Palm Springs Noir

by Barbara DeMarco-Barrett

“Not all of ’em. My dog’s not a barker. Whenever he tries it I blast him with my cane.”

  “I don’t know a single person, other than you, who will hit a dog for barking,” I said, feeling like an idiot for letting Don Donner trap me into one of his arguments again. What type of man admits to hitting his dog for barking in public, just to win an argument? He knew I had him, so he launched in another direction.

  “You know, if any of you dumb cocksuckers gave a shit you would post a description of this low-life piece of shit,” Donner said, his eye on me. “If she is doing what people claim she is, then she will get what’s coming to her. I guarantee this person isn’t stealing my keys.”

  “And here I thought it was my neighbors, the ones with the cabin tent and the too many kids,” said Denver Abernathy, an unlit cigarette in his hand. “We have two sets of keys missing … time for new locks, I guess.”

  Having said what he had to say, Abernathy sauntered outside for a smoke.

  “How you all so sure she’s a she?” asked Marci Day.

  “I seen her,” I said. “Loiters at Circle K, hair same color as a banana.”

  “If you seen her why didn’t you catch her?” said Donner.

  I took a deep breath. “Because, Don, you gotta catch her in the act. I can’t just lasso her and force her to confess. That will get me arrested.”

  “Jesus can help her if only she’d ask,” said Marci.

  “Come off it, Marci,” Donner said. “What the fuck has Jesus ever done for you?”

  “Plenty,” countered Marci with a puff of her chest that would have made a pro wrestler weep.

  Talk of Jesus always brought these meetings to a halt and Marci Day knew it. Donner would have none of it.

  “The broad’s an ankle,” he said, “which is ’bout two feet lower than a cunt.”

  Donner narrowed his eyes at Marci now, waiting for something sanctimonious, but got none. Unlike me, she knew better than to argue with Don Donner.

  “May I suggest we do the right thing,” Marci said, her eyes fixed on Donner, “and leave the poor creature be. The level of desperation driving her to a life of crime, I hope we never know.”

  “I say we find her and stomp her out,” Donner said. “But everyone just wants to chew the cud, hear theyselves talk like words matter.”

  “They do matter,” I said. “It’s why we’re all together. We need some good ideas, we need ideas that are legal and aren’t going to land any of us in jail.”

  “Lock your doors!” shouted Jimbo Lure, then let out a big dumb laugh. No one joined in.

  I looked at Jimbo. Poor man can’t help that he’s an idiot. “Thank you, Jimbo,” I said. “In a perfect world that would be a great suggestion. But all it takes is that one day you’re in a hurry. That one day you get careless.”

  Jimbo looked at me with a strange expression, not used to anyone actually talking reason to him when he flies off with one of his idiocies.

  Teddy Elderberry, resplendent in tie-dye shirt, tie-dye pants, and tie-dye do-rag, made his way to where Firth was standing. Elderberry had done time before cannabis was legal. Now, he wants those years back, but he’s not going to get them. Elderberry whispered in Firth’s ear and Firth nodded his head up and down in agreement.

  “Our friend Teddy Elderberry picked up a lot of useful info in the clink,” Firth said. “I suggest you all pay close attention.”

  “Thank you for that introduction, bud,” Elderberry said with a wide grin. He was proud of the time he had served and survived. “What you guys need to do is send in a decoy, friend her, hang with her, find out where and with who she is affiliated. Then you set her up with some keys and an addy. Have authorities waiting to take her down. Don’t just sit around waiting to see who gets hit next. Operation Ninja Takedown’s what you need. Fight fire with fire, you dig?”

  “That’s the fucking stupidest idea I’ve ever fucking heard,” said Donner, picking up his cane and ambling out the back door, his cane making a tap tap tap sound because he thought rubber tips were for dicks. “You wanna catch her,” he called from the door, “you fucking go get her. Where you say she go, that Circle K?” He pointed across the highway, the convenience store being set right across from the meeting hall.

  “Yeah, right over there, Donner,” I said. “Go get her, man. Take her down.”

  Donner lifted his cane and swung it through the air like a golf club meant to clobber. I had meant to be funny, but no one laughed, not even Jimbo Lure.

