Page 146 - Just Deserts

Playa de los Borregos

Clearview, close to the temperate Pacific coast, attracted
disproportionately large numbers of the socially and mentally
dispossessed. These unfortunates tenanted the interstices of an
infrastructure already coming loose at the seams. They slept under
freeway ramps, begged for food and spare change, rolled their plastic
trash bags of discarded clothing down city streets in purloined
shopping carts. Clearview’s forces of law and order, charged with the
discouragement—if not punishment—of vagrancy, discreetly pruned
the ranks of the homeless under cover of darkness, while the city’s
humanitarians struggled in the daylight hours to provide the survivors
hot meals and shelter.
Toward dusk on a clear spring evening a downtown soup kitchen
began drawing its bedraggled clientele from the surrounding alleys
and cardboard shanties. As one particularly ill-kempt character
pushed his wobbly cart along the pockmarked sidewalk toward the
handout haven, a man suddenly got out of a parked car and stood in
his path. The vagrant, who had been mumbling to himself while
gazing intently at the space immediately in front of him, came to an
abrupt halt.
“Joseph Burning Horse?” said the human obstacle, a youngish
man in a business suit.
The bum raised his rheumy red-lined eyes to a point halfway up
the other’s chest. “Outa my way,” he growled.
“I’m sorry,” the man replied, turning his palms outward in a
display of non-aggression. “It’s very important. Are you Joseph
Burning Horse?”
An impasse had been forced. The old indigent could not advance
without ramming his cart into a person dressing and speaking with
authority. He stood, stubbly jowls quivering, while his gaze shifted
helplessly in all directions.
“My name is Joe Burns. You got the wrong guy. Go hassle
somebody else. I gotta get my dinner.” He made an aggressive shove
at the handle of his cart.
“Wait just a minute, please. I am Filbert Nussbaum, an attorney
working for Gunning and Kyle. Our office is just a few blocks from
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