by Daniel Pyne
Kirby said it was. He said he wanted her to know that their hard history had surfaced again, but that he had it under control. That he would continue to protect her. And she laughed again, and he wondered, ruefully, if he would ever love anyone as much as he had loved this woman, and it was not a rhetorical question, and, no, he didn’t have an answer.
“If you’ve really got it under control, (a) why quit? And (b) shouldn’t you have kept this to yourself? Saved me the worry?”
Kirby didn’t like where this was going.
“Or is this just about you reminding me what a stand-up guy you are?”
“Do you remember,” he said, not really answering, “when you told me you wanted to have kids?” Her eyes flickered with something. It was a sore point, the one time she’d shown vulnerability during the whole torrid affair, when she had opened up and he’d seen what she wanted from him: Tell the wife, marry me, commitment, a future. “You said it’s all we have. People, human beings. Our brush with immortality, a promise of a better world, the one pure hopeful thing we can leave behind. All the cases, the settlements, the convictions, the bum-rush for money and power, all that is evanescent, you said, shadows on the walls of the cave.”
“You remember all that?”
“Yes.”
She said, fondly, so softly he could hardly hear her, “I said a lot of batshit crazy while under the influence of you.”
For a moment it looked to him like she was transported back, lost in remembering, comfortable with him, saying nothing. Or maybe that was just wishful thinking; he broke the spell:
“You think you’ll ever have kids?”
“What the fuck, Kirby? No. I won’t, and you shouldn’t,” she said, trying to make a joke of it, he thought, and failing. “And anyway, the whole immortality thing is overrated. Just more time to repeat the same mistakes.”
“Right.”
“Don’t look at me like that,” she said. “Please don’t.”
He shrugged.
A soft buzzing drew her around the desk, where she looked at the message from her secretary on the narrow LED text display of the office intercom and keyed something back and then looked up at him with what he took to be as much apology as she could gather, though it was also clear that she wanted him to go. “I have a conference call in five minutes.”
He made a slight, weird, formal bow, and started out the door.
“Kirby.” On his look back at her: “Was it worth it?” she asked.
“No,” he lied.
—
FOR THE ENTIRE TIME he was giving his first statement, Nick Mahrez’s face held no expression, betrayed no emotion. The light in his eyes was dimmed, but he was resolute, almost serene, and for four hours he spoke deliberately, and precisely, as if reading from cue cards in front of him.
It had taken thirty-six hours to strike a deal with Damien Belasco (who would never know that the reason Kirby had left messages for him was to talk about leaving Justice for the dark side) and another eight hours to arrange a convenient time for Mahrez to come in. His client was still, Belasco reported nebulously, trying to find a safe place to stay.
“In November of 1984, at a party on a boat in Ensenada Bay, the boat belonged to my then partner Vic—”
“—Victor Arnold?”
“Yes. I introduced my childhood friend Richard Poole to Juan Blanco, a Mexican businessman who was always interested in connecting with young, ambitious American politicians.”
Kirby had lasted all of three days in self-imposed exile. Colter had found him in shorts and flip-flops getting some pink on his pale legs at a Mission Beach brunch place he liked only because it wasn’t crowded, and the mimosas were tolerable.
“Guess who just showed up in my office,” she had announced without preamble, “alone, no counsel, ready to roll up his sleeves and go to work for us?” Kirby didn’t want to engage, so she had answered herself, “Stix Mahrez.” Colter was smug, sunglasses tipped back into her hair, smartly dressed, pantyhose picking up glints of muddled sunlight like somebody had gilded her legs. “I know: Shut up, Sabrina. You don’t care anymore. Well, he says he’ll agree to be our CI, and help us bring down the mayor to clean up City Hall. Boom.
“He only had one condition,” she had added, when Kirby still didn’t respond.
He had been only half listening, wondering how the hell she had found him, but now he had anticipated what she was going to say before she said it:
“Me.”
“He wants you to run the show. That’s right. You could have knocked me over with a feather.” She had been completely earnest, delighted. For the first time, she had smiled like a human being. And it was, Kirby had to admit, a beautiful smile.
