The Candidate (6 page)

Mike smiled. “Then we’re one step ahead. It’s all I’ve got. But the police have already been there. No name was left.”

That was not enough for Dee. “Check it out anyway. These Iowa cops ain’t worth a damn on this sort of thing. I got a feeling this woman’s a fly in our ointment, Mike. I want to know what sort of fly she is. Is she just a big ol’ harmless house fly, or is she the biting kind?”

Mike put down the little bottle of whiskey. It was empty now anyway. He also put all thoughts of Jaynie, his home, and his past, out of his mind. There was no time for that. Not now. There was work to do.

* * *

THE HAVANA motel lay on the northern edge of Des Moines, just as the landscape broke up into a mix of new subdivisions and square, brown fields edged with trees. It was a cold and gray morning as Mike pulled up, got out of his car and shivered against the weather. It was here that rural Iowa began, with its farms and gently rolling landscape hinting at the prairie that it once was – and, judging by the tall grass that grew up on any vacant lot, would quickly be again if ever given the chance.

The Havana was a one-story relic from the 1950s, arranged in a square horseshoe shape around a tarmac parking lot which long winters had disintegrated into a spider’s web of cracks. At one end of the horseshoe there was an empty swimming pool, its diving board promising nothing more than a six-foot leap into bare concrete. At the other end lay a management office with a sign hanging on the door that read, optimistically, “Vacancies. Inquire within“. The fact that there were only a half dozen cars in the parking lot seemed to indicate there was always room at this particular inn. Or that it played host to the sort of guests who did not need a whole night to carry out their business. Mike walked over and pushed open the door. An old man sat behind the desk, thin as one of the frozen telephone poles that lined the road outside. His chin was frosted with white stubble and his teeth were yellowed. In a voice turned gravely from cigarettes, he asked Mike if he wanted a room. Mike shook his head.

“I’m here about the woman who tried to shoot Senator Hodges. I work with his campaign.”

The man looked him up and down with a barely disguised hostility. “The cops have already been here. We don’t got nothing to say about her. No idea who she was.”

“Mind if I look at her room?”

The man thought about it for a minute, casting his eyes back down to the paper, weighing his options. Eventually he shrugged his scrawny shoulders, got up and beckoned Mike to follow him. They trudged across the frozen parking lot heading to one of the motel’s anonymous-looking rooms. It was number 37. The man opened the door.

“Ain’t no different to any other room. She didn’t leave nothin’ behind neither.”

Mike walked in. The room was sparse, with little more than a dingy bed, its faded linens pulled tightly around the mattress. An ancient-looking TV sat in one corner. Its walls were bare of any form of decoration and its bathroom tiles were streaked and stained. Yet, against his better judgment, against all rational thought, Mike felt he could sense the woman’s presence here. The void that existed within her had been in this place too, sucking something from it, yet leaving a trace of its passing. He shook his head. He was imagining things, he told himself. “Anyone see her?” he asked.

The man shook his head. “I let her in. She didn’t barely say a word. Just paid 20 bucks and took the room. I took her for a whore. But I didn’t see no John with her and she seemed kinda old for that line of work. Still, wouldn’t be the strangest whore I seen around here.”

The man stared directly at Mike, daring him to be shocked at his words. He spat theatrically on the floor. “We ain’t exactly the Sheraton, mister,” he added.

Mike was about to give up, when suddenly a thought hit him. “The cleaner? The person who cleaned the rooms that morning. Who was that?”

The man shifted a little and shrugged his bird-like shoulders, so bony you could see his collar bone and his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down like an elevator.

“I can’t recall,” he said.

Mike reached into his pocket and took out his wallet. “This must be a tough job. Pretty bad pay and some pretty mean customers.”

Mike took out two 20 dollar bills and reached over to tuck them into the breast pocket of the man’s shirt. He felt the man’s bones poking through the skin beneath the material, hard and ridged, seemingly covered by skin as thin and brittle as parchment.

“Suppose I could look at the roster?” Mike asked.

They trudged back to the management office and the man hauled out a thick book from beneath the desk. He opened it and thumbed through the pages, peering at tiny lines of almost undecipherable inky handwriting.

“Ernesto. Ernesto Benitez was the guy who cleaned that room,” he said, with the self-satisfied air of a man who just solved a puzzle.

“And where does he live? When’s he next in?”

The man turned back to the book and flicked through pages of writing until eventually he turned over one sheet that was only half-full of scrawl. He snorted to himself. “Well, he lives over at a trailer park at Elm and Huntsville in Altoona. But he ain’t been in since the morning he cleaned that woman’s room. Looks like young Ernesto must have left our employment.”

The two men looked at each other across the book laid out on the desk. Their eyes met, each perhaps realizing the significance of that information, or deciding to shy away from it.

“People leave all the time,” the man said. His voice, though, was weak and by the time he finished his sentence, Mike was already half-way to his car, pangs of doubt starting to gnaw on the edges of his mind.

CHAPTER 5

GENERAL CARILLO SAT at his table and looked at his dining companion, the Livingston police chief, Antonio Alvarez Zaragosa. The last remnants of a bottle of red wine were dripping from Zaragosa’s voluminous moustache like he had some desperate, alcoholic flu. Thank God he kept back the expensive Chilean stuff and served only Argentine table wine instead, Carillo thought. He was long familiar with Zaragosa’s appetites and only a fool would waste good wine on such an oaf.

Zaragosa, who was taller than the General and less fat, was clearly drunk. His head hung down as he talked, almost half to himself, and then jerked up suddenly as he stumbled across some valid point. His words were slurred but he often broke into rapid fluency as his anger shone through the booze.

