by David Freed
I thanked her for letting me know.
“He wrote a poem about his dad, if you’re interested,” Micah’s girlfriend said.
“I’m definitely interested.”
“Go to YouTube and type in his name—you do know YouTube, right?”
“On the Internets. I understand it’s a series of tubes.”
She tilted her head down and away, exposing the side of her neck, while softly stroking her suprasternal notch, the dimple between her collarbones—subconscious gestures usually meant to convey sexual attraction.
“You’re different,” she said. “And I definitely dig different.”
“You better head on back inside before your boyfriend starts wondering what you’re doing out here with an old man.”
“Not so old,” she said coyly.
I watched her walk back inside. I wondered if she set off airport metal detectors with her face.
The street lights had come on, the ones that hadn’t been shot out, anyway. In their harsh vapor glare, I noticed that somebody had keyed my rental car. One long bumper-to-bumper scratch along the driver’s side. My money was on the gangster I’d seen sucking the Tootsie Pop. Oh, the many entertaining things I would do to him if only he’d ride by once more. I realized that my vengeful thoughts were contrary to the Buddha’s teachings. The essence of Buddhism is harmlessness. Hatred and revenge are the twin evils of mankind. But that didn’t stop me from wanting to snatch the little punk off his dumb little bicycle and mess his shit up good.
THIRTEEN
Flight service was advertising low ceilings and poor visibility from San Francisco all the way south to Monterey. High pressure was breaking down. A cold front was moving in. I filed IFR, picked up my clearance from Norcal Departure, and took off from the San Carlos Airport a few minutes before midnight. Climbing through 500 feet, the headlights from the nearby 101 freeway disappeared. I was in the soup.
There’s something uniquely calming about flying a small plane alone on instruments at night without an autopilot. Everything fades away that might otherwise distract you from the tasks of piloting. You’re in a cocoon. In the soft red luminescence of the cockpit, you check and cross-check your instruments incessantly, scanning to make sure each is working properly, that one doesn’t contradict another. You check your gauges, your GPS, your floating compass, never taking your eyes off the instruments, trusting them to keep you upright and on course. If the clouds demand it, you do this for hours, cross-checking, working the radios, holding your assigned course, maintaining your assigned altitude, staying focused. Do it long enough and it becomes automatic. Only then do you have time to think.
I replayed the tapes in my head of my meetings with Echevarria’s ex-wife and son. Both obviously remained embittered by how Echevarria had treated them, but their respective body language suggested strongly that neither was involved in his death. If lingering resentments over interpersonal relationships were motives for murder, half the earth’s population would be dead and the other half in prison. Somebody murdered Arlo Echevarria, but it wasn’t his former spouse or estranged offspring. Of that I was fairly certain. I was less certain about Janice Echevarria’s second husband, Harry Ramos. Was he involved in the same oil deal as Carlisle and Tarasov? Was he a competitor? Did any of it have anything to do with how Arlo Echevarria met his end? I wondered.
“Cessna Four Charlie Lima, Oakland Center,” a voice intoned over my headset, interrupting my reverie, “cleared direct Jarrett, maintain 9,000 feet.”
I repeated the instructions from air traffic control. Seconds later, the clouds gave way and I was cruising above the moonlit overcast in smooth clear air. Off my left wing, the peaks of the Western Sierra floated above the milky blanket like islands on a sea of white. Ahead of me and to the south, the city of San Luis Obispo glowed beneath the creamy, translucent deck: a modern day Atlantis. Another forty-five minutes and I’d be home.
Center handed me off to Rancho Bonita Approach. The controller cleared me for the ILS approach into Runway Eight. I nailed the localizer dead-nuts center, squared the glide-slope indicator, slowed my airspeed and rode the needles all the way down at a steady ninety knots, breaking out of the clouds at 400 feet, feeling fine about what a damn gifted pilot I was—until I bounced it on. As Wilbur or Orville once said, every landing’s an adventure.
I taxied in and shut down. The airport was quiet. No grumbling whine of jet turbines. No piston-driven engines. Only the whisper of the wind intruded upon the darkness—a tranquility so perfect, a man could almost forget his troubles.
