Family Ties

By Richard Risemberg

A lakeside cabin in the Sierra foothills, a canyon village divided between old coots and laid-back hippies, and a bartender who's as square as square can be. It's just an all-too-rare escape from the hustle and bustle of L.A for Lenny and his ex-cop friend and landlord, Red Henshaw, when they arrive in Lake Helena for a weekend of rest and relaxation. Then they notice the couple in the battered van that dogs them everywhere they go.... Still, everything's calm in the woods—till Red turns up missing. Lenny's efforts to find his friend succeed in the worst way possible, and it's up to a motley crew made up of a sex-crazed gallery owner, a squad of gay outlaw bikers, a cop turned short-order cook, and the suave and deadly Uncle Angie—Lenny's future in-law—to set things straight. If they can. In this follow-up to The Dust Will Answer, Lenny Strasser, printshop production manager and accidental amateur sleuth, is tossed once more into the deep end of the off-beat to solve a double mystery.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Richard Risemberg
• Release date: Sep 7, 2016
• ISBN: 9781370413799

Richard Risemberg

Richard Risemberg was born into a Jewish-Italian household in Argentina, and brought to Los Angeles to escape the fascist regime of his homeland. He has lived there since, except for a digression to Paris in the turbulent Eighties. He attended Pepperdine University on a scholarship won in a writing competition, but left in his last year to work in jobs from gritty to glitzy, starting at a motorcycle shop and progressing through offices, retail, an independent design and manufacturing business, and most recently a stint managing an adult literacy program at a library branch in one of the poorest neighborhoods of the city. All has become source material for his writing. So has his family, in particular his son Jack, for whom Journey Through the Shadowlands was originally improvised. He has pursued journalism, photography, and editorial writing, as well as fiction, publishing stories, poems, essays, editorials, and articles in edited publications including newspapers, professional journals, and literary magazines the world over. The complete list, updated regularly, is available at CrowTreeBooks.com. 

Book preview

Part I

1.

The last of the storm blew away overnight, leaving tumbles of cloud glowing like white curtains as the morning sun struck through them. I heard a crow call somewhere down our hill, in the gulfs between my porch and the silhouetted skyscrapers downtown, sounding triumphant in the clean new light. It had been a wet winter, something all too rare in Los Angeles, which is a city that’s always praying for rain, and then doesn’t know what to do with it when it comes. Cars slide into each other, hillsides slump into homes, people slip and fall walking down their porch steps, and all that precious water whirls into storm drains and crowds into the concrete trench of the LA River, which kicks it down to the harbor like an unwanted guest. The whole city acts drunk. How someplace so big and busy can be so stupid and still live always surprises me. I hope it always will: there’s never a dull moment here. Sometimes that’s a problem, though, and you need a break.

That’s why I was glad my good ol’ boy landlord, Red Henshaw, had asked me to help him with fixin’ and cleanin’ that needed to be done at his property up at Lake Helena, in the Sierra foothills. Red had a bad leg and couldn’t do the heavy or awkward work. He also liked company: he was born to tell stories. And I was born to listen to them. So we divvied up the labor fairly: he was in charge of sitting, while I took over sweating. And we both supervised the drinking of beer. It wasn't very good beer at first, but I noticed that a couple of hours of splitting wood, painting, or digging out roots somehow wrought an improvement in its flavor, possibly through some sort of quantum effect. By afternoon it was the best damn beer on earth. Still, I was glad they carried draft at Red's preferred bar in town, where he hung out with a couple of lakeside buddies. I was looking forward to the trip. It was as complete a break as I could imagine from my day-to-day in the lurching heart of Los Angeles.

I got up late this morning; I preferred to wake up at dawn. But if I was going to be out of town for a few days, I figured I’d better make good use of that last night together with Sheela, so that I wouldn’t be missing her nocturnal antics too much while I was gone. We’d made up for lost time ahead of time. We’d make up for it again when I got back. Sheela was a vigorous girl, a full-blooded Italian in every sense of the word. Beyond Italian, as she was always diligent to point out: one hundred percent Sicilian, born in Jersey, raised in LA, a girl who’d gone through a wild youth and had decided to settle down as she hit thirty—just not too much. The nickname, which she insisted on spelling that way, made sense when you pronounced her real name, Cecilia, in Italian. Black haired, short, foul-mouthed, and smart, curvier than was fashionable in America, but the hell with that, she’d always say, let’s have fun. Just don’t get on her bad side: I’d seen what happened to a guy that had. In fact, I’d helped it happen. We were a good team, in and out of bed. She was the stuff that dreams are made of. All kinds of dreams.

