Still River

by Harry Hunsicker

  A couple of turns later I was on Gaston Avenue, headed to my home on Sycamore Street, a few blocks north of the office. I’d bought the house three years ago. The place was solid, made from rough-cut stone and one of about three in the city that had a basement. The neighborhood was an interesting mix: working class, half Asian and half Hispanic, and a handful of expatriated white guys like me. The homes ran the gamut from wooden shacks held together with little more than a coat of peeling paint to a handful of new brick cottages, snug little places with bars on the windows and outside lights triggered by motion detectors. This part of town was as far from the Dallas of J. R. Ewing as you could get, though a lot of the Cowboys buy their drugs from a dealer two streets over. That’s not really touristy, though.

  I pulled into my gravel drive and got out. Mr. Martinez, my neighbor to the left, stood in his backyard, scattering corn for the chickens he raised. He waved and said hello in Spanish. I stopped and leaned over the top of the chain-link fence separating our yards. A retiree, Mr. Martinez liked to talk and I could count on ten or fifteen minutes of uninterrupted neighborhood gossip. He’d gotten through the Hidalgos on the corner and the trouble their son had at the border in Laredo last week, when we heard shouting from the house on the other side of mine. He shook his head. “Muy loco.”

  I nodded and we looked in the direction of the shouting, waiting to see if anything else happened. No more commotion erupted so Mr. Martinez continued as if nothing had happened. My other neighbor was Edwin, an artist who sculpted in bronze and iron and became terribly agitated when his art went awry. Which was often.

  After Mr. Martinez finished his rundown, we said good-bye. I walked into my house and got the mail. Nothing of importance except for some bills. The rest was junk mail. I put the whole lot of it on the table in the hall, next to the latest issue of Model Railroader. The magazine was for my next errand, and I ignored it.

  Since it was lunchtime I went to the kitchen. The room was half finished, a mess of power tools, paint, and wooden debris. I’d redone most of the place myself, from refinishing the hardwoods to renovating the turn-of-the-century bathrooms. The kitchen I’d saved for last, and it was nearing completion. The nice people from the building supply company had delivered the new granite countertops last week, courtesy of a man named Phil. Phil built homes, nice ones in the good part of town. His daughter had fallen in with a couple of ex-ballplayers, third-string losers who had suited up for the Mavericks for a couple of seasons until no amount of strong-arming by the union could keep them on the team after a series of failed drug tests. They’d done some bad things to the girl, and he’d hired me to rectify the situation. They were punks and it hadn’t taken much time or effort. I’d tried to tell Phil that, but he wouldn’t listen. He insisted on paying my fee as well as a gift of the countertops. What can you do but smile and accept graciously? He’d call again because his daughter was that way.

  I got some stuff from the refrigerator and made myself a sandwich: corned beef and Swiss on whole wheat with mustard. Half an onion, wrapped in foil, called my name, so I added two thin slices to the mix and ate over the sink. The last two bottles of Carta Blanca beer called my name also, but I pretended I didn’t hear. I had work to do.

  Glenda, the chocolate Labrador retriever I sometimes think of as a pet, padded into the kitchen and sat on her haunches, watching me eat. Glenda was mean and smelled bad. She reminded me of the girlfriend who gave her to me.

  “Here you go.” I flipped her the last quarter of the sandwich. She managed to eat it and growl at the same time. That reminded me of my ex-girlfriend too.

  I checked the messages on my machine. Nothing but a pre-recorded solicitation for vinyl siding and a secretary I’d had a date with two weeks ago who wondered why I never called back. I erased both and rifled through the mail again. I popped open one of the Carta Blancas, went into the living room and thumbed through the model railroad magazine. My eyes saw things but my brain refused to read so I tried to concentrate on the pretty pictures of locomotives and cabooses. After a while I gave up and stared at a stain on the Oriental rug on the floor.

  When the beer was empty, I looked at my watch and swore. It was time to go to the hospital. My breathing became labored, lungs fighting imaginary smoke. I shivered even though I wasn’t cold as the walls of the living room seemed to shimmer and sway, like reflections in a pool. I swore again and slung my empty bottle into the fireplace, where it broke. I felt tears well up in my eyes but managed to fight them back, sheer will power keeping a weak corral around an onslaught of emotions.

