Moorpark Palms - 30. Chapter 30

Cyndi and Tim didn’t go out in a racket of bullets. But they might have. Soon after New Year’s, she kicked him out again, claiming that, since November, he hadn’t done his share of “the money stuff.” “This time, I hope they lock him up and let him scream off the drugs,” she told me. “The only good thing I can say is he really loved me when he really loved me.”
Listening to Cyndi was educational in a scary sort of talk show way. She looked like a talk show host, too, all that empty sincerity. But she seemed as harmless as Tim was with all his movie knowledge. Until they fought.
“Did you hear Tim and Cyndi last night?” Quinn would ask, roaring his matte black former police department motorcycle beside my Toyota. “I liked the part when the cats got so freaked they clawed out the screens.”
Who needed blockbusters?
Normally, Tim and Cyndi’s fights were as short as their attention spans. But January was different. These bouts settled in like a Santa Ana.
After the New Year’s ousting, Cyndi crudely disassembled Tim’s very expensive entertainment system. “I pay for half of it!” she muttered, viciously yanking cables.
“That’s not exactly true,” Franck said. “She mainly uses her paychecks for hobbies, and her dad picks up the bills.”
“Tim’s half, too?” I asked.
“No, she’s wrong on that as well. He pays half of the rent and electricity, and he’s always giving her money for take-out – neither of them cook. But I guess she wants more.”
Still, Bart told me the rent was always paid by one of Cyndi’s checks – pastel, cartoon-fested, with Cyndi’s name in gold and the writing elaborately calligraphed.
“I really don’t know what I’m doing here,” Cyndi said, the night she disemboweled Tim’s electronic baby and stacked the components outside her door in the January damp. “And there’s all these wires.” She held up a mass of clipped angel hair spaghetti and a pair of her scalloped scissors. “I told him to pick these up,” finished
It seemed she didn’t mind having paid for half of the system. She just wanted it out of her sight.
Annie took them all into her apartment. “I don’t want them ruined. We really should sell them.”
She and Cyndi were remarkably adept at finding garage sales. That was another place Tim got his tapes. “People practically give them away,” Cindy crowed. It’s also where she bought her Snoopies. “I have over a hundred and of them.”
Many of them Tim gave her as presents.
“This time, he’s never coming back,” Cyndi swore. “Never, never, never, never, never!”
Well, hardly ever: Tim was back the next morning.
“I still have keys,” he twinkled, dangling them as a tease and letting himself in. Then he carefully reassembled his system
“He’s back?” Franck asked, crouched on his customary step, flicking Marlboro Lights into his jar.
“Who knows?” I said, and I headed to work.
“Cyndi said she’d call the police,” Franck called after me. “She’s afraid Tim might steal her car.”
“Why? His is better.”
When he was first expelled, Tim had his own BMW. It wasn’t new, and Cyndi – or her dad – may have indeed helped pay it off. The morning he came back, he was driving a Porche.
“My boss’s,” he explained. “Mine’s in the shop.”
He’d really only come back for clothes, he assured the soon watchful Franck. “I’m staying with my boss. But I couldn’t leave that system a wreck. Cyndi’ll want to use it.”
So Franck had let him into Ed and Annie’s apartment.
That evening, Cyndi reportedly growled at the system. But she turned it right on.
“I’d bolt the windows,” she told me. “But the cats couldn’t get out.”
“Would you really call the police?” I asked. “If Tim shows up again?”
“I was going to take out restraining order. But there’s so much paperwork.”
“What if he comes back?” I persisted.
“He has his clothes. What more would he want?”
Nonetheless.
Early the next morning, Tim’s BMW crunched to a halt in front of our building. The car door slammed, then I listened while he tried his keys. Franck had again changed the locks.
“Fuckin’ whore!” he grouched, I assumed to himself. Cyndi was gone, and Franck wasn’t yet on his steps.
