“Well, yeah,” I said, glancing at Guerra. “That doesn’t help. You gotta keep the roof clean.”
Guerra seemed to be trying not to smile. I don’t know why he bothered fighting it. All it did was make him prettier.
“Any roof will leak if it’s got a swimming pool on top of it,” I said.
Alex scratched the back of his neck with one finger, thinking. “Ya know, the scupper thing might work, now that I think about it.”
“Lemme call you later, OK?” Guerra replied after a short pause. Alex nodded. The two men shook hands and Alex disappeared through the office door.
“Got any other secret superpowers I need to know about?” Guerra asked me, coming back over to his chair.
I considered telling him I bench-pressed my own body weight, but I wasn’t sure I could anymore. Plus, I don’t think that counts as a secret superpower. I hadn’t been born doing it. I’d picked up weight training shortly after starting the construction business in Bakersfield, when it became clear that there wasn’t a framing crew on earth who would take orders from someone who couldn’t lift a sack of concrete by herself.
Guerra picked up the clipboard and put on a pair of spectacles that were lying on the low table. It was only then that I realized he was my age or older. I let my gaze slide casually across his left hand. No wedding ring, and no telltale crease of one recently removed. If he was single, the women in this town were slackers.
After reading over my application for a few minutes, he put the clipboard down on the table and sat back in his chair, but before he could say anything, a female voice called from the direction of the bar: “If you’ve got my DSM-four in there, you’re a dead man!”
A young woman followed the warning in. She was small and dark, with a cloud of springy hair that bounced off her shoulders as she hesitated to a stop in the doorway.
“Oh! Sorry!” she said, seeing me.
“My sister, Connie,” Guerra said. I got up to shake hands and introduce myself.
When I told her my name, she said, “You’re Teresa’s friend, aren’t you?”
I admitted I was, and I must have looked uncomfortable doing it, because she explained, “She let us know you were coming, last week. I wait tables for Hector part-time.”
Her eyes had been darting around the room as she spoke, and now they homed in on a book lying open on the desk. She went over to get it, giving Guerra a light bonk on the head as she came back.
“How am I supposed to pass this practicum when you keep stealing all my field materials?” she complained.
“Maybe you shouldn’t pass it,” he groused, running a hand over the top of his hair.
“Oh, please. As if there were any danger of denting that thing.”
The book she was holding appeared to be a twin to one the federal shrinks always had handy during my sessions. “Are you premed?” I asked her warily. The last thing I wanted in my life right now was another mental health care professional.
“No, social work,” she said. “We all have to do a core in psychology. After I get my license, I’m hoping to go back to Guatemala and work with the indigenous populations down there.”
Guerra cut in, “Can you start tonight?”
I balked, and Connie said, “Our bartender threatened to strike unless Hector hired some help by the end of October.”
“I won’t make you actually work,” Guerra said to me. “We’ll call it paid training. Drinks on the house.”
“Paid how much?” I asked, feeling for the catch.
“Whatever it’ll cost me to get you to start tonight,” he said, his lazy smile threatening again.
I considered the offer. If he was really over a barrel, the thing to do was start the bidding high, but getting to look at him while I worked was worth a discount. I threw out a figure he couldn’t refuse. Guerra dropped his big head forward and swung a hand toward me. “Sold.”
Connie had turned toward the desk, reaching for the telephone. Hoping he wouldn’t regret it, I said to Guerra, “What time do you want me?”
“I unlock the doors around four, but Mike won’t be here until eight. Any time after that is fine.”
VII
Back out on the front sidewalk, I stopped to feel my feet on the ground under the big sky. Guerra had got me thinking about my first meeting with Joe.
