The Low Desert

by Tod Goldberg

  “I’m looking for Woodrow East,” I said.

  “Keep on looking,” he said, and he went to close the door, so I slammed my sap in the jamb.

  Red squinted at me, like he was trying to make sense of something. “You a cop?”

  “You a criminal?”

  This got Red to laugh. “You think a guy showing up with a gun in a holster intimidates me,” he said, his accent straight from the bleachers at Wrigley Field, “you’re knocking on the wrong door.”

  I looked around Red, which was easy since I had six inches on him. Room number 305 was a suite, with two sofas facing each other, a glass coffee table, a kitchenette, and bedrooms on either side. Straight behind Red, on the expansive balcony, I spotted a man on a chaise lounge, tanning shirtless between two women.

  “I feel like we’ve started on the wrong foot,” I said. I slid the sap back out. Smiled. Champion of courtesy. That was me. “You tell Mr. East that Morris Drew from Claxson is at the door. And if he doesn’t want to see me, you can come back and tell me that.”

  “And then what?”

  “And then you’ll find out if I’m a cop or not.”

  He looked down at the sap in my hand. “You got a license for that?”

  “Robert Kennedy hand-delivered it. You want his number?”

  Red stared at me for a few seconds, a smile forming at the edge of his mouth. “You’re a hard-ass,” he said. “You want to make some real money?”

  “I got a job.”

  “You work for Claxson,” he said. “Funny thing is, George Claxson works for my family.”

  A man came walking up the stairs behind me in a white linen suit, shirt unbuttoned halfway down his chest, sweat pouring down his face. “This fucking town is too hot,” the man said, and then he saw me and said, “Who the fuck is this?”

  “Morris Drew,” I said. “I’m the director of security for Claxson Oil.”

  “I like your policeman pajamas,” the man said. He extended his hand to me. “Tommy Faraci, real estate mogul and philanthropist.” This made Red laugh.

  “You do me a favor, Mr. Faraci?” I said, still holding his hand.

  “What’s that?”

  “You see Woodrow East on the balcony tanning? Tell him I’ll be waiting for him in the coffee shop.”

  “And what should I tell him this is concerning?”

  “The dead kid,” I said, “I pulled out of the Salton Sea this morning.”

  WOODROW EAST SLID in across from me in the Riviera’s coffee shop. He was in his late forties, stood over six feet tall, and was lean and sunburnt across his nose. He had on a pair of sand-colored slacks and a butter-yellow Penguin polo shirt, tucked in. He smelled like he’d just shaved. “I have fifteen minutes.” He waived over the waitress, asked her for a glass of orange juice, freshly squeezed. “Have we met before?” he asked me.

  “I’m in charge of security at the Salton Sea,” I said.

  “Right, right,” he said. “You found George’s daughter, is that right?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “I remember when that happened,” he said. “I’ve known George twenty years, so I remember Gretchen when she was a toddler. Most inquisitive child I ever met.” The waitress came and dropped off my plate—a New York steak and eggs—and another cup of coffee, then came back and slid a glass of orange juice in front of Woodrow. When the waitress was gone, he said, “What a terrible thing.”

  “I’m glad I found her.” I cut into my steak and chewed it for a few moments, let Woodrow wait on me. “Do you know anything about the man who killed her?”

  “No,” he said.

  “His name was Milton Stairs. They’d been dating for three months. Give or take. I’d gone to school with him. Kindergarten all the way up through high school, but he dropped out before graduating. We all thought he was down in Walla Walla working the wheat. That’s what he told us when he came back to Granite City.” I took a sip of my coffee. “Turns out, he was in the penitentiary there. Raped an itinerant farm girl, pled down to assault.”

  “Jesus,” Woodrow said.

  “Yeah. It was shocking. I’d lost touch with him, because I was fighting in Korea. And then I re-upped, twice. You must have served in Europe?”

  “No,” he said. “I’m colorblind.”

  “That got you out?”

  “I wanted to serve,” he said, and he left it at that.

  “I was just happy to see my old friend. You must have grown up with some people who went away and then showed back up with a story that maybe wasn’t altogether true?”

