It was a sharp drop after the way she had bounded out of bed so recently. I even wondered if she meant rest in the Clovis sense. As in, rest side by side in the morgue and have a double funeral. I wondered briefly if they made grey paper bras for lady corpses, then I wrested my mind away and told her I’d drop her at home and would she just phone the factory and tell them I was coming back. If anyone wanted counselling, they should wait for me in the cafeteria.
And what a shower of lazy wee toe rags! The lunchroom was packed solid when I peered round the corner and in through the glass doors. I did a Pink-Panther tiptoe past and then scuttled up Bilbo’s stairs and burst in without knocking.
“You didn’t knock,” he said.
I didn’t say duh. I’m very mature sometimes. “Sorry to disturb you again,” I said. “I’ve got a question.”
“About fireworks?”
“No. About Clovis and the handcuffs.”
“Cable ties,” Bilbo said.
And a choir of angels sang a chorus above my head as the clouds parted and sunbeams shone through. “Cable ties!” I said. “That’s what that square shape was. That’s it. Cable t—How did you find out?”
“I told you,” said Bilbo. “That lady detective said it.”
“No, no, no,” I said. “Categorically not. You said she said handcuffs.”
“Yes, I did. Well, she didn’t. She said cable ties.”
I waited.
Bilbo’s eyes strayed to his screen. “Well, if that was all, I’ve got a funeral display to design.”
“No, that’s not all,” I said, drily. “Of course it’s not.” I waited. In vain. “Why did you say handcuffs?”
“Because Mrs. Bombaro asked me to. She asked me not to say it was cable ties.”
“So why did you say it was cable ties?”
“I didn’t,” said Bilbo. “I said it was handcuffs.”
I sighed. “I now understand why you initially said handcuffs. Mrs. Bombaro told you to.”
“Correct. But I blew it saying ‘cut off.’ I should have extended the deception and said ‘unlocked.’”
“That certainly would have helped,” I said, as dry as if I’d sprinkled salt on my earlier dryness, left it overnight, and then wrung it out in a towel. “But anyway, now that that’s all straightened out, why did you stop saying handcuffs and start saying cable ties just now?”
“Because Mrs. Bombaro asked me to,” he said. “She asked me not to say it was handcuffs.”
“You just told me she asked you not to say it was cable ties!”
“It’s pretty straightforward,” he said. I didn’t beat him around his head with a computer keyboard. I’m proud of that. “Mrs. Bombaro told me that she didn’t mean you to be told the handcuff lie.”
“What?” I said, and I had to grab a breath to say it with.
“She told me she hadn’t ever meant you to be included in the audience for the handcuff lie. That was just for factory workers so that they didn’t feel suspected or even start to suspect one another. Because we use exactly those cable ties for packing and on the mounting boards. Everyone who works in this factory has got some at home too. Clovis was never strict about that. But Visalia never meant you to be told that version. You don’t work in the factory and there was no need to protect you.”
“Right,” I said. “That makes a lot of sense. That’s very clear.”
“It didn’t cause you any trouble, did it?” he said.
“What?” I said, and I flapped a hand at him. “Of course not. No trouble at all. Can I ask you one last question?”
“Is that—”
“Bilbo!”
“Yes, you can.”
“When did Mrs. Bombaro tell you to stop saying handcuffs to me and start saying cable ties?”
“About twenty minutes ago,” said Bilbo. “Lucky timing.”
I sneaked back past the gaggle of traumatised employees in the canteen and back across the baking car park to phone Todd from his own car.
“The plot splits like bad mayo and turns to a watery mess,” I said, and then went on to tell him what Bilbo had told me.
“Sheesh,” said Todd, “those people are going to get the shock of their lives if Bang-Bang really does take over and fires their asses. She wanted to protect them? She’s a sweetheart, isn’t she? But you know the only thing that worries me?”
“Shoot.”
“What did Visalia think you were going to the morgue for, if she already knew he had marks on his body from cable ties?”
