by Tim Maleeny
It was Jerome’s turn to laugh. He blinked and realized he had tears in his eyes.
Larry pretended not to notice. “I think it’s been a long time since I liked my own reflection—sorry I’ve been such an asshole.”
Jerome stared straight ahead through the windshield. “I haven’t exactly been easy to live with.”
“No,” said Larry, “you haven’t.”
Jerome was thinking it was the longest conversation they’d ever had about their relationship, then realized it was the only one they’d ever had. But it was enough. He was relieved that Larry’s sudden surge of gayness hadn’t made him too chatty. As they turned onto their street he said, “We need a plan, bro.”
Larry smiled. “I’ve got one.”
“You do?” Jerome coasted to a stop in front of their building. “Shoot.”
Larry turned in his seat. “I don’t care about the money anymore, do you?”
Jerome started to object before he realized the first image that popped into his head was Tamara—not a visual of himself wearing a two-thousand dollar suit and shades, driving a vintage Caddy, which until yesterday had been one of his favorite fantasies. But he wanted to make sure he understood the question. “Is this like a double-jeopardy thing?”
Larry shook his head and grinned with the confidence of someone who realized his entire day had been a carefully delivered message, a road map to the rest of his life. “All this time we’ve been playing ball with Zorro, there’s been a cop living next door.”
“So?” asked Jerome.
“So why don’t we change teams?”
Chapter Fifty-four
Gus decided to change teams. Just like that, he waved across the net at Rod and told him to double up with Judy before the next set. Gus wanted to play alongside Kathy, see if they fared any better. Bottom line, he was tired of losing and had decided that Judy’s shitball serve was dragging him down.
The other three had played tennis with Gus long enough to know when he was in a mood, so nobody objected as they took their places around the court. But once the game started, Rod couldn’t help himself. He started talking trash.
Rod was pushing seventy and had a wicked serve. Tall and lanky with most of his hair still in place, in the original mousy color, he fancied himself a ladies man. Wore a fedora when he wasn’t playing tennis and cocked it whenever he saw a pretty lady, like he just waltzed off the silver screen like John Barrymore. Gus had caught him more than once making eyes at Gail but let it slide, figured they’d settle it on the court.
But lately Rod had started trash talking Gus on the court. For his part, Gus let that slide, too, the first few times. Figured Rod was suddenly confused about the difference between a gentleman’s game like tennis and a little league baseball game where you razzed the batter. Rod was one of those coasters who had never worked very hard and retired early, when he was sixty-five, so Gus figured Alzheimer’s had set in. But after a week of taking shit from across the net, Gus had had enough.
He’d seen Rod at the coffee shop, in the clubhouse, and he was the same as always. No signs of dementia. Alert, friendly, perfectly pleasant. Congenial, that was the word. Rod was one congenial guy. So Gus waited until after their usual set one day to ask congenial Rod what was his problem, why the sudden obnoxious banter?
“Gives me an edge,” said Rod, leaning in close enough for Gus to smell his aftershave. “You’ve been taking me for two games for every one I win, Gus.”
“That’s because I practice every day.”
“Been too long since I’ve won a set, no matter who I partner with, so I decided to change the playing field. Throw off your concentration. Think of it as a test of wills.”
“You’re serious.”
Rod smiled, his teeth looking at lot younger than he did. “Deadly.”
Gus stared at him, speechless, until he asked the only question he could think of.
“So you’re going to keep making an ass of yourself, shouting at me over the net?”
Rod nodded as if a brilliant stock tip had been shared between them. “Precisely, old friend. What do you have to say about that?”
“Blow me.”
Things had been a little tense between Gus and Rod ever since.
Gus got into position to serve. He bounced the ball a couple of times, then threw it high in the air. A perfect toss, the sun behind him. He was about to make contact when Rod shouted across the net.
“You tossed that ball like a lame, Gus. Your gout acting up?”
Gus lowered his racket, let the ball bounce, bounce, bounce next to his foot. He gave Rod a look, then picked up the ball and bounced it a few times, trying to regain his focus.
