Pay Here

by Charles Kelly

  “Nothing scared her,” said Daly. “We were cleaning a man’s house—this was in south Chicago—and he came after me with a butcher knife.” At the memory, her eyelids ticked upward, revealing the whites of her eyes. She had been afraid. “Ricki hadn’t known he was unstable, or she’d have given me the high sign. How could she know? At first he was perfectly fine. He gave us gin and things. But then his attitude went bad, he just went crazy. That’s when Ricki made her move.”

  There it was again. Ricki?

  “You are speaking of Rhea?”

  “Rhea Montero, yes, that’s how you knew her.” Daly spoke quickly, hurrying past the memory of death. “She changed names a lot, sometimes just for fun. Her real name was Ricki Montefiero, but out here she wanted something different.” Daly laughed, a little desperately. “She was so creative. And ‘Rhea Montero’ was more exotic, I guess—like Arizona.”

  Exotic like something, I supposed. Arizona is not so much strangely foreign as it is the landscape of an uneasy future. Spanish missions, border runners, Indian tribes, all knocking up against microchip plants, casinos, and space-commanding freeways. Hiking immigrants dying of thirst in saguaro-scattered wastelands rimmed by Wal-Marts. The bones of old homicides turned up by sewer-line diggers knifing deeper and deeper into the desert.

  “Perhaps she simply wanted to hide something,” I said.

  Daly didn’t catch the full import of that. “Probably she just wanted a fresh start.”

  “So many do.”

  Annoyance narrowed Daly’s eyes. She was being taken away from her story.

  “Is that a bad thing?”

  “Not always. Not more than half the time, I would say.”

  I thought of the Phoenix that Rhea had come to—a careless place constantly flowing outward across the desert, flinging up faux New Mexican-design or Italian-villa or reverse-retro buildings in its wake. A bland city on the surface, conniving and constantly hustling below, wearing only the mask of sanity. Most of its residents would have been familiar to Hans von Hentig, the German professor who wrote The Criminal and His Victim. These were his “accusers of destiny”—the suicides and the insane.

  She scrutinized me, and I realized I was getting ahead of myself.

  “The man with the butcher knife,” I said. “What was his business?”

  Now we were back on familiar ground. “Selling Quaaludes. Crack cocaine, too. And Ricki said he was thinking about getting into meth.”

  “Yes,” I said, just a beat to keep her going. There is a rhythm to conversations, you must say just enough to nurture the flow. It seldom requires much. Before people grow very old, their verbal routines are set and comforting. Each time they speak, they return to their canned autobiographies: “My parents were bastards . . . The system won’t let me win . . . I can’t get a break . . . And so, he dumped me.” But Daly, at this point in her life, did not have her biography well formed, or she had been genuinely moved by the events of the day. She was now resorting to her third gin-and-lime. I did not want her to get too drunk—it would affect her memory.

  “And he tried to kill you—” I urged gently.

  She tucked her chin on one fist and her eyes re-focused on the past.

  “He ripped my left arm all the way down, from shoulder to elbow,” she said, mouth making an “ooh” at the memory. “I was bleeding like a fire hose, and he was going to do it again. I tried to get the broom up, but I was weak, he just swatted it away. Then Ricki cracked him with a frying pan right behind the ear, where there’s access to the small brain. Who else would have thought of that but Ricki?”

  “Rhea was quite inventive when it came to violence,” I agreed, and Daly Marcus gave me a long look. “I don’t suppose she had done anything to upset your client.”

  “Of course not.” Her tone was wary now. “He was crazy. He was into some wild fantasy. He thought I’d stolen some of his jewelry, that’s why he came after me.”

  “Perhaps you were simply first in line, and Rhea knew he was just warming up,” I said. “A man with a butcher knife likes to finish his work. At least that’s my experience.”

  “She did it to save me,” Daly said. “Ricki . . . Rhea . . . never did things just for herself. It was her best quality.”

