Holy Guacamole! (11 page)

“I almost forgot,” I exclaimed. “I brought little gifts for you.” I pulled the two bags up from the floor, wishing now that I’d bought something more practical, decent clothes, food.

“For us?” cried Polya, so excited that she came close to dragging the gift bag through her flan.

“So pretty,” murmured Irina, after unwrapping the tissue paper and examining the two six-inch glass fish with their swirling colors and tiny bubbles.

Each of the four fish was a bit different, and they seemed to be a hit. Now was the time to ask about Vladik’s friends and enemies in El Paso.

Home Sweet Trailer Park

“
W
ould you like
a cup of coffee, more flan, or perhaps some ice cream?” I asked since they were eyeing their empty flan dishes wistfully.

“Yes, please,” said Irina eagerly.

Evidently they wanted both, so I ordered, with coffee for myself. Both girls dove into their ice cream with enthusiasm, and I thought of Pancho Villa, who had come to El Paso when his revolutions were going badly and consoled himself by eating ice cream at the Elite Confectionary. There is a delightful 1912 photo of Villa and several other mustachioed revolutionaries eating ice cream, seemingly from paper cups that fit into cone-shaped holders. When I saw the picture, I wondered whether the ice cream was Mrs. Price’s. She was the widow of an Ohio man who came to El Paso in 1905 to make his fortune growing fruit. His trees were killed by a freeze, and he died shortly thereafter. The widow, left with four sons, rented a house in town, bought a cow, and went into the dairy business. Her sons milked and delivered the milk to neighbors in a little red wagon. However, their business grew rapidly, and they were soon providing milk and ice cream from a farm outside the city and a creamery in town.

“It’s a terrible thing—Vladik being murdered,” I said in introduction to my questions. “Being fellow country-women, did you know the names of his friends or, perhaps more important, the names of his enemies?”

“Murdered?” cried Polya.

“He is getting sick and dying,” Irina chimed in. “Who would be murdering Vladik?”

“Someone who didn’t like him, I suppose,” I replied, astonished that they didn’t know what had happened to their mentor, or at least what Lieutenant Vallejo thought had happened to him. Didn’t they read the newspaper? Perhaps it was something else that wasn’t part of their lives since they had moved to this country. “Considering how he treated you girls, he doesn’t seem to have been a very nice person. Probably lots of people hated him.”

“No one hate Vladik,” said Polya solemnly. “For us, he is our only friend in U.S. Is being wonderful opera producer. He is writing the trio for us. Maybe Verdi could writing that, and Vladik, but nobody else. Who would be not liking Vladik?” She was astonished. “Maybe we should now going to trailer. Having homework before go to work, and must finding boy to push car so can be driving to trailer. Many thanks for wonderful lunch and so pretty gifts. Can you taking us back to university? We are not having money for bus.”

“Of course,” I replied. “And I’ll give you a push. Obviously your battery needs to be recharged or replaced.” I know about such things because when Jason and I got married, we had a car like that. Our first apartment, when Jason became an assistant professor, had to be on a hill so that he could push the car while I sat inside and popped the clutch, a responsibility that made me very nervous, especially with a baby in the back seat. Then I’d drop Jason off and pray that the car would make it home. A colleague drove him home, so I never knew when he’d be arriving. After I became pregnant with Gwen, Jason ran to school and got a ride home. Adventuresome days.

I did manage to get the girls, in their dreadful, rusted-out car, started. Obviously it had begun life somewhere other than El Paso, where nothing rusts, because rust requires moisture. And thinking about how frightened I’d been, driving home with the baby as a young woman, I offered to follow them to be sure they actually got all the way to their trailer. This offer wasn’t completely altruistic. I’d learned hardly anything from them and hoped to give it one last try at the trailer park. They seemed grateful for the offer, rather than suspicious of my motives, so perhaps they weren’t hiding anything. How they could not hate their late mentor I couldn’t imagine, but they didn’t seem to. Polya had cried quietly all the way to the university, murmuring his name from time to time, while Irina, in the back seat, patted her on the shoulder and said occasionally, “Maybe Boris Ignatenko just forget to give us money. We asking tonight.”

