Something for Nothing

by David Anthony

  He made his way toward the back door, which opened into the laundry room, stopping every step or two to listen. No sound. He leaned down, found the spare key under the potted plant that was sitting by the door, and inserted it into the doorknob. Click. It unlocked. He opened the door and walked into the laundry room. It occurred to him that someone (Hano) might shoot him right there, right in the laundry room (“Walnut Station Man Gunned Down in Laundry Room by Prowler”). But nothing happened. And so he stood there for a minute, trying to decide how to proceed. (Move stealthily forward? Turn the light on and charge down the hall? Call out to Hano? . . . Taunt him?)

  Then he heard the phone ringing. Ring-ring. Ring-ring. It was the last thing he expected, and it threw him off his game plan.

  Ring-ring.

  He knew he should sit tight, not move, wait it out; it would stop ringing in a minute. But he couldn’t. He really needed to answer it. So without thinking—almost instinctively, really—he walked out of the laundry room and toward his bedroom, where there was a phone by his bedside. He didn’t hit the light switch, just walked forward, feeling his way in the familiar environment of his house (it immediately felt good to be in his own house).

  He sat down on the edge of the bed. Outside he could see light reflecting off the pool.

  Ring-ring.

  He reached out and picked up the phone.

  “Hello?” he said.

  There was a pause on the other end. He knew someone was there, but there was no response.

  “Hello?” he said again, more forcefully this time.

  “Martin?” a voice said. “Is this Martin? Martin Anderson?”

  Martin was quiet for a second, listening, thinking. He knew who it was, but he needed to think for just a second.

  “Yeah,” he said. “This is Martin. Who is this?”

  “Martin, it’s me, Derek. Derek Hano. Listen, I just got a call from someone up in the Bay Area. In Oakland. He said he was just watching the news, and he heard . . . he saw a story that said that Val is dead. That someone broke into his house and killed him and his wife. Have you heard about this?”

  Martin nodded, sitting there in the dark. Yes, he thought. I do know about that. But he was also thinking, suddenly, that this call meant that Hano wasn’t sitting in another part of his house, waiting for him. This was a relief.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I know. I mean, yeah, I heard about it. I’ve been getting calls all evening.”

  He heard Hano let out a big sigh. He sounded very upset.

  “Jesus Christ, Martin,” he said. “What the fuck? Do you know what this means? This is about Ramirez—you know, the job. The thing.” He paused for a second. “Fuck,” he said. “I can’t believe this. I can’t fucking believe this.”

  Martin didn’t say anything—didn’t know what to say, how to respond. The guy was a great fucking liar, that was for sure.

  “Where are you?” Martin asked.

  There was a pause—Martin could hear the line buzzing faintly. “I’m in fucking Santa Barbara,” Hano said. He sounded impatient. “At home. I’m at home. For now, at least. I just got back a few hours ago. Jesus. I can’t believe this. I wasn’t sure you’d be around—or if you were all right. You should get out of there, you know. I mean, if they came after Val, you never know. . . . Do you think anyone would connect you to Val? About the drugs, I mean?”

  Still holding onto the phone, Martin stood up. The cord connected to the receiver bobbed as he moved. He could see the faint outline of himself in a wall mirror that was to the left of the king-size bed. He stood in front of it and looked at his shadowy image—more like a silhouette—in the darkness of his room.

  “How did you get my number?” he asked.

  Another pause on Hano’s end.

  “How did I get your number?” Hano asked. “I called Directory Assistance. I picked up the phone, dialed four-one-one, and asked for your number. What do you think I did? Are you all right?”

  Martin was confused. What sort of game was Hano playing? Was this a subtle message that he wasn’t planning to kill Martin or his family—as long as he left town? Or just so long as he kept quiet? Or was this just the classic move of the guilty one being the first to come forward? Like toward the end of The Godfather, when Marlon Brando tells Michael to watch out for the double-cross. Martin had memorized the line—mostly after hearing Ludwig say it over and over in his rasping Marlon-Brando-as-the-Godfather voice.

