The problem is, flatfishing from a skiff got popular a few years back, the way fly-fishing got popular. And now all across America there are thousands upon thousands of garages with unused or once-used fly rods hanging next to the golf clubs and the badminton sets.
An increasing number of people have too much money and not enough sense to pound sand, as my grandfather used to say. So they take all that disposable income and spend it on things that looked really good on the cover of their sixty-dollar-a-year coffee-table magazines and then feel cheated when they don’t look as good on them. They have spent their money on The Best, and it was a lot of money, and they think that is supposed to guarantee them a good time.
They think it’s supposed to guarantee that they’ll look just like the modern-day, upper-middle-class Norman Rockwell picture of themselves they have in their heads from the pictures on the coffee table and they feel cheated when it doesn’t work out that way.
Nothing they do is fun, but it’s all expensive so they try to persuade themselves that they really are having fun when they’re not, or the game is rigged against them. They never figure out that a big bank balance is no guarantee of the good life. Somewhere along the way they read the fine print wrong, but they’ve already signed and they’re stuck with the product.
So they end up just like Pete: rich, miserable, and dangerously stupid on a small boat.
I felt the blood trickling down the right side of my head from where the rod tip had slashed my ear. I felt the salt water rolling off a dull ache on the left side where the crab had smacked me at 100 miles per hour.
I stepped off the platform and moved forward to where Pete was sitting, snarling at me. I stared down at him for a moment, reviewing mentally the ways I knew to kill him, quickly or slowly, with my bare hands, or perhaps with the pliers, a few big shark hooks, a little bit of leader wire—I leaned down instead and pulled the rod out of his hands.
“This is a handmade rod,” I told him. “It is worth more than the gold crown on your molars. When we get to the dock you will find an extra hundred and fifty dollars on your bill to cover repairing it.”
“The fuck I will,” he said.
“You are going to start fishing the right way, just like I tell you, or we’re heading back.”
“Fuck that noise, I paid in advance—four hundred fifty dollars, one day’s fishing. Bait the fucking hook.” He started trying to fumble a new rod out of its clamp.
I nodded at him, just like he’d really said something, and took his hand away, placing it in his lap and thinking how fragile the bones in the hand really are. I placed the broken rod back in the teak holder along the side of the boat and stepped back to the platform. I put the pole in its clamps and tied it down. I turned to the control panel and started the engine.
“Hey! Won’t that scare the fish away?”
I nodded at Pete and showed him some teeth. “I owe them that,” I said, and shoved the throttle forward hard.
The acceleration caught Pete by surprise and he slid onto the floor. He scrambled back up onto the seat just as I made a wide turn and stopped to pick my hat out of the water. The stop threw Pete forward and back onto the floor. By the time he got back up again, white-knuckled on the gunwale, we were headed for the dock at full speed.
“What the fuck are you doing?” he screamed at me.
“Going home,” I shouted over the noise of the engine. “Life is too short to spend any more of it with a dumb asshole like you.”
All the abuse and screaming he’d tried before were just a warmup. Now he really hit his stride. I’d never before heard some of the things he said, even in seven years as a cop. Maybe I’d underestimated Pete: some of it was impressive. I made a mental note to pass on some of the really choice ones to Art, who had a connoisseur’s appreciation of good cussing.
But Pete was no artist; he lacked patience and stamina. In a few moments he was winding down, repeating himself, and he finally started to bottom out. “You stupid cock-sucking piece of shit! I paid for a full day! You can’t fucking do this!”
“I’m only charging you for a half-day,” I yelled back over the sound of the motor. “But when you add on the damage to the rod, it comes out the same.”
“You dickhead shitbag butt-sucker!” he screamed.
Flats skiffs are delicate and light. Driving one across a moderate chop at full throttle can be tricky. Unfortunately it takes at least one hand on the wheel at all times, and that put me at a slight disadvantage. So I had to throttle way back again, until the boat was just barely moving forward, before I could lean forward and get my hands on Pete’s shirtfront. I lifted upwards. The boat rocked slightly.