As I finished breakfast, I watched Tim try the front windows. They were locked. He went around to the back of the apartment, where I couldn’t see him, and that’s when I left. I didn’t have time to get involved. But when I pulled out onto the street, in my rear view mirror, I could see Tim studying the back windows. I knew they were locked, too. Annie had Cyndi’s cats.
Later, it turned out, Tim had popped the bathroom screen, disassembled the casement crank, then slipped slideways onto the floor.
“Why didn’t you do something?” Cyndi yelled at Franck that night.
“Like what?” he asked.
“Call the cops! Dial 911! The shithead broke into my apartment!”
“What did he take?” I asked.
“My big Snoopies!” Cyndi cried. “Well, half of them – the ones he gave me. He knows he can’t sell them. I could, but he doesn’t know how, They’re for collectors. He only took them to hurt me.”
“You did trash his stereo system,” Annie counseled.
“This hurts more.”
No one wanted to measure that.
“I’m not sleeping here anymore,” Cyndi told us. “It’s too scary. I’ll stay with my parents.”
“What about your cats?” Annie asked.
“They’re safe at your place.”
“They can’t stay overnight. They’ll fight with mine. I had to lock them in Edan’s bedroom. There are just too many.”
“Then let them run free for a couple of days. They do half the time anyway. No one really owns a cat.”
Annie was persuaded, and she and Cyndi double checked the locks on all her windows, and tightly shut her blinds. After that, she divided anything else she thought Tim might steal between Annie’s closets and her car.
“That’s not right,” Lindsay advised. “No one should be afraid to stay in her own space.”
It was nice to hear Lindsay defend Cyndi because, just before Christmas, the two of them had a screaming fight in the courtyard.
Lindsay had insisted Tim was leading her new musician/boyfriend into drugs, a possibly naive charge. Cyndi howled back that Cliff had more drugs than Tim could ever imagine, and Lindsay was a fool not to figure that out. Lindsay said Tim was a thief who stole a guitar and had her boyfriend drive getaway.
“It was my guitar!” Cyndi screeched. “Tim was taking it in for repairs!”
“Well, he didn’t come back with the same one he took in!”
“Mine was beyond repair!”
The noise solved nothing that day, but I was glad they got over it.
The third morning Tim returned, his car shuddered to a stop, the door slammed, he tried the front, side, and rear windows, then came back to the door.
“Good!” he muttered. “She’s learning.”
His car door slammed again, and I waited for the motor to start. Nothing. Maybe he was thinking things out. Or getting high.
Then one of Cyndi’s back windows smashed in.
I considered what to do – not intending to get any further involved with this pre-school Punch ‘n’ Judy. But I couldn’t have Tim breaking up the place. I phoned Bart, reaching his wife and telling her what had happened. She immediately called the police.
Then. Nothing. Happened.
Maybe a half-hour later, I went down to leave for work, only to find two cops – pistols drawn – where our mailman should have been.
“Who are you?” the first cop spat.
“The m-m-manager,” I sputtered, involuntarily invoking my title.
The officer thumbed me away. Behind him was another armed pair with shouldered rifles. Down the block were four quickly-parked squad cars.
“Who’s in there?” the second cop hissed, his gun now slightly more politely aimed at my feet.
I wanted to be somewhere else.
“Tim,” I whispered back. “A tenant.”
Former? Present? I didn’t know
“Armed?” the officer asked.
“Barely fingered.”
He stared, but I had to laugh.
“What!” he shot.
“Unarmed,” I quickly clarified.
This was no time for comedy.
The cop nodded. I started to walk. And I continued to the end of the block. I wasn’t going to get shot for Tim.
“What’s goin’ on?” an unknown man on a balcony called.
I tried to explained.
“Super!” he said.
Minutes later, Bart’s car appeared. I signaled to him before he turned the corner toward the building.
“Do you know what’s happening?” I asked.
He knew more than I did. The cops had Cyndi talking with Tim from her office. She said he’d just come home to sleep in her bed – that he missed her. But he wasn’t coming out of the apartment because he feared police brutality.
