In Spanish el Señor asked, “What is the explanation of this?”
I answered for him. “I am the explanation. I am named Axbrewder. I do the work of a private investigator. I wish to speak with el Señor.”
I was hardly finished when I heard pistol hammers cocking. I didn’t need mirrors to know that the goons behind me were ready to blow me in half.
“Chota!” Estobal spat.
Trying not to sound desperate—or even in a hurry—I said, “I wish to speak with Hector Jesus Fría de la Sancha.”
El Señor’s eyes narrowed. For a moment he studied me. Then he leaned back in his chair. “Please to be seated, Señor Axbrewder.”
His fingers made a delicate gesture at the goons, and suddenly they were standing back against the wall. As I sat down, Estobal stamped out of the room.
After half a minute, el Señor asked quietly, “How does it transpire that you know my name, Señor Axbrewder?”
I answered him in English. Trying to shore up my position by exerting at least that much control over the conversation. “What difference does it make? The people who told me don’t have anything against you. And I don’t want to give you any trouble. I’m here for myself. Leave it at that.”
He steepled his fingers, gazed closely at the way the pink tips touched each other. “Already you have given me trouble. You have humiliated my Estobal. Now he will be unsure of himself. Also he will be very angry. His value has been made less.”
“He’ll recover,” I muttered.
“Nevertheless.” El Señor was not accustomed to being contradicted. His English had a mechanical precision more threatening than any amount of rage or screaming. “Your presence casts doubt upon my Estobal. It casts doubt upon my personal safety. Now you say that you are here for yourself. You presume a great deal upon my benevolence, Señor Axbrewder.”
I said, “No.” At that point I didn’t really care whether I contradicted him or not. “I’m already too familiar with your reputation for ‘benevolence.’ What I’m counting on is your reputation for honor.”
He considered me closely, then said, “I think I do not like the tone in which you address me.”
“Señor Fría—” I hunched forward in my chair, half protecting my sore guts and half pleading with him. “Let me tell you why I’m here. Then you’ll understand my tone.”
He unsteepled his fingers, rested his arms on the arms of his chair. “Very well. Begin.”
Begin, hell. It wasn’t that easy. There were so many things I had to explain before I could get to the point. I felt a sharp urge to stand up and start pacing around the room, try to relieve the tension. But I didn’t. I didn’t want to make the goons nervous. For a minute I just sat there racking my brains. Then I said, “I’ll tell you what happened to my niece.”
Carefully I told him Alathea’s story—her disappearance, the note, Lona’s concern, her decision to hire Ginny and me, Alathea’s reappearance, her condition, the bomb in the hospital. And all the time I watched el Señor’s face, studying it for any kind of surprise or sympathy that would tell me where I stood with him.
But his smooth neat features didn’t show a thing. When I stopped, he said, “Some word of this bombing in the hospital has come to me. A very bad thing. What has it to do with me?”
“I told you. She’s in a heroin coma. At thirteen she’s been forced to become a junky and a whore, and she’s in a coma.”
Abruptly he leaned forward, placed his hands flat on the desktop. “Señor Axbrewder,” he said softly, “I do not sell heroin to young girls.”
“I know that.” I did my best to make him believe it. My life depended on whether or not I could make him believe it.
He didn’t move a muscle. “Continue.”
“Señor Fría,” I said, “seven young girls Alathea’s age have been kidnapped in the past two years. They disappear. Their parents get phony notes. Then somehow they get hooked on heroin, and they turn into whores. And three or six months later, they end up dead. My brother’s daughter was number eight. Number nine is still missing.”
“Again I ask, what has it to do with me?”
“Heroin.” I wasn’t afraid anymore. I was past that. My voice was as soft as his. “Every nickel bag in this state has somebody’s name on it, and you know all the names. The man who kidnaps and rapes and dopes these girls gets his junk from somewhere. You know who he is.
“I want you to tell me who he is.”
“Go to the police. Let them find him.”
