Dave Brandstetter 08 The Little Dog Laughed by Joseph Hansen

Author:Joseph Hansen [Hansen, Joseph]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781480416840
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2013-03-14T15:40:00+00:00

12

CITY VIEW WAS A street of little frame houses along a low ridge. Dave hadn’t been in this part of L.A. for thirty years, maybe longer, and he was shocked. He remembered it as poor but neat. Jews had lived here then. A generation of Jewish kids had grown up on these look-alike streets with their pinched look-alike houses. He knew some of those kids—Abe Greenglass, his lawyer, was one. They’d prospered and were living out their old age in handsome west side apartments or ranch houses on broad lawns in Van Nuys and Sherman Oaks. They remembered poverty, or thought they did. They didn’t. Boyle Heights had gone from ghetto to barrio. Now there was poverty—not the kind anyone would romanticize from the comfort of wealthy suburbs. Real poverty.

The houses needed paint. Roofing had weathered through to the tar and the tar was faded gray by rain, sun, wind. Chimneys had lost bricks in earthquakes or from the simple shifting of the land under skimpy foundations. TV aerials had toppled. Broken windowpanes were mended with stained cardboard. Once grass had grown in the grudging front yards—now they were bare yellow hardpan. Old auto chassis on wheels stripped of tires gathered grime in short, steep driveways. Cars in not much better shape rusted at the curbs, their dusty windows glaring red in the sunset light. The porch of number nineteen twenty-two had pulled away some from the house and looked ready to slide downhill.

Dave stood for a moment at the foot of the cracked cement steps and looked along the street both ways. A pair of men, one squat, one tall, stood at a far corner. Cowboy boots, crimp-brimmed straw hats. But no Cherokee, Blazer, Bronco with black glass and a pintle mount on the roof was anywhere in sight. Dave climbed the steps to a cracked cement footpath, went up the footpath, and halted to test the wooden front porch steps gingerly with a foot. They hung at an odd angle, askew, like a stroke victim’s mouth, but they didn’t creak or wobble, and he climbed them. The gap between the front wall of the house and the porch where it had pulled away and showed rusty spikes was maybe nine inches, maybe a foot. He reached across and used knuckles on the frame of a torn screen door. The solid door inside it stood open. Radio or television talk came out. In Spanish. The door was loose, and gave a satisfying rattle. He was heard.

A woman came, small, her brown skin webbed with wrinkles, hair pulled tightly back and knotted, eyes black as basalt. She studied him, head turned a little aside, distrustful. He told her who he was, lying again about Banner Life, and said in Spanish that it was urgent that he talk to Porfirio. The young black to whom Porfirio had spoken about events in San Feliz was a mutual friend. The woman narrowed her eyes and said nothing. Dave said, “It is now known

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