A Nasty Piece of Work (23 page)

“You told me you were eager to share my pain,” Friday said. She pulled her dress off one shoulder, exposing the ugly welts on her rib cage. “You be the judge and jury, Lemuel. You try the case. If you find me guilty, I swear to you we’ll call the police. If you find me innocent—if you decide it was justifiable homicide—we’ll bury the body and get on with our lives.”

Thinking it would calm her if I heard her out, thinking we could still call the police when she’d finished, I accepted the challenge. On the porch of the abandoned Kelso hotel, with the rising sun burning the chill off the desert, I listened.

Shrugging her shoulder back into the dress, she noticed the nick in my neck. She spit on the hem of her dress and used the moistened fabric to wipe the blood from my wound. “I met Emilio Gava one night at a block party in Albuquerque,” she said, her voice hauntingly soft, her eyes tightly shut as if keeping them shut would stem a tide of tears. “He was lean and good-looking and a smooth talker and a good listener. I’d never known anyone like him before. He was uneducated and coarse and rough but he didn’t play intellectual games, he didn’t beat around the bush, he came right out and told me he wanted to have sex with me. So you said it yourself, Lemuel. You said we are different lovers with different people. You said it was completely mysterious and completely magical—how one person can transform you into an eager and ardent lover and another can barely get you to perform adequately. Was it my fault if Emilio transformed me into an eager and ardent lover? To put it crudely, he turned me on. At first the lovemaking was gentle, but gradually he began to explore the violent side of the sex act.”

The violent side of the sex act!
I almost choked on the words. I muttered, “Lady, we’re not talking about the same act.”

“Oh, yes we are, dearest Lemuel. You really were born into the wrong century. You’re out of sync with this one. You see it from a man’s point of view—you see sex as a coupling, like two cars in a train attaching themselves to each other with a gentle crunch. Women see it as a penetration, an invasion, an assault with or without battery, which leaves scars, some of which are visible, most of which are concealed. Can’t you understand, Lemuel? At different points in our lives we are different people. These points can be days apart, even hours, it doesn’t matter. Women love differently than men. We spend our lives trying to figure out what it means to be female. For the six months that we were together, Emilio imposed his definition on me. To the Emilios of this world, to be female is to be at the service of men, the receptacle in which they deposit their seed when they get the urge.”

Pushing herself to her feet, Ornella went to the barrel of rainwater and, wetting the hem of her skirt, began to wipe the blood off of her face and arms and chest and hair. After a while she walked over to what was left of the porch railing and stared out into the waves of heat beginning to rise off the desert floor. I realized she was still talking so I got up to stand next to her. She was saying something about having been a battered child. She was describing what it was like to have lived a lifetime of pain. The words and phrases emerged in a single tone of voice, as if dredging up the past had numbed her vocal cords. “Every time my father beat me I took it for granted that I’d done something wrong,” she was saying. “I couldn’t figure out what but I took it for granted I deserved the beating. The punishment made me feel as if I had expiated the sin, whatever it was; that I was Daddy’s little girl again. Oh, how he would cuddle me and fondle me after each beating. Over time the pain of the beating was transformed into pleasure, and the line between the two blurred. I became addicted to this pain-pleasure syndrome. Emilio picked up where my father, long since dead, left off; the brutal sex with Emilio was a continuation of this pattern.” She turned to look at me. I could have sworn the seaweed green in her eyes had faded to what I took to be mourning gray. Blinking back unshed tears, she said, “He beat me and fucked me and cuddled me. And the addict I was then kept coming back for more.”

When she finally ran out of words, I wandered off into the desert to sort through my emotions. A tepid breeze stirred paper cups and cellophane wrappers that had been tossed from passing cars over the years. Overhead, two kingfishers, with the distinctive white collar around their necks, circled looking for lizards. I watched them for a long time. I watched the slowly bloating contrails of a jet heading in the direction of the Pacific. The sound of the jet engines reached my ears well after the plane had passed, which meant it was flying faster than the speed of sound; which meant the sound, racing after the plane, would catch up with it on a Los Angeles runway. There is something about flying faster than the sound your engines produce, something about the infinity of space that birds and planes inhabit, that reduces life and love and homicide to puny details in the history of the universe. Gunn, the philosopher king spouting his half-baked theory of relativity. I remembered the first time I’d set eyes on Friday, with her nipple pointing straight at me through the flimsy fabric of her dress. She’d looked as if she were hanging on by her fingertips but I couldn’t figure out to what. Now I knew. She was hanging on to sanity. She’d been mauled, physically and mentally. The instinct that pushed her to kill Emilio was as old as the human race, as old as the first man who mastered walking on his hind legs so that he could use the front ones to grip a club. If you’re mauled, you maul back.