“Then maybe we having no job either.”

“What good is job with no food or gas?” Irina retorted, and Polya began to cry again.

As I followed them to the trailer park, which was on the Westside but not in any area I’d visited, I wondered what they were saying to each other in the privacy of their rattletrap vehicle. Probably deciding how to get rid of me as quickly as possible.

Imagine my surprise when we arrived. They invited me in for tea. Their trailer was as rusty as their car, with a dripping evaporative cooler sagging from a window outside and shabby Salvation Army-genre furniture inside. However, it was clean. It looked dreadful but rigorously scrubbed. The tea, served in jelly glasses, was hot and very, very strong, but I managed to sip it, no small triumph when the glass was blistering my fingers and the liquid my tongue.

On further questioning, both girls insisted that Vladik had no enemies. As for friends, they suggested that he must have been friendly with his fellow professors, and each girl named several with whom she had classes. Then Irina had an inspiration. “Boris Stepanovich lgnatenko. He and Vladik knowing each other in Russia before, always talking and drinking vodka when Vladik coming to club.”

“They are being business partners of Brazen Babes,” Polya added. “Boris Stepanovich is knowing if Vladik having other friends. You asking Boris Stepanovich. He not knowing Vladik maybe be murder. Maybe you telling him, not us? Is bad we must telling him we need money for eating and gasses. He seeming happy to have our dancing money. Maybe not liking give some back.”

“How much do you make?” I asked.

Both girls shrugged. “Money for dancing,” said Irina.

“Money men is tucking in our strings,” said Polya. “Is much money, I think. What is called tips. Pretty soon maybe we have paying back and keeping it.”

I really didn’t want to go to a place called Brazen Babes to talk to Mr. Boris Stepanovich Ignatenko. My only contact with exotic dancing had been with a tassel twirler in New Orleans, who sat down at a table full of chemists (and me) and chatted while she drank hot buttered rum at our expense. The rum was my suggestion, and I believe she was reprimanded for not ordering champagne.

Having extracted all the information I could, I thanked the girls for their hospitality, they thanked me for “food and fishes,” and I left.

I didn’t do too well getting back into familiar territory, but once I did, I decided to make a last stop in the day’s investigation. I needed to check out the alibi of Professor Brandon Collins at Jerk’s, not a very prepossessing name, but he had felt that it matched his status at the time he went there.

Jerk’s seemed a presentable enough place if you like neon beer signs and flocks of TVs turned to sports channels. There were few customers that time of afternoon, and it was hard to imagine it full of reeling drunks, which was how the geology professor had described himself. I did note that the customers at the bar were students, or so I assumed. If that was so at night as well, Professor Collins had set a very bad example for young men of college age. I went to the cash register and asked the waitress manning it if she had been here on Saturday night around midnight. She hadn’t, but said the boss would have been. He was always around.

She summoned him, and perhaps taking me for someone who wanted to give a party for a son, he told me that he had a back room for private functions, keg parties and the like. I had to disappoint him in that respect, but he took it well and did, in fact, remember Brandon Collins.

“Big guy. Looked like someone who might be in from working on an oil rig, except that we don’t have oil rigs around here. Wanted to arm wrestle all the kids—for money, no less. He was winning too. He had real impressive arm muscles on him. Course, I had to stop the gambling,” said the manager virtuously. “I imagine there’s some betting going on on the games, but I keep my eyes open. No gambling in Texas, except the little slots and bingo games. Gotta go to Sunland Park across the line in New Mexico for that, horses and a casino at their track. Or over to Juarez. They got the dog races and off-track betting. Used to have gambling at the Tigua casino here in El Paso, but Austin shut them down.