“They will,” I rasped. “But not tonight. They’re not that fast. And he knows they’re getting close. Tonight he’s going to kill number nine and get rid of the body. Destroy the evidence.”
“I see.” Again he leaned back in his chair, considered me from a distance. Then he said, “Perhaps I know the man. It is possible. Tell me, Señor. Why should I deliver him to you?”
Praying that old Manolo hadn’t betrayed me, I answered, “You’re a man of honor. What he’s doing is terrible.”
“He is Anglo. The girls are Anglo. Honor means nothing among Anglos.”
“Anglo, Chicano, it doesn’t make any difference. They’re only thirteen. Some of them are twelve.”
“You also are Anglo. You are a chota.”
Through my teeth, I said, “Señor Fría, I’m her father’s brother.”
Something about that reached him. He was silent for a long minute, looking at the ceiling. When he spoke again, his tone was softer. “I myself have two daughters. If I were dead or in prison, and some evil were done to them, my own brother would pay any price to punish that evil.”
With one hand, he gestured at the bar, and two seconds later the bartender set a bottle of tequila down on the blotter. With two glasses.
“We will drink together,” el Señor said. “Then I will give thought to this thing you ask.”
Right there, it all collapsed. I stared at the bottle while everything inside me went numb. Stared while he poured hefty jolts into both glasses. Took one himself. Pushed the other across the desk to me.
I didn’t touch it.
“Drink, Señor,” he said softly.
My hand tried to move, but I didn’t let it. I just sat there and stared at the glass and didn’t touch it.
“Señor Axbrewder.” Soft and ugly. “I give nothing without price. You are known to me. You are what the Anglos call ‘alcoholic.’ Also you are Anglo, and a chota. You have intruded upon myself and humiliated my Estobal. This is the price.”
I didn’t touch it.
“Do not insult me,” he said. Soft and ugly and fatal.
I wanted to say something, appeal to him somehow, make him understand. But I didn’t have any words for it. There weren’t any words. If I took a drink, the name he was offering me wouldn’t do me any good. Once I started to drink, I wouldn’t be able to do anything. About anything.
I got to my feet. “Sorry I bothered you,” I muttered. “I should’ve known better.”
El Señor made a cutting gesture with the edge of his hand. His goons hit me before I could step away from the chair. Maybe I could’ve taken them if they’d given me a second to move, but they didn’t.
They caught my arms, jerked me back down into the chair. One of them knotted a fist in my hair, hauled my head back. It all happened too fast. I was gasping and couldn’t help myself.
El Señor came around the desk, picked up the bottle, and started pouring tequila down my throat.
Then I went blind with tears while the stuff burned its way into my guts.
19
The goons turned me over to Muy Estobal, and Estobal turned me out of El Machismo.
He was methodical about it. First he half carried me down a couple of back halls until we reached a door that took us out into a dark alley behind the place. Then he searched my pockets until he found the cylinder to his .38. Then he pounded on me.
Grinning like a barracuda.
One hit split my lips so badly that I sputtered blood ever
y time I breathed. Another almost cracked my jaw. A couple more continued the job he’d already started on my ribs. Eventually he had to hold me up with one hand so that he could go on punching me with the other.
I suppose I should’ve made some effort to defend myself. I wasn’t all that drunk. But everything had fallen apart on me. It was all hopeless, and I couldn’t think of a good reason to exert myself. So I didn’t. If Estobal wanted to beat me to death, that was his business. My brain was numb.
Numbness is a wonderful thing. I really didn’t feel his fists much. Half the time I couldn’t even see him.
Nevertheless I could hear him fine. He panted like a locomotive, working himself up into a terrible lather. Every time he swung, he grunted like a small explosion, a lesser bomb. After each blow came a penetrating thud, muffled and profound.
Then I heard something else. A voice—a woman’s voice. It sounded dimly familiar.
It said, “Release him.” In Spanish.
Estobal stared down the alley for a second. He braced himself to hit me again.
