The Rita Farmer Mystery series Box Set Read online

  She went by the fullness of Amaryllis B. Cubitt, which, besides the satisfying ABC of it, just seemed to fit, like Susan B. Anthony or William Jennings Bryan.

  Politicians loved getting their picture taken with her. Movie stars especially adored her, I believe because they crave authenticity above all: an antidote to their tendency to overdose on their craft. Some of them adopted the ABC as a pet charity—excellent for publicity. The actors and actresses came and went, of course, while Amaryllis soldiered on consistently. The mission held generic Christian services on Sundays. Which the movie stars tended to avoid.

  The doctor returned and nudged over a rolling stool with her foot. She settled herself and began to flush my wound with saline solution out of a squirt-gunny instrument. “Does that hurt?”

  “No.”

  A nurse came in, saying, “I can give you a hand.”

  “Thanks, Lourdes,” said the doctor.

  So the nurse assisted, dabbing gauze and so on. Nurses in the movies dab their gauze daintily, as if they’re afraid to hurt the person, but real ones dab it pretty firmly, I can tell you. The doctor breathed evenly as she worked, her eyes quick behind her glasses.

  Detective Herrera came back. “You have a very protective friend out there.” He smiled, amused. He was good-looking with that tough-guy nose, but I didn’t have the energy.

  I said, “You mean Sylvan?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s a good man.”

  “The other one seemed pretty traumatized.”

  “Oh, yeah, Stuart. He has a delicate constitution.”

  Herrera laughed.

  Feeling steadier, I told him about my quest for a reasonably sanitary lunch, the boy on the sidewalk, the thugs and the two-by-four.

  “I didn’t see their faces at all, unfortunately, what with the sweatshirt hoods.”

  He asked about their height and weight, and I did the best I could, remembering the one to be short and thick-butted, the other much taller, maybe six feet, and thin.

  “How do you know they were guys?”

  “I don’t, I just got that impression. I can’t even tell you their race. Or races.”

  “Did you see their hands?”

  “Now that I think of it, they were wearing gloves. Yeah, like work gloves, leather work gloves. The heavier one’s sweatshirt was black with a white graphic on the front.”

  Herrera took notes. “See any lettering?”

  “No, I don’t remember, it was so fast. The other one’s sweatshirt was plain gray.”

  “Pants?”

  “Uh, blue jeans on the big-butt, and different pants on the tall one, maybe brown or black? I don’t remember.”

  “OK.”

  “Shoes?”

  “Sneakers, I think. Yeah, sneakers, mostly white. I don’t know what kind.”

  “Clean or dirty?”

  “Clean.”

  “Go on with what happened.”

  “Well, it was like my maternal instinct kicked in or something—”

  “You’re a mother?”

  “Yes, I have a five-year-old son, but I still get carded all the time. So yeah, I just yelled for them to drop it, and to my amazement, they did. I forgot about my costume. They took off running towards downtown on Mateo.”

  His cell phone rang. He flipped it open. “Yeah.” He wanted me to hear him sounding tough and casual. “No,” he said curtly. “I’ve only been here for”—he thrust out his arm and checked his watch—“twenty minutes. Can’t somebody—”

  He listened. “OK, I’ll find out, but then I’m going to come back and finish this interview with the female.”

  He shut the phone. “Take your time,” he said to the doctor. “Don’t let her go anywhere, I’ll be right back.”

  The doctor felt inside my wound with a gloved finger. All I felt was pressure. She said, “He likes you.”

  The nurse put in, “They like all the cute gunshot victims.” She was fortyish and fairly pert.

  The doctor used a forceps and a scalpel to cut away little bits of mashed skin. Competence radiated out of her. I watched without getting queasy, which made me proud.

  One time I had, in utter desperation, turned to the ABC Mission. It was about two years ago, when Petey’s and my chips were seriously down. Amaryllis B. Cubitt herself paid off my electric bill and then handed me a ten-dollar McDonald’s card. Walking into that mission I felt like the lowest piece of crap ever to stumble the earth, but Amaryllis grabbed me by the scruff, as it were, and snapped me out of it.