Almost.
My ex-wife’s Jaguar was parked in Mrs. Schmulowitz’s driveway. There was a light on in my garage apartment. I didn’t know whether to be enraged by the intrusion or aroused. As I unlocked the door and entered, I found Savannah in my bed, under the sheets, a nickel-plated revolver with an eight-inch barrel and plenty of scrollwork pointed at me. My cat was perched atop her chest, purring, his paws tucked contentedly underneath him.
“Your landlady let me in,” she said, lowering the gun as I locked the door behind me. “I told her I was your sister. I hope you don’t mind.”
“Once again I find myself asking, ‘What’re you doing here, Savannah?’”
“I’m scared.”
“You told me in Santa Monica that you thought your father might know something about what happened to Arlo. Is that why you’re afraid?”
“I asked him if he knew anything and he said no. But he’s acting very weird. Ever since you went to go see him. He thinks people are out to get him. Even you. He says he doesn’t know who to trust anymore.”
“Welcome to the club.”
“I’m sorry I got you into all this, Logan. I just don’t want to see anything bad happen to you, that’s all.”
I nodded with my chin toward her gun. “Where’d you get the fancy shootin’ iron? Roy Rogers?”
The revolver was a gift from her father, she said, given to her after Arlo moved out. A woman without a man needs protection, Carlisle had told her. He’d even paid for shooting lessons. I asked her how she got my address.
“Online.”
You can find just about anything online. Edible movie props. The most shocking items ever recovered from a dog’s stomach. The secret history of the mullet. Anything and everything but a surefire way to purge yourself of those roiling emotions you feel deep inside for that one woman you wish you could forget and hope like hell you never will.
I tossed my wallet and keys on the wooden orange crate that served as my nightstand and dropped my loose change in an empty coffee can on top of the pink Frigidaire.
“You feed the cat?”
“I tried. He didn’t seem very hungry.”
Kiddiot looked as happy as I’d ever seen him, sitting there on my ex-wife all nice and cozy, purring his feline ass off.
“What’s his name?”
“His name is mud,” I said.
My last meal had been breakfast in Oakland. I grabbed a tortilla and a slice of yellow cheese out of the refrigerator. I flicked some mold off the cheese, and rolled what was left of the slice inside the tortilla.
“I would’ve made you something,” Savannah said, “but I didn’t know when you’d be back. Plus, I checked the ’frig. You don’t really have anything to make.”
“I think you’d better leave,” I said, wolfing down the tortilla.
“Logan, didn’t you hear what I said? I’m scared.”
“You’ve got plenty of money. Hire a bodyguard. Hell, hire ten bodyguards, for all I care.”
She was slack-jawed. How could I be so callous?
“Don’t make me go, Logan. Please. Not tonight.”
“I’m tired, Savannah. I need to get some sleep. Now, if it’s not too inconvenient, take that six-shooter of yours and get out of my bed.”
She exhaled resignedly, picked up Kiddiot who meowed in complaint, and set him aside, then slid out from under my sheets. She was wearing a sheer blue satin robe that came
midway down her thighs and what appeared to be nothing underneath. Not that I would’ve ever looked, mind you.
“It’s one-thirty in the morning,” she said, lashing the robe tightly around her. “Where do you expect me to go?”
“Lots of hotels in town.”
“You don’t think I tried that first? There are no vacancies. There’s some big festival going on.”
There was always some big festival going on in Rancho Bonita. If it wasn’t the Sand Castle Building Festival, it was the Guacamole Eating Festival, or the International Film Watching Festival, or the Greek Salad Festival. There was even a festival, replete with a giant parade of half-naked, fully inebriated people, commemorating Summer Solstice. Every week, another festival, another excuse for local hoteliers to jack up room rates and sock it to the out-of-towners.
“Logan, please. Just for the night.”
I was too tired to fight her and too conflicted. I wadded up my upper sheet, lobbed it to her and pointed to my purple Naugahyde couch.
“Thank you.” She lay down on the couch and tucked the sheet in around her. Kiddiot jumped up and snuggled in once more on top of her.
