USA Noir Noir

by Johnny Temple

  “Was supposed to be.”

  * * *

  I drove fast to Vic’s hotel room downtown but he didn’t answer the door. Back downstairs the night manager, speaking from behind a mesh-reinforced window, told me that Vic left around eight-thirty—seven hours ago—and had not returned.

  I made Farrel’s place eleven minutes later. There were no cars in the driveway but lights inside were on. I rang the bell and knocked then tried the door, which was unlocked. So I opened it and stepped in.

  The living room looked exactly as it had two nights ago, except that the beer cans were gone and the pile of black binders had been reduced to just one. In the small back bedroom the stroller was still in place and the plastic doll was snugged down under the blanket just as it had been. I went into the master bedroom. The mattress was bare and the chest of drawers stood open and nearly empty. It looked like Farrel had stripped the bed and packed her clothes in a hurry. The bathroom was stripped too: no towels, nothing in the shower or the medicine chest or on the sink counter. The refrigerator had milk and pickles and that was all. The wastebasket under the sink had empty beer cans, an empty pretzel bag, various fast-food remnants swathed in ketchup, a receipt from a supermarket, and a wadded-up agreement from Rent-a-Dream car rentals down by the airport. Black Beamer 750i, of course.

  Back in the living room I took the black binder from the coffee table and opened it to the first page:

  THE SOPRANOS

  Season Four/Episode Three

  I flipped through the pages. Dialogue and brief descriptions. Four episodes in all.

  Getting Sal’s lines right, I thought.

  * * *

  Vic didn’t show up for work for three straight nights. I stopped by Skin a couple of times a night, just in case he showed, and I knocked on his hotel room door twice a day or so. The manager hadn’t seen him in four days. He told me Vic’s rent was due on the first.

  Of course Farrel had vanished too. I cruised her place in La Mesa but something about it just said she wasn’t coming back, and she didn’t.

  On the fourth afternoon after the murder of Joey Morra, Vic called me on my cell phone. “Can you feed my scorpion? Give him six crickets. They’re under the bathroom sink. The manager’ll give you the key.”

  “Sure. But we need to talk, Vic—face to face.”

  “I didn’t do it.”

  “Who else could throw Joey up there like that?”

  Vic didn’t answer.

  “Dom and his people are looking for you, Vic. You won’t get a trial with them. You’ll just get your sentence, and it won’t be lenient.”

  “I only took what she needed.”

  “And killed Joey.”

  “He pulled a gun, Robbie. I couldn’t thinka what else to do. I bear-hugged and shook him. Like a reflex. Like when I threw you.”

  “I’ll see you outside Higher Grounds in ten minutes.”

  “She met me at Rainwater’s, Robbie. I walked into Rainwater’s and there she was—that beautiful young woman, waiting there for me. You should have seen her face light up when I gave her the money. Out in the parking lot, I mean.”

  “I’ll bet,” I said. “Meet me outside Higher Grounds in ten minutes.”

  “Naw. I got a good safe place here. I’m going to just enjoy myself for a couple more days, knowing I did a good thing for a good woman. My scorpion, I named him Rudy. Oh. Oh shit, Robbie.”

  Even coming from a satellite orbiting the Earth in space, and through the miles of ether it took to travel to my ear, the sound of the shotgun blast was unmistakable. So was the second blast, and the third.

  * * *

  A few days later I flew to Little Rock and rented a car, then made the drive north and west to Center Springs. Farrel was right: it wasn’t on the rental-car company driving map, but it made the navigation unit that came in the vehicle.

  The Ozarks were steep and thickly forested and the Arkansas River looked unhurried. I could see thin wisps of wood stove fires burning in cabins down in the hollows and there was a smoky cast to the sky.

  The gas station clerk said I’d find Farrel White’s dad’s place down the road a mile, just before Persimmon Holler. He said there was a batch of trailers up on the hillside and I’d see them from the road if I didn’t drive too fast. Billy White had the wooden one with all the satellite dishes on top.

