Finnegan's week

CHAPTER 14

San Diego’s Old Town-wildly popular with the city’s vital tourist industry-was never one of Fin’s favorite haunts, even though a lot of cops frequented an Old Town restaurant that served pretty fair carnitas, homemade tortillas, and decent margaritas, all of which tended to attract happy-hour working women.

There wasn’t much left in Old Town of the Spanish period when Father Junípero Serra and the soldiers of the Presidio brought the Gospel to the local Kumeyaay whether the Indians liked it or not. There was some evidence that they didn’t, in that the peace-loving Kumeyaay destroyed the friars’ original mission.

The early nineteenth century brought the Mexican period and with it large adobes, including some impressive haciendas with whitewashed walls, tile roofs, patios and fountains. One of those old haciendas, actually built for a rich Peruvian, had been transformed into a restaurant with courtyard dining, and it packed in the tourists. But most of the surrounding shops sold items that could be purchased more cheaply in Tijuana.

A grassy square in the middle of Old Town Plaza was the best part of the whole shebang, as far as Fin was concerned. It was there in the pedestrian area where he’d strolled with ex-wife number two and made the disastrous mistake of proposing marriage, after guzzling five margaritas. He’d never enjoyed margaritas since.

Huerta’s Pottery Shed was larger than the other shops, in that the pots required large display space. Alberto Huerta, the second-generation owner of the shop, sold glazed pottery for cookware and serving, and decorative pottery for plants and flowers, specializing in cactus pots with watering ports. Some of his pottery was designed in the shape of chickens, pigs, sheep, and of course, bulls.

Nell Salter was late, so Fin decided to go it alone and get it over with. He figured that any acquaintance of the late thief José Palmera wasn’t about to confess and beg for leniency.

Alberto Huerta was surprised that afternoon when a rather slight man in a herringbone sport coat entered his shop and showed him a badge.

“You took delivery of a truckload of pots a couple of days ago,” Fin said to the shop owner.

“Yes, that’s right.”

Alberto Huerta didn’t look like somebody who’d know dick about a hot van and a cold thief, but since it was a bogus investigation anyway, Fin said, “The driver got killed in an accident after he left you.”

“He did? My god!”

“Did you know him well?”

“He told me his name was Pepe Palmera. I never saw him before, but we’ve done business with Rubén for years. That’s who makes the pots in Tijuana, Rubén Ochoa.”

“The paperwork indicated that the driver was the owner of the pottery business.”

“They do that down there,” Alberto Huerta explained. “They make up all kinds of paperwork to get past U.S. Customs and deliver their loads up here. It’s a hard life down there so they learn to cut through the U.S. red tape. That driver didn’t own a single pot, I promise you.”

“That was a special van,” Fin said. “It was loaded with drums of toxic waste when it got stolen last Friday. I’ve got a colleague who wants to know where the thieves dumped the waste.”

“I can’t help you with that,” the shopkeeper said. “A stolen truck? You might try Rubén Ochoa in Tijuana. Maybe he can help you.” Then he added, “Toxic waste? Those people have enough to worry about without us giving them our poison. Let me get Rubén’s address and phone number for you. I don’t think he’d knowingly do business with a truck thief.”

“You sure about that?”

“Well …” Alberto Huerta shrugged apologetically. “They’re poor people, aren’t they?”

He went into the back room and when he returned he gave Fin a piece of paper with the pottery maker’s Tijuana address and phone number on it.

“Here’s my card,” Fin said. “If you hear anything that I should know, gimme a call.”

Alberto Huerta nodded, anxious to help the customer standing in the doorway. She was a tall woman in a red cable-knit turtleneck. She had shapely legs revealed to advantage in a long skirt with a front slit. Alberto Huerta liked the way her hair had that I-just-got-out-of-bed look. She looked boldly at everyone in the shop. And her nose, it was slightly bent, obviously having been broken. On a fine-looking woman, the broken nose was strangely exciting, the shopkeeper thought.

After Fin spotted Nell, his thoughts were instantly similar to Alberto Huerta’s-about the long legs, and the go-to-hell hairdo-but especially about the nose. In 1984, when acting jobs were more plentiful, he’d done a local TV commercial with a model whose nose had been broken in a jet-ski accident. Her agent had tried to persuade her to leave it as is but she got it fixed, after which her modeling career went nowhere. Fin told her to rebreak it.

“Yo, Nell!” Fin said, and her firm handshake gave him goose bumps.

“Sorry I was late,” Nell said, as they walked toward his car after a quick briefing.