  “Listen,” Don Corleone says to Michael, “whoever comes to you with this Barzini meeting, he’s the traitor. Don’t forget that.”

  “Hano, I need to go,” Martin said.

  “Okay, but wait,” Hano said. “Hold on. We need to talk, okay? How about if we meet up? I mean, shit, we’ve got a few things to work out—get our story straight. Also, Martin—I’m getting the fuck out of my house. Tonight—right now. And I think you should do the same. Get out of there, and get your fucking family out of there.”

  Martin nodded.

  “So is there a way I can reach you?” Hano asked. “I’m coming up there in a few days. Or I’m supposed to, anyway. Let’s meet up, and we can figure this out.”

  Martin looked at his shadow reflection, and then leaned over and hung up the phone. He could see all right in the dark now, but he still struggled to get the receiver in the cradle. It clattered before it settled into place.

  He stood up straight again, listening. Then the house was completely quiet. He wondered if the phone was going to begin ringing again. He hoped it wouldn’t. He waited, but nothing happened. He turned and looked back again at the mirror next to his bed. But he couldn’t really see anything—just a dim shape. Hardly a reflection at all.

  He looked out through the sliding glass door of the bedroom, out at the shimmering light on his pool. He felt a sudden urge to take off his clothes and take a swim. He felt dirty and tired. He knew he wasn’t going to do it (he was too tired, for one thing), but he thought that it would be just the thing. And as he stood there, considering the possibility, he thought that if he turned on the backyard lights and made some noise, splashed around, maybe shouted a little, the neighbors might think that the Andersons were finally getting into the swing of things, figuring out how to spend a summer evening in Walnut Station.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Martin fell asleep the second he put his head down on the cool plastic mattress of the bunk. No sheets, no sleeping bag, no nothing. He didn’t even have the energy to pull a pillow out from the drawer underneath the bottom bunk. When he woke up the sun was streaming in through the two little portal windows of the boat’s V-shaped bedroom. The curtains were drawn, but the sun was insistent: Wake up, get out of bed. He looked at his watch. It was 6:20, maybe 6:21. Late for the marina.

  He lay there on his bunk and tried to sort things out. I’m in my boat, in Jack London Square Marina. Linda and the kids are at Sharon’s house, in Oakland. Val and Angela are dead—someone killed them. Probably Hano. Yesterday I went to Val’s house, saw what happened, then found Val’s money. I counted it, buried it, and then went to my house. Then Hano fucking called me, claimed he didn’t know what was going on, that he was worried, scared, and the rest of it. Now I’m here.

  Martin sat up, rubbed his eyes, stretched, yawned. Sometimes—like today—he noticed himself doing these waking-up things and felt silly, as if he’d been taught at some point how to properly rouse himself from a resting state, and now did it mindlessly, thinking it was natural.

  Hano. In some respects, the phone call had seemed genuine. “You should get out of there.” That wasn’t the sort of thing someone said when they were trying to hunt you down and kill you. But wasn’t that just the posture he was assuming in order to convince Martin that he hadn’t committed the murders? That he was freaked out, didn’t know who’d done it?

  But was that really Hano’s goal? No, what he really wanted was the money, and maybe he was thinking that the best way to get to Martin was to put him at ease, make him think they wer
e on the same side. Us versus Ramirez. Ramirez and the rest of those jerk-off drug guys. Jesus. They’re fucking crazy, Martin. Tell me what’s going on—where the money is—and we can figure this out together. Two is better than one, right? Let’s meet up. We can figure this out. That was the sort of thing someone said when he was trying to pull a double cross, wasn’t it?

  Martin groaned, stumbled into the bathroom, sat down to pee (yes, a recent habit, especially in the morning, one he’d been hiding from Linda). He cleaned himself up a little bit. He had to hunt around to find toothpaste, but he eventually found a mostly squeezed-out tube of Crest, brushed, then washed his face. He needed to shave, but he didn’t have a razor . . . or shaving cream. His toupee looked crazy, so he peeled it off his head. Ouch. But it felt better, less itchy. Okay, he thought, I’m bald, and today I don’t really care (though he knew he needed a trim to clean up the ring of hair that was left. He was starting to look like Ben Franklin on a hundred-dollar bill).

