Fifty Grand (35 page)

Something came into Karen’s face. A darkening. A suspicion.

“Where did you say you were from, Miss Hernandez?”

“I’m from the consulate in Denver.”

“Can I see some ID?”

Mierde
.

On to me.

The old man must have prepped her. If someone comes asking about me, ever, check their credentials at once.

My mind raced while I fumbled in my purse. Who was he hiding from? He was a defector hero among the Miamistas. Cuban intelligence never went after defectors. There were literally millions of them in the United States: baseball players, boxers, politicians, doctors, engineers. And Dad was a lowly ferry attendant. What was his game?

“Well, this is a little embarrassing, Señora Suarez, but I think I must have left my papers in my other bag back in Denver. I could come back the day after tomorrow and show them to you if that will help?”

A slight nod of the head. A narrowing of the eyes. She didn’t like that one bit. A furtive sideways glance into the bedroom. That’s where she kept the guard dog or the phone or the gun.

“I’ll come back when I have my ID?” I asked.

“Yes, I think I’d prefer that,” she replied in a frightened monotone.

“Shall we say Tuesday at ten in the morning?”

“Fine.”

“Tuesday, excellent. Well, in that case I’ll be on my way. I apologize if I have inconvenienced you in any way and hopefully we can get this resolved next week.”

“Yes,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper.

I smiled, turned, and walked down the driveway. Bye, Stepmom.

I didn’t look back but I knew she was in her bedroom, calling someone, looking for the emergency cash, packing a suitcase . . . Dad had told her about this day and the day had come.

I couldn’t begin to understand it.

Was his death not an accident? Was he something more than met the eye? Had Ricky gotten it completely wrong?

When the house was out of sight behind the trees, I crossed the road, vanished into the forest, and waited.

It took only an hour for her to load a beat-up eighties-style Volvo with suitcases and cardboard boxes. She turned right on Beech Street. I cursed at not having Esteban’s car to tail her, but it didn’t really matter. Right was south toward I-70, the big cross-country highway that could take her all the way to Los Angeles in the west or New Jersey in the east. I memorized the license plate, wrote it down for future use, walked back up the driveway, broke in through a side window. The white furniture was the only thing that wasn’t tossed, although the sofa had been pushed way up against the wall, maybe to give her room to pack.

And pack she had.

Drawers opened, clothes scattered, pictures ripped from the walls, a bed stripped. Method to the madness.
They had rehearsed this
.

No photographs, no diaries, no books.

No books. I thought at the very least I’d see some of his books, maybe flip through the titles while Karen made me a cup of coffee.

I rummaged in the trash but even that gave no clues, just a few nondescript bills. Everything incriminating gone. Tonight it would be burned and dropped in a trash can at some random truck stop.

I put a plastic bag over my arm and shoved it down the U bend of the toilet, but that was clean too.

I did the whole house. A quick brace and then a longer backward trace.

Nothing.

I sat on the sofa.

Memories. Guilt. Tears. Ricky said not to fall for that trip, and he was right.

Be like an alchemist. Transmogrify guilt to anger. Easy after Karen had brought his death so vividly to my mind.

I stood, addressed the void: “I don’t know what you thought you were doing here, Dad, I don’t know what you filled her head with, but you did a number on her, all right, just like you did on us. And . . . and I want you to know something: I’m angry at you, I’m angry that you left us, that you didn’t write, that you missed my
quince
and you sent nothing. I haven’t done a poem since you left, and Mom’s half crazy, and we’re all stuck in Cuba. You fucked us, old man, fucked us good.”

I left through the front door and had gone a kilometer along Beech before I turned and walked back.

Something was nagging at me. Something about the sofa.

In through the window.

No reason for her to move it.

I shoved it and found the place where she’d tried to rip up the floorboards.

She’d spent some time on it but she didn’t have a claw hammer and she was in a terrible rush.

I did have a hammer.

I smashed out the nails and ripped up the floor. One board, two boards. Dirt. A plastic bag. Inside the bag another bag, inside the second bag a gun.

Dad’s? I looked at it. It was strange. It was certainly a clue. If I had the time I’d check it out.

I sat back on the sofa. Sat there for a long time. Light marched across the floor.

The patterns changed.

A gnawing sound. A mouse investigating the mayhem. It looked at me with surprise.

Run, mouselet, I spare thee.

Yes. Run, run, run from the Cubans and enemies real and imaginary.

I fished in my pocket, found where I had written Karen’s license number, ripped it up, and flushed the pieces down the toilet.

You’ll be safe, Karen.

Safer,
at least, than your husband’s killer.

No. That poor bastard. I wouldn’t want to be him a few hours from now, on a sad, cold, December night in Nowhere, Wyoming.

T
he arithmetical process of elimination. Our two primary suspects and Esteban were three of the solutions to the case, but they weren’t
all
of the solutions, and I knew I wouldn’t be comfortable until I had dealt with every possibility, no matter how remote. At this last stage of the game I knew I was going to have to see about Ricky’s golf cart. I probably should have investigated this one first, but I’d been putting it at the back of my mind. It would be a ridiculous way for a man to die. Run over by a purple golf cart whose speed topped out at ten kph, but all ways to die were equally absurd and somehow in all this craziness it wouldn’t have been inappropriate.

The Scientology Drop-In Center was next to Donna Karan.

I decided to drop in.

Metallic walls, massive air-conditioning pods, dark, uncomfortable-looking chairs around an ebony coffee table. Scientology magazines, newsletters, booklets, and of course various texts by L. Ron Hubbard. The reception desk was a long curve of black marble. I’d never seen black marble before and I was impressed.

