A Nasty Piece of Work: A Novel

by Robert Littell

  “To what do I owe the pleasure?” Lyle asked when the switchboard finally figured out which extension to ring.

  “I need a favor,” I announced.

  “I owe you, Gunn. Only ask.”

  “Twelve days ago a joker name of Emilio Gava was arraigned in the Las Cruces courthouse on charges of buying cocaine. He was released on bail. Someone from the Star was on the courthouse steps when he came out. That someone took a photo of the alleged perpetrator, but when the item materialized on an inside page, there was no photo attached. I’d appreciate it if I could get a copy of the photo from your morgue.”

  Leggett got back to me an hour and a quarter later. “Here’s the deal, Gunn. I dug out the original rough layout for the page on which the item appeared. Funny part was they were going to publish a head shot with the article but pulled it at the last minute.”

  “To make room for an important article?”

  “To make room for what we call a filler—something we shove in when we suddenly find ourselves with a hole in the page when we go to press. A friend in the city room seems to recall that the city editor received a phone call, after which he ordered the photo pulled.”

  “Any idea who might have called?” I asked.

  I could hear Lyle laughing into his end of the conversation. “Maybe it was Gava’s mother. Maybe her son is shy.”

  “At least that confirms there were photos taken,” I said hopefully.

  “Yeah, there were photos taken. We had a trainee named Gordon Comstock, naturally everyone took to calling him Flash Gordon, shooting outside the courthouse that day. Flash doesn’t remember shooting anyone named Gava, but then he shot a half-dozen rolls of film. His personal notebook mentions six shots of a Gava, initial E. I checked the master log in the photo morgue. It lists an envelope under the name of Gava, initial E. When I looked in the G drawer, the envelope was missing. No photos, no negatives. Sorry I can’t be of more help, Gunn.”

  “You may have helped me more than you know,” I said. “So far you’ve only given me pieces, but they’ll begin to fall into place. They almost always do.”

  “Yeah, sure. Say, if you’re planning to run some Kalashnikovs across a border anytime soon, give me a heads-up.”

  Five

  Detective Awlson sat hunched over an IBM electric typewriter, hunting and pecking away with two forefingers faster than any touch typist I’d ever seen. Every now and then he’d raise his squinty brown eyes to read what he’d written, all the while tugging at an earlobe which looked as if it’d been tugged at before. He’d frown at the mystery of the little ball stabbing typed letters onto the page, then go back to the keyboard. “What can I do you?” he asked without looking up or letting up.

  I hauled one of my Santa Fe All-State Indemnity cards out of my billfold and dropped it on the desk. I was decked out in tan slacks and a tie and jacket and street shoes in order to give the Santa Fe logo credibility.

  Awlson stopped typing long enough for his eyes to take in the printing on the card. He took his sweet time finishing what he was working on before slowly swiveling around to face me. I could see him giving me the kind of once-over you only get from a detective with a lot of flight time.

  “Five foot eleven, one hundred sixty,” he guessed.

  “You’re in the ballpark. You undershot by one inch and overshot by five pounds.”

  “I’m losin’ my touch.” Awlson gestured with a very pointed chin to a very narrow wooden chair. I scraped it over to the desk and lowered myself into it. “Lemuel Gunn,” he announced with that New Mexican laziness which betrays a particular worldview, namely that people in a hurry die sooner. Lethargy, according to the gospel I picked up while running guns into Afghanistan for an employer who turned out to be as loyal as Iago, equals longevity. Awlson flipped my card over to see if anything was written on the back. He seemed disappointed when he found it blank. “I reckon I know what Santa Fe and All-State mean, but Indemnity has sure got me confounded.”

  “It’s a fancy way of saying insurance.”

  “Hell, why don’t you folks come right out with it instead of prevaricatin’ the way you do?”

