by Rick Riordan
White gave me a look I couldn’t read. Sadness.
Maybe even pity.
“As I said, my boy, some cages are better left unrattled."
We studied one another. Maybe that was when I had the first glimmering of understanding about where it was all going. Maybe that’s why I chose not to push him any further.
When I left, Guy White was listening to Emery’s rundown of their afternoon schedule--benefits, cocktail parties, an award for good citizenship from a local non-profit. Emery was cleaning another gun as he talked.
Guy White was staring out the sunny windows at his gardens, smiling a little sadly now.
57
When I looked out my living room window the next morning, Ralph Arguello’s maroon Lincoln sat in front of Number 90. When I came up to the driver’s window the black glass rolled down and mota smoke rolled out. Ralph grinned up at me like a happily stoned diablo.
“Do I know you?" I said.
“Get in."
I didn’t ask why. We drove into Monte Vista on Woodlawn, past rows of dying palm trees that leaned over the boulevard like they hadn’t quite woken up yet. Mansions squatted next to shacks. The signs and storefronts gradually turned bilingual. Finally Ralph looked across at me.
“I’m meeting a guy at eight-thirty," he said.
“Yeah?"
He nodded. “Business deal, vato. New territory."
We pulled up in front of a dark blue building that had been plopped down in the middle of an acre of asphalt on the corner of Blanco and French. The yellow back-lit sign in front promised "Guns N Loans." At least that’s what it used to say before half the letters had been broken out with rocks.
A tall Anglo man in a wrinkled black suit was waiting at the door, smiling. From the bruises on his face I wondered if he’d been pelted at the same time as his sign. Most of the marks were fading into yellow around his cheeks and neck, but he still had a blue-black knot the size of a pecan over his left eyebrow. The smile just made him look more grotesque.
“Mr. Arguello," the tall man said as we got out of the car. When he swallowed, his Adam’s apple went up a few inches and stayed that way. He shook Ralph’s hand a little too enthusiastically.
"Lamar," said Ralph. “Let’s see it."
Lamar fumbled with some keys. He unlocked two rows of burglary bars first, then the main door. The inside of the pawnshop smelled like cigars and dust. Grimy glass cases filled with guns, stereo parts, and jewelry made a “U" around the back walls. A few beat-up guitars and saxophones had been lynched from the ceiling.
Ralph inhaled, as if to get the full atmosphere of the place into his lungs. Lamar smiled nervously, waiting for his approval.
"Books," said Ralph.
Lamar nodded and went to open the office. I plucked a string on one of the convicted Yamaha guitars. It rattled loosely, like a Slinky.
Ralph looked at me. “Well?"
"Sure," I said, "some lace curtains, a loveseat or two. I can see it."
Ralph grinned. "Ethan Allan, maybe."
“Levitt’s."
“I’m sold. You can do all my shops, vato."
Lamar came back and spent a few minutes with Ralph over the books. I looked at the guns, then watched the traffic in and out of the flop house across the street for a while. Finally Ralph shook hands again and Lamar handed over the keys. Lamar started to leave but on his way out he looked at me, hesitated, then came over. He was so nervous his Adam’s apple disappeared above his jawline. The yellow bruises turned pink.
“I just—" he started. "Hey, man, it just wasn’t necessary. That’s all I got to say."
Then he left.
I looked at Ralph for an explanation. His eyes floated behind his round lenses, impossible to read. The smile didn’t change.
“Loco," Ralph said. “I guess he thought you were somebody else, man."
“I guess."
We went back to Ralph’s new office, a cheaply paneled closet with a window AC unit, two metal folding chairs, and an unfinished particle—board desk. Ralph sat down and started looking through the drawers.
“You always do property deals in under five minutes with no paperwork?"
Ralph shrugged. “Details, vato. That’s for later."
He fished out a half-empty bottle of Wild Irish Rose and a few .38 rounds, then a stack of ragged manila folders. When he was satisfied there was nothing else, he sat back in his chair and smiled at me.
"Okay," he said. “So tell me about it."
