I opted for bottled water this time, and Antonio ordered a Corona. I ponied up the cash and perched on a stool while Antonio leaned in beside me, elbow on the bar, his cap tugged low over his eyes.
“Are you Muriel O’Brien?” I asked.
Her eyes immediately became wary, and she took a half step backwards, pulling her flannel overshirt closed. “What do you want? You come in here to drink or what?”
Wow, this lady was on edge. What happened to chatting up the customers? I handed her a business card. “I came across your name in relation to Emily Diggs.”
She mulled that over for a second, then let out a throaty cackle. “That lunatic? I ain’t no relation to her.”
Oh, this one was bright. “But you know her.”
She darted her eyes around the bar as she huffed, shrugging her shoulders. “We’ve had the unfortunate pleasure.”
“Well, unfortunately for her, she’s dead.”
Muriel blinked, and blinked again, her gaze skittering around again, finally settling blankly on the May-December couple. They seemed blissfully unaware of anyone else. Oh, to be so in love.
Apparently, Muriel hadn’t read the obits in the Bee this morning. She threw her hands up and retreated even more. Her voice lowered to a raspy hiss. “You two just get on outta here. I don’t want nothin’ to do with this.”
I threw my own hands up in an effort to calm her down. “Emily’s brother just wants to know what happened to her. Can you help me out?”
“I’ll tell you this,” she muttered sharply. “If she’s dead, she probably asked for it.” She doubled over in a hacking cough. “She was looking for trouble, gettin’ mixed up where she don’t belong.”
Antonio notched up the bill of his cap. “Can you be more specific?”
Muriel bared her yellowed, crooked teeth. Her eyes jerked around the room, and her eyebrows lifted when she focused on us again. “She done screwed the wrong people, and she didn’t even know it. Made all kinds of trouble.” She dropped her voice to a whisper. “I tried to warn her.”
Muriel seemed to have forgotten she’d wanted us to leave, so I seized the moment. “Who’d she screw over?”
She hacked, her head thrusting forward like a cat coughing up a fur ball—only Muriel’s fur ball was a glob of brown phlegmy goop that she spit onto a napkin, crumpled in her hand, and tossed into the garbage can.
“Qué asco,” Antonio muttered under his breath.
It was totally gross, but I flashed him a look that said, Shut up. Who knew if this woman spoke Spanish?
Apparently she didn’t. She ignored Antonio and knocked a cigarette out of a battered pack. With the cigarette gripped between her thin lips, she managed to light it with a yellow Bic held in her shaky hand.
After a deep inhale, she hacked again. I tried to keep my face impassive. Guess I didn’t do a very good job. “You got a problem?” she rasped.
Shaking my head, I flattened the wrinkles that lined my forehead. “I was just thinking smoking might aggravate that cough you have.” Or make her cough up a whole blackened lung.
“Shee-it,” she drawled. “Smokin’ and drinkin’ are my only pleasures.” She pulled a glass out from the well of the bar and held it up in a toast before swigging a mouthful of her poison and swallowing hard. She leaned in toward me and hissed like she was divulging a world-class secret. “Only Myers’s, Coke, and Marlboros. Nothing else passes these lips.” She took another healthy swig before replacing the glass under the bar and out of sight. “I’m dead serious. Nothing.”
Good to know. “So, um, Muriel, who was Emily screwing over?”
“You ain’t the cops, right? You have to tell me if I ask, right?” Her eyebrows puckered, and she snaked her gaze at Antonio. “Hate to think a good-lookin’ man like you was a cop.”
Antonio nodded. He even managed a small smile, bless his heart. Maybe he deserved a kickback.
“No, we ain’t police.” I cringed, but if poor grammar was what it took to relate to her… I was willing to go the distance.
“So you ain’t shittin’ me. Someone really knocked off the old bat?”
The photo I had of Emily put her in her mid-forties. If she was an old bat, that made Muriel a walking corpse. Probably she thought she was hot stuff for a crotchety old broad. Rose-colored glasses. Was my perception of myself that warped? Twenty-eight and single to me meant wise and independent. What did it mean to an outsider?
