“Honey?” the barefoot woman called. “Mister Reedy’s waiting.”
Reedy? Levon Stichler’s bold determination began to dissolve in a muddle. Something was awry with this particular Tony Torres. Yet Levon had spied the Salesman of the Year plaque on the wall, PreFab Luxury Homes, in raised gold lettering. Had to be the same creep.
Levon Stichler knew he must act swiftly, or lose forever the opportunity to avenge. He removed the concealed weapon from his jacket and raised it, ominously, for the wife to see.
“You better leave,” he advised.
Calmly she set her coffee cup on the counter. Her brow furrowed, but not in fear; more as if she were stymied on a crossword puzzle. “What is that?” Pointing at the thing in Levon Stichler’s hand.
“What’s it look like?”
“A giant screw?”
“It’s an auger spike, Mrs. Torres. It was supposed to anchor my trailer in the storm.”
Levon Stichler had choreographed the crime a hundred times in his mind, most recently while sharpening the point of the auger on a whetstone wheel. The fat face of Tony Torres would make an easy target. Either of those cavernous hairy nostrils could be forcibly modified to accept the steel bit, which would (according to Levon’s calculation) extrude well beyond the nasal cavity and into the brainpan.
The barefoot woman said, “Excuse me, but are you fucking nuts?”
Before Levon Stichler could respond, the tall shape of a man materialized in the kitchen doorway. Levon Stichler aimed the spike like a lance, and charged. The woman shouted a sharp warning, and the man threw himself backward onto the wet tile floor. The auger impaled itself in the wooden shelf of a cabinet; with both hands Levon Stichler could not pull it free. Frantically he looked down at his intended victim.
“Oh shit,” he said. “You’re not the one.” He released his grip on the spike. “You’re not the one who sold me the double-wide!”
Another woman—wild-looking and half dressed—burst from the bedroom. Together she and the barefoot one helped Snapper rise to his feet.
In an accusatory tone, Levon Stichler said, “You are not Tony Torres.”
“Like hell,” Snapper said.
Edie Marsh moved between the two men. “Honey,” she said, facing Snapper, “Mister Reedy here appears to be nuts.”
“Worse than nuts,” Bridget asserted.
“My name’s not Reedy.”
Edie wheeled on the old man. “Wait a second—you aren’t from Midwest Casualty?”
Levon Stichler, who by now had gotten a close-up look at Snapper’s feral eyes and disfigured mug, felt his brittle old bones turn to powder. “Where’s Mister Torres?” he asked, with noticeably less spunk.
Edie sighed in annoyance. “Incredible,” she said to Snapper. “He’s not Reedy. Can you believe this shit?”
Snapper wanted to be sure for himself. He leaned forward until he was two inches from the old man’s nose. “You’re not from the insurance company? You’re not Dove’s boss?”
Misjudging the situation, Levon Stichler emphatically shook his head no. Edie Marsh stepped out of the way so Snapper could punch him into unconsciousness.
They sat on the rolled-up sleeping bags and waited for the governor to wake up in the palmettos.
Augustine assumed, as men sometimes do when they’ve had a particularly glorious time, that he should apologize.
Bonnie Lamb said, “For what? It was my idea.”
“No, no, no. You’re supposed to say it was all a terrible mistake. You got carried away. You don’t know what got into you. Now you feel rotten and cheap and used, and you want to rush home to your husband.”
“Actually I feel pretty terrific.”
“Me, too.” Augustine kissed her. “Forgive me, but I was raised Catholic. I can’t be sure I’ve had fun unless I feel guilty afterwards.”
“Oh, it’s guilt you’re talking about? Sure I feel guilty. So should you, allowing yourself to be seduced by a newlywed.” She stood up and stretched her arms. “However, Señor Herrera, there’s a big difference between guilt and remorse. I don’t feel any remorse.”
Augustine said, “Me, neither. And I feel guilty that I don’t.”
Bonnie whooped and climbed on his back. They rolled to the ground in an amorous tangle.
Skink came out of the thicket and smiled. “Animals!” he bellowed, evangelically. “No better than animals, rutting in public!”
Bonnie and Augustine got up and brushed themselves off. The governor was a sight. Twigs and wet leaves stuck to his knotted hair. Gossamer strands of a broken spider’s web glistened from his chin.
