Ken Kuhlken_Hickey Family Mystery 01 (3 page)

The chambers of Hickey’s brain kept misfiring randomly, which made thinking tough. And suddenly the kid stood beside him, then leaned on his shoulder as he swayed, drooling blood. “Make ’em get Wendy, Pop.”

Hickey stared, listened, kept trying to think. “No time. In a minute there’ll be cops.”

“I gotta try, though.”

Before Hickey found the sense to grab him, the kid went stumbling toward the street. Hickey lunged that way, on impulse. But he couldn’t at once chase the kid and hold these guys back.

“Whoa!” he shouted. “Get back here, give me a hand, anyway. Grab their guns, will you?” he shouted.

One Mexican shot his arms for the sky and pleaded mockingly for the kid to spare him. His compadres sniggered.

Clifford slowed, finally stopped, leaned on a garbage can a second, then turned back and marched to the three Mexicans against the wall. He quickly frisked them, snatched their guns, and slipped them into his pockets under his belt. At last he turned to Mofeto. But as he got near, the runt snapped his teeth and croaked, “No, boy. You touch me, only that, I’m killing you. My pleasure.”

“Go on, get the girl,” Hickey shouted. “Hold it—before you go in, find a cab. Make sure he’s waiting by the door.”

The kid weaved out of the alley, into the street. Hickey stepped closer to El Mofeto.

“Pass it over, la pistola, chico.”

The runt didn’t stir. One of those punks made tough by a death wish, Hickey thought. The kind you don’t even try to reason with. But he’d try anyway. “Here’s the deal. My nephew, he’s the girl’s brother. That makes me her uncle. And her dad, my brother, he’s General Bradley. Comprendes?”

“You a liar.”

“You oughta believe me, chico. Aw, the hell with you. Where’s the guy that owns this joint? El Patrón.”

“Maybe asleep. I bet that’s where he is.”

The runt started whistling a jazzy tune, an upbeat number you might hear at a parade. He gazed up at the sky and smiled. One of his boys tittered, just as Clifford ran into the alley and wailed, “Pop, she ain’t there.”

The kid bent forward, hands on his knees, and rolled his head in tight circles. Turning back to El Mofeto, Hickey raised his left fist, wanting to knock the runt’s teeth out of the rear of his skull. But not so much as he wanted the girl. “Okay, here it is—tomorrow you’re bringing La Rosa to the line. We’ll give you twelve hours. That’d be two o’clock. Comprendes?”

El Mofeto looked down from the sky and kept smiling. “Sure. We going to bring her. We’re swell guys.”

“Yeah, I’m betting on you. So we’re leaving now. I’ll take my pistola, huh?”

When the runt didn’t move, Hickey raised the .22 and sighted at the pointy nose. Then he winked. “Aw, you got my number. I’m not going to kill somebody, not even you, for a gun. There’s about a million where that came from. You like the rod, it’s yours, pal.”

The runt gave a hard, squeaky laugh. Hickey smiled grimly, turning to Clifford. He told the kid to guard their front while he watched the rear.

They made the street that way and got surrounded by a gang of spectators who’d been hiding behind cars, yet nobody challenged them. They piled into the rear of an old Ford taxi and Hickey commanded, “Frontera.”

The drizzle had stopped. Hickey smelled a wave of sea air. He wondered how much of this night was real, how much a mescal dream. Surely the girl wasn’t so perfect as she appeared. Nobody who’d spent an hour in a slime pit like the Club de Paris could be so undaunted and pure as she seemed. He leaned forward to see Clifford’s face. The kid had rolled down the window and was staring out into the wind. He and the girl had the same pouty lip, the same golden hair. But Clifford’s eyes were gray and frantic, and hers, until she saw her brother, had looked almost serene.

“You wanta tell me how she got there?”

Clifford turned and faced him. “Uh-huh. I don’t mind.” Suddenly his face clenched up in a fury, he grabbed Hickey’s arm in both hands. He squeezed and yelled, “What’ll I do, Pop? They ain’t gonna bring her.”

For a while, Hickey sat feeling the dull pains all over and the sharp one that burned from his eye nearly to his bowels. He silently cussed Clifford Rose for risking their lives without giving him the whole story. But again he thought of the girl. And before long he remembered his daughter, about the same age, and knew that if she was in the Club de Paris he might not care a damn about anybody else in the world. Not until he got her back.

Clifford tugged on his arm.

“I’m gonna pay you more,” the kid pleaded. “Me and Wendy got this place on the beach up to Lake Tahoe. Ain’t no buildings, but it’s an awful pretty place, out on a foresty beach there. I’m gonna deed it to you.”

