by Noreen Ayres
“Don’t worry about it. We got you covered.”
Right, I thought. Believe that when I see it.
My nerves were frayed, I’d ripped the strap off the tangerine thing I was supposed to wear for my third change, and now I was wearing a bodysuit that made me look like Catwoman after a fight, holes everywhere. Customers were arriving in onesies and twosies, no office parties tonight. Two wore knit shirts with the logo from the Hard Rock Cafe. Who said the Chili Pepper–Egg-Strawberry Capital can’t be as trendy as Newport Beach? I drifted along delivering my spiel to gin-logged men and the few high-haired women with them, when someone in the black shadows at a table caught my eye. When I took a second look, I nearly broke down and cried. When I came near, the hefty woman said, “Hi, friend. How you doin’ tonight?”
It was Christine Vogel—make that Agent Vogel—and she was the last person I expected to see. She wore the kind of filmy, crinkly dress that looks like she washed it by hand and killed it by mighty twists before putting it on still damp. Golden tigers swarmed on it as though turning ’round and ’round to find their napping place.
I said quietly, almost laughing, “You’re my undercover?”
“You wouldn’t want to see any of this uncovered, honey,” she said, and winked.
Looking over at Howard the bartender looking over at us, I said, “Who will I say you are?”
“Say I’m your sister. Your sister, not your mother.” She smiled in her twinkly way.
“I was going to leave soon,” I said.
“Do anything you want.”
In Monty’s office, I climbed into my jeans and pulled on my pig farm–smelling top when Coral, the fat model, came in. Pale as mashed potatoes, all colors on her became a bright vengeance. The gown she wore was a clean turquoise that set off her cinnamon hair. Earlier I’d learned that the young, baby-faced model was her daughter. “You and your girl can grab the rest of the tips, Coral,” I said, “I’m going home.”
She said that was really, really cool of me. “It’s not the best of work, but it’s better than some, you know what I mean? She’s got college and she just can’t earn enough working at Burger King.”
I shrugged a shoulder and said, “It’s all the carcass trade, one way or another, right?”
“Thanks,” Coral said. “We should go shopping sometime.”
“Maybe so,” I said, leaving, holding the door just a crack and adding, “Take care now.”
Agent Vogel by this time had a drink in front of her, something dark amber. I sat down with her. “Mind if I put out the candle?” I said, and proceeded to top the candle cup with an ashtray. The flame diminished and died, and when I removed the ashtray, a blue wail of smoke fled out the top. Over the bar the new TV Monty had installed was tuned to a music video, Song of the Harlot, by Violet Burn.
“Should we leave?” I asked.
“Wait awhile.”
“You’re not concerned?”
“Not at all. Best thing is to look natural, like you have a life.”
“You heard what happened today?”
“I heard Paul Avalos had a close call. The other one’s too dead to skin. Excuse me,” she said. “My humor. You just hang in there. You’re doing good.”
“Was the ambulance a mistake?”
“How could it be? You had to. This Switchie person was there?”
“Miranda thinks he had something to do with it.”
“What did you get out of her?”
“She says Switchie killed a man named Rollie Pierson. It’s a case we haven’t told you about because we had feelings but the connections didn’t add up. I think she knows about Bernie Williams too. She said a guy named Simon, little guy, carries around a snake, says he hauled a body away. Things went fast after that. I didn’t get to talk to her alone again.”
“We’re gonna get him. Will you see her tomorrow?”
“I don’t know. She went off with Monty.”
“This Monty,” she said, her tone quiet, her eyes serious, “we’ve had women who fall while they’re under. You okay on that?”
“Me and Monty?”
“Just checking. Anyone who looks good in a mug shot I say is minefield-dangerous.”
“What are you drinking, Christine?”
“A Black Widow. Rum and Southern Comfort.”
“It must be a double,” I said.
I was home, sound asleep, when the phone rang. “Did I wake you?” Joe asked.
“Uh, no.”
“Forgive me. Go back to sleep.”
“No, I . . .”
