by Susan Dunlap
“Liza, I—”
“No!” She couldn’t deal with being diverted. “Here’s what happened. Daddy waited till my grandmother went to the bathroom, grabbed the keys and grinned at Mom. ‘Joy ride? Come, my sweet!’ he said with a great flourish. It had been hours since either of them had a drink and she was barely holding it together. But at this she gave him a smile that must have been how she looked when she was seventeen. She was halfway out the door when he stopped her and said, ‘Kiss the baby goodbye.’ Mom thought it was part of the act and gave me a theatrical smooch. But Dad hugged me so hard my ribs crunched.” She shivered and shook herself sharply to escape the memories in her chest. “So hard that when the police came hours later I wasn’t surprised.”
“Oh, God, Liza.”
“All in all I spent less than six months in Juvie. But the Jewelry Shop Lolita case was salacious and it made news for months. The area we lived in was like a small town even though it was inside Los Angeles. Everybody knew. Even in other parts of L.A. people recognized my name and eyed me with either a sneer or a smirk. And of course, the cops were drooling over the surveillance photo with my tits, my tattoo and Pope’s penis.”
“Oh, Liza.”
“Right.” Liza jammed herself back against the booth wall. She felt naked, helpless with her secrets bared. She swallowed but there was no moisture left. “You can see…why I can’t trust the Los Angeles police. When they connect me to Elizabeth Cummings, the jewelry shop Lolita, they’ll start wondering if I killed Jay. Killed again.”
Ellen didn’t move or speak. The waitress and the old woman weren’t talking. But everything else in the room shrieked—the refrigerator, the coffee machine, the fan. In the parking lot the Camaro stood, outlined in the light from the restaurant window like a star in a spotlight. Why hadn’t she thought to park it in the dark? Why—
Ellen shifted and when Liza looked up it was into her gaze. She couldn’t decipher Ellen’s expression; it was a jumble of sad, resigned, determined.
“Liza, I am so very sorry, more sorry than I can say that this awful thing happened to you. And that you were so alone with it, for so long. I wish I, Mom and I, had known back then when you were so young. I just feel terrible for you.” Her voice was scratchy, too, and Liza took comfort in that. “But, well, there’s a saying in Mom’s family about things like that, that you just have to hitch up your skirt and step over them and not look down while you’re doing it. Liza, if you think this cop is going to blame you for Jay’s murder, you don’t have a choice. You’ve got to hitch up your skirt and call him and find out what he knows. It’s the only chance you have.”
Liza slumped down. She was too sapped to argue, and besides she knew Ellen was right. Still it was a full minute before she could make herself look up, nod, and slide out of the booth. She had to brace her hand on the table to get up.
Calling Bentec was a dangerous move. He’d be after her…No, wait. He would be after her if she were still driving the car she rented. But Bentec didn’t know about Ellen or her car. If she could talk fast…Even if he traced the call, so what? They’d get into Ellen’s car and drive on, two ladies headed to Healdsburg for breakfast. Okay, this could work. Already she was feeling more herself again.
She dropped coins in the phone, punched in the number, listened to the recorded demand and dropped in more coins. The phone rang and rang. It was the middle of the night. Bentec could have gone home like a normal person, which would mean this was no special case, and—
“Yeah?”
“Bentec?” she blurted out, startled by the gruff syllable.
“Right. Who’s calling?” Now he sounded more businesslike and she wondered if she’d caught him on the run, maybe running to go home.
“Liza Silv—”
“Where the hell are you? I told you to come in here. This is a murder case and I don’t have all night to sit waiting—”
“Hey! I can hang up.” She shouldn’t provoke him, this man who frightened even Jay, but she couldn’t help it.
“Don’t!” He spoke softly as if he didn’t need to raise his voice. “Liza, you get yourself in here at nine o’clock. No, better yet, I’ll be at your house then. And right now tell me when that container will arrive.”
“Container of what?”
“Don’t you question me. Do what I tell you. Are you home yet?”
