Talking God jlajc-9

by Tony Hillerman

  Chapter Sixteen

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  Leroy Fleck simply couldn’t get his mind relieved. He sat on the folding lawn chair in his empty apartment with the telephone on the floor beside him. In about an hour it would be time to go out to the phone booth and put in his once-a-month check-in call to Eddy Elkins. What he was going to say to Elkins was part of the problem. He was going to have to ask Elkins to wire him enough money to get Mama moved, enough to tide him over for the two or three days it would take The Client to pay up. He dreaded asking, because he was almost sure Elkins would just laugh and say no. But he had to get enough to move Mama.

  Fleck had on his hat and his coat. It was cold in the apartment because he was trying to save on the utility bill. What he was doing while he was doing all this thinking normally brought him pleasure. He was hunting through the classified ad section of the Washington Times, looking for somebody to talk to. Normally that relieved his mind. Not tonight. Even with talking to people he couldn’t get Mama out of his thoughts. The worst of it was he’d had to hurt the Fat Man. He’d had to threaten to kill the son of a bitch and twisted his arm while he was doing it. There just wasn’t any other way to make him keep Mama until he could find another place. But doing that had opened things up to real trouble—or the probability of it. He’d warned the man not to call the police and the bastard had looked scared enough so maybe he wouldn’t. On the other hand, maybe he would. And when the police checked his address and found it was phony—well, who knows what then? They’d be interested. Fleck couldn’t afford to have the police interested.

  The tape recorder on the box against the wall made a whispering sound. Fleck glanced at it, his thoughts elsewhere. It whispered, and fell silent. The microphone he’d installed in the crawlspace above the ceiling of the Santillanes apartment was supposed to be voice activated. That really meant “sound activated.” A lot of what Fleck was recording was Mrs. Santillanes, or whoever that old Mexican woman was, running her vacuum cleaner or clattering around with the dishes. At first, he had sometimes played the tape before sending it off to the post-office-box address Elkins had given him. He’d heard a lot of household noises, and now and then people talking. But the talking was in Spanish. Fleck had picked up a little of that in Joliet from the Hispanos. Just enough to understand that most of what he was taping was family talk. What’s for dinner? Where’s my glasses? That sort of stuff. Not enough for Fleck to guess why Elkins’ clients wanted to keep track of this bunch. It had seemed to Fleck from very early in this assignment that these folks next door were smart enough to do their serious talking somewhere else.

  He found an ad that sounded promising. It offered an Apple computer complete with twelve video games for sale by owner. Fleck knew almost nothing about computers, and cared less. But this sounded like a family where the kids had grown up and the item for sale was expensive enough so the owner wouldn’t mind talking for a while. Fleck dialed the number, listened to a busy signal, and picked up the paper again. This time he selected a gasoline-powered trash shredder. A man answered on the second ring.

  “I’m calling about the shredder,” Fleck said. “What are you asking for it?”

  “Well, we paid three hundred and eighty dollars for it, and it’s just like new.” The man had a soft, Virginia Tidewater voice. “But we ain’t got no use for it anymore. And I think we’d come down to maybe two hundred.”

  “No use for it?” Fleck said. “Sounds like you’re moving or something. Got anything else you’re selling? Several things I need.”

  “Not moving,” the man said. “We’re just getting out of gardening. My wife’s developed arthritis.” He laughed. “And she’s the one that did all the work.”

  From there, Leroy Fleck led the conversation into personal affairs—first the affairs of the owner of the item offered, and then Fleck’s own. It was something he had done for years and had become very good at doing. It was his substitute for hanging out in a bar. Keeping Mama in a rest home had made bars too expensive and the people you talked to there tended not to be normal anyway. Fleck had discovered more or less by accident that it was pleasant and relaxing to talk to regular people. It happened when he decided that it would be nice for Mama to have one of those little refrigerators in her room. He’d noticed one in the want ads, and called, and got into a good-natured conversation with the lady selling it. Mama had thrown the little refrigerator on the floor and broke it, but Fleck had remembered the chat. And it had become a habit. At first he did it only when he needed to relieve his mind. But for the last few years he’d done it almost every night. Except Saturday. People didn’t like to be called on Saturday night. With practice he had learned which ads to call, and how to keep the conversation going. After three or four such calls Fleck found he could usually sleep. Talking to somebody normal relieved the mind.

