I came to an intersection, stopped at the light. There’d been a convenience store on the southwest corner at one time, but it had been torn down in preparation for a new business that had never arrived, and desert had retaken the land. I took advantage of the open space and looked past the empty lot down the row of competing signs until I saw what I was looking for: The Shady Palm Motel.
The light changed. I eased into the right lane and pulled up in front of the motel, parking on the street next to the red curb. A dented green Torino with gray primer patches on its side blocked the motel driveway, and a drunken piece of white trash was sitting on the small square of dead lawn in front of the office, passing a brown-bagged bottle to a shirtless Mexican man. An overweight black woman in shocking pink hot pants and a spangled halter top walked up and down the sidewalk, smiling at traffic.
Looked like Sutton’s kind of place.
I walked around the Torino, ignoring the jeers of the drunks and the taunts of the whore, and stepped into the office. The shades were down and a fan was on, but the office windows still faced the sun, and nothing short of an honest-to-God air-conditioner could hope to cut the heat on a day like today.
A skinny teenage girl with too-white skin and a Squeaky Fromm face stared belligerently at me from behind the scuffed counter. In the small dark room behind her, a black-and-white television was tuned to a soap opera. “Whatcha want?” she said.
“I’m looking for Sutton,” I told her.
“He ain’t here.”
“Can you tell me where he is?”
“He ain’t here,” she repeated.
“Where is he?”
“You wanna room or not?”
I walked around the counter and poked my head into the dark space behind her.
“Hey!” she exclaimed.
I saw the television, an ice chest, a sagging couch, a pile of dirty laundry and an empty bag of potato chips on the floor.
“I’m callin’ the police!” she said.
“Go ahead. Ask for Lieutenant Armstrong. He’s a good friend of mine.”
She’d picked up the phone receiver and was already pretending to dial. She put it back in its cradle. “You a cop?”
“No. I’m just looking for Sutton.”
She stared stupidly, and I could almost see the thoughts slowly processing in her head. Finally, she sighed. “Come on.”
I followed her through the back room, through another doorway and into a hall. She stopped before a closet covered by a tie-dyed curtain. “Here,” she said disgustedly. She pulled the curtain aside.
Gil Sutton was crouched in the closet, clutching a rosary, his eyes closed, mumbling a prayer.
“Didn’t know you were Catholic,” I said.
Sutton’s eyes opened, and for a brief second, an expression of hope crossed his face. Then he shook his head, shut his eyes and went back to his prayer.
“He’s been like that since Monday.”
Monday.
That’s when Ed had shot Fredericks.
I crouched down so that I was on Sutton’s level. “Ed said you might know where Mart is,” I said.
He continued to mumble and finger his rosary, but he shook his head rapidly back and forth.
“Sutton?”
More emphatic head shaking.
“You know where she is?”
“No!” he shouted.
I slapped him. Hard. “Where’s Mart?”
“She’s not dead!” He began laughing hysterically. “She’s not dead!”
I slapped him again, and he returned to his rosary and his prayers.
He wasn’t going to be any help at all. I stood. Before me, on the back of the closet wall above a small empty shelf, I saw a red diagram. A lightning bolt in a circle. I turned to the girl. “What’s that?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know.”
I pulled Mart’s picture from the pocket of my shirt, showing it to her. “You ever seen this woman?”
She let the curtain fall, moved away from the closet. “Oh yeah.” She nodded. “I seen her.”
“Know where I can find her?”
The girl shook her head. “She was workin’ out front for a couple months. I heard she broke off some guy’s dick.” Her voice lowered. “When he was inside her. I ain’t seen her since.”
“Her name’s Mart. Martina Hernandez. She’s the woman I’m looking for. You know anyone who might be able to tell me where she is?”
The girl shrugged.
“Okay.” I started back toward the front office.
“Wait a minute.” The girl hurried up beside me. “Robin might know.”
“Robin?”
“That black bitch works out front? She might know.”
“Thanks.”
“Arn’tcha gonna give me a couple bucks? Ain’t that what you guys’re suppose to do when someone tips you off?”
“No.”
I walked out to the front of the motel, but the hooker was gone. I went over to my car, got in and sat there for a while listening to the radio, waiting for her to come back. About ten minutes later, she was dropped off by some middle-aged white guy in a Subaru, and I got out of the car and walked over. I showed her the photo. “Know where she is?”
The hooker didn’t even look at the picture. “No.”
“I’m not a cop.”
“Yeah, right.” She moved away from me.
“She won a big prize. A lot of money. I’m trying to track her down for the company.”
“Those stings don’t work no more.”
“All right. Her ex-husband’s in jail for murder and she’s the only one who can clear him.” I pulled out another photo. Ed and Mart together. She still wouldn’t look, so I shoved the picture in front of her face.
She squinted. “Hey, I saw that dude on TV. He’s the one who killed that planning commissioner.”
A hooker who paid attention to current events.
“Yeah, and he’s Mart’s husband, and she’s the only one who can get him out of it.”
