Pay Here

by Charles Kelly

  Only one thing seemed odd. I discovered it when I tried to dial Daly’s motel, my hand in a handkerchief to keep fingerprints off the handset. No dial tone. I clicked the buttons, but the phone remained dead. Sweeney had been garroted only this morning. Was there a general outage in the apartment complex, then? No, the kid in the office had taken a call. Had Sweeney not paid his bill? Possibly, but the nice clothes in the closet—Hugo Boss, Polo, Tommy Hilfiger—argued against that, and when I’d seen him recently, he hadn’t seemed short of ready cash. I traced the phone line back to the wall outlet. Someone had made a small incision in the line just where it met the plug, a razor-like cut that penetrated the plastic coating and copper wiring, just enough to stop the signal. Someone had been careful. Someone had worried Sweeney was talking, and that someone had wanted to cut off his communication before he took the ride that ended with a wire around his neck. I checked the screen on the mobile handset and hit the redial. The number that popped up was familiar. Rhea’s number.

  There was a moment when I was still rational, when I realized Sweeney must have been trying to reach someone on clean-the-files duty at Rhea’s apartment, most likely Arthur Morrison. But then I trembled, caught by a heat-shiver. That number had power over me. I’d dialed it dozens of times, and often it launched a road trip, for Rhea was always urging me out of the city, where she could have me alone. A cabin in the woods near Oak Creek, breakfast on the verandah of the Copper Queen Hotel in Bisbee, walks through the cool pines around Flagstaff. She seemed to relax, then, and I’d catch her in a natural smile. Or I’d listen to her, intrigued, as she described a scene from her past—a salesman working his magic in a roadside café, an old woman conversing with her dog on a beach in Florida, a teenage girl adjusting her hat to attract a boy on a bus in Cleveland. Disconnected pictures, visions with no context. Scenes that told nothing about Rhea, but who cared about that? She could tell stories as well as I could, and I’d always put great store by that. When you’re starving or your feet are freezing or the monster comes in the night, a story will make you forget, will take you elsewhere. Of course, her stories hid her from me and I suspected she had reason to hide, but that was all the more fascinating. Young as she was, she had depths I couldn’t see, dangerous pools I wanted to plunge into. And an easeful manner, at times, that made the mix even more exciting. I remembered her black hair against a white pillow, the shape of her body curling beneath a sheet, the way she stroked her cheek dreamily, looking out a window. Since Cathryn Ross, there had been many women, but none with mystery.

  I could feel blood pulsing in my temples. I shook my cell phone from my jacket pocket, dialed the number. I lost touch then. My mouth formed into a smile, and there was a ready remark on my lips, a bit of charm to meet Rhea’s answer. She had a voice that reached out to you, that took you back along that telephone line right to her, so you could smell her body and feel her breath on your ear.

  A mechanical click.

  “This is Rhea—”

  “It’s Michael,” I blurted. “You’ve given me a proper fright—”

  “—I’m not around right now, but I’ll always come around. I wouldn’t want to miss you, now. Leave a number.”

  A mechanical beep.

  I looked at the empty phone, feeling the terrible need to laugh, not being able to laugh, wanting to explain, having no one to explain to.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

  * * * *

  I rarely encounter mysteries. That may sound odd, coming from an investigative reporter, but most dirty doings are straightforward as Wonder Bread. Ponzi schemes, real estate scandals, black-bag ops: they all fall into predictable patterns. Murders, too. Your average garroting laid out in the sunlight with the grooves cut neatly on the neck and the glassy eyes and the protruding tongue, well, that’s nothing to get the wind up about. A corpse is a solid thing, after all. It’s understandable. When things stop being obvious, my stomach goes bad. It was bad now. For no reason I could identify, I felt surrounded by phantoms, half-heard whispers, half-seen movements. I drove south on Seventh Street, trying to get the solid feeling back. There was plenty of substance there, in the fried-chicken palaces, lube shops, real estate offices nudging in between the palm trees, places advertising antiques and groceries and used books. Church’s Fried Chicken. Sundown Real Estate. Jiffy Lube. But I was unsettled and suddenly I wanted to see Daly, just as badly as I didn’t want to see her.

