“Just great! I get laid off because the Winsletts are a couple of liars.”
“For the time being you’re still on payroll. But stay in town in case I come up with something for you to do before the evidentiary hearing. If I can’t get hold of you, these days all will come off your accrued vacation time.”
“Hey,” he said in a hurt voice, “Giselle Marc says stay in town, Larry Ballard stays in town. What do you think I am?”
“I think you’re twisty as a snake and slippery as an eel.”
“Okay.” He was now self-pitying. “Whatever you say.”
He hung up the phone and was on his feet with such energy that he knocked his coffee cup off the arm of the easy chair into the wastebasket he had learned to leave there for that purpose. Pulling on his jacket, he headed for the door. Maybe, if he went out to Stonestown and bought Midori Tagawa lunch, he could talk her into taking the weekend off. Then they could just stay in bed together until Monday morning, doing what they did best.
Trin Morales parked on slanting Filbert Street on Russian Hill. He locked up, trudged farther uphill to the narrow yellow apartment house where Colton Lewis had lived until just a few days before. Going around and around yesterday with the hostile old battleaxe landlady had got him nothing at all. Now, he was looking for a way to bypass her and snoop Lewis’s former apartment without her knowing anything about it.
There was a truck from a commercial cleaning service parked three spaces down from the building. Just as Trin climbed the terrazzo steps from the street, a tenant came out. Trin caught the door just before it closed.
“Thanks,” he said. “Cleaning service.”
He didn’t look back to see if the man was watching him; that kind of guilty behavior gave you away every time.
Trin puffed his way up the carpeted stairs to the third floor; someone had eaten sausage for breakfast. The smell made him hungry. As he hoped from seeing the cleaning service truck, the door to Colton Lewis’s evacuated apartment stood open. In the living room, a uniformed Latino was haphazardly running a vacuum cleaner over the wall-to-wall. Trin boldly strode across the room as if he belonged there. But before he reached the hallway to the bedroom, the cleaning man called at his back.
“Hey! Morales! Where’s my twenty bucks?”
Trin stopped dead. Hell, he knew that voice. Carlos Feliu. A stocky serious-faced man with a fat wife and six kids. He and Trin used to sometimes drink in the same bar on 21st Street. Trin’s gold tooth sparkled in his grin as he opened his arms wide to give Feliu a big abrazo. He stepped back to dig in his pants pocket and hand over the $20.
“I would of paid you back long ago, Carlos, but I been sick. I’m just back to work.”
“I can see you lost a lot of weight, man.”
“Listen, I really need to find the guy used to live here — he skipped out with a car isn’t his. If you go down and tell the landlady you found a gold ring with an opal in it — and want to give it back, maybe she’ll give you a forwarding address.”
“What if she wants to see the ring I didn’t find?”
Trin twisted the gold ring with an opal in it off the finger of his own left hand. He handed it to Feliu. “Then you show it to her, Carlos. You found it under the bedside table.”
“She’s gonna tell me she’ll see he gets it back.”
Maybe Carlos wasn’t the man for the job. But Trin still thought it was his best shot.
“Act suspicious. Let her think you suspect she’s just gonna keep it herself. You think there might be a reward and you want it.” Trin grinned his most engaging grin. “It’s worth the try — and another twenty.”
Fifteen minutes later Feliu returned with a forwarding address for Colton Lewis on Gellert Drive in the City.
“Hey, man! It worked. I acted real suspicious-like, didn’t trust her, see, and she got sort of mad. Like maybe she was sore because she hadn’t thought of the reward thing herself. But I just stood there playing the dumb Mexican peón, and finally she gave me the address and told me to get out of there.”
Trin gave Feliu another $20 and slipped the ring back on his own finger. “Man, you’d make a good private eye yourself.”
Driving back down to the Mission District with the address safely in his pocket, he thought, with an elation he hadn’t been able to feel in months, the Cisco Kid is back! And Colton Lewis is dog meat. Being cute and shifty, Lewis was still in town just as Giselle had surmised.
But who was cuter and shiftier? Trin Morales. The Cisco Kid. And who was about to treat himself to a pizza rather than the Mex food he usually ate? Right again. Trin Morales.
Since it was only 11:00 A.M., the pizza joint on Mission off 19th wasn’t yet crowded. Trin slid into a red-vinyl booth with a sigh of satisfaction. The slender, pretty Latina waitress came over with silverware and a napkin and a glass of water.
“Can... can I help you, sir?”
She had a quavery little voice like the squeak of a mouse, and stared at him as if he were a boa constrictor gonna swallow her up. He could smell shampoo on her long gleaming black hair, something flowery. Like her face, it was vaguely familiar.
“Oh, ah, yeah. Gimme a small double-cheese double-salami thin crust. Individual. And a Diet Coke, too.”
Forty pounds ago it would have been an extra-large thick crust with double everything, and he would have washed the whole thing down with draft beer. But his stomach had shrunk.
Instead of writing down his order, the girl leaned down close to almost hiss, “Are you crazy, coming here? If Esteban hears you came to see me, he will—”
Esteban! This was she, his sister! Milagrita! It all came back in a rush, her name, everything. He met her at a Cinco de Mayo dance, poured a lot of beer down her so she would pass out in his car. Then he took her to a hot-sheet motel out by the Cow Palace where he could always get a room for free because he had something on the guy who managed it.
She got sick in the toilet a couple of times that night. Afterward when she started to sober up, there had been blood on the sheets. That excited him, and he banged her again.
As he slid hurriedly out of the booth, she pressed a crumpled scrap of paper into his hand. Her voice was low.
“Just leave a time and place on the answering machine at this number — I have to tell you things.”
Outside in the colorful, bustling Latino crowds of Mission Street, Morales feared he might throw up into the gutter, like Milagrita that night in the motel room when she cried and told him that she’d been a virgin.
Stop! Esteban, stop! You have killed him!
He got into his car, slammed and locked the door. Did she think he was nuts? They set up a meet, Morales walks in with a big shit-eating grin on his face and his dick in his hand, there’s Esteban and all his buddies waiting, Morales goes home with his dick in a paper bag. If he goes home at all.
He pulled out into traffic and drove toward his Florida Street apartment. She must have seen him around the neighborhood after that night, gotten his real name, and told her loco brother about him. Puta.
But even as he muttered the word, he thought, Madre de Dios, how young had she been? Even now she looked only about sixteen.
He hadn’t trusted anyone since his eighth birthday, why should he be stupid enough to start now? And a woman besides? Especially this woman. He wasn’t loco. Was he?
Eighteen
When Midori saw Larry Ballard’s tall form threading its way toward her between the display tables, she shot a quick look around and relaxed: no sign of Luminitsa Djurik. Larry came up to her with his big sexy grin that made her go weak in the knees.