Double Solitaire

by Craig Nova

“Someone is in the vending machine business for one thing. They are hiding something,” said Pavel.

  They both turned to Karicek.

  “So, who’s this unhappy fuck?” said Nikolay. “Looks pretty scared. What’s he done?”

  “It’s got to be something,” said Pavel. “Show me the man and I will show you the fear.”

  “That’s not quite right,” Nikolay said. “It was Stalin’s man, Beria, who said, ‘Show me the man and I will show you the crime.’”

  “Beria was dead way before we were born. Strictly old school. But he had a point,” said Pavel.

  Farrell wondered if they knew that Beria was hung not only for crimes in the cheka but because he had been a rapist who had his underlings grab women off the streets of Moscow. Now, this suspicion added to Farrell’s alertness, or his awareness that these two were more sinister than he had given them credit for. Maybe he was losing his touch.

  Nikolay looked at the money on the table again, and then picked up a box of Chinese takeout.

  “Noodles. Can’t hold a candle to pelmeni.”

  He pushed it aside and turned to Farrell.

  “So what are you doing?”

  “I get people out of trouble.”

  “Well, that sounds like a growth industry. Glad to hear it. What’s this guy done?”

  “I just want to be left alone,” said Karicek.

  “We’re here to help you with that,” said Pavel.

  “He has a warrant out for his arrest,” said Farrell.

  “For what?”

  “He’s been dealing in stolen car parts. He has a collection of dealers who buy from him. A network.”

  “And so his boss is paying you to get him away, so he won’t rat anyone out? Is that it?”

  Farrell nodded. It was comforting, at least, to deal with people who thought in a definite way, betrayal, shaking someone down, bullying. At least you knew what they would believe. Most of the time.

  “Auto parts?” said Pavel. He touched those scars on his face. “Seems like there should be something more than that in this town. All those characters with kinky habits. Gerbils. Underage girls.”

  “I guess you hear rumors,” said Farrell.

  “Yeah,” said Nikolay. “Who knows what these people are up to? Something’s off.”

  “Yeah,” said Karicek. “But this is just car parts.”

  Pavel and Nikolay each crossed his arms across his chest, the gesture so similar as to look like Russian nesting dolls. They went on staring at Karicek.

  “So, tell me, what does a new Corvette fuel pump go for?”

  Karicek sat now with his hands in his lap.

  “You mean a Delphi gasoline pump?” said Karicek.

  “Yeah. If that’s what it is. A Delphi,” said Nikolay.

  “From an auto parts store,” said Karicek. “About three-fifty. That’s ballpark.”

  “Look it up,” said Nikolay.

  Pavel took his phone from his pocket, typed in the name of the pump and said, “Fuck. My thumbs are so big.” Then he got it right. They waited. Karicek glanced at Farrell.

  “Bingo,” said Pavel. “Three-fifty.”

  They all were silent, considering the price of the pump. Then Nikolay sighed and said, “All right.”

  “So, you thought you were pretty smart, didn’t you?” said Pavel.

  “Not if you’re here,” said Farrell.

  “We’ll call it even,” said Pavel.

  “For our cut,” said Nikolay. “And this guy can go sell his fuel pumps.”

  Farrell picked up the money from the table, counted out a thousand dollars. Nikolay took it, flipped the bills back and forth, smelled them, and said, “Nothing like that scent. Nothing. You want to smell?”

  He held it out for Farrell.

  “I know what it smells like,” said Farrell.

  “I bet you do,” said Pavel.

  “Hasta la vista,” said Nikolay. “In LA-speak. See you around, smart guy.”

  They went out the door, their gait identical, half swagger, half stalking, like a mixture of a gorilla and a cobra. They pulled the door shut with that same rough brushing sound.

  Karicek and Farrell waited for a moment.

  “Friends of yours?” said Karicek.

  “I wouldn’t go that far,” said Farrell.

  “Okay,” said Karicek. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  Farrell walked to the door, opened it, and went into that gray luminescence. The pool was empty, and the outside walkway was deserted. The only movement was a jet trail, a sort of white mark in the sky, like a scratch on the fender of a blue car. The flower box in front of the motel was filled with black dirt, where geraniums grew, and Farrell wiped off the ankle bracelet and pushed it into the flower box.