“I ain’t shittin’ you.” My high school English teacher would take back every one of my A’s if she heard me talking now. “Now what were you saying? About Emily screwing someone over?”
She surveyed the room, her expression turning hard when it returned to us. She was certainly conscientious of her other customers—I had to give her that. She shrugged. “When you go messing around in other people’s business, people get mad at you.” She doubled over again, coughing. After she stubbed out her cigarette, she moved the ashtray to the back counter. “How’d she die, anyway?”
“Her body washed up in the river.”
She grunted. “Drowned, huh?”
“Yes, drowned.” She was like a train-of-thought child. I had to redirect the conversation. “When did you see her last?”
Her gray eyes peered at me through the coils of her hair. “Last week sometime, I think.”
“Do you remember what you talked about?”
“Shee-it. How could I forget? She was trying to shut down my tattoo parlor, that’s what.”
Tattoos. A flash of Bonnie, the tattooed bandit from Laughlin’s market, shot into my brain. The tramp stamp on her breast was like a bull’s-eye right over her heart.
A knock sounded from the end of the bar, and Muriel ambled away to serve a customer. She pulled out two bottles of beer and flipped off the caps before sliding them over. She made acerbic small talk for a minute, collected a fistful of dollar bills, and knocked her fifty-cent tip against the bar with two quick flicks of her wrist. She’d been doing this a long time, and it showed.
“Relax, Lo,” Antonio said, rubbing my shoulder as if I were a heavyweight champ ready to go another round. “Don’t let her rattle you.” He adjusted his hat. “You’re doing great.”
I didn’t know why Bonnie’s tattoo was stuck in my mind, but I took a couple of deep breaths and had refocused by the time Muriel returned to us. “Why did Emily want to shut down your business?” I asked again.
“Get this,” she said, smacking her thin lips together. “That woman, Emily, said that a tattoo killed her son. She was nuts.”
“Crazy,” I echoed. But my heart was pounding in my chest, and my attitude toward Muriel improved dramatically with this new little tidbit of information. My adrenaline surged. Allison had said Garrett had had a heart infection. Bull’s-eye to the heart… Could a tattoo cause a heart infection? Is that really what Emily thought? “Was Emily’s son’s death ever investigated?”
She harrumphed again and shrugged.
“No?”
“Like I’m supposed to know?” She hesitated, and then continued. “Seemed to me like she was a one-woman show trying to shut our place down. It was bullshit, I tell you. She made the whole thing up.”
“When you saw her at Just Because, did she say something about her kids?” I asked.
Muriel rolled her eyes. “Just how she and her daughter don’t talk no more. Something about not doing right by her son, and she wasn’t going to let it happen again. I didn’t understand it at all.”
I couldn’t get any more information out of her, but I filed the conversation away for future consideration. How had she let Garrett down the first time? “Did she have proof about the tattoo and the heart infection?”
Muriel scoffed, her raspy voice filled with disdain. “Said she talked to a doctor and that she’d met with another family whose son died from a tattoo.”
Something to follow up on. “Interesting.”
Muriel slammed her palm down on the tacky counter. “No, it isn’t! That lady tho
ught that if someone else died from a tattoo, it meant that’s what killed her son, too. She didn’t know what she was talking about.”
The telephone rang, and Muriel snatched the handset from its cradle and held it to her ear. “Pffft. I didn’t mean to. Sorry ’bout that. For a hundred?” She made another sound, pinched her eyebrows together, and said, “Two hundred.”
Not three seconds later, she said, “Two hundred and fifty”; then she lowered her voice and turned around to finish her call more privately. Her attitude had shifted dramatically for the caller, and she’d lost her prickly edge.
She returned a minute later. Her lips were pursed tight, and her irritableness had returned, times a thousand. She scowled at us. “You two gotta leave now. I got work to do.” And just like that, our conversation with Muriel O’Brien was over.
I tossed a couple of quarters on the bar to feed Muriel’s habit, and we reluctantly left. The gravel crunched under our feet as we crossed the parking lot toward the car.
The sun had finally set. A group of straggling stars clung in the blanket sky.
