Pay Here

by Charles Kelly

  Later, I learned, she had checked in, left her things in her room, and gone down the block to a convenience store to buy a few cheap toiletries. Her shopping trip had taken somewhat longer than expected. There was a lottery drawing that night, and the store was full of people lined up to spend their food money on hope. By the time Daly had gotten to the counter and walked back to the Swiss Chalet, her unexpected visitor had been given plenty of time to do his work. She found a note taped to her door: We must meet. Rhea left something for you. Samoan Inn, 16th Street and Van Buren, 6:30 p.m. Let me buy you dinner. Arthur Morrison.

  The tone of the note was just right—mysterious, which appealed to Daly’s fey nature, but practical, too. She had almost no money, and a free meal would sustain her for another day—even more if she pretended to be Meher Baba on a special fast—while she clearly established that I was wrong and that Rhea was the caring sister she had never known. No doubt Arthur Morrison—the name sounded substantial and safe—was some sort of professional man who would have access to Rhea’s records and belongings, all the evidence Daly needed.

  She was thinking along these lines as she pushed open the motel room’s hollow-core door, which creaked a little, the layers separating in the dryness. All the windows were heavily shuttered, and she moved forward into darkness. The surroundings had been dreary when she’d entered the room a half-hour before, and they hadn’t changed. The ceiling fan was still plunking away at the drowsy air, the flies still buzzing about the ceiling bulb, the roaches still scuttling along the baseboards. The smell from the toilet was just as rank, the coverlet just as coarse. But something was different. For a moment, she wasn’t sure exactly what. Then it came to her. She had a mission now, and Morrison’s note had given her a chance to complete that mission. Her dreadful surroundings didn’t matter so much any more. In this desert outpost, where she thought she had lost her purpose in life, she had found new purpose. There was work to be done, and she was the only one who could do it. Such are the illusions that sustain us.

  Daly drank a cup of water from the tap, fortifying her body for the struggle ahead. Then she stripped naked and lay sweating under the thin sheet, hearing the shouting of the illegals in the courtyard. She wept a little for Rhea. She blotted her tears with the pillow. Then she slept and dreamed and the afternoon passed. August in Phoenix, with bad things moving about in the heat.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Until I encountered Daly Marcus, I had been doing what I do best: feeling sorry for myself over losing a story. This was not a frivolous concern. I had gotten to the age where a reporter can’t afford to lose too many stories. The newspaper is an animal that has to be fed, and when it stays hungry for too long, it starts spitting out reporters right and left. There was a time when the animal was content to munch on its ration of stories and to roll in a comfortable bed of greenbacks. But—times being what they were—the animal was now fearful that the Internet and 24-hour TV news were eating its lunch and its profits, so it was desperate to save money by replacing its well-paid feeders with those who were young and cheap.

  The animal had its eye on me—the rather watery eye of a young editor named Frye—and did not like what it was seeing. I was not what enlightened management referred to as a “producer.” For that reason, I risked spending my days scrabbling for a living in some back-office public relations operation, with men in Sansabelt slacks moving their lips as they read my prose, muttering and shaking their heads, then kicking it back to me with the comment that this wasn’t exactly what they wanted, but they couldn’t quite put a finger on the problem.

  Right at this time I was taking several days off, even though in a sense I had already taken three months off, trying to chase down the dark manipulations that led to Rhea’s grave. You may wonder how I got so much leeway. All I can tell you is that newspapers are odd places. They beat the life out of most reporters, but allow others to waste time in job lots. The reason for this is simple. Editors, even those who have sold their souls for Mammon, yearn for respectability. And respectability to them means long, tedious stories with multiple jumps and diagrams and starkly lighted pictures, preferably of inmates’ hands sticking through prison bars. A reporter’s fondest ambition is to be assigned one of these word-cathedrals, because he or she can do fuck-all for a few months, assembling documents, doing a few interviews, and eventually churning out enough lardy prose to float the photos.

