Romeo's Rules

by James Scott Bell

  The master bedroom was where she took me. It was simple and neat. There was a crucifix over the bed. Mrs. Gomez opened the closet. It wasn’t a large space. Clothes hung on the rod, boxes stuffed the shelf above. Shoes on the floor.

  Mrs. Gomez bent over and reached into the back of the space. She came out with a statuette about six inches high. She held it out for me to look at.

  It was a skeletal figure in a robe. In one hand the figure held a small globe. In the other a scythe. A grim reaper.

  “Nuestra Señora de la Santa Muerte,” she said.

  “Our Lady of the … Holy Death?”

  She nodded. “It is of Mexico. Some think for protect …”

  “Protection.”

  “Sí. From death. To pray to her. But also bad. Some for the killing.” Her face showed a growing, somber awareness. “This is Juan’s. I do not like it. It is not right before our Lord. He say it is for us, to bring us luck. But …”

  “You think something different?” I said.

  “I do not want to think it,” she said. “Take this away.”

  She handed me the statuette.

  “Do not let the children see you with it,” she said. “Wait.” She went into the bathroom and came back with a yellow hand towel. “Put in.”

  I wrapped the Santa Muerte in the towel and put it on the bed.

  Mrs. Gomez was trembling.

  “Keep your kids inside,” I said.

  BACK IN THE yard I covered up the body. I went in the house and took Mrs. Gomez and Sister Beatrice into the kitchen.

  “Do you have someone you can go to,” I said. “A place where you can stay with your kids for a while?”

  “My sister,” she said. “But why?”

  “Just a precaution. When the body out there gets reported, this house is going to be getting some attention. Maybe not just from the police.”

  She shook her head as if she didn’t understand any of this. Which was natural, because there was a lot I didn’t understand either.

  “What are you going to do, Mr. Romeo?” Sister Beatrice said. “Surely we must call the police?”

  “Not yet,” I said.

  “But we must.”

  “Mrs. Gomez needs a lawyer first, to advise her. Will you let me take care of that?”

  “I have no money,” Mrs. Gomez said.

  “That’s all right,” I said. “I know a lawyer who will advise you for nothing. Give me your sister’s name, address and phone number. I’ll have the lawyer contact you there.”

  She hesitated. Sister Beatrice patted her hand and nodded.

  I went to the bedroom and got the statuette wrapped in the towel.

  I HAD SISTER Beatrice drop me at Ira’s. I had to get word to Natalia about her brother, but I wanted to do it face-to-face. She was going to take it hard, piled on top of her missing kids.

  First, I filled Ira in on what I’d found at the Gomez place and showed him the statuette.

  “I know about this,” Ira said. “We had some dealings with a cartel in Mexico.”

  “Mossad?”

  “They were doing arms deals with the Saudis. Years ago.”

  “Natalia Mayne’s brother had a tattoo under his eye, like that scythe.”

  Ira thought a moment. “What did you say his name was? Danny?”

  “Right.”

  “And Natalia Mayne’s maiden name?”

  “She called herself Saint. Changed from Santiago.”

  Ira wheeled over to the computer and started his tapping.

  “What are you looking for?” I said.

  “Silence.”

  Tappety tappety tappety … tap.

  He studied the monitor.

  “What is it?” I said.

  “Silence.”

  I threw up my hands.

  Tappety tappety tappety.

  Pause.

  “Yes,” Ira said. “Daniel Santiago had a rap sheet. Six years in Corcoran.”

  I looked at the monitor, saw the stats.

  “What else can we find out about him?” I said.

  “I can do a little work. It’s going to cost you.”

  “Cost me what?”

  “I don’t know yet, but I’ll think of something. Okay, give me some time alone so I can use my superpowers.”

  “Right you are, Batman.”

  I WENT OUT to Ira’s front yard. It was normal there. It was life like everybody else lived it. The houses were well kept. There were people inside those houses who didn’t have other people outside who wanted to kill them. I felt like an alien.

