Something Borrowed, Something Black

by Loren D. Estleman

  A woman who’d been to school to burr the edge off her Panhandle accent took his name over the telephone, placed him on hold for five minutes, then informed him that Mrs. Holland would see him at two P.M. That irritated him. He couldn’t expect a snitch to be seen walking into police headquarters for an appointment, but he had anticipated speaking to her directly and hammering out a place to meet on neutral ground. Being told to present himself at her office after lunch made him feel as if he’d been granted an audience. Nevertheless he agreed. If the Bohdan Shevchenko business broke right, there could be an inspectorship in it, and possibly an opening in Dallas or some other real city where Casual Friday did not mean faded Levi’s and a bolo tie.

  The entrance to the club, a faux marble lintel supported on thick columns, made him think he was attending an exhibit at a museum of modern art. Glass-and-chromium doors mounted on pneumatic closers sucked him into the air-conditioned presence of The Massacre at Goliad, where a bubble-blonde receptionist behind a window found his name in a book and asked him to wait while she lifted a telephone receiver. He wondered who else’s name was in the book, or if there were different books for different kinds of visitors. That made him wonder how many visitors left their real names. Waiting, he glowered at the romantic painting of the martyrs of the Republic nobly accepting their fate at the hands of the Mexican rifle squad; as if they hadn’t scattered for cover like any other band of seasoned irregulars the moment the weapons were raised. Texas worshiped her dead like no other culture since Imperial China.

  “Lieutenant Childs? I’m Jeanine Ryder, Mrs. Holland’s secretary. Will you come with me, please?”

  The woman who had entered through an interior arch was as tall as he, dressed in a tailored ash-rose suit and rubber heels that made no noise at all on the black-and-white tiles. She was black, with hair cropped close to her skull, which was well shaped. Her smile was professional and friendly. He recognized the worked-over accent from the telephone. She pumped his hand once. She had a firm grip.

  “Is there a Mr. Holland?” he asked as he accompanied her through the arch.

  “Not since before I came to work for her. I understand he went missing in Vietnam.”

  They crossed through the carpeted lounge, deserted at that hour of the day, and climbed a broad staircase with a mission-style oak banister. Framed prints of what looked like lithographs from Harper’s Weekly hung on the staircase wall: Pony Express riders, Indian depredations, Civil War battlefields with smoke scudding across cannons and lines of infantry. He was annoyed, while following her down a hallway lined with numbered doors like a hotel’s, to realize that his ears were burning, like some teenage boy’s during his first visit to a brothel.

  Without knocking, she led him into a corner suite, with tall windows in two walls looking out on one of the lakes and the golf course next door. It looked like an ordinary hospitality suite, with a small bar with a mirrored wall behind it, club chairs, a love seat, and a large, glass-topped desk with a telephone and fax machine. The woman who was sitting behind it stood and reached across to shake his hand.

  “Thank you for coming, Lieutenant,” Austine Holland said. “I tried to move an appointment so I could see you in town, but the gentleman had already left.”

  She wasn’t what he’d expected. She was a plump, comfortable-looking sixty, with straight gray hair to her shoulders cut into bangs just above her eyes and no makeup. She wore a long, heavy, cable-knit blue sweater—on a ninety-degree day in the shade—over a navy dress with fat white leaves printed on it and a string of beads the size of crabapples around her neck, white and obviously made of cheap soap-stone. There were nets of wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and her dentures were very white, even against her pale skin. She had calluses on her hand.

  “Thanks for your time, Mrs. Holland.”

  “These are ready to go, Jeanine. I ran out of stamps.” She handed a brick of sealed No. 10 envelopes to her secretary.

  “I bought you a roll just last week. Why don’t you send e-mail, like everyone else?”

  “Why don’t I just pee in the snow? The effect lasts just as long. Some of us still like to mess with rag paper and ink. Run along now and lick stamps like a good girl.”

  The black woman left.

  “Have a seat, Lieutenant. Can I get you a drink, or are you one of those Joe Friday types, all duty and no fun?”

