Carcass Trade (23 page)

“These people, were they looking at you, do you think, when they died? Were they looking at you, or just off in the distance?”

His hand fit across my ankles, as if they were two rolling pins trying to get away. He said, “Maybe it was the light.” He checked for reaction. “You know, they were looking at the bright light.”

“Take it another way,” I said, swinging free of his lap and walking to where I could look out over the black bluffs of the bay against a royal sky. “Be the murderer,” I said.

I turned to see him now sunk into the pillow in the corner of the couch as a man might who's ready to watch the news, only tireder than most; a man with hard things on his mind.

“You're a killer,” I said. “You get up in the morning, bathe, eat, call a girlfriend. Joe, do you figure once you've murdered someone, anything else matters? Do you figure anything could ever break your heart? You could get mad, sure. Be disappointed. Ah, but . . . could you ever cry? Would anything ever delight you? Once you've found you can deliberately, methodically kill someone, are you a human being?”

He got up and came to me, taking the cup from my hand and putting it on the lamp table. “What can I do, baby?” He put both hands on my shoulders. “Let me stay with you.”

I didn't mean to be cruel. I said, “You can if you want. Either way,” then went to the couch and sat again, the shirt over my knees so I became a big gray boulder.

He came to sit beside me and ran his finger along the back of my neck. The CD stopped at the end of the last track. The first song played again, a song so slow in its tenderness that I took Joe's hand and held it to my chest. In a second tears fled down my face. I said a thing I seldom do: I love you.

Joe tipped my head to his shoulder. We were two people in a darkened theater, looking out at a slice of moonlit bay. On the bluffs to the north were the homes of the wealthy strung along streets named Galaxy, Constellation, Northern Star, and Evening Star. Their lights bleached the bulrushes, swept over the sleepless nightjars and the brown-headed cow-birds, the small-time burglars now busy in the shadows rustling nests from other birds. And I wondered which of those homes on the bluffs this night harbored distracted hearts, and which would, in the early hours, summon the lonely wail of sirens, and which of their inhabitants would prove the best and worst of human impulse.

She was slapping me with the flat of the big knife. My legs stung like a family of bees.

When I'd come in, her back was to me at the sink.
Where have you been, young lady?

I'd left the curtain next to the lamp, and the shade off the lamp because I needed a lot of light to trace something before I went to school, and the wallpaper was all burned now, and
just how are you going to pay for it, sister?

I said, I'll save, I'll sell my bike, just
don't
!

When she yanked me, the belt tore off my dress, and when she threw me across the chair it almost tipped over, and I kept thinking how my nose would hurt if I fell face first and the chair crashed. Where her fingernails scraped it burned real bad. I had my eyes squished shut because I could just
see
the knife coming, swish, sting, swish, sting. And then she whapped me and I didn't breathe. I clenched my teeth. I hummed like a bee. In the end, I begged.

When I took my dress off, I softly laid it in the wastebasket. I dabbed at my legs with toilet paper and put on jeans and lay on my stomach and thought about what I did. When I got ready for bed that night and took off my jeans, they barely stuck at all.

I felt Joe beside me before I even opened my eyes. I listened to his breath, then squinted at him as he lay swirled on the deep-green sheets, stomach down, a boy asleep on a summer lawn. An eye opened. He rolled halfway over, blinked hard, yawned, and said, “What time is it?” Then, tenderly: “Are you my fairy godmother or did I just get real, real lucky?”

While I was feeding Motorboat, the phone rang. I asked Joe to get it. He came back and said, “We're wanted at headquarters. The customs guy is in.”

“So early?”

Joe swallowed one of my giant vitamin pills, rinsed his coffee cup in the sink, and said, “I think you lit a line of gasoline, sweetheart.”

“Who was it called?”

“Captain Exner.”

“Cheesh. He say anything?”

“Yeah, he said, ‘This is Hal Exner.'”

“No, silly. I mean about your being here.”

“He's a smart boy. He figured it out.”

I got dressed quickly, but when I went to plug in earrings, I kept dropping them, the gold hoops bouncing on the dresser top.

