Broken Windows Read online

  He had never really known his father. He was killed in a freak accident when Eric was five years old. Some people idealized their prematurely lost love ones, even if they’d never met them. Some adoptees did the same to their birth parents. Eric never understood why. He didn’t idealize his father. He didn’t think about him much.

  His mother had worked hard to support him and his sister, Kimberly. They’d repaid her by being good students. He and Kim hadn’t been particularly close growing up. These days his sister wanted nothing to do with him. She could have offered to help him out until he got back on his feet. But why should she? She hadn’t bothered keeping in touch when things were good? She sure as hell wouldn’t bother now. At first that was fine, now he missed her. Missed any family contact.

  Eric walked to his so-called kitchen, pulled a can of sardines off the shelf, and put them between two pieces of hard, stale rye bread. His grandfather had loved sardine on rye sandwiches. For him it was a treat. For Eric these days it was subsistence, one step up from eating cat food from the can or scouring dumpsters for dinner. He sat at the table with a glass of water from the sink, wondering if it was really okay to drink. And he opened the L.A. Weekly underground paper. Today was the day his ad was due out. He scanned a few pages until he came to it.

  “Contact Eric,” it said, and gave his phone number. So far the phone hadn’t rung, but it was early. Breakfast time. He figured he’d sit by the phone today and hope for the best. If something didn’t come along, he wouldn’t even be able to pay the rent on this hell hole.

  He looked at the phone, willing it to ring. When it didn’t, his eyes shifted back to his ad, to the headline: “$$$ Will do anything for money. $$$”.

  CHAPTER 3

  The Santa Monica Pier used to be one of my favorite places to go to while away time, do some thinking on cases when things weren’t breaking right. I still liked it, but not as much as before. They’d remodeled it, turning it into a mini Disneyland, new rides, new chain restaurants. Just another mini-mall-amusement-park, but with a saltwater view, with kitschy chain restaurants featuring Cowabunga Burgers and a food court, for crying out loud. And a lot more people. Tourists. Families with their kids. Freaks of all kinds. Still, the air was clean. And I thought Molly should get a taste of it.

  There weren’t as many people as I thought there might be. They probably figured that if it was cold and overcast in their part of L.A., with just a hint of sun, it would be worse in Santa Monica and not worth the trip. And they would have been right. The biting ocean air stung my cheeks and I wished I’d brought a heavier jacket. Molly had her own jacket and since she’d been bred for the snow, I figured she’d be okay.

  I bought a hot dog on a stick, my favorite thing when I’m at the beach. The first hot dog on a stick I’d ever had was just off the pier. My parents told me I shouldn’t be eating any of the crap down here, who knew what was in it. But you know how kids are. I gave Molly her first taste. She took to it like mustard to a bun.

  The smell of the hot dog mingled with the biting smell of the ocean. A catamaran bucked the waves. Breakers foamed to shore. The day was clean. I felt good.

  The rides were open, but almost no one was on them. There’s little that’s more forlorn than an amusement park in the daytime with no one getting amused. We walked to the end of the pier to look out at the ocean. Jack and I had spent a lot of time in the ocean, diving, surfing. SEAL training. Besides, I was a SoCal boy. I grew up at the beach, in the Pacific. I think I learned to swim before I could walk. My father probably threw me in the pool and told me to either sink or swim when I was six weeks old. I don’t remember it, but knowing my father, I believe that’s what probably happened.

  The gunmetal gray ocean stretched to the horizon, which today was also gunmetal gray down here. You could hardly tell where one ended and the other began. I looked out across the water, to infinity. I saw my past.

  I blinked to pull a curtain down on that past. Tried to see my future, but that was an impossible task.

  “Are you really unsinkable, Molly?”

  She wagged her tail, lively brown eyes gazing up at me.

  “You better stick around, pal. I already lost one great dog prematurely.”

  We headed back down the pier. In the distance a woman with coal black hair sat on a bench staring out to sea, her back to me. The wind pitched her hair over her face; she swept it away with a backhand. Something seemed familiar about her. When we got closer I saw that it was Marisol. She didn’t see us and I debated whether to approach her.

