The Shake

by Mel Nicolai

  This seemed to satisfy the car question for her. “So what’s in the envelope?” she asked.

  “Our last order of business for tonight. Do you have a computer?”

  “Yeah, more or less. It might be older than my car.”

  “What kind of computer is it?”

  “An old desktop PC.”

  “Do you prefer a PC?”

  “No, not really. I don’t know very much about them. I got it cheap from a friend.”

  “There’s five thousand dollars in the envelope. Tomorrow, after you pick up the car, go to the Apple Store at Arden Fair and buy a laptop. I recommend you go top-of-the-line, the seventeen inch MacBook Pro, but it’s up to you. Have them fill it with RAM and buy the warranty. It’ll run around four thousand. Use the remainder to buy a decent carry bag and anything you might want to add. Software, or whatever. What’s left over you can keep.”

  She hadn’t hesitated picking up the cell phone or the car keys, but she was looking at the envelope like it might bite.

  “One thing you’ll learn about me, Karla, I don’t like to beat around the bush.”

  “Funny you should put it that way,” she said. “I mean, that’s a lot of money, on top of the salary and the car. I guess I’m wondering how often you’re going to be beating around my bush?”

  I was glad she’d brought it up. “Your suspicions are understandable,” I said. “So let’s get it straight now, and we won’t have to talk about it again. There won’t be any fucking in this relationship. Neither literal nor metaphorical. I’m not going to fuck you, and as long as you’re straight with me, and do your job, I won’t fuck you over.”

  She was trying to be cool, but I could see the whole thing was a bit much for her.

  “You know how weird this is, don’t you?” she asked. “I mean, out of the blue, offering me this job, all this money?”

  “What? Do you want to go home and fetch a copy of your resume? Do you want me to ask you a few standard job interview questions? How were your grades in school? Ever been arrested? Use drugs? Where do you see yourself in five years? Would that make you feel better?”

  “You can say whatever you want. It’s still weird.”

  “It is what it is, Karla. The job isn’t difficult, but there isn’t a lot of room for screw-ups. If you follow the rules, we’ll get along peachy and I’ll make it worth your while. If you don’t, well, hopefully we won’t ever have to go there.”

  She picked up the envelope. “I have to get back to work.”

  “I’ll give you a call on Saturday,” I said, and watched her walk away.

  Chapter 5

  I knew there was a good chance that Francine Arnaud had merely imagined a connection between Ron Richardson and her husband’s murder. Many of the events we perceive to be related are, in fact, not related at all. Their connections are completely imaginary. Like the man who thinks he’s going to have a good day because he hits all green lights on his drive to work. At the same time, while our imaginations are misleading us, there is an inconspicuous web of subtle influences threading its way through the world, establishing a pervasive connectedness that passes largely unperceived. Between those two lies the world of practical affairs where a quarter buys you so many minutes in a parking meter, and you know that your computer is better protected by anti-virus software than by prayer. But there are times when the barriers—between the imaginary, the mundane, and the mysterious—give way and we can perceive things that would otherwise remain hidden. When that happens, the imagination, instead of leading us into fantasy, can function as a conduit into the world’s mysteries. Or, at any rate, into something interesting.

  That’s what I was hoping for from the Arnaud business. Something interesting. And if that didn’t happen, it was at least a chance to fatten my bank account. I didn’t need Richardson’s money, but I didn’t like to pass up an opportunity for easy income. And the more I thought about it, the more Richardson looked ripe for the picking.

  Either way, it really didn’t matter if the Richardson/Arnaud connection turned out to be a dead end. There wasn’t anything riding on it. I was just curious. Of course, there were other considerations; some good reasons for keeping my nose out of the Arnaud mess. Involving myself in the private affairs of one of my meals just wasn’t very smart. My rule of thumb was “Eat and run.” Take what I was after and walk away. The best insulator between myself and my donors was distance. Whether or not to pursue the Arnaud matter came down to which was stronger: my curiosity over a chance convergence of events, or my reluctance to deviate from my normal policies for self-preservation.

