Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation

by A. W. Hill

  Having Angel Davidos’s name was no help. There was no directory at the front gate, and no landlord on-site. So Raszer began at an outside corner and wandered up and down the ill-defined paths between the trailers, the streets of this makeshift neighborhood. The residents, many of them Hispanic or of mixed race, seemed to be either in the act of preparing the evening meal or out in meager yards, enjoying the sunset and cocktail hour. The smell of beer and marijuana smoke hung in the air like a net suspended from the trees, and griddle smoke drifted from tiny, louvered kitchen windows. There could, Raszer thought, be worse ways and far worse places to live.

  Some of the owners had buttressed the front steps of their homes with narrow wooden decks constructed from plywood and two-by-fours, just wide enough to accommodate a couple of beach chairs and a barbecue. A few had flower boxes, American flags, and a coat of paint, enough to create the semblance of a front porch. On one of them, painted pale yellow and located at the far end of a diagonal thoroughfare running from corner to corner in the lot, Raszer spotted a girl in a blue dress, waiting.

  There was no question she was waiting. Her elbows were propped on the railing, and her chin was in her palm. Her feet were bare, and the skirts of her sundress billowed around her legs like lace curtains in a storm. Raszer approached from fifty yards’ distance with the sun at his back and his shadow thrown long in front of him. At one point, he instinctively lifted his arm in greeting, and she did the same. He doubted immediately that what he saw was what it appeared to be.

  He doubted it because the hair spilling messily around her heart-shaped face was long and auburn, like Katy’s. Her oval mouth was a natural dark pink, like Katy’s. The tilt of the head and the sweet little smile seemed to be Katy’s, too, based on the photos.

  The blue dress belonged to the girl in the Santuario de Chimayo.

  Up to a point, Raszer enjoyed having his mind fucked. It was part of the learning curve, always instructive, and visions no longer unsettled him. In fact, he chased after them. But this was different. The girl on the deck was not the girl from the Santuario de Chimayo, yet she seemed to know of her. She was not Katy Endicott, either—not unless things were really upside down—but she seemed to want to suggest that possibility. The impression was more than mimicry. It was an embodiment of inviolate longing.

  Why? Nothing about the vision on the yellow deck said “Ruthie” except for the feline eyes and the guile. As Raszer drew closer, she toyed with him, shuffling personae like playing cards, all of them some variation on the theme of bruised innocence. Finally, she leaned into the railing and just let the wind blow back her hair.

  “Lookin’ for a showdown, cowboy?” she asked, when he was within thirty feet.

  “Nope. Looking for a girl.”

  “You don’t look like you’d need to look hard,” she replied.

  “You’d be surprised,” he said, moving closer. “Were you expecting me?”

  “I was expecting somebody,” she answered. “But not you. Fat, sweaty, and bald, I guess. Like most private dicks really look.”

  “And wearing wingtips and a worsted-wool suit in summer, right?”

  “Somethin’ like that. Or maybe that guy with the glass eye.”

  “The bartender from the Cantina call you? Or was it the Indian girl?”

  He stood beneath her now. Her face was in the shadow of her hair, but her eyes, which on closer inspection were emerald green, had him fixed.

  “Neither one,” she answered. “Matter of fact, it was Lupe down at the police station. Ex–sister-in-law of my mother’s hombre. Those people stay close.”

  “I guess so,” he said. “Nice to have friends in high places.”

  “She’s only a dispatcher, but Lupe knows what’s what.” She cocked her head, exposing one side of her face to the low sun. There were pale freckles on either side of her nose. “But thanks for cluing me in. Pays to know who’ll sell you out for a drink.”

  “What’d you do with your hair? I’d have figured you for a natural redhead.”

  “Wasn’t any more natural than this,” she said, pulling at a strand. “I forget what color my real hair is.”

  “Well, it’s red, according to your California driver’s license.”

  “Which one?”

  Raszer laughed. “Mind if I have a cigarette?”

  “Not if you give me one.”

  He shook one from the pack and held it up for her to withdraw. He lit it, carefully navigating between the hanging curtains of hair, and she touched her palm to the back of his hand to steady the lighter. A learned gesture—movies, probably. Then he lit his own and stepped back to exhale the smoke—also a learned gesture.

  “You and your sister,” he said, “you were pretty good at trading identities, right? From the looks of it, you decided that the world needed Katy more than Ruthie.”

  “That ain’t exactly rocket science,” she said, blowing smoke toward the foothills. “Katy’s a good girl. The world likes them, but they don’t get to party much. You sure she didn’t take my place?”

  Raszer squinted. “I guess that’s a possibility, isn’t it?” He took a step in and wrapped his hands around the lower railing. “But I don’t think so, Ruthie. You’ve got the same bone structure—amazingly so—but the eyes are all your own.”