  Usually, that is. Tonight, it didn’t work. After a while the man selling the trash shredder just wanted to talk about that—what Fleck would pay for it and so forth. Fleck had then called about a pop-up-top vacation trailer which would sleep four. But this time he found himself getting impatient even before the woman who was selling it did.

  After that call he just sat there on the lawn chair. To keep from worrying about Mama, he worried about those two Indians—and especially about the one who had come to his door here. Both of those men had really smelled like cops to him. Fleck didn’t like having cops know where to find him. Normally in a situation like that he would have moved right out of here and got lost. But now he couldn’t move. This job Eddy Elkins had got him into this time kept him tied here. He was stuck. He had to have the money. Absolutely had to have it. Absolutely had to wait two more days until the month was up. Then he’d get the ten thousand the bastards were making him wait for.

  He went into the kitchen and checked the refrigerator. He had a little bit of beef liver left and two hamburger buns, but no ground beef and only two potatoes. That would handle his needs tonight. But he’d need food tomorrow. He didn’t even have enough grease to fry the potatoes for breakfast. Fleck put on his hat and his coat and went out into the misty rain.

  He returned with a plastic grocery sack and an early edition of the Washington Post. Fleck knew how to stretch his dollars. The bag contained two loaves of day-old bread, a dozen grade B eggs, a half -gallon of milk, a carton of Velveeta, and a pound of margarine. He put the frying pan on the gas burner, dumped in a spoonful of margarine and the liver. Fleck’s furniture consisted of stuff he could fold into the trunk of his old Chevy, which meant nothing in the kitchen except what was built in. He leaned against the wall and watched the liver fry. As it fried he unfolded the Post and read.

  There was nothing he needed to know on the front page. On page two, the word Chile caught his eyes.

  TOP CHILEAN POLICE BRASS VISITS; ASKS MUSEUM TO RETURN GOLDEN MASK

  He scanned the story, mildly interested in the affairs of his client. It told him that General Ramon Huerta Cardona, identified as “commander of Chilean internal security forces,” was in Washington on government business and planned to deliver a personal appeal tomorrow to the Smithsonian Institution for the return of an Inca mask. According to the story, the mask was “golden and encrusted with emeralds,” and the general described it as “a Chilean national treasure which should be returned to the people of Chile.” Fleck didn’t finish the story. He turned the page.

  The picture caught his eye instantly. The old man. It was on page four, a single-column photograph halfway down the page with a story under it. Old man Santillanes.

  “Oh, shit!” Fleck said it aloud, in something close to a shout.

  The headline read:

  KNIFE VICTIM PROVES TO BE CHILEAN REBEL

  Fleck slammed the paper to the floor and stood against the wall. He was shaking. “Ah, shit,” he repeated, in something like a whisper now. He bent, retrieved the paper, and read:

  “The body of a man found beside a railroad track in New Mexico last month has been identified as
Elogio Santillanes y Jimenez, an exiled leader of the opposition to the Chilean government, a spokesman for the Federal Bureau of Investigation announced today.

  “The FBI spokesman said Santillanes had been killed by a single stab wound in the back of the neck and his body removed from an Am-trak train.

  “ ‘All identification had been removed from his body—even his false teeth,’ the spokesman said. He noted that this made identification difficult for the agency.

  “The FBI declined comment on whether any suspects were being investigated. Two years ago, another opposition leader to the Pinochet regime was assassinated in Washington by the detonation of a bomb in his car. Following that incident, the Department of State issued a sharply worded protest to the Chilean embassy and two members of the embassy staff were deported as personae non gratae in the United States.”

