by David Freed
“The hibiscus is edible,” he said, as if he hadn’t heard a word of my exchange with Carlisle and Zambelli.
“Bonus,” I said.
Lamont Royale chauffeured me back to the North Las Vegas airport in Carlisle’s four-seat Rolls-Royce Phantom Drophead convertible. The car had teakwood paneling and the initials “GC” stitched into its leather headrests. I rode shotgun.
“Don’t be too upset with him,” Lamont said. “Mr. Carlisle’s a fine man.”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
Royale told me how he was originally from Florida. He’d had a few minor scrapes with the law growing up, he said, and was grateful to Carlisle for having taken a chance on him. He told me how much he missed his girlfriend, a dental hygienist named Laura who lived with her widowed father in Los Angeles. They saw each other on weekends, taking turns driving across the desert.
“They’re real tight, Laura and her dad; she doesn’t want to be too far away from him,” Lamont said, glancing over his shoulder as he changed lanes. “I’d move to LA, but then I’d have to quit working for Mr. Carlisle. I just can’t see doing that. Best job I ever had.”
“Stuck between the rock and hard place.”
“Exactly.”
He asked me how long Savannah and I had been married.
Long enough to know better, I said.
We stopped at a red light. A van pulled up in the next lane over, hauling a rolling billboard—a toll-free number and the words, “Fresh Hot Girls Delivered To Your Door In 20 Minutes or Less!!!” superimposed over the picture of a huge naked breast.
“I feel terrible for Savannah. She’s such a class act,” Royale said. “I hope they catch whoever killed Mr. Echevarria. I never had the pleasure of meeting him, but I’m sure he was a real good guy.”
“I’m sorry, did you say something?” I said, distracted by the giant breast.
“You don’t really think Miles Zambelli had anything to do with it, do you?” Royale said.
“I think that low-wing airplanes are easier to taxi in a crosswind than high-wing planes. I think that the national championship in college football should be decided in single-elimination tournament play, like basketball. I also happen to think my landlady makes the best brisket this side of the Wailing Wall. Beyond that, I don’t know what I really think anymore.”
“I just don’t think Miles is capable of murder,” Royale said.
“You push somebody hard enough,” I said, “they’re capable of anything.”
Traffic on Interstate 15 was stop-and-go from Baker south to Victorville as a legion of Southern Californians, their weekend debaucheries in Sin City come to an end, inched their way down Cajon Pass and into the eastern fringes of the Los Angeles Basin. Driving would’ve taken seven hours given all the congestion. I made it back to Rancho Bonita via air in a little more than two.
Leonardo da Vinci is purported to have said that once a person has tasted flight, “You will walk the earth with your eyes turned skywards, for there you have been and there you will long to return.” Old Leo nailed it—at least on days when the vagaries of Mother Nature aren’t factored into the mix, as was the case that afternoon. The weather had improved radically in time for my flight back to Rancho Bonita. No clouds. No turbulence. So silky was the air that it felt like the Duck was fixed in time and place, dangling there on some invisible thread while the earth glided silently by beneath us. I tried to think profound thoughts. Like how privileged I was to be unshackled from the wingless masses two miles below me, and how grateful I should’ve felt simply to be alive on such a glorious day. But all I could think about was how that little weenie, Miles Zambelli, had slept with my ex-wife. Which didn’t even begin to compare with the venom I harbored for Echevarria. Even now, after all the years, I despised him for having stolen Savannah. I hated myself even more for my inability to let go of it. We’d been brothers-in-arms. Spilled blood together. Gotten stinking blind-eyed drunk together. The Buddha believed that to understand everything was to forgive everything. I had a long way to go, I realized, before I could forgive Arlo Echevarria for anything, let alone everything. But I told myself that I would try harder. To find who killed him would be a big first step. Given our shared history, I suppose I owed him that much.
“Cessna Four Charlie Lima, Joshua Approach, turn right thirty degrees for traffic, Boeing 737, four miles southbound, descending out of 11,000 feet into Burbank. Caution wake turbulence.”
“Four Charlie Lima is coming right thirty degrees, looking for traffic.”