  Looking west, toward the corner, where I used to run. The church where it all started was only a few blocks away.

  South, a half a mile from here, was something else.

  I mean, someone else.

  Sophie. At the bookstore. She popped into my head and I found myself wanting to see her.

  There’s a scene in the Orson Welles classic, Citizen Kane, where old man Bernstein, who’d been with Kane since the beginning of his empire, talks to a reporter. He tells the reporter about a time way back in his youth when he was getting on a ferry for New Jersey. A girl in a white dress got off, carrying a white parasol. He only saw her for a second, he says, and then tells the reporter a month has not gone by since when he hasn’t thought about that girl.

  I always liked that speech, but didn’t fully get it.

  Until now.

  Ira called to me to come back in.

  “DO YOU LIKE interesting things, Michael?” Ira said.

  “Sure,” I said.

  “I mean, as opposed to the mundane and the insignificant?”

  “That’ll be enough of that, Ira. What do you have?”

  “Something very interesting. Our Mr. Santiago did his time in prison for armed robbery. I managed to pull up the indictment. He robbed a place up in Los Olivos.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “North of Santa Barbara. Wine country. Some nice houses up there. Big ones. Surrounded by land and vineyards.”

  “So what’s that tell you?”

  “I thought it might be interesting to see whose house it was he robbed. So I followed the address to the title holder. It’s owned by a corporation, MXP Limited.”

  “A winery, maybe?”

  “No, they don’t make wines. They build homes. Like this one. Luxury homes for the well-heeled. Now, here’s the really interesting part. Do you want to know who the CEO of MXP Limited is?”

  “Mark David Mayne.”

  “Bingo.”

  “How long will it take us to get up there?”

  “Thought you’d never ask,” Ira said. “Back in the saddle!”

  ONE HOUR LATER we were driving north on the 101 in Ira’s van.

  He’d brought along a few items of his former trade. Said he’d explain them to me once we got up there.

  Which would take about a couple hours. It would be dark by the time we got there.

  A perfect time to, as Joey Feint would have put it, case the joint.

  With the sun starting to apply orange paint to the sky I thought the drive would almost be restful. Something I needed.

  But that hope got blown to bits when we hit Oxnard.

  “IS YOUR REAL name Michael Chamberlain?” Ira said.

  It was like getting hit with a baseball bat carved out of ice. My head felt smashed. I couldn’t speak.

  “I didn’t know the best time to ask,” Ira said. “I figure now you won’t jump out the door and roll to the side of the freeway.”

  “How did you find out?”

  “Do you know someone named Jason Pratt?”

  “How did you get all this?”

  “I didn’t try,” Ira said. “I didn’t snoop or go looking. My brain just does its thing. I saw an item flash across one of my Los Angeles feeds. The headline was, Is Michael Chamberlain in Los Angeles? Something about the name hit me. Something from way back. So I read the story. It mentioned this guy Pratt, said he’d been a school friend of Chamberlain
, and then mentioned the killings at Yale what, twenty years ago?”

  I said nothing.

  “It started to come together in my mind,” Ira said. “You being on the run. Nothing known about you before a certain date. I respect your privacy, Michael. But I am first and foremost your friend, and I wanted to crack that barrier. I want you to trust me.”

  “I trust you, Ira. You’re the only one I do trust. But …”

  “Go ahead. I think you need to.”

  The wound opened and the words seeped out.

  “I GOT KNOCKED around a lot as a kid. I was always the youngest in class and the smartest. Easy pickings for the regular cast of schoolyard bullies. I fought back with my mind. I could only lay them out with insults, sometimes in Latin. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. It only got better when I got to Yale. I got accepted when I was fourteen. Was fifteen when I went, and something of a curiosity. Some jocks took me under their wing. I became the chief statistician for the football team. Got me a measure of respect. A future United States Senator from North Carolina befriended me. He was the QB one year. But the other stuff that happened before, that never goes away. It stays with you forever. The only question is can you keep it from ruining your own life?”

