by Bob Bickford
“You keep saying they,” Raines interrupted. “Who’s they?”
“Her husband, or his people. Seems obvious to me.”
He was getting angry, and his boyish face flushed.
“You know something about this,” he said. “She’s got a check made out to you in her purse, and it’s dated yesterday. We’ve known each other a while now. Why not be straight?”
I felt my own heat. The situation stunk. “You know damn well who Charlene Cleveland is,” I said. “You know who she married. I helped her get free of him, that’s all.”
“How did you manage that? Cleveland's not the type gets pushed around.”
“Maybe I just showed him he'd be happier without her.”
“You could get yourself in a lot of trouble,” he said, “trying to show Sal Cleveland what made him happy.”
“Who was she married to?” Runtz asked, pulling his head from the car's open window.
We both looked at him, irritated at the interruption.
“Sal Cleveland,” Raines answered. “Local bad guy, owns the Star-lite in Montelindo.”
“I know Sal Cleveland,” Runtz said. His expression was mild. “You think I moved here last week? I just hadn't heard he got married. Didn't figure him for the marrying type.”
“Couple of years ago,” Raines said. “And not anymore.” He looked at me.
“She got her divorce yesterday,” I said. “I got paid. She ruined the check she wrote and made out another one. No big deal.”
“It was a big deal to someone, by the looks of it.”
“You’re going to want my testimony?” I asked. “That the angle? Who called this in, anyway?”
Raines looked at me for a long moment. He seemed to be making his mind up about something.
“I don’t know what I want from you,” he finally said. “Want to know something funny? The property owner called it in a couple hours ago. Woman owns this ranch lives in town. She was apparently out here checking on her property and found the wreck.”
“What's funny about that?” I asked.
“She's a neighbor of yours. Close neighbor, next door to you, matter of fact. Strange name.” He checked his notebook. “Lady’s name is Kahlo. Anne Kahlo. Know her?”
“Kahlo?” I asked, startled. “I just met her. I don't mix with the neighbors much. She owns this place?”
I looked around at the steep hillsides, the ranks of avocado trees, the weathered barn and the burned-out house.
“What does she do with it?” I wondered. “I thought she was some kind of an artist.”
“Don't know,” Raines said, not really interested. “Maybe she likes avocados. One of the locals says these trees have been a free harvest for years. No one pays attention to who comes on the land and picks them. It isn't a huge yield, because no one irrigates the trees. The Kahlo woman isn't running a bona fide operation here.”
“She isn't running the place any kind of way, but she happened to be out here?”
Raines ignored the implications of my question.
“She was here this morning,” he said. “You can't see the wreck from the road. Good thing. A few days in this heat would have baked the body where you couldn't recognize it.”
A black station wagon picked its way slowly down the steep driveway, leaving a lazy trail of dust that lingered in the thickening heat.
“She looks like she was a dish,” Raines said. “Was she?”
“She was pretty,” I said. “Sort of a type.”
He looked at the approaching black wagon and shook his head. “Bet she didn't imagine when she started out last night that she'd be getting a ride home like this.”
I looked at the ruined tan convertible with its crumpled blonde cargo behind the steering wheel. I felt a little stab of something that might have been grief. It had been so long since I'd felt grief that I couldn't be sure.
“So you don't really know this Kahlo broad?” he asked. “Your neighbor?”
“Not really,” I said. “Met her just the once.”
“She acts a little crazy,” he said. “Doesn't make a lot of sense. She's kind of a dish, too, isn't she? Too bad a woman looks like that talks like a dingbat. Seems like a waste.”
I thought about her dark eyes, her dead sister, and birthday cakes.
“It's a shame,” I agreed.
-Five-
I walked past the old courthouse. It was done in some kind of Spanish architecture, surrounded by rows of king palms. The place was beautiful, stucco and red tile, tall and white and arched, with bell towers and sweeping lawns that were brown in the summer and green in winter. I didn’t know how a place so gorgeous could have seen and caused so much misery, but I guessed a lot of things were like that, different than they appeared.
It was the kind of strange, bright California evening that you only see right on the coast. Night falls almost blue, but darkness won’t quite come, and the sky stays lit up by colored clouds. The sun is dead but doesn’t know it yet. Down at the wharf, the roller coaster still rattled around, and lights colored the Ferris wheel pink and yellow.
Dinner had been at a Mexican joint on Cabrillo, a plate of enchiladas and a half-pitcher of cold sangria. I had never been much of a wine drinker, even on my good days, and these weren’t anything close to my good days. I knew I would pay for it in the morning, but for now I enjoyed the glow. A taxicab slowed as it passed, but I waved it by.
The whole scene felt like it was just for me, a show to keep me busy and distracted while other important things happened elsewhere. I wondered if Annie Kahlo was finishing her dinner, and maybe getting ready to go for a walk, too. Maybe she thought about me, and was figuring out what strange things she would say to me the next time we met. I wondered if I thought about her too much.
“Spare a smoke, pal?”
The voice from a doorway belonged to a bum. There were a lot of them here. Some had come back from the war with the best part of themselves left buried in the French countryside or on an island in the Pacific. They stayed as day labor to pick oranges in season and to drink where the weather stayed warm. They didn’t hurt anyone as far as I could tell, except maybe themselves.