  She scooped up a handful of skirt and squatted down to his level, placing her hand next to his on the one-by-four railing. She had a tangy smell, like citrus and musk. It occurred to him that she might be wearing a wig, a notable extravagance for a girl of modest means.

  “So, who hired you?” she asked. “My father?”

  “Yes,” Raszer replied. “It was the last thing he did, Ruthie.”

  “The last thing he did before what?”

  “Oh, God . . . you didn’t get word up here?”

  She shook her head and gently bit her lip.

  “Your father died, Ruthie. A stroke. He collapsed in my backyard after telling me the story. I’m really sorry to be the one—”

  She tossed the cigarette into the dust and stood back up. “Someone had to,” she said. “Don’t be sorry. He’s with his little flock up in heaven, and we’re still down here in hell.”

  “That may be,” said Raszer. “But I am sorry for your loss. No matter how you get along with your old man, he’s the one charged with protecting you. When he’s gone, you’re on your own.”

  “Nobody ever ‘protected’ me but me,” she corrected him.

  “Not even Henry?” Raszer asked.

  Ruthie looked away.

  “What are you doin’ here, anyway, mister?” she said, bitter. “I don’t know anything. I told the FBI that already.”

  “You know a whole lot more than I do, Ruthie. Three boys are dead who didn’t have to be. A fourth one’s half-crazy and won’t come out of his bedroom. A fifth is probably on his way to Gitmo. And there are two corpses in the L.A. morgue with their tongues torn out. All because the men who abducted your sister are still at large. Anything—I mean anything—you can tell me about Johnny Horn and Henry Lee will help.”

  She looked at him sideways. “Yeah, well, I don’t wanna talk here. My mother’ll be home soon. Shit, I’ll have to tell her about Silas. What’d you say your name was?”

  “I didn’t.” He offered his hand. “Stephan Raszer.”

  She took his hand, then gave it the slightest squeeze. “The La Fonda has a private bar with good margaritas. It’s dark in there. You know where it is?”

  “I know it well,” said Raszer. “Good choice.”

  “About eight okay?”

  “Perfect,” said Raszer. “I’ll see you there.”

  “Maybe,” she said. “Or maybe I’ll send a friend.”

  Raszer smoked a cigarette on the plaza and admired the Hotel La Fonda’s glazed brown-sugar facade. The massive oak joists—a ton each—that supported the second story thrust forth from the adobe walls and framed the night sky. The light spilling from the gently arched doors was white gold. He’d
been here once at Christmas, years before, when the luminarias lined the rooftop and the grand portal, and Taos powder covered the ground like jewel dust. Children in serapes had sung carols in voices as sweet as mountain water, and no one had moved an inch until the song was done. The La Fonda was what an inn should be, what the Holy Family should’ve been afforded. If at all possible, Raszer wanted his wake to be held in this place.

  Ditching the cigarette, he walked in, following his nose into the hotel bar, where a group of local artisans was holding a salon around the hearth and the barstools had been commandeered by fur-collared ski bunnies from L.A., smelling of Angel perfume. He spotted his table, a deuce in the far corner, half-cloistered by a Spanish dressing panel and overlooked by an ornately framed reproduction of one of D. H. Lawrence’s “forbidden paintings”: a lithe young man urinating on dandelions.

  He ordered a brandy and soda to take the chill off his shoulders, and settled back to wait. He didn’t know what to expect. He wasn’t even sure Ruthie would come. She’d already shown him that she could be as much a trick of the light as anything else here, in the town where C. G. Jung had come to learn that synchronicity was a fancy name for what the Pueblo shamans experienced when the scorpion’s tail traced their name in the dust.

  The local artists were trading stories around the kiva. A tall man in an embroidered blouse—a potter, judging from the red clay under his fingernails—told of the day a pregnant coyote had walked into his studio, her swollen teats brushing the plank floor. She’d emptied the cat’s milk bowl, then sat on her haunches to watch him work for nearly an hour before wandering back onto the road. That evening, on his way home, the man testified, he’d found her body on the highway, skull crushed, and had carried her to his garden, where he buried her and her unborn pups. The potter, a single man, told his friends that never had he grieved for anyone as he had for that coyote.

  “Am I the girl you’re looking for?” someone said, stirring Raszer from his reverie. Her hands were on his table. Same hands, apparently, but not quite the same girl.

  Raszer gave her a once-over. “I dunno,” he said. “I guess you’re one of them.”

  Ruthie’s hair was jet black and pixie-cut. Her lips were as red as a wound, and she wore a spandex bodysuit the color of old wine. As she dropped into the chair, the scent came off her, good and strong, and Raszer recognized one of its components: patchouli. Just a trace. The patchouli he’d sniffed in Johnny Horn’s trailer.

  “What’re you drinkin’?” she asked.

  “Brandy,” he said. “House brand. Like one?”

