Devil's Redhead

by David Corbett

  As they drove, Waxman returned to the article from the local social column about the quinceañera. “The daughter’s name is Larissa,” he said, reading aloud. “She’s fifteen. From the sounds of it, her father’s spared no expense.” Rain began to fall, heavily at first, then easing back into a drizzle. Waxman looked out at the verdant fields, then returned to the article in his lap. “Relatives are coming up from Mexico,” he said. “And Papa Rolando is addressing a civic group tonight, too. The Sacramento Valley Mexican-American Cultural Exchange.”

  “That’s a mouthful. Speech all by itself.”

  “It means there may be other reporters there,” Waxman said hopefully. “The ones covering the speech, they can join the party and add a little color to their coverage.” He folded the newspaper over. “We should blend in, at least to begin with.”

  They continued on toward Suisun and turned east along the road to Rio Vista until prominent signs, in English and Spanish, designated the turnoff to the hotel. A trio of men wearing orange reflective vests and bearing flashlights stood out in the rain at the corner of the cross-county highway and the hotel road. The men waved them south toward the river.

  The hotel lay beyond a range of treeless hills, and every hundred yards a torch decorated with flowers and gold and white bunting stood at the roadside. The rain had extinguished all but a handful of the torch flames, and the waterlogged bouquets sagged.

  The El Parador was a massive hacienda in the Mission style. A searchlight stationed in the parking light scoured the low clouds with its beam. Music echoed festively from the hotel’s bright interior. Abatangelo pulled into a parking lot crowded with limousines and directed the car into an isolated space on the periphery that would be easy to find when it came time to leave. He killed the motor, reached behind his seat for his camera and asked Waxman to retrieve several rolls of film he’d stored in the glove compartment. “Ready or not,” he said, opening the door. They crossed the distance from the car to the hotel portico on a run and shook off the rain once safely inside.

  Upon stepping beyond the lobby doors, they entered an extravagant chaos of white-clad revelers, celebratory ornament and antiquarian decor. Abatangelo likened the effect as half Porfirian Gothic, half an acid-laced reverie of Frida Kahlo giving birth to a zoo.

  Gold and white bunting, like that tied to the roadside torches, hung in long coiling festoons from every wall. As many as a hundred piñatas, fashioned from a rainbow of bright feathery paper—donkeys, elephants, clowns, angels, gauchos, a princess, a bandit, a whale, sombreros, cacti—hung by ribbons at various heights from the vaulted lobby ceiling. Beneath them as many as four dozen children, varying in age from four to sixteen and dressed in white tuxedos and brocaded gowns, wandered blindfolded, bearing sticks, to the cheers and proddings of manic adults—women crying out and clapping, men holding bottles of Chanaco and bellowing praise.

  Absent the decorations, the hotel’s design was simple and vaguely monastic. The floor was fashioned of sandstone palavers; archways connected the various rooms; the white plaster walls were accented with quatrefoils, wood beams and ironwork of medieval severity. Heavy wood doors were fitted with yellow quarreled glass.

  Off to the side on a dais, a full mariachi band struck up a song called “El Sueño” with a fanfare of brass arpeggios. The air was thick with the smell of cigars and orchids and café de olla. A pyramid of champagne glasses had been erected at the center of a long white table, behind which sat ice chests filled with bottles of Dom Pérignon. Atop a second table, a cut-glass punch bowl was attended by a servant in white livery, stirring with a ladle a pink concoction swimming with orange slices and melting ice. Further into the room, white-clothed tables bore platters of Oaxacan fare, meats roasted with lime and pasilla chile, tlayudas made with blue corn tortillas, squash blossom soup with purslane leaves and masa.

  Beyond the main desk a chapel of sorts had been erected, fashioned of two symmetrical flanks of folding chairs and a temporary altar. A statue of the Blessed Mother, on a pedestal mounted with roses, stood in modest serenity off to the left. Two altar boys sat by themselves beyond the statue, a plate of food on the chair between them. They still wore their cassocks and surplices and, after checking to see who might be watching, drank fast and hard from a bottle of beer.

