It got a mean look from the punk.
“That’s what I’m gonna find out. Get her to tell what we want to know.”
“Yeah, but first of all, I don’t think she knows where they are.”
“You mean she says she don’t.”
“No, what I mean—yeah, she could know where they are, like they’re in Florida, but not know their address for some reason, like they’re not gonna be in one place too long, so she don’t need it to write them letters or anything. See, when she wouldn’t say nothing to you, that was when she knew something but didn’t want to tell you. Like when you asked did she have their phone number. She didn’t answer. But when you asked her if she had their address, she said no, she didn’t.”
“She could be lying, couldn’t she?”
“I don’t think so. She didn’t expect that phone call, anybody asking about them, so the woman didn’t have any lies ready. When she didn’t want to tell you something, she didn’t say nothing, she kept quiet. You understand what I mean?”
“Hey, Bird, I don’t give a fuck what she said or didn’t. If she knows where they are I’m gonna find it out. That’s what we’re here for.”
This guy continued to be a punk and would never change.
“That’s what we want to do,” Armand said, “but when you talk to her you got to be cool, ‘ey? Like when you talk to her on the phone. See, what I’m thinking, if she’ll tell us their phone number, then we can find out from it where they are. Call the operator and say where is this anyway, this number?”
“If she’ll tell me?” Richie said. “She’s gonna be dying to tell me.”
“Yeah, but you have to take it easy,” Armand said, wanting to punch this guy in the mouth as hard as he could. “You don’t want to get rough with her.”
Richie said, “I don’t?” slowing down and hunching over the wheel. They were getting close now, the road lined with a wall of wooden garages and fences, one after another on deep, narrow lots along here. Richie was looking at the house numbers that were nailed over the garage doors or painted on. Some of the places bore names, “Lazy Daze,” “E-Z Rest” . . .
“No, we want to keep her friendly,” Armand said. “Maybe she can’t tell us something today, but then she finds out tomorrow they gonna be someplace for a few days, yeah, we can send the check there. See, you get rough then we can’t use her no more, she calls the cops. What’s this? All this time they think we took off, we’re gone. Oh, those guys are still around, ‘ey? They put up roadblocks and we can’t go nowhere, we can’t fucking move or we get caught and you go back to prison. You don’t want nothing like that, do you? . . . Hey, you hear what I’m saying?”
“There it is,” Richie said. The house number was painted on the gate in the board fence. He pulled up close to it and opened his door. “You don’t want to come watch? Or you don’t want her seeing what you look like? Shit, I know your game.”
“Remember that it’s nice to be nice,” Armand said.
He got a look at the house, a quick one—three stories counting the windows in the attic, narrow, straight up and down, white frame with green trim—as Richie went through the gate and it swung closed again.
Armand sat back thinking, You let him go in there with a gun.
So what difference does it make he has a gun or he doesn’t have a gun, a guy like that?
So you don’t care, do you?
He thought some more and decided, yeah, but not much. He had come this far, now he was along for the ride.
Carmen and Mr. Molina were in the living room, facing each other from opposite ends of the white sofa: Carmen dressed in a shirt and jeans, curlers gone from her hair, Molina smoking cigarettes, stubbing another one into the ashtray on the coffee table.
“All this stuff I was dealing in,” Molina said, “the bonds, the stock certificates, were either stolen or counterfeit. I was the middleman, you might say. I’d go up to Toronto every couple months and lay it off on the family there. They knew what it was, they were only using it as collateral, buying up property downtown. So I got to know those people. What was the guy’s name again?”
“Armand Degas,” Carmen said.
“No, I never heard that name. He could be connected, but I can tell you he’s not family. This’s going back, what I’m talking about, eight nine years. He could’ve come along since then. I still can’t see an Indian in any kind of position with those guys.”
“He kills people,” Carmen said.