She’d offered to drive, but he wanted her to see his Vette. “He didn’t seem to know diddly,” Fin said. “I bet your toxic goop got dumped in T.J.”

“Nothing unusual in that,” Nell said. “The next generation in that town’s gonna be Ninja Turtles.”

“This is mine,” he said, when they got to the Vette. He unlocked the door on her side and offered his hand as she settled into the leather seat.

Decent manners, Nell thought. And he was kinda cute, but pretty small for a cop. This actor was not the leading-man type, a second banana, maybe. The guy that doesn’t get the girl, hard as he tries. Still, he had soft gray eyes and didn’t have a macho cop mustache, thank god.

She hadn’t found a man worth sleeping with in seven months, not since St. Patrick’s Day after a boozy party for D.A. investigators. Then, after five dates with the guy, she’d found out that the lying bastard was married.

When Fin fired up the Vette he revved the engine to let her feel the power. Then he said, “Now that all the hard police work’s done, do you really want a beer or shall I take you someplace nice?”

“To that German saloon,” she said. “You made it sound slightly better than an emergency call to a shrink.”

“I was kinda lying about the beer,” Fin confessed. “Actually their suds is the kinda stuff they use in Germany to kill potato bugs with. Lemme take you somewhere else.”

“Speaking of bugs,” Nell said, “I think we’re gonna get a lab report from the medical examiner saying that Palmera had been exposed to an organophosphate.”

“What’s that?”

“In this case an insecticide called Guthion. That’s what they were hauling when the truck got ripped off.”

“Poetry in that,” Fin said. “The thief steals poison and it poisons him.”

“I just wanna know if it got somebody else. And where the hell is it, that’s what I wanna know.”

He took the Garnet turnoff to Pacific Beach, saying, “You’ve held up real well in the years since I last saw you.”

“They say that about old buildings.”

“That didn’t come out right,” Fin said. “I’m nervous. You’re the first woman that’s been in my Vette since last June.”

“Your dance card can’t look that bad.”

“It’s because of my last divorce,” Fin said. “I’m a three-time loser. Every time somebody rides in my Vette I marry her. I’ve learned to ask dates if they mind riding the bus.”

“So where’re we going for the beer?”

“Pacific Beach,” Fin said. “I know a place on the sand where we can get a free sunset with an overpriced beer.”

“I live in P.B.,” she said.

“Yeah? Then you’ve probably been everywhere in town.”

Nell decided that a sunset drink was about all this guy was good for. Three divorces? No way! To make conversation, she said, “Got any kids?”

“Never had kids,” Fin said. “Would it be too forward of me to explain that I have a very low sperm count? Negligible in fact.”

“I didn’t ask,” she said.

“Sorry if that was too intimate a revelation. It’s been several months since I talked to a date, not that this is a date. But let’s talk about me. Did you happen to catch my gig at Blackfriars’ Theatre? Or maybe at North Coast Rep? Or at Lamb’s Players Theatre last season?”

“I’ve never seen you perform,” she said. “But I think I read a small story in the paper a couple years ago about local actors. You were mentioned, right?”

“It wasn’t that small,” he said. “My picture was used in the story, though not one of my best. I’m, uh, being considered for a part in Harbor Nights.”

“What’s that, a play?”

“No, a TV series they’re shooting down here.”

“That should be interesting.”

“A contract killer. Can you see me as a killer?”

She turned and looked at him then, and he turned away from the traffic to face her. He was definitely one of them, Nell Salter thought. He had Peter Pan Policeman written all over him. Only he was worse than most: an actor to boot!

She said, “If you’re a real actor, you can be a killer or anything else.”

“That’s exactly right!” Fin said. “You’re smarter than all the yuppie casting agents I’ve read for in the past five years. ‘Not the type we’re looking for,’ they usually say. I say, ‘Was John Malkovich the type to play a world-class seducer in Dangerous Liaisons?’”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I didn’t see it.”

“Okay, let’s talk about me” Fin said. “Do you like Irish types? My full name is Finbar Brendan Finnegan.”

Was it an omen? “As a matter of fact, I just had a passing thought about last St. Patrick’s Day,” she admitted.

“Really? What?”

“Not important. Yeah, I like the Irish except for the Kennedys and all their cousins including pets and livestock. I don’t like people that treat women like …”

“Like Marilyn Monroe?”

“You got it.”

“I’m the opposite,” Fin said. “I’ve been victimized by women all my life. My sisters were so protective they thought Jerry Lee Lewis was the devil’s stepchild. And they were so unbelievably cruel they made me learn the words to every song Patti Page ever recorded. Would you like me to sing ‘How Much Is That Doggie in the Window’?”

