Girls in Pink

by Bob Bickford

  “I was drunk,” he said. “I'm not drunk now.”

  “We all get that way sometimes. No shame in it. I'd still like to get down to it.”

  “You've managed to kill three of my people,” he said. “That's a drop in the bucket. I have a lot more people.”

  “You say I killed them. I say I didn't.”

  “I've decided to put this behind us,” he said, ignoring me. He tried on a smile. “You're a major pain in my keester, but I have to admire that, a little. I could keep a guy like you pretty busy. Wouldn't you like to give up your lousy office and your lousy house and your lousy car? Start enjoying some nice things?”

  “That's what this is about?” I asked. “You think you can buy me off with a job? You think I'll forget what you did to your wife and come to work for you?”

  “I'm a businessman,” he said. “I see things in terms of business. I don't get emotional about them, and I want to keep on doing my business without looking over my shoulder all the time. You, on the other hand, get emotional about everything. You're a nuisance, and I want it to stop. I could have you killed in about ten minutes, but like I say, I sort of admire your guts. I can sweeten the deal, maybe.”

  “What else are you offering?”

  He spread his hands expansively,

  “Tell me what you want,” he said. “There aren't many wishes in this town that I can't grant.”

  I thought about Charlene Cleveland, crumpled over the wheel of her pretty Ford convertible, with two broken legs and a bullet hole in her pretty face. I thought about a mummified little girl in a pink party dress. I thought about the endless, proud tears that Annie Kahlo hid behind dark glasses. I felt the rage bloom inside me, huge and red and hot.

  “I want you dead,” I said. “I want to go to your funeral and then buy myself a nice lunch. I'm not sure if I'm ever going to get that, so why don't you tell me what's the second best thing you're offering.”

  His eyes widened in disbelief. “You have the balls to come in here and talk to me that way?” he asked. “Here in my place? After you've been back-shooting my people?”

  Beside me, Lopez had slipped out a pistol. He held it casually under the table, against the inside of his thigh. I willed my face not to reveal my shock to the men across from us. I had no idea what he would do.

  “You say I killed three of your people,” I said. “Trouble is, you're the killer here. You shot your wife like you were putting down a dog. Before she died, you told her that you were going to burn Annie Kahlo to death. This all seems to have started when you killed Annie's father and burned his house down on top of the body. Her sister ended up dead. People die wherever you go.”

  “Burn Annie Kahlo to death?” he asked. “Is that what the dizzy bitch told you?”

  “You scared her,” I said. “Enough to finally leave you.”

  He passed a hand over the cards, one way and then the other. He turned one over, looked at it and put it back.

  “I said she would burn to death, because it's what I saw. I didn't say I would do it. She's had hot pants for me since she was a girl. She's too crazy to wake up to in the morning, but I wouldn't mind tossing her again.”

  “You killed her father,” I said. “Are you going to deny that?”

  “I had a problem with Frank Kahlo,” Sal said. “Why would I lie about it? Done is done. No one cares anymore. He borrowed a lot of money to keep his pisspot ranch floating. Guess what? It didn't float. He couldn't pay me what he owed. After all this time, no one cares any more, if anyone ever really did.”

  He took a drink. I hadn't known his name was Frank. It seemed like an odd thing not to know.

  “Back then I was a nice kid,” he said. “I tried to find other ways for him to keep up. His place was private, and close enough to the city to suit me. I used it for a little bit of business, now and then.”

  “You used his barns to house girls and women,” I said. “On their way from Mexico to wherever you had sold them.”

  “Pretty good, shamus. How'd you know?”

  I pointed to the picture on his desk.

  “The photograph I traded you for your wife's divorce. There was a truck full of women and girls, and you standing in front of it. There was a house in the background. It didn't mean anything to me, just a house. When I saw the house, it was burned down . . . just the walls and part of a veranda still standing. It took a while to make the connection, but I did. It was the Kahlo house in the picture.”

  “I was young,” he said. “What can I say? It hung over there on my wall for so long I didn't see it any more, until it went missing, and you showed up trying to sell it to me. Sell back what you stole.”

