12 Bliss Street

by Martha Conway

  “Oh my God, oh my God,” Carmen kept saying as she watched. “This is what I did for him?”

  “You did not kill this girl,” Nicola said.

  “Oh my God in heaven,” said Carmen.

  She drank her coffee and watched it for a second time. They looked at every sequence. It was Carmen who noticed a small item by the foot of the bed, seen only once, very briefly. A jar? A wine glass? A glass, they decided. Lou said the woman was definitely drugged; she had probably died from an overdose.

  “I mean you can see she’s dying the whole time,” he said. “Maybe he slipped something into a drink. Or maybe he gave her pills, and she used a glass of water to wash them down.”

  It was hard to tell the exact moment of death. But clearly the girl was gone by the end.

  “I can’t look at this anymore,” Carmen said after the fourth round.

  But Nicola felt both scared and hardened—she was determined to watch the video until she figured things out. The wineglass was important. Was it important? If it wasn’t important, then she had nothing.

  She handed Carmen a pad of paper and a pen.

  “Okay. Then write down everything about this man,” she told her. “His name, anything he owns, what kind of car he drives—anything you can think of.”

  Carmen took the pen. Adam Lightwell. Age—mid fifties? Dark hair, dark eyes, drives a Toyota station wagon. Nicola went to the cupboard and opened a box of pretzels. The kitchen brightened as sunlight pushed through the fog. Already it was past noon. Carmen had pulled her hair into a ponytail and was wearing a T-shirt and a pair of Nicola’s sweat pants. Nicola realized she had never gone for her walk.

  “We should break for lunch,” she said, eating a pretzel. “I mean go out somewhere.”

  “I don’t want to go out,” Carmen said. She handed Nicola the list.

  “This is it?”

  “This is all I can think of.”

  Nicola read through it. All of a sudden her left hand dropped to her side. “Wait a minute,” she said. “He owns the Golden Gate Arms?”

  “With my brother.”

  “He’s maybe five, five eleven, with dark hair? He wears a silver chainlink bracelet and has a birthmark on his neck?”

  “You know him?”

  Nicola turned to Lou, who was sitting on the counter. “He’s the one at the motel. Remember? The one we saw by the wharf.”

  It was Chorizo. Why hadn’t she made the connection before? He was the motel owner, or at least a partial owner, but at any rate not a guest like she had assumed or whatever it is you call people who go to places like that. Johns? Or in his case.… And, Jesus, he had asked her out. He had asked her to go out with him, alone; he wanted her to take off work and go off with him that day. That Friday. The day that … Nicola’s eyes lost focus and she looked down at the list until it became just a sheet with lined patterns. Carmen and Lou were quiet, watching her. A car honked outside, and the door to the Russian’s house slammed shut, but Nicola didn’t hear it; she didn’t hear anything. She was thinking hard—something was coming together.

  “Oh my God,” she said suddenly. “I know who the video girl is.”

  * * *

  The phone rang and someone knocked at the door at almost the exact same time. Carmen jumped. “Who’s that?”

  “Carmen,” Nicola said, “if you’re going to jump every time the door bell rings.…”

  “I don’t want to see anybody,” Carmen said, looking at the door behind them. The window blind was still drawn; they could see nothing. “Please, send them away. Please.”

  “Carmen,” Nicola said.

  “My brother is dead,” Carmen said.

  Nicola looked at her. The phone stopped ringing. “Let me just look through the peephole,” Nicola said. A moment later she turned back.

  “Who is it?”

  “It’s my ex-husband,” Nicola said. “And his new buddy. Believe me, no one to worry about.”

  “Don’t let them in! Please.”

  “Carmen,” Nicola started, but Lou interrupted. “It’s all right, Nicola. Carmen, listen to me. Don’t take this the wrong way, but why don’t you take a shower. Take a long, long, long shower. Or take a bath. Bring a book in with you. Stay there a while.”

  “That’s a good idea,” Nicola said.

  “Run a bath, lock the door, stay in the bathroom. If you want we won’t tell anyone you’re here. We’ll say we’re letting the water get hot or something if they notice.”

