Nine Days: A Mystery Page 7

  I held my hands up, palms out. She continued to glare at me for a few seconds, then strode off, turning toward the square at the street. I let out a breath I didn’t know I’d been holding.

  As my midsection relaxed, the word “embalmed” reverberated up into my skull, and everything slid together like a bunch of flowers going into a vase: Silvia Molina. Hector must have let something slip about me when he was at the botanica picking up an order of cigarettes. That’s how she’d found out I was a widow, and since I hadn’t played ball on my visit, now she was upping the ante with some spare cadaver parts she had lying around.

  I considered going after the Amazon, but decided it would probably be better to give her some cooling-off time. Letting Silvia cook until morning probably wouldn’t bring on the apocalypse.

  There was nobody in the office when I returned to it. I shut the back doors and made sure they latched before going up front.

  II

  The club was almost empty now, and Connie and Mike were standing at the serving top, talking quietly across the wait station. Mike had a sink full of hot, soapy water running, and he wrung out a rag as I came over.

  “Is Hector still back there?” he asked me.

  I shook my head. He and Connie exchanged a look that made the back of my stomach tickle.

  “What?” I said.

  “He must have gone upstairs,” Mike replied as if it answered my question.

  “God, what a night,” Connie sighed, dropping her cigarettes and keys into her purse.

  Mike started wiping down the serving top, cracking at her, “Hope the guy’s head isn’t waiting on your doorstep when you get home.”

  “Oh, you are just so friggin’ funny,” she mocked back, then tsked, “I don’t know why Teresa thinks it has anything to do with me. The way things have been downtown lately, it’s a wonder there aren’t body parts littering the streets.”

  I was just about to ask her to elaborate when my eye caught movement on the front sidewalk. Benny was standing outside the front door, his back to us, one hand braced against Richard Hallstedt’s narrow chest to keep him from getting by. They were both talking at once, their voices escalating through the glass.

  Mike followed my look. “Jesus Christ. What now?” He tossed his rag into the sink and came through the flip-top.

  Connie motioned surreptitiously to me as he passed. “Let’s go out the back. I’ve had enough drama for one night.”

  I nodded agreement, and we headed for the office. As we passed through, I noticed the bottle of pills and glass of water still on the desk, untouched.

  “What are those tablets for?” I asked Connie.

  “Oh, it’s just an herbal sedative,” she said, jingling her keys out of her pocket with a nervous gesture. “Come on, I’ll walk you to your car.”

  She was a terrible liar. I remembered her deft, reassuring words to Hector as he’d come through the office door and seen the hand. His frozen expression; her fingers on his wrist.

  “What’s wrong with him?” I asked.

  She paused, then said reluctantly, “Post-traumatic stress disorder.”

  “From what?”

  “That’s not usually the first question people ask,” she said, eyeing me with curiosity.

  “A couple of shrinks tried to convince a friend of mine that she had it,” I said. It wasn’t technically a lie. I consider myself a friend.

  “Well,” she said, taking a long breath, “he doesn’t talk about it, so I don’t know the details, but Dad found him living on the streets of Managua in ’82, when he was in Nicaragua on a case. Apparently, Hector’s family was killed in the civil war—you know, all that stuff with the Sandinistas and Somoza.” She felt in her purse for a cigarette, then seemed to think better of it. “My guess is that he witnessed whatever happened to them.”

  The excruciating picture of Joe dropping to the pavement, half his beloved face gone, ripped through my memory. I resisted the urge to close my eyes.

  “Things were pretty brutal even after the Sandinistas took over in ’79, thanks to the Contras,” Connie had gone on. “Sixty thousand people died, even more were ‘disappeared.’ People down there are still dealing with it psychologically. That’s why I want to go back after I get my license.”

  I remembered our introduction. “Guatemala, right?”

  She nodded. “Same song, second verse—government coup, civil war, all my relatives killed.” Connie glanced down the alley over my shoulder, then fixed her eyes earnestly on my face. “Listen, keep this to yourself, will you? Everybody around here has always just assumed that we’re Mexicans, and it’s easier to let them think that. It keeps people from talking to Hector about stuff that’s difficult for him to deal with.”

