Hot Sur (60 page)

“There’s one hundred and fifty thousand,” she said softly. “Can you believe it? One hundred and fifty thousand dollars, Mr. Rose.
One hundred and fifty thousand.
I counted every single bill. They were inside Violeta’s giraffe, all stuffed tightly in. I found the bills when I wanted to wash it.”

“One hundred and fifty thousand, eh?” Rose managed to say.

“It has to be something connected to the people looking for Sleepy Joe,” María Paz said.

“Well, the figure matches, but how did it end up here?”

“Violeta found it, no other explanation. She digs through everything. Rummages through drawers and discovers hidden things. There were a lot of fights about that. Greg got enraged because she hid things or took them. Sleepy Joe swore to me that he had hidden one hundred and fifty thousand dollars in my house, and she found the stash and took it. Found the loot and hid it inside her giraffe. No other explanation.”

“They say that women are unpredictable,” Rose tells me, “that men can’t follow their logic. Not sure if that’s true overall, but I can attest to one thing, nothing is as maddeningly simple as María Paz’s logic. When she took me to the room to show me the pile of bills, she had everything perfectly figured out, in that gray labyrinth of her head. It was like reinforced concrete; that’s what it felt like when she made up her mind. Even God would have trouble changing her mind.

“You know what a syllogism is, right?” Rose asks me, and responds himself. “Of course you know, you’re a writer. Well, I’m not exactly sure of the nature of the damn syllogism that María Paz had come up with before she came to get me, but it was all very clear in her head. It’s been a while since my college philosophy courses, so don’t blame me if it doesn’t sound quite Aristotelian. It’s her syllogism, not mine:

“First premise: If Sleepy Joe is going to kill anyone, he will only kill to get his money.

“Second premise: If María Paz has his money, she can give it to Sleepy Joe.

“Conclusion: If Sleepy Joe has his money, he will not harm Violeta.

“And from that conclusion there most elegantly emerged, as if she were dancing a waltz in the labyrinth now, another series of equally absurd conclusions, namely: If Sleepy Joe was not going to hurt Violeta, then María Paz could go to Canada, assured that Violeta would be cared for and safe in her school, where she would rather be, as she herself had made very clear. The finale, the mother of all conclusions? All we had to do was get the money to Sleepy Joe, and the problems of humanity would be solved.”

Rose tells me that the events that followed the discovery of the loot were crazy. There they were, the two of them in that dark in that hotel room, huddled beside the bed, whispering so that the Yakuza wouldn’t burst in with their pistols for the money. They locked themselves in for the night, using a hair dryer to dry the money, counting it and counting it again, then stuffing it into María Paz’s Gucci bag, which fortunately was roomy, all the while mired again in their eternal debate about whether Sleepy Joe was a murderer or had just spun out of control because of his lost loot.

“Listen to me, Mr. Rose,” María Paz told him. “You’re very annoying about this, stubborn as a mule. I know Sleepy Joe, you don’t. I know more about this than you do. Sleepy Joe is not a murderer. He’s a bad guy, but he is not a murderer. Sick in the head, that’s for sure, very sick in the head, I won’t argue that. But not a murderer.”

“He murdered my son, Cleve.”

“That’s just a guess.”

“Are you saying he didn’t kill your dog, María Paz?” The bubbling outrage and indignation was evident in Rose’s voice. “Do you not know for a fact that he killed your dog? Or is that just another assumption?

“Shhhh, please,” she told him, “don’t get all riled up. Yes, yes, he killed my dog. And I loved my dog. And I know you love your dogs, Mr. Rose, but forgive me, a dog is not a person. Killing a dog is a fucking terrible thing that you pay for in hell, but killing a dog is not the same as killing a person.”

“Alright. So if the dog is not enough, here is something more serious for you. I think Sleepy Joe had something to do with the death of his brother, Greg. I can’t prove it yet, but I’m sure he had something to do with it. And why would he do such a thing, if he adored his brother? Well, why do you think he would, María Paz? To get rid of him. So he could keep the money and incidentally also keep you. Can’t you see it?”

