Violent ward, p.25
Violent Ward, page 25
‘She’s coming back here this evening.’
‘Well, I guess you have nothing to fear from her directly,’ I said. ‘If she went to so much trouble to get someone to kill you, she’s not likely to do it herself.’
‘No, she needs to be a long way away when it happens. The insurance company will put her under the microscope.’
‘How did it ever get to be like this between you?’ I said. I got to my feet and walked across the room, desperately needing to stretch my legs.
‘She’s sick,’ said Petrovitch. ‘It’s my fault, I guess. I neglected her when she needed care and attention.’
‘Is it the money?’ I asked. I looked at the coins in the glass case. The Roman emperors were all frowning. I think maybe the spotlights were getting in their eyes.
‘She feels rejected, and it’s eaten into her soul. She’s devious and manipulative. At first I even liked that, it seemed very female, very childlike. But when she started doing bad things I couldn’t handle it anymore.’
‘Has she seen a shrink?’ I said, abandoning the ancient world for more urgent problems.
‘She refuses. But her regular doctor is a shrewd old guy. He’s helped me a lot.’
‘No drugs?’ I sat down alongside him with my feet stretched out. We compared shoes.
‘Not for her, only for me.’ Rueful smile. ‘I’m in analysis. He’s arranged counseling too. It’s kind of traumatic.’
‘I imagine it is.’
‘The thing that torments me is the murder of the old guy in Topanga. Did she kill him, or was she just around when it happened?’
‘Maybe we’ll never find out,’ I said.
‘Goldie, would you go find the driver?’
It was a neat way to tell me the audience was at an end and tell Goldie that the master wanted a word with me in private.
I got to my feet. Petrovitch got up too. Take away the curly beard and the noble-looking horse and a distinct likeness to Marcus Aurelius was apparent. Of all the Roman emperors, here was the one to resemble: humane, studious, unassuming, and ready to share power. Good old Zach Petrovitch, he certainly chose the right decorators.
‘This signing,’ said Petrovitch, as if it was just an afterthought. ‘Have you arranged the witnesses and whatever we need? Is the other side ready?’
‘It can be ready tomorrow,’ I offered. ‘Vic Crichton is in town, and I’d like to get the whole thing off my hands. It’s to be done by means of a power of attorney. I guess you got my message.’
‘That’s okay. Tomorrow will suit me fine. Any time in the P.M. Line it up. Your office?’
I was about to tell him what a dump it was and suggest some other venue, but with him in the middle of paying good money for those premises that seemed inappropriate. ‘Great,’ I said. ‘Great.’
As he shook hands and said goodbye he said, ‘I still love her, Mickey. You’ll understand that, I know. That’s why I’m taking such a hit.’
‘I know,’ I said.
Goldie reappeared and escorted me down to the garage and told the driver to take me wherever I wanted to go. ‘Mexico City,’ I said. ‘Do you know a good whorehouse?’
After I got into the back seat of the white limo, Goldie followed me, leaving the car door open to show that he was getting out again.
‘It’s straight stuff,’ said Goldie. ‘No matter what you think, it’s true.’
‘Is it, Goldie?’
‘I’m not going to sit around and let it happen. It’s not just a matter of being on his payroll; he’s the guy I look after. I like him: he won a Silver Star flying a chopper in ’Nam. It’s my rep too. Am I getting through to you?’
‘You still think I’m a part of it?’ I said, trying to repress any sign of panic. ‘You think I’m trying to knock off my own client?’ I forced a smile. He reached out very slowly and took my arm in his gorilla hand.
Goldie had cold gray eyes, and looking into them wasn’t comforting. ‘I’m not sure,’ he said. ‘But I’ll tell you this, Mickey. I’m on the way to finding out, and when I find these people I will blow them away.’
‘Like you blew away Pindero?’
‘I think we both know the son of a bitch I’m talking about,’ he said.
‘Did you give my name to the cops, Goldie? About Pindero?’
‘I told you, it was Mrs Petrovitch did that.’
‘Yeah, I forgot. You told me.’
‘I’m going to blow that bastard away. I mean it, Mickey. You’re a buddy, but it won’t make any difference.’ He let go of my arm and stepped back out of the car, still watching me.
