“What was your major, man?”
“Literature.”
“Figures.”
“Beside, I was born in Deming, New Mexico.”
“Deming?” he said. “What a fucking hole.” He paused for a moment. “Shit, man, I don’t think I ever killed anybody from Deming.” He turned to the guy with my pistol. “Can you think of anybody, David?”
“There was that guy with the airplane, hermano,” he answered, “but you just fucked his wife and cut him up a little bit. In the pool hall down in Columbus. I don’t think he died. If he did, it wasn’t in the papers, so it don’t count.”
Dagoberto actually scratched his head. “What was that fucker’s name?”
“Johnny Carson,” David said.
Dagoberto looked at me. “You know how it is, man. Somebody, he’s got the same name as somebody else you know and you never can remember it.”
“Sure,” I said. “But a lot of people remember my name and they all know that I’m here.”
“We’ll make it look like an accident. No problem,” he said, smiling happily, “a really bad car wreck, gringo.”
I always knew I’d be killed by a cliché.
Then somebody rapped sharply on the door.
“Who the fuck is that?” Dagoberto asked David.
He shook his head and opened the door. Somebody asked if this was the men’s room, then David grunted as if he had been shot, staggered across the room, turning as he fell into a stack of strawberry flats. I didn’t bother with my piece but darted for the Glock. But it was over before I picked it up.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Solly sweep into the room, twirling his knobby cane like a mad kendo master. Dagoberto had a cracked collarbone, a broken wrist, and a knot the size and color of a rotten plum in the center of his forehead before I picked up the automatic.
Solly looked at me, puffed on his cigar, then took it out of his mouth and held it up for inspection. Not a tooth mark, not a single flake of ash lost.
“Next time, Sughrue, remember to call me,” he said, grinning. “I’m not just your friend, I’m also your lawyer.”
I don’t know exactly how Solly did it, but his Lawyer Rainbolt act worked like a snake charmer’s flute. First, he plucked Dagoberto’s fangs with laughter by pointing out that he had been taken by a one-footed old man. Which was of course true, but as Solly kindly pointed out, his many years had given him much time to practice kendo. And Solly was really sorry to have hurt Dagoberto, but age had slowed him so that he couldn’t take a chance on the reflexes of a younger, quicker man. Perhaps a tequila and a toot would lift everybody’s spirits, he suggested, a motion to which even a groaning Chato agreed.
So the patrones disappeared into the real office like hermanos while the hired hands headed for the employees’ john to tend their wounds.
A few minutes later, I had filled a sink with ice where Chato sat in his shorts while David cleaned up his face and I flushed strawberry seeds out of the Airweight with hot water.
“Not much of a piece, man,” David said. “You might not have stopped my cunado with that peashooter. I seen Chato take a thirty-eight round in the chest, then break this fucking cop’s nose, cheekbone, and jaw. Shit, then he drove both of them to the emergency room.”
I dumped the hand-loaded rounds into my hand. “The cop didn’t shoot him with one of these,” I said, “that was his first mistake.”
“The second?”
“He only shot him once,” I said.
“You were in Vietnam,” he said. It wasn’t a question. “My father used to tell me that same thing. He was a veterano. Not like you, though, man, like the dude in the suit with the hard eyes and the bullshit smile.”
“I only did six months,” I said. “Solly was there forever …”
“Es verdad, man,” he said. “Now let’s see about that drink.”
Chato shifted his weight, rattling the ice, but decided he’d had all the fun he could stand.
It didn’t take too long for Dagoberto to come to the same conclusion, so we made dinner plans before David took him to the hospital, then Solly and I looked for another place to drink.
The streets were fairly empty on this late afternoon in the shoulder season—the summer had gone and the snow hadn’t arrived yet—and by the time we walked to Norman’s ride, we had decided to catch the last of the sunlight shimmering among the aspen up toward Independence Pass, so we grabbed a six-pack of Coors and headed south, Solly behind the wheel, looking for whatever nostalgia Norman had cached therein.