  Mindful of this phenomenon, and badly needing to probe a story I knew might not pan out, I had convinced Frye that I was onto some sort of scheme involving the Border Patrol and nasty business—bribe-taking, coerced sexual favors from female informers, drug addiction, that sort of thing—and that I needed to do some clandestine work on it. Had I outlined my initial evidence against Rhea, he would have dismissed it as just another crime story, and sent me to an Estonian street festival to build up the minority readership. With a little time to run, I had found out things that even Frye would have found worthy of the front page, a Sunday follow-up and perhaps even a shocked editorial or two. The problem was that I hadn’t been able to pin the story. Worse, I had not determined how to sidestep my own involvement in it. Now Rhea had died and things had gone bust. And, to complicate matters, Daly Marcus had appeared on the scene. At this point, though I didn’t know it just yet, the pot was coming to a boil.

  Some aspects of what happened next remain a mystery to me. For instance, I am not sure whether the conspirators feared Daly or me. An argument can be made that I remained their chief worry as they followed me and Daly to the Swiss Chalet Motel and traced our movements through a loose network of motel clerks, streetwalkers and bartenders. But I believe that was unlikely. At that point, they had stopped me at every juncture. Could they stop Daly? That must have been the main issue. And that issue was still very much in doubt. Enter Arthur Morrison.

  When Daly reached the Samoan Village at Sixteenth Street, Morrison was waiting at a table near the door, sucking his false teeth and sampling a gin fizz. God knows why, but he was also wearing a fedora. Perhaps he had intended to mention it in his note as a mark of identification, but had forgotten. That would have been like Morrison. He obsessed about details that meant nothing while neglecting vital points. Now, as Daly approached, he snatched off the hat, clapped it on the table and reared to his full height of six-foot-three, all covered by seersucker and nervous sweat.

  “Arthur Morrison,” he said, expanding his name in a peculiarly Southern way: Aw . . . thuh Moh . . . ruh . . . son. Morrison, from New Jersey, had been run out of Georgia on suspicion of child-interference, but had adopted the treacly speaking style of the South, and Daly told me later his unctuousness gave her an uneasy feeling. Well, perhaps he was off his game. Typically, Morrison was a smooth talker capable of putting the goods over on any elderly lady, half-educated immigrant, or mental defective. Today, however, the stakes were higher. That had put the wind up Arthur Morrison, and it may have disturbed his rhythm. Still, he got Daly settled down with a drink in front of her, his expressions of condolence fluttering about her ears, his flattery vague and obvious.

  “I was much captivated by that little angel you arranged so . . . elaborately . . . there on the penumbra of Rhea’s final resting place,” Morrison told her. “She always said you were a hand at creatin’ artistic things. And that’s just the kind of memorial, the kind of . . . memento . . . that meant such a very lot to her.”

  Daly was trying to see this aging fraud in the same setting with Rhea, who was so nice and caring, but also so sharp about seeing through people.

  “You were pretty good friends with Rhea, then?”

  “Oh, I would say I was one of her very best friends,” Morrison said. He added quickly, “Not on the same . . . order . . . as you, of course. Of course not. Not a life-long friend.”

  Daly felt comforted in spite of her wariness.

  “How did you meet her?”

  “I was her lawyer,” Morrison said, br
ushing his sleeve. “Well, I should say, rather, that she considered me her legal advisor,” he amended, perhaps recalling his disbarment. “She depended on me for many things.”

  Some instinct—Daly occasionally did have excellent instincts—caused her to try to unsettle him by acting conspiratorial. It was not exactly that she suspected him of wrongdoing in the instant matter. After all, she believed I was the prime bad actor, the propagandist with a heart of stone. But perhaps Morrison was dicey, too. She surveyed the room as if checking for eavesdroppers, leaned in close.

  “Then you know what she wanted to do with me.”

  Arthur Morrison’s eyebrows twitched, but very slightly. “No . . . no.”

  “I mean, what kind of work she wanted me to do.”

  Daly saw his Adam’s apple—quite prominent—convulse and relax as he swallowed this altered version of her original question. He emptied his glass and called for another gin fizz.

  “Well, yes, I did have some idea about that.” A beat. He didn’t want to go too far. “Though it wasn’t a matter over which we actually consulted.” He squeaked his long fingers on his moist glass. “Rhea intended you to create angels, a line of those angel . . . creations . . . of yours, to sell to the public at large and to . . . our long-time customers in Rhea’s art business.”

