Hard Case Crime: Fade to Blonde (2 page)

I looked up the street. It was still just a dirt track. You could hear the whisper of the cars from the freeway across the valley. It was one of those bone-dry days when sound travels. There were big rolls of cyclone fencing lying around, I don’t know what for. No one had bothered to put them up. I looked back at her and said, “That’s terrible. You know where they’re showing any of them?”

“You wouldn’t recognize me,” she said. “I parted my hair differently back then. Look, let’s not keep standing around like this. Let’s go sit in the car.”

She turned and walked off. After a moment, I followed. She got in on the driver’s side, and I rode shotgun, if we were riding. The seats were white vinyl and already hotting up in the sun. She took hold of the steering wheel, closed her eyes, and let her breath out through her nostrils. Then she gave the wheel a little pat and dropped her hands in her lap. “So. You’re a screenwriter, an actor, a bodyguard. And a roofer, too.”

“I do odd jobs.”

She said, “I want a man killed.”

“Not that odd.”

“I didn’t mean that. Not killed, really. Just hurt.”

“I’d think you could do that work yourself.”

“Or scared.”

“Like I said.”

“I’m serious. There’s a man who’s, who’s got to leave me alone. I don’t know what to do about him. I need someone to help me.”

“What’s he doing?”

“I can’t tell you that unless I know you’ll help me.”

“Does it have to do with those movies?”

“It has to do with a lot of things. I can’t tell you unless I know you’re with me.”

“What do you do for a living?”

“Like you. Odd jobs.”

“Such as.”

“Sales clerk, lifeguard — I swim pretty well. Hatcheck girl. Perfume girl. One of those girls who stands around department stores smiling, with a bottle of perfume, and asks if you want a little puff. I tried modeling, but clothes don’t fit me.”

“Where’d you meet this man?”

“I was a hat check girl.”

“That pay pretty well?”

“No.”

“Nice car.”

“He didn’t buy it for me, if that’s what you mean. My folks left me a little money, and I came out here and got a place and bought a car, because I thought it would help, you know, to look right. The car’s what’s left. I can’t even afford to have it washed.”

“Why don’t you sell it?”

“I did. To him. He holds the note on it now.”

“But he lets you go on driving it.”

“He says one night when I’m out miles from anywhere, he’ll pull up behind me at a light and make me get out and give him the keys. And then I’ll have to walk home. In my high heels and little dress. So that by the time I get home, my feet will be bleeding and my stockings will be torn and my legs will be black with dust, and my face, and I’ll stink with sweat like a farm animal, like a cow, which, you see, is all I am, and I won’t be pretty anymore. Except he knows I’ll hike up my skirt to get a ride from somebody, some, um, farm hands — yeah, that’s about right — and be taken into some field and, and raped by the whole bunch of them, one after another, raped to death, which I’ll love, because that’s the kind of skinny bony filthy whore I am.”

“Nice,” I said.

“He really is crazy, but he’s got a business and I don’t suppose he wants that interfered with, so there must be some way to reach him. Don’t you know how to do things like that? Mattie seems to think so. He’s got to leave me alone. He’s got to stop threatening me. Just when I’m beginning to get somewhere and get myself normal for once.”

“You could’ve picked someone else to sell your car to.”

She let her head flop back against the seat. “Well. You know. He used to be very sweet.” She reached out a knuckle and rapped me softly on the chest. “I’ve been hit a few times, too,” she said.

Her eyes were large, pale, and set wide beneath a broad, low forehead. Her chin was pointed, but her fine-lipped mouth was wide. There wasn’t really room for it on her face, any more than there was room for that chest on her skinny frame. Her arms and legs were too long. Sitting there behind the wheel, she looked like she’d folded them up the wrong way, the way you’ll fold a road
map the wrong way. I could see why she’d flopped in pictures. She was disturbing-looking. Ten thousand guys had made a play for her, but I don’t guess any of them kidded himself it was a good idea at the time. I rubbed my face and said, “Let’s see what we’ve got. There’s a man, you’d rather not say who, and you want me to make him stop doing something, you’d rather not say what. Kill him, threaten him, you’d rather not say. And you’d rather not tell me your real name. And you’re broke.”

She opened her purse, took out what was in it, and gave it to me.

I counted it. “It’s not much,” she said.

“No,” I said.

“But you’ll take it?”

