by Noreen Ayres
I said, I’ll save, I’ll sell my bike, just don’t!
When she yanked me, the belt tore off my dress, and when she threw me across the chair it almost tipped over, and I kept thinking how my nose would hurt if I fell face first and the chair crashed. Where her fingernails scraped it burned real bad. I had my eyes squished shut because I could just see the knife coming, swish, sting, swish, sting. And then she whapped me and I didn’t breathe. I clenched my teeth. I hummed like a bee. In the end, I begged.
When I took my dress off, I softly laid it in the wastebasket. I dabbed at my legs with toilet paper and put on jeans and lay on my stomach and thought about what I did. When I got ready for bed that night and took off my jeans, they barely stuck at all.
I felt Joe beside me before I even opened my eyes. I listened to his breath, then squinted at him as he lay swirled on the deep-green sheets, stomach down, a boy asleep on a summer lawn. An eye opened. He rolled halfway over, blinked hard, yawned, and said, “What time is it?” Then, tenderly: “Are you my fairy godmother or did I just get real, real lucky?”
While I was feeding Motorboat, the phone rang. I asked Joe to get it. He came back and said, “We’re wanted at headquarters. The customs guy is in.”
“So early?”
Joe swallowed one of my giant vitamin pills, rinsed his coffee cup in the sink, and said, “I think you lit a line of gasoline, sweetheart.”
“Who was it called?”
“Captain Exner.”
“Cheesh. He say anything?”
“Yeah, he said, ‘This is Hal Exner.’”
“No, silly. I mean about your being here.”
“He’s a smart boy. He figured it out.”
I got dressed quickly, but when I went to plug in earrings, I kept dropping them, the gold hoops bouncing on the dresser top.
Joe stood smoothing himself before the mirror that was too low for him and cut off his head.
“I’ve got one of your shirts, from the cleaners. You left it when we went to the beach.”
“The gray stripe? I wondered where that went.”
“You’ve got a bit of a beard. Want a razor?”
“Nah,” he said. “I need some character, don’t you think? After all, I don’t smoke rum-dipped Indianas.”
While he changed, I looked at my answering machine and found that Nathan had called. “Sammi, call me,” he said; that’s all. I phoned him back, though it was only about seven. He sounded awake.
“I’ve been trying to get you,” he said.
“You found out something?”
“The question is, have you found out anything?”
“I can’t say we’re any closer, no.”
“What are you people doing down there? You do anything down there?”
“Oh,” I said, “drink beer, play cards. The cops crawl in, the cops crawl out, the cops play pinochle on your snout.”
He said, surprising me, “I don’t know why I do that to you. Suppose that’s why I’ve had four wives?”
“Could be you’re getting a clue.”
“Jesus, doesn’t anybody in California use a rake? Everywhere I go there’s a leaf blower.”
I heard the racket now in the background.
“Buzz and blow, that’s all they do. Look, I found out her husband’s booked to go to Beijing next week.”
“As in China? He has some kind of medical thing going on over there?”
“He flies Saturday, that’s all I know,” Nathan said. “If he’s going somewhere, why isn’t he going to Italy, to see his wife?”
“People take separate vacations, who knows? How’d you find out Dr. Robertson was going?”
“Hired a guy. My lawyer has an investigator he uses. That’s not all. He ran an asset check on the good doctor. He’s making frequent money transactions under ten thousand dollars.”
“So it doesn’t have to be reported to the IRS.”
“Right. I’d like to know why. The amount of money going through this guy, he could buy his own island in the Caymans.”
“He’s a doctor, Nathan. What do you expect, he’s poor? The P.I., he’s licensed?”
“Don’t worry about it. Look, I know I’m a jerk some of the time.”
“Is this still my endearing brother?”
“But, Sammi? Let’s not let this guy off the hook so soon, huh? You’re still checking?”
“I don’t see Detective Fedders every day. But I’ll lean on it.”
It sounded as if he might be holding the receiver away, looking out the window maybe, at the leaf blower culprits. “Fine,” he said, and I knew it wasn’t.