“Why is it nobody ever admits they were asleep when they were asleep?”
“Well, I’m awake now.”
“You wouldn’t want some company, would you?”
I looked at the clock. “What are you still doing up? It’s midnight.”
His voice was soft and halting. He told me he was worried about me. He’d been asleep off and on, but since the last waking, zero.
“Come over,” I said.
And later, in the bedroom, when he made love to me, it was as if he just couldn’t get to the bottom of that well.
33
“One puzzle piece that was off the table is now back on,” I told Captain Exner the next morning. Joe had left a half hour before.
“I’m not crazy about that development.”
“Well, we can’t put her back in the bottle though, can we? Miranda was disturbed, which, under the circumstances, is understandable. But I don’t think she’d spout off about me. And if she did, I think I could handle a cover story. I took an acting class once, believe it or not.”
“Remind me of that if I ever need a friend in court,” he said, and it was the first time I realized he had a sense of humor. “It’s dicey. How’d it go last night? Blackman show up?”
“Not while I was there. I worked a few hours and left. Agent Vogel came in.”
“She told me. Her husband likes the place. I guess you got a heavy model there?”
“Coral.”
“That’s the one,” the captain said.
“Captain, I’ve been in two of Monty’s houses and at the bar, and I saw no evidence of any chemicals, nothing like that. No weapons, drugs, not even any picnic coolers with swine semen on ice. Oh, except a little marijuana.”
“Right now I don’t give a rat’s tokus if Blackman pours precursors on the Easter Bunny’s cornflakes,” Captain Exner said. “What I want him for is conspiracy to murder. That guy is going down. We’ll RICO him.” By RICO, the captain was referring to federal legislation that nails offenders for a pattern of racketeering over the span of a decade. Racketeering is having influence or control over an enterprise by the commission of at least two felonies. There’d be no lingerie saloons for Monty for a good long time.
“What do I do now, Captain?” I asked.
“Come in and get wired,” he said.
Now all I had to do was dream up a good reason for showing back up at Monty’s farm. I tried calling him at the farm, then at the bar, where I found him. I asked how Paulie was. He said, “Bitchin’ about they don’t have hot sauce in the hospital. He’ll be okay, but he sure has one hell of a headache and claims he’s still coughin’ up fertilizer.”
“What happened, exactly?”
“His dad warned me. See, there’s all kinds of poisonous gases in sewage. Methane’s the one you usually hear about, but there’s carbon dioxide and ammonia, and hydrogen sulfide. In low concentrations you can smell it but high you don’t. He went down in there wadin’ around and stirred it up. He should have wore his scuba equipment. He didn’t have that on neither.”
“Scuba equipment?”
“His mask, whaddya call it? Self-Contained Breathin’ Apparatus. Scuba. Plus, you don’t go down in a pit without somebody else around knows what he’s doing. Whole farm families get wiped out. One goes down in there after another.”
“He had a worker from his father’s farm, right?”
“Yeah, and if Switchie
hadn’t stopped by, Paulie’d be dead as him.”
“Switchie’s clothes weren’t dirty,” I said.
“That’s ’cause Switchie’s too smart to follow them down there. He tossed him a rope. Alfredo was gone already. Paulie’s too heavy, though. It took us all to pull him out.”
“How’s Miranda? She looked pretty upset.”
There was a silence. “It might be good you come by and see her sometime.”
“Well, sure, I guess I can do that.”
“I’m goin’ to be busy here a little bit, then I’ll go see Avalos. You left early last night, I hear.”
“You said you only wanted me to check on things. Coral and her daughter did fine. Heard from Jolene?”
“Nope.”
“Maybe she’s with Switchie.”
“Nope. Just talked to him. I gotta go—state inspector’s here. Been harassin’ my ass all year.”
Wearing a rig may be easier for a woman; it hides in the cleavage well. Speak into the microphone, honey.
The captain told me he commandeered a van from Caltrans, the agency that each year plucks fallout ranging from blankets to boxes, bodies to beer off 140 miles of county freeway. My wire setup would transmit to the van, where a tape could be made by deputies. I met them before I left: two young men with small frames, big mustaches, no humor.
