Stormy Weather (34 page)

He arrived at Augustine’s home with a prepared speech and, if necessary, a legal threat. The lights were off. Nobody answered the door. In the absence of confrontation, Max was emboldened to slip around to the backyard.

The sliding glass door on the porch was unlocked. Inside the house, it was stuffy and warm. Max started the air conditioner and turned on every lamp he could find. He wanted to advertise his presence; he didn’t want to be found creeping through the halls in darkness, like a common burglar.

Thrilled by his own daring, Max combed the place for signs of his wife. Hanging in a closet was the outfit she’d worn on the day he was kidnapped. Since the rental car had been looted of their belongings, Max reasoned that Bonnie must now be wearing somebody else’s clothes, or her folks had wired some cash—or perhaps Augustine had bought her an expensive new wardrobe. Wasn’t that what wife-stealers did?

Max Lamb forced himself to enter the guest room. He purposely avoided the wall of skulls, but shuddered anyway under the dissipated stares. He was pleased to find the bed linens rumpled exclusively on the left side—Bonnie’s favorite. A depression in the lone pillow seemed, upon inspection, to match the shape of a young woman’s head. The bed showed no manifest evidence of male visitation.

An oak dresser yielded an assortment of female clothing, from bras to blue jeans, in an intriguing range of sizes. Relics of Augustine’s ex-girlfriends, Max assumed. One of them must have stood six feet two, judging by the Amazonian cut of her black exercise leggings. Max located several petite items that would have fit his wife, including a pair of powder-blue sweat socks in a tidy mound on the hardwood floor. His outlook improved; at least she was wearing borrowed clothes.

He steeled himself for the next survey: Augustine’s room.

The man’s bed looked like a grenade had been set off under the sheets. Max Lamb thought: He’s either having fantastic sex or horrible nightmares. The disarray made it impossible to determine if two persons had shared the mattress; the cast of
A Chorus Line
could have slept there, for all Max could tell.

Uncertainty nibbled at his ego. He got an idea—distasteful but effective. He bent over Augustine’s bed and put his nose to the linens, whiffing for a trace of Bonnie’s perfume. Uncharacteristically, Max Lamb couldn’t recall the brand name of the fragrance, but he’d never forget its orchard scent.

He sniffed in imaginary grids, starting at the headboard and working his way down the mattress. An explosive sneeze announced his findings: Paco Rabanne for men. Max recognized the scent because he wore it himself (in spite of a near-incapacitating allergy) every Monday, for the sixth-floor meetings at Rodale.

Paco and laundry bleach, that’s all Max detected on Augustine’s sheets.

One more place to check: the wastebasket in the bathroom. Grimly Max pawed through the litter: no used condoms, thank God.

Later, stretched out on Augustine’s sofa, Max realized that Bonnie’s faithfulness, or possible lack thereof, wasn’t the most pressing issue. It was her sanity. Somehow they’d snowed her, those madmen. Like some weird cult—one eats road pizza, the other fondles human skulls.

How could such a bright girl let herself be brainwashed by such freaks!

Max Lamb decided on a bold move. He composed a script for himself and rehearsed it for an hour before picking up the phone. Then he dialed the apartment in New York and left the message for his wandering wife. The ultimatum.

Afterwards Max called back to hear how it sounded on the answering machine. His voice was so steely that he scarcely recognized himself.

Excellent, he thought. Just what Bonnie needs to hear.

If only she calls.

Avila’s wife snidely announced that his expensive
santería
goats were in the custody of Animal Control. One had been captured grazing along the shoulder of the Don Shula Expressway, while the other had turned up at a car wash, butting its horns through the grillwork of a leased Jaguar sedan. Avila’s wife said it made the Channel 7 news.

“So? What do you want
me
to do?” Avila demanded.

“Oh, forget about! Three hundred dollars, chew jess forget about!”

“You want me to steal the goats back? OK, tonight I’ll drive to the animal shelter and break down the fence and kidnap the damn things. That make you happy? While I’m there I’ll grab you some kittens and puppies, too. Maybe a big fat guinea pig for your mother, no?”

“I hate chew! I hate chew!”

Avila shook his head. “Here we go again.”

“Chew and Chango, your faggot
orícha
!”

“Louder,” Avila said. “Maybe you can wake some of your dead relatives in Havana.”

The phone rang. He picked it up and turned his back on his wife, who hurled a can of black beans and stormed from the kitchen in a gust of English expletives.

