Write Me a Letter (Vic Daniel Series)

by David Pierce

  After Uncle Theo came back from the washroom, Avis came up with yet another bright red Ford. Why so many of their vehicles are bight crimson, I do not know. Maybe the color is supposed to appeal to us sporty types, us daredevils of the macadam.

  I settled my companion into the seat beside me, helped him to buckle up, and off we went. San Francisco's airport is located south of the city and we the famed Golden Gate Bridge, which Uncle Theo had excitedly pointed out to me from the plane as we circled out over the Pacific before making our approach in to land. The town of Lafayette lies east-northeast and you get to it, as we did, after bypassing most of the city, by joining tens of thousands of commuters heading homeward over the never-ending San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge. The bridge debouches onto a freeway that takes you north of Oakland through the Coastal Mountains to towns like Orinda, Lafayette, and Walnut Creek. If you headed eastward, inland, for a couple of hours you'd wind up, if you weren't careful, in Stockton or Sacramento. If you hit a left, you could enroll in civic disorder at the University of California, Berkeley, if you should so desire. North lay deltas and oysters; Jack London country. Did you know Jack started as an oyster pirate, then later got a job catching oyster pirates? Anyway, so claimed this pint-sized fount of information I ran into later that evening in the Round-up Saloon in Lafayette. We'd decided to spend the night there as it was getting on for eight o'clock when we hit town and we were both flagging somewhat.

  I booked us separated rooms in the shingle-fronted Ponderosa Pine Inn, a hostelry just off Lafayette's main drag, Mt. Diablo Boulevard. A leaflet in my room, kindly supplied by the local Rotary Club, informed me that the Ponderosa, and the Monterey pine, unlike the coast redwood, or sequoia, were only introduced in the nearby reservoir park in the 1930s. Well! Maybe me and Uncle Theo could go for a row around the reservoir mañana before leaving, that'd be oodles of fun. We might even be able to catch a glimpse of the rare Chinese pistachio (pistace chinensis).

  After I'd cleaned up a bit, I collected a newly bathed and freshly attired Uncle Theo from his room and we crossed Mt. Diablo Boulevard to Freddie's Pizza, which had been recommended to us by a helpful lady at the check-in desk. I didn't think the odds were too good on finding an Estonian eatery in town. We had to wait awhile for service, as Freddie's was jumping with high school kids, whole families, pops waiting for takeout orders, and so on, all of which was a good sign. Theo went through his half of the large, extra cheese, anchovies, olives, and garlic pizza almost as quickly as I devoured mine. Delicious, Freddie, and I told a pleased Freddie so on the way out. He gave me a gift of a green whistle with the name of his emporium on it, and presented Uncle Theo with a red lollipop, I guess he figured they had enough whistles already in Estonia.

  I escorted Theo back to his room, pointed to ten o'clock on my watch, and said, "Tomorrow."

  "OK," he said, in English. I grinned.

  "Dobreivie tchir," I said, which means goodnight.

  "Good night," he said, which means dobreivie tchir. We shook hands formally. He went into his room. I waited till I heard him lock his door, the dropped in the aforementioned Round-Up Saloon after a short stroll around town to stretch my legs and my lungs a bit. Bill's Drugs, across the road from Freddie's, was just closing up. The post office, like our hotel, was disguised behind old-fashioned wooden shingles. The streets were clean, the drivers sedate, the cars and station wagons large, new, and expensive. The color of the citizenry was white.

  To be truthful, I have hung around a lot of bars in my time. Occasionally they've hung around me, but I put that down to the thoughtless follies of laming youth. The Round-Up was just my kind of bar—large, rambling, with lots of wood, a couple of pool tables, a pretty girl in short cutoffs behind the bar, chilled steins for the beer, and hanging all over the walls, an assortment of bridles, types of bits, reins, and other leather and metalware associated with the horsey life, of which there was plenty in the hills and dales around Lafayette.

  Deer, too, according to the geezer on the next bar stool, the expert on Jack London and shellfish who'd started talking to me the moment I'd sat down beside him and so far hadn't stopped except to take the occasional swig of beer. Like I said, he was a little shaver, dressed in brown jeans tucked into cowboy boots, a checked wool shirt, and a cap that said "I've been to San Diego Sea world."

  "Deer, eh?" I said politely. "No kidding . . ."

