“Both.”
Fish? It was hard to believe anything was alive under the desert. I squinted, staring hard into the depths, seeing visions in the murky water—dark prehistoric monsters with weird antennae protruding from their heads, human corpses bobbing in liquid like Halloween apples, the skin eroded, the fish nibbling at the dangling flesh. And then faces, gazing up at me, Lila Shea calling out and receding into the well, the brown arm of Luis Vazquez reaching upwards, a black box of bones inscribed PROPERTY OF THE CORONER’S OFFICE, the words fading away like the fortune at the bottom of a toy eight ball. The sound of an airplane interrupted my reverie, first a dull puttering sound, then something louder, more than a hobbyist out for a ride or a few friends in a Piper or a Mooney come to get laid. The shadow of the wings streaked over the desert. The reflection flashed across the surface of the well. I looked over at the landing strip to see a Lear jet bounce over the ground on its thick rubber wheels and taxi over toward the hangar. The big plane made three passes back and forth before it came to a halt. I stepped away from the well.
“Who’s that?” I asked, but the cook didn’t answer.
The pilot got out of the plane and opened the door for two men in business suits. The one in front carried a large grey attaché case. They walked together, eyes straight ahead, along the gravel path between the ranch and the airstrip. They didn’t turn as they passed the silver Airstream trailer with its windows of gelatin and the pond with the weeping willow tree and the hissing swank. They continued along the path where it branched through the cottonwoods to the other side of the ranch house. I watched for a moment and then set out after them.
“You can’t go there,” said the cook, coming up behind me with the hoe swinging at his side.
“Why not?” I asked without looking back at him.
“It’s off-limits to guests.” He slid the hoe across the gravel in front of me, hooking it around my legs.
“How come?”
“Because that’s the way it is.”
“That’s not a very good reason,” I said, stepping sharply on the end of the hoe and making it fly into the air. As he watched, I slammed him hard in the gut. He buckled and clutched his stomach. I grabbed the hoe and held it over his head, threatening to come down on his skull. He looked up slowly.
“Turn around,” I said. “Now march over behind the acacia there.” I gave him a little kick in the pants for prodding. When we reached the other side of the bush, I raised the hoe higher over my head. “Sorry, old-timer,” I said and brought it down on the back of his neck. He buckled at the knees and crashed into the dirt. A light trickle of blood flowed from the top of his cranium. I really was sorry. I bent down over him. He was out cold, but seemed all right. I untied his cook’s apron and ripped it in pieces, using the parts to bind his legs and arms. Then I tied his whole body to the base of the bush and stuffed the bonnet of his chef’s hat in his mouth.
I crawled out from behind the bush and followed the path leading around the ranch house. A manicured lawn had been planted in the front yard, necessitating an elaborate sprinkler system with rotating nozzles that gushed water like the Trevi Fountain. I kept out of the spray, close to the wall of the house. Inside, the traditional ranch style had been carefully preserved. Rough-hewn beams supported a stucco ceiling. An antique spinning wheel stood opposite a brick fireplace beneath a shelf lined with kachina dolls. A meeting was taking place in the next room. The door was ajar and I could see the back of one of the businessmen seated at an oak table, his attaché case leaning against his chair.
I continued along the wall to another angle. A series of frame windows opened out from the meeting room, but they were all shuttered. I peeked into the cracks but all I could see was a side view of the businessman with the attaché case. He was lifting it onto the table and opening the latch.
“Twelve to five,” I heard a voice coming from the other side of the room. “Twelve to five. That’s the Greek’s morning line. It hasn’t budged in a week.”
“Fine. I just heard he has a habit of changing it at the last minute,” said the man with the attaché case.
“So what?”
“So we lost out. That’s all.”
“Don’t worry about it, Mat. Our bets go in this afternoon. After that he can switch the odds around to thirty to one Dillworthy, for all we care.” Someone laughed. “Let’s see the goods.”
