by Paul Moomaw
“Do you like Williams?” she asks, without turning to look at me.
“I didn’t think you had noticed me.”
I settle on the edge of the ottoman. Katherine smiles and massages the side of my thigh with one foot. She picks up the remote control. “Let me listen to the last movement of this. It’s short. It’s Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Second string quartet. He only wrote two, this one when he was old and wise.” She presses a button and the music begins. She settles deeper into the chair and closes her eyes. I am content to watch her as she listens. She wears no makeup, and I can see the tiny blood vessels that cross her eyelids. Her breast rises and falls gently. She stretches her head back and runs her fingers through her hair. I want to touch it, too, but I do not. I feel a twinge of something close to pain that I do not understand. I take a deep breath, then another, pushing the feeling away. By the time the music ends, I am calm again.
Katherine rises. “Coffee?” I nod, and she walks toward her kitchen. She moves easily, with the grace of an athlete, and I cannot stop watching her. Finally I stand up and follow her into the kitchen.
Katherine pours coffee from a stoneware pot and hands me the cup, then picks up a mug for herself. It is large and has on its side a cartoon showing a boat about to drop off the edge of a waterfall.
“Eddy gave me this for Christmas one year. You think he was trying to tell me something?” She fills the mug with water, goes to a drawer and pulls out a bottle from which she shakes a small, a yellow tablet into her hand. She glances at me. “I had an impulse to hide this from you.” She shrugs, takes the pill, pours the remains of the water into the sink and fills the mug with coffee.
“It’s just Valium, the housewife’s helper.”
“You’re not a housewife.” I try to brush away a whisper of disappointment.
“I used to be.” She swallows coffee, grimaces, and adds sugar to the cup. “I still like the way it makes me feel. Coats my nerves with honey.”
“Do I make you nervous?”
“No.” She shakes her head. “Yes. I don’t know. Everything makes me nervous. I worry too much, and work too much, and drink too much.” She looks at the bottle, then puts it back in the drawer. “And probably take too many of those.” She shrugs and drains the coffee mug, then looks at me with a smile that seems brittle and tired. “I didn’t sleep well last night. Bad dreams.” She pads restlessly around the kitchen. I watch her silently.
“I still want to go to the zoo.” she says finally.
I shake my head. “It’s raining.”
“The animals won’t care.”
The rain does not slacken, and we are almost the only visitors walking the grounds. Katherine insists on staying outside, where fenced paths curl through the large fields of animals.
“On rainy days, the insides of the buildings stink,” she says. “I don’t like snakes and birds that much, anyway.”
We have walked a quarter of an hour. A herd of some kind of gazelle stands next to the fence. As we approach, the animals begin to drift away, moving slowly, but with small, prancing, nervous steps. One of them remains, lying down, its head pressed against the wire of the fence. As we draw closer, I realize that it is dead. We look at it in silence. Then Katherine reaches through the fence and strokes the animal, running her fingers across its horns and muzzle. She snatches her hand back with a little cry, and presses her back against me. I put an arm around her and can feel her shiver. She pulls my hand down so that it covers one of her breasts, then presses it tighter with her hand.
“Dead things don’t bother you.” She makes it a statement, not a question. We begin to walk again. I keep my arm around her shoulder, and she slips hers around my waist. I am suddenly aware that she is small and fragile. Feelings whisper through me, but I am not sure what they are, or even if they are pleasant or not.
“Are you healthy, Daniel?”
“I suppose so.”
“I mean, are you going to live a long time?”
“Long enough.”
“Good. Then you can still be my friend the day I die. And you have to make sure it isn’t like that.” She stops and looks back at the gazelle. “All wet and cold, and alone.”
“I might die first.”
“No you won’t,” she says, and gazes intently at me. “You mustn’t.”
We hold each other a little longer, then step apart and our eyes meet again. At that moment I understand that, some time in the last few weeks, I have made a clear decision. I am not going to kill Katherine. In fact, I probably will kill her brother instead, although I will save him until last.