The jetliner was approaching from above and to my right. I tipped my starboard wing, nudged the right rudder pedal and eased into a standard rate turn. My new course would take me well behind the jet. The trick would be to avoid flying through the vortexes of violent air corkscrewing down and away from his wingtips—invisible mini-tornadoes that could easily flip the Duck like a flapjack and definitely ruin my day. I turned another twenty degrees and widened the angle between us until our opposing paths were roughly parallel. By the time I turned back on my original heading, we’d be far behind him.
The 737 passed off my left wingtip at a distance of less than two miles. I could see an Eskimo’s face painted on the vertical stabilizer. Alaska Airlines. I wondered how many Eskimos were on board. My guess was zero.
I checked the answering machine in my office at the airport after landing. There were no messages. Not that I expected any. OK, that’s a lie. I had hoped that maybe Savannah would’ve called to offer a truce. But I suppose she could have just as easily called me on my cell phone. She hadn’t done that, either.
Kiddiot was asleep in the oak tree when I got home. I told him that I’d missed him and encouraged him to come down and share some quality time. He raised his head, yawned, and went back to sleep. My punishment for having abandoned him.
“He wouldn’t touch his food,” Mrs. Schmulowitz said, dragging a trash bag out her back door. “I’m telling you, that is one persnickety cat.”
I took the bag from her despite her insistence that she was perfectly capable of taking out her own garbage and deposited it in a can out in the alley.
“By the way, somebody else came by looking for you,” she said when I walked back into the yard through the gate. “Not the hunky bill collector, either.”
“Who was it?”
“I didn’t ask. But I’ll tell you one thing: whoever he was, he was no fan of yours. Some piece of work, this schmuck. He wanted to know where you were. Tells me he’s your friend. So I say to him, ‘If you’re his friend, you must know where he is. You don’t gotta ask me.’ Then he gives me this look, like Paul Muni in Scarface, you know, the original, before the remake, the one with—what the blazes is his name?”
“Al Pacino?”
“Al Pacino—always screaming! Every movie like a human steam whistle, this man. OK, Mr. Top of Your Lungs, we know your vocal cords work. What else did you get for Hanukkah? Paul Muni never had to raise his voice. Not once. Now, there was an actor. And I’ll let you in on a little secret: his name wasn’t Muni. It was Meier—Meshilem Meier Weisenfreund. And I don’t have to tell you what kind of name that is. That’s right. Paul Muni was Hebrew! Lauren Bacall, too, and Kirk Douglas. And William Shatner! Not to mention Mr. Spock.”
“Not to change the subject, Mrs. Schmulowitz, but could we please go back to the schmuck who came to see me?”
“The schmuck. Right. So anyway, again he asks me, ‘Where is he?’ Meaning you. So I tell him, ‘Listen, buster brown, if you don’t get off my porch in the next five seconds, I’m calling the cops.’ He gives me that look again, like I’m supposed to be afraid, then turns around and leaves. A real shtik fleish mit tzvei eigen, that one.”
The man she described was dusky, five-foot-ten, maybe taller, 180 pounds or so.
“Built like a wide receiver,” Mrs. Schmulowitz said.
He wore sunglasses, blue jeans, a plain white T-shirt, untucked, and a yellow ball cap with the logo of a cow on it.
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br /> “You sure it was a cow?”
Mrs. Schmulowitz smirked. “I may not come from a long line of farmers, Bubeleh, but I do know what a cow looks like.”
“What about his car? What did that look like?”
“Small. White. With fancy schmancy wheels, and one of those things on the back.”
“Things?”
“Like a race car.”
“A spoiler?”
“Spoiler, schmoiler. One of those things. Like a wing.”
I asked her if the car could’ve been a Honda.
“What do I know from a Honda?” Mrs. Schmulowitz said. “All these cars today. A New Yorker. A Buick Regal. Now, those were cars!”
White. Small. With fancy schmancy wheels. And one of those things on the back. It sounded suspiciously like the car that had pursued me from the airport before I left for Los Angeles.
