Nightwork (3 page)

Dave asked Angela, “What happened to Bishop? A road accident?”

“He got sick. He was away from work a couple of days. Then he died. In the middle of the night. He couldn’t get his breath. Louella called a doctor, but it was too late. Big healthy man, still young. It scared Paul.”

Dave tasted the coffee. Hot but weak. He lit a cigarette. “When was Silencio Ruiz locked up?”

Angela wrinkled her forehead. “Two years ago? Eighteen months?” Her laugh was bitter. “The sentence was five years. It didn’t mean anything, did it?”

“Not much,” Dave said. “Ossie Bishop died a month ago?” He reached across the table for the ashtray. “I don’t think Silencio Ruiz killed your husband.”

A
BOVE HIS RAISED COFFEE
mug, Molloy squinted at him. “What the hell do you mean? What’s Ossie got to do with it?”

“Ossie just got sick,” Angela said.

“Maybe somebody made him sick,” Dave said.

“What for?” Molloy twisted out his cigarette. “Paul fingered Silencio for that holdup. That’s why Silencio killed him. Where does Ossie come in?”

“He got Paul the nightwork.” Dave turned to Angela. “What was he doing up in Torcido Canyon at three in the morning? What was he hauling? Who was he working for?”

“He—never told me.” The bag fell from her lap with a muffled thud. She snatched it up, rummaged in it, brought out a little mirror. She touched her bruises. “I’m a mess.”

“You weren’t curious about what he was doing? You said it worried you, how tired he was making himself.”

“It paid well. That’s all he said. He wanted to help my folks.” She glanced at Molloy. “Our folks. Dad had a stroke. He was always strong as a horse, so naturally he didn’t have any health insurance. They used up all their savings practically overnight—doctors, hospital bills. He’s a carpenter, and you know how much work they’ve been getting lately. They were running out of money even before he got sick.”

“What about the union?” Dave said.

Molloy’s laugh was dry. “He didn’t believe in unions. He wasn’t going to shell out dues every month so some fat wop racketeer could sit with his feet up on a desk drinking beer while he earned a living for the son of a bitch.”

Dave watched Angela apply fresh lipstick. Her hand trembled. He said, “Every man doesn’t feel so responsible for his in-laws.”

Molloy made a sound of disgust. “Dad bought Paul his first semi, started him out as an independent. Do you think he did the same for me when I got old enough? Forget it.”

“Paul still owed him for the truck?” Dave asked.

“He paid that off long ago.” Angela closed the lipstick and dropped it into the bag. “No. Dad was good to him when he needed help. Paul wouldn’t forget a thing like that. Dad was in trouble. Paul did all he could.”

“He doesn’t sound like a wife-beater,” Dave said.

“He was tired and strung out. He was taking pills to keep him awake. Amphetamines. Truckers always have them. Pass them around to their buddies at rest stops.” The mirror was propped against her coffee mug. She dropped the mirror into the bag now and zipped the bag closed. “He wasn’t mean. It was too much pressure for him. He was frantic, and I got him sore, nagging at him to give it up. He was kind and patient before.” Her eyes leaked tears. She wiped them away with a finger. “You ask the kids.”

“Amphetamines can make a man edgy,” Dave said.

“Where the hell is your County friend?” Molloy was reading a five-dollar digital watch. “Silencio will be in Mexico by now. In Argentina.” He laid his cigarette in the ashtray, picked up his mug. “What did you say this deputy’s name is?”

“Salazar,” Dave said.

“Jesus, another spic.” Molloy choked on coffee. “Don’t they hire white people anymore? What’s a guy named Salazar going to do about a guy named Ruiz?”

“Whatever has to be done,” Dave said.

Angela got to her feet, clutching her bag. “I have to get to work.”

“You’d better phone in sick,” Dave said.

“I’ve already been off a week. They’ll replace me with some other girl. I have to have that job.” She unzipped the bag again to dig keys out of it. “I have children to feed and bills to pay.”

“I don’t like to sound heartless or anything,” Molloy said, “but you’ve got a big fat insurance check coming.”

“Hah.” She looked glumly at Dave. “Have I?”

Dave gave her a little half smile. “Possibly. Tell me Louella Bishop’s address.”

“She left town. I don’t know.” Angela pushed open the back screen door. “I don’t care. I’m glad she’s gone.”

“Lieutenant Salazar will want to talk to you.”