Way out on the freeway, I heard a car horn, very faintly. Somebody was losing his temper. Then the traffic was whispering along smoothly again. The sun felt good on my face. I could smell the hot vinyl seat and the girl sitting beside me with her fists in her lap, waiting. She didn’t use perfume, just regular soap. I got out my wallet and tucked her money inside.

“Don’t they always?” I said.

I watched her car out of sight, and then climbed back on the roof and finished the row. I didn’t like to leave it all cranksided like that. To pass the time I thought what I sometimes do. I think, What if it was my house I was working on. I think about how I’d finish the roof, or the driveway or what have you, and how I’d get a truck then
and move some nice furniture in, and hang up some curtains, and some pictures, and put some dishes in the cabinets and some food in the fridge, and how it’d be done then, my house, and how me and some nice woman would move in and live our lives. I didn’t think about moving in with Rebecca while I was finishing the last row. I wasn’t that dumb, not yet. So the little woman didn’t have a face or name, but I’ll admit she did wind up on the tall side. When I was done I stacked up the loose tiles for the next guy, if there was one, and gave each of my tools a wipe with an oily rag as I put it away. I like a good set of tools. I closed the toolbox and climbed back down, leaving the ladder where it was. There was supposed to be a truck coming by each evening for things like that. I put my tools in the trunk of my car and went to see the boss.

Ortiz & Son had a little office in Inglewood. It was basically just a gravel parking lot with a wire fence around it, big enough for a couple of cement mixers and a few cars and, in the corner of the lot, a two-room shack. One of the rooms was so the laborers would have somewhere to wait for the truck. The other was for Nestor Ortiz. From what I hear, old Ortiz had always been a stand-up guy, but he was gone now and if anyone had a good word to say about his son, they hadn’t said it to me. Nestor Ortiz always wore a jaunty little porkpie hat with the brim turned down in front like a fedora. He was a dapper little guy, and he knew every man on every one of his sites by name, and their families’ names, and he’d go around asking all the guys, How’s your family. I don’t have a family and it didn’t sweeten me. When I opened the door, he spread his hands and said, “My friend! My friend, I know all about it.”

“Hello, Nestor,” I said.

“Raymond, my friend,” he said. “I know all about it
and is terrible. I stand before you this moment in shame. In shame.”

“It’s been three weeks, Nestor.”

“I know and is an awful thing. Awful. Everybody coming to see me, all good men like you, who work hard, and they need their pay, and what can I tell them? What? I’m not getting any money, I can’t give any money, and I don’t blame you one moment if you quit.”

“I am quitting, Nestor.”

“I don’t blame you a moment.”

“I still need my pay.”

“And you gonna get it, every cent. But right now you got to be a little patient because it isn’t so good. I can’t pay I don’t get the money from Olindas Estates. And where is Olindas now? Do they pay me? No.”

“Nestor, you are Olindas. You’re forty percent of Olindas.”

“That’s only forty percent,” he said. “My friend, I assure you I am completely and totally and absolutely broke at this moment we’re speaking.”

“I’ve seen where you live, Nestor. Have you seen where I live?”

“I assure you it is impossible right now for me to pay everybody asking.”

“I’m not asking you to pay everybody,” I said, trying to get my breathing under control. “I’m asking you to pay me. Seventeen dollars a day times thirteen days. No, I quit early today. Call it twelve days. Two hundred and four dollars. This isn’t the first time you’ve tried to short me, Nestor.”

“I hear,” he said patiently, “what you are saying. Do you hear what I am saying?”

“I did the work, Nestor. I want to be paid for it.”

“Is that all you can say the same thing over again? I heard you already, your pay. I am trying to talk to you like
a reasonable civilize human being. Can I do that, you think?”

“Nestor,” I said.

The first time you use a jackhammer, your hands are so swollen at night that you can’t close them. You can barely pick a fork up off the table. That’s the way my whole head felt just then. That’s how it takes me. It’s as if the front of my brain was swelling, locking up, and all I could think was,
I want my pay. I want my pay
. I didn’t blame Nestor for being sick of it. I was sick of it myself. I told myself to turn around and walk out. I wasn’t listening. I leaned forward on my hands and took a breath. Nestor looked up at me, unimpressed. I said, “Nestor.”

“Lissen, what do you want,” he said. “Think about what you really want. You want me to call the cops, that what you want?”

“Yeah, you want the cops here, Nestor. You want them here real bad. Nestor, I’m telling you. Give me my goddamn money, all right?”

