Endangered Species (13 page)

“That was remarkably stupid,” I told him.

Sulfin smirked at me. That was the last straw. I walked over to the table, took a garbage bag that was sitting there, and swept the dead rats into it. I did the same with the next lot.

Sulfin ran over to me. “What are you doing?” He grabbed my arm. “I had those sorted and everything.”

“Too bad.” I shook him off.

He snatched at me again. “Give them to me.”

“No.” I dropped the bag and peeled his hand off me.

He came at me, arms windmilling. I pushed him away. I guess I used more force than I intended, because he flew across the room, smacked against one of the kitchen cabinets, and slid partway down. His face collapsed. He looked as if he was going to cry.

“I'm taking these and the ones in the living room and then I'm getting on the phone and calling the health department,” I told Sulfin. “They're going to shut you down. Being a small businessman, I think you understand the consequences of disruption. People are fickle. They tend to go elsewhere if you don't have what they need and, unfortunately, they usually don't come back. However, if you want to give me Nestor's number, I'll be happy to stay out of your way.”

Sulfin stood up and reached around with his right hand and rubbed his back. The gesture made his ribs stand out even more than they already did. “You didn't have to do this,” he whimpered. “You have the number.”

“No. What I have, thanks to you, is a handful of confetti,” I corrected.

“I have to go get it. I don't remember what it was.” He turned and left the room. I was noticing he had a red welt running across his back from where he'd smacked up against the cabinet when it occurred to me, I shouldn't have let him go in the other room by himself. For all I knew, he could have been going to get a knife or a gun. I went after him. We met in the hall as he was coming back out.

“Here,” he said, handing something to me.

I breathed a sigh of relief as I looked down.

He'd put a grimy crumpled-up piece of paper in the palm of my hand. “This is what you want,” he told me. “Now, can I have my stuff back?”

I smoothed the paper out. It had a number written on it in pink Magic Marker. “Pretty color,” I commented before folding the paper back up. “And sure you can have your stuff back after you do two things.”

“That's not fair,” Sulfin groused.

“Too bad. First, I want you to tell me everything you know about Nestor, and when you're done with that, I want you to ring him up and put me on the line.”

T
he blinding blue of the morning sky had muted during the day, vanquished by the slow but steady gathering of dark, gray storm clouds. The streetlamps had come on around four, shedding feeble rays of yellow light onto the gloomy late afternoon. I gazed out of my living-room window at the five crows squabbling amongst themselves as they circled above the branches of the crab apple tree, settled down, then rose again with a flap of their wings only to land on another tree limb a few yards away.

There seemed to be more and more of them and fewer jays, robins, cardinals, and sparrows every year. Now it wasn't uncommon to see flocks of a hundred or more roosting in the trees above my house filling the air with their raucous cawing. It was enough to make me wish I had a shotgun.

Across the street, a neighbor, attired in a tatty housecoat and unbuckled galoshes, hanks of blond hair sticking out from her head, was scattering salt on her driveway and talking to herself. The white specks fell from her fingers like rice at the wedding party that would never be for her. The temperature had dropped fifteen degrees in the last two hours and the melting snow had turned to ice, making walking treacherous.

I closed the blinds, turned away from the window, and bent down to give my cat, James, another pet. Ever since I'd come home he'd been winding in and out of my legs, rubbing his head over every inch of my jeans that he could reach. Between the lion and the dead rodents, I was evidently irresistible. He meowed and I picked him up. His black fur eclipsed my arms. At twenty pounds, he weighed more than some of the smaller wild cats. He purred and rubbed his face against my cheek and neck. He cocked his head to the left and then to the right as I scratched behind his ears and thought about what I was going to do next.

I'd had a plan mapped out when I'd walked in the door, but the plan had depended on Eli and Eli wasn't here. No one was. Despite the fact that I'd asked him to stay put and wait for me, Eli had taken off.

I was still scratching the cat and thinking about where Eli could have gone when James turned around and bit me.

“Son of a bitch,” I cried and threw him on the sofa.