  The cat burglar was not at Circle K that afternoon. Just as the meeting was wrapping, Kimberly Miller (her actual name) was riding shotgun in a truck, sailing down the mountain on her way to Indio, the lowest of the low desert, with every intention of getting to the night market before the sun came up. The truck wasn’t new, and she’d had to cram her shit in the space not occupied by bags of chlorine and leaf skimmers, but it took the mountain roads with ease.

  Behind the wheel was Justin Alvarez, the only friend she had left from down below. Even as she got in the truck she knew he wouldn’t be her friend for long. She just needed him to stay her friend long enough to get to Indio. They’d met in Palm Springs five years ago, when she still had a house and a husband, a kid and a teenage pool boy.

  Justin was no one’s idea of what a Palm Springs pool boy might look like. At least he wasn’t her idea of what a Palm Springs pool boy might be. Bernard had passed on the tanned and muscled blonds who applied and hired the one that mostly resembled an adolescent garden gnome. He was a fully bearded man now and taking the mountain roads with ease. They were well out of Anza in no time and traveling through the pine tree forest that links Anza to the desert floor. She wondered how much fighting and screaming Justin had witnessed in that house with the manicured cactus garden, the crystalline pool.

  “You’re going back to Betty’s!” Bernard had shouted the last time she’d been in that house.

  “I’m not going to Betty nothing,” she’d slurred. She didn’t want to go to rehab. Rehab is where the party ends. She was too young for that. Sure, she’d regretted that Baby Carol had seen her like that, and on Mother’s Day, no less.

  “You’re disgusting.” Bernard brought it down to a defeated whisper.

  “What she’s going to remember is …” She stopped to see if she could find the point to what she was saying. “… is you shouting.”

  They had both looked at the baby who sat calmly playing with Legos. Go figure, a sixty-year-old man, just lost his wife of thirty years, no children, meets a desperate desert rat at the 7-Eleven on Vista Chino. He gets her pregnant, which shocks her because, well, he’s decrepit. So now there’s Baby Carol.

  He wanted to name her after his dead wife and Kimberly just shrugged. If she couldn’t name her miscarriage, or abortion, what did she care what people called her? He dressed her up for Mother’s Day, all in pink, even the little shoes. No matter. Baby Carol was only three. She’d never remember any of this. There were plenty of Mother’s Days to come. Next year would be better. Stick to wine, ditch the blow.

  That had been May. By August she had been to Betty Ford’s twice. Insurance covered most of the cost, but she hated it there. While sneaking a smoke out by Lake Hope, the immaculate man-made lake that is the centerpiece of the “campus,” she had looked up to the mountains bordering the valley and imagined it was more peaceful up there. Rehabs like to believe they are peaceful places, but that’s just because they paint everything beige. It’s actually exhausting—in the morning they get you up before you’re ready to get up, make you eat with other people, and participate in what they call their “wellness activities.” The mountain, as high as she could go, was the answer. Fewer people and it would be a lot cooler out. She scaled the fence and in less than four minutes was in the back of an Uber (Toyota Camry, navy blue).

  “Get me as far from this place as quickly as you can.”

  The Uber driver asked if she was sure she wanted to go all the way up the mountain.

  “Yes,
wherever it’s cooler. I can’t breathe down here.”

  He’d turned to look at her and at a glance had tagged her as trash.

  “How about Anza?”

  He drove her up the mountain in the dark, the car winding and twisting through the hairpin curves, her stomach not reacting to it well. She could only see as far as the headlights let her. About an hour later, he stopped at a Circle K.

  “Here it is, beautiful downtown Anza.”

  Before he left, she blew him in the backseat. When he’d come, she asked him for a twenty and he told her to fuck off and left her in the dust. She was going to write him a lousy review but caught a glimpse of herself in the convenience store window and changed her mind. I have to start eating, she thought, I’m all skin and bones. And my hair! But a Circle K’s better than a circle jerk.

  Welcome to your new life.

  Except for the fluorescent lights of the Circle K, Anza had been dead dark that first night. Some bum told her there were abandoned buildings all over Anza. At first light she started looking for a place to crash. She settled into an old toolshed at the ass end of Dusty Road—that’s what it was called and that’s also what it was. That’s what Anza was like: no frills.

