Prudence Couldn't Swim (15 page)

He calmed a little. He'd deployed nearly every weapon in his con man arsenal and I was still right in his face. Being a thorn in the side
of a millionaire was better than shooting my wad with Olga any time. I had to find out about this boating accident.

“I'm just thinking that maybe you forgot to protect yourself one time and you caught something from her,” I said. “She was, after all, an African. You knew that, didn't you? AIDS is rampant there. It could be a motive for revenge.”

“You're way off the mark now,” he said. “She was from London. Time to regroup your forces. This is going nowhere for either of us.”

“But at least we're having a good time along the way.” I gave him the broad smile I'd used on the secretary. My joy was not infectious.

“If I think of anything else, I'll call you,” he said, moving toward the door.

“I'd appreciate that. I hope you don't mind if I drop in from time to time just to keep you informed. I'm sure you don't want to be out of the loop on this.”

“Goodbye, Mr. Winter. If there has been foul play, I hope you uncover it. In the meantime, please call before you show up at my office again. I'd hate to miss you. If you continue to bother me, though, I will find an appropriate response.”

“That almost sounds like a threat.”

“Take it however you like,” he said. “We in the business world don't issue threats. We make offers, prepare lists of negotiating issues, determine priorities. I'm quite skilled in all phases of my work.”

“I'm sure you are,” I said. “So am I. I've got a certificate from the Leavenworth College of Business. Perhaps you've heard of it.”

He opened the door. I walked out, grabbing a quick glance at the harelip on his high school football team on the way. Poor kid was ugly as sin. I bet he was a reserve tackle. I paused for a second. The short kid next to him looked familiar, but I couldn't put a name to the face. Probably somebody I met in the joint.

I gave the secretary a replay of my greeting smile and headed for the stairs. Waiting for elevators doesn't make it when you're trying for a triumphant exit.

Jeffcoat was clearly a ruthless character. I was probably on over my head playing with him, but I couldn't stay away. This felt like my fifteen minutes of fame, wheeling and dealing on the fourteenth floor. If I was
about to fall, let it be remembered that Calvin Winter successfully got under the skin of millionaires and cops in his quest to find justice for a wife he'd never kissed.

In the meantime, I had to find out about Peter Margolis.

T
hat night Red Eye and I went for a drive in the hills of Oakland. Life always looked different from up there. I'd had a taste of hills life in my house but I didn't have a view. A view would have cost me another $100,000. It didn't seem worth it at the time, but now I understood. My neighbors with those enormous tinted windows overlooking San Francisco Bay saw the same world as Jeffcoat from the fourteenth floor. I hadn't quite gotten over my encounter with him. Even with all my experience, I just wasn't sure I could out-con a millionaire on his own turf. I came from a different planet.

When I wasn't in juvie, I grew up in neighborhoods where the only view I had was peeping in on what the family next door was up to. What I couldn't see, I heard through open windows or thin walls. There was life in those streets, though, and on the playgrounds. Nowadays they'd probably call the families in my old neighborhoods “dysfunctional.” Definitely two or three of the foster homes where I ended up fell in that category. Going to juvenile hall and then the penitentiary didn't help. Everyone knew your habits there. If you used an extra square of toilet paper, half a dozen guys would ask you if you had diarrhea. The hills had none of that openness. Everyone's life in Carltonville was a closed circle. Too much time to worry over nothing.

Red Eye halted the car in one of those places where you could see from San Francisco all the way down to San Jose. We wanted to get out of the car to take a fresh look. I waited while Red Eye put on a long-sleeve shirt. In this neck of the woods, he never showed off his montage of ink spider webs, dragon heads, prison bars, and the little graveyard with the RIPs for his fallen friends. If people in Carltonville saw all that, they might jump to dangerous conclusions.

“Just when I buy a house and get out of the ghetto,” I complained, “a woman turns up dead in my pool. I wasn't meant to have any peace in life. The curse of the harelip.”

“Trouble follows us,” said Red Eye. “We can move up the hill but we'll always be foreigners here. Our past is only a few miles away. It can climb up here and find us any time.”