“Poole was in the California State Assembly at the time you made the introduction,” Kirby remembered and, because Mahrez was talking so quietly, nudged the Naugra gain again, watching the sound meter needles waggle.
“First term,” Mahrez confirmed. “That’s right.” He looked rested, but still changed, like a man who’d undergone a religious conversion. A faraway, closed-for-renovations look. Kirby wanted to ask him about it, but they weren’t, technically, alone in the room.
“And what was Blanco’s business?”
Up in her office, Colter had a soundless cable feed from the dysfunctional video camera in the interview room, and she absently observed Mahrez’s deposition as she attacked a mountain of paperwork she told Kirby she’d been neglecting in her first week on the job. “I trust you completely,” she’d said.
“Restaurants, bars, Tijuana real estate. God, I think he even had a Ford dealership back then,” Mahrez recounted.
“But principally?”
“Principally, marijuana and cocaine.”
“And to your knowledge, did Richard Poole continue to be in contact with Juan Blanco, after that introduction?”
As Mahrez thought about his answer, Kirby couldn’t deny that he had missed this. Like a junkie craves the needle, for what it promises, and rarely delivers.
“To my knowledge, yes,” Mahrez said. But something in the way he said it made Kirby suspect his snitch was skipping something crucial.
The door opened and Hazel Fish’s head angled in, his eyes drawing Kirby out into the hallway, where he waited for the door to fully close after Kirby emerged.
“Blanco is dead,” Fish said softly.
Kirby canted his head and wasn’t sure he’d heard it clearly. “What?”
“Shot last night, in TJ.” And knowing Kirby’s next question, he said, “Some swanky disco where all the Mexican cool kids go.”
Kirby glanced back through the door window at Mahrez. Fish followed Kirby’s eyes, but kept talking. “Shooter reportedly fled on foot in, you know, the usual hail of gunfire and so forth, which usually translates to ‘nobody lifted a finger to stop him.’ Two dozen witnesses who all went blind in the moment. There’s a long line of little Caesars ready to step in for Blanco, and Tijuana cops, what do they care? La-dee-dah, life goes on.”
Kirby kept watching Mahrez, looking for a tell he sensed he wouldn’t get; eventually Stix seemed to feel Kirby’s gaze and looked up to meet it, making Kirby look away, back blankly at Fish, who hadn’t stopped his tale.
“A second victim, Anglo, possibly American, was killed in the backseat, but the TJ cops aren’t releasing any information on him. Somewhere between none and many innocent spectators got hit by the bodyguards’ useless return fire, but everyone else is still alive. So far.” Shakes his head: “Gonna be turf war, for sure, and for a good bit, yeah?”
“Yeah.” Kirby was silent for a moment. “Possibly American?”
“Well, specifically not Mexican—we’re the international shorthand for white guys, is all.” Fish studied Kirby. “What.”
“Nothing,” Kirby said.
—
TI
NA Z. FELL AWAY postcoital, flushed and fumbling for her purse on the bed stand, as she continued the story she’d been telling, “—And when he pulled the trigger—when the flash of the shotgun happened and I felt impact and wind go out of me, I forgot I was wearing a vest and I thought I was a goner.” Her hands trembled as she shook from its package and stabbed a slender Virginia Slims in her mouth without lighting it. Her knuckles were red and lumpy from punching Bert, but Kirby didn’t remark on them; he still hadn’t explained to her his own bandaged hand.
She became suddenly aware of the soft click click click of a needle across the end grooves in Kirby’s spent Lily Himes record, which Tina had decided she was starting to love. Jazz. Who knew?
“Since when do you smoke?”
“I’m thinking of starting.”
“Nobody starts smoking at, what—how old are you?”
“Don’t judge.”
“Okay.”
“It’s lame,” she admitted. “I know. I’m not lighting up yet, though.”
“Uh-huh.” Kirby traced the Texas-shaped bruise between her breasts with his finger and she shivered.
