Stateline

by Dave Stanton

  The newspaper articles gave me a sense of satisfaction, but it wasn’t until later that evening, as Cody and I were leaving the restaurant, that it finally occurred to me—if Osterlund hadn’t destroyed and thrown away the camera and tape, there was one person who might have it.

  Twenty minutes later, we pulled up in front of Mandy’s apartment complex in south San Jose. Once I told Cody my theory, he insisted we resolve it immediately. The light was on at Mandy’s unit. I knocked and heard muted noises.

  “Go away,” a female voice said through the door.

  “Open up, Mandy,” I said.

  The door opened the few inches the security chain allowed. A black man’s face looked out at us. “Get lost, motherfuckers,” he said.

  Wrong answer.

  Cody brushed past me and body-slammed the door open. The chain popped as if it were dry macaroni. The black man was shirtless, his arms covered with designer tattoos. He looked like he might be a cornerback for the local college team. He took a karate stance, but Cody simply barreled him over. They tumbled into the kitchenette, the man’s head bounced hard off a tile counter, and then he lay still on the linoleum. “Next time don’t cuss at me, motherfucker,” Cody said.

  Mandy watched impassively. Her low-cut blouse was slipping off her shoulder and her bra lay on the floor. The CD case on the coffee table was smeared with cocaine.

  “Sorry to disturb your evening,” I said. “I’ll make it quick.”

  “Looks like you’ll be spending the night in jail,” she said, and picked up her telephone.

  I reached down and yanked the cord from the wall. “Osterlund’s video camera. Where is it?”

  “What are you talking about? Are you high?”

  “Here’s how it works, Mandy. I tie your hands behind your back and duct tape your mouth, while Cody and I wreck your place looking for it. Or you do it the easy way and hand it over.”

  Her eyes blazed at me. “Gee, Dan, I guess it doesn’t matter to you that you’re breaking the law right now. Go ahead—tie me up, trash my place. And when you leave, you can look forward to being arrested. How’s that?”

  “The camera is evidence in a murder investigation, Mandy. The fact you have it means you’re withholding evidence. That’s mandatory jail time.”

  “You better just leave.”

  “Not yet,” Cody’s voice came from the kitchen. “I’m making myself a sandwich. Where the hell’s the mayo?”

  A groan followed Cody’s voice. “Don’t worry about this guy,” Cody said. “I’ll keep him occupied.”

  Mandy sat down on the couch and began chopping herself a line on the CD case.

  “So if I get you the camera, what happens then?”

  “Then you’re free and clear.”

  “As if it never happened?”

  “As if what never happened?”

  “Well, whatever’s on the tape.”

  “Hand it over and you got nothing to worry about.”

  She held her hair behind her ear and snorted a rail. Then she leaned back and studied me with glassy eyes. After a moment she shrugged and walked down the hall. When she came back, she held a black camera.

  “The tape’s still in it,” she said.

  “What was Osterlund’s deal, Mandy? Why was Sylvester hanging out with him?”

  “They were both hardcore voyeurs,” she said, chopping another line. “Sylvester could barely get it up unless he was watching somebody fuck, or unless he knew somebody was watching him. Sven was the same way, but not quite as bad.”

  “And Osterlund’s angle? Blackmail?”

  “Pretty obvious, isn’t it? He was going to make Sylvester pay him off, or he’d show the tape of Sylvester making it with a couple of whores to Desiree. It was my idea, but I never thought Sven would go through with it, the crazy son of a bitch.”

  Cody walked out of the kitchen with a submarine sandwich in his paw. “Got what you need, Dirt?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Sylvester was a perverted weirdo, Dan,” Mandy said. “Desiree told me he set up a camera and videoed them every time they got it on.”

  “Did you watch this tape?” I said, holding up the camera.

  “No, I-”

  “Good. Forget it ever existed.”

  “Consider it done,” she said.

  “Hey,” Cody said. “Sorry about your door, and raiding your fridge. I could come back and fix it and maybe take you out to lunch.”

  “How sweet of you,” Mandy said.

