The sky filled with the kind of darkness that was all around this case, and after a while someone inside the small apartment flipped on a light. I snuck closer to the front door, and I could hear the sounds of two female voices. Neither voice sounded very serene. I listened for a while, getting pieces here and there in Spanish. After a few moments I decided that listening outside of women’s doors wasn’t doing loads for my self-image, so I took a chance and knocked.
There was plenty of shuffling and “shush”-ing going on in the small apartment, and after a minute or so everything went quiet. It was a shaky, frightened voice that came drifting through the door.
“Who is there?” the voice asked. I assumed that it was the woman I tailed from the seamstress shop.
“I’m looking for Maria Del Toro,” I said, using my ‘Voice of Authority.’ It’s the tone of voice I use when I want people who have no reason to talk to me to talk to me. In this case, the ‘Voice of Authority’ let me down. Inside there was more shushing and moving around and I heard a lamp break. It didn’t take a genius to recognize the sounds of desperation and panic.
I moved away from the door and peered around the corner, to the only window the tiny apartment possessed. I saw a suitcase drop down, and the leg of a woman who was most certainly not the middle-aged seamstress I tailed to this studio. I moved to the window and, as the woman backed her way out of the apartment, I helped her down. My reward was a scream.
The young woman took a tumble backwards and fell into me. We both spilled onto the alleyway and the woman I tailed appeared before me, shotgun in hand. In other circumstances I would have jumped to my feet, but I was covered with a hysterical, crying younger version of the seamstress. I heard the older woman pull back the twin hammers of the shotgun as the younger woman peeled herself off me.
“Miss Del Toro?” I smiled. “I would like to provide you with full coverage for all your life insurance needs.”
Then I felt the butt of a shotgun strike the side of my head, and what little light was there went out.
I came to in the alleyway with the sharp taste of gun metal still fresh in my mouth. From somewhere nearby I could hear two voices arguing frantically, and it occurred to me that I hadn’t been out too long. Certainly not as long as the two seamstresses had hoped. I continued to lay in the dirt and grime of the alley, playing dead. From underneath my body I slowly snaked my hand into the holster under my left arm. I had been lucky all through this case, and my luck had continued to hold. I was clearly dealing with amateurs. The ladies were trying to get out of Dodge while the shady character they had koncked on the noggin lay sleeping it off. They didn’t tie me up and they never even checked to see if the shady character had a gun. The shady character did.
The women might have been rank amateurs, but I hadn’t exactly handled myself like a pro thus far. As my hand found its way around the grip of my pistol, I decided that I was through letting luck decide my fate. Luck had a nasty way of kicking you when and where you least expected it. It was time I trusted in a higher power.
“All right,” I said, struggling to my feet as I aimed a shaky snub-nose at the ladies. “I don’t know exactly what’s going on here, but my head is throbbing, I’m dirty, and I’ve spent the last two days peeking in people’s windows. Now I just have one question. Which one of you is Maria Del Toro?”
The ladies stopped in their tracks, dropped the suitcase, and looked at each other, waiting to see who would crack first. I gave them a moment before I cleared my throat, and the young woman in the shadows stepped forward, revealing herself to be the young woman from the photo.
“I am Maria Del Toro,” she said, her voice trembling.
“Pleased to meet you, Miss Del Toro,” I said, reaching out and taking the shotgun from the older woman. “I believe that you and I have much to discuss.”
The older woman with Maria turned out to be her Aunt, and Maria had been lying low for the last week or so until she could arrange passage to her mother’s home in Arizona. When I asked about Lazlo Lavage, both Maria and her aunt broke into hysterics. Lazlo had never posted a bond for Maria, and she had never committed any crime. Lazlo’s interest in Maria was much more unsavory than that.
Maria told me that she met Lazlo when he had visited the sweatshop she worked in, looking for a skip. He was smitten at first glance and somehow she had managed to keep her lunch down. Maria confessed that she had dated Lazlo for a few months, a feat which I considered either charitable or naive. She had seen Lazlo as a rich and powerful man, which I guess I could see if I squinted hard enough. She also told me that Lazlo was hooked on her from day one, which didn’t require bifocals.
She went on to spin me a fairy tale about how Lazlo wined and dined her, showered her with gifts, and promised her the moon. Maria went on with her story while Auntie got me a glass of water and apologized for bashing me on the noggin with a 12-guage. It wasn’t the first time. I grunted something in the way of acceptance and the older woman kept an eye on me as she started straightening the apartment. Straightening and packing.
Maria’s story continued all hearts and flowers for a while, until reaching the act where Lazlo turned mean. Anyone who had known Lazlo longer than a New York minute knew that was Lazlo’s natural state, and I can only assume that Maria was blinded, if not by love, then at least a love of the things that Lazlo would provide her.
Lazlo made demands and his temper flared, turning him from Prince Charming to Frankenstein’s Monster. Maria tried to walk out on him a few times, but Lazlo wasn’t having any of it. He made that clear to her one starry evening when he told her that if she left him, she would get the ‘Marbles’ Monroe treatment.
To this day, ‘Marbles’ mother still wears black when she so much as goes out for a quart of milk.
