She crossed her arms and pointed her chin up, and she didn’t move an inch back when I crowded her.
“I think you wouldn’t like to talk to the sheriff’s about much of anything. I heard her call you ‘Roy’ once. I’m thinking your name isn’t even real, and you sure as hell don’t want nobody taking your fingerprints.”
I whipped the cigarette out my mouth and a gull hopped to dodge the burst of sparks.
“Maybe I’ll just take off, then. You can get Rocky put in jail and the girl with a foster, and none of it’s got jack shit to do with me.”
“I guess you could do that. But I think you already could of done that. If you were going to. Maybe you tried that already. And it didn’t work.”
I glanced around the motel.
“You don’t want to leave her either,” she said. “You like that little one, too.”
I rubbed my eyes and held my palms up. “All right. Let’s stop bullshitting each other.”
She laughed a little, not entirely out of spite. “We can. But let me say. Whatever’s coming, that little girl’s going to need taking care of.”
I nodded. We leaned against the wall and watched the birds in the lot. The warm wind shushed between buildings, and drifts of sand washed across the concrete. The air was so thick with ocean I could taste algae.
“Well?” she said.
“Can you watch that little girl a while longer? I’m going to find where Rocky is. Okay?”
She thought. “How long?”
“Not long.”
I walked to number 8, and at the door I turned and saw that Nancy still watched me. I waited until she went back inside and knocked.
He checked the peephole first, winced when he opened the door to a sliver of sunlight. I pushed inside and shut the door. He was shirtless and swaybacked, his skinny arms dangling like deadweight. It was dark inside and heavy with cigarette smoke, body odor—sweats.
“Hey, cowboy,” Tray mumbled, then dropped onto his bed. He spread his arms and stared up at the ceiling. A sheen of perspiration covered his face and his eyelids fluttered. Drifting. High. Skinny as Christ.
“You know where Rocky is?”
He spoke slowly. “Said . . . she’s gone to work.”
“What happened with you and her?”
“Happened?” He sat up, rubbed his face. I could see his ribs and the striations of his thin muscles. “Nothing happened, man. We hung out. Drank some beer. I gave her a ride to work.”
“You pay her?”
“What? Man”—he shook his head, chuckled—“the Killer isn’t into the chickens. You dig?”
I stepped up and crowded him at the edge of the bed. “Where’d you take her?”
He kept his head facing the floor, arms slack between his legs. “Um, down the Strand. Just let her off.”
His garbage bag of clothes had spilled across the carpet, and I noticed the books on his table were open, those drawings spread around the room.
I almost left, but I stopped. “Where’d you cop?” I said.
“What?”
“Where’d you get the drugs? You looked clean before.”
“Oh. You know. It’s around if you want it.”
“You come into some cash?”
Lazy eyes rolled up to me, and he grinned with a shrug. “You thought any more about what we talked about?”
“No. Not interested.”
“Huh.” He rolled away so that he could stand up. Dug in the garbage bag and pulled out a T-shirt for himself, then walked to the sink and splashed water over his face, ran wet hands through his hair and finger-combed it straight.
“Saw you leave,” he said.
I watched him put on a pair of tennis shoes and dig around his papers for a cigarette. He lit it, turned on a lamp, and sat down, let the smoke float out like he had nothing but time. His voice had turned sober, and that Texas accent had almost disappeared completely. “Saw you jump up with that paper in your hands. I was right there. At the peephole. Saw you toss it and make tracks.”
My chest became heavy, that feeling of insides hardening like concrete.
“Found it in the trash. I’s just reading along, realized, hey—them girls in that article got the same name as these girls here. One plus one, you know. Pretty simple.”
My teeth squeaked, clenching, and my fists curled. He didn’t seem to notice.
He held up a hand. “None of my business, man. I ain’t got no desire to screw you any way, shape, or form. Just saying. If it comes to that.”
“Comes to what?” I said.
He leaned forward. He slid the ashtray over on the table and trimmed the cherry of his cigarette by rolling it across the grooved plastic edge.
“You know, working without a partner here, there’s a better chance I’m gonna get busted. If not the cops, then somebody else. You feel me? So, you know, look at it this way. You feature me in bracelets at some point, sweating some police box. I’m losing it, you know, getting sick, just needing out. And the cops, these asshole hard-liners, are loving it. This cop wants me down for a long stretch. He wants to kill my future. So I’m desperate, sick, freaking out. I might could get weak. I could say, ‘Listen, you all give me some flex, some pull, you all forget the charges and I can give you a murder. I can tell you something about some missing girls.’”
My knuckles throbbed and blood pressed up behind my eyes. Then he started playing with a butterfly knife he’d slipped from under some papers. He flipped it around and upside down and let the little blade flash in his hand. This was meant to announce that he could take care of himself, and he picked his teeth with the blade to show how he took it all in stride.
“Just think it over, man. I’m saying, I got no desire to screw you up. I’m saying, let’s make some money. Help me, help you. There’s a fifteen thousand payout for you at the end. Let’s make some money.” I could hear the vibrato skip under his voice now and then, and the pitch of it rose a little bit, and he kept looking at things on the table, lacing up his shoes, keeping away from my eyes. “Or else we both take our chances.”