“That was pretty dumb,” Solly said a few miles up the road as he eased the van around the curves over the white rush of the Roaring Fork.
“If you’re looking for ‘Thanks,’ Lawyer Rainbolt, I’ll be happy to say it.” I let him sit on that, then added, “Of course, then I’d have to point out that I didn’t ask for your fucking help.” Then I paused, laughed, and said, “Next thing you know, we’ll be out of the car, trying to kick each other’s ass.”
“I’d be sorry about that, Sonny,” he said without turning to look at me.
“You won’t have the advantage of sympathy,” I said, “or surprise. This time.”
Solly drove silently for a few minutes, then slammed on the brakes, shouting something at me. But he had his own troubles almost immediately. The van slid into a turnout over the river, shuddering on hard springs across the stony dirt until the right front tire dropped over the unprotected edge. On my side.
Solly and I sat there for a moment, silent, then I rolled my window open and stared down the cliff to the rocky avalanche of water ninety feet below.
“Can I get out on your side?” I said.
Then we laughed so hard we nearly rocked the van over the precipice into the cold river below.
After we got out of the car and stopped howling, Solly cracked two cans of beer and brushed the tears out of his eyes.
“Sughrue, Sughrue, what the fuck is wrong with you?”
“My life lacks reason,” I said, “and rhyme, too, said C. W. Sughrue.”
That set us off again. They say laughter makes you live longer. I twisted a doobie and we added years to our lives. And some scenery to the neurons firing.
We were just a few miles from a town I found particularly offensive, a chancre on my notion of home, but that few miles was enough in the Mountain West. We watched the shadow of the western ridges slice through the fluttering aspen, sat on gray-green rocks giving back the sun’s heat, all under a high-altitude blue wash of a sky. But we couldn’t be old hippie tourists forever.
“Thanks,” I finally said after we had stopped laughing again, laughing about some jibe that short-term memory was bound to lose, “for pulling me out of the scrape. But it’s insulting for you to dog my tracks like that, Solly.”
“What would you have done?”
“Doesn’t matter, man. I’d rather be dead than suffer that kind of insult.”
“That’s dumb.”
“Of course,” I said, “but let’s get down to the really smart part, okay? What if I had been looking at the employment files? What if I could’ve found this Wynona Jones and she knew something? Remember, man, you’ve got major law enforcement hordes out there searching for Mrs. Pines. They’ve got manpower, computer wizardry, and access to shit I can’t even imagine …”
“I can get that for you.”
“Fuck that. If they could find her that way, she would be found by now. So I’ll make a deal with you,” I said.
Solly thought about that, then shook his gray-blond hair in the shadowed light. “What deal?”
“I’ll stay in touch better and you stop dogging me.”
“Fuck, Sonny, you won’t stay in touch and you’ll just keep stepping in shit. How’s that a deal?”
“It’s the only one you’re going to get.”
He didn’t take it well, but he took it. He also let me back the van off the cliffside. As we headed back down the highway, I asked:
“What
were you shouting about just before you tried to kill us?”
“Don’t be such a hard-ass.”
“It’s a shitty job, but somebody’s got to do it,” I said.
“Proves my point,” he managed to say before we started laughing again.
Solly went home to his telephone, computer, and Washington, D.C., contacts. I went to Sun Valley in search of Wynona Jones. We both hoped we were both right.
During his brief social moment with Dagoberto Reyna, Solly discovered that Dagoberto didn’t really know Sarita Pines, but he did know her husband, in that social way that rich people along the border all know each other. Dagoberto also knew Joe Don Pines politically. He said he had contributed to Joe Don’s unsuccessful runs for state offices—governor, state senator, railroad commissioner, and most recently for the Texas Board of Agriculture—so he had supped expensively with Joe Don. Dagoberto also let Solly examine the employee files, where he found no record of Wynona Jones.
“They weren’t really going to hurt you,” Solly said as I dropped him at the Aspen airport so he could grab his borrowed private Learjet ride back to Meriwether.