  “Which they won’t,” Nicola said.

  “My brother is dead,” Carmen said again, twisting the ring on her thumb.

  “I know, sweetheart,” Lou said. “But Nicola has to act normal too. She can’t hide out with you.”

  The doorbell rang again.

  Nicola put a hand on her arm. “We won’t tell anyone you’re here unless you say it’s okay.”

  “Well,” Carmen said. She touched her forehead. “Okay. Wait, I didn’t mean okay, I meant okay.”

  “I know.”

  “I just meant okay.”

  “I know.”

  Nicola got a clean towel and gave Carmen her new robe from Victoria’s Secret, and when she heard the bathroom door lock she turned back to the door.

  “Well, well,” she said as she opened it.

  “What the hell took you so long?”

  Scooter walked in, followed by Dave. They both looked like they hadn’t slept all night—Scooter was wearing the same clothes he had on yesterday. With Dave it was hard to tell.

  “Hey, boys,” Nicola said.

  Scooter stopped, seeing Lou. “And who’s this?”

  But Lou was still watching Nicola.

  “Listen, don’t keep me in suspense any longer,” he said. “Who is the girl in the video?”

  “It’s the girl from the flyer,” she told him.

  “What flyer?” Lou asked.

  “What girl?” Scooter said. “What flyer?” He looked at Lou. “And who are you? Wait, you must be the loan, uh, guy.”

  “I’m Lou,” Lou said, jumping down from the counter. He held out his hand.

  Nicola introduced them quickly. “The video girl is the girl on the flyer,” she explained, “the missing girl flyer from the café where I first met Chorizo.”

  “Who’s Chorizo? Why the hell would someone be named after a sausage?” Dave asked.

  “Show them the video,” Lou suggested.

  “Shouldn’t you be in school?” she asked Dave.

  “I called in sick,” he said.

  “Today’s the day,” Lou commented.

  Nicola set up the video again. “Christ, I’m hungry,” she said. “I’ll show this once and then I really have to eat.”

  But as the video loaded yet again there was another knock at the door; it was Davette, carrying a bag of deli sandwiches.

  “You are an angel,” Nicola told her, opening the door.

  “I tried to call from the road,” Davette said. “I decided to just skip fifth period.”

  * * *

  They turned off the kitchen lights. The colors on the computer seemed overly bright, commanding attention. Still, Scooter seemed to be watching Lou more than the video.

  “She must have been faking,” Dave said at the end. But his voice sounded uncertain. He looked at Davette. “She’s not really dead, right?”

  “She wasn’t faking,” said Lou.

  “That’s right, you’re the loan shark, you must see dead bodies all the time,” Scooter said. “That’s like your business.”

  Nicola shot Lou a look. “Really?”

  “Really, no,” he said. “We’re small time. On the verge of unsuccessful, actually. Dead bodies—well, that’s way beyond our league.”

  Scooter scoffed. “Right.”

  “And I’m basically the errand boy anyway. I do some research, I tell my uncle what I find. Sometimes he sends me out if there’s a problem, but only the relatively tame ones.”

  “He sent you to deal with me,” Sc
ooter pointed out.

  “Exactly,” Lou said.

  They were all standing around the table except for Davette, who was sitting. Lou turned to get more coffee. There were small lines of wrinkles along the back of his shirt.

  Nicola pulled out a chair but didn’t sit down. “Anyway, you can see now how important this is,” she said. “That video was made by a man named Mehmet Pamuk—at least, that’s the name he gave me. He also goes by Adam Lightwell, and I myself call him Chorizo for reasons too uninteresting to explain. Anyway, he tried to pick me up in a café last Friday afternoon but instead he picked up this poor girl, the one you just watched die on the video. I recognized her from the missing-girl poster that the owner of the café put up. I’m going to go to the police, but also we should make some plans.”

  “Are you taking your computer with you?” Scooter asked.

  “Why?”

  Scooter looked at Dave. “We’ve come up with our own plan,” he said. “I didn’t know about this … about all this you were doing, but I think I can see a way to dovetail our two projects.”