The van followed me pretty close most of the way, then dropped back some when we got close. We had broken communications near Monty’s farm, but it would pull through, and then for a while we had nothing, the same as when I tried to call 911 for Paulie. All I could hope for was that, one, I wouldn’t need the guys for a cavalry attack; and two, the lines would eventually clear up.
Simon’s red truck was still at Monty’s when I arrived a little after one. The sight of it gave me a twist, and the large, flat box in the truck bed that held Simon’s boa constrictor didn’t make me very happy either.
I parked on the far side of the pickup and walked around its nose, wanting to look in the bed, but wanting to know where Simon was first. Monty’s black stallion was nowhere in sight, nor his green bike with hammered steel and molded snake head. Nor did I see Miranda’s bomber. I glanced at the fence by the side of the house. The butcher-bird had a new trophy: spiked on a barb was the head of a smaller bird, its beak in grimmest lock, its sightless eye like a tiny fried button.
I saw an unfamiliar white van up by the big animal building. Soon a man in a light-colored cowboy hat came out from behind the building. The distance prevented me from seeing his features, and at first I thought it was Monty, and then Mr. Avalos. But as he walked toward the truck, I thought he bore the gait of Switchie Ralph D’Antonio. He got into the van and drove northeast away from the farm.
Talking to my tan safari blouse, I told the deputies what I saw, then went to the front door. On the ground near the step was a wayward lemon, puckered by sun and wearing a single black fly.
I knocked. No answer. Trying the doorknob, I turned it and went in.
No one in the kitchen or living room. Ditto the bathroom and the far bedroom, where tangled sheets, empty drink cans, Miranda’s clothes (two sets of them) were tossed about, but not Monty’s. On a nightstand lay a hairbrush and a gold hair twist. The room smelled of drained beer and stale weed. I walked again through the living room and gently pushed open the door to the bedroom that served as an office.
“Nobody home, boys,” I said to the mike hooked on the center bridge of my bra.
Monty’s office was tidy. The computer even wore a cloth cover. He had books on artificial insemination, swine diet, animal husbandry, and alfalfa farming from the University of Modesto and Cal Davis. There was a slim volume on how to mix drinks that had stains the shape of wet bottle bottoms on the cover. In two black binders were old handwritten transaction records on lined paper: innocent, straightforward buy-and-sell accountings for swine and supplies. Standing upright in a cardboard box were books whose titles were interesting enough to recite softly into my breastbone: Consumer’s Guide to Handguns; Harmony by Handgun; Unarmed Against the Knife; a stapled volume called Tumbling Tumblers, on lock picking; and one called Border Busting: How to Smuggle Anything. A red-covered Alert bulletin from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on the hazards of infected silage lay on top of the box.
I didn’t know if the deputies in the Caltrans Trojan Horse could hear me, but as I stepped out of the house again, this time to look in Simon’s truck, I kept trying. The tape pack holding the battery to the small of my back itched, and I could feel the warmth of the unit even through the larger pad. To the two deputies I hoped were still listening, I said, “Nobody here but us chickens.” The hood of Simon’s truck was cold to the touch. I walked to the rear and peeked into the bed. I said into the mike, “Oh, and one big reptile you don’t even want to know about.” The box was screened on four sides. The boa, motionless, was jacked into a hairpin curve along the far side. The wood floor and ceiling of its home looked like wheat bread on a snake sandwich.
It was the toolbox I wanted a look into, and I wasn’t quite sure how I was going to do it with the boa box taking up nearly the whole bed. Hiking over the tailgate, I set foot in the bed, stretched forward, and used the box edges and truck sides to move across to the front. “Don’t mind me, big fella,” I said, then told the listening deputies I was addressing a snake.