The hooker thought for a moment.
“It’s important.”
“I might know where she is.”
I took out my wallet, peeled off a ten.
“She was here when it happened, though. I’ll testify to that.”
“This isn’t a court. Was she really here?”
“I’ll testify to it.”
“Fine. Just tell me where she is.”
“End of the road.”
“End of the road?”
“Where the freeway ends. One of them abandoned homes there. Least that’s where I dropped her off.”
“Thanks.”
“Hey!” the teenager screamed at me from the office door. “How come she got money and I didn’t?”
Ignoring her, I got in my car and took off.
It was hot as hell, and my throat was parched. I could’ve used a real drink, but I was supposed to be on the wagon, so I stopped off at a 7-Eleven and bought a Big Gulp. There was a pay phone next to the entrance, and I still had some change from my drink, so I called my buddy Cal in the DA’s office and asked about the status of the case, trying to figure out if anything new had come up.
He said that Fredericks’ body had been stolen from the morgue.
I didn’t like that. Even though I was sweating from the heat, I shivered. Something was wrong. I could feel it.
I’d been here before.
“How’d it happen?”
“No one knows. It was there, then it was gone. No one saw anybody come or go, no record of any visitors.”
“Security camera?”
“Broken.”
“So, is this good news or bad?”
“For your guy? Neither. Word in the corridors is that the coconut’s going down come hell or high water.” He cleared his throat. “And I heard, third-hand, that Armstrong’s running around putting his two-cent’s worth in to whoever’ll listen.”
“Let me guess. I should be restrained and prohibited fr
om investigating this because of my affinity for taking on Hispanic clients.”
“Well, because you’re a ‘bean-eating chihuahua lover’ is how I heard it put, but I guess the sentiment’s the same.”
“Thanks Cal,” I said. “I owe you.”
“You’re damn right you do.”
He hung up on me, and I stood for a moment in front of the 7-Eleven, thinking. I didn’t like the fact that the body had been stolen. And the fact that it had been done so cleanly worried me even more.
A homeless guy, a Gabby Hayes lookalike, walked up and asked for some change, but I shook my head and walked back to the car.
I drove to the end of the road.
There was only one house left, a condemned pink tract home in the direct path of the new freeway extension. Roadwork progressed slowly in Arizona, so a person could probably squat there for half a year or more before having to find new digs. It was a smart idea if you were homeless, but I couldn’t see why a woman like Mart would stoop so low.
Mart’s a demon.
I’d been sort of ignoring that part up to now, but it was time to face the situation head on. I wasn’t sure I believed what Ed had said, not totally, but I believed enough of it to think that she was no longer dead, that she’d come back and somehow, for some reason, forced her husband to kill the planning commissioner.
It was hot as I got out of the air-conditioned car, but there were goosebumps on my skin. The ground in front of the pink house was graded sand, flat and white, scarred with the big-tread tracks of earthmoving equipment. Behind the structure were twin concrete posts for the raised future freeway.
Mart’s a demon.
Was Mart really a demon? If so, had Ed known what she was before he married her? Had he found out afterward? How had he found out? There were so many questions I wanted answered, but most of them were peripheral questions, human interest questions.
What kind of powers did a demon have?
That was a real question. I’d asked Ed that before I left, but he hadn’t been able to tell me. He knew very little about that side of his wife, and I got the impression that after he’d discovered what she was, he’d done everything possible to forget it. He knew what he was supposed to do after she died, the ritual he was supposed to perform at her burial, but other than that, his knowledge appeared to be almost nonexistent.
Mart had looked human when I’d known her, completely and perfectly female, and I found myself wondering if there were other demons living among us, if I encountered them every day, disguised as regular people.
I guess I did believe she was a demon.
I walked up to the front door of the house. Like the windows, it was covered with unpainted plywood, a “Do Not Enter” warning spray-stenciled at eye level.
“Mart?” I called out.
No answer.
I pulled off the plywood, kicked open the door.
The interior walls of the house had been removed and the inside was one huge open room.
Covered with bloody symbols.
I stood in the doorway, staring. Figures and pictographic characters had been painted with blood on the ceiling and the four sheetrock walls. The unnatural and profane renderings, only partially illuminated by the diffused light that filtered around me from outside, were truly frightening, and made me want to instinctively turn tail and run. But I stepped inside, moving to the right in order to let more light in from the doorway. In the center of the room, on a raised tier of dirt, I saw Fredericks’ body, laid out in an awkward pose that looked vaguely ritualistic. He was nude, and the shotgun hole in his chest was clean and bloodless. There were twin pools of shadow where his eyes should have been.
At his feet crouched Mart.
The breath caught in my throat.
Mart.
It was Ed’s dead wife all right, but I could hardly recognize her. She’d been one hell of a beautiful woman, tall and thin, gorgeous face, Playboy body, but she appeared to have shrunk about three feet and was now squat, toadlike and thoroughly repulsive. Enough of her basic facial structure remained for me to discern who it was, but the specifics had been hideously distorted. She looked like a cross between a woman, a reptile and a baboon, and the end result was something simultaneously less and more than human.