Kiddiot climbed down from the tree with slow caution, one paw after the other, and jumped the last couple of feet to the ground. He rubbed up against Mrs. Schmulowitz’s legs, making little chirping noises. When he was finished showing my landlady how much he was into her, he sauntered toward me—and trotted past without stopping, straight into the garage. I made a note to self: no more cat toys for Kiddiot from the clearance bin at Petco. No more Taco Bell leftovers, either. Not until he showed me some love, too.
“Some nerve,” Mrs. Schmulowitz observed. “After all you’ve done for him.”
You don’t need an appointment at Primo’s on Cortez Avenue in downtown Rancho Bonita. You walk in and climb into Primo’s ancient barber chair, assuming it’s otherwise unoccupied. Primo hands you a well-worn Playboy without asking and pins a sanitary neck strip around your neck. He takes a cutting smock and flaps it high into the air, the way matadors flap capes, then lets it settle gently around your shoulders while you thumb through the magazine. He raises the chair with a few pumps of the pneumatic lift, pivots you so you’re facing the mirror, and then, standing beside you, comb and scissors at the ready, asks, “So, how would you like your hair cut today?” Then he proceeds to ignore your detailed instructions and cuts your hair the way he thinks it should be cut, which is usually not half-bad. For fifteen bucks, including a beard trim and a five-minute neck rub, you can’t go wrong.
Business was slow that morning. Primo was sitting in the chair, his own jet-black hair pomaded and perfectly combed as usual, wearing his usual spotless sky-blue Mexican wedding shirt. The bell jingled over the door. Primo looked up from the latest issue of Boxing Monthly.
“Que pasa, Logan?”
“How’ve you been, champ?”
“It’s all good, boss.”
Primo got up out of his barber chair, a little stiff, befitting a sixty-one-year-old former fighter. I settled into the chair. The comfortable brown leather seat was warm and bowed like an old swayback horse. He handed me a Playboy.
After the sanitary strip had been pinned in place and the smock settled down around me, he said, “And how would we like our haircut today?”
“In silence,” I said, perusing Miss February. “Need to catch up on my reading.”
“In silence it shall be,” Primo said.
Our little joke.
Primo and I rarely talked while he worked his magic on my tresses. We liked it that way, content in each other’s company. No need to humor or impress. He’d been a pretty good welterweight in his prime, I gleaned from what little of his career he’d shared with me. His nose was bent like the blade of a hockey stick—a souvenir from a summer night forty years earlier when he’d gone twelve rounds with Pipino Cuevas at the Fabulous Forum. The crowd cheered, “Primo! Primo! Primo!” over and over as he stood toe-to-toe with the younger, stronger Cuevas, giving as good as he got, only to loose on a split decision. Every writer sitting ringside that night said it was a con job. But it didn’t matter to Primo. He’d gone the distance with the champion when every bookie from Reno to Tijuana swore the match wouldn’t last two minutes.
He got out barber shears and a clean comb from a drawer while I read all about Miss February. I was old enough to be her father. Snip-snip-snip. Primo circled me like he was still in the ring, clipping and combing. The shop was redolent of bay rum and Aqua Velva. My scalp tingled pleasurably. I closed my eyes and let my mind drift. Fifteen minutes later, we were done.
He handed me a mirror to check the back of my head. I nodded my approval and gave him twenty bucks. He deposited the bill in an old cigar box and took out a five spot.
“Keep the change.”
Primo forced the bill into my hand. “No way, boss.”
“It’s called a tip, Primo.”
“You ain’t been in for a cut in three months, Logan. That tells me you gotta be more hard up than me. So you keep it. Spend it on your lady. Buy her some flowers or something.”
I made a joke about him not realizing how much flowers cost these days.
“Don’t matter how much they cost. Just get ’em. It’ll make her feel good,” Primo said. “The thing you always gotta remember about women is this: at any given moment, they are what they feel.”
Primo’s version of a fortune cookie. Every customer got one on their way out the door, whether they wanted it or not.
“I have no idea what that means, champ.”
“Go buy yourself a copy of Cosmo,” Primo said. “Probably do you some good.”
He was right. It probably would’ve helped, if I’d actually had a woman in my life. One particular woman, anyway.
