A Nasty Piece of Work (10 page)

Don’t ask me why but one-night stands have always turned me off. My immediate problem was to sidestep the invitation without hurting her pride. “Listen, Hattie, I find you awfully attractive—what man wouldn’t? Normally I’d jump at your invitation but the fact is, I have a medical problem.”

“It’s not some dreadful venereal disease?” she said breathlessly.

I averted my eyes.

“Oh, my poor dear Lemuel. Well, you did the honorable thing telling me. I know a lot of men who would have climbed into the rack anyhow.”

I muttered something about taking a rain check. She nodded. I asked her for her phone number so that I could cash in the rain check. She jotted it on a blank page of my little notebook, then stood on her toes and kissed me on the cheek. When I looked at my face in my Studebaker’s rearview mirror, I could see traces of her lipstick on my face. I wet a corner of my handkerchief with saliva and wiped them off.

Driving back to Hatch, I pulled up at the first phone booth I spotted. It reeked of urine. I took a deep breath and held it and reached in to dial Detective Awlson’s private number, then stepped outside to talk. Awlson sounded cantankerous when he came on the line. “Hope you’ve got some good news for me,” he said.

“I’ve got a good lead,” I told him. “Gava used one of his neighbor’s phones a lot—he told her he thought his phone line was being tapped by the IRS.” I held my notebook up to the light and gave Awlson Hattie Hillslip’s number.

“I’ll pull the log from the phone company,” he said.

“By the by, when you searched Gava’s condo after his arrest, did you come across one of Mr. Derringer’s short-barreled two-shot pistols?”

“Something told me you’d have bad news. What makes you ask?”

“Seems as if he owned one. Seems as if he showed it off to his poker-playing pals.”

“To answer your question, there was no two-shot derringer in his condo.”

“Which means he must’ve stashed it somewhere when he was choreographing his arrest. Which means he was very attached to his little cannon and planned to recuperate it when he got out of jail.”

“What you’re saying is he’s probably armed, right? Shit, piss and corruption! If he’s armed, he’s dangerous.”

“All rodents are dangerous,” I said.

“You’re going to explain that, I suppose.”

“Running out of quarters,” I said, and I hung up.

Fourteen

I was stretched out on my yellow couch, shoes off, feet crossed at the ankles, head on the armrest, eyes tight shut, relishing a delectably cold Carta Blanca straight from the bottle. France-Marie, my French Canadian lady accountant, was working on the Formica table in the galley—I could hear the rustle of paper as she went through my checkbook, balancing the latest monthly statement from the savings and loan folks. A Nat King Cole 33 was on the stereo. Only two of the four speakers still worked but the song—“It’s Almost like Being in Love”—was making me nostalgic for things I still hoped to experience. In my nostalgia, I suppressed the image of Gava’s sweet little double-barreled derringer and replaced it with Ornella Neppi’s delicate footprints on my sand pathway, toes turned outward. I fantasized about the barefoot contessa who had made them.

The sound of my phone ringing startled me out of this sumptuous reverie. I reached lazily behind my head for the receiver and brought it to my ear.

“Gunn, it’s me, your adopted offspring.”

“I recognize your voice, little lady. What are you doing calling Friday? I thought we were locked into Sunday phone rates.”

“Calling Friday because I won’t be near a phone on Sunday.”

“Why’s that, little lady?”

“Ted’s invited me to go with him to his parents’ place in the country—it’s on an island on a lake, you need to have someone with a boat come pick you up from the landing.”

I sat up on the couch. “Are you asking permission to go or informing me you’re going?”

“Don’t climb on your high horse, Gunn. Hear me out, huh?”

“I’m listening.”

“You’re listening but you’re not
hearing.
Ted’s parents and his two sisters will be there. I’m sharing a room with the sisters.”

“What do his parents do?”

“They parent, for Pete’s sake.”

“For work, I mean.”

“I think his father is a lawyer. The reason I think that is he seems to want Ted to go to law school.”

“Lawyers are not my favorite people.”

“Private investigators aren’t all that popular with the general public either, Gunn.”

“You still haven’t addressed the question. You
are
asking permission to go, aren’t you? I’ve got it right, right? That’s why you called?”

A sigh from the bottom of Kubra’s war-torn soul—her childhood in Afghanistan had been strewn with agonies—reached my inner ear and I melted. “Okay, little lady, you have my permission to go even if you’re not asking for it. But I have conditions. When you bunk in with the sisters, you are physically present in their room the entire night.”

“I love you to death, Gunn, but I think you’re a prig.”