She was staying behind, though. Red was an old-school kind of guy who had to get away from his wife, Cindy, now and then. They’d been married forty years and got along famously, two overweight peas in the fading pod of their house, which occupied the front of the lot that also bounded my little house on the hill. Red’s back yard was my front yard, and we shared the lemons that grew on the tree by the steps to my front door. Red Henshaw was a big-shouldered, big-bellied fellow with thick, silky white hair combed in an eternally-breaking wave back from his forehead. He'd got his bad limp from a bullet in the hip, a legacy of his days on the LAPD. That bullet had given him a good pension which left him with not much to do besides manage the rental I lived in. That, and tell stories, and keep an eye out for trouble. He’d helped me out of a jam once, and I owed him more than just the rent.

My front porch wasn't really a porch; it was just a rickety landing at the top of the stairs that clung to the front of the house. Still, it was my platform over the world—my world, at least. The lot was on a hill, so I could see over Red and Cindy's house and the house next door down the slope. Gray roofs and green trees sloped down to the shallow trough where Alvarado Boulevard ran, noisy and chaotic, through a grimy bustle of laundromats, liquor stores, taquerias, and a fading grocery. It carried traffic from a forlorn stub of the 2 freeway to Sunset Boulevard half a mile south. That wasn't the famous part of Sunset; though our neighborhood was only four or five miles from Hollywood, there was no overt glamour here, just hard work and tight budgets. Layers of graffiti confused each other's territorial bellowing on every back wall along Alvarado, but up on our hill it was quiet, and even the gangbangers were polite when you met them on the sidewalk. From my porch, it was all hidden by the crowns of the world-weary trees, which had been there since before the white people showed up in their graceful and dangerous sailing ships a few hundred years before. Far in the southeast, the treetops vanished, and the towers of downtown stood out against the morning, sentinels of wealth, overshadowing even City Hall and the courts, which were invisible from my hill. It was a city where money trumped justice every day of the week in a grand game where the little people I lived with were the cards. I stayed out of that game as much as I could. Red, for all his country-boy slouching, understood it better than I did, having been a cop.

The morning's bees stumbling into the lemon tree brought me back to my immediate world. They floated among the spindly branches like the lost thoughts that drift through your mind when you're half-awake. I could smell bacon frying somewhere, and hear the soft ripple of Spanish somewhere else, and then an old man coughing somewhere up the hill. People waking up in little square rooms all around me. The rumble of early traffic along unseen streets. Morning air cool on my face and arms as the distant white clouds slowly whirled and dissolved. The comfortable feeling of knowing there was no hurry to the day.

The back screen door of Red and Cindy's house opened, and Red himself lurched out, letting it bang shut behind him on its feeble spring. He wore a half-smile on his face, and waved at me with his free hand as he limped towards the trash can with a rumpled brown bag in his hand. I drifted down the stairs. Morning, Red.

Mornin' yourself Lenny. You ready to hit the road in a coupla hours?

Pretty much. Waiting for Sheela to get her butt out of bed so we can eat.

Ain't no hurry. I can never get my own ass ready in time anyhow. The lake'll still be there whenever we show up, and so will the chores. And, he grinned, the beer's already in the truck.

He moved himself downwind from me and lit his first cigarette of the day. The smoke drifted away in the cool morning breeze. There'll be a lotta work this time. I haven't been up there myself in three-four months. Winter always ruffles things up a bit around the cabin.

That sounds mighty good to me, Red. I've been sitting at a desk all day for too damn long.

You're workin'. That counts for something. Business good?

Yeah. Looks like the world's still got an appetite for ad sheets to throw on front porches and glossy-stock BS to wave at the shareholders. We're always busy. But reading that stuff all day…let's just say it gets tiring. It'll be nice to do something that doesn't start with a red pencil and end with a sore ass.

Know what you mean…I used ta start wishin' for someone to fuck up after I'd been sittin' in the patrol car for half a day with no action. Just so I could get my butt off that damn bench seat. He blew a stream of smoke up towards the shredding clouds. 'Course I wish I was back there now….

