A World the Color of Salt (35 page)

On Main you can get married at a chapel and have the flowers, tux, license, rings, and apartment all in one, then step out on the sidewalk and buy yourself furniture at any of about fifty stores, the brass lamps and vinyl chairs sitting outside under a blanket of car exhaust.

Ahead, I saw a sign for
NUDES ON ICE
and decided that was quite a concept. “Boy-lesque” was playing at the Congo with Cook E. Jarr and the Krums, but I thought I could pass on that too. If Patricia were with me, though, she'd go for it. Wouldn't she? Patricia.

Randy's was still there, a slot between a bail bondsman and a furniture store whose windows were covered with bubbled-up cellophane sun shield. Across the street, the pawnshop's roof sign said:
LOAN
—
SELL
—
BUY
—
TRADE
, and, on the win
dows beneath, I read that I could get
ANTIQUE JEWELRY
,
GOOD GUNS
,
CAMERAS
,
AND MORE
.

There were no geraniums in Randy's window. What replaced the dark-wood paneling was a yellow painted wall with a big clock made out of a wagon wheel in the center, and a bunch of old Nevada license plates tacked alongside, the significance of which was not apparent.

I parked in back, thinking for one moment about my gun in the trunk, and then walked around, stepping nearly out into the street to read the name again, to be sure it was the same place. Not ready to go in, I dodged a cab to go across the street to the pawnshop, where I stood for a few minutes, staring at hinged boxes of dusty finger rings yawning open in the window, a banjo standing above a set of drafting tools, and a china doll whose face had checkered from time. The doll wore a green-velvet 1890s dress, spread out over her stiff legs. I kept looking at the doll, not knowing why, and then the picture of the Vietnamese woman in the doughnut shop, the one with the stubby legs and the white/red towel over her head, rushed in, and I pulled up, crossed the street again between two trucks to the doorway at Randy's, and went in.

The place was not at all what it was before. There were fluorescent lights in the ceiling, but not all of them were on, as if the owner were conserving. The stage had been carpeted with a yellow-brown paisley pattern and was now an upper-level eating area, where, I assumed, the barbecue sandwiches advertised by signs tacked onto the floor-to-ceiling stanchions were served to parties of more than one woman from L.A. At a table sat a paunchy man and woman both in tan knit shirts, the woman without her false teeth in. She laughed, and it was a deep diaphragm-evoked sound that was strangely soothing. Two tables away, a man with huge deformed knuckles polished to a gleam held a white-bread sandwich in both hands, his left cheek knobbed out with something already in his mouth, and when she laughed, he smiled too.

My gaze then fell on a man to my right who'd been hunched over so that I barely saw him at first. He was young and thin, with a diamond-shaped face and very long, very black hair he flicked aside as he looked up. Cochise, except his skin was very light, as if he stayed inside all day. His hand
was still on the infant carrier in front of him, the baby inside entirely pink, without a shred of hair. I smiled at him, not a thing I often do. His full lips pressed together, and then he looked away.

I went over to the bar and ordered a coffee. “Put a little whiskey in it too, will you?” I said to the man. He was old, maybe sixty, with a flushed complexion. His close-cut brown beard and mustache seemed painted on.

“You got ID?” he said, and he wasn't smiling.

“Thank you,” I said. He still didn't smile. I brought out my license. He looked at it, then moved away down the bar and came back with the cup and plopped it down, sloshing some liquid over the side. He said, “That'll be five-fifty.”

“Five-fifty?” I said. “Isn't that a little steep?” Something else was going on. “You always this friendly,” I said, “or you just having a bad day?” I'd pulled up my purse and unzipped it, complying.

He moved directly in front of me and stood with his thumbs tucked in his back pockets. Keeping his voice down, he said, “No business here, lady. This ain't that kind of place.”

“Excuse me?”

“You heard me.” And he turned his back to me and walked down the strip of black-rubber flooring behind the bar.

I drank my coffee in peace and didn't let it bother me. I needed information. I could wait. When the time came, I did have to walk all the way down to him though, but I didn't wait for him to finish futzing around. I said, “Do you happen to know where I could find Cipriano Rycken? He used to own this place.”

It took him half a second to answer, and this time I didn't see quite so much hostility. “Did you look in the phone book? There's a phone book over there,” he said, nodding toward the hall.

“No, sir,” I said, “I didn't.”

I started away, and then the man said, “He won't be in there.” He loosened up as much as he was going to as he told me I'd find Cipriano in Saint Rose, in Henderson.

“What's that?” I said.

“A rest home.”

Rest homes are for old people—real old people. At eighteen
I thought of Cip as “older,” but older as in forty, forty-five, not a gray hair in his head; though now as I thought back on it, the hair, yes, had been too black. But Cip was appealing in his own way if you were into father figures, and certainly appealing enough to be married to a pretty woman with perfect skin, I remember that, having met her once or twice. I couldn't recall her name, though Cip talked about her often enough, seemed to be in love with her, the mother of his baby girl. Her picture had been on his desk, a wheat-scrubbed look to her. She'd been, he said, a dancer—not in a topless place, but onstage in one of the biggies—before they married. He was always talking about the casseroles she made him, patting his nearly empty shirt and saying she was making him fat.

