Taco Noir

by Steven Gomez

  “You would not find my hand in any such matter. In fact, it is my belief that the bottle of Medeira doesn’t even exist!”

  “How do you figure that?” I asked, cutting into the steak. I took a bite of the succulent, reddish-brown flesh and felt my eyes roll into the back of my head. With another bite, I would have to rethink my views on religion.

  “Robest is a blow-hard and a cretin. I’m sure he simply fabricated the story of the wine in order to increase his sorry reputation.”

  “You don’t seem too fond of him,” I said, cutting another piece off of the steak and savoring it. It was so tender that I could have cut it with a manila envelope.

  “Take a lesson from the French, detective,” the Big Man said as he drained the last of the wine from his glass. “Life is to be lived, women are to be loved, food eaten and wine savored. Anyone who would spend a fortune on such a bottle and never drink it is either a fool or a miser. And I have patience for neither.”

  “And should I see that particular bottle up for auction in London two months from now….?” I said.

  “Watch me as long as you like, detective. My life is an open book. Just remember what I said and live life to the fullest.”

  “I’ll do that,” I told the Big Man as I finished my meal. Tomorrow I would go see Robest and tell him that I found neither cork nor label of his fine Portuguese vino. I’d still bill the pasty little weasel for the time I had spent on his behalf, but as with most of my clients, I doubted the funds would come. But that was tomorrow, and as the Fat Man said, I enjoyed life while I could.

  “I’ll try to take your advice,” I told the large chef. “And I have to say that this is the finest meal I’ve ever eaten!”

  “Music to my ears!” said the chef. “The secret is in the marinade!”

  Purloined Red Wine Marinade

  1 lb. skirt steak

  2 ½ cups leftover red wine

  1 onion, diced

  4 cloves of garlic, smashed

  Juice from one lemon

  1 whole sprig of rosemary

  ¼ cup olive oil

  1 teaspoon salt

  1 teaspoon pepper

  Sweet-talk your butcher into taking his thumb off the scale and giving you one of the cuts of meat that he gives to his friends and loved ones. Take it home, give it a quick trim to remove the gristle and some of the fat, and park it. In a shallow bowl, toss in the remaining ingredients and beat with a whisk as if you were expecting a confession. Submerge the steak and leave it overnight in the fridge.

  The next day, preheat a cast iron skillet to high, let the steak rest until room temperature, and then sear it on both sides. Cook until the center reaches the temperature you like and let it rest once again for ten.

  Pure hard-boiled bliss!

  THE CASE OF THE BITING SPICE

  Sometimes the spice you don’t know about has the most kick

  It was a rare sunny day in the city and the warmth spread like a fever. I started the day with a breakfast at Leo’s Diner which consisted of crepes and coffee so strong it could sit up and beg. I followed up breakfast with a trip to the newsstand to pick up the daily rag, and then a stop at the local green grocer for a bag of farm fresh tomatoes. The plan for the day was to add the tomatoes to some ground beef that I had in the ice box, mix in some beans I had cooked the night before, and spend the day cooking a pot of chili while I watched the grass grow. Sometimes the absence of paying customers can be a blessing, especially during baseball season.

  Now I make a pretty good pot of chili, but it’s always been a sore point that it was good, not great, chili. I chalk it up to being a life-long Easterner. Years earlier, when Horace Greeley told Americans to “go west,” my ancestors told him where to go right back.

  I was in the kitchen, listening to the game and looking through my spice rack for inspiration to jump out at me, when my phone rang.

  “Acme Chili Company,” I said. “We like it hot.”

  “Why aren’t you in your office?” shouted the voice on the other end. Long ago I had gone into business for myself just so I wouldn’t have to answer questions like that.

  “You can’t expect a lug to be toiling away in a dank little office on a beautiful day like today.” I told the troll-like voice, which I recognized as being attached to an equally troll-like body. “Besides, I don’t work on Saturdays.”