“Aren’t you tracing this call, Frank? Don’t you know?”
“Yeah, I know. And I know you’re driving a Camaro so don’t think you can get away. Every sworn officer in the state is after you, Liza. They’re holding warnings that say Armed and Dangerous. You want to come out of this in one pretty piece, you get your ass moving. And you can start by telling me what Silvestri said to you before he died.”
Don’t provoke him! “You want his last words, Frank?”
“Didn’t you hear me? What did he say?”
“He said: Fuck Frank Bentec!”
She smashed the phone down and stood facing the wall, barely breathing. Her hip banged the phone tray. Coins bounced up and clattered on the floor.
It was past the time for small change. And not provoking him wouldn’t have helped. She picked up her wallet, turned, smacked into a gray-haired woman and screamed. “Oh my God, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”
The woman—the blue-jacketed woman whose husband had stalked out, Liza now realized—patted her arm. “Are you okay, honey?”
“I’m…yeah.” Before she could force out a lie, the woman’s arm was around her shoulder.
“You’re shaking all over. Here now, come on back inside where you can sit down.”
She let herself be led back into the dining room, let herself be lulled by the woman saying, “Let’s get you some tea, honey. Something nice and warm to drink. Hot, sweet tea. Here, now you just sit down with your friend and I’ll get you some fresh tea.”
“What happened?” Ellen was half out of her seat, reaching toward her.
“It’s worse than I thought, Ellen. Bentec’s a lunatic, and he knows about the Camaro.”
“Did he trace the call?”
“What difference does that make? If he knows that I’m with you and you rented the Camaro in San Francisco then he’s focused around here. Oh, God, Ellen, I am so sorry I got you involved in this. Maybe I should take the car and—”
“And what? Let me walk back to San Francisco?”
“I could drop you at Santa Rosa airport. That’s somewhere around here. There must be signs on the freeway. If the Highway Patrol doesn’t stop us first. But it can’t be that far, and—”
“And you figure Bentec will have cops on the freeways but no one will think of watching a Bay Area airport?”
“But they’re not after you.”
“Liza, sit still. Think. We’ve been seen at two hotels in San Francisco. I rented the car. I dropped everything to fly out here to be with you. Do you really think any cop on earth is going to decide I’m not involved?”
“I’m sorry. I am so sorry. I know, fat lot of good sorry does.” She reached for Ellen’s hand and when Ellen didn’t pull away she was surprised, surprised at both of them. “You’ve been a good friend to me, and, God, now I could get you killed.” She paused, in hopes of Ellen interrupting. But Ellen just slumped back. Her lank brown hair hung almost in her eyes and she didn’t bother to push it away.
A cup of tea was in front of her. It was a moment before she thought to pick it up. Another before she realized that the old woman had brought it herself. “I thought you could both use tea. Plenty of sugar. Drink it down even if you don’t like it that way. This hour of night, you need that before you get back on the road.”
“Thanks,” she squeaked out.
“Oh, hon, look, whatever this man did to you, it’s not worth going numb over, believe me. You feel all empty inside, but you’ll fill up again. It doesn’t seem like it now, but trust me. I’m an old broad and I’ve seen it all.”
Liza looked up to find her smiling.
Liza found herself almost smiling. She took a sip and felt the hot sweet liquid open her throat. “Thanks. I really mean it. The tea was exactly the right thing. It will keep us from driving the car into a ditch.”
Ellen put her cup down and reached for her wallet.
“No, hon. On me.”
“But you don’t have to—”
“There were hands there to help me when I felt all empty. And more times than one. Filling you girls with tea is my link in the chain.” She turned and started for the counter, her shoes thwacking against the floor. Not the soft-soled loafers Liza realized she’d expected, but sturdy brown boots.
The woman turned back and for the first time a look of uneasiness settled on her face. “Where are you girls headed?”
Richland. The word almost fell out of Liza’s mouth. But she caught herself. “Portland. Why?”