He tromped melodramatically toward the campfire, shouting: “Fornicators! Fellaters! You ought to be ashamed!”
Augustine winked at Bonnie Lamb. “That’s one I hadn’t thought of: shame.”
“Yeah, that’s a killer.”
The governor announced he had a tasty surprise for breakfast. “Your carnal frolics awoke me last night,” he said, “so I went walking the roads.”
From his fatigues he produced two small, freshly skinned carcasses. “Who wants rabbit,” he asked, “and who wants the squirrel?”
Later they doused the fire and loaded the truck. Using the hand-drawn map that Augustine had been given by the helpful Margo and David, they located Calusa Drive with no difficulty. The black Jeep Cherokee was parked halfway down the street, in front of a badly damaged house; the bawdy mud flaps were impossible to miss. Skink told Augustine to keep driving. They left the pickup half a mile away and backtracked on foot.
Bonnie Lamb noticed, uneasily, that Augustine wasn’t carrying either the pistol or the dart rifle. “Scouting mission,” he explained.
They stayed off Calusa and approached on a parallel street, one block north. When they got close, they cut through a yard and slipped into an abandoned house directly across from 15600. From the broken window of a front bedroom, they had a clear view of the front door, the garage, the black Cherokee and two other cars in the driveway.
Margo and David were right. Their stolen license plate had been removed from the Jeep. Skink said: “Here’s what happened. After the guy beat up Brenda, he pulled the tag from the Cherokee and tossed it. What’s on there now probably came off that Chevy.”
The car parked nearest to the garage was a late-model Caprice. The license plate was missing. The second car was a rusty barge of an Oldsmobile with a lacerated vinyl top and no hubcaps. Augustine said it would be useful to know how many people were inside the house. Skink grunted in assent.
Bonnie tried to guess what the next move would be. Notifying the police, she surmised, was not in the governor’s plans. Looking around, she felt a stab of melancholy. The room had belonged to a baby. Gaily colored plastic toys were strewn on the floor; a sodden stuffed teddy bear lay facedown in a dank puddle of rainwater. Mounted on the facing wall were wooden cutouts of popular Disney characters—Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Snow White. Oddly, they made Bonnie Lamb think of her honeymoon and Max. The first thing he’d bought at the Magic Kingdom was a Mickey golf cap.
I should’ve known then and there, she thought. Bless his heart, he probably couldn’t help it.
She got up to see the baby’s crib. A mobile of tropical butterflies, fastened to the rail, had been snapped at the stem. The mattress was splotched with dark greenish mildew. Shiny red ants trooped across the fuzzy pink blanket. Bonnie wondered what had happened to the infant and her parents. Surely they escaped before the roof blew off.
Augustine waved her back to the broken window. Heart skipping, she knelt between the two men. What am I doing? Where is this heading?
Another car drives up to 15600 Calusa. A white compact.
Man gets out. Bony and clerical-looking. Gray hair. Brown wind-breaker, loose dark trousers. Reminds Bonnie of her landlord back in Chicago. What was his name? Wife taught piano. What the heck was his name?
Standing by his car, the old man puts on a pair of reading glasses. Looks at a piece of pa
per, then up at the numerals painted on the house. Nods. Takes off the glasses. Tucks them in the left pocket of his windbreaker. Pats the right pocket, as if checking for something.
Awfully hot for a jacket, Bonnie’s thinking. Summertime in Miami, how can a person be chilly?
“Where does he fit?” said Augustine.
“Contractor. Utility worker. Something like that,” Skink speculated.
Bonnie Lamb watches the old man straighten himself, stride purposefully to the doorway. Into the house he goes.
Augustine said, “I thought I saw a woman.”
“Yes.” Skink scratched thoughtfully at his beard.
Creedlow! Bonnie thinks. That’s the ex-landlord’s name. James Creedlow. His wife, the piano teacher, her name was Regina. Chicago wasn’t so long ago—Bonnie feels ditzy for not remembering. James and Regina Creedlow, of course.
Augustine said, “What now, captain?”
Skink settled his bristly chin on the windowsill. “We wait.”
