Broken Windows Read online

  I did too; I’m not sure why. After peeing she looked up at me with those big brown puppy eyes as if to say, “Sorry, buster, but you know how it is.”

  I knew how it was.

  “Hey, what’s that shit you’re listening to now?” Jack said.

  “Portishead.”

  “Sounds like space-head music—space-case music.”

  “Don’t you like anything post 1850?”

  “Why don’t you ever listen to anything classical?” Jack’s idea of a hot composer was Scarlatti. If you wanted to push it, Grieg or Dvorak would do.

  “Or that country music you listen to,” I said.

  “Cowboy, not country. Get that straight.”

  “Yeah, I know, Gene Autry, Roy Rogers.”

  “Tex Ritter. Rex Allen. Sons of the Pioneers. Cowboy. ’Sides, I told you, I’m starting to get into swing. Ellington, Goodman, the Dorseys. Got a thing for Jimmy Dorsey.”

  “A thing?”

  “Not that kind of thing. He’s just got a certain sound.”

  Okay, so I exaggerated earlier. He likes some stuff from the twentieth century. But hell, Tex Ritter, Jimmy Dorsey—they might as well have been from the eighteenth century as far as the rest of the world was concerned.

  “Well, at least you’ve moved into the twentieth century.”

  “I’m a twentieth century man, but I hope to make it to the twenty-first century. Anyway, why don’t you call the vet, make an appointment, she probably needs shots.”

  “Don’t we need to take her to the pound, see if someone claims her?”

  “Anyone who lets a dog like this get out deserves to lose it. Get on the phone.”

  I mock-saluted Jack, but I called the vet and made an appointment for the next day. Jack didn’t hang around long. Molly and I were left alone. Flotsam and jetsam adrift on the convulsive tides of the L.A. River.

  Baron’s collar was too big for the pup, so I made a slip knot leash from rope, put it around Molly’s neck, making sure not to pull too tight, and headed outside for a walk during a break in the rain. If it rained anymore we’d be getting into the forty days and forty nights kind of thing. Would it wash away the corruption? I doubted it.

  The glare of the sun bouncing off the hard pavement made me squint but the air had that sweet, wet, new mowed lawn smell as we walked and I wondered what I’d feed her. Baron’s food had long since been tossed and I didn’t think I should be feeding human food to a dog. I’d pick up some puppy food on my next trip to the market. In the meantime I’d make do with something around the house.

  It’d been two years since I walked a dog along my street. It’d been two years since I walked on my street. The dust had finally settled from the huge Northridge quake that shook L.A. on Martin Luther King Day in January. Most of the debris had been removed and chimneys fixed. A couple of houses on the street were still yellow tagged—meaning they were unsafe for more than supervised entry pending repairs. No red tags on my street—buildings unsafe for human entry and occupancy. I was lucky, the only thing that broke in my house was a prop vase from The Big Sleep. But right next door the chimney had come down in their driveway. I guess I was on the good side of the quake ripple.

  I live in the heart of L.A., well it’s the heart to me. Not far from Beverly Boulevard and La Brea. Not far from the Beverly Center. In the Spanish colonial house I grew up in. Today I live alone. Make that yesterday I lived alone. Today I had a new roommate, Good Golly Miss Molly.

  We walked down the street, under the palms that looked like they were hoping for better weather, headphones from my Walkman tucked snug in my ears. Hot, dry Santa Ana winds blew; in L.A. the weather seemingly changed with the flick of a switch. Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” played loud in my head: and like they say in the song, I always slept with one eye open. Good advice. Every other house had burglar bars on the windows. Seemed like every time I stepped out of the house these days, someone had put up a new set of bars on their windows. I hadn’t succumbed to temptation yet. After all, this was a good Los Angeles neighborhood in the nineties. And I refused to become a prisoner in my own house.

  Molly trundled along, sniffing everything there was to sniff. I smelled the neighbor’s honeysuckle, sweet in the bright, fresh day. Then I saw a semi-familiar face, the housekeeper from a couple doors up, young, pretty, probably undocumented. But she’d been here at least two years ’cause I remember crossing paths back then, while I was walking Baron and she would walk her employers’ two Yorkies—talk about rats.

