Even so, letting himself into his apartment, he took a second to listen before turning on the lights. How does one judge a silence? The same way, he supposed, one weighs the future.
He dropped his briefcase onto the dining room table, made the rounds of the penthouse rooms, checking to be sure he was, in fact, alone. Kicking off his shoes, stripping off his tie, he went to the closet and crouched, working the combination on his safe.
Tugging open the thick metal door, he first took out the weapon, a 9mm Sig Sauer, then checked to be sure the magazine was fully loaded, a round in the chamber.
Finally, he reached beyond his disaster cash and passport toward the back, found the large velvet bag, and took it out.
Sitting on the bed, he undid the satin ties and opened the soft dark sack, removing from inside first one pump, then the other—Franco Sarto, a style called Cicero, blackberry suede, both freckled with blood. As always, he told himself that this was the last night he could keep them. And for the first time, he knew this was true.
What the Creature Hath Built
He wasn’t sure how long he’d driven or exactly why he’d stopped. The sign read Scully’s: wood-shake roof and faux stone cladding, glass brick windows, almost more a bunker than a bar. Even here, the smell of cinders.
He’d slalomed down the hills in a fury—curving parkways with overgrown medians: sawgrass, wooly sage, towering eucalyptus—glancing again and again at his rearview, watching the sky turn a plummy shade of brown. He’d finally hit traffic near the bottom, joining the stop-and-go, others fleeing. Act normal, he’d told himself, and carried that thought with him now as he pulled on the heavy studded door.
The deep room blurred. Hazy late-day sun behind, murk and glow within.
Finally his eyes adjusted and he spotted two men at the bar. They turned toward the doorway and stared. Beyond them, a TV flickered high in the corner, sound muted, the channel set to news of the fire.
“In or out, cap’n,” one of them said.
The thick door whispered shut behind him.
A chaos of filthy, half-filled glasses cluttered the length of the bar, each one bearing the filmy remains of some concoction, grown watery from melting ice. A party, Bernardo thought, or its aftermath, wondering if it was just the pair of them here now, left behind.
The nearer of the two had bristly, straw-colored hair and a hefty build, with a sunburn that stopped midway up his face like a soot line. The eyes were small and lifeless, despite the welcoming smile. He wore painter pants and a white guayabera with embroidered tracery down the front.
The other was knobby and tall with a backdraft of nutmeg hair curling away from his brow. He too wore a billowing shirt, adorned with hula girls and pineapples.
Taken together they looked like refugees from a redneck cruise. That or a Baja wedding.
“Bartender around?” Bernardo pulled back a stool, tried to arrange himself on it with conviction.
“You mean Henry,” the thin one said. A smoker’s voice, like a wasp in a jar.
“I suppose I do.” Despite himself, Bernardo glanced up at the TV. An aerial shot, houses engulfed in flame. Boiling smoke. “Or Scully. Whoever.”
“Scully’s just the name on the sign.” Sunburn offered that same blank smile. “Place been through a couple hands since Scully left the scene. New owner tends bar himself sometimes, name is Henry.”
Bernardo surveyed the derelict glassware. “Whoever he is, looks like he’s been busy.”
“Hell, Henry’s got nothing to do with this. Had to run, square away the homefront, told us to help ourselves. We took him kinda literal. You heard about the fires.”
“Yeah.” Bernardo was trembling. The surface of the bar felt gritty. “Sure.”
“In Henry’s regrettable absence, Eddie here’s pouring.” Sunburn clapped his hands. “Eduardo, where’s your manners?”
The rangy one jumped up and bit back a grin as he scuttled around to the other side of the bar. The state of things back there was worse yet—ravaged lemons, eggshells cradling unused yolks, maraschino cherries bleeding into the sink. Bernardo guessed the two characters had been here alone for a while.
“Name’s Glendon.” The sunburned one stuck out his hand.
Bernardo took it, felt the intimate leathery callouses. “Jason.”