‘Tell me something, Goldie,’ I said. ‘What charity is it that Mrs Petrovitch is so dedicated to? I mean the one where she met brother Pindero, who got so tragically dead?’
Asking Goldie even the simplest kind of question brought a suspicious frown to his face, like I knew the answer already and was trying to needle him. ‘Rainbow Stojil,’ he said. ‘The Rainbow’s End Shelter for Homeless Men. Don’t tell me you haven’t heard of it.’
‘Heard of it? I gave them a big donation only recently.’
He closed the car door with more force than it needed. Stojil? Ingrid? More than one helper? How much of Petrovitch was real life? None of it, maybe. None of these rich people were real – they were just poor folks acting.
‘Where did you say, buddy?’
‘My office,’ I said.
‘That’s a lousy neighborhood,’ said the driver.
‘What are you, a realtor?’
I sank back in the leather and thought about Zachary Petrovitch standing there in that room full of Roman pictures. From a paranoid like that I would have expected a mural of Julius Caesar being stabbed to death on the steps of the capitol building, but I guess that wasn’t one of the decisive battles of imperial Rome. It was just a felony.
15
The trial of the policemen accused of beating Rodney King was being aired on the Fox channel. The transmission was live and screened all day. It had been going for weeks. The evening news often featured day-by-day clips from the trial, but I didn’t watch the news regularly. Maybe I should have, but like most people in Los Angeles I figured a trial out in Simi Valley, Ventura County, was not something to miss the sports for. And for the likes of me, seeing the law in action was too much like work.
The verdict came through about three in the afternoon. I had been at LAX and was on my way from the airport to my office to keep my appointment with Mr and Mrs Petrovitch and Crichton. We were to read through and then sign the agreement and the other papers.
The sun was shining, and I’d had a good lunch at the airport with a satisfied client who was in transit. When I have meetings there I like to use the main restaurant because they have valet parking and I can be back on the road more quickly. The airport traffic was light, and I came under the 405 with the car stereo playing a tape of Mercer, feeling that everything was just fine. That’s always a dangerous state of mind.
The first time I became aware of something unusual was when I spotted a crowd standing watching the window of a TV store where dozens of TV screens were tuned to the Fox live transmission. It took me a moment or two to guess what was drawing these little crowds.
Once the verdict was brought in, the news spread through the city like a tidal wave. People who had shown no interest in the trial all week were suddenly inflamed or indignant or excited.
My first evidence of the city’s hysteria came a block or two later, when half a dozen black kids – big guys about eighteen or nineteen years old – came running out to my car when I stopped at a red light. There were four of them; they began beating on the glass with their fists and trying to wrench the doors open. I maybe would have toughed it out but a fifth guy arrived waving a baseball bat and swung it at my windshield. I shouted abuse at them and jabbed the gas pedal so that the car shot forward and the baseball bat hit metal instead of glass. Traffic coming across the intersection had to swerve as I went weaving through the cross-street traffic. There were yells of anger and a dissonance of horns, but I got through to the other side and kept going.
I began to realize I’d not encountered just one freak gesture of hostility. I could see other signs of agitation. People were arguing and shouting, and a fleeing figure – a young white guy – was chased across the street in front of me, so I had to brake to avoid him and his pursuers. I kept rolling and figured that as long as I didn’t stop I’d be safe. I saw a black-and-white coming the other way with beacon flashing and siren on. I switched my radio from station to station without finding any news bulletins. At the next intersection I slowed and took the right-hand lane. I found myself saying a prayer of thanks to that unknown guy who wrote into the traffic code permission to turn right on a red signal. It gave me a chance to keep moving, and now there were crowds gathering at every intersection to molest and attack any motorist who stopped for a light.
It was a rough district to drive through. Had the traffic in town been heavy, I might have been tempted to route myself from LAX to my office by the freeways, but that’s a long detour. The noon radio bulletin promised traffic everywhere was light, so I had taken the most direct route. No one had confided to me the fact that the city was about to disappear in smoke and flame.