  Waxman and Abatangelo made their way through the crowd, negotiating the maze of ficus trees, maidenhair ferns and palmetto palms the party’s mastermind had inserted to perfect the tropical mise-en-scène. Beneath the escalator to the mezzanine, young girls sporting pink tiaras and dressed like bridesmaids sat in phone booths with glasses of punch and accepted the doting attention of boys. Damas and caballeros: fifteen couples in all, one boy and one girl for each year of Larissa Moreira’s life.

  Waxman and Abatangelo were halfway up the escalator when the mariachi band abruptly broke off its tune and launched into a distinctive fanfare. The crowd erupted in a riotous cheer. Rolando Moreira, fresh from his speech, made his entrance, waving to one and all. Bodyguards stood to either side.

  Even from such a distance, Abatangelo gained a distinctive impression about the man. He had a vigorous balding portliness, the sort one associated with sybaritic wealth; his features were strong and handsome, a classic jaw, a sculpted moustache, lively eyes. For all this there was something irresolute about him, as though his life was a continuous act of seductive self-deceit. A patrician song-and-dance man.

  “Can you get a good shot from the mezzanine?” Waxman asked, but Abatangelo had already removed his lens cap and positioned himself along the brass rail, facing the entrance. Armed with a 28–150 mm zoom, he engaged the long end of the lens to get as much of a close-up as he could.

  The mariachi band broke into a waltz and the crowd entreated Don Rolando to come down and dance with his daughter. With a flourish, the father removed his overcoat, revealing a white tuxedo with tails, a red carnation dotting his lapel. This elicited even greater enthusiasm from the crowd. Don Rolando spread his arms, searching the crowd for his daughter, and shortly, through a divide in the revelers amid taunting whispers, Larissa Moreira made way toward her father.

  She was a tall, awkward girl, similar in features to her mother, who sat in a circle of aunts and matrons at the far end of the lobby. The mother wore a modest gown of yellow watered silk, with a broad red-ribboned sash. Her hair was pulled back and fastened with a mantilla in the old style, and she regarded her daughter’s advance toward her husband with a demeanor of bemused retreat.

  The women in her circle shared her attitude of reserve, each woman smiling to convey respect, not indulgence. The priest who’d served the quinceañera Mass sat with them, a slender, fresh-faced man with thinning hair, still wearing his vestments and nursing a glass of the children’s punch. Clustered together on a sofa and a semicircle of folding chairs, and surrounded by presents not yet opened, the doña and her entourage and the lone priest formed a tight-knit pocket of forbearing sobriety.

  Larissa Moreira reached the edge of the crowd, stepped forward to the dais that formed the lobby entrance and offered a reverent if ungainly curtsy to her father. Her gown was hooped and frilled, the brocaded bodice tight and sequined, with puffed sleeves erupting from the shoulders like wings. She wore a gold tiara in her auburn hair. Her father extended both hands to her and descended, took her in his arms and, to the sighs and cheers of the crowd, commenced the traditional waltz.

  “Pops and Pookie cut a rug,” Abatangelo remarked to Waxman as he rewound his first roll of film. “Should provide some contrast to the shots we took of Frank.”

  “I don’t see him,” Waxman responded, surveying the crowd.

  “He’s right there.”

  “No, I mean Facio,” Waxman said. “The security chief. I don’t see him.”

  The father-daughter waltz came to a triumphant end, another round of cheers erupted and Don Rolando led his daughter to where her mother was seated. It was time to open presents.

  A handful of reporters, the group w
ho’d covered Moreira’s speech, straggled in, shaking off the rain. One of them consulted a bellman, who promptly pointed upward to the mezzanine. Following the direction of his hand, Abatangelo spotted the entrance of the mezzanine lounge.

  “Let’s head in to the bar, Wax. Your friends in the press, maybe they’ll have something to tell us.”

  Abatangelo led him inside and took a seat in the nearest booth. Waxman approached the bar and ordered two coffees. The bartender, an old obrero who sang to himself, nodded his acknowledgment of the order. Waxman returned to the booth, checking his watch, and shortly the bartender arrived, delivering their coffees. Humming, he waved off their money and turned back to the bar. Waxman poured in his cream and watched it cloud as the reporters from Moreira’s speech trounced noisily into the lounge. There were two women and three men, none of them older than thirty. Waxman eyed them with interest.

