Double Wide

by Leo W. Banks

  “I know you’re holding out on me about Rolando. Tell me everything or I’m out. Nobody plays me.”

  The Audi shot away from the curb, the bumper brushing my leg. She squealed the tires and pumped the volume again as Nelly shook windows all along Fourth Avenue.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Early next morning I drove into Tucson and took I-10 west toward Phoenix, one of the worst drives in the state. Rolling through dark desert, not quite awake, not yet breathing properly, not yet seeing as well as I should, and an hour into the trip, the sun breaks beyond the windshield, and there it is, the boiling brown mess of Phoenix.

  Whenever I heard news of a car jumping the median and crashing into an oncoming eighteen-wheeler for no apparent reason, I didn’t have to wonder what happened.

  The driver saw Phoenix.

  Maricopa County’s Fourth Avenue Jail didn’t open until eight o’clock. I waited in the Bronco listening to ESPN Radio’s Mike and Mike talk about the designated hitter, the foulest invention in all of sports.

  When it was time, I went inside the Soviet-style brick-and-glass building. The check-in officer’s nametag said Rodriguez. She was 250 pounds of woman sweating inside an institutional tan-and-black uniform with a carrying capacity of 150.

  She knew who I was from my weekly visits and that sped up the routine. “Sam Houston Stark,” Rodriguez said with a grin. “He’s been a noisy boy this morning.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Talking lines from his plays. He sure attracts attention, that one.” She told me to wait while she went to get my father out of his cell.

  Attracting attention. Yes. That has always been Sam Houston Stark’s special skill.

  For twenty-two years, he was a distinguished professor at Arizona State University, brilliant, handsome, a classroom raconteur whose personality drew attention across campus. Students waited in line for a seat in his class. He put on a show using every bit of his energy in every class, and he had the perfect voice for it—a deep, resonant theater voice that sounded like it was echoing even when it wasn’t.

  His downward spiral came with shocking speed. First alcohol, then whatever drug he could get his hands on, then an affair with a prostitute thirty years his junior, and finally heroin. He fell so deeply into the black pit that he began pulling strong-arm robberies of convenience stores, supermarkets, banks.

  The prostitute was with him. Her name was Cristy Carlyle.

  The FBI put out grainy security photos of them wearing masks depicting various characters from Shakespeare. They spoke lines from his plays as they pulled their jobs.

  An enterprising TV reporter obtained a videotape of one of the robberies. It showed Sam leveling a pistol at terrified bank employees and calling out in that hypnotic voice: “Hell is empty, and all the devils are here!”

  That line was from The Tempest, spoken by Prospero, my namesake. The video looped endlessly on cable, which wasn’t alone in taking up the story. All the media fell hard for the so-called Hamlet Robbers.

  But the story didn’t go nuts until the cops found Cristy Carlyle dead in her apartment in Tempe, butchered like livestock with what the coroner said was probably a kitchen knife. The knife was never found.

  The police located Sam that same night wandering the desert across the street from the apartment, gone on that horrible drug, his clothing splattered with Carlyle’s blood. He remembered nothing and still doesn’t.

  I was watching TV in my Mexican jail cell when a news crawl announced Sam’s arrest on a charge of first-degree murder. I thought I was dreaming. Sometimes I still do.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  A different guard came and got me. I was the only one in the waiting room, but he announced my name like the king’s courier. He curled a filthy finger at me and we walked down a long, cold corridor, then another and another, all of them smelling of bleach and whatever the bleach was intended to clean up.

  He punched his code into three security pads and shoved open three heavy yellow doors with wired windows. Every sound was unusually loud. Our echoing footsteps, the door locks snapping open with metallic precision, the voices harsh along connecting rooms and corridors.

  The door at the end of the fourth corridor opened to the room for contact visits. I took booth number four. Sam sat on the other side of a table, and when he saw me, he brightened and said, “Prospero, you came!”

  Every time, Sam spoke those same three words as if he was surprised, as if there were any doubt. His voice was softer than before, back in his throat, chastened, with only a touch of that biblical tone. But enough of the old sound remained, and it was good to hear.