Next to her, on the dirt, was a pile of white skin that she had shed.
I tried to remain calm, though I was anything but. “Mart,” I said.
She cackled. “I didn’t expect to see you here.” Her voice was a shrill screech.
“What’s going on?”
“I’m going to eat his soul.”
“Did you kill him?”
She looked at me slyly. “Who wants to know?”
I met her eyes. “Ed.”
The change that came over her was instantaneous. Her smile disappeared, and the expression on her face collapsed into what looked like grief. Her voice, while still rough, lost some of its high-registered screechiness. “Ed?” she said.
I didn’t answer. The inside of the house smelled, not just of rot and decay and the chemicals of death from Fredericks’ body, but of something far worse. I looked at Mart. “You’re dead, aren’t you?”
She nodded.
“Why did you kill yourself?”
“He was fucking that bim.”
“Cheree?”
“Don’t even say her name!” The screeching was back.
“He never cared about her.”
“I caught them!”
“He loved you. Still does.”
“Bullshit!”
“Then why didn’t he cut off your head and do all those other things to make sure you didn’t come back?”
“Stupidity.”
“Love.” I looked at her. “That bitch was a one-off. She threw herself at him, he was weak, and he caved. But he never saw her again. You were his real love, his true love.”
“And look at me now.”
My eyes moved from her snout to her slimy elongated fingers. “That’s why you’re punishing him?”
“Punishing him?” She stood to her full height. “I’ve been watching out for him. I’ve been helping him. How do you think he got that deal in the first place?” She kicked Fredericks’ corpse. “And when our buddy here sold him out, who do you think made sure he got what was coming to him?”
My fear was gone. I walked forward, into the center of the house. It all seemed so…petty. Demons were supposed to have cosmic goals, incomprehensible intentions beyond the ken of us mere mortals. But she’d done all this because Fredericks had fucked up her ex-husband’s business plans.
She really had loved him, still did, perhaps, and I appealed to that. “You didn’t help him. He’s taking the fall.”
Her emotions downshifted again. “I didn’t know it would be him. The spells aren’t that specific. They focus on the end, not the means. That’s left up to the discretion of the intermediary.”
“Who was the intermediary?”
“I don’t know.”
“Isn’t there a way to find out?”
She shook her head.
“Ed’s in jail,” I said softly, “and he’ll probably get the death penalty.”
“I’ll kill them all! I’ll explode their heads! I’ll—”
I sighed. “Just get him out of it.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“That’s not the way it works.”
“Not the way what works?”
“Magic.”
I shut up. I was out of my depth here, and I knew it. I watched her face as she thought things through. I’d laid out the scenario, and she knew what was going down. She also knew what could and couldn’t be done. If either of us was going to figure a way to get Ed out of this, it would have to be her.
A black tear rolled down her discolored cheek. Angrily, she kicked Fredericks’ body. “It’s all your fault!” she screamed. “I’ll eat your soul and shit it into hell!”
I looked down at the corpse. On
Fredericks’ chest was carved a lightning bolt in a circle.
The same symbol I’d seen in Sutton’s closet.
“Could it be Sutton?” I asked.
She looked up sharply, eyes narrowing. “What?”
“Gil Sutton. Could he be the intermediary?”
She shook her head.
I pointed down at the symbol. “I saw that in his closet, on the wall. He was hiding in there, praying, scared out of his wits. Girl said he’d been in there since Monday, the day of the shooting.”
“That son of a bitch.” Mart was suddenly all business. She motioned toward the open door. “Shut that thing. I need darkness.”
“Why?”
“For what I’m going to do.”
“What are you going to do?”
She looked at me, and in those beady eyes I saw traces of the old Mart, the human Mart, but her voice when she spoke was flat and cold and even more monstrous than it had been before. A chill surfed down my spine. “You don’t want to know.”
She was right. I didn’t want to know.
But I had to know.
“What?” I said.
“He did it on purpose,” Mart mumbled, talking more to herself than me. “He put me into Ed on purpose. I knew he dabbled, but I didn’t think he could be an intermediary…” She trailed off.
“Tell me what happened.”
“I went out with Gil. A long time ago. Back in Tucson. He even asked me to marry him. This was way before I met Ed. I never told Gil what I was, but he knew anyway, somehow, and I think that’s why he wanted me.” She sighed, a gruff inhuman sound. “I think. Maybe not. Who knows? He said he loved me and maybe he did. He followed me to Phoenix. He kept in contact. I think he might’ve been behind the obscene phone calls I used to get.”
“Did Ed know?”
Mart shook her nightmarish head. “I didn’t want to hurt him. I let him think he and Gil met by accident. I never let on that I knew Gil from before.”
“Sutton introduced Ed to Cheree,” I said quietly.
Mart’s eyes widened.
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