  Daly could see he was struggling.

  “So her business was art?”

  Morrison poked a finger into his napkin.

  “One of her businesses. Rhea was quite versatile. It was hard to keep track, God bless her. She was involved in entertainment, art, personal services. Many, many things.”

  “Including the transportation business?” Daly asked. “A reporter named Callan told me she was into that.”

  Morrison issued an ironic smile, though the tic in his eyebrows worked against it.

  “Transportation?” he said. “Why Mr. Callan must have meant to be . . . jocular. Yes, of course, jocular. I believe he has that reputation.”

  “He also said Rhea was doing something criminal.”

  Now, with the nastiest charge of all sitting right there, Arthur Morrison rose to the challenge. His face composed itself. Even the eyebrows smoothed into his overall air of languidness, of world-weariness, of acceptance of charming foolishness.

  “Something criminal? Oh, what shall we do with Mr. Callan?” said Morrison, sweeping at the air as if to sweep away Mr. Callan. “To him, everything is criminal. Do you know that he did a whole series on building violations? And another on people not mowin’ their yards, and bein’ out of line with city codes? And another one on underage kids buying cigarettes and liquor?” Arthur Morrison sighed. “Things happen here, things a lot worse than that. Why, half the people in this city fudge up their financial statements when they go for bank loans. I’m sure he’d make a lot of that. But that’s just progress, or people trying to make progress. There wouldn’t be any city here if the likes of Mr. Michael Callan had their way. You know, this city was built on the main chance, and there are plenty of people around grabbing it. You think that makes them bad?”

  Daly was thinking about the cold streets of Chicago, of the ache in her forearms after scrubbing kitchens and bathrooms all through a long afternoon, of how the muscles in her legs pulsed painfully after a night waiting tables, of how often she wanted to grab at a main chance and never had the courage to do so.

  “No, I don’t think so,” she said. “Besides, I don’t think this Mr. Callan is much concerned with what’s good and what’s bad. A story is all he wants. No matter what. Part of him just doesn’t care.”

  “You see that, don’t you?” said Arthur Morrison, patting her arm and letting his fingers—briefly—treasure the firm flesh. “You have an uncommon sense of perception, it’s all over you.” He shrugged forgivingly. “But we can’t be too hard on Mr. Callan. This is a city that makes people suspicious, that makes ‘em think the worst. Too much going on. People coming and going all the time, all as nervous as a farm child sittin’ on her suitcase in the middle of a bus station. I’d leave, yes I would, except I got myself into this place and I don’t know how to get myself out.” He bit his lower lip regretfully. “But you, now, thank heavens, that’s a different story.”

  He dipped inside his seersucker jacket—unfortunately into a sweat-ring area—and produced a packet of rubber-banded bills. Arthur Morrison licked the tips of his long fingers, and began to count out greenbacks, lining them up in two ranks on the pseudo-mahogany top of the table. In the end ten bills lay there, each of them a hundred.

  “Rhea wanted you to have this,” he said. “Just a little gettin’ out money, and sorry for the inconvenience.”

  Daly looked at the cash, but didn’t see it. Instead, she saw a tangle of steel on hot concrete, wrecked vehicles forming an obscene sculpture in a desert landscape, the black mud of skid marks, blood splashed on glass, smoke rising up, steam hissing from radiators, a smashed semi-trailer truck straddling a passenger auto crushed to half its original size. And in the background the gravelly earth spreading out under a vicious sky. Silence from the wreckage. Not a cry, not a moan.

  And then, weakly, a woman’s voice—Rhea’s voice.

  Daly’s hands were covering her eyes.

  “You mean she lived?”

  She heard nothing, no reply. When she dropped her hands, Arthur Morrison was looking at her in a curious way. His eyebrows were down, his face had pinched toward his hatchet nose, and his eyes were glittering above the reversed curve of his mouth. He looked as if he hated her, though Daly could not understand why. Then he turned his face aside, examining a mural of hula dancers whirling through palm trees. Beyond the trees, Daly could see—through her sudden tears—a lonely beach, a crudely painted ocean, the distant outline of a ship, and a gray daub that might have been a shark.