“I’m not sure.”

“You’re not sure about what, that it was him?”

“Who knows, maybe it was.”

“Are you saying that you think he was involved?”

“I’m saying I don’t know. He told me he had nothing to do with it.”

“Who told you?”

“Sleepy Joe himself.”

“And you believed him?”

“People have to believe people, Mr. Rose.”

It was impossible, Rose tells me. Reasoning with María Paz was downright impossible. She did not show any interest in whatever his opinion was about the matter. She had created a narrative in her head to which she clung with everything she had, and Rose was not going to move her from there. The only thing that worried her at the time was not knowing where Sleepy Joe was, and because she didn’t know, she couldn’t give him the money.

Rose tells me that before this he had always suspected she was lying about her knowledge of his whereabouts. That she knew exactly where he was.

“But at that moment, I realized she really didn’t know,” Rose tells me. “It became clear that she was not lying, at least not on that point. So what did she want to do, what was her master plan? We would find Sleepy Joe, deliver the money, and neutralize the situation. That was her plan. It seemed to me like the stupidest thing in the world, but that’s what she believed was best. And when you think about it, rather curiously, we were finally doing what I had been hoping for: we were set directly on Sleepy Joe’s trail.”

The next day, Rose got up early and went out into the field. He wanted to take in the vast solitude of those lands not owned by anyone to let his dogs run around for a while, and he especially wanted to practice some target shooting, there in the woods, where nobody could hear. “This is for you, Claro Hurtado. This will be your revenge!” Rose screamed into the air and let off a few shots into the trees. “A good weapon, this Glock, excellent! Clearly, my friend, you need not worry. Your Remington was rubbish but my Glock is top of the line. Let’s give the motherfucker his due.” Now, Rose was set for some payback on the murderer of his son. Now, the adrenaline shot through every inch of him, and a vengeful euphoria took hold of him, arousal at the smell of gunpowder, so he pumped a round of lead into a poor tree, pretending it was Sleepy Joe. “Right there, right where I want you, you fucking little punk, you loser playboy, now it’s your turn to grow pale! Right there, you son of a bitch.” And
pum
,
pum
,
pum
, Rose emptied the Glock on the tree.

“After I did this, I had to go searching for the dogs, because Otto, Dix, and Skunko had stampeded out of there, every dog for himself, terrified by the shots,” Rose tells me.

That same morning, a few hours later, Rose, María Paz, and the three dogs crossed from Vermont into Upstate New York. They had a prize with them in the red Toyota: one hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

“This car is like Napoleon’s famous horse carriage,” Rose commented to María Paz and immediately regretted it because it wasn’t the kind of thing that he could mention to her without unleashing a barrage of questions. In that, she was a lot like Violeta, which even María Paz herself acknowledged. What horse carriage? Why Napoleon? Who won at Waterloo? And so on, not letting up until Rose was in full teaching mode, telling the story of how, in the Prussian offensive, Napoleon had to retreat on horseback, abandoning the carriage in which he always traveled, which moments later was seized and looted by the Prussians, who found a most precious treasure trove, Napoleon’s mythical cocked hat, his trademark gray cloak, the silverware he ate with, and his many awards, which were made of gold and embedded with precious stones.

“So a humongous treasure in the carriage,” María Paz sighed, “just like in this Toyota. What a mess you’ve gotten yourself into, Mr. Rose, running around with an escaped fugitive and a stolen treasure.”

“It was comical to an extent,” Rose tells me. “When we wanted to brush our teeth, we had to find the toothpaste under the bundle of bills.”

“Were you going back to the Catskills?” I ask.

“No. With María Paz directing, we were heading for a roadside bar called Chikki Charmers, where one of Sleepy Joe’s girlfriends had worked. The one who had drowned in the Jacuzzi.”

“Maraya,” I say. “The one who was skinny in all the right places and full where it was best to be full.”