He gave me a reproachful glance, got up, shook himself off, and pointedly cleaned where I had touched him. Then he delicately picked his way across the pages of the morning paper Eli had left strewn around. I watched the pages crumple under James's weight as I sucked the side of my hand. It was a good thing, I decided, I was dealing with something that was twenty pounds instead of five hundred, because when you come right down to it, no matter what some people say, all cats, whatever their size, act pretty much the same—unpredictably. You can almost always read a dog's intentions. You can't always read a cat's. And, unlike dogs, cats don't have a sense of shame, a fact demonstrated in this case by James, who was now curled up on a sofa cushion, sleeping the sleep of the innocent. He'd become tired of being petted or maybe he hadn't liked the way I was going about it, although he had seemed to, so instead of walking away, he'd bit me. And now his fit of pique was over. He wasn't going to waste valuable energy agonizing over whether he should have performed the action or not. He didn't feel a scintilla of guilt or doubt over what he'd done.

I sat down next to him. He opened one eye, then closed it again. He curled his tail around his nose and went back to sleep. I decided there was a lot to be said for that kind of ruthlessness as I touched his tail. His eyes snapped open. I stopped giving him a hard time and called George again. I'd been trying to get him since I walked in the house, without success. This time wasn't any different.

Maybe he was on campus. Or he could be at the library. I reached for the remains of the candy bar sitting on the coffee table while I waited for his answering machine's beep. When it sounded, I left a message telling him to call me ASAP and hung up. Then I peeled the silver paper off the two remaining squares of chocolate and ate them. As the candy dissolved on my tongue, I thought about what the police were going to say when they found out that the guy they had in the morgue was the guy who'd stolen Nestor's wallet.

If Nestor and Sulfin were to be believed.

The explanation Nestor had given me for the mix-up was iffy, but not so iffy it couldn't be true. I leaned my head back and closed my eyes as I remembered our conversation.

“My wallet got stolen, okay?” Nestor had said. “BFD.”

“Did you report it?”

“Of course I did. Not that it matters. The mall police don't do jack shit. They couldn't find their asses with their hands tied behind their backs. I'm glad that putz croaked. Saves me the trouble. He got my jacket, too. A new one. I had it over a chair at the food court and he just took off with the whole fucking thing. I had a hundred bucks in my wallet. Not to mention my driver's license. You know what a pain it is to get another one of those?”

“Yes, I do.” My wallet had gotten stolen a couple of years ago. It had taken me months to straighten out. I was still getting bills for things people had bought under my name months later. Now I just carried my license and a credit card, period. It was easier that way.

“I think you'd better call the police and tell them they made a mistake.”

“Yeah.” The yeah was halfhearted at best.

“I mean it. They need to know.”

“Of course I will.” Nestor did righteous indignation. “What the hell do you think I am?”

“How about a scum-sucking bottom feeder.”

Nestor's righteous indignation rose to biblical proportions. In the end, I allowed Nestor to convince me that he would make the call. The truth was, I'd wanted to believe him because it was easier that way, even though deep down I knew Nestor probably had as much intention of phoning the police as I did of quitting smoking.

It wasn't in his interest to. But then it wasn't in my interest, either, considering Chapman's little gift this morning to Eli. Which is why I'd allowed myself to be convinced. Or at least it wasn't until I had the suitcase in my hand, because if Nestor got himself tied up at the PSB—a definite possibility. The guy could have a warrant out on him for all I knew—it might be awhile before we could get our business cleared up. The bottom line was, whoever was lying in the morgue could wait another five or six hours to be identified. It wasn't going to kill them. They were dead already.

I got up, popped a couple of Advil—I couldn't believe how lousy I felt—then sat back down and called Manuel's house next. My luck was running true to form, that is to say bad. His mother told me he'd been there and left without saying where he was going. I tried Manuel's friends. Two weren't in and the other three told me they hadn't heard from him. I restrained myself from throwing the phone across the room, took a deep breath and dialed Tim.

“Guess what?” I told him. “Nestor is alive.”

I could hear him draw in his breath. “You're shitting me, right?”

“No.”

“Good. I'm glad.”

“You know, you're the only person I've heard say that.”

“I told you I like Nestor. I think he's an interesting guy. How'd the cops make a mistake like that anyway?”

I told him about the lost wallet.

“You believe that?”

“Stranger things have happened.”

Tim digested this for a moment. “I suppose,” he grudgingly allowed.

Then I told him about Eli taking off and asked if he called in.

“No. But Chapman has.”

“Great.”

“He told me to remind you about your date with him for tonight.”

“He used the word
date?
”

“From the Latin. As in appointment, although the word can also apply to the fruit of the date palm tree. Interestingly enough, that word comes from the Greek word for finger. A word that has obvious ramifications for him. Not to mention resonance.”

