The Big Fix

by Roger L. Simon

  “That you, Koontz?”

  “Sure is, Wine. What’re you doing here? The last plane for Peking left an hour ago.”

  “Very funny, Koontz. But this happens to be my house. And if you’ll kindly move your ass out of the driveway. . . .” I continued past him and opened the door of my car.

  “Just doing my job, Wine. Protecting you taxpayers. You do pay taxes, don’t you?”

  “Twice a day and a tithe to the Policeman’s Retirement Fund.”

  “Oh, you’ve got a good sense of humor too, peeper.” He flicked on his searchlight, beaming it into my eyes, then over the facade of the house. Jacob squinted and coughed a deep bronchial cough.

  “I got a sick kid, Koontz,” I said, putting the boys down carefully in the back seat. “You wouldn’t want a case of pneumonia on your conscience.”

  He watched me for a moment. “There was a wreck up here a couple nights ago,” he said.

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Car went off the cliff. Looked like an accident but someone tipped us something else might be involved. . . .You know what I’m talking about?”

  He beamed the light in my eyes again. I didn’t give him the satisfaction of turning away.

  “Sure you don’t know what I’m talking about? I wouldn’t like to see you get a blemish on your precious little detective’s license.”

  “No idea.”

  He aimed the searchlight on the back of my car. I could hear the messages coming over the squawk box. A couple of hookers were picked up for loitering in front of the Hotel Cortes. Another full minute passed before the cop spoke again.

  “Your left-turn signal’s defective, Weinstein. You better have that fixed or you’ll get yourself a citation.” Then he tapped the driver on the shoulder and they took off.

  I paused a few seconds before following them down the hill. If I knew Koontz, he’d be hiding in some cul-de-sac waiting to pick me up for doing 20 in a 30 zone, so I went around the long way through the winding streets on the far side of Elysian Park. It felt good when I reached the freeway and was out of his jurisdiction.

  Back in Laurel Canyon, Suzanne was on the living room floor chanting a mantra with Madas. Both of them were wearing flimsy little white gowns. I could see her good breasts coming through the cotton.

  8

  NEXT MORNING I slept through the alarm. It was set for 7:30, but I pulled myself out of bed after 9:00 A.M. If I had dreams, I couldn’t remember them. Without so much as a cup of coffee I got into my car and headed for East Los Angeles in search of Alora Vazquez.

  Evergreen Way was one of those narrow rambling streets behind Brooklyn Avenue that resemble country roads more than the by-ways of a great metropolis. Much of East L.A. still looked like that, chickens running free in dirt alleys, corn growing helter-skelter in the front yards of ramshackle houses. You’d think you were in Mexico somewhere, a working-class barrio on the outskirts of Monterrey, until you reached the top of a hill and stared down at the civic center, its freeways interlacing high-rise office buildings like so many cement pretzels enclosing sterile glass monoliths.

  A rundown synagogue stood at the corner of Evergreen and Soto, a testament to the former make-up of this community. I parked to the side where a swastika showed through a thick layer of whitewash. An orange van marked DOMESTIC SERVICES INC. drove past me, ferrying the “girls” to Beverly Hills. I got out of the car and proceeded up Evergreen to number 3201 ¼. It was a stucco court built around a row of banana trees but the leaves were all wilting and the trees were obviously on their last legs. Half the apartments in the court appeared to be either empty or unoccupied. I went around the back.

  3201 ¼ was the smallest and most rundown of the lot. I was about to knock on the door when I saw Alora through the window, slipping on a white tee-shirt. She walked over to the mirror and began to brush her hair, pulling it back simply in a knot. Then she applied her make-up lightly. She didn’t need it, but then it didn’t hurt either. This girl would have looked good in a burlap bag with a hood over her head. Her high cheekbones were strong and Oriental like the Indian princesses in those sepia daguerreotypes of the Southwest. And the way her full ass pushed through the white linen pants, not even the great Quetzalcoatl himself could have planned it better.

