Tough Luck L.A., page 17
“Would a return-trip ticket to San Francisco mean anything to you?”
“No, why?”
“She had an airline reservation for the twenty-first.”
“I’d have no idea.”
For a split second there, I almost wanted to tell him everything I knew. The sequence of events had fallen into a definite pattern, but I wasn’t sure I could crack it all by myself. And it wasn’t that I didn’t trust Steifer. I guess it was a primitive, superstitious inkling that Vicky wanted it this way. And as a friend I felt I owed it to her to do everything I could. As for myself alone, this death-wielding puzzle had become my responsibility. In an abstract sense, it could have been anything. It was just something that I had started and now had to finish. I hadn’t followed through on anything for a long time. I wanted to reacquire that old touch. I wanted to remember that Iowa farm boy in his senior year at the U of I—the one who had believed in possibilities. Somehow, it seemed necessary to go back in order to go forward.
Steifer’s eyes got leechy, the smile ironical again. He didn’t believe me, but, now, at this point, I didn’t have to care. I had been cooperative and he didn’t have a thing to hold me on. What he didn’t know now, he’d find out soon enough—that is, if I was still around to tell him.
42
Frenchie, mon cher,
Bonjour! Bon nuit! Comment ça va? Bien ou non? I’d like to talk to you and discuss terms. If you wish to contact me, please go to the corner of Crescent Heights and Sunset. See Elmo, the shoe-shine man, in Schwab’s parking lot. He will give you a number where you can reach me. Don’t waste your time trying to weasel information out of him. He won’t know anything.
So long or à bientôt, mon ami.
That Vicky had made a reservation to San Francisco, of course, came as absolutely no surprise to me. Whether by air, land, sea, or carrier pigeon made no difference. San Francisco was my inevitable destination. There was just one other thing it was imperative that I do first. I had to die first, then I could go to San Francisco; and, perhaps, after taking care of what I anticipated to be rather rough and complex business, I might even enjoy myself, relax and have a little vacation if I had any money left. But first things first. I had to die and die fast, and I wasn’t exactly sure how I was going to go about doing it.
I picked my blankets up off the floor and draped them neatly over the bed, patted the pillows, smoothed them out, and pinned my note to Frenchie to one of the pillows. I stood back and admired my work. Perfect. Your eye caught it as soon as you stepped into the room. Because my desk was messy and there were clothes strewn all over the floor, and the broken lamp still lay on its side in the middle of the floor, it was incongruous to find the bed made. Your eye picked it up as a contrast and from there moved to the note.
I walked down to the Country Store and picked out two cans of Kal Kan with scrumptious-looking labels and hurried back to make a peace offering of two pounds of solid horsemeat to pacify my sad-eyed pooch for his long confinement.
Doing penance to Stanley made me think over what else I might have forgotten and neglected over the last few days or weeks. Who was there—anybody? I was just about ready to drop it, when it slammed right into my guts: Petey! Oh, God, Petey. The Auto Show on Sunday. Over a year of building, cementing a relationship with a sensitive, volatile, highly explosive kid, and then when I’d almost gotten him into the palm of my hand, swish, like the wave of a wand, I had gone and blown it. I’d never stood the kid up before. You couldn’t even consider standing up a kid who considered his whole life to be a stand-up.
As I called, I was hoping that he’d transferred a little bit of his budding prepubescent maturity from his sex glands into the gray matter. I was praying that he’d be able to summon up enough good-natured optimism and sound judgment to read a good reason into my absence.
“Father O’Connor?”
“Speaking.”
“Hi, this is Ben Crandel.”
“Hello, Ben. How are you?”
“Fine. I—”
“I was just going to call you this evening.”
“About my not showing up last Sunday.”
“Yes, Ben. I’m sure you had a good reason, but you know how these kids are.”
If he hadn’t read the paper to find out where I’d been I wasn’t about to tell him. “What did he do now?”
