“That’s right,” I said. “But the man who operated on you was.”
“Dr. Heigenmeister?”
“Well, not the name. I made that up.”
“Nice touch.”
The plan had been to not stop until we got out of Tennessee, but about four hours out of Memphis, weariness hit me like a frying pan. I was afraid of running the car into a ditch, either from exhaustion or out of despair over the country music on the radio, so I stopped at the first cheap motel I could find off the highway. I parked where the car couldn’t be seen from the road and paid for a single room with twin beds. I had been trying to fall asleep—I had barely slept in the past three days—but somehow my very exhaustion was keeping me awake. So instead of sleeping I was going through all the necessary steps I would have to take on this journey to hell I had set myself upon, when Cindy broke the silence.
“If you’re not a doctor, then what are you?”
“A lawyer, actually.”
“I guess that explains the severance payment. I thought it was way high. Only a lawyer would insist on paying for a stolen kidney.”
“It just seemed fair.”
“Was it your money?”
“I made the old lady pay it.”
“Good. What’s he like, the kid who ended up with it?”
“He’s just a kid, with too much money and a future he’ll never live up to. He’ll either be president or drink himself to death for falling short.”
“Well, he has the kidney for it.”
We both laughed a little at that.
“You’re taking this better than I thought you would,” I said.
“How should I have taken it?”
“I would be out for blood.”
“Who says I’m not? I can be a sweet little thing until I’m crossed. Some of the girls found that out in high school. Why did you come back to save me? Why did you secret me out of my house? Why did you tell me that horrible story? Out of the goodness of your heart?”
“My heart has no goodness,” I said.
“Then why?”
“I decided to stop being their well-paid servant.”
“What are you now?”
“Their worst nightmare.”
“That’s what I want to be, too.”
“You?”
“Right now I feel like I could strangle someone with my bare hands.”
“Good girl.”
“Except all we’re doing is running.”
“I have a plan.”
“Oh, thank goodness, the man who stole my kidney has a plan.”
“Maybe we should get some sleep.”
“What’s the plan, kidney thief?”
“We’ll deal with it tomorrow.”
“Why should I trust your plan?
“Who else are you going to trust?”
“Well, I’ve got a plan, too.”
“What’s your plan?”
“Take me up to Philadelphia, give me a knife, point me in the direction of the little bastard,” she said in that high, sweet voice. “I want my kidney back. Once I get that sucker bagged, all I’ll need is someone to put it back in for me. Too bad you’re not really a doctor.”
“I was thinking something a little less bloody. And we won’t be going to Philadelphia.”
“Where are we going then?”
“DC,” I said.
“How will I get me my kidney back in DC when it’s wandering around like a ghost in Philadelphia?”
“I have a plan,” I said. “It’s not a sure thing, but at least in DC we can put the fear of God into their dark shrunken hearts, and at the same time maybe make you rich.”
35. Maria Guadalupe
There’s a wee bit left of the Scotch,” said the outlaw.
He grabbed the bottle, thwacked off the top, and poured the remainder evenly into the two glasses.
“Who said I couldn’t kill? I just killed this bottle.” He grinned. “Drink up.”
To the magazine writer, the outlaw’s ugly smile was just then filled with threat. From that horrible dream, and his reaction to it, it seemed the only thing burning behind his single dead eye was a brutal nihilism. Where would that lead her? She lifted her glass, peered into the color, not as bright as before, and took a swallow. Her tongue had numbed, and the whiskey no longer tasted rich with promise, just harsh and dark and slightly nauseating.
“Oh Christ,” said the outlaw after the shack’s door once again yelped open and the late-afternoon sun sliced through the dimness, before dying again when the door closed. “Another freak.”
The woman now standing at the bar’s entrance wore a cowboy hat, a denim jacket, boots. The hat left her face in shadow, and her jacket was bulky, and in the gloom of the bar there was something indistinct about her, lonely and lost. The magazine writer wondered for a moment if the woman was a specter of her own future.
“They call her Cactus Annie when they call her anything,” said the outlaw softly. “Look at her in her cowgirl finery, like she’s riding the range, when the only thing she rides is a Range Rover and the occasional drunk. She comes in about this time most every afternoon, sits with the other losers drinking herself sick, and staggers out with whatever piece of meat can put up with her smell. Let’s just say when it comes to her priorities, hygiene takes a backseat to gin. One thing she’s not short of is money, but even with her neat little nest egg, she chooses to drink here, which tells you all you need to know about her. An alcoholic’s alcoholic.”
Cactus Annie thumbed up her hat, nodded at their table as if she somehow knew the magazine writer, and then made her way to the bar, sitting to the left of the behemoth in the leather vest. There was no fuss made, no greeting. Without waiting for an order, Ginsberg started building her a drink.
“Is something wrong with the Scotch?” said the outlaw. “Enjoy it while you can. There are so few bottles of Samurai Scotch left in the world that I keep the empties in a cabinet beneath the bar as mementos, tombstones commemorating past glories. Visiting my little graveyard in this sad, stinking joint is a bitter little reminder of how empty my life has now become. Choices matter; the choice I made in that motel room in New Orleans led me straight to this hellhole. If you choose to bend your knee and beg for my help in finding justice for your precious brother, then that choice will matter, too.
