Feelers (7 page)

She probably smiled at him—she liked the tall, dark, handsome ones, like me, like Danny.

“Can I help you, sir?”

“Yes, thank you. I’m interested in the house on Vanderhoosen Street.”

“You have good timing, my friend.” Mary would have struggled to her feet, her glasses dropping to her belly. She was not comfortable talking to people sitting down, especially potential clients. “We just cleaned it out and put the sign up yesterday.”

“Cleaned out, huhn? Not moved?”

“Died a month or so back. People pile up a lot of stuff in a lifetime, kids can’t take it all in, so the rest has to be cleaned out. Would you like me to have one of our agents show you the place?”

“Any available now? I was just passing by, not sure when I’ll be back around here.”

“Ooo.” I can picture Mary chewing a lip in thought. “Let me see if I can raise one.”

“Or if I could have the key, I could just take a look myself, and if I’m, you know, interested, I’ll come back for another look.”

“Well, we wouldn’t want you to miss any of the features of the house.”

“There’s nothing to steal, right? Promise I’ll bring the key back. Just around the corner.”

“We trust you, it’s not
that
. . . my name is Mary, by the way.”

“Tom.”

“Let me find the key . . .”

He watched as she tugged the keys from her boobs and opened a cabinet on the wall next to her desk. Then she fumbled with the ornamental chain around her neck and got her glasses on her face so she could read the little labels. The inside of the key box, like the rest of the place, was a mess.

“If you’ll just bear with me, Tom, there are a lot of keys . . .”

The flyer with Danny’s picture was probably still on the top of her desk, staring up at her, while he stared at her from across the room. I had not recognized him from the mug shot, so it is not a surprise that Mary did not, either. The mug shot showed a man in an open-necked white shirt with a look of restrained panic slapped onto his face. The customer in the turtleneck was cool and polite and fifteen years older.

“Can I help?” Danny approached, hands folded behind his back, the ice picks up his sleeves pressing into his forearms. He stood next to her, both of them squinting into the box, while his own mug shot looked up at them from the desk. I guess with all the rest of the stuff strewn on the desk, he might have been hard-pressed to pick it out from the rest of the papers, but the image was a familiar one. Too familiar.

Danny was unable to read anything on the scribbled tags in
the key box and so turned away. He was probably thinking he might as well just bust into the place on his own and look around. Scanning the premises of Upscale Realty, he was probably not reassured that she would ever find the key. He began to notice that there were keys dotted all over the place. On a stack of files on the desk, in an empty coffee cup on a desk, in an ashtray on a desk over there, hanging from a clip on the edge of a lamp shade. Even her desk . . .

“Ooo!” Mary came up with the key and plunked down in her chair with a gasp. “Now, let me just get your name and number.” She found a pad of paper and dropped it on top of his mug shot.

“Tom Roberts.” He had heard many times in prison that the best aliases were a combination of two first names. People had a hard time remembering them, got the names mixed up. Then he gave her the phone number of where he grew up.

She stared at the number. “So you live not far from here?”

“Excuse me?”

“This exchange, it’s local.”

She held up the pad, pointing the pen at the number. “It’s a local exchange.”

Danny blinked. He realized that he was behind on popular technologies, so lying about things having to do with phones made him nervous. As he looked at the pad in her hand, beyond it would have been his mug shot. Now he was looking directly into his own eyes from fifteen years before—but his eyes shifted and focused on Mary’s instead of his own.

“That’s for messages,” he blurted.

“Oh, a message service.”

“A message service.” He nodded a little uncertainly. Even though they existed before he went to prison, he did not really know what a message service was.

“OK, well, here’s the key. Back here within the hour? I don’t want to have to call the police.”

Danny froze, key dangling from his hand.

She looked up at him, focusing on his face, noticing the restrained panic.

“Tom, I’m just joking. I trust you. You have an honest face.” People usually say that sort of thing when they aren’t sure, and by way of warning.

“Right.” Danny exhaled and tried to smile. Those smiling muscles hadn’t been exercised in a long time, so it was more of a lopsided grin. “I’ll be back soon with the keys.”

