“Hi. I’m looking for Sylvia Ramos. Is she home?”
“Sylvia?” He looked panicked. “Ma!” He bellowed it like a cry for help as he walked away. “Ma!”
A woman with strands of long white hair stuck to her sweaty face came to the door, drying her hands on a dish-towel. Sylvia Ramos would be forty-three now, Molly figured, and even taking into account the wear and tear of a hard life, this woman was too old. She squinted at Molly through the screen.
“Hi. I’m Molly Cates. Sorry to bother you, but I’m looking for Sylvia Ramos.”
Her face stony, the woman stared at Molly and continued to dry her hands. “Sylvia? What for?”
“I have a message for her.”
“You give it to me. I see she gets it.”
“Are you related to her?”
The woman shrugged and started to close the door.
“Wait!” Molly said, resisting the impulse to stick her foot in the door. “I need to see her. It’s really important. I flew here from Austin just to talk to her.”
The woman paused with the door half closed.
“I need help,” Molly said, looking her in the eye. “Please. I’m not with the police or immigration or anything like that. I promise I won’t hurt her in any way.”
“What you want with Sylvia?”
“A man who did something very bad to her, a long time ago, also did something bad to me. I just want to talk about it with her.”
The woman was silent, looking Molly up and down.
“Where can I find her?” Molly asked.
“You want Sylvia,” the woman said, “try downtown tonight. Cebeda Street. After nine.”
“But how will I find her? I don’t even know what she looks like.”
She shrugged. “Ask anyone. Corner Cebeda and Duranzo. There’s a bar—Las Brujas. They all know her there. La Risa, they call her.” Her mouth tightened, sending out rays of wrinkles from her lips.
“I’m only in town for a few hours,” Molly said. “Isn’t there somewhere I can find her now? A phone number where I could call her?”
The woman shook her head.
“Well, I can understand that you wouldn’t want to give out her number to a stranger. Maybe you could call her and ask her to—”
“She got no phone. You want to see her, you look for her tonight.”
Molly unfolded her map. “Cebeda and Duranzo, you said? Could you—”
Before she could ask, the woman closed the door.
Molly got into her rental car. She was still close enough to the airport to get back there for the five o’clock flight to Austin. But only if she left now. If she didn’t catch that flight, she’d have to stay here tonight and she wanted to get home, needed to get home. This was going to be a waste of time—it had all the signs. Sylvia Ramos would turn out to be a strung-out whore who wouldn’t even remember she had ever been in Austin.
But she was here now and her blood was beginning to simmer with the chase. By the time she drove the few blocks to the highway, she knew she’d stay. She pulled into the first motel that looked clean, an Econo Lodge, and checked in.
Once in her room she turned up the air conditioning and called home for her messages. There were lots since she hadn’t checked them for more than twenty-four hours: Jo Beth wondering if Molly would be back for exercise class; her editor reminding her to cover the actual passage of the bill, which his sources told him would happen in two days; her friend Barbara inviting her to go out and get drunk and listen to her latest tale of romantic woe; Cullen Shoemaker checking to see if she’d gotten his fax confirming her Monday interview with Garland Rauther and apologizing that he wouldn’t be there because he’d gotten fired and was taking his mother on a vacation; a really strange one, from the bag lady she’d met in the Capitol bathroom, wanting to tell her something, asking her to leave a message at HOBO; Grady, upset she hadn’t called last night; Grady again, worried about her, telling her Calvin Shawcross wanted to talk to her about Emily Bickerstaff.
Molly played them again to hear the bag lady message. It had come in yesterday at five-thirty and got cut off in mid sentence. The woman’s voice had a desperate sound, very different from the belligerent tone Molly remembered from their encounter in the bathroom. She sounded sick or upset, or both. She must have gotten the news about her friend Tin Can getting killed. Shawcross would surely want to talk to her if he hadn’t located her already. She should call him and tell him to pick the woman up at HOBO if he wanted her. But the woman wanted to talk to Molly; to call the police seemed like such a betrayal of confidence. Still, alerting Sergeant Shawcross was the responsible thing. Damn. She didn’t know what to do. She picked up the phone and dialed Grady’s office number. She got his pager and punched in the Econo Lodge number.
