A Nasty Piece of Work: A Novel

by Robert Littell

  “He’s your Emilio Gava in the sense that it’s you who posted the bail he’s jumping.”

  She took several deep breaths, which naturally drew my attention to her chest. As usual I wasn’t looking for campaign ribbons. “Want me to drive?” I asked.

  “Sure.”

  I walked around the Toyota and got in behind the wheel, pushing the lever to push the seat back. She slid across to the passenger side. I drove past the small airport on into town and pulled up in front of the only place that looked open for business, one of those old-fashioned hardware stores with aisle upon aisle of wooden shelving and dim electric lighting. MILLMAN & SON HARD AND SOFT WARE was written in fresh gold lettering above the door. There was a collection of barbed wire in a frame on a wall, samples of the different “bobbed wire” used by cattlemen to fence off grazing land in the Texas Panhandle. The name of each sample was printed underneath it: the Crandal Zigzag, the Merrill Buffalo, the Allis Sawtooth, Upham’s Snail.

  “You interested in barb wire?” an elderly gentleman with silky gray whiskers inquired from the back of the store.

  “Not especially,” I said.

  He ambled down one of his aisles toward us. “I’m the Millman of Millman & Son. Son’s gone up to Carson City to check out a radio-controlled model plane fair. Max-Leo, that’s the son in Millman & Son, he’s the one that went and added the software to my hardware—he has got hisself a line of computer software, hi-tech, low-tech, no-tech gizmos, microphones, recording devices, video cameras, he has got RAM and ROM and VDU and VDT, damned if I know what they all mean but Max-Leo sells them and repairs them. Seems like as if he’s gonna add radio-controlled model aeroplanes. Where Max-Leo will end only God knows and he ain’t confiding in your servant.”

  Ornella picked a pair of goggles off a shelf. “I could never bring myself to open my eyes underwater,” she said.

  “Them there ain’t underwater goggles, miss.”

  “They’re army PVS-7 night-vision goggles,” I said. “If there’s starlight or a slice of moon, you can see as if it’s daytime except everything you see looks greenish.”

  “How do you know all that?” Ornella asked.

  “There’re parts of me you haven’t been to yet,” I said.

  “How much?” Ornella asked Mr. Millman.

  “Brand new, they go for $2,699. These here are thirdhand. Max-Leo went and retooled them back to factory condition. They’ll set you back”—he scratched at a whisker—“three hundred, the case, the head strap, two AA batteries thrown in.”

  “Two fifty,” Ornella said.

  “Two seventy-five is my last price. You can take it or you can not take it, all the same to me.”

  “You accept credit cards?”

  “I accept checks on the barrelhead long as you got ID.”

  “What are you planning to do with night-vision goggles?” I asked Ornella as she wrote out a check on the top of a barrel.

  “I always wanted to see what’s going on around me at night. Now’s my chance.”

  I turned back to Mr. Millman. “We’re looking for the Original Searchlight Speakeasy Saloon.”

  “Well, now, you ain’t gonna find the Original Searchlight Speakeasy Saloon, are you? For the simple reason it don’t exist no more. Went out of business two, two and a half years ago when the tourist trade trickled off. They had themselves a giant-screen TV. Fact is, everybody’s got a giant-screen TV if you sit close enough to it, but that’s another story. Saloon turned into a guesthouse upstairs, Mojave Medical Supply downstairs, a unisex beauty parlor in the basement. Hell, I never yet met no one who was unisex, but then I ain’t said my last word, have I? Beauty parlor still goes by the name of Speakeasy. Speakeasy Beauty Emporium. The beauty parlor finished up with the saloon’s name and the saloon’s giant TV. Bunch of us go down there Monday nights to get our hair cut and watch football. Need any of those things—bed and breakfast at the guesthouse, crutches, oxygen bottle, wheelchair, haircut, Monday Night Football—I can direct you to the location.”

  Friday avoided my eye. “Does the guesthouse have a Clara Bow room by any chance?”

  “I’ll require mouth-to-mouth resuscitation if I cross the threshold of one more Clara Bow room,” I told Mr. Millman.

  “Hey, I do mouth-to-mouth, Lemuel dear. Just say the word.”

  “Damnation, you people talking English or what?” Millman of Millman & Son asked.

