A Nasty Piece of Work (12 page)

“Five by five,” I said.

“Five by five is military jargon, isn’t it? We are not military. We are civilian.” He stepped back to take a better look at my Studebaker. “What year?”

“She’s a 1950 Starlight coupe.”

“Beats me which end is the front end,” one of the bouncers said.

“The Studebaker’s flat trunk was a distinctive feature,” I explained. “What about your Cadillac?” I asked the fedora.

“She’s a 1938 LaSalle coupe. The teardrop fenders went out of style after the war. Something like four thousand LaSalles were manufactured, maybe a hundred fifty, two hundred still rolling today.”

“Fine-looking automobile,” I said.

The short man with the fedora whistled through his teeth. “Your Starlight’s no slouch,” he said. He removed his hat and mopped his brow on the back of a cuff before carefully setting the hat back on his head, using both hands. “You need to be extra careful driving a vintage car. The last thing you want is to scrape her paint against a fire hydrant.”

“It’s the last thing,” I said.

Nodding as if we’d signed a verbal contract, the short man walked up to the Studebaker and, using the diamond on a pinky ring, scratched the left front fender from end to end. The sound was excruciating.

“Can I assume we understand each other?” he inquired.

“You didn’t need to do that,” I said. The heel of my right hand was on the molded grip of the Smith & Wesson semiautomatic wedged under my thigh. It could have gone either way.

“I didn’t, did I?” he agreed. He tugged down the brim of his fedora to shade his eyes. “Hopefully our paths won’t cross again.” He took another look at the car and angled his head in admiration. “Some beaut,” he said, “scratch notwithstanding.”

“You ought to leave me your business card,” I said.

“Why would I want to do that?”

“In case I decide to sell the Studebaker.”

The four of them exchanged looks. “He’s a comedian,” one of the bouncers said.

“A regular sit-down comic,” the short man in the fedora said.

Jesus Oropesa thought I should be writing movie scripts. These jokers detected a talent for comedy. Good luck in my civilian endeavors.

The four of them backed toward their respective cars, then backed the cars out and headed, with the Cadillac LaSalle leading the way, in the direction of the interstate. I fitted the Smith & Wesson back into the holster attached by a magnet to the underside of the dashboard. It’d been an optional extra when I bought the Studebaker from an L.A. funeral parlor owner going to jail for aiding and abetting. I never asked what he’d been aiding and abetting. He never volunteered the information.

Sixteen

Keeping an eye on the rearview mirror, I drove north, skirting the urban mangle of Albuquerque and the rich-ghetto sprawl of Santa Fe. Taos, an hour and a quarter down the road north of Santa Fe, offers up a different moonscape than the rest of New Mexico. If you don’t count the artsy-craftsy crowd and their swank galleries and coffee shops, it still has the feel of a small frontier town, one part Pueblo Indian, one part descendants of frontiersmen who came out in Conestogas chain-smoking stogies to keep the gnats at bay. I passed the Kit Carson house on Kit Carson Road; it’d been turned into a museum celebrating the exploits of the Indian fighter who stood off beyond the range of arrows and shot warriors between the eyes with his Kentucky long rifle, then scalped them to collect the hundred-dollar bounty offered by the territorial government for dead Apaches. What can I say? Frontiers like the American Wild West or the tribal badlands of Afghanistan have been known to turn ordinary folks into ordinary killers.

I had trouble finding the Pueblo youth club, wound up asking directions from an Indian behind the cash register of one of those twenty-four-hour gas stations. I made it in time to catch the tail end of the marionette show. In the total darkness of the club’s theater, three puppeteers dressed in black—Ornella Neppi was one of them—were completely invisible as they worked the life-sized puppets with sticks. The illusion was eerily perfect. The puppets seemed so human I was taken aback when I went backstage after the show and saw them crumpled up in a straw hamper. You might have jumped to the conclusion they didn’t have a bone in their bodies.

“You could be arrested for puppet slaughter,” I told Ornella.

“There was a time in my life when I couldn’t hurt a fly,” she murmured. “I’ve moved on,” she added in a negatively charged afterthought. She smiled the barefoot contessa smile, the one despairingly devoid of joy that I first spotted when she turned up at the Once in a Blue Moon.