  “It’s a little early for me, thanks.” He sat in one of the club chairs. “I’m investigating something that happened in town the day before yesterday. I thought you might know something about it.”

  “The attempted strangling. What a fucked-up business. Excuse my French. I’m an El Paso girl. My father sold groceries near the bridge. He called it a supermarket because it had two cash registers. The stockboys were wetbacks and by the end of the first week they were fluent in all the four-letter words.”

  She had the broadest accent he’d heard since he came west. “I see this informant business works both ways,” he said. “No one outside the department’s supposed to know it was a strangling attempt.”

  “Don’t be too hard on your officers. San Antonio’s a small town, and I run the barbershop. Did you bring me anything?” She sat down and pulled her chin into her neck. She looked like an albino frog.

  He took a long fold of paper from his inside breast pocket and pulled it across the desk. “I had the department computer whiz run this off from what we got from Detroit and Washington. From a taxpayer’s standpoint we can thank this bookie Davis for saving us the cost of deportation.”

  The sheet contained the arrest information on Schevchenko and a photo obtained by fax from Immigration and Naturalization. She studied it for thirty seconds, then put it down. “We didn’t meet, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t here. I’ll circulate it among my young ladies.”

  “I’d appreciate that, but it isn’t precisely why I’m here. I’m not doing the door-to-door.”

  “I know that, Lieutenant.”

  “I need to find out why Davis was targeted, and if it was a mob contract.”

  “Are you coordinating your investigation with the FBI?”

  “It’s too early to say.”

  “You mean you won’t say. Have you been to see Spanish Rivera?”

  “I wanted to talk to you first.”

  “But you’re not talking to me. Even a slot machine requires you to put something in the slot.”

  “I thought you were more or less on permanent retainer.”

  “I’m not talking about money. If San Antonio is attracting federal attention, a number of people need to know it. I don’t know how you did things in Milwaukee, but out here, information is not a perpetual-motion machine. It feeds on facts in order to produce facts.”

  He laughed, a short bark, surprised and bitter. Who the hell had told her he was from Milwaukee? “I’m not your snitch. You’ve got things backwards.”

  She pushed the sheet his direction. “Thanks again for coming, Lieutenant.”

  “Ma’am, are you refusing to cooperate with an officer of the law?”

  “The officer of the law is refusing to cooperate with me. Do you think you and I and four thousand police are the only ones who know about our arrangement? If I didn’t give the people I answer to something in return for what they give me, they’d have cut out my cunt and dumped me off the Riverwalk ten years ago. That’s the standard prescription for a woman in my line. Sicilians are poets. If you want to feed a killer the needle in Huntsville badly enough, it means Mr. Rivera knows when the DEA is targeting south Texas so he won’t lose his investment in a carload of heroin coming in from Turkey by way of Matamoros. I’m a broker, Lieutenant, not a communist. There has to be an equal exchange of goods or services in order for the system to operate. If there isn’t, I’m the one who gets operated on. I don’t use my cunt much these days, but I’d sort of like to hold on to it for old times’ sake.”

  She smiled as she spoke, displaying the whole of her dentures. She looked not at a
ll like a complacent frog.

  “I’ll discuss it with the chief.” Childs couldn’t think of another answer.

  “When you do, please ask him how his grandson is. He was trying to walk last I heard.” She picked up the sheet. “I’ll ask some questions. For now, though, you might want to tell INS that Bohdan Shevchenko is probably another alias. Whoever forged his papers combined the names of two heroes from Ukrainian history. They might appreciate the information, and you’ll see I’m right.”

  EIGHT

  It was a good day, although—it went without saying, so of course she said it often, but only to herself—it would have been better with Peter.

  Abilene, who really did know his way around Hollywood, took her to Mann’s (formerly Grauman’s) Chinese Theater, where she mastered the urge to try out Jean Harlow’s footprints like the prototypical tourist but bought a poster in the gift shop that showed James Dean standing in the boat crossing the Delaware while John Wayne rowed and Humphrey Bogart draped his trench coat over Marilyn Monroe’s shoulders. She goggled at the pagoda facade and neon dragons that represented isolationist America’s idea of what the Orient was like and was truly surprised by the information, supplied by her escort, that the theater was one of three originally built by Sid Grauman, each more exotic than its predecessor. Sadly, the Egyptian had been gutted and the Spanish was no more. “That Jew took a bath in the Crash,” Abilene said.