  Baylor Medical Center was on Gaston Avenue, not far from my house but closer to downtown and Deep Ellum, one of the more popular bar districts in town. Everything in my seedy little neighborhood is close together: home, work, hospital. A liquor store on every corner; everything a body could need. I wheeled into the parking lot and got out, the model railroad magazine cradled under my arm. The early afternoon sun made the asphalt seem like a sauna. I leaned against the truck and let the heat work the kinks out of me, trying to regulate my breathing. The Dallas skyline loomed ahead, a textured wall of stone and glass phalluses jutting from the black-land prairie.

  A crew of window washers were cleaning their way down the Adam’s Mark Hotel, their scrubbing actions barely visible from the distance. I smiled, remembering the stories my partner and mentor Ernie Ruibal used to tell me about his father working as a bouncer at the illegal casinos when it was called the Southland Hotel back in the 1930s. Benny Binion had been the undisputed king of the Dallas underworld at the time, running craps and blackjack and working girls out of the top floor, the Dallas establishment turning a blind eye to the activities since it was good for business and the upcoming 1936 Texas centennial celebration. When a zealous new sheriff and district attorney had finally closed him down for good, forcing Binion to run with his millions to Vegas, where he would soon become a legend, he had given Ernie’s father one of the two pearl-handled .45 automatics he carried as a gift for a special job. To this day, Ernie never knew what the job had been.

  A lump of emotion hit my throat. I shrugged it off and headed to the front door of the hospital.

  Ernie Ruibal was on the fifth floor. He’d been there for the last five days, ever since the cancer had gotten so bad that the pain medication they gave him didn’t work anymore. His wife had been so fearful that she’d called 911 and then me. I’d held one hand and she the other on the ride to the emergency room. I’d visited him every day since then, at the same time. When he was lucid, we talked about cases and people we’d known over the years: cops and crooks, hookers, grifters, gamblers, and other assorted lowlifes. When he’d gone to see Morpheus, I’d sit for an hour or two, flipping channels or reading a book. Sometimes his wife, Miranda, was there, or one of his sisters. Sometimes not. He and Miranda had two children, boys. One was dead, the other in prison.

  Ernie also had a heart condition that precluded the transfer to a hospice the doctors wanted. “To die with dignity, you understand, don’t you,” they said. I didn’t understand shit when I saw a fifty-six-year-old man, the closest thing I’d had to a real father, wasting away as his olive skin turned yellow and his hair fell out. Go to hell, Marcus Welby.

  The door to Ernie’s room was open and I walked in. Miranda stood up and kissed my cheek. “He’s awake, not too bad today. Why don’t you sit with him while I go get a cup of coffee.”

  I said okay and walked over to the one chair that would fit in the cramped room. The door shut on her way out. Ernie opened one eye and looked at me. “Is she gone?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Thank Jesus. That woman’s about to drive me to drink again.” Ernie had quit the booze when he was in his thirties. He’d gone to AA meetings five times a week ever since. Until he got liver cancer. Ernie liked to point out how funny it was, in a sick kind of way, the irony of a recovering drunk getting liver cancer.

  “What’s she doing now?” I said.

  He reached for
the tumbler of water on his nightstand and took a drink. “I told her that I wanted to be buried in my blue suit. That’s all I say, and she starts to cry.” The outfit in question was baby blue and had a golden wagon wheel embroidered on the back. That was just one of its many western themes. When Ernie wore it, he looked like a Mexican Porter Waggoner.

  “Here’s your magazine.” I decided to ignore the Miranda/burial suit situation.

  “Thanks. What’s up at the office? The roof leaking again with that rain?”

  “Yeah. Ferguson’s about to have a stroke.”

  “A stroke would do him good. That or a high colonic.” Ernie flipped a couple of pages in the magazine and then closed it. “We got any new business?”

  “It’s not much but we do have a new client.” I related the story of Vera Drinkwater and her missing little brother. Then I told him about the guy in the beige Camaro.

  Ernie scratched his scalp. “And you didn’t recognize him?”