“You gonna serve or dribble, old man? This is tennis, not basketball.”
Gus glanced over the net at Judy, who looked appropriately embarrassed at Rod’s outburst even though she would be justified in being sore at Gus for changing teams. Judy had an eternally sunny disposition, even though she’d gone through a tough time during menopause when she decided she wanted to be a lesbian. Turns out most of the older lesbians in San Francisco were pissed off at men for one thing or another, probably deserved, but it gave their sexuality a decidedly activist edge. Far too angry for Judy, who was definitely a glass is half full kind of person. By contrast, she found that the younger lesbians were happy as clams about their Sapphic lifestyle. So Judy started hanging out with them, but then she realized that she was at least twenty if not thirty years older than her new friends, which made her feel like a dirty old lady. After five lonely years, she decided maybe she was straight, after all, and last May got married to the water aerobics instructor, a thoroughly nice guy who Gus always thought was gay.
“Hey Gus, you need a Geritol to get you going?” Rod was on a roll, and Gus wondered briefly if he’d stayed up the night before, writing these zingers down.
He shifted his gaze to Kathy, his new doubles partner. She was looking over her shoulder at him, her eyebrows raised, her expression saying she’d apologize for Rod if she thought it would make any difference. Kathy was sweet as syrup, the youngest in the group at fifty-eight, cursed with a backside so enormous that Gus could only see half the court whenever she took the net. He smiled at her as if to say don’t worry about it. Then he got an idea.
Actually, it was less of an idea than an impulse. He looked at Rod standing dead center at the foot of the box, right where Gus was meant to serve, and he visualized the bastard wearing his fedora on the court. Turning to an imaginary crowd and waving, flashing that Pepsodent smile. Gail sitting in the crowd, charmed despite herself. Waving back.
The mental image got his blood boiling. Nobody messes with my girl.
That made him think of the cop down the hall. Gus had nothing against him, really, except he’d seen him twice now leaving Gail’s apartment. Guy wasn’t bad looking, and he had a way about him. Gail was a sucker for real men, that’s how Gus had caught her eye. And just when he thought they were settling down, along comes this young buck with notions of becoming her back door man. No matter which was he turned, Gus was under siege.
Gus was suddenly the bull staring down Bugs Bunny, steam shooting from his nostrils, his eyes blood red. But he was Bugs, too. Cool, calculating. Smart as a hare.
He called out to Rod, no sound of anger or irritation in his voice.
“Hey Rod, you actually think you’re gonna return this serve?”
Rod looked up, nonplussed. Clearly he never expected a rebuttal to his taunts. Gus in his tennis whites was too proper to play the verbal hardball Rod had been pitching across the net. This must be a stalling tactic.
“Yeah…yeah, I do Gus.” Keep it short and snappy, thought Rod. Keep the pressure on.
Gus wore an expression that said he was going to ace Rod on the first serve. Rod squared his stance, legs wide. Straddling the middle of the box, in position to cut left or right. Just what Gus expected.
Gus threw the ball high in the air but made no attempt to hit i
t. Instead he stepped over the line and bolted toward the net, yanking a second ball from his tennis shorts and tossing it into the air, tracking its curve and timing it just right, his racket arcing through the air to find the ball at its zenith. By the time his racket smacked against the ball, Gus had cut the distance between himself and Rod by half the court, which gave Rod almost no room to maneuver and little time to react. Before he could dodge right or left, the ball hit Rod square in the crotch.
Gus thought it sounded like a hundred of those plastic packing bubbles popping all at once. Rod wasn’t the only one with a wicked serve.
Judy gasped and Kathy dropped her racket. Gus gave both ladies an apologetic grin, then turned and headed toward the showers. He’d played enough tennis for one day and felt great. It was amazing how even a little exercise got your endorphins going and calmed you down.
As he walked away he half expected to her Rod hurling some verbal abuse his way, but none came. Rod was still yelling in pain at the top of his lungs.