She shut the lid on the straw hamper, imprisoning the puppets—I was relieved they could breathe through the straw—and invited me for coffee and doughnuts in the club’s coffeehouse. A song with a drumbeat drowning out the words was coming from a jukebox. A dozen or so local adolescents—white boys with crew cuts, Pueblo Indians with dreadlocks, girls with ears and/or nostrils pierced—sat on benches around a long table nursing Diet Cokes, which Friday said was, for reasons unbeknownst to her, the only kind of Coke they served here. Ornella and I found a table in the corner the furthest from the jukebox.

“What brings you up to Taos?” she asked.

“You,” I said. I blew on my coffee to cool it off (by the time I got around to drinking it, it was cold) as I filled her in on what I’d learned about her bail jumper, Emilio Gava. “Silvio Restivo ring any bells?” I inquired when I’d set out the main points.

She shook her head. I thought I could read puzzlement in her eyes. Yul Brynner would have read it the same way.

“I have some leads to track down in Nevada,” I said. “One of them will hopefully take us to Gava’s doorstep. All the photographs—at the
Las Cruces Star,
in the police morgue—have disappeared. You saw Gava in court, you posted bail on him. You’re the only one I know who knows what he looks like. I need you to come with me to identify him.”

She flashed that smile of hers that I was coming to dislike because I didn’t know her well enough to know what was behind it. “Of course I’ll come with you,” she said almost eagerly.

Her puppeteer friends took care of the straw hamper. I led Friday to the Studebaker. Passing in front of it, she spotted the scratch on the fender. “Where’d you get that?” she asked.

“I hit a diamond,” I said.

If the answer struck her as curious, she didn’t let on. “Beautiful car,” she said as she settled into the passenger seat.

“Vintage fifties,” I said. “Only thing newfangled are the seat belts. Still has the original radio. If you turn it on all you get is Nat King Cole or Bo Diddley.”

She almost but not quite laughed. “I don’t even know who Bo Diddley is.”

“That’s what’s called a generation gap,” I said. “Chances are you never saw the Ed Sullivan show where Bo Diddley made his national debut.”

“I don’t know who Ed Sullivan is either.”

I mimicked moving closer to her in a wheelchair. “Can you talk louder?” I said. “I have a hearing aid but I can’t remember where I put it.”

“Hey, you’re not that much older than me.”

“In my body, maybe fifteen years. In my head, more like twice that.”

Working our way down the interstate to the Albuquerque airport neither of us made small talk, but unlike my recent experience with France-Marie the silence never became strained. I parked the Studebaker in the long-term lot as near as I could to the cashier’s booth. We took separate rooms in a respectable motel near the terminal. Early morning flights coming in so low they scraped tar off the roof woke us. We checked in for the first plane going in the right direction, a midmorning flight to Flagstaff. Our baggage was carry on—I had my small canvas overnight bag, Friday had her bulky silver astronaut knapsack slung casually over one bare shoulder. She was wearing faded red basketball sneakers without socks, loose-fitting jeans, and that butter-colored sleeveless blouse she’d had on when she came round the mobile home park looking to hire a private investigator. The sleeves of an off-white cardigan tied around her waist hid the sliver of midriff between the blouse and the jeans. The plane had been overbooked. Four people I took for college students and a spry older woman volunteered to leave in exchange for free tickets on a later flight. Friday wasn’t even seated next to me—she was on the aisle, across the aisle, three rows up. At the risk of being taken for a spine fetishist, I have to report that I stared at her vertebrae the several times she leaned forward to retrieve something from her knapsack.

I rented an air-conditioned four-wheel-drive Toyota from the Avis people at the Flagstaff airport, ticked the box on the contract to get full insurance, and set out heading west on U.S. 40. We shared a sub at a lunch counter outside of Kingman, then branched off onto Route 68 and crossed the Colorado River above Laughlin, a town booming with flashy casinos and fancy hotels and fleshy roadside billboards advertising same. Seems as if everything for sale these days is being marketed by half-naked ladies. We topped off the gas tank outside of Laughlin, used the facilities, stretched our legs in a picnic area behind the gas station, then set out for Nipton, crossing into California and arriving just after seven. I’d been to Nipton once before—it was when I was towing Once in a Blue Moon from Los Angeles to Hatch—so I pretty much knew what I was getting into. In a previous incarnation it’d been a stagecoach stop between Flagstaff and the coast. Nowadays it consisted of a dozen mobile homes and an equal number of dilapidated buildings, an old-fashioned general store with a potbellied stove inside and a gasoline pump that was “temporarily out of order” outside, and a pleasant enough adobe hotel with four bedrooms and one bathroom in the hallway. Giant hundred-fifty-car Union Pacific freight trains passed a stone’s throw from the hotel’s porch, rattling the windows, setting the building to trembling on its foundations.