“Well, I don’t want to put on you. But if you’re going north, I wonder if you could give me a lift. I’m headed just off the highway about an hour north. Won’t take you five minutes out of your way. I’m a good driver. Wouldn’t hurt either one of you to rest for an hour.”
And if the highway patrol came up alongside, it wouldn’t hurt to have a gray haired lady driving. “We’d love to have you,” Liza said and finished her tea.
Twenty-Three
HARRY COOPER DROVE SLOWLY through Kansas City. He wasn’t the kind of man who got threatening phone calls. Gangsters got calls like that. Not freight forwarders.
It was in-between time, no longer night-dark, but not yet dawn. The time when the fairies go back underground. Odd, he hadn’t thought of that tale from an old aunt in forty years. But now he made his way along the empty street, beneath the great oaks and maples and elms frantically waving their arms like the fairies before they were sucked down into the netherworld of hopelessness and moaning. His headlights made puffs of white, illuminating nothing. The snow that had melted during the day had frozen again, clear and slick. The car skidded every time he braked. He was too tired to drive, too distracted, too damned scared.
Once he got back to the office, he’d be okay. If the threatening lunatic on the phone was the recipient of Silvestri’s shipment it’d be easy enough to find it for him. He’d check the Web site, then if there was a problem he could go through the routing for the entire nation west of the Mississippi, check every transfer point that Union Pacific had and Southern Pacific used to have, look at every major carrier and every short line. He knew the majors like the back of his hand. The short lines he’d didn’t know so well. Short lines were problems. You couldn’t count on them. With the majors you keyed in the bill of lading and a copy was on the receiver’s screen before the container left the station. The recipient could log onto the carrier line’s Web site, find out exactly when his container would arrive, where it was this instant, and if there was a problem ahead. On the majors the electronic tags from the Automated Equipment Identification System logged in the car every time it passed through a transfer point. Mistakes still happened, but not like they did on the short lines where things were still done manually.
Harry Cooper was the best router in the business—that thought that always gave him a little buzz now only set his stomach quivering.
He made a left and was halfway through the red light before he thought to hit the brake. The car swung wide into a skid. If there’d been another driver crossing the intersection he’d have been crushed flat as a ninety-nine cent burger. Sweat coated his face. Oh God, he couldn’t the in a crash now when he might have lost a shipment, a shipment whose unverified weight he had listed as provisionally approved by the Western Weights and Inspector Bureau and stamped through. Never had he bent the rules like that before. “It’s just for a day or two, until the paperwork’s approved, right?” Silvestri had said. “A day or two, what can happen?”
What indeed.
He just hoped Silvestri initiated the papers before he got himself shot. Harry’s face flushed. An awful thing to think. But true.
A branch had blown down in the street. He slowed and swung around it.
Jay Silvestri’s shipment, a sealed container of Hollywood memorabilia headed to a collector in Richland, Washington, should have been an easy ship. The container, a roll-on-roll-off, should be somewhere north of Dunsmuir, California, by now. Could it have been sent via Fresno despite all his paperwork? Not likely riding on the majors. But still, the human element. Had their AEI code…
The light turned red. He slid to a stop. The tall trees and comfortable houses were behind him now. He was near the stockyards now, and the netherworld was filled with the lowing cries of the steer that would be dead within the day.
What had possessed Silvestri to give this lunatic his phone number, his home phone, yet? Silvestri should have given the phone lunatic the Web site information. Why didn’t he do that? Maybe he intended to, but got killed first?
Murdered for some totally unconnected reason? As likely as a caboose pulling the engine, Cooper admitted
Maybe it wasn’t memorabilia in those cars. Guns? Drugs? Contraband? A chill iced his chest, colder than when he stood listening to the phone message. He’d vouched for the shipment. If it was illegal he was an accessory. He’d never be let near freight again. Anything could be in those containers. Bombs. Oh, Jesus, he’d endangered the lines. And—the realization came so quick he hardly noted it as an afterthought—endangered the engineers, the porters, the people near the tracks.
