The Zozobra Incident

by Don Travis

  “I need to talk to you. Outside.”

  “Little busy, ya know.” He winked at the woman across the table, who looked even flabbier up close. Still, she pushed out her pink, low-cut blouse in all the right places. “Probably gonna have my hands full the rest of the night, ya know what I mean? How ’bout we get together sometime tomorrow?”

  “Has to be now.”

  “Hey, man! You heard the man. Man don’t wanna talk to you.”

  The speaker could have been the dumpy woman’s twin except he was younger, even beefier, and sweating liberally. Headed for a heart attack, but not before he could do me irreparable damage. The table went deathly quiet. It was probably my imagination, but this whole side of the barn seemed to fall silent. Judging from the reactions of the others at the table, their leader had just spoken.

  “This has nothing to do with you, amigo. I need to talk to Emilio, that’s all. He’ll be back in five minutes if he behaves himself.”

  “Cop.” The fatty sneered as if the word were a curse. For a heavy man, his voice was ludicrously high-pitched.

  “Naw, but he used to be,” Emilio said.

  I spoke before the big man could react. “Let me see. Jailhouse ink, gang tattoos. I’d guess that Latin cross with a halo on the back of your right hand says Santo Moreno.”

  A smirk crossed the hood’s face as I named one of the city’s most violent gangs. “You know that, gringo, then you know better’n to fuck with me. You being an ex-cop and all.” He added the last as if I couldn’t put the thing together without his help.

  “You’re wrong. Me being a former cop means I know how to fuck with you.” I inclined my head to indicate something behind him.

  He twisted his thick body around, almost ripping the shirt stretched across his meaty shoulders. Although he could see nothing except a mass of undulating bodies on the dance floor, he bought the idea I had backup.

  “Won’t always be cops around, asshole.”

  “Look, jefe, I’ve got no beef with you. I need to talk to Emilio, and then I’m leaving. We cool?”

  Obviously mollified by a show of respect, he leaned back in his chair and swept up a pitcher of beer, lifting it toward me. I declined with a shake of my head.

  The thug decided we were cool. “Milio, you go talk to the man.”

  Risking destruction of the delicate truce we’d worked out, I grabbed Emilio by the shirt collar and dragged him out of his chair.

  “Ow, man! Watch it.”

  “Hey, the cop knows how to treat a maricón,” someone chortled. “You get through with him, make him wash out his mouth ’fore he come back, okay?”

  The remark took the fight out of my quarry. Being labeled a queer by one of the gang told me Emilio wasn’t solid with this group. Once outside he twisted out of my grasp.

  “All right, cocksucker, what you want with me?”

  “What do I want? Right now I’m doing everything I can to keep from beating you within an inch of your miserable life.”

  “You sore about Del Baby, go see him, not me. He come looking for me.” Recovering some of his swagger, he leered. “He’s a hell of a fuck, ain’t he?”

  His backbone bruised my knuckles. He doubled over and got rid of the night’s load of beer and pretzels.

  “Man!” He swiped his mouth with a sleeve and gasped for air. “You… you can’t do that. I call the fuzz.”

  I shoved him back into the bushes lining the building. “You do that, smartass, and they’ll arrest you for propositioning me. The next time you mention Del Dahlman, you speak with respect. The man was good to you.”

  “A’right. Wha’ chu wan’, man?”

  His accent grew stronger. Not the one he used to charm men and women alike, but the patois of the streets that spawned him.

  “I want those pictures of you and Del.”

  He tried to climb back on top of the situation. “They good pictures, man. Hot. You cream lookin’ at ’em.” He held up a restraining hand as I advanced on him. “’Kay! Okay. If you ain’t got none a your own, I give you some. That way you get a good look at Emilio too.”

  Something wasn’t right. If those photographs were his gravy train, Emilio wouldn’t surrender them so easily. “No tricks. You pull anything, I’ll take my frustration out on your ass.”

  “That what you want, maybe we can work something out.”