“Sure,” Hickey said gently. “Take it easy now. You’ve got a war to fight.”

Chapter Four

As always—drunk, sober, or beaten up—Hickey washed, then read himself to sleep. He read a page, conked out, and dreamed again. There was his daughter, fourteen years old, tall, grown up fast like her dad, with the black wavy hair and black eyes that made her mother a beauty. But her pale skin that reddened easily and the long, ascetic-looking face came from Hickey.

Wearing a flowered hat and a sundress, Elizabeth jumped off the train and ran to him. As they embraced, suddenly they stood out front of the hillside cottage in Hollywood where they used to live. They began walking and soon they reached the ocean, at Long Beach near the oil field that once was a ranch Hickey’s father owned. The beach led them all the way to Tijuana. But as they passed through the gate, instead of finding hunger, filth, all kinds of meanness, they discovered a city more beautiful than any place. There were fountains around bronze statues, flower gardens, eucalyptus groves, boulevards lined with orange trees, shiny white buildings. Nobody was poor or sad in the Tijuana of Hickey’s dream.

And, from here you could reach all the world. This time they walked a trail beside the river and saw that it emptied into the Seine. The water turned violet, at dusk. The air was full of apple blossoms. Hickey bought his little girl crepes, dark sweet coffee, ribbons for her hair.

Then he snapped awake to the pain down from his eye meeting one shooting up from his jaw. Together they bellowed like a pair of tubas. He got up and swallowed a few aspirin. But he couldn’t drift off again, with the night in TJ come back to haunt him.

He should’ve known better than to get near any messes, the way this whole year had gone. Nineteen forty-three had sunk to hell about a day after it started, when he came home from work to his place on the bay, and found a letter folded into H.G. Wells’
Outline of History
, which he’d been reading.

Dear Tom,

It’s not that you’re a bad guy. But I’m 34. I need another chance before it’s too late. See, we’ve got nowhere in 15 years. I give up. I mean, you’re a three-time loser.

First the orchestra. You were a damned good bandleader, except you had to play what you liked instead of what the crowd wanted to hear. And of course you wouldn’t kiss the right behinds. Then, you could’ve been the richest cop in L.A., a guy with the smarts and charisma like you had, who knew all the nightclub boys, but you wouldn’t play the game. We could’ve had that mansion you used to promise me. No, you throw in your cards with old Leo, the next biggest loser, and drag me and Liz to this hick town. Two years we live like peasants. Then you get a shot at the steakhouse.

When you met Paul Castillo, it could’ve been the big break. Finally you get teamed up with somebody who knows how to beat the odds. I mean, what in hell does it matter if Paul had to pay off some guys and use a little muscle to get you the best meat in town? Rationing’s just a setup. Another way the smart boys make their fortunes. And it could’ve made
us
rich too. But you are so damned noble. Like you always have to show off, lending money, buying people things so everybody will slap you on the back and say Tom’s a prince all right.

Well, maybe you are, but this time it cost you dear. Today Paul sold the steakhouse, building and all. I’m leaving you our house, to help cover your losses. You can raise a few grand for the dump, enough to get that sailboat or mountain cabin you always dreamed of.

Sure, you’ll want to kill me. That’s one reason I’m staying with Paul, he’s at least as tough as you, and twice as shrewd.

Well, good-bye, my darling. It’s too bad. We used to make beautiful music. Of course I’m taking Liz. Where I go, she goes.

Love,

Madeline

Hickey would’ve fought back for his daughter. But he hadn’t even finished a two-week drunk when Uncle Sam jumped in. Saw him down and figured it was the right time to kick him. January 10 his draft notice came. Even though a year earlier, the week after Pearl Harbor, he’d tried to enlist—even knowing it might keep him from Elizabeth for the six or eight months everybody figured they’d need to smash the Axis—but they’d turned him down. He was a borderline diabetic, thirty-six years old. But when enough boys had died, by 1943, when the supply of young sacrifices became less than the demand, Hickey’s faults got forgiven.

It might’ve been history’s ugliest year, with half the world burning and shooting at each other, and kids like Wendy Rose getting preyed on by rats like the one Clifford said had brought her over the border and dealt her into some kind of slavery there.

Or, Hickey thought, maybe the kid was lying. Maybe his sister was down there on her own.

Chapter Five

Hickey woke up groaning at 10:15. After he’d fallen back to sleep, he’d kept waking in a sweat and seeing visions of Wendy Rose under the blue light in the Club de Paris, his heart gripped by something—maybe lust, or compassion.