The rain continues, and we pass few other visitors as we begin to walk back to the parking area. That may be why I notice when a man points his camera in my direction. I catch the glint of the lens out of the corner of my eye, and instinctively turn away. Katherine notices and asks me if something is bothering me. I say no, but that is a lie. It may be only coincidence. We were walking past the gorilla enclosure, and that may have been the camera’s target. I look again, and the man is still there, standing in the rain. He wears a dark gray raincoat, and has an umbrella in his left hand and the camera in his right. Now he holds the camera at his waist, but it is still pointed in our direction. I may simply be feeling edgy, especially after my sloppy work in Oregon. But my feelings tell me otherwise, and I have learned the hard way to trust my feelings. Disregarding them almost got me killed once.
Early in my career a man in Tucson who called himself Donald Casados offered me sixty thousand dollars to kill his wife’s lover. My first reaction was that it was too much money. But I was young, and time had not tempered my arrogance. I convinced myself that, for me, it was a reasonable fee.
That man told me he was a policeman. He said his wife had abandoned him for someone else, and had stolen a large amount of cash when she left. The cash, he told me sheepishly, was from bribes he had taken from drug dealers, and so it would have been awkward to report the theft. He wanted the new boy friend killed, but not his wife. He wanted her to live, and to understand that he had caused the death, and to fear him for the rest of her life. He said if I could find what was left of the cash, it would be mine as a bonus. He took me in his car, drove me past the house where he said his wife and her new lover lived. He gave me a key that he said was to the front door, and told me that on Wednesday nights his wife, a nurse, worked the overnight shift, and the man would be there alone. He gave me thirty thousand dollars in advance, with the promise of an equal amount when the job was done, and said he could provide me with a clean gun if I needed it. I declined. Even then I was not foolish enough to accept a murder weapon from a stranger.
Some of what he told me was not a lie. His name was Casados, he was a policeman, and he did possess a large amount of drug money; but his wife did not take it. It was the cash he gave to me, and probably expected to recover from my body at the end. I did not know that at first, of course. I took his money, waited one week, and then drove a car he took from the police impoundment lot to the target address. The night was clear, and a bright half moon touched the street and sidewalk with silver. On an impulse, I parked three blocks away and walked through the shadows to the house. That was probably my first intelligent act in the entire business.
The house was brightly lit. I approached a window and peeked in. On the other side, inches from the glass, a woman stood at a kitchen sink, washing dishes. I shrank back, and crept along the wall to the next lighted window. Through it I saw a dining room. A man sat at the table, drinking from a beer bottle and watching a small television that rested on a sideboard.
I moved quickly to the shadow of a large juniper a few feet from the house, and stood there, wondering what had gone wrong. I heard a noise, and a shadow caught my attention at the front corner of the house. I waited, and watched, and a human figure came into view. It approached, and coalesced into someone recognizable: the man who had hired me. He peered toward the back yard, then turned and vanished around the corner again
. I followed, quickly and silently. He never heard me approach.
There is a way, if you have the skill and focus, of striking a person just under the shoulder blade, to put his chest muscles and diaphragm into a spasm. Chinese martial artists call it sealing the breath. It worked especially well that night, because Casados was completely unprepared. It kept him silent long enough for me to lock his arm behind his back and guide him down the street toward the car. His air returned after a block, but he kept silent. I told him I would slit his throat if he did not. As we walked, I stripped him of his belt and lashed it around his arms. He was well-trussed by the time we reached the vehicle. I frisked him quickly. He wore a shoulder holster and carried a pistol, a nine-millimeter Browning with a silencer attached. I tossed the gun onto the back seat, then shoved him into the front passenger seat and drove out of town and into the desert. We passed several dirt roads before I chose one, turned onto it, and drove another mile. Then I stopped and pulled him out of the car.
