No Human Contact. Donald Ladew
not use bad language around me, shit for brains!”
Officer Sosa had the other men against the bar. He turned toward Keely.
“Always with the macho shit. I don’t know why I ride with you, Chica. I don’t do nothing except watch you beat the piss out of these pitiful savages.”
He turned back to the hood against the bar. “C’mon, rat breath. You’re lucky you didn’t grab. Even her boy friend don’t get to do that without he says, por, por, por favor.”
Keely gave Jaime a dirty look.
Two more squad cars, an ambulance and the wagon arrived and took the three men in custody. Sergeant Keely stood by the black & white looking at the hills above Sun Valley. Sosa finished the procedural detail and walked over.
“What’s the matter, Sargento, you did okay.”
She stared at the ground. “I don’t know, tired, tired of beating up hoods, and quit making smartass remarks about my boyfriend. You know I don’t have one.”
“Yeah, I know. C’mon, Teresa, get in the car, I’ll drive,” Sosa said.
Dusk settled in the hills as they left.
“You know what your trouble is, Viking? You’ve got it all. You’re smart, ambitious, a college grad, and as Lieutenant Epstein in burglary says, a body to die for.”
She gave him the, you’re thin ice, look.
Sosa ignored it. “That’s what I mean, Chica. You spend so much time making sure everyone knows you’re a bad ass, you’re no fun. Be nice, Teresa, lighten up.”
“I’m not that bad.” She got mad again. “Hey, I know how to lighten up, for Christ’s sake.” She banged the window with her fist angrily and pouted like a school girl.
“I didn’t say you were bad, Chica. I ride with you because I want to, not because I have to.”
Sosa drove so slow a line of cars stacked up behind him. Drivers cursed bitterly behind closed windows. A few gave him the finger which he ignored.
“Jesus, Jaime, pick it up. We aren’t dragging Van Nuys Boulevard in your pink pimpmobile low-rider.”
Sosa ignored her. “Don’t have a low-rider. I drive a piece of shit Chevy Caprice just like every right-thinking middle class gringo. When’s the last time someone rolled you around in the sheets? A year, more? Get out, fool around a little. The world don’t begin and end with that uniform.”
Teresa smiled wistfully, looked at large competent hands. “I’d like to, I really would.”
The sun went west in a rush leaving a soft afterglow in the hills above Burbank. It had been one of the wettest springs in California history. The perennial smog hadn’t begun to fill the LA basin like a dirty blanket.
In the orange trees below the house on Sunland the gray cat sought targets of opportunity: birds, mice, grasshoppers. A metallic tapping sounded in the distance. The cat stopped in mid stalk, turned and raced up the hill toward the house.
Wedges of light came from narrow windows in the second story of the tower. The cat shot through the open back door into the kitchen.
The man removed a tin of food from the refrigerator while the cat purred and stropped his legs.
“Patience, Bernie.”
After he fed the cat he left the kitchen and walked to the central tower where a narrow atrium went all the way to the roof. In the middle of the atrium was a small, deep pool. Around the outside of the three storey room a staircase spiraled upward.
He went up the stairs easily, two at a time. His movements were fluid and athletic, but not exuberant.
The entire second floor of the tower was a library. Painted panels divided the space into sections. The furnishings were an eclectic mixture of styles, colorful, yet too neat to be personal. The paintings were both modern and traditional, all devoid of people. Nowhere was the human form paid tribute. Of photographs, there were none. Not one.
Neatness replaced personality. The outgoing, the social would have felt uncomfortable, unwanted.
Vincent Vankelis stood in semi-shadow and looked out toward the city. He wore light weight cotton slacks, a polo shirt and canvas topped deck shoes without socks.
Standing, back to the light, square as a chunk of stone, broad across the shoulders and waist, yet without excess weight.
He turned away and walked back into the light toward a small free-standing bar. He removed a bottle of Meurseult les Gouttes d'Or from a small refrigerator and carried it across the room to the stereo. The melancholy voice of Brazilian singer, Caetano Veloso, filled the room.
Vincent’s face in the light had a slight olive cast. It was a Mediterranean face, full-lipped, strong narrow nose and a lightly cleft chin; thick black hair and a beard that required shaving twice a day.
In his early forties, one might have expected lines to mark the passage of time. There were none, no laugh lines at the corners of the eyes or mouth. Even alone in his hilltop redoubt his expression gave nothing away. It was a somber face, too melancholy to expose cruelty.
He opened the wine and poured a glass. Bernie, the cat, appeared from the shadows and jumped into a large, well-lit Morris chair, padded around in a circle before settling himself.
Vincent took the wine to the chair, reached down and lifted the cat with one hand, sat down, placed the cat in his lap and the wine on the table next to the chair. Spread out on the table were a half dozen books inter-leafed with slips of paper to mark points of interest.
He took the nearest, opened it and began to read. No sound disturbed the silence except the music and the soft rustle of pages for the next hour.
Vincent looked at his watch from time to time and went on reading. After a while the cat felt the tension, got up, jumped to the floor, stretched and wandered off into the dark. Another hour passed before Vincent marked his place and put the book down.
He walked slowly toward the center of the tower, through a door that opened onto a balcony overlooking the atrium twenty feet below. Forty feet up the segmented roof accepted pale light through thick glass skylights.
He stood quietly, taking a mental inventory of things known. He didn’t like surprise. Yet he had unpredictability, a quality prized by some and detested by others.
Vincent removed his clothes and folded them neatly over a railing. He stepped to the edge of the balcony and without looking, jumped away into the semi-darkness. There followed a long moment of silence. One might have imagined anything, then from below a quiet splash.
Twenty feet down in the dark faint sparkles of white glistened on the surface of a small pool that extended into the house under the nearest wall.
He swam under water out beneath the wall and rose slowly to the surface of a large outdoor pool, slowly back to life. It was like dying. He did it often.
Later in his room he bathed and shaved carefully, dressed in dark slacks and a dark blue turtle neck. He put on dark socks and black soft-soled shoes.
On top of a dresser a wooden display case contained an assortment of military medals. A green beret rested in front of the case.
He took a hard-bound journal held shut with an elastic band, a pencil and a navy wool watch cap from the top drawer and left the room. Down stairs in the kitchen the cat ran to him and put his feet up on Vincent’s legs.
Vincent reached down and scratched the cat’s chin.
“Not tonight, Bernie. I’m visiting family.”
Chapter 2
The gray pickup moved