A Nasty Piece of Work (6 page)

A lady newscaster with a mane of blazing orange hair and a smear of matching orange lipstick where her mouth would normally have been was describing the arrest of a father accused of administering electric shocks to his sons, aged eleven and nine, with an electric dog collar. The screen filled with a handheld shot of a stumpy man wearing baggy Bermuda shorts and a T-shirt with the words
CHILDREN SHOULD BE SEEN AND NOT HEARD
across it being hustled out of a police van. “They was disobedient,” he shouted at the reporter thrusting a microphone in his face, “is why I did it. I sure didn’t mean to hurt them none.”

Alvin Epley, who looked to be fifty and then some and had the pasty complexion of someone who spent most of his waking hours sleeping indoors, waved me toward one of the two Salvation Army chairs. “Getting so you can’t discipline your own children no more,” he muttered. He grabbed a piece of chalk hanging from a string and made a tick next to an item on the blackboard screwed to the back of the door—I could make out
3G: feed cat twice a day
and
12B: leak under sink.
Settling into the other easy chair, Alvin zapped the TV, leaving the image on but turning off the sound. Throughout our conversation he kept his eyes glued to the screen. I wondered if he could lip-read what was being said. I noticed a plate filled with food on the bridge table.

“I apologize if I’m interrupting your meal.”

“I can heat it up again, no sweat. My old lady always said things tasted better second time ’round than the first, tasted better third time ’round than the second. The meat loaf I’m eating, she cooked it up and froze it two weeks ago Wednesday, which was one day before she went into the hospital and three days before she passed on.”

“Hey, I’m really sorry.”

“No sweat.”

“How long were you married?”

“Twenty-three years next October seven. The way I see it, we all got to go sometime. Wilhelmina was like that—she needed to be positive in her head I wouldn’t go hungry before she’d let them wheel her in for the operation. She cooked up a storm for two days. I figure I still got enough to last me through the end of the month.”

I couldn’t resist asking him if he felt funny eating food that had been prepared by someone who was no longer among the living. With his eye still on the TV screen, Alvin hiked one bony shoulder. “We wear clothes dead people wore, we sleep in beds dead people slept in, we spend money dead people earned, why shouldn’t we eat food dead people cooked?”

“You have a point.”

“You know, the cops was out here asking about Emilio the day after they busted him. It came as quite a shock. Emilio was the quiet type, he kept a low profile, you know what I mean? Aside from the regular Sunday night poker game, nobody saw much of him. The cops, they had this search warrant, so I got out the passkey and neutralized the alarm and let them in his condo, which is 17C overlooking the tennis courts. Nothing much I can tell you that I didn’t tell them.”

“How long had Mr. Gava been living in East of Eden Gardens?”

“He turned up out of the blue eight months to the day before they incarcerated him. He was renting on a month-to-month contract because the promoters have got the apartment up for sale.”

“Did you know that Mr. Gava was released on bail?”

“Little Leon, he’s the guy that let you through the front gate, told me he read it in the
Star.
If Emilio was released on bail, he didn’t come back here.”

“How can you be sure of that, Mr. Epley?”

“The motherboard you maybe seen at the gatehouse automatically records the time a day, the day a week when the burglar alarms are set and when they are unset. A couple of days after I heard Emilio’d been released on bail, it hit me I hadn’t seen him around none, so I checked out of curiosity. The alarm’d been set at twenty-two twenty—you understand military hours, Mr. Gain?—the night Emilio was busted. Except for the cops coming and going the next day, nobody else’d been in or out.”

“My name’s Gunn, not Gain.”

“Sure. Gunn. Sorry about that.”

“No harm done.” I couldn’t miss that Alvin kept referring to Gava by his first name, Emilio. “I take it you were kind of friendly with Mr. Gava.”

“I’m Alvin to all the folks who live at East of Eden. And they’re on a first-name basis with me. They all need favors—they got birds to feed or toilets that leak or doors that squeak, just this morning I had a lady who lost a pearl earring down a drain—so the first thing they do after they move in, they tip me and put the relationship onto a first-name basis to show me how equal they think I am, as if I didn’t already have this information.”

“Did Mr. Gava live alone, Mr. Epley?”

“He lived alone except when he didn’t live alone.”

“You want to spell that out?”