Pete was a fairly large guy, maybe six feet tall and basically skinny, but with a pretty good spare tire around the middle that brought his weight up to around one-ninety. He was also one of those guys who confuses belly size with strength, because he grabbed at my wrists and tried to yank my hands away. But the hands he clamped on mine just gave me better leverage. I pulled up and Pete rose eight inches off the seat. It scared him. He shut up.
“You can shut your mouth and ride back,” I told him, trying not to let the strain of holding him up show in my voice. “Or you can open your mouth one more time and swim back. It’s ten miles, but it’s your choice.”
I held him up for another second to help him make up his mind. For a moment he thought he was going to say something. He opened his mouth; I tensed my forearm and lifted an inch higher, moving him toward the side of the boat. He shut his mouth quickly. I put him down.
He was quiet all the way to the dock.
By the time I got the first line secured he was already halfway to his car. I guess he figured he was safe there, twenty feet off, because he turned around there to yell at me.
“You haven’t heard the last of this, fuckbag!”
I smiled at him. “Yeah, I know. That would be too much to expect.” I bent and turned on the hose to wash the boat down.
Pete turned even redder, furious at being ignored. He took a half-step towards me. “Motherfucker! I know guys can put you in the fucking ground!”
I couldn’t think of anything really funny to say to that, so I just picked up the nozzle of the hose and pointed it in his direction. I squeezed the handle. A hard, very satisfying stream of water hit Pete square in the face. I wiggled my wrist, letting the stream play all over him for a few seconds, then cut it off and dropped it to the dock. “Have a nice day,” I said.
He glared at me for a few seconds, then turned away and stomped off to his car, leaving a trail of angry wet footprints.
It was a small victory, and it didn’t even really feel very good. Even Art didn’t think it was funny.
“That shit’s bad for business, Billy,” he wheezed at me a few minutes later when I went in to his arctic shack to tell him about it. He shook a collection of chins mournfully back and forth. “You don’t know who this guy’s friends are.”
“I don’t want to know anybody who’s a friend of that,” I told him.
He shook his head some more. “You just don’t know,” he said. “Guy came highly recommended. Now he’ll go back and tell everybody what a rotten time he had here trying to catch a fish.”
“Believe me, not this guy. He’ll go back with a handful of fake pictures proving he caught five record tarpons. He’ll show a testimonial from the mayor’s office stating that he saved the fishing industry singlehanded. This guy is a bullshit artist, Art.”
“You just don’t know,” he repeated. When Art got stubborn he was tough company. So I repeated a couple of Pete’s more memorable words and phrases for him. It cheered him up, and for a minute or two we were actually having a good time.
I figured out later that by the time Pete was climbing into his car and dripping on the rented upholstery, and me and Art were chuckling over the whole thing, Roscoe had been dead for about three hours, three thousand miles away. By the time I was done laughing and on my way home, six quarts of Roscoe?
??s blood had been hosed off the sidewalk and into the gutter. The lab trucks were just about done with the scene, although the yellow plastic tape would stay up a while longer.
Roscoe liked to keep a low profile. He didn’t want anything splashy on his record. Nothing too gaudy like dying on the street in Hollywood.
Witnesses say Roscoe died with a kind of embarrassed look on his face. That figures.
Chapter Seven
When I got home, Nicky was waiting for me on the front steps of my house.
“Mate,” he said without any warm-up, “you’re in the shithouse and you’re in it deep.”
“What’s up, Nicky?” I asked. I was still a little burned up after dealing with Pete. I wished I’d thrown him in. I didn’t feel like another Australian Oktoberfest at the moment.
Nicky handed me an envelope. “Telephone was ringing off the hook, Billy. It stopped. ’Bout an hour later, fella came ’round with this here.”
I looked at the envelope. The little plastic window in the front had my name showing.
“It’s a telegram, mate,” said Nicky helpfully.