“Listen up, sister. If you ever want the marriage, the kids, the house in the suburbs or the loft in the city, the dinner parties with old friends, the money to spend and the freedom to spend it, if all of that is what you might someday want, then when my story is told you will shake my hand, pocket your recorder, write your article, and move on.
“Because if I’m going to fight your battle, then you’ll be fighting it, too, and all those American-dreamy things are as unlikely as a dance band at Ginsberg’s. If you go after them, they’ll come after you. And if you start looking behind the injustice done to your brother, you’ll find a hundred other crimes, each graver than the last. And the louder you scream, the more you’ll be ignored. And the closer you get to the truth, the more danger you’ll be in. And in the end, when you’re hiding out in some run-down motel from henchmen as brutal and indifferent as me, with nothing to show for your life but an empty bank account and a string of failures—because rightness in this world is thwarted every which way by the good as well as the depraved—you’ll need to comfort yourself with the choice you made this day in this bar.
“And trust me when I tell you this: that comfort will be threadbare.”
And she did, just then, trust that the outlaw was telling the truth. For his whole dreadful story seemed to be a taste of her future foretold: wild threats and seedy motels and frantic dashes through the night. It was all fear and waste, it was all blight. For an instant, when faced with the test of the pickled egg, she had screwed up her courage and taken the plunge. But now, when contemplating the future she would be stepping into, her reaction was utter weariness. She wasn’t hard enough to live that life. She wasn�
��t even hard enough to drink the outlaw’s Scotch. She felt just then to be a failed thing, forlorn of purpose, devoid of any hope, and with no idea of where to find it.
“Look closely at the three wiseacres at the bar,” said the outlaw. “Minnie, Moe, and Jackass, along with their pathetic barkeep. There’s more intelligence and class in a chinchilla farm. Try to do one halfway-decent thing in the world, try to save one woman from a murderous thug, and this is where you end up, drinking in the worst saloon in America. Ginsberg’s bar is the lesson of the moment. And there were more lessons to come in the muck pits of Washington.”
“What if I don’t like him?” said Cindy Lieu. We had arrived in DC and landed in a bar almost as grim this one.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“I don’t get to choose?”
“We don’t have time.”
On her first visit to our nation’s capital, Cindy had been in an adventurous mood. She wanted something fizzy and bright to match the neon champagne glass replete with bubbles on the window outside the bar, but I told her it was false advertising and that everything they served at the Raven Grill was as brown as the walls. I ordered a beer, she ordered a rum and Coke, we tried not to look at the door as we drank, pretending we weren’t on the run.
“What about you?” she said. “Why can’t you be my lawyer?”
“Because it’s awkward getting legal things done when there’s a bullet with your name on it in someone else’s gun. They want to kill me as much as they want to kill you. They want to kill me more.”
She shifted down a seat and pretended not to know me.
“Not funny,” I said.
“I think it’s funny.”
“You seem a little cavalier, considering the circumstances.”
“What am I supposed to do, sit and cry in the corner?”
“That’s what I figured you’d do, what with your unicorns and teddy bears.”
“You ever read manga?”
“What is that, the word for ‘eat’ in Italian?”
“Japanese comic books.”
“But you’re not Japanese.”
“And you’re not Italian, but you eat Italian food. Manga heroes don’t sit in the corner and cry. They pull out their swords and start slicing. My favorite series is Lone Wolf and Cub, about this samurai who brings his little child along as he goes about seeking revenge for the murder of his wife.”
“That’s sounds about right,” I said. “How does it end?”
“The samurai dies.”
“Ouch.”
“But then the cub ends up killing the bad guy, so it all works out. See, it’s aspirational. Do they have food in this place?”
I gestured toward the chips and pretzels on the rack behind the bar.
“It’s the Raven Grill,” she said. “Where’s the grill?”
“In the bartender’s mouth. When the lawyer comes in, you let me talk to him first and then you can join us, okay?”
“Okay.”
“I’m going to sit in a booth and wait. Pretend you don’t know me.”
“But I don’t know you.”
“Then it will be easy.”
I slid off the stool and slipped into a booth—this time beneath a photograph of Elvis—sipped my beer, and waited.
Cindy and I had set up shop at a motel on New York Avenue, just south of the railroad tracks. The room was decent enough for a motel—low ceiling, two beds, checkerboard pattern on the rug, air freshener covering some foul scent that was almost alive, and there was a pool in the parking lot, a pool!—but even though it was a step up from the GrandView, it was still my third motel in three nights. And now here we were, in this downtrodden joint, a step up maybe from Ginsberg’s, but only a step. There was no getting around the fact that my grand epiphany in New Orleans might have loosened the iron chains that constrained my soul, but it had also consigned me to a future of dive bars and cheap motels, the very landscape Jesse Duchamp moved through on his voyage to oblivion. I was contemplating the bitter irony when Alberto Menendez walked through the bar’s door, and not alone.
