Flat Spin (17 page)

“Built like a wide receiver,” Mrs. Schmulowitz said.

He wore sunglasses, blue jeans, a plain white T-shirt, untucked, and a yellow ball cap with the logo of a cow on it.

“You sure it was a cow?”

Mrs. Schmulowitz smirked. “I may not come from a long line of farmers, Bubeleh, but I do know what a cow looks like.”

“What about his car? What did that look like?”

“Small. White. With fancy schmancy wheels, and one of
those things
on the back.”

“Things?”

“Like a race car.”

“A spoiler?”

“Spoiler, schmoiler. One of those
things
. Like a
wing.
”

I asked her if the car could’ve been a Honda.

“What do I know from a Honda?” Mrs. Schmulowitz said. “All these cars today. A New Yorker. A Buick Regal. Now,
those
were cars!”

White. Small. With fancy schmancy wheels. And one of those
things
on the back. It sounded suspiciously like the car that had pursued me from the airport before I left for Los Angeles.

Kiddiot climbed down from the tree with slow caution, one paw after the other, and jumped the last couple of feet to the ground. He rubbed up against Mrs. Schmulowitz’s legs, making little chirping noises. When he was finished showing my landlady how much he was into her, he sauntered toward me—and trotted past without stopping, straight into the garage. I made a note to self: no more cat toys for Kiddiot from the clearance bin at Petco. No more Taco Bell leftovers, either. Not until he showed me some love, too.

“Some nerve,” Mrs. Schmulowitz observed. “After all you’ve done for him.”

Y
ou don’t need an appointment at Primo’s on Cortez Avenue in downtown Rancho Bonita. You walk in and climb into Primo’s ancient barber chair, assuming it’s otherwise unoccupied. Primo hands you a well-worn
Playboy
without asking and pins a sanitary neck strip around your neck. He takes a cutting smock and flaps it high into the air, the way matadors flap capes, then lets it settle gently around your shoulders while you thumb through the magazine. He raises the chair with a few pumps of the pneumatic lift, pivots you so you’re facing the mirror, and then, standing beside you, comb and scissors at the ready, asks, “So, how would you like your hair cut today?” Then he proceeds to ignore your detailed instructions and cuts your hair the way
he
thinks it should be cut, which is usually not half-bad. For fifteen bucks, including a beard trim and a five-minute neck rub, you can’t go wrong.

Business was slow that morning. Primo was sitting in the chair, his own jet-black hair pomaded and perfectly combed as usual, wearing his usual spotless sky-blue Mexican wedding shirt. The bell jingled over the door. Primo looked up from the latest issue of
Boxing Monthly
.

“
Que pasa
, Logan?”

“How’ve you been, champ?”

“It’s all good, boss.”

Primo got up out of his barber chair, a little stiff, befitting a sixty-one-year-old former fighter. I settled into the chair. The comfortable brown leather seat was warm and bowed like an old swayback horse. He handed me a
Playboy
.

After the sanitary strip had been pinned in place and the smock settled down around me, he said, “And how would we like our haircut today?”

“In silence,” I said, perusing Miss February. “Need to catch up on my reading.”

“In silence it shall be,” Primo said.

Our little joke.

Primo and I rarely talked while he worked his magic on my tresses. We liked it that way, content in each other’s company. No need to humor or impress. He’d been a pretty good welterweight in his prime, I gleaned from what little of his career he’d shared with me. His nose was bent like the blade of a hockey stick—a souvenir from a summer night forty years earlier when he’d gone twelve rounds with Pipino Cuevas at the Fabulous Forum. The crowd cheered, “Primo! Primo! Primo!” over and over as he stood toe-to-toe with the younger, stronger Cuevas, giving as good as he got, only to loose on a split decision. Every writer sitting ringside that night said it was a con job. But it didn’t matter to Primo. He’d gone the distance with the champion when every bookie from Reno to Tijuana swore the match wouldn’t last two minutes.

He got out barber shears and a clean comb from a drawer while I read all about Miss February. I was old enough to be her father. Snip-snip-snip. Primo circled me like he was still in the ring, clipping and combing. The shop was redolent of bay rum and Aqua Velva. My scalp tingled pleasurably. I closed my eyes and let my mind drift. Fifteen minutes later, we were done.

He handed me a mirror to check the back of my head. I nodded my approval and gave him twenty bucks. He deposited the bill in an old cigar box and took out a five spot.

“Keep the change.”

Primo forced the bill into my hand. “No way, boss.”

“It’s called a tip, Primo.”

“You ain’t been in for a cut in three months, Logan. That tells me you gotta be more hard up than me. So you keep it. Spend it on your lady. Buy her some flowers or something.”

I made a joke about him not realizing how much flowers cost these days.

“Don’t matter how much they cost. Just get ’em. It’ll make her feel good,” Primo said. “The thing you always gotta remember about women is this: at any given moment, they are what they feel.”

Primo’s version of a fortune cookie. Every customer got one on their way out the door, whether they wanted it or not.

“I have no idea what that means, champ.”

“Go buy yourself a copy of
Cosmo
,” Primo said. “Probably do you some good.”

He was right. It probably would’ve helped, if I’d actually had a woman in my life. One particular woman, anyway.

E
LEVEN

T
hey say meditation is an adventure in self-discovery. It’s supposed to bring one a sense of fullness, of completion. It is, according to those who swear by its power, the eternal essence of nature taking on the order of the universe within the mortal human frame. Whatever the hell that means.

