There’s no response. I sigh, push myself slowly out of the chair I’m in, and wander back. She’s shaking her head. Her finger points accusingly at the screen. “What’s wrong with those people?” she says. “Don’t they know how sad the whole world is? Don’t they read the newspaper? What’s so funny?”
I grab a seat beside her, throw my arm around her shoulder, and give her a squeeze. “That’s when you need comedy the most,” I say, “when the whole world is going to hell.”
She looks at me and sniffs. “You don’t understand,” she mumbles. “I want to see something else.”
“Fine.” I pick up the remote and roam around until I find a stout, earnest, middle-aged woman wearing a white apron and chopping leeks. “Big, green beautiful leeks,” she says. “Just perfect for our potage de bonne femme.”
“Here, you like this any better?”
“Much,” Loretta says with satisfaction. “I used to cook, you know. You liked the way I cooked. Once upon a time.”
I get up from the couch. “I’m going back to where I came from,” I tell her. “You let me know if she starts cracking jokes about food.”
In my office again I shut the door quietly behind me. I sit down at the desk, close my eyes, and cup my head in my hands. Carmen should be here any minute. Carmen is a lifesaver. She’ll take Loretta out for a walk, or maybe they’ll go shopping for cheap clothes at Ross and then pretty soon it’ll be afternoon, and before you know it, evening. It’s been like this for a while. Minute to minute. Hour to hour. I don’t try to analyze Loretta anymore. You do what you can, of course. This pill, that pill. I stopped arguing with the doctors long ago. Whatever they give her helps, but the truth is, I don’t have much faith left in modern medicine. Maybe that was another thing that died in Vietnam, I don’t know. When you see your best friend collapse in front of you, when you see how fast a grown man can bleed and bleed and bleed in the tall spiky grass no matter what you stuff in his chest to stop it or what drugs the medic pumps up his arm or how loud you scream into the radio for the chopper to come, come, come now, come take him away goddammit—once you see that, it doesn’t matter, once you see his eyes roll like gray marbles back into his head, something just snaps inside of you and your buddies grab you and pull you off and you bite your lip and you lie there in the cool grass and you forget everything you were taught to believe.
I hear the front door click open and close, followed by Carmen’s sweet, “Buenos dias, señora.” The problem with the television is forgotten, and the two of them murmur affectionately like little birds on a wire. Lorerra loves me, okay. But she needs Carmen’s voice and strong, caring arms in a way I can’t possibly compete with. When Carmen walks in, that’s when I start to relax. That’s when I know the rest of Loretta’s day will go off smoothly, without a hitch.
Two skinny Asian teenagers on skateboards are laughing and racing around the lot at Park La Brea outside our tower. Both of them wear identical blue hoodies and white shorts. Both of them forgot to put on socks to go with their high-top sneakers. Both of them need to be in school. I watch them fly by me and shake my head. This younger generation, I mutter to myself. Then, before I turn the key in my Honda Civic and head north on the Hollywood Freeway toward Van Nuys, I decide to call my old friend, Lieutenant Malloy. We go way back. He’s on the homicide desk now, but I haven’t talked to him in a while and I figure he probably wouldn’t mind doing a little missing persons research for me. The LAPD has all those fancy new computers, after all. Why not put them to use?
He answers on the third ring. “You busy?” I say.
“I’m always busy, Amos. The city never sleeps, you know.”
“Yeah, so I heard.” I tell him about my meeting with Pinky Bleistiff and how he’s missing his lead singer.
“Maybe she found a better gig,” he offers.
“No,” I tell him, “it’s not like that.”
Malloy is slightly younger than me. He relocated to California a million years ago from the frozen streets of Chicago. Once he saw the blue Pacific, he realized he’d died and gone to heaven, and he never bothered looking back. For an Irish Catholic who once walked a beat and cracked heads with his trusty nightstick, he’s an exceedingly thoughtful man, which may be why we’re close. You shoulda been a philosopher, I’m always telling him. Or a priest. That makes him laugh.
“Why didn’t he just call the police?” Malloy says. “If he thinks something’s gone haywire, I mean—what the hell—that’s what you do, right?”
“I asked him that myself, Bill.”
“And?”
“And he kind of danced around it. I think he’s in love with her. He as much as said so, in fact.”
“Okay, so it’s romantic.”
“Right,” I say. “And when you put it in that light, well, then, maybe she’s not missing exactly—maybe it’s something else, maybe she’s just trying as best she can to disentangle herself from seeing him anymore.”
“Did you suggest that to him?”
“I—no. I didn’t say that. I couldn’t. I didn’t want to break his heart.”
“So you’re going to politely take his money instead? That doesn’t sound like something Amos Parisman would do.”
“Ordinarily, I wouldn’t. But Risa Barsky’s not the only one. There’s a drummer and fiddle player in the same band. Also vanished.”
Malloy is silent for a moment. Three musicians kicks it up to a new level of concern, I figure. “Okay,” he says finally. “Give me their names and anything else you got. I’ll send it downstairs and get back to you.”
“Thanks, Lieutenant. I owe you a lunch.”
“You still owe me a lunch from the last time I helped you,” he says and hangs up.
I fiddle with my radio dial while I cruise over to Van Nuys. Mariachi fades into basketball, which fades into rock n’ roll, which fades mercifully into Jesus. Help me, Jesus. I decide there’s nothing worth listening to finally and turn it off. By then I’m on the freeway, which isn’t too bad this time of day, and I’m feeling lucky because I’ve slipped between the morning rush hour and the next one that supposedly starts up about two o’clock. That’s what they say, but the truth is, it doesn’t matter. If you live long enough in LA you know damn well there’s nothing to be done. Too many people, too many things that can go wrong. You’re always under the thumb of the traffic god. I once drove to the dry cleaner’s on Santa Monica Boulevard, just a mile away—it took an hour, I swear.
Risa Barsky lives in a three-story tan stucco apartment building sandwiched between a series of similar ones. They all have names like Vista del Sol and Rancho Sereno. Hers is called Plata y Oro. The colors vary, but it’s pretty much the same bunch of pastel boxes all the way down the block. The sameness, in fact, reminds me of the slipshod apartments they used to crank out in the old gray Soviet Union. Only this is California. These places aren’t gray; they won’t collapse in the snow; the pipes won’t break or be stolen by the tenants. That’s not how it works here in paradise. Each unit has a tiny balcony of its own, big enough to park a bicycle or maybe a small barbecue grill. There are also newly planted magnolia trees on the apron up and down the avenue. In twenty years, if the drought doesn’t kill them, they’ll be spectacular. In twenty years, this will be a venerable neighborhood, worth millions. Not now, however. At the moment the street feels bored and barren and so sunny you have to squint to see where you’re going.
Except for yours truly, there is no one on the sidewalk. I adjust the brim of my Dodger cap and step inside the