Planet Willie

by Josh Shoemake

  “Alberto?” I ask. She nods her head, and I say Alberto again. You know the routine. Fortunately this time she calls back towards the kitchen before grinning at me again. Pretty soon a girl of eighteen or so comes out of the back wearing a white apron over her clothes like she’s been cleaning rooms. Her hair hangs close to her head and could probably be cleaned too. Poor girl looks exhausted.

  “Yes?” she says.

  “I was just checking out,” I say, “and was wondering if I could speak to Alberto before leaving.” Her body’s thin and her face is pale, but when I say this she goes even paler.

  “I’ll walk you out,” she whispers, and on the sidewalk she eyes me closely before asking if I’ve seen him.

  “Actually I haven’t met him,” I say, “but I’d like to.”

  She shakes her head and tells me he’s gone. I ask for her name, she tells me she’s Eralda. Her mother owns the motel and Alberto’s her boyfriend, or at least she thought he was. I ask what happened to him. She says he went to Texas.

  “How long ago?”

  “A few weeks. He should call me, but he hasn’t.”

  “Is he a part of this ALF?” I ask.

  She sniffs. “He doesn’t need them. He has talent.”

  Of course I’ve got a pretty good idea of why our friend Alberto went to Texas, but I ask Eralda for her opinion on the matter. She doesn’t know, he’s never traveled like this before, and when she asked, he wouldn’t tell her why he was leaving. I ask if Alberto and Kafka are friends.

  “Kafka?”

  “The tall kid with the slouch.” She shakes her head no, and then I can’t help noticing her lips lift a bit at the corners when she asks if I’m the one who gave him the black eye.

  “More like Kafka did it to himself,” I reply, accompanying it with a little wink, which she seems to appreciate. “Is he back in the hotel?”

  She shakes her head. “They left this morning.” They? Kafka and Drita, which some hazy memory tells me is the other name of Twiggy. I ask where they were headed, and if Texas was by any chance on the itinerary. She seems confused. “No,” she says, “they went to Colorado.”

  And what’s there to say to that? The plot thickens. If this keeps up, I won’t be able to dig myself out with a shovel. I’ll be so buried in plot, they’ll move somebody else onto my cloud. So I ask Eralda if she can do me one last favor. She’d love to help, she says, so sweet and polite that if this Alberto’s got any kind of sense, he’ll be back to her before long. Makes me wonder whether I’d be better off sticking with Eralda for a few days and letting the mystery come to me, but considering I’ve got leads scattering all over the continent, there unfortunately may not be a whole lot of time for Eralda.

  We walk down to the next corner, where I happen to know there’s a working pay phone. Before depositing a few quarters from my pants pocket, which is still loaded, we rehearse a bit.

  “Can you do some fancy accent?” I ask. She tells me she does a pretty good Mary Poppins. “Perfect,” I say. “Then tell her you were at the marvelous show last night and after further consideration you’d like to buy the still life with apples if it’s still available. Insist on speaking to Miss Shore. You want to arrange a meeting.” She nods as she takes this in, then asks why I can’t call her myself.

  “We broke up,” I say, dropping in quarters and dialing the number I’ve got. I hand over the phone, Eralda clears her throat, and what comes out of that little mouth is not just a British accent. Hell, Eralda could be the queen of England. She practically gets me bowing out there out on the sidewalk as she runs through her lines then stands there listening with a look of royal disdain.

  “What a disappointment,” she says.

  “It must be so lovely this time of the year,” she says.

  “Oh dear yes,” she says. “In England we say that those who help others help themselves. Perhaps you have that expression here.”

  “Thank you, darling,” she says. “And please do tell her that Lady Eralda called.”

  This goes on for another thirty seconds or so, if you can believe it, and although I’m not stingy with quarters, I am getting a bit anxious.

  “What the hell was all that?” I ask once she hangs up. Lady Eralda hums a little to herself and curls the corners of her mouth.

