Thin Air s-22

by Robert B. Parker

  "I used to tease her when she would come home with a date. I would catch her giving them a little kiss and later I would tease her about it. But it was never anything with the men. She always said I was the only one, the man she truly loved."

  "And your father?"

  Luis shook his head, annoyed. "I had no father," he said.

  "Is he alive?"

  "I told you," he said, "I have no father."

  The film looped back to the beginning, and began its second run-through. The apartment so often pictured seemed no more than a single room. The men pictured were never the same.

  "Your mother had a lot of men," Lisa said.

  "They were friends. She never loved them."

  "She had friends in every night?"

  Luis stood suddenly, and walked to the far side of the room.

  "Did they stay all night?" Lisa asked.

  "We will not speak anymore of my mother," Luis said. "We will talk of other things."

  He walked back behind the theater flats for a moment. She could feel his weakness, and she could feel her strength.

  "Did they stay all night?"

  He reappeared. When he spoke his voice was low and firm and dangerous, like a movie villain.

  "We will talk of us, now," he said.

  "Your mother was a hooker, wasn't she?" Lisa said.

  Luis whirled toward her and slapped her hard across the face; she fell to her hands and knees. Her head ringing. And, from that position she heard herself laughing.

  "She was, wasn't she? She was."

  And then Luis was on his knees beside her crying, his arms around her.

  "I am sorry, Angel, I am sorry. I am so sorry."

  She raised her bead and looked at him, still on hands and knees, and saw the tears, and laughed. The sound of it ugly even to her.

  "Hell, Luis," she said. "So was I."

  Chapter 35

  "Deleon look like his mug shot?" I said.

  "Yeah, but real tall," Chollo said.

  "Six-five," I said. "What do you think?"

  "He's dangerous, but he's not tough, you know. He's like a big kid and he's full of himself, but he's not really sure, and he's afraid someone will find him out, and you know he's kind of desperate all the time. He's got that look you see in some of the gang kids, the new ones. They're scared, but they're crazy, and they'd die to get respect, so you don't know what they'll do. You can't trust them not to be stupid."

  I nodded.

  "That's what Deleon's like. Guys like you and me, we know pretty well what we can do if we need to. Don't spend a lot of time thinking about it. Don't care too much if other people know it. Deleon doesn't know what he can do, or if he can do it, and he wants everyone to think he does and can, if you see what I'm saying. If the woman wasn't involved, he'd be easy enough. I've made a good living putting guys in the ground that were trying to prove how dangerous they were because they weren't sure themselves."

  "But the woman is involved."

  "Yeah, and that makes Deleon dangerous as a bastard because you can't do it simple, and you can't do anything without knowing how it'll affect the woman, and you can't trust him to do anything that makes any sense to you. And he's big and he's got a gun."

  "Swell," I said. "Is there a number-two man?"

  Chollo laughed.

  "El Segundo is a skinny little shooter with a big long ponytail, named Ramon Gonzalez. A coke head, got a thin, droopy moustache, jitters around behind Deleon wearing two guns."

  Chollo laughed again.

  "I don't mean a gun and some sort of hide-out piece in an ankle holster. Or a back-up under your arm. I mean he's wearing two Sig Sauer nines with custom grips, one on each hip, like the fucking Frito bandito."

  "He a real shooter?" I said.

  "Oh yeah," Chollo said. "And he loves Luis. Looks at him like he was George fucking Washington."

  "I never been too scared of a guy wears two guns," I said.

  "How many people you met wear two guns?"

  "The only other one is Hoot Gibson," I said.

  "I don't know if he's good, but Ramon's real. I know the type. He shoots people 'cause he likes it."

  "And you don't," I said.

  "I got no feelings about it," Chollo said. "I do it 'cause they pay me."

  "I'm not paying you," I said.

  Chollo grinned.

  "Maybe I'll go to heaven," he said.

  "You got my word on it," I said. "There's a dozen shooters? That include Deleon and Gonzalez?"

