The Rita Farmer Mystery series Box Set

by Elizabeth Sims

  The Whale was an interesting guy, I had to admit. I was almost starting to like him, his charisma was that ingratiating. His feebleminded followers were like a creepy little cult, hanging on his words, deferring to him.

  George pulled a clipping from his back pocket. “Do you want to know what impresses me the most about you? This.” He laid the clipping before Vargas. “I admire a man who can bring off a cop killing this well.” With slow vitriol, he said, “Sgt. Annette Soames.”

  The Whale smiled, amazed. “Haha,” he laughed softly, “you give me too much credit. I was nowhere near that extermination.”

  “Well,” said George, “I knew this particular one. She busted me for a moving violation, then planted shit on me to jack up her numbers. She wanted to be like the guys. I always thought I’d get her someday, but then I saw this.”

  The picture of pixie-faced, blond-bobbed Sergeant Soames lay there, its edges tattered from George’s pocket. The Whale looked at it approvingly.

  “Word gets around,” said George, “so I just want to say I admire the way you handle things. I can’t tell you how happy I am this Sergeant Soames is in her grave.”

  The Whale just smiled, thinking. Then he said, “Denny,” and pointed to the middle of the table. “H.”

  Denny went to one of the gun safes and punched in a code. He brought a baggy to the table and set it in the exact center. The baggy contained a fist-sized amount of white powder.

  I let my eyes light up. I stopped moving and everybody watched me breathe.

  George said, “She got some bad shit ’n’ almost died. I can’t have that again. If I can get her on clean shit, at least, you know. I don’t have any illusions about getting her off of it, even before the baby comes.”

  “I,” said the Whale, “am all about clean shit. And unity. People say no, unity’s not possible, you can’t do that. But I can, and I do.”

  “He does,” said Wichita. This evening she wore a necklace with BEEATCH spelled out in the same pavé bling as the guys. Plus yellow eye shadow, and that stupid T-shirt.

  Well, I thought, he’s certainly got a diverse team here, quite unusual in South Central, where hatred between the Latino-Americans and the African-Americans is a staple.

  Vargas asked George, “Do you use?”

  “No.”

  “Good business. Then you won’t mind getting tested.”

  “Huh?”

  “None of us use, a matter of professional conduct. None of us are supposed to use,” he corrected himself. “We’re about to initiate random drug tests for our staff, vice presidents on down. Anybody who won’t get tested doesn’t work for me.”

  George coughed to hide incredulous laughter, and I simply turned my eyes down to keep my composure. Drug testing for drug dealers. Yep, this guy’s the bellwether, all right.

  “Wouldn’t bother me,” said George cheerfully. “Pee-type test, like parole?”

  Every now and then, one of the vice presidents would pull his cell phone out of his pocket and check the display. Occasionally he’d leave the room through the teacher’s door, then come back a few minutes later, looking antsy.

  “We got business to do,” one complained carefully.

  “This is business,” said the Whale. “You guys need to learn how to handle recruitment. You don’t think creative enough.”

  They looked at their knuckles.

  “I saw a rat by my car,” said the Whale. “Too many damn rats in this neighborhood.”

  “There’s rats everywhere,” said Denny.

  “Well, I better never see one in here. That’s why you’re supposed to sweep up after yourself. You leave garbage around, you’re gonna get rats.” He kept smiling, really a nice smile, and the vice presidents responded, smiling slightly through their cultivated toughness.

  I saw that this bunch was a cut above the boneheads selling on the street corners, but just barely. That’s the kind of staff the Whale was after—smarter than the average thug, smart enough to be charmed by his manipulative shtick, but not intelligent enough to see through it.

  “Pretty good place to do business, though,” remarked George. “You got creative.”

  The Whale laughed. “I did, I got creative! Hahaha!”

  Someone knocked, and Denny went to the door. The Latino guard who’d interrupted George and me from breaking into this very room came tottering in, almost hidden by a stack of huge white cardboard food boxes. A wonderful smell wafted along. “Let’s see,” said the Whale.

