A Nasty Piece of Work: A Novel

by Robert Littell

  “I think I did, yes,” I said.

  “Where’bouts?”

  “Afghanistan.”

  He pursed his lips respectfully, one soldier acknowledging another. “I hear tell Ghanistan wasn’t a picnic.”

  “No one who was there would describe it as a picnic,” I agreed.

  “Did I hear you right? You thought you’d served your country? Jeez, how can you not be sure?”

  I hiked one shoulder. “Military service is complicated,” I said. I glanced at the photos on the wall. “I’m sure you can relate to that. You do what you’re told to do. You do it as well as you can. Sometimes it works out, other times it doesn’t.”

  “Nam was sure as heck complicated,” Uzzel said. “I was never sure which of the turkeys in black pajamas was the enemy and which was on our side, so I treated any turkey in pajamas as a potential hostile. Hostiles sometimes wound up dead before they could convince us they weren’t hostile. Heck, in Nam I was never sure what a victory would look like, though I got to admit I sure recognized defeat when I looked it in the eye.”

  I nodded. “Afghanistan’s not all that different,” I said. I waved away his offer of a Scotch neat, then accepted when he insisted. He poured one for himself and settled onto an ottoman covered in camouflage tent cloth.

  “This is about Emilio, huh? That’s what you said on the phone.”

  It turned out that Gava’s arrest had been a hot item of scuttlebutt in the East of Eden rumor mill. I explained about the suspicion that he intended to jump bail. “I heard he sat in on your regular Sunday night poker game, so you must have known him. I thought you might remember something he said—a comment, a quip, anything at all—that could help me find him so that my company doesn’t have to reimburse the bail bondsman who’ll have to fork over $125,000 to the state.”

  “Jeez, I don’t know as how I can add much to what you already know. Our poker game’d been running for years when Emilio moved into Eden. Hattie Hillslip over in 9A, she’s the one who went and invited him to join our Sunday night shootout. That’s what we call it. A shootout, though needless to say no guns are allowed at the table.” Uzzel chortled (Kubra’s pet word these days; she claims I don’t laugh, I chortle) at a private joke.

  “What?”

  “Emilio knew I was a gun collector from when he played here at my place,” Uzzel said. “He knew we had this little no-guns-at-the-table rule. It was one of those little rules you joke about but everyone figures is sensible. So one night, we were playing at Hank and Millie Kugler’s over in 8D, Emilio all of a sudden produced the neatest little two-shot derringer I ever set eyes on, and I’ve set eyes on my share. It was so small you could conceal it in the palm of your hand and nobody would be the wiser.”

  “How did your Sunday night regulars react to this breach of etiquette?”

  “Heck, we all laughed. What else was there to do?”

  “I see what you’re saying,” I said.

  “What am I saying?”

  “You’re saying you don’t confront a man with a weapon in the palm of his hand.”

  “Jeez, you’re putting words I never spoke in my mouth. You’re putting thoughts I never thought in my head.”

  I tried to change the subject. “How do you decide who gets to host the game any given week?”

  Uzzel let go of the previous subject reluctantly. “We take turns. One dollar is set aside from every pot to pay for the whisky and beer and cold cuts and potato chips and salted peanuts. I got to say, Emilio enjoyed the poker. He was in his element. The way he shuffled cards, the way he dealt them, he could have been a professional dealer in a previous incarnation.”

  “What was he in this incarnation?”

  “Don’t know as anybody ever asked him. He was Italian, you know, not that there’s anything wrong with being Italian. But those heavy lids that closed over his eyes didn’t encourage personal questions.”

  “Generally speaking, did he win or lose?”

  “Off the top of my head, I’d say he won more than he lost.”

  “Especially when he was dealing,” I ventured.

  Uzzel angled his head to squint at me. “What makes you say that, Mr. Gunn?”

  “Your description of the way he handled cards. I’ve seen dealers who can shuffle till you say stop and then make four aces come off the top every eighth card.”