  “I grew up in Chicago,” Woodrow said. “It’s not like that in a big city.”

  “You believe that? People in the big city are somehow different than small-town people?”

  “I believe that the people I knew growing up,” he said, “lied in less imaginative ways.”

  “I see what you’re saying.” I cut another bite of steak, watched Woodrow’s eyes glance at the steak knife. “Mr. Claxson is a good judge of character. He took one look at Milton and didn’t trust him. Looked into the guy, finds out he did time, gets Gretchen to dump him, straight away. Big family drama. Romeo and Juliet. That’s what my wife says, because she was Gretchen’s ear. Me, I’m the kind of person who thinks maybe you get out of prison, you can come back a better person. Assault, maybe you get drunk, hit a guy in a bar. We’ve all done that.”

  “I’ve never been in a fight,” Woodrow said.

  “Not even with your brother?”

  “Only child.”

  “See, I got a younger brother. We’d get rough with each other. You know. Like how bears playfight. Not trying to kill each other. But letting the other one know it’s possible. Showing our teeth. Getting our claws out.” I took one last bite of steak. “Mr. Claxson didn’t share my point of view.”

  “Turns out he was right,” Woodrow said. While we’d been talking, three beads of sweat had formed on his upper lip, so he took a napkin and casually wiped off his face.

  I broke off a piece of toast and dipped it in the yolk of my egg, chewed it. “The thing is, I should have known. I should have seen it in Milton. But I was so up in my own head after Korea that I was incapable of reading other people. I left something elemental out there. Something that gave me empathy, I think. And for a long time, I didn’t know if I’d ever get that part of myself back. Does that make sense to you?”

  “No.”

  “Well, the fact was, I knew Milton Stairs was a piece of shit. I’d known it since he was seven. I once saw him cut the head off a cat. Just for fun. Just to hear the noise the cat made. That’s not normal.”

  “Evil exists,” Woodrow said. “I believe that.”

  I drank down the rest of my coffee. Leaned back against the banquette. “So let me ask you something,” I said. “I tell your friend Mr. Faraci that I’m here to talk to you about a dead kid, and you sit down across from me and you don’t say a word about that. Doesn’t that strike you as odd?”

  “Why would it?”

  “Lots of people show up with questions about dead kids while you’re on vacation?”

  “Number one,” Woodrow said, “I’m not on vacation. I have business meetings with the mayor of Palm Springs tomorrow, talks with tribal leaders, and then I’m catching a plane from Los Angeles on Tuesday back to Corpus. Number two, I am the vice president of a major oil and development company. Terrible things happen at our locations around the world.”

  “And Tommy Faraci, he’s what? Your chauffer?”

  “He’s a business associate with interests in the region,” he said. “We have many investors. I don’t need to clear them with you.” He dabbed at his damp face again. “Whatever has happened this morning with this boy, we’ll make it right.”

  “How do you know I’m talking about a boy?” I said. Woodrow reached for his orange juice, but I put my hand over it, slid it, and my steak knife, away from him.

  “You must have said something,” he said.

  “I
didn’t.”

  We sat there like that for ten seconds, staring at each other. I could have pulled out my gun and shot him. I could have cuffed him to the table and then called the sheriff. I could have done anything I wanted to Woodrow East right then, but I did nothing, just waited for him to speak.

  “Where’d you find him?”

  “He washed up on the south shore. Most of his face was gone, but I recognized him.”

  “As who?”

  “As your son Darren, according to his mother, Brenda.”

  “I’m afraid those names aren’t familiar to me.”

  “Brenda said she was your wife,” I said, “and that Darren was your son. They were staying in your bungalow.” I reached into my back pocket and took out the bookmark from the novel I found. “This was in the paperback Brenda was reading when they came to get her and Darren from your bungalow, best as I can figure out.” I held it up to my nose. “Can still sort of smell her suntan lotion on it.” I slid it across the table, but he didn’t pick it up.

  “My wife,” he said. He tried to sound incredulous, but there was a tremor in his voice. “My wife is in Chicago. You should call her.”