  “Hey, I only bring the good stuff,” said the guard, opening them. Half of the boxes were full of saucer-sized quiches, others contained sliced cheeses and fresh fruit, and others were crammed with chicken skewers.

  Wichita brought the two biggest boxes of food to the Whale. Rolls of paper towels appeared.

  He arranged the food on either side of him, spread paper towels across his lap, and began to eat, slowly, with both hands. Wichita hovered over him, making sure he had everything he needed.

  Someone handed around Blue Bolts, the teenage caffeine drink in those phallic bottles.

  “Any ice cream tonight?” asked Wichita. No one answered. She sighed, “I love Tülky’s, I just love it. It’s that new brand from Denmark, it’s the best.”

  “Do you know,” asked the Whale, “they’re a subsidiary of Frito-Lay, and they make the shit in Pennsylvania?”

  Wichita sulked. “I don’t care, I’d kill for some Tülky’s right now. Their cocoa-peanut swirl? Mmm!”

  George took a quiche on a paper towel to be polite. “DeeDee, have some food.”

  I shook my head, craving heroin.

  “You need to eat.”

  Glassily, I took an orange quarter and sucked it indifferently. I ogled the heroin in the center of the table, which was in the center of the room, which had become the center of the universe.

  As the Whale ate, he cleaned his hands constantly with paper towels, rubbing them so vigorously in his palms that they shredded.

  “The premoistened towelettes,” he said at one point, and Wichita jumped up and retrieved a fistful from one of the lab cabinets. Vargas opened each foil envelope with fingertip delicacy. I thought about the Tucson drug boss whose eyelids he’d sliced away before killing him inch by unspeakable inch.

  And I remembered what I’d read about murderers often being obsessed with cleanliness, and I remembered what Amaryllis had said about the Whale never actually carrying drugs or weapons. Yeah, I thought, just surround yourself with people who do, and maybe you’ll be OK. Unless one of them turns on you.

  “You guys order in good stuff,” George remarked.

  “Oh, this is free!” said Wichita, gulping grapes. She reached over and popped one into the Whale’s mouth. She couldn’t do enough for him; he was like this big delicate baby she wanted to take care of. “It’s wedding food. The caterers bring it by sometimes if they got a lot left over.”

  One of the guards, ebullient over the food, said, “They think they’re feeding the homeless!”

  Vargas remarked, “These are inappropriate dishes for the homeless. Too rich, make them throw up.” Everyone nodded. “We do enough for them,” he added. “And bigger plans.”

  “Yeah?” said George.

  The Whale addressed me. “You like heroin, don’t you?”

  “Very much,” I said in a hoarse whisper.

  “Check her, Witch,” said he.

  Wichita, who had been en route for more food, lunged at me and seized my arm. Roughly, she pushed up my sleeve and inspected my inner arm. “Nothing!” she barked over her shoulder. I was glad Gina and I had applied some patchy latex on my arms anyway, just in case.

  I shrank from Wichita, Bambi-like. “I use my feet,” I whispered.

  “Let’s see.”

  Just before I’d walked out the door, Gina had said, “Wait. You need tracks.”

  “Oh my God, yeah.”

  “I was watching that doctor show, the one in Amsterdam, where the needle exchange clinic is th
is floating barge and—”

  “Right, what’ll we—”

  “On the show it just looked like red dots along the vein. They showed a close-up. Really red little dots. And on this show the person’s veins in their arms were no good, so they used their feet.”

  So now I lifted my foot in its zap-blue jelly sandal. “Here.”

  Wichita said, “You are such a compost heap,” and turned away, muttering, “…while yo’ pregnant, unbelievable, talk about trash!” None of the men seemed to give a damn about that. Denny came up and said, “Let me look.” He knelt and took my foot in his hands and looked it over carefully. I began to sweat, but maintained good breathing. “Well, you haven’t wrecked these veins yet,” he remarked, looking me directly in the eye. The veins on my feet happen to be quite prominent. Denny looked at the Whale and nodded.

  “How do I know your shit’s as good as you say?” George asked Vargas.

