A Nasty Piece of Work (5 page)

She polished off the wine in her glass and shook her head no when I offered a refill. “So explain to me, if you can—how is it possible to be nostalgic for things you never experienced?”

I shrugged. “It’s the human condition according to Gunn. In our mind’s eye, we write scripts of the life we’d like to lead.”

We were both finishing our coffee when I glanced at my Bulova and signaled for the bill. The waitress, wearing a name tag identifying her as Mildred, apologized for the odor of camphor coming from her sweater. “I only just landed this job,” she explained. “The diner is chilly. I had to take my winter clothes out of mothballs and didn’t have time to air them.”

I added up the bill. “You charged us for two salads,” I told Mildred. “We only had one salad.”

The manager, a fat man who walked as if his trouser pockets were weighed down with loose change, waddled over. “Is something not right here?” he demanded.

I explained about the two salads. The manager checked the table slip and apologized profusely. “I hope you won’t hold the mistake against us,” he said.

“I won’t as long as you don’t hold it against Mildred here,” I said. “It was an honest error. She’s a good waitress.”

Mildred flashed me a smile of gratitude.

As per our dutch treat agreement, I began to separate the liquids from the solids to see who owed what. Tongue in cheek, I tried to claim the salad dressing as well as the wine under liquids. Joining the game, Friday tried to claim the ice cubes in the house punch as well as the dinner under solids. “If you’re going to be like that,” I said, “I’m claiming the coffee.” “If you’re claiming the coffee,” she retorted, “I’m claiming the cubes of sugar you put in yours.”

We ended up laughing to beat the band. Heads turned, people began to stare at us, which only made us laugh harder.

It was our first conspiracy.

On the way out, I pointedly held the door open for Friday. In the parking lot, she very formally thanked me for the liquids. Picking up on her tone, I formally thanked her for the solids. “I’m glad you suggested a slow-food place,” she said. “It gives us time to get to know each other.”

“Fast food,” I informed her, warming to the subject, “is the tip of the iceberg. Everything these days is fast food. You can reheat chicken in a microwave in seconds, you can get a divorce in twenty-four hours, you can keep up with the sun if you fly the Atlantic from east to west. People climb into the sack with each other without courting. There is no time to salivate over anything anymore. Salivating is an important part of enjoying the meal.”

Friday fetched a key from her front pocket of the silver astronaut knapsack and unlocked the door of the van. She turned back toward me. “I did enjoy meeting you after all, Lemuel,” she announced, again with great solemnity.

“The last time you raised the subject you seemed to have doubts,” I noted.

“So a girl’s allowed to change her mind,” she said. She leaned toward me and deposited a weightless kiss in the general vicinity of my lips. Was it me engaging in wishful thinking or was this a hint of things to come?

Seven

I called Awlson the next morning to tell him the bail bondslady thought she recognized the voice on the phone. “You’re not going to believe this,” I said. “She thinks Gava fingered himself.”

Awlson was unfazed. “I’ve been in this line of work long enough to believe anythin’,” he told me. “Listen up, Gunn, all hell’s broken loose since you was here. I tracked down the cop who was on the mornin’ shift in Records. He says an individual flashin’ a laminated FBI card turned up, pulled the mug shot and prints from the day file, signed the ledger with an unreadable scrawl, and disappeared. The captain is liftin’ off like one of those souped-up rockets at Cape Canaveral. He phoned up the Albuquerque office of the FBI but they claim they don’t know anythin’ ’bout an agent comin’ out here to Las Cruces and takin’ records. They claim they never heard of anyone named Gava, Emilio.”

I was digesting this when he said, “I seem to be addicted to dead ends these days.”

“What am I missing here, Detective?”

“I ran the name Leffler past our Records people. They’ve already upgraded to computers, though from the blank look on the face of the lady running that shop I’m not convinced this would come under the heading of progress. For what it’s worth, the search engine—that’s what they call it, I’m not making this up—drew a blank. There was no Leffler, initial J for Jennifer, listed. She doesn’t have a police record. She doesn’t have a bank account. She doesn’t have a driver’s license or a hunting license or a mortgage or a passport or a kidney transplant. She doesn’t have a phone number. She hasn’t paid local, state, or federal taxes. There are seventeen Lefflers, initial J for Jennifer, who carry Social Security cards. Twelve of them are drawing retirement checks, three are under seventeen, one resides in Alaska, one is recently deceased.”