He did not want to talk at first, so I tugged his trousers off, and his underwear. He lay on his back, the moonlight shining on his bare skin. Between the chilly desert air and the touch of my knife, his penis shrank almost out of sight. I grabbed the head and stretched it out again, then held the sharp edge of the blade against the base. After that he talked readily.
He had learned how to make contact with me from an acquaintance who was a mid-level soldier in the Tucson Mob. It was true, he said, that his wife had left him for someone else. He had intended to kill me as soon as I drove up, then use my gun to kill his wife and the other man. His gun, he would leave with the bodies, so that it would look as if the three of us had died in some kind of a shootout. He told me he had a packet of cocaine, which he also intended to leave with the bodies.
I checked his coat pockets again, and found in one of them a Ziploc bag filled with white powder. I gripped it between the knuckles of my index and middle finger, so as to leave no prints.
“Take it,” Casados said. “A present from me. No hard feelings, okay? It wasn’t nothing personal.”
I nodded and stood up.
“I understand.” I stepped back to the car, tossed the bag of drugs inside, and retrieved the Browning from the back seat. He lay there watching as I came back to him. To his credit, he did not plead or whimper before I killed him.
Chapter 28
I wake up the next morning knowing I have dreamed. I cannot remember the dream itself, but it was not a good one. I can tell that from my mood and the odd sense of pressure I feel behind my eyes. I rub my forehead and roll out of my bed. I go to the living room and look out the window. It is still raining, but there are light spots in the overcast that offer hope of a few of what the weather people refer to optimistically as sun breaks. I turn on the radio to get some music, but immediately turn it off again. My stomach tells me I am hungry, but my brain turns away from the idea of food. I stand at the window again, rising up onto the balls of my bare feet, dropping to my heels with a jar, and rising again. My whole body wants to hop. I am irritated and disgruntled. I feel fussy, like some little old woman. I do not know what I want to do, and I do not want to do anything. I am sure it has to do with the man and his camera at the zoo. It may also have to do with Katherine, and not knowing what to do about her. I have not changed my mind about her death, but her life, and what part I might have in it, leaves me bewildered. I do not like being bewildered.
I force myself to prepare a breakfast, even though I am sure I do not want it. I put beans into the Cuisinart, add water, and turn it on. As the machine starts to grind, I realize that I have not placed a filter into the coffee basket, and so the entire operation is wasted. I curse, turn off the machine, and empty the grinding basket. I put in new beans and a paper filter, then turn the machine on again. As it starts to grind it emits its usual howl, like a tsunami alarm.
I pull out a pan, crack three eggs, and make a plain omelet as the coffee brews. I slide it onto a plate, sprinkle an ample amount of hot sauce on it, and take it to the table. The sauce is something called Iguana Radioactive Sauce. I used Tabasco for years, but got to accustomed to it. The new stuff is three times as hot, and tastes better. I suppose I will have to find another substitute some day. You get used to anything.
As soon as the Cuisinart has brewed enough coffee for a cup I take some and return to the table. I have to make myself take a first bite of omelet, but after that my hand and mouth collaborate to get me fed, and I realize I am enjoying it.
By the time I finish the eggs the Cuisinart has just about filled up its pot. I get up, pour myself another cup of coffee, and go to the living room. I stare out the window a while longer, then go to my desk and pull out Angwin’s list. Planning a job will settle my nerves. It always does.
