by Leo W. Banks
I asked if the driver was alone. She said there was something black next to him, maybe a passenger, maybe a jacket on the hook between the seats.
“If it was a man, he was teeny tiny,” she said.
“Look, I’m keeping the hand. We’re not saying anything to the cops about the hand.”
“You don’t need cops. I keep telling you.”
“I can’t leave that guy lying dead on the mountain.”
“Ever heard of coyotes, Mr. Whip? Like, excuse me? Two days and he never existed.”
“I’ve got enough trouble sleeping.”
“You’re such a saintly guy, a saint of the church. Like, seriously.”
“That’s me. A saint with a severed hand in his freezer. Remember, nothing about the hand. A strange truck came through, and we followed it up the mountain. That’s it.”
“Easy peasy.” Opal flipped her wrist like it was a cinch. “I lie to white people all the time.”
We bumped along the trail. The Bronco had no roof. It blew off a while back, and I hadn’t gotten around to replacing it. My jaw felt like a block of granite that someone pounded with a jack-hammer every five seconds.
Double Wide sat in dim light at the bottom of the mountain. There wasn’t much to the place, seven trailers along both sides of a dirt road lined with white-painted rocks. Those rocks had been my first community-improvement project.
After that I dug a hole outside the Airstream and installed a forty-foot flagpole with the American flag at the top. Cashmere Miller, one of my tenants, a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, put up his own pole flying the marine corps flag.
I have a windmill to pump water, a corral with no horses, and out on the county road, next to the steer skulls hanging on the barbwire fence, I stood up a cardboard sign painted in red: Welcome to Double Wide, Arizona, Population Six.
As I pulled up outside the Airstream, I had my cell stuck to my ear talking to the 911 dispatcher. The sheriff would need forty minutes to drive over the mountain. I went inside, and Opal came with me.
My other black Lab, Chico, was lying on his side under my kitchen table. He didn’t get up when he saw me but gave the floor a good hammering with his tail.
I filled his food bowl. He rolled upright and ate with the bowl between his paws, the tail sweeping the floor as he chewed. Without asking, Opal handed me a glass of milk, and I stepped outside again and sat at my midnight table to do some thinking.
What were you into, Rolando? Last I heard, the rehab had worked, and you were living happily in Mexico. How’d you wind up dismembered in a part of the world owned by drug smugglers?
There’s lots of terrain between using and smuggling, and I couldn’t believe he’d crossed that line. Something else had brought him to Paradise Mountain.
After a while, Opal came outside and handed me a rolled-up washcloth. “You need to ice up that jaw.”
“I can get my own ice.”
“Yeah, but you won’t. You’ll just sit there and take it.”
“Good night, Opal.”
“You’re trying to get rid of me, aren’t you?”
“Absolutely.”
“I have stuff to do too, you know. I’m gonna make my noodles and watch TV.”
Her trailer was directly across from mine. I watched her go.
Sitting there, I wondered if keeping Rolando’s hand was a mistake. But I couldn’t stand to see it stashed in some police freezer in downtown Tucson. At least behind the Airstream, he was with me. It might not be home, but it was as close as he was ever going to get again.
Almost 9:00 p.m. and the drizzle had stopped. Nothing fell on Double Wide now but starlight. I sipped my milk and waited to see the cop headlights streaming over the pass.
FOUR
I’d never been around a homicide detective. But I grew up reading crime novels and had an idea what to expect. It turned out those books hadn’t made me as smart as I thought.
Benny Diaz from the Pima County Sheriff’s Department didn’t fit the picture at all. He lacked the hard edge, the mean, suspicious eyes. He was young and earnest and didn’t know that he was supposed to be an exhausted bellyacher in sweaty clothes.
Diaz had a pleasing face and short black hair trimmed to perfection. He wore a white short-sleeved pullover shirt. His black slacks were beautifully pressed, his service weapon hooked to his belt. He wore brown shoes with tassels.