  The road leading in was dirt and heavily rutted from last season’s rain. I drove past travel trailers set up on cinder blocks. They were slouched and sun-dulled and some had decks and others just had more cinder blocks as steps. Dogs eyed me without bothering to sit up. There were cats and litter and a pile of engine blocks outside, looked like they’d been cast there by some huge child.

  Billy answered my knock with a sudden yank on the door then studied me through the screen. He was mid-fifties and heavy, didn’t look at all like his daughter. He wore a green-and-black plaid jacket buttoned all the way to the top.

  “I’m a San Diego cop looking for your daughter. I thought she might have come home.”

  “Would you?”

  “Would I what?”

  “Come home to this from San Diego?”

  “Well.”

  “She okay?”

  “I think so.”

  “Come in.”

  The trailer was small and cramped and packed with old, overstuffed furniture.

  “She in trouble?”

  “Farrel and her boyfriend hustled a guy out of some money. But he had to take the money from someone else.”

  Billy handed me a beer and plopped into a vinyl recliner across from me. He had a round, impish face and a twinkle in his eyes. “That ain’t her boyfriend. It’s her brother.”

  “That never crossed my mind.”

  “Don’t look nothing alike. But they’ve always been close. Folks liked to think too close, but it wasn’t ever that way. Just close. They understood each other. They’re both good kids. Their whole point in life was to get outta Center Springs and they done did it. I’m proud of them.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Preston.”

  “Did they grow up in this trailer?”

  “Hell no. We had a home over to Persimmon but it got sold off in the divorce. Hazel went to Little Rock with a tobacco products salesman. The whole story is every bit as dreary as it sounds.”

  “When did Farrel and Preston leave?”

  “Couple of months ago. The plan was San Diego, then Hollywood. Pretty people with culture and money to spend. They were going to study TV, maybe go start up a show. San Diego was to practice up.”

  “The scripts.”

  “Got them from the library up at Fayetteville. Made copies of the ones they wanted. Over and over again. Memorizing those scripts and all them words. They went to the Salvation Army stores and bought up lots of old-time kinda clothes. They both did some stage plays at the junior college but they didn’t much care for them. They liked the other kind of stories.”

  “What kind of stories?”

  “Crime stories. Bad guys. Mafia. That was mainly Preston. Farrel, she can act like anything from the Queen of England to a weather girl and you can’t tell she’s acting.”

  “Have they called lately?”

  “Been over a week.”

  “Where do you think they are?”

  “Well, Center Springs is the only place I know they ain’t. I don’t expect to ever see them out this way.”

  I did the simple math and the not-so-simple math. Eight grand for two months of work. Farrel dancing for tips. Preston delivering pizza and working his end of the Vic hustle. Vic caught between Farrel’s good acting and his own eager heart. And of course betrayed, finally and fatally, by his own bad temper.

  I finished the beer and stood. “Two men died because of them. Eight thousand bucks is what they died for. So the next time you talk to Farrel and Preston, you tell them there’s real blood on their hands. It’s not make-believe blood. You tell her Vic was murdered for taking that eig
ht thousand.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  “Thanks for your time.”

  “I can come up with a couple a hundred. It’s not much, but . . .”

  I saw the orange triangles bouncing in the air between us. I thought about those triangles as I drove away. Orange triangles denote pity and sometimes even empathy. All this for Vic Primeval, as offered by a man he’d never met, from his vinyl chair in his slouching home in the Ozarks. Sometimes you find a little speck of good where you least expect it. A rough diamond down deep. And you realize that the blackness can’t own you for more than one night at a time.

  PROMISED TULIPS

  BY BHARTI KIRCHNER

  Wallingford, Seattle

  (Originally published in Seattle Noir)

  I am floating between dream and wakefulness in my cozy treehouse nestled high in the canopy of a misty rain forest when he murmurs, “You’re so beautiful with your hair over your face.”

  I smile and bid him a Guten morgen. Ulrich—I like the full feel of that German name in my mouth, the melodious lilt, and I definitely appreciate the warm masculine body, its sculpted hardness visible beneath the sheets. He stretches an arm toward me, as if about to say or do something intimate, then closes his eyes and allows his arm to drop. I snuggle up against him, savoring the musky sweet skin, on a morning so different from others. Usually I rise at dawn, slip into my greenhouse, and appraise the overnight progress of the seedlings.

