A Nasty Piece of Work (2 page)

“I used to drink Guinness stout imported from Ireland,” I remarked, settling onto the wooden trunk across from her, “but I can’t seem to find it anymore. Can’t find a lot of things anymore. Sometimes I think it’s me, sometimes I think it’s a national affliction. We seem to be settling for less these days—less beef in hamburgers, less service in restaurants, less plot in motion pictures, less grammar in sentences, less love in marriages.” I hiked my glass. “To bail and to bonding, Friday. Cheers.”

She looked away quickly and gnawed on her lower lip. Whatever ache she was repressing made her look like one of those brittle, cracked Wedgwood teacups my mother brought off the shelf for important guests. It struck me that my visitor was hanging on by her fingertips, though I couldn’t figure out to what. It struck me that without the ache, she would have been too beautiful to be accessible.

“So I’ll drink to bail,” she finally agreed. What she said next seemed to float on a sigh. “To tell the truth, I’m less enthusiastic about the bonding part. Cheers.”

Out in the park a long mobile home pulled by a truck with a throaty diesel engine chugged past in the direction of the interstate. “Okay, I’ll bite—what do you do when you’re not bail bonding, Friday?” I started kneading one of the metal beer caps between my fingers, turning the rim in toward the middle.

“Does Suzari Marionettes ring a bell? I can see it doesn’t. No reason it should. That’s me, Suzari Marionettes. That’s my puppet company. I studied puppeteering in Italy and Japan when I was younger and organized this road company—we do schools, we do summer camps, we do private birthday parties, we do kids’ TV when we luck in. I dress in black and work the puppets from behind with sticks. The repertoire includes
Pinocchio
and
Rumpelstilzchen
. So I don’t suppose you’re familiar with Rumpelstilzchen. He’s the dwarf who spins flax into gold in exchange for the maiden’s first-born child.”

“Sounds like a depressing story.”

She watched me working the beer cap between my fingers. “Unlike real life, it has a happy ending, Mr. Gunn.”

“You manage to live off this puppeteering?”

“Almost but not quite. To make ends meet, I also do miming gigs at birthday parties.” She kicked at the astronaut-fabric knapsack. “It’s filled with wigs and funny eyeglasses and false noses for my various mime acts.” She nodded toward the beer cap, which had been crushed into something resembling a ball. “Your fingers must be incredibly strong to do that.”

I handed her the beer cap. “It isn’t strength. It’s anger.”

She hefted it in the palm of her hand. “What are you angry about—something you’ve done?”

I shook my head once. “Something I didn’t stop others from doing.”

“You care to be more specific?”

“No.”

“Mind if I keep this? It’ll remind me of the power of anger.”

“Be my guest.”

She dropped the beer cap into the silver knapsack, tucked her toes back behind her ankle and, screwing up her face, chewed on the inside of her cheek, uncertain how to proceed. Meeting new people, deciding who you want to be with them, is never easy. The gentleman in me decided to help her over the stumbling block. “Knock off the Mr. Gunn. Call me Lemuel.”

She tried it on for size. “Lemuel.”

I reached over and offered a paw. She unhooked her ankle and leaned forward and took my hand in hers. Her palm was cool, her grip firm. For the space of a suddenly endless instant the thing she was hanging on to with her fingertips was me. I can’t honestly say I minded.

“You work real fast,” she murmured.

“Life is short,” I told her. “The challenge is to make it sweet.” I hung on to her hand long enough for the moment to turn awkward. The depths of her seaweed green eyes were alert, as if a warning buzzer had gone off in her head. She slipped her hand free of mine with the casual ease of someone who had perfected the fine art of keeping a space between herself and the male of the species, and doing it with minimum injury to his ego.

“Fact is, Lemuel, I’m in a jam.”

In a sense, she was ahead of the game but this was neither the time nor the place to educate her. We’re all in a jam, all the time, we’re just too dumb to know it. We need to take our cue from the drug dealers in Hoboken who, when they reach twenty, go to the local undertaker and prepay their funeral because they don’t expect to live to thirty. “Why me?” I asked.