  Awlson’s cubbyhole of an office was at the bitter end of a long tunnel-like corridor in one of those precinct houses that are so old they ought to be declared historical monuments. The steel-and-glass warts we all know and loathe weren’t even on the drawing boards when this particular police station was constructed. The floor was worn wide-board planking, the walls were wainscoted, the single window in Awlson’s office was long and narrow and sashed with dark wood that had turned gray with age. The window was closed because the only things coming in from the street would have been noise and exhaust fumes mixed with hot air. A slowly churning overhead propeller stirred the few papers scattered around Detective Awlson’s desk and the wooden table near the door. There was a tall wooden filing cabinet against one wall with a neatly folded peach-colored sports jacket spilling out of an open drawer, and six or seven old Remingtons piled one on top of the other in a corner. Awlson himself was in suspenders and shirtsleeves, with the sleeves rolled up above the elbows, a striped tie knotted under a very conspicuous Adam’s apple. A shoulder holster with a long-barreled Colt Special nested in it hung from a peg on the wall behind him.

  He noticed me noticing the Remingtons. “We’re keepin’ them ’gainst the day when these IBMs turn ornery. So who you insurin’ and what’s it got to do with yours truly?”

  “We’re covering a bondsman named Neppi. His niece posted bail on someone you arrested named Emilio Gava. Miss Neppi thinks Gava may be about to jump bail, leaving her holding the $125,000 bag. Turns out the condo deed Gava’s girlfriend put up to cover the bond was phony. My company’s in for half of Neppi’s eventual loss, so they sent me out to jump-start the eventual investigation. According to the court records, you were the arresting officer.”

  “Damn right I was.” Awlson moistened a thick thumb on the tip of a pasty tongue and thumbed through a loose-leaf desk calendar. “I’m also the chief prosecution witness. Stanley Malone over at the prosecutor’s office asked me to show up in court at ten o’clock on—where the hell is it?—uh-huh, the Friday after next Friday.”

  “I’d appreciate it if you could walk me through the arrest.”

  “Not much to walk. We staked out a joint called the Blue Grass, which is a seedy bar the other side of the tracks even though we do not have tracks in Las Cruces, if you see what I’m drivin’ at. The county narcs been tryin’ to close the place down for centuries but somebody knows somebody in the state capitol. At least that’s my take on the situation. On or about eleven on the night of the second, the Blue Grass is dark but not so dark you cannot see once your eyes get accustomed. I am nursin’ a drink at the bar. Officer Rodriguez is playin’ pinball near the door. Officer DiPego is feedin’ quarters into the juke which he claimed on his expense account and they refused to reimburse because they said he was listenin’ to the music for his own personal pleasure. In breezes the perpetrator, who we later identified as one Emilio Gava, age forty-two. He is an American citizen but central castin’ Italian, which is to say dark-skinned, lean and leathery, with what I would describe as a smirk but someone else’d likely call a smile pasted on his too-handsome face. Dark good looks, oily black hair swept back, good shoulders, narrow waist, head held at an angle as if he was hard of hearing in one ear, which it turns out he was—he’d been hit in the ear with a brick once when he tried to peddle protection on the wrong block. His eyes were busy flickin’ here and there takin’ in everythin’. I make him to be six foot even, one hundred seventy-five, and hit it on the nose. He is wearin’ a white silk shirt buttoned up to the neck, no tie, a dark green double-breasted jacket unbuttoned.”

  “Was he carrying?”

  “We see the open jacket and we think he may be, so we all have got our handguns in our hands when we make the arrest, but he turns out to be clean as a whistle. Where was I? He slides into a booth in the back near the toilet
s across from a skinny kid with long sickle-shaped sideburns and a three-inch knife burn on one cheek. We later identified the second perpetrator as one Oropesa, Jesus, age twenty-seven, a Chicano with a record as long as Interstate 25 from here up to Santa Fe. I make the kid to be five foot seven and a half, a hundred thirty-three. In the mirror behind the bar I see him glance around nervous-like, then he slips a small rectangular-shaped package—now listed as prosecution exhibit A—across the table. The first perpetrator slides a long white envelope—prosecution exhibit B—back across the table to the kid. I nod to Officers Rodriguez and DiPego and we move in and collar them in the act.”

  “Did either of them resist arrest?”

  Awlson smiled a razor-edged smile. It said, You need to be real dumb to resist arrest if Sergeant Awlson is the arresting officer.

  “How’d he take it when you read him Miranda?”

  “Perpetrators all have got poker faces these days, you never know what they’re thinkin’, do you?”

  “Then what?”

  “The rest is pure routine. We cuff them and bring them in and photograph them and ink-pad them and hold them overnight. We let them each make one phone call on the house. By noon the next mornin’ they have both made bail and are out on the street.”