  I shook my head. “He’s not in the business. He wouldn’t have followed that close or panicked.”

  My partner nodded. “Maybe just some whack job.”

  I shrugged but didn’t say anything.

  “But you coulda handled him, right, Hank? You got the best moves of anybody I’ve ever seen.” In his youth, Ernie had boxed some, Golden Gloves and then a few professional fights as a welterweight. He held up his hands in the way a boxer would, one forward, the other back, waiting to strike. The IV line in the back of one fist slid across the metal bed rail.

  I didn’t reply, suddenly overcome with a sadness I couldn’t put into words.

  “You remember that loan shark on Ledbetter Avenue, that time he—” He stopped abruptly and grimaced, eyes shut so hard his brow furrowed.

  I waited without speaking, almost without breathing, painfully aware of my impotence when it came to this. A metal and glass contraption sat next to the bed, connected to the patient by a thin IV and a push button. Pain medication a touch away. He held the button in his hand, thumb poised to go. Another grimace and a groan and his thumb wavered. The spell passed and he opened his eyes. “Cancer sucks, Hank.” His breath was ragged.

  I nodded but didn’t say anything.

  “I need a favor, I hate to ask.”

  I took his free hand, the one without the IV. “Whatever you need, Ernie. What are partners for?” Hate to ask? Since when?

  “My sister, Isabella, she’s been up here but you haven’t met her, have you?”

  I shook my head.

  “Her youngest girl is Nolan—”

  “Nolan?”

  “Yeah. Her father named her.” Ernie drank some more water. The tumbler was empty so I filled it again. “Nolan just moved here from San Antonio. She used to be a cop down there, but she’s not anymore. Got her license and does what we do, skip tracing, missing persons, industrial security, that sort of thing. Anyway, she’s here now and there’s a certain person who is going to be at a certain place tonight. She’s supposed to serve papers on him.”

  “What’s the favor?” Serving papers is to a private investigator what fixing a hangnail is to a heart surgeon.

  Ernie knew this and avoided eye contact. “I promised my sister that I would look after her kid, including her first … uh … assignment here.” Ernie sighed dramatically. “I told her someone would be there, tonight, when she serves this man’s papers.”

  I tried not to sigh. “All right. I’ll do it. Tell me where and when.”

  “If you can’t be there, I could always call Delmar or Olson.”

  “I said I’d do it. Tell me the particulars.” Delmar and Olson were two psychopathic gun dealers we used occasionally for heavy muscle work and backup. They referred to themselves as “arms merchants” and wouldn’t be caught dead serving papers. They’d wad the papers up and shove ’em down the guy’s throat, but they wouldn’t serve them.

  Ernie coughed and grabbed his stomach. “Enrico’s, on McKinney Avenue. Tonight at eight o’clock.”

  “How am I supposed to recognize … Nolan?”

  Ernie held the dope button, thumb resting on the switch. “Her name is Nolan O’Connor. Dad’s Irish. Irish-Mexican-Catholic, how’s that for a mix? You’ll know her. Always wears her hair in a pony tail.” Something started at his toes and worked its way upward, causing his body to ripple like a piece of garden hose snapped at one end. When it got to his midsection, he let out a yelp and pushed the button. A few seconds later tension, pain, and coherency started to drain out of his body. He managed a few more words. “D-d-don’t worry. Blue eyes. And pretty.” Then he was asleep. I put the magazine I’d brought on the bedside table, pulled the covers up, and slipped away.

  The sky was the color of hot brass and the air had started to shimmer just above the concrete of the parking lot. I felt the heat worm its way through the soles of my shoes. The temperature on the bank sign across the street read 98 degrees.

  Visiting Ernie was the same way every time: I struggled not to lose it before going in, then felt nothing when I left. I looked at my watch: two o’clock. I had six hours before babysitting Nolan O’Connor. It was time to head north and visit Callahan Real Estate and see what they could tell me about Charlie Wesson.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Dallas, the northern portion anyway, owed its appearance to several things. Chief among them was structural engineering and the ability to mold concrete into any design imaginable. Additional factors included a flat, stable terrain and creative mortgage lending. But that’s another story.

