Nine Days: A Mystery Read online

  “Sort of,” I allowed. “I worked for her aunt in Boston for a while.”

  “I guess it’s been a long time since you’ve seen her, then,” he said. “I don’t think she’s taken a vacation for a decade, at least.”

  “Hector says he’s known her since grade school,” I parried, to distract him from digging any deeper into my personal history.

  “Yeah, we all used to run around together. He started school a couple of years behind and didn’t speak very good English, so naturally the other kids treated him like a freak. Teresa was always getting picked on for her weight, and I was, like, a walking target. We formed a kind of loser coalition.”

  I let out a little chuckle of recognition. “How’d you qualify?”

  “Hey, I wasn’t always the Adonis you see before you.” He flashed his brisk grin again, holding his arms wide. “Truly tragic orthodontics and a bad case of acne. Plus, ya know, I didn’t even make five-six until I was twenty-one.”

  “And look at him now,” Hector said, coming back dressed in shorts and a T-shirt. I made a point of not admiring his muscular legs as he sat down to put on his gym shoes. I had it bad enough already.

  “Oh,” Hector said to me, straightening up. “Can you come in at six tonight? Mike’s gotta go to San Antonio after we work out.”

  “Sure,” I said. “I might be a little rusty, though.”

  “Friday-night immersion learning’ll get you back up to speed plenty quick,” Hector assured me, hopping up.

  “You coming with us?” Mike asked as we clomped downstairs.

  “I don’t have my gear with me,” I hedged. The thing with Silvia was drilling into the brain again, and I wanted to talk to the Amazon before it hit an artery.

  VI

  Teresa’s Pontiac hadn’t returned to its parking spot under the tree behind the house, so I dialed her cell, but she didn’t answer. I tried again after half an hour, then once more around four, at which point I finally snapped to the fact that she was screening my calls. Probably trying to teach me a lesson for mouthing off at her the previous night. I left her a message full of gory details and told her to come see me at the bar after six if she didn’t want me reciting any more sensitive information on her unsecured line.

  Then, just to give her a taste of her own medicine, I decided to make myself scarce for a while.

  VII

  A faded FOR SALE sign appeared approximately where Connie had told me it would, just past a dry creek bed some eight miles from town. A driveway paved with chalky white gravel ran away from it down a long, bare hill. I stopped and got out to take a look before turning in, not ready to bust an axle on my new ride just yet.

  About a football field away, down and off to the right, stood a small house with an open shed connected to it by a wire-fenced yard. It didn’t look like much, and it stood perilously close to the low-water crossing just beyond it.

  Satisfied that the driveway was navigable, I turned in. About halfway down, a bigger house, tall and narrow, came into view on the left, and I realized that the two smaller buildings must be what Connie had referred to as “the barn.”

  The bigger house backed up to a stand of cottonwood trees, leaning uphill slightly as if digging in its heels. I parked on a bare patch of ground next to it and got out.

  It was one room deep, with a long veranda across the facade facing the river. It didn’t look like it had been painted since the day they nailed it together. Inside, the wallpaper hung off muslined wallboards in long, dusty arcs. The pine floor was covered with old tile mastic and carpet furring. There was no kitchen, and a modern bathroom had been installed in the back part of the main hall, the fixtures long gone. I didn’t trust the stairs, but from what I could see of it, the second floor was a twin of the first, minus the bathroom.

  I went back outside and stuck my head into the open crawl space. The house sat atop a forest of stripped tree trunks, none of which seemed to be rotted. I scooped down into the powdery dirt around the one closest to me and found the wood pier sound as far as I could dig.

  The wiring was 1930s knob and tube in remarkably good shape, then sat down on the porch steps to think. A hot breeze came up from across the river, bringing a perfume of dry grass and cows. The sun slanting along the lumpy ground was turning yellow with the afternoon, and I heard myself wondering why anyone would sell the place. That’s when I knew I was going to buy it.