“He hurt his leg,” the bartender said. I looked at him curiously, wondering how many quarters I'd have to put in his mouth to keep him talking, when he added, “He's my brother-in-law. He usually lives with us.”

I thanked him for the info, intending to leave, when he came out from around the bar and walked with me toward the door. He said, “You're not a friend of Kirsten's, are ya? From California, you a friend of hers?”

“No, I'm afraid not,” I said.

“Oh,” he said, nodding.

“Is that his daughter?”

He nodded again. His jaw went tight, and then he turned and walked away toward the table with the tan shirts at it. The Indian-looking man with the baby met my eyes, then quickly looked away as I opened the door to go out.

At a corner of the parking lot, conspicuous because there weren't that many other cars around, was the Taurus. “God
damn
,” I said to myself, furious that someone
was
pinching my behind, all the way up from Orange County. “You fucker.” Keys in my hand and rage filling my throat, I made a beeline across the lot, walking fast, and sure I was going to yank the twit right out of the driver's window by the hair. When he saw me headed for him, his elbow pulled in and he sank back as if he expected a blow, and the mirror of his sunglasses wavered and flashed.

“Get out of the car!” I yelled. He looked bewildered, so I said it again: “Get out of the car. I want to talk to you.”

The door opened. I knew he could have a gun. But something about him told me that that was not likely.

He stepped out, and a waxed-paper wrapper fell to the ground near his black shoes. His socks were white, the pants gray, the knit shirt a deep rose. He had a nervous smile on his face, and he stuttered, “I . . . I . . .”

“Who
are
you? Tell me right now.”

He shut the door and let his hands fall.

I said, “Take off your glasses.”

“Listen, I'm—”

“Do what I tell you, you creep, or you're going to be kissing concrete.”

He let a puff of air out his nose and turned his head—the start of a laugh—and I knew it was ridiculous too: I wasn't going to flatten the guy, wasn't sure I even knew how anymore. I took a step forward anyway, and said in a more normal tone, “Who are you?”

The man's pointed chin raised while he removed his glasses, and I saw a white scar on the red neck near the Adam's apple, like maybe a thumbnail had dug in there once. He'd composed himself by then. “My name is Lionel Crowell, and I'm a licensed private investigator.”

“Shit you are.”

He pulled his wallet out and opened it. I took it. It was a California license.

“What do you want from me?”

“A client is seeking information.”

“Now, that's big news. What information? Where do you get off following me? Why not just come up and talk to me?”

He shrugged and wagged his head. “Is now a bad time?”

Too much
. I had to laugh. Once I let down, it occurred to me: “Did Rowena Dwyer contact you?”

“I don't ordinarily give out my clients' names.”

“You're not supposed to be following
me
, you dumb shit,” I said, smiling and shaking my head. He wasn't even supposed to be wasting gas trailing someone out of state, and I figured he must be a few points low on the scale, and said, “What the hell, buy me a drink.”

I eventually dumped Lionel Crowell, pointed him home the way you would a blindfolded partygoer holding the tail of the donkey, and vowed I'd call Rowena Dwyer as soon as I could and tell her not to pick her PIs out of the phone book. He'd meant no harm, but he was a history teacher whose wife stepped out on him, he said, and so he decided to try this profession. On the way out of the casino we went to, he dropped three quarters and won four-hundred, so what do I know?

Cipriano was in the bathroom when I came in. The nameplate on the door outside told me this was the right room:
CIPRIANO RYCKEN
and
STEVEN NEFF
. Steven Neff was the old man dressed in brown in the wheelchair next to the perfectly made bed with the woven bedspread, white horses rearing on a pale blue background. Parallel to that bed was another, with a green bedspread, an empty wheelchair beside it. On the high table next to the bed three decks of Diamond playing cards were stacked atop some magazines.

“Excuse me,” I said to the man. He was looking across the room, out the sliding-glass doors that led to a veranda. A badly pilled brown throw lay across his lap. A moment later, his eyes locked on my face. I smiled and said, “I'm looking for Cipriano Rycken.”

Then I saw that the old man had a small purple stuffed dog sitting in the crook of his arm. Mr. Neff's blank blue eyes and the dog's stony black ones held on me, no answer forthcoming. I heard water running in the bathroom. As though a spell had been broken, Mr. Neff's expression changed, and I tried again: “Is that your dog?”

“Yes,” he whispered slowly.

“He's a great-looking dog.”

The man's head dropped to look at it. “Yes,” he said again.

“I'm going to wait here, all right? For your roommate.” I smiled as pleasantly as I could and got out of the way of a yellow-skinned black woman who came in to empty a waste-basket. As she straightened up, one hand at the small of her back, she looked outside where pink roses from the veranda
stretched close to the glass and shone like cups on stems. “Gosh, aren't those beautiful?” she said. “Looks like we're finally going to get rain. That'll be nice, won't it?” The basket in her hand, she turned to the patient and said, “How you doin' today, Mr. Neff? You doin' all right?” and the old man looked away, toward the roses, with a forlorn and lonely or maybe just bewildered expression on his face, as if he were trying to remember the word for those flowers.

She left, and I went to the bathroom door and said, “Cipriano?”

I heard a muted, “Yeah?”