Till the Butchers Cut Him Down

by Marcia Muller

  I stared. It was a junk-food fancier’s dream: egg rolls, tiny pizzas, little tacos, pot stickers, chicken wings, White Castle burgers, chips and dips and pork rinds. “This is wonderful!”

  Anna smiled triumphantly at Suits. I gathered they’d made a wager over which kind of cuisine—if either could be so termed—I’d go for. She reached for a taco and said, “We have such a crazy setup here that I haven’t cooked a meal except for big pots of chili and soup in years. I’m not sure I’d even know how any more.” Then she looked at Suits, who was plunging his knife into the Stilton cheese. “The wine?”

  “Oh, right.” He picked up a bottle and glanced at its label. “The Cabernet is a nineteen eighty-five Spottswoode—very crisp and lively. The Chardonnay is a nineteen ninety-three Sanford Barrel Select—spicy, complex—”

  “Just ask her white or red and pour, would you?” To me, Anna added, “It’s that damn photographic memory of his; he reads a wine magazine and the descriptions stick in his head.”

  To my surprise, Suits grinned widely. “She keeps me honest,” he said.

  I opted for the Cab—a perfect choice for a cold, rainy night—and loaded my plate with junk-food tidbits. As a concession to Suits, I also sampled some caviar and Brie.

  Suits was working seriously on the Stilton, as if he was afraid Anna or I might decide we wanted it and leave him only a chicken wing. “So, Sherry-O,” he said, “I guess you’re pissed at me.”

  “I will be dangerously pissed if you don’t stop calling me Sherry-O.”

  “It’s only a nickname.”

  “I hate it.”

  “Sorry, Sherry-O.”

  Anna leaned around me, frowning severely at him.

  Suits looked at her, rolled his eyes, and said, “Okay, I won’t use it again.”

  I smiled at Anna, shook her hand. To Suits I said, “You’re not off the hook yet. You might at least have told me you were married.”

  He shrugged.

  I asked Anna, “Was the resemblance a shock to you, too?”

  “Well, I’d known about it for years. The first time he laid eyes on me he told me about you. I used to be jealous. It’s not easy, thinking you’ve been chosen not for who you are but for who you look like.”

  “What changed that?”

  She glanced at him, the corners of her eyes turning down in amusement. “Oh, one time when he was throwing a fit over something and screaming at me, all of a sudden I thought, Hey, this guy really loves me. Those’re my faults he’s criticizing, nobody else’s.”

  Suits smiled complacently.

  I told him, “You must realize how many questions I have.”

  “Yeah.” He looked at his wife.

  And then I knew why he’d brought me here: Anna would be his voice; through her, he would tell me the things he couldn’t bear to discuss himself.

  She dusted pork rind fragments from her hands, picked up her wineglass. “First I should tell you about Suits and me. To do that I’ve got to go into my own background.”

  I poured myself more wine and snagged another pot sticker.

  “I’m a Kashia Pomo,” she began. “Grew up on the reservation in the hills above here, off Ridge Road. You know about it?”

  I shook my head.

  “Not many outsiders do. It’s tiny—maybe a dozen families left by now. There’s a school, three or four telephones, a graveyard. Even though it’s part of Mendocino County, it’s about as far removed from the rest of it as the moon. My parents … they left for a number of years, saw something of the world, but they weren’t prepared for it, and it wounded them. They went back, became very insular, very committed to keeping the family on the land. Naturally, I rebelled. Turned out really wild.”

  Surprisingly Suits picked up the narrative. “When I met Anna, she was living at the dope farm outside Garberville—the main reason I kept going there to make my buys. The guy she was with is—” He glanced at Anna, then shook his head. “Well, that doesn’t matter anymore. When I started to turn the place around, I threw him out, told him Anna didn’t want to go with him. A lie, but she stayed; she had no place else to go and was too strung out to care. Just about the time I realized how bad off she was, she disappeared. I spent nearly a year looking for her and finally found her in a Santa Rosa rehab house. She was doing fine.”

  “And I didn’t want anything to do with him anymore,” she said. “I’d put all that behind me, and I wasn’t about to get mixed up with a guy who was trying to turn a dope farm into a profit-making proposition. But he was persistent, and when he got his first installment on Gerry’s million, he made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.”

  I looked questioningly at Suits.

  “I bribed her to marry me. I told her she could have half the million and do whatever she wanted with it.”

  Anna said, “I knew a good deal when I heard one. We got married, and he put half of what he had into a separate account of my own. Looking back, I realize I was pretty cold, but I’d been through a lot and had grown fond of the guy, anyway. By then I’d graduated from high school and been accepted at college. Suits went back to finish turning the farm; I went to San Jose State. By the time he was done turning the film-equipment company in L.A., I was well on my way to a degree in psychology. By the time he was through with the Colorado turnaround, I’d fallen in love with him. But I still went back to the reservation.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “To make peace with my parents and my ancestors. To take a long look at my people. The young people in particular concerned me; I knew the reservation wasn’t going to be able to hold them, but they weren’t any more prepared for the outside than I’d been. Naturally, there wasn’t anything I could do for them up there; their families didn’t want me to encourage them to leave. So I hunted up and down the coast and found this house. It’s got a lot of rooms, plus the guest cottage where you’ll be staying. The kids from the reservation know they can come here anytime, stay as long as they want. While they’re with me, I help them develop their survival skills—and their talents. The only reason we don’t have two big teenagers hanging around tonight is that they’re down in Sausalito, where a Native American gallery is exhibiting their crafts this week.”