  He saw the look on my face.

  “It's business, shamus,” he said. “Just business, which you know nothing about. That's why you work and live in a dump.”

  He looked over at Lopez. “When I got it back, there was a signed affidavit sworn out on the back of it, one that wasn't there before you stole it. You stated the circumstances, and that it was you took the photo, Mister Lopez.”

  “Maybe so,” Danny shrugged.

  “No sir, not so.” Cleveland's voice rose. He pounded the photograph on his desk with one finger. “This photo was taken twenty-five years ago, and it wasn't you that took it. You were back in whatever Mexican shithole you crawled out of, cleaning fish and chewing on a tortilla.”

  “So I lied.” Lopez shrugged again. “You sell Mexican women to people who rape and kill them, and I lied and said I saw you do it. Seems fair.”

  I tasted my bourbon. It was excellent, better than anything I could afford to buy for myself.

  “I deal in whores,” Cleveland said. “I don't tell people what they can do with them, any more than I'd sell a car and tell the buyer to drive careful.”

  “You made a deal with Frank Kahlo to use his place,” I said. “You killed him, anyway. Why?”

  “Ah, that's the question, isn't it?” Cleveland smiled. “That's the question. Frank Kahlo had a sentimental side. He saw his daughter had fallen for me, and he sent her away. It annoyed me, but I was willing to let it go. The girl was a looney, even when she was young. I got tired of her, to tell you the truth. She had a lot of strange ideas, gave me the creeps.”

  He stroked the fan of cards laid out in front of him, brushing his fingers as lightly over them as if he were remembering the feel of a woman's skin.

  “When she was gone, old Frank got a little nervous and strange around me. Maybe he got some romantic ideas about the Mexican hookers coming through his ranch. I don't know. We'll never know. Maybe Frank got an attack of conscience. Maybe he just wanted to screw me. Whatever it was, he took his story to the cops.”

  Lopez stirred a little. He still held the pistol out of sight under the table.

  “Did the Santa Teresa Police Department take his story seriously?” Cleveland smirked. “I should say they did. They took Frank right upstairs to see the brass, that's how seriously they took it.'

  He indicated the man sitting to his right with a grand flourish.

  “Take a bow, Captain Earnswood. And did the captain here take the story seriously? Dead seriously. Too bad for Frank.”

  He laughed out loud. The teeth under his mustache were very white and even. I thought he looked like a pale version of Clark Gable.

  Earnswood smiled, but it was as strained as if it rubbed a canker sore.

  “A five-gallon can of gasoline and a bullet, and poof! Frank Kahlo didn't have any more worries. I did him a favor, really.”

  “You killed his daughter,” I said through gritted teeth. “You killed a ten-year-old girl.”

  “You read that in an old newspaper,” he said. “Let me set your mind at ease. There was no girl in the house. Kahlo owed me a lot of money, and you can believe I turned the place upside down and inside out before I struck a match. There was no girl in that house. I had no clue where she got to, but I knew she wasn't in the house.”

  “In the barn,” I said. “She h
id in the barn, waiting for her daddy to tell her it was okay to come out. Her daddy never came, because you had shot him. She died in that barn, waiting.”

  I looked at Earnswood.

  “You had to have heard we found a mummified body in the barn,” I said. “That's the kind of thing cops at the station would gossip about.”

  “I heard about it,” he said. “I assumed it was one of the Mexicans, if it was even anything to do with all that. Kid could have been anyone. I didn't pay a lot of attention, tell you the truth.”

  “Not important,” I said. “Frank Kahlo was dead and couldn't blab to anyone else. If one of his daughters got left to die, no big deal, right?”

  “I never would have left the kid behind in that barn,” Cleveland said. “I didn't know. I might be cold, but I'm not like that. I met her once or twice. She was a cute girl.”

  “I wouldn't know,” I said. “She wasn't very cute when we buried her.”

  “What else?” His voice got soft.