“Hard as it is for you to believe this, Nathan, this isn’t our only case. Things just take—”
“I say her name. I say her name all day in my mind. Yesterday on the phone I called my secretary Miranda. I called her Miranda, this woman who doesn’t even look like her.”
“I’m sorry, Nathan.”
“I just want to look in her face and ask why. Jesus, I want to just see her. She’s here with us, Sammi. She’s not gone, I know it.”
“I’ll be in touch, honest, I will.”
“For your old grumpy brother.”
“For me, Nathan, and maybe, if you’re good, I’ll include you.”
When I hung up, I felt as helpless as ever. I’d go back out to the farm. I’d go back and model for Monty. Whatever it took.
Joe was standing with one hand on the doorknob, a question on his face. I said, “Nathan.”
“Still torn up?”
I nodded, got my keys, shut off a lamp. “It’s a wonder Les Fedders didn’t run a check on him. But then, Les sort of does play pinochle all day, doesn’t he?”
“You’re hard on him. Les is not a bad guy.”
“I didn’t say he was. I just said I don’t like him.”
“Anyway,” Joe said. “He didn’t need to run a check on Nathan. I did.”
23
When we arrived at the captain’s, this time not in a classroom at the training center but at his office in Santa Ana, the heavy aroma of doughnuts hung in the air and there were two filter loads of coffee grounds in the wastebasket already, indicating the captain and the customs agent had been there awhile.
She was a woman whose rear could cover three chairs. Her face was ruddy and her hair ash-brown. Under a nubby cream cardigan she wore a black dress patterned with beige and white swoops. She’d be the person who’d be planning the next VFW dance, or the one with the pencil behind her ear, counting retail stock. Not a customs agent. She sat on a squeaky, vinyl two-person couch with her tablet on one knee.
As Captain Exner made introductions, there was a pleasantness in her face and a steadiness in her yellow-brown eyes: U.S. Customs Service Special Agent Christine Vogel, he said, operating out of the Office of the Resident Agent in Charge, Orange County. “You saw a man murdered yesterday?” she asked.
“I did.”
Joe, in a chair at a slight angle to mine, crossed his legs in my direction.
I recounted what happened in the storage shed.
Quietly, she asked, “Did you know this man?”
“I knew his name. Quillard Satterlee.”
“Can you tell me . . .” she said, and stopped. “How would you describe the murdered man?”
“Maybe five five, my height. A hundred and fifty. White hair and beard.”
Agent Vogel was not writing.
“He had a friend,” I said, “a woman named Marge. Late forties, kind of big.”
Captain Exner, silent all this while behind his desk, in his yellow-flowered tie and impeccable brown suit, said, “We ran what we had on Ralph D’Antonio—Switchie. Comes up clean on NCIC. Paul Avalos has one bust for morphie, was on the street in six hours. Completed probation. That’s all we have on him.”
“It won’t be for long,” Agent Vogel said. Then she asked me, “Was Morris Blackman there at the time of the murder?”
“Not in the shed.”
“Too b
ad.” She folded her tablet. I glanced at Joe, puzzled by her remark.
“Agent Vogel’s working on a task force investigating transport of contraband,” the captain put in. “Morris Blackman is a primary suspect.”
Gravely, she said, “Quillard Satterlee was one of ours.”
“Oh man,” I said.
Joe put his head down and pinched the bridge of his nose.
“His real name was Bernie Williams. I didn’t know him personally because he was new out from D.C., but it’s a small world: I know his mother. We play in the same Scrabble tournaments. It wouldn’t hurt me any to see this Blackman and all his buddies get thirty days in the electric chair.”
“We must be talking big green here,” Joe said. “Just what is this operation?”
“It’s not the value of the operation. It’s about betrayal. You can understand: It disorders their sense of things.” Head down, eyes at the tops of their sockets, she leaned forward. “Working undercover,” she said, “is like walking on quicksand over hell.”
I thought of my narrow escape, and as immediately felt it didn’t seem so important at all. I was safe, that’s all it meant. Bernie Williams was dead.