The drizzle rattled on the barracks’ tin roof. A few other MPs snored at the far end of the room. They’d woke Hickey, stomping in drunk a couple hours before—just as he’d got back to sleep from when the stupid bugle woke him—and it wasn’t the first time they’d blighted his sleep. On his way to the shower he kicked each of their bunks hard. After a shower, he finished dressing in his MP uniform, gathered what he needed into a bag, and walked out.

In Hickey’s gear bag were a couple of guns, swiped from the Mexicans outside the Club de Paris, his holster, nightstick, and a brown wool suit, bleached white shirt, and a tie with a painted macaw, his civilian work clothes.

At the Pier Five Diner on Market Street, he swallowed two rolls, an egg, and four cups of black coffee. Then he took out his old briar and smoked for a while. When his head felt clear enough, he went to the rest room, changed clothes, and walked a few blocks up Market Street, turning down 5th. He passed a line of service boys that stretched a half-block from the Hollywood Burlesque theater. At the corner of 5th and Broadway, he entered an old brick building. He climbed three flights of stairs to an office door lettered
hickey and weiss, investigations
, opened it with a key, walked straight to a desk, took out a Browning .45 automatic pistol in a shoulder holster and put it into his gear bag. From the same desk drawer he pulled an address book. He found the number of a German guy, a friend of Leo Weiss. The German was a devout Lutheran who detested Hitler more than he hated the Pope, yet who belonged to the German-American Bund, a gang of Nazis and sympathizers. Hickey sat down and phoned the man, told him enough about Wendy Rose and the Club de Paris to get in return the address of the German’s best friend’s wife’s nephew, who had been living in Tijuana a few months now. A coffee planter from Chiapas. Juan Metzger.

Hickey scribbled a note, left it on the desk, went back down to the street, and turned up Broadway.

Even in the rain some derelicts hung out by the fountain at the bus plaza, and dozens of newcomers wandered around, wrinkled and aching from thousand-mile bus rides. More of the hordes who came drifting and trucking southwest, at least twenty thousand each month, to live in tent cities on the beaches or in rickety fourplexes built last week, to be welders, riveters on planes and battleships, or stevedores loading the gray ships that filled the harbor.

At 12:30 the bus for the border arrived. Hickey got on with a trio of teenaged pachucos in khaki trousers, and heavy shoes in case they had to kick somebody, and two Mexican women dressed in shabby black dresses and veils. They were going home from a burial, carrying a sack full of personal effects and medals of a Mexican boy who had gone to be a U.S. soldier.

The bus clattered along, splashing, skidding to a stop near the National City shipyards to pick up Mexican workers, and next at the trailer parks on the south bay waterfront, to let off citizens. Soon the road narrowed and the bus had to ride the shoulder or else crash into northbound Mexican trucks hauling onions and potatoes. On both sides of the road, to the sea and the mountains, were farmlands, and all over the fields Mexicans walked around, stooping to plant vegetables in the rain.

He got off the bus about 1:30.

The border lay at the base of dark mesas capped with dense black clouds. Hickey plodded through the rain to the office shack next to the clinic shack. The door was unlocked, but he found no one there. Inside, he took the Browning and shoulder holster out of his gear bag and stuffed the bag into a locker. He strapped on the gun and put his sport coat over it. Then he went outside, sat on a step, and watched the gate. By 2:15 he gave up hoping a car might show and drop off the girl.

With his hat pulled low against the rain, Hickey walked across the border against traffic through the U.S. entry gate. He sloshed down the road, leaping over mudholes, to the red-and-pink Chrysler limo beside the coffee and taco stand.

Tito the cabbie sat behind the wheel reading a comic book. The mustached, unscarred side of his face looked almost handsome with the sunglasses covering his patched eye. As Hickey stepped close, the cabbie jerked with a start, then yawned and motioned for Hickey to get in front.

He came around, climbed in, took out his wallet and passed Tito five dollars. “For a couple hours. Let’s go back to the Club de Paris.”

The big engine revved. Tito said, “No uniform today. Hey, what you thinking about La Rosa?”

“I think she’s a little girl,” Hickey snapped.

Tito raised his hand. “Sure, man. That’s what I think too.” He sped away, flying through the mudholes, roaring over the bridge, but he got stalled in a jam of trucks at the turn onto Revolución. He took a Hershey bar out of the pocket of his bright yellow Hawaiian shirt, nibbled while he honked and cussed, finally turned to Hickey. “Why you going back down there?”

“You’re the guy with all the answers.”

“You got that right.”

“Who runs the Club de Paris?”

The cabbie lifted his eyebrows. “Hey. Easy. That one’s Señor del Monte.”