It was Jasmine on the line. She asked, “What’s all that noise?”

“Marriage,” Avila said.

“Well, love, I’m sitting here with Bridget, and guess where we’re going tonight.”

“To blow somebody?”

“God, look who’s in a piss-poor mood.”

“Sorry,” Avila said. “It’s been a shitty day.”

“We’re driving to the Keys.”

“Yeah?”

“To meet your friend,” said Jasmine.

“No shit? Where?”

“Some motel on the ocean. Can you believe he’s payin’ the both of us to baby-sit some old-timer.”

“Who?” Avila couldn’t imagine what new scam Snapper was running.

Jasmine said, “Just some yutz, I don’t know. We’re supposed to keep him busy for a couple days, take some dirty pictures. Five hundred each is what your friend’s giving us.”

“Geez, that sucks.”

“Business is slow, sweetie. The hurricane turned all our regulars into decent, faithful, God-fearing family men.”

Avila heard Bridget’s giggle in the background. Jasmine said, “So five hundred looks pretty sweet right about now.”

“You can double it if you give up the name of the motel.”

“Why do you think we called? Aren’t you proud of me?”

Avila said, “You’re the best.”

“But listen, honey, we need to know—”

“Let me talk to Bridget.”

“Nope, we want to know what you got in mind. Because both of us are on probation, as usual—”

“Don’t worry,” Avila said.

“—and we don’t need no more trouble, legally speaking.”

“Relax, I said.”

“You ain’t gonna kill this guy?”

“Which guy—Snapper? Hell, no, he owes me money is all. What time are you meeting him?”

Jasmine said, “Around eight.”

Avila checked his wristwatch. “You girls ain’t gonna make Key West by eight o’clock unless you got a rocket car.”

“Not Key West, honey. Islamorada.”

It was seventy-five miles closer, but Avila still wasn’t certain he could get there in time. First he had to make an offering; such a momentous trip was unthinkable without an offering.

He said, “Jasmine, what’s the name of the motel?”

“Not till you promise me and Bridget won’t get in trouble.”

“Jesus, I already told you.”

She said, “Here’s the deal, so listen. You gotta wait till we get our money from your friend Snapper. Then you gotta promise not to shoot anybody in front of us, OK?”

Avila said, “On my wife’s future grave.”

“Also, you gotta promise to pay us what you said—five hundred each.”

“Yep.”

“Plus two stone crab dinners. That’s Bridget’s idea.”

“No problem,” Avila said. Informing the prostitutes that stone crabs were out of season would only have muddled the negotiation.

“The name,” Avila pressed.

“Paradise Palms. I’ve never been there before. Bridget, neither, but Snapper promised it’s really nice.”

“Compared to prison, I’m sure it’s the fucking Ritz. What’s the room number?”

Jasmine asked Bridget. Bridget didn’t know.

“Doesn’t matter,” Avila said. “I’ll track you down.”

“Remember what you promised!”

“Yeah, I’ll try. It’s already been at least seven seconds.”

“Well, sweetheart, we better cruise.”

Avila was about to set the receiver on the cradle when he remembered something. “Hey! Jasmine, wait!”

“Yeah, what.”

“Did you tell her about me?”

“Bridget? I didn’t tell her nuthin’.” Jasmine sounded puzzled. “What’s to tell?”

“Nuthin’.”

“Oh … you mean about—”

“Don’t say it!”

Jasmine said, “Honey, I would
never
. That was between you and me. Honest to God.”

“’Cause the other night you said I was better.” How valiantly Avila had labored to stifle his vocalizing during the lovemaking! What few sounds he’d made were not, by any stretch of the imagination, squeaks.

“The other night you were just great,” said Jasmine. “Fantastic, even. Better than I remembered.”

Avila said, “Same goes for you, too.”

Later, driving to Sweetwater for the chickens, he couldn’t stop thinking about the call girl’s sultry compliment. Whether she meant
a word of it or not wasn’t worth speculating on; the concept of sincerity was so foreign to Avila’s own life that he felt unqualified to pass judgment on Jasmine. He was just glad she’d quit calling herself Morganna—what a clunker of a name to remember in the heat of passion!

