A car sped up the avenue, music on mondo, a thudding Latin beat and sugary rhythm that sustained in the air long after it passed, like the echo of a discharged cannon.
I hung back from the door, casually studying my watch. 12:18. Inside, the squirrel opened a second door and entered the building’s hallway. He went toward the stairs but passed by them, on to a rear left ground-floor apartment. Bit of luck.
He stopped with the key in his hand and knocked on the door twice. He said something, then opened the door himself and went in.
The squirrel was in his nest.
I turned my gaze back to the mailboxes. A name on the one he’d opened. I tried to read it, shifting my head around, standing on my toes, looking for a less clouded section of glass. First initial: L. Last name: A-N-D—was that an R?
“
What you want?”
He was a thick-featured Latin about 60 years old, dressed in pine-green overalls and a pine-green visored cap, carrying a bucket full of black water and a mop the color of storm clouds. He had a keyring crammed with about 30 assorted keys clipped to his belt. The building’s super. From the corner of his mouth hung a small smoldering cigar like a soggy stuffed grapeleaf.
I smiled. “Afternoon. Was looking to see if a friend of mine still lives here.”
“
Who’s your friend?”
I took a chance on the name.
“
Andrews.”
His face softened, his mug looked like a flabby kneecap. He had bushy gray eyebrows below which his black eyes were bright but deep-set like two coins out of reach under a grate.
He asked cautiously, “You a friend of Mr. Andrew?”
“
Yes. Is he still living here?”
He shook his head sadly. “Mr. Andrew went away. The people who stay in his place are no good. Very bad.”
A vapor of alcohol traveled on his words.
“
Really? Well, that’s not right.”
“
But I don’t know how to call Mr. Andrew,” he insisted, grieved nearly to tears. “I would tell him of how bad these people are.”
“
Well, maybe I could get a message to him for you.”
“
You call Mr. Andrew?” His dark eyes sparkled. “Yes? You talk to him, you tell him to call me, Luis, right away. He has my number, but I give to you.”
From his back pocket, he pulled a stubby pencil and a brown paper bag with a pint bottle still in it. He wrote something on a corner and tore it off and handed it to me.
“
You tell him about this man and this woman? Specially the woman. She’s…” He searched for the word in English, but couldn’t find it and shrugged ashamedly.
“
Bad?” I offered.
“
Loco
,” he said, and he said it darkly. “When I tell them not to leave garbage always in the hall outside their door, she punch a hole in the wall by my head. I call police, when they come she tell them I was drunk. She lies and says
I
punch the wall. They almost arrest me. I call the police and almost they arrest me. Ha! But other building people come out, come down to the sidewalk, and tell police who I am. Good building people, nothing like them.” He spat on the sidewalk.
I thought of the woman at the hotel who’d bashed me over the head. I asked him, “Red hair?
Rojo
? This woman?”
He shook his head. “No, blonde. Like an angel.” His lips contorted with the irony and made a wet-fart noise. “But she’s a
diabla
. You know? If devil were a woman. You know?”
I described Jeff to him and he nodded his head. “Yes, him. I see him at the garage, the one on Tenth, across from near the pool. He’s not so bad, but she is…she is…”
“
Bad?” I tried again.
He nodded. “Bad. You tell Mr. Andrew, he come back, see what these people do. I know Mr. Andrew, he will not like what they do. But I don’t know how to call. You call?”
I nodded my head, assured him I’d make the call.
He smiled broadly. Several bottom front teeth were missing, the rest slanted into a craggy yellow W.
He landed a meaty, callused hand on my shoulder.
“
You tell?” he asked again, now with a smile.
“
I will.”
He gripped my shoulder and squeezed hard in appreciation. Don’t think it could’ve hurt more if he’d meant it to.
He pulled out the paper bag from his back pocket again, but not to jot down a number this time. He unscrewed the cap and offered the open bottle to me.
I asked what it was. He told me, but it didn’t sound like anything I’d ever heard of, maybe he said it in his native tongue.
What the hell, I thought, it had to be nine a.m. someplace. I took the bottle and had a gulp from it.
His grin broadened and that should’ve warned me, but on I glug-glugged and swallowed.
Heavy duty tequila. Tears streamed from my eyes. I whooped and cast out a demon. The warmth in my chest was active and alive, but at least not rebellious.
He took the bottle and had a small dainty sip before replacing its cap. He shook his head, chuckling.
He reached for the jumble of keys on his belt and deftly selected the one he wanted, opened the building’s street door. He propped it open with his bucket.
“
You call, you tell Mr. Andrew,” he said and turned his back on me, getting back to his work.
He sank his mop into the bucket’s murky black water and swirled it around.
I walked away, essentially off to do the same myself.
Chapter Six: THE RIGHT CLIENT
I walked, steady enough, retracing the route back to the townhouse the woman had entered. I stopped, again steady enough, but no mistake, I was feeling fine. That good was tequila was good, that tequila was.