  “Days like this are my favorite time at the beach,” I said.

  She turned around, looking up at me through a tangle of hair. It looked like she had been crying, though it was hard to tell because the air was so damp.

  “Señor Duke. What are you doing here?” Her eyes had a glossy look to them. And she didn’t look like the sunny sea of her name.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Sometimes, you know, I wish I could just jump into la mar, the sea, and swim and swim and swim.” Her voice was soft, I could hardly hear it above the waves crashing below. She reached down, let her hand skim across Molly’s back. Molly returned the kindness by rolling over and offering Marisol her stomach. Marisol obliged and Molly looked like she was in puppy heaven.

  Marisol didn’t say anything for several minutes. She finally said, “Dogs are good. People are bad. Why cannot people be more like dogs? They don’t hurt for no reason.”

  She was hurting, that much was obvious. I didn’t want to pry so I hesitated, then she spoke some more.

  “Someone killed Carlos, mi hermano, my brother. Asesinado.”

  “Murdered?” I wasn’t ready for that one. I thought maybe she was having problems with immigration or had lost her job, after all I hadn’t seen her since that first time out with Molly.

  Murder. I was used to it, if one ever really gets used to it. It was part of my job as a PI And as a Navy SEAL I’d dealt with death, but not murder and it’s not the same. Marisol’s pretty features seemed washed out. She looked older, like a refugee.

  I asked her to tell me what happened.

  “No sé, I don’t know. I get a telephone call from la policía. They tell me he is dead. His neck is broken.”

  “How did it happen?”

  “No sé. The police say it was un accidente.”

  “You don’t think so.”

  She shook her head.

  “So, they’re not working the case?”

  “I think not.” She hesitated, as if she had more to say but didn’t want to say it.

  I thought I knew what it might be: “Because you’re undocumented?”

  She nodded. “They say it is because they have no, how do you say—”

  “—leads.”

  “Sí, no leads.”

  “Maybe they just have too much to handle.”

  I debated whether to offer my services. I was, after all, a famous detective. A famous Hollywood detective in the tradition of Philip Marlowe and Lew Archer, maybe even some real private eyes like Anthony Pellicano, Fred Otash, or Nick Harris. Hell, I had solved Teddie Matson’s murder two years ago.

  I wanted to help Marisol. Even lawyers do pro bono work. I knew Marisol couldn’t afford me, but I could do the job pro bono, help her find out what happened to her brother. I believed in what Einstein said about the world being a dangerous place not because of the evil people, but because of the people who stood by and did nothing. I was no hero. Maybe I’d watched too many old movies when I was a kid, where the cowboys had a code of honor. Maybe I wanted to make a tiny corner of the world a better place. Maybe I wanted to break the monotony of all the crappy cases I was working these days. Or maybe I wanted to continue making up for my part in Teddie Matson’s murder.

  She looked at me funny, startling me out of my reverie.

  “Your name is Duke, as in the royal family?” she said out of the blue.

  “It’s a
nickname.”

  “What is your real name?”

  “Everyone calls me Duke. You can too.” I told her my real name—Marion. My parents were John Wayne fans—and, believe it or not, his real name was Marion Michael Morrison. I can’t count how many fights I got in as a kid because of what my parents did to me. Why couldn’t they have named me John Rogers or even Wayne Rogers? Well, John Wayne’s nickname was Duke and I took it too. Hell, Bartholomew would have been better than Marion.

  “I will call you Mr. Rogers.”

  “How ’bout you just keep calling me Señor Duke?” I said half joking. “You know, I might be able to help with your brother. I’m a private detective.”

  “I know this. I hear my employers, Mr. and Mrs. Goldstein, speak this. But I cannot pay. I have to borrow dinero just to give him a proper funeral. The county will only hold onto his body for so long. He must be buried in hallowed, blessed ground. Only sinners are not.” She crossed herself.

  “Here or are you sending him back to Mexico?”

