Falling Down

by David Cole

  “No,” I lied.

  “I’m tapping my nose right now,” Kyle said. “I’m laying my index finger alongside my nose, I’m tapping it. The insider thing, you know? I smell something, you’re on to something. I might be asked to be a part of it.”

  “Can’t really say.”

  “I’ve worked hundreds of homicides, Laura. I’ve got a system, I get hunches, I’ve got instincts, you know what I’m saying?”

  “Really,” I said. “I’ve got nothing to say.”

  “Just remember this one thing.”

  “Yes?”

  “Today, you saw what these assassins do. They torture people, they slaughter people, their pulse rate hardly goes up at all, they love it. You be careful, Miss Laura Winslow. Whatever you’re doing, you be careful.”

  “I’m a good detective,” he said. “I hear things.”

  “Right now,” I said. “All I hear are three morning doves. What else should I be listening for?”

  “A rooster?”

  “Christopher,” I said. “Enough of this cute routine. What do you want to say to me?”

  “Maybe I know why TPD wants to hire you. I’ve been tracking illegal fights for nine months. Cocks, dogs…there’s even some extreme human fights. Winner gets a guaranteed good-as-gold Green Card. Loser gets hurt. Or dies. I brought it to my lieutenant once, he’s trying to cut down homicide statistics. Birds or dogs, he’s never been interested. So I’ve done this on my own.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Word is that these fights are sanctioned by cops.”

  “Wait, wait, wait,” I said. “What, are you saying, dirty cops?”

  “On the pad.”

  “To protect the people who stage the fights?”

  “Protect and serve.”

  “I don’t know anything about that,” I said.

  “Well, maybe they’re hiring you to find out. To find dirty cops.”

  “Christopher,” I said. “I work computers. I work identity theft, illegal Internet scams, money laundering through a dozen banks. That’s all I do.”

  “I just thought, being as how it’s TPD showing interest in you, financials about some dirty cops. Just my instincts, just my gut.”

  “Not my line,” I said. Some truth in that, it wasn’t yet my line, it might never be my line. “But thanks, Christopher.”

  “No problem.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Nope,” he said. “I just thought, these are vicious people. You’re better off, you stay away from it all.”

  “I’m going up to Monument Valley tomorrow.”

  “You’re leaving town?”

  “Yes. Leaving town.”

  “Well then, Laura. You sleep good, these nights.”

  11

  The monsoons came early that summer.

  Late in June, not at all the typical season, three storms thrashed up from Mexico but never reached Tucson. From Green Valley south, rain fell intermittently for eleven days. Temperatures stayed in the nineties, but the humidity soared beyond forty-five percent, never pleasant in the desert, not popular for those of us who live here because it’s both hot and dry.

  From my front yard lap pool at my home in the Santa Catalina foothills, all of Tucson stretched below me and I could watch the bands of gray cloud formations drift up from Sonora and veer toward the northwest. I’d lay in the bright sun, clouds covered my usual view of the Santa Ritas thirty miles to the south. Sun so brilliantly blue, layering southward into gray. You didn’t want to look directly up, you’d squint your eyelids shut, like when you’re on a lake, sailing in the clearest of clear days, or skiing in fresh new powder, the sunlight reflected and refracted until your eyes burned. I rarely wore sunglasses, except for the days like these. Occasional breezes would lick my Palo Verde trees and tall lantana bushes, but the sun always shone, and on June twenty-first, the longest day of the year for sunlight, the temperature slid above one hundred degrees.

  In the evenings, the sun slid through the skies and through parts of the color spectrum and just at that moment before it started to dip below the horizon it glowed like a bald, orange head.

  I loved to stare at that orange head, I loved watching it disappearing until, if I really focused my senses on watching, at the exact moment the sun disappeared I’d see the green flash.

  “Damn,” Spider said to me that afternoon as another monsoon passed us to the south. “You think it’ll ever rain up here?”

  In Tucson, you never really knew about rain. It’d come by surprise, Santa Claus unexpectedly stopping by with water. But she didn’t come out of the house to talk about rain. Holding a portable phone in her hand, staring at it with concern.