Glendon, still in Bernardo’s grip, thumbed his lighter’s flint wheel with the other hand, caught a flame, lit his cigarette. Taking a deep drag, he smiled through his exhale. “Welcome to Scully’s, Jason.”
“Name your poison.” Eddie leaned forward, fingering a cigarette from Glendon’s pack. Smoking prohibitions clearly had no truck here. “Happy hour’s never been happier.”
The two men laughed. Bernardo could not remember ever feeling so tired.
Glendon added, “Least not since we got rid of Bitchy Miss High Hat.”
Eddie chuckled, lit up. “Tell him the story.”
“Oh, he don’t want to hear—”
“C’mon, tell him the damn story.”
Glendon tapped some ash onto the floor. “About fifteen minutes before you got here, Jason, there was this woman sitting right where you are. Kinda full of herself, if you know what I mean. Had an attitude.”
“Thought she was tits and turmoil,” Eddie said.
“We’re all just sitting here watching the news,” Glendon continued, “and there was talk about this and that and finally some damn thing about trauma—you know, the people who stand to lose everything up there, oh boo hoo. Anyways, this woman, she apparently thinks ‘trauma’ is some kinda cue. Like we’d just been sitting around waiting to hear all about her sad and screwed-up life.”
“Says, ‘Oh, I know about that,’” Eddie chimed in. “‘I know about trauma,’ like it’s someplace with a tour. Graceland. The Alamo.”
“Anyway, off she goes. Tells us some guy busted into her house one night, held her at knifepoint for two hours—so she said, God only knows if it’s true—but giving her the benefit of the goddamn doubt and assuming, yes, some nitwit snuck into her house, put a blade to her throat, she just—now these is her words, not mine—‘did what she always does.’”
“Always,” Eddie noted, “meaning with damn near every man she meets.”
“That was kinda the gist,” Glendon agreed. “Like the guy’s having a knife wasn’t the issue. The fact he was male and standing there was the damn issue.”
“Not the most charming woman on the planet,” Eddie said. “Butt ugly to boot.”
“Be that as it may,” Glendon said, “the story goes on and the meaning of ‘what she always does’ becomes a little clearer. She didn’t fight. She didn’t just lie there and let him get it over with. She whined and wheedled and basically just nagged the poor bastard out of the house.”
“Got so sick of the sound of her voice,” Eddie said, “he just turned around and left.”
“And Eddie and me, we’re sitting here listening to this, wondering why the hell any sane woman would admit to such, at which point sauve Eduardo here—”
Eddie grinned. “Sometimes I don’t know when to bite my tongue.”
“He looks this ogress dead in the eye and says, ‘You mean to tell me, the point of the goddamn story is not even a rapist would fuck ya?’”
They broke into a helpless spate of laughter, Glendon slapping the bar and spewing smoke, Eddie shivering with the giggles. Bernardo worked up a go-along smile.
Glendon wiped away a tear. “Where’s our manners? Seriously, Jason, have a drink. Eddie here’s quite the mixologist. Tequila gimlet, rum alexander, sloe gin rickey—if he don’t know how to slap it together, he’ll look it up in the Mr. Boston. Or just improvise.” Another laugh, low and chesty. “He does like to improvise.”
Bernardo surveyed the glowing shelves behind the bar, noticed the conspicuous absences—Courvoissier, Bushmills, Bood
les, Pernod—the distinctive bottles plucked from their spots and abandoned elsewhere. The gaps in the backlit array conjured a strange feeling of lonesomeness, like he was looking at the future.
He spotted his brand finally. “Crown Royal,” he said, “double, neat. Water back. If you don’t mind.”
A kind of nervous attention rose in Glendon’s face, like a blush beneath the sunburn, stopping at the eyes. “Mind? Eddie, you mind?”
Eddie stared. “I can mix you a first-rate cocktail.” The scratchy voice low, not inviting. “Don’t mind the glassware, plenty more in back. Nothing but fucking glasses in back.”