I’d seen men wearing tassel shoes before, and all of them sat in baseball offices nursing pulled muscles from moving piles of paper.
He was fit but not athletic, with a gym rat’s body. His arms swelled inside his shirt sleeves, the veins bulging down to his wrists. That told me he had time on his hands and was unmarried. He was somewhere around thirty and probably hadn’t worked more than two or three homicides.
He introduced himself at the Airstream before driving up the mountain to look over the crime scene, and when he came back ready to talk, I was sitting outside smoking a cigar. By then, cop cars were streaming up the mountain.
Diaz said, “I checked your name before coming out here. Prospero Stark. You’re Whip Stark, right?”
“That’s right.”
“I read about that unbelievable game you pitched at Hi Corbett. That was some performance.”
Hi Corbett was Hi Corbett Field in Tucson, home of the AAA Tucson Thunder. When I pitched for the Thunder, the whole baseball world knew me. Cover of this, cover of that, ESPN. That’s where “Whip” came from. A sportswriter gave me the nickname on the idea that I threw the ball so hard that hitters got whiplash trying to follow it.
On the night in question, I struck out twenty, still the record for that ballpark.
Diaz sat opposite me. He leaned forward with his arms on his thighs and gave me his working smile. “I checked your stats. You rewrote the Pacific Coast League record book.”
“I call it the family album. Those records still stand.”
“You were a lock to become a big league superstar. They called you the Phenom.”
“They called me a lot of things, Detective.”
“If you don’t mind my asking, whatever happened to you?”
I got that question at least three times a week and had perfected my answer to a single word. “Shoulder,” I said with finality, eliminating the need for further inquiry. I waved my cigar at the trailers of Double Wide. “I’m a landlord now. As you can see, things turned out fine.”
He didn’t know what to say to that and nodded absently. A breeze blew down Main Street. It carried the animal smell of the desert after a rain.
Diaz said, “Now, the name Prospero, that comes from Shakespeare, correct? The Tempest was his last play.”
“A homicide detective who reads. I’m impressed.”
“I know that because of your father, Mr. Stark.”
“Everybody calls me Whip. You know Sam?”
“I took his Shakespeare class at Arizona State. Best class I ever had. I was dismayed to read about his current trouble and very sorry.”
Dismayed? Did I call the cops or the country club? “Nice of you, thanks. But I had all the Shakespeare I could handle growing up.”
“You’re not a fan?”
“My taste ran to the hard-boiled stuff. Cain, Cornell Woolrich, Jim Thompson.”
“I’ll bet that didn’t sit well with Professor Sam.”
“Did you know he kept a bottle of Glenlivet in his desk at school?” I was happy talking about Sam and Shakespeare as long as he wanted. I figured he’d used the drive over the mountain to work out how he wanted to play this and he’d get around to business in time.
I sipped my milk and continued. “My father delivered drunken soliloquies from the podium and came home to deliver drunken soliloquies from the dinner table. When I couldn’t take it anymore, I went to my room to read about men murdering each other with belly guns.”
“You enjoyed that?”
I puffed my cigar and blew. “Helped me sleep.”
“Well, detective stories are still
quite popular.”
“They move, and they have endings. Nobody comes to terms with anything.”
After a pause, and a glance to make sure the sky was still there, he said, “It’s so unusual, isn’t it?”
I motioned with the cigar for him to go on.
Diaz said, “The son of a renowned literary scholar prefers action-packed stories to Shakespeare and goes on to succeed in a physical profession like baseball.”
“Fathers and sons. I’m still his biggest supporter.”
“Blood loyalty. I’d expect that.” He shifted in his chair and fussed through several expressions meant to convey heavy thought. Finally: “Like it or not, my profession makes a thinker out of me, Whip.”
“Sounds exhausting.”
Diaz tapped his temple. “I make connections between things. I’ll give you an example. A heroin-addicted professor named Sam Houston Stark allegedly carves up his prostitute, and I’m sent out to investigate a murder near a major cross border heroin trail, below which lives the very same professor’s son. Who himself did time in Mexico for cocaine possession.”