  “Yeah, well, don’t think the thought didn’t occur to us—”

  “But the heavy lids closing over his eye didn’t invite accusations of cheating.”

  “If he’d been caught at it, I wouldn’t have backed off, I would have challenged him, derringer or not.”

  “I believe you would have, Mr. Uzzel. Did Gava ever host your shootout?”

  “He took his turn in the lineup like everyone. Three, maybe four times, sure.”

  “Did anything out of the ordinary happen when he was the host?”

  Uzzel gave this some thought. “I remember the phone ringing one night when we were playing at Emilio’s condo. He let it ring for so long it interrupted the game. Everyone stared at Emilio. Emilio stared at the phone, which was ringing off its hook. ‘Jeez, answer it,’ I said. Emilio scraped back his chair and got up and plucked the phone off the hook. He listened for a few seconds, then he turned his back on us and spat out in an angry whisper”—here Uzzel actually lowered his voice to an angry whisper and did his best to imitate Gava—“‘This is not a good time to call me, awright? I got company.’”

  “He said ‘Awright’?”

  “That’s the way he pronounced ‘all right.’ Awright. We laughed about it when we were playing tennis next day.”

  “We?”

  “Hattie Hillslip over in 9A. Her Christian name is Harriet but everyone, don’t ask me why, calls her Hattie.”

  “How did the phone conversation end?”

  “Emilio has sure got hisself a temper—it ended with him hanging up so hard I was sure he must have busted the phone.”

  The Chicano maid appeared at the door, which was ajar. “I’m off marketing, Mr. Uzzel.”

  “Don’t forget the cranberry juice, Consuelo. Lots of it.” He turned back to me. “You like cranberry juice, Mr. Gunn?”

  “I don’t think I ever tasted it.”

  “You ought to. Filled with vitamin A. Calcium. Ascorbic acid. ’Course, there’s more vitamin A in raw cherries but not as much ascorbic.” He laughed in embarrassment. “I’m a fitness nut. Jog eight, ten miles every morning even in the rain.”

  I pushed myself to my feet. “You’ve been generous with your time, Mr. Uzzel. Can I hit you with one last question?”

  He stood, too. “Why not?”

  “Ever catch a glimpse of Gava’s lady friend?”

  A queer smile spread across Uzzel’s square jaw. “Matter of fact, spotted her a few times when I was jogging on John Wayne Way before breakfast. Coming out of Emilio’s street. Blonde like one of them blonde movie stars. Enormous sunglasses which covered half her face. I reckoned she was wearing them because she wanted to be incognito. She wore one of those long raincoats even though it wasn’t raining so I didn’t get a good look at her body. But I’ll bet she came equipped with a good figure—heck, you can pretty much tell if a lady has got a good figure from the way she moves. She got into a panel truck parked in the visitors lot behind the tennis courts and drove off.”

  “Did you notice what kind of panel truck? The make? The color?”

  Uzzel scratched his head. “’Fraid not. ’Fraid I was more interested in the lady than the vehicle.”

  After Uzzel, I tried the Kuglers. I was curious to hear their version of the derringer story. I pushed the bell on 8D expecting music. Instead I heard a human voice yell, “Who the hell is it?” Go figure. I was wondering whether the promoters had thrown in Uzzel’s John Philip Sousa with the condo when Millie Kugler answered the door. “I’m the Allstate guy who called from the gatehouse,” I said. I grinned and held out my hand knowing she’d have a hard time refusing it. Get someo
ne to shake hands with you, you have one foot in the door. Kugler was out playing golf and Millie seemed only too pleased to have a visitor elbow into the monotony of her day. Her condo was crammed with stuff—cushions with the names of cities embroidered on them, statuettes of naked ladies and the Eiffel Tower, antique irons, antique candlesticks that had been electrified, antique hulls of model antique ships with dust collecting on their antique sails. Looking around, it struck me that she had enough possessions to furnish a second condominium. Millie herself was a seriously overweight, big-breasted woman in her middle sixties who had had, to my eye, one face-lift too many, which accounted for the tautness of the skin around her eyes and mouth, which explained why the only smile she could muster appeared pained. Her dyed hair was set in permanent waves on her scalp and looked something like frozen groundswells on a great lake. I could see right off she’d once turned heads when she walked into a room. She could see that I could see, which is probably why she shrugged before I could ask my first question. I suspected all of her conversations began with a shrug. It was her way of leaving unsayable things unsaid.