  A dishonorable satisfaction percolated down around my belly button. I wasn’t the only one in town living a secret life. Knowing as much didn’t do me any practical good at the moment, but it made up—a little—for the Amazon telling Hector about me.

  I suddenly remembered his reaction to the drunk biker’s remark. “Is he safe to be walking around loose?”

  Connie frowned. “What do you mean?”

  I described what I’d seen and she made a dismissive motion with her head. “I dunno, you might do the same thing, if you had to listen to stuff like that all the time.” She fidgeted, clearly ready to be done with the conversation. “Where are you parked?”

  I gestured south, and we started down the alley.

  The lights were still on at the café, and Lavon and Neffa were inside, doing their closing cleanup. Connie rapped on the window as we passed down the side street toward the square, and they both waved to us. We stopped on the corner, and I saw Richard and Benny get into Benny’s cruiser, which was parked at the curb in front of the bar. I wondered if he’d driven it the couple of hundred feet from the courthouse.

  “Damn it,” Connie murmured as the crowd that had been observing the fireworks between Richard and Benny broke up and a young woman began weaving toward us.

  She was under thirty, thin and pasty, with heavy dark brows making a lie of her blond hair, and a smear of bright lipstick sliding off her wide mouth. “Hey, girl, you gotcher car tonight?” she called in our direction.

  “I can’t, I’m going south,” Connie replied as the woman approached us.

  “You seen that cop cunt around?” she slurred, seeming to forget her request for a ride. “That bitch that ruined my life?”

  Connie gave me a sidelong eye-roll and put an arm around her shoulders, guiding her off down the sidewalk. The drunk woman continued spewing incomprehensible venom all the way back to the bar.

  I jaywalked the corner and made for the truck, which I’d parked in front of the burned-out salon. As I got in, I heard the unmistakable clatter of a BMW echoing away toward the north. I couldn’t blame Hector. After a night like this, I felt like taking a drive myself.

  III

  When I got home about half an hour later, Hector’s bike was parked under the oak tree next to Teresa’s Pontiac. I felt a shiver of anticipation as I climbed the back stairs, but nobody was waiting. I went into the bedroom to drop my wallet and keys on the nightstand, and heard voices coming from the front apartment. I stopped still and listened. It was Hector and Teresa.

  I couldn’t tell what they were saying, but Teresa sounded like she was enjoying a good joke, and Hector was angry. I tiptoed over and pressed my ear to the locked door, but I couldn’t make out any words, just the tone of the conversation.

  After a couple of back-and-forths, her voice went serious; then his started getting louder, rising almost to a shout. There was a short silence, and then a door slammed. Hector’s boots clomped across a wood floor, banged down some steps, and crunched onto the driveway gravel. A few seconds later, the BMW roared to life and gunned off toward the street. I could hear it almost all the way back to the square, out here in the silence. Then I heard the Pontiac starting up and rolling down the driveway. It, too, turned toward town. I looked at my
little travel clock, glowing on the nightstand. It was three fifteen.

  I remembered the hateful look I’d caught on Hector’s face, and wondered if the affair was breaking up. Wishful thinking, maybe, but I’ve wished worse things.

  I went back through the kitchen, peeling off my clothes, and started the bath running. It felt close to eighty inside the apartment, so I mixed the temperature to tepid and opened the windows. I took a long, cool soak, drank a big glass of ice water, and went to bed.

  IV

  A quiet scraping noise woke me some time later. I lay there listening intently into the dark. After a couple of minutes, I heard the noise again, coming from below the floor, and realized that someone was in the basement.

  I looked over at the clock—ten minutes after four—then kneeled up on the bed to peer out the window. A rectangle of weak light lay on the narrow sidewalk below. I watched and listened for a little while, but sleep dragged me back down when it became clear that nothing very interesting was happening. Probably Richard, picking up the last of his stuff at a time when he knew he wouldn’t run into Teresa. Maybe that was what she’d bitched him out for in the bar earlier.