“I’m not sure what ‘prig’ means.”

“It’s a guardian of morality who thinks Mary was a virgin when she gave birth to Jesus. It’s someone who thinks sexual intercourse contaminates the female of the species.”

I laughed uncomfortably into the phone. There was a grain of truth to what she was saying.

“There you go, chortling again,” she said.

“I’m not sure what ‘chortling’ means.”

“Lewis Carroll invented the word—we’re reading
Through the Looking-Glass
in my lit class.
O frabjous day! He chortled in his joy
. ‘Chortle’ is a cross between ‘chuckle’ and ‘snort,’ which is a perfect description of what you do when you laugh.”

France-Marie appeared from the galley. “I’ve finished the savings and loan statement, Lemuel. Also the quarterly self-employed estimated tax form—all you need to do is lick a stamp and mail it in. You
can
lick your own stamps? Mind if I use the loo?”

I nodded yes. Kubra said, “Somebody there with you, Gunn?”

“My accountant’s come by to do my paperwork.”

“You mean your
lady
accountant. At this ungodly hour?”

“She has three clients in Hatch. The manager of the roller-skating rink. The guy who runs this mobile park. And me. I was the last but not least on her appointed rounds, which is why she stopped by a bit late.”

I could hear Kubra—how can I describe this?—chortling. “Maybe you’re less of a prig than I thought,” she said.

I suddenly needed to get something off my chest. “Pay attention, Kubra. Hang on my every word. Wherever you’re at, however old you are, your best years are ahead of you. And don’t you ever forget it.”

I heard her awkward silence. Then, “You’re talking to yourself, aren’t you, Gunn?”

She was a smart cookie. “I’m talking to the both of us, little lady.” I changed the phone to the other ear. “Bye,” I said. “Have a good weekend on your island.”

“Bye-bye, Gunn of my heart,” she said. “Have a good night.”

Smiling to myself, I put on another Nat King Cole 33 and moseyed into the galley alcove to deposit the empty beer bottle into the garbage pail. There was a half-empty wineglass on the Formica table, along with a battery-powered adding machine. But no France-Marie.

“France-Marie?” I called.

When she didn’t reply, I made my way aft, past the head, to the bedroom. The door was ajar. France-Marie was stretched out naked on my bed, her red hair enticingly splayed across one of my pillows. She watched me watching her. “Don’t just stand there, honey,” she said. She had left her accountant’s voice in the kitchen alcove. “Come to beddy-bye.”

I’m old school when it comes to intercourse, sexual and otherwise. France-Marie and I had made love maybe a dozen times; she’d slept over twice before. She obviously expected to spend the night tonight. What could I say to let her down easily? Nothing occurred to me and I didn’t want to bruise her ego, so I stripped to the skin and climbed in alongside her. She rolled onto me, pressing the length of her generously endowed body against mine, kissing me on the lips and the side of my neck, nibbling on an earlobe, sucking on one of my nipples, all the while caressing my genitalia, which couldn’t have cared less about bruising the ego of an occasional lover.

France-Marie stopped abruptly. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong. I’ve had a hard day is all.”

She went back to caressing my organ, feather-light strokes with the tips of the fingers of her left hand. I tried to summon an erection. I even resorted to subterfuge—I ordered up an image of the butter-colored sleeveless blouse plastered against several of Ornella Neppi’s very spare ribs. Turned out I had as much control over my erections as I did over Kubra when she had her heart set on a weekend with her boyfriend.

France-Marie weighed my wilted weed in her hand. “There’s someone else, isn’t there?”

I took a deep breath. “I met a girl,” I admitted.

“Have you slept with her?”

I shook my head. “We had dinner. She kissed me on the lips in the parking lot.”

France-Marie rolled off me to her side of the bed and pulled the sheet and light blanket over both of us. “Men,” she said. “Who understands their music? Certainly not me. At least you’re honest, unlike my ex.”

I slipped my arm under her and pulled her closer so that her head was nestling into my shoulder. “Me neither, I don’t understand me,” I said. “You’re a fine woman, France-Marie.”

After a while she whispered, “I’m not going to play second fiddle.”

“I’d never ask you to.”

France-Marie listened to me breathing. I listened to her listening. I heard the bedside clock ticking away the minutes for the first time since I’d bought it, years before. I heard an owl in the branches of a tree hooting for its mate. I heard the occasional eighteen-wheeler on the interstate that skirted the mobile park, which meant the prevailing wind was coming in from the Painted Desert. In the absolute silence between the owl and the eighteen-wheelers, I caught the faint scruff of footfalls on my sand walkway. I’m not an Apache but I’d swear the footfalls were made by shoes, not bare feet.

