Tag

bar | An LA Crime Story

Remains

By | Serial | No Comments

A little after nine that night Rhea followed Sheena along the top of the cement embankment of the LA River. Daylight was nearly gone; shadows were long. As they neared the Chavez Bridge, Sheena pointed down, to a clump of debris under the bridge.

“There.”

“Stay here.” Rhea told Sheena as she scrambled down the bank where it trickled under the Chavez bridge. She walked a few yards to the remains of a homeless camp: a moldy sleeping bag, some squishy old sweat pants, three empty Cheetos bags and an empty can of diet Coke and Progresso Lite Pot Pie soup.

A sudden whoosh of air brushed down on her. She thought nothing of it – LA was a city of Santa Anas – she was used to sudden gusts. But the tail end of the second gust carried on it a faint smell. She knew it well. She looked around for a body but she knew it would be a little farther away. She took another whiff then looked up the opposite embankment toward the street above. A Chavez street bridge crossed over it. The young woman photographer was walking over it. Then she stopped. Through an opening between balustrades, Rhea could see the woman was barefoot. Was she homeless? Rhea wondered, though she seemed too clean. Plus she carried an old 35mm camera and an air of cool. Then she stopped. She looked down. At Rhea. Her expectant look pulled Rhea in like a memory.

“Find anything?” Sheena’s voice broke the spell.

Rhea turned. Sheena was about to skitter down the embankment.

“Stay there!” Rhea called up to her. Rhea glanced back up at the woman on the bridge. She was moving on, crossing to the side Sheena was on. Rhea decided the woman was just another hipster photog, looking for a moody downtown LA pic.

Rhea went back to Sheena. “You have somewhere you can stay for a few nights?” she asked her.

“What is it?”

“Probably just a dead dog or racoon. I’ll get animal control to pick it up in the morning. Is there somewhere you can-”

“I can crash downtown–”

“Try the shelter on San Pedro–”

Sheena shook her head. Hard.

“They’ve got better security now–” Rhea half-heartedly tried to convince her but Sheena wasn’t having it. Rhea understood – it would take an army of security and the compassion of masses to stem the violence and troubles of the homeless in LA. Rhea dug around in her pockets and gave Sheena almost seventeen dollars.
“Get some food. And be careful–”

Sheena took the money. Suddenly she grabbed Rhea and hugged her close. “You too.” she cautioned then hurried across the street and headed downtown.

Rhea walked across the Chavez Bridge. Below her was the homeless camp. Behind her was the city skyline. A few yards from the boulevard on the northeast side of the bridge was a sagging, shuttered old bar called Domingos. She went around to the back. She checked in trash cans and knee high weeds, sniffing and honing in on a spot behind an old tire. There it was: a rotting dead possum. She backed away then turned around. She was facing the back of the bar. She sniffed; smelled something. She walked to the bolted back door and put her nose to the edge of it. She sniffed. She went around to the front. That door was jammed tight with twenty years of grime and a ten dollar lock. Deciding the smell gave her cause, she jimmied it open. Air that held the whiff of charred beans kissed her as it escaped the place. She went inside.

Her eyes adjusted to a hazy darkness. The significant light of an LA night bled through three small curtained windows. She saw a bar against one wall, a pool table in the middle of the small room and a closed door in the back. A page of smoke slid out from under it. The door was locked. Three kicks knocked it open. Smoke veiled the room. Rhea walked through it. A blackened stove stood against against a burned wall, splattered with the scorched remains of a pot of beans that had exploded.

Rhea slid a finger through a layer of soot that covered everything. It was pitted by drops of water from the ceiling sprinklers that had put out the fire. But they hadn’t put it out fast enough. There was a spent extinguisher on the floor, still in the hand of a dead girl lying there. Rhea braced herself against the smell and bent over her. The girl looked Mexican. Her other arm reached out to two more dead Mexican girls, huddled together by the bolted back door. The girls from Chinatown. Their arms were around each other. Their eyes were open. Their bodies were splattered with extinguisher foam. They’re nostrils were blackened with smoke. The youngest one was still warm. Rhea checked for a pulse.

She pressed the sides of the girl’s mouth open. Her blue lips puckered like a snap dragon. The air above her shimmered and rippled then fluttered away, as though she’d exhaled one last dream.

Rhea jumped, a little freaked by the other-worldliness of it.

Back outside on the cement bank across the river from Domingos, the photographer dropped to one knee, steadied her lens and snapped off a half dozen pictures of the shimmer as it rose up into the night sky just above Domingos.

In the blackened kitchen, Rhea checked again for a pulse on the little girl. Nothing. The girl was dead. Rhea took out her phone and snapped a few pics of the dead girls. Then she called the boss.

