by Noreen Ayres
I went over and knelt beside her. “You’re sorry about that,” I said. “It wasn’t supposed to happen, was it?” She turned her head from side to side, her face a series of tortured expressions while her eyes stayed shut. “Miranda, I know that any woman my brother loves could not be responsible for something horrible like that. You think I’m a dummy? I may be an uptight asshole, but I’m smart enough to know that.”
When her eyes opened, tears were ladled at the bottom lid. She studied the ceiling; then a huge drop rolled into her ear. Her voice was at a lower, harder register. “You better get out of here. You don’t know what’s going on.”
“Tell me and we’ll both know.”
Bringing the recliner up, she tried taking another hit, but the nub in the ashtray was cold. “These aren’t people you just fool with. I’m serious.”
“Monty?” I asked, rising.
“And others.”
“The guy called Switchie?”
She nodded again. I sat at the end of the love seat an arm’s length from her.
“Who else?”
She waved her hand, munched in her lips, and looked away at the television, a blonde woman helping a fat man cook on screen.
“How’d you come so far, Miranda? You had a life with your husband and . . . and Nathan. That wasn’t so bad, was it? Two men who adore you.”
One hand propped her forehead. “That Zac’s for shit,” she said. “Out of Kentucky’s better.”
I leaned over and put my hand on the one that rested on her knee. “Who was the woman in the car, Miranda? Tell me.”
Her head jerked up, and she said, “Why are you doing this? Why do you have to know?”
“Maybe I can help.”
“Nobody can help me.”
“I’m not sure about that.”
“Monty tried. He’s the only one.”
“Monty tried to help you?”
She slipped her hand free of mine and thumbed her bra straps through her shirt, giving her hands something to do. She took on a tough tone. “When I met Monty, I was the Crystal Queen, fiending everything. I had a sugar bowl filled with rock. I dropped crank in my coffee. That’s before I knew coffee’d wash it out of your system.” Laughing, like I was a pal now.
“Was this before you married the doctor?”
“Yes. Tabs and cubes, tranqs and ludes. You name it, I did it, up, down, sideways. Ice? God, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. Straight-to-the-brain orgasm. No more diets and fourteen hours between hits. This was after your brother,” she said, looking at me as if for approval. “After Nathan, before this time, I mean. It gets confusing.”
“I guess it would. Then you met Monty.”
“I knew Monty from years ago, when I was a little kid. My dad rode motorcycles. At first I didn’t recognize him. I bumped into him in an auto parts store when I was buying windshield wipers. I thought he was cute. He started flirting with me. Then we realized we knew each other, and we kind of cooled it. He introduced me to Robert.”
“He’s the one knew Robert?”
“First, yeah.” She laughed. “I always wanted to marry a doctor.”
“And he cleaned you up.”
“Monty cleaned me up. He doesn’t like drugs.”
“Except grass.”
“Piff. That’s not drugs.”
I thought, He doesn’t like drugs, but Agent Vogel said he shipped precursors. The man didn’t add up. “The woman in your car . . . can we talk about her?”
“Why do you keep at it? Why do you want to know?”
“Who was she? A friend?”
“I need something.” She looked around the room as if tracking a fly, then at the stub in the ashtray.
“Just talk to me.”
She whipped into the kitchen and got herself another cooler. Untwisting the bottle cap, she cut her hand, and swore, and sucked between her forefinger and thumb. “Maybe I’ll die of lead poisoning—not of the Uzi kind,” she said. “Serve me right.” Her shoulders dropped as she came back and sat on the coffee table, on top of a sports magazine. “What do you care, anyway? She’s dead. Beyond help, as they say.”
“Lost and gone forever. Dreadful sorry, Clementine,” I said. “Is that what you mean?”
“She wasn’t such a nice person.” Miranda took a drink and set the bottle down.
“And that makes all the difference.”
“No, that’s not what I’m saying! I meant . . . who knows what I meant? Anyway, the main thing, it’s best that Nathan thinks I’m gone. But he won’t think that now, will he? You’ll tell him.”
“A guy’s suffering,” I said.
“A lot of guys are suffering. Women suffer more.”
