A Small Matter Read online

  Toyama, Vickie knew, lived alone in a back room at the dojo, where he devoted himself to his magic, keeping himself attuned to the tenets of his magic-based messianic religion which made him prone to offering to those around him some rather unusual remedial methods when confronted with the darker face of human frailties.

  “Toyama will respect you,” Dalk said. “And his religion does have a bona fide track record of healings. In any case, whatever Toyama attempts will be cleanly controlled and dignified.”

  “He’ll start shaking his gold charm in my face like he did the last time I had the flu. And I’ll tell you something else--Last week Toyama called me on the phone after you told him I was having my biopsy, and he told me he had a special dish of beans, cheese, and roast mice guaranteed to draw out the evil fox spirit inside me.”

  “Eat your pancakes. And is it so farfetched? Toyama offered to draw out an evil spirit from your back using a roast mouse as a lure--compare that to the folks at the HMO who’re waiting to go in with their knives and gut you like a fish.”

  Vickie’s fork dropped to the floor.

  “Oh Vickie. I’m so sorry. That was impossibly tactless of me--it wasn’t really me talking. It’s just that I can’t bear to lose you like this. The grief is killing me. I can’t sleep, and I can hardly eat--I’m on an emotional roller coaster here. Sometimes, I even wish it was me instead of you.”

  “Dalk, you’ve got to stay strong for me. You can’t let your emotions overwhelm you.”

  “I’ll be strong. It’s just that lately I’ve found myself really regretting the ten years I spent in Japan--I should have stayed here with you. I realize now that running away to Japan was my way of trying to process Mom’s death--I was just trying to escape everything. I shouldn’t have left you alone to handle the aftermath by yourself.”

  “You did what you had to do. And look at you. You’re one of the rising stars of the Los Angeles Police Department. I’m so proud of you. Besides, after Mom died, and you left for Japan, I wasn’t alone--I had Jack. Those ten years with him were probably the best years of my life. It was like every day I was a new bride. The only grief Jack and I experienced was our inability to have children together, but we made up for it by really loving each other.”

  A knock on the front door sent Dalk to the vestibule. He returned with Mulroney--the big guy looking frazzled in his baggy black slacks and tired white shirt--the only thing she’d ever seen him wear. Mulroney’s sudden appearance at their home was a common occurrence, him being extended family, having partnered with Jack for the twenty-six years preceding Jack’s untimely death. At Jack’s death, Mulroney pulled the pin on the job and bought The Lamplighter to give himself something to do, keep connected with cops, and in his own words, “to keep from eating his gun”.

  “You’re just in time,” Vickie said. “The coffee’s hot and so are the pancakes.”

  “Get dressed,” he said. “We don’t have time to eat. We’re going for a ride.”

  “Oh? Where to?”

  “North Hollywood. Guy I know says there’s one of these Virgin Mary ladies living over there who has a statue of Our Lady that cries real tears and heals people.”

  "The hell you say. I just turned down an offer of Sensei Toyama's roasted mice. I certainly don't need a Virgin Mary lady lighting candles for me."

  "Please. It's the last thing I will ever ask of you," Mulroney pleaded. "This woman is a real miracle worker."

  "Okay, as long as you understand I am doing it for you, not because I believe in her. But if she starts handling snakes or drinking blood or anything, I am gone."

  Chapter 4

  Vickie entered the middle bedroom to look for something to wear. It wasn’t an easy decision--the room had been converted into a huge walk-in closet, the racks filled with an amazing display of shoes, coats, and dresses, all the items arranged by type, many of them still with the tags on. Bags and boxes from famous designers lined the top shelves, as though somebody had taken the whole of Rodeo Drive and extruded it through a micro-screen, the net result appearing before her.

  Not sure exactly what the protocol was for visiting a faith-healer in North Hollywood, she finally decided to keep it simple, going with a black cashmere tee tucked into a long, plum, knit skirt, finishing off the look with mid-calf black boots. Against the morning wind, she buttressed her outfit with a trendy white coat and topped off the whole thing with a few miniature butterfly clips attached to her baby braids. The clips added a touch of whimsy she did not feel.