“I see you've been reading the dictionary again.”

“I find it soothing.”

There had been a time in high school when I had to. That's when my idea of a good time was a day spent reading at the library. “Did you say anything to him?”

“Other than that I'm planning on consigning him to the nether reaches of hell, no.”

“Did you really say that?”

“No. I told him I'd give you the message. What are you going to do about that asshole?” Tim asked.

“I wish I could tell you.” So far I hadn't come up with anything that wouldn't land me in jail. I could hear Zsa Zsa barking in the background. “What's she going on about?”

“Nothing. She's barking at one of the angles that got loose.”

I told Tim I was going to come by and pick her up.

“You don't have to, you know. She's perfectly happy with me.”

“I know I don't. I want to.” The truth was, I missed her company. Then I told him about my meeting with Sulfin Olsen.

“I suppose I should have told you.” I could hear the tinge of concern in Tim's voice.

I knew he was thinking I might be angry about the ads for feeders in the newsletter, even though I had no legitimate reason to feel that way. I reassured him I wasn't.

“It turns out he was the one that drove Eli up to the Myers house.” I reached for my cigarettes and lighter. “What kind of person would you say he is?”

“Sulfin?” I could picture Tim twirling his stud around in his ear as he framed his reply. “If I had to use one word to describe him, I'd say that word would be ambitious. Very ambitious.”

That pretty much summed up my opinion, too. I told Tim I'd be over in a little while to get the dog. Then I hung up. I tried George one last time. He was still out. I left a message on his machine and left my house. I had a few things to do before I met Nestor.

N
estor and I were supposed to meet in a house over on the west side of town at nine-thirty. I would have preferred a more public place, but Nestor had refused and, given the circumstances, I really felt as if I wasn't in a position to bargain, which was also why I didn't feel I could object to the location he'd chosen.

The feeling I'd gotten off him from the brief conversation we'd had was that either this meeting was going to go his way or it wasn't going to go any way at all. As it was, I'd had a tough time convincing him to see me, and I'd only done that by telling him what Sulfin had told me.

Viking Street was one of those streets that showed up a lot in the local paper when a crime was written about. As in: So and so was beaten up on Viking Street. Or, shots were fired on Viking Street. Or, John Doe remains in critical condition after being stabbed on Viking Street. You'd think the block should have a sign on it—Caution: Walk With Care.

It doesn't, of course. In fact, from the car the street doesn't look any worse than a dozen other run-down avenues in the neighborhood. Almost all of the large Victorians in the area have been turned into multifamily residences. They're dotted in among the neat, single family homes of working-class people who are fighting a losing battle to hold on to their neighborhood. Boarded up and plastic-wrapped windows, shored-up porches, and ripped-up driveways, alternate with picket-fenced yards and clipped hedges. Piles of trash spill out into the road. The only visible things of value here are the expensive drug-money cars sitting next to them.

The street still hadn't been plowed—no big surprise. The rich neighborhoods get done first and the poorer ones last—so I had to drive slowly. Although the cars had packed the snow down in the middle of the road, there were still hillocks along the edges, where it would be easy to get stuck. It was dark by the time I reached Viking, which added to the problem, since several of the streetlights were out, making it hard to read the numbers on the houses that still had them.

This was one of those times when it would have been easier to park the car and walk, but I couldn't do that because there was no place to put it. Vehicles were parked on both sides of the street, shrinking the road down to one lane. If anyone had come along, one of us would have had to back up. And even if I managed to hump my way into one of the few vacant spaces I spotted, I was fairly confident I wouldn't be able to get back out. The car I was driving could barely make it up a hill, let alone anything else.

I finally found a spot two blocks away and let Zsa Zsa out. She trotted along ahead of me, tail wagging, ears flying in the cold wind, pausing now and then to nose at the garbage spilling out from the ripped-open trash bags. Three twenty-five Viking turned out to be a slanting, shambling wreck of a structure that looked as if the city should have pulled it down a long time ago.

A quarter of its second floor had been burned away. Scorched jagged beams reached out to the winter sky. All the windows, except for the two in front, were boarded up. The lawn was still full of the sofas, chairs, and wood the firemen had thrown out of the windows when they'd put out the blaze. The front of the house had a large For Sale sign tacked over one of the windows. Another sign next to it said, “reduced.” Good luck, I thought as I mounted the steps, which shifted and sighed under my weight. Given the property values in this area, it would cost more to pull the building down and clean up the lot than it was worth.