“Like the woman in your car?”
She sucked the web of her hand again.
“Miranda, the woman had no head, no hands or feet. She was burned that bad.”
“Stop it!” All the air went out of her then. Her hands opened into wounded curls as if the palms had just been smacked by rulers.
We heard a sound out front, of doors closing.
Jumping up, she said bitterly, “Here they come,” and went to the window and peered between the strips of plastic lace curtain. “You want to know things? Well, dig this. Switchie? He murdered somebody. And that one there got rid of the body.” She nodded toward the faded red smear of Simon’s truck showing between the curtains. “He put it in his truck and hauled it away. Get out. You’re a little fool if you don’t. They’re coming.”
32
Simon’s face squinched into a happy grin at the lingering smell of weed. “You girls leave any of that for us pore ol’ boys?” He stood with his shirt half open and his feet spread like a duck’s. The money Monty gave him tubed in the pocket of his shorts like a magnum penis.
Miranda’s alarm didn’t transfer to me, and it wasn’t because of the dope—she was right, she got screwed, maybe literally, on the Zac. But I wasn’t afraid because Simon seemed like a harmless goon, and nowhere around Monty had I ever seen a weapon. After the killing of Bernie Williams, I thought of carrying, but all I had for a small gun was a mostly useless two-shot derringer whose projectile would’ve been a pebble tossed at two men in a shed.
When Monty came in, Simon hit him up for the grass: “Hey, good buddy, we gonna party hearty?” He looked at me with a happy grin.
Monty checked Miranda and said indifferently, “Go for it.” But Miranda sat there not offering to go for it, and Simon didn’t know where to look, and Monty went to squat in front of the TV, turn it off, and put on music.
I didn’t want to be around with night coming and people doping and Monty putting music on. At the same time, I wished I had more time with Miranda. I wanted to give her my phone number. We locked eyes when I said, “I guess I’ll see you all later,” hiking my purse strap over my shoulder.
Monty stood up. “Where you in a hurry to? I give you the night off. You don’t have to show at the Python.”
I shrugged, said, “Stuff to do. Stuff, you know?”
Monty stepped ahead and put a hand on the doorknob. He gave a long look without a smile, then said, “You want to go, go,” and opened the door.
Simon’s brows were knitting up, down, up down, trying to put it together.
As I stepped out, a horn blared from a distance and got closer and louder, and soon a green pickup barreled into the yard. A man with a dark face and a straw hat leaned out even before the truck stopped rolling, and then I recognized Mr. Avalos. He was shouting hoarsely, “Paulie’s down! In the pit! We can’t get him out!”
Monty said, “Shit! That intake valve,” and blew by me and ran to the passenger side and jumped in as Mr. Avalos yanked the wheel around to head back up to the animal confinement building. I jogged to the side of the house and looked. At the far edge of the building was a blue pickup in profile and two figures moving beside it. Ahead of the truck was the white shape of a motorcycle, and standing by it a man in black, with blond hair. Switchie.
As Simon ran for his truck, I yelled after him, “I’ll call nine-one-one,” and turned and looked for a house number. “Where are we?”
“Thirteen-thirteen,” Miranda said, following me in. “But don’t phone.”
“Why not?”
“Just don’t. They’ll work it out.” Her hand shook as she fumbled for a cigarette from a pack Simon left on the table.
“You’re hard to figure,” I said.
She said, “And you’re dead, is what you are. Didn’t you see Switchie out there?”
“I saw him.”
Still standing, she lowered her face to her hands, the smoky end of the cigarette close to a wayward strand of hair, then swept her hands away and said, “Listen to me! Get in your car and leave.”
“One of my strong points is that I’m stubborn,” I said, setting my purse down. “I’m not going anywhere.”
She gave a smirk, wisdom entering her eyes. “Like your brother,” she said, then sat on the arm of the brown chair, her braid with the gold-flecked tie riding her shoulder like Simon’s snake. She said, amused, “I told you Switchie kills people. You want to know something else? He said he’d like to be a cop if it paid for shit.” The look she gave me was lingering.
“How do you know Switchie killed anyone?”
“Because I was right back there in that bedroom when I heard him say it.”