We parked the Toyota under the overhang at the rear of the hotel. A tired cowboy engrossed in a comic book was holding fort behind the check-in counter. He had neglected to take off his Stetson indoors, probably because he felt naked without it. A plastic name tag attached to the flap of the breast pocket of his flannel shirt identified him as Clarence. I had to clear my throat twice to get him to look up from the comic book. He didn’t appear to appreciate the interruption. I told Clarence I’d called ahead from the Avis desk in Flagstaff. He moistened a thumb on a postage-stamp sponge and rifled through the pages of a large reservation book until he came to this week’s page. He ran a finger down the list, scratching at the names with a fingernail bitten to the quick.

“Only got us four rooms,” he remarked.

“That’s why I reserved,” I said.

“How’re we spelling Gun?”

My sidekick answered for me. “With two
n
’s,” Friday said.

“I don’t got nobody named Gunn on my list. I got a reservation for a Gun with one
n.
”

“That’s almost certainly me,” I said.

He looked up, a frown of disapproval on his face. “Did you go and spell out your name on the phone?”

I said I couldn’t remember.

“Well, then, it’s sure not our fault if’n it’s spelled bad.”

“I didn’t say it was your fault. What about the two rooms?”

“Only one listed on the reservation.” Clarence looked up again with something resembling a lecherous glint in his eye. “Only one still available.”

I could see Clarence sizing up the pretty creature standing next to me. She’d put on the cardigan but hadn’t bothered buttoning it. I wondered whether he could make out her very spare ribs. I wondered if he was calculating the age difference between her and me.

I looked at Ornella in confusion. “I promise you I asked for—”

“We’ll take it,” Friday told the night clerk.

“You’ll take it?” he asked, looking at me.

“The lady said we’d take it so we’ll take it.”

I signed the register “Mr. and Mrs. Gun from Hatch.” I figured the reservation was in the name of Gun and I didn’t want to confound the already confounded cowboy by registering under another name.

Which is how Ornella and I found ourselves sharing a tiny bedroom with a plaque on the door identifying it as the Clara Bow room. Seems as if the legendary silent-screen actress had lived here during the Roaring Twenties when she was building her Shangri-la in the Mojave Desert.

The situation was awkward, to say the least. I can only suppose my desire for Friday was written on my face. Clarence out at the desk certainly spotted it, judging from the way he licked his chapped lips as he slid the room key across the counter. Trouble is I have scruples. The last thing I wanted to do was impose myself on a woman. If something was going to happen in the Clara Bow room, in the Clara Bow double bed, Ornella would have to make the first move.

Which, I am happy to say, is what she did.

Here’s what happened. We had supper in the general store. An obliging Chicana named Vesustiana whipped up some hash browns and turkey burgers for us on her two-burner stove. “Where’bouts?” she asked as dished them out right from the frying pan.

“She wants to know where we’re from,” Ornella explained when she saw the blank look on my face. “We’re from Hatch,” she told Vesustiana.

“What brings you to Nipton?” she asked.

“We’re newlyweds,” Friday said with a straight face. “This is our wedding night. For our honeymoon, we’re going to explore the Mojave.”

“Well, neither of you look like virgins, so I reckon it’ll work out real fine. Wedding nights can be bad news for late bloomers who don’t have a lot of experience with sexual copulation. Since you’re celebrating, coffee’s on the house.”

Back in the Clara Bow cubbyhole, I asked Ornella why she’d said what she’d said.

She was looking at herself in the small wall mirror with seashells glued to the frame. Suddenly she crossed her arms and took hold of the hem of her shirt and pulled it up and over her head. The sight of her vertebrae left me short of breath.

I could see she was monitoring my reaction in the mirror. “I figured we could beat around the bush, Lemuel. We could laugh nervously at each other’s jokes. When I admitted I didn’t have the foggiest idea who Clara Bow was, you’d explain at great length. You’d be so edgy you wouldn’t economize on words. The subtext of what you said, the message between the lines would be the difference in our ages.”