The thin man’s silence was making me nervous. In order to force Tolson to introduce me to him I kept my eyes focused on the man’s mustache. After a few seconds of that nonsense the man finally squirmed and Tolson finally spoke. “Our witness’s name is Teresa Blair. This is her husband. James.”
Tolson gestured with his left hand and Blair and I nodded simultaneously. He remained intent and mute, an automaton fueled by a pair of blue eyes that looked fissionable. There was something decidedly scientific about the man, as though his natural passion was checked by carefully marshaled reason and prudence. He appeared competent and formidable, but detached. A device.
“So what do you want with me?” I asked Tolson.
“We’re covering the Fluto angle,” he said. “We’re pretty certain if Fluto has her we’ll know it within a few days. One complication is that Fluto himself seems to have dropped out of sight.”
“Maybe he’s skipped bail.”
“I’m not that lucky and Fluto’s not that dumb. He’ll show for the trial on Monday. If he doesn’t, the judge will issue a bench warrant quicker than flies find shit. Then we’ll really have him where we want him.”
“How about a continuance?”
“Fluto’s lawyer has refused to waive time, so it’s now or never. If we have to go to trial without Mrs. Blair, that leaves us with the lush and the kid, assuming we turn him up between now and Monday. And kids don’t make good witnesses—I guess because jurors were all kids once themselves and remember what little liars they were. Without Mrs. Blair or the kid we’ve got nothing. I’ll have to dismiss.”
“What am I,” I joked, “your star witness?”
Tolson barely stretched his lips. “I suggested to Mr. Blair here that it might help if he hired someone on the outside to assist in checking his wife’s family, friends, the personal side of the thing. He agreed and asked us to recommend someone. I talked to a few people and ended up recommending you. I just want to make certain you know the ground rules before you decide whether to take the case.”
“What ground rules are those?”
“Mainly, that you tell me every single thing you learn. Immediately, if not sooner. And also that you stay away from Tony Fluto and his people. Your job is Mrs. Blair, not Tony. Leave him to us.”
“I will if he lets me.”
“Yeah. Well, if you have any trouble, just let me know.”
“I will if he lets me,” I repeated. “Who’s paying the freight?”
“Mr. Blair,” Tolson said.
I looked at Blair. He nodded.
“Are the terms agreeable to you?” I asked him.
He nodded again.
“My rate’s forty an hour.”
He nodded again.
“Do you speak?”
He nodded again. I thought the blue eyes twinkled a tad, but I couldn’t be sure.
Tolson glanced at the clock on the wall and then at his watch and then stood up. “Mr. Blair is an accountant,” he explained. “Since this is the tax season, he has very little time to spare, or so he tells me. He had to juggle some meetings just to be here this morning, which we appreciate, but he has to leave now. I suggest you set up an appointment with him at his office to talk in greater detail about Mrs. Blair.”
“I’d rather meet at his home,” I said. “I’d like to look over Mrs. Blair’s things, the layout of the house, all that. Let’s say this evening at eight?”
Tolson and I looked inquiringly at Blair, who frowned, then shrugged, then nodded. Without apparent effort Blair stood and, with the liquid stride of a panther, moved to the door. Tolson looked at me and grinned.
“Maybe she left home to make sure her ears still worked,” I said to Tolson in what I thought was a whisper.
Blair stopped and turned back. “It’s more complicated than that,” he said. His voice was as soft as chamois.
Tolson waited until Blair’s steps had died away. “He wants his wife back but he’s not crazy about having her testify. So if you find her, you tell me first. I’ll put her in protective custody till after the trial. She’s not going home to hubby until she’s done her duty as a citizen.”
From the flare of Tolson’s nostrils and the set of his jaw, the duty he talked about was owed only to him.
2
I’d left my car on the street opposite City Hall, at the juncture of an adult bookstore and a fern bar. When I got back to it, there was someone sitting on the fender and it wasn’t the meter maid. He was short and wiry, his shoulders raised in a perpetual shrug, his arms long and awkward, seemingly without joints. His suit and tie were different shades of brown, his shirt a rumpled yellow. When he smiled, his lips formed an accent rather than a hyphen. The potbelly above his belt was as incongruent as a misplaced prosthesis.