  “We we’re just chatting,” she says. “She said that Miss Shore is attending a charity ball tomorrow night and will be out of town for a week. We got lucky, though – they didn’t sell the apples painting.”

  “Where is this charity ball.”

  “She said it was in Vail.”

  “Vail?” I say. “Colorado?”

  “Colorado,” she says, which does throw me for a loop, and also fills my calendar for the foreseeable future.

  Before saying goodbye I get Eralda’s number and promise to call if I run across Alberto. Then there’s really nothing left to do but head for the Port Authority and catch a bus. Shore may be paying expenses, but two planes in two days might well kill me. Long before Pittsburgh, however, I have come to a conclusion: only an idiot takes a Greyhound bus from New York City to Colorado. All the books any philosopher ever wrote can’t even begin to approach the wisdom held in that one little phrase.

  10

  What I really need to be doing is getting back down to Texas and making inroads into figuring out my life, by which I mean my death. What I need to be doing is focusing on unholy revenge, digging through ol’ Jimbo’s closet for pink paisley, and investigating the origins of Lady Caroline’s new aquatic sport. But I’ve been stuck on a bus to Colorado for a day, making pit stops in every town that can lay claim to a population. I get to thinking about it as the cornfields whip by, and I realize that the story of my life is that the story’s never the one I intended it to be. Sort of makes you wonder if eternity is long enough to get yourself on track.

  What I guess I also need to be doing is checking in with Saint Chief to let him know about my current trajectory towards the ol’ Rockies, but you can bet that won’t sit too well, so I decide that saying grace can wait. Finally, however, a miracle does come, and I make it to Vail, where it’s winter again and I do begin to reconsider that nostalgia for the seasons. Tromping through the snow outside the bus station, I start asking around for the most expensive hotel in town. I want Jacuzzis, I want fresh towels bigger than sheets, and I want room service with a smile.

  A taxi driver directs me to what they call The Aurora Lodge and Resort Center, a many-starred affair dropping down along the slopes with private patios so the guests can ski right out from their rooms. The marble floor of the lobby is so polished you get the feeling you could ice skate right across it. People sit around in arm chairs in sweaters and waterproof pants reading paperbacks and watching skiers fly down the mountainside. I tip the bellboy and tip a few of his friends, then slip and slide over to the front desk and tell them I want luxury. They have me checked in before I can pull out my Frequent Guest card, and the bellboy leads me down some never-ending hallways to my own little piece of paradise. The fireplace shoots flames at the push of a button, the bed could sleep everybody you might meet, and the bathroom, I’m relieved to discover, comes equipped with a bidet.

  So I unpack my worldly goods, slip the thirty-eight into the icebox of the minibar for safekeeping, and call up Consuela in housekeeping to see what she can do about an Italian suit that was never meant for Greyhound. Consuela’s on the scene in forty seconds flat. Comes bursting through the door like the fire department.

  “Where ees dees soot?” she says, scanning the room like a maniac.

  “I’m sorry, Consuela, I don’t speak Spanish,” I say. She takes me by the lapels and shakes her head at the sheer tragedy of it all.

  “Off with eet,” she says, and looks off towards the ceiling to give me a moment to work. Hadn’t realized it was all that bad myself, but Consuela may have a point. A perceptive woman, this little Consuela, and not unattractive with her black hair up in a bun so tight it makes her look half-Orie
ntal. She gets you thinking maybe all this time you’ve been one of those masochists and never even knew it. You wonder if maybe there’s a place to purchase a starter whip somewhere in this town. Not to mention the white uniform, which of course is fetish with a capital F as in fiesta.

  Anyway, I get the jacket off and then she sees the shirt, and believe me there is hell to pay. She holds out her hand while hammering that little foot of hers on the rug. I hand over the shirt without a protest and move on down to the main event.

  “I feel I should say a little something here, Consuela,” I tell her. “But unfortunately there is no word for it in Spanish. I know this because the people from the dictionary down there came up to investigate. Turns out you lose too much in translation, though maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing.”