  “You look incredible,” Mulroney said.

  “We’ll take my car,” she said.

  “Oh no. You know I can’t fit into that thing. We’ll take mine.”

  “You coming, Dalk?” she said.

  “Can’t. I’ve got a building-search seminar at 10, after which I’m running the rookies up and down the fire trails around Chavez ravine.”

  “Give me back my prescription. We’ll get it filled on the way to the crying statue.”

  Mulroney led her out the front door to his ride--a three-ton navy-blue Suburban with blackened windows. The eighteen-foot-long monstrosity on its oversize tires looked ready to assault a college campus demonstration, or an inner-city riot. The Suburban was the un-ecologic, unapologetic choice of many connected with copdom, it being the flagship of LAPD’s SWAT Division.

  He assisted her climb into the jump seat and shut her in. As soon as she clipped her belt, a hoarse cough from behind made her aware she was not alone. She turned to face a wide-eyed feline peering through the grill of a big carry cage. The beast was the largest of it’s kind she’d ever seen, with a head the circumference of a dinner plate. A single paw, claws extended to clutch the grill, easily outsized her own clenched fist. For a brief instant, she had the feeling she belonged to the cat, as though it had sized her up and mentally rehearsed her as a mealtime possibility. Her instinct was to flee the vehicle, a sensation interrupted by the intrusion of Mulroney’s massive carcass coming through the driver’s-side door. He popped into the pilot’s seat with an ease which seemed to defy gravity, considering his raw bulk.

  “What is that?”

  “That’s Kilkenney,” Mulroney said. “He’s a cat.”

  “What do you feed him--small dogs?”

  “Kilkenney’s a Maine Coon. They were first sent to the U.S. by Marie Antoinette, shortly before she got the blade. I won him in a dice game last week.”

  “He looks like a raccoon.”

  “I think they’ve been interbred with ‘coons, because they use their paws just like hands. You should see him sitting up with a chicken leg.”

  “I hope I never do.”

  Mulroney waited for a break in the busy morning traffic, didn’t get one, so instead bullied his way across the six-lanes in an outrageous U-turn before heading down Tampa to Burbank and turning eastward into a short, sharp sun. Vickie settled back. It would be a long overland haul over a varied and sundry terrain across the Valley to North Hollywood.

  “What’s Kilkenney doing in the car?”

  “I’m introducing him to travel,” Mulroney said. “Although you’ll never see a cat hanging out the window of a moving car like a dog, it’s a fact that cats who are introduced to travel often learn to enjoy it. We’re going to do some cage work this week before going cageless.”

  “What if he freaks out and rips your face off?”

  “Awww, he’s a big cream-puff. Although he’s designed for survival in tough conditions, he’s a great family-style pet.”

  She glanced back at the glaring cat. There was nothing in that wild visage which remotely suggested family-style anything.

  “What’s after going cageless? Restaurant training?”

  “Only if I think he’d feel comfortable doing so.”

  Vickie hit the radio--Janis Ian--Society’s Child. “I can’t believe it. Every song I hear lately takes me back to 1967. I was only a kid.”

  “I love Janis Ian,” Mulroney said. “She was only fifteen when she di
d this song.”

  “I hate people like you who know something about everything. You’re like an encyclopedia of Oldies--it makes me feel like I’ve done nothing with my life.”

  “You’re doing something now.”

  The Suburban crossed through the crammed and jammed Balboa Boulevard intersection and entered a curving, car-stalled swoop of roadway which presented a different world from the apartment/strip-mall zone they’d just left. The Sepulveda Dam Recreation area--a patchwork ecological menagerie comprised of a golf course, wetlands, ballparks, bike trails, and other amenities finding their terminus at the edge of a massive Thirties-era concrete flood control bunker erected--via a U.S. Government work-relief project--by the emigrant dust-bowlers. The bunker and its floodgates were part of a city-wide network of concrete channels, an array which collectively dwarfed, in both size and weight, the Pyramids of Egypt and the Great Wall combined.

