Double Wide

by Leo W. Banks

“That’s what I do at night—drink wine and Google men.” She raised a finger to add an activity: “And play SongPop with my nieces.”

  “I never snorted cocaine, okay.”

  “The newspaper in Mazatlán sure made it sound like you did.”

  “That was all Rolando. He couldn’t stay away from the stuff. We shared a beach house, and when the cops found his equipment bag stuffed with coke, they grabbed me, too. That’s how it works in Mexico. I was a name-brand American they could shake down for a lot of money. They got a suitcase full.”

  “Wait, did you just say you never did cocaine? Seriously?”

  “That’s your takeaway?”

  Roxy sipped her vodka and swallowed like it hurt. “I don’t understand people like you. There’s white powder on the table in front of you, you snort it. What’s complicated about that?”

  “I like to keep my head. That’s how I’m made.”

  Tommy came over to see about another round.

  Roxy said, “Tommy, if there’s white powder in front of you, what do you do?”

  “Easy. Wipe the bar down and grab the tip.”

  “I’m drinking with the Pope and his accountant.” Roxy shook her head. “I knew this day would come.”

  Two guys came in to play pool. They looked like bums just off the train, which meant they were probably professors. I asked Roxy what she had for me.

  “After your promo I got a call at the station. It was a woman, really panicked—said she had information about Paradise Mountain.”

  That got my attention.

  Roxy said, “She talked fast, and there was this music pounding in the background.”

  “Like a party?”

  “Could be. Boom, boom, boom, you know. It wasn’t a funeral.”

  “Name?”

  “Didn’t say. With the noise and the way she was talking, it was hard to get anything straight. But she identified the dead man on the mountain. Carlos Alvarez. He has a criminal record.”

  Pool balls clicked. Roxy sipped her vodka and wiggled the shot glass at Tommy. He jumped to her unspoken command.

  When her drink came, she said, “The way she talked about Alvarez, it sounded like they knew each other real well. Husband, boyfriend, something close. She was hysterical about him getting shot, and she mentioned you.”

  One of the pool players bent over the table to make a shot, loudly calling the eight ball. He missed, which I enjoyed. I asked what the tipster had said.

  “Something like, ‘I need to talk to Stark! The professor says talk to Stark!’”

  “Professor? What professor?”

  ‘Beats me. Something about a melody too.”

  “Melody meaning a song?” I asked.

  “Could be. She was raving about Arty’s melody. She kept saying the professor told her to talk to you.”

  The Note’s front door swung open, throwing a shaft of street light into the bar. It made shadows of three college girls. Looking wrung out and sweaty, they stagger-stepped to the bar in flip-flops. One of them called out, “Tommy!” and pounded on the top of the bar like she was playing bongos.

  Another leaned forward on her elbows and said, “Hurry, Tommy! We need libations! Multiple libations!”

  Most students leave town for the summer. The ones who stay spend the days sleeping and nights drinking. After a while they get to know bartenders’ names and use them a lot because they think it’s what real drinkers do.

  Tommy glanced at the girls and went back to cutting limes. He took his time. He dried his hands on a towel, folded it, edges perfect, sighed heavily, and moved toward the girls like he was going to war and might not come back.

  “Nice to see you ladies again,” he said. “Name your poison and I’ll provide it anon.”

  Roxy grinned at the exchange and sipped her drink. “With this caller, Whip, I know it’s frustrating, but that was all I got out of her. Either she passed out from hysteria, or the signal tanked, I don’t know. Ooops, my butt’s calling.”

  She jumped off her stool, pulled her phone from her back pocket and looked.

  “Really, people? Another bod?” she said. “We’re getting them every night now. What a town. Finding a corpse these days is like picking up a penny on the sidewalk and thinking it’s your lucky day.”

  She fingered more text onto the screen. “Well, this helps. Throat slashed, blood all over her blond wig. That’s a nice twist. I can lead with that.”

  “Did you say blond wig?” I thought of the woman tailing me in the white SUV.

  “Want to come along?”