“Why are you here?” Zaragosa asked, warming to his favorite topic: the General’s exile. He banged his fist on the table, prompting Carillo to hush him gently.

“But truly,” the policeman continued. “It is not right. You fought for our country against the communists. Against the bastards who would have taken our beloved homeland and turned it into a charnel house. Yet you are here, stuck in exile, as if you did something shameful. When all you did was make the hard choices to keep us safe in our beds at night.”

Carillo shrugged his heavy soldiers. Though he had heard the speech a hundred times, he never truly tired of it. It did him good to be praised like this, called a hero. Just like Zaragoza did during the war when he was a mere private and Carillo was a colonel.

“You remember that time, in 1985, I think, near Chiquimula?” Zaragoza asked. “When the Reds thought they could just come into town at night and we waited for them. You remember their faces? The look of shock on those Indians. It was something you could never forget. They thought they were prisoners, huh?”

The General smiled. Of course, he remembered. He closed his eyes and savored the thought. The strength he had felt. The divine will of serving his country. The power he once wielded to make the right decisions to defend the nation.

“But we showed them, right?” Zaragosa said. “We don’t take prisoners we know are guilty. Judge, jury and executioner. That’s what you said. Take them out into the jungle where they came from. They were savages and we treated them like they deserved to be treated.”

“Those were hard times and we had to be hard men,” said Carillo.

The policeman thumped his fist loudly on the table again, sending their glasses into the air like jumping beans. He ignored the fierce look Carillo shot him.

“Exactly, my friend! Exactly! You deserve better reward then this! Hidden here by a government who should be grateful, not ashamed.”

The General looked at his companion and decided that was enough. He got up from the table and rested a hand on the policeman’s shoulder.

“Your words are true, Antonio,” he said. “But perhaps the night is done now.”

The policeman looked disappointed at his sudden downward turn of fortune. In truth, he had hoped for another bottle of wine. He himself could only afford beer or the moonshine that the Garifuna brewed, and that was no drink for a gentleman and a former officer of the armed forces of the Republic. But he recognized when he must cut his losses and the look on Carillo’s face certainly suggested this night was at a close. He got up, banged into the table, thanked his host profusely and was led to the door.

When Zaragosa left, stumbling back down the road that led to town, the General walked back to the table. He picked up his own glass of wine and took a swig. Disgusting stuff, he thought. He walked into the kitchen and poured it down a sink, watching the bloody red liquid disappear down the plughole as the night’s conversation came back to him. Had that night in Chiquimula really been more than 20 years ago? He looked in the sink at the wine splashes staining the white porcelain red. Images swam in his mind. Images he did not want to think about. Then anger rose in him again. The drunk policeman was right, he thought. He should be rewarded for his sacrifices, not condemned.

He washed his hands, which caused the last traces of wine to disappear, and then he stomped into the living room. He picked up the phone and dialed. It was a number he had not dared think about for a long time. At least not like this. The sound of the ringing sounded distant. Obscure. Calling across oceans of time as well as water. Then a male voice answered. Carillo introduced himself with a hello and his rank and name. The voice waited a second in silence, just breathing down the line. But the General already knew. The man remembered. Oh yes, he remembered.

* * *

MIKE DROVE down Huntsville Street in Altoona, just a few miles from Des Moines, and looked at the trailer park that Ernesto Benitez called home. It was typical of such places, just like many he had seen in Florida, trying to help the tens of thousands of immigrants who worked in the fruit plantations. It was half-hidden behind a junkyard, massed with towering skyscrapers of squashed cars, and consisted of a seemingly random scattering of trailer homes and shacks.

Mike parked the car and spied a group of Hispanic-looking men on the corner of the road. They stood huddled together against the cold like a group of Antarctic penguins, stamping their feet and blowing out plumes of steam with their breath. Day laborers, Mike thought. Desperate for work, hoping someone will have an odd job to give them in exchange for a handful of dollars. He walked over and greeted them in Spanish. No one even looked at him. He repeated his hello.

“Guys, I am not
la migra,
” he said, using the nickname given to the immigration services. “I am with the campaign of Senator Jack Hodges. Have you heard of him?”

Mike took out his campaign ID, emblazoned with a red, white and blue logo. “Have you heard of the Senator? He wants to help make conditions better for guys like you.”

One man, nervously looked at his compatriots and broke from the group. He peered at the ID and took it in his hand. He examined it carefully and flipped it over to read the back. He handed it back to Mike.

“I am not from the government,” Mike insisted.

The man laughed. “But maybe you’ll be the government one day,” he said in Spanish thickly accented from some Mexican barrio.

Mike laughed too. “Hopefully. But for now I just need some help. I’m looking for a guy called Ernesto Benitez, or at least that’s the name he used at work. He used to clean rooms over at the Havana Motel. You know him?”

The man regarded Mike for a moment and then went back to the huddle. The group talked quietly for a while, casting nervous glances over in Mike’s direction. Then the man came back. “Why you want to know?” he asked.

“Look, this guy could be in real trouble. The hotel he worked at was used by someone who tried to shoot Senator Hodges. He cleaned the room of the shooter. We need to speak to him.”

There was silence between them. Mike tried again. “I’m not a cop. I’m ahead of the cops. I can help him. Senator Hodges can help him.”

The man’s face was a mass of contradictions. Mike had seen the expression a thousand times in Florida. These were people who feared any sort of authority, whose entire existence was based on staying below the radar, being anonymous, helping and trusting only each other. But the man clearly knew something else was going on here. Something big that could hurt his friend.

“He skipped town,” he said at last. “He went to Kansas. Garden City. To the meat packing plants there. They’re hiring at the moment. Tough work but the pay is okay. You can find him there, I think.”