As they swerved around the double-parked cars, then turned and crashed over potholes and rocks on the way down the hill toward the river, Hickey asked what he knew about del Monte.

The cabbie said, “Not this del Monte, but his papa—he’s a big one. Very famous. It’s him that brings Coca Cola to Mexico. Maybe he’s the richest cabrón in all Baja. Or maybe Lázaro Cárdenas is richer. Who knows?”

“How about this guy, the son?”

“Not so much,” Tito said. “Except maybe he’s a Nazi. In Spain, where he was going to college, he joined Franco’s army. He comes back with a German wife. She’s still here, up in Las Lomas. Maybe it’s a reason why General Cárdenas don’t send the Germans to the Capitol like he’s supposed to. Because these ricos are all friends, you know?”

Hickey thought a minute. “What about the Japs? Why doesn’t Cárdenas round up the Japs like he’s supposed to?”

“They’re paying somebody, I guess.”

A block before the Club de Paris, Hickey told the cabbie to stop, let him out, and wait.

There was no pavement or sidewalk, only red mud, rivulets and pools. A hard wind came up, blowing the drizzle into Hickey’s face as he waded around a ramshackle hotel, El Ritz, with most of its windows boarded up. He crossed a vacant lot. A few children playing there pelted him with mudballs, then laughed and ran. Hickey only glanced their way, turned up the road that led around back of the Club de Paris.

In the rear of the building were two doors facing a vacant lot with large piles of rubble. He noted that the left door must’ve let out of the back room that opened onto the stage. He finished circling the building, to the entrance, which was unmanned. No sign said open or closed. He drew the automatic from under his coat, held it in his outside coat pocket, pushed the heavy door, and stepped through.

The club was dark as ever. Windows were high and blackened. A blue light over the stage glowed dimly. The only sounds were murmurs from the few customers, all Mexicans, a few of Cárdenas’ soldiers at a table in the middle of the room. Behind the bar two men stood watchfully, a mestizo and a German. Each had clobbered him at least once the night before.

Hickey gazed around through the dark, looking for the runt called Mofeto. At the bar, he ordered a shot of mescal though he usually only drank the stuff at night. When the mestizo brought him a double shot of the brownest, thickest kind, he gulped, and asked, “Where’s Señor del Monte?”

The bartenders looked at each other, and the German grumbled, “What for you wanting him?”

Hickey glared until the German got skittish. He stepped around the bar, went to a door on the left of the stage. The mestizo smiled at Hickey and poured another shot of mescal.

El Mofeto stepped out of the back room first, in his same dark baggy coat with padded shoulders and the hat down to his eyes. The boss followed. Tall, skeleton thin, about Hickey’s age, with wavy black hair, pale flesh. Something about him didn’t look Mexican or Spanish, and there was a nervous, haunted presence about him. He reached out a bony hand, which Hickey didn’t shake as his right was occupied, still resting on his gun. Del Monte leaned on the bar.

With a glance at El Mofeto, Hickey said to the boss, “First thing, I’m an MP, and my partners know just where I am right now—so I’m not worth killing. Second, there’s a girl who works here. A kid. Una chica.”

“All our girls are young, Señor.” Del Monte sighed, bored already. “We grow up young in Mexico. We die young.
Asi es la vida
, no?…I expect you are meaning La Rosa.”

“Yeah. I wanta talk to her.”

“Every man wants to talk to her, Señor.”

Hickey seethed, then slapped his wallet onto the bar, in front of del Monte. “I got a hundred and twenty in there. You got a family. I wanta take her to her brother, that’s all. Then we’ll disappear.”

Del Monte straightened up, wearily like an arthritic, rolled his eyes, and turned to walk away.

“Whoa!” Hickey said. “How much?”

The man turned back. “Her brother, three times he comes here. She never wants him. He scares her, that’s all, and I don’t want to see that anymore.”

“She needs her family, pal,” Hickey demanded. “She’s like a little kid.”

Del Monte forced a contemptuous smile. “Sure, she’s not too smart. But she’s human, no? She can do as she wants.” His hand sliced the air to signal the end, goodbye. He turned and hustled to the back room. El Mofeto stayed just long enough to cackle before strolling after his boss.

Outside, Hickey caught some breaths, clearing the stink of that dive from his lungs. To the east it looked like the clouds might break someday. The limo was parked across the street. He jumped mudholes, slid into the cab, and asked, “You know that creep who wears the big hat and a mustache?”

Tito stiffened and his lips curled. “Sure. El Mofeto, that means he’s the skunk. I know him plenty. I used to have two good eyes, before I knew El Mofeto.”