“Oh,” I said. “That’s because … Hang on. That’s a good question. Why didn’t she tell me this morning in the bedroom instead of me having to go into that viewing room and see things that made me want to bleach my eyeballs? That’s a very good question. ”
“How about a very good answer?” said Todd.
“Got it!” I said. “I’m an idiot.” The car was starting to warm up, so I fired up the engine and cranked the a/c round to cryogenic. “I was trying not to speak too plainly. I think I maybe didn’t actually cough up any of the sordid details. I think I just said that the cops reckon two different people were involved and I wanted to find out how they knew.”
“But they don’t, right?” said Todd. “That was just Bilbo getting his story pretzeled.”
“Yeah,” I said. “So … hey! You know what that means?”
“Vi’s in the clear?”
“Vi’s in the clear!” I grinned at myself in the driving mirror. “Yay!”
“Only … ”
“Only … Why did she pretend not to recognise the marks? Why didn’t she tell me that the killer used cable ties? Why did she tell Bilbo to tell me?”
“Because … she was … ashamed of having told him to lie in the first place and she didn’t want to come clean to your face?” Todd offered.
“Huh,” I said. “I was going with because she knew I’d go straight back to the factory to ask him and she wanted to get rid of me for some reason.”
“But it can’t be that, if she’s in the clear.”
“And she’s in the clear!” I said. “Yay.”
“Yay,” Todd agreed. “Who did it?”
“I don’t care,” I said. “Someone with access to cable ties and knowledge of fireworks. Sparky, Chucky, Jan, a workers’ uprising? Not Vi and not Barb. That’s good enough for me.”
“This is a good day all round.”
“Oh? No more worms? No bugs?”
“More than that,” Todd said. “Something really truly good is happening. Noleen and Kathi have got guys in to clean the pool and get the filtration system going again. The Last Ditch is gentrifying.”
“That’s your fault,” I said. “First the gays move in and soon there’s no yolks in the omelettes and all the daycare’s for dogs.”
He blew a raspberry at me, like a real chip off the old Barb. I hung up and headed … back to the Last Ditch, which some bit of me not under the jurisdiction of my conscious mind seemed to be telling me was my …
Well, I went back anyway.
And standing looking through the chain-link fence surrounding the pool when I got there were … the people that same bit of me was calling my …
Well, I was glad to see them anyway.
“How’s it going?” I asked as I joined them. Inside the fence two guys in the white t-shirts and work boots I’d come to know so well when I was an up-suburb girl were watching the pool fill from a gushing hose that led from a water tanker parked at the far side. One of the guys couldn’t have been knocked over by a wrecking ball. He made Fred Flintstone look willowy, but the other one was five-ten with broad shoulders and slim hips and …
“You’re drooling,” said Todd.
“Fuck off,” I said. It’s the Scottish version of a raspberry. It made Bran cry once.
“Fuck o
ff yourself,” said Todd. “I’ve already ascertained that he’s straight and single and if Noleen agrees, he’ll be here twice a week. I’ve looked online for swimwear half a size too small for you and we’ll get you a gym membership.”
“Half a size too small?”
“Trust me.”
“And does Noleen agree?” I said.
Noleen looked at the guy’s bum in his jeans and then at me and screwed her face up. “I’m happy to have this windfall,” she said, “but pools cost money and I can just as easy do it myself.”
“What windfall?” I said vaguely. My guy had bent over.
“We won a pool rehab,” Kathi said. “One of those big bowls you toss your business cards into on service desks? A pool company bought the list this month and they offered either a pool rehab or patio landscaping.”
“Call me a bitter old cynic,” Noleen said, “but I thought I knew how it would go. I reckoned they’d come do the pool and tell us—surprise, surprise—it needed a ton of extra work not covered in the small print and could they go ahead and bill us on thirty-day terms. But they’ve restored my faith in humanity. They said the pool’s fine and they gave us two planters and a cabana they can’t be bothered to cart back.”