“Mr. Tanner?” he asked as I approached. “My name is Grinder. Conway Grinder. Welcome to El Gordo.” There was no hospitality in his tone. I took his proffered hand and got a squinting appraisal in return. “You’ve been talking to Ray Tolson,” he went on with feigned cheer. “Maybe he mentioned my name.”
“Why would he do that?”
Grinder smiled lazily. “Oh, because I’m the Chief of Detectives in this town. Because I’m the guy who’s keeping Tony Fluto’s place under surveillance for any sign of the Blair woman. Because I’m the guy you should talk to when and if you come up with anything on her.”
“Really?” I said. “Why should I do that?”
Grinder reached into his shirt pocket and took out a stick match, fit it into the left corner of his mouth and began to gnaw on the end. “I’ll tell you straight, Tanner. I didn’t want Tolson to bring you in on this. We can handle our own problems down here. El Gordo’s a funny place,” Grinder announced around the match. “We don’t like outsiders much, especially not civilians from the big city who don’t know the town and don’t want to, and who might just screw everything up because of it. But Tolson didn’t listen to me, did he?”
“Evidently not. Somehow I doubt it’s the first time.”
Grinder snarled, his voice suddenly full and sinister. “Don’t get smart with me, Tanner. In about three minutes I can have you in the foulest jail cell you’ve ever seen.” The match head darted and bobbed like the nipple of a grinding stripper.
I held up a hand. “What do you want from me, Grinder? I’m not going to run back home just because you like to play the Lone Ranger, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“I just want to make sure you got your instructions straight, Tanner, that’s all.”
“I report to Tolson, Grinder. You want to know what I learn, give him a call. I’m sure he’ll share it with you.”
“You know anything at all about El Gordo, Tanner, you know you never know for sure who you can trust down here. Now if you call Tolson, and he happens to be in court or in the john or home banging his wife, and you leave a message for him, well, that message just might fall into the wrong hands. And then we just might lose the lovely Mrs. Blair all over again.” Grinder smiled a huckster’s smile.
“But that won’t happen if I report directly to you, is that it?”
“That’s it. Because when you call me I’m going to get your number and then I’m going to leave the station and go to a pay phone tacked to the back wall of a poolroom I know and I’m going to call you back and then and only then are you going to tell me what you’ve got. Because that way only you and me know the where-abouts of the party in question. Not that I think you’re going to locate the lady.”
“Why not?”
“Because Mr. Fluto has her and because sooner or later I’m going to prove it. And when I do, it’s going to put him up on more than a measly hit-and-run charge. It’s going to mean a two-oh-seven.”
“What might that be?”
“Kidnapping.” Grinder gave the word a strange joy.
“You sound a bit intense on the subject of Mr. Fluto,” I said. “What’s behind it?”
“I got my reasons. You just remember what I s
aid. And I don’t want to see you anywhere near Fluto’s place. You stick to Mrs. Blair and her friends. Leave the scumbags to me.” Grinder tossed the matchstick on the ground and shoved himself off my fender and walked off toward City Hall, the bulge over his left hip advertising an accessible and functional tool of death.
There were still three hours to kill before I was due at James Blair’s house, and I spent them loitering in a couple of bars and driving through the streets of El Gordo. The town gave off a dispiriting mist. Without guidance or plan it had drifted on the tide of history, pitifully victimized by time’s fickle and unforgiving march. The center of town was a relic that was rapidly becoming refuse rather than icon. The halfhearted attempts at rehabilitation and restoration were limited to easy and cosmetic approaches—some flags hoisted, some bricks laid, some spindly trees planted in square stone pots, some freshly striped and metered parking lots. From the number of boarded doors and painted windows the effort had resulted only in a bleak monument to the cheap and the quick.