“Yeah. I figured that out,” I told him. I sat beside him and ripped open the envelope. He peered over my shoulder as I read:
URGENT YOU CALL AT ONCE STOP
DT SGT BEASLEY
LAPD
213/3611549
So Ed Beasley had made Detective Sergeant. That was nice. He had been my partner for two and a half years a while back. We got along just fine until he got a case of ambition. But he was a good cop.
Unlike Roscoe, Ed knew the streets. As a young black kid growing up in L.A., he’d stepped over the line more than once before settling on becoming a cop, and he was one of the few people who knew from both sides the sick thrill of walking down an alley in the Nickel, not knowing if you’d find a wino puking or an ice head with a MAC 10.
Ed Beasley lived through some tough years on the street and he deserved to be Detective Sergeant. He could even be a lieutenant if that’s what he wanted. I just couldn’t figure out why he wanted to talk to me so urgently.
“I thought so,” said Nicky, nodding. He was a slow reader, but he read everything he could get his hands on. Even my mail.
“You thought what?”
He clapped a sympathetic hand on my shoulder. “Yer lumbered, mate. They’ve got the wood on you good.”
I looked at him, still irritated. His gigantic brown eyes radiated all-knowing good humor at me.
“What language is that, Nicky?”
He cackled. “Oh, you’re in it good, mate. Your rising sign is in Aquarius. Until the new moon you got discord, loss of harmony, big problem with authority, which is where the coppers come in, see? Oh, and travel. You’re taking a trip. It’ll be awrful. At least until the new moon.”
“Okay, Nicky.” I’d had enough. I stood up, moving to the front door. “If you say so.”
“Clear as mud, mate. Clear as mud. See if it ain’t.” He cackled again and moved off through the yard, back to his place. I never knew if he really believed all that stuff, but he sure could spout it.
I pushed into my house and put the telegram on the seat of my chair. I stared down at it. I didn’t want to call anybody in Los Angeles. I didn’t want to think about Los Angeles being there at all. All of it, the whole smog-drenched crap-heap of a city, led right to those two small graves along Sepulveda—but Ed Beasley was a decent guy, a good cop. He had been my partner, and unless you’ve been a cop yourself you can’t really appreciate how much that means. It’s a close relationship. It’s for life.
I sat by the telephone and dialed.
I let it ring thirteen times. On the fourteenth ring, Ed picked it up himself.
“Beasley,” he said. I knew him well enough to hear the strain and fatigue in his voice.
“It’s Billy Knight, Ed,” I said. “What’s up?”
“Billy,” he said, and I heard him take a deep breath. I could imagine him sipping from his cup of regular coffee—cream and two sugars—and reaching for the Kool that would be smouldering in the ashtray beside him. “Roscoe McAuley is dead.”
I wished I had a cigarette. They are awful things and will kill you as sure as the sun will come up tomorrow and they disgust me, but there is nothing else I know of that you can do at a time like this that makes any sense.
A cigarette is a way of relating to a random universe, a wild and sickening cosmos that never seems logical and always attacks from odd angles in strange but very personal ways. Because smoking doesn’t make any sense at all, somehow it’s the only rational response to events that don’t make sense, that sneak in under the belt and floor you, leaving you stunned and breathless.
I have never smoked and I hope I never will but when I heard Ed tell me Roscoe was dead, and thought of him sitting there with his Kool, I wished I had one, too.
“How did it happen?”
Down the long-distance line I could hear Ed blow out a cloud of mentholated smoke. “It’s a funny thing, Billy. Roscoe was down in Hollywood. It’s like two-thirty A.M., and he’s crawling around in that shit. No place for a desk jockey like that. Nobody knows what he was doing there. So he’s down on Cahuenga, near that twenty-four-hour newsstand.”
I could see the place in my mind as clearly as if I stood there. “The World News.”