  “It’s Friday,” growled the troll. “A hot-shot detective like you ought to have a clue about the days of the week.” A quick glance at the calendar told me that the gruff voice had a point, so I shut up and listened for once. The voice, as I well knew, belonged to Lazlo Lavage, a bondsman with an office on the East side of town. Lazlo made a living off posting bail for the desperate and charging them inordinate prices later. He made a killing off bleeding those who were struggling just to get by, and he kept a long list of heavy hitters ready to track down those who skipped out on him. There were a few who made it past his goons and kept going, though. Those were the cases where Lazlo employed mugs like me.

  Lazlo told me the story of Maria Del Toro, a small-time seamstress in the neighborhood, who posted a bond with Lazlo. She had disappeared about a week ago, and his people had seen neither hide nor hair of her since. He left her picture in my office, where he was forced to slide the envelope under the door since I had called in on account of being too healthy. She was in the wind, and Lazlo wanted me to get her back quickly.

  “What did she do?” I asked the troll, wanting to know if I was going after a jaywalker or a mass-murderer.

  “None of your business is what she done!” growled Lazlo. “When I was at your office earlier I didn’t exactly notice a line of schmoes waiting to hire you.” Once again the man had a point.

  “And what are you offering,” I said, casting a quick glance at my bag of tomatoes.

  “The usual,” he said.

  “And?” There was a long pause on the phone as Lazlo mulled this over.

  “Fine!” he barked. “I’ll pay your expenses and give you a $100 bonus!”

  “And?” I asked. I could tell that I was in imminent danger of causing Lazlo’s head to explode.

  “And what!” he screamed. “What else do you want? The moon?!?”

  As I said, I made a good pot of chili, but Lazlo on the other hand…. “I believe you know what, my friend.”

  “Fine!” he yelled. I was beginning to think that Lazlo did not possess an ‘indoor voice.’ “I’ll give you my chili recipe as well! Just find Maria. And make it snappy!” Lazlo slammed the phone down, and I was left with very little to go on.

  Making a quick stop by my office to pick up the envelope Lazlo slid under the door, I did my best to dope out Maria’s whereabouts. The envelope held only Maria’s picture, and it verified that she was indeed a knock-out. The paperwork that Lazlo kept on everyone he did business with was conspicuously missing. Usually I would have called Lazlo back and asked him for more info, but he had already made it clear that I was there to find Maria and keep out of his business.

  Since I knew absolutely nothing about one Maria Del Toro, the natural place for me to start was at the precinct house on the East Side. I was on the permanent list of “persona non grata” there, so I waited around the corner at O’Malley’s, a cop bar, for a friendly face to stop in. It took a while, and I had to endure many a sarcastic comment about peeping into windows or tracking down lost pooches. I fended off the remarks by saying that my confidentiality agreement prevented me from telling them what their wives had to say about them.

  Luckily for me, I didn’t have to languish too long inside the bar before a friendly face in the form of Mike McCarthy, Special Investigator for the District Attorney, appeared. Mike saw that I was about to be shown the ugly side of a bartender’s baseball bat and jumped in to save me.

  “Back off guys,” Mike told the off-duty coppers. “He isn’t worth your time.”

  “You can say that again,” grumbled one of the flat-footed mugs as they all made their way
back to the bar. Mike told me that I owed him one, and I decided to press my luck by showing him the photo of Maria Del Toro.

  “She’s quite a dish,” Mike told me, “but she hasn’t been charged with anything.”

  “Are you sure?” I asked, falling into my usual state of confusion.

  “Do you think I would forget a face like this?” he asked. “Particularly with the Dick Tracy Rogues Gallery I usually work with?”

  Mike had a point, but I asked him to keep looking and get back to me if he found anything. I bought him a beer and decided to hot-foot it out of the bar before I was charged with something. I was back at square zero, seeing as my client wasn’t exactly fluent in the truth. But there was still a part of the story that I could follow up on. And if I was lucky, I might even have my jacket let out a bit.