“Bernie was supposed to be a courier for the operation,” she said. “There was another mule too. We don’t have his name. This second courier wanted Bernie—Quillard—to come with him on a money pickup because he was suspected of ripping off the operation. Except Bernie came down with a giant case of food poisoning, and while he was puking pizza in his motel room Paul Avalos was on his way up to see him. Bernie had the door cracked for air. Fatal mistake. He told us yesterday Avalos might’ve overheard his conversation to us. We think that’s why he was killed.”
“You haven’t said what kind of contraband you think Blackman’s delivering,” I said. “Dope?”
“We believe he exports precursors to Mexico and South America,” she said, precursors being the special chemicals needed to process drugs for street use and high profit. “He’s too smart to run a lab himself. They’re death kitchens. Blow up all the time.”
“A light switch can set that stuff off,” Joe said.
“We don’t have the complete routing yet,” she went on. “We wanted to acquire the route, get the folks on the other end. That’s what Bernie was doing for us.”
“A guy at the rally asked Monty for drugs,” I said. “He sent him on his way to see Switchie. He acted like he wanted nothing to do with it.”
Agent Vogel thought a minute and then said, “You know why they call it crank? Biker gangs used to cook it up in their crank cases. Now any butthead can do it in a motel bathtub. A lot of your kingpins won’t even smoke a mooter. So don’t let that fool you.”
“Somehow I have a problem thinking of Blackman as a kingpin,” I said. “I’m not defending him, he just seems too busy to be involved in a big operation.”
Agent Vogel shifted heavily, glanced over at the doughnut box, then stood, taking the guest coffee mug with her, a black one marked with gold numbers: 381. The numbers referred to the penal code provision relating to the possession and ingestion of the toxic chemical toluene, which, in Captain Exner’s eyes, passes for office coffee. She refueled at the coffee maker, then crossed to Captain Exner’s desk and poured for him too, unfettered by feminist roles.
“He’s a genuine multitalent, this Blackman,” she said. She set the pot back in its well and paused to scan the remaining doughnuts in the box. Not taking one, she faced us then, the whole imposing bulk of her solidly confident, mothering, and smelling slightly of floral perfume. “There’s another outbound we want him for,” she said. “Pig semen. Illegal export of pig semen.”
A man died at the Canadian border last year trying to smuggle bull semen, she said. “You think this isn’t big business? It is,” Agent Vogel said. She settled again onto the couch, moving her hands as if conducting some unseen orchestra. “This guy at the border was a real Rhodes scholar. The port-of-entry agent was asking him the normal stuff, nothing fancy, when what does the idiot do but accelerate through with his Styrofoam ice chest bouncing on the floorboards. Some cowboy in a Previa ran him off the road head-on into a pine tree. Turns out he was a twenty-two-thousand-a-year laundromat owner, but guess what? He had records in his apartment showing a fifty-thousand-dollar profit in two years from, yo-ho, ‘transportation services.’”
“Wait now,” Joe said, lacing his fingers over his knee and casting a look at the ceiling with a look that said he was being goofed on. “He smuggles pig semen and precursors, that right?”
“Can I help it,” Christine Vogel said, “if he’s an entrepreneur? Listen, we get weirder cases than this every day. Come by my office sometime.” She said it without irritation, just fact.
Joe’s hands went up in a Who, me? gesture. “Oh, I’m not doubting you, nuh-uhh.” But he grinned.
She patted her dress into place on her lap. “In 1983,” she said, “a Texas boar sold for fifty-six thousand dollars, and you can bet it wasn’t for his bacon. Fourteen billion sperm in a single shot, Number One Big Daddy of Pig Daddies.”
Speechless, the two men sat looking at each other.
Joe said, “I can do that.”
We laughed, and I realized it was the first time in what seemed like a very long time.