The combined effect of marijuana and methaqualone on Dr. Charles Gabler’s judgment was not salutary. Never was it more evident than late on the night of September 1, at a roadside motel off Interstate 10 near Bonifay, Florida. Overtaken with desire, the professor slipped out of the twin bed he shared with the sleeping Neria Torres, and slipped into the twin bed occupied by the wakeful young graduate student, Celeste. As he ardently attached himself to one of Celeste’s creamy breasts, Dr. Gabler was becalmed by a warm, harmonious confluence of physical and metaphysical currents. His timing couldn’t have been worse.

Neria Torres had been reevaluating the parameters of her relationship with the professor ever since they’d pulled off a highway outside Jackson, Mississippi, so he could take a leak. Sitting in the driver’s seat, watching Dr. Gabler try to tinkle in some azaleas, Neria had thought: I don’t find this cute anymore.

As the professor had tottered back toward the van, the beams of the headlights dramatically illuminated the ruby-colored crystals dangling from the lanyard around his neck.

“Oh wow,” young Celeste had exclaimed, suffused with mystic awe and Humboldt County’s finest.

That was the moment when Neria Torres had looked into her future and decided that the professor should share no large part of it; specifically, the insurance settlement from the hurricane. Neria envisioned a scenario in which Dr. Gabler might endeavor to sweet-talk her out of a portion of the money—he would probably call it a friendly loan—and then flee in the dead of night with his nubile protégée. After all, that’s pretty much what he’d done to his previous lover, a vendor of fine macramés, when Neria Torres entered his life.

Even if the professor harbored no selfish designs on the hurricane booty, Neria had a pragmatic reason to dump him: His appearance in Miami would complicate the duel with her estranged husband over the insurance settlement. Considering the tainted circumstance of her departure from the household, Neria doubted that Tony would
be in a mood to forgive and forget. Her inability to make contact in the days following the storm was foreboding—the vindictive bastard obviously intended to pocket her half of the windfall. If the battle went to court, Dr. Gabler’s bleary presence during the proceedings would not, Neria Torres knew, work in her favor.

These were the thoughts she carried into sleep at the motel in Bonifay. Had it been a deeper sleep, or had the room’s Eisenhower-vintage cooling unit been a few decibels louder, Neria Torres might not have been awakened by the muffled suckling and amorous hmmm-hmmms from the nearby bed. But awakened she was.

Except for cracking her eyelids, Neria didn’t move a muscle at first. Instead she lay listening in disgusted fascination, struggling to arrange her emotions. On the one hand, she was vastly relieved to have found a solid excuse for jettisoning the professor. On the other hand, she was furious that the sneaky little shit would be so crude and thoughtless. Over the years, Tony Torres undoubtedly had cheated on her now and again—but never while she was sleeping in the same room!

Eventually, it was the immodest giggling of young Celeste that galvanized Neria Torres. She sprang from the bed, turned on all the lights, snatched up the velvet satchel containing Dr. Gabler’s special healing crystals and began whaling deliriously on the writhing mound of bedsheets. The satchel was heavy and the stones were sharp, taking a toll on the professor’s unfirm flesh. With an effeminate cry, he scuttled to the bathroom and chained the door. Meanwhile the graduate student cowered nude and tearful on the mattress. The stubble on Dr. Gabler’s chin had left a telltale path of abraded, roseate blotches from her neck to her quivering belly. Neria Torres noticed, with fierce satisfaction, a faint comma of a scar beneath each of young Celeste’s perfect breasts; an Earth Mother with implants!

Repeatedly she gasped, “I’m sorry, Neria, please don’t kill me! Please don’t…”

Neria threw the satchel of crystals to the floor. “Celeste, you know what I hope for you? I hope that asshole hiding in the john is the highlight of your entire goddamn life. Now where’s the keys to the van?”

Hours later, at a busy truck stop in Gainesville, Neria tried another call to Mr. Varga, her former neighbor in Miami. This time his phone was working; Varga answered on the third ring. He insisted he knew nothing about Neria’s husband and a young blond hussy loading up a rental truck.

“Fact, I haven’t seen Tony since maybe two days after the hurricane.”

“Are there still strangers at the house?” Neria asked.

“All the time, people come and go. But no blondes.”

“Who are they, Leon?”

“I don’t know. Friends and cousins of Tony, I heard. They got two dogs bark half the night. I figured Tony’s letting ’em watch the place.”

Varga shared his theory: Neria’s husband was lying low, due to adverse publicity about the mobile-home industry. “Every damn one blew to smithereens in the storm,” Varga related. “The papers and TV are making a big stink. Supposedly there’s going to be an investigation. The FBI is what they say.”