As I turned the corner and neared my office, I saw a group of men in T-shirts and jeans smashing the windows of a dry cleaners I’d used from time to time. The Korean proprietor and his two muscular sons came out the door wielding shotguns. The men smashing the windows ran off, shouting and laughing. All along the street, shop windows had been broken. The sidewalks were marked with white puddles of broken glass, and at the end of the block there were flames billowing out of the little mom-and-pop grocery store.
My car phone buzzed. I thought it would be Miss Huth, complaining again about the social decline of the neighborhood, but it wasn’t.
‘Murphy?’
‘You got it,’ I said. I recognized Goldie’s voice, so I guessed what was coming.
‘Mr Petrovitch for you,’ said Goldie.
Without preamble, Petrovitch said, ‘Where are you, Mickey?’
‘South Central, and it’s very active. You?’
‘I’m on the Harbor Freeway heading north.’
‘You have a good view from there,’ I said.
‘There are fires all over South Central – to the right and the left of us. Is your office okay?’
‘I’ll be there in a couple of minutes,’ I said. ‘But it’s not a choice location for a meeting. Stay on the freeway and keep going; it’s not healthy down here in the streets.’
‘I can’t reach Ingrid,’ he said. ‘I missed her at the restaurant. She’s driving over to your office, but she’s not answering her phone.’
‘I’ll go to the office and wait for her. It’s better I’m there. My secretary will be popping her rivets: she’s never seen our lovely city en fête.’
‘Ingrid may have heard the news on the car radio and gone straight home.’
‘You go home too,’ I said. ‘I’ll ask Ingrid to call you if she arrives at the office.’
‘Do that,’ said Petrovitch and rang off. He wasn’t a man noted for his lingering goodbyes.
I saw a gang of about a dozen men in a parking lot, systematically smashing the cars, levering the trunks open, and ransacking them. Then I saw the first of the many looters. Dodging through the traffic came individuals, then streams of men, women, and children, every last one of them laboring under the weight of some item or other, from car batteries to sewing machines. The looting had started; political science gave way to economics. Seeing so many shiny possessions cradled in the loving arms of new owners, the gangs roaming the streets were irresistibly diverted from violence to theft.
As I neared my office the sky became darker with smoke and I saw more violence. Bloodied people rushed past. A white man was on the ground bleeding, and a woman was standing over him sobbing. From an overturned car, its doors opened wide, papers, hats, shoes, a newspaper, an umbrella, and broken glass had spilled onto the road. Many LA drivers regularly carry handguns in their glove compartments; today guns were what everyone wanted. Above the noise of the engine I heard the regular crack of gunfire. Everywhere I looked, there were indications that attacks had been made on shops and people who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Some of the business premises had BLACK scrawled or sprayed across doors and windows, but that had not always saved them from smashed windows or fire bombs. As I got to the office and turned into the garage I saw that the van parked across the street selling tacos and soft drinks had been wrecked and set afire. It was now just a blackened shell with blistered paint and smoldering tires. There was a stink of burning in the air, and the crack of gunfire was growing more frequent.
I breathed a sigh of relief as I went down the ramp and into the garage under my building. It was gloomy. The fluorescents were off so that the only light came through the windows along the sidewalk. There was no sign of the janitor; the little glass office he called home was locked up. I went around my car and examined the dent the kid had made in my paintwork; it was as big as my fist, but the paint was intact and with luck it wouldn’t flake before I got it fixed.
Not all the building’s tenants had fled for home. There were half a dozen cars there still. I saw Miss Huth’s old Buick, and on the far side of the garage I recognized a white BMW and knew I had a visit from Budd.
On the stairs I caught up with two of my neighbors. Karen, a big earth-mother Nicaraguan nurse from the single mothers advisory center, had a shotgun under her arm. Clive, the architect, was nursing a big machine gun with a curved magazine and wooden stock. ‘Jesus Christ!’ I said. ‘What are you doing with an AK-Forty-seven?’
‘Don’t you have a gun?’ said Karen in surprise.
‘Not like that, I don’t,’ I said.
‘You’d better stay with us,’ said Clive. I looked at him. His bold-patterned bow tie and neatly trimmed beard looked incongruous with the battle-worn old gun. ‘We’re going on the roof to protect the building.’
‘I’m expecting visitors.’