  “And can you?” Ira said.

  “Remains to be seen,” I said.

  We were getting to Ventura now. The ocean would show up soon.

  “It happened when I was seventeen,” I said. “Two days after my birthday, in fact. I remember thinking that morning that maybe, just maybe, if I could last it out and get to be twenty, and maybe go on to an academic career, the world would be a little more like an oyster. Yes, that morning …”

  I started breathing a little harder. Like I’d just run a sprint.

  “My parents were both at Yale. My dad was a professor of philosophy. My mom taught theology at the Divinity School. She was meeting my dad for lunch when it happened.”

  I paused, not knowing if I could go on. Feeling like the sea itself—calm on the surface, chaos and darkness beneath.

  Then Ira said, “Wait. The shootings? You’re talking about the shootings?”

  I nodded. “His name was Benjamin Weeden Blackpoole. Twenty-four. Med student. Packed to the gills with weapons. Killed seventeen people before turning it on himself. Two of those people were my mother and father.”

  My voice seemed to come from a distance, like a man standing on the other side of a crevasse, calling for help.

  “I was an only child. They were my whole world. I was catatonic for a month. Hospitalized. Psychoanalyzed. Had an aunt in New Jersey who took me in. For three months I’d wake up in the morning disappointed I wasn’t dead. I almost did the deed myself. The only thing that stopped me was thinking they’d be disappointed in me if I did.”

  A golf ball got stuck in my throat and made my eyes wet. I closed my eyes and waited for the ball to roll away.

  Ira said nothing.

  “The day I turned eighteen I told my aunt thank you, and left. I just hit the road in a beat up old Saturn. Had no idea where I was going to end up. I was gone for two years. I got by. Started working in a gym in Louisville. The head guy there made me a project. He wanted to turn me from a chunky wimp into the opposite. He did a pretty good job. Switched from fat to muscle. I thought maybe here I could have a future. But I just couldn’t shake the idea that there was more going on with Blackpoole. It was like this constant voice in me and I knew I’d go crazy if I didn’t find out. I came back to my aunt’s place. She didn’t recognize me at first. That’s how much I’d changed.

  “I started doing some digging on Blackpoole’s background. I went to see a PI about it. His name was Joey Feint. A real character. I had no money. He took me on. It worked out. I learned a few things from him. And I learned what I wanted to know about Blackpoole.”

  “What was that?” Ira said.

  We were past Ventura now, the ocean in full view. It looked so peaceful. If it hadn’t, I probably wouldn’t have gone on.

  “I learned he’d been involved with a man named Thurber McDaniels. This guy had a history with my father. He’d been a student of his once. My dad flunked him for plagiarism.”

  Ira said nothing, but I could hear the gears meshing in his head.

  “I’m almost finished for the day,” I said. “We can take it up another time.”

  “Is McDaniels the reason you changed your name?”

  That Ira. Nothing gets past him.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Did you kill him?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Michael, I—”

  “Some other time, Ira.”

  “Let me help you walk it through. You’ve run long enough.”

  “Some other time,” I said.

  LOS OLIVOS SLID into night.

  Ira and I slid into Los Olivos.

  The house was not hard to find. At least the outer gate and fence and security apparatus. We couldn’t see the house from the front. We drove right on past and up into hills. Ira had selected a location from where we could presumably look down on the place.

  Ira found a spot to pull over. From here we had a killer view of the valley, and of one slice of the rear portion of the house. Not much to go on.

  “Let’s get our spy on,” I said.

  “We never say that,” Ira said. “But you can play with my toys.”

  One thing about Ira Rosen, former Mossad, current rabbi, is that he has some very good equipment. Like binoculars that practically got me in the French doors in the back of the house. I watched from the passenger side of Ira’s van. No sign of life.

  “Try this,” Ira said.

