Unwanted Company - Barbara Seranella (10 page)

Ellen, she willed, call me. Munch wished the radio
would give her more details on the victims. Two people were dead. Was
it a man and a woman or the two women? Had they been shot? Were there
suspects in custody?

And where the hell was her limo?

To be fair, whatever had happened in the apartment in
Hollywood, or how it might concern her customers of last evening, had
nothing to do with Ellen. Except—someone had called this morning
and booked the limo. Someone, accord- ing to Ellen's note, who paid
cash and had worked out a special arrangement with Munch. It wasn't
as if her client list were so broad or that spur-of-the-moment runs
dropped from the heavens every day. That left only Raleigh Ward, the
morose drunk from last night. A morose drunk with a gun.

Munch set down the phone when she heard the chimes
that preceded the taped message telling her what she already knew. As
soon as she hung up, the phone rang, startling her.

"Ellen?" she answered.

"
No, it's me again. Mace St. John."

"
Hi."

"
Are you going to be home in the next half
hour?"

"Why?"

"
I wanted to swing by and show you some
pictures," he said.

"
Sure, I'll be here."

"
I'd also like to take a look at your limo. The
one you took out last night."

"
It's the only one I have," she said.

"
And it's a silver-gray Cadillac with a charcoal
gray vinyl roof?"

"Yes."

"What's the license plate?"

She hesitated for only a moment before she gave it to
him. She didn't want him thinking she had anything to hide. Perhaps
by the time he got there, the situation with Ellen and the missing
limo would be resolved. Yeah, and maybe she'd win the Publishers
Clearing House Sweepstakes. "I'll be here," she said.

"
See you in a bit, then," he said, and hung
up.

Munch cleaned the house nervously while waiting for
the phone to ring. She had the same feelings she had felt before when
a guy she really liked said that he'd call. She'd spent three
insecure hours not daring to tie up the phone in case when he did
call, he'd get a busy signal and not try again. Thinking back, she
was pretty sure the guy had never remembered his promise.

Fucking Ellen to bring up all this shit.

Twenty minutes later Munch pulled the extension by
the front door and went to work trimming the hedge under her front
window so she could watch for approaching cars. Across the street,
Derek was mowing his perfect green patch of lawn in the bright
sunshine. Lawn care was his claim to fame. When they had lived
together, he had leveled, aerated, weeded, fed, watered, and trimmed
hers to perfection. She'd once asked him to promise her that he
wouldn't turn into one of those old men who sat by his front window
and yelled at the neighborhood kids to keep off his grass.

A red bandanna tied around his forehead now caught
his honest sweat. His shoulders strained with the effort of pushing
the mower. Even those movements seemed deliberate to her. Derek had a
way of rolling his shoulders forward one at a time as he walked, his
smooth muscles rippling like a panther or some other type of sleek
night stalker. Derek's dog, Violet, sat on the front porch watching
her master work. Violet was another reason Derek needed to stick
close to home. The cocker spaniel had abandonment issues. Derek
softened the animal's neurosis with overfeeding. When Violet waddled
from her bed to her food bowl, her matted chest hair dragged on the
ground. Her only real exercise came when Derek let her hump his leg.

"
Why don't you stop her when she does that?"
Munch had once asked.

He'd mumbled something about not breaking the
animal's spirit, and she had not pursued the issue.

The first time she'd ever laid eyes on him, he'd been
standing in the parking lot of the Alano Club—an A.A. clubhouse on
Washington and Centinela that held three meetings most days and four
on weekends. Derek attended all the noontime meetings at the Alano
Club. The members of the fellowship who went to the midday meetings
considered themselves the core of the Program—the axis around which
the universe of sobriety was able to revolve. Some of them were
twenty years sober and still making five and six meetings a week,
they'd brag. Munch wondered if maybe they'd missed the point along
the way.

"
Aren't we all supposed to be rejoining
society?" she'd asked her sponsor.

Ruby had replied, "That's the best some folks
can do." The night Munch first spotted Derek, he'd been standing
with a small group while the meeting was going on inside. He'd
positioned himself against the building with one knee bent, the sole
of his tennis shoe resting flat on the wall behind him. He wore faded
but clean blue jeans and a short-sleeve sweatshirt. Steam rose from
his Styrofoam cup, his mustache just damp as he sipped and watched
over the rim with his Robert Redford eyes, waiting for an opening in
the conversation. She'd been drawn to his circle, even then wondering
if this tall, handsome stranger wasn't the cowboy of her dreams, with
his soft Arkansas drawl and easy laugh. It was only later, after he
moved in, after they'd done the deed, and Asia got used to seeing him
over morning cereal with the woolly buff colored beast clinging to
his calf, that certain things began to leak out.

For one, he was afraid of horses.

And then there was the work thing. He wanted to get
his contractor's license, but to qualify he needed two years of
experience in his field, which was glazing. He wasn't supposed to
work as a glazier, he explained, until he was licensed. "You
don't want me to lie on the contractor's license application he had
pointed out, citing the Ten Commandments and the Twelve Steps.

Munch listened sympathetically for a year. He'd had a
bad childhood, after all and he was doing the best he could and he
was staying sober and that was the most important thing, wasn't it?
Munch finally told him that she, too, had had a bad childhood, but at
least hers had ended at some point.

"How do you know whether you should hang in
there or when it's time to give up?" she asked her sponsor in
one of their weekly chats.

"Honey," Ruby said, "I've been married
and divorced four times, and I don't regret a one of them."