  I slapped him across the face. In the gloom, only partially eased by sodium-vapor lights mounted atop tall poles in the parking lot, I caught a look of confusion in his eyes. Not anger. Not fear. Emilio’s face crinkled with bewilderment. He was an actor. He made his living pretending to be drawn to sexual partners, extolling their prowess and faking concern, but he wasn’t that good of a thespian. My aggressiveness genuinely perplexed him.

  “The pictures, Emilio.”

  “A’right. I got ’em in the car.”

  He was recovering now. The barrio lingo was gone. I resolved to watch my step. After all, he was a street tough, and my aura as a former cop carried me only so far.

  He headed straight for an electric blue Mustang convertible heavy with gold trim, the muscle car Del had given him. When he reached for something in the backseat, I grabbed his wrist. He understood and waited patiently as I picked up a nylon backpack and made certain there were no weapons inside before handing it over. He pulled out an envelope stuffed with photographs.

  The guy had been right; merely shuffling quickly though the graphic images aroused me. As stars of a homoerotic shoot, they made a perfect pair. Emilio’s dark good looks played off Del’s fair perfection like spring on summer. In appearance each was everyone’s ideal man. Even with Emilio in the saddle, the image somehow held.

  Yet there was something wrong about them, something off-putting. Was it because they showed Del with another man? I shook my head. I was over that, wasn’t I?

  “You have any more copies?”

  “Naw.” He looked longingly at the photos in my hand. Doubtless they were mementos of the best few months of his life.

  “I’m going to accept your word on that, Emilio, because if you’re lying and they turn up anywhere, I’ll come looking for you. Understand? Give me the negatives, and you can go back to your friends.”

  He shifted his stance. “Can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Don’t have ’em no more. Lost ’em.” He backed away as I turned on him. “Hey, man, we can get it on right now, but I can’t give you what I ain’t got.”

  I stowed the photos in my jacket pocket and calmly took out a jackknife. Emilio gave me a worried look as I opened the longest blade on the instrument. It probably wasn’t the first time he’d been threatened with a knife, but in his business, he had to watch out for his looks. However, it wasn’t his person I intended to maim.

  He squawked like a strangled gander when the blade punched a hole in the leather of his backseat.

  “Not my car!” he wailed. “Don’t cut up my car, man. You can’t do that.” A flick of my wrist ripped the leather a couple of inches. “Ah, man, please.”

  He probably could have endured my carving up his arms and chest, but this studmobile was his second penis. The only thing he would fight harder to protect was the real thing, and we both knew it.

  “Talk.” The tip of my knife was still buried in the rich red leather.

  “Man, what I gotta do to make you believe me? I ain’t got the negatives.”

  “Who does?”

  It was easy to see he considered lying but didn’t have the nerve. “Last time I seen ’em was a while back. I showed the pictures to this fella. He got so hot, he slobbered all over them. He wanted a couple, but I wouldn’t give them up. They for me, you know. For my own self.” There was a plaintive note in his voice.

  “So what happened?”

  “This guy, he paid me to let him develop some in his… what chu call it? Darkroom.”

  I pulled the knife out of Emilio’s precious leather seat. “So you gave him the film?”
r />   “Just so he could print up a couple of them. And I was right there all the time.”

  “He returned the negatives?”

  The kid nodded and held out a hand, palm up. “Yeah. Put them right here.”

  “So where are they?”

  He shrugged. “Dunno. Next time I looked for them, they wasn’t in my backpack no more.”

  “Who was this man?”

  Another shrug. “Just said his name was John.” His eyes went wide when I raised the knife again. “But I know where the dude lives. Spent the night with him.”

  I GLANCED nervously at Emilio sitting silently beside me in the Impala. He was leading us down a meandering road in the remote far Northeast Heights. Lampposts were infrequent. My headlights were the only bright spot in the deep night. Sandia Peak with its corona of blinking, red-tipped TV antennae and the Cibola National Forest crowded us on the east. The Sandia Indian Reservation blocked the way north.

