Choke (9 page)

“Is that who I used to see talking to Hugh up in his office, your Uncle Guido?”

“You know the interstate loop they keep talking about?” Immy nodded. “It’s supposed to go awful close to Huey’s Hash. Guido thought that would be a good location for another Tomato Garden. He’s been trying to get Hugh to sell it to him.”

Should she tell Frank?
Oh, go ahead. It might be interesting to see his reaction.

“Frankie, Hugh was dead when Xenia got in her wreck. He was found dead the day before that, probably killed even earlier, the day before that.”

“Huh? She sounded hysterical when she ran out of there. Wasn’t making a whole lot of sense. I thought she said she was pissed at Hugh, but maybe it was someone else she was mad at. Who else would have been there?”

“Clem?”

Frank glanced at his Timex. “I gotta get going. I need to go to the unemployment office and fill out my monthly paperwork.”
The ideal job for Frankie, money and no work.
And you need a smoke,
thought Immy.

He shambled out through the revolving door, and Immy hightailed it up to Xenia’s room. Maybe Xenia would wake up.

* * *

SHE DIDN'T, AND IMMY LEFT after watching Xenia breathe for about ten minutes. She looked like a nicer person when she wasn’t awake, but maybe most people do, thought Immy. Her bleached blonde hair fanned out on the white pillowcase, below the bandages framing her pale face. She looked especially washed out without her usual cotton candy pink lipstick. Her breasts, two huge mounds under the thin sheet, rose and fell, so Immy knew she was alive.

Also, the machines pulsed and beeped with what they called on TV her vital signs, but Immy didn’t know which one was for her brain, if any of them were. If Xenia’s brain was dead, and she had killed Uncle Huey, it might never be known for sure who bumped him off.

Immy made her way out of the hospital slowly, hanging onto her wig when she got outside and trying to put some possibilities together in her mind. Maybe Frank had been trying to throw Immy off by telling her Xenia saw Hugh after he was dead. Maybe Frank killed Uncle Huey. Would she know if he was lying to her? She would have to see if there was a chapter in either of her books about how to tell when people were lying.

She tried to imagine how this scenario might have come about. Frank doted on Xenia, and Hugh fired Xenia. Would Frank be angry enough to kill Hugh? It didn’t seem like it, but maybe Frank’s hot temper got the better of him. His mother’s family was Italian, after all, Giovannis from El Paso. Everyone knew Italians were hot blooded.

Her head was down, pondering how to determine Frank’s guilt or innocence, as she entered the bottom floor of the dark, cool parking garage, glad to be out of the wind. The smell of cigarette smoke made her stop and fan the air in front of her. Then she heard the whispers.

“What the hell you think? I told you a million times, I’m-a retired.”

Where were the whispers coming from?

“Just one more, Uncle Guido. You used to do this in Naples. I know you could do it.” That was Frankie Laramie’s voice. He had raised his volume on the last sentence. But where were they?

“Shush! You don’t want nobody to hear this, do you? Of course I could-a do it, but do I wanna, that’s the question.”

“I know he’s responsible for Xenia’s wreck. I just know it.” Frank was whispering again. “He should pay. It’s for family, Uncle Guido.”

“Stop sayin’ my name,
cretino
. If I do whack-a him, it’ll be the last job ever for me.
Capisce?
And you’ll owe me somethin’, family or no.”

Immy heard footsteps coming toward her and looked around, frantic. A large trash barrel stood out about a foot and a half from the concrete wall. She squeezed in behind it, hoping the dim lighting would help conceal the parts of her that were going to stick out.

The footsteps stopped, however, before they reached her hiding place. Two car doors clicked open and slammed closed, then two separate engines started up. She stood abruptly, thinking it might look bad if she were seen hiding. Also, she wanted to see the cars.

The trash barrel went over with a clang that echoed up the ramp down which Frank’s noisy vehicle was coming. He was proud of his glass mufflers that shook the whole car. He liked to sit and rev the stupid thing outside the diner. Immy ducked into the stairwell and dashed up the stairs as fast as a jackrabbit. She knew what Guido’s car looked like. The two were definitely Frankie and Guido, and she didn’t want Guido to see her.