  "I don't know. It's an estimate. I counted nine while I was in there plus Deleon and Gonzalez. Figured there were a few I missed, on the roof maybe, growing squashes. So twelve, fifteen guys altogether."

  "And the women and children are theirs?"

  "Sure. The place is broken up into apartments with a common kitchen, looks like. Floor plan doesn't make any sense."

  "That'd be perfect. Nothing else makes any sense. I don't know if she's in there, and if she is I don't know why. And the only way to find out is to go in, but if I go she may get killed."

  "Hey, senor," Chollo said. "I'm just the translator. I am not paid to theenk."

  "Lucky for you," I said.

  The coffee was gone and the sandwiches were eaten. I gathered up the debris and got out and dumped it in a waste barrel near the sub shop. It was a fine bright spring day with the sun reflecting off the parked cars and glinting on their chrome trim, and sparkling off the tiny flecks of mica in-the surface of the parking lot.

  Adolescent girls in striped tee shirts and cut-off jeans loitered along under the arcade roof that ran along the front of the shopping center. Most of them smoked. Some of them inhaled. One of them saw me looking at them and stared back at me, full of bravado and uncertainty, and straightened slightly so that her new bosom, about which she was doubtless uneasy, stuck out proudly. I grinned at her, and she turned away quickly.

  Ah sweet bird of youth. They used to come running when I smiled.

  Back in the car I started up and headed back up Route 93.

  "What now, Jefe?" Chollo said.

  "Thought we'd go back and park in a different place and look at the citadel some more."

  "Man, it's amazing to watch an ace detective work," Chollo said.

  "Think how it is to be one," I said.

  We drove for a while in silence, Chollo looking at the bland, semirural scenery along the road. When we got to San Juan Hill, I parked on a different corner facing the other way. They had made no improvements in the property while we were gone.

  "How long we going to look at this fucking rat hole?" Chollo said.

  "Until I figure out how to get in there and get her out."

  Chollo eased lower in the seat and let his chin rest on his chest.

  "That long," he said.

  They sat beside each other on the floor. He was still teary, but he listened as she talked.

  "I didn't grow up in Los Angeles," she said. "I grew up in Haverhill. My old man was a drunk and a bum and a womanizer. He left my mother when I was about ten. My mother got custody, but my father came back and got me and took me with him. Kidnapped me, more or less. I don't think he even wanted me so much as he didn't want my mother to have me. I spent a couple years hiding in the backseat of his car, or sneaking into motel rooms after dark so no one would see me. I didn't go to school or play with other kids. My father, when he was sober, would pick up odd jobs and leave me alone during the day when he did them. I watched TV. Eventually some private detective my mother hired found me and kidnapped me back. My mother never forgave my father for cheating on her and leaving her, and she never forgave me, probably, for being his daughter. All the rest of my growing up I heard about what a wretch he was, what wretches all men were. I probably never forgave my father for letting them take me back."

  "But your mother loved you," Luis said.

  The flashes of naivete had always appealed to her, innocence shining through the machismo and flash. Probably because it was real,
she thought. The rest was posture, and she always knew that it was. But in those days the innocence had once redeemed it.

  "No," Lisa said, "my mother definitely did not love me. I was pretty much just another one of my father's women to her. She assumed from the moment I reached puberty that I was a disgusting slut, like all the rest of them."

  "You should not speak this way about your mother," Luis said.

  He was leaning forward now toward her, his forearms resting on his thighs. He was listening so hard he seemed to be watching her lips as they formed the words.

  "It's the truth," she said. "To be sane, you have to know the truth and be able to say it."

  "My poor Angel," Luis said. "It must have been horrible to have such a mother."

  "Yeah, well, I didn't stick around too long. When I was seventeen, I took off with a local guy named Woody Pontevecchio. Woody had some money he'd stolen and we hitchhiked mostly, all the way across the country. We were going, guess where, to Hollywood. He was going to manage me and I was going to be a star."

  "You are certainly beautiful enough," Luis said.