  “Mom. Uh, that was Nathan.”

  “Why didn’t you bring the phone outside?”

  “Um. He just wanted to talk to me.”

  “Tell me what he said.”

  “Well. He called me, he just wanted to say goodbye. That’s all. His actual words were, ‘I just called you to say goodbye.’ What’s wrong?”

  “He’s just gone.”

  “Well, he’ll be back.”

  “No. Not this time.”

  “What do you mean?” Now showing alarm and concern.

  “He’s gone up to the rez.”

  “So, go up there yourself. Or wait, he’ll be back. Won’t he?”

  “Not this time. He wants to live up there.”

  “So? Go up yourself.”

  “I don’t want to live on a reservation.”

  “You don’t have to live there. He needs you.”

  “Not this time.”

  “You need him.”

  “I don’t even know that for sure,” I said finally.

  “Oh, Mom.” She sat beside me, arm around my shoulders. I can remember, not that far back, when I’d give the world just for an hour of her touches. “Call him, Mom.”

  “I gave him a cell phone. But it’s turned off.”

  “So call where he’s going. Leave a message.”

  “He’s gone beyond telephones.”

  Her head flicked around like a lizard, darting just a fraction of an inch to the right, to the left, up and down, just like a lizard uncertain of his territory, uncertain of the dangers.

  “Can I help?” she said.

  “Just leave me alone.”

  I dove into the pool, a racing dive, a streamlined dive, crashing into another world to let the water wash all my cares away as I glide along in relative silence, my senses insulated by immersion into water.

  In the first lap, I began with a slow kick, blood awakening in an all-body pulsation beginning with the head, the shoulders, the back, the thighs, all the way down to my toes, my entire body undulating into one dolphin kick, the rhythm continued as I lifted my head to breathe, lifted my eyes toward the sky. As my toes broke the surface of the water, woooooshhhh, a spurt of energy, thoughts of Nathan fading, not entirely gone, but fading and lessening as I accelerated into the power of the butterfly stroke, grabbing the water, my hands following a circular shape, like entering the top of the keyhole, hands powering around, meeting at my belly, and then the surge at the bottom of the stroke, shaping the triangular base of the stroke, pushing myself ahead and winding my arms around, stretching ahead, my hands pounding into the water, into the next stroke.

  Stroke, kick, stroke, kick, a dichotomy of ease and power, my entire body fully into the rhythm, constantly adding power and strength.

  Each stroke entering the keyhole, sliding through the gateway into my inner thoughts for now, when I gain this power and strength and shape, the motion and the water and the breathing are all, I’m the sum of these motions, my anxiety gone, I am entirely quiet, immersed in an isolation tank.

  It’s just me.

  Just me fighting the forces of nature.

  And gradually becoming one with the flow, one with nature. The two-hundred butterfly, a warm-up. Next, flipping my body over for the backstroke, arching back and over then under the
surface, using a butterfly kick until I’m staring straight up into the blue sky, then switching to a motorboat flutter. The alternating windmill arm sweeps and the leaning into each stroke rock me like a baby. I could breathe constantly, but I keep the rhythm. Starting a breaststroke I experiment with the old-fashioned frog kick, but switching into the power of the whip kick which propels me half out of the water with each whip.

  Finally, I settle into the old reliable freestyle, the flutter kick constant, quick breaths on alternating sides with every third stroke. Whapping my legs to create a splash at each flipturn.

  Fifty laps of a twenty-yard pool is more than half a mile.

  I always lose count.

  Lost in my own world, fused with all.

  I love to swim. I swim fast. I’m physically unable to float, I’ve got to keep moving or I sink to the bottom. A small peril of being slim with little body fat.

  Swimming is, I don’t really know, I guess it’s just knowing I’m good at something, and then being able to prove I can do it well.

  There’s something about pushing yourself and trying to get past your physical limitations, then actually getting past that point, past being tired, I feel like I can do anything. Time has no meaning, that’s when I start cutting time off and I get the feeling that nothing can hold you back, no rules, no people, no promises to make or break, nothing except my body in the water, everything in that I have complete control over it all.

