“You know Arthur Rooney?” Clawson asked.
“Everybody in New Orleans knew Artie Rooney. He used to run a detective agency. People in the graveyard knew Artie Rooney. That’s ’cause he put them there.”
“Does Rooney use Thai whores?”
“How would I know?”
“Because you’re in the same business.”
“I own a nightclub. I’m a partner in some escort services. If the government doesn’t like that, change the law.”
“I got a short wick with people like you, Mr. Dolan,” Clawson said, unzipping the portfolio. “Take a look at these. They really don’t do justice to the subject, though. You can’t put the smell of decomposition in a photograph.”
“I don’t want to look at them.”
“Yeah, you do,” Clawson said, rising from his chair, placing eight eight-by-ten black-and-white blowups in two rows across Nick’s desktop. “The shooter or shooters used forty-five-caliber ammunition. This girl here looks like she’s about fifteen. Check out the girl who caught one in the mouth. How old are your daughters?”
“This doesn’t have anything to do with me.”
“Maybe. Or maybe it does. But you’re a pimp, Mr. Dolan, just like Arthur Rooney. You sell disease, and you promote drug addiction and pornography. You’re a parasite that should be scrubbed off the planet with steel wool.”
“You can’t talk to me like that.”
“The hell I can’t.”
Nick wiped the photos off his desk onto the floor. “Get out. Take your pictures with you.”
“They’re yours. We have plenty more. The FBI is interviewing your strippers. I’d better not hear a story that doesn’t coincide with what you’ve told me.”
“They’re doing what? You’re ICE. What are you doing here? I don’t smuggle people into the country. I’m not a terrorist. What’s with you?”
Clawson zipped up his empty portfolio and looked around him. “You got you a nice place here. It reminds me of a Mexican restaurant in Santa Fe where I used to eat.”
After Clawson was gone, Nick sat numbly in his swivel chair, his ears booming like kettledrums. Then he went into his wife’s bathroom and ate one of her nitroglycerin pills, sure that his heart was about to fail.
WHEN HIS WIFE called him to lunch, he scooped up the photos the ICE agent had left, stuffed them into a manila envelope, and buried them in a desk drawer. At the table in the sunroom, he picked at his food and tried not to let his worry and fear and gloom show in his face.
His wife’s grandparents had been Russian Jews from the southern Siberian plain, and she and their son and the fifteen-year-old twins still had the beautiful black hair and dark skin and hint of Asian features that had defined the grandmother even in her seventies. Nick kept looking at his daughters, seeing not their faces but the faces of the exhumed women and girls in the photos, smeared lipstick on one girl’s mouth, grains of dirt still in her hair.
“You don’t like the tuna?” Esther, his wife, said.
“The what?” he replied stupidly.
“The food you’re chewing like it’s wet cardboard,” she said.
“It’s good. I got a toothache is all.”
“Who was that guy?” Jesse, his son, asked. He was a skinny, pale boy, his arms flaccid, his ribs as visible as corset stays. His IQ was 160. In the high school yearbook, the only entries under his picture were “Planning Committee, Senior Prom” and “President of the Chess Club.” There had been three other members of the chess club.
“Which guy?” Nick said.
“The one who looks like an upended penis,” Jesse said.
“You’re not too old for a smack,” Esther said.
“He’s a gentleman from Immigration. He wanted to know about some of my Hispanic employees at the restaurant,” Nick said.
“Did you pick up the inner tubes?” Ruth, one of the twins, asked.
Nick stared blankly into space. “I forgot.”
“You promised you’d go down the rapids with us,” Kate, the other twin, said.
“The water is still high. There’s a whirlpool on the far end. I’ve seen it. It’s deep right where there’s that big cut under the bank. I think we should wait.”
Both girls looked dourly at their food. His could feel his wife’s eyes on the side of his face. But his daughters’ disappointment and his wife’s implicit disapproval were not what bothered him. He knew his broken promise would result in only one conclusion: The twins would go down the rapids anyway, with high school boys who were too old for them and would gladly provide the inner tubes and the hands-on guidance. In his mind, he already saw the whirlpool waiting for his girls, white froth spinning atop its dark vortex.
