him one on the nose.

  Down he went like a snipped calla lily.

  A woman’s voice shouted, “Did you see that? Get him!”

  A dozen pairs of eyes turned toward me.

  From out of this rabble came another of the thin-reed set, a brave warrior with a mask, swinging a chain with a heavy lock on the end of it. He twirled it above his head like some hopped-up Argentine gaucho, and came at me.

  The flail is a weapon that almost certainly was not widely used when it was supposed to—in medieval times. Fantasy gamers love it because it looks so good in a monster’s hand. But your soldier of yore figured out pretty quick that a heavy ball on the end of a chain was as likely to conk him or a fellow soldier on the bean as it was any part of the enemy. The more stable mace could be used as a club. Not so the flail. Thus we say that an out-of-control fighter was just “flailing away” at his opponent.

  The gut instinct when a chain and lock come at you is to back away. Always the wrong move. It gives control to the assailant who can reach out with the chain. You have to come inside.

  Or fake it.

  Which is what the rocker step is for. You lunge as if to move forward, but then you plant your lead foot and push back on it. Like you’re on a rocking chair. You want to cause momentary confusion, especially if the other guy has a weapon.

  So Chain Boy came at me with enthusiasm, swinging the thing over his head.

  I watched the rotations, timing them.

  And then made my move, issuing hearty abdominal kiai—Karate scream—as I lunged.

  My attacker’s whole body flinched. The lock missed me but caught the guy’s knee, flush. He screamed like a five-year-old, grabbing his knee and dropping the chain.

  Which I picked up.

  Just in time, too, as four or five other peaceful marchers came at me with various implements. A skinny guy—why were they all so skinny?—held a water bottle like a club. Frozen or not, it can do a lot of damage if it catches you across the face. A woman who looked like she weighed about as much as her backpack held her backpack by the straps, ready to lash out with it. And a third runt, amazingly, had nunchucks. Nunchucks! The very symbol of peace in our time!

  And there was me, keeping them at bay with a chain and lock, whirling it around my head.

  For a moment, over a no-man’s-land of five feet, we faced each other.

  And then it seemed like the whole parade gathered around, like spectators in the Roman Colosseum. They were rooting for the lions. Talking trash.

  I was trying to decide which wimp to take out first, when the decision was taken away from me.

  A phalanx of riot police moved in, shields up, getting between me and these upstanding citizens.

  And then in a display of breathtaking urban alchemy, the crowd turned its attention away from me and started shouting at the police. A fog of F-words befouled the air.

  A water bottle bounced off a cop’s polycarbonate shield.

  The riot squad pushed forward.

  A girl screamed, “Police brutality! Police brutality!”

  And there I was, behind a wall of police, holding a flail.

  “You!” It was one of the cops, pointing at me with his billy.

  “Weapon down, now!” he shouted.

  I dropped the chain and spread out my arms.

  The cop motioned for me to come forward.

  I complied.

  “Arms behind you,” the cop said.

  “Excuse me?” I said.

  “I’m going to cuff you.”

  “Excuse me again.”

  “Let’s make this look good.” The cop took the cuffs off his Sam Browne. “This is for your protection.”

  I turned around and allowed myself to be cuffed. Then he took me by the arm and started leading me away from the mayhem.

  “You’ll never get away with this, copper!” I said.

  “Don’t overplay it,” the cop said.

  That’s how I ended up in the back of a police van. All cage work and Plexiglas. Hard seats, made for easy cleaning because you never know what’s going to come out of the body of an arrestee. At least these seats had a concave space in the lower back area so a guy with cuffs on has a place for his hands.

  All the comforts afforded an arrestee. Though at 6’4” and 230, I was a bit cramped.

  Out the window I watched the ongoing street theatre. It’s all rehearsed. The mob lives for scenes like this. Getting the police into confrontation mode is good drama, with lots of juicy clips for the evening news. I couldn’t help thinking of Gandhi then, and Martin Luther King, contrasting their nonviolent resistance with the foul-mouthed, bottle-throwing mayhem happening now.

  But where Gandhi and King had reasonable arguments, based on the objective truth of human worth, this new form of protest went f
or blood first, power second, and nothing else third. Where we end up is anybody’s guess.

  After half an hour the cop who cuffed me came back to the van. He had his helmet and riot gear off. He was around thirty or so, not tall but in good shape. He slipped into the seat next to me. He was holding the chain and lock.

  “You okay?” he said.

  “Swell,” I said.

  “I’m Officer Aoki. I want you to tell me about this.” He held up the chain.

  “That’s a homemade flail,” I said.

  “I know. Popular item with some of the demonstrators. I want to know why you had this.”

  “I took it off a guy,” I said. “He came at me with it.”

  “Can you explain why?”

  “Because he is an amoral thug.”

  Aoki couldn’t help smiling. “Other than that.”

  “You mean a stimulus for his thuggery? Well, it could have been that I gave a Chicago free lunch to one of his companions.”

  “A what?”

  “A punch in the nose. He was going to throw a water bottle at you guys.”

  “And you stopped him?”

  “It seemed like a good idea at the time. Then the crowd started to turn on me, and the guy with that flail was front and center.”

  Tapping his leg with his fingers, Aoki said, “That’s your story?”

  “Facts,” I said. “You want to canvass for witnesses?”

  “Um, no. Let’s file this one under no harm, no foul.”

  I nodded. “How about taking off the bracelets?”

  “I better drive you away first,” Aoki said. “Remove you from the scene. Where can I drop you?”

  “At my employer’s house,” I said.

  “Which is where?”

  I told him.

  He said, “We’re going to take the long way.”

  As he drove east on Prospect, I asked what this dustup was all about.

  “The Shakespeare Bridge Garden,” he said.

  I’d been across the bridge a few times. It’s a gothic-style concrete bridge built in 1926 and named for the Bard. About twenty years ago the city council and local homeowners sought to resist a growing homeless encampment under the bridge by making it a garden spot. Flowers and shrubs and ivy moved in, while the overnight guests were moved out with a little help from the cops.