They both eyed Bernardo. He was spoiling the party. The hair on his neck bristled, he knew what came next—a flinch, a reckless grin, a swing. Leave, he thought, too weary to move. “Sure. Sorry.” He glanced back and forth, one man, the other. “How about an old fashioned.”
Like that, Eddie clicked back to affable. “Now you’re talking.” He rapped the top of the bar. “Crown Royal your brand, I take it. Top shelf Canadian, nice rye. Should work well.”
Drunks and their mood swings, Bernardo thought. He felt like he was looking up from underwater. “If you would.”
Eddie chafed his hands and went to it. Bernardo glanced up at the TV again. Same image, different angle, the view from a hovering chopper. Flame and smoke and devastation.
“So what line of work you in, Jason?” Glendon lifted a nearby glass, thought better of it, nudged it aside and chose another.
Bernardo lowered his gaze from the TV. “Real estate,” he said, the lie bubbling up from nowhere he could name. He almost laughed, the irony.
Eddie and Glendon exchanged another glance.
“Huh,” Glendon said. “Seriously.”
“Yeah. Seriously. That a problem?”
Glendon studied him, as though taking his measure. “I dunno, Jason. Build like yours?” He gestured to suggest the arms, the chest. “I woulda figured you for a cop. Firefighter maybe.”
Eddie mulled an orange slice and cherry in the bottom of a glass, tossed in a sugar cube, dashed in bitters. “But if he was a firefighter, Glendon, he’d be up there on the hill, you know, fighting the god damn fire. Cops no doubt are all up there too.”
The ensuing silence lingered. Glendon lifted the plastic sword from his nameless cocktail, plucked the cherry off it with his teeth. “Touché, Eddie. Looks can deceive. Am I right, Jason?”
Six months earlier, Leeanne had buzzed his cell mid-shift at the station house, telling him they had to meet. “Rickshaw, booth near the back. I’m here now. Please.”
Eight years they’d been married, he’d never heard that voice.
He begged off a civilian volunteer seminar on triage and hoofed over to the restaurant in his blues, six blocks away. Sinewy and freckled, cornsilk blond, Leeanne was already working on her third Tanq & T as he sat down. “Hey,” she whispered, finger-brushing her bangs.
The tiny smiling waitress appeared. Her nameplate read May but Bernardo, a regular, knew her as Meifeng. Beautiful wind. She took his order—coffee, black, two sugars—then scooted out of earshot.
“You may want something stiffer,” Leanne said.
She was the scrappiest, sunniest woman he knew, poster girl for the ongoing experiment known to the world as California, but in that moment he saw thunderheads behind her eyes.
“What’s this about?”
Things had taken a turn between them a little over two years before, when she teamed up with Coughlin and his mortgage operation. She began having grand ideas, all anchored to money. Bernardo felt all but certain she and Coughlin were catting around, the only thing keeping her in the marriage being a half million in shared equity on the house in Montclair and his healthcare package through the IAFF. But that was okay; he was hardly a saint himself.
“How much cash,” she said, “can you put your hands on right now?”
“You call that an answer?”
The coffee arrived. They smiled grimly and asked for more time with the menus. Beautiful Wind rushed away.
“You know those properties I told you about up in Black Diamond?”
What he’d known, up to that moment, was that she and Coughlin had “invested” in a half dozen languishing McMiniMansions on a cul de sac in the toniest new enclave up near the Mt. Diablo foothills. Called Black Diamond Estates, the development sat backed up against a protected wilderness, which, to men of his profession, meant fire country. She’d promised him they’d insured wisely.
But what he learned that day, his stomach shrinking to peach-pit dimension as she explained, was that they’d used straw buyers on title—creative paperwork, fake occupations and incomes plucked from thin air—no money down, teaser-rate monthlies. She said everyone had done it, only a fool wouldn’t. Join the stampede or get trampled. “Besides,” she said, “high-end demand is inelastic.” Geniuses do love their jargon.
The goal was to let the straw buyers enjoy the extravagant houses, pay the monthlies on the underlying notes as rent, while Leanne and Coughlin worked to flip the properties before the balloon payments hit. Once the houses rolled over, everyone would earn points on the windfall.