“Maybe two, maybe three times a week he’d turn up with a blonde, close the shutters, you’d hear funny noises coming from his place. Once the lady in 17D complained, so I phoned up and asked Emilio real polite-like to turn the music down. He said he wasn’t playing music. I said maybe he ought to. Next day I found an envelope with two brand-new twenties in it stuffed through my mail slot and a note that said something about how he appreciated a concierge with a sense of humor.”

“Did Mr. Gava turn up with the same woman all the time?”

“She was always blonde. Whether the same woman was under the blonde hair I can’t promise. She came late and left early. She wore dark glasses even at night and a lot of lipstick.”

“Does the name Leffler mean anything to you, Mr. Epley? Jennifer Leffler?”

“Nothing whatsoever.”

“You said something about funny noises coming from Emilio’s apartment. What kind of noises were you referring to?”

“Lookit, different folks have got different strokes. Emilio’s strokes were maybe rougher than the next guy’s but she was a consenting adult, so who am I to judge?”

“Are you saying he beat her up?”

Alvin zapped the TV and changed stations. He fell on a program about Hollywood sex scandals. “Maybe he beat her up, maybe she made noises like as if she was being beaten up.”

“Could you give me a peek at Emilio’s apartment, Mr. Epley?”

He finally turned to look at me. His eyes struck me as being very sad. Suddenly, eating food cooked by your late and obviously lamented wife struck me as a primitive but appropriate way of mourning her loss. “What exactly is it you’re insuring that you need to see his apartment?” he asked.

“My company’s insuring the bond that Mr. Gava appears to have run out on.”

This seemed to confuse him. “The bail bondsman insures that he’s going to show up for the trial. You insure the bail bondsman. Next thing, someone’ll be knocking on my door and tell me he’s insuring you.”

“Mr. Gava was right about your having a sense of humor.”

He accepted this with a nod. “I’m a laugh a minute. Look, there’s no purpose me showing you 17C. Place was sold to a Jewish-type lady from Los Angeles day before yesterday, so we moved Emilio’s stuff, what there was of it, into storage.”

“What exactly was there?”

“A queen-size double bed, a couch, chairs, lamps, a color TV, pots and pans and kitchen glasses and dishes, a sugar jar filled with sugar swiped from restaurants, a matchbox filled with toothpicks swiped from restaurants.”

“How did you know the toothpicks were swiped?”

“They was packaged two to a package and the restaurant’s name was on the paper.”

“Clothing? Toothbrush? Underarm deodorant? Razor?”

A photograph of a famous actress who had been caught sunbathing in her birthday suit on the Riviera came on the screen, with black rectangles blocking out her breasts and pubic hair. Alvin turned back to the TV. I watched closely but I couldn’t detect a flicker of interest in his lidded eyes. “Nothing like clothes or toothbrushes,” he said. “Nothing like that. Nothing personal.”

“One more question and I think that’ll be it.” I slipped a small spiral notebook and ballpoint pen out of my pocket. “Can you tell me who Mr. Gava played poker with Sunday nights?”

“Sure I can. There was Frank Uzzel in 4B, there was Mitch Tredwell in 14B, there was Hank Kugler and his wife, Millie, in 8D. Who else was there? There was Mrs. Hillslip in 9A—her Christian name is Harriet but everyone, don’t ask me why, calls her Hattie. Last but not least, not counting Emilio, was Cal Pringle in 16B and C, he bought both condos and knocked down the wall between them.”

I apologized again for interrupting his meal and thanked Mr. Epley for his help. “Call me Alvin,” he said. “Everyone does.” He slipped the meat loaf into the microwave and turned the knob, which began to tick like a time bomb as it wound down. Then he saw me to the door. “You find Emilio, you give him regards from Alvin, huh? Tell him to keep the music turned down, he’ll get a laugh outa that.”

Ten

I touched base with Detective Awlson from a phone booth off Interstate 25. I had to shout into the mouthpiece to be heard over the din of the cars and trucks. I asked Awlson to pull the phone logs on Emilio Gava’s home phone in 17C at East of Eden Gardens and see who Gava called. “I’m one jump ahead of you,” Awlson said. “I got the phone company to send me the logs the day you told me it looked as if Gava’d skipped out on his bail.”

“So who’d he call?” I asked.

“A Las Cruces pizza delivery joint, a dry-cleanin’ emporium, a neighbor at East of Eden name of Frank Uzzel, another neighbor name of Harriet Hillslip, a Chicano restaurant in San Miguel, an Italian restaurant up the road in Deming.”

“That doesn’t give us much to go on,” I remarked.

