1 Margarita Nights (16 page)

The dispatcher said she’d send a patrol car. All I had to do was wait. Easy for her to say!

Instinct told me to wash everything that the bastards had touched so I picked up the pots that had been dumped on the floor and put them in the sink. Under them were the salt and pepper shakers. Grandma Jenkins had given them to me for our first apartment, a green pepper for salt and a red one for the pepper. The red one lay broken on the floor. I started to sniffle. Over an ugly goddamn salt and pepper set that Grandma Jenkins had probably bought at a church jumble sale, I lost it.

My whole life felt cracked and broken and scattered all over the floor for other people to stomp on. Common sense said I’d got off lucky. What would have happened if I’d come in while they were here? Best not to think of those things.

How did they get in?

I wiped my nose on a piece of paper towel and went to the front door to check under the mat. The key was missing. Which meant the guy who used the key still had it.

The chain wouldn’t keep a flea out, but I put it on anyway. Then I got a wooden bench off the balcony and wedged it under the door handle. A stick that I was using to stake up a dead tomato plant fit perfectly in the door track of the slider. I still didn’t feel safe so I called a twenty-four-hour lock place and a sleepy voice answered and said he’d come right over. I didn’t even ask how much it would cost.

Fear and rage pumped adrenaline into me and I flew around the room at double speed, putting books back on the shelves, cushions on chairs, and cans back in the cupboards. I saw the pair of gold hoops I’d left lying on the counter by the phone and thought of the watch.

In the bedroom, I sank to my knees in front of the old beatup chest of drawers from my room back at the trailer park.

Someone had already been through the drawers but I searched for the dusty blue velvet box anyway, wildly pushing clothes aside until they flew out of the drawers and onto the floor. When Jimmy and I were together, I always hid the box so Jimmy couldn’t pawn it. A few times I’d hidden it so well I’d forgotten down which register or on top of which curtain rod I’d put it, and it had taken days to find it. Now I no longer worried about Jimmy making off with it; I’d left it out for the burglars.

But it was still there at the bottom of the drawer. I opened the box, punching the air in triumph at the diamond face of the Omega smiling up at me. I caddied for Jimmy in the tournament where he won the watch and it stood out as one of the greatest days of my life. Playing like Tiger Woods, Jimmy was hitting long and true and making twenty-foot putts look easy. If he’d been able to play that way all the time he’d been on his way to Augusta.

There was one more thing to check on. I shimmied under the bed and looked for the package tapped to the frame with heavy gray tape. The little Beretta that had been my father’s sixteenth birthday present was gone, leaving only the smell of oil and the drooping tape.

The cops were so not interested in my little event they could barely keep from yawning. When they checked out the door and heard where I kept the spare key, they gave each other a look. The investigation was over. They probably only came because it gave them a change from just cruising aimlessly up and down empty streets. I didn’t tell them about the Beretta. That might have made them too interested. “Would you like a coffee?”

“No thanks.” The older cop spoke for both of them as he headed for the door.

“Something cold then?” I was nearly dancing with eagerness to keep them.

“No thanks. Lock the door behind us,” the younger said on the way out the door. What kind of dumb-ass advice was that? The burglar had a key.

I barricaded the door behind them.

While I waited for the locksmith I answered the blinking light. The tape was half rewound. Why would burglars listen to my messages?

The first message was from Evan. “I’ll be home on Sunday. I’ll watch your tape then.”

There was a message from the Huff guy about insurance. This guy was going to get to the top of the pyramid with his persistence but he wasn’t winning a place in my heart.

And then, “It’s Andy. Things aren’t too good for me right now, but tell Jimmy the Holy Grail is safe.” The tape whirred on.

“Where are you, Andy?” I yelled at the machine.

As if responding to my question, Andy said, “I’ll try to get to you but don’t worry if you don’t hear from me. I’ve got stuff I have to do. It’s cool. Bye.”

Andy was alive. I’d cleared all the messages the night before. Andy hadn’t been on the
Suncoaster
.

I bolted for the VCR and stuck my fingers in the tape holder. Empty.

The answering machine played the rest of my messages as I tried to call Andy. It rang and rang but no one answered.

There was a loud knock at the door. “Who is it?” I called, frozen in place by panic.

“Locksmith.”

After a break-in the burglars would figure I’d send for a locksmith. If they wanted to ask me some questions, that would be an excellent way to get me to answer the door. “What do you want?” My normal contralto turned falsetto.

“Look lady, you called me. I didn’t call you.” True. I took a deep breath and pulled back the drapes to have a look at him. Pissed off and carrying a tool chest. Yep, a locksmith dragged out of bed. Sheepishly I opened the door and let him in. Like the cops, he was another bored person dealing with the routine of someone’s misfortune. And also like the cops, I couldn’t bribe him into staying one second longer than necessary to do the job, collect a check, which may or may not bounce and hustle himself out the door. I was on my own again and I didn’t like it much.

Somewhere towards morning I woke up with my heart pounding and my hands scrambling around the bed.

Why was I awake and why was I so frightened? That’s when I heard someone scratching lightly at the door and calling my name.