  “Our two projects?” Nicola asked.

  Scooter and Dave sat down at the table and Scooter took out a ragged piece of paper from his pocket and smoothed it.

  “I didn’t know there were two projects,” Nicola said.

  “The dog racing, remember?” Dave told her.

  “I thought we shelved the dog racing.”

  Dave took the paper from Scooter. He had a sulky expression on his face and his upper lip needed a shave.

  “Scooter and I have been hunting around on the Internet. We found those racing sites, remember? Well, we definitely found a way to make some money, enough money so that you can find a new apartment, Davette can take her class this summer, and I can get the hell out of San Francisco. We have a new theory.”

  Nicola looked at him. “A new dog racing theory.”

  Davette shook her head and said, “Dave.”

  “Wait, hear me out. It’s based on a tip we found on the Internet—a chart you can use to beat the odds, which basically looks at weight, averages, percentages—I forget what all. We have it loaded into my computer but Scooter was thinking we could run it on yours, too. I’m gonna design a program that automatically downloads racing stats every day to feed to the chart. Do you want to see how much we made last night?”

  Scooter grinned.

  “Almost four thousand dollars,” he said, and showed Nicola the paper. It had some figures written down, nothing very legible. “I was hoping we could borrow your computer and do twice as well.”

  “We hit ten out of the last thirteen trifectas that we played,” Dave said. “And that was only in, what, six hours?”

  “I think five,” Scooter said.

  “Five hours. That’s like a thousand dollars an hour.”

  “Eight hundred dollars an hour,” Nicola corrected.

  “Oh, yeah? And how much do you make an hour?” Dave sneered.

  “Okay, okay,” Nicola said. She looked at Lou—he was standing by the refrigerator now, drinking coffee, saying nothing. Probably wisely. “It’s great that you, uh, made some money last night, but I don’t want to go any farther with this. I’m not interested in betting.”

  Dave tugged impatiently on his T-shirt. “Listen, you’re not listening,” he said petulantly. “We can solve all your problems!”

  “I don’t think you can, Dave,” Nicola said. “Not by just getting some money, you can’t.”

  “You are so naive,” Dave said.

  “Maybe.”

  “Dave,” Lou said. “If you want to help, maybe you could go with Nicola to the police. Bring the computer for her.”

  “I’m not her lackey!” Dave told him. “I’m not computer-bearer boy! Scooter and I come up with this great angle and you guys are too … too weak to use it! You gotta have some guts! You gotta have balls! Jesus.”

  “You’re right, Dave,” Nicola said. “I don’t have balls.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Also, I’m cheap. I hate losing money.”

  “But this is what we’re trying to tell you! You can’t go wrong!”

  “Maybe afterward, when this is over. But right now I need you and Davette to find some more information on Chorizo.”

  “Hold on,” Dave said. “I’m not going to put off the dog chart. I need the money to get to Nevada. Maybe afterward,” he sneered, imitating her.

  Nicola looked at him for a long moment, trying to decide what to do. His face looked young and soft, and his hardened, angry expression seemed like a very thin mask. “Okay,” she finally said. “I get it. Well, I guess … I’m sorry but, look, I can’t pay you to keep doing that.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “You’re fired,” she told him.

  “I’m not fired, you never hired me! Well maybe you did hire me but you can’t fire me.”

  “A parting of ways, then,” Nicola said gently.

  “I do not believe this. You know what? I’m gone. I’m out of this party. But not because you so-called said you’re fired. Because I need to do my thing. My thing. Come on, Dave, let’s get the hell out of here,” he said, glancing over at Davette.

  “Davette,” Davette corrected. She was sitting very still.

  “Dave, Davette, whatever,” Dave said. “Let’s go.”

  She didn’t look at him. “I’m not going,” she said. “I’m staying.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah, I’m kinda with Nicola on this. I just don’t think betting on a couple of dogs is going to help that girl on the video there.”

  “Don’t you get it? Nothing is going to help that girl there. That girl is dead. We are the ones who need help, and money is the way help is given. Jersey boy over there can testify to that, right J.B.?”