“And I am telling you, you are a goddamn big stupid
cabrón
of an ape. And you gonna wait for your pay a long time. And how ’bout
that
?”

All right. It was out of my hands now. Anyway, that’s what I usually tell myself. The room was crammed full with rolls of tarpaper, coils of wire, cartons of bathroom tile. There was a two-foot length of heavy chain on the corner of Nestor’s desk, an open padlock hooked into the last link. I unhooked the padlock, picked up the chain, and came around the desk. “Oh, now you’re gonna be a big tough guy,” he said. “Now you’re gonna scare me. Big tough guy. Now you’re gonna threaten.” I scooped him out of his chair, mashed him one-handed against the wall, and wound the chain around his neck. His little hat fell to the floor. I slipped my fingers in between the chain and the side of his neck, gripped the chain, and twisted.
Nestor made a squeaking noise back in his throat, and then he made no noise at all except for the scuffling of his feet against the floor and the clacking of his teeth as he opened and closed his jaws. His bulging eyes didn’t leave mine. They seemed to be searching for some sign that I was somehow kidding. I loosened the chain and said, “I want my pay, Nestor.”

“You’re crazy!” he croaked. His voice whistled in his throat. “Crazy!”

I tightened the chain again and he was quiet. He was staring into my eyes, and then he was staring past them. His little belly heaved convulsively and his fingers scratched at my chest. “I want my pay,” I said.

I loosened the chain again.

“Crazy! Crazy!” he whispered.

“Two-hundred and four dollars,” I said, towing him over to the desk by the chain. He scrabbled in a drawer and pulled out a checkbook. I took it and dropped it back in the drawer. “Checks can be stopped, Nestor.”

He pulled his wallet from his breast pocket and threw it on the desk. He began to curse me in his whistling, broken voice. I tightened up a little and he stopped. “Count it for me,” I said.

He had a hundred and thirteen dollars. I put it in my pocket. “All I got!” he shrieked. “ž’S all I got!”

“Ninety-one dollars more, Nestor. Halfway there. Where’s the petty cash?”

He jerked open a desk drawer and threw a small lock-box on the desk. He pulled out a small key, unlocked it with trembling fingers, and thrust the box toward me. It skidded off the desk and spilled onto the floor.

“Pick it up,” I told him.

He got down on his hands and knees and began scooping the money up and flinging it on the desk and chair, cursing me all the while in Spanish and English
and maybe a few other languages. He was terrified of me, but he couldn’t seem to stop cursing me. I knew how he felt. I let go of the chain and it slithered to the floor and landed with a clunk. I didn’t see any singles on the desk, so I picked up four twenties and three fives and put them in my pocket. “Okay,” I said. “Now we’re quits.”

He just sat there in a scatter of money, holding his throat and weeping. I’d expected a bald spot under the hat, but he had a nice head of hair. I set his hat back on his head. “See you, Nestor,” I said.

He didn’t look at me as I left. He was busy weeping. I’m not sure he knew I’d been there anymore. I’m not sure he remembered what had hurt him.

Back then I lived at the Harmon Court Motel, out on Harmon, near Paige. The place was right behind the Sun-Glo billboard, which was something of a local landmark. The Sun-Glo Girl was seventy-five feet long and lay around all day on an elbow and a hip. Her job was to lie there, smiling and brushing back her hair. From the front she was an awfully healthy-looking girl, but from my window all you could see was the plywood back of her, propped up by iron struts. It was still a pretty healthy profile. The Court was usually half-empty, but it didn’t cost much to keep open, and I guess tearing the place down was more work than somebody was in the mood to do. My room was the last one past the pool. It was one of two deluxe rooms that had a kitchenette in the corner, and I got a percentage off my rent in exchange for
handyman work. That was the theory, anyway.

When I got home from Nestor’s office, I sorted the money out on the dresser: twenties, tens, fives, and ones. Two hundred and eight dollars. I added the money Rebecca had given me and counted again. It made a decent little pile. It wouldn’t last, because I was behind seven weeks’ rent and two payments on my car, but it still felt nice between my fingers. It’s always good to get your pay. There was a mirror over the dresser, and I watched myself tuck the bills neatly in my wallet, and then I stood and looked at myself. I looked like the kind of guy who strangles contractors. I pulled off my clothes, turned the shower up as hot as I could bear, and stood under it awhile. I toweled off and had a drink from the bottle in the desk. I looked in the mirror again. Better. I put on some pants. Better all the time.