That did it for chitchat. Diaz had officially arrived at work. We stared at each other for a moment.
“My father didn’t carve up anybody. He’s innocent, and the trial will show that. As for the Mexico trouble, I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”
Diaz gave me his sympathetic face. “You understand my position, Whip. I’ve got to throw everything into the soup.”
“Don’t go too wide, Detective. You have a body on a smuggling trail, two eyes in the back of his head. It’s a drug hit.”
“You’re sure about that?”
“Every night the gang that owns this trail runs loads through here. I thought it was marijuana, you say heroin. Okay, they’ve expanded operations. But it’s every night.”
“You don’t call the law?”
“Out here, civic pride can get you killed.”
“You understand we rely on the public’s participation.”
Those words gave me a chill. I think he believed them. “Let me tell you the rules of living on a smuggling trail. Never touch the loads. That’s number one. Number two, let the narcos do their business, and you do yours and hope the two don’t meet. That means losing your peripheral vision. See only what you need to see. Lose your telephone, too, because you’re on your own.”
“But you called us anyway?”
I pointed at the mountain, now shining with police lights. “That fellow up there, he needed a wagon to come pick him up. Everybody deserves that much at the end.”
Diaz sat watching me with a figuring expression. “I don’t get it. You were a star athlete, a really big name. You must’ve made a few million bucks in your career, but you live in the middle of nowhere on a drug trail twenty-five miles from the Mexican border?”
“I like the views.”
“With tenants of questionable character.”
That didn’t sit well, but I let it go. Diaz fetched a pair of black glasses from the pocket of his slacks and put them on. They angled off the tip of his nose. From the same pocket, he retrieved a notebook and flipped it open to the page he wanted. He said, “There’s a fellow here I’d like to speak to. Charles Hearn O’Shea.”
“Yeah, Charlie.” I motioned to the trailer sitting across the southern end of Main Street. It was held up by stacked cinder blocks at the four corners, but the top block underneath one corner had shattered, likely in the storm winds. “What do you want with Charlie?”
“Earlier today, we got a call about a knife attack at Woody’s Lounge on South Sixth Avenue.”
“Charlie left here a few days ago on vacation. That’s what he calls it when he goes to town and drinks for a week. He’s a housepainter.”
“He witnessed the attack, and deputies talked to him at the scene. But he disappeared before we could do a follow-up.” Diaz studied his notebook and peered at me over his glasses. “How about Cashmere Miller? Where can I find Mr. Miller?”
“Cash has put his life back together, I can attest to that. He’s a veteran.” After Iraq and Afghanistan, Cash went to work for his brother, who happened to run a truck-theft ring. When the cops moved in, Cash sang about everyone but his brother and got probation.
“I’ll need to have a word with him,” Diaz said.
“Look, I’ve got five tenants, and none of them are involved in the trade. If they were, I’d run them off. I hate drugs and everybody involved in drugs and won’t tolerate it here. I make that clear the first day.”
“It’s routine. I assure you.”
“Looks to me like you’re harassing my people for no reason.” I took a last puff of my cigar and threw it away.
Diaz held the notebook between his knees and watched me with cool eyes. I understood his position. The chief of detectives sent him out to investigate a body on a remote mountain trail with no expectation that he’d find a thing. They rarely do.
In the viciousness of the drug war, the desert sprouts bodies like beer cans, and there’s nothing to go on. Death by gun-shot, perp gone, no murder weapon, no decent forensics, motive unclear. Close the drawer and move on to the next one.
But Benny Diaz wasn’t the type to walk away. He was going to look under every bed, and I might even help him if it got me closer to finding out what happened to Rolando. I just needed to make sure he stayed away from that freezer.
When Diaz got around to the body on the trail, I gave him the sanitized story, and he walked over to Opal’s trailer. Hers was the biggest of the seven, four bedrooms with a lime green exterior except where side panels had fallen off, leaving rectangles of black tar paper.