“It’s nothing serious, except he’s been truant on both Monday and Tuesday. And he picked a fight with one of the older boys here at the home, I’m afraid.”
“That’s all?”
“Aside from a bloody nose, that’s about it. You want to speak with him?”
“Yes, please. Thanks a lot, Father.”
Not being a Catholic myself, and having mainly resided in either foster homes or nonsectarian places, I’m always unsure about the little rituals. I’m never sure whether you’re supposed to address a priest all the time as “Father,” or whether it’s all right to slip in a “sir” once in a while. I was thinking about this while I was waiting for Petey to pick up the phone. It was some wait too. I started to wonder if whether, under special circumstances, it was ever all right to call an older priest by his first name if you knew him well enough to know what it was. I doubted it.
“Ben?”
“Yes, Father.”
“I’m sorry, but I’m afraid Peter won’t come to the phone.”
“Oh, boy.”
“I told him he was being immature. But he says he doesn’t care. Do you have any suggestions?”
He asked it nicely. I liked this guy. He was pretty human for a guy that lived the way he did. I doubted that I’d be able to handle his sort of life. And he probably felt the same way about mine. My mind was drifting. What could I do to get the kid on the phone? “Would it help if I asked you to explain to him that I had to cancel due to unforeseen circumstances?”
There was a pause, then he said, “I hate to sound like an adversary, but I’m sure he’ll be thinking, if not saying, that you still could have called.”
Well, he was getting his digs in, after all, wasn’t he? What the hell. It was warranted. By being forgetful, irresponsible, I’d gummed up part of the works around the padre’s place. It was more work for him, made life harder than it was already. He had a right to gripe. “Listen, Father. What time is lights out over there?”
“Nine o’clock.”
“Well, it’s eight-forty-five right now. It’ll take me about fifteen minutes or so to get over there.”
“I’ll make sure he’s waiting for you in the lobby.”
“Thanks a lot, Father.”
“My pleasure,” said the padre.
43
The drab, Spanish-style building looked considerably better covered over in darkness and shadows. I much preferred not seeing the gray, rotted potholes in the thick, decaying plaster, which had once probably been a dead ringer for adobe brick until the clay red had faded over time into a very foolish pink. You wouldn’t have thought of it as being a home, but that didn’t change the fact that it had once been one, still was, in principle. And it wasn’t that the padre and his crew couldn’t do anything about improving the conditions. They weren’t rolling in dough, but being a good old Catholic charity, they weren’t exactly begging for handouts either. They had the plans and just needed a few more thousand before they could raze the old heap to the ground and construct a whole new, specially designed facility in its place. In the meantime, they didn’t want to waste money on restoring something they were soon going to do away with. A few months or so after Petey and I had started cruising around, he took up calling the place the old Pink Pussy. If he was having a good time, the joke was that he didn’t want to go back in there. If I sent him back into the old Pink Pussy, he might never again come out. Such was life. We must be brave—or some crap like that—I’d say with a smile as I dropped him off.
I was thinking about just that, the old Pink Pussy, as I knocked on the big old dark door. Unintentionally, of course, there was something of the old tired-out womb about this place. Inside, a slew of rowdy, parentless boys thrown together without choice, bristled, pounded on the walls through all the minutes of the day, waiting, wanting to bust out and go somewhere, do something real, be somebody for somebody. Mean something. Be wanted.
Father O’Connor greeted me at the door, rushed me into the main recreation area, and left me with not much more than a howdy-do. He did make time to say that the only way he’d gotten Petey down there was by locking him out of his room. I knew enough not to volunteer for an automatic putdown, so I didn’t bother to try and say hi when I walked into the room and saw him standing with his back to me. I just walked over to him.
So there we were, me and him standing in between the ping pong and pool tables, him with a paddle and ping pong ball, his eyes locked on the ball, his lips counting silently, seeing how many times he could bounce it without dropping it. In the Guinness Book, the record for this must be something like three days. The kid himself looked like tonight might just be the night. He knew I was there, but didn’t lift an eyelid. His pace was steady. He didn’t have to move his feet at all, and flicked his wrist ever so slightly every time the ball hit the paddle, just enough to pop it back up and keep it going. I went over to the candy machine along the side wall and bought a couple of Baby Ruths, picked up a couple of Cokes from the machine next door. Then I walked back over and stood next to Petey again.