The rim of the town was just as bad—malls and tracts approved by officials who thought the only function of good government was to say yes. Traffic sped aimlessly through all parts of town, unchanneled and directionless. Freeways sliced neighborhoods in half and turned the sky into a looming, buzzing slab. Multiunit apartments, square and featureless, sprouted randomly, turning once private backyards into public pits. Every second building was an abandoned bowling alley or a taco stand.
Even though I’d been ordered by Tolson to keep away from Tony Fluto, out of curiosity I dropped his name in a few bars and cigar stores, just to see what would happen. What happened most was paralytic paranoia, followed by rapid and elaborate protestations of ignorance. Tony Fluto was definitely a presence in El Gordo, sort of the way the stockyards used to be a presence in Chicago, and the reaction of a couple of bartenders when I mentioned his name made me quite willing to comply with Tolson’s orders to stay out of Fluto’s way. I just hoped he’d stay out of mine.
It wasn’t quite eight when I pulled to a stop across from 2190 Vista Grande Terrace, the home of my client and his missing wife. And I wasn’t the only new arrival in the neighborhood. Sometime during the day I’d picked up a tail, a green one with a dented fender and two men in it which was now parked fifty yards on up the hill. Grinder wasn’t leaving anything to chance, but I guessed I didn’t care. Not yet.
The Blair house was more than halfway up the hill that rose out of the mud flats and salt evaporators that rimmed the West Bay and, like all hills, took the socio-economic level of the community up with it. The homes ornamenting the slope all came complete with moats of semitropical flora and, if the little pickup down the block was an indication, with ethnically appropriate gardeners to tend them. Several of the houses were named. The one across from the Blairs’ was the Casa Schmidt.
I got out of my car and walked to the middle of the street, then looked back toward the bay and the lights of Fremont and Milpitas, which were just flicking on beyond it. A scintillating but disturbing view, as mesmerizing as a fireplace or a waterfall. The odd thing was that James Blair couldn’t see an inch of it. His house was as well guarded as his personality, entirely masked by a high fence of interwoven slats of brown-stained pine and two heavy wooden gates painted with glossy black enamel. The gates and the fence seemed impenetrable by any means at my disposal, and the tops of the coastal redwoods growing within the enclosure swaggered in the evening breeze, mocking my ostracism. I walked to the gate and pressed the latch. It didn’t move. I pressed the white button in the post beside the gate. Nothing happened. I went to the far end of the fence, where the second gate would open to admit vehicles, but that section wouldn’t budge, either. I jumped up and down several times, to see what I could see, but all that registered was dusk and shadow, triumphant and belligerent seclusion. When the change in my pocket spilled out during the fourth jump, I scraped it up and went back to my car to sulk.
Dusk turned to dark. The early evening lights danced a hypnotic nocturne and within minutes I was half sleeping, half dreaming. A while later the car door opened and a woman’s head joined me beneath the golden glow of the dome light.
“Are you from Wayne?” she demanded.
“What?”
“Are you from Wayne, I said. Did he hire you? Is that why you’re sitting out here spying on me? Is it?”
“Lady, I don’t even know who you are.”
I brought the talking head into focus. It was a handsome head, fortyish, waved brown hair, broad brown eyes, creased brown skin—one of those heads that probably had increased in pulchritude over the years. It was also an outraged head.
“A likely story,” she charged, the words harsh, but not naturally so. I envisioned the woman observing me for the past half hour from behind lace curtains, gulping a highball, gradually working up the avalanche of indignation which had shoved her out the door and into this confrontation.
“Believe me, ma’am,” I said, “I don’t know you or Duane or anything about either of you.”
“Wayne. His name is Wayne. And you know it.”
“No, I don’t. But if you want to discuss it further, why don’t you come in and sit down before you fuse a few vertebrae.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Why not?” I said, then shrugged and thought of what I could say that would be irreverent enough to get rid of her. Then I decided I didn’t want to be rid of her quite yet.
“Do you happen to know a woman named Teresa Blair?” I asked. I was as bland as bananas.