My cousin Norma and I had come out on the bus from Tucson and were doing the San Francisco waterfront—the seals, Ghirardelli Square, and all the rest—feeling like cosmopolitan grown-ups. We’d flipped a coin to decide which bar to drink in, and were under the influence of multiple rum and Cokes when Norma’s eyes widened at something over my shoulder. I turned to see what had caught her attention, and got the thunderbolt. The tall, dark willow of a man sauntering toward us, eyes fixed on me, looked familiar even though I knew I’d never seen him before—I’d have remembered. He was wearing dark pants and a shirt with the top two buttons undone. The buttons were white mother-of-pearl. There was a silver ring on his right hand, and his hair was too long, curling down into his collar. Still infiltrating me with his eyes, he asked if we were from around here. I said no. It was the last time I ever said no to Joe Rizzoli.
The smell of something delicious wafting down from the corner, where a hand-painted sign advertised a café, brought me out of my reverie. I hadn’t eaten breakfast, and maybe they’d know where I could get a newspaper, so that I could take a gander at the article the department store salesman had mentioned.
Old Town Kern, the historic center of Bakersfield, had devised a program where the city appraised properties they wanted renovated at or near zero, to entice developers. You couldn’t get a loan on them, but if you had the cash—which, of course, the Rizzolis did—you could buy a place and fix it up without having to lay out the ten to twenty thousand for the property tax. If the old salesman was right and Azula was doing something similar, I wanted in, no matter what the Amazon said.
The café’s floor plan was similar to Guerra’s, with a serving counter along the inside wall, booths facing it on the other side. A dark-eyed teenager with a high puff of ponytail sat behind the cash register to the right of the front door, reading a vampire romance novel. She gave me a squinty look and told me I could have a seat anywhere.
I took a booth, noticing a couple of workmen near the back, puttying a new sheet of glass into one of the windows that faced the side street. A black guy of maybe thirty-five came out of the kitchen with a roll of silverware and a glass of water. “What’ll you have, hon?”
I’ve never had a stranger call me “hon” before, and it made me grin. “What’s that I smell?”
“Gumbo,” he said. “It’s been making all day.”
He had bad skin but great teeth, and wore his hair in short, tight little knots that covered his head like cloves stuck into an orange. I thought the girl at the register resembled him, but he didn’t look old enough to have a daughter her age.
“Let me have some of that,” I said, “and some iced tea.”
He nodded and went behind the counter to a stainless steel urn. When he came back with my tea, I pointed my eyes toward the workmen and said, “What happened?”
“My weekly brick,” he deadpanned.
I gave him a look, and he waved a lazy hand. “I’m just playing. Last week it was a hammer.”
My eyebrows flinched up. “So the old guy at the store across the square wasn’t just trying to get a sympathy sale?”
“Mel,” he said with a short, barking laugh. “That dude like to talk your ear off, give him half a chance.” He squinted at me, increasing his resemblance to the girl at the register. “Where you from?”
The question wasn’t bothering me anymore. “I just moved from Boston.” I held a hand out. “Julia Kalas.”
“Lavon Roberts,” he replied, shaking it. He gave me a not-unfriendly visual exam, then gazed back out toward the square. “City council say this development thing gonna stop all the craziness been going on down here lately, but I ain’t see how.”
A ding from the serving counter called. He stepped over to the cash register and grabbed a newspaper from behind it. “Read all about it right there,” he said, handing it my way as he went to pick up the order.
The half headline showing above the fold read DOWNTOWN REVITALIZATION PROJECT, and finished COMES UP FOR COUNCIL VOTE when I opened the paper. There was a photo—captioned “Project sponsor Dr. Richard Hallstedt meets with other members of the city council”—showing a colorless guy in starched khakis and a single-needle dress shirt centered in a group. He looked straight as a ruler, from his mainstream haircut to the tasseled loafers. Not at all what I’d envisioned as marriage material for the Amazon. I wondered what kind of doctor he was.
The article didn’t say, but explained that Hallstedt, a second-term council member, was pushing a package of commercial property tax incentives, which he promised would bring new businesses to the square. This would in turn evict “the criminal element that has moved in over the last year.”
When I got to the end of the article, I noticed that the brain had tweaked back to the Amazon’s admission that she was “lame on some things.” I didn’t yet know what the connection was, but I bat about .750 on subconscious links. Something I hadn’t noticed at the time was lodged in the underground gray matter. I knew from experience that trying to excavate it would be pointless. It would surface on its own schedule.