  "Jenny!" he called out. "How about a couple more down here for me and Slim."

  "Sure, Mike," she called back. "Be right over."

  "That's right decent of you, Mike," I said.

  "What the hell, it's only money," he said.

  He lowered his voice and leaned closer. "Thing is, I'm leaving town tomorrow, OK? I've had enough. I've been working for this fat-assed dude owns a car lot, he dumped his load on me once too often so I am off on the morning train."

  "I hear Canada is nice this time of year," I said.

  "Canada, shmanada," Mike said. "I can get a job anywhere, anytime, like that." He snapped his fingers. "There's only one thing I'd like to do before I leave, and what d'ya think that is, friend?"

  "Say good bye?" I ventured. I swung around on the stool and took a casual look again at the assemblage without seeing anyone who looked like what I thought Lethal Lou looked like.

  Mike laughed and slapped my arm in a comradely fashion. I had a good idea of what he was about to claim he wanted to do before leaving town, but what the hell, I always like watching hustlers in action, there is always a chance to learn something new without it costing more than a leg. Thus I let him run his string out.

  "See, it's like this," he confided. "The boss won't be on the lot tomorrow, he's going to a funeral or something over to Orinda, so what I'm going to do is put the shaft in him, twist it a couple of times, then break it off. You want an Impala, under five thou on the clock, air-conditioning, radials, tape deck, you name it, Blue Book says thirty-two five, give me a grand, drive it away, fuck him. I got a gun-metal Porsche, make your mouth water, but she's already promised to Jerry over there, that big guy shooting pool? Fifteen hundred, fuck him."

  "Gee, I sure wish I could stop by, Mike," I said, shaking my head regretfully, "but me and the little woman got to get the camper on the road by seven-thirty latest, we got a goddamned shower of one of her cousins to go to in Sac."

  "No sweat, Slim," Mike said. "Just trying to do you a favor." Sure he was, he was trying to do me the great favor of selling me some overpriced clunker that might make it up the hill out of town if there was a following wind. While his fat-assed boss, if he even had one, watched the transaction out of the back window and laughed till his sides split. A slightly more sophisticated version of the same scam is for the hapless salesman to get shat on or otherwise deeply insulted by the boss right in front of the sucker. The boss takes off immediately for lunch or some make-believe errand, leaving the salesman a clear field to take his "revenge".

  Then Mike wanted to try me out on dollar-bill liar's poker, where you each take a dollar bill supposedly at random from your pocket and, using the serial numbers, proceed as you do with poker dice, alternately announcing higher hands until one calls the other, who either has the hand he claimed, and wins, or is caught bluffing, and loses.

  Of course your opponent is inclined to get suspicious if you play with a carefully preserved dollar bill you take out of your wallet's secret compartment, so Mike's version was to offer to use any one of the bills Jenny had given him in change when he'd bought the last round of drinks. Would pretty Jenny slip him a bill with, say, five of a kind in its serial number and sporting, say a slightly crinkled corner for easy recognition if Mike gave her the wink? What an idea. Oh—I forgot to mention that Jenny's T-shirt said NO LAYTEX? NO LAY, TEX.

  Anyway, when I declined, on the grounds that I was a terrible liar and couldn't even fool the little woman one time out of ten, he immediately suggested a new version of marienbad, that match game where the guy who has to take the last match loses, only in
Mike's version he wins. Again, I declined politely. Then he offered to take me on wrong-handed on the shuffleboard game; no luck there. Then he tried to snag me with a couple of sucker bets, in one of which he offered to bet me a buck that Joan of Arc wasn't French. I must admit he almost had me with that one, what else could she be?

  Finally, when he'd done everything but try and sell me a map of a lost gold mine, and he was probably warming up to that, I said to him, "Mike, give up. Cease. Desist awhile. Whoa. I wouldn't even bet you Joan of Arc was woman. I'm just country folks, I know when I'm out of my league."

  "No sweat, Slim," he said again, looking around for some livelier action. He didn't find any. I ordered up the next round. Mike shifted from actively trying to skin me to merely amusing me with coins, wooden matches, swizzle sticks, and various tidbits of local lore. He laid out five coins alternately heads and tails on the bar and wanted to know if I could reverse their faces turning over any two at a time three times. I couldn't. He could*. He arranged six coins in a pyramid and wanted to know if I could shape them into a circle in three moves, each coin moved being required to touch two others. I couldn't. He could. He said there was town wit who snuck out late at night and rearranged the letters on the movie marquee into something dirty: his latest effort was to change PARIS, TEXAS into SEX IS A TRAP. He said the local branch of the D.A.R. hung a banner across Mt. Diablo Boulevard, reading, "Lafayette says no to drugs." Underneath, some wit, perhaps the same one, had added, "Lafayette says no to everything."