  Ornella Neppi lowered her eyes and smiled. “We’ve got a secret language,” she confessed.

  I was starting to be comfortable with Friday’s smile. Even when she directed it at someone else, I had the feeling it was meant for me. Maybe that’s what she had in mind when she decided we needed to exchange tokens to mark the beginning of the beginning. “I’d take it kindly if you would point us toward the former Speakeasy Saloon,” I told Mr. Millman.

  “No problem,” he said. He pushed open the screen door and stepped onto the porch to give us directions. “Drive on down to that stop sign over there. You be sure to come to a full stop ’cause Furman, he’s part-time sheriff, part-time undertaker, sometimes hangs out in an alleyway to ticket offenders. You’ll be forty bucks lighter if he nabs you. Okay, you turn right at the stop, you go on down Cottonwood Cover Road past Furman’s police station, you can’t miss it because his police car, which is broken, is up on cinder blocks in front of it, you drive on down—what?—I reckon a mile would be ’bout right. Long ’bout where Searchlight ends and them hills out yonder begin you’ll see a three-story frame building, that there’s the Speakeasy. You can’t miss it, it’s directly across from the Mojave Mobile Home Park.”

  We followed Hillman’s directions and found the three-story onetime saloon on the edge of town. It still had faded but readable lettering across the frontage that said THE ORIGINAL SEARCHLIGHT SPEAKEASY SALOON. A small billboard in the yard, the kind planted in front of churches, listed the businesses on the premises. Searchlight Guest House. Mojave Medical Equipment. The Speakeasy Beauty Emporium. I pulled around to the side of the building and parked in the shade.

  “So you’re the detective,” Friday said. “What do we do now?”

  “Not sure,” I said. We were standing at the corner of the building and I was staring at the sign in the front yard. “Speakeasy Beauty Emporium,” I said, thinking out loud. “Why’d they keep the Speakeasy logo? If they kept the Speakeasy logo, maybe they kept the…” I turned to Ornella. “You don’t happen to have a portable telephone in that silver astronaut sack of yours?” She nodded yes and, reaching into the front pocket, produced it. “First time I get to use one of these contraptions,” I said. I pecked out Detective Awlson’s number with a fingernail because the numbers on the phone were too small for my fingertips. When he picked up I said, “Listen up, Detective, I’m in Searchlight looking for Gava’s girlfriend name of Annabel. Can you read me off that phone number Gava called from Hattie Hillslip’s kitchen phone?”

  I copied it onto my pad, cut the connection and began dialing the number Awlson had given me.

  “Who’re you calling?” Ornella asked.

  “Whoever answers is who I’m calling,” I said. I could hear a telephone purring on the other end. A woman came on the line. I held the earpiece away from my ear so Friday could catch the conversation. “Speakeasy Beauty Emporium,” the woman said. “Sharon speaking. You calling for a booking?”

  Friday took the phone. “My husband and I are passing through Searchlight. We saw your sign. Would it be possible to come by now?”

  “Sure you can, honey, long as you don’t mind reading fashion magazines for ten, fifteen minutes.”

  I trailed after Friday into the building, down a narrow staircase and through a swinging door into what was once the basement of the Original Searchlight Speakeasy Saloon. The Beauty Emporium consisted of a large space that stank of chemicals I couldn’t identify—I supposed the unpleasant odor came from products used to dress hair, which is one reason I never went in for hair dressing. You couldn’t m
iss the fact that the parlor was underground—narrow horizontal windows set high in the walls gave onto street level. I caught a glimpse of bicycle wheels passing by. Long neon tubes, one of them sizzling and blinking, hung overhead. A large framed portrait of Jesus filled most of the back brick wall, a small framed photograph of Ronald Reagan hung on another wall above the giant TV, a printed price list was thumbtacked to the back of the door. An older woman and a teenage girl were sitting under giant helmetlike hair dryers, thumbing through L.L.Bean catalogs. The noise from the dryers made conversation difficult.

  “You must be Sharon,” I called to the proprietor, a badly bleached middle-aged blonde wearing what I took to be a faded Indian sari with its embarrassingly bare midriff. She drifted away from her customers and approached me until her face was inches away from mine. When she angled her head inquisitively, I said, “My name’s Gunn. I’m a private investigator.” I flipped open my wallet to give her a look-see at my laminated New Mexico ID. “I’m trying to locate someone who worked at the Original Searchlight Speakeasy Saloon.”

