13 Under the Wire Read online

  “Come along with me, cuero.”

  Hermana. She had picked him up a half hour earlier on the dance floor downstairs, coming on real strong, giving him tongue on the first kiss, grinding her body against his. Whoring was another activity Simon and friends devoted themselves to in Tijuas. But Hermana wasn’t some skeevy, used-up Zona Norte hooker. She was a real girl. Something about her looks, the confident way she carried herself, attracted Simon right from the start.

  Now here they were, the two of them in a hotel suite packed with people. Partiers danced on the beds, on the tabletops, out on the balcony. The singer on the boombox told about his “three animals”—rooster (weed), parrot (cocaine) and goat (heroin)—and how they would destroy “la gente,” the middle-class white folks who dared to tangle with them.

  Mis animales son bravos

  Si no saben torear, pues no le entren

  “Those who aren’t matadors shouldn’t fight bulls.” The lesson might have been lost on Simon, whose Spanish-language skills were pretty much limited to the word cerveza.

  Hermana led him away from the crowd and into a tiny kitchen. They had scored from an acquaintance of Hermana’s named Fausto, who now opened the glassine deck and spilled out a thumb-size pile of powder. Simon gave Hermana a wicked smile, thinking at first that it was cocaine. But the way Fausto treated the stuff indicated that it was dope, scag, heroin. Not some dirty Mexican Brown, either, but real China Dragon, pure and pretty and white.

  Hermana was all over Simon, sitting on his lap, nuzzling his neck. “You’ll love this, papi.”

  Fausto was like some sort of dwarf or small person (“Say hello to my little friend,” Hermana had said mockingly when she introduced Fausto to Simon, playing off Al Pacino’s line from Scarface). The dude didn’t stand much taller than Simon’s chest. One of the reasons that Simon followed the two of them upstairs from the disco was that he figured he could handle a midget if the deal turned out to be a hustle.

  Fausto smiled. “Vas a volar al cielo.”

  “He says you are going to fly right off to heaven.” Hermana lit a candle. She opened a leather kit bag, took out a hypodermic syringe and started to transfer the dope to a spoon.

  “Nuh-uh.” Simon’s words came out slurred, but his meaning was clear enough. “I’ll snort it.”

  “Like a little pussy?” She mashed her lips against his face. “Huh? A little gringo pussy?”

  “Él es un novato,” Fausto said, telling her the gringo was a rookie.

  Hermana whispered into Simon’s ear. “I’ll take care of you real good, baby. You’re going to get higher than you’ve ever been in your life.”

  The syringe came still sheathed in its plastic wrapper. She waved the hypodermic proudly. “See? Fresh for you. No sharing, no SIDA.”

  SIDA, meaning AIDS. Simon watched the process, mesmerized. Hermana cooked, filtered the liquefied H through a scrap of cotton fabric, and then drew the product into the barrel of the hypo with the plunger. He knew that he should call a halt to the whole business, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to do it.

  The dwarf started to speak to Hermana in rapid-fire Spanish. She kept up with the cook, shaking her head, telling him “No” at intervals.

  Fausto shrugged, got up from his seat and left the hotel room, shoving his way through the crowd so quickly that it was comical.

  Simon laughed. “What’s with him?”

  “He’s a leprechaun.” The word, pronounced in Hermana’s light Hispanic accent, again made Simon laugh.

  She pulled a latex tube out of her kit of works. “Which one?”

  Simon shook his head. Instead of offering her one of his arms, he pulled them both back and pinned them to his sides. “No, no, that one’s for you. You take the first hit.”

  “Come on, it’s just a single point, that’s all. Nothing to worry about.”

  A handsome vato emerged from the insanity in the next room and propped his muscular frame against the doorway. He stood gazing casually at the frozen drama playing out at the kitchen table. The guy’s insolent, knowing expression read like a challenge.

  Simon flopped his right arm down on the table in front of Hermana. “A skin pop, chica. No veins.”

  But she tied him off and mainlined him.

  The hit, when it came, knocked Simon back in his chair, mouth slack, head flopping forward like a sunflower stalk. He embarked on a trip to planet Yum.