  Until I get out of the pool. The dry Arizona air slaps me back into reality, the world rushes back in, and my peace is gone.

  12

  My cell rang, an insistence, a startling intrusion.

  “Hello?” I said. Answered too quickly, voice too eager. “Hello?”

  “Laura. Bob Gates.”

  “Oh,” I said. Sad that it wasn’t Nathan.

  “Magellan’s Steak House. Six. You’re meeting me and Jordan Kligerman. For a drink. Just to meet him.” He waited. I could hear myself breathing into the cell, held it against my neck for a moment and quickly took it away, afraid my furious pulse rate would vibrate the cell. “He’s got your PI license reinstated,” Bob said.

  “Tell him to put it in the mail.”

  “He wants to tell you himself. That he’s reinstated the license. C’mon, Laura, it’s just a quick meeting, okay?”

  “Okay. Six.”

  I stood against the worn oak bar, one hand on a wine glass. Waiting.

  Magellan’s Steak House. Very elite, very expensive, everything in addition to the steak cost money. And since it was on the north side of River Road, smoking was allowed, the restaurant always plumy with cigarette and cigar smoke. Magellan’s, where Tucson power people ate, drank, smoked, and worked out whatever deals, public or private, kept a lot of Tucson running.

  Built in the thirties, when few properties existed anywhere near River Road, Magellan’s stood on a half acre lot amid a grove of Arizona sycamores. Bricked pathways rambled between these trees and elaborate gardens for those who wanted to eat and drink outside.

  Tourists ate outside, seating at the inside tables requiring a lot of connections since the restaurant was always jammed. Realtors mixed with TPD captains and lieutenants, B-list actors and rock stars and big league baseball players during spring training. When stars or ballplayers from the bigs show at Magellan’s, all kinds of Barbie babes come dressed to kill, well, actually, dressed to be undressed by somebody famous. Groupies aren’t just for rock stars.

  On the other hand, few places in Tucson had better food, and nobody had better steaks. Magellan’s got beef from the smallest of the Japanese cattle markets, brand names you’d never hear of, where cattle ripened in individual stalls, fed a mathematically and nutritious meal, stoked with beer, given massages, which somehow was supposed to make the meat even tenderer. An eight-ounce steak cost ninety dollars, and that was just the steak.

  Waiting for Bob Gates, I catalogued everywhere I’d eaten in Tucson, remembering my early years when I ate at fast-food or inexpensive chains, often getting just takeout because I’d never have to talk to anybody while picking up or eating. Eegees, Fuddruckers, how can there actually be a restaurant with that name, or any of those places in the world like Chuck E. Cheese and Jreck, or “dreck,” subs. No name sounds ridiculous anymore.

  I must have drifted off somewhere until a waiter clanked clean silverware onto a nearby table. I watched another waiter set places for three around a table in a nook, obviously a special table. The hostess carried over a centerpiece, three different-size crystal flutes bonded together, each flute holding a rose. Three pink roses, each a different pastel hue, all of them perfect.

  Four thirtyish women laughed their way past my stool, their arms around each other’s power suits, one of them brushing against me and her automatic I’m sorry smile quickly beamed at me, but she really wasn’t sorry at all, I couldn’t have been less significant to her. I felt like one of those crumpled airline magazines stuffed in the seatback, the crossword crudely attempted, shreds of peanuts in the pages and some of the ads ripped out. I caught the bartender’s eye on the group of women, his smile blossoming as one looked at him, but once she looked away his face changed, as though he’d seen things in her smile he didn’t like. He saw I’d caught his look, my smile small but genuine and he half-cocked his head in thanks and poured me an extra glass of wine, no charge.

  Those beautiful young women so, so confident in their youth and beauty, confident in using their beauty. I once saw three of these women in the dining room of the Arizona Inn. One needed more water. Instead of looking for a waiter, she just held out her glass to the side, kept on talking to her friends until a waiter appeared and filled the glass, and she just kept on talking without acknowledging the waiter’s presence.