Besides what he’d learned from movies, it seemed Tim had some personal experience with the police – and a minor criminal record from high school. Not for the expected – drugs. For loitering. He’d passed a gay bar one too many times in the prescribed two hours.
Still, Cyndi – touched by Tim’s missing her – wouldn’t press charges. And Tim insisted his name was on the lease. Bart confirmed it was.
“Then what are we doing here?” one of the officers asked. “It’s not illegal to get locked out of your own apartment.”
After an hour of assurances – by Bart, by the officers, by me – Tim cautiously out the apartment, hands wide above his head and wearing only briefs. After some talk, he got into his car and drove off.”
“Too bad,” the guy from the balcony said. He was on our front lawn and carried what looked like a video-cam – “that close” to a tape that would send him on a nice vacation.
I walked towards Bart, who was just finishing with the cops.
“Those kids are crazy,” he grumbled, as if that were news. “They’ve got to go.”
I couldn’t argue that.
He frowned. “But it’s not that easy. The law is set up to protect the renter. No matter how bongo the bozo.”
“Maybe she’ll move,” I encouraged. “She’s already scared.”
“And maybe I’ll buy the Dodgers.”
Then things got weird – as though up to now they hadn’t been. Cyndi still insisted she didn’t want to see Tim. She also wouldn’t sleep in her apartment because she was “still terrified.” And her parents – or so Annie claimed – swore they’d “cut Cyndi off if she didn’t ditch the little runt.” Still, Cyndi and Tim drove to Vegas for a weekend.
“It was so much fun!” she told Franck, when she’d stopped in the courtyard to “feed my babies” – the hundred-and-one calicos.
“What about your parents?” he asked.
“Oh – them!” Cyndi giggled. “They do whatever I ask!”
Tim appeared the next afternoon, with freshly-cut keys plainly supplied by Cyndi. “For my tapes,” he pacified Franck. “I’m not living here. We’ve agreed to a trial separation.”
“He’s so much nicer when he begs to see me,” Cyndi soon explained. “And he’s going to take a road trip east.”
“Why east?” I asked, wondering what movie might have inspired him.
“His mom lives in Pittsburgh,” Cyndi said. “He hasn’t seen her in years.”
Abstractly, I knew Tim had a mother. But I hadn’t figured she’d survived his birth.
“He’s driving the BMW cross-country?” Vic asked.
“I’m amazed it made Vegas,” I agreed.
“Oh, we didn’t drive that!” Cyndi laughed. “Some car dealer wanted to sell me a Land Rover – I got this letter in the mail. Of course, I didn’t want one – they’re too clunky. But they let me test drive one all weekend”
I wondered how those fools sold cars.
Tim’s car made it to Iowa, Cyndi reported. Then he spent two weeks with his friend. Cyndi gloated about that, knowing who was footing the hospitality. One Tim’s car was repaired, he pushed on to Pittsburgh, then headed south. Last Cyndi had heard, he was in Texas. Meanwhile, she’d moved back in.
“Got to show my parents I’m independent,” she told Sally. “Or else they’ll stop supporting me.”
But she wasn’t happy. Evenings, she moped on her couch, front door open as though awaiting Elijah. Too blue even for crafts and the flea markets, she and Claire loudly discussed tranquillizers across the resonant courtyard.
“I hate drugs,” Cyndi insisted.
“Sometimes you’ve got to take them,” Claire replied.
“Watch TV,” Annie suggested, more sanely.
“I can’t. I’ve got all these great tapes, and I can’t even play them. They remind me of Tim.”
All night, her lights stayed on.
“It keeps away gloom.”
Twenty-four hours, her small, bedroom TV blared.
“It keeps the cats company when I’m at work.”
“Could you turn it down a little?” I asked – gently at first. “My bedroom’s almost across from yours. I can hear the sound clearly.”
Cyndi promised, but she always forgot.
“Franck said your ceiling fan squeaks,” I’d added. “Do you mind if I oil it?”
“Go ahead.”