He pulled into the empty parking lot and headed for the building. Chances were the shipment was on schedule and the lunatic just didn’t realize how slowly trains move. But by the time lunatic called back, he wanted to be able to tell him he’d checked everything possible. He wanted this business cleared up before it affected Ellen.
Ellen. Why hadn’t she called from her new hotel? He didn’t know where she was. Only that she was out there in San Francisco with Silvestri’s wife.
Harry Cooper slammed the car door and ran across the icy lot, feet slipping, arms flailing.
At the edge of the lot a tall sandy-haired man sat in a rental car and watched.
Twenty-Four
LIZA WATCHED THE OLD woman, Gwen Brown by name, slide behind the wheel of the Camaro and start the engine. The dark smoothed her face and softened her sharp nose, and determined chin. As she leaned forward checking out the knobs and gauges, she looked like a teenage boy anxious to goose the car forward. Liza barely had the seatbelt latched when she shifted into reverse and the car shot back. Felton squealed.
“Please,” Liza said, stroking his head, “a pig expects a smooth ride.”
“Sorry, little guy.” Gwen grinned at him, reached over and rubbed his stomach, ignoring the road in the process. “We had a pig for a while. Alex, my second son, brought him home when he was no bigger than this. He was a cute little fella, and smart, and I hated to give him up, but I could see the handwriting on the wall, and the second time Gil mentioned bacon, I made sure that little guy ‘wandered off.’ ”
“I know what you mean. The only time I ever argued with my husband was about keeping Felton.”
“Only time, huh? This pig must mean a lot to you.”
“Odd, isn’t it?” Liza was rubbing softly on his belly. “My neighbor was going to take him to the pound, just because he wouldn’t be little and cute forever. Jay, my husband, couldn’t understand why that got to me.”
“Yeah, well, a man wouldn’t, would he? Course, now with men dyeing their hair and going in for facelifts, m
aybe some of them do know what it’s like to have a short shelf life.” She turned full face to Liza. “But you, hon, you’ve got good bones and bright eyes; you’re going to look good for a long long time. You’ve got nothing to worry about.”
Liza almost laughed. If there’d been a Farthest From the Truth Award, Gwen would be rushing the stage. “Felton’s only a piglet now. I don’t know what I’ll do when he’s a porker. But for now he’s as safe as I am.” She glanced into the back seat. Ellen was stretched out, and if there had been any question whether tension would keep her awake it was gone. In the time it had taken to let Felton out by the restaurant, Ellen had flung an arm over her eyes, and been asleep before the other one slipped off the seat and dangled to the floor. Even the jolt out of the parking lot and the sprint onto the freeway hadn’t rearranged her.
Liza leaned back and stared at the dark empty freeway. Two lanes going north now, like 99 had been, was that only last night? It seemed ages ago, making the wrong turns, lost in the fog.
Gwen slowed. “You mind if I cut onto a side road? It won’t take but a few more minutes.”
“Fine.” On 99 getting off the freeway and avoiding Bentec’s net had been the right move. And tonight, if Bentec had traced her call, getting off the freeway was a real good idea. “Why, though? Do you figure your husband will be driving around looking for you?”
Gwen laughed. “Not hardly, hon. I’d bet my ATM card that Gil’s got his butt settled in the recliner. He’s waiting for the phone, watching the door. But if the boys see the light’s on they might stop in. I know Gil, been married to the man for thirty-two years. Boys come in, he’s going to start telling them about me sitting in the restaurant, waiting for the sun to rise, realizing the error of my uppity ways. They’ll decide to do Gil a favor—maybe they’ll even think it’s me they’re helping out. They’ll swing by the restaurant. Celia will tell them their mom went off with two girls in a hot car, and the whole thing’ll be more than they can stand. By sun-up all their friends’ll be on the chase, at least those who don’t have the sense to turn their phones off. So, just in case, I say stay out of sight, you know?”