  The vato unfolded his tall-drink-of-water form, left his post at the doorway and approached the nodded-out americano.

  “Deberíamos terminado aquí.” We should do him here.

  Hermana shook her head. “¿Así que va a sentir dolor?” Asking if Simon deserved such a pleasurable death, getting snuffed in the midst of a heroin high. She rose, retrieved a coffee-can ashtray from a nearby countertop and returned to the table just in time to catch Simon’s first spew of vomit as he woke from the effects of the dope.

  “Sweet Jesus.” He bent over and puked into the coffee can a second time, then re-surfaced with a crooked, sick-stained grin.

  “Up on your feet, cuero.” Hermana cheerfully pulled him erect. “We get you outside, you’ll feel better.”

  With the high-quality dope singing through his veins, Simon’s mind was a shade overwhelmed. He mumbled unintelligibly.

  Hermana and her friend paid no attention. They escorted Simon through the party room. The music and the dancing melded seamlessly into his kaleidoscopic drug rush. He tried a shuffling dance himself, and practically nodded out mid-step. Faces loomed out of the dope-smoke haze, leered at him, fell away.

  The night air on the balcony felt glorious. Hermana and the handsome vato braced Simon, jostling the dancers aside, maneuvering through the crowd toward the front railing. Beneath them, the midnight street scene on La Revo was booming and zooming.

  “I love it here!” Simon yelled, staggering forward and raising his arms like Rocky.

  The two strangers he had just met boosted him up and over the tubular, white-enameled bars of the balcony railing. They launched him into space, or he launched himself—it was difficult for the distracted bystanders to recall. Later, a T-shirt vendor (“Tijuana—City of Tomorrow”) on the street told everyone that the boy came down gracefully, with his arms spread out as if they were wings, “como un cisne”—like a swan.

  Chapter 2

  After the priest pronounced the final “Amen” over Simon Loushane, the guests drifted away from the graveside. There was a large crowd, dozens of mourners, most of them present out of respect for the family rather than from any familiarity with the deceased. The lanes of Forest Lawn cemetery in Los Angeles—given sober-sounding names such as Ascension Road and Covenant Way—were lined with vehicles. Layla Remington had been forced to park a quarter mile away.

  Smog the color of a dirty overcoat socked in the whole San Fernando Valley. Air-quality alerts had gone out, warning anyone with breathing difficulties to stay inside. Those with healthy lungs were on their own.

  The limousines in the funeral cortege began to pass by Remington as she walked alone to her car. The lead limo slowed in order to negotiate a sharp turn onto Memorial Drive. The big car inched forward alongside her for a long beat. The back window remained half rolled down, smog be damned. Remington looked over to see the dead boy’s father, Victor Loushane, sitting in the backseat. She could have reached out and patted his shoulder through the open limousine window.

  Victor Loushane gave Remington a stony-eyed stare. His face appeared sculpted in wax. Layla felt embarrassed, as if she had blundered into the man’s private grief. His expression gave no hint of recognition. Of course he didn’t remember her, a onetime, long-ago friend of his children.

  Victor Loushane must have pressed a button, or ordered his chauffeur to do it, because the window powered silently up. It was like a curtain closing on a three-second drama. Remington quickly looked away. The spell was broken. The limousine rolled forward.

  A few minutes later, as Remington approach
ed her ancient Honda Civic parked down on Forest Lawn Drive, a sedan pulled up. The driver emerged—black suit, white shirt, simple black tie.

  “Miss Layla Remington?”

  “Yes?”

  “Mr. Loushane requested that I pick you up and bring you to Wildermanse.” The driver made a show of opening the back door of the sedan.

  “This is my car,” Remington said, indicating the Civic.

  “We’ll get you right back here after the gathering at the house,” the driver promised. His face wore the practiced blank expression that the wealthy required of their help.

  Remington was confused. “He said to bring me, specifically?”

  “There is to be a small get-together of family and close friends,” the driver said.

  Do I qualify? Remington didn’t say it out loud.

  “Nothing too formal,” the driver added. “There will be food.”