“If nobody is here, just drop them in the mail slot in the front door.”

“Thank you.” He headed for the exit, his hand adjusting the meat hammer in his belt.

Mary looked for someplace to put his name and address, muttering to herself about the mess, and picked up the mug shot to put it somewhere. Suddenly it hit her.

“Ooo! Tom!”

He stood in the open doorway and looked back across the room at her.

“Yes, Mary?”

“You may have to jiggle the lock and give the door a shove.”

“Thank you.”

WHILE DANNY WAS GETTING THE
key to the place on Vanderhoosen from Mary, I was depositing the check she gave me at the neighborhood Ponce de León bank. Yes, believe it or not, Father, we have banks in New York with this name. The storage place was not far away, and I was tempted to go visit my money. It was still hard to believe, and I wanted to refresh my mind to the fact that I was now almost rich. Let us be brutally honest: You would have a hard time finding someone who did not enjoy looking at a big pile of cash that belonged to them.

As Mary suggested, though, I had to be careful. Very careful. Perhaps I was being followed, and I did not want to lead them to the cash. What worried me even more was what to do with the key to the locker. It had a bright orange plastic handle with the number of the locker on it and the name of the storage place. I had been keeping it temporarily under the floor mat in the rear of my car, but as I said before, I was not comfortable leaving things in my car, knowing that it was likely to be searched—even as I hoped that the Prick was searching my apartment at that moment, getting it over with.

I considered burying the key in the park, or putting it in a tree. But what if the grounds workers somehow stumbled upon it?

After much thought, I decided to hide it in plain sight and to remove the plastic handle. In the parking lot of a White Castle, I found a hammer in my trunk and smashed the orange plastic, reducing the key to just an ordinary-looking key. I slid this key onto my key ring between my car keys and apartment keys. I was sure the people at the storage place would not be happy with my decision to alter their key. Considering the options, though, I did not really care—let them charge me twenty bucks for my wanton destruction of their key. If someone stole my keys, they would have no idea where in Brooklyn to look for the locker, if they even thought that I had a locker.

The paperwork for the locker was another matter. If I threw it away, I would have no backup in case the key were lost, and if someone found the rental agreement, they would know which locker to bust into. So I slid it into a sandwich bag and placed it under the battery in my car. This is an old trick from my foreman, Speedy. His father in Central America somewhere used to keep the family’s meager savings under the battery of a Ford Fairlane.

My mind turned toward more pleasant thoughts: Fanny. Ah, what a gem, and to stumble upon her the same day I discovered the thirty-two tight ones.

You may be wondering just how I felt about her—was love, marriage, and domestic glee a shimmering mirage in the distance?

I will tell you, the thought had crossed my mind. She was beautiful and, with a little gentle encouragement and training in certain departments, a superb lover. Fanny certainly had all the right parts in the right places, but Fanny posed a complication
as well as a delight. How she would fit in with my plans . . . it was early yet. You see, now that my ship had come in, I felt I had sufficient resources to realize my dream of moving away from Brooklyn, of leaving the feeler business.

As I was in this frame of mind, I left the White Castle parking lot and drove to the library to go online.

I guess you would have to say that my dream to move away came from my father. He claimed that we were descended from the conquistadors who founded La Paz, where you are, Father, on the Baja peninsula. He told me he was raised there, and he would tell me stories of this tropical paradise, of the cool breezes, blue waters, majestic mountains, and the beautiful hacienda where he grew up. His stated mission in life was to buy that hacienda—Casa Martinez—and regain what he called “our birthright.” I remember asking him what that meant, and he said that as the descendants of conquistadors, we come from noble blood that does not thin through generations and is bound to history, and thus to certain places, like Casa Martinez.

