Ken Kuhlken_Hickey Family Mystery 01 (6 page)

Chapter Nine

Hickey liked to walk, hard, early mornings, to burn the poison out of him. He strode three miles inland and rested on a bus bench at the top of C Street where 25th crossed, on the outskirts of downtown.

From there he gazed east across the brown hills, canyons, rolling mountains, and valleys that looked like Hollywood when he was a boy, when they moved there after his old man lost a fortune on cattle, and disappeared, to kill himself in the last big war, when his mother was a seamstress to stars like Mary Pickford—before she started preaching Christian Science and ran her patrons off.

He thought about Wendy Rose and knew the Mexicans had more at stake than the few hundred a night the Club de Paris could make off her. Down there you had everything or nothing, and guys like del Monte had it all. Maybe she knew too much about something. Or del Monte planned to keep her for his own.

He considered going straight to the top. Lázaro Cárdenas. An ex-Presidente, hero of the revolution, now general of the army of the frontera—if Cárdenas ordered del Monte or anybody to set the girl free, the man would jump like a kangaroo. But Leo said Cárdenas was pals with del Monte. He might give a different order, and Hickey would disappear. Cárdenas had to be the last resort.

The air had gotten crisp, dry, and sparkling without a particle of fog or haze. Beyond the city, across the bay, sat the dock where Hickey and Leo once dropped their life savings into a dealership for new and used sailboats, the business that brought them to San Diego when Leo retired and Hickey quit the LAPD. In six months the business sank.

Hickey sighed, gazed at Islas Coronados far out to sea, which looked so close you could swim there. It was just past dawn, and the ocean beamed more golden than the sun. The light stung his eyes—he’d gotten only three hours sleep before the drunks came crashing into the barracks and he’d snapped awake. He needed food and coffee. Then he’d go down alone—the kid would just make trouble—and find out where the hell they took her. Tijuana wasn’t so big. And while he was in the neighborhood, tonight he’d go see Luz.

The bus arrived and Hickey climbed on. At Horton Plaza he bought a pastry and transferred. In San Ysidro he chugged two cups of thick Mexican coffee. He changed, in the office shack, from his uniform to the gray suit. Then he filled his pipe and lit up, dialed the phone.

Sent from one number to the next three times, he finally reached Al Smythe—another ex-LA cop. When Hickey knew him, he was on the take from bootleggers. Now he was an Army lieutenant in ordnance, at the supply depot on the pier at the foot of Broadway. In charge of disbursing small weapons and vehicles.

Hickey said, “Al, this one’ll give you a laugh. See, I misplaced a Jeep down in TJ.”

When Smythe finished chortling, he said, “That’ll cost you two hundred.”

Hickey promised it tomorrow, then hung up, took paper from a drawer and wrote, “Lefty, If I’m not back for duty, sign me in and cover for me. Promise Boyle twenty dollars and he won’t snitch. Do it good and I’ll take the fall for losing the Jeep. Or else you better pack for New Guinea.”

He folded the note, taped it to Lefty’s locker, and stepped outside.

Beyond the sloughs lay a Swedish-flagged merchant ship carrying troops; soldiers hanging over the rails. It was probably bound for the Solomons. The ship Clifford ought to be on. You could almost see the soldiers’ eyes through the sparkling air.

Already, before 9
a.m.
, the line of trucks had backed up near the bridge waiting to haul Mexican produce to the Navy ships. A cloud of seagulls hovered, cawing, diving at the open trucks. Hickey stepped across the three traffic lanes, turned south through the Mexican entrance gate, saluted the Mexican guard. Then he walked in tire tracks, where the mud had already caked dry, to beneath the river bridge where the red-and-pink limo waited.

Tito lay sprawled in back asleep. Hickey rapped on the window. The cabbie sprang up, gazed around and rubbed his eye. He put on his sunglasses and straightened his bright red Hawaiian shirt. Finally he rolled down the window. “I been working hard boss, making me tired.” He rummaged through papers on the floor, came up with a stack of flyers.
girls! cocktails! beer! la rosa blanca! club de paris!
—In the middle was a grainy, dark picture of Wendy Rose.

“I been asking around. Don’t look like she’s anymore in TJ. Maybe they take her down to Ensenada or over the mountains, but we can find her. Soon as you give me one hundred dollars.” He eyed Hickey for a second. “Okay, sixty.”

“Twenty.”