  “You might as well have killed Annie Kahlo while you were at it. You broke her heart, turned her life into a nightmare. She'll never be a happy woman.”

  “And so, you want to kill me,” he said. “I didn't kill my wife, but you think I did, and that's the cherry on the sundae as far as you're concerned. Am I forgetting anything?”

  “Why don't you tell him the truth?”

  The voice belonged to Fin. He sat back comfortably, as though he were watching a game of lawn tennis.

  “What are you talking about?” Cleveland growled. “The truth about what?”

  Fin ignored him, and held my eyes. He seemed to be enjoying himself. His voice took up the whole room.

  “Young Anne Kahlo promised herself,” he said. “She went back on it, she broke her promise, she reneged. She disappeared for parts unknown, and her father helped her to do it. Mister Cleveland tried to be reasonable, you have my assurance. Mister Kahlo stayed obstinate and wouldn't give up his daughter's whereabouts. It was, shall we say . . . a Mexican standoff.”

  He looked at Lopez, who looked back, his face impassive.

  “Beg your pardon, of course,” Fin said, not sounding very sorry at all. “My friend Mister Cleveland still held a substantial promissory note, with little chance of repayment. Mister Kahlo held his daughter's location, and refused to offer it up. Then he went to the police in an attempt to ruin Mister Cleveland, who had no choice but to settle the matter himself, as fairly as he could.”

  “He took Frank Kahlo's life, and he burned his house down on top of him,” I said. “That the fair payment you're talking about?”

  “Mister Kahlo had other reasons for wanting to ruin Mister Cleveland. They don't have any bearing on this story, so we'll respect the dead and let those reasons rest with Mister Kahlo's ashes. I will simply assure you that when Mister Kahlo met with no success in telling tales to the police, he would have eventually resorted to violence of his own. Mister Cleveland was defending himself, as anyone has a right to do.”

  There was complete silence. Cleveland started to say something, and subsided. From the other side of the room, Earnswood gave me his dead-eye stare. The evil in the room increased, as if a cat got loose and climbed the curtains.

  Danny Lopez broke the silence. “You were going to take the little girl,” he said. “You were going to take the little girl as payment.”

  Only Fin seemed unperturbed. “Of course they were going to take the girl,” he said. “Frank Kahlo didn't have anything else to take, did he? Not even avocados. He couldn't even make a go of that, poor soul.”

  He took the small silver pill-box from his pocket and opened it with a thumbnail. He selected a tablet and put the box away. “Annie Kahlo ran away,” he said. “She was engaged to marry Mister Cleveland, and she ran away, much like his late departed wife ran away, with your help. Running away from debts and responsibilities is not something Mister Cleveland allows, from men or women. It’s bad for business, bad for his peace of mind, and perhaps bad for his soul. The consequences are reasonably dire. They have to be.”

  “What would you do with her?” I asked. “She was too young to be of any use to you, unless...”

  “There are certain private collectors who will pay very dear for a pretty young girl, the younger the better, one with no questions attached to her. A girl who can come out to play, but doesn't ever have to go back home. Some of these collectors are quite respectable, I can assure you, wealthy men in very high places. Not the sort of men who would be seen with gangsters at all.”

  “Which is where Earnswood comes in,” I said. “A police captain, a pillar of Santa Teresa. Your ambassador to the depraved scum at the top of the food chain. You people are monsters.”

  “I didn't kill the girl,” Cleveland said. “I turned around, and she was gone.”

  “We know that,” I said. “I helped to bury her. When you were busy shooting her daddy, she ran away and hid from you, didn't she?”

  Fin put his hands together, looking delighted. “You, sir, are truly a detective!” he exclaimed. “I can see the wheels grinding slowly in your head. The girl vanished! Poof! Looked high and low, they did, and couldn't find her! What good is a vanished girl to anyone?”

  “You know what?” Cleveland said. He put the card he was examining face down. “I'll tell you the truth. Why the hell not? I shot Frank Kahlo because he had lost control. He lost control of his wife, and then he lost control of his daughters. I couldn't trust him anymore, and then he wouldn't hand over the girl, and then the little bitch gave me the slip.”