He'd been given his limp not by a suspect but by the damn fool he was partnered with, and it had put him on a disability retirement years before. He still kept in touch with the cop world, and had even dragged me a little ways into it when he'd decided I needed to learn how to shoot. It was a foreign country to me, all straight backs and cheap suits, and I never made any friends with the people we met in the badly-lit alleys at the shooting range. I suppose that if I'd come across them in some other context, I might have connected with one or two of them, but in a room where people methodically practiced dealing death in measured doses, it was hard to think humanistically, at least for me. It didn’t seem to bother Red in the least. He kept going back there, though he'd been off the force now for longer than he'd been on it.

What I'm saying, Red went on, is that being on permanent vacation ain't all it's made out to be.

So what you're doing here, I said, is taking a vacation from your vacation, right?

He coughed a smoky laugh. I guess you got it right, Lenny!

I hadn't heard my front door open, but I sure as hell heard Sheela's morning greeting. How she could make her voice strident and sweet at the same time, I never knew, but I loved it.

Hey, you two! I know you're plotting trouble. Are you going to stand around there all day and leave me to eat breakfast all by myself? She was wearing my raggedy old bathrobe and, if I knew her, nothing else. It came practically to her ankles, but did nothing to hide her curves. Come on up! My famous eggs and polenta got about three minutes to go before they meet their destiny.

Red's eyes lit up, but he begged off. Count me out, Sheela. I made myself eggs and grits around six.

Hey, that's almost the same thing!

Ain't as good as yours, but you know Cindy'll want ta feed me again before we hit the road, and I'm fat enough as it is.

I didn't beg off; the fresh morning air, combined with last night's exertions, made me hungry. Duty calls, I told Red. See you in a couple?

A couple or three. No point in hurryin' through life. Everybody gets the same damn prize at the finish line, don’t they? That was his mantra. Between the war and the squad car, he'd seen too many people who had taken the prize too young.

She stood at the top of the rickety stairs bold as a statue, bright-eyed in the sun. I stopped one step short, which matched our heights a little better, and indulged in a hug. I heard Red's screen door clap shut, and Sheela and I edged our way together into the little house on the hill.

She graced the table with the polenta and eggs, splashed with a fresh tomato sauce, and even mixed a half-pitcher of mimosas. It was a tribute to our first breakfast together a couple of years ago, and so she never elaborated on it. Not that she needed to: having grown up Italian, even if it was in LA, she was a natural cook. Though her parents had been born in Jersey, the family was still rooted in the hills of Sicily, and half the time she was speaking in the island dialect when she was on the phone with them. In our house, bed & breakfast featured attractions that a tourist cottage never could. We settled into the breakfast nook that comprised our dining room.

Ah, Lenny, she said. That was a night to remember.

They all are, babe, when you're involved. And I still love you in the morning.

Yeah, 'cause you know what's good for you! She gave a loving sneer, then settled back in her seat. Her jet-black hair caressed the shoulder of the robe. She'd found time to brush the sleep out of it, and the fringe of bangs was perfect over her dark and shining eyes. A deep breath distended the bathrobe beautifully. I almost decided we should delay my departure, but…it was Saturday, a busy day at the hair salon Sheela owned with her sister. We both had to get ready to go. We tucked into the grub.

The dregs of the mimosa went into the glasses, and Sheela raised hers for a toast. Here's to a good trip, loverboy! We clinked the glasses together, and she added: Hey, stay out of trouble up there.

I laughed. There's never trouble up at the lake. It's a place people go to because nothing happens there.

The last of the drink went down as smoothly as if that was true.

2.

She walked as if she owned the world, and as far as I was concerned, she did. It had become our tradition to stroll down the hill together on Saturdays, when I didn't have to be at my own job earlier than the salon opened. The salon was barely over a mile away, tucked into a dusty huddle of fading storefronts under a small cliff on Sunset Boulevard. The cliff never quite crumbled in the rain, the shops on either side of it never quite succeeded or failed, but the salon did well. Sheela and Anna Maria were both tough broads with decidedly punk attitudes, and most of their customers had floated in on the second wave of artists and musicians to move into Echo Park, as the first wave died off or retreated into houses that they could never leave alive because they were finally paid for and they couldn't afford anyplace else. An unsteady but reliable stream of scrawny tattooed cynics kept them in business, and they returned the favor by making sure their haircuts advertised whatever countercultural pretentions their clients hoped would promote their misfit status. It was a world where you had to stand out to fit in, and the girls were natural masters of what you might call vernacular brand management. They were ahead of their time.

