by Joel Travis
“I was planning to leave tomorrow,” she said.
“Well, that’s good,” I said. “There’s no substitute for one’s own family. We’ll be sorry to see you go, but if you need a ride to the airport I’ll be glad to recommend a dependable shuttle service.”
I took a big bite of asparagus.
“However,” she said, raising her voice, “in light of what happened last night, I think I’d better stay here with Sheila and help out with the investigation.”
Her statement caused one of my carefully chosen spears to slide down the wrong chute. I choked and gasped for air. Sheila slapped me on the back, perhaps harder than necessary.
“What investigation?” I asked.
“The one Sheila told me about,” Crenshaw said. “To find out who killed that old man.”
“There must be some mistake,” I said. “You have to be a partner to participate.”
“Let’s not talk about that now,” Susan said.
So we didn’t. For the rest of the meal we made small talk. The others made plans to take in the latest Disney release at the new theater with the stadium seating. Susan invited me to come, but I passed. Let them have their childish entertainment. I would have the house all to myself!
I remembered how much fun it had been when Marty and I were kids and Mom left us alone for the evening under the mistaken belief that we were mature enough to behave ourselves. No sooner had the door swung shut behind her than we’d begin to fill balloons with water in preparation for a full-scale war. Or sometimes we’d play football in the hallway, which was all of three feet wide. Not much room for creative play-calling, but what fun it was to ram each others heads into the wall play after play until one of us got hurt. One time I stopped Marty near the goal line on fourth down with a bone-jarring tackle that propelled him into a table in Mom’s bedroom. There was a lit candle on that table which toppled over and landed on Marty’s head. His hair was badly singed on that play. I had to rule it a touchdown to stop Marty from crying. When she got home, we tried to convince Mom that his hair had always looked like that.
I should have gone to the movie. Turns out that having the house all to yourself is quite boring when you’re an adult. Of course, there’s nothing better than a good, thin book to wile away the hours. I scanned Marty’s bookshelves for just the right book to match my mood and reading level. I narrowed my selection down to two John Dickson Carr novels: The Crooked Hinge and Hags Nook. Carr is one of my favorite mystery writers. Although his books were written way back in the Golden Age of mystery writing, they’ve held up well over time. His far-fetched plots seem no more unrealistic today than when he devised them in the nineteen-thirties.
I had my nose in The Crooked Hinge when I heard Marty’s phone ringing. Drawn to the only compelling sound in an empty house, I found myself staring down at the Caller ID panel. When I saw the caller’s name I stood motionless, debating whether to pick up or let the call be forwarded to Marty’s answering service.
#
I had never gone out of my way to get to know Cesar Hernandez. Certainly I possessed the social skills to have formed a personal bond with my boss had I chosen to, but I sensed that Cesar was a man who valued his privacy. We kept it strictly business. An unspoken agreement existed between us—I wouldn’t pry into his affairs and in return he wouldn’t pry my eyeballs from their sockets and dump my body in the Trinity River.
However, because I never really got to know him, Cesar always had an air of mystery about him. I knew little of his background, his relationships, or his daily life beyond what I gleaned from our Monday morning meetings in his office where I turned in my weekly reports. Occasionally we’d be interrupted by a phone call, enabling me to listen in as I pretended to study the report in my lap. When he hung up, I’d ask a question concerning my report, as if I’d heard nothing and had no interest. By playing dumb, I became smarter. Although I learned nothing of substance, there was no doubt in my mind that Cesar was involved in other business dealings which were more profitable than our betting operation. I wondered if he was grooming me for a more important job in another business. If he was, he never let me know.