Nestor sure knew how to pick them, I reflected as I walked across the porch. If I hadn't been so anxious to wrap this up, I would have turned around and gone back to the store. Instead, I knocked on the door, which, given the condition of the house, was, oddly enough, still intact. It swung open. Zsa Zsa ran in before I could stop her.

Somewhere ahead of me I heard the sound of ska being played. I called for Nestor as I went inside.

I didn't get a reply.

Someone was here, though, because there were lit candles in glass jars set along either side of the hallway. They flickered and waved, casting shadows on the wall. For a moment, I thought I'd wandered into the set from a bad Hollywood gothic. You had to give the guy points for style. He definitely had a flair for the dramatic. Given what was in his room, I was surprised there wasn't something like a skull in the middle of the floor.

I could only marvel at what Nestor thought he was accomplishing with this setup as I followed the path the candles had laid out into the kitchen.

“Hey, Nestor!” I yelled. “Very impressive. You can come out now and stop playing ghoul in the closet. I've got the message. Let's get this thing wrapped up so we can get out of here.” I rubbed my arms. “It's too cold to stay here for long.” And, besides, the place stank of burnt wood.

He didn't answer.

Except for the music, the crunch of what I was stepping on, and the click of Zsa Zsa's nails on the floor as she trotted along in front of me, the house was quiet. At this point, I should have returned to my car and gotten my flashlight, but I was tired and cold and hungry and irritated. I wasn't in the mood to walk the two blocks to my car and back again. Instead, I picked up one of the candles and used that for a light.

Three more votive candles sat next to the boom box on the kitchen table. Nestor must have bought out the store. I picked up the CDs and read the labels. Ska, reggae, and rap. About what I would have expected. “Come on, Nestor. This is bullshit.”

Nothing.

I put the CDs down and looked around. The sink was intact, as were the countertop and the cabinets. “You want to play games, fine with me.” I told Zsa Zsa to seek and find, which was pretty laughable if you knew her—the only thing she was good at locating was the nearest bag of French fries—but you gotta work with what you got.

By this time I was beginning to have my doubts about Nestor being in the house, but I decided to give the place a quick look-see anyway. Maybe, through some unbelievable stroke of good fortune, he'd left Eli's suitcase lying around.

I walked over and opened the closet door. Except for a couple of brooms, it was empty. I tried the doors of the lower and upper cabinets next. Most were stuck shut. The ones I could manage to get open were filled with dented cans of food and spilled bags of rotting flour and sugar.

Zsa Zsa and I rapidly went over the rest of the downstairs. As we checked the rooms, it was obvious people had been using the place as a squat. The floors were all filled with trash. I kept on stepping on pizza boxes and tripping over empty soda cans. Occasionally I'd hear a squeak as a mouse or a rat hustled out of the way. There were probably hundreds in the building. I should tell Sulfin. What is that saying about, one man's loss is another man's gain?

The ripped sofas and chairs in what had once been the living room spilled their guts onto the floor. The odor of mold hung over everything. Metal blinds dangled down from single fasteners, letting in the light from the street. In another room, a bed was obliterated by chunks of plaster, as were the nightstands standing next to it. A dresser was covered with a thin dusting of snow. I looked up. There was a hole in the ceiling. Two Metallica posters, the only things left untouched, stared at me from the doorway of the third room. I moved on with Zsa Zsa following gingerly behind me.

The dining-room table was broken in two, each half inclining towards the other like dancers bowing at the end of the dance. The chairs to the set were lying on the floor, their legs splayed out in different directions. A lamp hung precariously from a ceiling wire. Miraculously, a sideboard stood intact, its display of commemorative plates untouched.

After I made my circuit I came back to the kitchen. Maybe Nestor had come and something had happened to make him leave. Or maybe he'd just gone to get something. Whatever the reason, the only thing I did know was he wasn't here now. What was worse was that the suitcase wasn't here, either.

I decided to give him fifteen minutes.

I was sitting, slumped down on the folding chair, with my feet up on the table, listening to Bob Marley and throwing pieces of an old Tootsie Roll I'd found in my backpack to Zsa Zsa, when Eli walked in.