  Lou said, “Sometimes. But I don’t think entering information about certain races with certain dogs is going to help you make money on the next race with different dogs.”

  “You’re fucked, you’re all fucked,” Dave said. “You know I’m right about the money. You of all people. Money talks.”

  “It does,” Lou agreed. He put his coffee cup in the sink. “When it’s actually in your hand, it does talk. Or at least it makes an impression,” he said.

  “I’m going to make a bundle,” Dave said. He was still standing by the table, pulling on his T-shirt.

  “All right,” Nicola said.

  “You’re going to be sorry,” he said.

  “All right.”

  He turned to go. “Scooter?”

  Scooter grinned embarrassingly at Nicola and pressed his lips together, then moved up and down on the balls of his feet. Nicola said, “That’s okay, Scooter.”

  He said, “But I am going to help you; it’s just that right now I have to, I just have to get myself together a little bit first and so on and so forth.”

  “It’s okay,” Nicola said again, and she watched him get his duffel bag from the living room. His hair was sticking up in the back and his eyes were lit with the excited expression she knew so well, the expression that comes with the roller coaster ride down. Well, she was no longer interested in the thrill of decline. Wait, was that true? Nicola paid attention to herself for a moment. It was true, she realized. It was absolutely true. Was she finally over Scooter? She didn’t want to be a scared passenger anymore, no matter how much fun the ride.

  “Sayonara,” Dave said, slamming the door behind them.

  Afterwards, Nicola and Davette and Lou looked at each other in the kitchen. Davette gave out a little humorless laugh and Lou opened his hands as if to say what can you do? It was warm in the room and Nicola could hear faint noises coming from the bathroom. She had almost forgotten about Carmen. Nicola looked at her watch. The deli bag was still on the table and she took out a wrapped sandwich and a pickle and a can of Sprite and she set a place for herself at the table. Then she opened the can.

  “Just a little downsizing,” she said calmly, taking a sip.
>
  Eighteen

  South San Francisco, The Industrial City. These words, spelled out in flat block letters, lay on the low hills just outside of the city, surrounded by transformers and a few six-story cranes in use at the airport.

  As she passed by them on the highway Nicola checked the rear-view mirror to see if her hair was rebelling. Her computer was on the car seat beside her. Although she said she was going to the police station, she wanted to make a personal stop first.

  Carmen and Lou were at the Golden Gate Arms looking for more data files—Carmen finally had agreed to leave Nicola’s house, but only if Lou went with her. He was taking her to the office. He would not let her out of his sight.

  Carmen had never seen Chorizo in the office on a weekday. Still, it was risky.

  “In cases like this,” Carmen had said, “the unexpected always happens.”

  “Cases like what?” Nicola asked.

  “Murder.”

  Nicola looked in the side mirror and changed lanes. It was really windy out. Fog swirled like chalk dust over the hood of her car. Murder—that’s what Carmen said. Nicola thought that Chorizo probably gave Robert the pills and told him they were something else. Afterward, he brought the empty pill bottle over then typed up a suicide note and left it on the printer tray.

  Was he really after Carmen? Carmen seemed to think so. Nicola tried to remember everything she could about Chorizo—his good manners, his hands, his awful shoes. He said he worked with computers. Well that at least was true.

  But why had he killed Robert? His business partner. Carmen claimed Robert didn’t know anything about the girls in the video. Well, maybe he found out.

  And so did I, Nicola thought. She looked in the rearview mirror again, this time more nervously.

  Ten minutes later she parked in front of a short strip mall, then sat for a minute looking around. There wasn’t much to see. Some construction guys were walking around talking into cell phones, a couple of teenagers were sitting on the curb, and a woman wearing a button-down shirt and a tie walked out of the gun shop carrying a plastic handle bag.

  Nicola had never been to a gun shop before. In fact, she didn’t even know anyone who had been to a gun shop before. She pictured the customers: badly dressed teenagers carrying rolled-up American Survivor magazines and comparing—what, the size of their Remingtons?