“I don’t think so,” Nell said, catching herself wondering if his little body held any interesting surprises, like a nice ass. His chatter was a bit disarming.

“Anyway, that’s my life story until I joined the marines and went to Vietnam and came home and joined the San Diego P.D. and got my own place just so I didn’t have to hear the Von Trapps yodeling in the Alps about the sound of mucous. My sisters think that’s the greatest musical ever made. They’re very Catholic. Then I met and married that sergeant you used to know who was the reincarnation of the Bitch of Buchenwald. Never marry somebody who thinks her handcuffs are a fashion statement.”

“Me, I learned about marriage the first time I tried it,” Nell said. “If I ever get real lonely I’ll buy a parrot. Better conversation than I get from most guys.”

“That’s ’cause you people’re more verbal than we are,” Fin said. “And more mature. Little boys stay little boys till they’re forty-something; little girls’re just sawed-off women.”

“And you?” Nell turned and looked at him. “Are you finally mature?”

“I haven’t got married since I was forty-two,” Fin said. “That might mean I’m growing up.”

Nell found herself wondering about his buns again. Then he wheeled the Vette into a parking lot across from the oceanfront.

The restaurant was by the Crystal Pier, one of the last structural relics of Southern California’s Golden Age of The Beach. It was a charming, seedy period piece. The main street of Pacific Beach, or “P.B.,” as the locals called it, fed right onto the pier, under a two-story arch that joined two whitewashed, teal-shingled buildings belonging to the Crystal Pier Hotel. Farther out on the wooden pier were twenty-one cottages lining both sides of the pier, where cars could park in front of their rooms, over a sandy beach and white water.

Beyond the cottages, the pier narrowed into a wide pedestrian boardwalk that opened up again onto a spacious fishing platform guarded by a white railing, one hundred yards out over blue water. From above, the pier looked like a sand shovel that had drifted away from a giant child and floated on the ocean.

The restaurant was a typical California chain. The emphasis was not on food but on drinks, expensive enough to justify the rent, but affordable enough not to completely discourage the locals who’d be needed when winter came and tourists went.

Fin and Nell were lucky to get a window table, where they ordered tropical drinks served in ceramic coconut shells by a waitress in a sarong. They looked out on a “boardwalk” made of concrete that stretched four miles south to Mission Beach. And because autumn was late in arriving, the boardwalk was loaded with joggers, walkers, rollerbladers and skateboarders draped in bag-rags out for their evening exposure. Most of the hardbodies wore combinations of Day-Glo shorts, tank tops, T-shirts, swimsuits and cutoffs. There was a bit of hip-hop and grunge, but not like at L.A.’s Venice Beach.

Continuing with his obsessive chatter, Fin said, “I’ve been around women all my life. You’ll find I’m easy to be with. In fact, women are very comfortable with me. I’m the sensitive artistic type. I wouldn’t hurt a Medfly.”

The weird thing was, whatever the guy was doing, it was starting to work on her. He was starting to look a little cuter, even after only one drink. Cute little guys could be dangerous though. She asked, “Did you bring your ex-wives here?”

“No, they preferred those trendy places in La Jolla where you can watch the sunset, but you’re surrounded by a lotta wealthy gentlemen from countries where camels’re still beasts of burden and occasional lovers. But enough about my ex-wives. Let’s talk about me.”

Then they didn’t talk much about anything for a few minutes, because of the impending sunset. Sitting there at the fake monkeypod cocktail table, drinking from a fake coconut shell, being brushed lightly by a fake potted-palm branch, they were getting caught up in the nostalgia. A hint of the way it was, the way it must have been, in bygone days when summer never ended along California’s coast. Because life was different then, or so they said, all who’d lived it.

Fin was delighted to see that it was going to be a great sunset, guaranteeing that people in the bar beside the windows would “Oh!” and “Ah!” the instant the fireball disappeared into the eternal sea. No matter how many times he’d seen it, Fin never stopped feeling exhilaration, followed by a sense of loss when the sky momentarily blazed crimson from the afterglow of the heavenly light.

By the time it happened, Fin and Nell had already finished their second drink. He turned to her and she looked as sad as he felt after all the fire had vanished.

She gazed into his eyes for a moment, and she astonished him by reading his mind. By saying what he felt.

“I know” Nell said, nodding. “For a little while, before it disappears, you can really pretend, can’t you? That life’s a beach, after all.”

Fin was awfully glad he’d matured. In the old days he’d have married her for that.