While Cousins hadn’t been looking for a party to crash, it wasn’t an entirely innocent question either. He hated Sundays, and since Sundays were thought to be a family day, invitations were hard to come by. Weekdays he was out the door just as his children were waking up. He would give their heads a scratch, leave a few instructions for his wife, and be gone. By the time he got home at night they were asleep, or going to sleep. Pressed against their pillows, he found his children endearing, necessary, and that was how he thought of them from Monday morning all the way to Saturday at dawn. But on Saturday mornings they refused to keep sleeping. Cal and Holly would throw themselves onto his chest before the light of day had fully penetrated the vinyl roll-down shades, already fighting over something that had happened in the three minutes they’d been awake. The baby would start pulling herself over the bars of her crib as soon as she’d heard her siblings up—it was her new trick—and what she lacked in speed she made up for in tenacity. She would throw herself onto the floor if Teresa didn’t run to catch her in time, but Teresa was up already and vomiting. She closed the door to the bathroom in the hall and ran the tap, trying to be quiet about it, but the steady sound of retching filled the bedroom. Cousins threw off his two older children, their weightless selves landing in a tangle on the bedspread folded at the foot of the bed. They lunged at him again, shrieking with laughter, but he couldn’t play with them and he didn’t want to play with them and didn’t want to get up and get the baby, but he had to.
And so the day went from there, Teresa saying she needed to be able to go to the grocery store by herself, or that the people who lived on the corner were having a cookout and they hadn’t gone to the last cookout. Every minute a child was howling, first one at a time, then in duet, with the third one waiting, then the third one joining in, then two settling down so as to repeat the cycle. The baby fell straight into the sliding glass door in the den and cut open her forehead before breakfast. Teresa was on the floor, butterflying tiny Band-Aids, asking Bert if he thought she needed stitches. The sight of blood always made Bert uncomfortable and so he looked away, saying no, no stitches. Holly was crying because the baby was crying. Holly said that her head hurt. Cal was nowhere in evidence—though screaming, be it that of his sisters or his parents, usually brought him running back. Cal liked trouble. Teresa looked up at her husband, her fingers daubed in the baby’s blood, and asked him where Cal had gone.
All week long Cousins waded through the pimps and the wife-beaters, the petty thieves. He offered up his best self to biased judges and sleeping juries. He told himself that when the weekend came he would turn away from all the crime in Los Angeles, turn towards his pajama-clad children and newly pregnant wife, but he only made it to noon on Saturdays before telling Teresa that there was work at the office he had to finish before the first hearing on Monday. The funny thing was he really did go to work. The couple of times he’d tried slipping off to Manhattan Beach to eat a hot dog and flirt with the girls in their bikini tops and tiny cutoff shorts, he’d gotten a sunburn which Teresa was quick to comment on. So he would go to the office and sit among the men he sat among all week long. They would nod seriously to one another and accomplish more in three or four hours on a Saturday afternoon than they did on any other day.
But by Sunday he couldn’t do it again, not the children or the wife or the job, and so he pulled up the memory of a christening party he hadn’t been invited to. Teresa looked at him, her face bright for a minute. Thirty-one years old and still she had freckles over the bridge of her nose and spreading over her cheeks. She often said that she wished they took their kids to church, even if he didn’t believe in church or God or any of it. She thought it would be a good thing for them to do as a family, and this party might be the place to start. They could all go together.
“No,” he said. “It’s a work thing.”
She blinked. “A christening party?”
“The guy’s a cop.” He hoped she wouldn’t ask the cop’s name because at that particular moment he couldn’t remember it. “Sort of a deal maker, you know? The entire office is going. I just need to pay respects.”
She’d asked him if the baby was a boy or a girl, and if he had a present. The question was followed by a crash in the kitchen and a great clattering of metal mixing bowls. He hadn’t thought about a present. He went to the liquor cabinet and picked up a full bottle of gin. It was a big bottle, more than he would have wanted to give, but once he saw the seal was still intact the matter was decided.
That was how he came to be in Fix Keating’s kitchen making orange juice, Dick Spencer having abandoned his post for the consolation prize of the blonde’s unimpressive sister. He would wait it out, showing himself to be reliable in hopes of scoring the blonde herself. He would juice every orange in Los Angeles County if that’s what it took. In this city where beauty had been invented she was possibly the most beautiful woman he had ever spoken to, certainly the most beautiful woman he had ever stood next to in a kitchen. Her beauty was the point, yes, but it was also more than that: there had been a little jolt between their fingers whenever she passed him another orange. He felt it every time, an electric spark as real as the orange itself. He knew that making a move on a married woman was a bad idea, especially when you were in the woman’s house and her husband was also in the house and her husband was a cop and the party was a celebration of the birth of the cop’s second child. Cousins knew all of this but as the drinks stacked up he told himself there were larger forces at work. The priest who he’d been talking to earlier out on the back patio wasn’t as drunk as he was and the priest had definitely said there was something out of the ordinary going on. Saying something was out of the ordinary was as good as saying all bets were off. Cousins reached for his cup with his left hand and stopped to roll his right wrist in a circle the way he’d seen Teresa do before. He was cramping up.
Fix Keating was standing in the doorway, watching him like he knew exactly what he had in mind. “Dick said I was on duty,” Fix said. The cop wasn’t such a big guy but it was clear that his spring was wound tight, that he spent every day looking for a fight to throw himself into. All the Irish cops were like that.
“You’re the host,” Cousins said. “You don’t need to be stuck back here making juice.”
“You’re the guest,” Fix said, picking up a knife. “You should be out there enjoying yourself.”
But Cousins had never been a man for a crowd. If this had been a party Teresa had dragged him to he wouldn’t have lasted twenty minutes. “I know what I’m good at,” he said, and took the top off the juicer, stopping to rinse the buildup of pulp from the deep metal grooves of the top half before pouring the contents of the juice dish into a green plastic pitcher. For a while they worked next to one another not saying anything. Cousins was half lost in a daydream about the other man’s wife. She was leaning over him, her hand on his face, his hand going straight up her thigh, when Fix said, “So I think I’ve got this figured out.”
Cousins stopped. “What?”
Fix was slicing oranges and Cousins saw how he pulled the knife towards himself instead of pushing it away. “It was auto theft.”
“What was auto theft?”
“That’s where I know you from. I’ve been trying to put it together ever since you showed up. I want to say it was two years ago. I can’t remember the guy’s name but all he stole were red El Caminos.”
The details of a particular auto theft were something Cousins wouldn’t remember unless it had happened in the last month, and if he was very busy his memory might go out only as far as a week. Auto theft was the butter and the bread. If people didn’t steal cars in Los Angeles then cops and deputy district attorneys would be playing honeymoon bridge at their desks all day, waiting for news of a murder. Auto thefts ran together—those cars flipped exactly as they were found, those run through a chop shop—one theft as unmemorable as the next but for a guy who stole only red El Caminos.
“D’Agostino,” Cousins said, and then he repeated the name because he had no idea where that particular gift of memory had come from. That’s just the kind of day this was, no explanation.
Fix shook his head in appreciation. “I could have sat here all day and not come up with that. I remember him though. He thought it showed some kind of class to limit himself to just that one car.”
For a moment Cousins felt nearly clairvoyant, as if the case file were open in front of him. “The public defender claimed an improper search. The cars were all in some kind of warehouse.” He stopped turning the orange back and forth and closed his eyes in an attempt to concentrate. It was gone. “I can’t remember.”
“Anaheim.”
“I never would have gotten that.”
“Well, there you go,” Fix said. “That was yours.”