“Heard him say what?”
“‘I bumped off Rollie.’”
Rollie Pierson! I was not expecting her to say that name, ever. If she said any name, it would be Quillard Satterlee. I echoed, “Rollie.”
“Yeah. He did stuff for Monty,” she said, with a dismissing wave of the hand. “Monty was really, really mad. Yelling. I never heard Monty yell before. I came out of the bedroom for a minute, saw him kick Switchie right out the door. He had his boots on, kicked him right out the front door.” She motioned in that direction. “Before, I told Monty I didn’t like him. He said, ‘What’s not to like?’ People who’ve shared a bad thing, like prison, I guess, what do they have? They help each other.”
“Why don’t you come on home with me, Miranda?”
Her liquid eyes turned to me, she said, “No.”
“Let me give you my phone number.”
“I won’t call.”
“But why?”
“Some doors close, they can’t be opened.”
“And some doors never really close. Nathan must have told you that.”
A great breath came out of her, and she sagged. “Could I have some water?”
“Of course,” I said, and stepped away to get it.
When I returned, she said, “I think Switchie killed him with a Gigli saw.”
“A what?”
“A Gigli saw. Robert sold it to him. Didn’t even give it to him. Sold it.”
“Your husband knows Switchie?” I sat next to her.
“Sure. Switchie’s taking classes at Orange Coast to become a stockbroker. Yeah,” she said, an edge back in her voice, “since he can’t be a cop. He was all the time on the phone to Robert, getting tips.”
“What’s a giggly saw?”
“This thin saw. Surgeons use it—well, before lasers. You drill two holes in a skull, and then you thread it in from underneath, and saw up so you don’t hurt the brain. There’s a little ring on one end you hold. Robert was showing it to Switchie one day.”
“And Switchie had to have one.”
She nodded. “Prisoners, CIA, they keep them in hollow shoelaces and belt buckles. When Switchie heard that, he gave Robert a hundred dollars for one. And he took it, the crumb.”
I thought about Rollie Pierson, the crude piece of carding wire found around his neck.
“Miranda—” I said, starting to urge her to leave with me again.
“I’m not afraid of him as long as I’m around Monty. But you shouldn’t be here. There’s no reason for you to be here.”
“Let’s go check on Paulie,” I said. She looked me straight in the eye and got up.
Opening the car door, we climbed into the rich smell of my neighbor’s dog pitched by late-afternoon heat. I took the dirt road up to the animal building, passing a small set of pens where three strange-looking turkey heads peeked over the boards and the silhouette of one lonely porker showed through the cracks.
“What about Simon?” I said.
“He’s nobody.”
“Monty keeps interesting company,” I said.
The wind from the open window was shattering her bangs. “The only thing Monty did wrong was get acquainted with my husband,” she said. “It made him greedy.”
“Your husband’s going to China. Why?”
“What?”
“Nathan told me. He found out somehow. It’s business tied to Monty, isn’t it?”
She pulled her foot up and kicked my dash and looked the other way out the window. She said, “He was supposed to take me.” The more I’m around humans, the more I’d rather be around pigs.
I pulled up behind a yellow backhoe not visible from the house and across the way from a grand hollow of earth with a pyramid of pipe stacked beside it like polished dinosaur bones. Ahead of the new green pickup was Simon’s, with the tailgate down. We got out and walked to where Monty, Simon, and one of the workers I’d seen at the Avalos ranch stood near the large lump of Paulie Avalos. His torso was wrapped with the rope they used to pull him from the cellar of slime below the animal building. He was greenish brown from pig gop. His face, where it wasn’t pasted with it, was red, the same color as victims of carbon monoxide poisoning, and I remembered Monty and Mr. Avalos talking about hydrogen sulfide and a rotten egg smell. The smell here was pig shit, but bearable.
The door of the building stood open. At ground level were two screened air intakes whose fan blades were motionless as abandoned windmills. In front, in the shadows, lay the still form of a smaller man. I’d seen enough bodies in my life to know he was gone.