That all seemed a cruel joke now. The economy hadn’t just hit a ditch, it was cratering. Four of the six bogus owners were jobless or chasing ghost commissions. They couldn’t make the monthly nut and were threatening mutiny.
“I don’t get it,” he said. “They’ve got no stake. Why not just walk away, hand the damn things back to the bank?”
“It’ll tank their credit. Seven years in financial purgatory’s a lot to ask.”
“Work a short sale.”
“Same deal, Jason. You think we haven’t thought this through?”
“Honestly?”
“State passed a new law this year—bank agrees to a short sale, they can’t go after the difference between the sale price and the amount of the note. That’s frozen things up. Lenders are hanging tough.”
“Then I’m unclear on what ‘mutiny’ means.”
She downed the rest of her gin and tonic, shook the ice, went after the dregs. “Ever hear of the Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force?”
Bernardo took a quick glance outside the booth, make sure no one was listening in. “That’s FBI. You mean these prestanombres of yours would rather wear a snitch jacket than botch their credit? Where did you find these toads?”
“Coughlin’s golfing buddies. One sells Chris Craft. Another, I dunno, has a car lot out in Turlock I think. The others are in the biz.”
“You got played by your own kind.”
“Don’t start, Jason, okay? Besides, you’re kinda in the biz yourself, yeah?”
One of the perks about life as a firefighter, especially in Contra Costa, was the time and means it gave you to pursue a second career. Given his rank and seniority, Bernardo’s salary topped two hundred grand, at a job that amounted to working out, eating well, and tagging along on the pumper truck to watch paramedics deal with accident victims. House fires were almost history; if they fought a blaze, it was almost always in the grassy hills out in the tractless boonies.
He worked on the side renovating fixer-uppers, and thus had the same flip mentality she did, except he aimed somewhat lower: neglected Craftsman bungalows in west county, Martinez and San Pablo and Richmond. He liked the work, the physicality of it, the demands it placed on your concentration—tearing out the old knob-and-tube, running new wire through the walls, stripping the roof, taking a crowbar and hammer to the ancient cabinets, slamming in new sinks and shower stalls, bolting the foundation, sanding, caulking, painting. End of the day, you felt like something had happened.
“How much are we talking?”
She was staring at her placemat, the Chinese zodiac. Year of the Rabbit, a time for peace and prosperity. “One point two-five.”
A needle-like n
umbness tinged his skin. “A hundred twenty-five grand?” He did a quick mental tally, working it out. Six loans, all top of market. “That per month or …”
She fiddled with her glass then leaned out of the booth, scoured the room for May the waitress, gestured for a refill.
“Leeanne—”
She looked ready to get hit. He felt ready to oblige her.
“One point two-five mil.”
The floor buckled. “How many fucking months—”
“Don’t be an ass, Jason. Keep it down.”
“How stupid could you two—”
“The loan desks are crazy, all the repos and walkbacks and REOs, we figured we had time.”
“No way I can put my hands—”
“I’m not asking for it all, just—”
“Even if I did, you’d just be caught up. What about next month, the month after—”
“Don’t lecture me.”
“Don’t come begging.”
He got up to leave. She latched onto his wrist. “Jason, don’t. You can’t.” She swallowed hard. “One of the houses is in my name.”
He cocked his head, wondering if he’d heard right. She just stared, her eyes locked on his, and for some reason he flashed on the last time they’d gone at it, down in the den, watching The Naked Kiss on IFC, a mid-flick urge, both of them half in the bag, pink sweats yanked down from her hips, one knee on the sofa, one foot on the floor, him pounding away from behind as she glanced over her shoulder, tucking her hair behind her ear, waiting for him to finish. For better or for worse, till death.
The waitress delivered the Tanq & T, took the empty away, no pretense of ordering lunch anymore.
“You were gonna tell me this when?” California was a community property state. He was on the hook right with her.
She shrugged, scraped at her bangs, drank.
Thirteen Confessions Page 7