  “How do you know so much?”

  He grinned his slanchwise grin. “Mr. Major says I’m a sponge. That’s why he promoted me. Said I was wasted in the field.”

  “Were you a salesman?”

  “Closed my share. Toss your poster in the back. We still got Tom Mix’s house and the canyon in Malibu where they shot westerns before sound.”

  He drove a new black Jeep Grand Cherokee, waxed to a lacquer shine, with a chromed custom exhaust system that gleamed like his boots. Except when he was shifting he drove one-handed, his left elbow resting on the sill of his open window. That arm was burned a dark cherry-red up to the point where he folded back his shirtcuff.

  They’d discussed having dinner at a place on Highway 1, a barbecue joint where he said the stars still went sometimes when they didn’t want to be seen, but the trip to Malibu had exhausted her. She pleaded a headache and he took her back to the hotel. The night man who looked like one of the Beach Boys checked and told her there were no messages.

  “Are you sure? I’m expecting my husband tomorrow, but I don’t know what time.”

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Macklin. I’ll buzz you if anything comes in.”

  At the elevators she shook Abilene’s hand. “Thank you. I’m afraid I took your whole day.”

  “Seemed like five minutes with a cold beer. How about Tijuana tomorrow? Show you where Will Rogers went to get laid. It’s a fudge factory now, but I hear if you know a guy you can buy good weed. That’s just a rumor. I never mess with that shit. Beg your pardon, ma’am.”

  “Thank you, but I’m sure Peter will be back in the morning.” The headache was suddenly no longer just an excuse. She’d had enough yee-haw to last her a long time.

  “I’ll call you at nine. Just in case he ain’t.”

  He was still standing there wearing his lopsided grin when the doors slid shut.

  On her floor she rummaged through her handbag and failed to find her key card. She supposed she’d left it in the room. Feeling drained, she returned to the lobby, where the Beach Boy smiled and gave her a replacement. On her way back to the elevators she stopped and turned. Abilene was stretched out in a figured armchair with his boots propped up on a glass coffee table. He lifted his Stetson off the bridge of his nose to look at her, then resettled it.

  She hovered a moment, undecided, then turned again and boarded the elevator. The hat covering Abilene’s face might as well have been a wall between them.

  In the room she double-locked the door and put on the chain. The two suits and one of the sportcoats Peter had brought on the trip hung in the closet. She smelled his faint scent when she leaned in to hang up her dress. It tore at her heart and comforted her at the same time. A man may leave his wife, but not his clothes. It made her laugh and so she didn’t cry. He would be back tomorrow.

  She put on the simple cotton shift she’d decided to pack at the last minute, having heard that the nights were cool in southern California. She’d smiled at her foolishness when she’d taken it out the day they checked in. She’d forgotten she had someone who would keep her warm. But after the strange scene in the lobby she felt less uneasy wearing it than she would have in any of the other flimsy and frivolous things she’d brought.

  In bed she thought. Did Abilene imagine he was protecting her? Did he take his charge to look after her so literally? It seemed so old-fashioned, so much in keeping with his ludicrous clothes and beg your pardon, ma’am’s, that she could not accept it as an explanation. Most likely he lived too far away to bother going home if he planned to check on her in the morning as he’d said.

  There had been no recognition in his expression. That was the part that chilled her, even more than learning that he’d staked himself out in the lobby like some kind of loyal dog. Even a tired dog would have thumped its tail once. It was as if she had ceased to exist for him as a social creature the moment after they’d said good night.

  Was she being stalked? Such things happened all the time, to celebrities and ordinary women. But the stalkers, the ones she’d seen being arraigned on television, all ran to a sinister type. They didn’t inspire derision, like the cowboy downstairs. Stalkers tried to blend into their surroundings. Abilene stood out like—well, like the Chinese Theater. No, he was just doing what he thought was expected of him by Peter and that Mr. Major. Whoever he was.