  “You see the woman at the head of the pack,” Waxman whispered to Abatangelo. “Her name is Eloise Beaulieu. Or at least that’s the name she uses for attribution. She used to be a movie reviewer for one of the trashier weeklies in town.” The woman was speaking loud and fast, gathering everyone forward to the bar, squirming her hips onto a stool and ordering margaritas for all. “Excuse me a minute,” Waxman said. He left Abatangelo in the booth.

  As Waxman approached the bar, the identities of the others came to him. The second woman, a plump assertive type with short-cropped hair, wrote an op-ed column for a Contra Costa daily. Her name was Gayle something, she catered to right-leaning libertarian views. Two of the men were stringers he knew from parties here and there, Smathers and Koch were their names; the third man, from what Waxman was able to overhear on approach, was named Holleran and had come down from Sacramento. Intent on their margaritas, they did not see Waxman closing from behind. One of the stringers, the one named Smathers, said, “You realize, Bing Crosby is the man responsible for bringing tequila to the States.”

  “Bing Crosby and Phil Harris,” Koch, the other stringer, corrected. “And it was agave tequila. Like Herradura and Sauza. Not the stuff they put in these.”

  Smathers shrugged. “So spank me.”

  “I’d rather spank the little princess down there.”

  “That little princess,” Holleran, the man from Sacramento, said, “will be wearing that same dress a year from now. Except the fit’ll be a bit more snug.”

  “You mean she’ll be at the altar,” Eloise Beaulieu said.

  “Barefoot,” Smathers said.

  “The other half of barefoot.”

  The men laughed, the women didn’t. Above them, the blades of a brass fan rotated drowsily. The bartender freshened their glasses. Waxman cleared his throat. Eloise was the first to recognize him.

  “Berty, my God. What are you doing here?”

  Smathers, hearing Waxman’s name, snapped to. “Bert Waxman. You did that piece on the hit out near Antioch today.” Waxman guardedly detected intimations of praise in this remark. Then Smathers added: “Man has to fall down drunk in just the right doorway to get a story like that to trip over him.”

  Waxman asked, “You folks cover Moreira’s speech?”

  “Whoa, Berty, whoa,” Eloise said. “My question came first. You working the same story that appeared this morning?”

  “You’ll read all about it,” Waxman replied. “I was wondering, the speech, was there a release given out?”

  “Here,” Holleran said, removing from his pocket a press release folded into sections. “Take mine.”

  “No,” Eloise said, snatching it from his hand. “First, I want to know, Berty. Why. Are. You. Here.”

  “I’m going downstairs,” Holleran announced, sliding from his stool. “Fetch me some vittles.”

  “No spanking,” Smathers said.

  “It’s a birthday!”

  “Only Daddy gets to spank.”

  “Well, damn.”

  Holleran exited waving absently to one and all, even Abatangelo, whom he spotted on his way out. Waxman made one halfhearted grab for the press release but Eloise snatched it away.

  “Is this Moreira guy implicated in the stuff I read today?” Eloise asked.

  Smathers and Koch were interested, too, now. They studied Waxman with waggling eyebrows and out-with-it smiles.

  Waxman said, “There were some squatters on the property around the time of the killings. They got scared off by the police and, rumor has it, they fled up here. I lost their trail. I thought Señor Moreira, or somebody who works for him, might be able to help.”

  Abatangelo, sitting with his coffee, listened in. Figuring Waxman had invented this account on the spot, he thought: Not bad.

  “So you came up to ask him on the night of his daughter’s quince,” Gayle, the short-haired woman, said. At the sound of her voice, Waxman recalled her last name: Fruth. She rolled her eyes. “Impeccable timing.”

  “It’s bullshit,” Smathers said. He was still smiling.

  “I was not aware,” Waxman said, “there was a party planned here for this evening.”

  Eloise Beaulieu made a face. Gayle Fruth groaned. Koch said, “Hell’s bells, give him the damn release,” and pushed his empty glass across the bar, calling out to the bartender, “Un otro, amigo.” After suffering a prodding elbow from Gayle Fruth, he added, “Por favor.”

  Eloise relented with a dispirited sigh and handed the release to Waxman. He unfolded it and read.