“I was dead,” she said, after a moment. She rolled up onto him again and found a comfortable fit, hips and pelvis. “And do you want to know what—who—my last thoughts were of?”
A long beat. If he answered right, she said to herself, she would tell him about Willa.
But he said, “No.”
Her heart tripped, she nodded, brave smile, hiding her disappointment and pretending she was expecting him to say just that all along. They had discrete boundaries. Her mouth went slack, lips dry, chapped; she feared she was hard-featured in the unforgiving last of the day’s light. Kirby smiled, distracted, but holding her gaze. She wouldn’t cry, she’d taught herself at Quantico to never cry. But there was emotion in her voice she couldn’t conceal, “What are we doing here, Kirby? What . . . is all this? I mean . . .”
“I don’t know, Z. I don’t know,” he said.
For a while they stayed that way, skin to skin, not moving, without judgment, without sentiment. His neck hot against her cheek, and she could feel his pulse, steady. Until it got so dark there was only the memory of the other, and the weight of him, under her.
Tina rose and moved to the edge of the bed, and began to pull her clothes back on. Sidelong, she saw the soft slope of him sit up in some ambient outside light.
“Lily Himes raised me,” he said, picking up a conversation she thought he was done with.
“Wait. Your jazz singer Lily Himes?”
“Yeah. The long story.”
She sorted it out. Thought of Willa. Stared at him, in shock plus maybe, if she was willing to admit to it, panic. “She’s black.”
“Well, she was what she liked to call, in those days, high yellow.”
Trying to comprehend it. “Lily Himes is your mother.”
“No. I said she raised me. Kind of a foster thing.”
Tina’s mind swirled, but at least she could breathe again. And then some part of her was troubled by why it mattered, and the question would keep coming back, again and again, for a long time, and she would have no answer.
But right then Kirby was talking. Confessing. “It’s not really as confusing as it sounds. And my foster dad was white as Wonder Bread, so. But. You know. Love is color-blind.”
“Love?”
“Or what passes for it.”
“The fuck do you know about love,” she said. It wasn’t a question. For a moment there was nothing either one of them could think to say. But Kirby, evidently misreading her silence as frustration, uncomfortably resumed:
“My real mom died and Lily took me. Himes was a stage name, she was born Eula Kirby. Then she left me with her nephew Oscar and went to Tokyo to sing when the West Coast club scene fell apart. I was twelve-ish . . . and, well, she kind of forgot to come back.” He took a pause. He sounded odd.
“But you had a foster dad.”
“They weren’t married. They didn’t live together. And he was on a military charter plane that went down en route to Saigon, 1962. Flying Tiger 739. One of two Flying Tigers that went down that day, you can only imagine the conspiracy theories.” He stopped again, then said, “I know. Pretty fucking tangled. Anyway. Did I say too much?”
Tina wasn’t looking at him, wasn’t looking at anything, she was motionless, soft, suspended in the darkness.
“It wasn’t as sad as it all sounds,” he added, discomfited by her quiet. “She left me her songs.”
Tina felt ashamed, suddenly, and overwhelmed, and even in the darkness kept her head turned away so that Kirby couldn’t see her face.
“I never tell anyone. But maybe it explains something. I don’t know. I so grew up in the gray.”
Another fragile silence settled and Tina took her watch and saw the time. “I gotta go. The baby’ll be hungry again.”
“Isn’t your husband home?”
“He is,” she said softly, “but.” Leaning clumsy, eyes averted, she kissed him, sadly, too quickly and, dropping the unsmoked cigarette back loose in her purse, took out a compact to check her makeup and hair in the mirror.
“Losertown dusk is a saffron shower of soft, warm deceit, promising heaven and delivering darkness,” Kirby recited from memory.
She wasn’t really listening anymore. “Who said that?”
“Stix Mahrez. He waxed kinda poetic, toward the end of his interview today.”
“Mmm.”
—
KIRBY ONLY HEARD, couldn’t see, Tina Z. walk out. It never occurred to him that it might be the last time she would ever be in his apartment.
