“Cash for the cause?”
“You want to speculate, I’ll speculate.”
I thought about it as he wrestled with the steering wheel and finally got back on Pacific. “Milo, if Gruenberg was involved in the dope scene, she could have made someone mad, and run out of fear. Or maybe the people she was afraid of got to her first. What if she’d ended up with a cash-flow or a dope-flow problem, and the break-in at her place was someone looking to collect?”
“Maybe,” he said. “But the other thing you’ve got to consider is that junkies are prime opportunists. The posters could have tipped them off that she was gone; her place was vacant, a perfect target. The bottom line is, all of this is just head-tripping- we don’t know shit.”
A block later I said, “Could Holly have been involved with them- Gruenberg and Novato’s cabal?”
“Cabal? An old lady, a bag boy, and a retarded kid who isn’t on anyone’s subversive list? Not much of a cabal.”
“She wasn’t retarded-”
“Okay, just stupid. Same difference.”
“I didn’t say it was a competent cabal. Two of them are dead and one’s missing. But maybe Holly’s shooting at Massengil was politically motivated.”
“If it was Massengil she was shooting at.”
“If.”
Milo came to a short stop at Washington Boulevard.
“Too weird, Alex. Got a headache.” He drove into a self-serve gas station with a mini-mart at the back of the lot. I waited in the Ford as he purchased a packet of aspirin. Before he returned to the car, he went to the pay phone and stayed there for a while, popping tablets, feeding quarters and talking, the receiver tucked up under his chin. Making two calls.
When he came back, he said, “Mehan’s out of town, two weeks’ vacation, no one knows where any of his files are, they’ll get back to me.”
“Who was the second call to?”
He looked at me. “What a sleuth! I tried the Holocaust Center, wanted to leave a message for someone I know there. Got a tape, they’re closed Sundays.”
“That’s right,” I said. “They know you. You helped them trace that Nazi scientist- the one the army protected.”
“Good old Werner Kaltenblud, president of the Poison Gas Club. Bastard’s still alive in Syria, living like royalty, unrepentant. I’ve got a more recent connection to the Center. Last year someone painted swastikas on the side of the museum building they’re putting up. Not my usual thing, but they called me because of Kaltenblud. Then it hit the news and the brass took over. ATD.”
“Frisk?”
“No. The asshole who preceded him, but same old story: TV crews and politicos making speeches- Gordon Latch, in fact.”
“How about Massengil?”
“Nope. Not his district.”
“Maybe not his area of interest, either.”
“Could be. It was a real circus, Alex. ATD playing I Spy, asking lots of clever questions, filing lots of paper, but they never bothered to surveill. Next week there were broken windows and an arson fire in one of the trailers out back in the construction site. We never found out who did any of it. So much for my credibility. But maybe I’ve still got enough good-will residue for them to think back and try to remember something about this Novato kid. Something more than his library card.”
He turned left on Washington, driving parallel with the Marina. A different kind of crowd here. White slacks and deep tans and aggressive little foreign ears. The boulevard was lined with new construction- mostly low-rise designer office buildings festooned with reminders of an architectural heritage that had never existed, and nautical theme restaurants draped with BRUNCH! and HAPPY HOUR! banners.
“Pretty, huh?” said Milo. “The good life reigns.”
He drove a couple of blocks, turned off on a street that dead-ended a block later. Small houses, in varying stages of gentrification. Cars lining the street, no people. He parked in front of a hydrant, left the motor running, got out, and opened the trunk.
He came back carrying a shotgun. Clamped it to the dashboard, barrel-up, and pulled the car out onto the street.
I said, “Where to?”
“Somewhere not so pretty.”
He got back on Washington, took it to the Marina Freeway, switched to the 405, wrestled with the airport jam for a while, and got off on Imperial Highway heading east. Bordering the off-ramp were the broad gray lots of shipping terminals, import-export companies, and customs brokers, and a four-story self-storage facility that looked like the box an office building would come in. A red light halted us at the intersection of La Cienega and Imperial, and we waited it out, staring at the colossal truncated bulk of the unfinished Century Freeway: hundred-foot concrete dinosaur legs supporting a six-lane slab that ended in mid-air and was fringed with curling steel veins- a messy amputation.
The green arrow appeared and Milo turned. The terrain deteriorated rudely to a block of scabrous one-story buildings on a dry-dust lot. A pool hall, a liquor store, and a bar advertising “nude table dancers,” all plywood-boarded and choked with graffiti. Even sin couldn’t flourish here.
But a block later there were signs of revitalization. Weekly-rate motels, auto shops, car dealerships, wig stores, and rundown apartments. Several beautifully kept churches, a couple of shopping centers. The sprawling campus of Southwestern College. And for color, the Golden Arches and its rainbow-hued clones- modular fast-food setups so clean and unscarred they might have been dropped into the neighborhood just minutes before by some clumsy Franchise Stork.
Milo said, “Taking the scenic route.”
I said, “Long time since I’ve been down here.”
“Didn’t know you’d ever been down here. Most folks of the fair-pigment persuasion never find the opportunity.”
“Grad school,” I said. “First year. I was a research assistant on a Head Start program trying to increase the reading skills of ghetto kids. I took an interest in one of the children- a very bright little boy named Eric. I visited him a couple of times at home- I can still picture the place. He lived on Budlong, near 103rd. Nice-looking building, not at all what I expected for the area. Widowed mother, the father had been shot in Vietnam. Grandma helping out- place was neat as a pin. Lots of pressure from both Mom and Grandma for Eric to get A’s, become a doctor or a lawyer.”
“How old was he?”
“Five.”
Milo whistled. “Long ways to med school.”
“Fortunately he had the brains for it.”
“What happened to him?”
“I followed him for a couple of years- phone calls, Christmas cards. He was still getting A’s. And starting to develop bad stomachaches. I was going up to San Francisco for my internship. Referred the mother to a good pediatrician and a community mental health center. After that, we just kind of lost touch. He’d be college age by now. Amazing. I have no idea what happened to him. Guess that makes me your typical superficial do-gooder, huh?”
Milo didn’t say anything. I noticed he was driving faster than usual. Two hands on the wheel. As we zipped eastward, the business establishments grew smaller, sadder, rattier, and I noticed a certain consistency to their distribution: check-cashing outlets, rib joints, nail palaces, liquor stores. Lots of liquor stores. Thin dark men lounged against filthy stucco walls, holding paper bags, smoking, staring off into space. A few women in shorts and rollers sashayed by and caught whistles. But for the most part the streets were deserted- that much South Central and Beverly Hills had in common. A quarter mile farther, even the liquor stores couldn’t make it. Plywood storefronts became as common as glass. Movie theaters converted to churches converted to garbage dumps. Vacant lots. Impromptu auto graveyards. Entire blocks of dead buildings shadowing the occasional ragpicker or stray child. More young men, glutted with time, starved of hope. Not a white face in sight.