Duplicity Dogged the Dachshund

by Blaize Clement

  Feeling heavy and sad, I called the people who were extending their vacation and talked to their voice mail; nobody talks directly anymore, we communicate through machines. I said I’d got their message and not to worry about their Airedale. I made my voice strong and cheerful, because that’s part of my job, seeming on top of things. It’s like being a parent, even when you don’t know what the heck you’re doing, your job is to act like you do so the people depending on you won’t freak out.

  I stood up and unwound the towel and pulled on clean underwear. Michael was right. I did need new underwear. As I was stepping into clean shorts, the phone rang again. I let the answering machine click on while I pulled on a sleeveless T.

  A thin voice spoke. “Um—uh, Dixie? This is Priscilla.”

  I leaped to snag the phone and answered so loudly it scared her.

  She said, “Oooh! I didn’t think you were there.”

  “Priscilla, do you have something to tell me?”

  “Well—um, Pete talked to me, and Josephine too. And they think I should—”

  Her voice cracked, and I realized she was crying.

  “Are you at Josephine’s?”

  “I’m at home.”

  “Tell me where you live.”

  She gave me an address about a mile from Josephine’s, and I told her I’d be there in ten minutes. I laced up clean white Keds, dropped the gun in my pocket, and grabbed the door remote and my backpack. Outside the French doors, I lowered the shutters and looked over at the house. Michael had left the pool and was probably upstairs in the shower. Paco was probably asleep, resting up for his undercover night job. With my storm shutters closed, they might think I was still inside my apartment. I could nip over to Priscilla’s and be back before they even knew I was gone, thus sparing them the concern they might feel about me leaving.

  What a load of horse manure.

  The truth was that if I told them I was leaving to get the name of the person who had tried to kill me with a truck and a rattlesnake, they would hog-tie me and call Guidry. But I had promised Pete I would let Priscilla tell me personally. He had kept his promise and persuaded her to talk to me, and I would keep my promise and keep the police out of it.

  I didn’t exactly sneak away, but I went down the stairs as quickly and quietly as possible, and eased the Bronco out of the carport. It wasn’t yet time for my afternoon rounds, so nobody was at the end of the drive to tail me.

  Pete’s house turned out to be a moss-green stucco bungalow almost hidden by old trees and hibiscus. Built before central air-conditioning, the house had a couple of window units humming and dripping on the side by the detached one-car garage. The apartment above the garage looked as if it had been built at the same time as the house, not added on later. A wide picture window overlooked the driveway, the glass covered by white pleated drapes. As I parked in the driveway, the drapes separated just enough for somebody to peek out and then fell back in place. I got out of the Bronco and walked around the corner of the garage, noting neatly trimmed flower beds running along the perimeter of the house. Somebody had spent time encouraging shrimp plants and green and white caladium to flourish. I wondered if gardening was another of Pete’s skills.

  The stairway to Priscilla’s apartment was steep and narrow, with a wooden railing on the outside that seemed to have been recently stabilized and freshly painted. In the outside corner of the covered landing, an enormous staghorn fern in a moss-filled wire container hung from the ceiling. Priscilla opened the door before I knocked. She wore frayed cutoff jeans and a tiny ribbed T molded to her bony rib cage. Her pink hair was sleep-flattened on one side, and the bruises on her arms had turned a sickish blue. Her face was so ashen that her diamond nose stud and the gold rings rimming her ears seemed cruel impalings. She seemed agitated and flapped her hands to hurry me inside. As soon as she could, she slammed the door closed, turned a dead bolt, and slid a night latch closed.

  Her apartment was one big room, with a tiny kitchenette by the front window and two doors at the back that I assumed led to a closet and a bathroom. The baby was asleep in a wooden crib in the corner, her knees tucked under her tummy and her rump raised in the air. A single bed against the wall had firm bolsters on its long side to make it double as a sofa. In front of it, a dented military trunk sat as a coffee table. The lid was open, and Priscilla hurried to it and started digging into it like a spaniel after a buried bone, pulling out articles of clothing and throwing them in a black plastic garbage bag next to the trunk.

