Fifty Grand (21 page)

Things to do, I thought.

Things to do.

W
hen I was thirteen I won a poetry competition—the Dr. Ernesto Guevara Young Poets’ Prize. The competition was open to all children under the age of sixteen, though really it was open only to the children of Party members. The prize was a trip to St. Petersburg to study composition at the Pushkin School. My poem wasn’t very good, it was about the harbor lights on Havana Bay watching themselves on a still January night. I imagined all the events the harbor had seen over the last five hundred years and wrote about them. The metaphors were weak, the images childish, and the good bits were echoes from José Martí and García Lorca. It was a bad poem but my father knew how to play the game. He changed my title from “Night Harbor” to “Time Can Be Either Particle or Wave” and threw in a line about quantum physics. It was the early 1990s. Things were changing in Cuba. We were ending our ties with Russia, America had a new president, and for a brief while all things seemed possible. It wasn’t quite our Prague Spring but it was something. The judges read my poem and lapped it up. I won the prize and at a big ceremony in the Teatro Karl Marx I got a medal from Vilma Espín—Mrs. Raúl Castro.

Of course they never flew me to St. Petersburg. The trip kept getting pushed back and pushed back and finally, after Dad defected, it was quietly forgotten about. I didn’t write any more poems after that. But the point of this story isn’t my aborted poetry career, or the evils of the Party, or my father’s cunning—no, the point is the change of title. “Night Harbor” would never
have won anything, but “Time Can Be Either Particle or Wave” sounded very hip back then. As Dad said, you’ve got to give people what they want, not what they need. You have to change yourself to fit the circumstances. When you’re an undercover detective you have to own every room you’re in.

Like a lot of actors I began with the clothes. I had bought an outfit in Mexico City, an expensive-looking dark gray suit: pencil-thin skirt, light, well-cut jacket, white blouse, black stockings, black high-heeled patent leather shoes, black fake Gucci clutch purse. I’d had to spot clean the jacket since it had been tossed from my bag and had lain on the desert floor while I killed two men.

I had the suit, I had the lie, I had a card.

My voice wasn’t my voice. My face wasn’t my face. Red lips, dark eyes, and that unpleasant local look—a thick layer of orange bronzer that made the skeletal Fairview women resemble victims of some nuclear disaster.

There wasn’t much I could do with my hair but I had gelled it for more bulk and I sat with the poise of an American businesswoman, cross-legged, relaxed, coolly regarding the glossy magazines in the waiting room.

Marilyn, the blond, good-looking, fortysomething secretary, finally announced me: “Miss Martinez from Great Northern Insurance,” she said.

I entered the office.

“Miss Martinez,” the man said, not getting up from his desk.

“Mr. Jackson,” I replied with a smile and passed him the card with the fictitious name and cell phone number.

“I’m a very busy man, what’s this about?” he asked, taking the card Ricky had made for me, crumpling it, and throwing it in a wastebasket.

“The next piece of paper I’m going to give you will be a subpoena, I hope you take better care of that,” I said, annoyed but inwardly thanking him for letting me enter the role without the necessity of small talk.

“You can’t touch me, you’re not a cop,” he said with a little tremor.

“No?” I said with a look that told him I knew everything. Every little scam he’d pulled over the last five years. A bend of the law here, a few false accounts there. There wasn’t a garage in the world that hadn’t defrauded an insurance company at some point, and the Pearl Street Garage of Fairview, Colorado, was surely no different.

He grimaced. His mouth opened and closed like a dying snapper.

I sat back in the chair. Breathed. Watched.

The TV news tells us that Americans are all bloated capitalists but this
was not the case in Colorado. The trophy wives on Pearl Street, the Hollywood types, the hardworking Mexicans in the Wetback Motel—lean. Mr. Jackson was no exception. Mid-fifties, but trim. Skinny arms, prominent Adam’s apple, dyed black hair, and dead, beady, blue-black eyes. Like those of a stuffed animal. I had the feeling that Mr. Jackson was one of those people undergoing a starvation diet in the hope of living longer.

There was certainly something not quite together about him.

Sweat on the temple. Tremble in the lip.

It made me depressed. Did everyone have a dark secret? Did everyone lie? No wonder cops got worse as they got older. Ten years in you’d need a machete to cut through the layers of cynicism.

I couldn’t bear to look at his face so I examined his clothes. A color-blind ensemble. Beige shirt, purple slacks, bright red tie with some kind of crest on it. After the clothes the room. Neat freak. A few landscapes on the wall. Empty desk. Phone. Pic of wife and four kids. A long sofa where he and Marilyn probably fucked.

Behind him, in the distance, I could see a ski lift carrying little empty chairs up a mountain. Empty because there wasn’t much snow, I assumed. I watched them for a while.

The silence cracked him, as I knew it would.

People, and especially people in sales, hate quiet. It reminds them of the eternity of lost mercantile opportunities under the coffin lid.

He fished the card from the trash. “Inez Martinez, Great Northern Insurance,” he read slowly. I nodded. “What can I do for you, Miss Martinez?”

“I’m investigating a fraudulent insurance claim,” I began. “I think you know what I’m talking about.”

His face whitened and he sat on his hands to stop them shaking. Christ, this character would last precisely thirty seconds in one of my basement interrogation rooms.