  I was in one of those moods in which I needed to talk. Before Rhea, those moods were rare. I hate them, because they take me right out of my game, damage me as a reporter and as a person, ruin my perspective. Spending most of my time by myself, I have developed the long view. When I engage with other people, I react to what they say and do. Someone looks at me sadly, and I tie myself in knots trying to figure out why. Someone makes a point about politics, and I try to comment wisely. Someone insults me, and I begin scheming my revenge. This is a terrible way to be. It puts me in the moment, means that I am always being moved about. When I am alone, I stand back from this. I see how people fit into my life, observe how they play off each other, trace patterns of behavior. I get a sense of where I am going and where the world is going. I feel omniscient.

  Of course, I may be fooling myself, acting like God without the knowledge God is said to possess. My theories may be wrong and my mistakes compounded by my illusion of wisdom. Understanding this, I can never be sure about anything. What to do? My solution is simple. I pretend that I am sure, that I am wise, that my loneliness is an advantage. It might be so, and in any case I move with certainty. If I am right, my success will be smashing. And if I am wrong, I will never know what hit me.

  This time, Daly answered her motel door when I knocked. She greeted me with a look of contempt.

  CHAPTER NINE

  “I thought I’d lost you,” I said.

  Her chin advanced a bit. Her attitude hadn’t changed, but perhaps she’d learned something. There was color high in her cheeks, an angry spark in her eyes.

  “You hoped.”

  And yes, I had hoped that at first, but no longer. At first, I had wanted to save her. Me, who had never been able to save anyone. Then I had wanted to get rid of her, to keep her away from my own past. But now I was glad she was alive, and I saw some possibilities in her. In Phoenix, mutual usefulness is what serves for friendship. Perhaps we could be friends. Of course she didn’t think so, she wasn’t used to our ways. She stepped forward to push me subtly away, posing confidently in the doorway of a room smelling of decades of stale alcohol, body odor, cheap detergent. I could see she was dying to jab me, to explain how clever she had been.

  “So you have been out and about,” I said. “Isn’t that grand? And I suppose people have been stuffing nonsense in your head, right in among the nonsense that’s already there. You’ve managed to ask questions and not to get yourself killed. Good, good. Well, a friend of Rhea’s has not been so fortunate.”

  She understood that, at least. Anything less subtle than a neon sign wouldn’t have registered. She licked her lips, her eyelids ticked up, and a flash of uncertainty whisked across her face. Good. I pushed past her, took three steps, flung myself onto the rumpled bed, which still breathed the rich odor of her body, and surveyed the empty side of life—the plasterboard dresser and third-hand lamp, the 59-cent English country scene in a dime frame. The ceiling fixture cast a low-wattage glow on the room, and an air-register had torqued out of line in a buckled wall. I knew such places, and I never wanted to go back.

  “Who’s dead?” she asked, approaching, stopping just short of the bed. Her eyes were glistening. The bleakness meant nothing to her, and the whiff of slaughter had made her forget she hated me. Bloody murder is such an adventure for those who haven’t seen it up close.

  “You wouldn’t know him,” I said, smoothing the threadbare coverlet, feeling a stitched-over place tickling my pa
lm. “A man named Arnie Sweeney. Just one more low-life in Rhea’s merry band.” I sniffed. “Fortune teller.”

  She folded her arms, dropped her eyebrows and projected her lips in an attitude of concentration. I had thought she would go ice-faced at the mention of Rhea’s rabble, but she seemed to take it for what it was. Perhaps she had gotten a glimmer of the Arizona version of Rhea. I pulled the tape recorder from my pocket, thrust it toward her and clicked the button. Sweeney’s voice crackled from the tiny speaker, explaining the mysteries of the universe. Well, at least he was using his performance voice. The rattling in his throat was suppressed so much that it only scratched along the bottom of his tone, like pebbles knocking against each other on the bed of a stream.

  She shot a finger toward the recorder.

  “I know that man!”

  Now this was a bit of a shock.

  “You do get about, then,” I said. “He’s been dead since early this morning.”