The man named Mat pushed his case across the table. It was lined with freshly minted bills, twenties and fifties.
“Don’t forget the covering bet on Hawthorne,” continued the voice on the other side. “Forty-five thousand. Then we put the rest on Dillworthy without raising eyebrows.”
The group fell silent.
I backed away from the wall. The front door was locked but I wondered if there were some way to get inside the house unnoticed. Ducking low, I circled around the side looking for a grate that might lead into the basement. There wasn’t any. The windows were all sealed tightly. The kitchen door had been bolted shut. Behind a flower trellis, a drainpipe led up to the roof. I grabbed hold of it and tugged. The pipe weakened at the joint, but I pulled myself up on it anyway, testing its give. A piece of siding slipped under my foot and slid to the ground. I froze against the building, feeling ridiculous and baking in the heat. Then I reached for the roof gutter and chinned myself, scrambling onto the roof and making an awful racket on the tile. Even up here the spray from the sprinkler still rose above me. It made a rainbow in the sun.
I looked around. The attic window I had planned on entering was nailed to the frame; there didn’t seem to be other openings. I crawled across the roof to the air conditioner. A steady blast of hot air was coming out of the exhaust. I lifted off the grid and placed it on the tile beside me. Then I spun on my haunches and pushed my feet through the duct. My skin burned from the exhaust. It felt like the heat would sear the soles off my shoes. But I proceeded down anyway, pushing off at the top and wriggling along on my back like an upside-down snake.
In the dining room, the discussion had resumed. I could hear them talking, but against the whir of the air conditioner it was hard to make out the precise words. Something about cash flow. The odds were repeated in a boisterous voice I hadn’t heard before. It was difficult to tell how many of them there were.
The duct widened and I was able to move more easily. I turned myself over and inched forward. Eppis, Eppis, were you working with these people? After all those years of protest had it come to this? A cheap pay-off for a big fix. I drew near the vent over the meeting, but I didn’t want to look.
And then the air conditioner stopped. Everything got very quiet except for a baseball game on a television set somewhere across the house. It was switched off.
“He’s up there, all right!” came a voice.
“Who?”
“Check up on the roof. . . . Jonas, try that way.”
I didn’t move.
I heard feet racing across a hardwood floor.
“He’s down here!”
“What the—?”
I saw fingers reaching through the grate. A .45 calibre revolver swung out from a shoulder holster.
Down below, Procari, Sr., stood there, holding his dark glasses in his hand and staring at me.
“Good to see you, Mr. Wine.”
19
MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD. Sonya and me, age six, walking along the boardwalk in Coney Island eating buttered corn and bialys.
A baseball game in Ebbets Field with Duke Snider in center and Erskine pitching.
The first day at school in Midwood High looking for the girl with long black hair from Grand Central Parkway. The ammonia smell in the cafeteria.
A quiet day in Berkeley playing chess with a guy named Al over on Northside.
Suzanne and me, making love for the first time on the beach in Carmel, the sand seeping into our sleeping bag from behind.
My head bashed by a cop at the LBJ riot in front of the Century Plaza Hotel.
C
ynthia dancing the can-can with Alora at an old Parisian nightclub.
Then nothing.
I tried to move but I had no reflex, no will. A failure in the central nervous system. The synapses would not bridge.
I heard a noise. What was it? Humming. An airplane?
No. Shuffling. Scraping. I listened again. It became dimmer. But had the source receded or was it just me fading away again?
Then I awoke, the noise returning. Closer this time. More distinct. I felt a dull thud on my cheeks. A pressure on my jaw bone. Someone was slapping me.
“Wine! . . . Wine!”
I sat up, blinking, trying to focus. A face blurred in front of my eyes. I fell back against the wall, feeling burning metal with my hands. I was in the shed.
“Wine?”
It was Sebastian. His face was flushed, his forehead covered with red blotches. He was seated on the floor opposite me in his pajamas. They were torn across the sleeve.
“What’d they do to me?”
“Pentothal.”
