Little Dog Laughed (15 page)

Dave husked his own tamale. The smell of it was so good he shut his eyes and simply breathed it in deeply for a minute. Tamales like this he thought had ceased to exist. When he was a kid, he could buy them off a rattly truck that parked under an old pepper tree in the schoolyard at noon. Steaming. For a dime. The same brand could be bought in supermarkets now. But the cornhusk wrappings had been replaced by plastic, and the shredded beef by something called textured vegetable protein. Even the masa meal was tasteless. This was wonderful. So were the pinto beans. So was the rice. He never wanted to eat anywhere else except this dim little kitchen with its crooked cupboard doors, faucet dripping in the sink, scuffed linoleum, faded pink paint. He told the woman:

“He will not have to stay there long.” He smiled and wiped his mouth with the small, rough paper napkin she had laid beside his plate. “You are a wonderful cook,
señora
.”

She smiled. Her teeth were discolored, those she still had. But dimples appeared in her withered cheeks, and for a moment it was possible to see the pretty girl she once was. “
Gracias
,” she said, “but it is very unremarkable food.”

“Not to me,” Dave said. “You do not like the wine?”

He had stopped for a bottle on the way back and paid well for it. Had this been a mistake? It was red, but it lacked roughness. It was not
vino tinto ordinario
, was it? We like what we’re used to. But the woman caressed the slim bottle that glinted in the light of a weak bulb dangling from a frayed cord over the table. And smiled again. “It is a lovely wine.” Her fingers were small and gnarled on the dark glass. “I thought that I would put the rest away for another time. When the danger is past and we can celebrate.”

“It will not keep well,” Dave said, and filled her glass again. “I will bring another bottle for that occasion.”

“You do not think it will be soon?” She tasted the wine.

“I’m going to try to make it soon,” Dave said.

But time stretched out. He helped the woman wash up and put the leftover food away in a gray refrigerator. She tugged a grubby cotton string to turn the light off, and the two of them sat in the small living room on old overstuffed chairs and looked at television while a candle flickered in front of a chipped statuette of the Virgin in a corner. Dave went out to the street every time commercials came on, and looked for the four-by-four vehicle, and climbed back up the sloping porch stairs and stepped across the gap and sat down in the living room again.

The woman brought him a dark brown bottle of Dos Equis, a bowl of tortilla chips, a bowl of cold refried beans, and set these on a low table. This was at ten o’clock. He had begun to feel foolish. By eleven, when nothing had happened, and the woman had fallen asleep in the chair, head back, gently snoring, he began to wonder if Leppard might be right.

Dave had phoned him on the way here. Leppard refused to help. “You’ve got this death squad craziness on the brain. Hunsinger denies he told you anything about any death squad.”

“I have a witness that he did,” Dave said. “Where did you find Hunsinger?”

“In Oxnard, on my APB, and they’re locked up here. He and Fleur. Conspiracy. Grand theft. With Underhill. The DA thinks Hunsinger found out Underhill meant to skip with Streeter’s hundred thousand, and he told Fleur, and Fleur threatened to tell Streeter unless Underhill split the money with her and Hunsinger. Underhill laughed at her, she told Streeter, he demanded his money back, and Underhill shot him.”

“What about those wire cutters?” Dave said.

“That section of the fence was junked when they repaired it. No way to compare the cuts with any clippers.”

“And the gun?” Dave said.

“You know about the gun, and if you’d told me, it would have saved this department time and money. The gun belonged to a Reverend Pierce Glendenning in Sierra Madre. He thought you sent me. When I said you hadn’t, he wept in gratitude. I am not weeping in gratitude, Mr. Brandstetter. What else do you know about this case you haven’t told me?”

“You don’t like what I do tell you,” Dave said, and hung up.

He came indoors again at five past eleven, went to the kitchen for another Dos Equis, came back into the living room to switch channels on the television set and move the bent, corroded antennae to sharpen the picture. He sat down, drank beer, dipped taco chips into the spicy beans and munched them, and watched the Channel Three news, hoping for a glimpse of Cecil. He hoped also for fresh word on the disappearance of General Cortez-Ortiz from the Guatemalan embassy in Tegucigalpa. File film showed Cortez-Ortiz playing with a dog in a white-walled patio filled with flowering shrubs. The dog was a young Doberman, full of energy and awkwardness. He and the general both had white, menacing teeth, and laughed a lot. But the whereabouts of the general was still a mystery. And Cecil did not show up on camera.