  “I did,” I said. “She offered me $500 to stay quiet, in fact.”

  “Do you hear how absurd this sounds?” He covered his mouth with his hand, shook his head. And then, he bit into the skin between his right thumb and index finger.

  “Easy,” I said. I reached across the table, but he snatched his hand from his mouth.

  “You’re fired,” he said. “I will approve two months of severance.”

  “I can help you,” I said.

  “Six months,” he said. “A year. Whatever you want.”

  “Someone is going to be looking for that boy, Mr. East.”

  “No one is going to be looking for him.” He slapped his hand on the table. “Don’t you understand?”

  “I understand you’re involved with some bad people,” I said. “That they’ve done some things for you that you might regret.”

  “You’re involved, too,” he said. “We’re all involved. Open your eyes.” He cut his gaze out the window for a fraction of a second. “Do you see a white and black Oldsmobile Starfire idling in the parking lot?”

  I looked out the window. Took my time. An Oldsmobile Starfire was parked facing the sun, so I couldn’t see into it, but there it was. “Yeah.”

  “If I don’t walk out of here in . . .” he looked at his watch, “nine minutes, they’re going to drive out to the Salton Sea and murder your wife. Is that what you want?”

  “No, they won’t,” I said.

  “You don’t know these kinds of people,” he said.

  “Woody,” I said, “I am those kinds of people.”

  “Please,” he said. “Please.”

  “There’s a child in a refrigerator in Indio without a name. You need to tell me if his mother is going to show up next. You’re not guilty of anything,” I said.

  “They’ll kill my wife,” he said. “My real wife.”

  “What did you do, Woody? What the fuck did you do?”

  “I asked for a favor,” Woodrow said. “I was involved in a . . . situation. I asked for a permanent solution to a temporary problem. I didn’t understand the scope of their intentions. Of what I would owe them. My god. These people.”

  “When did you learn their intentions?” I said.

  “Now. Today.”

  “Just give me a name. I’ll leave you out of it.”

  Woodrow East pushed himself out of the booth, took out his wallet, put a ten on the table. “What did you do to Milton Stairs when you caught him?” Woodrow asked.

  “I beat him until I thought he was dead,” I said. “I meant to kill him.”

  “You should do that to me,” he said. He picked up the bookmark, smelled it, and then tore it in half.

  “Be a decent man,” I said. “You’re still capable of that.”

  “I’m trying to do that,” he said. “If I tell you that boy’s name, your entire life will be upside-down. Everyone you know, every hope you’ve ever had, will be gone.” He looked out the window. The Starfire pulled up by the front door of the diner, idled there. I made out Tommy Faraci in the passenger seat, Red behind the wheel. From where I was sitting, if I had my M18 rifle, I could kill them both before they put it back into drive. “Do me a favor, please. Leave me somewhere I won’t be found.”

  I DIDN’T GET back to the Salton Sea until close to 4 p.m. I’d gone to the hospital in Indio, met with a representative from the coroner’s office, and gave what verifiable information I had, which was nothing. I put in a call to the sheriff’s office, let them know that we’d found a body, and the deputy on duty, Warren, told me the sheriff would get back to me on Monday or Tuesday . . . Friday at the latest. “We don’t have any new missing-children reports,” he told me. “Could be it’s a Mexican, floated in from the New River.” The New River ran north from Mexicali and met up with the Salton Sea just outside Westmorland.

  “That happens?” I said.

  “Every bad thing happens,” Warren said. “It’s no place to live.”

  Down on the shore, crews were cleaning up from the boat race. Three dozen fans milled around under a billowing white tent, but the intense afternoon heat—it was at least 115—had cleared out the VIP area and beer garden, save for Mark Sarvas standing guard over the giveaway Cadillac. He stood beneath a fixed umbrella. His uniform stuck to him like plastic wrap.

  “Where is everyone?” I asked.

  “Inside the yacht club, eating lobster and drinking gin,” Sarvas said, “that would be my guess.”

  “Go home,” I said.