“What do you want first? You’ve got your choice of three murders, blackmail, several pissed-off policemen—"
Ralph shook his head. “I know all that. I mean the Chinese woman. Tell me about her."
I stared at him for a few seconds. I guess I’d forgotten who I was talking to. Ralph would’ve heard just about everything that had happened to me over the last week. He’d know about the dead bodies, the heat, the people I’d talked to. But the question about Maia took me off guard.
I must’ve looked pretty irritated. Ralph laughed.
“Come on, wzto. All I want to know is this--are you still looking for Lillian or aren’t you? ’Cause if you’re not, that’s cool. I can take you home and save us some trouble."
"Some trouble?"
He shrugged.
"And if I’m still looking?"
He thumbed through the stack of manila folders. The action sent puffs of dust up in front of his face. He kept looking at me. “Is that a yes?"
"That’s a yes."
He shook his head, like I’d made a bad business decision. "Then this is between you and me. A couple of people came up to me over the last two days, telling me about this guy that turned up dead, this pendejo Eddie Moraga who took Lillian that Sunday."
"You’ve been sitting on information for the last two days?" I tried to keep my voice even.
Ralph leaned forward and spread his hands on the desk, palms up. "Hey, vato, every time I come to see you, I find the Man there. Or you’re with him. It kind of cuts down on the quality time I want to spend with you, you know?"
I nodded for him to go on.
"Okay, so first I talk to this guy, old friend of Eddie’s. He’s pretty shaken up about it all being in the papers Friday morning. So fifty dollars later and he says, yeah, he talked to Eddie on Monday night. He was all alone at this bar down on Culebra, talking about this hot date he’d had the night before. A date, vato, like this rich white girl would go out with him."
I couldn’t talk. I was remembering a rapist I’d brought down for a client of Terrence & Goldman two years ago, a rapist who’d talked about his "dates" with his victims, two of whom later turned up in garbage cans.
Ralph must’ve thought that through too. He’d been on the streets long enough. He looked at my expression.
"Hey, man," he said. He probably wanted to say something consoling. He shifted in his chair. "Like I said, if you were with this other lady, I could have just walked from this, vato. This isn’t easy shit—"
"Keep going. "
For a minute we both stared at the bottle of Wild Rose, almost tempted. Then Ralph sighed. “Yeah, anyway, so Eddie was talking about coming into some money from this lady. I don’t know, man, maybe not like she was paying him, maybe he was just making a joke, like he was getting paid to take her away for somebody else. Anyway, Eddie said that this lady was a fire-eater, like you couldn’t turn your back on her or she’d either steal your shit or kick you in the balls. That’s what he said. And check this out, vato: He said they went to this place he knew, a construction site he worked at, real intimate?
I shook my head. “There’s only a few thousand of those, Ralph."
“No, man," he said. “I’m not finished?
“What else?"
“Like I said, some other people talked to me. Some people who like a low profile. Keep that in mind."
I thought about Ralph and his .357 Magnum. “Low profile like you?"
"More than me, vato. These people, the
y’re in the car business, you know?"
“As in chop shop? S.A., second highest auto theft rate in the country?"
Ralph shrugged. "I wouldn’t know, vato. But I wouldn't tell these people they’re in second place, man. It might offend them."
“Okay."
Ralph nodded. “So anyway, I ask around about this green Chevy Eddie’s supposed to drive. His friend tells me it’s a ’65, fully restored. So I think, sure, the police are just going to find this Chevy sitting around on the streets after a week."
“So your friends just happened to come across it, strictly legit. "
“They were about to paint it white, man." Ralph’s frown told me he didn’t approve of the color choice.
“So I told them to wait awhile, leave it like it is."
“And how was that?"
He looked at me, grinning again. Then he took out a brown paper bag from his pocket and poured the contents onto the desk. White powder. I didn’t even have time to misread it as cocaine before Ralph shook his head.
“No, vato, check it out."
I looked closer.
"It was all over the wheel casings, man. The outside was washed off but it was caked on thick inside. You know that rainstorm that came through last week?"