  Every pair of eyes in the room turned toward me.

  Of course.

  They expected me to shoot up.

  My guts went into panic mode, but outwardly I kept calm, thinking rapidly.

  “I don’t have my works,” I rasped.

  “I’ve got ’em,” said George.

  I cannot describe my shock at that. I couldn’t have spit if my life depended on it.

  “Help yourself,” said the Whale.

  Denny brought out a small digital scale and set it on the table. George knelt before this little shrine to happiness and death. Had he planned this? What the flying freaking fuck was he doing?

  I pasted an anticipatory smile on my face, feeling desperate yet playing along; George had an improv going, and I had to support it.

  “What percent is it?” he asked.

  “My standard’s fifty,” said the Whale, “but this here’s seventy-five.”

  “That’s good,” said George, gratefully. “That’s real good.”

  He used his jackknife blade to scoop a bit of the heroin onto the scale. The heroin was quite fluffy, easily spoonable. The readout pulsed, and he scooped a tiny bit more. He drew a syringe from his shirt pocket. The bastard. And a metal teaspoon. Bastard! And a rubber ligature!

  I retreated to the shadows beyond the lab tables and sweated harder.

  “That’s a nice knife,” said Vargas.

  “You like it?” George folded it. “Here, it’s yours.”

  The Whale’s mouth dropped open.

  “What’s the matter?” George proffered the knife, a large folding hunter like my brothers carried. The handle was especially beautiful, a rich zebra-striped wood. “The pawn shop hasn’t gotten it yet, good thing!”

  “Nobody gives me anything,” said the Whale, and I almost thought he was going to cry. “Everybody asks me for stuff.”

  “Well, this is just a token. A courtesy to you.”

  Vargas reached for the knife and turned it over in his hands. He opened and closed it. He hefted it in his palm, then he opened it again.

  So fast that I almost doubted I’d seen it, he raised his arm and, with a perfect movement, flicked his wrist. I heard a thock! and turned to see the knife sticking into the bulletin board, smack in the center of Albert Einstein’s throat.

  Wichita laughed delightedly.

  Denny clapped and said, “Good shot, boss!”

  The other vice presidents concurred. “Yeah.”

  “Thank you,” said the Whale feelingly. “I was actually aiming for his left eye. It’s a good miss, though.” All the vice presidents looked jealous of George. I could see them wondering what they could give to their boss.

  “You take that knife back, Jimmer. I ought not to carry a blade. But I sure do appreciate the looks on that knife. Good balance too.” George pulled the knife from Einstein and put it in his back pocket. He returned to the table, tipped the heroin into the spoon, and came to me, cupping the dose in his hand. He winked at me. And with that wink, I breathed. Everything would be all right. In a second I saw the trick: he set the spoon down and brought an old-style metal lighter from his pocket. Carefully he opened it, and I saw he had a second bit of powder hidden in the lid of that lighter.

  I felt like grinning. Home free.

  But then he fumbled.

  I saw it in slow motion: a thread from his pants pocket had caught in the lighter’s hinge, and in almost dropping it, the hidden dose spilled out and dissipated in the air like Disney dust.

  He breathed, “Shit.” He licked his lips and then met my eyes. Gotta do it now.

  “So,” he flung over his shoulder, “I won’t need lemon?”

  “Nah, nah,” said Vargas, lazily.

  I wondered what the hell that meant.

  “What’s the other twenty-five, then?” George asked.

  “Standard mannitol,” came the answer.

  George turned on the tap at the nearest lab sink, and once he saw it was working, he screwed down the flow and added a few drops of water to the heroin.

  He sparked his Zippo. The mighty flame was enough to illuminate half of a biker bar, and he held it resignedly beneath the bowl of the spoon.

  I took the ligature and began to tie it around my left calf.

  “Nah, honey, let’s just skin-pop you tonight, since this is better than the shit you’re used to.”

  He said it so earnestly that the Whale laughed in his soft way. “What’s so special about her to you?”

  George looked over at him flatly. “Her mind.”