  “Hola Señor Rogers. Long time no see. You have a new dog.” She spoke with a slight accent and an engaging smile. I tried to remember her name.

  “Perro,” I said, trying out my rusty Spanish.

  “Sí, perro. Cómo se llama?”

  I remembered some high school Spanish so I knew what she had asked. “Molly.”

  “Molly, qué bonita. That’s a pretty name.”

  “What are your dogs’ names? I knew them, but I can’t remember.”

  “Oh, they are not my dogs. They belong to my employers. Their names are Hillary y Guillermo, William-Bill, after el presidente and his wife.”

  “Esposa,” I said.

  Good thing Jack wasn’t here. He wouldn’t have approved. He thought people should speak only English in the USA. He probably wouldn’t even want Molly consorting with dogs named Bill and Hillary.

  “Sí, wife.” She smiled warmly. “It’s good that you have a dog again. A man needs a dog.”

  I smiled at her, trying for friendly. I wasn’t one of those people who could smile on demand. I was no actor, though in my business you have to be to some extent. “I’m sorry, I don’t remember your name?”

  “Marisol. It means, sunny sea.”

  Pretty name, but I didn’t say it. These days you might get sued for some kind of harassment. Hell I might have been sued for smiling at her, if she was another person. Had to be on your guard. I wasn’t as unPC as Jack. These things made him absolutely crazy. And he was starting from a farther point along the craziness scale to begin with. Jack leaned more to the right, while I tried to balance in the middle. It wasn’t always an easy balancing act.

  Marisol’s face matched her name, pretty in an unadorned, wholesome way. Nice smile. Jet black hair trailing down her back. Bronze skin. Nice figure. Something else you didn’t comment on these days.

  We talked for another thirty seconds, then she went her way and I went mine.

  The next day the vet told me that Molly was a Chinook, or mostly Chinook. A rare breed, used for dog sledding in Alaska. Another transplant to L.A. Almost everyone here is from somewhere else, even the palm trees aren’t natives. On the way home I stopped at the pet store for a collar, food, and other supplies that I hadn’t thought much about in two years.

  To me a Chinook was a helicopter, so I looked up Chinook dogs. They were “invented” as a new breed of sled dog. Walden, the guy who created them, wanted a dog with power, endurance, and speed. But also one that would be gentle and friendly. He’d bred them from a mastiff and a Ningo, a Greenland husky descended from Admiral Peary’s lead dog, Polaris. Sounded like a good line to me.

  Powerful and friendly, my kind of dog. I liked big dogs. Tough dogs. Not junkyard mean dogs. I figured some breeds had a bad rep, Rottweilers and German Shepherds to name a couple. They could be friendly or they could be nasty, depending on how you raised them. Baron was the friendliest dog of all, kids loved him. But he was also protective of me and his turf. The perfect dog.

  I turned to Molly. “You got a lot to live up to, girl.” Right now she was about the same size as the Yorkies, but they were full grown. Molly would grow to be a monster. I scratched her ears and she rolled on her back for me to scratch her tummy. I guess we were going to be friends after all.

  I had blown off almost two full days of work to bond with Molly. I was working cases, but I didn’t give a damn about them. Ever since my seven minutes of fame with Teddie Matso
n’s case, I had every two-bit producer who needed the goods on his wife or girlfriend or boyfriend, or all three, or had to know what the competition at the other studios were up to, wanting me to work for them. I had no end of cases to work. A lot of Hollywood riff-raff; the fact they might be worth a hundred million dollars didn’t make them any less riff or raff. I was making good money for a change. And I hated every minute of it.

  So many people in our society want to be famous these days. They don’t realize they’re making a bargain with the Devil when they ask for that. When they do realize it, it’s too late. But most famous people aren’t famous for doing anything important. I didn’t want to be one of them. And fame is a double-edged sword. Sometimes it opens doors, but you also can’t be anonymous. Some people ask for it—movie stars, then resent the price that goes with it. I hadn’t asked for it. But maybe it was part of my penance.