  “Don’t be scared,” she told me after listening to my angst. “You can come back if you need to. But judging by you,” she laughed, “you aren’t going to want to need to.”

  I looked at her.

  She said, “I predict you’re gonna get that commercial you just auditioned for. Either that, or I predict you’re gonna go out and get a job waiting tables so PG&E doesn’t ever again turn the lights out on you and your child. I also predict you’re gonna get with DCSS and collect that child support you’re owed.”

  “I intend to pay this back,” I’d told her.

  “Hmp,” she growled skeptically. “Well, sister, I’ll go ahead and predict you will.”

  It was that kind of clairvoyance that commanded the respect of the city.

  On that occasion, I’d felt a resonance with this tall, beautiful, arresting woman. Not love, exactly, maybe not even affection, since her hard-assedness verged on belligerence, but something deep.

  And I had, in fact, made a point of paying the money back, plus extra.

  The doctor began to stitch inside the wound, and at this point I looked away. “You have to put stitches down inside?”

  “Yes, I’m pulling together the fascia first, that’s the sheathing around the muscle.”

  “I want to say ow but I don’t really feel anything. Just, like, pulling.”

  “Good.”

  For the first time, I thought about how my arm would look later on. I asked, “Should I be worried about a big old scar? Will children at the beach scream and run from me?”

  The doctor smiled. “You’ll have a scar, but it should be quite a thin line, if you let it heal well. Do you model too?”

  “A little, but I’m getting out of the whole business. Going to law school.”

  “Oh. Well, I suppose we could still call in one of the plastic fellows for a consult, if you’re highly concerned about a scar.”

  “I don’t know if it’s that important to me.”

  “Do you have good insurance?”

  “No.”

  “I’d forget it, then.”

  “OK.”

  “Your wound is fairly uncomplicated. I think you’ll be pleased.”

  “OK.”

  She pulled each stitch carefully. I felt the tugging in a general, dull way. It was nice to just lie there and have someone take care of me.

  I thought about Amaryllis’s radio show. Whenever I caught a few minutes of it I’d remember how she’d made me feel: so much less like a loser, without even referring to God. You’d listen to her call-in program on Saturday mornings for the hell of it, for the pure entertainment of it. She was an anti-bleeding heart, which is to say she didn’t pity the people she helped. Neither pitied them nor bought their bullshit.

  “Well, you see,” some sad sack would try to explain, “I can’t work because I can’t be away from my kids.”

  “That’s a good excuse,” Amaryllis would say breezily, “and you’ve used it for a long time, haven’t you?”

  “Well…”

  “So long that you’ve even got yourself believing it. Let me assure you, you’re the only one who still believes it. You got to get so you want that steady paycheck more than you want a knuckleheaded excuse. That’s all.”

  She certainly was a fresh gust blowing through the shrillness of the city’s cult-of-victimhood advocates who’d never gone a day without food in their lives.

  “You come see me tomorrow if you decide to get se
rious, and I’ll help you with the next step. I’ll be able to tell right away if you’re not serious, so don’t waste my time, OK, sugar?”

  The doctor began stitching my skin. The feeling of tugging got sharper. My stomach jumped and I took a deep breath.

  The doctor stopped. “You OK?”

  “Yeah.”

  She recommenced her sewing.

  Detective Herrera came back, and I described the bullets popping out at the boy and me from the derelict sedan in the middle of the day.

  “It was like a horrible dream, the way the car just slid over to the curb like a big fish and then these shots.”

  He questioned me closely about the shooters and the car. Again, I hadn’t seen any faces. The car was an old Buick, I thought, in a crapped-out beige, and I had not seen the license plates. “Except I think they were California, that’s just my impression. There was a driver, and somebody else in the backseat, but I don’t know if they were the only people in the car.”