  Sharon eyed Friday. “So you’re not here to get your hair styled?”

  Ornella shook her head. Sharon turned back to me. “The Speakeasy Saloon gave up the ghost two years ago come summer.”

  “I see you inherited the Speakeasy logo,” I said.

  “Had to if I wanted to inherit the Speakeasy phone number.”

  “Why’d you want the Speakeasy phone number?”

  “It was either that or wait ten months for the phone people to get around to running me in a new line with a new number. ’Tain’t easy launching a beauty emporium without a telephone. I’m still listed in the phone book as the Original Searchlight Speakeasy Saloon but everyone in Searchlight knows I’m the Emporium so, heck, I figure why bother changing it. Oh, I still get calls now and then from folks trying to reserve a table near the big-screen TV so I know right off they’re not calling to get their hair styled. I bought the TV off the saloon when it shut down but I only turn it on Monday nights for the gentlemen who come around to watch football.”

  “Did you by any chance know an Annabel who worked at the saloon?”

  “Oh my gosh, yes. Annabel was one of the three girls who waited tables. To my mind she was a mite too friendly with the customers—waiting tables, you need to keep a respectable distance between you and the clients, specially the male of the species who are all touchy-feely. She had a boyfriend that I never set eyes on. He must’ve roughed her up some—there were days when she came in wearing a lot of eye makeup and a scarf around her neck. Different folks, different strokes is what I always say. I talked Annabel into going to church, I think it helped her deal with whatever she was dealing with. When the saloon shut down, the other two girls moved on but Annabel was local so I took her in here. I taught her to wash and brush. Of course, I do all the actual cutting and styling.”

  “Did she get personal calls during work hours?”

  “From time to time.”

  “Was the caller a man?”

  Sharon nodded carefully. “It was a man, all right. I usually answer the phone in the Emporium so I heard the voice on the other end. I think it might have been the boyfriend that roughed her up because Annabel didn’t look none too happy speaking to him.”

  “Did you by chance overhear any of these conversations?”

  “It’s not my habit to listen in on someone else’s conversation. Besides which, Annabel always walked over to the far corner and turned her back when she talked on the phone.”

  “Would you know where I can find her?”

  Sharon pursed her lips in indecision. “Sunday and today are her days off,” she said. “Don’t know as she’d take kindly me giving out her whereabouts.”

  Friday stepped into the breach. “We’re not going to hassle her,” she told Sharon. “We just want to talk to her about the man who called her here.”

  “He in some kind of trouble?”

  “He got himself arrested in New Mexico for buying drugs,” I said. “We got hold of his phone records. We thought, from the records, he was calling the Speakeasy Saloon. All the time he was calling the Speakeasy Beauty Parlor—”

  “Emporium,” Sharon said. “It’s a beauty emporium.”

  “Sorry. The Speakeasy Beauty Emporium. A neighbor of his who overheard his end of a conversation thought he mentioned someone named Annabel. That’s how come we came by.”

  Friday said, “The man who was arrested may be thinking of jumping bail. Annabel may know where he is. Save him a lot of grief if we can find him and convince him not to jump.”

  “Heck, I just plain don’t know—”

  I stretched the truth to get at the truth. “If we don’t talk to Annabel, the police will.”

  The teenage girl under one of the dryers reached down and tugged the electric plug out of the wall. Half the noise in the Emporium died away. “I think I’m finished, Sharon,” the girl called over. She ducked out from under the helmet and, leaning forward to see herself in the mirror, ran both her hands through her newly curled hair to fluff it up.

  Sharon shrugged in resignation. “Annabel lives in one of them mobile homes cross the road,” she said.

  “You know her family name?” I asked.

  “Annabel’s Annabel Saxby. Her great-granddaddy was one of the original Searchlight gold rush Saxbys. Saxby’s a name that rings bells here.” Suddenly Sharon reached for Friday’s hand. “Do you accept Jesus Christ as your lord and savior?” she demanded.

  Her question broke over our conversation with the intensity of a rainsquall. Ornella looked at me in confusion—confusion is the wrong word, alarm would be more accurate—before turning back to Sharon. “No, I don’t, actually.”