  “I sure do.”

  “See, we have something in common, Phenom. You like it when everything goes wrong.”

  “I’ve had enough wrong to last a long time.”

  “There’s always room for more. Come on. I’ll drive.”

  Roxy drained the last of her drink with a fast snap of her head. I figured her neck muscles were well accustomed to the task.

  Night had fallen over the silent city. The temperature had gone from blazing hot to merely warm, and somehow it felt worse. Roxy drove a black Audi convertible. Had to be a $65,000 ride. She put the top down. I drove all the time with the top down on my Bronco, but that was because it didn’t have one. I was working on that.

  Roxy drove fast, the wind spraying her hair. She treated red lights as an affront aimed especially at her. She gunned the engine several times, and when the light flipped to green, she squealed off the line, leaving the fellow in the next lane to eat her exhaust. That made her smile.

  When we got onto Kino Parkway heading south, she shouted across the seat: “I haven’t told Detective Diaz about Alvarez yet.”

  I said nothing.

  Roxy said, “I wanted you to be the first to know.”

  “Diaz knows by now.”

  “Still, I should give the man a call. Let him know I’m thinking about him.”

  “You’re thinking about putting another source in your pocket.”

  She smiled grandly at the windshield. “Isn’t journalism an icky little game?”

  The airport is on the far south side. The ride from the Blue Note is long, over mostly undeveloped land in a lousy part of town. There’s not much traffic, not much street lighting, few businesses, no pedestrians, and no indication that actually people live in the sporadic clusters of earth-colored frame and stucco homes set out in the desert.

  The only signs of life were a couple of dangerous drive-up motels with busted neon signs and skeleton dogs darting across our headlights.

  TWENTY-TWO

  The last half mile of Tucson Boulevard near the airport is lined with hotels and pay parking lots. Police lights blinked at the end of the street. They made a colorful halo in the sky east of the boulevard and the terminals.

  Roxy followed a network of side roads to the scene, using the cop lights as a guide. She began to sing. Not a bad voice. She kept singing and motioned to me as though I should recognize the lyrics.

  “It’s from that song,” she said. “‘Unchained Melody.’”

  “The Righteous Brothers, right? What about them?”

  “The caller talked about Arty’s melody, and now I’ve got ‘Unchained Melody’ stuck in my head. But I don’t think she was talking about a song.”

  “What about art? Put the two together. ‘Arty Melody.’ Was she talking about an art professor?”

  “Let me look.” With one eye on the road, Roxy punched at her phone. She couldn’t find a University of Arizona art professor with a first or last name of Arthur. She checked for music professors and found nothing.

  I suggested looking up the name Melody. Roxy worked her fingers again. “No professor of anything at the school named Melody. What the hell was she talking about?”

  The road we were on dead-ended at a pipe fence running along a wash. Two police cruisers were parked against the fence. A young patrolman waved us to a stop and quick-stepped around to the driver’s window like he was on to something big.

  When h
e saw Roxy looking out at him, he stopped short. “Oh, hello there, Miss Santa Cruz.”

  “Hello, Doug. Nice night.”

  “We get the bloodiest ones on these hot nights, huh.”

  “Seems like it.”

  “Go on ahead. Your cameraman’s already there.”

  “Thanks. Who caught the case?”

  “Detective Martin, ma’am. Nice to see you again.”

  The cop waved Roxy into the desert immediately east of the wash. She parked short of the action, and we walked across bladed ground that had been staked out for a construction job. It looked like the cops had called in an army with orders to stand around. The headlights from a semicircle of squad cars threw a white light over the scene.

  I couldn’t make out what those lights were illuminating until I reached the yellow tape and peered past it, between parked cars, between cops and crime scene investigators moving in and out of the light. I saw what I expected to see, a white SUV.

  Roxy raised the tape and held it high for me. I ducked underneath. The driver’s door of the SUV was open. A woman sat with her forehead angled against the steering wheel, her face turned toward us. A long red gash half-mooned across her neck.