  In fact, Rhea had had many striking qualities, but this was not one I had personally experienced. The girl went on speaking about her old friend, her words rising and fading in the yeasty bar, with the drinkers parceling out their lives, the asthmatic air conditioner fending off the brutal heat, the stench of last night’s bodies lingering in the closed atmosphere. I half-listened, but I wouldn’t learn anything useful from Daly Marcus, I had only one mission left so far as she was concerned. Still, habits are hard to break, and I wanted more information.

  I interrupted her. “How did you meet?”

  “She saved me.”

  I shifted with impatience. “You told me that.”

  “No, I mean—”

  At last, she told me what she did mean. Daly Marcus had grown up in Chicago, in a an area known as Back of the Yards, for decades home to hard-drinking Slavs and Polacks, the descendants of men who had worked in the meatpacking industry and enjoyed boozing and having at each other with metal tools. Her father had been a small-time crook who barely got from one drink to another by selling stolen cars, bartending, burglarizing homes. When Daly was seven, he left. Her mother departed life two years after, done in by heroin weakness and the fists of one of her many boyfriends. Daly ended up in a foster home. It wasn’t good. She tried suicide, but that didn’t take.

  Then she met Ricki in a shelter in central Chicago, Daly on the run from her foster home, Ricki, so she said, holing up after escaping from a Mexican drug lord who wrongly suspected her of hijacking a heroin shipment. It had been a case of mistaken identity, so Ricki said. She’d been visiting friends in Mexico. They’d told her they’d gotten good jobs in Puerto Vallerta, waitressing at resorts catering to American retirees. But it had gone all wrong Her friends only worked when they had to and smoked too much dope and laid around all the time. That was no scene for her, Ricki said, she’d gotten out quick. Then, on the plane back, she sat next to a girl who let it slip she was a coyote ferrying in a load. At the airport in Houston, there had been a bag mix-up, Ricki had been wrongly targeted for ripping off the drugs, and— Well, you fill in the holes; Daly hadn’t been able to.

  Ricki took Daly on as a special case, decided to help her out. That, at least, was Daly’s view of the matter, and I’m sure that Ricki fostered that impression. Despite their age—Daly was 14, Ricki, 16—they managed to get started in the house-cleaning business. It was extraordinary how often their clients accused them of stealing jewelry, or cash, or wristwatches, but mostly the clients were comfortable types in Evanston or Lake Forest or Rolling Meadows who simply notified the authorities without much effect. The situation hadn’t turned bloody until Ricki and Daly began taking on the type of customer who solved his problems with a butcher knife.

  The slashing put Daly in the hospital, a charity ward, and it took weeks to heal. Ricki, at first attentive, finally took off on her own, hitchhiking, riding buses when she was a little ahead, hopping freight trains when she wasn’t. But she had kept in touch with Daly over the years, sharing her street wisdom: “Empty mail cars ride smoother than boxcars,” “Carry a suitcase with a college bumper sticker on it, drivers will pick you up a lot faster,” “Hide your cash in your shoe.” Sometimes, Ricki would even send a little money to ease the rough spots as Daly scratched out a living as clean-up girl in a nursing home, motel maid, fast-food worker. Daly would get a card from New Orleans or Las Vegas or Miami—Ricki telling of her adventures as a contract slot-machine player, courier in the diamond trade, lounge singer. Some of this may have been true: Rhea Montero knew casinos, had a knack for moving expensive goods, had a throaty singing voice. As for the rest, it hardly mattered to Daly. T
o her, Ricki Montefiero would always be a heroine with altruism in her heart and a lifesaving frying pan in her hand.

  “This was her first big success . . . ” Daly was saying, referring to Rhea’s situation just before she died. “I always knew she would make it huge, but I never really expected it would be out here in the desert. Ricki . . . Rhea . . . wrote me that Arizona was just wide-open for opportunity.”

  Certainly for opportunists, I thought.

  “What exactly was her business here?”

  “Don’t you know?”

  “I was just wondering what she told you. Sometimes—out here in Arizona—people differ in their views about particular ventures.”

  “It was a service business,” she said. “I knew that much.”