Taquitos

By | Serial | No Comments

Out of the almost Seventeen hundred bars in LA., Rhea narrowed her search down to twenty-seven. Knowing that a fifty-something year old Mexican woman wouldn’t be mixing Twinkie-tinis at the Skybar or pulling drafts at Barney’s Beanery or keeping it neat at the Frolic Room eliminated close to a thousand. Adding in the geography of LA and transit times, that knocked out another six hundred.

Rhea started at eight at La Golondrina. It was Friday night. The popular place stayed open until eight-thirty. Weird. Especially for a tourist place but that’s the way it was. She knew Myrna probably wouldn’t be there but La Golondrina was on Olvera Street and walking Olvera was a good place to start – walking Olvera was also, for Rhea, a self-inflicted wound.

The trinkets and sweet treats sold at the brightly-colored wooden vendor booths hadn’t changed in twenty years, making it easy for Rhea to let the pain of her past memory there fuse with the goal of the present. Pain always focused Rhea, as did guilt. And the three-buck taquitos with green sauce at Cielito Lindo momentarily took the edge off. She bought two classic ones. She took them to a little green table and dug in. Heaven. Not wasting the moment and thinking ahead, she took out a little paper notepad she carried and a pencil and jotted down a few words: Young. Creamy, Hot Mouthful – about the creamy tang of the signature sauce that blanketed crispy curled tortillas and the promising guy who was dipping them into the fryer.

Downing the last bite, she walked across the brick path to the famed La Golondrina. The bar area was packed. The two bartenders were male. “Is Myrna on tonight?” Rhea asked one of them. “Who?” he replied. Rhea waved him off; knowing it was a long shot to ever expect to see a woman bartender working an old-school Mexican restaurant.

Next up, she crossed Alameda and went into Union Station. The deco Traxx restaurant had an old bartender who looked like Nosferatu. But they didn’t have a Myrna.

The third, fourth, fifth and sixth bars were scattered over a few blocks around downtown. All bartenders were men except for one transgender Russian woman. None had heard of a Myrna.

The seventh was a dark-red old-world bar in a classic Chinatown joint that featured Mu Shu pork, Won Ton soup and lots of plum sauce. Behind that small bar was a snake-skinned old dame named Madame Wu. Rhea asked her over a sidecar if she knew of another woman in town who poured named Myrna. Her dyed-black eyebrow barely raised. But it raised in recognition of the name Myrna. Ignoring Rhea, she moved down the bar to pour a shot of Chartreuse for a ninety-year old dancer. Rhea now had an answer. Myrna Saldano was real. And local.

It was last call. Rhea left three-fourths of her sidecar on the bar and left.

Once home, Rhea forced her mind away from bartenders and darkness and tried to finish her taquito review. She fished the notepad from her purse and jotted some more thoughts down. She liked using paper. She’d been using paper to take notes ever since she got her first notepad from Strickland when she was sixteen, a terrified kid looking to him for hope on the darkest night of her life.

“…write down anything you remember.” He’d told her as he wrote his phone number on the pad, “Anything at all, then call me. Anytime.”

She wished she could call him now and tell him how sorry she was for letting him down. But she couldn’t. She wrote. She had to make a lot of it up… “–a sinewy gaucho casually walking by bought me three taquitos with extra heat for five-twenty-five and he sprung for a Champurrado. In the back of his Camaro parked in a lot on Main, he turned me into a liar for every time I’ve ever said “no” to a man or a meal that could set me on fire..” She hated making it up. She wanted it real. She found a snack sized bag of Maui potato chips and turned on the tv. Not much was on her basic cable. OVC. News reruns. Old PBS shows. She settled on a Huell Howser re-run. He was visiting Porto’s Bakery. It was an entire show about cakes: Mango cheesecake. White chocolate raspberry mousse. Kiwi merengue torte. Grand Mariner with chocolate ganache. Lemon curd pound cake. Vanilla custard cake with pineapple filling… she should have turned it off but her mood was dark and so she watched and let her mind be pierced with thoughts of her sister.

A pledge break reeled her mind in. She turned the tv off and went outside to the courtyard. It was late. All the apartments were dark. She sat in a plastic chair by the pool. The only sound was the constant whisper of cars driving by outside.

A moving shadow startled her. A young coyote darted from behind a trash bin enclosure. It stopped when it saw her – stared her down, unafraid. Finally it skulked away and slipped out between the rails of the courtyard gate, heading up Laurel, toward the hills. A greeting came to it from somewhere in those hills, the sound of its entire pack howling. It died down. Rhea shivered. She looked at her phone. Three AM. When the quiet settles into the cracks of the night and the ghosts in the air kiss your skin.

error: Content is protected !!