“Paul’s dead,” she said, “and you say someone killed him. That’s all I know. There’s nothing to talk about.” The screen door fell shut behind her. He went to it. The backyard was patchy grass, clotheslines, a twiggy lemon tree. She hoisted a garage door that creaked. “Tell him I couldn’t wait.” She went into the garage, a car door slammed, an engine started, stalled, started again. The motor raced hard and loud for a moment. Smoke poured out the garage door.

Dave asked Molloy, “What restaurant is it?”

“Cappuccino’s,” Molloy said. “They won’t like the cops coming to talk to her there.” He made to pass Dave, to go out and stop her. But the car, a dented, ten-year-old Toyota station wagon in need of a wash, bucked backward out of the garage and rolled quickly from sight along the side of the house. It jounced noisily across the gutter out in front. Molloy ran barefoot through the house. The front screen door rattled. Molloy called, “Angie, wait!” But the car went off up the street. Dave heard it.

He began opening drawers in the kitchen. Papers lay in one of the drawers. Supermarket tally tapes, receipts for electricity, water, gas, phone. Canceled checks in bank envelopes, old income-tax forms, property-tax forms, ownership registrations for a 1973 Toyota and an eighteen-wheel rig, and loan papers on the house at 12589 Lemon Street. He pocketed a check and a bankbook. There were no slips of paper with addresses scribbled on them.

Molloy came in. “What the hell are you doing?”

“Looking for Louella Bishop’s address. Your sister is too frightened to tell me about Paul’s nightwork. Maybe Louella Bishop will tell me.”

“Frightened? Come on.” Molloy opened a refrigerator door taped with children’s watercolor drawings. He brought out a can of beer. The drawings fluttered when he closed the refrigerator door. “You don’t ask your old man questions when he keeps putting a fist in your mouth. She doesn’t know. Why would she lie to you?”

“You don’t think Paul beat her up,” Dave said. “It surprised the hell out of you when she said that. You didn’t like him, but you know he wasn’t a wife-beater.”

Molloy pried up the tab opener on the beer can. “Then it had to be Silencio, didn’t it?”

Dave shook his head. “She didn’t know until this morning that he was out of prison. Anyway, what would be the point?”

Molloy sat at the table and took a long swallow from the beer can. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and belched. “He probably came looking for Paul, and when Paul wasn’t here, Ruiz beat up Angie just for openers, and she’s scared to say so because he’s still running around loose.” He looked at his watch again. “And the way this friend of yours is moving on the case, he always will be. ’Scuse me. You want a beer?” He half offered to get up.

“It’s a little early for me.” Dave judged Molloy to be twenty-five. He was already thick through the middle. It wouldn’t take many more years of drinking beer all day to turn him to flab. “Where’s the telephone?”

Molloy told him. The instrument sat on a spiral-bound leatherette book with lettered leatherette tabs on the page edges. He laid the book open at
B,
but the address for Ossie Bishop was local. He flipped pages ahead, pages following. Nothing. He lifted the phone, slid the book back under it.

He opened a door and saw bunk beds, stuffed animals, toy trucks, a poster of the Dukes of Hazzard. He closed the door, took a few steps, opened another. The bed was unmade. Women’s clothes lay around: skirts, blouses, jeans, crushed panty hose. Makeup and crumpled tissues littered a dressing table. He rolled open closet doors. A lone blue polyester suit hung on a wooden hanger. It smelled of dry-cleaning. Did she mean to bury him in that? There were two tan windbreaker jackets, a corduroy jacket, brown dress slacks, some heavy plaid wool shirts.

“You have to have permission,” Molloy said.

Dave didn’t answer, didn’t turn. He went through the pockets of Myers’s clothes and found a small address book. Knuckles rattled the front screen door. The door buzzer sounded. Molloy said, “For Christ sake, now what?” and went away. No new out-of-town address for Bishop was in the small book, but Dave pocketed it anyway and shut the closet. Where had Myers kept business records? Dresser drawers? Nothing but clothes. Drawers were under the closet doors, and he crouched and opened one. Sheets, towels, blankets. He shut that drawer and opened the other. Papers lay there, flimsies, dim carbon copies, pink, blue, green. He grabbed a handful, stuffed them into an inside jacket pocket, closed the drawer with a foot, and went to find Molloy.

Jaime Salazar was saying, “Then there’s no need to bother your sister at work. You can tell her.” He was slim and dapper in a lightweight blue denim suit, maroon shirt and socks, blue knit tie. Heat had already begun to gather in the small living room, but Salazar looked cool. His skin was smooth, pale brown. He wore a neat mustache and sunglasses. “There you are,” he said to Dave.

“What kept you?” Dave said.