There were no steps to get inside, and Diaz might’ve stood five foot seven on the Phoenix phone book. Opal’s front stoop came to his belt buckle. She kept an upturned paint bucket on the ground below the door.
Diaz studied his predicament, planted a tasseled shoe on the bucket, and reached forward with backward-turned hands to grab the jamb on both sides and pull himself inside.
FIVE
I dug through a drawer to get a phone number for Rolando’s family. Finding it was the second worst part of my day. Now I had to call and say whatever I was going to say.
How do you tell parents you have their kid’s hand in your freezer? And do you tell them? I didn’t know where the rest of him was and that was the first question they’d ask. The next question was how did I happen to possess the hand?
Well, you see, someone in a red truck put it in a shoe box and left it on my steps, but that person got bushwhacked on a drug trail.
What do the police say? They don’t know about Rolando or the hand in my freezer because I didn’t tell them.
The answers got worse the further along I went.
I had met Rolando’s parents once before, back when we were making our way through the minor leagues together. They came to watch us play in Vegas, against the Las Vegas Stars. His dad, Oscar, owned a cattle ranch, and his mom, Natty, looked after the brothers and sisters.
We gave them a tour of the locker room, they watched us play, and afterward we had dinner and showed them the town. They were great people, delighted to be part of their son’s world. It was one of those nights you don’t forget.
I killed the remaining hours before midnight with my cell in hand, but my muscles weren’t cooperating with punching in the number.
Why not wait until morning? The police were still on the mountain, and maybe they’d come back with information to fill out the story. They might even find Rolando’s body.
I settled into bed around 1:00 a.m. and fought the mattress until dawn, when I got up and let Chico out. I waited to make sure he got down the steps all right. Chico had three working legs. He came back from the desert one day with a bullet in his left hind leg, leaving it a useless husk dangling off his hip.
When he was safely outside, I went back and sat on the edge of my bed. Waiting wasn’t going to make talking to the Molinas any easier. I pun
ched in the number and felt relieved when their zombie message kicked on. I left an urgent request for a call back.
After showering and dressing, I got busy cooking breakfast. I’d recently finished a complete renovation of the Airstream that included a new three-burner stove that cooked as well as any house stove.
I was using a fork to wrangle the bacon in the pan when the door opened and Opal walked in. No knock. She’d just rolled out of bed and looked like it in loose-fitting black paisley-print pajamas. She shouldered past me. “Scooch. I need OJ.”
“I hope I’m not in your way.”
She yawned and scratched her head. “No, you’re fine.”
She poured herself a glass and sat at the kitchen table. It was to the right of the door as you entered and hugged the rounded back window. A three-section bench seated five, as long as everyone kept their elbows close, and folded out into a bed if necessary.
I’d rigged a small TV to the ceiling above the table. Opal sipped her juice and watched CNN. I asked what she was doing up so early.
“I need to get to town to work. Can I hitch with you? I’m, like, totally out of money.”
“After I get a call. How’d it go with Diaz?”
“I didn’t think he’d be so handsome.”
“The truck, Opal. Did he press you about the truck?”
“Not too bad. I told him like we said.”
A few minutes later, Chico came back and settled under the kitchen table, his favorite place since the shooting. Cashmere Miller wasn’t far behind.
“I got back late last night, missed the excitement,” Cash said. “Big transmission job.”
“They killed a guy,” Opal said, without taking her eyes off the TV.
“All them lights, man, I thought the mountain was on fire,” Cash said.
He was pale and thin with a long neck, narrow sloping shoulders, wide-stepping feet, and spindly legs. He had a runway for a forehead and curly-wire hair that topped his head like a broccoli crown. He wore a blue flannel shirt with the sleeves torn off, leaving long threads dangling against the dagger tattoos along both biceps.
He poured himself coffee and sat opposite Opal, cupping his mug with grease-stained hands. “Do we know who it was, the dead guy?”