“Angela was the only family I had here. My mother lives in Sedona. I lived with Aunt Angela since I moved here a year ago, but Lazlo’s men know where she works.” She leaned forward and grabbed my forearm with a grip that had been built by years of needlework. “Please, my aunt and I need to disappear before Lazlo finds us. We need to get out of the city.”
“Maria,” said Aunt Angela in a sad, beaten tone. “Senior Lazlo’s men have already found us.”
Both of the women fell silent and looked at each other. I sighed and held up a hand to calm them before they got out of hand and tried to kill me again.
“I’m not one of Lazlo’s men,” I protested.
“So you weren’t hired to find Maria to take her back?” asked the aunt hopefully.
“Uh…well, I kind of was,” I started, sparking off much wailing and shouting, much of it in Spanish.
“Whoa, whoa,” I said, putting away my pistol and holding out both hands. “I’m not a flunky, I’m a detective.” The ladies stopped at this, but the looks on their faces told me that they didn’t see a natural distinction between the two. Most days, I’m not sure that I do either.
I told Maria and Aunt Angela that I was hired by Lazlo because she had skipped out on bail. Maria confirmed what Mike from the DA’s office told me. She’d never had so much as a jaywalking ticket, let alone bail posted for her. Lazlo wanted a shamus just smart enough to find his lady, but not smart enough to ask any questions. I decided to get off the stupid train here and now.
“My plan isn’t to hand you over to Lazlo,” I told the frantic women. I had to repeat it a couple of times in order to get them to slow down and relax, but eventually my words penetrated.
“It isn’t?” asked a wide-eyed Maria. “Why?”
I could have told her that I don’t like being lied to by a client, any client, and I could have told her that taking a case from Lazlo Lavage already left a bad taste in my mouth that even his chili couldn’t erase. I also could have told her that I don’t think I could sleep at night if I delivered her and her auntie to a slug such as Lavage. I told her none of that.
“It ain’t my style, sister,” I said, and that was pretty much that.
I watched Maria and Aunt Angela finish packing up their belongings and loading up the beat-up sedan parked in front of the bakery. As I helped them strap on the last of their second-hand luggage, Maria asked what it would cost me to let her go. I told her about the payment and the expenses, but the part that really hurt was the recipe. It looked as if I were going have to wing my next batch of chili.
Maria smiled and went back to the apartment one last time. As Aunt Angela secured the last of their belongings, Maria returned and started to tell me where in Arizona they were headed.
“Save it, sister,” I warned her. “I don’t want you to tell a soul where you’re going until ten minutes after you’re there, understand?”
Maria nodded, her big cow eyes filling with tears. She and her aunt gave me a hug so tight that I saw stars for a moment, and then I felt something being pressed into my hand. Aunt Angela smiled wide, spoke quickly, and said lots of stuff. Most of it was in Spanish, some of it in English, and none I understood. I nodded back to her as she got into the passenger side of the sedan. Maria once again thanked me for what I considered as my only human act of the day, and kissed me softly on the cheek. From that kiss alone I could see what Lazlo saw in her, and it brought me no small amount of satisfaction to make sure that she escaped his greasy mitts.
They drove off into the sunset, aunt and niece, and as they did so I smiled in a way that I hadn’t for a long time, and probably wouldn’t again for a while. When the ladies had disappeared into the horizon, I looked down into my hand and examined the note Maria had slipped me. It was a hastily written recipe, along with a message scribbled at the top.
“Who do you think gave Lazlo the recipe in the first place?”
Perhaps good deeds are rewarded after all.
Maria’s Chili con Carne
3 dried ancho chilies
1 to 3 tablespoons vegetable oil
4 ounces pork shoulder, finely chopped
2 pounds boneless chuck steak, cut into 1/2-inch cubes
1 large white onion, chopped (2 cups)
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1 teaspoon dried oregano
1 bay leaf
Kosher salt
28 ounces whole peeled tomatoes, briefly pulsed in a blender
2 bottles of cheap beer
1 tablespoon white vinegar
THE CASE OF THE AWKWARD HIGH NOTE
Do Re Me Coq Au Vin
When I was a kid, the gargoyles at the Metropolitan Opera gave me nightmares. Large, gaping stone mouths, bat wings, and leering faces that seemed to beg small children to stop by for a quick bite. My mom used to scrape up enough money to drag her kids there for a Saturday matinee of high class and culture, when all we really wanted was to see the Scarlet Gumshoe bust up a ring of racketeers in the weekly serials. Ma desperately wanted her kids to get an education, to appreciate the finer things and, for the most part, it worked. I learned at a young age how to tell Verdi from Mozart. That was the same year Billy Driscal saw my mom haulin’ us out of the Met one afternoon and he told all the kids in my class that I loved the opera.
That was also the year I learned to fight.
I never developed the appreciation of opera and culture that Ma hoped I would, but at least I learned not to let the gargoyles bother me. Except now, to my surprise, the Met had hired one of them to guard its door.
“I told you to shove off,” said the ape someone crammed into a red doorman’s jacket. I could only assume that the Met had paid some unfortunate tailor to extend the length of the arms on the jacket to simian proportions. He had taken about three steps closer to me than society deemed acceptable, and I got a strong whiff of the horseradish that accented today’s roast beef special at the local deli.