  As he questioned me, Herrera leaned in closer and closer. He wore a navy blue suit and a crisp white shirt, and I saw that his cufflinks were brass discs stamped .45 ACP. Ammo-links.

  At this point the doctor stopped and, continuing to breathe patiently, turned and looked at him over the tops of her glasses. She said in a nice voice, “You’re interfering with my work.”

  Most people would back off, but this detective ignored her and told me, “We have a book of cars we’ll show you when you come into the station. Can you come right after this?”

  “Uh, I think so. You know, when the boy—”

  The doctor interrupted, “Please lie still. Can you guys continue this interview later?” She sighed just the slightest, and bit her upper lip, and the nurse looked tense.

  Herrera, irritated, said, “Fine. But let me ask you, can you tell about what caliber bullet that was?”

  The doctor relaxed a little. “I can tell you it was a low-velocity civilian handgun load.” She blinked and looked up at him.

  “You mean like a twenty-two?”

  “Or possibly a thirty-eight, but no bigger.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “Anything bigger would have torn up her arm much worse. This is more like a simple laceration. I had to debride very little out of there.” She turned back to me. “By the way, have you had a tetanus shot in the last five years?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Lourdes, order up one, OK?”

  “Got it.”

  “Thanks,” said the detective. He stalked out.

  He left before I told him what Kip Cubitt said to me before he slipped into unconsciousness. I did not call him back to hear it, because suddenly I decided not to tell him. I guess it was wrong of me; the message could be terribly significant to the investigation. But I wanted to deliver my message to Amaryllis myself first.

  As the doctor finished her work, I laid there and thought some more about Amaryllis.

  People called her the Iron Angel, and invariably, the politically correct hand-wringers criticized her for being too tough. She’d give an individual help once or twice, say with drying out or getting a job, but if the person backslid more than once, that’d be the end of it. No more services, except for basic handouts like food and a cot in the shelter at night. She’d never see anyone starve.

  Amaryllis defended herself against critics by simply saying, “There’s too many folks need help, in line right behind that fool. There’s no end to fools out there, but there’s only one ABC Mission. Plenty of folks right behind who want to try harder.” I always felt it had more to do with her belief in an individual. If you betrayed that belief, she took it personally.

  She avoided government grant money, because she didn’t want to answer to government regulations. Any donations that came her way—and there were many, every day—had to be made with no strings attached.

  The ER doctor swiped up with a last pad of gauze, and told me she’d put in four stitches beneath the skin and eight on the outside.

  “Wow, they’re pretty widely spaced,” I noted.

  She explained, “I put in as few stitches as I could, because with a wound like this there’s always a risk of infection. The less I put in there the better.”

  “I see.”

  She wrapped a soft bandage around my arm and taped it. “Keep it dry for two weeks until the stitches come out. See your family practitioner for that, OK? I’ll write you a prescription for a pain reliever. And here’s Lourdes with a tetanus booster for your other arm, so at least the pain will be symmetrical!”

  I had felt drawn toward the Iron Angel, and after she helped me out, I’d half wished she and I could somehow become friends. Now I had a reason to go and see her.

  Chapter 4 – Rowe Smells Blood

  George Rowe walked down a spur of Eighth Street near the Los Angeles River. River seemed such an overstatement in this case. The watercourse was an over-engineered trickle most of the time, becoming an actual rolling, bounding main only during winter floods. Then it was not only capable of floating a skiff, but tearing up a full-grown tree if one happened to topple in.

  Rowe went to the place The Canary Syndrome riot scene had been shot two days ago. It was Wednesday morning, and the sun was cutting through the midweek smog like a dull knife. He walked around, hearing his footfalls echo off the office building, noticing the chalk placemarks on the pavement where the actors and equipment had been. He looked up at the building, its windows clean and blank.

  He walked west on Eighth and then turned right on Mateo, looking carefully at the buildings and the traffic and the people.