Lavon brought my lunch and I flipped to the classifieds while I ate. If I were going to go after this development thing, I’d have to be driving something I could park on a construction site without getting laughed at. Fifteen thousand wouldn’t go far enough if I insisted on buying right off the assembly line. I needed a good used truck.
There were two likely options: a Chevy pickup and a Dodge. The Dodge was an ’87, which meant it might still have a carburetor and was probably constructed mostly of steel. The ad said to “see Tova @ Bradshaw Arms.” There was an e-mail address and phone number, but I preferred the direct approach option, if I could get there.
“Do you know where this is?” I asked Lavon when he brought my check, pointing out the ad.
He grinned and pointed at the side window with his eyes. I followed them over my shoulder to a light-colored stone building on the diagonal corner.
“If it was a snake, it woulda bit ya,” he said.
VIII
The Arms had two pairs of etched glass doors—one fronting on the square and one on the side street—that fed into a corner lobby with a polychrome quarry tile floor and what had to be the original oak reception desk at the far end. A purple-haired Generation Xer sat behind this, staring at a laptop computer screen, her spine bowed out behind her in an impossible-looking curve.
I asked for Tova as instructed, and the clerk said, “What’s your problem?”
She didn’t sound belligerent, so it kind of stumped me. “What?”
“She’s not consulting anymore, just filing paperwork,” she said, a warning in her voice. I continued to boggle at her and the other shoe dropped. “You don’t need legal advice?”
“Oh. No. I’m here about the truck that’s for sale.”
The clerk pressed her lips together, looking embarrassed, and picked up the desk phone. She told whoever answered what my mission was and then said I could “go on in,” pointing down the hall to the right of the desk.
I passed a nicely restored old phone booth and turned into a blindingly bright room with a set of French doors opening onto a stone-paved courtyard. A pair of cockatoos was quietly cracking sunflower seeds in a large bamboo cage in one corner. Everything else in the room was white, or close to it—the carpet, the computer, the filing cabinets, even the desk and chair. After the opulence of the hotel’s lobby, it felt a little like walking into an igloo.
The woman behind the desk was an eye-catching blonde, dressed to match the room in an expensive-looking linen pencil-skirt suit and nude pumps. Her platinum hair was done up in a French twist and her chilly blue eyes shoved me back in time to whispering high school cliques of perfumed rich girls, feminine and exotic in that way I could never pull off.
She got up as I came in, taking a set of keys out of the pencil drawer.
“It’s out back,” she said, coming around the desk. She had a bombshell figure and was proud of it, shoulders back, hips swinging.
“Who did the restoration on this place?” I asked, admiring some nice egg and dart crown molding as I followed her down the hall toward the back of the building. She threw a frown at me over one shoulder, and I said, “It’s at least a hundred years old. There’s no way it’s lasted that long in shape this good without help.”
She paused at the fire door. “Why do you want to know?”
“Just curious.”
It takes some starch to ignore a throwaway like that, but she did it, pushing out into the alley without answering. My temper kicked, but I mashed it down until I knew for sure whether we’d have to haggle.
“What are you asking for the truck?” I said as we crunched across the gravel alley.
“Twelve thousand.”
I made the shape of a whistle with my lips, but decided to keep quiet until I laid eyes on the merchandise. Maybe it had a solid gold steering wheel or something.
The blonde approached a corrugated steel warehouse and gave the big sliding door a push, revealing a pale yellow pickup, parked nose out. It wasn’t encrusted with diamonds, but somebody had taken very good care of it.
“How many miles?” I asked, walking around to the side.
“Forty-seven thousand,” she replied. I made a skeptical face, and she said, “It belonged to my father, who purchased it new and didn’t drive it very often. He was an immigration lawyer, and his work took him out of the country frequently. It’s always been kept in here when not being driven. I doubt that it’s ever been parked outdoors for more than a few hours.”
