by Nevada Barr
There is a back door.
In the front of the building, on the sidewalk, are six tables arranged inside a low cast-iron fence. Two young women, both on cell phones, occupy one of them.
Rose pushes open the door to the restaurant. Vincenzo’s is cut in half by a six-foot-high partition that separates the bar from the dining area. The bar side is dimly lit, the bar long and of polished wood. About a third of the stools are occupied. The dining side, an almost equally narrow space, is packed with tables covered in white cloths. Wicker-covered-wine-bottles-become-candle-holders and mason jars full of pencil-thin breadsticks serve as centerpieces.
Four tables are occupied. Eddie, the woman, and the little girl are seated at the back, near where the partition ends, giving access to the bar, kitchen, and restrooms. Eddie sits with his back to the door.
He must feel safe at Vincenzo’s. Rose hopes to change that.
She wends her way through the crowd of tables until she is standing next to Eddie’s chair. Ignoring her, he continues to study the menu. His date notices Rose is not a waitress, and smiles the way people do when they are not sure whether or not there is going to be a problem.
“Hi,” Rose says with an answering smile. “I’m Rose Dennis, a friend of Eddie’s.”
Eddie lifts his gaze from the menu, then does a classic double take. Rose’s smile widens. “Hi, Eddie, it’s good to see you taking a little time for yourself.” Eddie doesn’t move or speak. In the tradition of Medusa, Rose’s face has apparently turned him to stone.
Rose focuses her smile on his date. “You must be…”
The woman’s smile warms, comfortable now, deciding Rose isn’t going to report that their truck has been towed, or her escort is under arrest for attempted murder. “I’m Tania,” she says. Turning to Eddie, she punches him none too lightly on the biceps. “Eddie!”
Eddie takes on a sheepish aspect. Sheepish. Rose is amazed. In none of her paintings of his face had she recorded a whiff of sheepishness.
“Yeah, uh, Miss—”
“Dennis, Rose Dennis. You worked on my roof.” Eddie’s features flatten like a soufflé in an earthquake. His mouth works as if he’s trying to clean peanut butter off his back teeth. Rose gives Tania a little shrug. “I think it’s all coming back to him.”
“Yeah,” Eddie says woodenly. “Ms., uh, Dennis. This is, uh…” His face goes blank. Tania punches him again. “Tania Edgars, my fiancée” is knocked out of him.
“How do you do,” Tania says as Rose says, “Pleased to meet you.”
Eddie’s face is functioning, but his voice has again abandoned him.
Tania rolls her eyes theatrically. They are lovely eyes. “And this is my daughter, Amy.”
“Your Majesty,” Rose says with a bow. Amy touches her tiara and giggles. “May I borrow Eddie for a minute?” she asks Tania. “I promise not to keep him long.”
Eddie makes a noise somewhere between a choke and a growl. His lips thin. “Be right back,” he mutters. Rose gives him an encouraging smile and ushers him around the partition to the bar.
She climbs on a stool. From her perch, she can see Amy and part of Tania seated in the dining area. Eddie puts himself foursquare between her and the table he’s just vacated.
“What are you doing here?” he hisses. “Can’t you see this is a family place?”
Rose is taken aback by the vehemence. Amy waves shyly at her from the table.
“You leave Amy alone,” Eddie says in a menacing whisper.
“Why? Because there was only one thing wrong with the Dennis woman—she was alive?” Rose waves back at the little girl. “Just who tried to murder whom?”
“Stay the fuck away.” Eddie starts to turn back toward the table.
“Edward ‘Eddie’ Martinez. 1477 Palmetto. Arrested at seventeen for assault. Arrested again at twenty-two for assault and battery. Paroled this January. Parole officer, Carol Thompson.”
Eddie pivots, steps closer to Rose’s stool. She tenses, waiting for a beefy hand to smash her to the floor. Nothing happens.
“How do you know all that?” Eddie’s eyes dart up and down the bar as if one of the stools holds a pigeon.
“I ran your fingerprint,” Rose says.
“How’d you get—” He breaks off and stares hard at Rose. “You didn’t…”
“I did.”