He showed up in person, at midnight, when a rerun of “Vegas” broke for commercials and Dave pushed up wearily out of the butt-sprung overstuffed chair to go out to the silent street under its greenish lamps to look for danger one more time. When he had picked his way down the slumping porch steps, a car’s headlights caught his attention, boring along toward this place. A taxicab halted at the curb, and Cecil jumped out. He raised a hand to Dave, leaned in at the window to pay the driver, and turned to regard Dave with strained patience as Dave came down the cement steps to the sidewalk. “What the hell is this?” he said.

“I told you on the phone. When I walked into Ed’s Oasis for a beer after the sheriff interviewed me out by the irrigation canal, he was back of the bar, talking on the telephone. In an undertone. Upset and urgent, cupping the mouthpiece with his hand, looking over his shoulder every few seconds. Something was making him sweat. And he was warning somebody about something.”

“That the word was out on who killed Rafael?” Cecil looked up and down the deserted street, no lights at any of the windows now, except those at nineteen twenty-two, and everybody asleep. He looked at nineteen twenty-two, the collapsing porch. “You think he was warning El Coronel himself? Yeah. That’s why you’re here. You told him where to find Porfirio. To flush them out, right? Only now you have to keep Porfirio from being killed. So this is your new permanent address, right?”

“Porfirio is on a bus to Guadalupe,” Dave said. He held his watch close to his face. “Should be there by now. His sister’s house. To hide until the danger’s over.”

“But you want a look at who comes to kill him?”

“That’s it.” Dave nodded. “Me or someone I trust.”

“Not the police, Leppard, Ken Barker?”

“Barker’s in London,” Dave said, “and Leppard has a new homicide. Anyway, he thinks I’m fantasizing.” Dave summed up his conversation with Leppard. “So that leaves me on my own. Unless you want to help.”

“I’m in the news business now,” Cecil said, “remember? Dave, come home.”

Dave shook his head. “I have to know who these people are. But I’m tired. I’ve been up since dawn. I’ve driven three hundred miles today. And I need you to spell me.”

“We have an agreement,” Cecil said. “I’m through with shooting and being shot, right? If these dudes don’t find Porfirio here, why won’t they shoot us? You want to watch them shoot me? You want me to watch them shoot you?”

“They won’t do that. We’re not witnesses to anything.”

“Do you think they’ll wait for us to explain that? Come on home.” Cecil reached for Dave, but Dave stepped back. “Dave, why are you doing this? You’re not getting paid. Lovejoy called you off the case. You want the truth? You’re compulsive. You can’t leave it alone. You’re like Adam Streeter, you know that? You live for danger.”

“I live for justice,” Dave said.

“Justice is a dream,” Cecil scoffed, “a romantic ideal. Who the fuck gets justice in this life? The people living on this street?” His laugh was angry. “Or shall we consider the black people in this country? What the hell did they do?” Tears were in his eyes. His voice trembled. “They didn’t even want to come here, for Christ sake.”

“Easy,” Dave said. “You go on home and sleep now. Forget about this. You’re right—it’s not your worry.”

“Sleep? Without you there? Be serious. That’s why I left my van at work and came in a taxi. So we’d have to ride home together. In the Jaguar. Now.”

“Sorry.” Dave laid the keys in Cecil’s hand. “You go along. I’ll ring you in the morning.”

“Some cop will ring me, to say you’re dead. Shit. I wish I’d never taken that call from Porfirio, never come down here in the first place. If it hadn’t been for me—”

A car squealed to a halt at the curb. A glossy red sports car. Jeff Leppard climbed out. So clothes were not all he owned. The slam of the car door was loud in the midnight silence. “The commandos show up yet?” He came to them, stocky, sleek. “I didn’t think so. And they won’t. But I’ll stay and see. If you still want.”

“I still want,” Dave said. “Just to know who they are.”

“That’s what I’ll find out,” Leppard said. “Nothing else to do tonight.”

“Another ice princess?” Dave asked.

“Same one,” Leppard said wanly. “I’m a slow learner.”

“You’re also a bad liar.” Dave studied him. “I was fantasizing when we talked on the phone. You were so sure of that, you almost convinced me. What turned you around?”

“Yeah, well”—Leppard shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot—“I apologize for the way I talked. I was busy.”

“This visit isn’t an act of contrition,” Dave said.

“Not really.” Leppard sighed. “After you hung up, the FAA lab called. The rods to the rudder and tail flaps on McGregor’s plane had been sawed almost through. Which is why they broke, and why he crashed.” Leppard glowered. “But that doesn’t mean commandos did it.”