“I, I
don’t
know what you’re talking about,” he said.

“Mr. Jackson, let me put your mind at rest, this has nothing whatsoever to do with your garage or the work you’re doing.”

An all-too-visible sigh of relief.
Come mierda, lela,
you should be on the stage, you’d be too big for the movies, but perfect for the theater. Everything’s right there on your face.

“You’re not investigating us? But why would you? We run a very tight ship here. That kind of thing is a stranger to our . . . I mean, we’re not
the . . . What I mean is, we always maintain the highest standards of . . .” He lost his train of thought.

“Mr. Jackson, my company’s experience with your garage has always been first-rate, so let me just say again that this is nothing to do with you or the work you’ve done for us.”

His smile broadened and I knew I had to hit him now while the relief endorphins were at full tilt. “It’s nothing major, but my supervisor in the fraud department asked me to come up here and ask you for a favor since he knew I was going to be in Denver for a quite different matter,” I said.

“Of course. What can I help you with?” he asked.

“Well, as you know, fraud is most common in cases of personal injury, but sometimes we do see it in fully comprehensive cases too. It’s unusual but it does happen.”

“Yeah, I guess it does.”

Thin smile, more sweat.

“Generally it’s not worth the risk unless you have double or even triple insured yourself. With different insurance companies, of course.”

Mr. Jackson nodded enthusiastically. “God, yeah, I see what you’re saying. Someone had an accident. We did the work and he claimed it off more than one insurance company, is that what you’re talking about?”

“Exactly.”

“So, like you said, this, uh, wouldn’t be a reflection on the work we’ve done. We’d be, uh, we’d be—”

“Tangential.”

“Yeah, yeah, tangential. Hit the nail on the head. Ok, what do you want me to do?”

“Since this is an ongoing investigation I am not permitted to reveal particulars of the case.”

“No, of course not.”

“What I need are your records for the last week of May.”

“Of this year? May 2007?”

“Yes.”

“No problem. Hold on.”

He pressed an intercom on his desk. “Marilyn, can you bring me the accounts book for May, the red one. The red one,” he said.

She brought the red book. The official book, not the real book with what things actually cost. I scanned the names.

The two names for the twenty-seventh and twenty-eighth were the same ones that Ricky had already found. I passed the book back.

Two minutes’ work. Two thousand miles. Two dead men.

“Is that it?” he asked.

That was it. Marilyn saw me out.

Pearl Street was busy. Zombie
perras
in high-heeled boots, bearded men in sandals and ripped jeans. Pepper-spray perfume. Mustard-gas aftershave.

I started to lose character. Shoulders drooped. Face relaxed.

“Miss Martinez?”

I turned. Marilyn.

“Yes?”

“Mr. Jackson remembered something else that might be of use.”

Back inside.

The office again. Stuffed animal eyes. Fuck sofa. Empty ski lift. His stomach making a rumbling noise.

“Yes?”

“Look, I don’t know if this is important or not.”

“Go on.”

He coughed. “Well, like I say, I don’t know if this is a big deal or not but two other people have been asking questions about our records for the end of May.”

“Have they?”

“Yes.”

“Do you mind if I—”

“One of them was a Latino reporter from Denver, a few weeks back, apparently he talked to one of our mechanics.”

Ricky.

“Who was the other?”

“Sheriff Briggs.”

The day departing behind mountains, saying goodbye with yellow hands and an orange-colored carapace.

Angela shook her head and dissolved in the lotus light. “It’s not just that Esteban pays shit and he’s unreliable. He drinks and he has a gun and he deals drugs.”

Paco looked at me with stupid, tired eyes. “What are you going to do, María?” he asked.

I was dead tired too. I didn’t want to make a thing of it.

“I’m staying,” I said simply.

The Volkswagen microbus honked its horn. Luisa slid open the side door and waved to hurry us up. I acknowledged her wave and shook my head.

“I don’t know,” Paco said.

“We’d like you to come,” Angela said, touching him on the arm.

“Jualo and all my crew are at the other motel on I-70, some of them are in Denver, are you gonna take those guys?” Paco asked.

Angela shook her head. “We’ve got room for two more. Come with us, Francisco. Come on, we want to have you, things will be better in L.A., please come,” Angela insisted.

She hadn’t begged me this much. She liked him. She was a sensible girl. She’d be good for him.

“Listen to her. You should go, Paco, you’ll have more opportunities in Los Angeles,” I said.

“But Esteban’s done so much for us,” he replied lamely.

“Fuck Esteban,” Angela muttered.

The VW honked again.

“Vamonos!”
someone shouted.

“Well?” Angela asked.

“How far is L.A.?” Paco wondered.

Angela shrugged. “L.A.? I think it’s just over the mountains. A few hours. Not far. Not very far.”

“Do you have a map?” Paco asked.

Angela was getting impatient. “I don’t know. L.A. is huge. You can’t miss it. You just keep going west.”

Paco looked at me. It was hard, if not impossible, to read him but I had a stab: “Francisco, my friend, my brother, do not feel that you have an obligation to stay here because of me. I am able to look after myself,” I said in formal Spanish.

He grinned. “María, that I know only too well. But we’ve been through a lot together and I don’t want to go anywhere without you,” he said, and his eyes flicked down to the motel parking lot to cover his embarrassment.