A man’s shoes.

“Where you going?” France-Marie whispered.

“To the john.”

Feeling my way in the dark, I retrieved the Colt .38 Commando revolver—a favorite weapon of CIA field agents—from its hidey-hole in an old lace-up boot, pulled on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt and padded barefoot past the head to the small escape hatch across from the main door of the mobile home. Easing open the two dead bolts, which I made a point of keeping well oiled, I slipped outside and hunkered down into what my hand-to-hand instructors called a combat crouch. Tufts of cumulus clouds were defacing a sliver of a moon not bright enough to cast shadows. Moving stealthily, I made my way around the side of the Blue Moon and came up behind the figure of a man trying to peer into my mobile home through one of its windows. I jammed the business end of my Colt into his ear as if it were a Q-tip.

The Peeping Tom turned out to be a balding Caucasian male in his fifties. He was wearing a varsity jacket with the number 23 on the back, khaki trousers with pouch pockets on the sides of the legs, sturdy shoes. He froze the way children do when they’re playing Red Light, Green Light. “I figured it was time for Muhammad to come to the mountain,” my nocturnal visitor said lazily. He laughed under his breath. “Name’s Coffin. Charlie Coffin. A little bird told me you’d been nosing around the FBI regional office looking for me.”

Charlie Coffin had the street smarts of someone who had spent most of his working hours outside of an office. The business end of a Colt in his ear didn’t faze him—all in a day’s work, his body language seemed to say. Moving with the world-weariness of a snail crossing a leaf, he produced a laminated identity card with the letters
FBI
across the top and a mug shot of an agent on it. “That’s me eight, maybe ten years ago,” he said, gingerly easing the barrel of my Colt to one side with two fingers. “Had more hair on my head back then. You’re damn good, sneaking up on me like that,” Coffin said with grudging admiration. “I heard as how you’d picked up some field savvy in Afghanistan.”

“Field savvy didn’t keep me from getting kicked out of the Company,” I said.

Coffin grunted. “Lose some, lose some others.”

I took a closer look at the mug shot, then studied the face of the intruder as he slowly turned toward me. The two matched up. “You armed?” I asked.

He held up his palms. “Only with my hands,” he said. “I’m a black belt karate. Could have taken you down when you went and stuck the gun in my ear. You won’t take it amiss if I give you a friendly suggestion? When you get the drop on somebody, you need to keep back out of arm’s reach.”

“Trying to take me down could be dangerous for someone’s health,” I said. “Hey, you didn’t come skulking around a mobile home park at night to test out my moves.”

“Didn’t,” he agreed. “I heard tell you’d been asking ’bout Emilio Gava’s connection to the witness protection program. I thought as how we needed to have a conversation.”

I thumbed the safety on the Colt forward and stuck the handgun in my waistband as I led my visitor around back and into the Once in a Blue Moon through the escape hatch. The front door was bolted closed on the inside and I didn’t want to rouse France-Marie from her beauty sleep. I turned up the air-conditioning and brought in two cold beers from the galley.

“Okay, Gunn. I’ll begin at the beginning,” Coffin said. He unzipped his varsity jacket, revealing a T-shirt with
FBI
in bold black letters across the chest. “To understand who Emilio Gava is you need to understand where he comes from. Just inside the Nevada state line, a few miles from Nipton, California, which is a fleabag of a town at the edge of the Mojave Desert, there’s an old stagecoach station called Clinch Corners. About eight years ago, two minor Mafia families that couldn’t get a foot in the door in Vegas or Atlantic City decided to set up shop there. The result was and is two small casino operations, one on each side of what passes for a main drag, in the middle of nowhere—but only seventy-five minutes out of Los Angeles by automobile, twenty minutes by helicopter. The two families that run the two casinos, the Baldinis and the Ruggeris, avoided stepping on each other’s toes until eighteen months ago when Guido Baldini, the youngest son of Giancarlo Baldini, the godfather of the Baldini family, was arrested and sent to prison for income tax evasion. The Baldinis naturally suspected that the paperwork that turned up in the FBI’s hands was supplied by a member of the Ruggeri family, which happened to be not true—we got the ledgers from a disgruntled bookkeeper who thought he’d been cheated out of a year-end bonus. To get even, the Baldinis had Guido Baldini’s brother Salvatore turn state’s evidence, implicating the youngest son of the head of the Ruggeri clan, Fabio Ruggeri, on racketeering charges. You with me so far, Gunn?”