It felt as though everybody knew us on our hill, if not by name, at least by sight. Old men waved from porches, their wives smiled through kitchen windows, and hard-eyed young men in immaculate t-shirts lifted their chins in restrained nods of acknowledgment. Bulky dogs watched us through picket fences with blistered paint; they had given up barking at us long ago, after their owners had shambled up to the sagging gates to say hello in perfect Spanish or broken English. I spoke enough Spanish to get by, barely, as did most younger folk of any color in LA, and the fact that we walked marked us as locals. Our neighbors in the whiter, richer parts of the district, farther up the hill, only rumbled through in their cars, with the windows rolled up. Their faces never betrayed any affection for the ramshackle streets that I loved. Sheela's confident bustle fit her right in without being the least bit typical of our streets: she felt no fear, and you could tell that she loved the world.

A mockingbird whirled its song into the sky, where it dissolved among the vanishing clouds. Sheela smiled richly under her dark glasses. Ah, Lenny, this is so much nicer than living in the middle of a bunch of warehouses by the river. This is, whaddaya call it, a real place, y'know? I took her hand. Yes, I knew. It was why I kept on here though some of our friends were afraid to stay for dinner and have to drive home in the dark. It was patched-up, shabby, and sometimes rough, but it fit me as comfortably as the disreputable old bathrobe had, before Sheela appropriated it. I felt a nagging worry that someone would appropriate the neighborhood as well some day—money lurked at the fringes like a horde of plague rats breeding under the wooden wharves of a port—but I tried not to think about it on Saturday mornings with my gal.

The neat but tired houses gave way to apartments the last half block before Sunset, oddly-shaped buildings made to conform to the final slope of the hill and the twist of the street. Concrete stairways rose at odd angles beside them, probably improvised at the last minute by some dusty contractor three-quarters of a century before, in a time when the building code was something between a bureaucratic dream and a tentative suggestion. Some were brick buildings three stories high, waiting for the next earthquake like frail widows who would be tumbled into oblivion by a hurrying taxi, but most were the plaster fantasies of architects with neither ambition nor imagination, whose craft was animated by a vivid desire to present a bill and move on. Los Angeles has always been a city rooted in the provisional. But then we're all provisional in this life; we just don't want to admit it.

Sheela and I turned the corner and waded into the rush and bustle of Saturday traffic hurrying grimly nowhere. Not too many people walked in LA in those days if they could afford not to; the shriek and smell of a busy street like Sunset was one good reason. Our neighborhood was a secret refuge of the sane, and fortunately it was only a short way down Sunset to the salon.

Sheela strutted along beside me—strutting was a good way to give dignity to a short girl's scurry in a tall man's world—and we arrived at the stolid little building in short order. No new graffiti had appeared overnight, which was not surprising: Sheela and Anna Maria had hired the most talented of the local taggers to decorate the storefront; the painters' pride kept them from defacing it themselves, and their reputation in the streets and alleys warded off outsiders who might have been tempted to. Free haircuts now and then helped sweeten the deal, and the grace and skill with which Sheela and her sister wielded straight razors kept everyone polite. I kept the little .32 automatic Red had given me in a pocket or waist pouch as an aid to diplomacy when other means failed, but I generally kept it a secret. Nothing tempers someone's decorative aggression as readily as the sight of that little black hole at the end of a barrel. The portal to darkness generally restrains the haste to raise fists…as long as there isn't also a gun in play on the other side.

So far I'd been judicious in showing the little pistol, which I had done only twice, long before. Mostly I carried it to shut Red up. He didn't like walking naked, as he put it, and didn't want me to either. Maybe it embarrassed him to be seen with a man who wasn’t carrying death in his pocket. So far, I'd never fired it at anything more animate than tin cans and paper targets, and in my best-laid plans I never would.

Sheela unlocked the shop door and dragged me in. Plant your ass in that chair, lover; it's time for a trim. She got no argument from me. Sheela was a genius with the hair clippers, yet her unlamented ex had never let her touch his hair. He was an outlaw biker now stewing in jail on an assault charge, but he was a genius himself, with the tattoo gun, and his craft decorated any part of Sheela's torso that would be covered by street clothes. While the skill was undeniable, the taste exhibited made days at the poolside all too interesting to people who thought they knew her. The leering Mickey Mouse by her belly button, with an improbable and highly-detailed erection, generally left people at a loss for words—even some of the people from my circle of motorcycling buddies. She'd let Skull work on her—that was the name he went by—but it had never been a two-way street. I sat in the chair as commanded; it was a point in my favor, and besides I was in fact starting to look a little ragged.