Two hours later, the old man still hasn’t come out of the house at 15600 Calusa Drive. Bonnie’s worried.
Then another car pulls up.
CHAPTER
20
Neria Torres had no desire to drive all the way to Brooklyn in search of a thieving husband.
“Then fly,” suggested Celeste, the graduate student who shared the Volkswagen van with Neria and Neria’s lover, the professor.
The professor’s name was Charles Gabler. His field of interest was parapsychology. “Neria won’t fly,” he said. “She’s afraid to death of airplanes.”
“Wow,” said Celeste, cooking on a portable stove in the back of the van. She was in charge of the macrobiotic menu.
Neria said, “It’s not just the flying, it’s Brooklyn. How would I find Tony in a place like that?”
“I know how,” Celeste piped. “Hire a psychic.”
“Great idea. We’ll call Kreskin.”
The professor said, “Neria, there’s no need to be snide.”
“Oh yes, there is.”
She and Dr. Gabler had been sorely low of funds when he’d proposed that young Celeste join them a week earlier as they prepared to depart Eugene, Oregon, for Miami. Young Celeste had been blessed with a comfortable trust fund, a generous heart and handsome gravity-defying breasts. Neria was under no illusions about the professor’s motives, but she tried to put aside her concerns. They needed gas money, and young Celeste kept a world of credit cards in her purse. Somewhere near Salina, Kansas, Neria felt the need to inform Dr. Gabler that he was paying too much attention to their travel companion, that his behavior was not only rude but disrespectful, and that the Great Plains in the heat of summer was no place to relearn the basics of hitchhiking. The professor seemed to take the warning to heart.
In truth, Neria was growing bored with Dr. Gabler and his absurd blue and red crystals. Mystic healing, my ass—a box of Milk Duds starts to look pretty mystical, you smoke enough dope. Which was how the professor spent most of his waking hours, sluggishly bequeathing the driving duties to Neria and Celeste.
“I’d rather go to Miami anyway,” Celeste said, measuring out two cups of brown rice. “I’d like to work in one of those tent cities. Cook for the homeless, if they need me.”
The professor regarded Neria Torres through bloodshot hound-dog eyes. “Darling, it’s entirely up to you. We’ll go wherever you wish.”
“Wow,” said Neria. The mockery was lost on Celeste, who was immersed in a complex recipe. Neria declared she was going for a walk, and exited the van.
They had parked at a public campground off Interstate 20, outside Atlanta, to discuss which way to go—New York or Miami, north or south. Neria Torres replayed in her mind the upsetting conversation with the stranger who’d answered Tony’s telephone. The more Neria thought about it, the more doubts she had. Not that her piggy husband wasn’t capable of falling for a twenty-four-year-old blonde; rather, it was highly implausible that one would fall for him. And Brooklyn? Hardly a boomtown for the mobile-home trade. The stranger’s story didn’t add up.
Neria Torres had tried to confirm the lurid details with Varga, the nosy next-door neighbor, but his telephone was out of order. Neria was certain about two things: She was entitled to half the hurricane money for the house in Miami. And her estranged husband was dodging her.
New York was an astronomic long shot. At least in Florida there’d be a trail. Neria decided they should head for Miami, as originally planned.
She thought of a way to widen the net: Why not let the cops search for Tony, too? They were the pros, after all. Neria backtracked through the campground to a phone booth, where she used her husband’s PIN number to call the Metro-Dade police and make a missing-person report.
After a desk officer took the information, he put Neria Torres on hold. She waited several minutes, growing increasingly impatient. The sky began to drizzle. Neria fumed. She thought of Dr. Gabler and young Celeste, together in the back of the Volkswagen van. She wondered if the professor was demonstrating his “human Ouija board” exercise, the one he’d worked so charmingly on Neria herself.
Around Neria’s neck hung a polished stalk of rose quartz, which Dr. Gabler had given her to help channel untapped torrents of “unconditional love.” Dickhead! thought Neria. At that very moment he was probably tuning young Celeste’s inner chakras. Until she’d met the professor, Neria Torres hadn’t known what a chakra was. Celeste undoubtedly did. She and Dr. Gabler seemed to operate on the same wavelength.