Chapter Fifty-five
When Buster started yelling, Sam found an abandoned parking lot and drove over the speed bumps at thirty miles an hour. It took him two full circuits before his passenger settled down, at which point Sam pulled into the far corner of the lot and parked.
“Just need to make a phone call,” he said as he revved the engine in warning. “Try to keep it down, OK?” Grabbing Buster’s cell phone from the seat, he toggled through the numbers until he came to the last letter of the alphabet. A capital letter Z sat lonely at the end of the address book, no other incriminating letters necessary. Sam called up the numbers and studied them. There was no way to be sure, but the last four digits had that redundant pizza-parlor signature of a cell phone, not a house phone. Besides, he didn’t think Zorro would have a landline phone—or even a cell phone contract, for that matter. Dealers bought prepaid phones and trashed them every few days.
Sam set down Buster’s phone and fished his own from his jacket. It took him a minute to find the number he wanted. Sam counted eight rings before a gruff voice said, “Who is this?”
Sam smiled to himself. “That’s a bullshit, question, Maury, coming from you—my name came up on that fancy caller ID thingy of yours.” He held the phone away from his ear, waited a minute, and then said, “Call it whatever you want. I’m gonna call it a thingy as long as you keep busting my balls.” The berating resumed as Sam made faces at himself in the rearview mirror, mimicking the imagined expressions of his former colleague. When the rant subsided, Sam responded by saying, “Retired? No, it was a leave of absence. I’m back on the job.” Sam studied his face while he talked, surprised at how easily he lied. “I need to find a cell phone, don’t know if it’s moving, but I’m pretty sure it’s in the city.”
Sam read off the number from Buster’s phone and waited while Maury Korovich, evil genius of the SFPD technical support group, sat somewhere in a windowless office on Bryant Street. Sam tried to visualize the room but the effort brought forth a sense-memory of stale body odor and grilled cheese sandwiches.
When Maury came back on the line, Sam said, “I don’t need to keep him on the phone for three minutes or any of that Hollywood crap, right?” Once again the phone had to be held at arm’s length as an angry diatribe spilled into the car. “No, I don’t watch CSI or 24,” said Sam, trying to sound apologetic but doubting his own sincerity. Before he hung up, he added, “Call me back on this number, the one I called you on.”
Sam looked at Buster’s phone, the letter Z glowing blue and cold in the dark interior of the car. Dusk had swept over the city and brought enough fog to drop the temperature ten or fifteen degrees. Sam told himself he was just feeling the chill. He clenched the muscles in his jaw a few times before he pressed the button marked Send.
Sam held the phone gingerly to his right ear but almost dropped it when a male voice answered by saying, “Sí?” It was only a word, a single syllable, but the almost forgotten voice was all too familiar. Sam bit his tongue as he jammed his thumb against the End button and banished the voice back to Hell.
Thirty seconds later his own phone began to ring.
Chapter Fifty-six
Twisted Oliver picked up the phone, stared at it, then put it back in its cradle without dialing. He sat quietly for several minutes, wondering if he was going crazy.
Scowling, he shuffled through the papers on his desk before returning his watery gaze to his computer screen. Maybe he submitted the request to the lab incorrectly. He scanned the top of the glowing spreadsheet for the codes that indicated which tests would be run, then flicked his gaze to a sheet of paper clipped to the front of a manila folder. He compared names, dates, numbers.
He’d done this four times already, but Oliver believed in being thorough. He’d run the whole gamut of tests for Sam, as requested, and even told the lab to put this blood work at the top of priority jobs. He punched the keyboard and squinted through his glasses at the scientific names that appeared on the screen in a new window.
Well, well.
If you knew where to look, there were many flags for cause of death, and almost all could be seen in the blood. Oliver liked to think of the bloodstream as a person’s chemical record—not just their overall health but their stress level, diet, even state of mind. Every emotional state had corresponding blood chemistry, from the soothing endorphins of exercise to the pheromones of sex or the adrenaline of exertion and stress. Even the depression of a suicide or the blind rage of homicide left their mark, if you knew how to find them.
