Free Early Graves by Joseph Hansen

office among shiny stacks of motor oil cans. And their sweeping wouldn’t have satisfied Nakamura. He kept his head down, and got every last twig, leaf, pod.
    Dave tapped the horn. Nakamura came to the car. Dave wore a moth-eaten ski cap. Nakamura said, “You want the old car.”
    “Will it start?” Dave said. “Is there gas in it?”
    “I keep it ready for you,” Nakamura said. “That was our agreement, right?” He grinned with large, white teeth. When he did that, his eyes almost closed. He shook his head. “You look like a real bum.”
    “Flattery will get you nowhere,” Dave said and, moving carefully, got out of the Jaguar. At the moment he did that, the sun stopped shining. He looked up. Black, ragged clouds were scudding in from the southeast. It was going to rain again. He watched Nakamura walk off bowlegged to the rear of the station building. In a moment, he came back into view, driving a pale yellow sixties Valiant with a deep crease along one side, where it had got the worst of a sideswipe collision someplace in its past. It was as tinny as the car driven last night by the kid who had attacked him. On another case, years ago, Dave had driven the Jaguar into a neighborhood of street gangs and nearly had it stripped. He wasn’t going to repeat that mistake.
    He handed Nakamura the keys to the Jaguar. “Don’t let anything happen to it.”
    “I’ll tune it up,” Nakamura said. “When will you be back?”
    “Before you close,” Dave said. He winced, wangling his long lean limbs into the small car. The seat was tattered under him. Getting a grip on the door to close it was awkward.
    Nakamura saw that, and closed it for him. He leaned at the window, worried.
    “What happened to your arm?”
    “Somebody tried to remove it,” Dave said.
    “You sure you’re all right to drive?”
    “No,” Dave said. “But it’s too far to walk.”
    It was Chandler Park. And not as he remembered it. He remembered it from his teen years. A gospel temple with a big white dome loomed above the trees north of the park. For a few months in high school, Dave had yearned over a handsome classmate who adored Lizzie Tremaine, the flashy evangelist who had built the temple and presided noisily over its meetings in flowing white robes and brassy yellow hair. And Dave had tagged down here after the boy for a few Sundays, just to be near him. It was useless. Jesus was the only male that boy would ever love.
    But it was then that Dave had come to know this place at the heart of LA. Brick apartments from the 1920s along one side, hulking old three-story frame houses with jigsaw-work porches and bay windows on the other two sides. The neighborhood hadn’t been exactly upscale even then. In the decades since, paint had peeled, window screens had rusted out, glass had been smashed and replaced by cardboard, or nailed over with plywood. The brick buildings had fared a little better, but not much. Shops were mostly deserted, doorways piled with blown trash. The lettering on painted signs faded over the doors of Mexican cafés. A corner grocery looked flyblown. A place that claimed to sell records and tapes had padlocked grillwork over its doors and windows, and no one inside. Still, life went on upstairs.
    He heard voices when he parked the car and got out into a misting thin rainfall. Human voices, television voices. Music from boomboxes, very loud. The television voices spoke Spanish. The other voices spoke black. The music was black. A clutch of black teenage boys slouched at the far corner. Across from them, Latino boys slouched also, watching them. In the park, a solemn, white-haired, heavyset Mexican in plastic rowed a boat on the lake among ducks. He hinged the oars inside the boat, and rummaged in a white plastic supermarket bag, and began tossing bread to the ducks. A young pregnant black woman passed Dave as he fed the parking meter. She was pushing a pram with a baby in it. The baby was looking up at the rain, blinking,