  Sharon smiled sadly. “Well, if I was in your shoes, this is something I’d worry my pretty head about. Jesus can’t make you win the lottery if you don’t buy a ticket. Come home to Jesus when you can, dear.”

  The teenage girl was putting the L.L.Bean catalog back on the pile on the shelf. She obviously overheard the exchange between Friday and Sharon. “I went and came home to Jesus,” she told Ornella. “I’m here to bear witness he saves them that repents the error of their ways. How much I owe you, Sharon?”

  “The usual, Cathy-Jo.”

  Strange as this sounds, Ornella seemed to be fighting back tears when we reached the street. “You okay?” I asked.

  She wasn’t okay. She settled onto one of the Speakeasy’s wooden steps, a point of pain in her eyes. “When I spent summers in Corsica, my grandfather would take me to church with him on Sundays,” she said. Her voice fell to a whisper and I had to crouch down to hear her. “I was maybe eight or nine, so everything seemed larger than it probably was. The church swallowed me like a cathedral, a giant Jesus hung crucified on an enormous cross, a great big tear was running down the marble cheek of an enormous Virgin. Then, one Sunday…”

  Ornella leaned forward and rested her forehead on her knees as if she felt faint and was trying to get the blood flowing to her brain again. “One Sunday what?” I said.

  She straightened up slowly. “One Sunday my grandfather stopped going to church. When I asked him why, he said he’d had to kill someone and couldn’t look Jesus in the eye again. He said it’d been a matter of family honor.”

  “Did you ever find out who he killed?”

  Breathing deeply, Ornella looked away, her eyes fixed on a horizon that existed only in her mind’s eye. “The subject never came up again. Sharon’s ‘Come home to Jesus when you can’ made me think of my grandfather who couldn’t come home to Jesus.” Suddenly she focused on me. “Did you kill anyone in Afghanistan, Lemuel?”

  “Is there a difference between killing someone and letting someone be killed?”

  “I don’t know. I need to think about it.”

  I tried to remember what I’d seen on the Hindu Kush. “Me, too, I need to think about it.” I stood up. “At least you don’t have the same problem as your grandfather. You haven’t kill
ed anyone.”

  Then Ornella Neppi said something so softly it sounded like she was talking to herself. “Not yet.”

  Not yet?

  An eighteen-wheeler ripped past us heading for the Mojave hills. For some reason the driver, who was wearing a striped railroad cap, reached up over his head and pulled the horn cord, and a long loud blast startled the birds on the roof of the Speakeasy Saloon into the air. Across the street people popped out of their mobile homes to see what the fuss was. But the fuss had already vanished in a cloud of dust.

  Nineteen

  Annabel Saxby lived in a small one-room aluminum mobile home, three rows down and four trailers in across the street from Sharon’s beauty parlor. There was a tiny garden with a knee-high picket fence on either side of the front door. Wilted geraniums filled the flower beds. “You need to water more,” I told the woman who, responding to my knock, opened the door.

  “They charge an arm and a leg for water here,” she said. “Sharon called to say you was on your way over. She didn’t name your name.”

  “It’s Gunn.” I could hear what sounded like a television quiz program coming from inside her mobile home. “Lemuel Gunn,” I said.

  “With two n’s,” Ornella added playfully. “He’s very uptight about people spelling his name right. I’m Ornella Neppi with two p’s. I don’t care how people spell my name.”

  “Sharon said you was a detective,” Annabel said.

  I nodded. “Can we talk to you for a minute?”

  Annabel Saxby was in her late twenties and a fine-looking female with very bad taste in clothing: skintight jeans that must have stopped blood from circulating below her ankles, open-toed high-heeled shoes, shocking pink toenails, a tacky blouse unbuttoned down to a washed-out brassiere. She had streaked the hair that she dislodged from her mascara-heavy eyelids with a toss of her head so abrupt it set her earrings, modeled on minichandeliers, to tinkling. She glanced from me to Friday and back to me. “If you come around ’bout Silvio—”

  I filled in the blanks so she would think we knew more than we did. “Silvio Restivo. Nicknamed ‘the Wrestler.’ He dropped from sight eight months ago after he turned state’s evidence against Salvatore Baldini. We understand you’ve been in touch with him off and on since.”