  The Whale laughed again, slightly uneasily.

  The whole time, George and I were behaving as if we did this two or three times a day. We communicated with our eyes.

  Trust me, said his.

  I could kill you, said mine.

  You’ll be all right.

  Take care of me.

  I will.

  There’s always been, of course, much over-the-top hysteria about street drugs. Before we had Petey, I’d smoked pot with Jeff a few times and felt ho-hum about it. That was the sum total of my experience with illegal substances.

  At the moment, what scared me more than the heroin itself was that my alertness was about to be compromised while in the company of these lowlifes.

  And I realized why George had wanted me here: I was, in effect, his job reference.

  I held the teaspoon as he shifted the lighter. He murmured, “We can just use your arm, since we don’t need a vein.”

  Bizarrely, I recognized the spoon as an Oneida pattern like the one my best friend’s mom had back in Wisconsin. Maybe from his friend Gonzalo’s kitchen—then I realized: Gonzalo the neurologist and jazz trumpet player, that’s where he must have gotten this pristine syringe—it even had a plastic cap—probably the doctor had even given him whatever harmless powder he’d intended to substitute for the heroin, and showed him how to inject it.

  We crouched there, and the heroin and water melted into a skim-milk-like potion. A small, salty smell rose up.

  “Act,” breathed George.

  And with that, I snapped into feeling like the most depraved person in the whole world. I felt so horrible for what I was about to do to my poor little unborn foam fetus, I almost cried. I rubbed my foam and mourned my lack of integrity. I grieved for the shitty, shitty birthright I was handing to my child.

  But I wanted that heroin. Too bad, tyke, Mama’s got to fix.

  “Hey,” said Wichita, “whatchoo doin’, knittin’ a sweater over there?”

  George jacked the insignificant-looking puddle into the syringe. I suddenly understood the intimacy of shooting up. I actually kind of got into it: it’s like taking a sacrament, a powerful, devilish sacrament, and you want to hide, and you want to fully experience it. And I understood then how depraved you have to be to do it on the street in broad, unfiltered daylight.

  George shielded me with his body as he grasped my left arm, stretched my skin with his thumb, and with a quick motion, thrust the needle beneath my skin.

  He began to hum something, and I realized it was “I’v
e Got You Under My Skin,” Cole Porter’s night-rhythm song of—well, addiction. Suddenly I was deeply scared.

  George injected only a little, then withdrew the needle, squirting the rest invisibly down my arm; I smeared it off as if some blood had escaped. I put my finger over the hole and he replaced the equipment in his pockets. We returned to the group.

  “Let the lady have a seat,” said Denny.

  I felt the drug hit about one minute after I sat down: a warm glow started somewhere in my middle and grew outward from there.

  Suddenly my fear and manufactured self-loathing were gone, and I felt nothing but serenity and acceptance. And I felt beautiful. Everything was beautiful. I looked down and my skaggy hands were beautiful. My needle-tracked feet were beautiful.

  “How is it, DeeDee?” asked George.

  “Mmmm.” I hugged myself like a happy platypus.

  Everyone in the room looked so nice and attractive—their jewelry sparkled so—and there was no trouble. Deep down, of course, I knew everything was fucked up, same as when I walked in, but the difference was I didn’t care.

  The nearest I’d come to such a feeling was when I’d gotten a shot of morphine after I hurt my back once—I knew the pain was there, but suddenly I was totally indifferent to it.

  I smiled lovingly at everybody.

  One of the guards looked wistful, and I could tell he wanted some. Yeah, it’s only a matter of time, buddy, before you give in to this again.

  Satisfied that we were for real, the Whale welcomed George into his organization.

  “From now on you don’t have to worry about her. Get him a bag, Witch. Take yourself a couple of ounces, Jimmer. Gonna start you small. Keep an eye on you.”

  As I drifted on my cloud, I heard quite clearly George and the Whale talk terms and conditions.

  One by one, the vice presidents drifted out, but the Whale evidently found something resonant in George—who had been, of course, outthinking him, trying to be as resonant as possible. Wichita hung around.