  She snatched the recorder from my hand, held it closer to her ear, nodding all the while as Sweeney’s voice clattered on.

  “Yes, that’s him. That’s the man who called me in Omaha and arranged for me to come to work for Rhea. He told me about the airline ticket. He did everything.”

  I fell back on my elbows to get a longer perspective on her, but could see nothing false in her face or body language.

  “Apparently he did too much, or too little,” I said. “Someone used a garrote on him.”

  “What’s a garrote?”

  “A thin wire or rope used to strangle.” She clicked off the recorder, handed it back.

  “It must be linked to Rhea’s murder. Perhaps I should ask Mr. Morrison and Mr. Bracknall,” she said. “They seem to know a lot.”

  I shook my head, bemused. “I’m sure they do.”

  So she’d gotten through to Morrison and Bracknall, or perhaps they’d gotten through to her. Either way, something unusual was going on. Villains talk only when they must.

  “So they told you Rhea was murdered?”

  “Oh, no,” she said. “I figured that out for myself.”

  Then she spun out her murder mystery, with Rhea as the victim. It was quite lurid. She’d worked it out right down to how Rhea’s car had been bumped from behind to throw it into a spin. The technique had been used in Oklahoma in 1974, she said, to kill Karen Silkwood, a whistleblower in the nuclear industry, and that conspiracy had been documented beyond any question. Daly had seen it all, with Meryl Streep as Silkwood, on late-night TV.

  “So you see,” she said, “They must be lying to me. Either Rhea died instantly, as Bracknall said, or she lived a while, as Morrison said. Their stories are changing, because they don’t want me to know what really happened. They must have killed her.”

  At this point I didn’t know she’d told Bracknall she thought I had killed Rhea, but it wouldn’t have surprised me. Her type usually threw off theories like chaff from a reaping machine. In any case, the point she had made about the discrepancy—an important point, as it turned out—was completely lost on me. In addition, I could not convince myself that Rhea could be taken down, not by men such as this. Rhea was swift and graceful as a jungle animal, and her thoughts ran on ahead of her. God might take her off in a motor crash, but men could not plan such a thing. Still, Morrison and Bracknall were showing quite a lot of initiative, something they had never done before. I wondered about that, but chose to write it off.

  “These are hooligans, not historians,” I said. “Perhaps they simply spoke carelessly about the accident. They are, after all, the world’s most careless people.”

  She looked as if I had called her a whore.

  “You simply don’t see the point,” she said, folding her arms and turning away.

  But I did see the point, or thought I did. Daly was one of those who live by fantasizing a more interesting world, a strangely efficient world where any sloppiness is evidence of evil. No, I was not impressed with Daly’s theory about Morrison and Bracknall, but I was absorbed by her description of how they had acted. They had put themselves out to deal with her, had not tried to sweat her. Why had they taken that approach? It could only mean they thought she posed a threat, one so great they did not want to be heavy-handed. Perhaps they wanted to coax information out of her, believed she knew something about Rhea that she hadn’t given up. If she had that kind of information, I wanted it for myself. I had a story to write, after all, and personal reasons beyond that, too.

  Finally, I was back on track. When I’d first met Rhea, I had traded my good sense for the feel of her in the darkness. But my instincts were still there, and eventually they surfaced. A reporter runs on automatic. He is comfortable only when working. Information commands him and he obeys. He checks everyone out, not meaning to. There’s too much adrenaline floating around in his system and too many dead spots in his day. Eventually, everyone gets run through the databases—friends, relatives, sources, the man who sells him insurance, the owner of the laundry down the street, the people next door. The protocol is routine. Voter registration, court records, liquor department applications, secretary of state documents, annual reports at the corporation commission, land deeds, credit profiles. Two months after I met Rhea, the reflex kicked in. With a smile on my lips, I began to run Rhea’s name, thinking how clever she’d think I was when I surprised her with a semi-hidden bit of her life. And here’s what I found: nothing, nothing and nothing. Her name was on the sign outside a bar, but nowhere else. A ghost woman, so far as the documents knew. One who worked through others, even in the club she called her own. Without wanting to know, I found out. She was a hit-and-run, one who slips into Arizona and out again, leaving no paper past behind her. There’s a reason for that.