  The blond wig had shifted back on her head and down onto her left shoulder, and it hung there by its last strand, the shoulder and the hair bright red with blood.

  The revealed portion of her skull, immediately back of her forehead, was closely shaved, making her features more prominent. Her upper teeth protruded and a wedge of purple tongue showed between her lips.

  Her face was like no color you’d see on any living thing, a sickly gray mask. I turned away. Some sights will burn in your brain a long time.

  Roxy talked briefly to Detective Martin and summoned her cameraman. They shot a piece with Roxy standing against the crime tape. It didn’t have much meat to it. No name, no possible motive, no mention of evidence found.

  Back at the Audi, Roxy said, “Martin asked me to hold off broadcasting the name for a day or two. But the ID says Rosa Lopez. Ring a bell?”

  “No, but I’ll bet she’s your telephone tipster.” I explained that I’d been followed the night before by a woman wearing a bleached-blond wig and driving a white SUV.

  “Early thirties, manages a strip joint called Skin,” Roxy said. “I like that name. It gets to the point.”

  “That explains the boom-boom music you heard in the background,” I said. “She called you from Skin.”

  “It’s up the road here. Shall we have a look?”

  On the way out, we passed two SUVs carrying crews from competing TV stations. Roxy wiggled her fingers at them. As she buttoned up the window, she said, “Late again. What losers.”

  Skin was a mile north, a bleak warehouse-style building set alone on a patch of desert off the boulevard. No sign marked the entrance to the club, either on the street or on the building itself. The exterior was a windowless stone facade. Customers entered through a roll-up delivery door with a red light above it.

  Two police cruisers pulled into the parking lot just ahead of us and their lights were still blinking. Strippers leaned against cars talking to cops. Several were barefoot, legs exposed, and had blouses thrown over bare shoulders.

  Roxy and I walked between cars and inside the club. The business end of the night had ended with the news of Rosa Lopez’s murder. No dancers danced and no customers leered at them. But somebody had forgotten to shut off the music. It pounded up through the floor in that primal beat that made spinning naked on a pole seem perfectly sensible.

  A uniformed cop approached with his arms out, intending to sweep us back out the door. “Shut down for the night,” he said. “Outside. Let’s go. Club’s closed.”

  We turned and ran smack into Detective Martin. He was short and hard looking and not happy to see us. He said to Roxy, “I thought you were going to wait a day?”

  “Hello again, Frank. Are you following us, or are we following you?”

  “I told you I don’t want anything released until we know more. The wrong information goes out, somebody runs, and we never close this.”

  One of the dancers staggered past us, dollar bills hanging off her G-string. Except for stiletto heels, that was all she had on. She was long legged to begin with, but the heels made her a giant. She was small breasted, and her face was made up to look like a cat’s. But she was crying into a handkerchief, and her painted-on whiskers had smeared.

  One of the bills floated to the floor in front of Roxy. She grabbed it and showed it to Frank and said, “I came for the ambience.”

  Martin stood with his hands on his hips. He snapped his chin toward me.

  Roxy said, “Detective Frank Martin, this is Whip Stark. We’re working together.”

  Martin gave me a look that said, “Don’t get in my way.” Switching his eyes slowly to Roxy, he said, “All I can say is it looks like a message killing. Brutal. But they all are.” He pointed us toward the front door. “Call me in a couple days. I might have something.”

  Roxy stuffed the bill into Martin’s shirt pocket, and we walked out to the parking lot. The cat stripper was still naked and mewling into her hanky. Two other naked girls stood at her elbows, propping her up.

  TWENTY-THREE

  We got back to the Blue Note after 2:00 a.m. Roxy suggested a final drink, but Tommy had the front door open and all the inside lights on, and he was sweeping the place out.

  “Sorry, we’re closed.”

  “Come on, Tommy,” Roxy said. “One little drinky?”

  “Forget it, Roxanne. I’ve been on since this morning, and I have to go home to feed my cats.” He shooed us away and slammed the door.

  Roxy shivered. “I’ve never talked to him in proper lighting. Not good.”

