because of Pete. He lost his rep and he lost five years. Maybe during that stretch in Folsom Fuqua stewed and stewed, and decided that when he got out, he’d put getting even with Pete at the top of his to-do list.”
CHAPTER 16
On Wednesday evening, I pulled off Washington Boulevard, drove through a confusing labyrinth of streets, parked, and walked to Nicole Haddad’s house, which fronted one of the Venice canals. I was surprised how the area had changed.
When I was working patrol in the Pacific Division, the canals were filthy, with a sheen of scum on the surface and garbage littering the banks. Now they had been immaculately restored, and some of the small, ramshackle homes and vacant weed-choked lots had been replaced with two- and three-story villas. I had heard about the changes and now was relieved to see that they had not entirely destroyed the area’s idiosyncratic charm. Invisible from the major thoroughfares and accessible to only a handful of cars because of its narrow streets, the canals remained an anomalous L.A. island, cut off from the homogenous sprawl.
Unfortunately, the Italian-style resort, built in the early 1900s on marshland, was doomed-like so many city landmarks-because of Southern California’s slavish obeisance to the automobile. In the 1920s, when people began driving to the beach instead of commuting by trolley, city officials decided that Venice needed more roads and parking spaces. They ordered the inland lagoon filled in, converted it into a traffic circle, and paved over most of the canals. Soon, the remaining canals fell into disrepair. Later in the century, when land values in Venice and nearby Santa Monica skyrocketed, the scruffy neighborhood was rediscovered and gentrified.
I lingered for a moment by Nicole’s front gate. She lived in one of the original homes, a white clapboard beach bungalow with faded green trim and a weathered front porch made of rough-hewn redwood. Out front was a small dock with a rowboat tied to a post. Feathery cattails banked the fence that encircled the property. The tufts of star jasmine on the patio filled the air with an intensely sweet fragrance.
When Nicole peered through the blinds and saw me on the patio, she opened the front door. I could barely see her face because the living room was so dark; only the ruby studs in her ears were clearly visible, and they flickered like flames against her olive skin.
“How about a cruise?” I asked, jerking my chin toward the boat. “When I used to patrol this area, I always wanted to ride in the canals.”
“Sure,” Nicole said, walking to the edge of the dock. She wore black leather pants and a red 1940s jacket, cinched at the waist, with large black buttons.
We climbed in and I rowed down a canal, under an arched Venetian-style wooden bridge. I winced slightly because my shoulders were still sore from surfing.
“Sorry I don’t have a motorboat for you,” she said, a mocking gleam in her eyes.
“I think I can handle it. I went surfing a few days ago. First time in a long time. I’m out of shape.”
“A surfing cop?” she said. “Two diametrically opposed cultures.”
I set the oars in their hooks, leaned back, and watched the boat glide under another bridge. A soft, salty breeze blew from the sea, and the only sounds I could hear were the occasional quack of a duck and the tinkle of wind chimes. The faded blue sky was soon daubed with gold and tangerine, the rippled water reflecting the sunset. I closed my eyes for a moment, feeling the tension beginning to ease a bit from my knotted up neck and shoulders.
“You know why the sunsets are so great in L.A.?” she asked.
“The smog.”
“Right. It’s interesting when you examine Southern California landscape paintings from seventy-five years ago and compare them to more current works. The sunsets in the older paintings were more subdued than the sunsets in the current ones. That’s because as the smog worsened and the chemicals coalesced on the horizons, landscape artists began replicating those colorful, sulfuric sunsets.”
“Art imitating smog?”
Nicole laughed. “Something like that.”
I resumed rowing and said, “It’s amazing they haven’t paved this area over, like so much of L.A.”
“Where do you live?”
“In a loft downtown.”
“Oh, the forbidding Downtownistan. I’ve lived in L.A. fifteen years and I don’t think I’ve been downtown more than a couple of times. Let’s go to your ‘hood for dinner. Give me the downtown tour. Maybe L.A. will finally make sense to me.”
When I opened the Saturn’s passenger door, she said, “A station wagon in a hybrid world. I haven’t been in one of these since I was in the fourth grade.”
I returned to the Santa Monica Freeway, drove back downtown, and parked at Union Station. We walked to Olvera Street, a faux Mexican mercado lined with nineteenth-century brick and adobe buildings and filled with stalls where merchants hawked sombreros, serapes, leather wallets, small guitars, and other cheesy souvenirs. She followed me to a stall filled with the statues of Aztec warriors. A few feet away, a small section of the street was laid out in a zigzag pattern of brick and stone.
I tapped my foot on the pattern and said, “This is why L.A.’s such a mess.” I led her to La Golondrina, housed in a two-story brick building built in the mid-1800s, the first Mexican restaurant in L.A. We sat in a street-side patio and watched the German and Japanese tourists shuffle by. The waitress brought us the beer, corn tortillas, and nopales salad I had ordered.
I gazed intently at her, dazzled by how the flecks of green in her dark eyes glittered under the lights.
She waved both palms in front of my face and laughed. “Didn’t your mother ever tell you it’s not polite to stare.”
“She warned me about everything else-at least fifty times. I think that was the only admonition she ever forgot.”
I filled my tortilla with the nopales. When she gazed at it skeptically, I said, “Nopales is cactus. They marinate it and slice it up. It’s the chopped liver of Mexico.”
She laughed, covering her mouth with her napkin.
Since she said she couldn’t figure out the city, I decided to give her my why-L.A.-is-so-fucked-up-rap. I told her how the zigzag pattern I just showed her is where a section of the zanja madre — the mother ditch-brought water to the first settlers from the L.A. River about a half mile away; and the river is why the city was established here; but the river was eventually paved over to control the flooding and now is just a cement channel with a thin trickle of water most of the year. I told her how you could have an office on the top floor of a downtown office building and not even see a patch of water no matter what direction you looked; how the architect who designed the new cathedral downtown said the grand cathedrals in Europe were all built beside rivers and the best equivalent he could come up with in L.A. was the traffic-choked 101 Freeway; how the city has no real reason for existing because downtown is landlocked, the harbor more than twenty miles to the south and the ocean fifteen miles to the west.
We finished the nopales, and as we walked back to my car, I said, “My dad worked downtown for thirty-five years. He used to take me with him sometimes in the summer and show me the different buildings. When I was a kid, I thought about being an architect.”
“But you ended up as a homicide detective. Isn’t that a depressing gig?”
“Whenever I get called out on a case, I think about a quote from Ecclesiastics that I still remember from Hebrew school: It is better to go to a house of mourning than to go to a house of feasting, for death is the destiny of every man; the living should take this to heart. ”
She gave me a quizzical look.
“Everyone knows they’re not guaranteed tomorrow, but we all get so wrapped up in the daily drivel it’s easy to forget it,” I said. “But when you see a body out on the pavement, with the blood dripping into the gutter, well, that has a way of bringing it home to you. I feel sorry for people who are so insulated from death.”
“So when a body is-”
“I’d rather talk about L.A. history.”