Monty’s hands and clothes were filthy, as were Mr. Avalos’s and the other worker’s. Monty was stripping off his shirt, when Switchie, his shades on and his black T-shirt showing bulbous arms, squatted by Paulie’s head, bouncing on his heels. He balanced himself with one hand on the ground, fingers exposed at the ends of his black riding glove. “Paulie, you bean-eater pansy,” he said, “get yourself up here and get back to work.” A spill of blond hair arced over his forehead like a table saw blade. “You bug-fucking tortilla, get your ass up here. Come on, Paulie. Come on, my man.”
Mr. Avalos was standing bowlegged at Paulie’s feet. He turned and looked far away in the direction of the road and said, “Aren’t they coming?”
With his shirt off, Monty quickly wiped Paulie’s whole head with it. For the first time, I saw that Monty had a hued hide also: On his back a Viking whipped a short team of polar bears pulling a Harley. He left the shirt under Paulie’s neck for a prop, then pinched his nose and began blowing in his mouth. All the while, Simon, standing with his elbows back from his sides, was making painful faces.
Monty raised up and said, “Anybody know CPR?”
“Push on his chest too,” I said, but that’s all I could say because I hadn’t ever done CPR myself. I couldn’t take it anymore, started moving while I said, “I’ll call,” and Monty tossed a quick nod and put his mouth to Paulie’s lips and blew again.
In my car, I punched the right buttons but got a busy signal. That didn’t mean it really was; it could mean that something interfered with the transmitting cells or that the carrier I used didn’t cover this area. I drove for the house, found the yellow phone with workman’s dirt on it, and this time got through.
Moments later Miranda came walking in, breathing heavily from the walk over. She sat on the coffee table and pulled off her half boots, emptying bits of dried grass. Bitterly, she said, “Switchie had something to do with this. I just know it.”
“There was a worker too,”I said in defense.
Shaking her head strongly, she said, “He had
something to do with it.” Then she got up and went to the bedroom and brought back a candy tin filled with roll papers and purple Zac.
On the eastern side of Garden Grove, the “City of Youth and Ambition,” looms the Crystal Cathedral, offering Sunday services in English, Spanish, Korean, and Vietnamese. Beside its walkways lined with flowers and waterfalls, believers are baptized, married, trained, and buried, and when a baggy-clothed teenage tagger wielding a drill bit etched his calling card in seven thousand dollars’ worth of windows recently, the deed made the news spots for two days.
Eighteen square miles of mostly mid-income, mid-age white people, it was developed with the help of Mexican braceros, Jamaican laborers, German prisoners of World War II, and diligent farmers of Japanese descent who were later shipped to internment camps. Its boundaries snake in strange configurations into neighboring cities such as Westminster, home to Little Saigon, the largest settlement of Vietnamese in the country. Garden Grove has been the Chili Pepper Capital, the Egg Capital, and the Strawberry Capital. Now it crawls toward another distinction, that of being number two, next to Santa Ana, for the highest crime rate in the county for cities of its size.
It was where Monty had his bar and it was where Les Fedders went to church, and it was where I wound up the night of the day Paulie Avalos got carted off to the hospital, a victim of manure pit poisoning. Monty said I didn’t have to work, and then he did. When the ambulance arrived at the farm and took Paulie away, Monty stopped at the house, washed up and changed clothes, and told Miranda to ride with Simon to the hospital. Then he said to me, “Switchie says Jolene got sick and ain’t goin’ in. Go in for me, will you? Just for a little while.”
“Why? You said it wasn’t going to be busy.” He glared at me like he didn’t need another problem, and I said, “Okay.”
On the way to the Python I made three calls trying to find Joe Sanders and when I couldn’t, I called the pager number for Captain Exner. I was almost to my turnoff when he rang in. He was having dinner with his wife. Suddenly I was ravenous. I told him what had been going on, hardly believing that in the last eight hours since I’d had lunch with Joe, I’d been to San Clemente to interview Rollie Pierson’s sister-in-law, to Carbon Canyon where good bands play for bikers and I found Miranda, and then out to see Paulie Avalos slip in a manure pit at Monty Blackman’s farm. The captain said go, go on to work like Monty said. I asked, “Captain?” Am I getting any backup on this?”