  “Detective Awlson, you described Gava’s eyes flicking here and there and taking in everything. Everything but you. I don’t want you to take this the wrong way but if I spotted you sitting at the bar I wouldn’t purchase cocaine no matter how dark the joint was.”

  His eyes, which up to then had been squinting, slowly opened and he looked at me as if he were seeing me for the first time. “You ask all-right questions, Gunn. You been in the indemnity racket long?”

  “Long enough to notice things that are as plain as the nose on your face.”

  “My view is that I could pass for anythin’ from a travelin’ salesman to a travel agent. Officer DiPego chews gum and nods his head in time to the music for which he wasn’t reimbursed, so he looks like somethin’ that washed up on the tide. But Officer Rodriguez is fresh out of the police academy. He looks like an undercover detective tryin’ not to look like an undercover detective. To answer your question, maybe Gava isn’t as street-smart as you. To answer your question, maybe his eyes wasn’t accustomed to the dark in the Blue Grass. To answer your question, I don’t know the answer to your question.”

  “I have another question. What were you doing hanging out at the Blue Grass?”

  “We had an anonymous tip that a buy had been set up for eleven that night.”

  “A letter?”

  “A phone call.”

  “Phone calls are usually recorded.”

  He nodded carefully. “That’s correct.”

  “Do you have any idea who supplied the tip?”

  “It’s not anybody I’d want to break bread with. Listen up, Gunn, you know and I know and the wall over there knows that the tipster wasn’t a law-abidin’ United States of America citizen who overheard a conversation somewhere and wanted to help keep New Mexico drug-free. It was someone with a grudge against one of the perpetrators. It was someone who had somethin’ to gain by the arrest of one or both of the perpetrators. Gava and the Chicano kid were handed to us on a silver platter. Me, I am blue-collar, which is to say I never trust the contents of silver platters. If you want my opinion, the whole thing stinks.”

  “It’d sure be interesting to know who phoned in with the tip.”

  Detective Awlson’s scornful smile made a curtain call. Fan lines spread out from the corners of his eyes. It was easy to see he’d give his right arm to know the identity of the tipster. I decided to push my luck and asked him if I could get to hear the original phone call. On the theory that if you go hog, you might as well go whole hog, I asked if I could have a copy of the phone call. I told him about drawing a blank at the Las Cruces Star and asked for a copy of Gava’s mug shot.

  Awlson let his glance drift over to the wall clock just as the minute hand thudded onto the hour. He pushed himself off the chair and shrugged his way into his shoulder holster and headed for the Records Department on the second floor. I fell in alongside him. “Nice digs you have here in Las Cruces,” I remarked. “It’s got lots of class.”

  “They’re tearin’ it down in the fall to make way for another of them shopping malls. As if we weren’t drownin’ in shopping malls. We’re movin’ into one of those air-conditioned glass-and-steel doohickeys downtown. Word is they’re swappin’ our electric typewriters for word processors. First I hear that words can be processed. Live, learn. What the hell, I’ll add my IBM to the pile of Remingtons on the floor in case the newfangled computers crash, which is somethin’ I’m told they do if you look cross-eyed at them.”

  “People in New Mexico kill for air-conditioning,” I said.

  Awlson shrugged. “I’m not lookin’ forward to the move. Someone told me you can’t pry open the windows if you wanted to.” He snickered. “I s’pose they got our best interests at heart. I s’pose they don’t want us jumpin’ out in frustration.”

  Six

  I deposited messages on Ornella Neppi’s assorted phone numbers. She returned my call late afternoon. I did most of the talking but found myself leaving gaps between the sentences in the hope of hearing her voice. I suggested we meet at the new diner that recently opened halfway between Hatch and Las Cruces. “The word is out that the sirloins are thick as your thumb and charcoal broiled,” I said.

  She agreed on condition that we go dutch, which made me think of Kubra and that joker whose name escapes me going dutch at the Campus Cave. I proposed a more imaginative way of handling the bill. “You can pay for the solids,” I said. “I’ll pay for the liquids.”

  I was rewarded with a laugh.

  “Does that mean yes?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said, “it means yes.”