“Hey, you don’t get no other cabbies, just me. El Mofeto tells them already, don’t talk with you, don’t take you nowhere. So they don’t. Nobody else can be that crazy. But I don’t go crazy for twenty dollars.” Hickey slipped him forty.

On the drive he worried about Clifford. Last night he’d told the kid they should meet this morning at ten by the tuna boats. The way Clifford looked, ragged and looney, the Shore Patrol could nab him for suspicion. Or he might run amok, shooting pimps on Broadway, out of twisted revenge. He might go looking for Wendy on his own. Hickey had taken the kid’s gun away. But there were a million guns in San Diego.

He told the cabbie to stop at the telephone office. He went in and called Leo, reached him in bed, asked him to meet Clifford at ten and keep an eye on him.

“Only if you quit giving my number to jerks,” Leo growled. “A sap name of Metzger woke me up an hour ago. Said to give Señor Hickey this message. ‘Leave me alone and go to hell,’ I think he said. The guy’s a mumbler.”

Something had got Metzger squirming, Hickey thought. The German could’ve woke from his stupor just long enough to panic and do something ignorant like call Hickey and give him orders. Unlikely, though. Neither did it sound like a trick to lure Hickey back down there. All Metzger had to do was invite him.

After a drink or two, and a look around, he’d pay the fellow another visit.

There were about thirty strip clubs in the two paved miles of Avenida Revolución. Between the curio and tailor shops. Beside the feed and tack store. In the cellar of a jewelry shop where you might find stolen diamonds you read about last week in the
San Diego Tribune
. Most of the clubs were dark, smelly joints. A few looked like pool halls or cafés; they had big windows from which the younger whores could wave at passersby. It wasn’t the kind of street where gentle folks went strolling. Except on business, folks like the del Montes kept to Las Lomas. From where Hickey stood on Revolución, you could look over an open mercado and see the Lomas—the hot springs, mansions, and thoroughbred ranches, the race track with its palm trees high above everything.

At 4th and Revolución, Hickey stepped into the Climax Bar, ordered a shot of mescal. A half-dozen sailors slouched over a table near the stage where a leggy, orange-haired woman performed a belly dance with her back turned. Hickey didn’t question the sailors. They looked too drunk to tell a white girl from a green, three-headed Martian. He gulped the mescal and showed a handbill to the bartender, who waited for a tip and said she might be at La Caverna, two blocks up the street.

The Cavern was at the bottom of a flight of crumbling steps. As you stepped down, the passage narrowed. The door looked like a small hole. The floor was caked with an inch of red dirt. You could see cracks in the walls where mud had poured in. The room was all underground, dark, clammy, and stinking of mold. The only drinkers were a few broken old whores who waved sadly at Hickey and motioned for him to come near. A short, skinny one with woolen hair climbed onto the little stage in the corner. To a scratchy honky-tonk melody, she started wiggling stiffly, pulling off her clothes. Her belly was a patchwork of bruises.

The bartender only shook his head at the handbill. Hickey ordered drinks for several whores. They dragged him to a booth and gathered around. One nibbled his ear. Another squeezed his thigh. When the music stopped, the skinny one who’d been dancing came off the stage, plucked the hat off Hickey’s head and set it on her mop of thick hair. She kissed his bald place. Her pointed nipple kept brushing his shoulder.

“
Tu estas muerto
,” she whispered. “Dead man.”

He questioned her with a stare, got a grin for an answer. So he passed around the handbill. The women studied it, gave him sour looks, made scornful clucking noises, and the oldest of them said, “You want a little white girl, cabrón, why you coming to Mexico?”

Hickey stood up just as Tito appeared in the doorway, and suddenly the dancer started yelling. She called Tito a queer, motherfucking goat. The cabbie only hissed. As Hickey followed him out of there, she yelled something after them. On the sidewalk, Tito grumbled. “
Puta loca
.”

“Friend of yours?”

“One time, she was. But I got to tell you, hombre, we better look out. That one’s a sister of El Mofeto, and her brother don’t like us both.”

Hickey didn’t mention she’d called him a dead man. But he felt a touch lightheaded. In the air he caught a whiff of something that smelled like doom. Maybe he needed a different medicine, besides mescal. They crossed the street to a grille with sidewalk tables and both ordered tacos al carbón. Up and down the block, gringo soldiers and sailors came surfacing out of the clubs, grimacing at the crystalline sky. Junk cars crashed over the potholes. A gang of Indian kids stopped to beg. Hickey gave them a few dimes and they walked on, searching the gutters.