I smelled it. I tasted it. It seemed to be powdered rock.
"I give."
Ralph shook his head, disappointed.
"Oh,. man, " he said, “you didn’t live there. You didn’t go to Heights with your shoes covered in it. We lived in it, vato. Mother of God, my old man’s lungs collapsed because of this shit. It’s lime powder, man, pure lime."
It took a minute for that to register.
“As in the stuff they make cement from," I said. "Okay, vato," he said, trying to lead me to what he was thinking.
“Couldn’t that be any construction site?"
Ralph laughed and started repacking his desk.
"You goddamn white collars. No, man, who mixes cement on site? That much lime only comes from the factory."
As usual, the answer was something under my nose, something I’d lived next to most of my life. When I put it together I almost couldn’t believe how ridiculous the idea was, which probably meant it was the truth. Ralph and I looked at each other. God knows I didn’t have much to smile about. All I’d probably learned was where to find the body of the woman I thought I loved. But I looked at Ralph grinning like a fiend and I started smiling anyway.
"It’s pretty slim, man," I said.
"It ain’t goin’ to get any fatter, man," Ralph said. "You got to jump on it."
"Goddamn Cementville," I said.
Ralph grinned. "There’s no place like home."
58
The sign on the fence outside the factory said " Sheff Construction—Keep Out."
There was no movement inside the barbed wire. No trucks, no lights in the broken windows of the old factory. Ralph and I sat in his car for a while and just watched while the Cadillacs went by, old men going to the golf course, women going to shop Albertson’s and SteinMart. The new subdivision, Lincoln Heights, had its own private security, and after the same patrolman drove by us twice, real slow, Ralph and I decided it was time to move on.
“Tonight," I said. “I can’t do anything until then without being seen by half the North Side. Neither could they."
Ralph followed the security car with his eyes until it was out of sight. "How you know who ‘they’ is, man?"
"One way to find out."
As if he were reading my mind, Ralph reached into his backseat and produced a cell phone. I dialed a number I had memorized from Lillian’s datebook and got an answering machine.
“I’m thinking about visiting Cementville," I said. Then I hung up.
Ralph started the Lincoln and pulled it into traffic.
"You got the right person, they got to move her tonight," he said. "Or at least they got to look."
“Yeah."
"You want some backup?"
I started to say no, then I decided not to be hasty.
“I’ll call you."
Ralph nodded, then handed me a card.
“Two numbers," he said. "Cell phone and beeper."
“A beeper?"
Ralph grinned. “Hey, vato, the doctor is in."
When Ralph dropped me at home it was early afternoon. Several hours until dark, when I could actually do something. Rather than go crazy watching Robert Johnson run circles around the living room, I took my sword and walked down the street to the edge of Brackenridge Park.
The cicadas were the only thing stirring. Nobody was stupid enough to walk over a block in this heat, much less exercise in it. I crossed Broadway and jogged over to the Witte Museum where the old iron gates of the Alligator Gardens were hanging off their hinges. One of the less successful tourist attractions in San Antonio, the Gardens had seen ticket sales to the public schools drop off dramatically after the alligators had eaten a few hands off the trainers. Then the place had faded into obscurity and eventually closed. The gates were easy to climb, though, and the dried basin where the gators had been kept made a perfect shady tai chi surface. I did an hour and a half of high stance until I was sweating and about to pass out from the heat. Then I rested for a few minutes and did another two hours of sword. By the time the sun started going down, I had cleared my mind and worked the kinks out of my body. I knew what the plan was.
I bought some provisions from the Lincoln Heights Albertson’s, then I drove down to Vandiver and traded cars with my mother. More or less. Actually she’d taken her Volvo somewhere so I had to leave the keys to the VW in her mailbox and hot-wire Jess’s truck. With luck he’d need to run for beer between TV shows and would find it missing long before I could get it back to him. My evening was starting to look up.
Jess’s monstrous black Ford must’ve known I was not wearing the obligatory Stetson and boots required to ride such a beast. It bucked and kicked all the way down Nacodoches until I pulled it over into the scrub brush on Basse, just behind the old freight entrance to Cementville.