  She examined herself in the mirror for a final check, then went into the next room. I could hear her dialing a phone. I looked around the room. A frayed photograph was pinned to the wall near me. It showed a younger Alora with a boy who might have been her brother and a man who must have been their father, an aging campesino with one of those fine weathered Mexican faces that proved you could learn more from a year in the fields than ten in the library. But his daughter read too. A stack of tattered paperbacks reached the molding in the opposite corner of the room. From where I stood I couldn’t read the titles.

  It seemed peculiar a girl like this would be living in such a hovel. The walls were flaking and the carpets were threadbare. If the rent were more than thirty-five a month, it was highway robbery. Those Nevada hoods weren’t treating her very well. They could have provided a room in a cheap motel. Then at least she’d have a free shoeshine cloth and television for a quarter a shot.

  The phone clicked down and she came out of the back room, stopping to throw a denim jacket over her shoulder. I ducked behind the banana trees. Rather than confront her directly, I decided to let her lead me where I wanted to go.

  She got into her Studebaker and proceeded down Evergreen past Soto, heading East. It was hard to tell whether she noticed me. I tried to stay a few blocks behind her, speeding up when she started up a hill so I wouldn’t lose her at the top of a rise. But traffic on that back street was sparse, and we were often the only two cars on the road. At the corner of Evergreen and Lorena, she stopped for a red light. It was impossible for me not to pull up behind her. I flipped down my sun visor to make my face less visible and stared at the gas pedal waiting for her to start. She turned on Lorena and crossed Brooklyn to Fourth, turning once again beside a Catholic cemetery. I was at the top of a hill now and idled for a moment, allowing her to move ahead of me. But at the bottom she pulled into the parking lot of El Mercado, a large Mexican marketplace which took up a short city block between Lorena and Chicago Streets.

  It was already mid-morning and the market was jumping like Monterrey on a Saturday night as I drove around the parking lot looking for a slot. They were hard to find and Alora was already long gone when I pulled in next to a Ford pickup. I could hear the screech of mariachis from the balcony above. I walked quickly across the lot to the front stairs and headed up, guessing that she was on the balcony. Upstairs, it was mobbed. The tables were jammed with Mexican families eating gorditas and fat green chili burritos. Little kids jumped around on the dance floor doing a four-year-old’s version of La Bamba. Tough young machos stood by the foodstand with bottles of Dos X’s in their hands, wearing skin-tight tee-shirts emblazoned with portraits of Zapata and Juarez. The girls circled around them in an endless paseo of tie-dyed capri pants and nylon tops cut at the midriff that would have struck terror in the heart of any dueña back in the old country. But then this wasn’t the old country. El Mercado with its neon Pepsi signs and third-generation head shops mixed with fruit stalls and chili emporiums was part modern L.A., part funky Mexican but thoroughly Chicano. With the accent on the “cheek.”

  I made my own paseo around the balcony, stopping to peer into each of the little shops. I thought I saw Alora ducking through a beaded doorway, but it turned out to be the manicurist at the market barber shop. I continued on past the other stores, cutting through the magazine stand. The walls above the stand had been plastered with political posters aimed at garnering the Spanish-speaking vote. They showed Hawthorne with a variety of Mexican-American groups. Hawthorne por la Causa. El Pueblo con Hawthorne. Cesar Chavez con Hawthorne. On the other side of the stand, I came to the rail above the large produce market. Looking down, I was certain I could see Alora pushing a cart below. />
  I walked to the stairs and moved down swiftly. Keeping my distance, I could still see her in the spice department. She picked two different types of chili, then crossed over to the vegetables and examined the yellow jalapeño peppers, placing about a dozen in a brown paper bag. I moved closer, stopping at the end of the table. She turned and looked right at me, but seemed not to notice. At a table lined with greens—lettuce, parsley, and aromatic cilantro—she began to move more rapidly, wheeling her cart in front of her. I followed faster, trying not to attract the attention of the crowd. A Santana-like rock band had taken over for the mariachis. People were shouting and stomping to the rhythm of conga drums. It would be bad news indeed to be called attention to in this group. But she didn’t appear to be yelling for help. She just walked quickly, up one aisle and down another, ignoring my presence.