“What you need to do, Gunn, is stop by the station house. By happenstance I have someone in my office who, like the Brits like to say, may be able to help you with your inquiries.”

Twenty-five minutes later I made my way down the tunnel-like corridor to Awlson’s door, which was ajar. I walked in to find Awlson grilling a rail-thin Chicano with sickle-shaped sideburns and a three-inch knife burn on one cheek. “Je-sus, Jesus, you got to come up with a better story than that if you want to save yourself grief,” Awlson was saying.

Awlson noticed me at the door. “Well, look what the breeze blew in—if it ain’t Santa Fe All-State Indemnity in the flesh. You two know each other? Didn’t think so. The jerk with the handcuffs on his wrists is Jesus Oropesa, the pusher who was arrested with that Gava fella at the Blue Grass. He was picked up this morning peddling crack outside a Las Cruces high school. Say, remember when I told you he was five foot seven and a half, a hundred thirty-three? Turns out he’s three-quarters of an inch shorter but I hit his weight on the nose.”

“Ever see a picture called
The Incredible Shrinking Man
?” I asked. “Maybe Jesus here
was
five foot seven and a half. Maybe he’s shorter because he got zapped by nuclear fallout like that guy in the movie,” I said with a straight face.

“May be,” Awlson agreed.

“Which of you’s the good cop?” Jesus asked with a smirk. “I been through this wringer before.”

“He thinks we’re gonna play good cop, bad cop.” Awlson said. He seemed amused—how else would you explain the little wrinkles that fanned out from the corners of his eyes? “I ought to try it out one of these days. I know cops who swear by the good cop, bad cop routine.”

“Which role you see yourself playing?” I asked.

“S’pose I’d have to cast myself as the bad cop. No two-bit pusher would fall for me being the good cop.”

Jesus swallowed a yawn. “How’s about you go ahead and book me,” he said. “The sooner you book me, the sooner I get to see the judge. The sooner I get to see the judge, the sooner I waltz outa here on bail. I got a mouthpiece with a big mouth, he’ll plea bargain me into a two-to-five. Prisons being overcrowded like they is, I’ll be walking in three, four months. The way I see it, it’s a paid vacation.”

Awlson shook his head in disgust. “The syndicate that employs these jerks pays them monthly salaries while they’re doin’ time as long as they don’t name names.”

“Mind if I ask him a few questions?”

“Why would I mind?” Awlson said. “I need to relieve myself.” I grinned. He grinned back and left the room, closing the door behind him.

I settled onto the edge of Awlson’s desk. “I need to clear up some details about the arrest at the Blue Grass.”

“I do not know nothing ’bout nothing,” Jesus said.

“Did you ever do business with Emilio Gava before the Blue Grass?”

Jesus only smirked.

“Who set up the buy that night? Emilio Gava himself?”

The smirk was pasted on his face. I could feel the anger that resided permanently in my fingertips rising through my arm and on up to my throat.

“Was there a go-between? A woman maybe?”

“You know what you can do with your fucking questions,” Jesus said with a smirk. “You can shove them up your fucking ass.”

I lost it.
It
being my cool.
It
being my dignity. I ducked behind him and jerked the handcuffs and his wrists upward. Jesus shrieked “Police brutality” but I only laughed under my breath and pulled his wrists higher. “I’m not a cop,” I told him, “so this can’t be construed as police brutality.” I experienced a surge of pure pleasure as I elevated the cuffs another increment. I could feel the arm sockets in his shoulder reaching their limit before I reached my limit. Tears were streaming from Jesus’s eyes as he gasped, “Go ahead, break my arms, even if I knew who set up the sale, which I don’t, I wouldn’t tell you because they’d break my balls.”

I released my grip on the cuffs and took several deep gulps of air to calm myself. I had come off adrenaline highs before, namely in Afghanistan, so I was not surprised by the free fall. When I could talk again, I said, “Let’s say for argument’s sake you’re telling the truth for the first time in your life. How could a guy like Gava, who is not local, score cocaine in this town?”

Jesus was breathing hard. “He must have called the right number and named the right names.”

“Was he a junkie?”

“Christ no. The minute I seen him coming through the door, I could see he was not a user of the cocaine he was buying. You can spot users a mile off—they got this gleam in their eyes, they got dilated pupils, they can’t wait to pay you off and get their hot hands on the shit. When you finally pass it over they’re like kiddies in a candy store. Gava was laid-back like an undertaker at a funeral. I figured right off he was buying for a friend.”