ELEVEN
They say meditation is an adventure in self-discovery. It’s supposed to bring one a sense of fullness, of completion. It is, according to those who swear by its power, the eternal essence of nature taking on the order of the universe within the mortal human frame. Whatever the hell that means.
I’ve tried sitting and meditating. The sit-stand method of meditation. The recliner-chair method. I’ve tried mirror gazing. All with no joy. While I wait for the indescribable bliss that the earth is supposed to unleash upon those who meditate with sincerity and patience, my head is filled with questions like, “Who do the Broncos play Sunday?” or “Does anyone really know what Jell-O is made of?” or “I wonder what Savannah is doing right now?”
Savannah. It always seemed to come back to Savannah.
I was sitting lotus-like on the sand at Jenkins Beach, trying to become one with the universe and failing miserably. In the haze, the oil platforms two miles offshore resembled aircraft carriers. A jogger ran past me, her path paralleling the retreating tide line. She was petite, mid-twenties, with sinewy legs and a strong, determined face more handsome than pretty. Her chestnut hair was pulled back in a severely tight ponytail that flapped side-to-side like a metronome, the way Savannah’s hair did, when we used to go running together.
I shut my eyes and tried to focus on my inner self. “I am not this library of memories. I have no history. I have no biography.” I repeated it over and over, my self-inquiry incantation. “I am the space. I have always been the space, and I crush these bonds of attachment now.”
But it was no use. The universe and I definitely were not one.
My phone rang. The caller ID said Savannah Echevarria. She was angry with me. What else was new?
“First, you tell my father you think his business partner killed Arlo—”
“—I never said that.”
“Then, you have the audacity to tell him that Miles Zambelli did it?”
“I never said that, Savannah.”
“Well, you certainly insinuated it!”
“You asked me to help. I’m trying to.”
“I asked you to go to the police. I didn’t ask you to piss off everybody. You need to stop asking all these questions.”
“Why? Because you’re afraid of what I’ll find out?”
The anxiety in her voice was undeniable. “Just stop. Please. Before it’s too late.”
She hung up.
I sat on the beach the rest of the afternoon, staring at the w
aves, trying to comprehend her words. Before it’s too late. Why did Savannah want me to back off when she’d been so adamant that I get involved to begin with? I thought of Primo’s advice: At any given moment, a woman is what she feels. Savannah’s fear was palpable. But why? What had happened in the interim between her begging me to tell the police what I knew about Echevarria, and her insisting that I stop asking questions about who may have killed him? The answer had to be in the kind of questions I was asking. Or the people I was asking them to.
I called Buzz. Dangling the promise of a gift certificate to Dave and Buster’s, I asked him to check the records for me on Miles Zambelli. Buzz said he’d get back to me.
I drove a circuitous route to the airport, checking my mirrors frequently, my gun tucked between my legs. Nobody followed me.
Larry’s hangar was empty. He’d gone for the night. There were two messages on my answering machine. The first was from Eugen Dragomir, my one and only prospective student pilot. His father was rushing him a check made out in my name for $5,000. Eugen would be by with the money as soon as it arrived. I allowed myself a smile. Another five grand on top of the twenty-five large from Carlisle. I vowed not to tell Kiddiot. Knowing him, he would definitely demand I buy him more cat toys.
The second message was from Lamont Royale. He said he needed to speak with me urgently. I called him at the number he left. It took him several rings to answer.
“I’m in the middle of something,” he said in a hoarse whisper. “Let me get back to you.”
“I’ll be here.”
I sat down at my desk and reread the paid death notice Savannah placed in the Times after Echevarria died.
He was born in Oakland in 1961. Bullshit. The Arlo Echevarria I knew was born in Guatemala and emigrated at age five, crossing the border at Calexico with his mother, both hidden behind the driver’s seat of a tractor-trailer truck hauling cantaloupes up from Zacatecas. They’d settled in San Diego and later Oceanside, where Echevarria’s mother found work cleaning the bachelor officers’ quarters at Camp Pendleton. The Marines made a lasting impression on Echevarria. He would enlist in the Corps on his seventeenth birthday.