Snowstorms in a Hot Climate

by Sarah Dunant

  “The Network was muscling around, making people offers they couldn’t refuse. If you were real well established, you might get away with it. But the atmosphere had changed. Everything was getting rougher. Here and there. As more stuff moved, it was only a matter of time till prices dropped. And when they dropped far enough, they’d hit the streets. And that would make the old profit margins look like chickenshit. The noses of senators and record producers was one thing, the veins of street punks in L.A. ghettos was another. The authorities started to squeeze. Home and abroad. I could see it coming, and I wanted to get out. I told Lenny that if he knew what was good for him he’d do the same. But he was riding the wave and he didn’t want to get off. Me—I’d already made my pile and there were other things I wanted to do. I’d bought the land, and I wanted to get down to living on it. But, like everyone else, I couldn’t resist just one last trick.

  “It went beautiful. No problem. Until I got back here, that is. Then, maybe ten days after I’d sent it out, the shit hit the fan. Somewhere not so far down the line some geek left his car unlocked while he went in to pick up a packet of smokes. Someone else stepped in and took it for a joyride. It had two pounds of high-grade toot in the back. When the cops found it, they got real excited. Figured they were onto something big. It ought to have been far enough away to keep me safe. But the heat was on. The government was looking for prosecutions, and promotion was based on commission. The narcs leaned real hard, and the guy talked. They sniffed their way upward. It was bad luck, that was all.

  “Business had been slow. Already the glut was beginning to show, and not everyone had moved their stash. They busted one of the guys I sold to direct. In theory I was still safe. There are rules if you play the game properly. The few people you sell to are the only ones who know you. They need you as much as you need them. If you go down, you keep your mouth shut, and they do the same thing. They know there’ll be someone there with the money to see them through. Good lawyers, light sentences, and their families looked after. Insurance, like any profession. It’s not in their interest to go state’s evidence.

  “But this time my karma was bad all the way down the line. The guy himself knew the score—he would have stuck to the rules. But his old lady was something else. She was seven months pregnant and a real electric lady. She went crazy. This had been their last trick too. Enough money to make it a happy childhood, and she wasn’t going to have him go down for it. The cops were very helpful. They wanted the source and they even hinted they’d lift the rap altogether if he saw things their way. He held firm, and for a while everything looked OK. Then she got real antsy. Told him he wouldn’t have a wife and kid when he got out, and that if he wouldn’t save himself she’d do it for him; she had her own story to tell. Even I didn’t know how much she knew, but you could be pretty sure if she flung enough shit some of it would stick. To me and other people as well. I cleared the decks, cleaned out everything that could touch me, and sat back and waited.

  “Then, two days after the warning, she was on her way to visit her parents up in the mountains when her car went off the side of a bridge. It was the beginning of winter. The roads were wet, she had a BMW that she drove too fast, and the river was flooding underneath. She didn’t stand a chance. A lot of people were real sad, but a lot of others slept better in their beds that night.

  “Tyler, her old man, went into a kind of shock. He just zoned out. Gave up talking altogether. To anyone. That included the narcs. The welfare worked well. A lot of money went into the bank account of a high-flying lawyer who played footsie with the prosecution and got some mileage out of a false signature on a search warrant. Tyler got off with a two-and-a-half-year sentence for possessing a whole lot less cocaine than they actually found. Everyone started breathing again. I laid the electricity cables on the land, threw away my Colombian visa, and went into early retirement.

  “The day after the sentencing I got a wire from Lenny, congratulating me on my recovery. That summer he turned up here with Elly. Things were going fine. I was out of it. There was no competition between us, and he was riding high. He even felt like he’d mellowed out a little. Or maybe that was her. She had a kind of easiness about her then, as if she expected people to treat her right, and so they did. I’d never seen Lenny so hooked before. Anyway, whatever the reasons, we had some good times.