She sat in her car for a full five minutes while her breathing returned to normal. It had sounded like Frank’s Uncle Guido was going to kill someone. Isn’t that what whack meant? But they must not have seen her, since no hit man came for her. Her hands still shook, though, as she buckled her belt and started down the hospital parking ramp.

That word, whack, kept bouncing around in her brain, stopping all other thoughts. It was a scary word. Maybe being a PI was too frightening.

She was careful to drive the speed limit. It wouldn’t do to get nabbed for a traffic violation when she was a wanted woman and in disguise. She hightailed it toward her hideout to add Frank’s name to her list of suspects. Well, not hightailed exactly, since she did go the speed limit, more like slowtailed it. But, before she left Wymee Falls, an office supply store caught her eye. She thought it would be a good idea to color code the suspects on her list, and she needed supplies for that. Since she was still wearing most of her disguise, now would be a good time to shop for them.

Lamenting the loss of the floppy-brimmed hat, she held tightly to her wig as she got out of the car. The wind hadn’t died down any. It howled around the corner of the brick building and cut off when she got inside. Immy took a deep breath. An office supply store had a certain comforting, happy smell. Maybe it was all the paper. She always loved coming here.

Momentarily forgetting the amount of money she had left, she filled a basket with pens, pencils, notepads, Post-its, a stapler, a hole punch, a nice sharp letter opener, a cork board, and multicolored push pins. She arrayed her items on the checkout counter, her heart lifting at the sight of all those lovely office supplies.

The bored male cashier rang them up. “That’ll be sixty-four ninety-five.”

She got out her wallet. Oops. “I think I’ll have to put some back.”

“Ma’am, you have something on your face.”

Immy touched her cheek and came away with a beauty mark stuck to her forefinger. She gritted her teeth, shoved a couple items toward the insolent twerp, slapped down her money, and scooted out of the store.

As she drove away, she pulled her bag into her lap to inventory her purchase. She had ended up with a set of colored pencils, the push pins, and the letter opener.

A check in the rearview mirror revealed one beauty mark still pasted to her cheek. She ripped it off and flung it out the window.

The movement caused her wig to come halfway off. Disgusted with the whole ineffectual disguise thing, she decided to jettison it, too. Unfortunately, the wig was tangled in the handle of the plastic bag that held her newly purchased treasures, so they went out the window with it.

Slamming on the brakes, she pulled to the roadside shoulder, intending to retrieve her pencils and pins. She needed the pencils to color-code her list. A dark SUV that seemed to have been traveling at a high rate of speed squealed its tires as it swerved around her. A loud report sounded.

At first Immy thought a gun had been fired, and she ducked low behind the steering wheel. Then she saw the car, now in front of her, sag to the right. Was that her letter opener sticking out of the flattened tire?

Sirens wailed behind her, coming closer.

Had the rude clerk fingered her? Was she made? Were the cops onto her? She pulled out onto the road and sped away. The sirens continued screaming, wailing, up and down, drilling into her brain.

She kept her grip on the steering wheel, but sweat oozed from her palms, sprang to her forehead, and dripped beneath her arms. She had never been in a high-speed chase before.

As she reached the edge of Wymee Falls, the sirens came to an abrupt stop. She chanced a glance in the rearview mirror. They were stopping at the SUV with the flat tire.

Close call. They weren’t going to nab her, at least not today.

But her hands didn’t stop shaking until she had been back in the motel room for at least an hour.

Detective Immy needed more information. She needed to inspect the scene of the crime further. If Clem could go inside the diner when it was roped off with police tape, so could she. Maybe the tape was gone by now anyway. How long did they leave that stuff up?

She didn’t expect the diner to be open for business, but it was. What was Clem thinking of? It had to be him that opened it up. That just didn’t seem decent to Immy.

Five white pickups were nosed into the curb in front of Huey’s Hash, and as she walked past, again in disguise, two leather-skinned ranchers came out the front door rubbing their bellies and smiling. They looked vaguely familiar, and one nodded to her. They were probably semi-regular customers. They wouldn’t know her in disguise, so they were no doubt just being polite. Clem might see through it, though. She had better not go in.