“I’ll get the tubes,” Nick said. “Eat your food slowly so you don’t get cramps.”
He went back to his office and locked the door. What was he going to do? He couldn’t even think of a way to safely dispose of the photographs, at least not in the daylight. ICE had his name, Hugo Cistranos was circling him like a shark, and his conscience was pulsing like an infected gland. He couldn’t think of one person on earth he could call upon for help.
He sat at his desk, his face in his hands. How long would it be before Hugo Cistranos was at his door, demanding his money, implying Nick was a coward, making remarks about his nicotine habit, his weight, his bad eyesight, his inability to deal with the catastrophe his careless words “Wipe the slate clean” had created?
To sit and wait for misfortune to befall him was insane. He had heard over and over about people “surrendering” control during times of adversity. Screw that. He thumbed through his Rolodex and punched a number into his desk phone.
“How’d you get this number?” a voice with a New Orleans accent said.
“You gave it to me, Artie.”
“Then fuck me.”
“Hugo Cistranos says you offered him your Caddy to clip me.”
“He’s lying. I value my Caddy. It’s a collectible.”
“Hugo is lots of things, but a liar isn’t one of them.”
“You should know. Hugo is your employee, not mine. I don’t hire psychopaths.”
“I’m not guilty of what you think.”
“Yeah? What might that be? What might you be guilty of, Nicholas?”
Nick could hear the telephone wires humming in the silence.
“You don’t want to say? I don’t think there’s a tap on my line. If you can’t wash your sins with your old podna Artie Rooney, who can you trust, Nicholas?”
“It’s Nick. You told Hugo my family name was Dolinski?”
“It’s not?”
“Yeah, it is, because my grandfather had to change it so him and his family didn’t end up in a soap dish. They had to change it so the anti-Semite Irish cocksuckers in Roosevelt’s State Department wouldn’t shut them out of the country.”
“That’s a heartbreaking story, Nick. Maybe you could sell it as one of those docudramas? Didn’t your grandfather used to sell shoestrings door-to-door along Magazine?”
“That’s right, with Tennessee Williams. They also ran a soup kitchen together in the Quarter. His name is in a couple of books about Tennessee Williams.”
Nick could hear Artie laughing. “Your grandfather and a world-famous country singer sold soup to winos? Famous, rich guys do that a lot,” Artie said. “When you’re in Houston or Big D, drop around. Life is no fun without you. By the way, tell Hugo he owes me. For that matter, so do you.”
The line went dead.
NICK DETERMINED THAT his angst and funk would not control the rest of his day. He rented huge fat inner tubes in town, big enough to float a piano on. He stopped by the bakery and bought a carrot cake glazed with white icing and scrolled with chains of pink and green flowers. He packed a half-gallon of peach ice cream in dry ice. He put on a pair of beach sandals and scarlet rayon boxing trunks that hung to his knees, and walked his children down to the riverside and ran a long nylon cord through all the tubes, lacing th
em together so they would not become separated as they floated downstream toward the rapids.
Nick was first in the chain, ensconced in his tube, his skin fish-belly white, wraparound black Ray-Bans on his face. The shade trees slid by overhead, the sunlight spangling in their leaves. He laid his neck on the rubber, its warm petrochemical smell somehow comforting, the current tickling his spine, his wrists trailing in the water. Up ahead was a partial dam that channeled the current through a narrow opening. He could hear the sound of the rapids growing in volume and intensity and feel the tug of the river redirecting his course.
Suddenly, he and his children were sliding with the waves through the gap, rocketing through white water and geysers of foam, their own happy screams joining those of the other floaters, the sun overhead as blinding as an arc welder’s torch.
The whirlpool by the deep cut under the embankment disappeared behind them, powerless to reach out and draw Nick’s family into its maw.