  “You’ll be surprised to learn the private security company hired a bunch of yahoos who couldn’t take the sun,” Sarvas said. “So I’m on this spot until the Caddie dealership comes to lock up the car.”

  “Per who?”

  “Per Jim Connelly,” he said. “Who can fuck himself, if you don’t mind me saying so. He’s not my boss.”

  “Go home,” I said again. “I’ll cover it.”

  “You sure?”

  “Before you have a stroke.”

  Mark began to walk off, then stopped. “Hey, anything on that kid?”

  “Nothing good.”

  “Too bad,” he said. “Was hoping . . . well, I don’t know what I was hoping.”

  “When you were up in Springfield,” I said, “you ever encounter anyone named Tommy Faraci?”

  Mark Sarvas unbuttoned his uniform shirt, balled it up and dried his face, neck, and hair, then stood there in his sweat-matted undershirt, looking out at the water. “Why would you ask me that?” he said finally. The hand holding his shirt was shaking.

  “I met a guy today,” I said. “Two guys, actually. In Palm Springs. With Woodrow East.”

  Mark wiped at his face again. Stared at his uniform. “You planning to have children, Captain?” he said.

  “I guess so,” I said. “Why?”

  “This job,” Mark said, “it’s about to be no good for you. You and your wife, in the morning, you should pack up and go back to wherever you’re from. Forget Tommy Faraci. Don’t bring that darkness close to you. Forget Woodrow East, too.” He went over to the water station, filled up two Dixie cups, gulped down one, poured the other over his head, then dumped both cups, and his uniform, into the garbage. “The world’s a shit can, Morris. I told you. Don’t go kicking the can.”

  I CAME HOME and discovered Katharine in our backyard, sipping a beer, reading Hawaii. It was close to six, and a breeze had picked up from the west.

  “I thought I told you to go to Jim and Gloria’s when they came back,” I said.

  “You did,” she said.

  “And?”

  “And you’re not my father,” she said.

  I sat down beside her. She handed me her beer and I took a long drink. It was Rainier, from Seattle. “Where’d you get this?”

  “George,” she said. “He dropped it off wi
th the salmon.” I handed the bottle back to her. “You going to tell me what happened today?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “Do you think I’m a good man, Kat?”

  “If I didn’t,” she said, “I wouldn’t be sitting here.”

  “I met a man today,” I said, “who had nothing left to lose.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Got himself into trouble with the wrong people.”

  “Are there right people to get into trouble with?”

  “If I told you every bad thing I’d ever done,” I said, “I’d be sitting here alone.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong.” She shook out a cigarette from a pack of Marlboros at her feet, lit it, blew smoke into the sunset. “You’re not made up of your worst days, Morris,” she said. “No one is.”

  I took the beer back from Katharine and finished it. “Keep reminding me of that,” I said.

  THAT NIGHT, AFTER Katharine went to sleep, I walked down to the shore of the Salton Sea. The breeze moved the clouds out, leaving the sky brilliant with stars, the moon half-full in the east, the Sea silver in its reflection. Campers had bonfires going, even with the heat, which gave the world a flickering, smoky glow, so that when Jim Connelly showed up beside me, he appeared like an apparition out of the darkness.

  “Couldn’t sleep?” I said.

  “Didn’t try.” He had a bottle of Jameson with him and two shot glasses. He filled one and handed it to me. “Indulge?”

  “You knew I’d be down here?” I took down the shot.

  “I saw you walk out.” He filled his glass, sipped at it while we watched the water. “Can I ask you an impolite question, Morris?” he said after a time.

  “If you need to.”

  “Do you know, roughly, how many men you killed in Korea?”

  “I didn’t keep count,” I said.

  “A hundred?”

  “I don’t know, Jim,” I said. “A lot.”

  “What did it feel like?”

  “Like . . . nothing,” I said.

  “It didn’t bother you?”

  “No,” I said. “I mean it felt like . . . nothing. Like an absence. A void. It’s hard to explain.” I paused. “But it opened up something in me that was always there. Something I’m not proud of.”