  On the way to the diner, I stopped at the hock shop on the street behind the Korean twenty-four-hour market and purchased a used Sony Walkman. Friday beat me to the restaurant—I spotted her Ford van parked around the side. She didn’t beat me by much—the hood over her motor was still warm to the touch. She was sitting in a booth at the back of the diner and waved when she saw me. I can’t remember if I waved back. Then again I can’t remember if I didn’t. Her lips thinned into a hopeful smile as I slid onto the banquette across from her. “So you must have news to bring me all this way,” she said.

  The table top was transparent Plexiglas. I could see Friday had her sandals on. I could see she still didn’t paint her toenails. I could see the thin fabric of a washed-out skirt hugging her thighs. I ordered two glasses of house punch and, producing the Walkman, slipped in a cassette. Reaching across the table, I fitted the earphones over her ears and hit the button marked PLAY so she could hear the anonymous phone call that sent Detective Awlson off to the Blue Grass to arrest Emilio Gava and the Chicano pusher. Here’s what Friday heard.

  [Male voice] “Awright, awright, I want to report a crime that’s going to be committed.”

  [Voice of female dispatcher] “Please state your name and give us a phone number where we can get back to you if we need to.”

  “I don’t got a name, I don’t got a phone number. I don’t want to get involved. I am just an ordinary citizen reporting a crime, is all. Take my woid for it, huh? I heard dese two jerks talking in a bar. A Chicano is selling five ounces of uncut cocaine to some guy at eleven tonight.”

  “Sir, we need to have your name. I can promise you your identity will be protected—”

  “You’re chasing rainbows, angel. Nobody never found a pot of gold chasing rainbows. You wanna know where the sale is going to take place or you don’t wanna know, which is it?”

  “Sir—”

  “Awright, I have not got all night. What do you say we put this show on the road, huh? The merchandise changes hands at a joint called the Blue Grass in Las Cruces. At eleven. The seller is a kid with sideburns, a Chicano. The buyer is in his early forties, da
rk skin, dark hair, Italian.”

  “Sir—”

  “The Blue Grass in Las Cruces. At eleven.”

  At which point the phone line went dead. Friday handed me back the earphones. I asked her if she recognized the voice.

  Friday nodded carefully. “I recognize the way he pronounces the word ‘awright.’” She turned away to stare out the window for the time it took to clear cobwebs of confusion from her brain. When she finally turned back, she looked like a deer pinned in the headlights of a car. “Shit,” she said. “Excuse my language.” She shook her head in disbelief and said “Shit” again. “When I posted bond for Emilio’s bail, he called me angel—it’s him, it’s Emilio Gava.” She leaned toward me—I couldn’t miss the groundswell of her breasts visible over the bodice of her low-cut blouse—and lowered her voice to a whisper. “Why would Emilio betray himself to the police?”

  I said the obvious. “He wants to get himself arrested. He wants to be inside a jail.”

  She asked the obvious. “If he wants to be in jail, why is he jumping bail?” Then she leapt to what ordinarily would have been the obvious conclusion. “I know—he wants his fifteen minutes of fame. Getting arrested is one way of getting your picture in the newspapers.”

  “Except his picture wasn’t in the newspapers,” I reminded her, and I told Friday what my pal at the Star had said. “Just before the paper went to press someone phoned up the city editor, who pulled the picture. When my friend tried to find copies of Gava’s photograph in the newspaper’s morgue, they were missing. Ditto for the Las Cruces police station—the Gava file, which should have consisted of a mug shot and fingerprints, was empty.”

  Friday squinted in concentration. I was becoming familiar with her several moods. “Someone’s protecting him!” she burst out.

  “Bull’s-eye, little lady.”

  The middle-aged waitress, her eyebrows tweezed down to two thin pencil lines, her hair parted in the middle and pulled back into twin ponytails, each one tied with a candy cane ribbon, brought our sirloins and a Chianti Classico with fake plastic straw covering the bottle. The sweater she was wearing—the restaurant was air-conditioned and cool—reeked of camphor, which reminded Friday of the summers she spent in Corsica, where she’d been sent when her grandfather was still alive. Like many Corsican peasants, he’d chewed on camphor for health reasons. “Hey, you don’t ever want to cross me,” Friday said. “I come from Corsican stock.” She said it with laughter in her voice, but a dark cloud at the back of her eyes suggested she was not making small talk.