by David Freed
No response.
A red Volkswagen Jetta that hadn’t seen a car wash in years, if ever, was parked on the curb in front. Somebody had scrawled, “Wash me,” on the back window. The shiny new BMW convertible McManus was driving when I’d seen him last was nowhere around.
On the side of the house was a chain-link fence. In back was a detached, two-car garage. The dented metal garage door was closed. Inside I could hear a woman sobbing mournfully and trying to sing.
The melody was hard to identify at first, let alone the lyrics. The woman was no crooner. But as I walked through the gate and drew closer, I realized that the tune was Adele’s “Someone Like You” and that there was raw anguish in her effort.
On the north wall of the garage was a weathered, partially open side door. I knocked and stepped inside, startling a very pregnant woman in her early thirties who had been standing at a workbench. She was wearing yellow rubber gloves and a bloodstained shop apron over a Mickey Mouse maternity top. Tears irrigated her cheeks. In her right hand was a meat cleaver.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”
She stormed toward me, teeth bared, raising the blade over her head like she meant business. “Get the hell out of here!”
I snared her wrist easily, twisting the cleaver from her grip and kicking it under the bench.
“What do you think you’re doing? Let go of me!”
I held her as she fought to get away, her back to my chest, her arms pinned to her sides. “It’s OK. I’m a pilot, a friend of Pete’s. I’m not going to hurt you.”
Only then did I realize the garage was a butcher shop, but unlike any I’d ever seen. The remains of exotic game animals hung from the rafters on meat hooks—the hind quarter of a zebra with the hide still attached, something shaped like an elephant tusk, some sort of small deer. Piled on the workbench, next to an industrial-sized band saw, were hunks of raw meat that looked like they were being carved into steaks and roasts. Opposite the workbench was a wall-sized cooler with glass doors like the kind you’d find at any convenience store, only this cooler was crammed top to bottom with packaged meat wrapped in clear plastic and neatly labeled: “KUDU”; “LEOPARD”; “LION”; “ORYX,” “RHINO.” Something acrid rose in my throat and stayed there.
“What is this place?”
She struggled to escape my grip. “What do you want?”
The cement floor was sticky with blood. The soles of my shoes stuck to it. “I’m not going to hurt you,” I repeated. “I just want to ask you a few questions, that’s all. You think I could do that?”
Her resistance lessened.
“. . . OK.”
“Great. It’s OK. You can trust me.”
I let her go. She backed away a couple of feet, wiping away tears and staring at the floor, too scared to look at me directly.
“My name’s Logan. I’m a flight instructor. Are you Pete’s wife?”
She nodded.
“What’s your name?”
“Peyton.”
“Nice to meet you, Peyton. Again, I’m sorry if I scared you. Is Pete around?”
She peeled off her gloves. “He’s up north somewhere.”
Freckled and of medium height, Peyton McManus was less pretty than she was cute, with a tangled thatch of hair the color of straw and buff-colored eyes rimmed red from crying. She wasn’t wearing a wedding band.
“What is this about?”
“Roy and Toni Hollister,” I said.
Her chin trembled. “Toni Hollister was a two-timing whore.” She pulled off the apron and tossed her rubber gloves angrily on the bench.
“What makes you say that?”
“I’m due in three weeks,” she said. “I gotta eat something.”
I followed her toward the back door. The yard was sun-baked dirt, littered with rusting oil drums, broken chunks of cinder block, and an old motorcycle missing its front wheel. She went inside and didn’t protest when I did likewise.
The kitchen hadn’t been updated in what looked to be about fifty years. Harvest gold appliances. Butcher block countertops. Rolled linoleum floor. Formica dinette set with chrome trim. She washed her hands in the sink and dried them on a dishrag draped over the handle of the oven door.
“Why was Toni a whore, Peyton?”
“What do you care?”
“I’m just asking, that’s all.”
“You said you’re a flight instructor.” She opened the refrigerator. Packages of meat like those in the garage were stacked on the shelves. One of them was labeled, “ELEPHANT.” “Why would a flight instructor care who Toni was banging, unless you were banging her too.”