Eddie looks like he might lose his breadsticks. “That’s gross.”
For a while neither speaks. Finally Eddie ends the silence. “I want it back.”
“You want what back?”
“My finger. I want it back.”
Rose laughs. “What would you do, have it bronzed? It’s too late to get it reattached.”
“It’s mine. I want it.”
Rose worked hard for that finger. It is evidence. It is more than that. It is art. “Well, you can’t have it.”
“Why not? It’s my fu—”
Rose looks pointedly over his shoulder to where Amy is building a fort with breadsticks and flatware.
Eddie drops his voice and leans in menacingly. “It’s my effing finger.”
“I need it for DNA evidence,” Rose says.
“Bullshit. You don’t need a whole finger.” Eddie is getting increasingly agitated. Rose’s interview is in danger of going off the rails.
She lowers her eyes, refusing to meet his glare. “You can’t have it because it’s gone,” she murmurs.
“Gone?” He slaps the bar with the wrong hand and grunts as the pain registers. “What did you do? Throw it in the garbage? You threw my fu—my effing finger in the garbage!”
“No,” Rose manages, her voice cracking slightly. “I ate it.”
Eddie slumps onto the stool next to Rose, their knees almost touching. “You are shitting me.” He starts to slap the bar again, then thinks better of it. “You really ate it?”
Rose nods guiltily. “I’d read the whole Donner Party story, then there were those guys in the plane crash in the Andes and … you know. I kind of wondered what we taste like. It’s not like I wanted to eat a whole person or anything. I’m not a cannibal.”
Eddie is slowly shaking his head from side to side like an old dog who has lost his sense of smell. “Jesus effing Christ.” He fixes his eyes on the bar. “What did it taste like?”
“Finger food,” Rose says.
He looks at her, eyes narrowing.
“I have your information, your DNA, your fingerprint, and the knife. This would be strike three, Eddie. Next time you go away for life.” Rose doesn’t know if North Carolina has the three strikes rule or not, but it sounds good.
Eyes black and hard as chips of obsidian, he shoves his face close to Rose’s. “How about I just kill you the rest of the way,” he says.
“Information. My death. Safety deposit box. Do I have to spell it out?”
Eddie’s eyes go from fiery to blank. “Uh. Yeah. Spell it out.”
“I have all the evidence you kindly left at my home, along with a complete statement of what transpired. If anything happens to me, or to anybody even slightly related to me, all that evidence will be sent to the police, your parole officer, and the newspapers.”
Eddie gapes as if he can’t believe what he is hearing; then he lowers his gaze to the bar.
“Can I help you?” A bartender has glided over.
“Gimme a draft,” Eddie says.
“I’m fine.” Rose waves him away.
“You’d really do that, wouldn’t you?” Eddie asks. He looks angry and lost and miserable. “You’d wreck my life. They said you were one crazy bitch.”
“That’s what I’m here for, Eddie. Not to ruin your life. To find out who ‘they’ are. Who hired you?” The bartender is back with the draft beer. “To call on me that night?”
“How the fu—the eff—would I know?”
That he wouldn’t know hadn’t occurred to Rose. She thinks about it for a moment. “How did they contact you?”
“Email.” Eddie takes a long draft
of the beer, then wipes the foam off his lip with the cocktail napkin.
“Who emailed you?”
“It’s not like that.” Eddie runs his fingers through his hair, ruining the part and leaving hair stuck up on his crown like chick’s fluff.
“What is it like?” Rose asks patiently. Eddie doesn’t seem to be stonewalling; he seems to be trying to think. Rose guesses thinking is not his long suit.
“You know, like Angie’s List, Craigslist, shit like that.”
Rose nods.
“This is a site like that. Most of it is regular stuff. I get my lawn jobs there. But if there’s a particular need, somebody there contacts somebody, and it gets set up. All secure and untraceable. I found out about the site when I was in the clink.”
Rose wishes she’d ordered a drink. She puts her elbows on the bar. “I hate it that everything is in cyberspace. Sometimes I think I need a cyberspace suit to keep from exploding into a billion pieces.”