  He reached into a canvas bag just behind my seat and pulled out what looked like an oversized Star Trek phaser.

  “Are you going to make the house disappear?” I said.

  “Doppler radar, son,” Ira said. “We’re going to see if anyone’s inside the house.”

  He showed me how to hold it, told me how to trigger it. He watched a little monitor connected by a wire to the gun. Two minutes later he said there was at least one person home, maybe two. The house was too big to be more specific than that.

  “Maybe I can get in there for a closer look,” I said.

  “Sure, and maybe I can wheel myself into Fort Knox for a tour.”

  “What do you suggest?”

  “Waiting for sunlight and knocking on the front gate,” Ira said.

  “Don’t like it,” I said. “Too conventional.”

  I took up the binoculars again.

  As Ira mused, “Of course, I always did like nighttime assaults. There’s a real Batman quality to them. But you have to know your terrain and what security they have on the other side.”

  The French doors opened and a backlit figure came out. A man.

  “And then,” Ira said, “you have to go in fast and strong and not hesitate to use whatever force is necessary for the accomplishment of the mission.

  The man paused on the back porch, looked up at the sky, took out a cigarette and lit up. Something about the way he did it, with swag, seemed familiar.

  “There are other options, of course,” Ira said, “but most—”

  “Hey Batman, there’s a guy standing outside the house. I can’t make out his face. You got anything for that?”

  “Sure, but you’re not listening to my war stories.”

  “I’ll give you undivided attention tomorrow. Anything? Better scope?”

  Ira rooted around in his bag some more. Pulled something out. He was a magician, but instead of bunnies it was things like—

  “Night vision scope,” Ira said. “Try that.”

  A beauty, this scope. Put me right back in the yard, greenish hue all around. Ira told me how to zoom it in.

  It was like the guy was smoking right outside the van window. He looked up in the sky, practically at me, and I saw his face full on.

  “Tomás,” I said.

  “Who?”

  “Th
at guy who came to visit us when Natalia was over. The one I wrapped up in duct tape.”

  “He’s down there?”

  “I want to go have a look.”

  “Look for what?”

  “For people. I want to know if Mayne’s in there. I want to know if his kids are with him.”

  “So you’re going to knock on the door?”

  “Just look.”

  “I advise against this.”

  “Thank you. Now, are you going to help me?”

  IRA ARGUED WITH me for a couple of minutes then realized it was no use. So he spent another ten minutes out of the van and doing some observation of his own. Tomás had gone back in the house. There was no other sign of activity that I could see.

  “You have twenty feet of hillside,” Ira said, “then about fifty yards of pasture. There’s a post-and-rail fence around the perimeter. A wall closer to the house. It looks like normal security for homes like this. One mounted camera in the rear corner. Looks vintage. Monitors inside, but I’m guessing they’re not on or no one’s watching. It was high security about fifteen years ago. Still, if you’re going in, I will need to scramble the signal.”

  “You can do that?”

  “Please, this is Batman you’re talking to.”

  “Okay, Bat, tape my fingers.” I held up my left hand so Ira could put adhesive tape around my little and ring fingers.

  DOWN THE HILL. I got to the rail fence and waited, watching with the night vision scope. Looking for a dog with the run of the place. No dog, no sign of doggie toys.

  My left hand wasn’t much help, but I hopped the fence and made for the wall. It was more decorative than imposing. I put the scope strap over my shoulder and instead of using my hands to pull me up, I did a scissor kick like an old-time high jumper. I landed astride the wall. That was a little tough on my grand central station, but not like getting kicked there.

  And then I was in the spacious back yard. Three oak trees, thick of trunk, low of branches—good climbing trees—gave me cover. I made the one in the middle home base. I could see in the French doors now. Some dim light. No one moving around.

  To the right, another set of windows, dark. A second story dimly lit.

  I waited, watched. Then made for the house perimeter, ending up between the French doors and a window to the right.