I stood there and ran my fingers along the grain.

The receptionist looked up.

Pretty, with a Stepford hairdo and dress, she had a glazed Hero of the Revolution expression about her.

“Yes?”

“I was wondering if I could see Toby Armstrong. I’m an insurance inves—”

“Oh yes. Toby’s available right now if you want to go in. It will have to be brief, he’s auditing at two. IV Room number two, first on the left.”

IV Room #2.

Toby was sitting behind a desk, surfing the Web on a tiny silver Toshiba laptop. He was skinny with a raggedy gold sweater, blond hair, and a sallow, distant expression. His eyes were black, tired, and startled when I came in unannounced. He quickly pulled down the cover on the Toshiba.

“Can I help you?” he asked.

“Yes, I read that you crashed a golf cart at—”

Toby stood and offered me his hand. It was moist, limp, the nails dirty and bitten to the quick. He rubbed his face, sat back down, and reached into a drawer under his desk. He brought out a long white booklet and a pencil and passed them across to me. He didn’t appear to have taken in what I had begun to say. “I suppose they told you that this is going to have to be quick. I’ve got an audit at two,” he muttered.

“So they said.”

He stood again, his left eye twitched alarmingly for a moment, and then, abruptly, he left the office.

“Wait a minute,” I said. I went to the door and tried to follow him but it was locked from the outside.

“Excuse me! Excuse me!” I called out.

The door opened and the receptionist came back in. She was holding a glass of water.

“Oh, please take a seat, Miss . . .”

“Martinez.”

“Please take a seat, Miss Martinez. Just fill out that questionnaire and Toby will be back in to see you in a moment. And do drink the water, it’s very dry in here.”

She gave me a winning American smile and I found myself sitting.

The door closed.

I drank the water, opened the questionnaire.

I faked the career history and personal data pages, info dumping a fictional CV I was quite proud of. Inez Martinez 3.0 was a young Latina from Denver, who had become an insurance agent after attending Harvard University. Hmm, was that credible? Harvard, well, it was too late now. I’d made her magna cum laude and a member of the basketball team.

I started answering the other questions. It was amusing. A distraction.

They grew increasingly weirder as the pages turned.

Q. 43: “If your mother divorced your father and married someone of a different race would you A) Be angry? B) Be happy? C) Be worried about the opinion of others? D) Have no opinion?” I wrote D.

Q. 89: “When you are hunting and the quarry enters your sights, do you squeeze the trigger with A) Satisfaction? B) Regret? C) Joy? D) Emptiness?” I wrote D again, thinking about nightmares of dead men in the desert.

Q. 100: “If it were proven that there was life on Mars would you A) Move there? B) Stay on Earth? C) Question the findings of the scientists? D) Reevaluate your religious beliefs?”

Q. 102: “Where are you most at ease: A) The nonsmoking section of a cinema? B) A discotheque? C) An airport departure lounge? D) An airport arrivals lounge?”

I had just finished question 200 and closed the booklet when Toby came back in.

“That was good timing,” I said.

He took the booklet. “No, I was watching you through the monitor. Enjoy your vitamin water?”

I had barely touched the glass and now I was relieved.

“Vitamin water?”

“Drink it, it’s good for you. B Complex mostly, one hundred mg of niacin and lots of other good stuff. High potency, not like that crap in 7-Eleven. Better than coffee. Drink up.”

“Uh, no thanks.”

Toby began drawing a line through my answers, forming a kind of chart.

“Well, this will give us
some
idea,” he said. “If I wasn’t pressed for time, we could do the proper thousand-question test; that’s the real deal.”

“Uhm, look, Toby, I’m an insurance invest—”

“Ah, you’re from Denver! Denver, Denver, Denver!” Toby exclaimed, his eyes wide, his fist pounding the table.

“What about it?”

“Denver holds a special place in our pantheon. Is that the right word? No matter. It was in Denver that
Battlefield Earth
takes place, surely Denver’s claim to fame as a city.”

He leaned across to me and his eyes now took on a furtive expression.

“Do you want me to spill? Do you think you can handle it?”

“Spill.”

“There are some of us who don’t think it’s a novel at all.”

“No?”

“No. Not a novel, but a . . .” he lowered his voice. “Prediction.”

“Ah, I see.”

“That’s just between us.”

“Of course.”

“That’s why some of us think Mr. Cruise has moved to Colorado. And when Xenu returns . . . No, forget that, I’ve said too much, but let’s just say that the rumors about Mr. Cruise’s bunker aren’t just rumors.”

I leaned back in the chair while Toby finished his chart. When he was done he passed it across the table and began explaining it. It looked like the stock market index after a turbulent week, but according to Toby the fluctuations weren’t the problem, the problem was that the high points and the low points were in the wrong places. My life was a mess, I was rudderless, confused, clearly unhappy; however, there was an answer. He further explained that the Church of Scientology could help me iron out these personality defects, with the assistance of vitamin water, the thousand-question audit, and motivated people like Toby.

After this little speech he began biting his nails and, when he thought I wasn’t looking, exploring his ear canal with the eraser on the top of the pencil.

When he began nibbling at the eraser I decided that as amusing as this all was, I’d had just about enough of it.

I was a serious person, here on serious business.

I gave him my card and heavy hit him with words like “dead Mexican” and “hit and run” and “intoxication” and “manslaughter” and “leaving the scene” of an accident.