Add to this the fact that Emilio Gava a.k.a. Silvio Restivo, the Wrestler with a penchant for brutal sex, had blood on his hands; he had set up Salvatore Baldini for the sniper. Add to this the fact that the Delta-Foxtrot people who had murdered three females and blown out the brains of the especially tall mujahid on the Hindu Kush had never been charged with a crime.

Back at the porch I found Ornella where I’d left her, staring from the half-broken railing into the desert. “What have you decided?” she whispered.

“I’ve decided killing Gava was justifiable homicide. I’ve decided no jury would find you guilty of killing a killer. I’ve decided to bury his body in the dunes. I’ve decided we need to quit this stain radius in the hope that we can get on with our lives and our loves.”

She opened her eyes and the tears spilled from them. “Lemuel, Lemuel,” she sobbed as she came into my arms.

The rest was a matter of work in the final inch. I retrieved a length of white plastic stashed under the staircase and folded Gava’s corpse into it. I brought the Toyota down from the wadi and, with Friday’s help, loaded the body into the back of the car. I found Gava’s handgun in the sand off the pathway. I wiped the prints off it and off the derringer and buried both in a rabbit hole on the side of a dune a good mile into the Mojave. Then I drove deep into a tangle of wadis and, using the folding army shovel, dug a grave in the sand. I dragged the plastic into the hole and covered it with sand and big flat stones. I figured the wadi would be filled with water after the summer rains. With any luck the body would never be found—Gava would just be a hoodlum who had gone missing from the witness protection program; gone missing from the face of the earth.

Ornella, meanwhile, had soaked her dress in the barrel of rainwater and used it to wipe most of the stains off the walls and the check-in counter. To the naked eye the lobby of the Kelso Depot hotel looked long abandoned. It would have taken a forensic expert to identify the smudges on the walls as human blood. Friday had rinsed her dress and put it on sopping wet and was standing in the sun trying to dry it when I came back from the wadis. We caught our respective breaths, I took a last look around. Friday smiled a thin smile. “Thank you for being here, Lemuel,” she said. “Thank you for being.” I wasn’t sure how you said thank you for a thank you so I just nodded. We climbed into the Toyota and headed back toward Nipton to collect my belongings.

Which is when I discovered the note pinned to the door of the Clara Bow room. I somehow knew it spelled trouble.

Trouble it was.
Call this number urgently,
somebody had scrawled on the back of an envelope. I recognized the phone number—it was France-Marie’s, my French Canadian accountant in Las Cruces.

I used the pay phone in the general store. France-Marie came on the line. “Kubra called,” she said. “She sounded kind of funny. She said you should call her at a Nevada number. What’s she doing in Nevada, Lemuel? I thought she was supposed to be at her junior college in California. I asked her if it could wait until you got back to Hatch. She said no. She said it couldn’t wait. The way she said it made it sound almost like she needed help, and quick.”

I dialed the number in Nevada. A man answered. “That you, Gunn? You took your sweet time calling. Here, wait a sec—”

Kubra came on the line. “It’s me, Gunn.”

“You okay, Kubra?”

“Not really.”

“What’s wrong, little lady?”

“Plenty’s wrong,” she said. I could hear the strain in her voice, as if she were fighting off a persuasive terror. “I thought you’d sent them to get me, that’s what they said when—” She didn’t finish the sentence. I heard her cry out in pain.

A man comes on the line. “Listen up, dickhead,” he growled, “you are holding one of ours, we are holding one of yours. Like we suppose you will be interested in an exchange.”

Ornella was at my elbow. “Who is it?” she whispered.