  Consuela may or may not take this in, considering how she’s launched an assault on my suitcase and I’m starting to feel like the Alamo in person. Humbling experience, stripping unattended. By the time I get down to my pants zipper, she’s got laundry piled up clear to her chin and I’m taking a little trip down memory lane trying to pinpoint how exactly I came to be wearing no underwear.

  “Holy Christ!” I say by way of distraction, doing a little face I call the Poltergeist at the sliding glass doors to the slopes. “It’s the Mighty Sequatchie Snow Beast.”

  She goes for it, and by the time she can turn back around I’m standing there in full resplendence, unless you count the hat, which is technically just part of the resplendence. Consuela scoots right across that hardwood like a hyperactive lizard and has those pants up on the pile before I can make any introductions.

  “Is that it?” she says.

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” I say.

  “No more leetle socks under the bed maybe?”

  “Sweetheart, you’re holding my entire wardrobe in your hands there. How soon can we expect a reunion?”

  She shifts the laundry up on her chest a little like she’s weighing it then subtracting the clothes to see what she’s got left to obliterate.

  “One hour,” she says. “Will that be all, Meester Lee?”

  “I guess really only you can answer that question, Consuela, if you know what I mean.”

  “Stop catching cold, Meester Lee,” she says, softening up here a little if I’m not mistaken.

  “To tell you the truth, I’m a great one for laundry,” I say. “What do you say we just gather round the bathtub in there and do it by hand. Protect the fibers, so to speak.”

  Good ol’ Consuela. Giggles a little to herself, maybe. The smile certainly spreads a bit, unless I’m mistaken and she’s just showing her teeth. Her eyes get tugged out so wide by the hair-works I get to thinking she may in fact be Oriental. May have to brush up on my Taiwanese, I’m thinking.

  “Goodbye, Meester Lee,” she says, hustling out the door.

  “Call me Willie,” I holler after her. “With a W as in without starch, sweetheart. As in wear the uniform tonight and we’ll take it as it comes.”

  Which provides me the opportunity to spend some time with my nudey self. I get to watching the skiers out the glass doors plummeting past my little patio, thinking I’ll note the finer points of alpine sports before I go out there myself to give it a whirl. The way I understand it, you just strap on those skis and they more or less take care of the rest, but all the same the snow seems to be winning in Vail, Colorado. I mean within the space of thirty seconds I count six people, eleven poles, and three skis coming by, though at sixty miles an hour my arithmetic may be off. I move a little closer to the windows to investigate. It’s just terrifying. Right out there not thirty feet from my window is a pileup of bodies that would make the defensive line of the Denver Broncos blush. It’s like some supernatural force has snatched up thirty random skiers and dumped them in a little pile by my patio. Then it hits me. That supernatural force is yours truly. I am naked before the world, and the world has taken notice. And it is terrifying, the harm a man can do just by being naked. I’m thinking somebody needs to make that an eleventh commandment.

  Out of respect for the wounded, I decide to make my exit as graceful as possible and ease on over into the bathroom, where I pour myself a bubble bath and sud it up while rehearsing legal arguments in my suit against the paparazzi magazines. It may be that I drift off for a bit here, since when I come out of the bathroom in a complimentary robe with the belt done up tight, my suit is hanging in the closet and my clothes are on the bed all wrapped up in a little paper bow. I get dressed and polish the boots up nicely with one of those little kits they leave you on the bathroom counter. Get to feeling so pristine and bored I figure I’ll give Darling a call. Like most of us, I just can’t seem to get enough of the insurance industry.

  Unfortunately I seem to have been separated from Darling’s number sometime during my trip across the continent, so first I call up information in Manhattan and get a woman who calls herself Jill. Actually she’s sitting in an office in Calcutta, she tells me, and she manages to get me Jean, who after some negotiations puts me through to Darling. I say hello, but that’s about all I manage to say, considering he starts squawking about his career and his filing cabinet and who knows what else. I tell him to slow down and try and speak a little more distinctly. He tells me that if I don’t return the Shore Madonna folder immediately, he’s out of a job. Almost starts sobbing right there on the telephone.