  The story continued, but Fleck dropped the paper again. He felt sick but he had to think. He had guessed right about the embassy, and about why they had wanted him to kill Santillanes a long way from Washington, and why all that emphasis had been placed on preventing identification. How the hell had the FBI managed to make the connection? But what difference did that make? His problem was what to do about it.

  They weren’t going to send him the ten thousand now. No identification and no publicity for a month. That was the deal. A month without anything in the papers was going to be proof enough he hadn’t screwed it up. And now, what was it? Twenty-nine days? For a moment he allowed himself to think that they would agree that this was close enough. But that was bullshit thinking. All they needed to screw him was the slightest excuse. They looked down on him like trash. Like dirt. Just like Mama had always told Delmar and him.

  He smelled the liver burning in the frying pan, moved it off the burner, and fanned away the smoke. Elkins had told him that Mama was right. He hadn’t remembered telling Elkins anything about Mama, certainly wouldn’t have normally, but Elkins said he talked about it when he was coming out from under the sodium pen-tothal—the stuff they’d given him when they fixed him up there at the prison infirmary. Right after the rape.

  Elkins had been standing beside his bed when he came to, holding a pan in case he threw up the way people sometimes do when they come up from sodium pentothal. “I want you to listen now,” Elkins had told him in a whisper right by his face. “They’re going to be coming in here as soon as they know you can talk and asking you questions. They’re going to ask you which ones did you.” And he guessed he had mumbled something about getting the score evened with the sons of bitches because Elkins had put his hand over Fleck’s mouth—Fleck remembered that very clearly even now—and said: “Get even. But not now. You got to do it yourself. You tell the screws that you don’t know who did you. Tell ’em you didn’t get a look at anybody. They hit you from behind. If you want to stay alive in here, you don’t talk to the screws. You do your own business. Like your Mama told you.”

  “Like your Mama told you!” So he must have been talking about Mama when he was still under the anesthesia. It was all still so very vivid.

  He’d asked Elkins if they had really raped him the way he seemed to remember, and Elkins said they truly had.

  “Then I got to kill ’em.”

  “Yes,” Elkins said. “I think so. Unless you want to live like an animal.”

  Elkins was a disbarred lawyer with some seniority in Joliet and he understood about such things. He was doing four to eight on an Illinois State felony count. Something to do with fixing up some witnesses, or maybe it was jurors, for somebody important in the Chicago rackets. Fleck understood that Elkins had kept his mouth shut and taken the fall for it, and that seemed to be the way it worked out. Because now Eddy Elkins was important again with some Chicago law firm, even if he couldn’t practice law himself.

  For that matter, Elkins had been important even in the prison. He was just a trustee working as a male nurse and orderly in the prison hospital. But he had money. He had connections inside and out and everybody knew it. When Fleck came out of isolation, he found he had a job in the infirmary. Elkins had done that. And Elkins had helped him with the big problem—how to kill three hard cases. All bigger than him. All tougher. First he’d started him pumping iron. Fleck had been skinny then as well as small. But at nineteen you can develop fast if you have direction. And steroids. Elkins got him them, too. And then Elkins had showed him how a knife can make a small man equal to a big one if the small man is very, very fast and very cool and knows what to do with the blade. Fleck had always been fast—had to be fast to survive. Elkins used the life-size body chart in the infirmary office and the plastic skeleton to teach him where to put the shank.

  “Always flat,” Elkins would say. “Remember that. What you’re after is behind the bones. Hitting the bones does you no good at all and the way past them is through the crevices.” Elkins was a tall, slender man, slightly stooped. He was a Dartmouth man, with his law degree from Harvard. He looked like a teacher and he liked to teach. In the empty, quiet infirmary he would stand there in front of the skeleton with Fleck sitting on the bed, and Elkins would tutor Fleck in the trade.

  “If you have to go in from the front”—Elkins recommended against going in from the front—“you have to go between the ribs or right below the Adam’s apple. Quick thrust in, and then the wiggle.” Elkins demonstrated the little wiggle with his wrist. “That gets the artery, or the heart muscle, or the spinal column. A puncture is usually no damn good. Any other cut is slow and noisy. If you can go in from the back, it’s the same. Hold it flat. Hold it horizonal.”