  "Sure. I was beautiful in Haverhill. In Hollywood, everybody's beautiful. I had as much chance as a cow."

  "But you are so talented. "

  "Yeah. We had a room in a flop house in Venice, with a toilet down the hall. I got a job as a waitress in one of the joints on the beach, and Woody started hustling Hollywood. At first he got me some gigs doing sexy DJ stuff at parties-you know, wearing a string bikini while I played records and did chit chat, then we developed an act where I'd show up to do DJ work all dressed up and through the evening I'd strip, one piece of clothing at a time. He billed me as Hollywood's only exotic disc jockey, and then sure enough, he finally got me a job in pictures."

  "You have never told me this, " Luis said. "You have never said any of this to me."

  "Time I did," Lisa said. "I had a supporting role in a sixteen-millimeter film called Randy Pants."

  "Randy Pants? What kind of movie is that?"

  "Porno. I had a run of porn films for a while, but I was never any good at it, all that moaning and heavy breathing, and finally the parts stopped coming, and the exotic DJ schtick wasn't going anywhere, so Woody turned me out."

  As she spoke, Luis was shaking his head, slowly, back and forth, as if he were trying to clear it.

  "No," Luis said.

  "Yeah, he did."

  "No."

  "Yeah. Like your old lady, Luis. I was a whore, just like your old lady."

  "No," Luis said again. "No, no, no."

  He was crying, and pounding both his fists on his thighs as he said "no," invoking the word like a chant as if to exorcise the truth.

  "No, no, no, no…" And then the crying overcame the no. He slumped toward her and pressed his face against her and she put her arm around him and patted him softly as he wept.

  "Me and your old lady, both," she said, "me and your old lady."

  Chapter 36

  It was getting dark.

  Chollo eased into a more comfortable position on the front seat and said, "You think of anything yet?"

  "If we're going to go in, we need a plan," I said.

  "You think of that so quick?" Chollo said.

  "Trained investigator," I said. "I know the place is a maze, but can you find the woman's room?"

  "Si."

  "House has a stairwell in a front hall," I said. "I can see that from here. Probably designed originally as a three-family."

  "How you tell?" Chollo said.

  "My father was a carpenter," I said. "It's in the genes."

  "Was he also an asshole?"

  "No. That's an acquired trait," I said.

  "Well, you're right. Woman's room is off the secondfloor front hall. Should be where those windows are boarded up. There's a set of back stairs too. And a couple places where holes have been cut in the floor and ladders go down, or up, depending where you are."

  "A nice amenity," I said.

  We were quiet. The darkness settled slowly around us. Most of the street lights in San Juan Hill didn't work. The night sky was overcast. It was dark in the way it must have been dark in earlier times, except for some light that showed in the barricaded windows at the Deleon citadel.

  "Who's going in?" Chollo said.

  "You and me."

  "How's your plan coming?" Chollo said.

  "It's probably going to have something to do with me going in with you on the deal to make Deleon Mr. del Rio's East Coast marketing manager."

  "I told you, no gringos. They won't buy it."

  "How about I'm from the local mob, to discuss the territorial fee?"

  "Isn't that Freddie Santiago?"

  "I'm from Boston," I said. "Joe Broz sent me up to see where this fits in with us."

  "Broz the stud duck around here?"

  "Used to be," I said. "Thinks he is."

  "What if Deleon checks with him?"

  "Deleon probably can't get to Broz, but no harm being careful. Broz owes me a favor."

  "You can get to Broz?"

  "Yeah."

  "You big with the bad guys, Spenser. You got Santiago helping you, Mr. del Rio helping you, now this guy Broz, that I don't know, he's helping you. And I'm helping you. You sure you are a good guy?"

  "No," I said. "I'm not sure."

  Chollo was silent in the almost perfect darkness next to me.

  "Okay," he said after a while. "Say that works and it gets us in. Then what?"

  "Then we improvise," I said.

  "And you're sure she's in the castle there with Deleon?" Chollo said.

  "Yes."