Three-In-One oil didn’t help, nor did WD-40 or rubber washers. I asked if she’d keep the fan off till summer, when open windows and outside noise would drown the vibrations. Again, she promised but predictably forgot. Finally, with her permission, I went in one Sunday to take the fan down. She and Annie were off somewhere at an auction.
It was a good thing I went in because as I entered, I smelled burning plastic. Jumping in and out the window, the cats had somehow knocked the bathroom litter box – a kind of Tupperware traveling cage – against the wall heater, and turned it on. Its red coils glowed dangerously, and the plastic box seemed seconds from igniting. I killed the heater, cooled the box in the shower, then reported to Bart.
“She’s out!” he insisted. “This minute!”
But there was nothing he could actually do.
A few days later, Cyndi’s clock-radio went off at six AM, and was still rockin’ ‘n’ buzzing at nine. I phoned. I heard other people bang at her door. When I finally knocked myself, I saw a nasty letter from Isabelle tucked in the screen: “If you don’t care about sleeping, you should move somewhere else!”
Seeing me, Korki asked helpfully, “Did Cyndi overdose?”
It was nothing I’d considered.
Using the passkey, I went in. No death, but no Cyndi, either. Just cats.
“I guess she stayed at her folks,” I told Claire. “And forgot the alarm.”
And the lights. And the TV. I turned them all off and even jiggled the toilet handle. Its constant running was jacking up bills the building owner paid.
Two nights later, the TV was so loud, I finally called Cyndi at four AM. Repeatedly. With no answer. But I knew she was there, even though, this time, her lights were off. I’d seen her come in and had watched her sit moodily on the outside steps when I working at my desk. Also, her car was parked in the space beside her door. I was tempted to kill the electricity – I had that ability. But it was a huge overstep. Besides, with no alarm, she might oversleep and endanger her job. And who wanted her hanging around the building all day?
I finally banged loudly on her door, despite the hour but only succeeded in waking up Franck. He came down the stairs in an old terry bathrobe that stunk of cigarettes.
I explained that I was trying to wake Cyndi. He listened and went back upstairs, then I heard him stomp once, hard, on his bedroom floor, which was right above Cyndi’s. The music stopped.
Franck came back. “It’s an old trick I learned from living in cheap hotels,” he said. “You can also bang on radiator pipes, but we don’t have any.”
I didn’t ask why he was living in cheap hotels. I just went back to sleep.
At seven AM, my phone rang. It was Bart. “Cyndi just called me – hysterical. She woke up surrounded by glass and claims it’s all your fault.”
“Possibly,” I admitted groggily, knowing exactly what had happened. The old light fixture I’d put back after taking down Cyndi’s fan had a slightly cracked shade. After forty years, Franck’s heavy footwork was all it took to shatter.
That afternoon, Cyndi’s slicker-than-God father turned up in my office. We’d never met, but I could tell he was clearly worth more than Bill Gates.
“She’s doing so well,” went his pitch. “She’s out of our house. She dumped the midget junkie. Couldn’t you just take care of her? Treat her like a kid sister?”
I tried tact: “My kid sister never brought home the police. Or -- even accidentally -- tried to burn down our house. And if you think Tim’s gone, try looking in Cyndi’s bedroom. Along the wide headboard, there’s a double row of his framed pictures.”
“He’s never coming back! She promised!”
Tim was home for dinner, grinning like Dick Nixon. He’d had a great time on his trip east and was relaxed and happy.
“I feel so much safer with him around,” Cyndi told Lindsay. “When he’s here, no one’s mean to me.”
No one was buying that.
“He’s not staying!” Bart swore.
“He’s dead!” Cyndi’s dad threatened.
“Evict them both!” every other tenant railed.
Franck just sat on his step, smoking.
Can’t live with ‘em. Can’t kick ‘em out. It was winter, even in California. We all shut ourselves in.
Yet somehow it all ended happily: Mid-March, Tim and Cyndi suddenly moved out – claiming they “needed more space.”
All those Snoopies.
All them tapes.
And I suppose the Voodoo dolls we’d all been shoving nails in didn’t hurt.