  Molly curled up in a ball next to me on the sofa. I picked up the newspaper and turned on the radio. Through the foggy blather the news announcer’s voice came on strong:

  “Not since aspiring actress Peg Entwistle jumped to her death from the Hollywood Sign’s H in 1932 has there been another known suicide from the sign. Susan Karubian, twenty-one, wasn’t believed to be depressed. ‘It’s like that poem Richard Cory—I learned it in writing class,’ said Derek Futterman, a friend. ‘You just never know what’s going on in someone’s head. Susan had everything to live for—why would she kill herself and why off the Hollywood Sign?’ Ms. Karubian apparently jumped from the sign mid to late afternoon yesterday. Police are going through her car today. It’s thought that she might have been an aspiring actress despondent over not hitting the big time. In other news—”

  That caught my attention, not so much because of the young woman’s suicide—after all, this was Los Angeles and I was a private detective. Ms. Karubian was just another statistic, one of seventeen deaths that weekend in La La Land. But I’d hiked up to the sign a couple times. I’d even read up on Peg Entwistle. Another starlet come to Hollywood to fulfill her dreams, expecting streets paved with gold, only to find them covered with things you wouldn’t even want on your shoe.

  Unlike the despondent Ms. Karubian, Teddie Matson’s dreams had been coming true. I had never heard of her, but her star was on the rise.

  I felt the urge to do something I knew I shouldn’t. I walked to the office, pulled open the bottom drawer of the desk. Under a pile of papers was a yellowed newspaper clipping. Like someone reaching for a cookie they know they shouldn’t eat, I reached in and pulled out that clip. And like someone who has that box of cookies when it shouldn’t even be in the house, I shouldn’t have kept the L.A. Times clipping.

  PRIVATE DETECTIVE DUKE ROGERS

  NABS TEDDIE MATSON’S KILLER

  After a harrowing chase through the winding roads, hills and thicket-covered trails of Griffith Park, private detective Duke Rogers wrestled James Colbert over a wall at the Observatory. The two tumbled through the dense brush. Colbert managed to escape, jumped a wall and tumbled to his death.

  Skimming ahead, I came to:

  Hollywood hailed Mr. Rogers as a hero for achieving justice for one of their own. He is being feted at a party at Spago hosted by Aaron Spelling, producer of Ms. Matson’s series.

  They almost got it right. Good enough for the Times, I guess. What they didn’t get at all was the backstory. They never asked; I never volunteered the info.

  Teddie Matson was the co-lead on a successful sitcom and movie lights beckoned. Then one day a man—I called him The Weasel behind his back—walked into my office on Beverly Boulevard with a request to find an old classmate, Teddie Matson. It was quick cash. I gave the man his info and he gave me the money. A couple days later Teddie Matson’s career was over, as was her life. I had taken the man at his word—that he wanted to look up an old friend. My blood boiled over when I read the newspaper and realized I had found her for him. I decided to drop everything and find him. It wasn’t easy.

  Teddie’s family lived in South Central. I figured that was the best place to start in my effort to find The Weasel and I found myself there when the sparks hit the fan and the Rodney King riots broke out. Tiny, a friend of the Matsons, took me to their house, where I met Teddie’s mother and brother and her sister, Rita. I couldn’t tell them my unwitting part in Teddie’s death, but I convinced them I was out to find her killer. And in the midst of the flames and fires and looting, Rita and I became friends, more than friends. We were each other’s reassurance in that bad time, a black woman and a white man, together, telling each other, without words, that we could live together in peace, corny as that sounds. And I thought, and I think she did too, that we could have a growing relationship, one based on more than mutual need during a bad time.

  I followed a trail that led from L.A. to Calexico on the Mexican border to Reno and back to L.A. But I found him. And he found me, or at least I think he did. I think he killed Baron to scare me and get me off his trail. We had our scuffle at the Griffith Observatory and now he won’t be going after any more young starlets or killing any dogs or anyone else.