I kept walking.
“Have a good night,” he called after me.
I thought about Annie again, and wondered if I was falling for her. I wondered if I could fall in love at all, and if I did, if falling for someone who seemed to have a lot of loose screws could work out. I didn't know why it bothered me. I had steered clear of good looking women who seemed like trouble before and without a second thought.
Most recently, Charlene Cleveland. I felt a flash of sadness.
Maybe you won't turn down the next poor girl who needs you. You don't know the first thing about love.
I stopped and went back to give him a cigarette and the change in my pocket, a quarter and two nickels.
“Get something to eat,” I said.
I knew he wouldn’t. He smiled and tipped me the hat he wasn’t wearing. Maybe he was smarter than me.
The clock chimed eleven. The light from the single lamp didn’t quite reach into the corners of my living room. Other than the clock and me, there wasn't much in the room, just a chesterfield and a side table. I probably needed more furniture and maybe a dog to lie at my feet. I held a scotch. I didn’t care much for it, but I drank it on the nights that I wanted to feel civilized and sit in my empty living room and think about things.
Charlene Cleveland stayed on my mind. She had sat across from me, sweet and flirtatious, and I made her cry. Now the pretty face was ruined and she was dead. I hadn’t liked her much, but she hadn’t deserved a bullet. I had a pretty good idea who had killed her and why, and all of it sat with me like an upset stomach and made me restless.
I picked up my drink and went outside onto the porch. The night air felt cool, and the houses on the street had gone dark. Only my next-door neighbor seemed to be awake. Gold light spilled from her windows onto the vines on her front porch. I sippe
d my scotch. It tasted the same as it had in the living room.
I’ve been chased by dreams of loss since I was small. It was always nighttime, and I walked through an empty place as fast as I could. I saw the stars and something big and black over my head, and then the noises around me faded to a whisper. I woke up in my bed and could never remember the rest of the dream, but I was always convinced that years and decades had passed while I slept. Everyone else had moved on and left me behind. I was all alone, and terrified.
That’s why I was comfortable on wet city streets in the middle of the night. It’s why I’d go to the places no one else wanted to, and why the neon and smoke and the sound of my own footsteps felt like home. Being with moving shadows was better than being alone. Those moments passed. I’d learned to live with them, and I never talked about it. Maybe everyone else was the same, and they weren’t talking about it either.
Sal Cleveland had wrecked his wife long before he killed her.
She had come to me for help, another slightly tarnished damsel in a long line of them, just another case in another day in another week. The glamour of being a hoodlum's wife had long gone for her. The imagined danger and romance of it had given way under the steady pressure of neglect and abuse, and she finally tired enough of it all to want out. She was Sal's property, though. He owned her and he wouldn’t let her go.
It had been easy enough to change his mind. Cleveland sold dancers and reefer and throw-away guns out the back door of the Star-lite Lounge. There were rumors that he dipped his toes in worse things. The street gossip had it he made a lot of money selling women to the strange, the exotic, and the twisted. The women became food for the kind of creatures that hid in dark rooms during the day and only slithered out onto the sidewalks at night.
They said he ran whores up from Mexico, and that the unsuspecting women in the trucks he brought up here thought they were coming to be nannies and to clean houses. They disappeared. The street also whispered that Sal Cleveland sold pictures of children, and that no one knew where the children came from or what happened to them after the photographs were taken. It was all dirty enough that if it saw daylight, his gangster friends from San Francisco to San Diego would turn their backs on him, and not even the judges he had bought or the crooked cops who owed him would spare him.
I had a single photograph given to me by a friend in the Mexican community, a man named Danny Lopez. It showed a young Cleveland standing at the rear of a large farm truck. The truck was filled with merchandise: women and girls. They looked back at the camera with expressionless faces and black eyes. They might have been farm workers, except they were tied with rope. I didn't know why the photo had been taken in the first place. I suspected it was some kind of memento. Lopez claimed that it had hung, framed and unnoticed, for years in Sal’s office, and he had stolen it from the wall.
I had a single meeting with Sal at a table in the Star-lite Lounge, and I showed him the photograph. It became clear the discomfort it might cause for him wasn’t worth one blonde wife, and we made a trade. He took back the image, and Charlene had her freedom. She got divorce papers and whatever she could pack into a couple of suitcases. She thought she had another chance to chase some happiness. He had taken it all back with a gun. I hadn't seen that part coming, and that was unforgivable. It was my fault.
Like a smug fool, I had congratulated myself on another job well done. I had taken her check and given her a receipt and shooed her from my office.
My ice had almost melted, and the last of the cubes rattled softly in the glass as I finished my drink. I looked at the dark sky and wondered if Charlene Cleveland could see me.
“I'll fix this for you. I promise,” I mumbled. “I'm no good, but I keep my promises. I'm good for that much.”
The words slurred in my own ears. I was drunk. I wanted to see stars, but the night was overcast and there weren't any. I raised my glass in good night to her, wherever she was now.
“I won't let him get away with it,” I said. “You can sleep.”