I’ve tried sitting and meditating. The sit-stand method of meditation. The recliner-chair method. I’ve tried mirror gazing. All with no joy. While I wait for the indescribable bliss that the earth is supposed to unleash upon those who meditate with sincerity and patience, my head is filled with questions like, “Who do the Broncos play Sunday?” or “Does anyone
really
know what Jell-O is made of?” or “I wonder what Savannah is doing right now?”

Savannah. It always seemed to come back to Savannah.

I was sitting lotus-like on the sand at Jenkins Beach, trying to become one with the universe and failing miserably. In the haze, the oil platforms two miles offshore resembled aircraft carriers. A jogger ran past me, her path paralleling the retreating tide line. She was petite, mid-twenties, with sinewy legs and a strong, determined face more handsome than pretty. Her chestnut hair was pulled back in a severely tight ponytail that flapped side-to-side like a metronome, the way Savannah’s hair did, when we used to go running together.

I shut my eyes and tried to focus on my inner self. “I am not this library of memories. I have no history. I have no biography.” I repeated it over and over, my self-inquiry incantation. “I am the space. I have always been the space, and I crush these bonds of attachment
now.
”

But it was no use. The universe and I definitely were not one.

My phone rang. The caller ID said Savannah Echevarria. She was angry with me. What else was new?

“First, you tell my father you think his business partner killed Arlo—”

“—I never said that.”

“Then, you have the audacity to tell him that Miles Zambelli did it?”

“I never said that, Savannah.”

“Well, you certainly insinuated it!”

“You asked me to help. I’m trying to.”

“I asked you to go to the police. I didn’t ask you to piss off everybody. You need to stop asking all these questions.”

“Why? Because you’re afraid of what I’ll find out?”

The anxiety in her voice was undeniable. “Just stop. Please. Before it’s too late.”

She hung up.

I sat on the beach the rest of the afternoon, staring at the waves, trying to comprehend her words.
Before it’s too late
. Why did Savannah want me to back off when she’d been so adamant that I get involved to begin with? I thought of Primo’s advice:
At any given moment, a woman is what she feels.
Savannah’s fear was palpable. But why? What had happened in the interim between her begging me to tell the police what I knew about Echevarria, and her insisting that I stop asking questions about who may have killed him? The answer had to be in the kind of questions I was asking. Or the people I was asking them to.

I called Buzz. Dangling the promise of a gift certificate to Dave and Buster’s, I asked him to check the records for me on Miles Zambelli. Buzz said he’d get back to me.

I drove a circuitous route to the airport, checking my mirrors frequently, my gun tucked between my legs. Nobody followed me.

L
arry’s hangar was empty. He’d gone for the night. There were two messages on my answering machine. The first was from Eugen Dragomir, my one and only prospective student pilot. His father was rushing him a check made out in my name for $5,000. Eugen would be by with the money as soon as it arrived. I allowed myself a smile. Another five grand on top of the twenty-five large from Carlisle. I vowed not to tell Kiddiot. Knowing him, he would definitely demand I buy him more cat toys.

The second message was from Lamont Royale. He said he needed to speak with me urgently. I called him at the number he left. It took him several rings to answer.

“I’m in the middle of something,” he said in a hoarse whisper. “Let me get back to you.”

“I’ll be here.”

I sat down at my desk and reread the paid death notice Savannah placed in the
Times
after Echevarria died.

He was born in Oakland in 1961.
Bullshit. The Arlo Echevarria I knew was born in Guatemala and emigrated at age five, crossing the border at Calexico with his mother, both hidden behind the driver’s seat of a tractor-trailer truck hauling cantaloupes up from Zacatecas. They’d settled in San Diego and later Oceanside, where Echevarria’s mother found work cleaning the bachelor officers’ quarters at Camp Pendleton. The Marines made a lasting impression on Echevarria. He would enlist in the Corps on his seventeenth birthday.

He earned a business degree from San Francisco State
. Like hell. The only college Echevarria ever graduated from was what we in Alpha jokingly referred to as the “University of Direct Action.” Like the rest of us, he’d earned a bachelor’s in close quarters battle and a PhD in “Look at Me so Much as Sideways and I Will Fucking Blow Your Shit Away.”

He’d built a successful international trading company.
The trading company was little more than a mail drop in a three-story Art Deco office building on Geary Street with gilded styling and a terra cotta exterior, a half-mile west of downtown San Francisco. An outsourced answering service in New Delhi fielded incoming telephone traffic. The operators were instructed to say that Mr. Echevarria was “in a sales meeting” and to take a message whenever anyone called.

“He is survived by his loving and devoted wife and soul mate, Savannah . . .
Spare me. To have a soul mate, one first needs a soul. Arlo Echevarria had no soul as far as I was concerned, not after wrecking my marriage. There were times, sure, when I stepped on my own meat in the course of the marriage, but that didn’t give him the right to leave his wife and take mine, even if mine ultimately chose to go willingly. As a fellow operator, Echevarria should’ve kept his hands off my wife in the same way I kept my hands off his. Not that I was even for a moment attracted to his wife. The Janice Echevarria I remembered from the few times I’d met her was a foul-mouth she-devil with too much mascara and too little regard for her husband’s welfare beyond how much money he brought home. Under the circumstances, I suppose I couldn’t much blame Echevarria for having made a play for Savannah. Then again, maybe I could.