“Trying to find an ex-convict called Silencio Ruiz. Paul Myers’s testimony got him convicted of armed robbery year before last. He said he’d kill Myers when he got out. He’s out two days and pow—Myers is killed.”

Molloy grinned at Dave. “What did I tell you?”

“That bomb was no amateur effort,” Dave said.

“He could have paid somebody to make it for him.”

Dave said, “Why would he bother? Silencio was a street-gang member. Whatever happened to switchblade knives?”

“He’s disappeared. He was supposed to see his parole officer yesterday. He only slept at his parents’ house his first night. They haven’t seen him since. His gang has a hangout at a liquor store down by the creek. They haven’t seen him either—not since Myers’s so-called accident was on the breakfast news.”

“What reason would he have to run,” Dave said, “if the whole world believed it was an accident?”

“When we catch him, we’ll ask him.” Salazar looked out through the open blind. “Did that happen to your car here, this morning?”

“Gifford Gardens doesn’t have a red carpet,” Dave said.

Molloy said, “Care for a beer, Lieutenant?”

“Orange Crush?” Salazar asked wistfully.

“I’ll look. Maybe she keeps some for the kids.” Molloy went away whistling, pleased with himself.

Salazar tilted his beautiful head at Dave. “You don’t buy it? You think the wife did it for the insurance money?”

“She says he beat her. It wasn’t smart to tell me that. It also wasn’t true. She’s scared of whoever beat her. Since he’s dead, that makes no sense. I think whoever beat her also killed him. Why they would do that puzzles me. But if it was to keep her from telling what she knows, it had the desired effect.”

“If it wasn’t her, what’s left for you to do?”

“Life insurance can be tricky,” Dave said. “Ever hear of a two-year conditional clause? It lets the company back off if it turns out the insured lied to them. Paul Myers outlined for Pinnacle the kind of cargo he hauled—routine, machine parts, unfinished furniture, clothing. Nothing out of the way. Nothing anybody would want to blow him up for. So maybe he was lying.”

“If he was—she won’t get anything?”

“Something. Not a hundred thousand.”

Molloy came in and held out a frosty purple can. Salazar took a step backward and put his hands behind him. He said in an appalled voice, “Grape?”

“It’s all there is,” Molloy said.

“No, thanks,” Salazar said. “Thank you very much.”

“I’d better go,” Dave said, and went.

G
UAVA STREET HAD NO
sidewalks. Little enough remained of its paving—bleached, cracked islands of blacktop that stood inches above the dirt level of the street. The Jaguar rocked and rumbled. Weeds edged the street, seedy, sun-dried. There were a few fences, chainlink, picket, grapestake. The houses, on narrow lots, were smaller here, the stucco sometimes broken away, showing chicken wire and tarpaper. Under untrimmed, drooping pepper trees, the composition roofs were losing their green and silver coatings. Rooflines sagged.

Small black children, in paper diapers, rompers, jeans, or nothing at all, tottered and squatted, hopped and hollered in dusty yards of pecking chickens, sunflowers, hollyhocks. Auto bodies rusted in a few yards. A rope holding a tire swung from a tree branch. Scruffy dogs lay in patches of shade, tongues hanging. On stoops, on sunny roofs, cats washed themselves or dozed. Other than the children, he saw only occasional women, young and pregnant in cheap bright cotton prints and hair straighteners, or old and bony, or old and fat. No teenage boys.

Mount Olivet Full Gospel Church might have been a warehouse but for its location in a grove of walnut trees and its stucco steeple. It was built of cinder block. Through a fresh coat of pale yellow paint the ghosts of Spanish graffiti showed. The windows were narrow and sparse. There was no stained glass. Louvers, the pebbled panes amber-colored. A strip of clean concrete lay alongside the church and he followed it in the Jaguar. A typical Gifford Gardens house sat behind the church. He climbed the stoop and pushed a doorbell button,
LUTHER PRENTICE, D
.
D
.,
was on a weather-yellowed business card tacked beneath the bell push.

But it was a reedy, butter-colored woman in an apron who opened the door. Good cooking smells rushed out at Dave through the screen. The woman dried her hands on the apron. Her hair was abundant, soft, and white. She gave him a quizzical smile, blinking, tilting her head a little. “Yes. Good morning.” Beyond him she saw the Jaguar and her soft brown gaze rested on it a moment. “How can I help you?” He told her who he was, and offered his card. Like Gene Molloy earlier, she took it gingerly through a narrow opening between screen and doorframe. She read it and said, “I’m afraid we have all the insurance we need.”