The waitress brought a stack of buttered tortillas, and Hickey asked the cabbie to tell him more about this Mofeto.

“Okay. I know that loco a long time. He’s the worst, hombre, no lie.” Tito ripped a tortilla and hissed, “I saw him cut the head off the Virgin—a little statue, you know. For no reason. At his mother’s house while we eating dinner. It was Christmas, man, and he laughs. Ay, diablo.”

At the end of the block, a two-year-old red Chevrolet coupe pulled up and a strange man got out. He might’ve looked at home in London, Paris, Berlin, but not here. It wasn’t just the blondness that made him look unusual, but his shiny brown shoes and the fit of his brown cotton suit. Like a guy who combed his eyebrows. He glanced their way, then stepped into a curio shop.

Tito growled, “Aléman.”

“Aleh what?”

The cabbie pointed over where the slick guy had been. “German, that’s what I said.”

“Don’t point.”

The tacos arrived. The slick German came out of the curio shop and stood, straightening the knot of his tie. A couple of minutes later, a white Ford Model A roadster pulled up to the curbside, hitting a puddle and spurting up mud. It almost splashed the German. He jumped back and barked at the Mexican who got out of the roadster and came around to meet him. The Mexican wore boots and a straw cowboy hat with the brim curled up the way gringos wore them. The German only said a few words, then turned and walked to his Chevy, and drove off. At the first corner he took a right. Up the road to Las Lomas.

The Mexican entered the curio shop. Hickey caught the guy staring at him through the window.

He dropped a few bills on the table, and he and the cabbie got up and strolled down the block toward the limo, keeping an eye on the curio shop. He didn’t see the taxi until it screeched to a stop beside him.

Clifford Rose jumped out. He ran to Hickey and then pulled up short. His jaw quivered. “Why’d you leave me there, Pop?”

Hickey sighed and caught a deep breath of the fine air over the lump in his throat. He felt so sorry for the kid it shamed him. “I sent Leo to get you.”

“Yeah, but he tried to keep me up there.”

“Where is he?”

“I don’t know,” Clifford said meekly. “I socked him and got away.”

“Hey, you don’t sock an old guy. Understand?”

Clifford slumped and stared at the ground. Hickey gave him a shove toward the limo.

They cruised north on Revolución, and Clifford asked, “Where we going? You got a clue?”

Hickey didn’t answer, but wondered how to tell the kid in a few words that to search you didn’t just follow clues. Like in all pursuits, you kept your eyes drifting around, because the view straight ahead was only about a tenth of the world. Besides, Hickey wasn’t only seeking Wendy Rose. Same as every man except the few content ones, he was looking for what had gone wrong, and the wild card that could set him free.

Hickey stopped at the Long Bar, which ran the whole block between Calles Uno and Dos and was jammed with gringo troops. He left a message for Luz, with her brother, a waiter.

Now they’d go see Juan Metzger. The cabbie turned right, started down toward the river, and cut back uphill at Calle Siete. A block past the Club de Paris, Hickey noticed the square two-story building, painted blistering yellow except where
hell
was block-lettered in white over the open front door. He slapped Tito’s arm, pointed to the curb.

Juan Metzger, he was thinking. The German had told him to go to hell.

Hickey stared at the queer sight and wondered how he’d passed here before and hardly paid it any mind. Finally they got out and started toward the door, but the kid halted, gaping at the big white letters. Hickey backtracked to get him.

“I hope she ain’t here,” Clifford mumbled.

Hickey nudged him along through the door and to a table. The air seemed reddish and full of incense. The place looked clean, with good light through high windows and from overhead bulbs. On one wall hung a giant portrait of some tough medieval king. A small crystal chandelier hung in a corner over a round oaken table. A heavy green curtain, fringed in gold, draped around a small stage. There were no dancers now and only one customer, a cop at the bar. Across the room sat two whores. A light-skinned mestizo in a wig of flaxen hair, and a real blonde. Maybe Dutch. But she talked fast Spanish.

“They go for blondes here,” Hickey said.

The kid gazed up, glanced vaguely around. You reckon Wendy’s a whore.

Hickey grabbed and squeezed the kid’s shoulder. “Get that dirt outa your mind. Understand?”

Finally the kid looked square at him and drew back, let his frown ease away. “Yes, sir.”