“So here’s the deal: I can’t afford the services of one of those big-city detectives who charge by the hour and pad their expense accounts. I went to the police but they laughed me out of the station house. They have other things to do besides hunt down people who jump bail for relatively minor crimes, and the state is glad to add the bail money to its coffers. I heard on my grapevine that you sometimes take cases on spec…”

“What else did your grapevine tell you?”

“That you look young but talk old. That you’d been a brainy homicide detective in New Jersey before the CIA talked you into becoming some kind of spy. That you never run off at the mouth about it. That you were sent packing without a pension after an incident in Afghanistan that never made it into the newspapers. That you took the fall for following orders you couldn’t prove had been given. That you were a troublemaker in a war that had enough trouble without you. That you came out west and went into the business of detecting in order to live in the style to which you wanted to become accustomed. That you’re street-smart and tough and lucky and don’t discourage easily. That what you do, you do well, what you don’t do well, you don’t do. Which is another way of saying you don’t buy into the notion that if something is worth doing, it’s worth doing badly.”

“That’s one hell of a list.”

“I have a last but not least: that you charge satisfied customers ninety-five dollars a day and unsatisfied customers zero. That nobody can recall an unsatisfied customer.”

“Can you attach a number to your problem?”

“I bet $125,000 of my uncle’s nest egg this guy wouldn’t jump bail. I worry that I’m losing the bet. I feel real awful about it.”

“Just out of curiosity, you want to identify your grapevine?”

She flashed another one of those apologetic half-smiles. “Hey, I’d better not. If I tell you, you might send me packing. That’s what my grapevine said. She said you were peeved at her for being too available. She said, psychologically speaking, you wore starched collars and liked ladies who liked men who opened doors for them. She said you’d been born into the wrong century.”

Two

Friday’s story, the reason she had turned up at the door of my mobile home, came out in disjointed bits, which I took to mean it hadn’t been memorized. Here are the bits, jointed: Ten days before, the police in Las Cruces had apprehended a white male name of Emilio Gava on drug charges. Seems as if police undercover agents had caught him buying cocaine in a bar. After his arrest, Gava was allowed to make a phone call from the jailhouse. At the arraignment next morning, an out-of-state lawyer in a three-piece suit turned up to defend him. Friday described the lawyer, who went by the name of R. Russell Fontenrose, as unattractive a male as she’d ever set eyes on. He spurned an offer to plea bargain and pleaded his client not guilty even though he’d been caught with his hand in the cookie jar, as the saying goes. The judge, miffed to see a fancy-pants lawyer at the bar, set a high bail—$125,000. At which point a woman Friday took to be Gava’s lady friend turned up with a deed to a condominium in East of Eden Gardens.

“Can you describe her?” I asked.

“I’m not good at describing people,” Friday said.

“Try.”

The lids closed over Friday’s eyes as she rummaged through her memory. “She was roughly my height and build, with blonde hair that fell in bangs across her forehead.”

“What about her eyes? Women always notice other women’s eyes.”

“The single time I saw her, which was in my uncle’s office after the arraignment, she was wearing dark sunglasses.” Friday was looking at me again. “Lemuel, what do you know about the intricacies of bail bonding?”

I had to admit what I knew could fit in a thimble.

“Okay. Here’s the short course. Bail bondsmen—that includes bail bondswomen—require collateral for any bond over $5,000. If the collateral is real estate, they require double the amount of bail in equity. Equity is the difference between what the property is worth and the mortgage against it. A defendant’s personal property is not eligible, but the deed was in the woman’s name, which was Jennifer Leffler. She produced tax statements showing the property was valued at $375,000 and free and clear of mortgage, that the state and local property taxes had been paid up for the year. She paid the fee for the bond in advance in cash. I posted bail. Emilio Gava and Jennifer Leffler climbed into a utility vehicle and drove off.”

“Sounds pretty cut-and-dried to me,” I said. “Where’s the problem?”

Friday rubbed the cold beer mug against her brow as if she was suppressing a migraine. “The trial is two weeks from today. Day before yesterday my uncle asked me if I’d checked out the deed with the county records office. I’m new at this—I’m embarrassed to say it hadn’t crossed my mind. My uncle gave me the name of the clerk to call.”

I saw where her story was going. “The deed turned out to be phony.”