  As I sat there, a movement down near the barn caught my attention. A small brown donkey was trotting toward me, followed by a girl dressed in jeans and a red T-shirt. She was calling after the animal, which appeared to be making a beeline for the porch I was sitting on.

  “Can you grab him, please?” she yelled to me. As she got closer, I saw that it was Neffa.

  I went down the steps and waited for the donkey to reach me, then put out a hand and took hold of the woven bridle. He seemed to expect it and stopped, twitching his ears back at his pursuer.

  “I’m sorry,” she panted, hiking over. “He got through our dang busted-ass fence again.” The donkey was shoving his nose down around my pockets, and she laughed. “The people who lived here before used to give them apples and stuff. They’re always trying to get over here.”

  “I guess I’ll have to stock up on donkey treats.”

  “You gonna buy the place?”

  “I’m thinking about it,” I admitted.

  “We’re just across the river, there.” She tossed her head toward the rolling brown pasture on the other side. “What you gonna put on it? It ain’t good for nothing but goats.” She seemed more sure of herself out here under the sky, stroking the donkey’s big nose, and I smiled, remembering Charlie’s animal quiz. Neffa had a horsy, outdoorsy quality that I hadn’t noticed in the café, and her squint looked natural in the hard sunlight.

  “I don’t have any immediate plans,” I hedged.

  She nodded, saying, “Daddy’ll lease some acres from you, if you got a mind.”

  “I may take him up on that,” I said. It would be a way to get something extra coming in while I was waiting to win the lottery.

  “All right, then.” She gave me her shy smile, tugging at the donkey’s head. “We’ll see you later on.”

  The animal gave in reluctantly, and they scrunched off away through the dry grass.

  VIII

  I did some grocery shopping, then went back to the apartment to eat and make sure Connie and Tova hadn’t been winding me up about the property appraisal. Happily, the county tax assessor’s office had been modern-minded enough to get all its records online, but as I opened the search window, I realized that I didn’t know Connie’s last name. Since Hector didn’t go by Bradshaw, I doubted that she did either, but I typed in “Connie Bradshaw” anyway, just in case. No direct hits, but there was a record for a “C. Bradshaw.”

  When I opened it, though, the name was Christine Tova Bradshaw. I scrolled down to see if maybe there were a title document or something that referred to the other inheritors, but stopped as this year’s appraisal slid by. The lavishly restored hotel and its triple lot were valued at only $68,600. Misprint, I told myself, but the previous year’s appraisal, listed directly underneath the current one, was $67,450.

  I hesitated, not wanting to get drawn off track, but a nascent buzz was kicking up behind my eyeballs. I returned to the property search page and typed in what I figured would be the next address on Third Street: the vacant theater. When it came up similarly undervalued, the buzz got stronger. Half a dozen more addresses on the square and I sat back, gobsmacked. I’d apparently died and gone to real estate heaven.

  I hate to admit that I believe in a concept as hackneyed as the Criminal Mind, but I can remember having thoughts like the ones I was having now as far back as my memory goes. On the night Joe died, Pete had been holding $120,000 in cash from my laundry account, in preparation for a buying trip the next day. We were all going to drive down to L.A. for the pickup together—look at some movie stars, have a little fun before
hand. Joe and I had put in half of that $120K, and I couldn’t imagine that Pete had gone through with the buy after what happened. Even if he had, he was the kind of guy who’d want to get square.

  I had my federal fifty coming, which would cover the Ranch, nice and legal. An additional sixty would buy at least one of the vacant square buildings with enough left over to rehab it and put myself back in the construction business more or less immediately. I’d been assuming instead that my only option was to get there the hard way: building up my reputation with small projects until I could get hired on for larger ones, dodging the Amazon the whole time.