  This was one of the ritzy sections well outside of the city limits where front yards were left desert wild, except for cement driveways snaking across the hardpan to anchor the buildings to the roadway. Most of the landscape was vacant, but an occasional rambling house hunkered down beside some dusty road with a name like Black Bear Lane or Calle del Oso. Albuquerqueans were big on bears.

  Although it occurred to me that the good-looking creep might be planning something, it was more likely he was simply lost. It was hard enough finding an address out here in the daytime, much less at midnight.

  “Shit,” he mumbled. “It all looks different.”

  “You leading me around by the nose?”

  “Naw, I swear man. I figured I could find the guy any time I wanted.” His teeth gleamed in the faint moonlight as he smiled weakly. “He give me a hundred-dollar tip. But this don’t look familiar.”

  “Okay, you’re coming home with me for the night. I’m going to lock you in the basement. We’ll try it again tomorrow.”

  “You can’t do that. That’s kidnapping or something.”

  “Maybe so, but that’s the way it is.”

  “Go on down the road. Let’s try some more. I got a woman waiting for me, man.”

  “She’s long gone by now. But we’ll give it another few minutes.”

  As we plowed on through the darkness, the first car we’d seen in an hour of wandering the foothills came roaring up on us from the rear. Its sudden appearance made me nervous, but the massive Caddy Escalade roared by in a cloud of dust as I pulled to the side of the road.

  “That’s him!” Emilio threw a wiry arm toward the windshield. “That’s the dude’s big fucking tank.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah. That’s him, I tell you.”

  “Emilio, if you’re lying—”

  “I ain’t. I swear. Follow the Caddy.”

  Half a mile farther down the dusty road, the vehicle turned left at an intersection that was invisible until you were practically through it.

  “That rock. I remember that rock.” Emilio jabbed a finger at a huge boulder on the far side of the roadway. “Yeah, remember that rock.” The excitement in his voice convinced me he was on the up-and-up—at least for now.

  As my Impala maneuvered the sharp turn, the other vehicle pulled into the driveway of a rambling affair almost as massive as the C&W. I killed my lights and eased down the rough gravel road in time to see a husky, silver-haired man come around the car and open the door for an elaborately coiffed woman. His wife, most likely. The trick with Emilio had merely been a little dessert on the side. This was obviously a prosperous couple returning from a night out.

  By the glare of the motion-activated intruder light over the garage, the man seemed somehow familiar. After memorizing his license plate to jot down in my pocket notebook later, I motored past the house and turned on my headlamps. It took another half hour to find our way out of the maze of roads.

  When we finally arrived back on Tramway Road, a paved, well-lighted street, I headed straight for the C&W parking lot, using the time to extract details of Emilio’s assignation with the mystery man. Misunderstanding, he gave a smirk.

  “You get off on that, huh? You know, hearing ’bout me doing it with other dudes.”

  “In your dreams, asshole. I’m going to get inside that house, and the things you saw are going to prove to me you’re not lying. And the details you’re going to give me about the man are going to prove to him I know what happened.”

  “You gonna face the dude down? Hey, man, he give me a big tip. You gonna mess it up for me.”

  “Tough.”

  Emilio sulked the rest of the way. Nonetheless, I managed to pry a couple of details about his night with the man out of him. As Emilio crawled out of my car in the parking lot, I handed him a couple of bills.

  “There’s a leather shop on Fourth and Griegos. They’ll repair the cut in your rear seat. You won’t even know it was ripped.”

  I used the rearview mirror to watch him watch me pull out of the parking lot and turn west. All the way down the long hill toward the Rio Grande, I puzzled over how the beautiful, loving acts Del and I had engaged in so many times looked so sordid in the photographs burning a hole in my jacket pocket.

  Chapter 3

  I RELAXED on a chaise lounge amid the clashing odors of chlorine from the pool and the summer roses climbing the whitewashed adobe walls as I eyed the North Valley Country Club’s new lifeguard. Lean, loose-limbed, and broad shouldered, he had the ideal swimmer’s build, reminding me somewhat of Del, even though Del was a Teutonic blue-eyed blond, whereas this young man was bronzed and brunet, and his eyes were likely brown. Up close the dark shape on the left pec would probably morph into a small tattoo. Spandex seldom did anything for me, but his thigh-hugging, well-filled trunks were… interesting.