  She was obviously getting ready to run. Under any other circumstance I would have gone all mushy with regret and sympathy and concern. Now I just wanted the girl to get on with it and tell me what she knew.

  I leaned against the wall. “What is it you have to tell me, Priscilla?”

  In a strangled rush, she said, “I wasn’t sure it was him … I didn’t think he would do that … he’s not like that, not really … he’s good to the baby and lots of times he’s real sweet … but when Pete told me about the snakes, I knew it was him … he’ll kill me if he finds out I told!”

  She gave me a look so fearful and young and lost that I was undone. This was a child raising a child, trying to make a nest for herself and her baby in an uncertain world. Life couldn’t have treated her well or she wouldn’t be here alone, living precariously on the charity of other people.

  More gently, I said, “The person who drives that truck, is he your boyfriend?”

  She nodded, big-eyed, and began to cry.

  “The baby’s father?”

  More nods, more tears. She collapsed on the bed and buried her face in a tiny shirt—I supposed it was hers although it was almost small enough for the baby.

  I went over and sat beside her. “Why the snakes? Why did that convince you?”

  “That’s what he does. He catches them and sells them. Alligators too. That’s why he has those big tires, so he can drive in ditches and things. He grabs them with hooks and puts them in boxes in the back of his truck. Not the alligators. I think he has to shoot drugs in the alligators and then tie them up.”

  My heart did a little leap. “What kind of drugs?”

  “Something to keep them from fighting so they don’t get bruised or cut. If they’re perfect, he gets about fifty dollars a foot for the skin. Not so much if they’ve got marks. He uses a dart gun to shoot them.”

  “They don’t go to sleep?”

  “Gabe said they watch him until he kills them, so I guess not.”

  “His name is Gabe?”

  “Gabe Marks.”

  She raised her head and looked pleadingly at me, asking me for something I couldn’t give: to erase whatever had led to this moment, or at least to reassure her that she and her baby would be okay.

  The baby snuffled in her sleep, and Priscilla was instantly alert. I was beginning to see why Josephine and Pete were so protective. She was a combination of loopy child and sensitive, caring woman.

  “How in God’s name did you get mixed up with a man who traps venomous snakes and alligators for a living?”

  Priscilla went back to stuffing clothes in the plastic bag. “I went to work at All-Call and Mr. Brossi introduced us. I wanted to be a clown, but I couldn’t make any money at it.”

  “Gabe works at the call center too?”

  “No, he does other work for Mr. Brossi, I’m not sure what. See, Gabe used to get the golf balls out of the water at the golf course. Nobody else would do it because of the snakes in there, but Gabe liked it, and that’s where he met Mr. Brossi.”

  She held up a red knit sweater that I was almost sure was for the baby. “By the time it gets cold enough for her to wear this, it’ll be too little for her. Don’t you think?”

  “Probably.”

  She laid it on the floor next to the garbage bag. “Then I’m not taking it.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Pete’s taking us someplace. I don’t know where, but I have to get away from Gabe.”

&n
bsp; Seemed like a good idea to me.

  “Priscilla, about that call center—”

  “Oh, that’s an awful place, like a slave camp. They have these stupid rules about what you can wear, khaki pants or skirts with big ugly black knit shirts that are made for men but the women have to wear them too. Then they’ve got a blond bitch that sits on a tall stool and yells at you if you even speak to the person next to you. I hated that bitch so bad I used to have dreams about her. She had a basket by her stool for people to put presents in. If you gave her a present, you didn’t get yelled at.”

  She might have trouble speaking until she felt comfortable with you, but Priscilla was really good at it once she got going. She had got so heated up over the blond bitch, she’d stopped getting clothes out of the trunk.

  She said, “Mr. Ferrelli used to come there to see Mr. Brossi. Not the one that was killed, the one with the birthmark.”

  “Denton?”

