Maybe it was, but that was my mother’s story. Something was always denying her something. She saw no romance in her failure. The damage to her pride made her spit and lash out, and yet, oddly enough, it wasn’t my father who’d made me dream of and long to return to America. It was my mother, together with my grandfather. She didn’t talk about the place or her experiences there very often, but when she did, it was with a bitter glow, remembering a promise broken, fulfillment almost attained and then denied. I don’t think she ever wanted to have children. She talked about America the way Drew Diamond did about the sixties; you knew it could never have been quite that good, but your curiosity was aroused. America continued always as a part of her story, her myth.
My grandfather told me of the grit, the reality, first in terse and funny letters, and later when he came to see us in England. He and my mother always got along. He called her Princess. He himself was Duke, though the suggestion was anything but aristocratic. To witness this duke in an English seaside boarding house was to watch a man uncomprehendingly at war with an alien horse. He held cucumber sandwiches as though they were Venus fly traps, possibly deadly and not for nourishment. He never spoke to me about his work in those days. This was soon after he’d retired, decked out with every medal and merit badge the Department had to offer; and at that time, even more so than now, the Department went in for status decorations in a big way. He and I would sit in front of a small TV set and wait for the BBC to bless us with a Western. He took my plastic soldiers, built a model on a low table with sand from the beach scattered beneath it, and illustrated for me just how it had gone down at the OK Corral. “You don’t wanna be a cop, Billy,” he said. “Get some education. Remember what the job did to your father.” I didn’t know then what the job had done to my father. I inferred something bad.
“Maybe we should discuss this over a drink, your mother, your family,” said Cataresco. Down the other end of the line I heard her eating, avocado and alfalfa sprout sandwich, I guessed, her usual office snack. She never went out for lunch. The first time I met her I’d known she was ambitious. This was up in the Hollywood Hills, at the Academy. I’d been requalifying for shooting. She sat at my table in the cafeteria for coffee, just a rookie, having decided to become a cop after taking a degree in business administration. She asked how long I thought it would be before she made captain. These days the smart people in the Department viewed it not as an instrument of justice, but as an unwieldy and manipulable corporation, a series of rungs up the promotional ladder to a decent salary or transfer. Behind the wheel of a car, she drove smoothly but fast. Drew was out of date, she was the new model, and I was in between, the crossroads man.
“A drink, right,” I said, wondering about “Crime Scene: Steam ’n Clean.” Maybe they went in and laundered your home after murder was done there. Some job; but if there was an angle to be found, someone in Los Angeles would find it. Across the lobby the guys from the FBI and the DEA were exchanging business cards. “You know anything about Steam ’n Clean?”
Her voice was exasperated. “Billy, what are you talking about?”
“Listen, I’ve been thinking about the details that don’t fit. The strawberries. I don’t know why, but I’ve got a feeling she didn’t buy them herself. The shell casing — I think it was put there because someone wanted us to find it. And the garbage bag. Did anyone check on that?”
“You gave the job to Drew, remember? Before you fired him from the case.”
“So I did. But let’s find out where that thing came from. There’s usually a batch number somewhere. I’ll see you at the office later, OK?”
Having hung up, I saw the conversation between the two federal agents flicker and die, as if they’d been talking about me, most likely asking each other whether I could be trusted, comparing notes on what they’d heard, wondering how I could be used to get to Ricky Lee. This time the FBI guy spoke, the one with the baseball cap and the hard pink ears. “I heard about the job you did on the Farber case. Outstanding! Outstanding! Farber was a swift and evil perpetrator.”
“A stone killer,” said the one who fancied himself like George Custer. “I heard you got him right between the eyes.”
“I was shooting to miss.” I told them to be in touch if I could help in any way, and crossed the lobby to pass through the glass doors into the sparkle and deluge of the rain.
VENICE, or so I understand, the other Venice, Venice, Italy, is a city of museums, of picturesque gondolas, of splendid palaces somewhat in decay, and canals that, come summer, turn to soupy swill. My Venice was likewise a city of contrasts. Millionaire actors rubbed shoulders with gangsters. Flophouse motels butted up next to fancy gyms and stores where you couldn’t even buy a T-shirt for $95. Parrots and palm trees were nature’s aerial accompaniment to baseheads, dope dealers, hookers (known as strawberries, as in pick what you like), and other, more earthly essentials of urban life. The streets at either end of the local high school were barricaded off to discourage drive-bys. Restaurants opened and shut again within weeks, only to give birth to others on the exact same location. The beach, by day the blond capital of the known universe, was transformed at night into a battleground of the lost. My Venice was small, brilliant, spacy, and mean.
I lived and worked by the beach and I loved it. This was my place, where homeboys paraded their pit bulls alongside the tourists, the tarot readers, the scam artists, and the panhandlers hustling a dollar for the next hamburger. Drew Diamond accused me of being too kind to these people. “What’s it with you and the dude in the liquor store? You ain’t turning into one of those touchy-feely guys, are you, Billy?” I didn’t bother telling him that compassion was a tool like any other.
The house where I’d lived with Ellen and Lucy had been bought at the top of the 1980s market with the help of a loan from Ellen’s father. Later, when his business was failing, we’d taken out a hefty mortgage to pay him back, and that was the big beginning of our money trouble. Part of Ellen’s thinking for the move to Seattle was that at least she’d be able to escape with some of the capital we’d sunk into the place, our lovely white elephant, which to me these days now belonged on a continent apart, even though I’d helped build the porch and had hung the wind chimes above the rocker with the faded and now drenched cherry-red cushions.
I walked up the ramps to find the doors open and the TV on without the sound, as if Ellen were expecting someone. Channel 5 was showing King Kong, the remake with Jessica Lange, the part where Kong staggered lost through the streets of New York. Kong was scratching his head as Ellen’s quick voice came from the kitchen. “You want a cup of coffee?”
“Please, that’d be great.”
There was a pause before she said, “Oh, Billy, is that you?”
I picked up a book from the coffee table, a fat new biography of Mozart. “Who else were you expecting?”
“I’ll be with you in a minute,” she said.
I’d loved living in this house. The rooms were light and high, a lofty dream of peace. Now, every time I came back, there was a change. Books and flowers seemed to be breeding, filling the tables and the shelves on either side of the fireplace. A great red-and-yellow paper bird hung from the ceiling, swaying this way and that in the currents from the central heating. The old curtains were gone, replaced by ones with green and white stripes, which, in the rain, gave the room a pleasant underwater ripple. There was a table with a computer on it in the corner where my reading chair had been. I came here to be restored and replenished; it was home still, but it wasn’t my home. I felt pangs of regret for those times in the past when I should have been here, with my family, and instead had been out there, on the streets, on Broadway, or at Sixth and Alvarado, or down in the Southland, obsessing about some guy with a gun or a knife in case he did it again and destroyed another family. There was the irony: I’d helped others but had been unable to save myself. I’d had a great wife, a great life, a beautiful daughter, and I’d blown it. It weighed, this sense of having failed.