  If my mother were to peek in at this instant, she would draw a corner of her sari over her mouth to stifle a scream.

  “Sin!” she’d say. “My twenty-five-year-old unmarried girl is living in sin!”

  Fortunately, she’s half a world away in India.

  And I’m not in my treehouse, but rather in the bedroom of my bungalow in Wallingford, a.k.a. the Garden District of Seattle.

  Next door the Labrador retriever barks. Never before have I invited a man home on the first encounter and I’m unnerved by my daring. If my friends could see me now, they’d exclaim in disbelief, A shy thing like you?

  The silky, iris-patterned linen sheets are bunched up. He sleeps more messily than I, but for some reason I like the rumpled look. Last night’s coupling, with its wild tumbling and thrusting—I wouldn’t exactly call it lovemaking—has put me into deep communion with my body, and also taken me a bit out of my zone. My lips are dry and puffy from a surfeit of kissing.

  The man beneath the blanket turns his blond head, nuzzles the pillow, regards me with his green eyes, then looks at the clock on the lamp stand. “Eight-thirty?” He throws the blanket aside and bolts from the bed. “Ach, I’m supposed to be at work by seven.”

  An engineer by training, he works in construction, a choice he’s made to get away from “wallowing in my head.” So, he happily hammers nails all day, fixing roofs, patios, kitchens, and basements. Siegfried, his German shepherd, always goes along.

  I point out the bathroom across the hallway. He scrambles in that direction, mumbling to himself in his native tongue. A sliver of sun is visible through a crack in the window draperies. I can tell from its position that the morning has passed its infancy, the galaxy has inched on to a new position, and I’ve already missed a thing or two.

  I hoist myself up from my nest. My toes curl in protest at the first touch of the cold hardwood floor. I stoop to retrieve a pair of soft-soled wool slippers from under the nightstand.

  Then I look for my clothes. The long-sleeved print dress I wore last evening—a tantrum of wildflowers—lies on the floor, all tangled up with my bra and panties and Ulrich’s charcoal jeans. Crossing the room, I rummage around in the closet, grab a pewter-gray bathrobe, and wrap it around me.

  As I fluff the pillows, I hear the sounds of water splashing in the sink, and snatches of a German song. A peek through the draperies reveals a quick change of weather—a bruised, swollen April sky.

  The jangling of the telephone startles me. Not fair, this intrusion. If it’s Kareena on the line, I’ll whisper: Met a cool Deutsche last night . . . We’re just out of bed. I know, I know, but this one is . . . Look, I’ll call you back later, okay?

  Tangles of long hair drown my vision; I reach for the receiver. This is what a plant must feel like when it’s uprooted.

  “Palette of Color. Mitra Basu speaking, how can I help you?” Plants are my refuge, my salvation and, fortuitously, my vocation.

  “Veen here.” The downturn in her voice doesn’t escape me. Vivacious and well-connected, architect by profession, Veenati is an important part of my social circle. “Have you heard from Kareena recently?”

  “Not in a week or so. Why? Has something happened to her?”

  “She didn’t show up for coffee this morning. I called her home. Adi said she’s missing.”

  “Missing? Since when?”

  “Since the night before last. I was just checking to see if she’d contacted you. I’m late for work. Let’s talk in about an hour.”

  “Wait—”

  Click. Veen has hung up. This is like a dreadful preview of a hyperkinetic action flick. How could Kareena be missing? She’s a people person, well respected in our community for her work with abused women. Although we’re not related, Kareena is my only “family” in this area, not to mention the closest confidante I’ve had since leaving home. A word from my youth, shoee, friends of the heart, hums inside me. I’m badly in need of explanation to keep my imagination from roaring out of control.

  A vase of dried eucalyptus sits on the accent table. Kareena had once admired that fragrant arrangement—she adores all objects of beauty. Now she, a beautiful soul, has been reported missing. Wish I’d pressed her to take the risks of her profession more seriously. Don’t use your last name. Take a different route home every day. Always let somebody know where you are.