  * * *

  The Mist House was on Santa Monica Boulevard, about twenty minutes from the Brooklyn Bridge motel. It was an old-style restaurant with booths, linen table cloths, waiters in white shirts and aprons. It was cool in the afternoon, before the rush, and the barman was slicing lemons, cleaning glasses, wiping down surfaces, and, of course, he poured himself a small drink and swallowed it with his back to Farrell. Farrell sat in a booth, looked at his watch, then he touched the texture of the cloth on the table. It was a cool, soothing place. A glass of beer sat on the table, the fluid as golden as a sunset over a wheat field, its head dreamily white, like a bride’s veil.

  “What’s the rush?” said Shirushi. “You’re calling me every day.”

  “You’ve got to listen,” said Farrell. “There isn’t a lot of time. I want your advice, but there’s something else.”

  Shirushi wore a silk dress today.

  “Remember you asked me to give you something? Do you want it?” he said.

  “Sure, does a bear do it in the woods, quack, quack, quack. . . . Yeah. What is it?”

  She signaled a waiter He came over and she asked for a bottle of water.

  “Gas or flat,” he said.

  “Flat,” she said. Then she turned to Farrell.

  “So?” she said.

  Careful, careful. Get her to do this, but don’t get too close. . . .

  “There’s a man in the Brooklyn Bridge motel in Manhattan Beach . . .”

  “I know about him. We talked about him before,” said Shirushi.

  “You need to have someone follow him. It’s got to be today.”

  “Why do we follow him?”

  Farrell shook his head.

  “He’ll probably go out along Mulholland toward Malibu. He’ll probably go into the brush some place along the line. I think if you are careful you will find something interesting.”

  “And when is this going to happen?” she said.

  “Probably between rush hour and dusk,” said Farrell. “Make the call. Will you?”

  “He’s got a bracelet on his ankle,” said Shirushi. “What’s the big deal?”

  “I wouldn’t depend on that,” said Farrell.

  She kept her eyes on him as she thought it over. Time is money, and the department had budget difficulties. Then she might be asked where she found out about this, whatever it was. A confidential informant, right?

  Shirushi made a call, spoke for a while, waited for a call back, then went through the same details, sipping at her flat water. Then she hung up.

  “You better be right about this,” she said. “About him not wearing a bracelet.”

  “Oh, I’m right,” he said.

  “You don’t sound glad?” she said.

  He shrugged.

  “Being right and being glad aren’t always the same,” he said.

  “Uh-oh,” she said. “You’re splitting hairs. Got to be something going on here.”

  “Just between us, right?” said Farrell.

  “Up to a point,” she said. “I wonder if this has anything to do with the girls Jerry Macaulay says you were asking about, Portia and her friend, Charlene . . . her last name escapes me, do you know what it is?”

  “Kl
auski,” Farrell said.

  “They were picked up for shoplifting, and, as you know, they have a record for this and that, and so we were thinking that maybe a little time in the Youth Authority might do them some good, but I’m not so sure about that. And so, they said that they had something they could tell us about, you know, the movie business, but they had to think about it, and since they had a cheap lawyer, and since we were curious and since we thought we could wait, naturally we let them go.”

  She took another sip.

  “This is about something else,” said Farrell. “Not them. They’re going to be in a movie.”

  “No kidding,” she said.

  “This is something else,” said Farrell.

  “You want to know the secret of police work? I told you once. You don’t chase someone down. You just wait for them to do the same stupid thing a second or a third time . . .”

  He took a drink of the cold beer. If he could only live that way for a while, a cold drink in a quiet bar in the late afternoon. With Rose Marie smiling on the other side of the table that was covered with a linen cloth.

  “So, you said something on the phone about asking my advice,” she said.

  “Yes,” said Farrell. “Which is the worst rap? Moving a body a great distance and trying to make sure it is never found, or if you just left it close to where something happened . . .”

  “Something?” she said.

  “Please,” he said.

