Moorpark Palms - 29. Chapter 29

Despite everything else, almost the most exciting thing that happened around the building all year was the bomb scare.
BOMB SCARE!
I was on location, on a day-long shoot in nearby Ojai, fending off studio politics and Craft Services – neither very appetizing. So I had to piece together the news late that evening when I dragged home. Sally was the first to tell me. She’d been waiting up.
It seems that mid-afternoon, Chuck – who wasn’t our tenant but who lived in the building just east – noticed a pair of suitcases abandoned near his part of the cul-de-sac. I’d say they were “on the grassy knoll” – which might lend a sort of conspiratorial elegance to a neighborhood that sometimes seems inhabited by territorial paranoids – but the area between our tiny front lawns and the street is flatly paved. Chuck claimed the suitcases sat in front of his building, though he was a renter like the rest of us. “His building” was also the place The Screaming Woman had just – finally – been evicted from.
The Screaming Woman had been a 2 AM howler who, for over a year, had paced her curtainless living rom while battling her possibly sequential boyfriends on her phone. Through year-round open windows, everyone on the block heard her, including people in the motel, and there had been constant complaints. Most of her long telephone bouts ended with something like, “DON’T YOU FREAKIN’ DARE HANG UP ON ME!! I’M THE MOST BEAUTIFUL WOMAN YOU’VE EVER HAD!!! “Freakin’” and “had” are words some of us tactfully used on the police reports.
Sally said that when Chuck saw the mysterious luggage sitting unattended, that where anyone else might have figured, “Hmm, I should put those somewhere safe till the owner comes back,” Chuck zoomed in on BOMB! I suspect Vic might have done the same thing, had he seen the suitcases first.
Once Sally described Chuck, I remembered seeing – and even talking – with him before. He was a former National Guard member who seemed to do voluntary sentry duty outside his building both days and evenings. He was otherwise unemployed, after a double hernia operation he once described to me so graphically it could have been on an enemy. He mainly roils about in camouflage fatigues, a military cap, and lace-up reinforced boots. Despite this GI Joe facade, he also told Franck – who sometimes seems so bored he’ll listen to anyone – that had the Guard actually been called up for “that freakin’ Croatian thing” – automatic censor again – he would have skipped to Canada.
Still, Chuck’s a pretty good watchdog, and it’s not like he stands outside spying just because that’s what some of his neighbors – including, of course, The Screaming Woman – have accused him of. Sally told me this. I hadn’t heard it before and can’t say I was very interested.
Sally also explained that Chuck only stands outside smoking because the woman he currently lives with – but who refuses to marry him – hates cigarettes. “She even made his daughter stand outside with him when she was visiting. And she came all the way from Dallas!”
LA is turning into tough place for smokers.
Soon after spotting the luggage, Citizen Chuck summoned the cops, no doubt proactively thinking, in his too-many X-Files way, that this set of mismatched Samsonite might just be The Screaming Woman’s Revenge. We later found out that she hadn’t been evicted after all, so she wasn’t angry at her former neighbors. In a sentimental flourish, she’d merely moved in with one of her multiple boyfriends.
Still, Chuck wasn’t the first to spy the potential explosives. That fell to Meg and Quinn, who told me they’d already been slightly bombed themselves. “When we go out to eat at an expensive restaurant – which is where we were headed,” Meg explained. “We kind of pre-drink.”
“What’s that mean?” I had to ask.
“You know, we down a couple at our place first,” Quinn told me. “Saves a couple of bucks.”
“It’s kind of sucking-up,” Meg added. “His boss was taking us out, but he doesn’t drink. So we didn’t want to stick him for too much.”
Quinn’s sober-but-generous boss and his wife were also picking them up, and rather than making the couple search for a temporary parking space, Meg and Quinn were waiting at the curb. While they did, they noticed – and checked out – the bags.
“There were a couple of nice things,” Meg admitted. “A scarf. A blouse. But I wasn’t about to take them.” So they headed off to dinner.