I opened the gate and mounted the steps lightly, Vesuvius milk swishing and swaying behind my belt and spreading all through me a warm, cascading buzz. I pressed the bruise on my temple and it hardly hurt.
On impulse, I pushed the single intercom button, no idea what I was going to say when someone answered. I guess, if not for the shot of tequila, I might’ve handled it differently. First gone back to my office and thought about it, maybe done something else.
But I can’t entirely fault the liquor. She shared in the blame. And was the more intoxicating from the very first sip.
It’s not that I believed in love at first sight, just that as I saw her for the first time up close, I believed in nothing else.
She came outside to see me rather than speak over the intercom. Hot, smooth, and languid as honeyed liquid, she slipped out and closed the door behind her. Softly, she leaned her back against it.
“
Yes? Can I help you?”
Her frank eyes were almond-shaped and black as a bird’s. Eurasian? A dark complexion, deeper than tan. Maybe the gypsy curtains were more than mere decoration. A small flattish nose over thin lips, the ends of which curled into an arousing smirk. A wicked, impish chin and a slender downy neck with deer-taut tendons and a lively, animated throat.
“
Yes,” I said. “Yes yes yes.”
Some wise old freak once said, you can have anything you want in the world, all you’ve got to do is want it so badly it means more than anything else. Lot of people you talk to have no idea what that means. If you’ve never been hungry ever in life and you want a sandwich, you don’t really
want
that sandwich. But when you’ve been hungry for weeks, starving, no relief in sight—and you come across a sandwich, a stacked, lightly toasted club sandwich, so fresh there’s beads of dew on the pert overhang of lettuce? You want that sandwich.
That kind of want. But fuck the sandwich. I wanted her.
On top of the way she looked, I sensed something I never could resist. She was and/or was in trouble. And I could see from the look on her face she was trying to figure out just what I was. Would I be her knight in shining armor or another dragon?
A low sound in her throat, not a laugh, more like a confused cough. I couldn’t stop staring at her and she wouldn’t break eye contact with me. Like when someone’s got a grip on a high-voltage wire and can’t release it, and the people around watching him, his brains frying, sparks shooting out his ears, are all thinking to themselves, Why doesn’t he just let go?
She blinked and broke the spell, or at least suspended it.
“
Who are you looking for?”
“
You. Well, not exactly.”
What had I been thinking? She wasn’t all that pretty. Her features heavy, her nose a lump. Really kind of ugly, or else that was all just from the ponderous frown she leveled at me.
“
Not exactly,” she repeated. She had some trace of accent I couldn’t place, but not American, more guttural, her words spoken under her breath. “Could you be exact?”
“
Possibly. Given time.”
“
I do not have time, I’m about to go out.”
“
But you just got back in.”
She cocked her eyebrow, but ignored the deliberate provocation. “And now I go back out again.” She pushed the intercom button and, when she heard a crackle from the speaker, said, “The door.” The latch clacked and she pushed the door open behind her and took a backward step.
“
That’s in,” I said, feeling playful.
“
What?”
“
You’re going in. You said you were going back out again, but that’s in you’re going. I learned all about it. From this guy, Grover. Shaggy blue hair, red nose, thin dangly arms? No? He also taught me about near and far. If you like I could teach you sometime.”
“
Yes. Let us begin with far.” She started to swing the door closed.
“
I have information.”
Her eyes narrowed. She stepped out again, keeping one hand behind her back. I heard the door shut.
“
Who are you?”
I reached into my back pocket and she stiffened, her shoulders tensing, until my hand came forward with my wallet. Her reaction made me uneasy—what had she expected, what sort of thing was she used to?
I opened my wallet, keeping my thumb on the snapshot of Owl, while I extracted one of my business cards, one of a batch I had printed last year. Nicer than the old ones. Heavy cardstock, raised lettering. Nine boxes of them left. Hardly ever gave them out to strangers, even felt a little odd handing one over to her now, like an indecent exposure.
My head started to ache again, the tequila buzz was wearing off.
She read my card, her fingernail flicking its edge.
“
Private…investigator.” She said it like she was tasting the sound, as if she never had the opportunity to say the two words together aloud before. But she didn’t repeat it, the novelty already stale on her lips.
“
And you are?” I asked.
“
My name is Sayre Rauth.” Oddly formal, like a ritual recital. “You said you have information for me?”
From over her shoulder, the intercom speaker crackled a little. But it didn’t have to mean anything, could’ve been stray radio-dispatch noise from a passing taxicab.
“
I have information. Maybe it’s for you. Do you know this man?”
If she had glimpsed Owl’s picture inside my wallet before, she hadn’t reacted. Now I handed her the photo, made her look at it.
“
Who is he?” she asked.
Strike one.
“
George Rowell. His friends call him Owl.”
She looked up at me sharply, as if I were trying to confuse her again, then back down at the photo. She unfolded it so the young girl was in the photo, too.
“
He’s another private investigator,” I told her. “Do you know him?”
She shook her head, not lifting her eyes. But I saw a reaction, a tiny tightening of the muscles around her lovely, lovely jaw.