I found the phone that I’d gone to sleep clutching and shot out of bed, already pushing the buttons. The red light was flashing. The batteries were out of juice again.

“Sherri,” a voice whispered on the other side of the door.

“Go away. I’ve got a gun. I’ll shoot,” I screamed at the door as I ran for the kitchen.

“The police are on their way.” I jerked open a drawer, frantic for a weapon.

I found a butcher’s knife and swirled to face the door. I held the knife out in front of me with both hands like some damn martial arts superhero. “I’m armed,” I yelled.

The sound of running footsteps was the only answer. Knife still clutched in my right fist, I shot to the window to see my attacker. Through the light of the one remaining floodlight, Andy Crown sprinted across the parking lot. I dropped the knife and fumbled with the window latch. Sliding the window open, I called, “Andy, come back.”

He didn’t stop. Didn’t even slow down. He just disappeared into the shadows of Raintree Avenue.

There was a parking space in front of the stunted shrub that grew at Andy’s door. I listened to the pinging noises of the engine as it cooled. An eerie glow of a TV lit the thin curtains of a window a few down from Andy’s but the rest of the Roach Motel slept.

The sound of the truck door opening, the sound of my runners on the gravel, echoed in the horseshoe enclosure so at first I rapped lightly at the door. “Andy?”

No answer. I pounded just to make sure Andy could hear me. “Andy, it’s Sherri.” The sound ran around the walkway and came back to me. Louder now, “Andy.”

Three doors down a door opened and a man’s head appeared. “Shut the fuck up.” Always a slow learner, I leaned my right ear against Andy’s door to hear if there was any sound from inside. The mountain, posing as a man hitching the backside of his crumpled boxers, stepped out onto the walkway, unhappy that I was still there. I hustled to the truck, waiting for the man to go back inside and watching to see if Andy’s curtains twitched.

The guy waiting for me to go grew tired and started for the truck.

I jumped in and locked the door, sweeping the darkness for any signs of Andy, any movement in the shadows. I searched the rear-view mirror, thinking he might be hiding in the parking lot until he thought it was safe to come out. Nothing.

Marley’s call woke me in the morning sooner than I really wanted to rejoin the world. “Get over here,” she ordered. “I’m cooking.”

In the bright clear sunshine the green monster was looking even more depressing than usual. The cloth ceiling, which had been developing strange pouches of air, had finally let go and now the entire panel hung like a hammock from the visors up front to the edge of the back window. I just walked on by to the pretty red pickup.

Running east-west, Banyan Street is the main street of Jacaranda. Its traffic lanes are separated by a park full of banyan trees and their forest of roots, which hang down from branches to become more trunks, create a secret world. I remember chasing lizards among the smooth gray roots. Native to India, Florida purists think the banyans should be rooted out of the center of our city and replaced with palms. In the meantime, those banyans just keep on growing and three days a week the farmers from off the island bring in produce to sell in the banyans’ shade. The market was going full tilt, so I bought fresh marmalade and a loaf of raisin bread on my way through.

The stucco building Marley lives in was built in the twenties, old by Jacaranda standards. Downstairs there’s a drugstore that’s been there since the beginning and is still run by the same family. All the original fittings, hardwood floors and tin ceilings are still in place. Upstairs there are two apartments with twelve-foot ceilings that overlook the park. A broad alley leads to the open stairs of a balcony along the back of the second floor. I tapped lightly on the lace-covered glass of the door, breathing in the smell of bacon. The door flew open under my knuckles. “What kept you?” Marley demanded.

The demented cat was still doing his thing on the wall. Underneath him the table was set with Fiesta ware in turquoise and orange. Even without a hangover it was a stretch.

“Shouldn’t you be out tracking down bargains?” Friday’s paper lists all the garage sales being held on the weekend, and Friday night Marley sits down and marks them on her map to plan the most efficient route. She starts out at six Saturday morning, when it’s just Juice and the dealers, and hits them all. Everything in the apartment came from a garage sale or flea market someplace, but Marley had now slipped from need into obsession. Now she rents a storage unit to keep things the apartment can’t hold.

“I’m taking a day off” she informed me. “I’ll go tomorrow.”

“Did you make this great sacrifice just so you could cook me breakfast?”

“Don’t flatter yourself. Now tell me what’s happening.”

“Andy’s alive. That’s the good news. The bad news is my apartment got broken into, they took the videotape, and I chased Andy away.”

She set the glass jug of orange juice down hard on the table. “Why didn’t you call me?”

“I know how you are when you wake up in the middle of the night.”

“What did they get?”

“Just the tape.”

“And your only clue to what Jimmy was up to.” She pulled out a chair and plopped down. “It really sucks to be you, doesn’t it?”

“Hey!” I held my hands out, palms up. “Where’s the food? I didn’t just come for the chit-chat, you know.”

She popped up and went to the oven for the plate of blueberry pancakes surrounded by bacon and sausage and set them down on little round hotpads that somebody’s grandma crocheted back in the fifties.

“What was on that tape that made it worth breaking into your place?”