The drizzle turned to a hard rain. Under Neria’s feet, the red Georgia clay turned to slop. A man with a newspaper over his head came up behind her and stood uncomfortably close. He employed noisy, urgent breathing to emphasize his need for the telephone. Neria cursed aloud and slammed down the receiver.
On the other end, at Metro police headquarters in Miami, the desk officer had been diligently cross-checking the missing husband against a list of unclaimed bodies in the morgue. He was surprised to get a possible hit: One dead man had the same name, same date of birth, same extravagant brand of wristwatch.
The officer immediately had transferred Mrs. Torres’s phone call to the Homicide division. By the time a detective picked up, nobody was on the line.
Max Lamb flew from New York to San Diego to Guadalajara, where he slept for eleven hours. He woke up and called the airport hotel in Miami. Bonnie hadn’t checked in. Max lit a Bronco cigaret and fell back on the pillow.
He chewed over a scenario in which his new wife might be cheating on him with one of two certifiable lunatics, or both. He couldn’t conceive of it. The Bonnie Brooks he knew wasn’t a free spirit—that was one of the things he loved about her. Steady and predictable, that was Bonnie. To Max’s knowledge, the most impulsive thing she’d ever done was to hurl a stale pizza, Frisbee style, out the apartment window in Manhattan. When it came to sex, she was practically old-fashioned. She hadn’t slept with him until their seventh date.
So it took only minutes for Max Lamb to dismiss his worries about Bonnie’s fidelity. The ability to delude oneself on such matters was a benefit of owning a grossly inflated ego. Bottom line: Max couldn’t imagine that Bonnie would desire another man. Especially those types of men: outlaws and psychos. Impossible! He snickered, blowing smoke at the notion. She was punishing him, that was all; obviously she was still ticked off about the hurricane excursion.
Scrubbing in the shower, Max Lamb refocused on the task at hand: the obstreperous Clyde Nottage Jr., ailing chairman of Durham Gas Meat & Tobacco. Max’s orders were to talk some sense into the old fart, make him understand the grievous consequences of withdrawing all those expensive advertisements from print. Before Max Lamb had left New York, four Rodale & Burns executive vice presidents had individually briefed him on the importance of the Guadalajara mission. Success, Max knew, would guarantee a long and lucrative career at the agency. A home run, is how one of the honchos had put it. Turning the old man around would be a grand-slam homer in
the bottom of the ninth. Clyde Nottage was one crusty old prick.
A cab took Max Lamb to the Aragon Clinic, a two-story stucco building, freshly painted and lushly landscaped, in a residential subdivision of the city. The lobby of the clinic showed evidence of recent remodeling, which unfortunately had not included central air. Max loosened his necktie and took a seat. On a glass table was a stack of informational pamphlets printed in Spanish. Curious, Max picked one up. On the first page was a drawing of a male sheep with an arrow pointing between its hind legs.
Max returned the pamphlet to the table. He wanted a smoke, but a sign on the wall said “No Fumar.” A drop of sweat rolled down his jawline. Max dabbed it away with a handkerchief.
A man wearing a white medical coat came out; a pale-eyed American in his mid-sixties. He introduced himself as Dr. Caulk, Mr. Nottage’s physician.
“When may I see him?” Max Lamb asked.
“In a few minutes. He’s finishing his treatment.”
“How’s he doing?”
“Better, by and large,” said Dr. Caulk, enigmatically.
The chat turned to the clinic, and cancer. The doctor asked Max Lamb if he was a smoker.
“Just started.”
“Started?” The doctor looked incredulous.
“Long story,” Max said.
“Mister Nottage smokes four packs a day.”
“I’d heard six.”
“Oh, we’ve got him down to four,” said the doctor. He gave the impression it was a contest of wills.
Max Lamb inquired about the unusual nature of the tumor treatments. Dr. Caulk took full credit.
“We’re really onto something,” he told Max. “So far, the results have been quite astounding.”
“What made you think to try … you know—”
“Sheep semen?” Dr. Caulk gave a wise smile. “Actually it’s quite an interesting story.”
As Max Lamb listened, he wondered if the deepening consternation showed on his face. The Caulk therapy was based entirely upon the casual observation that male sheep have a low incidence of lung cancer.