There was a lock on the toolbox, but a lock is always worth testing. I fit my hand between boa box and tool coffer, tugged at the padlock, and found it not snapped to. The box was empty except for a small feed sack with rusty stain, bunched in the corner. Stain was on the bottom of the box as well. The scene in the shed flashed back: the shadows, Paulie Avalos’s pregnant profile, Switchie’s hair and quicksilver hand, and the awful eyes of Agent Bernie Williams while dying in a waterfall of blood.
I lifted the sack. Underneath was a frayed wad of steel wool. Hooking a few hairy strands, I tugged the wad toward me. Dark flakes shed from it. “Boys,” I said lowly, “all is cool, all is cool. But I just found a goodly piece of evidence to deliver us up a couple classic shitheels of the world.”
When I was on the ground again, I looked and still saw no one. I got a paper bag from my car and returned to the truck for the rag and steel wool. This time, Dragonwick had stirred from her sleep. As I peered into the snake’s accusing eye, a wave went through her like slow air in a windsock.
I slipped the sack under the seat of my car and went to look in the truck cab. No sooner had I opened its racking door than I heard Simon’s voice behind me. “I ain’t in there, dead or alive,” he said.
***
He carried a small blue bucket and wore yesterday’s pink snail shirt and jeans with gashes at the knees.
“Oh, hi, Simon! Nobody was around.”
“Uh-huh,” he said, looking me over. “I got critters to feed,” he said, a cigarette bouncing in his mouth. “I always say, your clothes are cold in the mornin’, you know you slept too long.” He tipped the blue bucket toward me. In the bottom writhed a brown snake.
Saying, “Harmless, I hope,” I still inched back.
“Here,” he said, “catch,” and he tossed the thing at me. I yelped. The snake plopped in the dust. Simon was on it before it could even roll its beige belly over to begin a skitter. He blocked its forward impulse, then clamped down with a quick hand and thrust the poor thing back in the bucket.
I worried that my Caltrans phonies would come running at my yelp, then worried because they didn’t. I spoke quickly so that if they were still listening they could hear me scolding Simon for his tricks, and asking where Monty and Miranda were. He said Miranda was prob’ly bringing pea soup to Paulie, but Monty was up at the pigsties cussin’ a blue streak with his wrenches spread all over.
“Isn’t that what got Paulie in trouble?” I asked. “Down there by himself?”
“He knows what he’s doing, which you can’t say for Paul Avalos all of the time. But Monty’s sure gonna get hard bit by the inspectors
after this. You want to drive on up there?” He nodded toward the back field, then set the bucket on the ground to hitch up his pants. “I promise, I won’t th’ow no more snakes on you. I can’t hardly believe I did that myself. I’d right now beat myself up if I wasn’t afraid of gettin’ hurt.”
“That’s okay. I’m taking off here in a minute.”
“Paulie, he used to say he couldn’t bring up the good avocados over the border ’cause they was quarantined since 1914 from the seed weevil. Always complaining about that, so he took to growing his own. Now yesterday, I hate to say it, but he looked like a big ol’ bowl of guacamole, dinn’t he?” Simon’s small face drew tighter from the cigarette smoke. He opened the truck door and put the blue bucket on the seat, then snapped a lid on. Reaching through the steering wheel, he plunged the key in the ignition and turned the radio on to something that sounded like reggae cowboy, then waved his wiry painted arm to me, Come on, come on.
There was no right-side mirror on Simon’s truck for me to see the Caltrans by, but I hoped they could see Simon’s pickup. The sky was burned clean with late May heat. Quick birds dipped over the fields of yellow fescue, timothy, and perennial rye.
“What’s your last name, Simon?”
“Legree.”
“No, really,” I said pleasantly. The bucket was at my left leg. On the floorboards was all sorts of litter.
“McGee,” he said, “Irish. You?”
“Irish.” Had he said Bolivian, I would have been that too. “Did Monty walk over?”
“Naw, we rode. Must’ve gone the back way for more tools,” he said.
“The back way where?”
“Avalos farm. They got more tools there than Sears at a fire sale. We’ll jest go yonder and see.” He picked up speed and rolled past the confinement building, taking the direction toward the mountains the white van had.
