“Lily,” the thin man said shaking his head and lighting his own cigarette, “Lily, Lily. What am I going to have to do to you?”
Lily. Two syllables.
Suddenly she did not feel like hurling, the surprise took care of that.
Lily.
Gregory’s girlfriend Lily.
Viridiana looked at Daisy and then at Gregory. She had believed their story that they were brother and sister, but they didn’t really look alike, did they? Their hair was blond, but a different sort of blond and their features did not match. Not that all siblings resembled each other, but the more she looked at them the more she knew this was yet another lie.
How many layers of deception are there? she wondered.
“Henry, cut it out. You know you don’t have to threaten me,” Daisy said, rolling her eyes and then she raised her head, her bracelets clanking as she raised a slender arm. “Scott, pour us a drink, will you, honey?”
Scott obeyed, grabbing a bottle and two glasses and setting them before Henry and Daisy. Viridiana admired the way Daisy spoke, how she seemed to act as if this was a visit by two beloved friends. Gregory, meanwhile, had a sick look on his face.
She’s the one who does the talking, Viridiana thought. He’s the shill.
What was it Daisy had said? Improvisation was the most important art.
“I’m not implying we are going to shortchange you,” Daisy said. “If you’ve come to collect right this second, there’s not much we can manage. But we have money coming down the pipeline very shortly and we’ll settle our debts.”
“How soon is ‘shortly’?”
“I can’t say. It doesn’t work that way.”
“You better wind it up, Lily. I wouldn’t be here if a certain someone was not feeling impatient and more than a little pissed off that you vanished on him.”
“I told you we were heading out of town for a while,” Gregory interjected.
“Out of town doesn’t mean out of the country,” Henry replied.
“It’s Mexico, not Europe. It practically doesn’t count as going anywhere. How did you find us, anyway?”
“The usual. Asked around. You should remember: I know everything.”
Viridiana recalled the phone call she’d placed. Could they have been bugging the line? Or maybe they had forced Gregory’s friend to spill the beans about their location. It could be their discovery had nothing to do with Viridiana. She suspected it did, but what was done was done. They had to deal with the now.
“About the money… enlighten me on your cash flow situation,” Henry said, lighting his own cigarette.
“My husband passed away recently. I thought it would be pretty cut and dry to get my share as instructed in the will, but turns out his nephew holds the purse strings. He’s here in town. You’re sure you don’t know this? Since you know everything.”
“So, the kid’s in town? And?”
“A couple of phone calls from him and I get a million dollars.”
Henry nodded, carefully inspecting the cigarette between his fingers. He raised his eyes, staring at Viridiana.
“Who’s the girl?”
“Our translator and protégé,” Daisy said.
“Is that what you call them these days?”
Daisy smiled as an answer. Viridiana should have been busy feeling frightened but right then she felt angry.
The man leaned forward. He wore glasses, round-rimmed, and they made Viridiana wonder what type of goon he was. She couldn’t picture people who went around collecting money like this with glasses; he ought to have looked more like the beefy, shorter man. Henry looked like an accountant. Perhaps that’s what he was, in some fucked up way.
“Translator, you have a name?”
She was able to answer without stammering. “Viridiana,” she said.
The man, he looked at her with a dispassionate, careful gaze. She sensed that what she said and how she said it was very important and that she must try to maintain her cool, like Daisy did.
“Viridiana, you know anything about this situation? Is this woman lying to me?”
“She’s not,” Viridiana said.
“What’s the nephew’s name?”
“Stanley Lawrence Landry.”
“Where’s he staying?”
“There’s only one hotel in town. I wouldn’t know the room number.”
“What’s the hold up? Why is this Landry making Lily wait?”
The man took off his glasses and held them between two fingers. There was nothing sinister about the gesture and yet she thought for a few seconds that she could not speak any more, that if she did her voice would be a pitiful squeak. Viridiana took a deep breath.
“He thinks she murdered her husband,” she said.
“That would put a damper on any inheritance. Right?”
The man was still looking at Viridiana, his gaze did not waver. “Maybe this Landry man is a hopeless cause. What do you think, protégé?”
Viridiana blinked. She intended to answer, but was prevented by Daisy. “I can talk any man into anything,” Daisy said.
The thin man turned his head to look at Daisy. There was no derision in his face or words, but something about his eyes felt like mockery to Viridiana. It was not easy to spot, this man kept his cards pressed to his chest, but Viridiana caught a spark of it, which made her look down quickly at her hands in her lap.
“If you could, you’d have talked this one already. Which means things are not going well, which means we get back to my initial question. Where’s the money?”
“We can go in circles all evening if you want. But that won’t get us anywhere. The money will wind its way down to us.”
“Maybe we should pay a visit to Mr. Landry.”
Viridiana glanced up at them again, cautiously.
“Henry,” Daisy said, tossing her cigarette into the ashtray. “That’s not how we do things. Give us a couple of weeks, it’ll be dealt with. I’m no fool, you know that.”