  As we left, Mandy’s date struggled woozily to his feet. “Hey, asshole,” he said and started toward Cody. Some guys have a steep learning curve. Cody backhanded him across the jaw with his fist and knocked him out cold again.

  “You ought to pick smarter boyfriends,” I said to Mandy, but she’d gone back to the couch to take another snort off the CD case. She didn’t look up when we walked out.

  “Christ, Dirt, get a load of the rack on Mandy,” Cody said once we were in my truck. “She looks like she’d be one hell of a good time. You got her number?”

  “My advice would be to stay away from her,” I said. “She eats guys like you and me for lunch.”

  Cody laughed as if I were kidding.

  CHAPTER 27

  Over the next few days, the Federal Anti-Corruption Task Force, the FBI, and then the IRS all flocked to South Lake Tahoe, turning the city into a media circus. Jake Tuma was arrested, and his house was sealed off while the cops went through it. They charged him with twenty-six separate drug-related offenses. The DA’s office, armed with a mountain of evidence and amid major public pressure, brought the case to trial promptly and convicted him of most of the charges. The drug-crazed bully who pushed women around when he didn’t get his way was sentenced to thirty years in prison. I saw him on TV the day he was sentenced. He stared the camera down, his face furious and bitter, then spat at the lens. He was quoted as saying he had a powerful family and intended to be free on appeal shortly.

  The Nevada Gaming Commission sent a team of accountants to scour the books at Pistol Pete’s. I heard later that Salvador Tuma left unexpectedly in the night and was rumored to have fled the country. I wondered if Jake thought about his father as he sat on a lumpy, thin mattress, smelling the open toilet in his cell, or when he showered next to men who were fully capable of punching a homemade shank through his liver for any perceived slight.

  Marcus Grier had been granted full back-pay for the work he had missed and was now running his department without impediment from Conrad Pace, who was still county sheriff, but had stopped coming into his office. Shortly after Grier was rehired, Detective Iverson found Raneswich comatose in his apartment, after an apparent overdose of sleeping pills. Raneswich recovered, and he and Iverson both quit the force and vanished. Louis Perdie, Ronald Fingsten, and Conrad Pace all tried to leave town shortly afterward. The Nevada Highway Patrol caught up with Perdie and Fingsten outside of Ely, Nevada. But Conrad Pace was a mystery, for the time being. Somehow, he had slipped through the cracks.

  I called Edward Cutlip at Bascom Headquarters and was pleased to find out John Bascom had promoted him to VP of operations, the position Sylvester would have had.

  “You know, it was weird,” Edward said. “After you and Cody brought me into the suite in the wheelchair and told Bascom what happened at the cathouse, he started treating me differently. It was like I was a different person.”

  “Maybe he appreciates you risked your life for his cause.”

  He was quiet for a moment. “Maybe you’re right,” he said.

  ******

  The district attorney from South Lake Tahoe contacted Cody and me in early April and said we would be called to testify in the trials of Louis Perdie and Ronald Fingsten. The charges ranged from kidnapping to drug and corruption offenses. We spent six nights at the Lakeside on the city’s tab, sitting in court during the day and keeping our nighttime activities to a low roar. The court sessions were tedious, but left me with a couple of enduri
ng images. One was of Louis Perdie in a dark blue suit and yellow necktie. He looked completely different from the violent hillbilly deputy I had known. But when we locked eyes, he gave me the same irreverent, cockeyed smile, as if he were back at the Lakeside’s diner, wiping scrambled eggs from the corner of his mouth. The other image was of Deputy Fingsten on the stand, so nervous and scared I could see him shaking, as if he couldn’t believe he’d be held responsible for his actions.

  On the same day both men were convicted on a series of capital offenses, an abrupt news bulletin interrupted the proceedings: Conrad Pace had been found.