  “We have no one there anymore. Our parents are muerto—dead. I will bury him here. But he must have a proper funeral.”

  What did it matter, I wanted to say. He was dead. He wouldn’t know the difference. I didn’t say it. Jack would have.

  I wanted to stay with her, but she wanted solitude. Molly and I headed off. I looked back once and she was still sitting and staring out to sea.

  When we got home, Jack was waiting for us in the kitchen, a glass of lemonade in hand. He was the only person I trusted with a key to my house. He and Molly greeted each other, while I stood at the double basin sink with a pill cutter snapping little yellow Valiums in half, hoping they wouldn’t shatter into ten pieces. Jack moved to the table, to clean and oil his Colt .45 Officer’s Model and a sleek black Sig 9mm.

  Molly sat at his feet. What’s wrong with this picture?

  “Whadda ya need those for anyway?” Jack said.

  “Help me sleep.”

  “Why don’t you just take the whole pill?”

  “I don’t want to be a junkie. I take Benadryl to help me sleep. But when that doesn’t work—”

  “—You hit the harder stuff—Valium.” The slide of the .45 snapped back into place with a metallic bang.

  “I don’t think takin’ a Valium or two makes me a junkie.”

  “They say it’s more addicting than heroin.”

  “You’re right, maybe I should just start mainlining H.” I was trying to be funny, but I wasn’t sure if Jack thought so. He had a certain kind of sense of humor.

  “And when’re you gonna get a real gun, something besides the Firestar?”

  “It is a real gun.” Jack thought my Firestar was a piece of garbage from Spain. It was from Spain, I didn’t think it was garbage.

  “You need a Sig or a Glock. Or a Colt .45.”

  I liked my little Firestar 9mm. It concealed nicely and besides, I wasn’t planning on shooting anybody. At least not today.

  “This is the wettest winter I remember in years,” Jack said.

  “Good thing we learned drownproofing. And now they can’t bug us about the drought.”

  “The hell with that. As long as there’s one illegal alien in this state don’t tell me to conserve water or electric or any damn thing else. What about that Proposition 187? I can’t wait to vote on that.” Jack snapped the .45’s magazine into place. “Can’t wait to get outta my apartment either. They’re cramming them in like in a clown car.”

  “There’s gotta be zoning laws against that.”

  “Hell with that. I’m breaking my lease and getting out. I don’t understand why they can’t stay home or at least why we can’t just enforce our borders?”

  “Maybe they’re desperate for work,” I said, but there was really no arguing with Jack about this.

  “Don’t tell me you’re buying into that propaganda.”

  Proposition 187 would have required California law enforcement, social services, health care, and public personnel to do a bunch of things nobody was doing or seemed to want to be doing, including verifying the immigration status of persons they came in contact with, reporting those persons to state and federal officials, and denying undocumented workers social services, health care, and education. And that was just a small part of what it said. Seemed that most of the state was for it and it looked good to pass. But there was strong and loud opposition. I guess I knew where Jack stood.

  “One eighty-seven, isn’t that also the penal code for homicide?” Jack grinned. He jacked a cartridge into the .45’s chamber.

  What could I say to that? So I didn’t. Sometimes Jack seemed like my evil twin or the Devil on my shoulder from a cartoon, shouting in my ear to go against my better nature. He said things a lot of people wouldn’t, but were probably thinking. Sometimes he said things I didn’t want to think. But we were tight. Some people couldn’t understand how I could be friends with someone like him. But he had my back in the Teams and he had it now—and I had his. If they couldn’t understand, so be it.

  I think most of us have a Jack in our lives.

  “You take care of my girl,” Jack said, bending down to give Molly a nice tummy rub. He packed up his guns and put my cleaning supplies away. “Remember, I have a stake in her too.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Molly had a relatively quiet night, but I woke up to spots of what looked like blood everywhere. Jesus, what was wrong with her? I didn’t want another Baron. He was murdered. It didn’t look like anyone had broken into the house. So what the hell was wrong with Molly?

  I leaned over her, running my hand through her fur. Her nose was covered with gunk; she was coughing. Wheezing. She had seemed fine just a few hours ago.