“I didn’t know Toni. Never met her.”
She opened a can of Sprite and slapped a piece of American cheese between two slices of Wonder Bread. Eating nothing would’ve been more nutritious.
“Answer my question,” Peyton said, easing herself into a chair. “Why do you care?”
I told her how I’d gotten caught up in the Hollister case, how I’d known her husband for a while, and how I respected him as a pilot.
Peyton slowly chewed her sandwich without seeming to taste it. “Toni and my soon-to-be former spouse were sleeping together on a regular basis,” she said contemptuously. “The affair was going on for over a year, right under my nose. I only found out about it a couple days ago. Ran across some e-mails I wasn’t supposed to. Or maybe I was. I don’t care anymore.”
“I’m sorry, Peyton.”
She stared at nothing, lost in her own venomous thoughts. “Toni was always so nice to everybody. All hugs and air kisses. Couldn’t do enough for you. It was all an act. Such a fake bitch. And the thing was, I trusted her, you know?”
I didn’t say anything.
Peyton shook her head, staring into space. “The woman was, like, fifteen years older than him. OK, so she had money but, I mean, what kind of guy goes after some shriveled-up old bitch like that? Like he was looking for his mommy or something. I mean, what’s wrong with me? Am I so disgusting?”
“I asked myself the same thing when my wife left me.”
Peyton looked up at me.
“What did you say your name was?”
“Logan.”
“You want a cheese sandwich, Logan?”
I’m rarely squeamish, but knowing what the cheese was parked beside in her refrigerator made me want to throw up in my mouth. I declined the offer.
She got up and rinsed her plate in the sink.
“What’s with the meat processing operation out back?” I asked her.
“I don’t want to get in trouble.”
“I didn’t come here to get you in trouble.”
Her back was turned to me, her hands braced on the counter. Several seconds passed.
“Screw it,” Peyton said. “It wasn’t my idea, anyway.”
The idea, she explained, was Roy Hollister’s, an offshoot of his struggling safari business. Many hunters were interested only in trophy heads they could hang on their walls. Hollister came up with a system by which game animals would be butchered like cattle and flown illicitly to California in the luggage compartment of his jet before being carved into individual and family-size servings. The meat would then be sold to gourmands with a taste for the exotic and to a handful of upscale restaurants in Los Angeles and San Francisco that offered special customers special entrees—dishes that never appeared on their regular menus.
“Roy didn’t pay Pete hardly anything when he was flying for him,” Peyton said, washing off her dish in the sink, “and it got to the point that Pete wasn’t doing hardly any flying. Roy was flying himself. So the meat was like a bonus? With me pregnant and working only part-time, we had to find a way to pay the bills, you know?”
I nodded.
“You sure you don’t want a sandwich?”
“I’m good, thanks.”
The image she painted of a young pilot and his wife struggling financially didn’t square with the pricey new sports car I’d seen McMa
nus driving. I asked her about the car.
“That was Pete’s deal,” she said, drying the plate with a dish towel. “He told me Toni loaned him that Beemer until we could get back on our feet. Apparently I must not have understood the terms of the ‘loan.’ Christ, she didn’t loan him that car. She bought it for him. The same way a rich old man buys his girlfriend a diamond bracelet. She bought him a rifle too.”
“What kind of rifle?”
“I don’t know. A hunting rifle. Made out of some fancy wood.”
The kitchen adjoined the living room. Above a red brick veneer fireplace hung the stuffed trophy head of a pronghorn antelope. I could’ve sworn it was looking straight at me.
“Does Pete hunt?”
“Pete?” Peyton snorted. “Are you kidding? Pete loves to hunt. He grew up hunting. Roy took him to Africa a couple years ago with a bunch of his big-deal clients. The highlight of Pete’s life. I think he shot a deer or something. That’s where he is now—after I told him to pack his bags.”
“Pete’s in Africa?”
She looked at me funny, her left hand cradling her baby belly. “Up north, like I said. His dad has a cabin outside Frazier Park, in Pine Mountain Club. They used to go hunting up there all the time before he died.”