She called information in Austin and got the number for HOBO. A man answered. She asked if he knew a woman called Cow Lady. “Sure do,” he said. “You want me to see if she’s around? Wait a sec.” Moments later he came back on the line. “They tell me she was here, but she left.”
“I’d like to leave a message for her. In case she comes back.”
“What’s the message?”
“Tell her to call Molly Cates right away, collect at this number.” Molly read the number off the phone and had him repeat it. “I’ll be waiting for her call,” Molly said. “It’s important. Please make sure she gets it.”
Then she lay down on her bed and wondered what the hell she was doing in a motel in El Paso late on a Friday afternoon when she wanted to be home. She wanted to go out to dinner and to a movie with Grady. She wanted to take him home to bed.
The phone rang.
“You alone?” said the low, mellow voice that had always had just the right amount of hoarse male rasp.
“Uh-huh.”
“Lying on your bed?”
“Where else?”
“In a cheap motel?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Shades drawn?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Naked?”
Molly looked down at her wrinkled slacks and blouse. She hadn’t even taken her shoes off. “Yes.”
“No, you aren’t.”
“How would you know?”
“When you’re naked your voice is lower, all languorous and liquidy.”
“Well,” she said, “I could get naked. If you will.”
“Mmmmm. Problem is, Captain Lahar and four rookies from Vice are here watching me. Just hearing the word ‘naked’ makes them get their handcuffs out.”
“Too bad.”
“Yeah. Vice would be out of business if folks confined themselves to telephone sex. Where the hell is area code 915, Molly? Not Lubbock.”
“El Paso.”
“Why El Paso?”
“Oh, there’s this whore I need to talk to.”
“Molly.” His voice had gotten suddenly cool.
“Just getting some pointers. Listen, Grady, I got a problem. There was a message on my machine from this homeless woman I told you about—Cow Lady, the one who hung out with Emily Bickerstaff.”
“Sarah Jane Hurley.”
“Is that her name?”
“Uh-huh. We’ve been looking for her. What was the message?”
“Well, wait a minute—”
“Molly, don’t be coy. Hurley’s the primary suspect in a homicide. What was the message?”
“Primary suspect?”
“You bet. She was known to be in a dispute with the deceased over a coat, she has an old warrant in Houston for aggravated assault, and yesterday she was involved in a fight at the public library. What was the message?”
“Whoa a minute. Was the coat in dispute black-and white-spotted?”
“Yup.”
“She was wearing it when I saw her on Monday. Remember, I told you that.”
“Well, her dead buddy was wearing it yesterday. What was the message?”
“Oh, Grady, she sounded sick and she wanted to talk to me.”
�
��Molly, please.”
“If I tell you, will you go pick her up yourself? Shawcross is so intimidating.”
“Yes, I’ll go myself.”
If he said it, you could count on it, and he was the rarest of creatures—a cop with a gentle bedside manner, especially with women. “Okay. She said I should leave her a message at HOBO and she would check there for it.”
“When did the message come in?”
“Yesterday at five-thirty. I just called HOBO and left her a message to call me here collect. They said she had been there but wasn’t now. Maybe she gave up on me.”
“I’ll go check.”
“Grady, I don’t think she did this.”
“Molly, you exchanged a few words with the woman in the can and that qualifies you as an expert on her capabilities?”
“She recites nursery rhymes, Grady. What happened in the library?”
“She got in a fight with an unidentified man. There was a razor involved, and she stole a book.”
“Was the man injured?”
“We don’t know. They both took off fast, but there was some blood on the rug.”
“What were they fighting about?”
“We don’t know, but she said he was trying to kill her and he said she was stealing a book.”
“What book?”
“Oh, Molly, I love you. The title is A Higher Form of Killing. It’s about chemical and biological warfare, mainly poison gases.”
“Poison gases? Really?”