  The problem wasn’t making my books look straight after I spent the money—I wouldn’t be where I was without my master chops on that score—it was how to get it here without the feds or the Brotherhood smelling me out. Pete could easily hide a big withdrawal—hell, the cash might still be sitting in the bar safe, for all I knew—but as soon as it hit my bank account, I’d be back in Langley handcuffed to Kang and Buford, or worse. Cashier’s check, wire transfer, online payment—same thing. There’s only one untraceable way to transfer money anymore, and the only time I’d ever seen anybody successfully pull it off long-distance, the event had been so remarkable that we’d named it.

  You know how the post office always warns you not to mail cash? It’s not because they’re worried about you getting ripped off. It’s because they know that if they told people it was safe, there’d be so much currency leaving the country the mint wouldn’t be able to print replacements fast enough. Pete had once taken advantage of that little-known fact by using twenty thousand in small bills as packing material around an “antique” lamp. We’d sat at his kitchen table in the house on Oregon Street, crumpling money and drinking cold hard cider until well past midnight. Everybody assumed Pete was nuts; I think a couple of guys even made book on it. But when the cash arrived in Chicago without a dollar missing, Pete became the proud inventor of the Bakersfield Transfer. Sixty thousand was a lot more to lose, but I was willing to risk it if he was.

  I got a pen and scrolled down to the owner’s contact details on the vacant theater. It was something called Milestone Properties, Inc., with a post-office box address. I wrote it down and brought up the next record, which I remembered as a narrow one-story brick storefront on the other side of the salon. It also had Milestone listed as the owner. When the third property came up under the same name, my excitement went wary. Milestone might be a community holding corporation, set up as a tax shelter until the downtown incentives went through, like they’d done in Bakersfield. However, those appraisals had been set at or near zero, so that property taxes would be nonexistent while the redevelopment plans were finalized. These numbers were too high for that. Plus, I couldn’t find any information online about Milestone, and it hadn’t been mentioned in the newspaper article I’d read. Community development needs publicity to succeed; nobody tries to hide that stuff. Whoever Milestone was, they had beaten me to the punch. Which, when you think about it, is hardly surprising. It’s not like I invented real estate profiteering. There were much better criminals than me out there making a good living at it.

  Unfortunately, the idea of recovering my sixty thousand bucks wouldn’t go back in the bag. The square buildings weren’t the only real estate in town.

  I cleaned up, changed clothes, and drove downtown, remembering the corner store across from where I’d stopped to watch Silvia Molina’s DeVille. Inside, the place looked like it had once been a grocery, with the old painted wooden shelves still in place, now holding the usual quick-stop fare. I found a writing pad and an overpriced box of envelopes and took them to the register.

  “Where’s the closest post office?” I asked the cashier as he rang me up.

  He was a middle-aged Asian guy, tall and slightly stooped. “Mm, other side of the river,” he said, pointing east.

  I laid a five on the counter, and nearly jumped out of my skin when I realized that the miniature canine figurine sitting there amongst the lottery ticket displays, gum boxes, and cigarette lighters was panting.

  “Wow,” I said. “That’s the smallest dog I’ve ever seen.”

  “Ah, watchdog!” the cashier replied, touching the tiny brown and black head with his forefinger. The wee beastie smiled up at him, showing a flicker of pink tongue.

  “Yeah, she looks like she’d take my leg right off,” I cracked.

  The post office was a lone building out in the middle of the nowhere Teresa and I had driven through my first night in town, adrift on a sea of fallow black dirt turned under for the winter. It had a freshly poured, nearly empty concrete parking lot in front. I turned off the motor and rolled down the windows, getting out the pad and a pen.

  I wrote the date and Dear Pete—then my hand stopped. How would he react to hearing from me? The feds had come to me in the hospital, before I’d been allowed any visitors, and I’d seized their deal immediately, my hatred of the punks who’d put me there throbbing almost as painfully as the bullet holes in my side. I’d effectively gone over the wall, leaving Pete behind to grieve alone. I’d never have to explain to a friend or customer what had happened, never have to find an old photo in a drawer, never be reminded of a touch or a look or a kiss when returning to a familiar place. Would Pete hold that against me?