  As the place was deserted at this early hour except for the two of us, the lifeguard turned pool boy and policed the area, scooping fallen leaves and debris from the water with one of those baskets mounted on a long aluminum pole. He worked his way to my side and netted a soggy candy wrapper.

  “Kids,” he observed in a pleasant baritone.

  Seized by an unexpected need that was 90 percent loneliness, I did something I had not done in twelve long months—reacted to the good-looking guy. Flustered, I fumbled for the orange juice on a table beside me and overturned my glass.

  He knelt to recover the tumbler, holding it up and offering to get me another.

  Yep, brown eyes, deep and soulful. Dangerous eyes on one so young. He couldn’t be more than twenty. The dark spot above the nipple was a small dragon.

  “No, thanks. Nothing left but ice cubes, anyway. But I appreciate your offer, uh….”

  “Paul. Paul Barton.”

  “Paul.” I was surprised by the family name. There was a strong Latin look about him. Must be the mother’s blood.

  “Anytime.”

  He rose, our eyes locked—and the penny dropped. This was the young man I had seen dancing so energetically at the C&W last night. He broke first, raking me with his intense gaze. His lips twitched as he zeroed in on a two-inch scar on my inner right thigh. My body looked pretty good except for that purple, puckered blemish. At first I’d been spooked by Del’s reaction to the pockmark and tried to hide it from the world. But after putting up with that foolishness for six months, I said to hell with it. The world was full of imperfections, and it could deal with this one too.

  “Bullet wound,” I said.

  “Damn, I’ll bet that hurt.”

  My throat closed up at his casual treatment of the wound. Maybe I wasn’t as blasé as I thought. “Like you wouldn’t believe. That’s why I swim early in the morning. Therapy.”

  “Swimming’s the best exercise in the world,” he declared like a true water bug. “And you were really going at it a few minutes ago. Looked pretty good out there.”

  “Thanks.”

  As Paul turned back to the pool, a cell phone on a nearby table piped the first line of “Dixie.
” The conversation was short. He admitted to someone named Jill that he got off work at five but said he’d decided to cool it this evening, turning down what was obviously an offer of some sort. Was it coincidental he was watching me throughout the entire brief conversation?

  The image of Paul Barton stayed with me as I peeled off my trunks and showered in the locker room a few minutes later. Then, dressed in Albuquerque casual—leather ankle boots, blue gabardine slacks with a knitted belt, and a yellow silk guayabera—I headed downtown for the office.

  ONE OF the best things about a PI license is it gives a person the ability to sit in a cozy office and pluck data right out of thin air. Hazel Harris was a lot better at searching the state’s Motor Vehicle Division records on the Internet than I was, but I was unwilling to open myself to rolled eyes and exasperated sighs when she figured out this had to do with Del’s case. It took longer, but I got the job done despite the fact this particular database did not permit us to view photographs.

  The owner of the gray Caddy Escalade was Richard H. Harding. No wonder the guy looked familiar in the floodlight last night. His picture regularly appeared in both the Tribune and the Journal, mostly in the society pages. Harding and his wife seemed to attend every benefit and black-tie affair in the state. In the twelve months since moving the company headquarters of Premier Tank & Plating, Inc. to its Albuquerque plant in the South Valley, he’d firmly established himself as one of the city’s Four Hundred.

  However, recent newspaper articles about Premier’s successful petition for the permits necessary to double the size of its local operations were more interesting. The expansion plan had incited a vicious battle. Premier, the Chamber of Commerce, and a docile County Commission stood on one side of the debate. Lined up against them were environmental groups, South Valley farmers concerned about increased usage of river water, an Indian Pueblo anxious over the quality of the effluent released back into the Rio Grande, and a host of other naysayers. In addition, Premier was embroiled in an unresolved labor dispute with a union bent on organizing the plant.