In contrast to her china-doll appearance, her voice was pitched low, and she spoke with a brisk, measured precision, as if holding back a tide of verbal energy that threatened to burst forth at any moment.
“How long since anybody drove it?” I asked.
“You’re welcome to take it for a spin, if you like,” she said, dangling the keys at me from one small white finger.
She gave a closed-lipped Mona Lisa smile as I got in and cranked the ignition. The engine turned over on the first try, and from the sound of it, I knew that I’d probably be making her an offer. I eased out of the warehouse and went around the block, then took it up Main Street, which turned into a two-lane highway about half a mile out of town. It went up to eighty without complaint, riding stiff and choppy like a truck should.
When I turned back into the alley behind the hotel, the blonde was down at the far end, talking to a woman dressed in—yes, it was a crinoline, a short red one above a well-worn pair of tall black cowboy boots. Her bottle-black hair was tied up in a cotton bandanna, ’40s-style, and she was tossing various items into a big green Dumpster from a water-stained cardboard box at her feet. I left the truck in the warehouse and walked down to them.
“Charlie, this is—” The blonde turned to me with an amused twinkle that felt calculated. “My goodness, how rude of me. I’m Tova Bradshaw.”
“Julia Kalas,” I said to both of them, shaking hands.
“Charlie Eames,” the stranger said. She was what they used to call gawky, tall and narrow with more nose than chin, but her ostentatious outfit and theatrical makeup told me she didn’t care. Something about her made me want to grin and tell a joke.
“Got a husband named Ray?” I cracked.
She winked at me. “No, I’ve got a girlfriend named Marie. Nice cultural reference, though.”
So much for my gaydar. Casting around for something to cover the faux pas, I realized that the building next to us was the previous night’s bonfire.
“Is this your place?” I asked, noticing that the bottles she was dropping into the Dumpster were caked with soot.
“It
was,” she said.
“You won’t have to leave,” Tova cut in with an air of picking up where she’d left off. “I’ll make sure your policy pays out enough to rebuild.”
Charlie made a face at the carcass of her business. “What’s the point, Tova? You know as well as I do that we’re all hanging on by a thread here. I didn’t even make a hundred dollars last month.”
I was only half listening, distracted by the building, which was trying to tell me something. They do that, the way some old north-country people used to say the sequoias talked to them, or beekeepers with their hives.
The place was two stories, all stone, and the sky showed through where some window glass had broken out on the top floor. The sashes up there were charred black at the top, but only marked with soot at the bottom. The lower-floor windows were still intact and didn’t show any smoke or fire damage.
“At least Humphrey and Lauren are OK,” Charlie said.
“Oh, my word,” Tova breathed, putting a hand to her mouth. “I hadn’t even thought.” She turned to me. “Charlie has a pair of champion koi that have to be seen to be believed.”
“Humphrey and Lauren are fish?” I said.
Charlie nodded, peering at me. “What’s your animal?”
“My animal?”
“Yeah. Everybody has an animal totem that follows them through life.”
I paused to think, then admitted, “I don’t think I do.”
“You have one,” she said, and bent down for another load. “You just haven’t noticed it yet.”
Tova gave me an amused look over Charlie’s head and said, “I’ve got all the records for the truck in my office. Charlie, I’ll call the adjuster tomorrow and let you know what I find out, all right?”
Charlie gave an affirmative-sounding grunt, and Tova and I started back toward the hotel. As soon as we were out of earshot, she warned me in a low voice, “That girl gives the best manicure in the county, but trust me on this—don’t let her touch your hair.” She cut her eyes at my rapidly assembled updo and murmured, “If you care about that sort of thing.”
The fire door from the hotel hall was one of the exit-only kind, so we had to walk around to the lobby doors on the street side to get back to her office, which gave my urge to slap her time to subside. Once inside, she went to the filing cabinet to get out a folder. “My brother is something of a motor head,” she said, sitting down behind her desk. “He’s been the truck’s sole caretaker practically since the day Dad bought it.”
Nine Days: A Mystery Page 3