Joe stood smoothing himself before the mirror that was too low for him and cut off his head.

“I've got one of your shirts, from the cleaners. You left it when we went to the beach.”

“The gray stripe? I wondered where that went.”

“You've got a bit of a beard. Want a razor?”

“Nah,” he said. “I need some character, don't you think? After all, I don't smoke rum-dipped Indianas.”

While he changed, I looked at my answering machine and found that Nathan had called. “Sammi, call me,” he said; that's all. I phoned him back, though it was only about seven. He sounded awake.

“I've been trying to get you,” he said.

“You found out something?”

“The question is, have
you
found out anything?”

“I can't say we're any closer, no.”

“What are you people doing down there? You
do
anything down there?”

“Oh,” I said, “drink beer, play cards. The cops crawl in, the cops crawl out, the cops play pinochle on your snout.”

He said, surprising me, “I don't know why I do that to you. Suppose that's why I've had four wives?”

“Could be you're getting a clue.”

“Jesus, doesn't anybody in California use a rake? Everywhere I go there's a leaf blower.”

I heard the racket now in the background.

“Buzz and blow, that's all they do. Look, I found out her husband's booked to go to Beijing next week.”

“As in China? He has some kind of medical thing going on over there?”

“He flies Saturday, that's all I know,” Nathan said. “If he's going somewhere, why isn't he going to Italy, to see his wife?”

“People take separate vacations, who knows? How'd you find out Dr. Robertson was going?”

“Hired a guy. My lawyer has an investigator he uses. That's not all. He ran an asset check on the good doctor. He's making frequent money transactions under ten thousand dollars.”

“So it doesn't have to be reported to the IRS.”

“Right. I'd like to know why. The amount of money going through this guy, he could buy his own island in the Caymans.”

“He's a doctor, Nathan. What do you expect, he's poor? The P.I., he's licensed?”

“Don't worry about it. Look, I know I'm a jerk some of the time.”

“Is this still my endearing brother?”

“But, Sammi? Let's not let this guy off the hook so soon, huh? You're still checking?”

“I don't see Detective Fedders every day. But I'll lean on it.”

It sounded as if he might be holding the receiver away, looking out the window maybe, at the leaf blower culprits. “Fine,” he said, and I knew it wasn't.

“Hard as it is for you to believe this, Nathan, this isn't our only case. Things just take—”

“I say her name. I say her name all day in my mind. Yesterday on the phone I called my secretary Miranda. I called her Miranda, this woman who doesn't even look like her.”

“I'm sorry, Nathan.”

“I just want to look in her face and ask why. Jesus, I want to just
see
her. She's here with us, Sammi. She's not gone, I know it.”

“I'll be in touch, honest, I will.”

“For your old grumpy brother.”

“For me, Nathan, and maybe, if you're good, I'll include you.”

When I hung up, I felt as helpless as ever. I'd go back out to the farm. I'd go back and model for Monty. Whatever it took.

Joe was standing with one hand on the doorknob, a question on his face. I said, “Nathan.”

“Still torn up?”

I nodded, got my keys, shut off a lamp. “It's a wonder Les Fedders didn't run a check on
him
. But then, Les sort of
does
play pinochle all day, doesn't he?”

“You're hard on him. Les is not a bad guy.”

“I didn't say he was. I just said I don't like him.”

“Anyway,” Joe said. “He didn't need to run a check on Nathan. I did.”

When we arrived at the captain's, this time not in a classroom at the training center but at his office in Santa Ana, the heavy aroma of doughnuts hung in the air and there were two filter loads of coffee grounds in the wastebasket already, indicating the captain and the customs agent had been there awhile.

She was a woman whose rear could cover three chairs. Her face was ruddy and her hair ash-brown. Under a nubby cream cardigan she wore a black dress patterned with beige and white swoops. She'd be the person who'd be planning the next VFW dance, or the one with the pencil behind her ear, counting retail stock. Not a customs agent. She sat on a squeaky, vinyl two-person couch with her tablet on one knee.