I stared, my worst umbrage subdued because I almost felt sorry for him. He hadn’t been taught good enough. He didn’t know me or what telling me these things meant for him. He tapped his smoke a little, straightened his jeans and scratched his arm, stroked his hair, and when there was nowhere else left to look, he faced me. His eye twitched.
I said, “This is it, though? I do the one thing with you, how do I know you’re not holding this over my head? How do I know you won’t want to do it all over again? Like you won’t put me on a leash.”
“Aw, man. That’s what I’m trying to say. It’s not about that. I ain’t about that. This is an exchange of favors. One for one. Even up.”
I noticed a barely visible line of red ants stringing along the baseboard of the room, and my sight roamed the papers on the table, little maps and circuit diagrams. A lot of the doodles were types of pentagrams, sketches of goat heads and butterfly knives.
He said, “I guess you just have to trust me, man. But I’m straight. I don’t say one thing and do the other. Just take a look at it, man. Hear me out. Just take a look at what I got set up, listen to what I got to say. Take a look.”
We sat there a moment and I could feel the heat ease off the aluminum foil at the window, and somehow I could tell it had darkened outside, like cloud cover had docked above us.
“All right,” I said. “It’s going to wait till dark, though. I have to go see about finding Rocky.”
“Yes. All right. I’m telling you.” He looked less like a kid when he smiled—his face wrinkled up and those crooked little teeth flashed like a handful of pebbles.
I stood up. “Probably people around here shouldn’t see us hanging out together. Meet me at that Circle K down the block. Eight o’clock.”
“You’re paranoid, brah. Ain’t nobody here going to know anything.”
“You want me in, we’re going to start being careful. Right now.”
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“Okay, okay. Man, you remind me of Wilson that way.”
“Then do what I say.”
He aye-ayed me with a mock salute. I didn’t look back as I walked out the room. I saw that I’d been right: furrows of gray clouds had piled up and hung down low, as if the crowded sky pressing down on us was the underside of a mountain.
I found the restaurant on Twenty-second between Ship’s Mechanic Row and Market Street. Pirandello’s was the bottom floor of a brownstone, and an arrangement of lightbulbs encased in glass flumes, shaped like flames, framed the entrance. Cursive script scrawled across the glass door, and burgundy curtains draped over the top halves of the windows. Down the sidewalk a man was yelling at a dog.
A hostess met me as soon as I entered. The staff wore black pants or skirts with white dress shirts and black bow ties. It was five o’clock and she told me the kitchen had just opened, asked if I wanted a table. The dining area was about a third full with women wearing blouses and jewelry, sporting big Texas hair.
“Is Rocky working now?”
“Who?”
“Rocky. Or Raquel? Small girl, has short blond hair. Real blond.”
Her face scrunched, thinking it over, and she looked down at the seating chart. “I don’t think I know her.”
“She doesn’t work here?”
“I’ve only been here a few weeks. I guess there might be some people I don’t know yet.”
“You know the other hostesses, though? You never seen this girl—real petite, with kind of feathery hair, really pretty. Small.”
“You know. I think I seen a girl like that at the bar once or twice. I didn’t think she worked here.” She motioned behind her, past the waiting area and the main floor, where a long, ritzy bar rail set at the end of the dining room was tended by a man in shirtsleeves and the kind of elbow garters men wore back in the last century or sometime.
He looked about my age, tanned the color of delta mud, and pale eyebrows were almost lost in his skin when he glanced up at me. He nodded, fixing with precise movements some drinks for a waitress. In any occupation you can usually judge a man’s professionalism by the way he uses his hands, whether he moves them loosely or in tight, controlled gestures. He greeted me and I ordered a Miller, tipped him equal to its price.
“Thanks.” He nodded. “Meeting somebody?”
“Actually, I’m looking for a girl. I kind of thought she worked here.”
I described Rocky again and called her Raquel again. “You know her? This short blond hair, lemon-colored. Sharp face, pretty. Told me she worked here.”
His eyebrows raised and his sun-beaten skin paled in stripes across his brow. He petted a neatly trimmed goatee. “I think I might know who you mean, man. She don’t work here, though. She come in the bar a couple times, right there. Sat around till somebody joined her. She’d sit here smoking till somebody offered her a drink.”
“Really?”
He nodded and looked a little amused. “You looking for company, I know a few girls. I could make a call for you, you want.”
“Just the one.”
“Well. She’s in here twice that I know of. I was told by management to say something if she comes back. This is kind of a classy place, you know.”
My eyes scanned the sponge-painted walls papered with shreds of gold leaf, the paper-mache sculptures of the Coliseum, the leaning tower.
“I mean, people’s business is their own. But she should try one of the hotel bars or something. This isn’t the place for it.”
“All right.” I rose off my stool and tossed him an extra five for the conversation. It was no trouble to picture Rocky walking in there the first time, and maybe she hadn’t even filled out an application, but sat in the bar, alone. Somebody approaches her, or she tosses a look, because she knows how to do that, and a few hours later she’s back at the motel, has money, and tells everybody she found a job.