  “My wife,” Suits said, “is one of those women who do good works. On my money.”

  Anna gave him another of her stern looks. “The marriage,” she told me, “is not without its flaws.” Then she broke down and smiled at him. “The worst of them is that I don’t get to see enough of the guy, although we talk on the phone for hours every night.”

  So that was who he’d been droning on to in the late hours.

  Suits and Anna were smiling at each other across me. I realized that they would probably like to spend some time alone. “So what’s on the agenda for tomorrow?” I asked.

  Suits said, “We’ll go over the background information Dottie Collier sent you. And you can ask your other questions.”

  “Then I’d better get some rest.” I stood up, stretching. “You said something about a guest house?”

  “Moonshine Cottage, it’s called.” Suits stood up too. “I’ll take her there, Anna. You don’t want to go out in this weather.”

  The cottage sat on a bluff above the south end of the cove, secluded in a cypress grove. Timber and stone like the main house, it contained two rooms, a bath, and a tiny kitchen. Suits showed me into the bedroom, lighted the logs that were laid on the small hearth, and departed with awkward formality. Away from Anna, he’d become ill at ease with me; I sensed that allowing me to intrude on his carefully guarded private life had cost him—and perhaps our relationship—more than he’d bargained for.

  By now weariness had a strong hold on me. I stripped off my damp clothing and slid between maroon-striped sheets under a goose-down comforter. Turned off the light and watched the fire. Rain beat on the roof; wind baffled around the chimney; and under the storm-noises lay the constant crash and ebb of the sea. I thought of Anna and Suits, together in the big
house. I thought of Hy, wherever he might be.

  Was this going to be my life—sleeping alone while others slept together? Waiting for Hy while he ran from—or toward—his demons? At first our relationship had seemed non-traditional and unconfining to me; now it seemed odd and uncommitted. At first I’d felt a connection to him that transcended time and distance; now more often than not that connection short-circuited.

  Tufa Lake on my birthday? I’d go, see how things were with us. I owed Hy that much. But if they were as I suspected, I owed it to myself to tell him it was over.

  Ten

  “Okay, we’ve eliminated all but two.” I consulted my notes. “Russ Zola, a longtime associate. Goes all the way back to when you turned the film-equipment company in L.A.”

  Suits closed his eyes, pinched the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. “As I said, under that amiable exterior there’s a cruel streak. We call him the executioner, and he likes his work. But I can’t think of any reason … Ah, well, we’ve been over that, too. Motives aren’t always logical or apparent.”

  I nodded. “Now, Noah Romanchek. Another associate of long standing. Goes back to the beginning in Garberville. Former drug lawyer. You admit you can’t get a handle on what makes him tick.”

  “I have no idea what goes on inside his head. But that doesn’t mean he’s plotting against me.”

  “But both of these men have access to the information that the person responsible for these attacks on you would need.”

  “Each of them has access to some of that information. And both of them pointed out to you that the responsible party would need it. Why would either—”

  “Covering. A person who volunteers the information can’t possibly be guilty, now, can he?”

  Suits shrugged.

  I dropped my notepad on the table between our low-slung chairs and swiveled toward the window wall. It was nearing three in the afternoon; we’d been going over the data on Suits’s organization and turnarounds since eight-thirty that morning. I’d drunk so much coffee that my fingertips tingled. He’d been eating aspirin tablets as if they were snack food.

  Overnight the storm had blown out to sea, leaving behind a rain-washed day whose brilliant light defined every branch on distant cypress trees, every crease in the offshore rocks. Even the waves looked sharp-edged. Anna was walking along the cliff, wearing a hooded crimson cape. A sudden gust of wind whipped the hood from her head; strands of her long hair blew free and trailed out behind her. Suits’s breath caught. I glanced at him, saw he was staring at his wife with frank admiration.

  I said, “She must be very lonely here when you’re away.”

  “Anna, lonely? I don’t think she’s had a lonely moment in her life.”

  “Still—”

  “Look, Sharon, what do we really have here?” He motioned at the papers on the table. “Two guys who’ve been with me a long time, who have access to information, who know more about my personal habits than the others. But so what? Neither’s got it in for me, as far as I know. Neither strikes me as the kind who would lurk in my parking garage or condo.”

  “Each of them has the wherewithal to buy off people such as your architect and to hire someone to shoot at you and beat you up.”

  “That just doesn’t compute, though.”

  I suspected he was right. “Then let’s look at those turn-arounds again. Keystone Steel and Lost Hope, Nevada.”

  “Tough ones, caused a lot of resentment. Keystone wasn’t totally successful. But again—so what?”

  I didn’t necessarily agree with him on that. “Still, I think it would be a good idea if I visited the sites in Pennsylvania and Nevada, tried to find out what some of those … what do you call them? Sacrificial lambs?”