  “How could you understand?” Daly Marcus was saying. “You look in the wrong places, at the wrong things.”

  “Perhaps you are correct,” I said, trying to sound sincere. “In fact, there is much that I don’t see. But I know one thing. This place isn’t safe for you now. There’s one person dead already, and Morrison knows where you are. If he and Bracknall killed Rhea, they won’t hesitate to kill again. You’d better spend the night with me.”

  Her eyebrows went up—yes, of course they did. Twenty-four hours ago, she’d told me she was going to ruin me, now here I was inviting her home. I could practically hear her brain clicking as she tried to compute the risks and advantages. Well, she did believe Morrison and Bracknall posed some kind of threat, since one of them was lying, at the very least covering up for Rhea’s killer or killers. And she was still interested in exposing my agenda. All things considered, my home was her next logical stop. She could not stand to slow down now, she had drunk the wild wine of investigation and was intoxicated. She looked angry and paced about for a bit, but her response was never in doubt.

  “If you really think it’s necessary,” she said, just coldly enough. You’re a shit, she was saying, but I’ll tolerate you for the greater good.

  “I do indeed,” I replied.

  She shrugged and began to pack. Her possessions were pitifully few: a magazine, a rather nice caftan, a bit of underwear, a toilet kit. She traveled light, but was rich in expectations. And off we went, traversing the bright city with its pools of darkness. We took a journey back down Van Buren and north on 32nd Street, me hitting the accelerator to keep the juice flowing. You can’t slow down in Phoenix or something will catch up with you.

  Daly was not seeing much of the metropolis, but that is the nature of investigation. One sees only the dull street ahead, hears the clanking of garbage cans bumped by the quarry as he flees through back alleys. How much more interesting if our adventure had carried us northeast to the stately halls of the Atlantis Resort, which the Dutch Reformed developer Aloysius Cantwell had built with widow’s mites invested in his schlock-built Red Rock Diamond Investment, Inc. Or into the Arcadia area, infested by roof rats, Rattus rattus
, which carried the Black Plague across Europe centuries ago and now burrow into middle-class attics and emerge at night to eat citrus. Or into the gangbanger purlieus of the West Valley, where I once heard a driver chastised because his booming car radio was drowning out a gunfight. I thought of unsolved murders, little-noted frauds, patches of city that no longer existed.

  Witness to history, that was me. Less than a quarter of a century, and I’d become an old Phoenix hand. Why had I stayed? Because the city wasn’t subtle. It was a frantic, unruly place, dirty and delectable at once. Stinking shacks and glossy sports stadia, bums’ settlements in the Salt River bed and glistening stores with enough shoes to make Imelda Marcos’ mouth water, tacky trailers and shiny towers that looked like they might have been plucked from Boston or New York or Chicago and parachuted into areas hastily rezoned for high-density commercial.

  Oh, I went back to Ireland sometimes, not to Belfast but to Dublin, to walk wet streets and feel the east wind ripping down the quays, and to hear an old man with an accordion, his tattered overcoat flapping about his ankles, playing the old songs and cursing his only friend, a one-eyed cat. But the punishing sun of Phoenix always drew me back. Here I faded into the rush, my heart drummed with the speed of change, the air whipping past my car window carried nervous excitement. Things tomorrow would not be as they were today. They might be better, might be worse, but they would be new. Keep your eyes open, the city whispered.

  Up Thirty-second Street we passed through a low cityscape of fast food places, old homes and check-cashing emporiums. Nineteen-forties-era bungalows set off by bad cars in scruffy yards. Businesses with a Mexican-American flavor—Discoteca and Mundo Musicale, Fajito Custom Upholstery, El Rancho Carniceria. Convenience stores offering a 12-pack of bottled Budweiser for $7.99, a six-pack of cans for $3.49. Wong’s Rice Bowl. China West. Mary’s Hair Fashions. And apartment homes for quick movers: Hidden Gardens, Majestic Palms, Spanish Gardens.