  Mike wanted to know if I could discover the one lightweight bag of nine bags of coke, in only two weighings. That one I figured out finally. He said, "Two traveling salesmen were born on the same day of the same month in the same year and both died at the same time in their fiftieth year. So how come one lived a hundred days longer than the other?"

  He said, "When the same two guys were drafted, they gave their names as Jim Riley and John Riley, the only children of the same parents, and as we know, they were born on the same day of the same month in the same year. So why weren't they twins."

  "You got me, Mike," I said.

  Then he laid out five matches like this, I I I I I, and wanted me to move any two to make an all-day sucker. I couldn't. Then he asked me if I knew how to pour a whole pint of beer into a half- pint mug. I didn't.

  I strolled back to the hotel trying to figure out the last stinker he laid on me just before I left. It seems there were these three guys in a cathouse. In came five ladies, three with bright red lipstick on, two with pale pink. The lights go out. Each guy who figures out what color lipstick is on his dome gets a freebie. After a while, one guy says, "I know" and he does. Given that there is no trickery with mirrors or some of the ladies having kissed all their lipstick off, how does he know?

  The outside door of the hotel was locked but I had a key and let myself in. I went upstairs and paused in front of Uncle Theo's door for a minute; all seemed tranquil. I wondered if Uncle Theo was dreaming, and if so, of what. I'd enjoyed the brief respite offered by the Round-Up Saloon, but I couldn't help thinking it was but the calm before the storm, these last few minutes in the trenches before going over the top. And, amigos, I am not noted for my ability to foretell the future; I have trouble sometimes foretelling the past.

  I hit the hay after doing what a lot of us keep-fit fanatics do—drink a lot of water as an antihangover precaution. I wondered why there were so many languages in my life I couldn't speak all of a sudden, my ignorance was getting to be a nuisance even to me. I had just about figured out the solution to those lipstick traces when I fell asleep.

  14

  Came the dawning of the new day.

  Several hours later, I arose.

  A while after that, after having partaken of breakfast at a counter joint up the road from us, Uncle Theo and I hit the road. I turned the wrong way out of the hotel's parking lot and had to take a small, winding lane to get back to the freeway entrance. On the way I spied a Red Indian up in a tree menacing us with a bow and arrow! I refused to panic; however as the fearless hunter's mother was standing at the foot of the tree telling him to climb down immediately before he fell and hurt himself, or else. Then I spied a horse being silly in a field, and after that a fencepost-hole digger at work. A hawk that had been following us to see, I surmised, if we spooked any field mice or whatever that it could snag for its breakfast swooped down one more time and then disappeared. I even thought I glimpsed a Symphoricarpos albus, or snowberry, but I could have been mistaken.

  We did see a goat farm just after picking up the eastbound freeway and I wondered vaguely what anyone wanted with so many of the hairy critters, turn them into goat-hair throw rugs? Who knew.

  After another while we passed through Alamo, then Danville. About then I pulled over to check the map I'd purchased from Mrs. Martel, Stationer, the previous day, then on we continued toward San Ramón, finally leaving the hills behind us. Uncle Theo sat quietly beside me. From time to time he pointed out some feature of particular interest, like a gang of naked to the waist asphalt layers who were resurfacing a stretch of the highway. It was Benny, I think, who once told me that what those guys did, first thing in the morning, was to wrap up a couple of chickens and unpeeled potatoes and an onion or two in foil and then tuck them in a corner of the hot asphalt so they'd be good and juicy by lunchtime. Where does he pick up stuff like that? I bet he'd even know what they did with all those billy goats.