  He nodded.

  “Find out what some of them are doing now.”

  “Do whatever you feel you have to.”

  “Which brings us to the next order of business: we need to talk about your private life.”

  His mouth tightened.

  “You said I could ask my other questions.”

  “I know what I said, but not now. Look, why don’t we break for a while? You go outside, take a walk with Anna. She’ll show you the cove; it can be interesting after a storm. Things wash up—bottles, even, from a bootlegger’s boat that was wrecked out there in the twenties.”

  “Suits, these diversionary tactics won’t help us—”

  “Go on, now. We’ll talk more later. I’m not feeling so great.” He stood up and crossed toward the glass gallery that connected this wing with the one where the bedrooms were. Maybe he did need a break; he held himself stiffly, as if he was in considerable pain.

  After a moment I put the papers into order on the table and went out to the gallery. Anna was just coming inside, her cheeks rosy from the wind, but when I told her what Suits had suggested, she readily agreed to show me the cove. The parka I’d worn the night before was still damp, so she offered me one of hers. As I was putting it on, I complimented her on her cape.

  “One of the young women from my reservation, Franny Silva, designed and wove it,” she told me. “Look—it tells a story, a modern-day one.”

  I examined the fabric more closely. From a distance it had appeared to be all one color, but there were actually shapes and figures interwoven in subtle shades of orange and purple. “What does it say?”

  “It talks about a woman such as Franny coming down here from the hills and finding hope.”

  “You give a lot of yourself to your people.”

  She shook her head. “Not so much. I’ve been fortunate and I believe in passing it along, that’s all.”

  We went through a door on the sea side of the gallery and followed a series of terraced rocks through the gorse and ice plant to the edge of the promontory. A redwood platform with built-in benches stood there, a gate giving access to a stairway that scaled the cliff face. Anna opened the gate with a key and led me down the steps. They were interrupted halfway by a landing, then switched back; we stopped there so she could point out the shape of the sand beach below.

  “It’s like a hand reaching out of the water and clutching at the land,” she said. “Like a drowning person who knows he’s got to hang on.”

  “Do you always come up with such cheerful images?”

  “I’m not a naturally cheerful woman, I’ll admit that. I spend too much time alone.”

  “Suits claims you’ve never had a lonely moment.”

  “Well, what would he know? I swear he says things like that to convince himself, so he can salve his conscience about being gone so much. It’s true that there’re usually people here, but they’re protégés and I’m the mentor. The situation doesn’t make for true companionship.”

  “Have you talked to Suits about that?”

  “What good would it do?”

  I nodded, thinking of her husband: so self-absorbed, wrapped up in his pursuits to the exclusion of everyone else’s needs and feelings. Thought then of Hy, and realized that in a way Anna’s situation mirrored my own. “Does he refuse to let you go along with him?”

  “Not exactly.” She turned and led the way down the rest of the steps. As we struck out across the soft sand toward the tide line, she added, “Being apart is the lifestyle we’ve grown into. At first it wasn’t possible for me to be with him; then I tried going along. It … didn’t work well, so we made the mutual decision not to do it again.” Her eyes clouded—an unpleasant memory?—but then she brightened. “Hey, it’s no big deal. This place is where we relate best, and when you’ve got money and aircraft at your disposal, distance isn’t a factor.”

  “I noticed that you have a security gate but no alarm system, and your fences look as if they’d be simple to get around. Aren’t you ever uneasy living alone in an isolated house?”

  “Not really. I considered an alarm system, but they’re always malfunctioning and sending you into a panic. I also thought about a guard dog, but they’re smelly critters. I’m a good sho
t, though—when I was a kid on the reservation, we used to hunt—and I own a couple of handguns. A three-fifty-seven Magnum and a Beretta ninety-two-F that I carry in my purse. They’re my security.”

  In spite of the fact that I’m an excellent shot and enjoy practicing on the range with my .38, I try to avoid carrying it unless it’s absolutely necessary. And I’ve always been uncomfortable about people owning handguns when they don’t have a professional need for them. I asked, “Would you actually use one of your guns against an intruder?”

  She hesitated, the set of her mouth becoming grim. Then she turned the question aside, saying, “Let’s walk south. I’ll show you the cave where the bootleggers used to stash their hooch.”

  She quickened her pace; I did the same. Why, I thought, did I feel she’d been on the brink of telling me something important at some point during the conversation, then decided against it?

  “Anna,” I said after a moment, “did Suits send me on this walk so you could answer my questions about his private life?”

  “He didn’t specifically ask me to, if that’s what you mean. But it’s possible that was in the back of his mind.”

  “This mania about his privacy seems to have been a lifelong preoccupation. I’ve known him for over fifteen years, and I wasn’t aware he went to Harvard until one of his associates told me just the other day.”

  “I suppose it has to do with all the attention that was focused on him when he was a child prodigy. Those early years weren’t a good time for him.”

  “There’s another thing that interests me: why, when he had a Harvard M.B.A., did he choose to roam all over the country peddling stuff like dope and term papers?”