  “I warned you,” she said. “Looks like you got yourself into a perfect position. It reminds me of the Inquisition. They had a piece of interrogation equipment, a box, and if you were being interrogated, they put you in the box. The sides could be adjusted so you couldn’t stand up and you couldn’t sit down.”

  “Yeah,” Farrell said. “Sounds familiar, you know, when you are confined.”

  “If a body was left near where something happened,” she said. “A good defense lawyer could make all kinds of excuses. Panic. Stupidity. Temporary insanity. But if someone made the effort to hide it, really hide it, then you have a rock-ribbed murder one item.”

  Her hair shined even in the dim light of the bar. Black hair with silver streaks.

  “So, there it is,” she said. “The girls, like all girls or a lot of girls, want to be in the movies. And you say that’s separate from this. All right. Okay. I’m not saying that you have anything to do with them, aside from asking about them.”

  “I ask about all kinds of people,” Farrell said. He shrugged. What’s the big deal?

  “Something about you makes me uneasy,” she said. “Give me a little more.”

  “I think keeping an eye this afternoon on western Mulholland is a good idea. But you don’t have much time. You really don’t.”

  “We’ll get around to it,” she said. “Is that all?”

  He nodded.

  “All right,” she said. “You’ve got my cell and my landline, right?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Just in case something else comes up,” she said.

  She winked at him, a frank, knowledgeable blink, and then that dangerous smile.

  20

  THE BEST TIME TO GATHER the girl, Farrell thought, if he was going to take Shirushi’s advice to make this look as bad as possible, was in that first blue light of dawn. Rose Marie was at her window when Farrell came out of his house in the first dim light, when shapes were emerging from the dark. She didn’t wave. Farrell thought, Don’t underestimate me. Those of us down here in the Ninth Circle know a thing or two.

  He had no idea what had happened the previous afternoon when Shirushi or her associates had followed Karicek to the Alaskan girl. He hoped this had happened, but it was always difficult to know how seriously a cop took some advice. He was sure of one thing. Karicek would have taken the girl a long way from Terry’s house. In fact, he knew, or suspected that this was so, if only because he had searched and found nothing close by. At least he wasn’t worried about being on Mulholland. Shirushi would have been miles away the day before, closer to the beach. There was no reason for her to be around this morning. Is that right? he thought. Well, this was one way to find out.

  On Mulholland the dawn came with that first blue on the verge of gray, like a medical symptom, and then the stars or planets begin to fade, and then shapes of things, houses, trees, stones at the side of the road, telephone poles, wires showed themselves, as though they had been produced in the dark. Some people were up early, but not many, and they were visible on Mulholland because they had their headlights on. In the Camry glove box sat some protein bars that came from the economy size box at Coin-A-Matic. Four bottles of water were in the back seat, which he thought should be enough even for the desert.

  The dirt next to the brush was still damp with dew, and the car stopped with a softness, a delicacy in that damp loam. The lights of the Valley were fading too, not quite as festive at this hour as they usually were, like those for some a failing amusement park. The trunk lid just rested on the sill of the body of the car so that it appeared like it was closed. The Department of Water and Power sign was still on the dashboard, but it was still invisible, given the light. Maybe someone who stopped would think that those Department of Water and Power guys were hard workers. The last two stars, above the smoky air, became more gray. Over the Ventura Freeway a long line of smoke was beginning to form.

  When any large change takes place, or at the beginning of action, a clarifying moment appears, and Farrell knew this was the case, if only because he faced nothing but anxious uncertainty, delusion, and personal static, as though what he wanted was only a matter of electricity. Still, vengeance has an icy clarity.

  The snakes would probably be out early, since they had waited all night for the prey to begin to move. And the best time for them was before the afternoon, or before the strong light, when they could sun themselves in the dappled shade. They were pit vipers, which meant that they hunted by looking for heat, and Farrell wondered if they could sense the temperature of his skin through his boots and jeans. Of course, they could.