As he read down the list, Oliver focused on the inconsistencies, chemical compounds out of sync with the alleged cause of death. There were two or three, but his eyes kept tripping on one in particular.
Prunus Dulcis.
“What the hell are you doing there?” he asked aloud, tapping the nail of his right index finger against the screen. When the screen didn’t answer, Oliver sighed and looked back at his notes.
Severe impact trauma. Adrenaline signature. Blood oxygen saturation.
Oliver turned his gaze once again toward the phone.
It’s not your job to figure it out, he told himself. Just report the facts and move on—there are plenty of corpses waiting for you.
The thought of handling dead flesh roused Oliver from his torpor, and this time he dialed. After four rings he heard the click of an answering machine, followed by Sam’s measured tone. When the beep came, Oliver spoke clearly and precisely.
“Hello, Sam? I ran those tests on your landlord, and I might have found something…”
Chapter Fifty-seven
Flan spotted the cop from across the street and knew something had gone terribly wrong.
Flan’s real name was Humberto, but since no one had called him that since his mother died, he thought of himself by the name given to him by Zorro’s crew. There was something about criminal life that made nicknames an automatic part of the shared language, a shorthand way of identifying someone without all the social niceties or bullshit of civilian life. Someone called it as they saw it, and if the name stuck, that label was good enough for everyone.
Flan was named for a crème caramel served in Mexico, a slightly yellowish custard with a thin crust and a sweet filling, which he ate in such enormous quantities that his skin had taken on both the texture and vaguely cloying scent of the popular dessert. Flan weighed in at a respectable three hundred and twenty pounds, most of it extraneous fat that began at his chin and rolled like the breaking tide when he walked, and every day he thanked The Good Lord Jesús that he wasn’t born Italian. He couldn’t stand going through life known as Humberto the Chin.
The cop parked his convertible in front of a hydrant and scanned the street before wrapping his knuckles on the trunk and jaywalking toward the restaurant. The cop’s gaze swept smoothly across the front door and didn’t linger, but Flan knew he’d been made. He was hard to miss and had no illusions about his appearance—too fat for the NFL and too ugly and mean-looking to be wa
sting his time sitting in some cubicle trying to get his sausage-fingers to type on a keyboard. Just as Flan knew the guy in the sportcoat and jeans with the broad shoulders was a cop—even though he’d never seen him before—the cop would know Flan was Zorro’s muscle. The only question was how to play it.
Flan decided to be sneaky. He quickly reached into his jacket and pulled out a cigarette and lighter, cupping his hand around the flame and looking as nonchalant as a three-hundred pound man can manage on short notice. Though his blood sugar was low, his brain seemed to be working just fine as Flan reasoned that the cop wasn’t going to do anything rash. After all, he was a cop, not a triggerman for some rival gang.
Flan decided to let the cop go inside the restaurant rather than brace him at the door, then follow him as he navigated his way to Zorro’s table. When he least expected it, Flan would come up behind him. Flan was surprisingly light on his feet for a big man and felt he could easily manage this maneuver, the idea being to intimidate the cop with his sudden appearance, as if he’d just materialized out of not-so-thin air. The cop would lose his nerve, Zorro would gain the upper hand in their exchange, and Flan would be rewarded appropriately.
Flan feigned a coughing attack as the cop brushed past him and headed through the front door and down the short hallway toward the reservations desk. He was about to follow when the cop took a sudden left, opened the door to the men’s room, and disappeared.
Caray! This was going to throw off his timing. Flan counted to sixty, thinking that was plenty of time to take a piss, but when the cop didn’t emerge, Flan figured the prissy bastard was washing his hands, so he kept counting until he hit a hundred.
Nothing. Flan started counting again as he tried to remember the layout of the men’s room. Three stalls, two urinals, two sinks but no window. So there was no way the cop was going to sneak out, even if he made had a change of heart and decided to run. In that case he’d just come back through the front door.