  “She lived long enough to worry about me?”

  At that, Arthur Morrison’s face returned to her, kind again.

  “Oh, yes,” he said. “Even in her extremity she was concerned. Just before she died, she told me I was to do everything possible to accommodate you, to see after you and get you home.”

  Daly wanted to believe, but—

  “That man on the phone, the one who told me she was dead, he told me she had been killed instantly.” She cocked her head, trying to get the words exactly right. “‘Just like that,’ he said. And ‘She never knew what hit her.’”

  Morrison chewed on his lip, his face unhappy. “Bracknall.”

  “Was that his name, Mr. Bracknall?”

  “Mmmm,” replied Morrison, as if he were thinking much more about Mr. Bracknall than he was about Daly Marcus.

  “Why would he say she was killed right away?”

  Arthur Morrison returned from his reverie.

  “He meant, I’m sure, that she did not suffer, or that she died before the ambulance could arrive. Which is true. Mr. Bracknall, I’m afraid, has a rather blunt way of speaking, a rather free way of speaking, and he is not always precise.”

  Morrison’s index finger came down sharply. “In any case, that is of no great matter. The sad fact is that Rhea is dead, and the comforting fact is that she took steps for you.”

  He swept the bills into a crisp sheaf and extended them across the table.

  Daly looked at the money. Money represented the most ignoble of man’s aspirations, that’s what the ancients believed. The Bible said it was the root of all evil, Meher Baba said it would lead you along a path where dragons lay in wait, the Upanishads required humankind to eschew money in order to find righteousness. It was the destroyer, and she was being asked to embrace self-destruction. Gently, Arthur Morrison shook the money, tempting her with it, urging it upon her. Urging her to accept Rhea’s offering of love. Her hand rose, and she took it. She had not done enough for Rhea, now she had to do this, no matter where it led.

  “This money is not for me,”
she said, dread rising in her throat as Arthur Morrison smiled securely, as if he were certain of Daly’s greed. Feeling tainted, she rushed to make her case.

  “I’m not going to just walk out on Rhea. I can’t, not now.”

  Morrison’s smile dissolved.

  “There’s one last thing I can do for her, and I’m going to do it. I’m going to show up this reporter Callan. If I don’t, I’d always be worried that he’d write something to ruin her, to dirty her reputation, to destroy the way everybody thinks about her.”

  Morrison’s eyes followed the wad of cash in her hand as if measuring his chances of being able to snatch it back. But she moved gracefully, slipping it into a leather shoulder purse whose strap crossed her chest like a bandolier.

  “This money will help me do that.” She compressed her hands. “Now, I’d appreciate it one more thing. Tell me where I can find Mr. Bracknall.”

  Morrison stared, and all his muscles seemed to collapse, his long body draping against his chair like a discarded rope. Looking back, I’m sure this moment defined a crucial passage in Morrison’s life. He’d been sent to talk Daly into leaving Phoenix, to get rid of her, and he’d done just the opposite, had made it possible for her to stay. Not only that. He’d created his own personal nightmare, sealed his future, laid the groundwork for the kind of action he abhorred. Morrison was fit only for subterfuge. He was schooled in lying and manipulation and indirection, but he dreaded confrontation, couldn’t bear anger, shrank from violence. Now he’d slipped. And because he’d slipped, he was kicking back against his own nature. Morrison was a confidence man, and confidence men hate to kill.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  It didn’t take the killers long to get down to work. Looking back, it’s obvious that they moved too quickly, but they were lucky. At first, their pattern was hard to discern. The first body was dumped in Guadalupe, a community devoted to the idea that the material things about us—the buildings, automobiles, streets—are peopled with ghosts. In Guadalupe at Easter, Yaqui priests dance in animal masks, and on the Mexican Day of the Dead the nearby graveyard is alight with candles and gay with offerings to those who lie in the earth. Bottles of California wine, denim jackets and polyester shirts, Snickers candy bars, six-packs of Pepsi, boxes of Corn Pops cereal. The dead, you see, are hungry, thirsty and badly clothed.