  Not surprisingly, my curiosity won out. I didn’t really understand why, but over the years curiosity had become a kind of life raft for me. Vampires often perish from the inability to give their activities a guiding context. They lose the ability to make efficacious practical judgments. For me, a certain fascination for the complexities of chance, awe before the world’s infinite contingency, was probably as close as I ever got to finding a guiding context for myself. Pleasure in my own curiosity was as close as I got to feeling at home in the world.

  This may not have been any more than a story I told myself, but it was a useful story. If I were human, the world of social relations would provide a context to find meaning in my activities. But I was on my own. On the one hand, free to have my own reasons for doing what I chose to do. But at the same time, condemned to finding those reasons for myself.

  When Saturday rolled around, I called Karla as I had said I would. She had picked up the car and bought the computer. She was as excited about the MacBook as she was about the car. We exchanged email addresses. I told her I wouldn’t use email very often, and then only for general matters without urgency, but asked her to check her mail once a day, or so, just in case. I also gave her instructions to pick me up the following evening at 11:00 p.m. by the footbridge on University Avenue. I had decided to have a talk with Richardson on money matters, and I would play the Arnaud factor by ear.

  The next evening, I arrived at the footbridge a few minutes early. The night was clear and cool, with a light breeze. The moon was just a sliver, low on the horizon. A beautiful dark night. Karla was already there, parked directly across the street from the bridge. I went around the car and got in on the passenger side. She was wearing a stocking cap pulled down tight on her skull and a black leather jacket. She looked like she was on her way to unload a truck.

  “Nice hat,” I said. “Been waiting long?”

  She ignored the remark about the hat. “Not long. Five minutes, maybe. Where to?”

  Richardson had a piece of prime riverfront property out on the Garden Highway, not far from San Juan Road. “Take Howe down to El Camino and turn left,” I said. “Then go all the way to the end where El Camino hits El Centro Road.”

  She thought about it for few seconds. “It would be faster to take 50 to I-5.”

  “We’re not in a hurry. Let’s go the slow way. How do you like the car?”

  “It’s a nice car. What’s with Tony the mechanic?”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, anticipating what was to come.

  “He’s a little scary, don’t you think? He’s like, bigger than my refrigerator. He looks like he could throw a car at you if he got mad enough. I mean, big guys don’t usually bother me. But he’s freaky big. I don’t mean he’s like a freak, or anything. Actually, his body is kind of amazing. It’s like, perfectly proportioned, but huge.”

  As humans go, Tony was a little scary. He was Navaho, and big even by their standards. Six foot five, with the barrel-chested, narrow-hipped build not uncommon among his people. Tony had a slight scowl that made strangers think he was angry, but he wasn’t. His face was just put together that way. He was a very friendly, gentle man.

  “Tony’s all right. Did he give you a hard time about the car?”

  “Not at all. He seemed kind of short tempered until I told him why I was there. Then he started falling all over himself, being li
ke, super-polite.”

  “Did you ask him about Linda?”

  “Yeah. He said she was doing fine and she got accepted at UC Davis.”

  “That’s good.”

  “He also asked how Mio was. Is that your wife?”

  Tony was one of the few people who had some kind of established relationship with both Mio and me. For me, he was a mechanic and he supplied a car. For Mio, Tony occasionally provided a different kind of service. But I wasn’t ready to discuss any of this with Karla.

  “I think it was Montaigne,” I said, shifting the conversation away from Mio, “who said that curiosity was a scourge of the soul.”

  “I’m not sure what ‘scourge’ means,” Karla said.

  Most people will try to hide their ignorance, even when it means preserving it. I was beginning to think Karla might be OK. “Originally,” I explained, “a scourge was a whip used to dispense punishment.”

  “So does that mean if I ask too many questions you’ll whip me?”

  She seemed about half serious.