As Captain Exner made introductions, there was a pleasantness in her face and a steadiness in her yellow-brown eyes: U.S. Customs Service Special Agent Christine Vogel, he said, operating out of the Office of the Resident Agent in Charge, Orange County. “You saw a man murdered yesterday?” she asked.

“I did.”

Joe, in a chair at a slight angle to mine, crossed his legs in my direction.

I recounted what happened in the storage shed.

Quietly, she asked, “Did you know this man?”

“I knew his name. Quillard Satterlee.”

“Can you tell me . . .” she said, and stopped. “How would you describe the murdered man?”

“Maybe five five, my height. A hundred and fifty. White hair and beard.”

Agent Vogel was not writing.

“He had a friend,” I said, “a woman named Marge. Late forties, kind of big.”

Captain Exner, silent all this while behind his desk, in his yellow-flowered tie and impeccable brown suit, said, “We ran what we had on Ralph D'Antonio—Switchie. Comes up clean on NCIC. Paul Avalos has one bust for morphie, was on the street in six hours. Completed probation. That's all we have on him.”

“It won't be for long,” Agent Vogel said. Then she asked me, “Was Morris Blackman there at the time of the murder?”

“Not in the shed.”

“Too bad.” She folded her tablet. I glanced at Joe, puzzled by her remark.

“Agent Vogel's working on a task force investigating transport of contraband,” the captain put in. “Morris Blackman is a primary suspect.”

Gravely, she said, “Quillard Satterlee was one of ours.”

“Oh man,” I said.

Joe put his head down and pinched the bridge of his nose.

“His real name was Bernie Williams. I didn't know him personally because he was new out from D.C., but it's a small world: I know his mother. We play in the same Scrabble tournaments. It wouldn't hurt me any to see this Blackman
and
all his buddies get thirty days in the electric chair.”

“We must be talking big green here,” Joe said. “Just what is this operation?”

“It's not the value of the operation. It's about betrayal. You can understand: It disorders their sense of things.” Head down, eyes at the tops of their sockets, she leaned forward. “Working undercover,” she said, “is like walking on quicksand over hell.”

I thought of my narrow escape, and as immediately felt it didn't seem so important at all. I was safe, that's all it meant. Bernie Williams was dead.

“Bernie was supposed to be a courier for the operation,” she said. “There was another mule too. We don't have his name. This second courier wanted Bernie—Quillard—to come with him on a money pickup because
he
was suspected of ripping off the operation. Except Bernie came down with a giant case of food poisoning, and while he was puking pizza in his motel room Paul Avalos was on his way up to see him. Bernie had the door cracked for air. Fatal mistake. He told us yesterday Avalos might've overheard his conversation to us. We think that's why he was killed.”

“You haven't said what kind of contraband you think Blackman's delivering,” I said. “Dope?”

“We believe he exports precursors to Mexico and South America,” she said, precursors being the special chemicals needed to process drugs for street use and high profit. “He's too smart to run a lab himself. They're death kitchens. Blow up all the time.”

“A light switch can set that stuff off,” Joe said.

“We don't have the complete routing yet,” she went on. “We wanted to acquire the route, get the folks on the other end. That's what Bernie was doing for us.”

“A guy at the rally asked Monty for drugs,” I said. “He sent him on his way to see Switchie. He acted like he wanted nothing to do with it.”

Agent Vogel thought a minute and then said, “You know why they call it crank? Biker gangs used to cook it up in their crank cases. Now any butthead can do it in a motel bathtub. A lot of your kingpins won't even smoke a mooter. So don't let that fool you.”

“Somehow I have a problem thinking of Blackman as a kingpin,” I said. “I'm not defending him, he just seems too busy to be involved in a big operation.”

Agent Vogel shifted heavily, glanced over at the doughnut box, then stood, taking the guest coffee mug with her, a black one marked with gold numbers: 381. The numbers referred to the penal code provision relating to the possession and ingestion of the toxic chemical toluene, which, in Captain Exner's eyes, passes for office coffee. She refueled at the coffee maker, then crossed to Captain Exner's desk and poured for him too, unfettered by feminist roles.