  As they made the crawl, Vickie found herself surveying the wonders of the basin as though for the first time. “When I first met Jack, he took me hiking around here. We’d start right here at the Dam and make our way across the spine of the Santa Monica mountains and down through Rustic Canyon all the way to the Pacific. One time we got caught in this huge concrete channel in the rain and had to wade five miles in hip-deep water to get out. I still remember how that channel ran through the backyards of the Arabs, and how all the peacocks came out and hooted at us. We also had a favorite place at the bottom of a ridge below Bel Air--a cave hidden by a waterfall--it was our own private world.”

  “Jack was a man among men. I remember the time there was a monkey loose in Van Nuys. We think the banana-eater escaped from some movie mogul's petting zoo up on Mulholland or someplace. It climbed a telephone pole and snuck into some guy’s third-story apartment and hid under the bed. When Jack and I were called in, we got down on our bellies to take a look and the thing charged us. Let me tell you, you don’t want to be trapped in a bedroom with a pissed-off monkey.”

  “What happened to the monkey?”

  “I capped it with my flashlight. Jack was a little irritated, what with his love of the wilderness, and wildlife, and all. He’d wanted to capture the small simian by throwing a blanket over it or something. He was a bit sensitive in that way, but it never got in the way of him doing his duty.”

  “He loved the wilderness up in those mountains. We walked every trail. Nowadays it’s not the same. The Getty Museum’s gone in, and the rich have started paving over the place.”

  “It’s the end of an era,” Mulroney admitted. “When rich producers start moving to the mountains and replacing nests of vipers and skunks--I figure Mother Nature considers that an even trade.”

  Vickie looked down from her perch high up in the Suburban at the traffic below her, the cars filled with sharply dressed office types, talking on the Bluetooth, some applying last minute makeup, some even reading, as the long slow cavalcade made its way across the wastelands towards the hill where the freeway connections could be made. The sight of the people with someplace important to go made her feel all the more the disconnecting impact of her present situation with the tumor. “I guess I’m quitting my job for good. No need to pretend with this leave of absence charade. Scratch one more departmental Special Liaison Rep.”

  “You should quit. That job wasn’t good enough for you.”

  “When Jack died, I went crazy staring at the walls. The job gave me a reason to get up in the morning, and a feeling of being needed by my colleagues. But I’ve learned something--those people weren’t really my friends. Nobody’s called me since I took the time off. But I don’t blame them. All they’re interested in is kissing corporate butt, doing deals and making money. It’s easy to see that, from their viewpoint, there’s not much deal potential in phoning a dying woman to see how she’s feeling.”

  “They’re morons. They should all be burned at midnight in some downtown alley. At least they’d serve a purpose by keeping the winos warm for a few hours. But enough of them. I wanted to apologize to you for last night.”

  “For what?”

  “Last night. When I shot the jukebox.”

  “You were just being you. Other men would have simply held my hand, or brought me flowers. You clipped the juke.”

  “May I get away with a little tactless honesty?”

  “It’s now or never,” Vickie said. “What’s on your mind?”

  “Okay. I feel like I ought to get you on Sally Jesse or something to say what I want to say to you. I didn’t have it figured for me to be saying it in the middle of rush hour, but you know, Vickie, we’ve grown pretty close over the two years since Jack died.”

  “Sure we have. I guess it’s because we both shared the common grief of losing somebody we both loved and depended on. Actually, if you think about it, we’ve been together almost every day since he died, if you count the time I spend at The Lamplighter.”

  “Well, that’s right. But last night, when Dalk gave me the bad news about you--about you’re--well, you know.”

  “Call it cancer,” Vickie said. “Let’s be right out front with it. It’s cancer, with a capital C.”