  It turned out that she, too, had heard about Gava’s arrest, but on her rumor mill he’d been selling cocaine, not buying. Yes indeed, she recalled the night when he’d produced the derringer. “One instant those long beautiful fingers of his were empty, the next, hocus-pocus, he was holding this tiny handgun in the palm of his hand. It was so small I thought it had to be a toy. He was laughing to beat the band. I think he’d put more than his share of bourbon under his belt because once he started laughing he seemed to have trouble stopping.”

  “Knew a woman once who said she couldn’t cry—said she was afraid once she started she’d never be able to stop.”

  “What’s that got to do with me?”

  She was defending a border that hadn’t been attacked. “Just trying to make small talk,” I said lamely.

  “Cut to the chase, Mr. Gunn.”

  I cut to the chase.

  Yes, she recalled the night he’d gotten a phone call when he was playing host to the shootout crowd. In her memory, Gava referred to the caller by name. “It was either Annette or Annabel,” Millie Kugler said. “I have difficulty placing faces when they’re out of context but I never forget a name. The phone call impressed everyone because it revealed a side of Emilio we’d never seen. Normally, he was a pussycat, the flirtatious neighbor eager as the next man to casually brush the back of his wrist against your bosom. I lost count of the times he went out of his way to carry my shopping bags from the trunk of my car into my kitchen. The one or two times I saw him angry, his eyes seemed to go dead. Oh, I heard from Alvin—you ought to talk to him, he’s the concierge here at East of Eden—about Emilio’s blonde bimbo. Alvin is always passing on the latest rumor. We joke that he’s the host of a morning gossip program called Radio Eden. Alvin let everyone know that Emilio had to turn up the volume of the radio to drown out the racket of their hanky-panky. Shoot, when we were younger, Hank and I used to turn up the radio, too. Twice a day on a good day.”

  “Did you ever set eyes on Gava’s blonde visitor?”

  Millie shook her head. “The way Alvin tells it, she turned up after my bedtime and departed at the crack of.”

  “Emilio ever give you cause to think he wasn’t happy here?”

  Millie turned to stare out the window. Several people in tennis shorts were cutting across her lawn heading for the courts. “I need Alvin to put up a DON’T WALK ON THE ASTROTURF sign.” She turned back to me. “What were you saying?”

  “Did Gava seem to you to be happy here?”

  “What are you suggesting, Mr. Gunn? That he’s not a bail jumper after all but a fugitive from a retirement Gulag?” She guffawed at her own little joke. “To answer your question, nobody’s happy here. This is a gated senior community. This is a pearly-gated predeath community. The reason no one is happy here is that no one here is young anymore. Shoot, you need to be young to be happy anywhere.”

  “Gava was only forty-two.”

  She favored me with one of her pained smiles. “Maybe he felt uncomfortable around fogies. I know I do, even if I’m one of the fogies. Truth is, I wasn’t surprised to hear Emilio had upped and disappeared.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Emilio looked and acted like someone who’d been sentenced to East of Eden.”

  “You want to go and spell that out?”

  “When my Hank was in the navy—oh my, tempus certainly does fugit, that was forty-two, forty-three years ago—he was forever counting how many days he had left before his discharge. It used to drive me up the wall. He was a short-timer who counted time. He’d cross off the days on a calendar. I had the eerie feeling Emilio was counting days like my Hank. If he didn’t cross off days on an actual calendar, he was sure as shoot crossing them off in his head. He was forever asking what date it was. I’d say, to give you a for instance, that it was the twenty-fifth and he’d say something about March being almost over and summer being just around the corner. If Emilio winds up jumping bail like you think, trust me, trust a woman’s intuition, it’s because his time here was up.”