Then she said some more, but my guy took his t-shirt off and stretched his shoulder muscles out and I didn’t hear her.
“I’m outta here,” Kathi said, fanning her t-shirt. “It’s too hot.”
“I’m willing to stay and get heatstroke,” said Todd. “Lexy, you with me?”
Todd lasted twenty minutes, which was fifteen minutes more than me. I went to stand under the shower and fantasize about swimming every morning again. That is my story of what I fantasized about in my shower and I’m sticking to it.
Moving on. I heard Todd come upstairs when I was sorting out a load of sweaty laundry for Kathi and I called him in.
“Your Adonis has gone to sit in his truck,” Todd said. “Thank God because I was beginning to get red spots in front of my eyes.”
They were prophetic words, as we were to know before the sun rose again.
Twenty-Two
It was a quiet night at the Last Ditch Motel. Thursday after a holiday, it seemed everyone who’d been on the move was home again and no one was planning a long weekend away. The regulars were there, of course, and one of them needed to be assured that Nemo, Gill, and Dory would be there the very next day with their other friend, who just couldn’t bear to be left behind but needed one more night to pack and say goodbye.
“A seahorse?” Diego said, his eyes now taking up about half his face. “A real seahorse?”
“And the tank it needs and the filter for the tank and the lights and some spare lightbulbs?” said Della.
“Absolutely,” I said, thinking I’d need to go to Sacramento for it. Or down to Monterey and break into the aquarium.
The pool helped. Diego splashed around on an inflatable in a Little Mermaid scuba mask and flippers until he was too tired to scream when Della fished him out and crammed him into his jammies. She sat on a lounger and rocked him to sleep while the rest of us had a little pool-warming ceremony.
Noleen and Kathi went first. Noleen wore a black bathing dress with a long history and a pair of yellow goggles. Kathi wore a polka dot bikini that had me humming for the rest of the night. They held hands and jumped in the deep end and then Todd, in a tiny white Speedo and a ton of oil, walked sedately down the steps at the shallow end with a tray of mint mojitos and served them. Roger shed his robe and dived in with barely a splash. Then it was my turn.
“Oh my GOD!” I said, pointing at the sky and then making a run for it. I fooled everyone except Todd, who pretended to retch and told me my first gym visit was in the morning.
We floated, drank, tried (and failed) to get Della to join us, then when Diego had gone to his bed and wasn’t around to be traumatised, we talked of murder.
“I like the Dolshikovs,” I said. “One of them or both of them or add the cousins and it’s all of them.”
“Families!” Kathi said. “Do you have to keep digging?”
“I promised Mizz Vi I’d present her crackpot theory to the cops, so I should really keep my word. Dob in the olive growers. But I don’t know how to say it in a way that doesn’t sound totally barmy.”
“Blame the language divide,” said Todd. “Dob them barmy.”
“And the other question,” I said, “is whether it should actually be me who goes at all. Detective Mike’s gone off me.”
“Really?” said Noleen. “What did you do?”
“I gave her the benefit of my psychological insight,” I said.
“About whom?” said Roger.
“Cops,” I said. “So … yeah.”
“Well, I can’t go,” said Todd. “And Roger can’t go.”
“Jesus Christ,” said Roger. “Todd, you are thirty-five years old and the ‘adorable’ routine is getting tired. You can’t just blab my business like you blab your own.” Then he lifted himself up like a dolphin and swam away underwater to the far end of the pool.
“Come back, you big dork,” Todd shouted, when he resurfaced. “Lexy’s met my mom. She knows I married up. She’s not judging you.”
“I’m really not,” I called. “I don’t even know what I’m not judging you for. That’s how much I’m not judging you.”
Roger swam back. “I ran with a gang,” he said when he was close enough to speak quietly but still have me hear him. “As you would know if you could read tattoos. I did bad things and hurt good people.”