  The place where Maria Del Toro worked as a seamstress was in the Nickel District, and in the Nickel, there were only two types of seamstresses. The first were the ones who worked in the shops owned by uptown tailors who sent their work down here to get it done cheaply for their rich clients. The second were the seamstresses who did work for mortuaries.

  After knocking on lots of doors and wearing out a little shoe leather, I found that Maria Del Toro was a seamstress for one of those uptown swells. The building she worked at was a run-down sweatshop that employed somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty woman. The flea that owned the shop paid the women pennies an hour while charging the uptown hoi-palloi top dollar. It was good work if you could get it, and you could sleep at night once you got it. I could try charging in and questioning these women, but I knew places like this. Every one of the ladies knew that, if they spoke to a shamus like me, they would be out of work five minutes later. If I were to go in there heavy with a lot of questions, then the only thing I would accomplish would be getting the dames to dummy up and probably getting them all fired in the process.

  I got a bratwurst and coffee from a shop up the road, as well as a newspaper. I planted myself on a park bench across the street from the sweatshop and waited. The ability to wait, along with the ability to stomach dreadful coffee and bratwurst, is a job requirement. I opened up the paper to the box scores, sipped on some coffee, and waited.

  I warmed the park bench for almost three hours before a loud horn sounded somewhere in the building, signaling the end of the work day. The women filed out in groups of two or more, moving slowly, too tired to make the walk home let alone work up any enthusiasm about it. I waited for stragglers, and saw my opening when one of the ladies left the building by herself.

  She was thin, dark-haired, middle-aged, and as skittish as a kitten when she left the building, looking over her shoulder. She was making sure that she wasn’t being followed, and doing everything but wearing a “please follow me” sign as she did so. She was as innocent as a babe when it came to spotting a tail, and she mistook me for just another schmoe enjoying his brats in the park.

  I followed her, watching as she stayed in the shadows and took to the back alleys. She walked almost three blocks out of her way and back-tracked to a small studio located in the rear of a local bakery. The dame looked this way and that before she made her way into the apartment. I felt a little bad that she wouldn’t know if anyone was following her unless it was a marching band. The door cracked open and the seamstress slipped in, darkness enveloping her, as the door closed. I walked around the building, as well as the bakery, just to make sure that this wasn’t more of the lady’s shenanigans. Then I played the waiting game once more, partly because I was still on Lazlo Lavage’s dime, but mostly because when I’m tailing someone I don’t like surprises.

  The sky filled with the kind of darkness that was all around this case, and after a while someone inside the small apartment flipped on a light. I snuck closer to the front door, and I could hear the sounds of two female voices. Neither voice sounded very serene. I listened for a while, getting pieces here and there in Spanish. After a few moments I decided that listening outside of women’s doors wasn’t doing loads for my self-image, so I took a chance and knocked.

  There was plenty of shuffling and “shush”-ing going on in the small apartment, and after a minute or so everything went quiet. It was a shaky, frightened voice that came drifting through the door.

  “Who is there?” the voice asked. I assumed that it was the woman I tailed from the seamstress shop.

  “I’m looking for Maria Del Toro,” I said, using my ‘Voice of Authority.’ It’s the tone of voice I use when I want people who have no reason to talk to me to talk to me. In this case, the ‘Voice of Authority’ let me down. Inside there was more shushing and moving around and I heard a lamp break. It didn’t take a genius to recognize the sounds of desperation and panic.

  I moved away from the door and peered around the corner, to the only window the tiny apartment possessed. I saw a suitcase drop down, and the leg of a woman who was most certainly not the middle-aged seamstress I tailed to this studio. I moved to the window and, as the woman backed her way out of the apartment, I helped her down. My reward was a scream.

  The young woman took a tumble backwards and fell into me. We both spilled onto the alleyway and the woman I tailed appeared before me, shotgun in hand. In other circumstances I would have jumped to my feet, but I was covered with a hysterical, crying younger version of the seamstress. I heard the older woman pull back the twin hammers of the shotgun as the younger woman peeled herself off me.