“Yeah, well, whatever he was doing in Algonac, Michigan, doesn’t sound to me like a family operation. I was in a different position, one phone call I could find out for you, but from what you told me”—Molina shook his head—“they’re not gonna go after a real estate company for any ten grand. They’d want a piece of it, steady income off the top. Same way it happened to me. I’m in the printing business, it’s slow, my accounts receivable are fulla deadbeats, like I owe a paper house fifteen hundred past due a hundred and twenty days. So I borrow it from a shylock. By the end of the year—listen to this—I’ve paid them twenty-seven thousand and they’re into my business. I can run off phony bonds or end up in the Susquehanna, that’s my choice.”
He paused to light a cigarette and Carmen stared at his hairpiece, its abrupt line across his forehead, the part, the wave in front, permanently combed.
“Ferris told us you were a loan shark, from New Jersey.”
“Ferris doesn’t have the right state even,” Molina said. “I don’t know how he got out of school, if he ever went. Seven years I’ve been in the government witness program. Started out, went to Washington, D.C., for orientation. I’ve met I don’t know how many U.S. marshals and every one of them was a decent guy except this asshole. There was one other one wasn’t too bright I can tell you about. But this guy Ferris, he comes on like he’s running for office—am I right? Next thing you know he turns into a fucking Nazi. I’m sorry, but there’s no other way to say it. Listen, at the time my wife had enough of this and left, I went back to Scranton for a week, talked to the FBI and the marshal there, the people that got me into this. They took me before a Senate committee and I told them my experiences as a protected witness.”
Carmen said, “You’ve been in it seven years?”
“That’s right, but it isn’t just the time spent. My first wife I was married to for twenty-six years divorced me. I haven’t seen my kids—I got three grandchildren I probably won’t ever see.”
“So you didn’t start out here.”
“No, the first place I was relocated . . . Remember them telling you they’re gonna, quote, provide suitable documents to enable the person to establish a new identity?”
Carmen nodded. “I remember, but we didn’t change our names.”
“I had to,” Molina said. “And you know how long it took to get suitable documents? Four months for a driver’s license. Almost a year for a social security card. I still don’t have a birth certificate. Try and get credit when you don’t have a history. Try and get any kind of a job on your own. The kid marshal takes me out to Procter and Gamble, they put me on the Pampers line. I’m fifty-nine years old with this white smock on making diapers. You know how long I lasted? I tell all this to the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs. They’re sympathetic, up to a point. The chairman says, ‘Well, our survey shows that seventy-three percent of the people in the program want to stay in it.’ I said to him, of course, they want to stay in. You leave it, you’re dead. I could’ve done ten at Allenwood instead of this shit and I’d be out by now, good behavior.”
“You didn’t like the first place they sent you,” Carmen said, “so you left? Can you do that?”
“The only thing that was good about it, I met my present wife, Roseanne. If we get along half the time it’s better than nothing. But that’s when they were bringing me back to Scranton to testify and the marshal—this’s the other one that wasn’t too bright—puts me on a direct flight.” Molina paused. “You understand what I’m saying? You
land at Avoca, the airport there, anybody watching for you knows where you came from. That’s not bad enough, we’re leaving the courtroom after the trial, people all around, the guy, the marshal, tells another marshal where we’re going. I mean he says it right out loud, anybody could’ve heard it. There people still in the courtroom, friends of the guy I just got done testifying against. I said to the marshal, ‘You crazy? I’m not going back there.’ They had to drag me on the plane. But then I bitched enough after that . . .” Molina paused, his head raised. “You hear a car door slam?”
“It could be Wayne,” Carmen said. She watched Molina stub out his cigarette and get up.
Walking over to the window he said, “I’ve been doing this for nine years. I hear something, I jump.”
“Is it a light-tan pickup?”
The man didn’t answer and Carmen started to get up.
By the time he said, “I hate to tell you this, it’s that fucking Nazi . . .”
Carmen was out of the sofa. “We won’t let him in. I’ll put the chain on.”