You had to give it to Daisy, she knew how to talk. She sounded very sure of herself, but there was also something sweet and charming about her words. Viridiana guessed that was part of the art of pulling cons. You had to have the charm. Daisy could deploy it in the right measure. Like right now, if she had been too cloying, it would have seemed desperate. Too little and you’d think she was being rude. Add the right dose and it comes out as a delightful tête-à-tête at a really nice party.
The thin man placed his glasses in his coat’s pocket.
“Ten days,” the thin man said and stood up. “What’s the name of that one hotel in town?”
He looked at Viridiana and so she replied. “La Sirena.”
“We’ll be there. You better be here. Try to leave town and next time we meet I won’t be so civil. Got it?”
“Yes,” Daisy said.
The men left. The three of them remained in the living room, no one willing to start a conversation, each one of them wishing to say something.
She’d been wrong about Gregory and Daisy, both. Several times she’d compared them to sharks, but thinking it better, she decided scorpions were the better animal. Scorpions killed a lot more people than anything else in Baja California, lots more people than snakes and black widows. They’d sneak up on you, sneak into your camping tent or your bed roll, your shoes, and that would be the end of it.
Sharks were clean killers.
Scorpions were not. Scorpions were secretive little monsters.
“Who were they?” Viridiana asked, figuring they might as well get this over with.
“Who do you think they were?” Daisy said, chuckling. “God, you sound stupid.”
“All right, I’ll ask a better question. Who are you?”
“Another stupid question.”
“Cut it out,” Gregory said, placing a hand on Viridiana’s knee. “It’s a fair thing to ask.”
“Why? I’m sure you’ve spilled your g
uts to junior here late at night. She probably knows your real name already,” Daisy said. “She probably knows everything.”
“No, he hasn’t told me everything,” Viridiana said. “But I know you’re his girlfriend.”
They seemed genuinely surprised by her words and she thought it was important that she use that surprise in her favor. They were usually firm, but the two men must have had an effect on them and this detail about their relationship had served to make them wobble even more.
“Did Ambrose figure it out too?” Viridiana asked. “Is that why you killed him?”
“Ambrose,” Daisy said, and she let out a sound that was not quite a laugh. A bitter, brittle sound and she had a face like the townspeople before they head into the confession booth, that resigned face before meeting the priest. Perhaps this was her method of expiation. Viridiana had told her sins to the tape recorder, she spoke to a mechanical priest.
“This whole trip, it was the perfect setup. The perfect place. I said ‘look, we’ll have him drown.’ There’s strong undertows in this area, you said so yourself, didn’t you? But then that day we went to the bay of Santa Caridad and you came with us. And you convinced him not to swim.
“I was upset. So when Ambrose fell asleep I went to Gregory’s room, to tell him he shouldn’t have invited you to the beach. To tell him that he didn’t have to bring you to every god damn outing we had because he wanted to fuck you.”
Daisy had sipped her drink while the men had been in the house, not truly drinking. She was not drinking now either. Not really. She held her glass with one hand, tracing small circles with her wrist. It was this little detail which alerted Viridiana of how irritated she really was, since her voice remained calm.
“And that’s when I knew. He didn’t only want to fuck you. He’d had enough of me and he was moving on. With you.” Daisy concluded.
“We both had enough of each other long ago,” Gregory said. “We agreed this was the last gig we were closing together.”
“Yes. It doesn’t mean I expected you to pick a whore as soon as we landed in Baja California.”
Daisy’s voice remained cool even as she spoke those words and stared at Gregory. They’d been more than lovers, they’d been partners, and now it had all gone down the drain.
“She started a fight,” Gregory said, his eyes hard, returning Daisy’s stare. “She said exactly that and more, and the problem is that Ambrose had woken up. He heard her talking, he rushed inside to yell at us both and tell us that we needed to get out of his house.”
“He grabbed me by the hair,” Daisy said and she grabbed her own hair, as if imitating Ambrose’s gesture, “tried to drag me down the stairs.”
“And you shoved him down instead,” Viridiana said.
For the first time she could see the scene clearly, like in a film reel. She had made conjectures before but now it played as if on the big screen, in full color, with sound.
“Yes,” Daisy said. “I did. He had his fucking hands on me and he wasn’t letting go. I’m not even a little sorry that he’s gone.”
Daisy put her drink down on the coffee table, as if fed up with it. “Some men, they deserve a shove down the stairs. Or a bullet to the head,” Daisy concluded.
“Maybe you’ve done that before,” Viridiana said. “A bullet to the head.”
The woman laughed. “What an imagination you have! You think that’s what we do?”
“I don’t know.”
“Arson,” Gregory said, his voice low. “What we normally do is arson. Claim the insurance, that sort of thing. But Daisy wanted bigger deals, bigger marks, wanted to try to score more and more.”
“You wanted that too,” Daisy insisted. “Don’t be pretending modesty in front of the child.”
“I wanted out long before this and you know it. I told you we shouldn’t have picked Ambrose, he was all wrong. Wrong temper, wrong habits. Then this trip! To Mexico!” Gregory said.
“Aren’t you glad we came to Mexico? So you could meet your new sweetheart?”
“Don’t you start again with that. It’s fucked. You and me, done and fucked,” he said.