  "What makes you so sure?"

  "It makes more sense than anything else we can think of."

  "And she's there against her will."

  "She hasn't come out at all while we've been watching."

  "Neither has he," Chollo said. "Maybe they are in there doing the funky chicken all the time."

  "Possible."

  "Once they ball one of us, you know," Chollo said, "they never want to fuck no gringo again."

  "I didn't know that," I said.

  Chollo grinned.

  "Been my experience, at least."

  "Funny," I said. "Mine's been different."

  "Lot of broads take off on the old man. Don't say a word. Just get in the station wagon and go. The old man's walking around saying, `She'd never do it. She don't even like sex.' And the old lady's banging some guy's ears off in a motel in El Monte."

  "El Monte?" I said.

  "Lotta people getting laid in El Monte," Chollo said.

  "How nice for them," I said. "But we've played grab ass with this thing long enough. We got to go in."

  In the darkness I could hear Chollo inhale quietly, a long breath which he let out slowly. We both sat in the near solid darkness staring at a house we could barely see, looking for a woman who might be there.

  After a while Chollo said, "Works for me, Kemo Sabe."

  "I do not know who my father was," he said.

  He was not crying now, but his voice was still shaky and he spoke haltingly, sitting on the floor beside her, her arm around him, his head on her shoulder.

  "My mother was with many men. Many Anglo men. My father might have been Anglo. My mother would bring them to our room because she had nowhere else to bring them. We had only a room, with a sink and a stove and a television. My mother hung up a blanket to hide my part of the room, but I could peek around, and I could hear, even when she turned up the television. I did not like being there, but I had nowhere else to go."

  His breathing was short and he stared at the floor in front of them while she patted his shoulder.

  "And afterwards my mother would say to me that she didn't love these men. She would say that she only loved me. But that the men had to come here and she had to pretend to love them. We could pretend too, she told me. We could pretend that we were living in a high room in a great castle. And we could pretend that the men were handsom
e knights who bravely stormed the castle and climbed up to the room to seek her hand in marriage."

  "And that's what you pretended," she said.

  "Yes."

  They were quiet for a moment. She could feel tremors run through him as he breathed. The room was dim, and it smelled dank. She heard a sound that might have been rain falling outside the boarded windows.

  "Every Sunday," he said, "she would take me to the movies. There were no men on Sundays. We would go sometimes to the movies all day. We loved the movies. It is why she bought me the camera. She said maybe I could be a movie person someday."

  The pictures of his mother and the men she was with moved jerkily on the monitors. Luis stood up suddenly and disappeared behind the scenery. The monitors went black for the first time since she'd been in the room. Luis came back and stood looking at the blank screens. The room seemed dark without their glow… and damp. She shivered and hugged herself.

  "How did she die, Luis?"

  "She was killed by Freddie Santiago."

  Chapter 37

  It was 8:30 in the morning when we entered Club del Aguadillano. There were six people in the place, drinking beer mostly, though one guy appeared to be drinking tequila and washing it down with beer. Made decaf seem better. Even inside the club, you could smell the river smell lurking behind the beer smell, and hear the faint thunder of the falls upstream, as a kind of undertone to the harsh sounds of the juke box. Dolly the bartender was wearing an attractive green tee shirt today, with the sleeves cut off. His massive upper arms were illuminated with tattoos of intertwined figures. He studied us as we came in. Chollo spoke to him in Spanish and Dolly answered. He put two glasses up on the bar and poured some tequila in them. Then he walked down to the far end of the bar and stood, staring at nothing. Chollo and I ignored the tequila.

  After a while the guy with the tequila and beer stood up and yelled something in Spanish at one of the beer drinkers. The beer drinker muttered something back, and the tequila drinker started toward him. He was a squat guy with thick hands that suggested a lifetime of heavy labor. The beer drinker stood. He was a tallish guy, with a medium build. A very large and startling belly pushed incongruously out under his dingy white ice shirt like something he'd hidden under there. The tequila drinker grabbed him by the shirt front.