They dragged their tubes out on the shoals and paid a kid with a truck to drive them upstream so they could refloat the river. They stayed in the water until sunset, whipping through the rapids like old pros. At the end of the day, Nick was glowing with sunburn, his hair and oversize boxing trunks gritty with sand, his heart swelling with pride in himself and in his children and the things he owned and the good life he had been able to provide for his family.
They ate the cake and peach ice cream on a blanket next to the river while the sun burned away to a tiny spark inside rain clouds in the west. He could smell the odor of charcoal lighter and meat fires on the breeze, and see Japanese lanterns strung through his neighbor’s trees and hear music from a lawn party someone was hosting on the opposite side of the river. The summer light was trapped high in the sky, as though nature had set its own rules into abeyance. Somehow the season had become eternal, and somehow all of Nick’s concerns with mortality had been emptied from his life.
He walked his children back up the stone steps to his house, then went into his office, removed the manila folder of photographs from his desk, and picked up a can of charcoal lighter and a book of matches from beside his barbecue pit. When he returned to the riverbank, the sky was purple, the sky filled with birds that seemed to have no place to land, and he thought he smelled gas in the trees. The surface of the river seemed thicker, its depths colder. The blue-green lawn of the house across the water was now littered with beer cups and paper plates, the band still playing, like a radio someone had forgotten to turn off.
The sunburn on his face and under his armpits ached miserably. He pulled the photos from the envelope, rolled them into a cone, and squirted charcoal lighter along their sides and edges. When he struck a paper match and touched it to the fluid, the fire crawled quickly up the cone to his fingers. He tried to separate the photos and keep them burning without dropping them or injuring his hand. Instead, they spilled into the grass, the faces of all the women and girls staring up at him, the heat blackening the paper in the center, curling the photos’ edges, dissolving hair and tissue and eyes and teeth inside a chemical flame.
The odor of burned hair on the backs of his hands rose into his face, and in his head he saw an oven in southwest Poland, its iron door yawning open, and inside the oven he saw the barest puff of wind crumble the remains of his daughters into ash.
A HISPANIC MAN had called in a 911 on an injured or drunk man stumbling around by the side of the state highway in the dark.
“Is this man a hitchhiker?” the dispatcher asked.
“No, he’s by a car. He’s falling down.”
“Has he been struck by a vehicle?”
“How do I know? He ain’t in good shape, that’s for sure. He’s trying to get in the car. There he goes again.”
“Goes where?”
“On the ground. I take that back. He’s up again and crawling inside, Jesus, a truck just went roaring by. The guy’s gonna get mashed.”
“Give me your location again.”
The caller gave the number on a mile marker. But evidently, in the poor light, he read the numerals wrong, and the deputy who was dispatched to the scene found only an empty stretch of highway, tumbleweed bouncing across the center stripe.
AFTER HACKBERRY HOLLAND had gotten the name of Pete Flores from Ouzel Flagler, he’d called the electric cooperative and been told a P. J. Flores was a member of the co-op and could be found up a dirt road fifteen miles from the county seat, living in a house where the electricity was scheduled to be cut off in three days for nonpayment of service.
It was 7:31 A.M. when Hackberry and Pam Tibbs drove up a pebble road to a grassless parcel of land where a frame house sat in the shadow of a hill, its front door open, the curtains blowing inside the screens. There were no vehicles out back or in the dirt yard. A crow sat on top of the cistern. It flapped its wings and lifted into the sky when Hackberry and Pam Tibbs stepped up on the gallery.
“It’s Sheriff Holland,” Hackberry called through the screen. “I need to talk to Pete Flores. Step out on the gallery, please.”
No answer.
Hackberry went through the door first. The wind seemed to fill the inside of the house in a way that reminded him of his own home after his wife had died, as though a terrible theft had just occurred for which there was no redress except silence. He walked deeper into the house, his boots loud on the plank floors. A half-eaten cheese sandwich lay on a plate on top of the kitchen table. Dry crumbs were scattered on the plate. A faucet dripped into an unwashed pan in the sink. A garbage sack, double-bagged and taped, rested on the back screen porch, as though someone had planned to carry it down to the Dumpster on the road or to bury it and had been interrupted.