Immy returned to the alley where she had stealthily parked the van and decided she would have to come back when the restaurant was closed. She picked up a bucket of chicken for her mother and her for lunch at the drive-through chicken place in Cowtail, then hunkered down at the hideout until nighttime when she could use the cover of darkness.

A good operative knew when to carry out covert missions, or was she straying from private eye into thriller territory with that thought?

You never knew how spooky a place was until you tried to sneak around in it at night. She waited until midnight, a time when most Saltlickians were in bed. The van sounded like a motorcycle roaring through the quiet, deserted streets. She passed close enough to the police station to see that both official cars were parked there. As far as she could tell, she wasn’t detected hiding the van in the back of the diner again, where Clem usually parked.

She still hadn’t figured out how to turn off the dome light, and she let out a squeak when it lit up the alley as she opened the van door. Then she let out a louder squeak when the sound of the door slamming reverberated off the solid back wall of the eatery like a rifle shot. This definitely felt much more like a thriller than a detective story lately. She hadn’t read many thrillers, but she hoped they had happy endings.

It was hard to tell if anyone had heard her. She doubted she could have heard a siren over the pounding she felt in her ears. Was her heart going to explode? After five full minutes of standing stock still and no one appearing, she approached the back door, her heart pounding slightly slower. A dog barked in the distance, a disinterested bark like his heart wasn’t in it. Some early crickets, stirred by the warmer weather, sang somewhere nearby.

She tried the back door to the diner. It was locked. She was not going to return to the motel and tell her mother she had failed in her reconnaissance. Hortense had actually condoned the idea and said it was a good thing Immy had thought of it. Immy knew better than Chief Emmett and Officer Ralph what belonged in the diner and what didn’t. If the killer left evidence, it made eminent sense, according to Hortense, that Immy could suss it out. “Suss it out” was Immy’s phrase, not her mother’s. “Scrutinize with a greater degree of success than the authorities” was Mother’s terminology.

A memory came back to her in a flash. On a normal day, Clem was always there before Uncle Huey and usually the first one in the place, but one day Hortense had dropped Immy at work because it was raining too hard to walk. The front door had been locked, so Immy had dashed around to the back, lamenting the van’s departing tail lights. She had seen Clem unlocking the back door.

Before he saw her, he had reached up and stowed the key above the door jamb. Maybe it was still there. Immy tried to feel for the key above the door, but she couldn’t quite reach the place. Clem was taller than she was. The big green dumpster container stood beside the door. If she could get on top of that, she should be able to reach the key, if it was still there.

She eyed the dumpster. How to get up on it? She opened the passenger door of the van, stood on the seat, and reached up for the lid of the dumpster. Maybe if she jumped. The third try worked, and she landed on the lid. If only that dome light in the van would burn out. She stuck her foot out and kicked the door closed to turn the light off. Then it took her a few moments to adjust her eyes to the dark alley. She was going to ignore the small animal sounds coming from behind the bin. She would assume the rats were busy on their own business errands and wouldn’t bother her.

Damn. The dumpster was farther from the diner door than she thought. If only she had pushed it over before she got on top of it. She would have to lean way over to reach the top of the door.

She clung to the side jamb of the door with one hand, stretched, and felt along the crumbling wood at the top with the other. Dust showered down. Immy controlled a shudder so she wouldn’t fall off the trash bin. Was it her imagination, or was she dislodging dead insects—or worse, live ones? Spiders? Tarantulas? Maybe scorpions?

There, metal! She had found the key. She curled her fingers around it and carefully straightened up, bringing her center of gravity back to the top of the bin. Her smile seemed to split the darkness, and a tiny giggle escaped.

Looking up to thank the heavens, she closed her eyes and took a step back.

Only half of the dumpster lid was in place, the half she stood on. The other half stood propped open. The yawning chasm below looked empty in the dark as she fell, but as Immy landed in it, she could tell it was nearly full. Of garbage, of course. Rotting lettuce, tomatoes, meat, paper plates smeared with BBQ sauce and French fry grease, coffee grounds, and a lot of other things reeking of former food stuffs she couldn’t identify. And rats. There may have been some in the alley, but there were definitely lots of them in the bin. She told herself she was not going to throw up.