Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation (42 page)

    
“That
ain’t exactly rocket science,” she said, blowing smoke toward the foothills.
“Katy’s a
good
girl. The world likes
them, but they don’t get to party much. You sure she didn’t take
my
place?”

    
Raszer
squinted. “I guess that’s a possibility, isn’t it?” He took a step in and
wrapped his hands around the lower railing. “But I don’t think so, Ruthie.
You’ve got the same bone structure—amazingly so—but the eyes are all your own.”

    
She
scooped up a handful of skirt and squatted down to his level, placing her hand
next to his on the one-by-four railing. She had a tangy smell, like citrus and
musk. It occurred to him that she might be wearing a wig, a notable
extravagance for a girl of modest means.

    
“So, who
hired you?” she asked. “My father?”

    
“Yes,”
Raszer replied. “It was the last thing he did, Ruthie.”

    
“The
last thing he did before what?”

    
“Oh, God
. . . you didn’t get word up here?”

    
She
shook her head and gently bit her lip.

    
“Your
father died, Ruthie. A stroke. He collapsed in my backyard after telling me the
story. I’m really sorry to be the one—”

    
She
tossed the cigarette into the dust and stood back up. “Someone had to,” she
said. “Don’t be sorry. He’s with his little flock up in heaven, and we’re still
down here in hell.”

    
“That
may be,” said Raszer. “But I am sorry for your loss. No matter how you get
along with your old man, he’s the one charged with protecting you. When he’s
gone, you’re on your own.”

    
“Nobody
ever ‘protected’ me but me,” she corrected him.

    
“Not
even Henry?” Raszer asked.

    
Ruthie looked
away.

    
“What
are you doin’ here, anyway, mister?” she said, bitter. “I don’t know anything.
I told the FBI that already.”

    
“You
know a whole lot more than I do, Ruthie. Three boys are dead who didn’t have to
be. A fourth one’s half-crazy and won’t come out of his bedroom. A fifth is
probably on his way to Gitmo. And there are two corpses in the L.A. morgue with
their tongues torn out. All because the men who abducted your sister are still
at large. Anything—I mean
anything
—you
can tell me about Johnny Horn and Henry Lee will help.”
 

    
She
looked at him sideways. “Yeah, well, I don’t wanna talk here. My mother’ll be
home soon. Shit, I’ll have to tell her about Silas. What’d you say your name
was?”

    
“I
didn’t.” He offered his hand. “Stephan Raszer.”

    
She took
his hand, then gave it the slightest squeeze. “The La Fonda has a private bar
with good margaritas. It’s dark in there. You know where it is?”

    
“I know
it well,” said Raszer. “Good choice.”

    
“About
eight okay?”

    
“Perfect,”
said Raszer. “I’ll see you there.”

    
“Maybe,”
she said. “Or maybe I’ll send a friend.”

    
Raszer smoked a cigarette on the plaza and admired
the Hotel La Fonda’s glazed brown-sugar facade. The massive oak joists—a ton
each—that supported the second story thrust forth from the adobe walls and
framed the night sky. The light spilling from the gently arched doors was white
gold. He’d been here once at Christmas, years before, when the luminarias lined
the rooftop and the grand portal, and Taos powder covered the ground like jewel
dust. Children in serapes had sung carols in voices as sweet as mountain water,
and no one had moved an inch until the song was done. The La Fonda was what an
inn should be, what the Holy Family should’ve been afforded. If at all
possible, Raszer wanted his wake to be held in this place.

    
Ditching
the cigarette, he walked in, following his nose into the hotel bar, where a
group of local artisans was holding a salon around the hearth and the barstools
had been commandeered by fur-collared ski bunnies from L.A., smelling of Angel
perfume. He spotted his table, a deuce in the far corner, half-cloistered by a
Spanish dressing panel and overlooked by an ornately framed reproduction of one
of D. H. Lawrence’s “forbidden paintings”: a lithe young man urinating on
dandelions.

    
He
ordered a brandy and soda to take the chill off his shoulders, and settled back
to wait. He didn’t know what to expect. He wasn’t even sure Ruthie would come.
She’d already shown him that she could be as much a trick of the light as
anything else here, in the town where C. G. Jung had come to learn that
synchronicity was a fancy name for what the Pueblo shamans experienced when the
scorpion’s tail traced their name in the dust.

    
The
local artists were trading stories around the kiva.
A tall man in an embroidered blouse—a potter, judging from the red
clay under his fingernails—told of the day a pregnant coyote had walked into
his studio, her swollen teats brushing the plank floor. She’d emptied the cat’s
milk bowl, then sat on her haunches to watch him work for nearly an hour before
wandering back onto the road. That evening, on his way home, the man testified,
he’d found her body on the highway, skull crushed, and had carried her to his
garden, where he buried her and her unborn pups. The potter, a single man, told
his friends that never had he grieved for anyone as he had for that coyote.

    
“Am I
the girl you’re looking for?” someone said, stirring Raszer from his reverie.
Her hands were on his table. Same hands, apparently, but not quite the same girl.

    
Raszer
gave her a once-over. “I dunno,” he said. “I guess you’re one of them.”

    
Ruthie’s
hair was jet black and pixie-cut. Her lips were as red as a wound, and she wore
a spandex bodysuit the color of old wine. As she dropped into the chair, the
scent came off her, good and strong, and Raszer recognized one of its
components: patchouli. Just a trace. The patchouli he’d sniffed in Johnny
Horn’s trailer.

    
“What’re
you drinkin’?” she asked.

    
“Brandy,”
he said. “House brand. Like one?”

    
“No
way,” she said, after sniffing it. “But I will have a martini. I feel like
impairing my judgment.”