  I offered to walk her back to the car, and she put her arm through mine as we went. Usually at that end of Fourth Avenue, the street and the sidewalks are jumping as the Blue Note and Nutcracker’s, a neighboring bar, clear out. But July made for slow Tuesday nights.

  Roxy said, “It feels like we’re ghosts, out here all alone.”

  “I don’t need the darkness to feel like a ghost.”

  “We can forget about it for tonight. Let all our stuff go.”

  “The night’s not long enough for that. Here we are.”

  We stopped beside the Audi. Instead of unlocking the door and getting in, Roxy leaned her back against the driver’s door and folded her arms and looked at me through the glow of the streetlamp. “Didn’t Skin give you any ideas?” Her tone was full of suggestion.

  “I’m out of ideas. Been that way for a couple of years.”

  “I’m going to have to explain this to the station’s accountant. Mr. Beasley smells like an old sofa. He’s going to ask if I’m okay. ‘Expensing a glass of milk, Miss Santa Cruz?’” She tossed her head and laughed wickedly. After closing time on Fourth Avenue, wicked laughs are the only kind you hear.

  She pointed at the slumbering buildings of downtown. “I’m down here along the railroad tracks, behind the blood bank. We can have a nightcap on my porch and watch the trains.”

  “I’ve got a long drive in the morning.”

  “To Phoenix, I know. You go there every week.”

  On Wednesdays, I drove to the Maricopa County Jail to visit my father. It seemed like everybody knew my schedule. A guard probably snapped a picture of me and sent it out on Twitter or Instagram.

  My face must’ve registered surprise, for Roxy quickly added, “I heard about Sam Houston Stark’s loyal son, the famous baseball player, his only visitor. Doing it alone is hard. I take care of my mother.”

  “Sick?”

  “Alzheimer’s. But that’s just an opinion. She’s been off her nugget since I was little and nobody called it anything.”

  “That’s why you’re still in Tucson. You strike me as the big-city type.”

  “I get offers all the time. Good money.”

  “Sure.”

  “My sister’s busy with
her kids and there’s nobody else. I’m stuck here.”

  Roxy unlocked the Audi, got in, and buttoned the window down, resting her slender arm along the door, her long painted fingers gripping the side mirror. For the first time, I saw that she was missing half the pinky finger on her left hand. The sight jarred me, four long, shapely fingers with nails painted blood red, and then a bent stump, like a snuffed-out cigarette.

  Something was all wrong about that. It scared me in a way, got my heart racing. She saw me looking at it and jerked her hand inside the car.

  Looking straight ahead, she said, “This is the part of the night I don’t like. Waiting for dawn, the empty hours.”

  “Isn’t that what vodka’s for?”

  She sucked in a breath and made a raspberry sound blowing it out. “This town…I don’t know. You can’t go to the supermarket without running into somebody. You must get that a lot.”

  “Until this Rolando deal, I’ve been avoiding town as much as possible.”

  Roxy looked at her watch, adjusted the rearview mirror. Her movements had become jerky and uncertain. She tapped her index finger on the mirror. “Are you sure I can’t talk you into a nightcap? I’ll ride up to Phoenix with you in the morning.”

  “I go there alone to see a man alone.”

  “Don’t get deep. Please. It’s too late for deep.” She sighed. “So that’s it? We’re done here?” She pushed her lips out and tilted her head and looked out at me from underneath that waterfall of hair. Her eyes sparkled with invitation, the look every man wants to see.

  But I had a lot on my mind. I was busy and exhausted. I was trying to shed every unnecessary thing so I could resurrect myself. It wasn’t easy. Desire makes you forget what you want, makes you a fool. I knew all about that from years as a young ballplayer on the road and wanted to leave it there.

  With no rancor in her voice, Roxy said, “I can’t believe you’re going to make me work for this, Phenom. You’re quite the bastard.”

  She started the engine and the stereo came on with it, blasting across the night. The bass reverberated under my feet, the rapper Nelly. She lowered the volume and turned her face up to me with a hard glint in her eyes.