“Doesn’t mean they didn’t,” Dave said.

“It could have been Hunsinger,” Leppard said.

“Not in that van,” Dave said, “not with those tires.”

“Why didn’t he use Fleur’s van?”

“Because she was driving it that day. I saw her.”

“Ah, look,” Leppard said, “I don’t know who sabotaged that plane, but somebody did, and that’s why I’m here—because you keep being right about crazy things, and it makes me nervous.”

“This is Cecil Harris,” Dave said. “Jeff Leppard.”

They shook hands. Leppard looked around him. Over the crooked roofs of the small dark houses, a faint colored haze tinted the sky from signs along a distant business street. Leppard looked at nineteen twenty-two. “Your man Porfirio in there?”

“His sister,” Dave said. “I sent him out of town. Out of danger.”

“Danger.” Leppard snorted and shook his head. “A death squad? In Boyle Heights?”

“You’ll see,” Dave said.

C
ECIL SLEPT, BUT DAVE
couldn’t manage that. At last, he slipped out of bed quietly so as not to disturb Cecil, pushed wearily into a big, loose kimono of brown raw silk, and went softly downstairs. He switched on a lamp by the couch, went to the bar for a squat bottle of Rémy Martin and a snifter, and paused at the desk. The black book lay there like a grave marker. He sighed, slid open a desk drawer for an extra pair of reading glasses he kept there, put the glasses on, tucked the book under his arm, returned to the couch. He sat to tilt brandy into the snifter, tasted the brandy, set bottle and glass under the lamp, and stretched out with the book. When he opened it and tried to read, he discovered that the lenses were dusty. With a corner of the robe, he wiped them, set them on his nose again, and read yet again about Lothrop Zorn, Colonel, U.S. Marine Corps, retired.

Zorn’s picture accompanied the article. Not a clear picture, reproduced secondhand from a newspaper. The man looked gaunt. A bad writer would say his sunken eyes burned like a fanatic’s. Zorn had distinguished himself in Vietnam, returned to the States in 1973, and made no news until 1981, when he was summoned to the White House as a military adviser on Central America. Before the end of the year, he was down there, El Salvador, Honduras, Los Inocentes, as the President’s liaison to the armed forces of those countries. Washington believed the rebels there were being armed by the Soviets. Zorn’s supposed mission was to explore ways the U.S. could keep the existing governments in power and prevent Central America from going communist and invading the U.S. across the Arizona border.

Treaties barred direct interference, and Zorn’s mission was not what the White House claimed. Zorn’s mission was to find covert ways for the U.S. to get arms, ammunition, tanks, trucks, aircraft, and money to the Central American governments. Also a flock of U.S. military officers to train troops. No one was to know—not Congress, the press, the voters, and not, as the writer of the article in Streeter’s thick black book put it, “the court of world opinion.” For a few months the secret operation went smoothly, paid for from a special White House fund Congress had no power to audit. Army pay rose sharply in El Salvador, Honduras, Los Inocentes, and hungry young men signed up. In hot sunlight, against a background of lush green mountains, they marched up and down in brand-new uniforms with brand-new M-16s on their shoulders, or crawled with them in the dust, while their drill instructors yelled at them in Iowa high school Spanish.

Then Zorn’s paranoia got out of hand. To keep Soviet ships from bringing arms to the rebels of Los Inocentes, he ordered the harbor at Los Raderos mined. A Norwegian freighter loaded with lumber and canned sardines blew up and sank, and Zorn’s mission came unraveled. Reporters flocked to Tegucigalpa, San Salvador, Los Raderos—Adam Streeter among them. Congress held hearings. On campuses across the country students marched and shouted against U.S. involvement in Central America. Congress revoked a new and legitimate aid bill. Red-faced State Department spokesmen spluttered into microphones. The scandal peaked and faded. The President’s popularity rose. The goat was Lothrop Zorn, who after three days before a congressional subcommittee, simply faded out of sight.

Dave’s eyes dropped shut. He shook his head, blinked his eyes, took off the glasses, rubbed his eyes hard with his fingertips. He sat up, swung his feet to the floor, laid the book aside with the glasses on it, and tried the brandy again. He needed a cigarette, and he’d forgotten to bring the pack down from the loft. He tottered to his feet and went to the desk, to the bar. No cigarettes. He sighed and climbed the stairs. In the shadows of the loft, he groped for the pack and lighter on the small table next to the bed. The bed jounced. Cecil sat up.