  “Then, just after they left, something started to crawl out of the swamp. Tyler’s old lady had had a sister who she was real tight with. A woman called Nellie, a good-looking broad with the same kind of electricity. I knew her from a couple of years back. She and I had played around a little, but I was into the business and it didn’t work out. She took off with some guy from Vancouver Island. She came back for the funeral. Then she stayed around and started digging up the past. Tyler had been one of the boys for a while. I had never told her what I did, but she wasn’t stupid. Now she began adding things up. She also began asking questions about her sister’s death. The verdict had been misadventure. The pathologist had found traces of tranqs in her blood, but Nellie wouldn’t believe it. Said her sister would never have taken that kind of shit during pregnancy. She started suggesting that the death maybe wasn’t such an accident after all. And she wasn’t too choosy who she said it to. She even came to see me about it. I told her to drop it, that she was whipping up a storm, but she didn’t listen. Maybe she needed to get back at me too.”

  He paused. Obviously not all the truth was for retelling. In recent memory something stirred. A good-looking woman standing outside a log cabin, watching him, long graying hair and a spark of sexual defiance in her eyes. An electric lady? Maybe.

  “I think I saw her,” I said quietly. “That day at the feed store. She was staring at you from across the road. I wondered why.”

  “Well, now you know,” he said grimly. “So, do you want to tell me about your love life, or can I get on with the story?”

  The sarcasm was meant for her, not me. I felt almost sorry for him. Almost. He took my silence for obedience and continued.

  “About a month later I had another visit. This time from a couple of professionals. Rumor travels fast, especially through prison gratings. Tyler had heard from someone who claimed they knew that his wife’s car had been ‘arranged’ just before that last drive. It couldn’t be proved—the engine had gone right through the front seat into the bodywork—but the facts added up to a nice round total. Tyler hadn’t been doing too well inside—some coke men don’t—and this flipped him out. So he commissioned a couple of old friends to find out the truth. I arrived back here one night to find them waiting for me. They put a few ideas to me, batted me around for a while, then asked me what I thought. It took a while, but I finally managed to convince them I had nothing to do with it. But by then I’d given the matter some serious thought, and I had a pretty good idea who did. I put a call through to my ex-partner, told him about my visitors, and said I wanted to talk to him.

  “By the time he arrived I was turning from blue to yellow and he didn’t have a mark on him. He knew why I wanted to see him. He even seemed quite pleased with himself. I don’t know—maybe he was expecting me to thank him. Sure the rumor was correct. It was just the paymaster they’d got wrong. I should have guessed. Lenny owed me. And he didn’t like being in debt. It was his style, not mine, to secure silence with a chiseled brake cable. He had it down pat. What else could he have done? I was in trouble. It was her or me. And if I wasn’t going to protect myself, then someone had to do it for me. And, after all, we were old amigos. He made it sound real logical, even necessary. As if there had been no way out and he’d taken the burden on his own shoulders just to help an old pal.

  “Except I didn’t see it quite like that. Maybe I just don’t like people doing me favors. Or maybe I didn’t agree with his logic. It had had nothing to do with him. It was my business, and I was the one calling the shots. I was ready for her to talk. Sure there would have been trouble, but it could have been contained. I was smelling real clean.
I had a good lawyer and an even better accountant. It didn’t matter to me if my cover was blown—I didn’t need it anymore. I’d closed down shop anyway. It wasn’t worth two deaths. Simple as that. Even if I had decided to stop the leak, there were other ways. It didn’t have to be done by pushing her and a seven-month-old fetus into the Santa Cruz River. That was something Lenny had not learned from me.”

  Playing the game fair. I seemed to have heard those sentiments before. Elly’s words. And where had she got them from? Lenny, of course. In public and in private with her, he was still the moral philosopher, the good guy, still the disciple of his teacher. And in reality? In reality I believed what I had just been told.

  “Of course, there was another side to the story. You had to look at it from Lenny’s point of view. After all, he was still in business, and he was right about one thing. If they’d busted me, a lot of other people would have gone down too. The ripples would have spread. And Lenny was one of the places they would have spread to. We had a whole past between us. My past, his present. Sure her death saved my ass, but it saved his as well. Mr. Nice Guy had an ulterior motive. And he knew I knew it.”