  I asked how he was doing. Instead of answering, he got a worried look and said, “Still reading your fedora stories?”

  “I keep most of them in storage, Sam.”

  “Excellent. You need to move on to something more edifying.”

  “But I did pull one out the other day.”

  “No! Sweet hour, why?”

  “It’s a long story. It involves a coyote named Jack.”

  He stared in professorial horror.

  “I don’t know, Sam. I guess I miss reading them. Who knows, they might help me figure some things out.”

  He rose in his chair, his voice loud: “Don’t say that! There’s no wisdom in those potboilers!”

  On Sam’s side of the table, a guard stepped to his shoulder and said, “Tame the lips, teach. We don’t need no riot this morning.”

  Sam leaned in and whispered to me: “See. They all talk that way now. Even the constables. Offal. It’s American offal!”

  “I didn’t come all this way to talk about Shakespeare.”

  Sam’s eyes warmed. “The bard is all you need.”

  It was the same old argument, and I let it go. I watched him. He wavered in his chair as if drunk. Trying to move the conversation along, I said, “I drove as fast as you to get here, Sam.” His impressive pile of speeding tickets was a family joke.

  The smile vanished. He stretched his neck forward. “They lay out traps on I-10,” he said darkly. “Did you know that? The cops do that. Don’t think they’re not waiting!” His voice rose to a bellow. “They’re waiting for you, Prospero!”

  The guard stepped forward again and Sam drew back, seeming to shrivel inside his orange jumpsuit. I studied him. He had changed in confinement.

  His long, narrow face had turned sallow, his features dulled. Red blotches marred the skin on both sides of his aquiline nose. He still had a full head of hair, but the gray streaking through it had grown prominent. His thin lips were split top and bottom, the bottom cut shining in the fluorescent light.

  If he laughed too hard, those splits would open again, and blood would likely run, though I didn’t see much chance of that. He normally smiled as easily as he breathed, giving his face a lively expression through bold blue eyes.

  But the old spirit was gone, replaced with a remote, unnatural stare.

  “Is everything all right, Sam?”

  “I’m writing a treatise on my addiction,” he whispered.

  “Are you getting enough sleep? You look tired.”

  “This tainted world needs to know my story. I’m going to see to it that something good comes of what’s happened to me.”

  “You’ve had enough attention. Let’s talk about your trial.”

  “Heroin addiction is like a train coming. That’ll be my thesis.”

  “Come on, Sam. There’s no thesis. Look at me and don’t talk like that.”

  But he wasn’t hearing me. He smiled without joy, seemed to look at me without seeing.

  He said, “You’re miserable where you stand until the spoon is in your mind and then in your hand and then you’re breathing it into your lungs. Your lungs welcome the smoke, and you see the first glimpse of the train coming. All you have to do is grab on to that train and ride it. And your troubles ride away with it.”

  I broke in. “We should talk about your trial.”

  But he kept going
, his voice a homeless-shelter monotone. “Everything inside you knows the truth. You know you shouldn’t do it. You know that by grabbing the train, you’re entering a darkness you can never leave. But all that matters is the moment. And here it comes, the hard rumble of metal wheels on metal tracks. The squealing, the whistle coming closer, and there’s no doubt what you’ll do.”

  “Sam, I don’t want to do this. I drove a long way, and it wasn’t for this.”

  His eyes were right on me but still far away. His voice rose: “You reach your hand out as the train nears, and you hate yourself. But there is no ‘self’ anymore. You take hold of the speeding train, and its power lifts you off your feet, and suddenly you’re soaring. Joyous! Full of life as you’re pulled along by this power, the instant pure pleasure running through your veins, through your muscles, into your brain!”

  “Sam! Stop this, Sam!”

  But he was unreachable, gone to me and gone to the world.

  He continued: “Anything after that is after that, and to hell with it! Let’s ride this beautiful train! But then you don’t need the train anymore. You can let go. This is the drug swarming over your brain, drenching it with the excitement, the thrill, the escape, and the wonder of life again. Soon you’re parallel to the speeding train, sideways to it. Like Superman!”