  The bus station was around here somewhere. You get a lot of scuzz around bus stations, then there was Skid Row a few blocks northwest.

  He found the grocery store across the street from where Rita and the young kid had been shot.

  George Rowe was in love with Rita Farmer.

  Not that she was in love with him.

  He speculated she might be, but she insisted she wasn’t. They had dated, and she’d broken it off, though she’d agreed to a minimalistic sort of relationship: they could keep in touch. And they did, by phone. She seemed to enjoy their friendly talks.

  When she’d called last night to tell him what had happened, his guts almost fell out.

  He crossed the street. Blood was easily visible on the pavement. No one had washed the sidewalk there, because the business that fronted it, a hairstyling school, was vacant. A small sign said, WE WILL MAKE YOU LOOK BEAUTEOUS. TEACHING HAIRCUTS $10. Nobody’s business to clean up this blood.

  Rowe squatted and looked at the sun-browned blood, now almost forty-eight hours old. Scattered around were scraps of bloody gauze and tubing the EMTs had left behind. The largest puddle of blood had flowed toward the curb—there had been enough of it to flow, not just spatter—in an accidental pattern that looked like a crown. The crown of the inner city, Rowe thought. He could smell the iron in it.

  He turned toward the grocery store.

  _____

  “That looks like a nice one,” said Petey from the backseat of our lousy-but-still-running Honda Civic. I knew he was pointing even though I couldn’t see his arm, him being secure in his car seat.

  “Um-hm,” I murmured noncommittally. This was the fourth day on the dog thing.

  “You know how come I want a dog?” his little voice piped. “I’m bored.”

  Children need to be taught the concept bored, did you know that? They are born without the slightest clue of boredom. Some beastly little friend must have introduced him to the word.

  I glanced to the side and saw a yellowish Chewbacca-looking thing lift its leg and pee on a spindly tree on Franklin Street. Pity urban trees everywhere, their trunks struggling to breathe under ceaseless showers of dog urine.

  “Honey,” I said, “I’ll try and help you not be bored.”

  “A dog would be someone to do stuff with.”

  He’d started discussing this last weekend, and I feared a
n obsession was brewing.

  “You have me,” I reminded him. “You have your little guy and gal friends. You have Daniel, who’s going to take you to swimming lessons this morning.”

  “But a dog would be with me all the time. Any time I want to do something, my dog’ll be right there. We’d do so much stuff?”

  “Well, honey, we’re not getting a dog now. They’re not allowed where we live.”

  “Let’s move! Let’s go live with Daniel!”

  “No, honey.”

  “Well, I could really use a dog.”

  What you could really use is a dad. Well, Jeff was trying. Staying sober. Though he was still a careless asshole, living in an apartment in Torrance.

  Petey had developed the idea, perfectly reasonable to him, that my best friend Daniel and I should get married. Great, except Daniel was looking for a steady guy. It was fun to compare notes on guys, and lucky that we went for different types.

  It was now two days after the shooting. When Petey had asked about my bandage, I told him I’d been walking through the forest and a stick fell on me.

  To Daniel I feigned nonchalance about having been grazed in a drive-by shooting in L.A. But I was damn freaked. Daniel was suitably aghast, and more concerned with me coming down with post-traumatic stress disorder than any future danger.

  I’d lived in L.A. for years and walked down tough streets before. I’d been stuck on roadsides at night with flat tires (twice). I’d done wash in coin laundries a little tipsy at one in the morning. Never any trouble except stares and an unsavory remark or two.

  Obviously the would-be killers had targeted Kip Cubitt. But what if—somehow, somewhere—they decided to come back for me, the only witness?

  When I told my former boyfriend George about it, I could tell it frightened him too. He went quiet, then said he had to go.

  “Don’t do anything, George, OK?”

  “I might look around, is all.”

  I dropped off Petey and drove across town and down—way down—toward the ABC Mission.