“Can you show me where Pete keeps his guns?”
“Why would I want to do that? I don’t even know you.”
“Somebody took a couple of shots at me last night.”
“And you think it was Pete? He may be a cheating piece of scum, but I find that a little hard to believe.”
The Buddha would have us trust everyone. My military mind knew better. A couple had been murdered and I, however willingly, had been sucked into the vortex of their violent deaths. Pete McManus had worked for the Hollisters. He knew I’d been asking questions about them. Did he have something to hide, something to fear that had compelled him to come after me? I didn’t know, but from where I sat, under the gaze of an antelope whose life he had stolen, everyone was suspect, including him.
“You think he shot Toni and Roy.”
I glanced back at Peyton McManus. Her expression was one of stunned disbelief and horror.
“I’m not saying he did or he didn’t. I’d still like to see his guns though.”
She led me down a short hall to their bedroom. The room was maybe ten feet square, if that, with lace curtains, a pressboard Ikea dresser, and matching nightstands. An older TV sat on the dresser. A hand-stitched quilt covered the bed. The closet had two sliding doors.
“I always have to be careful opening these,” Peyton said, clutching one of the doors with both hands. “Stupid things always come off, right on your foot. One more project he said he would get to but never did.”
“Allow me, please.”
She stepped aside as I manhandled the door, sliding it from left to right. As advertised, the stupid thing came off its track and landed on my toes.
“You OK?”
“Fine.” Bruised but otherwise intact, I set the door aside.
Peyton pushed a bunch of long dresses on hangers to the other side of the closet and began extracting firearms. Among the cache were two shotguns—a 12-gauge Remington pump-action, and a Mossberg .410 with a pistol grip—along with three rifles: an old lever-action Winchester .30-30; a Marlin bolt-action .223; and a .22-caliber Henry survival rifle with a collapsible barrel like the one I often packed in my cockpit when I was in the air force.
“Pretty sure that’s all of them,” Peyton said.
“He didn’t take any with him when he left?
“I couldn’t tell you.”
“You mean you can’t tell me, or you won’t?”
“I mean I wasn’t here when he left. I was at my mom’s. Pete’s into guns. I’m not. We used to argue over that. We used to argue over a lot of stuff.”
“Does he own any pistols or revolvers?”
“Not that I ever saw. His dad may have had some up at the house in Pine Mountain Club.”
She wrote down the address of the cabin without me having to pry it out of her.
“That’s the last of it,” she said, “just so you know.”
I wasn’t sure what she meant.
“The meat,” Peyton said. “There’s no more after this batch. I’m not sure where the rent money comes from after that. Gotta pay the hospital to deliver this baby and hire a divorce attorney. Who knows how much those guys charge in fees.”
“A lot,” I said. “I won’t tell anybody about the meat.”
“Some people think it’s gross. I just didn’t know what else to do.”
“It’ll work out.”
She walked me to the front door. “Do me a favor,” she said, “if you do happen to run into him, tell him he’s got a week to get his shit out of here or it’s all going to the dump.”
“I’ll tell him.”
Caliber-wise, none of the rifles Peyton McManus had pulled from the closet matched the one used to kill the Hollisters. The possibility certainly existed that her husband owned others. I presumed I’d find that out after I found him.
I presumed correctly.
NINETEEN
Even had the Ruptured Duck been airworthy, I still would have had to drive to Pine Mountain Club. The nearest airport was in Kern County, in Taft, sixty-plus miles away.
I filled up my truck at an AM-PM and bought two shriveled hotdogs while I was there. They tasted like they’d been cooked for a couple of years. Then I drove home to make sure Kiddiot had food. He was snoozing on top of the refrigerator.
“I hope to be back later tonight,” I said, scratching him behind the ears.
He jerked his head away as if to say, “Stop touching me.”
A houseplant would have been more affectionate.