“I've thought of moving to Hawaii,” I said.

“We can't let go, don't know how to leave it alone. It's just like in the pen. Someone steps on your foot and doesn't say ‘excuse me.' Another guy burns you for a few soups. Just a couple of bucks. But you have to retaliate. You know it's petty but you can't leave it alone.”

“This isn't petty,” I said. “It's a murder.”

“One we should leave alone. It will only bring us more trouble.”

“You're right, we should just forget about it, get on with our lives.”

“But we won't, will we?”

“Hell, no. It's just not our nature,” I replied, “just so we're on the same page.”

“We're on the same paragraph,” said Red Eye.

Before we'd left my house, Red Eye had rolled two joints and tucked them into his pack of Camels. Even with the weed I hadn't relaxed since Prudence's death, except for that one time with Olga. That really didn't count.

As we got back in the car, Red Eye put on the Eagles' “Lyin' Eyes.”

The lyrics highlighted my situation. But whose eyes were lyin'? Was it Jeffcoat's or Newman's? Was it Prudence's? Her eyes were lying from day one. She didn't come from London. English wasn't even her first language. And she had a family she never talked about. Lots of lies. But they never bothered me that much. Some people had to lie to survive. All my years of bringing people across the border taught me that.

My worry was that the real lyin' eyes might be my own. I'd have to check the next time I looked in the mirror. Was I lying to myself thinking I could solve this? After all, I'd made so many bad decisions in my life, how could I be sure this wasn't just another one? But I knew one thing. Finding Prudence's killer was the right thing to do. I just had to stop thinking about all this other stuff and go and track down Peter Margolis. That's what would turn this case around.

I
Googled “Peter Margolis” and got 353,000 hits. I looked at the first hundred. There was a Dr. Peter Margolis in St. Petersburg, Florida, who did boob jobs. Another Peter Margolis in Lincoln, Nebraska, had won first prize in the county fair pork and beef grill-off. I stopped there. I'd have to find someone who understood this Internet stuff.

I got up to go and put the tapes back in my stash. I looked next to the Paul Newman classics where I'd left them the night before. Gone.
Cool Hand Luke
and
Harper
were missing as well. I couldn't believe it. I tiptoed around the house, checked all the windows and doors. No sign of a break-in. Nothing else disturbed. I'd violated a basic rule of survival: what belongs in the stash stays in the stash—always. A real professional doesn't think it's a waste of time rolling up rugs and prying off floor boards. It's always time well spent. Someone was invading my space. My first thought was Jeffcoat, though I wasn't sure why.

I phoned him but his secretary told me he was out of town for the week. When I told her who it was, she wouldn't give me his cell number or tell me where he'd gone or when he'd be back.

She did agree to take my message.

“Tell him if I don't hear from him by the end of the day, I'll Fed Ex the tapes to the webmaster of Zebralove.com.”

“I'll give him the message.”

He phoned me three minutes later. The secretary had grasped the urgency of the situation. I assumed he was poking her as well. Just a gut feeling. I figured we still had him by the balls but our grip was getting a little loose.

“What the hell do you think you're doing?” he said before I even had a chance to let him have it. “Whatever you have to say, say it straight to me. People can read between the lines. I don't need that.”

“Call your thugs off and return what they stole,” I said. “There's plenty of copies in other places. In Leavenworth we killed anyone who stole from us. Anyone.”

“I don't have thugs,” he said. “It's not my style. And I'm not a thief.”

“So you have no idea who broke into my house last night?”

“I wish I did,” he said. “I'd like to give ‘em a medal.”

“You're pushing me to where I don't want to go,” I said, “but I've been there before. It's uncharted territory for you.”

“You live in a fantasy world,” he said. “Too bad you never investigate anything before you make wild allegations. You're a moron, Winter. Recognize who you're dealing with. I'm not from the world of breakins and broken thumbs. I'm a businessman, but I'm no Scout Master. When I've had my fill, I fight back. You don't want to go there.”

“You're nothing special just because you have an office on the fourteenth floor. We all come from the jungle.”