If he wasn’t grooming me, he could have at least groomed himself. I didn’t know if he was a fat Cuban or a fat Colombian or a fat Mexican, but if he was from a poor country, he must have eaten his share and Julio’s too. Julio was thin and wiry; his big brother was enormous. Cesar’s huge chest, broad shoulders, and muscular arms were overshadowed by one of the biggest guts I’ve ever seen. He wore his shirttails out, which made him look like a slob who’d just finished gorging himself at a buffet. His thick, black mustache was trimmed, in ridiculous contrast to his wild hair which never looked the same twice in the five years I worked for him. Although I always brought a calculator to our meetings to make tallies and figure commissions, I never did come up with an accurate count of the pockmarks on his greasy face. He wasn’t the kind of man who kept moist towelets and skin lotion in his desk drawer. He kept a gun in there.
Next to his gut, his eyes were his most remarkable feature. Technically, I know they were dark brown and not black. No one has black eyes unless they’ve recently lost a fight, and I can’t conceive of Cesar losing a fight to anybody. Yet his eyes appeared black when he looked you in the eye, and he always looked you straight in the eye.
He loved to smoke big, smelly cigars. Of course, there was a No-Smoking ordinance for the office building which Cesar disregarded like he did all rules society tried to impose on him. He never mastered the art of compromise, either. It was his way or the Trinity.
Actually, for all my talk of the Trinity River, I never saw him hurt anyone. He didn’t have to show me anything—I was already a believer. His powerful persona was such that you didn’t need to witness his wrath with your own eyes. I heard stories, though.
His pretty, nineteen-year-old secretary, Sylvia, told me about a janitor who entered the office one night when she and Cesar were working late. The janitor collected the trash from Cesar’s office and was on his way out when Cesar called him back to empty the recycling bin. The janitor explained that it was another company who handled that task, and that someone would be by the next day. Cesar grabbed the janitor by the collar and pinned him against the wall. Then he jammed the recycling bin over the man’s head and shoved him around the office for a few minutes, laughing as the humiliated trash man crashed blindly into the furniture. Just watching Cesar’s savage cruelty shook Sylvia up pretty bad. She told me she wasn’t going to spend forty hours a week helping a cruel man succeed. She said if she ever saw him treat anyone that way again, she might go part-time.
I remember another time when one of my clients—guy by the name of Rick—couldn’t pay off his losses in a timely manner. I strung it out as long as I could, assuring Cesar that the money was on the way. Then my client didn’t show up at the strip club anymore.
Rick lived in the apartments across the street from the club, so one day I dropped by his place to see what was up. His stripper girlfriend, who I also knew from the club, answered the door and invited me in for a drink. She didn’t look as hot hanging around the house in sweats as she did hanging upside down from a pole in a T-back. She told me that Rick had been having financial problems and they’d been fighting a lot. One day he just didn’t come home.
You hate to see domestic discord break up a promising family, but there was nothing I could do about that. All I could do was tell Cesar that Rick was good for the money as soon as he got back from Alaska where he was visiting his grandmother who was on her deathbed after falling through a crack in the ice. Maybe throw in a detail about a broken hip to make the story sound true.
“Bullshit,” Cesar said when I told him that story.
Somehow he knew there was no Eskimo granny.
“You think he’d lie about something like that?” I asked, breaking into a sweat.
“Somebody’s lying about it.”
“I’ll cover his losses until he gets back,” I
said.
“Don’t worry about it.”
“Can he place another bet if he pays up, or is he off the list forever?”
“He won’t be placing any bets.”
“Fair enough. I’ll just tell him he should have paid on time. ‘No more bets for you,’ I’ll tell him.”
“You do that.”
“Thanks, Cesar. It takes a big man to swallow a big loss.”
“Get out, Brit.”
As I backed out of his office, I tipped my ball cap as a show of respect. Then I went down the back stairs and into the parking lot where I sat in my car and thought about how lucky I was to work for a man with a forgiving nature.
Two weeks later I dropped by Rick’s again. Nobody answered the door when I knocked. I thought that maybe Rick’s girlfriend was walking around nude in there and couldn’t come to the door right away, so I went over to a window and looked inside. The apartment was vacant.