I opened up one of the candy bars and started eating it, chewing loudly, making an ostentatious display of smacking my lips as I tried to make it sound indescribably delicious. I stomached the whole candy bar, finished half a Coke, then I said, “How’s it goin’?”
No answer, of course.
“What number are ya on?”
His lips worked emphatically, mouthing what seemed like long numbers, making every effort to keep the count and blot out the sound of my voice.
“Care to tell me?” I continued. “I betcha if I keep talking like this, asking you what number you’re on, how long you’ve been doing this, what you’re goin’ for, you’re gonna have to start counting out loud, aren’t you, Petey?”
I kept it up. After a while, a small hard voice spit out numbers like rounds of ammunition: “Four hundred-five, four hundred-six, four hundred-seven, four hundred-eight, four hundred-nine—”
“Four-o-nine. That’s nothin’. You’ve only been at it a couple minutes then. If you were further along or something, I’d beg off and leave ya to it. But since I’m already over here and you’ve kinda just got started, would you mind if we shot the breeze for a few minutes?”
“Four hundred-fourteen, four hundred-fifteen, four hundred-sixteen, four hundred-seventeen, four hundred-eighteen, four hundred-nineteen.”
“Pete, I can’t talk to you if you’re just going to count your ping pong balls.”
“Four hundred-twenty-four, four hundred-twenty-five, four hundred-twenty-six.”
“All I’ve gotta do is knock the ball away. Of course, then that would give you a good excuse for getting real mad at me, wouldn’t it?”
More numbers.
“You can start up again after we’re finished—from the point where you left off.”
“Four hundred-thirty, four hundred-thirty-one, four hundred—”
I slapped the ping pong ball with the flat of my hand. It went bouncing out across the floor, rolling toward an old, beat-up right piano in the far corner. Petey held onto his paddle, turned away from me and started scurrying after the ball. I hurried after the kid and grabbed him by both his arms before he could bend down and pick up the ball.
“Jesus Christ, Petey, I’m sorry. I really am—I’m sorry.”
“Sure.”
“There’s no excuse. I forgot, that’s all. Something came up. I know it sounds bad.”
I let go of him. The kid sat down on the piano bench. Barely. Fell there might be a better way of putting it. Just like a sack of bones. “Somethin’ came up. Hey, man, I can get behind that. Somethin’ came up. No shit. Stuff comes up with me too. I guess when I fuck up, it’s different.”
He wasn’t needling. The tone wasn’t lancing, piercing with the normal repartee. It didn’t really care. The small voice was listless, indifferent. It brought out the father in me, made me realize I loved this kid more than anything. If I had a good home for him, I’d … That was a tangent, the wrong tangent, especially for this moment.
“It’s no different,” I told him. “But when you screw up, I don’t throw the towel in, do I? I don’t pretend like it’s the end of the world and we’re not friends anymore.”
“You can afford to be like that. You can do whatever you want. I gotta stay here.”
“In the old Pink Pussy.”
It didn’t make him smile like usual. I had to do better, so: “Say, did I ever tell you I used to live in places just like this? Must have had four—no, five—sets a foster parents, plus I lived in more of these types of places than you could count. I didn’t get along with people very well.”
I could tell he was listening. His neck jerked a little in surprise, I think; and though he kept his eyes on the floor, he was poised delicately, tensed up like an animal picking up a scent.
“My dad was a drunk. He beat up my mom so she left us. Then he beat up on me.” I rolled up my shirt and stuck my forearm down under his nose. “See those little scars—he used to put his butts out on me. Some neighbor reported it. He killed himself when they took me away from him. He must have loved me, ’cept he didn’t know how to show it—huh?”