A couple of gulls screamed at each other over a waxed paper wrapper on the sidewalk, and billboards on latticed scaffolds fought with palm trees for the skyline. The dawn gleamed so pretty and blue that I looked at my Ford coupe and thought about trading it for a ragtop. It would have to wait until after lunch, though, because I had things to do.
I hung a right onto State Street and drove away from the beach. I had no trouble finding a parking spot in front of my office. I got out and turned my face up for a last taste of the morning sun before I headed inside. Across the street, the early drunks congregated on the sidewalk and waited for the Schooner Inn to open at eight o’clock. They seemed sociable, and I wondered if they were happier than I was.
I pulled my key out as I climbed the stairs, and looked up to see Annie Kahlo looking down. She waited for me at the top, hidden behind dark glasses and a bright scarf. Up close, she smelled like a summer storm; citrus and rain and something earthy. I would have liked to keep her with me the rest of the day, just for her perfume. I held on to my wits and got the door unlocked.
I had a hot plate in the corner of the office, and a coffee percolator to go with it. There was the bottle of bourbon in my desk drawer for special occasions, but it seemed too close to breakfast for that. I went up the hall to the men’s room to fill the coffeepot. When I got back, Annie sat quietly in one of the chairs across from my desk.
She still wore the scarf, but she had taken off her dark glasses and held them in her lap. Dingbat or not, I thought that she was the most beautiful thing I was going to see all day.
“It's still early,” she said, as though she could read my mind. “You never know.”
“This time I do,” I answered, as though I could read hers.
I got busy making coffee.
“You don’t have a secretary, Mister Crowe?”
“I had one once,” I said. “I didn’t have enough for her to do. She read magazines and fixed her makeup all morning, and generally got into my liquor by lunch time. She ran off to get married, and I didn’t replace her.”
“That’s a shame.”
I didn’t ask her why she thought so. I brought her a cup, and sat on the corner of my desk. “What can I do for you, Miss Kahlo?”
“Call me Annie, please,” she said. “I told you last night. I want to hire you. I want you to do something for June. I want you to work for her—and me. The job has two parts, really. I want you to find out for sure what happened to her, and then I want you to do something else. Something even more important.”
I kept my voice gentle. “Annie, June was your younger sister. She died twenty-five years ago. Unless that’s changed.”
“It hasn’t changed,” she said.
She sipped at her coffee, and set the cup on the desk beside me. She didn't look like she enjoyed it. I didn’t blame her. Maybe I needed to get another secretary, one who could make coffee.
“Money isn’t a problem,” she said. “I have money.”
“It isn’t that. After this long, she's just a memory. She isn't real. There are no records and no clues. How am I supposed to find out about someone who isn’t real?”
I spread my hands helplessly. She gazed at me for so long I wondered if I should say something else. I didn’t though, and finally she spoke.
“I’m not real, and you found me, didn’t you?”
I had no answer for that. Her dark eyes were steady, nearly serene. She sat very, very still.
“I’ll tell you a secret,” she said. “You’re not real, either, Mister Crowe. That makes you exactly the right person to find June.”
I took a deep breath. I kept my eyes on my desk top. “There’s another thing, Miss Kahlo…” I glanced up, caught her expression and corrected myself. “Annie. There’s another thing. Yesterday I had to attend a crime scene, up in the mountains. A bad kind of murder, and the person who reported it…the police mentioned your name.”
She looked away, and then busied herself roo
ting around in her bag.
“I’m pretty upset about it,” I said. “It was a woman I knew, and it wasn’t a nice way for her to die.”
I waited.
“Doesn’t it seem like a funny coincidence?” I asked. “A woman sitting in the very same chair as you’re sitting in now, just the day before yesterday, gets herself killed on a property you happen to own. And here you are.”
She stood up, went to the window and looked out at whatever went by below us on State Street. I looked at her looking. Finally, I cleared my throat and spoke. “Her name was Charlene Cleveland,” I said. “She was my client, and she trusted me. I feel like I should have kept her safe. I want to at least make sure that there's some justice for her. Can you understand that?”
“June was my little sister.” Her voice was flat. “I feel responsible for what happened to her. I should have kept her safe. I want to know things, too. Can you understand that?”
I felt as though unseen currents were pulling me out to places I didn't want to go. I didn't feel like I had much choice.
“If I tell you what happened to the woman, will you help me?” she asked. “Is that a good trade?”
“You know what happened to her?” I asked. “You need to tell me, or tell the police. It has nothing to do with my helping you.”
“I tried to talk to the police,” she said. “They don’t believe anything I say. I can see it in people’s eyes when they think I’m crazy.”
“I don’t care about crazy one way or the other. I just want to get at the truth.”
“Do you carry a gun?” she asked.
“In my pocket.” I touched my jacket, and then touched my desk. “A second one, just in case, in the top drawer.”
“Do you like it? Having guns?”
“No, I don't. I've never found anything agreeable about guns. I don’t have much choice about carrying one.”
She looked at the sky outside. A wildfire burned in the hills to the south of the city. It was a long way off, but I thought I caught a ghost of smoke in the air from the open window. She turned around to look at me.