“Whoa, Nelly," I told the truck.
The engine shuddered resentfully and died. just as well. Another few blocks like that and I would’ve had to shoot it anyway.
I waited outside the fence for a couple of hours. What I was lookin for didn’t materialize. I ate an Albertson’s deli sandwich. I had some terrible Italian bottled water. On this side of the old factory there were fewer high-priced new homes, which meant there were fewer nervous security guards. After dark, traffic died down to almost nothing. Nobody seemed to care about me and my semi-stolen truck.
It was full dark when the Sheffs’ cherry-red Mustang passed me and slowed down a quarter mile up the road, right outside the old loading docks. I couldn’t see the driver very well when he got out. He unchained the gates, got back in the Mustang, and drove through.
I was about to drive back to the Albertson’s pay phone when I noticed the cargo holder by the stick shift. No chance, I thought. I opened it anyway and found Jess’s deep dark yuppie secret. The real cowboys would’ve laughed him off the open range if they’d known. Suddenly liking Jess more than I cared to admit, I picked up this cellular phone and dialed Ralph’s number.
He picked up almost immediately.
"Annie get your gun," I said.
The line was silent for a moment. “Give me ten minutes." Ralph hung up.
Exactly eleven minutes later the maroon U-boat slid to a stop behind the truck. Ralph stepped up to the shotgun window and leaned his head into the cab. "Nice wheels, vaquero. You chewing Red Man, yet?"
“The gun rack wouldn’t fit on my VW."
"No shit."
Ralph had changed into work clothes—Levi’s and a loose black shirt, untucked. I didn’t need to ask what he was carrying underneath. I pointed out the red Mustang up ahead, now dark and silent just inside the chain-link fence. Ralph nodded.
"Meet you up there," he said. Then he disappeared. By the time I got out of t
he truck and followed the fence up to the gate, Ralph was crouched in a patch of wild cilantro. He had his straight razor in one hand. In his other hand were four severed tire valve stems. He held them up, grinned, then tossed them through the fence. We watched the old factory for a while—the weed-covered shipping yard, the storage silos, the grimy windows with most of the glass broken out. The only thing moving were the fireflies. They were everywhere tonight, pulsing off and on in the hackberry bushes around the fence like defective Christmas lights. Ralph nudged my arm. We watched the yellow cone of a flashlight, aimed from the factory roof, slide up the right side of one of the huge smokestacks and illuminate a metal rung ladder that led up to the wraparound catwalk just below the red “O” in ALAMO. The light clicked off abruptly.
I could hear Ralph swallow. "There’s a small maintenance room up there where they wired up the sign," he said. “I think."
His voice sounded like it was closing up all of a sudden. I couldn’t see much in the dark, but I could’ve sworn he was turning pale.
"Ralphas?"
“Heights, man. I can’t handle them."
There was a quivery tone to his voice that might’ve been funny under other circumstances, like Ralph trying to imitate somebody who was really scared. But you don’t laugh at your friend’s phobias. At least not when your friend is holding a straight razor.
"Okay," I said. “We’ll deal with it when we get there."
"Shit, vato, I didn’t think—"
"Forget it, Ralphas. Any other chained gates between her and there, you think?"
Ralph showed me a small but wickedly sharp set of metal cutters. His grin came back slowly.
"Not anymore, vato."
Minutes later we were crossing the train tracks under the shadow of the factory walls. The ground was littered with dried globs of cement, old railroad ties, scrap metal, dry sage grass—none of it conducive to sneaking around in the dark. It was my turn to be embarrassed. When I stumbled the second time Ralph had to grab me by the shirt to keep me from sliding face first into a quarry pit. The sound of the loosened gravel skittering into the hole echoed off the building like a standing ovation. We froze. No sounds, no light from above. Ralph’s childhood memories came through. He found a set of metal doors around the side of the building that were standing wide open. What moonlight there was fell in a square over the bottom steps of a spiral stairwell. We went inside.