I snarled into the phone, “If anything happens to my kid—” I took a deep breath. “Okay, sure, let’s trade.” My thoughts were racing ahead of the words forming on my lips. “There’s a small-sized problem. We had a fight. Your man can’t walk so well.”

The gravel voice actually laughed. “No sweat. We’ll accept delivery in a wheelchair.”

I told him I’d scout around for a suitable site and would phone back at four that afternoon.

“Four, okay. Don’t talk to the fuzz. You talk to the fuzz, you never see the girl no more.” The line went dead in my ear.

I suppose the blood must have drained from my face because Friday looked frightened. “It’s your doing,” I burst out. “If you hadn’t—”

The lovely lady who tended to the counter and her two customers were all staring at me. I took Ornella by the elbow and steered her out of the store. Standing at the edge of the Mojave, I explained the situation to her in a few brittle words. She looked at me, heartbroken. “Oh my God!” she whispered.

“I’ve got to figure something out,” I said.

I turned and walked across the tracks into the desert. Ornella trailed after me several paces behind. I was in the mood for an orgy of recriminations. “If my daughter winds up dead because of you—”

I heard her words over my sore shoulder, the one I’d used to break Gava’s jaw. “What will you do? Could you bring yourself to kill me, Lemuel? Maybe you don’t have the stomach for that. Maybe you’ll only beat me up like Emilio did, with short little punches to the breasts that make me gasp for breath.”

I winced when she called him Emilio again. I was afraid to turn and face her, afraid that I would punch her in the chest. Violence begets violence. I kept walking, walking and thinking. Behind me, Friday had the good sense to shut up. Slowly the bits and pieces of a plan began to fall into place. It started with the wheelchair and went on from there. It was a long shot but my only shot. We were deep into the desert when I finally turned around. Ornella sank to her knees, her face speckled with grains of fine sand that had stuck to her skin where it was streaked with tears. “I would go back and change things if I could,” she murmured.

“Here’s what we’ll do,” I said.

Twenty-eight

We were crouching next to the Toyota on the rise in the desert across the tracks and up from Kelso Depot, not far from where we’d set out the tarpaulin and watched Gava’s Ferrari come down the road the night before. Gava’s body, which I’d excavated from his wadi grave and brushed pretty much clean of sand, was propped up with a neck brace and lashed onto the motorized wheelchair in front of the car. I’d rented both the brace and the wheelchair from the medical supplies store above the Beauty Emporium in Searchlight. The idea had come to me when I remembered Mr. Baldini tooling around his office in a motorized wheelchair. Max-Leo, the son in Millman & Son Hard and Soft Ware, had jury-rigged a remote joystick from one of his remote-controlled model planes so I could steer the wheelchair from a distance. Max-Leo was a whiz kid with electronics. He’d produced a two-deck tape player and toggled back and forth between my tape of Gava calling the police and a virgin cassette, recording from one tape to the other, until I had Gava saying what I wanted. Then Max-Leo had wired on a battery-powered loudspeaker so that I could broadcast Gava’s voice into the desert. Friday, meanwhile, had rummaged around the shelves of Searchlight’s secondhand apparel boutique and come away with black tights, black Reeboks, long black opera gloves and a long-sleeved midnight blue turtleneck sweater. She’d blackened her face with a cosmetic she kept in her astronaut knapsack for when she worked life-sized puppets with sticks. I’d caught her act in that Pueblo youth club, I was about to catch it again. Crouching next to me in the darkness, you’d never know she was there if you didn’t know she was there. I’d dialed an 800 number from a booth in Searchlight to double-check the Union Pacific freight train schedule, then phoned the Nevada number again to set a time and a place for the exchange—eleven thirty on the nose at Kelso Depot. God willing, my live Kubra for their dead Gava. I’d used the last of the daylight to scout the desert trails around Kelso before going to ground. Or should I say going to sand.

I could see Ornella was jumpy. I needed her to perform flawlessly, so I tried to calm her down. “This is going to work out,” I said.

Friday said, “I’ll never forgive myself if it doesn’t. If only—”

The wind had come up and with it the sand. Both of us were rubbing it out of our eyes. When the Ruggeri crowd showed up they would, thank God, be rubbing it out of their eyes, too. “We have to deal with the situation we have,” I said. “There’s no place for ifs.”