  “Miss Del Toro?” I smiled. “I would like to provide you with full coverage for all your life insurance needs.”

  Then I felt the butt of a shotgun strike the side of my head, and what little light was there went out.

  I came to in the alleyway with the sharp taste of gun metal still fresh in my mouth. From somewhere nearby I could hear two voices arguing frantically, and it occurred to me that I hadn’t been out too long. Certainly not as long as the two seamstresses had hoped. I continued to lay in the dirt and grime of the alley, playing dead. From underneath my body I slowly snaked my hand into the holster under my left arm. I had been lucky all through this case, and my luck had continued to hold. I was clearly dealing with amateurs. The ladies were trying to get out of Dodge while the shady character they had koncked on the noggin lay sleeping it off. They didn’t tie me up and they never even checked to see if the shady character had a gun. The shady character did.

  The women might have been rank amateurs, but I hadn’t exactly handled myself like a pro thus far. As my hand found its way around the grip of my pistol, I decided that I was through letting luck decide my fate. Luck had a nasty way of kicking you when and where you least expected it. It was time I trusted in a higher power.

  “All right,” I said, struggling to my feet as I aimed a shaky snub-nose at the ladies. “I don’t know exactly what’s going on here, but my head is throbbing, I’m dirty, and I’ve spent the last two days peeking in people’s windows. Now I just have one question. Which one of you is Maria Del Toro?”

  The ladies stopped in their tracks, dropped the suitcase, and looked at each other, waiting to see who would crack first. I gave them a moment before I cleared my throat, and the young woman in the shadows stepped forward, revealing herself to be the young woman from the photo.

  “I am Maria Del Toro,” she said, her voice trembling.

  “Pleased to meet you, Miss Del Toro,” I said, reaching out and taking the shotgun from the older woman. “I believe that you and I have much to discuss.”

  The older woman with Maria turned out to be her Aunt, and Maria had been lying low for the last week or so until she could arrange passage to her mother’s home in Arizona. When I asked about Lazlo Lavage, both Maria and her aunt broke into hysterics. Lazlo had never posted a bond for Maria, and she had never committed any crime. Lazlo’s interest in Maria was much more unsavory than that.

  Maria told me that she met Lazlo when he had visited the sweatshop she worked in, looking for a skip. He was smitten at first glance and somehow she had
managed to keep her lunch down. Maria confessed that she had dated Lazlo for a few months, a feat which I considered either charitable or naive. She had seen Lazlo as a rich and powerful man, which I guess I could see if I squinted hard enough. She also told me that Lazlo was hooked on her from day one, which didn’t require bifocals.

  She went on to spin me a fairy tale about how Lazlo wined and dined her, showered her with gifts, and promised her the moon. Maria went on with her story while Auntie got me a glass of water and apologized for bashing me on the noggin with a 12-guage. It wasn’t the first time. I grunted something in the way of acceptance and the older woman kept an eye on me as she started straightening the apartment. Straightening and packing.

  Maria’s story continued all hearts and flowers for a while, until reaching the act where Lazlo turned mean. Anyone who had known Lazlo longer than a New York minute knew that was Lazlo’s natural state, and I can only assume that Maria was blinded, if not by love, then at least a love of the things that Lazlo would provide her.

  Lazlo made demands and his temper flared, turning him from Prince Charming to Frankenstein’s Monster. Maria tried to walk out on him a few times, but Lazlo wasn’t having any of it. He made that clear to her one starry evening when he told her that if she left him, she would get the ‘Marbles’ Monroe treatment.

  To this day, ‘Marbles’ mother still wears black when she so much as goes out for a quart of milk.

  “Angela was the only family I had here. My mother lives in Sedona. I lived with Aunt Angela since I moved here a year ago, but Lazlo’s men know where she works.” She leaned forward and grabbed my forearm with a grip that had been built by years of needlework. “Please, my aunt and I need to disappear before Lazlo finds us. We need to get out of the city.”