My mother did not really like my father, and I have no idea how they ever came to be married. She said we were never going to leave Brooklyn, that my father was a fool, and that my father was never in Mexico, that he grew up in Jersey City. But how could he have such detailed memories if it were not true? I am not an idiot, I know the stories he told me may have been exaggerated. He was, after all, a very passionate and romantic man. As am I. So even if he did grow up in Jersey City, and Casa Martinez only existed in his mind . . . so be it. Now it exists in my mind, or as he would have said, in my blood, and it is my mission to voyage out from Brooklyn and return to the home of my conquistador ancestors.

To La Paz, “the Peace.”

Obviously, my father never achieved his dream. He was an auto mechanic. The money necessary to realize his dream was not going to come from doing brake jobs. So he gambled. This plan did not go well, and he was into bad people for big money. When I was twelve he was crushed and killed by one of the cars he was working on. It was said that local mobsters did it because he couldn’t pay. My mother never forgave him. She died a very bitter woman ten years after him. She slipped on an icy stoop and tumbled headfirst down the brick stairs.

At the library, I had studied La Paz on the computers and discovered that the Baja peninsula was visited many times by conquistadors. As my father told it to me, our bloodlines went back to one of Cortés’s compatriots, Hernando Martinez de Salvatierra, who established the Martinez home in La Paz. Subsequently, he left, intending to return, but was killed while seeking gold in South America. His descendants felt what my father and I felt—the need to connect with this place, and they returned, only to lose the home again when the family fortune was lost in a failed financial venture. My father left to come to America to find work. I have been unable on the Web to establish all this as fact. Except that there was an obscure conquistador named Hernando Martinez de Salvatierra.

For a few years, I had been on the library computers trying to locate Casa Martinez in La Paz, and I had found more than one. As you probably know, Father, Martinez is as common a name there as it is here, and the people in La Paz often name their houses after themselves rather than after the previous occupant. My ancestral home might have another name. So I had to search for the hacienda based on my father’s description. It was walled, like a compound, with a white stucco and red tile mission house that had a central courtyard with a fountain. According to my
father, the three-tiered fountain was brought to La Paz by Hernando Martinez de Salvatierra from the Basque region of Spain in the sixteenth century. On the side of this fountain is the Martinez coat of arms, which is very complicated but has a tree in the center surrounded by eight stars. Of course, I knew it was possible that the fountain had been removed and sold, as it could be quite valuable.

I searched real estate sites on the Web and communicated by e-mail with La Paz real estate agents. They would send me listings of houses like the one my father described. How would I know the house when I saw it, if the fountain had been removed? I can only tell you, Father, that I felt that the hand of fate would guide me. I guess I hoped that the fates would bring me the house at the right time—and now was the right time if ever there were one.

My recent correspondence made me think that I was getting close, as there had lately been some listings that were like those my father described. Once I felt there were some good leads, I would fly there and look them over. As you can imagine, the real estate prices in La Paz are a lot more reasonable than in Brooklyn. For what it costs for a studio apartment in Brooklyn Heights, you can buy a very nice house in La Paz.

But what would I—Morty Martinez—do in La Paz? I mean, assuming I wasn’t rich and didn’t need to make money. And I wasn’t rich. I had saved almost five hundred grand on my own, and the eight hundred from Vanderhoosen Drive put me comfortably in the black. I could buy a house and start a business in Mexico. It could be almost anything. A restaurant, a small hotel, a fishing boat. Anything but cleaning out houses.

Would Fanny be willing to leave Tangles and her career hairdressing to come with me to Mexico? Again, having only spent
one night with the girl, I was getting ahead of myself, but I could of course use help running a hotel, or I could set her up with her own hair place in La Paz. Perhaps she had money saved to open a place, but she probably had never considered La Paz.

Then again, part of my dream had been to set myself up and find a raven-haired Mexican beauty and start a family.

Either way, I was going to La Paz. Sooner rather than later.

The only thing possibly standing in the way would be Pete the Prick, if he took the money away.

Or so I thought.

So there I was at the library, checking the real estate sites, and of course my e-mail. I had a message from one of the La Paz real estate agencies. It was a listing with pictures. The pictures were of a stucco hacienda, the walls covered in cherry bougainvillea. There was one shot of the interior, with an opening to a courtyard. A courtyard with a fountain.