  “Actually, it was a transportation business,” I said, finally tipping my hand to move the conversation into a different realm. “And the police didn’t like it very much, or at least they wouldn’t have, once it came to light.” I paused for effect. “At best, she would have served twenty years.”

  Daly Marcus took a long time absorbing this, the out-of-touch expression in her eyes gradually firming into something resolute. Her mouth twisted to launch a suitable reply, but I jumped first.

  “Rhea was about as bad as she could be,” I said. “I’ve seen plenty of criminals here—in Arizona, we love our felons. But I suppose Rhea would have gotten into the record books if that car crash hadn’t taken her.” Finally, I saw the tears start in Daly’s blue eyes and I thought, Good: I’ve turned her. A hard lesson, but now she’s on her way, back to her dreams and her angels and her Midwest. But she wasn’t having any. Beliefs are tyrants. Beliefs are breath and food and light. Her fixed belief drove her, and she would come up with any explanation to grip it tightly.

  “A reporter,” she said, the anger making her tears boil and spill so she had to slash them away. “Looking for some dirty story. That’s all you care about. You don’t understand anything, you don’t understand Ricki. You’ve never had to live rough, you’ve never had to hustle.”

  I thought of the Belfast streets then, of my voice mixing with the cries of the other hollow children, of bumping against the legs of the passers-by, begging for pennies, for cigarettes to smoke away the hunger. But I said nothing and let her go.

  “What was Ricki doing?” Daly asked tauntingly. “A little smuggling?”

  “You might call it that.”

  “Tax-free cigarettes, some old artifacts from Mexico that nobody cared about?”

  “Few seemed to care about her trade, that’s true. I may have been the only one.”

  Irony twitched her lips. Huskiness made her voice muzzy.

  “You meant to bring her down, but you couldn’t. Now you want to smear dirt on her memory, but you won’t.” She stood erect, her stupidity producing a magnificent fury. “I’ll stop you. I’ll find the truth. There’s plenty of other reporters in this town. I’ll tell them your story. That won’t be quite so comfortable, will it?”

  I suppose she saw the uneasiness in my eyes and took it for confirmation that she was on the right track. Her napkin hit the table and she was on her way to the door, heading for reality and the blowtorch heat. The man-and-wife boozers looked up, startled out of their ennui. At the bar, the Budweiser drinker swung his face at me like a carnivore eager for a morsel. In fact, I felt like a morsel, sitting dangerously in the path of coming teeth. My belly turned over, settled, righted itself. I didn’t suppose she would uncover my story. She was an amateur, after all, and I’d spent a good deal of time covering my tracks. But what if she did? She was correct. That wouldn’t be so comfortable.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I caught up with her in the parking lot. I’d gone too far, I was at personal risk, and now I had to keep her under control. It wasn’t as difficult as you might think. She was gritty, but she knew no one else in Phoenix. If she wanted to destroy me, she would require my help. We all need people, even those out to do us in. Sometimes those are the only ones we can get close to. I didn’t have to catch her arm, she stopped on her own, half lifting her hands in frustration.

  “You’ve got my duffel bag,” she said.

  I took out my car keys and jingled them as a gesture of good faith, but there was nothing good about my faith. I didn’t move toward the car, I wasn’t going to make this too easy. This was a negotiation, not a concession.

  “You’ll want a place to stay,” I said. “A cheap headquarters for your crusade.”

  Her green hair lay collapsed and damp—she was already sweating a pond. August in Phoenix will batter you. It will boil the serum in your blood, incinerate your good intentions, melt your resolve. She hesitated, sighing long and low, and that’s when her personality took over. Daly depended on others. That’s why she had imagined herself so close to Rhea, even at a thousand miles distance.

  “I’m on to you,” she said. She wasn’t, of course. Not yet. But that was her way of putting me on my guard. She didn’t want me to think she was going easily, that she was giving up on exposing me as a vengeful yellow journalist.

  “Everyone’s on to me,” I said, playing her carefully. Not smiling, not pushing it. “That means I’ll be easy to find again, when you’re ready to.”

