Free Los Angeles Stories by Ry Cooder Page B

uniform.
    â€œI asked for you at La Bamba. They suggested I try your apart­ment. I went there, the door was open. I became alarmed. The Edmund is known to the police. Unsavory, I’m very sorry to say. You should be more careful. By the way, I found a syringe and a drug vial in your room. We will speak of that later. I think you have something important to tell me?”
    I was observing the streetlamps, an old habit. Styles change as one passes from one district to another, one era to another. Very interesting for one who travels by streetcar at night. But Morales was becoming impatient. My bones hurt, my head hurt. Where do old streetlamps go when they are no longer wanted? My eyes filled with tears at the thought.
    â€œYou must pay attention, my romantic friend. Listen to me. You were seen leaving General Hospital.What did you do there?”
    â€œA sick man, I don’t know him well. A favor.”
    â€œWho is the sick man? A musician?”
    â€œA laborer, not a musician.”
    â€œWhere did you get morphine?”
    â€œI am afflicted with a bone disease, I was born with it.”
    â€œIt is quite illegal to possess morphine. I thought we had an understanding. Need I remind you of the consequences of concealing information? I’m afraid we may have to detain you as a material witness. En El Tambo, no hay boleros, no hay morphine, no hay nada. I want you to tell me if this is the man you saw leaving the Million Dollar Theatre the day Salazar was murdered.” He thrust a photograph in front of me, a picture of Carlos Bulosan.
    My mind was starting to clear a little. “That is impossible. I saw this man, I spoke to him. He can’t walk, let alone walk out of the hospital and get himself to the theater and kill someone. Only a poor fruit­ picker, and he is dying. I know it, I know the signs.”
    â€œI suggest that you and this fruit ­picker conspired to murder Alberto Salazar!” Morales’s face was now inches from mine. He was enraged. “I further suggest that you were paid for your service in morphine!”
    â€œYou may suggest what you will, but I am sick, I must return home. It is useless to make these accusations.”
    â€œOf course. You are unwell, I’m very sorry for the inconven­ience. Police work — sometimes, it is distasteful. My wife sends her regards. Buenas noches.”
    We had come to a halt in front of the Edmund Apartments. Morales sat back in the seat, his face composed into a mask. The driver appeared human in form. The police car drove away, leaving me there on the curb. I entered the building and walked up the stairs to my floor. My door was closed and locked. I used my key. I laid down on the sofa, trying to think why Morales wore no left shoe. Was his left foot cloven? With the dawn, I fell asleep.
    MY GRANDFATHER IGNACIO was fond of saying, “If all the Mexicans in Los Angeles fought alongside Pancho Villa as they claim, the revolution would have triumphed on Olvera Street.” There’s a photograph of Villa with his arm around my grandfather, who is dressed as a woman, dated Durango, 1919. Grandfather carried a derringer in his boot and a very large bone-­handled knife in his coat right up until his last days in the hospital. “They got Flores­ Magon, but they’ll never get me,” he declared, referring to the anarchist, whom he claimed to have hidden in the cellar. “The anglos were on the floor above in countless thousands. We fired, Ricardo and I, until our last bullet was gone. They took him then. I escaped — a tunnel underneath Chinatown.” In another version, Flores­ Magon was shot in the back by an informer while straightening a photograph of Trotsky. “Porfiriato revanchist swine! Viva Tierra y Libertad!” The tears came.
    My grandparents had been itinerant comic actors in Mexico before immigrating to Los Angeles in 1930. They made a success in the little provincial