“Consider the possibility that she’s one of those individuals with a low profile.”

“Consider the possibility that she’s one of those individuals with no profile.”

“She exists,” I insisted. “My client spoke to her the day she posted bail for Gava.”

“Your client spoke to someone claiming to be Leffler, J for Jennifer. If the aforementioned Leffler posted a phony guarantee for the bail, chances are she did it under a phony identity.”

“Thanks for sharing your dead ends. Made my day.”

“My pleasure. What’s your next move, Gunn?”

“I think I’ll meander out to the Blue Grass for starters. While I’m at it I might as well take a peep at Gava’s condo and see what I can see.”

Eight

I lowered myself onto a bar stool at the Blue Grass that had been polished by so many rear ends you could see your reflection in it. The bartender, who wore a badge over the pocket of his short-sleeved bowling shirt identifying him as D.D., was a scrawny young man in his middle twenties with hunched shoulders and shoulder-length hair tied back to keep it out of his sunken eye sockets. He wore a small silver ring in the lobe of his left ear and had a stubble of a goatee on his chin that looked more like an oversight than something someone would cultivate intentionally. A wrinkled smile that had been worn too many times without laundering was pasted on his face. He set a chilled bottle of Dos Equis, a Mexican dark lager, on the bar in front of me. It was not yet dark outside but dark enough inside for the neon lights to be flickering on. The Blue Grass was deserted except for me and three wash-and-wear suits, traveling salesmen from the look of them, drinking Chardonnay at a corner table. D.D. wasn’t against having a conversation with a customer, he just had to be egged on to hold up his half of it. A cigarette glued to his lower lip bobbed when he supplied monosyllabic answers to my run-on questions. It took me three beers to get him to loosen up.

It turned out that D.D. was not really a professional bartender. He’d taken a bartending course when he was a student at the University of Santa Cruz in California in order to pick up loose change at fraternity parties. Fact was, D.D. was a painter days and a bartender nights. If things worked out he hoped to have his first show in a Santa Fe gallery in the fall. “Painting is a lonely business,” he allowed, “which is why I like bartending—I get to meet interesting folks, I get to hear interesting stories.” D.D.’s hobby was inventing alcoholic drinks—mixing ingredients in a way that nobody had thought of before. His ambition in life, if ambition is the right word for it, was to give his name to a drink that swept the country. “Imagine,” he said, “someone coming through them doors right here in the Blue Grass, right now, and ordering up a D.D. Dillinger on cracked ice with a twist of lime.”

“What’s a D.D. Dillinger?” I asked.

“Don’t know,” he said. “Haven’t invented it yet. Working on it.”

I learned, halfway through my third Dos Equis, that D.D. had been working the night the Las Cruces cops busted two clients for cocaine. “It must have been getting on near eleven,” he said, leaning back with his back against one of those old crank-operated cash registers. “This Chicano-looking dude installs hisself in a booth near the lavatory. Pretty soon an Italian-looking dude with slicked-back hair ambles in. He waits by the door until his eyes get used to the dark, at which point he spots the Chicano in the back. He asks me to bring him a Scotch on the rocks and slides into the booth across from the aforementioned Chicano. I bring over the Scotch. The Chicano is already drinking tap beer. I ask him if he wants a refill. Never lifting his eyes off the Italian he tells me to get lost, which is easier said than done in a bar this size.” I laughed at D.D.’s little joke. He nodded happily and laughed at my laughter. “All the while,” he went on, “there are these three dudes hanging out, one at the bar, one at the pinball machine, one at the jukebox. The one at the bar, the one at the pinball, are obviously cops, you have to be blind or dumb not to make them, they came in separately but kept checking each other out of the corner of their eye. Next thing I know the three of them has got enormous guns in their fists and are closing in on the booth. The Chicano starts to jabber in high-pitched Chicano but the Italian-looking dude doesn’t look all that surprised. He angles his head off to one side and smiles like as if he knows something nobody else knows. The cops snap cuffs on their wrists and head for the door. I yell after them, ‘Hey, who pays for the drinks they drank?’ The Italian-looking dude seems to get a kick out of the situation, you would never guess he is on his way to jail. He gets the cop in the peach sports jacket to lift this leather billfold out of the inside breast pocket of his green jacket. Then he pulls a crisp twenty out of it and folds it like a paper aeroplane and sails it over to me. The four road warriors and the two hookers at the long table near the door applaud. No kidding. I remember the Italian-looking dude saying something like ‘Keep your seat belt on when you fly, kid. Keep the change, too, awright?’ I figure it takes all kinds, don’t it? I mean, here is this dude being busted for possession, you have got to know they are going to go and give him serious time for that, and he doesn’t forget to tip the bartender. Go figure.”