  Even so, she wished Peter had left a number where she could reach him. She needed to hear his quiet chuckle when she confided her anxiety, the sound not carrying far enough to reach strange ears. That, and the way he steered her into doorways so that no one would see him kissing her in public, made her feel safe in their private world. She had thought she would punish him for deserting her, but she knew now she would be incapable of keeping that resolution when she saw him. She would run to him, in the lobby or on the street, and he would just have to put up with her making a spectacle of them both.

  The telephone woke her. She hadn’t realized she’d slept. Blades of light glittered at the edges of the heavy curtains that covered the window. The digital clock read 8:59. She couldn’t believe she’d been unconscious so long.

  “Peter?”

  “’Morning, Miz Macklin. No smog today. This is the day they shoot the postcards.”

  “Oh, hello, Abilene. I thought it was Peter.”

  “I guess I don’t need to ask if he got back. What do you say we strap on the nosebag downstairs and get us an early start on Tijuana?”

  “That’s sweet, but my head is pounding. I’m not used to the dirty air. I’d just like to stay in the room today. Anyway, I don’t want to be out when Peter comes back.”

  “Why don’t I bring you up some aspirin? These hotel folk’ll sock you ten bucks for a teeny bottle and charge a tip on top of it.”

  “No, I just need rest.”

  The pause that followed begged her to fill it. Did you spend the whole night in the lobby? She gripped the receiver hard, as if to hold back the question.

  “I’ll call you later,” he said then. “Them walls get close after a spell.”

  She had breakfast sent up, but she left most of it, and all but a sip of coffee. Her nerves were frayed enough without the caffeine. She went around the TV dial twice but found nothing that held her attention more than a few seconds. Abilene had been right about the walls. She showered, dried her hair, and put on pleated comfortable slacks, a light top, and flats for walking. She didn’t bother with makeup. She wondered if he was still downstairs. She thought about calling and asking a clerk, but she was afraid that if Abilene was there the clerk would ask him to leave. She
didn’t know if it was the prospect of insulting him that made her afraid or if it was Abilene himself. In any case she didn’t want anyone thinking she was a hysterical woman.

  On her way down she realized she should have called down to arrange for a cab. She didn’t want to ask at the desk and have to wait. Even if Abilene had left she didn’t know when he might come back to call up to the room. Once outside the hotel she would take a chance on flagging down a taxi.

  The chairs in the lobby were empty. A line of people was waiting to register. She started for the door—and withdrew behind a column just as Abilene looked up from a display of neckties behind the glass wall of the gift shop. From that position he had a clear view of the main entrance on Sunset.

  Her heart clattered. Was he her protector, or her prison guard? She was afraid, then angry. She wanted to march up to him and tell him to tell his Mr. Major she was a big girl who could take care of herself. In the next moment she knew she wouldn’t do that. She hated scenes. Her parents had made scenes.

  A carpeted hallway next to the elevators led to sunlight, perpendicular to the main lobby. She turned that way and followed it to a side door opening onto a one-way street. Just before she pushed through, she glanced back. No one was following.

  She walked toward Sunset. There would be cabs there. It was not like New York, where they lined up in front of the hotels. Presumably everyone in L.A. had a car unless there was something wrong with them, in which case they could make an appointment to be picked up.

  At Sunset she turned away from the hotel, where Abilene might have seen her walking past. Twice she spotted cabs in traffic and waved, but both times the cars cruised past. They had passengers. She kept glancing back as long as the hotel was in sight, but saw only the doorman in his white Prussian uniform in conversation with the bell captain, the latter leaning against his baggage cart.

  After ten minutes a canary-yellow Capri with itSON DUTY sign lit up, swung into the curb in front of an unmarked apartment building and let out a woman in her fifties carrying a sack of groceries. She left the rear door open. Laurie stepped toward it. A long arm stretched past her and swung it shut with a bang.