  Onward, ever onward . . . passing miles and passing thoughts . . . and then there was Fats, was one of the passing thoughts. Fats, to whom I owed one, you may recall. I could rat to the Mob about him. I could ditto to the cops. I could sic Used Car Mike on him. I could devise some appropriate trickery of my own. Or maybe I should just let sleeping curs lie, as long as he left Will's family alone. I didn't want him really mad at me, after all, he might start thinking, he might even conceivably get someone to gain access for him to Air France passenger lists, and then where would I be. How long did they keep those things in the computer, anyway? I knew passenger lists were entered daily, covering such subjects as name, sex, destination in seven different categories, starting point, fare paid, and method of payment and so on, but probably not even Benjamin knew how regularly they were expunged from the system. What I thought I would do was to merely drop Fats a polite note in which I would suggest that (a) it was Zit-Face who made off with the sixty-two five, not Will, and (b) Zit-Face had also held out on Fats when he reported on the almost penniless state of my wallet.

  Onward. Finally we turned off the main road, cruised past a trailer park, then into the town of our destination, Locke. Locke is not your average small Californian town, kids, replete with gas stations, fast-food joints, dogs, and teenagers. Locke is made of wood, firstly, and Chinese, secondly. All Chinese, with one or two exceptions. We parked behind the town's one hotel, the one we had been directed to, a semiderelict-looking all-wooden monstrosity; even the fire escapes were wood. We alit, then strolled along a (wooden) sidewalk past a short row of (wooden) homes and storefronts. A sign along the way informed us that the town had been built in 1912 to house levee workers and that it had once had a population of 1,500 plus a real live theater. We peeked in the windows of Yuen Chong's General Store; one or two of the items of foodstuffs looked almost edible. An old Chinese gent half dozing in the sun on a stairway gazed at us briefly as we passed, then went back to stroking his long gray goatee. We turned a corner and passed a shop called Locke Ness—get it? We noticed the Dai Loy Museum was closed. The whole town, with its false wooden frontages and Asian extras, was so cinematic I kept expecting Bruce Lee to suddenly leap out and scream bizarre noises. Which was not the reason I was nervous, by the way. I was nervous because I was already nervous. Was there such a thing as a Nazi Chinaman? Benny, where are you?

  We walked back to the hotel via Locke's number two street; two was about all there were. There were two people in the cavernous lobby when we entered—a youngish Asian fellow in a spotless white T-shirt
at the reception desk, and some nature lover, complete with hiking boots, sun hat, knee-length mosquito-proof shorts, and long woolen socks, who was sprawled in a bamboo chair in the corner looking at a map through a magnifying glass, a well-stuffed orange knapsack at his feet out of which unidentifiable rods of metal jutted, much like those chopsticks from Momma's bun. His face was bright red with sunburn, or maybe embarrassment, and his windbreaker sleeves were almost covered with sewn-on badges saying "Greenpeace," "Sierra Club," "Save the Whales," "Bike for Health," "The Audubon Society," "No to Nukes," "Dolphins Are People Too," and God knows what else. Repressing a shudder, I turned back to the desk clerk, who neatly folded up and then put away his Chinese-language newspaper before attending to our needs. Which he did, it is perhaps unnecessary to add, in perfect American, and with extreme politeness. I booked us two single rooms, for one night, in my name; he refused either a deposit or a look at my plastic. He insisted on carrying Uncle Theo's small bag up to the first floor, where our rooms were, opened them up for us, and then refused a tip. My room was small but clean and moderately comfortable. Once me and Uncle Theo were downstairs again, our host informed us that, in case we were hungry, there were two restaurants in town but only one, Dago Don's, served lunch. Then he snapped his fingers, made an apologetic gesture, and produced from under the counter a package that he said had come for me. "Perishable!" it said on the outside. I thanked him kindly, directed Uncle Theo to a chair, in which he sat, then made haste back up to my room to open my parcel. And I felt a lot better, hombres, when I saw the comforting sight of one of my own, my very own, .38-caliber Police Positive nestling inside on a bed of confetti, and beside it, a substantial supply of ammunition. I checked it out, tucked it in the shoulder holster I'd brought with me in my airline carry-all, slipped on a lightweight windbreaker to hide it from prying eyes, and then rejoined Uncle once again downstairs. Uncle was making "no spika da English" gestures to the nature freak, who had bits of a fishing rod spread out on the worn carpet. Evidently one of the couplings had come loose in the recent past and he was showing Uncle how he'd cleverly fixed it by himself, alone, out in the wilderness, with naught but a tendon from a tree frog's leg and a dash of Superglue. Close up the guy smelled of a combination of rubber and bug repellent.