  No thrills either.

  Until she started robbing them. What else could she do? As soon as the Uber charge showed up on the statement, Bernard canceled her credit cards. She called him. He wanted to know where she was. She refused to tell him, so he canceled her phone.

  “The only way to get your privileges back is to return to Betty’s and do what’s best for this family,” Bernard said before he hung up.

  She hated that he called it a family, not a favorite word of hers. And she hated most of all that he called the place Betty’s, as if the former first lady would be waiting behind the counter, like at a diner.

  Hi, hon, what’ll you have?

  An ounce of crank and a cup of Joe, Betty.

  Now, Justin Alvarez was halfway down the mountain, halfway to the desert towns she knew better than she knew herself: Palm Springs, Cathedral City, Rancho Mirage, Palm Desert, Indian Wells, La Quinta, and finally Indio. She had money but no credit card. No credit card, no Uber. The sunset turned the mountains orange. She wished it was dark so she could pretend she didn’t know where she was or where she was going or who that guy was beside her. Justin was holding onto the steering wheel hard.

  “You okay?” she asked him.

  He took forever to respond. “Yeah, twilight driving makes me sad.”

  “It will be dark soon,” she said.

  In the last light she’d seen the change in the terrain, from pine trees to mesquite to striped rocks to stretches of sand littered with what her mother called malicious plants—creosote, ocotillo, barrel cactus. Justin had to drive the last stretch of switchback curves in the dark, and as they twisted their descent, she could feel the heat rising up to greet her. You thought you could get away?

  By the time Justin dropped her off outside Indio’s night market, she had four hundred and sixty dollars in her pocket. She’d asked for five hundred, but Justin needed some of it for gas.

  He had convinced her to let him keep the loot and sell it on his own a lot farther away. “For your own good, Kim. Sell this shit near here, they’ll pop you before you start.”

  He got off cheap. Hell, he could get five hundred just for the birth certificate down in Mexicali. He worked a blow job and tittie grope into the deal and she went along. The pool boy had been waiting all this time. Kimberly no longer looked as she had when he was cleaning her pool, but she was still Kimberly to him.

  “You’re all the same,” she said before lowering herself on his rod. Soon as the transaction was over, she said she needed a beer.

  “I don’t think so.” He didn’t sound like Justin anymore, he sounded like a total asshole.

  “Get the hell out of here,” Kimberly growled, then hopped down from the truck and slammed the door.

  It was August and Indio’s swap meet could only function at night when the temperature dropped from 117 degrees to a tolerable ninety-five. The night market was all too well lit, too nicely organized. The blacktop parking lot too clean. Was this Indio? You’d think it was Rancho Mirage or some other pretentious desert community. It irritated her to walk past dozens of vendors waiting for someone, anyone, to buy a trinket, some silver jewelry, purses, shoes, mattresses, blenders from 1995, Aztec suns made of pounded tin, and about a mile of Mexican food and drinks. Kimberly wanted beer but they had none, so she bought horchata in a cup with ice and it was the most delicious thing she’d ever had. She could have drunk down the whole dispenser.

  As if drawn by invisible strings, she made her way to the back, beyond the light cast by the stalls, to where the blacktop ended and the sand and the weeds began. She smelled them before she saw them. They smelled just like the men who loitered around the Circle K in Anza. What was that smell? If she could bottle it, she could sell it as a pesticide. They were standing in a circle, talking in low voices. They were all colors; no one was exempt from the strings, the hooks. Take her for example, a white and, until recently, middle-class woman, until recently a pretty girl, naturally blonder than blond. Banana blond, some people called it.

  “You’re wasting your life away serving tacos to tourists,” her mother had said. “You’re certainly pretty enough to be a stripper.”

  She’d said so more than once, but stripping wasn’t for Kimberly. Too complicated. Too many routines. Too much competition from women who wanted to show off, who swung from those aluminum poles like glittering tether balls. These men, at the edge of the night market, were all shirtless and no one was tipping them for it. They looked up when she approached: the prey.