I pulled my shirt over my head, tossed it on the floor and turned off the light, got out of my jeans and swung into bed. The wool cover was scratchy without a top sheet, but the bottom sheet was warm where Savannah had been seconds earlier. I tried not to think about how good it felt. My life had been perfectly tolerable before she reappeared unannounced and uninvited—OK, maybe not perfectly tolerable, but tolerable enough. I wanted her to leave. I wanted to make love to her. Hell, I didn’t know what I wanted. Except maybe a little loyalty from my cat. I could hear him purring clear across the garage.
“Someone keeps calling me,” Savannah said, “a private number. They call and hang up. Last night, there was a car outside my house. Just sitting there. For over two hours. I called the police. They never came.”
“What kind of car?”
“Small. White. With tinted windows.”
“And a spoiler on the back.”
“A spoiler?”
“A wing.”
I could see Savannah prop herself up on one elbow in the darkness. “How’d you know that?”
The same car that chased me. The same car Mrs. Schmulowitz saw outside her house.
“Lucky guess,” I said.
Savannah tried to get comfortable on the couch. The Naugahyde squeaked every time she shifted her weight. With every squeak, I felt like a bigger jerk. Real Buddhists are supposed to demonstrate compassion toward all beings, including ex-wives. Yet, here I was, making mine spend the night sticking to fake leather. I exhaled and threw off my covers.
“Get in. I’ll take the couch.”
“I’m fine right here.”
“Get in the goddamn bed, Savannah.”
“I said I’m fine.”
We would’ve been there another hour arguing about it had I not proposed a compromise.
“OK, look. How about this: we both take the bed? Your side, my side. Berlin Wall down the middle. No monkey business. Just sleep.”
She thought about it a minute. Then she said, “Deal.”
We remade the bed with the top sheet under the blanket and climbed in like two prize fighters, each on our respective side of the squared circle.
“I really appreciate this, Logan.”
She was asleep within five minutes.
I lay there for more than an hour, listening to her breathing softly, afraid to move, afraid I might touch her. According to Mrs. Schmulowitz, Dr. Phil says the best thing to do when you can’t sleep is not try. So I didn’t. I got out of bed as quietly as I could, careful not to disturb her, sat down at the card table that doubled as my home office, fired up my laptop, turned the sound down low, and signed on to YouTube, that video repository of all topics inane and amazing. Ten seconds later, there was Micah Echevarria, sitting on his living room sofa, staring out at me. His face, captured in low light on what I assumed was his girlfriend’s camera phone, was fuzzy and handheld shaky, but I could still make out the tendrils of marijuana smoke wafting behind him.
“My father fucking sucked at the job,” he began, “but he was still my father. So I suppose I owe him something. This poem’s for him.”
I’m on firm literary footing when I say Micah Echevarria was no Alfred Lord Tennyson. His poem, recited from a spiral note-book, was vitriolic and peppered with forced, clunky rhymes like “deserted and perverted” and “hate and berate.” It was all about how his father had abandoned him as a child.
“And now you are dead and dead means forever,” he intoned, “and more than a few would say, well, better late than never. But there are days when I feel that you being killed is really nothing more than a nightmare fulfilled. Because now I will wonder for the rest of my life if we couldn’t have been friends without anger or strife. So, goodbye, old man, wherever you are. In purgatory or hell, or on some shining star. If you’ll still be my dad, I’ll still be your son, and maybe someday, we can still have some fun.”
The last line caught in Micah’s throat. He nodded off-camera and the screen went blank. Bad meter aside, it was a poignant reading.
Kids murder their parents. Ride little Timmy about taking out the trash and, instead of calling Child Protective Services to complain about how abused he is, Timmy takes matters into his own tiny hands and smokes you with the Luger that Gramps brought back from the war; the one you told him never to touch, the one you kept “hidden” in your nightstand with one round in the chamber because it’s every American’s inalienable right to keep a fully loaded, semi-automatic weapon within easy reach at bedtime, because you never know when the Krauts might decide to start another war. Or maybe Daddy walks out on little Timmy and Timmy’s mom. Resentments fester over the years. Little Timmy grows up. One night, he decides it’s finally time for a little payback, and puts three slugs in Daddy’s chest. It happens. But I doubted Micah Echevarria was little Timmy. If I’d learned anything in too many years hunting sociopaths in bad places, it’s that the culpable don’t usually post poems about their victims on YouTube.
