Something Borrowed, Something Black

by Loren D. Estleman

  She had a cinnamon roll and a cup of espresso at a counter operated by a solidly built young Mexican with a grinning skull tattooed on his wrist, encircled by a red-eyed serpent. She hadn’t noticed the tattoo, which she interpreted as a gang insignia, until after she’d ordered, and with a flutter she’d wondered if the place was safe. But it was spotlessly clean, the griddle wiped and the stainless-steel sinks gleaming (no mysteries there, unlike the situation in an upscale restaurant where the food was prepared behind closed doors), and as she stirred cream into her cup, seated comfortably on an upholstered stool while a Spanish-language station played salsa on the radio behind the counter, she decided she was probably not in danger of being raped or taken hostage. She tipped the young man a dollar. He showed her a set of capped teeth and said, “Muchisimas gracias, señora.” She wondered if he was an out-of-work actor.

  In a china shop six blocks from the hotel she handled a cookie jar shaped like James Dean in his red Windbreaker, then remembered there would be someone else living in the house from now on and that their tastes might not be similar. Happily surrendering her independence, she put it down. She bought a soup tureen with a Mexican sunrise enameled on the lid, a present for her mother, and arranged with the clerk—a tall young woman with her hair streaked black-and-white up the middle like a badger and lips painted black—to ship it east.

  The journey out had lifted her spirits. Outside the entrance to the hotel she gave an undernourished boy in filthy tennis shoes five dollars for a map to the stars’ homes and told him to keep the change.

  She felt sticky, so she showered, slipped into a sleeveless blue dress that had a startling effect on her eyes, fixed her hair carefully, and put on the pearl necklace Peter had given her for a wedding present. She’d tanned visibly just in the time she’d been out, and the pearls shone against her skin. A touch of perfume behind each ear and her husband would think twice before leaving her alone again in the big bad city.

  A bald, brown-faced waiter seated her in the restaurant a few minutes before noon. She explained that she was waiting for someone, ordered iced tea, and unfolded the map to the stars homes. She’d bought it on impulse, pitying the wretched boy, but she was seriously considering punishing Peter for his neglect by forcing him to accompany her on a bus tour. He preferred to drive himself. Airplanes and taxis irritated him. On the trip out he’d amused her by paying close attention to the flight attendant as she demonstrated safety procedures and pointed out the emergency exits. When Laurie had teased him about it, he’d smiled sheepishly and said he guessed he was an incurable neurotic. It was as close as she’d come to catching him in an untruth. He was the least neurotic person she’d ever known, and was in fact almost frighteningly calm under circumstances that would have unhinged a cardinal. At LAX their bags had been practically the last to emerge on the carousel, and all he’d said was, “Well, I was beginning to wonder.” Then he’d spent the entire ride in the cab on the way to the hotel looking out the windshield and back window as if he were the one doing the driving.

  The map was cheap and shoddy, garishly colored, and most of the points of interest were connected with actors and directors who were dead or in retirement elsewhere. The fabulous mansions, those still standing, would have been partitioned off for apartments long since, or used by Arab oil sheikhs and rap stars enjoying their three weeks in the spotlight. But it did provide a layout that helped her establish her bearings in the confusing sprawl of freeways, parks, suburbs inside suburbs, and crooked streets and boulevards named for saints she’d never known existed.

  “Miz Macklin?”

  She looked up, expecting a waiter. She’d been surprised the first time she’d called downstairs to be greeted by name, and had wondered if the entire staff was subjected to a daily briefing on the names of guests checking in and out. But the man standing in front of her table was no waiter.

  He was tall, absurdly so, with most of his height in his long legs, like a straw that had been split more than halfway up its length. They were encased in stiff new blue jeans that would crinkle behind the knees when he walked, held up by a wide brown tooled-leather belt with a square brass buckle. The heels of his cowboy boots—some kind of lizard, dyed bright red, with glossy black wingtips—added three inches he didn’t need, and he nearly brushed a hanging light fixture with the crown of his cream-colored Stetson when he swept it off his head. He wore a calico shirt with pearl snaps. His Adam’s apple stuck out through the open collar, an almost obscene protruberance. It cried out for a kerchief to conceal it.