“Don’t,” Molina said. “I did that one time, he busted the door.”
Carmen’s mother’s home had a sun porch across the front with a wide-open view of Lake Huron, gray as the sky, nothing to see. Richie stood there, giving the woman a look at his ironworkers-build-America jacket before turning to the living room again: dark in here, full of old furniture and pictures of birds all over the dark-paneled walls, color prints of birds and some that looked like a little kid had drawn them with crayons. Richie figured there were about thirty bird pictures in here, all different sizes and all framed. It was warm in here, too. He could hear a radiator hissing steam.
Richie said, “You like birds, huh? I notice you have feeders out’n the yard.”
“I’ve always loved birds,” Lenore said. “My mother named me from a poem about a bird. I guess I just love nature.” She gave a girlish shrug, but then looked at him hard through her glasses and said, “Don’t you?”
Like she was testing him. Richie felt he’d better say yes if they were going to get along. He said, “You bet. I even have a friend named Bird,” and gave the woman a smile, though loving nature made no sense to him. What was there to love about it? Nature was just there, outside, wherever there wasn’t something else.
Lenore gestured toward the crayon drawings and said, “Matthew did those when he was little. I’ve kept them.”
Like he was supposed to know who Matthew was. “They’re nice,” Richie said.
“He’s in the United States Navy, aboard an aircraft carrier.”
Richie nodded along, wondering about a kidwho liked to draw birds and ended up joining the navy, the kid sounding like a fucking re-tard. So it caught him by surprise when the woman said:
“What job are you working on?”
“Oh, well, we been on different ones.”
He’d better be careful, stay alert.
This woman’s eyes reminded him of Donna’s the way they seemed magnified by her glasses, her eyes hard and dark in silver frames. She was all red and grayish, red lips and rouge on her cheeks and grayish-blond hair to the shoulders of her flowery blouse. Another one trying to look girlish, but in a different way than Donna worked it. This one was a lot older and heavier, more like a foster mom he’d had named Jackie, who worked hard with six of her own kids in the house and was always sweating. Had little beads of perspiration on her upper lip like this one. Jackie could look you in the eye and tell if you were lying.
“I was wondering if you might be working on that Cobo Hall expansion.”
This woman seemed to know the business.
“As a matter of fact we were,” Richie said, hoping she wasn’t setting him up, trying to trip him. She didn’t appear suspicious. He’d still better cut the chitchat before he got in trouble. It was funny how he had the feeling of being back in a foster home.
“Anyway, what I started to tell you, I don’t see what difference it makes who mails the check, you or us. But the boss says we have to do it. I guess since it’s up to the company. You understand it’s not the boss doesn’t trust you. I told him you were a nice lady to offer in the first place.”
“And I told you,” Lenore said, “I don’t have their address. She never gave it to me. The only thing I have’s their phone number.”
Richie felt an urge to slap this old woman across the face and tell her to, goddammit, wake up. Why didn’t she say so on the phone and save them a trip? He had to wait till he could act natural and sound surprised before saying to her, “You didn’t mention that, did you, you have their number?”
“Not on the phone I didn’t,” Lenore said. “I wasn’t absolutely positive whom I was speaking to. I’ve had some problems with the wrong kind of people calling me, if you know what I mean.”
“I understand,” Richie said, forgiving the woman now that it seemed so easy. “You can’t be too careful.”
“Anything the least bit suspicious I report to the Annoyance Call Bureau. That’s what they’re for.”
“I don’t blame you,” Richie said, not knowing what she was talking about, but wanting to get this deal moving. “Well, I don’t see any problem now. You know we’re like family. Ironworkers build America and they look out for each other. Let’s calland get that address so we can send Wayne his check.”
“Ironworkers drink more than anybody in America, too,” Lenore said. “You give him that check, you know where he’ll cash it, don’t you? The nearest bar.”
“You’re saying Wayne drinks?”