“So you're stupid enough to think because I let my dick get the best of me now and then I'm a murderer?” he said. “Have a nice day, Mr. Winter.” He cut the phone before I had a chance to tell him I wouldn't let him alone until he spilled his guts. He was just an arrogant bastard. I was beginning to think he might have killed Prudence after all.

The worst part of it all was that Jeffcoat was learning how to make me feel like a fool. Too quickly. This talking game was supposed to be my turf. I had to settle into my groove or Jeffcoat and his thugs, if he had any, would be dancing on my face.

Before I had time to pour another shot of Wild Turkey, Red Eye phoned.

“My buddy's through with tape number nine,” he said. “He can't recover the audio and the video never came clear enough to ID anyone. All he knows is that the guy has a tattoo on his right arm and another one over his heart. Can't see what the tats say.”

“How many guys we got in Oakland with tattoos?” I asked. “A hundred thousand? Two hundred thousand?” It wasn't my day. I asked him if his buddy could follow up Peter Margolis.

“I tried,” I told him, “but there's about five thousand Peter Margolises around. I don't know where to start.”

“No problem,” Red Eye said, “homeboy is the bomb on computers.”

We arranged to meet later that night. I didn't even tell him the other tapes were gone. I was too wiped out to listen to his advice on how I should have put them back in the stash.

I filled in the afternoon with a business matter—matchmaking. Only for me it was usually more pleasure than business. If you got a perfect match it was like doing a good deed for the day. Even the Calvin Winters of the world like to do a good deed every once in a while.

As it turned out, I wasn't sure if this match qualified. I found a Filipina woman for Sunny Jim Fitzpatrick in Coeur D'Alene, Idaho. Sunny Jim looked like a geek. No teeth, no eyebrows. He'd pay $4,000 plus airfare. Corazon Pehau, his partner-to-be, said she was five foot four, 130 lb., aged thirty. She looked closer to 95 lb. and barely legal. Hard to tell in a photo, and I had to be careful in this business. Trafficking in minors was dangerous. Could get me plenty of federal time at 85 percent with no reduction for good behavior. Besides, I had some boundaries. I wasn't about selling some kid into sex slavery. If a grown woman wanted to put herself on the market, that was different. It was her affair. I was just a broker. Without the middleman, most trade would never happen.

I decided Corazon was over eighteen and e-mailed the photos to the prospective client. Like most Filipina women in my line of work, Corazon was ready to come at the drop of a hat, even if future hubby looked like the back end of a pit bull. I'd found out this modern world of ours had generated millions of desperately poor women in the far corners of our planet. Their flip side was the flood of lonely, socially misfit males in the United States. The women, the Prudences of the world, supplied companionship, sex, a little cooking and housecleaning, plus the image of a marriage—exactly what lames like my man from Idaho demanded. Of course Sunny Jim's demand was backed up by what made the whole process function—money.

Sunny Jim claimed to have a three-bedroom house on half an acre. He didn't post a photo of the place, either because it didn't exist or
because the yard was strewn with old transmissions, broken down Lazy Boy recliners and piles of unrecyclable bottles. No guarantees in this matchmaking marketplace. Truth in advertising did not apply. The parties relied on that most elusive of commodities—trust. Hell, I didn't even know if I could trust myself. At this stage I might tell all kind of lies just to have another body next to me, a voice in the house to suppress that image of Prudence's eyes receding into her head next to my guest bathroom toilet.

At least, unlike my Sunny Jim, I had a presentable house. It would look good in photos but it was no longer the sanctuary I dreamed of. The house wasn't really the problem. It was the situation I'd backed myself into. I couldn't settle for a homely woman who worked at J.C. Penney's and made a terrific meatloaf. I had to show the world that a harelip could attract a sexy woman, the type everyone wanted to get their hands on. The world was full of Corazons—desperate, homely, hardworking. I wanted glamorous. But the glamorous types like Prudence only came to me when they hit rock bottom. Prudence still had dreams when I met her. A short little ex-con with a harelip was just a stepping-stone. Corazon might stay with that guy from Idaho for years. I couldn't hold Prudence for more than a few months.