  I was running out of poker players to interview. According to Alvin Epley, Mitch Tredwell in 14B was off on a Mediterranean cruise, Cal Pringle in 16B and C had gone to the Mayo Clinic in Baltimore for his annual medical checkup. Which left Harriet Hillslip, the woman who brought Gava into the Sunday night shootout. I called her from the gatehouse to introduce myself. “Don’t need more insurance,” she said when she caught my Allstate spiel. “Canceled my life insurance after my third divorce, didn’t want to give the son of a bitch of an ex a motive to kill me.”

  “I’m not selling insurance,” I assured her. “I was hoping to ask you some questions about Emilio Gava.”

  “Hello? Emilio the bail jumper?”

  “Word spreads fast in East of Eden.”

  Mrs. Hillslip in the flesh was a handsome woman in her early fifties who shared a condo with her old mother. You couldn’t help but notice that Mrs. Hillslip had a shapely figure—she was wearing a ribbed chest-clinging sweater and jeans so tight it made a feller wonder how she got into them in the morning, how she got out of them at night, always assuming she got out of them at night. She perused my business card. “Knew a Lemuel once. Must have been when I worked in South Carolina in real estate. Lemuel Gulliver I think his name was. Or was that a character in something I read?” She shook her head to clear out the cobwebs. “You-all call me Hattie, Lemuel,” she simpered as she let me in. “Everyone around Eden does. Mother!” she hollered at the old woman rocking in a wooden rocking chair watching a television quiz show with the sound turned off, “we have got a visitor.” The old woman never turned her head. “She’s hard of hearing,” Hattie explained as she led the way into a small kitchenette, “which is why we never bother turning up the sound on the TV. Deafness can be a blessing, Lemuel. Mother watches television most of her waking hours. Before she became deaf she used to watch it with the sound turned way up. Drove me half crazy.”

  “Does she read lips?” I asked.

  “She reads minds,” Hattie said matter-of-factly. “It’s downright disconcerting. She always seems to know what I’m going to say before I write it down on her pad.” She settled onto one of the designer metal stools set around the egg-shaped table. I sat on another stool across from her. “Coffee, tea or me,” she said, her fingers on my wrist. She laughed when she saw my expression change to confused. “Shoot, only kidding.” She sat back and eyed me. “You look too savvy to be an insurance salesman, Lemuel. What is it you really sell?”

  “Services,” I said.

  “I’ll take a wild guess. You-all exterminate rodents.”

  I had to smile grimly at how close she’d come. “I hunted down rodents in my day. I let the people I worked for do the exterminating.”

  “You’re not joking, are you?” The tip of her tongue flicked at her upper lip. “So that’s what brings you to East of Ede
n,” she said. “Is Emilio Gava the rodent you’re after?”

  I smiled away her question. Prodded by my occasional interjections, Hattie warmed to the subject of Emilio Gava. “Fact is, our paths crossed more often than the other players in our poker shootout.”

  “How’s that?”

  “First time he sat in on the weekly shootout in my condo, he noticed that my phone had one of those unit counters attached to it—it’s right there on the counter behind you. I’d more or less inherited it from the previous owners, along with everything electric, since they were moving to the south of France where none of this stuff would work. Anyhow, Emilio took me aside one night and asked if he could come by now and then to use my phone.”

  “Did he give a reason?”

  “He said something about being harassed by the IRS for something a business partner of his did. He thought the government might be tapping his phone line.”

  “How often did he use your phone?”

  “Oh, he didn’t take advantage. Maybe once or twice a week. He’d come by when I was off shopping and bring Mother a strawberry tart he’d picked up at that French bakery in Las Cruces, along with a pile of movie magazines—Mother can spend endless hours reading movie magazines when she’s not watching TV. When I came back from my shopping, I’d find a scrap of paper on the kitchen table marked with how many units he’d used, along with the money to pay for it. He always left more than enough and never let me make change. If he was still here when I got back, I’d invite him to stay for dinner. Sometimes he accepted.”