  “So you had nothing,” I said.

  “I had nothing.” He smiled. “That's why I set the place on fire. I was sure she was hidden somewhere in the house, and she'd come out. Since she didn't, I figured she went up in smoke. Surprised the hell out of me when they found the body after all this time.”

  I felt a wave of emotion, thinking about June. I didn’t know if I wanted to cry or to lunge across the desk to strangle Sal Cleveland. What he said next startled the lump right out of my throat.

  “The littlest Kahlo girl would have taken to the life like a fish to water,” he said. “After all, her mother was a whore.”

  “Her mother wasn't even around,” I said. “What are you talking about?”

  Cleveland gave an elaborate shrug, and didn't try to contain his spreading smile. At his side, Earnswood grinned, too.

  “The sister gets around,” the cop leered. “Don't let the snooty act fool you. She's a hot tamale. I can tell you that for a fact. So was her mother. It runs in the family, all right.”

  I felt the heat in my face. This was pointless. We had come here so that a bunch of hoodlums could mock and gloat and egg each other on.

  “I ought to do the whole city a favor and just shoot you, Earnswood,” I said.

  “You're headed for a long rest behind bars,” he sneered. “Only you won't make it. They're going to find you floating under the wharf first.”

  I stood up. I ignored Earnswood and looked at Sal.

  “What about burning Annie Kahlo to death? You still planning on trying to do that?”

  He looked at me and couldn't hold my eye.

  “Nah,” he muttered. “That was talk. The cards say she'll burn to death, but it won't be me. For a long time, I thought about setting her house on fire, with her in it. I would have liked to strike the match myself, but you started butting in and showing up everywhere. It wasn't safe to show myself, so I sent Mary around to do the deed.”

  I remembered Mary Raw scurrying from the Gardiner’s house, dressed in her shapeless hat and dress. Now I understood what she had been doing there, and was relieved for the old couple.

  “She went to the wrong house,” I said. “I surprised her coming out the front door.”

  “She went to the wrong house,” he echoed. “Poor Mary.”

  “You don't have anything against the Gardiners, then? They have nothing to do with any of this.”

  “Who the hell are the Gardiners
?”

  “The neighbors,” I said. “The house Mary Raw was in.”

  “Wrong house, like I said.” He shrugged. “She saw that right away and left. You showed up before she could figure out which house she was supposed to be at.”

  I had nothing else to ask. The meeting didn't seem to have resolved anything, and I wondered if we had been lured here just to get buried. I felt like a fool for coming here in the first place.

  “We're done,” I said. “Are you going to let us walk out of here?”

  “I didn't have you frisked when you came in,” Cleveland shrugged. “The Mexican has been sitting there with his gun in his lap. If I were going to shoot you, it would already be done.”

  Lopez stood up, too, and put his gun away.

  “This was your one chance to make things right with me,” Sal said. ” When you leave, you're as good as dead. I'll do it someplace I don't have to clean up the mess. This was your one chance.”

  “Let me be clear,” I said. “I know you shot your wife dead. She sat in a wrecked car, badly hurt and crying. You shot her in the face. When I started this, I wanted to see you in the electric chair for it.”

  I looked at Earnswood. When he didn't say anything, I went on. “I was a chump to think there could be any justice, Cleveland. The law here is as dirty as you are. You'll never even see a day in prison.”

  Lopez touched my elbow, and I turned to leave.

  “Here's a promise, though,” I said. “I'm not done. You killed your wife, and you wiped out the Kahlo family, and you're going to live just long enough to wish you hadn't. I'm going to see to it.”

  He threw back his head and laughed. It was a pleasant laugh, and it went well with his white teeth and green eyes. I wondered if the nice laugh had attracted all the women he had ruined. I wondered if Annie had fallen in love with his laugh.

  “You're not going to see to anything, peeper,” he said. “The next time I see you it will be at your funeral. Just for old time's sake, I might bring along the Kahlo broad to see you off.”