“Molly, I gotta run, sweetheart.”
“Call me after you’ve talked to her?”
“Okay.”
Molly put the receiver down, wondering what a bag lady wanted with a book on poison gases and why she would steal it, and whether she really did slit her friend’s throat in a dispute over a coat and if the man in the library really was trying to kill her. What was it she wanted to talk to Molly about? Why had she been at the Capitol? She spoke like a woman with some education and more than a little intelligence. What happened to put her out on the street?
The questions were giving her a buzz. There was a story there that she couldn’t bring into focus, a jigsaw puzzle with some pieces missing. Molly had a feeling that if the picture ever got reconstructed it would be a fascinating one.
But it wasn’t her story. It wasn’t what she’d come to El Paso for. For a moment she yearned to be working on the Sarah Jane Hurley puzzle instead of the painful one she was trapped inside of. Puzzles were much more fun and easier to assemble when you weren’t personally involved, when it was other people’s families and other people’s failures and other people’s disasters.
She put her head on the pillow.
Maybe this was a wild-goose chase, a waste of her time.
Maybe she was wrong and everyone else was right—Grady and Jo Beth and Parnell, the people she loved. They all said let it drop. Well, maybe El Paso was the end of the trail, anyway. Maybe this nighttime rendezvous with a whore on the Texas border was the last gasp.
THERE WAS AN OLD WOMAN TOSSED UP IN A BASKET,
SEVENTEEN TIMES AS HIGH AS THE MOON;
WHERE SHE WAS GOING I COULDN’T BUT ASK IT,
FOR IN HER HAND SHE CARRIED A BROOM.
“OLD WOMAN, OLD WOMAN, OLD WOMAN,” SAID I,
“WHITHER, OH WHITHER, OH WHITHER SO HIGH?”
“TO SWEEP THE COBWEBS FROM THE SKY!”
“SHALL I GO WITH YOU?” “AYE, BY-AND-BY.”
—MOTHER GOOSE
Sarah Jane Hurley feels doomed to keep relearning life’s lessons. Now she remembers this one: if you swear you’ll never do a certain thing, right away fate starts slamming gates so that eventually all paths are blocked except one, and that one leads back to the exact thing you swore you’d never do.
After that one night in the Patchwork Pit when she first arrived in Austin, she left vowing to the heavens that nothing in the world could ever make her go back there. It has been more than a year, but now she is heading back, because it is the only place left to go. Even though she recalls all too clearly what happened the last time—the cries and pleas of the old bum Squint and Roylee and some others tortured and beat nearly to death because he had told the cops that Squint was running a scam at the day labor cage. Everyone on the street knew that Squint got the first ten bucks of any day labor job picked up at the cage. If you didn’t pay, you ended up with broken legs.
But this man who squealed got lots more than his legs broken. First they dragged him to the fire and held his fingers in the flames until he confessed he’d done it. Then they beat him to a bloody pulp and dropped him in a vacant lot. Sarah Jane Hurley has sunk pretty low and has even drawn blood herself. But what they did to that old man that night was way beyond what she could stand.
Just south of Town Lake, the Patchwork Pit lies in a draw hidden from sight in a densely wooded area not far from one of the busiest intersections in town. It is well known among the homeless as a vile, bottom-of-the-barrel camping place, dirty and dangerous, where derelicts prey upon one another, where Squint and Roylee bully the down-and-out and manage to squeeze some sort of payment out of them. In exchange, the transients at the camp are not hassled by the law. For some reason having to do with Squint, the cops leave Patchwork pretty much alone, even with the new ban on camping on public land.
So, in spite of it all, she’s heading down the dirt path back to Patchwork.
She knows this much: she is sick and exhausted. She needs a place to lie low. Last night after checking for messages at HOBO, and finding none, she was planning to crash on the loading ramp, but she was scared off when she saw a man she was sure must be a cop entering the building. He wasn’t in uniform, but he had the look of a cop, so she ended up walking around all night, afraid to settle anywhere, afraid to go back to HOBO. Billy Goat is surely trying to find her again, and if the cops aren’t looking for her now, they will be when Tin Can’s body is found. Everyone on the street knows she and Tin Can were hanging buddies.