  It’s amazing how quickly a pack of men can size up a woman walking alone, in the heat, in the desert, in the night. But just as quickly they looked away. Had she become that hideous? Just a bit ago Justin hadn’t thought so. But Justin lived on memories; the moment he’d started with remember this and remember that, she knew where they were headed, and it wasn’t Indio.

  “Remember that time when I came over and you were pregnant and wearing an orange bikini?”

  Hell yeah, she remembered. That week there’d been no way to get comfortable other than floating in the pool all but naked. And Justin had come stomping in with his leaf skimmer and his jugs of chlorine and just about scared the baby out of her. And her wishing he had. But it would be two more long, hot weeks before Baby Carol popped out. Baby Carol just a few miles from here. To hell with Baby Carol.

  “Go away, esqueleto,” one of the brown men said.

  She looked up at the mountain behind them. Atop that mountain were Anza’s high desert, homes without alarms, and men who weren’t so rude. Those men took your money, made the transaction quick, and the stuff was all good, always.

  “I got money,” she threw back at him.

  * * *

  “Shit’s still missing,” Don Donner said.

  I had to look to make sure he was talking to me. Unfortunately, he was. “It’s history, Don, let it go,” I said, and I meant it.

  “She was holed up in Dusty Road.”

  “Yeah, I heard that.” I’d heard it but I didn’t believe it. So they found some things that might have belonged to a homeless person. What does that prove?

  “You let her slip through your fingers. You ever think about that?”

  “What would you have done with her, Don, if you’d caught her?”

  We were at the post office. Anza doesn’t have mail delivery. We all go to the post office to get our mail and parcels and to run into the neighbors we mostly don’t want to see. The post office is next to the town hall, which is across from Circle K. Farther down the road is our Dairy Queen and farther down the road is the rest of California.

  “I’d bring her to justice,” he said, and he said it so casually that for a moment I took him for a reasonable man.

  “She’s hardly worth the trouble, considering all she too
k.”

  “That ain’t the point, Dave. Nobody appreciates a person walking through their house, going through their things.”

  I shrugged and sifted through my envelopes—Senior Fitness, Senior Dating, Reverse Mortgage Lender, Assisted Living, Retirement Community, Burial Insurance, and without fail, the American Association of Retired People. I’m not even sixty yet! I wanted to scream every time. But I knew the envelopes couldn’t hear me. They had started arriving just as I turned fifty. As if turning fifty wasn’t depressing enough.

  I looked up—Donner was still there, his little blue eyes glowing, his eyebrows sprouting white tentacles that reached out to ensnare me. “Then there is no point,” I said. “If some one is taking stuff you don’t really want or stuff you can easily replace, then where’s the crime?”

  “There were valuable documents.”

  I nodded in agreement. Sure, there had been a couple of birth certificates. That was about the most valuable thing.

  Donner spoke like he was reading my mind: “Them birth certificates are more than just paper.”

  “You ever hear of the Internet? Those things can be replaced, all you got to do is contact the hospital where you were born.”

  “What about the fucking Mexicans?”

  “What about them?”

  “They can make themselves legal with them. You want some Mexican walking around with your name on ’em?”

  He wanted to argue but I didn’t, so I made for the door. He tap-tapped behind me. “They can make themselves legal with them,” he said louder, as if I hadn’t heard him.

  I was at my car and he was right there behind me. He was looking at me like he expected an answer, so I gave it to him. “All right, Don, I hear you. So two Mexicans are now legal because they got ahold of some birth certificates. Two.”

  “Yeah, two today,” he just about shouted, tapping his cane hard on the gravel, “but the way those people fuck, there’ll be twenty by Sunday.”

  I drove off but I was sure he was still talking to me. People come up to Anza for all sorts of reasons. Mostly good ones. When I called that meeting a couple of weeks ago, I felt I was doing my civic duty. All I wanted to do was alert the neighbors that there was something going on that might affect them. I did not count on reactivating Don Donner. I did not anticipate that lynch mobs would be formed, like it was up here in the 1860s when this was all Cahuilla land. All because a woman got desperate enough to go klepto. I’d heard talk at the barbershop that Donner and some old guys had decided to waste their time dragging the mountain for her, had found some stuff in a shed on Dusty Road. Stuff that could have belonged to her.