“Tell me about it.” Eddie sighs. “First time I went away—back then—at least you knew your client. Now it’s all digital.”
Inwardly Rose curses Al Gore for inventing the internet. There is no way she could unravel that skein of cybertrails. She doubts even Marion could.
“You never met with an actual person?” Rose asks.
“Nobody.”
“How did they pay you?”
Eddie’s face twists into a pained expression. “What difference does it make?”
“The difference between life in prison and going home with Tania and Amy,” Rose says.
“So now I’m your bitch?”
“Pretty much. How did they pay you?”
Eddie drains his beer. “I needed a truck for my business,” he says. “Tania won’t marry a guy with no work. She says she’s had enough of criminals and deadbeats.”
Rose punches him in the arm, much harder than Tania had. “You were going to murder me for a used truck?” she explodes. “You couldn’t have at least asked for a new one?”
“Keep your voice down,” Eddie whispers.
“Tania’s tired of criminals. You’re a criminal,” Rose says, the low cost of her life making her vindictive.
“I am not!” Eddie rejoins. “That was one last job, just to get my business going. I don’t do crime no more.”
“Where did you get the truck? You had to pick it up, or have it delivered.” There had to be contact at some point in the exchange.
“I picked it up at Goodman’s Used Cars. The paperwork and everything was all done. I had to get insurance. That was it.”
Rose takes out her notebook and writes down Goodman’s Used Cars. She puts the notebook away. Looking hard at Eddie, she says, “Eddie, you are a two-bit crook. Don’t tell me you graduated from that to murder for a lousy used truck.”
Eddie fidgets. He glances over his shoulder at Tania and Amy. He takes a deep pull on his beer. Finally, he says sullenly, “My mom’s not from here, if you get my drift. The email said somebody would call ICE on her. This isn’t exactly a sanctuary city.”
“Oh, gosh.” Rose thinks about this. “Your mom is an illegal alien?”
“Mom never did an illegal thing in her life,” Eddie says sharply.
“You didn’t kill me, though. What happened to Mom?”
“She’s in detention. You happy?” Eddie finishes his beer in one long swallow.
Rose isn’t happy. She is not happy at all. But that is blood under the bridge. “Okay. I’m sorry. Now that they can’t hold Mom hostage, what happens if you don’t kill me?”
“I don’t know. I guess they repo the truck. Or come after me. Or Tania. Or Amy.” He glances at the two girls he wants to become his family, then back at Rose. She can feel him struggling with life in prison on the one hand and life as a victim on the other.
Before he can come to his own conclusions, Rose says, “Don’t even think about it, Eddie. You don’t kill me, maybe they come after you, maybe they don’t. They’re not going to want the exposure of going near Tania or Amy. Citizens don’t like people who kill young women and children. And, face it, you’re not a high-end employee. They can undoubtedly write off the cost of a used truck and never even feel the bite. So you don’t kill me, you will probably be okay.
“You do kill me, and nothing will ever be okay again. You will go to prison, Tania will marry a fabulous man and have a beautiful family, watch them grow up, have kids of their own, and all that time you’ll be folding other men’s boxer shorts and eating off plastic trays. And,” Rose says, dropping her voice for the coup de grâce, “you know as well as I do what’s coming down the road. Within a year or so all prisons will be nonsmoking.”
“Shit,” Eddie says.
Rose watches him as he uses his cocktail napkin to wipe his mouth. “Eddie, would you really have murdered me?”
Eddie’s eyes narrow and he looks at her shrewdly. The muscles of his face relax, and he lets out a gust of beer-scented breath. “Sure.” He sucks in his lower lip, then releases it with a small pop. “I don’t know. Then? Probably not. Now? I’m warming up to the idea.”
Rose pats him on the knee. She sets the backpack on the bar and unzips it. Using Marion’s ATM, she’d withdrawn five hundred dollars. Counting out five crisp twenties, she says, “This is for telling me about Goodman’s. There will be another hundred for anything you think of that helps.” Rose tucks the remainder of the cash into the backpack and zips it shut. She’s nervous about flashing the cash but wants Eddie to know viscerally that there is more where his came from.