Despite Meg’s caution, when the officers arrived, good neighbor Chuck somehow connected the luggage to Quinn, his “un-American tattoos,” and the “slick black Audi” that had taken him away.
“Were they planning a trip?” an officer asked. Rob, who happened to be in the crowd and knew Meg and Quinn’s evening plans because he sometimes got their leftovers – Meg has picky cats – said, “Nope, just going out to dinner.” Still, the cops wanted to talk with Quinn. But no one knew his pager number.
They all somehow managed to miss the – admittedly small – sign on the back of Quinn’s motorcycle, which was parked right in front of them and the building. Cleanly lettered was “Motorcycle Messenger” and the contact number.
After sniffing around the suitcases like cautious hounds, and encouraged by paramilitary Chuck, these enforcers of our law alerted their bomb squad. They came armed with flares and miles of Do Not Cross! tape,” Sally said. “They evacuated our building, and then everyone around.”
Our building. The one just north. Chuck’s. Two next to his. And three across the street. Probably a hundred apartments, easy. They could have disturbed more people if they’d added in the motel and the much larger hotel, just east of it. But those people might not have been frantically stashing bongs and their accessories as “rescue” arrived. The Bomb Boys meticulously swept door-to-door, knocking on the door to every apartment but somehow managing to overlook Franck. He’d worked overnight and was catching a nap.
“Edan was off to a movie with Annie and Ed, and the Dodgers weren’t playing,” he later filled in. “And I’d already fed the rabbit,” – Edan’s latest “toy” was a baby bunny. The dumb thing is the cops should have asked Franck because – like Meg and Quinn – he knew exactly what was in the bags.
While Edan and Annie were waiting for Ed to “bring the car around,” Annie had checked their mail and had seen the bags. Since she collects things, if she spots something on the street that she can use – or sell – she’ll pick it up faster than kibble on a cat’s tongue. Then she stashes it under the tarp-wrapped stack that’s crammed into the back of her parking space. Often there’s a cat on that stack, too, but it’s never for sale.
Franck said Annie nearly appropriated the suitcases, but after she popped them open and calculated their and their contents’ worth, she shrugged and left. But not before Franck, ambling from his usual smoking perch on the steps, copped a peek.
Which the cops never knew. Instead, they held everyone hostage at the end of the block, fruitlessly trying to find Quinn. Finally, the bomb squad loaded the suitcases into its armored van, boot-heeled their flares, rolled their yellow tape, and moved on.
“Finding Meg and Quinn would have helped, too,” Sally said. “Because they told me when they came back that they knew who’d left the luggage. They’d seen what had happened.”
“It was a couple next door,” Meg explained – as it happened, in Chuck’s building. “The woman and her husband were going somewhere – I think I overheard ‘Vegas.’ She brought out the bags, and he must’ve forgotten to load them. Quinn nearly ran after them, when they drove off, but he was all dressed up.”
“And I didn’t have the keys to my cycle,” he added. I could’ve caught them at the corner.”
The odd thing is, none of this explained why one of the suitcases was empty.
“I think they were planning to win,” Quinn guessed.
“Nah, she was going shopping,” Meg said. “All those outlet stores. But she can buy new luggage there, too.”
“And cartons of discount ciggies.”
“Any way you look at it,” Vic added. “It gave everyone something to do.”
“On an otherwise dull night,” Korki put in.
“And it was safer than one of those car chases that come off the freeway and ends at our front door,” Claire decided. “I hate the sirens and helicopters.”
“That’s what happens when you live at the 101 and the 405,” Tim informed us. “Do you know it’s one of the 10 worst intersections in the country.”
“That’s why it’s always so dusty,” Lindsay said. “It’s the only bad thing about living here.”
I wasn’t sure about that. I still remembered the recent nights of The Screaming Woman. “YOU LIPOSUCKED LOSER!” she’d howled one 2 AM. “PUMP IT UP AS BIG AS YOU LIKE! YOU STILL NEVER KNOW WHERE TO STICK IT!”