I cruised Harborside and down Rosenberg Avenue and toward Seawall, crawled along the beach and the people crowding one another in dusky gray sands, the sun setting the edges of everything afire and coming through the windshield in thick red wavelengths. I kept my eyes peeled for that bright shade of hair. A man had his legs bent on a bus bench, newspaper folded over his face, and women in bikini tops moved in and out of the glare, a fat man wielding a big jam box that played Tejano rock.
Youngsters had taken over one stretch. These tan, slim bodies drew some resentment from me at the way they took it for granted, time and opportunity, their entitlement. A Frisbee glided slow over their heads, and it seemed that for some people the world was forever noon, and I heard their voices and laughs and watched them chase one another like pups. I couldn’t imagine Rocky out there. A lot of things never get to become what they should.
Before returning to the motel I stopped at an Ace Hardware and bought a box of double-extra-strength Steel Sak trash bags and thirty feet of half-inch rope.
I ducked inside the office at Emerald Shores, and now Dehra and Nancy sat at a coffee table playing a board game with Tiffany, who looked clean and fresh in a little yellow linen dress. She slapped her hands together at the fall of the dice, looked up, and waved at me.
Nancy raised her eyebrows and I could only shake my head. She walked over.
“You’re right,” I said. “She don’t work there. Never has. I don’t know. I cruised around a while but didn’t see anything.”
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.” She stuck her hands to her hips. “So, what?”
“How long do they have on the room? I forget what I’ve paid.”
“Y’all are good till the day after tomorrow, I believe.”
“I bet she comes back by then.”
“Oh, really?”
“I bet she knows just when the rooms stop being theirs. She’s going to come back for that little one. If she doesn’t, I’ll start checking other motels.”
“You’re just assuming she’s all right? Just figure nothing happened to her?”
“She hasn’t been gone long enough to think that way.” I wasn’t letting myself ponder those lines, yet.
Nancy peeked back inside the office. The last of the sun was blocked by buildings, turning the air into a gloomy scarlet haze. We could see Tiffany through the glass, enjoying herself.
“What’s the matter with her, then? Having a little one like this. What’s wrong with her?”
“I can’t really say. You know how it is. Some people. Something happens to them. Usually when they’re young. And they never get any better.”
“But some do.”
“I guess. You tend to meet more of the other kind, though.”
She nodded and tapped her foot, eyed a Big Gulp cup someone had left in the parking lot. It rolled back and forth. I bent my head. “Listen. That little girl. If something . . . I don’t know. You all would take care of her. Wouldn’t you?”
She arched her head back as though mildly insulted. “What?”
Tray’s motorcycle caught my eye. Without realizing it, night had come down, and we stood in sudden, deepening blues. “What time is it?”
“Quarter till eight. What were you just saying?”
“Nothing. I have to meet somebody.”
“So we have the baby again?”
“I can take her with me, I suppose. But I don’t have any more right to her than you.” I handed her forty dollars. “There. For dinner. Or entertainment. If Rocky doesn’t come back by tomorrow, we’ll work something out.”
She didn’t hesitate to take the money, folded it and slipped the paper into the front pocket of her denims. “She’s not always happy, you know. That little one.”
“What?”
“Tiffany. She’s not always laughing and smiling. Sometimes she gets angry. Real angry. Throws her food and cries about it. She starts asking for the other one, and she gets angry. She’s jumpy if you move too fast. I know I already told you.”
I didn’t really know what I could say about that. I just nodded.
He opened the door.
“All right,” I said.
“You want to see it?”
“Let’s just go,” I sighed. He directed me toward Broadway and said there was no hurry.
“Basically everything’s kept in a storage room. There’s a small cloakroom there too, where they keep some lead vests and things, but behind that, inside, is like a shaft that used to lead to the roof or something. The panel’s bolted shut, but there’s a crawl space between floors. The maid’ll get me in there, when they’re closing. Chill till around one, and I get down, rewire that alarm. We need a van, too. I need you to take care of that. You bring it around back, we load the stuff—twenty minutes, tops. We take it to Houston. And I’ve done all the hard work.”
“What’s the address?”
“It’s 4515 Broadway.”
“Who’s your inside again?”
“This maid, man. I used to run with her brother.”
“There alleys on the other side? Somewhere we could scope it from?”
“Yeah. Sure. Turn here.”
He bounced his knees and tapped his thighs, chewed his bottom lip. I had worked out all kinds of variations of dialog between us, potential scenarios. But even if the score went smooth and we both walked with full pockets, that would just encourage him. No matter what he said about his word, it’s a simple fact of the living world that you can’t trust a junkie. He’d always have what he knew over the two girls.
I tried not to think about it, because he was like the girl in the motel room in Amarillo: he would never catch a break. It could only go bad.
“Where was your group home?” I asked.
“Huh? Oh. Jasper.”
“They ever make you all pick cotton there?”
“Uh. No.”
“They did mine. Had us all out there, every August till October. Called the Social Supplement Program.”
“Huh.”
Galveston Page 14