Shouldering the backpack, she stands. “Remember, Eddie, dead I am worth a life sentence. Alive I am worth one hundred dollars a clue.”
“How do I get hold of you?” Eddie asks sullenly, but he folds the hundred dollars into a money clip and stuffs it in his front pocket.
Rose writes her email address and phone number on his cocktail napkin. “Call or email. We’ll meet and talk face-to-face, like real people.” She steps around him and walks toward the restrooms. She doesn’t glance back.
Once in the relative safety of the ladies’ room, she locks the door and slumps down on the commode.
The adrenaline that kept her going during the interaction with Eddie Martinez evaporates like rain on the desert. Fatigue joins gravity. Rose barely has the strength to lift her arms. Laboriously, she fumbles the iPhone from the pack and texts Mel. Where are you?
At a table outside.
Of course. Rose wishes the kids were in a bunker ten miles away. Sighing, she heaves herself up and commences her metamorphosis. In the backpack are a wig—short and dark—a lightweight microfiber cardigan in teal blue, and a Whole Foods tote bag. Rose dons wig and cardigan, then dumps the backpack into the tote.
She leaves Vincenzo’s via the back door.
Mel and Royal are at one of the tables farthest from the door of the restaurant. An empty chair, its back to the entrance, awaits Rose. The girls on their cell phones are still on their cell phones, ignoring the food in front of them. A man has taken the table next to Mel and Royal. An open New York Times, a paper, an actual paper made of paper, hides most of him. A couple with a whining infant fusses at a table next to the phone girls.
Rose slides into the waiting chair and drops the tote to the ground.
“Well?” Mel asks.
“I think it went okay. Who knows?” Rose says. She is too tired to be a leader or a grown-up. “What are we doing now?”
“We’re going to wait, watch him come out, so we can see what he looks like,” Mel says.
“For identification purposes,” Royal adds.
A waitress appears with menus.
“Pinot grigio?” Rose asks hopefully. The woman writes it down as if a glass of wine is merely a beverage and not a heavenly reward.
“Diet Coke,” Mel says. Rose sniffs. “Regular Coke,” Mel says with exaggerated patience. To Royal she explains, “Gigi thinks diet drinks make you fat.”
“They do,” Rose says. “How do you
think they stay in business? If they worked, everybody would get thin and quit buying them. It’s all a marketing ploy.”
“Zero calories. How does it make people fat?” Royal asks.
“You can bet that is a very carefully guarded trade secret,” Rose tells him. “Ask your dad to poke his nose in the files if he ever gets detailed to a diet drink production plant. Scientific proof would be great. All I’ve got for now is a hint from the Akashic records.”
“The what?” Royal flips his bangs from his eyes with the side of his hand. Fifty years later, and in a landlocked city, the surfer look still rocks.
“The Akashic records are kind of like a psychic Google,” Mel says. “Gigi doesn’t really believe in it.
Rose laughs. “Mel is my interpreter.”
“All the great rinpoches travel with an interpreter,” Mel says.
* * *
Rose is finishing her bread bowl of corn chowder, and working on her second glass of wine, when the phone in her tote chimes. Mel nods. She has her cell in her hand.
Rose takes out the phone. Little girl in pink leggings, Mel’s text reads. Curvy lady in orange. Then: Dude with bandaged hand.
Heads down, eyes glued to devices; a family dinner out. Not suspicious.
I thought he’d be bigger, Mel texts.
Rose refuses to rise to the bait.
Looking up and down the street. Not at us, Mel texts.
Rose resists the urge to glance over her shoulder.
Leaving.
A couple of seconds later Eddie, Tania, and Amy walk past Rose’s table toward the parking lot. They don’t spare a glance at the diners.
“Last place he’d look,” Mel says smugly.
“Hide in plain sight,” Rose says.
Having signaled for the check, Rose downs the last of the wine in a single gulp.
“Need a lift?” The man at the table next to them folds down his paper.
“What are you doing here?” Rose demands. It’s her Lyft driver, Brian of the blue eyes and enticing smile.
“Backup,” Brian says, and winks.
“How did you know it was me?”
“Little chipmunk ears. Unmistakable.”