#
I knew it wouldn’t be easy investigating a dangerous man like Cesar Hernandez. I also knew I didn’t have much to go on. So when I saw the name “Forest Gardner” on Marty’s Caller ID, I saw it as a learning opportunity.
DetectiveGardner would have gathered much of the information I needed from his investigation into Cesar’s gambling operation, an investigation instigated by my deathbed confession. In a way, I felt he owed me. I had supplied a valuable lead. The least he could do was tell me where my lead had led. And Forest was my brother’s best friend, someone I’d known since high school. I remembered what Marty said about Forest when I called from Vegas: “He’s on your side, Brit.”
After calculating the risk/reward ratio, I lifted the receiver and extended my warmest Thanksgiving greeting to one of Dallas’ finest.
Chapter 9
Forest Gardner is thirty-three years old. Old enough, one would think, to know the importance of telephone etiquette. As soon as I greeted Forest, he said he’d call me right back. According to telephone etiquette, it’s the caller’s responsibility to clear time for the call.
I hung up and considered my position. If Forest wanted me to come in for questioning, he had only to send a squad car to Marty’s house. I called him back. Sure enough, the line was busy. Perhaps he was taking an urgent call, police business that couldn’t wait. Just as likely, he was placing an urgent call to the police. I felt a sudden urge to take a walk. Out the back door I went, through Marty’s backyard and into the alley.
I felt like a fool for giving away my exact location to the police. I’m known for my good judgment, so on those rare occasions when I do commit a blunder, it’s only natural to look around to see who or what caused the aberration. In this case it was Caller ID. I never would have answered Marty’s phone if not for that damn Caller ID.
You think about a simple device like Caller ID and you wonder why it wasn’t invented decades ago. But technology moves along at its own unpredictable pace. At times it advances so slowly that it leaves you scratching your head. As I was walking to Uncle Julio’s yesterday, I passed a demolition site where they were using a wrecking ball to knock down a building. How is it that instead of using a laser beam or something cool like that, we’re still relying on the wrecking ball, which is basically just a ball on a string? I won’t even mention the condom, so primitive in its conception that a caveman might have invented it in his spare time.
I wish I’d had a condom last night when I welcomed myself into Sheila’s bed. I hope Lady Luck didn’t make note of my negligence in her never-ending quest to screw up my life. God help me if Sheila became pregnant. What chance would our child have, inheriting my bad luck gene and Sheila’s bad temper gene? Blowing his stack every time his plans blew up in his face. Knowing he’s a born loser, yet at a loss to explain why he’d been born at all, the little bastard child of divorced parents.
Of course, the little bastard wouldn’t be little forever. Perhaps on his eighteenth birthday he would be allowed to visit me in prison, where I would be serving a life sentence for murdering the Codger. His mother would have told him that I was an innocent man, wrongly convicted and incarcerated, but he probably wouldn’t believe it. Separated by the shatterproof glass partition, my son and I would meet for the first time.
I picture my son with a beard, possibly grown to conceal an acne problem. I would also have a beard, because what’s the point of shaving in prison? I imagine us sitting there in awkward silence, stroking our beards simultaneously as we struggled to think of something to say to each other. We wouldn’t have much in common to talk about, except how our beards itched in warm weather. At the end of the visit we’d make a father-son pact to shave our beards off on the day I got paroled from prison. A nice ending to our first visit, though I’d wonder if my son realized he’d be wearing his itchy beard for another thirty years.
Soon my son would move away to another state where folks wouldn’t know he was the murderer Moran’s bastard boy. He’d never visit me, never answer my letters. But I’d make a solemn vow to see him again on the first day I was a free man, even if it meant violating my parole by crossing state lines. And when my parole officer found out that I’d left the state for no better reason than to beat the shit out of my son, they’d send me straight back to prison.