    
“Gin or
vodka? Dry or wet? Olive or twist?”

    
“Gin.
Dry. Six olives.”

    
“I hear
experience talking,” Raszer observed. “How old are you now, Ruthie?”

    
“Twenty-three
on Valentine’s Day,” she answered. “But age has nothin’ to do with it. My mom’s
forty-four and doesn’t know shit. I could’ve told her tequila ain’t the thing
to make hallucinations go away. I don’t even know if she knows what a blowjob
is.”

    
“Happy
birthday,” Raszer said, and ordered her drink. “What kind of hallucinations?”

    
“She
hears the Hum,” said Ruthie, throwing a spider’s leg over the table.

    
“The
Taos Hum?” Raszer asked.

    
“So she
says,” the girl replied. “And Angel—that’s her hombre
—
he believes her. Says she’s hearing the hoofbeats of the Four
Horsemen of the Apocalypse.”

    
“That’s
a new one,” Raszer said, and handed her her martini, six olives clustered on a
swizzle stick. “Angel doesn’t subscribe to the New Age theories, I guess.”

    
“New
Age! Ha! Angel’s as
Old Age
as they
come. He’s
medieval
.
He beats himself with a yucca stalk and
wears cactus-thorn vests, and he’s all excited that he’s gonna play Jesus on
Good Friday. He’s more like my father than my father, except that he fucks my
mother. I wish I’d been raised a Catholic. Lots more fun.”

    
“I think
I’ve heard about this,” said Raszer, watching her drain the gin from her glass.
“The Brotherhood of Light, or something like that, right? They reenact the
crucifixion and do penance for the community.”

    
“Whatever,”
said Ruthie. “Personally, I think they get off on it.”

    
“In a
way, maybe,” said Raszer, still searching the face to find the girl behind the
mask. “What we get off on is whatever takes us out of ourselves. The medieval
flagellants believed that the spirit could escape through the lacerations in
the flesh; that they were breaking the body down to its essence.”

    
“You’re
a little weird for a dick. What gets
you
off?”

    
Raszer
took a swallow of his drink and sat back. “Finding people.”

    
Ruthie
examined his hands. She did it sidelong, but he noticed anyway.

    
“Are you
married?” she asked.

    
“Nope.
Only to my work. Tell me about Johnny Horn.”

    
“What
about him? I lost it to him when I was fifteen. We stayed stoned through high
school. Then he got into meth, paintball games, and Henry Lee. He went to Iraq
and came back with big muscles, some new friends, and this whole ‘warrior’
thing. We started up again because it turned me on at first, but it turned Katy
on even more. I think she had the hots for him even back when she was doing her
daddy’s-girl thing.”

    
“Tell me
about Johnny’s new friends.”

    
Ruthie
drained her martini and popped the last two olives into her mouth. She held up
the empty glass and pinged it like a service bell with the long, scarlet nail
on her index finger. Then she gave Raszer a practiced little smile.

    
“Christ,”
he said. “If I bought enough rounds in this town, I could probably find out who
killed Cock Robin.”

    
“Hey,”
she replied, “I told ya I needed to get impaired. You think I’m gonna come
across without a little persuasion? Like you said, mister, people are dead.”

    
“Fair
enough,” said Raszer, and summoned the waiter. “But two’s the limit on those
things. Otherwise, you won’t be coming across anything but a toilet bowl.”

    
Once she
had her drink and another six olives, Ruthie made herself comfortable. She
shimmied her butt from side to side in the overstuffed chair until she’d found
the sweet spot, threw her leg over the arm, and reclined languorously, stirring
the martini like a moll in a gangster’s penthouse.

    
“Who are
you when you’re not being somebody else?” Raszer asked.

    
“Somebody
else,” she answered, and Raszer knew that Ruthie Endicott was one of those
small-town girls who are bigger than their origins from birth, the sort of
girls they’d once made movie stars out of. “Ya see, mister, when you grow up in
a Witness family, you’re only allowed to be what you aren’t. So, after a while,
you just go with it.”

    
“Is that
the way your mom is, too?”

    
“Worse.
She doesn’t have a personality, except for what a man gives her. Only reason
she had the gumption to leave Silas was ’cause he caught her in the bible
closet with the neighbor. She’s kinda empty. Maybe that’s why she hears the
Hum. It vibrates in all that empty space.”

    
“Does
she work?”

    
“She
works the front desk at the Fechin Inn.”

    
“Nice
place.”

    
“Yeah.
I’ll never stay there, that’s for sure.”

    
“Did you
ever meet the guys Johnny and Henry hooked up with?”

    
“In
Babylon?” she said.

    
“Yeah.
In Babylon.”

    
“Not the
big guys. They never came around. A voice on a cell phone, that’s all. A
message on a website that disappears the next day. But one day, that summer we
trashed the Kingdom Hall . . . guess you heard about that, right? That was
Henry’s trip. Baptize the place with sex, blood, and magic so that nobody’d
ever be able to do what they’d done to him when he was little without stirrin’
up this, uh,
spirit thing
he’d
created. I dunno. Henry was crazy, but if anybody could do that . . . ”

    
“Create
a thought-form . . . an egregore,” Raszer said.

    
“Right.
You did your homework, mister. Anyhow, one day that summer, this big limo
pulled up the dirt road to Johnny’s trailer, back up in San Gabriel Canyon. I
lived up there then, at least as much as I did at home. This tall guy in a dark
suit got out ’n whistled for Johnny. He coulda been any L.A. limo driver, any
race but white. Hell, I couldn’t tell. Nowadays, everyone in L.A. looks either
Arab or Mexican.”