  She looked up at me with pleading eyes. I scooped her up, jammed it to the Cherokee, and headed for the vet.

  She spit up blood in the car. And some other vile-looking stuff. I approached Beverly Boulevard and Robertson, slowly. Damn traffic. Everywhere you went, any time of day. My hand almost pounded on the horn, the guy in front of me was driving like he was the only one on the road. And this intersection had one of those damn traffic cams. I was already famous enough, I didn’t want any more fame, especially the kind you get when you’re nosing out into the intersection three-tenths of a second too late.

  “Move it, jackass,” I mouthed. Unfortunately, he wasn’t looking in his rearview mirror. Didn’t look like he was looking at the road either. “Make the light, make the light.”

  He made the light—don’t they always?—and I jammed into the intersection just as it turned yellow, smiling wide for the traffic cam, just in case. My left hand held the wheel. I thought about smiling for the camera with my right hand, or to be more precise the middle finger of my right hand, but it was busy petting Molly, who sat listless, in the passenger seat.

  The vet’s office was on Robertson, south of Olympic. And, of course, there was no parking in the six-space lot. Trying to park on the street would be a real nightmare. I found the closest space I could, carried Molly down the block, tucked under my arm.

  “Mr. Rogers,” the receptionist said, with a smile. Seeing Molly’s blood-covered nose made the smile disappear. “What’s wrong with Molly?”

  “She’s coughing up blood. And this other, dark stuff. I don’t know what it is.”

  “I will get you into the doctor as soon as possible.”

  And she was as good as her word. I was in the examining room within five minutes, ahead of several unhappy looking people in the waiting room. The vet came in and gave Molly the once over. The first time I’d brought her here a few days ago she was eager, friendly. Today she was lethargic, hardly even lifting her head to say hello.

  The doctor did a thorough exam. Helpless, I sat and watched as Molly was probed and poked. She did not look happy.

  “I think it’s kennel cough,” he said. “Maybe parvo. That can be serious. I’ll know more when I get the blood tests back.”
br />   “But she wasn’t in a kennel.”

  “It’s just a catch-all term. In the meantime, she’s got fluid on her lungs.”

  Great.

  “I want you to coupage her.”

  “What’s that?” The name sounded familiar, maybe from my training. But at the moment I couldn’t place it.

  He held Molly up. “You steam up the shower as damp as you can get it, turn off the water, and put her in the stall with you. Then you reach around under her ribs like this.” He demonstrated, patting her lungs under her ribs. “And you tap lightly to break up the fluid that’s built up there. Do it two or three times a day—three’s better.”

  “Will she be okay?”

  “I won’t lie to you. I don’t know. Right now it could go either way. But we’ll do our best.” He pulled out a needle and gave her a shot of antibiotics and a prescription for pills.

  I carried Molly into the reception area, paid. I thanked the receptionist for getting us in quickly.

  “Buena suerte,” she said as I carried Molly outside into a glaring winter sun, glad it wasn’t raining at the moment.

  I tried to make Molly comfortable on the passenger seat. She looked up at me, then put her head down and went to sleep. I waded through traffic on the way home.

  I pulled down the driveway, noticing a few more cracks in the cement than the day before, shut the engine off and went around to the passenger door. Molly’s tongue lolled out of her mouth. Shit, I didn’t want her to die. But I had just come from the vet. Besides, I wouldn’t let her die. I lifted her from the seat, kicked the door closed and walked up the steps to my back door. Tucking her under my left arm, I managed to unlock the door, open it and walk in. I set her on the floor and she dragged tail to her favorite spot between the kitchen and breakfast room, where she promptly spit up blood and mucous. It hadn’t taken her long to claim the little sunny area between the two rooms. In fact, she had a spot of her own in almost every room. I left her there while I went to the guest bathroom in the second bedroom, turned on only the hot water and let it steam up. And steam and steam. After several minutes, I retrieved Molly, under my arm again, went back to the head, reached into the shower with my right hand, turned off the water, and we stepped inside.