  “I’d honestly like to help you out, Darling,” I say, “but unfortunately I’m in Vail, Colorado doing a little skiing.”

  Turns out he may not be a big winter sports person, Darling, since what I’m hearing is dial tone. Which fortunately does allow me to call up information and ask to speak to Jill again. I get passed around to a few Indian girls with British accents nearly as perfect as Eralda’s until I get to developing a little courtly accent of my own, coming out with these high-class o’s like perfect little smoke rings until I’m more or less Duke Willie by the time somebody finds me Jill, whose real name is apparently Sumatra, although we’re talking with a hundred thousand miles between us and I may be mistaken. Twenty-seven years old, happily married, she says, and it’s a hundred degrees and raining in Calcutta. I tell her all about the snow up there in Vail, Colorado and ask if maybe she’s got a direct line in case I find myself in an emergency. She doesn’t, she says, and can’t keep talking anymore since sometimes the boss will listen in for customer service reasons and might dock her salary from four rupees a day to three rupees or whatever it is. So I wish her a pleasant evening, she says it’s morning and gets me Jean again, who puts me back through to the kid with a grunt.

  “Must have been a bad connection there, Darling,” I say. “Maybe it’s the altitude, I don’t know. Anyhow, you were saying.”

  “I want my file back,” he says, “or Brattle Brothers will take action.”

  “Of course they won’t, Darling, because you’re sure as hell not going to tell them you misplaced part of a client’s file. And not only have you misplaced it, you’ve been handing out photographs of a client’s painting. Which brings us to the principal reason for my call: exactly how many photographs of the Madonna have you distributed to the general populace?”

  Through the phone I hear what sounds like a dying squirrel.

  “Since I can count on your confidentiality,” I say, “it might be better if you knew that the Madonna has been stolen. I’ve been hired by Harry Shore to find it and save your employers some money, but in the meantime both I and your employers would appreciate it if you stopped advertising.”

  “She’s his daughter,” he says. “I didn’t think….”

  “You sure didn’t,” I say, “and the beautiful Fernanda happens to be a leading suspect at the moment. Although she is something, isn’t she?”

  He sighs, and I do feel sorry for him. Hope he’s lit a cigarette. God knows the kid needs his little pleasures. “She knew everything about movies,” he says. “We talked for hours.”

  “We’ll get to that,”
I say. “First I’d like to know how many photographs there were.”

  “Just two,” he says. “Plus the other one you and I found.”

  “The one you gave her was in the folder?”

  “Yes.”

  “And nobody else has been around asking about that painting?”

  “No,” he sighs.

  “Maybe you need to cut out a little early today, kid. Maybe take a little stroll through Central Park. What’s the weather like over there?”

  “Rain.”

  “Apparently it’s raining in Calcutta too.”

  “I can’t believe this,” he says.

  “Global warming,” I say. Then I tell him I want him to call me at the hotel in Vail if anyone approaches him looking for information about the painting. He says he will, I tell him we’re in this one together. He sighs some more, and I tell him that if we play our cards right, we might just come out of this thing alive.

  “One last question,” I say as I lie back on a feathered pillow, deathly tired again after the bus rides and transcontinental conversations. “I’m thinking of last lines, death lines. You remember Psycho?”

  “Hitchcock or the remake?” he says, sounding more tired than I’ll ever be.

  “You disappoint me, Darling,” I say. “In any case, I’ve got a little something that’s been bugging me. Janet Lee in the shower. Does she get in a last line or not? It’s been a while.”

  “No, he just stabs her.”

  “How about a little tune? Isn’t she whistling something as she washes?”

  “No, it’s just the sound of the water and then you hear her screaming. The effect wouldn’t be the same if she were whistling.”

  “You have a point,” I say. “The last lines are the toughest ones. Can just about ruin a perfectly good death scene if you don’t get it right. Lots of good deaths out there, very few good death lines.”