  I was awakened again after what seemed like only a few minutes, this time by a continuous banging on my apartment door. I got up and went to give whoever it was the piece of my mind that wasn’t busy fantasizing about a good night’s sleep in a cool room.

  Richard Hallstedt demanded, “Where’s Teresa?” almost before I got the door open. The gray light behind him told me it was near dawn.

  “What the hell time is it?” I said, squinting past him through the porch screen.

  “I don’t know,” he said, clearly unimpressed by the question. “Her car’s gone, and she’s not in her apartment.”

  His haughty tone was all the impetus I needed to shut the door in his face, but he set his foot against it before it latched. I pulled it open again and gave him an incredulous once-over. He wasn’t a small man—just under six feet, maybe 170—but I’d taken down guys who made a lot more noise hitting the floor than he would. My heft comes in handy sometimes, and I’m strong as fuck when I can get to the gym on a regular basis.

  “Get your foot out of my door, or I’ll rip it off and feed it to you,” I said.

  His face went alarmed, and the foot flinched back. I shoved the door closed, locked it, and went back to bed.

  I woke up again, pissed off and sweaty, just before noon. It took me a minute to remember Richard’s visit, at which point I got up, shuffled into the kitchen, and looked out into the backyard. The Amazon’s Pontiac wasn’t there. I returned to the bedroom and dialed her cell, but it went direct to voice mail. I sat there holding the phone and waiting for inspiration until it was clear I wasn’t going to get any, then went into the bathroom to get dressed.

  V

  The front door of the bar was unlocked, with the lights off inside except for the back hall, just like the day before. The office was closed and locked, so I went up the stairs and found Hector’s apartment door cracked open. When I knocked on the frame, a muffled voice called, “Come on in!”

  Hector was lying on the sofa, feet toward the door, up on one elbow. He appeared to have been awake for only a few minutes. He was alone.

  “Hey, there,” he said in a thick, slurry voice. “I thought you were Mike.”

  He was shirtless and barefoot, his midsection covered by a red and black blanket. As he sat up, it slipped to his hips and I realized that he was naked underneath.

  “Christ, I feel like hell,” he said, wiping his hands down over his face.

  I forced myself to stop wishing for X-ray vision and noticed the gray stains under his bloodshot eyes. He made a motion as if to get up, and seemed only then to realize the show I’d get if he did. Spotting a crumpled pair of jeans lying on the floor nearby, he reached unsteadily for them and said, “You want some coffee?”

  “No,” I said, “but I’ll make you some. You look like you need it.”

  He nodded, pulling the jeans up under the blanket. Disappointed by his modesty, I went into the kitchen and filled up the stainless steel kettle sitting next to the sink.

  “Must have been quite a bender,” I said, lighting the stove.

  Hector, decent and partially vertical now, reached for the box of cigarettes on the coffee table. He gave me a blank look, then asked, “You come by to quit?”

  “No, I wanted to talk to Teresa.”

  He didn’t say anything. The silence turned thick as I rummaged through the cabinets above the sink, finally finding a French press.

  “Listen,” I said, putting it down on the counter, “if I’m going to have to run interference on your personal life, maybe you’d better fill me in on what you want me to tell who.”

  He squinted over at me, his expression perplexed.

  “Richard Hallstedt woke me up at the crack of dawn this morning, looking for her,” I said.

  “What’s that got to do with me?”

  “You’re telling me she didn’t follow you over here after your argument last night?”

  He started to answer, and then his expression fuzzed over and he leaned forward and pinched the bridge of his nose.

  “I’m in the apartment behind her,” I told him. “I could hear you guys when I got home.”

  Hector examined his cigarette, not saying anything. The kettle whistled, and I reached to turn it off. “Coffee’s in the freezer,” he said.

  I found it and reduced a handful of beans to a fine grit with the grinder, noticing an empty wine bottle and two glasses on the drainboard, with the cork still on the screw next to them. So that was why Hector seemed so out of it. I’ve consumed way more than half a bottle of wine without paying for it the next day, but people’s tolerances vary. I smiled at the irony of a bar owner being a cheap drunk.