  He flicked on the TV, but the news wasn’t on, just some exercise thing with Jack LaLanne. Jesus, he thought, look at that clown, with his tight clothes, prancing around. Sure, he was strong, but come on.

  He needed to call the police. He needed to act like he’d just heard, and was horrified—not to mention worried about his horse (and it was true: who was taking care of him now?). But he was nervous about talking to anyone connected with the police. Would he reveal, somehow, that he knew more than he was letting on? He’d have to get into the mindset of someone who’d just heard that his friends had been murdered, and forget that he’d actually been there, seen the bodies (and stolen the money).

  Even if he didn’t call, the police were going to come around at some point, probably with a bunch of questions about him and Val. It would be much better to seem forthright and act like a guy with nothing to hide. But would they know anything about Val’s connection to the whole drug thing in Mexico? Hard to say . . . though a chopped-off finger and a ransacked house (a swanky house) were probably giveaways, especially to the discerning eye of a narcotics detective.

  Martin thought about Jim Slater. Of course, Slater’s investigation into the plane that went down in Humboldt County was unrelated, but how long would it be before he put two and two together? He could just hear it, Slater going through the paperwork and talking to his partner, or some other detective sitting at the desk next to him: “Hey, wait a second—it says here that Val Desmond was the horse trainer for that Martin Anderson guy. You know, the one I talked to out in Walnut Station. The airplane guy. He sold the plane to the guys who went down up in Humboldt Country, and then I flew around with him, looking for that landing strip in Livermore. That’s quite a coincidence, don’t you think? I think we need to do some digging.”

  Really, though, how much was there to find, regardless of how much digging Slater did? That was the question. Martin’s trips to Mexico were pretty much invisible. Sure, he’d logged out of the Hayward Airport, but he’d listed Reno as the location—a day at the casinos. And they never checked you out up there. Too many people coming and going. It was like parking your car; there was no way to know if you’d actually been there or not. As for Santa Barbara, he’d used fake information there, and he hadn’t talked face-to-face with anyone. The guy on the radio had just asked for the serial number on his plane, and Martin had given him a fake one. It was like he’d never been there. Sure, if someone had taken pictures of him there with Hano, he’d have some explaining to do. But that wasn’t going to happen, because this wasn’t some sort of movie where the police were really fucking smart and two steps ahead of the the bad guys. No, here the bad guy (Martin) was going to disappear into the ether, because with Val dead, there just weren’t any strings attached to who he was or what he’d done. At least for the police—Hano was a different story.

  He’d call the police after breakfast. He needed to wake up, get some coffee, eat. He was starving. He thought about calling Linda, but he knew it was too early. Had she heard about Val and Angela yet? It was possible. Would she think he was involved? Unlikely. But she’d have a vague feeling that there were links. She wouldn’t be able to see these links, of course, but she was likely to suspect something. It would be an intuition, one that set off little internal alarm bells. And her radar would be especially sensitive after having found Miriam’s jewelry box (though Martin again congratulated himself on his fantastic cover story about that). She just wouldn’t know what it was she suspected.

  He hopped into his car and drove over to Nelda’s in Hayward. Yes, this was going against his pledge to himself to stay in the boat, no exceptions, for forty-eight hours. But enough with the roughing it on canned food—was he supposed to have SpaghettiO’s for breakfast? Plus, Hano wasn’t going to be able to trace him to Nelda’s. He listened to the radio as he drove—KCBS. Nothing about Val and Angela.