  Eventually I told Rita the truth about my involvement with The Weasel. My unwitting aid in helping him find her sister. She didn’t understand. She hated me at first, then the hate turned to indifference and she drifted out of my life and I haven’t been able to call her. Every time the phone rings there’s some faint hope that it might be her. But it never is. And every time I start to dial her, I hang up before punching in the last number.

  So Susan Karubian’s jumping from the Hollywood Sign somehow stirred these memories. I looked out the window at the sun glinting off the magnolia leaves, trying to peer up into the hills. I could almost see the Hollywood Sign from here—if I was on the street in front of my house, I could for sure. After two years, the smoke from the riots had cleared from the air—not so the bad feelings. Today, the smoke was clearing above the sign or was it just the fog? And it dawned on me, Susan Karubian jumped from the sign at the height of golden hour. A magical time for some, especially if you’re making movies. Not so magical for Ms. Karubian. Nor for Teddie Matson. Golden hour is when she died too. Things happen at golden hour.

  I stared down at the already-yellowing newspaper—definitely yellow, not golden. Oh yeah, I was famous alright.

  CHAPTER 2

  Eric Davies sat on the floor, smack in the middle of his one room apartment in Venice, mindful that the cockroaches might not like him intruding on their space. The sage green carpet under him was so threadbare he could see the wood floor beneath. Maybe someday he’d pull up the carpet, polish the floor, and pretend he lived in a decent place. Hey it had real plaster walls, not drywall. Of course that also meant it was old and in this case pretty decrepit.

  The room was so small that his bed was on a cheap wooden platform against one wall so he could utilize the space underneath it. He was getting tired of climbing the ladder every night just to lay down. He wasn’t an eight-year-old happy to be in a bunk bed, but a thirty-four-year-old man. Under the bed platform stood his battered desk, bought for fifteen dollars at a yard sale, a lamp that Edison himself might have built, and an old uncomfortable office chair he’d picked up off the street. It rolled, sometimes. More often it was like a shopping cart where all the wheels went in different directions. Sometimes he believed it was alive, with a mind of its own.

  A couple of framed sailboat photos adorned the walls—they were clipped out of magazines. Ah, decorating. Two doors besides the front door, one led to a small closet, the other to a miniscule bathroom. The far wall held a book case and plenty of law books, remnants of a former life. Another wall entertained what passed for the kitchen. Sometimes he watched the little thirteen-inch, black-and-white TV that sat on an old crate and was illegally hooked up to cable. He’d watch the Home and Gardening Channel. Everyone on every show wanted a nice space for entertaining. Living room, kitchen, yard. All had to have the proper space for entertaining. Pr
oper balance, proper flow, good colors, and placement of one’s yin and yang. Feng shui. Eric looked at his apartment and tried to imagine entertaining here. Who would he entertain? The local gang bangers? He didn’t believe in God, but he was grateful every time he made it from his car to the front door of his six-story apartment building and every time he made it from his third-floor walk-up to his car in one piece. He thought he should thank someone. The question was who?

  He opened a window, could smell the briny ocean air and hear the waves booming in the distance. This was Venice, California—crammed onto the SoCal shore between tony Santa Monica and haughty Marina del Rey—but not the Venice of the tourists and beach people. And this certainly wasn’t what Abbot Kinney had envisioned when he wanted to recreate Italy’s Venice in southern California, complete with canals and gondoliers. No, Kinney must be rolling over in his grave these days. This was the other side of Venice. No canals here. No bathing beauties. Unless cockroaches had beauties in their midst, maybe to another cockroach. Miss Cockroach of 1994. Would she want world peace too? Or just a crumb of leftover bread?

  Tourists loved to come here. Venice was very cosmopolitan. To Eric that meant it was a third world country of its own. And the tourists didn’t have to sleep here. At least not in this part of Venice. There was a good part of Venice. He’d known that part once. Now he never got over that way, even though it was only a short walk.

  If he looked out the window just right he could almost see the ocean a block away. He used to come down here when he was at UCLA and the world was his for the taking. The girls loved him, his deep blue eyes, his chiseled good looks, as his mother called them. What would she think if she knew where he was today, saw how he was living? Luckily for her—or was it for him?—she had passed several years ago.