  Elkins would demonstrate on the plastic skeleton. “The very quickest is right there”—and he would point a slender, manicured finger—“above that first vertebra. You do it right and there’s not a motion. Not a sound. Very little bleeding. Instant death.”

  When it was time for him to go into the yard again, he went with a slender, stiff little shank fashioned of surgical steel and as sharp as the scalpel it had once been. Elkins had given him that along with his final instructions.

  “Remember the number for you is three. There are three of them. If you get caught with the first one you don’t do the last two. Remember that, and remember to hold it flat. What you’re after is behind the bone.”

  He had been twenty when he did it. A long time ago. He had yearned to tell Mama about it. But it wasn’t the sort of thing you could say in a letter, with the screws reading your mail. And Mama hadn’t ever been able to get away to come on visiting days. He felt badly about that. It had been a hard life for her and not much he’d done had made it any easier.

  The liver had that burned taste. And the hamburger buns were pretty much dried out. But he didn’t like liver anyway. He only bought it because it was about half the price of hamburger. And it satisfied what little appetite he had tonight. Then he put on his hat and his still-damp coat and went out to make his call to Elkins.

  “There’s not a damn thing I can do for you,” Elkins said. “You know how we work. After twenty years you ought to know. We keep insulated. It’s got to be that way.”

  “It’s been more than twenty years,” Fleck said. “Remember that first job?”

  The first job had been while he was still in prison. Elkins was out, thanks to a lot of good time and an early parole. And the visitor had come to see him. As a matter of fact, it was the only visitor he’d ever had. A young lawyer. Elkins had sent him to give Fleck a name. It had been a short visit.

  “Elkins just said to tell you to make it four instead of three. He wants you to make it Cassidy and Dalkin and Neal and David Petresky. He said you’d understand. And to tell you you’d be represented by a lawyer at the parole hearing and that he had regular work for you after that.” The lawyer was a plump, blond man with greenish-blue eyes. He was not much older than Fleck and he looked nervous—glancing around all the time to see if the screw was listening. “He said for me to bring back a yes or a no.”

  Fleck had thought about it a minut
e—wondering who Petresky was and how to get to him. “Tell him yes,” he said.

  And now Elkins remembered it.

  “That one was sort of a test,” Elkins said. “They said you couldn’t handle Petresky. I said I’d seen your work.”

  “All these years,” Fleck said. “Now I need help. I think you owe me.”

  “It was always business,” Eddy Elkins said. “You know that. It couldn’t be any other way. It would just be too damned dangerous.”

  Dangerous for you, Fleck thought, but he didn’t say it. Instead he said: “I simply got to have three thousand. I’ve got to have enough to get my Mama moved.” Fleck paused. “Man, I’m desperate.”

  There was a long silence. “You say this involves your mother?”

  “Yeah.” In Joliet he had talked to Elkins a lot about Mama. He thought Elkins understood how he felt about her.

  Another silence. “What’s your number there?”

  Fleck told him.

  “Stay there. I’ll make a contact and see what I can do.”

  Fleck waited almost an hour, huddled in his damp coat in the booth and, when he felt the chill stiffening him, pacing up and down the sidewalk close enough to hear the ring.

  When it rang, it was The Client.

  “You dirty little hijo de puta,” he said. “You want money? You bring us nothing but trouble and you want us to pay you money for it?”

  “I got to have it,” Fleck said. “You owe me.” He thought: hijo de puta; the man had called him son of a whore.

  “We ought to break your dirty little neck.” The Client said. “Maybe we do that. Yes. Maybe we cut your dirty little throat. We give you a simple little job. What do you do? You screw it up!”

  Fleck felt the rage rising within him, felt it like bile in his throat. He heard Mama’s voice: “They treat you like niggers. You let ’em, they treat you like dogs. You let ’em step on you, they’ll treat you like animals.”