  “Yeah, okay. Anyway, when I got the news, I nearly lost it--it didn’t seem fair. I thought, Why is God punishing me this way? Wasn’t I a good enough Catholic? You know, I’ve worked all my life, never taken a real vacation, saved all my money, put together a healthy retirement, paid my house off--all that--and suddenly I find out that you’ve got--Cancer!”

  They’d arrived at the top of the freeway overpass and were suspended forty feet above the Valley. Mulroney pulled off the boulevard into a small parking area. Before them stretched the wilderness playground which terminated in the massive bulwark of the dam, its gates open wide as if they were the portals connecting the wild to the Land of the Living.

  “Last night,” he continued, “I prayed to God, if he would give you another chance to live, I’d go to Mass every day. Or if you needed a body part--any body part--I’d donate mine, or I’d find somebody to give up theirs--one way or the other.” He broke off, eyes brimming.

  “Oh, Mulroney. Where would I be without my red-faced, white-haired Irishman?” She unclipped her seat belt and crawled across the console to huddle next to him. “Believe me, I’d never have made it through those dark days after Jack’s death if you hadn’t shown up on my doorstep every morning with your little cardboard tray of coffees and doughnuts.”

  They cried together, childlike.

  “I thought we had more time,” he said. “So I’ll say this now--and God have mercy on my soul--I love you, Vickie. I always have. From the first minute I saw you, I have loved you. I will love you always, and forever.”

  “Mulroney!”

  “Let me finish. After you hear me out, if you want to tell me where to go, that’s okay. Listen--when you and Jack got serious, I put my feelings for you in a cocoon and went about my business. Controlling feelings are a cop’s specialty. Early on, I learned to put my feelings aside and rely on myself to make it through tough spots. But in the weeks and months following Jack’s death, my feelings for you came back out. I couldn’t keep them down anymore. Vickie, I never said anything all this time, you’re being such a new widow and all, but it’s been two years, and unless I’m wrong, I think you have some small feelings for me. Vickie, this weekend, I was going to ask you to consider marrying me.”

  His words were huge, washing over her like a waterfall. Now that they were said, she realized she’d known about Mulroney all along. She’d seen it in his eyes the first time they met. A vast empty space opened up inside her as she saw the truth behind the last twenty-two years of her life.

  “You never married because of me,” she said. “Your whole life you never married because of me. You fool!”

  He grinned through his tears. “I’m some kind of stupid, huh?”

  There was a spirit in the air between them, charging itself higher and higher before releasing its lightning bolt which struck her right
between the eyes, conveying to her its message of Solomonic purity.

  “Mulroney--you know what I’m facing, right?”

  “I know.”

  “And yet you could have kept the lid on about your love for me, but you didn’t.”

  “No. But I told it to the priest instead. I’ve confessed it a million times.”

  “You chose just now to finally convey your deepest feelings to me--you were planning to ask me to marry you.”

  “Yeah.” His features sharpened. “Will you?” A tiny eternity passed.

  “Mulroney, I would have married you when I first met you. But you weren't ready. You big bastard, you were just into being a street monster cop and partying with your cop buddies. That's why I chose Jack. But I would have picked you if you had straightened up even a little bit."

  "Will you marry me?" he said slowly, one more time.

  "Yes."

  It was a small word from her lips, but it hung in the air a long time, like a free-floating balloon.

  “Yes?”

  “I’ll marry you,” she said. “That is, if you still want to, considering everything. And you’re right. I do have deep feelings for you. I just didn’t know how to deal with it until now. So, knowing what you know, knowing I’m going to die soon, do you still want me?”

  Mulroney looked deeply into her face. Etched around his eyes were the lines from a lifetime of command decisions, but now the lines were unfocused, as though he was a child. “I still want you...even considering everything.”

  “There’s one condition. You have to ask me properly.”

  He quickly exited the Suburban without closing the door and helped her down before dropping to one knee in the gravel, the formidable roar of freeway and boulevard like a giant, languageless choir surrounding their moment, she in her white coat standing before him like a working class angel presiding over a large and sorry penitent. He took her hand.