  “Think of it as my taking an interest in your soul,” I said.

  She looked at me like I’d said something bordering on repulsive. “You’re not going to start getting religious, are you?”

  “Karla,” I said, chuckling, “you can ask questions. Just don’t get miffed if I choose not to answer.”

  Our eyes met briefly, then Karla returned to her driving. When we got to the end of El Camino, I had her turn right, then left on San Juan Road. San Juan terminated at the Garden Highway, a levee road running along the Sacramento River. Between the river and the levee there was a narrow strip of land decorated with the mansions of some of Sacramento’s more moneyed residents.

  I directed her to pull over just before the stop sign. Karla pulled the car onto the shoulder and stopped.

  “I’ll get out here,” I said, opening the door.

  “Am I supposed to wait for you?” she asked.

  “I’m not sure how long I’ll be. Maybe an hour. Maybe two or three. I’ll call you on your cell when I’m ready to be picked up.”

  Karla glanced around at the dark, empty fields. “There’s not much around here, you know, and it’s kinda late.”

  “There’s a restaurant on the corner of 28th and J that’s open twenty-four hours. Or, if you want, you can go home and wait.”

  “It’ll take me fifteen or twenty minutes to get back here. Is that okay?”

  “That’s fine,” I said, and got out of the car. The air was full of river smells. Karla pulled away, turning left and heading toward downtown. Her receding taillights were the only visible traffic.

  My destination was only a couple hundred yards from the intersection. Richardson’s house was constructed of rectangular sections of steel, concrete, and glass. It followed the ground’s gentle descent toward the river, like irregular steps forming the facets of giant crystals. I particularly liked the broad expanses of glass. They made the lit up interior look like a stage set. A riding lawn mower sat parked in the shadow of a shed about twenty yards from the house. The seat looked comfortable, so, like a vampire farmer who has driven his midget tractor to the drive-in movies, I climbed on and proceeded to watch the show.

  Richardson and a woman who looked about half his age were in the living room, watching a very large wall-mounted wide-screen TV. The woman was wearing pajamas. She had recently showered and her hair was wrapped in a towel. Richardson was still dressed in jeans, cowboy boots, and a garish Hawaiian print shirt. He was slouched down on the sofa with his legs stretched out, his boots up on the coffee table. A dog, it looked like a Golden Retriever, was sleeping on the rug nearby.

  At this point in the game, I preferred to leave the woman out of it, so I just watched, waiting to see how things would develop. I knew Richardson went through women at the rate of two or three a year. If this one had been with him for a while, I figured they would be past the honeymoon stage, and there was a good chance they wouldn’t go to bed at the same time.

  I figured right. It wasn’t long before the woman sat up, said something to Richardson, kissed him on the cheek and left the room. Richardson didn’t even look at her. A moment later a light came on in one of the bedrooms. I could hear a hair dryer run for a minute or two. Then the light went out.

  Richardson continued to watch TV for another half hour or so before aiming the remote and turning it off. When the TV went black, the dog perked up and they both went out the back door. I climbed off the lawn mower and began to circle around the house. When I got to where I could see him, Richardson was standing at the far edge of the lawn, where the grass ended at a slope dropping down to the riverbank. The dog was meandering around with its nose to the ground, looking for the right place to pee.

  Richardson had his back to me and I was downwind from the dog. I sprinted across the lawn, hooked my foot under the dog’s rib cage, and gave him a little flip that sent him sailing out into the river. The splash brought Richardson out of his reverie. Confused, he stood staring, trying to figure out why his dog had jumped into the water. I stepped up behind him and gave him a shove that sent him tumbling down the slope.

  Grunting and cursing, Richardson rolled to a stop just short of the water. I was already down the slope when he started to get up, and I slapped him hard across the cheek. My open-handed slap sounded like a small-caliber gunshot against Richardson’s face. It knocked him down, spinning him halfway around so that he landed hard on his left shoulder. I grabbed both of his feet, yanked his cowboy boots off, and tossed them into the river.