  Two peckerwood fishermen stumbled upon his corpse in a shack built on stilts out in the deep bayou in southern Louisiana. They had stopped there when the motor on their skiff gave out. As they climbed the decaying ladder, they knew from the smell something was dead in the old wood slat structure. They thought it was probably an alligator that had been skinned and left behind. But when they walked through the humid air into the ramshackle, creaky room, they found the rapidly decomposing body of Conrad Pace. He was tied upright in a metal chair, his ankles fastened to the chair legs, his arms pinned behind him, his chest and shoulders tightly bound with bailing wire. The wire was buried deep in his flesh, as if his skin had grown around it. His mouth was sealed with duct tape, and two dime-sized holes were in the center of his forehead, like a second set of eyes.

  EPILOGUE

  Shortly after Conrad Pace’s assassination, a leading men’s magazine published an account of his criminality and his demise. Cody brought the article to my attention, and although some of it is fictionalized, it struck me as authentic, and I feel it bears repeating. The following is the section of the text I remember most vividly:

  Conrad Pace smiled to himself as he drove his new Cadillac across the low bridge over the swamplands. On the other side of the water was New Orleans, and he was deciding what to have for dinner. Maybe seafood gumbo. Or hell, why not the best steak money could buy? And then how about going down to the French Quarter and picking up a black whore for dessert? He laughed out loud. His old friend Louis was probably facing serious time, but so were the rest of those dago gumballs back in Nevada. Meanwhile, he had a new name and Social Security number and a briefcase with $3 million cash in his trunk. It was the way of the world—the simple-minded would always be sacrificed for the elite.

  His mind wandered to the home the realtor had just shown him—a large, white-columned, antebellum spread with a front lawn half the size of a football field. Maybe he’d sign the papers tomorrow and then hire an interior decorator. The mess in Tahoe already seemed a million miles away, and he had no doubt his future promised a continuance of the wealth and luxury he had earned.

  After dinner, he checked out a couple of strip joints in the Quarter, places he’d been to years before. They hadn’t changed much, and half an hour later he followed a woman up a flight of stairs to her apartment. She was just what he had in mind: tall and sultry, with one of those swinging asses that just wouldn’t quit, the kind only nigger bitches have. He’d crack her like a shotgun and ram her with his horse cock first thing, he decided. Give that ass a good working over. He followed her inside, his eyes glazed in anticipation, and then out of nowhere a fist slammed into his face.

  Pace reeled across the room and grabbed a heavy ceramic lamp. He swung it with all his strength at the shadowy figure coming at him and felt a satisfying crack as the lamp shattered against bone. But a second man seized him from behind and put him in a chokehold, and the man’s arms felt like iron girders. Pace couldn’t break free from the grip, and his lungs roared in pain. The last thing he saw before he passed out was the hooker’s red fingernails clawing at his face.

  When Pace opened his eyes, he heard water lapping at the side of the boat, and he could feel the dampness in the air. It must be dawn, it occurred to him, as his eyes stained to see through the thick fog. He lay on the bottom of a pirogue, and it reeked of rotting fish. Two men paddled the boat, their faces obscured behind rain hoods. Pace struggled upright, his head aching violently. His hands were tied behind him, and he felt like he’d been beaten with a baseball bat.

  “Do you have any idea who I am?” Pace said.

  The men were silent, hunched forward and paddling.

  “I’m talking to you. Whoever’s paying you, I’ll double it.”

  No response.

  “Listen to me, goddammit! I can make you both rich.”

  The man on the right turned his head slowly, and through the gloom Pace could make out his heavy mustache and thick jowls.

  “Salvador Tuma has a message for you. He wants you to know his son’s in prison, and you stole three million from him.”

  “Fuck Tuma! He went off the radar and left me and his son to clean up!”

  The men kept paddling silently. The fog was dense, and Pace knew he was out on the bayou, but he had no idea where. He peered out into the mist, seeing nothing, and felt an overwhelming sense that he and these two men were the last people on earth.

  “Name your price,” Pace said.

  They stopped rowing, and one man stood and tossed a rope around a wood piling that rose from the gray water.

  “The money you stole is already on the way back to Mr. Tuma,” the man said.

  “Yeah,” said the other one, speaking for the first time, in a heavy Cajun accent. “But I get to keep your car, me.”