  He laughed crazily. “The rush is so great you don’t have to hold on anymore and so you let go, and you’re in the air, and you no longer need its power because you have your own!”

  I spun and barked at the guard behind me. “How does he get heroin in this dump?”

  Foolishly, the guard said, “It’s against regulations.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to stop it?”

  Louder, in his guard voice: “Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to calm down.”

  The guard on Sam’s side stalked his shoulder again, taking him by the arm.

  Sam jerked away. His voice fell to a dreamlike tone: “Now you’re between Earth and the sky, and the thought that the train has to stop, putting you back on the ground—it doesn’t exist. It’s gone! Do you understand what I’m saying, Prospero? That’s a lifetime away. It doesn’t matter, for you’ve departed this realm of lawyers, salesmen, and cesspool merchants. Left its corporeal horrors behind.”

  The guard pulled Sam to his feet and muscled him out of the room. The visit ended just that way, without ceremony, without good-byes.

  I demanded a meeting with somebody in charge. The boss was busy. I cracked my knuckles for an hour in his outer office until my temper boiled up, and I had to get out of there, outside those walls.

  TWENTY-SIX

  In the parking lot, I leaned against the Bronco to collect myself. The sun-scorched metal nearly melted the skin on my back. A steady wind sent dust clouds marching across the valley.

  How does a man with everything anyone could want, a three day-a-week job, nobody looking over his shoulder, steady money, respect, go from that to what sat on the other side of that table?

  Sometimes happiness gets to be too much. You become convinced you’re bored and look around for something more when there is nothing more. That’s when you find a younger woman, in Sam’s case, a prostitute who turned him inside out.

  Then pile heroin on top of the booze. Why not? Maybe it’ll jerk me out of this paradise.

  When the sun always shines, you hunt for trouble. That’s just how people are.

  I checked my phone. No message from Oscar Molina. I called Cash at Double Wide to see if Opal had turned up. No Opal.

  Tork Mortenson left a message saying no one from the Rich Hill Gang would talk. Whoever got after them on that mountain really did the job.

  I thought about going back inside the jail and tipping over some desks to find out how Sam was scoring heroin. But I couldn’t afford to get banned. Sam needed to see me, needed to sit across from someone who believed absolutely in his innocence.

  The press and TV people were killing him, and that scared away his friends and colleagues at ASU. They had behaved like cowards, abandoning him. That included my mother, who headed the Western Collection at Arizona State’s library. She reacted as if the crime had happened to another family and fled to the safety of her archives.

  Sam’s lawyer, Micah Alan Gabriel, stayed cool on the question of whether he had carved up Cristy Carlyle. He was a lawyer, and Sam was a client, and that was as far as it went.

  A car pulled in next to the Bronco, and there he was, Micah Alan Gabriel.

  I didn’t like him. He had a long silver ponytail. I was out of touch when my mother hired him, which is a polite way of saying in jail in Mazatlán.

  If I’d been involved, the first thing I would’ve said was no ponytails. Your lawyer in a death penalty case should never have a ponytail. Gabriel’s reached the middle of his back. From the front he looked bald. From behind, he looked like he had an aged ferret crawling up his spine with dastardly intent.

  He stepped out of his car wearing chino slacks, tan woven-leather slip-on shoes, no socks, and a white guayabera. They’re called Mexican wedding shirts, and they make all men look like barbers. They’re short sleeved, untucked, have two rows of pleats down the chest and enough pockets to stash your tips, an extra comb, and a straight razor if the haircut goes bad.

  He had the look of a man creeping past fifty and tired of it all. He had washed-out eyes, a road map nose and mottled skin. He looked like a bass player. He looked like a twelve-stepper midway through the program who delivers pizzas to pay for his smokes.

  But the real reason I didn’t like Micah Alan Gabriel was that I was paying him in wheelbarrows of green money, and his investigator still couldn’t find the murder weapon, the missing knife that could prove Sam’s innocence. Or at least upend the prosecution’s theory of the crime.

