“Hey, there’s no reason to get upset,” I said. “I just wanted to talk to Angela. I really don’t know her.”
He seemed a bit befuddled. I don’t know if the befuddlement was caused by the beer or by my reaction to his aggression. In any case, I decided it was a good time to make my escape with as much dignity as I could muster.
“Tell her I’ll be back,” I said, still smiling as I turned around to walk to my car.
“She’s not here!” he shouted with a combination of anguish and anger that made me sort of believe him.
I walked to the car with my ears alert to the sound of the man running up behind me to attack me. Instead, I heard the door of the apartment slam shut. I started breathing again.
When I got to the car I felt as befuddled as Angela’s boyfriend, husband, relative, or whatever he was. My first attempt at a stakeout was not a success, and I didn’t know what to do next. It occurred to me that if Angela wasn’t there, maybe her friend would go to her and I could follow him. Why he would do that instead of picking up the phone is something that didn’t occur to me at the time. I was still shaken up by the reception I got at the apartment, and I just wasn’t thinking clearly.
I decided to drive up the block and kill some time at the garage sale, keeping the apartment under surveillance.
The garage sale was being monitored by an older Latina and a young girl. The older woman might be in her late fifties or early sixties. She had on a brown cotton dress, and she was sitting on a folding chair. Glasses with a light brown plastic frame were perched on her nose. Next to her, sitting on the ground, was a small portable radio. The announcer on the radio was talking in Spanish, and he seemed to be pitching something hard. I caught the word “Mustang” and realized it must be a car commercial.
The young girl was around nine or ten. She was wearing a white cotton top with a pattern of tiny pink rosebuds. Her hair was in two braids with little pink ribbons at the end, holding the braids together. She had the ubiquitous jeans on, and they weren’t the impossibly large-size jeans held up by a cinched tight belt like the gang-bangers wear. She was sitting on a little camp stool with a patient look that mirrored the older woman’s. Grandmother and granddaughter, I guessed.
I stopped the car and got out. “Hi,” I said to the older woman.
She seemed surprised to see me stop, and nodded to me gravely. She was uncertain about my intentions because she probably saw the incident at Angela Sanchez’s apartment. What else was there to see on that street?
“I’d like to look over the stuff you have for sale,” I said, waving at an array of junk spread out over two tables and also laying on her front lawn. I said that to let her know I wasn’t a salesman. Another grave nod.
On the lawn was used clothing of various sorts. A lot of it was for infants or a very young girl, and I wondered if they were clothes that the young girl helping the woman had outgrown. On the tables were the jumbled collection of old appliances and odds and ends that you see at garage sales, but one item caught my eye, a Japanese samurai sword. Curious, I lifted it off the table and looked at it.
The scabbard was wrapped in fine black silk cords, wound tightly with the thin cords forming a pattern. The hilt of the sword was similarly wrapped, although a few of the cords were frayed. The sword guard was a simple black metal oval, with a grasshopper design in bas-relief on one side of the guard. I pulled the sword slightly out of the scabbard, and was surprised to see that the blade was engraved with a pattern. It looked like a temple sitting next to a river. The other samurai swords I’ve seen had a polished blade, and the only pattern on the blade was a wave or scalloped effect caused by the polishing. I’m not a sword expert, but the engraved blade made me think the sword might be a reproduction.
“This is a nice sword,” I said. Another nod from the old woman. “Could you tell me where you got it?”
“My husband was in the army during World War Two,” she said. “He picked it up right after the war when he was stationed in Japan. I think it’s quite old, but now that my husband’s gone I don’t want to keep it around anymore.” Her English had no accent, and I realized with a jolt that I’ve come to expect an accent from Latinos. It’s the kind of racial stereotype I hate when people have similar expectations about Asians, and I was embarrassed and troubled by my own prejudice.
“How much are you asking for it?” I asked.
She looked at me shrewdly, sizing me up. “A hundred and fifty dollars,” she answered.
I put the sword down. An unemployed person doesn’t need an expensive samurai sword, even though I thought it would make a terrific prop for the L.A. Mystery Club mystery.
“I could go as low as a hundred,” she added when I put the sword down.
“It’s too expensive for me.”
“I can’t go any lower,” she said with a note of finality.
“I’m sure that’s a good price; it’s just more than I can swing right now.”
She looked disappointed, but didn’t seem inclined to reduce the price any more.
I moved over to a pile of books at the end of the table. They were mostly children’s books in both English and Spanish, including a couple of the Nancy Drew mystery books. I reached over to pick one up when I was suddenly shoved from behind.
The push propelled me into the table, jarring it from its position and spilling items to the ground. I spun around, and there was the man from Angela’s apartment.
“How come you still here?” he said belligerently. He held up a large clasp knife and waved it at me.
In Luis Valdez’s play Zoot Suit, the play starts with the narrator, dressed like a 1940’s Chicano zoot-suiter, cutting his way onto the stage with a four-foot switchblade knife. It always gets a laugh because it plays off of an old stereotype about Latinos. The knife before me wasn’t a switchblade, and it wasn’t four feet long. But I can assure you it sure looked that big. And the guy holding it had evidently not been enlightened about the need to fight stereotypes. And I wasn’t laughing.
Before I could say anything the old woman jumped up and started yelling in Spanish. The young girl ran for the house. My Spanish is almost nonexistent, but I got the impression that after she told the girl to run into the house she started berating the man with the knife.
He looked at her, then back at me. She must have been giving him a withering tongue-lashing, because he seemed to shrink back from the onslaught of her words. She was brave, defending a stranger from a knife-wielding drunk. When he looked at her again I reached on the table and picked up the samurai sword. I withdrew it from its scabbard, and when the man returned his attention to me, his eyes widened at the sight of me standing there with a real four-foot blade. He took a step back, which was a very good sign.
Emboldened by his retreat, the woman came around the table, still berating the man and shaking a finger at him. His ridiculous sense of machismo wouldn’t let him make a retreat without having the last word, and he said something in Spanish to the woman, then said to me, “Don’t come back.”
Then he backed into the street, keeping a wary eye on the sword in my hand. He backed up almost all the way to his apartment, then turned around and retreated inside, slamming the door.
The woman and I looked at each other, and we started laughing. It wasn’t laughter caused by amusement, at least on my part. It was laughter caused by relief.
“What’s that guy’s problem?” I asked.
“He’s just bad. He drinks too much, and I think his girlfriend left him. Do you want my granddaughter to call the police?”
I considered that a moment, then I said, “No. Thanks to you and this,” I lifted up the sword, “no harm was done. I’m glad that guy carries a knife instead of a gun. Are you going to be all right? I mean, he won’t bother you because of this, will he?”