If I’d learned anything visiting with Pete McManus’s wife, it was that Pete was into guns. Somebody like that, you don’t drop in unannounced, especially unarmed. I grabbed my .357 and stashed it under the front seat of my truck, then cruised over to the hospital to check on Mrs. Schmulowitz on my way out of town.
Nurse Rosa Uribe was behind the front desk at the cardiac intensive care unit, doing paperwork.
“Your favorite consulting cardiologist has returned,” I said.
“She’s gone,” Uribe said without looking up and without a trace of compassion.
My mouth went instantly dry. “Say again?”
“I said she’s gone. She’s no longer here.”
Finding words to describe the anguish that washed over me at that moment would be impossible. I’ve lost friends in combat. This was worse. Mrs. Schmulowitz was gone. My chest tightened. Who would I watch Monday Night Football with? Who would cook me brisket?
“When did she pass?” I managed to ask.
“What’re you talking about?”
“You said Mrs. Schmulowitz was gone.”
Nurse Uribe looked up at me and her face softened. “Oh, honey, I’m so sorry,” she said, taking my hand. “I didn’t mean it like that. Your friend was transferred this morning to a regular room. She’s actually doing much better.”
I wanted to hug and decapitate the nurse at the same time. I wiped my eyes instead.
“What room is she in?”
Rosa Uribe looked it up on her computer.
A PHLEBOTOMiST wearing pink scrubs and big gold-hooped earrings was bent at the waist, poking a needle into my landlady’s outstretched right arm. She was having trouble finding a good vein.
“Vampires have fewer demands,” Mrs. Schmulowitz said. “What is it with you people?”
“Finally,” the phlebotomist said, blowing a strand of brown hair out of her face and watching a glass vial slowly fill with blood the color of burgundy wine.
“She’s just doing her job, Mrs. Schmulowitz,” I said.
“A job? This is not a job, bubeleh. This is a Bella Lugosi movie.”
“I am so sorry,” the phlebotomist said. “You have exceptionally thin veins.”
“You bet I do,
honey, so I exercise and watch what I eat. People in America, they don’t exercise and boy, do they eat. Only in America does a pizza get to your house faster than an ambulance. When do I get outta here? Can somebody please answer me that?”
I assured her the hospital would keep her no longer than was necessary. She was hardly placated.
“Where’s my corned beef on rye?” she demanded. “You said you were gonna bring me one, remember?”
“I remember, Mrs. Schmulowitz, but I just don’t think corned beef is a good idea right now.”
“Be that way.” She sighed. “Don’t mind me. I’ll just lie here and starve to death.”
“All done,” the phlebotomist said, applying a Band-Aid. “There. That wasn’t so bad, was it?”
“Yeah,” Mrs. Schmulowitz said, “if you’re a voodoo doll.”
I waited until we were alone and tried to tell her how relieved I was that she wasn’t pushing daisies and would soon be coming home, but the words caught in my throat.
“C’mere, bubby,” Mrs. Schmulowitz said, motioning me closer.
I leaned in, over her bed. She reached up and kissed my forehead.
“Go. I’m sure you got places to be. Stop worrying. I’ll survive.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
“I’ll be back tomorrow morning.”
“Good. Now, get outta here. Just don’t come back without that sandwich if you know what’s good for you. If I have to eat any more orange Jell-O, I swear I’m gonna get all Al Pacino on these people. Always yelling, that man, every movie.”
“You’ll have that sandwich, Mrs. Schmulowitz. I promise.”
IT’S NOT easy getting from Rancho Bonita to Pine Mountain Club, an hour north of Los Angeles in the Los Padres National Forest. You have to backtrack south on the 101 to Ventura, then cut east on Highway 126, then north, up the concrete, trash-strewn wasteland that is the Golden State Freeway, before turning back west onto Frazier Mountain Park Road. A circuitous, roughly two-hour route, only to find yourself in the middle of nowhere.
Not that Pine Mountain Club is a dump. It’s actually a pleasant place, a loose confederation of several hundred rustic homes nestled amid evergreens in a deep valley directly astride the mighty San Andreas Fault. A location as picturesque and as potentially cataclysmic as any you’ll find in Southern California.