I continued to put more distance between myself and Marty’s house. A jacketless fugitive, I felt the cold wind slicing through me as I marched onward. And with the cold wind came the cold, hard truth—it took more than Caller ID to land me here. Maybe there’s something wrong with my brain which adversely affects my judgment. After all, I was in a horrible accident and I sneaked out of the hospital a week before they were finished with me. I wonder if Dr. Ferris had scheduled tests for that last week which might have revealed an internal head injury. It’s possible. Even if I didn’t suffer some hidden injury in the accident, I’m convinced that my mother or a clumsy babysitter dropped me on my head as a child. How else can you account for the fact that I remember nothing from the first three years of my life?
I caught a glimpse of Marty’s street between houses as I walked down the alley. A police car drove by. It was heading toward Marty’s house, but at low speed, so I didn’t know what to make of it. Could have been routine patrol. I didn’t take any chances. I pulled the cell phone from my shirt pocket. I needed to reach Ace Monroe to see if he could pick me up and get me out of Marty’s neighborhood before it was crawling with cop cars.
Unfortunately, I didn’t have his number on me. An ordinary man would have been forced to call Information, which is what I did. Unlisted number. An ordinary man would have been up a creek without a shovel. But Brit Moran is no ordinary man. Brit Moran has a photographic memory. Calling on my marvelous memory, I dialed Ace’s number.
A man answered in a gruff voice. “Hello, Freeman,” he said.
“I’m not Freeman,” I said.
“Then you dialed the wrong number.”
“How do you know? I haven’t told you who I’m calling.”
“Because, dumb ass, this number is unlisted. Only one person has it.”
“Well, now two people have it.”
“Hang up and go ask your mommy how to use a telephone.”
“And I thought all the great wits were dead.”
“Hey, toothpick dick, stick it up your—”
I turned the phone off before he could finish his tirade. I think he was almost finished anyway. I don’t like to hang up on people, but it was clear that the man had nothing constructive to offer and probably didn’t even know Ace Monroe. Could be that I dialed the wrong number. Whenever my photographic memory fails me, I just remind myself how lucky I am to even have it, and that it might work better next time, or the time after that.
I put the phone back in my pocket and made my way out of the alley and onto the street. I noticed a bus stop a few yards to my right. I walked over and leaned against the pole. I checked my wallet to see if I was a potential rider. Four bucks. Four bucks will take you about four feet in a taxi, but I had h
eard ads on the radio which boasted that you could purchase a DayPass for four dollars and “Ride the bus all day long!” I’d always wondered who in their right mind would want to do that, but under the circumstances I decided to take them up on it. Then I remembered it was Thanksgiving. There wouldn’t be any bus today. How unlucky can you get?
Thanksgiving Day is not the time to think about how unlucky you are. It’s a day to be thankful for your blessings. My auto accident could have killed me, yet I stand here in good health, if you don’t count my trick knee or a possible internal head injury. Anyway, the head injury could be all in my head, so to speak. I’m thankful for my health until further notice.
And didn’t I just finish a wonderful Thanksgiving feast? Mom always told us that there were children starving in … I don’t remember where they were, but she was right. I could have been born a starving child in Ireland, never knowing where my next potato would come from. I’m thankful I was born here in the States, where we can waste food without worry.
Thinking about the true meaning of Thanksgiving made me feel warm inside, though I was still shivering on the outside due to the wicked wind which continued to blow from the north, gusting at thirty miles per hour. I walked back into the alley where I was somewhat protected. A black sports car glided by. I read the license plate—THE ACE.
I ran after Ace Monroe’s car, leaping frantically and waving my arms like a wild man to attract his attention in the rearview mirror. The car rolled to a stop and I hopped inside. I ducked my head, whispering to Ace to keep a sharp lookout for cops and tell me what he saw. He said there was no reason to whisper, unless I thought the cops were hiding in the back seat.
I asked him if he could take me to my apartment so I could retrieve my winter clothes. I didn’t think anyone would be watching the apartment any longer, since I hadn’t been there in a month. I wondered if my place would be as I left it, or if I would find signs of a break-in.