  Suddenly she abandoned her cart and left it in my path, heading for the souvenir department. She began to run, through the sombreros and serapes and piles of ochre ceramics past the cheap Don Quixotes and velour bullfighters, in the direction of a side exit, pushing her way out. I reached the door seconds after her and grabbed the handle.

  The first hit was smack on the jaw, the next right in the solar plexus, the third about three-quarters of an inch below my penis. Four or five faces swam in front of my eyes. A solid chop on the back of the neck and I plunged headfirst in a barrel of papayas. Then I heard a loud ringing noise that had nothing whatever to do with mariachis or Chicano rock or even a marimba band. It was more like an Anacin ad multiplied by a factor of two thousand, coupled with the uneasy feeling that my mouth had swallowed itself and that if I had any balls left I would have to forage for them the next morning among the garbage cans in the back of the market. Then I don’t remember much of anything.

  It might have been an hour, it might have been a week. Some light spilled in through the cracks in the shutters but there was no way of knowing what time of day it was. I tried to open my eyes wide but they would only go halfway before the lids started to throb. I touched my face and felt a banana-shaped welt swelling across the top of my forehead. My cheeks were scraped and covered with scabrous blood and my mouth was one long slice of putrified meat hung out like in Potemkin waiting for the maggots. I didn’t dare find out if my teeth were still there. That could wait. My only consolation was that a good bash had straightened out the nose my mother had been badgering me about fixing all these years.

  I rolled over on my side. I was on a mattress elevated a few feet off the ground in what seemed to be an abandoned warehouse. On a table in front of me were some colored objects made of paper-màché. With some difficulty I reached for one of them. It was a theatrical mask fashioned like an ancient Mexican god. I put it over my face and peered through the eyes, staring out into the darkness.

  “Le gusta?” came a flat voice from across the warehouse.

  I tried to sit up but fell back on my shoulder blades. The mask dropped to the floor.

  “Perhaps you would like to join the Teatro Comunal de Aztlan?”

  A ripple of laughter. There were others, maybe half a dozen.

  I heard someone cross the room, then the lights were switched on. The glare of the exposed bulbs was strong. I threw my arm over my eyes.

  More steps. I heard them circling around me.

  “Where is Luis Vazquez?” came that voice again.

  Who? What were they talking about? I tried to answer, but couldn’t get anything together. Someone prodded me in the side with a sharp object.

  “Where is Luis Vazquez?” said another voice.

  I groaned, pulling the arm away from my eyes. There was a blur of brown faces in front of me. Over their heads I thought I recognized the insignia of the United Farm Workers: a black eagle on a red banner. My eyes closed.

  “No contesta. . . . Let him sleep.”

  The lights went out and so did I.

  Some time later they came on again. I could see clearly now, but my head still throbbed. About a dozen brown men and women stood in front of me wearing masks. One of them carried a guitar. The others were intertwined at the elbows, palms forward, linked together in theatrical poses. The group effect was a frieze, a tableau vivant drawn from a mural by Rivera, a fiesta on the Day of the Dead.

  “Where is Luis Vazquez?” said the man with the guitar. His voice was becoming familiar.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  The five people in the front row threw back their robes, displaying machine guns. But I had to smile. They were obviously stage props.

  “Where is Luis Vazquez?” “Where is Luis Vazquez?” “Where is Luis Vazquez?” One by one each of them spoke the words as if it were a litany. At last they came around to the man with the guitar again.

  “Where is Luis Vazquez, anglo? You may find this amusing, but if he is dead, you will have to answer for it.”

  “I don’t know who he is. I don’t know where I am. I don’t even know what day this is. Now if. . . .”

  One by one again they removed the masks from their faces. The last was Alora.

  “Where is Luis Vazquez, anglo?” she asked.

  “Look. . . .”

  “Where is he?”

  A man by my head raised his stage machine gun and threatened to smash me in the mouth.