“We think Blackman’s shipping stuff off his farm to the Philippines,” Christine said. “Pork producers are after a disease-resistant, lean pig, and if they can cut corners on development, all to the better. Never fear, U.S. meat producers steal genetic technology too. Unfortunately, government agencies have a tendency to bump into each other. We’ve got the departments of Ag and Commerce who’d have interest in this kind of transport, we’ve got the FDA’s APHIS—that’s Animal, Plant, and Health Inspection Service—and even Treasury, for taxes and tariffs. And us.”
“And now us,” Captain Exner said. He was resting on his forearms, wagging his handsome head. From that position, he changed, put an elbow on the desk and curled a finger over his mouth, and I knew he didn’t quite know what he was going to do with this situation, and was waiting for Christine to lay it all out.
I said, “So what is it, exactly, that you want me to do?” looking between Agent Vogel and the captain.
“We want you to hang near Blackman,” she said. “We want you to stick with the creeps who killed Bernie Williams.” She looked at Exner as if expecting either objection or a nod of strong support.
“What if someone saw me out there? I mean, I don’t think anyone did, but—”
“Call him up,” she said. “You have to give him a reason for splitting, right? Do that, and listen to his tone. The way he talks. You’ll be able to figure it out.” The pillows of her body moved with grace.
“What if,” I said, hesitantly, “he doesn’t know about the murder?”
“If he doesn’t know about the murder,” Captain Exner said, “he’s too dumb to run an operation like Agent Vogel’s talking about.”
Joe said, “What kind of backup are we giving her?”
“She’ll have what she needs, of course.”
Christine said, “I’d like you back out there as soon as possible.”
“The farm? Why?” I felt my breath come shorter.
“We have to know what they did with the body,” she said, and then dropped her gaze.
“Keep an eye out for newly turned earth,” the captain said. “There’s a good chance, even with everything going on out there, they stashed it on the property.”
“Don’t underestimate the stupidity of creeps,” Christine said. “Besides, it’s familiar ground. They could be more afraid of being seen by moving it. We just need somebody up close and personal.”
Joe said, almost apologizing, “You may be able to get physical evidence. The knife. Bindings.”
I was quiet but thinking, How am I going to bag anything? Put on my rubber gloves and bag bloody feed sacks, haul out my tape and say, Excuse me, Paulie, while I just run a measure here, okay?, and by the wa
y, will you hand me that blade?, I have to hang an evidence tag on it. My silence must have told.
“If you get out there,” Joe said, “and these guys are there and acting the least bit hinky, leave.” He looked at the captain then, for contradiction, but didn’t get any.
The captain said, “We’ll have plainclothes out. Repairmen, feed suppliers, somebody. Just keep us informed as to when you’re going back.”
“What’s my excuse for showing up?”
“Say you lost your wallet. You got suddenly sick, couldn’t find him, left without your wallet. Bring one you can plant if you need to. If that doesn’t work, say you guess somebody lifted it. How are you at lying?”
Agent Vogel’s face showed the slightest amusement when I answered, “I passed the department polly for the background investigation okay.” She set her coffee on the corner of the captain’s desk next to her while she dipped into each pocket of her sweater. Then she bent over for her tiny hard-leather, metal-studded purse that looked like she lifted it off her teenage daughter, and poked inside for a moment, saying, “I’m out of cards, but for one.” She handed it to me. “Call me if you need to. Anything at all.”
“Don’t carry that with you,” the captain said. “Memorize it.”
“Good plan,” Christine said, checking her watch, and while sitting there for another five minutes, managing somehow to always be in motion.
24
When Joe and I left Captain Exner’s, I was awash in images, concerns, and confusions, and remained silent most of the way back. Joe hoped to cheer me up by giving commentary on a new lunch place nearby. At the hallway where we split off to go to our separate offices, Joe said, “All this because your brother has interesting taste in women. Do you ever think whatever you’re doing at a given moment in time will have great significance downstream?”
“I try never to think at all,” I said.
“You’re trying to sell me swampland, baby.”
“It’s just real hard,” I said, “to imagine how Miranda Robertson could figure in all this. The only connection to anything is that she by mere chance knows Monty Blackman. We smooge up to Blackman and find all this other stuff.”