  Hector stayed quiet, smoking, until I went over to the sofa and handed him a steaming mug. He took it without looking at me and set it on the low table in front of him.

  “What were Teresa and I arguing about?” he said, tapping ash into a small brass tray on the side table.

  “Don’t you know?” I asked, surprised, then realized that he was feeling me out to see what I’d overheard. I started to tell him that he had nothing to worry about, then decided to see what would happen if I didn’t.

  When it became clear that he wasn’t going to break out in a rash from the silence, I said, “So, are you named in the divorce papers?”

  A muscle at the back of his arm tensed, and his face went murderous, like it had with the drunk biker the night before. A flash of genuine fear sprinted across the back of my neck.

  “Teresa and I have known each other since sixth grade,” he said. I could feel him holding his temper down. “If her husband wants to make more out of that than it is, let him answer for the consequences.”

  I noticed that it wasn’t an actual answer to my question, and waited to see if he’d notice it, too. He drank some of his coffee and smoked in silence for a minute, then said more gently, “Richard’s a pretty damaged individual. I don’t know how she put up with him as long as she did.”

  “He can’t be that bad,” I said, despite the bedside manner at my door that morning. “I saw in the paper that he’s a city council member. Don’t they have to get elected?”

  Hector made a wry face. “He’s related to half the county. Plus, you know what they say about books and their covers.” He looked over at me. “I’d never have guessed you were involved with the Aryan Brotherhood, for instance.”

  “I wasn’t,” I said, recoiling from the idea. “They’re the ones who killed my husband.”

  He didn’t say anything, just gazed dumbstruck at me with those melted-obsidian eyes of his. A quiver of nausea passed over me. “You didn’t know I was a widow?”

  He shook his head. “All Teresa told me was that you dodged a weapons indictment by going into protection.”

  So much for Hector’s being the source of Silvia Molina’s knowing my
real marital status. He couldn’t have told her something he didn’t know.

  “I’m sorry,” he said in a soft voice. “Why’d they kill him?”

  “I can’t tell you,” I replied quickly, in a hurry to ask, “What do you know about my marriage?”

  He made a negligent motion with one shoulder. “Nothing, ’til just now.”

  Even in its agitated state, the brain took a millisecond to register that he hadn’t known I was single until just now, either.

  “Was he Latino?” Hector asked. “You speak pretty good Spanish, and those Aryan guys don’t usually kill their own kind.”

  “Listen, if I could tell you the whole story, I would. It’s just not safe.”

  “Hey, no, it’s fine,” he said, leaning forward to crush out his cigarette.

  A step sounded on the landing, and Mike Hayes appeared. He was dressed in sweatpants and a T-shirt, and bounced into the room on sneakered feet, punching at the air. He didn’t seem surprised to see me. “Hey, Julia, what’s up?”

  “Just working the boss over for a raise,” I cracked, vacating my chair.

  “Damn, you don’t waste any time, do ya?” he cracked. “Find any more body parts on your way home?”

  “Jesus, Mike,” Hector said, dragging himself forward off the sofa. Mike stood back, hands up, and Hector padded by, muttering, “I’ll be ready in a second.”

  Mike watched him disappear into the back, his hands still raised as if I were about to demand his wallet. “What’s with him?”

  I pointed a look at the empty wine bottle, and Mike dropped his hands. “Naw, naw. Man is not a drinker. Still treats himself like he’s training for a belt.” He tucked up one corner of his mouth with a mock shudder. “Maybe that creepy-ass shit last night kept him awake, like it did me.”

  “Did the cops figure out how the guy got on and off the roof?”

  He made a face. “Benny got that guy-on-the-roof story from the drunk Hector threw out. Pink elephants, you ask me.”

  “So how’d the hand get there?”

  Mike shrugged and glanced toward the back, cracking his knuckles. He seemed nervous, maybe about having to make small talk with a relative stranger. It’s funny how those high-energy gregarious types aren’t always so comfortable one-on-one. I’d given up banal chatter along with the rest of my girl suit, and after a strained silence, he threw out, “I hear you and Teresa go back.”