  “Uh-hunh. He was the only one besides Mr. Brossi that went in this private room where some special people worked. They were up to something in there. Mr. Brossi and Mr. Ferrelli would go in there and then come out looking like the cat that chewed the canary.”

  “Swallowed the canary.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Who else was in there?”

  “I never knew their names, but there were five or six of them. They had keys to the door, and nobody knew who they were working for. The rest of us worked in groups, like everybody taking a company’s orders or its customer service calls were all in one group. They had big signs hanging over us with the names of the companies we worked for. But that locked room didn’t have any signs anywhere.”

  Priscilla replaced the rejected things in the trunk and closed the lid. “Everybody thought they were stealing IDs.”

  An electric jolt shot up my spine.

  Priscilla said, “People call in to order something, they give you their name and address and phone number. Then they give you their credit card number. Lots of times, if you ask them for their social security number, they’ll give that to you too. They don’t have to, but they don’t know that. Out on the regular floor, they watch you real close to make sure you don’t keep notes when you’re taking calls, but they record everything.”

  The transmitter Paco wore under his shirt was beginning to make sense. One call center processes thousands of calls a day. If crucial identifying information was being recorded and stored, a small group of protected thieves could use it to steal a staggering amount of money. And if Leo Brossi and Denton Ferrelli found out Paco was an undercover cop, they would kill him.

  “How long ago was this, Priscilla?”

  “I quit that place two months ago. That blond bitch yelled at me one time too many, and I left. That’s when Pete got me the job with Josephine. She doesn’t pay as much as All-Call, but she treats me like I’m a human being, not like a dog.”

  Most dogs get treated a lot better than most humans, but I let it pass.

  A car door slammed downstairs, and heavy footsteps pounded up the staircase. Priscilla froze, and I did too, both of us looking toward the door as if it might blow open from the force of the anger in the steps. A fist hammered on the door, and a man’s voice yelled, “I know you’re in there, cunt!”

  I didn’t know which one of us he meant, but nobody calls me that and gets away with it. In her crib by the door, the baby raised her head and began to cry. Priscilla ran on tiptoe to pick her up. She stood swaying back and forth with the baby against her thin chest, looking at me over the baby’s head with big frightened eyes.

  A key scraped in the lock, and I shot Priscilla an astonished glare. He has a key? She looked embarrassed, as if it had just struck her that locking the door against somebody with a key wasn’t a good way to keep him out. I sprang to my feet and pulled the gun from my pocket, holding it down and behind me. The doorknob turned and the door rammed forward, pulling the night latch from its mooring as if it were a hair.

  The man who stomped through the doorway was a lot younger than I’d expected, maybe not even twenty, with a body big and hard as a refrigerator, a near-shaved head, and beady blue eyes lit with the fevered determination of a shallow mind. The floppy stuffed toy dangling from one hand was an incongruous touch, like a flower tucked behind a rhino’s ear.

  “What the fuck, Priscilla? What’s this cunt doing here?”

  This time I knew for sure he meant me.

  Priscilla began to cry, curving over the baby like a turtle shell protecting its soft part.

  He pivoted toward her with one arm raised, and she cowered like a whipped dog.

  I yelled, “Don’t you touch her!”

  He whirled to glower at me. “Priscilla knows better than to argue with me. She’s going to go get in the truck and wait. And then you and me are gonna have a little talk, and I’ll show you what I do when cunts mess with my family.”

  Okay, that was two times I was certain he meant me.

  I raised my gun and took a shooter’s stance, feet spread, both arms straight out, the man’s chest in my sights.

  I said, “Priscilla isn’t going anywhere with you, and you’re leaving now. You’re going out that door and you’re getting in your big tall pickup and you’re driving away.”

  “Yeah? Who’s gonna make me?”

  I moved the barrel of the gun a little bit, aimed at the staghorn fern in its mossy basket on the landing behind him, and fired a round that whizzed past his left ear. The plant exploded and bits of plant and moss struck the back of his neck.

  I said, “That would be me.”

  21

  The cocky grin left Gabe’s face, and his little eyes darted right and left like a cornered rat.