“I do not jest, Estobal,” the woman snapped. “This man is known to me. I am in his debt. For his sake I will risk many things to punish you. The police will be grateful for any reason to seal you in their prison.”
Estobal pushed me away. I bounced against the wall and fell on my face. “Do not make threats to me, girl,” he rasped. “El Señor will be displeased.”
“Then permit him to be displeased. If he seeks to harm me, all Puerta del Sol will laugh at the man who revenges himself upon a woman.”
Estobal muttered some kind of retort, but I couldn’t make it out. Then he was gone. I heard the door slam behind him.
A minute later, the woman was kneeling beside me. “Ay, Señor Axbrewder,” she said in English. “Are you severely hurt?”
With her help, I rolled over onto one side. My chest and face were starting to hurt, and I had to hunt a long way through pain and alcohol to find her name. “Señorita Sanguillán,” I said. At least that’s what I tried to say. “What’re you doing here?”
I heard a tearing noise. Then she began dabbing my chin and mouth with something. It felt soft, like a piece of her slip. While she tried to clean me up, she answered my question.
“I wished to speak with you. Señor Sevilla, who is known to you”—old Manolo—“is the father of the man who married the daughter of my mother’s brother. When I revealed to him my wish, he informed me that you had a great matter in your heart which compelled you to seek words with el Señor.” She kept wiping at my face while she spoke, and it hurt off and on, but I was too fuzzy to care. “Therefore I came to this place and inquired of you. I was informed that you had been admitted to speak with Muy Estobal.” Suppressed fury rasped in the way she said his name. “I chose to await you.”
Under her breath, she muttered, “Pendejo.” I knew she didn’t mean me.
Groaning, I tried to crank myself into a sitting position. It wasn’t easy. I wasn’t absolutely sure which way was up. But she got her arms around my shoulders and helped me. With her face close to mine, she studied me anxiously.
“Is it possible for you to rise?”
I said, “Teresa.” My mouth felt like it was full of broken glass. I could hardly mumble. “Why did you want to talk to me?”
She hesitated, then said, “If you rise, I will inform you.”
I shook my head. “Just tell me.”
She sighed. “Very well, Señor Axbrewder. But you must not think ill of me.”
I wanted to tell her not to worry, but I didn’t have the strength. Or maybe what I didn’t have was the moral substance.
Facing me squarely, she said, “I have taken back the charges against the man who sought to harm me. I do not wish you to speak against him.”
That was the last straw. It was all too much for me—nothing mattered anymore. I let myself fall back against the cement and closed my eyes.
“Señor!” She shook me, but she didn’t weigh enough to move me much. “You must understand. Because of this Captain Cason, I have lost my employment in the Heights. He spoke, and I was sent away without reference. He is too strong for me. He desired me to take back the charges, and I agreed so that he would permit me to find some other place of work.”
I didn’t move. Why should I move? The only thing she could’ve offered me that would’ve meant anything was a bottle—and that never occurred to her. After a while she quit tugging at me. I didn’t even hear her leave.
I must’ve blacked out. The next thing I knew, she was back. With help. Two young men—old Manolo’s sons, if I understood her right. They propped their shoulders under my arms, heaved me up, and lugged me off.
I dragged along between them for a couple of minutes. But the strain hurt my chest too much, and I had to pick up some of my weight to ease the pain. Eventually old habits took over. By the time we reached her destination, I was practically walking by myself.
Her place was a ramshackle old adobe tenement maybe five blocks from El Machismo. The walls had once been painted, but now they were so chipped and weathered that the building looked diseased. Stricken by terminal futility. The young men levered me up a flight of rickety wooden stairs, and then she was home.
The one room she shared with her mother and two sisters was never going to look clean no matter how often they scrubbed it. Ordinary soap and muscle can’t keep up with rats.
She sat me down in the middle of the room in the only chair. Her mother heated some water on a stinking oil stove while her sisters watched me from their blankets with frightened animal eyes. When the water was ready, the young men held my arms while Teresa scalded the cuts on my face.