  Ulrich is back. “Everything okay?”

  “A friend is missing.” I make the statement official-sounding, while glancing at the window, and hope he won’t probe further. I’m of the opinion that intimacy has its limits. In the cold clarity of the morning, it discomfits me that I, a private person, have already shared this much with him.

  Standing so close to me that I can smell the sweat of the night on his skin, he dresses hurriedly. I linger on his muscles. His large fingers fumble with the buttons of his muted blue shirt and a thin lower lip pouts when he struggles to insert a recalcitrant button in its hole. He wiggles into his jeans and throws on his herringbone jacket. Then he draws me closer with an eager expression and cups my face in his hands. I grow as still as I’ve ever been. He gives me a short warm kiss which softens my entire midsection. The hum in the air is like static electricity crackling.

  Will I ever see him again? Coming from nowhere, the morbid thought slaps me on the forehead, but I recover quickly and my attention stretches back to Kareena. She could have gone somewhere for a breather from the daily battles she fights on her clients’ behalf.

  “I want to stay here with you,” Ulrich says, “but . . .”

  Modulated by his accent, the word want, or vant, hints at delicious possibilities for another time. I look up at his pale-skinned round face, and I really do have to look up, for he’s a good nine inches taller. I struggle with words to convey my feelings, to put a lid on my concerns about Kareena, but stay mute.

  “Catch you this evening,” he murmurs.

  As we walk to the doorway, our arms around each other, a yen to entice him to stay steals into my consciousness. I smother the impulse. Self-mastery is a trait I’ve inherited from my mother. (She denies herself pleasure of all sorts, refusing chai on a long train journey, and even returns bonus coupons to stores.)

  Ulrich gives me one last look followed by another kiss, sustaining the connection, that of a conjurer to a captive audience. As he descends the front steps, his face turns toward my budding tulip patch—an exuberant yellow salutation to the coming spring—and he holds it in sight till the last second. Yellow is Kareena’s color and I am growing these tulips f
or her. She’ll shout in pleasure when she sees how gorgeous they are.

  A Siamese cat from down the block watches from its customary perch atop a low brick wall as Ulrich lopes toward a steel-gray Saab parked across the street.

  I shut the door, pace back to the living room, open the draperies. Ulrich’s car is gone. Feeling a nip in the air, I cinch the belt of my bathrobe. Kareena and I bought identical robes at a Nordstrom sale. Despite different sizes—hers a misses medium and mine a petite small—we’re like twins or, at least, sisters.

  As I look down at my slippers, they too remind me of Kareena. A domestic violence counselor, she’d bought this pair from the boutique of a client who was a victim of spousal abuse. While I function in a universe of color, bounty, growth, and optimism, Kareena deals with “family disturbances.” Hers is a world of purple bruises, bloodshot gazes, and shattered hearts huddling in a public shelter.

  I look out at the long line of windows across the street. A blue-black Volvo SUV speeds by, marring the symmetry and reminding me of Kareena’s husband Adi; a real prize, he is.

  I met both Adi (short for Aditya, pronounced Aditta) and Kareena for the first time at a party they hosted. Before long, we began discussing where we were each from. Kareena had been raised in Mumbai and New Delhi, whereas Adi, like me, hailed from the state of West Bengal in Eastern India. Even as I greeted him, “Parichay korte bhalo laglo” (“How nice to meet you,” in our shared Bengali tongue), Adi’s name somehow brought to mind another word, dhurta: crook. The two words sort of rhyme in Bengali. That little fact I suppressed, but I couldn’t ignore the insouciance with which he flicked on his gold cigarette lighter, the jaunty angle of the Marlboro between his lips, the disdainful way he regarded the other guests.

  At just over six feet, he looked as out of place in that crowded room as a skyscraper in a valley of mud huts. He obviously believed that the shadow he cast was longer than anyone else’s. He informed me in the first ten minutes that his start-up, Guha Software Services, was in the black; that his ancestors had established major manufacturing plants in India; that he’d recently purchased a deluxe beach cottage on the Olympic Peninsula. Then he walked away without even giving me a chance to say what I did for a living.