  “Listen, cunt—”

  “Listen yourself, you muscle-bound Neanderthal. That’s the last time you’re calling me that.”

  I moved the gun to sight his head. Priscilla screamed, the baby screamed, and Gabe Marks threw the stuffed toy at Priscilla and ran down the stairs. As scream echoes bounced around the silent room, a car door slammed downstairs and an engine roared out of the driveway.

  Priscilla sobbed softly against the baby’s head. I backed up on wobbly legs and sat down on the bed. I laid the gun down beside me and put both hands on my thighs because there was a distinct possibility that I might fly apart, that my limbs might go shooting off like the thick fronds of the staghorn fern I’d shot. Adrenaline hit, and I began to shake.

  A stern voice in my head said, Would you really have killed him?

  The scary thing was that I didn’t know the answer. By some quirk of genetics, a particular coordination of eye, hand, timing, and instinctive skill, I am an excellent shot. At the Police Academy, I always won the top marksmanship awards. In any exercise with paper targets at a shooting range, I always laid all my bullets in the spots where I intended them to go: the middle of the forehead or the center of the heart. Everyone who has ever shot with me has been awed and amused by my skill with a gun. Awed because they can’t match it, and amused because I’m the least likely to ever actually kill anybody.

  If there’s anything I’m sure of, it’s that we pay one way or another for everything we do, that every action brings a reaction. The way I see it, this means that killing somebody on purpose is bound to bring really bad things into your life. And yet I had almost blown a man away.

  Not wholly because he was threatening Priscilla either, but because he’d called me a cunt.

  It was another unpleasant discovery about myself.

  Through the open door, we heard more footsteps coming up the stairs: light, quick steps. Pete appeared on the landing, taking in the demolished fern and the open door, his forehead creased with so much anxiety that his eyebrows were almost floating.

  “I met Gabe’s truck leaving. Are you okay?”

  For answer, Priscilla kept crying and I kept shaking.

  Pete said, “I had to go inside the bank, so it took longer.” He looked around the room. “Where’s y
our luggage ?”

  Priscilla sniffled and pointed to the black garbage sack. “I don’t have a suitcase.”

  He stooped to pick it up, twirled it to make a neck, and tied it. “We’ll pick up something on the way.”

  I said, “Where are you going?”

  “I’m taking Priscilla and the baby to the airport, where they’re taking a flight to see a lady I met several years ago at the Mooseberger Clown Camp. She’s a hospice clown too, and she’s got a spare room where Priscilla and the baby can stay for a while.”

  Priscilla said, “What about Josephine?”

  He shook his head impatiently. “I’ll explain to Josephine. If you’ve got pay coming, I’ll send it to you. Now come on, let’s get the hell out of here before Gabe comes back.”

  He seemed to notice the gun lying beside me for the first time. “Did you shoot at him?”

  Priscilla and I exchanged a quick furtive glance. I didn’t want Pete to know I’d fired a shot past Gabe’s head. Only a nut would do something like that.

  I grabbed the gun and shoved it in my pocket. “Pete, if I’d shot at him, he wouldn’t have been able to drive away.”

  He let out a relieved breath and motioned me up. “Come on, come on, let’s go!”

  We began to straggle out, Pete with the black garbage bag over his shoulder like a cheap Santa Claus and Priscilla close behind with the damp baby clasped to her meager bosom. At the door, she turned to scuttle back and scoop up the stuffed toy Gabe had thrown, then hurried out with a quick guilty look at me. I pulled the door closed and clumped down the stairs to the driveway, where Pete practically shoved Priscilla into a black Ford Taurus. He waved good-bye before he got in and started the engine. I waited until he backed out and then pulled out behind him.

  At the end of the street, where it connected to Midnight Pass Road, we turned in opposite directions, Pete toward the Sarasota airport, me toward home to explain to Michael and Paco where I’d disappeared and why.

  Like a bad conscience, my cell phone rang while I was rehearsing what I’d say. Expecting it to be Michael, I gulped and answered it without looking at the caller ID.