The medicine cabinet and the bedroom closet were empty, coat hangers strewn on the floor. The toilet paper had been removed from the spindle. Hackberry looked through the front screen and saw a small Hispanic boy on a bicycle in the yard. The boy was not more than ten or eleven, and he was staring at the pump shotgun affixed to the cruiser’s dashboard. The bicycle the boy rode was old and had fat tires and was too big for a boy his size.
“You know where Pete Flores is?” Hackberry asked, stepping out on the gallery.
“He ain’t home?” the boy said.
“Afraid not.”
The boy didn’t speak. He got back on the bike, his face empty.
“I’m Sheriff Holland. Pete’s helping me with a little matter. Do you know where he might be?”
“No, sir. Miss Vikki ain’t home, either?”
“No, nobody is here right now.”
“Then how come you’re in their house?”
Hackberry sat down on the steps and removed his hat. He straightened the felt in the crown. He lifted his face into the sunlight that was breaking over the hill. “What’s your name?”
“Bernabe Segura.”
“Pete might be in some trouble, Bernabe. What’s Miss Vikki’s last name?”
“Gaddis.”
“Do you know where I could find her?”
The little boy’s face was clouded, as though he were looking at an image buried behind his eyes.
“Are you listening, Bernabe?”
“There were some men here last night. They had flashlights. They went inside the house.”
“So you came here to check on Pete?”
“We were gonna hunt for arrowheads today.”
“You shouldn’t have come here by yourself. Where’s your father?”
“I don’t have one.” Bernabe tapped on his handlebars. “Pete give me this bike.”
“Where can I find Miss Vikki, Bernabe?”
JUNIOR VOGEL LEANED on the counter. “I knew it,” he said.
“Knew what?” Hackberry said.
Junior picked up a towel from the counter, wiped his hands with it, and threw it in the direction of a yellow plastic container filled with soiled towels and aprons. “It’s that damn kid she’s been mixed up with. Pete Flores. What’d he do?”
“Nothing I know of
. We just need some information from him.”
“Who you kidding? When that boy isn’t drunk, he’s hungover. I knew she was in trouble when she left the diner. I should have done something about it.”
“I’m not sure I follow you.”
“She came in for her check. But two or three things were going on at the same time. Like a bad omen or something. I don’t know how to put it. A guy wanted to buy milk for his baby. Then a couple of guys in a Trans Am started coming on to her. I didn’t sort it out at the time.”
Pam Tibbs looked at the side of Hackberry’s face, then at Junior and back at Hackberry. “We don’t have any idea what you’re talking about, sir. Can you take the pralines out of your mouth?” she said.
“This guy said he was staying at the Super 8 and needed milk for his three-month-old baby girl. I asked him why he didn’t go to the convenience store. He said it was after eleven and the store was closed. So I got him a half-gallon out of my refrigerator and told him to give me two bucks for it. But he didn’t have the two bucks. How can a guy be out looking for milk and driving across Texas with his family when he doesn’t even have two bucks in his pocket?
“While I’m dealing with this guy, these two characters in a Trans Am are hassling Vikki. I don’t have trouble in my place, but suddenly, I got it all at one time, you follow me now? Drunks and hard cases don’t mess with my employees, Vikki in particular. Everybody knows that. ‘Orchestrated,’ that was the word I was looking for. It was like it was all orchestrated.”
“You get a license number on any of these guys?” Hackberry said.
“No.”
Hackberry placed his business card on the glass counter. “Call us if you hear from Vikki or if you see any of these guys again,” he said.
“What’s happened to Vikki? You ain’t told me squat,” Junior said.
“We don’t know where she is. As far as we know, you’re the last person to have seen her,” Hackberry said.