“Yeah, well, that was a while before, as I came to learn. Near the end of her life, she was as emaciated as an old alley cat, skinny all over from her addiction.”

“Cocaine?” I ask.

“Heroin. She was overcome with these itching attacks that could only be relieved by submerging herself in the Jacuzzi.”

“Like Marat.”

“María Paz thought that Maraya’s coworkers may have known the whereabouts of Sleepy Joe. So we headed down there. Seeking information, you know. She intended to give the man his money. I wanted to burst his liver with a kick to the gut.”

Meanwhile, her relationship with the cyber-coyote had begun to deteriorate. Whenever María Paz postponed departure, the guy delivered a whole sermon about time schedules and agreements and tacked on four hundred additional dollars for each modification of the original plan. Every so often, on the highway, María Paz asked Rose to pull over and stepped out of the car to try to find a signal for her cell phone. Rose watched her arguing into the phone while walking up and down and up and down the shoulder of the road, and coming back either enraged or depressed because she had had another nasty fight with the guy.

“It must be true what they say about coyotes,” grumbled María Paz, “mysterious but stupid creatures.”

“What if he’s not so stupid? What if your cyber-coyote has turned into a bounty hunter?” Rose asked. “What if he already found out who you are, and is simply helping them capture you?”

“It may be,” she sighed. “I don’t know if he’s become a bounty hunter, but I know for sure he’s a thief. Can you believe it? Now he wants another four hundred dollars.”

“There’s more than enough in that bag for that.”

“No, what are you saying? That money is Sleepy Joe’s.”

“Sleepy Joe’s, my ass. That money is now yours, and before that it was your sister’s, and even before that your husband’s, and before that the police’s, and before that the state’s, and ultimately before that it belonged to the taxpayers, that money belonged to me and millions of other idiots like me. Sleepy Joe? Fuck him. I don’t see how he belongs in this chain at all. Your loyalty to him sickens me, María Paz, makes me suspect your own value scales.”

“Value scales! My value scales! I have plenty on my scales. Well, who would have thought it, Mr. Rose? That you begin to lecture me as if you were my father.”

“In some ways, I am.”

Chikki Charmers was supposedly located about twelve miles north of Ithaca. Rose had gotten the information online, and María Paz said she had memorized it. But heated as they were by their arguments, they passed it more than once without noticing, and before finding it they must have driven the same stretch of twenty miles for over an hour, arguing this way and arguing back that way too.

Judging by its outward appearance, the place was a bar for truckers, a dingy spot with a parking lot out front that was four times the area as the spot the structure took up. Since it was early afternoon, the place was closed and deserted, and they could not interview the employees. Instead, they contented themselves with making out the information on the neon billboard that was turned off, where the silhouettes of a couple of naked women in a frozen dance and wearing only boots, announced the following:

C
HIKKI
C
HARMERS, EXOTIC BODIES IN MOTION.

O
PEN
8
PM
-3
AM.

I
T IS FORBIDDEN TO TOUCH THE DANCERS.

N
O ALCOHOL.
N
O
S
MOKING.
N
O CELL PHONES, CAMERAS, OR VIDEO.

M
ANDATORY GRATUITY FOR STAGE SEAT.

I
F NUDITY OFFENDS YOU OR YOU DISAGREE WITH OUR RULES DO NOT ENTER.

V
IOLATORS WILL BE REPORTED OR KICKED OUT OR BOTH.

T
HANKS FOR YOUR SUPPORT.

There wasn’t much to do but wait until Chikki Charmers opened. Then they might be able to get some information from someone who had known Maraya, or more specifically Maraya’s boyfriend, a certain Sleepy Joe, a tall, handsome blond, although a little weary looking. He chewed on spicy candies, and often wore a retro nylon satin jacket with Castrol and Pennzoil patches on the sleeves. That’s how María Paz would put it, feigning complete ignorance to elicit information. And if they asked what she wanted with him, she would say she wanted to make good on some money she owed him. The message would get to him, and Sleepy Joe would be motivated to come out of his hole.