  “No way,” she said, after sniffing it. “But I will have a martini. I feel like impairing my judgment.”

  “Gin or vodka? Dry or wet? Olive or twist?”

  “Gin. Dry. Six olives.”

  “I hear experience talking,” Raszer observed. “How old are you now, Ruthie?”

  “Twenty-three on Valentine’s Day,” she answered. “But age has nothin’ to do with it. My mom’s forty-four and doesn’t know shit. I could’ve told her tequila ain’t the thing to make hallucinations go away. I don’t even know if she knows what a blowjob is.”

  “Happy birthday,” Raszer said, and ordered her drink. “What kind of hallucinations?”

  “She hears the Hum,” said Ruthie, throwing a spider’s leg over the table.

  “The Taos Hum?” Raszer asked.

  “So she says,” the girl replied. “And Angel—that’s her hombre—he believes her. Says she’s hearing the hoofbeats of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.”

  “That’s a new one,” Raszer said, and handed her her martini, six olives clustered on a swizzle stick. “Angel doesn’t subscribe to the New Age theories, I guess.”

  “New Age! Ha! Angel’s as Old Age as they come. He’s medieval. He beats himself with a yucca stalk and wears cactus-thorn vests, and he’s all excited that he’s gonna play Jesus on Good Friday. He’s more like my father than my father, except that he fucks my mother. I wish I’d been raised a Catholic. Lots more fun.”

  “I think I’ve heard about this,” said Raszer, watching her drain the gin from her glass. “The Brotherhood of Light, or something like that, right? They reenact the crucifixion and do penance for the community.”

  “Whatever,” said Ruthie. “Personally, I think they get off on it.”

  “In a way, maybe,” said Raszer, still searching the face to find the girl behind the mask. “What we get off on is whatever takes us out of ourselves. The medieval flagellants believed that the spirit could escape through the lacerations in the flesh; that they were breaking the body down to its essence.”

  “You’re a little weird for a dick. What gets you off?”

  Raszer took a swallow of his drink and sat back. “Finding people.”

  Ruthie examined his hands. She did it sidelong, but he noticed anyway.

  “Are you married?” she asked.

  “Nope. Only to my work. Tell me about Johnny Horn.”

  “What about him? I lost it to him when I was fifteen. We stayed stoned through high school. Then he got into meth, paintball games, and Henry Lee. He went to Iraq and came back with big muscles, some new friends, and this whole ‘warrior’ thing. We started up again because it turned me on at first, but it turned Katy on even more. I think she had the hots for him even back when she was doing her daddy’s-girl thing.”

  “Tell me about Johnny’s new friends.”

  Ruthie drained her martini and popped the last two olives into her mouth. She held up the empty glass and pinged it like a service bell with the long, scarlet nail on her index finger. Then she gave Raszer a practiced little smile.

  “Christ,” he said. “If I bought enough rounds in this town, I could probably find out who killed Cock Robin.”

  “Hey,” she replied, “I told ya I needed to get impaired. You think I’m gonna come across without a little persuasion? Like you said, mister, people are dead.”

  “Fair enough,” said Raszer, and summoned the waiter. “But two’s the limit on those things. Otherwise, you won’t be coming across anything but a toilet bowl.”

  Once she had her drink and another six olives, Ruthie made herself comfortable. She shimmied her butt from side to side in the overstuffed chair until she’d found the sweet spot, threw her leg over the arm, and reclined languorously, stirring the martini like a moll in a gangster’s penthouse.

  “Who are you when you’re not being somebody else?” Raszer asked.

  “Somebody else,” she answered, and Raszer knew that Ruthie Endicott was one of those small-town girls who are bigger than their origins from birth, the sort of girls they’d once made movie stars out of. “Ya see, mister, when you grow up in a Witness family, you’re only allowed to be what you aren’t. So, after a while, you just go with it.”

  “Is that the way your mom is, too?”

  “Worse. She doesn’t have a personality, except for what a man gives her. Only reason she had the gumption to leave Silas was ’cause he caught her in the bible closet with the neighbor. She’s kinda empty. Maybe that’s why she hears the Hum. It vibrates in all that empty space.”

  “Does she work?”

  “She works the front desk at the Fechin Inn.”

  “Nice place.”

  “Yeah. I’ll never stay there, that’s for sure.”

  “Did you ever meet the guys Johnny and Henry hooked up with?”

  “In Babylon?” she said.

  “Yeah. In Babylon.”

  “Not the big guys. They never came around. A voice on a cell phone, that’s all. A message on a website that disappears the next day. But one day, that summer we trashed the Kingdom Hall . . . guess you heard about that, right? That was Henry’s trip. Baptize the place with sex, blood, and magic so that nobody’d ever be able to do what they’d done to him when he was little without stirrin’ up this, uh, spirit thing he’d created. I dunno. Henry was crazy, but if anybody could do that . . . ”