  I made my way up the Dallas North Tollway, the turnpike that split the northern sector of the city. It was before rush hour and the traffic moved well. Since a portion of the highway sat below ground level, you felt like you were in a concrete canyon, swimming in some river of internal combustion engines. Above the walls of the canyon came the jungle. Like the vegetation at a creek bank, the buildings closest to the tollway were bigger, sucking their nourishment from the torrent of cars that passed by every hour. Those farther from the stream of automobiles grew smaller, content to feed on the eddies and tributaries that are the side streets leading off the highway. Beyond those sprawled the dwellings, thousands and thousands of houses and apartments, homes for the workers who toiled in the tall buildings at the edge of the canyon. Nobody kept chickens in their yard up here.

  I drove ten miles per hour over the speed limit, in the right-hand lane, and was the slowest-moving vehicle. At my exit, a Mercedes swung past me and cut across my lane to make the off-ramp, desperate to save those four or five seconds that would have otherwise been lost. I slid in after him and exited on Belt Line Road, crossing over the tollway and heading west. Traffic flowed heavier here, six lanes between a strip of offices and shopping centers, each disgorging a torrent of cars at one end while taking in an equal number at the other.

  Callahan Real Estate Company officed on Lindbergh, a side street in an industrial park near Addison Airport. Addison sits on the far northwest side of Dallas, one of a handful of suburbs bordering the city there. Addison was the only area for miles around to serve liquor by the drink. Consequently it had more restaurants per square mile than any city in America. They were classy places, usually part of some corporate chain, with names like T. J. McFunFuns or Bobblers—A Place to Ogle Teenage Waitresses While You Wait for Your Buffalo Wings.

  Lindbergh ran into the airport on the west side, one block north of Belt Line. I turned right on Midway Road, then a quick left, and idled down the street. Nothing remarkable, just a strip of dingy, one- and two-story offices and warehouses masquerading as offices. 3912 Lindbergh was a squat, cinder-block building. Gray paint peeled off the sides. A red awning, weathered to the color of three-day-old hamburger, proclaimed this the location of “Callahan Real Estate, Your Full Service Property Company.” A thin strip of grass and a scrawny pear tree served as landscaping.

  I parked in front, next to a late-model Cadillac and an elderly Pontiac Sunbird. A new Mercedes, complete with gold wheels
and tinted windows, sat on the other side of the parking lot.

  A bell sounded when I pushed open the door and walked in. The front room was a small reception area with cheap carpet and cheaper wood paneling. The place smelled of coffee, cigarettes, and copier toner. Sofa and chairs left over from the last Howard Johnson’s redecoration clustered to the left; on the right was a receptionist desk.

  A woman in her early twenties, a panorama of cleavage, eye shadow, lip gloss, and that big hair that they only do in Texas, looked up from her romance novel and blew a plume of smoke my way. “Yeah?”

  “I’m here to see Mr. Callahan. About the office space, the one on Arapaho Road.”

  She took another hit on the smoke and squinted her eyes. She was marginally pretty, in a fourth-string Playboy Playmate kind of way, until she frowned. Then she was ugly. “What office space are you talking about?”

  “The one on Arapaho.”

  “We don’t have anything on Arapaho.” She pulled a sheet of paper out of the top drawer and studied it. I didn’t think she could squint any harder but she did. “Nope, nothing on Arapaho. We got, hmm, lessee … two thousand feet on Spring Valley.”

  I pulled a piece of paper out of my pocket and looked at it. “My mistake. You’re right, it’s two thousand and fifty feet on Spring Valley.”

  She smiled, apparently unused to being right about anything.

  “I need to see Mr. Callahan about that space. I’ve got a tenant for it.”

  “Mr. Callahan?”

  “Yes. I need to see Mr. Callahan.” I tried not to sound or look exasperated. “About the space on Spring Valley.”

  She squinted again and I could see the wheels turning underneath all that hair spray. “Mr. Callahan is … in a meeting.”

  I sighed elaborately and put my hands on my hips. “Look, I’ve got a tenant who needs two thousand square feet, and he needs it yesterday. We’ve got an appointment in an hour at another building. It’s a little farther away than he wants but the agent is willing to deal. Do I take my guy there or can I talk to Callahan?”