Antonio walked around to the driver’s side of the Mustang, and I put my hands on my hips. “That was weird,” I said.
He cocked an eyebrow at me and straightened his Raiders cap. “Understatement.”
“Yeah.” A shiver crept up my spine as a shadow passed over the moon. Lucky I wasn’t superstitious. At least not very superstitious. As a general rule, I tried not to step on cracks in the sidewalk, I didn’t walk under ladders, and I held up my end of the bargain when I made a prayer offering. No sense in pissing off God.
Antonio laid his palms on the roof of his car. “Who do you think was on the phone?”
“Good question. It’s like someone told her to shut her mouth and get rid of us.”
The sound of a car starting interrupted my train of thought. Tires spun against the gravel, the screeching sound like a jet plane taking off.
I whipped my head around, startled by the booming rev of the engine. The shadow of a car jolted forward and into the light. Gravel ricocheted off the steel undercarriage. The headlights flashed on, blinding me. “Holy crap!” I gasped as I heard the car’s tires finally take hold.
“Lola!” Antonio yelled. “Get out of the way!”
I blinked, registering what was happening. The car barreled toward me at full speed.
Chapter 10
Shit, shit, shit! My heart pounded furiously. I sprinted to the left.
Antonio’s urgent voice rang in my ears. “Get out of the way!”
“I’m trying!” I yelled, but the car was like a heat-seeking missile, and I was the target. I stopped, faked left, then dodged to the right. Was the driver blind? My throbbing heart had climbed to my throat. Didn’t he see me? I dodged again, but slipped on the loose gravel, sliding like I was making the winning run at home plate.
I caught a glimpse of Antonio waving me down. “Get in the car!”
The headlights bore down on me. I scrambled up and sped toward the Mustang, trying to see through the spirals spinning in front of my eyes. I pulled frantically at the locked passenger door, my hands white-knuckling the old chrome handle. It wouldn’t budge.
At the last second, I managed to hike my foot up onto the door handle and heave myself onto the roof. Antonio reached for my arms to help pull me higher. The menacing car sideswiped the Mustang, the hair-raising screech of steel against steel worse than ten thousand metal claws scratching down a chalkboard.
The car pitched, and I catapulted off, knocking my head on the ground before skidding belly-down across the gravel.
Somewhere in the recesses of my mind, I heard tires squeal and grip the asphalt as the attack car skidded onto Bradshaw and sped away.
Antonio’s voice drifted in and out of my brain like a lighthouse beam circling around in the fog. “Lola! Lola, can you hear me?”
I lifted my head as I felt his hand on my shoulder. I felt three sheets to the wind, even though I’d had only half a beer and a bottled water. Finally the fog lifted. Holy shit! That had not been an accident. Someone had just tried to kill me, and I did not like it.
I murmured a slurred prayer of thanks that it had not been my day to die—not with plain gray Jockey underwear on—and rolled onto my side.
“Lola?” The concern in Antonio’s voice was almost as disconcerting as my nearly being roadkill.
“Argh.” I struggled to push myself onto my forearms.
He reached behind me and pulled up, holding me at arm’s length to examine my wounds. “Are you okay? Need to go to the hospital?”
My tongue licked the corner of my mouth. Blood-laced gravel dust had replaced my lipstick. “I’m okay.”
“You’re pretty scraped up.”
“I’m fine. Superficial injuries.” I took a tentative step, cringing at the pain that shot up my leg.
Antonio caught me. “No, you’re not.” Holding on to me with one hand, he pulled open the driver’s-side door of the Mustang and eased me onto the seat.
“Just give me a minute, okay?” I said.
He gripped my elbow. “We can clean this up.”
I looked at the missing layers of skin on my arm, tiny bits of gravel and dirt embedded in the abrasions. Ay, Dios. My first PI injury ever, and it was a doozy. So I wasn’t invincible. Kung fu wouldn’t do squat against a kamikaze car. Neither would a gun, for that matter. Good to know, and I’d make sure to drive that point home with Manny, but it didn’t make me feel any better. Did someone actually want me dead, or had this been a warning?
Either way, first thing in the morning, I was going to demand a raise.