  She hesitated. He had straw-colored hair, pale blue eyes, and a long rectangular jaw that slid sideways when he smiled, like a cow chewing. He could have been thirty or forty-five.

  “Yes?” She folded her map.

  “Pleasure to make your acquaintance, ma’am. I’m Roy Skeets. It’s Leroy, actually, but you don’t have to bother with that. Folks generally call me Abilene.”

  “You mean as in Abilene, Texas?”

  “That or Kansas, whichever you like. See, they named the one in Texas after the one in Kansas. Kansas had money and no beef, and Texas had beef and no money, so I guess some Texan thought it wouldn’t hurt to grease the pan. Like naming your kid after a rich uncle. But there I go, talking your ear off first thing. Promised myself I wouldn’t.” He unsnapped the flap on a shirt pocket and took out a square of folded paper.

  She stared at it. She’d suspected a pickup: someone who’d seen Midnight Cowboy a time too many but hadn’t watched long enough to learn the Gary Cooper routine was a bust. Maybe he was a bit player moonlighting as a messenger, and hadn’t time to change out of his costume between jobs. She took the paper and unfolded it. She recognized Peter’s handwriting.

  Darling,

  I’m stuck in Sacramento overnight. This will introduce Abilene, an old friend, who is flying to L.A. to keep you company until I can get away.

  I’m so sorry. I’ll make it up to you.

  Love,

  Peter

  She kept her head tipped back awkwardly as she refolded the note and opened her handbag and slipped it inside. She was afraid that if she tilted forward, the tears would spill from sheer gravity. “Would you excuse me just a minute, Mr. Abilene?” She kept her voice even.

  “Sure thing, ma’am. But it’s just Abilene. There’s no mister about it.”

  She went to the ladies’ room. A woman stood at one of the sinks, inspecting her teeth in the mirror. Laurie locked herself in a stall, sat on the toilet lid, and dug her nails into her palms to keep from sobbing aloud.

  She was angry at herself, not Peter. She’d married a stranger. She’d denied herself the comfort of her faith in him, believing that by the time the test came she’d know all she needed to face it. It had never occurred to her the test would come so soon. Was there a woman in Sacramento, some old girl-in-the-port from sales trips past? Was he even in Sacramento? For all she knew, he’d taken another room in that very hotel, where the two of them were in bed right now, laughing at the stupid Ohio farmgirl pining alone for her husband.

  Not the same hotel, she thought. As little as she knew Peter, she knew he would never be so incautious. Or so stupid. And any way she looked at it, she couldn’t figure out where Abilene fit in. The ridiculous cowboy was out of place anywhere outside a Roy Rogers film.

  By the time she heard the door closing behind the woman, she had attained control. Peter could do his explaining when he got back. How well he did it, or how poorly, would tell her just as much about the man she’d hooked up with.

  She left the stall, washed her face, and took time reapplying her makeup, making sure no trace of swelling or redness remained. When she returned, Abilene was seated in the other chair at her table, smoking a cigarette. When he saw her, he crushed the butt out in a saucer and stood. His Stetson rocked gently on the table where he’d placed it on its crown. The man’s awkwardness made her smile. It was as if he never spent time with women.

  “It seems I’ve been stood up f
or lunch, Abilene,” she said. “Did you eat on the plane?”

  “Plane?” Did he hesitate? “Oh, no, ma’am. Pretzels only. I’ll chow down with you on one condition.” His long jaw slid sideways.

  “What’s that?”

  “I get the check. A man never lets a woman pay for his grub, and a gentleman never lets her pay for hers. My Uncle Bud taught me that.”

  “I guess your Uncle Bud never read Gloria Steinem.”

  “Ma’am, Uncle Bud never read a stop sign. That’s how he died.” He pulled her chair out and held it for her. Then he sat back down.