  The British girl had not been disturbed, at least as far as he could tell. No obvious tearing of flesh, no small nibbling, no work of coyotes. Some insects had made a path, like a river seen from the air, from the obscurity of the brush to where the girl was. If she had been farther from the road, maybe the animals might have done their work, but the passing of the cars, the people who came to park here at night, the cars during the day, had probably scared them away. Hawks, at least, wanted recently killed animals.

  Farrell didn’t know how many days the girl had been here, but she wasn’t in the horrific condition he had been afraid of. Terry had kept her on ice for a while. Still, did Catherine know what the darkness really was, or how it could be seen after eight days, or so, when the British girl’s skin would turn red and blistered. Or that the underworld claimed by its horrors, by the colors, the blisters and a vile tug downward, what it did when it was finally in charge. The presence, the decay came to Farrell as a touch, a hint of all that was most horrifying. Catherine, he thought, Catherine.

  The latex gloves had the unseemly touch of a condom. A real body bag would have been better, since here she would have to be slipped into the open end of the construction bag without a zipper to close it up. But she was small and light, and the easiest way was to arrange her along the fall line of the hillslope, head at the bottom, and put the mouth of the bag under her and then wiggle it toward her feet. It was impossible to pretend there was no odor in the air, and so the best thing was to give up and just pull the bag to her feet and tie the ends. The brush rustled as Farrell got it close to the road, on the shoulder.

  The unlatched trunk opened with a sigh. The bag went in. Farrell made sure the trunk was locked. A piece of manzanita was at the side of the road and he used it to sweep out the tracks before he threw it into the canyon. The limb of manzanita, with its small leaves, appeared like a dark bird as it spun over the steep hillside. He started the engine
, went up to Laurel Canyon, and turned right. It would take him, depending on traffic, a couple of hours get to the Mojave Desert.

  He had driven through these places many times, Fontana, Victorville, and the rest. The towns were places he had been glad to avoid right from the first times when he had come here as a teenager. The reasons were obvious, the clutter, the sense that at a stoplight it wouldn’t take much to start a fight, or the fact that Fontana was a sort of hometown to the Hells Angels. The town wasn’t obviously that rough, although it had a hint of the ominous, and something else, too, which was harder to invoke but still there. The place perfectly melded the possibilities of malice since it was built on the edge of a desert, where the essential hostility of the landscape was just below one’s awareness. Still, a ghost of that hostility lingered. When people in Ohio thought of California, they weren’t thinking of Fontana.

  It happened in Barstow. Even though the Camry got good mileage, it needed gas, and so on the outskirts of Barstow Farrell stopped at a house that had been converted into a gas station and restaurant. Two gasoline pumps sat out front. It had a lunch counter that served bacon cheeseburgers, fries cooked in suet, and chili made from poached venison that was advertised as beef.

  The sign in front said, “Black’s Gas N Market, cold beer, water, Coke, Mountain Dew, Sandwich Meat, Lunch Counter, last gas for a hundred miles.” The sign looked like it had been painted by a kid, just someone trying to help out around a store at the edge of the desert.

  The dust of the parking lot blew behind Farrell, like a cloud of ill will. The nozzle of the pump went into the gas tank, and the sky was so haunting in its white-blue indifference as to make Farrell feel suspended. The pump ran very slowly, as though out here in the heat, everything was careful.

  Next to the door of Black’s, a woman tipped a chair back. She kept her eyes on the car, on the slowly moving numbers of the pump, and on Farrell. Would she remember him, be able to describe the man who stopped to get gas?

  He was never sure why people trusted him at first glance. Maybe it was that he looked a little like a character actor, one of those guys who played a member of the platoon that was about to get wiped out, and maybe it was that he had his hair cut a little like a Navy SEAL, wore jeans, had that smile, white teeth, and greenish eyes the color of money. The woman wore jeans, too, a flannel shirt, which should have tipped him off, since it was the wrong thing to wear here, in the desert. She was blond, her hair streaked, uncombed, and while she was very attractive, she was so thin it looked to Farrell that meth might have had something to do with it. Or Molly. It was hard to tell, but she had a hard beauty, a smile that was a little too ready and a little too false. Farrell wanted to fill the tank and get away. The less anyone saw the better.