Maybe they already have found Tin Can. It’s been more than a day since she and Lufkin found her body. Maybe that’s why Lufkin has disappeared. After the library, she looked for him everywhere, hoping he might have scored some bus tickets, but he was in none of the usual places. Maybe she can get a loan from Squint; he did say he’d make it worth her while if she came to Patchwork. She finds she is shivering, even though it is a warm afternoon and not raining yet. Out of cigarettes, she sucks on a piece of grass and hums to keep her courage up.
She smells the Patchwork Pit before she sees it—a stinking mix of rotting garbage, sweat, dog shit, and acrid smoke, which hovers in a filthy haze over the camp like an evil miasma. It is the smell of the bitter end. She tries to straighten up and control her shaking because in a place like Patchwork you can’t show weakness.
A dog barks, and several more join in.
Sarah Jane stops and calls out to announce herself. “I’m coming in. It’s okay. It’s me, Cow Lady.” That’s so she doesn’t alarm them. With the ban on public camping, everyone has gotten real spooky and the folks at Patchwork have better cause than most to be wary.
She pushes through the thick bamboo stand that surrounds the camp and there it is—the rock bottom, the place where you go to wait for the worst life has to offer. The packed dirt clearing is still covered with the squares of old carpet remnants that give the place its name; the fire pit in the center has the same black-encrusted cooking pot sitting on the charred wood. Four dogs and ten people are sitting and lying on the ground, eying her with suspicion. Bedrolls and garbage bags and bottles litter the place. The dogs quiet down but no one greets her.
Out of breath, Sarah Jane lowers her bag to the ground. There is only one other woman; she is sitting with her back against a tree trunk, a filthy child sprawled sleeping in her lap. Sarah Jane surveys the men, looking for Squint and Roylee, but they don’t seem to be here, which is a relief.
Across the camp she spots someone she knows—Rhyming Rudy, a small blac
k man who was in the State Hospital with Tin Can and got released about the same time. He used to hang with them down by the creek. Sarah Jane is pleased to see Rudy. He’s got this gimmick she really likes: he sells rhymes to people on the drag for a dollar a line. They tell him what the poem should be about and he writes it. It sure beats selling blood. Sarah Jane has always loved rhymes, from when she was a little girl and Gramma read her Mother Goose every night. And she read the same rhymes to Tom and Ellie back in the good days, when she was still trying to be a proper mother.
She hoists up her bag and walks over to talk to Rudy. He is sitting on an upside-down yellow bucket, holding a taco about an inch from his eyes and staring at it. He’s one of the smallest men she’s ever seen—about eighty pounds. He looks like a little boy sitting there on the bucket.
She surprises herself by saying, “Little Jack Horner sat in the corner, eating of Christmas pie.” She doesn’t usually let the nursery rhymes out, but lately they’ve been erupting and it worries her. It’s this dizzy head of hers, whirling bits of her inner thoughts out into the air against her will.
Rudy looks up at her, his black face scrunched in puzzlement. Then he says, “Cow Lady?”
“Yeah, it’s me.”
“I didn’t hardly know you without your coat, woman.”
“Me either.”
“What happened to it?”
“I gave it to Tin Can.”
Rudy smiles. “Tin Can, she my man.”
Suddenly Sarah Jane feels like weeping, something she hasn’t done in years. There is a big, sucking, hollow space in her chest. It’s Tin Can, that dumpy little twit, that dumb retard. She misses her so much she can barely breathe. “Can I sit down?”
“Take your rest,” Rudy says, “be my guest.” He studies her face, then says, “Don’t look so hot. What bug you got?”
Sarah Jane lowers herself to a carpet square. It is filthy and she can see the fleas bouncing around on it, but she doesn’t care. “What bug?” She touches her left leg where the swelling is tender to the touch. “Fire ants.”
All the Dead Lie Down Page 20