  Their waiter arrived. Laurie ordered a Cobb salad and another iced tea. Abilene asked for a steak sandwich, baked potato, and a beer, selecting Miller when the waiter informed him the bar didn’t stock Dos Equis. Abilene spent some time explaining how well done he wanted his steak.

  “I thought westerners preferred their beef bloody,” Laurie said when they were alone.

  “Not this one. I was an orderly in a hospital one whole summer. I mopped up enough blood to last me. Where you want to go after lunch? I know all the spots the chamber of commerce don’t. I been out here ten years and I got a good car.”

  “You don’t live in Sacramento?”

  This time he didn’t hesitate. “No, I just go up there with Mr. Major when he wants company. It’s dull as a spoon. There’s dust on the fire trucks.”

  “Is Mr. Major an associate of Peter’s?”

  “Yes, ma’am. They go clear back to Detroit, before Mr. Major came out here.”

  “Does Mr. Major sell cameras?”

  “He sells everything. So where you want to go first? Chinese Theater, I bet. Try on Marilyn Monroe’s footprints for size.”

  “You’re sweet to offer, but I’m comfortable alone. I’ll just wait for Peter, and you can go on about your business.”

  “Beg pardon, ma’am, but you’re my business. L.A.’s a tricky place till you get used to it, and even then it’s got tricks left. A lot of the bad neighborhoods look just like the good. You don’t know which is which till you’re in it. You get hurt, I might as well go back home. There won’t be no work for me out here.”

  “Where is home, Texas or Kansas? I can’t place your accent, and I’ve seen every western ever made.”

  “Arkansas. Little nothing town called Blytheville. You never heard of it. I ain’t been back in twenty-five years.”

  He was older than she’d thought. There were hairline fissures around his eyes. The irises were nearly as pale as the whites. “And where were you in between Blytheville and Los Angeles?”

  “You call it. Chicago, Vegas, Miami, Atlantic City. Wherever there was doing to be done.”

  The waiter brought their drinks. Abilene stopped him as he was pouring his beer from the bottle into a tall glass. “Not down the side, hoss. I like some cloud.”

  The waiter stopped tilting the glass and allowed a head of foam to build up. When the waiter left, Laurie said, “I thought everything was all settled with the sale of Peter’s business. What can you tell me about this tax problem?”

  “Not a thing, ma’am. I’m just one of the little injuns.” He grinned his sideways grin. “Know who said that? Richard Boone in Big Jake. He was talking to John Wayne.”

  “Do you like westerns?”

  “I never had the choice. Every time one came to the theater in town, Uncle Bud snatched me up and we went and seen it.” He swallowed beer and licked the foam off his long upper lip. “I was in a Clint Eastwood picture one time. They cut me out.”

  “Are you an actor?”

  “No, I was part of a crowd. Mr. Major had an investment.”

  “Was it a western?”

  “It was one of them damn monkey pictures. I wouldn’t of went to see it if I wasn’t in it. I took a girl. Well, I wasn’t in it anyway, so I didn’t get laid that night. Begging your pardon, ma’am.”

  “I don’t think you want my pardon at all, Abilene. I think you’re one of those men who says what he wants to and to hell with what anyone else thinks.”

  “It’s a failing. It sure is.”

  Laurie put down her glass and picked up the map to the stars’ homes. “Do you know where Harrison Ford lives?”

  “I stopped keeping up with that stuff when they quit making westerns. I can show you where Joel McCrea used to live, and Randolph Scott.”

  “That’s going back.”

  “Older’s better, and black-and-white’s best.”

  “Did your Uncle Bud say that?”

  “No, ma’am, he sure didn’t. I just this minute thought of it.”

  Their meals came. She waited impatiently while the waiter set everything out and determined that nothing else was needed. When he was gone—she didn’t know if it was anger at Peter that made her say it, or delight at the absurdity of her companion—she leaned forward and said, “Abilene, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

  He let his jaw slide. She laughed at him.