  “He’s opening some youth center for gang members, about which he said just about what you’d expect,” Gayle Fruth said. “You know, education, family, free enterprise.”

  “Tradition is a buttress for the soul,” Smathers intoned, quoting.

  “Fortune favors the brave,” said Koch. He was still waiting for his margarita, hands playing bongo on the bar. “But no spanking.”

  “It was preachy,” Eloise agreed. “But, per usual, they ate it up.”

  “They,” Koch said, accepting his refreshened margarita from the bartender with glowing eyes. “Who were ‘they,’ exactly?”

  “I think it’s a good deal,” Gayle Fruth interjected. “I think he has the best interest of those kids at heart. Convinced me, anyway. He wants them off the street, give them work. Taggers, gangbangers. Nuestra Familia, I mean, that’s the alternative, right? Money’s out of his own pocket, so what’s to bitch about? Not like we’re going to get taxed for it.”

  “To Bing,” Smathers said, lifting his glass.

  “Bing and Phil,” Koch corrected.

  Waxman put the release away. From a different pocket he removed one of the clippings he’d brought along from the accordion file Aleris had brought him from the refugee center. One of the ones with a picture of Victor Facio. He showed it to Eloise, knowing the others would crane to look.

  “See him anywhere? At the speech?” he asked.

  The bartender, cleaning glasses, looked up from his work. He glanced at the picture and then up at Waxman. Their eyes met.

  “His name is Victor Facio,” Waxman said.

  The bartender looked away.

  “Pretty dapper dude for a squatter,” Smathers remarked.

  “I don’t remember him,” Eloise said, studying the snapshot. “I mean, there was a real crowd. Not like here, but big.” She shrugged. “So who knows? Could be.”

  Waxman said, “Thank you,” and put the clipping away.

  “My point,” Smathers said, “is that this story you’ve handed us about chasing down some squatters doesn’t jive with that picture. Am I right?”

  The bartender picked up a hand towel, ambled toward the storage room in the rear and disappeared.

  “Thanks. See you around,” Waxman said to Eloise, then nodded to the others to include them in his farewell.

  “Why do I get the distinct impression I’ve just been fucked with,” Smathers said.

  “Come on,” Koch responded, sliding off his stool and slapping his companion on the shoulder. “Ground floor, tapas galore.”

  Waxman returned t
o the booth and sat across from Abatangelo again. Shortly the other reporters trailed out on their way to the food, making halfhearted gestures of farewell. Eloise in particular. At the doorway, she called back, “I’ll call you tomorrow, Berty. We’ll chat.”

  Once they were gone, Waxman leaned across the table toward Abatangelo and whispered, “He’s here. The bartender, the way he reacted when I said Facio’s name—like a switch went off.” He leaned back again, gazed into the distance and sipped his coffee. “I feel confident now.”

  “You don’t look confident,” Abatangelo said, smiling. “You look like you just swallowed your wallet.”

  The bartender returned from the storeroom and resumed humming to himself as he wiped down the bar. A moment later, a large man in a gray polyester suit appeared from the hallway and sidled up beside Abatangelo’s and Waxman’s table. He loomed over them, rabbit-eyed, his face slack and square. His hands were misshapen, as though from numerous bone breaks. “Vengan conmigo,” he said, gesturing for them to follow.

  The man wasn’t one of the bodyguards who’d accompanied Rolando Moreira into the hotel. Moving with a hulking swagger that reminded Abatangelo of prison, he led them to the elevator, which was waiting. Inside, he turned a key in the control panel and punched seven. Together, the three of them stared up silently as the numbers overhead lit and faded one by one, marking their passage floor to floor. The elevator shuddered to a whispered halt and the heavy doors slid open.

  The hallway receded in both directions. Brass sconces lined the wall above gilded wainscoting and sedge carpet. The smell of a recent vacuuming still hung in the air, a prickle of dust. Waxman and Abatangelo followed the lumbering man in the gray suit to the end of the hall, where he rapped three times on a large white door. A slight but square-featured landeno youth answered. He wore a ruffled formal shirt, an Edwardian bow tie. His tuxedo trousers bore a crisp press and his patent bluchers shone. Stepping back, he extended his hand toward the interior.