He didn’t say anything, so I went on: “So, I gotta confess I don’t just mess around with you to get a break on my income tax. Somebody like me knows where you’re coming from. I thought I had something to offer. That’s why I do it. So now you got the truth.”
My history lesson didn’t seem to have any bearing upon the current situation. After that first jolt, the kid hadn’t budged an inch. I swallowed my pride and knelt down by the piano bench in front of him. It was the only way I could really get his attention. I put my hands up on his shoulders. “Petey, you don’t realize it, but I’d never do anything in the world to hurt you. You’re a very important person in my life—as a matter of fact, pretty close to first place.”
“Sure.”
I shook his shoulders. “I mean it. You’re the tops, goddamn it.”
He looked at me then. His eyes were damned up, watery, dark with hurt still, as he said, “How come you forgot about me then?”
“My life’s in danger, that’s why.” There it was. Before I knew it, I’d said it.
His eyes widened and he lifted up his head. He looked at me like he believed me.
“Really?”
“Really.”
“What’d ya do?”
“I don’t have time to go into it. I just came over here to make sure you were still on my side.”
He wasn’t listening. His mind was too busy rolling out fantasies of incredible espionage and intrigue. “Are the cops after ya?”
“Not yet,” I said, almost thinking aloud. Which was a real mistake.
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing. Forget it.”
“Come on, Ben. Maybe I can help, huh?”
“You can help me mainly just by giving me your moral support.”
He broke away from me and stood up. “That’s the same as saying, ‘I don’t trust you,’ man.”
“OK, man, fine,” I mocked him. “But I feel like you’re playing chicken with me—just to see how far I’m willing to go.”
He shook his head and started walking toward the double doors leading to the hall. I talked to his back, saying, “All I’m trying to do is keep you out of it so you won’t be involved.”
He whipped around, yelling, “I am involved ’cause I know you. I suppose that don’t matter to you, does it?”
“OK, OK. You wanna deliver a message?”
44
Well, from there on out, I could say or do no wrong. It was all a bed of roses and more entertaining, besides, than the “Six Million Dollar Man,” “Charlie’s Angels,” “Starsky and Hutch,” “Wonder Woman,” and the “Hardy Boys” all rolled up into one superduper sexy car chase mystery. My life had suddenly become a prime time TV show with me as star, Petey as my side-kick. I asked him if he had gotten a look at the peanut vendor from the Dodger game. He hadn’t seen anybody, and all he remembered was me hanging from the railing like a monkey; but as soon as he made the connection linking seeming accident with rampant murder far afoot, there was no stopping him. Somebody was trying to get me. Geeze. No shit. Really. Were we both secret spies or something? To the best of my ability, I tried to convince the kid otherwise, but I could easily see he didn’t quite believe me. He nodded, agreed as I said that I wasn’t sure why, but that maybe we’d both find out if we could catch the guy. Petey was cool. It was OK if I couldn’t tell him. After all, I probably had my secret orders. And after he proved himself in this clandestine operation, maybe he, too, would attain select and privileged access to the secret files.
Well, at least the kid didn’t hate me anymore, and the way I was setting it up, I’d be making him feel important while still essentially keeping him out of trouble.
Mon cher Frenchie,
If you want to talk to me, call this number at exactly 5 P.M.: 451-0789. Today is the 25th. I’ll wait three days for your call. After the 28th, I’ll assume that you’ve rejected the deal and would rather not discuss anything.
Ben Crandel
I clipped a ten spot around the note, gave it to the kid and told him to deliver it to Elmo at the shoeshine booth the next day after school. I gave him five bucks to buy an old pair of clodhoppers from a hock shop. Inspired by Grandpa Swall’s subterfuge, I told Petey to slip the note down into one of the shoes, approach Elmo when the stand was empty, show him the shoes, let him see the note inside and tell him to shine them for Frenchie and make sure he got the note. Then ask him if the ten spot would cover the shine as a favor for Ben Crandel.