‘They won’t be coming,’ said Clive. He looked out of the window. The street had become quiet.
‘I’ll be okay. You go ahead,’ I said. ‘And be careful. You’ll kill someone.’
‘Tacka tacka tacka tacka tacka,’ he called. Oh, my gosh, every man is a Rambo at heart.
‘Is that thing loaded, Karen?’ I couldn’t believe that my neighbors were all armed to the teeth.
‘Of course it is,’ she replied, pushing her long black hair back with her free hand. ‘I keep it under my desk. I’m always having people threatening me and trying to steal the cash.’
‘In the prenatal advisory bureau?’
‘You’re a lawyer,’ she said. She was touchy in the way people get when they are nervous or frightened. ‘So don’t pretend you don’t know what goes on in this neighborhood.’
‘Okay. Well, take care, you two,’ I said.
‘You should have a gun in the office,’ said Clive. ‘It’s not fair to your staff to leave them unprotected.’
‘I’ll see about it.’
‘Tacka tacka tacka tacka tacka.’ His voice echoed in the narrow stairwell as he trotted up to the roof brandishing his machine gun. He put an arm around her protectively, but I figured Karen’s dark skin would keep her safer on the streets than Clive and his AK-47.
When I opened the door to my office I saw Budd facing me with an apprehensive look on his face. In his hand he had Danny’s Browning, and it was pointing at my belly. When he saw it was me he said, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, Mickey. I didn’t see your car arrive.’
‘You want me to go out and drive in again?’ I hate having guns pointed at me.
He’d been sitting in the room that used to be Korea Charlie’s office, alternately looking at the TV and then out the window and exchanging his thoughts with Miss Huth. I could see her now, standing on tiptoe to see over the frosted glass partition. I wiggled my fingers at her.
‘What are you doing here, Budd?’ I asked as I gently nudged the gun aside so it didn’t point at me.
He ignored my question. ‘Holy shit! Have you seen what’s going on out there?’
‘Have I seen it? I’ve just driven through it, buddy.’ I went to the phone and dialed Danny. After a few minutes with the busy signal I put the phone down again.
Budd was watching me. ‘I’ve never known anything like this,’ he said. ‘Were you here for the Watts riots?’
‘I was only fourteen years old,’ I said caustically. ‘You must have been twelve.’ I wasn’t in the mood for another of Budd’s flights of fancy.
Now that she was quite sure my arrival wasn’t a visit from a friendly neighborhood riot mob, Miss Huth emerged from her den to greet me. ‘We were worried about you, Mr Murphy,’ she said.
Budd said, ‘Miss Huth said you’d be here anytime. She said you had an appointment at—’ He looked at the clock.
‘Sit down,’ I said. ‘You’re making me nervous striding around with that gun in your hand. Put the damn thing away.’ To Miss Huth I said, ‘Is the coffee machine working? Have you heard from Mr Kim or Crichton or anyone?’
‘I’ll make you fresh coffee, Mr Murphy. I am so pleased you are safe. Mr Kim is at the Rainbow Hostel.’
‘How do you know?’
‘He just phoned from there,’ she said, ‘and I had to phone him back to tell him Mr Crichton’s date of birth.’
‘Did he take any money from the safe, do you know?’
‘Yes,’ said Miss Huth. ‘Twenty thousand dollars in cash. I had to get it from the bank. I am worried about him with all this trouble in the streets.’
The TV in the corner was babbling away. I was thankful I’d kept that ancient set although I seldom looked at it except during some really important football game.
By now most of the TV channels had suspended normal programming. The newsrooms were permanently on the air, bringing minute-by-minute reports from their mobile camera teams using vans with portable antennas. It was a hell of a scene to watch when you knew that the real thing was going on in the street outside your door. Most of these transmissions from the battlefront were shaky and wobbly. Sometimes the picture collapsed completely and the anchors in the studio had to ad lib their way through the break or find some earlier footage to transmit. In the back rooms of the TV stations every telephone was in use, as reporters heard – and tape-recorded – reports of fires and violence across the city. Other staff members were using the phones to locate politicians, sociologists, writers, and academics: instant-wisdom talking heads always ready to give a TV camera their views on the world.