  He broke off and pulled the glass slab toward him, peeling off another couple of lines and running them smoothly up his nostrils. A little more energy for a little more eloquence. There had been more words than I could have believed he had in him. Maybe some of them belonged to the cocaine. He squeezed his nose between his thumb and forefinger, then snorted and cleared his throat. I imagined the jet stream of energy coursing up through his brain, winding him up, speeding him on. He pushed the slab my way. I shook my head. I had all the excitement I could handle right now, and I was so awake my head hurt.

  “What happened?” I said, suddenly impatient with the silence.

  “Nothing happened. I told him that somebody at his end was whispering half-truths and that if he knew what was good for him, he’d find the leak and plug it fast. I sounded tough, but we both knew the score. We were quits. He knew I had to stand by him. Mind you, he also knew what I thought of his ‘favor.’ But business is business. Even when you’re retired you don’t go out of your way to make enemies. Particularly enemies like Lenny. He’s a big man now. I don’t have the muscle to fight him anymore.”

  I wondered if that were true but decided not to ask. “So, you pretended to be friends instead?”

  “We’re polite to each other, if that’s what you mean. A pattern of behavior has been established. He keeps in touch; I respond. Maybe he just needs to know what I’m doing. Who knows? Or maybe it’s more than that. You don’t make friends that often in this business. Associates yes, but not friends. For a while Lenny and I had something going. We trusted each other. We even liked each other. From what I hear those are two qualities he’s not familiar with now. Could be I remind him of the old times. He always wanted to be top of the heap. Maybe now he’s got there he doesn’t like the drop. Something’s changed in him. Sure as hell he can’t relax anymore. Even the charm has barbed wire in it—I reckon you noticed that too. And this time not even she can change him. Shit, he really blew it, threw it away. He had it all. She was there for him, I saw it. But he couldn’t hack it. Couldn’t share. He always did have too much vanity. Spent so much time looking at himself he forgot to check on other people. She was asking for help. Any fool could see that. But he couldn’t be bothered to notice. Stupid motherfucker …”

  Things were beginning to fall into place. Why he had given Elly the advice he had. And why he had told her to keep the visit secret. She was right. In some ways J.T. was closer to Lenny than she was. He knew him better. But how much better?

  “So, you think he never really gave up the job? Even when he told her he would.”

  He smiled lazily. “What do you think? Lenny’s not a guy to do something he doesn’t want to. Whatever the pressure. I think it suited him to have her believe he was giving up. Her and some other people. Telling the truth isn’t one of the strong points of this profession. And rumor has it Lenny has been getting more than a little paranoid.”

  “You’re saying he doesn’t trust her?”

  “I’m saying he doesn’t trust anyone. Why should she be the exception? You got any more to add, or shall I finish the story?”

  I treated it as a rhetorical question. There was only a short pause.

  “For a while everything went quiet. The garden was growing real good when Tyler got out of jail. Came riding into town about six months ago with a couple of ‘undercover’ narcs on his tail, curious to find out who his friends were. He was careful. He got a job, left his money alone, and went about his business. After a while they got bored and went back to busting punks. Everything looked good. Then, about a month out, he moved in with Nellie. He had nowhere else to go and she offered. She and her sister looked a lot alike. Maybe that gave him back the ache. Or maybe he’d never lost it. Anyway, Nellie was still cat-curious, and she started to needle him, to get him back on the scent again. So he talked to a few people, even took a trip east to check out some names.