I shook my head. “What time is it?”
“Eight o’clock. Twilight.” He pointed up at the vent over my head, where a slice of darkening sky was barely visible. Outside I could imagine a desert sunset, the ranch suffused with orange and red, the long shadows.
“So your father found you after all,” I said.
“He always knew where I was.”
“That figures. Like father, like son. Two rotten bastards. . . .What’d you do with Eppis?”
“Eppis?”
“Yeah, Eppis. Howard Eppis. Remember him?”
“Eppis is dead.”
“You mean you murdered him, you dirty son of a bitch.”
I stood, still groggy from the drug, pulling myself up.
“I didn’t kill him. It was an accident.”
“Accident, my ass.” I lashed out at him, tripping over a saw horse and falling onto my side. My face brushed against the cement floor.
Sebastian bent over me. “Take it easy,” he said. My stomach began to hurt again and I grabbed at it, wrapping my arms around my rib cage. “That stuff’s strong. It didn’t wear off me for twenty-four hours.”
“You?” I took a swing at him but I missed by a mile.
“They gave it to me yesterday when they brought me out here.”
“Who brought you out here?”
“My father.”
“Your father?” I looked at him again. He had been beaten badly. His lips were bruised and there was a long diagonal cut over his left eye. His nose had been pushed to the side. “Let’s start over,” I said. “Eppis is dead.”
“Right.”
“By an accident?”
“Yeah. . . . I think.”
“You think? Was it an accident or wasn’t it?”
“I’m not sure.”
“You’re not sure?”
“He knew too much. My father had to close the business.”
“What business?”
“The Church. The Church. I was the Priest and my father ran the business end. I never wanted to do it in the first place.”
I took a deep breath. Or tried to. Events were moving a little fast for me. Outside I could hear the sound of an airplane arriving. Some cars bounced down the dirt road, honking at each other. At sundown activity was picking up around the trailer.
“You’re confusing me,” I said. “You mean your father supported your Satanism.”
“Yes.”
“That’s not what I heard.”
“That was a cover. It was a racket and he set me up in it.”
“What kind of a racket?”
“A cover for gambling clubs. Big-time. 23 Columbia Drive was going to be one of them. Everywhere there was a church there would be a club. Religions are always tied in with business. Like bingo. Why couldn’t it be big-time gambling? That was his plan anyway, until Eppis found out.”
“So your father had him killed.”
“I don’t know. He told me it was an accident. Drug overdose.” Sebastian’s voice cracked. He was trying to stop himself from crying. “My father was always doing things like that, telling me what to do. I suppose I wanted him to . . . at least until Eppis died. I thought maybe he’d get off my back, that homicide was out of his league, but . . . ” Sebastian’s voice cracked again. His eyes filled with tears.
“But what?” I asked.
“He used it against me, like he always did. When I started working for Hawthorne he set up this fix. Just to make himself another bundle gambling. At first I didn’t even know where it was coming from, but then . . . ” He trailed off and looked away from me.
“How big is the bet?”
“Ten million. He asked me to help him. I told him I wouldn’t until . . . ”
“Until what?” I tried to get up.
“Until he forced me. He made me make phone calls, like the one to you, pretending to be Eppis, telling them I supported Hawthorne just to prove he was alive. I could always mimic voices, ever since I was a boy.” He sat on a box and put his head in his hand. “I wanted you to find out. Honest I did. I just didn’t have the guts. . . . I wrote the letter myself so you would know about the explosion. . . . He’s my father, after all.”
A tear rolled down Sebastian’s cheek.
“Why did he kill Lila Shea?”
“She suspected Eppis was dead. So did Luis Vazquez.”
“Luis Vazquez? He knew Eppis was dead too?”
“He wasn’t sure, but he thought so. He kept asking around for him.”
“And you told your father about that?”
He nodded, looking away.
“What happened to Vazquez?”
“I don’t know. . . . I don’t know. I’m not sure.”