She snipped and clipped, staring at me with an uncharacteristically objective expression, and finally announced; Much improved, Lenny! But listen: don't shave while you're up there; I wanna try a goatee on you next.

No problem, babe. I wasn't planning to anyway. I checked in the mirror she held up to me. I was, at least on the surface, much improved indeed.

The lock cricketed, and Anna Maria bustled in. Her normal driving-to-work frown turned into a brief and brilliant smile of greeting which swept across us in proper clan order: first Sheela, then me. So, Lenny, you gonna leave my sister all unprotected for a couple of days, huh?

Come on, Anna; you know it's the world that's got to be protected from her, right? She laughed and kissed my cheek, then went to the windows and pulled up the shades. The sun slanting through the bars outside the dingy plate glass striped the wall of the shop, where photos of the locals stared down into the torture chamber in which their hairstyles had taken on their sometimes-astounding shapes. A lot of them were in bands, including punk bands, and the sisters' no-holds-barred approach to life dovetailed well with the take-no-prisoners attitude to style favored by a good proportion of the clientele. It wasn't unusual to see a patron stroll out of the shop with what appeared to be a forest of purple tiger claws sprouting from his skull. Or hers: sometimes it was hard to tell. Life and love were as full of surprises as a minefield in the Echo Park of the early punkster era.

Sheela bustled over to give me a hug and a quick kiss on the lips. Be careful up there, lover. What with the bears and the rednecks, I worry.

There's no bears up there.

Okay, snakes, then. Or mountain lions. Ah, Lenny, it's not a world I understand. I woulda made a lousy caveman.

My first thought was that a paleolithic Sheela would have changed the course of civilization, but I kept that to myself. Don't worry, babe. My biggest danger will be falling asleep in the middle of the day. After another quick squeeze, I walked out into the light of spring in Los Angeles. The smell of car fumes drifted up into the bright blue sky, giving it its first tint of civilization.

I turned the corner and walked back up the hill toward the house. I walked past my street and down to Alvarado, where there was a deli run by an old Italian with a round bald head, a bristly moustache, and eternally sad eyes. Sheela said being around Joe made her feel like she was back in Jersey visiting the grandparents. Joe must have felt the same way, because once I'd introduced him to Sheela, he started giving me discounts on everything I bought there. Oddly enough, they had to talk in English, since he didn't speak Sicilian and she didn't speak what I had quickly learned not to call normal Italian. Joe was leaning his big belly on the counter and reading a newspaper when I came in. He did a little pushup and reached a hand across the counter to me. Hey, Lenny, been a while. How you doin'? How's that gal of yours?

Been working, Joe. Both of us. You know how it is.

You bet I do. And I love every minute of it behind this counter. Whaddaya need today? Pasta, cheese? Don't starve her now; she looks good and healthy just the way she is.

I wouldn't dare! Just picking her up a little present, since I'm going out of town for a few days. Got any moscato in stock today? I want to leave a bottle on the table as a surprise for her when she gets home tonight.

You're just in time. One left, Lenny. He bustled into the back room and brought it out. Here, take it, with my compliments. He made an exaggerated bow, nearly knocking his head on the counter.

Come on, Joe, I couldn't….

I'm not giving it to you, Lenny, I'm giving it to Cecilia. Anyway, I'll cheat you on something else later to make up for it. Okay? His eyes glimmered.

Okay, Joe. It's a deal. See you in a few days.

I'll be here.

I walked back up the hill the couple of blocks to my house.

It didn't take long to get ready. I'd already thrown some clothes and a paperback into my knapsack, along with the usual bathroom stuff, minus the shaving kit. I grabbed my floppy hiking hat out of the closet, along with the waist pack I used on bicycle rides. The little .32 went into that, where I could forget about it for the rest of the trip. It would be there if Red asked, or if any of the mythical bears, snakes, or mountain lions made an appearance, which they wouldn't. Well, there would be snakes; there always are; but they would still be torpid at that time of year, and anyway I'd hiked a lot and never killed a snake—or anything else for that matter, at least not without the intervention of a professional at a distant Midwestern slaughterhouse, or