  “It was only a matter of time till Lenny got wind of it and decided to reunite husband and wife. I went to see Tyler, to warn him off. He had kept his mouth shut when he could have talked, and I owed him. In the old days he would have listened. But, I tell you, he had changed. He used to be a real smart guy, kept things to himself, knew exactly what he was doing. But somewhere along the line he’d got turned inside out. You could taste the hatred in him. He was so eaten up with it he was vibrating. A real born-again revenge man. With nothing to lose. Except it wasn’t me he was after. He even apologized for having my ribs cracked. A simple case of mistaken identity. He knew that now. I didn’t bother to deny it. There was no point in lying. I just told him that paying back wouldn’t achieve anything, that it was finished and he should get on with his life. Only he wasn’t interested in living in the present. The house was full of pictures of her. It was like some goddamned shrine with Nellie as high priestess, and him full of Bible fever. An eye for an eye. That was what he wanted. He didn’t want Lenny, he wanted Elly—Elly for his wife and kid. I told him he was crazy. That it wasn’t the same. That taking out Elly wouldn’t destroy Lenny. All it was was a way of committing suicide. If the police didn’t get him, Lenny would. But he didn’t hear me. So in the end I gave him an alternative. Something that would hit Lenny where it hurt but that wouldn’t result in any funerals. And eventually he listened.”

  “Wait a minute. What are you saying? That you set Lenny up?”

  If he heard my question, he behaved as if he hadn’t. “I told him as much as he needed to know and let him get on with it. It wasn’t my war. Not anymore. Then, out of the blue, you two turned up. What could I do? Send you away? Lenny would have smelled something. And I sure as hell couldn’t tell you what was going on, however much I may have wanted to get Elly out of it. But then that day on the porch I got this real clear message beaming out from you. You didn’t like Lenny any more than I did. And you’d come to take her home. So I gave you a few clues, as much as I dared. But I reckoned without Tyler. When he found out she was here he flipped. And when you and I ran into Nellie that day outside the feed store and word got back that I was hanging out with the ladies, he began to wonder whose side I was really on. I told him to cut it, that the last thing I could do was turn her away. But having her so near got him nervous. And hungry. He had set up a couple of guys for a little surveillance—your camp stargazers—and now he gave ’em a pretty wide brief. They used it to have some fun.”

  “That’s not the word I’d use to describe it.”

  “Maybe not,” he said deliberately. “But that’s all it was.”

  “What do you mean? I don’t call a poisonous snake under my pillow fun.”

  “The snake wasn’t poisonous. It was a rattler, all right, but its fangs had been removed. It was meant to scare you, not kill you.”

  I remembered again the lightning flash of the head. “Says who?”

  “Your frie
nds in the canyon. When I left you at the bar, I went and got Tyler out of bed, and together we paid them a little visit. They even showed me the box they bought it in. It came from a pet shop. Born and bred. When you pulled back the sheet, the little critter was probably more scared than you were.”

  “I doubt it,” I said sourly.

  “Well, whatever, they won’t cause you any more trouble. They broke camp tonight. I watched them go. They won’t be back.”

  So that was it, the whole story. All that fear and panic over a couple of bully boys and an emasculated snake. Full stop. The end. Except for the pages I wasn’t allowed to read. Secret documents. It’s a historian’s job to uncover them.

  “What about Lenny? What happens to him?”

  He shook his head. The silence grew.

  “Why won’t you tell me?”

  “Because you don’t need to know. That was the deal, remember? It still is.”

  “Why? Because you’ve betrayed him?” I picked the cruelest word I could find, to goad him. He did not rise to it.

  “It’s none of your business. Your business is to take her home. Get on with it.”

  “Except it’s not that easy, J.T. You were right. I can’t simply tell her what you’ve told me. We both know what she’d do. March straight up to Lenny and demand to know if it was true. And where would you be then? She may want to leave him, but you know Lenny. Things happen only if he wants them to, wasn’t that what you said? Well, according to Lenny he doesn’t want to split up. In fact, according to him, he’s out for a reconciliation. He’s already arranged a trip for them to take together—a surprise second honeymoon. To England of all places. And when—”

  “Wait a minute.” This time I had touched a nerve. His attention crackled across the table. “What did you say about England? What do you know about that?”

  I explained. He never took his eyes off me.

  “And did you?”