Nine

If the original Garden of Eden was anything like East of Eden Gardens in Las Cruces, old Adam and his overcurious ribmate, Eve, were lucky to get evicted. Set back behind a no-nonsense chain-link fence topped with coils of army surplus concertina wire—for all I know there could have been a minefield, too—East of Eden Gardens was advertised as the promoters’ vision of what paradise must be like, except when you checked the register, you noticed the promoters didn’t actually live there themselves. Smart folks. Picture paper-thin semiattached white stucco condos set at weird angles to each other. Picture patches of Astroturf between the walkways, which were named after deceased movie stars. Picture a communal swimming pool inevitably shaped to look like the most fragile part of a promoter’s body, the kidney. Picture two fluorescent orange all-weather Astroclay tennis courts with neon night-lights designed to attract as wide a variety of insects as possible. Throw in a Jacuzzi in every (pardon the expression) facility, a Porsche convertible or its kissing cousin in every garage, around-the-clock security with (as the signs planted like Burma-Shave ads every twenty yards promised) an
ARMED RESPONSE.
All this and electricity, too.

An overweight security guard wearing aviator sunglasses and a skintight blue uniform faithfully following the contours of his beer belly flagged down my Studebaker at the gatehouse to this penal colony of the spirit. I cracked the window enough to let a blast of hot air in and one of my Santa Fe All-State cards out. The guard ducked back into his air-conditioned mole hole and ran a pudgy thumb down the typed list on a clipboard hanging on the wall next to the indicators monitoring the burglar alarms in every dwelling. He leaned toward the microphone on the counter. His voice boomed at me from a speaker suspended under the roof. “Mr. Epley is expecting you,” it said. “Park in the visitors lot behind the tennis courts, take Humphrey Bogart Lane on down to the first intersection, hang a right on John Wayne Way, Mr. Epley is the second garden apartment on the right. The entrance is around to the side. You can’t miss it. There’s a sign that says
CONCIERGE
on the door.”

I made a mental note to ask my resident expert on the proper pronunciation of “touché” how a French Canadian would say “concierge.”

Six minutes later I was rapping my knuckles on the
CONCIERGE
sign. After a moment the door opened the width of a safety chain and two dark little beady eyes were giving me the once-over. “I’m looking for Alvin Epley,” I announced in my Santa Fe All-State drawl.

“Who’s asking for him?”

“My name’s Gunn. I phoned you earlier—it’s about one of your tenants, Emilio Gava.”

“Yeah, I remember. You a cop or something? If so, you’re wasting your time and mine. Cops already been here.”

“I’m an insurance investigator, Mr. Epley. Santa Fe All-State Indemnity?” I figured if I pronounced the words with a question mark at the end, he’d assume he was the only person East of Eden who wasn’t familiar with the firm. “I’d take it as a personal favor if you could help me pin down a few loose ends.”

He scratched his fingernails along an unshaven cheek while he mulled it over, then shut the door enough to unlatch the safety chain and let me in. He closed the door and safety-chained it behind him. The promoters, who sold these condos starting at $99,999 for two glorious sun-drenched rooms without a view and rented out the ones they couldn’t unload at $550 a month, certainly weren’t pampering their concierge. Alvin Epley lived in a space large enough for four Ping-Pong tables, and it contained everything a body could ask for except space. There was a kitchenette that made my galley in the Once in a Blue Moon look like Julia Child’s dream kitchen. There was a folding bridge table with four folding bridge chairs around it. There were two calendars tacked to the sooty walls, one with a photograph of the Eiffel Tower being built for the Paris Exposition near the end of the nineteenth century (which, according to Ornella Neppi’s nameless grapevine, was the century I was meant to live in), the other with a reproduction of a painting of the Last Supper by an Italian name of Veronese. Add two single iron beds set at right angles to each other, one made, the other stripped down to the mattress. There were two Salvation Army–modern easy chairs facing the biggest color television set I’d ever set eyes on. Also a linoleum floor with what had to be the gaudiest pattern this side of the Mississippi.