  Remington shrugged, left her own car parked where it was and climbed into the backseat of the sedan.

  The funeral, held earlier in the day at Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, had been a huge affair. The Loushanes were active in society. Victor Loushane served as Los Angeles County’s Republican Party chairman. The Mass was said by the family’s close personal friend, William Cardinal Purchase, archbishop of the Los Angeles diocese.

  A decade back, when she was in grade school and a playmate of the Loushane family’s numerous children, Remington had been a frequent guest at Wildermanse. She loved the place, it was so magical, with formal gardens, extensive grounds and, in the far regions of the property, what amounted to a waterfall, probably the only one in L.A.

  As he maneuvered out of the cemetery, the driver asked Remington if she had known the recently deceased Simon Loushane. She told him they had been close when they were younger, that he was the kid brother of some friends her own age. The driver said he was sorry for her loss. They left it at that. The rest of the drive across the Valley to Granada Hills passed in silence. Remington kept asking herself what she was doing in a strange car headed to a memorial for a boy she hadn’t seen in two or three years.

  The answer didn’t immediately present itself once she arrived at Wildermanse. The driver pulled up at the front entrance and opened the car door for her. Nothing too formal, he had said. But just approaching up the long driveway at Wildermanse put things on a formal footing.

  “Just text me when you want to head back to Forest Lawn.” He gave Remington a card with his number on it. She must have looked a little lost, because he hesitated before getting back into the sedan. “They’ll be in back,” he said, motioning beyond the house.

  As she had been at Forest Lawn, she was left alone. She proceeded around to the rear of the mansion, feeling little stabs of nostalgia as she did so. She had last been here…when? Four years ago, when she was eighteen.

  The gathering of mourners scattered across the house’s expansive bluestone terrace and into the formal gardens beyond. The mood was muted, maybe even a little extra subdued, since the dear departed had been so young and the circumstances of his death so harsh. The whisper passed among the mourners. A suicide in Tijuana. Beneath that, a whisper of a whisper. Drugs.

  All the same, Remington didn’t see many wet eyes among the throng. She had shed her own tears in private. Simon Loushane had a place in the pantheon of her childhood, and in her adolescence, too. She looked across the terrace and picked out Simon’s brother and sister, the twins, Ellis and Caroline. They stood together in the small group of sleek people attending Cardinal Purchase.

  Both of the twins held faint, barely-there smiles. Caroline so cool, so favored and fresh and pretty. Her complexion appeared snowlike in the dying California afternoon. Ellis gave Remington a lazy nod of recognition. She smiled back and did her best to hide the involuntary shiver that passed through her.

  Remington watched, fascinated, as the group across the terrace slowly reoriented itself. What had been a half-dozen people standing worshipfully around a senior cleric of the Catholic Church became the same half dozen worshipfully surrounding Caroline, a beautiful twenty-two-year-old girl. Remington remained where she was, with her back to the expansive series of French doors that led into the living room.

  The Cardinal said something, nodding vigorously, and Caroline laughed.

  Yes, laughter at a wake, though that was not quite what this was. More like an après-burial party. There was indeed food, tasteful catered tables of it, servers circulating with hors d’oeuvres. Some cultures go out of their way to embrace a celebration of life, rather than the tragedy of death. So, yes, the murmur of voices, the rattle of small cutlery, interspersed with short barks of hilarity—all fitting, nothing unseemly. But Remington knew the Loushanes to be a coldhearted bunch, and she read the lightness of the mood accordingly.

  “Miss Remington?”

  A voice behind her. She turned to see Margaret Baily, the head of household staff at Wildermanse.

  “Oh, hi.” Remington was convinced that Baily had been sent to inform her that there was a mistake and she really hadn’t been invited to the affair after all.

  “Do you have a few minutes to see Mr. Loushane? He’s in the small study.”

  “Um, sure.”

  Very strange, Remington thought as she followed Baily through the house. Victor Loushane hadn’t said more than a few hundred words to her throughout her childhood. She had a sudden thought that Simon had left something to her in his will, and snorted with a low chuckle at the absurdity of the idea. The sound drew a glance from Baily, who opened the door to the Wildermanse study and motioned Remington through.