“Not sure?! Like you weren’t sure if Eppis’ death was an accident?”
Sebastian sobbed. I couldn’t figure whether he was lying or not. I leaned against the wall and slumped down opposite him.
“You know your father tells it differently,” I said. “He says everything you did was to humiliate him. That every time he tried to help you, you turned him down, insulted him.”
“I wish I had. He ruined my mother’s life too, you know.”
“Is your mother still alive?”
“It doesn’t make any difference. She’s a wreck of a woman and he did it.”
“And you never wanted revenge on him, never wanted to get back or even kill him?”
“No. I was too weak.”
“What about Skull and Bones. You came on pretty strong with the note and the dead rat on the pillow.”
“Skull and Bones? Is he still talking about that? I could never have been in Skull and Bones. He took me out of Yale six months before Tap Night. It’s in the records.” Sebastian reached out and touched my sleeve.
“Wine, I swear to you. I didn’t mean this. I wanted Hawthorne to win. I worked for him because it meant something to me.”
“If what you’re saying is true, how come your father left me here with you to hear the whole story?”
“Because it doesn’t matter anymore. He can keep you locked in until it’s all over and then get rid of you. Arrange another accident. There’s no way out. As for me, he’ll take me and give me a new identity someplace, just like he always does. Maybe South America. Maybe Europe. He trusts me.”
“Should he?”
Sebastian didn’t answer. He wouldn’t look in my eyes.
I stood up and walked across the shed, pacing it off like a prisoner in a cell. His story confused me. It was a pathetic tale on the face of it, filled with self-pity, and Sebastian was playing it to the hilt. Maybe he had a right to, I wasn’t sure, but relationships like this often had their own economy, a price exacted from each of the principals or a tension generated by a third party who had created the conflict. Whatever the case, I was in no mood to figure it out. I was locked in a shed in the middle of Death Valley with the success of the big fix assured and my head swimming with the prehistoric fishes. The m
ore difficult it became, the more important Hawthorne’s victory seemed to me. I was suckered. Already in my mind he had assumed the proportions of a Lao Tse, a great spiritual leader to lead our nation out of darkness.
“Do you know where the explosion will be?” I asked.
“The intersection of Hollywood and the Habor Freeways. Near the Music Center. At 3:00 A.M.”
Only five hours.
“Who’s going to do it? Jonas?”
“He and some others.”
“How do they plan to tie in Eppis?”
“Letters have been sent to all major newspapers and television stations under Eppis’ signature taking responsibility for the act and reaffirming his support for Senator Hawthorne. They will arrive tomorrow morning, a few hours after the explosion.”
“And what happens if people start investigating? If they discover Eppis is no longer alive?”
“By that time the election will be ancient history.”
He had a point.
I shook my head, trying to clear the Pentothal. Ignoring the numbness, I piled two metal crates against the wall and climbed up to the vent. Peering out, I could see the old timer seated opposite the shed. He had a shotgun in his hand. To his right, the sun was slipping down behind the Panamints, bidding its last farewell to the desert and giving his face a somber ochre cast. I stood there watching for a few moments when I heard a cry from in front of the trailer.
“C’mon, girl, what kind of a diddly-shit desert fleabag you runnin’ here?” It was the rancher. “All I’m asking is for you to stay in Barstow for a week. At the Arabian Nights Motel. They got color teevee in every room big as a cow’s ass.” He was reeling about in front of Cynthia who had changed into a suede skirt and tie-dye blouse. “Come on, honey,” he said, stumbling toward her. “You look just like my own daughter run off to San Francisco five years ago. Pretty little than wearing beads and all.”
“Sorry, sweetie.” She stepped away from him and ducked back into the trailer.
“Well, hot shit to you!” said the rancher.
The old-timer, sitting near him, started to laugh.
“What’re you smilin’ at?” The old man shook his head. “Better keep your smiles to yourself or I’ll shove that shotgun up your nose.”
The Big Fix Page 13