“Right. And he comes stumbling out the alley, blood pumping out like from a fire hydrant. Somebody cut his throat, just about took his damn head off. He was holding it on with both hands when he hit the street. He died pretty quick. For a chairwarmer he musta been in pretty good shape, or he wouldn’t of made it out the alley cut bad like that.”
I took a deep breath. Behind the cold cop description Ed gave me I could sense his shock. We know it’s wrong, but we think it anyway; cops are supposed to be immune. A stray bullet, sure. Going down in a face-to-face fight with the cocaine cowboys, or having a massive coronary just before retirement, we expect that. Cops are more aware of being mortal than most people. They expect to die more than most other people do.
But cops aren’t supposed to have their heads hacked off in alleys. Especially a command cop like Roscoe. I knew the kind of shock waves Roscoe’s brutal murder would be sending through the force. It might not seem fair, but a cop-killing gets a little extra effort, and a cop like Roscoe would get a little more than that.
“What have you got?”
Ed blew out smoke again. “Weird, Billy. Coroner says it was probably a straight razor.”
It took me a minute to register that. “A what?”
“Yeah. I know. I didn’t know they still made ’em. My daddy had one he’d put in his boot on Saturday night, but shit, Billy, ghetto kids nowadays got Uzis. Who the fuck uses a straight razor?”
I couldn’t think of anybody. It also occurred to me that it wasn’t my job to think of anybody. “Why did you call me, Ed?”
I heard him slurp a little coffee. “Just wondered what you knew, Billy,” he said a little too casually. “Your name is in his appointment calendar. He flew back there to see you. Now he’s dead. I wondered what you two talked about, that’s all.”
“His kid.”
“Uh-huh.” I could hear the routine cop suspicion settling into his voice. I was on the outside now, even to my old partner. I was in a drug zone, and a cop in an expensive suit had been brutally murdered after visiting me.
“For God’s sake, Ed, you must have something besides me.”
“Well, you know how it is, Billy. You guys just stood around and talked about his kid, huh?”
“That’s right.”
He blew out more smoke. “He flew all the way across the country, three thousand miles, to talk to you? About his kid?”
“He was very broken up about it, Ed. Had some crazy idea that I could help him find out who whacked out his kid.”
“What’d you tell him?”
I came close to biting my tongue. “Ed, you sound like you take that idea seriously.”
“That
means you said no, huh?”
“Stop it, Ed. That shit is crazy. What was I supposed to do?”
“I worked with you for two and a half years, man. I know what you can do, just like Roscoe knew it.”
“I’m retired. I take people fishing. Give me a break, I can’t do anything you couldn’t do a hell of a lot better.”
There was a long pause while Ed sipped, then blew out a lungful of smoke before he finally said, “Roscoe thought you could.”
I said a bad word. Ed didn’t say anything, so I said it again and hung up. I stood up and paced the room, stomach churning.
Maybe Donahue was right. Maybe we can’t run from our problems. If we do, maybe they run after us and catch up sooner or later. Maybe all the talk shows are right, all the pop psychology and easy, comfortable clichés. Maybe we really need to Face Negative Feelings and Be Okay with them. It didn’t seem to matter too much right now.
It mattered a lot less to Roscoe. He’d come to me with a problem and I’d told him to go to hell. Now he was dead in a messy, public way. His last thought was probably how much he hated going like that, in the street, his suit and carefully knotted silk tie ruined by all that sloppy blood.
His problem had caught up with him. When he couldn’t get me to help he tried to do it himself. He knew he wouldn’t be any good at it, but he had to try. After all, he was a cop. He was a pampered, street-stupid headquarters cop, but he was a cop and that meant something. It didn’t mean much to the person who had tried to saw his head off with a minstrel-show weapon, but to Roscoe it meant he had to deal with the problem. He knew from the start he couldn’t do it, but he had to try.
So he tried it himself and sure enough, he couldn’t handle whatever it was. Instead it handled him; casually, contemptuously, turning his carefully cultivated appearance into gutter garbage, a sad heap of guts in a $1200 suit.