  A wait captain checked the table, straightened a napkin, aligned a knife and fork, and turned to me with a snap of his wine towel and said, “Madame?”

  Caught me still partly in that daydream, I must have stood there for another half a minute before I realized he was talking to me. Patient, not moving, saw me snap out of the daydream and with perfect grace said again, “Madame?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes. Yes.”

  “I’ll bring the gentlemen from the cigar rack. May I seat you?”

  “Yes.”

  And a moment later, he returned with Bob Gates.

  “You, uh, you a bit nervous about the interview?” Gates said.

  “Some,” I said. Wanting to be honest because I looked nervous, although it had nothing to do with the interview.

  “Bound to be.” Smiled at me. “I’ve read your job history over and over. You’ve got just what we want.”

  I’d like to see that job history, I’d like to know what was on it. That’s also part of the honesty with a policeman, even one who’s somewhat of a friend. You know my past. Lots of things I don’t want on a job résumé.

  “It’s like…” I said, “it’s like the day before.”

  “Before what.”

  “You did sports? Football, baseball, like that?”

  “Third base. U of A, starter in my senior year. Thought I had a shot in the bigs, but I didn’t have the arm or the bat.”

  “Had a tryout?”

  “Yeah, I…ah, I see. Yeah. The day before, right?”

  “You wish it was over,” I said.

  “You wish it was the next evening, everything’s over. Well. I wouldn’t get too nervous, Laura. You’re the person we want. But just a word. This meeting is strictly about drug smuggling. It’s a cover, for you. There are half a dozen TPD offers in here, they’re already checking you out. Word will spread, quietly, that you’re being considered to help investigate computerized financial records of drug money laundering. Don’t say anything about your real job.”

  “The dirty cop.”

  “And here we are,” he said, turning to shepherd me to another man.

  “Hi. I’m Jordan Kligerman,” he said. “Laura Winslow. Glad to meet you.”

  A
tall handsome guy, with just enough of a tan to let you know he cared about being tanned without seeming over the edge about it. He wore a pale gray Brioni suit with a faint herringbone pattern, easily a fifteen-hundred-dollar suit over a kettle-black mock-turtle sweater. No dress shirt, no tie.

  The wait captain sat us at the table. Gates and I plumped down comfortably in the cushion chairs. When Kligerman sat, he carefully adjusted the creases of his Brioni pants as he crossed one leg over the other. Not wearing any socks, just those tasseled loafers that good-looking men consider really cool. With my mock-turtle sweater and these loafers, oh, they’re handmade for me in Arezzo. No wedding ring on his left hand, and I caught his casual glance while he put his briefcase on his lap, popped the latches, and swept his eyes over my left hand and then across my waist, quickly but efficiently over my breasts and neck, lingering with a smile on my arms, veins showing because I still did hand weights an hour every day, I had the muscles to show for it, and when meeting men like Jordan, without knowing what I was yet getting into, wearing a sleeveless blouse, tight around my arm so nobody could catch the right angle and look underneath the blouse.

  So, while he’s checking me out, I’m doing the same with him. Except our motives are different. He wants to know if I’ll come out and play. I just want to know if he’s good at what he does.

  A florid-nosed, heavy-joweled man stopped by the table.

  “Jordan,” the man said. “The women you hire get better and better looking. Or is this somebody private?”

  “Laura Winslow,” Kligerman said. “Assistant Chief Django Manouche.”

  “Pleasure,” Manouche said, his eyes all over my body until I realized he really had no interest in who I was at all, he just wanted to appraise my body.

  “Django approved my talking to you,” Kligerman said.

  “Computers aren’t my thing, God knows.” Manouche laced his fingers together palms outward, cracking his fingers. “Pleasure, Miss Winslow.”

  He moved away. Kligerman opened his briefcase, took out a sheet of paper. “Your PI license,” he said. “Or, sorry, it’s just a fax copy. But I had Sacramento take care of your reinstatement this afternoon.”