Commonwealth(16)

They took Alvarado to Olympic and slid down into the warren of side streets. Night was full on them and Fix killed the siren but left on the lights so that house by house the curtains parted an inch or two and the occupants peered out, wondering who was in trouble and wondering who was thoughtless enough to bring the cops down on their quiet neighborhood where everyone had at least one thing to hide. The house they were going to was dark. When the residents of the house know you’re coming for them, the residents of the house trouble themselves to get up and turn off the lights. Standard operating procedure.

“Looks like we’re too late,” Lomer said. “They’ve already gone to bed.”

“Let’s wake them up,” Fix said.

Were they ever afraid? Fix would wonder about this later. In the years that followed there was not a single thing Fix Keating didn’t know about fear, even though he would eventually learn to set his face in such a way so as not to show it. But in the years he spent with Lomer, he walked through every door certain he would walk back out again.

It was a small box of a house with a small, square yard. It was like every other house on the street except for a cascading hedge of bougainvillea covered over in flowers the burning pink of antihistamine tablets. “How did this even get here?” Lomer said, running his hand across the leaves. Fix knocked on the door, first with his knuckles and then with his flashlight. In the flashing blue light from the car he could see he was making small dings in the wood. He called out, “Police!” but whoever was inside knew that already.

“I’ll check around back,” Lomer said and walked off whistling through the narrow side yard, shining his flashlight in the windows while Fix waited. There were no stars above Los Angeles, or they were there but the city threw out too much light to see them. Fix had his eye on the slim quarter moon when he saw a bright light coming through the dark house. Lomer switched on the porch light and opened the front door. “The back was open,” he said.

“The back door was open,” Fix said.

“What?” Franny asked. She put down her magazine and pulled the blanket up to his shoulders. He’d been right about the blanket. Patsy had brought him one.

“I was asleep.”

“It’s the Benadryl. It keeps you from itching later on.”

He was trying to put it all together—this room, this day, his daughter, Los Angeles, the house just off Olympic. “The back door was open and the front door was locked. You would’ve stopped to think about that, wouldn’t you?”

“Dad, tell me what house we’re talking about? Your house now? The Santa Monica house?”

Fix shook his head. “The house we went to the night Lomer was shot.”

“I thought he got shot at a service station,” she said. That’s what her mother had told them, and if it was forty years ago, more than that, she still remembered it. Her mother had been fighting with Caroline. Whenever Caroline stayed out past curfew or said something really horrible to Bert or gave Franny enough of a slap to make her nose bleed, she took the opportunity to remind their mother that had Beverly been a decent wife and stayed with their father then none of this would have happened. If Beverly had stayed married to Fix then Caroline would have been a model citizen; her good behavior had been entirely within their mother’s grasp and she’d blown it by choosing to run off with Bert Cousins, so no one should be blaming Caroline for how her life was turning out. It was old news. By the point at which they’d come to this particular fight they’d been living in Virginia for longer than either girl had lived in Los Angeles, but the story of her alternative existence was Caroline’s trump card and she brought it out for every occasion. Franny remembered the time the three of them were in the car coming home from school, she and Caroline both in the plaid uniform skirts and white perma-press blouses of Sacred Heart. She couldn’t remember what Caroline had done that had started the fight, or why this fight seemed more serious than the others. But something that was said had made their mother tell them about Lomer.

“That’s right,” her father said to her. “He was shot at the Gulf station on Olympic.”

Franny leaned over in her chair and put her hand on her father’s forehead. His hair, which had been gray for as long as she could remember, had grown back a luminous white brush after the last round of chemo. Everyone talked about her father’s hair. She swept it back with her palm. “I really want to know what you’re talking about,” she said, her voice low even though no one was listening. No one in that room was thinking about them at all.

Fix, who had never been big on sharing, suddenly wanted to explain it to her. He wanted Franny to understand. “The house was so small we knew it wasn’t going to take any time to find them. There were three doors off the hall—two bedrooms, one bathroom. These places were all put together the same way. They were in the first bedroom. It was a father, a mother, four kids. They were on the bed together in the dark. We flicked on the overhead lights and there they were, all sitting up straight, even the littlest one. It was the father who’d been beaten. That’s not one you see a lot. Usually it’s the woman who’s taken the hit but this guy looked like someone had just scraped him up off the freeway, his lip had sliced open on his teeth, one of his eyes was already shut, his nose was everywhere. I can see his face as clear as I see you. It’s crazy how much of that house and those people I remember—their feet were bare, and all of them had their feet up on the bed. We started asking them questions and we got nothing, no response at all. The father was looking at me with his one eye and I was wondering how he was even upright. There was blood on his neck that was coming out of both of his ears. I would have thought the beating had popped his eardrums if it weren’t for the fact that no one on that bed seemed like they heard us. Lomer radioed in for an ambulance and backup. I kept talking to them and finally the oldest girl, maybe she was ten, tells me they don’t speak English. The mother and father don’t speak English but the kids do. There were three girls and a boy. The boy was maybe seven or eight. I said, ‘The person who did this, where did he go?’ And then they all turned mute again, the girl was staring straight ahead just like her parents until the little one, who was five or something like that, not so much bigger than Caroline was then, looked at the closet plain as day. She didn’t turn her head but she was very clear. The guy was in the closet. The older girl grabbed her wrist and squeezed the hell out of it but Lomer and I turned around and Lomer opened the closet door, and there he was, smashed into the clothes. It was a small closet, the kind people used to have, and everything they’ve got in the world was in there, including this guy. He understood the situation. He wasn’t going to make it past us. He had blood on his shirt and his hand was cracked up from beating the poor son of a bitch on the bed. I don’t think he spoke any more English than the one he’d come over to bust up. He’d stuck his gun in the pocket of a dress in the closet. Maybe he figured nobody would find it and he could come back and pick it up later. Right about that time the backup came in and then the ambulance. There were no Miranda rights back then, no calling in a guy who spoke Spanish. The family on the bed, they’re all shaking now and the kids were crying, like it was fine when he was in the closet and they didn’t have to look at him but now that he’s standing in the bedroom again they were all stirred up. His name was Mercado. We found that out later. He had a regular job beating Mexicans who’d borrowed money to be smuggled into the country and hadn’t made enough yet to pay off the debt. Nobody who had any money or any way to get their hands on money screwed these guys over. They beat people in front of their families, in front of their neighbors. That was the wake-up call, and if the money still didn’t come a week or two later they’d swing by and shoot you in the head. Everybody knew it.”