“Is this the worst?” Antonio said, examining my arm. “What about your leg?”
“It’s okay.” I’d banged my knee, but it didn’t feel more than bruised. I looked at the Mustang and frowned. “Is the car going to make it?”
He looked morose. “It’ll drive.”
“Tonio,” I said. “Go see if Muriel’s still inside.”
He gaped at me. “You think it was her?”
“I don’t know. Go check. Please.”
He nodded, just once, then jogged toward the entrance. He was back thirty seconds later. “She’s behind the bar.”
Damn. There was no way that lady could be in two places at once. If it wasn’t her, then who had tried to run me over?
“Let me get you home,” Antonio said. He walked around the Mustang and tried to pry open the passenger door for me. “Jammed.”
“I’ll climb over the seats.” I winced as I struggled to crawl through the inside of his vintage car to the passenger side.
Once I was settled, Antonio started her up and headed for home.
Talk about guilt. Tonio loved his Mustang more than any woman he’d ever dated. It was operational, but it looked like hell. “Sorry about your car.”
He grumbled. “Insurance’ll cover it.”
We were silent the rest of the drive. Inside our flat, he looked me over. “You going to be okay? Need help?”
“I’m fine.”
“That car came out of nowhere, Lola. Hijo de la chingada,” he muttered. “You were a sitting duck, you know that?”
What could I say? He was right. Either I was lucky beyond belief, or I’d just been sternly warned. I left him on the couch and went off to lick my wounds. I showered, and twenty minutes later, I was tossing and turning in my bed, trying to figure out who the hell I’d spooked. And why.
After a fitful sleep, I awoke to the sun. I piled my hair on top of my head in a loose bun, pulled on shorts and a T-shirt, and scrubbed the kitchen like a woman possessed. The silver lining of pent-up anxiety was a germ-free house.
I squeezed the excess water from my sponge and was giving the sink a final rinse when Antonio walked into the kitchen. Jack was right behind him.
They stopped short when they saw me. Somehow Jack seemed taller than his six feet this morning. He wore jeans and sneakers, and an olive green T-shirt with an El Toro Brewery log
o. Okay, I was totally superstitious. His shirt had to be a sign. Taking the bull by the horns was exactly what I intended to do. Whoever had tried to run me down would be sorry.
“You’re awake.” Antonio checked my bandaged arm then took my chin in his hand and turned my head. “It’s not too bad. How’re you feeling?”
My eyes darted to Jack. Hadn’t I just told him that I could take care of myself? “I’m fine.”
Jack’s face was tight. “You look like you had a run-in with a gravel parking lot.”
Clearly Antonio had given Jack every last detail. I stared him down. If he said one word about my dangerous job, I’d drop him—right here, right now. Terminado. Finito. All before it ever officially started.
He stood stone still, his jaw pulsing.
Finally I turned to Antonio. “Did you take the car in?”
“We just dropped it off. Needs a new door and side panel.” I sighed and nodded. “Will insurance give you a rental?”
“I have to call.” Antonio shrugged away his anger. “So. You’re really okay?” I’d barely started to nod when he said, “Good. Are you still hell-bent on your detective career? The folks are going to have a fit when they hear someone tried to kill you.”
He’d taken a page straight from the Magdalena Falcón Cruz book of guilt. “They don’t need to know.” Wink, wink. “Can’t it be our little secret?”
“Oh, yeah, you have lots of those,” he said, his gaze shifting to Jack for a split second.
I wanted to slug him. I did not have a ton of secrets. Only a few choice ones.
Jack leaned back against the refrigerator. “Do you have any idea who it was?”
Finally, a rational question. “No.”
“Any leads?”
I wanted someone to bounce my ideas off. Jack seemed like a good prospect at the moment. “Ever hear of a heart infection?”
He shook his head, but his interest looked piqued.
I wagged my finger as my thoughts spilled out. “I think that’s what Emily was calling you about. Her older son died of a heart infection. I think she was pissed about it and wanted to blame someone. I think she wanted you to investigate, I don’t know, the tattoo industry—”
Melissa Bourbon Ramirez - Lola Cruz 01 - Living the Vida Lola Page 13