Fed up, Munch was determined to split up with Derek
on a particularly stormy day in March. Asia was at a friend's, and
Munch and Derek had been arguing all morning. Munch finally fled the
house in frustration, muttering to herself that she didn't get sober
to put up with this kind of shit. She returned midafternoon after
doing some serious soul searching and reevaluation, only to find him
bent over a cardboard box. He'd found a baby bird that had been blown
from its nest. Inside the box he'd fashioned a new nest, put in a tin
of water, and was trying to get the bird to eat. That bought him
another month.

She ended up breaking up with him in April when he
managed to rack up three speeding tickets in as many weeks and then
miss the deadline for traffic school. The insurance company called
him a bad risk.

Munch removed Derek's name from the insurance policy
and the mailbox on the same day. That night she requested that he
sleep on the couch, but at 3 A.M., he joined her in bed, sobbing.

"Who will take care of me?" he asked.

She found herself in the odd position of being the
source of his pain and the provider of his comfort. Later she told
Ruby of the difficult night.

"They're always so surprised," Ruby said
with uncharacteristic directness, "when you finally wise up."

Munch's final act of insanity had been to find Derek
his job as apartment manager for the building across the street. She
was brought back to the moment when she realized that the man getting
out of the car that had just pulled into her driveway was Mace St.
John.

"What's so funny? " he asked as he got out
of his car.

"
Life," she said. "Long story. How
about a cup of coffee?"

He looked at his watch. "Maybe a quick one.
Where do you keep your limo?"

Munch was framing her reply when Asia burst out the
front door, and said, "Mom, I can't find my red shoes."

Mace turned, and asked, "Mom? You have been
busy."

Munch smiled weakly, feeling the cold hand of fear
grip her heart. It was a fear she'd lived with for six years. A fear
and a lie. But what did the whole exact truth really matter? How
important was it to anybody that she hadn't actually given birth or
gone through legal channels to ratify the adoption?

For all intents, Asia was her daughter.

Besides, when is it a good time to tell a kid that
both her birth parents are dead? At two? When she's stringing
together her first sentences?

Or was the time to deliver the news when Asia was
five?

When her school did the Thanksgiving play and all the
parents had come to see it. Asia had been so proud of her "Pilgroom"
outfit with the brown-and-white paper collar and matching hat.

Munch had rehearsed the riff many times about how of
all the children in the world, adopted kids were the most special
because they were chosen. It was bullshit, but it sounded good. The
point was to make the kid feel secure. And she'd always done that.
Now Asia was asking questions, starting to figure things out. Munch
lived with the fear of what the answers could bring. Always
wondering, had Asia said something to a teacher? The crossing guard?
Would someone in authority put together the scattered facts and
decide the Mancini case should be looked into?

And then what? An investigation from Child Welfare
with applications to fill out and social workers to convince? They'd
look at Munch's record. Not the one that mattered. Not how she'd
raised a happy, healthy kid who made friends easily and wanted to be
a ballerina/animal trainer They'd see a single unmarried woman who
worked and wasn't home when school let out. And then they'd dig
deeper. Their forms would ask the question, "Have you ever been
arrested?" And then they'd give her three lines to explain. As
if that would be sufficient to sum up a life story. They'd jump all
over the prostitution charges. Like would they be happier if she'd
been a thief to support her habit? Would that make her a better
parent? It was with that defiant attitude that Munch turned back to
Mace St. John, and said, "I've been real busy. Didn't you say
something about some pictures you wanted me to look at?"

"
Oh, right." Mace returned to his car. When
he ducked through his open window to retrieve a manila envelope,
Munch cast one final hopeful look up the street. It was still empty.
 
 

CHAPTER 8

Ellen and her merry band pulled into Tijuana at three
o'clock. Raleigh had her drive up a narrow, partially cobbled road.
She found a space large enough to accommodate the limo next to an
open-air market.

"
You two do some shopping," Raleigh said.
"I need to pick up a few things."

She followed his gaze to a small whitewashed
building. Over the narrow doorway, a sign proclaimed FARMACIA.
Obviously he felt he would do fine without her translating skills.
Not that she knew more than a few rudimentary commands such as
requesting a glass of water, a light, or the lyrical but practical
Dame el dinero primero
,
Give me the money first. Victor grabbed her elbow and steered her
toward a vendor selling bullfight posters,

"
Now, this is sport," he said.

"
Getting a poor little old bull mad and then
killing it?"

Ellen asked.

"
It is the ultimate contest," Victor said.
"Good versus evil. The bull gives his blood, his life, to
satisfy man's needs. "

"
Sometimes the bull wins," Ellen said.

"Exactly," Victor said, his eyes excited,
searing into hers as if she'd said the very thing he'd been waiting
to hear. The intensity in his face made her take a step away from
him. He leaned toward her as she moved back. A table full of colorful
scrapes blocked her escape.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a wad of
bills that was fat enough to make a nun salivate. The shopkeeper had
been roaming between the narrow tables that displayed his wares. When
Victor's cash appeared, the man hustled to his side.

"
Señor." He tipped his head to Ellen.
"Señora. How can I help you?"

Victor pointed at a poster depicting fighting cocks
and peeled a twenty from his roll. "We're looking for some
action. Do you know this place where the donkeys and the women . . ."

He finished the sentence with a pumping motion of his
hand. The man rubbed chubby palms together. "Of course."

Ellen saw Raleigh heading their way. He carried a
paper sack by its neck and held it up grinning as he got closer. At
least he was smiling now, she thought. He opened the bag and pulled
out a bottle of Del Guzano tequila.

"No trip to TJ is complete," he told Victor
as he cracked the bottle open, "without eating the worm."