The pain blinded me again. It wasn’t until after my eyes cleared that I realized somebody else had come into the room.
Old Manolo.
He regarded me with a face full of sadness. But I didn’t pay any attention to that. I had something else in mind.
He had a bottle of anisette in his coat pocket.
It was almost full.
As soon as his sons let go of my arms, I lunged at Manolo and got my hands on his bottle.
Putting my mouth around the mouth of the bottle tore my cuts, and the alcohol burned them like the lick of a whip. I stood it long enough to get three or four good swallows. I’ve never liked the taste of anisette, but right then I didn’t give a shit. All I wanted was to get drunk. Drunker. Drunk enough to pass out.
I put the cap back on the bottle, stuffed it away in one of the pockets of my jacket. Then I looked old Manolo in the face. “I took your advice,” I muttered stiff lipped. “Went to see el Señor. Now here I am. If you’ve got anything else to tell me, you’d better say it now. While I’m drunk enough to stand it.”
His old brown gaze never wavered. “Ah, Señor Axbrewder,” he sighed, “this night I have heard many sad tales. The daughter of your brother’s widow has been found without her mind. A bomb has taken the hand of your partner. The setter of the bomb is dead, and you have come no nearer to the author of these evils. It is a deep regret to me that el Señor saw fit to withhold the knowledge you seek. Never again will I give such counsel as I gave you. I am an old man, and old men are foolish.”
His eyes held me until I couldn’t stand it anymore—I had to look down. I didn’t want him feeling sorry for me. I was in bad enough shape without that.
“Señor Axbrewder,” he asked gently, “what will you do?”
That was a good question. Since I didn’t have an answer, I took another slug of anisette. It was starting to get to me. Some of the numbness I needed crept into my nerves.
“Will you not go to the Fistoulari woman? She has the name of a strong and clear-sighted person. Surely she will wish to know what has befallen you.”
Ginny. Just thinking about her made my heart hurt. But Manolo was a cunning old bastard, and he knew what he was doing. It was a sneaky way to give me advice, but it worked.
Ginny.
That was it, of cou
rse. Things weren’t bad enough yet. They wouldn’t be bad enough until I went and told Ginny that I’d screwed everything up. Then I’d be free to drink as much as I wanted. It wouldn’t be my problem anymore.
Everything has to be paid for. Even freedom. Humiliation is the price you pay for alcohol, one way or another.
I got to my feet, wincing at the way my ribs ground together. Shaking off the hands that tried to hold me, I went past old Manolo to the door.
I was on my way out when I recovered enough decency to turn around. Holding myself up on the door frame, I said as clearly as I could in Spanish, “Teresa María Sanguillán y García, I give you thanks. I think no ill of you, but only good. When a burden is too great to be borne, it must be set aside.” Then I left.
I stumbled a couple of times on the stairs, but the railing held me somehow.
After that things got harder. Walking made my chest hurt. Also my balance wasn’t good, and every time I stopped myself from falling I jarred my ribs. But I had to do it, and I did. Went back to El Machismo’s parking lot to recover the Olds.
Then I was driving. I concentrated on it hard. The last thing I needed in the world was a DWI bust. But I couldn’t help making mistakes. Once I had the distinct impression I was going the wrong way down a one-way street.
I hung on to the wheel with both fists and kept moving. A couple of times when things got fuzzy, I stopped and took a swig from my bottle. Not much—just enough to hold me together. After a long time I reached University Hospital.
It didn’t occur to me that there would be a problem getting in to see Ginny until after I’d parked the Olds and taken a look around. Most of the windows were dark, which reminded me of the time. Naturally the security guards and night-duty nurses weren’t going to want me wandering around their hospital at this hour of the night.
But I was too drunk to let that stop me. In spite of the alcohol, I still remembered Ginny’s room number.
I went into Emergency. But instead of stopping at the nurses’ station, I walked straight to the waiting room as if I had some perfectly good reason for being there. Then I sneaked over to the stairwell.