  “Hello, Layla.” Brockton Loushane moved forward to meet her. He was the oldest son.

  “Layla Remington,” said Victor Loushane, Brockton’s father. He came around the huge mahogany partner’s desk and took her by the arm. “I know you and Simon were very…close.”

  He must be past eighty by now, Remington realized. Victor possessed the kind of old man’s eyes that devoured the young. Clutching at Remington’s arm, feasting on her with his gaze, he searched with his fingers among the bones of her shoulder.

  “My father and I wanted to extend our condolences,” Remington said. She extricated herself and crossed to exchange an L.A. air kiss with Brock.

  “Thank you.” Brock motioned her to an armchair in front of the desk.

  “Yes, thank you for coming,” added the patriarch, seating himself and giving the floor over to his son.

  “Can I fix you something?” Brockton asked. He held a glass of his own filled with ice and an amber liquid.

  “She’s twenty-two years old, she doesn’t drink goddamn scotch,” Victor Loushane drawled.

  An uncomfortable pause. Remington thought she should take the son up on his offer, just to spite the overbearing father. But she didn’t like scotch.

  “So,” Brock said. “You’re at the police academy now?”

  “Yes, I just started.”

  “Where is that located, downtown in Elysian Park?”

  “That was the old one. The new academy holds some of its classes right next door, here in Granada Hills.” She gestured vaguely toward the east, where the LAPD’s Davis Training Facility was located alongside the freeway.

  “And you’re in a six-month program there?”

  Remington nodded. She couldn’t imagine where they were going with this. She felt as though she were in an interview for a job she didn’t want. Brockton ran neck and neck with his father in Layla’s sweepstakes for the least favorite Loushane family member. Supercilious prig.

  “You’ll be following in your dad’s footsteps, then, is that right?” Brock asked.

  “He’s never worn a badge,” the father barked out, breaking his moody silence to correct his son. “Her dad isn’t a police officer. He’s an administrative clerk at the Parker Center. Chief Gates hired him. Never worn a badge.”

  “That is correct, sir,” Remington said, meanwhile thinking, What the hell?

  “Does yo
ur work at the police academy keep you busy 24-7?” Brock asked. “Or might you find yourself with a little extra time on your hands?”

  Victor Loushane broke in, impatient. “I want you to do something for me, Layla. I’ll pay you handsomely for the service.”

  —

  That summer the ranch hands started to complain about the smell. Fausto had sited the Palo Mayombe shrine thirty yards from the adobe bunkhouse, in an unpainted wood-framed outbuilding. As the heat in Chihuahua climbed into triple digits, the distance proved too close.

  “Stinks like death,” Jesús da Silva said.

  “Death don’t stink, life does,” Hibram the ranch foreman responded, repeating something that he had heard Fausto say.

  The shed’s pine planking had weathered into a splintered brown-gray. They could have put the shrine anywhere on the ranch, but Fausto seemed intent on this particular shed. Probably it was an old gallinero, a former henhouse, long and low, eighty by twenty, or thereabouts, rectangular, anyway. Flat-roofed. No one noticed that the dimensions of the shed were of the same boxlike ratio as a coffin, 84 x 28 x 23, but in feet, rather than a casket’s inches. Fausto saw the parallel right away. He liked the symbolism.

  The walls inside were crusted with so much sacrificial blood that it felt as though the interior were getting smaller all the time. Chicken blood, most of it, but rat, rabbit, dog, sheep, ox, and goat, too. Lately, human. You couldn’t hear for the flies. Fausto covered the chinks in the planking with tar paper and boarded the windows with plywood, so that the shed was sightless dark inside. But the stench was so bad it was as if you could see it.

  When the hands complained, Hibram moved the whole crew out of the adobe bunkhouse into trailers a quarter mile away, at the bottom of the hill, down by the arroyo. Fausto spread the rumor that anyone who had bitched about the shed would sicken and die. That fall, a flash flood hit the wash and moved the trailers off their foundations. Jesús da Silva, the main complainer, stood watching the roiling waters. The bank gave way under him. His body was found two miles down the wash.