Ninety minutes later he was on a gravel road in the hills above Tijuana, standing outside the private dance club where Juan Blanco had died, Café Mayahuel, his guided tour courtesy of a well-fed, acne-scarred local policía captain named DiMaria, who claimed his uncle was an ex–Los Angeleno cop who made bank from a civil rights suit against the LAPD in ’68 and retired to Todos Santos, where he was a major player, now, in commercial real estate.
“Note the classy velvet awning,” DiMaria said, gesturing as if directing a remake. “Cocaine King Juan Blanco swaggers out, late, red-carpet-like with his posse of hired muchachas and local hard guys. There’s a crowd at the valet stand, but the jefe has his ride waiting, steps past the roped-off gauntlet of customers queued to get in, slaps a roll of pesos into the quaking palm of the valet captain—an individual who must’ve seen it all, no?, yet nobody can find him today—and gets behind the wheel of his Land Rover ébano, his retinue of jamooks about to join him, but this shadow separates from the shadows—gringo, muy pálido, according to witnesses who may or may not have been there. Suddenly? A pistol conjured from his clothing—”
“—And blows Blanco away.”
“Sí, Señor. The Land Rover, she was here”—the captain walked it off—“and the killer, he comes quick up from over here. Nobody pays no attention to him until, boom boom, vidrio quebrado, it’s everywhere, you know, and people ducking and scattering and the women screaming.
“Boom boom. Dos mordeduras de la manzana, isn’t that how you say it?”
Two bites of the apple? “No,” Kirby told him, “nobody says that about a shooting.”
“Well, anyway. Two bullets, two bodies. Professional hit.”
“Or just efficient.” Kirby stood where the captain said the shooter had stood, and stretched his arm out, making a gun with his hand. Even he couldn’t have missed from that close.
Gap Band bumped out of the club like the whole building had a heartbeat.
“Did he shoot the Anglo first?”
“¿Qué?”
“The gunman.” Kirby turned back to the Mexican policeman and lied. “I was told the gunman shot the Anglo in the backseat, before he shot Juan Blanco.”
Captai
n DiMaria seemed surprised that Kirby would know this, but pursed his lips and slowly nodded. “That is true. Strange, unless: Some say this backseat Yanquí was El Ventrilocuo. And Blanco merely his dummy.”
“Ventriloquist?” Kirby remembered where he first heard it. “Was he American?”
“We assumed. We only assumed.”
“Did he have another name, this Anglo?”
“El Ventrilocuo has been in Tijuana for a long, long time. Nobody knows how long. He had no papers, they say, just a permiso from an official in Mexico City, we left him alone,” Captain Nostro explained. “I, personally, never crossed paths with him.”
“Every man has a name,” Kirby said stubbornly.
“Juan Blanco called him Mi Fantasma,” the cop said. “Ghost.”
The night was clear and dry. The dawn would bring another muddled gray shroud of imbroglio. Kirby looked back down the hill, across the jumbled crazy-quilt lights of Tijuana, to the luminous, orderly grid of his own country, stretching north into the big empty.
—
STIX MAHREZ’S HOUSE was destroyed: charred lumps of rubble, broken walls, with the blackened exclamation point of a chimney.
A black Lincoln Town Car with city plates glided down the driveway and stopped, headlights raking these ruins. Mayor Richard Poole got out from the back. A deputy on security detail emerged from the front seat to join him, but Poole murmured for the man to stay with the car, and walked across the burned-brown lawn, around the ruins.
The still, dark water of the infinity pool shimmered and a skim of ash shifted away from the glistering edge. This ocean view was, the mayor thought, spectacular, and he stepped up on the raised decking of the Jacuzzi to look down at the beach, searching, finally finding the figure he expected sitting, far below, knees folded up, arms braced, staring out at the roiling white surf.
Mahrez didn’t turn even as Poole got close, bare feet squeaking on the damp, low-tide sand. Carrying his dress shoes. He came up alongside, took out a typed, folded note, and offered it to Mahrez, who finally looked, but didn’t move.
“What’s this?”