“I know, darling, I’m not even objecting to it, but I am objecting to the blame for this whole mess being piled solely on my feet. You had as much to do with it than I did.”
It was obvious that this conversation, in slightly different configurations, had been repeated dozens of times before. Not that this diminished the vehemence of their words. Their voices had been rising and although Daisy had not lost her composure, when Gregory took out his pack of cigarettes from his trouser pocket, he could barely place the cigarette in his mouth, his hand was shaking.
“I used to be different, once.”
“There he goes,” Daisy said, grabbing her glass and shaking her head. “He used to be an innocent. Innocent my ass. A hustler, a petty criminal.”
“It’s true,” Gregory said vehemently. “Damn it, it’s true!”
Daisy walked to the other end of the room, looking up at the abstract painting that constituted the only decoration on the walls. It was huge, a monstrous yellow, like the yolk of an egg, and little bits of red. An egg with the blood of a chick smeared on it.
Daisy let out a sigh. “Forget about it, what matters now is the future. Our collective futures. Lawrence Landry needs to pay up so we can wind this thing down and go our separate ways,” Daisy said. “You need to do your part, girlie.”
Viridiana thought about protesting, but that had done her no good. She also knew that the more she remained in this room, the more likely she was to do their bidding. But she had to do their bidding. Daisy had that tape, there were those men after them, and there was Gregory.
An arsonist, hustler, God-knew-what-else, but hadn’t she told him she loved him hours before?
Hadn’t she meant it?
Viridiana shook her head. “I need to rest. I don’t feel well,” she said.
Gregory gave her a look, like he wanted to ask her something, but she hurried back to her room, slipped into the shower and got herself into a clean set of clothes. When she stepped out of the bathroom she found Gregory sitting on the chair.
“Fuck,” Viridiana muttered. “What do you want? Stop chasing me.”
“A minute with you.”
“What for?” she asked, toweling her hair dry.
“I didn’t say I was a good guy,” he told her as he leaned forward, his fingertips touching her elbow.
Viridiana edged away from him. “That’s obvious.”
“I told you about the arsons, told you my real name and told you I used to have a girlfriend.”
“But not that it was her.”
“It’s hard to explain.”
“Is it now?” Viridiana whispered. Her comb was on the nightstand and she began running it through her hair. “Explain it.”
He gave her a little shrug, as if the story didn’t matter much, but even before he said a single word she could tell it mattered a lot. It was a big deal and it pained him, which is why he tried to appear nonchalant. That was good. It meant it was real.
“I met her when I was about your age. Daisy is older than me. Not too many years, but enough that she was an expert at the con game by the time we crossed paths. She was smart, pretty, bold. I was fascinated by her.”
Viridiana looked at him through the tangle of her hair, she ran the comb slowly down. A big smile had spread across his face and she knew he was picturing Daisy in the past, like the flashback in a movie, tinted in black and white. Then the smile faded.
“I’m not saying my nose was all clean,” Gregory said. “I knew a card trick or two, and I sold stolen goods. But Daisy did things at a totally different level. She scammed insurance companies out of a lot of dough. Scammed everyone.”
Gregory chuckled. “One time she drove a Cadillac off the lot. Like that!” he snapped his fingers. “Drove away with it. I didn’t dare to do that.
“The
re were a lot of men around her. Men who paid for her trinkets, her booze. Admirers. When we got together I was her shill and I was useful, but it’s less useful to have a boyfriend when you’re trying to convince another guy to buy you a Rolex. So we started pretending we were related.”
He looked at the floor, thinking for a minute.
“Ambrose was the third guy she married. The first two, it was easy-peasy. She met them through lonely heart ads and in a bit they were swooning, married her, and a month later she was running off with whatever they had that we could sell.
“Ambrose was different, better. He had a lot more money and Daisy salivated at the thought of it. I couldn’t stand him, but he was persistent. He came around with expensive trinkets and after a couple of months he proposed. I said ‘look, millionaires don’t part with their money that easily,’ but she didn’t want to believe me.”
“But you were right.”
“I was, wasn’t I?” Gregory said. “I told her I was leaving, but she said she needed help with this one last thing.”
“Murdering him?” Viridiana asked.
“No! She came up with that later. Just help in general. And it’s not like we didn’t need the money. We got involved with Frank at one point, and we had to settle that.”
“And like she said, you found a new lover pretty fast.”
“I didn’t expect it. I’ll swear on that Virgin in your church.”
He looked sincere again, his mouth curving a little, trying to make light of it. The smile trembling. Who was to say love didn’t work like that? It’s not like she had loved often. Could be it struck quick and fierce, cleaved you like a thunderbolt.
“On San Judas Tadeo,” she said, remembering how she’d thought he looked like the saint. There was no point in ugly icons, she supposed. Who would venerate a Jesus with acne?
Oh glorious apostle Saint Judas, faithful servant and friend of Jesus, the name of the traitor who delivered thy beloved Master into the hands of His enemies has caused thee to be forgotten by many, but the Church honors and invokes thee universally as the patron of hopeless cases—of things despaired of.
Untamed Shore Page 19