The head stayed where it was, a terra-cotta amulet suspended beneath the roof of my car, but its expression softened dramatically. “Teresa? What about Teresa? Where is she? Have you seen her?” The questions became a glissando of concern.
I put a hand up to ward off the words. “I haven’t seen her, no. Have you? You seem worried about her.”
“I am. I’m very worried. Is she all right? Can you tell me that, at least?”
“I don’t know,” I said truthfully. “Do you have any reason to believe she’s been harmed?”
The head measured me critically, cocked to one side, aiming from behind an unseen musket. “Did Wayne Martin hire you to spy on me?”
“No.”
“Are you following me? For any reason?”
“No.”
“Are you really interested in finding Teresa Blair?”
“Yes.”
“Then let’s go inside. My back is killing me.”
She smiled for the first time, and moved from handsome to comely, but the smile was brief and reluctant. I got out of the car and did a knee bend to loosen things up, then followed her across the street and into the house just south of the Blairs’.
It was a house without character. The mailbox was a windmill, the doormat a flag, the umbrella stand a milk can, the mirror a porthole, the lamp a cookie jar. Much of the contents looked out of place and scattered, as though the place had been hastily and thoroughly searched for something never found. The tables and shelves were occupied by scores of porcelain figurines in various positions of piety.
We came to a stop in what realtors call the family room. On the wall were a Sierra Club calendar and a decoupage version of the Desiderata. The furniture was Colonial, busily patterned, and shoved to the edges of the room. The TV was on: The Brady Bunch. At the counter separating the family room from the kitchen was a blond boy of twelve or so, eating something round and frozen to a stick. His shirt was a 49ers model, number 32. There was a scab the size of a quarter on his left elbow and a wad of something or other in his back pocket. “This is my son,” the woman said. “Davy.”
“Hi, Davy,” I said.
Davy left the room.
His mother remained standing in the center of the wall-to-wall shag, staring at the Miss Piggy poster taped to the refrigerator. She was tall and straight-bodied, an eastern preppie more than an active westerner. The seams of her white sailcloth slacks were puckered, as though just re
trieved from the dryer; the sleeves of her blouse were rolled into blue doughnuts above her elbows. I bet myself that everything she wore had come from an Eddie Bauer catalog. Her hair was a pixieish sprout of wheatish brown and, like her face, without cosmetic layers. When not in use her mouth lapsed into a pleasant, expectant smile. She would have been the last person to realize she had actually become lovely twenty years after the last time she wished for it.
“Do you want something to drink?” she asked distractedly, the request no more than filler.
“Scotch, if you have it.”
She shook her head. “I’m sorry. I don’t have any liquor, not since Wayne decided to … not since Wayne.”
“Coffee?”
“Coffee. It’s old, though.”
“So am I.”
She smiled feebly and moved into the kitchen. When she came back, she had a mug for me and a tall glass of something or other for herself. The liquid in the glass was cloudy, the color of fingernails. I asked her what it was.
“Just a little pick-me-up I mix in the blender. Celery, grapefruit rind, bean curd and soy. Would you like some?” She thrust her glass my way.
I shook my head. “If God meant for us to drink that stuff, he would have invented a cow that dispensed it.”
My joke fell flat. I took a sip of coffee and looked at the mug I had raised to my lips. The seal of Ohio State University was stamped on it, in silver and red. The woman saw me looking. “Wayne thought I’d like a set of those, can you imagine?” Her lip curled. “I hated Ohio State. Just hated it.”
With that, we took chairs on opposite sides of the room and sat and looked at each other. The coffee wasn’t hot and wasn’t good and the liquid celery must have been worse but we both drank our potions heavily, thinking other things. She spoke first, while I was struggling to get a taste out of my mouth.
“You know, you’re the first prayer of mine that’s been answered in more than a year. And I’ve prayed a lot in that time, believe me.”
I hadn’t been the answer to anyone’s prayer in a long time and I told her so. Then I asked her name.
State’s Evidence Page 2