I go down the list and stop at the first name that catches my eye. Clifford Hurt, who lives in Corpus Christi, Texas, on the Gulf Coast about a hundred miles north of the Mexican border. I go to the other end of my desk and pick up my lap top computer. I have outfitted it with a wireless card, so that I can go on line anywhere in my house. For a moment I fight the illogical conviction that someone may be listening in. Then I laugh at myself, take the computer to the big chair by the window, and settle down, physically and mentally. I go to Google, and start to type Clifford Hurt’s name in and then change my mind. It occurs to me that I have not checked on developments around Towner Cooper Maxfield. I go to the Portland Oregonian web site and look for news and he is there. The bodies were found the day after I left and the police have no leads. The story dead ends for a while and then there is one last item. It seems that after finding Maxfield and his employee they did a thorough search of the farm and discovered that one of the outbuildings was stacked high with a witches’ brew of chemicals—fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides. So much for Maxfield’s organic fruit. At least three of them, Dieldrin, Binapacryl and something called Silvex, have been banned for years and so in addition to the murder investigation the authorities are trying to find out where Maxfield got the stuff. I smile and shake my head, and then start looking for information about Clifford Hurt.
I learn that he is eighty-five years old, with an address listed on Ocean Drive. Google Earth shows me a picture of the place from above—a very large house with wings, right across Ocean Drive from the bay. Clifford Hurt built the house a number of years ago, and even then it had to cost a fortune. No problem for Hurt. He had a fortune. He appears to have run through more than one, in fact. He was married, but was now a widower. His wife, whose name, ironically, was Katherine, died in a storm, out on a boat in the Gulf of Mexico. It happened during a federal investigation of Hurt’s activities. There were rumors that she was on the boat with a lover named Billy Renfrow, but there was never any evidence that Renfrow had been on the vessel. He does seem to have disappeared about that time, however, and was never seen again.
Hurt made one fortune in real estate, then lost it in a series of deals gone bad. He appeared next as a broker and financial planner, and put together half a dozen tax shelter operations that he sold to wealthy investors. That was what the Internal Revenue Service was investigating. The shelters were bad ones, and any number of people lost their shirts when the feds came calling and demanded taxes, penalties, interest and criminal fines. Hurt slipped through the net, apparently because of his connections to the crony political system that Texas has become famous for over the decades. His last gambit was a vacation home development on Mustang Island, a barrier island about twenty miles from Corpus Christi. Hurt built close to fifty houses on the island, and sold them all at anywhere from a quarter of a million to a million each. They were all large, fancy, and with great views of the water. Wiser heads called them a catastrophe waiting to happen when the next big storm hit. Hurt assured everyone that no storm would ever damage those houses, and he was right. No storm was needed. The houses were built on tall pilings with nothing much but sand for foundations. The first house to tilt over onto its side was one of the milli
on dollar places, and things got worse after that. Hurt walked away unscathed from that, too; but clearly there were many people motivated to see him hanging from a tree.
Now Hurt appears to be retired. Two years ago he stated an intention to outlast his only relative, a younger brother named Matthew who apparently made even more money than Clifford and was last reported to be living in South Africa.
Satisfied with this first effort, I close the lap top and return it to my desk. I pour myself a third cup of coffee and sit down at the window again as plans for a trip to Corpus Christi coalesce in my mind. Then my mind goes off on a tangent and I find myself thinking of Katherine, and wonder how she would like the Gulf Coast. I almost succumb to an impulse to call her and ask. Then I catch myself and laugh at my foolishness, but the image of Katherine under a palm tree lingers.
Chapter 29
When I pick up my mail Friday morning I find a cream-colored envelope with no return address. It is addressed to “Resident” and has a New Jersey post mark, and I know that this is not a piece of junk mail that I should throw away. I open it at the Post Office and toss the envelope into the large trash container next to the wall of mailboxes. Inside is a piece of white paper that says, “Please call Mr. Harris.” It gives a telephone number with a Minneapolis area code, but the number means nothing. It is there to take up space. The number I am expected to call is in Lake Tahoe, and the man waiting for the call is not named Harris.
The coffee is still hot when I return home. I pour myself a cup and sit down next to the telephone. I am reluctant to make the call, because I know it will be business, that it will be from the Mob, and that I will accept the job. I am not required to. That is part of our agreement. But, as they say, I know which side my bread is buttered on. I finish my coffee, pick up the telephone, and punch in the Lake Tahoe number. The other end answers on the first ring.