“You know an ironworker doesn’t?”
“I barely touch it myself,” Richie said, thinking, Wait a minute. Jesus, is that all . . . And said it, “Is that all you’re worried about, he’ll spend it on liquor?”
“The way I look at it,” Lenore said, “if he doesn’t have extra money to spend, he won’t be tempted beyond what little willpower he might have. I don’t see why I should make my little girl’s life any harder than it is, with all she has to put up with.”
Man, here was a woman who could ruin your life knowing what was best for you.
Richie felt himself on the verge of causing her pain. Ask her to tell him the number. If she wouldn’t, bend her old-woman arm behind her back till she did. Or grab a handful of that skin hanging from her throat and give it a twist. He wouldn’t hit her. He had never hit a woman with his fist. Well, maybe once or twice. He’d punched Laurie that time, trying to find out if Kevin had been fucking her; but that was different, they were married. He was thinking of what he might do here, like start tearing her clothes off . . .
When Lenore said, “There’s only one way I’d consider making the call.”
It stopped Richie, just as he saw himself about to rip open her flowery blouse.
“And that’s if I leave it up to Carmen. If she says send the check, she can use it, then all right, it’s okay with me. But I won’t tell Wayne about it if he answers and I won’t let you talk to him, either.”
“That’s fine with me,” Richie said, experiencing a relief and then a tender feeling as they went to the phone sitting on a table and the woman bent over to look in her address book. Richie laid his hand on the warm, moist material covering her back and gave it a few gentle pats.
Lenore said, “Have you ever had back trouble? Mine is just killing me.”
Richie moved his hand down her old-woman spine, exploring. “Where? Right there?”
Ferris stood in the doorway to the hall: hands on his hips, no sport coat today, wearing a white shirt with the three top buttons undone, the short sleeves turned up to show more arm and muscle, and a big revolver snubbed high on his right hip.
The pose, Carmen thought. Saying, Look at me, Ferris Britton, Deputy Marshal. Dumb enough to be a TV star, he had the hair, the build, the fake boyish grin. . . . The only trouble was he was real.
“I rang the bell.”
Carmen waited.
“You heard it, didn’t you? You can’t say I just walked i
n on you.”
“What do you call it?” Carmen said. “I didn’t notice anybody opened the door for you.” She stood between the window and the sofa only half-turned to him, arms folded in her own kind of pose.
“I bet you even saw me drive up. Ernie, you heard me ring the bell, didn’t you?”
Molina, seated again, said, “Yeah, I heard it.”
“Then why didn’t you come to the door?”
“I don’t live here no more.”
“I guess that’s true enough, Ernie, but you could’ve answered the door, couldn’t you?”
Ferris serious was annoying as Ferris grinning. “The reason we didn’t open the door,” Carmen said, “was because we didn’t want you to come in. It’s that simple.”
“Why not?”
“Jesus, what difference does it make? Just leave, okay? Take your shoulders and your wavy hair and leave, will you, please?”
Ferris raised one hand to his head, frowning. “My hair? Man, I’d like to know what is going on here. I already got a bone to pick with you, lady, calling De-troit on me. I like to got in trouble. I said, well, why didn’t somebody tell me the guy wasn’t up on charges?” Ferris looked at Molina. “Her old man. You ever hear of a government witness wasn’t dirty? I haven’t.”
The phone rang in the kitchen, the sound coming from behind him. Ferris held up his hand.
“I got it—don’t nobody move. It’s prob’ly for me.” The phone rang again. “If it isn’t, I bet it’s a wrong number.” The phone rang again. “How much you want to bet?” He waited for another ring before turning and crossing the hall to the kitchen.
Carmen started after him and Molina said, “Don’t bother.” She hesitated and came around slowly.
“It’s my house.”
“Yeah, and he walks in, he answers the phone. He’ll look in the icebox, complain if you don’t have fresh orange juice . . .”