  Two motions to move the trial out of Maricopa County had been denied. Micah Alan Gabriel planned to file a motion to delay the trial based on Sam’s drug use and consequent inability to understand the proceedings against him.

  Gabriel came around his car to talk to me. “I’m here to see your father a final time before I file. This should be clear cut. He’s an addict and needs treatment.”

  “It needs to begin as soon as possible.”

  “No question about that. We’ll see what the court says.”

  “He’s innocent. Drug or no drug, he’d never do something like this.”

  I wanted more, some understanding from Gabriel that he was representing a good man. Instead, he assured me of his faith in the system, in a tone that sounded like a speech spoken a hundred times before, and then walked casually into the prison.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  On the drive back to Tucson, I jumped off the highway at Tangerine Road in Oro Valley. The Super Walmart had a special on nine-millimeter ammunition. I bought three boxes—brass casings, not aluminum—and some Maxwell House.

  At the register, I threw a bag of jellybeans onto the belt for Opal. She went crazy over jellybeans.

  From there, I followed Oracle Road along the west end of the Catalinas and down into the rattling city. Most of it was obscured by a cloud of haze suspended over the baking valley. Only the tops of downtown’s buildings and the peaks of the mountains pierced the vaguely orange veil.

  I thought about Rosa Lopez, her frantic call to Roxy, her desperate attempt to chase me down, and her murky clues. “The professor said to call Stark! Arty’s melody!”

  Those words had to mean something. She was chasing me to deliver a message. If she knew Carlos Alvarez, maybe she also knew Rolando and what happened to him. Maybe she wanted to tell me where his body was.

  Oracle Road was loud and clogged. Late in the day, shadow time. I passed a sales lot brimming with new cars and blowing flags, the Tucson Mall, an endless array of parked cars, cars moving an inch at a time, brake lights shining, horns blaring.

  I stopped at a red light and felt myself sticking to the seat. The air-conditioning in the Bronco roared, but without a roof, it only made noise. I’v
e had pitching coaches like that. I’d stick to the seat until I arrived at my destination and then stick to something else.

  Summer in Tucson. The key to life here isn’t a sun hat or a swimming pool. It isn’t a Big Gulp. The only real thing is covered parking.

  To drown out the car radios pounding on both sides of me, I turned on my own radio and heard the Righteous Brothers singing “Unchained Melody.”

  It sparked an idea. Roxy had checked the UA’s directory for music or art professors named Arthur or Melody. But she never checked Pima Community College. I got on my phone and checked Pima Community College, and found a plant sciences teacher named Arthur Melody. Had retired from the UA and taught a course at the college.

  The light changed. I gassed it while pulling up information on Melody.

  He was a genius, highly respected, had published papers and won awards. I found his picture. I knew he’d be bald, and he exceeded expectations. The only hair that remained wrapped around the lower portion of his head like a silver muff. He had wire glasses, a polite mustache, long ears with shovel lobes, and the easy smile and soft, indoor skin of an aging academic.

  But why was an unassuming plant sciences professor involved with a strip club manager, dead in a vicious knife attack, and her criminal boyfriend or husband, dead from two bullets to the back of the head?

  The Tucson phone book listed Melody’s home address. It was time to go ask him.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Melody lived in the Sam Hughes neighborhood immediately east of the university. Known for its Old World elegance, the homes first went up in the 1920s, most in the Spanish Revival style. They were single story, earth-colored or bright white, and they had huge picture windows, sculpted doors, red-tile roofs, and pebbled driveways that circled in from the street.

  Professors lived there. PBS, round glasses, white wine at four. Barrio Subaru.

  I parked at the curb on Melody’s street but down somewhat from his house. Sometimes I get these feelings.

  A chest-high wall surrounded the property. Back of it two drooping willow trees shrouded the entryway. The house wasn’t kept up and badly needed a new coat of paint. Vines crawled all over the exterior, a clever way to cover the network of cracks.