“I may be crazy, Solly, but I’m not stupid, and this is not the first time I’ve played this game,” I said.
“Maybe you’re out of practice,” he said. “Anyway, I believed him.”
“That’s your problem,” I said, “not mine.”
Then I drove west all night into the broken-back Jack Morman heart of Idaho, then turned north toward the smell of money.
It didn’t take me long to find out that whatever kin or friends Wynona Jones might have once had in or around Sun Valley or Ketchum, nobody knew her name now. Except the driver’s license bureau, but the people at the address the bureau had in Hailey had never heard of her. I spoke on the telephone to a lot of Joneses who all said “Wynona who?,” then hung up.
I tried combing the bars for somebody who might remember her but I was out of my territory now. Except for one drunken, stoned trip to the Hemingway grave in Ketchum back in the early seventies just after I finished my thesis at Colorado—I had to graduate to get loose of the Defense Intelligence Agency and get on with my life—I had never been there before and hadn’t paid much attention to where I was. This time I did, so I dredged up the right real estate broker and went to work.
If it sometimes seems that Aspen was home to half of the mediocre actors in the world, then Sun Valley looked like the home of ten thousand crooked brokers, bankers, greenmail goons, and assorted gangsters. But maybe that wasn’t the right explanation. Maybe only a Republican tax expert could explain that. I just couldn’t understand what sort of people could afford a three-million-dollar vacation home to use two months out of the year.
When I finally found the right real estate broker, one Rose Rosenbloom, a not too badly parched widow, she said that was what the Pines vacation house had cost. Three million dollars’ worth of smoked glass, stonework, redwood, and formed concrete. It sat on five acres above the Elkhorn golf course, and it just barely fit. Rose, who claimed to be in the business just for gossip and fun, was happy to point it out with a diamond-studded hand fifteen years older than her face. We were drifting from one $150,000 condo to another on the basis of a telephone call to check up on me with Solly’s office. Maybe she was just in the business for fun. She didn’t care that I was a “lookie-loo” or respond to my hints that my money might be in cash. Until late that afternoon.
Over mediocre martinis at The Lodge, where I’d taken a room, she gave me the real skinny on the marriage of convenience between Sarita Cisneros and Joe Don Pines: he was just the face; Sarita had the real money, Mexican money from her relatives on the other side of the border, money that had fled the devaluation of the peso in the early eighties.
Sipping the third martini, Rose lifted her watery but still sharp blue eyes to stare at me and propped her chin among her diamonds. It was a good act. Holding her chin in the air knocked ten years off her face and her hand blocked my view of the fine network of scars along her neck.
“Who are you, Mr. Sughrue? I mean really,” she said with the sort of sincerity one only finds in gin.
“Retired military,” I lied.
“You weren’t an officer,” she murmured. “I’ve fucked enough retired brass out here to start my own military establishment.”
“Senior master sergeant,” I said. “Did my thirty.”
“What kind of outfit?”
“I did it all when I was a kid,” I said, which was sort of true. I’d served three different hitches between various stints playing football at junior colleges that didn’t really care what my name was or what sort of eligibility I had worn out or where. Then Vietnam changed all that. “But mostly I ran NCO clubs.”
“Ah-ha, so you do have a nest egg, in cash, right? You know, my husband left me a place up Warm Springs; it’s not near the golf course and it’s not too big, but for cash, we could perhaps work something out. You understand?” Maybe I didn’t answer quickly enough. Rose’s face didn’t fall, but she shook her head. “You’re pretty good, Mr. Sughrue, but I’ve spent my adult life around phony assholes,” she said sadly. “You’re not exactly a phony but you’re not telling me the truth.”
“Jesus, I must be losing my touch,” I said.
“You’re just out of your league,” she said. “My husband owned a piece of every book between Cleveland and Rochester. Every snooty bitch in town looks down on me, even the ones whose husbands either did federal time for white-collar crime or rolled over like piss-soaked puppies. My Jacob never saw the inside of a cell, never even had to hire a criminal lawyer. So don’t be so hard on yourself. You’re still young. Still pretty good, too. But out of your league.”