“It is good to see you again, my friend,” said Alberto, standing beside my booth. His suit was new and elegant, quite different from the rag he was wearing when I first spied him in that same bar. “I thought we were finished with each other. I’m glad I was mistaken. What are you drinking? I’ll buy you another.”
I didn’t say anything, I merely looked at his companion, a young woman, shortish and squattish, dark hair, dark eyes, green jacket of her pantsuit tightly buttoned, and then I looked back at Alberto.
“I understand,” said Alberto. “You are concerned, but you need not be. This is my new associate, and also my granddaughter, Maria Guadalupe Menendez. You can trust her implicitly, as do I. Now, another beer or something more festive?”
“A beer is fine,” I said.
He spouted a line of Spanish to the woman, who then went to the bar as Alberto slid into the booth across from me. He shrugged off my stare.
“My son’s daughter, a recent law school graduate. Not the prettiest, I admit, but I am suddenly busier than I have been in years. I needed some help.”
“It’s good to be busy.”
“It is different, at least. And you look different, too, my friend.”
“How do I look different?”
He tilted his head. “Somehow less frivolous, less pleased with yourself. It is as if you were diagnosed with some terminal illness.”
“Something like that.”
“It looks good on you. I have less urge to punch you in the face.”
“Just as long as you pay me as you promised. Is your granddaughter aware of our arrangement?”
“I told her the details. She was not pleased. The young have such strong lines, but she was mollified when I informed her you were an attorney, and she will abide. It is a matter of family honor and respect. You took a chance on an old man. The whole family is grateful.”
I removed a piece of paper from my pocket and slipped it across the bar. “This is the number and the details for an account in Belize where you’ll send my share of the fees for the Gould case, and any other case I give to you.”
He took the paper, looked at it before sticking it into a pocket. “I will keep this, but sadly, I don’t think it will ever be used. We haven’t talked since the unfortunate suicide of Scarlett Gould’s former boyfriend. The publicity over our renewed interest was blamed for his act, which is a shame if true, but not a great shame, considering. I fear his suicide is the end of our involvement. Even if we bring a suit and win against his estate, there will be nothing to collect.”
Just then Maria Guadalupe came back with a beer, a bourbon, and a glass of something clear and frizzy with a lime sticking out. She sat beside her grandfather and gave him the bourbon as she took a sip of the clear drink.
“Gin and tonic?” I said.
“Seltzer,” said Alberto’s granddaughter. “I don’t drink.”
“That’s a shame. Your grandfather thinks the Scarlett Gould case is over as far as he is concerned. What do you think?”
“My grandfather is probably right. After the suicide, it would be difficult to win against another defendant. And Mr. Beamon’s estate is judgment proof. But then again,” she said, smiling, “his suicide seems a bit convenient, don’t you think?”
“Where did you go to law school?” I said.
“Georgetown.”
“I could never have afforded such an astute legal talent if I wasn’t her grandfather,” said Alberto, beaming.
“You’re right, Maria,” I said. “The suicide was damn convenient, except it wasn’t a suicide. Bradley Beamon was murdered. You should sign his parents up as clients so they can be part of the suit along with the Goulds. It will be the same defendants. It’s all part of the same conspiracy. We could maybe even RICO it.”
“Treble damages,” said Maria.
“Were two sweeter words ever coined?”
“And yo
u can prove all this, my friend?” said Alberto.
“In time. But right now I have a related matter to discuss, one that must be taken care of immediately. Can you get a full medical examination done right away? Today. With an MRI and a battery of blood tests.”
“That could be difficult to arrange,” said Alberto.
“I know someone at George Washington,” said Maria. “She’ll do it for me. It might cost, though.”
“Cover it,” I said.
“What do you have for us, friend?”
“A case worth millions, if you’re brave enough to take it on. A rich old lady in Philadelphia hiring a firm from Miami to steal something of great value in Memphis.”
“But that case is no good to us,” said Alberto. “We can’t file it here.”
“You’ll have to find local counsel in Tennessee, but it’ll be your case because it’ll be your plaintiff. And the pockets are as deep as you’ll ever find. After I leave here I’m going to try to get the police involved, but whatever happens, you’ll need to get it filed right away, before the same man who killed Bradley Beamon kills your plaintiff.”
“What have you gotten us into?” said Alberto.
“The big time, Alberto.” I reached into my jacket pocket, pulled out the thumb drive that had been given to me in the go-go bar in Philadelphia. “Show this to your doctor. She’ll figure out what it means. This should link the whole thing back to the defendants.”
“Where is the plaintiff?”
“In the city, waiting on you.”
“And the plaintiff already agreed to have us represent him?”
“Just whip up a contingency fee agreement. It has already been arranged.”
Maria Guadalupe turned her head to look at Cindy Lieu, still sitting at the bar, and then leaned forward, running a finger around the rim of her glass. “That’s our plaintiff, isn’t it?”
A Filthy Business [Kindle in Motion] Page 28