  SEVEN

  The Goliad Rod and Gun Club was a tradition nearly as old as the Alamo, and even though the original building had burned down and its replacement abandoned forty years ago in favor of larger quarters on eleven rolling acres outside San Antonio, the man who entered either place for the first time felt the same compulsion to remove his hat. This had to do in some measure with the huge painting that hung in the club’s entrance hall depicting the massacre by firing squad of four hundred seventeen Republic of Texas patriots by General Santa Anna’s men at Goliad in 1836, a work commissioned by the charter members. Mostly it had to do with the club’s reputation as the last of the great Texas whorehouses.

  It was not to be compared with the Chicken Ranch outside Dallas, any more than the two cities resembled each other. Here the overpowering Victoriana was absent, the women were by custom restricted to the upper floors, and the broad double-entendres and elbow-nudging that prevailed in the downstairs parlor of the more famous establishment would have encountered only well-bred silence at Goliad. The club was not a front. The business that was transacted upstairs was regarded as a logical extension of the sporting interests that dominated the spacious ground level, where working men of a particular class signed out firearms for target practice on the back range and changed clothes in the locker room to improve their casting skills in one of the two man-made lakes that were kept stocked with catfish, trout, and large-mouth bass. The leather slingback chairs and sofa where the members drank good liquor and discussed business and politics might have been found in any executive lounge, and the well-appointed bedrooms were indistinguishable from those of the hotels in the Convention Center. Even the graft paid to the local authorities was maintained at a discreet level, subject to the normal rate of inflation. For the most part the police and sheriff’s department and the Texas Rangers allowed the club to remain open because its personnel didn’t hesitate to report incidents and because they knew where to look whenever an outsider of questionable reputation was seen in the area. But only for the most part.

  Austine Holland, the woman who managed Goliad for its corporate owners, was widely believed to have been the reason the club was not shut down in 1992, when the son-in-law of a Texas Supreme Court justice died of a cocaine overdose in one of its bedrooms. Rousted from his bed by a telephone call from his hysterical daughter, the justice placed a call to the home of the director of the Department of Public Safety in Austin, who promised to begin an investigation that very evening. Ninety minutes later, Public Safety officers dispatched by the department’s chief of detectives visited the justice and explained that there would be no investigation and that the news agencies had already been notified of the death of his daughter’s husband of an apparent heart attack suffered at home. A furious second call to the director confirmed the decision. Should the justice wish to protest, he was advised that undercover officers were prepared to swear that his daughter was observed in the company of her husband on a number of occasions when cocaine was obtained from a well
-known dealer in Hemisfair Park. At a press conference the next day, a visibly aged justice announced that he had been granted a leave of absence in order to accompany his daughter on a visit to the state of Washington, where at her late husband’s request his ashes would be scattered from an observation platform on Mt. Rainier, after which the pair would leave for a “healing trip” to Scotland.

  Neither the reporters who covered the event nor the San Antonians who followed it were taken in. Those who were only partially in the know assumed that Austine Holland kept extensive files in a safe place on clients with ties to the state government. She did, of course, but that was not the reason for the swift action in the matter of the justice’s son-in-law. Only a few were aware the Holland woman was a paid informant who kept the authorities apprised of organized-crime activities throughout central and south Texas.

  Lieutenant Christie Childs had never met the woman, although her code name—Cassiopeia locally, but he understood she had a different designation for each law-enforcement agency she dealt with, and that she alone knew them all—had come across his desk in reports, played like a trump card by the author, who knew that no further authentication was necessary. Popular fiction to the contrary, organized crime rarely fell within Homicide’s jurisdiction. Those yahoos in Fraud and Vice considered her their personal property. They wouldn’t appreciate the fuck from back East paying her a visit. He looked forward to seeing her for that reason, if for no other. He’d met more than his fair share of whores in Milwaukee when he was in uniform, and didn’t buy into the romance of the soiled dove. They were walking petri dishes of communicable disease, needle-pierced and pimple-faced, with hearts made of solid shit. Even the high-priced ones didn’t have much in common with Miss Kitty. They could just afford a better grade of heroin.