“Thanks,” I said, trying to get used to the sound of the word in my mouth.
“So what do you really want?”
“You know, Rose, in my business I’m not used to dealing with people who tell the truth. Maybe I’ve become cynical. Or maybe I got cynical and quit working the job. I don’t know. But whatever,” I said, “here goes.”
When I finished, she stared at me. “I can’t help you with the kid, but maybe I can get you in the Pines place. If you’ll take me to dinner.”
Once again I hesitated too long.
“Hey, soldier, if I wanted to get fucked, we wouldn’t be here. We’d either be in bed or going our separate ways. I just want to go to dinner with an acceptable gentleman who isn’t young enough to be one of my children, god love them.” After the brief speech, she sighed and sipped her martini.
“It’s a date,” I said quickly. “Water your vases, Rosie, I’ll bring flowers.”
“Wonderful,” she said, grinning. “Wear a tie, too, if you’ve got one.”
I went out and bought one.
If our approach on the Pineses’ three-million-dollar vacation hideaway had gone as well as our dinner, Rose and I would have found Sarita sitting in the cavernous living room just waiting to hear from her long-lost abnormal abandoned son, Norman. As it was, the Mexican housekeeper refused to let us inside for love or money, both of which we offered her; and the FBI swarmed all over us like butterflies on wet cow shit before we got to the end of the driveway.
I don’t know how Rose got out of their custody, but she did, and I never saw her again. I got out by referring all questions to my lawyer and keeping my mouth shut. They really hated that. Special Agent in Charge Nicholas Cromwellington, one of those guys who looked like a hairy butthead who had tried to razor a part through his wiry curls, told me to get the fuck out of the state and never cross his sphere of influence again.
“Nickie,” I said, leaning close enough to his ear to kiss it, which I did, “I love you, man, but until I break the law and you can charge me, I’m going to go or stay as it suits me, and you can’t do a thing about it.”
SAC Cromwellington’s mouth tried to stop looking like his asshole but it didn’t work.
“And if you bother me, remember that I’ve got liver
cancer and I’m HIV positive from the last operation, and nothing to lose but a few years of really interesting pain and dying, so if you fuck with me, fella, I’ll kill your family, your friends, and everybody you ever knew. Then I’ll show you what revenge really means. So stay out of my hair, Nickie.”
“Ah, ah, ah,” he sputtered.
“If you even open your mouth to me, you homophobic turd, I’ll spit in it.” I hawked up a wad of phlegm worthy of Norman, puckered up like a redneck with a bad chew, but the Fibbie shut his mouth so tight he had to breathe through his colon.
God knows it was a cruel lie, but it wasn’t exactly against the law, unless they could prove it. As I drove away from the county jail, Nickie looked like a SAC whose tie had finally strangled him. I laughed all the way to the next pay telephone, where I called Solly. I could tell he wanted to complain about how I stayed in touch, but he couldn’t stop laughing. However, he finally promised to keep covering my ass.
I called Norman, thinking he might enjoy the story, at least get a laugh for his money. I was right. I could hear him shouting at Mary over the telephone. Then he got serious.
“You gonna find my mom?” he asked.
“You better believe it,” I said. “It’s personal now.”
“That’s good news,” Norman said, then added, “You know, Sughrue, you ain’t just somebody works for me. You’re my buddy. You need anything, call me. I ain’t no fucking rich-shit lawyer, but I got some clout here and there.”
“Thanks, Norman,” I said. And meant it.
Well, hell, this private eye business isn’t all sex and glory. Sometimes it’s just pissant paperwork and bad hunches. Or good ones. Good or bad, they both take about the same long boring time.
Now that I had pissed off the FBI, worrying about what the local police and sheriff’s departments thought about me seemed a terrific waste of time. In every state in the Union, law enforcement blotters are matters of public record. Of course, and with some reason, the cops hate that; but they particularly hate showing the reports to smart-ass private eyes. I didn’t blame them, but I didn’t let them off the legal hook, either.