  Deciding that if he did, he could shred the letter and forget it, I made it short and to the point, not wasting anything on making nice. When I finished, I read over it and added Margaret’s e-mail address. I was using snail mail precisely because it was safer than digital communication, but if some details needed to be confirmed, we both knew how to do that online without bringing out the cavalry. I folded up the single sheet, sealed it in an envelope, and addressed it. I cogitated briefly, then put Luigi Guerra in the upper left corner and the bar’s address underneath. I’d let Hector know that anything arriving for the cat was mine. If he got curious, I’d tell him it was top secret WITSEC stuff.

  I went into the post office, bought a book of stamps out of the machine, and stuck one on the letter. As I dropped it into the mail slot, I caught myself smiling.

  IX

  The row of motorcycles parked outside Guerra’s was longer tonight, and the crew milling on the sidewalk in front as I walked up was making good progress toward abject inebriation. People trickled all the way down to the café, which also seemed to be doing a brisk business.

  Inside the bar, the jukebox was blasting Hank Williams, and there were so many people standing in the aisle between the serving top and the booths that I couldn’t even see the end of the bar, much less get to it. I caught a glimpse of Hector between bodies. Connie was out on the floor with a tray full of drinks, her slim hips swinging around the tables.

  I turned to the young woman sitting on the barstool just inside the door. She was wearing a red spandex dress so short it didn’t deserve the name, and a pair of stiletto heels that made my feet hurt just looking at them.

  “Would you mind getting up a second?” I said.

  She gave me an unfriendly once-over.

  “There’s a free drink in it for you,” I told her.

  Her look didn’t get any friendlier. “What good’s that going to do me if I have to drink it standing up?”

  I leaned in and pointed down the bar at Hector. “How about if I get him to bring it to you?”

  She smiled and slid off the stool. I hoisted myself up onto the serving top and swung my legs across into the pit. Hector spotted me and lifted his chin in my direction, busy with an order.

  “What would you like?” I asked the young woman, who’d scrambled back onto her stool before anybody else could snag it.

  “Margarita on the rocks, no salt,” she said, still smiling.

  I nodded and went down to Hector. “Want me to spell you for a while?”

  “Halle-freakin’-lujah,” he breathed.

  “Before you go, the lady by the door would like a margarita rocks, no salt, and probably your phone number,” I said.


  He shot a look down the bar, then back at me. For a minute I thought he was going to give me a piece; then his face relaxed and he pushed past me, sighing.

  I started taking orders at the flip-top and worked my way around the curve, a little creaky at first, but feeling a rhythm start to kick in after a few setups. When I got to the wait station, Hector was there, having served his admirer and moved north.

  “This rush should calm down in a little while,” he said, his hands busy. “I’ll back you up until then.”

  His voice was going raspy, and I replied, “You do realize that if you drop dead, it’s just going to be more work for me, don’t you?”

  Connie appeared at the wait station, consulting her order pad. “OK, who wants it?”

  “Hit me,” I said before Hector could answer.

  She tore a sheet off and handed it over. “Give me the top two orders now. I’ll come back for the rest.”

  I cracked three longnecks and set them up with cold mugs, then mixed a Long Island Iced Tea and a Kamikaze while Connie added up the tab.

  “I went out to look at your place this afternoon,” I told her, taking the two twenties she held out. “Are there any deed restrictions on it?”

  She shook her head, looking wary.

  “How about floodplain?”

  “It’s mostly on Lavon’s side,” she said as I went over to the cash register. “The barn’s been under once or twice, but never the house.”

  I came back to the wait station. “Thirty-eight thousand,” I said, passing her the change.

  She pursed her lips, then said, “I’ll have to think it over.”

  That’s the response you want. If your seller accepts right away, you’ve offered too high; if they tell you to fuck off, you’re too low. Wanting time to consider means you’ve hit the sweet spot. I nodded without letting myself smile and went back to work.