  “Wait a minute! There’s been a big mistake!” I tried to speak slowly, distinctly. “My name is Moses Wine. I’m a private detective, and I’ve never heard of Luis Vazquez.”

  “We don’t believe you, anglo.”

  “You want proof, I. . . .” I reached for my wallet but of course it was gone. They smiled. The one with the guitar pulled it out from under his robe.

  “Proof of what?”

  I felt a sharp pain in my side as the machine gun came down.

  “Lousy bastard,” I muttered, loud enough to be understood. “Take out the address book. Turn to ‘v.’ Don Villarejo at the Barrio Defense League. He can vouch for me. . . .”

  “Who?”

  I felt another blow in the side.

  “Don Villarejo. . . .You know Don Villarejo, don’t you?”

  They didn’t answer.

  On signal from the one with the guitar, they turned and, moving in an undulating pattern like a serpent, picked me up over their heads and carried me about the room. A man in the front clutched a real dagger in two hands as they chanted in some ancient tongue like Nahuatl. For a moment my sacrifice seemed a genuine possibility, even imminent. I saw visions of my bloody entrails pouring out over a giant calendar stone. But then, on another signal, I was replaced on the mattress and the lights were extinguished.

  I lay back and tried to relax. In my present condition I wasn’t prepared for this kind of exertion. I slept for a while, until I heard footsteps again. It must have been night because the light no longer leaked through the shutters. I sat up feeling an intense pain in my stomach as if my innards had been kicked upside down and were only now beginning to sort themselves out. I stared into the darkness looking for the troupe but there was only one person this time.

  Alora lit the worklights and sat beside me on the edge of what I had come to realize was a stage. She was carrying a tray with a large bowl of soup and some surgical dressing.

  “You should have told us,” she said.

  “What?”

  “That you were the one who saved Alonso Alegria from a frame-up.”

  “He saved himself. The police didn’t have a case.” I rubbed my cheekbone where the rawness hurt. Off in an adjoining room, I could hear the one with the guitar singing a corrido. I couldn’t make out all the words, but it was something about a young rebel in the Mexican Revolution who was a big hero until the government caught him in a cantina with the town whore and shot him dead.

  “Still you should have told us,” she said.

  “You should have told me you had nothing to do with those Nevada punks.”

  Alora shrugged and ripped a piece of gauze along the seam, taping it to my cheek. “Tak
e some menudo,” she said, nodding toward the soup. It smelled good, but I wasn’t ready to eat. My stomach would have rejected Simon’s strained bananas.

  “Who is Luis Vazquez?”

  “My father, the founder of the Teatro Comunal de Aztlan.”

  “And why is he missing?”

  “None of your business.”

  “Suppose I could help you find him . . . ?”

  “You couldn’t. And even if you could, it would still be none of your business.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it is una cosa de le Raza . . . ”

  “Do you think he’s alive?” I propped myself up on one elbow. For the first time I could make out the stage flats behind me. They were grape fields painted in perspective. Itinerant farm workers, tiny figures in white shirts and sombreros, were stretched out into the distance beneath a map of California, Arizona, New Mexico and parts of Northern Mexico. The word AZTLAN was stencilled across it.

  Alora pushed me back on the mattress.

  “Do I have to tell you again it’s none of your business? I don’t ask you why you were trailing me around El Mercado like a second-rate James Bond.”

  “Suppose I knew where you could find Luis Vazquez right now. Would you want to know?”

  “Do you?”

  “No.”

  “Then stop playing games.”

  I winced as she dug in her nails applying the dressing. She taped it, then moved her hands down my chest to where I had a large bruise around my abdomen. Her head was very close to mine and if I had leaned forward an inch our lips would have touched. I could feel my penis growing, and from the look on her face, it was obvious she noticed too.

  “Una cosa Chicana,” she reminded me, wrapping the gauze around my chest. Then she stood up and started to walk out. “Don’t forget the menudo,” she said. “If you let it get too cold, the fat congeals and floats to the top . . . ” She flicked out the lights.