“And got some piss-poor therapy,” I told him. “I know learned routines when I hear them. Okay, so not Todd and not Roger. Noleen?”
“Too many parking tickets,” she said, and sent a playful splash Roger’s way. “You’re not the only desperado around here.”
“So that leaves Kathi,” I said. And the silence went on long enough for all the waves from Roger’s swim and Noreen’s splash to die down to ripples around us.
“No deal,” Kathi said. “And not just because cops play the stereotypes either. I’m not a good witness. I imagine things. I make mistakes.” She was floating on her back not looking at any of us. Noleen reached over, grabbed her toe, and pulled her close.
“What things do you imagine?” I said.
“Like that guy on the security feed the other day,” said Kathi. “I had a flashback. All the way back to Queens.”
“Queens College, Cambridge?” I said. Probably the dumbest thing I’ve ever said. And that, as Americans say, is a deep bench.
“Queens, New York,” said Kathi. “Where my family lives and works and disowns aberrations like me.”
“Assholes,” Noleen growled.
“I think you won that war,” I said. “You followed the sun and here you are in your own swimming pool with your loving wife and your good friends.”
This time even the ripples from Kathi’s little four-foot journey to Noleen’s side were gone before anyone spoke again.
“Via the old country and a forced marriage,” Kathi said. “Noleen isn’t my wife, Lexy, because I’m married already.”
“What old country is that?” I said. “Katherine Mary doesn’t sound like a forced marriage kind of name. Sorry if that’s racist.”
“It’s not Italy’s fault,” said Kathi. “This is a Poggio specialty.”
I drank a good slug of pool water before I came up spluttering. “Poggio?”
“Lex,” said Todd with eerie calm. “Isn’t that the name of those Sicilians Mrs. Bombaro keeps on about?”
“It is,” I said, just as calm as him. “Kathi, why didn’t you say something?”
“What?” said Kathi. “I did. I told you it was a mafia name and you should be careful.”
“I thought you meant Dolshikov,” I said. “Wait. Let me think. Shoosh a minute.”
“No one else is speaking,” Roger said.
My brain was sparking like a funereal firework show. “Your name is Poggio?” I said.
“Her name is Muntz,” said Noleen. “But carry on.”
“And you think you recognised a Poggio carrying the fake pizza box with the raccoon in it up the stairs?”
“Not just a Poggio,” said Kathi. “The Poggio. Marco Poggio. He’s not active in the family. He’s too dumb for that. But he is my husband.”
“Wow,” I said. “I mean wow. I truly thought Visalia was havering with all this.”
“All of what?” said Kathi. “You said there was a feud and I said ‘that sounds about right.’”
“Visalia thinks one of the Poggios came over here and killed Clovis. Now, wouldn’t you agree that sounds a lot less far-fetched if someone else saw a Poggio here up to absolutely no bloody good whatsoever?”
“You can’t tell the cops about the raccoon,” Noleen said.
“But a man died,” I insisted.
“And a hotel with bluebottles and worms and whatever the hell those red shitting things were will die too and it won’t bring him back.” Noleen had never looked sterner. There wasn’t a slogan t-shirt in print in the world that could have expressed it better than her stony face.
“And if they send the Health Inspectors they’ll take away Diego’s fish before he’s had a chance to name them,” said Kathi.
“And we won’t be allowed so much as a loaf of bread to make toast in the morning,” Kathi said. “We’ll have to take ‘Continental Breakfast’ off the sign by the freeway.”
“But someone has got away with murder!” I said.
All four of them stared back at me.
“Mizz Visalia and my mom are in the clear, Lex,” said Todd. “Isn’t that the main thing?”
“But how can you just wait for him to come back? What do you think the next thing is going to be?” I felt it again. The faint glimmer somewhere, like a dream of a memory, or a memory of a dream.
“I think it’s over,” Noleen said. She lifted her mojito glass and drained it. “Our luck has turned. This pool is the start of good times.”
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