I turned off the laptop and got back in bed. Savannah never stirred. Somewhere around four a.m., I drifted off. I don’t remember what I dreamed about.
There was a cocktail lounge in West Hollywood called the Wet Spot I remembered from my operational days, a sultry, intimate haunt with red-leather booths, where former apparatchiks mixed indistinguishably with Russian organized crime and Israeli mafia types, blowhards all with unbuttoned silk shirts and bulging crotches, who eagerly ordered $100 shots of Stoli if it meant impressing the Eurotrash starlet they were hoping to bang that night. The bar’s owner was a charming, heavyset thug named Gennady Bondarenko who, before seeking asylum at the U.S. embassy in Madrid, worked diplomatic cover for the main intelligence directorate of the Russian Armed Forces General Staff. He also happened to be related by marriage to Laz, my old shooting instructor from Alpha, which is how I first met him. Bondarenko was seemingly on a first-name basis with just about every disaffected former Soviet citizen living on the West Coast. I decided to drive down that afternoon from Rancho Bonita to see what, if anything, he could tell me of Pavel Tarasov.
Mrs. Schmulowitz insisted first on serving us breakfast at her kitchen table in honor of my “sister’s” visit. There were scrambled eggs cooked with onion and smoked salmon, and bagels from the only bakery in Rancho Bonita that made them fresh daily. I tried to explain that Savannah wasn’t really my sister, but Mrs. Schmulowitz was too intent explaining why California bagels were such schlect compared to their New York counterparts.
“I’m telling you, it’s the water,” Mrs. Schmulowitz said, a small glob of cream cheese clinging to the corner of her mouth. “People make jokes about New York water. Go ahead. Laugh. But they don’t know what the hell they’re talking about. The United Nations took a vote. New York water is the best—the BEST, period. End of story. You can look it up but why bother? I’m tellin
g you!”
Savannah said she couldn’t remember ever having eaten more delicious eggs. Mrs. Schmulowitz said she couldn’t remember my ever having mentioned a sister—then observed that Savannah and I bore absolutely no familial resemblance.
“Could be your mother knew the milkman,” Mrs. Schmulowitz said with a wink. “It’s very possible she didn’t have enough money to pay the bill for the milk. Maybe the milkman gave her a little break if you know what I mean and I think you do. Hey, I give you some milk, you give me some ‘sugar.’ I’m not saying it occurred, yes or no, but it wouldn’t be the first time.”
Savannah put down her coffee cup. “Well, actually, Mrs. Schmulowitz—”
“I myself enjoyed such an arrangement during my second marriage,” Mrs. Schmulowitz confided, cutting her off. “He should’ve been a movie star, this milkman. Talk about biceps. Carrying all those milk bottles up and down all the stairs all day? We took one look at each other and all of our clothes suddenly disappeared. It was off the charts. Sometimes, these things happen. What can I say?”
Savannah nodded and tried not to smile. I started to say that we really needed to be going, when Mrs. Schmulowitz’s chest began ringing. She reached into her sports bra, got out her cell phone, and answered it.
“Hello? . . . Who? . . . Arnie! Hello, my love, one minute.” Her eyes lit up and she cupped her hand over the phone. “It’s my son, the doctor—well, he’s not really a doctor doctor. Not the kind that does hysterectomies. He’s a teacher, a professor of history. The greatest. Will you excuse me, dears?”
“Of course,” Savannah said.
“Arnie,” Mrs. Schmulowitz said into the phone. “How are you, doll? Is everything OK?”
I cleared the table and Savannah washed the dishes while Mrs. Schmulowitz lost herself in happy conversation with her only child.
They were still chatting and laughing by the time we left.
FOURTEEN