“I dialed the home phone number Emilio Gava left with me. I got a recorded announcement saying the line had been disconnected. I drove out U.S. 70 to East of Eden Gardens to look at the condominium listed on the deed. According to the concierge, Gava rented the condo from its owner, an Albuquerque real estate investment company. The condo itself was in one of those new communities that seem to spring up overnight—”

“Replete with minimalls and minigolf and all-weather tennis courts. Been there. Seen ’em.”

“The Gava-Leffler condo was dark. They’ve obviously skipped out on the bail. Look, I know it’s a needle-in-a-haystack situation, but I thought you might give it your best shot…”

She let the thought trail off. I nodded at her beer mug. She nodded no. I thought about her problem, and mine. Here’s what I said: “The chances of tracking down a bail jumper in two weeks and bringing him back to court are slim.” Here’s what I didn’t say: I was having the usual cash flow problems, bills were piling up. With summer not far away, the air-conditioning unit in the Once in a Blue Moon could use reconditioning. My vintage Studebaker needed four retreads and a new suspension. The Afghan orphan I’d adopted, Kubra, was winding up her first year at a junior college in California that charged $5,500 a year tuition and another $2,500 for room and board. Then there was Friday herself, hunched forward on the couch, reaching down to absently massage the ankle of one naked foot. Touched by something in this cracked Wedgwood of a woman that was broken and needed mending, I heard myself say, “Why not?”

Her face brightened and I caught a glimpse of what she might look like without the weight of the world on her shoulders. “You’ll try?”

“I’m not guaranteeing results.”

She thrust a hand into her astronaut knapsack and came up with an item clipped from the back pages of the
Las Cruces Star
about the drug bust and the arraignment and release on bail of one Emilio Gava. In the article, he was described as a retired businessman. “Too bad they didn’t publish a photo,” I remarked.

“There was a
Star
photographer taking pictures on the courthouse steps,” Friday remembered, “but I guess they didn’t think Gava was a big enough fish to publish it.”

I walked her through her involvement with Emilio Gava and Jennifer Leffler a second time, jotting down weights and heights and ages and hair colors, jotting down places and dates and the names of judges and bailiffs and officers of the court. I copied the address of the Las Cruces condo that she’d gotten off the phony deed. I marked down the various addresses and phone numbers where Friday could be reached. Her uncle ran his bond company out of an office on the second floor of a 1930s brick building around the corner from the Las Cruces courthouse. Ornella Neppi herself had a place in a fifties garden apartment community on the edge of Doña Ana north of Las Cruces. Suzari Marionettes operated out of a secondhand Ford van and a PO box in Doña Ana.

I snapped my spiral notebook closed. Friday stood up. “Can I use the facilities, Lemuel?”

For the life of me I couldn’t imagine what facilities she was referring to. My confusion must have been draped across my face because she looked me in the eye and said, “So, hey, I need to pee.”

“Uh-huh. Sorry. I’m a bit thick at times.” I steered her to the bathroom at the back of the mobile home, then ducked into the bedroom to change into a pair of faded khaki slacks, a frayed but serviceable Fruit of the Loom and my running shoes without socks. I was collecting the empty beer mugs when Friday returned from the quote unquote facilities looking more delectable than a field of wild honeysuckle.

“This is quite a mobile home, Lemuel. You live in the lap of luxury. All the inlaid mahogany, all the Italian tiles—where’d you find it?”

“I bought it at a fire sale when one of those film studios in Hollywood went under. I suppose nobody wanted it because it was so big. They told me it was custom built in the thirties for Douglas Fairbanks Jr. when he was filming
The Prisoner of Zenda
on location. I think it was the first all-aluminum mobile home ever made, and a very fancy one at that. Which accounts, among other things, for what you call the facilities and I call the john.”

“You like living in a mobile home?’

“When you move into a suburb you’re surrounded by strangers. When you move into a mobile home park you’re living with family.”

I accompanied Friday outside and down the walkway to the road. “What is it about walking barefoot?” I asked.

“I love sand. I love earth. I love
the
earth. I’m frightened of leaving it. I’m superstitious about feeling the pull of gravity under my feet. It reminds me that I’m earthbound.”

I searched her face. She wasn’t making a joke. “That’s an unusual superstition,” I remarked.