  Her face didn’t move, but I knew she could see the sense in that. A droplet of sweat oozed from her right eyebrow and eddied down her cheek. She wouldn’t lift a hand to wipe it off.

  “Cheap,” she said, making a face. “I’m sure you’re the one to see about places like that.”

  “No-one better,” I said. “Shall we go?”

  * * * *

  I drove her down Van Buren Street, where Phoenix has degenerated in its peculiar way. Van Buren, which runs through what’s left of the old central city, is a patchwork street—new and dull in parts, seedy elsewhere. Modern apartments bland as Danish furniture, a 1920s-vintage insane asylum, circus-signed thrift stores, used-appliance warehouses full of knobby porcelain, chain restaurants where cops and street people grumble late at night over scabby eggs and underachieving coffee. But among people familiar with the city, Van Buren is primarily known as a sex market. The street is thronged with prostitutes who will saliva-vacuum your penis for $25 or $35 or $75, the price depending on your means and your stupidity. They will even come through with intercourse. Pavement whores are reluctant to waste time on their backs, but they will do it for the chance of making off with your wallet. For those romantic assignations, they choose rent-a-bed places that 50 years ago were clean stucco havens in a white landscape, destinations for Midwestern tourists with kids. For Daly, I ventured near the downtown and selected one of those gone-south establishments, the Swiss Chalet Motel, which slithered sideways between an old pickle factory and a walk-up liquor store with a steel-mesh window. The Swiss Chalet was particularly noxious in its clientele. Here Daly would be treated night and day to the comings and goings of horny salesmen and janitors and clergymen, all accompanied by women redolent of sulfurous breath, overpowering perfume and decaying sperm.

  The ambience was part of my plan. I knew Daly had lived downscale, but I sensed she’d been able to keep her distance from the spongy bottom. I meant to remove that distance, to lay on everything that would repel her. As we turned into the small motor court, her reaction was encouraging. She cast a quick glance at me and looked away again. She had seen the signs already: the barbed wire atop the fence around the empty swimming pool, the crudely painted motel sign, the feeling of humid desolation in the sagging cabins, the cracked roof tiles, the doors that hung awry. In the courtyard, four Hispanic men were demolishing a disused shed that had been a free-standing laundry room, beating away at it with crude instruments, crashing in its flimsy sides, doing junk work. That meant they were illegal.

  She shrugged, not even looking at me.

  “Cheap, huh?” was all she said.

  “Perfect for you,” I replied. “The u
ndertow of the city. There couldn’t be a better place to start searching for Rhea.”

  “I’m searching for you,” she said, a bit of vibrato betraying her emotion. “Rhea’s not here, don’t you remember?”

  “I remember better than you do,” I said, cocking the car into a parking space, just missing a badly parked van with Montana plates. “But you won’t find me in this dump. I’ve a well-kept adobe up off Thirty-second Street, a new refrigerator and a cleaning woman who comes in.”

  “You didn’t always,” she said, showing a flash of intuition, and I felt a twinge.

  She knew this kind of habitation, she had scuffled. Could she see a place like this reflected in my eyes, though we were an ocean away from Belfast, decades away from the boy I had been, the one with the starved gut and the blank expression, shivering in dead people’s clothes? A vengeful boy, who used his fists against men who pawed him late at night, then learned to use them too often and too well, getting a taste for it? Of course not. No-one saw that in me any more unless I let them. Suddenly the stakes were up and I wanted her gone. I reached across her to open the door, touched her body with my arm, felt her warmth. Instantly, I drew back.

  “Thanks for the lift,” she said, as if she’d won a victory.

  Then she pushed the door and climbed out. Her eyes still on me, she retrieved her duffel bag from the back seat and waved goodbye. I did not wave back. I sped away and left her standing there, haloed by sunlight. Later, I had a vision of her—a pale girl a bit too tall, a girl with green hair and blue eyes on a long journey that had taken an unexpected turning. A journey that, perhaps even an hour before, might have ended without personal remorse, but which now was approaching a terrible end. Within the hour, Rhea’s friends had traced her to the motel.