  They must have been his favorite boots. When he realized what I had done, he flew into a rage, charging me with his head down, roaring like a bull. I stepped out of his path and slapped him again, hard on the back of the head. He went back down with a loud humph, his face and chest plowing into the dirt. Before he could try anything else, I put my foot on the back of his neck.

  “Stay down,” I commanded. “If you try to get up, I’ll throw you in the river.”

  The fight went out of him as fast as it had flared up. “Please don’t,” he pleaded, “I can’t swim.”

  I moved a couple of steps back and sat down on a rock. I could hear the dog breathing as it swam. The current had taken it a good way downstream before it found a spot to climb onto the bank. The tags on its collar jingled as it shook the water out of its coat, then the dog’s padded steps headed back in our direction. A few seconds passed before its head appeared at the top of the slope. It made a little whining noise and retreated back to the house.

  Disgusted by his dog’s performance, Richardson apparently decided it was time to deal with the situation. “What the fuck do you want?” he asked, trying to make it sound like he was in control.

  “I haven’t even introduced myself,” I said, “and you’re already swearing at me, Ron.”

  Richardson rolled onto his side. “So who the fuck are you?”

  “My name is Shake. And before you let your bad judgment get the better of you, if you try to attack me again, not only will I throw you in the river, I’ll break both of your arms first. Are we clear on that?”

  I could tell from the expression on his face he wasn’t going to risk it.

  “Those were five hundred dollar boots,” he whined.

  “Are we clear, Ron”?

  “Yeah, we’re fucking clear.”

  “Good. You can sit up now and we’ll have a civilized conversation.”

  Richardson raised himself to a sitting position. “You mind if I use my handkerchief?”

  I gestured for him to go ahead. He took it out of his back pocket and proceeded to wipe the dirt off his face.

  “I’m going to say some names, Ron, and I want you to tell me what you know about them.”

  I recited the names of the three main distributors in his drug operation. When I said the first name, Richardson paused for a second, then continued wiping his face, as if it hadn’t meant anything to him. On the second name, he stopped wiping his face.
On the third, he looked like he’d swallowed the handkerchief. I waited while he decided what line of bullshit he was going use.

  “Never heard of them,” he said, as if that might settle the matter.

  “The thing is, Ron, you can’t actually play dumb if you really are dumb.”

  His anger flared again. He clearly wasn’t used to this kind of exchange. “Do you have any idea who the fuck you’re calling dumb?”

  “A run-of-the-mill asshole who’s been lucky, so far. I can change that if you insist.”

  “What do you want?” he asked, frustrated that his normal blustering wasn’t working for him.

  “Don’t you mean, what the fuck do I want?”

  “OK, what the fuck do you want?” he corrected, putting on a show of accommodation.

  “I want two things from you,” I said, “neither of which is negotiable.” I took a small slip of paper from my pocket and held it out close enough for Richardson to lean forward and take it without getting up. “That’s a Cayman Islands phone number. Tonight, after we’ve finished our talk, I want you to call that number and ask for Mr. C. They’ll ask who’s calling. Tell them you’re calling on behalf of Shake and you want to make a deposit. They’ll give you instructions on how to continue.”

  “Make a deposit?” Richardson asked, curious about what that implied.

  “Yes, Ron. From now on, on the last day of every month, you’re going to deposit ten thousand dollars into my bank account.”

  Richardson scoffed. “You’re out of your fucking mind!”

  “The last day of the month, every month, before midnight, Pacific Standard Time. It’s important that you not be late.”

  The idea of parting with that much money seemed to give Richardson a fresh shot of testosterone. “You listen to me,” he yelled, starting to get up, “you insane little fuck! You don’t...”

  But I already had him by the throat. He started thrashing around, trying to free himself from my grip. I squeezed hard enough to really scare him. I thought his eyes might pop out of his face.