  Pace’s mouth moved silently as the men lifted him by the arms. He nearly collapsed from dizziness, then vomited what was left of his supper into the murky water. Pace watched the contents of his stomach rolling with the weak current. He looked around desperately, trying not to panic, his hands straining behind his back against the tightly wound rope. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught a glimpse of a revolver in one of the men’s hands. In a detached place in his mind, Pace mused that he’d just heaved up the last dinner he’d ever have, and it was floating away in the bayou, his life floating away, his body reduced to a slick of rancid and steaming human waste.

  ******

  Beverly Howitt’s mother passed away in late April. I flew to Salt Lake City and drove down to Salina to attend the service. Glenda Howitt was laid to rest on a perfect spring day, a day all wrong for a funeral. The sky was a deep cloudless blue, the air smelled clean and pure, and the colors of the trees and flowers were so bright that no painting or photograph would do them justice.

  When I got on the plane back to San Jose, Beverly was with me. She hadn’t said anything about it; there was no discussion—she just had her suitcase packed and came with me to the airport. Funny the way things work out sometimes. When we walked into my apartment, she looked around, clicked her teeth, and went to work, cleaning, rearranging the cupboards, buying flowers and plants, lending the proverbial woman’s touch. She tried to throw out one of my favorite old sweatshirts and actually bought a can of silver spray paint and painted the rusty iron weight set I’d left outdoors for years in the rain and sun.

  The stock market had taken a dramatic dive earlier in April and continued to erode as investors started bailing out. Horror stories of day traders and margin investors losing their life savings dominated the local and then the national news. Dotcom companies in the Silicon Valley began going belly up, and hordes of common folk saw their stock portfolios shed value like a dog shaking water out of its fur. Wenger grew increasingly depressed and bitter until he confessed to me that he was many thousands in the red and was closing up his business. In May he moved from San Jose because he felt living here was a daily reminder of how much money he’d lost.

  My bank account was still flush with the checks from Bascom Lumber. Beverly and I decided to drive up to Tahoe to see the lake in the springtime, while the peaks were still covered with snow, looking down like content parents at the green meadows and blossoming flowers of the valley. While Beverly packed our clothes, I cleared some miscellaneous junk from the cab of my new Nissan four-by-four truck. I opened the glove box, and there sat Osterlund�
�s camera, like a diary that possessed a morbid secret. I hefted the camera in my palm, feeling its weight, knowing my fingers were obscuring the prints of Osterlund and Mandy. But it didn’t matter anymore. Osterlund was dead, and so were Michael Dean Stiles, Julo Nafui, and Conrad Pace. For some reason fate dictated I be the instrument of their downfall. Maybe it was my destiny, or maybe I just happened to be in the wrong place at the right time. Regardless, it didn’t matter; it was a chapter in my life I was ready to put behind me. I ejected the tape and stuck it in my pocket.

  Beverly had finished packing our bags, and when I walked in, she showed me the picnic lunch she had made.

  “I even packed a couple beers for you,” she said. “I was thinking we could stop somewhere pretty on the way up to Tahoe.”

  I kissed her cheek and walked out to the back patio, to my barbecue. I doused some half-burned coals in lighter fluid, then crumpled up the sports section from the morning newspaper and threw it on top.

  “Is everything okay?” Beverly called, coming out to join me.

  “It will be,” I said, tossing a match on the paper. Beverly put her hand on mine, which held the Sony video camera. She looked up at me, sudden realization flashing in her eyes. I pulled the tape out of my pocket and dropped it into the flames, but the fire burned out too quickly. “Wait a sec,” I said, and got my bottle of 151-proof rum down from above the refrigerator. I came back and doused the tape with enough booze to keep a man drunk for two days. When I flipped another match into the barbecue, it went up like a Roman candle. Beverly stood in front of me, her head under my chin, her body warm against mine, her face glowing in the heat of the flames. She held my arms tightly around her waist as we watched the tape burn into an unrecognizable scrap of melted plastic.