  Nelda’s was quiet. It was always dead early on the weekends. He didn’t recognize anyone, except one or two of the employees and a couple of older Mexican guys who were always at the same booth in the corner. He downed some coffee, and then had two fried eggs, sunny-side up, a big slice of ham, hash browns, and toast. He was really hungry, and he wolfed his food down; he thought he saw his waitress (blue hair, grumpy) give him a disapproving look at one point. There wasn’t anything about the murders in the Saturday Tribune or Chronicle. That figured; the weekend papers were mostly prepped in advance, and didn’t really try to keep up with the news. Sure, if somebody had popped Ronald Reagan, for example, or captured Patty Hearst, they’d stop the presses and get it in there (especially at the Chronicle, which was the morning version of the Examiner). But no one held up production of a newspaper for some random horse trainer out in Pleasanton.

  After breakfast he went back to the marina, walked around. It was a nice day, but Martin didn’t have plans to take the boat out. Not a chance. He walked along the docks, looking at boats, watching the seagulls and checking out the schools of fish darting around in the gray-green water. He saw lots of other guys who reminded him of himself. Late forties, into their fifties. Maybe early sixties. Hanging out, either avoiding the wife and family or out-and-out divorced. Everyone looked happy enough, but people also kept to themselves—quick hellos: how are you, how’s it going. No chats, no effort to connect. It was an unwritten rule, one Martin had always followed.

  Okay, he thought. Time to make the calls. He walked up to the pay phone, put in a couple of quarters, and dialed Sharon’s number. They were still there—hadn’t left yet for Santa Cruz.

  “Help your brother find his trunks, Sarah!” Linda yelled before she even said hello.

  He told her about Val. He said he’d just heard it on the news, and then listened to her freak out. It was the first time he’d talked about it with anyone (unless you counted Hano’s phone call), and it was both good and bad. Good because he could actually say the words: someone had killed Val and Angela. But bad in that her reaction was so straightforward and honest. It had the effect of cutting through the layer of protective emotional covering that Martin had immediately applied to his memory of the scene.

  “What?” she said. Screeched. “Someone what? Are you sure? How horrible! This is awful! Oh my God! Martin! I can’t . . . I can’t believe it! Poor Val—and oh my God! Angela!”

  They talked for a long time, with Martin feeding quarters into the marina phone over and over. Eventually Linda got around to asking if he was all right, but by then the answer was no. Her horror had gotten through to him, and made him realize how badly things had gone. He pictured Val sitting there in his barn, the blank expression on his face, the flies buzzing around him, landing on his belly. The image of Angela was just as bad. Worse. Martin was pretty sure that she hadn’t known the first thing about Val’s drug-world deals. So she wouldn’t have had the faintest idea what was going on. At least Val had known why he was going to die. Angela had just seen a guy with a gun marching toward her, run, and then felt the bullets tear into her. Jesus. Thank God her head had
been turned away, and he hadn’t seen her face. He was pretty sure she’d have a surprised expression—surprised and terrified.

  Eventually—finally—they ended the call, and Martin hung up. He needed to pee, then he’d call the police station. He headed back to the boat and flicked on the radio. Just the general blathering you got on KCBS, but as he was coming out of the bathroom he finally heard a spot about the murders.

  “In the East Bay, police are searching for clues to the murder of a Pleasanton couple that was slain in their hillside home early Friday morning. Horse trainer Val Desmond and his wife Angela were found dead of gunshot wounds Friday morning. Police are not yet speculating as to a motive. Desmond was the trainer for several horses that had been racing at the Pleasanton County Fair in the days leading up to the murders. Anyone with information is asked to please contact the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department.”

  It felt strange hearing an official description of what he’d already seen. It also felt strange knowing how much they were leaving out (or—maybe—how much they didn’t know). But the mention of the horse races at the fair sent a shock wave of fear through his body. The guy may as well have said, “By the way, he was hanging around with Martin Anderson all day—and if you don’t believe me, check out the photo they took together in the winner’s circle. They’re right next to each other!”

  He headed back out of the cabin, and walk-ran up the dock to the manager’s office. He took out a five, got some change, and hustled over to the phone again. He dialed o for the operator, and waited while she connected him to the sheriff’s department.